Chapter V

: Adventures in Æstheticism

_Paris and Student Days_

My first trip to Europe cost me forty dollars and my faith in human nature. The former was the price of an emigrant ticket on the boat and my food from London to Paris; the latter was caused by my lending a fellow passenger—a Frenchman—my best overcoat and never seeing it again. As he taught me a great deal of French, however, I may have been repaid.

There was never an idle moment in the steerage. Every noon we were all hustled up onto the deck—even to a man with a broken back—and our bunks washed out with chloride of lime. This was before the days of wholesale fumigation, and the company was taking no chances. At mealtime were brought in huge baskets of bread and large cans of coffee; we produced our own dishes and were fed much in the fashion of a barbecue, with hunks of meat. After two days I was invited by the purser to sit at his table, and so dined in splendor with the cooks, steward, and “barkeep” on virtually the same fare as the first cabin.

One night we arranged a mock marriage between a giggling Irish girl and rather a crazy fellow with a gray beard. I was the high priest. The barkeeper had given us some whisky and the noise of the merrymaking must have reached the upper deck, for just at its height the leading lady and some members of a well-known opera company that was crossing came down with the captain to see our show. I knew that this would mean the dampening of all our fun, so I stopped them, saying that we had not been invited to their entertainments, and demanded that the privacy of the emigrants should not be broken. The captain seemed amused, but agreed, and they went away, much to the annoyance of the opera star.

I remember being very much impressed with the shore of Ireland which showed once through the fog, looking so like a large emerald that I immediately saw where the island got its name. This dark, dark green, soaked in rain, was very extraordinary.

A brief stop at Liverpool, where a pretty barmaid drew me a tankard of stout that was the nearest thing to God’s nectar I ever tasted; then on to London; directly to Paris; the Hotel de Londres and—Julian’s!

Off the Passage de Panorama, which is just off the Boulevard, is the Galerie Montmartre. Here, up one flight of stairs, over a public _cabinet d’aisance_, in the dingiest place imaginable, was the Académie Julian. The room was dirty and dark, despite the skylight above; at one end a platform, and near it a soiled bit of drapery behind which the women models stripped. On a hot July day, what with paints, dirty Frenchmen, stuffy air, nude models, and the place below, this room stank worse than anything I can think of. Not much calculation for comfort, but possibly an enormous inspiration for genius.

Julian had his office below, but was not there with any regularity, generally coming in to loaf or to see new girls. He was a Hercules and quite a romantic figure, about whom there were many stories. They say he was the Masked Man who used to wrestle on the stage and at county fairs. This hulking fellow had been rather a good painter and had become a most successful business man. Born an Italian peasant, he had spent the early years of his life as a goatherd. To me he always looked exactly like a great big orangutan. The three hundred francs a year he received from each one of us seemed a small sum; but the models were paid only a few cents a day, the rental of the studio must have been negligible, and such men as Lefebvre, Boulanger, Bougereau, Tony Fleury, and after him Tony Robert Fleury, gave their instruction gratuitously. So it was not such a bad business deal after all.

One of the older students was the _massier_, or boss. He chose the model for the week or had one voted upon from the crowd of poor devils who lined the stairway every Monday morning in hopes of a job. This day we grabbed our places; first come, first served. If anyone came into the room, other than Julian or an _ancien_ (old student), there were hurled at him paint tubes, stools, cigar butts, oaths, and comments upon his appearance and clothing. This was a tradition of the school and had to be lived up to.

Some of the pupils were old men with gray hair who had been there fifteen or twenty years, still working away, I suppose, like some men who stay in prison after their terms are up, having got used to the place. One day a tall Englishman—I think he called himself Vernon—turned up. He was about fifty-five years old, hollow cheeked, with sad eyes looking out from under great brows. He came every day and worked hard, but his painting was not very good. He always made a pretty model’s legs look like twisted rope. One morning he called me over to criticize his drawing, and I asked him why he was doing this. He told me he was an art lover, owned a great many pictures, and thought he would get a far greater appreciation of them by doing the actual work. He stayed about two months and some time after we learned that he was Lord Dufferin, who had just come from the post of Governor-General of Canada and was on his way to St. Petersburg. Imagine the shame of a certain pupil from England who had constantly boasted in a truly British manner (and, indeed, in “Mr. Vernon’s” very presence) of his close friendship with Lord Dufferin!

