Shopping and the Senses, 1800-1970

Serena Dyer
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Shopping and the Senses,
1800–1970
A Sensory History of
Retail and Consumption

Edited by
Serena Dyer
Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970
 Serena Dyer
Editor

Shopping and the

Senses, 1800–1970
A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption
Editor
Serena Dyer
De Montfort University
Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-90334-3    ISBN 978-3-030-90335-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0

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 Acknowledgements

Writing a volume on materiality and sensorial experience during a global

pandemic has been a stimulating challenge. Our perspectives of shopping,
retail space and the rise of online shopping have dramatically impacted our
experiences of shopping and the senses during COVID. I am beyond
grateful to my contributors for their stellar efforts amidst these challeng-
ing years. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
insightful and kind comments, as well as Emily Russell, Raghupathy
Kalyanaraman and the team at Palgrave for their support of this project.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Serena Dyer

2 “To Rub the Nose in the Tea”: Smell, Taste, and the
Assessment of Quality in Early Nineteenth-Century Tea
Retail 17
Matthew Mauger

3 An Assault on the Senses: Cultural Representations of

the Victorian Village Shop 35
Lucy A. Bailey

4 The Politics of Sitting Down: Women, Cafés and Public

Toilets in Dublin 59
Stephanie Rains

5 Comfort and Safety: An Intersensorial History of

Shopping Streets in Nineteenth-­Century Amsterdam
and Brussels 79
Anneleen Arnout

6 The Cry of Silk: Erotomania and Fetishism in

Au Bonheur des Dames101
Wendy Ligon Smith

vii
viii Contents

7 “Behind the Scenes of a Retail Shop”: Sensory

Experiences of Living-In, c. 1880s–1920s121
Alison Moulds

8 Synergy and Dissonance of the Senses: Negotiating

Fashion Through Second-Hand Dealing, Jumble Sales
and Street Market Trading in 1930s East End London145
Cheryl Roberts

9 “A Seductive Weapon … a Necessary Luxury”: Shopping

for ‘Designer Perfume’ During the Interwar Period169
Lucy Moyse Ferreira

10 Be My Baby: Sensory Difference and Youth Identity in

British Fashion Retail, 1945–1970191
Bethan Bide

Index213
 Notes on Contributors

Anneleen Arnout is Assistant Professor of History at Radbound

University, The Netherlands. His first book, Streets of Splendor: Shopping
Culture and Spaces in a European Capital City, was published in 2019.
Lucy A. Bailey is a Project Officer at the University of Kent and was
previously Associate Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton.
She has published articles in History of Retailing and Consumption and
Midlands History.
Bethan Bide is a fashion historian and Lecturer in Design History and
Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. Her research centres around
the cultural, social and business histories of fashion. She has published in
Fashion Theory and The London Journal.
Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De
Montfort University, Leicester. She is the author of Material Lives: Women
Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (2021) and editor, with
Chloe Wigston Smith, of Material Literacy in Eighteenth Century
Britain: A Nation of Makers (2020).
Lucy Moyse Ferreira is Associate Lecturer in Cultural and Historical
Studies at the University of the Arts, London. She obtained her PhD on
violence in fashion during the interwar years from the Courtauld
Institute of Art.
Matthew Mauger is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Queen
Mary University of London. With Markman Ellis and Richard Coulton,

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

he has published The Empire of Tea: How an Asian Leaf Conquered

Britain (2016).
Alison Moulds has a DPhil in English Literature from the University of
Oxford, and is the author of Medical Identities and Print Culture,
1830s–1910s (2021).
Stephanie Rains is an associate professor at Maynooth University and
works on the Irish media and cultural history in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.
Cheryl Roberts is Lecturer in History of Art & Design at the University
of Brighton and visiting tutor in the Royal College of Art/V&A Museum
MA History of Design programme.
Wendy Ligon Smith is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia.
Her book on Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo is forthcoming.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand. After Thomas

Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin. Published in Repository of
Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 1809 7
Fig. 3.1 Illustration from ‘Stodge and Scumble’s Country Adventures’,
The Graphic (Summer 1885). (© Illustrated London News
Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library) 39
Fig. 3.2 Illustration (colour litho) by Francis Donkin Bedford for
‘Village Store’ in Lucas, E.V., The Book of Shops (Forum Books
1990, originally published by Grant Richards in 1899).
Heritage Images/Getty Images 47
Fig. 3.3 Illustration by Mary Ellen Edwards for ‘The Little Purchases’
in Weatherly, F.E., Among the Daisies (Hildesheimer and
Faulkner 1891). (© Mary Evans Picture Library) 51
Fig. 3.4 Illustration from The Tale of Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix
Potter. (© Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 1909, 2002) 54
Fig. 8.1 A group of young, working-class women selecting garments
that can be transformed into fashionable dresses, 1930.
Caledonian Market, London. (Photographer Hans Casparius.
Museum of London, no. IN7837/Museum für Film und
Fernsehen)153
Fig. 10.1 Eric Lucking window display for the “Young Liberty Shop” at
Liberty & Co., 1949. Westminster City Archives/Liberty Ltd. 197
Fig. 10.2 “Boutique” cover illustration. Jackie, 10 December 1966, 1.
DC Thompson Archive 205
Fig. 10.3 “Around the Boutiques” column, Jackie, 15 April 1967, 22.
DC Thompson Archive 207

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Serena Dyer

Shops are sensorily rich spaces. Their existence fundamentally rests upon a
ubiquitous consumer need and desire for material goods, be that food,
clothing, homewares, or a plethora of other products, both luxury and
necessary. Those goods carry cultural capital: shoppers might purchase a
new dress because it is the latest fashion, or a new perfume because the
brand is perceived as exclusive. Yet those goods are also intensely material.
They are bound up in a network of physical and emotional sensation.
Interactions with the material world—both within and beyond commer-
cial spaces—rest upon an intersensorial perceptual experience. How we
observe the materiality of an object is shaped by how that object looks,
smells, feels, sounds and, sometimes, tastes. How we interpret and process
those sensations is then shaped by our own cultural and historical context.
As material culture scholars have shown—although not always using sen-
sorial terms—haptic and visual assessments of the material properties of
objects are essential to object-centred methodologies (Prown 1982; Mida

S. Dyer (*)
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
e-mail: serena.dyer@dmu.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_1
2 S. DYER

and Kim 2015). Objects are not simply abstract cultural presences, but
animated and tangible entities. If our interactions with the material world
are inherently sensory, then the centrality of intersensory assessment and
interaction within shops is crucial. Shops are the access point, the space
within which most objects are obtained. In the twenty-first century, the
commercial primacy of the physical shop space has been effaced by the rise
of online retail. Yet those online spaces themselves have continued to
grapple with the insertion of sensory engagement within a digital space
(Kim and Forsythe 2009). It is, therefore, vital to reconnect the processes
and practices of historic shopping with consumers’ sensory perceptions
and experiences of the objects they encounter within retail environments.
The tempting aromas, curated soundscapes, and tactile textiles which
fill twenty-first-century shop spaces are often framed around the genera-
tion of a positive consumer experience (Helmefalk and Hultén 2007;
Spence 2021). The senses are utilised as a marketing apparatus, and a
sensory landscape is explicitly composed by retail display professionals to
seduce and delight consumers, and ultimately to encourage them to pur-
chase. It is tempting to frame shops of the past through the same lens,
with the sensory viewpoint providing imagined immersion into a roman-
ticised vision of lush department stores and luxurious and aromatic tea
sellers. This volume delves into and beyond the seductive idyll of con-
sumer sensuality. Tired feet and weary workers, rotting fish, and overpow-
ering and unpleasant scents inhabit this volume, as well as the luscious
rustle of silk and the now-familiar delights of the nineteenth-century
department store. Shops and the streets they were on could be smelly,
noisy, unpleasant places (Cockayne 2008). The sensorial experience of
shopping is not predominantly, let alone universally, positive.
This volume seeks to make two connected interventions at the intersec-
tion of consumer and sensory histories. Firstly, it asserts that browsing,
and the associated assessment of goods, must be framed as a sensory activ-
ity. Commercial materiality leads us to questions beyond abstract econo-
mies. While cultural capital, fashionability, and necessity shaped many
consumer choices, the material properties of goods, as understood through
intersensorial and somatic material knowledge, also shaped consumer
decisions. Secondly, that a sensorially attentive approach to histories of
retailing and consumption must go beyond the focus on the point of sale.
Shops were diverse sensory environments, which impacted upon not only
the transactions of commerce, but the health, bodies, and comfort of
shoppers and shop workers alike. A sensory approach to a holistic history
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

