Part 13

Had we lived in Paris, no doubt we would have done as we did in Rome and Venice and have gone every night to the same restaurant where the same greeting from the same smiling _patron_ and the same table in the same corner awaited us. But change and experiment and a good deal of preliminary discussion over an _apéritif_ were more in the order of a week's visit. As a rule, we preferred the small restaurant that was cheap, as we were most of us impecunious, also the restaurant that was out-of-doors, out-of-doors turning the simplest dinner into a feast. However, nobody yet was really ever young who was never reckless. Occasionally we dined joyously beyond our means, and one memorable year we devoted our nights to giving each other dinners where the best dinners were to be had. Those alone who are blest with little money and the obligation of making that little can appreciate the splendour of our recklessness, just as those alone who work all day and eat sparingly can have the proper regard for a good dinner. I do not regret the recklessness, I am not much the poorer for it to-day whatever I was at the time, and I should have missed something out of life had I not once dined recklessly in Paris. Moreover, our special business was the study of art and in Paris dining and art are one, though the foolish man in less civilized countries preaches that to eat for any other purpose than to live is gluttony. The clear intellect of the French saves them from that mistake, and I have entertained hopes for the future of my own country ever since one wise American,--Henry T. Finck,--discovering the truth that the French have always had the common sense to know, proclaimed it in a book which I have honoured by placing it in my Collection of Cookery Books with Grimod de la Reynière, Brillat-Savarin and Dumas.

At the time we were more concerned with the dinner than the philosophy of dining. Our one aim was to dine well, whether it was the right thing or the wrong, even whether or no it sent us back to London bankrupt. We did not flinch before the price we paid, and if we were too wise to measure the value of the dinner by its cost, we were proud of the bigness of the bill as the "visible sign," the guarantee of success. It was a tremendous triumph for J. when he paid the biggest of all, which he did, not so much because he set out to deliberately as because, by the choice of chance, he had invited us to Voisin's in the Rue St. Honoré, where the red-cushioned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund, meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and _petites fraises des bois_ I know because the season was spring; that the wine was good I also know because the reputation of Voisin's cellar permitted of no other. And I am as sure that the _menu_ was so short that ours would have seemed the dinner of an anchorite in the City of London, for if we could not dine often we were masters of the art of dining when we did, and we understood, as the Lord Mayor and the City Companies of London, celebrated for their dinners, do not, that dining is not an art when the last course cannot be enjoyed as much as the first. As I keep the family accounts, I was obliged to pay in another way for J.'s triumph at Voisin's when I got back to London and faced a deficit that had to be balanced somehow in my weekly bills for the rest of the month. But, at least, if abstaining has to be done, London is the easiest place to abstain in as Paris is the best to dine in.

The Publisher who was with us that year gave his dinner at the LaPérouse on the _Quai des Grands-Augustins_, and it was not his fault if he fell short of J.'s triumph by a few francs. The giver of a dinner at the LaPérouse in the happy past enjoyed the fearful pleasure of not knowing how much he was spending until he called for his bill, price being too trivial a detail for a place in the _menu_, and usually when the bill came it exceeded his most ambitious hopes. The Publisher must have hit upon Friday, for the perfume of _Bouillabaisse_ mingles with my memories of the dinner in the little low _entresol_ where, by stooping down and craning our necks, we could see the towers of _Notre-Dame_ from the window, and where the big, tall, handsome, black-bearded _patron_, alarmingly out of scale with the room, came to make sure of our pleasure in his dishes--he would rather the bill had gone unpaid than have seen the dinner neglected. I think there was a bottle of some special Burgundy in its cradle, for rarely in his life, I fancy, has the Publisher felt so in need of being fortified. Early in the day he had been guilty of the astonishing indiscretion, as it then seemed, of buying three Van Goghs. For this happened years before anybody had begun to buy Van Gogh--years before anybody had begun to hear of Van Gogh--years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants of Van Gogh and Cézanne who would assuredly have been the first to repudiate them. The Publisher had gone unsuspectingly, confidingly, with J. to _Montmartre_ and there, among other haunts, into the now celebrated little shop where the paintings Van Gogh used to give in exchange for paints littered the whole place, and where the dealer thought it a bargain if, for a few francs, he could get rid of canvases that now fetch their hundreds and thousands of pounds. J. would have invested had he had the few francs. Not having them, he persuaded the Publisher to, and to buy three of the best into the bargain, and never did his own empty pockets stand in the way of a more profitable investment, for had he bought not all but only a few in this wilderness of Van Goghs, and had he sold them again as he would never have done, we might now, if we chose, dine every night at the LaPérouse or Voisin's and prepare for the reckoning without a tremor. If I write of the buying of these pictures as if they were stocks and shares, it is because that is the way the creators of the "Van Gogh-Cézanne-Gauguin boom" have appraised them, appealing to the modern collector who collects for the money in art, not the beauty. That night at the LaPérouse the Publisher was dazed by his unexpected rashness as art patron; to-day, when he points to the one of the three paintings still hanging on his walls, he flatters himself that he discovered Van Gogh before the multitude.

Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparnasse, and if he had not of his own free will we should have compelled him to. He belonged there. At Lavenue's he and Louis Stevenson dined when they were young in Paris, it was always cropping up in Bob's talk of the old days, it plays its part--"the restaurant where no one need be ashamed to entertain the master"--in the opening chapters of _The Wrecker_, which I think as entertaining as any chapters Louis Stevenson ever wrote in that or any other book. The dinner, of which I recall nothing in particular, did not interest me as much as the place itself. To see Bob Stevenson at Lavenue's was like seeing Manet at the _Nouvelle Athènes_ or Dr. Johnson at the Cheshire Cheese, and to make the background complete Alexander Harrison, with two or three American painters of his generation, was dining at a near table.

He shall be nameless who gave the dinner at Marguery's. The dinner was all it should have been, for we ate the sole called after the house. It was the provider of it who proved wanting. I was brought up to believe that the host, when there is a host, should pay his bill. A large part of my life has been spent in getting rid of the things I was brought up to believe, but this particular belief I have never been able to shed and I confess I was taken aback--let me put it at that--when the white paper neatly folded in a plate, served at the end of dinner, was passed on to one of the guests. If the debt then run into was not paid does not much matter after all these years, or perhaps if it was not it has the more interest for the curious observer of modes and moods. In this case, the whole incident could be reduced to a kindness on the part of the debtor, sacrificing himself to show how right Bob Stevenson was when he said, as Robert Louis Stevenson repeated after him in print, that while the Anglo-Saxon can and does boast that he is not as Frenchmen in certain matters of morals, it is his misfortune to be as little like them in their vigorous definition of honesty and the obligation of paying their debts.

That the fifth dinner was at the _Tour d'Argent_ is not an achievement to be particularly proud of. On the contrary, it appears to me a trifle banal as I look back to it, for fashion was at the time sending Americans and English to the _Tour d'Argent_ just as it was driving them on beautiful spring days into that horribly crowded afternoon tea place in the _Rue Daunou_--wasn't it?--or to order their new gowns at the new dressmakers in the _Rue de la Paix_, or to do any of the hundred and one other things that proved them up to the times, at home in Paris, initiated into _le dernier cri_ or whatever new phrase they thought set the seal upon Parisian smartness. Frédéric's face was as well known as Ibsen's which it so resembled, his sanded floor was the talk of the tourists, the distinguished foreigner struggled to have his name on Frédéric's _menu_, and as for Frédéric's pressed duck it had degenerated into as everyday a commonplace as an oyster stew in New York or a chop from the grill in London. The bill at the end of the evening might be all that the occasion demanded of the man who was giving the dinner, but his choice of restaurant could not convict him of originality, or of sentiment either. But I do not know why I grumble when the dinner was so good. The _Tour d'Argent_ had not fallen as most restaurants fall when they attract patrons from across the Channel. Frédéric's cooking was beyond reproach. Even the theatrical ceremony over his pressed duck could not spoil its flavour.

The sixth evening saw us at _Prunier's_, eating the oysters that it would have been useless to go to _Prunier's_ and not to eat (we must have been in Paris unusually early in May that year), and if it was not the season to eat the snails for which _Prunier's_ is equally renowned, my heart was not broken. It may give me away to confess that I do not like them, since snails are one of the unconsidered trifles that no Autolycus posing as _gourmet_ should turn a disdainful back upon. But what can I do? It is a case of Dr. Fell, and that is the beginning and end of it. And if it wasn't the season for snails, and if I wouldn't have eaten them if it had been, in _Prunier's_ gilded halls other delicacies are served, and when I summon up remembrance of those dinners past, _Prunier's_ does not exactly take a back seat.

