SPENT LOVES
I am going to see dear and affectionate friends. The train would take
me to them, that droll little _chemin de fer de ceinture_, and it
seems a pity to miss the Gare St. Lazare, its Sunday morning tumult of
Parisians starting with their mistresses and their wives for a
favourite suburb. I never run up these wide stairways leading to the
great wide galleries full of bookstalls (charming yellow notes), and
pierced with little _guichets_ painted round with blue, without
experiencing a sensation of happy lightness--a light-headedness that I
associate with the month of May in Paris. But the tramway that passes
through the Place de la Concorde goes as far as Passy, and though I
love the droll little _chemin de fer de ceinture_ I love this
tramway better. It speeds along the quays between the Seine and the
garden of the Champs Elysées, through miles of chestnut bloom, the
roadway chequered with shadows of chestnut leaves; the branches meet
overhead, and in a faint delirium of the senses I catch at a bloom,
cherish it for a moment, and cast it away. The plucky little
steamboats are making for the landing-places, stemming the current. I
love this sprightly little river better than the melancholy Thames,
along whose banks saturnine immoralities flourish like bulrushes!
Behold the white architecture, the pillars, the balustraded steps, the
domes in the blue air, the monumented swards! Paris, like all pagan
cities, is full of statues. A little later we roll past gardens,
gaiety is in the air.... And then the streets of Passy begin to
appear, mean streets, like London streets. I like them not; but the
railway station is compensation; the little railway station like a
house of cards under toy trees, and the train steaming out into the
fanciful country. The bright wood along which it speeds is like the
season's millinery.
It is pleasant to notice everything in Paris, the flymen asleep on
their box-seats, the little horses dozing beneath the chestnut trees,
the bloused workmen leaning over a green-painted table in an arbour,
drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre, the villas of Auteuil, rich
woodwork, rich iron railings, and the summer hush about villas
engarlanded. Auteuil is so French, its symbolism enchants me. Auteuil
is like a flower, its petals opening out to the kiss of the air, its
roots feeling for way among the rich earth. Ah, the land of France,
its vineyards and orchards, its earthly life! Thoughts come unbidden,
my thoughts sing together, and I hardly knowing what they are singing.
My thoughts are singing like the sun; do not ask me their meaning;
they mean as much and as little as the sun that I am part of--the
sun of France that I shall enjoy for thirty days. May takes me to dear
and affectionate friends who await me at Auteuil, and June takes me
away from them. There is the villa! And there amid the engarlanding
trees my friend, dressed in pale yellow, sits in front of his easel.
How the sunlight plays through the foliage, leaping through the rich,
long grass; and amid the rhododendrons in bloom sits a little girl of
four, his model, her frock and cap impossibly white under the great,
gaudy greenery.
Year after year the same affectionate welcome, the same spontaneous
welcome in this garden of rhododendrons and chestnut bloom. I would
linger in the garden, but I may not, for breakfast is ready _et il
ne faut pas faire manquer la messe à Madame. La messe_! How gentle
the word is, much gentler than our word, mass, and it shocks us hardly
at all to see an old lady going away in her carriage _pour entendre
la messe_. Religion purged of faith is a pleasant, almost a pretty
thing. Some fruits are better dried than fresh; religion is such a
one, and religion, when nothing is left of it but the pleasant,
familiar habit, may be defended, for were it not for our habits life
would be unrecorded, it would be all on the flat, as we would say if
we were talking about a picture without perspective. Our habits are
our stories, and tell whence we have come and how we came to be what
we are. This is quite a pretty reflection, but there is no time to
think the matter out--here is the doctor! He lifts his skull-cap, and
how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity is the dignity that only
goodness gives; and his goodness is a pure gift, existing independent
of formula, a thing in itself, like Manet's painting. It was Degas who
said, "A man whose profile no one ever saw," and the aphorism reminds
us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from
Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical
invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable
to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear
doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a
bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a
vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary
itself as our helpless English chicken is; it lived to get fat without
acquiring any useless knowledge or desire of life; it became a capon
in tender years, and then a pipe was introduced into its mouth and it
was fed by machinery until it could hardly walk, until it could only
stagger to its bed, and there it lay in happy digestion until the hour
came for it to be crammed again. So did it grow up without knowledge
or sensation or feeling of life, moving gradually, peacefully towards
its predestined end--a delicious repast! What better end, what greater
glory than to be a fat chicken? The carcasses of sheep that hang in
butchers' shops are beginning to horrify the conscience of Europe. To
cut a sheep's throat is an offensive act, but to clip out a bird's
tongue with a long pair of scissors made for the purpose is genteel.
