DUST OF THE PAST

Taranaki Daily News, 1 June 1935, Page 13 (Supplement)

DUST OF THE PAST

“LOUIS DE ROUGEMONT”

(By

“Historicus.")

Henri Louis Grin was bom on November 12, 1847. Few people will recognise under the name of Grin the celebrated imposter “Louis de Rougemont,” who in September of 1898 divided newspaper interest between himself, Dreyfus and the news of the Dervish defeat at Omdurman. “De Rougemont” at the moment was at the zenith of his notoriety. News columns were full of him. It is now 30 ;% years ago since this highly imaginative gentleman set London, and the world for that matter, talking. .

Imagination is a wonderful gift, but such stories as “De Rougemont” unloaded on to a credulous public needed almost as much imagination in the reader as their creation. His adventures circled around Australia, and of all the tall tales that were ever connected with any Country “De Rougemont’s”] were the tallest. This repast of fiction was made doubly appetising for the reason that he served it up as fact. But that was where he made his mistake. He would probably have been a best seller even in the land of fiction.

“De Rougemont” was the son of a farmer born near Lake Neuchatel who reached Australia as a servant, and.lived a precarious life in various capacities over there. He appears to have developed his imagination from the stories he heard, and, with the assistance of notes from a genuine explorer’s diary, was able to foist on the reading public his collection of extraordinary fabrications. Some of them were true enough, such as turtle riding, because they came from the explorer’s notes. He was able to weave sufficient reality into his romance that he was invited to lecture before learned bodies for the advancement of science. That famous remark “that you can fool some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” was, however, to prove too true for “Rougemont’s” lasting popularity. He disappeared suddenly. But he was not beaten. Less than twelve months later he was “billed” at a theatre as a special attraction: “The Greatest Liar on Earth!” Thomas Ingoldsby.

If Richard Barham had not become Thomas Ingoldsby and given the world the “Ingoldsby Legends” he might have risen higher in the church than a minor canonry of St. Paul’s. Even an age of evangelical Protestantism must have felt that some of his versifications of mediaeval legends were irreverent products for a clergyman’s leisure. But St. Paul’s has had a sufficiency of Gloomy Deans, from John Donne to Dean Inge, whereas she has never had nor is likely again ( to have , another Thomas Ingoldsby; There are similarities between Barham and Dickens. Both were equally at home in Kent and London; both relished and recorded oddities of Kentish life; both had a saving faculty of irreverence which, mad©’, them see the oddity of what seemed worthily commonplace to their contemporaries; above all both wrote with a flowing pen, pouring out a medley of good-humoured extravagance. If'Dickens far surpassed .Barham in intensity and. characterisation, yet lovers of the “Ingoldsby Legends” will not shrink from claiming for. their author the pre-eminence, in wit and humour- Literary critics could go furtheri pointing out that in a period of slovenly or prosy, verse Ingoldsby s lines trip faultlessly and his rhymes, however far-fetched, • bring, sense and sound to happy wedding. When he pleases he can write a few lyric lines recalling Tennyson’s earliest woodnotes, and.now and .then,. laughing at himself, he throws off a few Byronic stanzas as neat'and fluent, as any in “Don Juan.” His prose in the prose tales of the Ingoldsby Legends has never received proper recognition. It is racy, but under control and economical of words. In the prolix age of Scott and his imitators Barham in his “Gray Dolphin” began a story with a hearty suddenness which Mr. Kipling might envy. At times as in “The Auto-da-Fe this laughing, rollicking, robust humorist, this early Victorian G. K. Chesterton, reveals a consuming hatred of cruelty and superstition, . and all the time he is English through and through, even when he is laughing at antiquaries. Barham was born at Canterbury on December 6, 1788. He died, in 1837 of a cold caught when watching Queen Victoria open the new Royal Exchange.

Five Horses Shot Under Him. “Circumstances over which I have no control,” a polite and evasive generality loved by Cabinet Ministers and others who have to repulse requests from friends, is said to have been first used by' the Duke of Wellington, when refusing to intercede for the life of Marshal Ney, who had been condemned to death for breaking his oath to Louis XVIII and joining his old chief Napoleon in the adventure of the Hundred Days. Wellington meant to imply that he could not influence King Louis, nor even Km® Louis the angry ultra-Royalists who clamoured for vengeance. Vengeance they had, when Ney was shot on December 7, 1815; but even the Bourbons who “learnt nothing and forgot nothing soon discovered that in sending ‘the bravest of the brave” to death they had stained their reputation irreparably. Of course Ney had been rash and a fool. That he took service under Louis whiie Napoleon was at Elba was excusable; that he rejoined his old chief when sent against him was the re ®} l tt of sudden and generous impulse. But he need not have promised when leaving Paris on that last mission that he would bring Bonaparte back in an iron cage, and he need not when fleeing towards Switzerland after Waterloo have insisted on wearing a gorgeous presentation sword which the country' police of France could not help noticing. King Louis’s Ministers were annoyed when they heard the police had arrested Ney, but they sent him for trial by court martial for all that and a court of old comrades found him guilty. So they shot the man who led the rearguard of the Grand Army from Russia till he was the rearguard, a whiskered scarecrow, firing the last shot across the frontier stream at the pursuing Cossacks: the man who had five horses shot under him as he led charges against the British squares at Waterloo.