I don't know how much more of this there was but, when Peter finally stopped talking, the sunlight was streaming in through the window.
Chapter IV
It was many days before I saw Peter again. I met other men and women. I visited the Louvre and at first stood humbly in the Salon Carré before the Monna Lisa and in the long corridor of the Venus de Milo; a little later, I became thuriferous before Sandro Botticelli's frescoes from the Villa Lemmi and Watteau's Pierrot. I made a pilgrimage to the Luxembourg Gallery and read Huysmans's evocation of the picture before Moreau's Salome. I sat in the tiny old Roman arena, Lutetia's amphitheatre, constructed in the second or third century, and conjured up visions of lions and Christian virgins. I drank tea at the Pavilion d'Armenonville in the Bois and I bought silk handkerchiefs of many colours at the Galeries Lafayette. I began to carry my small change in a pig-skin purse and I learned to look out for bad money. Every morning I called for mail at the American Express Company in the Rue Scribe. I ate little wild strawberries with Crème d'Isigny. I bought old copies of l'Assiette au Beurre on the quais and new copies of Le Sourire at kiosques. I heard Werther at the Opéra-Comique and I saw Lina Cavalieri in Thaïs at the Opéra. I made journeys to Versailles, Saint Cloud, and Fontainebleau. I inspected the little hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died and I paid my respects to his tomb in Père-Lachaise. The fig-leaf was missing from the heroic figure on the monument. It had been stolen, the cemetery-guard informed me, par une jeune miss anglaise, who desired a souvenir. I drank champagne cocktails, sitting on a stool, at the American bar in the Grand Hotel. I drank whisky and soda, ate salted nuts, and talked with English racing men at Henry's bar, under the delightful brown and yellow mural decorations, exploiting ladies of the 1880 period with bangs, and dresses with bustles, and over-drapings, and buttons down the front. I enjoyed long bus rides and I purchased plays in the arcades of the Odéon. I went to the races at Chantilly. I drank cocktails at Louis's bar in the Rue Racine. Louis Doerr, the patron, had worked as a bar-man in Chicago and understood the secrets of American mixed drinks. Doubtless, he could have made a Fireman's Shirt. He divided his time between his little bar and his atelier, where he gave boxing lessons to the students of the quarter. When he was teaching the manly art, Madame Doerr manipulated the shaker. I attended services at Les Hannetons and Maurice's Bar and I strolled through the Musée de Cluny, where I bought postcards of chastity belts and instruments of torture. I read Maupassant in the Parc Monceau. I took in the naughty revues at Parisiana, the Ba-ta-clan, and the Folies-Bergère. I purchased many English and American novels in the Tauchnitz edition and I discovered a miniature shop in the Rue de Furstenberg, where elegant reprints of bawdy eighteenth century French romances might be procured. I climbed to the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, particularly to observe a chimère which was said to resemble me, and I ascended the Tour Eiffel in an elevator. I consumed hors d'œuvres at the Brasserie Universelle. I attended a band concert in the Tuileries Gardens. I dined with Olive Fremstad at the Mercedes and Olive Fremstad dined with me at the Café d'Harcourt. I heard Salome at the Châtelet, Richard Strauss conducting, with Emmy Destinn as the protagonist in a modest costume, trimmed with fur, which had been designed, it was announced, by the Emperor of Germany. I discovered the Restaurant Cou-Cou, which I have described in The Merry-Go-Round, and I made pilgrimages to the Rat Mort, the Nouvelle Athènes, and the Elysée Montmartre, sacred to the memory of George Moore. They appeared to have altered since he confessed as a young man. I stood on a table at the Bal Tabarin and watched the quadrille, the pas de quatre, concluding with the grand écart, which was once sinister and wicked but which has come, through the portentous solemnity with which tradition has invested it, to have almost a religious significance. I learned to drink Amer Picon, grenadine, and white absinthe. I waited three hours in the street before Liane de Pougy's hotel in the Rue de la Néva to see that famous beauty emerge to take her drive, and I waited nearly as long at the stage-door of the Opéra-Comique for a glimpse of the exquisite Regina Badet. I embarked on one of the joyous little Seine boats and I went slumming in the Place d'Italie, La Villette, a suburb associated in the memory with the name of Yvette Guilbert, and Belleville. I saw that very funny farce, Vous n'avez rien à declarer at the Nouveautés. In the Place des Vosges, I admired the old brick houses, among the few that Napoleon and the Baron Haussmann spared in their deracination of Paris. On days when I felt poor, I dined with the cochers at some marchand de vins. On days when I felt rich, I dined with the cocottes at the Café de Paris. I examined the collection of impressionist paintings at the house of Monsieur Durand-Ruel, No. 37, Rue de Rome, and the vast accumulation of unfinished sketches for a museum of teratology at the house of Gustave Moreau, No. 14, Rue de La Rochefoucauld, room after room of unicorns, Messalinas, muses, magi, Salomes, sphinxes, argonauts, centaurs, mystic flowers, chimerae, Semeles, hydras, Magdalens, griffins, Circes, ticpolongas, and crusaders. I drank tea in the Ceylonese tea-room in the Rue Caumartin, where coffee-hued Orientals with combs in their hair waited on the tables. I gazed longingly into the show-windows of the shops where Toledo