But naturally, the most important dinner in my opinion was mine at the _Cabaret Lyonnais_ in the _Rue de Port-Mahon_, where never again can I invite my friends, for the _Cabaret_ has gone into the land of shadows with so many of the group who sat round my table. At the time, there was no looking back, no sad straying into a dead past to spoil a good dinner--at the worst, a fleeting moment of discomfort when we selected the tench swimming in the tank close to our table and saw them carried off to the kitchen to be cooked for us. It was the custom of the house, intended to be a pleasing assurance that our fish was fresh, but a custom with just a savour in it of cannibalism. I have never cared to be on speaking terms with the creatures I am about to eat. I squirm when I see the lobster for my salad squirming, though I know the risk if it should not squirm at all. Had I lived in the country among my own chickens and pigs and lambs, I should have been long since a confirmed vegetarian. But to go to the _Cabaret Lyonnais_ unwilling to swallow my scruples with my fish would have been as useless as to go to Simpson's in London and object to a cut from the joint, as I do object, which is why I seldom go. Anyway, we did not have to see the beef killed for the _filet_ which at the _Cabaret_ we were expected to eat after the tench and with the potatoes to which the city of Lyons also gives its name, so associating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in the Provinces, the wine was the _petit vin gris_ which I never can drink without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France, sunshine, a tandem tricycle or two bicycles, J. and myself perched upon them, and by the way friendly little inns with a good breakfast or dinner waiting, and a big carafe of the pale light wine served with it. That my dinner was comparatively cheap would at normal times have been for me delightfully in its favour. But that it was the cheapest of all in that week of dinners meant that I came out last in the race when, by every law of justice, I should have been first. In Paris as in London my "greedy column," as my friends called it with the straightforwardness peculiar to friends, had to be written every week for the _Pall Mall_ and mine was the enviable position of finding my copy in eating good dinners no less than in going to the _Salons_. If any one had an irreproachable excuse for extravagant living, it was I.

But even I, with the excuse, could not afford the extravagance--one weekly article did not pay for one cheap dinner for eight--at the _Cabaret Lyonnais_. And as the rest of the party were without the excuse and no better equipped for the extravagance, we never again gave each other dinners on the same lavish scale and rarely on any scale, henceforward ordering them on the principle of what Philadelphia in my youth called "a Jersey treat." I do not say that economy was invariably our rule. We could be, on occasions, so rash that before our week was up we had to begin to count our francs, put by for the boat sandwich and the reluctant tips of the return journey, and eat the last meals of all in the Duval, which, if admirable as a place to economize in, is no more conducive to gaiety than a London A.B.C. shop or Childs's in New York. Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely _brioche_ at the _Salon_, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday nights was of the party and where he went the top hat and frock coat, in which I used to think he must have been born, went too. If his fashion-plate correctness--men wore frock coats then--made him conspicuous at our Thursday nights it can be imagined what he was sitting with his coat tails in the gutter at the cabman's table where the glazed hat and the three-caped coat of the Paris _cocher_ set the fashion. He had the grace to be ashamed of himself, often apologizing for his clothes and assuring us that he could not help himself, which was his reason, I fancy, for accepting at an early age the professorial chair where the decorum of his hat and coat was in need of no apology.

IV

I have said we were young. It seems superfluous to add that now and then, in the sunshine of the perfect May day, with the call of the lilacs and the horse-chestnuts getting into our heads as well as into my copy, the _Salon_ grew stuffy beyond endurance, work became a crime, and we put up our catalogues and note-books before the closing hour and hurried anywhere just to be out-of-doors, as if our sole profession in life was to idle it away. After all, only the prig can be in Paris when May is there and not play truant sometimes.

The year Paris chose our week to show how hot it can be in May when it has a mind to, was the year I got to learn something of the Paris suburbs. The joyous expedition which ended our every day that year was so in the spirit of Harland that I should be inclined to look upon him as the tempter, had we not, with the usual amiability of the tempted, met him more than half way. Still, he excelled us all in the knack of collecting us from our work, no matter how it had scattered us or in what quarter of the town we might be, and carrying us off suddenly out of it in directions we none of us had dreamed of the minute before, just as he would collect and carry us off suddenly in London. Only, he was more resourceful in Paris because in Paris more resources were made to his hand. There are as beautiful places round London--that is, beautiful in the English way--as round Paris, but they do not invite to a holiday with the charm no sensible man can resist. The loveliness of Hampton Court and Richmond and Hampstead Heath and the River is not to be denied and yet, gay as the English playing there manage to look, the only genuine gaiety is the Bank Holiday maker's. Tradition consecrates the loveliness bordering upon Paris to the gaiety to which Gavarni and Mürger are the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the principal _rôle_ on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always hit upon the right expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.

I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long, the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all eternity.

Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see beauty more clearly and therefore to feel it more acutely than other people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides, artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the delicious absurdities of what the French called the _Vie de Bohème_ until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome _cliché_ of it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud, stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its classical symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as classical in its lines and masses, and with its note of sadness the stronger because of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect, an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who passed by chance looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries, at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.

Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he knew everything.

We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the _Vernissage_ in the New _Salon_. I think he had planned the dramatic effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and art demanded of him. He was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey Suède gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring _Vernissage_ crowd with the _clou_ of the year's New _Salon_: that portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the unbecoming if fashion decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places with anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the _cher maître et président_ strolled into the restaurant at the supreme moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their attention and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon, and got.

It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it was simply because he was still young enough to believe nobody had ever been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "_Après vous, madame! Après vous, monsieur!_" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his first glass of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he thought about _les vieux_ and their stultifying observance of worn-out laws and principles.