Glass. I^ CiQ-j Book_liaLZ^ PARIS DAYS AND EVENINGS y '^^ % '■<^////yif/mM£^^^MM/^^^^^^ . .M MLLE. SUBRA. PARIS DAYS AND EVENINGS BY STUART HENRY iriTH rn-ELVE illustrations PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY MDCCCXCVI • vV 38639 ET IN LUJETIA EGO \_All rights resen.ied.'] ]. W. G J. H. S. CONTENTS. PHASES OF LIFE. CHAP. PAOE I. HOUSEHOLD GODS OF VICTOR HUGO ... 3 - II. MY ABBE . . . . . . .19 in. A GREAT FASHION HOUSE ..... 41 IV. A BREAKFAST COLLOQUY . . . . .56 V. AT THE JARDIN DES PLANTBS .... 68 VI. THE DECLINE OF THE BOULEVARD DES ITALIENS . 78 VII. PARIS DAYS AT DIEPPE . . . . .93 VIII. PARISIAN FAMILY LIFE BY CONTRAST. . . 101 IX. MOURNING FOR PRESIDENT CARNOT . . .113 LETTERS AND COLOURS. X. THE ACADEMY ..... XL RENAN ...... XII. LITERARY LECTURES .... XIII. THE PARIS DAILIES . XIV. RANDOM PENCILLINGS IN THE SALONS XV. APROPOS OF A SARGENT PORTRAIT XVI. SUNLIGHT IN MODERN FRENCH PAINTING h 121 131 141 158 168 175 181 Contents. OPERA AND THEATRE. CHAP. XVir. LITTLE SOUVENIRS OF BIZET XVIII. MUSIC . . . XIX, MADEMOISELLE MARS XX. PH^DRE RACHEL AND BERNHARDT XXL MADEMOISELLE LUDWIG XXII. AMONG FAMOUS BALLET PEOPLE PAGE 189. 203 211 224 237 249 THE LATIN QUARTIER. XXIII. THE QUARTIER BY DAY XXIV. THE QUARTIER BY NIGHT . XXV. THE ROMANCE OF A STUDENT'S MENAGE 277 287 301 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. MLLE. SUBRA ...... HOUSEHOLD GODS OF VICTOR HUGO THE DECLINE OF THE BOULEVARDS DES ITALIEKS PARIS DATS AT DIEPPE .... THE ACADEMY ...... M. ROCHBGROSSE IX HIS ATELIER MUSIC ....... LOGE DE MLLE. LUDWIG (COMEDIE FRANCAISe) LOGE DE MLLE. LUDWIG (C0MED[E FRANCAISe) MLLE. MAURI, MLLE. SUBRA, MLLE. DE MERODA MARCHE AUX FLEURS .... THE ROMANCE OF A STUDENT'S MENAGE Fronti, apiece. ^ / 79 92 121'' 180 210^ 236^ 243"^ 253' 277 ' 304 PHASES OF LIFE Household Gods of Victor Hugo. itf Among the old build- ings in that noiseless quarter of Paris which lies dreaming of its royal past under the walls of the Luxembourg, there is a house that leans away from the street, as if disdainful of our age. It has an antique portal and an „ Henri Quatre stairw^ay. A vague '- ' tradition hints that some of the Medici resided in this hotel in the glorious and profligate days of Catherine and Marie. As one idles in its sombre rooms, with ^^ their lofty ceilings and venerable oak floors, and HOUSEHOLD GODS OF VICTOR HUGO peers into the mysterious depths of its invisible wall closets, quaint 4 Paris Days and Evenings. lines of the pensive Villon stray back into memory, and seem worth, in sucli a haunt, a hundred prophecies. Nowadays the apartments of the hel Stage of this edifice are decorated and filled with mementoes of Victor Hugo. An hour may be pleasantly spent here by any hero-worshipper, for these souvenirs give glimpses of the great man in his home life, and lend interest to certain of his books and verses. Of these relics, I fancy almost every person would ask to see first the pens that wrote " Les Miserables." They are here, at any rate, six of them — six modest quill pens, all fastened with a thread, side by side on a small piece of crumpled white paper. Just above them, in Victor Hugo's own hand, are the words, "Plumes des Miserables." Their points are ink-blacked and well worn out, and their barbs show stubborn use. Traces of the sweat of hard toil cover the white surfaces of their shafts, because they are just as they were when they left the fingers of the grand maitre. Steel pens did not come into noticeable service in France until about 1834, and Victor Hugo never used them in writing his manuscripts. Indeed a quill, with its broad, varying strokes and pliableness, was in every way more suited to his nature. And then the aristocratic associa- Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 5 tions of the quill, whicli seems to belong to the age of the sedan chair and the minuet, were probably quite agreeable to him, for, with all his democracy, he courted a title of nobility and a family tradition of caste. " Les Miserables " is Victor Hugo. Perhaps there never was a more automorphic novel. It is read, I imagine, with more enthusiasm in America than in France. The French consider Victor Hugo their greatest poet, but not their greatest novelist. For them his fiction is too diffuse and shadowy. The pens of "Les Miserables" repose by the side of an old companion — a black leather sack, carefully rolled up in two strong straps. It displays this inscription : — " Since you request it, I attest here the little adventure of this sack. It travelled with me fifteen hundred miles in 1861, when I left Guernsey on account of my health. I carried with me the manuscript of ' Les Miserables,' which I completed en route. I put the manuscript in this sack, and this sack, which I did not abandon for a moment, voyaged with me in England, Belgium, and Holland five months — from March 26th to September 3rd, 1861. Guernsey, May 21, 1863. Yictor Hugo." By the side of the sack are several stones, bullets, and a rust-eaten horse-shoe. He picked them up on the field of Waterloo when writing his im- 6 Paris Days and Evenings. mortal chapters on the battle. Each stone bears its legend : " Champs de Waterloo, ramassee par moi, 19 mai, 1861"; "30 mai, 1861— 'Les Miserables' "; "9 juin, 1861, plaine de Waterloo " — and so on. Here also is the greasy cap which he wore when he escaped from Paris at the time of the coup d'etat. It was given him for the purpose by one of his plebeian admirers— a journeyman printer. The walls of these apartments are covered with panels, inside doors, screens and mirrors, all of which V^ictor Hugo ornamented with the brush during his exile. He never studied paint- ing, but he had a talent for it, and, together with his promenades, it was his pastime. At the end of the salon is the red chimneypiece which he designed and embellished at Guernsey. Red was evidently the colour he preferred. In the centre of this chimneypiece there is a fine Venetian mirror. Four porcelain statuettes, representing the seasons, enliven its summits, and some Rouen faience is encrusted in its woodwork. At its sides are chimeras, and it rests on a black background, where the poet painted tv/o large dragons and, in big letters as usual, the ubiqui- tous "V.H." Naturally, as the leader of the Romantic school in France, he had a penchant for the Household Gods of Victoi^- Htigo. 