THEfRENCH MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH PAUL VERLAINE: His Life His Work. By EDMOND LEPELLETIER. Illustrated. 2is. net. THE LIFE OF OSCAR WILDE. By ROBERT HARBOROUGH SHERARD. Illustrated. i2s. 6d. net. OSCAR WILDE. By LEONARD CRESSWELL INGLEBV. 125. 6d. net. THE COURTSHIPS OF CATHE- RINE THE GREAT. By PHILIP W. SERGEANT, B.A. Illustrated. 6s. net. THE LAST EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH. Being the Life of the Empress Eugenie, Wife of Napoleon III. By PHILIP W. SERGEANT, B.A. las. 6d. net THE BURLESQUE NAPOLEON. Being die Story of the Life and Kingship of Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, youngest brother of Napoleon the Great. By PHILIP W. SERGEANT, B.A. Illustrated. los. 6d. net. THE LOVE STORY OF EMPRESS JOSEPHINE. By JAMES ENDELL. 40 Illustrations. 125. 6d. net. THE LOVER OF QUEEN ELIZA- BETH. Being the Story of the Life of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. By Mrs AUBREY RICHARDSON. Illustrated. 125. 6d. net. LOLA MONTEZ. An Adventuress of the Forties. By E. B. D'AUVERGNE. Illustrated. i2S. 6d. net. ROBERT HARBOROUGH SHERARD. Frontispiece. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH WITH DISCURSIVE ALLUSIONS TO OTHER PEOPLE BY ROBERT HARBOROUGH SHERARD Author of " Twenty Years in Paris," etc. etc. ILLUSTRATED LONDON T. WERNER LAURIE CLIFFORD'S INN TO IRENE OSGOOD DEAREST AND BEST OF FRIENDS THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED CONTENTS CHAPTER I Place aux Dames" Husbands ! Oh ! la ! la ! n In the Divorce Court Judges as Peacemakers Dwarfs as Mascots Purveyors of Happiness Daudet's Experiments Daudet and the Dogs The Im- morality of " Sappho n Cruelty to Animals Shall it remain unpunished ? An amiable Minister The Husband and the Kodak On the Pleasure of Feeling Important In a Minister's Antechamber French Freedom of Speech Monsieur de Goncourt rebuked English Reticence Morality or Hypocrisy A Diversion on Poets Rogers and his Court Dress Tennyson and Swinburne Tennyson, his Times and his Pipe : CHAPTER II Illegitimacy Difference of French Attitude The Gravest Insult in England And in France Prejudices of English, and of French Readers Two publishing Experts Monsieur Pierre Laffitte On Magazines in France Monsieur Jean- Joseph Renaud Literary Earnings The Hero and the Horse In the Divorce Court Hope, Eternal Monsieur, Madame, and Monsieur Jules Marriage, Divorce and Free Union More liberal Treatment of Wives in France Monsieur's Weekly Allowance French Housewifery Injustices towards English Wives Cottons and Cleanliness Woollens and Washing The Jews in Warsaw 16 CHAPTER III French Frugalities Parsimony and Pills A Gift Ex- Coupon Hereditary Instinct My Friend Mignon and the Basque Peasant Woman Sugar a Luxury v 256617 VI CONTENTS Chapter iii. continued. PACK Beetroots and Brandy Bonbons Anglais A Breton Grocery Twisting Paper Bags Alcoholism in Brittany The Three Barrels " Grande Fine Champagne " A la Mode de Bretagne Chez Jules Massenet Absinthe and Absinthism Cider and Lunacy In a Normandy Inn " Strangling Parrots "A Waif of the " Quartier "Made- moiselle Marguerite How she " Made an End u . 30 CHAPTER IV The Hypersensitiveness of Marguerite " La Belle F " Marriage in France Women who object to marry As in Jamaica " Make an Honest Man of me " Divorce a I 'amiable The Cost in France Marriage as a Business Proposition A Matter-of-fact Young Man " No Dowry, no Son-in-Law " A happy Sequel A Normandy Wooing Alphonsine's Suitor The Bridegroom's Expectations A suc- cessful Alliance An Algerian Boarding - house Keeper " With or without Bulbul " Inter- national Marriages Dumas and the Suffragettes Marie-Louise and her Spouses Dumas' Misad- venture His Diplomacy 46 CHAPTER V Duelling in France The Aggrieved Party Scholl as Arbi- trator Two Social Conventions The Feeling in England Jerome Napoleon and Empress Eugenie Whistler and George Moore George Moore in Dublin His Objection to Flaubert How Moore works Literature and the Middle Class Words- worth's Descent Wordsworth and Quillinan A Poem composed under Difficulties High Descent The Crossing Sweeper and the King The Irish Literary Movement The Contemporary Club Mr Oldham, William Butler Yeats Syng and the King of the Blasketts The Fenian O'Leary Padraic Colum and the American Maecenas Professor Dowden and De Quincey's Proofs ... 59 CONTENTS vii CHAPTER VI PAGE The Cost of a Duel An unearned Notoriety Coulson Kernahan warned Robert Barr and Henry Harland as Seconds Anonymity a Preventive Preparing for an Encounter A prudent Landlord Dodging the Police Alan Breck and the Chevalier Johnson Paul de Kock as a Duellist And as a Writer D'Artagnan redivivus Swashbuckling on the Cheap John Barlas, Poet Carrier Pigeons and Marconigrams John Davidson and the Goloshes of Fortune 78 CHAPTER VII Journalism and Literature Richard Whiteing and John Davidson Self-Advertisement, how considered in France Commercialism in Literature Keats' Letters as " Goods " Barbey d'Aurevilly Eccen- tricities unremunerative Ernest Lajeunesse and his Work Working in Cafe's Mr Crawford, Eugene Sue, Timothy Trimm The Cafe Napolitain Catulle Mendes as a "Ghost" George Courteline as a Bureaucrat Jean Moreas ; Zola's, Mendes' and Verlaine's Opinions on him The Ca// Habit The Old Man in the Rue Vicq d'Azir Henner on Wine Drinking Mr Loubet's Bottle of Beaune Messrs Stevenson and Osbourne's Bottle of Roussillon John Keats' Bottle of Claret " The Wrecker " and the Quartier Henner and Bismarck on Beer Beer Drinking in France A Parisian Beer King A Note on Chartreuse . 101 CHAPTER VIII Ruins at Sixpence Authors and Second-hand Booksellers Marmier's Bequest A modest Trouvaille Mary Queen of Scots' Prison Reading Anatole France on the Quays How he discovered Moreas Anatole France in the Avenue Hoche His placid Anarchism Property, Theft Pierre Louys and " Aphrodite " Jean Lorrain and the Roman a clef Paul viii CONTENTS Chapter viii. continued^. PAGE Adam and his Work Meredith and the Interviewer Meredith and Daudet Meredith's Claret Sienkiewicz's Mineral Water How " Quo Vadis ? " was conceived Red Ink and Violet Bernard Lazare and Dreyfus The Dreyfus Interviewer Jules Huret " The King of Interviewers " A Wife's Tribute Huret's Journalistic Records His " Inquiries " Spuller and Huret Monsieur Couteaux Economist and Chef Litvre & la Roy ale The Professor and the Chop . . . .121 CHAPTER IX George Du Maurier and an Interviewer W. H. Wilkins, Author and Journalist A Contributor's Physiog- nomy Jules Huret outdone An Interview under Difficulties Monsieur Bis, Rentier The Legatee and the Officials The Pare aux Chats Cats and Men of Letters Paul de Kock and Frontin Baudelaire and Monsieur Brunetiere Posthumous Animosities An Author's Pets and his Neighbours A Peasant and his Trespassers The Land of Dune and Pine Capbreton Wine The Messages of the Pumpkins The Vegetarian in the Kitchen Garden New Wine for Old Barrels A Masterpiece for a Canvas 147 CHAPTER X A Great Sale Millet's " Angelus "Tout-Paris and Some Others Meissonier and the " Slump " Some Prices obtained " No. 63 " The Beginning of the Fight How I bought " The Angelus " Incidents Dollars and Francs A Faiisse Sortie The Second Auction The Frenchmen's Premature Triumph An incredulous Cabman Old Masters Edison's Opinion of Same The Thatched Cottage at Bar- bizon A Specialist in Thatched Roofs Monsieur Fallieres and his Salary " Me for the Mazuma ! " A Peasant's Comment 167 CONTENTS CHAPTER XI PAGE Success and hard Work Carnot at the Elysee Napoleon's Vigils Count Ismael de Lesseps Still a Lieu- tenant My Visit to the Panama Canal Forty Thousand Lives for One How de Lesseps is re- membered A Letter never to be written How Madame de Lesseps Died Her Last Words De Lesseps' Indifference to Money How shared by French Savants Chevreul, Moissan, Marey French Indifference to Outside Matters " Qui $a, McKinley ? l ' j What the Frenchman reads On Serial Stories How advertised The Gangs of " Barkers " English Authors and French Publishers Stories of Evil Inns Two Women and their Father On the Calais Highroad Monsieur Carter of The Graphic The French Patriot's two Guns . 186 CHAPTER XII A Merchant of Human Hair Darthial on Hugo Heads as Crops Hair as the Thermometer of Prosperity The Travelling Buyers As to the Bretonnes Hair from Abroad Nothing doing in England Monsieur Darthial's Workshop The Secrets of the Trade- Various Lines and Various Prices Curls, Fronts, Topknots, Bangs and Transformations The Taste in America Gruesome Details The Hyaenas of Naples An Old Woman's Tragedy A Maker of Saints How a Model is designed The Realisms of Monsieur Pacheu The Humours of the Trade- Degrees of Popularity The Illusions of the Store- room Literature and Hair "There's 'Air 1 " 204 Tolerance in France CHAPTER XIII Edmond Rostand His Home in the Rue Alphonse de Neuville De Rubempre redivivus Early Successes Le Gant Rouge, Les Pierrots Les Musardises A Reading at the Com6die Franaise Refused Les Romanesques Monsieur Clare tie's Keys Re$u, a Correction Too long How Rostand works x CONTENTS Chapter xiii. continued: PAGE His " Enormous Weakness " for Shakespeare La Princesse Lointaine A First Night at the Fran$ais " Ca y est " Rostand and William Archer Folie de la Persecution A Sonnet to Sarah La Samaritaine Cyrano de Bergerac No Cyrano but Coquelin Sarah and the Due de Reichstadt Rostand's Love of Solitude The Coquelins ..... 229 CHAPTER XIV The Barber and Monsieur Barr6s Both Academicians The Violet Ribbon How it is distributed The Dessert at a Foyot Dejeuner Rostand at the Academy Why he left Paris" Oh ! Oh ! C'est une Imperatrice ! " Fauteuil 1 3 Rostand's Costume A Byronic Touch Rostand's Muse Tou jours Sarah Bernhardt A Literary Masterpiece Rostand's Histrionics M. de Vogue's Tribute Those who were Missing Jules Verne Tears and Kisses Catulle Mendes Saint Germain-en-Laye An old Retainer Ernest Dowson and the Yellow Butterfly The Castle, the Concierge , and the Cats . 252 CHAPTER XV Criminals in France Pickpockets Why the Artful Dodger dodges France Housebreaking v. Burglary The Cambrioleur and the Burglar Where the French hide their Money The Gang of " Polishers " Acts of Kindness to Strangers How One was not forgotten The Confidence Trick Blackmailers in Paris The Spanish Prisoner How the Trick originated Mie Prigione Arrested as a Pickpocket For defending the Queen Jean Hiroux and Monsieur St Clair A Tramp's Philosophy of Life On the Brink of Black Maria An Enemy to the Rescue On avoiding unpleasant Experiences An American Pupil Finis ..... 276 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ROBERT HARBOROUGH SHERARD . . . Frontispiece JEAN JOSEPH- REN AUD .... To face page 17 JULES HURET 17 ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 104 FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM ERNEST LA JEUNESSE ,, 112 FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM PIERRE LOUYS . 129 PAUL ADAM ,,132 MEMORIAL CARD TO FERDINAND DE LESSEPS . 186 FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM THE LATE COUNTESS DE LESSEPS 190 FERDINAND DE LESSEPS ON HIS DEATH-BED . 191 THE CHATEAU DE LA CHESNAYE ... 191 FACSIMILE OF NOTE FROM ETIENNE JULES MAREY ,, 192 IRENE OSGOOD (Mrs ROBERT HARBOROUGH SHERARD) 224 Two VISITING CARDS FROM FRENCH AUTHORS 253 JULES VERNE 268 HENRI DE REGNIER 268 IRENE OSGOOD, WITH "CAHIR" AND " SWIPES" 289 Two OF IRENE OSGOOD'S DOGS ... 289 xi MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH CHAPTER I Place aux Dames " Husbands ! Oh ! la ! la ! " In the Divorce Court Judges as Peacemakers Dwarfs as Mascots Purveyors of Happiness Daudet's Experiments Daudet and the Dogs The Immorality of ! Sappho '- Cruelty to Animals Shall it remain unpunished ? An amiable Mini- ster The Husband and the Kodak On the Pleasure of feeling Importance In a Minister's Antechamber French Freedom of Speech Monsieur de Goncourt rebuked English Reticence Morality or Hypocrisy A Diversion on Poets Rogers and his Court Dress Tennyson and Swin- burne Tennyson, his Times and his Pipe " ANOTHER husband ! No, thank you ! I have just had some. Je sors d'en prendre, des mavis \ Husbands ! Oh ! la ! la ! " And the pretty little woman who said these things shook her head most decisively, and laughed more than once, with scorn. Each time her laughter was twice echoed, once from a group of women who were collected at the far end of the passage, just outside the judge's door, and again from the thick body of men who filled the corridor right up to the head of the staircase. In the laugh of the women there was indignant repudiation, while the men gave a note of incredulous- ness to their guffaw. Contemptuous glances were exchanged between the two sexes. It was in that gloomy and malodorous passage in : 2 : M *FRXENDS THE FRENCH the Palais de Justice on to which opens the cabinet or chamber of the judge who officiates in the prelimin- aries to divorce suits. This passage is reached by a staircase which leads up from the extreme end of the Salle des Pas Perdus, or great hall. At the bottom of the staircase to the right is the very room in which the Revolutionary Tribunal sat, where Marie Antoinette faced with queenly dignity the rabble of her persecutors. A notice painted on the wall indicates that by this staircase may be reached the Cabinet des Conciliations, that is to say, the Room of Reconciliation. The French law ordains that before a husband or wife may sue for divorce the judge shall endeavour to reconcile them. It is in the Room of Reconciliation that the attempt is made. One has heard of cases where the words of the judge have been effective, and where two angry spouses, softened by judicial eloquence, have left the cabinet des conciliations arm in arm, determined to make a fresh start. In France the husband or wife who wishes to divorce applies through an avoue, who draws up a petition to the president of the tribunal. In this petition the various grievances complained of are set forth. The French law considers many offences as sufficient justification for divorce. Violent abuse, acts of brutality, incompatibility of temper even, are sufficient grounds for demanding a dissolution of the marriage bond. The same injustice marks in France still the relative treatment accorded to the two sexes. The laws made by the males will, I suppose, always favour the males. A woman can be divorced for adultery under any circumstances : a man can only be divorced for adultery by the wife to whom he has MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 3 been unfaithful if his infidelity has been committed in the "home," in the domicile conjugal, as the French law styles it. The man who drew up the divorce law and steered it against Catholic opposition through the two cham- bers was a hunchback and ill favoured. He had not much success with women, and I think that when he drew up his bill he remembered the fact, and made his law as hard on women as possible. I used to see him often in the company of General Boulanger, whose supporter and admirer he was, and I have heard him discussing the question of divorce. He looked impish, and somehow he always used to remind me of the boy who was seen stoning an unfortunate reptile while repeating : " I'll learn ye to be a toad." He seemed to say that he would " learn " women to be women. A thing that this legislator particularly hated in women was their superstitiousness. In France it is a superstition that to touch a hunchback's hump brings good luck, and whenever the man went out he used to feel people's hands passing over his protuberance. It used to rouse him to Quilplike and malignant anger. He declared that it was almost always women who touched him for luck, and I have seen him foaming at the mouth with indignation at being used as a fetich. I do not think, however, that he ever went as far as did another very famous Parisian hunchback of my acquaintance, who had needles so arranged above his hump and under his coat that people patting his back, with a view to advancing their private interests, got badly pricked in the hands. I cannot say that I understand this resentment. It seems to me that some people might feel flattered 4 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH to pass as a mascot. It would be delightful, I used to think, to feel that one could bring luck to a fellow- being, and I could quite imagine how, if I were hump- backed, I should enjoy my walks abroad. Fancy seeing a poor, unhappy woman gliding up to one, furtively touching one's back, and then going away radiant and full of hope. It would enable one to realise what Alphonse Daudet used to say would be his ideal on earth : to keep a shop of human happi- ness. " I want to set up," he used to say to me, " as marchand de bonheur, dealer in happiness. People would come into my shop and tell me their troubles and I would give them just what they wanted to make things right." Poor Daudet tried to carry into effect his benevolent schemes. As far as human ills can be remedied by money gifts he did more than any but the professional philanthropists. At one time he used to place on the mantelpiece of the study in which he held his weekly receptions a bowl, which was filled with silver coins, and it was understood that if any one of the Bohemians of letters who came to see him needed a little financial assistance he could go to the bowl and help himself. The experiment naturally failed. There were those who came to the receptions only for the sake of the bowl ; there were those who put too liberal an in- terpretation on the mute invitation extended to them. " I used to see fellows pocketing the coins by hand- fuls," Daudet told me, " and in the end I had to abandon the practice." But he was ever liberal with his money. It was a joy of his, if he happened to see in the streets of Paris some mournful and woebegone wayfarer, on whose pale cheeks Famine had imprinted her stigmata, to MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 5 brush hastily by the person and to press a five-franc piece into his hands. He used to call this " playing practical jokes on people." He was a very kind- hearted man, but curiously enough he had a peculiar and characteristic hatred of animals. Now people who hate animals are often very selfish. It is true that a great many animal lovers are abominably selfish. I was once at a dinner party at which GustaveLarroumet, at that time Director of Fine Arts, discussed horses with Alphonse Daudet, and I was surprised and pained to hear them speaking of these animals with disgust and hatred. Daudet said that horses filled him with terror, while Larroumet insisted on the ugliness of the horse's mouth. He said that the aspect of a horse's mouth always filled him with nausea. Daudet had a strong detestation of dogs and asserted that this terror of them arose from the terrible scares which he had had as a child in the country round Nimes, where mad dogs abound. I well remember how he described these terrors to me. "My foster-mother/' he said, "was an innkeeper, whose name was Garrimon, which is Provengal for Mountain Rat. There's a splendid name for you, Sherard. Why did I never use it in one of my stories ? The drinking-rooms in Garrimon's inn were on the first floor of the house, whilst the room where I slept was a storey higher. I remember how I used to hear the brigandlike, black-hearted, dark-eyed, long- haired men stamping up the wooden stairs that led to the taproom, as I lay awake of nights. Gradually, mon ami, their voices would swell into a tumult such an excitable race are we Provenaux stimulated by each other's talk and by draughts of harmless lemonade. No ; they rarely drank anything stronger 6 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH than limonade or orgeat, for we don't drink in the South. We are born drunk there, drunk with vitality, drunk with the sun. Sometimes I used to hear the clash of steel, and then I would rise from my bed and peep out of the window. I could see the wild-looking yet most inoffensive villagers all armed to the teeth, one with a scythe, another with a rusty cutlass, another with an old-fashioned flintlock, and some with flails or bludgeons. Then I knew that a mad dog was out and about, and I used to hurry back to bed all trembling with fear. I used to draw the bedclothes over my head and yet I strained my ears to hear what was being said downstairs. And every time that the words ' Kin foil ' rose above the tumult of voices, the clinking of glasses and bottles and the clatter of arms, I used to start with affright. I used to tremble all over as I thought of the Kin foil (the mad dog) and of the terrible weapons which the men carried because they, strong, blackbearded men, were just as much frightened of him as was the little, quaking wretch who shivered at every sound that the wind made in the eaves of the old house. At times my imagination would be so worked upon, and my fear grow so great, that I used to jump from my cot and run screaming to N6no Gammon, my foster-mother, and cling to her skirts for protection. " And on one occasion, I actually met the Kin foil a meeting which brought my horror to a climax and left an ineffaceable impression on my mind. It was on a summer evening, and I was walking home, carrying a little basket, along a path, white with dust, which led through thickly foliaged vines. Suddenly I heard a violent outburst of wild cries : ' Aou kin foil I Aou kin foil ! ' followed by a discharge of fire- MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 7 arms. Mad with terror I jumped into the vines, rolling head over heels in the dust and, as I lay there, unable to stir a finger, I heard the rush of the mad dog as it whirled by, as though a hurricane were passing, stones flying to the right and to the left of it, and a great cloud of white dust in the air above it ; heard too its furious panting and saw the horrid gleam of its devouring eyes. My heart stopped beating in a paroxysm of terror, and I have never, never forgotten the violence of the alarm which overwhelmed me. Since that day I have always held dogs in an absolute horror, and this horror indeed extends itself to almost all animals. I quite admit that it is strange that a poet should feel so about any of Nature's works, but there it is. I am unable to master this hatred. It is a hatred in which I am quite uncompromising. I consider animals the most ugly and vilest part of creation, cari- catures of what is basest and most loathsome in man. All my children have inherited my horror for them." I thought of this the other day when I met Leon Daudet, who has now grown into a very big man, walking about pensively in the Jar din des Plant es. Perhaps the same reason took him there which has often taken me to the Zoo : to see if among the animals I could find one as ugly and as degraded as, well, as the enemy of the moment. Leon Daudet was one of the sons to whom Daudet dedicated ' ' Sappho .' ' Paris, by the way, paraphrased the text of that dedication. It will be remembered that Daudet wrote : " Pour mes fits lorsqu'ils auront mngt ans " (For my sons when they shall be twenty years old). Paris said what Daudet meant to write was : "Pour mes fils lorsqu'ils auront mngt francs " (For my sons when they shall have twenty francs). The implication was that Sappho 8 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH was a venal person, and that the story of her should warn the young men of the dangers of such associa- tions. Unfortunately an extraordinary idea reigns both in England and in America that " Sappho " is such an immoral book that its publication should be interdicted. I remember speaking to Leon, who is a very old friend, about this, and he expressed the greatest indignation that his father should ever have been suspected of writing an improper book. He told me that Alphonse Daudet was and this I knew most particular to avoid in his writings any suggestion of coarseness. " I always read over to him what I had written," said Leon, " and if by any chance there was anything even suggestive of what is not quite . . . you understand he used to pull me up. He would be very indignant if he could know what is being said about his book." That is of course obvious from the work itself. The strangest thing is that a play adapted from this strong story formed the basis of a prosecu- tion in New York, in which my friend Mr Marcus Mayer, the famous impressario, was one of the defend- ants. It is worth a good deal to hear the old gentle- man relate his experiences as a prisoner at the bar. It should form one of the plums in his long-promised book of memoirs. He was acquitted, but none the less it is not to the credit of New York, whose stage is the most indecent in the world, that a play of such literary and social value should have been publicly branded as a pornographical work. Alphonse Daudet was a southerner, and in the South, where Catholicism is still so strongly rooted in the minds of the people, brute beasts, considered as being soulless, are looked upon as entirely at the merciless disposal of man. Your kind-hearted Spaniard thinks '^ 'J*""*~ ********- *** T 1 * ** tff**- 4 ' +A ?, FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM ALPHONSE DAUDET TO AUTHOR. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 9 you mad if you complain of the brutalities of his corridas di muerte, his bull-fights. He can't understand. A bull, a horse ; that has no soul ? It is of no account. Its blood may be spilled. Its sufferings appeal to no God. I think they do, and I have hopes that on the Day of Judgment, after Humanity has watched with a great sigh of relief the closing of the awful registers in which are recorded all the sins of man against God, great clouds of anger will be seen rolling up upon the terrible face of the High Justiciary, as the records of our persistent sin against our poor mute fellow- beings, the lower animals, are unfolded. Oh! the horrors of the Spanish bull-fights, the equal horrors of our English slaughter-houses, and that eternal cracking of whips which in Paris no less than in London, but worst of all in the pitiless cities of the South, is like the claque of cruel demons applauding the hideous tor- ments of the damned ! Ernest Renan tried to con- vince me once that there was no future punishment for sinners. Can it really be true that people who are cruel to animals are to escape all punishment ? One hopes not. The Gustave Larroumet, the Director of Fine Arts, who spoke what seemed such nonsense to me about horses at Daudet's dinner party, was forced to resign his high post by a husband who took snapshots of him while the unwary minister was courting his wife. The husband threatened to publish the photographs unless the Director of Fine Arts sent in his resignation. " I will ruin your career," said this vindictive husband, and that is what he did. Larroumet was an amiable gentleman, who seemed to spend most of his time walking about on the lead roofs of the galleries of the 10 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH Palais Royal, on to which the windows of his cabinet in the Ministry of Fine Arts opened, smoking cigar- ettes. He had about a dozen packets of caporal superieur always heaped up on his official table. He was not averse to the benefits of publicity. Once after I had visited him and had promised to write an account of our conversation it was something to do with the Comedie Frangaise he sent round several times to know whether the article had appeared. On each occasion the missive was brought me by a mounted soldier, a circumstance which vastly impressed my concierge. I remember a case where a young employe at one of the ministries was able to win the heart of a somewhat refractory Dulcinee, by sending her his appeals for a rendezvous by one of the dragoons who ride messages for the ministries. To receive a letter which has been carried by a minister's planton is to see one's importance vastly enhanced in one's street. It gives one the same sort of satisfaction that a certain kind of American derives from receiving from the hotel clerk, after he has duly " registered," a " voluminous mail." So real is this satisfaction that, to cater for it, people in the States are asked to insert, as an advertisement in a certain directory, their names and addresses, the result promised being " showers of mail." Se donner de ^importance, to make oneself out somebody or something, is as natural to a human being as it is to the poor hen, when in danger, to puff out her feathers so as to appear more formidable. Larroumet always used to receive me immediately my name was announced by the huissier, who quite abandoned his morgue in speaking to me . To abandon one's morgue, by the way, is a Gallicism for putting off one's side. However, one day the attendant told MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 11 me that the patron, or boss, really was engaged. He spoke in so mysterious a manner that I have since thought that his visitor may have been the lady who was afterwards to figure in the set of photographs which ruined this politician. Accordingly I had to wait. Indeed that day I failed to see the director, for when he was able to receive, I gave up my turn to an actor of the Comedie Frangaise, who had come to complain about the treatment he had met with in that year's promotion. He had confided his troubles to me at great length, speaking at the top of his voice, so that all the other people waiting in the minister's antechamber could hear what he said. His great grievance was the favouritism with which, as he said, the actresses are treated in the House of Moliere by contrast with the men. " Parbleu," he said, and kept repeating, " they have got something which we have not." As to his meaning, nobody of the many present can have entertained any doubt, either men or women, and it seemed to me a strange thing for such a man to say in such a place. There are many characteristics, however, of the French which appear curious to an Englishman before he knows this charming and light- hearted people with proper thoroughness. Their freedom of speech, the matter-of-fact way in which they speak of organs and functions of the body, and the humour they seem to discover in the baser physiological manifestations, will always shock and surprise the intolerant Britisher. I remember my astonishment once at Daudet's dinner-table, at which women and children were present, to hear old Monsieur Edmond de Goncourt relate an anecdote about a woman journalist and her devotion for an old polemical writer who had taken her to his study and his bosom. 