Chapter V: Part 5

The Scribner connection was not the only one putting heart into me. Among my early trial balloons was one marked for McClure’s Syndicate, New York City. It carried an article of two thousand words with a catchy title—“The King of Paris”—cribbed from a French newspaper. It was the story of Jean Alphand and his services to the city. The balloon reached its destination. The article was promptly accepted with a promise of $10 when it was published, also a suggestion that they would be glad to consider other subjects if I had them to offer—which I did. Indeed, I gave them no time to forget me; not that they took all I hustled across the Atlantic, but they took enough to make me feel that this might be a stable and prosperous market for short and timely articles. When suggestions finally began to come from them I felt the ground firmer on my feet. One of these suggestions led me into an especially attractive new field, and in the long run had important bearing on my major interest, Madame Roland. It was that I try a series of sketches of French women writers. There was a respectable group of them, and I asked nothing better than to look them up.

I began with a woman who at that time was introducing leading contemporary English and American writers to the French through the _Revue des deux Mondes_—Madame Blanc, her pen name Théodore Bentzon, a person of rare distinction and of gallant soul. She had been a lady in waiting at Napoleon III’s court, had made an unfortunate marriage, was now living on a small income and what she could earn by writing. In her salon there was a portrait taken in her young womanhood which charmed me, but when I spoke of it she shook her head as if she did not want to remember it. “Une femme qui n’existe plus,” she said.

Hard worker as Madame Blanc was, she found time to start me on my rounds among the French women writers. I doubt if there was an American writer of our day who would have had both the kindness of heart and the sureness of herself to take so much trouble for an unknown woman. She started me off, and I turned out ten or a dozen little pieces before I was through. With one of my subjects I had an amusing flirtation—I think I may call it a flirtation. This was Madame Dieulafoy who with her husband had done eminent work in archaeology, and who had a roomful of exhibits in the Louvre to her credit—a very great person indeed. Madame Dieulafoy was the only woman I had ever seen at that time who wore men’s clothes. It had been found necessary to put her into trousers for excavating work, and she liked them so well and Monsieur Dieulafoy loved her so in them that they had obtained permission from the French Government for her to wear them in Paris. From more than one source I heard of the sensation she created among servants when she came to call. They abandoned their duties to peep from dark places at the woman in men’s clothes.

Madame Dieulafoy and I grew friendly over the history of the exploits of women in the world, and it took no time at all for me to decide to write the history of women from Eve up, as if I had not already enough on my hands. She applauded my idea, gave me many suggestions, but it never went any further than my few visits, which as I say were more or less flirtations. She was such a pretty little man, so immaculate (the best tailors in Paris did her, I was told), that I could not keep admiring eyes off her. She used her eyes, too, and loved to pat me on the knee, partly I suppose because I always blushed when she did it. It was an amusing acquaintance and a profitable one to me, for she was as interested in my plans for articles as if I had been one of her own.

Another woman who interested me greatly was Judith Gautier. My interest was stirred by my indignation that her name had been left off the list of living women distinguished in French literature sent to the Chicago Exposition of 1893. There was much speculation among my friends as to how it happened. My own conclusion was that it was because of her long and impassioned devotion to the music of Richard Wagner.

The first Wagner opera to be given in Paris was “Tannhäuser.” This was in the early sixties, when Judith Gautier was about fourteen years old. She went to the opera with her father—Théophile Gautier—and was enthusiastic although the house received it coldly. As they were walking home a little fellow with hollow cheeks, eagle nose, and very bright eyes joined them. He rejoiced with cheerful violence over the failure of the opera. The girl, angered, forgot her manners and blurted out, “It is clear, sir, that you know you have heard a masterpiece, and that you are talking of a rival.”

“Do you know who that was, saucebox?” her delighted father asked as they passed on.

“No, who?”

“Hector Berlioz.”

It was the beginning of a lifelong devotion. Wagner was to her not only the master musician but a species of divinity. In 1882 she published a volume on him—valuable for its reminiscences.

Early in the winter of 1892 “Lohengrin” was announced for the season of Grand Opera. I was amazed at the loud and bitter protests. Among the few lovers of Wagner who had courage to come to the defense of the master was Judith Gautier. She was abused for it. As this was my first realization that political hatred ever influences the judgment in matters of art, I took the incident very much to heart. I could understand why people might dislike Wagnerian music, but that the soldiers should be called out to protect the Opera House when one of his greatest works was to be given shocked me. You could then so hate an enemy that beauty herself was outraged!

It was easy for me to conclude that Judith Gautier’s name had been left off the list of writing women sent to the Chicago Exposition because the committee wanted to punish her for defending the works of a great artist in whom she profoundly believed.

