I lived up at the top of the house, absolutely alone. After eleven
o’clock in the morning, when my servant left, I was my own doorkeeper.
Like most solitaries in strange places, whenever I heard a ring I had
a feeling that perhaps after all it might be the ring of romance. This
time it was the telegraph-boy. I gave him a penny, because in France,
much more than in England, every one must live, and the notion still
survives that a telegram has sufficient unusualness to demand a tip; the
same with a registered letter. I read the telegram, and my evening lay
suddenly in fragments at my feet. The customary accident, the accident
dreaded by every solitary, had happened. “Sorry, prevented from coming
to-night,” etc. It was not yet six o’clock. I had in front of me a
wilderness of six hours to traverse. In my warm disgust I went at once
out in the streets. My flat had become mysteriously uninhabitable, and
my work repugnant. The streets of Paris, by reason of their hospitality,
are a refuge.
[Illustration: 0045]
The last sun of September was setting across the circular Place Blanche.
I sat down at the terrace of the smallest _café_ and drank tea. Exactly
opposite were the crimson wings of the Moulin Rouge, and to the right
was the establishment which then held first place among nocturnal
restaurants in Montmartre. It had the strange charm of a resort which is
never closed, night or day, and where money and time are squandered with
infantile fatuity. Somehow it inspired respect, if not awe. Its terrace
was seldom empty, and at that hour it was always full. Under the
striped and valanced awning sat perhaps a hundred people, all slowly and
deliberately administering to themselves poisons of various beautiful
colours. A crowd to give pause to the divination of even the most
conceited student of human nature, a crowd in which the simplest
bourgeois or artist or thief sat next to men and women exercising the
oldest and most disreputable professions--and it was impossible surely
to distinguish which from which!
[Illustration: 0051]
Out of the medley of trams, omnibuses, carts, automobiles, and cabs
that continually rattled over the cobbles, an open _fiacre_ would detach
itself every minute or so, and set down or take up in front of the
terrace. Among these was one carrying two young dandies, an elegantly
dressed girl, and another young girl in a servant’s cap and apron. They
were all laughing and talking together. The dandies and the elegancy got
out and took a vacant table amid the welcoming eager bows of a _maître
d’hotel, a chasseur,_ and a waiter. She was freshly and meticulously
and triumphantly got up, like an elaborate confection of starched linen
fresh from the laundress. Her lips were impeccably rouged. She delighted
the eye by her health and her youth and her pretty insolence. A single
touch would have soiled her, but she had not yet been touched. Her day
had just begun. Probably, her bed was not yet made. The black-robed,
scissored girls of the drapery store at the next angle of the _place_
were finishing their tenth hour of vigil over goods displayed on the
footpath. And next to that was a creamery where black-robed girls could
obtain a whole day’s sustenance for the price of one glass of poison.
Evidently the young creature had only just arrived at the dignity of a
fashionable dressmaker, and a servant of her own. Her ingenuous vanity
obliged her to show her servant to the _place_, and the ingenuous vanity
of the servant was content to be shown off; for the servant might have
a servant to-morrow--who could tell? The cabman and the servant began to
converse, and presently the cabman in his long fawn coat and white
hat descended and entered the vehicle and sat down by the servant, and
pulled out an illustrated comic paper, and they bent their heads over it
and giggled enormously in unison; he was piling up money at the rate of
at least a sou a minute. Occasionally the young mistress threw a loud
sisterly remark to the servant, who replied gaily. And the two young
dandies bore nobly the difficult _rôle_ of world-worn men who still
count not the cost of smiles. Say what you like, it was charming. It was
one of the reasons why Paris is the city which is always forgiven. Could
one reasonably expect that the bright face of the vapid little siren
should be solemnised by the thought: “To-day I am a day nearer forty
than I was yesterday”?
The wings of the Moulin Rouge, jewelled now with crimson lamps, began
to revolve slowly. The upper chambers of the restaurant showed lights
behind their mysteriously-curtained windows. The terrace was suddenly
bathed in the calm blue of electricity. No austere realism of the
philosopher could argue away the romance of the scene.
*****
I turned down the steep Rue Blanche, and at the foot of it passed by
the shadow of the Trinité, the great church of illicit assignations,
at whose clock scores of frightened and expectant hearts gaze anxiously
every afternoon; and through the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where
corsets are masterpieces beyond price and flowers may be sold for a
sovereign apiece, and then into the full fever of the grand boulevard
with its maddening restlessness of illuminated signs. The shops and
_cafés_ were all on fire, making two embankments of fire, above which
rose high and mysterious _façades_ masked by trees that looked like the
impossible verdure of an opera. And between the summits of the trees a
ribbon of rich, dark, soothing purple--the sky! This was the city. This
was what the race had accomplished, after eighteen Louises and nearly as
many revolutions, and when all was said that could be said it remained
a prodigious and a comforting spectacle. Every doorway shone with
invitation; every satisfaction and delight was offered, on terms
ridiculously reasonable. And binding everything together were the
refined, neighbourly, and graceful cynical gestures of the race; so
different from the harsh and awkward timidity, the self-centred egotism
and artistocratic hypocrisy of Piccadilly. It seemed difficult to be
lonely amid multitudes that so candidly accepted human nature as human
nature is. It seemed a splendid and an uplifting thing to be there. I
continued southwards, down the narrow, swarming Rue Richelieu, past the
immeasurable National Library on the left and Jean Goujon’s sculptures
of the rivers of France on the right, and past the Theatre Français,
where nice plain people were waiting to see _L’Aventurière_, and across
the arcaded Rue de Rivoli. And then I was in the dark desert of the
Place du Carrousel, where the omnibuses are diminished to toy-omnibuses.
