courteous, the quietest Frenchman I ever met.
Jules Simon touched me deeply by what he wrote:
“Faire le bien
Récolter l’ingratitude
Se confier à Dieu.”
7
A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR
Now that _McClure’s_ was really started, I felt that on what I could do
for them and the two or three articles in which I had interested
_Scribner’s_ I could live, and that I might drop everything else and
devote the bulk of my time to my real business—a study of the life of
Madame Roland. She had never been out of my mind. Soon after my arrival
I had found to my joy that my daily walks to and from the National
Library, where I was spending most of my time, could be laid through the
very Quarter in which her father had carried on his trade of goldsmith
and past the house in which she had been born, the church where she had
taken her first communion, the prison where she had spent her last days,
along the route she followed to the guillotine.
“What luck, what luck,” I used to say, “that I should be taking the very
walks she took!” It was amazing how little things had changed. The house
where Madame Roland was born still stands at the western point of the
Ile de la Cité looking down on the statue of Henry IV and the busy
Seine, and to the right the Pont-Neuf, in her day the heart of Paris and
still to me one of its most fascinating spots.
As she slowly came to life something more important began to take shape,
something which had been little more than a set of dates and events in
my mind. I began to see the Revolution already well on its way when she
was born; I saw it rising around her, sucking her in, using her when she
thought it had gone far enough and should check its excesses, throwing
her over without her head while true to type it went the whole way,
finally falling exhausted into the hands of a dictator equipped with
guns.
The physical scars of all this long train of violence could be seen on
my daily walks or studied in the Musée Carnavalet where Paris has
gathered documents and relics of what she has destroyed as well as of
what she has achieved. But besides the scars of Madame Roland’s time
were other scars dating from the centuries, scars of revolutionary
outbreaks of the same type hardly to be distinguished from those of the
period I was trying to visualize; and the more you knew of these
explosions, the more they seemed to fit together. You could not bound
Madame Roland’s Revolution as I had supposed. What I had called the
French Revolution was only an unusually violent episode in the lifelong
struggle of Paris to preserve herself as a free individual, the slave of
no man or group of men. Revolution had always been her last resort in
making herself what she was, in forcing kings to do her bidding,
tolerating them when they fed her well, beautified her, protected her,
but throwing them over when they asked too much money for the job they
did.
The marks were all over the city. How could I understand Madame Roland
until I understood the elemental force which for centuries had been
sweeping Paris in big or little gusts? Did these who sought to loosen
the force suppose that they created it or could control it, once
loosened? Had Madame Roland, confident as she had been of her ability to
act as Providence, frank as she was in saying that no role but that of
Providence was suited to her powers, been anything more than a
revolutionary tool and victim?
It had always been at work and still was. I must find out about it, and
it looked at the moment as if I were going to have a good opportunity to
watch a revolutionary revival—of what proportions no man could tell.
The Panama affair had disgusted all self-respecting Frenchmen. “Is the
Republic to be a failure?” they were asking. Nothing so gives heart to
the leaders of lost causes, disappointed political groups, advocates of
panaceas and particularly to the radical-minded, as a rousing political
scandal. Panama stirred all the parties of France to action—Bourbons and
Bonapartists, extreme conservatives, socialists of all the many
varieties, and particularly the anarchists.
There were four groups of the latter, no one of which would have
anything to do with any of the others. It was the Independents who now
went into action. Members of this group worked alone, letting not even
their fellows know what they had in mind. A branch of the order existed
in the United States, and it was one of them, Alexander Berkman, who
attempted this same year, 1892, to assassinate Henry Frick in
Pittsburgh. The Independent who acted first in Paris was Jules Ravachol
by name, a man some thirty-three years old, a dyer by trade, with a
courageous but not a criminal face. So I thought when, a little later, I
secured his photograph and measurements from the Criminal Identification
Bureau for _McClure’s Magazine_.
