Chapter V: Nights: in Paris 225 (7)

That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it, became ponderously patriarchal, hoary with convention. In point of years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his age according to the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the character or pose he assumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state, at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new _rôle_, he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age, so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.

The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peacock at a _café_ in the _Bois_, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a severity, a solemnity, that alarms me. Their inability to take themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, but it struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us, accessories to the crime, was the fact that the cake stuck, a conspicuous lump, in the peacock's conspicuous throat. For what seemed hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But the peacock was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.

There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which, had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in the art and occupation of shocking the _bourgeois_. We had been tempted and had yielded as unreservedly as the peacock, with the difference that our temptation took the form of the sunshine and the convenience of the train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such sunshine out-of-doors could stay shut up in the _Salon_ and a train was ready at St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.

Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from the grey palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the dead past blot out the new life rekindling--to give its chill to the young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a holiday--to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive, just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.

I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the _National Observer_. The chances are we were talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.

We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park, alone in the alleys and avenues, alone in the gardens,--and the palace and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the sunshine. But such good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, harassed, conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of, pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as, after a fashion, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning--the same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove Hugo to writing his _Hernani_, and Gautier to wearing his red waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of shocking the _bourgeois_. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the _bourgeois_ in our own fashion or, to be exact, in Furse's fashion. He was then blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club, from whom an attitude of general defiance was required. He raged and raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideous blot on the landscape, that the guide-books were disgracefully out of tone, that it was unbearable and he wasn't going to bear it, and by his sudden satisfied smile I saw he had found out how not to. As the school-ma'ams came within earshot:

"It's beastly hot," he boomed to us, "what do you say to a swim?"

And he took off his coat, he took off his waistcoat, he took off his necktie, he unbuttoned his collar,--but already the school-ma'ams had scuttled away, the more daring glancing back once or twice as they went, their dismay tempered by curiosity.

Furse was pleased as a child over his success, vowed he was ready for all the tourists impudent enough to think they had a right to share Versailles with us, and, when a group of Germans talked their guttural way towards us, he had us all down on our knees, before we knew it, nibbling at the grass like so many Nebuchadnezzars escaped from Charenton--an amazing sight that brought the chorus of "Colossals" to an abrupt stop, and sent the Germans flying.

It may be objected that we were behaving in a fashion that children would be sent to bed without any supper for, that it was worse than childish to take pleasure in shocking innocent tourists much better behaved than ourselves. But there wasn't any pleasure in it. If we set out to shock them, it was to get rid of them, that was all we wanted, and it made me see that the succession of young rebels who have loved to _épater le bourgeois_ never wanted anything more either--except the self-conscious young rebels who play at rebellion because they fancy it the surest and quickest way "to arrive."

It is less easy to say why a beautiful day at Versailles should have sent us back to Paris singing American songs--or to give credit, if credit is due, it was the rest of the party who returned to the music of their own voices; I, who to my sorrow cannot as much as turn a tune, never am so imprudent as to raise my voice in song and so add my discord to any singing in public or in private. Had they been heard above the noise of the train, the explanation of those who saw us when we got to St. Lazare probably would have been that we were a company of nigger minstrels. By accident, or sheer inattention, when we climbed upstairs on the double-decked suburban train, we chose the car just behind the locomotive and memory has not cleaned away the black that covered our faces when we climbed down again.

It was all very foolish--and no less foolish were the afternoons in the depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of Saint-Germain--no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris, "the enchanted city with its charming smile for youth,"--that once I believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of his books.

V

The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however gay the sunshine and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great hardship not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in the _Salon_ until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs. It was an amusement simply to drink our coffee in front of a _café_, to go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere, but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the Paris streets.

I had got my initiation into _café_ life that first year in Italy and had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening taught me the difference between the country where there is a _café_ to pass an hour in over a glass of coffee after dinner, and England where choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a _café_; the Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.

"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't bothered by people."

But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more so if the background is the Street of a French or an Italian town.

Some nights we went to the _Café de la Paix_ on the _Rive Droite_; other nights, to the _Café d'Harcourt_ on the _Rive Gauche_; and occasionally to the _Café de la Régence_ where many artists went, especially foreign artists, and more especially Scandinavians. I seem to retain a vision of Thaulow, a blond giant more than fitting in the corner of the little raised enclosure in the front of the _café_. My one other recollection is of a story I heard there, though of the painter who told it I can recall only that he was a Belgian. If I recall the story so well, it must be because it struck me at the time as characteristic and in memory became forever after associated with the little open space I was looking over to as I listened, amused and interested, while the flower women pushed past their barrows piled high with the big round bunches of budding lilies-of-the-valley you see nowhere save in Paris. It is impossible for me to think of the _café_ without thinking of the little _Place_, nor of the little _Place_ without at once hearing again the artist's voice lingering joyfully over the adventures of his youth.