12 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH The old writer had been very ill and the doctors in attendance on him desired to make a certain analysis. But the nature of the man's illness had prevented him that day from supplying what the doctors wanted, "and so/' said Monsieur Edmond de Goncourt, "this devoted woman supplied what was lacking herself." I will add that a hush fell on the table and that Daudet, who was a man of great delicacy, gently scolded his old friend. But at any rate hypocrisy is not a fault of the French at least, of the Roman Catholic French. I make this reservation because it is quite true that amongst the Protestant French I certainly have met with some very sancti- monious, priggish individuals. I don't remember whether Tartuffe was a Protestant or not, but anyway his is not a type which one can discover nowadays amongst the Catholics. If he ever existed in that section of the French people we may take it that Moliere whipped him out of the world. One cannot describe the relief one feels to get away from the ubiquitous English hypocrite, whose mind is often as evil and as unclean as his pretence to purity is great. I remember staying a few months ago in an English country house, where I met a very fine collection of typical English hypocrites of both sexes. One of these was a lady moving in very good society, who professed the greatest rigidity of principles. I will not attempt to describe the chilling disgust which she expressed when a vivacious young Frenchman, another of the guests, described at the luncheon table a curious epitaph he had read in a neighbouring church. This, it appeared, was inscribed on a memorial tablet which had been placed in the church by the widow of a former incumbent about a hundred years ago. It MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 13 related that he had died leaving four sons and eleven daughters, and the epitaph went on to say that the monument had been raised to the memory of " a good father and an excellent husband " by his loving wife. Of course the young Frenchman would have been better advised not to have quoted this naive record at table in the presence of ladies, but really the woman's indignation was almost too severe a punishment for his indiscretion. It occurred to me that such outre prudishness must necessarily mask a very unclean mind, and I was not greatly surprised when, some days later, I learned that the lady in question, being pecuni- arily embarrassed, had written a most barefaced letter to an American journalist, who was one of the week- end party, and who was known to be earning a very big income, asking him to come and stay at her house, solus cum sold (she being a widow and the man's wife and family being in the States), a letter which was as open an offer of herself and as impudent a piece of soliciting as it would be possible for any female to address to a male. And at another house I heard a man indignantly rebuked for a reference to natural children, his reprimander being a man who was in the habit of bringing into the house a certain sporting paper which owes its vogue in moral England to the gross obscenities with which its front page is defiled, a paper which he used to leave lying about where any woman or child in the place might pick it up. Of course the horror of any reference to illegitimacy is a general English characteristic, which, as it is mainly confined to the middle classes, may, one supposes, be attributed to the hereditary objection of the Anglo-Saxons (from which those middle classes are largely, if not entirely, recruited) to the bastardy 14 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH of their Norman Conqueror. One can imagine the joy with which the Saxon predecessors of our pre- dominant bourgeoisie used, when whipped back into their kennels, to sneer at William's illegitimacy. Man has few pleasures keener than that afforded by the power to deride or contemn his superior. It is a mean characteristic, but then there is much meanness in the human composition. Even eminent men have not shown themselves free from this petty spirit. One is reminded of Rogers the banker, who was a poet in his moments perdus, and who was filled with a con- suming envy of any superiority or advantage in any- one who approached him. One morning at one of his famous breakfasts he was heard to mutter : " Thank God, he has bad teeth/ ' referring to a rich young nobleman, who was good-looking, faultlessly dressed and who was just then the Jion of London society. Rogers had been profoundly miserable about the gifts which Fortune had showered on his guest, until he found in the man's defective dentition some gratifica- tion to his spite. As a lad, by the way, I used to hear from my mother many things about the author of " The Tear." " I assure you, my dear lady, I spend my life in defending you," was a remark he once made to Lady , who, at one of these breakfasts, seeing him in animated conversation with his neighbour, had bent over the table, exclaiming : " Now, I am sure, Mr Rogers, you are saying something dreadful about me." It was Rogers, who had his grandes entrees at the Court of St James, who, when my great-grandfather, William Wordsworth, was presented to Queen Victoria, on the occasion of his appointment as Poet Laureate, lent the economical old gentleman his Court dress. The same MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 15 suit by the way afterwards served the same purpose for Alfred Tennyson. One wonders what has become of those garments, on what rubbish heap those Parnassian rags are mouldering. Possibly, turned into good foolscap paper, they have served some other poet to write upon. It would be worthy of the irony of the gods if that very paper did come beneath the pen of Charles Algernon Swinburne, that greatest of poets, of whose success Alfred Tennyson was so envious that he ordered Moxon to cease the publica- tion of his first volume of poems unless he wished to lose his remunerative connection with himself. I suppose that in no trade more than in letters, and in no section of authorship more than amongst poets, is what the Germans call Brodneid (bread-envy, professional jealousy) more strongly pronounced, and there was this excuse for Tennyson, that he was a very poor man. My mother remembers how, as a girl, being full of admiration for the young poet who was to succeed her grandfather in Laureate honours, she was taken over to see Mr Tennyson by Mrs Taylor (afterwards Lady Taylor), the wife of another poet of some distinction, author of " Philip van Arteveldt." Tennyson received them very badly, showing great irritation at being disturbed, and when Mrs Taylor rallied him on his manner, he said : " Madam, I am a poor man, and as I can't afford to buy The Times I hire it from the stationer's. He charges me one penny for it, which entitles me to keep it an hour. Why will people always select just that hour to come and call upon me ? " After which he flung out of the room, leaving Mrs Tennyson to apologise for his brusquerie. She said that she thought Alfred smoked far too much ; his pipe was never out of his mouth. CHAPTER II Illegitimacy Difference of French Attitude The Gravest Insult in England And in France Prejudices of English, and of French Readers Two publishing Experts Monsieur Pierre Laffitte On Magazines in France Monsieur Jean-Joseph Renaud Literary Earnings The Hero and the Horse In the Divorce Court Hope, Eternal- -Monsieur, Madame, and Monsieur Jules Marriage, Divorce and Free Union More liberal Treatment of Wives in France Monsieur's Weekly Allowance French Housewifery Injustices towards English Wives Cottons and Cleanliness Woollens and Washing The Jews in Warsaw THE contempt of the English middle and lower classes for unfortunate children whose parents were not married is so pronounced that the large reading public resents as an insult any reference to such monsters of immorality as natural children. I re- member a chat I once had in his office in Bolton with young Mr Lever Tillotson, who does a large business in supplying the newspapers with serial fiction. He told me how very careful he had to be as to the moral quality of the stuff he sent out. " In one of our recent serials/' he said, " the author had introduced a girl whose parents had not been married, and the editor received such a number of complaints from the readers of his paper that he was forced to stop the publication of the story ." Amongst the lower classes in England the word " bastard " (commonly pronounced "barstard") is the very gravest insult that one person can address to another. It illustrates the fundamental difference in the characters of the two nations that amongst the 16 JEAN JOSEPH-RENAUD The champion gentleman fencer of France. He has never been beaten. Is well known at the Sword Club in London. Monsieur Renaud is a popular author and a famous journalist. JULES HURET, The leading journalist in France. He is known as "the King of Interviewers " It was Monsieur Huret who first interviewed Captain Dreyfus. To face page 17. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 17 French to reproach a human being with the fact that his parents were not married when he was begotten would redound only to the discredit and ridicule of the insulter. In France the most offensive thing that one man can say to another is to call him un feignant (faineant), which means an idler, a do-nothing. It is the worst reproach that the industrious Frenchman can level against a man, to tax him with idleness. In England, of course, we are on our knees before what we call the leisured classes. The way in which it was impressed upon me how grave an offence the word faineant is in the ears of a Frenchman, will be illustrated later on from one of my own experiences in Paris. One does not mean to say that French readers of all classes will tolerate references to immorality. I was talking the other day on board the Heliopolis, on my way to Egypt, with Monsieur Pierre Laffitte, the enter- prising publisher of Je Sais Tout, and other very popular magazines on the model of the English and American periodicals, and Monsieur Laffitte, who de- scribes himself modestly as " un tout petit Americain " (placing his hand about a foot from the floor), com- plained of the very great difficulty he experienced in finding matter for the readers of Je Sais Tout, which is primarily a magazine for family reading. We had come to this topic in connection with Monsieur Jean-Joseph Renaud, the fencer and author, who, as I knew, had been engaged by Monsieur Laffitte to write a series of gruesome stories, the genre macabre, Monsieur Renaud having acquired considerable re- putation in this branch of fiction by the success of his book " Le Chercheur de Merveilleux." " Yes," said Monsieur Laffitte, " the gruesome tale seems the only thing that I can use for my paper. 18 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH I can't publish the ordinary French nouvelle about men and women, as my magazine is for family reading and French parents are very, very strict. On the other hand the sentimental love story in which English readers of every age so delight does not go down at all in France. The French won't have it. So one does not know what to give them, and when I have worked out this genre macabre how I shall fill my paper is what is perplexing my head. " I will confess," he added, " that, when I first started publishing magazines of the English kind in Paris, I had thought that I might be able to use a good deal of the matter that appears in the English and American periodicals, by arrangement with the publishers and authors. Well, to show you the great difference that there is between English and American readers on the one hand and our French reading public on the other, out of a huge pile of English and American magazines the readers of my staff were unable to find more than about three stories, and as many articles, which would have been of any use to us. On the other hand when I started Jeunesse, my magazine for children (which, by the way, was a dead failure, a four, a frost), the staff readers of that magazine found in the same magazines an enormous quantity of tales and articles which were just the very thing for my periodical. That is to say that your stories for grown-ups very well suit our French children, and on the other hand that you could not get French men and women to read them." I pointed out to Monsieur Pierre Laffitte that there is a way of presenting dangerous matter which renders it available for family use, and was proceeding to describe how that very able publicist, Mr Hall MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 19 Caine, had succeeded in getting the very clergy of England to advertise a play in which a number of street-walkers figured on the stage, but as to my great surprise Monsieur Laffitte told me that he had never heard of Hall Caine, and so my illustration missed its point, I did not pursue the topic. I had some further conversation with the energetic young publisher, who described the great difficulties which beset the publication of magazines and the comparatively small remuneration that could be looked for in this field in France. " Now here am I" he said. " This voyage to Egypt is the first trip which my wife and I have been able to allow ourselves. When I think of the huge incomes which my colleagues in England and America are earning ! " I bade him take heart of grace, and told him of the beginnings of such men as Lord Northcliffe, C.A.P., Sir George Newnes, and especially of Mr S. S. McClure of McClure' s Magazine, now one of the best " proposi- tions" in the United States. However, Monsieur Laffitte, like all men who are going to be successful, seemed profoundly discontented. " We can make no income out of our advertisements," he said. " My advertisements in Je Sais Tout don't bring me in anything." On the other hand, he said, his expenses for contributions were very heavy. He told me that he had just arranged with that eminent Academician, Monsieur Henri Lavedan, for a serial story for Je Sais Tout and that he was paying him at the rate of two shillings and twopence halfpenny the line. I was aware, by the way, that the rates paid were very much in excess of what French writers for the press usually obtain, because Jean- 20 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH Joseph Renaud had shown me his contract for the series of gruesome tales referred to above and I had noticed that the rate offered worked out at about five pounds a thousand words. Now many writers of fiction in France, contributors to good papers of very large circulations, have to be satisfied with one halfpenny a line. In fact I have heard unattached journalists in Paris, who eke out a precarious existence by contributing salacious little tales to the popular papers, describe their trade as a dog's life Un metier de chien. Once at Champrosay at a dinner party at Daudet's house a very popular writer described his life before he made a hit with a novel which would have landed him in gaol in England, and told us that many months his income in the bad old days never reached eighty francs. " A dog's life ! A dog's life ! " he kept re- peating, although it had led him to wealth, the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour and a universal notoriety. I remember how, apropos of his exclama- tion about a dog's life, the master of the house began to talk of dogs and his hatred for them. Daudet's detestation of animals en masse is fortun- ately rare, though one often comes across people who cannot bear certain kinds of animals. Many people object to dogs ; others have a real horror of cats ; mice and rats are an aversion to many, and not to women alone, and there are even brave men who are afraid of cattle and of horses. I was greatly surprised when out walking the other day in Northamptonshire with a friend, a very celebrated fencer, to hear him say that he would rather not approach a cow that was grazing quietly in a field through which we were passing. He afterwards told me that he was very MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 21 nervous about horses, did not like to go near them, and when out driving was always more or less frightened about being upset. He attributed this feeling to the fact that his mother had been frightened by a horse. It was a curious psychological phenomenon, for the man is in other respects as fearless as a man can be, an athlete, indifferent to danger. He drove off from the country house where we had been staying together in some trepidation, because the horse had reared a bit at the porch. He was on his way to London, where he was going to take a course of lessons in ju-jitsu. He wrote me a day or two later to tell me that " no- thing is more amusing than to throw a man down to the ground oh ! so easily and then to operate on a nerve or a muscle of his as though you had him upon a post-mortem table. " One can be very nervous and frightened about one thing and yet be a brave man. All of which has taken me very far away from the pretty little woman in my first chapter whom I over- heard in the corridor outside the Room of Reconcilia- tion, as she indignantly repudiated the suggestion that as soon as she had got rid of her first husband, she should pick another amongst the men who were waiting at the top of the staircase. I had accompanied a friend that day to the Divorce Court, or rather to that part of the Palais de Justice where the formalities preliminary to divorce are carried out, and it afforded me no little interest to watch the crowd of unhappy spouses, the men in one body and the women in another, who were waiting their turns to be admitted by a liveried usher into the presence of the judge. A garde de Paris in uniform helped the usher to keep order. He was grinning from ear to ear 22 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH at the salacious jokes of the men, jokes which seemed to rouse the indignation of the women. This was my friend's first visit to the court. He had to wait more than an hour before his name was called out. He then went into the judge's room, and here the formalities were disposed of with lightning rapidity ; in fact, after asking him his name and address, the judge merely added : " Do you per- sist in your demand for divorce ? " The petitioner assented, whereupon the judge signed his petition and said, " It is very well, monsieur ," giving him a sign to withdraw. In this way this energetic magistrate was able to dispose of about sixty petitioners, male and female, in considerably less than two hours. The women were admitted first, and as they came out they had to run the gauntlet through the serried ranks of the men. All sorts of stupid jokes were levelled at them. The poor girls looked for the most part nervous and distressed. One woman was crying. " Don't cry," said one of the men. " You'll make it up with him. A night with your heads on the same bolster will make that all right." " I snap my fingers at that," said the woman, " what is troubling me is that I have lost a day's work and that I have three children to feed." Those hours passed in that malodorous corridor were not uninstructive. I could not help wondering why some of the people should want to divorce, when it was too apparent that human concerns could interest them but so short a while longer. There was one man who crawled into the waiting-room on crutches, the hopeless wreck of a man. He was old, he was broken, he was feeble, and yet he wished to divorce his wife, presumably with a view to marrying MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 23 again. " My wife was unfaithful to me some years ago/' he explained to us, " and I did not care then, so I didn't divorce. But now things have turned out so that I do care, and I am asking to be released." I wondered what woman could be willing to marry such a man, and whether the poor fellow did really think that life could hold any more happiness for him. The way in which human beings cling to hope, under even the most desperate circumstances, is the most pathetic of our characteristics. We were a popular crowd and we were very con- fidential. Each man told of his grievance. The Anglo-Saxon would have perished rather than take strangers into the miserable confidences of his matri- monial mischances. " Cocu I am, sir," one man informed me, " cuckold as it is not possible to be. Dans les grandes largeurs / Full width. Goodness gracious ! what a tempera- ment that woman has to be sure." He spoke of her with admiration, though he was pursuing his divorce. Another man told me that his wife had run away from him and that he had had no news of her for the past five years. "This," he said, "will Jelay my divorce for two or three years it may be, and it is a pity, as I am living with quelqu'un and we are getting a family, and of course I shall never be able to legiti- mise these children." In France the natural children of a married man adulterine children, that is to say can never be legitimised. Nearly every man present told the story of his misfortunes. It was amusing to look at the body of women who were collected round the door of the 24 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH judge's chamber whilst these confidences were being exchanged. Their faces said as plain as words that nothing that had happened to any one of us was any- thing more than we had most richly deserved. They seemed to applaud the stories of perfidy that were being told. It was all very sad. I suppose that every one of these people had married, hoping to be happy, and this is what their dreams had led them to. Many of the women looked as if they would like nothing better than to cry and to have someone to comfort them lovingly. They seemed too weak to face the fight in which they were engaged. I noticed many under-lips which quivered, which had that look which the lips of women have who have suffered much and have cried often. Even the men inspired one with pity at least some of them did. I accompanied my friend about six weeks later to the same place. On this occasion his wife had been summoned to meet him and to present herself en conciliation before the judge that is to say, the wife was invited to listen to the judge's attempts to reconcile her to her husband. She did not put in an appearance, and my friend's interview with the judge was not much longer than on the previous occasion. In most cases the husband or wife who was being proceeded against defaulted. However, one woman had brought her lover with her, and her husband had also put in an appearance, and while we were waiting to be called before the judge we were highly diverted by the way in which this woman abused her husband. I much admired his patience. She patted the lover's cheek before us all and said : " This is my little Jules, the little darling whom I love." Jules, who was a fat, middle-aged man, looked vastly uncomfortable. As MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 25 for the husband he simply smiled and shrugged his shoulders. The wife grew angrier and angrier, while the usher, the garde de Paris and the crowd of suitors roared with laughter at her sallies. When this couple were called into the judge's room Jules, of course, remaining outside a rush was made for a side door, leading from the judicial cabinet into a waiting-room. It appeared that one could here listen to what was going on in the room and, as one man said, " We ought to hear something very funny when that young woman begins to talk." I saw a number of men with their ears pressed to the panel of this door, on whose faces eager expectation was de- picted. But they were doomed to disappointment, for the interview between the couple and the judge was of the shortest. I suppose that the lady who was fond of Jules very emphatically refused to listen to any of the judge's arguments and that that functionary was glad to give them their congi. She soon appeared amongst us again, seized Jules by the arm and walked off, casting sarcastic glances at her husband, who, tranquilly following them on his way out, was rolling a cigarette. Divorce in France is considered by some to be much too easy to obtain. Yet a large number of French citizens, both men and women, find it should be made very much easier for husbands and wives to separate when marriage has proved a failure. There is a strong movement in favour of an entire reform of the marriage and divorce laws. For the same people find that the French law makes it too difficult for people to marry. The tendency is, of course, in the direction of a total abolition of marriage, of that free 26 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH love union which has so many partisans in France already. Many distinguished men have openly shown their approval of the union libre. One great savant gave his two daughters to their lovers with no other marriage rites than the words, " Go, my children, I have united you," which he pro- nounced as he sent them off to their respective homes. The women later on took care to legalise their unions, but the fact remains that here was a father, a man of the highest scientific attainments and of universal reputation, who calmly consigned his daughters to a life of free love in defiance of the social prejudices accumulated by ages. There are many of his way of thinking in Paris to-day, and the number is gradually growing ; now that religious instruction has been done away with in the schools, it is probable that an immense increase of irregular unions will take place. What has restrained most women so far has been the teachings of Monsieur le Cure and the fear of the con- fessional, that " dust-bin of the soul/' as Rochefort once called it. One wonders how the children will be protected under the new order of things. I think that the Frenchwomen can be very well left to look after themselves. In France it is the women who rule, and it is right that it should be so, considering their physical and intellectual superiority. The Frenchman is so well aware that his wife is more sensible than he is, and his confidence in her is so entire, that it is almost an unvarying rule that the French ouvrier or employe hands over to his wife Ms entire wages. The wife in the vast majority of French households has the income of the household under her management. It is she MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 27 who pays the rent, who dresses the husband and the children, and who carries the savings to the bank. As to the husband he contents himself with the very small allowance of pocket-money which the woman grants him. I have known workmen earning from two to three pounds a week who have been well satisfied with a weekly tenpence for their tobacco and the debauch of a visit to the cafe on Sunday afternoon. A Frenchwoman would not understand those jokes which one sees constantly in the English papers, the point of which is the efforts made by the women to obtain from their husbands some new article of dress, a frock or a hat. If a Frenchwoman needs a new dress or a new hat she buys it out of the household purse that is to say, if she thinks that the expense can be afforded. She would not dream it her duty to ask her husband's permission to effect the purchase. It is one of the things which go without saying, that the wife should dress as well as the menage can possibly afford. The good housewifery of the Frenchwoman is indeed one of her most admirable qualities. Abroad she does not get as much credit in this respect as is her due. At the same time one often hears comparisons drawn between French and English women of the working- classes, in favour of the French, which are decidedly most unfair to our poor lasses. The Frenchwoman has got the climate on her side. She does not, as a general rule, have to contend with the greasy, sooty atmosphere of our English towns, which makes all the poor Englishwoman's efforts to keep the " home " clean so hopeless. And again, the Frenchwoman can dress her folk in cottons, which wash. In England even the poor have to dress in woollens, or shoddy 28 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH substitutes for the same, things that won't wash, become foul very soon, and remain so. It is not fair to say that because the man in the cotton blouse is clean, while his comrade in the shoddy coat is malo- dorous and filthy, that the wife of the former must be a decent woman and the wife of the latter a disgrace- ful slut. It's a question of climate. The colder the country the filthier the clothes of the poor. I re- member that when I was crossing steerage to New York there were some fellows down in the hold with me who wore sheepskins, with the wool outside, of which the odour haunts me still. Illingworth's Corner in Bradford is violets to that smell. For odours can haunt one even as tunes. One morning in my luxurious apartment in the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw I was suddenly taken frightfully ill with nausea. The recollection of a visit the day before to the awful Trefna Jatka, a tenement house occupied by over one thousand families of very poor Jews, and of the dreadful smells in many of the rooms which I had entered, had suddenly swept over me. I thought that this was a sign of particular sensitiveness on my part, and was feeling rather proud of my delicacy of feeling, when Mr Whitehead, the manager of a big lace factory in the Polish capital, told me that after a walk down the Jewish quarter in Lublin, at the end of which he had been taken ill, he was seized every day for three weeks with a violent fit of vomiting when he recalled his sensations in that awful ghetto. This, by the way, en passant, may illustrate the shameful treatment to which the Jews are subjected in the Russian Empire. Another reason why the Frenchwoman is better able to manage than her English sister of the working- MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 20 classes is that she and her husband do not have to pay such extortionate rents as our poor workpeople do in England. In England the landlord takes rarely less than a fourth, and often as much as half, the unskilled labourer's wages* CHAPTER III French Frugalities Parsimony and Pills A Gift Ex-Coupon Hereditary Instinct My Friend Mignon and the Basque Peasant Woman Sugar a Luxury Beetroot and Brandy Bonbons Anglais A Breton Grocery Twisting Paper Bags Alcoholism in Brittany The Three Barrels " Grande Fine Champagne " A la Mode de Bretagne Chez Jules Massenet Absinthe and Absinthism Cider and Lunacy In a " Normandy Inn " " Strangling Parrots tl A Waif of the " Quartier " Mademoiselle Marguerite How she "Made an End J! No doubt one reason, and the principal reason, why the Frenchman allows his wife to have the manage- ment of the household budget is that he knows that economy is the essential characteristic of the fair sex in his country. Indeed it is so. To some extent, perhaps, the Frenchwoman carries her practice of this housewifely virtue too far, and on the principle that there is no such thing as excessive frugality qu'il n'y a pas de petites economies -borders at times on avarice. I have eaten some really nasty soups in many French households over which ladies presided who had allowed their ruling passion thus to develop morbidly, and I remember once meeting the wife of a colonial officer who nearly killed herself by une petite economic which would have been worthy of Harpagon himself. The colonial, having returned home with a touch of malarial fever, had invested in a large case of pills advertised as a specific for his ailment. When he went back to the colonies he forgot to take the case with him. So his wife, who could not bear the thought of money having been spent for nothing, and desiring 30 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 31 value in exchange, began taking the pills herself, although there was nothing the matter with her, and continued doing so until, as a result, she became very ill and had to send for the family doctor, who im- mediately impounded the pills and suppressed the cause of her disorder. I once also witnessed in a small French household an act which struck me as rather mean. An old lady who felt her last hour approaching requested the family to present then and there to her faithful maid-servant, in lieu of legacy, a Russian bond. The niece fetched the bond, and was just handing it over to the weeping Julie when a thought occurred to her, and producing a small pair of nail-scissors she first carefully cut off the coupon for the next half-year's interest, which she placed in her pocket. Then she executed the wishes of her dying aunt, who had watched this scene without disapproval. II riy a pas de petites economies. One has to remember that until the French Revolu- tion the French people lived in extreme penury. The French proletarian and bourgeois have an instinctive respect for money and money's worth. For centuries they were at constant war with hunger, and any waste appears to their subliminary conscience a crime, or an act of madness. Thousands of French people I might almost write hundreds of thousands for instance, still look upon salt as a luxury to be hus- banded with the greatest economy, a tradition from the pre-Revolutionary days, and it is by no means only misers like Balzac's Pere Grandet who consider sugar an article not of daily consumption, but a treat, a regale, a dainty. I remember once hearing myself violently abused 32 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH in a tongue which I did not understand, down in a Basque village, by an old peasant woman, who had seen me giving sugar by the handful to a dear friend of mine, a pet donkey named Mignon, who was one of the nicest companions, as well as the most intelligent, whom I have ever fallen in with. Mignon was very fond of sugar. He used to follow me to the little cafe on the public square at Cap Breton, where we were living together, push the door open with his nose, and going the rounds of the tables rob the consommateurs of the lumps of sugar with which they proposed to edulcorate their absinthes. Whenever we went out together for walks in the pine forests I carried a provision with me, and as often as Mignon felt he could do with a bit he had the most explicit way of letting me know. On that day I was spoiling him. Perhaps it was that humanity had appeared to me more than usually in that light which makes me prefer the society of animals anyway Mignon had ingurgitated nearly half-a-pound of sugar. Suddenly a torrent of angrily spoken words assailed my ears, and turning round I saw by the roadside an old woman, who was shaking her fist at me while pouring out in the raucous Basque tongue comment and criticism on the scene before her, which most obviously were not compli- mentary. It appeared that she was saying that it was a criminal act on my part to be giving sugar