Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (17 page)

The bag itself was not, on the whole, remarkable. It was roomy and practical, and slightly patched. What was special was what was in it. By May 1871, when the Schreibers were making their steady progress towards the outskirts of the French capital, they had been on the road already (not to mention the seas, the railways and the back alleys) for almost a year. Throughout their journey, Charlotte had maintained her lifetime's habit of keeping a daily journal, recording the trials of collecting on the move and giving
us a colourful picture of what it took to be a collector. They had trekked through the South of France before attempting the ‘wretchedly bad' crossing of the Pyrenees, where the roads were no better than ‘ill-ploughed fields' and progress was only made by taking pickaxes to the wheels and whips to the horses.
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In Spain, hardly pausing for breath, they moved down through Gerona and Barcelona to Seville (with Charles suffering from headaches, a sore throat and inflammation of the eyes) and then on to Cadiz before crossing to Gibraltar. When their train ground to a halt in front of a broken railway bridge between Valencia and Cordoba, during a thunderstorm, Charles, along with other passengers, stepped in to help as the carriages were uncoupled and then pulled, one by one, across the ravine. At another unsound and unfinished railway bridge, they were transferred from their train to ‘a sort of temporary contrivance' which shunted them across ‘very slowly' with the men still at work around and below them.
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They had endured a twenty-six-hour journey between Granada and Madrid, having stayed up all night in advance to savour Granada's fabled nightlife. They had toiled on foot through Northern Spain and back into France during an unseasonable spring heatwave, carrying their big red bag between them, and stopping at shabby inns whose owners displayed a distrust of such odd English visitors. They had even spent one memorable night in Valladolid in the omnibus on which they had arrived in the city, much to the dismay of the driver who simply unharnessed his team of horses and pushed the carriage into the inn yard. The Schreibers were woken the next morning, early, by the stamping of mules, the neighing of horses, a cacophony of cocks and hens and ‘the tinkling of a bell on a very playful, restless goat'.
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Every moment of that year, every bright day in a pale Spanish town, every dusty evening in a Mediterranean port, every rain-sodden afternoon in a small, damp French village, had been filled with the unrelenting, resolute and entirely absorbing hunt for
things. And the spoils of the hunt – a delicate fan of exotic birds' feathers, a perfect silver serving jug, pieces of fine china carefully wrapped in paper, unusual figurines and a bright enamel – were safely stowed away in Charlotte's big red bag. So intense and energetic was Charlotte's search, so absorbing and dogged, that, when the farm cart finally trundled into the outskirts of Paris, the Schreibers were in for a shock. With her eyes fixed on the details of fine china, larger events in Europe had largely passed Charlotte by. The Franco-Prussian War, which had devastated Northern France and Germany for over a year, had registered simply as an inconvenience, prompting her to note blandly in her journal that Calais ‘looked sad and chastened' and Paris was ‘impassable'.
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None of this had really mattered, as long as the search was not interrupted. But now the Schreibers were thrown into a city in turmoil.

After the French defeat by the Prussians in the autumn of 1870, Paris had failed to accept the surrender offered by the rest of France. The victorious Prussian army had laid siege to the city with over a quarter of a million troops, and throughout the winter months Paris had defiantly starved. When the national government finally tried to enforce a truce in the spring, the workers and people of Paris, inspired by the ideal of ‘
la république démocratique et sociale
', had declared the city a separate commune. From March until May 1871, while the Schreibers had been further south, the revolutionary citizens had built over 600 defensive barricades. This time, however, it was not the Prussian army but the French army which marched on the capital. It arrived just a fortnight ahead of the Schreibers, overwhelming the revolutionaries in a series of violent, hand-to-hand street battles. Charlotte, her husband and her maid finally arrived on 1 June. Three days earlier, the revolutionaries had taken their last stand at the end of a week which saw as many as 30,000 casualties. Riding expectantly into Paris, what Charlotte discovered was not
the lively cultural capital she so much admired, with its network of dealers and showrooms and junkshops, but instead what she described forlornly as a ‘City of the Dead'.

