CHAPTER I

The Arsenal--Nodier's house--The master's profile--The congress of bibliophiles--The three candles--Debureau--Mademoiselle Mars and Merlin--Nodier's family--His friends--In which houses I am at my best--The salon of the Arsenal--Nodier as a teller of tales--The ball and the warming-pan

I promised I would return to Nodier, and I will keep my word. After the service Nodier rendered me by opening the doors of the Théâtre-Français to me, I went to thank him. Nodier did better for me on my second visit than he did on the first--he opened the doors of the Arsenal to me. And, lest my readers should be frightened at the word, and think that I mean a collection of arms, a museum of artillery, let me hasten to add that the doors of the Arsenal were the doors of Charles Nodier's house. Everybody knows the large, gloomy-looking building called the Arsenal, in a line with the quai des Célestins, at the back of the rue de Morland, looking over the river. This was where Nodier lived. In these unpretentious Memoirs it would take us too far afield to relate how, once upon a time, when Paris was preparing for war, this heavy building was raised upon a piece of ground called the Champ-au-Plâtre; how, when the heavy-looking building was raised, François I. had the cannon cast there which did much unlucky work at Pavia; how, requiring a plot of ground, he borrowed a farm from his good town of Paris, promising to return it; how, having borrowed this first farm, he borrowed a second from it, and a third; how, in short, on the principle of the axiom "What is good to take is good to keep," he kept the three borrowed farms--we will relate these matters when, at the end of our impressions of Europe, Asia and Africa, we set about putting down our impressions of rambles in Paris. These farms, together with the great building of which we have spoken, were used to store cannon and powder. One day, in the reign of Henri II., a spark, coming from nobody knew where,--who knows whence terrible fires spring!--set fire to the powder-magazine and exploded it. Paris shook as Naples and Catana shake when Vesuvius or Etna are in a state of eruption; the fish perished in the river; at the unexpected concussion the neighbouring houses swayed and then collapsed one upon another. Melun, a dozen leagues off, shuddered at the noise of the explosion; thirty persons blown into the air by this volcano fell down in fragments, a hundred and fifty were wounded and, unacquainted with the cause of the accident, attributed it to the Protestants, against whom they were not slow to pick a grievance. It will be readily understood that the buildings erected by François I. and the three farms of the city of Paris disappeared in this commotion. Charles IX., who was a great hand at building, and was responsible for the sculpturing in the Louvre and the carving of the fountain of the Innocents, paid a visit to the ruins with his architect. He designed the plan of a new building, began the fresh erection and, as he was both a great artist and a great poet, it is probable that he would have made a good piece of work of it. But Queen Catherine of Medici, having already got rid of one son, was not sorry to be rid of Charles IX., after the fashion of François II., in order to hasten the coming of Henri III. In case this accusation against Catherine de Medici should strike our readers as rather too strong, who may prefer to look upon the death of Charles IX. as the judgment of God (an act which, indeed, might quite possibly go hand in hand with the poisoning of Charles IX. by his mother), we will here reproduce a dialogue recorded by Bassompierre; it is short, but instructive.

"Sire," Bassompierre said to King Louis XIII., who was seated in the embrasure of a window of the old Louvre, fiercely blowing a horn,--"sire, you ought not to blow with all your strength like that; you are weak in the lungs, and the same thing might happen to you as happened to King Charles IX."

"My dear Bassompierre," Louis XIII. replied, "King Charles IX. did not die from blowing his horn too long and too frequently; he died from being so imprudent as to become reconciled to his mother, after he had had the prudence to quarrel with Catherine of Medici."