The opening up of opportunities so much more quickly than I had dared dream spurred me to longer and harder hours at work. There were few mornings that I was not at my desk at eight o’clock; there were few nights that I went to bed before midnight, and there was real drudgery in making legible copy after my article was written. It was all done by longhand—careful and painstaking handwriting, it was. I was to find later that Mr. McClure’s partner in the Syndicate, Mr. J. S. Phillips, trying to estimate the possibilities in this correspondent bombarding them with articles and suggestions, set me down from my handwriting as a middle-aged New England schoolteacher.

But if life was hard and life was meager, and if down at the bottom of my heart it was continuously in question to which class of the poor I would finally belong, life to my surprise was taking on a varied pattern very different from the drab existence of hard work and self-denial that I had planned and was prepared to endure to the end. It began at the Rue du Sommerard, where at the outset we stumbled on what turned out to be the most colorful, unusual, and frequently perplexing association that had ever come the way of any one of us.

When we took our rooms from Madame Bonnet she had told us that one room in the apartment was reserved for an Egyptian Prince who came only for the week ends. He was _bien comme il faut_, _très riche_, _très_ everything desirable. He would not disturb us, we might never see him. Upon inquiry we discovered that all Madame Bonnet’s rooms save those we were taking were occupied by Egyptian students of law or medicine or diplomacy. The Prince, himself, a cousin of the Khedive, was in the military school at Saint-Cyr. He kept a room at Madame Bonnet’s to spend an occasional holiday or Sunday with his compatriots, all of his age and all of the upper classes.

We all shared the American flutter over titles, and when we caught a first glimpse of the Prince and his friends we were still more excited. They were quite the most elegant-looking male specimens so far as manners and clothes went that any one of us had ever seen. Here was more in the way of flavor than we had bargained for. We had come to study the French and had dropped into an Egyptian colony.

We soon discovered that they were as curious about us as we were about them, for hardly were we settled when Madame Bonnet came to say that the _messieurs_ were all in her salon. Wouldn’t we come in and make their acquaintance? Of course we went. They wanted us to dance. Now it was Sunday, and we had all been brought up under the Methodist discipline. Sunday was a day of rest and worship and no play, no amusement of any kind. In my household at least I was supposed to play only hymns on the piano as we were supposed to read only religious books. My mother and I compromised at last on Gottschalk’s “Last Hope”; she, being moved by the story of its composition, thought that it must be religious, but “Martha” and “Poet and Peasant,” my two other show pieces, were forbidden.

Indeed, when I was forty years old my father, catching me reading a volume of a certain Congressional trust investigation on a Sunday afternoon, reproved me in his gentle way. “You shouldn’t read that on Sunday, Ida.” I quickly exchanged it for “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is not without suggestion for a student of the trust.

My young companions were particularly shocked at the Egyptians’ invitation to dance. I think it had never occurred to them that all people did not keep Sunday. “No,” we said a little severely, “we don’t dance on Sunday.” I had the satisfaction of hearing them whisper soberly to one another, “_très religieuses_.” It was just as well, I thought, they should have that idea to start with; better than starting with the degree of intimacy they might see in our dancing in their landlady’s salon on a first meeting.

But we had what was for us an exciting evening, and when we left and they all begged “Come again” we promised that we would.

It was the beginning of a weekly party. Madame Bonnet gave the Egyptians their dinners. We agreed to take dinners once a week with her. We couldn’t afford more, and besides we wanted to be on the safe side in our relations. There must be no question in their minds about our entire respectability—respectability as we understood it. What interested me particularly was that at once they wanted to understand our conventions, social and religious and political. Nothing disturbed them more, I found, than a feeling that perhaps they had not quite understood, that unintentionally they had infringed on our customs. Once convinced of this, we could go with entire freedom to our weekly Egyptian evenings. As I recall them they were happy evenings much like children’s parties at home, for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any sort. They laughed and shouted and, if something went wrong, flew into a rage like children.

The meat of the connection was the talk which sometimes ran far into the night. All of these young men were in training for some kind of professional or official position. Two or three of them had taken from three to four years at German gymnasia or English universities. All of them spoke three or four languages. The Prince’s English was perfect, and no one of us could ever hope to approach the French of the group, learned for the most part in Switzerland as children. They had much more curiosity and real information about the social customs of other countries than we had. They were eager to know all about our ways, particularly the life of women, their relation to men before and after marriage.

There were would-be reformers of Egyptian marriage customs among them; especially did they resent the convention which prevented them looking at the face of the bride before the marriage ceremony. One of the group had made a vow never to marry as long as that custom existed and was urging his compatriots to join him. Nearly all of them insisted that they would never marry more than one woman. They asked with a frankness startling to our ears about the way monogamy worked in the United States. They were curious to know the position of the mistress, and when we were shocked and insisted that a good man never had a mistress they were frankly incredulous. It would never work out, they insisted. One wife they understood; but one wife and no mistress seemed entirely impractical.

