You could smell money long before you arrived at the double portals
of the flat on the second floor. The public staircase was heated; it
mounted broadly upwards and upwards in a very easy slope, and at each
spacious landing was the statue of some draped woman holding aloft a
lamp which threw light on an endless carpet, and on marble mosaics.
There was, indeed, a lift; but who could refuse the majestic invitation
of the staircase, deserted, silent, and mysterious? The bell would
give but one _ting_, and always the same _ting_; it was not an electric
device by which the temperament and mood of the intruder on the mat are
accurately and instantly signalled to the interior.
The door was opened by the Tante herself--perhaps she had been crossing
from one room to another--and I came into the large entrance-hall, which
even on the brightest summer day was as obscure as a crypt, and
which the architect had apparently meant to be appreciated only after
nightfall. A vast _armoire_ and a vast hat-and-coat stand were features
of it.
“My niece occupies herself with the children,” the Tante half-whispered,
as she took me into the drawing-room. And in her voice were mingled
pride, affection, and also a certain conspiratorial quality, as though
the mysteries of putting a little boy and a little girl to bed were at
once religious and delicious, and must not be disturbed by loud tones
even afar off.
She was a stout woman of seventy, dressed in black with a ruching of
white at the neck and the wrists; very erect and active; her hair not
yet entirely grey; an aquiline eye. The soft, fresh white frill at the
wrist made a charming contrast with the experienced and aged hand. She
had been a widow for very many years, and during all those years she had
matched herself against the world, her weapons being a considerable and
secure income, and a quite exceptional natural shrewdness. The result
had left her handsomely the victor. She had an immense but justifiable
confidence in her own judgment and sagacity; her interest in the
spectacle of existence was unabated, and a long and passionate study of
human nature had not embittered her. She was a realist, and a caustic
realist, but she could excuse; she could accept man as she knew him
in his turpitude. Her chief joys were to arrange and rearrange her
“reserves” of domestic goods, to discuss character, and to indicate to
a later generation, out of her terrific experience of Parisian life, the
best methods of defence against the average tradesman and the average
menial. So seldom did anybody get the better of her that, when the
unusual did occur, she could afford to admit the fact with a liberal
laugh: “_Il m’a roulée, celui-là! Il a roulé la vieille!_”
In a corner of the drawing-room she resumed the topic, always
interesting to her, of my adventures among charwomen, generously
instructing me the whole time in a hundred ways. And when the
conversation dropped she would sigh and go back to something previously
said, and repeat it. “So she polishes the door-knobs every day! Well,
that is a quality, at least.” Then my hostess (her niece-inlaw) came
blandly in: a woman of thirty-five, also in mourning, with a pale,
powdered face and golden hair; benevolent and calm, elegant, but with
the elegance of a confessed mother.
“_Ça y est?_” asked the Tante, meaning--were the infants at last
couched?
“_Ça y est_” said the mother, with triumph, with relief, and yet also
with a little regret.
There was a nurse, but in practice she was only an under-nurse; the
head-nurse was the mother.
“_Eh bien, mon petit Bennett_,” the mother began, in a new tone, as if
to indicate that she was no longer a mother, but a Parisienne, frivolous
and challenging, “what there that is new?”
“He is there,” said the Tante, interrupting.
We heard the noise of the front-door, and by a common instinct we all
rose and went into the hall.
*****
The master of the home arrived. He entered like a gust of wind, and
Marthe, the thin old parlourmaid, who had evidently been lying in wait
for him, started back in alarm, but alarm half-simulated. My host, about
the same age as his wife, was a doctor, specialising in the diseases of
women and children, and he had his cabinet on the ground-floor of the
same house. He was late, he was impatient to regain his hearth, he was
proud of his industry; and the simple, instinctive joy of life sparkled
in his eye.
“Marie,” he cried to his wife. “I love thee!” And kissed her furiously
on both cheeks.
“It is well,” she responded, calmly smiling, with a sort of flirtatious
condescension.
“I tell thee I love thee!” he insisted, with his hands on her shoulders.
“Tell me that thou lovest me!”
“I love thee,” she said calmly.
