I seemed to have found a destiny in æsthetics or art, or what had been wanting in Princeton; that is, how the beautiful entered into life and was developed in history and made itself felt in all that was worth anything at all. Modern English writers on this subject—with exceptions like that of J. A. Symonds, whose Essays I cannot commend too highly—are in the same relation to its grand truth and higher inspiration as Emerson and Carlyle to Pantheism in its mightiest early forms. For several years the actual mastery of æsthetics gave me great comfort, and advanced me marvellously in thought to wider and far higher regions.
I forget where I parted with Pottinger; all that I can remember was, that early in November I arrived alone in Paris, going to some small hotel or other, and that as all the fatigues of the past many weeks of weary travel seemed to come upon me all at once, I went to bed, and never left the house till four o’clock p.m. the next day. On the next I found my way into the Latin Quarter, and secured a not very superior room in the Place Saint-Michel, near the Ecole de Médecine, to which I moved my luggage.
I was very much astonished, while sitting alone and rather blue and overcast in my room, at the sudden entrance of a second cousin of mine named Frank Fisher, who was studying medicine in Paris. He had by some odd chance seen my name registered in the newspapers as having arrived at the hotel, and lost no time in looking me up. He lived on the other side of the Seine in the Boule Rouge, near the Rue Helder, a famous happy hunting-ground for les biches—I mean kids or the very dear. I must go forthwith to his quarters and dine, which I did, and so my introduction to Paris was fairly begun.
I attended at the Collége Louis le Grand, and at the Sorbonne, all or any lectures by everybody, including a very dull series on German literature by Philarete Châsles. I read books. Inter alia, I went through Dante’s “Inferno” in Italian aided by Rivarol’s translation, of which I possessed
the very copy stamped with the royal arms, and containing the author’s autograph, which had been presented to the King. I picked it up on the Quai for a franc, for which sum I also obtained a first edition of Melusine, which Mr. Andrew Lang has described as such a delightful rarity. And I also ran a great deal about town. I saw Rachel, and Frédéric Lemaitre, and Mlle. Déjazet, and many more at the great theatres, and attended assiduously at Bobinot’s, which was a very small theatre in the Quartier Latin, frequented entirely by students and grisettes. I went to many a ball, both great and small, including the masked ones of the Grand Opera, and other theatres, at which there was dissipation and diablerie enough to satisfy the most ardent imagination, ending with the grande ronde infernale. I made many acquaintances, and if they were not by any means all highly respectable, they were at least generally very singular or notorious. One day I would dine at a place outside the Barrier, where we had a plain but fairly good dinner for a franc, vin compris, and where the honoured guest at the head of the table was the chef des claqueurs or head of the paid applauders at all the theatres. Then it would be at a private table-d’hôte of lorettes, where there was after dinner a little private card-playing. I heard afterwards that two or three unprincipled gamblers found their way into this nest of poor little innocents and swindled them out of all their money. When I was well in funds I would dine at Magny’s, where, in those days, one could get such a dinner for ten francs as fifty would not now purchase. When au sec, I fed at Flictoteau’s—we called him l’empoisonneur—where hundreds of students got a meal of three courses with half a bottle of ordinaire, and not so bad either, for thirty sous.
It happened one night at Bobinot’s that I sat in the front row of the stage-box, and by me a very pretty, modest, and respectable young girl, with her elder relations or friends. How it happened I do not know, but they all went out, leaving the young lady by me, and I did not speak to her.
Which “point” was at once seized by the house. The pit, as if moved by one diabolical inspiration, began to roar, “Il l’embrassera!” (He will kiss her), to which the gallery replied, “Il ne l’embrassera pas.”
So they kept it up and down alternately like see-sawing, to an intonation; and be it remarked, by the way, that in French such a monotonous bore is known as a scie or saw, as may be read in my romance in the French tongue entitled Le Lutin du Château, which was, I regret to say, refused by Hachette the publisher on account of its freedom from strait-laced, blue-nosed, Puritanical conventionalism, albeit he praised its literary merit and style, as did sundry other French scholars, if I may say it—who should not!
I saw that something must be done; so, rising, I waved my glove, and there was dead silence. Then I began at the top of my voice, in impassioned style in German, an address about matters and things in general, intermingled with insane quotations from Latin, Slavonian, anything. A change came o’er the spirit of the dream of my auditors, till at last they “took,” and gave me three cheers. I had sold the house!
There was in the Rue de la Harpe a house called the Hôtel de Luxembourg. It was the fragment of a very old palace which had borne that name. It had still a magnificent Renaissance staircase, which bore witness to its former glory. Washington Irving, in one of his earlier tales, describes this very house and the rooms which I occupied in it so accurately, that I think he must have dwelt there. He tells that a student once, during the Revolution, finding a young lady in the street, took her home with him to that house. She had a black ribbon round her neck. He twitched it away, when—off fell her head. She had been guillotined, and revived by sorcery.