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

must be admitted that, in general, a man of talent unfortunately placed in M Langlois’
circumstances, could not mix in society on equal terms.’ 72
Yet while the circumstances are real, Richard’s description of them is not without
conscious literary effect. The gloom, the contractions of the heart, the emphasis on the contrast
between the squalor of the room and the nobility of its occupant, rising above his sufferings, are
also conventions. They are conventions not of antiquarianism as understood in Britain, however,
but of Bohemia, a milieu well-established in the French popular imagination by 1840, the date of
Richard’s essay. Described by Richard as an artist, Langlois is starving in an attic. His
misfortune, which would as Ferrey says be seen as a social disadvantage in England, is to
Richard merely a dark background that sets his character off to greater advantage and marks him
out as high-minded and a free spirit.
Son erudition était si profonde, si variée, si imperturbable, son imagination si vive et si colorée, sa parole si animée,
si pénétrante, qu’il vous avait bientôt fait oublier le froid et sa misère, comme il les oubliait lui-même. [His learning
was so deep, so various, so certain, his imagination so lively so colourful, his speech so animated, so perceptive, that
he soon made you forget the cold and the poverty, as he forgot them himself.] 73
Although Langlois was indeed an artist, it is in his character as an antiquary that he is
portrayed here. In France the idea of the Bohemian was born, like antiquarianism, directly out of
the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the two categories overlapped. 74 In the case of
Victor Hugo, who could afford to dress the set more artfully, they were entirely fused. Dickens,
visiting Hugo in Paris in 1847, gives another measure, more detailed and suggestive than
Ferrey’s, of the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Gallic attitudes. With Scott’s and indeed
his own novels in mind, he could not take Hugo’s romantic interior quite seriously. The rooms in
the Place des Vosges, where Dickens met the Hugos, do not survive intact but the interiors of
Hauteville House, which Hugo created later on Guernsey do and they suggest what it was that
Dickens saw. He was, like Ferrey, mildly scandalised by this foreign variant of antiquarianism:
72
Ferrey, Recollections of Pugin, pp.18-19.
73
Richard, ‘E-H Langlois’, p.10.
74
For the development of the idea of ‘Bohemia’ in the aftermath of the French Revolution see Wilson, Bohemians.
190