CHAPTER XXXVI: PARIS. THE YEARS EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO AND EIGHTEEN

NINETY-THREE.

Whistler went to live in Paris again in 1892. Moving from London was a complicated affair, and, during several months, he and Mrs. Whistler and his sister-in-law, Mrs. Whibley, were continually running backward and forward, before they settled in the Rue du Bac. We saw him whenever he came to London and whenever we were in Paris, and, as we were there often, we saw much of him.

A group of artists and art critics, whose appreciation of Whistler had not waited for the turning of the tide, were in the habit of going together to Paris for the opening of the _Salon_. In 1892, R. A. M. Stevenson, Aubrey Beardsley, Henry Harland, D. S. McColl, Charles W. Furse, Alexander and Robert Ross, among others, were with us, and to all it was a pleasure to find Whistler triumphing as he had triumphed earlier in the spring in London. His pictures at the Champ-de-Mars were the most talked about and the most distinguished in an unusually good _Salon_. Many came straight from the Goupil Exhibition. Whistler called it "a stupendous success all along the line," and said that, coming after the Goupil "heroic kick," it made everything complete and perfect. He was pleased also with the fact that he was elected a full _Sociétaire_, and this year a member of the jury.

In the autumn, J., returning to Paris after a long summer in the South of France, found Whistler in the Hôtel du Bon Lafontaine, a house, Whistler said, full of bishops, cardinals, and _monsignori_, and altogether most correct, to which he had moved from the Foyot, inhabited by Senators, after a bomb had exploded in the kitchen window. J. says:

"He was not too comfortably established, in one or two small rooms. He was full of the apartment in the Rue de Bac, which I was taken to see, though there was nothing to see but workmen and packing-boxes. In the midst of the moving, he was working, and one day I found him in his bedroom with Mallarmé, whose portrait in lithography he was drawing, and there was scarcely room for three. This portrait is the frontispiece to Mallarmé's _Vers et Prose_.

"It was the first time I had ever seen Whistler working on a lithograph. He had great trouble with this portrait, which he did more than once, not altogether because, as M. Duret says, he could not get the head right, but because he was trying experiments with paper. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mechanical grained paper which he had used for the _Albermarle_ and the _Whirlwind_ prints, and he was then afraid of trusting to the post the paper that Way was sending him. He had found at Belfont's or Lemercier's some thin textureless transfer paper, thin as tissue paper, which delighted him, though it was difficult to work on. When he was doing the Mallarmé, he put the paper down on a roughish book cover. He liked the grain the cover gave him, for it was not mechanical, and, when the grain seemed to repeat itself, he would shift the drawing, and thus get a new surface. I do not know whether he used this thin paper to any extent, but he said he found it delightful, if difficult, to work on. He used that afternoon a tiny bit of lithographic chalk, holding it in his fingers, and not in a crayon-holder as lithographers do.

"The next day, he took me to the printers, Belfont's and Lemercier's, where he introduced me to M. Duchâtel and M. Marty, who was preparing _L'Estampe Originale_, devoting himself to the revival of artistic lithography in France. As I remember, the talk was technical, when not of the wonders of the apartment in the Rue du Bac--where 'Peace threatens to take up her abode in the garden of our pretty pavilion,' Mr. Starr quotes Whistler as saying--and the studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which I did not see until later on. He was also planning his colour lithographs, and he explained to me his methods, though very few colour-prints were made until the next year. He also told me what he thought of printing etchings in colour--that it was abominable, vulgar, and stupid. Good black or brown ink, on good old paper, had been good enough for Rembrandt, it was good enough for him, and it ought to be good enough in the future for the few people who care about etching. To-day, when the world is swamped with the childish print in colour and the preposterous big copper plate, it may be well to remember Whistler's words. His reason for rejecting the etching in colour is as simple and rational as his reason for making the lithograph in colour. Lithography is a method of surface printing; the colour, rolled on to the surface of the stone, is merely rubbed on to, and scraped off on, the paper. In etching or engraving, the colour is first hammered into the engraved plate with a dabber and then forced out by excessive pressure, fatal to any but the strongest or purest of blacks and browns; and colours, whether printed from one plate or a dozen, must have the freshness, the quality, squeezed out of them."

