When I submitted the plan of my Inquiry Upon the Age for Love to the
editor-in-chief of the Boulevard, the highest type of French literary
paper, he seemed astonished that an idea so journalistic--that was his
word--should have been evolved from the brain of his most recent
acquisition. I had been with him two weeks and it was my first
contribution. "Give me some details, my dear Labarthe," he said, in a
somewhat less insolent manner than was his wont. After listening to me for
a few moments he continued: "That is good. You will go and interview
certain men and women, first upon the age at which one loves the most,
next upon the age when one is most loved? Is that your idea? And now to
whom will you go first?"
"I have prepared a list," I replied, and took from my pocket a sheet of
paper. I had jotted down the names of a number of celebrities whom I
proposed to interview on this all-important question, and I began to read
over my list. It contained two ex-government officials, a general, a
Dominican father, four actresses, two café-concert singers, four actors,
two financiers, two lawyers, a surgeon and a lot of literary celebrities.
At some of the names my chief would nod his approval, at others he would
say curtly, with an affectation of American manners, "Bad; strike it off,"
until I came to the name I had kept for the last, that of Pierre Fauchery,
the famous novelist.
"Strike that off," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "He is not on good
terms with us."
"And yet," I suggested, "is there any one whose opinion would be of
greater interest to reading men as well as to women? I had even thought of
beginning with him."
"The devil you had!" interrupted the editor-in-chief. "It is one of
Fauchery's principles not to see any reporters. I have sent him ten if I
have one, and he has shown them all the door. The Boulevard does not
relish such treatment, so we have given him some pretty hard hits."
"Nevertheless, I will have an interview with Fauchery for the Boulevard,"
was my reply. "I am sure of it."
"If you succeed," he replied, "I'll raise your salary. That man makes me
tired with his scorn of newspaper notoriety. He must take his share of it,
like the rest. But you will not succeed. What makes you think you can?"
"Permit me to tell you my reason later. In forty-eight hours you will see
whether I have succeeded or not."
"Go and do not spare the fellow."
Decidedly. I had made some progress as a journalist, even in my two weeks'
apprenticeship, if I could permit Pascal to speak in this way of the man I
most admired among living writers. Since that not far-distant time when,
tired of being poor, I had made up my mind to cast my lot with the
multitude in Paris, I had tried to lay aside my old self, as lizards do
their skins, and I had almost succeeded. In a former time, a former time
that was but yesterday, I knew--for in a drawer full of poems, dramas and
half-finished tales I had proof of it--that there had once existed a
certain Jules Labarthe who had come to Paris with the hope of becoming a
great man. That person believed in Literature with a capital "L;" in the
Ideal, another capital; in Glory, a third capital. He was now dead and
buried. Would he some day, his position assured, begin to write once more
from pure love of his art? Possibly, but for the moment I knew only the
energetic, practical Labarthe, who had joined the procession with the idea
of getting into the front rank, and of obtaining as soon as possible an
income of thirty thousand francs a year. What would it matter to this
second individual if that vile Pascal should boast of having stolen a
march on the most delicate, the most powerful of the heirs of Balzac,
since I, the new Labarthe, was capable of looking forward to an operation
which required about as much delicacy as some of the performances of my
editor-in-chief? I had, as a matter of fact, a sure means of obtaining the
interview. It was this: When I was young and simple I had sent some verses
and stories to Pierre Fauchery, the same verses and stories the refusal of
which by four editors had finally made me decide to enter the field of
journalism. The great writer was traveling at this time, but he had
replied to me. I had responded by a letter to which he again replied, this
time with an invitation to call upon him. I went I did not find him. I
went again. I did not find him that time. Then a sort of timidity
prevented my returning to the charge. So I had never met him. He knew me
only as the young Elia of my two epistles. This is what I counted upon to
extort from him the favor of an interview which he certainly would refuse
to a mere newspaper man. My plan was simple; to present myself at his
house, to be received, to conceal my real occupation, to sketch vaguely a
subject for a novel in which there should occur a discussion upon the Age
for Love, to make him talk and then when he should discover his
conversation in print--here I began to feel some remorse. But I stifled it
with the terrible phrase, "the struggle for life," and also by the
recollection of numerous examples culled from the firm with which I now
had the honor of being connected.
