Quite early in the winter evening, before the light had died out of the
sky, central Paris was beginning to be pleasurably excited. The aspect
of the streets and of the _cafés_ showed that. One saw it and heard
it in the gestures and tones of the people; one had a proof of it in
oneself. The whole city was in a state of delightful anxiety; and it was
happy because the result of the night, whatever fate chose to decide,
could not fail to be amusing and even thrilling. All the thoroughfares
converging upon the small and crowded island which is the historical
kernel of Paris, were busier and livelier than usual. In particular,
automobiles thronged--the largest, glossiest, and most silent
automobiles, whose horns were orchestras--automobiles which vied with
motor-omnibuses for imposingness and moved forward with the smooth
majesty of trains.
[Illustration: 0091]
There came a point, near the twinkling bridges, where progress was
impossible, where an impalpable obstacle intervened, and vehicles
stood arrested in long treble files, and mysterious words were passed
backwards from driver to driver. But nobody seemed to mind; nobody
seemed impatient; for it was something to be thus definitely and
materially a part of the organised excitement. Hundreds of clever
resourceful persons had had the idea of avoiding the main avenues,
and creeping up unobserved to the centre of attraction by the little
streets. So that all these ancient, narrow, dark lanes that thread
between high and picturesque architectures were busy with automobiles
and carriages. And in the gloom one might see shooting round a corner
the brilliant interior of an automobile, with electric light and flowers
and a pet dog, and a couple of extremely fashionable young women in it,
their eyes sparkling with present joy and the confident expectation
of joy to come. And such young women, utterly correct, were doing the
utterly correct thing. But all these little streets led at last to the
same impalpable obstacle. So that from a high tower, for instance, the
Tour St. Jacques close by, one might have beheld the black masonry of
the centre of attraction as it were beleaguered on every side by the
attacking converging files that were held back by some powerful word;
while the minutes elapsed, and the incandescent signs of shops and
theatres increased in the sky, and the Seine, dividing to clasp
the island, darkened into a lamp-reflecting mirror along which tiny
half-discerned steamers restlessly plied.
*****
Despite the powerful word, the Palace of Justice, the centre of
attraction, was tremendously alive and gay with humanity. Traffic could
not be stopped, and was not stopped, and those who had sufficient energy
and perseverance could insinuate themselves into its precincts. The
great gold lamps that flank the staircase of honour gleamed upon a
crowd continually ascending and descending. The outer hall was full
of laughing chatter and of smoke. And barristers, both old and young,
walked to and fro in hieratic converse, waving their cigarettes in sober
curves, and on every one of their faces as they gazed negligently at the
public was the announcement that they could tell “an they would.” All
the interminable intersecting corridors were equally vivacious, with
their diminishing perspectives of stoves against which groups warmed
themselves. Groups of talkers made the circuit of the corridors as it
might have been the circuit of a town, passing a given spot regularly,
and repeating and repeating the same arguments. And the solemn arched
immensity of the Hall of Lost Footsteps was like a Bourse. Here, more
than anywhere else, one had the sense of audience-chambers concealed
behind doors, where fatal doings were afoot; one had the sense of
the terrific vastness and complexity of the Palace wherein scores of
separate ceremonious activities simultaneously proceeded in scores of
different halls. The general public knew only that somewhere within the
Palace, somewhere close at hand, at the end of some particular passage,
guarded doors hid the spectacle whose slightest episode was being
telegraphed to all the cities of the entire civilised world, and the
general public was content, even very content, to be near by.
The affair was in essence a trifle; merely the trial of a woman for the
murder of her husband. But this woman was a heroic woman; this woman
belonged by right of brain and individual force to the great race of
Thérèse Humbert. Years before, she had moved safely in the background of
a sensational tragedy involving the highest personages of the Republic.
And now in the background of her own tragedy there moved somebody so
high and so potent that no newspaper dared or cared to name his name.
