That was a memorable night at the Closerie des Lilas--and not only that
night, but, I regret to say, several ensuing nights; for Taillandy, to
Diane’s chagrin, could not bear to tear himself away from the city and
his old disciples and comrades. Once more he forgot how intensely he
hated Paris, remembering only how madly he loved it. The pagan child of
nature reverted and became the _boulevardier_ and the café prophet.
But that first night was responsible for the lapse. Taillandy enjoyed
himself so hugely on that first night that it was only human of him to
crave a second and a third. It was always: “To-morrow morning, my little
Diane, we will leave all this behind us,” and always on the morrow there
was some unreasonable reason why the departure should be postponed.
Diane, disappointed grievously at first, grew depressed and then
worried. Had her great godlike poet, then, feet of clay? She thrust the
suspicion resolutely from her as unworthy, and instead, womanlike, she
endeavored to see what she could do to help him. She knew that he was
too good to be wasting his days and his nights in the Closerie des
Lilas. She knew, too, that champagne is no fitting diet for
poets--especially for poets who are great enough to be inspired without
it--and so she found herself mothering her hero. Worshipping him, of
course--she would always do that--but mothering him at the same time. A
curious state of affairs.
Taillandy’s publishers, it seemed, had been exuberantly glad to see
him. His “Triomphe de l’Amour” and his “Tombeau de l’Amour” had made him
famous, and his eight years of absence had given him a sort of
posthumous halo. If he were not dead, why, so much the better. In brief,
they gave him a thousand francs in advance for the epic and a generous
royalty on its sale.
Of that thousand francs Taillandy spent seven hundred and ninety-six
during the next four days--ninety-six, possibly, on himself, and the
balance on his friends.
He had returned to the Closerie des Lilas that first afternoon and had
instructed Hippolyte and Madame Maupin that he intended to entertain
that evening from dinner-time to dawn. They were to invite any and all
of his old associates whom they should see. Everything in the house was
to be free, and he, by Bacchus, would foot the bills.
The result was that when Taillandy entered the Lilas at seven o’clock he
was amazed to discover what an army of friends he could lay claim to.
Never had the café been so crowded.
There was Bruno, the artist, who, he remembered with an inexplicable
pang, was also Diane’s friend; there was Jacques Gaumont, a minor poet
who was attempting to follow in the great Taillandy’s footsteps, and who
succeeded merely in being very shabbily dressed and very enthusiastic;
there was Baskoff, the Russian, a sculptor of the futurist school, half
mad and wholly unprepossessing; there was _le petit_ Martel, in
velveteens, who cried loudly for a return to the good old days of
Bohemia, but who sometimes dined surreptitiously at the Café de Paris in
full-dress clothes with a _chapeau à huit reflets_; there were the two
bearded, gray-headed veterans who remembered Delacroix and very little
else; there was a young architect or two from the Beaux-Arts, and there
were a score of others--nondescripts, driftwood, some of them mad but
talented, others mediocre but sane. Also, there were a dozen
girls--models, midinettes, dancers, and daughters of joy.
At Taillandy’s entrance they arose with a roar of delight. They embraced
him, they kissed him on both cheeks, they pounded his back, they cheered
him deafeningly. He was the only one of them worth while, and
subconsciously they knew it and acknowledged it. Moreover, since he had
once been one of them, they now felt a certain responsibility in his
success. Had they not contributed to his greatness by their
encouragement? Had he not perhaps imbibed some of his inspiration from
their companionship? There was not a man there that did not envy his
fame, but there was not a man there that begrudged it.
When the first commotion had somewhat subsided, Taillandy commanded
Hippolyte to serve dinner. But first he inquired for Diane. Had any one
seen Diane?
“Has any one seen whom?” asked Bruno, who was at his elbow.
“Diane--Diane,” answered Taillandy impatiently. And then, remembering,
he added, with a frown: “You know her, Bruno, I believe. At least it was
not your fault that she did not starve.”
“Ah, you wrong me,” said the artist. “I would have fed her for life, but
she would not permit it. She left me--she disappeared.”
“She did well,” replied Taillandy gravely.
Bruno looked at him quizzically, shrugged his shoulders and went to take
his place at a table.
“Our Ferdinand is in love,” he announced. “That will mean some very bad
lyrics, I fear. It is regrettable.”
Taillandy remained at the door, smoking furiously, with an eye on the
clock. He would not sit down, he said, until Diane arrived. No, nor
would he drink. There would be plenty of time for that.
Presently the door opened and Diane stepped hesitatingly into the
smoke-stained light of the restaurant. She was a little out of breath,
for she had been walking fast, and there was color in her cheeks and a
wet sparkle in her eye.
“Ah, my little one,” said Taillandy, “you are late.”
“I am sorry,” she answered. “I hurried as fast as I could. See, I have
bought the stout boots and the thick stockings, as you desired me to do,
so that we might climb--what was that mountain?”
“Olympus,” said he. “You were wise, for it is a hard climb. Come now and
sit down. I have kept a place for you on my right. You will eat while I
talk; and you need not listen, for I shall talk nonsense. I intend that
this, my one night in Paris, shall be remembered. It is to be a very gay
night.”
“But we start at dawn to-morrow, do we not?” she reminded him.
“Assuredly, assuredly. That is why we must make the most of these few
hours.”
