Nelson & His World

When still undergraduates both Witt and his future wife, Mary Helene (1871–1952), daughter of Charles Marten, stockbroker, began collecting photographs and reproductions. They were married on 15 April 1899. Their hobby led during their long married life to the formation of the vast Witt library of photographs numbering at that time three-quarters of a million. On 28 November 1944 Witt executed a deed of gift making over this library to the Courtauld Institute, but continued to administer it himself at his home, 32 Portman Square, where he had turned his spacious house into a reference library; all the walls in the rooms, passages, and even the bedrooms were crowded with shelves containing dark green boxes of photographs always readily available to students and collectors. At Witt's death the library was transferred to the premises of the institute (then at 19 and 20 Portman Square)

Many thanks for your post and information, Terry, and welcome to the forum.

The only additional information I have about Charlotte's picture came from Sam Sutton's descendant with whom I am in contact. She had been given a parish newsletter of 1968 which mentioned that the portrait was in the possession of a Mr Richard Haggard in 1929. The Haggards were a well known Ditchingham family - one of their members was the writer Rider Haggard; so the portrait was not, as I had first assumed, in Sam's hometown of Scarborough.

http://www.literarynorfolk.co.uk/ditchingham.htm

I don't know whether it would be possible to find out any more information using this slight lead - but do keep us informed if you manage to find out more.

