IN WHICH I AM DOWN ON MY LUCK IN PARIS
In no part of the world is starvation an agreeable business; but I
believe it is admitted there is no worse place to starve in than this
city of Paris. The appearances of life are there so especially gay, it
is so much a magnified beer-garden, the houses are so ornate, the
theatres so numerous, the very pace of the vehicles is so brisk, that a
man in any deep concern of mind or pain of body is constantly driven in
upon himself. In his own eyes, he seems the one serious creature moving
in a world of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe,
the _queue_ at theatre-doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate
pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the
jewellers' windows--all the familiar sights contributing to flout his
own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if he be at all
after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish satisfaction.
"This is life at last," he may tell himself; "this is the real thing.
The bladders on which I was set swimming are now empty; my own weight
depends upon the ocean; by my own exertions I must perish or succeed;
and I am now enduring, in the vivid fact, what I so much delighted to
read of in the case of Lousteau or Lucien, Rodolphe or Schaunard."
Of the steps of my misery I cannot tell at length. In ordinary times
what were politically called "loans" (although they were never meant to
be repaid) were matters of constant course among the students, and many
a man has partly lived on them for years. But my misfortune befell me
at an awkward juncture. Many of my friends were gone; others were
themselves in a precarious situation. Romney (for instance) was reduced
to tramping Paris in a pair of country sabots, his only suit of clothes
so imperfect (in spite of cunningly-adjusted pins) that the authorities
at the Luxembourg suggested his withdrawal from the gallery. Dijon, too,
was on a lee-shore, designing clocks and gas-brackets for a dealer; and
the most he could do was to offer me a corner of his studio where I
might work. My own studio (it will be gathered) I had by that time lost;
and in the course of my expulsion the Genius of Muskegon was finally
separated from her author. To continue to possess a full-sized statue, a
man must have a studio, a gallery, or at least the freedom of a
back-garden. He cannot carry it about with him, like a satchel, in the
bottom of a cab, nor can he cohabit in a garret ten by fifteen with so
momentous a companion. It was my first idea to leave her behind at my
departure. There, in her birthplace, she might lend an inspiration,
methought, to my successor. But the proprietor, with whom I had
unhappily quarrelled, seized the occasion to be disagreeable, and called
upon me to remove my property. For a man in such straits as I now found
myself, the hire of a lorry was a consideration; and yet even that I
could have faced, if I had had anywhere to drive to after it was hired.
Hysterical laughter seized upon me as I beheld (in imagination) myself,
the waggoner, and the Genius of Muskegon, standing in the public view of
Paris, without the shadow of a destination; perhaps driving at last to
the nearest rubbish-heap, and dumping there, among the ordures of a
city, the beloved child of my invention. From these extremities I was
relieved by a seasonable offer, and I parted from the Genius of Muskegon
for thirty francs. Where she now stands, under what name she is admired
or criticised, history does not inform us; but I like to think she may
adorn the shrubbery of some suburban tea-garden, where holiday
shop-girls hang their hats upon the mother, and their swains (by way of
an approach of gallantry) identify the winged infant with the god of
love.
In a certain cabman's eating-house on the outer boulevard I got credit
for my midday meal. Supper I was supposed not to require, sitting down
nightly to the delicate table of some rich acquaintances. This
arrangement was extremely ill-considered. My fable, credible enough at
first, and so long as my clothes were in good order, must have seemed
worse than doubtful after my coat became frayed about the edges, and my
boots began to squelch and pipe along the restaurant floors. The
allowance of one meal a day, besides, though suitable enough to the
state of my finances, agreed poorly with my stomach. The restaurant was
a place I had often visited experimentally, to taste the life of
students then more unfortunate than myself; and I had never in those
days entered it without disgust, or left it without nausea. It was
strange to find myself sitting down with avidity, rising up with
satisfaction, and counting the hours that divided me from my return to
such a table. But hunger is a great magician; and so soon as I had spent
my ready cash, and could no longer fill up on bowls of chocolate or
hunks of bread, I must depend entirely on that cabman's eating-house,
and upon certain rare, long-expected, long-remembered windfalls. Dijon
(for instance) might get paid for some of his pot-boiling work, or else
an old friend would pass through Paris; and then I would be entertained
to a meal after my own soul, and contract a Latin Quarter loan, which
would keep me in tobacco and my morning coffee for a fortnight. It might
be thought the latter would appear the more important. It might be
supposed that a life, led so near the confines of actual famine, should
have dulled the nicety of my palate. On the contrary, the poorer a man's
diet, the more sharply is he set on dainties. The last of my ready cash,
about thirty francs, was deliberately squandered on a single dinner;
and a great part of my time when I was alone was passed upon the details
of imaginary feasts.
