In 1834 Mr. Austin’s health, always delicate, broke down, and with his wife and daughter he went to Boulogne.  Mrs. Austin made many friends among the fishermen and their wives, but ‘la belle Anglaise,’ as they called her, became quite a heroine on the occasion of the wreck of the Amphitrite, a ship carrying female convicts to Botany Bay.  She stood the whole night on the beach in the howling storm, saved the lives of three sailors who were washed up by the breakers, and dashed into the sea and pulled one woman to shore.  Lucie was with her mother, and showed the same cool courage that distinguished her in after life.  It was during their stay at Boulogne that she first met Heinrich Heine; he sat next her at the table d’hote, and, soon finding out that she spoke German perfectly, told her when she returned to England she could tell her friends she had met Heinrich Heine.  He was much amused when she said:  ‘And who is Heinrich Heine?’ The poet and the child used to lounge on the pier together; she sang him old English ballads, and he told her stories in which fish, mermaids, water-sprites, and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle, who was diligently taking three sea-baths a day, were mixed up in a fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, often very pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings from the North Sea.  He afterwards told her that one of his most charming poems,

   ’Wenn ich am deinem Hause
   Des Morgens voruber geh’,
   So freut’s mich, du liebe Kleine,
   Wenn ich dich am Fenster seh’,’ etc.,

was meant for her whose magnificent eyes he never forgot.

Two years later Mr. Austin was appointed Royal Commissioner to inquire into the grievances of the Maltese.  His wife accompanied him, but so hot a climate was not considered good for a young girl, and Lucie was sent to a school at Bromley.  She must have been as great a novelty to the school as the school-life was to her, for with a great deal of desultory knowledge she was singularly deficient in many rudiments of ordinary knowledge.  She wrote well already at fifteen, and corresponded often with Mrs. Grote and other friends of her parents. {4} At sixteen she determined to be baptized and confirmed as a member of the Church of England (her parents and relations were Unitarians).  Lord Monteagle was her sponsor and it was chiefly owing, I believe, to the influence of himself and his family, with whom she was very intimate in spite of her Radical ideas, that she took this step.

[Lucie Austin, aged fifteen, from a sketch by a school friend:  ill4.jpg]