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As a special correspondent of The Daily Chronicle (after a spell of free-lance work) I went abroad a good deal on various missions, and occasionally took charge of the Paris office in the absence of Martin Donohue who held that post but was frequently away on some adventure in other countries.
I came to know and to love Paris, by day and night, on both sides of the Seine, and in all its quarters, rich and poor. To me it is still the most attractive city in the world, and I have an abiding passion for its ghosts, its beauty, and its people. To “feel” Paris one must be steeped in the history and literature of France, so that one walks, not lonely, but as a haunted man along the rue St. Honoré, where Danton lived, and where Robespierre closed his shutters when Marie Antoinette passed on her tumbril; in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins plucked leaves from the trees and stuck them in his hat as a green cockade; in the great nave of Notre Dame, where a thousand years of faith, passion, tragedy, glory, touch one’s spirit, closely, as one’s hand touches its old stones; across the Pont Neuf, where Henry met his murderer, and where all Paris passed, with its heroes, cutthroats, and fair women; on the left bank, by the bookstalls, where poets and scholars roved, with hungry stomachs and eager minds; up in the Quartier Latin, where centuries of student life have paced by the old gray walls, and where wild youth has lived its short dream of love, quaffed its heady wine, laughed at life and death; up the mountain of Montmartre where apaches used to lurk in the darkness, and Vice wore the false livery of Joy; in the Luxembourg Gardens, where a world of lovers have walked, hand in hand, while children played, and birds twittered, and green buds grew to leaf, which faded and fell as love grew old and died.
Paris is nothing but an exhibition of architecture and a good shopping place, unless one has walked arm in arm with D’Artagnan, seen the great Cardinal pass in his robes, stood behind the arras when Marguérite de Valois supped with her lover, wandered the cold streets o’ nights with François Villon, listened to the songs of Ronsard, passed across the centuries to the salons of Madame de Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, supped with the Encyclopædists, and heard the hoarse laughter of the mobs when the head of the Princesse de Lamballe was paraded on a pike, and the fairest heads of France fell under the knife into the basket of the guillotine. It was Dumas, Victor Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, Eugène Sue, Murger, Guy de Maupassant, Michelet’s “France,” and odd bits of reading in French history, fiction, and poetry, which gave me the atmosphere of Paris, and revealed in its modernity, even in its most squalid aspects, a background of romance.
So it has been with millions of others to whom Paris is an enchanted city. But, as a journalist, I had the chance to get behind the scenes of life in Paris, and to put romance to the test of reality.
One of my earliest recollections of Paris was when I went there for a fortnight with my wife, in the first year of our marriage, on savings from my majestic income of £120 a year. We stayed in a little hotel called the Hôtel du Dauphin, in the rue St. Roch—where Napoleon fired his “whiff of grapeshot”—and explored the city and all its museums with untiring delight, although at that time, during the Dreyfus trial and the Fashoda crisis, England was so unpopular that we—obviously English—were actually insulted in the streets. (It was before the Entente Cordiale!)
One little show was unusual in its character. A fool named Jules Guérin, wanted by the police for not paying his rates, or something of the kind, fortified his house in the rue Chabrol, and defied the whole armed might of Paris to fetch him out. It was a kind of Sidney Street affair, for he was armed with an automatic pistol and fired at any policeman who approached. M. Lépine, the prefect, decided to besiege him and starve him out, and when my wife and I wedged our way through vast crowds, we found the rue Chabrol surrounded by a veritable army of gendarmes. No one was allowed down the street, to the great annoyance of my wife, who desired to see Jules Guérin.
While we were talking together, a woman plucked my wife’s sleeve and said in French, “You want to see Guérin?... Come with me.”
She led us down a number of narrow passages beyond the police cordon until, suddenly, we came into the very center of the deserted street.
“Voilà!” said the woman. “Vous voyez l’imbécile!”
She pointed to an upper window, and there, sure enough, was the “imbecile,” Guérin, a sinister-looking fellow with a black beard, with a large revolver very much in evidence. My wife laughed at him, and he looked very much annoyed.... It was a full week before he surrendered to the law.
