Sheridan produced at Drury Lane her Edwy and Elgiva, a tragedy which was not saved even by the acting of the Kembles and Mrs Siddons. The play was never printed. Money was now a serious object, and Madame D’Arblay was therefore persuaded to issue her next novel, Camilla: or A Picture of Youth (5 vols., 1796), by subscription. A month after publication Dr Burney told Horace Walpole that his daughter had made £2000 by the book, and this sum was almost certainly augmented later. It is interesting to note that Jane Austen was among the subscribers. Unfortunately its literary success was not as great. “How I like Camilla?” wrote Horace Walpole to Miss Hannah More (August 29th, 1796), “I do not care to say how little. Alas! she has reversed experience ... this author knew the world and penetrated characters before she had stepped over the threshold; and, now she has seen so much of it, she has little or no insight at all: perhaps she apprehended having seen too much, and kept the bags of foul air that she brought from the Cave of Tempests too closely tied.” Nevertheless Camilla has found judicious persons to admire it, notably Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. A second play, Love and Fashion, was actually put in rehearsal in 1799, but was withdrawn in the next year. In 1801 Madame D’Arblay accompanied her husband to Paris, where General D’Arblay eventually obtained a place in the civil service. In 1812 she returned to England, bringing with her her son Alexandre to escape the conscription. In 1814 she published The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties. Possibly because readers expected to find a description of her impressions of revolutionary France, it had a large sale, from which the author realized £7000. Nobody, it has been said, ever read The Wanderer. In the end of the year General D’Arblay came to England and took his wife back to France. During the Hundred Days of 1815 she was in Belgium, and the vivid account in her Diary of Brussels during Waterloo may have been used by Thackeray in Vanity Fair. General D’Arblay now received permission to settle in England. After his death, which took place at Bath on the 3rd of May 1818, his wife lived in Bolton Street, Piccadilly. There she was visited in 1826 by Sir Walter Scott, who describes her (Journal, November 18th, 1826) as an elderly lady with no remains of personal beauty, but with a gentle manner and a pleasing countenance. The later years of her life were occupied with the editing of the Memoirs of Dr Burney, arranged from his own Manuscripts, from family papers and from personal recollections (3 vols., 1832). Her style had, as time went on, altered for the worse, and this book is full of extraordinary affectations. Madame D’Arblay died in London on the 6th of January 1840 and was buried at Walcot, Bath, near her son and husband.
Madame D’Arblay is still read in Evelina, but her best title to the affections of modern readers is the Diary and Letters. The small egotisms of the writer do not alienate other readers as they did John Wilson Croker. Dr Johnson lives in its pages almost as vividly as in those of Boswell, and King George and his wife in a friendlier light than in most of their contemporary portraits. Croker, in The Quarterly Review, April 1833 and June 1842, made two attacks on Madame D’Arblay. The first is an unfriendly but largely justifiable criticism on the Memoirs of Dr Burney. In the second, a review of the first three volumes of the Diary and Letters, Croker abused the writer’s innocent vanity, and declared that, considering their bulk and pretensions, the Diary and Letters were “nearly the most worthless we have ever waded through.” These pronouncements drew forth the eloquent defence by Lord Macaulay, first printed in The Edinburgh Review, January 1843, which, in spite of some inaccuracies and considerable exaggeration, has perhaps done more than anything else to maintain Madame D’Arblay’s constant popularity.
Bibliography.—The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay was edited by her niece, Charlotte Frances Barrett, in 7 vols. (1842–1846). The text, covering the years 1778–1840, was edited with preface, notes and reproductions of contemporary portraits and other illustrations, by Mr Austin Dobson in 6 vols. (1904–1905). This Diary, which begins with the publication of Evelina, was supplemented in 1889 by The Early Diary of Frances Burney (1768–1778), which was in the first instance suppressed as being of purely private interest, edited by Mrs Annie Raine Ellis, with an introduction giving many particulars of the Burney family. Mrs Ellis also edited Evelina for “Bohn’s Novelist’s Library” in 1881, and Cecilia in 1882. See also Austin Dobson’s Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay) (1903), in the “English Men of Letters Series.”
