Peter Ibbetson Part 5

And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty, self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either s.e.x; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, l.u.s.ty blind beggars, merry creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a cuira.s.sier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"

or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black _bonnets a poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers, conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the pork-butcher's wife!

Then a proletarian wedding procession--headed by the bride and bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best--all singing noisily together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by sympathetic eyes on its way to the Hotel-Dieu; or the last sacrament, with bell and candle, bound for the bedside of some humble agonizer _in extremis_--and we all uncovered as it went by.

And then, for a running accompaniment of sound the clanging chimes, the itinerant street cries, the tinkle of the _marchand de coco,_ the drum, the _cor de cha.s.se,_ the organ of Barbary, the ubiquitous pet parrot, the knife-grinder, the bawling fried-potato monger, and, most amusing of all, the poodle-clipper and his son, strophe and antistrophe, for every minute the little boy would yell out in his shrill treble that "his father clipped poodles for thirty sous, and was competent also to undertake the management of refractory tomcats," upon which the father would growl in his solemn ba.s.s, "My son speaks the truth"--_L'enfant dit vrai!_

And rising above the general cacophony the din of the eternally cracking whip, of the heavy carwheel jolting over the uneven stones, the stamp and neigh of the spirited little French cart-horse and the music of his many bells, and the cursing and swearing and _hue! dia!_ of his driver!

It was all entrancing.

Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Pa.s.sy--by the quays, walking on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli, the Champs elysees, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussee de la Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and before this poor scribe had reached his teens?

Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as one gazed from the heights of Pa.s.sy, with all its pinnacles and spires and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields, its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July, its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord, where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable fountains.

There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently enn.o.bled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.

Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire, with the cold blue east for a background.

Dear Paris!

Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination; all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of a hound.

Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugene Sue and _Les Mysteres_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au cinqueme_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook with, and all.

There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but always full of interest and charm!

One knew at a sniff as one pa.s.sed the _porte cochere_ what kind of people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond of Gruyere cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or b.u.t.ter, and liked their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's dispensation.

For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous clang.

I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense by the altar-steps.

"_Le pauvre en sa cabane ou le chaume le couvre Est sujet a ses lois; Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre N'en defend point nos rois_."

And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes and days gone by.

Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an

"_Air doux et tendre Jadis aime_!"

Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!

In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away and apart.

Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen her since.

Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.

My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal irony of fate.

So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou (with a nice little old castle to match), called la Mariere, which had belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were Pasquier de la Mariere, of quite a good old family); and there we were to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary _pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven knows what for!

My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately; and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one. For it turned out that my father had by this time spent every penny of his own and my mother's capital, and had, moreover, died deeply in debt. I was too young and too grief-stricken to feel anything but the terrible bereavement, but it soon became patent to me that an immense alteration was to be made in my mode of life.

A relative of my mother's, Colonel Ibbetson (who was well off) came to Pa.s.sy to do his best for me, and pay what debts had been incurred in the neighborhood, and settle my miserable affairs.

After a while it was decided by him and the rest of the family that I should go back with him to London, there to be disposed of for the best, according to his lights.

And on a beautiful June Morning, redolent of lilac and syringa, gay with dragon-flies and b.u.t.terflies and b.u.mblebees, my happy childhood ended as it had begun. My farewells were heartrending (to me), but showed that I could inspire affection as well as feel it, and that was some compensation for my woe.

"Adieu, cher Monsieur Gogo. Bonne chance, et le Bon Dieu vous benisse,"

said le Pere et la Mere Francois. Tears trickled down the Major's hooked nose on to his mustache, now nearly white.

Madame Seraskier strained me to her kind heart, and blessed and kissed me again and again, and rained her warm tears on my face; and hers was the last figure I saw as our fly turned into the Rue de la Tour on our way to London, Colonel Ibbetson exclaiming--

"Gad! who's the lovely young giantess that seems so fond of you, you little rascal, hey? By George! you young Don Giovanni, I'd have given something to be in your place! And who's that nice old man with the long green coat and the red ribbon? A _vieille moustache_, I suppose: almost like a gentleman. Precious few Frenchmen can do that!"

Such was Colonel Ibbetson.

And then and there, even as he spoke, a little drop of sullen, chill dislike to my guardian and benefactor, distilled from his voice, his aspect, the expression of his face, and his way of saying things, suddenly trickled into my consciousness--never to be whiped away!

As for so poor Mimsey, her grief was so overwhelming that she could not come out and wish me goodbye like the others; and it led, as I afterwards heard, to a long illness, the worst she ever had; and when she recovered it was to find that her beautiful mother was no more.

[Ill.u.s.tration:]

Madame Seraskier died of the cholera, and so did le Pere et la Mere Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M.

le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned in vain.

The _maison de sante_ was broken up. M. le Major and his friends went and roosted on parole elsewhere, until a good time arrived for them, when their lost leader came back and remained--first as President of the French Republic, then as Emperor of the French themselves. No more parole was needed after that.

My grandmother and Aunt Plunket and her children fled in terror to Tours, and Mimsey went to Russia with her father.

Thus miserably ended that too happy septennate, and so no more at present of

"_Le joli lieu de ma naissance_!"

Part Two

The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself, that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull reading, I fear.

[Ill.u.s.tration:]