w^KfWTVf'' ' >\ I w ' CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY "ZiAJU. (T'sP^z^ ^ DATE DUE r- ' ( — ■ t- r^Miia MUHft ^'- i. tp CAVLORO Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027325210 Cornell University Library PQ 2421.S4Z82 1893 3 1924 027 325 210 l^^^i^^ity Recollections of Middle Life BY FRANCISQUE SARCEY TRANSLATED BY ELISABETH LUTHER GARY WITH A PORTRAIT NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1893 V^ Ui 'S ' * * Copyright, 1893, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 31^5- If S' 6 , TROW DIRECTOHV PRINTINQ AND BOOKBINDINQ COMPANY NEW YORK «.' f " PROPERTY OF^'^ WfLL A. PAGeJ I PERMANENT ADDRESS, 1 K . **"* ** *««»». Northwest, 4 ^WASWNGTON, -;. D. C. 4 Introduction The reader of this volume will be likely to get a definite impression of its author, for M. Francisque Sarcey has a very distinct personality, a very lively consciousness of it, and remarkable candor in refer- ring to it. It is an interesting personality in many ways, and to a reader with the good sense to enjoy the unusual frankness of its manifestations, and the good-humor to overlook some of the more extreme, the book will bring new light on some phases of French life not often easily studied. M. Sarcey has been teacher, journalist, dramatic critic, novelist, lecturer, and for more than thirty years an eager and fortunate member of that society in Paris which embraces men of letters, artists, and the extremely varied class for whom esprit opens most, if not all, doors. In these pages will be found much, some- times important and significant, and always inter- esting, as to this curious and engaging world, le monde oil Von s' amuse, but in which there is far more hard work, vigorous purpose, and sober thought than the English-speaking reader commonly suspects. It vi Introduction may be that my own occupation has led me to value more highly at once the instruction and the charm of M. Sarcey's book than would the general reader, but it at least gives me a modest claim to attention for the statement, that a young man wishing to make journalism his calling can find in this volume some rules that he would do well to study, many sugges- tions that ought to be useful to him, and a lesson of patient industry, of constant conscientiousness, of sturdy independence and self-respect, and of invin- cible good-will, that can hardly fail to stimulate and strengthen whatever there is of good in him. With this hint as to what it seems to me that the little work may offer to its readers, it remains only to give an out- line of the principal facts in M. Sarcey's career. He was born in 1828, at Dourdan, in the Depart- ment of Seine-et-Oise, and had his schooling at the Lyc6e Charlemagne, winning honors in common with Edmond About, who was to be his life-long friend, and to exert a decisive influence over his course in later years. He entered the Ecolet,Normale in 1848, still with About, and with H. Taine, and H. d'Aude- gier. At this time he had a notion that he was born to be a musician and composer, and made efforts of heroic obstinacy to fulfil his fancied mission. He came reluctantly to the conclusion that he was mis- taken, and obtained an appointment in the Depart- Introduction vii ment of Public Instruction as professor of the third class, his first assignment being to Chaumont. But at the outset of his career he gave serious offence to the authorities by an extravagant remonstrance against the order requiring professors to cut off their mus- taches, and he never overcame the effect of this youth- ful "manifestation." He was banished to remote and unimportant stations — Lesneven (Finisterre), Rodez, Grenoble — and passed, with difficulty and slowly, through the grades to that of Professor of Philosophy. Of philosophy M. Sarcey has, as the reader will see, a varied and useful store, but it hard- ly seems of the pedagogic sort. In 1859, when the Empire was at the height of its glory abroad, and had reached the lowest depth of its meddlesome despotism at home, M. Sarcey got a year's leave of absence from duty and went to Paris, as nearly every young man of ambition was sure to do, and, as all such young men were apt to do, tried his hand at journalism. By About's friendly offices he found work on Le Figaro, and during the next year con- tinued his labors there and on numerous other journals. In i860. About called him to take the work of dra- niatic criticism on Z' Opinion nationak, in which, as he modestly says, " the most of my little fame has come to me." He resigned his professorship, not without acute regret, for it had given him "some of viii Introduction the sweetest pleasures of life," and he is able to say that he believes he was " a good, and even a rare, professor. ' ' Dramatic criticism was, however, to be- come his profession, and he followed it with rigid method, with great industry, and with deserved suc- cess. No drudgery was too tedious for him. He saw every play he wrote of, not only once, but many times, and faithfully and minutely studied every player. "I love the theatre," he wrote, "with so absolute a love, that I sacrifice everything, even my personal friendships, and, what is still more difficult, my repugnances, to the pleasure of urging the crowd to a play that seems to me good, or away from one that seems to me bad." He did not confine himself, however, to this work, but contributed various articles besides to his own and toother journals. In 1867 he joined the staff of Z^ Temps, and afterward that of Le Gaulois, and when this journal, after the war, became Imperialist, he went with About to the newly established Dix- neuvieme Steele. He had the usual varied experience of the French journalist, fought the regulation duel, was sued and fined, and passed his fifteen days in prison, d propos of an imprudent discussion of Les Bouchons de V eau de Lourdes. But his career was, on the whole, as successful and happy as it was busy and laborious. He found time to write several ro- Introduction ix mances, " Le Nouveau Seigneur de Village," a satire on the Imperial mayors ; " fitienne Monet, Roman psychologique ; " " Le Piano de Jeanne;" "Qui Perd Gagne; " "II ne faut jamais dire, Fontaine." He wrote an amusing and very ingenious little vol- ume "Le Mot et la Chose," tracing the different meanings of familiar words at successive periods and among different classes ; a story of the Siege of Par- is; an essay critical and biographic on "Paul-Louis Courier, fieri vain ; " a collection of sketches " Co- m^diens et Comediennes; " and in 1885, the auto- biographic volume, "Souvenirs de Jeunesse," of which the present is a sequel. It will be seen that his "literary baggage" is not inconsiderable, while the volume of his work in the journals is, of course, enormous. In 1889 he seriously considered whether he should present his claims, which were by no means weak, to a seat in the Academy ; but, with rare discernment, resolved not to do so. In explaining his course, he said : "I have but one ambition ; it is that on my tomb-stone may be placed the inscription, summing up my life: Sarcey, Professor and Journalist." In another place, he wrote: "I have no pretention to style, or better, I have but one. Boileau, in speak- ing of himself, has said, Et man vers. Hen ou mal, dit toujour! quelqiu chose. X Introduction As for me, my phrase, well or ill, always says some- thing." The reader of these " Souvenirs " will read- ily verify this judgment. I find it as correct as it is sincere, and, because it is so, this curious and minute and ample account of the author's experiences, meth- ods, failures, and achievements appears to me to jus- tify itself. To paraphrase his remark apropos of his first lecture at the Athente : " The reader who seeks a writer will find a man. ' ' Edward Gary. "The Times," New York, January, 1893. Contents PAGE Introduction, v I. / //. My Debut as a Lecturer, . . . ^ III. At the Athinie-Comique, ... 25 /K. The Lectures at the AtbMe, . . -44 V. The First Ballande Matinie, . . 61 yi. The Ballande MatinSes Before i8yo, . y8 yil. The Ballande MatinSes After i8jo, . 93 yill. How to Lecture, 1^6 IX. How a Lecture is Prepared, . . 1^6 X. In the Provinces, 77^ XI. In Foreign Lands, . . . • '93 xii Contents FACE XII. In Holland, 210 XIII. At the Salle des Capucines, . . 228 XIV. Difficulties of the Enterprise, . . . 247 Xy. On the Manner of Giving Lectures upon Books, 268 Xyi. Decadence of the Lectures of the Boule- vard des Capucines, .... 2gi Notes. 303 Recollections of Middle Life Recollections of Middle Life I. There are those who have appeared to desire that I should add a volume to that in which I told the story of my childhood and my youth, and my amia- ble publisher, by whom the first part of my memoirs had been issued, urged me, in the most friendly man- ner, to commence a new series of them. I hesi- tated a long time ; memories which date from that delightful springtime of life have, naturally, a grace and freshness most often wanting to those of matu- rity. The too favorable reception that the public had been good enough to give to my first volume, far from encouraging me, filled me with distrust. Some years have passed over my head since it was written. Could I recall, at will, that fine temper of the mind and that gayety of language that made the success of the earlier narrative ? I do not feel, thank 2 Recollections of Middle Life Heaven ! any bitterness toward life, which has al- ways been kindly to me. But the time is past of that happy, causeless laughter that jets spontaneous- ly from a well balanced soul in a robust body. What matter ! I will try once more. I shall open to you a little corner of my life in Paris ; I am going to show you how I became a lect- urer, and what, to my mind, a lecture is. If you take pleasure in this study — ^which will be short — ^I shall continue ; I shall tell you of my years of jour- nalism. If not, we will stop there. II. MY DiBUT AS A LECTURER I had already made something of a name for my- self in the press as theatrical critic, chroniqueur, reviewer, what-not ? for I am used to working with equal ardor at all things that concern my trade ; it had not yet entered my mind that I could join to the profession of journalist that of lecturer. For this there was an excellent reason : the lecture did not exist in Paris, and the word "lecturer" was as unknown there as was, three or four years ago, that of "interviewer." We knew, by hearsay, that in England some cele- brated writers did not disdain to seat themselves be- fore a glass of sweetened water, manuscript in hand, and to read therefrom a certain number of pages to an audience gathered expressly to listen to them. But that, properly speaking, was not a lecture. Dickens had come to Paris to give some of these readings, which were attended by hardly anyone save the English colony. We were too ill-acquainted with Shakespeare's tongue to pay twenty-five francs for 4 Recollections of Middle Life the very problematical pleasure of staring at a great writer. We had been told that in Belgium some of our political refugees, and first among them M. Des- chanel, driven to the sad necessity of gaining their living, no matter how, had intrpduced there the en- tirely novel art of lecturing. They bore from town to town their lesons, or rather their talks, which the population, and espe- cially the feminine part of the population, flocked eagerly to hear. But we had few details as to this innovation, and we said to ourselves that though it had succeeded in Belgium, where the people have more time for reflection and for tedium, it had few chances of becoming acclimated in Paris where only amusing distractions are liked. Between the Sor- bonne lesson, or that of the College of France, and evening conversation in salon or atelier, we did not suspect that there could be a place for an exercise of speech having a relation to each, not too serious nor too frivolous, and which might become for good so- ciety a recreation of high order. The first essays in lecturing took place at Paris in the month of May, i860, in a great hall which the organizers had rented in the Rue de la Paix. The purpose of these gentlemen was, I believe, somewhat political. My D^but as a Lecturer 5 In the vast silence of the Empire their idea was to found a tribune where one could, insinuatingly, quietly, under cover of history or literature, launch epigrams against the governnient. As I had always professed a complete scepticism regarding politics, caring neither to ally myself to the imperial regime, nor to combat it, I had never been thought of, aiid had received no proposition to fill that improvised chair, nor should I have consented to do so. The sessions at which I had been present by chance were not attractive. I had there seen my poor school-mate, Alfred Assolant, now dead, make his debut in lecturing. Assolant had always thrown himself passionately into politics ; on December 2d, he, professor in a city of the provinces, had gone down into the public square and called the citizens to arms. How came it that after this generous outburst he was neither Shot nor sent into exile ? As to that I know less than nothing ! He had refused the oath, given in his resignation, and had come to live by his pen in Paris. His first book, " Scenes of Life in the United States," which is a masterpiece of French "go " and British humor, had obtained an enormous success, and had brought him at once to the fore. He was a singular fellow, who joined to a rare 6 Recollections of Middle Life boldness of soul an incredible timidity of manner. These two qualities would seem to exclude one an- other — ^in him they were found together. He was endowed with a strong and tenacious will ; when once he had reached a resolution, and his resolutions were always excessive, he pushed on to the end with an invincible obstinacy. Once we saw him stand for a seat in the Corps ligislatif, in his native de- partment where he was no longer known to any one. All his friends dissuaded him from this sword-thrust in water, which would make him ridiculous. Noth- ing stopped him ; he wrote article upon article, sent circulars, begged us all to patronize his candidacy, and harvested twelve votes. Astonished at the re- sult, but undismayed, he talked of starting in again at the following elections. He took himself off, his eye lost in space, his hat far back on a brow already very bald, his long legs di- vided like compasses, in pursuit of his dream, disdain- ful of obstacles, energetic and headstrong. With- al timid — timid to a degree you cannot imagine. He never could find the word he wanted to use; without a shadow of repartee, he had not even stair- case wit. About amused himself with disconcerting him, and nothing was easier, alas ! for at the slight- est attack he stammered or grew angry. But for the most part he shut himself up against pleasantry — ^he My Debut as a Lecturer 7 who, pen in hand, could counter so readily — in a bristling silence. I do not believe that he ever in his life finished a phrase in conversation. It was precisely this war against the impossible that tempted him. Nature had refused him the speaker's gift, and he determined to be an orator. When he was applied to for a lecture in the Rue de la Paix, he did not weigh the matter for an instant, and what was more amusing, having consented to run this risk, he did not even think of putting all possible chances in his favor. He seated himself for the first time in the lecturer's chair with an ingen- uousness of confidence that is intelligible only to those who knew this inconsequent and contradictory being. He had taken for his theme the title of his book : "La Vie aux fitats-Unis." " Gentlemen," he said, with an assured air, " when one desires to set out for America — for America — when one desires to go there — one takes the boat — ^it is necessary to take the boat. ' ' His audience listened to him somewhat nonplussed. Suddenly we saw him gather up his papers, his book, rise to his feet, descend from the chair. " And I — I talce the door ! " he cried. A wild laugh ran along the tiers, no, not tiers, there was but one, which by good fortune was filled with friends. That lecture became legendary, like the one given 8 Recollections of Middle Life one evening by the celebrated Bohemian, Pelloquet, who arrived more than half drunk with one of his friends, who had drunk as much as he, and as the words fell slowly from his thick tongue : " Go in, ol' fellow," said his comrade to him in an encouraging voice, " give it to 'em straight." The second lecture at which I was present in the hall of the Rue de la Paix was that of Gaston de Saint- Valry. I take pleasure in recalMng this name, now nearly forgotten by the public. He is one of the men in our profession for whom I have had the liveliest esteem, and I believed him called to a great future. He possessed very varied and very profound learning, which he preferred to let glimmer through his articles, rather than to unfold it, having about him not a shade of pedantry. He had a horror of "snobs," and met them with a haughty disdain. He was a philosopher, and carried into his literary criticism, or into current politics, rare gifts as a moraUst; he wrote in a sober and firm style, and his prose was always full of sense. Unfortunately he only worked on journals with- out circulation. It did not displease him to be read but by a small number of good minds. There was at that time a newspaper, founded by M. Poggenpol, called Le Nord, that aspired to competition with rindkpendance Beige, which, if you remember, all My Debut as a Lecturer 9 Europe read under the Empire. As I contributed to it, I received it and read it assiduously. I had remarked some articles, which appeared three times a week, signed with a simple omega ; I had been greatly struck with the variety and delicacy of the observations in which the pen of the anonymous writer abounded, his vigor of thought and his pre- cision of language had charmed me. One day I met Gaston de Saint- Valry, with whom I was on good terms of literary comradeship, for he loved the thea- tre and liked to talk of it. " You know all Paris secrets," I said to him, " tell me who signs himself in Le Nord with an omega. He is a moralist of originality and a mas- terly writer." Not a muscle of his face stirred. "I will ask Poggenpol about it," he answered me. I learned afterward from M. Poggenpol himself that it was Gaston de Saint- Valry who, through hatred of stupid publicity, and in order also to be freer in his criticisms, screened his personality with that initial. Quite the opposite of Assolant, Gaston de Saint- Valry talked with fluency and force, he spoke with decision in an imperious and cutting voice, the right word left his lips like an arrow. Thus it did not lo Recollections of Middle Life astonish me when he informed me that he was going to give a lecture. He was an imperialist, or rather, in politics, a con- vinced and determined believer in authority. It was not unpleasing to him to carry to that tribune, where the opposition amused itself with the pin pricks of a teasing liberalism, ideas flowing from another doc- trine. He begged me to attend, and I did not fail to do so, for I liked and admired him with all my heart. I believed he would sweep his public off their feet. What a disappointment awaited me ! This robust talker, who in conversation knew so well what he wanted to say, and who said it so directly and so clearly, could no longer find his words ; he hemmed and hawed, he lost the thread of his argu- ment, and in order to regain it he was obliged to recur to his notes, and in these he lost his v.'ay. It was a painful hour both for him and for us. As he had no foolish vanity, and was unassuming, we discussed this gloomy failure freely. He told me of the singular impression the audience had made on him ; he was unprepared ; he had been frightened, and had lost his head. It was not such a very terri- ble audience either. There were not more than six- ty persons in that vast hall, and all these persons knew him ; he could count on their sympathy. It was of no use ! He could not control his emotion ; My Debut as a Lecturer n the lecture, all prepared, had fled in confusion from his memory. " It is," I told him, "what the comedians call in their argot the ' trac' " "It is one of the most disagreeable sensations in the world, and I shall not expose myself to it a second time." " Nevertheless, your ambition is to reach the Chamber." ' ' Oh ! the Chamber, that's another matter. One is there face to face with political adversaries who interrupt — who talk back. It seems to me that there I should be at ease." But Gaston de Saint- Valry was to speak no more, either in the Chamber or in the Rue de la Paix, for he was mown down in the full force of years and talent, and his loss is one of the most poignant that have fallen to contemporary journalism. These examples would have sufficed to repress in me all desire to attempt lecturing if at heart the de- sire had really tormented me. The truth is that I did not think for a moment of it. The lectures of the Rue de la Paix had never made much noise in the Parisian world. They changed their place without the public being warned of it by the ghost of a ie/ire de /aire part. There had been speaking in the Rue de la Paix before a small audi- 12 Recollections of Middle Life ence of friends. Then the speaking was resumed in the Rue Scribe, before the same audience. The great public took no notice. And nevertheless, the idea of establishing lectures had, in an obscure fashion, made its way. It was in the air, as we say nowadays. Lectures with the ulterior idea of a political propaganda had failed, as was nearly inevitable under the regime by which we were stifled. Those who dreamed vaguely of re- viving the institution took it up on another side. There was quite a notion at that period (for the Emperor affected to be the first socialist of his time) of enlightening the people, spreading instruction, all kinds of instruction, through the masses. The neutrality, and perhaps even the good will, of the powers that were, apt though they were to take umbrage, was secure, if the lecture were merely con- fined to an intellectual recreation for the middle class, with the reputed purpose of familiarizing them with the progress of the sciences, with new ideas in literature or in art. One fine morning Felix H6ment appeared at my house. Felix H^ment, who has since occupied in the Uni- versity the high post of General Inspector of Primary Instruction, and who, after having lived withdrawn from all honors, but always enamoured of teaching. My Debut as a Lecturer 13 has just died at Nanterre, was at the time I knew him half-professor, half-journalist. He was a man who was very correct in manner and dress, with a clear and amiable voice, endowed with ^ a marvellous facility in elocution, and whose hobby (and a noble one withal) it had always been to ren- der science accessible to all, lending to it all the graces of his language, touching, as our fathers used to say, the edge of the vase with honey. He became, later on, one of the happiest and most ardent promoters of those pedagogic lectures which have, in the provinces, rendered such great service to free thought and to primary teaching. But he was young at that time, unknown and without author- ity ; this project for reviving a taste for the things of the mind by the free lecture boiled in his brain, and escaped at hazard in diffused and vague va- pors. It was not yet clearly and precisely formu- lated- I had formed a friendship with him through Mil- laud, the manager of the Petit Journal, and of twenty other papers born of that one. I worked in that mill under the orders of the chief, whose nephew or cousin he was, I no longer remember exactly which. I had appreciated the extent of his information, his rectitude of judgment, and, above all, the taste for pedagogy common to us both. I felt in him gi devo- 14 Recollections of Middle Life tee who performed his devotions in the chapel whither my thoughts ceaselessly led me. He had explained to me that he had rented on the Quai Malaquais a large hall, where he planned to give three or four lectures a week — one on science, another on literature, another on history. It was a kind of free philosophical institute, for there was to be no sustained course, but each lecturer would try to awaken in his hearers new ideas on the subject chosen. He hoped that the women of the bourgeoisie would come to these sessions, and that they would bring their daughters. He proposed to me to open the literary series with a lecture on Corneille. I saw in it only a class to take and I accepted without resistance, sure of my- self, since I was taking up again for a day the calling of professor, which I had exercised for ten years. The recollection of that first lecture will remain eternally graven on my memory. It was a Monday in December. Toward three o'clock in the after- noon the clouds, which since morning had dragged, dingy and gray, over Paris, burst, and the snow com- menced to fall with silent regularity in great flakes, thick and close. Toward six o'clock traffic ceased, the streets were impassable and all the coachmen took their carriages to the stables. "I shall never get there," I said to myself, look- My Debut as a Lecturer 15 ing through the window-panes at the veil of fiat whiteness which united earth and sky. And I was not sorry either. I began to find that I had given my word to FeHx H6ment very lightly. It was not so easy as I had believed to talk of Corneille an hour running to a strange audience. Chance came of itself to my suc- cor by keeping the audience away. I set out on foot. On the quays the snow was knee-deep, and at most one could perceive at wide distances against that vast white shroud a black form detach itself, a witness in the wide silence of the de- serted street that the city was not dead. I arrived exhausted and soaked. There were five persons altogether in the hall, among them Felix Hement and his secretary ; two friends of mine who had braved that Siberian temperature to listen to me. I never knew the name of the fifth, of that heroic fifth whom I cannot compare to the fifth wheel of a coach, since he was alone my entire audience, the others not counting. Was he pleased? Wert thou pleased, brave and consoling Fifth, who, like Joab's wise woman, hast never told thy name, and hast never been seen again ? I have carried thee long in my heart, and keep a grateful corner in my memory for thee. I no longer recall whether I spoke well or ill that evening, but 1 6 Recollections of Middle Life it was for thee I spoke, and when "Gentlemen" escaped me, it was to thee that I in my gratitude addressed that polite plural. Felix Hement paid me, as he was obliged in courtesy to do, many compliments, but we did not renew the experiment. The snow lasted long enough that year of ill luck. The hearers we had counted on preferred to remain in the corner by the fire. " Et k combat finit faute de combatants.'''' I had forgotten this incident, and thought no more of lectures, when, one evening at the theatre, I was approached by a young man whose long hair fell over his shoulders, whose large, fine eyes, wide open and full of fire, his amiable smile and melodious voice, won me from the first. He abounded in gestures, and the words flowed from his mouth as water from a fountain, without pause or interruption, in harmo- nious sound. He told me that he was a lawyer, that he was com- mencing to try his hand at journalism, but that his ambition, his real and ardent ambition, was to re- store, or rather to establish, the lecture in our country. I regarded him with curiosity ; he appeared to me very young to have conceived such a project and to carry it to completion. My Debut as a Lecturer 17 It was M. de Lapommeraye. In the course of this recital I shall very often have to talk with you of Lapommeraye, for during long years we lectured together in brotherly fashion at Paris in the same halls ; together we traversed the provinces and foreign parts, where our two names are still associated in the same memories. But he had this advantage over me — ^he entered lecturing, by definite choice, at an age when one can still serve apprenticeship at a trade. Scarcely out of college, at twenty years of age, he had said to himself, " I will be a lay preacher for ladies." It is an art for which he had an instinct. He had only to concern himself with the handhng and the practice. He had from the very first — what is so rare in life — ^put his finger on his vocation. Was I born to lecture ? It must indeed be believed that I had some aptitude for it, since, after all, I have had much success and have made myself a name in it. But I never prepared myself by any study. People in general believe readily that one learns to speak by practice at the teacher's desk. Nothing of the kind ; one has no need of eloquence in a class, and I would almost venture to say that eloquence there is mischievous. A professor who likes to talk, and who talks too much, is nearly always a pretty bad pro- fessor. One obtains command over one's pupils less by 1 8 Recollections of Middle Life alluring them with grace or charm of discourse — ^for discourse is only used very intermittently in classes — I than by having the air of believing profoundly what one teaches them, and interesting one's self ardently in what they do. To believe and to love, you see, that's all there is of a professor. When I go over in my mind my college years, I see that the masters who had the most influence over me were precisely those who were not beaux esfrits, who did not know how to string elegant phrases. It was Caboche who first opened to me the secret of the language of the seventeenth century. This worthy man had a very narrow mind, and he had never in his life been able to complete a sentence ; but when in his nasal voice he read us two lines of Pascal or of Bossuet, his two favorite writers, and when stopping at each member of the period, he said, with a way of turning his right hand admiringly, "That is beauti- ful, my friends, that is beautiful ! ' ' there flashed in his gesture and in his voice a conviction so strong that we ourselves were seized with enthusiasm and we repeated, " Oh, yes, that is beautiful ! " And we found out why it was beautiful, for one always finds good reasons to justify one's sentiment to one's self. Sainte-Beuve somewhere ridicules an old-style pro- fessor of the old University, who, reading to his pu- pils the story of Laocoon in the second book of the My Debut as a Lecturer 19 ^neid, adorned it with commentaries after the an- cient fashion : " Ecce anient a Tenedo geniini tranquilla per alia." " Ecce," said he, with admiration, "there they are — it is they — one sees them coming down there from the isle of Tenedos ; gemini, coupled they swim. The poet did not use ambo : ambo would not be strong enough, they are not merely two, these two monsters, impelled by the same god ; they direct themselves together toward one end, thirsting for the same murder, tranquilla per alta. Ah, gentle- men, nature knows nothing of the vengeance that they contemplate, the sea that they cleave is tran- quil, and however high it is — alta ! it cannot stop them ! " And he continued in this tone verse upon verse. Sainte-Beuve enjoys his laugh, and perhaps indeed there is a little simpleness and pedantry in these ex- planations. But they had one merit, the child who heard them, captivated by this air of conviction, kindled by this fire, left the class admiring with all his heart and with all his strength the verses of Virgil, fragments of which he carried in his memory. A philosophical dissertation on the Laocoon of sculpture, compared to that of poetry, would per- 20 Recollections of Middle Life chance have lent itself to the employment of brilliant eloquence, but nothing of it would have remained in the mind of the student. He would have gone out of the class full of admiration for the bel esprit of the professor, as a devout woman goes from the sermon of her curi, who prides himself on his eloquence. " He has spoken well to-day," says she, with a satis- fied air. Do not ask her what he has said; she knows nothing of it. She has been moved by a vain sound of words. I have exercised, I believe, and it is one of my sweetest recollections, a strong influence over some of the pupils whom chance has gathered year by year around my chair. I do not recall a single day when I have given a developed lesson when I have been eloquent, or, to put it plainly, a fine talker. I be- lieved in the literature that I taught, I loved my pu- pils for the love of that ; it seems to me that seriously I have been a very good professor, and even a rare professor. You will pardon me this little excess of retrospective vanity. But I never in my class trained myself to the art of speech, I knew nothing of this trade of lecturer for which Lapommeraye prepared himself in public disputes with future advo- cates. He had managed his enterprise with an ability very extraordinary in so young a man. Not feeling My Debut as a Lecturer 21 himself ready to come upon the Parisian stage, he had organized a series of lectures in some of the lo- calities adjoining Paris. He had arranged now with the municipalities, now with the literary clubs of the place. He had created a little stir. One of the centres in which he had practised was that pleasant city of Sceaux, that Balzac has immor- talized by laying there the scene of one of his pret- tiest stories. He represented to me, with much vi- vacity, the interest there was in sustaining his enter- prise ; he was all aglow with hopes that seemed to me illusions. He was so pressing, and there was in his entreaties such an engaging air, that I surren- dered. I have never known how to say no. " Choose a theatrical subject," said he to me. Dumas had just achieved a grand success with — I don't remember which one of his pieces. " Suppose we take Dumas? " I asked him. " Dumas it is. But remember that you will have many young girls in your audience. ' ' " Fear not ; I'll not forget it." I had a certain number of ideas personal to myself on the subject of Dumas's plays, and I rubbed my hands in advance, thinking that they would of them- selves excite a lively curiosity, even though I did not succeed in presenting them in an .attractive form. I prepared the lecture without troubhng myself about 22 Recollections of Middle Life the cpmposition of the audience with which I should have to do. On the evening agreed upon I landed at Sceaux. Lapommeraye awaited me with some of the notables of the place, and the procession con- ducted me to the hall where I was to speak. I entered. If I should 'live a hundred years I should not lose the recollection of that moment. As far as my sight, which is not long, extended, I saw stretch, rank upon rank, the rosy faces of young women and young girls, and among these gay and smiling countenances some grave heads of papas. I was immediately conscious of a sensation that be- tween the lecture that I brought and this audience, as frivolous as it was prejudiced, there was an ab- solute incompatibility ; it was like a gust of cold air blown in my face. I trembled in all my limbs. I saw that I was lost. I was not sufficiently master of my calling to reverse the lecture at a stroke, and sub- stitute another better suited to the public. There remained to me, doubtless, in order to escape the cruel necessity of filling that hour, the means that Alfred 'Assolant had chosen : " And I, gentlemen, I take the door. ' ' I thought of it. Oh ! I protest I thought seriously of it. There is no torture compar- able to that of speaking all alone from a chair when one knows that one has nothing good to say, and that the Jittle one will be able to say will be said awry. My Debut as a Lecturer 23 It was a rout — it was a disaster. I was to see, alas ! many more of them ; but this was the first. And I could have torn my hair (I had some then) for having gone of my own free-will, without being forced to it, to seek the bitter chagrin of this dis- appointment and the shame of this defeat. Poor Lapommeraye, who was as desperate as I, showed nothing of it, that he might not add to my aiHiction. " No, no," he said to me, " it has not been so bad as you believe, and as you say. But ! there is one place " " Leave me at peace with your 'place.* I know confoundedly well that I have been execrable through- out." " Bah ! the next time you will take your revenge. " "My revenge! You're laughing at me. Never! Do you hear ? Never ! I will never lecture again. It's absurd to bring on one's self such emotions as these ! " And returning home I pondered all night on my unhappy adventure. There must have been some Parisians in the village gathering at Sceaux ; for the thing was done on a beautiful spring evening. I pictured them to myself chaffing me and my am- bitions as a lecturer ; I was furious against them and against myself — triple fool ! I should have liked to 24 Recollections of Middle Life pin them into a corner, and cry to them: "This is surely the first and last time I shall be so stupid. You'll never catch me at it again — ^no, never." I had forgotten this old proverb : " // nefaut pas dire : Fontaine, je ne boirai jamais de ton eau." ni. AT THE ATHENiE-COMlQUE It was the last month of the year 1866. The Opera was as yet only a vast work-yard shut in by boards ; the sumptuous quarter that surrounds it to- day had scarcely yet risen from the ground. The rumor spread through Paris that amid the rubbish of the Rue Scribe, then in course of construction, a kind of theatre was to be opened, destined by its proprietor to be at the same time a lecture-hall and a concert-hall. It was reported that a rich banker, M. Bischoff- sheim, the father of the one who built the Obser- vatory at Nice, and won his election as Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, had put this theatre at the disposition of a society which proposed to revive the institution of lecturing, and to organize there, under the direction of M. Pasdeloup, concerts of classical music, pledging itself to turn the receipts, if by chance there should be any, into the hands of Mme Lemonnier, directress of the Society for the Professional Education of Women. 26 Recollections of Middle Life Everything about this enterprise was gratuitous; M. Bischofifsheim had graciously declared to the members of the Society that he wished no other rent for his real estate than the pleasure of regular ad- mission. The members of the Society, on their part, had said smilingly, through their president, that they resembled all stockholders, in the sense that they counted on obtaining large dividends, but that they resembled many others in that they should not receive any. This facile pleasantry had much success. Reporting did not exist at that time as it is prac- tised to-day. However, the novelty of the thing had piqued the curiosity of some journalists who went to visit the haU before its opening. It was very extraordinary, and the descriptions of it that were given in the papers amused all Paris. As the theatre was wedged into a hotel, of which the first story was reserved for travellers, it was neces- sary, in order to keep it the proper height, to bury it in some sort in the depths below. From the street one entered on a level with the second floor, and had to descend by interminable stairs, the relations of which seemed very complicated, first to the first tier of boxes, then to the orchestra chairs. There was but one cry: "But it is a cellar! " And the Parisians, so long as this hall lasted — it became later At the Ath^nee-Comique 27 r AthSnee-Comique — knew it only by this familiar ap- pellation, " Bischoffsheim's cellar." It was very charming this " cellar ; " Cambon had decorated it with exquisite artistic taste. The stage, always too small for a theatre, was quite large enough for the lecturer's table, or even for four or five rows of music-stands. The lecture was finally fixed in a home of its own ; the austere amphitheatre of the Sorbonne was marvellously appropriate to the grave lessons that must there be delivered to an audience of select young people, and the professors of the old University ; this coquettish theatre harmonized bet- ter with one's idea of a lecture addressed to people of society. You could see in advance in these boxes, hung with red velvet, women in full dress ; aristo- cratic hands were sure to trail along the railing of these gold-embossed balconies. The inauguration ceremony was very brilliant ; lecture and concert for that time only, for the pro- gramme of the organizers provided that three days should be exclusively reserved for speaking, the other four for music. I was present at that seance ; I had been specially invited by Eugene Yung, one of my old schoolmates, publicist of the Journal des Dibats who, in his character as Secretary of the Society, had been charged with the starting and direction of the enterprise. He opened the meeting with a very neat 28 Recollections of ^VUddle Life address, in which after having paid the musicians the tribute due to these brilliant collaborators, he be- trayed a livelier taste for the lecture which was about to be acclimated among us. He spoke with infinite grace of style of what he expected of the new insti- tution, which he compared to the Royal Institute of London. "Distinguished men," said he, "who may wish to speak instead of writing, can seat themselves in this chair in the midst of this hall. Those who shall have made great discoveries, and may not have of- ficial chairs from which to announce them to the learned world, may come here. From time to time there arrives from the depths of Africa, or some other extremity of the universe, a traveller who, at peril of his life, through a thousand sufferings, has penetrated regions which the foot of a European had never trod. He has seen people with strange customs, professing the most singular beliefs : ' Come here, Monsieur,* we shall say to him, ' you will doubtless write the ac- count of your explorations, but you will give us great pleasure in recounting them to us by word of mouth. And be assured, Monsieur, our memory will keep with- out difficulty the lasting impression of what we thus learn, of what we gather from your lips.' " When the audience had dispersed, I went behind the scenes to grasp the hand of Eugene Yung, who At the Athen^e-Comique 29 was full of joy at his success, and to congratulate him. I could not refrain from expressing to him my anxiety as to the difficulty of recruiting lecturers. " There will not arrive each week," I said to him, " a traveller from the depths of Africa; great inven- tors who know how to talk of their discoveries are very rare, and as for the distinguished people on whom you count, I believe they will principally dis- tinguish themselves by refusing your offers. You will very soon have exhausted the stock of known lecturers. " I shall find others," he answered, and as I ven- tured a gesture of doubt : "You will see that I shall find others," he re- peated with an air of allusion so direct and so trans- parent that I cried impetuously, " Oh, no, no, not I ; never, do you hear ; never." And I returned to the house repeating to myself the peremptory and definitive never. I had sworn ; I was resolved to hold to my oath. Five or six days afterward Eugene Yung entered my house. I ought to say that I expected his visit, and had prepared to defend myself, for I knew by experience that there wasn't in the world a man more difficult to hold out against. It was not only that he possessed very persuasive eloquence. Cer- tainly, good reasons and delicate flatteries abounded 30 Recollections of Middle Life on his lips ; you felt yourself slowly enveloped by his logic, at once supple and strong, without being able precisely to tell at what point you were most seri- ously pressed. He had the charming, the irresist- ible gift of seduction. But what made him one of the rarest managers of men I have ever known was that he possessed a sixth sense, which warned him of the peculiar character of the person with whom he had to do, and opened to him what Virgil called faciles aditus et mollia tetnporafandi. In the same way he knew the public, by a subtle and delicate sense of unimaginable accuracy. He foresaw just the thing that would be the most pleasing to it, and for how long it would be pleased. It is due to these remarkable qualities, that all the enterprises to which he applied himself turned out well. He was an incomparable director of a Review. It was he who drew La Revue Bleue from the miser- able condition in which it was vegetating, and who gently, without having the air of taking much pains, conducted it to the degree of prosperity in which we now see it. He excelled in ferreting out from the young writers those whose talent was suited to the taste of his readers ; he indicated to them his subjects, he corrected them with discreet hand. He had a singular art of awakening the curiosity of the multi- tude as to the work with which he was occupied ; he At the Athenee-Comique 31 never practised obvious or noisy rtclame, he never stooped to purchase notoriety — that too easy and vulgar process was repugnant to his artistic taste. You remember what Figaro, an artist in intrigue, said : "To enter anyone's house by night, to trick a man of his treasure, and receive for it a hundred blows with a stick — nothing is more easy. A thou- sand dull scamps have done it, but to undertake a dangerous thing, and to carry it out well and escape peril, that is the refinement of skill. ' ' These words came to me when I saw Eugdne Yung at work. To have advertising by paying for it — a fine thing truly ! He was more delicate ; he played, like a biUiard expert, only difficult shots. He enjoyed talking with chroniqueurs of every order, suggesting to them articles for which he gave the broad outlines, so to speak, into their hands. He had a miraculous knowledge of the keyboard of the Parisian press, and each key on which he lightly placed his finger gave the sound that he expected. He was a dilettante,- a virtuoso of notoriety. Everyone was surprised suddenly to see in the papers articles spring forth and bubble up about a question of which no one had thought the evening before. It was he who, wrapping himself in silence and mystery, had, without appearing to touch them, put in motion the press and the public. 