I am going to see dear and affectionate friends. The train would take me to them, that droll littlechemin de fer de ceinture, and it seems a pity to miss the Gare St. Lazare, its Sunday morning tumult of Parisians starting with their mistresses and their wives for a favourite suburb. I never run up these wide stairways leading to the great wide galleries full of bookstalls (charming yellow notes), and pierced with littleguichetspainted round with blue, without experiencing a sensation of happy lightness--a light-headedness that I associate with the month of May in Paris. But the tramway that passes through the Place de la Concorde goes as far as Passy, and though I love the droll littlechemin de fer de ceintureI love this tramway better. It speeds along the quays between the Seine and the garden of the Champs Elysées, through miles of chestnut bloom, the roadway chequered with shadows of chestnut leaves; the branches meet overhead, and in a faint delirium of the senses I catch at a bloom, cherish it for a moment, and cast it away. The plucky little steamboats are making for the landing-places, stemming the current. I love this sprightly little river better than the melancholy Thames, along whose banks saturnine immoralities flourish like bulrushes! Behold the white architecture, the pillars, the balustraded steps, the domes in the blue air, the monumented swards! Paris, like all pagan cities, is full of statues. A little later we roll past gardens, gaiety is in the air.... And then the streets of Passy begin to appear, mean streets, like London streets. I like them not; but the railway station is compensation; the little railway station like a house of cards under toy trees, and the train steaming out into the fanciful country. The bright wood along which it speeds is like the season's millinery.
It is pleasant to notice everything in Paris, the flymen asleep on their box-seats, the little horses dozing beneath the chestnut trees, the bloused workmen leaning over a green-painted table in an arbour, drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre, the villas of Auteuil, rich woodwork, rich iron railings, and the summer hush about villas engarlanded. Auteuil is so French, its symbolism enchants me. Auteuil is like a flower, its petals opening out to the kiss of the air, its roots feeling for way among the rich earth. Ah, the land of France, its vineyards and orchards, its earthly life! Thoughts come unbidden, my thoughts sing together, and I hardly knowing what they are singing. My thoughts are singing like the sun; do not ask me their meaning; they mean as much and as little as the sun that I am part of--the sun of France that I shall enjoy for thirty days. May takes me to dear and affectionate friends who await me at Auteuil, and June takes me away from them. There is the villa! And there amid the engarlanding trees my friend, dressed in pale yellow, sits in front of his easel. How the sunlight plays through the foliage, leaping through the rich, long grass; and amid the rhododendrons in bloom sits a little girl of four, his model, her frock and cap impossibly white under the great, gaudy greenery.
Year after year the same affectionate welcome, the same spontaneous welcome in this garden of rhododendrons and chestnut bloom. I would linger in the garden, but I may not, for breakfast is readyet il ne faut pas faire manquer la messe à Madame. La messe! How gentle the word is, much gentler than our word, mass, and it shocks us hardly at all to see an old lady going away in her carriagepour entendre la messe. Religion purged of faith is a pleasant, almost a pretty thing. Some fruits are better dried than fresh; religion is such a one, and religion, when nothing is left of it but the pleasant, familiar habit, may be defended, for were it not for our habits life would be unrecorded, it would be all on the flat, as we would say if we were talking about a picture without perspective. Our habits are our stories, and tell whence we have come and how we came to be what we are. This is quite a pretty reflection, but there is no time to think the matter out--here is the doctor! He lifts his skull-cap, and how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity is the dignity that only goodness gives; and his goodness is a pure gift, existing independent of formula, a thing in itself, like Manet's painting. It was Degas who said, "A man whose profile no one ever saw," and the aphorism reminds us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary itself as our helpless English chicken is; it lived to get fat without acquiring any useless knowledge or desire of life; it became a capon in tender years, and then a pipe was introduced into its mouth and it was fed by machinery until it could hardly walk, until it could only stagger to its bed, and there it lay in happy digestion until the hour came for it to be crammed again. So did it grow up without knowledge or sensation or feeling of life, moving gradually, peacefully towards its predestined end--a delicious repast! What better end, what greater glory than to be a fat chicken? The carcasses of sheep that hang in butchers' shops are beginning to horrify the conscience of Europe. To cut a sheep's throat is an offensive act, but to clip out a bird's tongue with a long pair of scissors made for the purpose is genteel. It is true that it beats its wings for a few moments, but we must not allow ourselves to be disturbed by a mere flutter of feathers. Man is merciful, and saved it from life. It grew like an asparagus! And talking of asparagus, here are some from Argenteuil thick as umbrellas and so succulent! A word about the wine. French red wines in England always seem to taste like ink, but in France they taste of the sun. Melons are better in June--that one comes, no doubt, from Algeria. It is, however, the kind I like best, the rich, red melon that one eats only in France; a thing of the moment, unrememberable; but the chicken will never be forgotten; twenty years hence I shall be talking of a chicken, that in becoming a fat chicken acquired twenty years of immortality--which of us will acquire as many?
As we rise from table the doctor calls me into his studio: for he would give me an excellent cigar before he bids me good-bye, and having lighted it I follow my friend to the studio at the end of the garden, to that airy drawing-room which he has furnished in pale yellow and dark blue. On the walls are examples of the great modern masters--Manet and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet--is it not facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the haze. And look at the celebrated "Leçon de Danse" by Degas--that dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in the foreground, and their mothers are covering their shoulders with shawls--good mothers anxious for their daughters' welfare, for their advancement in life.
This picture betrays a mind curious, inquisitive and mordant; and that plaid shawl is as unexpected as an adjective of Flaubert's. A portrait by Manet hangs close by, large, permanent and mysterious as nature. Degas is more intellectual, but how little is intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! Yesterday I was in the Louvre, and when wearied with examination and debate--I had gone there on a special errand--I turned into the Salle Carrée for relaxation, and there wandered about, waiting to be attracted. Long ago the Mona Liza was my adventure, and I remember how Titian's "Entombment" enchanted me; another year I delighted in the smooth impartiality of a Terbourg interior; but this year Rembrandt's portrait of his wife held me at gaze. The face tells of her woman's life, her woman's weakness, and she seems conscious of the burden of her sex, and of the burden of her own special lot--she is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The emotion that this picture awakens is an almost physical emotion. It gets at you like music, like a sudden breath of perfume. When I approach, her eyes fade into brown shadow, but when I withdraw they begin telling her story. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder comes through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket, but the fur was no trouble to Rembrandt; he did not strive for realism. It is fur, that is sufficient. Grey pearls hang in her ears, there is a brooch upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the frame, and that hand reminds one, as the chin does, of the old story that God took a little clay and made man out of it. That chin and that hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge, as Nature moulds. The picture seems as if it had been breathed upon the canvas. Did not a great poet once say that God breathed into Adam? and here it is even so.
