The first invitation I ever received into a purely Parisian interior
might have been copied out of a novel by Paul Bourget. Its lure was thus
phrased: “_Un peu de musique et d’agréables femmes_.” It answered to my
inward vision of Paris. My experiences in London, which fifteen years
earlier I had entered with my mouth open as I might have entered some
city of Oriental romance, had, of course, done little to destroy my
illusions about Paris, for the ingenuousness of the artist is happily
indestructible. Hence, my inward vision of Paris was romantic, based on
the belief that Paris was essentially “different.” Nothing more banal in
London than a “little music,” or even “some agreeable women”! But what
a difference between a little music and _un peu de musique!_ What an
exciting difference between agreeable women and _agréables femmes!_
After all, this difference remains nearly intact to this day. Nobody
who has not lived intimately in and with Paris can appreciate the unique
savour of that word _femmes_. “Women” is a fine word, a word
which, breathed in a certain tone, will make all men--even bishops,
misogynists, and political propagandists--fall to dreaming! But _femmes_
is yet more potent. There cling to it the associations of a thousand
years of dalliance in a land where dalliance is passionately understood.
The usual Paris flat, high up, like the top drawer of a chest of
drawers! No passages, but multitudinous doors. In order to arrive at
any given room it is necessary to pass through all the others. I passed
through the dining-room, where a servant with a marked geometrical
gift had arranged a number of very small plates round the rim of a vast
circular table. In the drawing-room my host was seated at a grand piano
with a couple of candles in front of him and a couple of women behind
him. See the light glinting on bits of the ebon piano, and on his face,
and on their chins and jewels, and on the corner of a distant picture
frame; and all the rest of the room obscure! He wore a jacket,
negligently; the interest of his attire was dramatically centred in his
large, limp necktie; necktie such as none hut a hero could unfurl in
London. A man with a very intelligent face, eager, melancholy (with a
sadness acquired in the Divorce Court), wistful, appealing. An idealist!
He called himself a publicist. One of the women, a musical composer,
had a black skirt and a white blouse; she was ugly but provocative. The
other, all in white, was pretty and sprightly, but her charm lacked the
perverseness which is expected and usually found in Paris; she painted,
she versified, she recited. With the eye of a man who had sat for years
in the editorial chair of a ladies’ paper, I looked instinctively at the
hang of the skirts. It was not good. Those vague frocks were such as
had previously been something else, and would soon he transformed by
discreet modifications into something still else. Candlelight was best
for them. But what grace of demeanour, what naturalness, what candid
ease and appositeness of greeting, what absence of self-consciousness!
Paris is the self-unconscious.
I was presented as _le romancier anglais_. It sounded romantic. I
thought: “What a false impression they are getting, as of some vocation
exotic and delightful! If only they knew the prose of it!” I thought of
their conception of England, a mysterious isle. When Balzac desired
to make a woman exquisitely strange, he caused her to be born in
Lancashire.
My host begged permission to go on playing. In the intervals of being
a publicist, he composed music, and he was now deciphering a manuscript
freshly written. I bent over between the two women, and read the title:
“_Ygdrasil: reverie._”
*****
When there were a dozen or fifteen people in the room, and as
many candles irregularly disposed like lighthouses over a complex
archipelago, I formed one of, a group consisting of those two women and
another, a young dramatist who concealed his expressive hands in a pair
of bright yellow gloves, and a middle-aged man whose constitution was
obviously ruined. This last was librarian of some public library--I
forget which--and was stated to be monstrously erudite in all
literatures. I asked him whether he had of late encountered anything new
and good in English.
“I have read nothing later than Swinburne,” he replied in a thin,
pinched voice--like his features, like his wary and suffering eyes.
Speaking with an icy, glittering pessimism, he quoted Stendhal to the
effect that a man does not change after twenty-five. He supported the
theory bitterly and joyously, and seemed to taste the notion of his own
intellectual rigidity, of his perfect inability to receive new ideas
and sensations, as one tastes an olive. The young dramatist, in a
beautifully curved phrase, began to argue that certain emotional and
purely intellectual experiences did not come under the axiom, but the
librarian would have none of such a reservation. Then the women joined
in, and it was just as if they had all five learnt off by heart one of
Landor’s lighter imaginary conversations, and were performing it.
Well convinced that they were all five absurdly wrong, fanciful, and
sentimental either in optimism or pessimism, I nevertheless stood
silent and barbaric. Could I cut across that lacework of shapely elegant
sentences and apposite gestures with the jagged edge of what in England
passes for a remark? The librarian was serious in his eternal frost. The
dramatist had the air of being genuinely concerned about the matter; he
spoke with deference to the librarian, with chivalrous respect to the
women, and to me with glances of appeal for help; possibly the reason
was that he was himself approaching the dreadful limit of twenty-five.