Politics interested them profoundly. Particularly did they hate England—how deeply and bitterly I did not realize until in January of ’92 news of the death of the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha son of Ismail Pasha, great-grandson of Mehemet Ali, came to the Rue du Sommerard. Madame Bonnet came in at once to tell us how sorrowful our friends were and to ask that we dine with them that night. We found them very grave. “He was a good man,” they insisted, “our friend.” What was going to happen now? I took it they feared changes in government which might make their own futures uncertain. They were uneasy, frightened and wanted us to understand the reason behind their anxiety.

After dinner a large number of their compatriots filed into the room. We were begged to stay. They evidently wanted us to understand better their suspicion of what England might do in this crisis. The longer the talk, the more bitter they grew.

“Down with England!” they began to cry.

Indignation and enthusiasm are qualities as contagious as disease. Before I realized it, I shared their anger and was drinking repeatedly in _l’eau sucrée_—good Mohammedans that our Egyptians were, they never touched wine—drinking repeatedly to loud and angry roars of “A bas l’Angleterre!”

The Egyptians were not only a picturesque and enlivening feature in our life: they had a social value which they never suspected. We used them rather shamelessly to impress wandering Americans who looked with badly concealed scorn on the Latin Quarter and particularly on our narrow and stuffy rooms. “A Prince was our neighbor,” we said loftily, and to prove it we could show an autographed photograph which the Prince on his own notion had given me. I kept it on the mantel in the little salon. When we felt particular need of asserting ourselves we told of our weekly dinners and they lost nothing of their gaiety and interest in our telling. There was so much more flavor in them, we always assured those who tried to high-hat us, than ordinary sightseeing offered!

I have always felt rather proud of the way we handled ourselves in that year, keeping the entire respect of our Egyptians. It was not always so easy. It fell into my awkward hands to handle one rather violent love affair. A pretty and vivacious young girl had joined our party at the request of her brother: “Will you look after her?” The Egyptians were delighted with her, and she treated them as she might a group of American boys, could see no reason why she should not go out with them. Only our combined disapproval, our insistence that if she did she soon would be classed in the Quarter as little better than the gay little girls who swarmed about, and with whom we occasionally out of the corner of our eyes saw our Egyptians: she must not run that risk. But while that was managed the inevitable stir of youth could not be managed, and it was not long before I had one of the nicest of the boys begging me on his knees to let him pay his addresses to my little friend, insisting that he would marry her, never take another wife. He wept and pleaded, but I held my ground until finally the young girl who loved his suit but not the boy was safely on the ocean.

A long time afterwards I had proof that we did look after ourselves. When a couple of our party were going to Italy one of these young men gave them a letter of introduction to an Egyptian friend in Milan. The letter was not presented, and not opened until two or three years later, when my friend showed me the postscript. It read: “Surtout soyez convenable avec ces dames.”

After the Egyptians came our French professor, a woman of forty, buxom, competent, gay-hearted, an able teacher. I have never known man or woman more shrewd in gauging character or more expert in turning the qualities she found to her own advantage. If she respected or admired them she took no more than she gave—frequently, as in my case, much less. But if she found a pupil lazy or dishonest or stingy or rich and irresponsible, she took mercilessly. “Such people deserve nothing—nothing,” she declared once when I protested.

She respected me because I worked, but she always told me frankly that although I read French easily and wrote it _pas mal_ I should always speak it with the “detestable” English accent. “No ear—too old.” However, I could be made more fluent, my vocabulary enlarged, my grammar perfected. And to that end she bent all her efforts, establishing several useful exchange relations. The chief of these was her most intimate friend, Monsieur X, a man who I suppose had been for many years her lover.

Monsieur X had no superior intelligence; but he was industrious and _bon enfant_, and partly at least through the help of Madame A had come to hold an excellent official position. She kept him busy improving his chances. At the moment she took me on she had him translating a big volume on the English system of handling the unemployed and the helplessly poor, an acute problem for France in the early nineties. As she already had pried out of me full information of all I was trying to do, she saw at once the possibility of a trade. If I would help him in translating, he would secure reports and information on subjects in which I was interested. It seemed a good thing for me at any rate, and the arrangement was made.

I continued to help with the book until it was published. It was well received, even _couronné_ by the Academy of Science. To my astonishment I found then that Madame A’s interest in this book and its success was that it would help her in making a more profitable marriage for Monsieur X. They had settled on a wife—that, I knew—but, as she told me, his position was so much improved by the success of his book that he was worth a much larger dot. Therefore, she set out with his help, I suppose, to find another wife. They succeeded, and the affair was arranged.