But all the students were not old. Most of them were quite young, and some very unsophisticated. I remember a blond fellow, green, and straight from the country, who had received a hundred francs a month from the citizens of his home town to complete his art education. One day he came running into the studio, breathless, stammering out a most amazing story. He had been staring in a jeweler’s window when a beautiful woman, “an angel,” approached him, saying:

“Who art thou?”

“Your servant.”

She took him by the arm to her barouche, and he drove with her to a magnificent house on the Champs Élysées. There servants took charge of him and arrayed him in fine clothing. The details of the next three days were very vague, but he lived in a dream. One of the things he did was to drive with her into the country at 4 A.M. to drink milk fresh from the cows. It was another story of Diana and Endymion, but all he could say was:

“She was a goddess.”

We were inclined to disbelieve his tale until one evening we took him to the Variétés, whose back door opened into the same _galerie_ as Julian’s. There, on the stage, he discovered his “goddess.” She was Judic, a famous actress of the day, well known for her curious amours!

Most of us students were poor. I had fifty dollars a month allowance, but I roomed with a fellow who had only twenty for everything—and he made it do. We lived in the rue de Douai in Montmartre. The room, six flights up, with a trapdoor for a window, was furnished with two iron cots and very little else. I remember we used champagne bottles for water ewers. For all this we paid thirty francs a month. No heat, of course, and in winter the cold was unspeakable. One night I got an idea, and, taking my blanket, started across the icy red-tiled floor to get into my roommate’s bunk. In the middle of the room I ran into something. It was he coming to sleep with me! We laughed and went out and bought a roast chicken and a bottle of wine. It did not take much to start a party in those days.

We could not afford the theater, but would go now and then to sit on the boulevards over our beer. The wicked thing was to go to the Café Américain and drink with the girls. Here one night I saw an amusing thing. A little fellow with varnished boots, loud clothes, and a gay tie, showing every outward vulgarity that some Americans can show, was sitting on the balcony with two large, fat women.

Suddenly, a row started below—bad words and then loud oaths in English—and a blow. The French do not do this; they slap the face, but do not use the fist.

“_Un coup de poing Anglais!_”

We looked down. Five or six Frenchmen were upon two Americans; and then one yelled:

“Any Americans here?”

The little fellow got up. He was terribly drunk, but, stepping on his chair, he climbed upon the railing of the balcony, balanced himself a moment unsteadily, and then leaped wildly into the crowd, shouting:

“I don’t amount to much, but here goes!”

When the calm was restored it was seen that his action had had the desired affect, for several arms were broken and one or two Frenchmen were completely knocked out; but for an exhibition of true heroism and Americanism, it was gorgeous.

A great event was the Bal Bullier—the students’ ball; everyone went, and it was “artist” all through. Things always went well unless some one broke one of the unwritten laws. For instance, all the women who amounted to anything wore masks, and to take them off was an invitation to everyone. One evening at one of these affairs I suddenly heard:

“Any Americans here?”

In the middle of the floor, surrounded by dozens of Frenchmen and fighting with his fists, was an upstanding male in a cowboy hat—a fashion then unknown in Paris. Some one had broken the rule and taken his girl away from him. In a flash I recognized him as Charley White, a man I had known in the north of California.

