Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876

Cautionary day and night signals are displayed at the principal ports and harbors when dangerous winds or storms are anticipated. In one year 762 of these warning signals were displayed, and 561 were verified by storms of destructive winds which otherwise would not have been foreseen. In not a single instance during the last two years has a great storm reached, without warning from the office, the lakes or seaports of the country. The amount of shipping, property and life thus saved to the country is simply incalculable.

Tri-daily deductions or probabilities of the weather, wind and storms, with part of the data on which they rest, are published in all the principal papers of the country, and each man and woman can testify as to their use of them. Who now goes to be married or to bury his dead or to begin a journey without consulting the two oracular lines in italics at the head of the leading column? They have come to take part in our domestic lives. The people would miss politics or the markets or literature out of the paper with less regret than Probabilities should the service be discontinued.

Besides this practical labor, there is the publication of nine daily charts on which are inscribed 2160 readings of different instruments, giving an accurate view of the general meteoric condition; monthly charts and charts condensing the results of years of observation; records furnished for the study of scientific men more comprehensive and regular than can be offered by any similar institution in any country.

A special bit of history comes to light respecting our little wooden shed at the head of Barnegat Bay. An act of Congress approved March, 1873, authorized the establishment of signal stations at lighthouses or life-saving stations along dangerous coasts, and the connection of the same by telegraphs, thirty thousand dollars being appropriated for that end. In consequence, signal stations were established on the Massachusetts coast, from Norfolk, Va., to Cape Hatteras, and more closely along this dangerous lee-shore of New Jersey, and telegraph-lines were laid connecting them with each other and also with the central office. The plan for the future is to net the whole coast—the lake, Atlantic and Pacific shores—with these stations and telegraph-wires. By this means information of coming storms can be conveyed by signal to vessels, or of wrecks, by telegraph, to other life-saving stations: the close watch kept upon the ocean-swell and currents will give warning inland of approaching changes in the weather; for it is a singular fact that the ocean-swell communicates this intelligence more quickly than the barometer, in quite another sense than the poet's

Every wave has tales to tellOf storms far out at sea.

Our little station belongs to the advanced guard of this proposed line which is to encircle the coast, the whole work of establishing these stations and telegraph-lines having been, done by Sergeant G– and his comrades. Indeed, when we look at all the work done by our blue-coated friend, his steady, unintermitting attention to duty by day and night year after year, his comfortless quarters in the wooden shed on the lonely beach, and the almost absolute solitude for an educated man during many months of the year, we begin to think his station not the least honorable among the soldiers of the republic. Almost any man, set down on the battle-field, one army to meet and another to back him, with the crash of music and arms, the magnetic fury of combat blazing in the air, would rise to the height of the moment and prove himself manly. But to be faithful to petty tasks hour after hour, through all kinds of privation and weather, for years, is quite a different matter.

The reports of the chief officer give us a hint of some of the privations borne by the observer-sergeants, educated young fellows like our friend. In 1872 the chief ordered one of these men to establish a station on the western coast of Alaska and on the island of St. Paul in Behring Sea, which was done, the observer continuing for a year in that farthest outpost. His record of frozen fogs which wrap the island like a pall, of cyclones from the Asian seas that lash its rocky coast, of vast masses of electric clouds seen nowhere else which sweep incessantly over it toward the Pole, reads more like the story of a nightmare dream than a scientific statement.

In the next spring the chief ordered another sergeant to found a station on Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain-peak east of the Mississippi. Professor Mitchell discovered and measured this mountain about twenty years ago. While taking meteorological observations upon it he was overtaken by a storm, lost his way, and was dashed to pieces over one of its terrible precipices. Several years after his death the government, suddenly recognizing his right to some acknowledgment from science, ordered his body to be disinterred and buried on the topmost peak of the mountain. It was a work of weeks, the body in its coffin being carried by the hardy mountaineers up almost impassable heights. But it reached the top at last, and lies there in the sky above all human life, with the mountain for a monument. One is startled by such a pathetic whim of poetic justice in a government. It was to this peak that the sergeant was ordered to carry his instruments and to make an abiding-place for himself. And here, after two days' journey from the base, he arrived at night in a storm of snow and hail—the guides having cleared the way with axes—set up his instruments, and took observations above the clouds while trees and rocks were sheeted with ice, and there was no shelter for himself or his companions from the furious tempests. A hut was built after a few days, and here the observer remained with the lonely grave as companion, taking hourly observations during several months.