I was deeply disturbed by the matter. I believed, as I still do, that the only safe basis for a happy marriage is a compound of physical harmony, capacity for companionship combined with understanding and acceptance of each other’s ideals. I could see little chance where it was a matter chiefly of balanced income. But Madame A had no sympathy with my idealistic attitude towards marriage.

Of course it left her high and dry. The little dinners which the three of us had shared almost every week became dinners _à deux_. The first night I was torn with sympathy.

“Will you never see him again?” I asked.

“Of course, not now, later perhaps. These things arrange themselves, mademoiselle.”

But I noticed she ordered a double cognac that night.

Madame A rendered one very great service to our group, one which we could never repay. We had been but a short time in Paris before we realized that one of our duties was to be helping out American girls and women who had come to Europe to study a little, sight-see a little, travel a little, expecting easily to form congenial relations with the people of the country, and who for one reason or another had never been able to do this. They were disappointed and unhappy. The four of us standing together made a nucleus they envied. We made it a rule to do our best to help them out; but at least in one case it involved us in serious trouble.

Among those who had attached themselves to us was a woman of some forty or more years with a curiously repellent personality. I have never known a person to produce a more melancholy effect on strangers. I have seen our little salon empty itself if she dropped in on our evening at home. Even Madame Bonnet’s little black dog Riquet, who had adopted us, would slink around the edge of the room and beg to be let out if she came in. What was the matter? We could not imagine. More than once she threw herself into my arms and sobbed that she was unhappy, in great trouble, of which she could not speak.

Miss C had been some three months in the house when we came home from a week-end trip to be met by an outraged Madame Bonnet. Miss C, she told us, had been arrested, arrested for stealing at the Bon Marché and the Louvre. She was in Saint-Lazaire. There was a note for me. I must do something. Think of the disgrace to her establishment!

The note told me only where she was, that she had engaged a lawyer, asked me to see him. I did, and found him of the type which I suppose hangs around all prisons into which great cities dump women of the street and petty criminals. His only interest was in a possible retainer. How much would I pay him for taking the case? Nothing, I assured him, until I had talked to the American authorities. I went to the consulate, where an irate and worried official swore loudly at the faculty of American women for getting into trouble in France.

“Here I am,” he said, “saddled with a girl who is going to have a baby and who swears she’ll kill herself if I don’t arrange for her to have it so her family will never know.

“I was afraid she would do it too, and then there would be another nasty scandal to hush up, so I got the man here and told him he must put up the money to see her through.

“He laughed at me; but I pulled this revolver out of the drawer” (suiting the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to shoot him, but that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see that he did. Well, he settled for ten thousand francs. But that does not let me off. What am I going to do with the baby? And now here you are with one of the nastiest kind of cases for a French court. They can’t stand foreigners stealing from them.”

“But what am I to do?” I wailed.

“She’ll have to stand a public trial. You must impress the judges. Find out if she’s got friends. Get cablegrams. Show she has relatives willing to help her. Read her letters. See if they don’t show what is behind this, and when the trial comes have all the pretty girls and prosperous-looking men you know present. They’ll look at you, and they’ll think twice. Put on a campaign, woman.”

And so I started out to put on a campaign. I began by reading her letters. I did not go far before I had the story—a tragic one. Miss C was well born, her family prosperous and important in her state, she a graduate of a great university. She had been a successful teacher, was to have been married to a man whom she had loved for years with passion and depth. For reasons I never knew the engagement was broken. In an attempt to forget, patch up her shattered hopes, she had come to Europe for study and travel; but she couldn’t forget, and every week for months she had written the man long letters and every week they had come back to her unopened.

Her despair became so black that, as she told me later, “I had to do something.” And so, as when one bites on a sore tooth, she had begun to steal. The proofs of it were all there in her room: a pathetic collection of articles, not worth stealing, slipped mainly from bargain counters. Among them there were at least seventy pairs of gloves of every size and color—none of them any one of us would have worn. There were some fifty pen knives; there were a pile of half-bolts of ribbon and lace, innumerable spools of silk and cotton, packages of pins and needles. All taken not because she wanted them, only to hurt herself in another spot, take her mind from the original wound.

Understanding her wretchedness, I could sympathize with her folly. I began my campaign by telling Madame of our trouble. She detested Miss C, thought her crazy, though she admitted she was a better pupil than any one of us, but here was excitement, also an opportunity to serve us. What the consul had not suggested, she did.

There was a long wait. Our prisoner was transferred to the Conciergerie, where I went to see her. A gruesome trip under the very windows from which I knew Madame Roland had looked in the days before she mounted the cart and took her last ride along the quay to the guillotine.

