To the noise of a strident chorus in choice argot, which I was told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into his café. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge Mirliton hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at the Carnavalet by the side of the sign of the Chat Noir. When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of the Quartier Latin, a petit piou-piou or so, two or three stray workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt to classify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.
It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome face as he strode up and down his café-museum, for the striding, it seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician—her name was not Mademoiselle Miss—and when she discovered what was the matter, and why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to her, he sang us his St. Lazare and La Soularde, all the while striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle Miss back to us, ordered bocks for her, for me—the only other woman at our table—and for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our glasses in the fashion approved of at the Mirliton.
So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the most of it—I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually, as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his café, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the sense to know that, as we had come to the Mirliton of our own free will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to show our press ticket at the Salon turnstile, or to give up our umbrellas at the door of the Louvre, or to question the regulations of any other place in Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve matters?
It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in. We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however, could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony. Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed hat—the only time that night—and to bow us out into the darkness of the Boulevard Rochechouart.
Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at the Mirliton by eating supper at the Rat Mort. It was an experience I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the Casino de Paris and the Moulin Rouge. As light and satisfying a supper could have been eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art entered into the entertainment as at the Chat Noir and Bruant's. Vice was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the Nouvelle Athènes scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point of view.
Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the Rat Mort, in the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it crawled down one of the steep streets from Montmartre there was a creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round, made a pitiful tale of le pauvr' cocher and his hungry wife and children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the cocher with an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The cocher, the least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft, clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and disappeared into the night. A sergent-de-ville, who had been looking on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, cet animal là was in luck and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such generosity. Allez! Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present—Voilà tout!
And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent streets between Montmartre and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end.
VII
In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted, resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.
Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac rez-de-chaussée opening upon the spacious garden where, in the twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days—nights in the dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre, many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other, always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them, witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;—nights in the blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel, and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it—nights that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in them lives to remember;—Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Théodore Duret who had been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris, as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them is told.