I looked about me and yelled to each corner of the room:

“_À moi, Julian! À moi, Julian!_”

Instantly dozens of men sprang from all sides with cries of:

“_À toi, Simmons! À toi, Simmons!_”

In a second they were upon their brother Frenchmen, had downed them, and had hustled Charley White out of the room. No matter where one is in France, he can always call his class to his side; architects stick to architects, actors to actors, painters to painters, and so on. I could never convince my friend, however, that I did not employ private police.

These nights of revelry were few and far between; our evenings were spent in the studio, and I always see them in “black and white.” Black were the shadows in the recesses not reached by the big gas flame, black were the heads of the Europeans, strange beings to me at that time, some of them with beards; while the body of the model, the straining faces of the students, and the paper on the easels before us were a gleaming, glaring white. We did drawing alone at night.

Up to this time there had been one and only one real influence upon my artistic life, and that was Doctor Rimmer. While at the Boston Art Museum I used to go over to the Institute of Technology to his classes in art anatomy. Dr. William Rimmer, who is only to-day being given any recognition, probably occupies in the artistic world somewhat the same position that Samuel Butler does in the literary world. Rimmer’s work is being dragged out of obscurity to-day by men like Gutzon Borglum, as Butler’s was by Bernard Shaw.

He was a large man with a foreign accent, a crank, but an enthusiast and very excitable. His absorption in his work was that of a crazy genius, but his knowledge of the structure of the human figure, combined with his delicate sense of beauty and vigor of execution, was of inestimable value. In his life he was absolutely impersonal and cared for no man. Doctor Rimmer did me more good than any other man except one—Boulanger.

I had been told by Crowinshield, in Boston, that I had something that would be of great value in the future, but was very dangerous then—_chic_. With the conceit of youth, I thought it meant something, so I began to paint as soon as I joined Julian’s. My first work was the head of an Italian; it was very bad. Boulanger stopped in back of me and said:

“If you go on this way, you might as well go home and make shoes.”

A thing like that had seldom happened to me; I couldn’t help showing off, and it hit hard. I realized that the criticism was right, but I thought that he should have told me how to cure myself. So I left the room and waited on the stairs for a half hour before he came out. Seeing me, he tried to push by, but I stopped him, saying:

“I admit everything you said. I do not know anything, but I came here to learn. (By this time the tears were streaming down my cheeks.) You shall _not_ leave here until you tell me what to do.”

He thought for a moment. “Well, have you seen the outline drawings by Gérôme?”

I thought them the finest things I knew of, and said so.

“Go back and make one, and mind you, young man, see that you take a week over it. Good morning.”

These drawings were larger than the academy paper, so I got a three-foot stretcher and put wrapping paper on it. They wouldn’t let me in the front row at school because it was too large and obstructed everyone else’s view; I had, therefore, to go in the back of the room and stand up to see the model. In two days I had finished it, and I started it over again, rubbing out so much that I wore holes in the paper. After one every week for three weeks, they came easier.

Boulanger was away on a vacation, and when he came back he passed me by as though I did not exist. July, August, September went by and still he ignored me. I was too scared and miserable to speak to him. Finally, one day he walked in back of my easel and halted as if shot! Turning to the whole school, he said:

“None of you could do a drawing like this, and I doubt if any one of you could copy it.” Then turning to me, “Let’s see you make an academy.”

I switched from being a loafer and _chiquer_ from that moment, and realized that only by eight hours’ daily work and hard digging could I become a painter. The next week there was a prize offered of a hundred francs for the best drawing—and I won it.

My first showing was at the Salon of ’81. We students used to congregate at the Palais de l’Industrie and watch the four or five thousand pictures arrive for selection. From these only about two thousand were chosen. We were a great crowd, lining the grand stairway or sitting on the balustrade, and it was everybody’s business to be funny. First would come vans and wagons from which would issue twenty and sometimes forty pictures; then messengers; poor artists with their one creation; and last the commissionaires who carried the canvases on the easel-like thing they had on their shoulders. Of course, the barnyard pictures brought forth loud cackles and crows—this being my special accomplishment. Every now and then some girl would arrive with a portait of “Mother” (too poor to have it sent). Everyone would weep copiously. Up the stairway, with great ceremony, would come a portrait of some high official; we would all assume a manner of awe, but as it turned the corner—loud shouts of “_Merde!_” I remember mine (I was so ashamed of it) in a big frame so large that it had to be borne by two men. It was a portrait of a Scotchman in kilts.