32 Recollections of Middle Life I recall as if it were yesterday how he organized the lectures which Pere Hyacinthe, become M. Loy- son, gave at the Cirque d'Hiver, and secured a triumph for him. It was not an easy thing to fill that vast hall for an orator who was execrated by the Catholics and in great discredit with the freethinkers. The entire press took on at the same time, without noise or shock, a tone of sober emotion. Eugene Yung had had the skill to group around the former preacher of Notre Dame the most marked men in politics and literature. All the fine ladies came to see the sight — the success was enormous. The amus- ing thing about it was that Pere Hyacinthe inno- cently attributed all the merit to himself. Eugene Yung had gently warned him that the curiosity of the public would not extend further than the third representation. "I will guarantee you three houses," he said to him. The excellent man would believe nothing of that ; he said to himself that he should be quite as eloquent the fourth Sunday as the three others, and on that day he was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. I have very often verified in Eugene Yung the justness of this instinct. He knew his Paris and he knew men. He took it into his head to make lect- ures given in the Rue Scribe take. I doubted not At the Athenee-Comique 33 that he would succeed in this as in everything, but I had decided not to embark in that ship. She would assuredly arrive safe in port, but what gain to me if I fell into water ! I had been to hear the first lectures that initiated the series. The audience had frightened me. It was a very mixed audience, very composite, diffi- cult to move because it had no points in common, either of ideas or of sensations. In the balcony and in the boxes were women very much dressed, some even in full dress, who came there to pass the time until the hour for the opera or a sa/on ; in the or- chestra and parterre some professors, some students, and a number of worthy citizens of all professions and without profession, for whom the theatre was too dear a pleasure. The cafe-concert had. not yet swal- lowed up that clientele. How was one to please people of such diverse origin. Neither Taine nor Weiss succeeded perfect- ly in doing so. Heaven knows, however, with what authority and conviction the one, with what ele- gance and vivacity the other spoke ! They both gave excellent lectures which would have carried away an audience at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, or at the Sorbonne. They were listened to, they were applauded, but it was evident no one was stirred to the soul. Neither of the two orators, 3 34 Recollections of Middle Life although trained in the trade, had for a single instant gathered all hearts into his hand — ^held them atten- tive, excited, charmed. It seemed as though the public, in lending them an indifferent ear, were ful- filling a duty of social decorum. It was the fashion to spend one or two hours of the evening in the Rue Scribe ; people went there as a matter of good form, yawning behind closed lips — ^interrupting their half- naps with little "ohs" of feigned satisfaction, as when a charade is given by amateurs in a parlor. "And you," I cried, at Eugene Yung's approaches, " wish me to go before this bored and blasi audience to play a violin solo. I who do not know the vio- lin ? I have not even the excuse of Sostene in ' The Saltimbanques.' He had never tried. I have tried, to my cost, and have been hissed." Eugene Yung let the storm pass over. He knew me by heart, having been an associate in the Ecole Normale and later in journalism. He was not una- ware that I am of an impetuous and headstrong tem- per, but that one can easily lead me with a little pa- tience, for I am weak in will as I have already told you ; I have never in my life been able to say no. He showed me over and again how, day by day, this audience had gained in homogeneity, though it was still lacking ; that it would be an interesting task for the lecturer to meet it and form it ; that it At the Athenee-Comique 35 was animated with the best intentions, and brought to these sessions a kindhness and a curiosity that I did not suspect. He sounded to me the advantages of conquering by words a world into which my feuilletons had not yet penetratfed ; he recited to me the names of illustrious men who had promised him their co-operation ; shouldn't I be happy to find my- self in such good company ? He flattered my polemic instincts, he told me that I could bring before this audience some of the quarrels that I had raised in the newspapers and gain the battle a second time. He turned and re-turned me in a hundred ways, and I knew nothing to re- spond but, " No, it is not possible ; I shall never dare — do not insist," and he insisted the more, for evidently I was weakening. "Listen," said he, "try it at least once. You know whether I understand how to make up a house ; very well, I will make yours for you." " Ah ! yes, I know them — these houses made up beforehand — these houses full of friends. They are the more terrible for those who fail." " But no, I will give the hint to the ladies." In brief he was so insinuating, so urgent, that I could not longer resist him. I made a gesture of acquiescence. " I will, since you wish it." 36 Recollections of Middle Life " It is sworn ? " he asked. "It is sworn." All that remained was to find a subject. The search was neither long nor difficult. It was a mat- ter of course that I should talk about the theatre, since the theatre is the subject of my most usual meditations, and the most of my little renown has come to me from the studies I have made of it from week to week in Le Temps. I had been working for a long time to gather to- gether the elements of a theory of dramatic art, which I was always going to write and never have written. But is not happiness in this world the having in pros- pect a fine work which you can do and do not do, since the day that it is finished you will no longer care much for any one thing. I had reflected a great deal on the subject of the conventions of the theatre, and I had a certain num- ber of ideas concerning it that seemed to me to be sufficiently new. They are no longer so now, for I have put them into circulation, and every one has since taken them up to refute them or to confirm them by other arguments. Between ourselves, they were not new even then, for I found them later on where one finds all ideas believed to be new, in Aristotle. But, after all, I had thought them over for myself ; I had given them the turn of my mind ; I had imag- At the Athenee-Comique 37 ined for them unforeseen applications to the plays of the time. It seemed to me that in setting them forth I should interest at least a part of this public, the part which prided itself upon philosophy. "The conventions of the theatre," cried Eugene Yung; "admirable subject! You will be billed to-morrow, and you shall see what success you'll have! " He pressed my hand with affection. When he had gone I fell back into all my terrors. I reproached myself for my weakness, I called myself a coward and an imbecile. But the wine was drawn. It was then that an extravagant, foolish, absurd idea came into my mind, an idea which makes me tremble still when I think of it, for it promised nothing less than to run my head into the black hole of an irreparable blun- der, but which appeared to me most reasonable and the brightest idea in the world. "What has been your aim?" said I to myself, " in accepting the risk of this lecture ? It is to see if you have received from nature the gift of speaking. For without the gift in all art, one does nothing, one accomplishes nothing. If you learn your lecture by heart, or if you write it out and read it, or even if you prepare it too exactly, you may get applauded like your fellows, but you will learn nothing of the prob- lem set you. The best way is not to think in ad- 38 Recollections of Middle Life vance of what you will say. You know the subject of which you are going to speak clear through ; fix the order of the points upon which the development will hinge; but, the larger divisions of the lecture determined, rely for the rest on improvisation. If that works, you have the gift. If you get mixed up, you haven't it. The trial will be conclusive — you will not begin over again and they will let you alone. This reasoning was most ridiculous. For even men who have, as old Boileau said, received the secret influence from heaven, whose star at birth has made them orators, even these feel, when they have a lecture to deliver, the need of long and thorough preparation. M. Thiers, before bringing a discourse to the trib- une, delivered it and redelivered it ten times — twenty times — before an audience of friends. Add to this that he had for a long time had a bent that way, and that he knew the trade. I had never exercised myself in the art of speech-making, and there I was pretending to hold forth on a phase of aesthetics without having thought out or arranged the developments with which I must surround it, without troubling myself as to the way in which I should present them to the public. It was a ques- tion of my staking my whole fortune on a game of ecarU, and I discarded trumps. It was senseless. At the Ath^n^e-Comique 39 Yes, it was senseless ; but I gained this by it, that I passed the week before th*e lecture in wonderful tranquillity of mind. It seemed to me that it was someone else that was going to attempt this advent- ure, and I watched him do it, telling myself that he would probably break his neck ; but, after all, it was much the same to me. My heart only commenced seriously to beat on the morning of the great day. I was seized with an unrest that amounted to illness. Fear lashed me more furiously as the hour approached. I felt all the impertinence of my conduct, I saw the danger yawning under my eyes. I had scarcely touched breakfast that morning ; it was impossible for me to eat anything in the evening — my stomach refused food, and every mouthful choked me. I was in a pitiable state. At home they begged me to send word that I was ill, that I had been seized with a sudden hoarseness. I rejected these propositions with horror. I held it a principle in journalism that the only excuse for not "doing" one's article was death on the previous evening. I considered a lect- urer bound by the same obligations. When you are advertised you must go, cost what it may ; one has no right to skulk. But with what ardor I wished that the gates of heaven would open and let down a frightful shower, or even that fortunate snow which 40 Recollections of Middle Life had already saved me from a first defeat. But no, the night came on serene. I had resolved to go on foot to the theatre. The streets were full of people, and of each carriage that passed in the direction in which I bent my steps, I thought with trembling that there was perhaps behind those closed windows one of those before whom I should fall : Ave Ccesar, morituri te salutant. The evening was divided between two lectures. Mine was the second on the programme. I had, then, a good hour to wait in the salon of the foyer, to which Eugene Yung had led me. I was so pale, so dejected, that he had thought all encouragement would be useless. He had, after some words about the kindly disposition manifested by the audience, left me alone to my reflections. They were very gloomy. I imagine that one condemned to death, about to be conducted to the guillotine, entertains sentiments not very different from those that agitated me. It was by turns an overwhelming depression, barren of thoughts like a whirling in void space, and, immediately after, a boiling of the blood and an anxiety that would not permit me to remain quiet. I drew out my watch every instant ; let us end it soon for the love of heaven, I thought ! It was in- tolerable torture. I gathered all my forces to present a good coun- At the Athenee-Comique 41 tenance when I was summoned, but I was so troub- led that I made upon entering the most idiotic of mistakes. High up at the back of the stage, where the orator stations himself on lecture days, and which 'is occupied by the orchestra on the evenings of the concerts, there is an organ which is reached by a gal- lery. I have not very good eyes ; 1 was very much agitated ; I imagined, I know not why, that it was from this gallery that I was to speak. I ascended to it rapidly and I had no sooner made my appearance there than I heard from the dimly perceived distance a sound of an enormous burst of laughter. I stood confused, and instantly Yung, running after me, overtook me upon my perch and led me, laughing himself with all his might, to the table where the traditional glass of water awaited me. Everyone writhed with laughter. Yung laughed as well; in faith the blunder was so funny that I began to laugh also. It was a farcical effect, and I was going to speak of the theatre. I drew from the incident a very gay exordium, and the laughter con- tinued. Once started, all my fright disappeared as though by enchantment. I knew very well what I wanted to say if I didn't know how I should say it, and what I wanted to say was worth the trouble of saying, I assure you. They were absolutely personal ideas that I could confirm 42 Recollections of Middle Life by a crowd of facts borrowed from the current repertory of the theatre. Once embarked upon my demonstrations I forget entirely that I have an au- dience before me ; it seems as though I am chatting with a friend. I put into it the heat and verve that I bring to ordinary conversation ; I venture — or rather — no — I do not venture — ^the word is not a just one ; all the familiarities of the most unconstrained intercourse flow naturally from my lips ; when a word fails me I ask for it — it is blown to me from the audience ; I return thanks, and they shout with laughter. I cannot complete a single phrase, but the audience does not care, it has the appearance of be- ing enormously amused. It thought to see a lect- urer, it had, as someone said, found a man. A large man, with a good-natured face, with exuberant gestures, but without style, speaking with fine frankness, a little common in bearing and lan- guage, but so convinced — so impetuous ! And then, confound it ! there was another thing — I had some- thing to say and I said something. The audience felt borne along on this torrent of badly chosen and incomplete phrases toward an idea that was just and (I insist upon this) novel, or at least un- usual. The success of this first lecture was, as happens in Paris with everything relating to the theatre, pro- At the Athenee-Comique 43 digious, and out of all proportion to the reality. Yung fell into my arms in a transport : " Well, was I right ? You are ours. When shall the second one be ? " It was all hand-shakes and congratulations. As for me, I was as if stupefied and intoxicated. I seemed to walk in a dream. I returned arm in arm with my friend Laurier, who was, as is known, one of the most brilliant law- yers in Paris. "You've spoken," said he, "as a crow pulls nuts. It remains now to do with art what you have done unconsciously to-day ; you have invent- ed by chance — as three-quarters of the inventions are made — a style. You must make it your style. That will not be, perhaps, so easy as you think." Ah, no ! it wasn't easy; and I was not long in folding it out. IV. THE LECTURES AT THE ATH^NflE In the first intoxication of my unhoped - for suc- cess I had consented to give a lecture every week. How was it that my turn could come round so often ? Ah ! the explanation is simple enough. Eugene Yung had to provide six lectures a weekj as there were three evenings devoted to the lecture, and two lectures each evening. Now, lecturers were rare. The most illustrious among them upon whom he had believed he could count, had not obtained permission from a disturbed and jealous government to speak in this tribunal ; thus Messrs. de Saint-Marc Girardin, Jules Simon, Laboulaye, Albert de BrogUe, and Augustin Cochin found themselves refused per- mission to appear at the Athfeee; others, members of the Institute, who had practically agreed to give lectures, had withdrawn upon learning the interdic- tion that had fallen upon their colleagues, and had not wished to avail themselves of a favor that would seem to be a privilege. I remember that one even- ing I was advertised with M. L6on Say, whose name The Lectures at the Athenee 45 had even been agreed to by those in power. But the subject chosen by him was not pleasing in high places. Notice was given him, at the moment of his Stepping on the stage, to change it. M. Leon Say, instead of sulking over this ukase, received it with a pleasant smile, seated himself in the chair provided for him, recounted his mischance to his hearers with the utmost grace and wit, improvised a very pleasing exposition of the New Paris of M. Haussmann, and retired more warmly applauded than if he had deliv- ered the lecture promised. These stories had none the less an unpleasant echo. "Among the men of great reputation and of great talent upon whom we had counted," wrote Eugene Yung, two weeks after the opening, in the Revue des Cours littiraires, which has become the Revue Bleue, "many have put themselves upon their guard, since they have known what losses the list of lecturers has suffered, preferring to wait and see what names would replace those prohibited. Whatever may be the merit of the orators who have filled the void caused by this interdiction, it will be remarked that, the lecturers whom the Athdnfe has lost in spite of itself, were precisely of the number of those who were to have raised the new lectures to a high level at the very first, and given them a character such as would attract to them public attention and esteem. We 46 Recollections of Middle Life were right, then, when we noted as one of the prin- cipal obstacles to the success of the lectures the ill- will of the authorities." This voluntary or forced abstention of so many men of talent stood me in good part. I was only a debutant and offered only hopes. You know, or perhaps you do not know, what ardor thrills one after a first success. I no longer felt any doubts. It seemed to me that a crowd of subjects for lectures arose from the already considerable mass of my feuilletons and danced before my eyes. I caught them on the fly. " Subjects ! " said I to Yung, with the joy and in- fatuation of a parvenu, " I have enough of them to last till die judgment-day." I did indeed have enough of them to last through some months of the winter at one a week. I hardly know of any exercise that has been more useful to me even in my trade as writer, than the one to which I gave myself up for that season with the extraordinary fervor of the neophyte. I proposed to myself to ex- hibit to the audience at the Ath6n6e all my theo- retic views upon the theatre. I was naturally obliged to disentangle them, and to render them clear to myself. I afterward tried them by the infallible touchstone of the audience, and I was obliged to re- ject some of them. It is needless to say that I do The Lectures at the Athene'e 47 not wish to enter here into the details of the ideas emitted and the theories sustained by me ; I only aim at recounting to you my impressions and the progress that I made day by day in this art, to me quite new. You fancy, perhaps, that I gained assurance in proportion as I became familiar with the public. It was not so at all — quite the contrary. If you chat with dramatic artists concerning their debuts, all, or nearly all, will tell you that they commenced seri- ously to feel fear only when they were better able to measure the difficulties of their art. Without doubt one experiences the first time one appears upon the boards the particular sensation that actors have called the " trac ; " but when one is young, one ignores the peril ; one plunges on with unreflecting breakneck fury. It is like children who, by running, have crossed in a breath a narrow plank thrown from one to the other edge of a torrent's abyss, and who turn afterward and look, distracted with terror, upon the path they have followed, and say to themselves with pallor, "I can never cross that again." I spoke every Thursday. With what emotion did I see the fatal day come round ! All the week I had turned that unfortunate lecture in my mind, and as the hour approached for producing it before the pubUc it brought chills of dread and terror that I 48 Recollections of Middle Life still feel merely in thinking of it. I was tormented with all the anguish of uncertainty, never knowing whether I should succeed in mastering the audience, or whether I should fall flat. There was no half-way with my temperament, which was aggravated by my inexperience ; it was a smashing success or a tumble into a bottomless pit. And I could foresee nothing. Success or tumble de- pended — on what ? I could not just say — on every- thing, and on nothing ; on a first sentence coldly re- ceived ; on a lady who rose to go out ; on a chilly wind from the flies blowing unexpectedly across the back of the neck ; on the least incident which, days that I was ill-disposed — days marked with a black pebble — sufficed to upset me and strike my brain with a sort of paralysis. I continued to speak, for there was no way of stopping or of fleeing ; but I heard words reel off" by themselves and fall from my lips independently of me, and it seemed to me that they had no sense, and I sweated with shame and pity watching them flow. Those evenings I went back home despairing and furious. I went to bed and could not sleep. I have never understood better than on these occasions the force of the popular saying : Son sang ne fait qu'un tour. I felt indeed that my blood whirled through all my entire body with a sort of dull roar. The Lectures at the Athenee 49 and beat impetuously in my arteries in great pulsa- tions. Fever kept me awake until daylight. This abortive lecture rose from the depths of the dawn, and its developments presented themselves to my mind which worked then with a marvellous clearness. The words flowed abundantly, true and picturesque ; it was thus it should have been said ; where was my head? And it was precisely on those evenings of disaster that there were always auditors of mark in the hall, auditors who had been drawn by the noise of my budding reputation ; what would they think of me ? I had a foolish longing to cry to them, " This doesn't count ! Come next Thursday." I would rise from these sleepless nights horribly weary and heavy-eyed, my whole body as bruised as though I had received twenty blows from a cane, and I would set to work to prepare the next lecture. " I do not understand you," said to me a woman of society, who did me the honor to interest her- self in my attempts, " I do not understand how you can feel as you do. Lecturing brings you neither money, for you are paid nothing to speak of, nor glory, for no journal speaks of it unless sometimes to make fun of you. Supposing that you make a repu- tation for yourself of this order, where will it lead you, since it will never become acclimated in Paris ? It is much time and labor lost ! " 4 50 Recollections of Middle Life I felt the force of these reasons, but I had been gifted by nature with the tenacity of a bull-dog, which never lets go the prey that he has once seized in his terrible jaws. Failures irritated without dis- couraging me. I returned to the charge with all the more passion and energy. Nearly every week the Revue des Cours did me the honor, which it very rarely accorded to my colleagues, of giving an ac- count of my lecture. It was a young man, M. Leon Ferrier, now a dis- tinguished professor in our University, whom Eugene Yung had charged with this duty. These analyses, written with infinite care by a judicious mind which knew how to let the light fall on the essential points, which discussed my ideas after reporting them, re- animated my ardor each time. I was enchanted to see myself so well understood, and often even dis- proven in so intelligent a fashion. We did indeed have some fine evenings at the AthenSe. I recall two, which at the time made their little furore. I had been led by I forget just which comedy of MoliSre, and as at this time I was being fed on Stendhal, I set forth the idea, which constantly recurs in the Racine and Shakespeare of the great romancer, that Moliere had, in order to please Louis XIV., jeered at those who live by their intelligence and labor; that he had given The Lectures at the Athenee 51 them up to the ridicule of the cburt of the great king. I had felt the moment I spoke thus a certain re-, sistance in my audience. I persisted in going on, and suddenly casting aside the lecture prepared, I threw myself heart and soul into the development of this paradox. It was a great success, for when the whim took me I could have applied to myself what Perrin says of himself in "La M6tromanie : " "II part de moi des traits, des eclairs, et des foudres." I find in the report given by Ferrier an echo of this evening. The chroniqueur of the Revue spoke therein of the applause that I had roused. "It was provoked," he added, "by the familiar vivacity of his speech ; by the abundance and ingenious turn of his ideas ; by the curious and piquant recollections with which he sustained his arguments; by words that were even boldly and wittily profound ; above all, by the warmth with which he expressed, a pro- pos of his paradox, honest and sincere convictions. But " There was a but; there were indeed many of them. My colleague, M. Deschanel, was present at this lect- ure. Yung urged him to respond ; he promised to do so the following week, and you can imagine what 52 Recollections of Middle Life a crowd this oratorical tournament drew. I was beaten, first, because I was wrong at the foundation. I had let myself be carried away by the pleasure of astonishing and quelling a rebellious audience, and I had exposed myself in pushing to the farthest limit an idea which could only appear just if it were pre- sented with all sorts of attenuations and corrections. Again, it was because M. Deschanel was one of the masters of lecturing. The session that day was most brilliant. " What I cannot render," said Ferrier after having succinctly analyzed it, "is the courteous fi-ankness that M. Deschanel brought to this discussion ; it is that sure and supple speech, natural and elegant ; it is that ease without affectation, that knowledge of his public, that wit always matched by good sense, that veiled archness of bonhomie; it is the art of bringing in happy citations which throw light and sparkle upon the subject ; it is an animated and re- fined reading, that preserves the freshness of life in the masterpieces, and makes us see new intentions and shades even in Moliere; it is, in fine, all the qualities that make M. Deschanel one of the lect- urers most listened to and most enjoyed by the pubHc." There is not a word too much in this eulogy. There have been at the Ath6n6e a large number of The Lectures at the Athenee 53 lecturers whose merit I have not been able to appre- ciate, for in the evening I was generally called to the theatre by my functions as critic. But I have often had occasion to hear and to admire Deschanel. He was charming, he was exquisite. From the first moment of his entrance on the stage he charmed the public ; there was so much elegance in his bear- ing, such grace in his manner of bowing and seat- ing himself He slowly drew, with gentle noncha- lance, pearl-gray gloves from his hands, which were small and dimpled ; he stirred the sugar in his water with a dainty gesture; he threw over the audience a bright glance charged with sympathy. He com- menced in a low voice, which rose little by little until it reached all ears. Did he read ? Did he recite ? Did he improvise ? I believe, indeed, that he employed in turn all three processes, which he knew how to mould into a harmonious whole. The sentence flowed without effort from his lips, always correct, sometimes embel- lished with metaphor, pointed from time to time with a shaft which he launched with a delicate smile, unless, indeed, he affiected to disguise it by an air of indifference that made its intent only the clearer. He had a marvellous way of preparing for, and in- troducing, quotations, which gained in value from his clear and vibrating voice, his rich diction. He 54 Recollections of Middle Life was in full possession of his trade, which he had learned at Brussels ; there was such a certainty in his utterance that in listening to him the audience never felt uneasiness as to the result. They aban- doned themselves to the pleasure of following speech so sure, so elegant, so harmonious ; of seeing an even, steady light spread over the subject treated. When by chance the orator hazarded a digression, it was certain beforehand that he would not lose him- self; that after having beaten the bushes and raised from them ingenious ideas and witty mots, he would return, by a detour known to himself, to his prin- cipal theme, where he would disport himself with gleeful and charming ease. This manner formed a perfect contrast to mine. The difference, which was all to his advantage, lay in this, that he carried his to the furthest point of perfection of which it was capable ; that he played upon it with the sure hand of an accomplished virtuoso ; that he was a master : while, as for me, I was only a student still defective in the fingering of his instrument, and continually disconcerting the public by his incoherence and his defects of execu- tion. " You are insupportable," said to me the lady of whom I just now spoke. " You seem so little sure of yourself when you begin that one scarcely breathes ; The Lectures at the Athenee 55 one is afraid of some horrible break-down ; one suf- fers from the discomfort with which you appear tor- mented. ' ' With all that, I had my partisans, and I believe that I shall wound none of those who occupied in turn with us the tribune of the Ath6n6e, in saying that of all the orators produced by Yung, Deschanel and myself were able to pique most keenly the curi- osity of the public. Moreover, it must be noted that the others merely passed across the stage ; He- ment, Lapommeraye, Gasperini, and others never spoke with such assiduity as we. Their success was the success of an evening, and was rarely renewed. We two remained constantly in the breach. Yung even proposed, upon the request of his pub- lic, to put us both on the bulletin for the same evening. We readily lent ourselves to that ar- rangement, for there was never a shadow of jeal- ousy between us, and we always maintained a foot- ing of good comradeship — deferential on my part, as I had been Deschanel's pupil at the Normal School, and held him a master in the art of lecturing ; be- nevolent and amiable on the side of Deschanel, who. felt, indeed, that my order of eloquence (pardon the word; I have no other at hand), with its familiari- ties and its somersaults, could only the better set off the sustained elegance of his own. 56 Recollections of Middle Life It was arranged between us that first one and then the other should begin. This produced a phe- nomenon that Eugene Yung had not foreseen, nor yet had we, and which was repeated too often to be attributed to chance alone. When one of us had in the first lecture a brilliant success, and had stirred the audience, the other who came after him found it ill-disposed and almost cross. It is very probable that the contrast between our two manners was too violent for the audience to pass easily from one to the other. I never saw Deschanel upset but once ; but then he was seriously so. I had spoken with spirit. He commenced, and, thanks to that sixth sense with which true orators and old comedians are gifted, soon felt that he did not have his audience in hand. He was vexed. It chanced that the temperature that day was low without, and the stage, owing to an ac- cident to the heater, was insuificiently warmed. "Heavens! gentlemen," said he, half-seriously, half-jestingly, " I protest that I am freezing. You see that my voice shows it. Will you permit me to wrap up my throat ? ' ' He drew from his pocket a silk handkerchief, wound it about his throat, and continued to speak. But his irritation was plain. " 'Pon honor, gentle- men," said he, smiling, "I am very sorry, and I The Lectures at the Athenee 57 ask your pardon j but it is impossible to put two ideas together that have common-sense when I' have cold feet. I am obliged to stop here and make you my apologies." He gathered together his papers and his books and rose, without emotion or embarrassment, like a man of society taking leave of his hostess and her company. They laughed heartily and applaud- ed. He had saved himself, most sensibly, from a misstep. We should have asked Yung to separate us, but the season of lectures was drawing to a close ; the incon- venience, if there were any, would not be of long duration, and it was imprudent to interrupt an ac- quired habit. The public, accustomed to see our two names on the bulletins, would perhaps cease to come if there were one only. Thus we went on to the end, and finished the campaign — a campaign that must needs be, and that was, unique. Yung had been able to satisfy himself of the diffi- culty of the enterprise, and the increasing coolness of society toward it. I have told you that he was not a man to set his head against public opinion. He had expended, in order to carry this experiment through the year, much activity, address, and tact. He had saved his honor. He announced that M. BischofFsheim took back his hall to make a theatre of 58 Recollections of Middle Life it, and that neither lectures nor concerts would be resumed. There was a widely spread belief at that time that the lecture could not live except in the shadow of the concert ; that it ate up the money that the latter made. Nothing was more incorrect. The lectures brought in the receipts and filled the void made in the treasury by the concert. I had formerly in my possession the exact figures, which I have forgotten. But I find in the Revue des Cours litteraires a note signed by Eugene Yung himself, which is very sig- nificant. It was dated in the month of April, at the time when lectures and concerts were at their height : " Is proof desired that the public is interested in the lectures, and that it commences to rank them with pleasures worth paying for ? Let us take the financial side, the brutal fact, which is this : The lectures bring profit to the administration of the Athen6e, and that cannot be said of the concerts. Yes, in spite of the care taken by those in au- thority to clip the wings of the lectures, hindering them from their true flight ; in spite of the wrong done them by the erroneous opinion of society as to the pretended subordination of literature and science to music ; in spite of all that, and in spite of the novelty of the enterprise, the lectures, sustained by the growing taste of the public, contribute to the. The Lectures at the Athene'e 59 prosperity of the AthSnee, which, on the contrary, is compromised by the enormous expenses of the con- certs." I saw the institution disappear not without cha- grin. I had taken a fancy to the lecture, I finished by liking the emotions which it gave me each week. Journalism was beginning to pall upon me; I had become almost indifferent to the praise or blame which the feuilleton brought me. I knew so well that of so great a number some must succeed and some fail : " Sunt mala ; sunt qutsdam bona, sunt mediocria jilura," I could have said with Martial. And then, whether a newspaper article pleases or bores the public, one is not notified of it at once ; one does not feel the instantaneous and burning sensation of it ; while as for the lecture — the lecturer is the actor on the stage ; he neither succeeds nor falls half-way ; he comes out covered with bravos or is thrown over. There are emotions, painful, doubtless, because they are keen, but, after all, emotions ; and emotions are — life. To do to-morrow what one has done the day before, what one is sure of always doing very well, or nearly well, that is fine progress truly. One might as well be a cog in an administrative wheel, at eighteen hun- dred francs a year. Nothing is amusing but strug- 6o Recollections of Middle Life gle ; to contend hand to hand with any chance what- soever, to fell or be felled by it, is true happiness. The gamblers know it who sacrifice to this happiness their fortune, their health, and often their honor; the passion for politics, what is it for the most part but the need of struggle, and the need for strong emotion ? That is why so many old men are in the Chamber, in the Senate, and everywhere, and are crazy over it ; they have at their age no other way of giving themselves those charming thrills of hope and fear. These thrills I regretted. "Well, it is over," I said to myself when I learned of the closing of the Athenee. "It is a pity." I did not suspect that I was going to reappear in a larger theatre, and take up with a wider eclat a new series of lectures. V. THE FIRST BALLANDE MATIXEE At that time — I speak of the year of grace 1869 — there were no Sunday matinees at the theatre, and no one imagined that there could be any. One morning there appeared before me the man who is entitled to the honor of having attempted the enter- prise, and who brought the project to me in the first heat of its conception. It was M. Ballande. M. Bal- lande was at that time very little known to the pub- lic at large ; it might even be said that he was not known at all. He had been, on leaving the Conser- vatory, engaged at the Comedie-Fran^aise to play there the heroes or the confidants of tragedy ; had never been able to make himself a place there that he thought worthy of him, and was enrolled in Rachel's troupe when the great tragedienne organized her first tour through Europe and the two Americas. He was not long in quarrelling with her. And when he was asked why Ph^dre had parted from her Hippolyte, he had no scruple in relating the causes of their falling out. Mile Rachel was jealous of 62 Recollections of Middle Life him : when, after an act in which he had thrown the audience into transports, he was recalled with great shouts from an enthusiastic audience. Mile Rachel saw with spite that when the two together reappeared to make their bows, all the applause, in place of going to Chimene, was addressed to the Cid. She could no longer support this crushing companionship ; she had eliminated him from her troupe. She had often bitten her lips over it ; for it was he who had given her precious suggestions for her roles, and he knew from a trustworthy source that, many times, seeing the cold reception given her, she had cried : " Ah ! if Ballande were here ! " But Ballande was there no longer. He recounted these things in a measured, gentle tone, with an air of quiet conviction, without giving the least evidence that he aspired to the presidency of the Republic. He was a cold Gascon, crafty and unctuous. Gray hair falling straight over his shoul- ders framed his broad and placid face. His move- ments were slow and majestic. Often he forgot him- self and spoke of himself in the third person ; it was a mark of deference that he owed to his talent. This Gascon was a redoubtable man in conversa- tion. When he commenced to elaborate an idea, the stream ran with the continuity of a tirade of tra- gic Alexandrians, and all hope had to be renounced The First Ballande Matinee 63 of stopping or checking it. He was of the race of those from whom there is no escape, except by leav- ing in their hands the button by which they hold you. I trembled at his aspect. I knew that he would give his ears to get back into the ComSdie-Fran^aise, and that the Comedie-Fran^aise wished no more of him. He had more than once entertained me with the decadence of studies in tragedy in France ; he did not leave me ignorant that he was the only artist in the world who could restore to the Rue Richelieu the cult of Corneille and of Racine. He had been Rachel's master ; he would know how to form other tragediennes. " Et de David iteint rallumer le flambeau." He pronounced it " Steingt," for he had the Southern accent, but so little of it, so little ! It was the clove of garlic in the leg of mutton. That touch of accent only heightened the flavor of his diction. Rachel had envied him it ; but it was one of those qualities that cannot be acquired later at will. One must be caught young ; must have been born in the land of truffles. I settled myself to listen to the eulogy of the tragedy and the account of Rachel's last tour ; he did not say "the great Rachel," nor simply 64 Recollections of Middle Life "Rachel;" he said "Mile Rachel," with an em- phasis in which there was a shade of paternal protec- tion and of wounded sensitiveness; one could hear beneath it, " Mile Rachel, who was my pupil, and who paid me for my pains with such black ingrati- tude." But no ; it was not to be a question this time of his contentions with the ingrate Rachel. He en- tered, grave, mysterious, collected, with the air of a bishop who, from the dais, gives the Holy Sacrament to the company of the faithful ; he brought to me a project as great as the world, a project which he had long meditated upon and matured ; a project which was going to revolutionize dramatic art, and in which he had need of my co-operation. I listened to this magnificent preamble with a certain anxiety. These Southerners are terrible people; one never knows with them if he has to do with a crank or with a practical joker. " I have made an arrangement," said he, " with the director of the Gaite : he rents me the theatre for Sunday afternoons through the winter, and I in- tend to invite the public to representations which I shall give of the masterpieces of classic tragedy." I looked at him to see if he was not making fun of me. He was as serious as a pope. "Pardon," I said to him, "but tragedy already The First Ballande Matinee 65 draws but poorly at the Comedie-Fran^aise, even though it is played there with proper surroundings and by artists of talent. It is folly to hope that with a troupe picked up at hazard in the streets of Paris, on Sunday, between two and five, you will gather a crowd into a theatre dedicated to fairy shows, to see there the Cid ot Fhedre." He smiled benevolently. "I count," he said, " upon two innovations to attract the public. The first is a reduction of the price of seats ; the orches- tra and the balcony at forty sous, the first boxes at three francs, all the other seats at twenty sous ; I wish to democratize art." And he treated me to a superb tirade on the taste of the people for fine works. " Let us pass on to the second," I said to him. "It is precisely for the second that I come to claim your aid. I think of having the representation preceded by a lecture, in which the orator shall ex- plain to this new public what is to be shown them, and put them au courant with what they should know in order fully to enjoy it. ' ' This proposition would have nothing odd about it now. You must recall that time in order to compre- hend how astonished I was. Classic drama trans- ported to the Galt6 ! On Sunday, by daylight ! A lecture before the performance ! S 66 Recollections of Middle Life I saw myself speaking in a theatre, a showman for a magic lantern. " Ah, well," I cried, " if you believe that by add- ing a lecture to a tragedy you have more chance of alluring the Parisians, you are very much out in your reckoning. Tragedy is not too much in favor, but the lecture is in full discredit. We have just made a trial of it. After a year of struggle Yung has been forced to renounce it, and his Athenee has be- come a theatre of vaudevilles and operettas. You will have two repellant forces, one upon the other. The lecture will put to flight those attracted by the tragedy, the tragedy will repel those who like the lecture, if there are any remaining. You will have no one." Ballande was not one to be upset. He recalled to me the campaigns that I had so often conducted in journalism in favor of the great classic art, and above all, of tragedy ; he held high before me the glory there would be in reinstating it, triumphant, in a large theatre, in initiating the young generation in the masterpieces of the past. If he had cast his eyes upon me, it was because I was the only one who was capable of this task — I, who was at the same time professor, journalist, and lecturer. He understood nothing of my hesitation. He re- proached me with it. In truth he spoke with much The First Ballande Matinee 67 heat, and there was an air of sincerity in all that he said by which I could not but be touched at heart. You must have noticed from these confidences in which I am so free about myself, that if I am very prompt in seeing the difficulties of things and in measuring the inconveniences, I am easily enough turned toward the opposite opinion if I am pressed with arguments that seem to me sound and solid. " After all," I said to myself, " this devil of a man may indeed be right. At heart the French nation has in its blood respect and taste for tragedy ; who knows if it is not, after all, awaiting an occasion to see it elsewhere than at the Odeon or the Comddie- Frangaise, where it is the understood thing that it bores people." The more Ballande saw me weaken, the more he pressed the sword into my side. "Listen," I said to him, finally, "give me three or four days in which to reflect and consult. You have no need of an immediate response, since you will only open Sunday week." He pressed my hand and took himself off, believing his cause gained. And in fact I felt at the outset a great leaning toward a trial of the enterprise. "What do I risk," I thought within myself. " Suppose we do not succeed, and that is what we must expect, the undertaking will not be the less 68 Recollections of Middle Life honorable. There is no shame in falUng when the end one seeks is very noble. It will be a slight an- noyance, it will not be anything grossly ridiculous." I was nearly decided when I had the unhappy idea of speaking to my friends about it. Will you take a piece of advice, my readers ? When you believe a thing good in itself, and you have any desire to do it, never consult anyone. One can predict with certain- ty that a general who assembles his council of war will not fight. I had for friends people of wit, Paris- ians ; and the wit of Parisians, when they have it, is by preference sceptical, and, to cut it short, blagueur. Every Tuesday in those days I had at breakfast from a dozen to twenty of them — sometimes more, sometimes fewer — ^who had chosen my little apart- ment in the Rue de La Tour-d'Auvergne as a place of rendezvous. We lived poorly enough there, but very gayly. There were a thousand foolish things said, and never a word of politics. To this accomplished Areopagus I explained Bal- lande's proposition and asked their counsel. Among my habituis there was a clubman very well known in the clubs and on the turf. It was Mosselman, who is dead now. Mosselman was a fantasist, who piqued himself on knowing all circles of Parisian society, but who took pleasure only in those where people amused themselves. He was very well regarded in The First Ballande Matinee 69 Parisian high life, thanks to his enormous fortune, to his illustrious relatives, thanks also to his caustic wit. None the less he haunted, quite like Hugues Leroux, the huts of the rag-pickers, and the booths of the mountebanks. I have touched glasses in his company with the Hercules of Neuilly. It was Laurier who brought him to me one day, on Tuesday morning, to breakfast. As the house offered a constant procession of people of letters, artists, and actresses, he wilhngly came again. He was one of the most faithful, and we all liked him for the simplicity of his manners, and the humor of his conversation. He bore his millions amiably and gayly. We chaffed him on his immense property and on his race stables. When a new lady guest first took seat at my table, Mosselman was always pre- sented to her as the millionaire of the house. She would regard him wide-eyed, and everyone would cry in chorus, "Ah ! how beautiful is fortune." I had hardly, at dessert, told my plight to my guests when Mosselman arose, seized a cane which was lying around in a corner of the dining-room, and drawing it along the wall, began in the voice of the man who exhibits a magic lantern : " Gentlemen, you are going to behold Phedre, the most amorous personage of the company. Phedre, appear " 70 Recollections of Middle Life An actress who happened to be there stood erect, shaking with laughter, and leaned close against the wall, gliding after the fashion of shadows which pass thrown upon the white screen. "Admire, gentlemen," cried Mosselman, his face without expression. " She loves Hippolyte. Rise, Hippolyte. ' ' He continued for some time in this tone, enamel- ling this improvised show with original sallies and absurd puns. We roared with laughter, I with the others. The same day Ballande came for my reply. " Decidedly no," I said, in a tone so emphatic that he could not but see that it was a final resolu- tion, and there was no use in insisting. He seemed surprised and chagrined. "Really," he said to me, "I had counted on you ; I believed you had more spirit of initiative and courage." The fact is I was none too pleased with myself. I had yielded solely to the fear of ridicule, and my conscience quietly, but keenly, reproached me. Why recoil before this risk — I who had run so many others ? I did not recognize myself in this coward- ice. But what would you ? I saw again the tracing of Mosselman's cane upon the wall. I had in my ears the laughter which his exhibition had called forth. The First Ballande Matinee 71 And I had, nevertheless, more than once sworn never to pay attention to this Parisian ridicule, which I knew to be the worst dissolvent of bold initiative. But one does not always keep the vows one makes to . others ; those to one's self are not to be kept more faithfully. I tried to sweeten what bitterness my refusal must have for Ballande. I promised to announce his en- terprise with a flourish of trumpets ; I told him that doubtless he would not be obliged to give up the lecture ; that he would find a less timorous man to take the floor on the opening day. "Oh," he said, with superb confidence, "I am not troubled ; I will have, cost what it may, a lecture, if I have to give it myself. ' ' I looked at him with admiration. I was on the point of saying, " Well, no, I will give your lecture." I know not what shame restrained me. I pressed his hand with confusion. I heard an inner voice which reproached me with having committed a pusillani- mous act. It was the 17th of January, 1869, that that first representation was given. I had loyally announced it ; I had heaped eulogy on both enterprise and im- pressario. I had tried my best to pique the curiosity of the public. I did not believe much in the great effect of this "puffing." 