THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE PARIS NIGHTS ARNOLD BENNETT AUTISTIC EVENING (Page 1) PARIS NIGHTS AND OTHER IMPRESSIONS OF PLACES AND PEOPLE BY ARNOLD BENNETT AUTHOR OF THE OLD WIVES' TALE, CLAYHANGER YOUR UNITED STATES, ETC., ETC. With Illustrations by E. A. RICKARDS, F. R. I. B. A. GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK : : : : MCMXIII COPTBIGHT, 1913 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY CONTENTS PARIS NIGHTS (1910) PJLGE I. ARTISTIC EVENING 1 II. THE VARIETES 13 III. EVENING WITH EXILES .... 21 IV. BOURGEOIS 38 V. CAUSE CELEBRE 55 VI. RUSSIAN IMPERIAL BALLET AT THE OPERA 65 LIFE IN LONDON (1911) I. THE RESTAURANT 83 II. BY THE RIVER 90 III. THE CLUB 97 IV. THE CIRCUS 103 V. THE BANQUET 109 VI. ONE OF THE CROWD . 116 ITALY (1910) I. NIGHT AND MORNING IN FLORENCE 127 II. THE SEVENTH OF MAY, 1910 ... 148 III. MORE ITALIAN OPERA .... 154 y CONTENTS (Continued) THE RIVIERA (1907} I. THE HOTEL TRISTE . . . II. WAR! III. "MONTE" IV. A DIVERSION AT SAN REMO FONTAINEBLEAU (1904-1909} I. FIRST JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST 193 II. SECOND JOURNEY INTO THE FOREST 199 III. THE CASTLE GARDENS 203 IV. AN ITINERARY 206 SWITZERLAND (1909-1911} I. THE HOTEL ON THE LANDSCAPE . . 215 II. HOTEL PROFILES 228 III. ON A MOUNTAIN . 234 ENGLAND AGAIN (1907} I. THE GATE OF THE EMPIRE ... 243 II. AN ESTABLISHMENT 249 III. AMUSEMENTS 254 IV. MANCHESTER 259 V. LONDON 264 VI. INDUSTRY .269 vi CONTENTS (Continued) THE MIDLANDS (1910-1911) I. THE HANBRIDGE EMPIRE ... 277 II. THE MYSTERIOUS PEOPLE ... 284 III. FIRST VOYAGE TO THE ISLE OF MAN .290 IV. THE ISLAND BOARDING-HOUSE . . 298 V. TEN HOURS AT BLACKPOOL 305 THE BRITISH HOME (1908) I. AN EVENING AT THE SMITHS' . . 317 II. THE GREAT MANNERS QUESTION . 322 III. SPENDING AND GETTING VALUE . 327 IV. THE PARENTS 332 V. HARRY'S POINT OF VIEW ., . . 337 VI. THE FUTURE 342 STREETS ROADS AND TRAINS (1907-1909) I. IN WATLING STREET .... 349 II. STREET TALKING 361 III. ON THE ROAD ...... 367 IV. A TRAIN . . ... . . .374 V. ANOTHER TRAIN . 379 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE ARTISTIC EVENING Frontispiece SOME JAPANESE MUSIC ON THE PLEYEL . 6 A NEW GUEST ARRIVED 10 OPPOSITE THE "MOULIN ROUGE" ... 18 MONTMARTRE 22 LA DAME DU COMPTOIR 30 A BY-PRODUCT OF RUSSIAN POLITICS . . 40 CAUSE CELEBRE 56 THEY INSPIRE RESPECT 62 LES SYLPHIDES 68 FRAGILE AND BEAUTIFUL ODALISQUES . 70 THE UNFORGETTABLE SEASON .... 72 AN HONEST MISS . 74 SCHEHERAZADE . . .... . . . 76 CHIEF EUNUCH 78 HE IS VERY DEFERENTIAL ..... 84 THE RESTAURANT 86 THE BAND .88 ix ILLUSTRATIONS (Continued) PAGE IN THE EMBANKMENT GARDENS ... 92 HE SLUMBERS ALONE 98 THE CLUB OF THE FUTURE 102 FLOWER WOMEN . . 106 PICCADILLY CIRCUS 108 FROM BAYSWATER TO THE CIRCUS ... 110 FROM SOUTH LONDON TO THE CIRCUS . 112 FROM WEST KENSINGTON TO THE CIRCUS 116 WAITING FOR THE 'BUS AT THE CIRCUS . 118 THE ORCHESTRA PROVES THAT ITS IN- STRUMENTS ARE REAL 126 WHY DO THEY COME ? 146 LESS UNHAPPY HERE THAN AT HOME . . 150 A HUMAN BEING TALKING TO ANOTHER HUMAN BEING 166 GAMBLING AT MONTE CARLO .... 174 HOW BALZACIAN ! 196 ON THE TERRACE OF THE CASTLE . . .198 GUARDS OF^THE CASTLE . . . . . .200 THE CASTLE GARDENS 204 ARBONNE . . 210 THE CATHEDRAL OF LARCHANT .... 212 x ILLUSTRATIONS (Continued) PAGE THE LADY CLOG-DANCER 282 THE VOYAGE 292 THE ISLAND BOARDING HOUSE .... 298 YOU MEET SOME ONE ON THE STAIRS . . 300 FONTAINEBLEAU 366 THE LITTLE RIVER FUSAIN 370 ASILE DE ST. SEVERIN 372 CHATEAU LANDON 374 PARIS NIGHTS 1910 AETISTIC EVENING The first invitation I ever received into a purely Parisian interior might have been copied out of a novel by Paul Bourget. Its lure was thus phrased : tf Un pen de musique et d j agredbles femmes" It answered to my inward vision of Paris. My expe- riences in London, which fifteen years earlier I had entered with my mouth open as I might have en- tered some city of Oriental romance, had, of course, done little to destroy my illusions about Paris, for the ingenuousness of the artist is happily inde- structible. Hence, my inward vision of Paris was romantic, based on the belief that Paris was es- sentially "different." Nothing more banal in Lon- don than a "little music," or even "some agreeable women"! But what a difference between a little music and un peu de musique! What an exciting difference between