“_À biens l’horreur!_ It is of our friend Simmons. Shame! Shame!” (for the bare knees).

Up it went, and a big red-headed man from Julian’s rose and said:

“Silence for a while and tears.”

At last a wave of quiet—serious this time—and whispers all up and down the line.

“Sh! It is the master!” A Jules Lefebvre had arrived.

Pictures accepted and hung, varnishing day was the next excitement. Everyone of importance and all fashion turned out. New York society cannot conceive of what a place the fine arts have in France. Women of note at the gates with their _quêteuses_, soliciting money for charity; inside, great masses of people go through the galleries together, with some such person as Sarah Bernhardt at the head and the lesser following. I remember seeing Madame De Gautrot, the noted beauty of the day, and could not help stalking her as one does a deer. Representing a type that never has appealed to me (black as spades and white as milk), she thrilled me by the very movement of her body. She walked as Vergil speaks of goddesses—sliding—and seemed to take no steps. Her head and neck undulated like that of a young doe, and something about her gave you the impression of infinite proportion, infinite grace, and infinite balance. Every artist wanted to make her in marble or paint, and, although she has been done innumerable times, no one has succeeded.

At one Salon, in the early ’eighties, two Frenchmen, with flowing ties and low collars, stepped in front of me to look at a landscape by Boutet de Monvel. One said:

“There is a girl in England named Kate Greenaway who is doing some very clever work. She doesn’t know anything about drawing or color, but her idea is certainly original. Some day some man will take it and get a great name by it.”

I never forgot this, for the speaker was De Monvel himself, and he certainly did scoop the idea.

One who always attracted a crowd was Rosa Bonheur—she who was made famous and wealthy by American dollars. She looked like a small, undersized man, wore gray trousers, Prince Albert coat and top hat to these affairs. Her face was gray white and wizened, and she gesticulated, speaking in a high, squeaky voice. I have never seen anyone who gave a more perfect impression of a eunuch.

The Salon was not all fun; there were many tragedies. One day I called on my friend Renouf, a first-medalist, who was painting a decoration in the Palais de l’Industrie. The Salon had been closed a month, but there were hundreds of rejected canvases standing outside that had never been called for. Some were not even framed. He hauled out several pathetic attempts; then, coming upon one, said:

“Did you ever hear of a painter named G——? He has just been locked up; crazy.”

The picture was about six by ten feet, had no frame, but it was signed in large letters. It was a scene of a long corridor, with two barred windows on the side and a man crouched against the wall, with the most maniacal expression on his face. I never have forgotten the horror; he must have painted it when he was going crazy. I often think of poor De Maupassant, whose extreme intelligence warned him of approaching insanity and who, having a gun, desired to take his life. Of course, the gracious Christians surrounding him preferred his earthly sufferings to his heavenly happiness, and so prevented him from doing it.

Ten years after a man of prominence in the artistic world dies the French give a showing of his work. This places him historically as an artist. Some of his pictures are purchased by the government and, after this exhibition, if the authorities deem him great enough, pictures by him are moved to the Louvre. I remember the ten-year show of Courbet. He had been an anarchist, also one of the leaders in the Commune, and his work was considered frightfully “modern.” He was the brutal sort of painter that our present-day young men try to emulate, but, though he died many years ago, Courbet was a far abler painter than any man now alive in America.

Of course, this realism of execution brought forth much criticism from the members of the so-called old-school artists, and among the leaders in denouncing Courbet (while alive) was that classic authority, Tony Fleury. He considered this type of art worthless and all wrong and, if I mistake not, expressed his opinion of the modern man in the newspapers.