of shopping, the contributors to this volume show, presents an opportu-

nity for a far more complex, rich, and diverse examination of the cultural
dynamics of shopping. By placing feeling bodies back into the shops of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, it is possible to access embod-
ied histories of how these commercial spaces functioned for and upon the
people who inhabited them.
Vitally, shopping, as defined in this volume, encompasses more than the
simple exchange of money for goods. Extending out from transactional
and economic exchange there exists a complex web of cultural and social
phenomenon, as numerous historians of retail have outlined (Rappaport
2000; Stobart et al. 2007). Shopping shapes and is shaped by politics,
sociability, urban and rural space, colonialism, race, gender, and class
amongst numerous other cultural features. A sensory approach to shop-
ping reaches into those dynamics of power and practice, both within and
beyond the shop floor. Crucially, this volume situates itself not just at the
moment of monetary transaction, nor even within the process of browsing
alone. Instead, it comprises sensory experiences of retail work, urban
streets, and the bodily needs of a day’s shopping. Shopping, here, is a
conceived as a broad range of activities within and between retail spaces.
The bodies which sensorily experienced those spaces are not just those of
consumers, but shop workers, businesspeople, government officials, and
tourists. The sensory landscape of the shop extended far beyond the shop
counter itself.

Sensorially Attentive Histories

As sites of material evaluation, shop spaces may appear self-evidently sen-
sory. That browsing involves touching and examining objects is not in
itself revelatory. As the contributors to the volume show, however, the
cultural dimensions of how that sensory information is sought, processed,
received, and acted upon is complex and culturally wrought. As Mark
M. Smith has rightly noted, the senses “are not universal, and not transh-
istorical, and can only be understood in their specific social and historical
contexts” (2007a, p. 3; see also Classen 1993). How sensations are pro-
cessed, thought about, and acted upon depends upon the individual’s reli-
gion, class, gender, nationality, age, cultural background, and personal
experience. It is not only that an object or piece of music can fundamen-
tally change through time, but that the mental processing of sensory
responses is always subjective. As David Howes and Constance Classen
4 S. DYER

have stated, the concept of “a period eye” or the “educated listener” have
entered common parlance, but what they reflect is an acknowledgement of
the cultural cognitive understanding which shapes responses to sensory
stimuli (2013, p. 3). This subjective slipperiness makes sensory histories
tricky to handle, yet it also contributes to why the senses have played such
a vital role in fundamental debates around humanity, disability, race, social
roles and status, and gender. Sensory difference has been mobilised as a
tool to explain or reinforce numerous categories of human variety. Shops
are key venues for this sensorial evaluation, categorisation, and
logification.
The historical study of the senses has largely taken two forms: histories
of the senses and sensory histories; although, as Smith notes, these terms
are often deployed interchangeably (Smith 2007b, p. 4). The former
focuses in on a specific sense, such as touch or sight, and charts its evolu-
tion over time. Classen’s work, especially that on touch, is a particularly
influential example of this type of history (1993, 2005, 2012, 2017).
Sensory histories, on the other hand, tend to look to the role of the senses
in “texturing the past” (Smith 2007b, p. 4). Smith’s study of the Civil
War, for example, examined the “sensory totality of war” (Smith 2014b,
p. 8). Indeed, the connections and dynamics between the senses are as
important as the individual senses themselves in such intersensorial works.
This volume is framed as a step towards a sensory history of shopping. It
is interested in what happens to our understanding of histories of shop-
ping when approached from a sensory and intersensorial perspective. For
an activity which is so centred upon material evaluation, sensory histories
of shopping have been relatively sparse (Smith 2012; Dyer 2014;
Rappaport 2014). Indeed, the contributors to this book are primarily his-
torians of retail and consumption, rather than specialists in the senses.
However, their work demonstrates the fruitful opportunities available
when the theoretical frameworks of Classen, Smith and other sensory
studies scholars are applied to consumer histories. If, as Smith has claimed,
sensory history is a “habit” rather than a field, then this volume demon-
strates how general attention to the senses can spread beyond scholars
who specialise in sensory histories (2021, pp. 1–3). Smith’s concerns
around the etiolation of sensory history as a loosely defined field are, I
suggest, addressed in this broader sensorially attentive work.
One of the reasons behind what Smith perceives as the field’s lack of
cohesion is perhaps the blurred lines between sensory and other sensori-
ally attentive histories. Histories of the body and the emotions enjoy
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

significant overlaps with sensory histories but have experienced more

widespread engagement (e.g. Laqueur 1990; Reddy 2008; Boddice
2017). Twenty years ago, Roy Porter even referred the history of the body
as the “historiographical dish of the day,” and that interest is still going
strong (2001, p. 236). In the 2010s, the emotional qualities of material
culture have received particular attention (Downes et al. 2018; Holloway
2019). Yet here we find an intriguing lacuna between the emotions
ascribed to objects owned, gifted, and used, and the amorphous feelings
used to assess and judge objects in commercial settings. The emotive
power of objects seems to be at odds with their commercial stoicism. Yet
these objects are not empty vessels awaiting the application of their pur-
chaser’s emotions. Within the shop space they can elicit as much delight,
despair, and longing as a love token. Rob Boddice and Smith have called
for a “braided history of emotions and the senses,” and perhaps the body
should provide a third strand here (2020). In piecing together a sensory
history of shopping, this volume strives to repopulate the shops of the past
with the bodies, feelings, and experiences of shoppers and shop workers.
It frames shopping not as a straightforwardly procedural economic or even
social act. Shopping, here, was a holistically embodied experience. Shop
spaces were not the sanitised spaces conveyed in inventories and idealised
trade cards. They were charged spaces, full of the emotional, sensory, and
bodily experience which underpins humanity.

Shopping and the Senses

This volume commences at the dawn of the nineteenth century; yet it
certainly does not claim that the senses were only integrated into cultures
of shopping after this date. Instead, it positions the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries as sites of intersensorial tension, which broke away from an
eighteenth-century past of material literacy centred on a materially atten-
tive understanding of material goods (Dyer and Smith 2020). As Evelyn
Welch has demonstrated of Italian fairs, early modern retail spaces were
structured to privilege “viewing, touching, tasting and hearing” as much
as they were about commercial exchange (2006, p. 46). In many ways, the
senses were more fully and organically integrated into pre-modern shop-
ping practice. The industrial changes of the nineteenth century saw the
gap between producers and (middle class and elite) consumers widen
(Rappaport 2014, p. 71). As systems of class, manufacture, empire, trade,
and industry shifted gear, the sensory priorities of shops, shoppers, and
6 S. DYER

shop workers underwent parallel shifts. This period is often framed as a

time of retail ingenuity and innovation, from department stores to the
1960s boutique. Such spaces used sensory immersion in fresh ways. But it
is important to remember that they existed alongside the markets, fairs,
and itinerant traders who had plied their trades for centuries. An intersen-
sorial approach reanimates the bodies which existed within and between
all these spaces, and sheds light on the diversity of consumer experience
during this lauded period of retail innovation.
Prior to 1800, the senses had become part of the cultural rhetoric of
selfhood and humanity. The eighteenth century has been recognised as
the site of a newly sensual self. From fresh medical ideas around the nerves
to the cult of sensibility, the period was host to the establishment of new
ways of thinking about feeling (Tullett 2020, p. 4). “Feelings” incorpo-
rated both the senses and the emotions, and acted as an embodied marker
of social status (Brewer 1997). Cultural objects which stimulated the
senses, from art to literature and music, were framed through the emotive
notion of sensibility. Performing the correct sensory and emotional
responses to such stimuli was central to the presentation of the self.
Philosophical notions of the sensory body extended into the commercial
world through emergent shopping practices which centred on browsing.
Helen Berry’s browse-bargain model highlighted a consumer practice
centred on consumer choice, whereby the shopper would browse the
wares at various shops and haggle with the shopkeepers in order to find
the best deal for the best product (2002). Developments in the field of
sensory history led Kate Smith to revaluate this model through a haptic
lens (2012). Smith framed shopping as an intensely sensory experience,
centred heavily on the hands. Touching goods, assessing their weight,
quality, and suitability, became a means of building up a somatic memory
of materiality. This mental index facilitated and sensorily informed con-
sumer judgement, which was underpinned by a broad sense of material
literacy (Dyer 2014; Dyer and Wigston Smith 2020). Knowing and feel-
ing were not dichotomous poles, but interwoven and symbiotic states for
eighteenth-century consumers.
By the early nineteenth century, these sensory dimensions of browsing
were well established and recognised in cultural representations of shop-
ping practice. Knowledge of making and manufacture was encouraged
and catered for (Smith 2014a; Dyer 2018a; Dyer and Smith 2020). The
publishing entrepreneur Rudolph Ackermann’s (1764–1834) long-­
running periodical Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Fashion and Politics (1809–1828) offers a literary microcosm of urban

