"C'est vrai donc," says the Duke, "Que Madame la Duchesse n'est plus!" . . . "C'est trop vrai, Monseigneur." . . . "Tant mieux," says the Duke, and walks off deliberately, to the great satisfaction of the assemblage" — Book 7, chap. v. The twenty-second volume of the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens: John Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens" (1879)

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C'est vrai donc

Fred Barnard

1879

Composite woodblock engraving by the Dalziels

14 by 11 cm (5 ⅜ by 4 inches), framed

Full caption: "C'est vrai donc," says the Duke, "Que Madame la Duchesse n'est plus!" . . . "C'est trop vrai, Monseigneur." . . . " Tant mieux," says the Duke, and walks off deliberately, to the great satisfaction of the assemblage."

Book 7, chap. v. Forster's Life of Charles Dickens in the twenty-second volume of the Household Edition.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated: Incidents in Paris

Before Dickens left Paris in May he had sent over two descriptions that the reader most anxious to follow him to a new scene would perhaps be sorry to lose. A Duchess was murdered in the Champs Elysées. "The murder over the way (the third or fourth event of that nature in the Champs Elysées since we have been here) seems to disclose the strangest state of things. The Duchess who is murdered lived alone in a great house which was always shut up, and passed her time entirely in the dark. In a little lodge outside lived a coachman (the murderer), and there had been a long succession of coachmen who had been unable to stay there, and upon whom, whenever they asked for their wages, she plunged out with an immense knife, by way of an immediate settlement. The coachman never had anything to do, for the coach hadn't been driven out for years; neither would she ever allow the horses to be taken out for exercise. Between the lodge and the house, is a miserable bit of garden, all overgrown with long rank grass, weeds, and nettles; and in this, the horses used to be taken out to swim—in a dead green vegetable sea, up to their haunches. On the day of the murder, there was a great crowd, of course; and in the midst of it up comes the Duke her husband (from whom she was separated),[151] and rings at the gate. The police open the grate. 'C'est vrai donc,' says the Duke, 'que Madame la Duchesse n'est plus?'—'C'est trop vrai, Monseigneur.'—'Tant mieux,' says the Duke, and walks off deliberately, to the great satisfaction of the assemblage." [Book VIII, Chapter v, "Residence in Paris. 1855-1856," pp. 312-313]

Commentary: Barnard's Preference for Social Realism

Forster's re-telling the Duchess's murder and the Duke's relief at her death seems to have far less relevance to Dickens's life than his recollections of sitting for his portrait with Scheffer which immediately precede the anecdote about the reclusive duchess. Barnard prefers the social realism of the scene in the street outside the Duchess's gate, relishing the contrast between the uniformed gendarmes (right rear), the pesants, and the fashionably dressed aristocrat smoking a stub of a cigar — details entirely invented by the illustrator.

The oil-on-canvas painting itself (943 mm by 629 mm), completed by Ary Scheffer in 1855 in a series of sittings in Paris from October 1855, was first exhibited in 1856 at the Royal Academy. It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Barnard, Fred, et al. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney [and others] printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. P. 565.

[The copy of the book from which these pictures were scanned is in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.]

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872 and 1874. 3 vols.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 22 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.

Created 15 September 2009

Last modified 10 January 2024