to a donkey when she herself was never able to have so much as one lump wherewith to sweeten her coffee. Readers of Zola will remember how the peasants in Beauce look upon sugar, and how it is a locution of theirs to express great contentment : " I have sweetened my coffee twice." In some parts of France, or rather MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 33 amongst some French people of the poorer kind (though not of the poorest), a habit still exists which to English people may seem disgusting, and which dates from the period when sugar was such a great luxury that at a farmhouse feast a large lump of the precious product used to be hung up by a piece of string over the table, so that each guest might sweeten his mouth before imbibing his drink. Nowadays one sees people who never think of putting a lump of sugar into their cup. They put it into their mouths and let the fluid pass through it down their throats. It lasts longer and gives so it would appear more satisfaction. There is a superstitious regard in France for sugar, that is because it was so expensive. A thing so costly must according to the popular idea have many virtues, because money or money's worth necessarily implies the superior qualities, and not in epitaphs alone. A real medicinal or therapeutic value is still attributed to it amongst the French. They consider that plain water is a dangerous drink, whose nocive qualities can only be overcome by the addition of a lump of sugar. The indispensable furniture of the table de nuit that is to say, its exterior garnish is the verre d'eau sucree, a bottle of water, a glass and a small sugar-bowl. Sometimes a little phial of orange-flower water is added. Here is refreshment for the night, and in case of indigestion or insomnia a sovereign specific. The confirmed absinthe drinker deludes himself, and tries to impress on others, that the lump of sugar which he dissolves in his poison counteracts any evil effects of the alcohol or the lethal essences of which the drink is compounded, and here again is exemplified the hereditary superstition. I expect that the old Basque 34 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH woman who saw me treating Mignon looked upon my extravagance as an act of real sacrilege, and that the odium theologicum gave such extraordinary fire to her indignation. Sugar is still very expensive in France, and that may be wondered at seeing how plentiful is the beetroot, from which it is made. But industry has found for the beet a more lucrative application. It is from this root that the bulk of the cognac is distilled which is drunk in France and which is exported abroad as the perfumed distillation of the grape. The nasty fluid which oozes forth from the beetroot press on its way to the stills is technically known as le phlegme, which aptly describes its appearance. The first distillation is known as les mauvaises odeurs (the bad smells), and this is used in one stage for the manufacture of absinthe and fancy liqueurs, while the residue is employed in the preparation of those acidulated drops which are known to commerce as bonbons Anglais (English drops). The raw spirit which finally emerges from the still, coloured with burnt sugar, diluted with water and flavoured with certain essences and ethers, is shipped to the Charente, and returns on the markets of the world as commercial cognac. It is invoiced to the retailers at threepence a quart, and is drunk throughout France by thousands of quarts daily. The consumer pays from one and threepence the quart upwards, according to the amount of water which has been added, the place where it is sold, the bottle which contains it and the label which garnishes the bottle. I was once living in lodgings in St Malo, over a grocer's shop, which was kept by an excellent woman, a Madame Gloux, who may hereafter figure in my humble memoirs. As time hung very heavy on my MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 35 hands, I often used to go down into the epicene, to talk with the epiciere and watch the customers. It was a small shop, which catered rather to the wants of the working population. During my visits to Madame Gloux's shop I got an insight into the way of living of these classes in a Brittany port. French work- people seem to have as great a liking for sharp, acid vinegar and strongly flavoured edibles as our own pro- letarian. Pickles and strong cheese are the staple articles of food of hundreds of thousands of English men and women and, I am sorry to say, of English children also . And it's the same in France . I suppose the more pungent the flavour of the " kitchen " as the Scotch call it the further it goes in helping down that daily bread by which alone these men and women, at least, have to live. I used to see strong coal- heavers from the quays fetching their midday meal. They would ask for a pickled herring " with plenty of vinegar/ ' and the grocery woman used to wrap it up, herring, vinegar and all, in a piece of brown paper. It was, by the way, here that I learned the knack of twisting those little paper cones cornets which grocers use as bags for small purchases. It seems easy enough until you try it, and then one either knows how to do it or one does not. And the thing is so much a knack, a trade trick, that a certain Parisian detective used to use it as a test. It was his duty to scour Paris at night with the patrols for homeless vagabonds and to examine these after their arrest so as to weed out those who had a trade or profession from the beggars and thieves. Now in France it is almost as usual for a vagabond, when asked to define his social status, to describe himself as a grocer's assistant as in England it is for the loafer who gets 36 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH into trouble to style himself a journalist. " I have an unfailing means of assuring myself " so the detective, the great Rossignol himself, told me " whether my man really is a grocer's assistant out of work or not. I give him a page out of my note-book and I say to him : ' Twist a bag/ If he has ever worked in a grocery he turns the cone in the twinkling of the eye, and I set him free. But the impostor hesitates, blunders, fails, and him I send off to the central lock-up." I used to observe the extraordinary amount of drink- ing that goes on in Brittany, especially amongst the women. All day long little girls and boys came running in on errands from their parents. A frequent order would be " One sou's worth of sugar, one sou's worth of coffee, and" putting down a half -franc piece " fourpenceworth of brandy." There was a little mite of a girl, with a face as serious as that of a very old woman of the world, who used to come into the shop, and slowly pull up her little skirt, then dive into some recess of her garments and produce a pint bottle. " I desire," she used to say, " for ten sous, cognac brandy, and if you please, madame, mother says that it must be better than the last, which appeared to have been too liberally baptised. Other- wise I shall have to go elsewhere." There were three qualities of cognac on draught in that shop, and the demand for them was so constant that the principal article of furniture in the shop was three large hogsheads of polished wood, from which the brandy was drawn by a tap. The qualities were " Cognac Ordinaire," " Cognac Superieur," and " Fine Champagne." The spirits were the same in each, the beetroot brandy, but the amount of added water MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 37 varied. " The Cognac Ordinaire " was spirits watered down to 30 % of alcohol, the " Superieur " contained 10 % more and the " Grande Fine " was about half pure spirits. We used to prepare the qualities after dark, when the shutters were up. For the " Cognac Ordinaire " we employed a length of hose-pipe. The " Fine Champagne " was retailed at about 2s. 6d. the quart, though the same stuff put up in bottles with elegant labels fetched from sailors on the spree, or butlers from yachts in the harbour, as much as five, or even eight, shillings. As a matter of fact this " Grande Fine," although bouquet was lacking to it, and esters and ethers were absent, would not be any more injurious to the system than cognac manufactured from the juice of the grape. Fermentation (which is in its way a revolution), like a revolution, is a leveller, and reduces to the same plane the imperial and purple juice of the grape and the greasy scum of the pressed beetroot. Alcohol, we all know, is the excremental exudation of infusoria, and in the latrines social distinctions cease. There was recently experimented in a French laboratory the production of an alcohol for consumption out of that matiere premiere which of all products is the most primary of all. It would not be any more injurious to health, if consumed, than that exquisite liqueur which Jules Massenet once served me at his table, a " Grande Fine " which had been in bottle in his family since the days of the French Revolution, and of which a Frenchman present said that it slid down his throat like the Almighty in a pair of velvet trousers. Excellent grape-juice brandy can, of course, be had in France for those who care to pay a proper price, and stocks are to be found in unexpected places. For 38 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH instance some months ago a party of American motorists drew up at a small hotel in Vernon in Normandy. They were dying for " a drink," and, though they expected to get very bad cognac at this unpretending establishment, they ordered brandies. " Say, this is bully," was the general comment, and when the party got to Paris, and had sampled the " Grandes Fines" in the various first-class houses in the capital, they came to the conclusion that the Vernon brandy was better than anything they had sampled. So they wrote to the proprietor offering him any price per bottle that he liked to ask, and undertook to take his whole stock, if he would part with it. To this letter the worthy Norman innkeeper wrote back : " If you like my brandy, you must come to my house to drink it. We only sell it to customers to be con- sumed on the premises, in our hotel." "Well, this is the limit," was the remark of the would-be buyers. They had at last found that there are some things in France " Grande Fine " included which money cannot buy. The landlord was, of course, acting as a shrewd business man . His " Grande Fine" was the finest advertisement that his house could possess, and he would have been unwise to part with his stock. One never knows where good liquor may be stored. I once had a friend in Paris, Mr Westcott, who at that time was correspondent of The Standard, who informed me one day that he knew several places in Paris where the finest old bottled stout could be procured. This was at a number of small marchands de vins y who had stocked the porter years previously, but had never had any call for it. My friend told me that he was lunching every day at one of these wineshops and was MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 39 gradually working his way through the fine stock of really delicious stout. The reason why, in the form of absinthe, the juice of the beet, the mauvaises odeurs which are first distilled off that viscous fluid which the brandy - makers described as le phlegme, is so much more injurious to health, is first of all because a glass of absinthe contains a far greater proportion of pure spirit than brandy, and again because the colouring and flavouring of this liquor are obtained by the addition of most injurious substances. One is constantly reading in the papers that the French Government is going to put a stop to the sale and manufacture of absinthe in France, but nobody who knows how governments are run is for one moment the dupe of these lying and hypocritical promises. The French tapster is the great electoral agent and his business must not be interfered with. Again, strong drink keeps the proletarian electorate in that state of intellectual servitude which is the guarantee of their subjection, and then again financial considerations are not lacking why this huge industry should not be killed. Anyone who is interested in the systematic poisoning and degradation of a fine race should read the dreadful report published in 1902 by Doctor Laborde on the subject of the cordials, liqueurs and aperitifs in general, and of absinthe in particular, which are consumed in such huge and increasing quantities by the French nation. I remember hoping at the time that this report, ghastly reading as it is, would stimulate on the one hand repressive legislation and on the other would incite the public to prudence. That was six years ago. Since then much water has flowed under the bridges, and a river as formidable of poisonous fluids down the throats of the people. The 40 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH fact is that the French have been drinking absinthe, amers, and all their other infernal concoctions for the past fifty years and the resulting object lessons have been such that there is not a drinker of aperitifs in the republic who does not know quite as much as Doctor Laborde and the whole Parliamentary Commission on Alcoholism could tell him as to the dangers he incurs by his indulgence. Of all these nasty mixtures, absinthe is undoubtedly the most dangerous. It was to the introduction of the absinthe habit that Alphonse Daudet used to attribute the alarming spread of alcoholism in France. " This habit/* he often repeated to me, " was ac- quired by our soldiers in Algeria and Tunisia during our wars there, and was by them brought back to France. Before those wars we were a very sober people. In the South especially, an intemperate man was altogether an exception. We used to boast that we were born drunk, that is to say intoxicated with the light and warmth of our sun, and so stood in no need of alcoholic stimulants. But all that, hdas, is changed now." Absinthe is one of the strongest alcoholic drinks compounded. Its percentage of pure alcohol is 90 %, so that the drinker who has accustomed his palate to this fiery mixture will necessarily need to absorb unreasonable quantities of other spirits if he is to obtain the same effect. The ordinary brandy of French commerce, as I have pointed out above, contains, for instance, from 30 % to 35 % of pure alcohol. Therefore one tumblerful of pure, undiluted cognac will be required by the absinthe drinker as a substitute for his diluted tumblerful of absinthe. It is moreover an insidious drink, the habit of consuming MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 41 it grows upon its victim, who sooner or later has to abdicate all will power in the control of his passion. Dr Laborde attributed its especial danger to the various essences which are added to the alcohol to give the liqueur its peculiar colour and flavour. Of these essence of absinthe, essence of china-anise and tincture of benjamin are the principal. By his declara- tion the reporter put himself on the side of those doctors who diagnose a special malady called absinth- ism as the result of the absinthe habit, as opposed to those who classify it with the hundred and one evil results of alcoholism. As a matter of fact, one has observed the usual effects of absinthism, the hoarse, guttural absinthe voice, the wandering, glazed absinthe eye, the cold and clammy hand, which seems to emerge from swathing cloths, as well as all the accidents of which these symptoms are the forerunners, in people who have never drunk a glass of absinthe in their lives. Various amers, or bitters, even the sup- posed harmless vermouth, will, in due course, if taken to excess, conduct their man to epilepsy, paralysis and death. Absinthe gets in its work more speedily, because it is the more insidious drink, and the ab- sintheur consumes, therefore, a vastly larger quantity of alcohol than other drinkers. I think that it is the alcohol that does it, because I know that people who drink enough cider can eventu- ally land themselves in the same state of physical and mental wreck as even the most hardened votaries of that " green goddess " which caused such a breakdown in Alfred de Musset. " You will be very busy this year," was a remark recently made by the prefect of one of the departments in Brittany, speaking to the head doctor of the 42 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH departmental lunatic asylum. "Apples are very plentiful and cider is cheap." However, the fact remains that fourteen distinct poisons enter into the composition of good absinthe, such as is retailed at the best cafes. Of what the stuff is made which is sold in the popular bars in Paris and the provinces at ijd. the glass one shudders to think. I have heard that in the distilleries the workers take delight in throwing filth into the pots in which la verte is being manufactured, on the principle that nothing is too dirty for people with such a dirty habit as that of drinking absinthe. All that I know of it is that if you plunge a piece of iron wire into the liquor and leave it there for twenty-four hours you will find it, under the microscope, glittering with tiny specks of copper. The copper is used to produce the characteristic green colour. I have seen men, aye and women too, drink fifteen " goes " of this mixture in the early morning on empty stomachs. " Killing the worm," they call it, or " strangling a parrot." The absinthe woman is that dreadful female who only emerges from her nameless lairs in times of popular disturbance, gaunt, haggard, a Fury of death and destruction. Whenever such a report is issued as that of Doctor Laborde, one hopes and hopes that it will give the French nation pause. But one is ever disappointed, and how can parliamentary yellow books achieve what the most horrible object lessons fail to accomplish ? One reads every day of terrible things which have befallen absinthe drinkers. A few months ago the case of a man was reported who, whilst stirring his tenth " blue " at a marchand de vins, suddenly went blind, a case which I took pains to authenticate. In MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 43 a police station in Paris not very long ago there were brought in from the streets in one day six prisoners so demented from absinthe drinking that they had all to be sent to the lunatic asylum. Absintheurs drop down dead in the streets of apoplexy, cerebral congestion and heart failure, every day that dawns red over Paris. What the green goddess did for several well-known men in French literature is a matter of history. Yet merrily the " strangling of parrots " goes on and the jest about " taking a blue " is found as pleasant as ever. The habit is a rooted one in France. Drive through Paris or any other French town at the hours of eleven and six and see the city flecked with leprous spots. These are the " green hours " (theme verte), when the moderate absintheurs indulge. As for the absinthe drunkards, all their waking hours are green, and the first parrot is strangled the moment they emerge from coma in the morning. In the very buffet of the Chamber of Deputies whilst the absinthe habit and its ravages are being eloquently discussed from the benches, one can see many a parrot in the process of strangulation. Last year in an inn in Normandy, where I had gone to watch the spring adorn the apple-trees, I saw an Englishman drink himself into epilepsy on absinthe. He took one month to effect this, and his drink bill fell just short of a five-pound note. Doubtless when he arrived at the inn he had previously undergone considerable alcoholic preparation, but that month's steady absinthing finished the work. It was just after luncheon one morning. " I think I must have an absinthe," he said. Then suddenly he gave a cry, grimaced and fell on the floor in a fit. It behoved 44 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH me as his countryman to sit up at nights with him during his illness, and the doctor's special recommenda- tion to me was to keep all cutlery and other mischiev- ous instruments out of his reach. He won back to life again, but he was hardly out and about before he was strangling parrots once more, and this time he took the stuff neat. Absinthe renders people mad and bad. The murderer Soleilland, the monster whom Monsieur Failures thought fit to pardon (perhaps from consideration for the guillotine), was a confirmed drinker, and so, it is computed, are more than half the men who people the bagnios of Cayenne. I have heard of men who have worked themselves up to the commission of some dreadful deed by imbibing the stuff, which fires the blood and deadens the power of reasoning. And I know also of a poor little waif of a girl who went to absinthe to help her cast off the intolerable burden of her shame and suffering. In the days when I used to go to the cafes in the Latin Quarter, I often noticed a girl of the town, amongst the crowd of unhappy women who throng those establishments. She had beautiful grey eyes, a Madonna face and a modest demeanour. She looked as though she came of a good family and had only been driven by fatality into what the French call faire la vie (living life) perhaps because it is certain death. She was a pretty, ladylike girl, whose sad face it gave me pleasure to look at, and I suppose that she felt my sympathy with her, because whenever she passed my table she used to smile and say : " Bon jour, Monsieur Robert/' As often I used to answer her : " Bonjour, Mademoiselle Marguerite." One day it occurred to me that I had not seen the grey eyes of the Madonna-like face for a long while, and I asked about Mademoiselle MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 45 Marguerite. Then I heard that she was dead, had been dead some time. They had fished her out of the Seine by the Pont-Neuf . " Margot was never made for our life/' said my informant, " and she wasn't a poseuse either. On naquit au metier. She hated it. She was made to be a nursery-governess or to marry a clerk. She had often said that she would not bear it very much longer. Well, about a month ago we had all been spending the night, faisant la noce" (on the spree), " down at Baratte's at the Halles " (Central Markets), " and at seven o'clock in the morning Margot said she had enough and was going home. She walked straight back to her hotel and asked her landlady if the jewels she was wearing a ring, a bracelet, a watch and so on would cover the amount of what she owed, and whether the woman would give her ten francs besides. Of course the woman said yes Margot's jewels were worth a great deal more than that and the girl took them off and poured them into the old hag's hands and then went off with the two five-franc pieces chinking in her palm. She went off towards the Pont Neuf down the Rue Dauphine and stopped at every drink-shop on the way. She never used to drink, but she drank that day. She drank at every shop she passed, neat absinthe, until she had spent the last sou of her ten francs. By that time she had reached the river, then she ran down the steps behind the statue of Henri IV. and ... it was three weeks before Margot was heard of again. I was fetched to the Morgue to identify her. It was a difficult job, because her face had been badly disfigured . . . some paddle-steamer, sans doute" CHAPTER IV The Hypersensitiveness of Marguerite " La Belle F- Marriage in France Women who object to marry As in Jamaica "Make an honestMan of me- Divorce h Vaimable The Cost in France Marriage as a Business Proposition A Matter-of-fact Young Man " No Dowry, no Son-in-law " A happy Sequel A Normandy Wooing Alphonsine's Suitor The Bridegroom's Expectations A successful Alliance An Algerian Boarding-house Keeper " With or without Bulbul " International Marriages Dumas and the Suffra- gettes Marie-Louise and her Spouses Dumas' Misadventure His Diplomacy POOR little Marguerite with the grey eyes must have been a very sensitive girl, because in France there is little of that feeling of shame which overwhelms women who are not virtuous in other countries. The French cocotte sees no disgrace at all in her trade, and she is encouraged in her opinion by the weight of public opinion. In England a girl who goes that way very probably, and rightly so, gives up all hope of marrying and settling down. In France it is of common occurrence for such a woman to marry and become an excellent member of society. When I first went to Paris there used to be pointed out to me, at receptions in the best society, a very distinguished- looking lady, who was the wife of a great painter, and I was told that that was that " La Belle F ." Well, she certainly was beautiful, and as I saw her everywhere I gathered that she had conquered her admission to Parisian society. And so it was, thanks to her husband's talent and fame. The position of woman is quite different in France. In England 46 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 47 women themselves are accustomed to say that in marrying them their husbands have conferred upon them the highest honour they are capable of bestowing. A Frenchwoman would laugh in her husband's face if he ventured to say anything so foolish. Marriage in France is a business contract in which the woman brings at least as much as the man. And very often in cases of free union, where there is no marriage between the spouses, the reason is that the woman will not consent to bind herself. I know a very worthy French writer who for years past has been urging madame to make their union a regular, legitimate one by coming with him before the registrar. He says that were it only for the sake of their children she ought to do so, to make an " honest man " of their father. " You have compromised me," he urges, " and it's your duty to marry me." She however refuses. She says that as long as he behaves himself she will never desert him, but she cannot see her way clear to marry him. Strangely enough such is exactly the feeling also of the majority of the negresses in Jamaica. They have no objection whatever to live in union libre with a man, and to allow him to become the father of their numerous progeny, but, however ardently he may woo, they will rarely marry him. They like their liberty, and the hold it gives them over monsieur to be able to leave him at any time when the fancy to do so may take them. There are a great many women in France like her who do not see anything dishonourable in an irregular union, and nowadays, when divorce is easily obtained, the marriage ceremony is not a very binding one. Divorce, by the way, is one of those things which they 48 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH do very differently in France. Not very long ago a friend of mine asked me to lunch and, added he, " You will meet my wife." I said, " I hope so," and then he reminded me that he was living separated from that lady and that divorce proceedings were in progress between them. "But," said he, "we remain very good friends, and she often comes to see me, and she is to be at this luncheon." The dejeuner was a most cordial one, and the couple showed signs of great mutual affection. After the coffee had been put on the table the wife got up and went and kissed her husband, and when he called her "angel" she called him "darling." But she re- mained firm in her decision not to return home unless he would agree to certain conditions which he could not consent to. So between their words of endear- ment came discussions about legal proceedings. " My avoue will urge this," said the husband. " Oh, but my lawyer will say that," answered the wife. There was something pathetic in this familiar meal which united once more in domestic bonds two people who were about to separate for ever. After the pousse- caf e and that final glass of liqueur which the French call the coup de pied au deniere (the kick behind), the lady took her departure. Her husband escorted her to her omnibus, and there took leave of her. I am glad to say that in this case the difference was finally adjusted and the avoues lost a profitable case. A Parisian avoue usually charges one thousand francs for his share of the work, for which sum he carries the case up to the final judgment, paying court fees, subpoenas and so forth. He usually asks for half the money in advance, on the French theory of juris- prudence that the first document in any dossier must MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 49 be the suitor's cheque or banknote. Besides the avoue there is the advocate to be paid the barrister, that is to say, who makes his appearance before the court and applies for judgment. There is no fixed tariff for his services. He deals directly with his client and asks as much as he thinks the client can or will pay. He usually fixes twenty pounds as his fee, and he also usually asks for it in advance. It is a wise precaution, for the etiquette of the French bar is even stricter than that which regulates the conduct of English barristers. No avocat may apply for pay- ment in writing his services by a polite fiction are supposed to be gratuitous. He is strictly forbidden to put his name up over his office door. I have heard of the disbarment of a French barrister because he nailed his visiting card on which he was described as Avocat a la Cour d'Appel outside his apartment. He may not engage in any kind of trade and he may not sign a promissory note. It is a mistake to think that marriages which are entered upon on both sides as a commercial trans- action must necessarily be unhappy. The contrary is the case. They are usually very much more successful than what are called love matches. I know a very happy couple in Paris over whose union the coldest business spirit presided. The girl's father had promised to give a dowry of forty thousand francs in cash on the eve of the wedding. When that date came the bridegroom called to receive the funds. " I am sorry to say, mon gendre (son-in-law)/' said the father, " that I am not quite able to keep my promise. But if twenty thousand francs to-day and the balance in a promissory note at three months. . . . You see, son-in-law ' ' ' ' Don't son-in-law me,' ' said 50 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH the young man, putting on his hat. " If the dowry isn't ready, I am not ready either. The cash I want. I have no use for your promissory notes." " But surely/' said the father, " you don't mean to break off the marriage ? The religious service is arranged for, the carriages are ordered and a banquet at ten francs a head including wine has been bespoken at the Porte Maillot." " It is impossible for me to enter into these details," said the bridegroom. " I am here to receive forty thousand francs de bonne galette. You offer me paper. I have no use for your promissory notes. Therefore the contract is broken and I am off. You can tell Monsieur le Cure that there won't be a wedding to-morrow, and as to the carriages and banquet. . . . Well, that is your affair, not mine. Many kind things to Celestine. I am off." The father tried to persuade him to change his mind, but it was useless. The utmost that he would consent to was to wait a fortnight for the production of the funds. At the end of the fortnight the father- in-law was able to offer only thirty thousand francs in cash and again proposed a draft at three months for the balance. This proposal was indignantly rejected by the lover of Celestine, who went off, slamming the door. He said that he was a business man and liked things to be done in a businesslike way. Another delay ensued, although the prospective son-in-law declared that he had other arrangements in view. One may fancy that in his heart of hearts he had a tenderness for the fair Celestine. However, a month later the father was able to pay over the sixteen hundred pounds, and the wedding twice postponed finally was celebrated. The young man threw himself life and soul into the festivities, was gallant and MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 51 empresse, and delighted everybody present . He danced with the greatest grace and abandon, and touched the heart of every woman there, from that of his mother- in-law downwards, by his affectionate attentions to his bride. Well, this marriage has turned out one of the happiest unions that I know of in Paris. Not very long ago I saw Celestine and her husband walking in the Champs Elyse"es with their children. The man was addressing his wife as pou-poule y and was wheeling a perambulator with the baby. Once when I was staying in an inn in Normandy the hostess came up to my table while I was at lunch and said that she knew I should be glad to hear that her daughter was engaged to be married. She then told me how