The tiring night-journey, with its full four hours' wait at Liège, was
all pure enjoyment to me, and in a mood of mild ecstasy, at last, at
half-past ten on the morning of November 11th 1866, I made my entry
into Paris, and was received cordially by the proprietors of a modest
but clean little hotel which is still standing, No. 20 Rue Notre Dame
des Victoires, by the proprietors, two simple Lorrainers, François and
Müller, to whom Gabriel Sibbern, who was staying there, had announced
my arrival. The same morning Sibbern guided my first steps to one of
Pasdeloup's great classical popular concerts.
In the evening, in spite of my fatigue after travelling all night, I
went to the Théâtre Français for the first time, and there, lost in
admiration of the masterly ensemble and the natural yet passionate
acting, with which I had hitherto seen nothing to compare, I saw
Girardin's _Le supplice d'une femme_, and Beaumarchais' _Le mariage de
Figaro_, in one evening making the acquaintance of such stars as
Régnier, Madame Favart, Coquelin and the Sisters Brohan.
Régnier especially, in his simple dignity, was an unforgettable figure,
being surrounded, moreover, in my eyes by the glory which the
well-known little poem of Alfred de Musset, written to comfort the
father's heart, had shed upon him. Of the two celebrated sisters,
Augustine was all wit, Madeleine pure beauty and arch, melting grace.
These first days were rich days to me, and as they did not leave me any
time for thinking over what I had seen, my impressions overwhelmed me
at night, till sometimes I could not sleep for sheer happiness. This,
to me, was happiness, an uninterrupted garnering of intellectual wealth
in association with objects that all appealed to my sympathies, and I
wrote home: "To be here, young, healthy, with alert senses, keen eyes
and good ears, with all the curiosity, eagerness to know, love of
learning, and susceptibility to every impression, that is youth's own
prerogative, and to have no worries about home, all that is so great a
happiness that I am sometimes tempted, like Polycrates, to fling the
handsome ring I had from Christian Richardt in the gutter."
For the rest, I was too fond of characteristic architecture to feel
attracted by the building art displayed in the long, regular streets of
Napoleon III, and too permeated with national prejudices to be able at
once to appreciate French sculpture. I was justified in feeling
repelled by many empty allegorical pieces on public monuments, but
during the first weeks I lacked perception for such good sculpture as
is to be found in the _foyer_ of the Théâtre Français. "You reel at
every step," I wrote immediately after my arrival, "that France has
never had a Thorwaldsen, and that Denmark possesses an indescribable
treasure in him. We are and remain, in three or four directions, the
first nation in Europe. This is pure and simple truth."
To my youthful ignorance it was the truth, but it hardly remained such
after the first month.
Being anxious to see as much as possible and not let anything of
interest escape me, I went late to bed, and yet got up early, and tried
to regulate my time, as one does a blanket that is too short.
I was immensely interested in the art treasures from all over the world
collected in the Louvre. Every single morning, after eating my modest
breakfast at a _crêmerie_ near the château, I paid my vows in the
_Salon carré_ and then absorbed myself in the other halls. The gallery
of the Louvre was the one to which I owe my initiation. Before, I had
seen hardly any Italian art in the original, and no French at all. In
Copenhagen I had been able to worship all the Dutch masters. Leonardo
and the Venetians spoke to me here for the first time. French painting
and sculpture, Puget and Houdon, Clouet and Delacroix, and the French
art that was modern then, I learnt for the first time to love and
appreciate at the Luxembourg.
I relished these works of art, and the old-time art of the Greeks and
Egyptians which the Museum of the Louvre contained, in a mild
intoxication of delight.
And I inbreathed Paris into my soul. When on the broad, handsome Place
de la Concorde, I saw at the same time, with my bodily eyes, the
beautifully impressive obelisk, and in my mind's eye the scaffold on
which the royal pair met with their death in the Revolution; when in
the Latin quarter I went upstairs to the house in which Charlotte
Corday murdered Marat, or when, in the highest storey of the Louvre, I
gazed at the little gray coat from Marengo and the three-cornered hat,
or from the Arc de Triomphe let my glance roam over the city, the life
that pulsated through my veins seemed stimulated tenfold by sight and
visions.
Yet it was not only the city of Paris, its appearance, its art gems,
that I eagerly made my own, and with them much that intellectually
belonged to Italy or the Netherlands; it was French culture, the best
that the French nature contains, the fragrance of her choicest flowers,
that I inhaled.
And while thus for the first time learning to know French people, and
French intellectual life, I was unexpectedly admitted to constant
association with men and women of the other leading Romance races,
Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians.
Bröchner had given me a letter of introduction to Costanza Testa, a
friend of his youth, now married to Count Oreste Blanchetti and living
in Paris, with her somewhat older sister Virginia, a kind-hearted and
amiable woman of the world. The latter had married in Brazil, as her
second husband, the Italian banker Pagella, and to their house came,
not only Italians and other European Southerners, but members of the
South American colony.
So warm a reception as I met with from the two sisters and their
husbands I had never had anywhere before. After I had known the two
families one hour, these people treated me as though I were their
intimate friend; Costanza's younger brother, they called me. I had a
seat in their carriage every day, when the ladies drove out in the Bois
de Boulogne; they never had a box at the Italian opera, where Adelina
Patti's first notes were delighting her countrymen, without sending me
a seat. They expected me every evening, however late it often might be
when I came from the theatre, in their drawing-room, where, according
to the custom of their country, they always received the same circle of
friends.
I was sincerely attached to the two sisters, and felt myself at ease in
their house, although the conversation there was chiefly carried on in
a language of which I understood but little, since French was spoken
only on my account. The only shadow over my pleasure at spending my
evenings in the Rue Valois du Roule was the fact that this necessitated
my missing some acts at the Théâtre Français, for which the Danish
Minister, through the Embassy, had procured me a free pass. Certainly
no Dane was ever made so happy by the favour. They were enraptured
hours that I spent evening after evening in the French national
theatre, where I became thoroughly acquainted with the modern, as well
as the classical, dramatic repertoire,--an acquaintance which was
further fortified during my long stay in Paris in 1870.
I enjoyed the moderation of the best actors, their restraint, and
subordination of self to the rôle and the general effect. It is true
that the word genius could only be applied to a very few of the actors,
and at that time I saw none who, in my opinion, could be compared with
the great representatives of the Danish stage, such as Michael Wiehe,
Johanne Luise Heiberg, or Phister. But I perceived at once that the
mannerisms of these latter would not be tolerated here for a moment;
here, under the influence of this artistic whole-harmony, they would
never have been able to give free vent to individuality and peculiarity
as they did at home.
I saw many hundred performances in these first years of my youth at the
Théâtre Français, which was then at its zenith. There, if anywhere, I
felt the silent march of the French muses through Time and Space.