cigarette-cases, Bohemian garnets, and Venetian glass goblets were offered for sale. I bought a pair of blue velvet workman's trousers, a béret, and a pair of canvas shoes at Au Pays, 162 Faubourg St. Martin. I often enjoyed my chocolate and omelet at the Café de la Régence, where everybody plays chess or checkers and has played chess or checkers for a century or two, and where the actors of the Comédie Française, which is just across the Place, frequently, during a rehearsal, come in their make-up for lunch. I learned the meaning of flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette, and rigolo. I purchased a dirty silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV brass candlesticks, which I still possess, in the Marché du Temple. I tasted babas au rhum, napoléons, and palmiers. I ordered a suit, which I never wore, from a French tailor for 150 francs. I bought some Brittany ware in an old shop back of Notre-Dame. I admired the fifteenth century apocalyptic glass in the Sainte-Chapelle and the thirteenth century glass in the Cathedral at Chartres. I learned that demi-tasse is an American word, that Sparkling Burgundy is an American drink, and that I did not like French beer. I stayed away from the receptions at the American embassy. I was devout in Saint Sulpice, the Russian Church in the Rue Daru, Saint Germain-des-Prés, Saint Eustache, Sacré-Cœur, and Saint Jacques, and I attended a wedding at the Madeleine, which reminded me that Bel Ami had been married there. I passed pleasant evenings at the Boîte à Fursy, on the Rue Pigalle, and Les Noctambules, on the Rue Champollion. I learned to speak easily of Mayol, Eve Lavallière, Dranem, Ernest la Jeunesse, Colette Willy, Max Dearly, Charles-Henry Hirsch, Lantelme, André Gide, and Jeanne Bloch. I saw Clemenceau, Edward VII, and the King of Greece. I nibbled toasted scones at a tea-shop on the Rue de Rivoli. I met the Steins. In short, you will observe that I did everything that young Americans do when they go to Paris.
On a certain afternoon, early in June, I found myself sitting at a table in the Café de la Paix with Englewood Jennings and Frederic Richards, two of my new friends. Richards is a famous person today and even then he was somebody. He had a habit of sketching, wherever he might be, on a sheet of paper at a desk at the Hotel Continental or on a program at the theatre. He drew quick and telling likenesses in a few lines of figures or objects that pleased him, absent-mindedly signed them, and then tossed them aside. This habit of his was so well-known that he was almost invariably followed by admirers of his work, who snapped up his sketches as soon as he had disappeared. I saw a good collection of them, drawn on the stationery of hotels from Hamburg to Taormina, and even on meat paper, go at auction in London a year or so ago for £1,000. When I knew him, Richards was a blond giant, careless of everything except his appearance. Jennings was an American socialist from Harvard who was ranging Europe to interview Jean Jaurès, Giovanni Papini, and Karl Liebknecht. He was exceedingly eccentric in his dress, had steel-grey eyes, the longest, sharpest nose I have ever seen, and wore glasses framed in tortoise-shell.
It had become my custom to pass two hours of every afternoon on this busy corner, first ordering tea with two brioches, and later a succession of absinthes, which I drank with sugar and water. In time I learned to do without the sugar, just as eventually I might have learned, in all probability, to do without the water, had I not been compelled to do without the absinthe[1]. I was enjoying my third pernod while my companions were dallying with whisky and soda. We were gossiping, and where in the world can one gossip to better advantage than on this busy corner, where every passerby offers a new opportunity? But, occasionally, the conversation slipped into alien channels.
How can the artist, Jennings, for instance, was asking, know that he is inspired, when neither the public nor the critics recognize inspiration? The question is equally interesting asked backwards. As a matter of fact, the artist is sometimes conscious that he is doing one thing, while he is acclaimed and appreciated for doing another. Columbus did not set out to discover America. Yes, there is often an accidental quality in great art and oftener still there is an accidental appreciation of it. In one sense art is curiously bound up with its own epoch, but appreciation or depreciation of its relation to that epoch may come in another generation. The judgment of posterity may be cruel to contemporary genius. In a few years we may decide that Richard Strauss is only another Liszt and Stravinsky, another Rubinstein.
Inspiration! Richards shrugged his broad shepherd's plaid shoulders. Inspiration! Artists, critics, public, clever men, and philistines monotonously employ that word, but it seems to me that art is created through memory out of experience, combined with a capacity for feeling and expressing experience, and depending on the artist's physical condition at the time when he is at work.
Are you, I asked, one of those who believes that a novelist must be unfaithful to his wife before he can write a fine novel, that a girl should have an amour with a prize-fighter before she can play Juliet, and that a musician must be a pederast before he can construct a great symphony?
Richards laughed.
No, he replied, I am not, but that theory is very popular. How many times I have heard it thundered forth! As a matter of fact, there is a certain amount of truth in it, the germ, indeed, of a great truth, for some emotional experience is essential to the artist, but why particularize? Each as he may!