Peter Whiffle

by Carl Van Vechten

His Life and Works

BOOKS BY CARL VAN VECHTEN

INTERPRETERS
IN THE GARRET
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
THE MUSIC OF SPAIN
THE TIGER IN THE HOUSE
MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS
LORDS OF THE HOUSETOPS
MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR
PETER WHIFFLE: HIS LIFE AND WORKS

Peter Whiffle

His Life and Works

Carl Van Vechten

New York Alfred · A · Knopf

MCMXXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published, April, 1922
Second Printing, April, 1922
Third Printing, May, 1922
Fourth Printing, June, 1922
Fifth Printing, July, 1922
Sixth Printing, August, 1922
Seventh Printing, October, 1922
Eighth Printing, March, 1923
Ninth Printing, July, 1923

Set up, electrotyped, printed and bound by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N.Y.
Paper furnished by W.F. Etherington & Co., New York.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE MEMORY OF
MY MOTHER,
ADA AMANDA FITCH VAN VECHTEN

"'Tingling is the test,' said Babbalanja, 'Yoomy, did you tingle, when that song was composing?'

"'All over, Babbalanja.'"

Herman Melville: Mardi.

"We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Dencombe: The Middle Years.

"Les existences les plus belles sont peut-être celles qui ont subi tous les extrêmes, qui ont traversé toutes les températures, rencontré toutes les sensations excessives et tous les sentiments contradictoires."

Remy de Gourmont: Le Chat de Misère.

"The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiosity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than any one else."

Edmund Gosse: Books on the Table.

"O mother of the hills, forgive our towers;
O mother of the clouds, forgive our dreams."

Edwin Ellis.

Preface

So few people were acquainted with Peter Whiffle that the announcement, on that page of the New York Times consecrated to wedding, birth, and obituary notices, of his death in New York on December 15, 1919, awakened no comment. Those of my friends who knew something of the relationship between Peter and myself, probably did not see the slender paragraph at all. At any rate none of them mentioned it, save, of course, Edith Dale, whose interest, in a sense, was as special as my own. Her loss was not so personal, however, nor her grief so deep. It was strange and curious to remember that however infrequently we had met, and the chronicle which follows will give evidence of the comparative infrequency of these meetings, yet some indestructible bond, a firm determining girdle of intimate understanding, over which Time and Space had no power, held us together. I had become to Peter something of a necessity, in that through me he found the proper outlet for his artistic explosions. I was present, indeed, at the bombing of more than one discarded theory. It was under the spell of such apparently trivial and external matters that our friendship developed and, while my own interests often flew in other directions, Peter certainly occupied as important a place in my heart as I did in his, probably, in some respects, more important. Nevertheless, when I received a notification from his lawyer that I had been mentioned in Peter's will, I was considerably astonished. My astonishment increased when I was informed of the nature of the bequest. Peter Whiffle had appointed me to serve as his literary executor.

Now Peter Whiffle was not, in any accepted sense of the epithet, an author. He had never published a book; he had never, indeed, written a book. In the end he had come to hold a somewhat mystic theory in regard to such matters, which he had only explained to me a few moments before he died. I was, however, aware, more aware than any one else could possibly have been, that from time to time he had been accustomed to take notes. I was as familiar, I suppose, as any one could be, with the trend of his later ideas, and with some of the major incidents in his earlier life he had acquainted me, although, here, I must confess, there were lacunæ in my knowledge. Still, his testamentary request, unless I might choose to accept it in a sense, I am convinced, entirely too flattering to my slender talents, seemed to be inconsistent with the speculative idea which haunted him, at least towards the end of his life. This contradiction and an enlarging sense of the mysterious character of the assignment were somewhat dispelled by a letter, dated June 17, 1917, which, a few days after the reading of the will, his lawyer placed in my hands and which indicated plainly enough that Peter had decided upon my appointment at least two years and a half before he died. This letter not only confirmed the strange clause in the will but also, to some extent, explained it and, as the letter is an essential part of my narrative, I offer it in evidence at once.

Dear Carl—so it read:

I suppose that some day I shall die; people do die. If there has been one set purpose in my life, it has been not to have a purpose. That, you alone, perhaps, understand. You know how I have always hesitated to express myself definitely, you know how I have refrained from writing, and you also know, perhaps, that I can write; indeed, until recently, you thought I was writing, or would write. But I think you realize now what writing has come to mean to me, definition, constant definition, although it is as apparent as anything can be that life, nature, art, whatever one writes about, are fluid and mutable things, perpetually undergoing change and, even when they assume some semblance of permanence, always presenting two or more faces. There are those who are not appalled by these conditions, those who confront them with bravery and even with impertinence. You have been courageous. You have published several books which I have read with varying shades of pleasure, and you have not hesitated to define, or at any rate discuss, even that intangible, invisible, and noisy art called Music.

I have begun many things but nothing have I ever completed. It has always seemed unnecessary or impossible, although at times I have tried to carry a piece of work through. On these occasions a restraining angel has held me firmly back. It might be better if what I have written, what I have said, were permitted to pass into oblivion with me, to become a part of scoriac chaos. It may not mean anything in particular; if it means too much, to that extent I have failed.

Thinking, however, of death, as I sometimes do, I have wondered if, after all, behind the vapoury curtain of my fluctuating purpose, behind the orphic wall of my indecision, there did not lurk some vague shadow of intention. Not on my part, perhaps, but on the part of that being, or that condition, which is reported to be interested in such matters. This doubt, I confess, I owe to you. Sometimes, in those extraordinary moments between sleeping and awakening—and once in the dentist's chair, after I had taken gas—the knots seemed to unravel, the problem seemed as naked as Istar at the seventh gate. But these moments are difficult, or impossible, to recapture. To recapture them I should have been compelled to invent a new style, a style as capricious and vibratory as the moments themselves. In this, however, as you know, I have failed, while you have succeeded. It is to your success, modest as it may appear to you, that I turn in my dilemma. To come to the point, cannot you explain, make out some kind of case for me, put me on my feet (or in a book), and thereby prove or disprove something? Shameless as I am, it would be inconceivable, absurd, for me to ask you to do this while I am yet living and I have, therefore, put my request into a formal clause in my will. After I am dead, you may search your memory, which I know to be very good, for such examples of our conversations as will best be fitted to illuminate your subject, which I must insist—you, yourself, will understand this, too, sooner or later—is not me at all.

When your book is published, I shall be dead and perhaps unconscious. If, however, as I strongly suspect, some current connects the life to be with the life that is, I can enjoy what you have done. At the best, you may give others a slight intimation of the meaning of inspiration or furnish guideposts, lighthouses, and bell-buoys to the poet who intends to march singing along the highroad or bravely to embark on the ships at sea; at the worst, I have furnished you with a subject for another book, and I am well aware that subjects even for bad books are difficult to light upon.

Salve atque Vale,
Peter.

This letter, I may say, astonished me. I think it would astonish anybody. A profound and enveloping melancholy succeeded to this feeling of astonishment. At the time, I was engaged in putting the finishing touches to The Tiger in the House and I postponed meditation on Peter's affair until that bulky volume could be dispatched to the printer. That happy event fell on March 15, 1920, but my anthology, Lords of The Housetops, next claimed my attention, and then the new edition of Interpreters, for which I had agreed to furnish a new paper, and the writing of this new paper amused me very much, carrying my mind not only far away from cats, which had been occupying it for a twelvemonth, but also away from Peter's request. At last, Interpreters was ready for the printer, but now the proofs of The Tiger began to come in, and I may say that for the next three months my days were fully occupied in the correction of proofs, for those of Lords of The Housetops and Interpreters were in my garret when the proofs of The Tiger were not. Never have I corrected proofs with so much concentrated attention as that which I devoted to the proofs of The Tiger, and yet there were errors. In regard to some of these, I was not the collaborator. On Page 240, for instance, one may read, There are many females in the novels of Emile Zola. My intention was to have the fourth word read, felines, and so it stood in the final proof, but my ambition to surmount the initial letter of Zola's Christian name with an acute accent (an ambition I shall forswear on this present page), compelled the printer to reset the line, so that subsequently, when I opened the book at this page, I read with amazement that there are many females in the novels of Emile Zola, a statement that cannot be readily denied, to be sure, but still it is no discovery of which to boast.

It was not until September, 1920, that I had an opportunity to seriously consider Peter's request and when I did begin to consider it, I thought of it at first only as a duty to be accomplished. But when I began searching my memory for details of the conversations between us and had perused certain notes I had made on various occasions, visited his house on Beekman Place to look over his effects and talk with his mother, the feeling of the artist for inevitable material came over me and I knew that whether Peter had written me that letter or not, I should sooner or later have written this book about him.

There was another struggle over the eventual form, a question concerning which Peter had made no suggestions. It seemed to me, at first, that a sort of haphazard collection of his ideas and pronunciamentos, somewhat in the manner of Samuel Butler's Note-Books, would meet the case, but after a little reflection I rejected this idea. Light on the man was needed for a complete understanding of his ideas, or lack of them, for they shifted like the waves of the sea. I can never tell why, but it was while I was reading William Dean Howells's Familiar Spanish Studies one day in the New York Public Library that I suddenly decided on a sort of loose biographical form, a free fantasia in the manner of a Liszt Rhapsody. This settled, I literally swam ahead and scarcely found it necessary to examine many papers (which was fortunate as few exist) or to consult anything but my memory, which lighted up the subject from obscure angles, as a search-light illuminates the spaces of the sea, once I had learned to decipher the meaning of the problem. What it is all about, or whether it is about anything at all, you, the reader, of course, must decide for yourself. To me, the moral, if I may use a conventional word to express an unconventional idea, is plain, and if I have not succeeded in making it appear so, then I must to some extent blame you, the reader, for what is true of all books, is perhaps truest of this, that you will carry away from it only what you are able to bring to it.

Chapter I

One of my friends, a lady, visited Venice alone in her middle age. It was late at night when the train drew into the station, and it was raining, a drizzly, chilling rain. The porter pushed her, with her bag, into a damp gondola and the dismal voyage to the hotel began. There were a few lights here and there but she had the impression that she was floating down the Chicago River in a wash-tub. Once she had reached her destination, she clambered unsteadily out of the black barge, wobbled through a dark passageway, inhaling great whiffs of masticated garlic, and finally emerged in a dimly lighted lobby. At the desk, a sleepy clerk yawned as she spoke of her reservation. Tired, rather cross, and wholly disappointed, she muttered, I don't like Venice at all. I wish I hadn't come. The clerk was unsympathetically explanatory, Signora should have visited Venice when she was younger.

A day or so later, the lady recovered her spirits and even her sense of humour for she told me the story herself and I have always remembered it. The moment it passed her lips, indeed, I began to reflect that I had been lucky to encounter the Bride of the Adriatic in my youth. Paris, too, especially Paris, for there is a melancholy pleasure to be derived from Venice. It is a suitable environment for grief; there is a certain superior relish to suffering there. Paris, I sometimes think, smiles only on the very young and it is not a city I should care to approach for the first time after I had passed forty.