7 hideous animals tliat haunted the art, literature, and religious life of the Middle Ages. For he it was who embalmed the architecture of Northern France in the French language. He immortalised Notre Dame de Paris in a novel. He put Gothic architecture into appropriate rhyme ; the expand- ing, upward sweep of its clustered columns, the pointed, aspiring curve of its arches, the rapid flight of its lofty buttresses, the delicate textures of its traceries and foliations ; its monks and frightening monsters, its aerial galleries and fragile arcades, the slender heights of its soaring pinnacles and steeples — all he crystallised in poetry. Notice how, in Ballad XH. of the "Odes and Ballades," the ds, oiis, and ombres, in trisyllabic stanzas of eight lines, imitate the columned solemnity of the interior of a Gothic cathedral ; the elles, illes, ete's, etre's, dite's, and Sle's its lace -like fringes and network ; the es, IS, and eres its needle-form denticles and spires. And in the ommcs, onne's, and ammes, how perfectly one hears the drowsy chant of mumbling priests ! One finds, therefore, among these household ornaments of the poet of the ogive, many dragons and gargoyles, and one discovers that, like the old cathedral builders and decorators, he 8 Paris Days and Evenings. was fond of giving flight to unexpected, half- irreverent fancies. On one of the panels he painted a monk whose extremely doleful show of piety provokes laughter. His hands_ are devoutly clasped, and he is gazing up, with a most forlorn and sanctified mien, at the fierj^ avenging angel which appears above. On one of the inside doors there is a black, ugly jinnee. His arms and legs are crossed, and his eyes, m.outh, and toes are fiercely red. It brings to mind the poem of "The Jinnees" in "Les Orientales," which is not only a successful description in rhyme of the passing of a troop of genii — the oncoming, the rushing by, and the dying away in the distance — but is interest- ing also for the fact that its first and last stanzas picture silence with surpassing charm and eff'ec- tiveness. The hush of nature is put into the very form and sound of the verse : — Murs, ville, Et port, Asile De mort Mer grise Oil brise La brise Tout dort. Household Gods of Victor Hugo. g On doute La nuit ... J'ecoute : — Tout fuit, * Tout passe ; L'espace Efface Le bruit. Other favourite subjects of these decorations on wood are flowers, grotesque birds, and happy Chinamen. One of the Chinamen, with a dough- like face of celestial imbecility, is waving a fan ; and another is merrily cracking his heels to- gether, over the back of a chair, in such a manner that his shadow and that of the chair form " V.H." on the floor. Victor Hugo's cuisiniere for many years was an elderly faithful person called Suzanne. One day, after one of her savoury breakfasts, he said to her : "Suzanne, I am going to make a portrait of your future husband." And this is he on this plaque — a monstrous Chinaman seated at a table, and gleefully, but awkwardly, brandishing a fork as a preliminary to a gluttonous attack on a enormous fish. Just above is his name, Shu-Zan. One's notice is especially attracted by three mirrors, on whose wide borders the poet painted flowers, vines, birds, and butterflies. One of these mirrors bears this inscription : " Drawn TO Paris Days and Evenings. May 11, 1870, while they are judging and con- demning me at Paris." He referred, of course, to the Bonapartists. On the upper margin of this mirror there is an ink drawing of a chateau across the twilight. The colour of the natural pine adds a brilliant effect when a light is thrown on it at night. This recalls his wonderful habit of cleverl}^ utilising and making the most of all the materials at his hand, however commonplace they were. For him no incident was too in- significant to become the theme of a poem or a chapter. There are here, too, many of his pictures and drawings on paper surfaces, and they are suffi- ciently weird and sombre to entitle them to be hung in that fin de siecle Eomantic exhibition, called the Rosicrucian Salon. Two curious drawings in crayon haunt the eye. One is of a majestic cock who is saluting the dusky gray of early morn — a surprisingly stately chanticleer, who gives emphatic evidence of the poet's natural skill with chalks. Another is a repre- sentation of John Brown — a shrouded form hang-ing from a scaffold. Dim streams of peculiar light fall on the mysterious figure as it defines itself vaguely against the dark back- ground. It is signed "Victor Hugo, I860." He was writing- " Les Miserables " at the time. Household Gods of Victor Htigo. 1 1 The laro-est of these strang-e sketches has the legend of the book and the sword for its subject. It is a view of a black and ruined city. In the foreground, on the top of a lofty column, an aged prophet stands reading a volume. At one side is the sentence : " Non liber monet, non giadius servat." Victor Hugo had a fancy for old oak furniture as well as for chimeras. It seems fittins; that he should have had about him so much of the noble household ware of the Louis XIII. epoch. Its ampleness and strength suggest him at once. For instance, here is the fine oak table on which " La Legende des Siecles " was written. It is about two by four feet in size. Its legs are stout and twisted. It was apparently built to last as long as Notre Dame itself. On the worm-eaten top one reads : " Je donne a Madame . . . cette table sur laquelle j'ai ecrit La Legende des Siecles [I give to Madame — • — ■ this table, on which I wrote ' La Legende des Siecles']. — Victor Hugo, Guernsey, 19 aout, 1859." The ink-spots he left on it remain intact. In the way of historical furniture there may be mentioned a church stall which was in the " galerie de chene " at Hauteville House, his home at Guernsey during exile. The words " VIVE AMA " were carved on it at his bidding. It 12 Paris Days and Evenings. was occupied in olden times, it is said, by certain " Mesdames de France " whenever the)'" w^ere present at the ceremonies in the cathedral of Chartres. The gem of these relics of Victor Hugo has to be taken out of an iron safe, and then out of a perfumed sachet of satin moire. It is the first copy of " Les Chatiments " of Hetzel's edition of 1872. It is on Holland paper, and has deep-red covers of shark skin. On the back are the gilt initials "V. H," and embossed on the front is an immense, gold-embroidered bee. On one of the fly-leaves are the words : " First copy — At the feet of my Providence — To her who has saved more than my life — who has saved my manuscripts." He had reference to Madame Drouet's devotion to him at the time of the cowp d'etat. On another page he wrote the following explanation : " The bee wliicli is on the cover of this book, before adorn- ing the ' Les Chatiments,' adorned the imperial throne. It was embroidered on the velvet of the immense purple mantle which hung down in lambrequins from the canopy, and covered the throne at the Tuileries. In September 1870, M. Jules Claretie, member of the Commission appointed to search the papers of Bonaparte, detached this bee from the mantle of the throne, and brought it to me. Victor Hugo. "Paris, May 21, 1872." Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 1 3 On another fly-leaf of the book he transcribed the lines : " Filles de la lumiere, abeilles, Envolez-vous de ce manteaii ! " These are taken from one of the most beautiful poems of the collection — " The Imperial Mantle." Bees were the Napoleonic emblem, and at Jersey, in June 1853, Victor Hugo addressed to them these verses, which are unsurpassed among French lyrics. How little did even he dream, perhaps, w^hen grouping these rhymes as a derided exile, that a bee from Napoleon's dis- graced and empty throne would one day repose on a volume of " Les Chatiments" as a unique witness of^the poet's final triumph and assured glory ! One spring morning I was sitting on the balcony of this apartment of Victor Hugo's hearthstone gods, with the amiable and scholastic hermit to whom they have descended by legacy. He lives here, buried away from the present in his adoration of the great epoch of French Eomanticism. We were taking a cup of coffee, and looking over into an old lost Paris garden, full of lonely trees and turtle- doves, and flanked by the closed fayade of some ancient and forgotten hotel. I was asking my friend, to whom I had become attached by 14 Paris Days and Evenings. many months of companionship, what was Victor Hugo's real character. And I wrote down the following little outline of an estimate of the illustrious man, dictated by one who w^as one of the household acquaintances during the last thirty years of the poet's life. " Victor Hugo loved glory above all things, but his passion for money was abnormal. He was almost a miser. There was a pinched look in his face, and he had a way of holding his hands with the fingers pointed down and pressed together. He was extremely cautious and wary. It might not be quite true to say that he accumulated money for the mere pleasure of doing so, still it practically amounted to that, at least, during the latter half of his career. He was rich when the coiij) d'etat occurred, and died a ' millionaire,' leaving fifty thousand francs to the poor, and the rest to his family. His family then consisted of a daughter hopelessly insane, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. During his exile and during his last years in Paris, he gave frequently to the needy, yet in exceedingly small sums. He never endowed nor materially aided an institution of any kind. For him charity and pity for the miserable meant the expression of sympathy, not generous money donations nor Household Gods of Victor Httgo. 1 5 real personal sacrifice ; and it must be confessed that this sympathy always found its way into such verse and prose that it brought him princely sums from his publishers. He was very methodical, and watched his affairs closely, even housekeeping details. He was a shrewd and careful business man. " His egoism was colossal and his ambition unbounded, still one hardly would have suspected them from his bearing. He had such a quiet modest demeanour, he was so uniformly simple in his manner, he imposed himself so little on those about him, that you would not have guessed that it was all skilful acting. It was the most sublime egoism. I do not know that he fully realised it himself. The art was so natural, perfect, and even appropriate, that it might have passed for a virtue. It was agree- able to those around him, and he never was sensitive about it. One of his friends, a lady, once presented him with a quill pen, having 'Ego-Hugo' suggestively embroidered on it in silk. Far from being offended by it for a moment, he was amused and pleased. He was not proud, but he was vain. It should be re- membered, however, that he had the unique fate of being surrounded for nearly seventy years by those who were always lauding his 1 6 Paris Days and Evenings. genius in the most extravagant terms. Never- theless, he was master of himself — of his passions as well as his mind. Whether he guarded or dismissed his ill-will toward a person depended on polic}^ None knew so well as he how to take care of and exploit a reputation. " On the whole, he excelled in precisely those qualities which are least peculiar to his race, qualities which are associated with a powerful imagination. While he might very properly be called, in certain aspects, the Napoleon of his national literature, he was more Teutonic than French in the huge proportions of his ponderous literary arsenal. Yet, of course, he did not wish to be thought anything but French. In spite of his advocacy of the equality and brotherhood of man, he was Chauvinistic. He was fond, for instance, of recommending the formation of the United States of Europe, but it was with the tacit understanding that Paris would be the capital and France the leading state. He appeared to think that all civilisation would eventually become French. This belief in the overwhelming superiority of his race was en- couraged by the fact that he knew little of the other people. "It is not to be denied that his republicanism was due to the Second Empire's failure to satisfy Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 1 7 liis own political aspirations. His career in politics was governed by personal motives rather than by a disinterested interest in the welfare of the people. He was too ambitious and politic to be what the world would call unqualifiedly a sincere man. Events governed him rather than principles. His eye was on the effect. The only reform he urged