which I have hitherto lived with my nearest relatives, and to which I
hope soon to return, it is of no importance to the reader to know.
Neither is it at all worth while to occupy time and space with any
particular description of the illness from which I have been and am
still suffering. It will be enough for preliminary purposes, if I
present myself at once in the character of a convalescent visiting
Paris, with the double intention of passing agreeably an interval of
necessary absence from home, and of promoting, by change of air and
scene, my recovery from a distressing and a tedious illness. When I
add to this, that although I lived alone in my French bachelor
apartment, I had the good fortune at Paris, as afterwards in London,
to be in the near neighbourhood of the most kind, attentive, and
affectionate friends, I have said as much as is needful by way of
preface, and may get on at once to my main purpose.
What my impressions of my apartment in Paris might have been, if I had
recovered there according to my anticipations, I cannot venture to
say; for, before I had got fairly settled in my new rooms, I suffered
a sudden relapse. My life, again, became the life of an invalid, and
my ways of thought and observation turned back disastrously to the old
invalid channel. Change of air and scene--which had done nothing for
my body--did nothing either for my mind. At Paris, as before in
London, I looked at the world about me, purely from the sick man's
point of view--or, in other words, the events that passed, the sights
that appeared, and the persons who moved around me, interested or
repelled me only as they referred more or less directly to myself and
my own invalid situation. This curious narrowness of view, of which I
am not yet well enough entirely to rid myself, though as conscious as
another of the mental weakness that it implies, has no connection that
I can discover with excessive selfishness or vanity; it is simply the
result of the inevitable increase of a man's importance to himself
which the very fact of sickness is only too apt to produce.
My own sensations, as a sick man, now fill up the weary blank of my
daily existence when I am alone, and form the main topic of inquiry
and conversation when my doctor and my friends enliven my solitude.
The concerns of my own poor body, which do not, I thank heaven, occupy
my attention for much more than one hour out of the twenty-four, when
I am well, become the main business and responsibility of all my
waking moments, now that I am ill. Pain to suffer, and the swallowing
of drugs and taking of nourishment at regulated periods; daily
restraints that I must undergo, and hourly precautions that I am
forced to practise, all contribute to keep my mind bound down to the
level of my body. A flight of thought beyond myself and the weary
present time--even supposing I were capable of the exertion--would
lead me astray from the small personal rules and regulations on which
I now depend absolutely for the recovery of my health.
Have my temper and disposition changed for the worse, under these
unfavourable circumstances? Not much, I hope. I can honestly say for
myself that I envy no other man's health and happiness. I feel no
jealous pang when I hear laughter about me. I can look at people out
of my window, running easily across the road, while I can hardly crawl
from one end of my chamber to the other, without feeling insulted by
their activity. Still, it is true, at the same time, that I warm to
people now exactly in proportion as I see them sensibly and sincerely
touched by my suffering condition; and that I like, or dislike, my
habitation for the time being, just as it happens to suit, or not to
suit, all the little requirements of my temporary infirmity. If I were
introduced to one of the most eminent men in the country at this
moment, and if he did not look sorry to see me ill, I should never
care to set eyes on the eminent man again. If I had a superb room with
the finest view in the world, but no bed-side conveniences for my
pill-boxes and medicine-bottles, I would leave that superb room and
fine view, and go cheerfully to a garret in an alley, provided it
adapted itself comfortably to the arrangement of my indispensable
invalid's lumber. This is doubtless a humiliating confession; but it
is well that I should make it once for all--for, the various opinions
and impressions which I am about frankly to write down, will be found
to be more or less coloured by what I venture to describe as the
involuntary egotism of a sick man.
Let us see how my new lodging in Paris suits me; and why it is that I
immediately become fond of it.
I live in a little building of my own, called a Pavilion. Outside, it
resembles, as to size, brightness, and apparent insubstantiality, a
private dwelling-house in a Pantomime. I expect as I drive up to it,
for the first time, to see Clown grinning at the door, and Harlequin
jumping through the window. A key is produced, and an odd little white
door, through which no fat man could penetrate even sideways, is
opened; I ascend a steep flight of a dozen steps, and enter my
toy-castle: my own independent, solitary, miniature mansion.