The morning after I had had this very literary conversation with my
honorable director, I rang at the door of the small house in the Rue
Desbordes-Valmore where Pierre Fauchery lived, in a retired corner of
Passy. Having taken up my pen to tell a plain unvarnished tale I do not
see how I can conceal the wretched feeling of pleasure which, as I rang
the bell, warmed my heart at the thought of the good joke I was about to
play on the owner of this peaceful abode.
Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I had decided upon,
there is always left a trace of envy for those who have triumphed in the
melancholy struggle for literary supremacy. It was a real disappointment
to me when the servant replied, ill-humoredly, that M. Fauchery was not in
Paris. I asked when he would return. The servant did not know. I asked for
his address. The servant did not know that. Poor lion, who thought he had
secured anonymity for his holiday! A half-hour later I had discovered that
he was staying for the present at the Château de Proby, near Nemours. I
had merely had to make inquiries of his publisher. Two hours later I
bought my ticket at the Gare de Lyon for the little town chosen by Balzac
as the scene for his delicious story of Ursule Mirouet. I took a traveling
bag and was prepared to spend the night there. In case I failed to see the
master that afternoon I had decided to make sure of him the next morning.
Exactly seven hours after the servant, faithful to his trust, had declared
that he did not know where his master was staying, I was standing in the
hall of the château waiting for my card to be sent up. I had taken care to
write on it a reminder of our conversation of the year before, and this
time, after a ten-minute wait in the hall, during which I noticed with
singular curiosity and _malice_ two very elegant and very pretty young
women going out for a walk, I was admitted to his presence. "Aha," I said
to myself, "this then is the secret of his exile; the interview promises
well!"
The novelist received me in a cosy little room, with a window opening onto
the park, already beginning to turn yellow with the advancing autumn. A
wood fire burned in the fireplace and lighted up the walls which were hung
with flowered cretonne and on which could be distinguished several colored
English prints representing cross-country rides and the jumping of hedges.
Here was the worldly environment with which Fauchery is so often
reproached. But the books and papers that littered the table bore witness
that the present occupant of this charming retreat remained a substantial
man of letters. His habit of constant work was still further attested by
his face, which I admit, gave me all at once a feeling of remorse for the
trick I was about to play him. If I had found him the snobbish pretender
whom the weekly newspapers were in the habit of ridiculing, it would have
been a delight to outwit his diplomacy. But no! I saw, as he put down his
pen to receive me, a man about fifty-seven years old, with a face that
bore the marks of reflection, eyes tired from sleeplessness, a brow heavy
with thought, who said as he pointed to an easy chair, "You will excuse
me, my dear confrère, for keeping you waiting." I, his dear confrère! Ah!
if he had known! "You see," and he pointed to the page still wet with ink,
"that man cannot be free from the slavery of furnishing copy. One has less
facility at my age than at yours. Now, let us speak of yourself. How do
you happen to be at Nemours? What have you been doing since the story and
the verses you were kind enough to send me?"
It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's youthful ideals. When a
man has loved literature as I loved it at twenty, he cannot be satisfied
at twenty-six to give up his early passion, even at the bidding of
implacable necessity. So Pierre Fauchery remembered my poor verses! He had
actually read my story! His allusion proved it. Could I tell him at such a
moment that since the creation of those first works I had despaired of
myself, and that I had changed my gun to the other shoulder? The image of
the Boulevard office rose suddenly before me. I heard the voice of the
editor-in-chief saying, "Interview Fauchery? You will never accomplish
that;" so, faithful to my self-imposed rôle, I replied, "I have retired to
Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this
subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master."
It seemed to me--it may possibly have been an illusion--that at the
announcement of the so-called title of my so-called novel, a smile and a
shadow flitted over Fauchery's eyes and mouth. A vision of the two young
women I had met in the hall came back to me. Was the author of so many
great masterpieces of analysis about to live a new book before writing it?
I had no time to answer this question, for, with a glance at an onyx vase
containing some cigarettes of Turkish tobacco, he offered me one, lighted
one himself and began first to question, then to reply to me. I listened
while he thought aloud and had almost forgotten my Machiavellian
combination, so keen was my relish of the joyous intimacy of this
communion with a mind I had passionately loved in his works. He was the
first of the great writers of our day whom I had thus approached on
something like terms of intimacy. As we talked I observed the strange
similarity between his spoken and his written words. I admired the
charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of
imagination, his superabundant intelligence, the liveliness of his
impressions and his total absence of arrogance and of pose.
