And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like suspicion of a scent—a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, synthetic and all-embracing—an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase—I hope it means something), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes and days gone by.
Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an
"Air doux et tendre
Jadis aimé!"
Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all
Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!
* * * * *
In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away and apart.
Of all that bande joyeuse—old and young and middle-aged, from M. le
Major to Mimsey Seraskier—all are now dead but me—all except dear
Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen
her since.
* * * * *
Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.
My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal irony of fate.