Walter Scott, ‘Count Robert of Paris’ (1831)

[Continuing my read-through of Walter Scott. Previously on this blog: Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), Quentin Durward (1823), St Ronan’s Well (1823), Redgauntlet (1824), The Betrothed (1825), The Talisman (1825), Woodstock (1826), The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827), The Highland Widow (1827), The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) and Anne of Geierstein (1829). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

Scott struggled mightily writing this, the penultimate Waverley novel. He was still scribbling like a fury, working to earn the money to pay off his enormous debts, but his health was collapsing as he did so. Count Robert proved a smidge too far, writing-wise. He left a chaotic, incomplete and largely incomprehensible manuscript behind him and sailed off to the Mediterranean in the hope that a holiday and better weather would have a salutary effect on his decline. It didn’t, alas. The book as we have it was largely rewritten by his son-in-law John Lockhart — perhaps as much as a third of the novel is actually Lockhart, whole sections added and his stylistic polishing cloth having gone over, it’s likely, every original Scottian paragraph.

So what happened? It’s a rather mournful story. On the 15th of February 1830, whilst conversing with a certain Miss Young of Hawick (who had called, asking advice about publishing a memoir of her father) Scott fell to the floor, gasping and fitting. ‘I lost the power of articulation, or rather of speaking what I wished to say’ he later wrote to Lockhart. Doctors bled him and told him the attack had proceeded ‘from the stomach’, which is pretty bonkers even by the standards of early 19th-C medical science. In fact Scott had experienced a serious stroke, something he himself understood, writing to friends about ‘paralytic shock’.

His strength was very considerably sapped. Writing became much harder, and his handwriting deteriorated. He had to retire as Clerk of the Court in Edinburgh, a position he had occupied (and in which he had earned nicely) for decades. He also stepped away from his role as Sheriff of Jedburgh. And though he continued writing at a furious pace — oh, how he needed the money — the labour took an increasing toll. ‘I believe I have grown older in the last year,’ he wrote to his daughter Sophia in October 1830, ‘than in twenty before.’

Then in November he had another major stroke. Afterwards he wrote to friends of his terror that the next stroke would incapacitate him totally, and that he would ‘linger on an idiot and a show’. The ‘official’ biography, by Scott’s son-in-law Lockhart, soft-pedals Scott’s final debility, throwing a dutiful and pious lustre over it, so much so that John Sutherland condemns Lockhart’s ‘obfuscation’ where these last months of Scott’s life are concerned: ‘the motives for concealment clearly originate,’ says Sutherland, ‘in a collective guilt among Scott’s family for not having done more to prolong his life.’

Despite Scott’s degenerated physical and mental condition the lucrative possibilities of a new novel meant his family and publishers urged him to keep writing. Or at first they did so. When the early chapters of Count Robert emerged from Scott’s pen his publisher Cadell — who, by an earlier contract, had agreed to pay £4,200 for any new novel, sight-unseen (something like half a million in today’s money) — grew more and more anxious. The Magnum Opus edition was in the middle of its highly successful run of monthly publications, having reached vol 20. Cadell and printer James Ballantyne became worried a markedly substandard new novel would not only struggle to earn-out such a handsome advance, it might tarnish the reputation of the whole collected edition.

So, having previously encouraged Scott to write, they volte-faced, Ballantyne writing to Scott that the manuscript might prove actually unpublishable. Scott over-reacted: he would, he said, leave the country and die: ‘my present idea is to go abroad for a few months … so ended fathers of the Novel Fielding and Smollett [who died, respectively, in Portugal and Italy] and it would be no unprofessional finish for Walter Scott.’ Panicking that his golden goose was going to stop laying altogether, Cadell wrote in mollifying tones: ‘you have taken the matter too seriously — we agree that laying aside Count Robert is out of the question’. So Scott resumed work.

He had written the material for the second volume by March 1831 and pushed into the third and last; but, brain-fogged and exhausted, stroke-stricken, he had underestimated how much text was needed and was considerably underlength for vol 2. Then there was another, even more worrying development, at least so far as Cadell and Ballantyne were concerned: for Scott was working towards what was, to 1830s sensibilities, a highly shocking and unacceptable denouement to his story.