He was back in London at the end of December (1892) eating his Christmas dinner with his future brother-in-law. He stayed only a few days, but long enough to arrange to show _Lady Meux: White and Black_ in the first exhibition of the Portrait Painters at the Grafton Gallery, early in 1893, and a number of his Venice etchings with the destroyed plates at the Fine Art Society's.

"We were again in Paris for the _Salon_ of 1893, and found Whistler living in the Rue du Bac. Beardsley, MacColl, and 'Bob' Stevenson were with us. MacColl and I went to see Whistler in the new studio. It was at the top of one of the highest buildings in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, No. 86. As the _concierge_ said, in directing visitors, '_On ne peut pas aller plus loin que M. Vistlaire!_' The climb always seemed to me endless, and must have done much harm to Whistler's weak heart, though benches were placed on some of the landings where, if he had time, he could rest. When we got to the sixth storey MacColl knocked. There was a rapid movement across the floor, and the door was opened a little. Whistler held his palette and brushes between himself and us, and there were excuses of models and work. But MacColl felt the brushes, and they were dry, and so we got in.

"The studio was a big, bare room, the biggest studio Whistler ever had. A simple tone of rose on the walls, a lounge, a few chairs, a whitewood cabinet for the little drawings and prints and pastels; the blue screen with the river, Chelsea church, and the gold moon; two or three easels, nothing on them; rows and rows of canvases on the floor with their faces to the wall; in the further corner a printing press--rather a printing shop--with inks and papers on shelves; a little gallery above, a room or two opening off; a model's dressing-room under it, and in front, when you turned, the great studio window, with all Paris toward the Pantheon over the Luxembourg gardens. There was another little room or entrance-hall at the top of the stairs, and opposite another, a kitchen. On the front was a balcony with flowers.

"Carmen, his model, was there, and while he showed us some of his work she got breakfast, and we stayed a good part of the day. Mrs. Whistler came up later. I think she breakfasted with us. I have no recollection of what he talked about. But I am sure it was of what they had been saying in London, of what they were saying in Paris, of what he was doing. That is what it always was. We were all asked to lunch the following Sunday at the house.

"The apartment, No. 110 Rue du Bac, was on the right-hand side, just before you reached the _Bon Marché_, going up the street, from the river. You went through a big _porte cochère_ by the _concierge's_ box, down a long, covered tunnel, then between high walls, until you came to a courtyard with several doors, a bit of an old frieze in one place and a drinking-fountain. Whistler's door was painted blue, with a brass knocker. I do not suppose that then there was another like it in Paris. Inside was a little landing with three or four steps down to the floor a few feet lower than the courtyard. This room contained nothing, or almost nothing, but some trunks (which, as in his other houses, gave the appearance of his having just moved in, or being just about to start on a journey) and a settee, always covered with a profusion of hats and coats. Opposite the entrance a big door opened into a spacious room, decorated in simple, flat tones of blue, with white doors and windows, furnished with a few Empire chairs and a couch, a grand piano, and a table which, like the blue matting-covered floor, was littered with newspapers. Once in a while there was a picture of his on the wall. For some time, the _Venus_ hung or stood about. There were doors to the right and left, and on the far side, a glass door opened on a large garden, a real bit of country in Paris. It stretched away in dense undergrowth to several huge trees. Later, over the door, there was a trellis designed by Mrs. Whistler, and there were flowers everywhere. 'In his roses he buried his troubles,' Mr. Wuerpel writes of the garden, and there were many birds, among them, at one time, an awful mocking-bird, at another a white parrot which finally escaped, and, in a temper, climbed up a tree where no one could get it, and starved itself to death to Whistler's grief. At the bottom of the garden were seats. The dining-room was to the right of the drawing-room. It was equally simple in blue, only there was blue and white china in a cupboard and a big dining-table, round which were more Empire chairs and in the centre a large, low blue and white porcelain stand, on it big bowls of flowers, over it, hanging from the ceiling, a huge Japanese something like a birdcage.

