Ten years ago, as I was going through the Haymarket late one cold
damp winter evening, I came upon a negro, a lad of seventeen; he was
barefooted and without a shirt, and in fact rather undressed for the
tropics than dressed for London. Shivering all over, with his teeth
chattering, he begged from me. Two days later I met him again, and then
again and again. At last I got into conversation with him. He spoke a
broken English-Spanish, but it was not hard to understand the meaning of
his words.
‘You are young and strong,’ I said to him, ‘why don’t you get work?’
‘No one will give it me.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I know no one here who would give me a character.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From a ship.’
‘What sort of ship?’
‘A Spanish one; the captain beat me very much, so I went away.’
‘What did you do on board ship?’
‘Everything: brushed the clothes, washed up, did the cabins.’
‘What do you mean to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you will die of cold and hunger, you know, or anyway you will
certainly get a bad cold.’
‘What am I to do?’ said the negro in despair, looking at me and shivering
all over with cold.
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘here goes. It is not the first silly thing I have
done in my life.’
‘Come with me. I’ll give you clothes and a corner to sleep in; you shall
scrub my rooms, light the fires and stay as long as you like, if you
behave quietly and properly. _Si no—no._’
The negro jumped with joy.
Within a week he was fatter, and gaily did the work of four. So he spent
six months with us; then one evening he made his appearance at my door,
stood a little while in silence, and then said to me:—
‘I have come to say good-bye to you.’
‘How’s that?’
‘For now it is enough, I am going.’
‘Has anybody been nasty to you?’
‘No, indeed, I am content with all.’
‘Then where are you going now?’
‘To some ship.’
‘What for?’
‘I am dreadfully sick of it, I can’t stand it, I shall do a mischief if I
stay. I want the sea. I will go away and come back again, but for now it
is enough.’
I made an effort to keep him; he stayed on for three days, and then
announced for the second time it was more than he could stand, that he
must go away, that ‘for now it is enough.’
That was in the spring.
In the autumn he turned up again, tropically divested, and again I
clothed him; but he soon began playing various nasty tricks, and even
threatened to kill me, and I was obliged to turn him away.
These last facts are irrelevant, but the point is that I completely
share the negro’s outlook. After staying a long time in the same place
and sticking in the same rut, I feel that for a time _it is enough_,
that I must refresh myself with other horizons and other faces ... and
at the same time must retire into myself, strange as that sounds. The
superficial distractions of the journey do not prevent it.
There are people who prefer to get away _inwardly_, some with the help
of a powerful imagination and faculty of abstracting themselves from
their surroundings (a peculiar gift bordering on genius and insanity is
necessary for this), some with the help of opium or alcohol. Russians,
for instance, will have a drinking-bout for a week or two, and then go
back to their duties. I prefer shifting my whole body to shifting my
brain, and going round the world to letting my head go round.
Perhaps it is because I have a bad time after too much wine.
So I meditated on the 4th of October 1866 in a little room of a wretched
hotel on the Lac de Neufchâtel where I felt as much at home as though I
had lived in it all my life. The craving for solitude, and still more
for tranquillity, develops strangely with years.... It was rather a warm
night; I opened my window.... Everything was plunged in deep sleep: the
town and the lake and the boat which was moored to the bank and faintly
heaving, as I could hear from a slight creaking and see from the swinging
of the mast which shifted first to the right then to the left....
To know that no one is expecting you, no one will come in to you, that
you can do what you like, die perhaps, and no one will hinder you ... no
one will care ... is at once dreadful and good. I am certainly beginning
to be unsociable, and sometimes regret that I have not the strength to
become a secular hermit.
Only in solitude can a man work to the utmost of his power. The free
disposal of one’s time and the absence of inevitable interruptions is a
great thing. If a man begins to feel dull and tired, he can take his hat
and go himself in search of his fellows and rest with them. He has but
to go out into the street; the everlasting stream of faces floats by,
unending, changing and unchanged, with its flashing rainbow hues and grey
froth, its uproar and din. You look at this river of life as an artist,
you look at it as at an exhibition, just because you have nothing to do
with it. It is all apart from you, and you need nothing from any one.
Next day I got up early, and by eleven o’clock was so hungry that I went
for _déjeuner_ to a big hotel which could not take me the evening before
for lack of room. In the dining-room there was an Englishman with his
wife, from whom he concealed himself with a sheet of _The Times_, and a
Frenchman of about thirty, one of the new types which have come up of
late: stout, flabby, white, fair-haired, and softly fat, he looked as
though he were on the point of melting like jelly in a warm room, but
his ample overcoat and trousers of springy material fortunately held
him together. No doubt he was the son of some prince of the Bourse or
aristocrat of the democratic empire. Listlessly, in a spirit of mistrust
and investigation, he was proceeding through his lunch. One could see
that he had been engaged upon it for a long time already and was tired of
it.
This type, which scarcely existed in old days in France, began to appear
in the time of Louis-Philippe and has reached its full blossoming during
the last fifteen years. It is very repulsive, and that is perhaps a
compliment to the French. The life of an epicure of the _cuisine_ and
of wines does not so distort an Englishman or a Russian as it does a
Frenchman. The Foxes and the Sheridans drank and ate more than enough,
but they remained Foxes and Sheridans. The Frenchman is with impunity
devoted only to _literary_ gastronomy, consisting in an elaborate
_knowledge_ of dainties and in the ordering of dishes. No other nation
_talks_ as much about dinner, about sauces and culinary refinements,
as the Frenchman, but that is all a form of flourish and rhetoric. Real
gluttony and drunkenness destroy a Frenchman, swallow him up ... his
nerves are not fit for that. A Frenchman remains sound and uninjured only
when he spends his time flirting with every aspect of life; that is his
national passion and favourite weakness—in it he is strong.
‘Will you take dessert?’ asked the waiter, who evidently had more
respect for the Frenchman than for us. The young gentleman was at the
moment engaged in digestion, and therefore, slowly lifting his weary and
lustreless eyes to the waiter, he said: ‘I don’t know yet,’ thought a
little, and then added: ‘_Une poire!_’
The Englishman, who had all this time been eating in silence behind the
screen of his paper, stirred and said: ‘_Et à moa aussi!_’
The waiter brought two pears on two plates and handed one to the
Englishman; but the latter vigorously and emphatically protested: ‘No,
no! _aucune chose pour poire!_’ He simply wanted something to drink. He
got his drink and stood up; I only then observed that he was wearing a
child’s jacket, or spencer, of a light brown colour, and tight-fitting
light trousers terribly creased above his boots. The lady too got up; she
rose higher and higher still, and at last, terrifically tall, took the
arm of her squat husband and went out.
I followed them out with an involuntary smile, completely free from
malice; they seemed to me to have ten times as much human dignity as my
neighbour, who was unbuttoning the third button of his waistcoat as the
lady withdrew.