LIBR RY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF J 
 CALIFORNIA^/ 
 
M 
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 From a Water-Colour by L. ROSSI 
 
LI 
 at 
 
Thirty Years of Paris 
 
 and 
 Of my Literary Life 
 
 With Illustrations by 
 Bieler, Montegut, Myrbach, Picard, and Rossi 
 
Authorised Edition 
 All rights reserved 
 
tAlphonse T)audet 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris 
 
 and 
 
 Of my Literary Life 
 
 Translated by 
 
 Laura Ensor 
 
 London 
 
 J. M. Dent and Co, 
 
 1896 
 
(ty M^O 
 
 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &* Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press 
 

 CONTENTS. 
 
 1*1 (> 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Arrival ... i 
 
 VlLLEMESSANT 25 
 
 My First Dress Coat 46 
 
 The Story of my Books : Little What's His Name . . 67 
 
 Literary Salons 90 
 
 My Drummer 117 
 
 The Story of my Books : 
 
 Tar tar in de Tarascon . ...... 143 
 
 Letters from my Windmill 162 
 
 Mv First Play 183 
 
 Henri Rochefort . . 196 
 
 Henry Monnier 224 
 
 The End of a Merry Andrew and 
 
 of Murger's Bohemia 232 
 
 The Story of my Books : Jack 260 
 
 L'Ile des Moineaux 291 
 
 The Story of my Books : Fromont jeune 
 
 et Risler aine 301 
 
 Tourgueneff . . . 326 
 
 160 
 
^r.. f 
 
 THE ARRIVAL. 
 
 What a journey it was ! At the mere 
 recollection of it, after thirty years, I can 
 again feel the sensation of cramp, and again 
 my legs seem to be imprisoned in fetters of 
 ice. For two days I was cooped up in a 
 third-class carriage, in light summer clothing, 
 in bitterly cold weather ! 
 
 I was just sixteen ; I came from far away, 
 from the furthest corner of Languedoc, where 
 I had been usher in a school. I was coming 
 to Paris, in order to devote myself to literary 
 
Thii'ty Years of Paris. 
 
 / 
 
 work ! When I had paid my railway fare, I 
 was left with the exact sum of forty sous in 
 my pocket ! 
 
 But why should I be worried or anxious? 
 Was I not rich in anticipation? I even 
 forgot to be hungry, notwithstanding the 
 tempting array of tarts and sandwiches which 
 decked the buffets at the railway stations ; I 
 was determined not to change that precious 
 coin carefully hidden away in the innermost 
 recesses of my pocket. However, towards 
 the end of our journey, when our train, 
 groaning and tossing us from side to side, 
 was bearing us across the dreary plains of 
 the flat Champagne country, I very nearly 
 fainted. My travelling companions, sailors, 
 who had been whiling away the time with 
 singing, offered me a flask. What fine 
 fellows ! How harmonious seemed their 
 rude ditties ! and how good their rough brandy 
 to one who had not tasted food for eight and 
 forty hours ! 
 
 It saved and reinvigorated me, and, over- 
 come by fatigue, I leant back and dozed off. 
 A sleep, however, broken by periodical 
 awakenings when the train stopped, and 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 painfully resumed when it had started 
 again 
 
 At last, a sound of wheels clanking on the 
 turn-tables, a gigantic glass dome overhead 
 blazing with light, doors banging, luggage 
 vans clattering on the pavement, a restless 
 busy crowd, customhouse officers in fact, 
 Paris. 
 
 My brother was waiting for me on the 
 platform, a knowing, sharp, practical fellow, 
 in spite of his youth, and fully alive to the 
 importance of his duties as an elder brother, 
 he had secured a hand-cart and engaged 
 a commissionaire. 
 
 " He will carry away your luggage." 
 
 It was a load that luggage ! A poor little 
 trunk studded with nails, patched all over, 
 and weighing more in itself than all its con- 
 tents. We started off in the direction of the 
 Quartier Latin, along the deserted quay, 
 through the slumbering streets, walking be- 
 hind the porter, who was pushing the hand- 
 barrow. It was scarcely daylight, we only 
 met some workmen, their faces blue with 
 cold, or newspaper hawkers, who were 
 cleverly slipping the morning papers beneath 
 
Thi7'ty Years of Paris. 
 
 the house doors. The gas lamps were ex- 
 tinguished, and the streets the Seine being 
 at its highest all appeared to me gloomy 
 through the grey morning mist. Such was 
 
 my entry into Paris. Clinging to my brother, 
 my heart full of anxiety, I experienced a 
 feeling of involuntary terror while we con- 
 tinued steadily following the cart. 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 " If you are not in too great a hurry to see 
 our room, we will breakfast first," said Ernest. 
 
 " Oh yes, by all means." 
 
 I was literally dying of hunger. 
 
 But alas ! the 
 coffee tavern, one 
 in the rue de Cor- 
 neille, was not yet 
 opened ; and we had 
 to wait a long time, 
 trying to keep our- 
 selves warm by 
 walking about the 
 neighbourhood, and 
 round the Odeon, 
 which impressed me 
 by its huge roof, its 
 portico, and its 
 temple-like appear- 
 ance. 
 
 At length the 
 shutters were flung 
 
 back and a sleepy-looking waiter admitted us, 
 noisily dragging his loose slippers across the 
 floor and muttering to himself, very much in the 
 way that stable-men do when awakened from 
 
Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 their sleep to put to the relays. Never shall 
 I forget that breakfast in the dawning light. 
 I have but to close my eyes for the whole 
 scene to reappear before me. The bare 
 white-washed walls, dotted with rows of pegs, 
 the bar covered with piles of napkins rolled in 
 their rings, marble tables without table-cloths, 
 but scrupulously clean, glasses, salt-cellars, 
 and tiny flasks filled with wine, in which 
 there was not a drop of grape juice, but 
 which to me appeared excellent all these 
 were already in their places. 
 
 " Three sous of coffee " the waiter called 
 out on his own responsibility directly he saw 
 us, and as at this early hour there was no 
 one else but himself in the place, he answered 
 " Bourn " to himself, and brought us " three of 
 coffee" that is to say, three sous worth of 
 delicious, fragrant coffee, tolerably sweet : 
 which soon vanished, as well as two small 
 loaves that he had brought in a little basket. 
 
 We then ordered an omelette, for it was 
 too early to be able to get a cutlet. 
 
 "An omelette for two." 
 
 " Bourn," bellowed the waiter. 
 
 " And well done ! " cried my brother. 
 
The Arrival 
 
 I was overcome with respectful emotion at 
 the coolness and lordly airs of my sybarite of 
 a brother. And at dessert, eyes fixed upon 
 eyes, elbows on the table, what schemes, what 
 confidences, did we not exchange, as we sat 
 with a plateful of raisins and nuts before us ! 
 He who has well dined is a better man ! Away 
 with melancholy and anxiety; this simple 
 breakfast had intoxicated me as much as 
 champagne. 
 
 We sallied forth arm in arm, talking at the 
 top of our voices. By that time it was broad 
 daylight. Paris beamed upon me through 
 her open shop windows ; the Odeon itself 
 seemed to nod affably towards me ; and the 
 white marble queens in the gardens of the 
 Luxembourg, that I caught sight of through 
 the railings in the midst of the leafless 
 branches, appeared to bow graciously and wel- 
 come my arrival. My brother was rich ! He 
 filled the post of secretary to an old gentleman 
 who was dictating his memoirs and gave him 
 a salary of seventy-five francs a month. Till I 
 should win my laurels, we had to live on these 
 seventy-five francs a month, and to share the tiny 
 room on the fifth floor, almost a garret, in the 
 
8 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Hotel du Senat, rue de Tournon, which how- 
 ever seemed to me a palace. A Parisian attic ! 
 The mere sight of those words " Hotel du 
 Senat" staring in big letters on the front of 
 the house, nattered my conceit, and dazzled 
 my mind. Opposite the hotel, on the other 
 side of the street, there 
 was an old house, dating 
 from the last century, 
 with a pediment and 
 two reclining figures, 
 which always gave me 
 the impression that they 
 were about to fall from 
 off the wall into the 
 street below. 
 
 "That is where Ricord 
 
 lives, said my brother, 
 
 the famous Ricord, the 
 
 Emperor's physician." 
 
 The Hotel du Senat ! the Emperor's doctor ! 
 
 These grand words delighted me and lidded 
 
 my vanity. Oh, those first impressions of 
 
 Paris. 
 
 The large restaurants of the Boulevard St. 
 Michel, the new buildings on the boulevard 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 9 
 
 St. Germain and in the rue des ficoles had 
 not yet driven away the studious youth of the 
 Quartier Latin, and in spite of its high 
 sounding name, our hotel in the rue de 
 Tournon did not pique itself on its senatorial 
 gravity. 
 
 There was quite a colony of students there, 
 
 a horde from the south of Gascony, fine 
 fellows, slightly vain-glorious and self suffi- 
 cient, but jovial withal, great beer drinkers 
 and palaverers, who filled the staircase 
 and passages with the deep tones of their 
 sonorous bass voices. They spent their time 
 in empty talk and endless argument. We 
 
io Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 seldom met them, only on Sundays, and then 
 by chance; that is to say, when our purses 
 allowed us the luxury of a dinner at the table 
 d'hote. 
 
 It was there that I first saw Gambetta. 
 He was even then the man we have all 
 known and admired. Rejoicing in life; re- 
 joicing in talk ; this loquacious Roman grafted 
 on a Gallic stock, intoxicated himself with the 
 jingle of his own phrases, making the window 
 panes vibrate with the noise of his thundering 
 eloquence, most frequently ending in exuber- 
 ant explosions of mirth. Already he reigned 
 supreme over the mass of his comrades. In 
 the Quartier Latin, he was an important 
 personality, all the more so that he received 
 three hundred francs a month from Cahors 
 an enormous sum for a student in those 
 remote days. Later on we became intimate, 
 but at that time I was only a raw provincial 
 lad, new to Paris, and I was satisfied to sit 
 at the further end of the table and contem- 
 plate him from afar with a feeling of admir- 
 ation unclouded by the faintest shadow of 
 envy. 
 
 Both he and his friends were wholly ab- 
 
The Arrival. n 
 
 sorbed in politics, and from the Quartier Latin, 
 they were already laying siege to the Tuileries, 
 while my tastes and ambition were directed 
 towards other conquests. A literary life was 
 the sole object of my dreams. Sustained by 
 the boundless confidence of youth, poor but 
 radiant, I passed the whole year in my attic, 
 versifying. 
 
 It is an ordinary and touching story. Paris 
 can reckon hundreds of poor young fellows, 
 possessors of no other fortune than a few 
 rhymes ; but I do not imagine that any one 
 ever began his career in destitution more com- 
 plete than mine. 
 
 With the exception of my brother, I knew 
 nobody. Short-sighted, awkward, and timid, 
 whenever I stole forth from my garret, I 
 invariably wandered round the Odeon, stroll- 
 ing beneath its arcades, overcome by fear and 
 joy at the idea that I might meet some literary 
 character near Mme. Gaut's shop, for in- 
 stance. Mme. Gaut, already an old woman, 
 but with astounding eyes, brilliant and black, 
 allowed me to glance over the new works 
 exposed for sale, on condition that I did not 
 cut the leaves. 
 
12 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Often I saw her conversing with the great 
 novelist, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and while she 
 knitted a stocking, the author of Une Vieille 
 Mditresse stood before her with his hand 
 
 / 
 
 on his hips, a la Merovingienne, the' end of 
 his waggoner's cloak, lined with handsome 
 black velvet, thrown over his shoulder, so 
 that all might behold the richness of the 
 apparently unpretending garment. 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 T 3 
 
 Some one approaches, 'tis Valles. The 
 future Communist passed nearly every day 
 in front of Madame Gaut's establishment, on 
 
 returning from the reading room of " la Mere 
 Morel," where it was his daily habit to go 
 betimes in the morning to work and read. 
 Cynical, caustic and eloquent, always arrayed 
 
1 4 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 in the same old frock coat, he spoke in a 
 harsh, metallic voice, apparently issuing from 
 the depths of a rough, bristling beard, which, 
 reaching nearly to the eyebrows, enveloped 
 his sombre Auvergnat physiognomy. This 
 voice grated on my nerves. He had recently 
 written L' Argent, a pamphlet dedicated to 
 Mires, and illustrated in vignette form with a 
 design representing a five franc piece ; and 
 while waiting to become the associate of 
 Mires, he was the inseparable companion of 
 the old critic, Gustave Planche. The 
 Aristarchus of the Revue des Deux-Mondes 
 was at that time a ponderous old man of 
 stern mien, an inflated Philoctetes, with a 
 shuffling and limping gait. One day I had 
 the audacity to play the spy upon them from 
 a window of the cafe of the Rue Taranne, by 
 raising myself up to the casement and rub- 
 bing the pane with my fingers j it was the cafe 
 next to the house now demolished in 
 which Diderot lived for forty years. - They 
 were seated facing each other, Valles gesticu- 
 lating vehemently, and Planche rapidly 
 emptying a small flask of brandy tossing 
 down glass after glass. 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 '5 
 
 Neither can I forget Cressot, the easy- 
 tempered, eccentric Cressot, whom Valles 
 biis since rendered immortal in his Refraci- 
 * aires ! How often I saw him gliding through 
 the streets of the Quartier Latin, with his 
 sad and suffering face, and his thin, lanky 
 form shrouded in a short cloak. 
 
 Cressot was the author of Antonia, a poem. 
 No one knew how the poor devil subsisted. 
 One fine day however a friend in the 
 provinces left him a small annuity : that day 
 Cressot dined, and died of it. 
 
 Yet another face of this period is also 
 graven on my memory ; that of Jules de la 
 Madelene one of the best poetce minores 
 of our prose literature, the author of works 
 too little known, which excel by the beauty 
 of their truly classical style : the Ames en 
 Peine and Le Marquis de Saffras. Of aristo- 
 cratic manners, and a blonde type of head, 
 recalling by its delicate and somewhat pallid 
 features, Tintoretto's Christ, his eyes seemed 
 always full of sadness, and longing for the 
 warm sun of his native country, Provence. 
 The romance of his life was told in whispers : 
 'twas that of an enthusiast, and a brave scion 
 
1 6 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 of good family. Severely wounded on the 
 barricades in June, 1848, he had been left for 
 dead amongst the fallen insurgents. Picked 
 up by a tradesman, he remained concealed 
 in the house of his rescuer, whose family 
 nursed him devotedly till he was restored to 
 health, when he married the daughter of his 
 host. 
 
 To meet these celebrated men, and per- 
 chance exchange a few words with them, was 
 sufficient to fire me with ambition, and I 
 boldly exclaimed " I too will be famous ! " 
 
 With what impetuous eagerness I rushed 
 up the five flights of stairs, especially 
 when I had managed to buy a candle which 
 enabled me to work all night, and by the 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 17 
 
 light of its flickering flame, elaborate verses, 
 and sketch out dramas, covering innumerable 
 sheets of paper in endless succession. 
 Audacity lent me wings j I saw a magnificent 
 future opening before me, I forgot my pov- 
 
 erty ; I forgot my privations ; as on that well- 
 remembered Christmas Eve when I, rapidly 
 penning my rhymes, heard far below me the 
 noisy festivities of the students, amongst 
 whom dominated the voice of Gambetta, 
 
 c 
 
1 8 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 thundering through the hall and re-echoing 
 along the passages, causing even my frozen 
 window-panes to vibrate. 
 
 But once in the streets, all my former fears 
 returned. 
 
 The Odeon in particular filled me with awe. 
 During the whole of that year it seemed to 
 remain as frigid, as imposing and inaccessible 
 as it had first appeared to me on the day of 
 my arrival. Odeon ! Mecca that I yearned 
 for, object of my secret aspirations, how 
 often did I repeat my timid and ineffectual 
 attempts to cross the sacred threshold of the 
 small low doorway through which thine artists 
 entered ! 
 
 How often did I watch Tisserand in all his 
 glory pass through that portal, rounding his 
 shoulders under his cloak in the awkward 
 and careless fashion affected by Frederick 
 Lemaitre ! After him, arm in arm with 
 Flaubert, and as like him as a brother, came 
 Louis Bouilhet, the author of Madame de 
 Montarcy ; followed frequently by Count 
 d'Osmoy, now a deputy. They were at that 
 time writing together, a grand fantastic piece, 
 which however was never produced on the 
 
The Arrival. 19 
 
 stage. Behind them again, all cast in the 
 same dragoon mould, adorned with fair 
 moustachios, came a group of four or five 
 gigantic Normans. This was the cohort 
 from Rouen, Bouilhet's faithful lieutenants, 
 who applauded to order, the first represent- 
 ations of his plays. 
 
 Then Amedee Rolland, Jean Duboys and 
 Bataille followed on, a younger, more enter- 
 prising and daring trio ; striving also to enter 
 by that little door, under the ample shelter of 
 Tisserand's cloak. 
 
 All three, like Bouilhet, died at the outset 
 of their literary career, and thus it is that the 
 arcades of the Ode'on, as I wander through 
 them in the twilight are to me peopled with 
 friendly shades. 
 
 However, having completed a small volume 
 of poems, I went the round of the publishers. I 
 called on Michel Levy, on Hachette. Where 
 did I not venture ! I stole in and out of all 
 the large publishing offices, vast as cathedrals, 
 and in which, notwithstanding the carpets, the 
 creaking of my boots made a terrible noise. 
 Clerks with bureaucratic airs stared at me in. 
 a chilling and consequential manner. 
 
20 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 "Could I see M. Levy? about a manu- 
 script." 
 
 " I will see, sir. Kindly give me your name." 
 
 On hearing the name, the clerk methodi- 
 cally put his lips to one of the speaking tubes 
 and applied his ear to the other. 
 
 " M. Levy is not in." 
 
 M. Levy never was in, neither was M. 
 
 Hachette ; no one ever was in, and always 
 thanks to that odious speaking tube. 
 
 The Librairie Nouvelle, in the Boulevard 
 des Italiens, still remained for me to try. 
 There I found no speaking tube, no official 
 staff nothing of the kind. The publisher 
 Jacotet, who was then starting his new series 
 of little volumes at one franc apiece an 
 
The Arrival. 
 
 21 
 
 idea of his own was a short, small man, 
 reminding one of Balzac, but without Balzac's 
 noble brow ; constantly in motion, over- 
 whelmed by business and dinner-parties, and 
 
 continually planning some vast scheme. His 
 money burnt in his pockets. In a couple of 
 years this restless activity brought him to 
 bankruptcy, and he left France to found the 
 newspaper L Italia, on the other side of the 
 
Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Alps. His establishment was the rendez- 
 vous for all the choice intellects of the boule- 
 vards, and here might be seen Noriac, who 
 had just published his iox* Regiment ; 
 Scholl, happy and proud at the success of his 
 Denise ; Adolphe Gaiffe and Aubryet. All 
 these frequenters of the boulevards, irre- 
 proachably " got up," gossiping about women 
 and money, made me feel shy and awkward 
 when I caught sight of my own figure, re- 
 flected amongst theirs, in the glass of the 
 shop windows, with my hair as long as a 
 pifferaro's, and my little Proven gal headgear. 
 As for Jacotet, he was constantly making ap- 
 pointments to meet me at three o'clock at 
 the Maison d'Or. 
 
 " We will talk over matters," he would say, 
 " and sign our agreement on the corner of the 
 table." 
 
 What a humbug ! I hardly knew where 
 his Maison d'Or was ! Nevertheless my 
 brother encouraged me a good deal when I 
 returned home on the verge of despair. 
 
 One evening however I was the bearer 
 of a grand piece of news and a great joy ! 
 The Spectateur, a legitimist paper, had agreed 
 
The Arrival. 23 
 
 to test my talents as a journalist. It is easy 
 to fancy with what affection and tender care 
 I wrote my first article, bestowing a scrupu- 
 lous attention even on the caligraphic part of 
 the work ! I carried it to the office, it was 
 read, approved of, and sent to the printers. 
 I waited breathlessly for the number to 
 appear. Suddenly Paris was turned upside 
 down ! Some Italians had fired at the 
 Emperor. 
 
 Paris was immediately terrorized, the 
 papers were prosecuted, and the Spectateur 
 suppressed. Orsini's bomb had blown up 
 my article ! 
 
 I did not kill myself, but I thought of 
 suicide. Heaven, however, kindly took pity 
 on my woes, and I discovered the publisher 
 whom I had so long sought for far and near, 
 at my very door. It was Tardieu, the pub- 
 lisher in the rue de Tournon. 
 
 Himself a literary man, his compositions, 
 Mignon, and Pour une Epingle^ written in 
 sentimental sugar and water style, had met 
 with some success. I made his acquaintance 
 by accident one evening when he happened 
 to seat himself in front of his shop, while I 
 
24 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 was loitering about near our hotel. He 
 published my Amoureuses. 
 
 The title was attractive, the volume prettily 
 got up. Both my production and myself 
 were noticed by the papers, and now all 
 my shyness seemed to vanish. 
 
 I boldly walked about under the arcades 
 of the Odeon, watching how the sale of my 
 book progressed, and still more audacious, 
 at the end of a few days I even ventured to 
 speak to Jules Valles. I had appeared in 
 print. 
 
VILLEMESSANT. 
 
 I go sometimes, when my personal require- 
 ments and the direction of my walks chance 
 to coincide, and have my beard trimmed or 
 my hair cut at Lespes. A very interesting and 
 truly Parisian nook is this large barber's shop, 
 occupying the entire angle of the Maison 
 ^Frascati, between the rue Vivienne and the 
 Boulevard Montmartre. As patrons, Lespes 
 
 1 Written in 1879. 
 
26 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 had " all Paris ", that is to say, that infinitesi- 
 mal number of Parisians, whose existence 
 begins and ends with the Gymnase and the 
 Opera, Notre Dame de Lorette, and the 
 Bourse, and who fancy that they alone exist ! 
 Then he had the stockbrokers, the actors, 
 the journalists, without reckoning the in- 
 numerable legion of busy, fussy idlers and 
 frequenters of the Boulevards. Twenty or 
 thirty barbers are in constant work, curling 
 and shaving all day. 
 
 Superintending everything, keeping a sharp 
 eye on the razors and pomatum pots, con- 
 tinually moving from room to room, Lespes,the 
 proprietor, is a small, vivacious man, who, his 
 fortune made (and he is very wealthy), would 
 have grown fat, were it not that a certain 
 disappointed ambition keeps him in a con- 
 tinual state of fever. It was in this house, 
 really predestined, that, twenty years ago, in 
 the very entresol where Lespes carries on 
 his business, the Figaro had its offices. 
 Here was the lobby, the subscription room, 
 the cashier's office, where from behind a wire 
 grating peered the round eyes and sharp 
 beak of old Legendre, always irritable, 
 
Villemessant. 2 7 
 
 seldom amiable, like a parrot turned cashier. 
 Here was the editorial room, with " No 
 admittance except on business " written on 
 the ground glass of the door, and inside, a 
 few chairs ranged round a large table covered 
 with an immense green cloth. I can still see 
 it all, and can see myself, timidly sitting in a 
 corner, hugging under my arm my first article, 
 rolled and tied up with tender and affection- 
 ate care. Villemessant had not yet returned. 
 They had told me to wait, and I was waiting. 
 On that occasion there were about half-a- 
 dozen men seated round the green clothed 
 table, skimming the papers, or scribbling. 
 They were laughing and talking, smoking 
 cigarettes, and matters were being merrily 
 discussed. Amongst them was a small 
 man with a red face, and white hair 
 brushed up on end, making him look like 
 a cockatoo. 
 
 This was M. Paul d'lvoy, the celebrated 
 chronicler, who had been enticed away from 
 i/the Courrier de Paris regardless of cost 
 Paul d'lvoy, whose fabulously large remuner- 
 ation (it was fabulous at that time, but would 
 not appear so now) made him the admiration 
 
28 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 of all the literary circles. He wrote with a 
 smile upon his face, like a man thoroughly 
 pleased with himself : the slips of paper grew 
 j/ black under his pen, and I sat by, watching 
 M. Paul d'lvoy smiling and writing. 
 
 All at once there was a sound of heavy 
 footsteps, and a thickened, jovial voice : 
 
 " Villemessant ! " Instantly the pens 
 scratched away, the laughter ceased, and 
 the cigarettes were hidden, Paul: d'lvoy 
 alone raised his head and dared to gaze 
 familiarly upon their imposing deity. 
 
 Villemessant : " That's right, my children, 
 I see that you are all hard at work." (To 
 
Villemessant. 
 
 29 
 
 Paul d'fvoy in a good-natured manner) : 
 " Are you satisfied with your article ? " 
 Paul d'Ivoy : "I think it will do." 
 
 Villemessant: "Well so much the better, 
 that is lucky, for it will be your last." 
 
 Paul d'Ivoy {turning pale) : u My 
 last ? " 
 
 Villemessant : Certainly ! I am not laugh- 
 
30 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 ing your writings are most tedious there 
 is but one opinion on the Boulevards you 
 have bored us long enough." 
 
 Paul d'lvoy had risen from his chair : 
 11 But our agreement, sir ? Our agreement ? " 
 
 "That's a good joke ! Just try and bring 
 an action against me that would be fun : 
 I should read aloud your contributions in 
 open court, and we should soon see if any 
 agreement could compel me to insert such 
 rubbish in my paper ! " Villemessant was 
 quite capable of carrying out his threat, and 
 Paul d'lvoy never went to law. All the same, 
 this way of shaking off his officials with as 
 little ceremony as an old carpet out of a 
 window, gave poor innocent me cold shivers ! 
 I began to wish both myself and my hapless 
 manuscript, so ridiculously rolled up, a hundred 
 feet under-ground. I never entirely got over 
 that first impression ; after this I often met 
 Villemessant, and he was always most kind, 
 but I invariably felt on seeing him the same 
 cold shudder of painful terror that Hop o' my 
 Thumb must have experienced on first 
 meeting the Giant. 
 
 To be quite fair, I am bound to add that 
 
Viilemessant. 3 1 
 
 when in after days, this same Paul d'lvoy, 
 so summarily dismissed died, it was 
 Viilemessant, real ogre and St. Vincent de 
 Paul in one, who voluntarily provided for the 
 education of his children. 
 
 Was he kind or was he cruel? It is a 
 puzzling question, and Diderot's comedy 
 seems to have been written on him. Kind, 
 he certainly was, and cruel too, according to 
 his passing fancy ; and a painter might, with- 
 out falsifying a line, or a shade, have drawn 
 two portraits of him : one kind and benevo- 
 lent, the other harsh and cruel ; one all black, 
 the other all bright and rose-coloured, which, 
 though bearing no resemblance to each other, 
 would both be an excellent likeness of the 
 original. 
 
 In relating characteristic anecdotes of this 
 singularly dual nature, the only difficulty 
 which arises, proceeds from their excessive 
 variety. 
 
 Before the war, I had made the acquaint- 
 ance of a good honest man, father of a 
 family, a clerk at the Central Post Office, rue 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau. When the com- 
 mune broke out, he remained in Paris, 
 
32 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Possibly there lurked in the secret recesses of 
 his heart a weakness for the insurrection, of 
 that I cannot feel sure. Perhaps he said to 
 himself that after all, as letters would continue 
 
 to arrive in Paris, some one must sort and 
 distribute them j that is perfectly probable. It 
 may have been that, encumbered with a wife 
 and grown up daughters, a sudden exit was 
 not within his means. At that moment Paris 
 
Villemessant. 
 
 33 
 
 could reckon many a poor devil in a similar 
 position, barricaders through the force of 
 circumstances, insurgents without knowing 
 
 wherefore. However that may have been, 
 notwithstanding M. Thiers' orders, my friend 
 remained at this work, behind his grating, 
 
 D 
 
34 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 methodically sorting his letters amid the noise 
 of battle, as if nothing unusual were hap- 
 pening; but he absolutely refused to accept 
 any promotion or increase of pay from the 
 Commune. Nevertheless, when the Com- 
 mune was put down, he was dismissed, and 
 too thankful to escape being tried by court- 
 martial found himself thrown destitute on 
 the streets, when on the very eve of obtain- 
 ing a pension. Henceforth an existence at 
 once sad and comical began for him. He 
 had not dared to inform his family of his 
 dismissal ; each morning his daughters 
 prepared a clean starched shirt for him (a 
 government official must be neat !), carefully 
 and merrily, as in former days, tied the bow 
 of his cravat, and kissed him at the door as 
 they bid him good-bye at the usual hour, 
 fancying he was going to his office. His 
 office ! Ah, now far away was that office ! so 
 cool in the hot summer, so well warmed in the 
 cold winter that office where the time used 
 to pass so peacefully. Now he was obliged 
 to tramp all over Paris through rain and snow 
 seeking an employment he could never find, 
 and on his return home in the evening sad 
 
Villemessdnt. 35 
 
 and depressed, he was obliged to tell false- 
 hoods ; to invent stories about an imaginary 
 sub-director, and a phantasmagoric office boy, 
 and to relate them all in a cheerful and 
 facetious manner. (I made use of this poor 
 fellow for the character of Pere Joyeuse in 
 my novel the Nabob, who, in search of a 
 situation, also tells falsehoods to his 
 daughters.) I met him sometimes. It was 
 heartrending. His destitute condition de- 
 cided me to try an appeal to Villemessant. 
 I thought, Villemessant can surely find him 
 some little corner in the Figaro office. But 
 it was impossible 3 every place was filled. 
 And then a communist ! Fancy if it were 
 discovered that he, Villemessant, was employ- 
 ing a communist in his office ! Nevertheless, 
 the story of the daughters, the white shirts, 
 the cravat bows, had, it seemed, softened the 
 heart of the good-natured ogre. 
 
 " Stop," he exclaimed; "how much did your 
 protege receive a month ? " 
 
 "Two hundred francs." 
 
 u Well then, I will remit to you two hun- 
 dred francs a month for him until he finds a 
 situation. He will be able to keep up the 
 
36 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 appearance of going to his office, his daugh- 
 ters will continue to tie his cravats." And 
 he wound up his speech with his ever- 
 lasting phrase, " What a good joke ! " 
 
 It was indeed a capital joke; for three 
 months the poor fellow continued to draw 
 this little sum. At length he succeeded in 
 finding a place, and he economized so 
 steadily, and denied himself so vigorously, 
 that one fine morning he brought me back the 
 six hundred francs, and a beautiful letter of 
 thanks for M. Villemessant, whose name I 
 had revealed to him, and whom, notwith- 
 standing the difference of their political views, 
 he persisted in calling his benefactor. I 
 carried it all to Villemessant. 
 
 " What a good joke ! I gave him the money, 
 and he wants to return it. This is the first 
 time such a thing has happened to me. And 
 a communard too ; what a capital joke ! " 
 
 Then followed exclamations, laughter, 
 enthusiasm, and Villemessant, delighted, 
 threw himself back in his arm-chair. But 
 what ensued vividly paints the man. Happy 
 and radiant, both on account of the kind 
 action he had performed, and the natural 
 
Villemessant. 3 7 
 
 pleasure felt, by even the most sceptical, on 
 finding he has neither been duped nor yet 
 obliged a thankless fellow, Villemessant, 
 while talking, continued to pile up the six 
 hundred francs, arranging them in six little 
 heaps on the table. Suddenly, he turned 
 towards me. 
 
 " I say, Daudet, there are five francs 
 wanting ! " 
 
 Five francs were indeed missing j one un- 
 fortunate tiny gold-piece had been forgotten 
 in the lining of my pocket. In the midst of 
 his enthusiasm, the man of business cropped 
 up. Such is the complex character of this 
 man, who, in reality, reflective, and very 
 shrewd, hides these qualities under an appear- 
 ance of impulsive good nature which would 
 almost persuade one to believe that the poles 
 could meet, that Toulouse is close to Blois, 
 and that the turrets of Chambord are reflected 
 in the waters of the Garonne. 
 
 In public as well as in private life, 
 Villemessant had set up familiarity as a 
 principle to be exercised towards others 
 be it understood for he exacted great respect 
 directly he himself was concerned. On the 
 
38 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 morrow of one of those biting articles, which 
 he was in the habit of adding to the paper at 
 the very last moment, when it was actually 
 going to press, Villemessant was summoned 
 to the Presidency of the Corps legislatif (this 
 was under the Empire). If I am not mis- 
 taken, it was a propos of the famous article, 
 1 Morny est dans /'affaire ' (Morny is im- 
 plicated) which most old Boulevardiers will 
 remember. The Duke was, or pretended to 
 be, very angry, but our friend from Blois was 
 not to be disconcerted. 
 
 " What, Monsieur le Due, is it possible you 
 have not sent for me to decorate me ! The 
 orderly you sent, with his large sealed envelope 
 and his helmet, may boast that he gave me 
 a famous thrill of emotion. My staff are 
 already thinking of illuminations. This 
 time it is a good joke ! " And then he 
 quickly poured forth stories, anecdotes and 
 repartees without end, all thoroughly Parisian, 
 accompanied by a hearty laugh, then a 
 pretended air of concern, and a real and 
 visible pleasure in repeating " Monsieur le 
 Due ! n and so the grievance was forgiven. 
 
 Elsewhere, at de Persigny's, for instance, 
 
Villemessant. 39 
 
 his familiarity did not meet with such success, 
 and Villemessant one day found his facetious 
 buffoonery, frozen by the chilly official atmo- 
 sphere, fall flat and pointless. But Morny 
 delighted in him, and forgave him every- 
 thing. Thanks to his sovereign protection, 
 the Figaro was able to play a thousand freaks. 
 Then, too, what respect, what veneration 
 they had for the President. I knew the time 
 when they would have been capable of 
 building a little chapel in the thickness 
 of the walls of the editorial office, as to a 
 protecting deity, a kind of Lares. However, 
 all this did not prevent the Figaro from 
 publishing one morning, in a most conspicu- 
 ous place, apropos of a theatrical piece of 
 M. de Saint Remy (the name with which the 
 Duke signed his literary efforts), an article 
 written by Henri Rochefort, as corrosive and 
 biting as any acid, painful and irritating as a 
 hundred needles forgotten in an arm-chair. 
 
 " What spite has this Rochefort against me ? 
 I have never done him any harm ! " said the 
 Duke with that artless vanity from which 
 even the wiliest of statesmen are not always 
 exempt, once they have put pen to paper ; 
 
4-0 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 and Villemessant putting on a contrite air, 
 exclaimed, 
 
 " This is shocking ! Had I been there, such 
 an article would never have been allowed to go 
 to press. You see how grieved I am. But that 
 day as luck would have it I never went 
 near the office. The scoundrels have taken 
 advantage of my absence. I never even saw 
 the proofs." % 
 
 The Duke might think what he pleased 
 of this apology, but the article made a sen- 
 sation. People eagerly read it, and bought it. 
 Villemessant did not wish for anything better. 
 
 It is easy to see by the above anecdote 
 (and this was the basis of the unity of this 
 nature, in appearance so diverse and con- 
 tradictory,) that Villemessant was above all 
 devoted, body and soul, to his paper. After 
 the first cautious experiments of debut, after 
 a few broadsides, fired somewhat at hap- 
 hazard, hither and thither, after trying every 
 point of the compass, once the right^ road 
 found, he travelled undeviatingly along it, 
 never for a moment allowing himself to be 
 diverted from his course. His newspaper 
 had become his life. 
 
Villemessant. 
 
 4i 
 
 The man and his work resembled each 
 other, and no one, it may well be said, was 
 ever more exactly fitted for the measure of 
 his destiny. Wonderfully active, energetic, 
 restless, overwhelming others by his huge 
 presence ; temperate too, as was then the 
 
 'V_ 
 
 fashion (incredible as this may appear to the 
 present generation) ; never drinking, nor 
 smoking, fearing neither arguments, blows, 
 nor adventures, unscrupulous at heart, always 
 ready to throw overboard any prejudices, and 
 never having had any sincere political creed, 
 
42 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 he was yet fond of displaying a Platonic and 
 respectable legitimist attachment, as being 
 that which he considered the best style. 
 Villemessant was indeed the captain fitted to 
 command the daring pirate craft, which for 
 twenty years, under cover of the royal lily- 
 sprinkled flag, sailed chiefly on its own account. 
 He was tyrannical and capricious, but be- 
 neath the surface it was the interest of his 
 paper which always ruled the why and where- 
 fore of this tyranny and caprice. In the year 
 of grace 1858, we may see him at the Cafe 
 des Varietes, or the Cafe Veron, on a Thurs- 
 day morning at about eleven o'clock. The 
 Figaro has just appeared. Villemessant is 
 breakfasting. He gossips, relates anecdotes, 
 which he will introduce into the next issue if 
 they are laughed at ; and will forget imme- 
 diately, if they fall flat. He listens, and asks 
 questions. " What do you think of So and 
 Sds article ? Charming. Clever, is it not ? 
 Wonderfully talented ! " Villemessant returns 
 beaming to the ofhce. " Where is So and So ? 
 Tell him to come to me ! Wonderfully 
 talented ! There is no one like him ! All 
 Paris is talking of his article." 
 
Villemessant, 43 
 
 And then So and So is congratulated, made 
 much of, and his salary raised. Four days 
 later, at the same table the same guest pro- 
 nounces the same So and So's article to be 
 tedious, and Villemessant hurries up again to 
 the office, no longer beaming, but furiously 
 angry ; and this time, instead of increasing the 
 pay, settles and closes the account. 
 
 No doubt it was one of these post-prandial 
 consultations that brought about the scene 
 between Villemessant and Paul d'lvoy, which 
 so scandalized my youthful ingenuousness. 
 
 A writer more or less mattered little to 
 Villemessant ! 
 
 When one was dismissed, another was 
 easily found, and the latest comer was always 
 the best. According to him every one has 
 an embryo article lying dormant in his brain, 
 and the only question is what shall call it 
 forth. Monselet has founded upon this a 
 delightful story. " Villemessant meets a 
 chimney-sweep in the street, carries him off 
 to the office of the Figaro, has him washed, 
 sets him down before some paper, and says 
 to him ' Write ' ! The sweep writes, and 
 the article is thought charming." Tis thus that 
 
44 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 " All Paris " that can wield the pen, whether 
 famous or unknown, has moved across the 
 pages of the Figaro. In this manner many 
 a worthy fellow, finding renewed in his 
 favour, the history of the Quatrain of St. 
 Aulaire, has had, owing to a happy inspira- 
 tion of some fifteen lines, his brief moment 
 of celebrity. If the miracle was not repeated, 
 these ephemeral writers were pronounced 
 "used up"! and "used-up" by Villemes- 
 sant. I have known Paris quite filled with 
 the battalions of the used-up. Ingenuous 
 epoch ! when fifteen lines was supposed to 
 have "used one up." 
 
 Not that Villemessant despised literature, 
 on the contrary ! Only slightly educated him- 
 self, he felt for those who wrote well, and 
 with command of language (it is one of his 
 own expressions), the respect the peasant feels 
 for the Latin of his priest. But he also felt 
 instinctively, and not without reason, that 
 these matters of style pertained more te> the 
 higher flights of literature. To supply his 
 needs, the lightest French pastry was better 
 suited than such heavy nourishment. He 
 said one day to Jouvin, before me, with the 
 
Villemessant. 
 
 45 
 
 cynical frankness which was only excused 
 by his bluntness, 
 
 " You polish your writings ; they are those of 
 a well read man ; every one says so. Clever, 
 learned, admirably well written, and I print 
 them. Well, in my paper, no one reads them." 
 
 " No one reads them, indeed ! " 
 
 "Will you make a bet? Daudet is here, 
 and can be witness. I will print Cambronne's 
 famous word in the very middle of one of 
 your choicest pieces, and I will lose the bet 
 if any one finds it out ! " 
 
 Truth compels me to say that Jouvin did 
 not care to risk the bet. 
 
MY FIRST DRESS COAT. 
 
 How did I come by it, that first dress coat ? 
 What primitive tailor, what confiding trades- 
 man was it, trustful as Don Juan's famous 
 Monsieur Dimanche, who upon the faith of 
 my fantastic promises, decided one fine 
 morning on bringing it to me, brand new, and 
 artistically pinned up in a square of shiny 
 green calico ? It would be difficult for me 
 to tell. Of the honest tailor, I can indeed 
 recall nothing so many tailors have since 
 
My First Dress Coat. 47 
 
 then crossed my path save perhaps a vision 
 as in a luminous mist, of a thoughtful brow 
 and a large moustache. The coat indeed 
 is there, before my eyes. Its image after 
 twenty years still remains indelibly graven on 
 my memory, as on imperishable brass. What 
 a collar, my young friends ! What lappels ! 
 And, above all, what skirts, shaped as the 
 slimmest tail of the swallow ! My brother, a 
 man of experience, had said : " One must 
 have a dress coat if one wishes to make one's 
 way in the world." And the dear fellow 
 counted much upon this piece of frippery for 
 the advancement of my fame and fortune. 
 