What denouement? Explaining it needs a little story-context. So: the scene of Count Robert is 11th-century Constantinople, where the emperor Alexius Comnenus is contending with threats from East — hostile Turks and Scythians — and West, specifically an army of Franks and Saxons, passing through his territories on the way to the First Crusade, and not favourably disposed towards him. The emperor and his literary daughter Anna Comnena, figure largely in the story, but the two main characters are from the latter Western force: the titular Count Robert, a Frankish knight, the strongest and bravest warrior of France, and Hereward, an English (that is, Saxon) soldier who has fled his homeland after the Norman Conquest and is working as a mercenary, a ‘Varangian’, at Alexius’s court. Robert, on his way to the Holy Land, is in company with his wife, the Amazonian beauty Brenhilda, Countess of Paris, a warrior in her own right, whom her husband had courted by fighting with her at the Chapel of Our Lady of the Broken Lances, a location ‘in the midst of one of the vast forests which, occupy the centre of France’ where knights travel to joust and fight chivalrically. Having fought and thereby wooed the statuesque Brenhilda, Robert afterward married her and the two set out to crusade in the Holy Land.

Saxon Hereward first regards Robert as his mortal enemy — on account of the whole Norman invasion thing — but later comes to treat him as an ally and friend, two northern-europeans in the dangerous morass of conspiracy and plotting and orientalist decadence that is the Byzantine court. The Englishman is betrothed to the beautiful Saxon maiden Agatha, but she has been lost in the confusion of the invasion and exile, and Hereward believes her dead; she’s not though — it turns out that one of Anna Comnena’s ladies in waiting, Bertha, is actually Hereward’s lost Saxon love under an assumed name.

The story, as we have it, is built around one particular incident. The Frankish crusaders are on their way to regain Jerusalem for Christianity, and since Alexius is a Christian emperor, it is agreed to allow the Frankish soldiers through his lands. But Count Robert, as arrogant as he is brave and strong, insolently sits in the imperial throne after Alexius had vacated it to greet Count Bohemond. The Byzantine court are staggered and outraged by this blasphemy and Robert is only with difficulty ejected from the seat. The frontispiece, at the top there, is Robert’s swaggering moment of imperial throne hijacking. Here it is, bigger:

It’s not much to build a whole novel around, and Scott struggles to flesh out a larger story. What happens in terms of the plot is: Alexius is persuaded by his underlings to take a revenge upon Robert. That, and its consequences, are pretty much it for the novel. These underlings include the emperor’s son-in-law Nicephorus Briennius (who is unhappily married to the accomplished and literary Anna, daughter of the emperor), Achilles Tatius, captain of the Imperial Guard, and a devious holy hermit called Michael Agelastes.

One of the main points of focus of the novel is the contrast the decadent Byzantine court, full of plotters and schemers, liars and politicians, and the hearty honest straight-up manly vigour of the Frankish and Saxon cultures. Alexius’s Old Roman Empire is corrupt, decayed, superannuated; the new order is the strong right arm, recitutde and knightly valour of the new West. So: the emperor is persuaded that Robert’s outrageous bit of throne-sitting must be punished, but the danger of antagonising this crusading force of strong warriors means that his revenge must be undertaken in secret. Achilles and Michael urge this course of actions for political reasons — they are manoeuvring to overthrow the emperor — but Nicephorus has a simpler motivation: he lusts after Count Robert’s comely wife Brenhilda. Once Robert is out of the way, he hopes to seduce her.

To get Robert out the way Alexius is persuaded into a melodramatic set of exigencies. The Frankish Count is given a cup of drugged wine and, when unconscious, is locked in a prison cell — with a wild tiger! Count Robert kills the cat with a stool that also happens to be in the cell (‘his aim was so true, that the missile went right to the mark and with incredible force. The skull of the tiger was fractured by the blow, and with the assistance of his dagger, which had fortunately been left with him, the French Count despatched the monster’ [ch. 15]). But then a trap-door opens in the ceiling and down comes — a savage 9-foot-tall Orang Utan! Robert knocks this beast out, is going to kill it but instead takes pity on it: puts a poultice on its bruised head. Then he kills the Orang’s keeper.

