Margaret went alone to the house of the famous singer, for her teacher
knew by experience that it was better not to be present on such
occasions. Margaret had not even a maid with her, for except in some
queer neighbourhoods Paris is as safe as any city in the world, and it
never occurred to her that she could need protection at her age. If she
should ever have any annoyance she could call a policeman, but she had
a firm and well-founded conviction that if a young woman looked
straight before her and held her head up as if she could take care of
herself, no one would ever molest her, from London to Pekin.
It was not very far from her teacher's rooms in the Boulevard
Malesherbes to the pretty little house Madame Bonanni had built for
herself in the Avenue Hoche; so Margaret walked. It is the pleasantest
way of getting about Paris on a May morning, when one has not to go a
long distance. Paris has changed terribly of late years, but there are
moments when all her old brilliancy comes back, when the air is again
full of the intoxicating effervescence of life, when the
well-remembered conviction comes over one that in Paris the main object
of every man's and every woman's existence is to make love, to amuse
and to be amused. Terrible things have happened, it is true; blood has
run like rain through the streets; and great works are created, great
books are written, and Art has here her workshop and her temple, her
craftsmen and her high priests. The Parisians have a right to take
themselves seriously; but we cannot--we graver, grimmer men of rougher
race. Do what they will, we can never quite believe that genius can
really hew and toil all day and laugh all night; we can never get rid
of the idea that there must be some vast delusion about Paris, some
great stage trick, some hugely clever deception by which a quicksand is
made to seem like bedrock, and a stone pavement like a river of
quicksilver.
The great cities all have faces. If all the people who live in each
city could be photographed exactly one over the other, the result would
be the general expression of that city's face. New York would be
discontented and eager; London would be stolidly glum and healthy, with
a little surliness; Berlin would be supercilious, overbearing; Rome
would be gravely resentful; and so on; but Paris would be gay,
incredulous, frivolous, pretty and impudent. The reality may be gone,
or may have changed, but the look is in her face still when the light
of a May morning shines on it.
What should we get, if we could blend into one picture the English
descriptions of Paris left us by Thackeray, Sala, Du Maurier? Would it
not show us that face as it is still, when we see it in spring? And
drawn by loving hands too, obeying the eyes of genius. An empty square
in Berlin suggests a possible regimental parade, in London a mass
meeting; in Paris it is a playground waiting for the Parisians to come
out and enjoy themselves after their manner, like pretty moths and
dragon-flies in the sun.
But there is another side to it. More than any city in the world, Paris
has a dual nature. Like Janus, she has two faces; like Endymion, half
her life is spent with the gods, half with the powers of darkness. She
has her sweet May mornings, but she has her hideous nights when the
north wind blows and the streets are of glass. She has her life of art
and beauty, and taste and delight, but she has her fevers of blood and
fury, her awful reactions of raw brutality, her hidden sores of strange
crime. Of all cities, Paris is the most refined, the most progressive
in the highest way, the most delicately sensitive; of all cities, too,
when the spasm is on her, she is the most mediaeval in her violence, her
lust for blood, her horrible 'inhumanity to man'--Burns might have
written those unforgettable lines of her.
Margaret was not thinking of these things as she took her way through
the Parc Monceau, not because it was nearer but because she loved the
old trees, and the contrast between the green peace within its gates
and the intense life outside. She was nearer than she had perhaps ever
been to fright, just then, and yet would not for the world have turned
back, nor even slackened her pace. In five minutes she would be ringing
the bell at Madame Bonanni's door.
She had heard the prima donna several times but had never met her. She
knew that she was no longer young, though her great voice was
marvellously fresh and elastic. There were men, of that unpleasant type
that is quite sure of everything, who recalled her first appearance and
said that she could not be less than fifty years old. As a matter of
fact, she was just forty-eight, and made no secret of it. Margaret had
learned this from her own singing teacher, but that was all she knew
about Madame Bonanni, when she stopped at the closed door of the
carriage entrance and rang the bell. She did not know whether she was
to meet a Juliet, an Elsa, a Marguerite or a Tosca. She remembered a
large woman with heavy arms, in various magnificent costumes and a
variety of superb wigs, with a lime-light complexion that was always
the same. The rest was music. That, with a choice selection of absurdly
impossible anecdotes, is as much as most people ever know about a great
singer or a great actress. Margaret had been spared the anecdotes,
because most of them were not fit for her to hear, but she had more
than once heard fastidious ladies speak of Madame Bonanni as 'that
dreadful woman.' No one, however, denied that she was a great artist,
and that was the only consideration in Margaret's present need.
She rang the bell and glanced at the big window over the entrance. It
had a complicated arrangement of folding green blinds, which were half
open, and a grey awning with a red border. She wondered whether it was
the window of the singer's own especial room.
The house was different from those next it, though she could hardly
tell where the difference lay. She thought that if she had not known
the number she should have instinctively picked out this house, amongst
all the others in that part of the Avenue Hoche, as the one in which
the prima donna or an actress must be living; and as she stood waiting,
a very simple and well-bred figure of a young lady, she felt that on
the other side of the door there was a whole world of which she knew
nothing, which was not at all like her own world, which was going to
offend something in her, and which it was nevertheless her duty to
enter. She was in that state of mind in which a nun breathes an
ejaculatory prayer against the wiles of Satan, and a delicately
nurtured girl thinks of her mother. Her heart hardly beat any faster
than usual, though she was sure that one of the great moments of her
life was at hand; but she drew her skirt round her a little closer, and
pursed her lips together a little more tightly, and was very glad to
feel that nobody could mistake her for anything but a lady.