"There is no such thing as an age for love," he said in substance,
"because the man capable of loving--in the complex and modern sense of
love as a sort of ideal exaltation--never ceases to love. I will go
further; he never ceases to love the same person. You know the experiment
that a contemporary physiologist tried with a series of portraits to
determine in what the indefinable resemblances called family likeness
consisted? He took photographs of twenty persons of the same blood, then
he photographed these photographs on the same plate, one over the other.
In this way he discovered the common features which determined the type.
Well, I am convinced that if we could try a similar experiment and
photograph one upon another the pictures of the different women whom the
same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life we
should discover that all these women resembled one another. The most
inconsistent have cherished one and the same being through five or six or
even twenty different embodiments. The main point is to find out at what
age they have met the woman who approaches nearest to the one whose image
they have constantly borne within themselves. For them that would be the
age for love.
"The age for being loved?" he continued. "The deepest of all the passions
I have ever known a man to inspire was in the case of one of my masters, a
poet, and he was sixty years old at the time. It is true that he still
held himself as erect as a young man, he came and went with a step as
light as yours, he conversed like Rivarol, he composed verses as beautiful
as De Vigny's. He was besides very poor, very lonely and very unhappy,
having lost one after another, his wife and his children. You remember the
words of Shakespeare's Moor: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
and I loved her that she did pity them.'
"So it was that this great artist inspired in a beautiful, noble and
wealthy young Russian woman, a devotion so passionate that because of him
she never married. She found a way to take care of him, day and night, in
spite of his family, during his last illness, and at the present time,
having bought from his heirs all of the poet's personal belongings, she
keeps the apartment where he lived just as it was at the time of his
death. That was years ago. In her case she found in a man three times her
own age the person who corresponded to a certain ideal which she carried
in her heart. Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict
feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and
insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day. In
order that a sixty-year-old lover should appear neither ridiculous nor
odious you must apply to him what the elder Corneille so proudly said of
himself in his lines to the marquise:
"'Cependant, j'ai quelques charmes
Qui sont assez eclatants
Pour n'avoir pas trop d'alarmes
De ces ravages du temps.'
"Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall
be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there."
As he spoke the master had such a light of intellectual certainty in his
eyes that to me he seemed the embodiment of one of those great characters
he had been urging me to describe. It made me feel that the theory of this
man, himself almost a sexagenarian, that at any age one may inspire love,
was not unreasonable! The contrast between the world of ideas in which he
moved and the atmosphere of the literary shop in which for the last few
months I had been stifling was too strong. The dreams of my youth were
realized in this man whose gifts remained unimpaired after the production
of thirty volumes and whose face, growing old, was a living illustration
of the beautiful saying: "Since we must wear out, let us wear out nobly."
His slender figure bespoke the austerity of long hours of work; his firm
mouth showed his decision of character; his brow, with its deep furrows,
had the paleness of the paper over which he so often bent; and yet, the
refinement of his hands, so well cared for, the sober elegance of his
dress and an aristocratic air that was natural to him showed that the
finer professional virtues had been cultivated in the midst of a life of
frivolous temptations. These temptations had been no more of a disturbance
to his ethical and spiritual nature than the academic honors, the
financial successes, the numerous editions that had been his. Withal he
was an awfully good fellow, for, after having talked at great length with
me, he ended by saying, "Since you are staying in Nemours I hope to see
you often, and to-day I cannot let you go without presenting you to my
hostess."
What could I say? This was the way in which a mere reporter on the
Boulevard found himself installed at a five-o'clock tea-table in the salon
of a château, where surely no newspaper man had ever before set foot and
was presented as a young poet and novelist of the future to the old
Marquise de Proby, whose guest the master was. This amiable white-haired
dowager questioned me upon my alleged work and I replied equivocally, with
blushes, which the good lady must have attributed to bashful timidity.
Then, as though some evil genius had conspired to multiply the witnesses
of my bad conduct, the two young women whom I had seen going out, returned
in the midst of my unlooked-for visit. Ah, my interview with this student
of femininity upon the Age for Love was about to have a living commentary!