“It is very well!” he said, and swinging round to Marthe, giving her his
hat. “Marthe, I love you.” And he caught her a smack on the shoulder.
[Illustration: 0073]
“Monsieur hurts me,” the spinster protested.
“Go then! Go then!” said the Tante, as the beloved nephew directed his
assault upon her in turn. She was grimly proud of him. He flattered
her eye, for, even at his loosest, he had a professional distinction of
deportment which her long-deceased husband, a wholesale tradesman, had
probably lacked.
“Well, my old one,” the host grasped my hand once more, “you cannot
figure to yourself how it gives me pleasure to have you here!” His voice
was rich with emotion.
This man had the genius of friendship in a very high degree. His delight
in the society of his friends was so intense and so candid that only the
most inordinately conceited among them could have failed to be aware of
an uncomfortable grave sense of unworthiness, could have failed to say
to themselves fearfully: “He will find me out one day!”
*****
The dining-room was large, and massively furnished, and lighted by one
immense shaded lamp that hung low over the table. Among the heavily
framed pictures was a magnificent Jules Dupré, belonging to the Tante.
She had picked it up long ago at a sale for something like ten thousand
francs, apparently while the dealers were looking the other way. It
was a known picture, and one of the Tante’s satisfactions was that some
dealer or other was always trying to relieve her of it, without the
slightest success. She had a story, too, that on the day after the sale
a Duchesse who affected Duprés had sent her footman offering to take the
picture off her at a ten per cent, increase because it would make a
pair with another magnificent Dupré already owned by the Duchesse. “Eh,
well,” the widow of the tradesman had said to the footman, “you will
tell Madame la Duchesse that if she wants my picture she had better come
herself and inquire about it.” In the flat, the Dupré was one of the
great pictures of the world. Safer to sneeze at the Venus de Milo than
at that picture! Another favourite picture, also the property of Tante,
was one by a living and super-modern painter, an acquaintance of another
nephew of hers. I do not think she much cared for it, or that she cared
much for any pictures. She had bought it by a benevolent caprice. “What
would you? He had not the sou. _C’est un très gentil garçon_, of a great
talent, but he was eating all his money with women--with those birds
that you know. And one day it may be worth its price.”
What always interested me most in the furniture of that dining-room
was not the pictures, nor the ample plate, nor the edifices called
sideboards, etc., but the apron of Marthe, who served. A plain,
unstarched, white apron, without a bib--an apron that no English
parlourmaid would have deigned to wear; but of such fine linen, and
all the exactly geometric creases of its folding visible to the eye as
Marthe passed round and round our four chairs! Whenever I saw that apron
I could see linen-chests, and endless supplies of linen, and Tante and
Marthe fussing over them on quiet afternoons. And it went so well with
her dark-blue shiny frock! When Tante had joined her nephew’s household
she had brought with her Marthe, already old in her service. These two
women were devoted to each other, each in her own way. “Arrive then,
with that sauce, _vieille folle!_” Tante would command; and Marthe,
pursing her lips, would defend herself with a “_Mais madame--!_” There
was no high invisible wall between Marthe and her employers. One was
not worried, as one would have been in England, by the operation of
the detestable and barbaric theory that Marthe was an automaton,
inaccessible to human emotions. I remember seeing in the work-basket
of the wife of a wealthy English socialist a little manual of advice to
domestic servants upon their deportment, and I remember this: “Learn to
control your voice, and always speak in a low voice. Never show by your
demeanour that you have heard any remark which is not addressed to you.”
I wonder what Marthe, who had never worn a cap, nor perhaps seen one,
would have thought of the manual, which possibly was written by a
distressed gentlewoman in order to earn a few shillings. Martha could
smile. She could even laugh and answer back--but within limits. We had
not to pretend that Marthe consisted merely of two ministering hands
animated by a brain, but without a soul. In France a servant works
longer and harder than in England, but she is permitted the constant use
of a soul.
A simple but an expensive dinner, for these people were the kind of
people that, desiring only the best, were in a position to see that they
had it, and accepted the cost as a matter of course. Moreover, they knew
what the best was, especially the Tante. They knew how to buy. The chief
dish was just steak. But what steak! What a thickness of steak and what
tenderness! A whole cow had lived under the most approved conditions,
and died a violent death, and the very essence of the excuse for it all
lay on a blue and white dish in front of the hostess. Cost according!