all his life without change was the abolition of the penalty of death for criminals — a reform which could be advo- cated safely, while serving his pen as a proper subj ect. " Americans will find these traits character- istically displayed in his letter to the United States (' Actes et Paroles,' II.) written before the execution of John Brown. The gist of it is the prediction that the ' fissure latente ' which this proposed ' murder ' would cause, Avould end in dismembering the Union. There is no reference to the Slavery question, and no counsel or sympathy, is given either to the North, the South, or the blacks. It was just what he in- tended it should be — a letter that no one could take exception to, that committed him in no way, and that sounded well. He thought the breaking out of the American Civil War was merely the penalty for the crime of America in hanging John Brown. No one equalled him 1 8 Paris Days and Evenings. in making empty phrases resound like inspired wisdom and pregnant prophecy. " There was much artificiality about his senti- ment. On a page in one of his own texts of ' Les Miserables,' he pencilled this memorandum as if for his own guidance — ' Here is a place to weep.' He was considerate, indulgent, in his home circle. His friends were enthusiastic and devoted admirers of his genius rather than of himself. His soul of souls was always veiled even to those dearest to him. " He felt that he was a torch in the rio-ht hand of the Great Unknown. I think he really considered himself a part of Deity on earth. M. Deschanel, his eminent friend, is fond of characterising him by the line, ' Et maintenant, Seigneur, expliquons-nous tous deux ' [And now, Lord, let us come to an understanding]. This trait in Victor Hugo was due, not to the typical French indifference about such things, but to his mighty belief in himself." My Abbe. {Jxdy 1894). One wlio sojourns long in France is almost cer- tain, sooner or later, to number among his acquaintances an Abbe — a soft-handed, smiling, unctuous Abbe. My Abbe— so I call him to my- self affectionately — is about the dearest of my French friends. He is, indeed, a loose-shoed comfort to me, because, for one reason, I do not need to change my attire when I go to see him. This may seem a trivial matter, yet, with the months, it has come to mean much, and has persuaded me into many adventitious calls upon him w^hich should have been distributed else- where on the little checker-board of my social acquaintanceship in Paris. For I may avow in all frankness, with the consciousness of revealing- no secret, that my Abbe makes no pretension as a shining example of that virtue which we are assured comes next to godliness. We first met across a game of chess at a soiree in the St Sulpice Quartier. As he had 20 Paris Days and Evenings. only learned to play cliess in his later years, and always lost his queen about the twelfth move, notw^ithstanding the unvarying crudeness of my openings and developments, we abandoned this hobby after a month or two for another and greater one that chanced to be common to us both — Victor Hugo. It would be drawing it mildly to say that the Abbe is daft, vertiginous, corybantic on the subject of Hugo, for there is a no more crazy Hugoldtre than he in all France. The frenzy dates back to his youth. A dream- ing Breton, he was born a full-fledged Romantic in the epoch of Madame Bovary, and he remains one still, ignoring later movements and schools. When a very young man — it was in 1869 — he wrote to the great poet at Gruernsey, naively begging for light amidst all the light that came pouring forth in those days fj'om that isle. " Where," he prayed, " on what page, in what line, in what word, is the one central, funda- mental, all-embracing truth of the thirty volumes of your inspired pen ? " The reply was couched in something like these terms : "Of course a letter, and many letters, would not suffice to respond adequately to your enquiry. My message is in no one phrase, in no one stanza, in no one volume of my writings. My Abbs. 21 To find it you must read them all, for it is therein that I have put my soul." The Abbe and I think that is one of the most solemnly beautiful and profound responses a mortal ever received from earth. While more prosaic people would see in this a scheme of the thrifty, money-making poet to induce the Abbe to buy the whole edi- tion of his works, we perceive the revelation of a magnificent personality. Imagine what delight it was for the Abbe to call at the modest hotel in the Avenue \^ctor Hugo during the poet's last years ! One evening — how proudly he always recounts this I — he was in a corner of -the salon alone with Hugo. The master was on a settee, the Abbe was on a stool at his feet. And the mighty genius of "La Legende cles Siecles" and " Les Miserables " was answering his questions, and talking to him with the expansive freedom of a confidence, despite the presence of other guests. Finally, Madame Drouet came over in her tactful, august way, with the words : " Cher maitre, we can spare you no longer to Monsieur I'Abbe — the other friends are beginning to notice how you are nepiectino' them." But Huo;o waved her off" with a peaceful hint of impatience, and a " Presently," and, as she quietly turned away, he said to the Abbe in an intimate undertone : "Don't be 2 2 Paris Days and Evenings. disturbed ; we can continue." Ah, what a triumphant, immortal moment that was for our humble friend ! " Oh, yes," said a Parisian litterateur, who happened to be present on one occasion when the Abbe was relating the incident, '' it was sublime — if one could be sure that Hugo was not posing for you and the company. It was difficult to know whether he was genuinely simple and grandiose in his bearing acd language under such circumstances, or whether he was one of the most consummate actors the world has ever seen off the stage. I was dining at Hugo's one day when Louis Blanc was present. I was placed at Hugo's right hand, and Louis Blanc, who, you know, was as big as your little finger, sat next me. Hugo served me first, somewhat to my confusion and to the half- disguised surprise of Louis Blanc, for I was a young and unknown fellow between those two famous old men. In one aspect it seemed truly republican and people-honouring in Hugo ; yet it left me the half-relished