He was an Englishman who lived for the greater part of his life in
Paris. I would say he was a painter, if he had not been equally a
sculptor, a musician, an architect, a writer of verse, and a
university coach. A doer of so many things is inevitably suspect; you
will imagine that he must have bungled them all. On the contrary,
whatever he did, he did with a considerable degree of accomplishment.
The landscapes he painted were very fresh and pleasing, delicately
coloured, with lots of air in them, and a dreamy, suggestive
sentiment. His brother sculptors declared that his statuettes were
modelled with exceeding dash and directness; they were certainly
fanciful and amusing. I remember one that I used to like
immensely--Titania driving to a tryst with Bottom, her chariot a lily,
daisies for wheels, and for steeds a pair of mettlesome field-mice. I
doubt if he ever got a commission for a complete house; but the
staircases he designed, the fire-places, and other bits of buildings,
everybody thought original and graceful. The tunes he wrote were
lively and catching, the words never stupid, sometimes even strikingly
happy, epigrammatic; and he sang them delightfully, in a robust,
hearty baritone. He coached the youth of France, for their
examinations, in Latin and Greek, in history, mathematics, general
literature--in goodness knows what not; and his pupils failed so
rarely that, when one did, the circumstance became a nine days'
wonder. The world beyond the Students' Quarter had never heard of him,
but there he was a celebrity and a favourite; and, strangely enough
for a man with so many strings to his bow, he contrived to pick up a
sufficient living.
He was a splendid creature to look at, tall, stalwart, full-blooded,
with a ruddy open-air complexion; a fine bold brow and nose; brown
eyes, humorous, intelligent, kindly, that always brightened
flatteringly when they met you; and a vast quantity of bluish-grey
hair and beard. In his dress he affected (very wisely, for they became
him excellently) velvet jackets, flannel shirts, loosely-knotted ties,
and wide-brimmed soft felt hats. Marching down the Boulevard St.
Michel, his broad shoulders well thrown back, his head erect, chin
high in air, his whole person radiating health, power, contentment,
and the pride of them: he was a sight worth seeing, spirited,
picturesque, prepossessing. You could not have passed him without
noticing him--without wondering who he was, confident he was
somebody--without admiring him, and feeling that there went a man it
would be interesting to know.
He was, indeed, charming to know; he was the hero, the idol, of a
little sect of worshippers, young fellows who loved nothing better
than to sit at his feet. On the Rive Gauche, to be sure, we are, for
the most part, birds of passage; a student arrives, tarries a little,
then departs. So, with the exits and entrances of seniors and
_nouveaux_, the personnel of old Childe's following varied from season
to season; but numerically it remained pretty much the same. He had a
studio, with a few living-rooms attached, somewhere up in the
fastnesses of Montparnasse, though it was seldom thither that one went
to seek him. He received at his café, the Café Bleu--the Café Bleu
which has since blown into the monster café of the Quarter, the
noisiest, the rowdiest, the most flamboyant. But I am writing (alas)
of twelve, thirteen, fifteen years ago; in those days the Café Bleu
consisted of a single oblong room--with a sanded floor, a dozen
tables, and two waiters, Eugène and Hippolyte--where Madame Chanve,
the _patronne_, in lofty insulation behind her counter, reigned, if
you please, but where Childe, her principal client, governed. The
bottom of the shop, at any rate, was reserved exclusively to his use.
There he dined, wrote his letters, dispensed his hospitalities; he had
his own piano there, if you can believe me, his foils and
boxing-gloves; from the absinthe hour till bed-time there was his
habitat, his den. And woe to the passing stranger who, mistaking the
Café Bleu for an ordinary house of call, ventured, during that
consecrated period, to drop in. Nothing would be said, nothing done;
we would not even trouble to stare at the intruder. Yet he would
seldom stop to finish his consommation, or he would bolt it. He would
feel something in the air; he would know he was out of place. He would
fidget a little, frown a little, and get up meekly, and slink into the
street. Human magnetism is such a subtle force. And Madame Chanve
didn't mind in the least; she preferred a bird in the hand to a brace
in the bush. From half a dozen to a score of us dined at her long
table every evening; as many more drank her appetisers in the
afternoon, and came again at night for grog or coffee. You see, it was
a sort of club, a club of which Childe was at once the chairman and
the object. If we had had a written constitution, it must have begun:
'The purpose of this association is the enjoyment of the society of
Alfred Childe.'
Ah, those afternoons, those dinners, those ambrosial nights! If the
weather was kind, of course, we would begin our session on the
_terrasse_, sipping our vermouth, puffing our cigarettes, laughing our
laughs, tossing hither and thither our light ball of gossip, vaguely
conscious of the perpetual ebb and flow and murmur of people in the
Boulevard, while the setting sun turned Paris to a marvellous
water-colour, all pale lucent tints, amber and alabaster and
mother-of-pearl, with amethystine shadows. Then, one by one, those of
us who were dining elsewhere would slip away; and at a sign from
Hippolyte the others would move indoors, and take their places down
either side of the long narrow table, Childe at the head, his daughter
Nina next him. And presently with what a clatter of knives and forks,
clinking of glasses, and babble of human voices the Café Bleu would
echo. Madame Chanve's kitchen was not a thing to boast of, and her
price, for the Latin Quarter, was rather high--I think we paid three
francs, wine included, which would be for most of us distinctly a
_prix-de-luxe_. But oh, it was such fun; we were so young; Childe was
so delightful. The fun was best, of course, when we were few, and
could all sit up near to him, and none need lose a word. When we were
many there would be something like a scramble for good seats.
I ask myself whether, if I could hear him again to-day, I should think
his talk as wondrous as I thought it then. Then I could thrill at the
verse of Musset, and linger lovingly over the prose of Théophile, I
could laugh at the wit of Gustave Droz, and weep at the pathos ... it
costs me a pang to own it, but yes, I'm afraid ... I could weep at
the pathos of Henry Mürger; and these have all suffered such a sad
sea-change since. So I could sit, hour after hour, in a sort of
ecstasy, listening to the talk of Nina's father. It flowed from him
like wine from a full measure, easily, smoothly, abundantly. He had a
ripe, genial voice, and an enunciation that made crystals of his
words; whilst his range of subjects was as wide as the earth and the
sky. He would talk to you of God and man, of metaphysics, ethics, the
last new play, murder, or change of ministry; of books, of pictures,
specifically, or of the general principles of literature and painting;
of people, of sunsets, of Italy, of the high seas, of the Paris
streets--of what, in fine, you pleased. Or he would spin you yarns,
sober, farcical, veridical, or invented. And, with transitions
infinitely rapid, he would be serious, jocose--solemn, ribald--earnest,
flippant--logical, whimsical, turn and turn about. And in every
sentence, in its form or in its substance, he would wrap a surprise
for you--it was the unexpected word, the unexpected assertion,
sentiment, conclusion, that constantly arrived. Meanwhile it would
enhance your enjoyment mightily to watch his physiognomy, the
movements of his great, grey, shaggy head, the lightening and
darkening of his eyes, his smile, his frown, his occasional slight
shrug or gesture. But the oddest thing was this, that he could take as
well as give; he could listen--surely a rare talent in a monologist.
Indeed, I have never known a man who could make _you_ feel so
interesting.
After dinner he would light an immense brown meerschaum pipe, and
smoke for a quarter-hour or so in silence; then he would play a game
or two of chess with some one; and by and by he would open his piano,
and sing to us till midnight.