the engagement had come about. " Some days ago," she said, " an individual came into the cafe and took a vermouth grenadine. As he was a stranger I looked at him and I noticed that he kept peering about the room as though taking stock of the furniture and so on. After a while he asked me if I were Madame T , and when I said that I was she, and at his service, he said, ' I understand, madame, that you have two daughters of a marriageable age/ I said, 'You are mistaken, monsieur, my eldest daughter has already been married some months. Her husband is a young man in a big linen-drapery in Paris/ He said, ' Oh, very well, but then you still have one daughter whom a man could marry ? ' I said, ' Yes/ and then he said, ' My name is So-and-so, and I keep a little grocer's shop in Dieppe. I want to marry and settle down and I want a woman about the house, also to help me with the shop. I was round here a few months ago and I noticed a girl who seemed just my sort. So I made inquiries and I have come 52 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH over to say that if the young woman has no other views, and I might suit her, I should be very happy to enter into an alliance with your family. By the way, what is the young lady's name ? ' I told him, and I added that I was much flattered by so honourable a proposal, but that, of course, I must speak with Alphonsine. ' Do that,' he said, ' while I finish my vermouth grenadine! So whilst he was drinking his consommation I went upstairs. Alphonsine had a headache and was lying down. I went up to her and I said, l Alphonsine, there is a young man downstairs who has come to ask for your hand.' ' Oh ! tell him to go to ,' said Alphonsine, only her expression was considerably more coarse. I said that that was not the way to treat a man who came with a polite proposal, and at last I got her to get up and come downstairs. The young man was very polite, and offered us both coffee with little glasses. After a while I left them together and Alphonsine and he discussed matters. Since then he has been coming here pretty regularly paying court, and now the marriage is settled, and this is to ask you to honour us with your presence on the occasion." Some days later I saw the prospective bridegroom. He became confidential and he said : " Maybe I am doing a wise thing, maybe not. I think the girl is straight, or at anyrate that she is going straight now. Of course I know that virgins are rare, very rare, and I don't expect anything of the sort. But I believe she is a hard worker and that she will suit me." The marriage duly came off, with all the festivities which are usual in Normandy weddings. Well, this marriage was a most successful one. The young people suited each other perfectly. Alphonsine made MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 53 a splendid wife, and the pair did so well in the little grocery cafe in Dieppe that after they had been married a year they were able to take a good inn in one of the inland towns, a certain Cheval Blanc, where they are rapidly amassing a small fortune. They are perfectly devoted to each other and have already a large family. These two anecdotes go to illustrate an observation I have made in life over and over again i.e. that marriages over which common sense and cold business instinct preside are almost certain to be more happy than those which are initiated with palpitations of the diaphragm to the melodious notes of the nightin- gale. Of course, I know that nightingales may be as artificial as the sentiment which they inspire, and I remember a beautiful place at Mustapha Superieur, on the heights above Algiers, where the notes of the bird that sings by night were produced for the greater delectation of his guests by an ingenious boarding- house keeper, who felt he never could do enough for his wife's customers. The man was an English jockey who had married a Frenchwoman, whose aunt kept this delightful pension de famille, an old Moorish villa set in a fine old Moorish garden. The English nephew was manager of the place, and his activity was sur- prising and admirable. It was he himself who cooked the eggs and bacon for the breakfasts, for he declared that no Frenchwoman understood our national dish, he blacked the boots, he groomed the horse, he super- intended Ali the gardener, he drove the trap, he pumped the water and helped to peel the vegetables. At times he could be seen rushing upstairs with a long spyglass with which to scan the distant horizon so as to discover the approach of any ship in which guests 54 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH were either arriving or about to depart. And at night, when all had gone to bed, this devoted man, leaving his pipe and dog, would steal out into the orange groves and there would imitate in a beautiful and lifelike manner the trilling of the bulbul, which is the Moorish double of our English nightingale. When this came to my knowledge I suggested to him that musical evenings of this kind were really more than even the most exacting pensionnaire could claim for the money, and that his scale of charges ought to be fixed " With or without Bulbul." He was not of this opinion, for, said he, it was his bounden duty to make things as enjoyable as possible for his aunt's boarders, while he himself greatly delighted in these nocturnal warblings. This marriage was an exception to a rule which I have observed during my residence in France namely, that matrimonial alliances between Englishmen and Frenchwomen are not happy ones. Our little jockey simply basked in uxorious felicity. The " O-o-o- ouilliam " with which his wife addressed her husband was in itself like a bulbul note. But then William, though a jockey, had all the instincts of a gentleman, which implies, or ought to imply, a feeling of great chivalry towards women. The average English husband usually wants to dominate his French wife, more anglico, to keep the control of the domestic purse in his own hands, and generally to " boss the show " as he does at home. These are things which the French wife resents : a feeling of dislike for the domestic tyrant grows up within her gentle bosom and finally, when Jules or Alphonse comes along with rolling eyes and a mouth in the shape of a heart, she remembers that after all she is a Frenchwoman, that the husband is a foreigner, and . . . and she avenges MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 55 Crecy, Agincourt and Waterloo. I have seen many such cases, and the reason has always been the same the refusal on the part of the English husband to understand the difference between the psychology of his French wife and the woman of his own race. I attribute this difference to the fact that the French were ever a domestic people, and the men stayed at home, so that the wife naturally acquired ascendancy and rule. In England, on the other hand, where the men were largely wanderers, sailors on the seas, merchantmen and soldiers in foreign lands, the home woman played but an unimportant part in their lives, and could be treated with scant consideration. Then there is also to be considered the enormous preponder- ance of the female sex in our islands. It is this extraordinary preponderance of the female sex in England which, I suppose, makes the politicians so very reluctant to grant the demands of the " suffra- gettes/' If women got their votes in England they would be able to do just what they liked, the male vote would be swamped, and that prospect, I suppose, will ever raise strong opposition to their desires. Curiously enough, in more progressive France, there has been no movement of anything like so vigorous a nature as that which is being carried on by the suffragettes in England, though, of course, the question of granting votes to women is constantly cropping up there also. One recalls the very rude answer made by Alexandre Dumas, pere, when he was asked if he thought women could become deputies, Est-ce-que les femmes pourraient devenir deputes ? " Yes," he answered, " if you change the last syllable of the word." Oui, en changeant la dernier e syllabe. The remark is so rude that I will not further explain it. 56 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH Dumas, by the way, was not a moral man, and accordingly had no very great respect for women. And perhaps the natural consequence was that women had no very great respect for him. One will find that the men who have been most betrayed by women are just those who treat women as vastly their inferiors. Of these, the great Napoleon is a striking example. A great genius, a master of men, the most powerful king who ever lived, his domestic misfortunes were more numerous and more humiliating than have ever befallen the meanest man. To live to see a Neipperg preferred to him might have seemed a greater defeat than the catastrophe of Waterloo. Apropos of Neipperg I noticed the other day in a German paper the announcement of the death of the eldest son of Marie-Louise and the Austrian General who supplanted Napoleon in her affections and was consort to the Duchess of Parma. The Prince di Montenuovo (this is the Italian translation of Neipperg, or Neu Berg) died in a private lunatic asylum in Vienna. Marie- Louise, by the way, left a numerous descendance. After Neipperg she had a third husband, a Count Something, after the Count a Baron, and after the Baron there was, as Meneval tells us, another consort, by whom the former Empress of France had several daughters, who were reared in England. Which goes to prove, I think, that the most careful moral education rarely succeeds in modifying human nature. Marie- Louise was brought up with the very strictest attention to morals. Specially printed books were alone supplied to the Imperial princesses and only female animals of any kind were allowed them as pets. Yet she has left the reputation of a bourgeoise Messalina. I suppose the brutal initiation which she received from MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 57 Napoleon at Compiegne upset her moral balance, which she never afterwards recovered. Dumas, as has been said, had no very great respect for women. He looked upon them in life as Neben- sache, a by-issue, which is a common conceit with very active men. But at any rate when they gave him tit for tat he took the thing in a sportsmanlike spirit. One night when he had reached the landing of the apartment where he was living with a morganatic wife one of the very many who embellished his existence he heard while opening the door of the flat that scuffling and whispering and rustling which so many husbands have heard, are hearing and are likely to hear as long as matrimony re- mains a human institution. Dumas found the nuptial chamber in fairly good order, and received the usual specially amiable welcome from his guilty spouse. He said nothing and went to bed. After about an hour, during which he had been talking with his usual verve, he suddenly interrupted himself in what he was relating and said, " Don't you think, my dear, we might let him have his waistcoat ? " So saying he put his arm under the bed, pulled out a man's vest and, going up to the window, which opened on to a balcony, threw the garment out. It was a very cold night and the balcony was covered with snow. Ten minutes later he threw out another garment, and finally he invited the man to come in. Then ad- dressing the shivering, sneezing, frost-bitten Don Juan, who had been crouching outside on the balcony in the snow, he held out his hand to him across the woman's body and said, " My friend, let us reconcile ourselves on the public place." It appears to be considered, by the way, very good 58 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH form not to display anger under such circumstances as constitute what is called " conjugal misfortune. " Victor Hugo said that when a man finds that his wife is unfaithful to him, if he be a fop he makes a noise about it, if a fool he complains and laments himself, but that the honest man leaves the woman in silence. I suppose it punishes the two adulterers much more to be laughed at and treated with contempt when taken in their treachery than it would if their victim showed anger or offered violence. CHAPTER V Duelling in France The Aggrieved Party Scholl as Arbitrator Two Social Conventions The Feeling in England Jerome Napoleon and Empress Eugenie Whistler and George Moore George Moore in Dublin His Objection to Flaubert How Moore works Literature and the Middle Class Words- worth's Descent Wordsworth and Quillinan A Poem com- posed under Difficulties High Descent The Crossing Sweeper and the King The Irish Literary Movement The Con- temporary Club Mr Oldham, William Butler Yeats Syng and the King of the Blasketts The Fenian O'Leary Padraic Colum and the American Maecenas Professor Dowden and De Quincey's Proofs WITH reference to violence, it is a curious point of the French duelling code that, if a husband under such circumstances as are referred to in the preceding chapter, strike the intruder, it is the latter and not the husband who is the aggrieved party, and who in any subsequent duel would have the choice of weapons. Especially if the violence to which his indignation carried him took the form of a box on his rival's ears. In the French point d'honneur the box on the ears is a far greater insult than a blow with the fist, while the height of offensive aggression is to strike your man lightly in the face with a glove. The slighter forms of assault imply contempt, chastisement, and are humiliating, the knockdown blow suggests a certain respect for your adversary. I remember a case where a husband who had been cruelly outraged was refused the choice of weapons because he had struck his rival. The consequence was that the rival selected pistols and so got off without 59 60 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH any punishment. The husband, when he sent him his seconds, had hoped to fight a duel with swords, and was looking forward with some satisfaction to running him through the body. There was, I remember, con- siderable discussion between the seconds as to who really had the choice of weapons, and the matter was finally referred to the arbitration of Monsieur Aurelien Scholl, who was the great authority in Paris on all technical points of duelling law. The case was laid before him with all the formality with which an English lawyer takes counsel's opinion, and Monsieur Aurelien Scholl certainly spent more time in thinking out the case and writing out his answers than the average barrister does over the average case. And of course ScholTs services were purely gratuitous. ScholTs decision in this case was that as " A " (the husband) had struck " B " (the lover), the latter obviously became the offended party, and had the choice of weapons. At the same time he declared that, as the right acquired by " B " was purely a technical one, every other advantage should be left to "A." In what these " advantages " consisted was not made clear. I have often thought that the justification of the modern duel in France resides in the fact that it enables the outraged husband or lover to wipe off the stain on his honour in a gallant and gentlemanly way. That a man's honour be in any way stained by the amatory proceedings of a person of the opposite sex is purely a social convention, and so is also, of course, the vindication of a man's honour by the duello. French society says that a man is dishonoured if his wife or lady-love be unfaithful to him. It also says that a man who is dishonoured may regain his honour by crossing swords or by discharging pistols at the man MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 61 who has offended him. The one theory may possibly be fully as absurd as the other, but as long as they are both held in a great nation in the forefront of civilisa- tion it would be presumptuous of you or of me, would it not, to disregard public opinion in this respect? We are accustomed in England to speak either with contemptuous ridicule or with severe reprobation of duelling, as it is still practised in France. Yet it is not so very, very long since the last duel was fought on English soil, whilst the fact that the duelling spirit still lingers in our midst is established by the circum- stance that, although the law makes it a penal offence to challenge a person to armed combat, one recurrently hears of such challenges having been given, if not accepted. We can all remember how Mr Henry Labouchere invited an assailant, another London editor, to afford him satisfaction in Belgium ; Whistler's famous challenge to George Moore has no more been forgotten than the critic-novelist's amusing refusal of this cartel ; and quite recently the matter for humorous newspaper comment was afforded by a conflict between two parliamentary candidates in the course of which it was declared by one of the adversaries that a single combat could alone give satisfaction to his wounded honour. However, although we thus often demonstrate that the idea of duelling is not really so abhorrent as we pretend, we censure and ridicule the French for keeping the practice alive. The vitality with which this national custom is still imbued in France is shown by the facts that it is a general one, from which no class of the population except priests and actors are excluded ; that the Cabinet Minister no less readily than the boulevard 62 MY FRIENDS THE ^FRENCH journalist, who is thirsting for publicity, accepts or delivers a challenge ; that whatever the consequences of a duel may be, provided the stringent regulations which order such encounters have been duly ob- served, the violated laws are invariably disregarded by judges and juries alike and acquittal of all con- cerned, even where one of the combatants has been killed, follows as a matter of course ; and that public spirit is so strongly in favour of this mode of settling differences that the man who, having been challenged, declines a cartel on any of the grounds of civicism, humanity, respect of the law, which an Englishman would advance under similar circumstances with the fullest approval of public opinion, would be branded as a coward and excluded from society. One may recall the scathing contempt with which the Empress Eugenie replied to Prince Jerome Napoleon when the latter consulted her as to whether he ought to accept a challenge which had been sent to him : " In affairs like this, monsieur, a man of honour does not seek the advice of a woman. " It was evident to her that her uncle's only motive in consulting her was in the hopes that she would tell the Emperor, who would forbid the encounter. The position of the man " who won't fight" is in France that of a pariah. He is likened to a " public spittoon " ; he is spoken about as " a collector of boxes on the ear " ; and he is the object of general contempt. An officer in the French army who should decline a duel pressed upon him would be immediately cashiered. So respected is the point d'honneur amongst French soldiers of all ranks, that it is the colonel of the regiment himself who arranges the conditions of any duel which may arise between any two of his subordinates. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 63 George Moore answered Whistler's telegram by saying that he would as soon think of dressing up like a wild Indian and of dancing a war dance in Pall Mall as of accepting the artist's challenge. But then Moore was no longer residing in Paris. If he had been he might have decided otherwise. What a pity it would have been if the fiery Virginian had run him through. " Esther Waters " had not been written at that date, and English literature would have lost one of the finest novels in the language. It is a wonderful book, and if George Moore started his literary career by imitating the men at whose feet he had sat in Paris, the Zolas and other naturalists, he reached his apogee in a work which stands far above any realistic novel of modern life that any Frenchman has written. In his first book he shows in many ways how imbued he was with modern French literature. In writing the " Mummer's Wife " he seems to have thought in French. I remember a phrase, " Then why derange these ladies ? " where, of course, he had the French word deranger in his mind, for he did not mean to write, "Why are you driving these ladies mad," but "Why disturb them?" Also he speaks in the same book of a " sour and deaf anger." This conveys no meaning to an Englishman. What he was thinking about was the French une colere sourde, which is a favourite expression of the French writers on whom he was modelling himself. Having the word sourd before his eyes, he first wrote down the word " sour " which resembles it in appearance and spelling, and next he translated it into " deaf." These are two illustrations of what I have advanced, and there are others in the same book. But since then, what strides ! Not that he has ever entirely thrown 64 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH off the French influence. " Esther Waters " in con- struction is distinctly modelled on " Une Vie." The denouement is the same in both, in both to the afflicted woman a home-returning child brings solace. But now Moore has cast realism aside, and as under every naturalist if you scour him with sufficient energy you will find a poet and idealist, so in " The Lake " George Moore manifested this side also of his com- position. When I last saw him it was just before the publication of " The Lake/' I had called on him at his house in Ely Place, Dublin, and spent in his company a memorable hour. He was then girding against Flaubert, just as ten years previously he had utterly repudiated Zola. One has not forgotten that article which he wrote in The English Illustrated Magazine in which he prophesied that Zola would end with his " nose on the boudin." Which is exactly how poor Zola did end. He was very violent about Flaubert. " I am going to tackle Flaubert next/' he said to me. " I am going to let him have it. For over thirty years we have been accustomed to hear that he is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of prose-writers, and I am going to show that he is a rotten writer, one of the rottenest of writers. I intend to recommence my articles ' Avowals ' for the very purpose of exposing the delusions we have all been under with regard to Flaubert. What is that saying of his in the first pages of ' Salammbo,' something about the cry of the captives being like the bruissement of the war chariots ? What stuff ! What piffle ! No, no, there are in France," he continued (I am not certain that Moore did not say : " in the world's literature "), " only two writers of prose who are worthy of the name of master MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 65 and those two are Tourgenieff and Balzac. Here from every page shines forth upon the reader the light of a great intellect." Moore then told me the story of " The Lake," and I was struck by his way of telling it. He kept saying, " So then . . . ," just like one who is telling a story to a child. The book was, as one remembers, a big success and gave the very best writing of English of which the author was capable, which is saying a very great deal. Moore of Moore Hall in Connaught is a wealthy man and can afford to spend long months over one book. Poor Gissing, by the way, used to say that six weeks was the very shortest period in which a satisfactory novel could be produced, but then Gissing lived in Grub Street. Moore can and does take his time, and works in a conscientious manner. A clever lady secretary comes to his house every morning when he is engaged on a novel, and to her he dictates about 1500 words of copy, spending the whole of the morning in this dictation. She then types this " matter " out for him, and " then," he said, " I set to work to pull it about." He uses the typed copy as rough notes for his manuscript and spends hours over each page, each line almost. I had many talks with the author of " The Lake " during my stay in Dublin . He told me that Macmillan the publisher had informed him, demonstrating his assertion by the production of documents, that a sale of 20,000 copies is the high-water mark that any six-shilling novel ever reaches or has reached, which makes one wonder as to the veracity of the people who write advertisements for the publishers. He also told me that he was tired of living in Dublin and intended to return to Paris to live there. " There 66 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH must be," he said, " some quiet street off the Fau- bourg St Honore which would suit me very well/* He must be greatly regretted in Dublin, where he was looked up to as a leader by all the many young men there who have literary aspirations. For the rest he was very popular, in spite of his cynical way of talking and a certain Parisianism of tone which used to shock some of his Philistine neighbours. Although the young Irish writers so esteem him, and though when he first came to Dublin he interested himself strongly in the Irish literary movement, and especially in the revival of the study of the Irish tongue, he remarked to me that he now holds that the " Irish literary movement is very much like sterilised bouillon and that it would require a main of radium to galvanise it into anything like life." Moore remarked that nearly all writers of distinc- tion have sprung from the middle classes. I did not agree with him. There is a good deal of the sang azul in the Republic of Letters. It is true that when a gentleman does take to writing as a profession, things are made very much more difficult for him than for a plebeian. Of this the case of Byron is a notable example. Byron was chiefly attacked by his " dear confreres " because he was a nobleman. Wordsworth commented on the unfairness of this proceeding. He said : " Here is a young poet of great promise who is being abused and discouraged simply because he is a lord.' 1 Byron only heard that Wordsworth had said this towards the end of his life and he then expressed his regret that he had attacked Wordsworth so bitterly. " If I had only known," he said, presumably with the same acuity of remorse with which we all have said those words at some time or another. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 67 Wordsworth would instinctively feel sympathy for the noble poet, being himself of most distinguished and ancient lineage. The Wordsworths of Pennistone in Yorkshire, from whom the poet descended, were one of the oldest families in the north of England. A Wordsworth was knighted on the battlefield of Agincourt. It was doubtless to the hereditary instinct that the poet Wordsworth owed that supreme loftiness of character, that unbreakable pride, that entire confidence in himself by which in the end he won to land in spite of the thousand difficulties that were placed in his way. His pride was without limits. To this may be attributed the fact that never once during his long career, when he was struggling forward under ridicule, in poverty from failure to failure, did he betray the faintest envy of others more successful. Jealousy was alien from his nature. The very proud man does not deign to compare others with himself. On one remembered occasion, Wordsworth was heard to mutter indignantly : " What other poets ? " He was leaving a house at which he .had met various Parnassians, and somebody had spoken to him of himself and the " other poets. " However, on one occasion, he was glad to ac- knowledge the ability of a minor bard, who was his neighbour. This was Edward Quillinan, who lived at Loughrigg Holme on the Rothay. One night an order came down from Windsor to the Poet Laureate. The Queen commanded him to write an ode to cele- brate the election of the Prince Consort as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Wordsworth, when he accepted the Laureateship, had distinctly stipulated that he should never be called upon to write poetry about state functions or royal happenings, and this 68 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH had been cordially agreed to by the Prime Minister. But as Wordsworth, the Bishop of Lincoln, had shown himself greatly opposed to the election of Prince Albert, and as in consequence the Wordsworths had fallen into high disfavour with that most loyal of wives, H.M. Queen Victoria, the lady, in a feminine spirit, felt that she would like to set a Wordsworth to sing the defeat of the Wordsworth faction. The old gentleman was of course forced to obey, but he felt totally unfitted for the task. His daughter was lying dead in the house at that very hour. My mother has often told me how distressed her grandfather was. " I shall never be able to do it/' he kept repeating. At last it occurred to him to send for Quillinan. Quillinan came and long into the night the two bards sat together in Wordsworth's study grinding out the unworthy ode which was afterwards printed on white satin, set to music by Haydn and sung at the official installation of the princely Chancellor. My mother says she will never forget the sight that the old gentleman presented while this collaboration was in progress. His head was bowed, he seemed in much perturbation. The Quillinan-Wordsworth composi- tion is not, by the way, included in the poet's collected works. With reference to high lineage, by the way, an inter- esting story was told the other day by Lord Stanley of Alderley to my uncle, Mr William Wordsworth, of Capri. They had been talking over together family pedigrees, and Lord Stanley related how one day, sitting in his club in London with a certain famous genealogist, Mr John Horace Round, the latter had remarked to him that all English families were so intermingled that it would be difficult to find any man or woman MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 69 belonging to a race which had lived in England for a certain number of centuries who could not did he or she know it claim royal descent. " I would not mind wagering," added Mr Round, pointing to a man in the street who was sweeping the road outside the club window, " that if we could trace that good man's lineage, we should find that he is descended from one of the English kings." On leaving the club, the genealogist had the curi- osity to speak to the man and to ask him his name, particulars of his birth, and so on. He learned that the man had come from Yorkshire, where his father had been an agricultural labourer. Mr Round noted down all the data, and as a pastime, as well as for the pur- pose of proving his contention, made inquiries into the man's family history. A friend in Yorkshire assisted, and the result of their investigations was to trace that London crossing sweeper's lineage back to Edward III. It receded through a few generations of labourers to a farmer, then up to a parson's daughter, a country squire, and so on through rising social planes to the throne of England. All of which, of course, does not go to show that people of good descent should not be proud of it, or to deride the legitimate satisfaction that people feel who can point to a long line of honourable forebears. On the one hand such people are more likely, if only on account of their family pride, to behave properly, and on the other those who can establish that they spring from long generations of decent, well-behaved folk can justly claim a larger share of confidence from their fellow-citizens. One would naturally expect such people to be of better moral fibre, and far more likely to act honestly, than people who may have 70 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH sprung from generations of people of whose characters no record has been left or is obtainable. In Paris once I made the acquaintance of a young duke, a rich, hand- some, elegant man, of most charming manners and dis- position . His title sounded rather exotic and smacked but little of the Almanach de Gotha. Some time later I heard of his having done something very mean and bad. Then I looked up his pedigree, and discovered that he was the son and grandson of men who had made the huge family fortune thanks to which the title had been acquired -in the slave trade. Moore is a most entertaining man, but he speaks without much reflection and readily sacrifices fact to epigram. To describe the Irish literary movement as so much sterilised bouillon is an instance in point. It is a clever saying, but it is not true. Of this I was able to convince myself before I left Dublin, where I made the acquaintance of a number of interesting personalities directly associated with that Irish literary movement which Moore derided. I was entertained at the house of Mr Oldham, the hon. secretary of the Contemporary