PARIS
I had rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the Chancery, and a little
sitting-room on the same floor as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir
Edmund Monson; the Councillor, Michael Herbert; the head of the Chancery,
Reggie Lister. Both of these had rooms to themselves where they worked.
The other secretaries worked in the Chancery.
In the morning, the bag used to arrive from the Foreign Office. It
used to be fetched from Calais every night, and twice a week a King’s
Messenger would bring it. The business of the day began by the bag
being opened, and the contents were entered in a register and then sent
to the Ambassador. The dispatches were then sent back to the Chancery
in red boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put
away in a cupboard. Later on in the day, a box used to come down from
the Ambassador with draft dispatches, which were written out by us on
typewriters, if we could, or with a pen.
Work at the Embassy meant writing out dispatches on a typewriter,
registering dispatches and putting them away, or ciphering and
deciphering telegrams. That was the important part of the work. It was
for that one had to hang about in case it might happen, and it was liable
to happen at any moment of the day, or the night.
Besides this, there was a perpetual stream of minor occurrences which
came into the day’s work. People of all nationalities used to call at
the Embassy and have to be interviewed by someone. A lady would arrive
and say she would like to paint a miniature of Queen Victoria; a soldier
would arrive from India who thought he had been bitten by a mad dog, and
ask to see Pasteur; a man would call who was the only legitimate King
of France, Henry V., with his title and dynasty printed on his visiting
card, and ask for the intervention of the British Government; or someone
would come to say that he had found the real solution of the Irish
problem, or the Eastern question; or a way of introducing conscription
into England without incurring any expense and without English people
being aware of it. Besides this, British subjects of every kind would
come and ask for facilities to see Museums, to write books, to learn
how to cure snake bites, to paddle in canoes on the Oise or the Loire,
to take their pet dogs back to England without muzzles (this was always
refused), or to take a book from the Bibliothèque Nationale, or a
missal from some remote Museum. All these people had to be interviewed
and their requests, if reasonable, had to be forwarded to the French
Government, for which there were special stereotyped formulæ. Drafts had
to be written for notes to the French Government, and there was a large
correspondence with the various Consulates.
In the morning, the head of the Chancery used to interview the Ambassador
and report to the Chancery on the state of his temper; sometimes he would
go and see a French Minister and come back laden with news and gossip;
various secretaries, the naval and military attachés, or the King’s
Messenger, would stroll into the Chancery, and discuss the latest news,
and sometimes other visitors from England would waste our time.
The Ambassador never appeared in person in the Chancery, and his
displeasure with the staff, when it was incurred, used to be conveyed to
them in memoranda, written in red ink, which were sent to them in a red
leather dispatch box.
Sir Edmund Monson had the pen of a ready dispatch-writer, and he would
write very long and beautifully expressed dispatches.
We used to have luncheon generally at the same restaurant, and be free
in the afternoons, although we had to come back towards tea-time to see
if there was anything to do and often remain in the Chancery till nearly
eight o’clock; one resident clerk had to live in the house in case there
were telegrams at night. If there was a lot of telegraphing, the work
would be heavy.
The Chancery hours were always gay. One day one of the third secretaries
and myself had an argument, and I threw the contents of the inkpot at
him. He threw the contents of another inkpot back at me. The interchange
of ink then became intensive, and went as far as red ink. All the inkpots
of the Chancery were emptied, and the other secretaries ducked their
heads while the grenades of ink whizzed past their heads. The fight
went on till all the ink in the Chancery was used up. My sitting-room
was then drawn on, and the fight went on down the Chancery stairs, into
the street, and I had a final shot from my sitting-room window, the ink
pouring down the walls.
We were drenched with ink, red and black, but still more so was the
Chancery carpet, the staircase, and the walls of the Rue Faubourg St.
Honoré. Reggie Lister was told what had happened, and said: “Really,
those boys are too tiresome.”
We were alarmed at the state of the carpet, a handsome red densely thick
pile. We bought some chemicals from the chemist and tried to wash it out,
spending hours in the effort after dinner. The only result was that the
corrosive acids burnt the carpet away, which made the damage much worse.
The next morning Herbert arrived at the Embassy and noticed that the
Chancery staircase was splashed with black stains. He asked the reason
and was told. We were sent for. In quiet, acid, biting tones he told us
we were nothing better than dirty little schoolboys, and we went away
with our tails between our legs. But all that was nothing; Reggie’s
plaintive remonstration and Herbert’s biting censure left us calm; what
we were really frightened of was the Ambassador—would he find it out?
The next three days were days of dark apprehension, overclouded with the
shadow of a possible ink-row; especially as the stain caused by the acids
on the Chancery carpet had turned it grey and white, and left a dreadful
cavity in the middle of the stain. We ordered a new carpet and prayed
that the Ambassador might not be led by an evil mischance to visit the
Chancery. He did not, and the episode passed off unnoticed by him.
Our relations with France at this time were not of the best. The Fashoda
incident was just over; the Boer War was going on, which the French said
was: “Une guerre d’affaires”; a speech had been made recently by Sir E.
Monson at the banquet of the Chamber of Commerce which had made a great
sensation. The majority of the French Cabinet were in favour of asking
that the British Government be asked to recall Sir E. Monson, but M.
Delcassé was strongly opposed to this as he feared war. In spite of all
this, the French were friendly to us personally. I was elected to the
“Cercle de l’Union” and seconded by General Galliffet.
The French were absorbed in the Dreyfus case. Nothing else was discussed
from morning till night. Wherever one went one heard echoes of this
discussion, and in whatever circle or group you heard the problem
discussed the disputants were generally divided in a proportion of five
to three; three believing in the innocence of Dreyfus, and five believing
in his guilt.
One night I dined with Edouard Rod and Brewster. The burning topic
engrossed us to such an extent, we discussed it so long and so keenly
that I still remember the only other subjects we mentioned; they stood
out, isolated and rare, like oases in the vast Dreyfus desert. I remember
Rod saying he didn’t care for Verlaine’s poetry, because it wasn’t
_banal_ enough. Brewster and I quoted some lines; but Rod thought them
all too subtle and not direct enough. Finally I quoted:
“Triste, triste était mon âme,
A cause, à cause d’une femme.”
This he passed.