Ravachol began by blowing up various houses. It was like a tocsin. All
over France similar outrages followed, and they continued at intervals
for two or more years—the crowning one a bomb thrown in the Chamber of
Deputies in December of 1893 by a notorious anarchist known as Auguste
Vaillant. Several Deputies and eighty or more spectators in the gallery
were wounded seriously. It was a ghastly affair.
The outbreaks and the rumors of outbreaks as well as the actual
destruction had a bad effect on the nerves of many of the French. There
was Alphonse Daudet.
Madame Daudet had offered to get me a _pensée_ for the collection I was
making for _McClure’s Magazine_, and arranged for me to call for the
copy. After we had tea she took me to the library to see how “Alphonse
was getting on.” It was my first glimpse of him: a little man, with a
shock of straight black hair which stood out rather ferociously at the
moment, evidently from running his fingers through it. His face was
pale, his eyes astonishingly black and bright. He had lost two or three
teeth, and the remaining ones were not very good. He was terribly
excited. He had not finished his _pensée_, he said, because he had just
had a visit from an anarchist. The servant had let in a man who had
demanded twenty francs to buy a wagonload of dynamite to blow up the
Hôtel de Ville. He grew more and more excited as he talked.
“I really expected the man to kill me,” he said, “and I got out this
revolver which I always keep in the drawer.” And he pulled it out to
show it to me. “A pretty affair,” he said, “if while you two were
visiting in there a tragedy had gone on in here.”
I so shared the general nervousness that, more than once when I saw a
man on the omnibus carrying a package, I feared a bomb and abruptly
descended; yet along with all my nervousness I was always nosing around,
hoping to see a bomb go off. It seemed to me that was my journalistic
duty, but I never saw anything more than the ruins they had caused. I
did see a pretty good revolution, one that had all the earmarks that I
had been finding in my attempted study of Revolution. It was in July of
1893. This time it was youth in revolt, the youth of the Latin Quarter
and the Beaux Arts. From start to finish the revolt went on practically
under my windows.
The Annual Ball of the Beaux Arts in the winter of 1893 had scandalized
Paris. As I remember, the exhibit which outraged was a lady who
promenaded with no other covering than a mosquito net. The protest
finally reached the Chamber of Deputies, where a member—Berenger—took it
up in a serious way and proposed a restrictive law which angered the
students. It was, they said, an interference with their right to amuse
themselves. Immediately long and picturesque _monômes_—single lines of
men, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, the other grasping a
hand of the one behind—threaded their way up and down the boulevards,
particularly in the vicinity of the Luxembourg, chanting at the top of
their voices, “Conspuez Berenger!” “Conspuez Loze [Chief of Police]!”
“Down with the puritans!”
The demonstration began on a Saturday, and that night a great crowd
centered in a café in my neighborhood. The place was packed inside and
out with youths noisier and noisier as the hours went on. Finally the
crowd became so unruly that a squadron of police charged them. There was
a great hubbub and in the mêlée somebody hurled one of the heavy white
match boxes which were used on all the tables in the Latin Quarter
restaurants—a dangerous missile. It hit an innocent spectator who had
come to see the fun—a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three from the
other side of the river—and killed him. The students were wild with
rage, and all that night and all next day they tore up and down the
streets, pulling up trees, knocking over kiosks, breaking windows.
The shopkeepers of Paris, having the experience of centuries of
revolutionary outbreaks behind them, knew when to retire; and before
Monday night the heavy wooden shutters with which they protect their
fronts were all up, their doors closed, and the Quarter was alive with
soldiers and mounted police. The center of the disturbance that day,
however, was not the Latin Quarter but the streets around the Chamber of
Deputies, where a great band of angry students kept up a tumult. There
were funny incidents. A big group of deputies came out to look over the
demonstration, and on the instant the air rang with the jingling of
hundreds of big copper sous pitched on the pavements to cries of
“Panama, Panama.”
The Dahomans were pets of Paris in those days, a picturesque addition to
the population. Handsomer creatures never were seen. It happened a
carriageful, naked to the waist, attempted to pass through the crowd. At
once the students set up the cry, “Berenger, Berenger, bring ’em a
figleaf, bring ’em a figleaf.”
