I speak of matters before it occurred to all Charing-Cross
and Cheapside to “take the water” between
Dover and Calais, and inundate the world with the
wit of the Cider Cellar, and the Hole in the Wall.
No! In the days I write of, the travelled were
of another genus, and you might dine at Very’s
or have your loge at “Les Italiens,” without
being dunned by your tailor at the one, or confronted
with your washer-woman at the other. Perhaps
I have written all this in the spite and malice of
a man who feels that his louis-d’or only goes
half as far now as heretofore; and attributes all his
diminished enjoyments and restricted luxuries to the
unceasing current of his countrymen, whom fate, and
the law of imprisonment for debt, impel hither.
Whether I am so far guilty or not, is not now the
question; suffice it to say, that Harry Lorrequer,
for reasons best known to himself, lives abroad, where
he will be most happy to see any of his old and former
friends who take his quarters en route; and in the
words of a bellicose brother of the pen, but in a
far different spirit, he would add, “that any
person who feels himself here alluded to, may learn
the author’s address at his publishers.”
“Now let us go back to our muttons,”
as Barney Coyle used to say in the Dublin Library formerly
—for Barney was fond of French allusions,
which occasionally too he gave in their own tongue,
as once describing an interview with Lord Cloncurry,
in which he broke off suddenly the conference, adding,
“I told him I never could consent to such a
proposition, and putting my chateau (chapeau) on my
head, I left the house at once.”
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning,
as accompanied by the waiter, who, like others of
his tribe, had become a kind of somnambulist ex-officio,
I wended my way up one flight of stairs, and down another,
along a narrow corridor, down two steps, through an
antechamber, and into another corridor, to No. 82,
my habitation for the night. Why I should have
been so far conducted from the habitable portion of
the house I had spent my evening in, I leave the learned
in such matters to explain; as for me, I have ever
remarked it, while asking for a chamber in a large
roomy hotel, the singular pride with which you are
ushered up grand stair-cases, down passages, through
corridors, and up narrow back flights, till the blue
sky is seen through the sky-light, to No. 199, “the
only spare bed-room in the house,” while the
silence and desolation of the whole establishment
would seem to imply far otherwise—the only
evidence of occupation being a pair of dirty Wellingtons
at the door of No. 2.
“Well, we have arrived at last,” said
I, drawing a deep sigh, as I threw myself upon a ricketty
chair, and surveyed rapidly my meagre-looking apartment.
“Yes, this is Monsieur’s chamber,”
said the waiter, with a very peculiar look, half servile,
half droll. “Madame se couche, No. 28.”