 This, my first dress coat, made its 
 debut at Augustine Brohan's, and under 
 what circumstances worthy of being trans- 
 mitted to posterity, you shall now hear. 
 
 My little volume had just made its appear- 
 ance, fresh and virginal, in rose-tinted cover. 
 A few critics had noticed my rhymes. Even 
 V Official had printed my name. I was a 
 poet ; no longer hidden in a garret, but 
 printed, published and exposed for sale in 
 the shop windows. I was astonished that 
 the busy folk in the streets did not turn 
 
48 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 round to look at me, as my eighteen years 
 wandered along the pavement. I positively 
 felt upon my forehead the pleasant pressure 
 of a paper crown, made up of flattering 
 paragraphs culled from the papers. 
 
 One day some one proposed to get me an 
 invitation to Augustine Brohan's soirees. 
 Who ? some one. Some one, egad ! You 
 know him already : that eternal some one, 
 who is like every one else, that amiable 
 institution of Providence, who, of no personal 
 value in himself and a mere aquaintance in 
 the houses he frequents, yet goes everywhere, 
 introduces you everywhere, is the friend of a 
 day, of an hour, of whose name even you are 
 ignorant, that essentially Parisian type. 
 
 You may imagine with what enthusiasm I 
 accepted the proposal ! To be invited to 
 Augustine's house ! Augustine, the famous 
 actress, Augustine, the laughing representative 
 of Moliere's comic muse, softened somewhat 
 by the more modern poetic smile of Musset's 
 genius; for while she acted the -waiting 
 maids at the Theatre Francais, Musset had 
 written his comedy Louison at her house ; 
 Augustine Brohan in short, in whom all 
 
My First Dress Coat. 
 
 49 
 
 Paris delighted, vaunting her wit, quoting her 
 repartees ; and who might already be said 
 to have adorned herself with that swallow's 
 plume, unsullied yet by ink, but already well 
 sharpened, with which she was hereafter to 
 sign those charming Lettres de Suzanne ! 
 " Lucky dog ! " said my brother, helping me 
 
 on with the coat : 
 
 your 
 
 fortune is made." 
 
 Nine o'clock was 
 striking as I sallied 
 forth. 
 
 At that time Augus- 
 tine Brohan was living 
 in the rue Lord Byron, 
 at the top of the 
 Champs Elysees, in 
 one of those pretty 
 coquettish little houses which seem to 
 ignorant provincials the realization of the 
 poetical dreams which they weave for them- 
 selves from the pages of the novelist. A 
 railing, a tiny garden, four steps covered by 
 an awning, an entrance hall filled with flowers, 
 and then opening immediately from it, the 
 drawing-room, a brilliantly lighted room in 
 
5 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 green, which I can see now vividly before 
 me. 
 
 How I managed to get up those steps, how 
 I made my entry, and how I presented my- 
 self, I cannot now remember. A footman 
 announced my name, but this name, which 
 
 he mumbled, produced no effect on the 
 brilliant assembly. I can only recollect hear- 
 ing a woman's voice say : " So much the 
 better, here is another dancer." It appears 
 they were short of dancers ; but what an 
 entry for a poet ! 
 
My First Dress Coat 51 
 
 Startled and humiliated, I tried to lose my- 
 self among the crowd. How can I describe 
 my dismay, when, a moment later, another 
 mistake arose? My long hair, my dark 
 and sombre looks excited general curiosity. 
 I heard them whispering near me : " Who is 
 it ? Do look," and they laughed. At last 
 some one said, 
 
 " It is the Wallachian Prince ! " 
 
 " The Wallachian Prince ? Oh yes, very 
 likely." 
 
 I suppose that a Wallachian Prince had 
 been expected that evening. My rank being 
 thus settled for me, I was left in peace. But 
 for all that, you cannot imagine how heavily 
 my usurped crown weighed upon me all that 
 evening. First a dancing man ! then a 
 Wallachian Prince ! Could not these good 
 people see my lyre ? 
 
 Fortunately for me, a startling piece of news, 
 flying from mouth to mouth, spread rapidly 
 through the ballroom, casting into oblivion 
 both the dancer and the Wallachian Prince. 
 Marriage was at that time much the fashion 
 among the feminine portion of the Comedie 
 Company, and it was generally at Augustine 
 
5 2 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Brohans' Wednesday receptions, where all the 
 choicest talents of journalism, together with 
 bankers and high government officials gathered 
 round the lovely members or associates of the 
 Francais, that the foundations were laid of 
 most of these romantic unions. 
 
 Mdlle. Fix, the witty actress, with her long 
 Hebrew eyes, was soon to marry a great finan- 
 cier and die in childbirth. Mdlle. Figeac, 
 Catholic and romantic, was already dreaming 
 of the future day when a priest would solemnly 
 bless her immense shop on the Boulevard 
 Haussmann, just as if it were a vessel about 
 to be launched. Emilie Dubois, the fair Emilie 
 herself, although destined by the delicate 
 style of her beauty to the perpetual repre- 
 sentation of artless maidens, had visions of 
 orange blossoms from behind the protecting 
 shelter of her mother's shawl. As for 
 Madeleine Brohan, the handsome and ma- 
 jestic sister of Augustine, she was not marry- 
 ing, but was unmarrying just then ; thereby 
 giving Mario Uchard time and m'oney to 
 devote himself to the four acts of his 
 Fiammina. What an explosion was therefore 
 caused in that circle so highly charged with 
 
My First Dress Coat. 53 
 
 matrimonial electricity, when this news 
 spread : " Gustave Fould has married 
 Valerie." Gustave Fould, the minister's 
 son ! Valerie the charming actress ! Now, 
 all this seems very far off. After a 
 flight to England, after letters in the papers 
 and pamphlets written, after waging a war in 
 Mirabeau's style against a father as inexor- 
 able as the " people's friend j " after the most 
 romantic of romances, ending up in the most 
 prosaic fashion, Gustave Fould, following, in 
 that, Mario Uchard's example, wrote the 
 Comtesse Romania and eloquently displayed 
 the history of his misfortunes on the stage. 
 Mdlle. Valerie laid aside her married name, 
 and signed, under the pseudonym of Gustave 
 Haller, volumes entitled Vertu, with a lovely 
 picture on the palest of blue covers. So 
 the passionate language of love calmed down 
 in an ocean of literature ! But what endless 
 gossip, what emotion it created that evening 
 in Augustine's green drawing-room ! The 
 men, the officials, shook their heads, and with 
 mouths round with astonishment, said, 
 " Oh ! This is very serious, very 
 serious ! " One overheard the following 
 
54 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 broken sentences. " Everything is going to 
 the dogs." " Respect has died out." 
 " The Emperor ought to interfere." " Sacred 
 rights." "Paternal authority." The women 
 on their side openly and gaily stood up in 
 defence of the two lovers who had fled to 
 London. "Well, if they are fond of each 
 other!" "Why should not the father 
 consent ? " " He is a minister, but what 
 of that?" "Since the Revolution, thank 
 God, there is no longer a Bastille or a Fort- 
 l'Eveque ! " Picture to yourself all these 
 people talking at the same time, and rising 
 brilliant above the noisy hubbub, like a 
 thread of gold on a piece of embroidery, the 
 clear ringing laugh of Augustine, her full 
 prominent eyes (those pretty short-sighted 
 eyes) gleaming with fun, and the whole of her 
 little plump figure the very embodiment of 
 mirth. 
 
 At last comparative calm was restored and 
 the quadrilles began. I danced. I was 
 obliged to do so ! I danced moreover -some- 
 what badly for a Wallachian Prince. The 
 quadrille once ended, I became stationary ; 
 foolishly held back by my short sight too 
 
My First Dress Coat. 55 
 
 shy to sport an eyeglass, too much of a poet 
 to wear spectacles, and dreading lest, at the 
 slightest movement, I should bruise my knee 
 against the corner of some piece of furniture, 
 or plunge my nose into the trimming of a 
 bodice. Soon hunger and thirst interfered 
 in the matter ; but for a kingdom I should 
 never have dared to approach the buffet with 
 all the rest of the world. I anxiously watched 
 for the moment when it should be deserted ; 
 and while waiting, I joined the groups of 
 political talkers, assuming a serious air, and 
 feigning to scorn the charms of the smaller 
 salon, whence came to me, with the pleasant 
 sound of laughter and the tinkling of teaspoons 
 against the porcelain, a delicate aroma of 
 scented tea, of Spanish wines and cakes. At 
 last they came back to dance, and I gathered 
 up my courage. I entered, I was alone. 
 
 What a dazzling sight was that buffet ! A 
 crystal pyramid under the blaze of the candles, 
 brilliant with glasses and decanters, white and 
 glittering as snow in sunshine ! I took up a 
 glass as fragile as a flower, careful not to hold 
 it too tightly lest I should break the stem. 
 What should I pour into it? Come now, 
 
56 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 courage, I say to myself, since no one can see 
 
 me. I stretched out my hand, and took at 
 
 haphazard a decanter. It must be kirsch, I 
 
 thought, from its diamond clearness. Well, 
 
 I'll try a glass of kirsch ; I like its perfume, 
 
 its bitter and wild perfume that reminds me 
 
 of the forest ! And so, like an epicure, I 
 
 slowly poured out, drop by drop, the 
 
 beautiful clear liquid. I raised 
 
 the glass to my lips. Oh, 
 
 horror ! it was only water. What 
 
 a grimace I made ! Suddenly 
 
 a duet of laughter resounded 
 
 from a black coat and a pink 
 
 dress that I had not perceived 
 
 ," flirting in a corner, and who 
 
 were amused at my mistake. 
 
 I endeavoured to replace my glass, but 
 
 I was nervous, my hand shook, and my sleeve 
 
 caught I know not what. One glass, two 
 
 glasses, three glasses fell ! I turned round, my 
 
 wretched coat tails swept a wild circle, and 
 
 the white pyramid crashed to the ground, 
 
 with all the sparkling, splintering, flashing 
 
 uproar of an iceberg breaking to pieces. 
 
 At the noise of the catastrophe the mistress 
 
My First Dress Coat. 
 
 57 
 
 of the house rushes up. Luckily, she is as 
 short-sighted as the Wallachian Prince, and 
 he is able to escape from the buffet without 
 being recognized. All .the same, my evening 
 
 is spoilt. The massacre of small glasses and 
 decanters weighs on my mind like a crime. 
 My one idea is to get away. But the Dubois 
 mamma, dazzled by my principality, catches 
 
58 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 hold of me, and will not allow me to leave 
 till I have danced with her daughter, or indeed 
 with both her daughters. I excuse myself as 
 best I can j I escape from her, and am stealing 
 away, when a tall old man, with a shrewd 
 smile, stopped my egress. It is Doctor 
 Ricord, with whom I had exchanged a few 
 words previously and who like the others, takes 
 me for the Wallachian. " But, Prince, as you 
 are inhabiting the Hotel du Senat, and as we 
 are near neighbours, pray wait for me, I can 
 offer you a seat in my carriage." How will- 
 ingly would I accept, but I have no overcoat. 
 What would Ricord think of a Wallachian 
 Prince without furs, and shivering in his dress 
 coat? Let me escape quickly, and hurry 
 home on foot, through the snow and fog, 
 sooner than allow my poverty to be seen. 
 Always half blind and more confused than 
 ever, I reach the door and slip out, not how- 
 ever without getting somehow entangled in 
 the tapestries. " Won't Monsieur take his 
 coat ? " a footman calls after me. 
 
 There I was, at two o'clock in the morning, 
 far from my home, alone in the streets, hungry 
 and frozen, with the devil's own self, a badly 
 
My First Dress Coat. 59 
 
 lined purse, in my pocket. But hunger 
 inspired me with a brilliant idea : " Suppose 
 I go to the markets ! " I had often heard of 
 the markets, and of a certain Gaidras, whose 
 establishment remained open all night, and 
 where for the sum of three sous they provided 
 a plateful of succulent cabbage soup. By 
 Jove, yes, to the markets I would go. I 
 would sit down at those tables like the veriest 
 prowling vagabond. All my pride had van- 
 ished. The wind is icy cold ; hunger makes 
 me desperate. " My kingdom for a horse," 
 said another prince, and I say to myself as I 
 trot along : " My principality, my Wallachian 
 principality, for a basin of good soup in a 
 w 7 arm corner, 
 
 Gaidras' establishment looks a mere filthy 
 hovel, all slimy and badly lighted, thrust back 
 beneath the colonnades of the old market 
 place. Often and often since then, when 
 noctambulism was the fashion, have we future 
 great men spent whole nights there, elbows 
 on table, amidst tobacco smoke and literary 
 talk. But at first I must own, notwithstanding 
 my hunger, I almost drew back at the sight 
 of those blackened dingy walls, that dense 
 
6o 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 smoke, those late sitters, snoring with their 
 backs against the wall or lapping up their soup 
 like dogs ; the amazing caps of the Don Juans 
 of the gutter, the enormous drab felt hats of 
 
 the market porters, and the healthy rough 
 blouse of the market gardener side by side 
 with the greasy tatters of the prowler of the 
 night. Nevertheless I entered, and I may at 
 once add that my black coat found its fellows. 
 
My First Dress Coat. 
 
 61 
 
 Black coats that own no great coat are not 
 rare in Paris after midnight in the winter, and 
 they are hungry enough to eat three sous' 
 
 worth of cabbage soup ! The cabbage soup 
 was however exquisite ; full of perfume as a 
 garden, and smoking like a crater. I had two 
 helpings, although a custom peculiar to the 
 
62 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 establishment inspired by a wholesome 
 distrust of fastening the forks and spoons 
 with a chain to the table, hindered me a little. 
 I paid, and fortified by the substantial mess, 
 resumed my way to the Quartier Latin. 
 
 What a picture that return home ! The 
 return of the poet, trotting up the rue de 
 Tournon, with his coat collar turned up, 
 while dancing before his sleepy eyes are the 
 elegant shadows of a fashionable evening 
 party mingling with the famished spectres of 
 the market-place. He stands knocking his 
 boots against the kerbstone of the Hotel du 
 Se'nat, to shake off the snow, while opposite, 
 the bright lamps of a brougham light up the 
 front of an old mansion, and Doctor Ricord's 
 coachman cries out : " Gate, if you please." 
 Life in Paris is made up of these contrasts. 
 
 " A wasted evening ! " said my brother, the 
 next morning. "You have been taken for a 
 Wallachian Prince, and have not succeeded 
 in launching your book. But all is not yet 
 lost ; you must make up for it when you 
 make your ' digestion call ! ' as we say in 
 Paris." 
 
 The digestion of a glass of water, what 
 
My First Dress Coat. 63 
 
 irony ! It was quite two months before I 
 made up my mind to pay that call. How- 
 ever one day I summoned up courage. 
 Besides her official receptions on Wednes- 
 days, Augustine Brohan received more un- 
 ceremoniously on Sunday afternoon. I 
 resolutely started off. 
 
 In Paris a matinee that respects itself can- 
 not decently begin till three or even four 
 o'clock in the afternoon. I, poor unsophisti- 
 cated mortal, taking the word matifiee literally, 
 arrived there at one o'clock, and thought my- 
 self already late. 
 
 " How early you come, sir ! " said a fair- 
 haired little boy of five or six years of age, who, 
 dressed in an embroidered velvet suit, was 
 riding a mechanical toy horse through the 
 fresh spring greenery of the garden. The 
 young man impressed me ! I bowed to the 
 fair curls, the horse, the velvet, the embroid- 
 eries, and too bashful to retrace my steps, I 
 went in. Madame was not yet dressed, and 
 I waited all alone for half an hour. At last 
 Madame made her appearance ; screwing up 
 her eyes she recognized her Wallachian 
 Prince ; then by way of beginning the 
 
64 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 conversation, she said : " You are not at 
 La Marche, Prince?" At La Marche, I, 
 who had never seen a race nor a jockey ! 
 
 Really I felt too much ashamed ! a sudden 
 throb rose from my heart to my brain ; and 
 then the bright sun, the sweet perfume of 
 spring wafted from the garden through the 
 open casement, the absence of all ceremon y, 
 the smiling and kind-hearted little woman, all 
 combined to encourage me, and I poured 
 forth my whole heart. I told her all con- 
 fessing everything : how I was neither a 
 Wallachian, nor a Prince, but a simple poet ; 
 and the adventure of my glass of kirsch, and 
 my supper at the markets, and my wretched 
 return home, and my provincial timidity, and 
 my short sight, and my aspirations all sea- 
 soned by the accent of my southern province. 
 Augustine Brohan laughed heartily. Sud- 
 denly a bell rang. 
 
 " Ah ! my dragoons," she exclaimed. 
 
 ' ; What dragoons? " 
 
 "Two dragoons they are sending me from 
 the camp at Chalons, and who, it appears, 
 have a wonderful taste for acting." 
 
 I wished to take leave. 
 
My First Dress Coat. 65 
 
 " No, no, stay; we are going to rehearse 
 Lait d'dnesse, and you shall help me with 
 your criticisms. Sit down by me on the 
 sofa ! " 
 
 Two huge fellows came in, shy, awkward, 
 tightly belted, purple in the face (one of them 
 acts somewhere at the present day). A fold- 
 ing screen is arranged, I settle myself, and the 
 representation begins. 
 
 " They do not act so badly," said Augustine 
 Brohan in a low tone, " but what boots ! My 
 dear critic, do you smell those boots ? " 
 
 To be on these intimate terms with the 
 wittiest actress in Paris raised me to the 
 seventh heaven. I threw myself back on the 
 sofa, nodding my head and smiling in a capa- 
 ble manner. I was positively intoxicated 
 with delight. 
 
 Even now I can recall the smallest details 
 of that interview. But see how all depends 
 upon our point of view. I had told Sarcey 
 the comical story of my first appearance in 
 society, and one day Sarcey repeated it to 
 Augustine Brohan. Well the ungrateful 
 Augustine whom, it is true, I have not seen 
 for thirty years swore most sincerely that 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 she knew nothing of me but my books. She 
 had forgotten everything ! Everything all 
 that had played such an important part in my 
 life the broken glasses, the Wallachian Prince, 
 the rehearsal of Lait d'anesse, and the boots 
 of the heavy dragoons. 
 
THE STORY OF MY BOOKS. 
 
 " LE PETIT CHOSE." 
 
 {"Little Whafs His Name.") 
 
 No other book of mine has ever been written 
 under such capricious and varying conditions. 
 Without plan or notes, it was a frenzied, 
 hurried improvisation dashed down on coarse 
 whitey-brown paper, on which my pen 
 stumbled as it raced along, and which, once 
 
68 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 scribbled over, I threw impetuously on to the 
 floor. All this took place some two hundred 
 leagues from Paris, between Beaucaire and 
 Nismes, in a large, lonely, far-away country 
 house, that some relatives had kindly placed 
 
 V*^ 
 
 at my disposal during the few winter months 
 I had come thither in search of the 'closing 
 scenes of a drama that I could by no means 
 bring satisfactorily to its climax ; but the 
 melancholy quiet of the great plains, the 
 
Little Whafs His Name. 
 
 6 9 
 
 groves of mulberry and olive trees, and the 
 vines undulating down to the Rhone, in short, 
 the gloom of this retreat in the midst of nature 
 was out of harmony with the conventional 
 forms of a theatrical composition. Probably 
 
 also, the country air, the mistral sweeping 
 across the sun, the neighbourhood of the 
 town where I was born, the names of the little 
 villages, where as a boy, I used to play, 
 Bezouces, Redessan, Jonquieres, stirred up 
 within me, a whole world of old memories, 
 
70 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 and soon I abandoned my drama, in order to 
 write a kind of autobiography Le Petit 
 Chose the story of a child. 
 
 Begun during the first days of February, 
 1866, this headlong work was carried on with- 
 out a break till the second fortnight in March. 
 Nowhere else, at no other time of my life, not 
 even, when a caprice for silence and solitude 
 led me to shut myself up in a lighthouse, have 
 I lived so completely isolated. The house 
 was far from the road, surrounded by fields ; 
 apart even from the farm belonging to it, 
 the noises of which never reached me. Twice in 
 the day, the wife of the bailo (farmer) spread 
 my meal, at the end of a vast dining-room, all 
 the windows of which, with one exception, 
 had closed shutters. This stuttering Proven- 
 9ale, dark complexioned, with a nose flattened 
 like that of a Kafir, could not make out what 
 strange task had sent me into the country in 
 midwinter, and held me in suspicious terror, 
 setting down the dishes in haste, leaving me 
 without uttering a word, avoiding even a 
 glance in my direction. It was the only face 
 I saw during that hermit-like existence, the 
 monotony of which was only broken by a 
 
Little Whafs His Name. 71 
 
 stroll in the evening through the avenue of 
 tall plane trees, standing bare amid the plain- 
 tive sighing of the wind, and the sadness of 
 the cold red winter sunset, which, rapidly 
 fading, was greeted by a discordant clamour 
 of frogs. Directly I had finished my book, I 
 set to work on that laborious business, the 
 second copy. It was contrary to my whole 
 nature of Improvisatore, of Troubadour : and 
 I was attacking it with all my courage, when 
 one morning, the voice of the bailesse, hailed 
 me loudly in the local dialect: " Moussu, 
 moussu, vaqui an homo!" Sir, sir, here is 
 a man ! " The man was a Parisian, a 
 newspaper reporter, sent down to some 
 agricultural show near there, and who, know- 
 ing I was somewhere in the neighbourhood, 
 came to see me. He breakfasted with me ; 
 we gossipped about the news, the papers, the 
 boulevards. The Paris fever seized me, and 
 in the evening I started off with my intruding 
 guest. 
 
 This abrupt relinquishment of my labour, 
 the suddenness with which I forsook my 
 work, just as it was taking form, gives an 
 exact idea of my life at that time, influenced 
 
7 2 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 by every passing fancy, full of fitful impulse, 
 whim more than will, following only the 
 caprice of the moment, and the blind fancy 
 of a youth that threatened to be endless. 
 On my return to Paris, I left rny manuscript 
 to grow yellow for many a day at the bottom 
 of a drawer, not being able to find in my 
 broken-up existence, the necessary time for 
 a more lengthy task ; but the following 
 winter, pursued by the thought of this book, 
 I took the violent resolution of withdrawing 
 myself from everything that could possibly 
 divert me from my work, from the noisy 
 irruptions, which at that time, turned my 
 defenceless dwelling into a regular gipsy 
 camp, and I settled myself in a friend's 
 apartment in that small room which Jean 
 Duboys then occupied on the entresol of the 
 Hotel Lassus, Place de l'Odeon. 
 
 Jean Duboys, to whom his plays and novels 
 lent a certain celebrity, was a kind, good 
 creature, gentle and timid, with the confiding 
 smile of a child beaming over a Robinson 
 Crusoe style of beard, a hirsute, unkempt 
 beard that did not seem to belong to his 
 face. His writing was wanting in style, but I 
 
Little Whafs His Name. 73 
 
 appreciated his good-nature, I admired the 
 courage with which he devoted himself to 
 interminably long novels, arranged beforehand 
 in given lengths, of which he wrote each day 
 so many words, lines and pages. At last a 
 play of his entitled : La Volonte, was 
 produced at the Come'die Francaise, and 
 although set forth in execrable verse, I, who 
 was so devoid of will myself, was impressed 
 by it. I had therefore come to place myself 
 under his influence, hoping to gain a love of 
 work from the constant example of this inde- 
 fatigable toiler. 
 
 The fact is that for two or three months I 
 fagged away, seated at a little table next to 
 his, under the light of a low arched window, 
 which framed, as in a picture, the Odeon 
 and its portico, and the deserted square, all 
 glittering with hoar frost. From time to 
 time Duboys, who was working at a great 
 sensational novel, would interrupt himself to 
 relate to me the combination of incidents in 
 his book, or to develop his theories on the 
 evolution of the human species. In the 
 mind of this methodical and quiet bureaucrat 
 there ran a vein of visionary mysticism, just 
 
74 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 as, in his library, there was a shelf devoted 
 to the Kabbalah, the black arts, the most 
 whimsical lucubrations. Later on, the flaw 
 in his brain deepened, insanity ensued, and 
 poor Jean Duboys died mad at the close of 
 the siege, without having finished his great 
 philosophical poem Enceldonne^ wherein 
 all humanity was to revolve around a central 
 axis. But who then, would have suspected 
 the sad destiny of this excellent fellow, so 
 quiet and sensible, whom I watched enviously, 
 while he covered with his neat writing, page 
 after page of a novel for some trumpery 
 paper, looking up now and then at the clock, 
 in order to ascertain if he had finished his 
 task. ? 
 
 There was a hard frost that winter, and, 
 notwithstanding the scuttles full of coal 
 swallowed up by the grate, we often saw, dur- 
 ing those laborious night vigils so indefinitely 
 prolonged, the rime throwing over the window 
 panes a veil of fantastic tracery. Outside, 
 chill shadows wandered through the opaque 
 mist that filled the square : it was the audience 
 leaving the Odeon, or the students who were 
 making their way to Bullier, shouting as they 
 
Little What's His Name. 75 
 
 went along, in the exuberance of their spirits. 
 On the evenings of the masked balls, the 
 narrow stairs of the hotel shook beneath the 
 mad rushes of hurrying footsteps, accom- 
 panied by the constant tinkle of the jester's 
 bells. Far on in the night the same fool's 
 cap and bells pursued its mad career of folly 
 on its homeward road, and often, when the 
 hotel waiters, sleeping too soundly, were slow 
 to open, I heard the ringing of the little bells 
 before the door diminishing in force as the 
 wearer became disheartened, and reminding 
 me of Edgar Poe's Cask of Amontillado, 
 where the unhappy walled-up wretch, weary 
 of supplication and screaming, only betrays 
 his presence by the last convulsive movement 
 of his fool's cap. I still retain a delightful 
 remembrance of the winter evenings during 
 which I wrote the first part of Le Petit 
 Chose. The second part was written very 
 much later. In the interval between the two 
 parts an unexpected, serious and decisive 
 event took place. I married ! How did 
 that happen ? To what magic art did such 
 a wild gipsy as I was then fall a victim ? 
 What spell was cast over me ? What charm 
 
76 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 was strong enough to bind fast my once ever- 
 changing caprice ? 
 
 For several months the manuscript was 
 again abandoned, forgotten at the bottom of 
 a wedding trunk, spread out on hotel tables 
 in front of an arid ink-stand and a dried-up 
 pen. It was so delicious under the pine 
 trees of the Esterel ; it was so pleasant to fish 
 for sea-urchins off the rocks of Pormieu ! 
 Then settling the little household, and the 
 novelty of home life, the nest to be built 
 and adorned, all were excellent pretexts for 
 idleness. 
 
 It was only the following summer, under 
 the shadow of the big trees of the Chateau 
 de Vigneux, whose flat Italian roofs and 
 tall shrubberies extend towards the plains of 
 Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, that I resumed my 
 interminable novel. Six exquisite months, 
 far from Paris at that time thrown into 
 confusion by the Exhibition (which I refused 
 even to look at) of 1867. 
 
 I wrote Le Petit Chose some'times 
 seated on a mossy bank at the end of the 
 park, where the gambols of the rabbits and 
 the gliding of the adders through the heather 
 
Little Whafs His Name. 
 
 77 
 
 alone disturbed me : or in the boat on the pond, 
 which shimmered with every colour of the 
 prism, reflected from the glory of the summer 
 sky ; or else, on the rainy days, in our room, 
 while my wife played Chopin to me, music 
 that I cannot even now listen to without 
 recalling the 
 dripping of 
 
 the rain- 
 drops on the 
 green sea of 
 elm trees, 
 the harsh 
 scream of 
 
 the pea- 
 cocks, the 
 call of the 
 
 pheasant, 
 
 mingled 
 with the perfume of the trees in flower and 
 the smell of the damp woods. 
 
 At last, in autumn, the book was finished, 
 appeared first in numbers, in Paul 
 Dalloz's Petit Moniteur, was afterwards 
 published by Hetzel, and met with some 
 success, notwithstanding all its defects. 
 
 Oi'-l 
 
78 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 I have mentioned in what manner this 
 first work of any length had been under- 
 taken, thoughtlessly, and at random ; but its 
 most serious fault was, that I wrote it too soon. 
 One is not sufficently matured at five and 
 twenty, to be able to look back upon, and 
 annotate one's own life : and Le Petit Chose, 
 especially the first part, is in reality, but an 
 echo of my own childhood and youth. 
 
 Later on, I should have had less fear of 
 dwelling too much upon childish trifles, and 
 I should have given fuller play to the dis- 
 tant recollections in which lie those first im- 
 pressions which are so vivid and so deep, 
 that all that comes after, renews but never 
 surpasses them. In the ever-increasing 
 movement of life, in the perpetual flow of 
 days and years, facts are lost, fade away and 
 disappear, but the past stands out, clear and 
 bright, bathed in the light of the breaking 
 dawn. We may forget a recent date, a face 
 seen but yesterday, but we ever remember 
 the pattern on the walls of our childhood's 
 nursery, and a name or a lullaby of the time 
 when we could not read. How far back can 
 memory reach into those past times ! I can 
 
Little What's His Name. 79 
 
 remember, for instance, when I was three 
 years old, a display of fireworks at Nismes, 
 given in honour of some Saint Louis or 
 another, and which I saw, carried in arms, 
 from a hill top covered with pines. The 
 minutest details are even now present to my 
 mind the sighing of the night wind, no 
 doubt my first night in the open air, the 
 noisy delight of the crowd, the " ah ! " rising 
 and swelling, bursting forth with each fresh 
 rocket, and the Catherine wheels shedding a 
 pallid and spectral light on the faces around 
 me. 
 
 Again, I see myself about the same time, 
 standing on a chair in the small clerical school 
 in front of a blackboard, chalking my ABC, 
 all proud of my precocious knowledge. What 
 memories, and sensations, what sounds and 
 perfumes come back from those past days 
 as from another world, and yet among them 
 all, not the trace of an incident or an 
 emotion ! 
 
 At the further end of the manufactory 
 where Petit Chose spent his childhood, near 
 some forsaken buildings, the doors of which 
 beat to and fro in the solitary wind, there grew, 
 
80 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 out of doors, some tall pink oleanders, dif- 
 fusing around them a bitter-sweet scent, 
 which haunts me still, even after forty years. 
 I should wish for a little more of that same 
 scent in the first pages of my book. 
 
 Too brief also, are the chapters on Lyons, 
 where I have neglected many vivid and valu- 
 able sensations. Not that my childish eyes 
 could have comprehended the originality and 
 grandeur of that industrial and mystical town, 
 with the ever-present mists rising from its 
 rivers, penetrating its walls and its people, 
 and permeating even the works of its writers 
 and artists : Ballanche, Flandrin, deLaprade, 
 Chenavard, Puvis de Chavannes. But if the 
 inner personality of the country escaped me, 
 I have, on the other hand, imperishable 
 memories, all of which found their place in 
 Le Petit Chose, of the enormous working hive 
 of the Croix- Rousse, buzzing with the sound 
 of its hundred thousand looms : and, on the 
 rising ground opposite, Fourvieres, proces- 
 sions streaming through its narrow streets, 
 lined on each side with religious wares, and 
 stalls full of relics j and resounding with con- 
 tinual pealing and chiming. 
 
Little What's His Name. 81 
 
 What I always find faithfully represented 
 is the ennui, the feeling of exile, the sufferings 
 of a southern family lost and enveloped in 
 the foggy atmosphere of Lyons that change 
 from one province to another, the difference 
 of climate, customs, language; that mental 
 distance, never entirely obliterated by facili- 
 ties of communication. I was ten years of 
 age, and already sometimes tormented by 
 the desire to lose my own personality, to 
 incarnate myself in other beings : the mania 
 for observation and analysis was already 
 laying hold of me. My chief amusement 
 during my walks was to pick out some passer- 
 by, to follow him through Lyons, through all 
 his idle strolling or busy occupations, striving 
 to identify myself with his life, and to enter 
 into his innermost thoughts. 
 
 One day however, when I had thus fol- 
 lowed a gorgeous female in brilliant attire to 
 the door of a small house with closed shutters, 
 from the ground-floor of which arose a sound 
 of discordant voices, accompanied by the 
 harp, my parents, to whom I expressed my 
 surprise, forbade my wandering studies and 
 observations of life. 
 
82 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 But how came I, while recording the dif- 
 ferent stages of my youth, to pass by without a 
 word the various religious crises which 
 stirred Le Petit Chose so painfully : and the 
 rebellion of his spirit against the irrational 
 mysteries he was bound to believe rebellions 
 quickly followed by remorse and despair, 
 prostrating the child on his knees in dark 
 corners of lonely churches, into which he stole 
 furtively, ashamed and trembling at the idea 
 of being seen. And moreover why did I 
 leave the little man that appearance of gentle- 
 ness and good temper, without mentioning 
 the diabolic phase upon which he entered 
 towards his thirteenth year, inspired by a 
 sudden thirst for life and its enjoyments, an 
 impatient desire to tear himself away from 
 the withering sadness and tears that filled his 
 parental home, rendered day by day more 
 sombre by approaching ruin ? It was the out- 
 spring of a southern temperament, and an 
 imagination too much restrained. The deli- 
 cate and timid child became transformed 
 into a bold and violent spirit, ready for any 
 mad prank. He neglected school, and spent 
 his days on the river, amongst the crowd of 
 
Little Whats His Name. 
 
 83 
 
 steamboats, barges and tugs, rowing about in 
 the rain, a pipe between his teeth, a flask of 
 absinthe or brandy in his pocket, having end- 
 less hairbreadth escapes from the paddles of 
 a steamer, the collision of a collier, from the 
 swift current which bore him against the 
 
 piles of a bridge, or under a towing-rope, half 
 drowned, picked up again with broken head, 
 cuffed by the watermen, who were exasperated 
 by the awkwardness of this brat, too weak 
 for his oars \ and in the midst of all these 
 dangers, and blows, and fatigues, he felt a 
 
84 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 savage delight, a widening of his whole being, 
 and of the sombre horizon. Later on, a few 
 Co?ites du Lundi have given a sketch of these 
 momentous days, but how much better would 
 it have been placed in JJ Histoire dun 
 Enfant. 
 
 The naughty little Chose already possessed 
 a faculty that he has never lost the gift of 
 seeing and judging himself, of seizing himself 
 in the very act, in flagrante delicto, as if he 
 were perpetually accompanied by a ferocious 
 and formidable overseer. Not what is called 
 conscience, for our conscience scolds, preaches, 
 and, mixing itself up with our affairs, modifies 
 or arrests them. And then one can lull it to 
 sleep, that good, kind conscience, with easy 
 excuses or subterfuges ; whereas the witness 
 of whom I am speaking never grew weaker, 
 never mixed in one's life, and remained 
 simply on the watch. It was as an inner eye, 
 impassible, rigid, a cold and inert double, 
 who, during the most violent outbursts of 
 Petit Chose, quietly observed eve'rything, 
 and not till next day said "A word with you." 
 Read the chapter headed " He is dead ! 
 pray for him ! " It is a leaf out of my life, 
 
Little Whafs His Name. 85 
 
 absolutely true. It was exactly thus that we 
 learnt my brother's death, and I can still hear 
 ringing in my ears the poor father's cry, guess- 
 ing that his son was dead ; so heartrending, 
 so piteous, that first great cry of human grief 
 near to me in every sense, that all night 
 long, weeping and despairing, I found my- 
 self repeating. " He is dead," with the pa- 
 ternal intonation. In this manner was my 
 double revealed to me ; the implacable 
 witness, who in the midst of our mourning, 
 had noted, as at the theatre, the truth to 
 nature of that wail of anguish, and practised 
 it on my lips. I regret on reading over this 
 book to find nothing of this avowal, especially 
 in that first part, where the character of 
 Daniel Eyssette resembles me so much. 
 
 Yes, it is indeed myself, that little Chose, 
 obliged at sixteen years of age to gain his 
 daily bread at that horrible trade of usher, 
 and carrying it out far away in the provinces, 
 in a country of pits and furnaces, which sent 
 us rough little mountaineers, who insulted me 
 in the harsh and brutal dialect of the 
 Cevennes. A prey to all the persecutions 
 of these little monsters, surrounded by bigots, 
 
86 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 and coarse vulgar pedants who despised me, 
 I there suffered all the degrading humiliations 
 of poverty. 
 
 No other sympathy had I, in the melan- 
 choly of that prison, but that of the priest, 
 whom I have called " VAbbe Germane" and 
 the frightful little " Bamban" whose ludicrous 
 face, always covered with ink and mud, 
 rises up sadly before me while I write. 
 
 I remember yet another of my little pupils, 
 a delicate and refined nature, to whom I had 
 become much attached, and whose studies 
 I carefully encouraged, for the mere pleasure 
 of watching the development of his youthful 
 intelligence as one watches a bud opening in 
 the spring. Touched by the care I bestowed 
 upon him, the child had extracted a promise 
 that I should spend the holidays at his home 
 in the country. His parents would be so 
 happy to know me and thank me ! And, on 
 the day when the prizes were distributed, 
 after all his successes for which he was 
 greatly indebted to me my pupil came, 
 and taking me by the hand, prettily led me 
 up to his people ; father, mother and sisters, 
 all elegantly dressed, and busily occupied 
 
Little Whafs Bis Name. 87 
 
 putting his prizes into their waggonette. I must 
 have presented a somewhat dilapidated and 
 uninviting appearance in my shabby old 
 clothes, for the family hardly bestowed a 
 glance upon me, and the poor little fellow 
 went off with tears in his eyes, ashamed at 
 his own and my disappointment. Cruel and 
 humiliating moments, withering and dis- 
 honouring life ! I trembled with rage, in my 
 little attic under the roof, while the carriage 
 bore away the child, loaded with his wreaths, 
 and the vulgar folk who had wounded me in 
 such a contemptible manner. 
 
 How often, long after I had taken leave of 
 that prison house at Alais, did I not awake 
 in the middle of the night, bathed in tears, 
 dreaming that I was still there, a victimized 
 usher. Fortunately, this painful beginning of 
 life has not hardened me, and I do not curse 
 too roundly those wretched days, which 
 enabled me to bear more lightly the trials of 
 my literary novitiate and first struggling years 
 in Paris. Those were indeed hard times, of 
 which the story of little Chose gives but a 
 faint idea. 
 
 Moreover there is but little taken from 
 
88 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 real life in the second part of the book, 
 except my shoeless arrival, my blue socks, 
 my goloshes, and the brotherly welcome, the 
 ingenious devotion of that " Mother Jacques" 
 whose real name is Ernest Daudet, the one 
 bright figure of my childhood, and my youth. 
 But with this exception, all the other person- 
 ages are purely fictitious. 
 
 Not however that models were wanting, 
 some most interesting and rare, but as I have 
 just said, I was too young when I wrote the 
 book. Part of my life was still too near to 
 me, I wanted distance to focus it all, and not 
 seeing, I invented. For instance the little 
 Chose has never been an actor, indeed he 
 has never been able to say a word in public. 
 He has never dealt in china : Pierrotte with 
 her black eyes, the lady on the first floor, 
 her negress * White Coucou ' thrown on the 
 canvas, as the painters say, are wanting both 
 in depth and vitality. The same may be 
 said of the literary outlines, in which people 
 have chosen to recognize wounding person- 
 alties that I never even dreamt of. 
 
 To be noted however among the realities 
 of my book, is the description of the room 
 
Little W/iafs His Name. 
 
 8 9 
 
 under the roof, near the steeple of Saint- 
 Germain-de-Pres, in a house since pulled 
 down, and whose absence makes a blank 
 before my eyes each time I pass by and look 
 up, seeking in vain for the place where so 
 much folly and so much misery, so many 
 nights of fruitful labour or of despairing 
 solitude were spent. 
 
LITERARY SALONS. 1 
 
 At the present day, not one such, I be- 
 lieve, remains. We have other salons, more 
 in unison with the spirit of the time political 
 salons like those of Madame Edmond Adam, 
 or Madame d'Haussonville, either all of one 
 political party or all of the other, where pre- 
 fects are proposed, ministers deposed, and 
 where on gala days appear the Orleans 
 princes or Gambetta. Then there are the 
 salons where people amuse themselves, or 
 rather try to amuse themselves ; full of re- 
 
 1 Written in 1879 for the Nouveau Temps, 
 published at St. Petersburg. 
 
Literary Salons. 91 
 
 membrances and regrets ! They sup, they 
 play, they endeavour to the utmost of their 
 power to revive the delights of Compiegne ; 
 pretty hothouses, beneath whose fragile crystal 
 roof bloom in all their factitious splendour, the 
 scentless flowers of the hollow worldly circles. 
 But the real literary salon, where, gathered 
 round a gracious and kindly muse, literary 
 men, or those who believed themselves such, 
 assembled once a week to recite their little 
 verses, dipping the while their little dry bis- 
 cuits in little cups of tea j a salon like this 
 in short, has undoubtedly disappeared. . Al- 
 though I am not old, it has yet been my lot 
 to know some of these blue-stocking salons, 
 banished nowadays to the provinces, more 
 out of fashion even than the guitar, the " aspi- 
 rations after the Unknowable," and the 
 quatrains scribbled in ladies' albums. 
 
