Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands

Paris, June 1853: unknown at last

The tone changes the moment the book reaches Paris. In Britain Stowe had been a public event for two months. In Paris she writes that she has come into dreamland, into the land where it is always afternoon, and that she is released from care, unknown and unknowing. She has a room opening onto a little garden, and her time is her own.

The party stayed with American friends who rented the ground floor of an old mansion in the rue de Verneuil, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Charles Beecher's journal notes that the house belonged to a marquis loyal to the old royal family, who lived in the country and let it out. On their first Sunday they walked to the Madeleine and heard a sermon on charity, and were startled to find that Paris kept no Sabbath.

Her first request was the Musée du Louvre, a short walk away. She went back again and again. Her favourite piece was the armless statue she calls the Venus de Milon, dug up on the island of Milos and given to Paris, she writes, with old Louis-Philippe as bridegroom by proxy. She liked the sculpture better than the paintings, because it never distorted a hand or a face the way the painters did.

The Bellocs, and a portrait looking away

Her guide in Paris was Louise Swanton Belloc, who with Adélaïde de Montgolfier had made what Charles Beecher calls the best French translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her husband, the painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc, directed the government's drawing school. Charles's journal records Stowe sitting for him in his studio on 13 June. Belloc decided to paint her looking away, following Charpentier's observation that she always looked around her, with the air of an observer, but not of curiosity.

While she sat, the publisher Charpentier came in. Charles Beecher's journal records him saying that in thirty-five years as a bookseller he had never known a success like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Charpentier said he had found the poet Alfred de Musset reading it, and that Musset told him the book left them all miles behind. The journal spells the poet's name as De Musée.

Stowe came back in August and stayed in the drawing school itself, in a room Madame Belloc had filled with flowers and engravings. The Bellocs took her to call on the poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, who had not had breakfast at eleven and ate his chop in front of them. Her description of French conversation comes from that visit: like the gambols of a thistledown, or the rainbow changes in soap bubbles.

The Sutherland letter, and Gloomy Memories

The book's least sunny legacy is Letter XVII. American papers had printed stories that the Duchess of Sutherland's family had turned tenants out into the snow and burned their cottages. Stowe calls them absurd. She says the stories exaggerate changes made on the Sutherland estates in 1811, when the Highlands were turned from military holdings into farms, and she defends the changes as progress.

Donald McLeod answered her. His reply was printed for him in Toronto in 1857, under a title that turns hers inside out: Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland versus Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Sunny Memories. Its subtitle calls the clearances the extirpation of the Celtic race from the Highlands. Stowe had been the Duchess of Sutherland's guest at Stafford House that May.