Steak; but better steak could not be had in the world! And the
consciousness of this fact was on the calm benignant face of the hostess
and on the vivacious ironic face of the Tante. So with the fruits of the
earth, so with the wine. And the simple, straightforward distribution of
the viands seemed to suit well their character. Into that flat there had
not yet penetrated the grand modern principle that the act of carving is
an obscene act, an act to be done shamefully in secret, behind the
backs of the delicate impressionable. No! The dish of steak was planted
directly in front of the hostess, under her very nose, and beyond the
dish a pile of four plates; and, brazenly brandishing her implements,
the Parisienne herself cut the titbits out of the tit-bit, and
deposited them on plate after plate, which either Marthe took or we
took ourselves, at hazard. Further, there was no embarrassment of
multitudinous assorted knives and forks and spoons. With each course the
diner received the tools necessary for that course. Between courses, if
he wanted a toy for his fingers, he had to be content with a crust.
During the meal the conversation constantly reverted with pleasure to
the question of food; it was diversified by expressions of the host’s
joy in his home, and the beings therein; and for the rest it did not
ascend higher than heterogeneous personal gossip,--“unstitched,” as the
French say.
*****
Instead of going into the drawing-room, we went through a bed-chamber,
into a small room at the back. By taking a circuitous service-passage,
and infringing on the kitchen, we might ultimately have arrived at
that room without passing through the bedchamber; but the proper, the
ceremonious way to it was through the bedchamber. This trifling detail
illuminates the methods of the French architect even when he is building
expensively--methods which persist to the present hour. Admirable at
façades, he is an execrable planner, wasteful and maladroit, as may be
seen even in the most important public buildings in Paris--such as the
Town Hall. In arranging the “disposition” of flats, he exhausts himself
on the principal apartments, and then, fatigued, lets the others
struggle as best they may for light and air and access in the odd
corners of space which remain. Of course, he is strong in the sympathy
of his clients. It is a wide question of manners, stretching from
the finest palaces of France down to the labyrinthine coverts of
industrialism. Up to twenty-five years ago, architects simply did not
consider the factors of either light or ventilation. I have myself lived
in a flat, in one of the best streets of central Paris, of which none
of the eight windows could possibly at any period of the year receive a
single direct gleam of sunlight. Up to twenty-five years ago, nobody had
discovered a reason why, in a domestic interior, a bedroom should not be
a highroad.. . .
Visualise the magnificent straight boulevard, full of the beautiful
horizontal glidings of trams and automobiles; the lofty and stylistic
frontages; the great carved doors of the house; the quasi-Oriental
entrance and courtyard, shut in from the fracas of the street; the
monumental staircase; the spacious and even splendid dining-room; and
then the bedroom opening directly off it; and then the still smaller
sitting-room opening directly off that; and us there--the ebullient
doctor, his elegant and calm wife, the Tante (on a small chair),
and myself--sitting round a lamp amid a miscellany of bookcases and
oddments. This was the room that the doctor preferred of an evening. He
would say, joyously: “_C’est le décor home!_”
*****
A cousin of the host was announced; and his relatives and I smiled
archly, with affectionate malice, before he came in; for it was
notorious that this cousin, an architect by profession, and a bachelor
of forty years standing, had a few days earlier solemnly and definitely
“broken” with his _petite amie_. I knew it. Everybody knew it within the
wide family-radius. It was one of those things that “knew themselves.”
This call was itself a proof that the cousin had dragged his anchor.
Moreover, he embraced his aunt with a certain self-consciousness. He
was a tall, dark-bearded man, well dressed in a dark-grey suit--a good
specimen of French tailoring, but a French tailor cannot use an iron and
he cannot “roll” a collar. A rather melancholy and secretive and flaccid
man, but somewhat hardened and strengthened by the lifelong use of a
private fortune. They all had money--money of their own, independently
of earned money; the wife had money--and I do not think that it occurred
to any of them to live up to his or her income; their resources were
always increasing, and the reserves that the united family could have
brought up to face a calamity must have been formidable. None of them
had ever been worried about money, and by reason of their financial
ideals they were far more solid than a London family receiving, but
spending, thrice their income.