commercial sensory practice. This publication included profiles of
London’s leading shops within its early issues, accompanied by illustrative
engravings showing shoppers in action. The illustration in the periodical’s
very first issue depicted Ackermann’s own print shop on The Strand
(Fig. 1.1). Replete with prints and artistic paraphernalia and flooded with
light from the glass clerestory and domed skylight, the shop space is care-
fully constructed for sensual interactions. The illustrated figures of model
consumers act out the shopping practices which the reader-consumer was
encouraged to emulate. The bright daylight illuminates the shop’s con-
tents, which they methodically view, leafing through the stands of prints.
Other consumers reach out to touch, hold, and handle the objects on
display. As Kate Smith has observed of Ackermann’s depictions of china
shops, consumers are portrayed as conducting an intersensorial shopping
practice centred on touch (2012, p. 3). Visual and haptic interaction with
these goods is certainly privileged, and the auditory and even olfactory
dimensions of the shop space are notably missing from these cultural
depictions.
Ackermann’s recognition of the sensorial needs of consumers was also
underlined by his inclusion of fabric sample pages in his publication. Titled

Fig. 1.1 Repository of Arts, 101 The Strand. After Thomas Rowlandson and
Augustus Pugin. Published in Repository of Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 1809
8 S. DYER

“Patterns of British Manufacture,” each of the early issues contained sam-

ples of three of four fabrics, accompanied by instructions about where they
might be purchased, as well as suggestions about what they could be used
to produce. If, as I have argued elsewhere, we can view Ackermann’s peri-
odical as a locum shop counter, then the inclusion of tactile samples within
its pages gestures towards the centrality of material examination within
nineteenth-century consumer practice (Dyer 2018b; Wilder 2018).
Periodicals like Ackermann’s, and similar nineteenth-century publications
such as Henry Cole’s Journal of Design and Manufactures (1849–1852),
highlight the intensely sensory lens through which shopping was viewed.
The genteel environs of The Strand and the polite consumers of the
Repository were, of course, only one pocket of consumers. The “retail cir-
cuits” which spread across modern and early modern Europe were toured
by a more diverse clientele than the urban and fashionable consumers
whom Ackermann sought to reach (Blondé et al. 2006). The history of
shopping is replete with so-called revolutions, from the eighteenth
through to the twenty-first century (McKendrick et al. 1982; Hilton
2003). Yet these revolutions are often focused on the commercially pow-
erful middling sorts or middle classes. As such, they take their cue from
the ripples which consumer activity casts on the economic, manufacturing,
or trade preoccupations of a particular period. A sensorial approach
encourages us to look beyond the privileged histories of the economically
powerful. Aristocrats and the working class alike mobilised sensory skill
when shopping. The variations in sensory priorities and interpretations
illuminate social status, economic, and class-based social divisions of the
modern period.
Some of the revolutionary moments in consumer history were funda-
mentally sensorial. The transition from market to supermarket in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is perhaps the most apparent
(Deutsch 2010; Mack 2010). The climate-controlled, ordered, and sani-
tised interiors of supermarkets at once prevented sensory inspection by
secreting food products in layers of plastic and engendered new types of
sensory experience (Rappaport 2014, p. 87). The chilly blow of air-­
conditioned units, the gustatory blandness of processed and frozen food,
and the privileging of cleanly purity over olfactory authenticity radically
redefined consumers’ sensorial expectations around shopping for food.
Display and visual consumption were favoured over intersensorial assess-
ment. As Rappaport explains, supermarkets “encouraged [consumers] to
fantasize about goods and their relationship to this material world” rather
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

than to sensorially assess and test out products (2014, p. 87). This senso-
rial sanitisation signals a centring of rejuvenation, pleasure, and comfort
within shop spaces, which occurred unevenly through the period this vol-
ume covers. Refuge and a form of retail sensory deprivation existed along-
side stimulation and sensory strain.

Sensory Variety: Capitalism, Comfort,

and Cacophony

This volume aims to open up discussion around the variety of sensorial

experience which bodies encountered and generated within and beyond
the commercial space of the shop. On the one hand, the senses were cast
as commercial tools, which were shaped and honed to understand the
material “world of goods.” In some ways, the senses were a capitalist
instrument, focussed on the assessment of market value and material
worth. Yet sensory experience and practices within shops went beyond this
commercial mechanism. Besides from the goods which these shops sold,
the spaces of commerce were diverse and sensorily rich. Whether sur-
rounded by the grand glass and velvet environs of a luxury department
store or the filth and stench of a rural fish market, the sensorial experience
of shopping was holistic, and spread far beyond a focussed myopic view of
the objects for sale. While elite shop spaces may have been carefully con-
structed and controlled as—in theory—sensorially pleasant spaces, the
sensory dynamics of the market stall or itinerant seller were transient and
haphazardly negotiated.
Individual shops also generated layered sensorial experiences. While
shops were intersensorial in nature, that mingling of the senses was not
immediate or consistent. Shops were often structured around stages of
sensory access to goods, which were carefully controlled and stage man-
aged by retail staff. Within elite, genteel, and middle-class shops, glass
windows offered opportunities to create visual spectacle, which became
increasingly artistic and fantastical as the nineteenth century proceeded
(Walsh 1995; Lomax 2006). Indeed, department stores as “cathedrals of
commerce” took this celebration of glass spectacle to an even greater
extreme (Crossick and Jaumain 1999; Rappaport 2000). Enclosed in their
glass cases, intersensorial inspection was restricted, but visual display was
heightened. Such encased objects are rarefied and rendered something to
marvel at, much like an exhibit in a museum. A comparison between shops
10 S. DYER

and museums is not a new one, but the synergy is especially relevant to a
discussion of sensory restriction (Classen 2007; Shimbo 2016, p. 129).
On entering the shop, this visual pre-eminence often continued, as wares
were piled high behind the counter. Haptics, smell, sound, and taste were
gradually layered onto the sensory experience at the hand of the shop
assistant, as they carefully revealed objects to the consumer, permitting
them controlled intersensorial access. Activities and modes of consump-
tion which threatened this sensory control were viewed with concern and
disdain (Tickell 2018). For genteel consumers, this mingling of sensory
experience was an act of intimacy with the objects they inspected. That the
senses exist in a hierarchy has been broadly questioned and interrogated
(Smith 2021, p. 109). While sight has widely been privileged, it is now
acknowledged that any attempts to conceive of the senses as hierarchical is
as subjective and fluid as any other element of their historicisation (Howes
2004, p. 10). Within shopping, different commercial spaces layered and
privileged different senses in various combinations.
This volume takes a broadly chronological journey through the com-
forts and discomforts, sights and sounds, pleasures and over-stimulation
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer landscapes. The chapters
celebrate sensorial variety and reflect the uneven and occasionally chaotic
sensory negotiation of commercial spaces throughout this period. Matthew
Mauger’s chapter opens the volume with an appropriately multifaceted
interrogation of the early nineteenth-century tea trade. The senses were
called upon to codify and index tea’s quality and value. Crucially, Mauger
reminds us of the sensory limitations of consumers. Ideas about sensory
appreciation of quality were often constructed and disseminated to con-
sumers. While the East India Company sought to market sensation, shop-
pers, Mauger shows, were rarely able to distinguish between the various
olfactory and gustatory features of different teas. The sensory skill of
retailers, quality assessors, and traders is also foregrounded here in relation
to the commercial, political, and colonial facets of tea. The senses, Mauger
shows, impacted taxation and foreign policy as much as the commercial
practices of the shop floor.
Lucy Bailey takes us away from the metropolis and seats of parliamen-
tary power, and instead leads us into the village shops which proliferated
through nineteenth-century Britain. Plagued by accusations of adulterat-
ing the goods or providing false measure, village retailers were routinely
framed as incompetent and economically unproductive. Bailey examines
cultural representations of the village shop in contemporary literature to
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