The cell door is inadequate to hold back Robert’s superb strength and he breaks out, whereupon he bumps into Hereward: the two men first fight and then become friends, Hereward using his privileges as part of the imperial guard to smuggle Robert inside the palace. There, secreted away, he observes the whole wicked imperial plot. Meanwhile his wife, unsure if her husband is alive or dead, remains stalwart in her chaste love for him, and promises to fight a duel — though she is a woman — to defend his, and her, honour.

This, then, is the denouement towards which Scott was writing in the third volume of Count Robert: a martial duel between Countess Brenhilda — pregnant with Robert’s child !— and Anna Commenius, fighting on behalf of her worthless and adulterously-lusting husband Nicephorus, to whom she is rather bafflingly loyal. Two women fighting in the gladiatorial arena! Tasty, I think you will agree.

The mere prospect of this scene as the novel’s climax spooked Cadell and Ballantyne big time. In Sutherland’s words, Cadell and Ballantyne’s ‘anxiety peaked into panic when they encountered Scott’s “highly offensive” descriptions of Brenhilda’s pregnancy’. They urged Scott to rewrite the whole final section. At first Scott refused. Then, in April 1830, he had yet another stroke, more serious than the previous two. Pressing his advantage, Ballantyne wrote to the convalescing, barely-able-to-speak Scott: ‘this episode [that is, pregnant Brenhilda’s gladiatorial combat with Anna] will injure all your work to the extent of many thousand pounds.’ It’s likely Scott was by this stage thinking not just of paying off his debts but also of leaving his children a solid inheritance: which is to say, this stab probably hit its spot. Scott put Count Robert aside and started instead on a new novel, Castle Dangerous. Indeed, he never finished drafting Count Robert, leaving it and Castle Dangerous in manuscriptual disorder as he left for a trip to the Mediterranean, hoping for rest and the restoration of his health.

That Count Robert was published in Scott’s lifetime was down to Lockhart, who gathered together the scattered MS sheets, transcribed what he could and rewrote much (Lockhart had started his own career as a writer, publishing several sub-Scottian historical novels in the 1820s). Scott, very likely, had no idea what was happening: he didn’t see a copy of the published volume until he returned to Britain when he really wasn’t well enough to judge it clearly, or perhaps even to read it. Whilst still abroad he wrote in a letter to his son-in-law: ‘I am ashamed for the first time in my life of the two novels’ — Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, he means. It’s possible Lockhart felt he had a tacit licence to save something from the wreckage.

The problem is that ‘saving’ the novel meant making it more conventional, more dull and less distinctive. Instead of having the pregnant Lady Brenhilde fighting the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena in the gladiatorial arena (picture the splendour!) Lockhart flinched: in the novel as we now have it, Brenhilde is not pregnant. When it comes to the fight, Count Robert himself steps up at the last minute, to fight as his wife’s champion; and Hereward the Saxon, as a leading member of the Byzantine imperial guard, steps-up to champion the princess. Off the two go, hammer and tongs. They’ve already fought once, earlier in the novel, afterwards becoming friends and allies, so this second combat is dramatically otiose and illogical, and, worse, is written in a limp, feeble mode that leaves the reader scratching her head in puzzlement:

The first blows were given and parried with great caution [but] the fiercer passions began, as usual, to awaken with the clash of arms and the sense of deadly blows, some of which were made with great fury on either side … their strength and agility seemed somewhat equally matched, although those who judged with more pretension to knowledge, were of opinion, that Count Robert spared putting forth some part of the military skill for which he was celebrated … Accident at length seemed about to decide what had been hitherto an equal contest. Count Robert, making a feint on one side of his antagonist, struck him on the other, which was uncovered, with the edge of his weapon, so that the Varangian reeled, and seemed in the act of falling to the earth. [ch 33]

Pff. Rubbish. Robert does not deliver the coup-de-grace to this improbable violation of physics (how can a body seem to fall? Surely it falls, or it doesn’t?), instead sparing Hereward and the two men become, once again, friends. In the arena a herald announces that Agelastes has been executed for plotting against the emperor; Alexius issues a general pardon for everyone else, and Robert and his wife continue on their crusade, afterwards returning in triumph to France. Then Robert buys-up and gifts an estate in Hampshire to Hereward, now reunited with his love Agatha. Sappiest of happy endings.