We discussed plays for a brief moment. Rod said he liked bad plays played
by good actors—for instance, Duse in _La Dame aux Camélias_; Brewster
said he liked good plays done by bad actors—Musset played by refined
amateurs; I said I liked good plays acted by good actors. Then we talked
of Dreyfus once more, and Rod said plaintively: “De quoi est-ce-qu’on
parlera lorsque l’affaire sera finie?”
I made acquaintance of Anatole France and attended some of his Sunday
morning levées at the Villa Said in the Bois de Boulogne.
When I first went there, I never heard any topic except _L’affaire_
mentioned, and indeed the only people present at these meetings were
fanatical partisans of Dreyfus who did not wish to talk of anything
else. In other houses I met equally fanatical believers in Dreyfus’
guilt. While one was sitting at a quiet tea, an excited academician would
rush in and say: “Savez-vous ce qu’ils ont fait? Savez-vous ce qu’ils
osent dire?” I find this entry in my notebook dated 5th July 1899, from
Boswell:
“Talking of a court-martial that was sitting upon a very
momentous public occasion, he (Dr. Johnson) expressed much
doubt of an enlightened decision; and said that perhaps there
was not a member of it who in the whole course of his life had
ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities.”
On the other hand, I remember someone saying at the time that although
the decisions of court-martials were nearly always wrong, technically, in
their form, they were nearly always right in substance.
Most English people whom I saw during this period believed in Dreyfus’
innocence, but not all. Among the fervent believers in his guilt was
Arthur Strong, then librarian in the House of Lords.
I had made Arthur Strong’s acquaintance at Edmund Gosse’s house, and he
was from that moment kind to me. In appearance he was like pictures of
Erasmus (not that I have ever seen one!)—the perfect incarnation of a
scholar. He knew and understood everything, but forgave little. And the
smoke from the flame of his learning and his intellect sometimes got into
people’s eyes. I frequently saw him in London, and once he came to see me
in Paris. I remember his looking at the bookshelf and the pictures on my
walls, photographs of pictures by Giorgione and Titian.
He approved of Dyce’s Shakespeare; Dyce’s, he said, was a good edition.
He disapproved of Stevenson; Stevenson, he said, had fancy but no
imagination. Giorgione, he said, was to Titian what Marcello was to
Gluck. Talking of the Dreyfus case, he said if English people would only
understand that the Dreyfusards are the same as pro-Boers in England they
would talk differently. He said the French were supreme critics of verse.
They were like the Persians, they stood no nonsense about poetry. To them
it was either good or bad verse. He used to say that there had never
been since Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_ a critical review of English
literature as big and as broad. We might find fault with some of Dr.
Johnson’s judgments, but there had been nothing to replace it.
He admired Byron as much as my father did, and in the same way. He
thought him a towering genius. Shelley likewise, but not Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, he said, was like Taine and Wagner. They were all three just
on the wrong lines, each one of them on a tremendous scale, but wrong
nevertheless.
We used to have fierce arguments about Wagner. Wagner’s work, he used
to say, was not dramatic but scenic. He invented a vastly effective
situation but left it at that; neither the action nor the music moved
on. He thought Mozart was infinitely more dramatic. He said that Wagner
could not write a melody, and that if he did, with the exception of the
Preislied in the _Meistersinger_, it was commonplace and vulgar. The
“Leit-Motivs” were not complete melodies.
I was at that time a fervent Wagnerite, and used to contest his points
hotly. Curiously enough, six years later, his ideas on Wagner found an
echo in a letter which I received from Vernon Lee, after she had been to
Bayreuth. This is what she wrote:
“About Bayreuth. Although I expected little enjoyment, I
have been miserably disappointed. It is so much less out of
the common than I expected. Just a theatre like any other,
save for the light being turned out entirely instead of
half-cock only, and the only beautiful things an opera ever
offers to the eye, namely the fiddles, great and small, and
the enchanting kettle-drums, being stuffed out of sight. The
_mise en scène_ is more grotesquely bad than almost any other
opera get-up. What is insufferable to me is the atrocious way
in which Wagner takes himself seriously: the self-complacent
(if I may coin an absurd expression) _auto-religion_ implied
in his hateful unbridled long-windedness and reiteration;
the element of degenerate priesthood in it all, like English
people contemplating their hat linings in Church, their prudery
about the name of God… Surely all great art of every sort
has a certain coyness which makes it give itself always less
than wanted: look at Mozart, he will give you a whole act of
varying dramatic expression (think of the first act of _Don
Giovanni_) of deepest, briefest pathos and swift humour, a
dozen perfect songs or concerted pieces, in the time it takes
for that old _poseur_, Amfortas, to squirm over his Grail, or
Kundry to break the ice with Parsifal. Even _Tristan_, so
incomparably finer than Wagner’s other things, is indecent
through its dragging out of situations, its bellowing out of
confessions which the natural human being dreads to profane
by showing or expressing. With all this goes what to me is
the chief psychological explanation of Wagner (and of his
hypnotic power over some persons), his _extreme slowness of
vital tempo_. Listening to him is like finding oneself in a
planet where the Time’s unit is bigger than ours: one is on the
stretch, devitalised as by the contemplation of a slug. Do you
know who has the same peculiarity? D’Annunzio. And it is this
which makes his literature, like Wagner’s music, so undramatic,
so sensual, so inhuman, turn everything into a process of
gloating. I had the good fortune (like Nietzsche) of hearing
_Carmen_ just after the _Ring_. The humanity of it, and the
modesty also, are due very much to the incomparable briskness
of the rhythm and phrasing; the mind is made to work quickly,
the life of the hearer to brace itself to action.”
I think Arthur Strong would have agreed with every word of this.
I had not been at Paris long before one evening after dinner the
telephone bell rang; I went to answer it and was told that President
Faure was dead. The staff of the Embassy walked in the funeral
procession to Notre Dame, in uniform. It was a radiant day. The mourning
decorations—a veil of crape flung negligently across the façade of the
Chamber of Deputies—the banners, the wreaths, the draperies, were a fine
example of the French discretion and artistic instinct in decoration. On
the balcony of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Bernhardt was sitting
wrapped in furs; with us were the Corps Diplomatique, some officials from
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one a composer of dance tunes,
_Sourires d’Avril_, etc., once celebrated all over Europe, now more
forgotten than the songs of Nineveh or Tyre. We laughed, we chattered,
we ate chocolate, we enjoyed the sunshine and the exercise, we gave no
thought to the man in the gorgeous coffin who had taken so much trouble
to ape and observe the forms of majesty, and who had been rewarded with
such merciless ridicule.