souvenir that Hugo was merely trying to plague Louis Blanc at the expense of my insignificance. There was much of the vieux malin about Hugo, and I, for my part, never knew how to take him." To return to the Abbe. One summer's nio-ht My Aby. 23 found us under the walls of the great, gloomy Seminary of St Sulpice, plotting a series of excursions to the \arious forests around Paris for the purpose of reading some of our poet's verse in the open green-shaded air. As a result, on bright days we might have been seen taking the train for the woods of Clamart, or lazily sunning ourselves on some boat as it skimmed along on its way to Vincennes or down the river to the terrace of Meudon and the heights of St Cloud. The afternoon would be taken up with a superb passage in " Les Contemplations," or with some curious poem of "La Legende des Siecles," or with some high-plunging, big- thumbed ecstasy in "Dieu." For we read here and there and everyvv'here, without sequence or coherence, in Hugo's twenty volumes of rhyme, just as the mood stopped us or as fancy sped us on. Now and then we would get lost in a thicket in one of the books, and once I asked the Abbe, '■ Why do you suppose Victor Hugo planted such scrub oak and underbrush as this in his verse ? " The Abbe, in the utmost seriousness, approached his face close to mine, looked me gravely in the eye, and spoke as if it were a sacrilegious thing to be pointing out a defect in his idol. " I will tell you why, and I hope you will excuse me if I 24 Paris Days and Evenings. employ a bit of slang. There is one idiom which expresses it so pat that I cannot well refrain from using it. The trouble with Victor Hugo is this : he thought that all the phrases he dashed off had the inspired touch of immortality, and that there weie none such — ' il se gobe ! ' (he swallows himself!) " But it was grand when we were both swept up across magnificent spaces of the infinite blue by our poet, and once in a while the Abb^ would close the book in a sort of seraphic paralysis, and try to find a sentence to girdle his beatitude, sometimes losing himself into silence as, with open mouth and eyes and outstretched hand, he would miss trace in the air of the nameless word he was just about to seize to describe his colossal wonderment and jo}''. Again, it would be some emotional passage in " Les Contemplations," and our tears would well softly forth, and we would blow our noses tenderly, half proud and half ashamed of the fact that we, two full-grown men, were sitting out in the broad light of the afternoon, and weeping over some simple rhyme. Frequently the Abbe would chance to pick up "Les Chansons des rues et des bois," and read aloud from its satyr pages. It was a study for me to see him thoughtlessly grazing in these My Abbd.. 25 half- forbidden pastures. Occasionally I would give him an opportunity to come to a realising sense of the situation, by asking him perhaps this : " Can you imagine why Victor Hugo, at the age of sixty-three, published such frivolous, such erotic verse, as all this ? " The Abbe would look up, reflect for a moment, shake his head, and say : " Isn't it incredible ? I have never been able to explain it." Then, after another pause, he would gently turn the leaf, and con- tinue the grisette stanzas. Yet I knew it could not be possible that he was really a little fond of these wanton-eyed, short-skirted gaieties. I was amused one day when, in reading the poem " L'Eglise " in " Les Chansons," he intoned these lines : " La plus belle feuille du monde ]^e peut donner que se qu'elle a." As the words came from his lips, 1 could not suppress a sound of laughter. He insisted on knowing what it meant, so I finally told him that these verses recalled a couplet of a certain Chat Noir song — indeed, that it was the identical couplet with one word changed. " Yes," he remarked naively, with the promptness and frankness of a momentary impulse, "I was thinking of that too." I said to myself: " Cecy 26 Paris Days and Evenings. nous d^monstre en toute evidence," as Balzac would have written at the close of a " Conte Drolatique," that it is difficult, even for an Abb^ in Paris, not to have caught a few rhymes of Xanrof on the branches of his memory. But it would be unfair to intimate that the Abbe never indoctrinates one about any theme except Victor Hugo, for he talks eloquently on many a subject. For instance, he outlined a suggestive idea one morning, when an elderly friend was complaining to us of own Jin de siecle in this fashion — " Our epoch has become too dangerously speculative in its commercial theories and business habits. Nowadays men count on making a fortune in five or ten years — they try to fabricate something out of nothing by a turn of luck, by a twist of the fancy, not by slow, honest effort and sure, accumulative methods. We have nothing in these times but speculators filling the air with unheard-of schemes, cultivating and exploiting unwarranted expectations in people, and demoralising the public with illusive projects that promise money without work or merit " " Yes," said the Abbe, " I believe it is worse in our day than ever ; yet, suppose it is, are not My Abbd. 27 you and I, two old Romantics, directly respon- sible for it in a way ? For it was precisely these fantastic, imaginative, emotional features and qualities which our Hugo school infused into letters and life — the sound and echo of noisy successes, of romantic luck and epic adventure and foolhardiness, always crowned in the end with good fortune. The traits that characterise the literature of an epoch are sure to characterise, sooner or later, the commercial world and business customs. Look at Hugo himself, skilfully making a din about his books, giving them a great reclame, 'booming' them, floating them at a fine price on the public, and dying a millionaire as the result! Our Romantic school w^as largely the cause of all this modern love of the incredible and trust in the possible." A favourite pastime of the Abbe is to follow the lectures and examinations at the Sorbonne. One afternoon he took me over to the New Sorbonne to listen to the oral examination of a candidate for the Ph.U. Four professors — MM. Janet and Himly and two colleagues — were in array behind a desk, and were gaily roasting a squirming young man, who was dressed in a swallowtail