It is true that it beats its wings for a few moments, but we must not
allow ourselves to be disturbed by a mere flutter of feathers. Man is
merciful, and saved it from life. It grew like an asparagus! And
talking of asparagus, here are some from Argenteuil thick as umbrellas
and so succulent! A word about the wine. French red wines in England
always seem to taste like ink, but in France they taste of the sun.
Melons are better in June--that one comes, no doubt, from Algeria. It
is, however, the kind I like best, the rich, red melon that one eats
only in France; a thing of the moment, unrememberable; but the chicken
will never be forgotten; twenty years hence I shall be talking of a
chicken, that in becoming a fat chicken acquired twenty years of
immortality--which of us will acquire as many?
As we rise from table the doctor calls me into his studio: for he
would give me an excellent cigar before he bids me good-bye, and
having lighted it I follow my friend to the studio at the end of the
garden, to that airy drawing-room which he has furnished in pale
yellow and dark blue. On the walls are examples of the great modern
masters--Manet and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet--is it not
facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon
evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the
haze. And look at the celebrated "Leçon de Danse" by Degas--that
dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the
staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing
class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds
out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in
the foreground, and their mothers are covering their shoulders with
shawls--good mothers anxious for their daughters' welfare, for their
advancement in life.
This picture betrays a mind curious, inquisitive and mordant; and that
plaid shawl is as unexpected as an adjective of Flaubert's. A portrait
by Manet hangs close by, large, permanent and mysterious as nature.
Degas is more intellectual, but how little is intellect compared with
a gift like Manet's! Yesterday I was in the Louvre, and when wearied
with examination and debate--I had gone there on a special errand--I
turned into the Salle Carrée for relaxation, and there wandered about,
waiting to be attracted. Long ago the Mona Liza was my adventure, and
I remember how Titian's "Entombment" enchanted me; another year I
delighted in the smooth impartiality of a Terbourg interior; but this
year Rembrandt's portrait of his wife held me at gaze. The face tells
of her woman's life, her woman's weakness, and she seems conscious of
the burden of her sex, and of the burden of her own special lot--she
is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The emotion
that this picture awakens is an almost physical emotion. It gets at
you like music, like a sudden breath of perfume. When I approach, her
eyes fade into brown shadow, but when I withdraw they begin telling
her story. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful
tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white,
faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder comes
through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket, but the fur was no trouble
to Rembrandt; he did not strive for realism. It is fur, that is
sufficient. Grey pearls hang in her ears, there is a brooch upon her
breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the
frame, and that hand reminds one, as the chin does, of the old story
that God took a little clay and made man out of it. That chin and that
hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge, as Nature
moulds. The picture seems as if it had been breathed upon the canvas.
Did not a great poet once say that God breathed into Adam? and here it
is even so.
The other pictures seem dry, insignificant; the Mona Liza, celebrated
in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared
with this portrait; I have heard that tedious smile excused on the
ground that she is smiling at the nonsense she hears talked about her;
that hesitating smile which held my youth in tether has come to seem
but a grimace; and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe
or map seen from a little distance. The Mona Liza is a sort of riddle,
an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle
or ballade with double burden, a sestina, that is what it is like, a
sestina or chant royal. The Mona Liza, being literature in intention
rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets. We must forgive
her many mediocre verses for the sake of one incomparable prose
passage. She has passed out of that mysterious misuse of oil paint,
that arid glazing of _terre verte_, and has come into her
possession of eternal life, into the immortality of Pater's prose.
Degas is wilting already; year after year he will wither, until one
day some great prose writer will arise and transfer his spirit into
its proper medium--literature. The Mona Liza and the "Leçon de Danse"
are intellectual pictures; they were painted with the brains rather
than with the temperaments; and what is any intellect compared with a
gift like Manet's! Leonardo made roads; Degas makes witticisms.
