The Mysteries of Udolpho (121 page)

12.
livres
: The livre was old French money of account, divided into twenty sols (or sous) and approximately equivalent to the franc of 1900 (
OED
).

13.
a salle à manger, a salon, a salle au commune
: A dining room, a drawing room, and an everyday room in which to converse. (A ‘
salle commune
' would have been appropriate to a large public building in a town or city.)

14.
Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Summer']
: ll. 1672–5; ‘game' (l. 1674) in the original.

15.
The Glow-Worm
: This is the first of thirteen poems attributed to Emily in
Udolpho
. Six others are variously attributed to Du Pont, St Aubert, Count Morano, a group of peasants, Blanche and Valancourt. The female glow-worm (
Lampyris noctiluca
), with which Emily is ‘so little acquainted', emits a green light from the tip of its abdomen.

16.
fays
: fairies. In 1798 Nathan Drake, in his essay ‘On Gothic Superstition', pointed out that, in concentrating on the fearful aspects of the supernatural, writers of Gothic romance had neglected the ‘sportive' branch of medieval superstition, the ‘traditionary tales of elves and fairies' which had been employed to good effect by Spenser and Shakespeare. See
Literary Hours or Sketches Critical and Narrative
, 2nd edn (Sudbury, for T. Cadell, Jun., and W. Davies, London, 1800), Vol. I, No. 8, p. 38.

17.
Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Summer']
: ll. 1687–93; ‘flings' (l.1689), ‘wavering woods' (l. 1690) and ‘retained' (l. 1691) in the original.

1.
Shakespeare [Hamlet]
: I.v. 15–16. The works of William Shakespeare enjoyed a great revival during the second half of the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole in the preface to the second edition of
The Castle of Otranto
(1765) claimed to have imitated Shakespeare (‘a star of first magnitude among the moderns') in writing his five-chapter tale, and to have ‘shelter[ed] [his] own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced' (see Peter Fairclough, ed.,
Three Gothic Novels
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 41).

2.
closet
: A small private room for retirement.

3.
Tholouse
: Toulouse. Also spelt ‘Thoulouse' in Vol. I. ‘Thoulouse' appears on maps of the late sixteenth century.

4.
commotions… tumults
: During the time of Spanish control over Italy after 1559, there were some 7,000 Spanish soldiers in Lombardy and 5,000 in Naples. Their purpose was to keep the peace and maintain control in the face of any threats from the Papal States and Venice. But the army was ill-disciplined and was maintained through the system of
condotti
. That is, Philip II of Spain gave the independent Italian princes subsidies in return for military assistance in case of war – in the process, encouraging younger sons of the ruling Italian princes to take service and hold commands in the Spanish army. His task of keeping these princes of the small independent states themselves in check was made easier by the rampant jealousies amongst them. Radcliffe appears to be alluding to the constant skirmishing which occurred. Emily's apprehension of ‘civil commotion' and the warring between ‘petty' states is again raised in Ch. XIII.

5.
the French opera
: This is anachronistic, as are the references to opera in the Venice section in Vol. II. Peri's opera
Dafne
, now lost, was performed in Florence in 1597, but Monteverdi's
La Favola d'Orfeo
, performed at Mantua in 1607, is generally considered the landmark in the history of opera. The first public opera house in the world, the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, did not open until 1637.

1.
[Beattie] The Minstrel
:
or, The Progress of Genius
, I.ix and x. James Beattie (1735–1803) was born in a small village in Scotland, where he nourished a love of sublime and beautiful scenery. He went on to receive academic acclaim and royal patronage for his
Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth
(1770), which sought to refute work by philosophers David Hume and Bishop Berkeley. The first book of
The Minstrel
came out anonymously in 1771 and was praised in rapturous terms. The second book, together with a new and corrected version of the first, appeared in 1774, with the author's name added. A long poem in Spenserian stanzas, it traces the progress, in a Gothic age, of the solitary and sensitive Edwin – son of a shepherd, but a poetical genius. It foreshadows Wordsworth's
The Prelude
in its theme of Edwin's enlightenment through nature.
The Minstrel
remained enormously popular in the late eighteenth century. All references given for Beattie are to
The Poetical Works of James Beattie
(London: Bell & Daldy, n.d.).

2.
‘Drag… chain'
: Oliver Goldsmith,
The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society
, l. 7; ‘And drags' in the original. Goldsmith (1730?–1774) began writing
The Traveller
while pursuing medical studies on a tour of Europe in the summer of 1755. It was published in 1764. References are to Roger Lonsdale, ed.,
The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith
(London and Harlow, Longman, 1969).

3.
league
: The league was an itinerary measure of distance, varying from country to country, but usually taken to be about three miles. The use of the term in England tended to occur in poetical or rhetorical estimates of distance, rather than in everyday parlance.

4.
which science, rather than the eye, enabled him to describe
: St Aubert's mastery of his subject matter here arises from study or learning, rather than from local observation.

5.
‘
Rocks… green
': Beattie,
The Minstrel
, II.vii. ‘scorched with lightning' (l. 57) in the original.

6.
a scene as Salvator… had he then existed
: Radcliffe alludes here to the popular dark, craggy mountain landscapes of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa, apotheosized as ‘savage Rosa' by the poet James Thomson in his
The Castle of Indolence
(1748): ‘Whate'er Lorrain light-touched with softening hue, / Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew' (I.xxxviii). Many of Radcliffe's mountain, night and storm descriptions which evoke sublime awe and terror are reproductions in prose of the style of Rosa's paintings. The threatening atmosphere of his
Night Scene with Figures – The Banditti
, for example, with its gloomy chiaroscuro shadings of moonlit sky, massive projecting rock, barren tree and inimical human figures, is created on occasion for St Aubert and Emily as they travel through the Pyrenees. However Radcliffe's storm scenes also resemble the work of Nicolas Poussin (1593–1665), whose human figures are frequently frozen in moments of action and sublime emotion. Her picturesque scenes, particularly her melancholy evening landscapes, draw on the paintings of Claude Geleée (Lorrain) (1600–1682), whose expansive horizons are suffused with the soft luminosity of early morning or late afternoon.