One of the most interesting times I had in Paris was when the Confédération Générale de Travail, under the leadership of Jean Jaurès, declared a general strike against the government of Aristide Briand. It was a trial of strength between those two men, who had once been comrades in the extreme Left of revolutionary labor. Both of them were men of outstanding character. Jaurès was much more than a hot-headed demagogue, of the new Bolshevik type, eager to destroy civilization in revenge against “Capital.” He was a lover of France in every fiber of his body and brain, and a man of many Christian qualities, including kindness and charity and personal morality, in spite of religious scepticism. He saw with clear vision the approaching danger of war with Germany, and he devoted his life, and lost it, on behalf of antimilitarism, believing that German democracy could be won over to international peace, if French democracy would link up with them. It was for that reason that he attacked the three years’ system of military service, and denounced the increasing expenditure of France on military preparations. But to attain his ideal of international peace, he played into the hands of revolutionary labor, and defended many of its violent methods, including “direct action.” It was with Aristide Briand that he had drawn up the plans of a general strike in which every trade union or syndicate in France would join at the appointed hour, in order to demonstrate the power of “Labor” and to overthrow the autocracy of “Capital.”
When Briand deserted the Left Wing, modified his views for the sake of office, and finally became Premier of France, Jaurès, who had taunted him as a renegade, put into operation against him the weapon he had helped to forge. A general strike was declared.
There were astonishing scenes in Paris. The machinery of social life came to a dead stop. No railway trains arrived or departed, and I had a sensational journey from Calais to Paris in the last train through, driven by an amateur who had not mastered the mystery of the brakes, so that the few passengers, with the last supply of milk for Paris, were bumped and jolted with terrifying shocks.
Food from the rural districts was held up on wayside stations, and Paris was like a besieged city, living on rapidly diminishing stocks. The “Metro” ceased work, and armies of clerks, shopgirls, and business men had to walk to their work from suburbs or distant quarters. They made a joke of it, and laughed and sang on their way, as though it was the greatest jest in the world. But it became beyond a jest after the first day or two, especially at night, when Paris was plunged into abysmal darkness because the electricians had joined the railway men and all other branches of labor.
The restaurants and cafés along the great boulevards were dimly lighted by candles stuck into wine and beer bottles, and bands of students from the Latin Quarter paraded with paper lanterns, singing the Funeral March and other doleful ditties, not without a sense of romance and adventure in that city of darkness. The apaches, who love not the light, came out of their lairs, beyond Clichy, and fell upon wanderers in the gloom, robbing them of their watches and ready money, and clubbing them if they put up any resistance. No milk could be had for love or money, no butter, eggs, fish, or fresh meat, except by the rich hotels which cornered the markets with their small supplies brought in by farm carts, hand carts, or babies’ perambulators.
On the whole there was very little violence, for, in spite of their excitability, Parisian crowds are good-natured and law-abiding. But there was one section which gave trouble. It was the union of terrassiers or day laborers. They knocked off work and strolled down toward the center of Paris in strong bodies, looking dangerous and picturesque in their great loose breeches tucked into their boots, short jackets, and flat bonnets pulled over the right eye. Most of them carried knives or cheap pistols, and they had ancient, traditional grudges against the agents de police.
Those simple and admirable men were remarkably polite to them, and generally contrived to keep at a safe distance when they appeared in force. But the mounted police of the Garde Républicaine tried to herd them back from the shopping centers of the city which they threatened to loot, and came into immediate conflict with them. As an observer interested in the drama of life, I several times became unpleasantly mixed up with terrassiers and other rash onlookers when the Garde Républicaine rode among them, and I had some narrow escapes from being trampled down.
A hot affair took place round a scaffolding which had been put up for some new building up by Montmartre. The terrassiers, driven back by the mounted men who used the flat of their swords, made a stronghold of this place, and loosed off their pistols or flung brickbats at the “enemy,” inflicting several casualties. Orders were given to clear out this hornets’ nest, and the Garde Républicaine charged right up to the scaffolding and hauled out the ruffians, who were escorted as prisoners through hooting mobs. It was all very exciting, and Paris was beginning to lose its temper.
Jaurès had called a great meeting of cheminots—the railway workers—in the Salle de Manège, or riding school, down the rue St. Denis. In the interests of The Daily Chronicle I decided to attend it. It was in a low quarter of the city, and vast crowds of factory workers and young hooligans surged up and down the street, jeering at the police, and asking for trouble. Far away, above their heads, I could see the steel helmets with their long black plumes of the Garde Républicaine.
A narrow passage led to the Salle de Manège, where Jaurès had begun his meeting with an assembly of two thousand railway workers, packed tight, as I could see when the door was opened an inch to give them air. It was guarded by a group of strikers who told me in rough language to clear off, when I asked for admission. One of them, however, caught my remark that I belonged to The Daily Chronicle. It impressed him favorably. “I used to read it when I was a hairdresser in Soho,” he told me. He opened the door enough for me to step inside.
