CHAPTER XXVIII

PARISIAN SALONS UNDER THE THIRD REPUBLIC

Madame de Caillavet’s salon was certainly one of the most influential among political and literary men of the Third Republic. She was one of the leading women of that period, was moreover an excellent hostess, and, thanks to the continual presence of Anatole France in her house, she succeeded in attracting many notables to her salon. Journalists composed the majority of her visitors, and diplomats occasionally came to hear the last news of the day, especially whilst the Dreyfus agitation lasted. Dramatists were always to be found at her receptions, colleagues of her son Gaston de Caillavet, the author of so many amusing comedies, whose collaborator, the Marquis de Flers, the husband of Sardou’s daughter, was also among the number of people who seldom missed these friendly gatherings. But in spite of this, and notwithstanding the number of clever men and pretty and amiable women who clustered around her, to the eyes of a keen observer there was always something Bohemian about her receptions. It was not the salon of a _grande dame_, and it was no longer that of a bourgeoise of olden times: it was essentially modern, like the Republic itself.

Far different from it was the house of Madame Ménard Dorian, also one of the feminine stars of the Republic. Madame Dorian was a charming woman, who had received an excellent education, and who, coming as she did from an old bourgeois stock, never pretended to be aught else than what she was by birth. She was extremely intelligent, very broad in her opinions, and with many advanced ideas in regard to religion and politics; above everything else, she was a lady in her manners, her general behaviour, and her tastes. Very rich, she possessed a lovely house in the Rue de la Faisanderie, which she had furnished with extreme taste and where she used to give receptions as sumptuous as they were pleasant.

There one could meet, together with some of those who frequented the salon of Madame de Caillavet and other Republican hostesses of the same kind, persons belonging to other classes, and forming part of the aristocratic circle of Paris. Academicians frequented it, and diplomatists were generally eager to be introduced to Madame Ménard Dorian, where they ran no risk of meeting people they would not have cared to become acquainted with, and where they could, on the other hand, get an idea as to what was going on in Republican circles. Madame Dorian had been a Dreyfusard, but she had been so moderately and in a ladylike way. Her salon was something like the one of Madame Geoffrin in the eighteenth century, with the exception that no one would have dared to say about it what the Marquise du Deffand had told of the former, that it was “une omelette au lard.” One gossiped in it, in a mild way, and became interested in the literary movement of the day, perhaps even more than in the political one.

M. Ménard Dorian used to put in an appearance at his wife’s receptions now and then, when he was not too busy to do so. He was a quiet, pleasant little man, liked by everybody, and especially by ladies, who always found him most polite and amiable to them. An evening party or dinner given in the Hotel de la Rue de la Faisanderie was always sure to be a meeting place for intelligent and clever people, and no one who had once been asked ever regretted it, but on the contrary was always most eager for the invitation to be repeated.

M. Ménard Dorian is now dead, and his widow only sees her friends occasionally, and in a quiet fashion, having refrained from opening again the hospitable doors of her house so freely as in former years. But she has remained the same amiable woman she always was, and certainly among the Republican ladies of the present day she deserves to rank first. She would have graced the Court of any European monarch.

Madame Dorian had one daughter who had been married to Georges Hugo, the grandson of Victor Hugo. That marriage ended in a catastrophe and a divorce, after which the young Hugo married the first cousin of Mademoiselle Dorian, who had attracted his fancy one morning when he had met her at his mother-in-law’s, together with her husband, the sculptor Ajalbert.

The daughter of the charming Madame Dorian had a curious personality; she seemed to take a vicious pleasure in thwarting her parents, and making herself disagreeable to them whenever she found the opportunity. She occupied a flat in their house, the Hotel de la Rue de la Faisanderie, and on the evenings when her father and mother gave receptions at which the partisans of Captain Dreyfus, such as Colonel, later on General, Picquart, the Zolas, and their circle of friends were honoured guests, Madame Hugo used to invite people such as Drumont and the strongest anti-Semites of Paris, so that several times queer situations arose, and the staunchest Dreyfusards entered by mistake the apartment of one of their worst enemies, whilst one evening Henri Rochefort himself, who for the world would not be seen at Madame Ménard Dorian’s, was ushered into her drawing-room by a footman who did not know him by sight.

That sort of thing, however, could not go on for any length of time, and when Pauline Hugo left the house of her parents, her departure was a relief to them. But even after her marriage to Herman Paul, after her divorce and Paul’s, she did not become reconciled to her father and mother.

Georges Hugo’s sister, Jeanne, was also a strange kind of person. She married when quite young, Leon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet, and very soon ran away from him with the explorer Charcot. It was said that Daudet was delighted when he divorced her, as they had scarcely been a single day without quarrelling since they married, and, although a fervent Catholic, he hastened to take to himself another wife.

