(suiting the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to
shoot him, but that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see
that he did. Well, he settled for ten thousand francs. But that does not
let me off. What am I going to do with the baby? And now here you are
with one of the nastiest kind of cases for a French court. They can’t
stand foreigners stealing from them.”
“But what am I to do?” I wailed.
“She’ll have to stand a public trial. You must impress the judges. Find
out if she’s got friends. Get cablegrams. Show she has relatives willing
to help her. Read her letters. See if they don’t show what is behind
this, and when the trial comes have all the pretty girls and
prosperous-looking men you know present. They’ll look at you, and
they’ll think twice. Put on a campaign, woman.”
And so I started out to put on a campaign. I began by reading her
letters. I did not go far before I had the story—a tragic one. Miss C
was well born, her family prosperous and important in her state, she a
graduate of a great university. She had been a successful teacher, was
to have been married to a man whom she had loved for years with passion
and depth. For reasons I never knew the engagement was broken. In an
attempt to forget, patch up her shattered hopes, she had come to Europe
for study and travel; but she couldn’t forget, and every week for months
she had written the man long letters and every week they had come back
to her unopened.
Her despair became so black that, as she told me later, “I had to do
something.” And so, as when one bites on a sore tooth, she had begun to
steal. The proofs of it were all there in her room: a pathetic
collection of articles, not worth stealing, slipped mainly from bargain
counters. Among them there were at least seventy pairs of gloves of
every size and color—none of them any one of us would have worn. There
were some fifty pen knives; there were a pile of half-bolts of ribbon
and lace, innumerable spools of silk and cotton, packages of pins and
needles. All taken not because she wanted them, only to hurt herself in
another spot, take her mind from the original wound.
Understanding her wretchedness, I could sympathize with her folly. I
began my campaign by telling Madame of our trouble. She detested Miss C,
thought her crazy, though she admitted she was a better pupil than any
one of us, but here was excitement, also an opportunity to serve us.
What the consul had not suggested, she did.
There was a long wait. Our prisoner was transferred to the Conciergerie,
where I went to see her. A gruesome trip under the very windows from
which I knew Madame Roland had looked in the days before she mounted the
cart and took her last ride along the quay to the guillotine.
When the trial came the sympathizing claque was a grand success. At
Madame A’s suggestion we dressed for it in the best we had, bought new
flowers for our hats and fresh gloves, brought over two or three
handsome young women from the Champs Elysées Quarter. As for Madame A
herself, she made a toilette which even a judge would see and hear.
I had suggested that Monsieur X, being an important person, might
impress the judge. She was horrified. “Drag a member of the Government
into such a stupid affair! No, you Americans must do it. I’ll bring the
rich American.”
And she did. The rich American was a wealthy idler who for several
winters had taken lessons from her, largely, I think, because he found
her so pungent and amusing. He treated her royally as to fees and kept
her in flowers and candy. He looked his part of important man of
affairs. No one could have added more to our display, for one could see
even the judges eyeing enviously the elegance of his clothes.
Petty larceny cases were at that time, and I suppose still are, taken
into a courtroom perhaps forty by twenty, with seats for friends and the
public. On a mounted platform at the end sat three judges in their
robes. A dossier of each case lay before them; they had for our friend a
rather impressive collection of documents, cablegrams from her family,
proofs that her father was or had been a man of importance in public
affairs, her college diploma, her check book and a letter of credit
showing her to have ample funds.
When all was ready seven prisoners were brought in, six men half
degenerate petty thieves and our poor pale tired friend between them.
Nothing more incongruous could have been seen than this well dressed
woman of evident breeding flanked by these hopeless derelicts.
After looking over the papers in her dossier the judges looked at her
and then at us, now paler than she and praying for mercy with eyes and
clasped hands. They were perplexed and annoyed. Was there an
international angle to the case?
“What are you doing in Paris?” asked one of them harshly.
“Studying,” Miss C answered.