Presently I was sorry he did. The atmosphere was hellish in its heat and stench, arising from the wet sawdust of the riding school and the greasy clothes of this great crowd of men, densely massed. Jaurès was on the tribune, speaking with a powerful, sonorous voice, I forget his words, but remember his appeal to the men to reveal the nobility of labor by their loyalty and their discipline. He was scornful of the renegade Briand who had sold his soul for office and was ready to use bayonets against the liberties of men whose cause he had once defended with passionate hypocrisy.... After an hour of this, I thought I should die of suffocation, and managed to escape.
It was out of the frying pan into the fire, for the crowds in the rue St. Denis were being forced back by the Republican Guard, and I was carried off my feet in the stampede, until I became wedged against the wall of a corner café, with a surging crowd in front. Some one flung a wine bottle at one of the Republican Guards, and unseated him. Immediately the mounted troops rode their horses at the throng outside the café. Tables fell over, chairs were smashed, and a score of men and women fell in a heap through the plate glass windows. There were shrieks of terror, mingled with yells of mirth. I decided to watch the drama, if possible, from a more comfortable observation post, and knocked at the door of one of the tall tenement houses near by. It was opened by a villainous-looking man, shielding the flame of a candle with a filthy hand.
“What do you want?” he asked in French.
“A view from your top window,” I said.
He bargained with me sullenly, and I agreed to five francs for a place on his roof. It was worth that money, to me, to see how the poor of Paris sleep in their cheap lodging houses. I went through the rooms on each floor, by way of rickety old stairs, and in each room were fifteen to twenty people, sitting or lying on iron bedsteads, men in some rooms, women in others. Some of them were sleeping and snoring, others lay half-dressed, reading scraps of newspaper by flickering gas light. Others were undressing, careless of the publicity given to their rags. It was astonishing to me that hardly any of them paid the slightest attention to the scenes in the street below, which were becoming riotous, as I could hear by gusts of noise, in which the shrieks of women mingled with hoarse groans and yells and a kind of sullen chant with the words, “Hue! Hue! Hue! A bas la police. A bas la police! Hue! Hue! Hue!”
This house was older than the French Revolution, and I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps when the tumbrils were passing on their way to the guillotine, men and women like this were lying abed, or yawning and combing their matted hair, or playing cards by candlelight, as two fellows here, not bothering to glance beyond the windows at such a common sight as another batch of aristocrats going to their death.
From the roof I looked down on the turbulent crowd, charged again and again by the Republican Guards until the street was clear. Presently the cheminots came surging out of the Salle de Manège, with Jaurès at their head, walking very slowly. The police let Jaurès get past, and then broke up the procession behind him, with needless brutality, as it seemed to me. Many men were knocked down, and fell under the horses’ hoofs. Others were beaten by blunt swords.
Not only Paris was in the throes of the general strike, but all France. It was a serious threat to the French government and to the social life of the people. Briand, who had played with revolutionary ideas as a younger man, showed now that he had the wisdom that comes from responsibility, and the courage to apply it. He called certain classes to the colors. If they disobeyed, it would be treason to the Flag, punishable by death. If they obeyed, it would break the general strike, as they would be ordered, as soldiers, to run the trains, and distribute supplies. It was a great risk to take, threatening civil war, but he took it, believing that few men would refuse obedience to military discipline. He was right, and by this means he crushed the general strike and broke the power of the trade unions.
I interviewed him at that time, and remember my first meeting with that man who afterward, when the World War had ended in the defeat of Germany, held the office of Premier again and endeavored vainly to save France from the ruin which followed victory.
I waited for him, by appointment, in a great salon furnished in the style of Louis XV, with gilded chairs and a marble-topped table at which Napoleon had once sat as Emperor. I was chatting with one of his secretaries, when the door opened, and a tall, heavily built man with large, dark, melancholy eyes, came into the room. He looked at me somberly, and I stared back, not realizing that it was the Prime Minister of France. Then the secretary whispered “Monsieur Briand,” and he held out his hand to me. We had a long talk, or, rather, he talked and I listened, impressed by the apparent frankness and simplicity and courage of the man.
He told me how great had been the danger to France from the forces of anarchy let loose by the Confédération Générale de Travail by their action of the general strike, and he defended the policy by which he had broken that threat against the authority of government. He did not disguise from me that he had risked not only his political life and reputation, but even the very peace and stability of France. But that risk had been necessary, because the alternative would have been a weak and shameful surrender to anarchy and revolution.
Jaurès was beaten, as he deserved to be, on that issue. His worst defeat was not then, but in August of 1914, when those German Socialists, in whose pacifism and brotherhood of man he had believed, supported the challenge of their war lords against France and Russia, and marched with all the rest toward the French frontier. The whole of Jaurès’s life struggle for international peace was made vain by the beating of drums for the greatest war in history. Among his own people there were many, once spellbound by his oratory and loyal to his leadership, who now abused him as the man who had weakened the defenses of France by his antimilitarist influence. There were some, even, who said “Jaurès betrayed us to the Enemy!”