How it would illumine his words to hear him conversing with these new
arrivals! One was a young girl of possibly twenty--a Russian if I rightly
understood the name. She was rather tall, with a long face lighted up by
two very gentle black eyes, singular in their fire and intensity. She bore
a striking resemblance to the portrait attributed to Froncia in the Salon
Carré of the Louvre which goes by the name of the "Man in Black," because
the color of his clothes and his mantle. About her mouth and nostrils was
that same subdued nervousness, that same restrained feverishness which
gives to the portrait its striking qualities. I had not been there a
quarter of an hour before I had guessed from the way she watched and
listened to Fauchery what a passionate interest the old master inspired in
her. When he spoke she paid rapt attention. When she spoke to him, I felt
her voice shiver, if I may use the word, and he, he glorious writer,
surfeited with triumphs, exhausted by his labors, seemed, as soon as he
felt the radiance of her glance of ingenuous idolatry, to recover that
vivacity, that elasticity of impression, which is the sovereign grace of
youthful lovers.
"I understand now why he cited Goethe and the young girl of Marienbad,"
said I to myself with a laugh, as my hired carriage sped on toward
Nemours. "He was thinking of himself. He is in love with that child, and
she is in love with him. We shall hear of his marrying her. There's a
wedding that will call forth copy, and when Pascal hears that I witnessed
the courtship--but just now I must think of my interview. Won't Fauchery
be surprised to read it day after to-morrow in his paper? But does he read
the papers? It may not be right but what harm will it do him? Besides,
it's a part of the struggle for life." It was by such reasoning, I
remember, the reasoning of a man determined to arrive that I tried to lull
to sleep the inward voice that cried, "You have no right to put on paper,
to give to the public what this noble writer said to you, supposing that
he was receiving a poet, not a reporter." But I heard also the voice of my
chief saying, "You will never succeed." And this second voice, I am
ashamed to confess, triumphed over the other with all the more ease
because I was obliged to do something to kill time. I reached Nemours too
late for the train which would have brought me back to Paris about dinner
time. At the old inn they gave me a room which was clean and quiet, a good
place to write, so I spent the evening until bedtime composing the first
of the articles which were to form my inquiry. I scribbled away under the
vivid impressions of the afternoon, my powers as well as my nerves spurred
by a touch of remorse. Yes, I scribbled four pages which would have been
no disgrace to the Journal des Goncourts, that exquisite manual of the
perfect reporter. It was all there, my journey, my arrival at the chateau,
a sketch of the quaint eighteenth century building, with its fringe of
trees and its well-kept walks, the master's room, the master himself and
his conversation; the tea at the end and the smile of the old novelist in
the midst of a circle of admirers, old and young. It lacked only a few
closing lines. "I will add these in the morning," I thought, and went to
bed with a feeling of duty performed, such is the nature of a writer.
Under the form of an interview I had done, and I knew it, the best work of
my life.
What happens while we sleep? Is there, unknown to us, a secret and
irresistible ferment of ideas while our senses are closed to the
impressions of the outside world? Certain it is that on awakening I am apt
to find myself in a state of mind very different from that in which I went
to sleep. I had not been awake ten minutes before the image of Pierre
Fauchery came up before me, and at the same time the thought that I had
taken a base advantage of the kindness of his reception of me became quite
unbearable. I felt a passionate longing to see him again, to ask his
pardon for my deception. I wished to tell him who I was, with what purpose
I had gone to him and that I regretted it. But there was no need of a
confession. It would be enough to destroy the pages I had written the
night before. With this idea I arose. Before tearing them up, I reread
them. And then--any writer will understand me--and then they seemed to me
so brilliant that I did not tear them up. Fauchery is so intelligent, so
generous, was the thought that crossed my mind. What is there in this
interview, after all, to offend him? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Even if
I should go to him again this very morning, tell him my story and that
upon the success of my little inquiry my whole future as a journalist
might depend? When he found that I had had five years of poverty and hard
work without accomplishing anything, and that I had had to go onto a paper
in order to earn the very bread I ate, he would pardon me, he would pity
me and he would say, "Publish your interview." Yes, but what if he should
forbid my publishing it? But no, he would not do that.
I passed the morning in considering my latest plan. A certain shyness made
it very painful to me. But it might at the same time conciliate my
delicate scruples, my "amour-propre" as an ambitious chronicler, and the
interests of my pocket-book. I knew that Pascal had the name of being very
generous with an interview article if it pleased him. And besides, had he
not promised me a reward if I succeeded with Fauchery? In short, I had
decided to try my experiment, when, after a hasty breakfast, I saw, on
stepping into the carriage I had had the night before, a victoria with
coat-of-arms drive rapidly past and was stunned at recognizing Fauchery
himself, apparently lost in a gloomy revery that was in singular contrast
to his high spirits of the night before. A small trunk on the coachman's
seat was a sufficient indication that he was going to the station. The
train for Paris left in twelve minutes, time enough for me to pack my
things pell-mell into my valise and hurriedly to pay my bill. The same
carriage which was to have taken me to the Château de Proby carried me to
the station at full speed, and when the train left I was seated in an
empty compartment opposite the famous writer, who was saying to me, "You,
too, deserting Nemours? Like me, you work best in Paris."