DARBOY, GEORGES (1813–1871), archbishop of Paris, was
born at Fayl-Billot in Haut Marne on the 16th of January 1813.
He studied with distinction at the seminary at Langres, and was
ordained priest in 1836. Transferred to Paris as almoner of the
college of Henry IV., and honorary canon of Notre Dame, he
became the close friend of Archbishop Affre and of his successor
Archbishop Sibour. He was appointed bishop of Nancy in 1859,
and in January 1863 was raised to the archbishopric of Paris.
The archbishop was a strenuous upholder of episcopal independence
in the Gallican sense, and involved himself in a controversy
with Rome by his endeavours to suppress the jurisdiction of the
Jesuits and other religious orders within his diocese. Pius IX.
refused him the cardinal’s hat, and rebuked him for his liberalism
in a letter which was probably not intended for publication. At
the Vatican council he vigorously maintained the rights of the
bishops, and strongly opposed the dogma of papal infallibility,
against which he voted as inopportune. When the dogma had
been finally adopted, however, he was one of the first to set the
example of submission. Immediately after his return to Paris
the war with Prussia broke out, and his conduct during the
disastrous year that followed was marked by a devoted heroism
which has secured for him an enduring fame. He was active in
organizing relief for the wounded at the commencement of the
war, remained bravely at his post during the siege, and refused
to seek safety by flight during the brief triumph of the Commune.
On the 4th of April 1871 he was arrested by the communists as
a hostage, and confined in the prison at Mazas, from which he
was transferred to La Roquette on the advance of the army of
Versailles. On the 27th of May he was shot within the prison
along with several other distinguished hostages. He died in the
attitude of blessing and uttering words of forgiveness. His body
was recovered with difficulty, and, having been embalmed, was
buried with imposing ceremony at the public expense on the
7th of June. It is a noteworthy fact that Darboy was the
third archbishop of Paris who perished by violence in the
period between 1848 and 1871. Darboy was the author of a
number of works, of which the most important are a Vie de St
Thomas Becket (1859), a translation of the works of St Denis the
Areopagite, and a translation of the Imitation of Christ.
See J. A. Foulon, Histoire de la vie et des œuvres de Mgr. Darboy (Paris, 1889), and J. Guillermin, Vie de Mgr. Darboy (Paris, 1888), biographies written from the clerical standpoint, which have called forth a number of pamphlets in reply.
DARCY, THOMAS DARCY, Baron (1467–1537), English
soldier, was a son of Sir William Darcy (d. 1488), and belonged to
a family which was seated at Templehurst in Yorkshire. In early
life he served, both as a soldier and a diplomatist, in Scotland and
on the Scottish borders, where he was captain of Berwick; and
in 1505, having been created Baron Darcy, he was made warden
of the east marches towards Scotland. In 1511 Darcy led some
troops to Spain to help Ferdinand and Isabella against the
Moors, but he returned almost at once to England, and was with
Henry VIII. on his French campaign two years later. One of the
most influential noblemen in the north of England, where he held
several important offices, Darcy was also a member of the royal
council, dividing his time between state duties in London and a
more active life in the north. He showed great zeal in preparing
accusations against his former friend, Cardinal Wolsey; however,
after the cardinal’s fall his words and actions caused him
to be suspected by Henry VIII. Disliking the separation from
Rome, Darcy asserted that matrimonial cases were matters for
the decision of the spiritual power, and he was soon communicating
with Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador of the emperor
Charles V., about an invasion of England in the interests of the
Roman Catholics. Detained in London against his will by the
king, he was not allowed to return to Yorkshire until late in
1535, and about a year after his arrival in the north the rising
known as the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out. For a short time
Darcy defended Pontefract Castle against the rebels, but soon