During the first fortnight I spent in the Diplomatic Service there was a
plethora of funerals which we had to attend; one at the Greek Church; one
at the Madeleine. Attending funerals, and going to the station to meet
royalties were both important factors in Diplomatic life. Indeed, at a
small post one seemed to spend half one’s life at the railway station.
Some of the secretaries were keen race-goers, and when, as sometimes
happened, they were not allowed to go because of possible work, and they
would point out that there was not likely to be any work to do, Reggie
Lister used wisely to remark that we were not paid for the amount of work
we did, but for hanging about in case there should be any work. In spite
of this, he used generally to arrange things in such a manner that anyone
who wanted to go to the races could go.
Reggie Lister was an artist in life and the organisation of life. He
built his arrangements and those of others with a light scaffolding that
could be taken down at a moment’s notice and rearranged if necessary in
a different manner to suit a change of circumstance. He was radiantly
sensible. He had a horror of the trashy and the affected, and his gaiety
was buoyant, boyish, and infectious. If he was really amused himself,
his face used to crinkle and his body shake like a jelly, “comme un gros
bébé,” as a Frenchman once said. His intuition was like second-sight
and his tact always at work but never obtrusive, like the works of a
delicate watch. I never saw anyone either before or after who could
make such a difference to his surroundings and to the company he was
with. He made everything effervesce. You could not say how he did it.
It was not because of any exceptional brilliance or any unusual wit, or
arresting ideas; but over and over again I have seen him do what people
more brilliant than himself could not do to save their lives, that is,
transfigure a dull company and change a grey atmosphere into a golden
one. It was not only that he could never bore anyone himself, but that
nobody was ever bored when he was there. You laughed with him, not at
him. He took his enjoyment with him wherever he went and he made others
share it.
His taste was fastidious, but catholic, and above all things sensible.
He was acutely appreciative of external things: a walk down the _Champs
Elysées_ on a fine spring morning; good cooking; dancing and skating,
and he danced like mad; he was never tired of telling one of his summer
travels in Greece; his first disappointment and his subsequent delight in
Constantinople—and nobody in the world could tell such things as well.
It was difficult to be more intelligent; but his intelligence (and after
a minute’s conversation with him you could not but be aware of its
acuteness), his love and knowledge of artistic things, his shrewdness,
his humour, and rollicking fun, although taken all together, are still
not enough to account for the fascination that his personality exercised
over so many different people—over, I believe, almost anyone he pleased,
if he took the trouble. If his diplomatic duties called for trouble of
this kind, there was none he would not take; if only his own private
social life was concerned he sometimes permitted himself the luxury of
indifference; but he never indulged in “le plaisir aristocratique de
déplaire”; although the company of celebrities tried him almost beyond
endurance, leaving a peevish aftermath for his friends to put up with.
One instance is better than pages of explanation and analysis.
One day Reggie Lister and myself each received a letter from a friend in
England asking us to be civil to a young French couple who were newly
married, and were just setting up house in Paris. Reggie left cards on
them, and they asked us both to luncheon.
We found them in a small but extremely clean apartment on the other
side of the river, and as we went into the drawing-room it seemed to be
crowded with relations in black—mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and
aunts. All of them in deep mourning. It reminded me of the opening scene
of a one-act play, which used to be popular many years ago, called _La
joie fait peur_. In that play, the curtain rises on a bereaved family who
are all of them steeped in inspissated gloom.
We went into the little dining-room and sat down to a shiny mahogany
table. An old servant tottered and pottered about the room with a
bunch of keys and a bottle of wine covered with cobwebs. A rather grim
mother-in-law sat at the head of the table. The young, newly married
couple were shy. There was an atmosphere of stern, rigid propriety
and inflexible tradition over the whole proceeding. Formal phrases
were bandied, and all the time the mother-in-law, the aunts, and the
sisters-in-law, all of them dressed in crape with neat white frills,
never ceased to throw on the bashful young couple the full searchlight of
their critical observation. But we had not been at the table many minutes
before Reggie had captivated the company, and at the end of five minutes
they were all screaming with laughter and talking at the top of their
voices. They were not laughing at him. They were laughing with him.
This is just what Reggie Lister could do, and what I have never seen
anybody else succeed in doing, to that extent and in such difficult
circumstances. He had something which made you, whoever was in the room,
wish to listen to him, and made you wish him to listen to you. He had
also the gift of making the witty wittier, the singer, the talker, the
musician, the reciter, do better than his best, of drawing out the best
of other people by his instantly responsive appreciation.
The French of all classes appreciated and loved him, and when he died
they felt as if an essential part of Paris had been taken away, and a
part that nothing could replace. To be with him at the same Embassy, as I
was for a year and a half, was an education in all that makes life worth
living. But what was life to me was, I am afraid, sometimes death to him,
as I tried him at times highly.
The Ambassador, Sir Edmund Monson, was academic with a large swaying
presence and an inexhaustible supply of polished periods. A fine scholar
and a master of precise and well-expressed English and an undiminishing
store of vivid reminiscence; in the matter of penmanship he was passion’s
slave. Possibly my opinion is biased from having had to write out so
many of his dispatches on a typewriter, and so often some of them twice,
owing to the mistakes. Typewriting, it is well known, is an art in which
improvement is rarely achieved by the amateur; one reaches a certain
degree of speed and inaccuracy, and after that, no amount of practice
makes one any better. If there were too many mistakes in a dispatch
it would have to be written out again. There never seemed to be any
reason why Sir Edmund’s dispatches should ever end, and they were just
as remarkable for quantity as for length. He was exceedingly kind and
always amiable, to talk to or rather to listen to; he was the same in
his dispatches; one had the sensation of coasting pleasantly downhill on
a bicycle that had no break, and save for an accident was not likely to
stop.