 Let us fan our recollections of twenty years 
 ago. Pftf pft! pft! The dust rises in a 
 dainty cloud, and in this cloud, distinctly 
 drawn and becoming gradually clearer, as the 
 apparition of a fairy, is the pleasing outline 
 of excellent Madame Ancelot. Madame 
 Ancelot lived at that time in the Rue Saint 
 
92 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Guillaume ; a short street of provincial as- 
 pect, forgotten somehow by the indefatigable 
 Haussmann in the very heart of Paris, where 
 the grass grew between the stones, where the 
 sound of wheels was never heard, and where 
 the tall houses, too tall in proportion for their 
 three stories, allowed only a distant and chilly 
 daylight to penetrate. The silent old man- 
 sion with its great gate never open, the 
 shutters of its balconies always closed, looked 
 as if it had lain for centuries asleep under the 
 wand of some enchanter. The interior did 
 not belie the promise of the exterior ; the 
 corridor was all in white, the staircase dark 
 and echoing, the ceilings lofty, and over the 
 great windows pictures were let into the 
 panelling. Everything was faded and wan, 
 having lost all semblance of vitality ; and in 
 the middle of it all, well suited to her sur- 
 roundings, was Madame Ancelot all in white, 
 round and wrinkled like a little red apple, 
 just such in fact, as one pictures to oneself 
 the fairies of the stories, who never die, but 
 grow gently old, through thousands of years. 
 Madame Ancelot loved birds like all good 
 fairies. All round the drawing-room, hiding 
 
Literary Salons. 
 
 93 
 
 the walls, were piled cages of warblers, as at 
 the bird-fanciers' shops on the quay. But 
 even the birds themselves seemed to pipe 
 only old-fashioned tunes. In the place of 
 honour, in the best light and most prominent 
 position, hung a large portrait by Baron 
 Gerard, of the muse of this household, with 
 flowing locks, dressed in the fashion of Louis 
 
 the Eighteenth's time, smiling with the smile 
 then in vogue and posed in a well-chosen 
 attitude to set off, with a suggestion of flight, 
 like that of Galatea, the tip of an exquisitely 
 white and round shoulder. Forty years later 
 than the date of the picture of which I speak, 
 Madame Ancelot still wore low dresses, but 
 it must be owned, the shoulders displayed 
 
94 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 were no longer those marvels of round white 
 loveliness formerly painted by Baron Gerard. 
 But what did the dear old lady care? In 
 1858 she still believed herself the beautiful 
 Madame Ancelot of 1823, when Paris was 
 applauding her pretty piece of Marie ; ou, les 
 Trois Epoques I There was nothing besides 
 
 to warn her of the flight of time ; everything 
 aged and faded with herself, the roses of the 
 carpets, the cords and tassels of the hangings, 
 the human beings around her and the' re- 
 membrances of other days ; and while the 
 century marched on, this arrested existence, 
 this interior of another age, motionless as a 
 
Literary Salons. 95 
 
 vessel at anchor, remained buried in the still- 
 ness of the silent past. 
 
 One simple word would have broken the 
 spell ! But who would pronounce that sacri- 
 legious word ? who would have the courage 
 to say, " We are growing old ? " The habitues 
 least of all, for they too were of the same 
 period, they too could not believe they were 
 growing older. Behold M. Patin, the illus- 
 trious M. Patin, professor at the Sorbonne, 
 playing the young man over there, in the left- 
 hand corner by the window. He is a little 
 man, with white hair smartly curled, and of 
 a discreet friskiness suited to a pedant of the 
 First Empire. Then there is Viennet, the 
 Voltairian writer of fables, long and spare as 
 the crane of his own dry fables. The divinity 
 of the saion, admired and petted by all, sur- 
 rounded by a crowd of worshippers, was Alfred 
 de Vigny, great poet indeed, but great poet 
 of yet another epoch, looking eccentric and 
 obsolete with his angelic airs and scattered 
 white locks, too long for his diminutive figure. 
 Alfred de Vigny had, when dying, bequeathed 
 his parrokeet to Madame Ancelot. The par- 
 rokeet, on a gilt perch, took the place of 
 
96 Thirty Years of Paris. s 
 
 honour in the middle of the room, and the 
 old habitues stuffed it with good things, for 
 was it not the parrot of de Vigny? Some 
 profane jesters nicknamed it " Eloa," on 
 account of its great beak and its profound 
 eye. But this was hereafter ; at the time 
 when I was presented to Madame Ancelot, 
 the poet was still alive, and the parrot did 
 not yet mingle its short, shrill, and aged cry 
 with the formidable burst of song, which as 
 a kind of protest, I imagine rose from all 
 the cages whenever M. Viennet tried to 
 recite a few verses. 
 
 Sometimes a few younger people enlivened 
 the evening. On such days one might meet 
 Lachaud, the celebrated lawyer with his wife, 
 Madame Ancelot's daughter ; she, somewhat 
 melancholy, he, fat and smooth, with a fine 
 Roman head, which might have been that of 
 a jurisconsult of the last days of Rome. There 
 were poets too, Octave Lacroix, the author of 
 the Chanson d'Avril ; and E Amour et son 
 Tram; both of which were played at the Theatre 
 Francois; he impressed me strongly,for though 
 mild enough in appearance, he was secretary 
 to Sainte-Beuve. Emmanuel des Essarts was 
 
Literary Salons. 
 
 97 
 
 there, brought by his father, a distinguished 
 writer and librarian at Sainte-Genevieve. 
 Emmanuel des Essarts was at that time quite 
 a young man, scarcely known, and wearing 
 still in his buttonhole, if I recollect aright, the 
 green badge of the " Ecole Normale." He 
 
 occupies at present the literary chair at the 
 University of Clermont, which does not pre- 
 vent him from publishing, most years, one or 
 two volumes in which may be found some 
 charming verses. Delightful Professor, as you 
 may guess, with a twig of the poet's myrtle 
 
 H 
 
9 8 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 wreath in his cap. Then there were the ladies, 
 poetical ladies like Madame Anais Se'galas, 
 and from time to time a newly discovered 
 budding muse, with golden curls and blue 
 eye full of inspiration, who attitudinized 
 
 in the antiquated style of Delphine Gay and 
 Elisa Mercceur. Thus did the fair Jenny 
 Sabatier one day make her appearance, her 
 real name being Tirecuir terribly prosaic 
 name for a muse. From me also, verses were 
 
Literary Salons. 99 
 
 expected, as from the others, but it appears I 
 was bashful, and that my voice was affected 
 thereby. ''Louder," Madame Ancelot used 
 to say to me, " louder, M. de la Rochejacque- 
 lein cannot hear you ! " There were half 
 a dozen such old fogies, deaf as Etruscan 
 vases, never hearing, but always assuming an 
 attentive air, with the left hand well rounded, 
 trumpet fashion behind the ear. Gustave 
 Nadaud however could make himself heard. 
 Stumpy, snub-nosed, a large face, an expansive 
 smile, and affecting a rustic cheerfulness which 
 was not without its merit in this sleepy 
 atmosphere, the author of Les Deux Gen- 
 darmes would take his seat at the piano, sing 
 loudly, thump hard and awaken everybody. 
 What a success he always had ! We were all 
 jealous of him. Sometimes too, an actress, 
 anxious to make her way, would come to 
 declaim a few verses. It was a tradition of 
 the house that Rachel had recited stanzas in 
 Madame Ancelot's drawing-room ; a picture 
 near the chimneypiece testified to the fact. 
 The recitation of stanzas continued ; only it 
 was no longer Rachel who recited. This 
 picture was not the only one of its kind, one 
 
loo Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 might be found in nearly every corner all the 
 work of Madame Ancelot, who had not dis- 
 dained to handle the brush and mahl stick in 
 her time, and all dedicated to her "Salon," 
 intended to perpetuate the remembrance of 
 some great event in her tiny world. The 
 inquiring mind will be able to find them 
 reproduced (oh, cruel irony of fate, by E. 
 Benassit, the most sceptical of painters,) in a 
 kind of autobiography, Mon Sa/on, by Madame 
 Ancelot, published by Dentu. Each of the 
 " faithful " is therein portrayed, and I think 
 that even I am represented in it, somewhere 
 in the background. 
 
 This somewhat heterogeneous society met 
 thus every Tuesday, rue Saint Guillaume. 
 They came late, and for the following reason : 
 a few doors off, rue du Cherche-Midi, placed 
 there like a permanent protest, was a rival 
 " salon " j the salon of Madame Melanie 
 Waldor. In former days the two muses had 
 been intimate, Madame Ancelot had even at 
 first given Melanie a helping hand. " Then 
 suddenly Melanie had shaken her off, had 
 raised up altar against altar a repetition of 
 the conduct of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
 
Literary Salons. 101 
 
 and Madame du DerTand. Melanie Waldor 
 wrote novels, verses, and a play called : La 
 Tirelire de Jeannette. One day Alfred de 
 Musset, in a fit of ill humour, wrote some 
 terribly sarcastic lines about her, a biting and 
 high flavoured medley, savouring of Aretino 
 and Juvenal, which will, for want of a better 
 reason, hand the name of the muse down 
 to posterity on the wings of clandestine 
 publications. What could Madame Waldor 
 have done to the spoilt child ? I remember 
 her well, dressed all in velvet, with her black 
 hair black with the blackness of a centenarian 
 raven that absolutely refuses to grow white 
 hanging loosely over the sofa, on which 
 exhausted and languid she reclined, affecting 
 broken-hearted attitudes. But the eye bright- 
 ened and the lips became viperish directly 
 she was mentioned. She ! that is to say the 
 other one, the enemy, good old Madame 
 Ancelot. Between these two it was war to 
 the knife. Madame Waldor had purposely 
 chosen the same day, and when at about 
 eleven o'clock one tried to slip away unob- 
 served and dash over to the opposite house, 
 a freezing glance nailed the truant to his 
 
102 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 place. Escape was impossible, so one 
 remained j to make wit, to abuse poor old 
 Ancelot, and to exercise one's talents in re- 
 peating or inventing scandalous anecdotes. 
 Over the way one made up for it by telling a 
 thousand mysterious legends about Madame 
 Waldor's political influence. 
 
 What time lost, what hours wasted on those 
 venomous or stupid little nothings, in that at- 
 mosphere of little mouldy verses, and little 
 rancid calumnies, on those paste-board Par- 
 nassus, where no spring ever flowed, no bird 
 ever sang, and where the poetic laurel wreath 
 was the colour of the green leather cushion 
 of a head clerk's stool ! To think that I too 
 have climbed those Parnassus ! One must see 
 everything in youth ! It lasted just as long as 
 my dress coat lasted. 
 
 Poor dear old coat, what narrow passages 
 did its tails not brush through in those days ; 
 what banisters did it not polish with its 
 sleeves. I remember having worn it also in 
 the "salon " of the Comtesse Chodsko: 
 
 The Countess had for husband a kind, 
 learned old man, who was hardly ever seen, 
 and not of much account. She must have 
 
Literary Salons. 
 
 103 
 
 been very handsome ; at this time she was 
 a tall, stiff, dry woman, with a domineering 
 and even ill-tempered air. Murger, it was 
 said, had been much struck by her, and 
 represented her in his Madame Olympe. 
 
 Murger had in truth at one time made a 
 voyage of discovery into that fashionable 
 society which he did not generally frequent, 
 and here was the society which he ingenu- 
 ously believed himself to have discovered. 
 
104 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 This fashionable society was meanly lodged, 
 perched high up on a third floor of the rue 
 de Tournon in three cold and shabby little 
 rooms, looking out on a small courtyard. 
 Nevertheless one went to them, and the 
 company was not of 
 the vulgar herd. It 
 was there I saw for 
 the first time, Philarete 
 Chasles, whose restless 
 spirit and nervous pen 
 belonged to the school 
 of Saint-Simon and 
 Michelet. His aston- 
 ishing Memoires, full of 
 fight and devilment, 
 made up of attacks and 
 parrying thrusts, seem- 
 ing filled from the first 
 chapter to the last with 
 the continual noise of 
 clashing foils and shivering swords, are now 
 being published, and passing almost unnoticed 
 through the midst of a Paris absolutely in- 
 different to anything that is not either 
 painting or politics. Above all things a 
 
Literary Sahfis. 105 
 
 literary man, he was, like Balzac, devoured 
 all his life by the thirst for a wider existence 
 and a love of dandyism ; he remained a 
 librarian at the very gates of the Academie, 
 which however were never opened to him, 
 why, no one knows, and he died at Venice 
 of cholera. 
 
 I also met there Pierre Ve'ron, Philibert 
 Audebrand, and a curious couple very 
 curious, and at the same time very sympa- 
 thetic, whom I must crave leave to introduce 
 to my reader. We are now in the drawing- 
 room, let us seat ourselves and look on : . the 
 door opens, and Philoxene Boyer and his 
 wife make their entry. Philoxene Boyer ! 
 another of those strange sons, the terror and 
 punishment of families, chance productions 
 that no atavism can account for; seeds 
 brought from we know not whence on the 
 wings of the wind, from far away over the 
 seas ; and which one fine day with their 
 curiously jagged leaves and their strangely vivid 
 flowers, suddenly burst forth into bloom in 
 the midst of a cabbage plot, in the very 
 middle of a quiet bourgeois kitchen garden ! 
 Son of Boyer, he who knew more Greek 
 
io6 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 than any other man of his time : born 
 between two pages of a lexicon, never 
 having as a child known any other walk 
 or garden than the learned garden of Greek 
 roots, fed upon Greek, anointed with Greek ; 
 Philoxene with his Greek nomenclature 
 seemed destined to see his name graven 
 on the marble, side by side with those of 
 the Eggers and the Estiennes in the pantheon 
 of the Hellenists. But Father Boyer counted 
 without Balzac. Philoxene, like all school- 
 boys of that date, kept volumes of Balzac in 
 his desk ; and so ardent an admirer was he, 
 that having inherited a hundred thousand 
 francs * from his mother, he found nothing 
 better to do than to come to Paris to spend 
 those hundred thousand francs, as they are 
 spent in the pages of Balzac. The project 
 was put into execution in the most method- 
 ical manner bouquets were offered, gloved 
 finger-tips kissed, duchesses conquered, 
 courtesans with tawny eyes bought ; nothing 
 was wanting, the whole crowned by "a wild 
 orgie, modelled upon that in the Peau de 
 
 1 Four thousand pounds. 
 
Literary Salons. 107 
 
 Chagrin. The Peau de Chagrin, that is to 
 say, the hundred thousand francs, had lasted 
 exactly six months. The son of the great 
 Hellenist had amused himself prodigiously. 
 With his pocket empty and his head full of 
 rhymes, he declared he would henceforth 
 only follow the calling of a poet 1 But fate 
 decreed that, till the day of his death, 
 Philoxene should be the victim of the author 
 of his fancy. Throwing aside Balzac, he 
 chanced upon Shakespeare. Balzac had only 
 devoured his money, Shakespeare devoured 
 his life. One morning, perhaps it was the 
 consequence of a dream, Philoxene awoke 
 head over ears in love with the works of 
 Shakespeare. And as this man, at once 
 weak and determined, gentle and violent, 
 could do nothing by halves, from that 
 morning, henceforward, he devoted himself 
 body and soul to Shakespeare ! To study 
 Shakespeare, to know him by heart, from his 
 most obscure sonnet to his most contested 
 play, was nothing, and that part of the 
 business only took a few months. But 
 Philoxene had the pretension to do better 
 than that : wishing to write % book upon 
 
:o8 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 ~^M : " 
 
 Shakespeare, a book that should be com- 
 plete, final, in a word, worthy of the divinity ; 
 he conceived the impracticable project of 
 reading first everything, absolutely every- 
 thing, withoui omitting the least little article 
 or most insignificant document that has been 
 published upon Shakespeare for the last two 
 hundred years up to the present day, in order 
 to extract from it all 
 its innermost essence. 
 Then began a piling up 
 of dusty folios enough 
 to build the tower of 
 Babel : and, alas ! 
 Babel it was very soon 
 in the head of the un- 
 fortunate Philoxene. 
 I have seen him at home, no longer master 
 in his own house, but overpowered on all 
 sides by Shakespeare. l 7 ive thousand, nay, 
 perhaps ten thousand volumes on Shake- 
 speare, of all shapes, in all languages, 
 reaching up to the ceiling, obstructing the 
 windows, invading the armchairs, loading 
 the tables, heaped up, falling down, choking 
 both air and light, and in the midst of it all 
 
Literary Salons. 
 
 109 
 
 L 
 
 was Philoxene, taking notes while his brats 
 wrangled around him. For he was married, 
 he did not quite know why or 
 how ; and even in some moment 
 of abstraction between two 
 studies, had 
 had 
 
 children. 
 Over excit- 
 ed by his 
 one idea, 
 talking 
 
 aloud to 
 himself with 
 
 a vacant 
 gaze, lost in 
 his dreams, 
 he wander- 
 ed through Paris like a blind 
 man. His wife, a gentle, 
 saddened creature, followed 
 him everywhere and acted as 
 his Antigone. It was she who 
 mixed his absinthe with the 
 utmost care ; a mild absinthe 
 scarcely tinted with the green opal coloured 
 
 rife 
 
no Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 liquid, for the poetic enthusiast had no need of 
 stimulants. She was to be seen also, seated in 
 the front row at the conferences held by Philox- 
 ene, always upon Shakespeare, in the hall on 
 the Quay Malaquais. Sometimes the right 
 word would not come. Painful spectacle ! in 
 vain the orator sought for it, in vain he knit his 
 brow ; every one felt that in that encumbered 
 brain, ideas and phrases jostled each other, 
 unable to make their escape, like a frightened 
 crowd struggling at a door in a fire. The 
 wife, guessing the missing word, would softly 
 and maternally prompt it. The phrase was 
 started, flew forth, and then in the midst of 
 this painful improvisation, of this frenzied 
 gesticulation, there would be flashes of 
 brilliance, and brief bursts of eloquence. 
 There was a true poet within this gentle 
 lunatic. Philoxene ended sadly, working at 
 obscure writings to earn a bare pittance and the 
 wherewithal to buy books, always dreaming 
 of his great study without being able to write 
 it. For he would fain read everything written 
 upon Shakespeare ; and every day there 
 appeared in Germany or England works 
 which distanced him, obliging him to put 
 
Literary Salons. 1 1 1 
 
 off once more till some other day the com- 
 mencement of his own book. He died, 
 leaving as the only outcome of his life's 
 work, two short acts written in collaboration 
 with The'odore de Banville, an unfinished 
 Polichinelle, sufficiently original in fancy, and 
 since then reshaped by the makers of such 
 things; and a volume of verses, gathered 
 together and published by the tender care 
 of his friends. A situation as post-mistress 
 was obtained for his widow, who, after long 
 mourning her poet, married again some two 
 years ago, you will never guess whom 
 the postman. 
 
 Was I not right to draw your attention to 
 Philoxene and his wife ? For myself, I can 
 never forgot them, and I see them still, shy and 
 timid, in a corner of the little drawing-room : 
 he, agitated by spasms of nervousness, she, 
 holding her breath with astonishment, while 
 Pagans, just returned from the country of 
 the orange and the lemon, sang Spanish 
 songs, and Madame de Chodsko poured out 
 a pale and vapid decoction called tea real 
 exile's tea for the handsome Polish women 
 whose heavy bright russet locks lay twisted 
 
12 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 in great masses at the back of the head. 
 As midnight struck the excellent M. Chodsko 
 appeared with the regularity of a cuckoo in a 
 clock, bed candle in hand, at the door, cast 
 over the company a comprehensive glance, 
 
 mumbled with a strong Slav accent : " Good 
 evening, gentlemen," to people who were 
 never even introduced to him and whom* he 
 never knew, and then disappeared mechanic- 
 ally among the folds of a portiere. 
 
Literary Salons. 
 
 "3 
 
 The longing to show off my coat led me 
 sometimes further afield, right away, to 
 the other end of Paris, on the opposite side of 
 the Seine. To get there, one followed the 
 quays for some distance, greeted by the odour 
 of wild beasts, and the roaring of the lions 
 
 from behind 
 the railing of 
 the Jardin des Plantes ; 
 then over a bridge, from 
 which one contemplated by the gaslight or the 
 moonlight, the fantastic frontage and quaintly 
 pierced spire of the ruins of the Hotel 
 Lavalette; next came the Arsenal, the old 
 Arsenal, now a library, with its long iron rail- 
 ings, its great flight of steps, its doorway of 
 
 i 
 
H4 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 the time of Vauban, decorated with sculp- 
 tured representations of old-fashioned cannon, 
 and rich, to this day, in recollections of 
 Charles Nodier. Nodier, was no longer 
 there, the famous little green drawing-room 
 where romanticism had its beginning, where 
 Musset, Hugo and Georges Sand shed tears 
 over the adventures of Brisquet's dog the 
 little green drawing-room more celebrated, 
 and justly so, than the blue drawing-room of 
 Arthenice, was at this time occupied by M. 
 Eugene Loudun. 
 
 The spirit of revolution and liberty of 
 thought floated no longer among the curtains. 
 After the champions of romance, had come 
 workmen poets, Christian versifiers, stealing 
 into this eighth palace of the King of 
 Bohemia. Of the old romantic school, only 
 one remained, faithful and unfaltering at his 
 post, stiff and upright in his frock-coat, like 
 an old Huguenot soldier in his armour. 
 
 This was Amedee Pommier, a wonderful 
 manufacturer of words and rhymes, the 
 friend of the Dondeys and the Pe'trus 
 Borels, the author of EEnfer, of Crdneries 
 et Dettes de CceurHne books with flaring 
 
Literary Salons. 115 
 
 titles, delight of the literary, horror of the 
 academies, and full of verses, noisy and 
 gaudy as a flight of tropical birds. 
 
 Amedee Pommier was a poor and worthy 
 fellow. He led a secluded life, gaining his 
 daily bread by making, for the firm of 
 Hachette, translations which he did not 
 even sign. One curious detail must not be 
 overlooked : it was in collaboration with 
 Amedee Pommier that Balzac, always tor- 
 mented by the desire to write a great classic 
 comedy, had undertaken Orgon, five acts in 
 verse, as a sequel to Tartufe. 
 
 It was also in the green drawing-room of 
 the Arsenal that I became acquainted with 
 M. Henri de Bornier. He often recited 
 wittily turned little poems, one amongst 
 others I particularly remember, of which 
 each verse ended with this refrain : " Ah ! 
 ah ! I am not such a fool ! " Not such a 
 fool indeed was M. Bornier ! for it is he who 
 has written La Fille de Rola?id, which met 
 with so much success at the Theatre Francais 
 and which should some day bring its author 
 to a chair in the Academy. On certain 
 evenings there was a great commotion ; 
 
n6 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 screens were arranged, chairs and armchairs 
 arrayed in line, and charades acted. I 
 even, I must confess, have figured in these 
 charades, and I can still see myself dressed 
 as a Circassian slave, shrouded in long, 
 flowing white veil, in the middle of a 
 Turkish market. Madame Bornier was my 
 companion in slavery, while M. Bornier in 
 turban and caftan, represented some kind of 
 sultan who purchased us. As for the slave 
 dealer who sold us, it was, saving your 
 
 presence, no less a person than M. L , 
 
 senator, quondam minister, much before the 
 public at that time and convicted since of 
 financial irregularities. The fall of the 
 Empire held many surprises in store for 
 us; and the great highways of Paris have 
 sometimes strange windings. 
 
MY DRUMMER. 
 
 I was at home, and still in bed, one 
 morning, when there was a knock at the 
 door. 
 
 "Who's there?" 
 
 " A man with a large case ! " 
 
 I naturally fancied that some parcel had 
 arrived from the railway, but instead of the 
 looked-for railway porter, a little man with 
 the round hat and the short jacket of the 
 Provencal shepherd greeted my eyes in the 
 yellow light of the November day. I beheld 
 two black eyes, anxious and gentle, an obsti- 
 nate, and at the same time, ingenuous face, 
 half lost behind thick moustaches, an accent 
 
1 1 8 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 flavoured with garlic, savouring outrageously 
 of the sunny south. The man said, 
 
 " I am Buisson," and held out an envelope, 
 on which I immediately recognized the pretty 
 and regular handwriting of the poet, Frederic 
 Mistral. His letter was brief. " I send you 
 friend Buisson; he is a performer on the 
 drum, and wishes to make himself known in 
 Paris. Pilot him." 
 
 Pilot a drummer ! These southerners have 
 no conscience ! 
 
 Having read the letter, I turned to Buisson. 
 
 " So you are a drummer? " 
 
 "Yes, M. Daudet, and the best of them 
 all ; you shall see ! " 
 
 He went to fetch his instruments, which 
 he had discreetly left on the landing, behind 
 the door : a small, long, flat box, and a large 
 cylinder covered with green baize, the same 
 shape and size as the immense tourniquets 
 that the sellers of sweet wafers drag about 
 the streets. The small flat box contained 
 the galoubet, the simple rustic flute or fife, 
 which says " tu tu," while the drum growls 
 " pan pan." The covered cylinder was the 
 tabor (or drum) itself. What a drum it was ! 
 
My Drummer. 119 
 
 Tears came into my eyes when I saw it 
 unwrapped : a real authentic tabor of Louis 
 XIV.'s time, touching and comical at the 
 same time in its hugeness, and growling like 
 an old man if only the tip of a finger touched 
 it. It was made of fine walnut wood, orna- 
 mented with light carvings, polished, slight, 
 light, sonorous, and mellowed as it were by 
 the touch of time. Solemn as a judge, 
 Buisson hung his tabor over his left arm, 
 took up the flute between three fingers of his 
 left hand, (you have seen the attitude and the 
 instrument in some antiquated engravings of 
 the eighteenth century, or painted on a plate 
 of old Moustier,) and handling with the right 
 hand the little stick tipped with ivory, he 
 attacked the large drum, which, with its 
 sonorous vibrations, and its sharp whirr like 
 that of a grasshopper, marked the rhythm, 
 and formed a deep bass accompaniment to 
 the sharp and shrill warbling of the flute. 
 "Tu tu pan pan! Lo ! Paris was far 
 off, and so was winter. I was transported to 
 Provence, to the shores of a blue sea, under 
 the shade of the poplars of the Rhone ; 
 serenades of the night and of the dawn 
 
120 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 resounded beneath the windows. I heard 
 the singing of carols, saw the country dances 
 of the Olivettes, of the farandole winding 
 beneath the leafy plane-trees of the village 
 greens, along the dusty whiteness of the high 
 roads, amongst the lavender of the sunburnt 
 hill sides ; disappearing, reappearing, more 
 and more impassioned and fantastic, while 
 the drummer followed slowly, with even 
 
 step, sure that the dance would not forsake 
 the music by the way j solemn, grave, and 
 hobbling a little, with the movement of the 
 knee, which at every step pushes the drum 
 on in front of him. 
 
 So many things in the beat of a drum ! 
 
 Yes ! and many more, that you, perhaps, 
 could not have seen, but which to me were 
 vividly present. Such is the Provencal im- 
 agination: made of tinder, and inflammable, 
 
My Drummer. 
 
 121 
 
 even at seven o'clock in the morning; and 
 Mistral did right in counting upon my 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 Buisson also became excited. He told 
 
 me of his struggles, his efforts, and how, 
 midway on the downward path, he had 
 saved fife and drum from desecration. 
 
 Some barbarians, it appeared, wished to 
 
 
122 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 improve the fife by adding two holes to it 
 a fife with five holes ! what a sacrilege ! He 
 held religiously to the fife with three holes 
 the fife of his ancestors, without nevertheless 
 fearing any rival in the suavity of his slurs, 
 or the vivacity of his variations and shakes. 
 
 " It occurred to me," said he with a 
 modest air of vague inspiration, and with 
 that particular accent of the south which 
 renders comical, even the most touching of 
 funeral orations. " It occurred to me at 
 night, one time when I was sitting under an 
 olive tree, and listening to the nightingale ; 
 and I thought to myself : What ! Buisson ! 
 can a wild bird of the good God's sing like 
 that, and what it can do with one hole, art 
 thou not man enough to manage with three ? " 
 Somewhat stupid in its pomposity, no doubt,, 
 this platitude, but that morning it struck me 
 as charming. 
 
 A good southerner cannot thoroughly en- 
 joy an emotion unless he can share it with 
 others. I admired Buisson : others must 
 admire him also. Behold me then, rushing 
 all over Paris, showing off my drummer, pre- 
 senting him everywhere as a phenomenon; 
 
My Drummer. 123 
 
 hunting up friends, organizing a soiree at my 
 own house. Buisson played and related his 
 struggles, and again said, "It occurred to 
 me." He was decidedly fond of that phrase, 
 and my friends were kind enough, on hearing 
 1/ him, to appear marvellously struck by his 
 talent. 
 
 But this was only the first step. At that, 
 time a play of mine, a Provencal play, was 
 being rehearsed at the Ambigu. I recom- 
 mended Buisson, his drum and his fife, to 
 j/Hostein, the impresario \ and you may 
 fancy with what eloquence ! During eight 
 days, I ceaselessly extolled him. At last 
 Hostein said, 
 
 " Suppose we put your drummer into the 
 play ? It wants a peg to catch the fancy of 
 the public." 
 
 I am sure the Provencal lost his sleep 
 from excitement. The next day, we all 
 three got into a cab ; he, the drum, and 
 myself, and, at twelve for the quarter past, 
 as the notices of rehearsal say, we were 
 deposited amid a crowd of idlers, gathered 
 together by the strange appearance of the 
 machine, in front of that low, shamefaced 
 
124 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 little door-way, which in even the most 
 luxurious theatres, serves as the unostenta- 
 tious entrance alike for authors, actors, and 
 underlings of all kinds. 
 
 M Good Heavens, how dark it is ! " sighed 
 the Provencal, as we followed the long passage ; 
 damp and windy as all theatre passages 
 " how dark it is, and how cold ! " 
 
 The drum seemed of the same opinion, 
 knocking itself against all the windings of 
 the passages, the steps of the corkscrew 
 staircase, with many vibrations and much 
 formidable rumbling. At last, limping and 
 hobbling, we reached the stage. The re- 
 hearsal had begun. Thus seen, in all the 
 barrenness of its undress, a theatre presents 
 a most disenchanting appearance ; devoid of 
 movement and life, without the tinsel and 
 brightness of the evening, full of busy folk 
 stepping softly, and their low- voiced talk 
 sounding as far off as if it came from 
 shades on the banks of the Styx, or miners 
 at the bottom of a mine. A smell of mouldy 
 damp, and of escaping gas pervaded everything. 
 Men and things, the moving crowd, all were 
 fantastically mixed up with the scenery, and 
 
My Drummer. 
 
 "5 
 
 all wore the same dust-coloured hue, in the 
 mean and paltry light of small hanging lamps, 
 
 and gas jets protected with wire gauze, like 
 Davy lamps. And, as if to make the dark- 
 ness more heavy, the subterranean sensation 
 
126 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 more forcible, from time to time, far aloft, 
 on the second or third tier of the darkened 
 house, the door of a box would open, and, 
 as if from the far away mouth of a well, let 
 fall a ray of external light. This sight, new 
 to my countryman, slightly unnerved him. 
 But my fine fellow soon recovered himself, 
 and pluckily took his place, alone in the 
 shadow at the back of the stage, on a 
 barrel that had been got ready for him. 
 With his drum, it had the effect of two 
 barrels, one on the top of another. In vain 
 did I protest : in vain did I say : " In Pro- 
 vence the drummers play as they walk, and 
 your barrel is impossible." Hostein assured 
 me that my drummer was a strolling minstrel, 
 and that a minstrel could only be represented 
 on the stage on a barrel. Very well ! then 
 have the barrel ! Moreover, Buisson, full of 
 self-reliance, had already clambered up, and 
 was stamping about to find a steady balance, 
 saying to me : " It does not matter ! " We 
 left him therefore, his fife at his lips, his 
 drum-stick in his hand, behind a dense forest 
 of scenery, side pieces, pulleys and ropes ; 
 and we all, director, author, and actors, 
 
My Drummer. 127 
 
 settled ourselves in the front of the stage, as 
 far off as possible, the better to judge the effect. 
 
 " It occurred to me " sighed Buisson 
 from out of the darkness, " it occurred to me 
 at night, one time when I was sitting under 
 an olive tree, listening to the nightingale " 
 
 "That will do, that will do; play us 
 something ! M I cried out, already exasperated 
 by his phrase. 
 
 Tu tu ! Pan Pan ! 
 
 11 Hush ! he is beginning." 
 
 " We shall be able to judge of the effect ! " 
 
 Great heavens ! what an effect was produced 
 upon this sceptical audience, by this rustic 
 music, bleating and shrill as the noise of an 
 insect, buzzing over there in a corner ! I saw 
 the jeering actors, always professionally de- 
 lighting in the failure of a comrade, ironically 
 pucker up their smooth lips : the fireman 
 under his gas jet, was laughing fit to split his 
 sides ; the prompter himself, drawn out of 
 his usually somnolescent state by the strange- 
 ness of the occurrence, raised himself up on 
 both hands, and peered out of his box, look- 
 ing like a gigantic tortoise. However, Buisson 
 having finished playing, again began his 
 
128 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 phrase, which he apparently thought very- 
 telling : 
 
 " What ! can a wild bird of the good 
 God's sing like that, and what it can do with 
 one hole, art thou not man enough to manage 
 with three ! " 
 
 "What is this fellow of yours talking about, 
 with his story of holes ? " asked Hostein. 
 
 Then I tried to explain the point of the 
 matter, the importance of the three holes 
 instead of five ; the originality there was in 
 playing alone, the two instruments. " The 
 fact is," observed Marie Laurent, " it would 
 be infinitely more convenient if they were 
 played by two persons." 
 
 I tried, in order to strengthen my argument, 
 to sketch out 2ifara?idole step on the stage. 
 It was of no avail, I began vaguely to under- 
 stand the sad truth, that, to make others feel 
 the impressions and poetical recollections 
 evoked in my bosom by the drummer and 
 his old-fashioned airs, the musician should 
 have been able to bring at the same time to 
 Paris, the top of a hill side, a space of blue 
 sky, a whiff of the warm Provencal atmo- 
 sphere : " Come, my children, get on, get on ! 
 
My Drummer. 129 
 
 And without bestowing any further notice 
 on the drummer, the rehearsal continued. 
 Buisson never stirred, and remained at his 
 post, feeling certain of success, and honestly 
 believing that he was already acting a part in 
 the play. After the first act, a feeling of 
 remorse came over me, at leaving him over 
 there on his barrel, where only his outline 
 could vaguely be seen. 
 
 "Come, Buisson, get down, quick." 
 
 ' Are we going to begin ? " 
 
 The unfortunate fellow thought he had 
 made a wonderful effect, and showed me a 
 stamped paper, an agreement already pre- 
 pared with the foresight characteristic of the 
 peasant. 
 
 "No, not to-day; they will write to you; 
 but take care ! hang it ! your drum knocks 
 against everything, and makes a frightful row." 
 I felt now quite ashamed of the drum, I 
 trembled lest any one should hear it, and oh ! 
 what a joy and relief it was, when I got it 
 back into the cab ! For a week I did no t 
 venture to return to the theatre. 
 
 Shortly afterwards, Buisson came again to 
 see me. 
 
130 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 " Well ! how about that agreement ? " 
 
 " That agreement ? Ah yes ! that 
 agreement. Well, Hostein hesitates ; he 
 does not understand." 
 
 ." He's a fool ! " 
 
 On hearing the bitter and harsh tone in 
 which the gentle musician pronounced these 
 words, I realized the extent of my crime. 
 Intoxicated by my enthusiasm, and my praise ; 
 his equilibrium upset, and losing all sense of 
 proportion, the Provencal drummer seriously 
 believed himself a great genius, and ex- 
 pected alas ! had I not led him to expect 
 it that Paris held in store for him endless 
 triumphs. 
 
 How could one stop a drum, uproariously 
 careering through the rocks and thorny 
 thickets of the slopes of imagination ! 
 
 I did not even attempt it : it would have 
 been madness, and labour lost. 
 
 Moreover, Buisson had now found some 
 other admirers, and amongst the greatest 
 celebrities, Felicien David, and The'ophile 
 Gautier, to whom Mistral had written at- the 
 same time as to me. Poetic and dreamy 
 spirits, easily charmed, prone to abstraction, 
 
My Drummer. 131 
 
 the author of a Journey in the East, and the 
 musician of the land of roses, had found no 
 trouble in creating in their minds' eye a 
 landscape around the rustic melodies of the 
 drummer. 
 
 The one fancied, while the fife piped away, 
 that he saw once more the shores of his native 
 Durance, and the half ruined terraces on the 
 slopes of Cadenet : while the dreams of the other 
 carried him still further away, and he found 
 in the dull and monotonous sound of the drum 
 I know not what charming memories of nights 
 at the Golden Horn and of Arab derboukas. 
 
 Both had been smitten with a sudden and 
 violent caprice for Buisson's real talent, here 
 however so out of harmony with all its 
 surroundings. 
 
 For a whole fortnight there were incessant 
 puffs in the newspapers about the drummer ; 
 the illustrated papers were full of his portraits, 
 in an attitude of proud defiance, and a con- 
 quering look, the light flute between his 
 fingers, the drum slung over his shoulder. 
 Intoxicated with his success, Buisson bought 
 the papers by the dozen, and despatched 
 them to his own country. 
 
132 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 From time to time, he came to see me and 
 to relate his triumphs : smoking parties made 
 up for him in some artists' studios, a few 
 evenings spent in fashionable society in the 
 Faubourg Saint Germain (he was full of the 
 Faubourg de Sei'nt Germein, as he called it), 
 where the fellow brought back tender dreams 
 to the old turbaned 
 dowagers, as he re- 
 peated without the 
 slightest bashfulness 
 ^v his famous phrase : " It 
 
 '^ occurred to me at 
 night, one time, when 
 I was sitting under 
 an olive tree and 
 listening to the night- 
 ingale." Meanwhile, 
 as he was afraid of getting rusty, and 
 wished, in spite of the thousand amusements 
 of an artist's life, to keep up the mellowness 
 of his touch and the delicacy of his mouth- 
 piece, our ingenious Provencal conceived the 
 idea of rehearsing his serenades and- his 
 Jara7idoles, in the very heart of Paris, on 
 the fifth floor of the furnished lodgings he 
 
 ^5fc 
 
My Drummer. 133 
 
 was occupying in the Quartier Breda. Tu 
 til ! Pan pan ! The whole Quartier pro- 
 tested wrathfully against this unwarrantable 
 disturbance. The neighbours gathered to- 
 gether and made a formal complaint ; but 
 
 Buisson only continued the more, spreading 
 around him a wide circle of harmony and 
 sleeplessness; till one evening the door 
 porter, utterly worn out, refused him the 
 key of his room. 
 
 Draping himself in all the dignity of an 
 
134 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 artist, Buisson appealed to the magistrates, 
 and gained his cause. French laws, so hard 
 on musicians, relegating the performance on 
 the horn to the depths of the cellars all the 
 year round, with the exception of Shrove 
 Tuesday, allowing them only one day out 
 of three hundred and sixty-five on which to 
 flourish their brass instruments in the open 
 air ; the French law it appears, had " not 
 foreseen the Provencal drum. 
 
 After this victory Buisson no longer 
 doubted his own powers. One Sunday 
 morning I received a card : that afternoon 
 he was going to make his appearance at a 
 large concert in the Salle du Chatelet. Duty 
 and friendship compelled my attendance, I 
 therefore went to hear him, not without a 
 secret misgiving, and sad forebodings. 
 
 A capital house, full from the pit to the 
 roof; decidedly our puffs and notices had 
 borne fruit. Suddenly, amid the general 
 excitement and breathless silence, the cur- 
 tain drew up. I uttered a cry of amazement. 
 Alone, in the centre of the stage, on which 
 six hundred supernumeraries can be man- 
 oeuvred without crowding, stood Buisson and 
 
My Dru??imer. 135 
 
 his drum, dressed up in a skimpy coat and 
 wearing a pair of gloves which made him 
 look like those long, yellow-legged insects 
 that Granville (the famous caricaturist) 
 portrays in his whimsical drawings, furiously 
 playing on the most fantastical instruments. 
 Buisson alone stood before us. I could see 
 him through the opera glass, waving his long 
 arms, fluttering his elytra ; evidently the un- 
 happy fellow was playing, drumming with all 
 his might, blowing with all his strength ; but 
 not the faintest note reached the audience. 
 It was too far off, all the sound was swallowed 
 up by the stage. It was like a baker's cricket 
 chirping his serenade in the middle of the 
 Champ de Mars ! Impossible to count the 
 flute holes at this distance, impossible to 
 repeat the phrase : " It occurred to me,'- or 
 to mention the " bird of the good God's ! " 
 I blushed with mortification. Around me I 
 saw nothing but amazement, and I heard the 
 muttered words, " What poor joke is this?" 
 The doors of the boxes slammed, the house, 
 little by little, was emptying ; however as it 
 was a polite audience, they did not hiss him, 
 but quietly left the drummer to end his tune 
 in solitude. 
 