On that night when many nations of Europe answered the call to arms, stupefied, conscious of enormous terrors approaching all human life, hearing already, in imagination, the thunder of a world of guns that had not yet opened fire, I paced the streets of Paris with a friend, wondering how soon he and I would be caught up in that death struggle.
“Let us turn in at the Croissant,” he said. “We must eat, though the world goes mad.”
It was late, and when we arrived at the restaurant in the rue Montmartre, it was closed and guarded by police.
“What has happened?” I asked, and some one in the crowd answered with intense emotion:
“Jaurès is assassinated! He was shot there, as he sat at dinner.”
He was shot from behind a curtain, in a plush-covered seat where often I had sat, by some young man who believed that, in killing Jaurès, he was helping to secure the victory of France.
I saw his funeral cortège. They gave him a great funeral. Ministers of France, men of all parties, dignitaries of the Church, marched behind his coffin, and behind the red flags which were blown by a strong wind. It was not love for him, but fear of the people which caused that demonstration at his burial. It was an appeal for that Union Sacrée of all classes by which alone the menace to the life of France might be resisted. There need have been no fear. There was hardly a man in France who did not offer his life as a willing sacrifice, in that war which seemed not only against France and her friends, but against civilization itself and all humanity. So the poilus believed, with simple faith, unshaken by any doubt—in the peaceful policy of France and the unprovoked aggression of Germany.
The restaurant in which Jaurès was killed—the Croissant, with the sign of the Turkish Crescent—was one of the few in Paris open all night for the use of journalists who slept by day. Needless to say, other night birds, even more disreputable, found this place a pleasant sanctuary in the wee sma’ hours. I went there often for some meal which might have been dinner, lunch, or breakfast, any time between 2 and 5 A.M. I was with my colleague, Henri Bourdin, during the Italian war in Tripoli.
Our job was to receive long dispatches over the telephone, from Italian correspondents, and transmit them by telephone to London. It was a maddening task, because after very few minutes of conversation, the telephone cut us off from one of the Italian cities, or from London, and only by curses and prayers and passionate pleading to lady operators could we establish contact again.
Though the war in Tripoli was a trivial episode, wiped out in our memory by another kind of war, the Italian correspondents wrote millions of words about every affair of outposts—all of which streamed over the telephone in florid Italian. I had a Sicilian who translated that Italian into frightful French, which I, in turn, translated into somewhat less frightful English, and conveyed by telephone to London.
It went on hour after hour, day after day, and night after night, especially from a man named Bevione. I hated his eloquence so much that I made a solemn vow to kill him, if ever I met him in the flesh.... I met him in Bulgaria, during another war, but he was so charming that I forgave him straightway for all the agony he had inflicted on me. Besides, undoubtedly, he would have killed me first.
The Sicilian was a marvel. Between the telephone calls he narrated all his love affairs since the age of fourteen, and they were innumerable. During the telephone calls, it was he who pleaded with the lady operators not to cut him off, or to get his call again. He punctuated every sentence with a kiss. “Madonna!... Bacio!... Bacio!” He gave these unknown beauties (perhaps they were as ugly as sin!) a million kisses over the telephone wires, and by this frenzy of amorous demonstration seriously disturbed the Paris exchange, and held up all our rivals.
Henri Bourdin, in intervals of waiting, used to make the time pass by acting all the most famous dramas of the modern French stage, and I vow that this single man used to give me the illusion of having seen the entire company of the Comédie Française, so vivid were his character studies and descriptions.
Abandoning the Sicilian to any opportunities of love he might find beyond the telephone receiver, Bourdin and I used to leave the office on the Boulevard des Capucines just as the light of dawn was creeping into the streets of Paris, when the chiffonniers picked at the rags in the dustbins, and pale ladies of the night passed like ghosts to their lodgings in mean streets.
We made our way sometimes to the markets—Les Halles—where the women of the Revolution used to gather with their knitting and their gossip of the latest heads to fall in the basket of the guillotine. Many of the houses round about belong to that period, and Bourdin and I used to take coffee in old eating and drinking houses like the “Chien qui Fume” (The Dog Who Smokes), which still have on their walls the iron brackets for the lanterns on which French aristocrats were hanged by infuriated mobs, in 1793.
