"Why did you not send a letter? We have all been writing to you for the
last six months, but no answer--none. Had you written one word I would
have saved all. The poor _concierge_ was in despair; she said the
_propriétaire_ would wait if you had only said when you were coming
back, or if you only had let us know what you wished to be done. Three
quarters rent was due, and no news could be obtained of you, so an
auction had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those horrid
men tramping over the delicate carpets, their coarse faces set against
the sweet colour of that beautiful English cretonne.... And all the
while the pastel by Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the
face--'the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,' 'the fan widespread across
the bosom' (you see I am quoting your own words), looking down, the
mistress of that little paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the
intrusion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes 'deep set
in crimson shadow' to fill with tears. But nothing altered her great
dignity; she seemed to see all, but as a Buddha she remained
impenetrable....
"I was there the night before the sale. I looked through the books,
taking notes of those I intended to buy--those which we used to read
together when the snow lay high about the legs of the poor faun in
_terre cuite_, that laughed amid the frosty _boulingrins_. I found a
large packet of letters which I instantly destroyed. You should not be
so careless; I wonder how it is that men are always careless about their
letters.
"The sale was announced for one o'clock. I wore a thick veil, for I did
not wish to be recognised; the _concierge_ of course knew me, but she
can be depended upon. The poor old woman was in tears, so sorry was she
to see all your pretty things sold up. You left owing her a hundred
francs, but I have paid her; and talking of you we waited till the
auctioneer arrived. Everything had been pulled down; the tapestry from
the walls, the picture, the two vases I gave you were on the table
waiting the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, all the _marchands
de meubles_ in the _quartier_, came upstairs, spitting and talking
coarsely--their foul voices went through me. They stamped, spat, pulled
the things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held up the Japanese
dressing-gown and made some horrible jokes; and the auctioneer, who was
a humorist, answered, 'If there are any ladies' men present, we shall
have some spirited bidding.' The pastel I bought, and I shall keep it
and try to find some excuse to satisfy my husband, but I send you the
miniature, and I hope you will not let it be sold again. There were many
other things I should have liked to buy, but I did not dare--the organ
that you used to play hymns on and I waltzes on, the Turkish lamp which
we could never agree about...but when I saw the satin shoes which I gave
you to carry the night of that adorable ball, and which you would not
give back, but nailed up on the wall on either side of your bed and put
matches in, I was seized with an almost invincible desire to steal them.
I don't know why, _un caprice de femme_. No one but you would have ever
thought of converting satin shoes into match boxes. I wore them at that
delicious ball; we danced all night together, and you had an explanation
with my husband (I was a little afraid for a moment, but it came out
all right), and we went and sat on the balcony in the soft warm
moonlight; we watched the glitter of epaulets and gas, the satin of the
bodices, the whiteness of passing shoulders: we dreamed the massy
darknesses of the park, the fairy light along the lawny spaces, the
heavy perfume of the flowers, the pink of the camellias; and you quoted
something: '_les camélias du balcon ressemblent à des désirs mourants_.'
It was horrid of you: but you always had a knack of rubbing one up the
wrong way. Then do you not remember how we danced in one room, while the
servants set the other out with little tables? That supper was
fascinating! I suppose it was these pleasant remembrances which made me
wish for the shoes, but I could not summon up courage enough to buy
them, and the horrid people were comparing me with the pastel; I suppose
I did look a little mysterious with a double veil bound across my face.
The shoes went with a lot of other things--and oh, to whom?
"So now that pretty little retreat in the _Rue de la Tour des Dames_ is
ended for ever for you and me. We shall not see the faun in _terre
cuite_ again; I was thinking of going to see him the other day, but the
street is so steep; my coachman advised me to spare the horse's hind
legs. I believe it is the steepest street in Paris. And your luncheon
parties, how I did enjoy them, and how Fay did enjoy them too; and what
I risked, short-sighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down to
that out-of-the-way little street! Men never appreciate the risks women
run for them. But to leave my letters lying about--I cannot forgive
that. When I told Fay she said, 'What can you expect? I warned you
against flirting with boys.' I never did before--never.