agreeable women and agredbles femmes! After all, this difference remains nearly intact to this day. Nobody who has not lived in- timately in and with Paris can appreciate the unique savour of that word femmes. " Women" is a fine word, a word which, breathed in a certain tone, will make all men even bishops, misogynists, and political propagandists fall to dreaming! But femmes is yet more potent. There cling to it the associations of a thousand years of dalliance in a land where dalliance is passionately understood. The usual Paris flat, high up, like the top drawer of a chest of drawers! No passages, but multitudi- nous doors. In order to arrive at any given room it is necessary to pass through all the others. I passed through the dining-room, where a servant with a marked geometrical gift had arranged a number of very small plates round the rim of a vast circular table. In the drawing-room my host was seated at a grand piano with a couple of candles in front of him and a couple of women behind him. See the light glinting on bits of the ebon piano, and on his face, and on their chins and jewels, and on the corner of a distant picture frame; and all the rest of the room obscure! He wore a jacket, negli- gently; the interest of his attire was dramatically centred in his large, limp necktie; necktie such as none but a hero could unfurl in London. A man with a very intelligent face, eager, melancholy (with a sadness acquired in the Divorce Court), wistful, appealing. An idealist! He called himself a pub- licist. One of the women, a musical composer, had a black skirt and a white blouse; she was ugly but provocative. The other, all in white, was pretty and sprightly, but her charm lacked the perverse- ness which is expected and usually found in Paris; she painted, she versified, she recited. With the eye of a man who had sat for years in the editorial chair of a ladies' paper, I looked instinctively at the hang of the skirts. It was not good. Those vague frocks were such as had previously been something else, and would soon be transformed by discreet modifications into something still else. Candle- ARTISTIC EVENING 3 light was best for them. But what grace of de- meanour, what naturalness, what candid ease and appositeness of greeting, what absence of self -con- sciousness ! Paris is the self -unconscious. I was presented as le romancier anglais. It sounded romantic. I thought: "What a false im- pression they are getting, as of some vocation ex- otic and delightful ! If only they knew the prose of it!" I thought of their conception of England, a mysterious isle. When Balzac desired to make a woman exquisitely strange, he caused her to be born in Lancashire. My host begged permission to go on playing. In the intervals of being a publicist, he composed music, and he was now deciphering a manuscript freshly written. I bent over between the two women, and read the title : "Ygdrasil: reverie" When there were a dozen or fifteen people in the room, and as many candles irregularly disposed like lighthouses over a complex archipelago, I formed one of a group consisting of those two women and another, a young dramatist who concealed his ex- pressive hands in a pair of bright yellow gloves, and a middle-aged man whose constitution was ob- viously. ruined. This last was librarian of some public r.brary I forget which and was stated to be monstrously erudite in all literatures. I asked him whether he had of late encountered anything new and good in English. 4 PARIS NIGHTS "I have read nothing later than Swinburne," he replied in a thin, pinched voice like his features, like his wary and suffering eyes. Speaking with an icy, glittering pessimism, he quoted Stendhal to the effect that a man does not change after twenty- five. He supported the theory bitterly and joy- ously, and seemed to taste the notion of his own in- tellectual rigidity, of his perfect inability to receive new ideas and sensations, as one tastes an olive. The young dramatist, in a beautifully curved phrase, began to argue that certain emotional and purely intellectual experiences did not come under the axiom, but the librarian would have none of such a reservation. Then the women joined in, and it was just as if they had all five learnt off by heart one of Landor's lighter imaginary conversations, and were performing it. Well