reveal the sensory experiences of shopping in such spaces as unpleasant,

cramped, and sensorially overwhelming. In doing so, she uncovers how
the sensory landscape of the village shop evolved through the nineteenth
century into the rural idyll of the twentieth-century British imagination.
The senses, Bailey suggests, offer a significant crux upon which this shift
in cultural portrayals of the village shop rest. The picturesque and quaint
utopia of early twentieth-century rural nostalgia was built upon an imag-
ined sensory experience which fundamentally contradicted earlier Victorian
accounts of these pastorally framed commercial spaces.
The negotiation of the discomforts of shopping also dominates in
Stephanie Raines’s chapter on the introduction of tea rooms and public
conveniences for women in nineteenth-century Dublin. Raines builds on
Smith’s call to be attentive to the class and gender divisions in historicised
sensory experience. Expectations around and opportunities for sensory
relief were highly gendered in commercial urban spaces. Women were
required to physically enact their respectability, and the introduction of
the café into the urban retail landscape sat within a complex web of social,
cultural, and sensory issues. The development of suburban living and the
shopping day in town and city centres made the sensory experience of
women consumers’ bodies an urgent issue. As cafés opened, the sensory
immersion, offered within these spaces offered up its own gendered ten-
sions and controversies.
This holistic view of the shop as part of a broader retail landscape is
continued as Anneleen Arnout invites us into the shopping streets of
nineteenth-­century Amsterdam and Brussels. Looking beyond the much-­
studied commercial models of London and Paris, Arnout considers the
spatial ideals of urban space as these cities grew and developed. In particu-
lar, Arnout questions the primacy of the visual spectacle of shopping, and
instead highlights the intersensorial experience of the shopping street. The
cultivation of an urban space devotes to shopping, Arnout suggests,
required attention to the smells and sounds which shaped the city-­dweller’s
experience of that space as a venue for luxury and leisurely consumption.
The creation of a holistic intersensorial environment contributed to the
division and demarcation of urban space.
Having travelled the shopping streets of Europe, Wendy Ligon Smith’s
chapter brings attention to the consumption of a particular material: silk.
The sensory dimensions of this luxurious fabric are well established. The
sound and feel of silk are central to how this material is differentiated from
his manmade and artificial counterparts. Yet the sensuous language around
12 S. DYER

silk also engendered connotations around the fabric’s impact upon the
body. As Smith shows, silk could at once be praised for its physical health
benefits, and decried for its association with fetishism, deviant eroticism,
and diagnoses of mental illness. As with Raine’s chapter, the gendered
nature of rhetoric around response to sensory stimuli Is apparent. Smith
focuses on both Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames and the silk
consumption of Richard Wagner to unpack the complex sensory nuances
of this provocative and stimulating material.
Zola’s fictional department store continues to provide a point of focus
as we move away from the counters and public salerooms, and more into
the domestic areas of the shop. Alison Moulds’ chapter examines the sen-
sory experiences of shop staff who lived in—that is those who received
food and lodging as part of their employment. Moulds unpacks the rela-
tionship between the sensory and the sanitary, whilst also considering the
dynamics between bodily comfort and affective experience. By peering
behind the performative display of the nineteenth-century shop as luxuri-
ous spectacle, Moulds tallies the sensory experience of the shop floor with
that of the backrooms and bedrooms of shop staff. Here, we find screwed-­
down windows, cell-like rooms, and putrid air in reports on the living
conditions in such spaces. Elsewhere, however, those same spaces are
framed as a refuge from the sensorially overwhelming shop floor. The
senses, Moulds shows, were often mobilised in debates around heath, san-
itisation, and workers’ conditions.
Sensory chaos and cacophony follow the reader back out onto the
streets in Cheryl Roberts’ chapter on second-hand goods, street trading,
and jumble sales. A far cry from the department stores of Paris, Brussels,
and Amsterdam, Roberts’ examination of London’s East End reveals the
synergy of senses required to navigate wares that were not neatly and for-
mally displayed. These undisciplined spaces were key venues for the cross-­
class consumption of fashionable dress. Roberts deftly explains how
sensorial language pervaded the rhetoric used to think about these bus-
tling spaces, from the stink of the air to the noise of hawkers and bargain-
ing consumers. When removed from the carefully controlled retail
environment of the shop, Roberts shows, the intersensorial assessment of
goods became even more vital in order to find quality bargains.
Intersensorial approaches were equally important in the retail of high-­
fashion items, as Lucy Moyse Ferreira explains in relation to perfume.
Ferreira shows how the encompassing definition of fashion as “an assem-
blage of body modifications and/or supplements” led fashion designers to
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

enter the olfactory world of perfume (Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1993,

p. 15). Perfumes, Ferreira describes, were both a seductive and sexualised
commodity, and a necessity to distinguish the body from the unpleasant
aromas of everyday life. Shopping for perfume connected the olfactory
with the cultural and the bodily and, as this chapter demonstrates, neces-
sitated an intersensorial approach to marketing. The consumption, pack-
aging, and retail of perfume replied on more than the sense of smell.
In the volume’s final chapter, Bethan Bide coalesces the diverse sensory
experiences touched upon throughout the volume. The cultural rhetoric
of sensory delight attached to the 1960s fashion boutique is juxtaposed
with the viscerally unpleasant smells and alarming experiences of more
experimental forms of fashion retail. Bide reminds us of the ways in which
retailers attempted to pioneer fresh sensory shopping landscapes when
faced with a newly created category of consumer: the teenager. Yet, as
Bide demonstrates, the lineage of the strategies wrought by these sup-
posed innovators can be traced to the earlier shop spaces explored in this
volume. Vitally, Bide demonstrates how intersensorial stimuli in shops
were fundamental to the generation of new consumer cultures and identi-
ties. Whether luxurious and enticing or uncomfortable and disquieting,
the sensory landscape of the shop held significant cultural power.
Collectively, these chapters display the variety and diversity of intersen-
sorial practice and experience within the nineteenth- and twentieth-­
century shopping landscape. The dominance of online shopping, especially
in a world shaped by a pandemic and economically dominated by digital
technology companies, has brought new challenges (Molenaar 2013).
However, even there, the development of sensory technologies is a matter
of urgency (Kim and Forsythe 2009). Whether conducted in a physical
shop space, via the proxy of an online storefront, or on a platform for digi-
tal goods, how those goods are received and consumed by the shopper is
inherently sensory. The chapters in this volume have demonstrated that
intersensorial primacy within the consumer landscape stretches beyond
this functional and procedural paradigm. Repulsion, disgust, and discom-
fort could be part of the shopping experience alongside the conventional
framing of shopping as a pleasurable and leisurely experience. Feeling and
sensitive bodies moved between, through, and within commercial spaces,
constantly digesting the sensory environments which surrounded them.
Lucious or disconcerting, sensuous or sterile, the sensorial richness of
shops saturated the commercial landscape.
14 S. DYER

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 CHAPTER 2

“To Rub the Nose in the Tea”: Smell, Taste,

and the Assessment of Quality in Early
Nineteenth-Century Tea Retail

Matthew Mauger

In April 1834, soon after the conclusion of the East India Company’s
quarterly tea auction, 40 samples of tea were prepared by Henry Goodhall
(tea warehouse-keeper for the Company) under the superintendence of
William Hunt (the Company’s Inspector of Teas in London). They were
despatched for consideration by the Board of Commissioners for the
Affairs of India—more commonly known as the ‘India Board’ or the
‘Board of Control’—which had since 1784 imposed government oversight
on most aspects of the East India Company’s affairs. One of the
Commissioners, Henry Ellis, later recalled the tin boxes containing the
samples, with covers ‘which contained, upon the outside a description of
the contents’ in terms that included ‘Congou but middling, little on the
pekoe side’, ‘Twankay but middling, brightish leaf, curled and speckled’
and ‘Hyson Skin middling good, brightish leaf’ (House of Commons
1834, 67 and 19). Officials from the Board of Control then swapped the

M. Mauger (*)
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
e-mail: m.p.mauger@qmul.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Dyer (ed.), Shopping and the Senses, 1800–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90335-0_2
18 M. MAUGER

covers between tins, so that ‘what was written on it could not at all lead to
a knowledge of what was inside the box’. The stage was thus set for a curi-
ous experiment. Between three and six tea tasters (varying between the
reports of those who were present) were ushered into the room, and set
the challenge of distinguishing the samples laid out before them. Ellis’s
description of their method evokes a performative and sensual appeal:

I never saw tea tried before, but the process was as follows; the tasters took
it into their hands and smelled it first, rubbing it up and down; in that way,
I think, without exception they always distinguished the tea, and pro-
nounced at once of what description it was. They tried it also by infusion,
for we had small teapots sent us, and by that process also they always distin-
guished the tea without hesitation… In fact it much exceeded any anticipa-
tion I could have had. I was perfectly astonished at the accuracy with which
they distinguished the teas, for I am sure, with ordinary knowledge, a per-
son would not be able to distinguish tea by looking at it and smelling it.
(House of Commons 1834, 68)