"From Paris, in May, I went down to Caen and Coutances, coming back a few weeks later. Beardsley was still in Paris, or had returned, and we were both stopping at the Hôtel de Portugal et de l'Univers, then known to every art student. Wagner was being played at the Opera, almost for the first time. Paris was disturbed, there were demonstrations against Wagner, really against Germany. We went, Beardsley wild about Wagner and doing, I think, the drawing of _The Wagnerites_. He had come over to get backgrounds in the rose arbours and the dense alleys of the Luxembourg gardens, where Whistler had made his lithographs. Coming away from the Opera, we went across to the Café de la Paix at midnight. The first person we saw was Whistler. He was with some people, but they left soon, and we joined him. Beardsley also left almost at once, but not before Whistler had asked us to come the next Sunday afternoon to the Rue du Bac. Then, for the first time, I learned what he thought of 'æstheticism' and decadence.'

"'Why do you get mixed up with such things? Look at him! He's just like his drawings, he's all hairs and peacock's plumes--hairs on his head, hairs on his fingers' ends, hairs in his ears, hairs on his toes. And what shoes he wears--hairs growing out of them!'

"I said, 'Why did you ask him to the Rue du Bac?' 'Oh--well--well--well!' And then it was late, or early, and the last thing was, 'Well, you'll come and bring him too.'

"Years later, in Buckingham Street, Whistler met Beardsley, and got to like not only him, as everybody did, but his work. One night when Whistler was with us, Beardsley turned up, as always when he went to see anyone, with his portfolio of his latest work under his arm. This time it held the illustrations for _The Rape of the Lock_, which he had just made. Whistler, who always saw everything that was being done, had seen the _Yellow Book_, started in 1894, and he disliked it as much as he then disliked Beardsley, who was the art editor; he had also seen the illustrations to _Salomé_, disliking them too, probably because of Oscar Wilde; he knew many of the other drawings, one of which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was more or less a reminiscence of Mrs. Whistler, and he no doubt knew that Beardsley had made a caricature of him which a Follower carefully left in a cab. When Beardsley opened the portfolio and began to show us _The Rape of the Lock_, Whistler looked at them first indifferently, then with interest, then with delight. And then he said slowly, 'Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake--you are a very great artist.' And the boy burst out crying. All Whistler could say, when he could say anything, was 'I mean it--I mean it--I mean it!'

"On the following Sunday Beardsley and I went to the Rue du Bac, Beardsley in a little straw hat like Whistler's. Whistler was in the garden and there were many Americans, and Arsène Alexandre and Mallarmé, some people from the British Embassy, and presently Mr. Jacomb Hood came, bringing an Honourable Amateur, who asked the Whistlers, Beardsley, and myself to dinner at one of the _cafés_ in the Champs-Elysees. As we left the Rue du Bac, Whistler whispered to me, 'Those hairs--hairs everywhere!' I said to him, 'But you were very nice and, of course, you'll come to dinner.' And, of course, he did not.

"I was working in Paris, making drawings and etchings of Notre-Dame. I was in one of the high old houses of lodgings and studios, with cabmen's _cafés_ and restaurants under them, on the Quai des Grands Augustins. I had gone there because of the view of the Cathedral. Most of the time I was at work up among the Devils of Notre-Dame, using one of the towers as a studio by permission of the Government and the Cardinal-Archbishop. One morning--it was in June--I heard the puffing and groaning of someone climbing slowly the endless winding staircase, and the next thing I saw was Whistler's head on the stairs. When he got his breath and I had got over my astonishment, I began to ask why he had come, or he began to explain the reason. He had learned where I was staying, and he said he had been to the hotel, which, was, well! I think it reminded him of his days _au sixième_, for that was the floor I was on. He left a note written on the _buvette_ paper, in which he said, 'Jolly the place seems to be!' After he had climbed up to my rooms, the _patron_ told him where he possibly would find me, and then the people at the foot of the tower said I was up above.

"He told me why he had come up. He was working on a series of etchings of Paris. Some were just begun, others ready to bite, but a number ought to be printed, and would I help him? I was pleased, and I said I would. I took him about among the strange creatures that haunt the place, introduced him to the old keeper with his grisly tales of suicides and of sticking to the tower through the Commune, even when the church was on fire, and showed him the awful bell that, at noon, suddenly crashed in our ears, the uncanny cat that perched on crockets and gargoyles, tried to catch sparrows with nothing below her, and made from one parapet to another flying cuts over space when visitors came up. But he did not like it, and was not happy until we were seated in the back room of a restaurant across the street. He talked about the printing, saying that I could help him, and he could teach me.

