I do not say that we had only adverse opinions from our friends. Our own generation sustained us with warm and enthusiastic approval, and we were fortified by this, despite the fact that a stern young brother wrote to me in high reprobation, and ended by saying that “such a combination of bodily and mental hideosity as Charlotte could never have existed outside of your and Martin’s diseased imaginations.” Which left little more to be said.
On the whole, the point insisted on, to the exclusion of every other aspect of the book, was the “unpleasantness” of the characters. The pendulum has now swung the other way, and “pleasant” characters usually involve a charge of want of seriousness. Very humbly, and quite uncontroversially, I may say that Martin and I have not wavered from the opinion that “The Real Charlotte” was, and remains, the best of our books, and, with this very mild commendation, the matter, as far as we are concerned, closes.
We were in Paris (with the tallest and youngest of the Magdalen Tower party) when Charlotte was published. I was working for a brief spell at the studio of M. Délécluse; Martin was writing a series of short articles, which, with the title “Quartier Latinities,” and adorned by drawings of mine, appeared in Black and White. The casual, artless, yet art-full life of “The Quarter” fascinated Martin; she had the gift of living it with zest, while remaining far enough outside it to be able to savour its many absurdities. As we said, in one of our books, and the idea was hers, “The Irishman is always the critic in the stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.” The “English Club” for women artists, of which I was a member, soon got to know, and to accept, the slim and immaculately neat critic of the simple habits and customs of its members, and resented not at all her analysis of its psychology. Black and White had an immense vogue there; some day, perhaps, those articles, and others of Martin Ross’s stray writings, may be collected and reprinted. If the “Boul’ Miche’,” now orphaned of its artists, ever gathers a new generation under its wings, these divagations of autre-fois will have an interest of their own for those that survive of the old order.
We had rooms at a very unfashionable hotel on the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, at the corner of the Boulevard Raspail. It was mainly occupied by art students, and the flare of esprit à bruler lit its many windows at the sacred hour of le fife o’clock, or such of its windows as appertained to les Anglaises. The third member of our ménage went daily to what she spoke of as “The Louvre”—meaning the Magasin, not the Musée—and explained rather vaguely that she had “to buy things for a bazaar.” Her other occupation was that of cook. There was a day when “Ponce” (my fellow lodger, it may be remembered, in the Rue Madame) came beneath our windows at lunch time and was offered hospitality. She declined, and was then desired to “run over to Carraton’s” and purchase for the cook a dozen of eggs. This she did, and cried to us from the street below—(we were swells, living au premier)—that the eggs were there. The cook is a person of resource, and in order to save trouble, she bade Ponce wait, while she lowered to her a basket, by the apostolic method of small cords, in which she should place the eggs. Across the way was a café, dedicated to a mysterious and ever-thirsty company, “Les bons Gymnasiarques.” The attention of these beings, and that of a neighbouring cab-stand, was speedily attracted to the proceeding. Spellbound they watched the cook as she lowered the basket to Ponce. Holding their breaths, they watched Ponce entrust the eggs to the basket; as it rose, they rose from their seats beneath the awning; as the small cords broke—which of course they did, when the basket was about halfway to the window—and the eggs enveloped Ponce in involuntary omelette, the Bons Gymnasiarques cheered. I have little doubt but that that omelette helped to cement the Entente Cordiale, which was at that time still considerably below the national horizon.
I am aware that tales of French as she is spoke by the English have been many, “but each must mourn his own (she saith),” and we had a painful episode or two that must be recounted. The gentlemen of the Magasin du Louvre could, if they would, contribute some stirring stories. One wonders if one of them is still dining out on the tall young English lady who told him at the Rayon devoted to slippers that she desired for herself a pair of pantalons rouges? And if another, who presided at a lace counter, has forgotten the singular request made to him for a “Front avec des rides”? “A wrinkled forehead!” one seems to hear him murmur to himself, “In the name of a pipe, how, at her age, can I procure this for her?”
These are, however, child’s play in comparison with what befell one of my cousins, when shopping in Geneva with an aunt, a tall and impressive aunt, godly, serious, middle-aged, the Church of Ireland, as it were, embodied, appropriately, in a black Geneva gown. My aunt desired a pillow to supplement the agrémens of her hotel; one imagines that the equivalents for mattress and for pillow must have, in one red ruin, blended themselves in her mind. “Oreiller,” “sommier,” something akin to these formulated itself in her brain and sprang to her lips, and she said,
“Donnez moi un sommelier, s’il vous plait.”
“M’dame?” replied the shopman, in a single, curt, slightly bewildered syllable.
“Un sommelier,” repeated the embodiment of the Irish Church, distinctly, “Je dors toujours avec deux sommeliers——”