He continues: ‘the mode of trying was to rub the nose in the tea; the
taster then took the tea into his hands, rubbed it and smelled it, and after-
wards made the infusion.’
In this striking description, a part of the witness evidence presented in
the published report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Tea
Duties (13 May—10 July 1834), tea is discovered to have a sensory com-
plexity—even in its dried state—little imagined by the non-specialist with
‘ordinary knowledge’. In the performance of artisanal connoisseurship
that Ellis witnessed, tea’s identity lies in the curl and speckle of its leaf, in
its wiriness, in the aroma released when rubbed in the hands of a ‘taster’
for whom actually ‘tasting’ the infusion seems an almost unnecessary—
perhaps even a somewhat vulgar—afterthought. As Denise Gigante
reminds us, the bodily ingestion required to stimulate taste relegated it to
the lower reaches of the classical philosophical hierarchy of the senses
(Gigante 2005, 3–4). Nonetheless, there is an undeniable physicality to
the experts’ approach. The sensory organs have a direct contact with the
tea: the leaves permeate the skin and press against the nose. For all that
certain visual characteristics bear significance for the process of evaluation,
it is clear that smell, touch, and (if only through its figuration as a last
resort) taste—are the key empirical markers for the assessment of quality.
These senses, as Gigante points out, had acquired across the long
 “TO RUB THE NOSE IN THE TEA”: SMELL, TASTE, AND THE ASSESSMENT… 19

eighteenth century a new experiential primacy in expressing the sensitivity

of human subjects to the material, sensory, and emotional landscapes
through which they moved. The skin, in particular, became regarded as
‘the subjective interface by which human beings touch and taste the world
of sensory reality’ (Gigante 11). So vivid is the sensory cacophony that the
tasters recognise the teas ‘without hesitation’. Elsewhere in the evidence
heard by the Committee, we find startling testimony of the role of sense-
based categorisation and assessment at all levels of tea’s complex distribu-
tion channel: from its initial acquisition and consignment as long-distance
cargo, to its evaluation and warehousing on arrival in London, to the
brokerage associated with the quarterly tea auction, to its wholesale, retail,
and consumption.1
We might readily imagine the premises of a typical ‘seller of fine teas’ at
the turn of the nineteenth century to have been full of smells, and at least
the promise of deferred tastes; and yet we conceive more clearly the visual
evidence of grocers’ trade cards, notes of goods received, satirical carica-
tures of the tea trade, and society portraits of fashionable aristocrats at tea.
As Constance Classen has argued (most recently in The Museum of the
Senses (2017), but perhaps most influentially in a collaborative study with
Anthony Synnott and David Howes, Aroma: A Cultural History of Smell
1994), our received understandings of the history of engagement with
material culture prioritise the more tangible, more scientifically verifiable
evidence of sight over the evidence of the more intimate bodily senses
such as touch, smell, and taste. In this chapter, I focus on the fascinating—
if unlikely—snapshot of the sensory life of the tea market in Britain, offered
in the pages of the report of a Parliamentary Select Committee established
to enquire into matters of taxation. It captures the trade, moreover, at a
moment of transition that was to define the nineteenth-­century tea busi-
ness: the ending of the East India Company’s monopoly, and the liberali-
sation of the trade. The statements offered by shopkeepers, warehousemen,
Privy Counsellors, inspectors, brokers, and merchants provide evidence
for the practical assessment of tea quality, and its importance in the sale of
dried tea leaves, at a moment when the settled circumstances of tea retail
in thousands of small shops across the country—contexts which had
changed little for over a century—were about to experience profound
upheaval. As such, they offer a tantalising glimpse of the role that sensory
experience had acquired in the sale of tea since its first appearance as a
regular item of grocery in London in the early eighteenth century (for
detailed accounts of the emergence of tea as an item of eighteenth-­century
Another random document with
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 "No! Not yet!..."

Lebas, pretending not to have heard, called out—

"Héron! Hér..."

Robespierre threw himself on him, and pinning him to the wall, said
breathlessly—

"Don't call, I tell you! Don't call!"

Then lowering his voice he muttered in a dry whisper—

"Be quiet, man, I say! Be quiet! ... It is my son!"

"Ah!" and Lebas looked at him in stupefied amazement.

When he had sufficiently recovered from his surprise, he asked in a low

voice—

"Why do you not tell him so?"

Could Robespierre tell him? Tell the lad who loathed him! Would he
believe him? Olivier would say it was false, or how could he hate him so?

"Oh, no! I cannot tell him that I am his father!" he said sadly, sinking
down exhausted on a chair.

Lebas took his hand and pressed it sympathetically, deeply touched.

"You are right!" he murmured.

And turning to Olivier he said aloud—

"Then let us discover the prisoners without him!"

Olivier understood that matters were becoming very serious. However,

Robespierre looked discouraged. How was it possible to find the women,
under their assumed names, in Vendée? But Lebas remarked that they might
be in Paris. At this Olivier visibly trembled, which Lebas did not fail to
notice.

"Why," he continued—"why should he be so far from them?"

The point of this remark struck Robespierre.

"Yes, to be sure; you are right," he said, and interpreting Lebas's

thoughts he bade him take a carriage and drive to each prison and interview
every woman that had been arrested with a young girl. Lebas, who had
already put on his hat, remarked that he did not think the night would
suffice; there were so many women arrested with a daughter or a younger
sister. And what if Olivier spoke the truth, and his mother had been
inscribed on the prison-register under another name—her husband's, for
instance?

"Mauluçon," interrupted Robespierre, the name suddenly recurring to

him.

Lebas took out a note-book from his pocket. Was he a soldier, or a

magistrate, this Mauluçon? Robespierre could not say. All he knew of him
was that among the people represented as having gone into mourning for
Louis XVI. he had seen the names of Pontivy, his son-in-law Mauluçon,
and his daughter Clarisse.

"Clarisse!" repeated Lebas, stopping his note-taking.

Robespierre looked at him in surprise. In what way could that name

interest him? Lebas had now closed his note-book, deep in thought.
Clarisse? Olivier's mother was called Clarisse? But the woman who
implored Robespierre's clemency for her son, aged nineteen, the woman
whose letter he had refused to read just now ...

"Was signed Clarisse?" cried Robespierre breathlessly.

"Yes," replied Lebas.

"That is his mother!"...

 And pointing to the young man, who was on the brink of swooning.

"You see, it is she! Look at him; there is no mistaking, it is she!"

"She is at the prison of La Bourbe, then," said Lebas.

Robespierre could no longer hide his joy, at last he knew where to find
them!

But he was interrupted by a cry of pain. Olivier, thinking his mother

now irretrievably lost, had fainted away. Robespierre ran to him, and
bending over tried to bring him to consciousness, gently reassuring him,
swearing he was going to give the prisoners their liberty.

But Lebas, who was also bending over the young man, reminded the
Incorruptible that Olivier no longer heard him. Then Robespierre, with
infinite precautions, assisted by Lebas, lifted him into an armchair, and
taking a bottle of scent left behind by the ladies, gently bathed Olivier's
temples with the perfume. Lebas, rather anxious lest Robespierre's paternal
solicitude should be discovered, remained on the watch, imploring him to
be prudent.

"Some one might come in!" he urged.

Robespierre, entirely taken up with Olivier, shrugged his shoulders.

"Let them come!" he said impatiently. "I have a right surely to pardon
my own son!"

Lebas recalled him to reality.

No! he had no right to pardon a chouan, who had insulted the Republic
the day before in presence of the whole nation. Robespierre's enemies
would seize the occasion to cite the example of Brutus sacrificing his son to
the interest of his country. They would exact from him a like proof of
patriotism....

Robespierre was trying to loosen Olivier's cravat, but not succeeding

asked Lebas's assistance. After all, he was right, especially as his enemies
on the Committee of Public Safety, out of hatred for him, would kill the lad
all the quicker. Opening the collar gently, he continued the while to reason
about it, saying that the only means of saving him was to throw him brutally
into prison, so as to mislead them, and to get him out secretly after three
days.

The young man heaved a sigh.

"He is coming to," said Robespierre, checking his speculations.

Lebas observed that it was high time to let others come in; they would
wonder at the length of the cross-examining. Robespierre assented, his eyes
fixed on his son, who seemed now coming to himself. As the Incorruptible
bent over him to ascertain if this was so, his lips touched the pale forehead.

