COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS Works by Arthur Symons Cities. Illustrated Net $2.50 Cities of Italy Net 2.00 Introduction to the Study of Browning. (New Edition) Net 1.50 Plays, Acting and Music Net 2.00 The Romantic Movement in English Literature Net 2.50 Spiritual Adventures Net 2.50 Studies in Prose and Verse Net 2.50 Studies in Seven Arts. Illus Net 2.50 The Symbolist Movement in Liter- ature Net 2.00 The Life of William Blake Net 3.00 Figures of Several Centuries Net 3.00 Colour Studies in Paris. Illus .... Net 2.50 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY NEW YORK PORTRAIT OF MALLARME BY WHISTLER COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS BY ARTHUR SYMONS AUTHOR OP " Pkys, Acting and Music," " Studies in Seven Arts," " Th'e Symbolist Movement in Literature," etc. f ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS SIGNATURES AND RARE CARTOONS NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 68 1 FIFTH AVENUE COPYRIGHT, 1918 By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS PACK Paris 3 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES . . 5 MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER . . 25 PARIS AND IDEAS 43 THE POET OF THE BATS 55 SONGS OF THE STREETS 67 A BOOK OF FRENCH VERSES 77 At the Ambassadors 89 YVETTE GUILBERT 9 1 La Melinite: Moulin-Rouge 105 DANCERS AND DANCING 107 LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS BEGGAR . .121 VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS 131 A TRAGIC COMEDY 147 PTRUS BOREL 157 v vi CONTENTS PAGE NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE: The Absinthe-Drinker 189 Ax THE CAFE FRANCOIS PREMIER . . .191 THE MAN 197 BONHEUR . 205 EPIGRAMMES 215 CONFESSIONS 219 DEDICACES 223 INVECTIVES . . . . . . . .231 A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS .... 239 ODILON REDON 251 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Portrait of Mallarme by Wh : stler . Frontispiece Quartier Latin. 10 A. M 26 Quartier Latin. 5 P. M 30 Quartier Latin. 2 A. M 36 Le Rat Mort 38 Invitation Card, Le Rat Mort .... 39 Cartoon of Jean Moreas 44 Facsimile of Letter from Montesquiou . . 56 Aristide Bruant 68 Newspaper, "Le Mirliton" 70 Cartoon of Charles Cros 78 Yvette Guilbert 96 Poster. Folies-Bergere ...... 108 Victor Hugo as a Young Man .... 132 Facsimile of Letter from Victor_Hugo . .136 Petrus Borel !62 Facsimile of Verlaine's Signature .... 198 Cartoon of Arthur Rimbaud .... 202 Paul Verlaine 206 Facsimile of Letter from Mallarm6 . . . 225 Facsimile of Note from Redon . . . .251 Odilon Redon 254 vii COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS PARIS MY Paris is a land where twilight days Merge into violent nights of black and gold ; Where, it may be, the flower of dawn is cold : Ah, but the gold nights, and the scented ways ! Eyelids of women, little curls of hair, A little nose curved softly, like a shell, A red mouth like a wound, a mocking veil : Phantoms, before the dawn, how phantom-fair ! And every woman with beseeching eyes, Or with enticing eyes, or amorous, Offers herself, a rose, and craves of us A rose's place among our memories. 1894 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES THE tram rolls heavily through the sun- shine, on the way to Vincennes. The sun beats on one's head like the glow of a furnace ; we are in the second week of May, and the hour is between one and two in the afternoon. From the Place Voltaire, all along the dingy boulevard, there are signs of the fair; first, little stalls, with the refuse of ironmonger and pastry-cook, then little booths, then a few roundabouts, the wooden horses standing motionless. At the Place de la Nation we have reached the fair itself. Already the roundabouts swarm in gor- geous inactivity : shooting-galleries with lofty 5 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS names Tir Metropolitan, Tir de Lutece lead on to the establishments of cochonnerie, the gingerbread pigs, which have given its name to the Foire au pain d'epice. From between the two pillars, each with its airy statue, we can look right on, through lanes of stalls and alleys of dusty trees to the railway bridge which crosses the other end of the Cours de Vincennes, just before it subsides into the desolate Boulevard Soult and the impoverished grass of the ramparts. Hardly anyone passes : the fair, which is up late, sleeps till three. I saunter slowly along, watching the drowsy attitudes of the women behind their stalls, the men who lounge be- side their booths. Only the photographer is in activity, and as you pause a moment to note his collection of grimacing and lachrymose likenesses (probably very like), a framed horror is thrust into your hand, and a voice insinuates: Six pour un sou, Monsieur! 6 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES To stroll through the fair just now is to have a sort of "Private View." The hour of disguises has not yet begun. The heavy girl who, in an hour's time, will pose in rosy tights and cerulean tunic on those trestles yonder in front of the theatre, sits on the ladder-staircase of her "jivin wardo," her "living waggon," as the gipsies call it, dili- gently mending, with the help of scissors and thread, a piece of canvas which is soon to be a castle or a lake. A lion-tamer, in his shirt-sleeves is chatting with the pro- prietress of a collection of waxworks. A fairy queen is washing last week's tights in a great tub. And booths and theatres seem to lounge in the same deshabille. With their vacant platforms, their closed doors, their too visible masterpieces of coloured canvas, they stand, ugly and dusty, every crack and patch exposed by the pitiless downpour of the sunlight. Here is the show of Pezon, the old lion-tamer, who is now assisted by 7 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS his son; opposite, his rival and constant neighbour, Bidel. The Grand Theatre Cocherie announces its grand f eerie in three acts and twenty tableaux. A concert in- ternational succeeds a very dismal-looking Temple de la Gaiete. Here is the Theatre Macketti; here the Grande Musee Vivant; here a Galerie artistique at one sou. Laurent, inimitable dompteur (pour la premiere fois a Paris) has for companion fuliano et ses fauves: Fosse aux Lions. There is a very large picture of a Soudanese giant il est id, le geant Soudanais; 2m 20 de hauteur outside a very small tent; the giant, very black in the face, and very red as to his habiliments, holds a little black infant in the palm of his hand, and by his side, carefully avoiding (by a delicacy of the painter) a too direct inspection, stands a gendarme, who extends five fingers in a gesture of astonishment, somewhat out of keeping with the perfect placidity of his 8 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES face. Theatres des Illusions flourish side by side with Musees artistiques, in which the latest explosive Anarchist, or Le double crime du boulevard du Temple is the "great attraction" of the moment. Highly coloured and freely designed pictures of nymphs and naiads are accompanied by such seductive and ingenuous recommendations as this, which I copy textually. I cannot reproduce the emphasis of the lettering: Etoiles Animees. Filles de I' Air. Nou- velle attraction par le professeur Julius. Pourquoi Mile. Isaure est-elle appelee Deesse des Eaux? Cest par sa grace et son pouvoir mysterieux de paraltre au milieu des Eaux limpides, devant tons les spectateurs qui deviendront ses Admira- teurs. En Plein Theatre la belle Isaure devient Syrene et Nayade! char me par ses jeux sveltes et souples, apparait en Plein Mer, et presentee par le professeur Julius a chaque representation. Plusieurs pales 9 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS imitateurs essayent de copier la belle Isaure, mais le vrai Public, amateur du Vrais et du Beau, dira que la Copie ne vaut pas I' original. And there is a Jardin mysterieu.v which represents an improbable harem, with an undesirable accompaniment of perform- ing reptiles. Before this tent I pause, but not for the sake of its announcements; in the doorway sits a beautiful young girl of about sixteen, a Jewess, with a face that Leonardo might have painted. A red frock reaches to her knees, her thin legs, in white tights, are crossed nonchalantly : in her black hair there is the sparkle of false diamonds, ranged in a tiara above the gracious contour of her forehead ; and she sits there, motion- less, looking straight before her with eyes that see nothing, absorbed in some vague reverie, the Monna Lisa of the Gingerbread Fair. 10 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES II IT is half -past three, and the Cours de Vincennes is a carnival of colours, sounds and movements. Looking from the Place de la Nation, one sees a long thin line of customers along the stalls of bonbons and gingerbread, and the boulevard has the air of a black-edged sheet of paper, until the eye reaches a point where the shows begin. Then the crowd is seen in black patches, sometimes large, extending half across the road, sometimes small; every now and then one of the black patches thins rapidly as the people mount the platform, or there is a simultaneous movement from one point of attraction to another. At one's back the roundabouts are squealing the repertoire Paulus, in front there is a continuous deaf- ening rumble of drums, with an inextricable jangle and jumble of brass bands, each play- ii COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS ing a different tune, all at once, and all close together. Shrill or hoarse voices are heard for a moment, to be drowned the next by the intolerable drums and cornets. As one moves slowly down the long avenue, dis- tracted by the cries, the sounds, coming from both sides at once, it is quite another aspect that is presented by those dingy platforms, those gaping canvases of but an hour ago. Every platform is alive with human frip- pery. A clown in reds and yellows, with a floured and rouged face, bangs a big drum, an orchestra (sometimes of one, sometimes of fifteen) "blows through brass" with the full power of its lungs; fulgently and scantily attired ladies throng the fore- ground, a man in plain clothes squanders the remains of a voice in howling the at- tractions of the interior, and in the back- ground, at a little table, an opulent lady sits at the receipt of custom, with the business- like solemnity of the dame du comptoir of 12 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES a superior restaurant. Occasionally there is a pas sent, more often an indifferent waltz, at times an impromptu comedy. Outside Bidel's establishment a tired and gentle dromedary rubs its nose against the pole to which it is tied; elsewhere a monkey swings on a trapeze; a man addresses the crowd with a snake about his shoulders, and my Monna Lisa, too, has twined a snake around her, and stands holding the little malevolent head in her fingers, like an ex- quisite and harmless Medusa. Under the keen sunlight every colour stands out sharply, and to pass between those two long lines of gesticulating figures is to plunge into an orgy of clashing colours. All the women wear the coarsest of worsted tights, the usual tint of which is intended to be flesh-colour but it varies, through all the shades, from the palest of pink to the brightest of red. Often the tights are patched, sometimes they are not even 13 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS patched. The tunic may be mauve, or orange, or purple, or blue; it is generally open in front, showing a close-fitting jersey of the same colour as the tights. The arms are bare, the faces, as a rule, made up with discretion and restraint. There is one woman, who must once have been very beau- tiful, who appears in ballet skirts; there is a man in blue-grey cloak and hood, warriors in plumes and cuirass ; but for the most part it is the damsels in flesh-coloured tights and jerseys who parade on the platforms outside the theatres. When they break into a waltz it is always the most dissonant of mauves, and pinks, and purples that choose one another as partners. As the girls move carelessly and clumsily round in the dance, they continue the absorbing conversations in which they are mostly engaged. Rarely does anyone show the slightest interest in the crowd whose eyes are all fixed so thirstingly! upon them. They stand or 14 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES move as they are told, mechanically, indif- ferently, and that is all. Often, but not always, well-formed, they have occasionally pretty faces as well. There is a brilliant little creature, who forms one of the crowd of warriors outside the Theatre Cocherie, who has quite an individual type of charm and intelligence. She has a boyish face, little black curls on her forehead, a proud, sensitive mouth, and black eyes full of wit and defiance. As Miss Angelina, artiste gymnasiarque equilibrist e et danseuse, goes through a very ordinary selection of steps ("rocks," "scissors," and the like, as they are called in the profession), Julienne's eyes devour every movement ; she is learning how to do it, and will practise it herself without telling anyone, until she can surprise them some day by taking Miss Angelina's place. COLOUR STUDIES IN ' PARIS III BUT it is at night, towards nine o'clock, that the fair is at its best. The painted faces, the crude colours, assume their right aspect, become harmonious, under the arti- ficial light. The dancing pinks and reds whirl on the platforms, flash into the gas- light, disappear for an instant into a solid shadow, against the light, emerge vividly. The moving black masses surge to and fro before the booths; from the side one sees lines of rigid figures, faces that the light shows in eager profile. Outside the Theatre Cocherie there is a shifting light which turns a dazzling glitter, moment by moment, across the road ; it plunges like a sword into one of the trees opposite, casts a glow as of white fire over the transfigured green of leaves and branches, and then falls off, baffled by the impenetrable leafage. As the light drops 16 