From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

by Edward Simmons

Chapter VIII: Summer Adventurings

I. Carrière St.-Denis

I have often wished I could have the faith of some Christians in the power of the Holy Book and, when I wanted to decide anything of importance, just open it to any page, put my finger on a spot, and proceed according to the instructions thereupon given. I have the gambler’s instinct, but perhaps only for little things, and while I have never gone to the Bible for material guidance, I have many times employed the childish quotation, “My mother says that I shall do this”—pointing a finger at each word—and following the lead. This does not always prove a happy method of selecting one’s future, but I think it is as near as one can come to it. There is only one case where I am certain it cannot fail, and that is for a very good reason—there is a prize package at the end of every string. If you stand in the center of Paris and start in any direction toward its environs, you will end at a place more charming than you can imagine. I have tried this experiment many times and have never been disappointed.

Carrière St.-Denis was discovered quite accidentally by two of my painter friends, and it was only after a long time that they let me in on the secret. Having traveled out of the city on the railway as far as Nanterre, you take your courage in your hands and get off at this place, which seems to have nothing more interesting than endless fields of vegetables. Despair not; cross the tracks and walk steadily on until you come to a canal. Here is a wooded island whose banks look like nothing so much as the old fishing place on the Concord River at home. All is quiet, with no signs of human habitation until you come to a post across from which a boat is tied. Here you must stop, put your hands to your mouth to form a trumpet, and cry: “Passeur!”—”Passeur!” After about the second call will come the answer, “Attendez!” and down the path from his little hut, which is entirely concealed by the trees, comes an old man bearing upon his shoulder a pair of oars. Without speaking a word, he comes over, you get into the boat, and he rows you across the canal, where, very gravely, he leaves the skiff and, again carrying the oars, he walks with you across the island. Here you are at the Seine, but a part of the river that you have not known before. Another boat is waiting, again the old man rows you over, but this time you land upon a gravelly beach flanked by a cliff so steep that you despair of ever climbing it.

At first glance this falaise reminds you of the familiar Palisades, only made of Caen stone, but on closer examination, you are astonished to find that there are doors and windows cut out of the solid rock! The blacksmith shop is a former quarry, as are many of the homes of the humbler and poorer, their people having taken up their habitations in the same manner as the hermit crab—in the shell of a former owner. On the other side is the village, looking like an old-fashioned jewel in a rough setting, while farther along, on the outskirts of the town, are the fields of cabbages and beets. You must be very careful in wandering over these stretches of growing vegetation, for at any moment you may come to a hole like a rabbit burrow almost concealed by the grass. If you have the Alice in Wonderland instinct (and you will certainly have acquired it by this time), you will plunge down this rough tunnel to see what mysteries the underground holds.

Men have dug out this rock, from which Paris has been made, leaving a labyrinth of paths and chambers. Every once in a while there are flashes of light very much like the glimpses of the sky that one gets from the train when going out from New York at the Grand Central Station. Over the edge of these openings hang blackberry vines, and the singing of birds can be heard. You are reminded of that story told by Wells, of the race of people that lived under the earth and came out at night to feed upon those who lived on top. There is one long tunnel which leads to an amphitheater larger than the Hippodrome. It is dark as the night, and you feel as if this must be the cathedral of these underground men.

All at once, out of the dampness comes a new odor, something of the earth, but not of the deep earth. It is as if the plowshare had just turned over a bit of sun-warmed humus, and as your eyes become accustomed to the darkness you see that this vault, so much like a stage setting of Gordon Craig’s, has small apertures in its sides where beds of mushrooms are pushing their way out of the ground. It is in places like this that the supply for Paris is grown.

Turning to the left, you will find a continuous passage, and if you have the courage to traverse its three miles of length you will come out to the light at the site of another red-roofed village—this one called Montessan—and strange to relate, there again is the Seine, which has coiled itself around like a snake and met you at the other side. Across the river at this point is a large and formidable building which seems by its modernity to deny the facts of all you have seen, for this is the Pavilion Henri Quatre, and Paris is but twenty miles away.

My hotel at Carrière St.-Denis was above a shop where pig meat in different forms was sold. M. Perdrielle, charcutier, was a genial host, and his wife’s cooking did ample justice to his artistry as a butcher. We often went out there for a few days, and once I spent a month with these people who lived the life of the France of a hundred years ago. I was always called “M. Edouard le Dessineur,” which is not French, but peasant argot, and they did not see anything at all generous in including cigarettes, billiards, and drinks in the two hundred and fifty francs a month they charged for board.