The eighteenth and nineteenth-century parsons who were the incumbants of such remote livings usually dwelt with their families in the nearest small town and drove out into the country by pony cart just once or twice a week in order to hold services and make a few calls. One such vicar of Ilketshall St Margaret was the Reverend Ives, a mathematician and Hellenist of some standing, who lived with his wife and daughter in Bungay and was said to have liked his glass of sparkling Canary wine at dusk. During the summer of 1795 they were visited every day by a young French nobleman who had fled to England to escape the terrors of the Revolution. Ives talked with him about Homer’s epics, Newton’s mathematical theories, and the journeys which both of them had made in America. What great expanses that continent covered, and how immense the forests were with trees whose trunks towered higher than the pillars of the tallest cathedrals! And the plunging waters of Niagra – what did their eternal thunder mean if there were not also someone standing at the edge of the cataract conscious of his forlornness in this world. Charlotte, the rector’s fifteen-year-old daughter, would listen to these conversations with glowing fascination, especially when their distinguished guest conjured up pictures in which warriors adorned with feathers appeared, and Indian maidens about whose dark skin there was a touch of mortal pallor. Once she was so overcome with emotion that she ran out quickly into the garden on hearing of a hermits good dog that led one such maiden, in her heart already a Christian, safely through the dangerous wilderness. When the teller of the tale asked her what it was in his account that had so moved her, Charlotte answered that it was mainly the image of the dog carrying a lantern on a stick in his mouth, lighting the way through the n ight for the frightened Atala. It was always such little details rather than the lofty ideas that went straight to her heart.
In the manner of such things, it was surely inevitable that the Vicomte, who was exiled from his homeland and undoubtedly surrounded by the aura of a romantic hero in Charlotte’s eyes, took on the role of tutor and confidant as the weeks went by. Whilst it goes without saying that she practiced her French, by taking dictation and engaging in conversation, Charlotte also asked her friend to devise more extensive courses of study for her, to include antiquity, the topography of the holy land, and Italian literature. They spent long hours in the afternoon together reading Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and the Vita Nuova, and in all likelihood there were times when the young girl’s throat flushed scarlet and the Vicomte felt the thud of his heartbeat right under his jabot.
Their day always ended with a music lesson. When the dusk was settling inside the house, but the light streaming in from the west still lit the garden, Charlotte would play some piece or other from her repertoire and the Vicomte, appuye au bout de piano, would listen to her in silence. He was aware that their studies brought them closer every day, and convinced that he was not fit to pick up her glove, sought to conduct himself with the utmost restraint, but nonetheless remained irresistibly drawn to her. With some dismay, as he later wrote in his Memoires d’oute-tombe, I could foresee the moment at which I would be obliged to leave. The farewell dinner was a sad occasion during which no one knew what to say, and when it was over, much to the astonishment of the Vicomte, it was not the mother but the father who withdrew with Charlotte to the drawing room. Although he was on the point of departure, the mother – who, the Vicomte noticed, was herself most seductive in the unusual role which she was now playing in he teeth of convention – asked his hand in marriage for her daughter, whose heart, she said, was entirely his. You no longer have native country, your property has been disposed of, your parents are no longer alive: what could possibly take you back to France? Stay here with us and be our adopted son and heir. The Vicomte, who could scarcely believe the generosity of this offer made to an impoverished emigrant, was thrown into the greatest conceivable turmoil by her proposal, which it seemed the Reverend Ives had approved. For while on the one hand, he wrote, he desired nothing so much as to be able to spend the rest of his life unknown to the world in the bosom of this solitary family, on the other hand the melodramatic moment had now come when he would have to disclose the fact that he was married. While the alliance he had entered into in France had been arranged by his sisters almost without consulting him and had remained a mere formality this did not in the slightest alter the untenable situation in which he now found himself. Mme Ives had put her offer to him with her eyes half downcast, and when he responded with the despairing cry Arretez! Je suis marie! She fell into a swoon, and he was left with no other choice than to leave that hospitable house at once with the resolution never to return. Later, setting down his memories of that ill-omened day, he wondered how it would have been if he had undergone the transformation and led the life of a gentleman chasseur in that remote English county. It is probable that I should not have written a single word. In due course I should have even forgotten my own language. How great would France’s loss have been, he asks, if I had vanished into thin air like that? And would it not, in the end, have been a better life? Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? - The Vicomte wrote these words in 1822. He was now the ambassador of the French King at the court of George IV, One morning, when he was sitting working in his study, his valet announced that a Lady Sutton had arrived in her carriage and wished to speak to him. When this strange caller crossed the threshold, accompanied by two boys aged about sixteen who, like herself, were in mourning, he had the impression that she found it difficult to remain upright owing to some inner agitation.
The Vicomte took her by the hand and led her to an armchair. The two boys stood by her side. And the lady, speaking in a quiet, broken voice as she brushed back the black silk ribbons that hung from her bonnet, said: My lord, do you remember me? And I, the Vicomte wrote, recognised her. After twenty seven years I was sitting by her side again, the tears swelled up in my eyes, and I saw her, through the veil of those tears, exactly as she had been during that summer which had long sunk into the shades if memory. Et vous, Madame, me reconnaissez-vous? I asked her. She did not reply, however, but looked at me with such a sad smile that I realised that we had meant far more to each other than I had admitted to myself at the time – I am in mourning for my mother, she said; my father died years ago. As she said this, she withdrew her hand and covered her face. My children, she continued after some time, are the sons of Admiral Sutton, whom I married three years after you left us. You must excuse me now. I cannot say any more today. – She took my arm, the Vicomte writes in his memoirs, and as I led her through the house, down the stairs and back to her carriage, I held her hand against my heart and could feel that she was trembling. She drove off with her two dark haired boys sitting opposite her like two mute servants. Quel bouleversement des destinees! Over the next few days, the Vicomtee writes, I visited Lady Sutton four times at the address in Kensington that she had given me. On none of these occasions were her sons at home. We talked and were silent, and with each Do you remember? Our past love rose more clearly from the cruel abyss of time. On my fourth visit, Charlotte asked me to put in a good word with George Canning, who had just been made Governor-General of India, for the elder of her two sons, who planned to go to Bombay. It was solely on account of this request, she said, that she had come to London, and she must now return to Bungay. Farewell! I shall never see you again! Farewell! – After this painful parting I spend long hours shut away in my study at the embassy and with repeated interruptions for vain reflection and brooding, committed our unhappy story to paper.