“You take a queer way to do it,” he said tartly. “Why did you do this?”
he asked more gently.
With a weary shake of her head she said, “Je ne sais pas.”
It was Madame A who won the case, for it was to her the judges turned as
one who, they knew at a glimpse, talked their language. She sailed down
the aisle to take her stand before them, and I never have seen any one,
man or woman, to whom one could so aptly apply the old figure, “like a
full-rigged ship.” They let her talk. She told how _comme il faut_ we
all were—as they could see. We were important, serious, rich. Yes, rich.
Then she said candidly: “This woman is crazy. Send her home to her
friends.”
She had solved their problem, told them their duty, and they followed
her advice, adding a fine of five hundred francs and an order that she
leave France in a week after her dismissal, and never return.
Madame A had saved Miss C, but she wanted no thanks from her, wouldn’t
see her; nor would Madame Bonnet let her come into the house save to
gather up her things. She had been a fool and got caught. To steal the
_riens_ as she had! It was a disgrace and respectable people like them
could not afford to have her cross their doorways.
Luckily for us, our association with American women was not confined to
problem cases. There was a disturbing number of them compelling me to
ask myself again and again if this break for freedom, this revolt
against security in which I myself was taking part was not a fatal
adventure bound to injure the family, the one institution in which I
believed more than any other, bound to produce a terrible crop of
wretchedness and abnormality. Had not even the few successes I saw about
me been paid for by a hardening of heart, a suppression of natural human
joyousness that was uglier even than the case of my poor Miss C?
But I was saved from too much perplexity over what freedom might be
doing to my compatriots by a gradual drifting into rather close
companionship with a number of Americans like ourselves taking lectures
at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France. It was a great piece of luck
for us since these Americans were all students of more experience and
attainment than any one of us. There was Dr. John Vincent of the History
Department of Johns Hopkins University, and along with him his wife who
spent hours of every day making beautiful copies of canvases in the
Luxembourg. There were Fred Parker Emery of the English Department of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife. There was a younger
man, Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate—a man who was to make a
distinguished career for himself in French history, and now Professor
Emeritus of History at Columbia, the author of many valuable books.
Serious work did not dull our new friends’ curiosity about French life
in general nor prevent a humorous detached view of things. We soon were
dining together every week in restaurants of the Quarter into which we
had never ventured before. Here for one franc, fifty (thirty cents) we
got a decent dinner—_vin compris_, as well as a gay company of students
and their girls. They were so merry, so natural in their gaiety that
none of us were anything but amused over their little ways. It was in
one of these restaurants that for the first time in my life I saw a girl
take out a compact, straighten her hat—her head had been on her
cavalier’s shoulder and it was out of plumb—straighten her hat and
powder her nose. That the day would come when the manners and customs of
the Latin Quarter of the nineties would be the manners and customs of
American girls in practically every rank of life would have been
unthinkable to me then.
Our new friends added greatly to the pleasure of the weekly sightseeing
excursions which had been one of the features of The Plan. “Every week
end, go somewhere”—I had laid down. So every Saturday we were taking a
_bateau mouche_ or train or tram journey costing only a few of our
precious sous—to Saint-Denis, the September fête at Saint-Cloud,
Versailles. If the weather was bad we went to the museums, the churches,
the monuments. Our new friends liked the idea. When spring came our
promenades took on a wider range. There were week-end trips to
Fontainebleau and to one after another of the great cathedral and
château towns—Chartres, Beauvais, Rheims, Pierrefonds, Compiègne.
Week ends in company as genial, unaffected and intelligent as that of
our new friends proved were a rare experience. When the time came for a
final break-up of the crowd in August of 1892—my first companions had
already gone back to America—those left of us decided to take a farewell
vacation together. The difficulty was to settle on a place. Here was
something not on my schedule. We considered Etaples, Beuzeval-Houlgate,
Belle-Île and finally at the last moment took tickets to
Mont-Saint-Michel—a glorious spot; but after watching the tide come in
for two successive days, after climbing to the top and descending to the
bottom of the château, sitting out sunsets on the wall and eating
omelettes at Madame Poulard’s until we were fed to the full we pushed on
to Saint-Malo and exhausted it as quickly as we had Mont-Saint-Michel.