Michael Herbert, the Councillor, was a complete contrast to Sir Edmund
in many ways. With him one felt not only the presence of a brake, but
of steel-like grasp on that brake—a steel-like grasp concealed by the
suavest of gloves and a high, refined courtesy and the appearance of a
cavalier strayed by mistake into the modern world. Never was there an
appearance more deceptive in some ways; in so far, that is to say, as
it seemed to indicate apathy or indifference or lack of fibre. He had
a will of iron and a fearless and instant readiness to shoulder any
responsibility, however grave or perplexing. He was a man of action, and
an ideal diplomat. At one of his posts they called him “the butcher.” At
that time the men who enjoyed the highest reputation in the Diplomatic
Service, and who seemed to be the most promising, were perhaps Charles
Eliot, Cecil Spring-Rice, and Arthur Hardinge; and in every one of these
cases the promise was fulfilled; but as a diplomat, I think anyone would
agree, that Herbert excelled them all and easily, although the others
might be in one case more intellectual or more brilliant, in another more
erudite. Herbert had a steely strength of purpose, a quick eye, and the
power of making up his mind at once, as well as a shrewd understanding
of the world and especially of the foreign world, and a quiet
far-sightedness. Moreover, he had the charm that arises from natural
and native distinction, and a subtle flavour which came from his being
intensely English, and at the same time a citizen of the world, without
any admixture of artificial cosmopolitanism. He would have been at home
in any period of English history; whether at the Black Prince’s Court at
Bordeaux, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at Kenilworth, at Whitehall,
or at the Congress of Vienna.
Had he dressed himself up in the shimmering and sombre satins and the
waving plumes of the Vandyk period they would have seemed to be his
natural, his everyday clothes.
I could imagine him putting his inflexible determination, expressed in
thin, metallic tones of deferential and courteous deprecation, lit up by
gleams of a sharp and shy humour, against the perhaps equally obstinate,
but unfortunately less wise and less constant, wishes of Charles I. I can
imagine him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet
appreciation to the jokes of Falstaff, at the first performance of _Henry
IV._; or signing, without a flicker of hesitation, a dispatch to Drake
or Raleigh that would mean war with Spain; or shutting his snuff-box
with a sharp snap, as he saw through some subtle wile of Talleyrand;
or listening, civil but quite unabashed, to a storm of invective from
Napoleon.
One day someone in the Chancery remarked on the peculiarly nauseous odour
of the food that is given to foxhounds. “I like it,” he said. “I used to
eat it as a child.”
I have always thought the most crucial test to which a new piece of verse
or a modern picture can be put is to imagine what effect the verse would
produce in an anthology of another epoch or the picture in a gallery of
old masters. Herbert as a personality and as a diplomatist could have
stood any test of this kind, and placed next to any of the old masters or
the old masterpieces, in character and statesmanship, without suffering
from the comparison; indeed, so far from suffering any eclipse, his
personality would only have emerged more signally and more distinctly,
with the melancholy suavity of its form and the unyielding resilience of
its substance.
In April 1899, the second centenary of the death of Racine was celebrated
in Paris by a performance of Racine’s _Bérénice_ at the Théâtre français.
This performance was one of the landmarks in my literary adventures.
Bartet played Bérénice, and I do not suppose that Racine’s verse can ever
have been more sensitively rendered and more delicately differentiated.
Between the acts, M. Du Lau, a fine connoisseur of life and art, took me
behind the scenes and introduced me to Bartet. They talked of the play.
Around us hovered an admiring crowd, and whispered homages were flung to
the artist, like flowers. It was like a scene in a Henry James novel, a
page from the _Tragic Muse_. They agreed that Racine’s loveliest verses
were in this play: “Des vers si nuancés,” as Du Lau said. Bartet wore
a lilac cloak over white draperies, and a high ivory diadem, and when
we said good-bye Du Lau kissed her hand and said: “Bon soir, charmante
Bérénice.”
If anyone is inclined to think Racine is a tedious author they cannot do
better than read _Bérénice_. It is the model of what a tragedy should be.
The drama is simple and arises naturally and inevitably from the facts of
the case, which are all contained in one sentence of Suetonius: “Titus
Reginam Berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab urbe
dimisit invitus invitam.” That is to say, Titus loved Bérénice and, it
was believed, had promised her marriage. He sent her away from Rome,
against his own will as well as against hers, as soon as he came to the
throne.
It is the eternal conflict between public duty and personal inclination.
“With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part,
My very dear,
Our solace is the sad road lies so clear;
Go thou to East,
I West.”
Coventry Patmore’s Ode sums up the whole tragedy. The sentiments the
characters express are what any characters would have said in such a
situation now or a thousand years ago, and would be just as appropriate
and true if the protagonists of the drama belonged to Belgravia or to the
Mile End Road. The verse is exquisite.
Antiochus, who loved Bérénice in vain, says to her as he leaves her:
“Que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,
Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
The tragedy is full of musical lines, sad and suggestive and softly
reverberating, with muted endings such as:
“Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui?
Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,
Lieux charmants, où mon cœur vous avait adorée,”
and some of the most poignant words of farewell ever uttered:
“Pour jamais! Ah Seigneur! songez-vous en vous-même
Combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?
Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.”
The Prince of Wales passed through Paris and stayed there a night that
winter and dined at the Embassy, and we had to wear special coats and be
careful they had the right number of buttons on them.
I got to know a good many French people, and some of those who had been
famous in the days of the Second Empire: Madame de Galliffet and Madame
de Pourtalès. Madame de Pourtalès had grey hair, but time, which had
taken away much from her and stamped her with his pitiless seal, had not
taken, and was destined never to take, away the undefinable authority
that alone great beauty possesses, and never loses, nor her radiant
smile, which would suddenly make her look young.
Once at a party at Paris many years after this, at the Jaucourts’
house, I again saw Madame de Pourtalès. It was not long before she
died. Her hair was, or seemed to be, quite white, and that evening the
room was rather dim and lit from the ceiling; her face was powdered
and she appeared quite transfigured; the whiteness of her hair and the
effect of the light made her face look quite young. You were conscious
only of dazzling shoulders, a peerless skin, soft shining eyes, and a
magical smile. She put out everyone else in a room. She looked like the
photographs of herself taken when she was a young woman. One saw what
she must have been, and everybody who was there agreed that here was an
instance of the undefinable, undying persistence of great beauty that
just when you think it is dead, suddenly blooms afresh and gives you a
glimpse of its own past.
Reggie Lister told me that he had once asked Madame de Pourtalès what
was the greatest compliment that had ever been paid her. She said it was
this. Once in summer she had been going out to dinner in Paris. It was
rather late in the summer, and a breathless evening, she was sitting in
her open carriage, dressed for dinner, waiting for someone in the clear
daylight. It was so hot she had only a tulle veil round her shoulders.