72 Recollections of Middle Life Le Cid had been announced. Le Cid had not been brought back to the stage by M. Perrin, in the brilliant fashion that is now known ; when it was played at the Com6die-Fran9aise, on a summer even- ing, there were six hundred francs receipts. I doubted whether any one would come to see it, mounted as it now would be. Among the artists who had promised to play, some had taken fright like my- self, and freed themselves at the last moment. Mile Debay had been forced to learn in a week the role of ChimSne, abandoned by the actress — ^half-way cele- brated — ^who had accepted it at first. The Cid him- self had fled at the last moment. "So be it," Ballande had said, "I will play Ro- drigue. ' ' And between ourselves I imagine he was delighted with this accident ; his secret ambition was to show to the Parisians, in one of the great tragic roles, the master of Rachel, and to bury the dagger in the heart of the Com^die-Fran^aise. Other artists had shown signs of withdrawing, it was such an unprecedented undertaking, one that ap- peared so extravagant, to give a representation in the afternoon — and above all, a representation of tragedy. Ballande remained firm. He alone — it was enough t The heavens themselves seemed to conspire against him ; it was abominably cold that Sunday, and the The First Ballande Matinle 7^ rain fell by bucketfuls. " The unfortunate man will not have a cat," I said to myself as I went, more from duty than preference, to the Gatt6 theatre. I was very much surprised : the hall was nearly full — a very animated, and what appeared to be a very sympathetic crowd. The curtain rose on a spectacle with which my eyes have since become very much familiarized, but which was then entirely new : A table, surmounted by a glass of sweetened water, and behind that table a gentleman, erect, in a dress- coat. Ballande had finally discovered a willing lecturer. It was an unfrocked priest, who besides, certainly had the air and face of one, M. Chavee, a learned linguist, deeply versed in the study of Sanskrit, who had given, I believe, some public lectures on the spe- cial subject of his studies. He is dead now : so I can say without fear of wounding him that he was more conversant with the Aryan language than with the theatre. He scarcely spoke of the Cid, which he seemed to know rather confusedly; it was more a sermon than a lecture. He spread wide his arms, leaned on the table as he would on the arm of a chair, quoted the fathers of the Church through his nose, and softened his voice where tremolos were called for. One could decently praise him only for the courage with which he had consented to intro- 74 Recollections of Middle Life duce this novel institution j he wandered from the point, and was, frankly, execrable. The performance was hardly better. I had never in my life heard Ballande, it was the old method in all its horror. He sing-songed the Cid, and always with that deuced accent ! Poor Debay, who was, after all, a charming wom- an, and in comedy an agreeable actress, had only taken a week in which to learn the role of Chimene. " I fear that it is perceptible," she had said to me modestly. Was it perceptible ? Great heavens ! Yes ! It was perceptible ! And the others — what sticks they were ! They had been clothed, doubtless, by the costumer on the corner, by contract. For Ballande looked after the economies. There was a sense of haste and improvisation, and the prompter was very busy in his box. I met at this performance one of my old schoolmates, a fanatic like myself on the subject of the old repertory, and as I returned with him, "It is a dead and buried business," he said to me. This was not my opinion. I already knew too well the habit of the theatre-fre- quenting public to mistake certain signs which are perceptible only to people in the business. It was evident that all the defects of execution which had The First Ballande Matinee 75 shocked intelligent and serious judges had not even been remarked by the crowd, troubled neither by the wretchedness of the decorations, nor the poverty of the costumes, nor the insufficiency of the actors, nor the dropped or halting lines. It had brought a good will to this representation that was most significant. It listened to both lect- ure and tragedy with extraordinary attention ; at cer- tain moments even it had been transported, and the applause had broken forth on all sides. It was Dumaine who had been charged with the role oi Don Diegue. Dumaine, whose diction had always been open to ridicule, never spoke the Alex- andrine over-correctly ; but he had a magnificent self- confidence, a superb voice, sensibihty and warmth. Hand-clapping and cheers greeted him ; Maubant had never seen such an ovation. It seemed as though all these people had never seen the Cid, and that they had discovered its beau- ties for the first time. It was an entirely new pubhc with which one had to do in these Sunday matinees. Collegians who were very much in the way on Sunday at home, be- tween two and six, and whose relatives brought them there as a preparation for the baccalaureate; the fetits bourgeois, smitten with respect for the old rep- , ertory, who were attracted by the moderate price ; 76 Recollections of Middle Life workingmen seeking occasion to instruct themselves cheaply ; studious young people consumed with love of the theatre, all that floating population who on a Sunday when the sun is hidden know not what to do with the afternoon, to them immeasurably long. The Catholic clergy, who are not stupid, had in the day of faith filled these long dominical hours with prayers and vesper chants. Vespers had disappeared from our customs and nothing had come to fill the void. " These will be our lay vespers," I said to myself. On the Monday following, in the paper, I launched the mot, which was repeated everywhere and had its vogue. This new public was not very difficult, for all sorts of reasons ; the first being that anything seemed to it better worth while than the weariness of staying at home ; but there were many others. It brought to the theatre not the idea of seeing an amusing specta- cle, but a firm resolution to be instructed. What do I say ? To be edified, to commune in Corneille or in Racine ; it never arrived, as it does in the evening, with full stomach, in the fever of digestion, some- times heavy. It had that freedom and lighthearted- ness which is given by a healthy body. It was not, as it is at the Comedie-Frangaise, or even at the Od^on, haunted by the remembrance of great artists who had made their mark in the classic roles ; it was The First Ballande Matinee n not hindered in its expansions of curiosity or enthusi- asm by the majesty of tradition, by the superstition of high art. It had felt a fresh impulse of admira- tion ; it was bon enfant. I took account in an instant of all these considera- tions, which had not struck me the evening before, and I felt a bitter regret that I had not attached my name to the first manifestation of this work, for which I saw a long and brilliant future. I proved once more the truth of the maxim that one does nothing in the world with that "good sense ' ' which doubts or which mocks, and that there is nothing but faith for moving mountains. Ballande had put aside every timid motive, how- ever reasonable to ordinary logic. He had believed, he had marched ahead ; it was he who was found to be in the right. He had convicted the wise men of error. On the morrow of this session I saw Ballande, and extended my hand to him. "Well," I said, "I am with you, whenever you wish. Would you have me deliver your second lect- ure?" "I accept," he said, "and in return I promise you not to play again in my performances." This Gascon was not without wit. VI. THK BALLANDE MATINflES BEFORE 1870 So it was I who gave the second lecture at the Ballande matinees. They played that day "Les Horaces" of Comeille. I have never forgotten that attempt, because the re- membrance of it links itself in my memory with that of an incident which was for me food for long reflec- tion. It was then 1869, and I do not know if you remember it, but the idea of universal peace was in great favor. The deputies of the opposition refused, amid the applause of the public, the credit asked for by Marshal Neil for the reorganization of our army ; a league was formed of the Friends of Peace, which published pamphlets upon pamphlets in which war was cursed and given over to the execration of the nations ; a journalist of much spirit had opened in a very wide-awake journal a department under this title, "The Gayeties of the Sabre," in which he rallied the military men on their mania for appearing in public with their arms, as if one ought ever to have need of arms in the era of peace, which we had just The Ballande Matinees Before 1870 79 inaugurated. Peace was the mania of the moment — ■ the French must always have one. As I had to explain "Les Horaces" to an audi- ence of collegians, I had shown them that when two nations are neighbors, and join each other at many points of their territories, they quite naturally in time of peace form, by way of marriage, alliances between families of different countries, which war rudely sun- ders if it suddenly breaks out. "Thus," I said, "let us suppose a family of Alsace, the son of which should espouse a young girl born in the grand-duchy of Baden ; Germany declares war against us " At this moment there was a sort of outburst of dis- approval in the hall, and from the midst of this dis- turbance came several strident hisses. I paused in astonishment, comprehending nothing ; a gentleman rose from the orchestra, and in a very animated tone, "The supposition is infamous," he cried; "it is a want of patriotism. ' ' The word gave me my chance ; I turned toward the man and apostrophizing him directly, I told him what you would have told him in my place, that in case war broke out I was sure he would be the first to go to the front ; that we should all go. "Yes, all, all!" 8o Recollections of Middle Life And I continued. I had reconquered the audi- ence. I should have had them all against me had I persisted in explaining my thought, — which was the simplest in the world, — if I had had the stupidity to give reasonable reasons. But it must be that I was born for eloquence, for there immediately mounted to my lips a phrase of pure foolishness, a sentimental foolishness which lifted the crowd of simple creat- ures off their feet. The fact is, that on this vast stage, before this immense audience, I felt myself immediately more at ease than I had done in the more limited frame of the Ath^nee. The exuberance of my gestures, • the movement of my entire person, the familiar audacity of my language, the outbursts of a naturally very sonorous voice, and of a diction nat- urally ample and vivid, harmonized better with those empty spaces, where I moved in perfect liberty be- fore these twelve hundred heads turned toward me, which I swayed with my hands spread out be- fore me over the railing. There remained to me of that frightful malady of the " trac," which had of old besieged and paralyzed me, only a sUght num- ber of symptoms, of which I did not rid myself until much later, and which even to this hour, after thirty years, reappear, Uke an old gout — the days de grande premiere. The Ballande Matinees Before 1870 8i At the moment when the curtain which separated me from the spectators rose, my mouth used instantly to become parched, and it was impossible for me to retain in it a particle of moisture, even by gulping down swallow upon swallow ; my tongue became thick and heavy, and it was a most painful effort to move it. My voice mounted to my head, I heard it high and piercing as though it had been some other voice than mine ; I was stupefied and discon- certed by this tone, which was strange to me. It seemed to me that the words, articulated with diffi- culty, reeled themselves off aside from my will, and I sought in vain to pick up the phrases that fled from me. It was a very unhappy state, which only lasted three or four minutes. I knew, through the con- fidences of my colleagues in lecturing, and of many dramatic artists, that the greater number had experi- enced the same distress. I know of no remedy ; I tried everything. A physician had given me I don't know just what substance, that I must chew at the moment of going upon the stage, and which had the property of exciting the secretions. It was in vain that they were more abundant at the moment I was to appear before the public. The noise that the curtain made in rising was sufficient to dry them up. I tried learning my exordiums by heart, think- ing that all trace of emotion would disappear, and I 6 82 Recollections of Middle Life should be like Master Petit- Jean, sure of my com- mencement. But I had no memory, and my trouble was augmented by the efforts I made to recapture my poor phrases. I finally resigned myself to the three minutes of torture. How many times, as I was awaiting the moment to go upon the stage, comrades or friends seeing me preoccupied, anxious, nervous, have said to me in a tone of compassionate reproach : " How is this? You, after so many years of suc- cess, you who are sure of your audience, get yourself into this condition ; it isn't common-sense." Heavens ! yes, I was sure, or nearly so, of my audi- ence ; heavens ! yes, I was without anxiety as to the final result, being perfectly prepared ; but I knew that, come what would, I must cross those three frightful moments ; and I went over it in anticipation. Habit only, and confidence in one's self, cure this fear. I know actors who, after thirty years of fame, coming upon the stage the day of a first performance, no longer find, as they say, a cent's worth of saliva, and speak with their voice in the air, which they have in- finite trouble in bringing down to the chest. I once saw an artist, whom it is needless to name, interrupt himself in the midst of a long recitative, to go to a table where were placed for the requirements of the piece a carafe of water and two glasses, pour one out for himself and swallow it, and his throat once moist- The Ballande Matinees Before 1870 83 ened, come down the stage and resume in his natural voice the passage that he had broken off. He would otherwise have been incapable of going on, so dry was his throat. With Mile Sarah Bernhardt " le trac" used to show itself by a symptom peculiar to herself; her teeth would shut violently together by a sort of unconscious contraction, and the words would no longer come from her lips, except hammered out with harsh sono- rousness. She only found her natural voice again when she became mistress of her emotion. The even- ing of her debut at the Comfedie-Fran^aise, as it was for huge stakes that she played there, appearing for the first time before a public hostile to her, with a role which was not within her range, that of Mile de Belle-Isle, she spoke through the three first acts in that metallic voice which issued as though ground between her teeth. The effect was disastrous. She has never been able entirely to rid herself of this tic which takes her on the days of her great struggles. She has had the wit to make of this defect a manner, and has used it, and has imposed it on the public, and you see that the parodists who imitate her in the bur- lesques always try to reproduce this hammering of sound, ground out between shut teeth, which had at one time been only a symptom of fear with her. During the two theatrical seasons of 1869 and 1870 84 Recollections of Middle Life I made a very brilliant campaign at the Galte ; the Ballande matinees were, like everything else, inter- rupted by the war, and were only resumed in 1872 with a new eclat. It was in that year and the three which followed that they had their most glorious period ; but before retracing for you, at least in its general features, its interesting history, I must tell you what became of the lecture during the siege. It was, with public readings, one of the rare distractions of those funereal days. The theatres were closed, for there were no longer any troupes ; the men were serv- ing in the National Guard. At the advanced posts the women were caring for the wounded in the am- bulances. And naturally there was little thought of laughter at that time, and no one had the heart for comedy. But it was easy to ask of an artist to recite a poem for an occasion, of a lecturer to treat a sub- ject which would not clash too much with the pre- occupations of the public. In this way, at slight expense, a soirie was given for the benefit of the wounded. Some of these soiries were very interesting. Verses were read there in which Banville derided the Prussians, in which Man- uel solemnized our sorrows and consoled us for our reverses ; but it was especially Victor Hugo, and after him Francois Copp6e, who contributed to these repre- sentations. How many times have I not heard during The Ballande Matinees Before 1870 85 those soiries the celebrated piece, " L' enfant avait re(u deux balks dans la tete, ' ' or the famous piece of the " Chatiments," " II neigeatl, il neigeait." The lecture was nearly always on the programme. I had given many of them by that time, and on all sorts of subjects. For I was beginning to speak with great facility, and without long preparation. One only remains deeply graven on my memory, be- cause it was the most terrible scrape of my life, and if I tell the story of it, it is that it may serve as a lesson to the young people studying this calling. M. Pasdeloup conceived the idea of resuming, at the Cirque d'Hiver, in the daytime of a Sunday, his customary concerts of classical music, and as he feared that this diversion would hardly seem in harmony with our troubles and despair, he bethought himself, in order to correct whatever there might be too fashionable in this pleasure, to interpolate a lecture between the two parts of the concert. The lecture seemed to him to be funereal. He applied to a ven- erable ecclesiastic, whose name has escaped my memory, to open this series. Picture to yourself, in this day and generation, a cur6 in his robes, standing erect in a cirque, deliver- ing a sermon between a Mozart sonata and a Beet- hoven symphony; but there was no longer place in our souls for Parisian fooling. Everything was 86 Recollections of Middle Life taken seriously, even tragically. The address of this worthy priest was very short ; he told us in good strong terms that we must not persist in the idle contemplation of our misfortunes ; that music was a relaxation in which we should renew our courage ; that art lifted up one's heart and gave one premoni- tions of God. Commonplaces, but spoken with much good feeling and force by a man evidently accustomed to speaking to crowds from the height of a pulpit in a great church. His voice was full of authority, and it rang with marvellous strength through the vast hall. This little discourse was, under the circumstances, a kind of master-piece, so appropriate to the time and place. I was ravished by it, and when M. Pasdeloup came to ask me if I would be willing to give the second lecture, I accepted without reflection ; when the other had so easily succeeded why should I not have the same success ? I saw none of the difficulties of the enterprise. I engaged myself carelessly, and thought no more of it, so to speak, up to the eve of the Sunday when my turn would come to appear on the stage. " Bah," said I to myself, "it is only a matter of ■ twenty minutes' speaking. I can certainly get through that. I have done more difficult things." The programme advertised Beethoven's Pastoral The Ballande Matinees Before 1870 87 Symphony. The Pastoral Symphony ! Nothing more simple than to make it the theme of a little dis- cussion which would be in place. The purpose of music is to excite sensations and evoke images. The Pastoral Symphony brought the country to us, that country of which we had been deprived for two months, poor besieged people, who no longer knew anything of it but the slopes of the fortifications bris- tling with bayonets. There was, indeed, the where- withal to speak twenty minutes, or even an hour if necessary. I can see now the "argument" of a professor of rhetoric giving out to his class this sub- ject to be treated of: "Exordiemini pingendo campos suburbanos, ubi horrent arma et strepit bellum. ' ' The thing appeared to me so easy — so easy that I believed any preparation to be needless. I trusted myself to improvisation, as I had done at the time of my debut I did not reflect that in that day I had chosen for my subject a course of literature which I knew to the very bottom, to which I brought, in default of the habit of speech, personal ideas long meditated and matured. I came here with a com- monplace in my pocket, a commonplace of rare stupidity, to which I was, moreover, very indifferent, and in the truth of which I did not more than half believe. I amounted to little as a lecturer except 88 Recollections of Middle Life for the childlike impetuosity with which I exposed and sustained the ideas that were dear to me ; a commonplace subject which demanded only a fine choice of brilliant words, of delicate allusions, of in- genious details, was not the one for me at all. I ought to have been able to see that, and consequently take my precautions. But blunders would never be made if everything were thought of, and I troubled myself about nothing. I seem to see myself once more coming down the boulevards under the bright sunshine and directing my steps toward the Circus. I had been on guard at the fortifications, and instead of going home to re- sume the customary black coat, I had thought it a bright idea to keep on the military costume, vest and cap. It was one more blunder added to many others, but when one gets started — eh ? I was in a mood to ignore them. I went along confident and gay, my hands in my pockets like an old campaigner, whistling a little air : I was to speak of Beethoven, that was a sort of prep- aration. I arrived ; the Circus was overrunning with spectators. From top to bottom, on all the benches, a black swarm of heads. I believe, indeed, that there were there gathered together and pressed close all the people in Paris who could afford to pay the hundred sous. Even the rings were crammed The Ballande Matinees Before 1870 89 with auditors, standing up and pressed one against the other. At the appointed moment Pasdeloup made me a sign and I mounted the stage, where the musicians had reserved a small space for me. At sight of me a long murmur ran through the crowd. It was my vest which had had its effect : a disastrous effect. I had not precisely the air of a warrior, and then, truly, for a lecture, in that solemn place, before that assembled multitude, this costume was out of place. I felt it at once. There struck me in the face a sort of whiff of reprobation that warned me of the ridiculous disproportion between this odd fantastic vestment and what I had come to do. I don't know how it was, but an old vaudeville refrain crossed my mind, and while I sought the first words of my ex- ordium I heard an inner voice singing in my ear, ^*£n le voyant sous P habit militaire, J'ai vu tout d^suit, quHl n' itait fas soldat, J'ai vu tout d'suit, qu'il riitait pas soldat." I did not, however, lose countenance, and by an artifice, which had already succeeded with me more than once, taking my cue from the very cause of my embarrassment, I set myself to paint the savage aspect of the fortifications that I had just quitted, and the desolation of the fields perceived from the crest of the 90 Recollections of Middle Life slope. But I have not, pen in hand, any talent for description ; true and picturesque words fail me. Still less could I find them when I improvised. I becaipe entangled in my painting, and I commenced to stumble seriously. A detail completed my confu- sion. I had been in the habit of speaking in a thea- tre, where the orator has his entire audience facing him and under his hand. At the Circus, by the very arrangement of the place, only a part of it could be seen, and one had to speak with his back to a good half of his auditors. It seemed to me that behind me I heard something like a murmur of disapprobation ; I wished to turn, in order to look the monster in the face and conquer him. But I had no dexterity of movement ; I executed this demi-turn with a deplor- able awkwardness. I felt myself ridiculous, and I was so. I still went on, for once on the boards there was nothing else to do. I felt that I must play my role to the end ; but I felt my voice go up to my head, and the words, which fell unconsciously from my lips seemed to me to have no sense. One of my friends, who listened to me from the foot of the stage, told me afterward that I had the vague, wild look of an idiot, or a person possessed, and he had some fear lest my mind were deranged. As for me, I do not recall a word of that fatal lecture ; the only souvenir of it that remains with The Ballande Matinees Before I870 91 me is that, not knowing how to finish, I declared at the end that the French would be always Fretrch, and concluded with the cry of "Vive la Republique ! '" which had only a distant connection with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Of all the defeats of that kind which I have met with, that one was, without contradiction, the most galling. Chance had brought together in that hall a crowd of people who had never heard me speak, but who, on the strength of my reputation, believed me to be in the first rank. It was a sad break- down. Ten years later I again ran across in society some people who had attended but one of my lectures, and that one in the Circus during the siege, and they complimented me on it. " Ah, you said charming things about music; per- fectly charming ! ' ' I could have devoured them. " Stop ! I was absurd." I had indeed been so, and I could have boxed my ears with a good will, for it was my fault, and my very greaj/fault. One draws from a fountain only the water that has been first poured into it. In the mind are found only the ideas and developments that one has been careful to store there in advance. It is in vain to 92 Recollections of Middle Life turn on the tap of improvisation ; if the fountain is empty only air will come from it. By good fortune for my little reputation the jour- nals, which were few in number and only appeared on a single sheet, hardly ever occupied themselves with the minor facts of Parisian life ; they were en- tirely given up to the details of the siege and the polemics of the war. I don't believe there was a sin- gle one that bethought itself to relate my misadven- ture, and I had the weakness to be very glad of it. VII. THE BALLANDE MATINEES AFTER 1870 The war came to an end, then the Commune. That horrible nightmare finally vanished — ^then we commenced to live again. You remember that there was then in all minds a great movement in favor of instruction. The more or less just idea was diffused through the pubKc that if we had been beaten it was by the Prussian Schoolmaster. The people then must be instructed, and everyone set himself at this duty with the somewhat disordered impatience that we carry into everything, we French, and especially we Parisians, with whom everything is a matter of fashion. The lecture was naturally benefited by this new hobby. I could not tell you how many projects were formed at this propitious hour, all of which sprang •' (Tun bon naturel," as La Fontaine says, but which did not all have common-sense. One desired that in each mayoralty, on every Thursday and Sunday, a reader should come to read the finest passages of our literature arid comment upon them to the children of 94 Recollections of Middle Life the lower classes ; another proposed to ask of the theatres one day a week on which should be explained the history of the masterpieces played there, when it should be shown that art ought to elevate the mind and make the heart healthy. And all these planners came to me fuming with their idea, and asking my assistance. Had I listened to them I should have gone from lecture to lecture. Some even proposed to me to take me into the provinces to evangelize the departments ; it is true that these were the very shrewd manufacturers, who assured me a share in the receipts. They were good apostles who wished that I should take up the calling of apostle to their profit. Of all these undertakings, of which some were never even begun to be put into execution, of which others had only an ephemeral success, there is only one that I take pleasure in remembering, for I laughed heart- ily over it at the time. We who lived mider the Empire remember what was at that time the casino known under the name of the Casino-Cadet, because of its situation in the street of that name. It was a choregraphic establish- ment, where every night, and all the night, belles of the quarter gathered. There was dancing, there was drinking, there was worse yet. Naturally enough, on the morrow of the Commune the impresario of the Casino-Cadet had no notion of reopening its doors The Ballande Matinees After 1870 95 and reinstating the violins. We were all just then completely given over to ideas of social regenera- tion ; we piqued ourselves on being serious, and the can-can was hardly serious. The hall remained empty and abandoned, a very fine hall with vast annexes. To rescue this hall definitely from the dance and from immorality, to regenerate it, as we were re- generating ourselves, by instruction, and to conquer it for the lecture, what a dream, my friends, what a dream ! This dream a worthy man, whose name it is unnecessary to mention here, had conceived in the innocence of his heart, and he came all hot and eager to explain his project to me. He had rented the hall on very easy conditions ; there should be four lecturers of us, one for science, another for history, another for philosophy ; for me he had reserved the literary part. We should each have a lecture a week, turn and turn about. The hall would easily contain fifteen hundred people. At twenty sous for the first places, and fifty centimes for the second, we should readily make our eight hundred francs a night. The cost of instalment and rent was to be paid first, the rest should be used to found other centres for lectur- ing, and remunerate richly certain orators whose names stood high, and who could not be obtained without a strong inducement. The first year would be a year of sacrifices,' but afterward what fortune ! 96 Recollections of Middle Life And we should have the joy — while making money — of contributing to the regeneration of our land. The gentleman who appealed to me with such warmth and candor was one whom I could not de- cently refuse. " Listen," I said to him, " I believe that you are indulging in many illusions, and the Casino-Cadet does not appear to me a place marvellously well chosen for a first experiment. But you think you need me. I am at your disposition. I will open your lectures at the Casino-Cadet since you desire it. After all, I have seen Ballande push through successfully an enterprise that appeared to me even more extravagant. Perhaps your view is correct. Take charge of the programmes, the announcements, all the details of administration. At the appointed hour I will be there, ready to mount the platform." Accordingly I soon beheld the walls of the quar- ter covered with posters, in which were announced in enormous capitals the reopening of the Casino- Cadet, and lower down, in smaller letters of various character, that the Casino would henceforth be de- voted to lectures. The names of the four lecturers were given on four lines, mine at the head. When I arrived on the day appointed, the man- ager came to receive me, very busy and very excited. The hall was not yet ready ; he hustled the workmen The Ballande Matinees After 1870 97 and domestics who had not finished. " We shall be I a little behindhand this evening. You can under- stand, the first day, but be reassured there will be a very fine house. The audience is already very nu- merous — ^many women in full dress. It will take — it will take ; you will see. Meanwhile, should you like to walk up and down in one of our side-parlors ; you will find only a few there — you will not be too put out — you will be able to think over your lecture at ease." I let myself be conducted into a side-parlor. Five or six groups of women were walking there, lost in that immense steppe of waxed flooring. They were rather dicoUetees, and trailed trained robes of gaudy coloring. I caught here and there some scraps of conversation exchanged in an undertone. " Ah there," said one, " aren't they going to be- gin to dance soon ? ' ' " There are no musicians yet. They are always late ; it is disgusting. ' ' One of them remarked that the leader of the or- chestra had been changed. They wondered who the new one might be. They planted themselves in front of one of the posters attached to the side-wall. They read my name. " Is that the leader of the orchestra ? " " Gracious ! It would seem so." 7 98 Recollections of Middle Life " Do you know him ? " None of them knew me. But one of them vi had gone on reading cried with amazement, " But it isn't a ball after all ; there is to be a le ure!" A lecture ! They paused at first in consternatic it was a heavy blow. A lecture ! What sort of " animal ' ' was that ? " Well, zut then," said the one who had read. And they all filed out indignant. They had b( cheated. I laughed till I cried. I had only ha] house to listen to me. There was no one at the th lecture. All hope of sanctifying the Casino-Ca( had to be abandoned. All these chimeras were shortly dissipated, a only the Eallande matinees profited by this state the public mind, and took a new start toward si cess. I will return to them to recount their gk and their decadence. While the theatre managers, on the morrow of 1 Commune, amid the still smoking ruins of the ci war, sought in alarm for what they could best of the public, Ballande had no hesitation; he imr diately reopened his matinees, and the crowd flocl to them. That fatal year of defeat and misery 1: opened such an abyss in the life of Paris that seemed as though a century separated the last mon The Ballande Matinees After 1870 99 of the year 1871 from the month of June, 1870. A torrent of frightful events had rolled between the two dates. Ballande, without diiiiculty, across the divis- ion of the brinks rejoined the two ends of the new institution. It responded to the need we felt to regenerate our- selves by means of instruction. People felt a kind of shame in presenting them- selves at the theatre solely to be amused there. But the moment a tragedy was to be heard, with a lect- ure added, all scruples were banished. Ballande had had the wit to take the lead. The remembrance of the classic matinees of the past was still vibrating in all minds ; there was then, so to speak, no interruption, and the " lay vespers " on the morrow of the Commune met with the same success they had obtained at the end of the Empire, indeed an even greater success, and one of which the recol- lection remains dazzling in our minds. Ballande for the moraent was a great man ; the Academy, upon the report of M. Jules Simon — thanks to the powerful intervention of the austere Guizot — accorded him a prize, and all the journals sounded his praise. There is always on the streets of Paris a floating; mass of artists without engagements, some of whom have talent and a future ; all held out their hands to Ballande and begged him to give them opportunity ICX3 Recollections of Middle Life to appear in the ancient repertory. He welcom them graciously, and made them fine promises, whi he did not always keep. Among the actors w'. were known and already in possession of a reno\ acquired in the theatres of- melodrama or genre the were some who dreamed of getting into the Com6di Fran^aise ; what player is there whose secret ami tion is not to make himself a place in the house Moliere ! They also applied to Eallande ; they ii plored him to give for them such or such a play the olden time ; M. Perrin would be invited to t] performance and would not fail to propose an engag ment immediately. Even at the Comgdie-Fran^ai there were pensionnaires boiling over with the desi to play a fine role refused to them in that house "Permit us," they said to Ballande, " to appear it just once." And Ballande listened to them all, filled with h importance, and smiling. He felt the grandeur his mission, and he bore the weight of it with a co fident and gentle serenity. He walked peaceful amid his glory, taking care, lest their eyes should 1 too much injured, to soften some of the rays th surrounded his forehead like an aureole. Ah ! he had some fine Sundays ! I saw the Mme Laurent, who passionately desired to pli Clytemnestre and Agrippine, to terminate her care The Ballande Matinees After 1870 loi in the Rue Richelieu; I saw there the charming Mme Grivot, now dead, and dead without having realized her dream, which was to play les ingenues comiques at the " Comedie-Fran^aise," and resusci- tate " La Fausse Agn^s " of Destouches ; I saw there that poor Dugueret, who had so much talent and who ruined her life, appear in the Pauline of "Po- lyeucte; " I saw there a crowd of artists, since be- come celebrated, make their dibuts or try themselves in great roles ; thus Laroche, now sociitaire at the Com^die-Fran^aise, played Niron there ; thus I saw in turn Talien, recently deceased, and that amiable Dica Petit, who after having made a success of the theatre of St. Petersburg, returned to die miserably in France of inflammation of the lungs, and Mme Lauriane, also vanished, and that brilliant Jeanne Samary who was later on to have such a bright career, too soon ended, alas ! in the house of Mo- li^re, and Dupont- Vernon, now professor in the Con- servatory, who in his last book, " Diseurs et Com6- diens, ' ' has recalled in some lines full of emotion the memories of that hour of enthusiasm. Sometimes even actors whose position was long since assured, and who had arrived at the height of their renown, took part in these performances for the pleasure of playing before a new public more sensi- tive and more expansive. I there saw Coquelin the I02 Recollections of Middle Life elder in "Le L6gataire;" Mme Arnoult-Plessy in "Tartufe; " Febvre, if I remember rightly, in " Le Barbier de Seville." Mme Arnoult-Plessy said to me : " It is a pleasure to play at these matinees ; at the Th6atre-Fran?ais our audience is always airish and cold ; but here, what freshness and what vivacity of impression ! The audience can be felt trembling under one's hand — ^it is an exquisite joy." How many times I was involved in the negotia- tions that preceded and prepared for these matinees 1 As I gave the account of them in Monday' s/eutlle- ton, and as I was one of the most assiduous lecturers, it was to me, as a sort of obligatory go-between, that all the artists came who for one reason or another wished to appear. Ballande Ustened to me with an air of benevolent condescension, for he had a friend- ship for me, and treated me on an almost equal footing. He consented to lay aside for me his aureole. " I have," he told me, "already a hundred and eighty-four young people registered who offer me their services." You should have heard the unction with which he lingeringly pronounced that hundred and eighty-four. Why didn't he say at once two hundred, in round numbers ? Tell me why at a fair things sell for nineteen sous and never for a franc ! A hundred and eighty-four ; that gives you the im- pression of sincere, honest precision. An exact The Ballande Matinees After 1870 103 reckoning has been made; a hundred and eighty- four — not one more. And we debated together, as if the destiny of Europe depended upon it, the timeliness of a re- hearsal or of a debut. You may not perhaps believe it, but it is the truth that Mile Sarah Bernhardt had a passionate desire to play at the matintes of the Gaite. She was at that time at the Od6on, and had not succeeded in forcing the doors of the Comedie- Fran^aise. She had excited against her so many hostilities, some very treacherous, others very clamor- ous, that M. Perrin, in spite of my entreaties, hesi- tated to engage her. I took it into my head to sweep away by one brilliant stroke this slow resist- ance. What interviews ! What negotiations ! For she was not — she least of all ! — easy to deal with. At the last moment, everything being well arranged, everything agreed upon, the Directors of the Od^on, MM. Chilly and Duquesnel, refused to allow their pensionnaire to appear, even for one day, upon another stage. It was their right, there was nothing to do but yield. But Ballande could not help bearing a kind of grudge ; he believed that Mile Sarah Bern- hardt, by one of those inconsequences already famil- iar to him, had broken the word she had pledged. "That young woman," he said, in a dogmatic tone, "will never succeed." I04 Recollections of Middle Life He would have formed her as he had previous formed Rachel. For he did not fail to distribu right and left his advice and his teachings, which fi where they would without the asking. He gave su gestions to Mme Plessy or to Coquelin. It was ve funny ! Since he had met with success, he conceived a n( idea every month. One fine morning it occurred him to celebrate Lamartine, another day, Alfred < Musset, and he had the most beautiful of their poei recited with great ceremony, the whole, be it aa^^e stood, always preceded by a lecture. He took it in his head once to arrange a spectacle on Holy Thui day, with the funeral oration of the Prince of Cqifid which Dupont-Vernon recited from beginning to ei without flinching. I delivered Bossuet's eulogiui Oh ! it was an austere /efe, and I assure 3''0u the wasn't the least little word to laugh at ! But wh will you have ! People did even better than regent ate themselves at that time — they were edified. Tl public flocked to these communions. One year it occurred to him to celebrate a jubil of Moliere's. He rented a hall, in which he broug together all the pictures he could procure of the gre man, all the bibelots that had belonged to him, all t] editions that had been published of his works, ani of course, lectures to explain these marvels. The Ballande Matinees After 1870 105 He did better — he instituted a competition in tragedy ; the prize of the competition was to be the right of two representations at the Sunday matinees ; he named a committee, with the provision (this clause was expressly mentioned) that they should take no account of the frivolous tastes of the public. As the piece chosen was to be given but twice, there was no need to humor the crowd or to take the receipts into consideration. The project had not a shadow of common sense, but that devil of a man sailed before the wind ; everything succeeded with him. His committee put their hand upon a work, very incomplete, no doubt, but admirable in places, " Ulm, le Parricide," by M. Parodi, in which oc- curred one of the most novel, the strongest and most pathetic situations of the contemporaneous theatre. " Ulm, le Parricide," was played, and again it was I who gave the lecture. The drama, although it was written in very rough verse, had the luck to attract the attention of M. Perrin, and the author was not long in being admitted to the Com^die-Fran^aise with a new tragedy, " Rome Vaincue," in which Mile Sarah Bernhardt, in the r6le of the blind girl, achieved one of the purest and most beautiful tri- umphs of her life. Of artists and plays M. Ballande had then as many as he wished, even more than he wished. He also io6 Recollections of Middle Life found lecturers, but not so easily. I presented some to him, as La Pommeraye, whom he did not yet know, and Albert Delpit, who has perhaps forgotten that he spoke, and with success, at these matinees. Others were suggested to him by the name they had won in that kind of exercise, as Deschanel, who was very willing to lend to three or four of these per- formances the iclat of his speech, also M. Le- gouv6. . . . I pause at this name, for M. Legouve was one of the masters of lecturing. It was the taste that I had, like himself, for this dehcate and charming art that gained for me the honor of further intimacy with him. I heard him more than once. He had a man- ner of his own, thoroughly his own, which he carried to the highest point of perfection, and which I ad- mired with all my heart, while quite comprehending the impossibiUty of appropriating to myself a single one of its processes. M. Ernest Legouve left nothing to improvisation. He wrote his lecture from beginning to end with in- finite care, and this first labor over, he begged his wife, his daughter, or some of his friends to listen to a reading of it. Having thus composed for himself an audience, he studied the expression of his kindly hearers. Any development that appeared to fatigue them, every piquant phrase at which they did not The Ballande Matinees After 1870 107 smile, was pitilessly cut out. " What is suppressed is never hissed," said Scribe. He listened to all ob- servations ; one passage was not clear enough, another would be improved by abridgment, and he set him- self again at his task. M. Legouv6 was, before everything else, a dramatic author. He had instinct and taste for theatrical ef- fect. Read every book that he has written. Every- thing turns to a scene in comedy, recitals are changed into dialogues, and the theatrical phrase, the phrase that should catch attention, always comes at just the right place. He thought of the lecture as a kind of vaudeville or drama, in which the idea explained in the exordium as in a first act, is developed by a regu- lar movement through the episodic scenes, anecdotes or digressions produced on the way, and carried the mind along by a certain though insensible progress to the denouement. He excelled in those skilful compo- sitions in which the expert hand of the man of the theatre betrayed itself. When he had once well fixed, in concert with his family, the composition of the lecture, and possessed the written text of it ne varietur, he gave himself up to another labor not less painstaking ; he applied himself to its delivery. M. Legouv6, as you doubt- less know, for he has published some excellent books on the art of diction, is one of the best speakers of io8 Recollections of Middle Life our time. He unites in this art two qualities that seem to exclude one another. He is both a come- dian to his fingers' ends, and a man of the world, or, if you hke better, honnete homme from heart to soul and from head to foot. Hear him relate an anec- dote: he has niceties of delivery, pauses, emphasis, variations of voice which are almost disquieting by the ideal perfection that they attain — one dreads dis- covering in them a professional flavor, and a profes- sion that savors ever so little of that of the strolling player. But these devices are concealed under such a brave and fine air of irreproachable simplicity, the speaker appears to be so disinterested as to the art that he unconsciously employs, that all suspicion of affectation vanishes ; there remains only the deUcious pleasure of listening in a salon to a gentleman of good society, who, being placed at the piano, pla)fs like Rubinstein without appearing either to suspect it or be puffed up by it. M. Legouve attained by means of art the most ex- quisite naturalness. The least intonations were long studied, and I am sure that the most difficult thing for him was precisely to bring them to the easy tone of running conversation, to make their refinement alwajrs felt without ever accentuating it. It was by learning to speak the text that he committed it to memory. Then for the last time he got together his areopagus. The Ballande Matinees After 1870 109 he recited the lecture again, and only hazarded it be- fore the public at large after a final approval. And still he would not venture until after he had taken every precaution. He took account of the acoustics of the hall, fixed the place where the table should be put, sent in advance the arm-chair in which he was to sit, for he feared that, in a chair of which the handling was not familiar to him his movements might lose something of their ease. Do not smile j only at this price is absolute perfection attained. M. Legouve gave us only a small number of lec- tures — all were chefs-d' muvre. They were masterly morceaux rendered by a faultless virtuoso. I remem- ber one day M. Legouv6, meeting me in the green- room as he was about to go on the stage, said to me, in a half-serious, half-bantering tone : "Why are you here? You have already heard this lecture twice." " Ah ! " I answered him, " I would have gone ten times to hear the ' Carnival of Venice ' played by Paganini." He smiled ; that might be at once praise and criti- cism, and perhaps in my thought it was both. I studied with the curiosity of a man of the profession that marvellous art of composition, that constant skill in the setting, that imperturbable science of die- no Recollections of Middle Life tion, while the audience gave itself up without re- serve to the pleasure of listening to such easy and such piquant speech. I shall doubtless astonish my readers in telling them that we had among our lecturers Paul Feval, the celebrated romancer of former times, whose name was commencing to sink into the shade. I was his co-worker on the XIX' Steele ; he confided to me the desire he had to speak for Ballande. I was a little surprised, for he had never tried it, and he was near the age when one does not easily learn a new trade. But he was too important a man for his prop- osition to be put aside with a refusal. Ballande was enchanted to have his name on the bills. I went to hear him. You cannot imagine his suc- cess ! There was never anything like it. I was then able for the first time to estimate the fascination that eloquence and external charm have upon the crowd. Paul F6val had an agreeable person, a gentle, mysti- cal face, with a habit of leaning his head slightly on one side as if it bent under the weight of in- ternal suifering ; he was captivating at first sight by that air of lassitude under which was felt, neverthe- less, the Breton's solidly built strength; he smiled with half-closed eyes, an ecstatic smile which played about his lips, he remained thus for several moments, his mind occupied with some celestial vision. Then The Ballande Matinees After 1870 m his eyes opened ; the hall seemed illumined by them, he had resumed possession of himself; it could be perceived that there was in the glsmce and in the smile a sly humor which was amusing by contrast. He commenced to speak — it was the most enchanting voice that I ever heard, not even excepting that of M. Larroumet, the eloquent Director of the Beaux Arts. A music of penetrating sweetness, seraphic music, shaded with the finest, the tenderest, the most deli» cate inflections. It was impossible to think of the ideas he expressed, one was under a charm. Ideas ! Great Heavens ! he didn't express many and he didn't take much care to arrange them in good order. I recall that he spoke the first time on the " Barbier de Seville." He made, like the veri- table romancer that he was, a portrait of that rogue of a Figaro, but a portrait so aptly dressed out that the audience nearly died of laughing. I still hear the little cries of pleasure that the women gave. I should have great trouble in remembering the rest. I saw him from time to time draw from his pocket a paper at which he glanced. After the lecture, as I was in the habit of giving an account of them in the XIX' Steele, I went to ask him for his notes to aid my memory. For there is nothing so difficult as to recall exactly a discourse delivered without plan and at hazard. 