How to Create the Perfect Wife (15 page)

Day, at least, survived the rigors of the journey unscathed, as he informed Edgeworth in an uncharacteristically exuberant letter written soon after arrival at the end of November. “Behold me at Avignon, full six hundred and fifty miles, three quarters, and one furlong, from Barehill,” he announced jubilantly, “and yet, by heavens! I am alive! And what is more, tolerably well.” Travel—or at least the attentions of two spellbound girls hanging on his every word—plainly agreed with him. Edgeworth would later say that Day’s letters from Avignon were “almost the only instances of gaiety of manner, which ever appeared in his correspondence.”

With boyish exhilaration, Day continued: “Were I to relate the stagecoaches I have travelled in, the post-boys I have talked big to, (nay, I have gone so far as to say
sacre Dieu!)
the inns I have lain at, the rivers I have passed with no more than a three-quarters of an inch plank between me and destruction, I should make you shudder!” Visualizing Edgeworth working on his latest invention “in a warm comfortable room” back in Berkshire, Day extolled “the toils, the dangers, of us who travel to see the wonders of the world.” But whether the two orphans who were the chief object of the entire journey were likewise alive and well was left entirely to Edgeworth’s imagination. Day made no direct reference to the girls beyond an enigmatic “Everything belonging to me goes on well.”

Perched on a rocky outcrop above the Rhône, the ancient city of Avignon provided an ideal winter refuge. Having served as the seat of seven popes for nearly seventy years during the fourteenth century—when it was the center of the medieval Western world—Avignon still fell under papal control as capital of the enclave, the Comtat Venaissin. The heavily fortified citadel was therefore conveniently beyond the reach not only of English but of French laws, making the city a favorite destination for political, religious and tax exiles of all nationalities as well as a natural hideout for smugglers and other criminals.

Several British aristocrats who had supported the failed Jacobite uprisings in 1715 and 1745 fled to Avignon to lick their wounds. They were followed in later years by fellow Britons seeking sun and scenery for a year or two in Provence so that, according to one source, more than a hundred English people made Avignon their home. Sterne poked fun at the city’s profusion of titled British and French residents in his novel
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman:
“for they are all Dukes, Marquisses, and Counts, there.” Lively, cultured and prosperous, the city owed its economic well-being as much to its vigorous black market in contraband goods, like tobacco, gunpowder and playing cards, which it sold to its surrounding French neighbors at competitive prices, as to its vibrant silk and calico industry.

Far enough off the tourist trail to provide a degree of anonymity for a young man traveling with two young girls, Avignon was still a sufficiently popular residence with French and British upper-class society to assure Day of intellectual adult company. With its shady squares and cool courtyards
encircled by three miles of solid ramparts, Avignon provided a pleasant haven where he could pursue his educational experiment without fear of disturbance. Day ushered Sabrina and Lucretia through one of the city’s seven gates and rented a house in Avignon’s most desirable district, the Quartier des Fusteries.

Close to the great papal fortress, the Popes’ Palace, the fusteries district owed its name to the wood sellers, the
fustiers
, who once lived there alongside other poor artisans, but now it was dominated by grand town houses, called
hôtels,
belonging to the idle rich. Having rented his house from a certain Monsieur Fréderic, Day employed native-speaking servants so that he could continue to exclude any outside influences on the two girls. Here Thomas Day began the difficult task of choosing which of his two pupils should become his perfect wife. But first he planned to go out and ingratiate himself with Avignon society.

Discarding his usual drab garb, he sailed out into the Avignon streets in a new laced coat, which he had probably bought in one of the fashionable shops of Paris, or in Lyon, which was famous for its silk and embroidered cloth. When in Avignon, Day presumably reasoned, he should dress like the locals. The novelist Tobias Smollett scorned extravagant French fashions at least as much as Day, but he explained that in France English travelers either had to adopt flamboyant French clothes or make themselves look even more foolish by comparison: “When an Englishman comes to Paris, he cannot appear until he has undergone a total metamorphosis.”

