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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Literary woodlice boring needless holes in biographical bedposts

If true, and I give the story exactly as I received it, the tale makes a curious ‘double’ in French history: the hearts of both of France’s most notorious tyrants met a grisly fate. It was a custom of the French monarchy that, whenever the bodies of the kings were buried, vital organs, including the heart, were preserved at the Capetian family church, St Denis. During the Revolution, the church was broken into and ransacked of its treasures. Some royalist, however, managed to rescue the heart of Louis XIV, presumably in its reliquary, and took it into exile with him. It ended up at Nuneham, seat of the Harcourt family, a curious dried-up, shrivelled thing of dark and repulsive appearance, which was shown to visitors. One day it was produced for the entertainment of a Cambridge professor, a zoologist who, unknown to Lord Harcourt, was notorious for eating bits of the exotic animals he studied. This monster said, ‘I have eaten many strange things in my life, but I have never eaten the heart of a king.’ Whereupon he grabbed the loathsome piece of matter, popped it into his mouth and, after a perfunctory chew, swallowed it. His Lordship was outraged, but could do nothing. I may say that this kind of behaviour by Cambridge professors of the rougher sort is not wholly unknown — one can imagine Dr Leavis doing something similar. But it is odd to think of the last surviving morsel of Le Roi Soleil ending up in a Cambridge academic tummy. No odder, however, than Napoleon’s heart being devoured by Atlantic rats.

Relics of the famous are by no means so uncommon as one might suppose. For instance, during the gestation period of the magnificent Pilgrim edition of Charles Dickens’s letters (the last of the 12 volumes appeared in 2002), many hundreds of new letters came to light, bringing the total to 14,252. In the last volume alone, containing 1,151 letters, 427 were published for the first time. Roughly the same proportion applies to the famous Leslie Marchant edition of Lord Byron’s letters in 12 volumes, totalling over 2,900 letters, over 1,700 more than the most complete previous edition. In both cases, some of the newly discovered letters were of the highest importance. It has been the same story with the enormous Duke University edition of the letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, of which 35 volumes have so far been published, taking the story up to 1859. There will be, I imagine, over 60 volumes in all, and new letters appear almost every week. Such valuable bits of paper are to be found in all kinds of places, though strongboxes in the offices of old-established firms of solicitors — carried on from partner to son, to grandson and great-grandson — are the most likely. One such box revealed 35 letters from Dickens to John Forster, his closest associate throughout his life. I am hopeful that, sooner or later, a cache of Dickens’s letters to Ellen Ternan will be uncovered, clearing up many mysteries (and probably starting new ones too). We know Dickens wrote to her constantly, and though the Victorians were fearful incendiaries of private letters, even if she had a bonfire of Dickens’s after his death in 1870, some must have survived, as they always do. When Victoria herself died in 1901, her heir Edward VII carried out a monstrous holocaust of her possessions and papers but a good deal of material, happily, escaped his little piggy eyes. Nine volumes of her adult letters were published between 1907 and 1932, plus a supplementary volume of 1938 and two volumes dealing with her girlhood. My friend Kenneth Rendell, the great authority on collecting historical documents, writes in his authoritative volume, History Comes to Life, that autograph material of the Queen is ‘common’ and ‘documents, usually appointments, are fairly readily found’, but her letters ‘have become more scarce... she is very popular with collectors and there is great interest in her’. (By contrast, there is ‘little interest’ in autograph writings of Edward VII.)