Let us return to the Arsenal, and to another king who was so imprudent as to quarrel with his wife--or, rather, with the House of Austria to which she belonged--to Henri IV. He it was, in fact, who finished the Arsenal and laid out the beautiful garden, which we can still see in pictures of the period of Louis XIII. He gave it to Sully, wherein to carry on his ministry of finance; and here it was that the parsimonious minister amassed the millions with which Henri III. intended to carry on his war with Flanders, when the poignard of Ravaillac put an end to that strange dream of the seventeenth century, which was to become a reality in the nineteenth, namely, the union of the seven elective republics and of the six hereditary monarchies, under one supreme head, established under the title of the _Congrès de la Paix._

Ah! my dear Mr. Cobden, you with whom I once spent several dull days and shared some melancholy dinners in Spain, the idea of this Peace Congress did not originate with you; it came from our unfortunate King Henri IV.,-"Let us render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's."

And so all you who visit the Arsenal should know that those beautiful rooms which now form the library were decorated by Sully with Henri IV.'s money.

In 1823, Charles Nodier was appointed librarian of this library, and left the rue de Choiseul, where he lived, to establish himself in his new habitation. But the building that was often the subject of illustrations was not a very magnificent place to live in! On the first landing of a flight of steps with massive balustrades, you came upon a badly fitting door on the left which led to a bricked corridor; the dining-room and the office were paved with bricks like the corridor. Three other rooms completed the suite--three luxurious rooms, with parquetried floors and panelled walls: one was Madame Nodier's bedroom; the other the salon; and the third the workroom, library and bedchamber of Charles. Charles led two separate existences: his week's existence was that of a worker and bibliophile; his Sunday existence was that of a society man and host. Nodier was an adorable personality; I have never met nor ever known anyone so learned, so much of an artist and yet so kindly in disposition as he, save, perhaps, Méry. And though he possessed plenty of faults he hadn't a vice, and his winning faults sprang from the originality of the man of genius. Nodier was extravagant, careless, dilatory; but his was the delightful idleness of a Figaro. He might, perhaps, have been accused of being rather too worldly; but that, too, sprang from his carelessness, in not taking the trouble to examine into his feelings. It was rather the whole community of martyrs, so to speak, that Nodier loved after this fashion; he had an inner circle of privileged friends whom he loved with all his heart; others, he liked only intellectually. Nodier was _par excellence_ a man of learning: he knew everything and a host of things besides; for he exercised the prerogative of men of genius: if he did not know a thing he invented his knowledge of it, and it must be confessed his invention was generally far more likely, far more ingenious and romantic and specious and, I will venture to say, far nearer the truth than the reality itself. It will be readily guessed that, with this gift of invention, Nodier was a veritable mine of paradoxes. But he never tried to force you to accept these paradoxes; he created three-fourths of his paradoxes for his own diversion.

One day, when I had been lunching with a minister, I was asked--

"How did the luncheon pass off?"

"All right," I replied; "but if I hadn't been there myself I should have been horribly bored!"

And so it was with Nodier; for fear of being bored, he made up paradoxes, just as I told stories.

I must return to what I said about Nodier being a little too much inclined to love everybody. My sentence sounds somewhat reproachful, but it must not be taken so. Nodier was the philanthropist of Terence, the man unto whom nothing is alien. Nodier loved, as fire warms, as a torch lightens, as the sun shines; he loved because to love and make friendships were as much the fruition of his nature as grapes are the fruit of the vine. Let me be permitted to coin a _mot_ to describe the man who himself coined so many, he was a lover (_aimeur_). I have said he loved and made friendships because, for Nodier, women existed as well as men. As he loved all men of goodwill, so, in his youth (and Nodier was never old), did he love all lovable women. How he managed this he himself would have found it impossible to explain. But, in common with all eminently poetic minds, Nodier always confused the dream with the ideal, and the ideal with the material world; for Nodier, every fancy of his imagination really existed--Thérèse Aubert, la Fée aux miettes, Inès de las Sierras--he lived in the midst of all these creations of his genius, and never sultan had a more magnificent harem.