Another officer was sent to the top of Pike's Peak, where he lived in a rudely-constructed cabin until his health broke down; he was then replaced by another, who after a year was obliged to yield also. As soon as one soldier succumbs in these perilous outposts another goes forward. The rarity of the air at this great altitude (nearly thirteen thousand feet) produces nausea, fever and dizziness: added to this were the intense cold and exposure to terrific storms. Sergeant Seyboth records several nights when he with his companions were forced, in a driving tempest, to leave the shelter of their hut and work all night heaping rocks upon its roof to keep it from being blown away; beneath them, many thousand feet, was the rolling sea of clouds. Again and again these men were lost in the drifted snow of the cañons while passing from station to station, and barely escaped with their lives. So imminent, indeed, was their danger during the winter of 1873 that prayers for their safety were offered continually in the churches below.

Frederick Meyer, another of these signal-service soldiers, was sent on the North Polar expedition with Captain Hall. No such marvelous tale as that contained in his formal report was ever found in fiction. Sergeant Meyer made observations every three hours on the voyage north, and hourly when coming south, during a year and two months. At the end of that time, as is well known to our readers, he, with part of the crew of the Polaris, was deserted by the ship, and left on a floe of ice in 79° north latitude, the steamer going southward without attempting their relief. Even in that moment of extremity he made an effort to secure the case containing his observations, but it was washed away from him by heavy seas. For six months these nineteen human beings drifted on the mass of ice over the polar seas, through all the darkness and horrors of an Arctic winter, without fire except such as was made by burning one of their boats—a feeble blaze daily, enough to warm a quart of water in which to soak their pemmican—without shelter save such as the heaped ice and snow afforded, and on starvation diet. After four months the floe began to melt so rapidly that it was but twenty yards wide. "We dared not sleep," says Sergeant Meyer, "fearing the ice would break under us and we should find our grave in the Arctic Sea." Several times the ice did break beneath them, and they were washed into the flood, but scrambled up again on the fast-melting floe. During the whole of this time the signal-service soldier continued faithful to his work, taking such observations as were possible with the instruments left to him. The boat had been burned long before, and they warmed their water with an Esquimaux lamp. On April 22d their provisions consisted of but ten biscuits. Starvation was before them when a bear was shot, and they lived on its raw meat for two weeks. At the end of that time a steamer passed within sight. The poor wretches on the ice hoisted a flag and shouted, but the vessel passed out of sight. Another ship a few days later came within the horizon and disappeared. The next day was foggy: again a steamer was sighted, and for hours the shipwrecked crew strove to make themselves seen and heard through the fog, firing shots, hoisting their torn flag and shouting at the tops of their voices. They were seen at last, and taken aboard the Tigress, "more like ghastly spectres who had come up through hell," says one of the narrators, "than living men."

The pay of the signal-service soldiers is small, and it is hardly to be supposed that they are all enthusiasts in science, or so in love with meteorology that they cheerfully brave danger and hardships such as these for its sake. We must look for the secret of their loyalty to their steady, tedious work in that quiet devotion to duty which we find in the majority of honest men—the feeling that they must go through with what they have once undertaken. And, after all, the majority of men are honest, and loyalty to irksome work is so commonplace a matter that it is only when we see it carry a man steadily through great and sudden peril, or consider how in its great total the work of obscure individuals has lifted humanity to higher levels in the last three centuries, that we can understand how good a thing it is.

At some future time we shall ransack the lower floor of the little house on the beach and discover what is to be found there.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

A DEAD LOVE

O Rose! within my bloomy croft,Where hidden sweets compacted dwell,The wanton wind with breathings soft,To perfect flower thy bud shall swell,Then steal thy rich perfume,Tarnish both grace and bloom,Until, thy pearly prime being past,Withered and dead thou'lt lie at last.O gleaming Night! whose cloudy hairWaves dark amid its woven light,Bestudded thick with jewels rare,Than royal diadem more bright,Lo! the white hands of DayShall strip thy gauds away,And in the twilight of the mornMock thy estate with cold-eyed scorn.My love, O Rose! hath had a dayAs fair, a fate as quick, as thine:All wrapped in perfumed sleep I layTill my fond fancies grew divine,And sweet Elysium seemedAround me as I dreamed.The rose is dead, the dawn comes fast:Joy dies, but grief awakes at last.F.A. HILLARD.

