“Would that I had a bourgeois here on this terrain vague; a bourgeois I might terrify and harrow!” declaim the realistic chansonniers of the Montmartre cabarets. “‘Bourgeois,’ I would cry, ‘what do you see? Bourgeois, look well, look again, look always. Bourgeois, do you understand? It is well, wretched, cowardly Bourgeois—you tremble!’”
No less attracted by terrain vague are the frail, wistful poets of Paris, the poets (as they have been so admirably denominated) of “mists and half-moons, dead leaves and lost illusions.” On to the waste they bring Pierrot, their favourite, eternal hero. Midnight has long struck. A half-moon casts silvery shafts on to the wreckage—and on to Pierrot, who, as he stands there forlornly amidst the debris, proceeds to disclose the secret: “Pourquoi sont pâles les Pierrots....” Only the cheeks of the vulgar are rosy; for the vulgar cannot feel. But the artist is stung day after day by ironies, cruelties, bitter awakenings—and so is frail, and so is pale. How he suffers, how tragically is he disillusioned! There was a blonde... but she was capricious. There was a brune... but she, too, was fickle. There was a rousse, an auburn-haired goddess... but alas! she also was false. And Pierrot sobs. And Pierrot goes on his knees to the half-moon. And Pierrot prays. And suddenly a radiant figure appears on the waste ground, and a sweet, melodious voice murmurs: “Why sigh for the blonde? Why grieve for the brune? Why weep for the rousse? Am I not enough?” And Pierrot, looking up with his pale, tear-stained face, beholds his Muse, smiling down upon him—
“Sur ce terrain va—aa—gue.”
Farther away—away, this time, to one of the environs of Paris, and down there, by the river-side, the annual fête. Not an empty corner, not a vacant space; nothing but booths, “side-shows,” shooting-galleries, roundabouts, caravans—“all the fun of the fair.” Confusion, exhilaration, and a hundred different, frenzied sounds. All this babel lasts a week; but at the end of the week, departure and gloom. Gone the caravans and their picturesque inmates. Gone the “distractions.” There stood the shooting-gallery, with its targets, grotesque dummies and strings of clay pipes. One fired twice for a penny. If successful, one was rewarded with paper flowers, or a shocking cigar, or (in exceptional cases) a strident alarm clock; if a bad marksman, one was consoled with a slice of hard, gritty ginger-bread. Farther on revolved the roundabout. One rode a rickety steed, with only one stirrup. One turned to the accompaniment of a husky, exhausted old organ. What appalling liberties it took with the Valse Bleue! Next, one visited the palmist, inspected a seedy lion, stared at optical illusions, shook hands with a dwarf, bought sticks of nougat, rode again on the round about, returned to——
But all over now, and nothing but memories and souvenirs about: broken clay pipes, splinters of bottles and wood, shavings, scraps of cloth, hand-bills and rusty, bent nails, the eternal old battered hat, the equally inevitable old boot, and a hoof or two from the rickety horses that revolved to the haunting tune of the Valse Bleue.
The usual mounds of refuse. Also, the turf damaged with ruts, and burnt away in places by the fair people’s fires. The annual fête over, not a soul but myself loiters on this portion of the Seine river-bank. Only gloom and desolation. Nothing but waste. Again, terrain vague.
II
IN A CELLAR
Bright things and sombre things, tarnished things and threadbare things, frail things, fast-fading things; things and things, and all of them old things.... The past in this cellar; in every nook and corner of it—the past. Come here through a hole in the wall of a narrow, cobbled Paris street—come down a number of crooked stone steps—I now look curiously about me, and wonder what to do next. No one challenges me: the cellar appears to be uninhabited. Yet above its crude, primitive entrance, on a weather-beaten board, I discern the name—Veuve Mollard.