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES suddenly on the crowd, an instant before only dimly visible, it throws into fierce re- lief the intent eyes, the gaping mouths, the unshaven cheeks, darting into the hollows of broken teeth, pointing cruelly at every scar and wrinkle. At every return it daz- zles the eyes of one tall girl at the end of the platform, among the warriors ; she turns away her head, or grimaces. In the middle of the platform there is a violent episode of horse-play: a man in plain clothes be- labours two clowns with a sounding lath, and is in turn belaboured; then the three rush together pell-mell, roll over one an- other, bump down the steps to the ground, return, recommence, with the vigour and gusto of schoolboys in a scrimmage. Further on a white clown tumbles on a stage, girls in pink, and black, and white move vaguely before a dark red curtain, brilliant red breeches sparkle, a girl en gargon, standing at one side in a graceful 17 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS pose which reveals her fine outlines, shows a motionless silhouette, cut out sharply against the light; the bell rings, the drum beats, a large blonde-wigged woman, dressed in Louis XIV costume, cries her wares and holds up placards, white linen with irregular black lettering. Outside a box- ing booth a melancholy lean man blows inaudibly into a horn; his cheeks puff, his fingers move, but not a sound can be heard above the thunder of the band of Laurent le Dompteur. Before the ombres chinoises a lamp hanging to a tree sheds its light on a dark red back- ground, on the gendarme who moves across the platform, on the pink and green hat of madame, and on her plump hand supporting her chin, on monsieur's irreproachable silk hat and white whiskers. Near by is a theatre where they are giving the Cloches de Corneville, and the platform is thronged with lounging girls in tights. They turn 18 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES their backs unconcernedly to the crowd, and the light falls on pointed shoulder-blades, one distinguishes the higher vertebrae of the spine. A man dressed in a burlesque female costume kicks a print dress extrava- gantly into the air, flutters a ridiculous fan, with mincing airs, with turns and somer- saults. People begin to enter, and the plat- form clears ; a line of figures marches along the narrow footway running the length of the building, to a curtained entrance at the end. The crowd in front melts away, straggles across the road to another show, straggling back again as the drum begins to beat and the line of figures marches back to the stage. In front, at the outskirts of the crowd, two youngsters in blouses have begun to dance, kicking their legs in the air to the strains of a mazurka; and now two women circle. A blind man, in the space between two booths, sits holding a candle in his hand, 19 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS a pitiful object; the light falls on his straw hat, the white placard on his breast, his face is in shadow. As I pause before a booth where a fat woman in tights flourishes a pair of boxing gloves, I find myself by the side of my Monna Lisa of the enchanted garden. Her show is over, and she is watch- ing the others. She wears a simple black dress and a dark blue apron; her hair is neatly tied back with a ribbon. She is quite ready to be amused, and it is not only I, but the little professional lady, who laughs at the farce which begins on a neighbour- ing stage, where a patchwork clown comes out arm in arm with a nightmare of a pelican, the brown legs very human, the white body and monstrous orange bill very fearsome and fantastic. A pale Pierrot languishes against a tree: I see him as I turn to go, and, looking back, I can still dis- tinguish the melancholy figure above the waltz of the red, and pink, and purple undef 20 THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES the lights, the ceaseless turning of those human dolls, with their fixed smile, their painted colours. IV IT is half-past eleven, and the fair is over for the night. One by one the lights are extinguished; faint glimmers appear in the little square windows of dressing rooms and sleeping rooms; silhouettes cross and re- cross the drawn blinds, with lifted arms and huddled draperies. The gods of tableaux vivants, negligently modern in attire, stroll off across the road to find a comrade, rolling a cigarette between their fingers. Monna Lisa passes rapidly, with her brother, car- rying a marketing basket. And it is a steady movement townwards; the very stragglers prepare to go, stopping, from time to time, to buy a great gingerbread pig with Jean 21 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS or Suzanne scrawled in great white letters across it. Outside one booth, not yet closed, I am arrested by the desolation of a little frail creature, with a thin, suffering, painted face, his pink legs crossed, who sits motion- less by the side of the great drum, looking down wearily at the cymbals that he still holds in his hands. In the open spaces roundabouts turn, turn, a circle of moving lights, encircled by a thin line of black shadows. The sky darkens, a little wind is rising ; the night, after this day of heat, will be stormy. And still, to the waltz measure of the roundabouts, turning, turning franti- cally, the last lingerers defy the midnight, a dance of shadows. 1896, MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER OF all places for a holiday, Paris, to my mind, is the most recreative; but not the Paris of the English tourist. To the Eng- lish tourist Paris consists in the Champs- Elysees and the Grands Boulevards, with, of course, the shops in the Rue de Rivoli. In other words, he selects out of all Paris precisely what is least Parisian. The Rue de Rivoli always reminds me of Boulogne; the one is the Englishman's part of Paris, as the other is the Englishman's part of France, and their further resemblances are many and intimate. The Champs-Elysees have their moments and their hours of in- terest ; it may be admitted that they are only partially Anglicised. As for the Grands Boulevards, which are always, certainly, at- tractive to any genuine lover of cities, to 25 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS any real amateur of crowds, they are, after all, not Parisian, but cosmopolitan. They are simply the French equivalent of that great, complex, inextricable concourse of people which we find instinctively crowding, in London, along Piccadilly; in Berlin, down the Unter den Linden; in Madrid, over the Prado; in Venice, about the Piazza: a crowding of people who have come together from all the ends of the earth, who have, if tourist likes to meet tourist, mutual at- traction enough; who have, undoubtedly, the curiosity of an exhibition or an ethno- logical museum; but from whom you will never learn the characteristics of the coun- try in which you find them. What is really of interest in a city or in a nation is not that which it has, however differentiated, in common with other nations and cities, but that which is unique in it, the equivalent of which you will search for in vain else- where. Now the two parts of Paris which 26 QUARTIER LATIN, 10 A. M. MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER are unique, the equivalent of which you will search for in vain elsewhere, are the Quartier Latin and Montmartre. And these are just the quarters which the English tourist, as a rule, knows least about; fancy- ing, though he may, that he knows them, because he has climbed Montmartre as far as the Moulin-Rouge, and gone leftward one Saturday night as far as Bullier. I have often, when sitting at the Bras- serie d'Harcourt, on the "les serious" side, the side facing the Boulevard Saint-Michel, tried to imagine that gay, noisy, and irre- sponsible throng which surges in and out of the doors, overflows the terrasse, and scat- ters up and down the street; I have tried, but always in vain, to imagine it, so to speak, in terms of London. No, it is simply unthinkable. That Piccadilly (or is it to be the Strand?) will some day more or less approximate to the continental idea of the necessary comforts of life, that it will have 27 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS its cafes like every other civilised city, and so redeem England from the disgrace of being the only country where men have to drink, like cattle, standing; that, I have no doubt, is merely a matter of time; it will come. But there will never be a Boul* Mich' in London. It is as impossible as Marcelle and Suzanne. The Boul' Mich' is simply the effervescence of irrepressible youth; and youth in London never effer- vesces, or only in one man here, in one woman there. The stern British moralist tells us it is indeed fortunate that we have not a Boulevard Saint-Michel in our midst; that we have not, and never can have, a d'Harcourt; and he points to the vice which flaunts there. No doubt whatever vice is to be found in the Quartier, does very much flaunt itself. But is it not really less vicious, in a certain sense, than the corresponding thing in London, which takes itself so seriously as well as cautiously, is so self- 28 MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER convinced of evil-doing and has all the un- healthy excitement of an impotent but per- sistent Puritan conscience? However, be this as it may, the real peculiarity of the youth of the Latin quarter is its friendly gaiety, its very boisterous sociability, its ex- traordinary capacity for prolonging the period of its existence the existence of that volatile quantity, youth into the period of beards and the past thirties. You may say, if you like, that it is ridiculous, that grown- up men should know better than to run about the street with long hair and large hats, singing and shouting from eleven in the evening till two in the morning. It has its ridiculous side, certainly, but it is remark- able, above all, as a survival of youth, and it implies a joie de vivre, which is a very valuable and not a very common quality. The place and the moment where the Quartier Latin becomes what shall I say? its best self, are upon those fine Sunday 29 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS afternoons when the band plays in the Lux- embourg Gardens. Does every one know Manet's picture of the scene: the long frock-coats, the long hair, the very tall hats, the voluminous skirts of the ladies, and the enchantment of those green trees over and between and around it all? Well, the real thing is as delightful even as a Manet; and when I am in Paris, in the fine weather, I consider that Sunday is not quite Sunday if a part of it is not spent just as those people in the picture spend it. Early in the after- noon groups begin to form; Marcelle and Suzanne bring their sewing, or a book of verses, for a pretence, and each has her little circle about her. The chairs around the band-stand fill gradually, the tables of the little green buvette spread further and further outwards, leaving just room for the promenade which will soon begin, that church-parade of such another sort from the London one, so blithely 30 . "; ' % i < QUARTIER LATIN, 5 P. M. MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER "within this fair, This quiet church of leaves." Further out again, along the terrace, be- tween the last trees and the line and curve of the balustrade, there is an outer, quite different, rim of mothers and nurses and children. And now the band is playing, it is the ballet music in Faust; and the shim- mery music, coming like sunshine into the sunlights of such an afternoon, just here and now, sounds almost beautiful, as things do always when they are beautifully in keeping. Marcelle and Suzanne, between two shouts of laughter, feel the poetry of the moment; they are even silent, biting meditatively the corner of a fanciful hand- kerchief. And the slowly moving throng which trails around the narrow alley be- tween the chairs is no longer the noisy, ir- repressible throng which last night acted the farce of the monome from door to door of the d'Harcourt ; it is the other, more serious, COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS more sentimental side of that vivid youth which incarnates and is the incarnation of the Quartier Latin. Up at Montmartre, how different is the atmosphere, yet how typically Parisian! To reach Montmartre you have to go right through Paris, and I always think the route followed by that charming omnibus, the "Batignolles-Clichy-Odeon," shows one more of Paris, in the forty or fifty minutes that it takes, than any other route I know. It is an April evening; nine o'clock has just struck. I am tired of turning over the books under the arcades of the Odeon, and I mount the omnibus. The heavy wheels rattle over the rough stones, down the broad, ugly Rue de Tournon. We curve through narrow, winding streets, which be- gin to grow Catholic, blossoming out into windowfuls of wax-candles, as we near Saint - Sulpice, our first stopping - place. After we have left the broad, always some- 32 MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER what prim and quiet open space, dominated by the formidable bulk of the curious, com- posite church, it is by more or less feature- less ways that we reach the Boulevard Saint-Germain, coming out suddenly under the trees, so beautiful, I always think, in that odd, acute glitter which gas-light gives them. There are always a good many people waiting here; my side of the imperial is soon full. We cross the road, and the two horses start at full speed, as they invari- ably do at that particular place, down the Rue des Saints-Peres. The street is long and narrow, few people are passing; all the life of the street seems to be concentrated behind those lighted windows, against which we pass so close. I catch a glimpse of in- teriors ; a table with a red table-cloth, a lamp upon it, a girl sewing; she leans forward, and the lights crimson her cheek. Another room, an old woman holding a candle moves across the window ; in another I see the back 33 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS of an arm-chair, just a tuft of blonde hair overtopping it; there are two candles on the table, several books. Farther on, the curtains are drawn, I can see only a sil- houette, the face and bust of a woman, clearly outlined, as she sits motionless. We turn the corner, are on the Quai, and now crossing slowly the Pont des Arts. The heavy masonry of the Louvre looms up in front; to right and left below, the Seine, draped in shadow, with sharp points of white and red where the lights strike the water. Then begins the jolting and rumbling over the horrible pavement of the Louvre, the sudden silence as the wheels glide over the asphalte, and we emerge, through that im- possibly narrow archway, into the Rue de Rivoli; in two minutes we are at the Palais Royal. For a moment I see the twisting currents of cabs, down the Avenue de TOpera, and then we are in the interminable Rue de Richelieu, broken only by the long, 34 MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER but new, monotony of the dreary Biblio- theque National e, and that odd, charming little square opposite, with its old houses, its fountain, its dingy trees, its seats. At last we have reached the Grands Boulevards, and we edge our way slowly across, between the omnibuses and cabs. The boulevard is not crowded, it is the hour of the theatres; and then I am facing that side of the street which I never care for, the virtuous side (despite Julien's). When we turn up the Rue Le Peletier, out of the broad, lighted space stretching on in a long vista between the trees and lamp-posts, we find ourselves, ere long, in a new atmosphere; first, that ambiguous quarter of the Chaussee d'Antin, then the franker Montmartre. As we toil up the steep Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, past that severe but eccentric church which seems trying to block our way, but in vain, I watch curiously the significant windows, with their lights and their blinds. As the 35 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS horses turn aside, Clichy-wards I get down ; there, just before me, as if at the other end of the street, across the broad open space of the Place Blanche, are the red bulk and waving sails of the Moulin-Rouge. And that is one of the landmarks of Montmartre. They tell me that Montmartre is not what it once was, in the great days of the Chateau-Rouge, of the Boule-Noire. And even in my time there has been a certain falling away; for have I not seen the death of the Elysee-Montmartre, and the trivial resurrection, out of its ashes, of a certain characterless Trianon-Concert? Still, if some of the glories of Montmartre are gone, Montmartre remains, and it re- mains unique. In no other city can I recall anything in itself so sordidly picturesque as those crawling heights, which lead up to the Butte, so wonderful as the vision of the city which the Butte gives one. I know Mont- martre chiefly by night ; it is not a place for 36 QUARTIER LATIN, 2 A. M. MONTMARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER the day; and the view of Paris which I am thinking of is the view of Paris by night. When you have climbed as high as you can climb, ending almost with ladders, you reach a dreary little strip of ground, in which a rough wooden paling seems to hold you back from falling sheer into the abyss of Paris. Under a wild sky, as I like to see it, the city floats away endlessly, a vague, immense vision of forests of houses, softened by fringes of actual forest; here and there a dome, a tower, brings suddenly before the eyes a definite locality ; but for the most part it is but a succession of light and shade, here tall white houses coming up out of a pit of shadow, there an unintelligible mass of darkness, sheared through by an inex- plicable arrow of light. Right down below, one looks straight into the lighted windows, distinguishing the outline of the lamp on the table, of the figure which moves about the room; while, in the far distance, there 37 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS is nothing but a faint, reddish haze, rising dubiously into the night, as if the lusts of Paris smoked to the skies. Night after night I have been up to this odd, fascinating little corner, merely to look at all I had left behind; and I have been struck by the at- traction which this view obviously has for the somewhat unpleasant and unimpression- able people who inhabit the neighbourhood. Aristide Bruant's heroes and heroines, the lady on her way to Saint-Lazare, the gentleman who knows? perhaps to La Roquette, they rest from their labours at times, and, leaning over the wooden paling, I am sure enjoy Paris impressionistically. Perhaps this is one of the gifts of the Esprit Montmartre, that philosophy of the pavement which has always been more or less localised in this district. Here at Montmartre of course, and of it essentially, are almost all the public balls, the really Parisian cafe-concerts, which exist in Paris. 38 LE RAT MORT MONTH ARTRE AND THE LATIN QUARTER The establishments in the Champs-Elysees are after an order of their own; the Folies- Bergere is an unsuccessful attempt to imitate an English music-hall and a successful at- tempt to attract the English public; but amusing Paris, and Paris which amuses it- self, goes to Montmartre. The cabaret of Aristide Bruant has lost something of its special character since Bruant took to sing- $e \fouf ffcca/cu" jHrtpi G jtyeu^c el clegatjU cucrjfelt- ~<\u\ W^T) ipen} !en)p$ qu'ajx cuvtfijj? ^ojajee el fes cjjaippagpes euovf 0wH took fa T2oi /. ' INVITATION CARD OF THE RAT MORT 39 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS ing at the Ambassadeurs ; the Concert Lis- bonne, which was once so pleasantly eccen- tric, has become ordinary; but there is still the true ring of Montmartre in the Carillon, that homely little place in the Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne, and the baser kind of Montmartre wit in the Concert des Con- cierges, not far off. And then, to end the evening, is there not the Rat Mort, of which a conscientious English lady novelist once gave so fanciful a picture? The Rat Mort, which ends the evening, sums up Mont- martre; not wisely, perhaps, not prudently, but with "some emotions and a moral." 1904. 40 PARIS AND IDEAS PARIS AND IDEAS I HAVE been turning over a book which has called up many memories, and which has set me thinking about people and ideas. The book is called French Portraits: being Appreciations of the Writers of Young France, is published in Boston and it is written by an American, who writes some- what hysterically, but in a spirit of generous appreciation. It is pretentious, as the people in the Latin Quarter are pretentious; that is to say, innocently, and on behalf of ideas. It all keeps step, gallantly enough, to a march, not Schumann's, of the followers of David against the Philistines. One seems to see a straggling company wandering down at night from the heights of Montmartre: the thin faces, long hair, flat-brimmed tall hats and wide-brimmed soft hats, the broken gestures, eager voices, desperate 43 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS light-heartedness. They have not more talent than people over here ; they are much more likely to waste, as it is called, what- ever talent they have ; but these people whom this book calls up before us are after all the enthusiasts of ideas, and their follies bubble up out of a drunkenness at least as much spiritual as material. Few of the idealists I have known have been virtuous; that is to say they have chosen their virtues after a somewhat haphazard plan of their own; some of them have loved absinthe, others dirt, all idleness; but why expect everything at once? Have we, who lack ideas and ideals, enough of the solid virtues to put into the balance against these weighty abstractions? I only ask the question; but I persist in thinking that we have still a great deal to learn from Paris, and especially on matters of the higher morality. Well, this writer, in his vague, heated, liberal way, scatters about him, in this large 44 J y CS / CAHTOON OF JEAN MOREAS BY EMILE Com AND SIGNATURE OF MOREAS PARIS AND IDEAS book of his, many excellent criticisms of people and things; flinging them in our faces, indeed, and as often the stem with- out the flower as the flower without the stem. He tells us about Verlaine and Mallarme, about Barres, Marcel Schwob, Maeterlinck, Moreas, Pierre Louys, and a score of others; not as precisely as one might have wished, often indeed rather mis- leadingly, but always with at least the freshness of a personal interest. An un- wary reader might, it is true, imagine that the chapter on Maeterlinck records an actual conversation, an actual walk through Brussels: instead of a conversation wholly imaginary, made up of scraps out of the essays, rather casually tossed together. Such a reader will indeed be beset by pitfalls, and will perhaps come away with several curious impressions: such as that Adolphe Rette is a great poet and Henri de Regnier not a poet at all. But books are not written for 45 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS unwary readers, and pitfalls are only dangerous to those who have not the agility to avoid them. The portraits, especially Valloton's clever outlines (mostly repro- duced from Remy de Gourmont's two ad- mirable volumes of Le Livre des Masques) give a serious value to these pages, and there are, in all, more than fifty portraits. As I turn over the pictures, recognising face after face, I am reminded of many nights and days during the ten years that I have known Paris, and a wheel of memory seems to turn in my head like a kaleido- scope, flashing out the pictures of my own that I keep there. The great sleepy and fiery head of Verlaine is in so many of them. He lies back in his corner at the Cafe Frangois Premier, with his eyes half shut; he drags on my arm as we go up the boule- vard together ; he shows me his Bible in the little room up the back stairs; he nods his ntirhtcap over a great picture book as he sits PARIS AND IDEAS up in bed at the hospital. I see Mallarme as he opens the door to me on that fourth floor of the Rue de Rome, with his exquisite manner of welcome. Catulle Mendes lec- tures on the poetry of the Parnassians, read- ing Glatigny's verses with his suave and gliding intonation. I see Maeterlinck in all the hurry of a departure, between two port- manteaus ; Marcel Schwob in a quiet corner by his own fireside, discussing the first quarto of Hamlet. Maurice Barres stands before an after-luncheon camera, with the Princess Mathilde on his arm, in an im- provised group on the lawn. Jean Moreas, with his practical air, thunders out a poem of his own to a waitress in a Bouillon Duval. I find myself by the side of Adolphe Rette at a strange performance in which a play of Tola Dorian is followed by a play of Rachilde. Stuart Merrill introduces me to an editor at the Bullier, Viele-Griffin speaks English with an evident reluctance at the 47 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS office of the Mercure de France, where Henri de Regnier is silent under his eye- glass. It is a varied company, and there are all the others whom I do not know, or whom I have met only out of Paris, like Verhaeren. In those houses, those hospitals, those cafes, many of the ideas on which, consciously or unconsciously, how many of us are now liv- ing, came into existence. Meanwhile, how many ideas, of any particular importance to anybody, have come into existence in the London drawing-rooms and clubs of the period, where our men of letters meet one another, with a mutually comfortable re- solve not to talk "shop" ? Ideas, it may be objected, are one thing; achievement is quite another. Yes, achieve- ment is quite another, but achievement may sometimes be left out of the question not unprofitably. It is too soon to see how much has been actually done by the younger men I have named; but think how Maeterlinck 48 PARIS AND IDEAS has brought a new soul into the drama ; has brought (may one not say?) the soul into drama. Think what Verlaine has done for French poetry, ending a tradition, which only \vaited extinction, and creating in its place a new law of freedom, of legitimate freedom, full of infinite possibilities. And, coming down to the very youngest school of "Naturists" (or is there, as I write, a still younger one already?), is there not a sig- nificant ferment of thought, a convinced and persuasive restatement of great princi- ples, which every generation has to discover over again for itself, under some new form ? All these men, or, to be exact, nearly all these men, have thought before writing, have thought about writing, have thought about other things than writing. They have taken the trouble to form theories, they have not hesitated to lay a foundation before building. The foundation has not always been solid, nor the building a fine piece of 49 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS architecture. But at least literature in France is not a mere professional business, as so much of what passes for literature is in England, it is not written for money, and it is not written mechanically, for the mere sake of producing a book of verse or prose. In Paris the word art means a very serious and a very definite thing: a thing for which otherwise very unheroic people will cheerfully sacrifice whatever chances they may have of worldly success. Over here I know remarkably few people who seem to me to be sacrificing as much for art as almost any one of those disorderly young men who walk so picturesquely in the Luxembourg Gardens when the band plays. Well, the mere desire to excel, the mere faithfulness to a perhaps preposterous theory of one's duty to art, the mere attempt to write literature, is both an intellectual and a moral quality, which it is worth while to recognise for what it is worth, even if the SO PARIS AND IDEAS outcome of it, for the moment, should but be some Pere Ubu in all the shapelessness of the embryo. Where we have the germ of life, life will in time work out its own ac- complishment. And for ideas, which are the first stirrings of life about to begin we must still, I think, look to France. 