All that was known was that this enigmatic and awful individual existed,
that he was involved, that had he been less sublime he would have had
to appear before the court, that he would not appear, and that justice
would suffer accordingly. In the ordeal of extremest publicity, the
woman had emerged a Titaness. Throughout all her altercations with
judge, advocates, witnesses, and journalists, she had held her own
grandly, displaying not only an astounding force of character, but a
superb appreciation of the theatrical quality of her _rôle_. She was of
a piece with yellow journalism, and the multitude that gapes for yellow
journalism. She was shameless. She was caught again and again in a net
of lies, and she always escaped. She admitted nearly everything: lyings,
adulteries, and manifold deceits; but she would not admit that she knew
anything about the murder of her husband. And even though it was obvious
that the knots by which she was bound when the murder was discovered
were not serious knots, even though she left a hundred incriminating
details unexplained, a doubt concerning her guilt would persist in the
minds of the impartial. She was indubitably a terrible creature, but she
was an enchantress, and she was also beyond question an exceedingly
able housekeeper and hostess. She might be terrible without being a
murderess.
And now the trial was closing. The verdict, it was stated, would be
rendered that night even if the court sat till midnight. It would be a
pity to keep an amiable public, already on the rack of impatience for
many days, waiting longer. The time was ripe. Further, the woman had had
enough. Her resources were exhausted, and to continue the fight would
mean an anti-climax. The woman had completely lost the respect of the
public--that was inevitable--but she had not lost its admiration. The
attitude of the public was cruel, with the ignoble cruelty which is
practised towards women in Latin countries alone; she had even been
sarcastically sketched in the most respectable illustrated paper in the
attitude of a famous madonna; but beneath the inconceivably base jeers,
there remained admiration; and there remained, too, gratitude--the
gratitude offered to a gladiator who has fought well and provided a
really first-class diversion.
*****
The supper-restaurants were visited earlier and were much more crowded
than usual on that night. It was as though the influence of the trial
had been aphrodisiacal. Or it may have been that the men and women of
pleasure wished to receive the verdict in circumstances worthy of its
importance in the annals of pleasure. Or it may have been that dinner
had been deranged by the excitations connected with the trial and that
people felt honestly hungry. I went into one of these restaurants, in
a square whose buildings are embroidered with inviting letters of fire
until dawn every morning throughout the year. A stern attendant took me
up in a lift, and instantly I had quitted the sternness of the lift I
was in another atmosphere. There was the bar, and there the illustrious
English barman, drunk. For in these regions the barman must always be
English and a little drunk. The barman knows everybody, and not to know
his Christian name and the feel of his hand is to be nobody. This
barman is a Parisian celebrity. But let an accident or a misadventure
disqualify him from his work, and he will be forgotten utterly in less
than a week. And in his martyred old age he will certainly recount to
charitable acquaintances, who find him ineffably tedious, how he was
barman at the unique Restaurant Lepic in the old days when fun was
really fun, and the most appalling iniquity was openly tolerated by the
police.
The bar and the barman and the cloak-room attendant (another man of
genius) are only the prelude to the great supper-hall, which is simply
and completely dazzling, with its profuse festoons of electric bulbs,
its innumerable naked shoulders, arms, and bosoms, its fancy costumes,
its bald heads, its music, clatter, and tinkle, and its desperate
gaiety. To go into it is like going into a furnace of sensuality. It can
be likened to nothing but an orange-lit scene of Roman debauch in a play
written and staged by Mr. Hall Caine. One feels that one has been unjust
in one’s attitude to Mr. Hall Caine’s claims as a realist.
Although the restaurant will positively not hold any more revellers,
more revellers insist on coming in, and fresh tables are produced by
conjuring and placed for them between other tables, until the whole mass
of wood and flesh is wedged tight together and waiters have to perform
prodigies of insinuation. The effect of these multitudinous wasters is
desolating, and even pathetic. It is the enormous stupidity of the mass
that is pathetic, and its secret tedium that is desolating. At their
wits’ end how to divert themselves, these bald heads pass the time in
capers more antique and fatuous than were ever employed at a village
wedding. Some of them find distraction in monstrous gorging--and
beefsteaks and fried potatoes and spicy sauces go down their throats
in a way to terrorise the arthritic beholder. Others merely drink.