I was, as a matter of fact, in my twenties when I first went to Paris—my happiness might have been even greater had I been nineteen—and I was alone. The trip across England—I had landed at Liverpool—and the horrid channel, I will not describe, although both made sufficient impression on me, but the French houses at Dieppe awakened my first deep emotion and then, and so many times since, the Normandy cider, quaffed in a little café, conterminous to the railroad, and the journey through France, alive in the sunlight, for it was May, the fields dancing with the green grain spattered with vermilion poppies and cerulean cornflowers, the white roads, flying like ribbons between the stately poplars, leading away over the charming hills past the red-brick villas, completed the siege of my not too easily given heart. There was the stately and romantic interruption of Rouen, which at that period suggested nothing in the world to me but Emma Bovary. Then more fields, more roads, more towns, and at last, towards twilight, Paris.

Railroads have a fancy for entering cities stealthily through backyards and the first glimpses of Paris, achieved from a car-window, were not over-pleasant but the posters on the hoardings, advertising beer and automobile tires, particularly that of the Michelin Tire Company, with the picture of the pinguid gentleman, constructed of a series of pneumatic circles, seemed characteristic enough. Chéret was dead but something of his spirit seemed to glow in these intensely coloured affiches and I was young. Even the dank Gare Saint Lazare did not dismay me, and I entered into the novel baggage hunt with something of zest, while other busy passengers and the blue porters rushed hither and thither in a complicated but well-ordered maze. Naturally, however, I was the last to leave the station; as the light outside deepened to a rich warm blue, I wandered into the street, my porter bearing my trunk, to find there a solitary cocher mounted on the box of his carious fiacre.

An artist friend, Albert Worcester, had already determined my destination and so I gave commands, Hotel de la Place de l'Odéon, the cocher cracked his whip, probably adding a Hue cocotte! and we were under way. The drive through the streets that evening seemed like a dream and, even later, when the streets of Paris had become more familiar to me than those of any other city, I could occasionally recapture the mood of this first vision. For Paris in the May twilight is very soft and exquisite, the grey buildings swathed in a bland blue light and the air redolent with a strange fragrance, the ingredients of which have never been satisfactorily identified in my nasal imagination, although Huysmans, Zola, Symons, and Cunninghame Graham have all attempted to separate and describe them. Presently we crossed the boulevards and I saw for the first time the rows of blooming chestnut trees, the kiosques where newsdealers dispensed their wares, the brilliantly lighted theatres, the sidewalk cafés, sprinkled with human figures, typical enough, doubtless, but who all seemed as unreal to me at the time as if they had been Brobdingnags, Centaurs, Griffins, or Mermaids. Other fiacres, private carriages, taxi-autos, carrying French men and French ladies, passed us. I saw Bel Ami, Nana, Liane de Pougy, or Otero in every one of them. As we drove by the Opéra, I am certain that Cléo de Mérode and Leopold of Belgium descended the steps. Even the buses assumed the appearance of gorgeous chariots, bearing perfumed Watteauesque ladies on their journey to Cythera. As we drove through the Tuileries Gardens, the mood snapped for an instant as I viewed the statue of Gambetta, which, I thought at the time, and have always thought since, was amazingly like the portrait of a gentleman hailing a cab. What could more completely symbolize Paris than the statue of a gentleman perpetually hailing a cab and never getting one?

We drove on through the Louvre and now the Seine was under us, lying black in the twilight, reviving dark memories of crime and murder, on across the Pont du Carrousel, and up the narrow Rue de Seine. The Quartier Latin! I must have cried aloud, for the cocher looked a trifle suspicious, his head turned the fraction of an inch. Later, of course, I said, the left bank, as casually as any one. It was almost dark when we drove into the open Place, flanked by the Odéon, a great Roman temple, with my little hotel tucked into one corner, as unostentatiously as possible, being exactly similar to every other structure, save the central one, in the Place. I shall stop tonight, I said to myself, in the hotel where Little Billee lived, for, when one first goes to Paris when one is young, Paris is either the Paris of Murger, du Maurier, or the George Moore of the Confessions, perhaps the Paris of all three. In my bag these three books lay, and I had already begun to live one of them.

The patron and a servant in a long white apron were waiting, standing in the doorway. The servant hoisted my trunk to his shoulder and bore it away. I paid the cocher's reckoning, not without difficulty for, although I was not ignorant of the language, I was unaccustomed to the simplicity of French coinage. There were also the mysteries of the pourboire to compute—ten per cent, I had been told; who has not been told this?—and besides, as always happens when one is travelling, I had no little money. But at length the negotiations were terminated, not to the displeasure of the cocher, I feel certain, since he condescended to smile pleasantly. Then, with a crack of his whip, this enormous fellow with his black moustaches, his glazed top-hat, and his long coat, drove away. I cast a long lingering look after him, apparently quite unaware that many another such teratological specimen existed on every hand. Now I followed the patron into a dark hallway and new strata of delight. He gave me a lighted candle and, behind him, I mounted the winding stairway to the first floor, where I was deposited in a chamber with dark red walls, heavy dark red curtains at the windows, which looked out over the Place, a black walnut wash-hand-stand with pitcher and basin, a huge black walnut wardrobe, two or three chairs of the same wood, upholstered with faded brocade, and a most luxurious bed, so high from the floor that one had to climb into it, hung with curtains like those at the window, and surmounted by a feather-bed. There was also another article of furniture, indispensable to any French bedroom.

I gave Joseph (all men servants in small hotels in Paris are named Joseph, perhaps to warn off prospective Potiphar's wives) his vail, asked for hot water, which he bore up promptly in a small can, washed myself, did a little unpacking, humming the Mattchiche the while, changed my shirt, my collar and my necktie, demanded another bougie, lighted it, and under the humble illumination afforded by it and its companion, I began to read again The Confessions of a Young Man. It was not very long before I was interrupted in the midst of an absorbing passage descriptive of the circle at the Nouvelle Athènes by the arrival of Albert Worcester, who had arranged for my reception, and right here I may say that I was lodged in the Hotel de la Place de l'Odéon for fifty francs a month. Albert's arrival, although unannounced, was not unexpected, as he had promised to take me to dinner.

I was sufficiently emphatic. Paris! I cried. Paris! Good God!

I see you are not disappointed. But Albert permitted a trace of cynicism to flavour his smile.

It's too perfect, too wonderful. It is more than I felt or imagined. I'm moving in.

But you haven't seen it....

I've seen enough. I don't mean that. I mean I've seen enough to know. But I want to see it all, everything, Saint Sulpice, the Folies-Bergère, the Musée de Cluny, the Nouvelle Athènes, the Comédie Française, the Bal Bullier, the Arc de Triomphe, the Luxembourg Gardens....

They close at sundown. My expression was the cue for him to continue, They'll be open tomorrow and any other day. They're just around the corner. You can go there when you get up in the morning, if you do get up in the morning. But what do you want to do tonight?

Anything! Everything! I cried.

Well, we'll eat first.

So we blew out the candles, floated down the dark stairs—I didn't really walk for a week, I am sure—, brushing on our way against a bearded student and a girl, fragrant and warm in the semi-blackness, out into the delicious night, with the fascinating indescribable odour of Paris, which ran the gamut from the fragrance of lilac and mimosa to the aroma of horse-dung; with the sound of horses' hoofs and rolling wheels beating and revolving on the cobble-stones, we made our way—I swear my feet never touched the ground—through the narrow, crooked, constantly turning, bewildering streets, until we came out on a broad boulevard before the Café d'Harcourt, where I was to eat my first Paris dinner.

The Café d'Harcourt is situated near the Church of the Sorbonne on the Boulevard Saint Michel, which you are more accustomed to see spelled Boul' Mich'. It is a big, brightly lighted café, with a broad terrasse, partially enclosed by a hedge of green bushes in boxes. The hands of the clock pointed to the hour of eight when we arrived and the tables all appeared to be occupied. Inside, groups of men were engaged in games of checkers, while the orchestra was performing selections from Louis Ganne's operetta, Les Saltimbanques. On the terrasse, each little table, covered with its white cloth, was lighted by a tiny lamp with a roseate shade, over which faces glowed. The bottles and dishes and silver all contributed their share to the warmth of the scene, and heaping bowls of peaches and pears and apples and little wood strawberries, ornamenting the sideboards, gave the place an almost sumptuous appearance. Later I learned that fruit was expensive in Paris and not to be tasted lightly. Victor Maurel has told me how, dining one night with the composer of The Barber, he was about to help himself to a peach from a silver platter in the centre of the table when the frugal Madame Rossini expostulated. Those are to look at, not to eat!

While we lingered on the outer sidewalk, a little comedy was enacted, through the dénouement of which we secured places. A youth, with wine in his head and love in his eyes, caressed the warm lips of an adorable girl. Save for the glasses of apéritifs from which they had been drinking, their table was bare. They had not yet dined. He clasped her tightly in his arms and kissed her, kissed her for what seemed to be a very long time but no one, except me, appeared to take any notice.

Look! I whispered to Albert. Look!

O! that's all right. You'll get used to that, he replied negligently.

Now the kiss was over and the two began to talk, very excitedly and rapidly, as French people are wont to talk. Then, impulsively, they rose from their chairs. The man threw a coin down on his napkin. I caught the glint of gold. He gathered his arms about the woman, a lovely pale blue creature, with torrid orange hair and a hat abloom with striated petunias. They were in the middle of the street when the waiter appeared, bearing a tray, laden with plates of sliced cucumbers, radishes and butter, and tiny crayfish, and a bottle of white wine. He stared in mute astonishment at the empty table, and then picked up the coin. Finally, he glanced towards the street and, observing the retreating pair, called after them:

Mais vous n'avez pas diné!

The man turned and shot his reply over his shoulder, Nous rentrons!

The crowd on the terrasse shrieked with delight. They applauded. Some even tossed flowers from the tables after the happy couple and we ... we sat down in the chairs they had relinquished. I am not certain that we did not eat the dinner they had ordered. At any rate we began with the cucumbers and radishes and écrevisses and a bottle of Graves Supérior.

That night in Paris I saw no Americans, at least no one seemed to be an American, and I heard no English spoken. How this came about I have no idea because it never occurred again. In fact, one meets more Americans in Paris than one does in New York and most of the French that I manage to speak I have picked up on the Island of Manhattan. During dinner I began to suspect a man without a beard, in a far corner, but Albert reassured me.

He is surely French, he said, because he is buttering his radishes.

It would be difficult to exaggerate my emotion: the white wine, the bearded French students, the exquisite women, all young and smiling and gay, all organdie and lace and sweet-peas, went to my head. I have spent many happy evenings in the Café d'Harcourt since that night. I have been there with Olive Fremstad, when she told me how, dressed as a serpent in bespangled Nile green, she had sung the finale of Salome to Edward VII in London, and one memorable Mardi-Gras night with Jane Noria, when, in a long raincoat which covered me from head to foot, standing on our table from time to time, I shouted, C'est l'heure fatale! and made as if to throw the raincoat aside but Noria, as if dreading the exposure, always dragged me down from the table, crying, No! No! until the carnival crowd, consumed with curiosity, pulled me into a corner, tore the raincoat away, and everything else too! There was another night, before the Bal des Quat'z Arts, when the café was filled with students and models in costume, and costume for the Quat'z Arts in those days, whatever it may be now, did not require the cutting out of many handkerchiefs. But the first night was the best and every other night a more or less pale reflection of that, always, indeed, coloured a little by the memory of it. So that today, when sometimes I am asked what café I prefer in Paris and I reply, the d'Harcourt, there are those who look at me a little pityingly and some even go so far as to ejaculate, O! that! but I know why it is my favourite.