112 Recollections of Middle Life " Here they are," he said to me, " but they won't tell you anything." I saw with astonishment on reading them that these notes were composed of the first words intro- ducing each paragraph. He had written his lecture and learned it by heart, and as he was not sure of his memory, he had written down on a paper, at each stopping-place, the first words of the next pas- sage, which put the rest in swing. But afterward we had more than once occasion to discuss this lecture. He avowed to me that he had worked three months on it. " It has brought me in a hundred francs," he said to me, smiling, " it cost me ten thousand." It was evident that at this price he would not give many. The fact is that he spoke only four Sundays, repeating each of his lectures twice in succession. But of all those who were associated with Ballande he, perhaps, took firmest hold of his audience, moved and charmed it most. I have seen women half- fainting ; the effect he produced smacked of hysteria. M. Hippolyte Maze, who has just died, a senator, was one of the lecturers whom I presented to Bal- lande. It was during the first period of the mati- nees under the Empire. Maze, who belonged a± that time to the University, spoke to me of his de- sire to occupy our chair. I knew him to be already The Ballande Matinees After 1870 113 deeply absorbed in the opposition, of an ardent tem- perament and impetuous speech. " We are bound in honor," I told him, " never to speak of politics. We have to do with a public that is very sensitive on that subject. To pronounce in a certain way the one word Liberty in its presence is enough to make it thrill and clap its hands. This is easy success and we must deny it to ourselves. We only live by the tolerance of the Government. On the day after a scandal there would be suppression, pure and simple, of the lectures, Ballande would be ruined and the institution lost." Maze assured me laughingly that my fears were chimerical, he would know perfectly well how to be moderate, even to abstain entirely, that he saw in the Gaite lectures only a chance to practise the art of public speaking which he counted on exercising later. "On this footing," I said to him, "I will try hard to get Ballande to take you." Ballande, who, later on, had more lecturers than he wanted, was at that time obliged to seek them everywhere. He welcomed Maze with open arms, and I warned him to remind his new orator of the little lesson that I had given him. He did not fail to do so. I could not be present at the lecture that Sunday, 8 114 Recollections of Middle Life but on the following morning I saw Ballande come in, not upset, for Ballande would no more dfficend from his calm than a bronze statue from its pedestal ; but grave and anxious. " Didn't things go well yesterday? " I asked him. "Very well. A prodigious success, he has really most captivating eloquence. But would you believe it? He was to speak of " PhSdre," a subject that does not lend itself to political allusions.' ' What did he do but take it into his head to say of Theseus, who seeks truth which is hidden from him, that it is the destiny of kings never to know the truth, W have about them only flatterers who conceal it from them, never to listen to the great voice of the people. It seemed as if the roof would fall with the applause. If there was yesterday in that crowd a censor or some friend of the ministry we are done for." We were more scared than hurt. Ballande con- tented himself with postponing Maze, and when after the Commune the lectures were taken up again Maze had no longer need of this spring-board ; he could launch himself openly into active and militant poli- tics, where he made rapid progress. Some of our professors of rhetoric in Paris, and notably Gidel and Talbot, also gave very acceptable lectures, but the heaviest duty fell, as long as the in- stitution endured, upon two men, who were always in The Ballande Matinees After 1870 115 the breach, ready to stop all the gaps, namely, La- pommeraye and myself. It is time for me to come to that. It was I who presented to Ballande Henry de Lapommeraye, who commenced to be spoken of both as writer and lecturer. He conquered the audience of the matinees at the first stroke, and held it as long as they lasted. No one ever had the gift of more prompt and easy, I might almost say fluid, speech. There was about him something of the lawyer of the court of assizes and the parish preacher. He was ready upon every subject, and treated commonplaces with extraordinary abundance of improvisation ; that was the lawyer's part. From the bar he brought the gift of true or feigned emotion. He became ten- der or indignant, he protested, while he beat the air with his arms or struck his chest. His voice, which was very beautiful and very soft, was either tremu- lous with suppressed tears or broke into hearty ac- cents. It had by turns pathetic tremolo or superb vibration. Leaning upon the table, above which he towered by the height of his great stature, he gazed at and fascinated his audience with his great wide- open eyes, save when he stirred it and made it quiver by a passionate movement of his black mane falling straight and long upon his neck, an ever-rebellious lock of which he tossed back with a powerful gesture of the head. From time to time he became genial, ii6 Recollections of Middle Life and with a gracious air, with a smile full of unction, he dealt out some flattering- compliment to the ladies, as if he had interrupted a chat to offer them bonbons in a golden dish, or else he launched mischievously but without a suggestion of bitterness some innocent epigram upon opinions that he knew to be distasteful to them. They thrilled with pleasure, and whis- pered to one another, " He is charming, he is deli- cious ! " The men were the same — he left them penetrated with the communicative heat of that al- ways active eloquence. What the orator said was not always of startling novelty, but he had the appearance of being so sin- cerely, so profoundly, so ardently convinced ; he set himself at convincing others with such fervor of pas- sion that they were moved, carried away in spite of themselves. He took possession of the crowd as La- chaud did formerly of his dozen jurors ; he knew all the ways to master them and keep them under con- trol. The artifice was at times too obvious for the fastidious. I have never seen the audience resist, or even make a show of defending itself. Lapommer- aye in his long career as lecturer scored only suc- cesses. Before long we became the two columns of the temple of Israel. It was upon us that the matintes rested. Whenever a lecturer failed to keep his word with Ballande, or when the latter could not The Ballande Matinees After 1870 117 find one to treat a subject that seemed unattractive, he sought Lapommeraye- or myself. We always re- sponded "Present," and went gaily to the front. The public and the papers associated our two names with Ballande's enterprise. When the caricaturists of the theatre put a lect- urer upon the stage, it was always on Lapommeraye or me that the actor based his make up, copying our peculiarities and exaggerating them. I remember one of these burlesques which amused the tout-Paris of that time. The subject was the theatres. Each of the plays acted during the year passed, according to custom, under the eyes of an accomplice who asked for ex- planations. Explanations ! And instantly the lect- urer sprang into view carrying his table and his chair. He seated himself gravely. " I am going to give you," said he, "some ex- planations." And he stirred the sugar in his glass, and drank, and in place of putting the glass on the table he tipped it over himself, and dried himself off with his handkerchief. " Explanations," he began again, " there they are." And the accomplice grew impatient and ended by chasing him away. At the third appearance that the lecturer made, carrying his explanations, there was a ii8 Recollections of Middle Life wild laugh through the hall, and when the accom- plice, throwing himself upon his table, seized his hands, crying to him : " Do not come back ! You are a bore with your lectures," they writhed and collapsed with laughter. All eyes were tiurned toward me, and I laughed with all my heart, for it was I that the Aristophanes of the burlesque had caricatured in that scene. Lapom- meraye had his turn the following year, and Saint- Germain made a very similar attack upon him, which was almost too near the truth to be truly comical, for the model must not be too exactly copied in this kind of caricature. Only the most sahent features should be taken and enlarged upon with a proper feeling for the grotesque. For that matter we both lent ourselves to caricature, for we both had very obvious processes and mannerisms easy to catch and push to absurdity. I am sure that during these few years of vogue I reviewed all the classic masterpieces, and moreover, a considerable number of works of the second order which Ballande exhumed on the score of curiosity. For instance, he gave the " PhSdre" of Pradon, " La Fausse Agnfe " by Destouches, " Le Martyr de Saint- Genest" of Rotrouj he tried once to render one of Racine's tragedies with the mise en scene of the period. He had placed at the sides of the stage The Ballande Matinees After 1870 119 three rows of benches, on which he had seated some supernumeraries who represented the courtiers of the great king. They represented them, alas ! in the shabbiest way — ^the wretches looked as if they were being bored at forty cents an hour. Were they even paid that much indeed ? I was charged with presenting them to the audience, and relating to it the revolution that Voltaire made in the eighteenth century, when he freed the stage and chased away the crowd of young lords who had for a long time encumbered it. The lecturer had in these representations the largest part of the responsibility, and he also gained the most credit from them. I shall not tell you of the success that I may have attained in this direc- tion. I shall only bring to mind the recollection of one or two matindes which influenced my life in an especial way. I then wrote every morning for the XIX' Steele, which all Paris read. I no longer know what folly it was that our students permitted themselves in one of the Paris colleges that led me to address a little lecture to them in that paper, and I made use in the course of the article of the epithet, those mischievous monkeys. I attached no further importance to it, nor did About, who let the phrase pass. You know how hot- I20 Recollections of Middle Life headed young people are ; they took fire at this in- sult — they formed a company, a party was made to rent the orchestra of the theatre, and there hiss the insulter of French youth. I suspected nothing, when on Saturday morning I received a note from my old friend Maxime Gaucher, the same whose easy and refined criticisms have long been relished by the readers of the Revue Bleue. " I have," he wrote, ' ' just captured in my class a list of subscrip- tions on which the names of the greater niunber of my pupils were inscribed. I interrogated one of them, who has revealed the horrible secret to me. They are organizing for Sunday a furious ' smoking out ' for you. I have not even tried to dissuade them. You know yourself that no counsel would be listened to. We must let them go on, and laugh at it. I warn you so that you may not be taken un- awares and disconcerted; keep on your guard." In truth I only laughed at this warning. I was born with the instinct of combativeness. The ex- pectation of a battle excites and amuses me. I informed Ballande, who asked me if I didn't want him to take measures for the co-operation of the police : " Not for the world," I said to him, " I will get out of this business by m)rself ; these are gamins ; they promise themselves some fun. Don't let us spoil it for them ; when they are tired of shout- The Ballande Matinees After 1870 121 ing I will take advantage of it and deliver the lecture." That was also Ballande's opinion. At heart he was enchanted. Beyond the fact that the house was filled from top to bottom for this especial matinee, he fore- saw that the noise of this manifestation would have its echo in the newspapers, the gift of a grand advertise- ment falling to him from heaven like gratuitous manna. At noon, according to my habit, I set out on foot, pondering all along the streets and boulevards upon the beginning of my lecture. Just at the moment of entering the theatre by the artists' door I saw two persons detach themselves from a somewhat numer- ous group stationed on the sidewalk, and approach with the evident intention of speaking to me. " Heavens ! M. Sarcey," one of them said to me, " we are not known to you ; but we are fathers of families, and we come to you in advance to make our apologies for our rascals of boys, who propose to make a great row for you. We have done all that we could to turn them from this project ; but they are enraged. It only remains for us to ask your par- don. For the rest, we have ourselves taken seats, and we shall be there to sustain you. ' ' " You remind me of Brutus," I said to him, laugh- ing. I thanked these gentlemen for their kindness, pressed their hands, and entered. 122 Recollections of Middle Life There was a little nervousness in the side-scenes. The actors had got wind of what was going on. Artists as a rule don't like to have hissing come into the game in theatrical matters. It is not exactly in- terest or friendship for comrades; it is rather that when the public is once let loose it cares not for any- one or anything. You can never tell just where it will stop. It is the cat in the fable, who after hav- ing munched the neighbor's sparrow finds the flavor exquisite and devours others. I was perhaps the only one who kept his sang-froid and his good-hu- mor. The idea of fathers and sons contending in my honor — ^lus quam civilia bella — ^made me cheerful. I had no sooner pronounced the consecrated for- mula, " Mesdames, messieurs," than the storm broke. Ah, my friends ! What a racket ! They all had rattling whistles, and they interrupted their hissing only to shout ; savage yells, the cries of various animals, and from time to time upon the air of the footlights: "Apologies! apologies!" Some fiercer ones even cried, " No apologies ! Put him out ! " I waited, resigned and smiling. At the least sign of clearing I tried to throw in a phrase, which was instantly drowned by an enormous uproar. I did not insist. I economized my strength and my voice. My tactics were to let the brawlers exhaust them- selves. I was convinced that the real audience after The Ballande Matinees After 1870 123 being amused for ten or fifteen minutes by this dis- turbance would in the end tire of it, would take my part in a body and impose silence upon them. This calculation, which was shrewd enough, found, by the merest chance, an auxiliary upon whom I had not counted. In the stage-box at the left there was, besides Ballande, a lawyer with whom I was slightly acquainted, for he was the brother of M. Laya, the author of the " Due Job," that has just been revived at the Comedie-Fran^aise. He possessed an enor- mous voice, what we call a "good deep," an extraor- dinary flow of speech, and a still more extraordi- nary desire to employ both, cost what it might. He climbed over the ledge of the box, leapt upon the stage, pressed my hand, and shouted back across the tumult. At this unexpected reinforcement the assailants re- doubled their fury, there was a new tempest of cries and hisses. He stood his ground. I hear him sing- ing my praises and those of Ballande, those of Ra- cine, those of the matinees, those of the youth, of that noble youth who may doubtless be misled for an instant, but who can, by a word — a single word di- rect from the heart — be brought around to great thoughts and to generous sentiments. He uttered many of them, which fell as they might, and the youth were not brought round. But they weakened sensibly ; there only remained two 124 Recollections of Middle Life groups of the ill-disposed, which formed two very dis- tinct spots, one in the orchestra, the other in the high galleries. The isolated hissers were stifled either by weariness or because their neighbors had imposed si- lence upon them. The battalion of the fathers seized the moment. " Now we rise ! " as would soon be said in " Le Cid." Some voices cried : " Put out the college rascals ! " "Let us hear! " "It is absurd ! " "It is revolting! " I saw an elderly man take one of these gamins by the ear. " Behave yourself, little scamp." There was laughter; the audience decidedly re- belled ; that was the moment my defender chose to set off again. I threw myself upon him. I begged him to let me alone. I pushed him gently toward the side-scenes. He struggled. He actually wished to offer me the assistance of a new discourse. I held out against it. " He will go I " "He will not go ! " He goes. He is gone. I return to the stage a victor. " Mesdames, messieurs." A new volley of hisses, but this time the audience rises to its feet, furious. The Ballande Matinees After 1870 125 "The police — the police! Are there no police in the theatre ? ' ' They arrive in the shape of the municipal guard, and their uniforms appear in the third gallery. The most determined members of the cabal are indicated to them, they gather them in neatly, in spite of indi- vidual resistance, and lead them out of the house. The same performance is started in the orchestra, but the conspirators prefer to lay down their arms. They have the good grace to put their rattling whistles in their pockets, the insurrection is put down. Order reigns in Warsaw. " Mesdames, messieurs, we have lost twenty-five minutes. I will try and make it up to you." And with an extraordinary transport of speech I give a lecture. Oh ! such a lecture ! I have related some of my failures to you ; it is the least I can do to tell you also of my days of triumph. That time I fully tasted the deUcious pleasure of feeling an audi- ence vibrate under my hand. As I was near the end a timid hiss came from a corner of the orchestra. "Ah, my young friend," I said to him, "your watch is forty minutes behind time." The phrase was not specially witty ; but had it been a hundred times more stupid it would have been applauded just the same ; there was an explosion of laughter and bravos. Upon leaving the hall I went. 126 Recollections of Middle Life as you may imagine, to ask pardon for those who had been taken to the guard-house. I pressed their hands after a little paternal admonition. One of them, more arrogant than the others, said to me, shaking his head, that it couldn't end this way, and that I should be hissed yet. He used another word that I do not wish to write. "Ah ! well," I said, "my friend, I do not wish to deprive you of that little pleasure. I was not to speak next Sunday; but in order to please you I will beg Lapommeraye to grant me his turn in lect- uring; be careful not to get kept in." The report of these little incidents was noised abroad among the pubhc, so that on the following Sunday the house was crammed ; there were even people in the corridors. And behold of what success and failure consist in lecturing. The audience was visibly preoccupied ; it awaited a manifestation which did not come. As for me, I prepared (which was a blunder) some piquant phrases for which I could not find a place. I was uneasy. In the audience there was a certain reserve ; I could not succeed in breaking that thin layer of ice. I spoke coldly, and they listened to me in the same way. It is always a very delicate undertaking to give a lecture before an absent-minded audience. It takes The Ballande Matinees After 1870 127 infinite pains to bring them over, sometimes one suc- ceeds. I remember, a propos of this, a little story in which I played a part. The organizers of a charity fgte were given the Salle du Chatelet, and to force the receipts they had thought of applying to Edmond About. About was then in full enjoyment of his renown. No one was ignorant of the fact that he was a sparkling talker, and he had never spoken in public, which doubled the curiosity to hear him. When it was known that he had accepted, when his name shone on the post- ers it was as though Patti had been about to sing — in two days the immense Salle du Chatelet was rented from top to bottom. Tickets sold at a pre- mium. About had given his name a little imprudently. The noise it made, both in the papers and among the public, disquieted him beyond measure. There was in this art of talking with twelve hundred persons an enormous technical element that he had not learned. It would have been painful to him to attain only a suc- ces d'estime. He did not feel sure of himself. The evening before we saw him come in at the XIX' Steele ofifice, his neck enveloped in a muffler, and speaking with difficulty. " The deuce ! " I said to him, " won't your voice work? How about to-morrow ! " 128 Recollections of Middle Life " I will try to be in condition," he replied, and thereupon I left him. The morrow was Sunday — the famous Sunday. At eight o'clock in the morning my bell rang, and one of the organizers of the ffete entered, frightened, wild. " Here, read that," he said, tendering me a letter. About sent him word that bronchitis confined him to his bed ; he urged them to come to me, assuring them that I would get them out of the scrape. To this letter was added another, addressed to me personally. About begged me to keep his engagement, it was a service that he expected of my old friendship. My first idea was to refuse plumply. Think of my going to speak — a poor provincial barytone — before a house which counted on Faure, which had paid to hear him, which would be horribly disappointed, and which would perhaps slip out, leaving me alone with my disgrace. "The receipts must be saved," cried my man, in despair. "Enormous, frightful receipts j for the poor; it is to the poor that you sacrifice yourself. Come, consent ! The pubUc will be grateful to you for it." " But the subject of the lecture is announced ! I have nothing ready a propos of it, and there is no way of changing it, since you are to give the play afterward." The Ballande Matinees After 1870 129 " Bah ! it relates to the theatre — you are always ready on that subject. ' ' While we were arguing another letter arrived, brought by About's servant. He insisted forcibly upon the embarrassment that I should impose upon him and the worthy people who were placed at the head of this good work, if I did not accept. " Very well ! I surrender," I said. They did not put a paster on the bill ; they did not apprise the public of the change of scene. They were too much afraid of desertion in a body before my entrance on the stage. It was supposed that, the curtain once raised, the audience would reconcile themselves to the substitution, satisfied or not satis- fied, of small matter : the essential thing was not to give back the money. The curtain rises ; I advance to the rail, moving my table as was my custom to the prompter's hole. While engaged in this operation I heard run from the top to the bottom of the hall a murmur of sur- prise and disappointment. " Well ! yes," I said, gazing at the audience, "it is only I," and I accompanied the phrase with a gest- ure of resignation and humility which was, it ap- pears, so irresistibly comic that the entire house burst into laughter. This beginning encouraged me. I 9 I30 Recollections of Middle Life began to tell with much animation and good-huinor about About's cold, the insistence of these gentlemen, my anxiety about the audience. I painted for them the state of mind that they had just passed through ; everyone recognized the picture and they laughed still more heartily. I enter upon the chosen subject ; from time to time I stop : " That is not what About would have said — would you like me to tell you what About would have said — and would have said much better, doubtless?" And I make him speak, and I respond to him ; it is a comedy, the salt of *hich lay in the childish gayety of the improvj^jon. I have hardly had in my life as lecturer a more in- stantaneous and complete success. The next day I received from the organizers of the fSte a monu- mental inkstand with this inscription : Vale, scribe et ora ; it is in this inkstand that I dip my pen to- day to tell you this story. Everything has an end in this world. It was the very success of the Ballande matinees that killed them. All the managers, seeing that to invite the public to come on Sunday afternoon brought in fine receipts, organized matinees in their theatres. They only came to it slowly, one after another, with great reluctance, but they came to it. There is not a place in the world where the spirit of routine has such narrowness, strength, and tenacity, as in the The Ballande Matinees After 1870 131 theatre. It would seem to you, wouldn't it, that at the first rumor of the infatuation of the Parisian pub- lic for the Sunday matinees, all the managers, aroused, must have thrown themselves on this unexpected manna. Instead they hesitated a long time. I was then on very pleasant terms with Montigny, the director of the Gymnase, who was, thank heaven ! very intelligent and full of initiative. As soon as I saw the public crowding Ballande's house, I sought Montigny and represented to him with warmth that there would be much money gained for him, and it would be a service rendered to art if each Sunday he would give us in the afternoon some work of the old Theatre de Madame, reproduced with care. I still see Montigny listening to me with an air of disdainful condescension, and saying to me in his cutting, autocratic voice, impatient of all con- tradiction : " Performances in the daytime? It is senseless ! " He gave up, nevertheless, vanquished later on by example ; but he never liked to dip his own hands in that business so subversive of all tradition. He put it upon Landrol, an excellent comedian, who steered it as best he could, far from the master's eye. The master pocketed the money, none the less, for these matinees brought him in a great deal ; but he sighed and lamented to himself the decadence of the theatre. 132 Recollections of Middle Life As this movement became marked, poor Ballande saw the profits of his matinees decrease. It troubled him ; he suffered from it ; his grief gave me pain ; nevertheless I can't think of it without laughing. How funny it was when he entered my study, ma- jestic and irritated : " Still another announcing matinees ! The whole world is robbing me ! I am being plundered ! It is an outrage ! Can the government permit me to be so despoiled ? ' ' And, seriously, he consulted me upon the chances he would have in beginning a lawsuit against all the sharpers who had stolen his idea ! He wrote peti- tions to the ministers to ask national compensation. I would almost venture to say that he solicited the direction of the Com^die-Fran^aise, and that he pre- dicted an evil future when he learned that it had been given into other hands. If he had been content to pour his complaints into my waistcoat, it would only have been half bad for him; but he spread them abroad, with an impar- tiality very rare in our iron age, upon all whom he met. He was in a fair way to become ridiculous. He had always conducted his business with much economy, an economy which was imposed on him by the necessities of his work, but which also belonged to his temperament. He had had up to that time, at The Ballande Matinees After 1870 133 very small cost, the hall in which he gave his repre- sentations, and the actors who played for him for the honor of it, and I will even add his lecturers, for whom these matinees were a field for practice — a palestra. Now that there were matinees everywhere, he saw the necessity of raising his salaries, and nothing could affect him more dolefully. With his eyes upturned to heaven, he called upon it to witness the ingrati- tude of artists who asked of him a compensation of twenty francs. And he had trained them. He had given them counsel. They had resented it in the green-room. There is a crowd of legends about him, which by dint of repetition were taken for truth. How many times have I not heard an anec- dote which always raised a laugh. One day he had played Alceste in the " Misan- thrope," and as he had lent it his accent and his jargon, he had been from the first act greatly guyed by an audience inclined to that sport. He entered the side-scenes, and cried with a scandalized air : " Oh, my friends, this is the first time I ever heard Moliere hissed. Poor France ! " Let us add that the public was little by little tiring of lectures. Besides the fact that all were not amus- ing, the number of subjects is not infinite, and the same ones appeared more than once on the bills. I remember an irritated letter that I received one 134 Recollections of Middle Life day from an honorable inhabitant of the provinces, who, finding his way to Paris, had come to hear me speak of " Le Barbier de Seville." "Monsieur," he said to me, "if I had been told that in a lecture on 'Le Barbier de Seville' there would be not a word of Figaro, I should never have believed it." And he read me an indignant lecture. "Monsieur," I replied to him, "a lecture must please the public and instruct it, that is evident ; but it is also necessary that it should interest the lecturer. The one that you have heard is the third that I have given on ' Le Barbier de Seville ; ' in the first I did indeed speak of Figaro, of his ancestors, and suc- cessors; in the second I showed that 'Le Barbier de Seville ' is the prototype of the vaudeville, as the writers of the Restoration understand it. This time, in order not to repeat or bore m)rself, I have taken Rosina and compared her to all Moliere's young girls, and Regnard's, and those of the con- temporaneous theatre. And that is why in a play of which Figaro is the very soul, the name of Figaro has Scarcely been mentioned once." The institution crumbled away day by day — ^it slowly fell in ruins. Ballande finally retired. He obtained the conces- sion of the Theatre D^jazet, and there founded, with The Ballande Matinees After 1870 135 his habitual solemnity of language, the "Third Th6- atre-Fran^ais." There I continued, together with Lapommeraye and some others, to give a few lect- ures, but they no longer drew a crowd ; the taste for them had died out. I had gained in this campaign, followed for several years, more or less knowledge of the trade, the ability to explain my processes to myself, and to acquire a more facile handling of them. Perhaps it will not be disagreeable to you if I take advantage of this pause to tell you what these processes were, to give you a little theory as to the lecture as I have understood and practised it. VIII. HOW TO LECTURE I do not pretend to teach you how to set about giving a lecture. I simply wish to relate to you how I set about it myself; I wish to spare those who may read me some of the groping that I went through, to point out to them some of the rocks on which I have more than once foundered. I know very well that the experience of others is of very little use. Per- haps, however, these counsels, fruits of long practice, will have a certain interest for those who intend to follow the same career. It is needless to say, is it not, that if you are to undertake lecturing the gift for it is necessary. Oh, I mean a little gift, a very little gift. It isn't a ques- tion of being born for great eloquence. A very fair success can be attained in this direction without an eminent collection of superior qualities ; but, still, it is necessary to possess certain aptitudes, modest ones, if you will, but real. There are men who are very skil- ful writers, and even brilliant talkers, who will never speak in public. Some have not fluency, others have How to Lecture 137 a weak, dull voice. Thirty years ago a great deal was said about the lectures of Alexandre D\mias,/ere. No one was more amusing and brilliant than Dumas chatting at table or in a salon ; in a lecture and be- fore an audience he was simply extinguished. He read, in a loud but indistinct voice, passages from his "-M6moires," and. connected them with difficulty. The crowd came all the same, because it was greedy to behold the old Dumas in this new form. We journalists took care not to make any criticism that would chagrin this good giant, enamoured of popu- larity. He might believe, and he did believe, in all good faith that he was king of the lecture as he was of romance. There never was a more naive soul or one more open to illusions. He never could have succeeded in this direction had he not brought to the lecture-table the radiance of his name. His voice was cottony ; it made no impression on the audience. But I need not lay great stress on this. On this point it is with lecturing as with all other arts. At the base there is the gift, that is to say, an ensemble of natural qualities without which one can never be- come, in spite of every effort and all the labor in the world, anything more than a good and neat workman : it is certainly something to be that, and as, after all, the lecture is not an art of luxury, as teaching is its end, and as it aims by preference at practical utility. 138 Recollections of Middle Life I should have scruples about discouraging worthy per- sons full of learning and good-will, who should seek by appropriating our methods to conquer natural ob- stacles. The first condition in giving a lecture is to have something to say. " To make a hare-ragout," says " La Cuisiniere Bourgeoise," " first catch your hare; " a good hare- ragout cannot be made of a rabbit's tail. But let us understand each other. To have some- thing to say is not to possess upon the subject you have chosen new ideas or peculiar views ; it is not to produce paradoxes, were they the most ingenious and possibly the truest in the world. No, I will say to you that, even if you have these new ideas, these pe- culiar perceptions, these paradoxical points of view — well, the advice I should give you would be to keep them prudently in your pocket, at least to be sure of the audience to which you address yourself, and to be still more sure of your authority over it. Get this primordial truth well into your head, you who aspire to the honor of instructing or amusing your contemporaries. With lectures people can only be taught that which they know, they can be persuaded only of the things of which they already desire to be convinced ; only those ideas can be opened to them as to which they have been somewhat enlightened in How to Lecture 139 advance ; the good seed of the word genninates only when it falls upon minds long before prepared to re-, ceive it. Distrust every new idea that shocks an an- cient prejudice, and above all a general sentiment ; if you hazard it, do so only with extreme circumspec- tion. No, when I speak of having something to say, I mean that it is necessary to have upon the subject treated some ideas discovered for one's self, be these ideas as old as the world, be they simple common- places. A personal idea is not a new idea, there is not much original observation; it is an idea that one has discovered after many others by the effort of one's individual initiative. Originality consists not in thinking new things, but in thinking for yourself things that thousands of generations have thought be- fore you. Let us take an example : You have to speak, we will suppose, of " Le Cid " by Corneille. Do not weary yourself at first by reading all that has been written on " Le Cid ; " steep yourself in the play, think of it, turn it over and over, go to see it if it is being played ; if neither the reading nor the representation of the drama suggests to you any impression that is properly yours — ^good gracious ! my friend, what would you have me say ? Don't meddle with lecturing either on " Le Cid " or 140 Recollections of Middle Life any other theme drawn from literature. Manifestly you are not born for the trade. But if you have shuddered and thrilled at a given passage, if there has been presented to your mind some comparison that has, so to speak, sprung from the depths of your reading; if you have yourself formed an opinion upon the whole, or upon some scenes of the work, you must cling to that, it is that which must be told, it is that that I call having something to say. Do not trouble yourself to know if others have thought it before you, and have said it perhaps even better than you will say it yourself. That is not the question. The idea, however old it may be, will appear new, and will be so indeed, because you will strongly impress upon it the turn of your mind, be- cause you will tinge it unconsciously with the colors of your imagination. As you will have made it flash from the reading, as you will yourself have drawn this truth from its well, your passion will go out to it, you will naturally put into its expression a good faith, a sincerity, a trans- port, the heat of which will be communicated to the public. Not until you have performed this first task, the only necessary one, the only efficacious one, shall I permit you — ^pay attention — permit you — not advise How to Lecture 141 you — to read what your predecessors have thought of " Le Cid," and written about it. If by chance you run across some interesting point of view that had escaped you, and that strikes you, take care, for the love of heaven, not to transfer it just as it is to your lecture, where it would have the mischievous effect of second-hand and veneer. No, take up " Le Cid " anew, reread it with this idea, suggested by another, in mind, put it back into the text in order to draw it out yourself, rethink it, make it something of your own, forget the turn and the form given it by Sainte- Beuve, from whom it first came to your notice. If you cannot succeed in taking possession of it, in melting it so well in the crucible of your mind that it will be no longer distinguished from the matter in fusion which is already bubbling there, better dis- card it, however pleasing, however ingenious it may be. Be assured there will be nothing good in your lecture but what you shall have thought for yourself, and what you shall have thought for yourself will have always a certain seal of originality. You have thought that Chimene sacrifices her love to her duty, that Rodrigue is a hero boiling over with love and youth, that Don Diegue is an epic Gascon. Do not embarrass yourself with scruples and repeat to your- self in a whisper, " But everyone has said that." 142 Recollections of Middle Life Everyone has said it ! So much the better, because there is some chance that your audience will be en- chanted, seeing you plunged up to your ears in the truth. But everyone has not said it as you will say it ; for you will say it as you have thought it, and you have thought it yourself. I cannot insist too much on this point. In the lecture the commonplace must not be discarded; I do not know who it is has said that the commonplace is the body and soul of eloquence. That is a great truth. But it is necessary to rethink the common- place for one's self, to recast it, in some way, in the image of one's own mind. Our professors — ^many have tried lecturing — have nearly all a defect against which I must warn them, for it is this defect which explains the coldness with which I have seen lectures full of erudition, of good sense and intelligence, received by the public. They never fail when they speak of a work to review the opinions expressed by the critics who have preceded them, discussing them, showing their strong and weak points, and concluding : "La Harpe said that, Villemain contradicted it, Sainte-Beuve ranged him- self on the side of the first," and they quote, discuss, expand. It is an excellent method in a class of rhetoric or before a Sorbonne audience. In lectur- ing it is another thing. There is — there ought to be How to Lecture 143 — nothing true but what the lecturer says ; the rest does not exist. I, who listen to him, know neither Sainte-Beuve nor Villemain nor La Harpe; I see him only, and it is for him to tell me what I must believe. And the more what he tells me conforms to what I already believe to be true, the more will I discover of good sense and talent in him. Regulate yourself accordingly, you who seat your- self in the lecturer's chair. You must clear away all that has been said before you on the subject that you treat. If you assume, even intentionally, the ideas of others, you must have assimilated them — you must have made them your flesh and your blood. You launch them from the heights of Sinai, with the conviction of the prophet who has just seen the Lord face to face. It is the Lord himself who has re- vealed to you these marvellous truths : that Chimene sacrifices her love to her duty, that Rodrigue is a hero, and that " Le Cid " is a work which sparkles with youth. You are convinced of them, impreg- nated, on fire with them when you descend from the mountain. You are happy and proud to bring them to your audience. You impose them upon it. I speak perfectly seriously, for I have a horror of irony, which is the driest and most sterile of figura- tive forms. If you do not draw from yourself (often 144 Recollections of Middle Life after having put it there by design) the matter of your discourse, you may be able to make either inge- nious salon chatter or severe Sorbonne lessons ; but you will never — ^mark me well — you will never give a good lecture. When once you are in possession of your subject, and of the ideas that it has suggested, they are then to be classified and arranged ; that is the work of composition. I know none more important or more difficult. Doubtless when you were at college you learned by heart, or at least read the sermons of Massillon. You remember those geometrical divis- ions of implacable rigidity ; this will be my first head, and that will be my second head, and that will be my third head. And the sermonizer took each of these heads, one after another, and when he had finished the first head, he did not fail to warn his auditors of it : " Notice, I pass to the second head." In the same way with the second head, and even with the third, which was nearly alwa)^ the last. You have smiled over the inflexibility of these limitations, if, indeed, you have not pronounced them a bore. Well, a lecture must be constructed and arranged like one of Massillon's sermons. It goes without saying that you can, and that it will be better to, conceal from sight the lines of this frame- work which distinctly mark its parts. But the lines How to Lecture 145 must exist, you must have them always present to your mind and the public must feel you sustained by them. A lecture has a chance of imposing itself upon the audience and pleasing them only when each hearer can say, if his wife asks about it: "This was his thesis, and to sustain it he said first this, then that, and finally that, in conclusion. ' ' I would almost lay it down as a law for this work that there is needed in a lecture only one leading idea, which is made clear and confirmed by three or four groups of successive developments. Yes, but how to arrange these developments? I believe that there are some very clear and powerful minds that immediately find the most luminous and conclusive order ; that establish, so to speak, at the first stroke, after a glance at the ensemble, the great divisions on which their developments rest. Happy they who have this force and directness of thought. I confess that in the preparation of a lecture, what I have always hit on last is the general order of the subject-matter and the arrangement of the develop- ments. As I imagine that there are among lecturers many as frail as I, who are not capable of embracing a sub- ject at a glance, and dividing it into its principal parts before doing anything else, I shall tell how I 146 Recollections of Middle Life went at it ; I realize that the process is not the best one, and it has played me many a trick, but I give it to you for what it is worth, and it has continually been of great service to me. I knew what I wanted to say, I had my ideas on the subject; feeling my impotence to arrange them I did not trouble myself with composition and I took one of the themes to develop by chance. I pondered on it, turning it over and over in my brain, without asking myself in what place it belonged. I did the same with the others, I took them as the caprice of my work brought me to them ; I rolled them a long time in my head, and little by little, without my knowing just how, the large divisions disentangled themselves and became visible to me. The develop- ments arranged themselves, so to speak, and took their true place — and I generally succeeded in estab- lishing and determining the ensemble and the com- position only long after having thoroughly prepared each of the parts. There is one lecture that I worked over three or four times before different audiences before having discovered and fixed upon its best arrangement, the most logical and the clearest. It is true that when I finally possessed the true frame I considered the lecture done, the rest was for me only accessory. It is a defect of my mind ; I can only raise myself How to Lecture 147 to the ensemble by aid of the details. Buffon says, with reason, in his discourse upon style, that before beginning to write a work the plan must be very exactly determined. As for me, it is, on the con- trary, in preparing the expression of my ideas that I succeed in discovering and fixing their arrangement. It is not the method of the masters, and my excuse is that I cannot do otherwise ; and even now, after so ■many years of practice, when I have a lecture to give, I never trouble myself with the arrangement of ideas, reserving that to be reached later, as best may be ; I throw myself immediately, heart and soul, into that part of the preparation which should come last, that which consists of seeking and fixifig the form under which these ideas shall be presented to the public. On this particular point of form and style, most dreaded by adepts in lecturing, I have some advice to give that may prove profitable to them. It is, first of all, never to read a written lecture, and never to recite a lecture learned by heart. You will tell me that some of the most celebrated men have done it, and you will recall to me what I have told you of Paul Feval, and Mr. Ernest Legouv6. You can cite more instances of it ; Coquelin the elder reads his lectures, at least those that I have heard ; and there are others, with fame not so far reaching. But notice : Paul Feval gave two lectures during 148 Recollections of Middle Life his lifetime, Mr. Legouv6 a dozen perhaps, Coquelin three or four ; no one of them has pretended to make a profession of lecturing. I am supposing that you wish to become a veritable lecturer like my.self, that is to say, a man capable of improvising, on no matter what subject before any audience, a devel- opment of any theme whatsoever. Very well, you could read or recite lectures for ten years, and you would not be trained to the profession of lecturing. You would not be any further along at the end of ten years than on the first day. And then, if you but knew what force of persuasion is lost in reading or reciting. If one reads, the eyes, bent upon the paper, no longer open over the crowd to magnetize it ; if one recites, the glance turns in- ward, hypnotized by the effort of memory, and no longer gives out that electricity which awakens and stirs the audience. Some seek to dissemble ; they make a show of improvising that which they read from a corner of the eye upon a skilfully hidden manuscript ; or they pretend to hesitate at a word of a phrase that they have learned beforehand and know by heart. These are tricks "stitched with white thread," which deceive but for a few moments. The audience are not long in seeing through the arti- fice ; the development is too regular, the phrase is too complete and polished, the words themselves are How to Lecture 149 too justly chosen or too ingenuous ; all this smacks of and betrays preparation. It is better when one reads or recites to do it frankly. " What need have you," asked I of M. Legouv6, " of that manuscript that you spread out on your table and the pages of which you never turn ? You never look at it, and you possess an imperturbable memory. ' ' "It is a matter of honesty and modesty," he re- plied ; " I try to speak as if I were improvising, but I do not wish to give myself the airs of an orator who does improvise. I insist that the audience shall know the truth ; it hears a lecture given by a man who knows how to read." Coquelin still less makes any bones of it ; he reads frankly, and in order that no one shall be ignorant of it, he puts on, that he may read more easily, the obligatory eye-glass. It is not because he is lacking in memory ! But he doubtless thought that there would be no illusion about it, even if he learned by heart and recited, natural and varied as his diction is; and he was right. Illusion is impossible. But see to what one is exposed when one reads. Coquelin read one evening, at the Salle des Capu- cines, a lecture on the art of the comedian, and speak- ing of the great artists who had made the stage illus- I50 Recollections of Middle Life trious, he quoted the name of Rdgnier. You know that R6gnier was his professor at the Conservatory, and that he encouraged his first steps at the Comddie- Frangaise. At his name Coquelin stops, takes a mo- ment of time, and says, in a broken voice : " Par- don, gentlemen, if I cannot overcome my emotion." The action, if it had truly sprung from improvisa- tion, would have touched the audience. But no ! it was marked in advance : the orator said to himself " here I will be moved — ^my voice shall choke or break, I will be forced to suspend my reading for an instant. ' ' It was, then, only the trick of the comedian, and instead of softening us toward the lecturer, we ad- mired the art with which he rendered his part. Never, then, write a lecture. I will even add, do not carry notes, at least in the lectures that I shall call state lectures, which are to be given before a nu- merous audience in a great hall. I would only ad- mit notes in the lectures which, being addressed to a small audience of the initiated or faithful, resemble the college lesson. At the theatre or in the vast cir- cular amphitheatres, no notes. Remember that the public is a monster of a thousand heads, and you can only control it by fixing your glance steadily upon its own. While you look for your paper and read it, the monster frees itself from the magnetism in which How to Lecture 151 you have wrapped it. It has leisure to think of something else, and often takes advantage of it. But the quotations ? Well, don't quote, or if you cannot avoid it, quote from memory. The quotation will be per- haps shortened, mutilated, stripped, so much the worse for the author. What is the author to you ! He is dead, and you are on the stage. For you the essential thing is not to let go of the audience for an instant. I have spoken upon all the classical works in the repertory ; you may well imagine that I do not know them all by heart ! I have a most copious memory, it is true, but at the same time the most inexact in the world. I never bothered about it. When I had a quotation to make, verse or prose, I always resolutely launched the text at ran- dom, changing the words, falsifying the verse, as memory served ; but what did it matter to me ? Either the public knew the play, and the entire pas- sage came to their minds in its true text, or they didn't know it, and in this case my quotation suf- ficed them perfectly, because it was absorbed and carried along by the development of the idea to which this quotation only supplied support and light. I permit you only one note, but that I counsel you to bring and keep open on your table. It ought to 152 Recollections of Middle Life be contained in a little scrap of paper as large as your hand. This note is the plan of the lecture. There are three or four points which the lecture should touch successively, and which form, as it were, its skeleton ; these points can be fixed by two words, let us say a line of writing, if you wish to give full measure. You will very rarely have need of this scrap of paper, but it is a security to know that it is there. It happens to you often, doesn't it, in chatting with a person, to miss a name or a word that you need ? The more you seek for it, the more it evades you, the more it recedes into the obscure depths of baf- fled recollection. And yet this name or word is familiar to you — you have it, as they say, on the end of your tongue. But it acts as though it did it on purpose — it will not come out. Well, blanks of this kind often open up abruptly in the memory of a lecturer, one knows not why, in which the development disappears, swallowed up, body and boots. When one has his idea, one is certain of being able to develop it, whether well or ill ; but if the idea is lacking, one may search the memory in affright, it will no more yield you the absent idea than it gave you, in the previous instance, the lost word. Do not rely upon reasoning to pick up the points How to Lecture 153 you have lost. First, it may be that the composition of your lecture is not logically excellent ; it is, as I have warned you, the most difficult thing to find, and the thing found last if found at all, the fine order of the parts