One gleam of hope visited me--an order for a bust from a rich
Southerner. He was free-handed, jolly of speech, merry of countenance;
kept me in good humour through the sittings, and, when they were over,
carried me off with him to dinner and the sights of Paris. I ate well, I
laid on flesh; by all accounts I made a favourable likeness of the
being, and I confess I thought my future was assured. But when the bust
was done, and I had despatched it across the Atlantic, I could never so
much as learn of its arrival. The blow felled me; I should have lain
down and tried no stroke to right myself, had not the honour of my
country been involved. For Dijon improved the opportunity in the
European style, informing me (for the first time) of the manners of
America: how it was a den of banditti without the smallest rudiment of
law or order, and debts could be there only collected with a shot-gun.
"The whole world knows it," he would say; "you are alone, _mon petit_
Loudon--you are alone, to be in ignorance of these facts. The judges of
the Supreme Court fought but the other day with stilettos on the bench
at Cincinnati. You should read the little book of one of my friends, 'Le
Touriste dans le Far-West'; you will see it all there in good French."
At last, incensed by days of such discussion, I undertook to prove to
him the contrary, and put the affair in the hands of my late father's
lawyer. From him I had the gratification of hearing, after a due
interval, that my debtor was dead of the yellow fever in Key West, and
had left his affairs in some confusion. I suppress his name; for though
he treated me with cruel nonchalance, it is probable he meant to deal
fairly in the end.
Soon after this a shade of change in my reception at the cabman's
eating-house marked the beginning of a new phase in my distress. The
first day I told myself it was but fancy; the next, I made quite sure it
was a fact; the third, in mere panic I stayed away, and went for
forty-eight hours fasting. This was an act of great unreason; for the
debtor who stays away is but the more remarked, and the boarder who
misses a meal is sure to be accused of infidelity. On the fourth day,
therefore, I returned, inwardly quaking. The proprietor looked askance
upon my entrance; the waitresses (who were his daughters) neglected my
wants, and sniffed at the affected joviality of my salutations; last,
and most plain, when I called for a _suisse_(such as was being served to
all the other diners), I was bluntly told there were no more. It was
obvious I was near the end of my tether; one plank divided me from want,
and now I felt it tremble. I passed a sleepless night, and the first
thing in the morning took my way to Myner's studio. It was a step I had
long meditated and long refrained from; for I was scarce intimate with
the Englishman; and though I knew him to possess plenty of money,
neither his manner nor his reputation were the least encouraging to
beggars.
I found him at work on a picture, which I was able conscientiously to
praise, dressed in his usual tweeds--plain, but pretty fresh, and
standing out in disagreeable contrast to my own withered and degraded
outfit. As we talked, he continued to shift his eyes watchfully between
his handiwork and the fat model, who sat at the far end of the studio in
a state of nature, with one arm gallantly arched above her head. My
errand would have been difficult enough under the best of circumstances:
placed between Myner, immersed in his art, and the white, fat, naked
female in a ridiculous attitude, I found it quite impossible. Again and
again I attempted to approach the point, again and again fell back on
commendations of the picture; and it was not until the model had enjoyed
an interval of repose, during which she took the conversation in her own
hands and regaled us (in a soft, weak voice) with details as to her
husband's prosperity, her sister's lamented decline from the paths of
virtue, and the consequent wrath of her father, a peasant of stern
principles, in the vicinity of Chalons on the Marne--it was not, I say,
until after this was over, and I had once more cleared my throat for the
attack, and once more dropped aside into some commonplace about the
picture, that Myner himself brought me suddenly and vigorously to the
point.