1900. THE POET OF THE BATS THE POET OF THE BATS VISITORS to the Salon du Champ de Mars cannot fail to have noticed a full-length portrait by Whistler, the portrait of a gentle- man of somewhat uncertain age, standing in an attitude half chivalrous, half funam- bulesque, his hand lightly posed on a small cane. There is something distinguished, something factitious, about the whole figure, and on turning to the catalogue one could not but be struck by a certain fantastic ap- propriateness in the name, Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, even if that name conveyed no further significance. To those who know something of the curiosities of French literary society, the picture has its interest as a portrait of the oddest of Parisian "originals," the typical French "aesthete," from whose cult of the hortensia Oscar Wilde no doubt learnt the worship of 55 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS vuur* tonfi^J^s ( QtuJL Ofo.it / ^ "ni -^ " V'-AraJ^^ . !" If ^^ C-. f I tWj \ j J^^._^j '5V \ ^ \ S^^- ^ >^ / _ SKETCH OF YVETTE GUILBERT YVETTE GUILBERT just that kind of emotion, she affects one all the time as being, after all, removed from what she sings of an artist whose sym- pathy is an instinct, a divination. There is something automatic in all fine histrionic genius, and I find some of the charm of the automaton in Yvette Guilbert. The real woman, one fancies, is the slim, bright-haired girl who looks so pleased and so amused when you applaud her, and whom it pleases to please you just because it is amusing. She could not tell you how she happens to be a great artist ; how she has found a voice for the tragic comedy of cities; how it is that she makes you cry when she sings of sordid miseries. "That is her secret," we are accustomed to say ; and I like to imagine that it is a secret which she herself has never fathomed. The difference between Yvette Guilbert and every other singer on the variety stage is the difference between Sarah Bernhardt 97 and every other actress. There are plenty of women who sing comic songs with talent : here is a woman who sings a new tragic variety of comedy and sings it with genius. The word "creation" has come to have a casual enough meaning in regard to any new performance on the stage, but in this case it is an epithet of simple justice. This new, subtle, tourmentee way of singing the miseries of the poor and the vices of the miserable is absolutely a creation; it brings at once a new order of subject and a novel manner of presentment into the comic repertoire, and it lifts the entertainment of the music-hall into a really high region of art. To hear her sing six songs, all quite different in tone La Petite Curieuse, La Terre, Beranger's Lisette, Morphinee, Les Demoiselles a Marier, and fa fait toujours plaisir, is to realise how wide her range is. One song, for instance, La Terre, which is serious to the point 98 YVETTE GUILBERT of solemnity, and in which the whole effect consists in the deep feeling and the delicately varied intonation given to the refrain at every recurrence, gave me much more pleasure than Beranger's Lisette, the "grisette de quinze ans." Morphinee is sheer tragedy; it is a song by that clever, eccentric, never quite satisfactory person, Jean Lorrain, and it tells all the horror of a life enslaved by morphine. Words and music are singularly apt and mutually ex- pressive, and the rise of the voice, into a sort of dull, yet intense monotony, at the words "je suis hallucinee," is one of the most thrilling effects that even Yvette has ever obtained. The whole thing sordid, horrible, crazed, as it is is, as a piece of acting, incomparably expressive, and it is always restrained within the severest artistic limits. La Petite Curieuse and fa fait toujours plaisir are more conventional, as songs; slight, neatly done, quite finished in 99 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS their way, and with some of that perverse naivete which was, I believe, Yvette Guil- bert's earliest discovery in method. Les Demoiselles a Marier, the most cynical and subtle of her studies in the young lady of the period, carries this method to a far finer perfection. In what it says and what it sug- gests it is excessively piquant: really witty, with a distinctively French wit, it has all the fine malice of Les Demoiselles de Pen- sionat, and an even finer, because a more varied, expressiveness. It is in this ex- pressiveness that the secret of Yvette Guil- bert lies, and the secret of the expressive- ness is, partly, a conscientious attention to detail. Other people are content with mak- ing an effect, say, twice in the course of a song. Yvette insists on getting the full meaning out of every line, and, with her, to grasp a meaning is to have found an effect. It is genius, which must be born, not made ; and it is also that "infinite capacity for tak- 100 YVETTE GUILBERT ing pains." I remember her saying to me, "Other women are just as clever as I am, but if I make up my mind that I will do a thing I always do it. I try, and try, and try, until I succeed." There the true artist spoke, and the quality I claim for Yvette Guilbert, above all other qualities, is that she is a true artist, an artist as genuine, and in her own way as great, as any actress on any stage. 1900. 101 DANCERS AND DANCING LA MELINITE: MOULIN-ROUGE. OLIVIER METRA'S Waltz of Roses Sheds in a rhythmic shower The very petals of the flower; And all is roses, The rouge of petals in a shower. Down the long hall the dance returning Rounds the full circle, rounds The perfect rose of lights and sounds, The rose returning Into the circle cf its rounds. Alone, apart, one dancer watches Her mirrored, morbid grace ; Before the mirror, face to face, Alone she watches Her morbid, vague, ambiguous grace. Before the mirror's dance of shadows She dances in a dream, And she and they together seem A dance of shadows, Alike the shadows of a dream. 105 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS The orange-rosy lamps are trembling Between the robes that turn; In ruddy flowers of flame that burn The lights are trembling: The shadows and the dancers turn. And, enigmatically smiling, In the mysterious night, She dances for her own delight, A shadow smiling Back to a shadow in the night. 1892. 106 DANCERS AND DANCING IT was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from the hotel where I was staying, the Hotel Corneille, in the Latin Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, Z. Marcas), I found myself in Le Jardin de Paris where I saw for the first time La Melinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more pro- vocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; dcollete nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had long black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved virginity. And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on the night of May 22d, danced in her 107 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS feverish, her perverse, her enigmatical beauty, La Melinite, to her own image in the mirror : "A shadow smiling Back to a shadow in the night": as she cadenced Olivier Metra's False des Roses. The chahut, which she danced, is the suc- cessor, one might almost say the renaissance, of the cancan. Roughly speaking, the can- can died with the Bal Mabille, the chahut was born with the Jardin de Paris. The effervescent Bal Bullier of the Quartier Latin, in its change from the Closerie des Lilas, of the days of Murger, may be said to have kept the tradition of the thing, and, with the joyous and dilapidated Moulin de la Galette of the heights of Montmartre, to have led the way in the establishment of the present school of dancing. But it was at the Jardin de Paris, about the year i< 108 FOLIES -BERG ERE POSTER DANCERS AND DANCING that the chahut, or the quadrille natural- iste, made its appearance, and, with La Goulue and Grille-d'figout, came to stay. The dance is simply a quadrille in delirium a quadrille in which the steps are punctu- ated by le port d'armes (or high kicks), with le grand ecart (or "the splits") for parenthesis. Le port d'armes is done by standing on one foot and holding the other upright in the air; le grand ecart by sitting on the floor with the legs absolutely hori- zontal. Beyond these two fundamental rules of the game, everything almost is left to the fantasy of the performer, and the fantasy of the whirling people of the Moulin Rouge, the Casino, the Jardin de Paris, the Elysee Montmartre, is free, fertile, and peculiar. Even in Paris you must be somewhat ultra- modern to appreciate it, and to join, night after night, those avid circles which form so rapidly, here and there on the ball-room floor, as a waltz-rhythm ends, and a placard 109 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS bearing the word "Quadrille" is hung out from the musicians' gallery. Of all the stars of the chahut, the most charming, the most pleasing, is La Goulue. Still young, though she has been a choreo- graphic celebrity for seven or eight years; still fresh, a veritable "queen of curds and cream" among the too white and the too red women of the Moulin Rouge; she has that simple, ingenuous air which is, perhaps, the last refinement, to the perverse, of per- versity. To dance the chahut, to dance it with infinite excitement, and to look like a milkmaid: that, surely, is a triumph of natural genius! Grille-d'Egout, her com- panion and rival, is not so interesting. She is dark, serious, correct, perfectly accom- plished in her art, and a professor of it, but she has not the high spirits, the entrain, the attractiveness, of La Goulue. In Nini- Patte-en-rAir, a later, though an older, leader of the quadrille naturaliste, and, like no DANCERS AND DANCING Grille-d'gout, a teacher of eccentric danc- ing, we find, perhaps, the most typical repre- sentative of the chahut of to-day. She is not young, she is not pretty, she is thin, short of stature, dark, with heavy eyebrows, coarse, irregular features. Her face is worn and haggard, almost ghastly; her mouth is drawn into an acute, ambiguous, ironical smile ; her roving eyes have a curious, intent glitter. She has none of the gaminerie of La Goulue: hers is a severely self-conscious art, and all her extravagances are perfectly deliberate. But with what mastery they are done, with what tireless agility, what tire- less ingenuity in invention! Always cold, collected, "the Maenad of the Decadence," it is with a sort of "learned fury" that she dances; and she has a particular trick the origin of her nickname a particular quiver of the foot as the leg is held rigid in the air which is her sign and signature. After these three distinguished people come many. in COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS There is La Melinite, Rayon-d'Or, La Sauterelle, Etoile Filante, and many another; of whom La Melinite is certainly the most interesting. She is tall, slim, boyish in figure, decolletee in the Eastern fashion, in a long slit; she dances with a dreamy ab- sorption, a conventional air, as of perverted sanctity, remote, ambiguous. And then there is La Macarona of the Elysee-Mont- martre, whose sole title to distinction lies in the extraordinary effrontery of her costume. II On my way to Nini-Patte-en-r Air's I stopped at a second-hand bookstall, where I purchased a particular edition which I had long been seeking, of a certain edifying work of great repute. Opening the book at ran- dom, I found myself at Chapter XX., De Amore Solitudinis et Silent i. "Relinque 112 DANCERS AND DANCING curiosa," I read. Then I put the book in my pocket and went on to Nini-Patte-en- 1'Air's. Of course, I had been at the Trafalgar Square Theatre two Saturdays ago, was it not? when the unaccountable British pub- lic had applauded so frankly and so vigor- ously its first glimpse of a quadrille natural- iste in England. But now I was going, in response to a special invitation from Madame Nini, to see what I fancied would interest me far more, a private lesson in the art of the chahut. I found the hotel, but not, at first, the front door. In the bar no one knew of a front door, but I might go upstairs, they said, if I liked: that way, through the door on the right. I went up- stairs, found a waiter, and presently Nini- Patte-en-1'Air bustled into the room, and told me to make myself quite at home. Nini is charming, with her intense nervous vi- vacity, her quaint seriousness, her little COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS professional airs; befitting the directress of the sole ecole du chahut at present existing in the world. We have all seen her on the stage, and the little, plain, thick-set woman with the vivid eyes and the enigmatic mouth, is just the same on the stage and off. She is the same because she has an individuality of her own, which gives her, in her own kind of dancing, a place apart an individuality which is reinforced by a degree of accom- plishment to which neither La Goulue nor Grille-d'figout, neither La Sauterelle nor Rayon-d'Or, can for a moment pretend. And I found that she takes herself very seriously; that she is justly proud of being the only chahut dancer who has made an art out of a caprice, as well as the only one who has conquered all the difficulties of her own making, the only executant at once faultless and brilliant. We talked of many things, I of Paris and she of London, for which she professes an immense enthusiasm; then she 114 DANCERS AND DANCING told me of her triumphant tour in America, and how she conquered America by the subtle discretion of her dessous, which were black. Blue, pink, yellow, white, she experi- mented with all colours; but the American standpoint was only precisely found and flattered by the factitious reserve of black. Then, as she explained to me all the tech- nique of her art, she would jump up from the armchair in which she was sitting, shoot a sudden leg, surprisingly, into the air, and do the grand ecart on the hearthrug. But the pupils? Oh, the pupils were coming; and Madame and I had just finished moving the heavy oak table