convinced that they were all five absurdly wrong, fanciful, and senti- mental either in optimism or pessimism, I neverthe- less stood silent and barbaric. Could I cut across that lacework of shapely elegant sentences and ap- posite gestures with the jagged edge of what in England passes for a remark? The librarian was serious in his eternal frost. The dramatist had the air of being genuinely concerned about the matter; he spoke with deference to the librarian, with chival- rous respect to the women, and to me with glances of appeal for help ; possibly the reason was that he was himself approaching the dreadful limit of twenty-five. But the women's eyes were always contradicting the polite seriousness of their tones. Their eyes seemed to be always mysteriously talk- ARTISTIC EVENING 5 ing about something else ; to be always saying : "All this that you are discussing is trivial, but I am brood- ing for ever on what alone is important." This, while true of nearly all women, is disturbingly true of Parisians. The ageing librarian, by dint of freezing harder, won the altercation: it was as though he stabbed them one by one with a dagger of ice. And presently he was lecturing them. The women were now admiring him. There was some- thing in his face worn by maladies, in his frail phys- ical unpleasantness, and in his frigid and total disgust with life, that responded to their secret dream. Their gaze caressed him, and he felt it falling on him like snow. That he intensely en- joyed his existence was certain. They began talking low among themselves, the women, and there was an outburst of laughter; pretty giggling laughter. The two who had been at the piano stood aside and whispered and laughed with a more intimate intimacy, struggling to sup- press the laughter, and yet every now and then letting it escape from sheer naughtiness. They cried. It was the fou lire. Impossible to believe that a moment before they had been performing in one of Lander's imaginary conversations, and that they were passionately serious about art and life and so on. They might have been schoolgirls. "Farceuses, toutes les deux!" said the host, com- ing up, delightfully indulgent, but shocked that women to whom he had just played Ygdrasil, should be able so soon to throw off the spell of it. The pretty and sprightly woman, all in white, 6 PARIS NIGHTS despairing, whisked impulsively out of the room, in order to recall to herself amid darkness and cloaks and hats that she was not a giddy child, but an ex- perienced creature of thirty if she was a day. She came back demure, her eyes liquid, brooding. "By the way," said the young dramatist to the host, "Your People's Concert scheme doesn't it move?" "By the way," said the host, suddenly excited, "Shall we hold a meeting of the committee now?" He had a project for giving performances of the finest music to the populace at a charge of five sous per head. It was the latest activity of the publicist in him. The committee appeared to consist of everybody who was standing near. He drew me into it, because, coming from London, I was of course assumed to be a complete encyclopaedia of London and to be capable of furnishing detailed statistics about all twopence-halfpenny enterprises in London for placing the finest music before the people. The women, especially the late laughers, were touched by the beauty of the idea underlying the enterprise, and their eyes showed that at instants they were thinking sympathetically of the far-off "people." The librarian remained somewhat apart, as it were with a rifle, and maintained a desolating fire of questions : "Was the scheme meant to improve the people or to divert them? Would they come? Would they like the finest music? Why five sous? Why not seven, or three ? Was the enterprise to be self-supporting?" The host, with his glance fixed in SOME JAPANESE MUSIC ON THE PLEYEL (Po^e ARTISTIC EVENING 7 appeal on me (it seemed to me that he was entreating me to accept him as a serious publicist, warning me not to be misled by appearances ) the host replied to all these questions with the sweetest, politest, wistful patience, as well as he could. Certainly the people would like the finest music ! The people had a taste naturally distinguished and correct. It was we who were the degenerates. The enterprise must be and would be self-supporting. No