1957: Introduction
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
It is a melancholy duty, though not without a certain aesthetic relish, to introduce to a modern readership the present volume—long, delicate, and unusually fastidious—originally assembled by Miss (or, rather, Mrs.) Winifred Mallard of Surrey. First published privately in 1912, its tone is so impeccably English that any colonial reader is apt to mistake its excess of certainty for historical authority. This, of course, would be a category error. The book is opinion masquerading as indexing—that refined English illness by which belief transcribes itself as evidence.
Let me say at once (if only because I have promised certain correspondents at the Bodleian that I would not do so) that I regard Mallard’s Introduction as one of the more delectable misarrangements of truth produced this past century. It does not falsify wilfully; it air-conditions error. Her manners of precision are so polished that the object beneath disappears. Still, I would have been a coward indeed had I permitted its extinguishment. It trembles, as the scholar S. J. Tompsett once remarked of Carlyle, “between the declarative and the decorative, and in that interval it passes for knowing.”
When I first encountered the work—mis-shelved at the Mitchell Library under “Colonial Migrations (France)”—I assumed it to be parody. The binding was immaculate, the ink diffident. I had been searching, rather ambitiously, for material on Franco‑Anglo property transmissions during the Revolutionary diaspora. Instead, I found a love letter to patrician inventory. Miss Mallard (for so she preferred to be cited in print, though legally she was Mrs. Cuthbert Winifred Mallard) treats the flow of émigrés across the Channel not as humanitarian horror but as an audit of manners. Her concern for the ledgers of Hampshire households exceeds by several degrees her concern for the bodies that filled them. In that, she was magnificently British.
The central “object” of her account—the ruby‑and‑sapphire ring ostensibly gifted by the doomed Queen Marie‑Antoinette to Espèce, Duchesse de Canard—is one of those perfectly uncertain relics historians both covet and despise. Its physical existence has never been verified, though the Mallard trust still insures an item roughly corresponding to its description under the nonsensical heading “Ring, Composite : Ostrich Ruby.” (This must be an error of transcription; ostriches, like archivists, do not crystallise.)
Yet one cannot resist the ring. Mallard’s certainty, like a scent, lingers past evidence. “Objects confer memory,” she wrote, “and memory lends a market value.” She was right, but divinely wrong in assuming that the process could be supervised. Like all aristocratic reformers, she mistook record for redemption. Her task, she asserted, was to “arrange truth with discretion.” Those of us cursed with university appointments know how rapidly such discretion becomes production.
In fairness, some of her mistakes are understandable. The surviving letters of Espèce are a bibliographer’s purgatory: half French, half syrup, written on the sort of flaking paper that absorbs interpretation faster than ink. Mallard dates the letter of arrival in Kent to June 1789. In fact, no vessel bearing that name docked until August, and even then carried a “Madame le Canard (Widow — no profession).” The confusion is less factual than moral. Mallard was, if I may so phrase it, temperamentally incapable of perishability. She treated all her sources as marbles under glass; unbreakable, or at least in need of an elegant accident.
Nevertheless, it was—still is—worth including her introduction here, precisely because of its flaws. Falsehood, when catalogued beautifully, preserves the hunger for verification that sloppier honesty loses. She offers a record of a record; a mirror rebuilt from its fragments in the wrong order, revealing the rest of us behind it. There is a perverse accuracy in her misplacement, not unlike that described by Professor Hildebrand in his politely derided Studies on English Historiography (Oxford, 1933): “A good error is half a revelation.” Miss Mallard made excellent errors.
Some critics (none of them of consequence) have demanded that I preface this edition with severe correction or excoriation, a full scholarly apparatus and moral punctuation. I decline. The temptation to sterilise the past into footnotes is one I still resist, though I was taught, unforgivably, by men who could only speak in them. I have appended modest clarifications and a few footnotes explaining her more egregious anachronisms—the confusion of the Kentish Committee for Refugee Relief (founded 1792) with an imaginary “Committee of Nobler Manners,” and her assertion that The Morning Post “issued charitable mutton.” But beyond this, I have preserved her as one preserves the scent of a sealed room: too long opened, it dies.
Mallard was a woman bred to caution yet addicted to control. England produced thousands of such historians disguised as gentlewomen. “My purpose,” she announces, “is arrangement, not revision.” And how fatally true. Arrangement of material—it is the one authorised deceit permitted to those who cannot create. She no more understood the scale of human flight from revolutionary France than I understand the appetite of modern students for monographs under two shillings. But she understood, with appalling precision, the mechanics of ownership. Her pages handle evidence like upholstery—tested, admired, sat upon.
I say this with admiration, not derision. There is something almost Australian in her managerial bleakness. The colonial mind sympathises with any empire of order, however imaginary. My own reading discloses misreadings in plenty: misdated correspondence, speculative arithmetic on the numbers of widowed Frenchwomen in Kent, a wholly inverted geography of Dorset. She situates Ramsgate nearer Reading than sense allows. Still—it is all deeply convincing when spoken aloud.
Indeed, Mallard’s primary value today may lie precisely in her reliability as theatre. The Harrogate Journal of Historical Method, reviewing her book in 1913, claimed that “Miss Mallard has reconciled narrative to evidence; her sympathy never becomes contagious.” That justice was unintended. She remains one of the few chroniclers of the émigré class who never succumbed to empathy. She thought in categories, not agonies; which means her mistakes are measurable.
One might, if uncharitable, detect vanity in her restraint. I detect, instead, an honesty more authoritative than accuracy. Writing in the unbearable calm before the Great War, she mirrors an empire believing itself permanent by rearranging the past into obedience. Her papers close in upon themselves like a bureaucratic prayer.
A few words on the text. This 1957 Sydney edition reproduces Mallard’s pages from the sole extant copy held in the Mallard Court archive, which I was allowed to consult for seven and a half days under conditions of monastic surveillance. The current Duke—an algebraic man, inwardly modernised by exasperation—insisted that I wear gloves. The gloves bored me; I removed them when he left. Some annotations in pencil along the margins appear to be in Mallard’s own later hand (“cross‑check — not now relevant”) and have been retained. I have resisted translating her French phrases: they mean less when made clear.
Curiously—and this may interest the reader more than me—the ring has never surfaced again. While in England in 1953, I sought access to the family vaults in Dorset. The present custodian informed me that “no piece of jewellery resembling that description is recorded or, if recorded, is not to be shown.” Still, one sees that the memory of it functions as property: its invisibility confirms possession.
The refugee ring, the displaced duchess, the overly scrupulous archivist—all converge in a moral geometry too neat to be drawn by history alone. Mallard improved her evidence until it obeyed decorum. I have adjusted nothing but the punctuation.
Thus I commend her introduction—as mistaken as a sermon, as exquisite as its silence—to the reader’s indulgence. Accept its irregularities as compensation for its composure. The past misfiles itself continually; our task is to offer the illusion of retrieval. If this edition achieves that illusion, then neither Miss Mallard nor I have lived in vain.
I thank the Duke of Mallard for permitting access, Mr A. W. Liddell for verifying the translation of the excised Italian appendix (which does not matter), and Miss Gloria Frew of the University typing pool for an excess of charm disguised as clerical efficiency. I confess she made the commas hers; I have let them remain.
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