But he heard steps, and had only time to pull himself up, when Héron
entered, followed by his men.

Héron looked straight at Olivier, who had now recovered his senses.

"What! Did he faint?" he asked.

Robespierre had regained possession of himself, and at once assumed a

brutal demeanour. Yes, the scoundrel had been playing a farce, and an
infamous farce too! The family now entered also, brimming with curiosity
and questions.

"Has the young man made a confession?"

"No; but he has betrayed himself, and I know all that I desired."

General satisfaction was expressed. At last, then, he was caught, and his
accomplices! At this moment Madame Lebas and Victoire discovered in
what a sad state Olivier was. Had he been ill, then? They would have come
to him; but Robespierre stopped them, assuming contempt.

"It was better," he said, "to leave the young madman alone, for he really
did not deserve that any one should take interest in him."
 "Monster!" Olivier groaned.

Robespierre had heard the word. He took hold of Lebas's arm, as if for
support, and pressed it convulsively. Then, in a voice which he tried to
render harsh, he told him to conduct Olivier to the Prison de la Force.
Héron had only waited for this; and his men seized their prisoner, who at
the roughness of the police-agents gave a sharp cry.

"You brutes!" exclaimed Robespierre, in a faltering voice, taking a step

towards his son in spite of himself. But Lebas stopped him.

"Be careful!" he whispered.

Robespierre sat down, realising his imprudence.

Lebas again whispered to him—

"Don't be uneasy, I will watch over him."

And telling the men not to handle the prisoner too roughly, he went out
with them.

Robespierre watched his son disappear, and when he had gone he felt
some one take his hand. This made him tremble. It was Cornélie.

How tired he seemed! Every one was around him now. That young
madman had given him terrible trouble, hadn't he?

"Yes," he replied, wiping his temple, "it was very trying! Exceedingly
trying!"

Duplay remarked that, judging from the length of the cross-

examination, he must have learnt something very important. Robespierre
made a gesture, as if protesting. Then rising abruptly he took leave of the
company, on the pretext of urgent work.

"The lad can rest assured," said Duplay, "it is his death-warrant our
friend has gone to sign."
 "What a pity!" observed Victoire; "the young fellow seemed so nice!"

But mother Duplay stopped her daughter indignantly, asking her if she
was mad. What would the Incorruptible say if he could hear her?

CHAPTER IX

HOURS OF ANGUISH

Once in his room, Robespierre sank exhausted into a chair. At last he

was alone! He could now give free vent to his long suppressed emotion.
The feeling uppermost at the moment was one of dread dismay, as the
terrible position rose before his mind, with all its fearful consequences. He
gave no thought to the insult, it was the fate of the two women which
haunted him. If he saved them it would atone for all in the eyes of his son.
They had been arrested, thrown into prison, and cast for death, but he would
set them free.

Who had arrested them? What had they done? Were they implicated in
some seditious plot which would render it difficult to deliver them? As to
Olivier's release, he would see to that. By causing things to drag a little,
Olivier's trial could be put off until Robespierre had the power in his own
hands, and could act as he liked towards his son. It was after all his concern,
for it was he whom Olivier had insulted, and not the Republic, which he
could not yet impersonate. Had he even been proclaimed dictator, and sole
representative of France, he would, he supposed, have had the right to
pardon. It would seem but natural that his first act on accession to power
should be an act of clemency! The most important thing then at present was
that Olivier should remain in prison as long as possible under the closest
supervision.
 But again, why had the women been arrested? By whose orders? They
were perhaps at that very moment at the Conciergerie, on their trial, before
the Revolutionary Tribunal. He could, no doubt, secure their acquittal, but
what if the inquiry brought Olivier's name to light?

"I am wandering!" he caught himself exclaiming. How, indeed, could

the name of Olivier be mentioned during the trial? The young man had
nothing to do with it. He had insulted Robespierre, it was to him personally
he had to answer.

The Incorruptible rubbed his eyes, unable longer to follow the thread of
his own thoughts. He was suddenly reminded of the law to be submitted by
him next day to the Convention, the vindictive law which would ensure
conviction without proof, evidence, or even cross-examination. This law
would be of twofold service to him; it would rekindle the Terror, would
help Robespierre to get rid of those who were still in his way, and be the
means of reducing the two women to silence, thus saving not only Olivier's
life, but theirs also. Olivier would then see that Robespierre was not the
monster he imagined, for he would owe the lives of his mother and of his
fiancée to him, the very man he had so wantonly insulted!

Robespierre's reflections were suddenly interrupted by a knock. He

started up. Some one was calling him. He listened, and recognising Lebas's
voice, hastened to open the door.

"I saw a light through your window," said Lebas, "and knew you had
not yet gone to bed."

"Well, what have you learnt?" Robespierre asked anxiously.

"They are still at the prison of La Bourbe."

"Both of them?"

"Yes, both of them."

"Ah!" sighed Robespierre, with relief.

 "And I have given strict instructions in your name, that they were not to
be allowed out, under any circumstances. I am quite satisfied on that point,
since the Concierge knows that they have been arrested by your orders."

"By my orders?"

"Yes, alas!"

And he whispered to the Incorruptible, as if fearing to be heard—

"They are the two women from Montmorency."

"The women of the forest?"

"Yes!"

Robespierre leant back against his desk for support. Lebas pulled an
armchair towards him, into which he sank quite overcome.

"You could not have prevented it!" said Lebas gently; "nowadays
surprises of that sort are common enough. How could you know?"

The Incorruptible gave no reply, but seemed lost in a dream.

"Take some rest now.... You must feel exhausted.... I feel so myself....
Au revoir till to-morrow. After all, why should you worry? Are we not the
masters?"

"That is the question!" murmured Robespierre, without lifting his eyes.

But Lebas had just closed the door, and wished him good night.

Robespierre, left alone, resumed his train of thought. He had, himself,

then, ordered the two women to be arrested. This made everything clear to
his mind! He now understood why Olivier had insulted him, and matters
were more complicated than he had imagined. But what was Clarisse doing
at Montmorency? How had she gained acquaintance with that man
Vaughan, who had proposed to him the Regency in the name of England?
For one moment he was vain enough to think that Clarisse had acted in
conjunction with the Englishman. She had perhaps an idea of winning
Robespierre over to the Royalist cause, and of rendering homage to his
exalted position and power, realising all the good he could do. If this were
indeed the fact, then she knew everything, was aware of the Englishman's
proposals, and of the forest interview! She was in possession of his secret
and could by a single word completely ruin him!

No! No! He was raving! ... Why! he was accusing the mother of his
child! For she was the mother of his son! Then he alone was in fault; ... he
who had her arrested for no reason! For no reason? Was that so certain?
And he sought about in his mind for excuses. Yes! he was the dupe of Fate,
the tool of blind Destiny! Why had Clarisse been there? Why had she been
implicated with the secret interview? Why? Ah! why?

With closed eyes, still repeating that unanswered "Why?" he fell into a
half sleep. Little by little the image of a cell in the prison of La Bourbe rose
before him; Clarisse was there. She appeared to him, as he had seen her in
her youth, at the Rue des Lions, with her sweet pale face, large blue eyes,
fair silken hair, so fair ... so fair.... He began to wonder that one so young
and frail should have a son so big as Olivier! His dream-thoughts became
more confused.... She was now Olivier's fiancée.... He was promising her to
marry them in London, through the intervention of Vaughan ... of Fox....
Fox was all powerful in England, as he, Robespierre, was in France.... His
head gradually sunk on his shoulder, and he fell asleep at last.

The lamp, turned very low, shed upon him a flickering light, pale and
subdued as the glow of a sanctuary lamp, softening as if in pity the stern
lines of his troubled countenance, which even in sleep did not relax the
painful contraction of its features. He had fallen asleep, dressed as he was,
his head aslant, his arms hanging by his sides listlessly. Now and then, his
whole frame would twitch and quiver nervously, and vague, incoherent
words escaped his lips at intervals; harsh, guttural sounds fell from him
suddenly in that silent apartment, whose curtains and drapery in the
subdued light assumed the soft and delicate tints of a young girl's chamber.

Its hangings were really of damask, with designs of white flowers on a

blue ground, cut out of an old dress by Madame Duplay. This was the one
obvious attempt at ornament. The Incorruptible's room was otherwise very
modestly furnished, containing only the armchair in which he had fallen
asleep, a few cane chairs, a very simple desk, a plain deal bookcase
overladen with books and fastened to the wall, and a bed of walnut-wood.