By Tuesday the Latin Quarter had begun to look sinister. The inevitable
had happened.
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those
who start it. Advocates of all sorts of systems and causes join it,
seize it, if one of them can produce a real leader. A students’ revolt
can easily become an anarchist raid, with looting and arson on the side
by professional lawbreakers, who always come out of their hiding places
when anarchy breaks out. As the to-be-expected invasion of the Latin
Quarter from without began, destruction increased. Omnibuses were seized
and, at strategic points, piled up as barricades.
But the rioters never succeeded in making a stand. Steadily and quietly,
night and day, platoons of mounted police moved up and down the
boulevards and into the Quarter. I tried at first to go on my usual
round, hoping to learn something of revolutionary technique, but after I
had been caught in a crowd the cavalry was driving from the Place de la
Sorbonne, had heard bullets whistling over my head, been forced to take
refuge in the portal of the church, I was content to stay at home.
However, there was excitement enough there.
Our street was narrow and steep. When the cavalry charged, it would fill
up with the rioters. The movement was amazingly quiet—no shouting, no
shots, the only noise the clatter of the horses’ feet as they drove the
mass ahead.
This invasion of our street produced panic among the foreigners in the
house. There were a couple of middle-aged American women on the floor
below me out seeing the world; but they had not bargained for a
Revolution, and during the three or four days our Revolution was going
on they shut themselves night and day in their room.
The Egyptians were in a worse panic. They whispered horrible stories of
what happened in revolutions, and one night when fires had been set in
our neighborhood and the firemen were out, they were sure we were all
going to be burned alive. “Here we are, fourth floor,” cried one of
them, “too high up to get out. We’ll all be dead by morning.”
A week was as long as the students could hold out in the torrid weather.
There were too many cavalry, too many soldiers, too alert a police
force, and also there were the apaches, the anarchists. It was no longer
their revolution. They gave up; and by the end of the week kiosks were
replaced, trees replanted, windows and doors opened, and we were all
going on in our normal way.
Over, all quiet, nevertheless it was a pretty fine little revolution
while it lasted. Was it not like Ravachol and Vaillant, a symptom, the
kind of symptom by which the rise of the revolutionary fever always
announces itself? Were there those who would nourish these symptoms as
carefully as Madame Roland and her friends had nourished them in her
day? If so, you would get your explosion. And for what good, I was
asking myself.
Madame Roland had lost her head because she was not content with a first
Revolution which had given the country a Constitution. She wanted to get
the King and Queen and the highborn of all varieties out of the way. She
wanted a Republic. She lost her head to those who were not satisfied
with getting King and Queen out of the way, who wanted her and her
followers out of the way as soon as they began to cry for order. Her
Republic had collapsed under Napoleon Bonaparte. There had come a return
to the Bourbon, then a Republic, then a return to a Bonaparte and again
her Republic. But was this corrupt and vulgar Republic I was hearing
about any better than the corrupt and scandalous court she hated and
helped overthrow? Was the affair of the diamond necklace any worse than
the affair of Panama? Was the Bastille a more ghastly prison than the
spot where they were now sending political prisoners—the Devil’s Island
of the Tropics?
I did not have the consolation of a fixed political formula to pull me
out of my muddle. It is very easy to put everything in its place when
you have that and are armed with its faith and its phrases. But here was
I with a heroine on my hands whose formula and methods and motives I was
beginning to question as I was questioning the formula, the methods and
motives of France of the moment.
What kept me at my task, prevented me from throwing up Madame Roland and
going on a blind research for the nature and roots of revolution, was
the brilliant and friendly intellectual circle into which my quest of
Madame Roland had led me.
Among the names I had been advised to include in my series on the
writing women of Paris was that of A. Mary F. Robinson, an Englishwoman
of the pre-Raphaelite school, a poetess of delicacy and distinction who
had married one of the eminent scholars of France, James Darmesteter, a
Hebrew and a cripple. One had only to look into his face to know that
here was a great soul. And what interested me so was that this something
in his face, his remarkable head, wiped out all sense of incongruity
between the mating of this slender and exquisite woman with this man of
alien race and crippled body. I never felt for a moment an incongruity.