The other pictures seem dry, insignificant; the Mona Liza, celebrated in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared with this portrait; I have heard that tedious smile excused on the ground that she is smiling at the nonsense she hears talked about her; that hesitating smile which held my youth in tether has come to seem but a grimace; and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe or map seen from a little distance. The Mona Liza is a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle or ballade with double burden, a sestina, that is what it is like, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Liza, being literature in intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets. We must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of one incomparable prose passage. She has passed out of that mysterious misuse of oil paint, that arid glazing ofterre verte, and has come into her possession of eternal life, into the immortality of Pater's prose. Degas is wilting already; year after year he will wither, until one day some great prose writer will arise and transfer his spirit into its proper medium--literature. The Mona Liza and the "Leçon de Danse" are intellectual pictures; they were painted with the brains rather than with the temperaments; and what is any intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! Leonardo made roads; Degas makes witticisms. Yesterday I heard one that delighted me far more than any road would, for I have given up bicycling. Somebody was saying he did not like Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while. "If you were to show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it, he would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would say with a sigh 'That is my fault!'"
My reverie is broken by the piano; my friend is playing, and it is pleasant to listen to music in this airy studio. But there are women I must see, women whom I see every time I go to Paris, and too much time has been spent in the studio--I must go.
But where shall I go? My thoughts strike through the little streets of Passy, measuring the distance between Passy and the Arc de Triomphe. For a moment I think that I might sit under the trees and watch the people returning from the races. Were she not dead I might stop at her little house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is her portrait by Manet on the wall, the very toque she used to wear. How wonderful the touch is; the beads--how well they are rendered! And while thinking of the extraordinary handicraft I remember his studio, and the tall fair woman like a tea-rose coming into it: Mary Laurant! The daughter of a peasant, and the mistress of all the great men--perhaps I should have said of all the distinguished men. I used to call hertoute la lyre.
The last time I saw her we talked about Manet. She said that every year she took the first lilac to lay upon his grave. Is there one of her many lovers who brings flowers to her grave? What was so rememberable about her was her pleasure in life, and her desire to get all the pleasure, and her consciousness of her desire to enjoy every moment of her life. Evans, the great dentist, settled two thousand a year upon her, and how angry he was one night on meeting Manet on the staircase! In order to rid herself of her lover she invited him to dinner, intending to plead a sick headache after dinner.... She must go and lie down. But as soon as her guest was gone she took off thepeignoirwhich hid her ball dress and signed to Manet, who was waiting at the street corner, with her handkerchief. But as they went downstairs together whom should they meet but the dentistqui a oublié ses carnets. And he was so disappointed at meeting his beautiful but deceitful mistress that he didn't visit her again for three or four days. His anger mattered very little to Mary. Someone else settled two thousand a year more upon her; and having four thousand a year or thereabouts, she dedicated herself to the love and conversation of those who wrote books and music and painted pictures.
We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination, at least the imagination stimulates the senses, acting as a sort of adjuvant. The barmaid falls in love with No. 1 because he wipes a glass better than No. 2, and Mary fell in love with Coppée on account of his sonnet "Le Lys," and she grew indifferent when he wrote poems like "La Nourrice" or "Le petit épicier de Montrouge qui cassait le sucre avec mélancolie." And it was at this time when their love story was at wane that I became a competitor. But one day Madame Albazi came to Manet's studio, a splendid creature in a carriage drawn by Russian horses from the Steppes, so she said; but who can tell whether a horse comes from the Steppes or from the horse-dealers? Nor does it matter when the lady is extraordinarily attractive, when she inspires the thought--a mistress for Attila! That is not exactly how Manet saw her: but she looks like that in his pastel. In it she holds a tortoiseshell fan widespread across her bosom, and it was on one of the sticks of the fan that he signed his name. A great painter always knows where to sign his pictures, and he never signs twice in the same place. The merit of these Russians is that they never leave one in doubt. She could not sit that day, she was going to the Bois, and asked me and a young man who happened to be in Manet's studio at the time to go there with her, and we went there drawn by the Russian horses, the young man and I wondering all the while which was going to be the countess's lover; we played hard for her; but that day I was wiser than he; I let him talk and recite poetry and jingle out all the aphorisms that he had been collecting for years, feeling his witticisms were in vain, for she was dark as a raven and I was as gold as a sunflower. It was at the corner of the Rue Pontière that we got rid of him. Some days afterwards she sat to Manet. The pastel now hangs in the room of a friend of mine; I bought it for him.
The picture of a woman one knows is never so agreeable a companion as the picture of a woman one has never seen. One's memory and the painter's vision are in conflict, and I like to think better of the long delicate nose, and the sparkling eyes, and a mouth like red fruit. The pastel once belonged to me; it used to hang in my rooms; for with that grace of mind which never left him, Manet said one day, "I always promised you a picture," and searching among the pastels that lined the wall he turned to me saying, "Now I think that this comes to you by right." When I left Paris hurriedly, and left my things to be sold, the countess came to the sale and bought her picture, and then she sold it years afterwards to a picture-dealer, tempted by the price that Manet's pictures were fetching. Hearing that it was for sale, I bought it, as I have said, for a friend. And now I have told the whole story, forgetting nothing except that it was years afterwards, when I had written "Les Confessions d'un jeune Anglais" in theRevue Indépendante, that Mary Laurant asked me--oh! she was very enterprising; she sent the editor of theRevueto me; an appointment was made. She was wonderful in the garden. She said the moment I arrived, "Now, my dear ----, you must go," and we walked about, I listening to her aphorisms. Mary was beautiful, but she liked one to love her for her wit, to admire her wit; and when I asked her why she did not leave Evans, the great dentist, she said, "That would be a base thing to do. I content myself by deceiving him," and then--this confidence seemed to have a particular significance--"I am not a woman," she said, "that is made love to in a garden." Her garden was a nook at the fortifications, hidden among lilac bushes. She wished to show me her house, and we talked for a long time in her boudoir. But I knew she was Mallarmé's mistress at the time, so nothing came of thiscaprice littéraire.
My thoughts run upon women, and why not? On what would you have them run? on copper mines? Woman is the legitimate subject of all men's thoughts. We pretend to be interested in other things. In the smoking-rooms I have listened to men talking about hunting, and I have said to myself, "Your interest is a pretence: of what woman are you thinking?" We forget women for a little while when we are thinking about art, but only for a while. The legitimate occupation of man's mind is woman; and listening to my friend who is playing music--music I do not care to hear, Brahms--I fall to thinking which of the women I have known in years past would interest me most to visit.
In the spring weather the walk from Passy to the Champs Elysées would be pleasant and not too far; I like to see the swards and the poplars and the villas, the tall iron railings, and the flower vases hidden in bouquets of trees. These things are Paris; the mind of the country, that mind which comes out of a long past, and which may be defined as a sort of ancestral beauty and energy is manifested everywhere in Paris; and a more beautiful day for seeing the tall, white houses and the villas and the trees and the swards can hardly be imagined. I should be interested in all these things, but my real interest would be in one little hillside, a line of houses, eight or nine, close by the Arc de Triomphe, the most ordinary in the avenue. She liked the ordinary, and I have often wondered what was the link of association? Was it no more than her blonde hair drawn up from the neck, her fragrant skin, or her perverse subtle senses? It was something more, but you must not ask me to explain further. I like to remember the rustle of a flowered dress she wore as she moved, drifting like a perfume, passing from her frivolous bedroom into the drawing-room. A room without taste, stiff and middle-class, notwithstanding the crowns placed over the tall portraits. I see a picture of two children; but she is the fairer, and in her pale eyes and thinly-curved lips there is a mixture of yearning and restlessness. As the child was, so is the woman, and Georgette has lived to paper one entire wall of her bedroom with trophies won in the battlefields of ardently danced cotillons. The other child is of a stricter nature, and even in the picture her slightly darkened ringlets are less wanton than her sister's. Her eyes are more pensive, and any one could have predicted children for one and cotillon favours for the other.