The conversation begun in this way, might easily have led to the
confession I had resolved to make. But in the presence of my unexpected
companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness, moreover he inspired
me with a curiosity which was quite equal to my shyness. Any number of
circumstances, from a telegram from a sick relative to the most
commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure
from the château where I had left him so comfortably installed the night
before. But that the expression of his face should have changed as it had,
that in eighteen hours he should have become the careworn, discouraged
being he now seemed, when I had left him so pleased with life, so happy,
so assiduous in his attentions to that pretty girl. Mademoiselle de
Russaie, who loved him and whom he seemed to love, was a mystery which
took complete possession of me, this time without any underlying
professional motive. He was to give me the key before we reached Paris. At
any rate I shall always believe that part of his conversation was in an
indirect way a confidence. He was still unstrung by the unexpected
incident which had caused both his hasty departure and the sudden
metamorphosis in what he himself, if he had been writing, would have
called his "intimate heaven." The story he told me was "per sfogarsi," as
Bayle loved to say; his idea was that I would not discover the real hero.
I shall always believe that it was his own story under another name, and I
love to believe it because it was so exactly his way of looking at things.
It was apropos of the supposed subject of my novel--oh, irony!--apropos of
the real subject of my interview that he began.
"I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am
afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may
love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this
love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to
the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice. I should
like to share with you a human document, as they say to-day, which is in
itself a drama with a dénouement. But I must ask you not to use it, for
the secret is not my own." With the assurance of my discretion he went on:
"I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had
loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them.
The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died.
My friend lived. Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as
true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing
which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious
passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed
that first ineffaceable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves.
He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone
and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's
depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his
words. How many times he has said to me, 'In others I have always looked
for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one
but her.'"
"And had she loved him?" I interrupted.
"He did not think so," replied Fauchery. "At least she had never told him
so. Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You
must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at
last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting
some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the
image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years
before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the
color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the
thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could
not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of
my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the
tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead
through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know
where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily
commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost
love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and
spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs,
she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at
her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon
to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend
entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the
house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself,
painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly.
There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the
glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this
moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed
upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which
makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who
tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the
room that morning."
"What then?" I asked, as he paused.
"My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable
imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses. A mirror
hung near by, where he could compare his present with his former face, the
man he was with the man he had been. He never told me and I never asked
what his feelings were at that moment. Did he feel that he was too
culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have
been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through
his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved?
Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had
never given him a kiss like that at a time when he might have returned it?
I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one
whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the
purity, the soul of a man of twenty."
A few hours after this conversation, I found myself once more in the
office of the Boulevard, seated in Pascal's den, and he was saying,
"Already? Have you accomplished your interview with Pierre Fauchery?"
"He would not even receive me," I replied, boldly.
"What did I tell you?" he sneered, shrugging his big shoulders. "We'll get
even with him on his next volume. But you know, Labarthe, as long as you
continue to have that innocent look about you, you can't expect to succeed
in newspaper work."
I bore with the ill-humor of my chief. What would he have said if he had
known that I had in my pocket an interview and in my head an anecdote
which were material for a most successful story? And he has never had
either the interview or the story. Since then I have made my way in the
line where he said I should fail. I have lost my innocent look and I earn
my thirty thousand francs a year, and more. I have never had the same
pleasure in the printing of the most profitable, the most brilliant
article that I had in consigning to oblivion the sheets relating my visit
to Nemours. I often think that I have not served the cause of letters as I
wanted to, since, with all my laborious work I have never written a book.
And yet when I recall the irresistible impulse of respect which prevented
me from committing toward a dearly loved master a most profitable but
infamous indiscretion, I say to myself, "If you have not served the cause
of letters, you have not betrayed it." And this is the reason, now that
Fauchery is no longer of this world, that it seems to me that the time has
come for me to relate my first interview. There is none of which I am more
proud.