The mother of Leon Daudet, Madame Alphonse Daudet, is also a celebrity in her way, and gives receptions at which the best society of Paris can be met. She has entirely renounced her bourgeois origin, and only talks of Dukes and Duchesses. She labels herself a Clerical by conviction and a Royalist by sympathy, and frequents the houses of great ladies, such as the Duchesse de Rohan or the Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles. Her second son, Lucien Daudet is a devoted admirer of the Empress Eugénie. Among Republican hostesses I haven’t yet mentioned Madame Psichari, the daughter of Ernest Renan. She has inherited the intelligence and the art of conversation of her father, and is one of the most distinguished women of modern France. At her house can be met most of the members of the French Academy, and nearly all the prominent literary men in Paris. Her receptions are perhaps a shade dull, and more or less solemn, but always instructive and always interesting. Her personality was always singularly attractive, and inspired great respect, because her errors of judgment when they occurred were always sincere.

Madame Psichari was one of the victims of the divorce mania that has lately taken hold of Parisian society, and, to the great astonishment of her numerous friends, after more than thirty years’ matrimony she applied for a decree. She had one son, who occupied for a few days the attention of Paris, when at twenty years old he married the daughter of Anatole France, nearly seventeen years his senior, to the chagrin of both their families.

Madame Zola, also, used to receive her friends on Saturdays in her little flat in the Rue de Rome. At her house could be met all the principal actors in the Dreyfus drama, including its hero. I must here mention one fact that is very little known, that Zola, far from making money out of the Dreyfus affair, as it was said everywhere that he had done, lost a great deal by his attitude in regard to it. His novels, instead of being read more than had been the case formerly, were on the contrary boycotted, and several important papers for which he wrote articles, and which published his works before they came out in volume form, closed their doors to him after the letter “J’accuse,” for which he was sent before a jury at first and to exile afterwards.

Emile Zola died, relatively, a poor man, and his widow found herself reduced to almost embarrassed circumstances after his death. She sold a great deal of the furniture which he had collected, gave up to the State in return for a modest remuneration the villa of Médan, where he had lived for so many years, and arranged her existence on quite a different scale from that which had been her custom before her widowhood. Zola, as well as Captain Dreyfus himself, were the only two people who did not profit by the clamour which arose around them and around their actions.

Talking about Dreyfus reminds me of an incident in his story which, so far, I believe, has never been told. When he was languishing on the barren rock called the Devil’s Island, a Russian who had had occasion to approach the Tsar spoke to Mathieu Dreyfus, the Captain’s brother, and advised him to appeal to the Russian Sovereign to intercede in favour of the Captain. Mathieu Dreyfus said that he would consult his sister-in-law, and reply in a few days. When these days had elapsed, he came back and told the man who had made the proposition that neither Madame Dreyfus, nor himself, thought that they had the moral right to apply to a foreign Monarch, or to ask his intervention in a case that was too important for France not to allow her to dispose of it herself. In general the dignity displayed by the whole Dreyfus family cannot sufficiently be praised; they all unanimously showed themselves superior to the misfortunes which assailed them.

So far all the hostesses of whom I have spoken were long past middle age, but there was another lady, young and beautiful, with a shade of eccentricity in her manners, who also aspired to have a salon, and to be able to dictate to those who visited it, or at least to suggest to them the opinions they ought to have. It was the Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles, a Roumanian by birth, coming from the family of the Princes of Brancovan, whose mother had been very well known in London, where her father, Musurus Pasha, had occupied for long the post of Turkish Ambassador. The Princesse de Brancovan was one of the best musicians of her generation, and her wonderful talent for the piano was famous among her acquaintances. She had been handsome, and her daughters had inherited her loveliness as well as her intellectual gifts. The eldest one, whose large dowry secured her an entrance into the ancient aristocratic family of the Ducs de Noailles, has made for herself a name among the poets of modern France Her books have been widely read, and have had a great success, which they deserved, because there was some really genuine poetic inspiration in them. Madame de Noailles has succumbed to the vogue of eccentricity; she wears long floating white garments which trail out behind and give her the appearance of a fairy from the children’s tales. She speaks languidly, as if sick of a world she would really be very sorry to leave, and looks disdainfully at humanity in general.

The Comtesse de Noailles used to give parties, during which she recited some of her own poetry, and allowed her great friend and admirer, the Comte Robert de Montesquieu, to read his. She did not trouble much about her guests, merely smiled on them when they arrived, and softly sighed when she saw them going away. She glided about her lovely rooms, as the ghost of something too beautiful to be real, and she seemed to be interested in nothing that did not concern her personally, or that had no association with her books or poems.

Her receptions were singularly eclectic. Apart from the family, friends and relations of the Noailles, one met people who belonged to an entirely different grade--journalists, artists, politicians, even those of an advanced shade; members of the Republican government, and diplomats or foreigners happening to be in Paris. She received them all with the utmost grace, and liked to see them surround her, like the satellites of her fame and of her high social position. In its way her vanity was as remarkable as it was charming.

Madame de Noailles composed poems, the Comtesse de Greffuhle wrote operas and sonatas with decided talent. Madame de Greffuhle has played, and is playing still, a very important part in Parisian society. She was by birth a Princess de Chimay, and had married, without dower, the Count Greffuhle, whose fortune was supposed to be one of the largest in France, and had at once begun to exercise a considerable influence in the circles in which she moved. She was beautiful, intelligent, had great tact, and a considerable knowledge of the world, liked to surround herself with artists and musicians, to organise exhibitions of works of art, and to help her neighbour as much as she could.