The first room is the drawing-room. It is about the size of a large
packing-case, with a gay looking-glass and clock, with bright red
chairs and sofa, with a cosy round table, with a big window looking
out on another Pavilion opposite, and on a great house set back in a
courtyard. To my indescribable astonishment, it actually possesses
three doors! One I have just entered by. Another leads into a
bed-chamber of the same size as the drawing-room, just as brightly and
neatly furnished, with a window that looks out on the everlasting
gaiety and bustle of the Champs Elysées. The third door leads into a
dressing-room half the size of the drawing-room, and having a fourth
door which opens into a kitchen half the size of the dressing-room,
but of course possessing a fifth door which leads out again to the
head of the staircase. As no two people meeting in the kitchen could
possibly pass each other, or remain in the apartment together without
serious inconvenience, the two doors leading in and out of it may be
pronounced useful as well as ornamental. Into this quaint little
culinary crevice the coal-merchant, the wood-merchant, and the
water-carrier squeeze their way, and find a doll's cellar and cistern
all ready for them. They might be followed, if I were only well enough
to give dinners, by a cook and his scullions--for I possess, besides
the cellar and cistern, an elaborate charcoal stove in the kitchen, at
which any number of courses might be prepared by any culinary artist,
who could cook composedly with a row of small fires under his nose, a
coal-cellar between his legs, a cistern scrubbing his shoulder, and a
lukewarm wall against his back.
But what is the main secret of my fondness for the Pavilion? It does
not, I am afraid, lie in the brightness and elegance of the little
rooms, or even in the delightful independence of inhabiting a lodging,
which is also a house of my own, where I can neither be disturbed nor
overlooked by any other lodgers. The one irresistible appeal which my
Parisian apartment makes to my sympathies, consists in the perfect
manner in which it fits my wants and flatters my weaknesses as an
invalid.
I have quite a little druggist's stock-in-trade of physic-bottles,
glasses, spoons, card-boxes and prescriptions; I have all sorts of
queer vestments and coverings, intended to guarantee me against all
variations of temperature and all degrees of exposure, by night as
well as by day; I have ready remedies that must be kept in my
bed-chamber, and elaborate applications that I must find handy in my
dressing-room. In short, I myself am nothing but the centre of a vast
medical litter, and the closer the said litter revolves round me the
more comfortable I am. In a house of the usual size, and in rooms
arranged on the ordinary plan, I should be driven distracted (being an
untidy man even in my healthiest moments) by mislaying things every
hour in the day, by having to get up to look for them, and by being
compelled to walk up and down stairs, or to make others do so for me,
when I want to establish communications between dressing-room,
bed-room, drawing-room, coal-cellar, and kitchen. In my tiny Parisian
house of one small storey, I can wait on myself with the most perfect
ease; in my wee sitting-room, nine-tenths of the things I want are
within arm's length of me, as I repose in my elbow-chair; if I must
move I can get from my bed-chamber to my kitchen in less time than it
would take me to walk across an English drawing-room; if I lose my
morning draught, mislay my noontide drops, or leave my evening
pill-box under my afternoon dressing-gown, I can take my walking-stick
or my fire-tongs, and poke or fish for missing articles in every
corner of the room, without doing more than turning round in my chair.
If I had been well and had given dinner parties, I might have found my
habitation rather too small for me. As it is, if my Pavilion had been
built on purpose for a solitary lodger to fall ill in with the least
possible amount of personal discomfort, it could not have suited my
sad case better. Sick, I love and honour the skilful architect who
contrived it. Well, I am very much afraid I should never have bestowed
so much as a single thought on him.
Why do I become, in one cordial quarter of an hour, friendly,
familiar, and even affectionate with my portress? Because it is part
of my unhealthy condition of body and mind, that I like nothing so
well as being pitied; and my portress sweetens my daily existence with
so much compassion that she does me more good, I think, than my doctor
or my drugs.