The story was one of a kind I had often listened to at the _Nazionale_ in Rome and the _Orientale_ in Venice--a story of student days--a story of two young painters coming to Paris in their first ripe enthusiasm, with devotion to squander upon the masters, upon none more lavishly than upon Jules Breton, which explains what ages ago it was and how young they must have been. They were at the _Salon_, standing in silent worship before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish sunset, when they heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things they were thinking to one they knew must be the _cher maître_ himself, and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no higher happiness. The worship of the young is pleasant to the old. Breton let them shake his hand and, more, he kept them at his side until his visit to the _Salon_ was finished, and then sent them away walking on air. They were leaving the next day. In the morning they went to the _Rue de Rivoli_ to buy toys to take home to their little brothers and sisters, and one selected a dog and the other a mill, and when wound up the dog played the drum and cymbals and the mill turned its wheel and, children themselves, they were ravished and would not have the toys wrapped up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in the _Avenue de l'Opéra_ to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning, who should come towards them but the _cher Maître_. It was too late to run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their mortification--they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.

"_Tiens_," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"

Cannot you see the little comedy,--the fine old prophet with the red ribbon in his button-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the _Avenue de l'Opéra_, and not a passer-by troubling to look because it was Paris where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to worship at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the sunset.

One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Purée, and many another poet for all time and celebrity for the day, in the _cafés_ where they waited to be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when the _café_ they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with so much else London was labelling _fin-de-siècle_. To have met them, to be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what, their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on, and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight with the _Reine de Golconde_ on his arm, walking down the _Boul' Mich'_ at the head of a band of poets.

Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and the subject as announced was "Contemporary French Poetry," and through all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below, a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing, Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically could write the verse I had loved ever since his _Romances sans Paroles_ first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in Tchekhof's play--so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and his photograph in shop windows--whose crime was to condescend to fish and to be pleased when he caught something.

VI

The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as characteristic--as _fin-de-siècle_, the Englishman under the impression that he knew his Paris would have classified it--nor did we want to be let off, though it lured us indoors.

The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw up hands of horror and say what an immoral place it was.

Once or twice we tried the out-door _Café-Chantant_, and we heard Paulus in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.

Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the _Folies-Bergère_ which cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up and down the _Boulevards_ of the _Rive Gauche_ in pursuit of its poets, sent us to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. But a first visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not have missed the _Casino_ if only for the imperishable memory of the most solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the _Moulin_ _Rouge_ for another memory as imperishable of the most socially pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge calculated to _épater le bourgeois_ at home, referring by name with easy familiarity to the dancers in the _Quadrille Naturaliste_, as celebrated in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the _chahut_ and the _grand écart_ and _le port d'armes_ and every evolution in that unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I found in _The Gypsy_--the direct but belated offspring of _The Savoy_--a poem to _Nini-patte-en-l'air_. And does anybody now know or care who Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or who _La Goulue_ and the rest? Would anybody now go a step to see the _Quadrille_ were any graceless acrobats left to dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fashions that passed with the Nineties, and the _Moulin Rouge_ itself could burn down to the ground a few months ago and hardly a voice be heard in lament or reminiscence. Upon such rapidly shifting sands did the young would-be revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.

The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we looked for it--and found it--was in the little _café_ or _cabaret_--the _cabaret artistique_ as it was then known in Paris--with a flair for the genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris with: theatre and performance and advertisement impossible in any other town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finest blossoms. We knew it was a pleasure to be snatched this year, for next who could say where it might be, and we set out to snatch it with the same diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to exhaust it.

Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest _café_, we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses, now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt the need--as we never did--of a reason for our eagerness, we might have had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a _cabaret_ of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance known as a _Revue_, which is all the vogue just now in the London music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall _Revue_ and the old _Cabaret_ performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.

If one night the end of the journey was the _Tréteau de Tabarin_--the hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and recited and sang the _chansons rosses_ that "all Paris" flocked there to hear--it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in the centre of the sculpture court at the New _Salon_, and the summing up was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter because the wit was so fine.