136 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 I waited for him at the door to console 
 him. Well ! would you believe it ! He 
 fancied he had had an immense success, and 
 more radiant than ever, exclaimed, "I am 
 waiting for Colonne to sign ! " at the same 
 time showing me a large paper covered with 
 official stamps. This time it was more than 
 I could bear, I plucked up my courage 
 and said roughly, all in a breath, what I 
 thought. 
 
 "Buisson, we have all been mistaken in 
 trying to make Paris understand the charm 
 of your large drum ; the melody of your 
 fife. I have made a mistake, Gautier and 
 David have made a mistake, and, as a natural 
 consequence, you also have made a mistake. 
 No, you are not the nightingale." 
 
 " It occurred to me," interrupted Buisson. 
 
 " Yes, I know it occurred to you, but you 
 are not a nightingale. The nightingale sings 
 everywhere, his songs are the songs X)f every 
 country, and in every country his songs are 
 understood. You are only a poor little 
 cicala, whose monotonous and dry note 
 is in harmony with the pale olive trees, 
 the pines weeping their rosin in tears 
 of gold, the brilliant blue sky, the glorious 
 
My Drummer. 137 
 
 sun, the stony hill-sides of Provence ; but 
 here, under this gray sky, midst rain and 
 wind, you are nothing but a ridiculous, 
 lamentable grasshopper with long damp 
 wings. Return home, take back your drum, 
 sing your love songs by daybreak and by 
 twilight, play to the girls while they dance 
 their farandoles, lead the triumphal march of 
 the conquerors in the bull fights; down there 
 you are a poet, an artist ; here you are no- 
 thing but a misunderstood mountebank." 
 
 He did not answer, but in his mystic glance, 
 in his gently obstinate eye, I read his 
 thought : " My friend, you are jealous of me !" 
 
 A few days later, my fine fellow, proud as 
 " Artaban," came to tell me that Colonne 
 another fool, like Hostein ! had refused to 
 sign, but that another affair was offered to 
 him, marvellous this time, an engagement in 
 a cafe concert at a hundred and twenty francs 
 a night, all settled and signed beforehand. 
 He showed me the paper. Ah ! what a 
 capital paper ! I learnt the truth later on. 
 
 I know not what puzzled director, borne 
 away and blinded by the muddy current of 
 bankruptcy, desperately seized upon that 
 
138 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 broken reed Buisson's pitiful music. Cer- 
 tain that he would never pay, he signed all 
 that was asked. But the Provencal did not 
 see so far ahead ; he had it down on stamped 
 paper, and this stamped paper was sufficient 
 for his happiness. Moreover, as it was a 
 music hall, a costume was necessary. 
 
 "They have dressed me up as a Troubadour 
 of the olden time," he said with a gracious 
 smile, " but as I am very well made, it suits 
 me, you will see." I did see ! 
 
 It was one of those music halls near the 
 Porte Saint Denis, so much in vogue during 
 the last years of the Empire ; with the tinsel 
 of the barbarous ornamentation, half Chinese, 
 half Persian ; its daubs and gilding rendered 
 more glaring by the exaggerated number of 
 gas jets and lustres, and with closed and 
 latticed boxes, in which, on certain evenings, 
 duchesses and ambassadresses hid themselves 
 to applaud the strange contortions or vulgar 
 songs of some eccentric diva. A sea of heads 
 and beer glasses all levelled like waves in foggy 
 weather by the dense smoke of the pipes and 
 the vapour of breath \ the waiters running about, 
 the consumers shouting their orders ; and all 
 
My Drummer. 139 
 
 dominated by the orchestra leader, white- 
 tied, impassible and dignified, raising or 
 calming with the gesture of a Neptune, the 
 tempest of fifty brass instruments. Between 
 the ridiculously sentimental song, bleated out 
 by a somewhat pretty girl, with sheepish 
 eyes j and an eclogue as hot as cayenne 
 pepper, cynically bawled by a kind of 
 Theresa with red arms, there appeared on 
 the stage, in front of a semi-circle of some 
 six simpering and yawning women in low 
 white dresses, a personage whose appearance 
 in all my life long I shall never forget. . It 
 was Buisson, the fife between his fingers, the 
 drum on his left knee, in Troubadour costume, 
 as he had threatened. But what a Trouba- 
 dour ! A jerkin (imagine such a thing ! ) half 
 apple-green, half blue ; one leg red, the other 
 yellow, the whole attire so tight fitting that it 
 made one shudder ; a crenelated cap, shoes 
 turned up like a jester's ; and with all this, 
 moustaches, his magnificent moustaches, too 
 long and too black, which he could not bring 
 himself to sacrifice, falling over his chin like 
 a cascade of blacking ! 
 
 Carried away apparently by the exquisite 
 
1 4 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 taste of this costume, the public greeted the 
 musician with a long murmur of applause, 
 and my Troubadour smirked with pleasure, 
 and was happy at seeing before him this 
 sympathetic audience, and feeling at his 
 back a warm glow of inflammatory glances 
 from the admiring and lovely creatures seated 
 in a half-circle behind him. It was quite 
 another affair however when the music be- 
 gan. The tu-tu, pan-pan, failed to please 
 the vitiated taste of ears surfeited by the 
 vitriol-like repertoire of the place, as a palate 
 loses its discrimination by the abuse of 
 spirits. Then too it was not a distin- 
 guished and well-mannered company like that 
 at the Chatelet. " Enough ! Enough ! 
 Take him away ! Shut up, squeaker ! " 
 Vainly did Buisson try to open his mouth 
 and to say : " It occurred to me." The 
 audience rose, the curtain had to be lowered, 
 and the red, green, blue and yellow Trouba- 
 dour, disappeared in a storm of hissing and 
 hooting, like some poor draggled parrot, 
 eddying round in a tropical hurricane. * 
 
 Would you believe it ? Buisson persisted ! 
 An illusion springs up quickly in a Provencal 
 
My Drummer. 141 
 
 brain, and is difficult to uproot. Fifteen 
 evenings running he reappeared, always 
 hissed, never paid ; till the moment arrived 
 when the sheriff's officer came to fix a notice of 
 bankruptcy upon the open iron work of the 
 concert hall gates. 
 
 Then began the downfall of Buisson. From 
 one low pothouse to another, lower and lower 
 still, always believing in his success, always 
 pursuing his chimera of an engagement made 
 on stamped paper, the drummer trundled at 
 last to the tea-gardens of the suburbs, where 
 the players are only paid by the hour, have 
 no other orchestra than a toothless piano, 
 and form the delight of a public composed of 
 tipsy and tired canoeists and counterjumpers 
 out for their Sunday holiday. 
 
 One evening the winter was scarcely over 
 and the spring not yet begun I was crossing 
 the Champs Elyse'es. An open air concert, 
 wishing to get the start of the others, had 
 already hung its lanterns in the still leafless 
 trees. There was a slight drizzle, an air of 
 melancholy over all. Suddenly I heard 
 Tu Tu Pan Pan ! There he was 
 again ! I saw him through the opening, 
 
T42 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 drumming away at a Provencal air, before 
 some half dozen auditors, favoured no doubt 
 with orders, and sheltering themselves under 
 umbrellas. I dare not go in ! ''It was my 
 fault," I thought, " after all ! The fault of my 
 imprudent enthusiasm." Poor Buisson ! Poor 
 half-drowned grasshopper ! 
 
 
 
 * " 
 
 1 
 
 
 : *w~ 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon." 
 
 THE STORY OF MY BOOKS. 
 
 Although it is now nearly fifteen years 
 since I published the Adventures of Tartarin, 
 Tarascon has not yet forgiven me for writing 
 them ; and travellers worthy of belief assure 
 me that every morning, when that tiny Pro- 
 vencal town opens the shutters of its shops 
 and shakes its carpets in the balmy breath of 
 the great Rhone, there breaks forth from 
 every threshold and from every window, a 
 united fury of clenched fists and flaming 
 black eyes, one vast cry of rage directed 
 towards Paris. " Oh that Daudet ! If for 
 
144 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 once he came this way ! " As Bluebeard says 
 in the story, " Come down, or I come up." 
 
 And without joking, one day, Tarascon did 
 " come up ! " 
 
 It was in 1878, when Provincials swarmed 
 in the hotels, on the boulevards, and on that 
 gigantic bridge connecting the Champ de 
 Mars and the Trocadero. One morning, the 
 sculptor Amy, a native of Tarascon, natural- 
 ized in Paris, beheld, piercing their way into 
 his house, a formidable pair of moustaches, 
 arrived by the excursion train, under pretext 
 of seeing the Exhibition, but in reality to 
 have an explanation with Daudet on the 
 subject of the brave Commandant Bravida, 
 and the Defense de Tarascon^ a little tale 
 published by me during the war. 
 
 11 Que? we will go to that Daudet ! " 
 
 It was always the first word of those 
 Tarascon moustaches on entering the studio ; 
 and for a whole fortnight, the sculptor Amy 
 had this phrase ringing in his ears: "And 
 now then, where shall we find that Daudet?" 
 The unfortunate artist was at his wits' end 
 to find any way of sparing me this serio- 
 comic visit. He took the moustaches of his 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 145 
 
 compatriot to the Exhibition, lost them in the 
 gallery of " dwellings of all nations," in the 
 machinery department j poured down their 
 throat English beer, Hungarian wines, mares' 
 milk, and every exotic and varied drink he 
 could find ; deafened them with music of all 
 kinds : Moorish, Tzigane, Japanese ; worried 
 them, tired them to death, and dragged them 
 like Tartarin on his minaret to the sum- 
 mit of the Trocadero turrets. 
 
 But the enmity of the Provencal rankled 
 deep, and even from this lofty height, spying 
 over Paris, he said with a frown, 
 
 " Can we see his house ? " 
 
 " Whose house ? " 
 
 " Tel why Daudet's of course ! " 
 
 It was the same thing everywhere. 
 Happily the excursion train got up steam 
 again, and carried away the unsatisfied ven- 
 geance of the Tarascon ; but although that 
 one had departed, others might arrive, and 
 all the time the Exhibition was open, I never 
 slept. 
 
 It is a serious affair, after all, to feel 
 concentrated upon one's self the hatred of a 
 whole town. Even now, whenever I go 
 
 L 
 
146 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 south, I feel an awkwardness in passing 
 Tarascon ; I know they still bear me a 
 grudge, that my books are prohibited in 
 their libraries, are not even to be found at 
 the railway bookstalls \ and from the first 
 moment I behold through the railway carriage 
 window the castle of good King Rene, I feel 
 myself ill at ease, and long to whisk past 
 that station. 
 
 This is why I seize the opportunity afforded 
 me by this new edition, to offer publicly with 
 my apologies, to the people of Tarascon, the 
 explanation which the former commander-in- 
 chief of their militia came at that time to 
 demand of me. 
 
 Tarascon was for me only a pseudonym 
 picked up on the way from Paris to Marseilles, 
 because it had a fine sonorous roll in the 
 accent of the South, and sounded as the 
 name of the station was shouted, like the 
 triumphant war-cry of an Apache warrior. 
 In reality, the home of Tartarin, and the 
 scene of the famous cap-shooting parties is 
 a little farther off, five or six leagues on -the 
 other side of the Rhone. There it was that 
 as a child, I watched the baobab tree, Ian- 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 147 
 
 guishing in the confinement of its tiny 
 mignonette pot, faithful image of my hero, 
 cramped within the precincts of his little 
 town ; there the RebufTas sang the duet from 
 Robert le Diable; from thence it was, in short, 
 that in November, 1861, Tartarin and T, 
 armed to the teeth and Chechia on head, 
 started to hunt the lion in Africa. To tell 
 the truth, I did not go there altogether ex- 
 pressly for that purpose, being desirous above 
 all things, of repairing my somewhat dilapi- 
 dated lungs in the warm sunshine. But not 
 in vain, heaven be praised, was I born in the 
 land of the mighty cap-shooters ! and from 
 the moment I set foot on the deck of the 
 Zouave, where they were getting on board 
 our enormous case of arms, I imagined, more 
 Tartarin than Tartarin himself, that I was 
 going to exterminate all the wild beasts of 
 the Atlas. 
 
 Ah, what a fairy tale was that first voyage ! 
 How vividly I can recall the moment of 
 departure ; the blue sea before me blue as 
 cobalt all ruffled by the wind, flecked with 
 sparkling spray, and the bowsprit of the 
 vessel, which again and again rose in the air, 
 
1 48 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 dipped in the wave, trembled a moment all 
 white with foam, and ever pointed seawards ; 
 once more I hear in the broad sunlight, the 
 hour of noon strike from all the clocks of 
 Marseilles, and once more my twenty years 
 of life ring in my head a joyous peal. 
 
 Merely to speak of it, brings it all before 
 me again : I am over there, I haunt the 
 bazaars of Algiers in a semi-daylight which 
 is scented with musk, amber, dried rose 
 leaves and warm woollen stuffs. Three- 
 stringed guzlas are twanging before the little 
 glass-fronted Tunisian cupboards, arabesqued 
 in mother-o'-pearl, while the plash of the 
 fountain throws a fresh note of sound upon 
 the tiles of the court-yard. I see myself 
 ranging the Sahel, the orange groves of 
 Blidah, the ChifTa, the famous brook of 
 monkeys ; wandering over the green slopes 
 of Milianah, its orchards tangled with bottle- 
 gourds, sunflowers and fig-trees, as in the 
 walled enclosures of our own Provence. 
 
 Once more the immense valley of Chelif 
 lies before me, with its thick brushwood of 
 lentisk and dwarf palms, and the dry beds of 
 torrents edged with oleanders ; on the hori- 
 
Tar tar in de Tarascon. 
 
 149 
 
 zon, the smoke of a camp fire rises straight 
 upwards from a thicket of cactus, nearer, the 
 gray circle trampled by a caravan, a saint's 
 tomb with its white turban-like cupola, its 
 thank-offerings hung on the dazzling, white- 
 washed wall, and here and there, in the wide, 
 
 M^ 
 
 V 
 
 burnt-up space, a few dark, moving spots 
 which I know to be cattle. 
 
 I hear again, accompanied by the horrible 
 shaking of my Arab saddle, the clink of my 
 great stirrups, the cry of the shepherds 
 rebounding through the still and clear at- 
 
150 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 mosphere : "Si mohame eed i" the 
 furious barking of the slougi dogs round the 
 camps, the firing and howling of an Arab 
 fantasia and the wild music of derboukas, 
 played in the evening before the tent doors, 
 while jackals yelp in the plains, persevering 
 like our grasshoppers, and above all rises in 
 the star-spangled blackness of the night sky, 
 a faint crescent of the moon the crescent 
 of Mohammed. Very distinct too in my 
 memory is the dreariness of the return ; 
 the feeling of exile and cold on arriving at 
 Marseilles, where the blue of our ProvenQal 
 sky seemed to me dulled and veiled by com- 
 parison with those clear and vast Algerian 
 skies, filled as they were with the most 
 intense and varied range of colour : with the 
 wonderful green of the sunrise a poisonous, 
 arsenical green ; with the brief twilights of 
 the evening changing and trembling through 
 mother-o'-pearl tints of purple and amethyst ; 
 where the wells were rose-coloured, and rose- 
 coloured camels came to drink, and the chain 
 of the well and the beard of the Bedouin 
 who drank from the same bucket, all glittered 
 with rose-tinted drops; after a lapse of 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 151 
 
 twenty years, I feel again the regret and 
 longing for the breadth of that African sun- 
 shine left behind me. 
 
 There is in the language of the poet Mistral, 
 a word which comprises and defines clearly 
 a whole instinct of the race : ga/eja, to joke, 
 to make fun. And it conveys to the mind 
 the flash of irony, the sparkle of malice, 
 shining in the depths of the Provencal eyes. 
 Ga/eja recurs on all occasions in the conver- 
 sation, in the form of a verb or substantive. 
 " Vesses pas ? Es uno galejado. Don't you 
 see? It is only a joke. Taisote, galejaire. 
 Hold your tongue, naughty jester." But to 
 be galejaire does not exclude from the 
 character either kindness or tenderness. 
 They amuse themselves, te! they must laugh j 
 but in that country, laughter is the ac- 
 companiment of every sentiment, of the 
 deepest as of the most tender. In an old, 
 old song of my beloved mother-country, the 
 history of little Fleurance, this Provencal 
 love of laughter is exquisitely exemplified. 
 Fleurance, when almost a child, is betrothed 
 to a knight, who marries her, la pren tan 
 jouveneto se saup fas courdela, when so young 
 
152 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 that she can scarcely tie for herself the lacing 
 of her bodice. Scarcely is the honeymoon 
 over when Fleurance's lord is obliged to 
 start for Palestine, leaving his little bride all 
 alone. Seven years pass by, and the knight 
 has given no sign of life, when one day, a 
 pilgrim with cockle 
 shell and long beard 
 presents himself at the 
 gate of the castle. 
 He has returned from 
 the wars ; he brings 
 news of the husband 
 of Fleurance ; and at 
 once the fair lady 
 causes him to be ad- 
 mitted and places him 
 him at table opposite 
 to her. 
 
 What happened be- 
 tween them then I can relate to you in two 
 ways ; for the story of Fleurance, like all popular 
 songs, has made the round of France in the 
 pedlars' packs, and I found it in Picardy with a 
 significant variation . In the Picardy version the 
 lady begins to weep in the middle of the feast. 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 
 
 153 
 
 " You weep, fair Fleuranee ? " says the 
 pilgrim all trembling. 
 
 " I weep because I recognize you you are 
 my dear husband." 
 
 The little Fleuranee of Provence, on the 
 
 contrary, is scarcely seated in front of the 
 pilgrim with the great beard, before she begins 
 to laugh delightfully at him, " He ! what are 
 you laughing at, Fleuranee ? " " Te ! I laugh 
 because you are my husband." 
 
 And laughing she jumps upon his knee. 
 
154 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 and the pilgrim also laughs in his sham beard 
 of tow ; for he is, as she is, a galejaire ; all of 
 which does not prevent them from loving 
 each other tenderly, with open arms, with 
 meeting lips, with all the pent emotion of 
 their faithful hearts. 
 
 I too am a galejaire. In the fogs of Paris, 
 in the splashing of her mud, in the sadness 
 lurking in a great city, I may perhaps have 
 lost the taste and faculty of laughter ; but in 
 reading Tartarin, any one may see that there 
 then remained in me a store of gaiety which 
 promptly broke forth in the glorious sunlight 
 of " down there." 
 
 Certainly, I am willing to admit that many 
 other things might have been written about 
 Algerian France, than the Adventures of 
 Tartarin ; for instance, a close and incisive 
 study of manners and customs, the observa- 
 tions of a new country on the confines of two 
 races and two civilizations, with their reflex 
 action j the conqueror conquered in his turn 
 by the climate, by the profoundly indolent 
 habits, the carelessness, the utter rottenness 
 of the East, the bastinado and thieving, 
 the Algerian Doineau and the Algerian 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 155 
 
 Bazaine those two perfect products of the 
 Arab bureau. What revelations might be 
 made of the wretchedness of this pioneer 
 existence, this history of a colonist ; the 
 foundation of a town in the midst of the 
 rivalry of three presiding powers, army, civil 
 administration, and magistracy. Instead of 
 all that, I brought back nothing but Tartarin, 
 a burst of laughter, a galejade. 
 
 It is true that my comrade and I must 
 have appeared a fine pair of simpletons, when 
 we landed in red sashes and gaudy Chechia 
 in the famous town of Algiers, where we were 
 the only two " Teurs." With what a medi- 
 tative air of conviction did Tartarin doff his 
 immense hunting boots at the doors of the 
 mosques and gravely penetrate into the 
 sanctuaries of Mohammed, with tight shut lips 
 and in bright coloured socks. Ah ! how 
 thoroughly he at least believed in the East, 
 in the muezzins and the almees, in the lions, 
 the panthers, and the dromedaries; in every- 
 thing that his books had been kind enough 
 to suggest to him, and which his meridional 
 imagination had magnified and exaggerated. 
 
 Faithful as the camel of my story, 1 
 
156 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 followed him through his heroic dream ; but 
 I had my moments of doubt. I remember 
 one evening, at Oued-Fodda, starting off to 
 lie in wait for a lion, how, passing through a 
 camp of chasseurs d'Afrique, with all our 
 paraphernalia of spatterdashes, guns, re- 
 volvers and hunting knives, I felt a sharp 
 sensation of ridicule, when I saw the silent 
 amazement of these worthy troopers cooking 
 their soup in front of the long lines of tents. 
 " And what if after all there is no lion ! " 
 
 Nevertheless, an hour later, when night 
 had fallen, hiding on my knees in a clump of 
 laurels, sweeping the dark shadows with my 
 glasses, while the cry of the crane sounded 
 high up in the sky, and the jackals trampled 
 the vegetation around me, I felt my gun 
 chatter and rattle on the handle of the 
 hunting knife stuck in the ground. 
 
 I have invested Tartarin with this shiver 
 of fear, and the absurd reflections which 
 accompany it ; but it is doing him a great 
 injustice. I can honestly assure you, that if 
 the lion had really come, the worthy Tartarm 
 would have received him rifle in hand, dagger 
 upraised ; and if his ball had missed, his 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 157 
 
 sword broken in the huge animal closing 
 upon him, he would have finished the 
 struggle hand to hand, would have crushed 
 the fierce brute in the powerful muscles of 
 his arms, and torn it to pieces, with his nails 
 and his teeth, not even stopping to spit out 
 the fur ; for he was a tough fellow at bottom, 
 this mighty shooter of caps, and moreover a 
 man of humour who was the first to laugh 
 at any galejade I 
 
 The story of Tartarin was not written till 
 long after my journey in Algeria. The 
 journey took place in 1861-62, the book was 
 written in 1869. I began to publish it in 
 parts, in the Petit Moniteur universe!, illus- 
 trated with amusing sketches by Emile 
 Benassit. It was an absolute failure. The 
 Petit Moniteur was a popular paper, and the 
 populace are puzzled by printed irony which 
 makes them think they are being laughed at. 
 No words can describe the disappointment 
 of the subscribers to this half-penny paper, 
 who delighted in Rocambole and the writings 
 of Ponson du Terrail ; when they read in the 
 first chapters of the life of Tartarin, of the 
 songs, of the baobab tree ; their disappoint- 
 
158 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 merit even expressed itself in personal abuse 
 and threats of discontinued subscriptions. 
 I used to receive letters which said : " Well 
 then, what follows ? What does all this prove ? 
 Idiot ! " and then came a furious signature. 
 Paul Dalloz suffered the most, for he had 
 gone to great expense in advertisements, and 
 illustrations, and paid dear for this experience. 
 After a dozen or so of numbers had appeared) 
 I took pity on him and carried Tartarin to 
 the Figaro, whose readers were better fitted 
 to understand it, but here it was met by other 
 conflicting powers. The working editor of 
 the Figaro just then, was Alexandre 
 Duvernois, brother of Clement Duvernois 
 quondam journalist and minister. By the 
 merest chance I had, nine years before, in 
 the course of my delightful expedition, met 
 Alexandre Duvernois at that time a humble 
 clerk in the civil administration of Milianah, 
 and who from that date retained a perfect 
 enthusiasm for the whole Colony. Irritated 
 and indignant at the frivolous spirit in which 
 I wrote about his beloved Algeria, he arranged," 
 although he could not prevent the publication 
 of Tartarin, to cut it up into intermittent 
 
Tartarin de Tarascon. 159 
 
 scraps, on the horrible stereotyped pretext of 
 " press of matter," to such effect, that the 
 poor little tale dragged its weary length in 
 the paper, almost as interminably as the 
 Wandering Jew or the Three Musketeers. 
 " It drags, it drags," grumbled the deep bass 
 of Villemessant, and I was greatly afraid I 
 should be obliged to break off once more. 
 
 Then came fresh tribulations. The hero of 
 my book was then called Barbarin of Tarascon. 
 
 Now, there unfortunately happened to live 
 at Tarascon an old family of the name of 
 Barbarin, who threatened to go to law with 
 me if I did not at once take their name out 
 of this outrageous piece of tomfoolery. Hav- 
 ing a holy horror of courts of law, and justice 
 generally, I agreed to replace Barbarin by 
 Tartarin on the already corrected proofs, 
 which had therefore to be re-read line by 
 line in a most scrupulous hunt for the letter 
 B. In those three hundred pages, a few 
 managed to escape my notice, and you 
 may find in the first edition, Bartarin, 
 Tarbarin, and even tonsoir for bonsoir. At 
 last the book was published, and succeeded 
 well enough in the circulating library, not- 
 
160 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 withstanding the local flavour, which could 
 not be to the taste of every one. One must 
 be of the south, or know it very well indeed, 
 to understand how frequent a type amongst 
 us this Tartarin is, and how, under the 
 glorious sunshine of Tarascon, which fills 
 its people with warmth and electricity, the 
 wild absurdity of brains and imagination, 
 becomes developed in profoundly exaggerated 
 forms, as varied in shape and dimensions as 
 the fruit of the bottle-gourd. 
 
 Judged impartially, at a distance of years, 
 Tartarin, with its careless and madcap style, 
 seems to me to possess the qualities of youth, 
 life and truth ; a truth however of beyond the 
 Loire, which exaggerates, dilates, but does not 
 lie, and is Tarascon to the backbone all the 
 time. The quality of the writing is neither 
 very finished nor very concise. It is what I 
 venture to call "peripatetic literature," spoken, 
 gesticulated; accompanied by all the easy 
 manners of my hero. But I must own, that 
 with all my love of style, of fine prose, 
 harmonious and full of life and colour, that 
 this is not all that is needed, in my opinion, 
 by the novelist. His truest joy must always 
 
Tartarifi de Tarascon. 161 
 
 be to create beings, to set on foot by their 
 truth to nature types of humanity which 
 shall thenceforward be known in the world 
 by the name, the expression and gesture, he 
 has bestowed upon them, and which have 
 caused them to be talked of, detested, or 
 liked, by those who read of them, without 
 reference to their creator, or without so 
 much as mentioning his name. For my own 
 part, my emotion is always the same, when, 
 a propos of some passer-by, one of the thou- 
 sand marionnettes of our human comedy, 
 political, artistic, or of the world, I 
 hear it said, "He is a Tartarin a Mon- 
 pavon a Delobelle." A thrill runs through 
 me then, the proud thrill of a father, hidden 
 amongst the crowd who applaud his son, and 
 who, all the time is longing to exclaim, 
 "That is my boy ! " 
 

 THE STORY OF MY BOOKS. 
 
 "LETTERS from my windmill." 
 
 On the road between Aries and the 
 quarries of Fontvielle, after passing the Mont 
 de Corde and the abbey of Montmajour, 
 there rises, on the right-hand side, behind a 
 large village, white with dust as a stone- 
 cutter's yard, a small hillock covered with 
 pine trees ; a refreshing patch of green in 
 the midst of the parched landscape. Up 
 above, turned the long arms of a windmill ; 
 and below, nestling under the hillside was a 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 163 
 
 large white house called Montauban, an old 
 building of great originality, for, beginning 
 like a great country house, with a flight of 
 steps and an Italian terrace supported by 
 columns, it finished with the walls of a mas 
 or country farm, with perches for the pea- 
 cocks, a vine over the doorway, a well with 
 a fig tree twisting round the iron work, sheds 
 under which lie harrows and ploughs, a 
 sheep-pen in front of an orchard of slender 
 almond trees, their branches of delicate pink 
 flowers continually scattered by the March 
 winds. These are the only flowers of 
 Montauban. There are no lawns, no flower 
 beds, no gardens, no enclosures; nothing 
 but clumps of pine trees starting from 
 amongst the gray rocks, a natural and wild 
 park, full of tangled pathways, all slippery 
 with the dry and fallen pine needles. Inside 
 the building existed the same incongruous 
 mixture of mansion and farm ; there were 
 long galleries, flagged and cool, furnished 
 with cane-twisted sofas and armchairs of 
 the time of Louis XVI., so well suited for a 
 summer siesta : spacious stairs, imposing 
 corridors, where the wind dashes in, and 
 
164 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 whistling under the doors of the rooms 
 shakes the old-fashioned striped hangings. 
 Then, on going up a couple of steps, a 
 sudden transformation greets the eye ; here 
 is the large rustic kitchen of the farm, with 
 its uneven floor of beaten earth, where the 
 hens scratch to pick up the crumbs of the 
 farm breakfast, and its whitewashed walls 
 supporting the walnut-wood shelves and the 
 quaintly carved bread box and kneading 
 trough. 
 
 Twenty years ago, an old Provencal 
 family lived there, no less original and 
 delightful than their dwelling. The mother, 
 a superior woman of the better class of 
 farmer, old, but still upright, and wearing the 
 widow's cap she would never discard, 
 managed entirely the extensive property, 
 consisting of olive trees, wheat, vines and 
 mulberry trees j near her, were her four 
 sons, four old bachelors known by the names 
 of the professions they had practised or were 
 still exercising : the Mayor, the Consul, the 
 Notary, the Lawyer. When their father died, 
 and their sister married, they gathered all 
 four closely round the old woman, sacrificing 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 165 
 
 for her sake, their ambitions and their tastes ; 
 united in an all-powerful bond of love for her 
 whom they spoke of as " dear Mamma," with 
 a respectful and tender accent. 
 
 Excellent folks ! fortunate household ! 
 How often have I come there in the winter 
 months to put myself again in touch with 
 nature, to shake off 
 Paris and its fevered 
 life, by the health-giv- 
 ing scents of our little 
 Provencal hills. I 
 arrived without any 
 warning, certain of my 
 welcome, heralded by 
 the screams of the 
 peacocks and the 
 barking of the dogs. 
 
 Miracle, Miradet, Tambour, jumping up 
 round the dog-cart, while the Arlesian cap 
 of the servant girl fluttered with surprise as 
 she rushed off to inform her masters ; and the 
 11 dear Mamma " pressed me to her little gray 
 checked shawl as if I had been one of her 
 own boys. After five tumultuous minutes, 
 when the huggings were over, and my trunk 
 
 
 :-t 
 
i66 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 was in my room, the house became again 
 silent and calm. As for me I whistled to 
 old Miracle a spaniel picked up at sea on 
 a piece of wreckage by the fishermen of 
 Faraman and went up to my windmill. 
 
 The windmill was a 
 ruin, a mass of crumbling 
 stone, iron, and rotten 
 wood, which had not been 
 set to the wind for many 
 a year, and which lay all 
 broken and out of gear, 
 useless as a poet, while all 
 around on the hill-side, 
 the busy trade of the 
 miller prospered, and 
 sails went merrily round. 
 What strange affinities lie 
 within us ! From the 
 very first this aban- 
 doned mill was dear to 
 me, I liked it for its forsaken air, its path 
 overgrown with grass, the short mountain 
 grasses, gray and perfumed, full of the little 
 herbs with which Father Gaucher composes 
 his elixir; its broken platform, where one 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 167 
 
 might idly lie, sheltered from the wind, 
 while a rabbit dashed past, or a long adder 
 with creeping and sneaking motion came 
 forth to hunt the field mice with which the 
 ruins were swarming. With the gusts of the 
 tramo?itana shaking the old building till it 
 crackled again, whistling through its shat- 
 tered sails as if through rigging, the wind-mill 
 awoke in my uneasy and wandering brain 
 memories of past sea voyages, of visits to 
 lighthouses, and distant isles, and the 
 quivering swell all round me completed the 
 illusion. I know not whence I inherit this 
 love of solitude and wild nature, but I have 
 had it from childhood ; it seemed so little in 
 harmony with the exuberance of my spirits 
 unless it can be at the same time a physical 
 necessity for me to repair by a fast of words, 
 an abstinence from talk and gesticulation, 
 the frightful expenditure of his whole being 
 which is a Southerner's life. In any case, I 
 owe much to these mental rests ; and no 
 place was ever more healthful to me than 
 this old Provencal windmill. I even thought 
 once of buying it ; there might be found yet, 
 among the papers of the notary of Fontvielle, 
 
1 68 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 an agreement of sale, which remained only a 
 project, but of which I made use, as the 
 preamble of my book. 
 
 My windmill never belonged to me. But 
 this did not prevent me from spending there 
 long days filled with dreams and recollections, 
 till the sun sank among the little flattened 
 hills, of which it filled the hollows as with 
 molten metal, a casting of fiery and glowing 
 gold. Then, at the sound of a conch-shell, 
 the horn with which M. Se'guin summoned 
 home his goat, I returned for the evening 
 repast, at the hospitable and fantastic table of 
 Montauban, laid according to the tastes and 
 habits of each member of the party : the 
 Constantia drunk by the Consul, side by side 
 with the water gruel, or the plate of boiled 
 chestnuts which formed the frugal dinner of 
 the old mother. The coffee drunk, pipes 
 lighted and the four sons gone off to the vil- 
 lage, I remained alone talking with the excel- 
 lent woman a good energetic character with 
 a subtle intelligence and a memory full of 
 stories, which she related with much simple 
 eloquence : tales of her childhood, of the de- 
 parted, of disused customs, the gathering of 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 169 
 
 the gall nuts on the oak trees of the parish ; of 
 18 1 5, the invasion, the cry of relief that rose 
 from all mothers' hearts at the fall of the first 
 Empire ; the dances, the bonfires lighted in all 
 the market places, and the smart Cossack officer 
 who made her skip like a kid, as they danced 
 all night long on the bridge 
 of Beaucaire. Then came her 
 marriage, the death of 
 husband; that of her eldest 
 daughter, which a sad presenti- 
 ment and a sudden shock of 
 terror revealed to her 
 at a distance of many 
 miles away mourn- 
 ings, births, arid the re- 
 moval of the cherished 
 remains of her dear 
 ones, when the old 
 cemetery was closed. It was like turning over 
 the leaves of one of those ancient family 
 chronicles, with well worn edges, wherein 
 formerly it was the custom to write down the 
 inner life of the family, mixed with the com- 
 mon details of every-day life, and where the 
 accounts of good years of wine and oil stand 
 
170 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 side by side with perfect marvels of self-sacri- 
 fice and pious resignation. In this half-rustic 
 bourgeoise there was I felt, a beautiful soul, 
 charmingly feminine, delicate, intuitive, allied 
 to the graceful and ignorant malice of a little 
 child. Weary of talking, she would sink back 
 in her large armchair, far from the lamp, 
 
 while the growing 
 shadows of the 
 falling night closed 
 her sunken eye- 
 lids, slowly crept 
 over her aged face, 
 with its long lines 
 of wrinkles, fur- 
 rowed as with the 
 plough and the 
 harrow ; and silent 
 and motionless, I 
 might have thought her asleep, had it not 
 been for the clink of the beads, that 
 her fingers were telling at the bottom 
 of her pocket. Then I softly rose, and 
 went to end my evening in the large 
 kitchen. 
 
 In the ingle-nook of the gigantic chimney, 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 171 
 
 where the copper lamp hung, a numerous 
 company was seated in front of a bright fire 
 of olive roots, the fitful flame of which fantasti- 
 cally lit up the pointed caps of the women 
 and the yellow woollen jackets of the men. 
 In the place of honour, on the hearth-stone, 
 squatted the shepherd, with his shaven chin, 
 tanned skin and his cachimbau (short pipe) 
 stuck in the corner of his well-cut mouth ; 
 he hardly spoke, being accustomed to the 
 contemplative silence of his long months of 
 lonely watching, far away from all human 
 companionship, on the Alps of Dauphiny, 
 gazing up at the stars he knew so well, from 
 Jen de Milan down to the Char des times. 
 Between the puffs of his pipe, he gave out in 
 his sonorous dialect, sentences, half uttered 
 parables, and incomprehensible proverbs, 
 some of which I still remember. 
 
 " The song of Paris ; the saddest history in 
 the world. Man in speech a?id beast by his 
 horns. Monkey's work, little and bad. As 
 the moon wanes, water falls. Red moon, 
 wind changes. White moon, fine day." And 
 every evening he brought the proceedings to 
 a close with the following sentence. " The 
 longer the old woman lived, the more she 
 
172 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 knew and for that, the less willing was she 
 to die." 
 
 By his side, the keeper Mitifio, nicknamed 
 Pistol, with merry twinkling eye, and white, 
 pointed beard, amused the company, with a 
 series of tales and legends, pointed and 
 spiced afresh by his mischievous and tho- 
 roughly Provencal wit. Sometimes, in the 
 midst of the laughter caused by one of 
 Pistol's stories, the shepherd would say very 
 gravely, " If a white beard were all that is 
 needful to be accounted wise, then the goats 
 would be the wisest." There was also old 
 Siblet, Dominique, the coachman, and a little 
 hunchback, called lou Roudeirou (the prowler), 
 a kind of hobgoblin, the spy of the village, 
 whose sharp, inquisitive glances pierced both 
 night and walls ; an ill-tempered fellow, eaten 
 up by religious and political hatreds. 
 
 You should have heard him imitate and 
 repeat the stories of old Jean, a red republi- 
 can of '93, lately dead, and who to the last 
 remained faithful to his opinions. The 
 journey of Jean Coste twenty leagues on 
 foot to go and see his village cure and his 
 two secondaires (curates) guillotined. "Ah, 
 well, my children, when I saw them stick 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 173 
 
 their heads through the lunette and it was 
 not very becoming to them as a collar by 
 gad, well, I was pleased ; taben aguere de 
 plesiy Jean Coste all shivering, warming 
 his old carcase against some wall, hot in 
 the blazing sun, and saying to the lads 
 around him, " Young men, have you read 
 Volney ? Jouven aues legi Voulney ? He 
 mathematically proved that 
 there is no other God but 
 the sun ! Ges de Diou, 
 doum de Liou ! ren que 
 lou souleii ! " And then 
 the way he judged the men 
 of the Revolution: "Marat, 
 good fellow. Saint Just, good 
 fellow. Danton also a good 
 fellow but towards the 
 end he got spoilt and became moderate in 
 his views dins lou mouderantisi?w ! " Then 
 the description of Jean Coste's death scene, 
 when, raising himself up like a spectre in his 
 bed, he spoke French for the first time in his 
 life, to throw in the face of the priest : 
 "Avaunt, black raven, the carrion is not yet 
 ready for thee." And the little hunchback 
 
174 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 accentuated these last words so horribly that 
 the women screamed out, " Aie ! dear life ! " 
 and the sleeping dogs started awake, and ran 
 growling towards the door, shaken by the 
 moaning night wind, until some clear and ring- 
 ing woman's voice struck up, in order to dispel 
 the painful impression, a Christmas carol of 
 Saboly : u J saw in the air an angel all green 
 with a pair of great 
 wings springing out 
 from his shoulders ;" or 
 else the arrival of the 
 Magi at Bethlehem : "e- 
 ^~>#? f * ^> hold the Moorish King 
 
 with his rolling eyes ; the 
 infant Jesus weeps the 
 .<-j3^*' King no longer dares to 
 
 enter." A simple and 
 flute- like air, that I noted down with all the 
 imagery, expression and local tradition 
 gathered up from the ashes of this old hearth. 
 Often too my fancy carried me off, and I 
 made little excursions around my windmill. 
 Sometimes it was a shooting or fishing expe- 
 dition in Camargue and the pool of Vacares, 
 amidst the herds of wild cattle and horses 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 175 
 
 ranging freely in this pampas-grown corner. 
 Another day I went and joined my friends 
 the Provencal poets, the Felibres. At that 
 time the Felibrige had not yet been set up as 
 an university institution. We were still in 
 the early days of enthusiasm, in the fervent 
 and ingenuous stage, devoid of schisms or 
 rivalry. Five or six jolly comrades, with 
 innocent child-like laughter and beards like 
 apostles, met occasionally, either at Maillane, 
 in Frederic Mistral's little village, from which 
 I was separated by the jagged, rocky line of 
 the Alpilles ; or at Aries, in the forum, 
 surrounded by a throng of drovers and 
 shepherds gathered together to be hired by 
 the farmers. Or we went to Aliscamps, and 
 there, lying on the grass amongst the sarco- 
 phagi of gray stone, listened to some fine 
 drama of Theodore Aubanel's, while the air 
 vibrated with the click of the grasshopper, 
 and from behind a screen of gray trees, 
 resounded ironically the blows of the 
 hammers in the workshops of the Paris- 
 Lyons-Mediterranean Railway. When the 
 reading was over, we took a turn on the 
 Lice, just to see pass, in her white necker- 
 
176 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 chief and little helmet-shaped cap, the proud 
 and coquettish Arlesienne, for whose sake 
 poor Jan killed himself. At other times our 
 trysting-place was at the Ville des Baux, that 
 powdery mass of crumbling ruins, wild rocks 
 and escutcheoned palaces, which rocked 
 feebly in the wind, perched up like eagles' 
 nests on the heights, from whence could be 
 descried, far beyond the plains, a line of 
 purer, brighter blue, which is the sea. We 
 supped at the inn at Cornille ; and strolled 
 about all the evening, singing verses in the 
 midst of the little winding streets, the tumbled 
 down walls, the ruined stairways and columns, 
 all lighted up by a spectral light, which 
 tipped the grass and stones as with a slight 
 sprinkling of snow. 
 