Her salon was not the meeting-place of the pure Faubourg St. Germain, neither was it, on the other hand, exclusively Republican. But it afforded a neutral ground to men belonging to both parties, and her receptions were never dull nor banal, but on the contrary always interesting and pleasant. She possessed a lovely country place near Paris, called Bois Boudran, where she entertained most sumptuously, and where she often welcomed foreign Sovereigns or members of Royal houses, when they happened to come to France. Madame de Greffuhle was a woman essentially made for society, who could never have lived outside it. She described herself better than anyone else could have done one day when she was asked to write her name on the visitors’ book of the Phare d’Ailly, near Dieppe, where some friends had taken her. She signed “Chimay Greffuhle, dame de qualité,” thus admitting that she had no pretensions to be considered a _grande dame_.

The Baron Henri de Rothschild was also “un écrivain amateur,” with more pretensions to literary talent than perhaps that talent deserved. He had married Mlle. Weiswiller, who is supposed to be one of the best-dressed women in Paris, and whose name appears prominently in all the chronicles of the _Figaro_ or the _Gaulois_. The couple entertain with the hospitality for which their family has always been famous, and the Baron has made for himself a name among the benefactors of the Paris poor, for whom he does a great deal. He has studied medicine and even practised it with all the zeal of a millionaire who believes himself to have a vocation for some kind of science.

Baron Henri is an exceedingly pleasant man, cultured, and well read, capable of most entertaining conversation on a variety of topics. The receptions which he gives, and of which his wife helps him to do the honours with an exquisite grace, are the meeting-place of almost all the distinguished men of scientific and literary Paris. Members of the government can be met at them, but though his salon is known to be Liberal in its opinions, it is yet one at which politics have never played a part or been discussed. The guests succeeded in avoiding them even at the time of the Dreyfus affair, during which the Rothschilds adopted an entirely passive and impartial attitude.

Talking of politics makes me think of a house where they were always very prominent, and almost the only subject of conversation. It was the house of M. Rouvier, one of the ablest politicians whom France has seen in recent times, who had occupied, more than once, important State positions, and who was always spoken of, among his friends, as a possible President of the Republic. M. Rouvier’s was a most complicated mind. He had considerable capacity, an intelligence far above the average, great ambition, and absolutely no vanity, perhaps because he had a full consciousness of his strength and of his worth, in presence of the lesser intelligences with which he was surrounded.

He had made his way with the help of a good deal of luck, and perhaps more determination than is generally met with. There was one moment in his life when he nearly became one of the victims of the Panama scandal, but he succeeded in emerging quite unharmed. As a financier, he very nearly approached genius, and when he left office almost all the large banks in France entreated him to join their board. He became director of a large financial establishment, which he managed with the intelligence and knowledge that he brought into everything which he attempted. But although he had many partisans and more friends than could have been expected in a man who had held the difficult posts which he had successfully occupied; though he was in a certain sense a sort of small king, feared by most of the politicians who ruled France or aspired to do so, he always regretted that he had been obliged to retire from the government of his country. When he died, he was about to put forward his candidature to the Presidency of the Republic, in opposition to that of M. Poincaré or any other of the probable successors of M. Fallières at the end of the latter’s septenary.

M. Rouvier had been twice married. His first wife was the famous sculptor known as Claude Vignon, whose first husband was l’Abbé Constant, an unfrocked priest, who was later on to be so well known by the name of Eliphas Lévy, and who was considered to be the greatest master in occult sciences that the world possessed. I met Eliphas Lévy more than once, and I was always extremely interested in him. He had a most venerable appearance, with his long white beard, and of all the indulgent men I have ever met he was the one who practised that virtue to the largest extent. He lived absorbed in his studies of high magic, but would always carefully avoid talking on the subject, save with his most intimate friends. He was called uncanny, I don’t know why, because he certainly had the most peaceful countenance possible, but a certain prejudice used to cling to him or rather existed against him at the time I knew him; probably because the fact of a priest having given up his profession appeared still to be something quite dreadful in France.

Madame Constant, or Claude Vignon as she was generally called, had greatly contributed to the unfrocking of her husband, but though he had loved her passionately, she had very soon tired of him, and the couple separated, never to meet again so long as they lived. She married Rouvier, to whom she brought the very large fortune she possessed, but died not long after, leaving one son, with whom his father never could get along, and whom one never met at his house.

The second Madame Rouvier was a small, slight woman, with golden curls, a most pleasant manner, and a charming conversationalist. She aided her husband quite admirably, interested herself in his political career and successes, and was perhaps even more ambitious than he. The couple lived in a splendid establishment which they possessed at Neuilly, on the outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, where they often entertained, and where generally the latest news of the day was to be heard. No political man would have dared to ignore M. Rouvier and his wife, and their salon has been more than once called the “succursale du Sénat,” of which he was a member. Diplomats also were to be met in their house; and it was, indeed, frequented by almost everybody of note in Paris.