Even a leisurely dinner ends at last, and I knew, as we sipped our coffee and green chartreuse and smoked our cigarettes, that this one must be over. After paying our very moderate addition, we strolled slowly away, to hop into an empty fiacre which stood on the corner a block down the boulevard. I lay back against the seat and gazed at the stars for a moment as the drive began through the warm, fragrant Paris air, the drive back to the right bank, this time across the Pont Neuf, down the Rue de Rivoli, through the Place de la Concorde, where the fountains were playing, and up the Champs-Elysées. The aroma of the chestnuts, the melting grey of the buildings, the legions of carriages and buses, filled with happy, chattering people, the glitter of electricity, all the mystic wonder of this enchanting night will always stay with me.

We drove to the Théâtre Marigny where we saw a revue; at least we were present at a revue; I do not remember to have seen or heard anything on the stage. Between the acts, we walked in the open foyer, at this theatre a sort of garden, and admired the cocottes, great ladies of some distant epoch, they seemed to me, in their toilets from Redfern and Doucet and Chéruit and Callot Sœurs, their hats from the Rue de la Paix and the Place Vendôme, their exceedingly elaborate and decoratively artificial complexions. Later, we sipped cassis on the balcony. It was Spring in Paris and I was young! The chestnut trees were heavy with white blossoms and the air was laden with their perfume. I gazed down the Champs-Elysées, surely the true Elysian Fields, a myriad of lights shining through the dark green, the black, leaved branches. I do not think I spoke many words and I know that Albert did not. He may have been bored, but I think he derived some slight pleasure from my juvenile enthusiasm for, although Paris was old hat to him, he loved this particular old hat.

We must have stopped somewhere for more drinks on the way home, perhaps at Weber's in the Rue Royale, where there was a gipsy band. I do not remember, but I am sure that it was nearly four in the morning when we drove up before the little hotel in the Place de l'Odéon and when, after we had paid the driver and dismissed him, I discovered to my astonishment that the door was locked. Albert assured me that this was the custom and that I must ring for the concierge. So I pulled the knob, and even outside we could hear the distant reverberations of the bell, but no reply came, and the door remained closed. It was Joseph's job to open the door and Joseph was asleep and refused to awaken. Again and again we pulled the cord, the bell tinkling in the vast silence, for the street was utterly deserted, but still no one came. At last we desisted, Albert suggesting that I go home with him. We walked a few paces until we came to the iron fence surrounding the Luxembourg Gardens and there, lying beside it, I espied a ladder, left by some negligent workman.

But my room is on the first floor. The window is open; it looks over the Place. I can enter with the ladder, I cried.

Albert, amused, helped me carry it back. Set up, it just reached the window and I swiftly scaled it and clambered into the room, waving my hand back to Albert, who hoisted the ladder to his shoulder as he started up the street trying to whistle, Viens Poupoule! but laughing to himself all the time, so that the tune cracked. As for me, I lighted one of my candles, undressed, threw the feather-bed off to the floor, and climbed into bed. Then I blew out the candle and soon fell asleep. It was the tenth of May, 1907, that I spent my first night in Paris.

Chapter II

It must have been nearly noon when I awakened and drew back the heavy curtains to let the sunlight into my room, as I have since seen so many French actresses do on the stage. I rang the bell, and when Joseph appeared, I asked for hot water, chocolate and rolls. Presently, he returned with a little can of tepid water and my breakfast on a tray. While I sponged myself, I listened to the cacophony of the street, the boys calling vegetables, the heavy rumbling of the buses on the rough pavement, the shrieking and tooting of the automobile sirens. Then I sipped my chocolate and munched my croissant, feeling very happy. My past had dropped from me like a crustacean's discarded shell. I was in Paris and it still seemed possible to live in Paris as I had been told that one lived there. It was exactly like the books.

After my breakfast, I dressed slowly, and wandered out, past the peristyle of the Odéon, where I afterwards spent so many contented hours searching for old plays, on through the now open gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, gaily sprinkled with children and their nounous, students and sweet girls, charming old ladies with lace caps on their heads and lace scarfs round their shoulders, and painters, working away at their canvases on easels. In the pool in front of the Senate, boys were launching their toy sloops and schooners and, a little further away on the gravel walk, other boys were engaged in the more active sport of diabolo. The gardens were ablaze with flowers but a classic order was maintained for which the stately rows of clipped limes furnished the leading note. The place seemed to have been created for pleasure. Even the dingy statues of the queens smiled at me. I sat on a bench, dreaming, until an old crone approached and asked me for a sou. I thought her a beggar until she returned the change from a fifty centimes piece which I had given her, explaining that one sou was the price of my seat. There were free seats too, I discovered after I had paid.

The Luxembourg Gardens have always retained their hold over my imagination. I never visit Paris without spending several hours there, sometimes in the bright morning light, sometimes in the late afternoon, when the military band plays dolent tunes, usually by Massenet, sometimes a spectator at one of the guignols and, very often in the autumn, when the leaves are falling, I sit silently on a bench before the Medici fountain, entirely unconscious of the passing of time. The Luxembourg Gardens always envelop me in a sentimental mood. Their atmosphere is softly poetic, old-fashioned, melancholy. I am near to tears now, merely thinking of them, and I am sure the tears came to my eyes even on that bright May morning fourteen years ago.

Did I, attracted by the strange name, lunch at the Deux-Magots? It is possible. I know that later I strolled down the Rue de Seine and along the quais, examining eighteenth century books, buying old numbers of l'Assiette au Beurre, and talking with the quaint vendors, most of them old men. Then I wandered up the Rue de Richelieu, studying the examples of fine bindings in the windows of the shops on either hand. About three o'clock, I mounted the impériale of a bus, not even asking where it was going. I didn't care. I descended before the gate of the Parc Monceau and passed a few happy moments in the presence of the marble lady in a dress of the nineties, who reads Guy de Maupassant in the shadow of his bust, and a few more by the Naumachie, the oval pool, flanked by a semi-circular Corinthian colonnade in a state of picturesque ruin.

At a quarter before four, I left the parc and, hailing a fiacre, bade the driver take me to Martha Baker's studio in the Avenue Victor Hugo, where I had an appointment. Martha was painting my portrait. She had begun work on the picture in Chicago the year before but when I went to New York, she went to Paris. So it was still unfinished and I had promised to come to her for more sittings. Now, in Chicago, Martha noted that I grew restless on the model-stand and she had found it expedient to ask people in to talk to me, so that my face would not become dead and sullen. There, I usually knew the people she would ask, but it occurred to me, as I was driving to her door, that in Paris I knew no one, so that, if she followed her habit, I would see new faces.

The cocher stopped his horse before an old stone house and I entered. Challenged by the concierge, I asked for Mademoiselle Bahker, and was directed to go through the courtyard into a back passageway, up the stairs, where I would find Mademoiselle Bahker, troisième à gauche. I followed these instructions and knocked at the door. Martha, herself, opened it.

Oh, Carl, it's you! I'm so glad to see you!

Martha had not changed. She and even her studio were much as they had been in Chicago. She is dead now, dead possibly of a broken heart; certainly she was never happy. Her Insouciance, the portrait of Elizabeth Buehrmann, in a green cloth dress trimmed with fur, and a miniature or two hang in the Art Institute in Chicago, but during her lifetime she never received the kind of appreciation she really craved. She had an uncanny talent for portraiture, a talent which in some respects I have never seen equalled by any of her coevals. Artists, as a matter of fact, generally either envied or admired her. Her peculiar form of genius lay in the facility with which she caught her sitters' weaknesses. Possibly this is the reason she did not sell more pictures, for her models were frequently dissatisfied. It was exasperating, doubtless, to find oneself caught in paint on canvas against an unenviable immortality. Her sitters were exposed, so to speak; petty vices shone forth; Martha almost idealized the faults of her subjects. It would be impossible for the model to strut or pose before one of her pictures. It told the truth. Sargent caught the trick once. I have been informed that a physician diagnosed the malady of an American lady, his patient, after studying Sargent's portrait of her.

Martha should have painted our presidents, our mayors, our politicians, our authors, our college presidents, and our critics. Posterity might have learned more from such portraits than from volumes of psychoanalytic biography. But most of her sitters were silly Chicago ladies, not particularly weak because they were not particularly strong. On the few occasions on which in her capacity as an artist she had faced character, her brushes unerringly depicted something beneath the surface. She tore away men's masks and, with a kind of mystic understanding, painted their insides. How it was done, I don't know. Probably she herself didn't know. Many an artist is ignorant of the secret of his own method. If I had ascribed this quality to Martha during her lifetime, which I never did, she might not have taken it as praise. It may not, indeed, have been her ambition, although truth was undoubtedly her ambition. Speculation aside, this was no art for Chicago. I doubt, indeed, if it would have been popular anywhere, for men the world over are alike in this, that they not only prefer to be painted in masks, they even want the artist to flatter the mask a bit.

The studio, I observed at once, was a little arty, a little more arty than a painter's studio usually is. It was arranged, of that there could be no doubt. There were, to be sure, canvases stacked against the wall in addition to those which were hanging, but they had been stacked with a crafty hand, one indubious of its effect. For the rest, the tables and couches were strewn with brocades and laces, and lilacs and mimosa bloomed in brown and blue and green earthenware bowls on the tables. Later, I knew that marigolds and zinnias would replace these and, later still, violets and gardenias. On an easel stood my unfinished portrait and a palette and a box of paints lay on a stool nearby.

Martha herself wore a soft, clinging, dark-green woolen dress, almost completely covered by a brown denim painter's blouse. Her hair was her great glory, long, reddish gold Mélisande hair which, when uncoiled, hung far below her knees, but today it was knotted loosely on top of her head. Her face, keen and searching, wore an expression that might be described as wistful; discontent lurked somewhere between her eyes and her mouth. Her complexion was sallow and she wore eye-glasses.

There was some one else present, a girl, sitting in a shadowy corner, who rose as I entered. A strong odour of Cœur de Jeannette hovered about her. She was an American. She was immediately introduced as Miss Clara Barnes of Chicago, but I would have known she was an American had she not been so introduced. She wore a shirt-waist and skirt. She had very black hair, parted in the middle, a face that it would have been impossible to remember ten minutes and which now, although I have seen her many times since, I have completely forgotten, and very thick ankles. I gathered presently that she was in Paris to study singing as were so many girls like her. Very soon, I sized her up as the kind of girl who thinks that antimacassars are ottomans, that tripe is a variety of fish, that Così Fan Tutte is an Italian ice cream, that the pope's nose is a nasal appendage which has been blessed by the head of the established church, that The Beast in the Jungle is an animal story, and that when one says Arthur Machen one means Harry Mencken.