GENTILHOMME AND GENTLEMAN

"Le dernier gentilhomme de France vient de mourir!" exclaimed the Figaro a short time ago when recording the death of the Count de Cambis. But the announcement has been made so often during the last century that we are led to hope that the race may not be extinct yet. Every generation of Frenchmen has boasted the possession of its "first" and lamented the loss of its "last" "gentilhomme de France," and on each occasion have hasty English journalists of the day joined both in the glorification and the lamentation over the individuals thus commemorated by their own countrymen. The term "gentilhomme" is so liable to be confounded with "gentleman" that it needs explaining, for, despite the similarity of derivation, no two words can be more distinct. The French gentilhomme must be of noble blood: he must be of ancient and distinguished race, for no nouveau parvenu can ever aspire to be cited as a vrai gentilhomme, while the qualifications necessary for sustaining the character seem to be wholly confined to the one virtue of generosity. Whenever you hear it said of a man, "Il s'est conduit en vrai gentilhomme," be sure that it means no more than that he performed a simple act of justice in a courteous and graceful manner. The sacred and self-imposed qualities which make up the significance of the English word "gentleman" no Frenchman, nor indeed any foreigner, can understand, and the word itself is never translated, but always left in its original English. Bulwer defines the appellation more clearly than any other author when he says, "The word gentleman has become a title peculiar to us—not, as in other countries, resting on pedigree and coats-of-arms, but embracing all who unite gentleness with manhood."

Now the gentilhomme of France is an entirely different type. He must rely on pedigree and coats-of-arms; he must be sudden and quick in quarrel; he must fling away his money freely amongst the roture; he must be what is called a beau joueur—that is to say, he may lose at the gaming-table the dowry of his mother, the marriage-portion of his sister, everything, in short, save his temper; he may defraud a creditor, and be the first to laugh at the fraud. "One God, one love, one king!" is the cry of the good old English gentleman. But in religion the gentilhomme Français may declare with Henri Quatre that "Paris vaut bien une messe;" in love he may pledge his faith to as many mistresses as that same valiant sovereign; and in politics he may cry, "Vive le Roi! vive la Ligue!" and yet remain a parfait gentilhomme in spite of all.

Every generation seems to have furnished its parfait gentilhomme par excellence. The court of Louis Quatorze boasted of its Chevalier de Grammont, from whose own confession we learn that he gloried in the skill with which he cheated the poor Count de Camma at Lyons and the cunning with which he eluded payment of his bill at the inn.

Then came M. de Montrond, and he again was premier gentilhomme de France while he lived and le dernier des gentilhommes Français when he died. M. de Montrond belonged to two generations, two strongly-contrasted epochs. At his first ball at court he wore a powdered cadogan and danced in talons rouges: at his last he lolled with bald head against a doorway, in varnished boots and starched cravat. His existence has remained an enigma to this hour. Although solicited to accept office by every party that rose to power during his life, he steadfastly refused, and yet, by virtue of his quality of premier gentilhomme de France, possessed unbounded influence with them all. The explanation he gave of his system was cynical enough: "A man must march straight to the cash-box and secure the money, without waiting in the ante-room or the bureau: the power is sure to follow." He chatted politics sometimes, but never "talked" them, and seldom failed to introduce the names of one or more of the forty-three duchesses, countesses and marquises whose peace of mind he boasted of having wrecked for ever. Is it not strange that such frothy frivolity could have obtained dominion for more than fifty years over the most critical people in the world? But Montrond always declared that no man in France would ever take the trouble to read a book if once he had taken the trouble to read the preface. Even by the capricious and pedantic yet ignorant society of fashionable London his fantastical dominion was acknowledged; and the reason of this will be understood at once in the fearlessness with which he uttered his rule of conduct: "Every man of distinction should settle his income at ten thousand pounds a year, and never trouble himself whether or not he possesses as much for the capital." This premier gentilhomme de France was proud of his want of reading, and used often to declare that the only two books he had ever skimmed were the wearisome Henriade of Voltaire and the frivolous Liaisons Dangereuses of Laclos. No research, no analysis of character, can be found to explain the strange inconsistency by which M. de Montrond was, notwithstanding, entrusted by every government under which he lived with the most important secrets, the most serious negotiations—sent abroad to stay revolutions, summoned home to remodel constitutions, and consulted on every point as though he had spent his whole life in the study of Montesquieu or Colbert. Such was the moral life of the man pronounced the premier gentilhomme de France by the fathers and grandfathers of the present generation.