Some quarrel, with the boneless persistency of intoxication. One falls
humorously under a table, and is humorously fished up by the red-coated
leader of the orchestra: it is a marked success of esteem. Many are
content to caress the bright odalisques with fond, monotonous vacuity. A
few of these odalisques, and the waiters, alone save the spectacle from
utter humiliation. The waiters are experts engaged in doing their job.
The industry of each night leaves them no energy for dissoluteness. They
are alert and determined. Their business is to make stupidity as
lavish as possible, and they succeed. To see them surveying with cold
statistical glances the field of their operations, to listen to their
indestructible politeness, to divine the depth of their concealed
scorn--this is a pleasure. And some of the odalisques are beautiful.
Fine women in the sight of heaven! They too are experts, with the hard
preoccupation of experts. They are at work; and this is the battle of
life. They inspire respect. It is--it is the dignity of labour.
[Illustration: 0099]
Suddenly it is announced that the jury at the Palace are about to
deliver their verdict. Nobody knows how the news has come, nor even who
first spoke it in the restaurant. But there it is. Humorous guffaws of
relief are vented. The fever of the place becomes acute, with a decided
influence on the consumption of champagne. The accused lady is toasted
again and again. Of course, she had been, throughout, the solid backbone
of the chatter; but now she was all the chatter. And everybody recounted
again to everybody else every suggestive rumour of her iniquity that had
appeared in any newspaper for months past. She was tried over again in
a moment, and condemned and insulted and defended, and consistently
honoured with libations. She had never been more truly heroic, more
legendary, than she was then.
The childlike company loudly demanded the verdict, with their tongues
and with their feet.
A beautiful young girl of about eighteen, the significant features
of whose attire were long black stockings and a necklace, said to a
gentleman who was helping her to eat a vast _entrecote_ and to drink
champagne:
“If it comes not soon, it will be too late.”
“The verdict?” said the fatuous swain. “How?--too late?”
“I shall be too drunk,” said the girl, apparently meaning that she would
be too drunk to savour the verdict and to get joy from it. She spoke
with mournful and slightly disgusted certainty, as though anticipating a
phenomenon which was absolutely regular and absolutely inevitable.
And then, on a table near the centre of the room, instead of plates and
glasses appeared a child-dancer who might have been Spanish or Creole,
but who probably had never been out of Montmartre. This child seemed to
be surrounded by her family seated at the table--by her mother and her
aunts and a cousin or so, all with simple and respectable faces, naïvely
proud of and pleased with the child. From their expressions, the
child might have been cutting bread and butter on the table instead of
dancing. The child danced exquisitely, but her performance could not
moderate the din. It was a lovely thing gloriously wasted. The one
feature of it that was not wasted on the intelligence of the company was
the titillating contrast between the little girl’s fresh infancy and the
advanced decomposition of her environment.
She ceased, and disappeared into her family. The applause began, but
it was mysteriously and swiftly cut short. Why did every one by a
simultaneous impulse glance eagerly in the direction of the door? Why
was the hush so dramatic? A voice--whose?--cried near the doorway:
“_Acquittée!_”
And all cried triumphantly: “_Acquittée! Acquittée! Acquittée!
Acquittée!_” Happy, boisterous Bedlam was created and let loose. Even
the waiters forgot themselves. The whole world stood up, stood on
chairs, or stood on tables; and shouted, shrieked, and whistled. But
the boneless drunkards were still quarrelling, and one bald head had
retained sufficient presence of mind to wear a large oyster-shell
facetiously for a hat. And then the orchestra, inspired, struck into
a popular refrain of the moment, perfectly apposite. And all sang with
right good-will:
“_Le lendemain elle était sonnante_.”