into a corner, when the door opened, and they came in. I was introduced, firstly, to La Tene- breuse, a big woman of long experience, whom I found to be more supple than her figure indicated. Eglantine came next, a tall, strong, handsome, dignified-looking girl, with dark eyes and eyebrows; she is in her US COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS second year, and has been with Nini in America. Then came fipi-d'Or, a timid, yet gay, rather English little blonde, who makes her debut in London. They sat down meekly, like good little school-girls, and each came forward as she was called, went through her exercises, and returned to her seat by the door. And those exercises! It was not a large room, and when a tall girl lay at full length on the floor, and Nini bent over her, seized one of her legs, and worked it about as if it were a piece of india-rubber, the space seemed quite sufficiently occupied. When Eglantine took her third step towards me, kicking her hand on the level of her eyes at each step, I tried to push back my chair a little closer to the wall, in case of accidents; and the big girl, La Tenebreuse, when she did the culbute, or somersault, ending with the grand ecart, or the splits, finished at, almost on, my feet. I saw the preparatory exercises, le brisement, or dis- 116 DANCERS AND DANCING location, and la serie, or the high-kick, done by two in concert; and then the different poses of the actual dance itself: la guitare, in which the leg is held almost at right angles with the body, the ankle supported by one hand; le port d'armes, in which the leg is held upright, one hand clasping the heel of the boot a position of great diffi- culty, on which le salut militaire is a slight variation; la Jambe derriere la tete, a posi- tion which requires the most elaborate acro- batic training, and which is perhaps as pain- ful to see as it must be to do ; le croisement, which ends a figure and is done by two or four dancers, forming a sort of cross-pat- tern by holding their heels together in the air, on a level with the eyes; and le grand ecart, or the splits, which is done either by gliding gradually out (the usual method), or by a sudden jump in which the split is done in the air, and the body falls violently to the ground, like a pair of compasses which 117 i COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS have opened out by their own weight. It was all very instructive, very curious, very amusing. "Relinque curiosa," said the book in my pocket. But I was far from being in that monastic mood as I watched these extraordinary contortions, done so blithely, yet so seriously, by Tenebreuse, Eglantine, and pi-d'Or; Nini-Pattee-en-l'Air giving her orders with that professional air now more fixed than ever on her attentive face. It was all so discreet, after a fashion, in its methodical order; so comically indiscreet, in another sense. I am avid of impressions and sensations; and here, certainly, was a new sensation, an impression of something not easily to be seen elsewhere. I sat and pondered, my chair pushed close back to the wall, Nini-Patte-en-1'Air by my side, and be- fore me Tenebreuse, Eglantine, and pi- d'Or. 1897. 118 LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS BEGGAR LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS BEGGAR THE writer whom Octave Mirabeau has called le plus somptueux ecrivain de noire temps, of whom Remy de Gourmont has said that he is un de plus grands createurs d'images que la terre ait portes, is indeed "himself remarkable." In Le Mendiant In- grat, a journal kept during the years 1892- 1895, which forms a sort of autobiography, he writes: "J'ai vecu, sans vergogne, dans une extreme solitude, peuplee des ressenti- ments et des desirs fauves que mon execra- tion des contemporains enfantait, ecrivant ou vociferant ce qui me paraissait juste. cri- vant ou vociferant," for the writing of this strange pamphleteer of genius is at times an almost inarticulate cry of rage or of disgust. "Je suis Tenclunie au fond du gouffre," he 121 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS cries, in a letter to Henry de Groux, written at a time when his wife, believed to be at the point of death, had received extreme unc- tion, "renclume de Dieu, qui me fait souffrir ainsi parce qu'il m'aime, je le sais bien. L'enclume de Dieu, au fond du gouffre! Soit. Cest une bonne place pour retentir vers Lui." In the dedication of his new book he invites a friend to make his escape "des Lieux Communs ou Ton dine pour venir heroiquement ronger avec moi des cranes d'imbeciles dans la solitude." It is a dish on which he has sharpened his teeth all his life, and his hunger is deadly. Bloy tells us that he lives entirely on alms, and he affirms that it is the duty of man toward man, and espe- cially of Christian toward Christian, to supply the need of one whose poverty is hon- ourable. "Pourquoi voudrait-on que je ne m'honorasse pas d'avoir etc un mendiant, et, surtout, un 'mendiant ingrat ?' " His journal is the journal of Lazarus at the gate, lifting 122 LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS BEGGAR up his voice against the rich man who has thrown him the crumbs from his table. Here is no anarchism, no political or social grievance ; it is the outcry of a Catholic and an aristocrat of letters, unable to "make his way in the world," because he will not "pros- titute himself" to any servile or lying tasks. Has a man the right to claim his right to live, and to claim it without shame, and without gratitude to the giver for more than the spirit of the gift? That is the problem which Bloy sets before us. Bloy is a fervent Catholic, he believes in God, he believes that the promises of the Bible are to be taken literally, and that, literally, "the Lord will provide" for his servants. Man, in alms- giving, is but the instrument, often the un- willing instrument, of God; Bloy is therefore ready to receive help from his enemies and to bastonade his friends, in perfect good faith. "I recognise a friend," he says simply, "by his giving me money." He is 123 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS the living statement of the dependence of man on man, that is, of man on God, who can act only through man. Where he is alone is in his pride in that humiliation of himself, and in his insistence on the duty of others to give him what he is in need of. The most eloquent of his pleadings against the world's commonplaces is No. CXLIV, Avoir du pain sur la planche. Quand il n'y en a que quelques miettes, he says, ga se mange encore. Quand il y en a trop, ga ne se mange pas du tout, ga devient des pierres et c'est avec le pain sur la planche des bour- geois de Jerusalem que fut lapide le proto- martyr. But it is not merely in his quality of man and of Christian that Bloy demands alms, it is as the prophet and familiar friend of God. I do not doubt Bloy's sincerity in be- lieving that he has a "message" to the world. His message, he tells us, is de notifier la gloire de Dieu, and it is to notify the glory 124 LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS BEGGAR i of God by spoiling the Egyptians, scourging the money changers out of the Temple, and otherwise helping to cleanse the gutters of creation. It is his mission to be a scavenger, and to spare the cesspool of a friend who might be useful, or the dunghill of an em- ployer who has been useful, materially, would be an act almost criminal. With this conviction in his soul, with a flaming and devouring temperament which must prey on something if it is not to prey mortally on itself, it is not unnatural that he has never been able to "write for money." The artist may indeed write for money, with only comparative harm to himself or to his art. He permits himself to do something which he accounts of secondary importance. But the prophet, who is a voice, must always cry his message ; to change a syllable of his mes- sage is to sin the unpardonable sin. With him whatever is not absolute truth, truth to conviction, is a wilful lie. 125 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS Bloy's Exegese des Lieux Communs is a crucifixion of the bourgeois on a cross of the bourgeois* own making. Now it is to the bourgeois, after all, that Bloy appeals for alms, and it is from the bourgeois that he receives it, as he declares (and, indeed, proves) "thanklessly." I am not sure that the conventional estimation oi gratitude as one of the main virtues, of gratitude in all circumstances and for all favours received, has not a profoundly bourgeois origin. I have never been able clearly to recognise the necessity, or even the possibility, of grati- tude towards anyone for whom I have not a feeling of personal affection, quite apart from any exchange of benefits. The con- ferring what is called a favour, materially, and the prompt return of a delicate senti- ment, gratitude, seems to me a kind of com- mercialism of the mind, a mere business transaction, in which an honest exchange is not always either possible or needful. The 126 LEON BLOY: THE THANKLESS BEGGAR demand for gratitude in return for a gift comes largely from the respect which most people have for money; from the idea that money is the most "serious" tiling in the world, instead of an accident, a compromise, the symbol of a physical necessity, but a thing having no real existence in itself, no real importance to the mind which refuses to realise its existence. Only the miser really possesses it in itself, in any significant way; for the miser is an idealist, the poet of gold. To all others it is a kind of mathe- matics, and a synonym for being "re- spected." You may say it is necessary, al- most as necessary as breathing, and I will not deny it. Only I will deny that anyone can be actively grateful for the power of breathing. He cannot conceive of himself without that power. To conceive of oneself without money, that is to say without the means of going on living, is at once to con- ceive of the right, the mere human right, 127 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS to assistance. If, in addition to that mere human right, one is convinced that one is a man of genius, the right becomes more plainly evident, and if, in addition, one has a divine "message" for the world, what further need be said ? That, I take it, is the argument of Bloy's conviction. It is a prob- lem which I should like to set before Tolstoi. I am not sure that the meekest and the most arrogant enemy of our civilisation would not join hands, Tolstoi's with a gift in it, of- fered freely and humbly, which Bloy's would take, freely and proudly. 1902, VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS THE centenary of Hugo gives this collec- tion a special interest as the last thing from the hand of the master whose astonishing literary career began in 1816. On one of the pages of the Post-scriptum de ma Vie he writes : Mais les fondateurs de religions ont erre, I'analogie n'est pas toujours la logique. The whole of this book is a vast exercise in analogies. It comes to us as with the voice of a new revelation; it neither proves nor denies, nor does it even argue; from beginning to end it affirms. And the affirmations range over the universe. L'in- telligence est I'epouse, I'imagination est la maitresse, la memoire est la servante. There, on the side of a witty common sense, is one affirmation. Here, in the language of an apocalyptic mysticism, is another: Et c'est toujours de I'immanent, toujours COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS VICTOR HUGO AS A YOUNG MAN 132 VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS present, toujours tangible, toujours inex- plicable, toujours inconcevable, toujours in- contestable, que sort I'agenouillement hu- main. There are 270 pages of the most eloquent images in the world images which seem to bubble out of the brain like unin- habitable worlds out of the creating hands of a mad deity. Every image detaches itself gaily, floats away with supreme confidence into space; and perhaps arrives somewhere: certainly it soon becomes invisible. Mon- mouth and Macedon are at one for ever in these astonishing pages ; every desire of the heart seems to fulfil itself by its mere utter- ance; there is no longer a truism: ABC have become miraculous again, as they were in the beginning. Qu'est-ce que I' ocean? C'est une permission. When the ocean is a permission, birds may fly where they please. And these little, hard, sharp sentences are scattered violently in all directions ; they rise like fireworks, they fall like comets, lighting 133 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS 'up patches of impenetrable darkness. They succeed one another so rapidly that the eyes can scarcely follow them; and each leaves behind it the same blackness. When Victor Hugo thought that he was thinking, he was really listening to the in- articulate murmur that words make among themselves as they await the compelling hand of their master. He was master of them all, and they adored him, and they served him so willingly and so swiftly that the never needed to pause and choose among jthem, or think twice on what errand he should send them. They had started on their errand before he had finished the mes- sage he had to give them. Par le del, dont la mort est le noir machiniste, . Le sage sur le sort s'accoude, calme et triste, 1 Content d'un peu de pain et d'une goutte d'eau, Et, pensif, il attend le lever du rideau. Is not this epigram rather than poetry, in- genuity rather than imagination? Does it 134 VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS not show, in the words of M. de Regnier, a little of le gigantesque effort du prosateur qui boite d'une antithese fatigantef Or take this line, La vie est un torchon orne d'une dentelle, which it has seemed worth giving by itself among the Tas de Pierres, a line certainly characteristic of Hugo : can one accept it as a line of poetry, or is it not rather, like the whole passage which we have quoted, an effort of mere prose logic? Poem follows poem, sonorous, ingenious, exterior, made for the most part out of a commonplace which puffs itself out to a vast size. They are like clusters of glittering images round the faint light of a tiny idea. One cannot read them without admiration for their astonishing cleverness; still one cannot feel anything but cold admiration, without either interest or sympathy. They are the mathe- matical piling up of a given structure, in 135 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS a given way, always the same. Poem re- peats poem like an echo; always the same admirable form, finished to a kind of hard clear surface, off which the mind slips, with- out penetrating it. It is really difficult to read a poem like Soir d'Avril, for instance, with its facile forty-five stanzas, so apt, so eloquent, so elegant, so generalized, in which so many pretty things are said about love, but in which love never speaks with its own voice. All these resonant poems about Babel, and hell, and le grand Eire contain splen- did images, and rise into a fine oratory; but they come to us like the voice of a crowd, not the voice of a man. Among the fragments in these pages are some epigrams of a Latin sharpness and savour. Take this one, A un Critique: Un aveugle a le tact tres fin, tres net, tres clair; Autant que le renard des bois, il a le flair ; Autant que le chamois des monts, il a 1'ouie ; Sa sensibilite, rare, exquise, inouie, 136 -VX-_ ..