"You didn't come here to talk this rot," said he.
"No," I replied sullenly; "I came to borrow money."
He painted a while in silence.
"I don't think we were ever very intimate?" he asked.
"Thank you," said I. "I can take my answer," and I made as if to go,
rage boiling in my heart.
"Of course you can go if you like," said Myner, "but I advise you to
stay and have it out."
"What more is there to say?" I cried. "You don't want to keep me here
for a needless humiliation?"
"Look here, Dodd; you must try and command your temper," said he. "This
interview is of your own seeking, and not mine; if you suppose it's not
disagreeable to me, you're wrong; and if you think I will give you money
without knowing thoroughly about your prospects, you take me for a fool.
Besides," he added, "if you come to look at it, you've got over the
worst of it by now: you have done the asking, and you have every reason
to know I mean to refuse. I hold out no false hopes, but it may be worth
your while to let me judge."
Thus--I was going to say--encouraged, I stumbled through my story; told
him I had credit at the cabman's eating-house, but began to think it was
drawing to a close; how Dijon lent me a corner of his studio, where I
tried to model ornaments, figures for clocks, Time with the scythe, Leda
and the swan, musketeers for candlesticks, and other kickshaws, which
had never (up to that day) been honoured with the least approval.
"And your room?" asked Myner.
"O, my room is all right, I think," said I. "She is a very good old
lady, and has never even mentioned her bill."
"Because she is a very good old lady, I don't see why she should be
fined," observed Myner.
"What do you mean by that?" I cried.
"I mean this," said he. "The French give a great deal of credit amongst
themselves; they find it pays on the whole, or the system would hardly
be continued; but I can't see where _we_ come in; I can't see that it's
honest of us Anglo-Saxons to profit by their easy ways, and then skip
over the Channel or (as you Yankees do) across the Atlantic."
"But I'm not proposing to skip," I objected.
"Exactly," he replied. "And shouldn't you? There's the problem. You seem
to me to have a lack of sympathy for the proprietors of cabmen's
eating-houses. By your own account, you're not getting on; the longer
you stay, it'll only be the more out of the pocket of the dear old lady
at your lodgings. Now, I'll tell you what I'll do: if you consent to go,
I'll pay your passage to New York, and your railway fare and expenses to
Muskegon (if I have the name right), where your father lived, where he
must have left friends, and where, no doubt, you'll find an opening. I
don't seek any gratitude, for of course you'll think me a beast; but I
do ask you to pay it back when you are able. At any rate, that's all I
can do. It might be different if I thought you a genius, Dodd; but I
don't, and I advise you not to."
"I think that was uncalled for, at least," said I.
"I daresay it was," he returned, with the same steadiness. "It seemed to
me pertinent; and, besides, when you ask me for money upon no security,
you treat me with the liberty of a friend, and it's to be presumed that
I can do the like. But the point is, do you accept?"
"No, thank you," said I; "I have another string to my bow."
"All right," says Myner; "be sure it's honest."
"Honest? honest?" I cried. "What do you mean by calling my honesty in
question?"
"I won't, if you don't like it," he replied. "You seem to think honesty
as easy as Blind Man's Buff: I don't. It's some difference of
definition."
I went straight from this irritating interview, during which Myner had
never discontinued painting, to the studio of my old master. Only one
card remained for me to play, and I was now resolved to play it: I must
drop the gentleman and the frock-coat, and approach art in the workman's
tunic.
"_Tiens_, this little Dodd!" cried the master; and then, as his eye fell
on my dilapidated clothing, I thought I could perceive his countenance
to darken.