But the women’s eyes were always contradicting the polite seriousness of
their tones. Their eyes seemed to be always mysteriously talking about
something else; to be always saying: “All this that you are discussing
is trivial, but I am brooding for ever on what alone is important.”
This, while true of nearly all women, is disturbingly true of Parisians.
The ageing librarian, by dint of freezing harder, won the altercation:
it was as though he stabbed them one by one with a dagger of ice. And
presently he was lecturing them. The women were now admiring him.
There was something in his face worn by maladies, in his frail physical
unpleasantness, and in his frigid and total disgust with life, that
responded to their secret dream. Their gaze caressed him, and he felt
it falling on him like snow. That he intensely enjoyed his existence was
certain.
They began talking low among themselves, the women, and there was an
outburst of laughter; pretty giggling laughter. The two who had been
at the piano stood aside and whispered and laughed with a more intimate
intimacy, struggling to suppress the laughter, and yet every now and
then letting it escape from sheer naughtiness. They cried. It was the
_fou rire_. Impossible to believe that a moment before they had been
performing in one of Landor’s imaginary conversations, and that they
were passionately serious about art and life and so on. They might have
been schoolgirls.
“_Farceuses, toutes les deux!_” said the host, coming up, delightfully
indulgent, but shocked that women to whom he had just played _Ygdrasil_,
should be able so soon to throw off the spell of it.
The pretty and sprightly woman, all in white, despairing, whisked
impulsively out of the room, in order to recall to herself amid darkness
and cloaks and hats that she was not a giddy child, but an experienced
creature of thirty if she was a day. She came back demure, her eyes
liquid, brooding.
*****
“By the way,” said the young dramatist to the host, “Your People’s
Concert scheme--doesn’t it move?”
“By the way,” said the host, suddenly excited, “Shall we hold a meeting
of the committee now?”
He had a project for giving performances of the finest music to the
populace at a charge of five sous per head. It was the latest activity
of the publicist in him. The committee appeared to consist of everybody
who was standing near. He drew me into it, because, coming from London,
I was of course assumed to be a complete encyclopædia of London and
to be capable of furnishing detailed statistics about all
twopence-halfpenny enterprises in London for placing the finest music
before the people. The women, especially the late laughers, were touched
by the beauty of the idea underlying the enterprise, and their eyes
showed that at instants they were thinking sympathetically of the
far-off “people.” The librarian remained somewhat apart, as it were with
a rifle, and maintained a desolating fire of questions: “Was the scheme
meant to improve the people or to divert them? Would they come? Would
they like the finest music? Why five sous? Why not seven, or three? Was
the enterprise to be self-supporting?” The host, with his glance fixed
in appeal on me (it seemed to me that he was entreating me to accept him
as a serious publicist, warning me not to be misled by appearances)--the
host replied to all these questions with the sweetest, politest, wistful
patience, as well as he could. Certainly the people would like the
finest music! The people had a taste naturally distinguished and
correct. It was _we_ who were the degenerates. The enterprise must be
and would be self-supporting. No charity! No, he had learnt the folly of
charity! But naturally the artists would give their services. They would
be paid in terms of pleasure. The financial difficulty was that, whereas
he would not charge more than five sous a head for admission, he could
not hire a hall at a rent which worked out to less than a franc a head.
Such was the problem before the committee meeting! Dufayel, the great
shopkeeper, had offered to assist him.... The librarian frigidly exposed
the anti-social nature of Dufayel’s business methods, and the host
hurriedly made him a present of Dufayel. Dufayel’s help could not
be conscientiously accepted. The problem then remained!. . . London?
London, so practical? As an encyclopaedia of London I was not a success.
Politeness hid a general astonishment that, freshly arrived from London,
I could not suggest a solution, could not say what London would do in a
like quandary, nor even what London had done!
“We will adjourn it to our next meeting,” said the host, and named day,
hour, and place. And the committee smoothed business out of its brow
and dissolved itself, while at the host’s request a girl performed some
Japanese music on the Pleyel.
[Illustration: 0029]
When it was finished, the librarian, who had listened to Japanese music
at an embassy, said that this was not Japanese music. “And thou knowest
it well,” he added. The host admitted that it was not really Japanese
music, but he insisted with his plaintive smile that the whole subject
of Japanese music was very interesting and enigmatic.
Then the pretty sprightly woman, all in white, went and stood behind an
arm-chair and recited a poem, admirably, and with every sign of emotion.
Difficult to believe that she had ever laughed, that she did not exist
continually at these heights! She bowed modestly, a priestess of the
poet, and came out from behind the chair.
“By whom?” demanded the librarian.
And a voice answered, throbbing: “Henri de Régnier.”
“Indeed,” said the librarian with cold, careless approval, “it is pretty
enough.”
But I knew, from the tone alone of the answering voice, that the name
of Henri de Régnier was a sacred name, and that when it had been uttered
the proper thing was to bow the head mutely, as before a Botticelli.