Let us glance at the physical side of his existence—the outward and visible sign of the distinctive title with which he was honored. M. de Montrond began his career by the study of arms, wine, women and dice—which constituted the accomplishments necessary for a gentleman of the period—in the regiment of Royal Flanders. Theodore Lamette was his first colonel, Douai his first garrison-town. Soon after his arrival there every man in the place became his devoted friend, every woman his willing slave, and every tradesman his ready creditor. It so happened that a detachment of Royal Cravattes had sought temporary quarters in the same town; and among the officers was a certain Comte de Champagne, a great duelist and gamester. From this man, by some good fortune, over which a veil has always been thrown by Montrond's friends, he won a considerable sum, and on finding, after suffering a considerable time to elapse, that no sign of payment was made, he proclaimed his intention of taking steps—not according, but in opposition, to the law—in order to obtain his due. Montrond knew himself to be a wretched swordsman, and therefore resolved at once to replace his want of skill by audacity. He sent his servant to the stable where four-and-twenty goodly steeds belonging to the Count de Champagne were champing their oats in all security, with orders to carry them off and leave in lieu of the magnificent animals a message to the effect that M. de Montrond would sell the stud to pay himself, and hand over the balance to the Count de Champagne. In a few hours, as he had expected, he was called to the field, and presented himself before the great duelist with a phlegmatic humor which completely upset the count's own self-possession. Montrond was hit hard at the first lunge. He had intended to be; and the result has become historical in the annals of dueling. He had been pierced in the breast by his adversary's sword, and was evidently thought by the latter to have received his death-wound. In token of this belief the Count de Champagne lowered his weapon, and then M. de Montrond, making one desperate thrust, drove his sword right through his adversary's heart. The Count de Champagne fell dead without a cry, without a struggle. Then M. de Montrond rose covered with glory and with honor, for in such adventures lay the fame of the gentilhommes of that time.

It would be impossible to recount the long catalogue of M. de Montrond's triumphs after this. He became the idol of fashion—as much with the Directoire as he had been with the old court—and under the patronage of Madame Tallien he was permitted to carry amongst the stern republicans the habits and morals of the Régence. It was at this moment of his life that the one act of expiation of the past took place. He worked with right good-will for the benefit of the exiled nobles, many of whom were recalled through his influence, which was so great that he found means to persuade the unkempt rulers of the Republic to invite to their banquets the pardoned émigrés, and to show that they felt no rancor and experienced no dread.

We were about to follow the example of Montrond himself, and forget that he was married—"just as little as possible," as he was wont to say, but legally, notwithstanding. He married during the Revolutionary movement a grande dame, a divorced lady, a certain Duchesse de Fleury, who had sought in this union nothing more than the protection of her property against the name of her first husband, through which it would have been infallibly condemned to confiscation. Many of the great ladies of that time had done likewise, thus defrauding the Republic. But the Duchesse de Fleury neglected the most important precaution of all—that of securing protection against the protector she had chosen, who at once seized the property—more gayly perhaps, but quite as effectually as the Republic would have done. The terms of the marriage-contract may be quoted as a specimen of the motives by which the premier gentilhomme de France was governed in the transaction. After the declaration that the Duchesse de Fleury had brought to the communauté certain houses and lands, besides an income of forty thousand livres, we find added by way of set-off to this fortune that the count engaged himself to bring yearly the sum of a hundred thousand francs—the produce of his wits. After a little while, the premier gentilhomme having exercised the said wits in spending the produce of the houses and lands of Madame de Fleury, and Madame de Fleury not being able to return the compliment by selling the wits of the Count de Montrond, the two went on their respective ways, leaving to Providence the task of redeeming the lands which the wits had sold and the income which the wits had scattered to the four winds of heaven.

Space is wanting to recount the struggles of the different parties which succeeded each other with such frightful rapidity in France to obtain possession of the Count de Montrond's influence. But he remained true to one principle, the one with which he started—"to make straight for the cash-box." Yet with all this prosaic prudence, amid the poetry of his position, the moral of this man's life was fulfilled to the very letter. The Count de Montrond managed to outlive every pecuniary resource save the one afforded by the remembrance of "auld lang syne" and the unforgotten days of bygone love. He died in the house of Madame Hamelin, after having been soothed and sheltered by this friend and protectress through the revolutionary storm of 1848. He died dependent, subject to the same changes and caprice he had so long inflicted upon others.