We often sat on her bedroom balcony reading, talking, or watching the sky growing pale beyond Mount Valerian, the shadow drifting and defining and shaping the hill. In hours like the present, dreaming in a studio, we remember those who deceived us, those who made us suffer, and in these hours faces, fragments of faces, rise out of a past, the line of a bent neck, the whiteness of a hand, and the eyes. I remember her eyes; one day in an orchard, in the lush and luxuriance of June, her husband was walking in front with a friend, and I was pleading. "Well," she said, raising her eyes, "you can kiss me now." But her husband was in front, and he was a thick-set man, and there was a stream, and I foresaw a struggle--and an unpleasant one: confess and be done with it!--I didn't dare to kiss her, and I don't think she ever forgave me that lack of courage. All this is twenty years ago, and is it not silly to spend the afternoon thinking of such rubbish? But it is of such rubbish that our lives are made. Shall I go to her now and see her in her decadence? Grey hair has not begun to appear yet in the blonde, it will never turn grey, but she was shrivelling a little the last time I saw her. And next year she will be older. At her age a year counts for double. Others are more worthy of a visit. If I do not go to her this year, shall I go next?
In imagination I go past her house, thinking of a man she used to talk about, "the man she left her 'ome for"; that is how the London street girl would word it. He had been the centre of a disgraceful scandal in his old age, a sordid but characteristic end for the Don Juan of the nineteenth century. Perhaps she loved the big, bearded man whose photograph she had once shown me. He killed himself for not having enough money to live as he wished to live. That was her explanation. I think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come out of a world of perfume and lace.
In imagination I have descended the Champs Elysées, and have crossed the Place de la Concorde, and the Seine is flowing past just as it flowed when the workmen were building Notre Dame, just as it will flow a thousand years hence. A thousand years hence men will stand watching its current, thinking of little blonde women, and the shudder they can send through the flesh; they can, but not twenty years afterwards. The Reverend Donne has it that certain ghosts do not raise the hair but the flesh; mine do no more than to set me thinking that rivers were not created to bear ships to the sea, but to set our memories flowing. Full many a time have I crossed the Pont Neuf on my way to see another woman--an American! The time comes when desire wilts and dies, but the sexual interest never dies, and we take pleasure in thinking in middle life of those we enjoyed in youth. She, of whom I am thinking, lives far away in the Latin Quarter, in an ill-paven street. How it used to throw my carriage from side to side! I have been there so often that I know all the shops, and where the shops end, and there is a whitewashed wall opposite her house; the street bends there. Theconciergeis the same, a little thicker, a little heavier; she always used to have a baby in her arms, now there are no more babies; her children, I suppose, have grown up and have gone away. There used to be a darkness at the foot of the stairs, and I used to slip on those stairs, so great was my haste; the very tinkle of the bell I remember, and the trepidation with which I waited.
Her rooms looked as if they had never been sat in; even the studio was formal, and the richly-bound volumes on the tables looked as if they had never been opened. She only kept one servant, a little, redheaded girl, and seeing this girl back again after an absence of many years, I spoke to Lizzie of the old days. Lizzie told me her servant's story. She had gone away to be married, and after ten years of misfortune she had returned to her old mistress, this demure, discreet and sly New Englander, who concealed a fierce sensuality under a homely appearance. Lizzie must have had many lovers, but I knew nothing of her except her sensuality, for she had to let me into that secret.
She was a religious woman, a devout Protestant, and thinking of her my thoughts are carried across the sea, and I am in the National Gallery looking at Van Eyke's picture, studying the grave sensuality of the man's face--he speaks with uplifted hand like one in a pulpit, and the gesture and expression tell us as plainly as if we heard him that he is admonishing his wife (he is given to admonition), informing her that her condition--her new pregnancy--is an act of the Divine Will. She listens, but how curiously! with a sort of partial comprehension afloat upon her face, more of the guinea-pig than of the rabbit type. The twain are sharply differentiated, and one of the objects of the painter seems to have been to show us how far one human being may be removed from another. The husband is painfully clear to himself, the wife is happily unconscious of herself. Now everything in the picture suggests order; the man's face tells a mind the same from day to day, from year to year, the same passions, the same prayers; his apparel, the wide-brimmed hat, the cloak falling in long straight folds, the peaked shoon, are an habitual part of him. We see little of the room, but every one remembers the chandelier hanging from the ceiling reflected in the mirror opposite. These reflections have lasted for three hundred years; they are the same to-day as the day they were painted, and so is the man; he lives again, he is a type that Nature never wearies of reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, this woman waiting for me by an oak table, a little ashamed of her thoughts, but unable to overcome them. Once I heard her playing the piano, and it struck me as an affectation. As I let my thoughts run back things forgotten emerge; here comes one of her gowns! a dark-green gown, the very same olive green as the man's cloak. She wore her hair short like a boy's, and though it ran all over her head in little curls, it did not detract at all from the New England type, the woman in whose speech Biblical phraseology still lingers. Lizzie was a miraculous survival of the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in theMayflowerand settled in New England. Paris had not changed her. She wasle grave Puritan du tableau. The reader will notice that I writele grave Puritan, for of his submissive, childlike wife there was nothing in Lizzie except her sex. As her instinct was in conflict with her ideals, her manner was studied, and she affected a certain cheerfulness which she dared not allow to subside. She never relinquished her soul, never fell into confidence, so in a sense we always remained strangers, for it is when lovers tell their illusions and lonelinesses that they know each other, the fiercest spasm tells us little, and it is forgotten, whereas the moment when a woman sighs and breaks into a simple confidence is remembered years afterwards, and brings her before us though she be underground or a thousand miles away. These intimacies she had not, but there was something true and real in her, something which I cannot find words to express to-day; she was a clever woman, that was it, and that is why I pay her the homage of an annual visit. These courteous visits began twenty years ago; they are not always pleasant, yet I endure them. Our conversation is often laboured, there are awkward and painful pauses, and during these pauses we sit looking at each other, thinking no doubt of the changes that time has wrought. One of her chief charms was her figure--one of the prettiest I have ever seen--and she still retains a good deal of its grace. But she shows her age in her hands; they have thickened at the joints, and they were such beautiful hands. Last year she spoke of herself as an old woman, and the remark seemed to me disgraceful and useless, for no man cares to hear a woman whom he has loved call herself old; why call attention to one's age, especially when one does not look it? and last year she looked astonishingly young for fifty-five; that was her age, she said. She asked me my age; the question was unpleasant, and before I was aware of it I had told her a lie, and I hate those who force me to tell lies. The interview grew painful, and to bring it to a close she asked me if I would care to see her husband.