W.G.Sebald rings of Saturn

..his pupils used to call Monsieur ‘Shatterbrain’ came to England as a refugee in the days of the Terror, he drifted down to Bungay, how or why I do not know, where he supported himself by giving French lessons in the neighbourhood. Amongst his pupils was Charlotte Ives, the daughter and only child of the hard-drinking parson, a very pretty and charming young lady with large dark eyes which are still remembered in this neighbourhood. The exiled Frenchman was tender, and Charlotte, it seems, was impressionable; at any rate, she welcomed his advances, and being a young woman of determined mind, persuaded her well-to-do parents to overlook the émigre’s lack of means and position to put no obstacle in his amorous path. Time went on, but although the attentions continued, as nothing tangible came from them, Mrs. Ives, the mother, thinking that he did not speak because of a natural delicacy that sprang from his lack of fortune, took Chateaubriand aside in the old red house in Bridge Street, and explained to him frankly that as they were mutually attached, and as their daughter would be well provided for, his misfortunes need be no obstacle to their union. The gallant Frenchman looked up and sighed, then he ,looked down and murmered: ‘Helsas! Madame, je suis desole; mais je suis marie!’ For all the time this poetic soul could boast a wife in France!
In the end the young lady, getting over her disappointment married a sailor who became Admiral Sutton, and lived for many years as a wife and widow at the Lodge. When in after days Chateaubriand returned to England as the Ambassador of France, a meeting took place between him and his old love, Mrs. Sutton. At first it was arranged that they should see each other here at Ditchingham, but in the end she went to London, and what passed at the interview I do not know.
About this Mrs. Sutton is told a rather interesting story. When she was a widow at the Lodge she engaged for her sons a certain tutor named Colonel A., who for various reasons became very distasteful to the lads in question. In his habits Colonel A. Was free and easy, and as the dark stain upon the white marble still shows, or showed not long ago, it was his graceful habit while instructing the mind of youth to rest his head against the mantelpiece and prop his legs upon a chair. In due course Colonel A., the tutor, died, and, much against the will of her sons, Mrs. Sutton, who, as I have said, was of a determined character, insisted upon burying him in the Sutton vault in Ditchingham churchyard. Time went on and Mrs. Sutton died also, whereupon the sons, taking the opportunity of the vault being opened, dragged out the body of their unfortunate mentor by night, and thrust it into a hole which they had dug somewhere in the graveyard. That tale is substantially correct I have satisfied myself by inquiry.

including his loveless marriage shortly after his return to France, his disastrous few months as a soldier in the emigre army, his exile in England and especially his aborted romance there with his young pupil Charlotte Ives. In the Memoires Chateaubriand spoke of Charlotte as his first real love. But in his description of the episode with her, there is apparent a clear connection between his reaction and the psychology of Rene in ‘The Natchez’. He could not marry Charlotte because he was already married, a fact the he had guiltily concealed during the months he tutored her without any plan except a desire not to snuff out the growing feeling on both sides. “It was then,” he wrote in the Memoires, having broken the news of his marriage to Charlotte’s distraught mother and left their home, “that embittered as I was by misfortunes, already a pilgrim from beyond the seas, having began my solitary travels, it was then that I became obsessed by the mad ideas depicted in the mystery of Rene which turned my into the most tormented being on the face of the eartg” (Memoires 1:465). This was written in 1822, after a surprise meeting with Charlotte Ives, now Mrs. Sutton, while Chateaubriand was ambassador to England.
His feelings toward her in that meeting were very complicated, no longer the candor and innocence, he says, of first desire. “[I]f I had pressed in my arms, as a wife and a mother, her who was destined for me as a virgin and a bride, it would have been with a sort of rage, to blight, to fill with sorrow, to crush out of existence those twenty-five years which had been given to another after having been offered to me” (Memoires 1:464). The jealous rage Chateaubriand attributed to Ondoure and Rene he reported experiencing himself, but at a much later date, closer to the revision and publication of the Natchez.

From the text their appears a definite hint of Charlotte liking this man in a possibly romantic way. Sam Sutton died in 1832 so was around and alive at the time.