Club, on the evening of its first meeting for the winter season. This takes place regularly every Saturday at Mr Oldham's very comfortable and spacious house in Leeson Street (not many doors removed from the house in which Speranza wrote her famous article " Jacta est Alea "). The proceedings of the club are based on the axiom of high think- ing and plain . . . drinking. Nothing but tea is con- sumed by the members, though an exception used to be made in favour of the old Fenian editor, Mr O'Leary, who always had his thimbleful of whisky before he went home. The evenings, and the nights too (for the club some- MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 71 times does not separate before two o'clock on the Sunday morning), are spent in discussion of some literary subject. The proceedings are most orderly. Each member is requested to address the Chair and he may not be interrupted until he has finished his say. There were a number of interesting people there on the night that I was the guest of the club, and I spent an entertaining and instructive evening. Mr Oldham makes an excellent leader of debate. He is profoundly learned in all questions of statistics and political economy, but he can speak too, and speak well, on other subjects. William Butler Yeats was there and I was pleased to make his acquaintance. I admired his striking figure and appearance. He has all the physical advantages which make for success and, as I wrote to him the other day, with such gifts, quo non ascendas ? He speaks wonderfully well. He has a winning voice devoid of affectation and he talks from an evident fund of thought and knowledge. For the rest, all the Irishmen I heard that night dis- played the same facility of speech and power of language, facundity in one word, which I have so long admired in the Southern French. With this differ- ence, however, the Irishman seems to speak about things on which he is perfectly informed. Your Gascon can and will speak for hours on a subject about which he knows naught. I was struck in Mr Yeats' remarks with the intimate knowledge he possesses of America. He seemed to have something to say about every one of its principal cities and to have met most of its leading men and women. There is no doubt that if Mr Yeats cared to devote his energies and talents to his own advancement he might take a foremost place 72 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH in the literary world of London, but he seems to have given himself up entirely to that Irish literary move- ment of which Moore spoke so disdainfully. His great interest is in the Irish theatre which he has started. Here the plays of modern Irish dramatists are performed. The patronage of the Dublin public is very poor, and after the first night or two of a new piece the house is practically empty. During my stay in Dublin the financial arrangements of the company were put on another basis. I think that it was turned into a limited liability company, which will relieve Yeats of a serious responsibility. At the same time his autocracy in the matter of selection of plays and general management, very fortunately, remains un- disturbed. On the same evening I had the pleasure of meeting his father, an Irish painter of great talent, who is one of the most courteous gentlemen I met with in Dublin that city of good manners. The poet who writes under the initials "A, E.," and whose poems have lately been taken over by the publishing house of Macmillan, was another member present. The dramatist Syng was there also, just back from the Blaskett Islands, some wild and rocky islets in the Atlantic, where, I understand, he lived in the hut of the king of these islands, and was entertained by this monarch, who is as proud of his descent and mon- archy as any of the gentlemen whose names figure in the Almanach de Gotha, with patriarchal hospitality. Every morning the king himself brought him his matutinal noggin of Irish whisky to his bedside wherewith to break his fast, and the king's daughter, otherwise the princess royal, used to hold the basin in which he performed his ablutions and with her royal MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 73 hands used to wipe him dry. I had not the oppor- tunity of much conversation with this remarkable young man ; otherwise I should have liked to have asked him whether he found that living in such a place as the Blaskett Islands he was able to write good work, I myself have found that life in remote places, where one is deprived of all intellectual com- panionship, produces a fatal stagnation of the brain. One rapidly turns towards the state of a vegetable, or at best, a sea-anemone. However, very possibly the king and princess of the Blasketts are highly in- tellectual companions. The Gaels, no matter to what class of society they belong, always know something interesting and always have something to say, which is what cannot be said of the Anglo-Saxon. I found O'Leary an entertaining old gentleman, with the most delightful manners, which contrasted very much with his wild appearance. He resembled some- what a King Lear in his decadence, yet he carried himself with the dignity of a bishop. It was painful to hear him speak of his prison experiences, and I could not help wondering what political or other purpose could have been served by torturing this man. A great charm to me in the man's company proceeded from the utter want of resentment with which he spoke of the powers which broke his life and health and left him at an advanced age so poor a man. Really one does not find such gentlemen as in Dublin in any other city in England. He broke down and wept before the evening was out and I attributed that to his evident weak state of health. One does not serve years in an English convict prison without feeling the effects of the " system " on one's health in after years. I understood that the poor old gentleman's main 74 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH anxiety in life was to know what sort of a funeral would be accorded to him by his fellow-townsmen. Would it be as big a funeral as the one given to So-and-So ? The old gentleman was in very poor circumstances and sadly neglected. He was eking out his small means by selling occasional volumes from his rare library, which was heaped up ceiling high in the poor room which he occupied till the day of his death. " A. E." did not speak a word during the whole evening, but a few days later I spent a very pleasant evening with him up in his house which is in a remote suburb of Dublin, and which adjoins the cottage where Maud Gonne lives when she comes to Ireland. " A. E.'s " studio is full of interesting pictures. He has the aspirations of a Corot and is an apt portrait painter besides. At his house I met Jack Yeats the painter, who had an exhibition of paintings at the Leinster Hall in Molesworth Street at that time. A characteristic sketch by Jack Yeats is given as frontispiece to the little volume of poems, entitled " New Songs," which, edited by " A. E." as a " Lyric Selection made by A. E. from Poems by Padraic Colum, Eva Gore-Booth, Thomas Keohler, Alice Milligan, Susan Mitchell, Seumas O'Sullivan, George Roberts, and Ella Young," and published by O'Dono- ghue, the author of that excellent Life of Mangan which one can now obtain nowhere, was then in a third edition. It is called " The Plougher," and illustrates one of the most remarkable poems written by that remarkable young man, Padraic Colum. I cannot help saying how much I was struck with the power of this youth's verse. He has language ; he has philosophy, he has colour and he has depth, and in the matter of technique we may salute him as a MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 75 master. Unlike most young men his poems do not echo what he has read. Possibly he reminds one of Walt Whitman, but the probability is that he has arrived at the same plane of thought as the American sage by the same process. I did not have the ad- vantage of meeting him while I was in Dublin. He was out of town, working at the revision of a play of which Yeats told me great things, and I can only judge of his mental composition from the few pieces of his work which I have had the privilege of reading. I think " The Plougher " very fine indeed. The thought embodied in the last two couplets is of the highest philosophy and is expressed in the highest of language. He has described a plougher at sunset, in the silence of the land : "Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend the savage, The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, by a head's breadth only above them ! A head's breadth, ay, but therein is Hell's depth and the height up to Heaven, And the thrones of the gods, and their halls and their chariots, purples and splendours. " Very high expectations were entertained in Ireland of the future work of Padraic Colum. He had a good chance to impose himself on the world. An American Maecenas, one of those men for whom all young poets long, but who comes so rarely at the right time, as he did though to Coleridge and, in the person of Raisley Calvert, to Wordsworth, was making a suitable allowance to the young man, so that he might have a chance of working his best, untrammelled by the soul-destroying care or anxiety of poverty. This American was giving him 100 a year for three years. People in Ireland were saying that 76 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH Colum would make a splendid return for this in- vestment. I wonder how he is progressing. I have heard of him no more. Before I left Dublin I spent a very agreeable hour with Professor Dowden at his fine house outside the city. It was a rare treat. Dowden is a great admirer of Wordsworth, and was able to show me a collection of portraits of him, many of which were unfamiliar to me. We talked literature all the time, naturally, and one of the things that we discussed was, apropos of writers who spend hours over one phrase, whether hasty work can be good. I had been quoting the example of De Quincey, whose English prose has always seemed to me facile princeps for beauty and limpidity. Dowden said that it was a great mistake to think that the constant use of the whetstone was necessary to produce perfect prose ; that many of the finest things that had been written had been the result of a spurt of genius. I was thinking about Moore's remarks on Flaubert as the professor spoke. Dowden showed me some of De Quincey's manuscript, and would have shown me, only he could not lay hands upon them, some of the proofs bearing the master's corrections of "The Stagecoach/' "The Vision of Sudden Death/' which many think the most beautiful, as also the most gruesome, of his fantastic inventions. I was sorry that Dowden could not find these proofs, for I wanted particularly to look at the author's writing. I hold that morbid visions of the kind described in " The Stagecoach " never are pure creations. I hold that they always reveal in the writer a morbid physical state. If I may use slang, I will say that they are the writings of a man who is MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 77 in a " jag." I don't believe that a healthy man ever does write morbid or fantastic matter. I think that " The Stagecoach " was written by De Quincey after a particularly purple opium debauch, in that state of nervous reaction which makes men who have been drinking feel that the roof of the house is going to fall in and crush them. It is not in nature for a healthy man to have morbid imaginings. We know what price poor Poe and poorer Baudelaire paid so that we might be thrilled with their terrible phantasies. De Quincey's writing on that proof might have shown the state he was in at that time, though, of course, between the actual writing of the essay and the correcting of the proof he may have had ample time to recover his equanimity and the steadiness of his hand. CHAPTER VI The Cost of a Duel An unearned Notoriety Coulson Kernahan warned Robert Barr and Henry Harland as Seconds Anonymity a Preventive Preparing for an Encounter A prudent Landlord Dodging the Police Alan Breck and the Chevalier Johnson Paul de Kock as a Duellist And as a Writer D'Artagan redivivus Swashbuckling on the Cheap John Barlas, Poet Carrier Pigeons and Marconigrams John Davidson and the Goloshes of Fortune IT would indeed have been a pity if George Moore had been run through the body by Whistler, because George Moore is a very fine writer and one of the very few art critics in England who are worth listening to. However, had he been residing in Paris at the time when Whistler sent him his cartel, it is difficult to see how he could have avoided the encounter, public prejudice being what it is in Paris. I know very well that, if only for motives of economy, I should gladly have avoided " going out " more than once. I was never desirous of the reputation of fire-eater, which at one period of my career in Paris I " enjoyed." * A duel never costs you less than 300 francs, and if you have no friend who is a doctor and who will come out with you without a fee, so that you have to hire the attendance of a professional gentleman, you have two or three louis more to pay. A certain sum has to be spent in preliminaries, in cabs for your seconds to attend the meetings with the other man's 1 I use the word " enjoyed " here in the same way as in York- shire they say " I enjoy very bad health. 11 It is an instance of the lucus a non lucendo idiom; MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 79 representatives, in outlay at the cafes where these meetings and discussions take place. Then comes the hiring of the barouche or landau in which you proceed to the field of honour. If the duel is a pistol duel you have to hire your weapons from Gastine Renette, who charges anything up to four pounds for the loan of the same. At one time, by the way, the combatant had reason to rejoice in taking his pistols at this famous shooting gallery. He often may have owed his life to that. The man at Gastine Renette's always used to ask when duelling pistols were wanted : "Is it for a really serious duel ? " The seconds would, of course, say " Yes/' and then the attendant before handing them the case containing the shooters used to do something to them which rendered it absolutely impossible for a man taking any kind of aim to hit what he was firing at. If swords are being used, the weapons have to be bought, though that is of course cheaper than hiring pistols. On the way out there are always small ex- penses. Often light refreshment, frequently repeated, has to be offered to the seconds and the doctor, and if the coachman who is driving the party is to be expected to look solemn and impressed, instead of wreathing his face with sarcastic and derisive smiles, he has to be kept well primed with his favourite con- sommation. After the duel is over it is the rule to invite one's seconds and the doctor to a lunch at a first-class restaurant in town, and of course, if one has been reconciled with one's adversary, one may want to invite him also, together with his party. Twelve pounds, therefore, is quite a low estimate for the cost of " going out " in Paris, and it is fortunate that this is so, otherwise one would hear of many 80 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH more of these opem-bouffe encounters being forced upon peaceable persons like myself. Being a resident in Paris, and associating by pro- fession and inclination with every kind of French society, from the faubourg down to ... well, the faubourg again, it was impossible for me to have the reputation of a man who does not fight, and whenever I was challenged I accepted the cartel with resigna- tion, if not with enthusiasm. On only one occasion was I the challenging party. Under the circum- stances it was rather hard to learn that I passed in London for a swashbucklering bully. Coulson Kernahan told me that the first time he saw me was at one of those literary At Homes which used to be given at The Idler office, and that I was pointed out to him as a " very dangerous man." " Beware," said his informant, "how you give offence to that man. He will call you out and run you through the body as soon as look at you." Kernahan said that he had no intention whatever of offending me, and that he would certainly arrange matters so as not to give me any opportunity of running him through the body. In this way are reputations made or unmade. I had done no more than conform myself to the rule that in Rome one should do as the Romans do, and in my own land was pilloried for my pains. And this was specially hard because I had always been careful that nothing should appear in any papers concerning any of the affaires d'honneur which were forced upon me. I used to tell my seconds to make this stipula- tion a sine qua non. But having asked Robert Barr, at that time editor of The Idler, and again Henry Harland, to act as my seconds in the serious affair alluded to above, in which I was forced to challenge MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 81 a man, these gentlemen, when they returned to London, naturally talked about it, and so my swash- bucklering reputation was made. Barr seemed to be highly amused by the bored and casual way in which I spoke to him of the business and made up rather a good tale about it all. Harland, on the other hand, worked the thing up into a short story for The Idler, but somewhat per- fidiously made me, under a transparent transposition of names, figure as an odious aggressor and bully, my adversary receiving all the sympathy of the reader. The story ended on a pathetic note. I was supposed to have killed my adversary, and Harland, who was the young man's second, and who tells the story in the first person, exclaims, " And I, I have to go and break the news to his mother/' All of which I thought rather Carthaginian. Harland was a fidgety, nervous man with a great deal of literary talent, but with a weakness for postur- ing which used rather to irritate people who were thrown into contact with him. He could not sit down in a drawing-room like an ordinary mortal, but used to spring upon the chair and descend with his legs crossed beneath him, Turkish fashion, in which un- comfortable position he would sit until he took his leave. He started in life as a writer of sensational stuff which sold very well, but the contact of certain very clever people in London turned him into another equally profitable field. Towards the end of his life he was making a good income from his books from two thousand to three thousand a year but the vein was a very shallow one and would soon have been exhausted. Publicity being the soul of the modern French duel, it is, I think, a pity that the Parisian newspapers 82 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH from a spirit of confraternity so readily insert the reports of these encounters, as well as the letters exchanged between principals and seconds, the proces- verbaux and so forth. If the usual tariff for reclame advertisements at so much a line were applied to these announcements, one would hear much less about the warlike ardours of young people who are thirsting for notoriety. In this respect the French newspaper, Le Journal du Caire, published in Egypt, sets a good example. It inserts no duelling matter otherwise than as a paid advertisement, and heads any such communications, Insertions Payees. I ought to have asked Monsieur Thomeguex, the famous duellist, whom I met on the Heliopolis going out to Alexandria, what he thought of this innovation. I do not think that he would have approved of it, for Monsieur Thomeguex, who is a very able writer on colonial matters, is a fighter who does not disdain publicity, and only the other day I noticed a report of a duel in which he wounded a Monsieur Meyer, at which a cinematograph operator was present taking films of the encounter. Thomeguex, by the way, is in his person a speaking argument in favour of the practice of fencing. Although a stout, almost bulky, man he is the incarnation of grace and activity. And his fencing keeps him in good health and spirits, so that among the many bright and charming Frenchmen on board the Heliopolis, on her maiden voyage, none was more popular than he. I remember that the ladies in the drawing-room after dinner were always much diverted by the Parisianism of his anecdotes. He related one which illustrates the ease with which divorces are procured in France when both parties are willing. A MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 83 friend of his, he said, was married to a very beautiful and elegant young woman, who, as was natural with such physical attractions, was a woman of very expensive tastes. "My poor friend loved her very much/' he said, " but he was quite unable to give her many of the things which she needed, so he agreed to allow her to divorce him. This she did and married a very rich man. My friend and she continued on excellent terms of camaraderie, and the woman used to visit her ex-husband and tell him how unhappy she was with her new spouse. Finally she divorced the rich husband." Thomeguex did not add whether she married the old one a second time, but one hopes that this may be the ending of his story as he used to say that the poor husband loved the woman very, very much, because she was very beautiful and " such a dear." When circumstances forced me to provoke my man I was very much in earnest, and thought that, as a duel had been forced upon me, it should at least be a serious one. Therefore, I was most anxious not to fight it with pistols. This pistol is described as the coward's weapon, and very rarely indeed does the formula of the concluding proces-verbal vary from the stereo- typed : " Two shots were exchanged without result/' But at that time my fencing had grown very rusty, so whilst preliminaries were being discussed I went to a fencing school to be coached. The master the place was somewhere in the Rue de Rennes had the reputation of being able to teach a man in two lessons how not to get killed in a sword duel. I was not anxious to get killed and so gladly availed myself of his instructions. These mainly consisted in show- ing one how to hold one's point always towards one's 84 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH adversary with extended arm. When a man so holds his weapon it is, it appears, impossible for the other man to wound him. At the same time it was said to be advisable to develop great suppleness of leg and ankle, so as to be able to leap back, still holding one's point extended, in the event of the other man rushing forward with such impetuosity as possibly to break down one's guard. It was further explained to me, that if whilst leaping back I could also dig forward with my sword most satisfactory results might be hoped for (for me, not for the other man). The preliminaries dragged very much (as the other man was difficult to find at home, and indeed was supposed to flee precipitately into a wardrobe when- ever my seconds called at his house), so that I had plenty of time to reacquire the rudiments of rapier play. In the end, however, the duel had after all to be fought with pistols. My adversary declared that he knew nothing about fencing and was not prepared to make a fool of himself on the field of honour. It was very hard on me, who had taken so much pains on his behalf, that I could leap backwards with surprising agility while digging my point forward with, as the maitre d'armes assured me, a certainty of most effective results. The man had technically the right of choice of weapons and he chose pistols. My seconds then obliged me to pass the evening before the duel at a shooting gallery, where I spent a couple of louis in firing duelling pistols at a man's figure. I remember that the person in attendance in the gallery was some- what intoxicated. He was much interested in the purpose of my visit and expressed the greatest sym- pathy. He kept up a running comment on my firing. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 85 When I hit the figure in the face he cried out : " Ah, the pig ! That has broken his pipe." When I hit the man in the chest he opined that that would deprive the " blackguard " of his taste for bread, and when my bullet hit the figure in the stomach he gleefully expressed the opinion that it would spoil the " old cow's " breakfast for her. It was gruesome enough, seeing that I was exercising in view of a real encounter, and I remember a curious psycho- logical fact that I resented his coarse abuse of my adversary, as figured by the dummy. It seemed to me an offence against the courtesy and dignity that should preside at an encounter on the field of honour, and I frequently requested him to moderate his ex- pressions. But he was vinously enthusiastic in my cause and thought to show his partisanship by ex- ulting in the fictive injuries which I was inflicting on the other man. I am heartily glad to say that his farewell predic- tions that I should " teach him how to live " (by killing him) were not realised. I do not think that I should ever have forgiven myself if I had taken the man's life, or even if I had seriously injured him. We fired two shots at each other. Just as I had dis- charged my pistol for the second time I saw " the other man " give a jump, and the horrid expectation came that he would topple over. Fortunately, how- ever, nothing had happened. My bullet had just grazed his right ear. It was a runaway knock by Death, and I hope that the lesson served him, because his conduct towards me had been very bad indeed. I have often shuddered to think what would have been the result if the muzzle of my pistol had been held a fraction of an inch more to the left. A difference 86 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH of nothing more than the width of a ruled line would, at the distance of twenty paces, have brought my bullet crashing into his temple. Our original intention had been to fight this duel in the Hermitage at Villebon, which was in those days a favourite rendezvous for duellists, but on arriving at that forest hostelry, and explaining our purpose, the landlord declared that he allowed no more pistol duels to be fought on his premises. The gentlemen, he declared, fired wildly. He had some glass-houses on either side of the garden and he did not care to have his glass smashed. Also on one occasion an old pony, grazing in a field somewhere to the right, had been badly hurt : another bullet had killed a favourite cat. We were welcome to use his garden for sword- play, but if we were decided upon a pistol duel he must really ask us to go elsewhere. It was not at all an easy matter to find a pitch for the encounter. The gendarmerie at Sevres had, it appeared, received instructions to stop any duelling in the Meudon woods possibly because of the in- convenience and danger to the public by the wild firing to which the landlord of the Hermitage had objected and a sharp lookout was being kept for duelling parties. A premium had been offered to various small boys for information as to the arrival on the Sevres gendarmerie territory of " a double set of four serious-looking gentlemen in black frock-coats driving in landaus, with one gentleman in each set with his gueule de tr avers (his mug awry)/' No sooner had our little procession emerged from the inhospitable Hermitage than some boys who had been loitering outside set off running at great speed, and not long afterwards we saw in the distance two mounted MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 87 gendarmes approaching. We had to drive about for more than two hours before we outdistanced the representatives of law and order, and I fancy that all the four gentlemen in each set had their gueules de tr avers by the time we were able to get to business. The fact that my adversary's ear had been grazed by my bullet got abroad, and the following day, much to my annoyance, there appeared a report that I had shot my man's ear off. This was, of course, cabled to London, and one of the papers there gravely opined that I owed an apology, as an Englishman, to the British nation, for taking part in so degrading an encounter. Another editor saw the chance of good copy in my experience and that evening I received a telegram asking me to contribute an article on my duel. I stipulated for anonymity, so my article was published as by "An English Fire-Eater/' an ap- pellation which I had certainly not deserved. In this way, I suppose, I acquired the reputation which led to the warning which was given to Coulson Kernahan, and I quite agree that a man with an aptitude for digging his point viciously forward while himself leaping backwards with agility out of danger is not the most agreeable person one can fall in with. Which reminds me of Alan Stuart Breck in Stevenson's " Kidnapped." Here was a fire-eater with a vengeance. I remember how I used to admire the author of this creation. However, not very long ago, I discovered that Alan Breck was not a production of Stevenson's at all. He was a historical character, and his real name was the Chevalier Johnson, Jacobite, of whose adventures, including a flight through the heather, a full record exists. Stevenson seems to have taxed his imagination little, if at all, in writing " Kid- 88 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH napped." The material for it was all at hand in the record to which I refer. Even that pretty passage where a girl is so touched by the danger and misery of the fugitives that she herself rows the Jacobites over the firth into safety is taken from the history in question. Stevenson seems to have had a great talent for adapting and appropriating the writings and ideas of others. I find much that is in " Treasure Island " in various histories of the buccaneers. He took the striking names of some of his pirates from real char- acters, Pugh, Israel Hands and others. An instance of clever adaptation is the passage where the maroon, Benjamin Gunn, tells the cabin-boy that his career of evil all began with gambling on " the blessed grave- stones." On reading this, a vivid picture presents itself to one's mind's eye, but it is not a picture of Stevenson's creation. We have all seen the engraving by Hogarth of the idle apprentice lying outside the church playing pitch and toss on a gravestone, while the beadle approaches with uplifted stick. I suppose authors have as much right to use other men's pictures as have stage managers, who bring a curtain down on a scene which reproduces some famous historical tableau. But it lessens one's admiration for the creative genius of an author to find him producing effects with the work of other men. Apropos of authors I have more than once hoped, when being forced to go out on the " field of honour," that my adversary might imitate the man with whom Paul de Kock fought his one and only duel. This was a person who had spoken very rudely about the author of " Mon ami Raymond " in a drawing-room in which Paul de Kock happened to be present. A MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 89 challenge followed and a pistol duel was decided upon. The parties met out in the Bois de Boulogne, and whilst the seconds were arranging preliminaries, Paul de Kock's man edged away out of sight behind some trees. A minute or two later he was seen running with unparalleled velocity in the direction of Paris. One of his seconds, who had turned green while the pistols were being loaded, cried out that his friend must have lost something and that it was his duty to run after him and help him to find it. So he too set off at top-speed. The other second hesitated a moment and then, without making any remark, turned and ran too. It was afterwards ascertained that the principal did not stop running until he had reached the Porte Maillot and had taken refuge in a cab, to the driver of which he gave orders to lash his horse into a gallop. Paul de Kock and his seconds waited for half-an-hour, and then the combat ceased in the famous words of a French dramatic author for want of combatants. An account of this appears in " Paul de Kock's Memoirs," a book which I can recommend to anyone who wants to read a vivid and interesting account of life in Paris during the first fifty or sixty years of the last century. Paul de Kock was the son of the de Kock, a rich Dutch banker, who was guillotined under the Terror. Fouquier-Tinville wanted to arrest his mother also, and had indeed come for that purpose to the villa in which the poor woman was living at Passy. But while he was interrogating her, little Paul, who was in his mother's arms, caught hold of the scoundrel's finger and " rostled " with it. For once in his life