Well, we'd best begin, said Martha. It's late.

Isn't it too late? I was rather surprised when you asked me to come in the afternoon.

Martha smiled but there was a touch of petulance in her reply: I knew you wouldn't get up very early the morning after your first night in Paris, and I knew if I didn't get you here today there would be small chance of getting you here at all. If you come again, of course it will be in the morning.

I climbed to the model-chair, seated myself, grasped the green book that was part of the composition, and automatically assumed that woebegone expression that is worn by all amateurs who pose for their portraits.

That won't do at all, said Martha. I asked Clara to come here to amuse you.

Clara tried. She told me that she was studying Manon and that she had been to the Opéra-Comique fifteen times to hear the opera.

Garden is all wrong in it, all wrong, she continued. In the first place she can't sing. Of course she's pretty, but she's not my idea of Manon at all. I will really sing the part and act it too.

A month or two later, while we munched sandwiches and drank beer between the acts of Tristan und Isolde in the foyer of the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich, Olive Fremstad introduced me to an American girl, who informed me that a new Isolde had been born that day.

I shall be the great Isolde, she remarked casually, and her name, I gathered, when I asked Madame Fremstad to repeat it, was Minnie Saltzmann-Stevens.

But on the day that Clara spoke of her future triumphs in Manon, I had yet to become accustomed to this confidence with which beginners in the vocal art seem so richly endowed, a confidence which is frequently disturbed by circumstances for, as George Moore has somewhere said, our dreams and our circumstances are often in conflict. Later, I discovered that every unsuccessful singer believes, and asserts, that Geraldine Farrar is instrumental in preventing her from singing at the Metropolitan Opera House. On this day, I say, I was unaware of this peculiarity in vocalists but I was interested in the name she had let slip, a name I had never before heard.

Who is Garden? I asked.

You don't know Mary Garden! exclaimed Martha.

There! shrieked Clara. There! I told you so. No one outside of Paris has ever even heard of the woman.

Well, they've heard of her here, said Martha, quietly, pinching a little worm of cobalt blue from a tube. She's the favourite singer of the Opéra-Comique. She is an American and she sings Louise and Manon and Traviata and Mélisande and Aphrodite, especially Aphrodite.

She's singing Aphrodite tonight, said Miss Barnes.

And what is she like? I queried.

Well, Clara began dubiously, she is said to be like Sybil Sanderson but, of course, Sanderson had a voice and, she hurried on, you know even Sanderson never had any success in New York.

I recalled, only too readily, how Manon with Jean de Reszke, Pol Plançon, and Sybil Sanderson in the cast had failed in the nineties at the Metropolitan Opera House, and I admitted as much to Clara.

But would this be true today? I pondered.

Certainly, advanced Clara. America doesn't want French singers. They never know how to sing.

But you are studying in Paris.

The girl began to look discomfited.

With an Italian teacher, she asseverated.

It delighted me to be able to add, I think Sanderson studied with Sbriglia and Madame Marchesi.

Your face is getting very hard, cried Martha in despair.

I think he is very rude, exclaimed the outraged and contumacious Miss Barnes, with a kind of leering acidity. He doesn't seem to know the difference between tradition and impertinent improvisation. He doesn't see that singing at the Opéra or the Opéra-Comique with a lot of rotten French singers would ruin anybody who didn't have training enough to stand out against this influence, singing utterly unmusical parts like Mélisande, too, parlando rôles calculated to ruin any voice. Maeterlinck won't even go to hear the opera, it's so rotten. I wonder how much Mr. Van Vechten knows about music anyway?

Very little, I remarked mildly.

O! wailed Martha, you're not entertaining Carl at all and I can't paint when you squabble. Carl's very nice. Why can't you be agreeable, Clara? What is the matter?

Miss Barnes disdained to reply. She drew herself into a sort of sulk, crossing her thick ankles massively. The scent of Cœur de Jeannette seemed to grow heavier. Within bounds, I was amused by her display of emotion but I was also bored. My face must have showed it. Martha worked on for a moment or two and then flung down her brushes.

It's no good, no good at all, she announced. You have no expression today. I can't get behind your mask. Your face is completely empty.

And, I may add, as this was the last day that Martha ever painted on this portrait, she never did get behind the mask. To that extent I triumphed, and the picture still exists to confuse people as to my real personality. It is as empty as if it had been painted by Boldini or McEvoy. Fortunately for her future reputation in this regard, Martha had already painted a portrait of me which is sufficiently revealing.

I must have stretched and yawned at this point, for Martha looked cross, when a welcome interruption occurred in the form of a knock at the door. Martha walked across the room. As she opened the door, directly opposite where I was sitting, I saw the slender figure of a young man, perhaps twenty-one years old. He was carefully dressed in a light grey suit with a herring-bone pattern, and wore a neck-scarf of deep blue. He carried a stick and buckskin gloves in one hand and a straw hat in the other.

Why, it's Peter! cried Martha. I wish you had come sooner.

This is Peter Whiffle, she said, leading him into the room and then, as he extended his hand to me, You know Clara Barnes.

He turned away to bow but I had already caught his interesting face, his deep blue eyes that shifted rather uneasily but at the same time remained honest and frank, his clear, simple expression, his high brow, his curly, blue-black hair, carefully parted down the centre of his head. He spoke to me at once.

Martha has said a good deal, perhaps too much about you. Still, I have wanted to meet you.

You must tell me who you are, I replied.

I should have told you, only you just arrived, Martha put in. I had no idea that Peter would come in today. He is the American Flaubert or Anatole France or something. He is writing a book. What is your book about, Peter?

Whiffle smiled, drew out a cigarette-case of Toledo work, extracted a cigarette from it, and said, I haven't the slightest idea. Then, as if he thought this might be construed as rudeness, or false modesty, or a rather viscous attempt at secrecy, he added, I really haven't, not the remotest. I want to talk to you about it.... That's why I wanted to meet you. Martha says that you know ... well, that you know.

You really should be painting Mr. Van Vechten now, said Clara Barnes, with a trace of malice. He has the right expression.

I hope I haven't interrupted your work, said Peter.

No, I'm through today, Martha rejoined. We're neither of us in the mood. Besides it's absurd to try to paint in this light.

Painting, Peter went on, is not any easier than writing. Always the search for—for what? he asked suddenly, turning to me.

For truth, I suppose, I replied.

I thought you would say that but that's not what I meant, that's not at all what I meant.

This logogriph rather concluded that subject, for Peter did not explain what it was that he did mean. Neither did he wear a conscious air of obfuscation. He rambled on about many things, spoke of new people, new books, new music, and he also mentioned Mary Garden.

I have heard of Mary Garden for the first time today, I said, and I am beginning to be interested.

You haven't seen her? demanded Peter. But she is stupendous, soul, body, imagination, intellect, everything! How few there are. A lyric Mélisande, a caressing Manon, a throbbingly wicked Chrysis. She is the cult in Paris and the Opéra-Comique is the Temple where she is worshipped. I think some day this new religion will be carried to America. He stopped. Let me see, what am I doing tonight? O! yes, I know. I won't do that. Will you go with me to hear Aphrodite?

Of course, I will. I have just come to Paris and I want to do and hear and see everything.

Well, we'll go, he announced, but I noted that his tone was curiously indecisive. We'll go to dinner first.

You're not going to dinner yet? Martha demanded rather querulously.

Not quite yet. Then, turning to Clara, How's the Voice?

It was my first intimation that Clara had thus symbolized her talent in the third person. People were not expected to refer to her as Clara or Miss Barnes; she was the Voice.

The Voice is doing very well indeed, Clara, now quite mollified, rejoined. I'm studying Manon, and if you like Mary Garden, wait until you hear me!

Peter continued to manipulate Clara with the proper address. The conversation bubbled or languished, I forget which; at any rate, a half hour or so later, Peter and I were seated in a taxi-cab, bound for Foyot's where he had decided we would dine; at least I thought he had decided, but soon he seemed doubtful.

Foyot's, Foyot's, he rolled the name meditatively over on his tongue. I don't know....

We leaned back against the seat and drank in the soft air. I don't think that we talked very much. The cocher was driving over the bridge of Alexandre III with its golden horses gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight when Peter bent forward and addressed him,

Allez au Café Anglais.

Where meant nothing to me, but I was a little surprised at his hesitation. The cocher changed his route, grumbling a bit, for he was out of his course.

I don't know why I ever suggested Foyot, said Peter, or the Café Anglais either. We'll go to the Petit Riche.

Chapter III

If the reader has been led to expect a chapter devoted to an account of Mary Garden in Aphrodite, he will be disappointed. I did not see Mary Garden that evening, nor for many evenings thereafter, and I do not remember, indeed, that Peter Whiffle ever referred to her again. We dined at a quiet little restaurant, Boilaive by name, near the Folies-Bergère. The interior, as bare of decoration as are most such interiors in Paris, where the food and wines are given more consideration than the mural paintings, was no larger than that of a small shop. My companion led me straight to a tiny winding staircase in one corner, which we ascended, and presently we found ourselves in a private room, with three tables in it, to be sure, but two of these remained unoccupied. We began our dinner with escargots à la bordelaise, which I was eating for the first time, but I have never been squeamish about novel food. A man with a broad taste in food is inclined to be tolerant in regard to everything. Also, when he begins to understand the cooking of a nation, he is on the way to an understanding of the nation itself. There were many other dishes, but I particularly remember a navarin because Peter spoke of it, pointing out that every country has one dish in which it is honourable to put whatever is left over in the larder. In China (or out of it, in Chinese restaurants), this dish is called chop suey; in Ireland, Irish stew; in Spain, olla or puchero; in France, ragoût or navarin; in Italy, minestra; and in America, hash. We lingered over such matters, getting acquainted, so to speak, passing through the polite stages of early conversation, slipping beyond the poses that one unconsciously assumes with a new friend. I think I did most of the talking, although Whiffle told me that he had come from Ohio, that he was in Paris on a sort of mission, something to do with literature, I gathered. We ate and drank slowly and it must have been nearly ten when he paid the bill and we drove away, this time to Fouquet's, an open-air restaurant in the Champs-Elysées, where we sat on the broad terrasse and drank many bocks, so many, indeed, that by the time we had decided to settle our account, the saucers in front of us were piled almost to our chins. We should probably have remained there all night, had he not suggested that I go to his rooms with him. That night, my second in Paris, I would have gone anywhere with any one. But there was that in Peter Whiffle which had awakened both my interest and my curiosity for I, too, had the ambition to write, and it seemed to me possible that I was in the presence of a writing man, an author.

We entered another taxi-auto or fiacre, I don't remember and it doesn't matter, there were so many peregrinations in those days, and we drove to an apartment house in a little street near the Rue Blanche. The house being modern, there was an ascenseur and I experienced for the first time the thrill of one of those little personally conducted lifts, in which you press your own button and take your own chances. Since that night I have had many strange misadventures with these intransigent elevators, but on this occasion, miraculously, the machine stopped at the fourth floor, as it had been bidden, and soon we were in the sitting-room of Whiffle's apartment, a room which I still remember, although subsequently I have been in half a dozen of his other rooms in various localities.

It was very orderly, this room, although not exactly arranged, at any rate not arranged like Martha's studio, as if to set object against object and colour against colour. It was a neat little ivory French room, with a white fire-place, picked in gold, surmounted by a gilt clock and Louis XVI candlesticks. There were charming aquatints on the ivory walls and chairs and tables of the Empire period. The tables were laden with neat piles of pamphlets. Beside a type-writer, was ranged a heap of note-books at least a foot high and stacked on the floor in one corner there were other books, formidable-looking volumes of weight and heft, "thick bulky octavos with cut-and-come-again expressions," apparently dictionaries and lexicons. An orange Persian cat lay asleep in one of the chairs as we entered, but he immediately stretched himself, extending his noble paws, yawning and arching his back, and then came forward to greet us, purring.

Hello, George! cried Whiffle, as the cat waved his magnificent red tail back and forth and rubbed himself against Peter's leg.

George? I queried.

Yes, that's George Moore. He goes everywhere with me in a basket, when I travel, and he is just as contented in Toledo as he is in Paris, anywhere there is raw meat to be had. Places mean nothing to him. My best friend.

I sat in one of the chairs and lit a cigarette. Peter brought out a bottle of cognac and a couple of glasses. He threw open the shutters and the soft late sounds of the city filtered in with the fresh spring air. One could just hear the faint tinkle of an orchestra at some distant bal.

I like you, Van Vechten, my host began at last, and I've got to talk to somebody. My work has just begun and there's so much to say about it. Tell me to stop when you get tired.... In a way, I want to know what you think; in another way, it helps me merely to talk, in the working out of my ideas. But who was there to talk to, I mean before you came? I can see that you may be interested in what I am trying to do, good God! in what I will do! I've done a lot already....

You have begun your book then?

Well, you might say so, but I haven't written a line. I've collected the straw; the bricks will come. I've not been idle. You see those catalogues?

I nodded.

He fumbled them over. Then, without a break, with a strange glow of exhilaration on his pale ethereal face, his eyes flashing, his hands gesticulating, his body swaying, marching up and down the room, he recited with a crescendo which mounted to a magnificent fortissimo in the coda:

Perfumery catalogues: Coty, Houbigant, Atkinson, Rigaud, Rue de la Paix, Bond Street, Place Vendôme, Regent Street, Nirvana, Chypre, Sakountala, Ambre, Après l'Ondée, Quelques Fleurs, Fougère Royale, Myrbaha, Yavahnah, Gaudika, Délices de Péra, Cœur de Jeannette, Djer Kiss, Jockey-Club, and the Egyptian perfumes, Myrrh and Kyphy. Did you know that Richelieu lived in an atmosphere heavily laden with the most pungent perfumes to inflame his sexual imagination? Automobile catalogues: Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Ford, tires, self-starters, limousines, carburettors, gas. Jewellery catalogues: heaps of 'em, all about diamonds and platinum, chrysoprase and jade, malachite and chalcedony, amethysts and garnets, and the emerald, the precious stone which comes the nearest to approximating that human manifestation known as art, because it always has flaws; red jasper, sacred to the rosy god, Bacchus, the green plasma, blood-stone, cornelian, cat's-eye, amber, with its medicinal properties, the Indian jewels, spinels, the reddish orange jacinth, and the violet almandine. Did you know that the Emperor Claudius used to clothe himself in smaragds and sardonyx stones and that Pope Paul II died of a cold caught from the weight and chill of the rings which loaded his aged fingers? Are you aware that the star-topaz is as rare as a Keutschacher Rubentaler of the year 1504? Yonder is a volume which treats of the glyptic lore. In it you may read of the Assyrian cylinders fashioned from red and green serpentine, the Egyptian scarabei, carved in steaschist; you may learn of the seal-cutters of Nineveh and of the Signet of Sennacherib, now preserved in the British Museum. Do you know that a jewel engraved with Hercules at the fountain was deposited in the tomb of the Frankish King Childeric at Tournay? Do you know of Mnesarchus, the Tyrrhene gem-cutter, who practised his art at Samos? Have you seen the Julia of Evodus, engraved in a giant aquamarine, or the Byzantine topaz, carved with the figure of the blind bow-boy, sacrificing the Psyche-butterfly, or the emerald signet of Polycrates, with the lyre cut upon it, or the Etruscan peridot representing a sphinx scratching her ear with her hind paw, or the sapphire, discovered in a disused well at Hereford, in which the head of the Madonna has been chiseled, with the inscription, round the beasil, in Lombard letters, TECTA LEGE LECTA TEGE, or the jacinth engraved with the triple face of Baphomet, with a legend of darkly obscene purport? The breastplate of the Jewish High Priest had its oracular gems, which were the Urim and Thummim. Apollonius Tyaneus, the sorcerer, for the purposes of his enchantments, wore special rings with appropriate stones for each day of the week. Also, in this curious book, and others which you may examine, such as George III's Dactyliotheca Smithiana (Venice; 1767), you will find some account of the gems of the Gnostics: an intaglio in a pale convex plasma, carved with the Chnuphis Serpent, raising himself aloft, with the seven vowels, the elements of his name, above; another jewel engraved with the figure of the jackal-headed Anubis, the serpent with the lion's head, the infant Horus, seated on the lotus, the cynocephalus baboon, and the Abraxas-god, Iao, created from the four elements; an Egyptian seal of the god, Harpocrates, seated on the mystic lotus, in adoration of the Yoni; and an esoteric green jasper amulet in the form of a dragon, surrounded by rays. Florists' catalogues: strangely wicked cyclamens, meat-eating begonias, beloved of des Esseintes (Henri Matisse grows these peccant plants in his garden and they suggest his work), shaggy chrysanthemums, orchids, green, white, and mauve, the veined salpiglossis, the mournful, rich-smelling tube-rose, all the mystic blossoms adored by Robert de la Condamine's primitive, tortured, orgiastic saints in The Double Garden, marigolds and daisies, the most complex and the most simple flowers of all, hypocritical fuchsias, and calceolaria, sacred to la bella Cenerentola. Reaper catalogues: you know, the McCormicks and the Middle West. Porcelain catalogues: Rookwood, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, Delft, the quaint, clean, heavy, charming Brittany ware, Majolica, the wondrous Chinese porcelains, self-colour, sang de bœuf, apple of roses, peach-blow, Sèvres, signed with the fox of Emile Renard, or the eye of Pajou, or the little house of Jean-Jacques Anteaume. Furniture catalogues: Adam and Louis XV, Futurist, Empire, Venetian and Chinese, Poincaré and Grand Rapids. Art-dealers' catalogues: Félicien Rops and Jo Davidson, Renoir and Franz Hals, Cranach and Picasso, Manet and Carpaccio. Book-dealers' catalogues: George Borrow, Thomas Love Peacock, Ambrose Bierce, William Beckford, Robert Smith Surtees, Francis William Bain. Do you know the true story of Ambrose Gwinett, related by Oliver Goldsmith: the fellow who, having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared his bed-chamber at a tavern, revived in the night, shipped at sea as a sailor, and later met on a vessel the man for whose murder he had been hung? Gwinett's supposed victim had been attacked during the night with a severe bleeding of the nose, had risen and left the house for a walk by the sea-wall, and had been shanghaied. Catalogues of curious varieties of cats: Australian, with long noses and long hind-legs, like kangaroos, Manx cats without any tails and chocolate and fawn Siamese cats with sapphire eyes, the cacodorous Russian blue cats, and male tortoise-shells. Catalogues of tinshops: tin plates, tin cups, and can-openers. Catalogues of laces: Valenciennes and Cluny and Chantilly and double-knot, Punto in Aria, a Spanish lace of the sixteenth century, lace constructed of human hair or aloe fibre, Point d'Espagne, made by Jewesses. Catalogues of toys: an engine that spreads smoke in the air, as it runs around a track with a circumference of eight feet, a doll that cries, Uncle! Uncle! a child's opium set. Catalogues of operas: Marta and Don Pasquale, Der Freischütz and Mefistofele, Simon Bocanegra and La Dolores. Cook-Books: Mrs. Pennell's The Feasts of Autolycus, a grandiose treatise on the noblest of the arts, wherein you may read of the amorous adventures of The Triumphant Tomato and the Incomparable Onion, Mr. Finck's Food and Flavour, the gentle Abraham Hayward on The Art of Dining, the biography of Vatel, the super-cook who killed himself because the fish for the king's dinner were missing, Mrs. Glasse's Cookery, which Dr. Johnson boasted that he could surpass, and, above all, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du Goût. Catalogues of harness, bits and saddles. Catalogues of cigarettes: Dimitrinos and Melachrinos, Fatimas and Sweet Caporals. Catalogues of liqueurs: Danziger Goldwasser and Crème Yvette, Parfait Amour, as tanagrine as the blood in the sacred altar chalice. Catalogues of paints: yellow ochre and gamboge, burnt sienna and Chinese vermilion. Catalogues of hats: derbies and fedoras, straw and felt hats, top-hats and caps, sombreros, tam-o'shanters, billycocks, shakos and tarbooshes....

He stopped, breathless with excitement, demanding, What do you think of that?

I don't know what to think....

I'm sure you don't. That isn't all. There are dictionaries and lexicons, not only German, English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, but also Hebrew, Persian, Magyar, Chinese, Zend, Sanscrit, Hindustani, Negro dialects, French argot, Portuguese, American slang, and Pennsylvania Dutch.

And what are those curious pamphlets?

He lifted a few and read off the titles:

A study of the brain of the late Major J.W. Powell.

A study of the anatomic relations of the optic nerve to the accessory cavities of the nose.

On regeneration in the pigmented skin of the frog and on the character of the chromatophores.

The chondrocranium of an embryo pig.

Morphology of the parthogenetic development of amphitrite.

Note on the influence of castration on the weight of the brain and spinal cord in the albino rat.

There are, he added solemnly, many strange words in these pamphlets, not readily to be found elsewhere.

Now Peter pointed to the pile of note-books on the table.

These are my note-books. I have ranged Paris for my material. For days I have walked in the Passage des Panoramas and the Rue St. Honoré, making lists of every object in the windows. In the case of books I have described the bindings. I have stopped before the shops of fruit vendors, antique dealers, undertakers, jewellers, and fashioners of artificial flowers. I have spent so much time in the Galeries Lafayette and the Bon Marché that I have probably been mistaken for a shoplifter. These books are full of results. What do you think of it?

But what is all this for?

For my work, of course. For my work.

I can't imagine, I began almost in a whisper, I was so astonished, what you do, what you are going to do. Are you writing an encyclopedia?

No, my intention is not to define or describe, but to enumerate. Life is made up of a collection of objects, and the mere citation of them is sufficient to give the reader a sense of form and colour, atmosphere and style. And form, style, manner in literature are everything; subject is nothing. Nothing whatever, he added impressively, after a pause. Do you know what Buffon wrote: Style is the only passport to posterity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some little known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter, that will insure immortality. Recall the great writers, Théophile Gautier, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris Huysmans, Oscar Wilde: they all used this method, catalogues, catalogues, catalogues! All great art is a matter of cataloguing life, summing it up in a list of objects. This is so true that the commercial catalogues themselves are almost works of art. Their only flaw is that they pause to describe. If it only listed objects, without defining them, a dealer's catalogue would be as precious as a book by Gautier.