Berthe, the daughter of the household, was married while I was in Carrière St.-Denis, and I had the extreme pleasure of assisting at a true rural marriage. Her husband-to-be was a wine merchant and, wishing to do him great honor, she begged me to wear my evening clothes. A merchant de vin is on about the same social level with that of the owner of a corner saloon in America; but I was perfectly willing to show off for Berthe’s sake.

The banquet began in the evening and was enlivened by many old customs. At a certain time a small boy came in with a giggle and ran away with the bride’s garter, which was twenty yards long, and was immediately pulled this way and that by all the men, who fought for the pieces. One ceremony, which must have been a survival of the Rabelaisian period, was carried out by the bridesmaids, who came in singing an old French song (one of those delightful things whose meaning could be taken either of two ways) and holding aloft a pot de chambre filled with dragees, or sugar almonds, which they distributed to the company. The procession of young men followed with a pair of candy horns for the groom.

At the end of many toasts they all were sufficiently tipsy to begin their long pilgrimage, for it is the custom for the bridal pair to spend the first week of their married life visiting all their friends, taking all the bridesmaids and groomsmen with them. At each home they eat and drink, and on the seventh day an exhausted pair of lovers return home, dirty and forlorn, with their clothes—and their nerves—in tatters.

Every change of season has its corresponding duties to nature, and each one is made the occasion of a festival by the simple folk in all lands. Let the foreigner who wanders into peasant France in the autumn beware of letting himself loose among the grape gatherers. The “vendange,” as it is called, is the ceremony of picking these little fruits out of which the native wine is made, and it is during this season that the peasants let themselves go, like children. They dance and they sing and they play practical jokes, the most common being to catch the unwary bystander and rub him with the juice of the tenturier, the Spanish grape. There are a certain number of these in every vineyard. They are called the “dyer” grape, and are used to give color to the petit vin, and assuredly give a lasting color to the poor victim. After the harvest they all come home in a tumbrel, the noise and laughter in no way indicating the former gruesome use for that vehicle.

When you have managed to tear yourself away from this interesting and strange suburb of Paris, and crossed the Seine, should you look back upon the scene of your former pleasures, you will see nothing of the villages with the red-tiled roofs, nothing of the cabbages and beets, indeed, nothing to indicate any human habitation. As far as you know, there is only a solid cliff of Caen stone—the same of which the Louvre is built—pale cream in tone and gray when the air touches it. I once dug my finger-nail into a soft piece of the rock and found it was made of an infinite number of seashells, a veritable paste of dead animals.

II. Barbizon

On the fringe of the woods of the forest of Fontainebleau is Barbizon. We used to go out here whenever we could, where, at the Hotel Siron there were always dozens of artists gathered together, hoping to pick up one of Millet’s paper collars.

Most of the old Barbizon group were dead by the time I got there, but among those left were Frank O’Mara, Naegley, and Hawkins—all Englishmen—and Jameson, brother of the doctor of South African fame; my friends, Ruger Donoho and Charles H. Davis; Butler, who married a daughter of Monet; and Jaques, the well-known French painter of sheep. Jaques was the last of the original French colony.

Babcock, an American painter, had lived there for twenty years. He was one of those beings who had been soured by time and had come to know that the world was all wrong. He almost always went out of his back door, and if ever he emerged from the front it was in the dead of night. He had sat at the feet of Millet and had a portfolio of twenty or thirty drawings that the great artist had thrown away. He told me with joy that Millet would crumple up his self-condemned work and throw it into a box behind the stove. Every once in a while Babcock would fish out one and open it up, Millet yelling at him all the time. Nothing daunted, he would retreat like a dog with a bone. Even the garbage can is not sacred to some people.

In Boston, Millet has been overrated (W. M. Hunt did it). Once he sold a picture for two thousand francs, the highest price he had received up to that time. He was most human and, like all artists, optimistic, so he immediately hired a professor to come out from Paris and tutor his children, and hired saddle horses for them to ride upon in the park. Of course, this period of affluence did not last, and when he died, at about fifty-nine years of age, he was supposed to be a poor man, cursed by fate; yet he had received an order from the Pope and decorations from his own government. This is not a case of neglected genius.