Yesterday I heard one that delighted me far more than any road would,
for I have given up bicycling. Somebody was saying he did not like
Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while. "If you were to
show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it, he
would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would
say with a sigh 'That is my fault!'"
My reverie is broken by the piano; my friend is playing, and it is
pleasant to listen to music in this airy studio. But there are women I
must see, women whom I see every time I go to Paris, and too much time
has been spent in the studio--I must go.
But where shall I go? My thoughts strike through the little streets of
Passy, measuring the distance between Passy and the Arc de Triomphe.
For a moment I think that I might sit under the trees and watch the
people returning from the races. Were she not dead I might stop at her
little house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is her
portrait by Manet on the wall, the very toque she used to wear. How
wonderful the touch is; the beads--how well they are rendered! And
while thinking of the extraordinary handicraft I remember his studio,
and the tall fair woman like a tea-rose coming into it: Mary Laurant!
The daughter of a peasant, and the mistress of all the great
men--perhaps I should have said of all the distinguished men. I used
to call her _toute la lyre_.
The last time I saw her we talked about Manet. She said that every
year she took the first lilac to lay upon his grave. Is there one of
her many lovers who brings flowers to her grave? What was so
rememberable about her was her pleasure in life, and her desire to get
all the pleasure, and her consciousness of her desire to enjoy every
moment of her life. Evans, the great dentist, settled two thousand a
year upon her, and how angry he was one night on meeting Manet on the
staircase! In order to rid herself of her lover she invited him to
dinner, intending to plead a sick headache after dinner.... She must
go and lie down. But as soon as her guest was gone she took off the
_peignoir_ which hid her ball dress and signed to Manet, who was
waiting at the street corner, with her handkerchief. But as they went
downstairs together whom should they meet but the dentist _qui a
oublié ses carnets_. And he was so disappointed at meeting his
beautiful but deceitful mistress that he didn't visit her again for
three or four days. His anger mattered very little to Mary. Someone
else settled two thousand a year more upon her; and having four
thousand a year or thereabouts, she dedicated herself to the love and
conversation of those who wrote books and music and painted pictures.
We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the
imagination, at least the imagination stimulates the senses, acting as
a sort of adjuvant. The barmaid falls in love with No. 1 because he
wipes a glass better than No. 2, and Mary fell in love with Coppée on
account of his sonnet "Le Lys," and she grew indifferent when he wrote
poems like "La Nourrice" or "Le petit épicier de Montrouge qui cassait
le sucre avec mélancolie." And it was at this time when their love
story was at wane that I became a competitor. But one day Madame
Albazi came to Manet's studio, a splendid creature in a carriage drawn
by Russian horses from the Steppes, so she said; but who can tell
whether a horse comes from the Steppes or from the horse-dealers? Nor
does it matter when the lady is extraordinarily attractive, when she
inspires the thought--a mistress for Attila! That is not exactly how
Manet saw her: but she looks like that in his pastel. In it she holds
a tortoiseshell fan widespread across her bosom, and it was on one of
the sticks of the fan that he signed his name. A great painter always
knows where to sign his pictures, and he never signs twice in the same
place. The merit of these Russians is that they never leave one in
doubt. She could not sit that day, she was going to the Bois, and
asked me and a young man who happened to be in Manet's studio at the
time to go there with her, and we went there drawn by the Russian
horses, the young man and I wondering all the while which was going to
be the countess's lover; we played hard for her; but that day I was
wiser than he; I let him talk and recite poetry and jingle out all the
aphorisms that he had been collecting for years, feeling his
witticisms were in vain, for she was dark as a raven and I was as gold
as a sunflower. It was at the corner of the Rue Pontière that we got
rid of him. Some days afterwards she sat to Manet. The pastel now
hangs in the room of a friend of mine; I bought it for him.