Charlotte found Paris ravaged, and its people demoralized. No corner was untouched by the ferocious fighting of the past weeks. There was, she wrote in her journal, ‘no life or animation; scarce anyone in the streets. . . the Tuileries and other public buildings still smoking; the Vendôme Column lying in pieces on the ground'. She was shocked and bewildered, moved to tears by the destruction, but still undeterred by smoking ruins and bodies half-hidden in the rubble. She managed to secure a small apartment – with ‘a sort of cupboard' for the maid – in a building where workmen were bricking up the ground floors against the threat of arson. During the last days of the Commune, the Palais de Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville had been burned down and rumours were rife that working-class women –
les pétroleuses
– were stalking Paris with bottles full of petroleum or paraffin, ready to start fires through unprotected cellar windows. In fact,
les pétroleuses
turned out to be mythical, a construct of fear and suspicion, but at the time they were considered a formidable threat. The sale of flammable liquids was banned for several months, and as far as Charlotte was concerned, her lodgings could be burned to the ground at any moment in an act of revolutionary spite. There is no doubt that she was frightened and overwhelmed by the situation she and her party had wandered into blindly. Perhaps because of this, she set her mind even more firmly on collecting. Within minutes of arriving in Paris, she went out into the ruins to try to discover what had become of her trusted dealers and whether there were any bargains to be had.

It took time to establish exactly what had happened. Entire streetscapes had been altered, first by the building of the huge barricades and then by their destruction and the hand-to-hand fighting. Houses and shops were burned out and deserted, and
many Parisians were sheltering in cellars or attics, afraid to venture on to the streets for bread, far less to talk about antiques with English travellers. Eventually, though, through perseverance and with the aid of a few substantial banknotes, Charlotte began to get a trickle of information. And the news was not good. Two of her oldest and most trustworthy dealers, Mme Caillot and Mme Oppenheim, had, Charlotte noted sadly, ‘both died of fright'. Nothing was left of their stock, which had been burned or looted. For another of Charlotte's contacts, ‘poor old Fournier', the fear and confusion had proved too great: he had reportedly gone mad, and could not be found. The only dealer Charlotte could locate was Mme Flaudin, and the next morning she set out early for the small dark shop which she had visited many times before on happier occasions. Remarkably, it was open and largely unscathed by the fighting. Mme Flaudin was waiting with a jug of hot coffee and a table covered in things she hoped would tempt her intrepid customer. But even in the aftermath of revolution, Charlotte would not be rushed. She took her time browsing, and carefully examined any of the objects that caught her eye. She asked questions, and bartered fiercely. She was in her element; she had found what she was looking for, a surviving Paris dealer, and, better still, a dealer with things worth buying. Not even her walk back through the bloody wreckage of the city could blunt her joy at unearthing some decent china, a ‘matching old maroon Chelsea set'.
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Rescued from the rubble of Paris, Charlotte's set of china was tenderly wrapped and given a temporary home in the big red bag. Produced in the eighteenth century by a factory founded around 1740 in the rapidly expanding but still rural town on the outskirts of London, Chelsea china was regarded as the very finest of English porcelain. Its famous claret-red tableware, daintily decorated with gilded borders and golden curlicues, was prized above everything. It had been popular since the day it was made
and so demanded high prices, finding its way into the homes of the very wealthy. Charlotte admired the deep tones and fine shapes of the china, and was shrewd enough to recognize that what she was offered in Mme Flaudin's was a bargain. The Chelsea set was to become one of her treasured pieces. Fittingly for such a glamorous refugee of the Paris violence, it was to end up in the refined cabinets at South Kensington, part of the huge collection that Charlotte donated to the museum – one of the finest, most detailed and most interesting collections of English china ever amassed.