For men this metamorphosis meant a shopping spree for new clothes, a new wig, a new hat, new shoes and even new buckles and ruffles. The costume varied according to the season. French fashion decreed that in spring or autumn men should wear a suit made of “camblet,” a blend of goat or camel hair with silk. In summer, they should wear a suit of silk, and in winter a suit made of “cloth laced with gold, or velvet.” Decked out in his laced coat, perfectly in vogue for the winter season, Day was ready to enter the best Avignon society. Even if he had only just begun the process of transforming his two girls, he had easily mastered his own metamorphosis.

Looking the very picture of the perfect fop, Day spent a dizzying first week visiting Avignon’s abundant coffeehouses, concert halls and soirées. Adopting French couture, French manners and even testing his schoolboy’s
French conversation, he was warmly welcomed into French society and impressed his hosts as “the traveller, the polite scholar and the fine gentleman,” he told Edgeworth in this new spirit of effervescence. “I have been introduced into all the polite assemblies. I know something of their manner of life, at least the outward and visible signs.” Although he was shocked by the capacity of the local bourgeoisie for squandering their days in idle leisure—gambling, drinking and gossiping—Day was delighted at the ease with which he had infiltrated French society:

There is indubitably among the French a greater spirit of dissipation than among the English: they are accustomed to no kind of employment, to no kind of attention; their mornings are spent in dress and in sauntering about, and their afternoons in visits. . . . In their visiting rooms, you see a number of beings lolling, walking, standing, yawning, talking of the same trifling subjects, which you would hear discussed in England with the same indifference, till the happy moment arrives, which sets them down to the gaming table. . . . If you go into their coffee-houses you find a number of idle people playing at dice, sitting round a stove doing nothing, gaping, yawning, getting up, and sitting down again.

Yet it was “so much easier for a stranger to get into society here” than in England, he continued, while there was also a “more generous spirit of politeness among the French.” In France, “a man runs less hazard of being affronted, or meeting with any kind of incivility or positive rudeness,” and with good reason, he noted, since the rules of etiquette laid down that a genuine insult or argument could only be settled on the dueling ground—and usually in death.

As to how his young companions were spending their time, Day maintained an infuriating silence. With a careful eye on his future reputation, he was obviously concerned that his letters might fall into the wrong hands. So just as with his letter to his mother from Paris, Day’s first letter to Edgeworth from Avignon covered everything except the most interesting aspect of his trip. He seemed delirious with the excitement of his first continental travel or perhaps drunk on the thrill of his daring experiment. Yet his role as teacher was evidently on his mind. He ended his letter
by asking for news about Dick and his ongoing program of education—“let me hear of nothing but your boy, your wooden horse, and other domestic occurrences”—and signed off with a battery of questions: “Have you got a house yet?—have you got a patent?—a title?—a fortune?—a child?—a medal?—a new chaise?”

At home in wintry Berkshire, a frustrated Edgeworth wrote back to press his friend for news of the girls. Although he was busy enough juggling all of the issues that Day had listed—another child was on the way, his father was seriously ailing in Ireland and he was hunting for a new house—Edgeworth knew that, in England, at least, he was legally responsible for his young apprentices’ welfare. Furthermore, as he struggled to apply the Rousseau regime to the truculent Dick, Edgeworth was feeling increasingly doubtful as to the practicalities of the educational theory. Now that he was five, Dick showed no inclination for either reading or writing. While Rousseau’s
Émile
insisted this was perfectly acceptable even until the age of twelve, Edgeworth naturally worried that his son would not acquire his own love of books.

By the time Day replied a few weeks later, toward the end of 1769, he was already tiring of France and French society—or perhaps the denizens of Avignon’s salons were tiring of him. The jaunty, jovial Day who had bounded through the gates of Avignon in November had returned to form as the gloomy and embittered young man who harbored a grudge against everyone and everything. “That gaiety, my friend, which you remark in my letter, is neither an effect of French, nor of the recovery of my health,” he explained. “It is an effect of either a constitutional philosophy, or of habit to make a jest, at least to others, of what is most disagreeable to me.” It was irony, he now insisted. And in a complete change of mood from his previous enthusiasm, he continued: “For be assured no one circumstance of life was ever half so [disagreeable], as my residence in France.”