and white kids, and was supposed to be sitting, with his back to the audience, in a chair on a small platform. In spite of the lively 28 Paris Days and Evenings . St Lawrence spectacle, I soon felt drowsy and longed to drop away into dreamland, for the theme of torture was very abstract and dessicated. At length I could not repress my curiosity to look around and see if the Abb4 were actually enjoying this lengthy and abstruse performance — and behold! there he was cosily asleep at my side ! When he awoke, he seemed as glad to' get away as I! It is perhaps needless to say that the Abbe finds much to criticise in the Parisian literary critics and conferenciers of the present day, for— full-winged Eomantic — he belongs to a past generation. He will hit off M. Brunetiere in the following strain : "Yes, I have been over to the Sorbonne this winter and heard two or three of the lectures of M, Brunetiere on Bossuet. Now, for my part, I, as an ecclesiastic, do not attach much importance to the discussion of church theses by litterateurs. Some of our Catholic people are delighted with the fact that Brunetiere is glorifying one of our leading- apostles, and have remarked to me — '(3h, we must stand by him ; he is doing us immense good ; here is a strong ally ; he has come to us.' I do not understand it so. The first words with which M. Brunetiere opened this series of lectures were these : ' Those who study Bossuet belong to My Abbd. ; 29 two classes — those who have faith, and those who have not, I may say frankly, and at once, that I am of the second class.' What is there in that for us ? " It was the same way with Taine. When he published the initial volumes of ' Les Origines,' many of our number clapped their hands, and exclaimed: 'See how he has taken up the cudgels for the Church — he is one of us now ! ' I was sceptical about him, for I lived round the corner from his house, and saw in his daily life no evidence of an}^ change denoting that he had turned toward Catholicism. I was right, and his later books showed my friends their mistake. " I know that M. Brunetiere is rather the fashion to-day, yet I confess there is not much in him for me. To begin with, he is too pedantic. He is always displaying vast arrays of names of authors and authorities of all cen- turies, races, and kinds, known and unknown. He wishes to overwhelm you — to astonish you into silence by the length and breadth of his reading. He has read, unquestionably, many authors, but he has thoroughly digested few. He has never taken time to do so. He does not live with his authors. He writes in hot haste, and at the same moment, on several different topics, without waiting to let time 30 Paris Days aud Evenings. mature a judgment or ripen an opinion. These are feats of an acrobat — a j aggler ; it is not the highest form of literary criticism. His essays are full of rude projections and abrupt descents, of crude ridges and crags, and jagged valleys, which time has not smoothed down nor filled in. He approaches his themes too newly, and thrusts at us general impressions ; first drafts, and when you examine his official-sounding language at the crucial point in his subject, you usually dis- cover a ' perhaps ' or ' it is probable ' slipped in, showing that he leaves the real tug at the idea for someone else — he has merely scrambled together suggestions. " So he thunders along alike on all questions and writers. He o-oes hammering; through the most delicate prose and the most aff'ecting verse, apparently unconscious of their true charm. He has no compassion, no sympathy, no affection — he is always metallic, arbitrary, and absolute ; and still, if you turn back in his essays of ten years ago, you need not be surprised to find that he was saying the contrary of what he is saying to-day in the same authoritative m.anner. In our age we prefer to have subjects approached humanly, not dogmatically. Nothing that is absolute is human. AVe do not like to be whipped into line in heUes-lettres, as if we were, My Abbd. 31 always more or less benighted or wilfully aberrant. Absolutism inevitably means a narrow or superficial outlook — prejudices. "M. Brunetiere piques himself on being an impersonal critic, yet he is the most personal of them all. His enmities in the flesh are decidedly pronounced. If some one whom he does not like holds an opinion about the thesis he is treating, he is quite sure to take a reac- tionary view. His style — his language — is very eftective as it comes from his lips. He is an orator — the most successful one I have ever heard in a chair of literature ; but his paragraphs become abominably poor French when put into print." As for the other celebrated lecturers in the Rue des Ecoles, the Abbe is no less exactina*. He is not disposed to emphasise their admir- able and unusual qualities. He will say: " M. Deschanel, as a conferencier, is too light and amusing to suit my taste. He loves to make the ladies titter. And Larroumet also is a lady's professor. Of course, the ladies — you know my notion about them — I say, call it pretty and inofiensive if you will, still, for what I hold to be literature in its best sense, all this is of precious little value. M. Faguet ? Well, M. Faguet is very adept, clever, ingenious, able in fact, but he is — how shall I express it ? — a kind of farceur. 32 Paris Days and Evenings. I mean that letters have become a routine with him. What he seeks is not to be constructively helpful, and to be working in an orderly and responsible way, so much as to be original, gymnastic, diverting. He has the air of saying to his classes : " Now, let us go at this — it's our metier, you know — we must get through w^ith it; so let us do it creditably, and with as little ennui as possible." It is a pity to introduce these severe lines into the tender, amiable picture of my Abbe, yet T should not be wholly true to my theme if 1 did not do so, for he, like other mortals, has his austere moods, when he shows that he can trace a sharp angle, and be as keenly incisive as the critics themselves. So let us hasten to finish this portion of the sketch by noting that, with all his gentleness, sentimentality, and love of the ideal, he draws the line at woman. He seems to have a veritable fear of her. I have never heard him speak of his mother or a sister. He was remarking one