The room was situated, as already said, in a wing which connected the
main building occupied by the Duplay family with an outhouse opening on
the Rue Saint-Honoré. It also communicated with little Maurice's room, to
whom the Incorruptible in his leisure hours gave lessons in history, and on
the duties of a citizen. The child, who had been sent early to bed on the
arrival of the police-agents with Olivier, now slept soundly.

At about three o'clock, the boy awoke with a start. He heard a noise in
the next room, and, thinking he recognised Robespierre's voice, turned over
to sleep again. It was not the first time his good friend had talked aloud in
his sleep. But he was awakened again by the falling of a chair, and jumped
from his bed anxiously and ran to open the door. In the flickering light of
the nearly extinguished lamp he discerned the Incorruptible standing erect,
still dressed, and gesticulating wildly as if pushing some one back. The boy
advanced towards him, asking what was amiss. Robespierre stared at him
with a frightened look, then folding him in his arms, he fell on his knees
moaning. Between his groans the child could catch the words—

"My son! ... My son!"

Then the lamp went quite out.

The child gently disengaged himself. Bon ami had called him his son!
Yes, he was his son, his affectionate and dutiful son. Then with tender
solicitude he helped him to rise. The day was already peeping through the
half-closed shutters. Maurice with some difficulty succeeded in replacing
his friend on the armchair in which he had passed the night, and asked him
if he wished for anything. But Robespierre had fallen asleep again.

The boy returned to his room, walking backwards on tiptoe, fearing to

awaken him, and went to bed again.

At seven o'clock in the morning Robespierre opened his eyes. He

remembered nothing. The fact of having slept in his clothes, and in an
armchair, did not surprise him. He had often done so in the days of sore
trial. He drew aside the curtains, and the room was suddenly flooded with
daylight. Some one knocked. It was Maurice Duplay, asking if he could
come in.

The boy's early visit surprised Robespierre.

"Are you well, bon ami?"

"Yes, why?"

"Nothing ... only ... last night ... you know..."

"Last night? Well!"

"You rather frightened me!"

"Frightened you?"

"Yes, you frightened me!"

The child then told him what had taken place in the night.

"Are you quite sure?" asked Robespierre anxiously.

"Oh! quite sure, and since you called me your son it shows you
recognised me, and had not the fever so badly after all."

"Yes, you are right! It was nothing since ... as you said ... since I
recognised you; ... for it was you of course I called my son: ... you are my
good little son, are you not?"

And he patted his cheeks, adding—

"But you must not speak of it to anybody! not to anybody, mind! It is

not worth while worrying your father and mother."

"Oh no! I have never said anything!"

 Robespierre began again to feel uneasy.

"How do you mean? You have never said anything?"

"Why, it is not the first time it has happened to you."

"Have you heard me before, then?"

"Oh yes! speaking loud in your sleep."

"And what did I say?"

"Oh, I never understood anything, ... disconnected words, that's all....

And then I was so accustomed, I did not pay much attention. But last night
it was too much and I got up."

"You should not have done so, it was nothing more serious than usual,
only the worry and bother that upset me so."

"It was the cross-examination of the Chouan yesterday which unstrung

you, I suppose?"

"Perhaps; ... it may be.... But, you see, now I am quite well."

As the lad was going he called after him.

"Now you know, and you won't give it another thought, will you? And
not a word, mind, not a word! Now go, child."

He was subject to such nightmares then?

"Perhaps I don't take enough exercise," he thought, and he resolved to

go out at once into the open air. A good walk to the Champs-Elysées would
completely revive him. He changed his clothes, shaved, powdered and
perfumed himself as usual, and had actually started, but went back and took
from a drawer in his desk the draft of the new law which he had prepared
the day before, and put it in his pocket. He had decided after reflection not
to submit it himself, but to confide it to Couthon, one of the most faithful of
his friends on the Committee with Lebas, Saint-Just, and Augustin. Couthon
would read the document from the tribune, and this would leave him fresh
and fit for the ensuing debate.

Having called at Couthon's house, and concluded this arrangement,

Robespierre made his way to the Champs-Elysées through the Tuileries
with his dog Blount, who gambolled joyously in his new-found freedom
after a three days' confinement in the house. The Incorruptible walked
quickly and briskly as usual, in spite of the intense heat, which was but little
diminished by the shade of the chestnuts lining the avenue. He was already
telling over in his mind those among his enemies who would be the first
victims of the new law. As to Olivier and the two women, it was quite
decided. They should remain in prison in the most absolute secrecy until the
time came for him to be master.

At the end of the avenue he turned into the Allée de Veuves and went
towards the Seine. Blount, who had scented the water, leapt and bounded
forward in high glee. On fine summer days the dog used to swim in the
river under the eyes of Robespierre. When he reached the banks of the
Seine Blount was awaiting him, and at a sign jumped in the water, and the
Incorruptible found some release from his harrowing thoughts in watching
the gambols of his dog in the river.

At the Convention the Bill read by Couthon was received with loud
protests, and the subsequent debate opened amid turbulence and uproar.
That the judgments of the Revolutionary Tribunal should be accelerated by
the suppression of evidence and cross-examinations had already frightened
not a few; but when it became a question of transmitting to the Committee
of Public Safety the right of life or death, the whole assembly was filled
with fear. Up to that time the Convention alone had the right to sit in
judgment on a representative of the people!

A voice was heard exclaiming—

"If that law is passed, nothing is left but to blow out our brains!"

Robespierre appeared in the tribune. The Bill was voted. The next day
several attempts were made in the Convention to repeal the atrocious law
which brought the Terror into their very midst, but all such efforts failed.
 With so trenchant a law, a two-edged weapon which could be turned at
will either against the Committee of Public Safety or against the
Convention, according to the intricate windings of his subtle policy, with
such a weapon Robespierre could keep his enemies of the Committee at
bay. He had in future but to accuse them, and have them replaced by
creatures of his own, satellites of his will.

However, all was going well. His adversaries, blind and unwary, had
begun to tear each other to pieces in party disputes, and to split up into
factions, the very day after the passing of the atrocious law which made him
so dreaded.

The Incorruptible tried to take advantage of these cabals, but he was too
hasty. The Committee, realising their danger, united against him; and this
was the prelude to a terrible and decisive struggle, for in case of failure
there remained nothing for Robespierre but to have recourse to force.
Realising this to the full, he no longer attended the sittings of the
Committee, but worked silently in the shade, preparing the coup d'état
which was to rid him at once and for ever of all his enemies,—with Saint-
Just, whom he had sent for from the Northern Army, with Hauriot,
Commander-in-Chief of the armed force; Fleuriot-Lescot, Mayor of Paris;
Payan, Agent of the Commune; and Dumas, President; and Coffinhal, Vice-
President of the Revolutionary Tribunal. His design was very simple. He
would denounce his adversaries of the Committee of Public Safety at the
bar of the Convention and ask for their arrest and judgment. Should the
Convention resist, he would subdue them with the help of Hauriot and his
troops, and of all sections of the Commune, who on a sign from him and
from Fleuriot, Payan, Dumas, Coffinhal, and their friends, would be stirred
to insurrection, and would take the Tuileries by storm.

As to Olivier and the two women, they were always under his hand.
Olivier, at La Force Prison, was in no way disturbed. Clarisse and Thérèse
had been kept at La Bourbe by his orders. Twice the names of Olivier's
mother and fiancée had appeared on the list of the Revolutionary Tribunal,
and twice their names had been struck off by Robespierre, who, anxious and
watchful, took care that all lists should be submitted to him.
 Soon the decisive hour approached. It was the 7th Thermidor. Six weeks
had elapsed since the memorable Fête of the Supreme Being, and the
passing of the horrible Prairial law, which had sent hundreds of victims to
the scaffold. The Terror was at its height, and France, prostrate before the
knife of the guillotine, was awaiting in distracted anxiety the result of the
struggle. The guillotine was also waiting, ready to devour whichever of the
two parties was vanquished—Robespierre's opponents or Robespierre
himself and his partisans.

The Incorruptible, driven to the last extremity, had fixed the battle for
the next day, the 8th Thermidor, when he would throw off his mask and
accuse his adversaries of the Committee of Public Safety in presence of the
Convention. Although he was almost certain of the issue, he deemed it none
the less prudent to take infinite precautions, and to put Olivier and the two
women in perfect safety, in case of defeat, however impossible it might
seem. They must be taken from prison, and all three placed in some secure
retreat, out of the reach of danger, from whence they could escape if
necessary.

Robespierre thought of the Hôtel de Ville, where he reigned supreme.