“I have something here,” said the host, producing one of these
portfolios which hurried men of affairs carry under their arms in the
streets of Paris, and which are called _serviettes_; this one, however,
was of red morocco. The pretty, sprightly woman sprang forward blushing
to obstruct his purpose, but other hands led her gently away. The host,
using the back of the arm-chair for a lectern, read alternately poems
of hers and poems of his own. And he, too, spoke with every sign of
emotion. I had to conquer my instinctive British scorn for these people
because they would not at any rate pretend that they were ashamed of
the emotion of poetry. Their candour appeared to me, then, weak, if not
actually indecent. The librarian admitted occasionally that something
was pretty enough. The rest of the company maintained a steady fervency
of enthusiasm. The reader himself forgot all else in his increasing
ardour, and thus we heard about a score of poems--all, as we were told,
unpublished--together with the discussion of a score of poems.
*****
We all sat around the rim of an immense circle of white tablecloth. Each
on a little plate had a portion of pineapple ice and in a little glass a
draught of Asti. Far away, in the centre of the diaper desert, withdrawn
and beyond reach, lay a dish containing the remains of the ice. Except
fans and cigarette-cases, there was nothing else on the table whatever.
Some one across the table asked me what I had recently finished, and I
said a play. Everybody agreed that it must be translated into French.
The Paris theatres simply could not get good plays. In a few moments it
was as if the entire company was beseeching me to allow my comedy to be
translated and produced with dazzling success at one of the principal
theatres on the boulevard. But I would not. I said my play was
unsuitable for the French stage.
“Because?”
“Because it is too pure.”
I had meant to be mildly jocular. But this joke excited mirth that
surpassed mildness. “Thou hearest that? He says his play is too pure for
us!” My belief is that they had never heard one of these strange, naïve,
puzzling barbarians make a joke before, and that they regarded the thing
in its novelty as really too immensely and exotically funny, in some
manner which they could not explain to themselves. Beneath their
politeness I could detect them watching me, after that, in expectation
of another outbreak of insular humour. I might have been tempted to
commit follies, had not a new guest arrived.
[Illustration: 0035]
This was a tall, large-boned, ugly, coquettish woman, with a strong
physical attractiveness and a voice that caused vibrations in your soul.
She was in white, with a powerful leather waistband which suited her.
She was intimate with everybody except me, and by a natural gift
and force she held the attention of everybody from the moment of her
entrance. You could see she was used to that. The time was a quarter
to midnight, and she explained that she had been trying to arrive for
hours, but could not have succeeded a second sooner. She said she must
recount her _journée_, and she recounted her _journée_, which, after
being a vague prehistoric nebulosity up to midday seemed to begin
to take a definite shape about that hour. It was the _journée_ of a
Parisienne who is also an amateur actress and a dog-fancier. And
undoubtedly all her days were the same: battles waged against clocks
and destiny. She had no sense of order or of time. She had no exact
knowledge of anything; she had no purpose in life; she was perfectly
futile and useless. But she was acquainted with the secret nature of men
and women; she could judge them shrewdly; she was the very opposite
of the _ingénue_; and by her physical attractiveness, and that deep,
thrilling voice, and her distinction of gesture and tone, she created in
you the illusion that she was a capable and efficient woman, absorbed
in the most important ends. She sat down negligently behind the host,
waving away all ice and Asti, and busily fanning both him and herself.
She flattered him by laying her ringed and fluffy arm along the back of
his chair.
“Do you know,” she said, smiling at him mysteriously. “I have made a
strange discovery to-day. Paris gives more towards the saving of lost
dogs than towards the saving of lost women. Very curious, is it not?”
The host seemed to be thunderstruck by this piece of information. The
whole table was agitated by it, and a tremendous discussion was set
on foot. I then witnessed for the first time the spectacle of a fairly
large mixed company talking freely about scabrous facts. Then for the
first time was I eased from the strain of pretending in a mixed company
that things are not what they in fact are. To listen to those women, and
to watch them listening, was as staggering as it would have been to
see them pick up red-hot irons in their feverish, delicate hands. Their
admission that they knew everything, that no corner of existence was
dark enough to frighten them into speechlessness, was the chief of their
charms, then. It intensified their acute femininity. And while they were
thus gravely talking, ironical, sympathetic, amused, or indignant, they
even yet had the air of secretly thinking about something else.
Discussions of such subjects never formally end, for the talkers never
tire of them. This subject was discussed in knots all the way down six
flights of stairs by the light of tapers and matches. I left the last,
because I wanted to get some general information from my host about one
of his guests.
“She is divorcing her husband,” he said, with the simple sad pride of a
man who had been a petitioner in the matrimonial courts. “For the
rest, you never meet any but divorced women at my place. It saves
complications. So have no fear.”
We shook hands warmly.
“_Au revoir, mon ami._”
“_Au revoir, mon cher._”