Mlle. la C——’s home chanced to be the house next but one to the Studio, and the Rue Washington was a street of a decorum appropriate to its name. None the less, a bonne came daily at 12 o’clock to escort her home for déjeuner. There came a day when the bonne failed of her mission, and on my return at one o’clock, I found my young friend (who was as old as she would ever, probably, admit to being) faint with hunger, and very angry, but too much afraid of the wrath of her family to return alone.
One wonders whether, even in provincial France, Freedom still denies herself to this extent.
In the following spring I went again to Paris, and this time, my friend May Goodhall being unfortunately unable to come with me, a very delightful American, and her friend, German by up-bringing, but of old French noble descent, allowed me to join their ménage. Its duties were divided according to our capacities. Marion A—— was housekeeper, “Ponce,” by virtue of her German training, was cook, and to me was allotted the humble rôle of scullion. We had rooms in a tall and filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. For Marion and Ponce and I had decided to abandon the Rue Washington, and to go to what was known there as “le Colarossi là-bas,” the real, serious, professional studio (as opposed to its refined astral body, “près l’Étoile”), and we now felt ourselves Art students indeed.
I don’t know how young women manage now, but in those days I and my fellows were usually given—like the Prodigal Son—a portion, a sum of money, which was to last for as long or as short a time as we pleased, but we knew that when it ended there would be no husks to fall back upon; nothing but one long note on the horn, “Home!”, and home we should have to go. (I once ran it to so fine a point that I could buy no food between Paris and London, and when I arrived at my uncle’s house in London, it was my long-suffering uncle who paid the cabman.)
Therefore, for the keen ones, the most stringent and profound economies were the rule. Never did I reveal to my father and mother more than the most carefully selected details of that house in the Rue Madame. I paid seven francs per week for my bedroom and service, and though this may not seem excessive, I am inclined now to think that the accommodation was dear at the money. My room, au cinquième, had a tiled floor, but this was of less consequence, as its size permitted of most of the affairs of life being conducted from a central and stationary position on the bed. Thence, I could shut the door, poke the fire, cook my breakfast, and open the window, a conventional rite, quite disconnected with the question of fresh air. The outlook was into a central shaft, full of darkness and windows, remarkable for the variety and pungency of its atmosphere, and for the fact that at no hour of the day or night did it cease to reverberate with the thunderous gabble of pianos, the acrid screeches of the violin—(to which latter I contributed a not unworthy share)—and, worst of all, the solfeggi of the embryo vocalist.
The service (comprised, it may be remembered, in the daily franc) consisted in the occasional offices of a male housemaid, whose professional visits could only be traced by the diminution of our hoarded supplies of English cigarettes. Yet he was not all evil. He reminded me of my own people at home in his readiness to perform any task that was not part of his duties, and a small coin would generally evoke hot water. Marion A——, who had retained, even in the Rue Madame, a domestic standard to which I never aspired, would, at intervals, offer Léon her opinion of him and his methods. The housemaid, with one of Ponce’s cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and one of mine behind his ear, would accept it in the best spirit possible, and once went so far as to assure her, with a charming smile, that he had now been so much and so very often scolded that he really did not mind it in the least.
Colarossi, the proprietor of the studios, was a wily and good-natured old Italian, who had been a model, and having saved money, had somehow acquired a nest of tumble-down studios in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. He then bribed, with the promise of brilliant pupils, some rising artists to act as his “Professeurs,” and secured, with the promise of brilliant professors, a satisfactory crowd of rising pupils, and by various arts he had succeeded in keeping both promises sufficiently to make his venture a success. The studio in which I worked was at the top of the building, and was reached by a very precarious, external wooden staircase; the men-students were on the ground-floor beneath us. “Le Colarossi là-bas” was indisputably serious. The models were well managed, as might be expected, when no trick of the trade could hope to pass undetected by “Le Patron”; the students were there to work, and to do good work at that, and the women’s and men’s studios were all crowded with “les sérieux.” Raphael Collin, gloomy, pale, pock-marked, and clever, and Gustave Courtois—“Le beau Gustave”—tall and swaggering, with a forked red beard, and a furious moustache like two emphatic accents (both grave and acute), were our professors. They were both first-rate men, and were respected as much as they were feared. They went their rounds with—as it were—scythe blades on their chariot wheels, and flaming swords in their hands. It was nerve-shaking to hear the cheerful and incessant noises of “les hommes en bas” cease in an instant, as though they had all been turned to stone, and to know that the Terror that walked in the noonday was upon them. Extraordinary how that silence, and that awful time of waiting for the step on our stair, opened the eyes; everything was wrong, and it was now too late to make it right. And then, the professor’s tour of slaughter over, and the study, that was “pas assez bien construit,” looking with its savage corrections, as if someone had been striking matches on it, how feebly one tottered to the old concierge for the three sous’ worth of black coffee that was to pull one together, and enable the same office to be performed for the humiliated drawing. It may, however, be remembered to “le beau Gustave” that one élève was spared from the fire and sword to which he was wont to put the Studio. This was a small and ancient widow who arrived one Monday morning, announcing that she was eighty-two, but none the less had decided to become an artist. It was soon pathetically obvious that she would require a further eighty-two years, at least, to carry out her intention. Courtois came, regarded with stupefaction the sheet of brown paper on which she had described, in pink chalk, hieroglyphs whose purport were known only to herself, faltered “Continuez, Madame,” and hurried on. Despite this encouragement, the old lady apparently abandoned her high resolve, for on Saturday she departed, and the Studio knew her no more.
When I think of Colarossi’s, I can now recall only foreigners; many Germans, a Czech, who sang, beautifully, enchanting Volksliede of the Balkans, and whose accompaniments I used to play on a piano that properly required two performers, one to sit on the music stool and put the notes down, the other to sit on the floor and push them up again; they all stuck. There were Swiss, and Russians, and Finlandaises; there was a Hungarian Jewess, a disgusting being, almost brutish in her manners and customs, yet brilliant in her work; an oily little Marseillaise, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia (with a stress upon the first syllable), unclean, uncivilised, determined, with but one object in life, to extract the last sou of value from their abonnements (and, incidentally, also to extract from any unguarded receptacle such colours, charcoal, punaises, etc., as they were in need of, uninfluenced by any consideration save that of detection.)
The standard of accomplishment was very high. The Marseillaise, who looked like a rag-picker, did extraordinarily good work; so, as I have said, did the Jewess, whose appearance suggested an itinerant barrow and fried potatoes. (Delicious French fried potatoes! I used to buy five sous’ worth off a brazier at the corner of the Place S. Sulpice, and carry them back to the ménage wrapped in a piece of La Patrie, until Ponce, who adored animals, was told very officiously that they were fried in the fat of lost dogs, and forbade further dealings with the murderer.)
Colarossi’s never took “a day off.” Weekdays, Sundays, and holy days, the studios were open, and there were élèves at work. Impossible to imagine what has become of them, all those strange, half-sophisticated savages, diligently polishing their single weapon, to which all else had been sacrificed.