THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE
Some writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow from childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in which illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation (a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and, finally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there are writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to take up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all the monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the greatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or, if their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled all the way. Coppée hesitates on the brow of that hill from which can be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already disillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the past. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes joyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious joy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that has long since faded away.
He took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose eyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a regret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the prologue to Le Reliquaire, published in 1866, he wrote:
“Et de même que, tous les soirs,
Ils font autour du reliquaire
Fumer les légers encensoirs.
Dédaignant le douleur vulgaire
Qui pousse des cris importuns,
Dans ces poèmes je veux faire
A tous mes beaux rêves défunts,
A toutes mes chères reliques,
Une chapelle de parfums
Et de cierges mélancoliques.”
In building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and melancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose was written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of his architecture.
He was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself to yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having charmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour and the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could trust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There remain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability. Sometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would have taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that pervades, for example, Le Coupable, is enough to show that he was ill at ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian grisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the vicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a serious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father, learning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he himself, rather than his son, is not the true coupable. Coppée finds in it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close and accurate description, and for a very searching account of the reformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Coppée has dropped out of it.
I do not mean that all Coppée’s best work is to be known by an atmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more delicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not often cry aloud,
“Hélas! les beaux jours sont finis.”
He only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days of enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world far below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head, he cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant. Knowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the memory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express his regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his stories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and pained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and loss of it.
In Toute une Jeunesse he confesses that his hero, “personnage imaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais quand j’étais un enfant, et quand j’étais un jeune homme.” Much of the imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life, and it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the gradual realisation that they had been fine. Amédée Violette, born in a little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of the Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very young, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next door. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, turning out of the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows the schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant masters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like the terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress his pupils’ parents. Amédée grows up, spending fine evenings in long walks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually to absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter, studies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious frivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with whom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is taken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk. So many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the evenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes all day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him almost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Café de Séville in the Boulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet and editor of an unpopular review—Catulle Mendès, perhaps. The café is full of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery recognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems with success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a publisher—no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first volume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is taken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel him to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through various more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves the girl a widow with a boy, and his friend’s last wish is that they should marry. The wish is fulfilled: Amédée, married to a woman he has loved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend. It is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the consolation of his art, and the book ends: “Hélas! ta jeunesse est finie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!”
The leaves fall on the paper as Coppée writes. It is always autumn in his books, because he is always thinking of spring. But Toute une Jeunesse lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of love for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or rather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one inside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final. There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability than of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes of in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He felt, he said, like Madame de Staël, “la nostalgie de son cher ruisseau de la rue du Bac,” but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days when he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal that has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris represents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune the pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame des Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the airy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout. When he talks of buying books at the Odéon, we do not watch an old man choosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money that he has not counted. We see the Coppée of 1864, or ourselves of ten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous for dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other books on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with the swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop, and, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going straight off again. We see that dead Coppée, or ourselves, sitting among the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with a clasp-knife from a fair. The Café de Seville, once a meeting-place for men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Coppée and his dead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to town, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn’s morbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens, all the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is speaking.
His obsession by the contrast between rich and poor reduces to the same sentiment. He does not hate the rich because they are rich; he is only sorry for them if money has taken away from them something they might have had in poverty. He is not sorry for the poor because they are poor, but only if their poverty expresses the lack of something that, with money, they think they might have had. He has come to regard illusions as the only sterling coin. In the two contrasted tales of “The Italian Organ” he seems to weigh rich and poor in opposite scales, and to find a balance between them. One tune of the organ reminds a poor clerk’s wife of the days before she married, when she was the prettiest girl at the cheap dances, and Monsieur Fred, amusing himself, filled her head with dreams. Riches have carried him away from her, and she has grown paler, and married Jules with the stiff collar and the india-rubber-cleaned gloves. It is very sad. Another tune reminds the Countess of the days before she married, when as la Belle Adah of the American Circus, she reigned in her own place. The Count fell in love with her, pursued her, married her, and trained her to be a lady. She spends her mornings in visiting institutions, and there is a vicar waiting on her in the drawing-room. It is very sad. But the sorrow of both these women is not for their riches or their poverty. It is mourning for a life that can never be lived. Coppée’s love for the poor is unlike Daudet’s. Daudet loves the poor because they are brave and picturesque. Coppée sees in them the simpleness of heart and the power of dreaming that were his when he was poor himself, that is to say, when he was young. The poor invented Christianity.
Very little happens in Coppée’s short stories. In some of them nothing happens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those notes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have been told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried to the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless Time to take the little Coppée out for walks. Now it is a couple of old bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, “Mon Ami Meurtrier,” a swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men, attending to his mother’s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of the stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real hero. “The White Frock” is the tale of a lame child whose only white dress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second on their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really the tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in watching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his own youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy piece of childhood’s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never be destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the Luxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught in a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long walks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in the autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to make a pleasant trampling place for children’s feet, and in the winter, when, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked mournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate with all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities, rhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the world a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was fortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the midst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows seemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to matter. And this boy never left the study of François Coppée. If Coppée looked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly boy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged clothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to dross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt, like the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in thinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone.
1909.