While she was waiting a workman passed the carriage, and when he saw
her he stood and gaped in silence; at last he said: “Christi! que tu es
belle!”
I had already written some short parodies of four French authors which I
wished to get published. A friend of mine sent them to Henri de Régnier
and asked his advice. His opinion was extremely favourable. He said,
and I quote his words, so that he may bear the responsibility for my
publishing such a thing in Paris: “J’ai lu les amusants pastiches de M.
Baring. Bourget, Renan, Loti ou France pourraient avoir écrit chacun des
pages qui soient moins eux.” “Il faut pour avoir fait cela une science
bien délicate de la langue française. Conseillez donc à Monsieur Baring
de faire imprimer une petite plaquette. Elle representerait à elle seule
de gros livres, ce qui sera délicieux.” I sent the parodies to Lemerre
and he accepted them, and they were published in Paris by his firm. The
pamphlet was called _Hildesheim_, and the small edition was soon sold
out. The little book was well received by the French, and I got a good
deal of fun out of it.
Another literary adventure I had at this time was a correspondence I
started in the _Saturday Review_. Max Beerbohm, in an article on a French
translation of _Hamlet_, said something about the French language being
lacking in suggestiveness and mystery. I wrote a letter saying that the
French language was as suggestive to a Frenchman as the English language
was to an Englishman, upon which a professor wrote to say that the French
language was only a bastard language, and that when a Frenchman wrote of
a girl as being _beaucoup belle_ he was talking pidgin-Latin. Many people
then wrote to point out that the professor was talking pidgin-French, and
a certain H. B. joined in the fray, quoting the “Chanson de Roland,” and
saying that an Englishman who used the phrase _beaucoup belle_ in France
would be treated with the courtesy due to strangers, but a Frenchman
would be preparing for himself an unhappy manhood and a friendless old
age. It was a terrible comment, he added, on the modern system of primary
education. The controversy then, as nearly always happens, wandered
into the channel of a side-issue, where it went on merrily bubbling for
several weeks.
English people used to stream through Paris all the year round. One was
constantly asked out to dinner, both by them and by the French. One night
I dined with Admiral Maxse, and the other guest was M. Clemenceau. M.
Clemenceau was in those days conducting a violent campaign for Dreyfus in
the Press, and was a thorn in the flesh of the Government. I was severely
reproved for dining with him the next day. I knew a few Frenchmen of
letters: M. Henri de Régnier, Melchior de Vogüé, André Chevrillon,
Edouard Rod, Madame Darmesteter.
I remember at one of Anatole France’s receptions (I only attended very
few, as in those days a foreigner felt uncomfortable in circles where
the Dreyfus case was being discussed—it was too much of a family affair)
Anatole France talked of Æschylus. He said the texts we possess of
Æschylus are shortened, abbreviated forms of the plays, almost, speaking
with exaggeration, like the libretto of an opera founded on a well-known
drama, almost as if we only possessed an operatic libretto of _Hamlet_
or _Faust_, but he added: “Pourtant ceux qui ont admiré Aschyle ne sont
point des imbéciles.”
But literature was rarely discussed anywhere in those days, as
_L’affaire_ dominated everything and excluded all other topics.
In August came the Rennes trial, and the excitement reached its climax.
Galliffet was minister of war, and I heard him make his first speech in
the Chamber. “Assassin!” shouted the left. “C’est moi, Messieurs,” said
Galliffet, and waited till they had finished. During the month of August,
he used to dine every night at the “Cercle de l’Union.” The club was
quite deserted. I used often to sit at his table.
He told me that many people in the Club would probably not speak to him
when they returned, for his having accepted the portfolio at such a time.
“They will turn their backs on me probably,” he said. “Mais,” he added,
with a chuckle, “ils ne se permetteront pas une impertinence.” He used
to tell me many interesting things. He said the most beautiful woman
he had ever seen in his life was Georgiana, Lady Dudley, at one of the
early Paris Exhibitions, and after her, Madame de Castiglione. I never
knew whether he had believed in the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, but I
knew he was determined the case should end somehow and by a verdict which
should bring about an _apaisement_.
The General was a picturesque and striking figure, not tall nor imposing,
but carved, as it were, in some enduring granite-like substance, with
steely eyes, a quick, rather hoarse, jerky utterance, and a very direct
manner, a little alarming to a newcomer, owing to its abrupt frankness,
and his way of saying what he thought in the most pointed, Gallic manner.
His illustrations, too, and his confessions were sometimes startling.
In conversation he leapt over all conventions, with the same gaiety and
gallantry that had made him say at Sedan: “Tant que vous voudrez, Mon
Général.” In the early days of the case he had been strongly in favour of
revision.
When the verdict of the Court of Rennes was announced, and Dreyfus
subsequently pardoned, a curious thing happened. Although the topic
had been raging daily for years to the exclusion of everything else,
exciting everywhere the fiercest passions, and dividing every family in
France, estranging friendships, and breaking careers, the very moment
the decision was made known, the topic dropped from the minds of men
instantly and finally, as though it had never existed.
My own point of view, which I sometimes found was shared by others, was
that I believed Dreyfus to be innocent, but I loathed the Dreyfusards.
Commenting on this, Andrew Lang wrote to me: “People like us, who hate
vivisection and anti-vivisectionists, who believe Dreyfus was innocent
and loathe Dreyfusards (though anti-Dreyfusards were really worse), have
no business on this foolish planet.”
I often went to the play, and the chief enjoyment I derived was from what
Sarah Bernhardt did in those days, about most of which I shall deal with
separately. She must have a chapter to herself. Of the rest I remember
but little except a revival of _La Belle Hélène_ with its enchanting
tunes, and some funny songs at Montmartre; Réjane in _Zaza_ and _La Robe
Rouge_, and a terrifying play at the Théâtre Antoine called _En Paix_,
about a man who is shut up in a lunatic asylum, when he is sane, and who
ends by going mad. This play was said not only to have been founded on
fact, but to have been written by a man whose brother had been shut up in
a private lunatic asylum by some conspiring greedy relations.