Let me try to describe her. She is a thin, rapid, cheerful little
woman, with a tiny face and bright brown eyes. She has a husband
(Hippolyte-senior) and a son (Hippolyte-junior), and a lodge of one
room to live in with her family. She has not been in bed, for years
past, before two or three in the morning; for my Pavilion and the
second Pavilion opposite and the large house behind, are all shut in
from the roadway by handsome iron gates, which it is the business of
somebody in the porter's lodge to open (by pulling a string
communicating with the latch) at all hours of the night to
homeward-bound lodgers. The large house has so many tenants that some
one is always out at a party or a theatre--so the keeping of late
hours becomes a necessary part of the service in the lodge, and the
poor little portress is the victim who suffers as perpetual
night-watch. Hippolyte-senior absorbs his fair share of work in the
day, and takes the early-rising department cheerfully, but he does not
possess the gift of keeping awake at night. By eleven o'clock (such is
sometimes the weakness even of the most amiable human nature) it is
necessary that Hippolyte-senior should be stretched on his back on the
nuptial bedstead, snoring impervious to all sounds and all in-comers.
Hippolyte-junior, or the son, is too young to be trusted with the
supervision of the gate-string. He sleeps, sound as his father, with a
half-developed snore and a coiled-up body, in a crib at the foot of
the parental bed. On the other side of the room, hard by the lodgers'
keys and candlesticks, with a big stove behind her and a gaslight
before her eyes, sits the faithful little portress, watching out the
weary hours as wakefully as she can. She trusts entirely to strong
coffee and the near flare of the gaslight to combat the natural
sleepiness which follows a hard day's work begun at eight o'clock
every morning. The coffee and the gas deserve, to a certain extent,
the confidence she places in them. They keep her bright brown eyes
wide open, staring with unwinking pertinacity at the light before
them. They keep her back very straight against her chair, and her arms
crossed tightly over her bosom, and her feet set firmly on her
footstool. But though they stop sleep from shutting her eyes or
relaxing her limbs, they cannot prevent some few latent Morphian
influences from stealthily reaching her. Open as her eyes may be, the
little woman nevertheless does start guiltily when the ring at the
bell comes at last; does stare fixedly for a moment before she can get
up; has to fight resolutely with something drowsy and clinging in the
shape of a trance, before she can fly to the latch-string, and hang on
to it wearily, instead of pulling at it with the proper wakeful jerk.
Night after night she has now drunk the strong coffee, and propped
herself up stiffly in her straight chair, and stared hard at the
flaring gaslight, for nearly seven years past. Some people would have
lost their tempers and their spirits under these hard circumstances;
but the cheerful little portress has only lost flesh. In a dark corner
of the room hangs a daguerreotype likeness. It represents a buxom
woman, with round cheeks and a sturdy waist, and dates from the period
when she was the bride of Hippolyte-senior, and was thinking of
following him into the Porter's Lodge. "Ah! my dear sir," she says
when I condole with her, "if we do get a little money sometimes in our
way of life, we don't earn it too easily. Aïe! Aïe! Aïe! I should like
a good sleep: I should like to be as fat as my portrait again!"
The same friendly relations--arising entirely, let it always be
remembered, out of my illness and the portress's compassion for
me--which have let me into the secrets of the strong coffee, the
daguerreotype portrait, and the sleepy constitution of Hippolyte-senior,
also enable me to ascertain, by special invitation, how the
inhabitants of the lodge dispose of some of the hardly-earned profits
of their situation.
I find myself suffering rather painfully, one morning, under some
aggravated symptoms of my illness, and my friend the portress comes
into the Pavilion to talk to me and keep up my spirits. She has had an
hour's extra sleep, for a wonder, and is in a chirping state of
cheerfulness in consequence. She shudders and makes faces at my
physic-bottles; entreats me to throw them away, to let her put me to
bed, and administer A Light Tea to begin with, and A Broth to follow
(un Thé léger et un Bouillon). If I will only stick to these remedies,
she will have them ready, if necessary, every hour in the day, and
will guarantee my immediate restoration to health and strength. While
we are arguing the question of the uselessness of drugs and the
remedial excellence of tea and broth, Hippolyte-senior, with a look of
mysterious triumph, which immediately communicates itself to the face
of his wife, enters the room to tell her that she is wanted below in
the lodge. She goes to his side and takes his arm, as if he was a
strange gentleman waiting to lead her down to dinner, nods to him
confidentially, then glances at me. Her husband follows her example,
and the two stand quite unconfusedly, arm-in-arm, smiling upon me and
my physic-bottles, as if they were a pair of lovers and I was the
venerable parent whose permission and blessing they were waiting to
receive.