We found the old man alone in his studio, looking at an engraving under the light of the lamp, much more like a picture than any of his paintings. She asked him if he remembered me, and he got up muttering something, and to help him I mentioned that I had been one of his pupils. The dear old man said of course he remembered, and that he would like to show me his pictures, but Lizzie said--I suppose it was nervousness that made her say it, but it was a strangely tactless remark--"I don't think, dear, that Mr. ---- cares for your pictures." However celebrated one may be, it is always mortifying to hear that some one, however humble the person may be, does not care for one's art. But I saved the situation, and I think my remarks were judicious and witty. It is not always that one thinks of the right words at the right moment, but it would be hard to improve on the admonition that she did me a wrong, that, like every one who liked art, I had changed my opinion many times, but after many wanderings had come back to the truth, and in order to deceive the old man I spoke of Ingres. I had never failed in that love, and how could I love Ingres without loving him? The contrary was the truth, but the old man's answer was very sweet. Forgetful of his own high position, he answered, "We may both like Ingres, but it is not probable that we like the same Ingres." I said I did not know any Ingres I did not admire, and asked him which he admired, and we had a pleasant conversation about the Apotheosis of Homer, and the pictures in the Musée de Montauban. Then the old man said, "I must show Mr. ---- my pictures." No doubt he had been thinking of them all through the conversation about the Musée de Montauban. "I must show you my Virgin," and he explained that the face of the Infant Jesus was not yet finished.
It was wonderful to see this old man, who must have been nearly eighty, taking the same interest in his pictures as he took fifty years ago. Some stupid reader will think, perchance, that it mattered that I had once loved his wife. But how could such a thing matter? Think for a moment, dear reader, for all readers are dear, even the stupidest, and you will see that you are still entangled in conventions and prejudices. Perhaps, dear reader, you think she and I should have dropped on our knees and confessed. Had we done so, he would have thought us two rude people, and nothing more.
What will happen to her when he dies? Will she return to Boston? Shall I ever see her again? Last year I vowed that I would not, and I think it would please her as well if I stayed away.... And she is right, for so long as I am not by her she is with me. But in the same room, amid the familiar furniture, we are divided by the insuperable past, and to retain her I must send her away. The idea is an amusing one; I think I have read it somewhere, it seems to me like something I have read. Did I ever read of a man who sent his mistress away so that his possession might be more complete? Whether I did or didn't matters little, the idea is true to me to-day--in order to possess her I must never see her again. A pretty adventure it would be, nevertheless, to spend a week paying visits to those whom I loved about that time; and I can imagine a sort of Beau Brummel of the emotions going every year to Paris to spend a day with each of his mistresses.
There were others about that time. There was Madame ----. The name is in itself beautiful, characteristically French, and it takes me back to the middle centuries, to the middle of France. I always imagined that tall woman, who thought so quickly and spoke so sincerely, dealing out her soul rapidly, as one might cards, must have been born near Tours. She was so French that she must have come from the very heart of France; she was French as the wine of France; as Balzac, who also came from Tours; and her voice, and her thoughts, and her words transported one; by her side one was really in France; and, as her lover, one lived through every circumstance of a French love story. She lived in what is called in Paris an hotel; it had its ownconcierge, and it was nice to hear the man say, "Oui, monsieur, Madame la Marquise est chez elle," to walk across a courtyard and wait in a boudoir stretched with blue silk, to sit under a Louis XVI. rock crystal chandelier. She said one day, "I'm afraid you're thinking of me a great deal," and she leaned her hands on the back of the chair, making it easy for me to take them. She said her hands had not done any kitchen work for five hundred years, and at the time that seemed a very witty thing to say. The drawing-room opened onto a conservatory twenty feet high; it nearly filled the garden, and the marquise used to receive her visitors there. I do not remember who was the marquise's lover when the last fête was given, nor what play was acted; only that the ordinary guests lingered over their light refreshments, scenting the supper, and that to get rid of them we had to bid the marquise ostentatiously goodnight. Creeping round by the back of the house, we gained the bedrooms by the servants' staircase, and hid there until the ordinary guests in decency could delay no longer. As soon as the last one was gone the stage was removed, and the supper tables were laid out. Shall I ever forget the moment when the glass roof of the conservatory began to turn blue, and the shrilling of awakening sparrows! How haggard we all were, but we remained till eight in the morning. That fête was paid for with the last remnant of the poor marquise's fortune. Afterwards she was very poor, and Suzanne, her daughter, went on the stage and discovered a certain talent for acting which has been her fortune to this day. I will go to the Vaudeville to-night to see her; we might arrange to go together to see her mother's grave. To visit the grave, and to strew azaleas upon it, would be a pretty piece of sentimental mockery. But for my adventure there should be seven visits; Madame ---- would make a fourth; I hear that she is losing her sight, and lives in a chateau about fifty miles from Paris, a chateau built in the time of Louis XIII., with high-pitched roofs and many shutters, and formal gardens with balustrades and fish-ponds, yeset des charmilles--charmilles--what is that in English?--avenues of clipped limes. To walk in an avenue of clipped limes with a woman who is nearly blind, and talk to her of the past, would be indeed an adventure far "beyond the range of formal man's emotion."
Madame ---- interrupted our love story. She would be another--that would be five--and I shall think of two more during dinner. But now I must be moving on; the day has ended; Paris is defining itself upon a straw-coloured sky. I must go, the day is done; and hearing the last notes trickle out--somebody has been playing the prelude to "Tristan"--I say: "Another pretty day passed, a day of meditation on art and women--and what else is there to meditate about? To-morrow will happily be the same as to-day, and to-morrow I shall again meditate on art and women, and the day after I shall be occupied with what I once heard dear old M'Cormac, Bishop of Galway, describe in his sermon as 'the degrading passion of "loave."'"
The day dies in sultry languor. A warm night breathes upon the town, and in the exhaustion of light and hush of sound, life strikes sharply on the ear and brain.
It was early in the evening when I returned home, and, sitting in the window, I read till surprised by the dusk; and when my eyes could no longer follow the printed page, holding the book between finger and thumb, my face resting on the other hand, I looked out on the garden, allowing my heart to fill with dreams. The book that had interested me dealt with the complex technique of the art of the Low Countries--a book written by a painter. It has awakened in me memories of all kinds, heartrending struggles, youthful passion, bitter disappointments; it has called into mind a multitude of thoughts and things, and, wearied with admiring many pictures and arguing with myself, I am now glad to exchange my book for the gentle hallucinations of the twilight.
I see a line of leafage drawn across the Thames, but the line dips, revealing a slip of grey water with no gleam upon it. Warehouses and a factory chimney rise ghostly and grey, and so cold is that grey tint that it might be obtained with black and white; hardly is the warmth of umber needed. Behind the warehouses and the factory chimney the sky is murky and motionless, but higher up it is creamy white, and there is some cloud movement. Four lamps, two on either side of the factory chimney, look across the river; one constantly goes out--always the same lamp--and a moment after it springs into its place again. Across my window a beautiful branch waves like a feather fan. It is the only part of the picture worked out in detail. I watch its soft and almost imperceptible swaying, and am tempted to count the leaves. Below it, and a little beyond it, between it and the river, night gathers in the gardens; and there, amid serious greens, passes the black stain of a man's coat, and, in a line with the coat, in the beautifully swaying branch, a belated sparrow is hopping from twig to twig, awakening his mates in search for a satisfactory resting-place. In the sharp towers of Temple Gardens the pigeons have gone to sleep. I can see the cots under the conical caps of slate.
The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual memories, but the one before me rises for the first time--for fifteen years it has lain submerged, and now like a water weed or flower it rises--the Countess Ninon de Calvador's boudoir! Her boudoir or her drawing-room, be that as it may, the room into which I was ushered many years ago when I went to see her. I was then a young man, very thin, with sloping shoulders, and that pale gold hair that Manet used to like to paint. I had come with a great bouquet for Ninon, for it wasson jour de fête, and was surprised and somewhat disappointed to meet a large brunette with many creases in her neck, a loose and unstayed bosom; one could hardly imagine Ninon dressed otherwise than in apeignoir--a bluepeignoirseemed inevitable. She was sitting by a dark, broad-shouldered young man when I came in; they were sitting close together; he rose out of a corner and showed me an impressionistic picture of a railway station. He was one of the many young men who at that time thought the substitution of dots of pink and yellow for the grey and slate and square brushwork of Bastien Lepage was the certain way to paint well. I learned afterwards, during the course of the evening, that he was looked at askance, for even in Montmartre it was regarded as a dishonour to allow the lady with whom you lived to pay for your dinner. Villiers de L'Isle Adam, who had once been Ninon's lover, answered the reproaches levelled against him for having accepted too largely of her hospitality with, "Que de bruit pour quelques côtelettes!" and his transgressions were forgiven him for the sake of themotwhich seemed to summarise the moral endeavour and difficulties of the entire quarter. When Villiers was her lover Villiers was middle-aged, and Ninon was a young woman; but when I knew her she was interested in the young generation, yet she kept friends with all her old lovers, never denying them her board. How funny was the impressionist's indignation against Villiers! He charged him with having squandered a great part of Ninon's fortune, but Villiers's answer to the young man was, "He talks like theconciergein my story of 'Les Demoiselles de Bienfillatre.'"
Poor Villiers was not much to blame; it was part of Ninon's temperament to waste her money, and the canvases round the room testified that she spent a great deal on modern art. She certainly had been a rich woman; rumour credited her with spending fifty thousand francs a year, and in her case rumour said no more than the truth, for it would require that at least to live as she lived, keeping open house to all the literature, music, painting, and sculpture done in Montmartre. At first sight her hospitality seems unreasonable, but when one thinks one sees that it conforms to the rules of all hospitality. There must be a principle of selection, and were theratésshe entertained less amusing than the people one meets in Grosvenor Square or the Champs Elysées? Any friend could introduce another, that is common practice, but at Ninon's there was a restriction which I never met elsewhere--no friend could bring another unless the newcomer was araté--in other words, unless he had written music or verse, or painted or carved, in a way that did not appeal to the taste of the ordinary public; inability to reach the taste of the general public was the criterion that obtained there.
The windows of Ninon's boudoir opened upon the garden, and on my expressing surprise at its size and at the large trees that grew there, she gave me permission to admire and investigate; and I walked about the pond, interested in the numerous ducks, in the cats, in the companies of macaws and cockatoos that climbed down from their perches and strutted across the swards. I came upon a badger and her brood, and at my approach they disappeared into an enormous excavation, and behind the summer-house I happened upon a bear asleep and retreated hurriedly. But on going towards the house I heard a well-known voice. "That is Augusta Holmes singing her opera," I said; "she sings all the different parts--soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass." At this time we were all talking about her, and I stood by the window listening until suddenly a well-known smell interrupted her. It was Ninon's cat that had misconducted herself. A window was thrown open, but the ventilation did not prove sufficient. Augusta and her admirers had to leave the piano, and they came from the house glad to breathe the evening air. How dear to me are flowered gowns and evening skies and women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta's voice streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs attitudes grew more abandoned, and hands fell pensively. Among the half-seen faces I caught sight of a woman of exceeding fairness; her hair had only a faint tinge of gold in it; and Ninon remembered that she was a cousin of hers, one whom she had not seen for many years. How Clare had discovered her in the Rue la Moine she could not tell. It was whispered that she was the wife of a richcommerçantat Tours. This added to the mystery, and later in the evening the lady told me she had never been in artistic society before, and begged me to point out to her the celebrities present, and to tell her why they were celebrated.
"Who is he--that one slouching towards the pond, that one wearing grey trousers and a black jacket?--oh!"
My companion's exclamation was caused by a new sight of Verlaine; at that moment he had lifted off his hat (the evening was still warm), and the great bald skull, hanging like a cliff over the shaggy eyebrows, shaggy as furze bushes, frightened her. The poet continued his walk round the pond, and, turning suddenly towards us, he stopped to speak to me. I was but a pretext; he clearly wished to speak to my companion. But how strangely did he suit his conversation to her, yet how characteristic of his genius were the words I heard as I turned away, thinking to leave them together--"If I were in love with a young girl or with a young man?" My companion ran forward quickly and seized my arm. "You must not leave me with him," she said. On account of his genius Verlaine was a little slow to see things outside of himself--all that was within him was clear, all without him obscure; so we had some difficulty in getting rid of him, and as soon as he was out of hearing my companion inquired eagerly who he was, and I was astonished at the perception she showed. "Is he a priest? I mean, was he ever a priest?" "A sort of cross between a thieves' kitchen and a presbytery. He is the poet Verlaine. The singer of the sweetest verses in the French language--a sort of ambling song like a robin's. You have heard the robin singing on a coral hedge in autumn-tide; the robin confesses his little soul from the topmost twig; his song is but a tracery of his soul, and so is Verlaine's. His gift is a vision of his own soul, and he makes a tracery as you might of a drawing with a lead pencil, never troubling himself to inquire if what he traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,--there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead--Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day. Verlaine has not cut the throats of so many little boys as Gilles de Rais, but Gilles de Rais always declared himself to be a good Catholic. Verlaine abandons himself to the Church as a child to a fairy tale; he does trouble to argue whether the Conception of the Virgin was Immaculate; the mediaeval sculptors have represented her attired very prettily in cloaks with long folds, they have put graceful crowns upon her head, and Verlaine likes these things; they inspire him to write, he feels that belief in the Church is part of himself, and his poetical genius is to tell his own story; he is one of the great soul-tellers. From a literary point of view there is a good deal to be said in favour of faith when it is not joined with practice; acceptation of dogma shields one from controversy; it allows Verlaine to concentrate himself entirely upon things; it weans him away from ideas--the curse of modern literature--and makes him a sort of divine vagrant living his life in the tavern and in the hospital. It is only those who have freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get the real taste of life--the aroma as from a wine that has been many years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but he quickly recovers. 'After all, I have written a good many volumes.' 'And what would art be without life, without love?' He has a verse on that subject; I wish I could remember it for you. His verse is always so winsome, so delicate, slender as the birch tree, elegiac like it; a birch bending over a lake's edge reminds me of Verlaine. He is a lake poet, but the lake is in a suburb not far from a casino. What makes me speak about the lake is that for a long time I thought these verses,
Ton âme est un lac d'amourDont mes pensêes sont les cygnes.Vois comme ils font le tour....
were Verlaine's, but they are much less original; their beauty, for they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of his, really his own, poetry. His desires go sometimes as high as the crucifix; very often they are in the gutter, hardly poetry at all, having hardly any beauty except that of truth, and of course the beauty of a versification that haunts in his ear, for he hears a song in French verse that no French poet has ever heard before, and a song so fluent, ranging from the ecstasy of the nightingale to the robin's little homily.
Oui, c'était par un soir joyeux de cabaret,Un de ces soirs plutôt trop chauds où l'on diraitQue le gaz du plafond conspire à notre perteAvec le vin du zinc, saveur naïve et verte.On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et onEntendait des soupirs voisins d'accordéonQue ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.Quand la porte s'ouvrit de la salle de danseVomissant tout un flot dont toi, vers où j'étais,Et de ta voix fait que soudain je me tais,S'il te plaît de me donner un ordre péremptoire.Tu t'écrias 'Dieu, qu'il fait chaud! Patron, à boire!'
"She was from Picardy; and he tells of her horrible accent, and in elegy number five he continues the confession, telling how his well beloved used to get drunk.
"Tu fis le saut de ... Seine et, depuis morte-vive,Tu gardes le vertige et le goût du néant."
"But how can a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape, cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with hair, I said:
"Verlaine has an extraordinary power of expression, and to be ashamed of nothing; but to be ashamed is his genius, just as it was Manet's. It is to his shamelessness that we owe his most beautiful poems, all written in garrets, in taverns, in hospitals--yes, and in prison."
"In prison! But he didn't steal, did he?" and thecommerçant'swife looked at me with a frightened air, and I think her hand went towards her pocket.
"No, no; a mere love story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling in love with drabs."
Dans ces femmes d'ailleurs je n'ai pas trouvé l'angeQu'il eût fallu pour remplacer ce diable, toi!L'une, fille du Nord, native d'un Crotoy,Etait rousse, mal grasse et de prestance molle;Elle ne m'adressa guère qu'une paroleEt c'était d'un petit cadeau qu'il s'agissait,En revanche, dans son accent d'ail et de poivre,Une troisième, recemment chanteuse au Havre,Affectait de dandinement des matelotsEt m'... enguelait comme un gabier tancant les flots,Mais portrait beau vraiment, sacrédié, quel dommageLa quatrième était sage comme une image,Châtain clair, peu de gorge et priait Dieu parfois:Le diantre soit de ses sacrés signes de croix!Les seize autres, autant du moins que ma mémoireSurnage en ce vortex, contaient toutes l'histoireConnue, un amant chic, puis des vieux, puis "l'îlot"Tantôt bien, tantôt moins, le clair café falotLes terasses l'été, l'hiver les brasseriesEt par degrés l'humble trottoir en théoriesEn attendant les bons messieurs compatissantsCapables d'un louis et pas trop repoussantsQutorum ego parva pars erim, me disais-je.Mais toutes, comme la première du cortège,Dès avant la bougie éteinte et le rideauTiré, n'oubliaient pas le "mon petit cadeau."
"In the verses I have just quoted, you remember, he says that the fourth was chaste as an image, her hair was pale brown, she had scarcely any bosom, and prayed to God sometimes. He always hated piety when it interfered with his pleasure, and in the next verse he says, 'The devil take those sacred signs of the Cross!'"
"But do you know any of these women?"
"Oh, yes; we all know the terrible Sara. She beats him."
Thecommerçante'swife asked if she were here.
"He wanted to bring her here, in fact he did bring her once, only she was so drunk that she could not get beyond the threshold, and Ninon's lover, the painter you saw painting the steam engines, was charged to explain to the poet that Sara's intemperance rendered her impossible in respectable society. 'I know Sara has her faults,' he murmured in reply to all argument, and it was impossible to make him see that others did not see Sara with his eyes. 'I know she has her faults,' he repeated, 'and so have others. We all have our faults.' And it was a long time before he could be induced to come back: hunger has brought him."
"And who is that hollow-chested man? How pathetic he looks with his goat-like beard."
"That is the celebrated Cabaner. He will tell you, if you speak to him, that his father was a man like Napoleon, only more so. He is the author of many aphorisms; 'that three military bands would be necessary to give the impression of silence in music' is one. He comes every night to the Nouvelle Athènes, and is a sort of rallying-point; he will tell you that his ballad of 'The Salt Herring' is written in a way that perhaps Wagner would not, but which Liszt certainly would understand."
"Is his music ever played? Does it sell? How does he live? Not by his music, I suppose?"
"Yes, by his music, by playing waltzes and polkas in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet. His earnings are five francs a day, and for thirty-five francs a month he has a room where many of the disinherited ones of art, many of those you see here, sleep. His room is furnished--ah, you should see it! If Cabaner wants a chest of drawers he buys a fountain, and he broke off the head of the Vénus de Milo, saying that now she no longer reminded him of the people he met in the streets; he could henceforth admire her without being troubled by any sordid recollection. I could talk to you for hours about his unselfishness, his love of art, his strange music, and his stranger poems, for his music accompanies his own verses."
"Is he too clever for the public, or not clever enough?"
"Now you're asking me the question we've been asking ourselves for the last ten years.... The man fumbling at his shirt collar over yonder is the celebrated Villiers de L'Isle Adam."
And I remember how it pleased me to tell this simple-minded woman all I knew about Villiers.
"He has no talent whatever, only genius, and that is why he is a raté," I said.
But the woman was not so simple as I had imagined, and one or two questions she put to me led me to tell her that Villiers's genius only appeared in streaks, like gold in quartz.
"The comparison is an old one, but there is no better one to explain Villiers, for when he is not inspired his writing is very like quartz."
"His great name----"
"His name is part of his genius. He chose it, and it has influenced his writings. Have I not heard him say, 'Car je porte en moi les richesses stériles d'un grand nombre de rois oubliés.'"
"But is he a legitimate descendant?"
"Legitimate in the sense that he desired the name more than any of those who ever bore it legitimately."
At that moment Villiers passed by me, and I introduced him to her, and very soon he began to tell us that hisEvehad just been published, and the success of it was great.
"On m'a dit hier de passer à la caisse ... l'edition était épuisée, vous voyez--il paraît, la fortune est venue ... même à moi."
But Villiers was often tiresomely talkative about trifles, and as soon as I got the chance I asked him if he were going to tell us one of his stories, reminding him of one I had heard he had been telling lately in thebrasseriesabout a man in quest of a quiet village where he could get rest, a tired composer, something of that kind. Had he written it? No, he had not written it yet, but now that he knew I liked it he would get up earlier to-morrow. Some one took him away from us, and I had to tell my companion the story.
"Better," I said, "he should never write it, for half of it exists in his voice, and in his gestures, and every year he gets less and less of himself onto the paper. One has to hear him tell his stories in the café--how well he tells them! You must hear him tell how a man, recovering from a long illness, is advised by his doctor to seek rest in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all to be robbers and assassins.
"He would escape but he dare not, for he is being followed, so turning on his pursuers he asks them if they can direct him to a lodging. The point of Villiers's story is how a suspicion begins in the man's mind, how it grows like a cancer, and very soon the villagers are convinced he is an anarchist, and that his trunks are full of material for the manufacture of bombs. And this is why they dare not touch them. So they follow him to the farmhouse whither they have directed him, and tell their fears to the farmer and his wife. Villiers can improvise the consultations in the kitchen; at midnight in the café, but when morning comes he cannot write, his brain is empty. You must come some night to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear him; leaning across the table he will tell the terror of the hinds and farmer, how they are sure the house is going to be blown up. The sound of their feet on the staircase inspires terror in the wretched convalescent. He sits up in bed, listening, great drops of sweat collected on his forehead. He dare not get out of bed, but he must; and Villiers can suggest the sound of feet on the creaking stairs--yes, and the madness of the man piling furniture against the door, and the agony of those outside hearing the noise within. When they break into the room they find a dead man; for terror has killed him. You must come to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear Villiers tell his story. I'll meet you there to-morrow night.... Will you dine with me? The dinner there is not really too bad; perhaps you'll be able to bear with it."
Thecommerçant'swife hesitated. She promised to come, and she came; but she did not prove an interesting mistress; why, I cannot remember, and I am glad to put her out of my mind, for I want to think of the strange poet whom we heard reciting verses, under the aspen, in which one of the apes had taken refuge. Through the dimness of the years I can see his fair hair floating about his shoulders, his blue eyes and his thin nose. Didn't somebody once describe him as a sort of sensual Christ? He, too, was after thecommerçant'swife. And didn't he select her as the subject of his licentious verses--reassure yourself, reader, licentious merely from the point of view of prosody.
"Ta nuque est de santal sur les vifs frissons d'or.Mais c'est une autre, que j'adore."
Thecommerçant'swife, forgetful of me, charmed by the poet, by the excitement of hearing herself made a subject of a poem, drew nearer. Strange, is it not, that I should remember a few words here and there?
"Il m'aime, il m'aime pas, et selon l'antique riteElle effleurait la Marguerite."
The women still sit, circlewise, as if enchanted, the night inspires him, and he improvises trifle after trifle. One remembers fragments. Some time afterwards Cabaner was singing the song of "The Salt Herring."
"He came along holding in his hands dirty, dirty, dirty,A big nail pointed, pointed, pointed,And a hammer heavy, heavy, heavy.He placed the ladder high, high, high,Against the wall white, white, white.He went up the ladder high, high, high,Placed the nail pointed, pointed, pointedAgainst the wall--toc! toc! toc!He tied to the nail a string long, long, long,And at the end of it a salt herring, dry, dry, dry,And letting fall the hammer heavy, heavy, heavy,He got down from the ladder high, high, high,And went away, away, away.Since then at the end of the string long, long, long,A salt herring dry, dry, dry,Has been swinging slowly, slowly, slowly.Now I have composed this story simple, simple, simple,To make all serious men mad, mad, mad,And to amuse children, little, little, little."
This was the libretto on which Cabaner wrote music "that Wagner would not understand, but which Liszt certainly would." Dear, dear Cabaner, how well I can see thee with thy goat-like beard, and the ape in the tree interrupting thee; he was not like Liszt, he chattered all night. Poor ape, he broke his chain earlier in the evening, and it was found impossible to persuade him to come down. The brute seemed somehow determined that we should not hear Cabaner. Soon after the cocks began answering each other, though it was but midnight; and so loud was their shrilling that I awoke, surprised to find myself sitting at my window in King's Bench Walk. A moment ago I was in Madame Ninon de Calvador's garden, and every whit as much as I am now in King's Bench Walk. Madame Ninon de Calvador--what has become of her?
Is the rest of her story unknown? As I sit looking into the darkness, a memory suddenly springs upon me. Villiers, who came in when dinner was half over, brought a young man with him. Fumbling at his shirt collar, apologising for being late, assuring us that he had dined, he introduced his friend to the company as a young man of genius, of extraordinary genius. Don't I remember Villiers's nervous, hysterical voice! Don't I remember the journalist's voice when he asked Ninon's lover if he sold his pictures, creating at once a bad impression? By some accident a plate was given to him, out of which one of the cats had been fed. The plate might have been given to any one else: Villiers would not have minded, and as for Cabaner, he never knew what he was eating; but it was given to the journalist. Now I remember the young man misconducted himself badly; he struck the table with his fist, and said, "Et bien, je casse tout." Yes, it was he who wrote the article entitled "Ninon's Table d'hôte" in theGil Blas, and from it she learned for the first time how the world viewed her hospitality, how misinterpreted were her efforts to benefit the arts and the artists. Somebody told me this story: who I cannot tell; it is all so long ago. But it seems to me that I remember hearing that it was this article that killed her.
The passing of things is always a moving subject for meditation, and it is strange how accident will bring back a scene, explicit in every detail--a tree taking shape upon the dawning sky, the hairy ugliness of the ape in its branches, and along the grey grass a waddling squad of the ducks betaking themselves to the pond, a poet talking to acommerçant'swife, Madame de Calvador leaning on a lover's arm.
Had I a palette I could match the blue of thepeignoirwith the faint grey sky. I could make a picture out of that dusky suburb. Had I a pen I could write verses about these people of old time, but the picture would be a shrivelled thing compared with the dream, and the verses would limp. The moment I sought a pen the pleasure of the meditation, which is still with me, which still endures, would vanish. Better to sit by my window and enjoy what remains of the mood and the memory. The mood has nearly passed, the desire of action is approaching.... I would give much for another memory, but memory may not be beckoned, and my mind is dark now, dark as that garden; the swaying, fan-like bough by my window is nearly one mass of green; the last sparrow has fallen asleep. I hear nothing.... I hear a horse trotting in the Strand.
I had come a thousand miles--rather more, nearly fifteen hundred--in the hope of picking up the thread of a love story that had got entangled some years before and had been broken off abruptly. A strange misadventure our love story had been; for Doris had given a great deal of herself while denying me much, so much that at last, in despair, I fled from a one-sided love affair; too one-sided to be borne any longer, at least by me. And it was difficult to fly from her pretty, inveigling face, delightful and winsome as the faces one finds on the panels of the early German masters. One may look for her face and find it on an oak panel in the Frankfort Gallery, painted in pale tints, the cheeks faintly touched with carmine. In the background of these pictures there are all sorts of curious things; very often a gold bower with roses clambering up everywhere. Who was that master who painted cunning virgins in rose bowers? The master of Cologne, was it not? I have forgotten. No matter. Doris's hair was darker than the hair of those virgins, a rich gold hair, a mane of hair growing as luxuriously as the meadows in June. And the golden note was continued everywhere, in the eyebrows, in the pupils of the eyes, in the freckles along her little nose so firmly and beautifully modelled about the nostrils; never was there a more lovely or affectionate mouth, weak and beautiful as a flower; and the long hands were curved like lilies.