7.
banditti
: Robbers, bands of outlaws found in Spain and Italy. They were part of the traveller's everyday life, especially in mountainous areas and frontier regions, such as the borderlands between the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, between France and Savoy, and between France and Spain, where wild, hilly terrain made ambushes easier. Travellers' diaries frequently contained accounts of the dangers they had encountered. See Antoni Maczak,
Travel in Early Modern Europe
, trans. Ursula Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 158–62.

8.
laving
: Washing or bathing.

9.
brakes
: Brushwood, thickets.

10.
volumes of Homer, Horace, and Petrarch
: Valancourt has had an eighteenth-century classical education. Homer, born some time in the eighth century BC, was a great Greek epic poet, author of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, born in 65 bc, was a Roman poet famous for his
Satires
,
Odes
,
Epodes
,
Epistles
and
Ars Poetica
. Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) was an Italian poet and humanist, most famous for the ‘
Rime sparse
' which included his love sonnets in praise of Laura. Petrarch's work had become very fashionable in the late eighteenth century, after a century of neglect.

1.
[Beattie] The Minstrel
: I.xxii.

2.
[Mason] Caractacus
:
Written on the Model of the Ancient Greek Tragedy
(1759), ll. 443–51. William Mason (1725–1797) was a friend of both Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray (1716–71) and worked with the latter on a projected ‘History of English Poetry'. As Gray's executor, he edited Gray's poems and letters and wrote his memoirs. His own works, which include a poem in blank verse,
The English Garden
(1771–81), are little read today. References are from
The Works of William Mason M.A. Precentor of York and Rector of Aston
(London: printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies by W. Bulmer, 1811).

1.
Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Spring']
: ll. 251–2.

2.
louis
: Louis d'or, a French gold coin issued in the reign of Louis XIII and subsequently until the reign of Louis XVI. In 1717 its legal value was fixed at seventeen shillings (
OED
).

3.
Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Summer']
: ll. 673–5, 773–7; ‘Broad o'er my head the verdant cedar wave' (l. 674) and ‘there let me draw / Ethereal Soul' (ll. 773–4) in the original.

4.
‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror'
: Rictor Norton, in his biography of Ann Radcliffe,
Mistress of Udolpho
(London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), points out (pp. 78–9) that this line appears to be appropriated from William Gilpin's
Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmorland
(London: R. Blamire, 1786), Vol. I, p. 183. Gilpin himself attributes it to the ‘ingenious' Mr Charles Avison, organist of St Nicholas in Newcastle upon Tyne, who said of Derwentwater, ‘Here is beauty indeed – Beauty lying in the lap of Horrour!' Radcliffe's happy change of ‘lying' to ‘sleeping' makes the phrase memorable. For Gilpin, features of landscape that are rough and irregular, are shaded in obscurity, or are in some way sublime, must combine with some degree of beauty for a scene to be deemed picturesque.

1.
Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]
: II.iii.

2.
fane
: Spire; see ‘rich Cathedral fanes' and ‘The fane conventual there is dimly seen' in Mason's
The English Garden
, III.59ff; vane.

3.
Milton [Comus]
:
A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle
(1634), ll. 555–60; ‘steam' (l. 556) in the original. The poetry of John Milton (1608–74), like the plays of Shakespeare, enjoyed a revival during the second half of the eighteenth century amid the reaction against the Augustan critical attitude and a new emphasis on spontaneity and the revival of things Gothic such as ‘folk-poetry' and ballads. Bishop Hurd, in his
Letters on Chivalry and Romance
(1762), argued that Milton, among others, had been ‘charmed' by the old
Gothic romances and that his work had gained ‘power' from them. All references for Milton are to
The Poetical Works of John Milton
, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).

4.
‘narrative old age'
: Alexander Pope (1688–1744),
The Temple of Fame
(1715), l. 291. Reference is to
Pope: Poetical Works
, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

5.
[Smith] The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books
(London: T. Cadell, 1793), II.300–301. The first publication of Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) was her
Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays
, but she became a prolific writer of novels when a series of misfortunes required her to support herself and her eight surviving children.

1.
Beattie [The Minstrel]
: I.xxvi.

2.
coffee
: An anachronism here, as is the allusion to coffee houses in Venice in Vol. II, Ch. III. Coffee was introduced into France in 1643 and was not in common use in Paris until 1669. The first public cafeé in Paris opened in 1672. There were several coffee houses around the Piazza San Marco in Venice by 1690.

3.
the tumults
: An allusion to the religious wars which had occurred in France during the previous decade.

1.
Collins [‘Ode… Fontenoy']
: ll. 19–21. Little is known of the life and work of William Collins (1721–59), especially after the onset of the mental disorder which appears to have led to his early death. References are to
The Works of William Collins
, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

1.
Mason [‘Ode; To a Friend']
: ll. 9–16.

1.
[Shakespeare] Macbeth
: III.iv.109–11.

2.
‘thick-coming fancies'
: Ibid., V.iii.38.

1.
[Beattie] The Minstrel
: III.iii; ‘artless all, as Edwin's infant song' (l. 27) in the original.