"Have you been getting a new doctor for me?" I ask, excessively
puzzled by their evident desire to connect me with some secret in the
lodge.
"No," says the portress, "I believe in no doctors. I believe in
nothing but a light tea and a broth."
("My sentiments also!" adds her husband, parenthetically.)
"But we have something to show you in the lodge," continues the
portress.
(Hippolyte-senior arches his eyebrows, and says "Aha!")
"And when you feel better," proceeds my cheerful little friend, "only
have the politeness to come down to us, and you will see a marvellous
sight!"
Hippolyte-senior depresses his eyebrows, and says "Hush!"
"Enough," replies the portress, understanding him; "let us retire."
And they leave the room immediately, still arm-in-arm--the fondest and
most mysterious married couple that I have ever set eyes on.
That day, I do not feel quite strong enough to encounter great
surprises; so my visit to the lodge is deferred until the next
morning. Rather to my amazement, the portress does not pay me her
usual visit at my waking, on the eventful day. I descend to the lodge,
wondering what this change means, and see three or four strangers
assembled in the room which is bed-chamber, parlour, and porter's
office, all in one. The strangers, I find, are admiring friends: they
surround Hippolyte-senior, and all look one way with an expression of
intense pleasure and surprise. My eyes follow the direction of theirs;
and I see, above the shabby little lodge table, a resplendent new
looking-glass in the brightest of frames. On either side of it, rise
two blush-coloured wax tapers. Below it are three ornamental pots with
blooming rose-trees in them, backed by a fanlike screen of fair white
paper. This is the surprise that was in store for me; and this is also
the security in which the inhabitants of the lodge have invested their
last hard-earned savings. The whole thing has the effect upon my mind
of an amateur High Altar; and I admire the new purchase accordingly
with such serious energy of expression, that Hippolyte-senior, in the
first sweetness of triumph, forgets the modesty proper to his position
as proprietor of the new treasure, and apostrophises his own property
as Magnifique, with a power of voice and an energy of gesticulation
which I have never noticed in him before. When his enthusiasm has
abated, and just as I am on the point of asking where my friend the
portress is, I hear a faint little voice speaking behind the group of
admiring friends:
"Perhaps, Messieurs et Mesdames, you think this an extravagance for
people in our situation," says the voice, in feebly polite tones of
apology; "but, alas! how could we resist it? It is so beautiful--it
brightens the room so--it gives us such a noble appearance. And, then,
it is also a property--something to leave to our children--in short, a
pardonable extravagance. Aïe! I am shaking all over again; I can say
no more!"
While these words are in course of utterance, the group of friends
separate, and I see sitting behind them, close to the big stove, the
little portress, looking sadly changed for the worse. Her tiny face
has become very yellow; her bright brown eyes look disproportionately
large; she has an old shawl twisted round her shoulders and shivers in
it perpetually. I ask what is the matter, imagining that the poor
little woman has got a fit of the ague. The portress contrives to
smile as usual before she answers, though her teeth are chattering
audibly.
"You will not give me drugs, if I tell you?" she says.
"I will do nothing that is not perfectly agreeable to you," I reply
evasively.
"My complaint is a violent indigestion (une forte indigestion),"
continues the portress, indicatively laying one trembling fore-finger
on the region of her malady. "And I am curing myself with a Light
Tea."
Here the fore-finger changes its direction and points to a large white
earthenware teapot, with an empty mug by the side of it. To save the
portress the trouble of replenishing her drinking vessel, I pour out a
dose of the Light Tea. It is a liquid of a faint straw colour, totally
unlike any English tea that ever was made; and it tastes as a quart of
hot water might taste after a wisp of hay had been dipped into it. The
portress swallows three mugsful of her medicine in my presence,
smiling and shivering; looking rapturously at the magnificent new
mirror with its attendant flower-pots and tapers; and rejecting with
grimaces of comic disgust, all overtures of medical help on my part,
even to the modest offering of one small pill. An hour or two later, I
descend to the lodge again to see how she is. She has been persuaded
to go to bed; is receiving, in bed, a levée of friends; is answering,
in the same interesting situation, the questions of all the visitors
of the day, relating to all the lodgers in the house; has begun a
fresh potful of the light tea; is still smiling; still shivering;
still contemptuously sceptical on the subject of drugs.