When Monsieur Darmesteter learned I was after Madame Roland he was
immediately helpful. “You must know Léon Marillier of the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes. He is a great-great-grandson of Madame Roland. He has
papers which have never been given to the public. I will write you a
letter.” Which he did, a letter which brought me an invitation to
dinner.
This dinner was the gate to a whole new social and intellectual world.
Here was a French academic household of the best sort, simple,
hard-working, gay. Léon Marillier was an excellent and respected
scholar. Jeanne, his wife, a sister of the Breton poet, Anatole Le Braz,
was not only a skillful household manager but, like the wives of many
French scholars, her husband’s amanuensis, copy and proof reader, and
general adviser. She had particular charm among Parisians, for she was a
Bretonne who loved her _pays_ and kept its distinguishing marks without
being provincial. Here I found, too, eager to go over the papers which
Léon Marillier spread out after dinner for my inspection, one who was to
prove a most helpful and delightful friend, Charles Borgeaud the eminent
Swiss scholar, a friend of my friends the Vincents now back at Johns
Hopkins.
But this was not the end of it. There was a closer connection, Léon
Marillier’s mother, the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, and they
quickly passed me on to her.
Here again I was invited to dinner, and here I discovered a circle
different from anything I had ever known, a household of brilliant men
presided over by Madame Marillier, a most gracious woman, of fine
intelligence, freed and mellowed by a tragic life, as I was to learn.
More than any woman I have ever known, Madame Marillier came to stand in
my mind and heart as the personification of that quality which the
French hold so high—_bonté_.
The leader of the group of men was a Sorbonne professor of
history—Charles Seignobos. He was a learned man who carried his learning
not as an accomplishment but as a social utility. Seignobos was a not
too dogmatic socialist and materialist, a good pianist, a marvelous
talker, a lovable and pungent personality. Around him there gathered
every Wednesday evening for dinner at Madame Marillier’s table a number
of young men—all serious students, liberal minds, hard workers. After
dinner six or eight more habitués of the house were sure to drop in for
coffee and for talk.
Among these regular habitués was Lucien Herr, who at that moment was
seeking to convert to socialism the two men who in the years since have
done most to make the doctrine an impregnable factor in political life
in France—Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, the recent premier of France. Herr
at that time was the librarian at the Ecole Normale, as well as managing
editor of the _Revue de Paris_. In both positions he met many young
would-be scholars and writers. When one of them seemed to him to have
the makings of a liberal thinker he worked over him as a missionary
works to save a soul. He was so working in the early nineties over Jean
Jaurès and Léon Blum.
Occasionally Lucien Herr brought to the Seignobos circle one of those
whom he was seeking to convert. If Jaurès and Blum were ever among them
they made no particular impression on me, much as I dislike to think so.
They were simply a couple of Lucien’s young men.
Although Herr believed the socialistic state he sought would and could
come by a peaceful evolution, the thing I remember best about him was an
exhibit of indifference to bloodshed which shocked me to the core. The
night that Vaillant threw the bomb in the Chamber of Deputies the group
was dining with Madame Marillier; Lucien was late, not an unusual
happening. We were halfway through when he came in, pale, exalted. We
all turned in our seats as he standing told us how he had been in the
Chamber when the bomb was thrown, of the explosion in mid-air, of the
wounded all about him. He had no word of the suffering, only of the
political bearings of the deed.
“But the wounded, Lucien,” broke in Seignobos, who could not endure the
thought of pain.
“Cela ne me fait rien,” said Lucien.
His opposition to bloodshed was intellectual, not emotional like that of
Seignobos.
On the face of it nobody could have been less at home in such a group
than I, a tongue-tied alien, all eyes and ears, contributing nothing but
my presence; yet it came about before many weeks that “Mademoiselle
Mees,” as Seignobos called me, had a place at the weekly dinners.
