Friend of Boswell

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6626, 12 August 1931, Page 10

Friend of Boswell

lWho: BELLE de ZUYLEN (Zelide). Where: Holland and Switzerland. When! Eighteenth to nineteenth jsenturies.' Whv famous: A Swiss author, dess famed for her novels and letters than for' her ' remarkable friendship wit James Boswell, biographer of Dr Johnson. She was Dutch by birth, her family one of the oldest m the land. At Zuylen, in a moated country house, she spent her summers— cattle, dykes, slow-passing barges, mist and stillness, at Utrecht, in an equally solemn house, she BDent her winters— empty streets, shadowy rooms, candlelight, polite and dull society. Yet by every mood and characteristic Zelide belied all this, for she had a mocking spirit, sho was gay, eager, restless. In French she thought and wrote, she was steeped m lore of the French philosophers. Her world was one of idease and a great adventure. History records that she had 12 suitors. By far the most famous of them was James Boswell, arriving at Utrecht m August, 1765, to study law. this charming creature,” the Scotsman called her and tried to think she was in love with him. They had the most tremendous intellectual conversations, to which Boswell appended a seventeenpage letter written from Berlin, in the course of his Continental tour. It was four years before he could forget her and settle down to courting his Scottish Miss Blair, who made him a much more suitable wife than Zelide could possibly have done. That lady, whose future had promised so very brilliantly, was married in 1771 to her brother ? s tutor, Saint-Hyacinth de Charriere, and went with him,to an old .Swiss country house near Lausanne. The establishment was dominated by her quiet husband’s quieter spinster sisters, and there the sparkling Zelide finished her days—wind in the apple trees, invigorating air, the tinkle of cowbells. Her amusement was found in the writing of several novels which present a delightfully vivid picture of French life and manners in her day.