Poplar and gummy Plum-trees, Lilac and Acacias, courtyard and indeed the whole Institution, had already disappeared when I bethought myself, for the first time after so many years of oblivion, to go and gaze upon the scene once more. It was quite in middle life. I had lately been reading that sad and strangely affecting work, “Peter Ibbetson,” the first, and to my mind by far the best, of the three novels written by Georges du Maurier in the late autumn of his days. By the thousands who for so many years had, week after week, enjoyed the delicate humour and pencilling of the great Punch artist, the book was received with a favour that paved the way for the greater popular success of “Trilby.” But I doubt whether it ever appealed to any denizen of our planet as intimately as to the Master of the House.
Those who have read the curiously original novel which, like so many first attempts at fiction, is autobiographical—autobiographical as to feelings, if not necessarily as to facts—may remember his description of the English boy’s early “French days;” and, later on, of the mature man’s poignant impressions on revisiting the old playground of his life. Now, there were so many points of resemblance between the surroundings of Du Maurier’s hero’s childhood and my own; so many allusions to the kind of things and the kind of people I had once been familiar with but, as time flowed on, had dismissed from mind as removed from real existence and new workaday points of view; they were presented, moreover, in so sympathetic a manner, that one need hardly wonder at the sudden resolve that rose within me, to go and look up the old place again.
Such a desire, when it comes, has something of the twist of hunger about it—it is une fringale, to use a word for which, oddly enough, we have no counterpart. But, alas! delight in scenes of the beau temps jadis is not to be recaptured! It may but be espied in fitful, elusive glimpses. The world has moved on and the genius loci has fled. Have you ever found out that the return, after many years, to a place oft dreamed of until then and with never-failing tenderness, besides leaving you blankly unsatisfied, seems to have killed the glamour, to have broken the magic spell of memory? The dream is dispelled. It will henceforth nevermore haunt your pillow. You have seen the phantom of the past with the eyes of nowadays; the new picture has replaced that of the dream—for ever.
Well, la boite Delescluze—as we irreverent youngsters called that respectable institution—unlike those other places, St. Cloud, for instance, which were fated to evoke but a melancholy disappointment, could not be beheld again with the carnal eye—not the least vestige of it. And it is, no doubt, for that reason that so many memories still come flitting back, smiling and clear, of that forgotten cradle of scholarship.
XI
A glowing log rolls down from its allotted place on the hearth, sending into the room a jet of wood smoke, blue at the stem, white feathering as it spreads out; and the pungent smell immediately revives a fresh set of scenes from the past.
NOSTRIL MEMORIES
That nothing brings back old memories so suddenly and so vividly as perfume is a commonplace remark. But I wonder whether the extraordinary persistency of a first impression, in the case of odours constantly met with, has been so generally noticed. Perhaps I am peculiar in this sensitiveness. Smells, pleasant, indifferent, or otherwise, which one is liable to encounter in the most varied circumstances, should, one would think, cease in time to recall any particular period of existence.