It is interesting to know how a writer who produced so many books, and such entertaining ones too, as he did, worked. I am going to tell you. We will take the Nodier of the week-days, romance-writer, savant and bibliophile, the writer of the _Dictionnaire des Onomatopées_, _Trilby_, the _Souvenirs de Jeunesse._ In the morning, after two or three hours of easy work, when he had covered a dozen or fourteen pages of paper six inches long by four wide, with a regular, legible handwriting, without a single erasure, he considered his morning task done, and went out. When he was out of doors, Nodier wandered about aimlessly, going up now one street of the boulevards, now another, now along this or that quay. No matter what road he took, three things preoccupied him: the stalls of the second-hand bookshops, booksellers' windows and book-binders' shops; for Nodier was almost as fond of fine bindings as of rare books, and I believe he really classed Deneuil, Derome, Thouvenin and the three Elzevirs in the same rank in his mind. These adventurous walks of Nodier, which were protracted by discoveries of books or by meetings with his friends, usually began at noon and nearly always ended between three and four o'clock at Crozet's or at Techener's. In these houses, at about that hour, the book-lovers of Paris gathered together: the Marquis de Ganay, the Marquis de Châteaugiron, the Marquis de Chalabre; Bérard, the Elzevir collector, who, in his spare moments, made the Charter of 1830; finally, the bibliophile Jacob, king of bibliographical knowledge when Nodier was not present, viceroy when Nodier came on the scenes. Here they exchanged opinions and discussed _de omni rescibili et quibusdam aliis._ These causeries lasted till five o'clock. At five o'clock, Nodier went home by some other route than that which he had traversed in the morning; thus, if he had come by the quays he would return by the boulevards, and if he had gone along the boulevards, he would return by the quays. At six o'clock, Nodier dined with his family. After dinner, came a cup of coffee sipped like a true Sybarite, in little and big draughts, then the cloth was removed with everything on it, and three candles were placed on the bare table. Three tallow candles, not three wax ones. Nodier preferred tallow to wax--why, no one ever knew: it was one of Nodier's caprices. These three candles, never more, never fewer, were placed triangularly. Then Nodier brought out the work on which he was engaged and his quill pens--he detested steel pens--and he worked until nine or ten o'clock at night. At that hour, he went out a second time; but, this time, he invariably followed the course of the boulevards; and, according to what might be on, he would go to the Porte-Saint-Martin, to the Ambigu or to the Funambules. It will be remembered that it was at the Porte-Saint-Martin that I met him for the first time.

There were three actors whom Nodier adored--Talma, Potier and Debureau. When I made Nodier's acquaintance, Talma had been dead three years; and Potier had retired two years before; so there only remained to him the irresistible attraction of Debureau. He it was who first extolled the famous Pierrot; in this respect, Janin came after Nodier and was merely his imitator. Nodier saw the _Bœuf enragé_ nearly a hundred times. At the first representation of the piece he waited for the ox until the end, and not seeing it, he went out and spoke about it to the boxkeeper.

"Madame," he asked, "will you please inform me why this pantomime that I have just seen is called the _Bœuf enragé?_"

"Monsieur," replied the boxkeeper, "because that is its title."

"Ah!" exclaimed Nodier; and he withdrew satisfied with the explanation.

The six days of the week were spent in exactly the same way: then came Sunday. Every Sunday Nodier went out at nine o'clock in the morning to breakfast with Guilbert de Pixérécourt, for whom at that time he had a profound admiration and the friendliest feelings. He called him the Corneille of the boulevards. Here he met the scientific gatherings of Crozet or of Techener.

We have mentioned that one of these bibliomaniacs was called the Marquis de Chalabre. He died leaving a very valuable library, which he bequeathed to Mademoiselle Mars. Mademoiselle Mars read very little or, to be truthful, she did not read at all. She commissioned Merlin to classify the books left her and to arrange for their sale. Merlin was the most honest man on the face of the earth; and he set about this commission with his usual conscientiousness, and he turned and re-turned the leaves of each volume so carefully that one day he went to Mademoiselle Mars with thirty or forty one-thousand franc notes in his hand, which he laid on a table.