Marthe came with another coffee cup, and the cousin, when the hostess
had filled it, set it down to go cold, after the French manner.
“Well, my boy,” said Tante, whose ancient eyes were sparkling with
eagerness. “By what appears, thou art a widower since several days.”
“How a widower?”
“Yes,” said the host, “it appears that thou art a widower.” And added
enthusiastically: “I am pretty content to see thee, my old one.”
The hostess smiled at the widower with sympathetic indulgence.
“Who has told you?”
“What! Who has told us? All Paris knows it!”
“Well,” said the cousin, looking at the carpet and apparently communing
with himself--he always had an air of self-communing, “I suppose it’s
true!” He drank the tenth of a teaspoonful of coffee.
“Eh, well, my friend,” the Tante commented. “I do not know if thou hast
done well. That did not cost thee too dear, and she had a good-hearted
face.” Tante spoke with an air of special intimacy, because she and the
cousin had kept house together for some years at one period.
“Thou hast seen her, Tante?” the hostess asked, surprised a little out
of the calm in which she was crocheting.
“Have I seen her? I believe it well! I caught them together once when I
was driving in the Bois.”
“That was Antoinette,” said the cousin.
“It was not Antoinette,” said the Tante. “And thou hast no need to say
it. Thou quittedst Antoinette in ‘96, before I had begun to hire that
carriage. I recall it to myself perfectly.”
“I suppose now it will be the grand spree,” said the hostess, “during
several months.”
“The grand spree!” Tante broke in caustically. “Have no fear. The grand
spree--that is not his kind. It is not he who will scatter his money
with those birds. He is not so stupid as that.” She laughed drily.
“Is she _rosse_, the Tante, all the same!” the host, flowing over with
good nature, comforted his cousin.
Then Marthe entered again:
“The children demand monsieur.”
The host bounded up from his chair.
“What! The children demand monsieur!” he exploded. “At nine o’clock! It
is not possible that they are not asleep!”
“They say that monsieur promised to return to them after dinner.”
“It is true!” he admitted, with a gesture of discovery. “It is true!”
“I pray thee,” said the mother. “Go at once. And do not excite them.”
“I think I’ll go with you,” I said.
“My little Bennett,” the mother leaned towards me, “I supplicate you--at
this hour--”
“But naturally he will come with me!” the host cried obstreperously.
We went, down a long narrow passage. There they were in their beds, the
children, in a small bedroom divided into two by a low screen of ribbed
glass, the boy on one side and the girl on the other. The window gave
on to a small subsidiary courtyard. Through the half-drawn curtains the
lighted windows of rooms opposite could be discerned, rising, storey
after storey, up out of sight. A night-light burned on a table. The
nurse stood apart, at the door. The children were lively, but pale. They
had begun to go to school, and, except the journey to and from school,
they seemed to have almost no outdoor exercise. No garden was theirs.
The hall and the passages were their sole playground. And all the best
part of their lives was passed between walls in a habitation twenty-five
or thirty feet above ground, in the middle of Paris. Yet they were very
well. The doctor did not romp with them. No! He simply and candidly
caressed them, girl and boy, in turn, calling them passionately by the
most beautiful names, burying his head in the bedclothes, and fondling
their wild hair. He then entreated them, with genuine humility, to
compose themselves for sleep, and parted last from the girl.
“She is exquisite--exquisite!” he murmured to me ecstatically, as we
returned up the passage from this excursion.
She was.
*****
In the small sitting-room the cousin was offering to the Tante some
information of a political nature. The Tante kept a judicious eye on
everything in Paris. .
“What!” The host protested vociferously. “He is again in his politics!
Cousin, I supplicate thee--”
A good deal of supplication went on there. The host did succeed in
stopping politics. With all the weight of his vivacious good-nature he
bore politics down. The fact was, he had a real objection to politics,
having convinced himself that they were permanently unclean in France.