Fouquier-Tinville's tiger heart was touched. He decided that it would be too cruel to separate the woman from her child and agreed to leave her at liberty 90 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH until little Paul was weaned. Thermidor intervened and Fouquier-Tinville's sanguinary activities received a final check under the knife of the guillotine. Paul de Kock relates his first experiences of author- ship and gives most interesting pictures of the Bohemia of Paris during the last century. He quotes with great pride a very flattering letter he received from Bulwer Lytton, and relates that Monsieur de Chateau- briand considered his novel " Mon Ami Raymond " the most interesting work of fiction he had ever read. But what he was proudest of is that the Pope's favourite reading were the books of Paolo di Kocko, of which a complete set was kept in his Holiness's dressing-room. Paul de Kock detested smoking and had a horror of travelling. He relates that he only once went on a journey and that was when he drove down to Rosny to see the chateau of the Duchesse de Berry, a distance of about forty miles. He was very fond of cats, and declared that a cat is a much better companion than a dog. When I first came to Paris, Paul de Kock was looked upon as a pornographic writer. To-day his works have quite lived down that evil reputation. He is one of the most popular authors, and many cheap editions of his amusing books have been and are being issued. I know few books which are easier or pleasanter to read. They are full of humour, of pleasant satire, and as pictures of Parisian bourgeois life during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century they have never been equalled. Poor Paul de Kock's great grievance was that he never received the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour. That was because his writings were supposed not to be quite moral. How things have changed since then ! Men MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 91 who have first made a reputation by writing a filthy book reach the highest honours in the Paris of to-day and the Legion of Honour counts many men by the side of whose works Paul de Kock's writings have the insipidity of Maria Edge worth. I am not quite sure which is the more unworthy, to run away from one's adversary on the field of honour, as Paul de Kock's traducer did, or to win for oneself an easy reputation as a man of courage by boasting of encounters which never took place. Some years ago Paris was full of the heroic deeds of a man who was that morning christened by all the papers " D'Artagnan redivivus." It was reported that on the previous afternoon, having fought a duel in the Bois de Boulogne, where he had run his man through, he had next accepted challenges then and there from his adversary's two seconds, defeated each of these in turn and finished up by spitting a fourth man, whose remarks had failed to please him. This Cyrano avant la lettre was a well-known man, a frequenter of the fencing saloons, and people had always ranked him as a good swordsman. But four duels one after the other, and complete victory in each ! Paris made a hero of him. His portrait was published in all the morning papers with long eulogis- tic articles. He was described as the typical French- man ; references were made to the furia fmncese and the old chivalrous spirit which still inspires Gaul. Alas ! that same evening, we learned that another canard had flown through the city. We had all been duped. There never had been any duel the day before. Not one of the four encounters had existed otherwise than in the diseased imagination of the swordsman, whom approaching madness had trans- 92 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH formed into a swashbuckler. The poor fellow was suffering from an attack of megalomania, which is invariably the forerunner of general paralysis. By the irony of Nature the man whom she intends to degrade into something much lower than the lowest of animals imagines himself the most powerful, the most gifted, the wealthiest of men. Paris was sorry to have to admit that this particular Frenchman had not shown the chivalry and skill which had been attributed to him, but the papers declared that there were plenty of men walking about the boulevards who would be fully prepared to fight four men one after the other without turning a hair, " the race of d'Artagnans being by no means extinct in France. " I should not be inclined to rank amongst the modern d'Artagnans the English journalist who once challenged my poor friend John Barlas (Evelyn Douglas), the Scotch poet, to a duel. I had taken this man to call on the poet, who wa3 living, during a brief visit to Paris with his wife and son, in a miser- able garret in the Rue Victor Masse, just opposite the Chat Noir. The two men got to talking on socialism. Barlas was an ardent socialist, and ranked it as a great achievement in his life that during the riots in Trafalgar Square, Heaven knows how many years ago, he had been struck down by a policeman's bludgeon, falling at the " very feet of one of the daughters of Karl Marx." The journalist was cynical and superior in his manner, and apparently irritated Barlas, whose mind was not well balanced, into fury. I suddenly saw him leap upon the man, belabour him soundly and fling him out of his garret. I told the journalist that Barlas was hardly to be held responsible, but he saw there a chance for a cheap and good advertisement, MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 93 and sent the poet his seconds. I am sorry to say that that distinguished writer Monsieur Maurice Leudet, of Le Figaro, was one of them. Barlas met them in the Cafe Durand. Then he rose up and, addressing the fashionable crowd of diners there, announced that he had been challenged to a duel, that he was without friends in Paris, and that he hoped that two of the men present would render a gentleman the service of assisting him in a matter of honour. Alas ! the days of chivalry are over. People stared and laughed, and poor Barlas flung out of the place, crying out that chivalry was no more to be found on earth. The journalist was delighted at the issue events had taken. He had secured his advertisement with- out having to incur any risk, and immediately requested his seconds to carry round to the papers a full account of how John Barlas had refused a challenge. I was present at the time, and I declared that it would be no kind of conduct to do so, that Barlas knew nothing about duelling, was a stranger in Paris, and that it was certainly unfair to his name and family to besmirch him under such circumstances. I added that I should go straightway to the papers, explain the matter to the editors and beg of their gentlemanly instinct not to publish any such proces- verbal. And I did go to the Figaro, where I was received by Monsieur Calmette, who very kindly kept the thing out of his paper. I am sorry to say that some account did appear in some of the other newspapers. Poor Barlas! I had made his acquaintance at Oxford. He was at the same college, where he had already earned a reputation as a writer of beautiful verse. There are many of us who still hope that some 94 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH day his talents may be recognised. He published some years ago, under the pseudonym of Evelyn Douglas, several volumes of verse. These, however, were, for the most part, printed by small local printers, were not reviewed or pushed in any way, and attracted little or no attention except amongst his friends. I understood a year or two ago that a selection from these various volumes was in preparation and I hoped that people were at last to have a chance of repairing the gross injustice which was done to him in the utter disregard of his genius. But alas ! it is to be feared that the poor fellow will never know if the day of atonement does dawn for him, for for a long time past his fine brain has been obscured. Poverty and suffering, and too great sympathy for the myriad woes of this world, threw over his brilliant intellect and for years he has been confined in a Scotch asylum. I do not even know if he be still alive, for my in- quiries have failed to elicit any information. Here, by the way, is one of his sonnets. It will be recognised, in spite of one or two little technical blemishes, as the work of a true poet : " Loosed from strange hands into the wild, wet night Straight to his home the carrier-dove returns : The faithful love that in his bosom burns Is as a lamp to guide his lonely flight : He lingers not, where sheltering boughs invite, Nor backward from the gathering tempest turns Till far off in the distance he discerns At the known casement the familiar light. How many miles hath my poor spirit flown This night to thee through wind and storm and rain Bearing thee word of many mystic things, Till thou on thy soft pillow making moan, Didst hear it pecking at thy lattice pane And took'st it in, a dove with draggled wings." MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 95 I remember poor Barlas reading me this sonnet in his rooms on the first quadrangle of New College. Like all his love verses, it was addressed to the beautiful girl, a grand-niece of Lord Nelson's, who afterwards, under very romantic circumstances, and while he was still an Oxford undergraduate, became his wife. Barlas was the direct descendant of that Kate Douglas who, using her arm to bar the door while her lord the king was escaping, won for herself and her line the noble name of Bar-Lass. The above sonnet was republished some time ago in a magazine article dealing with the poet and his works, with this editorial comment : " One may suspect that the poet's ornithology was at fault in making the carrier-pigeon fly in the night-time. " Is this correct ? I remember that two days after we left Le Havre de Grace for New York on the Champagne, when I was doing my pauper emigrant work (that was before the days of wireless telegraphy), a covey of carrier-pigeons was released to carry news of us back to France, and as it was late in the afternoon when this took place I fancy that unless those pigeons could, like the sea-gulls, cradle themselves on the bosom of the deep, they would have to travel by night. Apropos of " homers/' a remark made to me once by a Northamptonshire squire always makes me laugh. I daresay the thing is a " chestnut," but it is certainly funny. He told me that a friend of his had been trying to cross pigeons with parrots, and when I asked him why, he said : "So that the cross- breeds can ask their way in a fog." I do not know what sort of messages were despatched that afternoon by the pigeons. I hope that they were 96 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH more interesting than the first Marconigram that it was ever my privilege to read. This was shown me in the " Five o'Clock Club " in the Savoy Hotel by my old friend Marcus Mayer, the impresario, and was one of the very first private wireless cables that was ever received in London from mid- Atlantic. It ran : " Get me double-bedded room Hotel and two stalls for Merry Widow, Saturday night. Mrs J. is not to know I am in Europe. J." The Marconi system of telegraphy is, of course, very wonderful, but when is any great saying, truth or axiom going to be wafted from the clouds to an anxious humanity panting for truth, from some mid-ocean sage, which shall make one recognise the inestimable benefit which was conferred upon us by an invention which enabled us so many days, so many hours, so many minutes earlier than would have been possible by ordinary transmission to hear the new gospel, the new philosophy, the new discovery, the new truth. When I was travelling to Alexandria on the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company's magnificent liner, the Heliopolis, we had a Marconigraph apparatus on board and every morning there was served with our breakfast a printed sheet giving us a reprint of the messages which had been sent through the air to our ship. I used to scan those lines very eagerly. Here were wonderful things made new, but alas! there was nothing for the surprise of the sky children. One morning one would learn that "the Skupstchina was to assemble in a fortnight," the next that " Monsieur Fallieres had gone to Rambouillet for a little shooting." And so on. Human ingenuity strides along. Humanity wallows. We invent wonderful things to serve no purpose at all, except, MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 97 perhaps, further to convince us of our impotence, helplessness and limitations. As I remarked the other day, while crossing from New York on the Kaiser in Augmte-Victoria, to my friend Dr Arnold Berliner, of Berlin : " Gegen die Dummheit kaempft der Marconi vergebens. u This paraphrases the famous German line : "The gods fight in vain against stupidity." Marconi cannot supply us with ideas, though he has furnished a new and wonderful means of trans- mitting them. As we sailed along the Cornish coast on that lovely spring evening, watching the sun setting behind Land's End, and in due course came opposite Penzance, I talked with Dr Berliner about poor John Davidson the poet, whose last home it was. Berliner had never heard of him. " But," he added, " it was only last year that I began to read Keats, and Shelley is still a closed book to me." I think that the very first time when Davidson came to call on me in London, he was wearing a pair of goloshes, and I remember saying to him that I hoped they were the Goloshes of Fortune. He had just stepped out on his way as a man of letters. I hoped that the Goloshes of Fortune might lead him to prosperity. Whither indeed they have led the poor man, there can be little doubt. I often have thought of Davidson's goloshes since I heard of the catastrophe of his end. Here was a man taking special precautions to keep well and be comfortable. Twenty years later the same man was to destroy his life under circumstances of great cruelty towards himself. We poor human things, with our puny 98 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH efforts to protect and cherish ourselves, what sport does not destiny make of our weak defences ! I once saw in the Morgue the body of a man who hanged himself that day in the Bois de Boulogne. He had plugs of fresh white cotton-wool in his ears, so that it showed that just before he went out on his fatal errand he was very solicitous about the health of that body which he was so very soon ruthlessly and fatally to spoil. Davidson had only been in London a very short time when I first met him. He was married and had children, and was rather proud of the fact that he was living in the " very smallest house in town." Prudent, self-controlled, frugal and hard-working, with talents in counterpoise to his indisputable genius, he started on the literary career as well equipped as any man one has heard of. And it was all to end where it has ended. There were other poets who used to come to my rooms in Charles Street, Grosvenor Square, and it is a disquieting fact, for me, that of those the three most brilliant and gifted have come to perdition in its cruellest form. Wilde was one, John Barlas was another. . . . What does destiny reserve for the fourth ? Perhaps, however, as I really never had any claim to the title of poet, and as at any rate it is many years since I strung two rhymes together, I may escape. It is circumstance of human interest that Davidson used to comment on the eccentricities of Barlas' conduct, and declare his conviction that his brother Scotsman would never make any way in life. He based this conviction on the conformation of Barlas' skull. " He has no back to his head it goes down MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 99 to his neck in a straight line/' is what he once wrote me. Davidson himself had a well-shaped head, and yet which of the two, Barlas or he, has had the less fortunate end ? I think that Davidson at any rate got a good deal of enjoyment out of life. I remember him as a very jovial fellow at those Charles Street gatherings. His face flushed red with talk and merriment, and in his excitement his wig used to push up over his forehead. His bright eyes sparkled and his whole body seemed alive with good fellowship and enjoyment. The mill-wheels of London ground much of his early joie de vivre out of him, but on the rare occasions when I did meet him in later years I found him genial and optimistic as ever. I remember one very pleasant afternoon we spent together in the Grosvenor Club, where, after luncheon, we adjourned to the library and rummaged amongst the books. We found an old record there of the Tower of London, with a long list of prisoners who had languished in its dungeons, and we commented on some of the names, speculating as to whether certain names do portend certain destinies. And we agreed that a certain " John Syndercombe " was indisputably foredoomed to Tower Hill. We did not conclude that " John Davidson " was as surely predestined to Penzance Pit. His career is the best argument against the pursuit of literature as a profession, though it should dissuade no one against attempting to write successful copy. When I first heard of Davidson's death, I was dining in the most luxurious hotel in New York with an American author, who produces the best " sellers " in the U.S.A. There were some millionaires at the table next to ours, and I am sure that their dinner was 100 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH not a bit more Lucullian than the one my host had set before me, and that his wife was fully as elegantly attired, if not as lavishly begemmed, as the very rich tradeswoman who was our neighbour. During dinner my friend was speaking of his dissatisfaction with the work he was doing, and described his longing to be engaged in the production of books which should rank as literature. And I had the song and sorrow of John Davidson in my mind at the time. So I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. CHAPTER VII Journalism and Literature Richard Whiteing and John Davidson Self- Advertisement, how considered in France Com- mercialism in Literature Keats' Letters as " Goods " Barbey d'Aurevilly Eccentricities unremunerative Ernest Lajeunesse and his Work Working in Ca//s Mr Crawford, Eugene Sue, Timothy Trimm The Cafe Napolitain Catulle Mendes as a " Ghost " George Courteline as a Bureaucrat Jean Moreas, Zola's, Mendes' and Verlaine's Opinions on him The Cafe Habit The Old Man in the Rue Vicq d'Azir Henner on Wine Drinking Mr Loubet's Bottle of Beaune Messrs Stevenson and Osbourne's Bottle of Roussillon John Keats' Bottle of Claret" The Wrecker " and the Quartier Henner and Bismarck on Beer Beer Drinking in France A Parisian Beer King A Note on Chartreuse IF it had not been for an absurd prejudice against being ranked as a journalist, which made him despise and avoid the notoriety which he might have gained by the very excellent journalistic work he did for the newspapers and magazines, Davidson could have made himself popular enough to enable his publishers to make good sales of his less marketable literary wares the poems, dialogues, dramatic sketches and novels. But he shared with many other English men of letters a very foolish contempt for journalism, as a profession below the dignity of the true man of letters. Of course it is nothing of the kind ; of course some of the best literary work which is done in England is first, or exclusively, published in the periodicals. For years, for instance, Richard Whiteing, who is a finished master of letters and deserves to rank as quite one of our foremost British novelists, contributed daily to The Daily News, in the form of leading articles, 101 102 IO FEIENDS THE FRENCH essays on current topics which were literature of a very high order. It is true that Andrew Lang got most of the credit due to Richard Whiteing, but that was the result of the unfair system of anonymity which then obtained in the London press, nor did it diminish the benefit which Whiteing derived from the daily exercise of his pen in a high form of literary art. Whiteing was proud of being a journalist, as I often heard him declare in his rooms in the Rue de Rivoli, when he lived in Paris. But then he had lived many years in France, and in France no snobbish distinc- tions are drawn between men who write for the news- papers and those who write for the publishers. Every great French writer, novelist, dramatist, poet, began as a contributor to the press ; many never abandoned these relations, even after great success. Davidson had the silly English prejudice against journalism as a profession, and so carefully veiled his connection with the papers that the big public never pierced through his anonymity. He wished to be known as a poet alone, on the strength and by reason of his published poems, and so it was that his name was familiar only to very few. If he had boldly signed his very clever newspaper and review articles, he could have won what passes nowadays as fame, with the emoluments that result from such notoriety. And his poetry and other work of the kind, which an American editor would classify as " soul-throb," the literary matter of which he was proud, would have sold all the better because of this notoriety. In Anglo-Saxon countries though in these alone notoriety inspires the reading-public with confidence. Literary success in these countries must be pursued in MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 103 exactly the same way and by the same methods as any other business " proposition." I could name one very popular author who never fails, when any new work of his is due to appear, to start an advertising campaign, which has all to be carefully thought out and discussed, and the superlative cleverness of which is that he obtains a stupendous publicity of direct cash value without disbursing a farthing. In France or Germany such a proceeding would excite suspicion in the minds of the readers. The author would rank as a farceur or as a fumiste, and people would not be very inclined to read his work. Here and in America we are so essentially commercial that we can be drummed into admiring as a writer the man who persistently pushes himself and his wares. We are inclined to think that a writer who shows commercial aptitude is likely to practise the commercial axiom of giving us value for our money, to be inspired by the hope of earning some share of public patronage by supplying a good article at a reasonable price. There seems no reason why literary men should not cast aside any lingering reticence or shame and come forward as tradesmen pure and simple. Nobody would consider this infra dig on their part, because the British public refuses to admit that a literary man as such is entitled to any dignity, and nothing that he might do to advance his interests would therefore appear derogatory. One cannot derogate from no position at all, which is the locus assigned to writers in this country. I would like to see authors and publishers treating books exactly like any other kind of merchandise. I once saw an invoice sent to a friend of mine in which he was debited for so much " To Goods." I asked 104 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH him what the goods were and he told me he had been buying some autographs, including letters from John Keats. That is the proper spirit in England and the proper expression. Keats' letters, goods. And why not ? Let all authors look on their productions as goods and give up the pose and it is nothing but a pose of despising the commercial side of their trade. I remember once arranging some advertisements for a lady friend of mine who had published a novel and who wanted it announced in an effective manner. I accordingly drew up six advertisements addressed to different classes of the community inviting them on various grounds to purchase and read the new work. In the phraseology of the advertising agent I made the " copy " as " pulling " as possible in all the series, but by far the most effective piece was the advertise- ment in which I invited " Business Men " to buy the book, on the grounds that the authoress had made it her principle, in writing it, to see that any purchaser " got full value for money." Such an advertisement in France would have covered both publisher and authoress with ridicule and would have disposed the public against the book. In England it was so effective that the special papers which deal with advertising commented eulogistically on the novelty and effectiveness of the advertisements, complimented the publisher on his originality, and referred com- placently, as proof of the value of " pulling copy/' to the big sales to which the book attained. I cannot call to mind in France a single writer of prominence who has been able to put himself into commercial success by self-advertisement, by eccen- tricities of costume, scandal, or any of the other means which succeed so well here or in America. ERNEST LA JEUNESSE, /are /)^ 104. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 105 People there regard such writers with suspicion, and leave their books alone. Barbey d'Aurevilly might have had a good public and might have made money enough to live on in comfort. But the author of " Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas " chose to walk about Mont- martre in a ridiculous costume and cloak, ranked in the mind of the public in consequence as a fumiste, and had to confess as the outcome of it all that not more than thirty people used to read his books. " I write for a public of thirty people, not including my concierge'' he once remarked to me with bitterness. The result was that he lived in great poverty in a small room in Montmartre and that but for the kind- ness of Paul Bourget he would have died in hospital. In England, eccentricity which is almost always pose helps an author and is a paying " proposition." In France, where as often as not it is a manifestation of one of the curious characteristics of genius, it damns him. One of the young writers in France of to-day, a man whom I admire immensely and rank as a literary genius, is Ernest Lajeunesse, to whose splendid work I called attention in my " Twenty Years in Paris." I have always held that the reason why he has not been financially successful in any degree proportionate to his great merits is because of his personal eccen- tricities. In France the literary man who goes in for eccentricity does not rank as serieux, and the French public, which au fond is essentially commercial, fights shy of him for the very reason which in England attracts the reader. Ernest Lajeunesse, who is an artist to his finger-tips, has tastes in the matter of dress and personal adornment which are unusual. He is very fond of all kinds of barbaric jewellery, and 106 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH covers his fingers with weird rings. I suppose the French reader considers that a man who spends so much time in the bric-a-brac shops hunting up old jewels cannot give full value for money in his literary work. Anyhow, there is no boom in Ernest Lajeunesse, which in such a country as France, where literary genius ranks so high, is an extraordinary phenomenon. I do not think I am exaggerating in saying that Lajeunesse is quite the best stylist living in France at the present day. And the cruel thing about the public indifference is that he is one of the French writers who do give the very best value for money. He has that infinite capacity for taking pains which is the synonym of genius. He is a very hard worker. Even in his journalistic pursuits, in the hack work to which circumstances constrain him, he displays enormous energy. I have often watched him at work in the Cafe Napolitain, where, with scissors and paste- pot, one may see him engaged for hours over some article for one of the papers. The bejewelled fingers working with the gum brush and blue pencil afford a curious insight into the profession of letters in Paris of the day. He has a pretty knack of draughtsmanship, too, and caricature, and the other day sketched himself for me with two or three rapid strokes of the pen. He is one of those writers who " arrive " too soon. He was only twenty-two when he found all Paris speaking about him. That was in 1896, when he had published his famous " Les Nuits, Les Ennuis et les Amis de nos plus notoires Contemporains," which he wrote after leaving his post as private secretary to Anatole France. Since then he has written many books of almost uncanny cleverness. " Limitation MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 107 de Notre Maitre Napoleon " (1897), " L'Holocauste " " Serenissime " (1900), " Cinq Ans Chez les Sauvages " (1901), " Le Boulevard" (1906), " Le Forgat Honor- aire " (1907). He has also written two plays, Les Ruines and La Dynastie ; a novel called " L'fipee au Fourreau," a study entitled " La Verite sur Salome/' a political satire, " Rocaroc, homme d'Etat," and many essays. Besides all these works he has collaborated steadily on the Journal since 1896, and is a constant contributor to the Figaro, the Gil Bias, the Revue Blanche, the Phalange and other papers. I have given some account of this wonderful young man he is only thirty-five this year because I feel sure that he will eventually attain a great reputation in France. He is one of the few Frenchmen of letters who still delight to work in cafes. When I first went to Paris it was rather the thing to do for a journalist, to use his house of call as his study. Old Mr Crawford, the husband of Mrs Crawford, of Truth, who was correspondent of The Daily News, used to write his correspondence every evening in the Cafe Veron, at the corner of the Rue Vivienne. Two wax candles and tout ce qu'il fallait pour ecrire used to be placed on a table specially reserved for the correspondent. Sue used to correct the proofs of " Les Mysteres de Paris " in the saloons of the Jockey Club and got disliked for it. Timothy Trimm wrote his daily chronique for the then new Petit Journal in a Parisian cafe, and people used to go and stare at the man who was so clever as to be able to turn out an article on a fresh subject every day of the week. In consequence of which popularity, Trimm got an exaggerated sense of his own importance, and imposed such demands on the pro- 108 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH prietors of the Petit Journal that they were forced to dispense with his services. The Cafe Napolitain, where Lajeunesse usually works, used at one time to be the favourite rendezvous of the men of letters and actors of Paris, who collected there between the hours of five and seven, " the green hour," as it is called. Catulle Mendes was a frequent guest, and Courteline, and Sylvain the actor, and numerous French and foreign journalists and literary camp-followers, including one or two poor fellows who belonged to what are called in Paris the " negroes " of literature. These are the hacks, the " ghosts," the men who write the books, plays and articles of well-known men, who are either too lazy to write themselves, or who have exhausted everything except the commercial value of their names. I knew one man there who used to write serial stories for the big dailies, on behalf of a well-known feuilletoniste, who remunerated him at the rate of one penny for ten lines. He thus might have described himself as a centime-a- liner. His employer, the man who put his name to the tale, drew from five to ten pence a line for the copy he had thus obtained. But there are " negroes " in Paris who work for even less than that. Women are often employed at this cruel work. Mendes once told us of his experience as a " ghost." When he first came to Paris, as quite a young man, he brought with him from Toulouse a one-act play called My Wife's Garters, which he had written after leaving school and which had been successfully played at the Capitole Theatre there. Being very hard up, after his arrival in Paris, he accepted an offer of four pounds outright for this play, and transferred it to a certain well-known poet. The poet changed the name, struck MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 109 out two or three lines and had it produced under his own name at a boulevard theatre. It was very popular, and still holds the boards in the provinces at cafes-concerts and small suburban theatres. George Courteline, by the way, was always to be seen in MendeV company. They made a curious couple, so entirely different was their work, so divergent were their talents. Courteline is a man of great if coarse humour, specially successful in writing about soldiers and government clerks, bureaucrats. He obtained his knowledge of these types from his own experience. He served three years, " three most miserable years/' as a dragoon, and he was afterwards for some time employed at the Direction des Cultes in the Ministry of Religion. His father was Jules Moineaux, who made himself famous, as a police-court reporter, by publishing an amusing series of fanciful sketches of police-court cases, under the title of " Les Tribunaux Comiques." He had, however, no faith in literature as a profession, and used his influ- ence to get a berth for George where he would earn a regular income and in due course become entitled to a pension. But having fallen in, early in his career, with Catulle Mendes, Courteline, who had already produced a military saynette, called Lidoire, at the Theatre Libre, collaborated with him in a big piece called The Merry Wives of Paris , which was produced at one of the principal theatres. It was successful and produced money. Then Courteline adapted his very funny story " Bourbouroche " for the Theatre Antoine. It made a great hit. The great scene was where the husband, searching for his wife's lover in her bedroom, in the dark, suddenly sees a bright light shining through the chinks of a big wardrobe which is 110 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH standing in the room. He throws the doors of the cup- board open and discloses the young man, sitting at a table,with a reading-lamp, perusing a novel, the armoire being his usual hiding-place when his disappearance became necessary owing to matrimonial exigencies. Paris found this hugely amusing, and I do not think I ever heard an audience laugh more heartily than when Bourbouroche found himself staring at the " other man/ 1 who insisted on having all his comforts even in the fevers and turmoil of adulterous loves. After that Courteline thought himself justified in giving up his desk at the Ministry of Religion, but at the same time stipulated with his superiors that if literature failed him he might return to his bureau- cratic security. This fortunately never became neces- sary. Courteline could always be recognised by the fact that he never went abroad without carrying under his arm a huge leather portfolio, crammed with manu- scripts, a portefeuille Ministre, such as politicians carry, pour se donner de V importance (to look important). Jean Moreas was an occasional visitor to the Cafe Napolitain, mainly for the purpose of meeting Sylvain, the actor, who produced his play Iphigenie in various open-air theatres in the provinces. I remember seeing it played at Algiers, where it was greatly applauded, and was pleased to be able to congratulate a very old friend on his triumph. Moreas had been carrying Iphigenie round in his head for many years before it was finally put into shape. On many noctambulous walks with Jean Moreas had I heard him declaiming lines which rang out sonorously under the bright African sun and carried me back to the days of Sturm und Drang. In those days people used to laugh at Moreas, and to-day he ranks as one of the MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 111 first poets in France, and wears the rosette of officer of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole, a distinction which de Goncourt did not obtain until he was long past sixty years of age. I remember how indignantly Zola spoke of Moreas once. Moreas had said some- thing about " Victor Hugo and I." This roused Zola's ire. " What's this Moreas ? " he cried. " What has he done, then, goodness gracious, to have such a colossal cheek. ' Victor Hugo and I ! ' Can you imagine it ? Isn't it sheer madness ! He has written three or four little songs of sorts, things like Beranger wrote, neither more nor less : the rest of his work is the output of a crazy grammarian, twisted, complicated, inept, with nothing fresh or youthful in it : it's poetry in spirits of wine." Mendes was a much kindlier man in his criticisms and was always ready which Zola never was to welcome new talent. His remark on Moreas at the time when everybody was discussing the young Franco-Greek poet was that " there was talent in Moreas, who delights in little discoveries in language. Moreas, whose archaism modernises itself, and is spiced with a touch of exoticism, interests me, to tell the truth, very considerably. He has found some curious rhythms." Poor Verlaine admitted that he was jealous of Moreas, whom he claimed as his pupil. " I have had pupils," he said, " but I consider them as scholars who have revolted against me. Moreas, au fond, is one of them. I am a bird myself just as Zola, by the way, is an ox and there are some evil tongues who say I have created a school of serins " (canaries). " Tis false, the symbolists are birds also, certain exceptions being made. Moreas is one also, but, no he may rather be described as a peacock." 