As we listened bored to the orchestra in the square a poster on a wall
suddenly caught our collective eyes. It told us to go to the Island of
Jersey. With one accord we said “Let’s,” packed our bags and caught the
steamer all within an hour. At Jersey we walked into lodgings: rooms,
plenty of them; a salon looking on the sea; such sea fish and vegetables
and fruit as only that island offers. We thought it was costing a
fortune, but when the bill came—house, housekeeper, maid, and food such
as we had not had for a year—it totaled just eighty cents apiece for a
day.
That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris. I began the
second in deep depression, for several good reasons. First, I had
exhausted my reserve. I think I came back from my vacation with twenty
francs in my pocket. All my American associates were gone or going soon.
I had a new address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood
of the Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and,
hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at
least two to finish my undertaking. The homesickness and hunger for my
family had never been appeased. I had lived on their letters. If they
did not come regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of
their daily life. My mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully
frank about her neighbors and about the family. She told who was at
church, fretted because father spent so much time with his precious
Sunday school class of girls, described every new frock, told what they
had for Sunday dinner, announced the first green corn in the garden, the
blossoming of her pet flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the
spring, roses in the summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter.
Occasionally she would apologize for her homely details, particularly
after I had written a long guidebookish epistle home describing some
ancient monument I had been visiting. How I must have bored them
sometimes! But home details—“I live off them,” I told her. “You can’t
tell me too much about your daily doings.”
This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and
accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of
the possibilities in telepathy. This came the first Sunday of June,
1892. I had hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most
unaccountable alarm. What it was about, I did not know. I could not work
and finally went to the street. For hours I walked, not able to throw
off the black thing that enveloped me. It was late in the afternoon when
I returned to find a compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting.
As he was leaving the apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy
of _Le Temps_ and as I always did turned first to the news from _les
Etats Unis_. It was to read that the city of Titusville and its neighbor
Oil City had been utterly destroyed by flood and fire. The only
buildings left in my home town were said to be the railroad station and
a foundry. A hundred and fifty persons had been drowned or burned to
death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills.
At that moment my caller came back for his umbrella. I seized him
roughly: “Read, read. What shall I do?”
He was a sensible man. “Steady, steady,” he said. “Put on your hat, and
we’ll go out and get other papers.” We were soon back with the last
editions of all the English and French journals. They all gave space to
the disaster, each more distressing and unsatisfactory than the one
before.
This explains my black day, I told myself. The family is dead—our home
gone. It was useless to cable, for the newspapers all spoke of broken
communications. But the next morning as I was dressing, Madame Bonnet
came in with a cablegram. Hardly daring to open it I backed into the
corner of the room to feel the support behind me of the walls while my
friend Mrs. Vincent, still with me, watched with white face. The
telegram was from my brother, and it had just one word. “Safe.”
When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of
horror. For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of
my father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills.
But they were safe, our home was standing. The experience left me more
nervous than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took
all the resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under
control.
Although I was beginning my second year with no money in the bank I had
friendly relations with two publishing firms that seemed to see a
possible something in my work. There was _Scribner’s Magazine_, a
relation of which I was justly proud; not only had they encouraged me
about my book, but they had asked me to let them consider magazine
subjects that interested me and that I was doing. But, while it was the
relation on which I hoped to build serious work in the future, at the
moment I must share it with something of quicker return; and that seemed
to be the McClure Syndicate. I felt surer of this after my first meeting
with its founder, S. S. McClure. That meeting had been just before my
vacation in the summer of 1892; Mr. McClure had dropped into Paris in
the meteoric fashion I found was usual with him, and came by appointment
to see me at my new address in the Rue Malebranche. This crooked and
steep passage off the Rue Saint-Jacques was unknown to half the
_cochers_ of Paris, but Mr. McClure found it and arrived bareheaded,
watch in hand, breathless from running up my four flights—eighty steps.
