AN INTERLUDE
A DECISION FIN DE SIÈCLE AT THE CAFÉ LANDER
IN the middle of the rue Taitbout, there is a little café, which was not so well known twenty years ago as it is now, at the end of the nineteenth century. Then it was only beginning to emerge from the inferior position of crémerie. Came one day, from the unconventional region of the Latin Quarter, somewhere in the seventies, an enterprising proprietor; and in his wake followed a train of noble youths, enthusiastic in the praises of Lander, wishful for the further enjoyments of his hospitalities, and with kindly memory of his generosity in the matter of credit.
Lander brought the pleasant ways of the Quarter across the town with him, and the band of noble youths stood by him, encouraged and sustained him. In consequence, the Café Lander flourished exceedingly, and its circle of clients daily increased, until it was known, far and wide, as the resort of embryo genius. For all the boisterous and good-tempered young fellows who crowded round its tables, and emptied bocks and consumed coffee (fifty centimes a cup with fine champagne), were coming great men. They were the future lights in literature, art, philosophy, and politics. The real living great man they professed to regard with respectful admiration, but they wanted none of him in their midst. In the slang of the day, he had made his pile, and reposed on velvet and laurels among the Immortals. When he would have become a part of the past, and the future was their present, they could afford to be on more intimate terms with him. But for the present, they belonged exclusively to the future.
These young fools had their place a while, and expectation dwelt indulgently upon them. They chatted loudly of isms and ologies and oxies, with refreshing crudeness: upheld the realistic, the romantic, the psychological, and Heaven knows what other schools of literature. They prated of form, and matter, and art, and style, as only Frenchmen, bitten by love of these things, can prate. And then, one by one, they dropped out of the ranks of embryo genius, having accomplished nothing, with the great epic unwritten, unwritten the drama, the psychological novel that was to teach M. Bourget something new about women; unwritten the important History of the Franks, that was to throw into relief hitherto unrevealed aspects of the character of their conquerors; unsolved the problems of metaphysics under discussion, undiscovered the great political panacea of the age, unpainted the grand masterpiece. With the first stone of their reputation still to be laid, they went, and the café saw them no more.
Some of them became commonplace advocates, and made uninteresting citizens and fairly reputable fathers of families: or sordid notaries, or humdrum bourgeois. Romance shook its bridle rein with a regretful backward glance: ‘Farewell for evermore,’ and the converted fool turned upon his heel to enter into the ignoble strife with his fellows in quest of daily bread. Others there were who had a troublesome way of right-about-facing upon fond expectation. They jilted the muse for historical research, or discarded art for literature, or drifted from sonnets to the stage. One youth of philosophic tastes was known, with inexcusable fickleness, to shake off the secular garb, and array himself in the white of the cloister. He was the only one who made a serious reputation; he became a fashionable preacher, and wrote a History of the Church which brought upon him the wrath of Rome.
But if they were mostly crude, ineffectual youths, they had bright faces, and eager glances, and hearts full of hope and enthusiasm. They were each confident of his own powers, inapprehensive of defeat or failure, bound upon a fiery race for experience and new sensations, contemptuous of the past, and looked gaily toward a future of glorious achievement. Not a city but furnishes the type, and in no other city is it so persistent as in Paris. Paint one such, and you paint all her young men, nourished upon vivid imagination, upon inexhaustible hope and unconquerable self-faith.
Into this circle of frank and amiable egotists, Dr. Vermont dropped accidentally some ten years ago. Being of an experimental turn of mind, and apt to fall upon mild curiosity in his casual scrutiny of impetuous youth, he stayed. It is a mistake to assume that an interest in youth, and a tolerance of its nonsense, is an indication of lingering kindness of heart Dr. Vermont liked youth as a vivisectionist likes animals. It taught him much that he desired to know, and where it did not teach him precisely, it helped him along the path of observation. Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers, artists, poets, what you will.
A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to indulge his passion for experimental psychology.
As he sat evening after evening, and drank his coffee and little glass, and smoked a meditative cigar, it amused him to encourage the vivacious contentment around him, and lead the unborn reputations to reveal their bent. His influence upon young men was a thing to make older and saner persons gape. It was, perhaps, all the stronger and more subtle because it was unrecognised. He was feared, and yet admired, to an incredible degree. His mild, sarcastic face, with its finished features and wholly effaced humanity of expression, put a point upon emulation and goaded to rash display. But none were made to feel the rashness of their flights, or the absurdity of their theories. Dr. Vermont was too clever a man to scare expansion, or cow ambition. This was how he kept his hold upon the fresh-moustached lads around him. This was how they spoke of him among themselves as a good fellow—un bon garçon, malgré—well, in spite of a great many things.
Thus he sat, and smoked, and listened, while the years passed, and out of the circle familiar faces went and new ones came. It must be admitted there was not much variety in the entertainment. Always the same questions of form and expression, of style and matter; always the same comparison of international literatures and the relative virtues of different forms of government; above and beyond all, sex and its unexplained and stinging problems. They never tired, and each batch came up, fresh and eager for the old discussions. Names may vary, fashions may alter, but the rough, broad facts of life are there, immutable like nature, ever recurrent like the ebb and flow of the tide.