112 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH One is to imagine poor Verlaine half-drunk with absinthe saying this involved and complicated critical phrase in the Cafe Frangois Premier. The word serins, by the way, is difficult of translation into English, though its exact meaning is the one put in brackets namely, canaries . But serin means more than that . It means a "duffer," a stupid person who has to be taught just as a canary is taught with a bird-organ, a dense person who can only learn anything by having it repeated to him over and over again. I remember Zola once telling me that he made a rule, when at- tending a rehearsal of one of his plays, not to seriner his actors that is to say, not to badger them with instructions repeated over and over again, not, in other words, to treat them as (f duffers/' but to allow them to exercise a little initiative. In those days the Cafe Napolitain was one of the few cafes left in Paris which were made regular houses of call by certain steady customers, a cafe with what the Germans would call " Stamm-Gaeste." The habit of going regularly to cafes, which used to be a feature of Parisian life, has quite died out. For one thing the coffee served at most Parisian cafes is not fit to drink, and as to alcoholic drinks, though absinthe drinking prevails, people don't like to be seen sitting for any length of time in any one particular cafe with a glass of ardent spirits before them. The absinthe drinker takes his first drink at one cafe, his second somewhere else and his tenth or twelfth at some tenth or twelfth other cafe. I knew a very distinguished musician, brother of one of the principal theatre managers in Paris, who used to start off at the Cafe Napolitain and finish up at the Gare du Nord, in the identical little Swiss brasserie which was one of the scenes in Courteline's Bourbouroche. He "BOLS" Liqueurs Extra Fines 32, Boulevard des Italics FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM ERNEST LA JEUNESSE TO AUTHOR. face page 112. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 113 always asked for un lait chaud (a glass of hot milk) and the waiters knew what he wanted instead. What I say about cafes refers mainly to those in the centre of the town on the boulevards. In the suburbs and outlying districts cafes are still made places of call by the bourgeois of the quarter. Here they sip their mazagrans or their " bocks " and here they play manille. I remember a cafe in the Rue Vicq d'Azir, at the corner of the boulevard, where there met every evening a respectable party of middle-aged men, who, according to the old lady who kept the place, had been coming there regularly for more than twenty years. The principal figure in this group was old Father Deibler, the executioner, who never missed an evening's cards, unless he was engaged in the provinces. After his retirement he came there every night, and people used to come and stare at the sinister old man, who rather enjoyed the curiosity evinced. To the last he kept alive his interest in his life-work, and frequently accompanied his son, Monsieur Anatole, who had succeeded to him, to pay a visit to Louison, the guillotine, in her shed hard by. Louison wanted a good deal of care to keep her fit and well, and Father Deibler used to help his son in his duties towards her. Anatole, by the way, is a total abstainer and does not drink or go to cafes. He says he has seen too much of the consequences of drinking to care to try it himself. These principles would not have found much favour with the late Monsieur Henner, the great artist. Henner had a very high opinion of the advantage of drinking good liquor, especially wine. He said good wine was good for the health and good for inspiration. As he lived to an old age and did excellent work of its kind to the end, his opinion may be worth re- 114 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH membering. He used to speak with much contempt of the young men of the day, who, when dining out with a lady, ask for a bottle of mineral waters, and he once said to me that when he was a young man, if he had ventured to ask a young lady to share a bottle of mineral water with him at dinner, she would very soon have shown him to the door. Henner's favourite wine was Burgundy, a taste which he shared with President Loubet, with whom in his lifetime he cracked many a dusty bottle of Beaune. A good bottle of Beaune always exercised an irresistible temptation over the President. I remember once being in his wake when in March 1904 he visited the Agricultural Show. I had heard him refuse various offers of hospitality in the different sections, in each of which a " lunch " had been spread for the President's refreshment. He said, and kept saying, that by his doctor's orders he could take nothing " between meals." However, when the presidential party reached the wine-growers' section there was an uncorking of bottles at every stall. Monsieur Loubet smilingly refused all these hospitable offers, but one grower, a Burgundian, more pushing than the rest, begged him at least to smell the bouquet of a glass of pale ruby-coloured wine which he had poured out with ever so much care from a dust- covered bottle. The President put his nose to it ; his features relaxed, and with his eternal smile more genial than ever, said : " I really think that I must taste this. The doctor can say what he likes. I have really never smelled anything so delicious as this, and Burgundy is my favourite wine." It was a bottle of Beaune which had been laid down just thirty-nine years previously. The President was, of course, quite right, doctor or MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 115 no doctor, to refuse to drink red wine between meals, which is a fatal thing to do, and on many constitu- tions has the exact effect of an emetic. I am always amused when I read in English novels how the hero quaffs claret between meals, while smoking a cigar. Poor Keats among real people used to declare it the joy of his life to quaff claret between meals a habit which no doubt accelerated the breakdown of his constitution. The English novelists, by the way, often write very strange things when they deal with wines and the elegancies of the table. I remember how in " The Wrecker/* a novel written by Stevenson in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, there is an account of how a man, who had been hard up for a long time in the Latin Quarter, indulged himself, after getting a remittance, in a feast at the Cafe de Cluny, at which figured specially a bottle of old Roussillon wine. It occurred to me that neither R. L. S. nor his collaborator can have known much about French wines, or they would never have selected that par- ticular cm even supposing it could be found on the wine list of a good cafe as a table wine. Roussillon is a strong heady vintage, which is never drunk pure, except in the Roussillon district, but is used to "cut " i.e. to blend with light wines which need body. Many of the clarets one gets in not quite first-class English hotels have been doctored with Roussillon. It much resembles Spanish wine, and it has been said of it that one needs a knife and fork to it. It contains about 18 % of alcohol. It is very cheap and common, and in the Roussillonnais district workpeople who want a real good fill of wine go to a dealer and for a pay- ment of one penny per hour can go on drinking the whole day if they are so disposed. In Perpignan this 116 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH arrangement is called a la soulee that is to say, that for a penny a man can go on drinking until he is intoxi- cated ! In other parts of France it is called a la rincee. Amongst the most excellent things to be found in "The Wrecker/' by the way, the description of Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter in Paris is par- ticularly well done . The days of " La Vie de Boheme ' ' are by no means, as has been said over and over again, past, and Doppelgangers of every one of the famous characters in Murger's book, not excepting Mimi Pinson, could be found to-day over and over again in the hotels meubles of that quarter. They dress a little less raggedly perhaps, and on the whole have more luxurious tastes, for Bohemia has marched with the times also, but there they are just the same. Here, for instance, is a scene which I witnessed not long ago, and which might have come straight out of the pages of "Vie de Boheme." I was walking down the Boulevard St Michel with a young Breton gentleman, who has recently given up the study of medicine for the practice of literature. It was not to be wondered at that his clothes should not be of the best. At the corner of the Rue de Cluny we came upon another man of letters, who, though rather shabby as to his hat and boots, wore a magnificent cloth overcoat. I recognised the man as a very well-known poet and writer, who contributes occasionally some most brilliant essays to the press, and who at one time was considered to be the coming man of Paris. As soon as my friend saw him he left my side and crossed over to him and an animated dialogue ensued between the two. I did not hear what they said, but they seemed to be both much excited. In the end, in answer to a particularly vehement speech on the part MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 117 of the young Breton, the other was seen to unbutton his overcoat, disclosing therewith that he had nothing on between it and his shirt. My Breton friend presently joined me, and I asked him what the trouble was. " Oh ! ce cochon" he said, " he's got my overcoat on. We lived together a few weeks ago, for we were collaborating. Just before we separated, X told me that as he had some business visits to pay, and as his clothes were too shabby, he would be much obliged to me if I would lend him my overcoat to put on over them so as to hide their tattered condition. I did so, and haven't seen him since until to-day. I wanted my coat back first, because I, too, am getting very rusty ; and, secondly, because here's the winter coming when it will be needed. Well, he opens it and shows me that he is telling the truth when he says that he has nothing else to wear. He has sold his coat and waistcoat and couldn't go out in his shirt-sleeves. But he will find the money sure enough for his beer. He is the biggest drinker of ' bocks ' in the quartier" Apropos of " bocks," Henner always set his face against the fashion of beer drinking which, during the last twenty years, has so spread in Paris. He had the same objection to it that Bismarck had. The Iron Chancellor once said to me that the natural, rational drink of the North Germans was wine, and that it was beer that made them slow and ponderous. But the " bock " has come to stay in Paris, and the quantities of German beer consumed daily in the French metro- polis are very large. From the results of an inquiry made some little time ago amongst the leading brewers and brewers' agents, it transpired that during hot weather there are con- sumed every day in Paris 4,000,000 bocks. The bock 118 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH is popularly supposed to contain one-third of a litre, or quart, but after the duty on beer was raised the glass or " bock " was altered, so that while looking the same as the old " bock," and apparently being of the same capacity, in reality it held rather less than a quarter of a litre or half-a-pint. Apropos of beer drinking in Paris, I was amused the other day, on entering a brasserie on the Boulevard du Palais, to hear the manager telling a customer that, " to his great regret/' he could not supply him with another demi (or pint) of beer. The man was very angry, but the manager remained firm, and the customer walked off and seated himself at a brasserie directly opposite, and was there seen to imbibe several demis one after the other. The manager watched him from the terrace of the cafe at which I was sitting, and announced in a loud voice the number of demis that his ex-customer was consuming. It appeared that when he had refused to serve him any further the man had put himself outside fifteen demis. Over the way he certainly drank five more while I was there, making a total of about eight quarts (for the demi does not hold a pint, though it is supposed to do so). I was amused at the terror of the manager, who seemed to expect to see the man explode or to fall down in a fit. I told him something of what I knew of the capacity of the human being for swallowing lager beer, illus- trated from my experience as a student in Germany, who have taken part in many a Kommers, where sixty Seidels was not considered at all an excessive con- sommation for one evening's Schmaus. I told him of the heroic doings of the Beer King at Bonn, who used to come up to the University, in a fourth-class carriage, sitting astride on a huge vat of beer, and I MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 119 described to him the real nature of a Beer Journey, where a band of students travel from town to town, absorbing at each halting-place the most phenomenal quantities of lager. He said that he would only be too glad to receive customers of that kind in his house, men who were hardened to excessive beer drinking ; but that as to the gentleman en face, he knew that he could not stand more than a certain quantity, after which he became bassinant, and desired to fight all the men and to kiss all the women. He added that the demand for " bocks " was very large just then, and that he had no reason to complain (for the managers in these establishments have a percentage on the sale of the beer), and that in his house four thousand " bocks " were retailed daily. The biggest sale of beer at one house in Paris is recorded at six thousand " bocks." This is considered very large, but the quantity will make many an English publican smile with pity. It was at this particular cafe that I had once a long conversation on the vexed question of Chartreuse with a specialist in liqueurs. Said he : " The genuine stuff is that manufactured at Tarragona and sold as the ( Liqueur des Peres Chartreux.' The non-genuine stuff is that manufactured at the monastery, whence the Carthusian monks were expelled. This is sold as ' Grande Chartreuse/ It has no resemblance with the real article." The government trustees who " an- nexed " the monks' property and confiscated their trade-mark put a number of skilful analysts to work on samples of Chartreuse with a view to discovering the monks' secret recipe. After long investigations, and presumably frequent sampling degustations, or tastings, the analysts proclaimed that they had found out what were the ingredients used in the making of 120 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH the liqueur and the exact doses of each. As, however, there are over one hundred ingredients used, one is inclined to doubt this statement. The Father Superior of the Carthusians, who has since vindicated in an English court his right to the trade-mark " Chartreuse/' left France with the laugh on his side against the government liquidateur. He communicated to the press, the day after he was expelled from the monastery, a letter which he had written to the government official. It referred to the large stock of grape-brandy which the trustee had taken over with the rest of the property. By the way, the real secret of the superiority of Chartreuse as a liqueur has always been the use of the very finest old grape-cognac. " You stole my alcohol," wrote the reverend father, "and you intend to use it in the manufacture of a liqueur in imitation of ours. I think it therefore right to remind you that the alcohol being my property, I was at liberty to treat it as I chose, before I left the monastery." In other words the Father Superior hinted that all the alcohol in the Carthusian cellars might have been poisoned, or that one barrel or bottle might be so, it being left to the liquidateur to find out which barrels or barrel or bottle had been thus doctored. Of course as a matter of fact nothing of the kind had been done, but the trustee felt that he could not run the risk of using the brandy without analysing the contents of every cask and flagon in the cellars. It was also a very bad advertise- ment as a send-off for the imitation liqueur. Paris was hugely amused with the Parthian shaft and many people no doubt thought it more prudent to abstain from drinking Chartreuse until the monks brought out their new liqueur. CHAPTER VIII Ruins at Sixpence Authors and Second-hand Booksellers Marmier's Bequest A modest Trouvaille Mary Queen of Scots' Prison Reading Anatole France on the Quays How he discovered Moreas Anatole France in the Avenue Hoche His placid Anarchism Property, Theft Pierre Louys and " Aphrodite " Jean Lorrain and the Roman a clef Paul Adam and his Work Meredith and the Interviewer Meredith and Daudet Meredith's Claret Sienkiewicz's Mineral Water How " Quo Vadis ? " was conceived Red Ink and Violet Bernard Lazare and Dreyfus The Dreyfus Interviewer Jules Huret " The King of Interviewers " A Wife's Tribute Huret's Journalistic Records His " Inquiries " Spuller and Huret Monsieur Couteaux The Professor and the Chop Economist and Chef " LMvre a la Roy ale " WHENEVER I went to the cafe-brasserie on the Boulevard du Palais, referred to in the preceding chapter, which I always did when there was a big trial on at the adjoining law courts, I used to notice a hawker I had seen him in other parts of Paris also who did excellent business amongst the lawyers, barristers and students who frequented the house. His must be a familiar figure to those who sit out on the terrasses of the cafes in Paris. As he walks along he cries out in doleful tones, " Here is the Ruin of the publishing trade ! Here is the Despair of authors ! At sixpence each ! At sixpence ! " He is commonly known as " La Ruine des Editeurs." A jovial fellow withal, by no means showing like a prophet of woe. His business is to buy up publishers' remnants, and to retail them to the best advantage. Thanks to his 121 122 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH clever patter, and to his skill in selecting only books with " fetching " titles, he is always able to dispose of his bundle of yellow backs before midnight. I took a petit verre with him the other night at a marchand de vins, in the Rue de la Paix, and learned that it was " a bad day on which he did not make his couple of louis." How many authors here can say the same ! He looks on literature only as merchandise, and " never read a book ; not he." He had something else to do. I consulted him as to titles, but I dare not print what he said on the subject. I have often wondered at the kindly feeling that authors entertain towards second-hand booksellers, a feeling which I consider much to our credit. For after all the boitquinistes are our natural enemies. The second-hand bookstall is the knacker's yard of a literary reputation, and to the second-hand bookseller the great author is even less of a hero than to his valet. Yet we like second-hand bookshops, and eagerly read their catalogues. Is it perhaps because we want to see how our dear colleagues are faring, how many of X's " grand new work " are being disposed of as "new remainders," and for how many pence Y's latest novel, which was to startle the world, is being offered " newly rebound " ? I don't know and won't say. I only know that the feeling is there. Some men develop real friendships for the bouquin- istes. One great literary man, Xavier Marmier, left one thousand francs to be divided amongst the book- hawkers on the quays. However, as Marmier, by his own account, purchased for a mere song on one occasion, from one of these bouquinistes, some volumes which were valued at many thousand francs, his legacy might be considered rather^an act of justice MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 123 a kind of posthumous conscience-money than as anything else. Apropos of such bargains, it is still quite possible to pick up very good things at very low prices on the quays, but the opportunities require watching and patience. You may walk daily for a year from the Pont-Royal to the Pont St Michel and examine every box of books on the way, without coming across anything worth purchasing. Again, when you least expect a find, you may come across one. I remember one afternoon, after dining at the Cafe d'Orsay, turning over a pile of old books at a stall just opposite that cafe and coming upon a volume for which the dealer asked me one franc. I purchased it at that price, but a few minutes later repented of my bargain, because I felt it " real mean " to profit by the ignorance of a very shabby and hungry-looking retailer, returned and offered to take back my franc in exchange for the volume. My motive was, however, totally misunder- stood, and the shabby and hungry-looking dealer absolutely refused to annul the bargain. "What is sold is sold/' he said, "that is all I know," and scoffed at my pretensions. The book was a first edition of Stendhal's " L' Amour," and very rare. I was offered one hundred and twenty francs for it the same afternoon by a bookseller in the Rue de Castiglione. I have since occasionally had trouvailles of the same sort, but on the whole it is hardly re- munerative to go hunting for bargains on the Paris quays. The bouquinistes are terribly sharp. Apropos of trouvailles, I remember the delight with which Pierre Louys informed me one day, how in hunting through one of the public libraries in Paris he had come across a certain copy of Ronsard's 124 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH " Hymnes " which he had every reason to believe was the identical copy which consoled poor Mary Stuart in her captivity. It may be remembered that when the luckless Queen of Scots was asked whether she wished for a Bible to read in prison, she replied that her volume of Ronsard sufficed her. The volume which came into Pierre Louys' hands was, according to the catalogue, purchased in England. On the fly- leaf it bore in female workmanship the inscription : " Per far* il mio cattivo tempo piu suave." There was also other contributory evidence to the origin of the book. Anatole France retains his fondness for the quays and the bookshops there. In him book-hunting is hereditary and instinctive. His father for over fifty years kept a bookshop on the Quai Voltaire and it was in this bookshop that young Thiebault stored his mind with that erudition which has since stood him in such excellent stead. One often sees him flitting round on the quays, chatting with the bouquinistes, or looking into the shops of the publishers and book- sellers. It was after such a visit to the quays that he wrote the famous article in Le Temps which raised Jean Moreas out of comparative obscurity into fame and prominence. In France one newspaper article signed by somebody in whom the French public has confi- dence can make a man's reputation. I hardly think that the same can be said of the English press, " What one lit'ry feller says about another lit'ry fellow/ ' said once a great city magnate to me, while I was lunching with him at the Baltic, " is not agoing to influence my opinion, sir." But in France it is different, and one has not forgotten how both Maeterlinck and Pierre Louys MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 125 were put up into full view by two articles written by Octave Mirbeau. That day Anatole France had been into Vanier's bookshop on the quays and in conversation Vanier had mentioned to the writer that he had in the press a volume entitled " Le Pelerin Passionne " by one Jean Moreas, of which he spoke with the temperate enthusiasm of a publisher. France asked to see some of the proofs, and Vanier having brought him a seat sat down and read and read and read . Then he went home and proclaimed that a great poet was living in France to whom, so far, justice had not been done. Et wild ! The last occasion when I saw Anatole France was last year, just after I had returned from Egypt, full of emotion from reading his wonderful "Thais." It had been my companion in the desert, and with " Thai's " in hand I had paced over Alexandria tracing the steps of that wonderful courtesan. I met France at the house of Madame Arman-Caillavet, whither I was taken by Loie Fuller. France is a very old friend of the Caillavet family, very rich people, who have placed their house at his disposal. The arrange- ment reminds one of the splendid days of the old regime when the grands seigneurs, and especially the grandes dames, had in their houses always an apart- ment at the disposal of some poet. La Fontaine, for instance for whom, by the way, the highest admira- tion is entertained nowadays in literary Paris lived most of his life, first as the guest of one grande dame and then of another. When a patroness died he moved his traps to some other lady's mansion, on one occasion without waiting for an invitation, so sure was he of a welcome. France has a room in the house in the Avenue Hoche where he works as though 126 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH at home. Amongst Madame de Caillavet's most prized treasures are France's manuscripts. I re- member with what reverence I examined the beautiful script of " Thais/' bound in luxurious style like some rich monastic tome. It interested me to note, by the way, that the last page showed signs of hurried writing. The penmanship was not so careful, the pen seemed to have been agitated, and I could well under- stand the reason. " The terrible v/eight of the pen/' said Zola once. When one is within sight of the end of one's task the pen gallops, just as a tired horse does who sees the gate, the stable-door, the roof behind the trees. I need hardly describe the elegance, the wit, the learning of the author of " Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard," nor how he delighted us that Sunday after- noon. One thing, however, which he said, made some impression on me, and that is where he declared himself an anarchist in spirit. We had been speaking of Cairo and the Americans, and I had related an instance of how the financial crisis in the States had entirely wrecked certain fortunes. During my stay in Cairo a lady had driven up to the Credit in a motor and entering had asked the director of the Bureau des fitrangers to let her draw several thousand piastres on her letter of credit, which was issued by one of the Fifth Avenue Trusts, a letter of thirty or forty thousand dollars. The manager was forced to tell her that he could not pay her anything on her letter, as he had that morning received notification from headquarters that the trust in question had the previous day suspended its payments. The un- fortunate woman's despair was pitiful to behold. She was without a single penny, her hotel bill was unpaid, MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 127 the very motor at the door was a hired one. She was suddenly hurled from great affluence into the most distressful poverty. I believe that she made some attempt to commit suicide, but that in the end another American lady came to her rescue and supplied her with sufficient funds to return home to the States. But to this denouement France would not listen, for he had interrupted me, saying : " How can one take any interest in such misfortunes ? That money, no doubt, was stolen money. The case inspires no sympathy. All such fortunes are, perforce, dishonestly acquired. It would be a good thing if the same catastrophe might await every rich person. I declare I despise rich people, les gens Uen, and I wish no more to frequent them. Indeed, I have determined no longer to go into society, I do not wish to meet people of that sort." In saying which, France was, of course, only paraphrasing the famous remark of Pierre Proudhon, who answered his own question : " What is Property ? " with " Property is Theft." And of course Proudhon was the author of the " Systeme des contradictions economiques." When one reads over " Thai's " one cannot help feeling how greatly this book must have inspired Pierre Louys in writing his famous " Aphrodite," which deals also with a courtesan in Alexandria, a book of which the success has been phenomenal, and which has always interested me specially because I saw Louys write it. I think he called it " Chryseis " in those days. He used to come to see me in the Rue Lafayette and read me passages of his Gothic manuscript. I should much have liked to give the portrait of Pierre Louys, the Rubempre of modern Paris, in these 128 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH pages, and wrote to him to ask him for one of his photographs. His reply was amusing and character- istic. I give it in the original French : " 16 Juin, 1909. " MON CHER AMI, Je n'ai pas fait faire ma photo- graphic depuis le siecle dernier et je ne laisse meme pas vendre celles de jadis chez les marchands. Per- sonne ne connait mon visage. Alors savez-vous ce que vous devriez faire ? Prenez un citoyen de Guilsborough ou de Brixworth, autant que possible un reverend, avec une tete respectable et grave, une grande chaine de montre sur un gilet obese, et une Bible noire a la main : ou mieux avec une Concordance de la Bible : la Concordance est plus grosse. Faites le photographier, et ecrivez dessous : PIERRE LOUYS. Comme on ne me connait pas la ressemblance n'im- porte guere. Mais je compte sur votre amitie pour choisir un modele tout a fait respectable. " Songez qu'a 1'heure actuelle je n'ai pas un ami a Londres. Depuis quinze ans je n'ai passe que trois jours a Charing Cross ou aux environs, et la seule relation que j'aie au dela de la Manche est un certain libraire de Tunbridge Wells a qui je telegraphic de temps en temps pour lui acheter des incunables mais ce libraire meme ne m'a jamais vu. " Vous avez fait cette annee en Angle terre une perte immense : Swinburne. C'etait le plus grand poe'te vivant. Quand je pense qu'il m'ecrivait quand j'avais 19 ans, qu'il a collabore" a ma premiere revue, et que pendant vingt ans je 1'ai laisse mourir sans aller le voir, je ne m'en console pas. Quinze jours avant sa mort ne le croyant pas malade j'avais propose aux meilleurs poetes frangais de faire une manifesta- MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 129 tion a sa gloire pour protester contre son exclusion du Prix Nobel. Je voulais composer une anthologie qui aurait paru sous ce titre tres simple : " ' Vers presentes a Mr Swinburne/ " Et comme je recevais mes premieres reponses, Swinburne est mort. Amicalement a vous, ff PIERRE LOUYS." x He has always been a very elegant young man, a 1 This is the translation of Pierre Louys' amusing letter : e 1909.