contributing each in its logical place to the harmony of the whole. If the ideas of which the lecture is composed are linked only by an artificial thread, it may be that this thread will break, and the ideas escape like the pearls of a broken necklace. But even when the arrangement of the lecture is excellent, when the themes follow one another and connect logically to circulate around the principal idea, an unexpected bewilderment may be feared. There suddenly appears in the brain an enormous void — ^it is a frightful sensation of which I can speak with authority, for I have twice been a victim to it. The first time I was obliged to leave the hall. It was so painful a spectacle that no one either laughed or hissed. The eye became suddenly vague and the glance wondering, the face was clouded. I drank down two or three glasses of water, one after another, stammered some incoherent words, and withdrew, staggering. The audience thought it a sudden at- tack of paralysis. The other accident was much gayer. It was on the Boulevard des Capucines, before the restricted audience of the place, with whom I had long held 154 Recollections of Middle Life familiar relations. I was amusing myself that time with improvising what used to be called "physiogno- mies," that is to say, professional monographs — the journalist, the dramatic author, the actor, the profes- sor. It was a series that did not fail to amuse the habitues of the Salle des Capucines. I was speaking of the professor, and I had, according to the princi- ples just explained, divided the lecture into three parts ; to be a professor it was necessary to unite three things, which I had enumerated. I develop the first theme, all goes well. Arrived at the second point the idea escapes me, it has fled, I cannot put my hand on it. But I am among friends. I do not give up, though such adventures are never without a suspicion of the ludicrous. " Hold ! " I say, gayly, " I can no longer find the second quality of the professor, it is a lost quality ; is there anyone among you who can give it to me ? " They smile, there is no response. A word had been sufficient to set me going again. No one gives it to me ; in fact, they appear amused at my embar- rassment, which I conceal under a boyish gayety. "Upon my word, gentlemen, I have certainly lost my second point. We will go on to the third. Perhaps the second will take advantage of the res- pite to return." I enlarge complacently upon this third point, for How to Lecture 155 one can, when he Jcnows his profession, lengthen and vary a development according to circumstance and time. But that imp of a second point is stubborn and will not reappear. "Come, gentlemen," I say, with my customary cheerfulness, " I have not found the professor's sec- ond quality. Let us mourn it ; I will go to-morrow to look for it at the office for lost articles. . . . " And as everyone rose to leave, the idea came to me like a flash of light : "Ah, gentlemen, I have it, I've got hold of it! . . ." The movement is arrested ; they look at me — they have an air of expectation j I draw out my watch. " It has come too late ; so much the worse for it. One should be on time. ' ' They commenced to laugh, and that was all. But since that accident, I always have in my pocket the four cabalistic words, with the aid of which I can recall the lost theme, evoke the vanished idea. It is a good precaution to take, and I advise you not to neglect it. As for the developments, trust yourself only. I have told you never to write them. I am going to explain to you now how I went to work, how I still go to work to prepare them. IX. HOW A LECTURE IS PREPARED When you have taken all your notes, when you have possessed yourselves of at least the substance of all the ideas of which the lecture is to be composed, whether you have them already arranged in fine or- der, or in the mass, still confused, seething in your mind ; when you have reached the moment of prep- aration, when you no longer seek anything but the turn to give them, the clearest, the most vivid and picturesque manner in which to express them ; when you are so far, mind, my friend, never commit the imprudence of seating yourself at your desk, your notes or your book under yoiu: eyes, a pen in your hand. If you live in the country, you doubtless have a bit of a garden at your disposal ; and in default of an alley of trees belonging to you, a turn around the town where no one passes ; if you are a Parisian, you have in the neighborhood either the Luxembourg or the Tuileries, or the Pare Mon- ceau, or in any case some wide and solitary street where you can dream in the open air without too How a Lecture is Prepared 157 much interruption ; if you have nothing of all this, or if the weather be execrable, you have in your house a room larger than the others ; get up and walk. A lecture is never prepared, except while walking. The movement of the body lashes the blood and aids the movement of the mind. You have possessed your memory of the themes from the development of which the lecture must be formed ; pick out one from the pile, the first at hand, or the one you have most at heart, which for the moment attracts you most, and act as if you were before the public ; improvise upon it. Yes, force yourself to improvise. Do not trouble your- self about badly constructed phrases, nor inappro- priate words — ^go your way. Push on to the end of the development, and the end once reached, recom- mence the same exercise, recommence it three times, four times, ten times, without tiring. You will have some trouble at first. The development will be short and meagre; little by little around the prin- cipal theme there will group themselves accessory ideas or convincing facts, or pat anecdotes that will extend and enrich it. Do not stop in this work until you notice that in thus taking up the same theme you fall into the same development, and that this development with its turns of language and or- der of phrases, fixes itself in your memory. For 158 Recollections of Middle Life what is the purpose of the exercise that I recom- mend to you ? To prepare for you a wide and fertile field of terms and phrases upon the subject that you are to treat. You have the idea ; you must seek the expression. You fear that words and forms of phrase will fail you. A considerable number must be accumulated in ad- vance, it is a store of ammunition with which you provide yourself for the great day. If you commit the imprudence of charging your memory with a single development which must be definitive, you will fall into all the inconveniences that I have brought to your attention : the effect is that of reciting a les- son, and that is chilling ; the memory may fail, you lose the thread, and are pulled up short ; the phrase has no longer that air of negligence which improvisa- tion alone gives and which charms the crowd. But you have prepared a half-dozen developments of the same idea without fixing them either in your mem- ory or upon paper, you come before the audience ; the mind that day, if good fortune wills that you be in train, is more alert, keener, the necessity of being ready at call communicates to it a lucidity and ardor of which you would not have believed yourself capable. It draws from that mass of words and phrases accumulated beforehand, or rather that mass itself is set in motion and runs toward it and How a Lecture is Prepared 159 carries it along, it follows the flood, it has the ap- pearance of improvising what it recites, and in fact it is improvising even while reciting. This is not a new method that I am inventing. The ancients, alas ! have worn the matter thread- bare, and one must always go back to the De Oratore of the late Cicero. You have, I imagine, heard it told that Thiers, when he had an important speech to make in the Chamber, first tried the effect of his arguments upon his friends and guests. He received much company, and every evening he improvised, for a little circle of auditors, some parts of his future speech. Visitors succeeded one another, and he re- commenced without weariness, and indeed without wearying them, the same developments. He was firing at a target. After all, isn't this the same kind of preparation that I recommend to you ? You are not M. Thiers, you have not at hand a series of listeners, who relieve one another to give you a chance. I would not advise you to inflict the suffer- ing of these recommencements and hesitations upon your unfortunate wife. Improvise for yourself, as if you were speaking before an audience. It will doubtless happen more than once, in the course of these successive improvisations, that you will hit upon a picturesque word, a witty thrust, a happy phrase. Beware of storing it in your mem- i6o Recollections of Middle Life ory, and on your return, sticking it on paper like a butterfly fastened on a blank sheet with a pin. If you bring it to the lecture you will certainly wish to place it, and instead of abandoning yourself to improvisation in the development of your idea, you will be wholly occupied with directing it toward the ingenious or brilliant sally that you have stored away. You will appear embarrassed and awkward in spite of yourself, and three-quarters of the time you will spoil the effect upon which you counted. You will have sacrificed the thought to a mot, and the mot will miss fire. That mot, heavens ! perhaps it will not be lost, though you have taken pains to forget it. Who knows ? Perhaps on some great day, in the flow of improvisation, it will mount to the surface, and you will see it suddenly spring up in the eddy of a phrase. Oh, then, throw it in boldly, it will be more attractive from having the air of a " find," a bit of good luck. The great principle to which we must always re- turn is that every lecture must be improvised ; but have a care ! one does not improvise successfully be- fore the public until one has twenty times improvised in solitude, as one can only draw fi-om a fountain the water that one has taken care to put into it before- hand. How a Lecture is Prepared i6i Many believe that at least the exordium and the peroration may be learned by heart. It is not my opinion. I have tried it. I have never succeeded by that means. The most that I would admit is, in speaking before a new public, if one has first to ad- dress to it some of the phrases of courtesy and thanks demanded by custom, one may fix the expressions, because they are pure formulas of politeness ; and it is better to know them by heart. It would be ridic- ulous to stumble in the phrase used to congratulate a person on his good health, or felicitate him upon his marriage. But every time that you have true ideas to express — and they enter into the exordium and the peroration as well as into the rest — you must improvise. For the audience is always warned by a change of tone or manner of the moment when the author passes from recitation to pure improvisation, and it begins to be distrustful, it constantly wonders if the improvisation may not simply be an uncertain recitation ; it loses confidence and resists. You see ! there is no real success to be had — I cannot too often repeat it — ^un- less the audience feels itself in some sort plunged, completely bathed, in the deep and rapid ilow of im- provisation. Even the peroration — and between ourselves, is there any need in the lecture of what is called a per- 1 62 Recollections of Middle Life oration ? The peroration is the bellow of the medi- ocre actor upon the last verse of the tirade. Great artists disdain the applause that it arouses. What do you undertake to do when you speak ? You wish to explain and prove an idea. Well, when your demon- stration is finished, you put a period to it — that is the peroration. The worth of a lecture is not in the ingenuity of an exordium, in the hrilUant fanfare of a peroration, in the number and splendor of the lustrously cut phrases sown through the discourse: it is in the ensemble of its mass. Be sure that when you have faithfiiUy explained, developed, and re- vealed your idea ; when you have, with or without applause, impressed it upon the mind of your audi- ence, there is no success comparable to that. Applause ! flee from it as from the plague. An au- dience that applauds is an audience that is not given leisure to listen. When it claps its hands, it's a sign that it no longer is bound to the idea that you express — that it is no longer carried away, rolled in the torrent of your discourse. It takes time to cry out at a pretty phrase, to go into ecstasy over a flash of wit — bad business for you ! for it forgets while lin- gering to applaud this, that which is the foundation of the lecture, the succession of ideas and reasoning ; you will have trouble in recapturing it again. I am so persuaded of this truth that I never leave How a Lecture is Prepared 163 my listeners leisure to breathe. Of course it has happened to me, as to my fellows, to touch here and there a corner of my discourse with a more bril- liant vivacity than usual, and to be conscious of it ; one is always conscious of that sort of thing. In such a case I hardly launched the last word of the development before setting out again at full speed for another series of ideas, cutting short all ten- dency to applause. The confidence felt in an orator evaporates in these bravos. " Le vrai feu d' artifice est d'etre magnanime," said M. Belmontet once upon a time, in a verse still celebrated. The only applause that counts, the only true applause, is the attention of the audience, letting itself be so won by what you say that it no longer thinks of the way in which you have said it. You will doubtless be somewhat alarmed to know that it is necessary to improvise a dozen times, and often more, each of the subjects for development of which a lecture is composed. You think to yourself that that is a tremendous task. Yes, my friends, there is nothing so long and so preoccupying as the preparation of a lecture ; you must make up your mind to it, if you expect to follow that career. You will spend much time and pains on it. Reassure yourselves, however; the work will become easier and more rapid as the habit of doing it grows with 1 64 Recollections of Middle Life you. Among these themes of development as each lecturer approaches only the subjects which relate to his studies and are within his range, some will often re-present themselves and will only require a sum- mary preparation. This humus of which I just now spoke to you, this prepared heap of turns of speech, of exact and pictur- esque words, will naturally grow richer ; you will have it right at hand, and it will serve the occasion without fresh effort. There will come a time when, even with themes that are new to you, you will no longer need, in order to establish the development, ten or twelve suc- cessive improvisations. You will be astonished to find with what facility, all at once, accessory ideas and convincing facts will spring from the first impro- visation, and arrange themselves about the principal idea to sustain and clear it. It will always be deli- cate work, but it will no longer be so painful or so distressing. In a few hours, spread over two or three days, you will get through the preparation of a lect- ure, on condition, be it understood — ^it is a prime condition — of fully possessing your subject. You have improvised — ^picking them out one after the other just as they came — each of the themes, so that it only remains to put them in their place on the day of the final improvisation. One of the great How a Lecture is Prepared 165 anxieties of a novice in lecturing is to know how to pass from one theme to another, what Boileau called the labor of transition — which used to give us blue terror in college. Permit me to give you, just here, an axiom which I only succeeded in formulating after much reflection and many attempts. In lecturing there is no transition. When you have finished one development you en- ter upon another, as at dinner, when you have eaten the soup you pass to the entr6e, and then to the roast. If there is no connection between the two ideas that succeed one another in your discourse, what use is there in an imitation of one ? When you speak, distrust little s^f okes of finesse, tricks of style, bits of false elegance. All this is worth nothing and serves no purpose. When you have finished the ex- planation and the demonstration of the idea, say loy- ally, if you must say something, ' ' We have done with that theme, let us pass to the next. ' ' But the best way would be to say nothing at all, and to enter upon another order of development, with no warning but a short silence. If, on the contrary, there is a connection between the two themes, do not disturb yourself, you do not need expressly to mark it. It is useless to take the trouble to throw a bridge between the two ideas ; the moment that you, the orator, leap from one to the 1 66 Recollections of Middle Life other, the audience must leap after you, borne on by the same impulse. The transition is no more than the movement of your thought, that the audience necessarily follows if you keep a firm hand upon it. Ah ! bless me, you, the lecturer, must have always present to your mind, even through any digression you permit yourself, your principal idea, and must not let your audience forget it ; you will have no trouble in leading them back when you yourself re- turn. And, if by chance you Eire so far removed from it that you do not know what road to take to reach it again, the simplest way is frankly to an- nounce your embarrassment. ' ' It seems to me that we are straying — ^where was I ? Ah ! I wished to de- monstrate to you that — " and there is the thread picked up, without great art, I confess ; but I have remarked that the public like very well to have you make a confidant of it, speak to it with open heart, if need be ask counsel from it. It would not do to make an artifice, a trick, of this means of exciting interest and sympathy. The public is very sharp, it would easily see that you played upon its credulity, and would range itself against you. But if you have truly lost the thread, do not fear to say frankly, " I do not know where I am — ^put me on the right track." If a word escapes you, ask someone to prompt you. They probably will not do so, but you How a Lecture is Prepared 167 will have had time to find it while they search for it, or an excuse for not having found it any sooner than the others. This excuse would not be permitted to a man who recites, for it would pass for a failure in memory, and to be brought up by a defeat of mem- ory is the worst that can happen in lecturing, as in the theatre and in the pulpit. Laughter breaks forth invincibly. It never offends in an orator who im- provises, it may even please by I know not what air of sincerity and good fellowship. Is there a special tone and style for the lecture, as there is for academic discussions, for the pulpit, for the Sorbonne, for the bar ? That is a point to be looked into. What is a lecture ? It is, properly, to hold a con- versation with many hundreds of persons, who listen without interrupting. It may be said, in general, that the tone of the lecture should be that of a chat. But there it is — there are as many tones for chatting as there are people who chat. Each one talks accord- ing to his temperament, his cast of mind, his turn of thought ; each talks as he is, and that which is pleas- ing in a chat is precisely the discovery in it of the physiognomy of the talker. I can give you only one piece of advice on this point : try to be through art, when once seated in the lecturer's chair, that which you naturally are in your drawing-room, when you i68 Recollections of Middle Life talk with five or six persons and when you engross the conversation. Hear yourself speak, observe your- self — these introspections are become very easy to us, thanks to the habit that we have contracted of. an- alyzing ourselves — ^and bend all your efforts to pro- ducing a lecture, not according to your neighbor,- who, perhaps speaks better than you, but yourself, only yourself, accentuating if possible the rendering of your principal traits. I will condense my coun- sels in this formula, which is not so humorous as it seems : It is permitted you, it is even recommended to you, to have a " make up " for the lecture, but the " make up " must be your own. Your entire personaUty must shine forth in your discourse. And that is the especial service rendered by this method of successive improvisations that I have just prescribed for you. While you are thus im- provising alone, face to face with yourself, without any witness to inspire you with a desire to pose, you are free, you unconsciously set your entire being in full swing. The mould is taken, you spread your personality before the public, you are no longer a more or less eloquent, more or less affected orator — you are a man ; you are yourself. To be one's self; that is the essential thing. Among the young lecturers discovered in these later times there is not one who has more quickly How a Lecture is Prepared 169 acquired a greater or more legitimate reputation than M. Brunetiere. Nevertheless there is not one further removed in speaking from the ordinary tone of famil- iar conversation. It would seem that the lecture, as he practises it, would hardly come within the defini- tion we have given of the species — a conversation with an audience that holds its tongue. But what would you have ? That is the way that Brunetiere talks, and he talks as he is. He is a man of doctrine, who loves to dogmatize ; he feels an invincible need of demonstrating that which he advances, and to force conviction on those who hear him. He ma- noeuvres his battalions of arguments with a precision of logic and an ardor of temperament that are mar- vellous. The phrases fall from his authoritative lips with an amplitude, correctness, and force to which everything bends. He is to be found entire in his lecture — ^the lecture is, then, excellent, because it is of him, or rather, because it is he. Old Boileau had aheady expressed these truths in some verses that are not among his best known : ** Chacun pris dans son air est agr Sable en soi ; Ce n'est que Pair d'autrui quipeut cliplaire en mot." If I should try to talk like Brunetiere, I should be execjable ; it is possible, on the other hand, that if Brunetiere tried to appropriate some of my methods I/O Recollections of Middle Life he would not succeed, because, to tell the truth, my air of good-fellowship, my familiarities of language, my jovial anecdotes interspersed with frank laughter, my unpolished and torrent-like phrases are not meth- ods, they are all of a piece with myself; it is all I — a little more I perhaps than I ordinarily am, but Bru- neti^re is also probably a little more himself in his lecture than in his chimney-corner at home. May I be permitted to end these reflections on the art of the lecturer with some practical advice ? Never dine before the lecture hour. A soup, some biscuits dipped in Bordeaux, nothing more. If you fear gnawing at the stomach, add a slice of roast beef, but without bread. Do not fill the stomach. There is a rage in the provinces for inviting you to a gala dinner when you have a lecture to give. It's the worst of all preludes. It is in vain to try to restrain yourself. You eat and you drink too much; you arrive at the lecture-hall chatting with the dinner company. You have infinite trouble in recovering yourself. Dine lightly and alone an hour beforehand, stretch yourself for half an hour on a sofa and take a good nap. Then go, entirely alone, to where you are expected, improvising, reimprovising, pondering upon your exordium, so that when the curtain rises you are in perfect working order, you are in form. How a Lecture is Prepared 171 I do not know how the political orators manage to deliver their long discourses after gala banquets. It is true that they generally do not dine. I have seen those who all during the repast abstractedly roll balls of bread under their fingers, and only respond vaguely with insignificant monosyllables to the tiresome talk of their neighbors. Speak standing ; one commands a fuller and strong- er voice, but especially the audience is dominated ; you hold it with your eye. Speak from behind a table, even though (according to the rules that I have laid down) you have no notes to read, no quotation to make, book in hand. One is sustained by the table, and brought around to the conversational tone. If one has before him the wide space of the plat- form, in proportion as one warms up he makes more motions, he surprises himself striding across the stage ; the voice rises and is soon no longer in harmony with the level of the things that are to be delivered. Be- ware of these balks. Watch the play of your physi- ognomy and your gestures, but not too much. I leave mine to the grace of God ; what is natural, even though it be exuberant and trivial, is worth more than a factitious and studied correctness. Have I other recommendations to make? No, I truly believe that I am at the end of my list. All the rest can be put into one sentence : " Be yourself. ' ' 172 Recollections of Middle Life It is understood, is it not, that it is necessary first to be some one ? You now know the processes which I have used, which I still use. It only remains for me to end this l^jstory by telling you of the lecture in the provinces and abroad, and finally, in one chapter, which will be the last, of the campaign that we made in the Boulevard des Capucines. IN THE PROVINCES If I consulted only the interests of my vanity I should refrain from writing this chapter of my me- moirs. The excursions that I made in the provinces have left me but wretched recollections. I have never brought away with me very positive success, and it is only rarely and by exception that I have re- turned satisfied with myself and others. But the history of these failures, which have been numerous and constant, may be useful to those who follow the same career ; it will spare them perhaps some of the shipwrecks in which I have been submerged, by pointing out to them some of the reefs on which I have been shattered. After having long spent upon the provinces a useless and very fooUsh ill-humor, I realized the causes which had kept me from succeed- ing, and I am convinced that in this affair it is I who have always wronged the public. And first, my friends, cram into your heads this truth, which I have attained but slowly and after much reflection : Every time that a lecturer does not 174 Recollections of Middle Life get firm hold upon the audience before which he speate, it is his fault and not that of the audience ; he can — he ought to — ^lay the blame only upon him- self. You treat the audience when it has remained cold as idiots and blockheads. Be it so ; I concede to you that your audience was what you say, but it was your place to know it and to manage yourself so as to say to them what would be understood by them or please them. You complain of their stupidity, but you are more stupid than they, since it was your business to foresee, to have a sense of this stupidity, and to accommodate your discourse to it. In the lecture as in the theatre (more than in the theatre, for the man of the theatre has the right to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip fasting ; the lecturer has not that resource. If chance has it that he speaks before Philip drunk, he must take account of this drunkenness, and he must find just the things that will persuade and touch a king under the influence of wine), in the lecture it is always — and the rule admits of no exception — ^it is always the audience that is in the right as against the orator, for the final aim of the orator is to play upon his audience and lead it to be- lieve or to do that which he wishes. If he misses his stroke it is because he did not aim accurately. When your professors teach you rhetoric, do they still speak to you of rules of oratory? I doubt it, In the Provinces 175 for I no longer see Cicero's "De Oratore" among the class-books. All the chapters that the ancients have written on the rules of oratory, and they have not been stingy with them, can be summed up in the formula that I have just given you. When one has to do with an audience of blockheads, it is necessary to know that one is going to speak to blockheads, and to say to them only what is calculated to win over blockheads. You recollect the celebrated mot of one of the great lawyers of our Parisian bar. One of his friends who had just heard one of his speeches reproached him with having insisted upon an aigument which was an evident absurdity. "When one is pleading," he answered him, "it is necessary to give bad reasons with good, there is always among the jurors a stupid mind that is touched by them alone." This is really what the ancients — who have said everything there is to say about eloquence, their favorite art — called the rules of oratory ; to know by a sort of intuition the character and disposition of the audience one addresses and to take it at its sensi- tive points. It is this fact, simple as truth and old as eloquence, that I have finally discovered after Cicero and Aris- totle. But mark — one never discovers anything that Cicero or Aristotle has not said. Only it is one thing 176 Recollections of Middle Life to have learned it from them, another thing to have found it out after numerous personal experiences, by means of study and reflection. And the proof is, that if, after having read this page, it happens to you to make a dead failure in lecturing, you will cry in an aside regarding the audience: "Blockhead ! " while I, like you, will say: "Go blockhead!" but will mean myself. That is the difference, and it shows plainly that I am as well up in the rules of oratory as Cicero. It was under the Empire, about 1865 or 1866, that I commenced to be in demand in the provinces. I do not know if lecturing has flourished there since that epoch, and it is of small consequence. I do not pretend to be writing the history of the lecture in our country. I lack the documents. I am recount- ing my recollections as my memory presents them, and trying to draw from them some lessons useful to my brother-lecturers. I did not trouble myself over- much at this first period, which reaches to 1870, with the failures that I encountered nearly everywhere. I had foreseen and counted on them. I was not the less sensitive to them, but I said to myself that I could only get possession of the public of the prov- inces after many attempts and much groping. Work- men have a proverb which says that one learns the carpenter's trade only by spoiling much wood ; one In the Provinces 177 only learns the lecturer's trade by failing in many lectures. I spoke at that time at Nantes, where I was for two days, in succession, frankly execrable; at Lyons, where they were polite, but frigid, to me, and the truth is I was very mediocre ; in some cities of Normandy and the East, and each time I felt, under the obligatory compliments of those who had called me there, the chagrined astonishment of people de- ceived in their expectations. But I had made up my mind. I had allowed myself some years to achieve the victory over this new public. I suffered no fail- ure to dishearten me, however grievous it was to my amour-propre. I consoled mjrself by telling myself that the reverberations of it were limited and the echo would never reach Paris. The journalists of the locahty, in courtesy to a colleague, accompanied the reports of the lecture with some hackneyed praises, that, of course, amounted to nothing. After the war there was a great demand for lect- ures in the provinces. The municipalities organized some ; in many of the cities there were formed liter- ary societies, whose aim was the establishment of in- tellectual centres of instruction and conversation. The University was aroused ; associations composed of professors of lycies arranged successive courses, some designed for young girls, others for people of society, others again more especially reserved for 178 Recollections of Middle Life working-people. The idea naturally came to nearly all these societies to join to the lectures regularly given by the amateur orators the relish of a lecture by one of those who passed at Paris as masters of their art. I was quite conspicuous just then; the lecturer's campaign that I had ostentatiously led in the Bal- lande matinees had brought my name forward. To me, then, most of the cities wishing to organize a series of lectures naturally addressed themselves. I was asked to deliver the opening lecture, or at least a special lecture. I believed the hour of revenge had come. I was master, or nearly master, of the trade ; I enjoyed an incontestable authority ; I had in this department that which M. Bourbeau lacked — ^pres- tige ; I possessed a considerable stock of lectures al- ready prepared upon the old repertory, and upon dramatic theories from which I could draw. It would be the dickens to pay indeed, said I to myself, if with all the trumps in my hand I did not win the game. I continued to lose, time and again, as in the earlier days. They were not scandalous failures ; no, just decent falls, the secret of which I should have been able, if I had had less clear-sightedness and more vanity, to conceal from myself. I felt, in- deed, that everyone, upon returning, said at the club In the Provinces 179 or cafe: "Was that all? It wasn't worth making such a rumpus about. If we had known, we should not have bothered to go." Besides, I had one infallible criterion for meas- uring the extent of the disaster. When I had once spoken in a city they never asked me to return. I was burnt out for that place. Among all the cities into which I have carried the lecture, hardly more than two or three have asked me to return, and even then without appearing to be very anxious for it. In vain I piqued myself upon my philosophy. You may imagine how long I kicked against that fatality which brought so many failures tumbling about rny head, and how I laid my defects at other peoples' doors, instead of seeking the cause within myself. What would you? One can't be perfect, and the amour-propre is always there — watching, counselling you to blame the public and attribute to it the stupidities of which you alone are culpable. It would be idle to relate to you the details of these mishaps. I prefer to unfold to you the causes, which I only discovered long afterward. There were some particular ones which occurred only because I found myself in a special situation, and spoke in circumstances which could scarcely ever be the same again. You remember that at that epoch the religious question had taken on a keen i8o Recollections of Middle Life interest. Gambetta had, in his powerful voice, sent forth his famous cry : " Clericalism, that is the enemy." I was writing under the leadership of Ed- mond About for the XIX' Siede, and we both launched almost daily against the clerical party arti- cles that were very lively, very gay, very amusing, which all the Republican journals of the provinces vied with each other in reproducing, and of which the vogue was prodigious. It was a pleasantry which had passed into a by-word that I breakfasted in the morning on a cur6 and supped in the evening on a monk. The truth is that I never had such a dis- ordered appetite. As to that I fall back on About's mot, who said, laughing, that if I hunted the unclean creatures I did not eat them. I continually told those who came to engage me for a gala evening, that I never under any pretext touched upon religion or politics in lecturing ; that I limited myself strictly to the domain of pure litera- ture. They would not believe me; they winked smilingly at me. The ladies, who set the fashion, agreed together that they should not come, or if they came it was in a hostile mood. I had always a little clique of nice young people who kept their eyes open for the least mistake, the least occasion to protest or to laugh. And what grieved me more was that Re- publicans came to the lecture with the secret hope In the Provinces i8i that I would find a way to give the enemy — Clerical- ism — its deserts ; they also waited for a phrase, an allusion, to applaud. I had, indeed, a dim idea of the disposition of my audience, but even had I had a clearer perception of it I should not have been the less embarrassed, for I had, on principle, decided to refrain. I remember, apropos of this, a little occurrence which enlightened me upon this state of mind that I vaguely suspected without being able to realize it clearly. I had gone into a town of Normandy to give a lecture on the "Polyeucte" of Corneille. The audience had been more than cold, and I had reaped on returning to the foyer only the flat compli- ments and lax pressures of the hand that mark for the orator and actor who are testing the temperature a sorry number of degrees below freezing. It never- theless appeared to me that I had been good enough and in working trim that day. Some days after, on receipt of the local journals, I found the explanation of that frightful lowering of the temperature. The Republican journalist rated me sharply for not having shown that " Polyeucte," in overturning the statues of the gods, had given way to one of those impulses so customary with clerical fanaticism. Ah, what an admirable opportunity I had had to stig- matize intolerance. Everyone in the town had be- 1 82 Recollections of Middle Life lieved that I had chosen that subject to strike at these eternal promoters of disorder. But I had failed. Doubtless I had been frightened by the young clergy- men who had invaded a part of the orchestra. But I had nothing to fear ; they were prepared to sustain me ; I could have — I ought to have — ^gone ahead. I swear that on reading this article I was stupefied, like one of Corneille's simple heroes. The idea, which appeared to me the height of buffoonery, had never once entered my head, to take "Polyeucte" for a clerical Turk's head to strike at in a lecture ! But what completed my stupefaction was that in opening the Catholic journal I read that I had purposely low- ered, by the familiarity of my language, the grandeur of a divine subject ; that they perfectly understood this bad faith, the more venomous that it bore the air of bonhomie, the eternal enemy of all holiness and all religion, etc., and it proceeded to drag me through the mire. I was struck at from both sides. For that, heaven knows, I cared not a fillip. I had had blows rained upon my shoulders until my skin was hardened. It defied that of the hippopotamus, to whom I some- times had the honor to be compared in the sheets that prided themselves on their wit. But what as- tonished me most was that no one had come to the lecture to seek what they had asked me to give; In the Provinces 183 what alone they had the right to expect, a lesson in literature. There had been misunderstanding, and, in consequence, disappointment. That, however, was not my fault. I had been faithful to my engage- i ments ; it was the audience who unconsciously failed in theirs. Such circumstances, happily, are rare enough. The best way is, when one sees that one is about to be involved in some such situation, where one can neither overcome nor evade the difficulty, the best way is to keep out of it. It is what I ought to have done, and what I have done in some towns where I was told that religious feeling ran very high. In vain might I have cried upon the roof-tops that I did not regard anti -clericalism as an article of provincial exportation. I was impregnated with an anti-cleri- cal perfume so violent that it exhaled even from my silence. But if I have owed some failures to these special circumstances, others can be imputed to myself only, who have never known how to take the measure of the public with which I had to do in the provinces, and to whom I am prevented by pride and sulkiness from yielding. Deputations, generally considerable, came from a town to seek to engage me upon the reputation of my name, for a lecture. I ought to have been i84 Recollections of Middle Life able to say to myself from merely this first indi- cation : "Attention! these worthy people expect to treat themselves to a gala evening. I must not go to them in frock-coat with an every-day mind. To answer their expectations I must dress up my speech a bit ; they are coming to hear a virtuoso ; he ought to give them his Carnival of Venice. ' ' You can see from all that I have said to you of my manner of lecturing that the best qualities of which . I have given evidence are bonhomie and familiarity ; but every quality has its defects ; I easily pushed the one to triviahty, the other to too great freedom. I lacked balance. In Paris no one cared. When the Parisian public has adopted an artist, it accepts him en bloc, and permits everything to him. They said of me : " That is his way. We must take him as he is." They chaffed me sometimes for my freaks of language ; but as I made up for them by an extraor- dinary sincerity and fervor of speeeh, they were not offended by them. These defects were part of my being, they had accepted them, some very indulgent persons even found them pleasant. I knew these defects very well, for feeling it im- possible for me to correct them entirely, since they belonged to the nature of my mind, I studied to com- pose a personal manner for myself. If I had had In the Provinces 185 two cents worth of good sense and reflection I might have known that this would not work in the provinces as in Paris. These new audiences knew nothing of me but my name; I had not had the leisure to form relations with them, to accustom them to the excessive familiarity of this manner. I had not as yet enough authority to impose it upon them at the very start. When it did not wound their sense of propriety, it shocked them by a negligence that they took for contempt. How many times I have seen on the following day in the papers giving an account of the lecture : " M. Sarcey has not seen ' fit to take much trouble for us. He has not thought it worth while, doubtless, having to do with provin- cials," etc. And I received my switching. And it angered me. I had, on the contrary, taken a great deal of trouble, for there is nothing so diffi- cult — it is the height of art — as to chat with twelve hundred people as if from one's own hearth-stone. But I was a fool not to be willing to understand the state of mind of the public, who were eager to hear me, and not to manage to please them. I could have accomplished it somehow ; I have done more diffi- cult things than that. But I was in a temper. I, too, committed the unpardonable blunder of being angry with the public when I was the sole culprit. The most amusing, and at the same time the most i86 Recollections of Middle Life mournful thing about it was that I blamed Lapom- meraye, who was very much liked in the prov- inces, and who scored only triumphs there. Heav- ens ! how httle philosophy philosophers have. I passed fifteen years raging against others before rec- ognizing the very simple fact that I was only an im- becile. I hardly ever go any longer into the provinces ; age and the multiplicity of my occupations keep me at Paris. I truly beheve that now, if I went to give a lecture in some town, the authority that I have gained by thirty-five years of labor is such that they would accept me as I am, without retouching. But I have become wiser, and I accommodate my- self to the requirements of the good people who do me the honor to listen to me. I cut out of my man- ner all that would not please them. I have made over for my use the chapter of Cicero on the rules of oratory. I suffered still another inconvenience in the prov- inces. You know that I was for a long time a pro- fessor, and that I am still attached at heart to the University, whose doctrines and interest I have al- ways defended in journalism. I was sure, then, when I came into a town, to have in the audience all the masters of the Faculty or of the School, who came less to learn — they knew as much as I — than to give a In the Provinces 187 pledge of sympathy to one of their own. To this lit- tle kernel of literary hearers were added most often all those who in the provinces have a taste for things of the mind — magistrates, lawyers, high functionaries. It was a difficult audience, but open and receptive. Unfortunately they formed only a small portion of my hearers. Of what elements was the rest of the hall composed ? Of curious persons come to see the face of a man whose name was in the papers, of women desiring to show themselves in theatre toilette, of worthy people animated by the best intentions but knowing not the first word of the subject to be treated, of victims of ennui who had no other aim than to kill a moment's time. A very composite audience of great disparity. Imagine a race-horse harnessed in the same shafts with an old cab hack. Naturally I thought first of the little clan of my colleagues and their like ; it was to them that I spoke. I indulged a certain coquetry in bringing to them a new view, or at least a personal view, of the drama which they had themselves profoundly studied. I avoided the commonplace as I should the plague, knowing that it would disgust them. What fool- ishness ! I ought to have thought that they were intelligent enough to understand that if I were ad- dressing myself to a large audience it was to the large audience that I should speak, and that I was 1 88 Recollections of Middle Life bound in honor to tell these only what they would understand, while they, ill prepared to accept new truths, would not accept them and would even be annoyed at having them presented. It is folly for an orator to despise the common- place, especially when he has under him a hetero- geneous audience. I gave but one lecture at Marseilles. It was at the Grand-Theatre, in 187 1 or 1872, a short time after the war. A large lottery had been organized for the benefit of the widows and children of the victims : I had been asked to speak, and I had taken for a sub- ject our sorrows and sufferings during the siege of Paris. I had recounted with much simphcity and emotion the phases through which we had passed, and it seemed to me that I was listened to with at- tention; the audience had appeared to be amused when I had spoken of some of the comic incidents of the siege, they had been touched in the sadder por- tions, when I had recalled our distress. The evening ended, however, in the coldest fashion, and the crowd retired with an air of disappointment which I could not mistake : I knew it so well. I had down there a college friend, Parisian by birth, education, habits, and who, at Marseilles, where he occupied an important position, remained Parisian to the tips of his fingers. We had been In the Provinces 189 great friends at Massini's, and we kept up a corre- spondence after he left the lycie, so that to him I opened my heart. " It's a complete failure, isn't it? " I asked him. "No," he replied. "Not precisely. But do • you know what your lecturing lacks, and what causes that impression of coldness that you have re- marked at the end ? It is that you finished as you commenced, and as you continued, in a simple and uniform tone. They listened to you with much interest, they were even amused, but you failed to rouse them at the last moment by a brilliant tirade. They expect an explosion of blind partisanship, of fine-plumed phrases, of resounding words, a bunch of fireworks ; nothing more would have been needed to fire the hall — a Marseilles hall." " I thought of it, in truth," I said to him. " But I knew there were half a dozen of you Parisians there, and I did not dare." "Ah," he responded, "it is precisely because I am a Parisian that I understand how necessary it is to speak to the Marseillais in the Marseilles tongue." He was right. I had long had a horror of seeming to make phrases. Experience led me to juster views on this point. The rapid and sounding phrase is certainly in itself a bad thing, and one to be guarded against. But it is a sign of a too exclusive taste, it T90 Recollections of Middle Life is poorly to understand the necessities of eloquence to banish it altogether from the discourse. I had been one day to give a lecture at Coulom- miers, at the invitation of Marquis de V , who had also been one of my companions at the Lycee Charlemagne. I had spoken in the afternoon, and he begged me to remain all night ; for he had at din- ner one of the most celebrated lecturers of this age, and Bancel, after dessert, was to occupy the same chair that I had occupied some hours before. I had never heard him ; I accepted, although urgent busi- ness recalled me to Paris. I cannot here criticise either the manner or the talent of Bancel, who is now dead. If the volume in which he has published a collection of his lectures falls into your hands, you will easily see that the idea is nearly always ab- sent; there are sonorous and magnificent phrases which he launched with an inspired air, in a re- sounding voice, striding across the platform, with forcible gestures. I confess that he did not please me. On the mor- row, after his departure, I chatted with my host as we walked up and down the paths of his park, and I told him the scorn that I felt for these rhetoricians who sought effect only in the magnificence and so- nority of words. "Well," said he, "you are wrong. There is In the Provinces 191 Bancel, who had yesterday for hearers some petits bourgeois of Coulommiers, and a large number of peasants whom I had caused to come. It is clear that they did not comprehend much of his discourse, which passed over their heads. ' ' " Oh, I believe you ! " I cried. " But believe me, these words, these grand words of liberty, progress, civilization, flung at them with a strong voice, awakened their minds, incited them to think, to reflect, opened to them a world of ideas which had, up to that time, been closed to them. These words, doubtless, have the same meaning for them as for us, even though perhaps not a very clear one; they don't know exactly what it is; what mat- ter, if it moves them, warms them, and, as Rabelais says : ' leur disemberlucoque V entendement ? ' To raise them from the purely material interests in which they are sunk, to furnish them with a subject of con- versation and discussion, is that nothing in your opin- ion?" " I wish," he added, "that you had the time to go about with me just now in the neighborhood. I know all these worthy people ; you would converse with them, and you would see if I am right. You have said very good and very just things to them, and things that they have understood. You have not shaken them like Bancel, who has told