"What is that, Merlin?" asked Mademoiselle Mars.

"I do not know, madame," he replied.

"What do you mean? Why, those are bank-notes!"

"Certainly."

"Where have you found them?"

"In a pocket-book, within the cover of a very rare Bible; and, as the Bible belongs to you, these bank-notes are yours too."

Mademoiselle Mars took the bank-notes, which were of course hers, and she had the greatest difficulty in making Merlin accept a present of the Bible in which he had, as I understand, discovered the bank-notes.

Nodier would return home between three and four o'clock, and, like M. Villenave, would allow his daughter Marie to dress and titivate him. For we have omitted to mention that Nodier's family was composed of his wife, his daughter, his sister Madame de Tercy and his niece. At six o'clock, Nodier's table would be laid. Three or four spare covers would be provided in excess of the number of the family party, and these were for regular habitués. Three or four more covers were put for chance comers. The habitués were Cailleux, the director of the Musée; Baron Taylor, who was soon to leave his place vacant because of his journey to Egypt; Francis Wey, whom Nodier loved as though he were his own child, whose old French aristocratic accent was but little less noticeable than Nodier's own, and Dauzats'. The casual diners were Bixio, the huge Saint-Valery and myself. Saint-Valery was a librarian, like Nodier. He was six feet one inch in height and an extremely well informed man but possessed of no originality or any wit: it was of him that Méry wrote this line--

"Il se baisse, et ramasse un oiseau dans les airs!"

When he was at the library, it was a very rare thing for him to need a ladder to reach down a book, so tall was he. He would stretch up one of his long arms, standing on tiptoe, and find the book that was required, even if it were close to the ceiling. He was susceptible in the extreme, and could not bear any joking references to his tall figure no matter how harmless they were; he was angry with me for a long while because once, when he was complaining to Madame Nodier of a violent cold in his head, I asked him if he had had cold feet a year ago.

When you were admitted into that charming and desirable inner circle of the Nodier family, you could dine with them as often as you liked. If one, two or three covers were needed beyond the number already laid, they were added; if the table had to be enlarged, it was made longer. But unlucky was the man who happened to be the thirteenth! he was pitilessly placed at a little table to dine by himself, unless a fourteenth guest, still less expected than he, should turn up to relieve him of his penance. I was very soon among the number of the more intimate friends of whom I have just spoken, and my place at the table was settled once for all, between Madame Nodier and Marie Nodier. When I appeared at the door I was greeted with exclamations of joy; they all rushed at me, from Nodier downwards, who stretched out his two great arms to embrace me or shake me by the hand. At the end of a year, from being an accepted fact, my place became recognised as mine by right: it remained vacant for me until after the soup course; then they ventured to fill it, but if I happened to arrive, either ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or half an hour late, even if I did not arrive until dessert, the interloper got up, or was made to do so, and my place given up to me. Nodier used to make out that I was as good as a fortune to him, because I saved him from doing the talking; but what may have been a pleasure, in this respect, to the idle master of the house, was a source of sorrow to his guests: to relieve the most fascinating talker imaginable from conversing was tantamount to a crime. Nevertheless, when I was charged with being viceroy of the conversation I was on my mettle to fill my position to the best of my abilities. There are certain houses wherein one is spontaneously brilliant; others where one is dull no matter how one tries to be the reverse. There were three houses where I was at my best, three houses in which my spirits ever rose and scintillated with youthful exuberance; these houses were Nodier's, Madame Guyet-Desfontaines' and Zimmermann's. At all other places I could still be entertaining, but merely in the ordinary way of social intercourse. However, no matter whether Nodier himself was the talker (and when this was the case, grown-up people and small children all held their peace to listen); whether his silence left the conversation to Dauzats, to Bixio or to me, the time flew by unheeded until the close of dinner was reached--a dinner that might have been envied by the most powerful prince of the earth, provided his tastes were intellectually inclined. Dinner over, coffee was handed round, while we were still at table. Nodier was far too much of a Sybarite to rise from the table to take his Mocha standing uncomfortably in a half-warmed salon, when he could take it lolling back in his chair, in a warm dining-room, well scented with the aroma of fruits and liqueurs. During this last act, or rather this epilogue to the dinner, Madame Nodier and Marie rose to go and light up the salon, and I, who took neither coffee nor liqueurs, accompanied them, to help in their task, my tall figure being very useful to them in lighting the lustres and candelabras without the necessity of standing on chairs. I need hardly say that if M. Saint-Valery, who was a foot taller than I, were there, the charge of lighting up fell to him by right.

