Paris rises in a cloud of chill darkness, the rain falls like whips of
ice, the street-lamps loiter on vague, bitter errands, confused strings
of light, a stealthy, idiot wind glories in being corrupted by corners.
The platforms of the omnibuses are packed tight with small men whose
overcoats are too short for them, the brims of their felt-hats too
narrow, their trousers turned up too high, their eyes too dark, their
faces too pale. The jargon of the traffic on the rue de Rivoli, as it
squabbles for every step between the deserted pavement beneath the
railings of the Tuileries and the reeking pavement under the long
archway lit by impudent shop-lights falling on imitation jewellery, is
multiplied an hundred-fold by the shrewish air into a noise that hurts
like warm water on a chill hand.
The taxi, a clever little Citroën taxi, darted hither and thither among
the squabbling hosts, and nimbly we capered across the dark face of the
Louvre, nimbly over the Pont Royal and the river paved with broken
darkness, and so down the slope into the rout of the Boulevard Raspail.
Maybe it is true that there are times when we can detest Paris more
deeply than any other city. Other cities stare back calmly at our sudden
hatreds, other cities grow more impersonal as we execrate them, while as
for Paris, she is always personal, but when we are nervous and detest
her for being Paris she becomes even more herself, she insists on being
herself with a nerveracking insistence, like a silly woman who, seeing
she is getting on her man’s nerves, gives a loud, nervous laugh and
simpers: “I can’t help it, it’s my nature to be like this....”
Now why were the people yelling here, what was the matter? Millions of
them there were, joined in some strife between the Bon Marché, the Hôtel
Lutetia and the entrance of the Nord-Sud railway, while omnibuses and
trams made strategic movements against each other, while _facteurs_ in
dirty blue, fabulously moustachioed, pushed carts about in all
directions, irritating any one they could, and a motionless _gendarme_
or two played with his bâton, heedless, unheeded. The eager face of a
young artist I knew, shadowed by a great black hat, artistic,
anarchistic, strode out of the white mass of the Hôtel Lutetia and
turned greedily towards Montparnasse. At last my clever little Citroën
and I plunged into quieter wastes, lit here and there by the bastard
glitter of a Cinema Theatre falling on posters livid with three colours,
red, blue, and yellow.
That strange unstormy exquisite, Cherry-Marvel! That most æsthetic
creator of a monster more terrible than Frankenstein’s, for it devoured
the spirit of all who passed beside it! Why I should be worried about
Iris I could not tell, indeed I was too tired to inquire, but worried I
was despite Cherry-Marvel’s so well-informed badinage about the white
woman’s burden, and the more worried too, as the taxi plunged into
nameless darknesses beyond the Bal Bullier, towards the address of the
nursing-home which Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, had of
course known.
Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We
were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for
a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was
now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was
withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved,
beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we
should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come
together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time
of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the
most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning
grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont
Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted
women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been
bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes
bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi
Marianne danced a _minuet du cœur_ with a crimson garter and the moon
fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the
soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down
to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low
darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours....
And now we tore up a dark, endless boulevard, even as a shifty maggot in
a pit of darkness. But surely this was the murderer’s Paris, here lived
the fathers and grandfathers of Apaches, here were born the daughters of
the drinkers of blood and the sons of the mothers of crime. It stretched
never-ending between lamps fixed at astronomical distances, and on each
side tall naked trees thrashed the shadows of very high black walls.
They hid from the world, the people of this boulevard of the high walls,
and who shall say that they had no reason to hide? And then, do you
know, a lion leapt out of the night, a huge lion that was black as sin
and crouched for prey in the centre way between five lanes of darkness
made even darker by confused strings of light. And as we breathed a
prayer in thanks for our deliverance from the lion of darkness trams
crawled near us and stayed a while, and tram, at the impulse of a vice
peculiarly continental, was joined to tram and crawled away; while we,
having regained our breath, came beneath the shadow of a terrible wall.
It was the wall of a castle, a fortress, a something satanically
majestic. This, I thought, is another of Carlyle’s mistakes, this is no
less than the Bastille skulking in these parts until such time as the
Camelots du Roy shall have left the kindergarten and can crown the duc
d’Orleans King of France. Far above our laboured passage glowed a long,
long row of small windows faintly lit, and it seemed to me that they
were striped with bars of iron. And there was a great gate of iron, and
a black soldier with a beastly bayonet to his rifle, and an old woman
with a great brown parcel under her arm, waiting. The clever little
Citroën stopped. It is tired, I thought, and will go on later....
“_Eh, numéro quarante-neuf, Boulevard Pierre Abel?_” the taxi-driver
threw at me reproachfully, and I got out, and I stared up at the great
fortress which towered above me like a beast with a row of unclean eyes
about his forehead, and the rain whipped my face.
“_C’est un prison?_”
“_Mais oui, monsieur. Le Paradis._”
The pavement was broad, of mud and asphalt. The prison towered on our
right, filling the sky with darkness--but for those distant, terrible
windows. The rain whipped down, stinging like little animals. Nearby one
forlorn lamp lit the putrefying colours of the advertisements circling a
_lavabo_. What, I wondered and wondered, could Iris be doing here?
Facing me across the broad pavement of mud and asphalt was a great gate
which had once been brown, lit by a lamp on which had once been
inscribed the number of the Nursing Home. Iris was here. Were we, then,
always to meet in darkness, Iris and I? She was here, and perhaps, I
thought, on the other side of her is a Morgue or an Asylum.
A yard or so from the great door there was let into the high wall a
small door inscribed _Concierge_. I was startled at the clatter made by
the bell. A nun stood in the dim doorway.