During this discourse, George Moore, the orange cat, had been wandering around, rather restlessly, occasionally gazing at Peter with a semi-quizzical expression and an absurd cock of the ears. At some point or other, however, he had evidently arrived at the conclusion that this extra display of emotion on the part of his human companion boded him no evil and, having satisfied himself in this regard, he leaped lightly to the mantelshelf, circled his enormous bulk miraculously around three or four times on the limited space at his disposal, and sank into a profound slumber when, probably, with dreams of garrets full of lazy mice, his ears and his tail, which depended a foot below the shelf, began to twitch.

Peter continued to talk: d'Aurevilly wrote his books in different coloured inks. It was a wonderful idea. Black ink would never do to describe certain scenes, certain objects. I can imagine an entire book written in purple, or green, or blood-red, but the best book would be written in many colours. Consider, for a moment, the distinction between purple and violet, shades which are cousins: the one suggests the most violent passions or something royal or papal, the other a nunnery or a widow, or a being bereft of any capacity for passion.

Henry James should write his books in white ink on white paper and, by a system of analogy, you can very well see that Rider Haggard should write his books in white ink on black paper. Pale ideas, obviously expressed. Gold! Think what you could do with gold! If silence is golden, surely the periods, the commas, the semicolons, and dashes should be of gold. But not only the stops could gleam and shine; whole silent pages might glitter. And blue, bright blue; what more suggestive colour for the writer than bright blue?

Not only should manuscripts be written in multi-coloured inks, but they should be written on multi-coloured papers, and then they should be printed in multi-coloured inks on multi-coloured papers. The art of book-making, in the sense that the making of a book is part of its authorship, part of its creation, is not even begun.

The sculptor is not satisfied with moulding his idea in clay; he gives it final form in marble or malachite or jade or bronze. Many an author, however, having completed work on his manuscript, is content to allow his publisher to choose the paper, the ink, the binding, the typography: all, obviously, part of the author's task. It is the publisher's wish, no doubt, to issue the book as cheaply as possible, and to this end he will make as many books after the same model as he practicably can. But every book should have a different appearance from every other book. Every book should have the aspect to which its ideas give birth. The form of the material should dictate the form of the binding. Who but a fool, for example, would print and bind Lavengro and Roderick Hudson in a similar manner? And yet that is just what publishers will do if they are let alone.

Peter had become so excited that he had awakened George Moore, who now descended from the mantelpiece and sought the seclusion of a couch in the corner where, after a few abortive licks at his left hind-leg, and a pretence of scrubbing his ears, he again settled into sleep. As for me, I listened, entranced, and as the night before I had discovered Paris, it seemed to me now that I was discovering the secrets of the writer's craft and I determined to go forth in the morning with a note-book, jotting down the names of every object I encountered.

I must have been somewhat bewildered for I repeated a question I had asked before:

Have you written anything yet?

Not yet.... I am collecting my materials. It may take me considerably longer to collect what I shall require for a very short book.

What is the book to be about?

Van Vechten, Van Vechten, you are not following me! he cried, and he again began to walk up and down the little room. What is the book to be about? Why, it is to be about the names of the things I have collected. It is to be about three hundred pages, he added triumphantly. That is what it is to be about, about three hundred pages, three hundred pages of colour and style and lists, lists of objects, all jumbled artfully. There isn't a moral, or an idea, or a plot, or even a character. There's to be no propaganda or preaching, or violence, or emotion, or even humour. I am not trying to imitate Dickens or Dostoevsky. They did not write books; they wrote newspapers. Art eliminates all such rubbish. Art has nothing to do with ideas. Art is abstract. When art becomes concrete it is no longer art. Thank God, I know what I want to do! Thank God, I haven't wasted my time admiring hack work! Thank God, I can start in at once constructing a masterpiece! Why a list of passengers sailing on the Kronprinz Wilhelm is more nearly a work of art than a novel by Thomas Hardy! What is there in that? Anybody can do it. Where is the arrangement, the colour, the form? Hardy merely photographs life!

But aren't you trying to photograph still life?

Peter's face was almost purple; I thought he would burst a blood-vessel.

Don't you understand that perfumes and reaping-machines are never to be found together in real life? That is art, making a pattern, dragging unfamiliar words and colours and sounds together until they form a pattern, a beautiful pattern. An Aubusson carpet is art, and it is assuredly not a photograph of still life.... Art....

I don't know how much more of this there was but, when Peter finally stopped talking, the sunlight was streaming in through the window.

Chapter IV

It was many days before I saw Peter again. I met other men and women. I visited the Louvre and at first stood humbly in the Salon Carré before the Monna Lisa and in the long corridor of the Venus de Milo; a little later, I became thuriferous before Sandro Botticelli's frescoes from the Villa Lemmi and Watteau's Pierrot. I made a pilgrimage to the Luxembourg Gallery and read Huysmans's evocation of the picture before Moreau's Salome. I sat in the tiny old Roman arena, Lutetia's amphitheatre, constructed in the second or third century, and conjured up visions of lions and Christian virgins. I drank tea at the Pavilion d'Armenonville in the Bois and I bought silk handkerchiefs of many colours at the Galeries Lafayette. I began to carry my small change in a pig-skin purse and I learned to look out for bad money. Every morning I called for mail at the American Express Company in the Rue Scribe. I ate little wild strawberries with Crème d'Isigny. I bought old copies of l'Assiette au Beurre on the quais and new copies of Le Sourire at kiosques. I heard Werther at the Opéra-Comique and I saw Lina Cavalieri in Thaïs at the Opéra. I made journeys to Versailles, Saint Cloud, and Fontainebleau. I inspected the little hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died and I paid my respects to his tomb in Père-Lachaise. The fig-leaf was missing from the heroic figure on the monument. It had been stolen, the cemetery-guard informed me, par une jeune miss anglaise, who desired a souvenir. I drank champagne cocktails, sitting on a stool, at the American bar in the Grand Hotel. I drank whisky and soda, ate salted nuts, and talked with English racing men at Henry's bar, under the delightful brown and yellow mural decorations, exploiting ladies of the 1880 period with bangs, and dresses with bustles, and over-drapings, and buttons down the front. I enjoyed long bus rides and I purchased plays in the arcades of the Odéon. I went to the races at Chantilly. I drank cocktails at Louis's bar in the Rue Racine. Louis Doerr, the patron, had worked as a bar-man in Chicago and understood the secrets of American mixed drinks. Doubtless, he could have made a Fireman's Shirt. He divided his time between his little bar and his atelier, where he gave boxing lessons to the students of the quarter. When he was teaching the manly art, Madame Doerr manipulated the shaker. I attended services at Les Hannetons and Maurice's Bar and I strolled through the Musée de Cluny, where I bought postcards of chastity belts and instruments of torture. I read Maupassant in the Parc Monceau. I took in the naughty revues at Parisiana, the Ba-ta-clan, and the Folies-Bergère. I purchased many English and American novels in the Tauchnitz edition and I discovered a miniature shop in the Rue de Furstenberg, where elegant reprints of bawdy eighteenth century French romances might be procured. I climbed to the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, particularly to observe a chimère which was said to resemble me, and I ascended the Tour Eiffel in an elevator. I consumed hors d'œuvres at the Brasserie Universelle. I attended a band concert in the Tuileries Gardens. I dined with Olive Fremstad at the Mercedes and Olive Fremstad dined with me at the Café d'Harcourt. I heard Salome at the Châtelet, Richard Strauss conducting, with Emmy Destinn as the protagonist in a modest costume, trimmed with fur, which had been designed, it was announced, by the Emperor of Germany. I discovered the Restaurant Cou-Cou, which I have described in The Merry-Go-Round, and I made pilgrimages to the Rat Mort, the Nouvelle Athènes, and the Elysée Montmartre, sacred to the memory of George Moore. They appeared to have altered since he confessed as a young man. I stood on a table at the Bal Tabarin and watched the quadrille, the pas de quatre, concluding with the grand écart, which was once sinister and wicked but which has come, through the portentous solemnity with which tradition has invested it, to have almost a religious significance. I learned to drink Amer Picon, grenadine, and white absinthe. I waited three hours in the street before Liane de Pougy's hotel in the Rue de la Néva to see that famous beauty emerge to take her drive, and I waited nearly as long at the stage-door of the Opéra-Comique for a glimpse of the exquisite Regina Badet. I embarked on one of the joyous little Seine boats and I went slumming in the Place d'Italie, La Villette, a suburb associated in the memory with the name of Yvette Guilbert, and Belleville. I saw that very funny farce, Vous n'avez rien à declarer at the Nouveautés. In the Place des Vosges, I admired the old brick houses, among the few that Napoleon and the Baron Haussmann spared in their deracination of Paris. On days when I felt poor, I dined with the cochers at some marchand de vins. On days when I felt rich, I dined with the cocottes at the Café de Paris. I examined the collection of impressionist paintings at the house of Monsieur Durand-Ruel, No. 37, Rue de Rome, and the vast accumulation of unfinished sketches for a museum of teratology at the house of Gustave Moreau, No. 14, Rue de La Rochefoucauld, room after room of unicorns, Messalinas, muses, magi, Salomes, sphinxes, argonauts, centaurs, mystic flowers, chimerae, Semeles, hydras, Magdalens, griffins, Circes, ticpolongas, and crusaders. I drank tea in the Ceylonese tea-room in the Rue Caumartin, where coffee-hued Orientals with combs in their hair waited on the tables. I gazed longingly into the show-windows of the shops where Toledo cigarette-cases, Bohemian garnets, and Venetian glass goblets were offered for sale. I bought a pair of blue velvet workman's trousers, a béret, and a pair of canvas shoes at Au Pays, 162 Faubourg St. Martin. I often enjoyed my chocolate and omelet at the Café de la Régence, where everybody plays chess or checkers and has played chess or checkers for a century or two, and where the actors of the Comédie Française, which is just across the Place, frequently, during a rehearsal, come in their make-up for lunch. I learned the meaning of flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette, and rigolo. I purchased a dirty silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV brass candlesticks, which I still possess, in the Marché du Temple. I tasted babas au rhum, napoléons, and palmiers. I ordered a suit, which I never wore, from a French tailor for 150 francs. I bought some Brittany ware in an old shop back of Notre-Dame. I admired the fifteenth century apocalyptic glass in the Sainte-Chapelle and the thirteenth century glass in the Cathedral at Chartres. I learned that demi-tasse is an American word, that Sparkling Burgundy is an American drink, and that I did not like French beer. I stayed away from the receptions at the American embassy. I was devout in Saint Sulpice, the Russian Church in the Rue Daru, Saint Germain-des-Prés, Saint Eustache, Sacré-Cœur, and Saint Jacques, and I attended a wedding at the Madeleine, which reminded me that Bel Ami had been married there. I passed pleasant evenings at the Boîte à Fursy, on the Rue Pigalle, and Les Noctambules, on the Rue Champollion. I learned to speak easily of Mayol, Eve Lavallière, Dranem, Ernest la Jeunesse, Colette Willy, Max Dearly, Charles-Henry Hirsch, Lantelme, André Gide, and Jeanne Bloch. I saw Clemenceau, Edward VII, and the King of Greece. I nibbled toasted scones at a tea-shop on the Rue de Rivoli. I met the Steins. In short, you will observe that I did everything that young Americans do when they go to Paris.

