_"La--soupe aux choux--se fait dans la marmite;
Dans--la marmite--se fait la soupe aux choux."_
which would give us all the nostalgia of supper.
Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le
Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald
head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great
master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at
Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days--never of St. Helena; he would not
trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to
Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how,
virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on
all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we
listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!
Oh, the good old time!
The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of
Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a
gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle
that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet,
that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to
Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.
On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of
the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor,
long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my
ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve
me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I
was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name
was Peter).
She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom,
and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the
Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont là tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and
the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien à craindre."
And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor
health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative
of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to
have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of
her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon
carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and
would have done anything for her.
As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a
martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.
"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand
ça ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mère ... elle a toutes les
intelligences de la tête et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased
Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side.
_L'art d'être grandpère!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier
had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of
his own. He was a _born_ grandfather!
Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music,
for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and
roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil,
which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were
eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or
drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through
the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.
She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the
fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of
the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home
by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with
Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Médor; swishing our way
through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe
horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and
beechnuts here and there as we went.
And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome
and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and
chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before
the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French
gloaming--while Thérèse was laying the tea-things, and telling us the
news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the
drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west
behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was
light, and the appetites were let loose.
I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every
incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy
remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there
is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my
consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth,
health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood
itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy
recollections.
That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt
to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place,
my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of
learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as
English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to
translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter
languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the
"Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid"
into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece
and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the
Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all
beer and skittles.
It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost
each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's,
opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and
French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a
Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize)
the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what
sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth--a
mere social test--a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter
_h_, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French
education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters
there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into
consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their
sons to the same school (which did not happen to be M. Saindou's, by the
way, where it was nearly all greengrocer and no King); and the fee for
bed, board, and tuition, in all public schools alike, was something like
thirty pounds a year.
The Latin, in consequence, was without the distinction that comes of
exclusiveness, and quite lacked that aristocratic flavor, so grateful
and comforting to scholar and ignoramus alike, which the costly British
public-school system (and the British accent) alone can impart to a dead
language. When French is dead we shall lend it a grace it never had
before; some of us even manage to do so already.
That is (no doubt) why the best French writers so seldom point their
morals and adorn their tales, as ours do, with the usual pretty,
familiar, and appropriate lines out of Horace or Virgil; and why Latin
is so little quoted in French talk, except here and there by a weary
shop-walker, who sighs--
"Varium et mutabile semper femina!" as he rolls up the unsold silk; or
exclaims, "O rus! quando te aspiciam!" as he takes his railway ticket
for Asnières on the first fine Sunday morning in spring.
But this is a digression, and we have wandered far away from Mr. Slade.
Good old Slade!
We used to sit on the tone posts outside the avenue gate and watch for
his appearance at a certain distant corner of the winding street.
With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck
in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned
inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his
head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face--the sight of
him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.
[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE"]
Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs
would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude
we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that
we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds
or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone
posts and let it steal over us by degrees.
These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,
perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable
English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.
And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious
Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And
then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an
afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,
round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!
It was our way in those days to think that everything English was
beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond
of using.
But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable
sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the
Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and
uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the
children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But
whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versâ_) I
cannot tell. Let us hope the former.
They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type
was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original
of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists
have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It
had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding
jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that
swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'
heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British
self-righteousness.
At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal
virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run
away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so
Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.
Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical
and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and
grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and
its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could
hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and
straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton
at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a
dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might
some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, _never_!
I have lived so long away from the world that, for all I know, this
ancient British type, this "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous
bird of yore," may have become extinct, like another, but less
unprepossessing bird--the dodo; whereby our state is the more gracious.
But in those days, and generalizing somewhat hastily as young people
are apt to do, we grew to think that England must be full of
Prendergasts, and did not want to go there.
To this universal English beastliness of things we made a few
exceptions, it is true, but the list was not long: tea, mustard,
pickles, gingerbread-nuts, and, of all things in the world, the English
loaf of household bread that came to us once a week as a great treat and
recompense for our virtues, and harmonized so well with Passy butter. It
was too delicious! But there was always a difficulty, a dilemma--whether
to eat it with butter alone, or with "cassonade" (French brown
sugar) added.
Mimsey knew her own mind, and loved it with French brown sugar, and if
she were not there I would save for her half of my slices, and carefully
cassonade them for her myself.