They were still frequented by strange and sinister-looking characters. I remember one group, certainly as queer as any I have seen. Bourdin and I were seated at table when they came in excitedly—about thirty men and women, all laughing and jabbering. The men wore long hair, very wild and unkempt, with flowing black ties of “La Vallière” style. The women had short hair, cut with straight fringes. Presently another man appeared, astoundingly like Ary Scheffer’s study of Our Lord, with long pale hair, and straw-colored beard, and watery blue eyes. At his coming, the company became delirious with enthusiasm, while he went gravely round the circle and kissed each man and woman on the lips.
It was Bourdin who explained to me the mystery of these fantastic creatures. They belonged to the most advanced Anarchist society in Paris. The man who appeared last had just been acquitted by the French courts on a charge of kidnapping and locking up one of his fellow anarchists, who had betrayed the society to the police.
The only time in which I myself have been in the hands of the French police was in the early days of the war, while I was waiting in Paris for my papers as accredited war correspondent with the British Armies in the field. This unpleasant experience was due to my ceaseless curiosity in life and the rash acceptance of a casual invitation.
A friend of mine had become acquainted with two ladies who sang at “Olympia,” and I happened to be in a taxicab with him when they approached the door of his vehicle as we alighted.
It was eleven o’clock at night, and it was murmured by the two ladies that they were going to a “reception” at some apartment near the Étoile—a most aristocratic neighborhood. They would be delighted if we accompanied them. I was tired, and did not wish to go, but my friend Brown, always fresh at midnight, saw amusement ahead, and begged me to come.
“For an hour, then,” I said.
In the cab on the way to the Étoile, Brown sang mock Italian opera with one of the ladies, who had an excellent voice and a sense of humor. I exchanged a few remarks with the other lady, and was slightly disturbed by the somewhat German accent with which she spoke French.
Certainly, the apartment in which presently we found ourselves, in an avenue by the Étoile, was extremely elegant, and crowded with men and women in evening dress, who looked highly respectable. Among them were a few French officers in uniform and one English officer. The hostess was a charming-looking lady, with snow-white hair. There was a little music, a little dancing, and polite conversation. It was decorous and dull.
At the end of an hour I spoke to Brown.
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”
He informed me in a whisper that if I went I should be losing something very good in the way of an adventure.
“This is, undoubtedly, one of the most criminal haunts in Paris,” he said. “I can smell abomination! Something melodramatic will happen before long, or I’ll eat my hat.”
I was surprised, and alarmed. I had no desire to be at home in a criminal haunt in time of war. I decided even more firmly to go, and went to take leave of the charming lady with the snow-white hair.
She seemed vexed that I should desire to go so soon, but seeing that I was decided, made a somewhat curious request.
“Do you mind going out by the garden entrance—through the French windows? We do not care to show lights through the front door. C’est la guerre!”
I went out through the garden entrance, followed by Brown, who said I was missing the fun.
It was dark in the garden, and I stumbled on the way to a little garden gate, twenty yards away from the house.
As I put my hand on the latch of the gate, I was aware of a large number of black shadows coming toward me out of the bushes beyond. Instinctively I beat a hasty retreat back to the house. Something had happened to it. Where the French windows had been was now a steel door. Brown was doing something mysterious, bending low and making pencil marks on a white slab of the wall.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’m identifying the house, in case of future need,” he answered.
I made a tattoo with my stick against the steel door. My one foolish desire was to get back into the house, away from those black figures outside the garden gate. It was too late. Directly I knocked on the door, a score of them rushed into the garden, and I was seized and carried in strong arms until, at a considerable distance, I was dumped down under the Eiffel Tower, in charge of a dozen agents de police. Groups of men and women in evening dress, some of whom I recognized as visitors at the reception of the charming lady with the snow-white hair, were also in charge of strong bodies of police. My friend Brown was a prisoner some twenty yards away. It was a cold night, but, philosophically, to the amazement of the French police, he lay down on the grass and went to sleep.
We were kept under the Eiffel Tower for two hours, at the end of which time a motor car drew up, with a gentleman wearing the tricolor sash of a French prefect. It was for him that we had been waiting. Strangely enough, we were all taken back to the apartment from which we had come, and there each person was subjected to an examination by the prefect and his assistants. There was evident terror among the men and women who had passed the evening in the house of mystery.
Brown and I were liberated after an inspection of our passports. On the way home I asked Brown for a little explanation, for I could understand nothing of the business.
He understood perfectly.
“That place was a gambling den. The police were looking for German spies, as well as French officers absent without leave. I told you we should see something worth while!”
I confess I did not think it worth while. I had had a nasty fright, caught a bad cold, and missed a good night’s sleep.
But it was certainly a little bit of melodrama, which one may find in Paris more easily than in any city in the world.