charity! No, he had learnt the folly of charity! But naturally the artists would give their services. They would be paid in terms of pleasure. The financial diffi- culty was that, whereas he would not charge more than five sous a head for admission, he could not hire a hall at a rent which worked out to less than a franc a head. Such was the problem before the committee meeting! Dufayel, the great shop- keeper, had offered to assist him. . . . The li- brarian frigidly exposed the anti-social nature of Dufayel's business methods, and the host hurriedly made him a present of Dufayel. Dufayel's help could not be conscientiously accepted. The prob- lem then remained! . . . London? London, so practical? As an encyclopaedia of London I was not a success. Politeness hid a general astonishment that, freshly arrived from London, I could not sug- gest a solution, could not say what London would do in a like quandary, nor even what London had done! "We will adjourn it to our next meeting," said the host, and named day, hour, and place. And the committee smoothed business out of its brow and 8 PARIS NIGHTS dissolved itself, while at the host's request a girl performed some Japanese music on the Pleyel. When it was finished, the librarian, who had listened to Japanese music at an embassy, said that this was not Japanese music. "And thou knowest it well," he added. The host admitted that it was not really Japanese music, but he insisted with his plaintive smile that the whole subject of Japanese music was very interesting and enigmatic. Then the pretty sprightly woman, all in white, went and stood behind an arm-chair and recited a poem, admirably, and with every sign of emotion. Difficult to believe that she had ever laughed, that she did not exist continually at these heights ! She bowed modestly, a priestess of the poet, and came out from behind the chair. "By whom?" demanded the librarian. And a voice answered, throbbing: "Henri de Regnier." "Indeed," said the librarian with cold, careless approval, "it is pretty enough." But I knew, from the tone alone of the answering voice, that the name of Henri de Regnier was a sacred name, and that when it had been uttered the proper thing was to bow the head mutely, as before a Botticelli. "I have something here," said the host, producing one of these portfolios which hurried men of affairs carry under their arms in the streets of Paris, and which are called serviettes; this one, however, was of red morocco. The pretty, sprightly woman sprang forward blushing to obstruct his purpose, but other ARTISTIC EVENING 9 hands led her gently away. The host, using the back of the arm-chair for a lectern, read alternately poems of hers and poems of his own. And he, too, spoke with every sign of emotion. I had to con- quer my instinctive British scorn for these people because they would not at any rate pretend that they were ashamed of the emotion of poetry. Their candour appeared to me, then, weak, if not actually indecent. The librarian admitted occasionally that something was pretty enough. The rest of the company maintained a steady fervency of enthusi- asm. The reader himself forgot all else in his in- creasing ardour, and thus we heard about a score of poems all, as we were told, unpublished to- gether with the discussion of a score of poems. We all sat around the rim of an immense circle of white tablecloth. Each on a little plate had a portion of pineapple ice and in a> little glass a draught of Asti. Far away, in the centre of the diaper desert, withdrawn and beyond reach, lay a dish containing the remains of the ice. Except fans and cigarette-cases, there was nothing else on the table whatever. Some one across the table asked me what I had recently finished, and I said a play. Everybody agreed that it must be translated into French. The Paris theatres simply could not get good plays. In a few moments it was as if the entire company was beseeching me to allow my comedy to be translated and produced with dazzling success at one of the principal theatres on the boule- 10 PARIS NIGHTS vard. But I would not. I said my play was un- suitable for the French stage. "Because?" "Because it is too pure." I had meant to be mildly jocular. But this joke excited mirth that surpassed mildness. "Thou hearest that? He says his play is too pure for us!" My belief is that they