So that’s the story as eventually released. While all this was going on in Britain (the novel was published 1 December 1831, becoming a bestseller in 1832) Scott was far away on his Mediterranean tour. Remarkably, and though he was only intermittently comprehensible to his companions when speaking, Scott kept writing (I’ll come to the unfinished books he wrote during the voyage, Siege of Malta and Bizarro, later on this blog). Then, passing through Germany on his way home, Scott suffered another gigantic stroke (this happened 9th June 1832). By the time he reached London he recognised neither friends nor family, often couldn’t speak at all and when he could rambled and mumbled incoherently. It was decided — Lockhart’s biography presents this as Scott’s expressed wish, but it’s very possible the family decided it on his behalf — that he ought to die at Abbotsford rather than in the south. Accordingly he was loaded onto a steamboat and ported up the east coast like luggage. Hoisted ashore at Edinburgh, unconscious, ‘like so much cargo’, he was brought by carriage to his home. During this final journey Scott suddenly came round, struggled and tried to leap from the carriage. Back at Abbotsford he calmed down again, but then he started again ranting and accusing his carers of — something, they weren’t sure what: ‘unintelligible but violent reproaches’. At the very end he started screaming — howling, it seems, for twenty six hours straight. Blimey. Lockhart, looking forward to his appointed duties as his father-in-law’s official biographer, and specifically prompted by a friend to concoct a more edifying death-bed-scene than this, later wrote the following pious paragraph:

As I was dressing on the morning of Monday the 17th of September, Nicolson came into my room, and told me that his master had awoke in a state of composure and consciousness, and wished to see me immediately. I found him entirely himself, though in the last extreme of feebleness. His eye was clear and calm, every trace of the wildfire of delirium extinguished. “Lockhart,” he said, “I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man — be virtuous — be religious — be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.” [Lockhart, Life of Scott]

This was (it’s a harsh but apposite word) a lie. In fact Scott never regained consciousness after his 26-hour screaming marathon. So, as Vonnegut said, it goes.

The standard scholarly edition of Scott is the Edinburgh University Press edition, in which series Count Robert is edited by estimable Scott-scholar J H Alexander — who taught me, when I was callow undergraduate at Aberdeen University in the 1980s, to my enormous and ongoing advantage. Alexander, perhaps understandably, wants to redeem the novel from its detractors:

Count Robert of Paris, condemned by Scott’s printer as ‘altogether a failure’, was later prepared for publication by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart , and his publisher Robert Cadell. What appeared was a bowdlerised, tamed and tidied version of what Scott had written and dictated. This edition, the first to have returned to the manuscript and to the many surviving proofs, realises Scott’s original intentions. Scott’s last full novel has many roughnesses, but it also challenges the susceptibilities of his readers more directly than any other and in that lay its fault in the eyes of the lesser men who condemned it.

What can we say. I hate to take my stand with those lesser men (I mean, seriously? those guys are awful) but … Count Robert really isn’t a very good novel. It was, however, quite successful commercially, and critics have made the argument that it proved influential:

Abortion though it was, Count Robert of Paris turned out to be an influential work. In terms of literary history it emerges as the first of the nineteenth-century’s muscular novels. In the character of the Varangian Hereward and the clash of Saxon heroism, and imperial Byzantine dissipation, Scott lays the ground for Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake and Hypatia. Count Robert of Paris deals with the clash of two huge ideologies, the classical world now in decay and capable of supporting itself only by guile and conspiracy, and the crusades with their new chivalrous energy. [Sutherland, Walter Scott, 343]

