Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

Being anxious to see as much as possible and not let anything of interest escape me, I went late to bed, and yet got up early, and tried to regulate my time, as one does a blanket that is too short.

I was immensely interested in the art treasures from all over the world collected in the Louvre. Every single morning, after eating my modest breakfast at a crêmerie near the château, I paid my vows in the Salon carré and then absorbed myself in the other halls. The gallery of the Louvre was the one to which I owe my initiation. Before, I had seen hardly any Italian art in the original, and no French at all. In Copenhagen I had been able to worship all the Dutch masters. Leonardo and the Venetians spoke to me here for the first time. French painting and sculpture, Puget and Houdon, Clouet and Delacroix, and the French art that was modern then, I learnt for the first time to love and appreciate at the Luxembourg.

I relished these works of art, and the old-time art of the Greeks and Egyptians which the Museum of the Louvre contained, in a mild intoxication of delight.

And I inbreathed Paris into my soul. When on the broad, handsome Place de la Concorde, I saw at the same time, with my bodily eyes, the beautifully impressive obelisk, and in my mind's eye the scaffold on which the royal pair met with their death in the Revolution; when in the Latin quarter I went upstairs to the house in which Charlotte Corday murdered Marat, or when, in the highest storey of the Louvre, I gazed at the little gray coat from Marengo and the three-cornered hat, or from the Arc de Triomphe let my glance roam over the city, the life that pulsated through my veins seemed stimulated tenfold by sight and visions.

Yet it was not only the city of Paris, its appearance, its art gems, that I eagerly made my own, and with them much that intellectually belonged to Italy or the Netherlands; it was French culture, the best that the French nature contains, the fragrance of her choicest flowers, that I inhaled.

And while thus for the first time learning to know French people, and French intellectual life, I was unexpectedly admitted to constant association with men and women of the other leading Romance races, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians.

Bröchner had given me a letter of introduction to Costanza Testa, a friend of his youth, now married to Count Oreste Blanchetti and living in Paris, with her somewhat older sister Virginia, a kind-hearted and amiable woman of the world. The latter had married in Brazil, as her second husband, the Italian banker Pagella, and to their house came, not only Italians and other European Southerners, but members of the South American colony.

So warm a reception as I met with from the two sisters and their husbands I had never had anywhere before. After I had known the two families one hour, these people treated me as though I were their intimate friend; Costanza's younger brother, they called me. I had a seat in their carriage every day, when the ladies drove out in the Bois de Boulogne; they never had a box at the Italian opera, where Adelina Patti's first notes were delighting her countrymen, without sending me a seat. They expected me every evening, however late it often might be when I came from the theatre, in their drawing-room, where, according to the custom of their country, they always received the same circle of friends.

I was sincerely attached to the two sisters, and felt myself at ease in their house, although the conversation there was chiefly carried on in a language of which I understood but little, since French was spoken only on my account. The only shadow over my pleasure at spending my evenings in the Rue Valois du Roule was the fact that this necessitated my missing some acts at the Théâtre Français, for which the Danish Minister, through the Embassy, had procured me a free pass. Certainly no Dane was ever made so happy by the favour. They were enraptured hours that I spent evening after evening in the French national theatre, where I became thoroughly acquainted with the modern, as well as the classical, dramatic repertoire,--an acquaintance which was further fortified during my long stay in Paris in 1870.

I enjoyed the moderation of the best actors, their restraint, and subordination of self to the rôle and the general effect. It is true that the word genius could only be applied to a very few of the actors, and at that time I saw none who, in my opinion, could be compared with the great representatives of the Danish stage, such as Michael Wiehe, Johanne Luise Heiberg, or Phister. But I perceived at once that the mannerisms of these latter would not be tolerated here for a moment; here, under the influence of this artistic whole-harmony, they would never have been able to give free vent to individuality and peculiarity as they did at home.