One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Purée, and many another poet for all time and celebrity for the day, in thecaféswhere they waited to be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when thecaféthey went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with so much else London was labellingfin-de-siècle. To have met them, to be able to speak ofthem in intimate terms, to be authorities on the special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what, their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on, and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight with theReine de Golcondeon his arm, walking down theBoul' Mich'at the head of a band of poets.
Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and the subject as announced was "ContemporaryFrench Poetry," and through all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below, a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing, Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidnessimpossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically could write the verse I had loved ever since hisRomances sans Parolesfirst fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in Tchekhof's play—so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and his photograph in shop windows—whose crime was to condescend to fish and to be pleased when he caught something.
The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as characteristic—asfin-de-siècle, the Englishman under the impression that he knew his Paris would have classified it—nor did we want to be let off, though it lured us indoors.
The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throwup hands of horror and say what an immoral place it was.
Once or twice we tried the out-doorCafé-Chantant, and we heard Paulus in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.
Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to theFolies-Bergèrewhich cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up and down theBoulevardsof theRive Gauchein pursuit of its poets, sent us to theCasino de Parisand theMoulin Rouge. But a first visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not have missed theCasinoif only for the imperishable memory of the most solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor theMoulinRougefor another memory as imperishable of the most socially pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge calculated toépater le bourgeoisat home, referring by name with easy familiarity to the dancers in theQuadrille Naturaliste, as celebrated in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly thechahutand thegrand écartandle port d'armesand every evolution in that unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I found inThe Gypsy—the direct but belated offspring ofThe Savoy—a poem toNini-patte-en-l'air. And does anybody now know or care who Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or whoLa Goulueand the rest? Would anybody now go a step to see theQuadrillewere any graceless acrobats left to dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fashions that passed with the Nineties, and theMoulin Rougeitself could burn down to the ground a few months agoand hardly a voice be heard in lament or reminiscence. Upon such rapidly shifting sands did the young would-be revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.
The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we looked for it—and found it—was in the littlecaféorcabaret—thecabaret artistiqueas it was then known in Paris—with a flair for the genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris with: theatre and performance and advertisement impossible in any other town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finestblossoms. We knew it was a pleasure to be snatched this year, for next who could say where it might be, and we set out to snatch it with the same diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to exhaust it.
Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearestcafé, we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses, now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt the need—as we never did—of a reason for our eagerness, we might have had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't acabaretof them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance known as aRevue, which is all the vogue just now in the London music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hallRevueand the oldCabaretperformance is that art and literature could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.
If one night the end of the journey was theTréteau de Tabarin—the hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and recited and sang thechansons rossesthat "all Paris" flocked there to hear—it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in the centre of the sculpture court at the NewSalon, and the summing up was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter because the wit was so fine.
A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for theChat Noir. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in thecaféand the drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at theSalonand buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and bookshops on the way back.
To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house bydecorating its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!
But Salis,—the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of theChat Noir, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded hiscaféby letting poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny—some of them, Maurice Donnay for one—as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least two—Charpentier and Debussy—were afterwards to reach; and by allowing the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in black-and-white, theOmbres Chinoisesthat were the crowning glory of the night's performance. From days in theSalons, from the illustrated papers and magazines and books wefilled our bags with to take back to London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and Caran d'Ache and Rivière and Louis Morin until we had seen alsoThe Prodigal Son,The March of the Stars, and all the stories they told in those dramatic silhouettes—those marvellous little black figures, cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as to give the swing and the movement and the passing of great armies until one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call, or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of theChat Noirwas gone, and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his artist, young,—that is where he scored.
It is possible that I was the more impressedby the beauty of the show because it was not of that side of theChat NoirI had heard most. Its British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send her young hero from the English provinces to theChat Noirin the course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to be for the sakeof the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at theChat Noir, refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade—"I never liked smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but firmly, showing her the door.
A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the end of our journey was Bruant'sCabaret du Mirliton, in the remoteBoulevard Rochechouart. I daresay there was not one of us who did not own a copy of Bruant'sDans la Rue, but we had bought it less because of his verses—some of us had not read a line of them—than because of Steinlen's illustrations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that hisMademoiselle Missappeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much to collect incidents for that gay little tale.
Poster by Toulouse-Lautrec ARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITONPoster by Toulouse-LautrecARISTIDE BRUANT OF THE CABARET DU MIRLITON
Bruant ran theMirlitonon the principle that the less easily pleasure is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at the ordinarycafé, no paying for admission as upstairs at theChat Noir. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in standing outside his door while he examined them through a little grille, an amusement which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure he did not like our looks and would send us away, andthat the reason was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at theChat Noir, but, at theMirliton, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature, half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the passing pose of a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and hisCabaretwas to recognize him at a glance.
To the noise of a strident chorus in choiceargot, which I was told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into hiscafé. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brassesand tapestries on the walls, and if the hugeMirlitonhanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at theCarnavaletby the side of the sign of theChat Noir. When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of theQuartier Latin, apetit piou-piouor so, two or three stray workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt to classify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.
It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome face as he strode up and down hiscafé-museum, for the striding, it seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician—her name was not Mademoiselle Miss—and when she discovered what was the matter, and why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to her, he sang us hisSt. LazareandLa Soularde, all the while striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the courteous dignity, of a prince, led our MademoiselleMiss back to us, ordered bocks for her, for me—the only other woman at our table—and for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our glasses in the fashion approved of at theMirliton.
So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the most of it—I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually, as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left hiscafé, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the sense to know that, as we had come to theMirlitonof our own free will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to show our press ticket at theSalonturnstile, or to give up our umbrellas at the door of theLouvre, or to question the regulations of any other place inParis we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve matters?
It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in. We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however, could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony. Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed hat—the only time thatnight—and to bow us out into the darkness of theBoulevard Rochechouart.
Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at theMirlitonby eating supper at theRat Mort. It was an experience I cared less to repeat even than the visits to theCasino de Parisand theMoulin Rouge. As light and satisfying a supper could have been eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art entered into the entertainment as at theChat Noirand Bruant's. Vice was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at theNouvelle Athènesscandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point of view.
Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside theRat Mort, in the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it crawled down one of the steep streets fromMontmartrethere was a creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round, made a pitiful tale ofle pauvr' cocherand his hungry wife and children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to thecocherwith an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. Thecocher, the least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft, clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and disappeared into the night. Asergent-de-ville, who had been looking on, shrugged his shoulders; inhis opinion,cet animal làwas in luck and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such generosity.Allez!Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present—Voilà tout!
And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent streets betweenMontmartreand our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end.
In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted, resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights ofgaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.
Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bacrez-de-chausséeopening upon the spacious garden where, in the twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days—nights in the dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre, many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other, always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them, witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;—nights in the blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel, and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it—nights that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman,who shared in them lives to remember;—Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Théodore Duret who had been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris, as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them is told.
And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who studied and worked and lived in Paris—nights that have bequeathed to me the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases, and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a friendly war of words—nights with men irrevocably in the movement, whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the NewSalonand had probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and writing voluminous notesin our note-books—nights not the least stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids me to tell the tale.
And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St. Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed swallowed up in the International Society's business—not the International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation—J. included in it—to collect all that was most individual and distinguished in theSalonsfor its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working in Paris—a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.
And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into American nights—nights with old friends, established there or passing through and run across by chance—nights of joy in being with my own people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone—the zone where Silence is Golden.
I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its galleries, noSalonhas opened to take me there in the springtime. With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the old beauty and fragrance along theChamps-Elyséesoutside theGrand Palais, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut fast theSalondoor means the endof the old order of things in the Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over it by night at acafétable, or in the peaceful twilight of the suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with the past I had in theSalon, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say at the moment of my writing, when the echo of shells and bullets is thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new occupation.