When the trial came the sympathizing claque was a grand success. At Madame A’s suggestion we dressed for it in the best we had, bought new flowers for our hats and fresh gloves, brought over two or three handsome young women from the Champs Elysées Quarter. As for Madame A herself, she made a toilette which even a judge would see and hear.

I had suggested that Monsieur X, being an important person, might impress the judge. She was horrified. “Drag a member of the Government into such a stupid affair! No, you Americans must do it. I’ll bring the rich American.”

And she did. The rich American was a wealthy idler who for several winters had taken lessons from her, largely, I think, because he found her so pungent and amusing. He treated her royally as to fees and kept her in flowers and candy. He looked his part of important man of affairs. No one could have added more to our display, for one could see even the judges eyeing enviously the elegance of his clothes.

Petty larceny cases were at that time, and I suppose still are, taken into a courtroom perhaps forty by twenty, with seats for friends and the public. On a mounted platform at the end sat three judges in their robes. A dossier of each case lay before them; they had for our friend a rather impressive collection of documents, cablegrams from her family, proofs that her father was or had been a man of importance in public affairs, her college diploma, her check book and a letter of credit showing her to have ample funds.

When all was ready seven prisoners were brought in, six men half degenerate petty thieves and our poor pale tired friend between them. Nothing more incongruous could have been seen than this well dressed woman of evident breeding flanked by these hopeless derelicts.

After looking over the papers in her dossier the judges looked at her and then at us, now paler than she and praying for mercy with eyes and clasped hands. They were perplexed and annoyed. Was there an international angle to the case?

“What are you doing in Paris?” asked one of them harshly.

“Studying,” Miss C answered.

“You take a queer way to do it,” he said tartly. “Why did you do this?” he asked more gently.

With a weary shake of her head she said, “Je ne sais pas.”

It was Madame A who won the case, for it was to her the judges turned as one who, they knew at a glimpse, talked their language. She sailed down the aisle to take her stand before them, and I never have seen any one, man or woman, to whom one could so aptly apply the old figure, “like a full-rigged ship.” They let her talk. She told how _comme il faut_ we all were—as they could see. We were important, serious, rich. Yes, rich. Then she said candidly: “This woman is crazy. Send her home to her friends.”

She had solved their problem, told them their duty, and they followed her advice, adding a fine of five hundred francs and an order that she leave France in a week after her dismissal, and never return.

Madame A had saved Miss C, but she wanted no thanks from her, wouldn’t see her; nor would Madame Bonnet let her come into the house save to gather up her things. She had been a fool and got caught. To steal the _riens_ as she had! It was a disgrace and respectable people like them could not afford to have her cross their doorways.

Luckily for us, our association with American women was not confined to problem cases. There was a disturbing number of them compelling me to ask myself again and again if this break for freedom, this revolt against security in which I myself was taking part was not a fatal adventure bound to injure the family, the one institution in which I believed more than any other, bound to produce a terrible crop of wretchedness and abnormality. Had not even the few successes I saw about me been paid for by a hardening of heart, a suppression of natural human joyousness that was uglier even than the case of my poor Miss C?

But I was saved from too much perplexity over what freedom might be doing to my compatriots by a gradual drifting into rather close companionship with a number of Americans like ourselves taking lectures at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France. It was a great piece of luck for us since these Americans were all students of more experience and attainment than any one of us. There was Dr. John Vincent of the History Department of Johns Hopkins University, and along with him his wife who spent hours of every day making beautiful copies of canvases in the Luxembourg. There were Fred Parker Emery of the English Department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife. There was a younger man, Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate—a man who was to make a distinguished career for himself in French history, and now Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia, the author of many valuable books.

Serious work did not dull our new friends’ curiosity about French life in general nor prevent a humorous detached view of things. We soon were dining together every week in restaurants of the Quarter into which we had never ventured before. Here for one franc, fifty (thirty cents) we got a decent dinner—_vin compris_, as well as a gay company of students and their girls. They were so merry, so natural in their gaiety that none of us were anything but amused over their little ways. It was in one of these restaurants that for the first time in my life I saw a girl take out a compact, straighten her hat—her head had been on her cavalier’s shoulder and it was out of plumb—straighten her hat and powder her nose. That the day would come when the manners and customs of the Latin Quarter of the nineties would be the manners and customs of American girls in practically every rank of life would have been unthinkable to me then.

Our new friends added greatly to the pleasure of the weekly sightseeing excursions which had been one of the features of The Plan. “Every week end, go somewhere”—I had laid down. So every Saturday we were taking a _bateau mouche_ or train or tram journey costing only a few of our precious sous—to Saint-Denis, the September fête at Saint-Cloud, Versailles. If the weather was bad we went to the museums, the churches, the monuments. Our new friends liked the idea. When spring came our promenades took on a wider range. There were week-end trips to Fontainebleau and to one after another of the great cathedral and château towns—Chartres, Beauvais, Rheims, Pierrefonds, Compiègne.