A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for the _Chat Noir_. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the _café_ and the drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at the _Salon_ and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and bookshops on the way back.

To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by decorating its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!

But Salis,--the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the _Chat Noir_, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his _café_ by letting poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny--some of them, Maurice Donnay for one--as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least two--Charpentier and Debussy--were afterwards to reach; and by allowing the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in black-and-white, the _Ombres Chinoises_ that were the crowning glory of the night's performance. From days in the _Salons_, from the illustrated papers and magazines and books we filled our bags with to take back to London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and Caran d'Ache and Rivière and Louis Morin until we had seen also _The Prodigal Son_, _The March of the Stars_, and all the stories they told in those dramatic silhouettes--those marvellous little black figures, cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as to give the swing and the movement and the passing of great armies until one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call, or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the _Chat Noir_ was gone, and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his artist, young,--that is where he scored.

It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show because it was not of that side of the _Chat Noir_ I had heard most. Its British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send her young hero from the English provinces to the _Chat Noir_ in the course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the _Chat Noir_, refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade--"I never liked smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but firmly, showing her the door.

A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the end of our journey was Bruant's _Cabaret du Mirliton_, in the remote _Boulevard Rochechouart_. I daresay there was not one of us who did not own a copy of Bruant's _Dans la Rue_, but we had bought it less because of his verses--some of us had not read a line of them--than because of Steinlen's illustrations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that his _Mademoiselle Miss_ appeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much to collect incidents for that gay little tale.

Bruant ran the _Mirliton_ on the principle that the less easily pleasure is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at the ordinary _café_, no paying for admission as upstairs at the _Chat Noir_. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in standing outside his door while he examined them through a little grille, an amusement which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure he did not like our looks and would send us away, and that the reason was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the _Chat Noir_, but, at the _Mirliton_, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature, half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the passing pose of a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and his _Cabaret_ was to recognize him at a glance.

To the noise of a strident chorus in choice _argot_, which I was told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into his _café_. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge _Mirliton_ hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at the _Carnavalet_ by the side of the sign of the _Chat Noir_. When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of the _Quartier Latin_, a _petit piou-piou_ or so, two or three stray workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt to classify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.

It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome face as he strode up and down his _café_-museum, for the striding, it seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician--her name was not Mademoiselle Miss--and when she discovered what was the matter, and why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to her, he sang us his _St. Lazare_ and _La Soularde_, all the while striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle Miss back to us, ordered bocks for her, for me--the only other woman at our table--and for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our glasses in the fashion approved of at the _Mirliton_.

So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the most of it--I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually, as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his _café_, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the sense to know that, as we had come to the _Mirliton_ of our own free will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to show our press ticket at the _Salon_ turnstile, or to give up our umbrellas at the door of the _Louvre_, or to question the regulations of any other place in Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve matters?

It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in. We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however, could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony. Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed hat--the only time that night--and to bow us out into the darkness of the _Boulevard Rochechouart_.

Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at the _Mirliton_ by eating supper at the _Rat Mort_. It was an experience I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. As light and satisfying a supper could have been eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art entered into the entertainment as at the _Chat Noir_ and Bruant's. Vice was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the _Nouvelle Athènes_ scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point of view.

Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the _Rat Mort_, in the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it crawled down one of the steep streets from _Montmartre_ there was a creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round, made a pitiful tale of _le pauvr' cocher_ and his hungry wife and children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the _cocher_ with an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The _cocher_, the least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft, clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and disappeared into the night. A _sergent-de-ville_, who had been looking on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, _cet animal là_ was in luck and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such generosity. _Allez!_ Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present--_Voilà tout!_

And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent streets between _Montmartre_ and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end.

VII

In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted, resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.

Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac _rez-de-chaussée_ opening upon the spacious garden where, in the twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days--nights in the dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre, many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other, always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them, witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;--nights in the blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel, and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it--nights that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in them lives to remember;--Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Théodore Duret who had been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris, as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them is told.

And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who studied and worked and lived in Paris--nights that have bequeathed to me the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases, and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a friendly war of words--nights with men irrevocably in the movement, whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New _Salon_ and had probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and writing voluminous notes in our note-books--nights not the least stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids me to tell the tale.

And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St. Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed swallowed up in the International Society's business--not the International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation--J. included in it--to collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the _Salons_ for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working in Paris--a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.

And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into American nights--nights with old friends, established there or passing through and run across by chance--nights of joy in being with my own people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone--the zone where Silence is Golden.

VIII