The picture of a woman one knows is never so agreeable a companion as
the picture of a woman one has never seen. One's memory and the
painter's vision are in conflict, and I like to think better of the
long delicate nose, and the sparkling eyes, and a mouth like red
fruit. The pastel once belonged to me; it used to hang in my rooms;
for with that grace of mind which never left him, Manet said one day,
"I always promised you a picture," and searching among the pastels
that lined the wall he turned to me saying, "Now I think that this
comes to you by right." When I left Paris hurriedly, and left my
things to be sold, the countess came to the sale and bought her
picture, and then she sold it years afterwards to a picture-dealer,
tempted by the price that Manet's pictures were fetching. Hearing that
it was for sale, I bought it, as I have said, for a friend. And now I
have told the whole story, forgetting nothing except that it was years
afterwards, when I had written "Les Confessions d'un jeune Anglais" in
the _Revue Indépendante_, that Mary Laurant asked me--oh! she was
very enterprising; she sent the editor of the _Revue_ to me; an
appointment was made. She was wonderful in the garden. She said the
moment I arrived, "Now, my dear ----, you must go," and we walked
about, I listening to her aphorisms. Mary was beautiful, but she liked
one to love her for her wit, to admire her wit; and when I asked her
why she did not leave Evans, the great dentist, she said, "That would
be a base thing to do. I content myself by deceiving him," and
then--this confidence seemed to have a particular significance--"I am
not a woman," she said, "that is made love to in a garden." Her garden
was a nook at the fortifications, hidden among lilac bushes. She
wished to show me her house, and we talked for a long time in her
boudoir. But I knew she was Mallarmé's mistress at the time, so
nothing came of this _caprice littéraire_.
My thoughts run upon women, and why not? On what would you have them
run? on copper mines? Woman is the legitimate subject of all men's
thoughts. We pretend to be interested in other things. In the
smoking-rooms I have listened to men talking about hunting, and I have
said to myself, "Your interest is a pretence: of what woman are you
thinking?" We forget women for a little while when we are thinking
about art, but only for a while. The legitimate occupation of man's
mind is woman; and listening to my friend who is playing music--music
I do not care to hear, Brahms--I fall to thinking which of the women I
have known in years past would interest me most to visit.
In the spring weather the walk from Passy to the Champs Elysées would
be pleasant and not too far; I like to see the swards and the poplars
and the villas, the tall iron railings, and the flower vases hidden in
bouquets of trees. These things are Paris; the mind of the country,
that mind which comes out of a long past, and which may be defined as
a sort of ancestral beauty and energy is manifested everywhere in
Paris; and a more beautiful day for seeing the tall, white houses and
the villas and the trees and the swards can hardly be imagined. I
should be interested in all these things, but my real interest would
be in one little hillside, a line of houses, eight or nine, close by
the Arc de Triomphe, the most ordinary in the avenue. She liked the
ordinary, and I have often wondered what was the link of association?
Was it no more than her blonde hair drawn up from the neck, her
fragrant skin, or her perverse subtle senses? It was something more,
but you must not ask me to explain further. I like to remember the
rustle of a flowered dress she wore as she moved, drifting like a
perfume, passing from her frivolous bedroom into the drawing-room. A
room without taste, stiff and middle-class, notwithstanding the crowns
placed over the tall portraits. I see a picture of two children; but
she is the fairer, and in her pale eyes and thinly-curved lips there
is a mixture of yearning and restlessness. As the child was, so is the
woman, and Georgette has lived to paper one entire wall of her bedroom
with trophies won in the battlefields of ardently danced cotillons.
The other child is of a stricter nature, and even in the picture her
slightly darkened ringlets are less wanton than her sister's. Her eyes
are more pensive, and any one could have predicted children for one
and cotillon favours for the other.
We often sat on her bedroom balcony reading, talking, or watching the
sky growing pale beyond Mount Valerian, the shadow drifting and
defining and shaping the hill. In hours like the present, dreaming in
a studio, we remember those who deceived us, those who made us suffer,
and in these hours faces, fragments of faces, rise out of a past, the
line of a bent neck, the whiteness of a hand, and the eyes. I remember
her eyes; one day in an orchard, in the lush and luxuriance of June,
her husband was walking in front with a friend, and I was pleading.
"Well," she said, raising her eyes, "you can kiss me now." But her
husband was in front, and he was a thick-set man, and there was a
stream, and I foresaw a struggle--and an unpleasant one: confess and
be done with it!--I didn't dare to kiss her, and I don't think she
ever forgave me that lack of courage. All this is twenty years ago,
and is it not silly to spend the afternoon thinking of such rubbish?