 " Poets anen ! " said Master Cornille. 
 " People who like to see the ruins by 
 moonlight." 
 
 The Felibrige also met amongst the reeds 
 and rushes of the island of Barthelasse, 
 opposite the ramparts of Avignon and the 
 Papal Palace, silent witnesses of the intrigues 
 and adventures of the little Vedene. Then, 
 after breakfasting in some little boatman's 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 177 
 
 tavern, we went up to see the poet Anselme 
 
 Mathieu, at Chateauneuf-des-Papes, famous 
 
 for its vines, which for a long time were the 
 
 most celebrated in Provence. Oh, the wine 
 
 of the Popes, the golden, regal, imperial, 
 
 pontifical wine ! We drank it up there on 
 
 the hill, and sang the verses 
 
 of Mistral, new fragments out 
 
 of his lies d'or. " At Aries, 
 
 in the olden times bloomed 
 
 the Queen Ponsirade a rose 
 
 bush." And then again the 
 
 fine sea ditty, "The boat 
 
 comes from Majorca with a 
 
 cargo of oranges." What with 
 
 the blazing sun, the sloping 
 
 vineyards, propped up by low 
 
 dry stone walls, the olive, 
 
 pomegranate and myrtle trees, 
 
 one might have fancied oneself in Majorca. 
 
 Through the open casement flew away the 
 
 rhymes, humming like bees, and we too, 
 
 carried away by them, spent whole days 
 
 flitting across the sunny province of Comtat, 
 
 through highways and byeways, making a halt 
 
 in the towns, under the plane trees in the 
 
i 7 8 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Corso, or the Square ; and with much loud- 
 voiced gesticulation, we distributed from our 
 lofty waggonette, nostrums to the assembled 
 populace. Our nostrum was Provencal verse ; 
 fine verses in the language of these peasants, 
 who understood and greeted with applause 
 the strophes of Mireille, of la Venus d' Aries 
 
 by Aubanel, a 
 legend of An- 
 selme Mathieu 
 or Roumanille ; 
 and took up the 
 chorus with us 
 in the song to 
 the Sun : Great 
 Sun of Prov- 
 ence, gay 
 comrade of the 
 mistral, thou who swallow est up the 
 Durance like a goblet of Crau wine. And 
 we wound up with an improvised ball, or 
 dance, the lads and lasses in their working 
 attire ; and the corks flying round the 
 tables ; and if perchance some prayer-mut- 
 tering old harridan ventured to criticize the 
 freedom of our mirth, the handsome Mistral, 
 
Letters from my Windmill. T79 
 
 proud as King David, would say, looking 
 down upon her, " Be quiet, be quiet old 
 mother. Everything is permissible to poets." 
 And he added, confidentially winking to 
 the old woman, who dazzled, respectfully 
 curtsied to him, " Es ?iautre que fasen 
 li saume. It is we who write the 
 psalms." 
 
 How delightful it was to return, after one 
 of these lyrical escapades, to the windmill, 
 and lying on the grass of the platform, to 
 think over the book I should sooner or later 
 make out of all this; a book to which I 
 would give the murmur that lingered in my 
 ears, of those songs, that ringing laughter, 
 those fairy-like legends, and also the reflection 
 of that vibrating sun-light, the perfume of 
 those sunburnt hill-sides, and that I would 
 date from my dear ruin with its shattered 
 and useless sails. 
 
 The first Lettres de mon Moulin appeared, 
 somewhere about 1866, in a Parisian paper 
 where these Provencal chronicles, signed 
 under a double pseudonym borrowed from 
 Balzac " Marie-Gaston," jarred by the pe- 
 culiarity of their style. Gaston was my 
 
t 80 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 comrade Paul Arene, then a young man, 
 who had just had a little piece of his, 
 full of wit and vivacity, played at the Odeon ; 
 he lived near me on the confines of the 
 woods of Meudon. But although this 
 exquisite writer had not yet put to his 
 credit Jean des Figues, nor Paris ingenu, nor 
 yet many pages of his delicate and powerful 
 writings, he had already too much real talent, 
 too strong a personality, to be satisfied for 
 long with the mere occupation of a miller's 
 man. I therefore remained alone to fashion 
 my little stories, at the changing caprice of 
 each breeze and each hour, while I led a 
 terribly restless existence. The work was 
 broken and intermittent ; then I married, 
 and carried off my wife to Provence, to show 
 her my windmill. Nothing had changed 
 there, neither the landscape nor the welcome. 
 The old mother tenderly pressed us both to 
 her little checked shawl, and a place was 
 made for the novio at the boys' table. She 
 sat by my side on the platform of the wind- 
 mill, where the tramontana, beholding in this 
 Parisian an enemy of sunshine and wind, 
 took pleasure in shaking and ruffling her, 
 
Letters from my Windmill. 181 
 
 striving to bear her away in a whirlwind like 
 Chenier's young Tarentine. 
 
 It was on my return from this journey that, 
 seized again by a love for my Provence, I 
 began in the Figaro a new series of Lett res 
 de mon Moulin, Les Vieux, La Mule du Pape, 
 V Elixir du Pere Gaucher, &c. ; written at 
 Champrosay, in that studio of Eugene Dela- 
 croix's which I have already mentioned in 
 the story of Jack, and of Robert Hebnont. 
 The volume was published by Hetzel, in 
 1869, two thousand copies were with diffi- 
 culty disposed of, waiting, like my other 
 earlier works, till the success of my novels 
 should create some further demand for them. 
 Nevertheless it is still my favourite book, not 
 from a literary point of view, but because it 
 recalls the happiest hours of my youth, mad- 
 cap laughter, intoxication without remorse, 
 friendly faces and places that I shall never 
 see again. 
 
 Now Montauban is deserted, the "dear 
 Mamma" is dead, the sons dispersed, the 
 Chateauneuf vineyard utterly destroyed. 
 Where are Miracle and Miraclet, Siblet, 
 Mitino, le Roudeirou ? If I went down 
 
182 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 there, I should find no one I knew. They 
 tell me however that the pines are very 
 much grown, and above the glittering un- 
 dulations of their dark green tops, my 
 windmill turns merrily round in the sun ; 
 repaired, recovered, with new sails, like a 
 vessel just afloat; poet set once more to 
 the wind ; dreamer restored to life and 
 action. 
 
MY FIRST PLAY. 
 
 Ah, how long ago that was ! Far, very far 
 from Paris, I was enjoying a springtide of 
 happiness, under a flood of light, at the 
 further end of Algeria in the valley of Chelif, 
 one fine day in February, 1862. Thirty miles 
 of plain lay before me, bordered on the right 
 and left by a double line of mountains, all 
 transparent and purple like amethysts in the 
 golden mist. Lentisks dwarf palms, stony 
 beds of dried torrents, choked with oleanders ; 
 and far apart in the distance a caravansary or 
 an Arab village ; on the heights, some saint's 
 tomb gleaming in its whitewash, like a 
 great die capped by a half orange, and 
 hither and thither, under the broad white 
 expanse of sunlight, dark moving objects, 
 
184 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 which are flocks, and which, were it not for 
 the deep uniform blue of the sky, might 
 be mistaken for gliding shadows cast by the 
 passing clouds. All the morning we had 
 been hunting ; then the afternoon heat 
 becoming too oppressive, my friend bachaga, 
 Boualem had the tent pitched. One of the 
 sides was raised on poles, like an awning j 
 and from that side the whole horizon was 
 visible. In front of us the hobbled horses 
 stood motionless with their heads down, the 
 great deer-hounds slept curled up in the sun ; 
 and lying down flat on his stomach in the 
 midst of his little pots and pans, our coffee 
 maker was preparing the moka on a tiny fire 
 of dry twigs, the thin smoke of which 
 ascended straight up into the air ; while we 
 lay silently rolling big cigarettes, Boualem- 
 Ben-Cherifa, his friends Si Sliman, Sid' Omar, 
 the aga of the Atafs and myself, stretched 
 out on cushions in the shadow of the white 
 tent, tinted amber by the sunlight outside, 
 while the outline of the symbolical crescent 
 and bloody hand, obligatory ornaments of 
 every Arab dwelling, appeared like trans- 
 parencies on the canvas. 
 
My First Play. 185 
 
 It was a delicious afternoon, and one 
 which should have lasted for ever ! One of 
 those golden hours, which stand out, after 
 even four and twenty years, radiant as on 
 the first day, from the gray background of 
 life. And see how illogical and perverse is 
 our unfortunate human nature. To this day 
 I cannot think of that siesta in the tent, 
 without regret and longing : but on that 
 afternoon I must own, in that country, I 
 thirsted for Paris. 
 
 Yes, I regretted Paris, which I had been 
 obliged to leave abruptly on account of 
 my health, seriously impaired by my five 
 years literary novitiate. I regretted Paris 
 for all the beloved reasons I left there 
 behind me : for its fogs and its gas, for its 
 newspapers and new books, for the evening 
 discussions at the cafe, or under the portico 
 of the theatre, for that glorious fever of art, 
 and that perpetual enthusiasm, of which at 
 that time I only saw the sincere side; I 
 regretted it above all, on account of my play, 
 my first play ! of which the acceptance at 
 the Odeon had been announced to me on the 
 very day of departure. Certainly, the land- 
 
i86 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 scape before me was beautiful, and the 
 setting of it singularly poetic ; but I would 
 then willingly have exchanged Algeria and 
 the Atlas, Boualem and his friends, the blue 
 of the sky, the gleaming white of the 
 Marabouts' tombs, and the exquisite pink 
 of the oleanders, for the 
 gray colonnade of the 
 Ode'on, the little lobby of 
 the artists' entrance, and 
 the office of Constant the 
 concierge, a man of taste, 
 all hung with autographs 
 of actors and portraits of 
 actresses in costume. 
 Instead of all this, there I was in Algeria, lead- 
 ing the life of a great lord of medieval times, 
 when I might have been moving triumphantly, 
 with the hypocritically modest mien of the new 
 author whose piece is about to be played, 
 through those repulsive corridors, which 
 had once seen me so trembling and timid. 
 I was accustoming myself to the society of 
 Arab chiefs, undeniably picturesque, but 
 wanting in conversation ; while the prompter, 
 the scene-shifters, the manager, the director 
 
My First Play. 
 
 i8 7 
 
 and all the innumerable tribe of over-painted 
 and dyed actresses and blue-chinned actors 
 were busy over my piece ! I breathed the 
 fresh and penetrating scent of the breeze- 
 
 kissed 
 
 orange groves, 
 
 when I might have 
 
 delighted my nostrils with the 
 
 close and fusty odour peculiar to theatre 
 
 walls ! And then the ceremony of reading to 
 
 the actors, the bottle and tumbler of water, 
 
 and the manuscript shining white under 
 
 the lamp ! The rehearsals too ! in the 
 
Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 green room at first, round the great chim- 
 ney piece, then on the stage : the stage, 
 with its mysterious, unfathomable depths, 
 all crowded with frame-work and side 
 scenes, facing the empty house, echoing as a 
 cavern, and freezing to behold, with the 
 great chandelier covered up, and the boxes, 
 dress circle and stalls all shrouded in gray 
 linen. Then would come the first represen- 
 tation ; the front of the theatre, casting on 
 the square before it, the cheerful brightness 
 of its lines of gas, the vehicles arriving, the 
 crowd at the box office, the anxious wait at 
 the cafe opposite, alone with some faithful 
 friend, and then the throb of emotion, 
 striking the heart like a blow, at the mo- 
 ment when shadows in black coats, moving 
 with animation, appearing against the lighted 
 windows of the lobby, announced that the 
 curtain has fallen, and that, amidst applause 
 or hooting, the name of the author has been pro- 
 claimed. " Come," says the friend, M courage ; 
 we must go and see how it has all gone off; 
 thank the actors, and shake hands with ttre 
 friends who are impatiently waiting in the 
 little room at the cafe' Tabourey." This 
 
My First Play. 189 
 
 was the dream that I dreamt wide awake 
 beneath the tent, in the drowsy heat of a 
 fine month in the African winter ; whilst far 
 away, amongst the oblique rays of the sunset, 
 a well white but an hour ago became rose 
 tinted; and for all noise, on the silence of the 
 vast plain, rose the tinkle of a sheep bell and 
 the melancholy call of the shepherds. 
 
 There was absolutely nothing to disturb my 
 reverie. My hosts knew, amongst the four of 
 them, some twenty words of French ; I for 
 my part, scarcely ten words of Arabic. The 
 companion who had brought me there and 
 who usually served as my interpreter (a 
 Spanish corn merchant, whose acquaintance I 
 *had made at Milianah) was not with me, 
 having persevered in the chase : so that we 
 smoked our great cigarettes in silence, while 
 sipping the black Moorish coffee out of micro- 
 scopic cups, inserted in egg-cups of silver 
 filigree. 
 
 Suddenly, there was a great commotion, 
 the dogs barked, the servants ran hither and 
 thither, a great long devil of a spahi in his 
 red burnous stopped his horse short in front 
 of the tent and said,- *' Sidi Daoudi?" 
 
190 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 It was a telegram from Paris, which had 
 followed my track from camp to camp since 
 I left Milianah. It contained merely these 
 words : " Piece played yesterday, great 
 success, Rousseil and Tisserant splendid ! 
 
 viipmtt 
 
 I read and re-read this delightful 
 telegram, twenty times, a hundred 
 times over, as if it were a love letter. Only 
 think ! my first piece. Seeing my hands 
 trembling with emotion, and the happiness 
 shining in my eyes, the " agas " smiled at me 
 
My First Play. 
 
 191 
 
 and spoke among themselves in Arabic. The 
 cleverest of them even called up all his learn- 
 
 1<?out 
 
 ing to his aid, in order to say to me, 
 " France news family ? " Ah no, it was no 
 news of my family which made my heart beat 
 
192 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 so rapturously ; and unable to accustom my- 
 self to the notion of having no one to whom 
 I could communicate my delight, I set to 
 work to explain with my four words of Arabic 
 and the twenty words of French I believed 
 them to understand, what a theatre was, and 
 the importance of a first representation in 
 Paris, to the aga of the Atafs, to Sid'Omar, 
 to Si-Sliman, and Boualem Ben-Cherifa. Hard 
 work, as you may fancy ! I hunted for com- 
 parisons, I expressed myself in endless 
 pantomime, I nourished the blue cover of the 
 telegram saying : Karagueuz ! Karagueuz ! as 
 if my affecting little piece, intended to touch 
 the heart and draw forth tears from the eyes 
 of innocence, could possibly have any affinity 
 with the monstrous and devilish buffoonery in 
 which the Turks delight ; and as if one could 
 without blasphemy compare the classic 
 Ode'on with the clandestine haunts of every 
 Moorish town, in which at night, notwithstand- 
 ing the exertions of the police, the good Mus- 
 sulmans assemble to enjoy the spectacle of the 
 wanton adventures of their favourite hero ! ~ 
 These are the mirages of Africa. In Paris a 
 disappointment awaited me. For I returned to 
 
My First Play. 193 
 
 Paris at once in frantic haste, and much 
 sooner than prudence and the doctors would 
 sanction. But what mattered to me the fog 
 and the snow that I sought, what did I care 
 for the balmy sky I should leave behind me ? 
 To see my piece ! Nothing else in the world 
 signified. I am on board, I am on shore, I 
 fly through Marseilles, and behold me in the 
 train, trembling with eager excitement. I 
 arrived in Paris at about six o'clock in the 
 evening, when it was dark. I could not wait 
 for dinner, but cried : "To the Odeon, 
 Cabby ! " Ah, youth ! youth ! 
 
 They were about to draw up the curtain 
 when I seated myself in my stall. The house 
 presented a strange appearance j it was Shrove 
 Tuesday ; there would be dancing all night at 
 Bullier, and a large number of students and 
 their sweethearts had come to pass a couple 
 of hours at the play in their masquerade 
 costumes. There were jesters, clowns, 
 pierrots, pierrettes, follies. " Difficult, very 
 difficult," I thought to myself, " to bring tears 
 to the eyes of such a motley crowd ! " 
 They did cry however, and cried so much 
 that the spangles on the dresses, which 
 
 o 
 
194 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 caught the light, seemed so many bright 
 tear-drops. On my right was a little Folly 
 whose cap and bells were shaken every mo- 
 ment by her sobs, and on my left a Pierrette, 
 a fat, roundabout creature with a tender heart, 
 absurd to see in her emotion, with two great 
 streams running from her eyes and falling 
 down the double furrow coursed in the pow- 
 der on her cheeks. Decidedly, the telegram 
 had not lied, my little piece really was a great 
 success. During this time however I, the 
 author, would gladly have been a hundred 
 feet under ground. The play that these 
 good people were applauding, I now con- 
 sidered odiously bad. What a failure ! Was 
 that my dream ? that fat man, who, in order 
 to appear paternal and virtuous, had made 
 himself up to resemble Beranger ! Naturally, 
 I was most unjust : Tisserant and Rousseil, 
 two artists of great ability, acted as well as 
 an actor can act, and to their talent was due 
 much of my success. But the blow was 
 terrible, the difference too monstrous between 
 that which I fancied I had written, and what 
 I now saw before me ; showing all its flaws, 
 blemishes and defects in the pitiless glare of 
 
My First Play. 
 
 195 
 
 the footlights : and cruelly I suffered on 
 seeing my cherished ideal reduced to a mere 
 stuffed lay figure. Notwithstanding the emo- 
 tion, notwithstanding the applause, I felt an 
 indescribable sensation of shame and disgust. 
 The blood rushed hotly to my head and 
 flushed my cheeks. It seemed to me as if 
 all this masquerading public were scoffing at 
 me and knew me. Wretched, ill, losing my 
 head, I nervously repeated the actor's gestures. 
 I longed to make them move more quickly, 
 speak more quickly, skim over phrases and 
 stage, so that the torture might be the sooner 
 ended. What a relief it was when the curtain 
 fell, and I could make my escape, skirting 
 the walls, with turned up coat-collar, shame- 
 faced and stealthy as a thief. 
 
 II RHR II Hum 
 
 f i''1 JIM' 
 
 I 
 
 ' ' 
 
HENRI ROCHEFORT. 
 
 Somewhere about 1859, I made the ac- 
 quaintance of an excellent fellow, who was one 
 of the clerks in the bureaux of the Hotel de 
 Ville. His name was Henri Rochefort, but 
 this name at that time conveyed no particular 
 meaning. Rochefort lived in a quiet and 
 unpretending manner with his parents in the 
 old rue des Deux-Boules, within reach of his 
 work, in the swarming Quartier Saint-Denis, 
 invaded by business and fancy goods, with its 
 houses full of shops, covered from top to 
 
Henri Rochefort. 197 
 
 bottom with sign-boards, everywhere samples 
 displayed, placards hung at the sides of the 
 doors : such as, Feathers and flowers, Imi- 
 tation Jewellery, Beads and Spangles, Mock 
 Pearls ; a different trade on every floor; a 
 perpetual noise of work descending from 
 the windows to the street below j vans being 
 loaded, parcels tied up, clerks running about 
 pen behind ear; a work-girl in her smock, 
 gilt-clips sticking in her hair ; and here and 
 there some fine old mansion turned into a 
 wholesale shop, its coat-of-arms and sculp- 
 tures carrying one's thoughts back a couple 
 of centuries, causing one to dream of upstart 
 valets, financiers made of money, of Count 
 Horn, of the Regent, of the Mississippi, of 
 Law and his great scheme ; of the time, in 
 short, when in these now commercial and 
 bourgeois streets fluctuated the most wildly 
 impossible fortunes ; a flood of feverish 
 excitement and of wealth rolling with the 
 majestic impassibility of a tide from out of 
 that narrow, stinking passage hard by, still 
 called rue Quincampoix ! My friend Roche- 
 fort was a little like the street he lived in, 
 and held his past in small account. Every 
 
1 98 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 one knew he was of noble birth, son of a 
 Count ; he appeared to ignore that, and 
 simply called himself Rochefort; and this 
 American simplicity did not fail to impress 
 me, freshly imported from our vain and 
 legitimist South. 
 
 M. de Rochefort, the father, belonged to 
 the generation of men who were young in 
 1830, and whose career was interrupted and 
 future spoilt by the Revolution of July. It was 
 a particularly amiable and witty generation, 
 preserving a delicate perfume of ancien regime 
 in the atmosphere of Louis Philippe's reign ; 
 sulking at the new royalty, without however 
 sulking at France ; attached to the elder 
 branch, but too well aware that any res- 
 toration must be for a long time impossible 
 to permit the slightest mark of the gloomy 
 temper of the fanatic or sectarian to brand 
 their sceptical and disinterested loyalty. While 
 some of them amused themselves by bom- 
 barding the Tuileries with their sparkling wit, 
 or protested against the dulness of the bour- 
 geois manners by joining the uproarious crowd 
 of masqueraders and jingling jesters, in the 
 legendary " descente de la Courtille " ; others 
 
Henri Rochefort. 199 
 
 less scatterbrained or poorer, tried to procure 
 by their own labour what they could no longer 
 hope for from the good graces of royalty. Thus 
 did M. de Lauzanne, whom we saw not long 
 ago pass by still brisk and smiling, still erect 
 in spite of his great age, still a thorough gen- 
 tleman, notwithstanding his work as a vaude- 
 villiste, and the nickname of Father Lauzanne 
 which his colleagues with affectionate fa- 
 miliarity bestowed on him thus did also M. 
 de Rochefort, who in his day had been the 
 intimate friend of the ex-bodyguard "Choca," 
 and very prominent in his time among the 
 noisy young royalist party. Having been 
 much addicted to haunting the green room, 
 Rochefort, the father, like Lauzanne, when 
 bad times came, remembered the way to the 
 theatre, and returned thither, this time to 
 make a livelihood. Within every amateur 
 is concealed an author ; and from applauding 
 plays, to trying to write them, the transition 
 is easy ; thus M. de Rochefort- Lucay wrote 
 plays and became a vaudevilliste. 
 
 These details are not without meaning, for 
 they serve to give us an idea of the surround- 
 ings in which Rochefort's childhood was 
 
200 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 passed. 1 1 was a curious childhood, character- 
 istic and very Parisian, spent entirely between 
 the Lyce'e and the little world of the theatre j 
 
 the cafes to which his father took him on 
 Sundays, where authors and actors meet, are 
 more patriarchal than is generally supposed ; 
 and instead of the mad revels dreamt of by 
 
Henri Rochefort. 201 
 
 the provincial mind, one hears the dry click 
 of the dice thrown on the backgammon boards, 
 or of the dominoes as they are moved to and 
 fro. Rochefort was therefore the collegian, 
 son of an artist or man of letters, that we 
 have all known, initiated from childhood into 
 the secrets of the green room, addressing the 
 most celebrated actors with familiarity, know- 
 ing all about the newest plays, secretly giving 
 orders for the play to the under master, and 
 thus able to compose with impunity in the 
 recesses of his desk, in company with a pipe 
 and a tame lizard, a whole heap of master- 
 pieces, dramatic or otherwise, which he would 
 carry on the next holiday, his cap jauntily 
 stuck aside, and his heart beating fiercely 
 enough to burst the buttons off his tunic, 
 to the letter-boxes never open of the 
 newspaper offices, or to the sneering stage 
 doorkeepers of the theatres. The destiny of 
 such collegians can be traced beforehand : at 
 twenty they obtain a clerkship of some sort, 
 ministerial or civil, and continue to manu- 
 facture subterranean literature at the bottom 
 of a desk, concealing it from their chiefs as 
 they had done from their schoolmasters. 
 
202 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Rochefort did not escape the usual fate. After 
 trying the highest flights of literature, and 
 after having fruitlessly sent I know not how 
 many odes and sonnets to all the poetic 
 assemblies of France, he used, when I knew 
 him, the pens and paper of the Paris Munici- 
 pality in writing short resumes of plays for 
 the Charivari, which was just then reforming 
 its staff and trying to infuse therein a little 
 fresh blood. 
 
 Although I could not guess the future in 
 store for Rochefort, his physiognomy interest- 
 ed me from the very first. It was evidently 
 not that of a man who would long put up 
 with this clerk-like existence, fettered by the 
 punctuality of the office hours, as exasperating 
 as the tic-tac of a Black Forest cuckoo clock. 
 You know the strange head, just such as it 
 has always remained, a head of hair standing 
 erect and bristly above a forehead almost too 
 large, at one and the same time an abode for 
 neuralgia and a reservoir of enthusiasm ; 
 deep and hollow eyes gleaming under the 
 shadow of the brow, the nose, straight and 
 sharp, the mouth curved bitterly, the whole 
 face lengthened by a pointed beard, which 
 
Henri Rochefort. 203 
 
 inevitably made one think of a sceptical 
 Don Quixote, or a gentle Mephistopheles. 
 Very thin, he wore a wretched black coat, 
 which was much too tight, and it was his 
 custom to keep his hands buried in his 
 trouser pockets a deplorable habit, which 
 made him seem even thinner than he really 
 was, accentuating terribly the angularity of 
 his elbows and the narrowness of his 
 shoulders. He was generous and a good 
 friend, capable of great self sacrifice, and 
 under the appearance of coldness, was 
 nervous and easily irritated. One day, in 
 consequence of an article, on what subject I 
 no longer remember, he had a duel with the 
 editor of the Gaulois newspaper. The Gau- 
 lois of that day (for the title of a newspaper 
 in France has more incarnations than Buddha, 
 and passes through more hands than the 
 betrothed of the King of Garbe), the Gaulois 
 of that day, was one of those ephemeral 
 cabbage leaves such as spring up between the 
 paving stones around the cafes of the theatres 
 and the literary taverns. The editor, a short, 
 jolly, witty, red and round little man, was, 
 as far as I can recollect, called Delvaille 
 
204 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 and signed himself Delbrecht, no doubt 
 thinking that a prettier name. Delvaille or 
 Delbrecht, whichever you please, had pro- 
 voked Rochefort. Rochefort would have pre- 
 ferred to fight with pistols ; not that he was 
 a very alarmingly good shot, but he had 
 sometimes won a few macaroons at a fair : 
 while, as to a sword, neither from far nor 
 from near, could he ever remember having 
 seen such a thing. Delvaille, having been 
 challenged, had choice of weapons, and chose 
 swords. " Very well then, said Rochefort, I 
 will fight with swords." A rehearsal of the 
 duel was held in Paul Veron's room. Roche- 
 fort was willing to run the risk of being 
 killed, but not that of appearing ridiculous. 
 Veron therefore had summoned a great 
 sergeant-major of Zouaves (since then cut to 
 pieces at Solferino) very skilful at the salutes, 
 attitudes, and manners most in fashion in the 
 barrack fencing school. " After you Not 
 at all To please you Proceed, Sir." 
 After ten minutes fencing, Rochefort might 
 as far as grace went, have shown the most 
 moustached la Ramee how to set to work. 
 The two champions met the next day, in those 
 
Henri Rochefort. 205 
 
 delightful woods of Chaville between Paris 
 and Versailles, which we all know so well, 
 often spending Sunday there in less warlike 
 pastimes. A cold fine rain was falling that 
 day, making bubbles on the pond, and veiling 
 in a faint mist the green circle of hills, the 
 slope of a ploughed field, and the falten sides 
 of a red sand pit. The combatants took off 
 their shirts, notwithstanding the rain, and, 
 but for the gravity of the situation, one would 
 have been tempted to laugh at seeing, face to 
 face, this little fat and white-haired fellow, 
 in a flannel vest piped with blue at the wrists, 
 putting himself into position as correctly as 
 on the platform ; and Rochefort, lanky, spare, 
 yellow, grim as a death's head, and so cased 
 in bony ribs that one really doubted whether 
 there was space upon his body for the prick 
 of a sword. Unfortunately, he had forgotten 
 in the night all the fine lessons of the sergeant- 
 major, held his sword like a taper and made 
 the most reckless thrusts leaving himself 
 exposed. At the first pass he received a 
 thrust which grazed his side. The sword 
 had scratched him but very slightly. It was 
 his first duel. 
 
206 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 I shall surprise no one by saying that even 
 then Rochefort was witty; but it was a 
 
 kind of concentrated wit, of subtle essence 
 consisting, above all, of cutting words long 
 meditated, in the association of ideas utterly 
 
Henri Rochefort. 207 
 
 incongruous and unforeseen ; in the wildest 
 absurdities, in chilling, and ferocious jokes, 
 which he muttered between his teeth with the 
 voice of Cham, and the silent laugh of 
 Leather-stocking. But this wit remained 
 useless and congealed. His witticisms were 
 amusing enough when uttered among in- 
 timate friends and comrades, but to write and 
 print such things, to plunge into literature 
 with any such furious bounds and capers, 
 appeared impossible. Rochefort did not 
 know his own value, and as is generally the 
 case, it was a chance, an accident, which 
 revealed to him his talent. He had for 
 friend and inseparable companion, a singular 
 figure, whose mere name will raise a smile 
 amongst those of my own generation who 
 can recall an acquaintance with him. He 
 was called Leon Rossignol. A true type 
 of old man's child, one might almost say he 
 was born old. Slim and blanched like a 
 lettuce grown in a cellar, at eighteen he was 
 a confirmed snuff-taker, coughed and ex- 
 pectorated, and leant with an air of dignity 
 on a stick worthy of a grandpapa. A medley 
 of irreconcilable elements ; or rather having 
 
2o8 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 in him some unsettled spirit, this bold fellow, 
 strange to say, was fond of a quarrel and 
 afraid of a blow. Cowardly and insolent as 
 Panurge, he was capable of provoking with- 
 out rhyme or reason the first carabineer he 
 met in the street, and if the soldier took 
 the joke amiss of falling on his knees to 
 beg pardon, with such exaggerated humility, 
 that the offended party scarcely knew 
 whether to laugh or be angry. In short, he 
 was a grown-up child, weak and sickly; 
 beloved by Rochefort on account of his ready 
 command of vulgar oratory, wittily attuned to 
 the taste of the populace, and whom he 
 saved more than once from the consequences 
 he might have brought upon himself through 
 some practical joke carried too far. Rossignol, 
 like Rochefort, was employed at the Hotel 
 de Ville. He was perched aloft, on the top 
 story, under the roof, in an office, far away 
 at the end of a labyrinth of narrow staircases 
 and passages, and there, in charge of stores, 
 he gravely distributed as required, paper, 
 pens, pencils, pen-knives, letter-weights, 
 squares of india-rubber, bottles of pounce 
 powder, blue ink, red ink, gold dust, illustrated 
 
Henri Rochefort. 209 
 
 almanacs, and I know not what else ; all the 
 useless paraphernalia with which the idle 
 penmen of a great office love to surround 
 themselves, and which one may call the flora 
 of office life. Rossignol too had naturally 
 literary ambition. To see his name in some 
 publication or another was his most ardent 
 desire, and we used to amuse ourselves, 
 Pierre Veron, Rochefort and I, by cooking 
 up for him scraps of articles, or improvising 
 little quatrains, which he at once carried, full 
 of pride, to the Tintamarre. This irrespon- 
 sibility had a curious effect. Rochefort, who, 
 when he wrote under his own name was 
 hampered by servile imitations and con- 
 ventionalism, showed originality and in- 
 dividuality the moment he wrote under the 
 signature of Rossignol. Then he was free, 
 then he did not feel the irritated eye of the 
 Institute following on his paper the un- 
 academic contortions of his thought and 
 style. And it was delightful to see this bold 
 spirit indulging in mirth j cool, incisive, full of 
 astonishing audacity and familiarity, with 
 a feeling peculiar to himself for everything 
 pertaining to Parisian life, and for taking it as 
 
210 
 
 Thirty Years of Pai'is. 
 
 text for all manner of jokes, put together with 
 patience and without mercy ; in the midst 
 of which the phrase maintained the solemnity 
 of a clown between two grins, content with 
 
 just one wink, when once the paragraph 
 was ended. 
 
 " But this is charming, new, original, quite 
 yourself; why don't you write like this -on 
 your own account ?" "You are right perhaps. 
 I must try." Rochefort's style was dis- 
 
Henri Rochefort. 211 
 
 covered, the Empire had now to look to 
 itself. 
 
 It has been said that it was the spirit of 
 Arnal on paper, and that Rochefort had only 
 put in paragraphs the dialogues of Duvert 
 and Lauzanne. We do not deny the influence. 
 It is evident that the point of view and the 
 mode of expressing in a set formula a given 
 proceeding, of turning the dialogue and giving 
 a fanciful twist to the thought, which, during 
 the endless games of dominoes on the Boule- 
 vard du Temple, had made an impression on 
 his school-boy brain, were not without their 
 use to him afterwards. But these are un- 
 conscious imitations, from which no one can 
 escape. It is not contrary to the laws of litera- 
 ture to pick up a rusty weapon ; the important 
 part is to know how to sharpen the blade, and 
 to re-model the hilt to the measure of one's hand. 
 
 Rochefort made his debut in the Nain 
 Jaune, edited by Aurelien Scholl. Who does 
 not know Scholl ? However little you may 
 have frequented the Boulevards of Paris, or 
 visited their neighbourhood during the last 
 thirty years, you must have remarked in front 
 of Tortoni's, under the lime trees of Baden, 
 
Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 or the palms of Monte Carlo, these pre- 
 eminently Parisian and Boulevardier features. 
 By the gaiety of the accent, the clear sharp- 
 ness of the tone, the brilliant and trenchant 
 sparkle of the style, Scholl in the midst of 
 a Paris overwhelmed by Parliamentary slang 
 and the foolish babble of reporters remains 
 one of the last, we might almost say the last, 
 petit jour?ialiste. The petit journaliste in the 
 sense given to the words, means a journalist 
 who thinks himself bound to be at the same 
 time a journalist and a good writer; the great 
 journalist considers himself free from this 
 obligation. Like many others, in these 
 troubled latter days, Scholl, little by little, 
 seeing no harm in it, has been drawn into the 
 political arena. He is in the full heat of the 
 battle now, and it is amusing to see this 
 grandson of Rivarol become republican, 
 pointing against the enemies of the Re- 
 public, the golden arrows dipped in a little 
 poison, borrowed from the reactionary arsenal 
 of the Actes des Apotres. But at the date of 
 the Nain Jamie, politics languished, and 
 neither did Scholl any more than Roche- 
 fort have any thought or expectation of a 
 
Henri Rochefort. 213 
 
 Republic. He contented himself with being 
 one of the most amiable sceptics and the 
 wittiest scoffers in Paris. Passionately fond 
 of display, in his character of Bordelais, he 
 maintained what in those good old times of 
 Sainte Boheme had a faint suspicion of para- 
 dox about it he maintained that a literary 
 man ought to pay his bootmaker, and that 
 one could be witty and yet own fresh gloves 
 and a clean shirt. Faithful to his principles, 
 he made use of all the elegances of the 
 moment, even to the eye glass wedged in the 
 corner of his eye, to which he still adheres ; 
 he breakfasted at Bignon's, and afforded the 
 Parisians the entirely novel sight of a simple 
 chronicler partaking daily of his boiled egg 
 and his cutlet, in company with the Due de 
 Grammont-Caderousse, who was at that time 
 the reigning monarch of the gilded youth. 
 The Nain Jaune was the only serious rival 
 Viilemessant ever encountered. Greatly 
 helped forward by his fashionable acquaint- 
 ances, Scholl, in a few months had succeeded 
 in making his journal the organ of high life, 
 and of the clubs, the umpire of Parisian 
 elegance ; but, at the end of a year, he 
 
214 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 became disgusted, and thought himself worthy 
 of better things; he was too much of a writer, 
 too much of a journalist, to remain long as 
 a mere editor. 
 
 Rochefort's success in the Nain Jamie was 
 rapid, and in the Figaro, which hastened to 
 secure his pen, he was still more brilliant. 
 The Parisians, always critical fault-finders, 
 and long unaccustomed to independence 
 took a fancy to these pamphlets, which set 
 to work to mock aloud, in a tone of jeering 
 raillery, all sorts of solemn and official things 
 which, till now, the boldest had hardly dared 
 to jest at in a whisper. Rochefort was fairly 
 launched, he had duels, more successful than 
 that on the borders of the pond at Chaville ; 
 he gambled, lived generously, filled Paris with 
 the noise of his fame, and remained, in spite 
 of all, notwithstanding the intoxication of the 
 successes of an evening or an hour, the same 
 Rochefort I had known at the Hotel de Ville, 
 always modest and kindly, always ready to do 
 a service to a friend ; always uneasy about 
 the forthcoming article, always fearing he had 
 lost the vein, exhausted himself, and could 
 continue no longer. 
 
Henri Rochefort. 215 
 
 Villemessant, who loved to be despotic 
 with his contributors, had for this one an 
 admiration coupled with fear. The mocking 
 and impassive face, the headstrong and fan- 
 tastic temperament astounded him. The fact 
 is, Rochefort was full of strange obstinacies 
 and singular caprices. I have related else- 
 where the effect of his article on M. de Saint 
 Remy's play, and with what insolent familiarity 
 he put down the pretensions of this unlucky 
 ducal, presidential volume, which had been 
 decked with every term of flattery by each 
 Dangeau and Jules Lecomte of journalism. 
 Paris chuckled at the audacity, Morny felt 
 the hit and called out. With a simplicity 
 worthy of a wounded author, astonishing how- 
 ever on the part of a man of wit, he sent his 
 dramatic works to Jouvin, concluding that 
 Jouvin would have better taste than Roche- 
 fort, and that he would write in the Figaro, 
 an article which should make amends. 
 
 Jouvin accepted the volume, but wrote no 
 article, and the poor Duke had to swallow as 
 best he could, the bitter prose of Rochefort. 
 What happened then appeared incredible 
 and unlikely at first sight, yet it was after all 
 
216 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 true to human nature. Morny, courted, 
 flattered and all-powerful, conceived a sort of 
 affection, mingled with fear and spite, for the 
 man who had not feared to hold him up to 
 ridicule. 
 
 He would have liked to see and know him, 
 to have a quiet explanation with him in a 
 corner, as between two friends. His little 
 court did their best to prove that Rochefort 
 possessed neither wit nor style, and that his 
 judgment was absolutely without weight. 
 
 His flatterers (a Vice-Emperor always has 
 plenty of them) visited the quays, and collected 
 little vaudevilles, peccadilloes of Rochefort's 
 youth, analysed them, picked them to pieces, 
 and upheld by a thousand conclusive argu- 
 ments that those of M. de Saint Remy were 
 better. Imaginary crimes were attributed to 
 Rochefort. A fanatical Prudhomme arrived 
 one day at a hand gallop, scarlet with indig- 
 nation, his eyes starting out of his head, 
 " You know, Rochefort, the famous Roche- 
 fort, who gives himself such immaculate airs ? 
 Well, do you know what we have found oift 
 about him? He was granted a scholarship 
 under the Empire ! " What a base and vile 
 
Henri Rochefort. 217 
 
 heart the man must have had, who, having 
 been Imperial scholar at eight years of age, 
 at thirty declared the plays written by M. le 
 Due to be contemptible ! A little more and 
 they would have held Rochefort accountable 
 for the political opinions of his nurse ! Vain 
 efforts ; useless revelations. Morny, like a 
 neglected lover, only became more obstinately 
 determined to make Rochefort his friend. 
 
 The caprice became a mania, which pos- 
 sessed him all the more that Rochefort, made 
 aware of it, practised a sort of comic coquetry 
 in persistently refusing to know the Duke. 
 How well I remember, at the first representa- 
 tion of the Belle Helene, Morny stopping 
 Villemessant in the lobby, saying: "This 
 time, you must introduce Rochefort to me ! " 
 " Monsieur le Due ! Certainly, Monsieur le 
 Due ! It was but a moment since that we 
 were talking about " And Villemessant ran 
 off after Rochefort, but Rochefort had van- 
 ished. Then the idea was suggested that some 
 arrangement, some kind of trap should be 
 laid, by which the Duke and Rochefort should 
 accidentally be brought together face to face. 
 The latter was known to be a great collector 
 
Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 of old curios (for had he not published the 
 Petits Mysteres de V Hotel des Ventes ? ), and 
 was passionately fond of pictures. The Duke 
 had a good many fine paintings. Rochefort 
 would be induced to come and see the gallery, 
 the Duke would be there, as if by chance, 
 and the introduction would thus take place. 
 A day was fixed, a friend undertook to bring 
 Rochefort ; the Duke waited in his picture 
 gallery ; he waited one hour, two hours, alone 
 with his Rembrandts and his Hobbemas, and 
 again this time the wished-for monster never 
 came. 
 