"Paris is now just as it was when you used to sit on the balcony and I
read you Browning. You never liked his poetry, and I cannot understand
why. I have found a new poem which I am sure would convert you; you
should be here. There are lilacs in the room and the _Mont Valérien_ is
beautiful upon a great lemon sky, and the long avenue is merging into
violet vapour.
"We have already begun to think of where we shall go to this year. Last
year we went to P----, an enchanting place, quite rustic, but within
easy distance of a casino. I had vowed not to dance, for I had been out
every night during the season, but the temptation proved irresistible,
and I gave way. There were two young men here, one the Count of B----,
the other the Marquis of G----, one of the best families in France, a
distant cousin of my husband. He has written a book which every one says
is one of the most amusing things that has appeared for years, _c'est
surtout très Parisien_. He paid me great attentions, and made my husband
wildly jealous. I used to go out and sit with him amid the rocks, and it
was perhaps very lucky for me that he went away. We may return there
this year; if so, I wish you would come and spend a month; there is an
excellent hotel where you would be very comfortable. We have decided
nothing as yet. The Duchesse de ---- is giving a costume ball; they say
it is going to be a most wonderful affair. I don't know what money is
not going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got home a
fascinating toilette. I am going as a _Pierette_; you know, a short
skirt and a little cap. The Marquise gave a ball some few days ago. I
danced the cotillion with L----, who, as you know, dances divinely; _il
m'a fait la cour_, but it is of course no use, you know that.
"The other night we went to see the _Maître-de-Forges_, a fascinating
play, and I am reading the book; I don't know which I like the best. I
think the play, but the book is very good too. Now that is what I call a
novel; and I am a judge, for I have read all novels. But I must not talk
literature, or you will say something stupid. I wish you would not make
foolish remarks about men that _tout-Paris_ considers the cleverest. It
does not matter so much with me, I know you, but then people laugh at
you behind your back, and that is not nice for me. The _marquise_ was
here the other day, and she said she almost wished you would not come on
her 'days,' so extraordinary were the remarks you made. And by the way,
the _marquise_ has written a book. I have not seen it, but I hear that
it is really too _décolleté_. She is _une femme d'esprit_, but the way
she affiché's herself is too much for any one. She never goes anywhere
now without _le petit_ D----. It is a great pity.
"And now, my dear friend, write me a nice letter, and tell me when you
are coming back to Paris. I am sure you cannot amuse yourself in that
hateful London; the nicest thing about you was that you were really
_trés Parisien_. Come back and take a nice apartment on the Champs
Elysées. You might come back for the Duchesse's ball. I will get an
invitation for you, and will keep the cotillion for you. The idea of
running away as you did, and never telling any one where you were going
to. I always said you were a little cracked. And letting all your things
be sold! If you had only told me! I should like so much to have had that
Turkish lamp. Yours ----"
How like her that letter is,--egotistical, vain, foolish; no, not
foolish--narrow, limited, but not foolish; worldly, oh, how worldly! and
yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity
of feeling that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an
inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, and she has lived
her life and felt it very acutely, very sincerely--sincerely?...like a
moth caught in a gauze curtain! Well, would that preclude sincerity?
Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and she was not very deep,
that is quite certain. I never could understand her;--a little brain
that span rapidly and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there was
something more in her than that. She often said things that I thought
clever, things that I did not forget, things that I should like to put
into books. But it was not brain power; it was only intensity of
feeling--nervous feeling. I don't know...perhaps.... She has lived her
life...yes, within certain limits she has lived her life. None of us do
more than that. True. I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp,
little, and merry--a changeable little sprite. I thought she had ugly
hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had
known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time passes! I was
very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels! Still we had
good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far
too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once...once I
did, _enfin_! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm
was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever; that I
know.... I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments
when.... Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely
subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that
was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never
knew if she hated her husband,--one never knew her,--I never knew how
she would receive me. The last time I saw her...that stupid American
would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding
behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door.