But it is of such rubbish that our lives are made. Shall I go to her
now and see her in her decadence? Grey hair has not begun to appear
yet in the blonde, it will never turn grey, but she was shrivelling a
little the last time I saw her. And next year she will be older. At
her age a year counts for double. Others are more worthy of a visit.
If I do not go to her this year, shall I go next?
In imagination I go past her house, thinking of a man she used to talk
about, "the man she left her 'ome for"; that is how the London street
girl would word it. He had been the centre of a disgraceful scandal in
his old age, a sordid but characteristic end for the Don Juan of the
nineteenth century. Perhaps she loved the big, bearded man whose
photograph she had once shown me. He killed himself for not having
enough money to live as he wished to live. That was her explanation. I
think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead
man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like
orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was
twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her
brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come
out of a world of perfume and lace.
* * * * *
In imagination I have descended the Champs Elysées, and have crossed
the Place de la Concorde, and the Seine is flowing past just as it
flowed when the workmen were building Notre Dame, just as it will flow
a thousand years hence. A thousand years hence men will stand watching
its current, thinking of little blonde women, and the shudder they can
send through the flesh; they can, but not twenty years afterwards. The
Reverend Donne has it that certain ghosts do not raise the hair but
the flesh; mine do no more than to set me thinking that rivers were
not created to bear ships to the sea, but to set our memories flowing.
Full many a time have I crossed the Pont Neuf on my way to see another
woman--an American! The time comes when desire wilts and dies, but the
sexual interest never dies, and we take pleasure in thinking in middle
life of those we enjoyed in youth. She, of whom I am thinking, lives
far away in the Latin Quarter, in an ill-paven street. How it used to
throw my carriage from side to side! I have been there so often that I
know all the shops, and where the shops end, and there is a
whitewashed wall opposite her house; the street bends there. The
_concierge_ is the same, a little thicker, a little heavier; she
always used to have a baby in her arms, now there are no more babies;
her children, I suppose, have grown up and have gone away. There used
to be a darkness at the foot of the stairs, and I used to slip on
those stairs, so great was my haste; the very tinkle of the bell I
remember, and the trepidation with which I waited.
Her rooms looked as if they had never been sat in; even the studio was
formal, and the richly-bound volumes on the tables looked as if they
had never been opened. She only kept one servant, a little, redheaded
girl, and seeing this girl back again after an absence of many years,
I spoke to Lizzie of the old days. Lizzie told me her servant's story.
She had gone away to be married, and after ten years of misfortune she
had returned to her old mistress, this demure, discreet and sly New
Englander, who concealed a fierce sensuality under a homely
appearance. Lizzie must have had many lovers, but I knew nothing of
her except her sensuality, for she had to let me into that secret.
She was a religious woman, a devout Protestant, and thinking of her my
thoughts are carried across the sea, and I am in the National Gallery
looking at Van Eyke's picture, studying the grave sensuality of the
man's face--he speaks with uplifted hand like one in a pulpit, and the
gesture and expression tell us as plainly as if we heard him that he
is admonishing his wife (he is given to admonition), informing her
that her condition--her new pregnancy--is an act of the Divine Will.
She listens, but how curiously! with a sort of partial comprehension
afloat upon her face, more of the guinea-pig than of the rabbit type.
The twain are sharply differentiated, and one of the objects of the
painter seems to have been to show us how far one human being may be
removed from another. The husband is painfully clear to himself, the
wife is happily unconscious of herself. Now everything in the picture
suggests order; the man's face tells a mind the same from day to day,
from year to year, the same passions, the same prayers; his apparel,
the wide-brimmed hat, the cloak falling in long straight folds, the
peaked shoon, are an habitual part of him. We see little of the room,
but every one remembers the chandelier hanging from the ceiling
reflected in the mirror opposite. These reflections have lasted for
three hundred years; they are the same to-day as the day they were
painted, and so is the man; he lives again, he is a type that Nature
never wearies of reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life.