In the evening I go down again. The teapot is not done with yet, and
the hay-flavoured hot water is still pouring inexhaustibly into the
system of the little portress. She happens now to be issuing
directions relative to the keeping awake of Hippolyte-senior, who, for
this night at least, must watch by the gate-string. He is to have a
pint of strong coffee and a pipe; he is to have the gas turned on very
strong; and he is to be excited by the presence of a brisk and wakeful
friend. The next morning, just as I am thinking of making inquiries at
the lodge, who should enter my room but the dyspeptic patient herself,
cured, and ready to digest anything but a doctor's advice or a small
pill. Hippolyte-senior, I hear, has not fallen asleep over the
gate-string for more than half-an-hour every now and then; and the
portress has had a long night's rest. She does not consider this
unusual occurrence as reckoning in any degree among the agencies which
have accomplished her rapid recovery. It is the light tea alone that
has done it; and, if I still doubt the inestimable virtues of the hot
hay-water cure, then of all the prejudiced gentlemen the portress has
ever heard of, I am the most deplorably obstinate in opening my arms
to error and shutting my eyes to truth.
Such is the little domestic world about me, in some of the more vivid
lights in which it presents itself to my own peculiar view.
As for the great Parisian world outside, my experience of it is
bounded by the prospect I obtain of the Champs Elysées from my
bed-room window. Fashionable Paris spins and prances by me every
afternoon, in all its glory; but what interest have healthy princes
and counts and blood-horses, and blooming ladies, plunged in abysses
of circumambient crinoline, for me, in my sick situation? They all fly
by me in one confused phantasmagoria of gay colours and rushing forms,
which I look at with lazy eyes. The sights I watch with interest are
those only which seem to refer in some degree to my own invalid
position. My sick man's involuntary egotism clings as close to me
when I look outward at the great highway, as when I look inward at my
own little room. Thus, the only objects which I now notice attentively
from my window, are, oddly enough, chiefly those which I should have
missed altogether, or looked at with indifference if I had occupied my
bachelor apartment in the enviable character of a healthy man.
For example, out of the various vehicles which pass me by dozens in
the morning, and by hundreds in the afternoon, only two succeed in
making anything like a lasting impression on my mind. I have only
vague ideas of dust, dashing, and magnificence in connection with the
rapid carriages late in the day--and of bells and hollow yelping of
carters' voices in connection with the deliberate waggons early in the
morning. But I have, on the other hand, a very distinct remembrance of
one sober brown omnibus, belonging to a Sanitary Asylum, and of a
queer little truck which carries baths and hot water to private
houses, from a bathing establishment near me. The omnibus, as it
passes my window at a solemn jog-trot, is full of patients getting
their airing. I can see them dimly, and I fall into curious fancies
about their various cases, and wonder what proportion of the afflicted
passengers are near the time of emancipation from their sanitary
prison on wheels. As for the little truck, with its empty zinc bath
and barrel of warm water, I am probably wrong in sympathetically
associating it as frequently as I do with cases of illness. It is
doubtless often sent for by healthy people, too luxurious in their
habits to walk abroad for a bath. But there must be a proportion of
cases of illness to which the truck ministers; and when I see it going
faster than usual, I assume that it must be wanted by some person in a
fit; grow suddenly agitated by the idea; and watch the empty bath and
the hot-water barrel with breathless interest, until they rumble away
together out of sight.
So, again, with regard to the men and women who pass my window by
thousands every day; my view of them is just as curiously
circumscribed as my view of the vehicles. Out of all the crowd, I now
find, on taxing my memory, that I have noticed particularly just three
people (a woman and two men), who have chanced to appeal to my invalid
curiosity.