At four o’clock Leontine ran up, gave me her hand, and we set off to the
Café Riche. Though that is not far from the Opera House, yet Haug had
time on the way to fall in love with the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto,
that is, the fair girl. And at the first course, after long and curious
sentences concerning the Tintoretto charm of her hair and eyes, Haug
began discoursing on the aesthetic sin of dancing the _cancan_ with the
face of a madonna and the expression of an angel of purity. ‘_Armes,
holdes Kind!_’ he added, addressing us all.
‘Why is it your friend talks such boring _fatras_?’ Leontine whispered in
my ear, ‘and why does he go to fancy-dress balls at all—he’d better go to
the Madeleine?’
‘He is a German, they all suffer from that complaint,’ I whispered to her.
‘_Mais c’est qu’il est ennuyeux, votre ami avec son mal de sermon. Mon
petit saint, finiras-tu donc bientôt?_’
And while waiting for the sermon to end, Leontine, tired out, flung
herself on the sofa. Facing her was a big looking-glass; she kept looking
in it, and at last could not refrain from pointing to herself and saying
to me: ‘Why, with my hair so untidy and in this crumpled dress and this
position, I really don’t look bad.’
When she had said it, she suddenly dropped her eyes and blushed—blushed
openly up to her ears. To cover her confusion she began humming the
well-known song which Heine has distorted in his translation, and which
is terrible in its artless simplicity:—
‘Et je mourrai dans mon hôtel,
Ou à l’Hôtel-Dieu.’
A strange creature, elusive, full of life; the ‘Lacerta’ of Goethe’s
Elegies, a child in a sort of unconscious delirium. Like a lizard, she
could not sit still for a single instant, and she could not keep silent
either. When she had nothing to say, she was singing, making grimaces
before the looking-glass, and all with the unconstraint of a child and
the grace of a woman. Her _frivolité_ was naïve. Carried away by chance,
she was still whirling round, still floating.... The shock which would
have stopped her on the edge or finally thrust her over the precipice
had not yet come. She had gone a good bit of the road but could still
turn back. Her clear intelligence and innate grace were still strong
enough to save her.
Her type, her circle, her surroundings, exist no longer. She was ‘_la
petite femme_’ of the student of old days, the _grisette_ who passed
from the Latin Quartier to this side of the Seine without sinking to
the level of the street-walker nor rising to the secure social position
of the Camélia. That type has passed away, just as conversations by the
fireside, reading aloud at a round table, chatting over tea have gone.
There are other forms, other notes, other people, other words.... This
too has its own scale, its own _crescendo_. The mischievous, rather
abandoned element of the ’thirties—_du lest_, _de l’espièglerie_—passed
into _chic_; there was cayenne pepper in it, but it still retained a
careless exuberant grace, it still retained wit and cleverness. As
things began to be done on a larger scale, commerce cast off everything
superfluous, and sacrificed everything spiritual to the shop-front, the
_étalage_. The type of Leontine, the lively Parisian _gamine_, mobile,
clever, spoilt, sparkling, free, and on occasion proud, is not wanted,
and chic has passed into _chienne_. What the Lovelace of the boulevards
wants is the woman-_chienne_, and above all, one who has her master.
It is more economical and disinterested: with another man running the
show, he can get his sport by simply paying the extras. ‘_Parbleu_,’ an
old man whose best years had been at the beginning of Louis-Philippe’s
reign said to me, ‘_je ne me retrouve plus—où est le fion,[54] le chic,
où est l’esprit?... Tout cela est beau, well-bred, mais ... c’est de la
charcuterie ... c’est du Rubens._’
That reminds me how in the ’fifties dear good Talandier, with the
vexation of a man in love with his France, explained to me with a musical
illustration its downfall. ‘When,’ he said to me, ‘we were great, in
the early days after the revolution of February, nothing was heard but
the Marseillaise—in the cafés, in the street-processions, always the
Marseillaise. Every theatre had its Marseillaise, here with cannon,
there with Rachel. When things grew duller and quieter, the monotonous
sounds of _Mourir pour la Patrie_ took its place. That was no harm yet,
but we sank lower.... _Un sous-lieutenant accablé de besogne ... drin,
drin, din, din, din_ ... the whole city, the capital of the world, the
whole of France was singing that silly thing. That is not the end; after
that, we began playing and singing _Partant pour la Syrie_ at the top and
_Qu’aime donc Margot ... Margot_ at the bottom: that is, senselessness
and indecency. One can sink no lower.’
One can! Talandier did not foresee either _Je suis la femme à barbe_ or
_The Sapper_; he stopped short at chic and never reached the _chienne_
stage. Hurried carnal corruption superseded all embellishments. The body
conquered the spirit, and, as I said ten years ago, _Margot, la fille
de marbre_, crowded out Béranger’s Lisette and all the Leontines in
the world. The latter had their humanity, their poetry, their ideas of
honour. They loved uproar and spectacles better than wine and supper,
and they loved their supper more for the sake of the surroundings, the
candles, the sweets, the flowers. They could not exist without dancing
and balls, without laughter and chatter. In the most luxurious harem
they would have been stifled, would have pined away in a year. Their
finest representative was Déjazet—both on the great stage of the world
and the little one of the _Théâtre des Variétés_. She was the living
embodiment of a song of Béranger, a saying of Voltaire, and was young
at forty—Déjazet, who changed her adorers like a guard of honour,
capriciously flung away gold by the handful, and gave herself to the
first-comer to get a friend out of trouble.
Nowadays it is all simplified, curtailed. One gets there sooner, as
old-fashioned country gentlemen used to say who preferred vodka to wine.
The woman of _fion_ intrigued and interested, the woman of _chic_ stung
and amused, and both, apart from money, took up time. The _chienne_
pounces straight away upon her victim, bites with her beauty, and pulls
him by the coat _sans phrase_; in this there is no preface, in this the
epilogue comes at the beginning. Thanks to a paternal Government and the
medical faculty, even the two dangers of the past are gone; police and
medicine have made great advances of late years.
And what will come after the _chienne_? Hugo’s _pieuvre_ has completely
failed, perhaps because it is too much like a _pleutre_. And yet we
cannot stop at the _chienne_.
However, let us leave prophesying. The designs of providence are
unfathomable.
What interests me is something else.
Which of the two prophecies of Cassandra will come true for Leontine? Is
her once graceful little head resting on a lace-trimmed pillow in _her
own hotel_, or has it been laid on the rough hospital-bolster to fall
asleep for ever, or awaken to poverty and sorrow? Though maybe neither
the one fate nor the other is hers, and she is busy getting her daughter
married or saving money to buy a recruit to replace her son in the army.
She is no longer young now, and must be long past the ’thirties.