Cuincy. Heavenly day – after dejeuner rowed out
on the lake – and walked in the Park. Old fashioned
picturesque house – thoroughly French. Good ménage.
Drove in to Douai afternoon – queer, straggling,
dirty, largish & prosperous town. Good concert room
in the Hotel de Ville. Rather a handsome woman
Mad: Druont(?) came to dinner. Him: n. (2)
It’s the autumn of 1881. In London, Patience is playing to large houses. Sullivan is earning the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. What better time for a holiday on the Continent? He’s been at it for over a month.
Sullivan left London on 11 August, with Ed Dicey (a life-long friend and fascinating person himself), Fanny Ronalds and her mother, Mrs Carter. They traveled together to Coblenz, Germany, then split up. The ladies went on to the spa town of Bad Ems; Sullivan and Dicey went to Bad Homburg.
Although Sullivan and Ronalds frequently spent time together on holidays, they almost never traveled alone together. In Sullivan’s diaries, they either find themselves in the same city one day, or they travel together with one or more other ladies.
Sullivan went to Bad Homburg to “take the cure”. As at most spas, the “cure” there consisted of drinking several glasses of water from a local spring, eating a low-cal diet, ceasing tobacco and alcohol, and walking for several periods each day. I suspect that a few weeks of that regimen would make most people feel better, even without the water, which usually tasted very bad. Bad Homburg was a natural hangout for Sullivan, as it was the favorite spa town of the British royal family, who were of course German.
On August 23 Sullivan took the train to Bad Ems to meet Fanny on her birthday (“Mrs C & Daughter eager to see me”). He returned to Bad Homburg the next day, where he spent several days, and at least one evening, with the alluring Madame Heritoff.
Once he felt his cure was complete, Sullivan rejoined Fanny and Mrs Carter in Kassel, on 5 September. And there began a long string of Himmlische Nächte, “heavenly nights”. In his diary Sullivan ended several entries with the phrase Himmlische Nacht followed by a number in parens. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decipher that. After several days of such nights, he starts to abbreviate, hence by the time of this entry on September 14 we have just Him: n. (2).
The curious part of this entry is its location. Two days previously, Sullivan and the two ladies made a rather long journey from Kassel in Germany to a tiny town in northern France, Cuincy. Today they “rowed out on the lake – and walked in the Park”. But they’re not at another spa, nor even a hotel. They are the guests of Jules Edmond Joseph, Marquis d’Aoust, and his wife Henriette, nee Félicie-Alexandrine-Henriette de la Croix de Chevrières.
I don’t know the connection between Sullivan and the Marquis d’Aoust; this is the first time he appears in Sullivan’s diary. His family was famous for having an ancestor in the Assembly who voted to execute King Louis 16th and was later himself guillotined. The Marquis clearly had invited Sullivan for the stay, and that could be because the Marquis was himself a composer, and Henriette the Marquise sang. I suspect they met in Paris, where the d’Aoust’s held musical evenings.
After three heavenly days and nights in Cuincy, Sullivan and Ronalds took separate trains home to London.
ps: A note from Dr. J. Donald Smith:
During her time in Paris – roughly 1864-1869 – Fanny had sung many times at the home of the Marquis d’Aoust, who ran musical salons and soirées in Paris of the type which Fanny herself would become famous for in London.