 While the Duke lived (no doubt by a mere 
 coincidence, for I do not suppose that this 
 distant and unrequited friendship was ever 
 carried to the extent of protecting the un- 
 grateful pamphleteer from the decrees of 
 justice), nevertheless, while the Duke lived, 
 Rochefort was comparatively little molested. 
 But once Morny had disappeared from the 
 scene, the persecutions began. Rochefort, 
 exasperated, redoubled in insolence and 
 audacity. Fines fell as thickly as hailstones, 
 and imprisonment followed up the fines. 
 The censor began to notice his writings. 
 
Henri Rochefort. 219 
 
 The censor's conventional palate found 
 that all Rochefort's writings had a strong 
 political flavour. The Figaro's very ex. 
 istence was threatened, and Rochefort com- 
 pelled to withdraw from the paper. He 
 thereupon founded the Lanterne, unmasked 
 his batteries, and boldly ran up his pirate 
 flag. It was again .Villemessant, Villemessant 
 the conservative, Villemessant of the magis- 
 terial fasces, who chartered this fire-ship. The 
 censor and Villemessant on this occasion 
 rendered a strange kind of service to con- 
 servatism and to the Empire. The history 
 of the Lanterne-, and its wonderful success, 
 is well known, the little flame-coloured paper 
 seen in every hand, in the streets, the cabs, 
 the railway carriages, all bright with the red 
 sparks ; the Government losing its head, the 
 scandal, the trial, and inevitable, easily 
 foreseen result Rochefort named deputy for 
 Paris. 
 
 There again, Rochefort remained the same 
 as ever ; he carried with him to the benches 
 of the Chamber, even to the tribune, the 
 insulting familiarity of his pamphlets, and to 
 the very last refused to treat the Empire as a 
 
220 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 serious adversary. Do you remember the 
 scandal ? A government orator, speaking in 
 a high and mighty tone, and with all the 
 
 contempt that a stiff and pompous parlia- 
 mentary man may feel towards a mere news- 
 paper scribbler, had coupled his name with 
 
Henri Rochefort. 221 
 
 the word ridiculous ! Pale, with his teeth 
 clenched, Rochefort rose from his seat, and 
 smiting the sovereign's cheek, over the 
 shoulder of his minister said : * I may some- 
 times have been ridiculous, but I have never 
 been seen in the tawdry masquerading get-up 
 of a mountebank dentist, with an eagle on 
 my shoulder and a piece of fat bacon in my 
 hat ! " That day M. Schneider was presiding. 
 I can remember the consternation expressed 
 on his great good-natured face. And picturing 
 to myself in his place, the Due de Morny's 
 refined and haughty face, with its cool and 
 ironical expression, I said to myself, " What 
 a pity he is not sitting up there, he would at 
 last have realized his wish, and made the 
 acquaintance of Rochefort." 
 
 Since then, I have only twice caught sight 
 of Rochefort : the first time at the funeral of 
 Victor Noir, fainting and borne past in a cab, 
 worn out by the desperate struggle of two 
 hours, that he had maintained by the side of 
 Delescluze against a bewildered mob of two 
 
222 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 hundred thousand unarmed men, who with 
 women and children insisted on taking back 
 the body to Paris, and so march on to certain 
 butchery as Rochefort knew that cannons 
 were there, ready to fire on them. Then, 
 again another time during the war, in the 
 scurry and bustle of the battle of Buzenval, 
 with the tramping of the troops, the dull 
 sound of the cannons in the forts, the 
 rumbling of the ambulance carts, amid the 
 fever and the smoke ; bishops showing off on 
 horseback, fancifully dressed up like mas- 
 queraders; brave citizens going off to be 
 killed, fully believing in Trochu's plan 5 in 
 the midst of the heroic, in the midst of the 
 grotesque, in the midst of this never-to-be-for- 
 gotten drama full as those of Shakespeare 
 of both the sublime and the ridiculous- 
 called the Siege of Paris. It was on the road 
 to Mont Valerien, cold and muddy, the 
 bare trees shivered sadly against the mono- 
 tonous gray of the misty sky. My friend 
 passed by in a carriage, pale and livid as 
 ever, behind the window ; still as in the far- 
 away days at the Hotel de Ville, buttoned up 
 in a tight black coat. I cried to him 
 
Henri Rochefort. 
 
 223 
 
 through the storm, " Good morning, 
 Rochefort." 
 
 Since then I have never seen him again. 1 
 
 tf^ 
 
 
 1 This description of Rochefort was published in 
 the Nouveau Temps of St. Petersburg, in 1879. 
 
z^M- 
 
 HENRY MONNIER. 
 
 Once more I see myself in the humble 
 garret of my youthful days, in the depth of 
 winter, no fire in the grate, and the window 
 panes clouded by the thick hoar frost. Seated 
 in front of a little white wooden table, my 
 legs wrapped in a travelling rug, I was busily 
 engaged in penning verses. Some one raps 
 at the door, " Come in S " and in the open 
 doorway a strange apparition comes into 
 sight. Imagine a vast and rotund waistcoat, 
 a shirt collar, a homely, ruddy, close-shaven 
 countenance, with a pair of spectacles astride 
 on a Roman nose. The individual bows 
 ceremoniously, and says, 
 
 "I am Henry Monnier." 
 
Henry Monnier. 225 
 
 Henry Monnier ; at that time a celebrity ! 
 Actor, writer, artist in one, he was pointed 
 out as he passed through the streets, and 
 M. de Balzac, the great observer, held him in 
 high esteem for his powers of observation. 
 It was a singular style of observation, it must 
 be added, and not at all that of ordinary 
 mortals. Many a writer, indeed, has acquired 
 wealth and renown by rallying the foibles and 
 infirmities of others. Monnier however had 
 not gone far in search of a model : he placed 
 himself in front of his looking-glass, listened 
 to his own thoughts and words, and finding 
 the type thus before him a profoundly 
 ridiculous one, he conceived that pitiless 
 incarnation, that cruel satire on the French 
 bourgeois, which is known under the name of 
 Joseph Prudhomme. For Monnier is Joseph 
 Prudhomme, and Joseph Prudhomme is 
 Monnier. From the white gaiters to the 
 cravat of many folds and endless windings, 
 they have all in common. Both have the 
 same pompous and turkey-cock style of frill, 
 the same air of grotesque solemnity, the same 
 domineering round-eyed stare through the 
 gold-rimmed spectacles, the same impossible 
 
 Q 
 
226 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 apophthegms, delivered in the voice of a 
 vulture with a cold in the head. "If I 
 could only get out of my own skin for an 
 hour or two," says Fantasio to his friend 
 Spark, " if I could only become that man 
 passing by ! " Monnier, who had but little affinity 
 with Fantasio, never had any wish to become 
 that passer-by ; possessing in the highest 
 degree the singular quality of duality, he 
 sometimes quitted the husk that enveloped 
 him, in order to turn it into ridicule ; and to 
 laugh at his own appearance ; but he soon 
 wrapped himself again in his cherished 
 personality, and the relentless scoffer, the 
 cruel mocker, the scourge of bourgeois fool- 
 ishness, became again in private life the most 
 ingenuously stupid of the class he ridiculed. 
 Among other pre -occupations, worthy in- 
 deed of Joseph Prudhomme, Henry Monnier 
 was possessed with one idea, which he held 
 in common with every provincial magistrate 
 who is given to improvising rhymes, and with 
 all the superannuated colonels who employ 
 their enforced leisure in translating Horace. 
 He longed to soar aloft on Pegasus, to wear 
 the buskin and sandals of Thalia, to stoop 
 
Henry Mounter. 
 
 227 
 
 and gather in the hollow of his hand even 
 
 at the risk of snapping his mental braces 
 
 some of the pure water of Hippocrene ; he 
 
 dreamt of verdant laurels, of academic prizes, 
 
 and last, but not least, of seeing a play of his 
 
 own acted at the Theatre 
 
 Francais. Already does 
 
 any one remember it now ? 
 
 a play of his, in three 
 
 acts and in verse, as the 
 
 play-bills say, had been 
 
 represented at the Odeon ; 
 
 Feint res et Bourgeois was 
 
 its title : and it was his joint 
 
 production with a young 
 
 commercial traveller, I 
 
 think, who was somewhat 
 
 of an expert in the art of 
 
 turning a couplet. The 
 
 Odeon was all very well; 
 
 but the Theatre Francais ! 
 
 the home of Moliere ! And for twenty 
 
 years, Henry Monnier prowled round the 
 
 abode of fame, haunting the Cafe de la 
 
 Regence, and the Cafe Minerve; wherever 
 
 the societaires of the theatre met together 
 
22< 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 there Monnier was to be seen, always digni- 
 fied and trim, his tidy and close-shaven face, 
 like that of the "noble father" of a play, and 
 with the conscious self-satisfied look of a 
 pedantic exponent of comedy. 
 
 The worthy fellow had read my verses, and 
 counted on my help 
 to realize his ambi- 
 tious dreams. It 
 was in order to 
 propose our working 
 together that he had 
 clambered panting 
 up the innumerable 
 
 and steep stairs 
 which led to my 
 attic in the Rue de 
 Tournon. You will 
 easily understand 
 how flattered I was, 
 and with what alacrity I accepted his offer ! 
 
 The very next day I went to his house. 
 He occupied, in a respectable-looking old 
 house in the Rue Ventadour, a small apart- 
 ment, which bore the very characteristic 
 stamp of an economical, tidy, fidgety spirit, 
 
Henry Mounter. 229 
 
 at once actor and old bachelor. Everything 
 furniture and floors was polished and 
 shining. In front of each chair was a little 
 round bit of carpet, edged with red cloth, 
 neatly pinked out. There were four spit- 
 toons j one in each corner. On the mantel- 
 piece were two saucers, each containing a few 
 pinches of dry snuff. Monnier occasionally 
 dipped into them, but never offered any. 
 
 The first impression this house conveyed 
 to my mind was that of miserliness. Later 
 on I learnt that this parsimonious appearance 
 hid in reality a very hard and difficult life. 
 Monnier was entirely without fortune : from 
 time to time the representation of a play, a 
 short article, the sale of a few sketches, came 
 to supplement, and that in a very partial 
 manner, his small resources. Little by little 
 he had slipped into the habit of dining out 
 every day. He was a favourite guest, and 
 paid his welcome by relating, or rather acting 
 for his parodies and jokes were never 
 spontaneous highly seasoned stories after 
 dinner. They were either some thoroughly 
 scandalous dialogue between two persons 
 whose voice he mimicked, or else he repre- 
 
230 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 sented his favourite hero, Monsieur Prud- 
 homme, carrying his great stomach and his 
 imperturbable solemnity through the most 
 doubtful and ticklish adventures. All this 
 was delivered without a smile ; for the 
 bourgeois lurking within Henry Monnier 
 secretly rebelled at playing the part of 
 buffoon. He was full too of despotic and 
 unreasonable requirements ; insisting, for 
 instance, on a quarter of an hour's nap after 
 dinner, no matter how high the society in 
 which he happened to be ; and was seized with 
 fits of jealousy, sullenness, and rage, like an 
 old parrot robbed of the bone he is picking, 
 if by chance any other than himself led the 
 conversation at table, and threatened to put 
 him in the shade. At one time his friends 
 were anxious to obtain for him a government 
 pension ; it would have seemed wealth to 
 the poor fellow, but in this instance his after- 
 dinner jokes had an unfortunate effect. 
 Malassis had published a collection of his 
 stories in Belgium ; a copy was sent over to 
 Paris, the ministerial propriety was declared 
 to be outraged, and the promised pension 
 vanished into thin air. This volume must 
 
Henry Mounter. 231 
 
 not be mistaken for the Basfonds de Paris, 
 which by comparison might have been written 
 for young girls ; although the publication of 
 even this last was only permitted on suffer- 
 ance, and restricted to a very limited number 
 of copies, sufficiently expensive to prevent 
 the volume from exerting a dangerous in- 
 fluence beyond the excommunicated frontiers 
 of the world of bibliophiles. 
 
 Such was the double nature of this man 
 homo duplex who did me the honour of 
 wishing to make me partner in his literary 
 work. Full as I was at twenty of whimsical 
 fancy, I might have been able to agree with 
 the buffoon, but unfortunately it was the 
 bourgeois Prudhomme, and he alone, who 
 wished to collaborate with me. After a few 
 interviews I ceased my visits to him. No 
 doubt Henry Monnier hardly regretted me ; 
 and of my first dream of fame nothing 
 remains but the memory of this ridiculous 
 old man in his neat and shabby home, 
 taking little whiffs out of little pipes, and 
 seated in the leather arm-chair,wherein he was 
 found dead one morning some fifteen years ago. 
 
THE END OF A MERRY-ANDREW, 
 AND OF MURGER'S BOHEMIA. 
 
 When I was about eighteen, I made the 
 acquaintance of a somewhat singular indi- 
 vidual, who now seems to me, after a certain 
 lapse of time, to be the very personification 
 of a world to itself, with special language and 
 peculiar manners, a world that has dis- 
 appeared and is now almost forgotten ; but 
 which at one time held a prominent place, in 
 the Paris of the Empire. I allude to that 
 gipsy band, guerillas of art, rebels against 
 
The E?id of a Merry Andrew. 233 
 
 conventional philosophy and literature, fan- 
 tastic to the very uttermost, which had 
 insolently ensconced itself before the Louvre 
 and the Institute, and which Henri Murger 
 not without embellishing and poetizing the 
 remembrance of it has celebrated under the 
 title of Bohemia. We will call my personage 
 Desroches. I had met him at a ball of the 
 Quartier Latin, with some friends, one summer 
 evening. I had returned home very late to 
 my little room in the Rue de Tournon, and 
 was sleeping as soundly as a dormouse the 
 next morning, when suddenly there appeared, 
 at the foot of my bed, a man in a black coat, 
 a scanty, threadbare coat, of that peculiar 
 black only seen on policemen and under- 
 takers. 
 
 " I come from M. Desroches." 
 
 41 M. Desroches ? What M. Desroches ? " 
 said I, rubbing my eyes, for my recollections 
 that morning obstinately refused to be aroused 
 as quickly as my body. 
 
 li M. Desroches of the Figaro. You spent 
 the evening together last night ; he is in the 
 lock-up, and he refers to you." 
 
 " M. Desroches ah, to be sure 
 
234 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 exactly he refers to me well, tell them to let 
 him out ! " 
 
 " Beg pardon, there is fifteen-pence to 
 pay!" 
 
 " Fifteen-pence ! Why ? " 
 
 " It is the custom." 
 
 I gave the fifteen-pence. The black-coated 
 man disappeared, and I remained sitting on 
 my bed, half dreaming, and not clearly under- 
 standing in consequence of what eccentric 
 adventures I found myself brought to the 
 point of ransoming, like a new brother of 
 mercy for fifteen-pence a contributor to 
 the Figaro from the clutches not of the Turks, 
 but of the police. 
 
 I had no long time for reflection. Five 
 minutes later, Desroches, freed from his 
 fetters, came smiling into my room. 
 
 " A thousand pardons, my dear colleague ; 
 all this is the fault of the Raisins muscats. 
 Yes ! the Raisins muscats, my first article, 
 which appeared yesterday in the Figaro. 
 Confounded Raisins muscats! You see, I 
 had got the payment my first payment 
 and it flew to my head. We patrolled 
 the whole quarter after we left you, indeed 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 235 
 
 towards the end my recollections are some- 
 what mixed; still I have a sensation as if 
 I had received a kick somewhere or another. 
 Then I found myself in the station- 
 house a charming night indeed ! First 
 
 of all they poked me into the furthest 
 den the black hole, you know. How it 
 smelt ! But I made the gentlemen laugh 
 they were good enough to take me into 
 their guard-room we talked, played cards 
 
236 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 They insisted on my reading them les 
 Raisins muscats, such a success ! ... It is 
 really astonishing the taste these policemen 
 have ! " 
 
 Imagine my stupefaction, and the effect 
 produced on my simple and provincial boyish 
 mind by the revelation of these eccentric 
 literary habits and customs ! And the 
 colleague who thus related his adventures 
 was a little round fellow, well brushed and 
 shaved, affecting polite manners, and whose 
 white gaiters and frock coat of bourgeois cut 
 made the most marked contrast with his 
 extravagant gestures and the grimaces of his 
 buffoon-like features. He astonished me, 
 half frightened me, saw that he did so, and 
 evidently took pleasure in exaggerating, in 
 honour of me, the cynicism of his paradoxes. 
 
 " I like you," he said, as he took his leave ; 
 "come and see me next Sunday afternoon. 
 I live in a delightful spot, near the Castle 
 of Fogs, on the hillside looking over Saint- 
 Ouen, you know it well the vineyard of 
 Gerard de Nerval ! I will introduce you 
 to my wife ; she's worth taking a journey to 
 see. Happily, too, I have just received a 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 237 
 
 barrel of new wine ; we will drink it in mugs, 
 as one does at the wholesale dealers at Bercy, 
 and we will sleep in the cellar. Then, too, 
 a friend of mine, a Dominican monk, un- 
 frocked only a day or two ago, is coming to 
 read me a drama in five acts. You will hear 
 
 it ; superb subject ! full of rape and ravish- 
 ment ! Now you understand. Gerard 
 de Nerval's vineyard ; don't forget the 
 address ! " 
 
 All came to pass exactly as Desroches had 
 promised. We drank out of the cask the 
 new wine, and in the evening the pretended 
 
238 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Dominican read us his drama. Dominican 
 or not, he was a fine handsome Breton, with 
 large shoulders, well fitted for the frock, and 
 with something of the preacher in the rounding 
 of his sentences and gestures. He has since 
 made himself a name in literature. His 
 drama did not much astonish me, but it must 
 be owned that, after an afternoon spent in 
 Gerard de Nerval's vineyard in what 
 Desroches called his home astonishment 
 was no longer easy to attain. 
 
 Before climbing the slopes I had bethought 
 me of re-reading the exquisite pages that 
 Gerard, the lover of Syh'ie, in his Promenades 
 et Souvenirs , has consecrated to the descrip- 
 tion of this northern declivity of Montmartre, 
 a scrap of country inclosed in the midst of 
 Paris, and therefore so much the more 
 cherished and precious : " There still remain 
 to us a certain number of gently sloping hill- 
 sides, girdled with thick green hedges, which 
 the barberry decorates alternately with its 
 violet flowers and purple berries. There are 
 there windmills, rustic inns and summer- 
 houses, elysian fields and deep-cut silent lanes; 
 there may even be found a vineyard, the last 
 
The End of a Merry Andreiv. 239 
 
 of the celebrated vintage of Montmartre, 
 which in the time of the Romans rivalled 
 those of Argenteuil and Suresnes. Year by 
 year this humble hillside loses a row of its 
 stunted vine-stocks, swallowed up by the 
 stone quarry. Ten years ago I could have 
 bought it for four hundred pounds. I should 
 have built in this vineyard so dainty an 
 edifice ! a little villa in the 
 Pompeiian style, with an 
 impluvium and a ee/la." 
 
 In this poet's dream of 
 antiquity lived my friend 
 Desroches. There ! horrible 
 antithesis ! did he present 
 to me, under a blue summer 
 sky, in the shade of an 
 arbour of flowering elder, 
 all musical with the hum of bees, an andor- 
 gynous monster in the dress of a carter, blue 
 smock, short velveteen skirt, cap striped with 
 red perched over the ear, a whip drawn round 
 her neck : 
 
 " M. Alphonse Daudet, Mine. Desroches!" 
 
 For this monster was really his wife, his 
 
 legitimate wife, always arrayed in this costume, 
 
240 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 which pleased her fancy, and than which, 
 certainly, nothing could have been found to 
 suit better with her masculine voice and face. 
 Smoking, spitting, swearing, with all the vices 
 
 of a man, she kept the whole household in 
 awe ; her husband in the first place, who was 
 much henpecked, and, besides, two thin 
 daughters her daughters ! of strange and 
 boylike aspect, and who, too early matured 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 241 
 
 and run to seed, promised at thirteen and 
 fifteen to become some day all that their 
 mother was at forty. It certainly was worth 
 the trouble, as he had said, to have a sight of 
 such a household. 
 
 Desroches was nevertheless the son of a 
 rich and orderly Parisian manufacturer; a 
 jeweller, I believe. His father had disowned 
 him more than once, and now made him a 
 small allowance. It is not rare to find in 
 France instances of these lunatics, positive 
 scourges of Heaven, appearing suddenly in 
 the midst of peaceful families, troubling their 
 calm repose, putting in circulation their 
 accumulated gold, smiting the bourgeosie in 
 short, in its tenderest spot. And I have 
 known several of these ducklings set under 
 hens, which, when once out of the shell, rush 
 to the water. The water, to them, is art, 
 literature, that trade open to all, without 
 patent or diploma. Desroches, when he left 
 college, had dabbled in art in all the arts. 
 He had begun with painting, and the career 
 through the studios of this cool, orderly and 
 reserved cynic, who preserved in the midst of 
 the wildest fancies, the indelible stigma of 
 
242 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 his bourgeois origin, has become a standing 
 legend. The attempt at painting proving a 
 failure, Desroches attacked literature. In- 
 spired perhaps by his vineyard, he managed 
 to accomplish the Raisins muscats a hundred 
 lines a complete article ! Vainly afterwards, 
 did he try to write another ; he could never 
 again find the right inspiration, and reached 
 the age of forty, having as the work of a life- 
 time, written the Raisins muscats. 
 
 The conversation and sallies of friend 
 Desroches amused me ; but his household 
 did not suit me at all. I never returned to 
 JVLontmartre, but I crossed the river some- 
 
 / times in order to visit him at the tavern in the 
 rue des Martyrs. The Brasserie (tavern) of les 
 Martyrs, nowadays the quiet resort of the 
 worthy linendrapers of the neighbourhood 
 for their evening game of draughts, repre- 
 sented then a power in literature. The 
 Brasserie sat in judgment; and made famous 
 whom it would ; and in the overpowering 
 silence of the Empire, Paris was aroused by 
 the noise made there every evening, by eighty 
 or a hundred choice spirits, while smoking 
 their pipes and drinking their beer. They 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 243 
 
 were called Bohemians, and the name did not 
 displease them. The Figaro of that day. non- 
 political, and appearing only once a week, 
 was generally their rostrum. 
 
 The tavern was a sight worth seeing we 
 used to call it "The Brasserie," simply, as 
 the Romans spoke of Rome as "The City," 
 it was worth seeing about 
 eleven o'clock at night, with 
 all its cheerful hubbub of 
 voices, and clouded by the 
 smoke of all those pipes ! 
 
 Murger reigned absolute, at 
 the middle table ; Murger, 
 who was at once the Homer 
 and Columbus of this little 
 world, and to which his exqui- 
 site fancy lent a rose-coloured 
 tinge. Decorated with the Legion of Honour, 
 and henceforth famous, publishing his stories 
 in the Revue des deux Mondes, he nevertheless 
 continued to frequent the Brasserie, "to keep 
 alive," he said, "his impressions of the worthy 
 folk he had described, and also to receive 
 their homage and applause. 'VHe was pointed 
 out to me a large, melancholy head, the 
 
 s 
 
244 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 eyes reddened, the beard scanty, sure signs 
 of very indifferent Parisian blood. He lived 
 at Marlotte, in the forest of Fontainebleau ; 
 constantly to be seen with a gun on his shoul- 
 der, he pretended to shoot, but it was more a 
 search after health than after partridges or 
 
 
 
 hares. The fact of his abode in the village 
 had drawn thither quite a Parisian colony of 
 men and women, natives of the asphalt and 
 the tavern, producing a strange contrast un- 
 der the great oaks ; there are traces of it 
 in Marlotte to this day. Ten years after the 
 death of Murger, who died, as all know, in 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 245 
 
 the Hospital Dubois I was there with some 
 friends at the famous inn kept by Mother 
 Antony. An old peasant sat drinking near us, 
 such a peasant as Balzac describes, soil-stained 
 and weatherbeaten. An old hag, arrayed in 
 tatters, and a red handkerchief round her 
 head, came to fetch him away. She called 
 him drunkard, spendthrift, good-for-nothing ; 
 while he tried to make her drink with him. 
 
 " Your wife is none too gentle ! " said some 
 one when she was gone. 
 
 " She is not my wife ; she is my mistress ! " 
 replied the old peasant. 
 
 You should have heard the tone in 
 which this was uttered. Evidently the good 
 man had known Murger and his friends, and 
 sought to lead a Bohemian life according to 
 his lights. 
 
 To return to the Brasserie. As my eyes 
 became accustomed to the smarting caused 
 by the smoke, I could see to the right and 
 left, and in every corner, well-known faces. 
 yy Each great man had his table, which be- 
 // / came the nucleus, the centre of a whole 
 clique of admirers. 
 
 Pierre Dupont, old already at forty-five, 
 
246 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 fat and stooping, his mild bovine eye scarcely 
 visible beneath the drooping eyelids, sat, 
 elbows on table, trying to sing some of the 
 political or rustic songs with swinging rhythm, 
 vibrating still with the fair dreams of '48 ; or 
 re-echoing the many sounds of work and 
 labour of the Croix-Rousse, and scented with 
 the thousand perfumes of the Lyonnaise 
 valley. But there was no longer any voice ; 
 burnt away by alcohol, it was but a hoarse 
 rattle. 
 
 " You require the fresh air of the fields, 
 my poor Pierre," said Gustave Mathieu, the 
 bard of les Bons Vins y of le Coq Gau/ois, and of 
 les Hirondelles. This last, who came of good 
 bourgeois blood in Nevers, had travelled 
 much in his younger days, and retained from 
 his travels, a passion for fresh air and wide 
 horizons. He found all this round his little 
 house at Bois-le-Roi, and when he came to 
 the Brasserie, it was only to walk through it 
 smiling, erect, with a Henri IV. air, and at 
 all times of the year with a wild flower in 
 his button-hole. 
 
 Dupont died sadly enough in the black 
 manufacturing town of Lyons. Mathieu, 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 247 
 
 
 tough and healthy as a vine-stock, long 
 survived him. It is only a few years ago, 
 that after a short illness his friends laid him 
 to rest in the little cemetery of Bois-le-Roi 
 a cemetery only separated by a simple hedge 
 from the neighbouring fields a true poet's 
 
 resting-place, where he sleeps beneath roses 
 in the shadow of the oak-trees. 
 
 The evening on which I first saw Gustave 
 Mathieu, there sat near him a great spare red- 
 headed fellow with the braggart airs of a 
 corsair, who imitated his voice and copied 
 his movements; this was Fernand Desnoyers, 
 
248 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 an original, who wrote Bras-Noir, a panto- 
 mime in verse ! On the other side of the 
 table some one was arguing with Dupont ; it 
 
 was Reyer, who, nervous and excitable, jotted 
 down the airs which occurred with so much 
 facility to the poet Reyer, the future author of 
 la Statue, of Sigurd, and many other fine works. 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 249 
 
 What memories rise before me at the mere 
 sound of the name of the Brasserie ! How 
 many faces did I there behold for the first 
 time amidst the reflections and gleams of the 
 beer-glasses and the canopy of thick smoke ! 
 
 Let us choose at hazard among the 
 numbers of the departed and the lesser 
 band which yet survives. Here is Monselet, 
 delicate prose writer, yet more dainty poet, 
 smiling, curled, plump. M. Cupid might be 
 taken for a gallant abbe of the olden time ; 
 one looks at his back for the short mantle 
 fluttering like a pair of wings. Champfleury, 
 then leader of a school, father of realism, and 
 confounding in one and the same passion the 
 music of Wagner, old pottery, and panto- 
 mime. Pottery, in the end, won the day, and 
 Champfleury, transported to the height of 
 his ambition, is now curator of the ceramic 
 museum at Sevres. 
 ^^Here too is Castagnary in double-breasted 
 waistcoat, a la Robespierre, cut out of the 
 velvet of some old armchair. Chief clerk in 
 a lawyer's office, he used to escape from his 
 work to come and recite the Chatiments of 
 Victor Hugo, with all their delightful flavour 
 
250 Thirty Yec.rs of Paris - 
 
 of forbidden fruit. He is surrounded, ap- 
 plauded ; but he rushes away in search of 
 Courbet, he must see Courbet, he wishes to 
 consult with Courbet upon his Philosophy of.. X/ 
 Art exemplified in the Salon of i857r~^With- 
 out altogether neglecting art, and while still 
 contributing with lively pen more than one 
 remarkable page to our annual Salon, the 
 shrewd native of Saintonge, always smiling 
 a mocking smile beneath his long drooping 
 moustache, has little by little become ab- 
 sorbed in politics. He was first a municipal 
 councillor, then editor of the Siecle, now a 
 member of the Council of State, and no 
 longer recites verses nor wears a red velvet 
 waistcoat. 
 
 Here also is Charles Baudelaire, tormented 
 in art by a thirst for the undiscoverable, in 
 philosophy by the alluring terror of the un- 
 known. Victor Hugo said of him that he had 
 invented a perfectly new shudder ; and indeed 
 by no one has the heart of humanity been 
 so well persuaded to speak aloud its secrets ; 
 no one has searched more deeply for those 
 flowers of evil, startling and strange as 
 tropical blossoms, with poison lurking in 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 251 
 
 their very core, which lie in the mysterious 
 depths of the human soul. Patient and 
 delicate artist, weighing carefully the turn 
 of every phrase, the choice of every word, 
 Baudelaire, by a cruel irony of fate, died 
 paralyzed, his intelligence remaining intact, 
 as the mute complaint of his black eye 
 sorrowfully testified, but incapable of ex- 
 pressing his thoughts save by a confusedly 
 murmured oath mechanically repeated. Cor- 
 rect and cold, of paradoxical politeness, his 
 wit as keen as English steel, he astonished 
 the frequenters of the Brasserie by drinking 
 foreign liqueurs in company with Constantin 
 Guys the designer, or Malassis the publisher^ 
 This last was a publisher of a kind un- 
 known nowadays. Witty and well-read in 
 curious by-ways of literature, he squandered 
 royally a fine provincial fortune in publishing 
 the writings of men who pleased his fancy. 
 He too is dead; died smiling, with scanty 
 fortune left, but without a complaint. And 
 it is not without emotion that I recall that 
 pale mocking face, lengthened by the points 
 of a red beard a Mephistopheles of the 
 time of the Valois. 
 
252 Thirty Years of Park 
 
 Alphonse Duchesne and Delvau appear 
 also in a corner of the tavern two more 
 who have joined the majority. It was a 
 singular fate which pursued this generation, 
 so early laid low, not one having passed the 
 age of forty ! Delvau, a Parisian, connoisseur 
 of his Paris, admiring its beauties, loving its 
 defects, offspring of Mercier and of Retif de 
 la Bretonne, whose choice little volumes, full 
 of small insignificant facts and picturesque 
 observations, have become the delight of the 
 literary epicure and the joy of the bibliophile. 
 Alphonse Duchesne still hot over his great 
 quarrel with Francisque Sarcey, who, opposing 
 the standard of the Normal School to that 
 of the Bohemians, had just launched forth 
 into literature with a warlike article entitled 
 Les Melancoliques de Brasserie (the melancholy 
 haunters of the tavern). 
 
 It was at the Brasserie that Alphonse 
 Duchesne and Delvau wrote those " Junius' 
 Letters " which were brought every week to 
 the Figaro by a mysterious messenger, and 
 which convulsed the whole of Paris. Ville- 
 messant swore by that mysterious Junius. 
 He was clearly a great personage every- 
 
 ^ 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 253 
 
 thing pointed to it the style of the letters, 
 their curt yet well-bred tone, a faint perfume 
 of nobility and the old faubourg clinging 
 tenderly to them. What then was his rage 
 
 when the mask was dropped, and he learned 
 that these aristocratic pages were written day 
 by day by two needy Bohemians at a beer- 
 shop table ! Poor Delvau ! poor Duchesne ! 
 Villemessant never forgave them. 
 
254 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 I leave out many, for it would take a whole 
 volume to describe the frequenters of the 
 Brasserie table by table. Here is the table 
 of the thinkers ; they say nothing, neither do 
 they write ; they only think. They are ad- 
 
 mired on the faith of their own word j it is 
 said they are deep as a well. It is possible 
 to believe this when one watches them filling 
 themselves with beer. Bald heads, flowing 
 beards, with an odour of strong tobacco, 
 cabbage soup, and philosophy. 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 255 
 
 r 
 
 A little further on are pilot coats, Spanish 
 birettas, cries of animals, rough jokes, puns, 
 in a glorious confusion ; there crowded to- 
 gether are artists, sculptors, painters. In the 
 midst of all this appears a refined and gentle 
 head that of Alexandre Leclerc whose 
 fantastic frescoes, destroyed by the Prussians, 
 once adorned the walls of the Moulin-de- 
 Pierre inn at Chatillon. 
 
 One day the poor fellow was discovered 
 hanged; he had strangled himself sitting down, 
 and pulling the rope tight, among a crowd 
 of tombstones at the top of the cemetery of 
 Pere-Lachaise, just at the spot where Balzac 
 points out the immensity of Paris to Ras- 
 tignac. In my recollections of the Brasserie, 
 Alexandre Leclerc always appears in the best 
 of spirits, singing songs of Picardy ; and these 
 rural airs, airs of his native province, seemed 
 to spread around his table in the tobacco- 
 laden atmosphere, a penetrating and poetical 
 aroma of cornfields and green plains. 
 
 ^ had nearly forgotten the women, for 
 there were women too ; former models, fine 
 creatures, but somewhat faded in appearance. 
 Queer physiognomies and strange names, 
 

 256 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 nicknames that spoke of low haunts and 
 aristocratic affectations : Titine de Barancy 
 and Louise Coup-de-Couteau. Curious speci- 
 mens of a singular refinement, having passed 
 from hand to hand, and caught from their 
 thousand and one liaisons a veneer of artistic 
 erudition. They express their opinions on 
 every subject, and according to the lover of 
 the moment, declare themselves materialists 
 or idealists, catholics or atheists. Touching, 
 and at the same time somewhat ridiculous. 
 
 Amongst them were a few new recruits, 
 quite young, admitted by the dreaded areo- 
 pagus; but the majority were composed of 
 those who had grown old in the service, 
 thereby acquiring a kind of undisputed 
 authority. Then there were the pseudo- 
 widows of well-known authors and artists, 
 who were busily engaged in educating some 
 raw provincial fellow just arrived from his 
 province. All these people were rolling and 
 smoking cigarettes, sending up their little 
 spiral clouds of thin blue smoke amongst the 
 thick gray fog of the pipes and breaths. - 
 
 S 
 
 The beer flows, the waiters rush about, the 
 discussions become more animated, and in 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 257 
 
 the midst of the shouting and upraised arms, 
 the tossing of many shaggy and mane-like 
 locks, Desroches^ screaming louder, gesticu- 
 lating more violently than any, stands on a 
 table, looking as if he were swimming over 
 an ocean of heads, leading and dominating 
 with his clown's voice, the noisy uproar of 
 the thronged room. He looks well thus, 
 with an inspired air, his shirt unbuttoned, his 
 cravat floating half untied, true descendant 
 of Rameau's nephew. 
 
 Every night he comes there to forget his 
 worries, to intoxicate himself with words and 
 beer, to secure collaborators, to relate his 
 literary projects, to lie to himself, and to 
 forget that his home has become unbearable, 
 that he is incapable of settling to any work, 
 that it would even be impossible for him to 
 re-write the Raisins muscats. No doubt 
 amongst the medley at the tavern there were 
 some noble minds, some serious thinkers, 
 and at times a fine verse or an eloquent 
 paradox would lighten the atmosphere, like 
 a current of fresh, pure air, dispelling the 
 smoke of the pipes. But with the exception 
 of a few men of talent, were not most of 
 
258 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 them Desroches ! For a few moments of 
 fine inspiration how many dull and wasted 
 hours ! 
 
 Then also what a sad feeling the next day. 
 What cruel awakenings ! what sickening dis- 
 couragement ! What disgust for such a life, 
 without having courage enough to change it. 
 Look at Desroches ; he no longer laughs ; 
 his grin subsides. He is thinking of his 
 children, who are growing up; of his wife, 
 who is ageing and sinking lower and lower, 
 with her whip, her cap, her smock, her 
 carter's costume, thought so original the first 
 time it was worn for a masqued ball, and 
 now become so repulsive. 
 
 When his fits of depression were upon him, 
 Desroches used to disappear and go off into 
 the provinces, dragging his strange family 
 after him. 
 
 Now selling watches ; then actor at Odessa, 
 bailiff at Brussels; or companion of a moun- 
 tebank. What extraordinary callings had he 
 not tried ? But he soon returned, tired and 
 disgusted even with that. 
 
 One day, in the Bois de Boulogne, he tried 
 to hang himself, but the keepers found him 
 
The End of a Merry Andrew. 259 
 
 and took him down. He was even chaffed 
 about it at the brasserie, and himself spoke 
 of his adventure with a little forced laugh. 
 Shortly after, determined to put an end to 
 his life, he threw himself into one of those 
 terrible quarries an abyss of chalk and clay 
 which abound round the Paris fortifications. 
 There he lay all night, his ribs crushed, his 
 wrists and thighs broken. He was still alive 
 when he was taken out. 
 
 " Ah, well ! " he 
 said, " they will call me 
 the man who always 
 misses his mark." 
 
 These were his last 
 words. After an agony 
 which lasted sixty days, 
 he died. I 
 shall never 
 forget him. 
 
THE STORY OF MY BOOKS. 
 
 JACK. 
 
 In front of me, upon the table, stands a 
 photograph by Nadar, representing a young 
 lad of eighteen or twenty years of age. A 
 delicate, sickly-looking face, with vague and 
 dreamy features, clear, playful and child-like 
 eyes, strangely contrasting, by their vivacity, 
 with the sadness of the weak and faded mouth 
 and its drawn look the mouth of a poor 
 man, who has suffered much. It is the 
 portrait of Raoul D -, the " Jack " of my 
 
Jack. 261 
 
 novel, just as I knew him towards the end 
 of 1868; just as I used to see him coming 
 towards the little house I inhabited at 
 Champrosay, shivering, bent, with rounded 
 shoulders, his arms clasping tightly, his scanty 
 wrap across his narrow chest, and coughing 
 with a sound that echoed like a death knell. 
 We were neighbours, separated only by the 
 woods of Senart. Already ill, crushed by 
 the horrible factory life, to which a caprice 
 of his mother's lover had condemned him, 
 he had come in search of rest and quiet to 
 a large lonely building in the country, where 
 he led a kind of Robinson Crusoe existence, 
 with a sack of potatoes, and a running account 
 for bread at the Soisy baker's shop. He had 
 no money, not even enough to take the train 
 to Paris ; and when the longing to see his 
 mother became too unbearable, he trudged 
 the eighteen tedious miles on foot, and came 
 back, worn out and exhausted, but thoroughly 
 happy; for he adored his mother, speaking 
 of her with a tender, admiring effusiveness, 
 something like the respect that the half-breed 
 feels for the white woman, for the superior 
 being. " Mamma is a canoness," he said to 
 
262 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 me one day, with so satisfied an air that 1 
 did not dare to ask him of what chapter. 
 Nevertheless, several things he had said, 
 made me understand the character of this 
 misguided woman, who, notwithstanding her 
 love of rank and her aristocratic pretensions, 
 had consented to make a mere mechanic of 
 her son. Did she not tell him on one occa- 
 sion that he was the son of the Marquis de 
 
 P , a well-known name under the Empire? 
 
 And the notion of being the son of a noble- 
 man amused the poor fellow, and threw a 
 glimmer of vanity over his sad and miserable 
 life and low coffee-house fare. Later on, 
 forgetting her first avowal, she told him his 
 father was an artillery officer, without its being 
 possible to guess on which occasion she had 
 lied, or if she spoke truthfully, at the hap- 
 hazard of her capricious vanity and over- 
 crowded recollections. In my book, this 
 characteristic detail has shocked many of 
 my readers; drawn from the very life, it 
 seemed an exaggeration of the psychologist, 
 who, however, would have shrunk from such 
 an invention. 
 