Now he lamented that the French had no interest in discussing politics, agriculture or science and no reason to discuss the weather since it was “constantly serene.” Bored and snubbed, he spent much of his time reading and thinking. But even though he missed the “fogs and showers of Old England,” he was determined to last out the winter and continued to grace the concert parties and assemblies he despised decked out in the comical
finery he detested. “Oh, my dear friend, you’d be quite surprised to see me now,” he told Edgeworth. “Oh Lord! I am quite another thing to what I was—I
talks
French like any thing; I wears a velvet coat, and a fine waistcoat, all over gold, and dresses quite
comme il faut:
and trips about with my hat under my arm, and
‘Serviteur Monsieur!
’ and
‘J’ai l’honneur Madame
,’ &c. O dear, it’s charming upon my soul!”

When he was not attempting French small talk, Day skulked moodily in a corner and fumed over his hosts’lifestyles and, in particular, their attitudes toward women. “Nothing can be more ignorant than those of the French Nobility whom I have seen,” he told Edgeworth. “Attached entirely to exteriors,” they were “enslaved by their king” and—a far more serious charge in Day’s book—by “their women.” French girls were generally educated in convents or brought up at home by governesses, Day told Edgeworth. When they were old enough to enter society, they “bring prejudice, extravagance and coquetry to their husbands: no laws, nor the force of the religion they are bigoted to, can restrain them; the feeble ties of modesty, decorum, or shame, are unknown.”

Appalled at the tolerance within the French upper classes for what he termed “universal infidelity,” he stormed, “the men can feel nothing but indifference for their nominal wives; hence all the ties of nature are broken through, all the sweet connexions of domestic life unknown.” Naturally, it did not occur to him that his own behavior toward the opposite sex might be deemed immoral. And rising to his climax Day spluttered, “But the most disgusting sight of all is to see that sex, whose weakness of body, and imbecility of mind, can only entitle them to our compassion and indulgence, assuming an unnatural dominance, and regulating the customs, the manners, the lives and the opinions of the other sex, by their own caprices, weakness, and ignorance.” This nightmare vision, a topsy-turvy world in which women dominated men, completely reinforced Day’s faith in his educational project. It must have been a relief to return from these wild parties where women ruled the roost to his peaceful house where his two young girls waited meekly for their master.

More convinced than ever that adult upper-class society would never furnish him with a suitable spouse, Day threw himself into his educational project with relish. “You inquire after my pupils,” he at last volunteered in
his letter to Edgeworth. “I am not disappointed in any one respect. I am more attached to, and more convinced of the truths of my principles than ever.” The girls’ company had preserved him from “many melancholy hours,” he wrote. “I have made them, in respect to temper, two such girls as, I may perhaps say with vanity, you have never seen at the same age. They have never given me a moment’s trouble throughout the voyage, are always contented, and think nothing so agreeable as waiting upon me (no moderate convenience for a lazy man).”

Stoical, patient and submissive, the two girls were proving themselves perfect examples of the transformative powers of education—their education within the Foundling Hospital at least. More than a decade spent under the charity’s guiding influence had produced models of subservience; their last few months in the company of Day could have had little impact as yet. Day was sure, however, that Rousseau’s educational program would prove perfect for his needs. As he told Edgeworth, if all the books in the world were to be destroyed, the second book that he would save, after the Bible, would be
Émile. “It
is indeed an extraordinary work—the more I read, the more I admire,” he enthused. “Every page is big with important truth. . . . ‘Excellent Rousseau!’ first of humankind! Behold a system which, preserving to man all the faculties, and the excellences, and the liberty of his nature, preserves a
medium
between the brutality and ignorance of the savage, and the corruptions of society!”

Batting away Edgeworth’s own growing doubts about the Rousseau method, Day advised him not to worry about Dick’s slowness to read and write, only to take care not to advance his education too quickly: “In respect to your child, I know of only one danger, which is you may enlarge his ideas too fast,” he urged. It would never be too late to add to Dick’s understanding, but “a single error, like a drop of poison” might contaminate him forever. “Never trouble yourself about Dick’s reading and writing, he will learn it, sooner or later, if you let him alone; and there is no danger, except that the people of Henley may call him a dunce.” Evidently Day had no concern about how the taunts of the residents of Henley, the nearest town to Edgeworth’s home, might affect poor Dick.