On a certain afternoon, early in June, I found myself sitting at a table in the Café de la Paix with Englewood Jennings and Frederic Richards, two of my new friends. Richards is a famous person today and even then he was somebody. He had a habit of sketching, wherever he might be, on a sheet of paper at a desk at the Hotel Continental or on a program at the theatre. He drew quick and telling likenesses in a few lines of figures or objects that pleased him, absent-mindedly signed them, and then tossed them aside. This habit of his was so well-known that he was almost invariably followed by admirers of his work, who snapped up his sketches as soon as he had disappeared. I saw a good collection of them, drawn on the stationery of hotels from Hamburg to Taormina, and even on meat paper, go at auction in London a year or so ago for £1,000. When I knew him, Richards was a blond giant, careless of everything except his appearance. Jennings was an American socialist from Harvard who was ranging Europe to interview Jean Jaurès, Giovanni Papini, and Karl Liebknecht. He was exceedingly eccentric in his dress, had steel-grey eyes, the longest, sharpest nose I have ever seen, and wore glasses framed in tortoise-shell.

It had become my custom to pass two hours of every afternoon on this busy corner, first ordering tea with two brioches, and later a succession of absinthes, which I drank with sugar and water. In time I learned to do without the sugar, just as eventually I might have learned, in all probability, to do without the water, had I not been compelled to do without the absinthe[1]. I was enjoying my third pernod while my companions were dallying with whisky and soda. We were gossiping, and where in the world can one gossip to better advantage than on this busy corner, where every passerby offers a new opportunity? But, occasionally, the conversation slipped into alien channels.

How can the artist, Jennings, for instance, was asking, know that he is inspired, when neither the public nor the critics recognize inspiration? The question is equally interesting asked backwards. As a matter of fact, the artist is sometimes conscious that he is doing one thing, while he is acclaimed and appreciated for doing another. Columbus did not set out to discover America. Yes, there is often an accidental quality in great art and oftener still there is an accidental appreciation of it. In one sense art is curiously bound up with its own epoch, but appreciation or depreciation of its relation to that epoch may come in another generation. The judgment of posterity may be cruel to contemporary genius. In a few years we may decide that Richard Strauss is only another Liszt and Stravinsky, another Rubinstein.

Inspiration! Richards shrugged his broad shepherd's plaid shoulders. Inspiration! Artists, critics, public, clever men, and philistines monotonously employ that word, but it seems to me that art is created through memory out of experience, combined with a capacity for feeling and expressing experience, and depending on the artist's physical condition at the time when he is at work.

Are you, I asked, one of those who believes that a novelist must be unfaithful to his wife before he can write a fine novel, that a girl should have an amour with a prize-fighter before she can play Juliet, and that a musician must be a pederast before he can construct a great symphony?

Richards laughed.

No, he replied, I am not, but that theory is very popular. How many times I have heard it thundered forth! As a matter of fact, there is a certain amount of truth in it, the germ, indeed, of a great truth, for some emotional experience is essential to the artist, but why particularize? Each as he may!

I know a man, I went on, who doesn't believe that experience has anything to do with art at all. He thinks art is a matter of arrangement and order and form.

His art then, broke in Jennings, is epistemological rather than inspirational.

But what does he arrange? queried Richards. Surely incidents and emotions.

Not at all. He arranges objects, abstractions: colours and reaping-machines, perfumes and toys.

Long ago I read a book like that, Jennings went on. It was called Imperial Purple and it purported to be a history of the Roman Empire or the Roman Emperors. It was a strangely amusing book, rather like a clot of blood on a daisy or a faded pomegranate flower in a glass of buttermilk.

At this period, I avidly collected labels. Who wrote it? I asked.

I don't remember, but your description of your friend recalls the book. What is the name of your friend's book?

He hasn't written a book yet.

I see.

He is about to write it. He knows what he wants to do and he is collecting the materials. He is arranging the form.

What's it about? Jennings appeared to be interested.

Oh, it's about things. Whiffle told me, I suppose he was joking, that it would be about three hundred pages.

Richards set down his glass and in his face I recognized the portentous expression of a man about to be delivered of an epigram. It came: I dislike pine-apples, women with steatopygous figures, and men with a gift for paronomasia.

Jennings ignored this ignoble interruption. George Moore has written somewhere, he said, that if an author talks about what he is going to write, usually he writes it, but when he talks about how he is going to write it, that is the end of the matter. I wonder if this is true? I have never thought much about it before but I think perhaps it is. I think your friend will never write his book.

Richards interrupted again: Look at that maquereau. That's the celebrated French actor who went to America after a brilliant career in France in the more lucrative of his two professions, which ended in a woman's suicide. His history was well-known to the leading woman of the company with which he was to play in America, but she had never met him. At the first rehearsal, when they were introduced, she remarked, Monsieur, la connaissance est déjà faite! Turning aside, he boasted to his male companions, La gueuse! Avant dix jours je l'aurai enfilée! In a week he had made good his threat and in two weeks the poor woman was without a pearl.

He should meet Arabella Munson, said Jennings. She is always willing to pay her way. She fell in love with an Italian sculptor, or at any rate selected him as a suitable father for a prospective child. When she became pregnant, the young man actually fell ill with fear at the thought that he might be compelled to support both Arabella and the baby. He took to his bed and sent his mother as an ambassadress for Arabella's mercy. Choking with sobs, the old woman demanded what would be required of her son. My good woman, replied Arabella, dry your tears. I make it a point of honour never to take a penny from the fathers of my children. Not only do I support the children, often I support their fathers as well!

It was sufficiently warm. I lazily sipped my absinthe. The terrasse was crowded and there was constant movement; as soon as a table was relinquished, another group sat down in the empty chairs. Ephra Vogelsang, a pretty American singer, had just arrived with a pale young blond boy, whom I identified as Marcel Moszkowski, the son of the Polish composer. Presently, another table was taken by Vance Thompson and Ernest la Jeunesse, whose fat face was sprinkled with pimples and whose fat fingers were encased to the knuckles in heavy oriental rings. I bowed to Ephra and to Vance Thompson. On the sidewalk marched the eternal procession of newsboys, calling La Pa—trie! La Pa—trie! so like a phrase at the beginning of the second act of Carmen, old gentlemen, nursemaids, painted boys, bankers, Americans, Germans, Italians, South Americans, Roumanians, and Neo-Kaffirs. The carriages, the motors, the buses, formed a perfect maze on the boulevard. In one of the vehicles I caught a glimpse of another acquaintance.

That's Lily Hampton, I noted. She is the only woman who ever made Toscanini smile. You must understand, to appreciate the story, that she is highly respectable, the Mrs. Kendal of the opera stage, and the mother of eight or nine children. She never was good at languages, speaks them all with a rotten accent and a complete ignorance of their idioms. On this occasion, she was singing in Italian but she was unable to converse with the director in his native tongue and, consequently, he was giving her directions in French. He could not, however, make her understand what he wanted her to do. Again and again he repeated his request. At last she seemed to gather his meaning, that she was to turn her back to the footlights. What she asked him, however, ran like this: Est-ce que vous voulez mon derrière, maestro?

Now there was a diversion, an altercation at the further end of the terrasse, and a fluttering of feathered, flowered, and smooth-haired and bald heads turned in that direction. In the midst of this turbulence, I heard my name being called and, looking up, beheld Peter Whiffle waving from the impériale of a bus. I beckoned him to descend and join us and this he contrived to do after the bus had travelled several hundred yards on its way towards the Madeleine and I had abandoned the idea of seeing him return. But the interval gave me time to inform Richards and Jennings that this was the young author of whom I had spoken. Presently he came along, strolling languidly down the walk. He looked a bit tired, but he was very smartly dressed, with a gardenia as a boutonnière, and he seemed to vibrate with a feverish kind of jauntiness.

I am glad to see you, he cried. I've been meaning to look you up. In fact if I hadn't met you I should have looked you up tonight. I'm burning for adventures. What are you doing?

I explained that I was doing nothing at all and introduced him to my friends. Jennings had an engagement. He explained that he had to talk at some socialist meeting, called our waiter, paid for his pile of saucers, and took his departure. Richards confessed that he was burning too.

What shall we do? asked the artist.

There's plenty to do, announced Peter, confidently; almost too much for one night. But let's hurry over to Serapi's, before he closes his shop.

We asked no questions. We paid our saucers, rose, and strolled along with Peter across the Place in front of the Opéra and down the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin until we stood before a tiny shop, the window of which was filled with bottles of perfume and photographs of actresses and other great ladies of various worlds and countries, all inscribed with flamboyant encomiums, relating to the superior merits of Serapi's wares and testifying to the superlative esteem in which Serapi himself was held.

Led by Peter, in the highest exuberance of nervous excitement but still, I thought, looking curiously tired, we passed within the portal. We found ourselves in a long narrow room, surrounded on two sides by glass cases, in which, on glass shelves, were arranged the products of the perfumer's art. At the back, there was a cashier's desk without an attendant; at the front, the show-window. In the centre of the room, the focus of a group of admiring women, stood a tawny-skinned Oriental—perhaps concretely an Arabian—with straight black hair and soft black eyes. His physique was magnificent and he wore a morning coat. Obviously, this was Serapi himself.

Peter, who had now arrived at a state in which he could with difficulty contain his highly wrought emotion—and it was at this very moment that I began to suspect him of collecting amusements along with his other objects—, in a whisper confirmed my conjecture. The ladies, delicately fashioned Tanagra statuettes in tulle and taffeta and chiffon artifices from the smartest shops, in hats on which bloomed all the posies of the season and posies which went beyond any which had ever bloomed, were much too attractive to be duchesses, although right here I must pause to protest that even duchesses sometimes have their good points: the Duchess of Talleyrand has an ankle and the Duchess of Marlborough, a throat. The picture, to be recalled later when Mina Loy gave me her lovely drawing of Eros being spoiled by women, was so pleasant, withal slightly ridiculous, that Richards and I soon caught the infection of Peter's scarcely masked laughter and our eyes, too, danced. We made some small pretence of examining the jars and bottles of Scheherazade, Ambre, and Chypre in the cases, but only a small pretence was necessary, as the ladies and their Arab paid not the slightest attention to us.