I was still under thirty when I met Mrs. Millet. She immediately asked:

“You paint? Then might I, as an older woman, give a bit of advice? Remember you run the risk of making any woman you marry unhappy.” (I can hear her voice now, as we sat at the table d’hôte.) “A woman who marries an artist must realize beforehand that he will never care for her alone. She must look forward always to playing second fiddle to something else. If he is a true artist, it is his painting, if not—but she will always be second fiddle just the same. If she has the capacity to adapt herself to that position, she will be happy. I, myself, have been a happy woman.”

Robert Louis Stevenson had just left Barbizon a short time before my first visit. I was avid to hear about him and tried in vain to get them to give me some details of his character and personality. But all the boys said, indifferently:

“Oh yes, he writes, but his cousin is much the cleverer author.” And they had read the Lodging for the Night! Not a very good recommendation for the literary acumen of painters.

We led a lazy life out there, with rarely a tinge of excitement. We were all in the same financial class and, I imagine, in about the same state of blissful innocence and ignorance of the world. I remember a very pretty girl of the Paris gay life, who was advised to go to Barbizon for a rest and to freshen up a bit. We were thrilled at her appearance and entertained her as if she were a grande dame. She was evidently in no way pleased, but very much puzzled, when she went back to Paris and told a friend:

“Crois tu, ma chere, pas un de ces cochons la m’ont offert le sous!”

We made most of our own good times. One favorite game at Sirons was to go out, each one of us, and lean a sketch against a tree, retire to a hiding place, and watch. Of a lovely afternoon, myriads of carriages would come out from Fontainebleau, the occupants leisurely lying back and gazing from side to side. Some of them would spy the painting there on the ground. If they looked at it, it counted one point; if they examined it carefully, it was two; but if they carried it off with them it was a sign that the painter was one hundred per cent perfect and he had to pay for a bottle of wine for the crowd. I once had one of my sketches taken away and it cost me two bottles of fizz, but I was a very happy man. Some one had liked my work and had stolen it! And what was one sketch? It was so easy to make another.

A man, perhaps not so well known as the Barbizon painters, but certainly much more interesting than the majority of them, was Professor Lainey. He looked an old man when I knew him, white haired and a chatterbox. For years he had taught drawing in the schools of Fontainebleau.

In his youth Professor Lainey had hoped to become an actor and had joined a class to study for the stage. Among the pupils was a little Jewess, fourteen years old, plain looking and poorly dressed, and as it was his fate to take the same omnibus with her, politeness demanded that he escort her to her door. This he hated to do, as she was a most hopeless-looking creature and he was cad enough to be ashamed to be seen with her. One day in class, the teacher asked her to deliver a line of Racine, and said:

“Shall I give it as I was told to, or as it should be rendered?”

Very amused, he replied: “Mademoiselle will be good enough to give it first as she has been told to give it, and afterward the class will be delighted to hear her improvement.”

She obeyed, and Professor Lainey added: “For the first time I understood Racine.”

Continuing, he said: “I saw no more of her until I was an art student in Paris. One night I went to the Théâtre Français, and there upon the stage appeared the little Jewess of my class. She was none other then the divine Sarah!”

Poor, plain, and of a despised race, even as a child her brain had begun to work. Like Christ, as a boy before the elders, she told them, not they her.

Professor Lainey had been in Fontainebleau during the Franco-Prussian War and remembered the invasion of Barbizon. The franc-tireurs (citizen troops), of which he was a member, were a constant bother to the Germans. One of their pranks was to stretch a wire across the road, just the height of a rider, and they finally succeeded in decapitating an orderly. The Germans decided that some one must hang for it, and, being unable to find the guilty one, they chose a dozen men and told them to draw lots. Not liking to kill one of the prominent citizens with whom they had been playing cards all winter in quite a friendly manner, they put on the list a man whom we call a “natural,” then winked and walked away. But they reckoned without the French nature. These men refused to sacrifice the poor half-wit, and said:

“Hang all or any one of us. We will not choose.”

France is still covered with the evidences of monarchs, and one of the best reasons why kings no longer rule and the Third Empire went to pieces still remains in Fontainebleau Forest. In walking about, one has to use the utmost care, as one is constantly catching his foot and taking a “header.” All around, underneath the brush and now entirely covered by it, are paths of asphalt, miles and miles of them, literally riddling the whole woods. These were laid by her generous spouse so that the Empress Eugènie could follow the boar hunt in her Parisian shoes and not wet her feet on the grass!

III. Montreuil

The history of France could be told by the wall which surrounds the village of Montreuil. Originally encircled by a Roman structure (the bricks of which still show a few feet above the ground), every succeeding dynasty has added its touch, each a different material, until the wall has become as expressive of the past as a patchwork quilt. There are several layers of soft stone, one of granite put on by Vauban; the top must have been added many years ago, for there are large trees growing upon it. The town was besieged thirteen times by the English, but was never taken.

During one of these sieges, there was a drought inside the wall, and they were forced to brave the enemy and get their water from one of the many springs out upon the hillside. Thinking it better to save the fighting men for sterner duty, it was decided to let the clerks and those who wrote in the books go for the supply. There was one petit clerc, noted for the beauty of his singing in church, who was beloved of a girl of high birth. These two met but seldom, as their affair was not approved by the young woman’s family. One night the clerk’s name was on the list of those who must go outside the gates. His sweetheart found it out and, stealing the message before it was delivered to him, she put on boy’s clothing and took his place. That night the English lay in wait and killed a dozen or more water carriers, throwing the bodies into the spring. This was supposed to have stopped the flow of the water, and to-day the inhabitants will show the sink in the side of a hill which used to be this spring. I have always wanted to dig down and see if a girl’s skeleton were there.

Standing on this wall, I could not help being hypnotized by the surroundings into a feeling that it was not the nineteenth, but the fifteenth or sixteenth century. I could see, with my mind’s eye, coming up the valleys toward the walled town, a long line of men and laden beasts, a troop of soldiery returning to their nest with the spoils, the loot raped from the countryside; for as neither printing nor powder had come to their aid, the countryfolk were robbed of everything they had but their shift and their pickax. Led, perchance, by Sieur Johan or my lord high bishop, they bore upon their saddlebows beautiful maidens with streaming hair, their heads drooping and their hands tied behind their backs.

At the end of one of the streets of Montreuil, quite a distance down, there is a church which seems to be covered with lichens, but on nearer approach they are seen to be bullet holes—mute testimonials to the sufferings the people have endured during the ages—for example, the result of the French Commune.

I slept in the inn made famous by Laurence Sterne. It was here that he stopped near the beginning of his Sentimental Journey and hired his valet. On its wall in large copper letters were the figures 1640, indicating that it had been built in that year. It was a fitting place to stop on a quest of romance, and, indeed, one could not be surprised at any strange adventure that might overtake one in such a memory-laden setting. Even the bedroom (I wondered if it were the same that Sterne occupied) was of a charm and quaintness that was conducive to the most extravagant dreams. The furniture and fixings breathed of the long ago, and all about in convenient nooks and crannies were bits of old brass for which any collector would give a king’s ransom. But best of all (and these were evidently placed so that they would be the first things upon which the sleep-laden eyes of the lodger would rest when he was awakened by the early morning noises), was the decoration around the foot of the bedroom wall. In solemn procession, and reaching to a height of about five or six feet, were illustrated the gods and goddesses of Olympus! I have always wanted to do a room like this.

IV. Grez

Grez has been immortalized by the artists that have stopped there. The bridge, built over the river Loing, which was so much like the Concord that it was a constant delight to me, has been painted times innumerable, but it is so charming that we never tire of seeing it on canvas.

The story of Grez is the story of nearly every French village, and one has only to notice the way it is laid out to visualize its history. There is one central street upon which the houses face so close together as to form a solid wall on either side. In the back of this phalanx of stone the whole life of the community goes on. Here are the gardens, many of them sloping down to the river, where are the stones upon which they wash their clothes; here the children play, protected from all harm. The cultivated fields lie away up on the hillsides, as do the pastures, but in olden times, before the last ray of the sun had left the sky, every evening would see each inhabitant of the village back in his home, close to his neighbors, protected not only from the roaming wild animals, but from the lord upon the hill as well. The wolves were the scavengers and nightly used to clear the little street of all its refuse, so that anything thrown out of the window (and everything was) had disappeared in the morning light.

I passed many months in Grez. Here again I met the trail of Stevenson, only too late. He had started the habit of going there, and I saw the actual garret room which he speaks about in the Treasure of Franchard. It was here that the mummer died—while the big shadows were dancing about the walls—and left the boy to the doctor. The same landlady was bustling around the inn, and during my stay, as business was none too good (or else she was a generous provider and therefore a bad manager), we had to give her our money beforehand or there would be no dinner.

John Runciman was one of the bright, particular lights at the inn. He was a very unconscious man with a brave brain and would quietly say anything he pleased. He was also a musician of no mean attainment and could sit at the piano with his back turned to the keys and play Chopin well enough to suit me. He had the audacity to write the musical criticisms for the Saturday Review (Frank Harris being the editor at the time), and all the time he was living in the Fontainebleau Forest! I asked him how he could manage to satisfy his readers without having heard the concerts.

“Oh,” he replied, “one conductor always plays too fast, and a certain soprano invariably breaks on her high C. Besides, I know all the music, and the public does not want anything new in the way of criticism.”

Runciman once showed me a magazine which he had saved, with an article by Stevenson telling how he had written Treasure Island. He was down in Bournemouth for his health, and at the same place was a little boy who was dying of tuberculosis. Stevenson composed the tale for him and got him to draw the map of the island as he had imagined it. This he sent with the manuscript, to London to the publisher. Through some carelessness in the office, the boy’s drawing was lost, and, although Robert Louis Stevenson tried to do it from memory, he declared it was greatly inferior to the naïve child’s fancy.

I hesitate to tell about something that I have always thought very beautiful, and that is the song of the nightingale, but I remember some typical Gopher Prairie people coming to Grez and, doubtless, being disappointed at the abandoned street, the dogs, and the hens, when remaining up especially to hear the songbird, said that they had been awakened many times by that sound, but had “always thought it was the croaking of frogs.”

However it may have sounded to the Middle West, it was sufficiently beautiful to my untrained musical ear to make me journey back to Grez twenty years later to hear it again. You can take a scientific or sentimental view of the flight of the queen bee, and I prefer to hold with Maeterlinck.

No birds in the world make real music except the nightingale and the wood thrush. The remainder whistle. Shelley’s lark is the ideal of the going to heaven and disappearing, but there is no song. This little bird in our dark wood coppice used to come out and sit on a garden post at night and commit suicide from love in such a way as nearly to tear his throat apart. Look out how you take it seriously, though, for the next minute after you are sure the life has gone out of his body he is fooling you by gurgling such sentimental poppycock as “I took you away and made you love me.” All the way from Hamlet to Pierrot, it is music burbling through blood and tears.

V. Stuttgart

It is a far cry from Paris to Stuttgart, but my only experience of Germany is in this town, and there are several things about it that I like to remember. The greatest impression left to me is the music, everything was permeated with it. I have never been able to perform on any instrument, and my only claim to singing is that I could yell louder than anyone else in school, but some how I have always felt the rhythms inside, and the wonder to me was to see a whole race of people who were musicians. In the later afternoon the workmen come home from their work in the vineyards, fifteen or twenty of them in one group. They fall into singing quite naturally, each one taking the part best suited to his voice, while away down the road another group will take up the melody, fitting in perfect harmony, until the whole has formed a large chorus, singing in accord. I often think it is a pity that we do not have something like that, but I suppose that these songs must be the growth of the soil—and we are too young.

Many years ago—I do not know how many—a citizen left a sum of money in his will, providing for music to be played from the cathedral tower at twelve o’clock noon. I do not know if he directed the kind of music it should be, but in my time it was provided by four stringed instruments. Just after the clock had struck the hour, proclaiming that the weary worker might pause and rest, this music would come down from the sky, as if some heavenly chorus were singing.

My host in Stuttgart was a scion of one of the aristocratic families, and I had a chance to peep into the gay German life of the period. We used to lunch quite often at the officers’ mess of a certain smart cavalry regiment who were noted for their daring and bravery as well as for lavish entertaining. A most amazing habit that these genial souls indulged in struck horror to my very marrow. At regular intervals, as a test, they were required to ride a distance of twenty miles. Tied to the saddlebow was a magnum of champagne, and they must drink this on the way, the one reaching the end of the journey first being considered the real male of the crowd. This was not so bad, but they did not hesitate to run down peasants and kill them without compunction. Their foolhardiness and utter indifference to the lives of the country people was an ingrained part of their natures, and no one seemed to think anything about it. It was considered a huge joke if one of the cavalry officers was found later thrown from his horse into the bushes and dead drunk.

Employed by my friend as a tutor for his children was an unfrocked French curate, and he was always arguing that the German women were plain. I was asked as an artist to judge. At four o’clock in the afternoon, we went out to the promenade and watched the beauties of the city pass by. From that motley crowd I was able to pick out only eight who were at all pretty. Of these, they told me that two were American, two English, one Swedish, and two Viennese, while only one of the whole galaxy was from Stuttgart.