A couple of weeks before arriving in Paris, Charlotte Schreiber celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday. It was a day like any other, spent hunting for collectables with her husband. Good wishes had been sent from some of her children in the letters which straggled into foreign post offices in the days running up to the occasion, but 19 May 1871 was passed quietly in Tangiers. The most special and welcome thing about the day was the quality of the Victoria Hotel, chosen by chance rather than as a birthday treat, but worth noting in Charlotte's journal as ‘clean and comfortable, unlike any since leaving England'.
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Charlotte looked like any other elderly traveller, taking in the fabled and relaxed culture of the North African port. She was slightly plump and matronly; she was not, and had never been, particularly beautiful, and she dressed sedately and neatly in sombre colours, even in the African heat. Perhaps her one concession to vanity was that her grey hair was dyed. This was not an easy thing to achieve in the midst of so much travelling, and Charlotte may well have resorted to using Condy's Fluid, a mixture of the mineral pyrolusite (largely magnesium dioxide) with potassium hydroxide that had been patented in the mid-nineteenth century and which could be conveniently carried as a disinfectant as well as being used to colour hair. Even with
Condy's Fluid, however, the process was not straightforward and would have given Charlotte's maid a great deal of work: each hair had to be dyed individually. In addition, it was something that would have had to be done discreetly. While it became very popular for Victorian women to dye their hair, and magazines were awash with advertisements for products, it was not quite accepted as thoroughly respectable, especially among the middle and upper classes. ‘Above all dyes will be renounced', proclaimed Baroness Staffe authoritatively, in a French etiquette manual that was influential enough to be translated into English towards the end of the century. ‘The natural colour of the hair will be kept and grey hair itself will not be powdered. . . At this cost the hair will remain abundant and vigorous, even in those of advanced age, and will allow of being prettily and gracefully dressed.'
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Even with the fashionable rebelliousness of dyed hair, Charlotte did not look like a woman whose name was becoming known across Europe. She looked ordinary; a woman of her class and time. And even she, as she admitted in her journal, was surprised at the way things were unfolding. She had not expected to be ransacking foreign lands for china. She had not planned to spend her days hurrying from one dealer to the next, excited by rumours of the rare and beautiful, exhausted and exhilarated by the chase. There was little in her earlier life to suggest that she was to become such a dedicated and inventive collector, and she was almost fifty when the obsession overwhelmed her. Her enthusiasm for collecting came late, and apparently out of the blue.

But, while there may have been few clues in Charlotte's first fifty years to suggest she would become such a significant and respected collector, the energy, determination and curiosity that characterized her collecting were clearly evident in the range of activities to which she dedicated herself as a younger woman. She was born in 1812 with a title, Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie,
the daughter of Albemarle Bertie, the 9th Earl of Lindsey, an army general and an MP. She was the first of three children, but her father was already sixty-eight years old when Charlotte was born, and he died just six years later. By the time Charlotte was nine, her mother had married again and her new husband, the Reverend Peter Pegus, had moved into the family home at Uffington House in Lincolnshire; a year later, Charlotte began the journal which she was to keep candidly and faithfully until she was seventy-nine years old and almost completely blind.

Charlotte hated her new stepfather. Pegus was a bully and a drunk who was once so desperate for beer that he downed a mug of lamp oil instead. Unpredictable and violent, he was quick to flare into a rage; passionate about the most trivial of domestic habits, on one occasion he sacked the entire household of servants on the spot. Family life was stormy and miserable, and Charlotte was lonely. The house at Uffington was isolated and there were no suitable friends for Charlotte nearby. Her eldest brother suffered from what would now be regarded as a mental disability; her younger brother was baffled by her bookish tastes; and she was never close to her mother, who sank into decline after her second marriage. Charlotte spent hours alone in the garden, particularly among the avenue of lime trees, and she immersed herself in her studies. She was serious, literary and fiercely bright. She worked with her brothers' tutor whenever she could (falling in love with him at the same time) and studied hard outside the hours officially allocated to her schooling, rising each morning to begin work by four, setting herself strict routines, devouring the books in the library and reciting poetry in her garden walks. She taught herself a variety of languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and Persian; she worked diligently at her mathematics; she practised her drawing skills until she became an accomplished draughtswoman; she played piano and harp, she read Chaucer and Ariosto for pleasure – and she played a mean game of billiards.
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