This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost
as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill,
a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood
waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its
appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the
tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung
about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage
there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, this woman waiting
for me by an oak table, a little ashamed of her thoughts, but unable
to overcome them. Once I heard her playing the piano, and it struck me
as an affectation. As I let my thoughts run back things forgotten
emerge; here comes one of her gowns! a dark-green gown, the very same
olive green as the man's cloak. She wore her hair short like a boy's,
and though it ran all over her head in little curls, it did not
detract at all from the New England type, the woman in whose speech
Biblical phraseology still lingers. Lizzie was a miraculous survival
of the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in the _Mayflower_ and
settled in New England. Paris had not changed her. She was _le grave
Puritan du tableau_. The reader will notice that I write _le
grave Puritan_, for of his submissive, childlike wife there was
nothing in Lizzie except her sex. As her instinct was in conflict with
her ideals, her manner was studied, and she affected a certain
cheerfulness which she dared not allow to subside. She never
relinquished her soul, never fell into confidence, so in a sense we
always remained strangers, for it is when lovers tell their illusions
and lonelinesses that they know each other, the fiercest spasm tells
us little, and it is forgotten, whereas the moment when a woman sighs
and breaks into a simple confidence is remembered years afterwards,
and brings her before us though she be underground or a thousand miles
away. These intimacies she had not, but there was something true and
real in her, something which I cannot find words to express to-day;
she was a clever woman, that was it, and that is why I pay her the
homage of an annual visit. These courteous visits began twenty years
ago; they are not always pleasant, yet I endure them. Our conversation
is often laboured, there are awkward and painful pauses, and during
these pauses we sit looking at each other, thinking no doubt of the
changes that time has wrought. One of her chief charms was her
figure--one of the prettiest I have ever seen--and she still retains a
good deal of its grace. But she shows her age in her hands; they have
thickened at the joints, and they were such beautiful hands. Last year
she spoke of herself as an old woman, and the remark seemed to me
disgraceful and useless, for no man cares to hear a woman whom he has
loved call herself old; why call attention to one's age, especially
when one does not look it? and last year she looked astonishingly
young for fifty-five; that was her age, she said. She asked me my age;
the question was unpleasant, and before I was aware of it I had told
her a lie, and I hate those who force me to tell lies. The interview
grew painful, and to bring it to a close she asked me if I would care
to see her husband.
We found the old man alone in his studio, looking at an engraving
under the light of the lamp, much more like a picture than any of his
paintings. She asked him if he remembered me, and he got up muttering
something, and to help him I mentioned that I had been one of his
pupils. The dear old man said of course he remembered, and that he
would like to show me his pictures, but Lizzie said--I suppose it was
nervousness that made her say it, but it was a strangely tactless
remark--"I don't think, dear, that Mr. ---- cares for your pictures."
However celebrated one may be, it is always mortifying to hear that
some one, however humble the person may be, does not care for one's
art. But I saved the situation, and I think my remarks were judicious
and witty. It is not always that one thinks of the right words at the
right moment, but it would be hard to improve on the admonition that
she did me a wrong, that, like every one who liked art, I had changed
my opinion many times, but after many wanderings had come back to the
truth, and in order to deceive the old man I spoke of Ingres. I had
never failed in that love, and how could I love Ingres without loving
him? The contrary was the truth, but the old man's answer was very
sweet. Forgetful of his own high position, he answered, "We may both
like Ingres, but it is not probable that we like the same Ingres." I
said I did not know any Ingres I did not admire, and asked him which
he admired, and we had a pleasant conversation about the Apotheosis of
Homer, and the pictures in the Musée de Montauban. Then the old man
said, "I must show Mr. ---- my pictures." No doubt he had been
thinking of them all through the conversation about the Musée de
Montauban. "I must show you my Virgin," and he explained that the face
of the Infant Jesus was not yet finished.
It was wonderful to see this old man, who must have been nearly
eighty, taking the same interest in his pictures as he took fifty
years ago. Some stupid reader will think, perchance, that it mattered
that I had once loved his wife. But how could such a thing matter?
Think for a moment, dear reader, for all readers are dear, even the
stupidest, and you will see that you are still entangled in
conventions and prejudices. Perhaps, dear reader, you think she and I
should have dropped on our knees and confessed. Had we done so, he
would have thought us two rude people, and nothing more.