Montrond's successor, the Count de Cambis, the man who has represented the premier gentilhomme de France in our day, died lately at as good an old age as the Count de Montrond. Autres tems, autres moeurs: no more cheating at cards, no more beating the watch, as in the case of the Chevalier de Grammont; no more dueling and killing the adversary by surprise, as in that of the Count de Montrond. When the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, succeeded to the elder branch, the gentilhomme Français entirely lost his prestige, and the necessity of his existence was ignored. Everything bourgeois had become the fashion at court: the court itself was denominated a basse-cour (farm-yard) by the Faubourg St. Germain, and all who frequented it "les oies de Frère Philippe" or "les canards d'Orléans." The Count de Cambis appeared at that moment at the Tuileries in search of office. His name stood high in the annals of the French noblesse: society had, however, ceased to confound the gentilhomme with the roué. The conditions necessary to fulfill the character were changed, and it was now the bourgeois gentilhomme and not the gentilhomme roué whose claim to the vacant place was more likely to be accepted. The Count de Cambis had held the place of honorary equerry to the Duc d'Angoulême, having obtained it less on account of his patent of nobility than by reason of his unblemished character. He was now in search of some place about the court, and soon found favor in the eyes of the citizen-king, to whom the quiet virtues of the Tiers-État were of more value than the flash and tinsel of the Régence. The count was of fine, commanding person and handsome countenance: moreover, he was "the man with a story," and a painful one it was, creative of the greatest interest in the tender bosoms of the Orleans princesses. Although poor, belonging to a ruined family, his prospects had been good at the court of Charles Dix, and one of the greatest ladies of the court had cast her eyes upon him as a suitable parti for her daughter. The young lady, nothing loath, had accepted with alacrity the proposition of marriage, seconded as it was by the Duchesse d'Angoulême, and backed by the promise of high office on its realization. A marriage is easy to arrange in France; not so the execution of the marriage-contract, which is rendered as wearisome by delays as the still more dilatory proceedings of the law; and therefore it was deemed advisable, in order to pass this dismal period, to despatch the Count de Cambis to Holland for the purchase of horses for the royal stable. Arrived at The Hague, he was seized with an attack of smallpox, which laid him prostrate on the low flock bed of the miserable little inn to which he had been conveyed on landing from the boat. Here he lay for some time incognito, his identity unknown to any save the faithful valet who attended him, until he had perfectly recovered from the disease, which, however, was found to have left the most frightful traces of its passage in scar and seam and furrow from forehead to chin. The handsome young cavalier who landed so full of hope and spirits on the quay at The Hague rose from his bed with a face bloated and discolored, seamed and scarred and pockmarked, his once luxuriant locks grown thin and dank, his eyelashes gone, his whole appearance so changed that as he gazed at himself for the first time in the looking-glass he was overwhelmed with such despair that, as he owned afterward to his friends, he would have thrown himself from the window at which he stood into the canal below had he not been prevented by the strong arm of his servant, Dulac. A terrible period of anguish and depression followed on this first excitement, but he awoke from it and returned to life once more, a sadder and a wiser man. When the first impression of horror and dismay had passed away his resolution was taken at once. He resolved to disengage the lady from her vow, and sat down to write the words which were to rend his heart in twain. At that moment Dulac entered the room with a packet of letters just arrived from Paris by estafette. Amongst them was one from the young lady's mother, full of sweet pleasantry and graceful mirth, describing the gay doings at the Tuileries, and the delight her daughter had experienced at the idea of being allowed to attend the Duchesse d'Angoulême to the ball about to be given in honor of the visit to Paris of some one or other of the Spanish princes. She described with the greatest vivacity all the details of the toilet to be worn by her chère petite Adèle and the kindness of the royal princess, and ended with the most affectionate expressions of regret at the absence from the fête of her daughter's affianced lover, writing in playful terms of the danger in which Adèle's heart would have been placed at the accession of so many new and handsome cavaliers in attendance on the Spanish prince had it not been for the precaution of wearing, as the safest shield against all attacks, the locket which contained the portrait of her brave and beautiful lover—the miniature he had given her on his departure. He turned from the perusal of the letter with a deadly chill at his heart: he crushed it in his hand, and threw it on the blazing logs upon the hearth, holding it down with the tongs until every fiery spark had disappeared, then watched the blackened flakes as they flew one by one up the chimney; and when the last had disappeared he dashed the tears from his eyes, and, to the great surprise and consternation of Dulac, ordered him to pack up and prepare for their immediate return to France.