However, she could not blame me that time--and all the stories she used
to invent of my indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the
sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got
her into a certain line; that marriage, that title, and she used to
think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into
mourning for the Count de Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois
they were! That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight
hundred francs on the Boulevard St Germain, the cabinets, brass work,
the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room
geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms
and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a
little grotesque no doubt;--the mechanical admiration for all that is
about her, for the general atmosphere; the _Figaro_, that is to say
Albert Wolf, _l'homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c'est-à-dire, dans le
monde_, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave Doré. But
with all this vulgarity of taste certain appreciations, certain
ebullitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain
elevations and depravities,--depravities in the legitimate sense of the
word, that is to say, a revolt against the commonplace....
Ha, ha, ha! how I have been dreaming! I wish I had not been awoke from
my reverie, it was pleasant.
The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes
that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to say that
one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer
honey and a glass of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant
letter. My agent's handwriting, even when I knew the envelope contained
a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance in
me;--so hateful is any sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible
even knowing how I stand at my banker's. Therefore the odour of honey
and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that
morning for me; and it was some time before I slipped on that beautiful
Japanese dressing-gown, which I shall never see again, and read the
odious epistle.
That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I
may not be deprived of my _demi-tasse_ at _Tortoni's_, that I may not be
forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python--monstrous.
And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England; they
will find pity!
Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me.
The great pagan world I love knew it not. Now the world proposes to
interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak
shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the
strong shall be really strong,--that the strong shall be glorious,
sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right,
cry the moderns.
Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale
socialist of Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity.
His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He
dreamed; again He is denied by His disciples. Poor fallen God! I, who
hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and
feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way
beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou has
drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find
Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee
now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and
more Divine than any man's has been. The chosen people, the garden, the
betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of
Magdalen. The God descending to the harlot! Even the great pagan world
of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and
hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this.
Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible
disastrous Word, and before it fell the ancient gods, and the vices that
they represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men;
the Word went forth, and the world interpreted the Word, blindly,
ignorantly, savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless nearing
every day the end--the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw,
that finds its voice to-day (enormous though the antithesis may be, I
will say it) in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. What fate has been like Thine?
Betrayed by Judas in the garden, denied by Peter before the cock crew,
crucified between thieves, and mourned for by a harlot, and then sent
bound and bare, nothing changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious
plight, forthward in the world's van the glory and symbol of a man's new
idea--Pity. Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame
with Thy light than ever before--Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing
on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming
night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth
century. The bearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in the
hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown of thorns is falling, Thy face
is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for
sceptre; only I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in
the ruin Thou hast created.
Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is
the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of
fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of
lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but
for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice!
What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under
Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might
have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment.
Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the
ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some
sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres' _La Source_? That
the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when
compared with the essential that I should have _La Source_, that
exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with
delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a
wrong was done--that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a
girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal
thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for
the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold,
for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great gladiators pass, to
hear them cry the famous "Ave Caesar," to hold the thumb down, to see
the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned
slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime! I would give many lives to save one
sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, "_A la très-chère, à la très-belle,
qui remplit man cœur de clarté"_ let the first-born in every house in
Europe be slain; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness to
decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and elsewhere, to save from
destruction one drawing by Hokusai. Again I say that all we deem sublime
in the world's history are acts of injustice; and it is certain that if
mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and
fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was
great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England's greatest
son was the personification of injustice--Cromwell.
But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark
with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are
running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing
remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate
Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud,
creatures of the ooze and rushes about us--we, the great ship that has
floated up from the antique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain
passion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive
blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen
escaping! We are weary of pity, we are weary of being good; we are weary
of tears and effusion, and our refuge--the British Museum--is the wide
sea shore and the wind of the ocean. There, there is real joy in the
flesh; our statues are naked, but we are ashamed, and our nakedness is
indecency: a fair, frank soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs; and
how strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the bare,
barbarous soul of beauty and of might!