There is her portrait, dear reader, prettily and truthfully and faithfully painted by me, the portrait of a girl I left one afternoon in London more than seventeen years ago, and whom I had lost sight of, I feared for ever. Thought of her? Yes, I thought of her occasionally. Time went by, and I wondered if she were married. What her husband was like, and why I never wrote. It were surely unkind not to write.... Reader, you know those little regrets. Perhaps life would be all on the flat without regret. Regret is like a mountaintop from which we survey our dead life, a mountaintop on which we pause and ponder, and very often looking into the twilight we ask ourselves whether it would be well to send a letter or some token. Now we had agreed upon one which should be used in case of an estrangement--a few bars of Schumann's melody, "The Nut Bush," should be sent, and the one who received it should at once hurry to the side of the other and all difference should be healed. But this token was never sent by me, perhaps because I did not know how to scribble the musical phrase: pride perhaps kept her from sending it; in any case five years are a long while, and she seemed to have died out of my life altogether; but one day the sight of a woman who had known her, brought her before my eyes, and I asked if Doris married. The woman could not tell me; she had not seen her for many years; they, too, were estranged, and I went home saying to myself: "Doris must be married. What sort of a husband has she chosen? Is she happy? Has she a baby? Oh, shameful thought!"
Do you remember, dear reader, how Balzac, when he had come to the last page of "Massimilla Doni," declares that he dare not tell you the end of this adventure. One word, he says, will suffice for the worshippers of the ideal: "Massimilla Doni was expecting." Then in a passage that is pleasanter to think about than to read--for Balzac when he spoke about art was something of a sciolist, and I am not sure that the passage is altogether grammatical--he tells how the ideas of all the great artists, painters, and sculptors--the ideas they have wrought on panels and in stone--escaped from their niches and their frames--all these disembodied maidens gathered round Massimilla's bed and wept. It would be as disgraceful for Doris to be "expecting" as it was for Massimilla Doni, and I like to think of all the peris, the nymphs, the sylphs, the fairies of ancient legend, all her kinsfolk gathering about her bed, deploring her condition, regarding her as lost to them--were such a thing to happen I should certainly kneel there in spirit with them. And feeling just as Balzac did about Massimilla Doni, that it was a sacrilege that Doris should be "expecting" or even married, I wrote, omitting, however, to tell her why I had suddenly resolved to break silence; I sent her a little note, only a few words, that I was sorry not to have heard of her for so long a time; but though we had been estranged she had not been forgotten; a little commonplace note, relieved perhaps by a touch of wistfulness, of regret. And this note was sent by a messenger duly instructed to ask for an answer. The news the messenger brought back was somewhat disappointing. The lady was away, but the letter would be forwarded to her. "She is not married," I thought; "were she married her name would be sent to me.... Perhaps not." Other thoughts came into my mind, and I did not think of her again for the next two days, not till a long telegram was put into my hand. Doris! It had come from her. It had come more than a thousand miles, "regardless of expense." I said, "This telegram must have cost her ten or twelve shillings at the least." She was delighted to hear from me; she had been ill, but was better now, and the telegram concluded with the usual "Am writing." The letter that arrived, two days afterwards, was like herself, full of impulse and affection; but it contained one phrase which put black misgiving into my heart. In her description of her illness and her health, which was returning, and how she had come to be staying in this far-away Southern town, she alluded to its dulness, saying that if I came there virtue must be its own reward. "Stupid of her to speak to me of virtue," I muttered, "for she must know well enough that it was her partial virtue that had separated us and caused this long estrangement." And I sat pondering, trying to discover if she applied the phrase to herself or to the place where she was staying. How could it apply to the place? All places would be a paradise if----
At the close of a long December evening I wrote a letter, the answer to which would decide whether I should go to her, whether I should undertake the long journey. "The journey back will be detestable," I muttered, and taking up the pen again I wrote: "Your letter contains a phrase which fills me with dismay: you say, 'Virtue must be its own reward,' and this would seem that you are determined to be more aggressively Platonic than ever. Doris, this is ill news indeed; you would not have me consider it good news, would you?"
Other letters followed, but I doubt if I knew more of Doris's intentions when I got into the train than I did when I sat pondering by my fireside, trying to discover her meaning when she wrote that vile phrase, "Virtue must be its own reward." But somehow I seemed to have come to a decision, and that was the main thing. We act obeying a law deep down in our being, a law which in normal circumstances we are not aware of. I asked myself as I drove to the station, if it were possible that I was going to undertake a journey of more than a thousand miles in quest--of what? Doris's pretty face! It might be pretty no longer; yet she could not have changed much. She had said she was sure that in ten minutes we should be talking just as in old times. Even so, none but madmen travel a thousand miles in search of a pretty face. And it was the madman that is in us all that was propelling me, or was it the primitive man who crouches in some jungle of our being? Of one thing I was sure, that I was no longer a conventional citizen of the nineteenth century; I had gone back two or three thousand years, for all characteristic traits, everything whereby I knew myself, had disappeared! Yet I seemed to have met myself somewhere, in some book or poem or opera.... I could not remember at first, but after some time I began to perceive a shadowy similarity between myself and--dare I mention the names?--the heroes of ancient legend--Menelaus or Jason--which? Both had gone a thousand miles on Beauty's quest. The colour of Helen's hair isn't mentioned in either the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey." Jason's quest was a golden fleece, and so was mine. And it was the primitive hero that I had discovered in myself that helped me to face the idea of the journey, for there is nothing that wearies me so much as a long journey in the train.
When I was twenty I started with the intention of long travel, but the train journey from Calais to Paris wearied me so much that I had rested in Paris for eight years, to return home then on account of some financial embarrassments. During those eight years I thought often of Italy and the south of France, but the train journey of sixteen or seventeen or eighteen hours to the Italian frontier always seemed so much like what purgatory must be, that the heaven of Italy on the other side never tempted me sufficiently to undertake it. A companion would be of no use; one cannot talk for fifteen or sixteen hours, and while debating with myself whether I should go to Plessy, I often glanced down the long perspective of hours. Everything, pleasure and pain alike, are greater in imagination than in reality--there is always a reaction, and having anticipated more than mortal weariness, I was surprised to find that the first two hours in the train passed very pleasantly. It seemed that I had only been in the train quite a little while when it stopped, yet Laroche is more than an hour from Paris, quite a countryside station, and it seems strange that theCôte d'Azurshould stop there. That was the grand name of the train that I was travelling by. Think of any English company running a train and calling it "The Azure Shore"! Think of going to Euston or to Charing Cross, saying you are going by "The Azure Shore"! So long as the name of this train endures, it is impossible to doubt that the French mind is more picturesque than the English, and one no longer wonders why the French school of painting, etc.
A fruit seller was crying his wares along the platform, and just before we started from Laroche breakfast was preparing on board the train; I thought a basket of French grapes--the grapes that grow in the open air, not the leathery hot-house grapes filled with lumps of glue that we eat in England--would pass the time. I got out and bought a basket from him. On journeys like these one has to resort to many various little expedients. Alas! The grapes were decaying; only the bunch on the top was eatable; nor was that one worth eating, and I began to think that the railway company's attention should be directed to the fraud, for in my case a deliberate fraud had been effected. The directors of the railway would probably think that passengers should exercise some discrimination; it were surely easy for the passenger to examine the quality of a basket of grapes before purchasing--that would be the company's answer to my letter. The question of a letter to the newspaper did not arise, for French papers are not like ours--they do not print all the letters that are sent to them. The French public has no means of ventilating its grievances; a misfortune no doubt, but not such a misfortune as it seems, when one reflects on how little good a letter addressed to the public press does in the way of remedying abuses.