Week ends in company as genial, unaffected and intelligent as that of our new friends proved were a rare experience. When the time came for a final break-up of the crowd in August of 1892—my first companions had already gone back to America—those left of us decided to take a farewell vacation together. The difficulty was to settle on a place. Here was something not on my schedule. We considered Etaples, Beuzeval-Houlgate, Belle-Île and finally at the last moment took tickets to Mont-Saint-Michel—a glorious spot; but after watching the tide come in for two successive days, after climbing to the top and descending to the bottom of the château, sitting out sunsets on the wall and eating omelettes at Madame Poulard’s until we were fed to the full we pushed on to Saint-Malo and exhausted it as quickly as we had Mont-Saint-Michel. As we listened bored to the orchestra in the square a poster on a wall suddenly caught our collective eyes. It told us to go to the Island of Jersey. With one accord we said “Let’s,” packed our bags and caught the steamer all within an hour. At Jersey we walked into lodgings: rooms, plenty of them; a salon looking on the sea; such sea fish and vegetables and fruit as only that island offers. We thought it was costing a fortune, but when the bill came—house, housekeeper, maid, and food such as we had not had for a year—it totaled just eighty cents apiece for a day.

That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris. I began the second in deep depression, for several good reasons. First, I had exhausted my reserve. I think I came back from my vacation with twenty francs in my pocket. All my American associates were gone or going soon. I had a new address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood of the Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and, hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at least two to finish my undertaking. The homesickness and hunger for my family had never been appeased. I had lived on their letters. If they did not come regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of their daily life. My mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully frank about her neighbors and about the family. She told who was at church, fretted because father spent so much time with his precious Sunday school class of girls, described every new frock, told what they had for Sunday dinner, announced the first green corn in the garden, the blossoming of her pet flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the spring, roses in the summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter. Occasionally she would apologize for her homely details, particularly after I had written a long guidebookish epistle home describing some ancient monument I had been visiting. How I must have bored them sometimes! But home details—“I live off them,” I told her. “You can’t tell me too much about your daily doings.”

This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of the possibilities in telepathy. This came the first Sunday of June, 1892. I had hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most unaccountable alarm. What it was about, I did not know. I could not work and finally went to the street. For hours I walked, not able to throw off the black thing that enveloped me. It was late in the afternoon when I returned to find a compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting. As he was leaving the apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy of _Le Temps_ and as I always did turned first to the news from _les Etats Unis_. It was to read that the city of Titusville and its neighbor Oil City had been utterly destroyed by flood and fire. The only buildings left in my home town were said to be the railroad station and a foundry. A hundred and fifty persons had been drowned or burned to death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills.

At that moment my caller came back for his umbrella. I seized him roughly: “Read, read. What shall I do?”

He was a sensible man. “Steady, steady,” he said. “Put on your hat, and we’ll go out and get other papers.” We were soon back with the last editions of all the English and French journals. They all gave space to the disaster, each more distressing and unsatisfactory than the one before.

This explains my black day, I told myself. The family is dead—our home gone. It was useless to cable, for the newspapers all spoke of broken communications. But the next morning as I was dressing, Madame Bonnet came in with a cablegram. Hardly daring to open it I backed into the corner of the room to feel the support behind me of the walls while my friend Mrs. Vincent, still with me, watched with white face. The telegram was from my brother, and it had just one word. “Safe.”

When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of horror. For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of my father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills. But they were safe, our home was standing. The experience left me more nervous than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took all the resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under control.

Although I was beginning my second year with no money in the bank I had friendly relations with two publishing firms that seemed to see a possible something in my work. There was _Scribner’s Magazine_, a relation of which I was justly proud; not only had they encouraged me about my book, but they had asked me to let them consider magazine subjects that interested me and that I was doing. But, while it was the relation on which I hoped to build serious work in the future, at the moment I must share it with something of quicker return; and that seemed to be the McClure Syndicate. I felt surer of this after my first meeting with its founder, S. S. McClure. That meeting had been just before my vacation in the summer of 1892; Mr. McClure had dropped into Paris in the meteoric fashion I found was usual with him, and came by appointment to see me at my new address in the Rue Malebranche. This crooked and steep passage off the Rue Saint-Jacques was unknown to half the _cochers_ of Paris, but Mr. McClure found it and arrived bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless from running up my four flights—eighty steps.

“I’ve just ten minutes,” he announced; “must leave for Switzerland tonight to see Tyndall.”