The town was shut off by the vast arms of the Louvre. The purple had
faded out the sky. The wind, heralding October, blew coldly across the
spaces. The artfully arranged vista of the Champs Elysées, rising in
flame against the silhouette of Cleopatra’s needle, struck me as
a meretricious device, designed to impress tourists and monarchs.
Everything was meretricious. I could not even strike a match without
being reminded that a contented and corrupt inefficiency was corroding
this race like a disease. I could not light my cigarette because
somebody, somewhere, had not done his job like an honest man. And thus
it was throughout.
I wanted to dine, and there were a thousand restaurants within a
mile; but they had all ceased to invite me. I was beaten down by the
overwhelming sadness of one who for the time being has no definite
arranged claim to any friendly attention in a huge city--crowded with
pre-occupied human beings. I might have been George Gissing. I re-wrote
all his novels for him in an instant. I persisted southwards. The tiny
walled river, reflecting with industrious precision all its lights, had
no attraction. The quays, where all the book shops were closed and all
the bookstalls locked down, and where there was never a _café_, were as
inhospitable and chill as Riga. Mist seemed to heave over the river, and
the pavements were oozing damp.
I went up an entry and rang a bell, thinking to myself: “If he isn’t
in, I am done for!” But at the same moment I caught the sound of a
violoncello, and I knew I was saved, and by a miracle Paris was herself
again.
*****
“Not engaged for dinner, are you?” I asked, as soon as I was in the
studio.
“No. I was just thinking of going out.”
“Well, let’s go, then.”
“I was scraping some bits of Gluck.”
The studio was fairly large, but it was bare, unkempt, dirty, and
comfortless. Except an old sofa, two hard imperfect chairs, and an
untrustworthy table, it had no furniture. Of course, it was littered
with the apparatus of painting. Its sole ornamentation was pictures, and
the pictures were very fine, for they were the painter’s own. He and
his pictures are well known among the painters of Europe and America.
Successful artistically, and with an adequate private income, he was a
full member of the Champ de Mars Salon, and he sold his pictures upon
occasion to Governments. Although a British subject, he had spent nearly
all his life in Paris; he knew the streets and resorts of Paris like a
Frenchman; he spoke French like a Frenchman. I never heard of him going
to England. I never heard him express a desire to go to England. His age
was perhaps fifty, and I dare say that he had lived in that studio for
a quarter of a century, with his violoncello. It was plain, as he stood
there, well dressed, and with a vivacious and yet dreamy eye, that the
zest of life had not waned in him. He was a man who, now as much
as ever, took his pleasure in seeing and painting beautiful, suave,
harmonious things. And yet he stood there unapologetic amid that ugly
and narrow discomfort, with the sheet of music pinned carelessly to an
easel, and lighted by a small ill-regulated lamp with a truncated, dirty
chimney--sole illumination of the chamber! His vivacious and dreamy eye
simply did not see all that, never had seen it, never saw anything that
it did not care to see. Nobody ever heard him multiply words about a bad
picture, for example,--he would ignore it.
With a gesture of habit that must have taken years to acquire he took a
common rose-coloured packet of caporal cigarettes from the table by the
lamp and offered it to me, pushing one of the cigarettes out beyond its
fellows from behind; you knew that he was always handling cigarettes.
“It’s not really arranged for ’cello,” he murmured, gazing at the
music, which was an air from _Alceste_, arranged for violin. “You see
it’s in the treble clef.”
“I wish you’d play it,” I said.
He sat down and played it, because he was interested in it. With his
greying hair and his fashionable grey suit, and his oldest friend, the
brown ’cello, gleaming between his knees, he was the centre of a small
region of light in the gloomy studio, and the sound of the ’cello
filled the studio. He had no home; but if he had had a home this would
have been his home, and this his home-life. As a private individual, as
distinguished from a public artist, this was what he had arrived at. He
had secured this refuge, and invented this relaxation, in the middle
of Paris. By their aid he could defy Paris. There was something wistful
about the scene, but it was also impressive, at any rate to me, who
am otherwise constituted. He was an exile in the city of exiles; a
characteristic item in it, though of a variety exceedingly rare. But
he would have been equally an exile in any other city. He had no
consciousness of being an exile, of being homeless. He was above
patriotisms and homes. Why, when he wanted even a book he only borrowed
it!
“Well, shall we go out and eat?” I suggested, after listening to several
lovely airs.
“Yes,” he said, “I was just going. I don’t think you’ve seen my last
etching. Care to?”