Good Robert Thompson was followed by _fin_ M. Lerambert--who was surely
good too, in his different way; good at least for feigning an interest
he could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to
give a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly have
divined at the time (in fact I make bold to say that I personally did
divine it,) exactly a sign of his _finesse_. Of no such uncanny engine
had Mr. Thompson, luckily, known a need--luckily since to what arsenal
could he possibly have resorted for it? None capable of supplying it
could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have
had to help him toward it. He was easily interested, or at least took an
easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so;
whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value--one
recognising no secondary substitute. Perhaps this was why our connection
with M. Lerambert can have lasted but four or five months--time even for
his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeed
even as I say this I vaguely recall that our separation was attended
with friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared
(or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. It could have been
no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind
as my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impression
constantly renewed; but we two juniors, Wilky and I, were a
drag--Wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for
ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude
showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when a
couple of months had sped, save as to rendering La Fontaine's fables
into English with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. I remember
perfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, I
remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character
inspired me--that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, and
ever so strangely, I recover no sense of having been crushed, and this
even though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. The fact leaves
me at a loss, since I also remember my not having myself thought
particularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty.
"Oh," I seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only could
be, _really_ a question of rendering--!" and so, without confusion,
though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: as if so
many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to change and operate,
so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the
bridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, much
more finish such a sentence.
All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of
the summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert--by what
agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget--was at
this time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that,
between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colisee, hung, at no great height,
over the Avenue des Champs-Elysees; hung, that is, from the vantage of
its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter
was with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place for
familiar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it,) and
yet not to the point of fencing out life. A blest little old-world
refuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and
peculiarly resonant small court and idle _communs_ beside it, accessible
by a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of
response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of
all old Paris. Old Paris then even there considerably lingered; I
recapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relic
of a house, the property of an American southerner from whom our
parents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poor
unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, between Louisiana
and France. What association could have breathed more from the queer
graces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassy
polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror
and clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and
gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all,
which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, no
doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? It was amid
these refinements that we presently resumed our studies--even explicitly
far from arduous at first, as the Champs-Elysees were perforce that year
our summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and the
season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter.
M. Lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale
and prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rue Jacob with his mother
and sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate prophetically
his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of Victor
Cherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his
authorship of a volume of meditative verse sympathetically mentioned by
the Sainte-Beuve of the Causeries in a review of the young poets of the
hour ("M. Lerambert too has loved, M. Lerambert too has suffered, M.
Lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtle
personality, really a high form of sensibility I surmise, and as
qualified for other and intenser relations as any Cherbuliez figure of
them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth
as good Mr. Thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warm
somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashy
court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken.
The afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for
our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing
Mademoiselle Danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible _taille_ and the so
salient smiling eyes, than which even those of Miss Rebecca Sharp, that
other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided with
high efficiency for our immediate looser needs--mine and Wilky's and
those of our small brother Bob (l'ingenieux petit Robertson as she was
to dub him,) and of our still smaller sister at least--our first fine
_flaneries_ of curiosity. Her brave Vaudoise predecessor had been
bequeathed by us in London to a higher sphere than service with mere
earnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and weeping
and was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in the
most beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with
details that brought home to us as we had never known it brought the
material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the
solidly, the spreadingly seated. A couple of years later, on an occasion
of our being again for a while in London, she hastened to call on us,
and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for a
gossip--it was a bustling day of June--across a long stretch of the
town; when I left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my
having in our transit seen much of Society (the old London "season"
filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extent
now foregone,) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologic
study, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to its
end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous
and "work over" the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing my
steps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street with a lively sense of
observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws.
Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no such
character as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate,
fortunately for the case altogether--as our mere candid humanity would
otherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novel
contains a plate from his own expressive hand representing Miss Sharp
lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a
scrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of _our_ exemplar of the Becky
type was exactly that though her larger, her more interested and
sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess
but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, we
never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, we
must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have
caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I imagine,
because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too
numerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all
information for the free enjoyment--on the terms proper to our tender
years--of her beautiful city.
It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the second
Empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way,
with the great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Haussmann marked as
yet but in the light preliminary flourish. Its connections with the
past, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries,
comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, the
charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance composition
and colour now quite purged away. The whole region of the
Champs-Elysees, where we must after all at first have principally
prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated
radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it,
carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places
abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hotels of another
time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafes of homely,
almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty
ruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. What was the Jardin
d'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us and
that looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a mere
twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of having
been admitted--or rather, I suppose, conducted, though under
conductorship now vague to me--to view it by colourless day, when it
must have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots."
More distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barriere at
the top of the Avenue, on the hither side of the Arch, where the old
loose-girt _banlieue_ began at once and the two matched lodges of the
octroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guarded
the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations
and dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they had
seen come and go. But the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much more
thinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been traced, as the Empress
herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably _new_, and
fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition;
with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparable
passage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for
his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach that
gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and
beside which the _cent-gardes_, all light-blue and silver and intensely
erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. Was a public
holiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at Notre
Dame, the fete of Saint-Napoleon, or was any ever more immortalised, as
we say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vivid
picture of it in the Eugene Rougon of Emile Zola, who must have taken it
in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so
much more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of that
interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling
in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers
and false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all
transfigured at the last, withal, by the biggest and brightest
illumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blinding
glare of the new Empire effectually symbolised--the vision of the whole,
I say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from the
Rougon-Macquart, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy,
without shades or undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. I dare say
that for those months our contemplations, our daily exercise in general,
strayed little beyond the Champs-Elysees, though I recall confusedly as
well certain excursions to Passy and Auteuil, where we foregathered with
small resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose French, an
unpremeditated art, was a revelation, an initiation, and whence we
roamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the Bois de Boulogne that,
oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest better than anything at
our own American door had done.
It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, none
the less--for I detect myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging a
social aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed to
my reflective gape or to otherwise associated strolls; perceptive
passages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairs
within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose I
should have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in
the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still
their spell to cast--as part and parcel, that is, of the general
intensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amusement," the
aesthetic and human appeal, of Paris had in those days less the air of a
great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed
less to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, the
detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a
straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace--character,
temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. These
scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears--not a little even
already for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the season
waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that I
connect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company of
W. J. Again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; Guignol and
Gringalet failed to claim his attention, and Mademoiselle Danse, I make
out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him
perhaps a little of an _ours_--which came to the same thing. We
adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in
the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angouleme-St.-Honore and now,
after other mutations, as the Rue La Boetie; which we were again to
exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this last
after a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration
setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated
at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life,
among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected in
still other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite but
respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our
ineluctable phase at the Institution Fezandie in the Rue Balzac; of
which latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom
for. With the Rue d'Angouleme came extensions--even the mere immediate
view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and
neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: our
many-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung over
the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel,
with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied.
What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner,
for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty
crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with
our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread
fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came
the small cremerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secret
of its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square,
prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked,
to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly
_bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of
the ecaillere or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into
their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured
in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat
faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his
sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, are
framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrance
fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes
back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or
less aesthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or
household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise
or ouvriere to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted
cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is to
say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and
harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found
them anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though I
must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare.