Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

figure equivalent to Hugo might have spanned the gulf but he was dead and his popularity as an
author, though still high, was waning.
In terms of cross-Channel relations it is no doubt true, as Carola Hicks and others have
observed, that after Queen Victoria’s marriage, in 1840, to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha,
the imaginative pull of the Norman past gave way, in England, to an interest in the Saxon
heritage. It was as Saxons that Victoria and Albert were portrayed by William Theed in his
sculpture of 1863-7, commissioned at the suggestion of their daughter, Princess Victoria of
Prussia to symbolise ‘the ties between the German and English peoples’. 179 By 1843 when
Caroline de Berry’s son, the dispossessed Duc de Chambord, came on a self-promoting tour to
Britain, the contrast with his mother’s heyday and the quadrille could not have been more
poignant. The change was not lost on the Viscomte Walsh who accompanied the Duc and was
commissioned to write the official account. Walsh’s description of the Bourbon pretender
wandering through Abbotsford employs every technique of scenery, weather and atmosphere.
Nearly thirty years after Dawson Turner and his family were moved and entranced by Lenoir’s
museum the novelty has worn off, the romantic melancholy given way to a more serious sense of
loss. Abbotsford itself is a kind of Jardin Elysée, home of the dead. Walsh conjures up the ghosts
of the living author and of his characters, fictional and historical, who join together in the
antiquarian narrative of resurrection, a last dance of death.
Ce fut par un temps affreux, la neige et la pluie tombant sans relache, que Monseigneur arriva à Abbots ford [sic];
pas un rayon de soleil sur la demeure du poète et du romancier; le vent soufflant dans les arbres verts qui entourent
le manoir et agitant les longs rameaux des saules qui pleurent sur les ondes du lac… Walter-Scott [sic] a souvent
décrit la tristesse des demeures abandonées, celle d’Abbot’s ford aurait été digne d’être redite par lui…
Monseigneur visita tout avec intéret, et emotion… le genie ayant passé par là, il en reste quelque chose… A défaut
du maitre du château, le jeune descendant de Robert-le-Fort pouvait évoquer, sous les voûtes des salles desertes,
Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Rebecca, Philippe-Auguste, Louis XI, Elisabeth, Amy Robsart, Marie Stuart… Péveril du
Pic, Miss Vernon, la jolie fille de Perth… et tant d’autres figures qui hantent Abbot’s ford comme des esprits.
[It was in terrible weather, the snow and rain falling relentlessy, that Monseigneur arrived at Abbotsford; not a ray of
sun on the home of the poet and novelist, the wind blowing through the evergreens that surround the house and
179
Label on the cast of Theed’s statue, currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
160