Abortion, no less! Actually, I’m not sure this timeline of influence is quite right: as Herbert Tucker demonstrates in his Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford 2008) the first decade of the century witnessed a huge number of ‘muscular’ epic poems with Anglo-Saxon heroes, Arthur, Alfred and others, embodying the supposed virtues of the north, often pitched against corrupt continentals. There were loads and loads of epics with titles like Britannia: a National Epic (1800), Britain Preserved: a Poem in Seven Books (1800), to say nothing of Cottle’s twelve-book Alfred (1800) and Thelwell’s The Hope of Albion; or Edwin of Northumbria, an Epic Poem (1801) — and we haven’t even reached 1802. Tucker works assiduously through dozens of these. As for novels: Doris B. Kelly has asssmbled a check-list of ninety-six American and British literary works (primarily prose, but also drama and verse) published in England from 1790 onwards ‘that make use of the decline and fall [of Rome] for their historical background’. And Ernest Baker’s ‘monumental reference work A Guide to Historical Fiction (1914)’ lists ‘well over one hundred novels alone set in ancient Britain or the Mediterranean world during the first five centuries of the Christian Era. Baker notes in particular the enormous success of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834), ‘the most spectacular success of any novel issued since Waverley and probably the single most influential prototype for the classical-historical novel’. Stanwood S. Walker, who quotes both these sources, adds another, rather closer to home for Scott: John Lockhart himself had published a novel called Valerius (1821) set in the decaying Roman empire. As Walker notes this book was respectfully but not enthusiastically received, as the title of his paper shows how limited was its impact (‘A False Start for the Classical-Historical Novel: Lockhart’s Valerius and the Limits of Scott’s Historicism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 57:2 (September 2002), 179–209]

And actually, although this particular dynamic — vigorous north-European strength vs decadent feebleness and orientalist corruption — clearly is part of Scott’s novel, it’s not what stands out in a re-read, or so I’d argue. Something else is going on. Scott doesn’t (or Scott-Lockhart — the Scottlock combo — don’t) describe the Byzantine empire in any particular detail. The account of Constantinople, a place Scott himself never actually visited, consists of diluted cribs from Gibbon: a few streets, a gatehouse, a bit of coast, a church here, an arena there. The exception is the imperial palace, which is described in lovely, Gormenghastly detail: a vast pile containing labyrinths of levels and corridors, trapdoors and cells and halls and secret chambers, filled (as we have seen) with wild tigers and trained Orang Utans, prisoners in oubliettes whose beards have grown down to their feet, giant mechanical lion-automata working as robot guardians (Count Robert smashes one of these) and various other tasty details. The inner sanctum of the palace is accessible only via the ‘bridge of peril’, a slender stone arch, without handrails, stretching across a chasm above a deep-down subterranean moat (‘it is said,’ we are told, ‘that it has been occasionally smeared with oil, or strewed with dried peas’ to baffle intruders. Dried peas?! The horror!)

If there is something Gothic, or orientalist-Gothic, in Scott’s version of this great castle, then there is something, contrastingly, spacious and wonderful in the open-air and cleanly chivalric ambition of Count Robert himself, an aspect of the novel that looks forward to a mode of Pre-Raphaelite and later Tolkienian visionary medievalism. Count Robert gives its reader tantalising glimpses of a much better novel in which Robert and his beautiful wife have a series of exciting ‘Fantasy’ adventures. Here they are first arriving in the vicinity of Constantinople:

Count Robert’s course of knight-errantry did not seem to be in the least intermitted by his marriage; on the contrary, when he was called upon to support his renown, his wife was often known also in military exploits, nor was she inferior to him in thirst after fame.

The Countess Brenhilda was now above six-and-twenty years old, with as much beauty as can well fall to the share of an Amazon. A figure, of the largest feminine size, was surmounted by a noble countenance, to which even repeated warlike toils had not given more than a sunny hue, relieved by the dazzling whiteness of such parts of her face as were not usually displayed.

… Count Robert of Paris had embarked his horses on board of ship, and all his retinue, except an old squire or valet of his own, and an attendant of his wife. He began to look among the scattered trees which fringed the shores, down almost to the tide-mark, to see if he could discern any by-path which might carry them more circuitously, but more pleasantly, to the city, and afford them at the same time, what was their principal object in the East, strange sights, or adventures of chivalry.

