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Monsieur de Roni in his glory; or, Mr. Paul Rooney and his Cossack Friends
Phiz
December 1842 instalment
Steel-engraving
13.5 cm by 10.9 cm (5 ¼ by 4 ¼ inches), vignetted
Twenty-fifth steel-engraving and thirty-fourth serial illustration for Charles Lever's Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (1843), facing page 366.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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O'Grady conveyed my mother through the crowd to a seat, where, having placed my cousin beside her, he once more came near me.
"Jack," whispered he, "come a little this way." He drew aside a curtain as he spoke, and we entered a boudoir, where a buffet of refreshments was placed. Here the scene was ludicrous in the extreme, from the incongruous mixture of persons of so many nations and languages who were chatting away and hobnobbing to one another in all the dismembered phrases of every tongue in Europe; loud laughter, however, poured from one corner of the room, whither O'Grady directed his steps, still holding my arm. A group of Cossack officers in full scarlet costume, their loose trousers slashed with gold embroidery and thrust into wide boots of yellow leather, stood in a circle round a person whom we could not yet perceive, but who, we were enabled to discover, was exercising his powers of amusement for this semi-savage audience, whose wild shouts of laughter broke forth at every moment. We made our way at length through the crowd, and my eyes at last fell upon the figure within. I stared; I rubbed my eyes; I actually began to doubt my very senses, when suddenly turning his joyous face beaming with good-humour towards me, he held forth his hand and called out, "Captain, my darling, the top of the morning to you. This beats Stephen's Green, doesn't it?"
"Mr. Paul Rooney!" said I.
"No, no! Monsieur de Roni, if you please," said he, again breaking out into a fit of laughing. "Lord help you, man, I've been christened since I came abroad. Let me present you to my friends." Here Paul poked a tall Cossack in the ribs to attract his attention, and then pointing to me, said: "This is Captain Hinton; his name's a poser, — a cross between chincough and a house-key. Eh, old fellow?"
A Tartar grin was the reply to this very intelligible speech; but a bumper of champagne made everything comprehensible between them. Mr. Rooney's hilarity soon showed me that he had not forgotten his native habits, and was steadily bent upon drinking glass for glass with his company, even though they only came in detachments. With Bashkir chiefs, Pomeranian barons, Rhine graafs, and Polish counts he seemed as intimate as though he had passed as much of his time in the Caucasus as the Four Courts, and was as familiar with the banks of the Don as ever he had been with those of the Dodder.
"And is it really our old friend Mrs. Paul who entertains this host of czars and princes?" [Chapter LVIII, "The Roni Fete," pp. 365-366]
From his mother Jack has learned of a certain recently arrived socialite "Madame de Roni, née Cassidy de Kilmainham, prie honneur" (to quote her beautifully embossed, gold burnished visiting card); he and the reader strongly suspect that this is but another incarnation of Mrs. Paul Rooney. Little does Lady Charlotte Hinton realise that the woman she observes on the arm of Czar Alexander of Russia is in fact the Irish woman she had denigrated earlier in the novel. And most of the characters whom we met earlier in the story, including the malignant Ulick Burke, the devious Lord Dudley de Vere, and Louisa Bellew, are present at the splendid Roni fête. Count Guillemain, a new acquaintance of Lady Charlotte, has discretely explained to O'Grady and Hinton that the new regime is tolerating the Irish impostors because the Minister of Police finds such entertainments useful in both unravelling and instigating political intrigues at the Hộtel de Rohan, where Madame de Roni nightly holds court.
Lever uses this chapter to pose a number of suspense-generating questions:
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. Jack Hinton, The Guardsman. Illustrated by Hablột Knight Browne (Phiz). London: Downey & Co., 1901. [First published serially in The Dublin University Magazine January through December 1842; and subsequently in a single volume, Dublin: William Curry, Jun. December 1842, pp. 396. Illustrated with wood and steel engravings by H. K. Browne: 27 full-page plates. 8vo, 396pp. Boston: Little, Brown, 1894; New York: Croscup, 1894. 2 vols.
Stevenson, Lionel. Chapter VI, "Editor, 1841-1843." Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall, 1939. 92-107.
Sutherland, John A. "The Dublin University Magazine." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 200.
Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablột Knight Browne, "Phiz". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.
Created 11 June 2023