evening : "I cannot bear to have even a maid- servant in the liouse. A woman used to come in and cook my meals and take care of my room. She was eternally pricking me with interrogation points, and pestering me with household attentions. She My Abbe. ^t, would ask me two or three times a day what I wished for the next meal. I became tired of it, and told her she might do my room and I would prepare my own repasts. Finally I said to my- self, ' If you can cook, you can do your own chamber work ' — so I dismissed her. What a comfort to feel that you are not to be inter- rupted every hour by afemme de menage ! It is alw^ays a relief to me to know there is not a woman about the premises." To reinvoke, then, if w^e can, something of the blowsy serenity of the Abbe. Last summer he was offered, and urged to accept, a tempting office connected with the Hierarchy in Eome. He remarked to me : ' ' They wanted me to come to Eome. Should I go or not ? This incident greatly troubled my tranquillity. My friends said : ' What ! refuse an opportunity to be in the highest ecclesiastical circles ? ' I at last told them : ' No ! I am a Frenchman, and love my liberty ! There is no place like Paris for me. I prefer to be free and tied to no one — not even to a cardinal ! ' " This partly answered the query I had often propounded to myself : "Is the Abbe a Frenchman first, or a Catholic ? Is he religious before he is patriotic ? " One evening last October he came to see me, and divulged the secret that in three weeks he was 34 Paids Days and Evenings. to preach a sermon in a village' near Versailles. He appears in tlie pulpit so seldom, and fears so niuch any light of publicity, that he confided his undertaking to me as if it were a confession; And to prevent me from being present,, he refused to give the name of the parish. But he recited to me his sermon, which he had already written and memorised. It had been scrupur lously and affectionately.polished, and, with its lyrical flights, was as tender and poetical as a lover's song. ;^ Last winter the. Abke became the almoner of ■a Hospital, or Kefuge, in a hamlet that crowns a low-lying hill a mile or two south of Paris. One afternoon in May I went out by train in quest of him, for I had not heard from him for some time. I rang the bell at the great green faded portals of his ancient hermitagej once the hunting seat of. a favourite of Louis XV. The doors opened, and there, in an old grass-checkered court, and not three feet away from me, stood the. most beautifid nun I have ever beheld. Fra Ana:elico mio-ht have dreamed of her. She was dressed in a black and cream-coloured garb, and wore the conventional white band around her face. Her features seemed celestial in their regular outlines and in their soft cast of sweet serenity. Her beauty, and the . fa-ct that it had . ,- -My Abbd.' 35 not occurred to me that a woman would be seen in the haunts of the Abbe, trifled somewhat with the poise of my question as I asked her if 1 might see him. She conducted me, with her clattering sandals, through several doors and halls. We came to a gate in a garden wall, and, as if opened in response to her summons with a bell, she bade me "Bonjour, Monsieur," and disappeared. I found myself in a small square garden full of cherry-trees in -bloom, and made my way to the house that stood at one side. I surprised the Abbe in the loveliest of moods in his room, for he had just come out of a delicious nap. We began participating at once in one of our com- munions of souls. He described how he had dreaded the thought of quitting Paris, and how soon he had learned to adore the country and his life here of a hermit. His four walls were in reality narrow and low, yet he lengthened them into the spaciousness of a palatial gallery in the stretches of his musing on the past and on the future ; and no mural decoration, he said, could be more sumptuous than that with which his fancy ornamented his cell. AVhen he spoke of his solitude, I could not refrain from hinting that there seemed, never- theless, to be maidens to open the gate to his flowery bower, and that-- some people migit 36 Paris Days and Evenings. think that even a Piagnone painter was to be envied if such were the circumstances. . . . The Abbe did not appear to notice the suspicion of a jest, and I did not urge my timid impeachment. He simply remarked : " Oh, there are two or three hundred women and girls over the wall there, but they do not trouble me, for I do not confess them, and then I have a private door into the street through which I come and go without being seen by anyone." As we talked, we looked out of his window over little fragrant fields of flowers and fruits, and smoothed our vision along the long ribbons of green, villa-dotted hills. He told me that all men were more or less egoists ; that he himself was something of an egoist though his life and mission were so lowly, for, while he abjured wealth, ambition, and what the world at large called pleasure, and asked for nothing except a bed and some food and raiment, and leisure to bathe his soul in the firmament, his career was, after all, the choice and product of his indolence. " And really," he said, "do we now owe our first duty to ourselves, and should not that first duty be gentleness ? ' II fiiut etre doux envers soi- meme ' (One should be gentle to himself) is the favourite of my mottoes. When in doubt as to what course to pursue, I always ask myself^ My Abbd. 37 ' Which, path promises to be softest to my footsteps ? ' " Then he read some modest-eyed verses that he had addressed to the first violet that peeped up in his garden in February. I discovered a few leaves of his. love poesies, for, notwithstand- ing his enmity to woman, he often fondles Cupid in his metres. And when one of his madrigals ended with "Et mourir de ne pas mourir" (And die because one cannot die), I exclaimed that it was worthy the lines of Oronte in " Le Misanthrope " : — " Belle Philis, on desespere, Alors qu'on espere toujours." The difierentiation of friendship and love ofi'ered by another of these poems wedded my memory :— " Friendsliip — one soul of which two hearts have each a half. Love — one heart inhabiting one soul." Of all his poems I have heard, only one was not an offertory on a sentimental or sublime theme. This one was dedicated to a certain countess, whom the Abbe had formerly known when she was always clothed in black. It recounts that when he was walking along the street one day, she drove past arrayed in -38 Paris Days and' Evenings. brilliant stuffs. She acknowledged his salutation in an indifferent manner, whence this verse. It revealed the unpleasant fact that she was haughty and a redoubtable has hleu ; and in these last lines the Abbe condescended to take a mortal's revenge : " Qaoique vous en fassiez, Vous serez toujours laide, Et pedantesque et raide."