"Next morning I was at the Rue du Bac at nine. After I had waited for what seemed hours, and had breakfasted with him and Mrs. Whistler and we had a cigarette in the garden, where there was an American rocking-chair for him--well, after this it was too late to go to the studio. He brought out some of the plates which he had been working on--the plates of little shops in the near streets--and we looked at them, and that was all. So it went on the next day, and the next, until on the third or fourth things came to a head, and I told him that charming as this life was, either we must print or I must go back to my drawing. In five minutes we were in a cab on our way to the studio. He understood that, much as I admired his work and appreciated him, I could not afford to pay for this appreciation and admiration with my time. From the moment this was plain between us, there was no interruption to our friendship for the rest of his life.

"We set to work. He peeled down to his undershirt with short sleeves, and I saw in his muscles one reason why he was never tired. He put on an apron. The plates, only slightly heated, if heated at all, were inked and wiped, sometimes with his hand, at others with a rag, till nearly clean, though a good tone was left. He painted the proofs on the plate with his hand. I got the paper ready on the press and pulled the proof, he inking and I pulling all the afternoon. As each proof came off the press, he looked at it, not satisfied, for they were all weak, and saying 'we'll keep it as the first proof and it will be worth something some day.' Then he put the prints between sheets of blotting-paper, and that night or the next, after dinner, trimmed them with scissors and put them back between the folded sheets of blotting-paper which were thrown on the table and on the floor. Between the sheets the proofs dried naturally and were not squashed flat.

"The printing went on for several days, he getting more and more dissatisfied, until I found an old man, Lamour, at the top of an old house in the Rue de la Harpe, who could reground the plates. But Whistler did not rebite them and never touched them until long after in England.

"A number of plates had not been bitten and one hot Sunday afternoon he brought them into the garden at the Rue du Bac. A chair was placed under the trees and on it a wash-basin into which each plate was put. Instead of pouring the diluted acid all over the plate in the usual fashion drops were taken from the bottle on a feather, and the plate painted with acid. The acid was coaxed, or rather used as one would use water-colour, dragged and washed about. Depth and strength were got by leaving a drop of acid on the lines where they were needed. There was a little stopping-out of passages where greater delicacy was required; when there was any, the stopping-out varnish was thinned with turpentine, and Whistler, with a camel's-hair brush, painted over the parts that did not need further biting. To me, it was a revelation. Sometimes he drew on the plate. Instead of the huge crowbar used by most etchers he worked with a perfectly balanced, beautifully designed little needle three or four inches long, made for him by an instrument-maker in Paris. He always carried several in a little silver box. The ground on all the plates was bad and came off, and the proofs he pulled afterwards in the studio were not at all what he wanted. These were almost the last plates he etched.

"He was not painting very much, few people came to the studio, and he went out little. No one was in the Rue du Bac but Mrs. Whistler for a while, and there were complications with the servants and others--how people who kept such hours, or no hours, could keep servants would have been a mystery had not servants worshipped him. Almost daily the _petit bleu_ asking me to dinner would come to me. Or Whistler would appear in the morning, if I had not been to him the day before. In those early June days I seldom met anyone at the house and we never dressed for dinner, possibly because I had no dress clothes with me; he would insist on my coming, telling me not to mind the stains or the inkspots! One evening in the garden with them I found a little man, a thorough Englishman in big spectacles, with a curious sniff, who was holding a hose and watering the plants. He was introduced to me as Mr. Webb, Whistler's solicitor, though in the process we came near being drenched by the wobbling hose. It was that evening I first heard the chant of the missionary brothers from over the great wall. A bell sounded, and as the notes died away a wailing chant arose, went on for a little, then died away as mysteriously as it came. Always, when it did come, it hushed us. At dinner we should be cosy and jolly, Whistler had said in asking me, and we were, and it was arranged that we should go the next day to Fontainebleau.