 Well, even this, Raoul forgave his mother, 
 
Jack. 263 
 
 and he never showed any greater trace of 
 bitterness than a sad, deprecating smile, 
 which seemed to ask pardon for the irre- 
 sponsible offender. " It cannot be helped ; 
 it is just like her." It must not be forgot- 
 ten, however, that the lower class is devoid 
 of much refinement and delicacy in its ideas 
 of morality, and Raoul formed part of that 
 class, among whom he had been thrown from 
 the early age of eleven, after a few short 
 months spent in a fashionable school at 
 Auteuil. Of this attempt at education he 
 had retained only a few vague notions, names 
 of authors, titles of books, and a love of 
 study which he had never been able to 
 satisfy. Now however, when all physical 
 exertion had been strictly forbidden him by 
 the doctor, and that my library shelves were 
 thrown open to him, he revelled in them, 
 seizing upon the books with the avidity of 
 a hungered man. He would go off laden 
 with books for his evenings and for his 
 nights those long weary nights of fever and 
 cough, which he spent in his dimly-lighted 
 house, shivering in his miserable bed, even 
 though he had heaped upon it the whole of 
 
264 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 his wretched wardrobe. But above all, he 
 enjoyed reading in my house, seated in the 
 window recess of the room I worked in, 
 looking out on the fields and the Seine. 
 
 " Here I seem to understand better," he 
 would say. Sometimes I helped him to 
 understand j for, moved by a kind of super- 
 stitious feeling, an ambitious turn of mind, 
 he always chose difficult authors Mon- 
 taigne, La Bruyere. " One of Balzac's or 
 Dickens's novels amused him too much," he 
 said, and failed to give him the proud, satis- 
 faction of conquering a difficulty, which the 
 laborious perusal of classical work afforded 
 him. In the pauses of rest I made him talk 
 to me of his life and of the working class, 
 which he intuitively judged with a keenness 
 of observation far beyond his age and 
 position. He felt the painful as well as the 
 ridiculous side of things, and the grandeur 
 of certain aspects of factory life. For in- 
 stance, the starting of the machine I describe 
 in Jack is one of his 'prentice recollections. 
 But what I found most interesting was 
 the awakening and refining of this mind, 
 which revived like a dormant memory under 
 
Jack. 265 
 
 the exciting influence of the books and our 
 conversations. A change was even taking 
 place in the physical being raised up by the 
 intellectual effort. Unfortunately the exi- 
 gencies of life were about to separate us ; 
 and while I returned to Paris for the winter, 
 Raoul taking up his workman's tools, engaged 
 himself in the workshops of the Lyons rail- 
 way company. During the following six 
 months, I only saw him two or three times ; 
 each time thinner and more altered, and in 
 a state of utter despair, feeling that he was 
 decidedly too weak for his work. "Well, 
 leave it, we will find you another." But he 
 insisted upon struggling on, lest he should 
 grieve his mother ; feeling himself wounded 
 in the pride of his manhood. Not aware 
 that he was in so dangerous a condition, 
 I dared not insist, fearing above all things 
 lest I should make him dissatisfied with his 
 lot, and take this poor artisan with a romantic 
 name, out of his proper sphere. 
 
 Time went by. One day I received a few 
 shaky and piteous lines : " 111 ; laid up at the 
 hospital de la Charite, ward St. Jean de Dieu" 
 It was there I found him again, lying on a 
 
266 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 stretcher ; the winter, which was drawing to 
 an end, having been so severe that there was 
 not a vacant bed in the ward devoted to the 
 consumptive patients. The first bed left 
 vacant by death would be given to Raoul. 
 He seemed to me very seriously ill ; the eyes 
 sunken, the voice hoarse, the imagination 
 cruelly affected by the prevailing sadness, the 
 moans, the harrowing coughs, the sister of 
 mercy's prayer at nightfall, and the chaplain, 
 who in red slippers brought his ministering 
 comfort to the agonies of the dying. He 
 was terrified at the idea of dying there. I 
 tried to reassure him, although I could not 
 help expressing my surprise that his mother 
 did not bring him home to nurse. " It was 
 I who refused," replied the unhappy victim ; 
 " they were adding to their house, building 
 I should have been in the way." Then, 
 answering the silent reproach he saw in my 
 eyes, he added, " Oh, mamma is very kind ; 
 she writes to me and comes to see me." I 
 am convinced that he lied; his miserable 
 condition, the bareness of his hospital cover- 
 let, the absence of any little delicacy, not 
 even an orange, spoke of his abandoned and 
 
Jactz. 267 
 
 neglected state. Seeing him so lonely, so 
 unhappy, I conceived the idea of making 
 him write down what he saw around him, 
 what he too was undergoing, convinced that 
 his mind would thereby take a higher view 
 of his surroundings. And then who knows ? 
 it might become a pecuniary aid to the proud 
 fellow who could with difficulty be induced 
 to accept a gift of money. At the first 
 suggestion, the invalid raised himself up, 
 clinging with both hands to the wooden 
 handles hanging over the head of his bed. 
 
 " Really, is it really true do you think I 
 could write ? " 
 
 "lam certain of it." 
 
 As it turned out, I had hardly to change 
 ten words in the four articles Raoul sent me 
 from the hospital. Their tone was simple 
 and sincere, and of an intense realism well 
 suited to their title " Life in a Hospital." 
 Those who may have read these short pages 
 in an ephemeral medical review, the Journal 
 d'Enghien, will assuredly never have sup- 
 posed that they were written from a hospital 
 bed with such efforts and at the cost of such 
 feverish heat. He was so happy too when 
 
268 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 I brought him the few gold pieces earned 
 by his prose ! He could hardly believe it, 
 turning them over and over again, while in 
 the beds near him, faces full of curiosity 
 leaned forward at the unusual sound. From 
 that day forth, the hospital presented a less 
 dreary aspect to him, cheered by the study 
 he was making of it. A short time after, 
 thanks to a spontaneous effort of youth, he 
 was able to leave ; but the house-surgeon did 
 not conceal from me the dangerous state he 
 was in. The injury to the lung still remained 
 incurable, ready to break forth afresh at any 
 moment, whenever the unfortunate fellow 
 should resume his hard mechanic's life. I 
 then remembered that when I was the same 
 age, and in a critical state of health, a few 
 months spent in Algeria had been of the 
 greatest benefit to me. I wrote to the 
 prefect of Algiers, with whom I had a slight 
 acquaintance, asking him for some employ- 
 ment for Raoul. No doubt M. Le Myre de 
 Vilers, now the representative of France at 
 Madagascar, does not remember this, but- I 
 have not forgotten with what alacrity and 
 good nature thereby doubly enhancing the 
 
Jack. 269 
 
 kindliness he answered my request, offering 
 Raoul a situation in the official surveyor's 
 office ; five hours' work per diem, work with- 
 out fatigue in the most lovely country in the 
 world, in the midst of fresh green scenery and 
 with the blue sea spread out before his eyes. 
 For Raoul this departure seemed quite 
 like a fairy tale the long journey, the 
 happy thought that he would never return 
 to the factory, that he would no longer have 
 dirty black hands, and that he would be able 
 to gain his daily bread without killing himself 
 by such cruel and uncongenial work. In. my 
 family circle I am surrounded by kind beings 
 with large and noble hearts, who had been 
 touched by this unfortunate lad's sufferings, 
 and they vied with each other in contributing 
 to his comfort. " I will pay the journey," 
 said our good grandmamma ; another took 
 charge of his linen, another of his clothes, 
 for he must throw aside the blue jersey and 
 dirty working-suit of the factory. Raoul 
 accepted everything now that he had a 
 situation, and the certainty of being able to 
 refund all expenses. Only fancy, sixty pounds 
 a year ! Besides, he would write ; he would 
 
270 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 send me articles. He planned many other 
 schemes of happiness, which he discussed 
 with me on the eve of his departure : his 
 mother must come to him, and with him 
 take up the thread again of a more happy 
 and dignified life. She had lived long 
 enough with others ; it was his turn now. 
 Looking well in his new clothes, his eyes 
 bright, his face once again handsome and 
 intelligent as he stood speaking to me, he 
 no longer seemed the wretched forlorn 
 creature I had known formerly, but my 
 companion, one of my own belongings, who 
 was taking leave of me, and whom I was 
 never to behold again. 
 
 He often wrote to me from Algiers, 
 " I dream ! I dream ! It seems to me that 
 I am in heaven ! " He lived in one of the 
 suburbs, separated from the sea by an orange- 
 grove, near one of my friends, a painter, to 
 whom I had recommended him, as well as 
 to Charles Jourdan, who readily opened his 
 large and hospitable house of Montriant to 
 the poor exile. His office work was light, 
 and gave him ample leisure to continue his 
 education, following the programme of read- 
 
Jack 27 1 
 
 ing I had traced out for him. But it was 
 already too late when we rescued him from 
 his misery. He had suffered so terribly, and 
 so young ! the wounds of childhood had 
 deepened with manhood. " I have been 
 very ill," Raoul wrote to me in a letter dated 
 18th June, 1870, "but thanks to an energetic 
 treatment, I am up again, weak, very weak, 
 it is true, and counting every step I take. 
 During the fortnight of my convalescence, 
 while I was unable to move out, my imagi- 
 nation took many a stroll with you through 
 the forest, and we had many a talk in . the 
 large studio. My head was too weak to 
 allow of my reading, and I was rather lonely 
 and sad, immersed in day dreams, when the 
 kind giant, Charles Jourdan, came to fetch 
 me with a donkey, and carried me off to 
 a house, winch would be the dearest in the 
 world to me, if Champrosay did not exist. 
 At Montriant, the air is so pure, the view so 
 lovely, the silence so deep, that I feel I am 
 returning again to life. What a delightful 
 fellow Jourdan is ! so full of heart and youth ! 
 His study is a regular library, and I spend 
 my days turning over the pages right and 
 
272 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 left, as I used to do at your house. He 
 dictates to me his articles for the Siede 
 and VHistoire. This morning we cut up the 
 local administration in merciless style. . . ." 
 The tone of his letter was cheerful, but one 
 could feel a real fatigue running through it 
 all ; and towards the end the tall straight 
 handwriting became sloping, the ink changed 
 in colour ; he had evidently been obliged to 
 interrupt his letter and to complete it by 
 degrees. 
 
 Then the war broke out, the siege fol- 
 lowed. I heard no more about Raoul, and 
 I forgot him. Which of us during those long 
 five months thought of anything else but our 
 unhappy country? Directly Paris was set 
 free, amongst the piles of letters which 
 covered my table, I found one from an 
 Algerian doctor informing me that Raoul 
 was very ill, and begged for some news of 
 his mother ; it would be an act of charity if 
 I could send any. Why did the mother, who 
 had likewise been warned, give no sign of 
 life to her child ? I have never known why. 
 But on the 9th of February she received 
 the following indignant lines from Charles 
 
Jack. 273 
 
 Jourdan : " Madame, your son is at the 
 hospital; he is dying. He asks for news 
 of his mother. In the name of mercy send 
 two words in your own handwriting to the 
 child you will see no more ! " 
 
 Shortly after the following news reached 
 me : 
 
 " Raoul died at the civilian hospital of 
 Algiers on the 13th of February, after a long 
 and painful agony. To the very last, he 
 craved for the kiss his mother denied him. 
 ' I suffer dreadfully,' he said to me, ' but I 
 feel that one word from my mother would 
 ease my pain.' That word never came, was 
 never sent. . . . Believe me, that woman 
 has been cruel and pitiless to her child. 
 Raoul adored his mother; nevertheless, on 
 his death bed he judged her with terrible 
 severity. ' I can neither esteem her as a 
 mother, nor as a woman ; but my heart, 
 which will so soon cease to beat, is full of 
 her. I forgive her all the harm she has done 
 me.' Raoul spoke about you a great deal 
 before his death. In the midst of his sad 
 life of suffering he was astonished at finding 
 one tender and sweet recollection. 'Tell 
 
274 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 him that, at the moment of quitting this life, 
 it is he and his dear wife whom I regret to 
 lose.' I had become very intimate with the 
 poor invalid you had sent us. I inhabit a 
 large country place full of sunshine and 
 flowers. I wished Raoul to come and go 
 as he liked, but the gentle and excellent 
 young man was always afraid of intruding. 
 In these latter days, I begged him to come 
 and be nursed at my house. He refused, 
 and went to the hospital, pretending he 
 would be better taken care of there. In 
 reality the poor child felt his end approach- 
 ing, and would not distress a friend with the 
 sad sight of his death. ..." 
 
 * * 
 This is what real life brought before me. 
 For a long time I only saw in this story one 
 of the many thousand sorrows that cross our 
 own sorrows. It had all taken place too 
 near to me to attract my attention as a 
 novelist. The study was hidden from me 
 by personal emotion. One day at Champ- 
 rosay, seated on the trunk of a tree by ihe 
 side of Gustave Droz, in the autumn melan- 
 choly of the woods, within a few paces of the 
 
Jack. 275 
 
 red brick building where so many of Raoul's 
 hours of forlorn illness had been spent, I 
 related to him the story of that miserable 
 existence. 
 
 " What a fine book it would make ! " Droz 
 remarked, much moved. 
 
 From that day, putting aside the Nabab, 
 which was then in process of construction, I 
 started on this new track with the feverish 
 haste, the tremblingly eager fingers, with 
 which I begin and end all my books. In 
 comparing the story of Raoul with that of 
 Jack, it is easy to distinguish what is real 
 from what is imaginary, or, at least for I 
 invent but little what I have introduced 
 from other sources. Raoul never lived at 
 Indret, and he was never a stoker. Never- 
 theless he has often related to me how, at 
 Havre, during his apprenticeship, the air, 
 full of the sounds of travel vibrating with 
 the cries of the sailors, the blows of the 
 hammers in the graving -dock sometimes 
 filled him also with the longing to be afloat, 
 and to accompany in its voyage round the 
 world, one of those gigantic engines turned 
 out by the house of Mazeline. 
 
276 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 The whole episode of Indret is imaginary. 
 I wanted a great iron-manufacturing centre, 
 and I hesitated between Creuzot and Indret. 
 I decided in favour of the latter, on account 
 of the river life, the scenes on the Loire and 
 the port of Saint Nazaire. This gave occa- 
 sion for a journey and for many expeditions 
 during the summer of 1874. Having placed 
 my little Jack there, I wished to know in 
 what surroundings, among what human en- 
 tities, I must make him live. I have spent 
 many an hour in the isle of Indret, and 
 haunted the vast workshops both during the 
 working hours and in those, so much richer 
 in impressions, of rest. I have seen the 
 house of the Roudics with its little garden ; 
 I have gone up and down the Loire from 
 Saint Nazaire, in a crazy boat which rolled 
 as much and seemed as drunk as its old boat- 
 man, who was greatly astonished that I did 
 not rather take the rail at Basse Indre, or 
 the steamboat at Paimbceuf ; and the wharf, 
 the transatlantic steamers, the engine rooms, 
 visited in detail, furnished me with closely 
 kept notes for my study. 
 
 On these excursions, I was nearly always 
 
Jack. 
 
 277 
 
 accompanied by my wife and my little boy I 
 had only one at that time a dear little pickle 
 
 with ruddy curls, who displayed at these 
 amazingly novel scenes, his simple and 
 
278 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 childish surprise. When the expedition 
 promised to be too rough, the mother and 
 child awaited me in a little inn at Piriac, 
 a real Breton inn, white and square as a die, 
 on the edge of the great ocean ; it owned a 
 huge bedroom with rustic beds j one of them 
 let into the whitewashed wall, cupboard 
 fashion ; the chimney piece was adorned 
 with sponges and sea-horses, as at the 
 Roudics ; and two little windows fastened 
 by that transverse bar common to the coast, 
 overlooked, one the pier and the vast expanse 
 of sea, while from the other could be seen 
 orchards, a bit of the church, and the 
 cemetery full of black crosses, crowding 
 and jostling each other, as if the rolling 
 of the neighbouring waves, and the wind 
 from the open sea, shook even the tombs of 
 the sea-faring population. Beneath us, a 
 thought noisy on a Sunday evening, was the 
 tap-room, where one could hear sung the old 
 airs of the district, which re-live again in my 
 book. Sometimes, when the great brigadier 
 Mangin was there he really was the brigadier 
 Mangin, for I have not even changed his name 
 or rank our host would allow the benches 
 
Jack. 279 
 
 to be pushed back, and a dance to take 
 place, "with a singing accompaniment." 
 Thither came with their wives, the fishermen 
 and sailors, who had become friendly with us, 
 taking us in their boats to breakfast on the 
 island of Dumet, or even to some rock 
 out at sea. They knew that a little swell 
 frightened neither my little Parisian nor his 
 mother; and one of them, an old whaler, 
 once said to us, that, when he looked at 
 Monsieur, Madame and the little boy, always 
 travelling together, it reminded him, begging 
 our pardon, of three North Sea blowers 
 which always moved in company : father, 
 mother, and young whale. 
 
 In all our excursions there was no question 
 of anything but Jack. We seemed to live so 
 entirely with him, that to-day, in thinking of 
 this corner of Brittany, I imagine my poor 
 Raoul must have been of the party. When 
 we returned to Paris, I did not set to work at 
 once. There was still wanting to my work, 
 notes on the life of the Parisian work-girl. 1 
 only knew of it all that may be learned in the 
 street, of its misery, debauches, struggles ; but 
 what of the factory, the wine shop, the tea 
 
280 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 gardens on the banks of the lake of Saint- 
 Mande, where I have represented the wedding 
 of Belisarius ; the dust of les Buttes-Chaumont, 
 where I have dawdled away many a Sunday 
 afternoon, drinking sour beer and watching 
 the kite flying? As for the hospital which 
 holds so large and so mournful a place 
 in the life of the lower class, I knew it 
 well. 
 
 I had spent long hours there, during Raoul's 
 illness, and had also derived much information 
 from his articles. But as the Goncourt 
 brothers had described the hospital of La 
 Charite once and for all in Sccur Philomene, 
 I could not, and after them, begin again upon 
 the same subject. Therefore, I barely touched 
 upon it, and only in very brief passages. In the 
 third part of Jack, the recollections were those 
 of the siege, the National Guard, which were of 
 the greatest service to me, and the workmen's 
 battalion, with which I scoured Paris and the 
 outskirts during four months, sleeping in the 
 damp wooden sheds, or on the straw of cattle 
 trucks ; and in these experiences, learning to 
 love the people even in their vices, caused 
 as they are by misery and ignorance. The 
 
Jack. 281 
 
 Belisarius of my book Offehmer was his 
 real name was with me in the sixth of the 
 ninety-sixth^ and I can see him yet, with his 
 huge and deformed feet, breaking the line 
 by his limp, always the last of the company 
 in the interminable rue de Charenton. Denis 
 Poulot's book, Le Sublime, to which Zola's 
 fine novel has since given popularity, was also 
 of great help to me, filled as it is with typical 
 expressions and the special slang pertaining 
 to certain trades, just as I also found in the 
 Manuel Roret and the G?'andes U sines of Tur- 
 gan, many technical details of the working life 
 of these great factories which were new to me. 
 This then, is the foundation of a novel ; the 
 preparation, slow as possible and full and 
 close, from which must spring for the 
 writer, the invention, the style, the real merit 
 of the work. And to think that there are people 
 who, two months after a new publication, ask : 
 " When will your next book appear ? Come ! 
 get on, lazy bones." 
 
 The failures and their surroundings cost 
 me much less trouble and research. I had 
 only to look behind me in my five and twenty 
 years' experience of Paris. The high priest 
 
282 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Dargenton existed, just as I have drawn him, 
 with his forehead out of all proportion, his 
 imaginary fits, his blind and fierce egoism of 
 an impotent Buddha. Not one of his " bitter 
 sayings " is invented. I gathered them fresh, 
 as they fell from his fruitful lips ; his faith in 
 his own genius was just such as I have 
 described it at full length in my book ; 
 solemn, black and gloomy as a country 
 sheriff, he no doubt smiled scornfully on 
 reading it, and said, " Envy ! mere envy ! " 
 Labassindre may be seen ten times over in a 
 cafe well known on the boulevards, during 
 summer, the idle times of such actors. 
 Hirsch is a more peculiar type : twenty 
 years ago I used daily to see this would-be 
 doctor, with a bottle of ammonia peeping out 
 of the pocket of his vast nankin waistcoat; 
 dirty, infatuated, bent upon visiting and 
 drugging whom he could, notwithstanding 
 his lack of diploma. He had always some 
 victim in hand, upon whom he was studying 
 the effect of unusual and dangerous medi- 
 cines ; then, for want of patients, he took 
 to dosing himself, and died at the hospital of 
 Bordeaux, in consequence of his own reme- 
 
Jack. 283 
 
 dies. Moronval, the mulatto, was a living 
 being too, he wrote in the Revue Coloniale, 
 and after 1870, was for some time a deputy. 
 He inhabited, when I knew him, a little house 
 with a garden, at Batignolles, and lived upon 
 half a dozen little niggers sent over from 
 Port-au-Prince, or Tahiti, who were at once 
 pupils and servants, going to market for him, 
 and blacking boots, while they construed the 
 Epitome. 
 
 Of the real and living drama I have in the 
 main kept the principal personage, and the 
 chief outlines of his hard life and sad death. 
 I did not know the mother, but I have repre- 
 sented her as I guessed her from the narrative 
 of her child. True to life again, and excel- 
 lent as truth itself, was the noble Doctor 
 Rivals, a saint, a hero, who had frequented 
 for thirty years those roads so familiar to 
 Jack and his novelist. For fear of annoy- 
 ing him and of offending his great modesty 
 I dare not here give his name, which a whole 
 population of peasants has blessed for two 
 generations. I trust he will forgive me for 
 having in the composition of my story worked 
 into his noble life so open and upright a 
 
284 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 dark drama drawn from other sources. 1 I 
 had nearly forgotten two other witnesses of 
 Raoul's sad misery, the gamekeeper's wife, 
 who still inhabits the humble cottage in the 
 forest, where more than once the poor little 
 fellow was given a place by the fire and at 
 the table ; and old Sale, to whom I left her 
 real name, the old hooked-nosed peasant, 
 the dread of the poor abandoned child, who 
 dreamt of her during the long nights in his 
 hospital-bed. It is sometimes a weakness 
 of mine to leave to my models their real 
 names, and to persuade myself that were the 
 name transformed, it would take away some- 
 thing from the integrity of the creation, which 
 is nearly always a reminiscence of real life, 
 of haunting, wearying phantoms, only laid 
 when I fix them in my work as life-like as 
 possible. 
 
 * 
 
 All this foundation well established, my 
 figures on the scene, my chapters arranged 
 in their place, I set to work. My workshop 
 
 1 He is dead now, his name was Doctor Rouffy ; 
 his bust adorns the pretty village green at Draveil. 
 
Jack. 285 
 
 was still the large study with two high and 
 wide windows in the Palace Lamoignon. 
 In the first pages of the chapter entitled 
 Jack en menage, you may see the horizon of 
 artisan dwellings, of zinc roofs, of tall factory 
 chimneys bound round with iron cordage, 
 which through the streaming panes and the 
 fog of Parisian daylight, greeted my view 
 whenever I raised my eyes from the paper. In 
 the evening, all the windows crowded together 
 in these tall frontages were lighted on every 
 floor, revealing shadows of brave toilers, 
 figures bending over their work far into the 
 night, especially towards New Year's Day, 
 the stalls and booths of which were supplied 
 chiefly by this colony of toy-sellers. But 
 the best pages of all were written at Champ- 
 rosay, where the first blossoming lilac saw 
 us arrive for a summer residence, often 
 prolonged till the appearance of the first 
 snows. 
 
 The best guarded, the most carefully 
 closed of our Paris houses, are yet open to 
 many unforeseen distractions. It may be 
 the friend who brings for your sympathy 
 his joy or his anxiety y the morning paper 
 
286 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 full of stirring news ; the shameless bore who 
 will not be denied ; and the mill round of 
 society j dinners, first nights, from which the 
 observer, the painter of modern manners, 
 has scarcely the right to absent himself. In 
 the country, the space is vast, the air fresh, 
 time seems endless ; and free to dispose at 
 will of the long days and of self, one feels 
 above all, the security of this independence, 
 the reassuring sensation of being really alone 
 with one's idea. It is an orgie of thought 
 and of work. I never felt it more so than 
 when writing Jack. This time of un- 
 ceasing production has left to me delightful 
 memories. Long before daylight, I was 
 installed at my white wood table close to 
 my bed in the dressing-room. I wrote by 
 lamplight, beneath a skylight pearled with 
 dew, which reminded me of my early years 
 of poverty. Cats and other roamers of the 
 night prowled upon the roof, scratching the 
 tiles, an owl hooted, cattle lowed in the 
 warm straw of a stable close by; and with- 
 out glancing at the alarum-clock ticking -in 
 front of me, without lifting my eyes to the 
 gradual lightening of the dawn, I knew the 
 
Jack. 287 
 
 hour by the crowing of the cocks, by the 
 sounds of movement in the neighbouring 
 farm, whence rose a clatter of wooden shoes, 
 of bucket-handles falling as the beasts were 
 watered ; gruff voices hailing each other in 
 the chill grey of early day, and the clamour, 
 the cackling and flapping of heavy wings. 
 Then upon the road, the sleepy tramp of 
 workpeople passing by in gangs ; and a little 
 later, a flock of children running to the 
 school three miles off, sounding like the 
 passing flight of a covey of partridges. 
 
 What excited me and urged me to this 
 breathless haste of labour, was that, from 
 the month of June, and long before I had 
 finished my book, Paul Dalloz had begun the 
 publication of it in the Moniteur. I have the 
 habit, which may seem in contradiction to my 
 slow and conscientious method of work, of 
 handing over in advance to the journals, the 
 first finished chapters of a book. By this, I 
 gain the absolute necessity of separating my- 
 self from my work, without further yielding 
 to the tyrannous desire for perfection which 
 makes an artist correct too much and re- 
 
288 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 commence ten, twenty, times the same page. 
 I know some who thus exhaust themselves, 
 and for years expend their energies without 
 result, upon the same work ; paralysing their 
 real qualities and finally producing only 
 what I may call "literature of the deaf," of 
 which the beauties and niceties are at length 
 appreciated only by themselves. 
 
 I gain also a spur to my natural indolence ; 
 the lazzarojiisme of my race that causes me 
 to detest long-continued efforts of attention 
 or reflection, and which in me is accompanied 
 by a horrible faculty for critical analysis. 
 However, when once in the water, swim one 
 must, and that is why I throw myself into 
 it resolutely. 
 
 But what fears, what terrors ensue; and 
 then the dread of falling ill, and the anguish 
 of feeling that fenilleton with giant strides 
 perpetually treading upon one's heels ! 
 
 Jack was finished towards the end of 
 October. I had taken nearly a year to write 
 it. It is much the longest, and also the most 
 quickly finished of any of my books. Thus 
 
Jack. 289 
 
 it was that the completion of it left me in a 
 state of prostration from which I went to 
 recover, always accompanied by my two dear 
 travelling companions, in the glorious sun- 
 shine of the Mediterranean coast, among the 
 violets of Bordighera. There I spent days 
 of positive mental convalescence, with the 
 silences, the absorbed contemplation of 
 nature, the delightful draughts of pure and 
 reviving air, which follow a severe illness. 
 On my return Jack was published by Dentu, 
 in two thick volumes, and had not the same 
 successful sale as Froi?iont Jeune. Two 
 volumes to our French customs appear both 
 long and dear. " A little too much paper 
 about it, my boy," my good Flaubert, to 
 whom it is dedicated, said to me, with his 
 kind smile. I was reproached also with 
 having too much insisted on the sufferings 
 of the poor martyr. Georges Sand wrote to 
 me that she rose from reading them with 
 such a terrible heart-ache that " she remained 
 three days without having been able to 
 work." The impression must indeed 
 have been vivid that could change the 
 
290 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 course of this courageous and imperturbable 
 worker. 
 
 Yes ! it is indeed a sad, bitter > cruel tale. 
 But what is it after all compared with the 
 real existence which I have just related. 
 
VILE DES MOINEAUX. 
 
 (sparrow island.) 
 
 A Meeting on the Seine. 
 
 At that time I did not suffer from rheuma- 
 tism, and for six months of the year I worked 
 in my boat. It was on a lovely bend of the 
 river, about thirty miles above Paris, where 
 the Seine is provincial, countrified, and fresh, 
 where reeds and rushes, iris and water-lily, 
 encroach upon its waters, and tufts of long 
 grass and roots float about, on which the 
 water wagtails, tired by flight, abandon them- 
 selves to the course of the stream. On the 
 
292 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 slopes of each bank, cornfields, squares of 
 vineyard ; here and there a few green islands 
 dotted about ; Hie des Paveurs, Tile des 
 Moineaux this last quite small, a mere 
 nosegay of brambles and straggling branches, 
 which had become my favourite mooring- 
 place. I used to push my dingy between 
 the reeds, and when the soft rustling of the 
 long slight canes had ceased and my wall was 
 well closed in around me, I found myself in 
 a tiny harbour of clearest water, hollowed 
 under the shade of an old willow which 
 served me as a study, the two oars crossed 
 before me making a desk. I loved the smell 
 of the river, the hum of the insects among 
 the rushes, the murmur of the long quivering 
 leaves, all that mysterious, infinite agitation 
 which the silence of man awakes in nature ! 
 To how vast a multitude this silence brings 
 happiness ! To what millions of little beings 
 is it reassuring! My islet was more popu- 
 lous than Paris. I heard busy creatures 
 hunting and ferreting beneath the grass, the 
 flight of birds pursuing each other through 
 the branches, the shaking of damp feathers 
 spread out to dry. No one paid any attention 
 
Dlle des Moineaux. 293 
 
 to me ; they took me for an old willow. The 
 black dragon-flies shot by under my nose, the 
 water-flies bespattered me in their luminous 
 leaps, the swallows came to drink actually 
 beneath the oars. 
 
 One day, on penetrating into my island, 
 I found my solitude invaded by a yellow 
 beard and a straw hat. That was all I 
 beheld at first, a yellow beard and a straw 
 hat. The intruder was not fishing ; he lay 
 at full length in his boat, his oars crossed 
 like mine. He was working too, working in 
 my study ! At first sight both our faces 
 expressed the same feeling of annoyance. 
 Nevertheless we bowed. There was no 
 help for it ; the shadow cast by the willow 
 was limited and our two boats touched. As 
 he did not appear inclined to go away I 
 settled myself without saying a word, but 
 this hat with a beard to it so near to me 
 disturbed my train of thought. Probably 
 I too embarrassed him. Inaction made us 
 speak. My boat was called UArlesienne, 
 and the name of Georges Bizet served at 
 once as a point of contact. 
 
 " You know Bizet ? Are you by chance 
 
294 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 an artist?" The beard smiled and replied 
 modestly, 
 
 " Sir, I am in the musical line." 
 Generally speaking, literary people have a 
 horror of music. Gautier's opinion on "the 
 most disagreeable of all noises " is well 
 known ; Leconte de Lisle and Banville share 
 it. The moment a piano is 
 opened Goncourt frowns. 
 Zola has a vague impres- 
 sion that he once, in his 
 youth, played some instru- 
 ment, he no longer remem- 
 bers what it was. That 
 excellent Flaubert pretend- 
 ed to be a great musician, 
 but it was only to please 
 Tourgue'neff, who in reality 
 never cared for any music 
 but that heard at the Viardots. As for 
 me I love every kind madly the classic, 
 the simple, Beethoven, Gluck and Chopin, 
 Massenet and Saint-Saens, the bamboula, 
 the Faust of Gounod and that of Berlioz, 
 popular songs, grinding organs, the tam- 
 bourine and even bells. Music that dances, 
 
L lie des Moineaux. 
 
 295 
 
 music that dreams, all speak to me, all awake 
 an answering chord within me. The 
 
 Wagnerian chant seizes me, envelops me, 
 
 hypnotizes me like 
 
 the sea ; and the 
 
 wild strains of the 
 
 Tziganes prevented 
 
 me from seeing the 
 
 Exhibition. Every 
 
 time those confounded 
 
 violins caught me as I 
 
 passed along, it was 
 
 impossible to go further. 
 
 There I must remain till 
 
 evening with a glass of Hungarian wine before 
 
 me, a choking in the throat, eyes staring. 
 
296 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 and my whole body quivering to the nervous 
 beat of the dulcimer. 
 
 This musician falling upon my islet won 
 my heart. His name was Leon Pillaut. 
 He had wit, ideas, a pretty imagination ; we 
 suited each other at once. Started by nearly 
 the same things, our paradoxes made common 
 cause. From this day, my island belonged 
 to him as much as to me ; and as his boat, 
 a Norwegian craft without a keel, rolled 
 horribly, he got into the habit of coming to 
 talk of music in mine. His book Instru- 
 ments et Musiciens, which caused him to be 
 named Professor at the Conservatoire was 
 already running m his head, and he used 
 to relate it to me. We lived that book 
 together. 
 
 I read between the lines of it the pleasant 
 intimacy of our gossip, just as I used to see 
 the Seine dancing between my reeds. Pillaut 
 set forth to me absolutely new views upon 
 his art. A talented musician, brought up in 
 the country, his trained and delicate ear re- 
 tained and noted all the varied sounds -of 
 nature ; he heard as a landscape-painter sees. 
 For him every flutter of wings gave its par- 
 
Dlle des Moineaux. 
 
 297 
 
 ticular thrill. The confused hum of insects, 
 the dry rattle of autumn leaves, the babbling 
 of the brooks over the pebbles, the wind, the 
 rain, far-off voices, the distant rumble of the 
 train, wheels creaking in the ruts all this 
 country life and being may be found in 
 his book. And many other things too 
 ingenious criticisms, a pleasant and erratic 
 erudition, the poetical biography of the 
 orchestra and all instruments, from the 
 amorous viola to the Saxony horn all re- 
 lated for the first time. We talked of it 
 beneath our willow or in some inn by the 
 riverside, while we drank the muddy white 
 wine of the year's vintage, and split a herring 
 on the edge of a chipped plate in the midst 
 of quarrymen and mariners ; we talked of it 
 as we pulled the oar, exploring the Seine and 
 the unknown streamlets which fall into it. 
 
 Oh ! what expeditions we made upon the 
 pretty Orge, dappled with light, black with 
 shade, tangled with scented cords of briar 
 and climbers, as a brooklet of the tropics ! 
 We went straight on without knowing whither. 
 Sometimes for a moment we passed between 
 civilized lawns, whereon a white peacock 
 
298 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 trailed his tail, and bright-coloured dresses 
 gleamed like flowers. A picture by Nittis. 
 In the background, the house, all radiant with 
 its galaxy of beauty, was shadowed by thick 
 and lofty foliage, from which trilled forth the 
 sonorous roulades and cheerful twittering of 
 those cage birds kept by the rich. Further 
 on we found again the wild flowers of our 
 island, the straggling branches, the twisted 
 and gnarled gray willows j or else some old 
 windmill, tall as a round tower, with its moss- 
 grown gallery, great walls with irregular loop- 
 holes, and on the roof a crowd of pigeons 
 and guinea fowl, amongst whom was a con- 
 tinual shiver and rustle of wings which 
 seemed to be put in movement by the heavy 
 machinery. Then came the return down 
 stream with the current, singing old ditties ! 
 The screech of the peacock resounded on 
 the deserted lawns ; in the middle of a grass 
 field stood the little cart of the shepherd, 
 who was collecting his beasts from a distance 
 to fold them for the night. We disturbed 
 the kingfisher, the blue bird of the little 
 streams; we bent ourselves double at the 
 mouth of the Orge to pass beneath the low 
 
Vile des Moineaux. 299 
 
 arch of the bridge, and then all at once the 
 Seine opening out before us in the rolling 
 mists, gave us the impression of the open 
 sea. 
 
 Amid so many charming wanderings one 
 above all is imprinted on my mind an 
 autumn breakfast at an inn by the waterside. 
 I see again the chilly morning, the leaden, 
 melancholy Seine, the landscape beautiful in 
 its stillness, while low over the land lay a 
 penetrating mist, which made us turn up the 
 collars of our coats. The inn was a little 
 above the lock at Coudray, an old posting- 
 house, where the inhabitants of Corbeil are 
 wont to spend a joyous Sunday, but which, 
 out of the season, is only frequented by the 
 people who use the lock crews of the barges 
 and tugs. At that moment the soup was 
 smoking hot, ready for the passing of the 
 gang. What a delicious puff of hot scent 
 greeted us on entering. "And what after 
 the beef, gentlemen ? How would a 
 stewed tench suit you ? " That tench was 
 exquisite, served up on a coarse earthen- 
 ware plate in a little parlour, the wall-paper 
 of which had a pleasant air of bourgeois 
 
3 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 merry-making about it. The meal finished 
 and pipes lighted, we began to talk of Mozart. 
 It was truly an autumn conversation. Out- 
 side on the little terrace in front of the inn 
 I could see through the leafless arbours a 
 swing, painted green, a game of tonneau, 
 the targets of a crossbow shooting-gallery, all 
 shivering in the teeth of a cold wind off the 
 Seine, and wearing the air of mournful 
 sadness peculiar to abandoned pleasure 
 haunts. "Ah, a spinet!" said my com- 
 panion, lifting the dusty cover of a long 
 table covered with plates. He tried the 
 instrument, drew from it a few cracked 
 and bleating sounds, and till evening closed 
 we bemused ourselves delightfully with 
 Mozart. 
 
FROM NT JEUNE ET RISLEK AIN&. 
 
 The first idea of Fromont Jeune occurred 
 to me during a grand rehearsal of V Arlhienne 
 at the Vaudeville Theatre. Before a magnifi- 
 cent scene of the Camargue, blazing under 
 jets of gas to the very background, were un- 
 folded the slow and rhythmical scenes of the 
 pastoral, accompanied by ancient carols and 
 antique marches, expressed in the charming 
 music of Bizet. Seated before this impas- 
 sioned fairy tale, that charmed my Southern 
 
302 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 heart, but which I divined to be some- 
 what too local, too slight in action, I said to 
 myself that the Parisians would soon tire of 
 hearing me talk of cicalas, of the daughters 
 of Aries, of the mistral, and of my windmill ; 
 that it was time to interest them in some 
 work which should speak of things nearer 
 to them, to their every-day life in their 
 own atmosphere ; and as I then lived in the 
 Marais, I naturally bethought me of placing 
 my drama in the midst of the energetic 
 labour of this mercantile quarter. The 
 association tempted me : the son of a manu- 
 facturer myself, I was well acquainted with 
 the inner workings of commercial collabora- 
 tion, where similar interests draw together, for 
 the business of a day, and sometimes for years, 
 beings of the most various temperament and 
 education. I knew well the jealousies be- 
 tween household and household, the bitter 
 rivalry of the women, amongst whom castes 
 exist and struggle far more than amongst men, 
 and all the petty worries of a roof shared with 
 others. At Nismes, Lyons, or Paris, I had 
 more models than enough, and all in my own 
 family, and I began to think of this piece, of 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler dine. 303 
 
 which the pivot of the action must be the 
 mercantile value of the signature and the 
 firm. 
 
 Unfortunately, whatever happens, there 
 must be some passion in a play. Adultery, 
 with all its dangers, its emotions, never fails 
 to attract \ and thus it is that the interest of 
 my study is lessened and misplaced, being 
 concentrated upon Sidonie and her adven- 
 tures, when the association should be the 
 principal interest ; but I fully intend to re- 
 turn to this subject some day. 
 
 L Arlesienne^ as every one knows, was not 
 a success. It was unreasonable to suppose 
 that in the middle of the boulevard, in that 
 coquettish corner of the Chaussee-d'Antin, 
 right in the pathway of the fashions, the 
 whims of the hour, the flashing and changing 
 vortex of all Paris, any one could be inter- 
 ested in this drama of love, taking place in 
 a farmyard in a plain of Camargue, full of 
 the odour of well-plenished granaries and 
 lavender in flower. It was a splendid failure ; 
 clothed in the prettiest music possible, with 
 costumes of silk and velvet in the centre 
 of comic-opera scenery. I came away dis- 
 
304 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 couraged and sickened, the silly laughter 
 with which the emotional scenes were greeted 
 still ringing in my ears ; and without attempt- 
 ing to defend myself in the papers, where on 
 all sides the attack was led against this play 
 wanting in surprises, this painting in three 
 acts, of manners and events of which I alone 
 could appreciate the absolute fidelity, I re- 
 solved to write no more plays, and heaped 
 one upon the other all the hostile notices 
 as a rampart around my determination. 
 Fromont, which was devised, thought out, 
 almost to completion, appeared to me ca- 
 pable of transmutation into a novel. I ought 
 then to have changed the setting of the 
 intrigue, re-arranged the order and the gra- 
 dation of the sentiments ; but nothing is 
 more difficult than to upset a piece of work 
 where the fragments hold together in close 
 assemblage and are completely fitted as a 
 mosaic ; nothing is more unwelcome than 
 the voluntary destruction of conceptions 
 long nursed in the mind and vivid in their 
 melancholy. And the elements of the drama 
 I mean by this the drama such as I had 
 imagined it, not as it was afterwards played 
 
Fromoiit jeune et Risler ahie. 305 
 
 having served me for the groundwork of 
 the novel, explains how the plot of Fromont 
 jeune is a little conventional and romantic 
 with types and surroundings strictly copied 
 from nature. 
 