On the opening day of the Courbet show (there was a smart crowd, as there always is at these affairs) I noticed the attention was suddenly turned in one direction and people seemed to be following some one. Sure enough, with his hands behind his back under coat tails was that notorious enemy of the dead painter, the venerable Tony Fleury, pottering around the room and examining each picture with great care. Then a striking thing happened—so theatrical and so French.

Whirling and facing the audience, he spoke:

“Gentlemen and ladies, for many years I have said that this man was a bad painter. I was mistaken. He was a genius!”

Whistler was a well-known figure at all Salons, but I first met him in London, where I visited him with a letter of introduction from my aunt Fanny, who had trotted him on her knee when he was a baby. He was charming, said there was something he had to do, and, if I could wait for him, the day was mine. He handed me a portfolio of drawings to look at while he was gone, saying:

“Some things I picked up in Italy.”

When he came back I told him, with the arrogance of youth, that I hadn’t cared at all for some of the etchings and wondered why he had bought them. He was very curious to know which ones I meant, but never told me, what I found out later, that they were all his own! The well-known Venetian etchings!

We lunched at the Hogarth Club and back to his studio to look at his work—me to drink in fountains of knowledge and he to be much amused at my untrained conversation. The studio was large, dignified, and very bare. I remember multitudes of little galley pots in which to mix colors. His painting table had a glass top, and I made a mental decision to have one like it. Whistler always had his own canvas made for him and was extremely careful about all his materials.

His accent was very English and he was full of mannerisms, constantly fooling with his eyeglass or the lace at his throat. He asked about Paris, and I told him of the first show of the Impressionists, held on the Boulevard des Capucines; of Monet, Sisley, etc. The pictures had looked crazy to the people of the day. Whistler said:

“Oh, I know those fellows; they are a bunch of Johnnies who have seen my earlier work.”

Considering that his earlier work looks pre-Raphaelite or stuffy German, this was a curious remark.

A large manservant in full livery brought out the pictures to show us. He wore white gloves and was careful not to touch the surface of the canvas. I remember the portrait of Sarasate; it was very large and the servant acted as an easel, holding it on his toes, with his two hands at the sides. Our conversation became quite interesting at the moment, and his master left him standing in that position for more than half an hour while we talked of other things. I thought this very inconsiderate, as we had never treated servants that way. It was this same portrait of Sarasate that I later saw finished in the Salon. Whistler had kicked up a great row, because it had occupied only the central position of the left-hand room instead of the right, which was more popular. He spoke to me about it, and I told him that he should not care, as the poor fiddler looked as if he were trying to commit suicide in the Metropolitan subway. He tried to get angry and wanted to know why. The figure was all black, with the signature (a gold butterfly) looking like the headlight of an engine, about to dash it into oblivion.

Whistler could always find plenty of adorers to sit at his feet and let him use them as a doormat. The Claimant in Lemon Yellow told me that he was hurrying home with him one evening in the rain, when the master spied something that pleased his æsthetic taste. It was a little lighted grocer’s window. He stopped like a pointer dog, ordered the Claimant to go home, a mile or more, and get his box. Then he started painting like mad in the dark, and for more than an hour the Claimant held his umbrella over him and handed him his materials. Truly, the man had an hypnotic power.

Whistler was all heart and all pocketbook to any poor unknown and, for all his arrogance, the servants loved him; but he could never resist a chance to rap Authority. He sent his “second-class thanks” for a second-class medal awarded him at the Salon. Considering the fact that this is the highest honor a foreigner gets, it seems, for once, that the little man lost his sense of humor. He couldn’t resist getting in his knock at the English, either. I remember a phrase in a letter written by him to a friend of mine.

“Yes, Sid, here I am again in Paris and gentle Peace seems at last to be inclined to take up her permanent abode in my little pavilion; but I shall drop back across the Channel, now and again, just to see that too great a sense of security may not come upon the people.” They reveled in it; he was master then, and the British love to be patronized by some one who has arrived.