- (For, whatever you do, you will always be ugly, pedantic, and stiff.) His own rhymes finished, then came of course his recitations of Hugo, and we soared aloft on expanded wing among the heights of "Les Contemplations." Toward five o'clock a faint rap at his door meekly announced that the vesper hour was a;pproaching. We went down to the fruit and flower garden which lies in front of the long white fagade of the chateau. It was laid out in the Lenotre fashion a hundred and fifty years ago. The Abbe, with his fat hands sanctimoniously folded athwart his abdomen, led my nervous, zigzag, secular steps quietly and minutely along the straight and narrow gravelled walks hedged with vine-trained fruit trees. Flowers weighted the air with dense incense in this virginal retreat. Here and there I caught a glimpse of some self-communing nun slowly / ' - ' My Abyy ■ . . . 39, eclipsing into a quincunx, or winding her way: leisurely- in intricately intersecting and closely elipped alleys lined with cool shrines and stations of the cross. Then the Abbe accom- panied me to his private gate, and ..closed me out into the gray-walled street with his usual warm hand-shakino;s and his fervent '" Au revoir — a bientot." And as I walked back to Paris along the gray highway, with the vesper bells chiming in my ears, I thought how widely different this Breton and priestly temperament w^as from any I had ever intimately known ; how far it was separated from me by race, and time, and life itself; and yet how near it seemed ; how fully it belonged to the Middle Ages with its faith, romantic emotions, and imagination ; and how it made for the love of humble peace and tenderness, with its " II faut etre doux envers soi-meme." Here was a living example close to my consciousness of the manner in which one can be absorbed away from the earth and up into celestial realms, and can repose on the bosom of the Beyond. The Abbe has shown me a velvet, dow^iy soul in the traditional Catholic sense. He has shown me how infinitely sweet it is for a priest to let himself float softly, and yield all to the caresses of his religion. He 40 Paris Days and Evenings. lias illustrated for me how one, in the old and true Christian meaning, can be nothing, do nothing, have nothing, and still be happy, and pass his years in praising God for His innumer- able gifts and blessings. A Great Fashion House. The two proprietors of tliis fashion house in the Eue lead the easiest of business lives. They are not to be seen here until about two o'clock in the afternoon. The senior gentleman sells four or five robes as his daily task, and then goes over to his club for repose. He returns about six o'clock to consult the totals of the day's traffic, and if they are satisfactory, he smiles and is full of compliments to every one. The prosperity of the firm is due to the junior member, because he conceives and creates the styles launched from these doors. His designs display variety, daring, and grace, and are reputed nowadays to be the most chic of all those afloat in Paris. For this reason the house has reached, within a few years, an annual aggregate of ten million francs of sales, and employs within its walls five hundred persons. This gentleman prepares in February his models 42 Paris Days and Evenings. for the warm season, and in August he groups his fashions for cold weather. Thus his apart- ment in winter is decked in summer goods, and in midsummer it is clothed in furs and thick hibernal stuffs. He is always three months ahead of the world at large. Very likely no man in France is_ so flattei'ed as he byjadies. Princesses, wealthy heiresses, actresses, daily rehearse before him their admiration of his taste, and give evidence of how essential he is to their mundane successes and happiness. ' The desperate means embraced by some women, whose purses are lean, to get without eost a robe devised by him expressly for them is illustrated by the case of a- person who recently wrote him that she had a rather grace- ful figure and pretty face (" joli minois ") which .perhaps might suggest to him new combinations in gowns. For, of course, the varying _ female types are indispensable to the quest of novelties in dress. He sent her word in response that he- should be pleased to "contemplate her physi- ognomy." When she arrived, he saw at a glance that she did not possess a sufficient beauty or grace to be an inspiration to him, so he politely- foiled, her attempt to procure a toilet for nothing by- affecting not- to understand precisely, what she desired of him. . ^ - ■ ... ^ -^' A Great Fashion House. 43 About the first of August, when he begins to think of his autumn and winter designs, repre- sentatives of wholesale establishments show him -samples of their new materials — silks, woollens, embroideries, pearls. He studies the samples, forms his general conceptions, and sends for the "living mannikins." All is done in private, so tliat even the personnel may be surprised. A few days pass, and some afternoon he suddenly opens the door of his atelier, and twenty-five living models, arrayed in costumes never seen before,^ file out and through the salons, while he observes the efi"ect his latest creations produce cupon the employees. This is his jour cle ^ernissage, for, like a painter, he is an artist in colours and forms. Buyers from foreign lands — Eussia, - Spain, the United States — are the first to revel in these virgin patterns. It is not until the end af September that the French customers appear on the scene. Of the five hun^lred women employed here, about one hundred receive regular salaries, and are breakfasted and dined at the expense of the firm on the fifth floor of the building. The cuisine- is not -without pretensions-. These salaried employees diVe somewhat free to come and go during the