He installed her beside him with great ceremony, as if she were the
queen of a carnival. Then he motioned to Hippolyte to open the
champagne....
Toward midnight Taillandy, in response to repeated toasts to himself and
his work, rose rather unsteadily to his feet and made a speech.
“Friends--comrades,” he began--“and fellow artists, no man is better
than his neighbor: therefore there is no reason why I should be called
upon to speak ahead of any other man present. All of us are alike in
that all of us are seeking, each in his own way, the Truth. Naturally,
since all of us are artists, we seek the Truth through Beauty; and when
I say Beauty I spell it with a capital B, because Beauty, as I
understand it, is more than a noun--it is religion. Now, to my eyes,
Beauty exists wherever man does not intrude the ugly work of his hands.
The world, if left to itself, would be universally beautiful, and in
like manner a man’s soul, if isolated and uncontaminated by man-created
ugliness, would of necessity be beautiful. A child’s soul, for example,
is beautiful--how long? Why, until the child learns to talk and to hear
and to understand the evil of men. In short, it is the herding of men
together in cities and communities, it is the daily contact with
artificiality, it is the galling yoke that we call modern civilization
that has banished Beauty out of our lives and so has banished Truth.
“Granting (and I am sure you will grant it) that if a man have no
responsibilities he will be happy, we may go on to say that if he be
happy he will be in tune with the beautiful, and receptive to Beauty.
What, then, is the lesson? Does it not cry aloud in your ears? Be free!
Throw off the shackles of civilization that weigh you down, go forth
into the world, keep close to the Beauty that the gods have revealed to
you in nature and, casting down your false idols, bow the knee only to
her. Cease to be slaves--be free!”
He sat down to great applause. Perhaps they were in a mood to applaud
anything, for they were unaccustomed to champagne at sixteen francs the
bottle. Taillandy drained his glass, refilled it, and drained it again.
Then he turned to Diane: “Do not forget,” he said; “we leave at dawn
to-morrow.”
“Do you think I could forget?” she reproached him.
But they did not leave at the dawn of the morrow; for at that hour
Taillandy was sleeping most uncomfortably on Bruno’s sofa, whither he
had been carried with difficulty by three well-meaning but unsteady
friends. As for Diane, she had cried herself to sleep in a room over the
café that Madame Maupin had placed at her disposal for the night. She
was up and dressed, however, at daybreak, hoping against hope that her
hero would not forget to come for her; and she waited, sad-eyed at the
door, watching the stars pale in the face of the glow that came slowly
out of the east, watching the roofs and the chimney-pots take form
against a lightening sky, watching the shadows of the houses stretch
their blue lengths along the street.
Madame Maupin, descending cheerfully from a dreamless sleep, found her
at a table by the door, with her face in her hands. Madame Maupin,
taking in the situation with the intuition of a true Frenchwoman, strove
to console her, saying: “Come, my little cabbage, you must not cry. He
will be back, and there are a great many more mornings ahead of you. He
is doubtless a little tired, that is all, and if he is tired you surely
do not begrudge him his sleep.”
Diane dried her eyes and tried to smile.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I am very foolish. But I love him so much, Madame
Maupin.”
“Of course you do. Every one does. He is a wonderful man, Monsieur
Ferdinand is. And a great poet. You must remember that and make
allowances; for all great poets get drunk. They tell me that Monsieur
Paul Verlaine was--well, no matter. I do not remember him, and he is
dead now. But he was a great poet and a wonderful drinker, too.”
Diane, never having heard of Monsieur Paul Verlaine, was of course not
greatly interested. She felt that it was all the fault of Paris--that it
was Paris that was reaching out hideous, soiled hands to drag her idol
from his pedestal. And it was then that the high resolve came to her to
save Ferdinand from this soul-devouring monster. I doubt if the irony of
the situation entered her mind. I doubt if she remembered that
originally it had been he who was to save _her_ from the maw of Paris,
who was to “pluck the flower from the mire of a Christian city and plant
it in the garden of the gods.”
At eleven o’clock a perfectly cheerful Taillandy swung into the café,
arm-in-arm with Bruno and _le petit_ Martel, and found a Diane, serene
and resolved, there to receive him.
He kissed her good morning on the forehead, inquired how she had slept,
was glad that Madame Maupin had extended her hospitality, and, worst of
all, asked Madame Maupin if she would be good enough to repeat the offer
that night or any other night should it be necessary. He would gladly
pay the bill.
“But,” ventured Diane, “do we not leave to-morrow surely?”
“Of course, my little one,” he answered--“of course. To-morrow at dawn.
But it is well to be prepared in case something should intervene to
delay us.”
Then, complaining of a headache, he ordered absinthe for three and a
_sirop de groseille_ for Diane. And he took occasion to warn her never
to drink absinthe--it was very injurious and led to all sorts of
follies. Diane assured him that she would always abstain from it. She
was uncomfortable; her heart was heavy; she wished that Bruno were not
present--she hated Bruno--and she believed that, if she were allowed an
hour alone with Taillandy, she could persuade him to return to his gods.
But Bruno and _le petit_ Martel, anticipating perhaps another evening
similar to the last, stuck close to Taillandy’s elbow, and saw to it
that his glass (and their own glasses) remained full.