I made my plea in English; for I knew, if he were vain of anything, it
was of his achievement of the island tongue. "Master," said I, "will you
take me in your studio again--but this time as a workman?"
"I sought your fazer was immensely reech?" said he.
I explained to him that I was now an orphan, and penniless.
He shook his head. "I have betterr workmen waiting at my door," said he,
"far betterr workmen."
"You used to think something of my work, sir," I pleaded.
"Somesing, somesing--yes!" he cried; "enough for a son of a reech
man--not enough for an orphan. Besides, I sought you might learn to be
an artist; I did not sink you might learn to be a workman."
On a certain bench on the outer boulevard, not far from the tomb of
Napoleon--a bench shaded at that date by a shabby tree, and commanding a
view of muddy roadway and blank wall--I sat down to wrestle with my
misery. The weather was cheerless and dark; in three days I had eaten
but once; I had no tobacco; my shoes were soaked, my trousers horrid
with mire; my humour and all the circumstances of the time and place
lugubriously attuned. Here were two men who had both spoken fairly of my
work while I was rich and wanted nothing; now that I was poor and lacked
all: "No genius," said the one; "not enough for an orphan," the other;
and the first offered me my passage like a pauper immigrant, and the
second refused me a day's wage as a hewer of stone--plain dealing for an
empty belly. They had not been insincere in the past; they were not
insincere to-day: change of circumstance had introduced a new criterion,
that was all.
But if I acquitted my two Job's comforters of insincerity, I was yet far
from admitting them infallible. Artists had been contemned before, and
had lived to turn the laugh on their contemners. How old was Corot
before he struck the vein of his own precious metal? When had a young
man been more derided (or more justly so) than the god of my admiration,
Balzac? Or, if I required a bolder inspiration, what had I to do but
turn my head to where the gold dome of the Invalides glittered against
inky squalls, and recall the tale of him sleeping there: from the day
when a young artillery-sub could be giggled at and nicknamed
Puss-in-Boots by frisky misses, on to the days of so many crowns and so
many victories, and so many hundred mouths of cannon, and so many
thousand warhoofs trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty
miles in front of the grand army? To go back, to give up, to proclaim
myself a failure, an ambitious failure--first a rocket, then a stick! I,
Loudon Dodd, who had refused all other livelihoods with scorn, and been
advertised in the St. Joseph _Sunday Herald_ as a patriot and an artist,
to be returned upon my native Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the
circuit of my father's acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to sweep
offices! No, by Napoleon! I would die at my chosen trade; and the two
who had that day flouted me should live to envy my success, or to weep
tears of unavailing penitence behind my pauper coffin.
Meantime, if my courage was still undiminished, I was none the nearer to
a meal. At no great distance my cabman's eating-house stood, at the tail
of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a wide thoroughfare of mud,
offering (to fancy) a lace of ambiguous invitation. I might be received,
I might once more fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps
this day the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead,
with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I knew it was
policy; but I had already, in the course of that one morning, endured
too many affronts, and I felt I could rather starve than face another. I
had courage and to spare for the future, none left for that day; courage
for the main campaign, but not a spark of it for that preliminary
skirmish of the cabman's restaurant. I continued accordingly to sit upon
my bench, not far from the ashes of Napoleon, now drowsy, now
light-headed, now in complete mental obstruction, or only conscious of
an animal pleasure in quiescence; and now thinking, planning, and
remembering with unexampled clearness, telling myself tales of sudden
wealth, and gustfully ordering and greedily consuming imaginary meals,
in the course of which I must have dropped to sleep.
It was towards dark that I was suddenly recalled to famine by a cold
souse of rain, and sprang shivering to my feet. For a moment I stood
bewildered; the whole train of my reasoning and dreaming passed afresh
through my mind; I was again tempted, drawn as if with cords, by the
image of the cabman's eating-house, and again recoiled from the
possibility of insult. "_Qui dort dine_," thought I to myself; and took
my homeward way with wavering footsteps, through rainy streets in which
the lamps and the shop-windows now began to gleam, still marshalling
imaginary dinners as I went.