*' ^- it- FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM VICTOR HUGO VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS Du moindre vent coulis lui fait un coup de poing; Son oreille est subtile et delicate au point Que lorsque un oiseau chante, il croit qu'un taureau beugle. Quel flair! quel tact! quel gout! Oui, mais il est aveugle. There, in that merely logical development of an idea, in that strictly calculated progres- sion, you will find the method which really lies hidden in most of the more eloquent, the more obviously poetical, passages in this volume. A poem which impresses by its largeness and loftiness, Du Haut des Mon- tagues, is poetical, if one looks into it, only in its choice of detail; the "mental cartoon- ing" is inadequate, mechanical. It begins : Voici les Apennins, les Alpes et les Andes. Tais-toi, passant, devant ces visions si grandes. Silence, homme! histrion! Les monts contemplent Dieu. Then conies a powerful and vivid statement of 137 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS Le drame formidable ei sombre de Pabime, L'entree et la sortie etrange de la nuit, of which the mountains are the spectators; then the reflection : Pour eux, 1'homme n'est pas, un peuple s'evapore; finally, a geographical conclusion : Balkan, sans voir Stamboul, chante son noir salem ; Sina voit 1'infini, mais non Jerusalem. Is there not in all this something a little obvious, a little made up ? Is it not an effect of rhetoric rather than an authentic vision? That the authentic vision can be found in Hugo when Hugo is his finest self, we all know; but in how much of his work, as in the whole, or almost the whole, of this last volume of it, we find that fundamentally in- sincere rhetoric which is none the less insin- cere because it is thundered from the hilltop ! The testament of Victor Hugo, Post- VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS scriptum de ma Vie, is after all not the last publication of a writer whose energy seems to survive death. Here is Dernier e Gerbe, the last sheaf, a collection of poems, of which the earliest dates from 1829. For the most part the poems are complete, but there is a small collection of fragments, called Tas de Pierres, single lines, couplets and stanzas; and at the end of the volume are some dis- connected scenes and speeches from one or two unfinished plays, Une Aventure de Don Cesar, Maglia, Gavoulagoule. The poems contained in this volume are all characteristic of Hugo, but not charac- teristic of Hugo at his best. Take, for ex- ample, Le Rideau: Ce monde, fete ou deuil, palais ou galetas, Est chimerique, faux, ondoyant, plein d'un tas De spectres vains, qu'on nomme Amour, Orgueil, Envie. L'immense ciel bleu pend, tire sur 1'autre vie. Le vrai drame, ou deja nos coeurs sont rattaches, Les personnages, vrais, helas! nous sont caches. 139 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS It did not matter; there were always more words, and more and more, ready to do his bidding. Listen : Pourquoi Virgile est-il inferieur a Ho- mer e? Pourquoi Anacreon est-il inferieur a Pindar ef Pourquoi Menandre est-il inferieur a Aristophane? Pourquoi Sophocle est-il inferieur a Eschyle? Pourquoi Lysippe est- il inferieur a Phidias? Pourquoi David est-il inferieur a Isaief, Pourquoi Thucyd- ide est-il inferieur a Herodotef Pourquoi Ciceron est-il inferieur a Detnosthenef There are eight more similar queries, and there the series ends, but there is no reason why it should ever have ended. "The primitive and myth-making char- acter of his imagination," says Mr. Have- lock Ellis, "the tendency to regard meta- phors as real, and to accept them as the basis of his mental constructions and doc- trines, these tendencies, which Hugo shared with the savage, are dependent on rudi- 140 VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS mentary emotions and a high degree of ig- norance regarding the precise relationship of things." Which he shared with the savage, yes, with that primitive being which is at the root of every great poet. The poet who is also a philosopher loses nothing as a poet ; he adds meaning to beauty. But there is also the poet to whom the vast joy of making is sufficient, who has no curiosity concerning the work of his hands; who makes beauty, and leaves it to others to ex- plain it. "Le beau, c'est la forme," declares Hugo. "La forme est essentielle et absolue ; elle vient des entrailles memes de 1'idee." To work, with Hugo, was almost an auto- matic process; an enormous somnambulism carried his soul about the world of imagina- tion. Read the Promontorium Somnii in this testament; it is a picture in fifty pages, and each sentence is a separate picture. Ideas? ideas come and go, drift away and 141 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS return; visible and audible ideas helping to make the colours of the picture. There is beauty in this book, as in every- thing that Hugo wrote; there is the great poetic orator's mastery of language. Hugo's poetry was never made to be "overheard"; his prose knocks hard at the ear for instant hearing. Even when he dreams, he dreams oratorically ; he would have you realise that he is asleep on Patmos. He has strange glimpses. Le spectre blanc coud des manches a son suaire et devient Pierrot. Quant a la quantite de comedie qui peut se meler au reve, qui ne I'a eprouve? On rit endormi. Little passing thoughts, each an analogy, leap out: L'echo est la rime de la nature. Ce qui fait que la musique plait tant au commun des hommcs, c'est que c'est de la reverie toute faite. Every sentence contains an antithesis or forms an epigram. All is clamour, clangour, and the voice of "loud uplifted angel- 142 VICTOR HUGO AND WORDS trumpets." When it is ended, and one looks back, it is as if one tried to recall the shapes and colours of an avalanche of clouds seen by night over a wide and tossing sea. 1902. 143 A TRAGIC COMEDY A TRAGIC COMEDY IN one of the letters now published in their complete form for the first time, Al- fred de Musset writes : "La posterite repe- tera nos noms comme ceux de ces amants immortels qui n'en ont plus qu'un a eux deux, comme Romeo et Juliette, comme Heloise et Abelard. On ne parlera jamais de Tun sans parler de 1'autre." It is true that the name of George Sand instinc- tively calls up the name of Alfred de Mus- set, and that his name instinctively calls up hers. But does posterity really repeat the names of "the lovers of Venice" in the same spirit as it repeats the names of the lovers of Verona, or even as it repeats the name of "the learned nun" and her lover? A third name asks to be admitted into the company ; posterity queries, "And Pagello ?" This is a question on which the last word COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS will probably never be said; but the most important documents in the case, certainly, are those which have now been published in as entire a condition as George Sand's care- ful scissors left them. They were pre- served by her, it is clear, as a justification of herself; and there is no doubt that they justified her in her own eyes. It is still possible to read them through, and, while admitting the troubles that she had to suffer from a spoilt child like Musset, to sympa- thise, if not actually to take sides, with Musset rather than with her. Musset's let- ters, with all their extravagance, sentimen- tality, literary affectations, petulances, fits and starts of feeling, hysteria even, are the letters of a man who is really in love, who really suffers acutely. George Sand's letters are maternal, affectionate, reasonable, sooth- ing, at times worried into a little energy of feeling; but they are the letters of a woman who has never really loved the man 148 A TRAGIC COMEDY whom she has left for another. "Tu as vingt-trois ans, et voila que j'en ai trente- et-un," she says, in one of the last of them ; and there, certainly, is the explanation of much. In one of the first letters after Musset's flight from Venice, he writes to her: "Tu t'etais trompee; tu t'es crue ma maitresse, tu n'etais que ma mere;" and she answers, "Peuimporte!" She calls him "Mon petit f rere, mon enfant," and cries, "Ah ! qui te soignera et qui soignerai-je? Qui aura besoin de moi et de qui voudrai-je prendre soin desormais?" The real woman speaks there, and, coming when it does in the story, it is not the word of a lover. It expresses the need of an organisation, the besoin de nourrir cette maternelle sollicitude qui s'est habituee a veiller sur un etre souffrant et fatigue. Between this instinct of compas- sion and the impulse of love there is a great gulf. It is an instinct that may be heroism in a woman who renounces love for its sake. 149 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS But a very harsh kind of comedy steps in when the woman writes of her present lover to her former lover : "J e I'aimais comme un pere, et tu etais notre enfant a tous deux." It is true that Musset, genuine as his let- ters seem to be in their expression of a real feeling, is not always absorbed in it to the exclusion of other interests. A month after he has left Venice, in the midst of a troubled and very serious letter, he says suddenly: Je m'en vais faire un roman. J'ai bien envie d'ecrire notre histoire: il me semble que cela me guerirait et m'eleverait le cceur. He asks her permission which she gives readily; she is writing something else, not about herself or him at all, a part of her undeviating course of work, which flows onward, then and always, without change of direction, or in any direction. While he reads Werther and meditates the Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, a book certainly 150 A TRAGIC COMEDY made out of the best of his heart and the most honest part of his senses, she is ask- ing him to correct her proofs for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and to insert the chapter- divisions, which she is afraid in her haste she has forgotten. Later in the book the letters become more exciting. They meet again, and Musset forgets everything but his love. The letter from Baden is an out- cry almost of agony. The words gasp and rush: Je suis perdu, vois-tu, je suis noye, inonde d 'amour; je ne sais plus si je vis, si je mange, si je marche, si je respire, si je parle; je sais que j'aime. Je t'aime, ma chair. Pagello is no longer between them, but there is something, as before, between them; she tries to love him again, seems about to succeed, and then there is the new, inevitable parting with which these letters end. In some of the brief last letters she, too, seems to suffer, and the distressing rea- sonableness of tone gives way to a less COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS guarded emphasis. But she recovers her- self, and with the cry of, Mes enfans, mes en fans. 1 leaves him. Such value as the episode may have had to the rarer genius of the two is to be found, perhaps, in the phrase of Musset, true most likely: Sois fiere, mon grand et brave George, tu as fait un homme d'un enfant. The amount of "self-improvement" derived by George Sand from the same experience is a more negligible quantity. Musset at least was to write a few songs and a few comedies which were worth any "expense of spirit" whatever; and if George Sand helped to make him the man who was ca- pable of writing these, she did well. Her own sentimental education could probably have done without Musset easily enough; we might have had one Elle et Lui the less, but we should have had one Lucrezia Floriani the more. Musset or Pagello, Chopin or Pierre Leroux, it mattered little 152 A TRAGIC COMEDY to her; each added an appreciable interest to her life, and an appreciable volume or so to her work. But of no man could it be said that he had been needful to her, that he had helped to make her what she was. She went through life taking what she wanted, and she ended her days in calm self-content, the most famous of contempo- rary women. It is possible that in the future she will be remembered chiefly as the friend or enemy of some of the greatest men of her time. 1904. 