“I’ve just ten minutes,” he announced; “must leave for Switzerland
tonight to see Tyndall.”
A slender figure, S. S. McClure, a shock of tumbled sandy hair, blue
eyes which glowed and sparkled. He was close to my own age, a vibrant,
eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and
the cynical. His utter simplicity, outrightness, his enthusiasm and
confidence captivated me. He was so new and unexpected that practical
questions such as, “Would you be interested in articles on ...” and “How
much will you pay?” dropped out of mind. Before I knew it I was
listening to the story of his struggle up. How as a peddler he had
earned money for college—who could have let him go without buying?—his
vast schemes of learning undertaken when a freshman at Knox College, one
of which was to study every word in the English dictionary, its start,
its development, its present stage, its possible future, his beautiful
romance with Hattie, his wife, the story of the Syndicate and of
John—always John this, John that, and last a magazine to be—soon. And
here I was to come in. While he talked I was managing somehow to tell
him the story of my life and hopes and to fit things together.
What was to have been ten minutes stretched to two hours or more. “I
must go,” he suddenly cried. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too
late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.”
“Certainly,” I said. I had forty dollars there in my desk, the sum set
aside for my farewell vacation. It never occurred to me to do anything
but give it to him.
“How queer,” he said, “that you should have that much money in the
house!”
“Isn’t it?” I replied. “It never happened before.” But I didn’t mention
the vacation.
I had some bad moments after he was gone. “Will-of-the-wisp,” I said, “a
fascinating will-of-the-wisp. I’ll never see that money. He’ll simply
never think of it again. I’ll have to give up that vacation. Serves me
right.”
I did see the money promptly, for Mr. McClure did not forget as I
expected him to do, but wired his London office that night to send me a
check.
What the new magazine would want from me, I gathered in my long and
exciting interview with Mr. McClure, was articles on the achievements of
the great French and English scientists. Not history, not literature,
not politics, but science, discoveries, inventions, and adventures.
Here I was back to my college days. I found my natural enthusiasm for
the physical world and its meanings which Professor Tingley had directed
was not dead, only sleeping. I found that, little as I knew of all these
things, I still had something of a vocabulary and knew enough to find my
way about by hard work. There was Pasteur; there was Janssen, who was
building an observatory on Mont Blanc; there was Bertillon, the inventor
of the system of criminal identification then attracting the attention
of the world. It took all my courage to talk with these gentlemen, but I
was soon to find they were the simplest and friendliest of people. For
two years I kept on hand popular scientific articles whose success
depended on interviews with distinguished specialists, and in that time
I met with only one rebuff; but that was a very contemptuous one. It was
not from a man but from a gifted American woman who was doing valuable
special work in one of the great French scientific institutions. The
effect of scholarship on a woman, I told myself. She doesn’t ripen, she
hardens. I know better now. It happens, but by no means to all women.
Take Dr. Florence Sabin, a great human being as well as a great
specialist.
The contacts I made on this work left me precious memories. There was my
acquaintance with Madame and Monsieur Pasteur. One of the first articles
Mr. McClure asked for was on the Institute, then but eight years old. Of
course that meant an interview with Pasteur if it could be managed. It
turned out to be easy enough.
The Pasteurs lived in a spacious apartment in the Institute: big rooms
with heavy furniture, heavy curtains, dark soft rugs of the period. It
was not until I was actually in the library where Madame Pasteur led me
that I realized how sadly Pasteur was crippled by the paralysis of his
left side which he had suffered twenty-five years earlier after three
years of incessant and exhausting labor on the diseases of the silkworm.