them 192 Recollections of Middle Life nothing at all, but who has said it with conviction and energy, in fine, sonorous phrases. Words, you see, words must not be disdained when one is an orator, for words govern the world." To govern the world ! It is a great business ! I have been content to instruct it, and, when I could, to please it. I have told you how and why I never pleased it in the provinces. I had more luck abroad. XI. IN FOREIGN LANDS Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland are the Euro- pean countries which offer the largest hospitality to the French lecture. All good society there speaks our language easily, and even in Belgium, at least in all the Walloon portion, French, which is the official language of the country, is freely employed in the ordinary relations of life. I do not believe that in England one of our people has ever been able to organize a course of lectures. I have heard of lect- ures given by M. Renan or M. H. Taine, or by M. Pasteur, but they were formal occasions arranged for a famous man by the academies or the universities. I have in all my life given but one lecture in London, and that was entirely by chance. I have an amus- ing recollection of it, because among all that I have given, in France and abroad, it is the only one that brought me money. I had come to London with the company and, so to speak, among the luggage of the Com6die-Fran- 5aise. M. Mayer, the impresario with whom the »3 194 Recollections of Middle Life Comedie-Fran^aise had arranged, offered to put his theatre at my disposal between four and six for a lecture. He would bear all the expenses, and the expenses once paid, we would divide the receipts. I had nothing to risk ; I was not much entertained by London, where the days were sometimes long ; I accepted. I arrived at the hour set. No one, or almost no one, in the hall. Mayer informs me with a contrite air that we have unwittingly chosen a day of the races ; others tell me that the lecture had been in- sufficiently advertised, that the places were too dear ; the true reason is that in London I was not known by the public at all, and the public had not consid- ered it worth while to put itself out and pay half a pound to hear me. It is the only reason that was not alleged. There was all the same a little some- thing made out of it, because two or three boxes had been taken by some considerable personages who wished to give a mark of sympathy to a Frenchman, but who did not push their courtesy to the point of occupying them. In France we take concert tickets in the same way for a Polish pianist, and then re- main in our chimney-corner, while he taps with all his might upon a hired Pleyel. When I had finished my "brilliant piece" and left the stage, I saw coming toward me a gentle- In Foreign Lands 195 man whom I had remarked in the first row in the hall, for he appeared to listenwith much attention. " Monsieur," said he to me, " I am manager of the Nineteenth Century, the name of which you perhaps know." I did in fact know this review, which was then, and doubtless is now, one of the most cele- brated in England. "Your confer cTue has inter- ested me keenly. Are you willing to give me the manuscript ? I will have it translated, and I am con- vinced that all our subscribers will regret, after read- ing it, having lost the opportunity of hearing you." I was a little provoked by the indifference of the English public; it was an unexpected revenge that was offered me. I was only too glad to grasp the opportunity ; but the manuscript that he asked for — I had it not ! and I told him that I never wrote a word of my lectures. He appeared surprised. " That is not the custom with us," he said; "our lecturers, as the name im- plies, always read or recite. But this lecture," he added, obligingly, " you ought to know it ; couldn't you write it?" I weighed my response, for it was a big task, and one which did not seem to me very convenient to be undertaken in a hotel room. He misimderstood the cause of my hesitation. "It is true," he said, " that the expense of trans- 196 Recollections of Middle Life lation being ours, we shall only be able to pay forty guineas for the article." ' ' Forty guineas ! ' ' That figure staggered me. A guinea is worth a little more than twenty-six francs. It was something like eleven hundred francs that he offered me for a piece of work that would have paid me two hundred francs in France. " When will you need the copy? " I asked. " Day after to-morrow." " You shall have it without fail." "All right!" I had taken for my subject the organization of the Com^die-Franpaise, it was a sufficiently curious piece of work, full of personal views, and was much to the taste of the English public. The best proof of the success that it obtained is that the manager of the Nineteenth Century asked me for a study upon the Theatre of the Palais Royal as a pendant to this article, under just the same conditions, of course. It pleased less, not because it was less careful, or less piquant ; it seems to me, on the contrary, that it had more flavor. But the translator, who was a great friend of mine, had been arrested by a difficulty that we had neither one of us suspected. The French lan- guage has, for the purpose of expressing the ideas pf the pertly witty badinage upon which the repertory of the Palais Royal has subsisted for years, a crowd of Ill Foreign Lands 197 words and turns of speech, of which each has its par- ticular shade of meaning, from the simple bit of gay- ety to the most unbridled buffoonery. All these words, which are like the colors of the palette, I had used according to the kind of piece of which I was speaking. You can imagine my stupefaction at see- ing appear at every turn in the translation the word "licentious," which awakens in the mind the most disagreeable images of gross immorality. "What would you have?" Bar bier asked me; " the English do not know this kind of pleasantry ; they have a horror of it. They have no words in their tongue for the shade so varied, so fine, so deli- cate which ' grivoiserie ' admits of with us. Gri- voiserie, grivois have no equivalents with them, any more than egrillard, gaillardise, and many others. They put all into the same bag, or, if you prefer, into a single word, which testifies to a morose and indig- nant virtue, rather than to a mind agreeably tickled, and in humor to laugh." We confided our scruples to the manager of the Review, who did not share our apprehensions. Some days after I quitted London and heard nothing of it. But Barbier told me that this study was a closed book for the English. My lecture at the Gayety Theatre, that lost lecture, did not bring me less, indirectly, than two thousand 198 Recollections of Middle Life six hundred francs. I could not have made so much at home in ten years of lecturing. You will do me the justice to realize that in these souvenirs I have never approached the question of money. Permit me, since the opportunity presents itself, to say a word about it. I shall not be suspected of speaking pro domo med, for I am very nearly out of the field, and like the old Entellas of Virgil, cxstus artemque repono. I am not defending my own interest. I no longer have any in this affair. It is a sort of tradition in the provinces to offer a lecturer no suitable compensation. Many a society in a large town does not hesitate to allow a singer or a dramatic artist, who comes to recite a bit of verse, a payment of five hundred or even a thousand firancs. i see no harm in that, assuredly. But some day it prefers to treat itself to the luxury of a lecture. It offers the man it chooses just the wherewithal to pay his traveling expenses ; it is, so it tells him, simply for that purpose. , Nevertheless, the lecturer is nearly always a con- siderable person in his way, very much occupied, and who is sought for the sole reason that he has won a wide reputation. He is asked to quit his business, to lose a day or two of his time, which is precious, to do a very risky and fatiguing piece of work ; I do not know any labor more exhausting than that of In Foreign Lands 199 lecturing, which demands the highest exercise of strength, and the greatest expense of nervous fluid ; and people think to be even with him — what am I saying ? — it is believed to be a sort of favor to offer him a sum which is merely a reimbursement of his expenses. In Paris, we were not paid, or so little that it is not worth speaking of. But in Paris we were at home ; there was no inconvenience or loss of time. And then, Paris is Paris. The notoriety reaped from the lecture was payment in itself; "play" money, if you will ; but that kind sufficed at Paris, where it was current. It was another affair in the provinces ; no money and no favor ! What then ? How often, at the epoch when lecturing in the provinces was at the height of its great vogue, some of my younger confreres came to me and said : " The lecturer's recompense is absurd. Your age and your authority would permit you, and you only, to impose other conditions. You will render us all a real service by taking the initiative. The price once raised by you, we shall profit naturally by the increase." I had at various intervals chatted on this question with Lapommeraye, who more than I, in lecturing at least, held the ear of the provinces. Lapommeraye was of the opinion that we could make this attempt together. But I had never considered lecturing as 200 Recollections of Middle Life anything but an amusement ; I hardly saw in it a calling. Often an impresario had come to me and said : " Would you be willing, with such a subject as is indicated to me, and which is the order of the day, to make a round of lectures in the departments? There is not a shadow of expense, the municipality will almost everywhere put a hall at your disposition, the newspapers will gladly give you publicity, you need trouble yourself about nothing ; we will divide the receipts." The proposition never failed to be tempting. I always refused. It has always been re- pugnant to me, I do not know just why, thus to coin money with speech. It is a prejudice, for there is no reason for not profiting by lecturing as by &feuil- leton, one is as legitimate as the other. I found it more dignified to be invited either by the municipal council, or by a literary society, of which I became the guest. Only I could wish that they have less re- spect for us, and that they treat us, I do not say on the same footing as the actors — ^my ambition does not reach so far as that — but as good workmen, to whom one pays what they are worth, whenever they are engaged. In Paris, some of the impresarios, who in these later times have organized lectures, have resigned themselves to offering an appropriate remuneration. I beheve that certain towns are commencing to follow In Foreign Lands 201 their good example. The lecturers who come after us will be more fortunate than we have been. We have planted the vine, they will gather the grapes. But possibly, in eating them they will taste less pleas- ure than we have done in making them grow. We have created, or at least have acclimated, an art. When, glancing backward, I consider the enormous amount of time and strength devoted to lecturing that has brought me next to nothing, others in my place might complain ; but I — no. I have taken more pleasure than the cost in money. I have still been the gainer. Belgium and Holland are the only countries in which I have exercised the industry of lecturing. I should have liked to make a tour in Switzerland, where some of my colleagues told me they found a very serious, very attentive, and very sympathetic public. But I should have to go at my own risk and peril ; rent the halls, take care of the advertising, in- stall a ticket-agent, and these housekeeping details are too wearisome to me. In return, I had been asked, with many repetitions, to come to Copenhagen, where a fine reception awaited me ; I had nearly accepted, when at the last moment my heart failed me. In the same way I could have gone to St. Petersburg. I had given my consent. But it was under the auspices of one of the grand-dukes that the first lecture was to be 202 Recollections of Middle Life given, for which I had graciously promised to come. A funeral in the family postponed the project, which was never taken up again. I was at the same time somewhat sorry and glad. The idea of venturing a lecture before an audience of princes and grands seigneurs sent cold chills, down my spine ; I could not picture myself, a peasant of the Seine, holding forth in the midst of that illus- trious assembly, so I experienced an inexpressible re- lief when I learned that I should be spared that tri- al ; and, nevertheless — ^man is truly an abyss of con- tradictions — I was heart-broken at not being able to fight that battle. Would you believe it ? An American impresario proposed to me, as though I were Coquelin or Sarah, to take me to South America and have me give a round of lectures there for him for three months. I looked him in the eyes to see if he were making fun of me. But no, he was as serious as a pope ; so serious, even, that he offered to deposit at the bank half of the sum that he promised mfe. I dare not tell the figure j you would think I was fooling you. I believed myself that he was fooling me. It was ten months to pass far from Paris, in the most out- landish country, to seek problematical success; and to catch yellow fever. I shirked it ! Belgium is less doubtful, and it is at hand. It was In Foreign Lands 203 not at Brussels that I first made acquaintance with the Belgian public. It was in one of those little col- liery villages, to-day desolated by strikes, but which were then tranquil and prosperous : at Marchiennes, not far from Charleroi. There was, it appears, the same rivalry between Marchiennes and Charleroi that we sometimes see in France between two neighbor- ing cities, Beaune and Dijon, for example. Sens and Auxerre, Marseilles and Aix, which seek to do each other bad turns, and riddle each other with epigrams. Marchiennes, to outstrip Charleroi, had instituted a literary and artistic society that gave concerts and lectures, and prided itself on inviting thither cele- brated virtuosos. The president came to see me. It was at the time when I was carrying on the anti-clerical campaign with the greatest ardor in the XIX' Siecle. The Marchiennes cercle was entirely composed of liberals, and you know the question excited even more lively passions in Belgium than in our country. From among the subjects that I proposed to him, he chose, you can guess why, the pamphlets of Paul-Louis Courier. Edmond About had just opened in the paper a subscription to raise a little commemorative monument to the wine-grower of la Chavonni^re ; I had my Paul-Louis at my fingers' ends, so all was for the best. 204 Recollections of Middle Life This president was a very amiable man, very hos- pitable, as everyone is in Belgium, and he received me with open arms. Scarcely landed, I found the table loaded with food, and all about joyous compan- ions of marvellous spirits, who seemed to have agreed among themselves to make a festival for me. They urged me to be seated. You know my principles, I never dine before a lecture. But I let myself be won over by their vivacity and gayety. It is in Belgium that our best growth of Burgundy is drunk. I ex- cused myself in vain, I must fill my glass and touch it all around. They ate to drink, and they drank like bellringers, and I assure you the conversation took a pace ! They execrated Messieurs the Cler- gy, they told stories of them to make you die with laughter, or to raise the hair on your head with horror. " Hit hard," said the president, " and set at it in earnest. I answer to you for a proud success. ' ' The heady gayety of thes6 good people, and per- haps also a finger of Burgundy — Burgundy is a treacherous wine — ^had intoxicated me a little. Nev- ertheless, it was not my intention to " hit hard," as my host advised. It did not seem to me suitable for a Frenchman to come into Belgium to sow discord and mix himself up in polemics that did not concern him. I promised myself, then, to be very moderate. In Foreign Lands 205 and I was. But what would you? I had to do with an audience that saw allusions in every word, caught them on the fly. When I pronounced the name of the Jesuits, however little malice I put into the into- nation, the audience were shaken with a mighty laugh. It was the public who gave the lecture, for which I was only the pretext, and it found it excel- lent, admirable. It clapped its hands; it would gladly have borne me home in triumph. " Now," said the president, " we must have some refreshments. ' ' He takes me to a room of the club, where I find some forty persons seated silently at table before some bottles, waiting for me before drinking. We mount, the president and I, upon a platform of honor, and I say in a low tone, not without some alarm : " Ah, am I to be obliged to give another lecture ? ' ' I was soon relieved of anxiety. All my dinner companions were there, they started talking again, and there was an exchange of outrageous pleasantries — a chapter of Rabelais's " Gargantua." "But drink," the most animated said to me. " What a poor drinker you make ! " And in truth they swallowed down pint upon pint. The parched sand of the desert does not sooner ab- sorb a shower of rain. I declared that beer was not my favorite drink. 2o6 Recollections of Middle Life "Ah, my fine fellow ! You like Burgundy better. Let us have some Burgundy ! " I trembled, but had to submit. The company was broken up and we went to our host's house. The table awaited us, fully set, and loaded with old bot- tles. There were hams, pates, and cold fowls, as at the wedding of Gamache. It was midnight when we sat down to sup. I wished to eat only a chicken wing ; there was nothing for it ; their opulent gay- ety went with their opulent repast, and set me going a little in spite of myself. Those venerable bottles, each with its date, were no sooner opened than they were drained. I was astonished, with an admiration mingled with alarm, at the amount of Burgundy the Belgian stomach is capable of holding. I ended by begging for mercy. "You doubtless prefer Champagne?" my host said to me. I looked at him with fright ; we had been drink- ing Burgundy for two hours. " Let us pass on to the Champagne," he resumed, with a shade of regret. It was in vain for me to protest, they declared it to be impossible to end a supper without drinking a " flute' ^ of Champagne. A "flute," my friends! Trombones rather, ophiclHdes of Champagne were poured a la ronde. Four o'clock struck. In Foreign Lands 207 "Ton honor! gentlemen," I said. "lean do no more, I must go to bed." " It won't do to quit like that, in three or four hours it will be day ! " I stuck to it. My mind was firmer than my legs. I mounted to my room, pursued by the friendly shouts of those intrepid drinkers, who — I being gone — set themselves to work again as before. On the morrow I awoke at eight o'clock. I must take the ten o'clock train to Paris. I dressed and descended to the dining-room. I gave a cry of surprise. They were still there. The table was strewn with empty bottles, there remained only the crust of the pat6s ; the bones of the fowls, scraps of galantine, the scattered debris of a Panta- gruelic feast. " Ah, there you are ! " cried the leader of the joy- ous band. " We can breakfast together." I made so forcible a gesture of negation that they all shouted with laughter. " Nothing sets one up like a glass of old Bur- gundy. ' ' And I must sit at table again, whether or no, with these bans vivants and cope with them. Ah, the worthy people, wearing their hearts upon their sleeves, a gayety of such "haute gresse^^ and such warm Burgundy ! How they animate an audience 2o8 Recollections of Middle Life for you, what a whirlwind of enthusiasm they bring into it ! I went into the country again two years afterward. My host unhappily had been taken ill and died. He was a very distinguished physician ; he knew, I was told, that he was condemned to an early death, and he had wished to put to the profit of friendship and pleasure the little time he had to live. He was the soul of that association, which after him went to pieces. You may imagine that I did not find in other cen- tres of Belgian population the same habits and the same expansive Rabelaisian gayety as in this little privileged corner of the earth. But everywhere I encountered the same kindly humor, the same taste for large hospitality — often more than large, luxuri- ous — the same desire to be agreeable without the vul- garity of tame compliments. In my relations with the Belgians, and I visited in lecturing the greater number of their large cities, I have always met with fine and smiling cordiality, the audiences appeared very responsive, and upon the bad days very cour- teous. For I have had my bad days in Belgium as every- where. Of my successes I shall not speak — why should I ? Yes, I won great successes down there ; my first lecture at Brussels was one of my finest triumphs. In Foreign Lands 209 and I never remember it without pleasure, for truly upon that evening I was satisfied with myself; and I believe that the audience, which was numerous, was pleased also. But of all the cities in which I have oftenest succeeded, the recollection of Liege gives me the most pleasure. What a charming popu- lation ! so literary, so amiable, so truly French, with a something — I know not what — more serious and better balanced to their minds than we always have ! It is my regret, when I think of that amiable public, that I am no longer nimble enough in body or lively enough in mind to go among them and refresh my- self with a little familiar chat ; for this familiarity, which is the mark of my manner, did not displease them, and I felt myself as free with them as with a Parisian audience. What a bother it is to grow old ! But, as some- one says, it is as yet the best way that has been found for living a long time. 14 XII. IN HOLLAND It was the year that France organized a universal exposition at Amsterdam. When I say "France" it is a form of speech. It was a French company that took the lead in the enterprise. Some distin- guished members of the Parisian press were invited to be present at the inaugural festivities. M. Di- etz-Monin had begged me to join the party. I had never seen Holland, I accepted with pleasure. You know that we journalists can do nothing with- out announcing it by trumpet blasts, urbi et orbi. My name appeared in all the papers together with the names of my companions, the hour of our de- parture, and the reception that awaited us. Some days before leaving Paris I received a letter post-marked Amsterdam. A Hollander who called himself my confrere wrote to tell me that he had seen in the newspapers that I was to take part in the expedition ; he offered me the hospitality of his house, excusing himself for the great liberty ; he proposed to be my guide and cicerone for the cu- In Holland 211 riosities of the city. The letter was signed Van Hall. That letter was very prettily turned, full of bon- homie and kindliness. But when one is a Parisian, and still more a journalist, one has seen so many things of so many kinds that one learns to mistrust. Perhaps this was simple practical joking, perhaps again this hospitable Hollander was one of those terrible bores who, the grappling iron once thrown upon the victim, no more release their prey than does the greedy Acheron. At the idea of putting myself into unknown hands from which I could not withdraw, I trembled from head to foot. I re- sponded to the signer that I regretted my inability to accept his invitation, but that we were to depart in company and were pledged not to separate from one another. The journey was very gay, and we installed our- selves, everyone of us, in the same hotel where we had engaged rooms. The day after my arrival the hall-boy brought me the card of a gentleman who asked to see me. I took it and read " Van Hall." " Botheration ! my bore ! " I gave orders to introduce him. I beheld a man of amiable countenance, easy man- ners, who spoke French with an extraordinary puri- ty, not a shadow of accent, in whom I immediately 212 Recollections of Middle Life felt confidence. He proposed to me to take a turn through the city ; we chatted familiarly, and I was surprised, and at the same time enchanted, to dis- cover in this Hollander a Parisian of an alert mind, very familiar with our literature, knowing the boule- vard to the tips of his fingers, and, as we say, " dans le train. ' ' He invited me to dinner for that evening. I went to his home. I found a charming family, who welcomed me with the most cordial simplicity. It seemed to me at the end of an hour that I was with friends of twenty years' standing. After dinner I ascended to my host's study. I ad- mired the library, in which our contemporary poets occupied a large place. Mr. Van Hall was a great admirer of Copp6e, sev- eral of whose poems he had translated into Dutch. Quite half of this library belonged to German liter- ■ature, for the Dutch, besides their native tongue, all speak — at least in the better classes — German and French with the same facility. I was somewhat ashamed of our ignorance, seeing this man who chatted with me of Meilhac's last play, instruct me upon the literary movement in Germany, upon the theatre of Berlin or of Vienna. I was confounded by this agile curiosity, this taste for exact informa- tion, this open-mindedness, this smiling grace. "Well," said my host, when I took leave of him In Holland 213 to return to my hotel, "are you reassured now? Oh, I understood very well that your excuse was only a pretence. You were afraid, confess ? ' ' " Well, put yourself in my place." He opened a door. " Here is your room," he said to me. " It awaits you ; to-morrow I will have your trunk brought, and you will be at home here." I passed with this excellent gentleman a delicious week, of which I shall retain the most vivid and charming recollection all my life. In the long talks that we had together the question of the lecture and lecturers naturally came up. Mr. Van Hall told me that some years before Cop- p6e had made a lecturing tour in Holland, and that his success there had been immense ; there was a reg- ular rush for him ; he had repeated some of his best poems, and all the women were captivated both by the verses and by him who read them. " Do you want to try next year ? " he asked me. " I have charge for the Art Club of the literary enter- tainment evenings. I will arrange for you the same course as Coppee had : Amsterdam, Leyden, The Hague, Utrecht; you shall see how you will be received everywhere ! " I made some objections ; indeed, I had been so bruised by my recent mishaps in Belgium that I was still used up ; and I trembled 214 Recollections of Middle Life at the idea of confronting a new public, a public that scarcely knew me at all ; while in Belgium I was, thanks to the anti-clerical campaign in the XIX' Steele, almost popular when I decided to speak there. Mr. Van Hall did his best to reassure me, and the truth is, I only asked to be convinced. The idea of returning, of pressing once more those friendly hands, of finding myself again among these peaceful and hos- pitable surroundings, attracted me. I promised. It was agreed that I should return to Amsterdam toward the first of May. Later I should have had no hear- ers, as society in Amsterdam went out of town ; ear- lier, I should have had to submit to the severity of the cold weather, which is bitter in Holland. Mr. Van Hall told me entertainingly of the imprecations of poor Coppee, who is very sensitive to cold, against the climate of the country. The unfortunate man shivered under the enormous fur-lined cloak in which he was enveloped from head to foot. He looked desperately at the snow ; his face disappeared under the silk scar& that he knotted, one above the other, about his neck. There is, he once told me, no heat in that country except in the hearts of the peo- ple. As I had been told that the Dutch are naturally very serious-minded, I had thought it would be best, in order to please them, to choose my subjects In Holland 215 from the classic dramas, and to entertain them rather with the austere masterpieces of Corneille and Racine. I took then "Polyeucte," "Horace," "Athalie," " Le Misanthrope," " Les Femmes savantes," and, if occasion offered, " Le Bar bier de Seville" or "Le Mariage de Figaro," writing Mr. Van Hall, who was to be my guide in this affair, and begging him to point out himself the plays that appeared to him the best fitted to appeal to a Dutch audience. I have learned since that he would have preferred subjects that were less grand and belonged more to the present ; but he said nothing of it to me, fearing to trouble me, and assured me that I would be lis- tened to with pleasure, whatever the theme of the lecture might be. So I chose " Polyeucte " and " Le Mariage de Figaro." I had adopted, for speaking of the master-pieces of classic drama, a method which is current to-day, but which at that time was entirely new, and perhaps savored slightly of scandal. This method rested upon a very just idea : Cor- neille and Racine, studying to paint the human .heart, had put upon the stage the universal, and even the eternal, passions of humanity. Oreste, Phedre, Agrippine, Polyeucte, Horace, doubtless had different customs from ours, and expressed themselves in a language that we no longer speak ; but they felt as 2i6 Recollections of Middle Life we do ; they loved, hated, suffered, wept, and laughed precisely as we do to-day. In order, then, thoroughly to comprehend and en- joy classic works, it was necessary to seek the pas- sions which move our own souls under the poetic phraseology of the seventeenth century. It was nec- essary, if I dare use the comparison, to transpose the antique work as one plays a scrap of music in an- other key ; it must be brought into the current of contemporaneous life. I was not, you may well believe, the first who had had this idea. In criticism nothing is invented. But a theoretical idea that one does not draw out of the domain of speculation to give it practical appli- cation, hardly touches the imagination. It is as though it did not exist. To say in a general way, for example, that Agrippine is a mother jealous of the authority she exercises over her son, and that there have always been, as there will always be, jeal- ous mothers, fond of authority, is to say nothing great, and does not teach anything to anyone. The curious, the difficult part is to take the action and the characters of a classic work, boldly to trans- port them into modern surroundings, and to show in the Pauline of " Polyeucte," or in the Hermione of " Andromaque, " the woman with whom you dined the evening before, and to whom you sent a bouquet In Holland 217 on the following day. It is to render the discourse that Corneille and Racine lend to their heroes, in familiar and contemporaneous prose, letting drop oc- casionally some verses of the original text, so that the resemblance and the contrast shall break suddenly upon the vision of all. It is one method, I grant, but it would seem to be a method not very easy to handle, for, since I have given the formula and example of it, I have seen some of my confreres try it timidly, and fail pitiably. It needs a touch of a surety, an adroitness, and even a delicacy, to which it is very difficult to attain. The speaker who executes this transposition must all the time allow the original work to show through it, and manage in such a way that this very familiar, almost trivial, translation of an heroic text shall ap- pear so true, so profoundly true, as not to shock the prejudices of a literary audience ; he must, moreover, execute it with such quickness and good humor that the audience shall not have time to collect itself and resist. I need hardly say that some of these analogies between the antique work and the modern life will be forced ; that is an inconvenience of the system, it cannot be avoided. So the audience must be subju- gated, taken into the plot, borne along, as it were, on the whirling utterance. All the tragedies of ancient times do not lend 2i8 Recollections of Middle Life themselves to these translations ; thus there would be no way of modernizing " Le Cid," or, if one should do it, it would be only a puerile piece of wit. But I have thus transposed, and often with prodigious suc- cess, "Horace," " Cinna," "Polyeucte," "Mitliri- date," " Athalie," " Britannicus," and still others. I have written some of the lectures, and I have made Monday feuilletons of them for Le Temps. Theatrical amateurs may possibly recall the three feuilletons in which I amused myself by drawing Athalie out from the surroundings in which Racine had placed her, and throwing her into the midst of the nineteenth century. They amused my readers much, and I had the pleasure of finding later, in all the classical editions that have appeared of "Atha- lie," some of these ingenious and suggestive com- parisons quoted with commentaries by the grave pro- fessors of the University. I need not tell you that no one in Amsterdam sus- pected this system of analj^is, nor the effects of sur- prise and laughter that could be drawn from it. And that was fortunate for me. I have several times, in the course of this narrative, told you how my ig- norance of the secret sentiments of my public had in- jured me. It was only just that this same ignorance should once have turned in my favor and rendered me service. In Holland 219 Upon seeing the posters, all the Dutchmen (these details were given me afterward) said to themselves that they were going to be bored in the correct fashion, listening to the panegyric of an austere clas- sical work. The name of " Polyeucte " could never have awakened sportive images in their minds ; they resigned themselves to the hour of attention that so- cial propriety imposed upon them. Many of my au- dience had re-read Corneille's tragedy the preceding evening, and yawned to themselves. But it would have been unbecoming to confess that they had not fully enjoyed a work consecrated by the admiration of centuries, and reputed to be a masterpiece. I mounted the platform ; and in a few moments I had despatched the theoretical portion of the dis- course, which appeared to pique the curiosity of my hearers. It chanced that evening that I was in cap- ital spirits, master of myself and quite at ease. I reached the essential part of my lecture, which was also the dangerous part. I took Pauline, and sup- posed her to be one of the young Dutch girls who were then before me, and then I need not repeat that lecture to you here, since I gave it again two or three years ago, at the Odeon, before a full house which appeared to enjoy it greatly. I only wish to tell you about the impres- sions of that audience. There was first some hesita- 220 Recollections of Middle Life tion and some astonishment ; the dissimilarity be- tween what they had expected from a study of " Poly- eucte, ' ' and what I was giving them, was so strong, that the audience, disconcerted and wavering, did not know whether to be frankly amused, or whether it would be more proper to be angry ; for, after all, with my audacity of disrespectful familiarity, I re- sembled that iconoclast of " Polyeucte," who broke the venerated idols, and that could not be suffered. Happily I had among my hearers, without count- ing Mr. Van Hall himself, some professors of the University, and among them a man who, by his wide knowledge and good taste, enjoyed an incon- testable authority in the city. He was reputed to be grave, very grave, having given up his entire life to works of erudition, and he was so indeed. But he had wit, and he saw immediately, through the in- tentional exaggerations of these analogies and con- trasts, how just was the fundamental idea, and that it required rare analytical and oratorical art thus to follow it scene by scene, and render it visible to the eye. He gave the signal for applause, and was pleased to smile at some happy hits ; the entire au- dience began to clap their hands with him and to laugh with all their heart. The women, enchanted at not being bored, dared acknowledge themselves amused, and once set loose and fairly launched, they In Holland 221 did not stop. " Polyeucte " had never had such a reception in Holland, nor doubtless anywhere else. On the morrow the public got possession of them- selves, and some objections came to light. Was it not treason to Corneille to inflict this translation, which was only a travesty, upon him ? "Heavens! " I said to people who spoke to me thus, not without sincere trouble. " You may be- lieve that I know what there is excessive and even false in these transportations. But mark, if I had pronounced, in a more or less brilliant fashion, the panegyric that was expected of me, everyone would have applauded and praised me, and no one on the morrow would have given thought to Polyeucte any more than though it had never existed. You ac- knowledge yourselves that you have passed your day in re-reading the work of the old master, that the women themselves are moved, that it has been for twenty-four hours a subject of conversation and even of dispute in the town. I am right, then ; for I have for an hour given animation and action to a tragedy congealed during two centuries in an unmoved ad- miration. ' ' There was much to answer to these arguments ; but you know nothing succeeds like success. I had everyone for me, even those who grumbled through respect for the tradition lightly overturned. I was 22 2 Recollections of Middle Life very happy to have succeeded so well, first for my- self, for thus I won a name in Holland ; and then for my host, Mr. Van Hall, who had answered for me, and who was not without_some uneasiness as to the issue of the enterprise. For when a lecturer brought from such a distance fails, it is always the organizer who gets the blame. The lecturer goes away, but the organizer remains, and it is he who suffers from reproaches and ill-humored jokes. I went in this campaign, borne on by the fame of this first success, from triumph to triumph. I had the pleasure of speaking, in one of the towns of Hol- land, before an audience composed solely of students. The students down there form a vast association which is extremely rich. It has had built for its own a sort of hotel or palace, where its members meet to read, to drink, to play. There are libraries, billiard- rooms, a caf6, and finally, what most concerned me, a hall for lectures or plays which was magnificent and comfortably fitted up. Nothing could be more cordial and kindly than the way in which these young people received us, Mr. Van Hall and myself. I feel some shame in recalling the delicate attentions with which I was loaded, the eulogies and compli- ments that I received. What charmed me more was that in me (they made it plain) they honored France and the French language. That is, indeed. In Holland 223 the joy and the peril of these expeditions upon for- eign soil. One may thoroughly realize himself to be nothing great, but he feels all the same that, in what- ever degree it may be, he represents the country, and if he commits a blunder, it is she who suifers for it, as she is raised in the estimation of the people he is among if he is fortunate enough to please them. I returned to Paris worn out and good for noth- ing. I had spent a week speaking nearly every evening, which would not be very fatiguing, but also in taking part in the gala suppers that followed the lectures, always on exhibition, talking and toasting. I had some trouble in recovering from this excess of fatigue, and when, the following year, Mr. Van Hall urged me cordially to return to Amsterdam, telling me that everyone there was asking for me again, I responded that I should be happy to see his fireside again, to seat myself once more on that veranda from which one beheld in the distance such fresh rolling verdure, but that I intended not to quit Amsterdam : I would give two lectures there, three at the most, each followed by a day of rest. It was thus that things were arranged. Nevertheless, I had my little failure there that year, for I was fated to have one everywhere. Oh, a very little one, this time, which did not assume disastrous proportions. If I relate it, it will be as 224 Recollections of Middle Life a new proof of that truthfulness upon which I have already insisted so often in this long autobiographi- cal study on the art of lecturing. It is necessary before addressing an audience to inquire very ex- actly into what it expects, what it desires, what it fears, to feel out its tastes — ^in one word, to observe the " rules of oratory." You recall that lecture that I gave in London for the organization and history of the Comedie-Fran- gaise. I imagined, I don't know why, that the sub- ject would take in Holland. I was in thorough pos- session of it, I may say I was full of it. I did not trouble myself to prepare developments, sure that when the day came they would come in crowds to my mind. Upon this point I was not mistaken. The lecture was full and solid, and even here and there enlivened by ingenious hits. It had no ef- fect ; the audience remained depressed. I perceived it, not without astonishment ; for it did not seem to me this time that I was below my average. But I soon had an explanation of the mys- tery. The Dutch, when they read from the posters that I was going to speak to them of the Com6die- Fran^aise, all said to themselves : "A man who has amused us so much with such a severe subject as ' Polyeucte,' will overcome us with laughter when he opens to us the mysteries of the theatre he has knowa In Holland 225 so intimately and practically for so many years." They had come with the idea that I was going to give them portraits of artists, relate anecdotes to them, put them au courant with the theatrical cui- sine. They expected to be put in good spirits and diverted. I ought to have suspected it ; it was so natural in them. But no ; I brought them a dissertation, interesting certainly, but very severe in tone and aspect, upon the organization of the Com6die, upon the decree of Moscow, and the hindrances it had received ; there was nothing very gay in all that, and, it must be said, nothing that had any great interest for the in- habitants of Amsterdam, who know of the Comedie- Fran^aise only its fame, and care not how it is gov- erned. I should doubtless have had a lively enough success with this lecture in Paris, at the Salle des Capucines, or with Bodinier at the Cercle d' Ap- plication ; I should at least have been listened to with interest and sympathy ; I bored the Dutch, and it was my own fault. It is true that, once advised of my error and its causes, I took two signal revenges. I gave in partic- ular, before an exclusively masculine audience — the audience of a club which had invited me expressly to speak — a lecture upon the passion for play in the theatre, which is among the best that I remember, IS 2 26 Recollections of Middle Life and I have reason to believe that it is not yet for- gotten in Amsterdam. The rumor of the always kindly, sometimes enthu- siastic, welcome that I received in Holland, was spread at Paris through our little circle of lecturers. Many of those who prided themselves on belonging to it, came to me to get information as to the pecun- iary arrangements made with orators, and, as they were very fine, for Holland is larger and more gen- erous than Belgium, they prayed me to intercede with Mr. Van Hall. I did so. None succeeded. But I had warned them discreetly, so far as it was permitted me, being one of their set and open to the suspicion of throwing obstacles in their way through jealousy ; I warned them that the Amsterdam audience, like . that of The Hague, of Leyden, and of Utrecht, was doubtless very courteous, but very cultivated, very intelligent, difficult, delicate even, demanding abso- lutely the solid and the good, whom it is not per- mitted to treat lightly. But what would you have ? These young people have a curious inclination to believe that foreigners are only too happy to see a Parisian, to crowd about him, to listen to him, and to welcome open-mouthed every word that falls from his lips. There were some mistakes made. These mistakes had, unhappily, the effect of cooling the desire of the Dutch for lectures. In Holland 227 Mr. Van Hall wrote me that things had reached the point where only my name or that of some brilhant personality, such as Emile Zola, or Alphonse Dau- det, for example, was capable of drawing a numer- ous audience to a lecture hall. There had been too many and too cruel disappointments. The Dutch had vowed never again to go to hear a Parisian lecturer, at least not unless he was of the highest rank. I let a year go by myself without going back ; the list of journab for which I wrote was ever lengthen- ing. It became nearly impossible for me to leave Paris for a week in winter ; and I no longer felt the same elasticity of mind and body as formerly. I have never again beheld Amsterdam, or Brussels, or Liege, of which I keep such pleasant memories. I believe that courses of lectures in the provinces and abroad are now ended for me, unless upon some extraordinary occasion, under exceptional circum- stances: " VHiran, je nC asseois sur mon tambour crevt. ' ' And I remain in Paris, where I shall gather faithful audiences about me sufficiently often, in the Boulevard des Capucines. I will end these memoirs and this study by the account of my twenty years of assiduous lecturing in that hall. Reassure yourselves, it will not be very long now. XIII. AT THE SALLE DES CAPUCINES I shall not here undertake to recount the full his- tory of the Salle des Capucines. I am poorly ac- quainted with it ; lectures were always given in the evening there ; I have never been able to follow them closely, since I am by profession on duty at the theatre during those hours. For the rest, my pur- pose in writing these purely personal memoirs has only been to tell what I know of this profession, and to open to young beginners, by showing them my successes and my mortifications, the treasure of my old experience. It was after the war that the little society of lit- erary people and of lawyers of which I spoke at the beginning of this work, carried the lectures of the Rue de la Paix into this hall of the Boulevard des Capucines. This hall was not too well chosen : its only advantage was its situation in the very heart of Paris, in the richest and most populous quarter of the city. But it was dull in aspect : it had to be sought out at the rear of a court ; it At the Salle Des Capucines 229 could only be reached through a narrow door and a dingy hallway. It was small, with low ceiling, cut with great pillars, robbing a portion of the audience of the view of the platform. All the audience were on a level floor, seated on chairs which stretched away like rows of onions. ' The spectators could not see one another, and it was impossible to establish among them that electric communication without which an audience is never anything but a collection of isolated individuals, who feel a languid pleasure in listening to an orator, when, indeed, they are not heartily bored, each by himself. In addition, the hall was badly lighted, and badly heated ; one's feet were frozen by a current of cold air, while the head, congested, was bathed in an atmosphere much too warm. This wretched hall has been my despair for twenty years. The interior arrangement has been somewhat improved during these last years, without rendering it, alas ! more convenient or more cheerful. I am convinced that the ennui that is breathed there and the discomfort that is inflicted upon the audience, have largely accounted for the slight attention mani- fested. Lecturing has not succeeded, for want of a spacious and comfortable home. I have never been abroad, where I have found such beautiful amphi- theatres, without returning melancholy to our poor little black, sad hall of the Boulevard des Capucines. 