“Ah, Mademoiselle! Tu vas enterrer la petite?” (“You go to bury the little one?”)
There was dead silence until she was out of sight, when every man in the café rose and lifted his hat to the speaker. We, in America, are not in consonance with wit and beauty as they are.
If you make good in Paris, it is all right. The students once carried a nude model all over the city, and the citizens respectfully bowed to Beauty. Again, conversely, an actress who appeared in a play in the nude was madly applauded—until she made the fatal and inartistic mistake of taking a curtain call. She was hissed off the stage. I remember Rochegrosse, a fellow painter, picking up a red-velvet-and-gold hat of the Louis Onze period, one day in the studio. It made him look exactly like a mediæval page. Without thinking, he wore it out—the whole length of the boulevard. No one thought to laugh, but all stopped and said “Admirable.” You must not be ridiculous in France, but you are not necessarily ridiculous just because you differ from the crowd, as you are in America.
My only meeting with the haut noblesse of France did not leave me with a very good impression of that society which it is practically impossible to penetrate. I had been asked by a friend of mine, in Colorado, to play gallant to the beautiful singer, Marie Van Zant, to whom he was betrothed. My first act of friendship was to try to protect her from a marquis who had been forcing his attentions. The marquis had bet forty thousand francs that he would make her his mistress, and wrote, asking her to be a party to his game and share the money. Receiving no answer to this proposal, he sent a bouquet to Miss Van Zant’s dressing room in which was a note stating that if she did not accept his offer he would publicly insult her as she left the theater. Then she appealed to me.
I had a carriage waiting at the stage door that evening, into which I quickly bundled both singer and her mother and, in order to avoid any further scandal, sent them off alone. But I was mistaken. The marquis must have been before me and bribed the coachman to go to a different address. Before they knew it they had stopped before a brilliantly lighted restaurant and the young man was running down the steps to meet them. Marie succeeded in avoiding him by threatening the coachman with arrest if he did not take them home.
But some woman got hold of the story, and there was a scandalous article in one of the papers in America. Twelve days after it appeared my friend was in Paris and, coming to my rooms, asked me to meet him at a certain hour as he was going to shoot a Frenchman. He asked me to be one of his seconds and I carried his challenge to the marquis. The nobleman was a mere boy and pleaded that he was too nearsighted to use pistols, and, as my friend did not know the use of swords, the duel came to nothing. I did not know enough to ask for a Jury of Honor or he would have been forced to go on the field. One very characteristically French thing came out of the affair, however, when the marquis tried to pooh-pooh my overtures for a fight on the basis that no “actress” could be insulted in his country and that it was only because we were Americans that he would consider the matter at all.
We sometimes went to the Closerie des Lilas, at the corner of the Boulevard St.-Martin. This was quite in the country, in the days of Henri Quatre—a sort of road house where the young bloods went to drink. The women of the court discovered this and used to go out there, disguised as milkmaids, and flirt outrageously with the tipsy members of the nobility. Alas! the lilacs are gone now and sportive milkmaids no longer frequent the place; but the Cafe des Lilas still has its stories, and in my day there was at least one interesting habitué. He was a major whom everybody knew and spoke to familiarly. He was gray bearded and must have had his title from the Franco-Prussian War. He and his cronies had the same table, played piquet, and sat for hours over their coffee. His was a mazagran. The first time I saw him I noticed he had a funny trick which he repeated every night. For a mazagran the waiter leaves three lumps of sugar; he always used two, left the other in his saucer, and became exceedingly annoyed if, by any chance, it got wet. In his right-hand waistcoat pocket was his watch, with a great fob that went across. With the utmost deliberation, he would reach into the left-hand pocket, take out a piece of brown paper, beautifully cut into a square, and fold into it the extra lump of sugar, carefully putting the package back in his pocket again. For many nights I watched this proceeding and made up my mind that, being a thrifty Frenchman, he used it for his morning coffee. But not so. Some time after, I read in the Figaro that Major P—— who lived in Montparnasse (there was no mistaking the name and place), had died suddenly, leaving no estate and no personal effects; but behind the door of his small bedroom had been found—a cubic yard of sugar!
Verlaine sometimes came to this café—Paul Verlaine; I often paid for his beer. A plain, hairy, dirty figure, seeming physically very feeble; you would not think to look at him twice except to marvel at his ugliness and disorderly appearance, unless you saw his eyes. If he looked at you, you knew you were in the presence of your better. He was worshiped by all, and they fought to pay his check, hovering about him like crows around dead carrion, waiting to snatch at anything that dropped from his lips. I was not a good student of character in those days and in no way realized his importance, but I could not help feeling his charm. One night I had a dispute with a Frenchman as to what was the meaning of courage. One of us argued that it was an admirable quality, and the other that it was vanity and stupidity—therefore, idiotic. At the height of the discussion Verlaine came in and was appealed to to decide the question. He first demanded beer and then listened carefully to one and then the other. Looking at me, he said:
“I decide for the young American.”
“Well, why?” asked the Frenchman.