It was not the measures that he objected to, but the men--all of them
with scarcely an exception--as cynical adventurers. On this point he
was passionate. Politics were incurably futile, horribly _assommant_. He
would not willingly allow them to soil his hearth.
“What hast thou done lately?” he asked of the cousin, changing the
subject.
And the talk veered to public amusements. The cousin had been
“distracting himself” amid his sentimental misadventures, by much
theatre-going. They all, except the Tante, went very regularly to
the theatres and to the operas. And not only that, but to concerts,
exhibitions, picture-shows, services in the big churches, and every kind
of diversion frequented by people in easy circumstances and by artists.
There was little that they missed. They exhibited no special taste or
knowledge in any art, but leaned generally to the best among that which
was merely fashionable. They took seriously nearly every craftsman
who, while succeeding, kept his dignity and refrained from being a
mountebank. Thus, they were convinced that dramatists like Edmond
Rostand and Henri Lavedan, actors and actresses like Le Bargy and Cécile
Sorel, painters like Edouard Détaille and La Gandara, composers like
Massenet and Charpentier, critics like Adolphe Brisson and Francis
Chevassu, novelists like René Bazin and Daniel Lesueur, poets like Jean
Riche-pin and Abel Bonnard, were original and first-class, and genuinely
important in the history of their respective arts. On the other hand
their attitude towards the real innovators and shapers of the future
was timidly, but honestly, antipathetic. And they could not, despite any
theorising to the contrary, bring themselves to take quite seriously any
artist who had not been consecrated by public approval. With the most
charming grace they would submit to be teased about this, but it would
have been impossible to tease them out of it. And there was always
a slight uneasiness in the air when they and I came to grips in the
discussion of art. I could almost hear the shrewd Tante saying to
herself: “What a pity this otherwise sane and safe young man is an
artist!”
“Figure to yourself,” the host would answer me with an adorable,
affectionate mien of apology, when I asked his opinion of a new work by
Maurice Ravel, heard on a Sunday afternoon, “Figure to yourself that we
scarcely liked it.”
And with the same mien, of a very fashionable comedy in which Lavedan,
Le Bargy, and Julia Bartet had combined to create a terrific success at
the Théâtre Français:
“Figure to yourself, it was truly very nice, after all! Of course one
might say.. . .”
The truth was, it had carried them off their feet.
Upon my soul I think I liked them the better for it all. And, in talking
to them, I understood a little better the real and solid basis upon
which rests all that overwhelming, complex, expensive apparatus of
artistic diversions laid out for the public within a mile radius of the
Place de l’Opéra. There _is_ a public, a genuine public, which desires
ardently to be amused and which will handsomely put down the money for
its amusement. And it is never tired, never satiated. The artist, who
seldom pays, is apt to wonder if any considerable body of persons
pay, is apt to regard the commercial continuance of art as a sort of
inexplicable miracle. But these people paid. They always paid, and
richly. And there were whole streets of large houses full of other
people who shared their tastes and their habits, if not their extreme
attractiveness.
*****
I wondered where we should be without them, we artists, as I took leave
of them at something after midnight. My good friend, the melancholy
cousin, had departed. Tante had gone to bed, though she protested she
never slept. We had been drinking weak tea as we wandered about the
dining-room. And now I, obdurate against the host’s supplications not to
desert them so early, was departing too. At the door the hostess lighted
a little taper, and gave it to me. And when the door was opened they
moderated their caressing voices; for a dozen other domestic interiors,
each intricate and complete, gave on the resounding staircase. And with
my little taper I descended through the silence and the darkness of the
staircase. And at the bottom I halted in the black entrance way, and
summoned the concierge out of his sleep to release the catch of the
small door within the great portals. There was a responsive click
immediately, and in the blackness a sudden gleam from the boulevard.
The concierge and his wife, living for ever sunless in a room and a
half beneath all those other interiors, were throughout the night at the
mercy of a call, mine or another’s. “Curious existence!” I thought, as
my shutting of the door echoed about the building, and I stepped into
the illumination of the boulevard. “The concierge is necessary to them.
And without the equivalent of such as they, such as I could not possess
even a decent overcoat!” On the _façade_ of the house every outer
casement was shut. Not a sign of life in it.