Behind this, in the Rue du Martroy, were some unoccupied apartments, in a
building connected with and forming part of the hotel. Clarisse might live
there with her niece and Olivier until they could with safety leave Paris. He
unfolded his projects to Lebas, who alone knew of the secret drama which
poisoned the private life of the Incorruptible at the very moment when his
public career was reaching its climax. Lebas approved the plan.

"I am entirely at your service!"

"Thanks. I was counting on your help. But don't let us be too hasty. To-
morrow will be time enough. Everything depends on the sitting. If you see
that the majority hesitate from the commencement, go immediately to La
Bourbe and take the two women out, then to La Force and see about my
son. The apartments are ready. You have only to take them there. But save
the women first. Olivier must find his mother and his fiancée when he
arrives."
 Then taking two papers from his pocket, he added, "Here are the
warrants of release."

"Agreed!" said Lebas, after reading them.

Next day at the Convention, Lebas, a parliamentary expert, judged that

Robespierre would come out victorious from the contest, nor was he
mistaken. The Incorruptible had brought a general accusation, without
mentioning names, against members of the Committee of Public Safety and
General Security. This was received in anxious silence, a few only daring to
protest. But the printing of the speech, and its circulation in all the
communes of Paris, was none the less voted. It was an official accusation,
by the voice of Robespierre, of his adversaries, before the whole of France.
It was victory; and nothing was left but to name the victims.

But the implicated members of the Committee of Public Safety did not
give him time. Vadier boldly made for the tribune, followed by Cambon,
who, feeling it was a case of kill or cure, played a daring game, and replied
to the general accusation of Robespierre by a direct, personal accusation,
denouncing him openly to the astonished Assembly. The real traitor, he
declared, was this masterful Robespierre, who paralysed the will of the
National Convention!

There was a counter-wave of feeling among the members of the

Assembly at this public indictment, and censure of their slavish submission
to Robespierre. They seemed suddenly to realise their position, and the
more daring members, seeing the tide turn, prepared for the fight. Thus the
attacked were in their turn attacking.

Billaud-Varennes succeeded Cambon at the tribune.

"The mask must be torn aside, no matter whose face it covers!" he cried.
"I would rather my corpse should be the stepping-stone of the ambitious
than by my silence be an accomplice of their crimes!"

Others succeeded Billaud-Varennes, reiterating his accusations more

boldly and insultingly. Robespierre, disconcerted, tried to face the storm,
but it was too late. In confining himself to a general accusation, in
mentioning no names, he had frightened every one. The Assembly revoked
their previous decision, and amended the Bill. The speech was not to be
sent to the Communes, but to the Committee, to be examined.

"What!" cried Robespierre, "I have the courage to make before the
Convention revelations which I believe necessary to the salvation of the
country, and my speech is to be submitted for examination to the very men
whom I accuse!"

Victory had been followed by defeat; a partial defeat, it was true, for,
seeing the hesitating attitude of the Convention, Robespierre hoped to win
them back again the next day. He must, however, be prepared for every
emergency! That very evening he would take steps to organise an
insurrection of the Communes, which, in case of resistance, would
annihilate the whole set of dastardly cowards. The Incorruptible wished to
act within legal bounds as long as possible, and only to overstep them when
forced to do so.

Robespierre looked round for Lebas, but he had disappeared, and this
gave him grounds for hope that the two women, and perhaps Olivier, had
reached the private apartments chosen by him in the Rue du Martroy.

"I must go and make sure that all is well," he said to himself; "there is
not a moment to lose"—and leaving the Convention, he hastened in the
direction of the Hôtel de Ville.

CHAPTER X

THE TUMBRILS

At that very moment Lebas reached the Hôtel de Ville with Clarisse and
Thérèse. On leaving the prison of La Bourbe he had given a false address to
the coachman who drove the prisoners, and he followed them at a distance
in another carriage, accompanied by a man to superintend the luggage, who
was one of the attendants at the Hôtel de Ville, and a devoted adherent of
Robespierre. The second carriage soon overtook the first, when Lebas gave
the correct address to the driver—

"13, Rue du Martroy!"

Clarisse and Thérèse mounted the stairs more dead than alive, ushered
up respectfully by Lebas, and Urbain, the attendant, carrying their luggage.
Where were they going? Who were these people? Lebas at the prison had
scarcely spoken to Clarisse.

"For your safety," he had said simply, "for your niece's safety, do not
question me before we arrive at our destination."

For her safety? For Thérèse's safety! Then they were to be saved? Who
could save them? She would surely learn now who it was.

The two men stopped on the third floor, and Urbain opened a door.

"It is here!" said Lebas, making way for them to pass in.

The two women entered, and found themselves in a plain sitting-room

with fittings and furniture of dark grey wood. Urbain took the luggage to a
door opening on the left, through which a bedroom was visible.

"You must make yourself quite at home, here," said Lebas.

And he informed them that they were free, but from motives of
prudence he who had saved them, and for whom Lebas was acting, had
judged it advisable to offer them these apartments as a temporary residence,
where they would be entirely out of danger's reach. Clarisse and Thérèse
could not recover from their surprise, and wished to know to whom they
owed their deliverance. But Lebas would not tell them, having received no
orders to that effect. All he could say to reassure them was that their
protector was all-powerful at the Paris Commune, and that the apartments
were in direct communication, through a door which he indicated, with the
Hôtel de Ville, so that they were under his immediate care.

Clarisse started. She understood now. She owed her safety to the
Incorruptible! Her letter of the preceding month had reached Robespierre.
She knew this already, as he had acknowledged it in a few brief words three
days after receiving it—"Fear nothing, your son is safe!" And this was all
she had heard.

Lebas was still giving the women particulars of their new surroundings.
Everything had been arranged to render them as comfortable as possible.
The man who had accompanied them was entirely at their disposal, and it
was to his interest to serve them well. His wife would see also to their
wants, and take charge of their apartments, where they would be absolutely
free and unrestrained.

Only one precaution was earnestly recommended to them; to show

themselves as little as possible at the windows of their sitting or bed room,
so as not to attract the attention of neighbours. They were especially told to
avoid this in the afternoon, from four to six. The windows looked on to the
Rue du Martroy, through which the carts carrying the condemned passed.
The scaffold was now installed at the Barrière du Trône Renversé, and it
was the shortest way.

The two women shuddered.

"Unhappily we had no choice," Lebas added, seeing their repugnance,

"but you will be warned by the cries of the crowd, and you can then retire to
the dining-room which looks on to the courtyard. It lasts but a quarter of an
hour or twenty minutes, at the most."

But Clarisse scarcely listened, her whole mind occupied with one
thought, the longing to inform Olivier, whose whereabouts she hoped soon
to learn, of their release from prison.

"Could I write a few words to some one who is very dear to me?" she
asked. "I wish to set his mind at rest about our welfare."
 Lebas replied in the affirmative, and she thanked him gratefully. He
politely protested; she owed him no thanks, these were solely due to him
whose orders he was executing. He then offered to take the letter himself,
saying he would return for it in a quarter of an hour, as he had another
urgent duty to fulfil. And he retired, leaving the two women with Urbain,
who busied himself arranging the furniture of the sitting-room.

Thérèse, now full of hope, gave thanks to God. They would perhaps
soon see Olivier again. What joy! But to whom did they owe their release?
She looked inquiringly at her aunt. Clarisse owned that she believed it was
to an ex-secretary of Thérèse's grandfather, now all-powerful, and to whom
she had written from the prison of La Bourbe. Thérèse seemed astonished
that her aunt had not told her of this. But Clarisse made the very plausible
excuse that she did not wish to raise her hopes, not knowing whether her
appeal would have success.

The young girl was now looking through the shutters of one of the
windows which Urbain had partly opened.

"Ah! there is a church!" she exclaimed, and immediately she thought

that if they were allowed to go out she would go and pray for their
protector, for he could not be all-powerful and not have done wrong; he
must belong also to the Government of Terror.

At the mention of a church, Clarisse approached the window. She

recognised the building; it was St. Gervais Church, on whose portal could
be read in large letters the sadly ironical inscription: "National Property, to
be let as a Warehouse."

At Clarisse's request Urbain had placed an ink-stand and blotting-paper

on the table, and Clarisse hearing it was ready turned round joyfully. "At
last I can write to Olivier!" she thought.

She then seated herself at the table and began to write, while Thérèse
was making a tour round the room, taking a survey of the furniture.
Suddenly catching sight of an illustrated paper on a sofa, she took it up to
pass the time away. It was five weeks old, and had been preserved no doubt
on account of the illustrations. Its pages gave an elaborate account of the