A broad and beaten path seemed to promise them all the enjoyment which shade could give in a warm climate. The ground through which it wound its way was beautifully broken by the appearance of temples, churches, and kiosks, and here and there a fountain distributed its silver produce, like a benevolent individual, who, self-denying to himself, is liberal to all others who are in necessity. The distant sound of the martial music still regaled their way; and, at the same time, as it detained the populace on the high-road, prevented the strangers from becoming incommoded with fellow-travellers. [ch 10]

There’s something deliciously spacious and wonderful about this prospect: coming ashore in a strange land, looking forward to ‘strange sights and adventures of chivalry’. But instead of these promised adventures we get a brief encounter with some Orc-ish Scythians — ‘a party of heathen Scythians, presenting the deformed features of the demons they were said to worship, flat noses with expanded nostrils, which seemed to admit the sight to their very brain; faces which extended rather in breadth than length, with strange unintellectual eyes placed in the extremity; figures short and dwarfish, yet garnished with legs and arms of astonishing sinewy strength, disproportioned to their bodies’ (as I’ve argued, previously, Tolkien manifestly read Scott) — whom Robert instantly defeats in battle.

Then they meet Agelastes, who tells them the story of ‘the rich island of Zulichium’ that lies somewhere off the Byzantine coast ‘amid storms and whirlpools, rocks which, changing their character, appear to precipitate themselves against each other’. The island contains one ‘stately, but ruinous castle’ inside which a beautiful princess sleeps, the victim of a curse laid upon her, and all her court, by a wizard, ‘one of the Magi who followed the tenets of Zoroaster’: for the princess and her courtiers, ‘a sleep like that of death fell upon them, and was not removed.’

Agelastes tells of a Frankish knight who attempted to Prince Charming this dormant lovely:

Never seemed there a fairer opportunity for that awakening to take place than when the proud step of Artavan de Hautlieu was placed upon those enchanted courts. On the left, lay the palace and donjon-keep; but the right, more attractive, seemed to invite to the apartment of the women. At a side door, reclined on a couch, two guards of the haram, with their naked swords grasped in their hands, and features fiendishly contorted between sleep and dissolution, seemed to menace death to any who should venture to approach. This threat deterred not Artavan de Hautlieu. He approached the entrance, when the doors, like those of the great entrance to the Castle, made themselves instantly accessible to him. A guard-room of the same effeminate soldiers received him, nor could the strictest examination have discovered to him whether it was sleep or death which arrested the eyes that seemed to look upon and prohibit his advance. Unheeding the presence of these ghastly sentinels, Artavan pressed forward into an inner apartment, where female slaves of the most distinguished beauty were visible in the attitude of those who had already assumed their dress for the night. There was much in this scene which might have arrested so young a pilgrim as Artavan of Hautlieu; but his heart was fixed on achieving the freedom of the beautiful Princess.

He passed on, therefore, to a little ivory door, which, after a moment’s pause, as if in maidenly hesitation, gave way like the rest, and yielded access to the sleeping apartment of the Princess herself. A soft light, resembling that of evening, penetrated into a chamber where every thing seemed contrived to exalt the luxury of slumber. The heaps of cushions, which formed a stately bed, seemed rather to be touched than impressed by the form of a nymph of fifteen, the renowned Princess of Zulichium … [ch 10]

Things don’t go the Perrault-fairy-tale way you might expect, however:

Sir Artavan de Hautlieu, says the story, considered in what way he should accost the sleeping damsel, when it occurred to him in what manner the charm would be most likely to be reversed. I am in your judgment, fair lady, if he judged wrong in resolving that the method of his address should be a kiss upon the lips. Never had so innocent an action an effect more horrible! The delightful light of a summer evening was instantly changed into a strange lurid hue, which, infected with sulphur, seemed to breathe suffocation through the apartment. The rich hangings, and splendid furniture of the chamber, the very walls themselves, were changed into huge stones tossed together at random, like the inside of a wild beast’s den, nor was the den without an inhabitant. The beautiful and innocent lips to which Artavan de Hautlieu had approached his own, were now changed into the hideous and bizarre form, and bestial aspect of a fiery dragon. A moment she hovered upon the wing, and it is said, had Sir Artavan found courage to repeat his salute three times, he would then have remained master of all the wealth, and of the disenchanted princess. But the opportunity was lost, and the dragon, or the creature who seemed such, sailed out at a side window upon its broad pennons, uttering loud wails of disappointment.

Excellent! But this is only an aside, an inset story: Robert and Brenhilda don’t ever visit this island, or follow up its cursed princess. It leaves the reader wishing Scott had made it, and similar, the main point of his story.