On the other hand, we thought everything French the reverse of
beastly--except all the French boys we knew, and at M. Saindou's there
were about two hundred; then there were all the boys in Passy (whose
name was legion, and who _did not_ go to M. Saindou's), and we knew all
the boys in Passy. So that we were not utterly bereft of material for
good, stodgy, crusty, patriotic English prejudice.
Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and
sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,
whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our
white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and
called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the
days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there
were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and
runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O
là, là! O, là, là--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.
Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,
unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young
blacksmith--Boitard!
It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young
butcher.
Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him
to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It
was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of
Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).
I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw
scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac. The ring was kept by Alfred
and Charlie helped, oddly enough, by a couple of male Prendergasts, who
so far forgot themselves as to take an interest in the proceedings.
Madge and Mimsey looked on, terrified and charmed.
It did not last long, and was worthy of being described by Homer, or
even in _Bell's Life_. That is one of the reasons why I will not
describe it. The two Prendergasts seemed to enjoy it very much while it
lasted, and when it was over they remembered themselves again, and said
nothing, and stalked away.
As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations
to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride
thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous
"School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot.
[Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."]
Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so
majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in
"la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been
quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of
header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tête-bêche," "la tout
ce que vous voudrez."
Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.
For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old
mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high
walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified
seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days
gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights
templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.
And that other more famous island, la Cité, where Paris itself was born,
where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,
leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hôtel-Dieu.
Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and
perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of
the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the
Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high
slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have
such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and
wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of
these very dwellings must have been the Hôtel de Gondelaurier, where,
according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda
once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel
Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so
transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was
but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,
before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final
undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell
the beloved name of "Phébus."
Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher
Méryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it
had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed
eyes of Memory.
La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name!
[Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]
After gazing one's fill at the horrors within (as became a
healthy-minded English boy) it was but a step to the equestrian statue
of Henri Quatre, on the Pont-Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris, by the
way); there, astride his long-tailed charger, he smiled, _le roy vert et
galant,_ just midway between either bank of the historic river, just
where it was most historic; and turned his back on the Paris of the
Bourgeois King with the pear-shaped face and the mutton-chop whiskers.
And there one stood, spellbound in indecision, like the ass of Buridan
between two sacks of oats; for on either side, north or south of the
Pont-Neuf, were to be found enchanting slums, all more attractive the
ones than the others, winding up and down hill and roundabout and in and
out, like haunting illustrations by Gustave Doré to _Drolatick Tales_ by
Balzac (not seen or read by me till many years later, I beg to say).
Dark, narrow, silent, deserted streets that would turn up afterwards in
many a nightmare--with the gutter in the middle and towerlets and stone
posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was
_défendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and
overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old
gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And
suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street
corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille
Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the
imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.
And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most
irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in
blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton
nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,
self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own
hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling
wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either
sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry
creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about
their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or
legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one
underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and
barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there
a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a
cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"
or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black
_bonnets à poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,
conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and
straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and
staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the
pork-butcher's wife!
Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and
bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily
together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by
sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hôtel-Dieu; or the last sacrament,
with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in
extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.
And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the
itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum,
the _cor de chasse,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot,
the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of
all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every
minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his
father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to
undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father
would growl in his solemn bass, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant
dit vrai!_
And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking
whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp
and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his
many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dià!_ of his driver!
It was all entrancing.
Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking
on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till
a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,
the Champs Élysées, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussée de la
Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it
was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and
before this poor scribe had reached his teens?
Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as
one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires
and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,
its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,
its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,
where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable
fountains.
There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike
our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that
stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently
ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a
page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin
quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on
the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of
France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the
French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.
Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun
was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the
blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire,
with the cold blue east for a background.
Dear Paris!
Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small
English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his
nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination;
all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of
life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of
a hound.
Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand
and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le
Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained
by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugène Sue and
_Les Mystères_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron
gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who
sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au
cinquème_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook
with, and all.
There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating
and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were
afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but
always full of interest and charm!
One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochère_ what kind of
people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and
what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned
tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond
of Gruyère cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable
cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked
their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped
black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with
mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and
bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too
long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a
dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's
dispensation.
For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous
clang.
I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big
with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded
waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great
occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove
all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every
corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense
by the altar-steps.
"_Le pauvre en sa cabane où le chaume le couvre
Est sujet à ses lois;
Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre
N'en défend point nos rois_."
And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like
suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,
synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout
Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain
would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,
like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this
is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents
need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes
and days gone by.