A slender figure, S. S. McClure, a shock of tumbled sandy hair, blue eyes which glowed and sparkled. He was close to my own age, a vibrant, eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and the cynical. His utter simplicity, outrightness, his enthusiasm and confidence captivated me. He was so new and unexpected that practical questions such as, “Would you be interested in articles on ...” and “How much will you pay?” dropped out of mind. Before I knew it I was listening to the story of his struggle up. How as a peddler he had earned money for college—who could have let him go without buying?—his vast schemes of learning undertaken when a freshman at Knox College, one of which was to study every word in the English dictionary, its start, its development, its present stage, its possible future, his beautiful romance with Hattie, his wife, the story of the Syndicate and of John—always John this, John that, and last a magazine to be—soon. And here I was to come in. While he talked I was managing somehow to tell him the story of my life and hopes and to fit things together.

What was to have been ten minutes stretched to two hours or more. “I must go,” he suddenly cried. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.”

“Certainly,” I said. I had forty dollars there in my desk, the sum set aside for my farewell vacation. It never occurred to me to do anything but give it to him.

“How queer,” he said, “that you should have that much money in the house!”

“Isn’t it?” I replied. “It never happened before.” But I didn’t mention the vacation.

I had some bad moments after he was gone. “Will-of-the-wisp,” I said, “a fascinating will-of-the-wisp. I’ll never see that money. He’ll simply never think of it again. I’ll have to give up that vacation. Serves me right.”

I did see the money promptly, for Mr. McClure did not forget as I expected him to do, but wired his London office that night to send me a check.

What the new magazine would want from me, I gathered in my long and exciting interview with Mr. McClure, was articles on the achievements of the great French and English scientists. Not history, not literature, not politics, but science, discoveries, inventions, and adventures.

Here I was back to my college days. I found my natural enthusiasm for the physical world and its meanings which Professor Tingley had directed was not dead, only sleeping. I found that, little as I knew of all these things, I still had something of a vocabulary and knew enough to find my way about by hard work. There was Pasteur; there was Janssen, who was building an observatory on Mont Blanc; there was Bertillon, the inventor of the system of criminal identification then attracting the attention of the world. It took all my courage to talk with these gentlemen, but I was soon to find they were the simplest and friendliest of people. For two years I kept on hand popular scientific articles whose success depended on interviews with distinguished specialists, and in that time I met with only one rebuff; but that was a very contemptuous one. It was not from a man but from a gifted American woman who was doing valuable special work in one of the great French scientific institutions. The effect of scholarship on a woman, I told myself. She doesn’t ripen, she hardens. I know better now. It happens, but by no means to all women. Take Dr. Florence Sabin, a great human being as well as a great specialist.

The contacts I made on this work left me precious memories. There was my acquaintance with Madame and Monsieur Pasteur. One of the first articles Mr. McClure asked for was on the Institute, then but eight years old. Of course that meant an interview with Pasteur if it could be managed. It turned out to be easy enough.

The Pasteurs lived in a spacious apartment in the Institute: big rooms with heavy furniture, heavy curtains, dark soft rugs of the period. It was not until I was actually in the library where Madame Pasteur led me that I realized how sadly Pasteur was crippled by the paralysis of his left side which he had suffered twenty-five years earlier after three years of incessant and exhausting labor on the diseases of the silkworm. He moved with difficulty, he hesitated painfully over words; but his eyes were bright, curious, interested.

After a few more or less stumbling explanations on my part we fell to talking naturally. They made it so easy. Mr. McClure was insistent at that moment on what were called human documents, series of portraits of eminent people from babyhood to 1893. I must have a Pasteur series. Monsieur and Madame were delighted with the idea. The old albums were brought out, and the three of us bent over them exactly as we did now and then at home when the question of W. W. T. at one, S. A. T. at two, I. M. T. at three came up. Again and again they stopped to say: “Tiens! Voilà Pierre, comment il est drôle!” “Marie, comme elle est jolie!”

When the album was closed and we had talked long of his early life I made an effort to get some idea of what he was thinking of now, but he said: “No science. If you want that, go see Monsieur Roux.” And so reluctantly I went down the stairs that led from the apartment, the kindly old faces watching me, for Monsieur and Madame Pasteur had done me the honor to see me off, and Monsieur kept repeating as I went down, “Look out, the stairs are dark.”

When finally the article came out, in the second issue of _McClure’s Magazine_, September, 1893, I took a copy to him. He was as pleased as a boy with the pictures. On a later visit he complained that one of his colleagues had carried off the copy. Could I get him another? When I took this to him it was with the request that he write a maxim for the January, 1894, issue of the magazine.