I once rented a studio that Whistler had used, and the decorator, who had a shop below, told me that he had changed the color of the wall to agree with every new picture he painted. On one side of the room was a large space filled with palette scrapings. When I think of Abbott Thayer, I know I must have missed a good business deal by not cutting them off to sell to his admirers in the U. S. A. Mr. Thayer was giving an outdoor lesson to a number of girls and, wishing to sit down, and also having on a new pair of trousers, he went over to a near-by barn and got a shingle. When he left he heard a sound like a football rush. The girls were fighting for the shingle!

There is a letter of Whistler’s, written in the ’sixties, to Fantin Latour, which I am going to quote, trusting there may be some young artist, in however remote a land, who, reading it for the first time, will say:

“I will profit; I will learn my trade.”

DEAR FANTIN—I have far too many things to tell you for me to write them all this morning, for I am in an impossible press of work. It is the pain of giving birth. You know what that is. I have several pictures in my head and they issue with difficulty. For I must tell you that I am grown exacting and “difficile”—very different from what I was when I threw everything pell-mell on canvas, knowing that instinct and fine color would carry me through. Ah, my dear Fantin, what an education I have given myself! Or, rather, what a fearful want of education I am conscious of! With the fine gifts I naturally possess, what a painter I should now be, if, vain and satisfied with these powers, I hadn’t disregarded everything else! You see I came at an unfortunate moment. Courbet and his influence were odious. The regret, the rage, even the hatred I feel for all that now, would perhaps astonish you, but here is the explanation. It isn’t poor Courbet that I loathe, nor even his works; I recognize, as I always did, their qualities. Nor do I lament the influence of his painting on mine. There isn’t any one will be found in my canvases. That can’t be otherwise, for I am too individual and have always been rich in qualities which he hadn’t and which were enough for me. But this is why all that was so bad for me.

That damned realism made such a direct appeal to my vanity as a painter, and, flouting all traditions, I shouted, with the assurance of ignorance, “Vive la Nature!” “Nature,” my boy—that cry was a piece of bad luck for me. My friend, our little society was as refractory as you like. Oh, why wasn’t I a pupil of Ingres?—How safely he would have led us!

Drawing! by Jove! Color—color is vice. Certainly it can be and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Grasped with a strong hand, controlled by her master drawing, color is a splendid bride, with a husband worthy of her—her lover, but her master, too, the most magnificent mistress in the world, and the result is to be seen in all the lovely things produced from their union. But coupled with indecision, with a weak, timid, vicious drawing, easily satisfied, color becomes a jade making game of her mate, and abusing him just as she pleases, taking the thing lightly so long as she has a good time, treating her unfortunate companion like a duffer who bores her—which is just what he does. And look at the result! a chaos of intoxication, of trickery, regret, unfinished things. Well, enough of this. It explains the immense amount of work that I am now doing. I have been teaching myself thus for a year or more and I am sure that I shall make up the wasted time. But—what labor and pain!

One advantage in not having money in Europe is that it forces one to live with the natives and not mingle with transplanted America, vulgar with luxury, that exists in every large capital. We had a good chance to learn the French nature, bear with its eccentricities, and appreciate its wonderful charm. They never miss a chance to make a witty remark. I remember a girl about twenty-five, but looking sixteen, with bobbed hair (unusual in those days), conspicuously short skirts, and woolen stockings, looking distinctly the poor gentlewoman, walking down the boulevard one day entirely alone. Under her arm was a violin case, looking exactly like a coffin. Each café has its character, and as she passed the Café de Madrid, with its gathering of literary people, a perfectly dressed Frenchman, lavender tie and all, at one of the outer tables rose, raised his hat and said:

“_Ah, Mademoiselle! Tu vas enterrer la petite?_” (“You go to bury the little one?”)