When, thanks to us, the salon was lit up,--a ceremony that only took place on Sundays, for on week-days the receptions were held in Madame Nodier's room--the light illuminated white panelled walls with Louis XV. mouldings, and furniture of extreme simplicity, comprising a dozen chairs or easy-chairs and a sofa covered with red cashmere, the hangings being of the same colour; a bust of Hugo, a statue of Henri IV. as a child, a portrait of Nodier and a landscape of a view in the Alps, by Régnier. On the left, as you entered, was Marie's piano, in a recess almost like a room in itself. This recess was large enough, like the spaces between bedsteads in the time of Louis XIV., for the friends of the household to stand round and talk with Marie as she played quadrilles and valses with her clever, agile fingers. But quadrilles and valses did not begin before the given moment: two hours, from eight to ten, were invariably devoted to conversation; then we danced from ten to one in the morning. Five minutes after Madame Nodier, Marie and I had lighted up the salon, Taylor and Cailleux were the first to come in--they were far more at home in the house than was Nodier himself; then came Nodier with his arm through that of Dauzats or Francis Wey or Bixio; for although Nodier was only thirty-eight or forty at that time, he was like a tall climbing plant that covers walls with leaves and flowers, but already needs something to lean on. Behind Nodier entered the rest of the guests, with his little daughter dancing and skipping. Ten minutes later, the usual callers began to drop in--Fontanay and Alfred Johannot, with their two impassive faces, always melancholy in the midst of our laughter and gaiety, as though they were under some vague presentiment of death; Tony Johannot, who never came without a fresh drawing or an engraving to enrich Marie's album or collection; Barye, who looked lonely in the midst of the tumult, for it always seemed as though his mind were far away from his body in quest of something wonderful; Louis Boulanger, with his variable moods, to-day sad, to-morrow gay, ever the same great artist, great poet and faithful friend; Francisque Michel, a seeker of old manuscripts, often so preoccupied with his researches of the day that he would forget he had come in an ancient hat of the period of Louis XIII. and yellow slippers; de Vigny, who, in ignorance of his future transfiguration, still deigned to mix with mortals; de Musset, almost a boy, dreaming over his _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_; and, bringing up the rear, Hugo and Lamartine, the two kings of poetry, the peaceful Eteocles and Polynices of Art, one bearing the sceptre of the ode and the other the crown of elegy.

Alas! and alas! what has become of all those who gathered there? Fontanay and Alfred Johannot are dead; de Vigny has made himself invisible; Taylor is given over to his travels; Lamartine, with his provisional government, has let France slip through his fingers; Hugo is a deputy and strives to hold the country together, a task that proved too difficult for his colleague's hands; and the rest of us are all scattered, each following his own laborious career, hampered with spiteful enemies, harassing laws and petty ministerial hatreds; we struggle on, blindfold and weary, towards that new world which Providence is preserving for our sons and our grandsons, which we shall not see, but towards which at least our tombs, like milestones, will point the way.