He moved with difficulty, he hesitated painfully over words; but his
eyes were bright, curious, interested.
After a few more or less stumbling explanations on my part we fell to
talking naturally. They made it so easy. Mr. McClure was insistent at
that moment on what were called human documents, series of portraits of
eminent people from babyhood to 1893. I must have a Pasteur series.
Monsieur and Madame were delighted with the idea. The old albums were
brought out, and the three of us bent over them exactly as we did now
and then at home when the question of W. W. T. at one, S. A. T. at two,
I. M. T. at three came up. Again and again they stopped to say: “Tiens!
Voilà Pierre, comment il est drôle!” “Marie, comme elle est jolie!”
When the album was closed and we had talked long of his early life I
made an effort to get some idea of what he was thinking of now, but he
said: “No science. If you want that, go see Monsieur Roux.” And so
reluctantly I went down the stairs that led from the apartment, the
kindly old faces watching me, for Monsieur and Madame Pasteur had done
me the honor to see me off, and Monsieur kept repeating as I went down,
“Look out, the stairs are dark.”
When finally the article came out, in the second issue of _McClure’s
Magazine_, September, 1893, I took a copy to him. He was as pleased as a
boy with the pictures. On a later visit he complained that one of his
colleagues had carried off the copy. Could I get him another? When I
took this to him it was with the request that he write a maxim for the
January, 1894, issue of the magazine.
Mr. McClure had had the happy idea of asking from leaders of science,
industry, religion, literature a paragraph or two embodying their
convictions as to the outlook for the world’s future, their hopes for
it. There was need enough of encouragement. The world had been going
through as bad a year as often comes its way, a year of despair,
uncertainty, hopelessness. What was ahead? The replies which filled
eighteen pages of the magazine included letters and sentiments from
Huxley, Tyndall, Max Müller, Henry Stanley, Julia Ward Howe, Cardinal
Gibbons, and a score of others: noble collection. It was published under
the heading “The Edge of the Future.” It raised my interest in the
venture to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It was for me the spirit, the
credo of the new magazine. It meant something more than I had dreamed
possible in magazine journalism.
For the “Edge of the Future” undertaking I was asked at a last moment to
collect all the sentiments I could from distinguished Frenchmen.
Pasteur, certainly, and he was easy. “Of course I will do it,” he said.
“Come back, and I’ll have it ready.” But when I went back I found him in
a flurry. He had written his _pensée_, and it was lost.
“Never mind,” comforted Madame Pasteur. “She’ll come back when you have
it ready for her.”
And so I did; but it was unfinished, and Madame Pasteur had to stand
over him, encouraging him with tender _très biens_ and little pats while
he wrote. He was peevish as a child; he didn’t like the looks of it,
tried again, and finally with a pathetic look said: “I’m afraid you
don’t want either. But if you do, take your choice.” And so I did.
What he had written was:
“_In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power
fails._”
Before the time limit was up I had autographed sentiments from Alphonse
Daudet, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, François Coppée and Jules Simon, as veil
as a collection of impressions still clear. There was Zola.
I carried away from my visit with him an impression of a man agitated,
confused, sulky, an impression emphasized by the amazing conglomeration
of furnishings of all ages and all countries which cluttered the entry,
stairway, and big salon of his house. I had to wind my way between suits
of armor, sedan chairs, Chinese lacquered tables and seats, carved and
painted wood to reach him standing at the end of the room. The whole
house was like that, as is shown in a series of sketches McClure
published in one of the early numbers. He talked long and violently
about his enemies, defended his realism, hinted that he was a latter-day
Balzac, also a great collector spending his leisure in Paris at art
sales, which accounted for my difficulty in finding him in his own
salon. The sentiment he gave me was a reflection of his talk and of the
point of view of his school.
“War,” he wrote, “is the very life, the law of the world. How pitiful is
man when he introduces ideas of justice and of peace, when implacable
nature is only a continual battle field.”