- "Mv DEAR FRIEND, I have not been photographed since last century, and don't even allow the photographs that used to be in the shops to be sold any more* Nobody knows what I look like. So I'll tell you what you ought to do. Take some citizen of Guils- borough or Brixworth, a reverend gentleman as far as possible, with a grave and respectable head, a big watch-chain across an obese waistcoat, and a black Bible in his hand ; or, better still, a Con- cordance. The Concordance is a bigger volume. Have him photo- graphed, and write underneath it, PIERRE LOUYS. As nobody knows what I look like, the non-resemblance will be of no importance. But I rely on your friendship to choose somebody who is altogether respectable. " Fancy, that to-day I have not a single friend in London. During the last fifteen years I have only spent three days at Charing Cross, or in its neighbourhood, and the only connection I have on the other side of the Channel is a certain bookseller at Tunbridge Wells, to whom from time to time I telegraph to buy incunables; But this bookseller does not even know me by sight. "You have had an immense loss in England this year Swinburne. He was the greatest living poet. When I think that he used to write to me when I was nineteen years old, that he contributed to my first review, and that during twenty years I have been allowing him to die without going to see him, I cannot console myself. A fortnight before his death, not knowing that he was ill, I had asked our best French poets to make a manifestation in his honour, so as to protest against his having been excluded from the Nobel Prize. I wished to get together an anthology which would have borne this simple title : "'Verses offered to Mr Swinburne.' "And just as the first answers were coming in, Swinburne died. Yours amicably, " PIERRE LOUYS." I 130 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH dandy of letters. His wedding when he married one of the daughters of Jose-Maria de Heredia l g&tj>& A and was written by one of the ladies of the Du Maurier family. It stated that M. Du Maurier had been asked to give me an interview and that he would be very glad to receive me for that purpose if I would call on him. This was the first intimation that I had received of the negotiations between the novelist and the editor. I took the matter as in the ordinary course of business, made an appointment, and some days later called at the house in Hampstead. Du Maurier received me very amiably and gave me very full particulars about his life and work. I was gratified by his reception of me and pleased with the interesting matter which had been sup- plied, while the pathos of this tardy triumph, after a lifetime of struggle, and more particularly of the terrible menace of impending blindness which had hung over the man's life and cast a perpetual shadow of gloom over the mind of one who was by trade and necessity a humorist, appealed very strongly to my sympathies. Under the circumstances I was able to produce an article on George Du Maurier which, on its publication in America, produced a very consider- able effect on the minds of the public, and did certainly contribute very largely to the enormous success of " Trilby/' A year later, in the Authors' Club, I heard from W. H. Wilkins that he had been talking with Du Maurier some time previously, and that this article had been referred to. " Yes," said Du Maurier this is what Wilkins told me "that interviewer man came to my house and wanted to interview me. But I sent out to say MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 149 < Sorry. Busy. Must go away/ The next day the same chap turned up again, ringing and knocking. Again I sent him away. Then he came a third time, and really, you know, his persistence touched me and I let him in/' That was Monsieur Du Maurier's account of my visit to his house. I pre- sumed that his great success had turned his head. Apropos of Wilkins, Fate was no kinder to him as an author than she was towards George Du Maurier. Both of them had fought long rights, success was at last attained, and then they were cut off before they had had time to enjoy their hard- won triumphs. Wilkins died just when his book on Mrs Fitzherbert was becoming a great commercial success. It will be remembered that it was the book of that season, and that, in spite of the disturbing influence of the election on the bookselling trade, it rapidly ran into a large number of editions. I remember that just at that time Mrs Earle, the authoress of " Potpourri from a Surrey Garden," wrote me saying that for the sale of books those months were quite as bad as " that bad winter during the war." Wilkins' success was therefore all the more fortunate, and in the same ratio it was all the more unfortunate that he should not have lived to enjoy it. He had worked very hard, but had never got beyond what the French call un succes d'estime, and though he had produced many books of merit equal to that of the Fitzherbert book, notably his " Queen of Tears," none of these, I think, did much more than pay its expenses. Wilkins was a tall, fine man, Britishly cynical, but agreeable. Besides bookwork he had achieved some success in journalism. For many 150 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH years he edited The Lady's Realm, and he was also the literary adviser and practical manager of Mrs Woodhull Martin's extraordinary publication The Humanitarian. To this publication I also used to contribute it was there that the famous Ibsen interview appeared but my connection with it ceased after a visit I paid by request to the lady-proprietor's house in London. On being shown into the drawing-room, Mrs Woodhull Martin informed me that she wished to have a good look at my face, so as to be able to judge the sort of man I was. She accordingly bade me seat myself in a chair in the centre of the room, and then began walking slowly round the apartment, scrutinising my countenance from different points of view, now creeping towards me and peering up into my face, now receding to remote corners and gazing at me, while shading her eyes with her hand. The difficulty was to restrain myself from laughing, the whole stance was much more embar- rassing than a sitting to a photographer. I pre- sumed that the inspection of my physiognomy was not satisfactory, for I did not receive any further commissions from the good woman. Wilkins was eminently a " society man/' and on intimate terms, one understood, with peeresses. When he was editing The Lady's Realm he used to say that ladies of the beau monde literally bom- barded him with manuscripts. " And though they are often the greatest rubbish/' he remarked, " I am glad to get them and put them in, because the British public dearly loves to read anything written by a person of title/' He also said that the countesses and duchesses who contributed were MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 151 more eager and greedy about their cheques than the neediest Fleet Street hack. "The King of Interviewers " Monsieur Jules Huret was bound to admit that I had done one thing at least in that branch of journalistic activity which he had not. He had interviewed kings and emperors, and so had I, but he had never handled a subject such as was dealt with by me in 1892. I always remember that interview, with one who was the richest of his kind. In the interviewing business one often has great difficulties : skirmishing in doorways, long linger- ings in dull antechambers and draughty passages, encounters with languid lackeys and supercilious mattres d'hotel and all the rest of it. I cannot recollect however having ever undergone more promenading from pillar to post, more tedium of waiting, nor to have been obliged to exercise more diplomacy than to get into the presence of this " subject." It was all the more annoying to be rebuffed in my endeavours because I knew in advance that even when at last I should stand face to face with him, he would have nothing to say to me, absolutely nothing. That is a common enough experience, to be sure, with those who go a-inter- viewing to find that the great of the world have little or nothing to say, are indeed for the most part inarticulate, save for a " yea" or "nay," and strange rumblings in their throats, but at least one always hopes for the best. In this case how- ever I knew from the start that, interview I never so wisely, it would all be language thrown away, that he would not talk, that he would be even 152 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH more reserved than a Cabinet Minister who has to keep up the appearance of keen discretion. At the same time I had the comforting assurance that, although one of the wealthiest of his contempor- aries, he would very probably not be proud, that, unlike too many people whom one meets, a sudden accession to fortune would not have turned his head, that in spite of the immense difference between himself, the capitalist, and me, poor proletarian of the pen, he would receive me amiably, even affectionately, and that even if he did spit upon my beard it would not be with scorn. I may say that to a certain extent my expectations were realised. He did eventually receive me as one who mounts the steep staircases of the great would ever like to be. His name was Monsieur Bis, and at that time until weighty issues had been decided he was residing in an unfurnished flat at No. 54 Rue de Fondary, a street in the heart of Crenelle, in one of the remotest corners of Paris. It was the daughter of the concierge of this house who escorted me into the presence, and who unlocked certain doors of that third-floor flat, for Monsieur Bis was carefully guarded, which was natural, seeing what interests he represented. He received me in the back-kitchen, and was occupied as I entered in pacing to and fro with a preoccupied air. Maybe I had interrupted him in the midst of a weighty consideration as to the best investments in the market. Patriotism would suggest Russian bonds, family ties some enterprise in Persia, but doubtless the French Rentes would be safest after all. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 153 "Here is a gentleman come to see you, monsieur/' said, by manner of introduction, the porter's lass. He, however, still walking to and fro paused only now and then to rub himself against the brickwork of the kitchen range. An embarrassing silence ensued. It was evident that he would say nothing and, though apparently he had no objection to my presence, his indifference discountenanced me. I profited by the respite after mumbled congratulations on his good fortune rapidly to survey the presence chamber. A very sweet simplicity, the sight of which did much to calm certain uncontrollable jealousies with which I eyed one whom never the terrible anxieties of life should vex, who, with his fixed income safely invested by impeccable trustees, had only to let himself float calmly down the stream of life, safe from the tides and currents by which you and I are so sadly buffeted. A plain repast, a dish of meat and some milk, was set out on the range, the floor was strewn with rushes as in Saxon days. Ah ! if all rentiers would live like this, what could the anarchists like Monsieur Anatole France have to say ? Monsieur Bis, then, having no observations to offer, and apparently preferring his promenade, his reflections and the rubbing of his back to any intercourse with me, I was forced to address myself to the lady who had escorted me into his presence. Allow me however to disclaim on his behalf any rudeness towards his visitor. If he said nothing, it was because, under the circum- stances, he could say nothing. His manners were perfect, and I particularly noticed his very grace- 154 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH ful method of arching his back : indeed he showed himself a past master in deportment and might have been envied by Lord Chamberlains, Gold Sticks in Waiting, Masters of Ceremonies, and the whole of Turveydropdom. " Can you tell me his age ? " " No, he has only been in the house eighteen months that is to say, since Madame Dubrai came to live here." " She was very fond of him, I suppose ? " ff Beyond everything in the world. I never saw a more devoted mistress." I feel myself here treading upon dangerous ground, and accordingly make haste to explain that Monsieur Bis, the subject of my interview, was a fine tom-cat, and that Madame Dubrai, then recently deceased, had been his owner. Bis was a very handsome animal: sleek, well-fed, as be- fitted a rentier, with fluffy fur of immaculate whiteness. He had a tender expression in his large grey eyes. Biswas an heir. When Madame Dubrai died, and her will was read, it was found that she had bequeathed a sum of 9000 francs to the Caisse des Ecoles of the Third Arrondisse- ment, subject to two conditions. The first of these was that the municipality should provide that her tomb should always be kept in good repair, and the second was that her beloved tom- cat, Monsieur Bis, should be boarded and lodged for the rest of his natural life. A sum of eight pounds per annum was appointed by the testatrix to be paid to his trustees, who in return were to provide him with certain stipulated comforts. These were elaborately detailed, for, as the good MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 155 Madame Dubrai remarked while testating, "Bis has all his life been accustomed to his little luxuries/' The conditions under which he was to be boarded out were that the very first thing in the morning, he was to be served with a cup of milk in a saucer of Sevres china, to which he had always been accustomed. At midday he was to have a square meal of liver or bullock's heart, suitably prepared, or else fish, but in case of fish being served all the bones were to be carefully removed. An occasional sardine might be given to vary the menu. In the evening another square meal of similar quality was to be served. He was to sleep always in a basket warmly lined with flannel. On Sundays he was to be combed and to have a bow of blue ribbon tied round his neck. <( Madame Dubrai was very fond of animals, you say ? Had she any other pets.? " " No, only a bird, a canary/' " Is it also a legatee ? " There was no answer. I repeated my question, and lowering my voice added : " Perhaps it is dead ? " The silence was awkward. Then I saw the mistake which I had committed. Monsieur Bis, however, did not seem to mind. Perhaps he had not heard : perhaps his thoughts were still taken up with that question about the three per cents. Evidently long since he had disposed of the canary bird's claim to any interest in the legacy. " I suppose it is you who will undertake the conditions of the legacy ? " I asked. 156 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH " We are keeping him/' answered the girl, " pending the decision of the municipal council. It is rather a responsibility, and, as you see, we keep him locked up. We should be glad to keep him on, as we are so fond of him, and he is such a pet and so caressing." " Rich people are always so nice," I said. The cat looked it. I felt sure that if he could have spoken he would have said it. He looked a great many things. Amongst others that I was not to imagine that it is the summum bonum of life to have a fixed income, that property had its cares as well as its joys, that one has to pay for being great, as witness his own case. By the way, how much more expression there is in a white than in a black cat's face. A white cat is infinitely more mysterious and sinister in certain aspects, and shows itself far more complex and subtle than its black brother. What had especially aroused my curiosity in connection with this legacy to a cat was the manner in which the municipal official would con- sider the matter. In Paris there is as much of that commodity called red tape as in any other city in the world. " You see," said a representative of the munici- pality, whom I consulted on the subject, " 9000 francs will only produce an income of 300 francs. After deducting the 200 francs a year for the care of the cat, and paying for the upkeep of the lady's tomb, there will be little or nothing for the Caisse des Ecoles. It is true that the cat will not live for ever. We are informed by specialists in these matters that the average dura- MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 157 tion of feline life is twelve years, so that eventually we should step into possession of the legacy. I cannot tell whether we shall be allowed to accept it or not. We shall not know until a full report on the matter, which will be addressed to the Prefect of the Seine, has been considered. Our architect will have to inspect Madame Dubrai's tomb and estimate the cost of keeping it in repair, and a veterinary surgeon will be delegated to examine this Monsieur Bis and to calculate his chances of long- evity. The wretched brute might live a long time. Or some tricks might be played upon us by the trustees. We should have to take strong pre- cautions against a phenomenal life. We should have him photographed, and possibly marked, be- cause it would not be very difficult to substitute another white cat with grey eyes, after Monsieur Bis's decease. That vermin is all alike. We could not tolerate a Monsieur Bis a perpetuity. The mayor would grumble to see the poor children of his district kept out of their inheritance whilst this Monsieur Bis or his successor was gorging himself on sardines and cream/' As I left the Rue Fondary house I asked the girl, " I suppose people in the quartier are much interested in his story ? " "Yes," she said. "Everybody keeps asking after his health. I suppose a good many people would like to be appointed his trustees. One does not find 200 francs a year in a mule's hoof." I remember that as I returned homeward that night down the Boulevard Saint-Michel I looked into the gardens of the Cluny Museum. There is here a corner, where nightly all the vagabond cats 158 MY FRIENDS THE FEENCH of the Luxembourg quarter congregate, for charit- able souls mainly poor old women bring scraps of food for them. The Pare aux Chats, as it is called in the quarter, was filled that night with a motley crew, as I looked through the railings. Phosphorescent eyes gleamed from every bush, and here and there a gaunt form passed mewing athwart the rays of the gas lamps. What a sorry, draggled, famished, unrestful, haggard crew it was I For these no rentes, no assured saucers of fine Sevres porcelain, no flannel baskets, no ribbon bows on Sundays only the tiles, and the gutter, the dogs, the urchins, rain and cold and hunger. " Bohemian cats, my brothers/' I exclaimed, as I pressed my head against the iron bars, " when I look upon your distress, I pity you. And yet, and yet, when I think of those locked doors, whereas you have the wide world's range, and again of all the jealousies and expectations that lurk around the sleek and comfortable gentleman whom I have just seen, I take heart of courage and would like in congratulation to stroke your several backs. N'est-ce-pas, pariah pussies, my brothers, there is not one of us who would exchange our fretful free- dom for the shackled leisures of Monsieur Bis, the rentier cat ? " In a subsequent reference to Saint Germain-en- Laye I shall have a word to say about some annuitant cats and how they fared at the hands of their trustee, being less carefully protected than was Monsieur Bis, who when I was last in Paris was still living, long after the actuary's estimate of his chances of longevity had expired. I had been very fond of cats, so that the story of MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 159 Monsieur Bis and his "heritage" had specially appealed to me. There is, I think, a time in the life of every man who works with his brain and taxes his nerve-force when, however fond he may be of dogs, he grows to prefer the hourly companionship of cats. The cat is so reposeful, so quiet about the room. It seems to understand nerves, to share in one's detestation of all that shocks, and I often think that the main reason for the cat's enmity towards dogs, and its certain contempt of the canine species, is that, with their exuberance and noise and restlessness, they mar his calm. Paul de Kock, amongst other French writers, was an enthusiastic admirer of cats. He said of them that they were as capable of affection as dogs, and superior to them in gaiety, intelligence and pretty ways. "I have had cats," he writes, ~ ^_> > d) O> J.2 B> = 1 S.2'2 aj g -e 3 DH - 0> -O) i QJ -S3 /^ -^ ,-s S-s Sf J .-" "Tl E S-s ^ o en " u- = . E ou. "- 1 . I "-. e S ^ c ~ .* 5.J S S 5 '5" ^-i ^"^ ^J ^^ ^ r3 Si* o3 O^ :-. ^ o> o -/a s a. c ^ C fc S 3 S-a .- P.-S s -i I jj ^ 1" *^V3 ? ^ - S S E b 5 rt-gjE^-ga-^ g 2 3 "C O d O MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 187 canism, and that he would make an excellent, hard- working President. It was because I knew that this was the opinion held of him by most of his colleagues in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies that I confidently predicted his election. One could not well find a harder-working man. He is, next to Carnot, the French President who has worked the hardest. And a thing I have noticed in life is that it is really, after all, with very rare exceptions, only the men who work hard who suc- ceed, and only those who work hardest who succeed the most. Some few " get there " by chance, some few by the help of women, but as a general rule it is only the hardest of wprk that brings a man to the top anywhere. These men who are prominent are men who have laboured, and labour, unceasingly. I remember being told by Monsieur Carnot of his hours of work. They were certainly not less than those of some American business men of the " get- rich-quick" order. The quiet little man, with his Oriental calm, was a prince of hustlers. Three o'clock in the morning often found him seated at his desk in the cabinet de travail adjoining his bedroom. He used to go to bed at midnight and rise three hours later. He told me that he found the early hours of the morning most propitious. I made him smile by asking him what he (( worked on," meaning what refreshment he took. He told me that he only drank a little weak China tea, and asked me why I was curious on the subject. I said that I had read in Baron de Meneval's memoirs that Napoleon used to rout him out of bed the baron was the emperor's secretary at two or three in the morn- ing, a proceeding to which he objected very strongly, 188 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH and, while dictating letters to him from the inside of a very hot bath, press him to refresh himself with iced drinks or sorbets, to which Monsieur de M^n^val objected still more strongly. My reference to the Affaire du Panama reminds me that a little while ago I received from Count Ismael de Lesseps, the eldest son of Count Ferdi- nand de Lesseps by his second marriage, a very sad letter acknowledging one I had written to him condoling with him and his family on the death of his mother, the beautiful and devoted Countess de Lesseps. I noticed that he signed his letter " Lieutenant 4 e Hussards," which spoke eloquently of political rancour in France. Count Lesseps' son has been left to occupy the lowest rank of commissioned officer, after years and years of service, just to teach him, I suppose, to be the son of Monsieur de Lesseps. But in politics there is neither gratitude nor conscience; rancour and revenge, however, flourish. On my way to the West Indies last winter I had landed at Colon, and had visited the canal works, being very kindly allowed to accompany a Liberal M.P., who had warm letters of introduction to Colonel Goethals, the head of the staff there. We were shown everything the Cut, the Gatan dam, and the rest of it. The sanitary work carried out within the canal zone is a marvel of thoroughness. When the railway in the works was originally built one man died for every sleeper laid down, and on that line the sleepers are very close together. Now- adays the zone is much healthier than many American cities, and the death-rate is phenomenally MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 189 low. The authorities told me that when they first came there they found the place swarming with mosquitoes, of which they classified 700 different varieties, all deadly, though a certain striped mosquito was the worst of all. To-day it is unusual to see a single one of these insects. In this the Americans have done a very good thing, though of course there is the mosquito's point of view to be considered. The mosquito himself is no doubt convinced that he is a brisk little fellow, buzzing and lively, and cannot understand our objection to him. But altogether I did not feel about the extermination of these billions of these insects as I did when the other day I was told of the late Grand- Duke of Baden, that in the course of his sporting career and on the evidence of the grand-ducal game-books All-Highest- The-Same had killed 40,000 head of game 40,000 lives, 40,000 bright- eyed things, with soft fur and pretty feathers, and grace and speed, sacrificed for the pleasure of one single being ! While I was visiting the canal I heard everywhere with what respect Count de Lesseps was spoken of, how honourably he was remembered there, and nowhere was any other opinion of the reason of his failure held than that he was the dupe of a company which "was out for graft." Major Sibbert, the engineer at the head of the Gatan dam works, told me that de Lesseps' engineering skill, even in those late years of his, was very great. " We find that everything he did was well done. Often when we have decided on a side-track, and begin clearing the jungle, we find a side-track there already, made by the French company/' 190 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH My intention had been on reaching Jamaica to write to Madame de Lesseps and to tell her of what I had heard at Panama, but when I landed at Kingston I heard that the poor lady had just died. So I wrote to the new head of the family, Ismael de Lesseps, and told him that less than ever need the children of my old friend feel any concern because their father's name was associated in the public mind with that terrible financial catastrophe. Apropos of which I heard a little while ago from a poor woman who had invested eighty pounds, years and years of savings, in the Panama lottery bonds, that she had at last " touched " some money on this investment, the first centime that had been returned to her. The amount she had received on her bonds was one franc and eightpence eighteen- pence, in other words, less twopence halfpenny for the stamp. Ismael de Lesseps wrote to thank me for my letter. The children had been pleased with what I had said about Ferdinand de Lesseps. " Nobody/' he wrote, " who did not know him well could know his infinite goodness, his entire disinterestedness, his beautiful soul. " My poor dear mother died like a saint/' he told me, " in her full strength, and in full possession of all her mental faculties. . . . Her end was an edifying one, it was the death of a righteous woman. c Let me go/ she said ; c I shall be more useful to you up there/ c ' ' Love one another/ such were her last words. This was a saying which our dear father often used to repeat to us. It was this universal love of his which prompted him to undertake things which \ <- H M W Q 11 nil Is "<5 ^ < * W PHOTOGRAPH OF FERDINAND DE LESSEPS ON HIS DEATH-BED. Underneath is one of the last things he wrote before his mind was clouded. It was written for the author, and was his favourite motto : " Aperire terram gentibus." THE CHATEAU DE LA CHESNAYE, Where Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, died of a broken heart. To face page rgi. MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH 191 he considered would be for the great good of humanity." On one of the last occasions when Madame de Lesseps wrote to me, she sent me a memorial card of her husband's death. It is a touching little thing, which I keep ever in sight, to remind me of many things, and to prompt many thoughts on human greatness and human misfortune. Monsieur de Lesseps was one of the great men I knew who was absolutely indifferent to money. I have met many such in Paris. The great French scientists are the least money-seeking of men. I was well acquainted with old Monsieur Chevreul. He made many discoveries which, exploited by others, produced enormous fortunes : he found his reward in having invented things which made life easier and happier for men and women. Moissan was another savant who worked for no pecuniary reward. He lived on the salary paid him as pro- fessor of the Ecole de France and his own private means. This was the man who invented the electric stove and showed how real diamonds could be made out of powdered sugar a feat he once performed for my inspection. The experiment took over a month from start to finish, but was entirely successful. The diamonds were, of course, so small as to be almost invisible, but that they were actual diamonds there was no possible con- testation. c f Diamonds/' said Moissan to me, " are the result of subjecting carbon to intense heat and enormous pressure. Now look at the size of even the largest diamonds which Nature produces, with the colossal forces of heat and pressure at her dis- posal. There is not one much larger than a pigeon's 192 MY FRIENDS THE FRENCH egg. Is it therefore surprising that we who try to imitate her, with such feeble resources, cannot pro- duce anything bigger than these particles ? " The manufacture of artificial rubies, by the way, based on Moissan's discovery, has become a commercial " proposition/' I was told at Tiffany's not long ago that the effect has been to create a " slump " in real rubies. " People will not buy genuine rubies/' said the manager,