"Ah, Monsieur Dodd," said the porter, "there has been a registered
letter for you. The facteur will bring it again to-morrow."
A registered letter for me, who had been so long without one? Of what it
could possibly contain I had no vestige of a guess, nor did I delay
myself guessing; far less form any conscious plan of dishonesty: the
lies flowed from me like a natural secretion.
"Oh," said I, "my remittance at last! What a bother I should have missed
it! Can you lend me a hundred francs until to-morrow?"
I had never attempted to borrow from the porter till that moment; the
registered letter was, besides, my warranty; and he gave me what he
had--three napoleons and some francs in silver. I pocketed the money
carelessly, lingered a while chaffing, strolled leisurely to the door;
and then (fast as my trembling legs could carry me) round the corner to
the Cafe de Cluny. French waiters are deft and speedy; they were not
deft enough for me: and I had scarce decency to let the man set the wine
upon the table or put the butter alongside the bread, before my glass
and my mouth were filled. Exquisite bread of the Cafe Cluny, exquisite
first glass of old Pomard tingling to my wet feet, indescribable first
olive culled from the _hors d'oeuvre_--I suppose, when I come to lie
dying, and the lamp begins to grow dim, I shall still recall your
savour. Over the rest of that meal, and the rest of the evening, clouds
lie thick; clouds perhaps of Burgundy: perhaps, more properly, of famine
and repletion.
I remember clearly, at least, the shame, the despair, of the next
morning, when I reviewed what I had done, and how I had swindled the
poor honest porter: and, as if that were not enough, fairly burnt my
ships, and brought bankruptcy home to that last refuge, my garret. The
porter would expect his money; I could not pay him; here was scandal in
the house; and I knew right well the cause of scandal would have to
pack. "What do you mean by calling my honesty in question?" I had cried
the day before, turning upon Myner. Ah, that day before! the day before
Waterloo, the day before the Flood; the day before I had sold the roof
over my head, my future, and my self-respect, for a dinner at the Cafe
Cluny!
In the midst of these lamentations the famous registered letter came to
my door, with healing under its seal. It bore the postmark of San
Francisco, where Pinkerton was already struggling to the neck in
multifarious affairs; it renewed the offer of an allowance, which his
improved estate permitted him to announce at the figure of two hundred
francs a month; and in case I was in some immediate pinch, it enclosed
an introductory draft for forty dollars. There are a thousand excellent
reasons why a man, in this self-helpful epoch, should decline to be
dependent on another; but the most numerous and cogent considerations
all bow to a necessity as stern as mine; and the banks were scarce open
ere the draft was cashed.
It was early in December that I thus sold myself into slavery, and for
six months I dragged a slowly lengthening chain of gratitude and
uneasiness. At the cost of some debt I managed to excel myself and
eclipse the Genius of Muskegon, in a small but highly patriotic
"Standard Bearer" for the Salon; whither it was duly admitted, where it
stood the proper length of days entirely unremarked, and whence it came
back to me as patriotic as before. I threw my whole soul (as Pinkerton
would have phrased it) into clocks and candlesticks; the devil a
candlestick-maker would have anything to say to my designs. Even when
Dijon, with his infinite good-humour and infinite scorn for all such
journey-work, consented to peddle them in indiscriminately with his own,
the dealers still detected and rejected mine. Home they returned to me,
true as the Standard Bearer, who now, at the head of quite a regiment of
lesser idols, began to grow an eyesore in the scanty studio of my
friend. Dijon and I have sat by the hour, and gazed upon that company of
images. The severe, the frisky, the classical, the Louis Quinze, were
there--from Joan of Arc in her soldierly cuirass, to Leda with the
swan; nay!--and God forgive me for a man that knew better!--the humorous
was represented also. We sat and gazed, I say; we criticised, we turned
them hither and thither; even upon the closest inspection they looked
quite like statuettes; and yet nobody would have a gift of them!