What will happen to her when he dies? Will she return to Boston? Shall
I ever see her again? Last year I vowed that I would not, and I think
it would please her as well if I stayed away.... And she is right, for
so long as I am not by her she is with me. But in the same room, amid
the familiar furniture, we are divided by the insuperable past, and to
retain her I must send her away. The idea is an amusing one; I think I
have read it somewhere, it seems to me like something I have read. Did
I ever read of a man who sent his mistress away so that his possession
might be more complete? Whether I did or didn't matters little, the
idea is true to me to-day--in order to possess her I must never see
her again. A pretty adventure it would be, nevertheless, to spend a
week paying visits to those whom I loved about that time; and I can
imagine a sort of Beau Brummel of the emotions going every year to
Paris to spend a day with each of his mistresses.
There were others about that time. There was Madame ----. The name is
in itself beautiful, characteristically French, and it takes me back
to the middle centuries, to the middle of France. I always imagined
that tall woman, who thought so quickly and spoke so sincerely,
dealing out her soul rapidly, as one might cards, must have been born
near Tours. She was so French that she must have come from the very
heart of France; she was French as the wine of France; as Balzac, who
also came from Tours; and her voice, and her thoughts, and her words
transported one; by her side one was really in France; and, as her
lover, one lived through every circumstance of a French love story.
She lived in what is called in Paris an hotel; it had its own
_concierge_, and it was nice to hear the man say, "Oui, monsieur,
Madame la Marquise est chez elle," to walk across a courtyard and wait
in a boudoir stretched with blue silk, to sit under a Louis XVI. rock
crystal chandelier. She said one day, "I'm afraid you're thinking of
me a great deal," and she leaned her hands on the back of the chair,
making it easy for me to take them. She said her hands had not done
any kitchen work for five hundred years, and at the time that seemed a
very witty thing to say. The drawing-room opened onto a conservatory
twenty feet high; it nearly filled the garden, and the marquise used
to receive her visitors there. I do not remember who was the
marquise's lover when the last fête was given, nor what play was
acted; only that the ordinary guests lingered over their light
refreshments, scenting the supper, and that to get rid of them we had
to bid the marquise ostentatiously goodnight. Creeping round by the
back of the house, we gained the bedrooms by the servants' staircase,
and hid there until the ordinary guests in decency could delay no
longer. As soon as the last one was gone the stage was removed, and
the supper tables were laid out. Shall I ever forget the moment when
the glass roof of the conservatory began to turn blue, and the
shrilling of awakening sparrows! How haggard we all were, but we
remained till eight in the morning. That fête was paid for with the
last remnant of the poor marquise's fortune. Afterwards she was very
poor, and Suzanne, her daughter, went on the stage and discovered a
certain talent for acting which has been her fortune to this day. I
will go to the Vaudeville to-night to see her; we might arrange to go
together to see her mother's grave. To visit the grave, and to strew
azaleas upon it, would be a pretty piece of sentimental mockery. But
for my adventure there should be seven visits; Madame ---- would make
a fourth; I hear that she is losing her sight, and lives in a chateau
about fifty miles from Paris, a chateau built in the time of Louis
XIII., with high-pitched roofs and many shutters, and formal gardens
with balustrades and fish-ponds, yes _et des charmilles--charmilles_--what
is that in English?--avenues of clipped limes. To walk in an avenue
of clipped limes with a woman who is nearly blind, and talk to her of the
past, would be indeed an adventure far "beyond the range of formal man's
emotion."
Madame ---- interrupted our love story. She would be another--that
would be five--and I shall think of two more during dinner. But now I
must be moving on; the day has ended; Paris is defining itself upon a
straw-coloured sky. I must go, the day is done; and hearing the last
notes trickle out--somebody has been playing the prelude to
"Tristan"--I say: "Another pretty day passed, a day of meditation on
art and women--and what else is there to meditate about? To-morrow
will happily be the same as to-day, and to-morrow I shall again
meditate on art and women, and the day after I shall be occupied with
what I once heard dear old M'Cormac, Bishop of Galway, describe in his
sermon as 'the degrading passion of "loave."'"