Monsieur Maurice

Monsieur Maurice

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Title: Monsieur Maurice
Author: Amelia B. Edwards
Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8383] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on July 5, 2003]
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MAURICE ***

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MONSIEUR MAURICE
By
AMELIA B. EDWARDS
1873

1
The events I am about to relate took place more than fifty years ago. I
am a white-haired old woman now, and I was then a little girl scarce
ten years of age; but those times, and the places and people associated
with them, seem, in truth, to lie nearer my memory than the times and
people of to-day. Trivial incidents which, if they had happened
yesterday, would be forgotten, come back upon me sometimes with all
the vivid detail of a photograph; and words unheeded many a year ago
start out, like the handwriting on the wall, in sudden characters of fire.
But this is no new experience. As age creeps on, we all have the same
tale to tell. The days of our youth are those we remember best and most
fondly, and even the sorrows of that bygone time become pleasures in
the retrospect. Of my own solitary childhood I retain the keenest
recollection, as the following pages will show.
My father's name was Bernhard--Johann Ludwig Bernhard; and he was
a native of Coblentz on the Rhine. Having grown grey in the Prussian
service, fought his way slowly and laboriously from the ranks upward,
been seven times wounded and twice promoted on the field, he was
made colonel of his regiment in 1814, when the Allies entered Paris. In
1819, being no longer fit for active service, he retired on a pension, and
was appointed King's steward of the Château of Augustenburg at

Brühl--a sort of military curatorship to which few duties and certain
contingent emoluments were attached. Of these last, a suite of rooms in
the Château, a couple of acres of private garden, and the revenue
accruing from a small local impost, formed the most important part. It
was towards the latter half of this year (1819) that, having now for the
first time in his life a settled home in which to receive me, my father
fetched me from Nuremberg where I was living with my aunt, Martha
Baur, and took me to reside with him at Brühl.
Now my aunt, Martha Baur, was an exemplary person in her way; a
rigid Lutheran, a strict disciplinarian, and the widow of a wealthy
wool-stapler. She lived in a gloomy old house near the Frauen-Kirche,
where she received no society, and led a life as varied and lively on the
whole as that of a Trappist. Every Wednesday afternoon we paid a visit
to the grave of her "blessed man" in the Protestant cemetery outside the
walls, and on Sundays we went three times to church. These were the
only breaks in the long monotony of our daily life. On market-days we
never went out of doors at all; and when the great annual fair-time
came round, we drew down all the front blinds and inhabited the rooms
at the back.
As for the pleasures of childhood, I cannot say that I knew many of
them in those old Nuremberg days. Still I was not unhappy, nor even
very dull. It may be that, knowing nothing pleasanter, I was not even
conscious of the dreariness of the atmosphere I breathed. There was, at
all events, a big old-fashioned garden full of vegetables and
cottage-flowers, at the back of the house, in which I almost lived in
Spring and Summer-time, and from which I managed to extract a great
deal of