had never heard one of these strange, naive, puzzling barbarians make a joke be- fore, and that they regarded the thing in its novelty as really too immensely and exotically funny, in some manner which they could not explain to them- selves. Beneath their politeness I could detect them watching me, after that, in expectation of an- other outbreak of insular humour. I might have been tempted to commit follies, had not a new guest arrived. This was a tall, large-boned, ugly, coquet- tish woman, with a strong physical attractiveness and a voice that caused vibrations in your soul. She was in white, with a powerful leather waistband which suited her. She was intimate with everybody except me, and by a natural gift and force she held the attention of everybody from the moment of her entrance. You could see she was used to that. The time was a quarter to midnight, and she ex- plained that she had been trying to arrive for hours, but could not have succeeded a second sooner. She said she must recount her journee, and she re- counted her journee, which, after being a vague pre- historic nebulosity up to midd-ay seemed to begin to take a definite shape about that hour. It was the jownee of a Parisienne who is also an amateur A NKW GUEST ARRIVED (Pa^e /O) ARTISTIC EVENING 11 actress and a dog-fancier. And undoubtedly all her days were the same: battles waged against clocks and destiny. She had no sense of order or of time. She had no exact knowledge of anything; she had no purpose in life; she was perfectly futile and useless. But she was acquainted with the secret nature of men and women; she could judge them shrewdly ; she was the very opposite of the ingenue; and by her physical attractiveness, and that deep, thrilling voice, and her distinction of gesture and tone, she created in you the illusion that she was a capable and efficient woman, absorbed in the most important ends. She sat down negligently behind the host, waving away all ice and Asti, and busily fanning both him and herself. She flattered him by laying her ringed and fluffy arm along the back of his chair. "Do you know," she said, smiling at him myste- riously. "I have made a strange discovery to-day. Paris gives more towards the saving of lost dogs than towards the saving of lost women. Very curi- ous, is it not?" The host seemed to be thunderstruck by this piece of information. The whole table was agitated by it, and a tremendous discussion was set on foot. I then witnessed for the first time the spectacle of a fairly large mixed company talking freely about scabrous facts. Then for the first time was I eased from the strain of pretending in a mixed com- pany that things are not what they in fact are. To listen to those women, and to watch them listening, was as staggering as it would have been to see them 12 PARIS NIGHTS pick up red-hot irons in their feverish, delicate hands. Their admission that they knew every- thing, that no corner of existence was dark enough to frighten them into speechlessness, was the chief of their charms, then. It intensified their acute femininity. And while they were thus gravely talking, ironical, sympathetic, amused, or indig- nant, they even yet had the air of secretly thinking about something else. Discussions of such subjects never formally end, for the talkers never tire of them. This subject was discussed in knots all the way down six flights of stairs by the light of tapers and matches. I left the last, because I wanted to get some general informa- tion from my host about one of his guests. " She is divorcing her husband," he said, with the simple sad pride of a man who had been a petitioner in the matrimonial courts. "For the rest, you never meet any but divorced women at my place. It saves complications. So have no fear." We shook hands warmly. "Au revoir, mon ami. 3 * "Au revoir, mon cher" II THE VAElf Tlfis The filth and the paltry shabbincss of the en- trance to the theatre amounted to cynicism. In- stead of uplifting by a foretaste of light and mag- nificence, as the entrance to a theatre should, it de- pressed by its neglected squalour. Twenty years earlier it might have cried urgently for cleansing and redecoration, but now it was long past crying. It had become vile. In the centre at the back sat a row of three or four officials in evening dress, prosperous clubmen with glittering