153 PETRUS BOREL PETRUS BOREL THE name of Petrus Borel has come to be a laughing-stock to the Philistine, a by- word to the Bourgeois. His nick-name, "le lycanthrope," is remembered, but it is for- gotten that it was of his own christening. \Yhat Gautier said of him as a friend, and Baudelaire as a critic; all that and the fact that he was the chief of a cenacle and "un roi qui s'en allait," all but a few seekers after lost reputations have forgotten. He is a figure fantastic but not grotesque, a defter of order but a slave of letters. He dreamed of conquering the world. He was a dandy, whether with a "gilet a la Robes- pierre" or naked under a tiger-skin. His whole work, scattered in reviews and jour- nals, and never reprinted, is contained in a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of verse. None of them are accessible, and 157 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS one, not the least remarkable, exists only in its original edition of 1833, of which I have a copy. No one has ever yet done them entire justice. Pierre-Joseph Borel de Hauterive was born in Lyons 26 June, 1809, and died at Mostaganem, in Algeria, on 14 July, 1859. The events of his life are of no great im- portance, but his ill-luck was continuous. He was set to be an architect, and built a few houses and the once famous Cirque of the Boulevard du Temple. But he preferred the studios of his friends, and was soon pen- niless. His books brought him no money, he founded newspapers with names such as Le Satan, L'ane d'or, and wrote articles, stories and poems wherever he could get them taken; finally, in 1846, through the help of Gautier and Mme. de Giradin, was appointed Inspector of Colonies at Mostaganem. There he built a house for himself which he called "Haute Pensee." 158 PETRUS BOREL In 1848 he was turned out of his post, and afterwards removed to another. He mar- ried, and had a son, Alderan-Andre-Petrus- Benoni; and died in misery in the year 1859. The jeune et fatal poete has described himself under an imaginary name in the preface of one of his books: its exactitude is confirmed by all the portraits painted and the eulogies written by his friends. The two mottoes on the title-page of Rapsodies render its character with great exactness. One is chosen from Regnier, one from Malherbe. The former affirms the author to be, "Hautain, audacieux, conseiller de lui-meme, Et d'un coeur obstine se heurte a ce qu'il aime." The second, in the name of the book, de- clares : "Vous, dont les censures s'etendent Dessus les ouvrages de tous, Ce livre se moque de vous." 159 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS Nothing more remained to be said, only there is a long preface: the end is fine irony: "Heuresement que pour se consoler de tout cela, il nous reste 1'adultere! le tabac de Maryland! et du papel espagnol pour cigaritos." He names himself "Un loup- cervier." "Mon republicanisme, c'est de la lycanthropie !" The word caught, he recap- tured it, and "le lycanthrope" will be found among his titles for himself. The book be- gins and ends with an avowal of poverty, and between that beginning and ending what romantic dreams, what towers, chate- laines, what satisfaction to have only "a tattered cloak, a poignard, and the skies," if one can also "taste one's sorrows in an ele- gant tea-cup." The sombre Carlovingian manner is there. Is it from Hugo already that the romantic properties find their way into these pages, and this sort of antithesis : "Enfer! si ta peine est ma peine, Qu'en ce moment tu dois souffrir!" 160 PETRUS BOREL It was in the air, and all the gay and fierce love-songs were what everybody was writ- ing. What is personal comes in, here for instance, where the vagabond life of Petrus and his companions is indicated in a single quaint stanza: "Chats de coulisse, endeves! Devant la salle ebahie Traversant, rideaux leves, Le Theatre de la vie." And there is the ceaseless refrain which re- turns throughout his whole work : "Naitre, souffrir, mourir, c'est tout dans la nature Ce que 1'homme pergoit; car elle est un bouquin Qu'on ne peut dechiffrer: un manuscrit arabe Aux mains d'un muletier : hors le titre et le fin II n'interprete rien, rien, pas une syllable." The wolf barks harshly enough, and to little purpose, in the political pieces, but has not yet tasted blood. Champavert is hardly anticipated in Agarite, the one dainty frag- ment of dialogue, with its instant of drama. 161 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS All this, however, is in the interval, and we end with a desperate epilogue: "J' a i faim." It is curious how many things which Petrus Borel could not achieve he left as an impetus to others. Few readers probably have paid any heed to the motto, of the fifth Ariette oubliee of the Romances sans Paroles: "Son joyeux, importun d'un clavecin sonore." Verlaine's poem is a miraculous transposi- tion of what Borel only suggests in his poem, which is called Doleance and is a personal lament. But he has taken from it all that he needs; there is, besides the line quoted, the "Parle, que me veux-tu ?" which may be discerned in "Que voudrais-tu de moi?" May not "une main frele" come from: "Indiscret, d'ou viens tu? Sans doute une main blanche, Un beau doigt prisonnier Dans de riches joyaux a frappe sur ton anche D'ivoire et d'ebenier?" 162 MEDALLION OF PETRUS BOREL PETRUS BOREL Of a bitter, personal lament, in which the "clavecin sonore" is a mere starting-point, Verlaine has made a floating, vague, and divine dream of music scarcely heard in a twilight: no more than that, but a master- piece. But to him, as to others, it was Petrus who had given the first impulse. Petrus Borel's best poem is not to be found in the Rapsodies, but in the form of a pro- logue to Madame Putiphar. It is filled with a grave and remote phantasy, and in its cold ardour, its romantic equipment, and its naked self under that cloak, it anticipates Baudelaire, and is almost worthy of him. Baudelaire was conscious of its merit, and has defined it as, "un etrange poeme, d'une sonorite si eclatante et d'une couleur presque primitive a force d'intensite." The poem is a cavalcade of three adversaries in the soul : the world, a mystic's solitude, and death. The picture of each is given: the first, young, gay in his steel corslet on his 163 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS caparisoned horse; the second bestrides a bony mule ; the third, a hideous gnome, bears at his side a great fishhook, on which hangs nets of unclean creatures. And so, he ends, after praising and cursing each in turn, with admiration and hate, "Ainsi, depuis long-temps, s'entrechoque et se taille Cet infernal trio, ces trois fiers spadassins: Us ont pris, les mediants, pour leur champ de bataille, Mon pauvre coeur, meurtri sous leurs coups as- sassins, Mon pauvre coeur navre, qui s'affaisse et se broie, Douteur, religieux, fou, mondain, mecreant! Quand finira la lutte, et qui m'aura pour proie, Dieu le salt ! du Desert, du Monde ou du Neant ?" In the year 1833 a book of between four and five hundred pages was published in Paris by the firm of Eugene Renduel, under the title: Champavert. Conies Immoraux, par Petrus Borel, le Lycanthrope. The first thirty-eight pages contain a Notice sur 164 PETRUS BOREL Champavert, written by the author, and professing that Petrus Borel was dead, and that his real name had been Champavert Some of the poems published two years be- fore in the Rapsodies are quoted, and some biographical notes, not perhaps imaginary, are given. The rest of the book contains seven stories, named: Monsieur de I'Ar- gentiere, I'Accusateur, Jaquez Banaon, le Charpentier (La Havane), Don Andrea Vesalius, I' Anatomist e (Madrid), Three Fingered Jack, I' Obi (La Jamaique), Dina, la Belle Juive (Lyon), Passer eau, I'Ecolier (Paris), and Champavert, le Lycanthrope (Paris). Each has a motto, or a series of mottoes, on the fly leaf of its title, mostly from the Bible, and from contemporary poets, Gerard, Gautier, Musset. Each story is divided into a great number of divisions, and every division has its own title, more often in English, Spanish, Latin, or Provencal than 165 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS in French. These seven stories, though not immoral, as they profess to be, in the defiant manner of the day, are as extraordinary as any production of the human brain. All are studies in horrors and iniquities; above all, in the shedding of blood. Written by anyone else they would be revolting, for they spare no detail of monstrous deeds; they would be pitiless but for their immense self- pity; cruel but for their irony, which is a bitter, personal, and at times magnificent arraignment of things. They are crude, ex- travagant, built up out of crumbling and far-sought materials; they are deliberately improbable, and the persons who sin and suffer in them are males all brain and females all idols and ideals. They are as far from reality as intention and style can make them; a world of vari-coloured puppets swinging on unregulated wires. And yet these violences and crudities and all this dig- ging in graveyards and fumbling in the dead 166 PETRUS BOREL souls of the treacherous and the unforgiving, have something in them or under them, a sincerity, a real hatred of evil and unholy things, which keeps us from turning away, as our first impulse may well be, in mere disgust. A man, suffering from some deadly misery, leaps before us in ironical gym- nastics, and comes down with his mortal laugh, a clown, in the arena. That is what makes the book tragic, a buffoon's criticism of life; there is philosophy in it, and an angry pathos. Can the sense of horror become, to those accustoming themselves to it, a kind of luxury, like drunkenness? In another later book Borel tells us that it can: "Car il y a dans la douleur une volupte mysterieuse dont le malheureux est avide; car la souffrance est savoureuse comme le bonheur." Many great writers have had it, as a small part of their genius; Hugo had it, for instance, together with his passion for the tragically COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS grotesque. But in this one writer horror seems to be almost the whole substance of his dreams. Whenever he seems about to open the door to beauty, horror shuts to the door. He does not suggest, he is minute, and will number every circumstance, which others would turn from. At times horror finds a voice in such a litany as Dina and the boatman chant on their dreadful voyage; or, with an appalling irony, in that scene where two negroes, fighting to death, stop suddenly at the sound of the convent bell striking eight, draw apart, kneel, re- peat the "Angelus" each taking his turn, pray silently for one another's souls, and then rise and hack and tear each other to pieces. We shudder and wonder, and find the horror almost insupportable; but we do not, as in a story of Pierre Louys, sicken at the calm, deliberate cruelty of the writer. In Petrus Borel horror is an obsession: its danger is at times to become an absurdity. 168 PETRUS BOREL It is one of the defects of his hasty, de- fiant art, that we are not always sure whether, when he is absurd, he is absurd intentionally. And it pleased him to write a style which was half splendour and half rage. Listen to this jewellery of the senses before Huysmans: "Depraved by grief, she sought ardently for all that irritated her nerves, all that excited and awakened her apathy; she covered herself with the most heavily scented flowers ; she surrounded her- self with vases full of syringa, jasmine, vervain, roses, lilies, tuberoses; she burned incense and benzoin; she shook around her amber, cinnamon, storax, musk." And he will tell you that a woman is "pyramidally virtuous"; and I hardly know how often things are obombre, which is the Biblical "overshadowed." English and Spanish rudely decorated his pages, generally more accurate than in the seekers after this form of local colour in his time. He has many 169 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS varieties of dialogue from the pompous to the abject, but all are done with an uneven energy. To be delivered from most of the beauti- ful as well as the discomforting things of the world, was the continual prayer of one who liked to be called "un lycanthrope." "La souffrance," he said, "a fait de moi un loup feroce," and the world to him was a thing "sur lequel je crache, que je meprise, que je repousse du pied." He realised that to think too closely about life was to be unhappy. And so that varying image of himself who goes through the best of his stories is the man who thinks and dies. What logic there is often in certain of the preposterous scenes, which reach their sum- mit in the dialogue between the man who wants to be guillotined ("not publicly, but in your back-garden") and M. Sanson, the state mechanician of the guillotine. The bourgeoisie itself is concentrated in one vast 170 PETRUS BOREL bewilderment in the professional gentle- man who doubts, with strict politeness, the sanity of a strange visitor who addresses him after this manner: "Je jure par toutes vos oesophagotomies que j'ai mes saines et entieres faculties; seulement, le service que je vous prie de me rendre n'est point dans les moeurs." But the one splendid, franti- cally original, sentence, which gives the whole accent to this strange story, is: "Peu de chose, je voudrais simplement que vous me guillotinassiez." The whole story of Passereau, in which this is the most significant of several auda- cious and unparalleled incidents, has a macabre humour which is terrible, if you will, but personal, and at that time new. It has been seen since, and we find Baudelaire, consciously or not, taking the exact details of his murderous drunkard's action, in Le Vin de L f Assassin, from the well in which Passereau drowns his mistress. The very 171 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS words are almost the same. "Passereau alors," we read, "avec un grand effort, de- tache et fit tomber sur elle, une a une, les pierres brisees de la margelle," just as the drunkard in Baudelaire was to confess afterwards : "Je 1'ai jetee au fond d'un puits, Et j'ai meme pousse sur elle Tous les paves de la margelle." Huysmans is anticipated, not only in such a passage as I have quoted, but in that sketch of an earlier des Esseintes : "Sometimes, the bad weather, having gone on without inter- mission, he remained cloistered for a whole month, surrounded perpetually by lamps, by torches, flooded by a splendid artificial daylight; reading, writing sometimes, but more often drunk or asleep. His door was closed against everyone but Albert, who came very readily, to shut himself up with him; not crazed by the same delirium, the 172 PETRUS BOREL same suffering, the same desolation, but for the oddity of the thing, for the chance of taking life in a wrong sense and of