There was dead silence until she was out of sight, when every man in the café rose and lifted his hat to the speaker. We, in America, are not in consonance with wit and beauty as they are.

If you make good in Paris, it is all right. The students once carried a nude model all over the city, and the citizens respectfully bowed to Beauty. Again, conversely, an actress who appeared in a play in the nude was madly applauded—until she made the fatal and inartistic mistake of taking a curtain call. She was hissed off the stage. I remember Rochegrosse, a fellow painter, picking up a red-velvet-and-gold hat of the Louis Onze period, one day in the studio. It made him look exactly like a mediæval page. Without thinking, he wore it out—the whole length of the boulevard. No one thought to laugh, but all stopped and said “Admirable.” You must not be ridiculous in France, but you are not necessarily ridiculous just because you differ from the crowd, as you are in America.

My only meeting with the _haut noblesse_ of France did not leave me with a very good impression of that society which it is practically impossible to penetrate. I had been asked by a friend of mine, in Colorado, to play gallant to the beautiful singer, Marie Van Zant, to whom he was betrothed. My first act of friendship was to try to protect her from a marquis who had been forcing his attentions. The marquis had bet forty thousand francs that he would make her his mistress, and wrote, asking her to be a party to his game and share the money. Receiving no answer to this proposal, he sent a bouquet to Miss Van Zant’s dressing room in which was a note stating that if she did not accept his offer he would publicly insult her as she left the theater. Then she appealed to me.

I had a carriage waiting at the stage door that evening, into which I quickly bundled both singer and her mother and, in order to avoid any further scandal, sent them off alone. But I was mistaken. The marquis must have been before me and bribed the coachman to go to a different address. Before they knew it they had stopped before a brilliantly lighted restaurant and the young man was running down the steps to meet them. Marie succeeded in avoiding him by threatening the coachman with arrest if he did not take them home.

But some woman got hold of the story, and there was a scandalous article in one of the papers in America. Twelve days after it appeared my friend was in Paris and, coming to my rooms, asked me to meet him at a certain hour as he was going to shoot a Frenchman. He asked me to be one of his seconds and I carried his challenge to the marquis. The nobleman was a mere boy and pleaded that he was too nearsighted to use pistols, and, as my friend did not know the use of swords, the duel came to nothing. I did not know enough to ask for a Jury of Honor or he would have been forced to go on the field. One very characteristically French thing came out of the affair, however, when the marquis tried to pooh-pooh my overtures for a fight on the basis that no “actress” could be insulted in his country and that it was only because we were Americans that he would consider the matter at all.

We sometimes went to the Closerie des Lilas, at the corner of the Boulevard St.-Martin. This was quite in the country, in the days of Henri Quatre—a sort of road house where the young bloods went to drink. The women of the court discovered this and used to go out there, disguised as milkmaids, and flirt outrageously with the tipsy members of the nobility. Alas! the lilacs are gone now and sportive milkmaids no longer frequent the place; but the Cafe des Lilas still has its stories, and in my day there was at least one interesting habitué. He was a major whom everybody knew and spoke to familiarly. He was gray bearded and must have had his title from the Franco-Prussian War. He and his cronies had the same table, played piquet, and sat for hours over their coffee. His was a _mazagran_. The first time I saw him I noticed he had a funny trick which he repeated every night. For a _mazagran_ the waiter leaves three lumps of sugar; he always used two, left the other in his saucer, and became exceedingly annoyed if, by any chance, it got wet. In his right-hand waistcoat pocket was his watch, with a great fob that went across. With the utmost deliberation, he would reach into the left-hand pocket, take out a piece of brown paper, beautifully cut into a square, and fold into it the extra lump of sugar, carefully putting the package back in his pocket again. For many nights I watched this proceeding and made up my mind that, being a thrifty Frenchman, he used it for his morning coffee. But not so. Some time after, I read in the Figaro that Major P—— who lived in Montparnasse (there was no mistaking the name and place), had died suddenly, leaving no estate and no personal effects; but behind the door of his small bedroom had been found—a cubic yard of sugar!