 Copied from nature ! 
 
 I have never followed any other method. 
 Just as painters carefully keep their albums 
 full of sketches where the outlines, attitudes, 
 foreshortenings and movements of the limbs 
 are caught on the spur of the moment, so 
 have I for the last thirty years, collected a 
 quantity of memoranda, in which I have re- 
 corded my observations, my passing thoughts, 
 sometimes jotted down in a few short words 
 sufficient to recall a picture, an intonation, 
 which later on I have enlarged upon and 
 brought into harmony with the larger and 
 more finished work. In Paris, during my 
 travels, in the country, these notebooks have 
 been carelessly scribbled in without a thought 
 for the future work which was accumulating 
 there ; surnames are there too, which I have 
 been unable to change, finding in their very 
 sound a physiognomy, a living image of those 
 who bore them. On the publication of some 
 
3 6 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 of my books there has often been an outcry 
 and a talk of a " key " to my novels ; some 
 such thing has indeed been published, with 
 a long list of celebrated personages, without 
 reflecting that in my other works many real 
 characters have also figured, unknown, it is 
 true, and lost amongst the crowd where no 
 one has sought for them. 
 
 Is it not the true way to 
 write a novel, that is to say, 
 the history of those folk 
 who have no history? All 
 the individuals in Fromont 
 have lived or are still living. 
 By my delineation of old 
 Gardinois, I have grieved 
 some one for whom I 
 have a sincere affection, 
 but I could not omit this specimen of a 
 selfish and terrible old man, of the piti- 
 less parvenu, who many a time from the 
 terrace in his park threw his covetous glance 
 over the large buildings of the farm and 
 manor, the woods and the cascades; and 
 said to his children assembled around him : 
 " What consoles me in dying, is that after 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler aine. 307 
 
 me not one of you will be rich enough to 
 keep all this together." Planus, the cashier, 
 was in real life called Scherer. I saw him 
 in a banking-house in the rue de Londres, 
 shaking his head in front of the well-filled 
 
 strong box, and muttering in a soft, tragi- 
 comic manner and strong uncouth Teutonic 
 accent: " Fui, fut, te Varchent, peaucoup 
 farchent ; mats chaibas gonviaiize (" Yes, yes, 
 money, lots of money, but I've no faith in 
 
308 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 it). Sidonie also exists, and the poor home 
 of her parents, and Mother Chebe's little 
 case of diamonds, stored away in a corner 
 of the Empire chest of drawers, for so long 
 the only bit of luxury belonging to the Chebe 
 household. Only Sidonie was not so vile as 
 I have drawn her. Full of intrigue and 
 ambition, her head turned with her unex- 
 pected fortune, intoxicated with pleasure and 
 dress, she was however incapable of behaving 
 badly in her own home, in the way I have 
 described, with a view to scenic effect. 
 Madame Gardinois still flashes and twirls 
 her rings in the same manner far away in 
 the provinces; but she will never read this 
 book. She never reads ; her fingers are too 
 busy. Risler is a recollection of my child- 
 hood. That tall fair man, designing patterns 
 in a manufactory, was employed by my father. 
 I made him Swiss instead of Alsatian, in 
 order not to pander to any patriotic senti- 
 mentality and call forth an easily-won 
 applause. Finally, Delobelle lived near to 
 me, and more than a dozen times has said 
 to me : "I have no right to leave the stage." 
 In him I have, in order to complete the type, 
 summed up all I knew about actors their 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler dine. 309 
 
 manias, the difficulty they find in resuming 
 every-day life when they leave the boards, 
 and in keeping their own individuality under 
 so many different garbs. I have here, amongst 
 old memoranda turned over while writing 
 this book, a " Blessing of the Sea," recited 
 by an actor, which is certainly one of the 
 most extraordinary things possible. I cannot 
 transcribe it here. It would be impossible 
 for me to describe the rolling of eyes and 
 voice, the maudlin emotion, the breathless- 
 ness, the quivering attitude of tremendous 
 feeling that accompanied the delivery. of this 
 curious declamation, heard in the greenroom 
 of the old Vaudeville theatre. Then again, 
 I find in a notebook a sketch of the wonder- 
 ful attitude of another Delobelle, contemplat- 
 ing his house, burnt down by the Prussians, 
 rendering a very natural feeling of regret by 
 gestures so inappropriate as to be absolutely 
 comical j for it is the peculiarity of this class 
 whose study it is to interpret life that they 
 misunderstand everything and are never able 
 to divest themselves of the conventional stage 
 illusion, so devoid of light and shade. My 
 mind was therefore well impregnated by the 
 figure of Delobelle ; but I had not yet con- 
 
310 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 ceived him as completed by his family, when 
 about that time I assisted at the funeral of 
 a great actor's daughter ; there I beheld in a 
 courtyard of the rue de Bondy the whole 
 theatrical world ; and all that I describe 
 later on as taking placeat the death of little 
 Desiree the typical entrance of the guests, 
 the play of their different shake hands, varied 
 according to their habitual parts the tear 
 wiped out of the corner 
 of the eye and gazed at 
 on the tip of the gloved 
 finger. I immediately 
 conceived the idea of 
 giving Delobelle a daugh- 
 ter and I was desirous of 
 describing that child as 
 having inherited some 
 of the oddity of the 
 father, transforming the artistic irritability 
 into the gentle sentimentality of the 
 woman and the invalid. By reason even 
 of this sickliness, and in contrast with it, I 
 bestowed upon her a trade devoted solely fo 
 luxurious accessories. First, I made her a 
 doll-dresser, in order that this humble and 
 unfortunate girl might at least satisfy her 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler aine. 311 
 
 delicate and elegant taste, and in default of 
 herself, clothe her dreams in shreds of silk 
 and gold tinsel. The work was essentially 
 one of those practised in the buzzing, droning 
 
 JvV^'v" 
 
 Marais, in the old scutcheoned mansions and 
 black five-storied houses in which are shelt- 
 ered those who prepare the pleasures of 
 
312 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 Paris, letting fall in the dust of their garrets 
 or on the wrought-iron railings of their stair- 
 cases bits of gilding and chips of veneering 
 woods. Go into those narrow alleys, climb 
 up those melancholy stairs, through the half- 
 opened doors on each landing, you will see 
 women and children working round a wretched 
 fire by the light of a petroleum lamp. A bit 
 of wire, a little glue, gilt paper, and a few 
 snips of velvet, are sufficient, notwithstanding 
 poverty and cold, for them to create with 
 their nimble fingers, almost without a tool, 
 by sheer dexterity and ingenuity, those little 
 trifles, "pretty and well-made," as the Boule- 
 vard street sellers say in offering their wares : 
 clowns, dancing dolls, butterflies with wings 
 that flutter, perfect marvels for twopence, 
 toys for the poor, made by the poor, bearing 
 the stamp of the delicate, childlike taste of 
 this wonderful Parisian population. 
 
 In relating my book out loud, as is my 
 custom while mentally evolving it, I men- 
 tioned one day to Andre Gill, the sketcher 
 of outlines, who was in all respects an artist 
 the little Delobelle and the manner in which 
 I was describing her \ and he warned me 
 that in one of Dickens's novels, till then 
 
Fro77iont jenne et Risler aine. 313 
 
 unknown to me, Our Mutual Friend, there 
 was exactly the same account of an infirm 
 girl, a doll dresser ; described with the deep 
 tender sentiment for the poor, the imaginative 
 feeling for the street, which is so palpable in 
 the great English novelist. I remembered 
 how often I had been compared to Dickens, 
 even long before a friend had, on returning 
 from a journey in England, informed me of 
 the sympathy existing between David Copper- 
 field and Le Petit Chose. An author who 
 conscientiously records what he sees, can 
 make no answer to such a criticism, except 
 that there are certain affinities of the mind 
 for which one is not responsible, but that on 
 the day of the great creation of men and 
 novelists, nature in a fit of abstraction may 
 have mixed her materials. I feel in my 
 heart, the love that Dickens felt for the 
 unfortunate and the poor, and for childhoods 
 spent in the wretchedness of large cities ; 
 like him, I began life in a heart-rending 
 manner, obliged to gain my daily bread 
 before I was sixteen years of age ; in that 
 lies, I believe, our greatest resemblance. 
 Nevertheless, my conversation with Gill 
 threw me into a state of despair, and, giving 
 
314 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 up doll dressing, I strove to find some other 
 trade for the little Delobelle. Such things 
 are not however easily invented j and then, 
 how should I be able to discover so practical 
 an imaginary profession as that of doll 
 dresser, showing all I meant to portray ; the 
 exquisite grace in the wretched existence, 
 the smiling dream under the dingy roof, the 
 nimble fingers embodying the winged in- 
 spirations. Ah, how many of those sombre 
 houses did I not search through, how many 
 cold stairs, with their rope -bannisters did I 
 not climb that year, while seeking for my 
 ideal home among the numberless paltry 
 little manufactories. At last I almost de- 
 spaired ; but my obstinacy found its reward. 
 One day, rue du Temple, on a leathern 
 placard, in one of those frames on which 
 for the convenience of purchasers are written 
 and advertised all the trades carried on in 
 the house, I read in faded gilt letters- which 
 nevertheless dazzled me : 
 
 BIRDS AND FLIES FOR BONNETS. 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler ain'e. 315 
 
 The habit I have already mentioned of 
 relating my books aloud, is with me a process 
 of my work. To explain to others my subject 
 elucidates it to myself, I become more deeply 
 imbued with it ; experiment upon my listeners 
 what parts will tell, and the conversation 
 brings me new ideas godsends, which, thanks 
 to my excellent memory, I am able to retain. 
 Woe betide the luckless caller who rashly 
 intrudes on my feverish creation ! I con- 
 tinue mercilessly in his presence talking 
 instead of writing, putting together anyhow, 
 so that they may be somewhat intelligible to 
 him, the different parts of my novel ; and in 
 spite of the bored and absent looks with 
 which he tries to fly from my superabundant 
 improvisation, I build up my chapter and 
 develop it in words. In Paris, in my study, 
 in the country, in my strolls through the 
 green meadows, and out boating, how many 
 of my comrades have I not thus tired out, 
 while they little guessed their part of silent 
 collaboration. But my wife has had to bear 
 the greater part of this repetition of out- 
 spoken work, of subjects thought over and 
 over twenty times running. " How do you 
 
3i6 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 think it would do to make Sidonie die ? 
 Shall I let Risler live? What must Delo- 
 belle or Frantz or Claire say in such and 
 such a circumstance?" It went on from 
 morning till night, at each instant of the 
 day, at meals, on our way to the theatre, 
 on our return home from parties, during 
 those long cab journeyings through the 
 silence and slumber of 
 Paris. Ah, the poor 
 wives of writers ! True? 
 mine is such an artist 
 herself, and has taken 
 such a part in all I have 
 written ! Not a page she 
 has not looked over, 
 touched up, on which she 
 has not thrown a dash of her fine azure and 
 gold-dust. And withal so modest, so simple, so 
 little of a blue-stocking. I expressed all this 
 one day, and rendered homage to all her 
 tender and indefatigable aid in a few dedi- 
 catory lines of the Nabab ; but my wife would 
 not allow it to be printed, and I only left it on 
 a dozen copies given to intimate friends, now 
 very scarce, which I recommend to connoisseurs. 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler dine. 317 
 
 My method of work is known. All my 
 notes being jotted down, my chapters in 
 good order and well divided, my personages 
 
 thoroughly alive in my mind, I begin to 
 work quickly, rapidly. I dash down ideas 
 and events without allowing myself time for 
 
318 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 proper or exact wording even, the subject 
 hurrying me on, swamping both details and 
 characters. The page covered, I hand it to 
 my collaborator ; I look it over again after- 
 wards ; then at last I re-copy it ; and with 
 what joy ! the joy of a schoolboy who has 
 finished his task, touching up some phrases, 
 completing, refining them ; it is the best 
 period of work. Fromont was thus written 
 in one of the oldest palaces of the Marais, 
 where my study, with its large light windows, 
 looked out on the fresh green and the dark- 
 ened trellis of a garden. But beyond that 
 zone of calm and of piping birds lay the 
 working life of the faubourgs, the straight 
 smoke of the factories, the rumble of the 
 vans, and I still hear on the pavement of 
 a neighbouring yard the rattle of a little 
 hand-cart, which at the moment of New 
 Year's gifts dragged about children's drums 
 from early morn till seven o'clock at night. 
 There is nothing more healthy, more exciting 
 than working in the very atmosphere of one's 
 subject, in the centre in which one's own 
 personages are living. The noise of the 
 workmen entering and leaving the mills, the 
 
Froinont jeune et Risler aine. 319 
 
 call-bells of the factories, ran through my 
 pages at fixed hours. No effort was required 
 to find the local colour, the ambient air; 
 I was invaded by it. The whole surround- 
 ings helped me, carried me away, worked 
 for me. At the two extremities of the large 
 room stood my long table and my wife's 
 little writing-bureau, and running to and fro, 
 carrying the sheets from one to the other, 
 my son, now a medical student, then a child 
 with thick fair locks falling over his little 
 pinafore, black with the ink of his first up- 
 and-down strokes. It is one of the happiest 
 recollections in my author existence. 
 
 Sometimes, however, I required some 
 more distant detail, an observation noted 
 down in some special place; then all the 
 family would start off in search of the im- 
 pression. I dined with my wife and child 
 in the Palais Royal, the very dinner Risler 
 and Sigismond dined after they were ruined, 
 at the hour when the military music was play- 
 ing, when the straw chairs placed in circles, 
 the tired attitudes of the people listening, 
 even the dripping of the fountains on the 
 dust of a hot summer's evening, threw out 
 
320 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 a peculiar melancholy ; an emptiness, the 
 provincialism of Paris in summer time. I 
 felt thoroughly impregnated by it, and, 
 wrapped up in my subject, stirred by the 
 
 hackneyed military music, I fancied it softly 
 accompanying the mournful conversation of 
 my two unhappy heroes. The death of 
 Risler necessitated a still longer expedition ; 
 I had in my mind a little house of the editor 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler ahie. 321 
 
 Poulet-Malassis, far away near the forti- 
 fications, and I had settled Planus there in 
 front of green slopes, with yellow flowers 
 scattered and trodden down by the Sunday 
 excursionists. It became necessary to revisit 
 that country, to follow Risler step by step, 
 from the threshold of the house to the dark 
 
 archway, where he was to hang himself, close 
 to those barracks, from whence one can 
 behold Paris, as it may be seen from the 
 suburbs : a smoky mass of tightly packed 
 cupolas, steeples and roofs, with a perspective 
 like that of an immense harbour, of which 
 the chimneys might be the masts. Hence- 
 
 Y 
 
322 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 forth I had the outline of all my chapters. 
 I had but to write ; and under these con- 
 ditions, the drama pictured, illustrated, I 
 may say, by my recollections and my walks, 
 the work was already half done. 
 
 Fromont jeune et Risler aine appeared in 
 feuilletons in the Bien Public, and during its 
 publication I felt, for the first time, that my 
 work awoke the serious interest of the public. 
 Claire and Desiree found friends ; I was re- 
 proached with the death of Risler, and I 
 received letters interceding for the little lame 
 girl. Life offers nothing better than this 
 dawn of popularity, this first intimacy of 
 the reader and the author. 
 
 The book was published by Charpentier, 
 who had just moved into a bright apartment 
 full of sunshine, on the Quai du Louvre, a 
 charming and friendly home which has 
 become a regular literary rendezvous. It 
 was on leaving him, after one of the last 
 evenings of the season, towards the month 
 of May, that a perfectly clear vision of the 
 death scene of Desiree Delobelle occurred 
 to me, as I walked through the rows of 
 flowers ready for the morrow's market, while 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler aine. 323 
 
 before me lay the Seine, all starred with 
 reflections of the gas lamps. 
 
 The successful sale of the book astonished 
 me much. Accepted until then only by a 
 small artistic group, I had never dreamt of 
 any great popularity, and I well recall my 
 delighted surprise at the announcement of a 
 second edition which greeted me when, some 
 days after the publication of my book, I came 
 in fear and trembling to ask for news of it. 
 
 Soon reprints succeeded each other rapidly ; 
 then came a demand for translation from Italy, 
 Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, from 
 England too, but last of all. It is the country 
 in which I have most slowly made my way, and 
 yet the one in which it would have seemed 
 that my choice of homely subjects would 
 have been most likely to attract and please. 
 
 One more detail. 
 
 At that time we used to have at Gustave 
 Flaubert's Sunday meetings, which by degrees 
 made of a little group of writers, united by 
 their respect and zeal for literature, a group 
 of true friends. We met in a suite of tiny 
 rooms in the rue Murillo, overlooking the 
 carefully trimmed clumps of shrubs, and the 
 
324 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 sham ruins of the Pare Monceau. Within, 
 was the quiet of a private house opening on 
 to a park, and a freedom of artistic talk which 
 gave me pleasure of the highest and most re- 
 fined sort. The party was composed of four 
 of us, or perhaps five when TourguenefT was 
 free from the gout, and the dinner which 
 brought us together every month was boldly 
 called " the dinner of unsuccessful authors ; " 
 at it we cursed the indifference of the age to 
 literature, and the timid reception given by the 
 public to any new departure. The fact is, 
 not one of us had the good luck to catch the 
 ear of this terrible public. 
 
 Flaubert was undergoing the melancholy 
 attendant on past success, drunk to the very 
 dregs, even to the reproaches of the critics 
 and the masses, always holding up the first 
 work as a standard, making of Madame 
 Bovary a glorious obstacle to the renown 
 of Salamtnbo or the Education sentimentale. 
 Goncourt seemed tired out, disheartened by 
 a strenuous effort which would profit a whole 
 fresh generation of novelists, and would leave 
 him, the instigator of it or at least he thought 
 this would be the case almost unknown. 
 
Fromont jeune et Risler aine. 325 
 
 Suddenly I found myself the only one of the 
 party who could feel that fashion had turned 
 towards him, with several thousand copies 
 to prove the fact ; and I was quite embar- 
 rassed by it, almost ashamed indeed, in the 
 company of writers of such merit. Each 
 Sunday when I arrived they would ask, 
 " Well, and how about the editions ? What 
 number have you got to now ? " Each time 
 I had to acknowledge fresh reprints ; honestly, 
 I did not know where to hide myself and my 
 success. " Our books will never sell," Zola 
 would say, without envy, but somewhat sadly. 
 It is twelve years since then. Now his 
 novels run to a hundred editions ; those of 
 Goncourt are in every hand, and I smile 
 when that plaintive and resigned accent recurs 
 to me, " Our books will never sell." 
 
TOURGUE-NEFF. 
 
 The time is ten or twelve years ago, the 
 scene Gustave Flaubert's home in the rue 
 Murillo. The coquettish little rooms, hung 
 with Oriental materials, opened upon, the 
 Park Monceau, that trim and aristocratic 
 garden which held up a blind of greenery 
 before the windows. There we met every 
 Sunday, five or six of us, always the same, 
 in a delightful intimacy. Strangers and bores 
 were rigidly excluded. 
 
 One Sunday, when I came as usual to 
 meet the old master and the expected 
 friends, Flaubert seized upon me the moment 
 I entered. 
 
 "You do not know Tourgueneff? There 
 he is." 
 
Tourgneneff. 327 
 
 And without waiting for an answer he 
 pushed me into the drawing-room. On a 
 divan lounged a tall old man with a snow- 
 white beard, who as I entered raised and un- 
 coiled himself like a boa-constrictor with great 
 astonished eyes from the pile of cushions. 
 
 It must be owned that we French live in 
 extraordinary ignorance of all foreign lite- 
 rature. Our minds are as stay-at-home as 
 our bodies, and with a horror of travel 
 amidst the unknown, we read no better than 
 we colonise, when we are taken out of our 
 own country. As it happened, I knew Tour- 
 gueneff's writings well. I had read with the 
 deepest interest the Memoires cTun Seigneur 
 Russe, and the study of this book had led 
 me on to the knowledge of others. We had 
 a link to bind us together, even before we 
 became personally acquainted, in our com- 
 mon love of cornfields, of forest thickets, of 
 nature in short a twin comprehension of 
 its penetrating charm. 
 
 Generally speaking, descriptive writers have 
 only eyes, and are content to paint what they 
 see ; TourguenefT besides can smell and hear. 
 All his senses have doors opening upon each 
 
328 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 other. He is overflowing with country scents, 
 the noise of streams, clear skies, and allows 
 himself to be lulled, without reference to 
 any school, by the orchestra of his own 
 sensations. 
 
 This music does not reach all ears. The 
 denizens of cities, deafened from childhood 
 by the roar of great towns, never perceive it. 
 They fail to hear the voices which speak in 
 the so-called silence of the woods, when 
 nature fancies herself alone, and when man, 
 holding his peace, has succeeded in being 
 forgotten. Can you recall to yourself the 
 splash of oars from a far-distant boat that 
 you have heard in fancy on some lake of 
 Fenimore Cooper's ? The boat is miles away, 
 far beyond the range of vision ; but the 
 woods seem to become the vaster for this 
 far-off sound vibrating on the still waters, 
 and we feel the thrill of solitude. 
 
 It was the Steppes of Russia that brought 
 the heart and senses of Tourgue'neff to blos- 
 soming point. One becomes good by listening 
 to nature, and those who love her do not lose 
 their interest in mankind. Hence that 
 sympathetic gentleness, sad as a moujik's 
 
Tou rgueneff. 329 
 
 song, which seems to sob in the background 
 of all Slave story-tellers' tales. It is the sigh 
 of humanity spoken of in the Creole song, the 
 valve which saves mankind from suffocation : 
 li Si pas te gagne, soupi lien moune, moune fa 
 touffeT And it is this sigh constantly re- 
 peated which makes the Mhnoires d'un 
 Seigneur Russe a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, 
 minus shrieks and declamations. 
 
 I knew all this when I met Tourgueneff. 
 For a long time he had reigned in my 
 Olympus on an ivory throne among the 
 ranks of my deities. But far from suspect- 
 ing his presence in Paris I had never even 
 asked myself whether he were dead or alive. 
 Imagine my astonishment when I found 
 myself face to face with him in a Parisian 
 drawing-room on the third floor looking on 
 to the Pare Monceau. 
 
 I told him all this lightly and expressed my 
 admiration for him. I told him, too, how I 
 had read him in the woods of Senart. There 
 his spirit was so well in unison with the 
 surroundings ; and the balmy remembrances 
 of the landscape and of his books were so 
 intermingled that more than one of his stories 
 
33 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 was represented in my thoughts by the colour 
 of a little patch of pink heather already faded 
 by autumn. 
 
 Tourgue'neff could not hide his astonish- 
 ment. 
 
 " What ! you have really read me ? " 
 Then he gave me some particulars as^to 
 the small sale of his books, and the obscurity 
 of his name in France. Hetzel had pub- 
 
Tourguhieff. 331 
 
 lished for him almost as a charity. His 
 popularity had not gone beyond the frontier. 
 It hurt him to live unknown in a country for 
 which he had an affection, and he confessed 
 his mortifications a little sadly, but without 
 any bitterness. On the contrary our disasters 
 of 1870 had only increased his attachment 
 to France. He could no longer bear to quit 
 it. Before the war he used to spend his 
 summers at Baden, now he would no longer 
 go there, but contented himself with Bougival 
 and the banks of the Seine. 
 
 It happened on this particular Sunday that 
 there was no one else at Flaubert's, and our 
 tete-a-tete was prolonged. I questioned the 
 writer upon his method of working and ex- 
 pressed my surprise that he did not make 
 his own translations, for he spoke excellent 
 French a shade slowly, to give time for 
 the subtle play of his mind. 
 
 He owned to me that the Academie and 
 its Dictionary frightened him. He turned 
 the leaves of that formidable dictionary in 
 fear and trembling, as if it were a code 
 wherein were formulated the laws of words 
 and the penalties incurred for any hardihood 
 
332 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 of expression. He emerged from these re- 
 searches with a conscience pricked by literary 
 scruples, which killed all energy and dis- 
 heartened him for further attempts. I re- 
 member that in a novel he wrote about this 
 time he did not venture to risk the phrase, 
 " ses yeux /'dies," through fear of the Forty 
 and their definition of the epithet. 
 
 It was not the first time I had met with 
 such anxieties. I had already found them 
 in my friend Mistral, who was also spell- 
 bound by the cupola of the Institute, that 
 ridiculous monument, a medallion of which 
 adorns the covers of the Didot edition 
 
 On this subject, I set forth to TourguenerT 
 what I had so much at heart : that the 
 French tongue is not a dead language, to be 
 written with a dictionary of definite ex- 
 pressions, classified as in a Gradus. For 
 myself, I felt it to be instinct with life, a 
 grand river rolling along with a powerful and 
 scouring current, full to the very brink. The 
 river indeed picks up much dross by the 
 way, for everything is thrown into it, but Jet 
 it flow on, and it may be trusted to make its 
 own selection. 
 
Tourgueneff. 333 
 
 Then, as the day wore on, Tourgueneff 
 observed that he must join " the ladies," at 
 the Pasdeloup Concert, and I came away 
 with him. I was delighted to find that he 
 loved music. In France, literary men in 
 general have a horror of it, painting having 
 usurped its place. Theophile Gautier, Saint- 
 Victor, Hugo, Banville, Goncourt, Zola, 
 Leconte de Lisle, are all music haters. To 
 the best of my belief, I am the first to con- 
 fess aloud an ignorance of colour, and a 
 passion for music : no doubt this arises from 
 my meridional temperament, and from my 
 short sight, one sense has developed at the 
 expense of the other. With Tourgueneff the 
 taste for music had been part of his Parisian 
 education. He had absorbed it from the 
 surroundings in which he lived. 
 
 These surroundings had been formed by 
 an intimacy of thirty years' standing, with 
 Madame Viardot, Viardot, the great singer, 
 Viardot-Garcia, sister to Malibran. A 
 bachelor, and very lonely, Tourgueneff had 
 lived for years in the family mansion, 50 
 rue de Douai. 
 
 " The ladies " of whom he had spoken 
 
334 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 to me at Flaubert's, were Madame Viardot 
 and her daughters whom he loved as his 
 own children. It was in this hospitable 
 dwelling that I visited him. 
 
 The house was furnished with refined 
 luxury, and a great attention alike to art and 
 to comfort. In crossing the hall, I saw 
 
 through an open door, a gallery of paintings. 
 Fresh voices of young girls came to me 
 through the hangings, and alternating with 
 them was the sympathetic and powerful 
 contralto of Orphee, which filled the staircase 
 and ascended with me. 
 
 Up stairs, on the third floor, was a snug 
 
Tourgueneff. 335 
 
 little room, crowded as a boudoir, with soft 
 and comfortable furniture. Tourgue'nerT had 
 borrowed from his friends their artistic 
 tastes ; music from the wife, painting from 
 the husband. 
 
 He was lying on a sofa. 
 
 I sat down by him, and we at once re- 
 sumed the conversation begun a few days 
 previously. 
 
 He had been struck with my remarks, and 
 promised to bring to Flaubert's on the 
 following Sunday, a story which should be 
 translated under his own superintendence. 
 Then he talked to me of a book he wished 
 to write, Les Terres Vierges, a sombre picture 
 of the new classes seething in the depths of 
 Russia, the history of those poor simplifies, 
 pushed by a heartrending misunderstanding 
 into the arms of the people. The people 
 do not understand them, but repulse and 
 jeer at them. And while he spoke I reflected 
 that Russia is indeed a virgin land, an in- 
 choate country, scarcely yet more than a 
 marsh, whereon every footstep leaves its 
 print, a country where all is new, all to be 
 done, all to be explored. With us, on the 
 
33 6 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 contrary, there is no longer even a deserted 
 avenue, a pathway that has not been trodden 
 underfoot by the crowd ; and to speak only 
 of the novel writer's art, the ghost of Balzac 
 appears at the end of every alley. 
 
 After this interview our meetings became 
 frequent. Amongst all the hours spent to- 
 gether I have a vivid impression of a spring 
 afternoon, a Sunday in the rue Murillo, 
 which stands out in my recollections unique 
 and luminous. We had spoken of Goethe, 
 and Tourgue'neff had said to us, " You know 
 nothing about him." The following Sunday, 
 he brought Prometheus and the Satyr, that 
 Voltairian tale, impious and rebellious, ex- 
 panded by Goethe into a dramatic poem. 
 From the Pare Monceau came to us the 
 cries and shouts of children, the clear sun- 
 shine, the freshness of the well-watered 
 lawns, and we four Goncourt, Zola, Flau- 
 bert, and myself moved by this magnificent 
 improvisation, listened to genius interpreted 
 by genius. This man, who trembled when 
 pen in hand, had, as he stood there, all the 
 splendid audacities of the poet ; it was not 
 the misleading translation which curdles 
 
To u rgueneff. 337 
 
 and petrifies, but Goethe himself living 
 and speaking to us. 
 
 Often too, TourguenerT would come to 
 seek me in the heart of the Marais, in the 
 old hotel Henri II., where I then dwelt. 
 He was amused with the strange sight pre- 
 sented by the great courtyard, the royal 
 dwelling with its gable ends and mashra- 
 beyahs filled with the petty industries of 
 Parisian trade manufacturers of tops, of 
 seltzer- water and sugar-plums. One day, 
 when he arrived a colossal figure arm-in- 
 arm with Flaubert, my little boy said to me 
 in a whisper, " Why, they are giants ! " Yes, 
 giants they were, excellent giants, with great 
 brains and great hearts proportionate to their 
 appearance. There was a link, an affinity 
 of simple goodness between these two genial 
 natures. It was Georges Sand who had 
 united them. Flaubert, boaster and fault- 
 finder, a Don Quixote with the voice of a 
 trumpeter of the Guards, and his powerful 
 irony of observation, his manners of a 
 Norman of the Conqueror's time, was cer- 
 tainly the masculine half of this marriage 
 of minds ; but who would have guessed that 
 
 z 
 
338 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 in this other Colossus, with bushy eyebrows 
 and immense flat cheekbones, was the femi- 
 nine element ; the woman of acute delicacy 
 described by Tourgueneff in his books ; that 
 nervous, languid, passionate Russian, sleepy 
 as an Oriental, tragic as a nation in revolt ? 
 So true is it that in the vast confusion of the 
 manufacture of humanity souls occasionally 
 mistake their proper envelopes, and men's 
 souls may find their way to women's bodies, 
 while the souls of women may chance into 
 the carcases of cyclops. 
 
 It was at this date that the idea of a 
 monthly meeting, at which friends should 
 assemble at a good dinner, occurred to us. 
 It was to be called <; the Flaubert dinner," 
 or " dinner of unsuccessful authors." Flau- 
 bert was to be admitted, on the strength of 
 a slight check with his Candidat ; Zola on 
 account of Bouton de Rose ; Goncourt for 
 Henriette Marechal ; myself for my Arle- 
 sienne. Girardin wished to insinuate himself 
 into our band, but he was not a literary 
 man, and we refused him admittance. As 
 for Tourgueneff, he gave us his word of 
 honour he had been damned in Russia, and 
 
Tourgueneff. 339 
 
 as it was so far off no one went thither to 
 ascertain the fact. Nothing could be more 
 delightful than these friendly dinners, where 
 we talked in perfect freedom, elbows on 
 table, our minds thoroughly roused to action. 
 As experienced people should be, we were 
 all gourmets, and so there were as many 
 pet dishes as there were temperaments ; as 
 many different recipes as there were pro- 
 vinces. Flaubert must have Normandy but- 
 ter and stewed Rouen ducks; Edmond de 
 Goncourt, exotic and refined, demanded pre- 
 served ginger; Zola, sea-urchins and cockles; 
 while Tourgue'neff enjoyed his caviare. 
 
 Ah ! we were not easy to provide for, 
 and the restaurants of Paris no doubt re- 
 member us. We often changed our meeting- 
 place. Sometimes it was at Adolphe and 
 Pele, behind the Opera ; sometimes in the 
 square of the Opera Comique ; then at 
 Voisin's, whose cellar could meet any emer- 
 gency and reconcile all tastes. We were 
 wont to sit down to table at seven o'clock, 
 and at two o'clock we had not finished. 
 Flaubert and Zola dined in their shirt- 
 sleeves ; Tourgueneff lounged on the divan ; 
 
34 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 the waiters were turned out a needless 
 precaution, since Flaubert's "roar" could 
 be heard from roof to cellar of the house 
 and we talked literature. There was 
 always on the table a book by one or other 
 of us at any rate, just out. It might be the 
 Tentation de Saint- Antoine and the Trois 
 
 Contes of Flaubert ; La Fille Elisa of Gon- 
 court ; IJAbbe Mouret of Zola ; Tourgueneff 
 brought Reliques Vivantes and Terres Vierges ; 
 and I, Fromofit or Jack. We opened our 
 minds to one another without flattery 
 and without any conspiracy of mutual 
 admiration. 
 
Tourgueneff. 341 
 
 I have here before me a letter of Torgue- 
 nefTs, the handwriting large, foreign, ancient 
 in appearance, a writing of old manuscript ; 
 and this letter I transcribe in its entirety, for 
 it well describes the tone of sincerity pre- 
 vailing amongst us : 
 
 " Monday. 24 May '77. 
 
 "My dear Friend, 
 
 "If I have not yet spoken to you about 
 your book, it is because I wished to do so 
 at length, and would not content myself with 
 a few commonplace phrases. I postpone it 
 all till our meeting, which will soon take 
 place now, I hope, since Flaubert will soon 
 return and our dinners will recommence. 
 
 " I will confine myself to saying one thing : 
 the Nabab is the most remarkable and also 
 the most unequal bock you have written. 
 If Fromo7it and Risler were represented by 
 
 a straight line , the Nabab would have 
 
 to be figured thus :/\/\A/\A and the 
 heights of the zigzags could only be reached 
 by a talent of the first order. 
 
 " I beg your pardon for expressing myself 
 so geometrically. 
 
34 2 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 " I have had a long and very violent attack 
 of gout. I only went out yesterday for the 
 first time : and I have the legs and knees of 
 an old man of ninety. I much fear I am 
 become what the English call ' a confirmed 
 invalid.' 
 
 ' : A thousand kind regards to Madame 
 Daudet, and with a warm shake hands, 
 ' I am, 
 
 "Yours ever, 
 
 " Ivan Tourgueneff/' 
 
 When we had done with the books and 
 the chief interests of the moment, the con- 
 versation became more general, and we 
 returned to the ever-present themes and 
 ideas of love and death. 
 
 The Russian stretched out on his sofa said 
 not a word. 
 
 "And you, Tourgue'nerT? " 
 
 " Oh, I never think about death. In our 
 country no one has any very distinct idea on 
 the subject; it is a vague, distant notion, 
 enveloped in the Slavonic mist." 
 
 That word revealed the whole tempera- 
 ment of his race and of his own genius. The 
 
Tourgueneff. 343 
 
 Slavonic mist floats over all his handiwork, 
 softening it, throwing a hazy vapour over all ; 
 even his conversations seeming pervaded by 
 it. What he related was hesitatingly and 
 laboriously begun j then all at once some 
 clear and incisive word dispelled the clouds 
 as by a flash of light. He described his 
 Russia to us, not the historical and stereo- 
 typed Russia of the Beresina, but a summer- 
 like Russia, speaking of ripe cornfields and 
 tender blossoms springing up under the April 
 showers ; Little Russia, full of the fresh 
 budding forth of nature, of green grass 
 sprouting up, and the hum of the busy bees. 
 And so, as we are wont to devise some kind 
 of local habitation, to imagine some already- 
 known landscape as the setting in which to 
 frame the exotic stories we may hear, Russian 
 life appeared to me through his narrative 
 as a vast manorial existence, placed in an 
 Algerian country with a surrounding of Arab 
 encampments. 
 
 Tourgue'neff talked to us of the Russian 
 peasant : of his inveterate drunkenness, his be- 
 numbed conscience, his ignorance of liberty ; 
 or else he would describe some brighter 
 
344 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 scene, some charming idyl, some tender re- 
 collections, such as that of a miller's daughter 
 whom he had met while on a shooting expe- 
 dition, and with whom he had for a while 
 fancied himself in love. 
 
 "What shall I give you?" he had often 
 asked her ; and the pretty maid had answered 
 blushingly, 
 
 "Bring me some scented soap from the 
 city that I may perfume my hands, and then 
 you will kiss them as you do those of the fine 
 ladies." 
 
 After love and death we talked of illnesses, 
 of the slavery in which we drag about with 
 us our wretched bodies, like the convict's 
 cannon-ball at the end of his chain. The 
 sad confessions in fact of men past their 
 fortieth year ! As for me, not yet a victim 
 to rheumatism, I laughed at my friends, at 
 poor Tourgueneff, who was a martyr to gout 
 and who came limping to our dinners. Since 
 then I have changed my tone. 
 
 Alas ! death of which we were always 
 speaking soon came. First Flaubert wa^s 
 taken. He was the soul, the link which 
 bound us together. Once he was gone our 
 
Tou rgueneff. 3 45 
 
 life changed, and we only met from time to 
 time, none of us having the courage to 
 resume the meetings so sadly interrupted by 
 mourning. 
 
 Some months later, Tourgueneff endea- 
 voured to bring us together again ; Flaubert's 
 empty place was to be kept at our table, but 
 his loud voice and hearty laugh were too 
 sadly missing. They were no longer the 
 dinners of former days. Since then I have 
 met the great Russian novelist at an evening 
 party at Madame Adams's ; he had brought 
 with him the Grand Duke Constantine, who 
 on his way through Paris was anxious to 
 meet a few of the celebrities of the day 
 a kind of living and eating Tussaud's exhi- 
 bition. Tourgueneff was ill and depressed. 
 His pitiless enemy the gout constantly con- 
 fined him to his bed, and he begged his 
 friends to come and visit him. 
 
 I saw him for the last time two months 
 ago. The house was still full of flowers, of 
 fresh voices down stairs, while up stairs my 
 poor friend lay stretched out upon his sofa 
 sadly changed and weakened. He was 
 suffering acutely from an attack of angina 
 
346 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 pectoris, and from a wound caused by the 
 excision of a tumour. The operation having 
 been perfomed without the aid of chloroform, 
 he gave me a painfully lucid account of it. 
 First came a circular sensation, like that of 
 peeling a fruit, then the sharp pain of cutting 
 into the quick. He added : 
 
 " I analysed my sufferings, in order to 
 describe them to you at one of our dinners, 
 thinking you might find it interesting." 
 
 As he could still drag himself about a little 
 he came down stairs to accompany me as 
 far as the door. We entered his picture- 
 gallery, and he showed me some paintings 
 of the Russian school a Cossack camp, 
 waving cornfields, and glowing Russian land- 
 scapes, such as he described them. 
 
 Old Viardot was there; he also seemed 
 ill. In the next room Garcia was singing, 
 and Tourgueneff, surrounded by the artistic 
 associations he loved so well, smiled as he 
 bid me good-bye. 
 
 A month later I heard that Viardot was 
 dead and that Tourgueneff was dying. I 
 could not believe this. It seemed to me 
 that as long as a beautiful and powerful 
 
Tourgueneff. 347 
 
 mind had not yet said its last word life must 
 surely be prolonged for it. Fine weather 
 and the balmy air of Bougival would give 
 Tourgueneff back to us, but the friendly 
 gatherings he so loved to attend were at 
 an end for him. 
 
 Ah, those Flaubert dinners ! We began 
 them again the other day ; there were only 
 three of us ! 1 
 
 While I am correcting the proofs of this 
 article, which appeared a few years since, 
 a book of Souvenirs is brought to me, in 
 which Tourgueneff from the other side of 
 the grave criticizes me without mercy. As 
 an author, I am beneath all criticism ; as a 
 man, I am the lowest of my kind. My friends 
 were well aware of it, and told fine stories 
 about me. What friends did Tourgueneff 
 allude to, and could they remain my friends 
 if they held such an opinion of me ? And 
 himself, that excellent Slave, who obliged 
 him to assume so cordial a manner with 
 me? I can see him in my house, at my 
 
 1 Written for the New York Century Magazine 
 in 1880. 
 
348 
 
 Thirty Years of Paris. 
 
 table, gentle, affectionate, kissing my children. 
 I have in my possession many exquisite 
 warm-hearted letters from him. And this 
 was what lay concealed behind that kindly 
 smile. Good heavens ! how strange life is, 
 and how true that charming word of the 
 Greek language, Eironeia. 
 
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 Edinburgh and London 
 
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