230 Recollections of Middle Life The directors who succeeded each other there felt its faults, surely, but they lacked money. They could not think of building a proper hall, because they got no receipts ; and they had no receipts, because they had no hall. It is a vicious circle from which they have not escaped, and within which we are strug- gling still at the hour of my writing. If only we had on the Boulevard des Capucines the hall which Bodinier has constructed on the Rue Saint-Lazare, where he gives sometimes theatrical representations, sometimes lectures, and occasionally even lectures that are only a kind of theatrical representation ! But we should need two hundred thousand francs at the lowest figure ; and two hundred thousand francs will never be found at a lecturer's disposal. At the time the lectures of the Boulevard des Ca- pucines were opened, I took quite an active part in them without binding myself to regularity — ^which was moreover not asked of me. There were, without counting myself, Messrs. Chavie, Deschanel, Flam- marion, Lapommeraye, Frank Geraldy, and others besides, whose names I no longer recall, not having listened to them, who came in turn to set forth their ideas ; and as the institution then had the grace and piquancy of novelty, the audiences were numerous and faithful. Some of the orators, better liked, more conspicuous, filled the hall, Deschanel and At the Salle Des Capucines 231 Flammarion in the first rank. I gave, at this time, a series of lectures which appeared to please the ha- bitues ; I remember particularly having amused them by improvising for them a series of monographs of professions : the professor, the journalist, the dra- matic author, the lawyer, the magistrate, and others. But all that could not go far. When one has not a fund of consecutive teaching to sustain lectures, sub- jects cannot but fail ; fancy soon exhausts itself. The lecturers in fashion grew more and more scarce. Deschanel, appointed to the College de France, re- served himself naturally for his chair and for the state. It was difficult to find speakers, and speakers commenced to find their audience more sparse and restive. This precarious situation rightly gave the director concern. He came to me, one morning, to unfold a project which he had long meditated. He proposed to ar- range with a few carefully selected lecturers, who should pledge themselves, each, for once every week or fortnight; it would be, so to speak, a regular troupe, which would assure him a certain number of evenings, gathering an audience of faithful habitues for an expected lesson upon fixed days. The bashi- bazouks of the passing days would fill in the voids. He had thought of me to give each week a lecture upon the play that should have been given in one or 232 Recollections of Middle Life another of the theatres — a sort of spoken feuilleton. He developed his idea, which appeared to me very specious, with much warmth. But I had my reasons for not going into it. "Listen," I said to him; "I have no desire to give a lecture upon the drama each week. I have already my Monday review for the Temps ; every time I am asked for an article or for a lecture, a subject that bears upon dramatic art is proposed to me ; I receive at home only the people who talk about the theatre; I go to the theatre every even- ing ; I am up to my ears in the theatre. ' ' As I spoke I saw his face lighten ; an enigmatical smile hovered about his lips, and, instead of insist- ing, of urging me, as I expected, he asked me to whom I thought he could address himself for this work. "I scarcely see anyone," I told him, "except Lapommeraye who could do you this service. He is as well acquainted with the theatre as I am; he speaks fluently and easily ; he is liked by our pub- lic." My man broke into laughter. " What are you laughing at ? " I asked ; " what is so amusing ? ' ' " If I laugh," he responded, " it is because I have just come from Lapommeraye. I may indeed tell At the Salle Des Capucines 233 you now that I thought first of him, foreseeing your objections. The proposition appeared to him prom- ising, and he immediately found the general title to give to these lectures : Le feuilleton parle. But he added, ' Sarcey is my elder in journalism ; he is my colleague in the Salle des Capucines. It will be taken ill if the first advances are not made to him ; I will accept only after he has refused.' Thus," added the director, "it is a refusal that I have sought from you. I am delighted with the way things have turned ; for Lapommeraye will do this work, which he at heart desires, with much spirit and success, and for you I have another scheme. You give us books." I started. " Yes, books. There will certainly appear each week, from September until June, a volume of ro- mance, history, or philosophy, which will be worth talking about to the public. You will take it ; you will talk of it in our hall ; you will thus institute a sort of course of contemporaneous literature. ' ' He scarcely suspected that, in making this propo- sition to me, he was flattering my dearest hobby. Every man has had in his lifetime a dream which has never been realized ; mine was to have in some paper a weekly feuilleton, in which I could do for books what I had done for the theatre in the Temps. 234 Recollections of Middle Life When I entered the ranks as theatrical critic, there shone some names which were of the highest order : Jules Janin, Theophile Gautier, Paul de Saint- Victor, and Fiorentino, who was, whatever may have been said, one of the masters of the dramatic feuilleton. Others still of less degree were Jules de Pr^maray, Paul Foucher, etc. I did not conceive the imperti- nent idea of ever equalling these illustrious writers; I simply made this reflection, which events have proven just : without doubt some wit and talent are neces- sary in France to win an audience ; nothing told me that I had more than others, and, if I had very httle, I could not give myself any more by either toil or artifice. But there are other ways of grappUng the crowd and gaining authority over it, which are, it is true, slower, but also surer, and which are suited to me, as they exact only a firm, persevering will, an assiduity that nothing checks, and hterary probity that nothing can encroach upon. " I will go every evening that heaven wills to the theatre ; I will never speak of a work until I have seen and re-seen it ; I will say of it only what I truly think, and if I think nothing of it I will frankly assert that I think nothing of it. " That I can do ; for the will is all that is neces- sary. It will take me five years, ten years, fifteen years to persuade the public that I speak only of what At the Salle Des Capucines 235 I know, and that I say only what I think. But I shall succeed ; for I know beforehand that in this path I shall have no competitor. Wit, with us, runs the streets ; there is a little talent everywhere ; genius, even, is not absolutely rare. What is really rare is energetic, patient obstinacy in one single idea. " ' Constant dropping weareth away a stone,' says a proverb. I will wear away slowly, week by week, drop by drop, a deeper entrance into the confidence of the public. I will never be afraid of fatiguing or boring them ; when I have to give them an account of a miserable, rough sketch I will not treat it lightly, taking on airs of raillery ; I will bring to it the same care, the same competence that I bring to more im- portant works. Everything is interesting to him who interests himself in it, and I wish to implant deeply in the brain of the reader this idea, the mother of confidence, that I am interested in what I speak of, and that I only speak of it because it interests me, and that I expect to interest him by speaking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." I gave myself fifteen years in which to conquer the public ; I required a little more. But I have reached it in spite of raillery and jesting, for which I cared nothing, of which I was even glad ; for every time any one joked me upon my fidelity to representations 236 Recollections of Middle Life in the smallest theatres, upon the importance I ap- peared to attach to the thinnest vaudeville, or upon the severity of my judgment, " Good ! " I said to myself, "my work is progressing. This excellent brother has gained me three months ! What a pity that he is so lacking in both wit and style ; his article would be more widely read, and would do me more good. ' ' I have not had many such chances. I have been more often than belongs to my share, attacked, cried down, scoffed at. I have been almost alwaj^ treated thus by the hedge priests of Uterature. One cannot have everything ! One would be too happy, if one had to do only with Zolas, or even with Cali- bans. This resolute assiduity and probity would not have carried me far, however, if circumstances had not favored me. In literature, as in everything else, a large part must be left to chance. I have had the good fortune to encounter and fill the post of dram- atic critic in two journals, whose success apart from my collaborations has been prodigious. In October, 1859, I went upon the Opinion nationale, which Gu^rout had just founded ; three months after, the paper printed thirty thousand copies, and was read by all Paris. Chance might have forced me to re- main on it ; it dragged along for many years after Gu^rout's death, without the power to die, forsaken At the Salle Des Capucines 237 by all, forgotten. Doubtless, I should have con- tinued to write for it as a point of honor, not wish- ing to leave a paper in its death-struggle. The little reputation that I had been able to gain would have been extinguished in obscurity. No one would have paid any attention to the sound of shots fired in that cellar. I had the opportunity of quitting the Opinion na- tionale for Le Temps. My best friends considered at that time that I made a blunder. For the paper that I abandoned was in full vogue and I was com- mencing to be personally very well liked there. Le Temps, on the contrary, had then only a feeble cir- culation, and was struggling against money difficulties from which it only freed itself later on. What at- tracted and determined me was not, as many be- lieved, a question of salary. Gu6rout had offered to increase mine. It was the grave attraction of that sheet, which the whole University read with devo- tion. It seemed to me that I should be more at my ease in these very intellectual and serious surround- ings, to set forth and develop the theories of dramatic art which commenced to bubble confusedly in my brain. It was a hundred to one that I should lose in hazarding this move. When I think of the agility with which I accomplished this revolution, I am sometimes seized with a little retrospective shiver. I 238 Recollections of Middle Life played my whole future upon a single throw of the dice. My instinct served me well. In Le Temps, I found the large and severe frame which I needed for the feuilleton that I meditated writing, and which finally imposed upon the public ; and Le Temps has become the journal that you know — a leading journal that is read over all Europe. Such an opportunity does not come to one twice in a lifetime. I did not have the same fortune with the bibliographic /(?»«7/if/o« that I was dreaming of. I resolved to apply the same principles to it. I said to myself: The critics who are charged with present- ing literary news in the journals and reviews, are nu- merous ; all are men of wide knowledge, high intel- lect, and some are superior writers. But they do not generally trouble themselves with rendering the pub- lic the service that the public expects of them. They nearly all give themselves up to philosophical consid- erations, or personal fancy, concerning the works of which they have to give an account ; some even con- tent themselves with executing more or less brilliant variations upon a book of which they have read only the title, and perhaps a few pages at random. The old-time criticism of the eighteenth century and of the Restoration, the criticism which consist- ed of saying to the reader : Here is what there is in the work ; here is what is good in it, and here is At the Salle Des Capucines 239 what is bad in it ; you will do well to buy it, or you can pass it by — that useful and narrow criticism has completely disappeared. It is considered super- annuated, and, as we say, vieuxjeu. Well, I am convinced that a large part of the bourgeois public regret it ; that an infinite number of worthy people, half literary, loving to read and having the leisure to do so, would be dehghted to have a guide with good sense, with taste, and the honesty in which they could have confidence, whose word they could believe. That would be, thought I, a clientele to win ; and I should reach it by the means that served me for the dvaxDziic feuilleton : To read with care the books of which I wished to speak ; to analyze them conscien- tiously, in order to put the things themselves before the eyes of the public, and to conclude by rational criticism which would naturally be worth what he who made it was worth. At first I should have only a small number of attentive readers ; I should not be discouraged, for I know that nothing serious or dur- able can be done without much time and patience. Authority is the confidence of others, and no one wins confidence at a single blow. It is won slowly, by being often right and proving that you are right. Perhaps I should succeed better in this now, having already a strongly established reputation for literary probity elsewhere gained. 240 Recollections of Middle Life You cannot imagine the number of journals and reviews in which I have attempted to found this criticism and give myself this influence. I have had no success ; a dozen times I have believed myself- near it ; a dozen times my jar of milk has been over- turned upon my head. I seemed to myself like one of these poor big ants fallen into a bowl full of liquid. It climbs obstinately up the porcelain walls, and each time that it is about to touch the edge, a mischiev- ous child fillips it back into the dish, where it pad- dles ; it is not discouraged, it begins over again with an invincible stubbornness, until finally, cap- able of no further effort, the body floats inert, its legs stretched out and hanging. Oh ! how sure I was, more than twenty years ago, when Weiss founded his paper, the Farts, how sure I was that I was going to win the prize ! Concern- ing literary criticism, I mean concerning the manner of exercising it, Weiss had the same idea as myself. We had more than once chatted about it together. As I was writing in his paper three times a week, he said to me : " As far as you can, take the new books that appear for subjects of chroniques ; when I defi- nitely organize the Paris, I will assign you to a ■wee\i[y feuilleton." Unfortunately for me the Paris, one of the most original sheets that ever appeared on the boulevard, had more admirers than subscribers. At the Salle Des Capucines 241 Weiss, instead of organizing it, was obliged to liqui- date it, and the hope I had caressed flew away again. It was for me a great disappointment, for Weiss would have left me free to say ainything I might wish. No one was ever less arbitrary ; no one was ever more the friend of truth, or felt a greater horror of advertising, whether gratuitous or bought. I can give, since the course of the talk has led me toward the subject^ a very curious example of it, and one very difficult to believe if one did not know how much imagination Weiss had. One day he took me aside : "Do you feel the courage," he said to me, "to make a new study which will take you six months of your life, if not more ? ' ' " What is it about ? " I asked, a little astonished. " I should like to have, for the financial portion of the paper, an account of the stock exchange given by a man who will say only what he believes to be the truth, who will not allow himself to be bought by anyone. Will you take six months to study these questions, which ought not to be so difficult to com- prehend as they are said to be ? then I will give you the iinancial bulletin ? You shall do the stock ex- change for the Paris as you do the theatre for the Temps." Much as I was accustomed to Weiss's flights of 16 242 Recollections of Middle Life fancy, I looked him in the eyes to see if he were not making fun of me. No, he was very serious; this eccentric proposition was not a joke. I need not say that I declined the honor that he wished to give me, and I believe that by the next day he no longer thought of his project himself; for he never spoke to me of it again. On the other hand, he returned many times to the idea of a bibliographical feuilk- ton. He was so smitten with it that he took the duty upon himself, and it would have been admir- ably done if, at that time, he had not been entirely swallowed up by politics, those miserable politics which so grievously spoiled his life. Thus I have seen crumble in my hands, I know not how many times, this hope of mine ; the last ex- perience was the saddest. The Parti National had just been founded ; at the head of the paper were men quite disposed to accord me whatever might please me. I asked for a literary feuilleton, and obtained it. I set myself at work with that imperturbable tenacity which is my ruling characteristic. I had loyally warned the directors : "I shall first be read by only a small number among your subscribers ; in three or four years I shall be read by all. In ten years, if God lends me life, I shall bring you read- ers ; I shall have conquered authority. ' ' The Parti National was a very well made paper, At the Salle Des Capucines 243 wise in tone, and moderate in language, whose cir- culation increased but slowly ; I can say, however, that all the readers of that sheet became my readers and were beginning to believe in me. Presto ! the paper changed hands, and the poor ant again fell into the bowl, from which, alas ! there is no sign of his ever escaping. The greater number of papers have, for reasons that I need not comment upon here, suppressed not only the book reviews, but even the articles which, under the name of VarUtes, were the pride of the ancient press. They will not re-establish them for me ; I have bidden a sad adieu to the long hopes and vast thoughts of which the fabulist speaks. I had not yet renounced them when the director of the Salle des Capucines came to propose that I should give, each week, my spoken feuilleton upon books, after the fashion of Lapommeraye. It was not the same thing. Ah, no ! it was not the same thing ! A paper, however little vogue it has, counts, at the least, fifteen hundred or two thou- sand readers. Many have thirty or forty thousand ; some count up hundreds of thousands. The audience at the Capucines, when the hall is full, is composed of three or four hundred persons, and I suspected that the days on which I spoke of books, especially un- known books, it would be only half filled. I should 244 Recollections of Middle Life have at the most a hundred faithful hearers, and that would still be a very pretty number, if I could, at each lecture, gather them about my chair. It seemed pretty certain that, during the first six months, I should not have even that numba: ; I should be forced to form my audience slowly, and week by week. But only young people are in a hurry ; at my age, one has time to wait. I have confidence in time. I warned the director, who appeared to me to have strong illusions as to the rapid success of this attempt, that the constitution of an audience was a work of patience, and of long patience. He spoke to me of piquing the curiosity of the crowd by attractive titles ; of having the posters flame with the names of scan- dalous books, those of writers about whose names sounded the trumpet flourishes of notoriety. I would have nothing of all that. "No," I said to him, "with those methods we shall have half a dozen houses and big receipts ; but the attraction of scandal dies out, the trumpets of notoriety do not long turn heads ; the stock of idlers will soon run out, and we shall have aUenated the serious people who will be annoyed by the noise ; if they return to us, it will no longer be with confi- dence ; they will no longer be of the faithful. I am so persuaded of this truth, that I do not wish to be paid, according to the custom of the Boulevard des At the Salle Des Capucines 245 Capucines, from the returns. I am too much afraid that in some pressing need of money — we are all sub- ject to it, alas ! — I might yield to the desire for a full house, and sacrifice a good, honest, and moderate work to a book that was making a noise. I wish to put myself beyond all inclination to commit these injustices. You shall pay me a fixed sum ; at least I shall be sure, when I choose a subject, of not being, unconsciously, led astray by considerations of self- interest. ' ' Things were arranged as I wished. It was decided that I should be absolutely master of my choice of subjects ; that I should consult only my personal preferences, without taking account, except so far as I wished, of the tastes of the crowd. My man wanted, at least for the first lectures, to insert some flashing advertisements in the papers. I begged him to do nothing of the kind. " I am not sure of myself," I said; "it is a hazardous enter- prise. PericuloscB planum opus alem. I prefer to begin modestly without so much fuss. It is useless to arouse the attention of the papers. They will never see in a lecture anything but a pretext for more or less witty chaffing. This chaffing would doubtless bring people to me, but not the kind of people whom I aspire to attract, and of whom I wish to take pos- session. I need believers ; my contemporaries would 246 Recollections of Middle Life send me only sceptics, and one of the forms of scepti- cism, in Paris, remember, is to never pay for a seat." " It shall be as you wish," said my director, laugh- ing. "But with these conditions — ^it is settled?" He gave me his hand, I gave him mine. "It is settled," I said. We had chosen Thursday, because it was one of two days of the week on which the Com6die-Fran- ^aise never gave a first night, nor had an important rehearsal. I commenced, then, with neither drum nor trumpet, almost in secret, before a very restricted audience. I continued for sixteen years, without other interruption than that imposed upon me by the closing of the hall during the three summer months. To-day I am still in the breach, though I have been able, latterly, to arrange these lectures a fortnight apart. I have never had very brilUant successes, nor very bad failures; neither the place, nor the audi- ence, nor the subject invite these extremes; it has been a nearly always equal series of serious lectures, of which some merely give more pleasure than others. I must not fail to tell you some curious particulars, be- cause you may draw from them, not the rules of this difficult business — there are, to tell the truth, no rules for this sort of lectures, any more than there are for the others — but indications and profitable suggestions to those who may wish to engage in them after me. XIV. DIFFICULTIES OF THE ENTERPRISE I found myself at once overtaken by a difficulty that I had, indeed, suspected, but the importance of which I had not calculated. When one writes a literary criticism upon the book of the day, it is not always sure to be read by the public, but it is perfectly sure to be read by the author. I was going to give each week a spoken feuilleton under the title of " bibliography." It was a question whether I should have many hearers; I was certain of one at least, the author himself, who listened, concealed behind one of the pillars of the hall ; or in default of the author, someone of his friends sent by him to listen to the lecture and give him an account of it : sometimes even his wife or his daughter. Oh, woman ! I find myself seized, in thinking of her, with retrospective fright. The authors, in truth, I have nearly always found easy enough : they ad- mitted, when we chatted together at the close of the lecture, or they feigned to admit, good ground for 248 Recollections of Middle Life some of the criticisms, they laid others to differences as to schools. They discussed doubtful points with me, and without appearing to bear me any grudge, they explained to me with a good grace their inten- tions, which I had misunderstood. We parted with a handshake. I do not wish to assert that I have never encoun- tered, among those who have passed under my ferule, any irascible, conceited ones whose ill-humor was afterward exhaled in bitter complaints. Yes, I have more than once had to do with crabbed fellows whose temper I have set going in spite of all my oratorical precautions. But I must say that in gen- eral I have had only relations of coiu-tesy, formal or amiable according to their dispositions, with the infinite number of writers whom I have picked to pieces. I remember that one evening, I had to speak of one of the romances of Jules Claretie, to whom I was bound by a warm and sincere friendship. But there is no friendship that holds. It is a principle of mine, in criticism, that there is a minimum of truth to which the public has a right. " I mean to come and hear you," Claretie said to me that same morning ; ' ' can I do so without an- noying you ? ' ' " Oh ! you can do it," I answered ; " not a word Difficulties of the Enterprise 249 shall escape me that would wound a legitimate sensi- bihty." Evening came, I said what I had to say of the work, and the lecture over, we returned, arm in arm, to our hill, for we lived near one another on the heights of the CUchy quarter. " It was a strange sensation that I have just expe- rienced," he said to me. " While you were analyz- ing my book I felt myself in a way flayed and torn to pieces. I felt at certain moments a wild desire to interrupt you, for there are points you know, of course, on which I am not of your opinion, and the necessity that restrained me was horribly painful and grievous. The blood crinkled in my veins and buzzed in my ears. I am, however, very glad to have passed through it. I thank you, but I will not do it again ! ' ' " Bah ! " I said to him, laughing ; " you will be- come inured." There were some, and not among the least, who supported this flaying with still more courage, and more even temper. Thus Richepin, every time he was in Paris, came to the quite large number of lectures that I gave upon his romances and poems. They were not always calculated to satisfy him. He talked about it with me without a shadow of wounded vanity, with freedom and zest, conceding 250 Recollections of Middle Life at times that I was right, as though he had to do with someone else's work. I have, in the same way, had Maupassant speak to me of a study that I had made of him and before him. He was as yet little known at that time, and there was only a little clan of us admirers to believe that he would take one of the first places in contem- porary romance. I had chosen, as a pretext to speak of him, a rather thin volume of verse and some of his novels. His baggage at that far away period was not yet considerable. It chanced that I was not in good trim that day. I wished to read two or three of his poems. I read them ill, and I felt that I was reading them ill. I closed the volume brusquely, very angry with my- self; and with that excessive familiarity of language to which I had accustomed my audience. " I do not know what is the matter with me to- day. I read that like a Et d'une horrible toux les acc^s violents fitouffent 1' animal qui s'engraisse de glands." * And I pronounced the word that Delille formerly dissimulated under this poetic paraphrase. * ' ' And a horrible coughing-fit chokes the creature that fat- tens on acorns " — whose name is unspeakable in polite French. Difficulties of the Enterprise 251 There was, nevertheless, an oh ! of surprise and revolt. " Yes," I insisted, " like a pig. I am false to the poet. It is not. Heaven knows ! that his verses are worthy of his prose " And I started off. Well, I was not tender to those unfortunate poems, and at the close of the lect- ure, I saw with some confusion that Maupassant, whom I had not known to be there, was advancing toward me, his hand extended, his face frank. He was much amused both by my mishap and my vexa- tion. And as I was excusing myself, he said : " But no — no — there was truth, and much truth, I know very well, in all your criticism." With men, above all with superior ones, all went well. I have never been too much annoyed. But the women, the sisters and friends, were, on the other hand, fiercely uncompromising. I nearly always had them at these lectures. The writers themselves, whether from shame, or indifference, or fear, gen- erally abstained from appearing, or hid themselves in some dark corner, and their presence was re- vealed neither to me nor to anyone in the audience. Often I only learned of it afterward, through some fortuitous indiscretion. The women hardly ever failed to place themselves in the first row, facing my chair, surrounded sometimes by people of their 252 Recollections of Middle Life acquaintance. And they ! — ^they are terrible ! No praise, however strong, seems sufficient to them ; the least qualification pricks them in the tenderest spot of their hearts, and causes them to cry aloud. You may employ all the forms of expression that the usages of a polite language suggest ; they feel under this phraseology the point of criticism, and they re- sist, and they fume ; then they abound in unpleasant recrimination. How many times have I been pronounced a fool or a brute, by pretty red lips. And what is most irri- tating is that they are generally unintelligent, but their fervor obscures their judgment, and prevents them from entering into the true sense of the lect- urer's words. He sets forth a theory without intend- ing any malice. They see in it a subtle fashion of criticising the work of the man they love, and in the evening, at home, they say to him, " You can- not imagine with what fury he tore you to pieces." They see awry through the glasses of their imagina- tion and their prejudice, and to their eyes all is de- formed and grotesque. I cannot, unfortunately, sup- port these reflections with conclusive facts. But how many times it has happened to me, learning in an indirect fashion that some author bore me inexplica- ble ill-will, to cry to myself in an aside : " What a, pity that he was not there himself, in person — ^tha^ Difficulties of the Enterprise 253 he did not hear with his own ears what I said of him ; that he should know me only through a translation, and such a translation ! The most faithless, possible, made by passionate, nervous, and therefore unreason- able beings." The disciples were no more agreeable. Every time that I spoke of a writer, an acknowledged master of a school, I was sure to have, outside of my usual audience, a certain number of young people, all fanatics on the subject of the master, whom the live- hest evidence of sincere admiration could not satisfy — they themselves went as far as adoration, as feti- chism — who flamed inwardly at the least word of reserve, still more of criticism. As I am very near-sighted and cannot distinguish faces, I did not see their irritation ; but the lecturer is warned by a seventh sense, of the disposition of his audience. An invisible fluid wafts him the sympathy or anger of his listeners. He is bathed in it, so to speak. He feels it through all the pores of his quiv- ering skin. It is a phenomenon which I have never been able to explain, but which occurs too fre- quently to be doubted. Dramatic artists have expe- rienced it a hundred times. When the curtain rises, even before the hall has manifested its secret inclina- tions, a puff of warmth or coolness, that rises from the orchestra and strikes them full in the face, warns 254 Recollections of Middle Life them of what they have to hope or fear from the au- dience. How many times I have set my face against a re- served ill-humor that showed its discontent only by a sullen silence ! How many times I have turned it around and around, seeking the place by which I could seize the porcupine, rolled into a ball, to turn aside its prickles and penetrate it. Useless care ! trouble lost ! Disciples are, for other reasons and in a different way, as intolerant as the women. It is the intolerance of fanaticism. Thus it was necessary, ceaselessly to adjust one's self to those particular auditors, who came each time to impose themselves upon, or, rather, to annex themselves to, the bulk of my usual bourgeois au- dience, more animated, more stirring than that, and at times sufficiently numerous and compact to force upon it their preferences or antipathies. It was an egg-dance that I was obliged to execute every Thurs- day evening. I was not at first very skilful in the exercise ; I broke, it is true, only the eggs on which I walked, but I broke all of those. Skill came little by little : I observed myself more carefully, I made for myself a vocabulary of attenuated words, of in- genious equivalents, of suggestive reticences, of sly suspensions, and perfidious turns. Nature had boun- tifully endowed me with bonhomie of manner and Difficulties of the Enterprise 255 language. I studied myself to find use for them. I got acceptance for the strongest criticisms with the air of letting them escape innocently, as though I did not myself suspect their keenness ; and I accent- uated their energy by feigning suddenly to perceive that I had gone too far ; I tried then, with simulated awkwardness, to catch them on the wing, and the excuses that I made with an extremely embarrassed air turned themselves into new criticisms. I ques- tioned my audience upon a page that I had just read, telling it with feigned natveU that, as for me, I hardly knew what to think of it ; there were things for and against it. I contrived that it should rebel when I stated the reasons for — and then, stopping myself with an astonished air, I said : " Ah ! you think so ! I should not have believed it ! it is useless in that case to pass to the contrary thesis since that is your own. But I fear you may go too far in that direction." I had a mass of such little dodges, into the details of which it is useless to enter, because they were entirely personal to me, and other lecturers would have some trouble in making use of them. They succeeded with me, because, so to speak, they fitted into my manner, because there appeared to be no preparation about them ; and in truth there was none. Boileau somewhere confesses to us that he does the 256 Recollections of Middle Life most malicious things without any malice. I resem- bled Boileau in that. None of these little scenes were premeditated by me j I should even have been very much embarrassed to tell whether I played them more for myself or more for the audience. When the comedy was actually begun, they flowed so easily, they seemed to me as to others so much the natural expression of my thought. It must be added that I had to do with an audience long trained by myself, that comprehended a hint, and winked intelligently when it beheld one of those developments spring up through which criticism conceals itself under a guise of ingenuous bonhomie. I recall, apropos of this, a very witty response once made me by a society lady, with whom I was chatting one evening after the lecture. She, with her hus- band, had done me the honor, the preceding year, to follow my Thursdays at the Salle des Capucines with considerable assiduity, and I had become ac- quainted with both of them. The following winter I saw her only at long intervals, and by a fatality that I could not explain, instead of choosing the lect- ures in which I spoke of fine books that I loved, when I was sometimes very brilliant, enthusiasm be- ing a lively spring of eloquenee, she arrived on her husband's arm only on those evenings when the pro- gramme contained some work of which she well Difficulties of the Enterprise 257 knew, knowing my tastes, I should find it impossible to say anything good. " Dear me, madame ! " I said to her, after one of these lectures, " how sorry I am not to have had you and your husband for auditors last Thursday instead of this. What can you expect one to get out of such a work ? I must take it because it has just appeared and nothing else is talked of; but it is against my will. You always come on such evenings. Allow me to regret it." "But I do it on purpose," she told me; "what need have I to hear you speak of a romance by Zola or Daudet ? I have read it myself and I know in ad- vance what you will think of it. But there is noth- ing so amusing as to see you skirt about a book that displeases you. You have ways of carefully and awk- wardly putting your foot in it that are the most enjoy- able things in the world. You do not yourself sus- pect what inflections your voice takes when you read a passage that you consider bad, and which social obligations force you to praise. You have such pite- ous and forlorn notes in your admiring tone, that when one is used to your lectures it is a joy to foresee them and hear them. When you embark on one ' of those phrases, full of artful simplicity, which end in either a pin-prick or a stunning blow, a smile plays about the lips of a certain number of the faithful. 17 258 Recollections of Middle Life And then with you there are unexpected outbreaks ; you let yourself go ! you have your moments when you are carried away, and then ! " She spoke the truth. It is vain to keep watch over one's self and hold one's self severely bridled ; occa- sions always present themselves when the depths of nature surge vehemently up and crack all the surface. There is something of Alceste in me, an Alceste eager for brutality, that I have conquered only after infinite trouble, and of which I am not always master. He has done me ill turns in my TAonday feuilletons ; you may believe that I have more than once been his victim in the Thursday lectures. I recall one day — yes, I must tell you this anec- dote, for it is very typical and contains a lesson. All Paris knows M. Vallery-Radot, one of our most brilliant pohtical writers. When M. Vallery-Radot, after his years of study, published his first volume (its title escapes me), I had the good fortune to be one of the first to speak of it, and to present the author to the public. He was grateful to me, and came to thank me. I beheld a charming young man, of very correct bearing, exquisite manners, soft voice, whose conversation abounded in polite phrases, pleas- ing compliments, but all without a suspicion of coarse flattery — easy and graceful. He pleased me much ; I made him very welcome, and urged him to come Difficulties of the Enterprise 259 again. He did not fail to do so. The year after he brought me a new volume in which, telling the story of his student life, he had tried to paint the Latin quarter as he had seen it. "Very well, I will read it," I said to him, "and rest assured, the article will not be long in appear- ing." " This time," he said, " I would ask a little more. I wish that you would take the book for the subject of one of your approaching lectures. ' ' One of my principles was never to pledge myself to give a lecture upon a book without having previ- ously read it. There are, in truth, some books other- wise excellent, from which it would be impossible to make a lecture. A lecture is an hour of speaking, and so many things are said in an hour ! The vol- ume chosen must furnish the material, and one or two bits must also be taken from it in which the work is summed up, and which give a just idea of the author's style. I had already been caught two or three times in imprudently pledging my word, and I had had reason to regret it. In this case, however, I saw no difficulty in prom- ising what was asked of me. Supposing the book were not of the best, the subject itself was interesting. The student of to-day compared with the student of former times ! I could always fall back on Castor 26o Recollections of Middle Lite and Pollux, on Henry Murger and Valles. And then the young man was so polite, so interesting ! He had just married M. Pasteur's daughter, and he had intimated that this would be a way to make my- self agreeable to the illustrious savant, who was one of the purest lights of our Ecole normale. "Very well, be it as you like," I said to M. Val- lery-Radot. "You can count on me. I do not know what I shall say of the book, as I have not yet read it ; but the subject of the next lecture must be furnished this very morning ; I will put it on the pro- gramme. ' ' And he shook my hand. I commenced to read the book. M. Vallery-Ra- dot had been brought up by the good fathers of the Church, and he had retained a lively and profound gratitude toward them. Heaven forbid that I should blame him ! Only, he had in their school contracted habits of reserve and courtesy which may be a su- preme distinction in a salon, but which enervate the thought and spoil the style when one carries them into the observation and painting of customs. Doubtless there were in this work curious details con- cerning the life of the student of this generation, but there was also such an evident determination to find everything good, to distribute eulogies and compli- ments among the free-thinkers, as well as among the Difficulties of the Enterprise 261 Catholics, to avoid every dangerous or unpleasant image, every offending word, to roll his words in the honey of amiable phraseology, that I was some- what irritated. One point especially amazed me : woman was absent from the volume ! No women in the Latin quarter ! Oh, nonsense ! No dancing either ! then nothing, indeed nothing ! "Ah!" I said to myself, choking, "the stu- dents of to-day are no longer susceptible, then ! Is it turnip-juice that runs in their veins ? Who has made such young people as that ? They are nothing but curled dolls! " And though boiling with indignation, I still said : " Gently ! he is very nice, after all, this Vallery-Ra- dot ; there is talent in his book ; care should be taken not to wound him who has wounded no one. It will be better to pass very lightly over this criti- cism, to simply indicate it in a word, and to pause only at the parts where, in recounting what he has seen, he has blocked in the contours with a pencil less vague and soft. ' ' I was thus armed with the best resolutions when I mounted to my chair. I had decided to restrain myself, and I even whispered to myself that it would be quite pleasant to open a box of sugar-plums with this confectioner. I commence, and naturally I be- gin with this little bit of criticism, reserving all the 262 Recollections of Middle Life rest for praise and sweetness. I feel a certain resist- ance in the audience, and I insist without bitterness or malice; the coolness becomes accentuated. I might have glided quickly over it, and spun along ; but suddenly, I know not how, the taste for com- bativeness which is at the foundation of my charac- ter awakes in me j I yield to my temperament, and there I am, like a runaway horse, kicking at random, stamping with transports of anger or outbursts of contemptuous delight: The young people too cor- rect, the phrases too neatly trimmed, the manners too formal, and then, the propriety, the cant ! and from time to time, perceiving the devastation that I was sowing broadcast, I stopped — I tried to collect myself ; it was only to start off again the more furi- ously. Nothing remained of the unfortunate book and its poor author. When it was over and I rose, heated with the galloping charge I had just made, I saw M. Vallery- Radot advancing toward me, a smile upon his lips. He thanked me with the kindliest courtesy for the excellent lesson I had just given him with so much verve, and taking me by the hand, he said : •' M. Pasteur has expressed a desire to know you. Will you permit me to present you to him? " "What!" I cried, astounded. "M. Pasteur was there?" Difficulties of the Enterprise 263 " Certainly, and my family, and my friends. I have brought everyone to you." The roof was tumbling about my head. What folly in me not to have foreseen this audience, or, at least, not to have guessed it from the resistance I felt in the hall. And I had tried to vanquish it, to overcome it by main strength ! I could never get over my foolishness. I allowed myself to be led to M. Pasteur, like a condemned man to the guillotine. He welcomed me very graciously ; we chatted some moments. " I assure you," I said to him, when I had recov- ered my natural manner, " if I had known I had you for an auditor, I should perhaps have said the same things, but I should have said them differently. ' ' He smiled and said, with a shrewd air : " They would, I think, have gained by being said differently." M. Vallery-Radot had the good sense to bear me no grudge ; our relations remained none the less cor- dial. I have not always been so fortunate. I have made some desperate enemies through these scoldings. I recall the story of a very worthy man, whom I do not wish to name. He belonged to a high gov- ernment office, and occupied his leisure with making verses which were neither better nor worse than many 264 Recollections of Middle Life others. He had published a volume, and was burn- ing to have it talked about. A friend who had just rendered me a great service, and of whom I asked what favor I could do him, begged me to speak of this collection. "All right!" I said. "I am willing ; but I will put him with another poet in or- der to fill up the lecture. They can divide it be- tween them." " As you like, provided you speak of it." When the unfortunate man learned that his verses were going to be read and commented upon in pub- lic, he could not contain himself with joy. In his office they raUied him freely upon his hobby, and affected not to believe in his talent. It was a rehabihtation for him. " The day of glory has arrived ! ' ' He took, unhappy man, a hundred tickets that he paid for out of his own pocket ; he distributed them among his comrades and his family. "You shall see," he said, " you shall see ! " And he placed himself in the midst of his battalion. I knew nothing of these details ; I was somewhat as- tonished when I entered the hall to see so many people in it. Generally, when I spoke of poetry, unless the name of Victor Hugo gleamed upon the posters, I had but a meagre audience ; I attributed this increase of curi- Difficulties of the Enterprise 265 osity to the other poet, who had made a little name for himself, and I did not further disturb myself about it. I read a number of his verses and read them tol- erably well, with strong praise, delaying as long as I could the moment for the arrival of the hero of the occasion, my friend's proUgi, with whom I had found, as the saying is, nothing to fry. An " ah ! " of relief and curiosity rose from the whole hall. Among the pieces of which the volume was composed, I had chosen one which seemed to me more apt than the others to please my audience, and also easier for me to praise. After some kindly words upon the idealistic tendencies of the book, I undertook the task of reading this morsel. But it is a severe test of a poet to read him aloud. When one reads the verses to himself in the chim- ney corner, a general harmony that cradles and caresses the imagination, often suffices to charm him. But reading aloud reveals all the weaknesses, it ac- centuates the error of an inappropriate term ; it un- fastens the bolt which is left unguarded ; if the idea is not strong or just, if the sentiment is not true, the voice of the reader, which brings out in clear re- lief each member of a phrase, brings out also with cruel clearness the poverty or falsity of the develop- ments. It becomes impossible to mask these failings by a skilful artifice of diction. 