"They called for me at the hotel in the morning. We drove to the Lyons station, Whistler, his wife, Mr. Webb, and I. And Whistler had the little paint-box which always went with him, though on these occasions it was the rarest thing that he ever did anything, and we got to Fountainebleau. We lunched in a garden. We didn't go to the palace, but drove to Barbizon, stopping at Siron's, through the forest. I don't think the views or the trees interested him at all. He was quiet all the way, but no sooner were we back than we must hunt for 'old things': 'here was a palace and great people had lived here, there might be silver, there might be blue and white, though really, now, you know, you can find better blue and white, and cheaper silver, under the noses of the Britons in Wardour Street than anywhere.' We did not find any blue and white, or silver. But there were three folio volumes of old paper, containing a collection of dried leaves, which we bought and shared, and they were to him more valuable than the palace and the Millet studio, which we never saw.

"It was late when we got back. The servants had gone to bed, and Marguery's and the places where he liked to dine were shut. So we bought what we could in the near shops and sat down in the Rue du Bac to eat the supper we had collected. After we had finished I witnessed his and Mrs. Whistler's wills, which Mr. Webb had brought with him from London, and for this the long day had been a preparation.

"If I did not always accept Whistler's invitations he would reproach me as an awful disappointment and a bad man. If I did not go to the dinner, to which I was bidden at an hour's notice, he would tell me afterwards of the much cool drink and encouraging refreshment he had prepared for me. He always asked me to bring my friends. Mr. J. Fulleylove had come over to 'do' Paris and I took him to the Rue du Bac; '_les Pleins d'Amour_,' Whistler called him and Mrs. Fulleylove, whose eyes he was always praising. They were working at St. Denis and so was I, and one day Whistler and Mrs. Whistler came in the primitive steam tram that starts from the Madeleine to see the place. We lunched--badly--and he was bored with the church, though he had brought lithograph paper and colours to make a sketch of it.

"One Sunday Mr. E. G. Kennedy posed in the garden for his portrait on a small canvas or panel, and all the world was kept out. I had never before seen Whistler paint. He worked away all afternoon, hissing to himself, which, Mrs. Whistler said, he did only when things were going well. If Kennedy shifted--there were no rests--Whistler would scream, and he worked on and on, and the sun went down, and Kennedy stood and Whistler painted, and the monks began their chant, and darkness was coming on. The hissing stopped, a paint-rag came out, and, with one fierce dash, it was all rubbed off. 'Oh, well,' was all he said. Kennedy was limbered up and we went to dinner.

"After that, almost every night we dined together through that lovely June, either with him in the Rue du Bac, or he came with Kennedy or me to Marguery's or La Pérouse--once to St. Germain--or somewhere that was delightful.

"The summer was famous in Paris for the 'Sarah Brown Students' Revolution,' the row that grew out of the _Quat'z Arts_ Ball. Whistler did not take the slightest interest in the demonstrations, in fact, did not believe they were taking place, though I used to bring him reports of the doings which culminated on July 4, my birthday, when he was to have given me a dinner at Marguery's. I told him the streets of the Quarter were barricaded and full of soldiers, but though he ridiculed the whole affair, he decided to dine at home and to put off by telegram the dinner he had ordered. I went round to the Boulevard St. Germain to send the wire and found it barred with soldiers and police, and the entire boulevard, as far as one could see, littered with hats and caps, sticks and umbrellas. There had been a cavalry charge and this was the result. We dined merrily, but Kennedy and I left early. There was a great deal of rioting through the night, but that was the end of it.

"Mrs. Whistler had not been well, and they suddenly made up their minds to go to Brittany, or Normandy, or somewhere on the coast. It was not altogether a successful journey. Nature had gone back on him, he wrote me, probably because of his exposure of her 'foolish sunsets'; the weather was for tourists, the sea for goldfish in a bowl--the studio was better than staring at a sea of tin. And the terrible things they had eaten in Brittany made them ill. But the lithographs at Vitré were made, also the _Yellow House, Lannion_, and the _Red House, Paimpol_--his first elaborate essays in colour.

"Only a few impressions of the _Yellow House_ were ever pulled owing to some accident to the stone. One of these I wanted to buy. Whistler heard of it 'Well, you know, very flattering, but altogether absurd,' he told me, and the print came with an inscription and the Butterfly."