“I believe that they did see a light go sailing up from the Dome of the Observatoire, (which we can see from here) and that was a balloon, containing a lady astronomer, Mademoiselle Klumpke, (who is, I believe an American) and others. She sailed away in the piercing cold to somewhere in the South of Switzerland, and I believe she saw a few dozen meteors. Anyhow, two days afterwards, she walked into Kinkie’s studio, bringing a piece of mistletoe, and some flowers that she had gathered when she got out of the balloon down there.”
The South African War made life in Paris, that winter, a school of adversity for all English, or nominally English, people. Each reverse of our Army—and if one could believe the French papers it would seem that such took place every second day—was snatched at by the people of Paris and their newspapers with howls of delight. Men in the omnibuses would thrust in our faces La Patrie, or some such paper, to exhibit the words “Encore un Écrasement Anglais!”, in large, exultant letters, filling a page. Respectable old gentlemen, in “faultless morning dress,” would cry “Oh yais!” as we passed; large tongues would be exhibited to us, till we felt we could have diagnosed the digestions of the Quarter. At last our turn came, and when the Matin had a line, “Capitulation de Cronjé,” writ large enough for display, Martin made an expedition in an omnibus down “The Big Boulevards” for no purpose other than to flaunt it in the faces of her fellow passengers.
To Martin, who was an intensely keen politician, the aloofness of many of the art-students whom she met, from the War, the overthrow of the French Government, from, in fact, any question on any subject outside the life of the studio, was a constant amazement.
In a letter from her to one of her sisters she releases her feelings on the subject.
V. F. M. to Mrs. Cuthbert Dawson.
(Paris, Nov. 29, 1899.)
“The French papers are realising that a mistake has been made in the attacks on the Queen, and the better ones are saying so. But the Patrie, the Libre Parole, and all that fleet of halfpenny papers that the poor read, have nailed their colours to the mast, and it seems as if their idea is to overthrow their present Government by fair means or foul. As long as this Government is in there will be no quarrel with England, but it might, of course, go out like a candle, any day. I daresay you have heard the Rire spoken of as one of the papers that ought to be suppressed. We bought the number that was to be all about the English, and all about them it was, a sort of comic history of England since the Creation, with Hyde Park as the Garden of Eden. The cover was a hauntingly horrible picture of Joan of Arc being burned. The rest of the pictures were dull, disgusting, and too furiously angry to be clever. We had pleasure in consigning the whole thing to the stove.... The students here, with exceptions, of course,—appear deaf and blind to all that goes on, and Revolutions in Paris, and the War in the Transvaal, are as nothing to them as compared with the pose of the model. In every street are crowds of them, scraping away at their charcoal ‘academies’ by the roomful, all perfectly engrossed and self-centred, and, I think, quite happy. Last Sunday we went to a mild little tea-party in a studio, where were several of these artist-women, in their best clothes, and somewhere in the heart of the throng was a tiny hideosity, an American, (who has a studio in which R. B. once worked,) fat, bearded, and unspeakably common, but interesting.[14] Holding another court of the women was a microbe English artist, an absurd little thing to look at, but, I believe, clever; I hear that on weekdays he dresses like a French workman and looks like a toy that you would buy at a bazaar. No one talked anything but Art, except when occasionally one of the hostesses (there were four) hurriedly asked me what I thought of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, or how two people managed to write together, just to show what good hostesses they were, while all the while they tried to listen to the harangues of the microbe or the hideosity. Poor things, it was very nice of them, and I was touched. There are about half a dozen, that I know here, who take an English paper; it is a remarkable thing that they are nearly all Irish and Scotch, and have baths.”
CHAPTER XXIV
HORSES AND HOUNDS
With Flurry’s Hounds, and you our guide,
We learned to laugh until we cried;
Dear Martin Ross, the coming years
Find all our laughter lost in tears.
—Punch, Jan. 19, 1916.
I have thought of leaving it to our books to express and explain the part that hunting has played in Martin’s life and mine; but when I remember (to quote once again those much-quoted lines) how much of the fun that we have had in our lives has been “owed to horse and hound,” I feel an acknowledgment more direct and deliberate is due.