rakish hats, at a distance of twenty feet, but changing as we ap- proached them to indigent, fustian-clad ticket- clerks penned in a rickety rostrum and condemned like sandwich-men to be ridiculous in order to live. (Their appearance recalled to my mind the fact that a "front-of-the-house" inspector at the prin- cipal music-hall in France and in Europe is paid thirty sous a night.) They regarded our tickets with gestures of scorn, weariness, and cupidity. None knew better than they that these coloured scraps represented a large lovely gold coin, rare and yet plentiful, reassuring and yet transient, the price of coals, boots, nectar, and love. We came to a very narrow, low, foul, semi-circu- lar tunnel which was occupied by hags and harpies 13 14 with pink bows in their hair, and by marauding men, and by hats and cloaks and overcoats, and by a double odour of dirt and disinfectants. Along the convex side of the tunnel were a number of little doors like the doors of cells. We bought a pro- gramme from a man, yielded our wraps to two har- pies, and were led away by another man. All these beings looked hungrily apprehensive, like dogs nosing along a gutter. The auditorium which was nearly full, had the same characteristics as the porch and the couloir. It was filthy, fetid, uncom- fortable, and dangerous. It had the carpets of a lodging-house of the 'seventies, the seats of an old omnibus, the gilt and the decorated sculpture of a circus at a fair. And it was dingy I It was en- crusted with dinginess ! Something seemed to be afoot on the stage : from the embittered resignation of the audience and the perfunctory nonchalance of the players, we knew that this could only be the curtain-raiser. The hour was ten minutes past nine. The principal piece was advertised to commence at nine o'clock. But the curtain-raiser was not yet finished, and after it was finished there would be the entr'acte one of the re- nowned, interminable entr'actes of the Theatre des Varietes. <7* 5* (5* (5* The Varietes is still one of the most "truly Paris- ian" of theatres, and has been so since long before Zola described it fully in Nana. The young bloods of Buenos Ayres and St. Petersburg still have vis- ions of an evening at the Varietes as the superlative THE VARIETIES 15 of intense living. Every theatre with a reputation has its "note," and the note of the Varietes is to make a fool of its public. Its attitude to the public is that of an English provincial hotel or an English bank: "Come, and be d d to you! Above all, do not imagine that I exist for your convenience. You exist for mine." At the Varietes bad management is good management ; slackness is a virtuous coquet- terie. It would never do, there, to be prompt, clean, or honest. To make the theatre passably habitable would be ruin. Its chic would be lost if it ceased to be a Hades of discomfort and a menace to health. There is a small troupe of notorious artistes, some of whom show great talent when it occurs to them to show it ; the vogue of the rest is one of the innu- merable mysteries which abound in theatrical life. It is axiomatic that they are all witty, and that what- ever lines they enunciate thereby become witty. They are simply side-splitting as Sydney Smith was simply side-splitting when he asked for the potatoes to be passed. Also the manager of the theatre al- ways wears an old straw hat, summer and winter. He is the wearer of an eternal battered straw hat, who incidentally manages a theatre. You go along the boulevard, and you happen to see that straw hat emerging from the theatre. And by the strange potency of the hat you will be obliged to say to the next acquaintance you meet: "I've just seen Samuel in his straw hat." And the thought in your mind and in the mind of your acquaintance will be that you are getting very near the heart of Paris. 