Undoubtedly the friendship that sprang up quickly between Madame
Marillier and me, as well as the fact that I asked nothing but to
listen, explained it. I could afford to listen; I had never heard such
talk. There was nothing on earth that was foreign or forbidden. Opinions
were free as the air, but they had to fight for their lives. There was a
complete absence of pretense, and sophistry was thrown as soon as it
came to its feet. That it was a friendly circle, its acceptance of me
was proof enough.
Friendliness began at the door when I arrived Wednesday evening. It was
always Seignobos who came rushing to meet me, seized my hand, helped me
off with my wraps, danced about me asking eager boyish questions about
what I had been doing since I was there last. The talk begun, I was
forgotten unless by chance he suddenly recalled me. Then he would jump
up, run over, demand, “What do you think of that?” Half the time I was
thinking less about what they were saying than about their exciting
personalities. They seemed to be vividly related to life, but much of
their talk was based on something that was not life—abstract literature,
learning, speculation. I realized this when they talked of America.
Seignobos saw it only as he had read about it in books. It seemed to him
not to be producing that intellectual élite on which he felt the
salvation of society depended—a group capable of doing the thinking and
planning for a world of lesser men. It was the lesser men who were
coming to the top in America. Confronted with superiority from America,
he refused to believe it native. One summer I presented to him a friend
of mine, a woman of exquisite mind and manner. “She is not American?” he
said. “They do not produce that kind in America. Where was she
born—where was she educated?”
“In Kansas,” I said. He bounded out of his chair like a ball. “It
couldn’t be, it couldn’t be. Kansas is only a half-settled state. One
has only to look to see this is a rare type that you have brought here.
She never came out of Kansas.”
I never saw him more outraged than one day when pressure was brought to
bear on him to accept a position in the University of Chicago at a
handsome salary. Jumping up, he raced around the room. “Chicago! What
can a man of intelligence find there? You can’t build an intellectual
center on money and organization. It is a growth. Five hundred years
from now Chicago may be fit for scholars, but not now.”
He mistrusted the intelligence of the United States, but less than that
of England. Americans were not stupid: Englishmen were. He wanted none
of them in his circle. I met this prejudice head-on when I asked
permission to introduce to him a brilliant young English friend, H.
Wickham Steed.
I had never known a young man who was surer of what he wanted to do in
life or who was preparing for it in a more thorough and logical fashion
than Steed. His ambition was to become a foreign correspondent of the
London _Times_. He knew that for this it was necessary for him to be
familiar with the languages, the history, the men, the politics of the
leading countries of the Continent. He began by taking some two years in
Germany. Now he was acquainting himself with the French language,
literature, politics, leaders. I found Steed especially interesting on a
subject of which I knew little, although we were having reverberations
in the United States. This was the philosophy of Karl Marx. Steed was
familiar with its then status in Germany, knew its leaders—Liebknecht
and Engels. He envied me my relations with the group at Madame
Marillier’s, envied me my Wednesday night dinner, as he might very well.
“Could you not present me?” he asked.
I knew how jealous they were of their circle, and knew, too, they
thought the English a stupid bigoted race and wanted none of it. But
Steed was certainly not stupid. Besides, he was young, and I had a
feeling that nothing would be better for him than contact with these
enlightened friends of mine. And so with some hesitation I told
Seignobos about him and asked him if I might bring him.
“Never! The English are stupid.”
“You are wrong about Steed,” I argued. “You ought to be willing to give
him the benefit of the doubt.”
After some arguments I was allowed to present my protégé. As I expected,
they pounced on him mercilessly. It was fine to see the way he held his
own and a relief when, after an hour or more of baiting, Seignobos came
to my corner and in a tone of surprise and wonder said, “Mademoiselle
Mees, your Englishman is intelligent.”
When they came to that conclusion they took Steed in, and from that time
on he was welcome. All through the years of his brilliant career as a
correspondent and later through the war as foreign editor of the London
_Times_, the association with Seignobos continued. In his recollections,
“Through Thirty Years,” Steed tells of his introduction to the circle—“a
sort of entrance examination” which convinced his examiners he was less
stupid than he ought to have been.