The man whose brother was thus treated went to Law, but without avail,
so as a last resource he wrote a play in which he exposed the facts,
which were briefly these: A greedy family wish to get one of their
members out of the way. They say he is mad and get him sequestered in
a mad-house. He has a just brother who tries to get him released, but
the brother finds himself faced with the obstinacy of professionalism
when he declares the sequestered man is not mad; the lunatic experts
say he does not understand the intricacies of the disease, and when he
loses his temper, the doctors say: “You, too, are showing signs of the
family madness.” The man who is shut up is quick tempered; a sojourn with
lunatics sharpens his temper, and the play ends by his being dragged
out by sinister-looking warders, crying out: “A la douche!” I could not
sleep after seeing this spectacle, which lost nothing in the realistic
interpretation of actors such as Antoine and Gémier.
In September, I went for a short time on leave, and stayed at Lynton,
North Devon, with the Cornishes in a delightful little house called the
Chough’s Nest. It was a warm, soft windy Devonshire September. Hubert
and I bathed in the great breakers. We had wonderful teas in the valley,
and followed the staghounds on Exmoor. We talked of all the books under
the sun, and I wrote a poem in blank verse which was afterwards published
in the _Anglo-Saxon Review_.
Later in the autumn, I stayed a few days at a château near Fontainebleau,
and saw the forest in all the glory of its autumn foliage, with the tall
trees ablaze, like funeral torches for the dying year; and the gardens of
the château, and the splendid rooms seemed more melancholy than ever, as
though the ghosts of the kings and queens of France were there unseen;
and, looking at the gorgeous raiment of the fading forest, I thought of
Mary Stuart putting on her most splendid robes on the morning of her
execution, and mounting the scaffold in flaming satin.
“And all in red as of a funeral flame,
And clothed as if with sunset.”
There are no sadder places in the world than Versailles, Fontainebleau,
and Compiègne; those empty, deserted shells where there was once so much
glory and so much gaiety, so much bustle and so much drama, and which are
now hollow museums laid bare to the scrutiny of every profane sight-seer.
During the autumn of 1899, in Paris, I received a visit from Reggie
Balfour, whom I had known at Cambridge, although he went to Cambridge
after I had left. He was a brilliant scholar and had done great things at
Cambridge. He had been staying at Angers to study French. We talked of
books, of the Dreyfus case, and he suddenly said that he felt a strong
desire to become a Catholic. I was extremely surprised and disconcerted.
Up till that moment I had only known two people who had become Catholics:
one was a relation, who had married a Catholic, and the other was an
undergraduate, who had never discussed the matter except to say he must
have all or nothing. When Reggie Balfour told me this I was amazed.
I remember saying to him that the Christian religion was not so very
old, and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of
mankind; but that if he believed in the Christian revelation, and in the
Sacraments of the Anglican Church, he would find it difficult to turn
round and say those Sacraments had been an illusion. I begged him to
wait. I said there was nothing to prevent his worshipping in Catholic
churches without committing himself intellectually to a step that must
cramp his freedom. I advised him to live in the porch without entering
the building. I said finally: “My trouble is I cannot believe in the
first proposition, the source of all dogma. If I could do that, if I
could tell the first lie, I quite see that all the rest would follow.”
He took me one morning to Low Mass at Notre Dame des Victoires. I had
never attended a Low Mass before in my life. It impressed me greatly.
I had imagined Catholic services were always long, complicated, and
overlaid with ritual. A Low Mass, I found, was short, extremely simple,
and somehow or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings of
the Early Christians. One felt one was looking on at something extremely
ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their
faces impressed me too. To them it was evidently real.
We worked together at some poems I had written, and Reggie arranged to
have a small pamphlet of them privately printed for me, at the Cambridge
University Press, which was done that Christmas.
When we got back to London, he sent me this epitaph, which is translated
from the Latin, and is to be found at Rome in the Church of St. John
Lateran, the date being about 1600:
“Ci-gît Robert Pechom, anglais, catholique, qui après la rupture de
l’Angleterre avec l’église, a quitté l’Angleterre ne pouvant y vivre sans
la foi et qui, venu à Rome y est mort ne pouvant y vivre sans patrie.”
The next year saw the opening of the Exhibition. On the 17th of March,
I went with Reggie Lister to the first night of _L’Aiglon_. It was a
momentous first night. All the most notable people in the literary
and social world of Paris were there: Anatole France, Jules Lemaître,
Halévy, Sardou, Robert de Montesquiou, Albert Vandal, Henry Houssaye,
Paul Hervieu, Coquelin, Madame Greffuhle. The excitement was tense.
Sarah had a tremendous reception. When she spoke the line, which occurs
in the first scene, “Je n’aime pas beaucoup que la France soit neutre,”
there was a roar of applause, but this, one felt, was political rather
than artistic enthusiasm. The first quiet dialogue between the Duke
and the courtiers held the audience, and we felt that Sarah’s calm and
biting irony portended great reserves held in store, and when the scene
of the history lesson followed, which Sarah played with an increasing
accelerando and crescendo, and when she came to the lines:
“Il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;
Un soir il dit au camp: ‘Demain!’ Le lendemain,
Il dit en galopant sur le front de bandière:
‘Soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre!’
Il va, tachant de gris l’état-major vermeil;
L’armée est une mer; il attend le soleil;
Il le voit se lever du haut d’un promontoire;
Et, d’un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l’histoire!”[8]
she carried them off with a pace and an intensity that went through the
large theatre like an electric shock. People were crying everywhere
in the audience, and I remember Reggie Lister saying to me in the
_entr’acte_ that what moved him at a play or in a book was hardly ever
the pathetic, but when people did or said splendid things.
The rest of the play, from that moment until the end, was a triumphant
progression of cunningly administered electric thrills which were
deliriously received by a quivering audience.
When it was all over and people talked of it the next and the following
days in drawing-rooms and in the press, the enthusiasm began to cool down.