parody- ing this rectilineal bourgeoisie/' Is it not almost to the very word characterising it, the plan of existence in A Rebours? If a wild but living sketch may be com- pared, at whatever distance, with a flawless picture, it might be said that there is some- thing in the power of creating a sense of suspense at the opening of a story, and in developing it to the explicit horror of the end, in which Petrus Borel sometimes re- minds us of Poe. Still more does he at times seem to anticipate Villiers de L'lsle- Adam. How like a first sketch of Villiers is the idea of suicide by guillotine, and the mock-pedantic form of the letter to the "Commission des Petitions": "Dans un moment ou la nation est dans la penurie et le tresor phtisique au troisieme degre, dans un moment ou les delicieux contribuables 173 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS ont vendu jusqu'a leurs bretelles pour solver les taxes, sur-taxes, contre-taxes, re-taxes, super-taxes, archi-taxes, impots et contre- impots, tailler et retailler, capitations, archi- capitations et avanies; dans un moment ou votre monarchic oberee et votre souveraine piriforme branlent dans le manche, il est du devoir de tout bon citoyen," and so forth. "To sing of love!" he says in the Testa- ments. It is a catalogue of his work; not Beddoes was more funereal. Is this obses- sion of blood, this continual consciousness of evil, this inability to see any but the dark contraries of things, a mere boastful affec- tation or the only possible way of expressing a personality so full of discontent, and bitter knowledge of reasoned complaint? All his stories have such a dissection, such a passing of all things through so bitter a crucible. "Pauvre Job au fumier," he calls himself in a poem, which seems to be sincere. Petrus Borers next and last complete 174 PETRUS BOREL work, his "triste epopee," as he called it, was not published till six years after Champavert. The mood has again changed, or rather changes in the course of the in- terminable pages; the style is elaborated, and used with a singular, paradoxical effort. The name, Madame Putiphar, is of a nature to call up anticipations which are far from being gratified. Never was virtue so magnanimously or more preposterously presented, praised, and carried unshaken through unheard of tribulations. Beings so transcendently moral and so consistently led by their merits and good deeds into pitfalls which the smallest worldly common-sense would have avoided, do not exist in fiction. A sentence in the book, not meant to refer to them, defines with perfect accuracy the manner of their treatment. "There are cer- tain cases," we are told, "where really reason has so stupid an air, where logic has so absurd a figure, that one has to be ex- 175 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS tremely serious if one does not laugh in their faces." Is Deborah or Patrick Mac- Why te the more saintly, the more heroic? It would be difficult to say, especially, as, by a further freak of their chronicler, they are set for the most part to speak in a language so formal and artificial that the feeling it is meant to convey is only to be faintly seen through it. Here is Deborah speaking, at a moment of crisis, to her husband. "Veuillez croire que je sais vous estimer," she says; "je ne suis point assez impertinente pour me supposer Tauteur de votre delicatesse et presumer que sans vos rapports avec mo? vous eussiez ete un malhonnete homme; mais, sans fatuite, il m'etoit bien permis de penser que, livre a vous-meme, sans liens, sans serments, sans dilection emplissant votre coeur, place dans la fatale alternative ou vous vous etes trouve, vous auriez pu preferer manquer a Texigence de vos ver- tueux principes," and much more: but no, 176 PETRUS BOREL the faultless man would have been quite capable of doing it all, on his own account. It is from the very explicit and perilous trial of his virtue by a Madame Putiphar who is meant to typify the worst side of the Pompa- dour that the book takes its name. Here, as elsewhere, the snares of evil are but vaunted to be trampled upon, and the picture which is called up: "flowers, candles, per- fumes, sofas, vases, ribbons, damask, a lovely voice, a mandoline, mirrors, jewels, diamonds, necklaces, rings, earrings, a lovely and gracious woman lying back languor- ously," are but the prologue to a condemna- tion. The story itself begins with an arraign- ment of Providence, as if to justify the ways of man to God. "If there is a Providence, it often acts in strange ways! woe to him predestined to follow a strange way !" Such are these martyrs of their own virtue, and they are shown as, in a way, God's puppets. 177 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS There is a sentence which might have been written by Thomas Hardy, so clearly does it state, in an image like one of his own, the very centre of his philosophy. "I have often heard that certain insects were made for the amusement of children; perhaps man also was created for the same pleasures of superior beings, who delight in torturing him, and disport themselves in his groans." There he states his own problem: the book is to be an illustration of it; hence the hor- rors and the angelic natures that endure them. But he has no explanation to give, and can but bow down, like a later mouth- piece of Villiers, "before the darkness." It is from this gloomy and hopeless point of view that the whole horrors of the story are presented, up to page 250 of the second volume. Then, suddenly, comes a change of direction, and the last sixty out of the six hundred pages are written from this new point of view. "When I took up my PETRUS BOREL pen to write this book my mind was full of doubts, of negations, of errors. But I know not by what mysterious means light has come to me on the way. I have con- strained myself in the whole of this book to make vice flourish and dissoluteness over- come virtue ; I have crowned roses with rot- tenness; I have perfumed iniquity with nard; I have poured overflowing happiness into the lap of infamy; I have brought the firmament down to the gutter; I have put dirt in the sky; not one of my brave heroes has not been a victim; everywhere I have shown evil as the oppressor and good as the oppressed." And now, he affirms, all these cruel accumulated destinies have turned upon him, after all his pains to interpret them, and have given him the lie. "There is a Providence," he cries now, a God of Vengeance. The just man, if he suffers, suffers from some ancestral or at- tributed sin; and evil is destroyed by the 179 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS action of God or some destroying power in man. "Croyez a un Dieu punisseur ici bas !" he cries, or the world will be an enigma without a secret, an absurd, impossible charade. And he brings the great symbol of useful destruction, the French Revolu- tion, to end his arraignment of the cruelty of things by a vengeance in which man takes back his rights, the sheep shearing the shearer, the people crushing its giants like a rag between its fists. And for him it is the approach of the hour when all those miseries that he has sung, and mountains more of them, shall weigh down the ultimate scale of the balances of the wrath of God. In this sudden illumination, this prophetic outburst, which ends a book full of clouds, dissonances, errors, absurdities, but always sincere, noble or tending blindly towards nobility, we see certain brave and serious convictions underlying all that is contra- dictory and uncertain in a creature of pas- 180 PTRUS BOREL sionate and eccentric imagination. When a people, he says, revolts against its deities, its first act is to break their images. That is what he does in these pages, where none of his deities are allowed to be logical. A book so incoherent defies analysis, but it is not difficult to see how closely the truth is followed in many of the details, the Defoe- like dungeon scenes, in particular, which are full of a painful reality, passing at least once, in the death-scene of Fitz-Harris, into notes as of an instrumental solo, as he cries in the last ecstasy of death in the pit's darkness, "All shines like a carbuncle; all is flaming, caressing, wavering, dusty." For the actual part of these scenes Petrus Borel has an invaluable model in the nar- rative of de Latude. No one, so far as I know, has identified the very striking re- semblance between scenes in which, equally, we grope from horror to horror. My copy of Le Depotism Devoile, ou memoires de 181 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS Henri Masers De Latude, detenu pendant trente-cinq ans dans divers prisons d'Etat, is dated 1790, "imprime aux frais de M. de Latude," and authenticated by his signature, in his own handwriting, at the foot of the preliminary Avertissement. All the names of the governors of the prison, and of fellow-prisoners are taken by Borel from de Latude, in one instance almost word for word : and the characterisation of Guyonnet, the first Governor of the Donjon of Vin- cennes ('Thonnete M. de Guyonnet," as Borel calls him ; "homme delicat et honnete," as he is called by de Latude), of Rouge- mont, his successor, who, in both narratives, is represented as the same odious tyrant, tampering with the prisoners' food, brick- ing up the little light left in their windows, suppressing their walks in the open air, "un sot, un fat, un puant, un pince-maille, un belitre," as Borel calls him, is in both identical. The terrible lieutenant-general of 182 PETRUS BOREL police, defined by Borel as "un mauvais charlatan en maniere de magistrate," is seen at much greater length in de Latude, who prints perhaps the most ghastly letter in the world. "II feroit a-propos," he writes to the Minister, "de le transferer au Donjon de Vincennes, ou il y a moins de prisonniers qu'a la Bastille, et de 1'y oublier." In that phrase are exceeded all the horrors of Madame Putiphar. Whatever was the good or evil reputa- tion of the Pompadour who figures as Madame Putiphar in his pages, I find, in the evidently veracious and documented pages of de Latude, confirmation enough to justify that part of Borel's characterisation which is concerned with her vindictive and destroy- ing frivolity. "What then has been my crime?" de Latude questions. "At the age of twenty-three years, misled by an access of ambition which was simply absurd, I dis- pleased la Marquise de Pompadour, I of- 183 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS fended her, if you will, and that is a good deal to admit. At forty years, worn out by seventeen years of captivity and of tears": but not yet nearly at the end of either. And he affirms: "Also she has never given liberty, as it is asserted, to any of those whom she has hurled into chains; she shut down for ever in the dungeon walls their sighs and their anger." And he names (Borel names them after him) a Baron de Venae, who was imprisoned in the Donjon for nineteen years for having given the Pompadour a piece of good advice which "humbled her pride"; a Baron de Vissec, seventeen years imprisoned on the suspicion that he had spoken against her ; a Chevalier de Rochequerault, suspected of being the writer of a pamphlet against her, imprisoned for twenty-three years. Borel and Latude's books, in scarcely less impressive ways, represent the moment of her death, and their natural hopes that a personal vengeance 184 PETRUS BOREL would be set right at last by the law. "I thought I saw the skies purple with shame," de Latude tells us. "Not even the idea came to me that there could be any delay in breaking my chains." For de Latude and for the innocent prisoners of Borel no key unlocks a door, and it is Borel who repre- sents the dying woman writing a great "no" in a last refusal of mercy. All this, then, and the episode of Mal- sherbes visiting a prisoner in the pit of a dungeon, drawing him up into the light, and then persuaded by false tidings to leave him to his fate, is historical fact, and is used by Borel as part of a story, which has so much of the document where it seems most the invention of a story-teller. Not less real, in its properly artificial way, is the adventure of the Parc-aux-Cerfs. Borel seeks too often such local colour as "aze- derach," a Syrian tree, or the plants "mahaleb" and "aligousier." Pedantry 185 COLOUR STUDIES IN PARIS comes in here as in other ways and places; as for instance, in the return to old spell- ings in avoit, touts, abyme, gryllons. Ped- antry passes into ignorance in certain English words, which we may set partly to the credit of those printers whom he calls to account on one of his last pages. Strange metaphors flourish on all the pages, as when "il lui sembloit qu'il venoit de contracter avec les pieues de son cachot, avec ses fers, un hymen indissoluble, un hymen eternal, ne devant rompre qu'a la mort." There are windy howlings, the "Lycanthropie" I sup- pose, and at times grave silences, like this, with its sombre air as of Villiers: "Elle etoit du nombre de celles qui jamais ne s'effacent." Everywhere there is, in Baude- laire's phrase about him, "le charme de la volonte" ; and the sign that "il aimait f eroce- ment les lettres," as the same great critic characterised him, after his exact manner, in an adverb. 1907. 186 NOTES ON PARIS AND PAUL VERLAINE THE ABSINTHE-DRINKER GENTLY I wave the visible world away. Far off, I hear a roar, afar yet near, Far off and strange, a voice is in my ear, And is the voice my own ? the words I say Fall strangely, like a dream, across the day; And the dim sunshine is a dream. How clear, New as the world to lovers' eyes, appear The men and women passing on their way! The world is very fair. The hours are all Linked in a dance of mere forgetfulness. I am at peace with God and man. O glide. Sands of the hour-glass that I count not, fall Serenely: scarce I feel your soft caress, Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide. Boulevard Saint Germain. Aux Deux Magots, Paris, 1890. 189 AT THE CAFE FRANgOIS PREMIER LITERARY French Bohemia congregates in certain cafes of the Boulevard St. Michel in the Cafe Vachette, the Soleil