16 PARIS NIGHTS Beyond question the troupe of favourites consid- ers itself to be the real centre of Paris, and, there- fore, of civilisation. Practically the entire Press, either by good nature, stupidity, snobbishness, or simple cash transactions, takes part in the vast make- believe that the troupe is conferring a favour on civilisation by consenting to be alive. And the troupe of course behaves accordingly. It puts its back into the evening when it thinks it will, and when it thinks it won't, it doesn't. "Aux Varietes on travaille quand on a le temps" The rise of the curtain awaits the caprice of a convivial green-room. "Don't hurry the public is getting impatient." Naturally, the underlings are not included in the benefits of the make-believe. "At rehearsals we may wait two hours for the principals," a chorus- girl said to me. "But if we are five minutes late, one flings us a fine. A hundred francs a month I touch, and it has happened to me to pay thirty in fines. Some one gets all that, you knowl" She went off into an impassioned description of scenes at rehearsals of a ballet, how the ballet-master, after epical outbursts, would always throw up his arms in inexpressible disgust and retire to his room, and how the women would follow him and kiss and cajole and hug him, and how then, after a majestic pause, his step could be heard slowly descending the stairs, and at last the rehearsal would resume. . . . The human interest, no doubt! The Varietes has another role and justification. It is what the French call a women's theatre. When I asked a well-known actress why the entr'- THE VARlTS 17 actes at the Varietes were so long, she replied with her air of finding even the most bizarre phenomena quite natural: "There are several reasons. One is, so that the gentlemen may have time to write notes and to receive answers." I did not conceal my sense of the oddness of this method of conducting a theatre, whereupon she reminded me that it was the Varietes we were talking about. She said that little by Httle I should understand all sorts of things. * x * * As the principal piece progressed it was an operette the apathy of the public grew more and more noticeable. They seemed to have forgotten that they were in one of the most truly Parisian of theatres, watching players whose names were house- hold words and synonyms of wit and allurement. There was no applause, save from a claque which had carried discipline to the extreme. The favour- ites were evidently in one of their moods of casual- ness. Either the piece had run too long or it was not going to run long enough. It was a piece brightly and jinglingly vulgar, ministering, of course, in the main, to the secret concupiscence which drives humanity forward; titillating, like most stage-spectacles, all that is base, inept, and gross in a crowd whose units are perhaps, not quite odious. A few of the performers had moments of real bril- liance. But even these flashes did not stir the pub- lic, whose characteristic was stolidity. A public which, having regard to the conditions of the par- ticular theatre, necessarily consisted of simple snob- 18 PARIS NIGHTS bish gulls whose creed is whatever they read or hear, with an admixture of foreigners, provincials, ad- venturers, and persons who, having no illusions, go to the Varietes because they have been to every- thing else and must go somewhere ! The first half- dozen rows of the stalls were reserved for males : a custom which at the Varietes has survived from a more barbaric age, as the custom of the finger-bowl has survived in the repasts of the polite. The self- satisfied and self-conscious occupants of these rows seemed to summarise and illustrate all the various masculine stupidity of a great and proud city. To counterbalance this preponderance of the male, I could glimpse, behind the lath grilles of the cages called baignoires , the forms of women (each guarded) who I hope were incomparable. The sight of these grilles at once sent the mind to the seraglio, and the House of Commons, and other fastnesses of Orientalism. The evening was interminable, not for me alone, but obviously for the majority of the audience. Impossible to describe the dull fortitude of the au- dience without being accused of wilful exaggera- tion! Only in the entr'actes, in the amplitude and dubious mystery of the entr'actes, did the audience arouse itself into the semblance of vivacity. There was but little complaining. Were we not at the Varietes? At the Varietes, to suffer was part of the entertainment. The French public is a public which accepts all in Christian meekness all! It knows that it exists for the convenience of the bureaucracy and the theatres. It covers its coward- OPPOSITE THE MOULIN ROUGE" (Page 2 1) THE VARI^T^S 19 ice under a mantle of philosophy and politeness. Its fierce protest is a shrug.