The following extracts from an article which I wrote in the _Speaker_
about it, immediately after the performance, give an idea of the
impression the play made at the time:
“Monsieur Rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, and the
colossal success of _Cyrano de Bergerac_, is certainly the French author
of the present day who attracts the greatest amount of public attention
in France, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are
supported and disputed with the greatest vehemence. His popularity in
France is as great as that of Mr. Kipling in England; and in France, as
is the case with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many and
determined advocates of the devil. Some deny to M. Rostand the title of
poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he
has no poetical talent whatsoever. In the case of poetical plays the
public is probably in the long run the only judge. Never in the world’s
history has it been seen that the really magnificent poetical play has
proved a lasting failure, or a really bad poetical play a perennial
success. Of course there have been plays which, like other works that
have come before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate;
while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of surprising
mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the
hand of time. But in the main the public has been right, and those who
take the opposite view generally belong to a class alluded to by Pope:
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng
By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
Certainly in M. Rostand’s case, whatever may be the exact ‘place’ of
his plays in the evolution of the world’s poetical drama, one thing is
quite certain: his plays are triumphantly successful. This for a play
is a merit in itself. After the triumph of _Cyrano_ it was difficult to
believe that _L’Aiglon_ would attain the same level of merit and success,
and never was a success more discounted beforehand. For weeks _L’Aiglon_
was the main topic of conversation in Paris, and provided endless copy
for the newspapers. Another thing is certain: however the æsthetic value
of _L’Aiglon_ may be rated in the future, it constitutes for the present
another gigantic success. Never did a play come at a more opportune
moment. At a time when the French are thinking that their country has
for a long time been playing too insignificant a part in European
politics, when the country is still convalescent and suffering from the
vague discomfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, fretting and chafing
under the colourless mediocrity of a régime that falls short of their
flamboyant ideal, M. Rostand comes skilfully leading a martial orchestra,
and sets their pulses throbbing, their ears tingling, and their hearts
beating to the inspiring tunes of Imperial France.
“M. Rostand’s play is certainly a forward step in his poetical career.
It has the same colour and vitality as _Cyrano_; the same incomparable
instinct for stage effect, the same skill and dexterity in the
manipulation of words which amounts to jugglery, the same fertility in
poetical images and felicitous couplets that we find in his earlier
works; but, besides this, it has something that they have not—a graver
atmosphere, a larger outlook, a deeper note; the fabric, though the
builder’s skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, more irregular,
but in it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the Epic Muse,
which compensates for the unevenness of the carpentry.
“In _L’Aiglon_ we breathe the atmosphere of the epic of Napoleon.
Although the scenes which M. Rostand presents to us deal only with
the sunset of that period, the glories and vicissitudes of that epoch
are suggested to us; we do not see the things themselves, but we are
conscious of their spirit, their poetic existence and essence. M. Rostand
evokes them, not by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in
the images of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see
them more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form of
elaborate tableaux or spectacular battle-pieces.
“The existence of Napoleon II. was in itself a tragic fact. Yet more
tragic if, as Metternich is reported to have said of him, he had ‘a
head of iron and a body of glass.’ And a degree more tragic still is M.
Rostand’s creation of a prince whose frail tenement of clay is consumed
by ambition and aspiration, and who is conscious, at times, of the vanity
of his aspiration and the hopelessness of his ambition. Thus tossed to
and fro, from ecstasy to despair, he is another Hamlet, born, not to
avenge a crime against his father, but to atone for his father’s crimes.
Perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is when the prince realises,
on the plain of Wagram, that he himself is the atonement; that he is the
white wafer of sacrifice offered as an expiation for so many oceans of
blood. M. Rostand has chosen this theme, pregnant with pathos, as his
principal _motif_. It is needless to relate the play… The close of the
Fifth Act is perhaps the finest thing in conception of the whole; in it
we see Napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape to France,
alone on the battlefield of Wagram, pale in his white uniform on the
great green moonlit plain, with the body of the faithful soldier of the
Old Guard, who killed himself rather than be taken by the Austrians,
lying before him. Gradually in the sighing winds Napoleon imagines he
hears the moans of the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the
fancy grows into hallucination, until he sees himself surrounded by
regiments of ghosts, and hears the groans, the call, and the clamour of
phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate in the cry
of ‘Vive l’empereur.’ He hears the tramping of men, the champing and
neighing of chargers, and the music of the band; he thinks the ‘Grande
Armée’ has come to life, and rushes joyfully to meet it; the vision is
then dispelled, and the irony of the reality is made plain, for it is the
white uniforms of the Austrian regiment (of which he is Colonel) that
appear in the plain. The scene is almost Shakespearean in its effect of
beauty and terror.
“Finally, in the last Act, we see the _Roi de Rome_ dying in his gilded
cage while he listens to the account of his baptism in Paris, which
is read out to him as he dies. He who as a child ‘eut pour hochet
la couronne de Rome’ is now an obscure and insignificant Hapsburg
princeling, dying forgotten by the world, without a friend, and under the
eye of his imperturbable enemy.
“The play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthiness, and
inequality; of too rapid transitions, of a clash in style between
preciosity and brutality. It has been compared unfavourably with
_Cyrano_… Fault is found now, as it was before, with the form of M.
Rostand’s verses; they are no doubt better heard on the stage than read
in the study, and this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions.
His verses are not those of Racine, of Alfred de Vigny, or of Lecomte
de Lisle … but they have a poetic quality and a value of their own; and
while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears I should think it
foolish to quarrel with them and to criticise them in a captious spirit;
possibly on reading _L’Aiglon_ the impression may be different. For the
present, still under the spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause
which his couplets inspired on the memorable first night of the play, I
can but thank the author who brought before my eyes, with the skilful and
clamorous music of his harps and horns, his trumpets and fifes and drums,
the vision of an heroic epoch and the shadows of Homeric battles—the
red sun and the cannon balls shivering the ice at Austerlitz, the Pope
crowning another Cæsar at Notre Dame, Moscow in flames and the Great Army
scattered on the plains of Russia, and the lapping of the tideless sea
round St. Helena.”
Many of those who had been most enthusiastic at the first night of
_L’Aiglon_ lost no time in saying they had been mistaken, and that it was
after all but a poor affair. Someone said that Rostand’s verse was made
_en caoutchouc_. I heard someone ask Robert de Montesquieu his opinion
soon after the play was produced. He said he thought the verse was in
the best Victor Hugo tradition; some of it, Metternich’s monologue on
Napoleon’s hat, very fine. Somebody mentioned the more sentimental verses
on _La Petite Source_: “Cela doit être,” said Montesquiou, “de Madame
Rostand.”
Arthur Strong, after he saw the play, told me it had carried him away,
and the fact of Sarah Bernhardt being a woman, and not a young woman, had
mattered to him no more than the footlights or the painted scenery; he
had accepted it, he had been made to accept it gladly, by the fire of the
play and the power of the interpretation.