266 Recollections of Middle Life In proportion as the reading advanced I felt more keenly the emptiness of the thing ; I noticed in front of me, in the bays, a light sound of ironical applause. Ah ! irony — there it was ! I could not mistake that, the seventh sense, you know ; I stopped, and in my good-natured tone, which this time was not assumed, I said : " Yes, you are right ; it is not as good as I thought, but I have noticed others. This is not, perhaps, the best." I turned some leaves, stopping at one page, from which a mark on the margin signalled me. I ran it over rapidly with my eyes ; a silence of expectation weighed upon the hall ; I was convinced of the impos- sibility of reading it aloud with any hope of success. "Well," I went on, closing the volume, "it ap- pears that it was the best. We will stop with that." And I rose. Little stifled laughs ran along all the rows of seats. I did not know until later the results of this cruelty. The poor man was horribly vexed by the affront which he had sought, and paid so dear for, for his companions to make fun of. It gave him an illness. They invented a by-word for him in his office ; when he spoke of anything, no matter what — a picture that he had seen, a dish that, he had tasted — if he praised it, " Is it really the best ? " they asked him. Difficulties of tiie Enterprise 267 I was truly sorry when I learned what I had done. It was not absolutely my fault, but there were ways enough of sparing this worthy clerk. This long practice in lecturing has been an excellent school of politeness for me. I gradually laid aside what there was biting and savage in my manner. When I re- read my old feuilletons, I am frightened sometimes by the horrible and useless ferocity of language that I encounter at intervals. I say the same things now, but in a gentler fashion, and, as M. Pasteur sug- gested, they gain by being said differently. It is not that the primitive nature does not reappear from time to time, but those brusque thrusts of a brutal style are more and more rare; and I am convinced that, could I only live two or three centuries, I should become perfection; as our fathers used to say, "a little saint in a niche." Most lecturers, my comrades, who have to speak in public of the work of a living author, will find themselves exposed to this same inconvenience that I have just experienced with them. I urge them to take the precautions, the need of which I have learned after much groping. I have other advice of a more delicate kind to give them as to the fashion in which they must — I mean by that, in which they would do better, according to my belief, to arrange this kind of lecture and manage the developments. XV. ON THE MANNER OF GIVING LECTURES UPON BOOKS In order to undertake a series of lectures upon new books, and pursue it week after week for years, one needs to be armed in advance with a sufficiently large fund of general ideas ; one must possess a doc- trine. When one speaks a single time, by chance, of a work that has just appeared, one can depend upon personal taste to judge it by. It is not the same thing when every week one mounts the platform as upon a judge's seat ; there's no magistrate without a code. The thing needs no demonstration, so I shall not insist upon it. The first question that presents itself to a lecturer — one much more difficult to solve than the greater part of the public will think it, and one which has long tormented me — ^is to know where to place the exposition of these general ideas. Is it better to open the conference by treating ex professo the part of the doctrine to which you propose to link what you have to say of the book ? Or is it preferable to begin with the anal3rsis of the book, and arrive at Giving Lectures upon Books 269 the general ideas only when you have started them up, so to speak, by beating the bush ? Do not think this a question of little importance. I have often told you, in the course of these sketches on the art of lecturing, that there are no good lectures without a good plan ; that is to say, a just and luminous ar- rangement of the parts of which they are composed ; and the last thing one finds, or, at least, the last thing I have always found, is the plan. Racine is said to have remarked, " I have finished the plan of my tragedy ; the play is done. ' ' That is, nothing but the writing remained for him, and the execution of that ought to be very easy to an artist who has sure and easy control of his instrument. When the plan of a lecture is fixed, it is as if the lecture were finished. It would be most logical, indeed, to commence by setting forth theoretical ideas in virtue of which you should afterward criticise the work. Moreover, you may remark that most of the literary criticisms ap- pearing in reviews are constructed in this way. The author first establishes as strongly as he can the prin- ciples of the school in which he belongs ; then he shows where the book he is giving account of fol- lows them, and where it departs from them ; and he winds up with a conclusive judgment, giving first his major reason, then passing to the minor, and ending with the conclusion which is necessarily deduced 270 Recollections of Middle Life from the premises. It is the syllogistic method; it is the rational order par excellence. I have been constrained, after a number of unfor- tunate experiences, to renounce it, and I advise no one to employ it. It is not, believe me, that I do not consider it the best, but it is too difficult and hazardous in practice. If you have ever tried, however little, to write or speak, you must have perceived that there is nothing in the world more difficult than to express general ideas. They exact a precision of terms, a justness of description, an authority of style, that one attains only after much work and many efforts ; they need, moreover, a particular turn of mind not the most common. The development of a general idea is not improvised ; perhaps there are some orators, M. Bru- netiere, for example, who could indeed state a liter- ary theory without preparing anything but the ar- rangement of the proofs, speaking fluently on the inspiration of the moment. It would be very dan- gerous to imitate them. " Ou la mouche a pass^ le moucheron demeure." For my part, I have never been able to manage it. I need (and the greater part of my brother-lecturers are in the same predicament), I need to warm myself up little by little, and it is only at the end of several Giving Lectures upon Books 271 minutes that I enter into full possession of my speech. What would happen with this ordering of a lecture commencing with a theoretical exposition? I was obliged to express, precisely when I was not yet going, when the exact and picturesque words would not flow from my lips, ideas which admit of neither vagueness nor inexactness in the language through which they are revealed. Ah ! how many times — for I long clung to this arrangement through love of pure logic — ^how many times I have floundered among the de- velopments in which I had involved myself, without knowing how I should come out ! Finally, indeed, I made myself understood, but as I never felt at ease myself, I never caused my audience to feel so. And between ourselves, my audience — I speak of mine, for there are all kinds, and what I am going to say would doubtless be false of the Sorbonne or I'Ecole Normale — my audience is not so very fond of general ideas and theories. I believe, indeed, that if under the analyses and judgments it had not felt the solid doctrine, it would quickly have tired of statements that consisted only of whipped cream and the whites of eggs beaten into snow. But as to this doctrine, it cared nothing for having it defined ex cathedrA ; if I found general ideas difiicult to express, it found them difficult to follow. One should always begin by laying a hand upon the audience and attract- 272 Recollections of Middle Life ing it. I started out with imposing upon it the task of reflection, which fatigued it, and prejudiced it against me. I gave myself much trouble, with no other result than boring it and alienating it. I came then, after long and numerous experiments, to reversing the accepted order of logic, to putting clearly and resolutely the minor before the major of the syllogism, to beginning with the analysis of the book. I adopted an invariable formula : ' ' Gentlemen, we have to concern ourselves to-day with such and such a work of such and such a gentle- man. ' ' Then followed some words upon the author and his preceding works, if I knew them, and if I had anything good or useful to say of them. And I entered upon the subject at once with the description of the romance, if it were a romance ; with the study of the large divisions of the work, if it were a book of philosophy or history ; with naming the most beau- tiful pieces and their subjects, if it were a collection of poems. Oftenest it was a romance or a work affecting the form of romance, since in our time the romance has encroached upon all classes of work and invaded them. I recounted the romance, then. Do not imagine that it was an easy operation, demanding no prepara- tion. Some of my confreres, people of infinite learn- ing, of wit and talent, MM. Anatole France and Giving Lectures upon Books 273 Jules Lemaltre among others, hold this task in criti- cism to be inferior, and they speak of it only with aristocratic disdain. Certainly it needs not a man of genius to give an account of a play one has seen, or a romance that one has just read. It is none the less a very delicate task, that exacts much taste and ex- traordinary exactness of language. It is not a question of describing the romance in minute detail ; one might as well read it aloud. One has only an hour, and the book never contains less than three hundred pages ; some reach five hundred. One needs must choose, and it is precisely this choice that constitutes the arduous and intricate work of the lecturer. He cannot do otherwise than indicate the general arrangement of the events which compose the story ; but preference must be given to the events that most clearly mark the idea of the work, and to the char- acters that throw most light on this idea. How shall they be distinguished ? It is an instinct to be strengthened by use. When one has this gift — it is a gift — ^he sees immediately, in listening to a play or reading a romance, the scene or two about which the description will turn, the characters that must be put forward, and those to be pushed into the shade. There is no rule to prescribe, nor even any ad- vice to be given, for the making of this choice. Oiie 18 274 Recollections of Middle Life of fimile Zola's worlcs, in which thirty characters swarm through a crowd of events, all connected by a single idea, cannot be described in the same way as a romance by Daudet, in which the scenes are more dispersed and the characters more inconsistent ; or a romance by Maupassant, or by FeuiUet, or by Fer- dinand Fabre. In each case you must accommodate yourself to the meaning of the work, to the ideas and tendencies of the author; the finger must be placed just on the point from which the light must spring up and spread over all the rest, and to this point you must cling, bringing everything around it with deliberate purpose, cutting away pitilessly the details that have not to do with it, forcing the others forward. In the account of a romance, clearness does not result from the care with which one spreads equal light over all parts of the story; that would be a diffuse and fluttering light. The only truth is that which is obtained by showing a great mass of light upon what is, or what one believes to be really characteristic of the work, sacrificing all the rest, which is thrown in the shadow. A very true eye is needed, and consummate art also, for nothing is more difficult than thus to dis- tribute, in the course of improvisation, events and personages, each one according to the importance Giving Lectures upon Books 275 given it, and the place assigned to it, and leading all toward the central idea of the narrative. I venture to say, and I do not believe that any of my followers will deny it at the risk of being tasked with vanity, I venture to say, that I have given some lectures of this kind that were, in a way, masterpieces. More than once people, having heard me, have come afterward to chat about my chair, and have said to me: "I have read the romance with which you have just been entertaining us. I thought I knew it; you have revealed it to me. ' ' One of the compliments which I most enjoyed, was the sally that Michel Levy levelled point-blank at me after a lecture at which he had been present. He had asked me to speak upon some romance, of which he was the publisher. I had been, it seemed to me, very brilliant that evening. "Well," I said, finding him at the exit, where he was waiting for me, " are you satisfied ? " "Why, no," he answered, in an ill-natured tone that did not seem to me assumed. I looked at him, a little mystified : " And why ? What is the matter ? " I asked. " Oh, who do you think would buy the volume after having heard your lecture ? They would know it better than if they had read it themselves. ' ' 2/6 Recollections of Middle Life He was sincere in speaking thus. I think, never- theless, that he was mistaken, for those who were present at the lecture did not fail to speak of it at home to their friends and acquaintances, and aroused a desire to procure the book that they might not otherwise have thought of buying. I need hardly say that in this kind of lecture, as in all others, I had my good and my bad days. Thus, with Zola, I failed absolutely in talking of "La Terre; " I became entangled with the infinite num- ber of characters, and I lost myself in the detail of the events. The narrative was confused, too pro- lix at the beginning, forcibly shortened at the end. "L' Argent" was just as difficult to talk about. I only rescued the lecture by extraordinary vivacity. But such are the chances of improvisation. And the general ideas ? and the theories ? you will ask me ; what did you do with them ? Where did you put them, having chased them from their legitimate place. Did you suppress them alto- gether ? Deprive yourself of their support ? Certainly not ; but I always managed to put them in some corner of my recital. This recital I turned slyly, without appearing to notice it, in such a way that those of the audience who were at all well-in- formed (and all of my audience were more or less so) should feel them coming and desire them. Then I Giving Lectures upon Books 277 no longer needed a serious pause for the purpose of making a long exposition of principles. In a few rapid words I sketched one of the great features of the theory ; the audience itself finished the develop- ment which I was not obliged to make. I often, even when it was one of the general ideas that con- stitute the foundation of my teaching, and for that reason are constantly returning — I often, even, sus- pended a recital or quotation as if I were going to start upon a philosophical dissertation ; I indicated it with a gesture or an exclamation, and left it ; the audience, having the run of these devices, benevo- lently conspired with the lecturer and smiled intelli- gently. I can, indeed, bear myself witness that during the fifteen years of this course, I have never, after the first attempts, made ex professo an exposition of princi- ples nor developed a single theory ; and nevertheless, I have slowly impregnated my audience with the ideas which were in some sort the marrow of my criticism. When I reflect upon it, it seems to me that I have brought to the lecture only those methods, the excel- lence of which in the chronique my experience in journalism has taught me. The chronique (at least such as I have always written, and still write) con- sists in philosophizing upon a fact, small or great, of daily life. I once imagined that it would be neces- 278 Recollections of Middle Life sary, first to set forth the principles in virtue of which I criticised the event, to state them, to prove them, to write a short dissertation which I strove to enliven as best I could. At length I perceived that in the chronique it was necessary always to start from the fact and rise to the idea; " to mount," as the philo- sophers say, "from the particular to the general." Better even, if possible, indicate only by an amusing touch, or enclose in an anecdote, the general idea, which is also the generating idea of the article. There was no reason why the method that was good for the newspaper should not be good for the lecture, which is only a spoken paper. But one does not learn the simplest things all at once, and believe me, nothing is simple in art. Among those who read this, are doubtless some who are preparing themselves to be lecturers. I im- agine that the observations I present will appear sound to them, so sound, perhaps, that certain of them will say, " What a fuss for nothing ! We knew all that, there was no need of his taking so much trouble to teach it to us." Well, I will wait until they practise it. They will see if the advice is as easy to follow as it seems. Another question which disturbed me for a long time in this kind of lecturing, was to know if it were well to make quotations from the work of which one Giving Lectures upon Books 279 is speaking, or whether it is better to speak one's self all the time. The solution of this problem, which has its impor- tance, depends upon a mass of considerations that must be taken into account. There are books which do not lend themselves to quotation — those by fimile Zola, for instance. Zola proceeds in masses, the development with him spreads over immense areas, from which it is impossible to detach a passage. It would be wronging him to take a page separately, even though it were admirable, and to read it as a specimen of his style. Zola must be taken as a whole. It is, then, of the whole that you as a lecturer must give the public an idea. Otherwise you betray him. I believe I have never read twenty lines of Zola, un- less it were some time when I wanted to put my hearers on their guard against certain crudities of language. It was necessary to read these from the book. But they were exceptional cases. Maupassant, even though he writes in sturdy, firm, and highly colored language, does not gain by being read in fragments. It never would have occurred to me to read a line from a romance of Claretie's or Hector Malot's, or many others, but there are writers who, to use a word of literary slang, "fontle mor- ceau," Alphonse Daudet, for instance. Confess that it would be too bad not to arrange a space in the 28o Recollections of Middle Life lecture for the reading of a page or two of his ; it is clear that one should be chosen that will best char- acterize the manner of the author, and one should know how to lead up to it. To lead up to the reading of a fragment that has been selected is an art, and a very complex and difficult art. You must manage to make the public desire it ; it is necessary, above all, to soften the tran- sition between the tone in which one speaks and the tone in which one is about to read. If the change is too brusque and too violent, I have remarked that the pleasure of the audience is sensibly diminished. I often used an artifice which nearly always succeeded with me. When I had an important bit to read in a considerable work, I made the lecture converge gently toward that bit, upon which I first improvised in my own fashion, trying to reproduce its move- ment ; then suddenly interrupting myself, I said : "I do not know why I am spoiling an admirable page in this way ; listen to the author." And I started off in the same movement, carrying the pubhc with me. You can vary this device in a hundred ways. The essential thing is that you should not arrest the devel- opment, which is personal to you, before reading, as a race-horse before a stream that is too wide. You should glide by an almost imperceptible slope from the improvisation to the reading. Giving Lectures upon Books 281 There are works, on the contrary, of which you can give the audience a just idea only by the aid of numerous well-chosen readings ; thus, a book of max- ims and reflections; I have presented many of them to the public — a journal such as that of Goncourt ; a correspondence like that of Marie Bashkirtseff, or that of Xavier Doudan. Of those there is nothing to tell ; it is necessary to begin with general ideas, by the aid of which you will be able to link together the read- ings that you will have to give. It is the same with a collection of poems. How do you expect to inter- est your hearers by praising or criticising for them po- ems of which they do not know the first word. Here the necessity of reading freely is imposed upon the lecturer. It is for him to choose intelligently, ac- cording to the end he wishes to attain ; whether he wishes to excite admiration or provoke raillery. Lecturers who are new to the trade are inclined to think that they will gain success more easily by ridiculing bad verses and jeering at their authors. I can assure them that it is a grave error. The public does not like mockery, and does not long support it. "Mockery," says La Bruyere, "is often poverty of mind." It does not carry one far. I have al- ways seen my audience smile at a bit of mischief, become amused at a piquant touch ; but as soon as raillery becomes prolonged, I have always seen also 282 Recollections of Middle Life that it drew away from me, showing uneasiness. It had the air of saying, " If this bit is so detestable, why do you talk to us so long about it? Is it not cruel to insist ? Why not pass on to other things ? ' ' The audience (I speak of a lecturer's audience) is pleased, on the contrary, by admiration and gentle- ness. It likes, when a poem is read to it, to have that poem one with which it can and must be en- raptured. There is scarcely a poet of any reputation whose works I have not presented to my audience. I have spoken, I do not know how many times, of Victor Hugo, and even, a propos of new editions, of Lamartine, de Musset, and de Vigny ; I have spoken of Auguste Vacquerie, of Catulle Mendfe, of Sully- Prudhomme, of Leconte de Lisle, Richepin, Coppte, and twenty others. It is only the poets of the new school that I have not ventured to lecture upon. And do you know why? It is because I hardly ever like them, and do not always understand them. I should be obliged to read them in a way to make their defects felt, and as the criticism would occupy nearly all of a lecture, I should be sure to weary the audience, were it the most inteUigent in the world. If I have any advice to give you, it is, choose for speaking of them in pubhc only the poets with whom you are sympathetic, and choose for reading Giving Lectures upon Books 283 from their works only the bits that you sincerely ad- mire. Do not think, however, that it is sufficient for a fragment to be very beautiful to succeed in a lecture. There are masterpieces from which you will draw absolutely nothing. Get it well into your head that a poem, from the moment that you take it from the volume to read it to the public, must have some of the qualities of a drama ; it must, as we say, pass over the foot-lights. There are verses that are charming, delicious, exquisite, everything that you choose, but which are made to be read only to two people, or at most to three or four. It is chamber music that must not be transferred to a vast stage. I recall that one day, at the inauguration of a statue of Corneille at Rouen, Sully-Prudhomme wrote with his delicate pen a piece of verse that was a jewel of fine gold artistically wrought. I had read it in the text, and had found that it was really a masterpiece. Mounet-SuUy recited it. He sent it forth in a full voice, and with what marvellous art of diction ! It left the immense audience that heard it unmoved. It was because the audience was immense, and Sully- Prudhomme is the poet of seclusion. Victor Hugo, with his flaming and sonorous verse, hits the crowd ; Coppte is delicious to read before a small audience like that of the Boulevard des Capu- 284 Recollections of Middle Life cines. Still, with Coppee it is necessary to choose. Not everything will go. Instinct alone will guide you in the choice that you will have to make. Do not allow yourself to be prejudiced by your personal tastes, your individual admirations. Always ask your- self beforehand what the audience will think of the piece that you read. It is not at all through fear of disappointment for your amour-propre ; it is because if you take from a poet, with the hearty intention of making it admired, a piece of verse demanding mys- tery and the chimney corner to be understood and enjoyed, you will arrange a failure for him, and be- tray him. If by chance you are embarked upon a lecture from which you had hoped great success for the author, and you feel that the audience is indiffer- ent, even hostile, do not hesitate to stop short, and, if you are in the humor, take that attitude of your hearers for the text of a lesson, that is always enter- taining — I have done it at least ten times — explain to them the reasons for your choice and for their ennui. Take five or six verses — the best ones of the inter- rupted poem — show that they are charming, and why they are charming ; show that they have not charmed the audience, and how it comes that they haven't "passed the foot-lights." Nothing enter- tains an audience hke being blamed in that way, you can turn it like a glove. Giving Lectures upon Books 285 I have no advice to give you as to your way of reading the passages that you have chosen. Advice as to that is not of much use. To read is a gift and an art ; if you have not received the one from nat- ure, if you have not acquired the other by practice, what do you expect me to say ? Better not meddle with it. There are, however, some observations that I have made on this point that will be useful to you, keeping you from dangers over which I have often stumbled. Consult your voice ; I mean by that, pay attention to the quality of your voice. Never, unless from ab- solute necessity, choose anything to read that does not suit your voice. I possess a very frank, very clear voice, of a slightly sarcastic tone ; it is impossi- ble for me to render passages of feeling and tender- ness with which a deep, grave voice would do mar- vels. I know it, and I never venture to read them in public unless circumstances exact it. Then I am al- ways careful to forewarn my audience that I shall give them the meaning, but not the sentiment, of the thing. All the science in the world is helpless against a natural defect, and I defy the most skilful artist to draw from a little fife the moving notes of a violin- cello. Never read too long an extract. You, a lecturer, will not gain the same forbearance that is shown the 286 Recollections of Middle Life artists, who obtain listeners or feigned listeners even when they recite enormous poems demanding very earnest and sustained attention to be understood. The lecturer's audience is not capable of such atten- tion as that. If, however, you have to read an ex- tract that is rather long and difficult to get at, I will tell you how I go about it. It is another trick pecu- liar to me, but it seems to me to be within the power of every man who speaks. I saturate myself with the idea or ideas that the poet has expressed (it is nearly always Victor Hugo, many of whose pages, admirable as they are, are nevertheless often ab- struse), and without appearing to notice it, I treat them as a subject of a lecture, being careful to insert in my improvisation some of the terms or turns the meaning of which has appeared to me the most diffi- cult to grasp. I thus prepare the task for my hear- ers. When I open the volume the subject has al- ready become familiar to them, suid the principal difficulties of the text are smoothed away. It is- a great relief to them, for they no longer have to take the trouble to understand the ideas and connect them. I then advance slowly, and so soon as I perceive a suspicion of fatigue at the end of a paragraph, I pause under one pretext or another — sometimes to put forth a more or less prucC hommesque reflection, sometimes to cry out in admiration over a verse or a Giving Lectures upon Books 287 word ; in reality to give the attention of my audience a rest. It costs me nothing to speak a common- place : the important thing is to manage an entr'acte. I then start off again, and thus arrive, step by step, at the end of the poem. I have, thanks to this skil- fully handled artifice, made women listen, from the beginning to the end, to a qjiantity of philosophical poems which they never could have read at one sit- ting. When I have chanced to let myself be carried away by the beauty of a poem, neglecting these pre- cautions, I have left the audience, which could no longer keep up with me, lagging behind. I remem- ber one evening when I had chosen that admirable poem, " Plein Ciel." I was accustomed in this kind of lecture not to mark out for myself the stop- ping-places. I trusted to my familiarity with the au- dience. I paused as soon as it showed any fatigue. All went well during the first half of the poem ; but once started, I escaped from myself I paid no fur- ther attention to the audience that faced me, and I read solely for my own pleasure, with a very un- unusual intensity of emotion and vivacity of manner — better, perhaps, than I have ever in my life read anything else. But alas ! the audience deserted me. I ran ahead like a locomotive that spins along with- out suspecting that the train behind is separated from 288 Recollections of Middle Life it and remains in distress upon the road. I only perceived the accident after the lecture was over, in the constrained attitude of my followers, who, seeing me start off so vehemently, had let me go by myself. Some lecturers, and among others a woman lec- turer, Mme. Ernst, have assured me that they had had their audience hanging upon their words while reciting the longest and most abstruse of Victor Hugo's poems. They have had better luck than I, and I don't know how they go at it. You will tell me that doubtless it is because they read much bet- ter, with more force and variety. That is possible, though I chance to have heard some of them, and you know I am acquainted with my audience. If I had spoken in such a way it would not have been at the fiftieth, but at the twentieth, verse that they would have parted company with me. I know only two or three actors in Paris with whom I would not venture to compete in reading aloud. And I have, moreover, the advantage over them of an artifice that I recommend to all my col- leagues. Actors, when they recite a poem, remain, and are obliged by circumstances to remain, im- personal. They do their best to render the poet's idea without letting their own emotions be in any way suspected. A lecturer has the right, when he reads a fine passage, to give to his voice the note Giving Lectures upon Books 289 of admiration, of enthusiasm, or even of emotion: He has, not only to interpret the poem, but, in a way, to herald it. The admiration vibrating in his voice is communicated to the listening public. You know that all sentiment is contagious. AH true sen- timent, be it understood ; for if the audience suspects you of a shadow of pretence, it revolts and treats you as it would a bad actor. You can only save yourself from ridigule by sincerity. But if you act in good faith, with loyalty and skill, you will win effects that will astonish yourself. I have often been able to read the same passage three times over, insisting more each time upon the fine places with a vibration or trembling of the voice, like a man overcome by enthusiasm. Need I add that these effects wear out and fall into discredit by too frequent repetition ? And now, having told you what you must read, and how you must read it, I can only conclude by this last counsel : whenever it is possible, refrain from reading in a lecture. You can keep your audience under better control when you have your eye upon it. The time needed for looking up a paper or opening a book at the right page, the necessity of lowering the head and interrupting the magnetic current estab- lished between you and your hearers, the change of tone which is inevitable in passing from improvisation to reading, all contribute to separate you from the 19 290 Recollections of Middle Life people who are in the humor to listen to you. When- ever quotations are not imposed upon you by absolute necessity, speak without paper or book, and in case you have a passage to call attention to, indicate it, even though you murder the text when your memory serves you ill. The excuse for reading will be still more limited if you speak upon a large stage, or in an immense am- phitheatre, before a very numerous audience. It will amount to an interdiction in this case. The more considerable the audience, the greater the necessity of dominating it; and to take a book in your hand is to loosen your hold on the audience. There, I am at the end of my task. I do not wish, however, to leave the readers who have accom- panied me thus far without telling them in what con- dition the lectures of the Boulevard des Capucines are now, and what has become of lecturing in general in Paris. That will be matter for a short chapter. XVI. DECADENCE OF THE LECTURES OF THE BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES These Thursday lectures at the Boulevard des Capu- cines did not escape from the common law which wills that every institution, after a longer or shorter time of prosperity, shall dwindle and enter upon its period of decadence. It had taken me some years to form a quite numerous and very faithful audience. It slowly disintegrated under the influence of causes of which I prefer not to analyze all, because I am writ- ing my own memoirs, and not those of other people. All that I can and wish to say is that the spirit of the institution, from which my lectures arose, altered little by little, and the directors who succeeded one another at the Capucines, tired of seeing no moneyed success answer to their efforts, abandoned day by day the se- rious style which did not offer sufficient attractions to the general public, and directed the lecture in new paths. Among those who had, with myself, contrib- uted from the start to impress upon the lectures of the Boulevard des Capucines a character of amiable 292 Recollections of Middle Life severity, some grew weary. M. Flammarion no longer spoke, except at rare intervals ; Frank G6raldy, who had a marvellous art of explaining in a simple, clear, and animated style the discoveries of contemporary science, retired, occupied with too absorbing func- tions ; Lapommeraye, with whom I had always walked hand in hand, had been appointed professor at the Conservatory, and he seldom appeared in the Boule- vard des Capucines. These were terrible gaps. We now had few save passing lecturers, of whom some, doubtless, were fuU of learning and talent, but who by a natural self- consideration, having to speak but once or twice, sought rather to win the public by the singularity of the posters or the sensation of the day. They were doubtless right, since, after all, the most important point for a lecturer is not to have to commence before rows of empty chairs. But these were new ways, which frightened away our faithful auditors. In the Boulevard des Capucines, as in a newspaper, as in a theatre, there was a solidarity between us all, and every change that occurred in the customs of the house affected me in the little corner where I moved alone. I no longer felt at home, and my audience itself, stirred by some vague uneasiness, no longer received me with the same sympathy and good-humor. Decadence of the Lectures 293 I had done all that I could to check this little revolution. Every time that I ran across anyone, among my contemporaries of the press, whom I be- lieved capable of leading the literary bourgeoisie to- ward the Boulevard des Capucines, I begged him to come to its aid. How many entreaties I have made of Jules Lemaitre, of fimile Faguet, of Brisson, the acute critic of the Parti national, and the manager of the Annales politiques et litteraires, and of many others! Unfortunately, lecturing at the Boulevard des Capucines brought but little money and little fame ; it was a considerable, even an enormous task, without hope of returns. One could draw from it no other recompense than the honor of having aided in founding a useful institution in France. The pros- pect was not the most engaging. I was, in fact, obliged to say to those whom I urged to join me : "You will at first have but a very small number of auditors, you will not receive a cent, and if the papers take any notice of you, it will be only to make fun of you." They all received me with a shrug. Meanwhile, the managers on their side made great efforts in another direction. They invited all the actors who were in the humor to appear upon this new stage ; they added the execution of fragments of music to the musical lectures ; they brought singers, they organized soirees at which two orators should 294 Recollections of Middle Life respond to one another ; they invited magnetizers, they were delighted when an adept of the new schools promised them a galloping charge against the old fogies or the old theories. I do not blame them, Heaven forbid ! but you can imagine how out of place I appeared when I arrived, quiet and serious, with my eternal first phrase: " Gentlemen, we are to-day to occupy ourselves with such and such a book." I was the representative of another age, they hstened to me as though I came from Pontoise. I thoroughly understood this situation. I asked the management to no longer count upon me for a weekly lecture. It was arranged that I should put them further apart, that I should not give more than two a month, unless there appeared between the lect- ures some work that solicited the attention of the public. That was the end of the Thursday lectures as I had conceived them. They formed in my idea an ensemble of teaching, a course of literature for the use of society. I contented myself with being only a virtuoso who came from time to time to execute upon a fashionable theme more or less brilliant variations. I am not altogether that, but if I have kept some little of the old bearing, it is through deference to some half-dozen persons who have obstinately followed me through these evolutions, and who lifted to me a Decadence of the Lectures 295 gaze full of reproach if I broke too openly with their ideal of former times. Last year the manager of the lectures came hasten- ing to me. " I am come," he said, "to propose to you a subject of which the announcement alone will fill the hall. You will see what returns there will be!"' I trembled, for when he put forward a question of returns I was sure that he was going to speak to me of a book of disrepute. I was mistaken in my ap- prehensions. M. Drumont had just published his second work against the Jews. It was this book that he begged me to have put upon the posters. "As good luck has it," he said, " you have lent a hand to the Jewish cause in the papers. They will all come in the evening." " If I should accept," I said to him, " there would certainly be in the hall, besides the five hundred Isra- elites of whom you speak, four or five persons, my followers of old, in whose esteem I should be lowered, and who would perhaps never come to hear me again. They would rightly think that a pamphlet by M. Drumont was not literature. I am not acquainted with them. I only know their faces ; they are my conscience. ' ' " But you can say just what you please." " I understand it thus, indeed, but I have accus- 296 Recollections of Middle Life tomed the public to expect only lessons in literature from me. They will take it very ill if, in order to attract people and gain a httle more money, I should throw myself into polemics." And I refused. They then left me master of my subjects; but I no longer treat any but those which, while they please me, are of a nature to pique the curiosity of the crowd. So my lectures are more rare, and I con- tinue them only in order not to interrupt the per- petuity of the tradition. M. Bodinier, at the Theatre d' Application, has also tried to found an institution of bi-weekly lect- ures, which are addressed rather to society people, and are given between three and half- past four o'clock, just before the hour for five o'clock tea. The institution is still new, and it is rather difficult to foresee precisely what it will become. Up to the present time it has succeeded. M. Bodinier knew, thanks to the position of general secretary which he long occupied at the Comedie-Fran^aise, the greater part of the noblemen and rich men, Tuesday and Thursday subscribers. Many have subscribed to one or two seats for his afternoon lectures, so there are some returns assured in advance, even though the audience be small. He has addressed himself to the most celebrated among us to obtain these lectures, or Decadence of the Lectures 297 rather these weekly chats, and I have seen some new names produced. I need not say that I have had my share in this concert. What induces me to believe that these lectures will deviate from the spirit that animated them in the beginning, is a fact that is small enough in itself, but which in my opinion has important consequen- ces. You doubtless remember with what rapidity the name of Yvette Guilbert emerged from the cafe- concert, and how the young divette suddenly came into vogue, and a vogue as amazing as it was sudden — such as one sees only in Paris, the land of infatua- tions. Mile. Yvette Guilbert could only be heard at the caf6-concert, where she sang across the cigar smoke. It was very difficult for good society to venture into such a place. Bodinier had an inspiration. His hall was of the prettiest, his pubUc of the most aristocratic. He engaged the fashionable divette to come and sing her sweetest songs there, and he flanked her with a lecturer charged with explaining her sort of talent, and whose presence prevented, by an air of gentle and learned gravity, whatever effect of scandal this intrusion of pert singing in the Thea- tre d'Application might have had. He made a happy hit in his choice of a lecturer. He took Hugues Leroux. 298 Recollections of Middle Life The readers of the Temps, of the Revue Bleue, and of twenty other papers, were perfectly well ac- quainted with Hugues Leroux. They were able to appreciate the restless subtleties of his taste, and the fleeting graces of his style. As speaker he is even more winning than as writer. He possesses a voice of penetrating sweetness, which allies itself marvellous- ly with the melancholy of his countenance and the graceful languor of his person. He is, like all nerv- ous people, none the less sturdy and resisting; un- der the amiability one feels the manhood ; there are stores of energy within this frail envelope. Hugues Leroux acquitted himself with infinite tact and charm in the deUcate role that he had accepted. He distributed about the fragments Mile. Yvette Guilbert was to sing, just enough ideas to excite ex- pectation, and these ideas he presented gracefully, without appearing to attach too much importance to them ; but also without appearing to hold them too cheap. He kept an exquisite measure between the explanation and the lesson, his sole aim was to please after the divette, and he pleased. Lecturer and singer, the one announcing the other, were a great success, that had to be repeated twice a week to the end of the season. It is, alas ! the most fatal blow ever dealt the lect- ure. People will no longer come to hear it for itself. Decadence of the Lectures 299 How content do you think the crowd, to whom Rosa-Josepha has been exhibited, would be to see poor Joseph as the only spectacle ? Already Bodinier has had imitators. At the Boulevard des Capucines we have seen benevolent lecturers arrange about three or four cafe-concert songs which were the principal dish, the parsley of their eloquent speech. It is still believed that people who know how to speak are needed for this subaltern duty : it will before long be perceived that the first one who comes along will answer. He who lives shall see ! I have finished. It only remains for me to make my excuses to the public for having talked so long of myself and of my story. I shall be pardoned, without doubt, if it is observed that in this study I have spoken of myself only to say what I thought of the art of lecturing, and to give the counsels of my long experience to my brother-lecturers. You can see that I have loved lecturing much, with a love that has not been over-happy. If I turn my head and cast backward a comprehensive glance over these twenty-five or thirty years that I have tra- versed with you step by step, I see that I have given an enormous amount of work for the slightest possi- ble result ; I have tried to found, or rather to accli- mate, the lecture in our country, and I affirm that 300 Recollections of Middle Life my efforts have been in vain. We have at this mo- ment neither a school of lecturers, nor a public fond of lectures. The lecture has not only cost me time and strength, I have lost a considerable sum in it ; for I should have been able to carry into other tasks the prodigious effort of mind, and the incredible number of hours, that I have thrown into that bot- tomless and echoless pit. Ah ! well, I regret neither my time nor my trouble, nor my money. And do you know why ? Because I have felt in lecturing a kind of pleasure the equivalent of which I have found only in play — the pleasure of struggling against chance, the terrible and charming sensation of cast- ing the die. At the end of some years in my calling I could scarcely feel any emotion in writing, I was so per- fectly sure that amid the thousands of articles which flowed in a torrent from my pen, there would not be a single one absolutely bad, because I knew my trade to the foundation ; that some would be excellent, others gpod or mediocre, according to chance ; but the public would not notice, reading on the fly and judging a man by the ensemble of his productions. While as to the lecture ! I could never be certain in advance that I should not break my neck, and that was delicious. However much assurance the habit of speaking may give a lecturer, he never knows how Decadence of the Lectures 301 things will turn for him, and his heart leaps in his breast like that of a player who has put his last five louis on the red. He hopes and he fears ! Do you know any greater happiness for a man ? The lecture has given that to me. Had it not rendered me this service, I should still be grateful to it. I am of those who believe that no eflfort is lost, no labor fruitless. I cannot for the moment see the fruit that I and my fellow-lecturers have gathered during these long and laborious campaigns. But who knows ? Possibly the seeds that we have sown will spring up some fine morning. Possibly it may some day produce a more skilful or a happier orator, who, taking up our task, will climb the mast upon which we have slipped, but for whom we have made the ascent easier, and who will bring down the cup. And as for me, my recompense is that the lecturer of the future will hardly be able to do other than open this little volume, were it only for the sake of its information, and that he will say, after having run it through : " He was a good fellow and a hard worker ; he knew what he was talking about, and he was not so altogether stupid as the beaux esprits of his time would like to make out." I ask no other funeral oration. You see I am not ambitious. NOTES p. 4. iSmile Deschanel, born at Paris, i8ig. Professor in the ificole normale and dismissed for anti-Catholic criticism in 1851, he entered journalism as a liberal, was imprisoned and banished after the Coup d'fitat, and took up the work of lecturer in Belgium. Readmitted to France in 1859, he joined the staff of Les Debats. He is the author of numer- ous anthologies, accompanied by piquant personal comments : "Les Courtisanes grecques," "Le Mai qu'on a dit des Femmes," etc. He was elected to the Chamber in 1876 as a Republican, and in 1881 was elected a. life-Senator. He has published since a, number of critical works, including a life of Benjamin Franklin. P. 5. Jean-Baptiste Alfred Assolant, born at Aubusson, 1829. After a, brilliant career as professor, he resigned after 1851, and made a long journey in the United States, the fruit of which was found in numerous sketches, halt- philosophic and half-humorous. He has since been an ac- tive journalist in politics, literature, and the drama, but, though essaying three times, has never reached the Assem- bly. P. 8. Gaston Souii.lard de Saint- Valry, bom in Eure-et- Loir, 1828, died in 1881. Known chiefly as the literary critic of the Patrie. P. 12. FiiLlx HfiMENT, bom in Avignon, 1827, noted for his zeal in the promotion of popular instruction in science, through teaching, lecturing, and books, of which latter one, "Simples Discours sur la Terre et sur I'Homme," was crowned by the Academy in 1875. 304 Notes p. 17. Pierre-Henri-Victor Berdale de Lapommeraye, born at Rouen, 1839, critic and lecturer. In 1881 was given charge of the course of dramatic history and literature at the Conservatory. P. 18. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, born at Boulogne- sur-Mer, December 23, 1804, died at Paris, October 13, 1869. Originally one of the romanticist poets, in 1837 he devoted himself to a history of Port-Royal, v?hich occupied nearly twenty years of his life. He was appointed librarian of the Mazarin Library in 1840, Professor of Latin poetry of the College of France in 1S62, and Senator in 1865. From 1850, he published a series of weekly articles of criticism and biography in the Constitutionnel, the Moniteur, and the Temps, by which he is most widely known. P. 32. Father Hyacinthe or Chari.es Lovson, bom at Or- leans, March 10, 1829. Formerly a Catholic priest and noted preacher, who left the Roman Church, married, be- came first an advocate of the Old Catholic, then of the Gal- ilean Catholic Church, and finally connected himself in- directly with the Church of Scotland. His latest work in public was in support of General Boulanger. P. 33. HippolYte-Adolphe Tainb, born in the Ardennes, April 21, 1828. Philosopher and critic and historian, his chief works are the "Histoire de la Litterature anglaise," various books on art, and the " Origines de la France con- temporaine." For some time his liberal doctrines in phil- osophy kept him from the Academy, but he was elected in 1878. In philosophy he is an evolutionist of the school of Spencer. In politics he is conservative, and held posi- tions under the Empire in St. Cyr and the Beaux-Arts, the latter of which he still retains. P. 33. Jean- Jacques Weiss, bom at Bayonne in 1827. Teacher and journalist, he was connected with the D'ebats, wrote for the Revve des Deux Mondes, and established the Journal de Paris va 1867. He entered the public service Notes 305 under Ollivier, and after the (all of the Empire was council- lor of state under the Republic. He became, later, editor in chief of the Gaulois, He was a warm friend of Gam- betta, and was in the Foreign Office under his ministry. He afterwards undertook the dramatic criticism for the Debate. P. 44. Jules Simon, bom at Lorient (Morbihan), 1814, en- tered the Department of Education as professor of history and philosophy. He was a Republican deputy in 1848, and councillor of state in 1849. After the Coup d'ifitat he re- tired to Belgium, but returned to France and was elected to the Assembly in 1863, and voted against the declaration of war in 1870. He became Minister of Public Instruction, Worship, and Fine Arts in 1870, as a member of the Gov- ernment of National Defence. In 1876 he became Prime Minister under MacMahon, and resigned on the famous May 16, 1877. He was a devoted friend of Thiers, and pro- nounced the funeral oration at his grave. Apart from poli- tics his work has been chiefly in the department of instruc- tion. He is the author of many works on philosophy and his- tory, and the editor of others. P. 82. MaItre Petit- Jean was a famous doctor of theology of the early part of the fifteenth century, and author of the plea that it "is permissible and even praiseworthy for any- one to kill a tyrant" — an apology for the murder of the Duke of Orleans by the Duke of Burgundy, in whose pay the ddc- tor was. P. 84. Theodore Faullain de Banville, bom at Moulins, 1823, poet and dramatist and dramatic critic from 1869 of the National. P. 84. FKANCIS-&OUARD-J0ACHIM CoppfeE, born in 1842, poet and dramatist, author of " Le Reliquaire," "Intimi- tes,"' "La Gr^ve des Forgerons," "Le Passant." Since 1878 he has had charge of the Archives of the Comedie- Franjaise. 3o6 Notes p. loi. Jeanne Samary, bom at Paris, 1859. She made her first appearance at the Thedtre-Franjais August 24, 1875, where she took the soubrette parts. Among her fa- vorite roles were Toitum in " L'fitincelle," and Suzanne de Villiers in " Le Monde ou Ton s'enuuie," though she at- tained great distinction in the classic repertory. In 1880 she married a banker, M. Legarde. She died a few years ago in the fulness of her powers and fame. P, loi. Henri Dupont-Veenon, actor, bom at Puiseaux (Loiret), 1844. He entered the Frangais in 1873, and gained fame as Laffemas, in " Marion Delorme," and in classic roles. In 1888 he was made professor of declamation in the Conservatory. P. 102. BenoIt-Constant Coquelin, actor, bom at Bou- logne, 1841. He entered the TheStre-rran9ais in i860, and became societaire in 1864. His greatest success has been in the classic repertory, but his range in modem comedy is very viride. P. 103. Sarah Bernhardt, whose baptismal name is Kosine Bernard, was bom at Paris, October 22, 1844, and was the daughter of a Holland Jewess. She appeared at the Theatre- Franjais in 1862, but had little success. Afterward, at the Odeon, she played Zanetto in "Le Passant" of Coppee, and the Queen in " Ruy Bias," and was admitted to the Fran- gais, where she had a very brilliant career, leaving the com- pany some fifteen years ago for a still more brilliant one in all quarters of the globe. She studied sculpture and paint- ing, and has exhibited works in both arts. P. 106. Ernest-Wilfried Legouv:6, born at Paris, 1807, novelist, dramatic author, notably in collaboration with Scribe, and writer of essays and manuals on elocution. P. 127. Edmond-Fran50is-Valentin About, journalist and writer, born at Dieuze (Meurthe), February 14, 1828. In 1851 he was appointed professor in the School of Athens. His first work (1855) was " La Grjce contemporaine," which Notes 307 had a great sale, Duriog the next three years he published "Tolla,"' a novel largely autobiographic, " Mariages de Paris," "Le Roi des Montagnes," "Trente et Quarante," and many others. He entered the field of politics with his pamphlet on "La Question romaine." During the decade preceding the Franco-German war, he published numerous novels and pamphlets, was one of the editors of Le Constitu- tionnel, Z' Opinion nationale, Le Gaulois, and Le Soir. The most famous of his novels was " L' Homme k 1' Oreille cas- see," a stinging satire on the pseudo-bonapartisme of the Sec- ond Empire. After the war, with M. Sarcey, he founded the X/X "' Siick. P. 212, Henri Meilhac, dramatic author, born in Paris in 1832. He has been one of the most proliSc and successful of writers, both of plays and librettos. His best-known works were in collaboration with M. Ludovic Halevy (music by Offenbach), "La Belle HeUne," " Barbe-Bleue, " "La Grande- Duchesse de Gerolstein," "La Perichole,'' and the well-known comedy, also with Halevy, " Frou-Frou." P. 236. Caliban, pseudonym of Auguste-lfimile Bergerat, journalist, novelist, dramatic writer, born at Paris in April, 1845. ^^ '^ ^ son-in-law and biographer of Theophile Gau- tier. •• v, t/^-,^ 1 Pii J-* ,iS>J4 -^