We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one afternoon—a leonine old gentleman bundled up in cap and overcoat before a little grate fire, while a secretary ran through the big heap of letters piled on the bed. In the corner of the room was a roll-top desk—the sanctum, evidently, of The Chained Man.
As M. Clemenceau was insistent that he should not be interviewed, I may not repeat the exceedingly lively talk on all sorts of people and things with which he regaled us once—and it didn't take long—he "got going."
One purely personal little bit of information may be passed on, however, in the hope that it may be as interesting to other practitioners of a laborious trade as it was to me.
We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day, columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter.
This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war-horse greatly. He went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was covered with a small, firm handwriting. It was his next day's broadside, not yet finished.
"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said. "I get up at half past three every morning. I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at nine o'clock. If I had to write a banal note, it might take time, but there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life. I worked a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am eighty-three years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time"—the old gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, and, with a quick movement of shoulders and hands, concluded—"it would be a public calamity—a malheur public!"
I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charlatans and editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young artists ruined as painters by becoming popular illustrators, the young writers content to substitute overpaid banality and bathos for honest work, and I must confess that the sight of this indomitable old fighter, who had known great men and held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid prose, stirred every drop of what you might call one's intellectual sporting blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the justice of his attacks less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he is something of a trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit—for its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its tireless intelligence and unquenchable fire.
Monday.
The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy when we met on the steamer last August; not quite so odd when we bumped into each other in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he fought against the Prussians in '70. Cognac is a real place, it appears—an old town of twenty thousand people or so, and it is really where cognac comes from, all other brandies being, of course, as one will learn here, mere upstart eaux-de-vie. We went through some of the cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in Bordeaux, although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because not so "alive." For wine is a living thing, as the man said in Bordeaux, and it must be ignobly boiled and destroyed before turning into a distilled spirit. To some this pale spiritual essence may possess a finer poetry—the cellars are more fragrant, at any rate.
All the young men had gone to the front—their wages continued as usual —and the work was carried on by women and old servitors, scarcely one of the latter under seventy. They were pointed out as examples of the beneficent effect of the true cognac—these old boys who had inhaled the slightly pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac. It comes wandering down old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people live literally in a fine mist of it. The very stones are turned black by the faint fumes.