Mr. McClure had had the happy idea of asking from leaders of science, industry, religion, literature a paragraph or two embodying their convictions as to the outlook for the world’s future, their hopes for it. There was need enough of encouragement. The world had been going through as bad a year as often comes its way, a year of despair, uncertainty, hopelessness. What was ahead? The replies which filled eighteen pages of the magazine included letters and sentiments from Huxley, Tyndall, Max Müller, Henry Stanley, Julia Ward Howe, Cardinal Gibbons, and a score of others: noble collection. It was published under the heading “The Edge of the Future.” It raised my interest in the venture to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It was for me the spirit, the credo of the new magazine. It meant something more than I had dreamed possible in magazine journalism.

For the “Edge of the Future” undertaking I was asked at a last moment to collect all the sentiments I could from distinguished Frenchmen. Pasteur, certainly, and he was easy. “Of course I will do it,” he said. “Come back, and I’ll have it ready.” But when I went back I found him in a flurry. He had written his _pensée_, and it was lost.

“Never mind,” comforted Madame Pasteur. “She’ll come back when you have it ready for her.”

And so I did; but it was unfinished, and Madame Pasteur had to stand over him, encouraging him with tender _très biens_ and little pats while he wrote. He was peevish as a child; he didn’t like the looks of it, tried again, and finally with a pathetic look said: “I’m afraid you don’t want either. But if you do, take your choice.” And so I did.

What he had written was:

“_In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power fails._”

Before the time limit was up I had autographed sentiments from Alphonse Daudet, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, François Coppée and Jules Simon, as veil as a collection of impressions still clear. There was Zola.

I carried away from my visit with him an impression of a man agitated, confused, sulky, an impression emphasized by the amazing conglomeration of furnishings of all ages and all countries which cluttered the entry, stairway, and big salon of his house. I had to wind my way between suits of armor, sedan chairs, Chinese lacquered tables and seats, carved and painted wood to reach him standing at the end of the room. The whole house was like that, as is shown in a series of sketches McClure published in one of the early numbers. He talked long and violently about his enemies, defended his realism, hinted that he was a latter-day Balzac, also a great collector spending his leisure in Paris at art sales, which accounted for my difficulty in finding him in his own salon. The sentiment he gave me was a reflection of his talk and of the point of view of his school.

“War,” he wrote, “is the very life, the law of the world. How pitiful is man when he introduces ideas of justice and of peace, when implacable nature is only a continual battle field.”

Dumas _fils_ was the only serene person in the group and was very courteous, the quietest Frenchman I ever met.

Jules Simon touched me deeply by what he wrote:

“Faire le bien
Récolter l’ingratitude
Se confier à Dieu.”

7
A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR

Now that _McClure’s_ was really started, I felt that on what I could do for them and the two or three articles in which I had interested _Scribner’s_ I could live, and that I might drop everything else and devote the bulk of my time to my real business—a study of the life of Madame Roland. She had never been out of my mind. Soon after my arrival I had found to my joy that my daily walks to and from the National Library, where I was spending most of my time, could be laid through the very Quarter in which her father had carried on his trade of goldsmith and past the house in which she had been born, the church where she had taken her first communion, the prison where she had spent her last days, along the route she followed to the guillotine.

“What luck, what luck,” I used to say, “that I should be taking the very walks she took!” It was amazing how little things had changed. The house where Madame Roland was born still stands at the western point of the Ile de la Cité looking down on the statue of Henry IV and the busy Seine, and to the right the Pont-Neuf, in her day the heart of Paris and still to me one of its most fascinating spots.

As she slowly came to life something more important began to take shape, something which had been little more than a set of dates and events in my mind. I began to see the Revolution already well on its way when she was born; I saw it rising around her, sucking her in, using her when she thought it had gone far enough and should check its excesses, throwing her over without her head while true to type it went the whole way, finally falling exhausted into the hands of a dictator equipped with guns.

The physical scars of all this long train of violence could be seen on my daily walks or studied in the Musée Carnavalet where Paris has gathered documents and relics of what she has destroyed as well as of what she has achieved. But besides the scars of Madame Roland’s time were other scars dating from the centuries, scars of revolutionary outbreaks of the same type hardly to be distinguished from those of the period I was trying to visualize; and the more you knew of these explosions, the more they seemed to fit together. You could not bound Madame Roland’s Revolution as I had supposed. What I had called the French Revolution was only an unusually violent episode in the lifelong struggle of Paris to preserve herself as a free individual, the slave of no man or group of men. Revolution had always been her last resort in making herself what she was, in forcing kings to do her bidding, tolerating them when they fed her well, beautified her, protected her, but throwing them over when they asked too much money for the job they did.

The marks were all over the city. How could I understand Madame Roland until I understood the elemental force which for centuries had been sweeping Paris in big or little gusts? Did these who sought to loosen the force suppose that they created it or could control it, once loosened? Had Madame Roland, confident as she had been of her ability to act as Providence, frank as she was in saying that no role but that of Providence was suited to her powers, been anything more than a revolutionary tool and victim?