At length, following a brief apology, Serapi broke through the ranks and disappeared through a doorway behind the desk at the back of the room. As the curtains lifted, I caught a glimpse of a plain, business-like woman, too dignified to be a mere clerk, obviously the essential wife of the man of genius. He was gone only a few seconds but during those seconds the chatter ceased abruptly. It was apparent that the ladies had come singly. They were not acquainted with one another. As Serapi reentered, they chirped again, peeped and twittered their twiddling tune, the words of which were Ah! and Oh! In one hand, he carried a small crystal phial to which a blower was attached. He explained that the perfume was his latest creation, an hermetic confusion of the dangers and ardours of Eastern life and death, the concentrated essence of the unperfumed flowers of Africa, the odour of their colours, he elaborated, wild desert existence, the mouldering tombs of the kings of Egypt, the decaying laces of a dozen Byzantine odalisques, a fragrant breath or two from the hanging gardens of Babylon, and a faint suggestion of the perspiration of Istar. It is my reconstruction, the artist concluded, of the perfume which Ruth employed to attract Boaz! The recipe is an invention based on a few half-illegible lines which I discovered in the beauty-table book of an ancient queen of Georgia, perhaps that very Thamar whose portrait has been painted in seductive music by the Slav composer, Balakireff.

The ladies gasped. The fascinating Arab pressed the rubber bulb and blew the cloying vapours into their faces, adjuring them, at the same time, to think of Thebes or Haroun-Al-Raschid or the pre-Adamite sultans. The room was soon redolent with a heavy vicious odour which seemed to reach the brain through the olfactory nerves and to affect the will like ether.

He is the only man alive today, whispered Peter, not without reverence, who has taken Flaubert's phrase seriously. He passes his nights dreaming of larger flowers and stranger perfumes. I believe that he could invent a new vice!

Serapi went the round of the circle with his mystic spray, and the twitterings of the ladies softened to ecstatic coos, like the little coos of dismay and delight of female cats who feel the call of pleasure, when suddenly the phial fell from the Arab's unclasped hand, the hand itself dropped to his side, the brown skin became a vivid green, all tension left his body, and he crumbled into a heap on the floor. The ladies shrieked; there was a delicious, susurrous, rainbow swirl and billow of tulle and taffeta and chiffon; there was a frantic nodding and waving of sweet-peas, red roses, dandelions, and magenta bell-flowers; and eight pairs of white-gloved arms circled rhythmically in the air. The effect was worthy of the Russian Ballet and, had Fokine been present, it would doubtless have been perpetuated to the subsequent enjoyment of audiences at Covent Garden and the Paris Opéra.

Now, an assured and measured step was heard. From a room in the rear, the calm, practical presence entered, bearing a glass of water. The ladies moved a little to one side as she knelt before the recumbent figure and sprinkled the green face. Serapi almost immediately began to manifest signs of recovery; his muscles began to contract and his face regained its natural colour. We made our way into the open air and the warm western sunlight of the late afternoon. Peter was choking with laughter. I was chuckling. Richards was too astonished to express himself.

Life is sometimes artistic, Peter was saying. Sometimes, if you give it a chance and look for them, it makes patterns, beautiful patterns. But Serapi excelled himself today. He has never done anything like this before. I shall never go back there again. It would be an anticlimax.

We dined somewhere, where I have forgotten. It is practically the only detail of that evening which has escaped my memory. I remember clearly how Richards sat listening in silent amazement to Peter's arguments and decisions on dreams and circumstances, erected on bewilderingly slender hypotheses. He built up, one after another, the most gorgeous and fantastic temples of theory; five minutes later he demolished them with a sledge-hammer or a feather. It was gay talk, fancy wafted from nowhere, unimportant, and vastly entertaining. Indeed, who has ever talked like Peter?

We seemed to be in his hands. At any rate neither Richards nor I offered any suggestions. We waited to hear him tell us what we were to do. About 9 o'clock, while we were sipping our cognac, he informed us that our next destination would be La Cigale, a music hall on the outer circle of the boulevards in Montmartre, where there was to be seen a revue called, Nue Cocotte, of which I still preserve the poster, drawn by Maës Laïa, depicting a fat duenna, fully dressed, wearing a red wig and adorned with pearls, and carrying a lorgnette, a more plausible female, nude, but for a hat, veil, feather boa, and a pair of high boots with yellow tops over which protrude an inch or two of blue sock, and an English comic, in a round hat, a yellow checked suit, bearing binoculars, all three astride a remarkably vivid red hobby horse whose feet are planted in the attitude of bucking. The comic grasps the bobbed black tail of the nag in one hand and the long yellow braid of the female in the other.

The cocottes of the period were wont to wear very large bell-shaped hats. Lily Elsie, who was appearing in The Merry Widow in London, followed this fashion and, as a natural consequence, these head-decorations were soon dubbed, probably by an American, Merry Widow hats. Each succeeding day, some girl would appear on the boulevards surmounted by a greater monstrosity than had been seen before. Discussion in regard to the subject, editorial and epistolary, raged at the moment in the Paris journals.

Once we were seated in our stalls on the night in question, it became evident that the hat of the cocotte in front of Peter completely obscured his view of the stage. He bent forward and politely requested her to remove it. She turned and explained with equal politeness and a most entrancing smile that she could not remove her hat without removing her hair, surely an impossibility, Monsieur would understand. Monsieur understood perfectly but, under the circumstances, would Madame have any objection if Monsieur created a disturbance? Madame, her eyes shining with mirth, replied that she would not have the tiniest objection, that above all else in life she adored fracases. They were of a delight to her. At this juncture in the interchange of compliments the curtain rose disclosing a row of females in mauve dresses, bearing baskets of pink roses. Presently the compère appeared.

Chapeau! cried Peter, in the most stentorian voice I have ever heard him assume. Chapeau!

The spectators turned to look at the valiant American. Several heads nodded sympathy and approval.

Chapeau! Peter called again, pointing to the adorable little lady in front of him, who was enjoying the attention she had created. Her escort, on the other hand, squirmed a little.

The cry was now taken up by other unfortunate gentlemen in the stalls, who were placed in like situations but who had not had the courage to begin the battle. The din, indeed, soon gained such a degree of dynamic force that not one word of what was being said on the stage, not one note of the music, could be distinguished. Gesticulating figures stood up in every part of the theatre, shrieking and frantically waving canes. The compère advanced to the footlights and appeared to be addressing us, much in the manner of an actor attempting to stem a fire stampede in a playhouse, but, of course, he was inaudible. As he stepped back, a sudden lull succeeded to the tumult. Peter took advantage of this happy quiet to interject: Comme Mélisande, je ne suis pas heureux ici!

The spectators roared and screamed; the house rocked with their mirth. Even the mimes were amused. Now, escorted by two of his secretaries in elaborate coats decorated with much gold braid, the manager of the theatre appeared, paraded solemnly down the aisle to our seats and, with a bow, offered us a box, which we accepted at once and in which we received homage for the remainder of the evening. At last we could see the stage and enjoy the blond Idette Bremonval, the brunette Jane Merville, the comic pranks of Vilbert and Prince, and the Festival of the Déesse Raison.

The performance concluded, the pretty lady who had not removed her hat, commissioned her reluctant escort to inquire if we would not step out for a drink with them. The escort was not ungracious but, obviously, he lacked enthusiasm. The lady, just as obviously, had taken a great fancy to Peter. We went to the Rat Mort, where we sat on the terrasse, the lady gazing steadily at her new hero and laughing immoderately at his every sally. Peter, however, quickly showed that he was restless and presently he rose, eager to seek new diversions. We hailed a passing fiacre and jumped in, while the lady waved us pathetic adieux. Her companion seemed distinctly relieved by our departure. Peter was now in the highest animal spirits. All traces of fatigue had fled from his face. The horse which drew our fiacre was a poor, worn-out brute, like so many others in Paris, and the cocher, unlike so many others in Paris, was kind-hearted and made no effort to hasten his pace. We were crawling down the hill.

I will race you! cried Peter, leaping out (he told me afterwards that he had once undertaken a similar exploit with a Bavarian railway train).

Meet me at the Olympia Bar! he cried, dashing on ahead.

The cocher grunted, shook his head, mumbled a few unintelligible words to the horse, and we drove on more slowly than before. Peter, indeed, was soon out of sight.

Ten minutes later, as we entered the café under the Olympia Music Hall, we noted with some surprise that the stools in front of the bar, on which the cocottes usually sat with their feet on the rungs, their trains dragging the floor, were empty. The crowd had gathered at the other end of the long hall and the centre of the crowd was Peter. He was holding a reception, a reception of cocottes!

Ah! Good evening, Mademoiselle Rolandine de Maupreaux, he was saying as he extended his hand, I am delighted to greet you here tonight. And if this isn't dear little Mademoiselle Célestine Sainte-Résistance and her charming friend, Mademoiselle Edmée Donnez-Moi! And Camille! Camille la Grande! Quelle chance de vous voir! Et Madame, votre mère, elle va bien? Et Gisèle la Belle! Mais vous avez oublié de m'écrire! Do not, I pray you, neglect me again. And the charming Hortense des Halles et de chez Maxim, and the particularly adorable Abélardine de Belleville et de la Place d'Italie. Votre sœur va mieux, j'espère. Then, drawing us in, Permettez-moi, mesdemoiselles, de vous presenter mes amis, le Duc de Rochester et le Comte de Cedar Rapids. Spécialement, mesdemoiselles, permettez-moi de vous recommander le Comte de Cedar Rapids.

He had never, of course, seen any of them before, but they liked it.

Richards grumbled, It's bloody silly, but he was laughing harder than I was.

I heard one of the girls say, Le jeune Américain est fou!

And the antiphony followed, Mais il est charmant.

Later, another remarked, Je crois que je vais lui demander de me faire une politesse!

Overhearing which, Peter rejoined, Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle. Quel genre?

It was all gay, irresponsible and meaningless, perhaps, but gay. We sat at tables and drank and smoked and spun more fantasies and quaint conceits until a late hour, and that night I learned that even French cocottes will occasionally waste their time, provided they are sufficiently diverted. Towards four o'clock in the morning, however, I began to note a change in Peter's deportment and demeanour. There were moments when he sat silent, a little aloof, seemingly the prey of a melancholy regret, too well aware, perhaps, that the atmosphere he had himself created would suck him into its merry hurricane. I caught the lengthening shadows under his eyes and the premonitory hollows in his cheeks. And this time, therefore, it was I who suggested departure. Peter acceded, but with an air of wistfulness as if even the effort of moving from an uncomfortable situation were painful to him. Rising, we kissed our hands to the band of sirens, who all pressed forward like the flower maidens of Parsifal and with equal success. Three of the pretty ladies accompanied us upstairs to the sidewalk and every one of the three kissed Peter on the mouth, but not one of them offered to kiss Richards or me.

We engaged another fiacre and drove up the Champs-Elysées. Now, it was Richards and I who had become vibrant. Peter was silent and old and apart. The dawn, the beautiful indigo dawn of Paris was upon us. The cool trees were our only companions in the deserted streets until, near the great grey arch, we began to encounter the wagons laden with vegetables, bound for the Halles, wagons on which carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, radishes, and heads of lettuce were stacked in orderly and intricate patterns. The horses, the reins drooping loosely over their backs, familiar with the route, marched slowly down the wide avenue, while the drivers in their blue smocks, perched high on the fronts of their carts, slept. We drove past them up the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne into the broadening daylight. On Peter Whiffle's countenance were painted the harsh grey lines of misery and despair.