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man: but about
the sixth month, when I already owed near two hundred dollars to
Pinkerton, and half as much again in debts scattered about Paris, I
awoke one morning with a horrid sentiment of oppression, and found I was
alone: my vanity had breathed her last during the night. I dared not
plunge deeper in the bog; I saw no hope in my poor statuary; I owned
myself beaten at last; and sitting down in my night-shirt beside the
window, whence I had a glimpse of the tree-tops at the corner of the
boulevard, and where the music of its early traffic fell agreeably upon
my ear, I penned my farewell to Paris, to art, to my whole past life,
and my whole former self. "I give in," I wrote. "When the next allowance
arrives, I shall go straight out West, where you can do what you like
with me."
It is to be understood that Pinkerton had been, in a sense, pressing me
to come from the beginning; depicting his isolation among new
acquaintances, "who have none of them your culture," he wrote;
expressing his friendship in terms so warm that it sometimes embarrassed
me to think how poorly I could echo them; dwelling upon his need for
assistance; and the next moment turning about to commend my resolution
and press me to remain in Paris. "Only remember, Loudon," he would
write, "if you ever _do_ tire of it, there's plenty of work here for
you--honest, hard, well-paid work, developing the resources of this
practically virgin State. And, of course, I needn't say what a pleasure
it would be to me if we were going at it _shoulder to shoulder_." I
marvel, looking back, that I could so long have resisted these appeals,
and continue to sink my friend's money in a manner that I knew him to
dislike. At least, when I did awake to any sense of my position, I awoke
to it entirely, and determined not only to follow his counsel for the
future, but, even as regards the past, to rectify his losses. For in
this juncture of affairs I called to mind that I was not without a
possible resource, and resolved, at whatever cost of mortification, to
beard the Loudon family in their historic city.
In the excellent Scots phrase, I made a moonlight flitting, a thing
never dignified, but in my case unusually easy. As I had scarce a pair
of boots worth portage I deserted the whole of my effects without a
pang. Dijon fell heir to Joan of Arc, the Standard Bearer, and the
Musketeers. He was present when I bought and frugally stocked my new
portmanteau, and it was at the door of the trunk-shop that I took my
leave of him, for my last few hours in Paris must be spent alone. It was
alone, and at a far higher figure than my finances warranted, that I
discussed my dinner; alone that I took my ticket at St. Lazare; all
alone, though in a carriage full of people, that I watched the moon
shine on the Seine flood with its tufted isles, on Rouen with her
spires, and on the shipping in the harbour of Dieppe. When the first
light of the morning called me from troubled slumbers on the deck, I
beheld the dawn at first with pleasure; I watched with pleasure the
green shores of England rising out of rosy haze: I took the salt air
with delight into my nostrils; and then all came back to me--that I was
no longer an artist, no longer myself; that I was leaving all I cared
for, and returning to all that I detested, the slave of debt and
gratitude, a public and a branded failure.
From this picture of my own disgrace and wretchedness it is not
wonderful if my mind turned with relief to the thought of Pinkerton
waiting for me, as I knew, with unwearied affection, and regarding me
with a respect that I had never deserved, and might therefore fairly
hope that I should never forfeit. The inequality of our relation struck
me rudely. I must have been stupid, indeed, if I could have considered
the history of that friendship without shame--I who had given so little,
who had accepted and profited by so much. I had the whole day before me
in London, and I determined, at least in words, to set the balance
somewhat straighter. Seated in the corner of a public place, and calling
for sheet after sheet of paper, I poured forth the expression of my
gratitude, my penitence for the past, my resolutions for the future.
Till now, I told him, my course had been mere selfishness. I had been
selfish to my father and to my friend, taking their help and denying
them (which was all they asked) the poor gratification of my company and
countenance.
Wonderful are the consolations of literature! As soon as that letter was
written and posted the consciousness of virtue glowed in my veins like
some rare vintage.