The Paris Exhibition of 1900 was opened on the 14th of April, and
the whole of the Embassy staff attended that ceremony in uniform. I
remember little of it. The features of the Exhibition were the _trottoir
roulant_, a moving platform, that took visitors all round the Exhibition
without their having to stir a foot; the pictures in the Grand Palais;
the little city on the left bank of the Seine, where every nation was
represented by a house, and where, in the English house, there was a room
copied from Broughton Castle, full of Gainsboroughs; the Petit Palais,
a gem in itself; and, besides these, there were the usual features of
all exhibitions—side-shows, bales of chocolate, and galleries full of
machinery and implements.
Towards the end of April I was taken by M. Castillon de Saint Victor for
an expedition in a free balloon. I had been up twice in a captive balloon
in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and had not enjoyed the experience,
especially once on a windy day. I was not at all sure I was not going to
dislike the free balloon, and I felt a pang of fear whenever I thought of
it beforehand; but when the moment of starting came, and the balloon was
released, and rose as gently and as imperceptibly as a puff of smoke from
Saint Denis, and soared higher and higher into the dazzling sky without
noise, without our experiencing any effect of motion or breeze, I felt
intoxicated with pleasure. We went up to three thousand feet. It was like
reaching another planet, an Olympic region of serenity and light, and one
had no desire to leave it or to descend again to the earth.
We ate luncheon from a basket and drank a little rum, which was said
to be the best beverage in a balloon, and we took photographs from the
air. I little thought that I should one day have something to do with
aircraft, air photographs, and all the many details of air navigation.
We floated on across Paris in a south-easterly direction. We came down
low over a château belonging to the Rothschilds’ and over the forest of
Creçy; later in the afternoon, we dropped a guide rope and floated over
the country at a height of about two hundred feet, and as the evening
came on, the balloon came down still lower and sailed along just over
the tree-tops. Finally we landed. The balloon hopped like a football,
the basket car was overturned, and the gas was let out. We landed in a
deserted piece of flat country, but no sooner was the balloon on the
ground than, as always happens, a crowd sprang from nowhere and helped
us. The balloon was put in a cart, and we walked to the town of Provins,
which was not far off, and there we took the train to Paris. The next
time I visited Provins it was the General Headquarters of the French Army
during the latter part of the European War.
I spent a week of that spring at Fontainebleau and Chantilly. There were
a great many English people in Paris. One night, at the opera, in a box,
an English lady was sitting, a large emerald poised high on her hair; the
audience looked at nothing else, and an old Frenchman, who had been an
ornament of the Second Empire, came up to me in the entr’acte and said:
“Il est impossible d’être plus jolie que cette femme.” Shortly after this
I travelled up to Paris from Fontainebleau with this same lady. The train
was crowded, and we just managed to find room in the barest of provincial
railway carriages. There were some private soldiers in the carriage, and
some substantial women in sabots with large baskets. They gazed at her
with childish delight, unmixed admiration, and surprised wonder, as she
sat, making the boards of the third-class carriage look like a throne, in
cool, diaphanous, lilac and white muslins and a large bunch of flowers,
a vision of radiance and grace; it reminded me of the large masses of
lilies of the valley and roses you suddenly meet with in a dark, narrow
street corner on the first fine day of spring in Florence.
We went to a shop in Paris where she wanted to buy a pair of gloves. When
she asked how much they were, the lady who was serving her said: “Pour
vous rien, Madame, vous êtes trop jolie!”
I used to see a great deal of Monsieur and Madame de Jaucourt, whom I
could remember ever since the early days of my childhood. Monsieur de
Jaucourt had the most delightful way of expressing things. One day when
Madame de Jaucourt was pressing myself and another of the secretaries
to stay with them in the country, he said: “Ma chère, les jeunes gens
ont beaucoup mieux à faire que d’aller passer des heures à la campagne!”
He was passionately fond of Paris. “On me gâte mon cher Paris,” he used
to say. After luncheon, he would interview the cook and discuss every
detail of last night’s dinner, praising this and criticising that, with
extraordinary nicety and precision; and when he gave a dance in his
house for boys and girls, on the afternoon preceding it, he would have
different samples of lemonade and orangeade sent up to taste and choose
from, to see if they were sweet enough but not too sweet. The lemonade
was for the juvenile buffet. Women’s bets used to amuse him, and when
they talked about racing, he would say: “Les paris des femmes sont à
crever de rire.” He was a connoisseur of artistic things, and enjoyed a
fine house, and beautiful _objets d’art_. He insisted on my going to see
the château of Vaux, which he said was the finest house he knew. He said
what distinguished it from other houses was that it was not crammed with
valuable things for the sake of ostentation, show, or ornament, but where
a piece of furniture was wanted, there it would be, and it would be a
good one.
Monsieur de Jaucourt had a house not far from Paris in the country, and
I remember playing croquet one day there. His daughter, Françoise, aimed
carefully at the ball and missed the hoop, upon which M. de Jaucourt
said, with a sigh: “Ma pauvre fille, tu as joué sans réfléchir.” I often
used to dine at the “Cercle de l’Union.” There were about four or five
old men who used to dine there every night; a few, a very few, younger
men, but no quite young Frenchmen.
One night someone arrived and asked for some cold soup. There was none.
In a fury of passion this member asked for the book of complaints. When
it was brought, he wrote in it: “N’ayant pas pu trouver un consommé froid
j’ai dû diner hors du Club.”
One night the new house, built by Count Boni de Castellane in the Bois
de Boulogne, was being discussed. Someone said it was like Trianon, and
that it would be difficult to keep up. Someone else who was there said:
“Mais Boni est beaucoup plus riche que Louis XIV.” M. Du Lau and General
Galliffet used often to dine there to discuss the days of their youth and
talk over the beauties and even the wines of the past; General Galliffet
told us one night how he won sums of money by playing with a piece of
rope taken from a gibbet in his pocket, and that the best wine he had
ever drunk in his life was in the Rhine country. Now they are all dead,
and I suppose their place is taken by those who were the older young men
in those days, but I have no doubt that they sit round in the same chairs
and sometimes complain if there is no _consommé froid_ to be had.
In the summer of 1900, I went on leave to London for a few weeks and
attempted to pass an examination in International Law after a few weeks’
preparation. I went up for the examination, and I don’t think I was able
to answer a single question; my crammer told me I had not the legal mind.
At the end of the summer, I was told that the Foreign Office wanted me to
go to Copenhagen, and at the beginning of August I started for Denmark as
Third Secretary to Her Majesty’s Legation.