Marse Henry Part 25

"Oh, well," says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, "if you insist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me."

He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box.

It was literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gone for sure.

"La!" says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the ma.s.s of sh.e.l.ls with his cane as he held the candle aloft.

"But," says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance, "you told me they were dancing the cancan!"

The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite numb and frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the sh.e.l.ls about in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a sudden he stopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch.

"Ah," he murmured. "I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It is ten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o'clock by the watch every night." And without another word he reached for the Veuve Cliquot!

For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major was exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs.

His legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity could not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned his business--though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making much or any profit--so that there rose the query how he contrived to make both ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten thousand francs each.

Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House," and in relating the famous Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose pa.s.sage he spoke of "l'Oncle Celestin," with the deepest feeling.

"Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?"

Doctor Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, sir, the other night he told it to me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!"

I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came from Ma.r.s.eilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money dealings scrupulously honest--was all I could be sure of. What had he done to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, for that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife--a tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a saint--had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she had been the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf.

But before her time what had he been, what had he done?

Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, I entered The Brunswick. It was empty too. In the farthest corner of the little dining room The Major, his face buried in his hands, laid upon the table in front of him, sat silently weeping. He did not observe my entrance and I seated myself on the opposite side of the table.

Presently he looked up, and seeing me, without a word pa.s.sed me a letter which, all blistered with tears, had brought him to this distressful state. It was a formal French burial summons, with its long list of family names--his among the rest--the envelope, addressed in a lady's hand--his sister's, the wife of a n.o.bleman in high military command--the postmark "Lyon." Uncle Celestin was dead.

Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which I may not recall and must not repeat; for, included in that funeral list were some of the best names in France, Uncle Celestin himself not the least of them.

At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had come his body was taken away, n.o.body knew when, n.o.body where, and with it went the beautiful woman, his wife, of whom from that day to this I have never heard a word.

Chapter the Fifteenth

Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure

I

Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breeds equally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has witnessed so much of the drama of life--of the romantic and picturesque--as the age we live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were not more delightfully tragic than the years between Serajevo and Senlis.

The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains the interest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roads led to Rome. In d.i.c.kens' day "a tale of two cities" could only mean London and Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date the t.i.tle would have now to read "three," or even "four," cities, New York and Chicago putting in their claims for mundane recognition.

I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent student of history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my history and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when the hum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of the Beau Quartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of what was once the Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have enabled me to learn many things not commonly known, among them that Paris is the most orderly and moral city in the world, except when, on rare and brief occasions, it has been stirred to its depths.

I have crossed the ocean many times--have lived, not sojourned, on the banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again--do not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning--I may be forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame, or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that "other life," whereof we remember so little that we cannot recall who we were, or what name we went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse in dreams, or a "hunch" from the world of spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy we might have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra--as maybe we were!--or at least Joan of Arc, or Jean Valjean!

II

Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call existence had so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a succession of performances; has so concentrated human attention upon mundane affairs; has called such a muster roll of stage favorites; has contributed to romance so many heroes and heroines, to history so many signal episodes and personal exploits, to philosophy so much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge, to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection.

Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us as pictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about statues--that they all look alike to me? There are too many of them.

They bring the ancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood. We do not really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with aeschylus and Homer. The very nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on a collection of curios in an auction room, droning the dull iteration of a catalogue. There is as little to awaken and inspire in the system of religion and ethics of the pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of the stone effigies that stare blankly upon us in the British Museum, the Uffizi and the Louvre.

We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity, the human side quite lost in the archaic. What is Caesar to us, or we to Caesar? Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than the Medici Venus for the lights o' love.

Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundred years--semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly ascribe to Athens or Rome--beginning with the exit of this our own world from the dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and continuing thence through the struggle of man toward achievement--tells us a tale more consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive, than may be found in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of the civilizations which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to yield at last to triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, from the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow luxury and culture. Refinement had done its perfect work. It had emasculated man and uns.e.xed woman and brought her to the front as a political force, even as it is trying to do now.

The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age is as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working its immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.

To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's imps and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the field marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in Caesar de Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent and in Jean La.s.s. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.

I once pa.s.sed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.

Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers--a gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us--a poor, insane creature she must have been--disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond the Place des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags and did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no longer to slide down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, colored and exceeding life-like, taken the day after Ravaillac delivered the finishing knife-thrust in the Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the Bearnais as anything but a tamer of hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say Dumas'

narrative is quite as authentic as any.

One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarter of the town to live in--and Rachael, too!--it having given such frequent shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real abode of a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the days of Diane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of statesmen and prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to Turgot.

III

I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde Park--as a well-known local section--yet how few Americans who have gone to Paris have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the town. One finds it a curious circ.u.mstance that so many if not most of the great cities somehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate toward the setting sun.

When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Pa.s.sy were distant villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderly described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and a part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.

Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind of awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop that claimed to have furnished the mise en scene for the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche "down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves." Ah, well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, and my Paris has been as interesting as his Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siege and the Republic.

I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person in his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as t.i.tmarsh would himself agree.

I knew them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every Frenchman rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place Vendome, when I got there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they told me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood against the wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the Cathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as many decades.

IV

Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters. It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy finale came to pa.s.s; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary history.

His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly houses of the Place Vendome that the poet of the keyboard died a few days later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. A bra.s.s plate marks the house.

May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and part of which I may at length take to myself: