IV.
The tiring night-journey, with its full four hours' wait at Liège, was all pure enjoyment to me, and in a mood of mild ecstasy, at last, at half-past ten on the morning of November 11th 1866, I made my entry into Paris, and was received cordially by the proprietors of a modest but clean little hotel which is still standing, No. 20 Rue Notre Dame des Victoires, by the proprietors, two simple Lorrainers, François and Müller, to whom Gabriel Sibbern, who was staying there, had announced my arrival. The same morning Sibbern guided my first steps to one of Pasdeloup's great classical popular concerts.
In the evening, in spite of my fatigue after travelling all night, I went to the Théâtre Français for the first time, and there, lost in admiration of the masterly ensemble and the natural yet passionate acting, with which I had hitherto seen nothing to compare, I saw Girardin's Le supplice d'une femme, and Beaumarchais' Le mariage de Figaro, in one evening making the acquaintance of such stars as Régnier, Madame Favart, Coquelin and the Sisters Brohan.
Régnier especially, in his simple dignity, was an unforgettable figure, being surrounded, moreover, in my eyes by the glory which the well-known little poem of Alfred de Musset, written to comfort the father's heart, had shed upon him. Of the two celebrated sisters, Augustine was all wit, Madeleine pure beauty and arch, melting grace.
These first days were rich days to me, and as they did not leave me any time for thinking over what I had seen, my impressions overwhelmed me at night, till sometimes I could not sleep for sheer happiness. This, to me, was happiness, an uninterrupted garnering of intellectual wealth in association with objects that all appealed to my sympathies, and I wrote home: "To be here, young, healthy, with alert senses, keen eyes and good ears, with all the curiosity, eagerness to know, love of learning, and susceptibility to every impression, that is youth's own prerogative, and to have no worries about home, all that is so great a happiness that I am sometimes tempted, like Polycrates, to fling the handsome ring I had from Christian Richardt in the gutter."
For the rest, I was too fond of characteristic architecture to feel attracted by the building art displayed in the long, regular streets of Napoleon III, and too permeated with national prejudices to be able at once to appreciate French sculpture. I was justified in feeling repelled by many empty allegorical pieces on public monuments, but during the first weeks I lacked perception for such good sculpture as is to be found in the foyer of the Théâtre Français. "You reel at every step," I wrote immediately after my arrival, "that France has never had a Thorwaldsen, and that Denmark possesses an indescribable treasure in him. We are and remain, in three or four directions, the first nation in Europe. This is pure and simple truth."
To my youthful ignorance it was the truth, but it hardly remained such after the first month.
Being anxious to see as much as possible and not let anything of interest escape me, I went late to bed, and yet got up early, and tried to regulate my time, as one does a blanket that is too short.
I was immensely interested in the art treasures from all over the world collected in the Louvre. Every single morning, after eating my modest breakfast at a crêmerie near the château, I paid my vows in the Salon carré and then absorbed myself in the other halls. The gallery of the Louvre was the one to which I owe my initiation. Before, I had seen hardly any Italian art in the original, and no French at all. In Copenhagen I had been able to worship all the Dutch masters. Leonardo and the Venetians spoke to me here for the first time. French painting and sculpture, Puget and Houdon, Clouet and Delacroix, and the French art that was modern then, I learnt for the first time to love and appreciate at the Luxembourg.
I relished these works of art, and the old-time art of the Greeks and Egyptians which the Museum of the Louvre contained, in a mild intoxication of delight.
And I inbreathed Paris into my soul. When on the broad, handsome Place de la Concorde, I saw at the same time, with my bodily eyes, the beautifully impressive obelisk, and in my mind's eye the scaffold on which the royal pair met with their death in the Revolution; when in the Latin quarter I went upstairs to the house in which Charlotte Corday murdered Marat, or when, in the highest storey of the Louvre, I gazed at the little gray coat from Marengo and the three-cornered hat, or from the Arc de Triomphe let my glance roam over the city, the life that pulsated through my veins seemed stimulated tenfold by sight and visions.
Yet it was not only the city of Paris, its appearance, its art gems, that I eagerly made my own, and with them much that intellectually belonged to Italy or the Netherlands; it was French culture, the best that the French nature contains, the fragrance of her choicest flowers, that I inhaled.
And while thus for the first time learning to know French people, and French intellectual life, I was unexpectedly admitted to constant association with men and women of the other leading Romance races, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians.
Bröchner had given me a letter of introduction to Costanza Testa, a friend of his youth, now married to Count Oreste Blanchetti and living in Paris, with her somewhat older sister Virginia, a kind-hearted and amiable woman of the world. The latter had married in Brazil, as her second husband, the Italian banker Pagella, and to their house came, not only Italians and other European Southerners, but members of the South American colony.
So warm a reception as I met with from the two sisters and their husbands I had never had anywhere before. After I had known the two families one hour, these people treated me as though I were their intimate friend; Costanza's younger brother, they called me. I had a seat in their carriage every day, when the ladies drove out in the Bois de Boulogne; they never had a box at the Italian opera, where Adelina Patti's first notes were delighting her countrymen, without sending me a seat. They expected me every evening, however late it often might be when I came from the theatre, in their drawing-room, where, according to the custom of their country, they always received the same circle of friends.
I was sincerely attached to the two sisters, and felt myself at ease in their house, although the conversation there was chiefly carried on in a language of which I understood but little, since French was spoken only on my account. The only shadow over my pleasure at spending my evenings in the Rue Valois du Roule was the fact that this necessitated my missing some acts at the Théâtre Français, for which the Danish Minister, through the Embassy, had procured me a free pass. Certainly no Dane was ever made so happy by the favour. They were enraptured hours that I spent evening after evening in the French national theatre, where I became thoroughly acquainted with the modern, as well as the classical, dramatic repertoire,--an acquaintance which was further fortified during my long stay in Paris in 1870.
I enjoyed the moderation of the best actors, their restraint, and subordination of self to the rôle and the general effect. It is true that the word genius could only be applied to a very few of the actors, and at that time I saw none who, in my opinion, could be compared with the great representatives of the Danish stage, such as Michael Wiehe, Johanne Luise Heiberg, or Phister. But I perceived at once that the mannerisms of these latter would not be tolerated here for a moment; here, under the influence of this artistic whole-harmony, they would never have been able to give free vent to individuality and peculiarity as they did at home.
I saw many hundred performances in these first years of my youth at the Théâtre Français, which was then at its zenith. There, if anywhere, I felt the silent march of the French muses through Time and Space.