Of old, we are told, Freedom sat on the heights, well above the snow line, no doubt, and, even in 1884, she was disposed to turn a freezing eye and a cold shoulder on any young woman who had the temerity to climb in her direction. My cousin, who had been painting in Düsseldorf, had moved on to Paris, and his reports of the studios there, as compared with the possibilities of work in Düsseldorf, settled the question for me. But the point was not carried without friction.
“Paris!”
They all said this at the tops of their voices. It does not specially matter now who they were; there are always people to say this kind of thing.
They said that Paris was the Scarlet Woman embodied; they also said,
“The IDEA of letting a GIRL go to Paris!”
This they said incessantly in capital letters, and in “capital letters” (they were renowned for writing “capital letters”), and my mother was frightened.
So a compromise was effected, and I went to Paris with a bodyguard, consisting of my mother, my eldest brother, a female cousin, and with us another girl, the friend with whom I had worked in Düsseldorf. We went to a pension in the Avenue de Villiers, which, I should imagine and hope, exists no more.
As I think of its gloomy and hideous salons, its atmosphere of garlic and bad cigars, its system of ventilation, which consisted of heated draughts that travelled from one stifling room to another, seeking an open window and finding none; when I remember the thread-like passages, dark as in a coal mine, the clusters of tiny bedrooms, as thick as cells in a wasp’s nest; the endless yet inadequate meals, I recognise, with long overdue gratitude, the devotion of the bodyguard. For me and my fellow-student nothing of this signified. For us was the larger air, the engrossing toil of the studio. It absorbed us from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. But the wheels of the bodyguard drave heavily, and they had a poor time of it.
So poor indeed was it, that, after three weeks of conscientious sight-seeing and no afternoon tea (“Le Fife o’clock” not having then reached the shores of France), my mother decided it were better to leave me alone, sitting upon the very knee of the Scarlet Woman, than to endure the Avenue de Villiers any longer, and to fly back to what she was wont to describe to her offspring, if restive, as “your-own-good-home-and-what-more-do-you-want.” (In this connection, I remember an argument I once had with her, in which, being young and merely theoretically affaired with the matter, I furiously asserted my preference, even—as the fight warmed—my adoration, for the practice of cremation, and my unalterable resolve to be thus disposed of. My mother, who would rise to any argument, no less furiously combated the suggestion, and finally clinched the matter by saying, “Cremation! Nonsense! I can tell you, my fine friend, you shall just be popped into your own good family vault!”)
With the departure of my people, May Goodhall and I also shook off as much of the dust of the Avenue de Villiers as was possible, and moved to another pension, nearly vis-à-vis the Studio. This latter was an offshoot of the well-known Atelier Colarossi. It had been started in the Rue Washington (Avenue des Champs Elysées) in order to secure English and American clients, as well as those French jeunes filles bien élevées to whose parents the studios of the Quartier Latin did not commend themselves. Its tone was distinctly amateur; we were all “très bien élevées’ and “très gentilles,” and in recognition of this, a sort of professional chaperon had been provided, a small, cross female, who made up the fire, posed the models, and fought with les élèves over the poses, and hatred for whom created a bond of union among all who came within her orbit. One of the French girls, Mlle. La C——, fair, smart, good-looking, bestowed upon me some degree of favour. The class was wont to do a weekly composition for correction by M. Dagnan-Bouveret, who was one of the professors; the subjects he selected were usually Scriptural, and Mlle. La C—— was accustomed to appeal to me for information. She was, I remember, quite at sea about La fille de Jephté, and explained that the Bible was a book not convenable pour les jeunes filles, whereas the Lives of the Saints were most interesting, and full of a thousand delicious little horrors. Without approaching Martin’s Sunday School erudition, I presently found myself established as the exponent of the composition. I recollect one week, when the subject was “The Maries at the Sepulchre,” an obsequious German came to inquire “if eet was in ze morning zat ze holy Laties did co to ze tomb? Or did zose Laties, perhaps, co in ze efening?”