Verlaine sometimes came to this café—Paul Verlaine; I often paid for his beer. A plain, hairy, dirty figure, seeming physically very feeble; you would not think to look at him twice except to marvel at his ugliness and disorderly appearance, unless you saw his eyes. If he looked at you, you knew you were in the presence of your better. He was worshiped by all, and they fought to pay his check, hovering about him like crows around dead carrion, waiting to snatch at anything that dropped from his lips. I was not a good student of character in those days and in no way realized his importance, but I could not help feeling his charm. One night I had a dispute with a Frenchman as to what was the meaning of courage. One of us argued that it was an admirable quality, and the other that it was vanity and stupidity—therefore, idiotic. At the height of the discussion Verlaine came in and was appealed to to decide the question. He first demanded beer and then listened carefully to one and then the other. Looking at me, he said:

“I decide for the young American.”

“Well, why?” asked the Frenchman.

“Because you are right and he is right; you are wrong and he is wrong. But _he_ believes what he says.”

To him, _truth_ was of no importance—the question was _belief_—and this seems to me to be the secret of his whole philosophy.

There is a corner in Paris where Arthur Cosslet Smith says, if you sit there long enough, you will meet everyone of importance of your day—the corner of the Café de la Paix. Here one day I was sitting, having an _apéritif_ before lunch; at a table in the corner was gathered a group of _jeunesses dorées_ and a little farther back I noticed Barbey d’Aurevilly. The young men began to discuss literature with that cocksureness that is the quality of youth the world over. Victor Hugo was still alive, and it was the fashion to “knock” him, which they proceeded to do, outrageously. Finally, one said, so the whole café could hear:

“Oh, your Victor Hugo, he is stupid.”

At that I _felt_ a figure rise behind me and come forward; then I saw this wonderful vision. About seventy, handsome, tall, dressed with the most exquisite care, lace at his sleeves and neck; D’Aurevilly was a count and noted duelist and distinctly of the old school. Looking as if he had stepped straight out of a book of Dumas’, he walked up to the young men. Instantly, their conversation was hushed. He did not present himself, but said:

“My young friends, I also care for literature; and that is my excuse for speaking to you. I heard your talk of Victor Hugo and I came to tell you that I agree with you in your estimate of him. Alas! he _is_ stupid—stupid as the Himalayas!” (“_Il est bête——bête comme les Himalays!_”)

We are fond of saying that things are not the same as they were when we were young, but I fear we are wrong. The change is in ourselves. When I went back to Paris in 18—— I visited some of the old familiar haunts. One was the little café, where I used to breakfast every morning when a student. Everything looked the same—the dingy walls, dirty floor, but spotless tables—as the French tables always are; the waiters calling out the orders for their well-known patrons as soon as they showed their faces in the doorway; the poor, half-starved grisettes eating their sou’s worth of bread—I could hardly believe I had been away for so many years.

But why did the food taste so strange? The _croissons_ were soggy, and the coffee, with its abominable taste of chicory—bah! Was it possible I could once have lived on this fare and actually liked it? I could not even call back one old thrill.

After such a disappointment, I was almost afraid to visit Julian’s, but with rather a sinking heart I turned into the Passage de Panorama, around the corner to the galerie, up the still dirty stairway, and opened the door. Instantly I was greeted with French oaths and comments, and I found myself running a barricade of paint tubes and what seemed to me all the furniture in the room, hurled at my head. I stopped and swore in every language I knew, crying:

“If anyone here is as old an _ancien_ as I, I’ll kneel to him, but if not, get down on your knees, the whole crowd of you!”

“Who are you?” they asked.

I pointed to the wall where hung a drawing—the very one which had won me the hundred francs in the contest. Instantly everyone in the room was on his knees.

The tears streamed down my cheeks; I was not disappointed. My old Paris had come back to me!

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