Let us go back to our salon, into which those of whom I have just been speaking were now entering, hailed with effusive greetings of delight. If Nodier, when he left the dinner-table, went and stretched himself out in his arm-chair by the fireside, it was because he liked, after the fashion of the egoistic Sybarite he was, to enjoy at his ease some chance play of his imagination, during that blissful moment which follows in the wake of coffee; if, on the other hand, making an effort to remain standing, he leant against the chimneypiece, his calves to the fire and his back to the mirror, it meant he was going to tell some of his stories. We were then all on the _qui vive_ to smile at the anecdotes which were to drop from those finely modelled, satirical and witty lips; everybody kept silence; and he would pour forth one of the delightful stories of his youth, which sounded like a romance of Longus, or an idyll of Theocritus. He seemed like Walter Scott and Perrault; the savant grappling with the poet, memory battling with imagination. Nodier was not merely amusing to listen to, but in addition he was delightful to watch. His tall, lean body, his long thin arms, his white tapering hands, his long face, full of a serene melancholy, all harmonised and fitted in with his rather languid voice, and with the afore-mentioned aristocratic accent; and, whether Nodier were reciting a love-story, or describing a fight on the plains of la Vendée, or some drama that happened in the place de la Révolution, a conspiracy of Cadoudal or of Oudet, his hearers would hold their breath to listen, so wonderfully did the story-teller know how to get at the heart of everything he described. Those who came in in the middle bowed silently and sat down in an arm-chair or leant against the wainscotting; the recital always came to an end too soon; why he ever concluded was a mystery, for we knew that Nodier could draw eternally on that purse of Fortunatus which we call imagination. We did not applaud,--do we applaud the murmur of a stream, the song of a bird, the perfume of a flower?--but when the murmur ceased, the song died away, the perfume evaporated, we listened, we waited, we longed for more! Then Nodier would slide back quietly from his position at the fireplace into his big arm-chair; would smile and turn to Lamartine or Hugo with--

"Enough of such prose as that--now let us have poetry, poetry!"

And, without a second bidding, one of the two poets would, from where he was, with hands leant on the back of an armchair, or shoulders propped up against the panelled walls, give birth to the harmonious and eager flow of his poetic fancy; then every head would turn in the fresh direction, every intellect would follow the flight of a thought which soared above them on eagle's wings to play now in the mist of clouds among the lightnings of the tempest, now in the rays of the sun.

On these occasions applause followed; then, when the applause had ceased, Marie would go to her piano and a brilliant rush of notes would burst upon the air. This was the signal for a quadrille; arm-chairs and chairs were put away, card-players took refuge in corners, and those who, instead of dancing, preferred to talk with Marie, would slip into her alcove. Nodier was one of the earliest at the card-tables; for a long time he would only play at _bataille_, at which he claimed to be very expert; but, finally, he was induced to make a concession to the taste of the century and played _écarté_. When the ball had begun, Nodier, who was usually very unlucky, would call for cards. From the moment he began, Nodier effaced himself, disappeared and was utterly forgotten; he was one of those old-fashioned hosts who obliterated themselves in order to give precedence to their guests, who, when made welcome, become masters of the house themselves. Moreover, after Nodier had disappeared for a time, he would disappear entirely. He went to bed in good time, or, to speak more correctly, he was put to bed early. To Madame Nodier belonged the care of putting this great child to bed; she would therefore leave the salon first in order to get his bed ready. If it were winter, and very cold, and the kitchen fire had perchance gone out, a warming-pan would be seen to thread its way amidst the dancers to the salon fireplace, its wide jaws would open to receive the glowing coals, and then it would be taken away to Nodier's bedroom. Nodier followed the warming-pan, and we saw him no more that night.

Such was Nodier; such was the life of that excellent man.

Once we came upon him in a mood of humiliation and shame and embarrassment. The author of the _Rot de Bohème et ses Sept Châteaux_ had just been nominated an Academician. He made very humble apologies to Hugo and to me, and we forgave him.

After having been rejected five times, Hugo was nominated in his turn. He offered me no excuses, which was as well; since I should certainly not have forgiven him!