But there were two Henri Rocheforts, and the virtues of the second almost made amends for the vices of the first.
The second Rochefort revealed himself at the age of twenty. He was a medical student. Shortly after the adoption of these studies young Rochefort harangued the surgeon and his fellow-students upon the “iniquities” of vivisection: and that ended his short medical career. Another outburst at the Hôtel de Ville, when Rochefort next accepted a petty clerkship at a pound a week. His colleagues were underpaid and overworked; a scarcity of light and utter lack of ventilation in the dusty, shabby office-rooms resulted in cases of acute anæmia and consumption. “We must have light—floods of it. We must have air—great, healthy draughts of it,” shouted youthful Rochefort to a high official. “I’m strong enough myself and don’t care; but look at your clerks. Martyrs, victims! De l’air, de la lumière, nom de Dieu!”
The high official, a pompous, apoplectic soul, was struck dumb by Rochefort’s invasion of his private sanctum. At last he gasped: “If you were not the son of a marquis——” But Rochefort interrupted: “My father died a fortnight ago. But I have no predilection for titles. My name is Henri Rochefort.”
Rochefort nevertheless was an aristocrat—“la race” remained, in spite of his assumption of democracy. He was, in fine, a democrat-aristocrat—most chaotic of combinations. Therein lay the secret of his turbulence and incoherency. Like all French aristocrats, he was a militarist at heart. He was the ally of Boulanger. He was the hottest champion of Paul Déroulède when that well-meaning but impossible “patriot” attempted his celebrated coup d’état, on the morning of President Félix Faure’s funeral, by establishing General Roget as a military dictator in the Élysée. He was, furthermore, an Anti-Semite. “Pale, white blood,” he cried disdainfully of the French noblesse. His own blood was vigorously red, but tinged indelibly with blue. Yes; “la race” remained, persisted—clashed inevitably with the true spirit of democracy. And hence the chaos, the thunder and lightning; from out of which there nevertheless shone tenderness, chivalry and a love of beautiful things. He loved music, sculpture, pictures: and whilst urging on France to declare war against England over the Fashoda Affair, announced in my hearing that he would rather annex a portrait by Reynolds than a province in the Sudan. He loved animals: and animals loved him. Wild fury of Rochefort when a bull-fight was advertised to take place at Enghien-les-Bains.
When the Government declined to forbid it, down to Enghien went Rochefort and a number of friends. Sallow-faced old Rochefort seized hold of the “impresario” who was organising the bull-fight and shook him. “I and my friends are going to wreck your arena,” he shouted. Nor did he release the “impresario” until the latter had promised that the bull-fight should not take place.
If Rochefort had been all vindictiveness and luridness, how did it come to pass that he was the guest of the great-hearted Victor Hugo, when both of them were exiles in Brussels? And if the hoarse-voiced, steely-eyed old journalist had been all venom, how did it come about that he was the devoted, admiring friend of that very noble, if disconcerting apostle of humanity, Louise Michel, “the Red Virgin.”
Londoners may remember the frail, thin, shabby little Woman who denounced social injustices in a dingy hall in a back street off Tottenham Court Road some ten years ago. In appearance she was nothing—until she spoke. And when Louise Michel spoke, ah dear me, how one realised the miseries grimly and heroically endured by the poor of this topsy-turvy world! The shabby, frail little figure, with the big, inspired eyes, became galvanised. From London to Paris, from Paris to every European capital, travelled the “Red Virgin”—incomparably eloquent—the woes and sufferings of her fellow-creatures at once crushing and supporting her. Herself, she cared nothing for. The same old threadbare black dress; eternal dim attics and meagre food; the same old self-sacrifice, the pity to the verge of despair, the same old breakdowns from weakness and exhaustion.
Rochefort—Victor Henri Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay—sought her out in her attic. When the “Red Virgin” was travelling and lecturing abroad, Rochefort instructed his foreign correspondents to look after her. He bought her a country house: which she promptly sold; he gave her an annuity: which she mortgaged; he arranged that his tradespeople should serve her in his name; but house, annuity, provisions—everything went to the poor.
“I can do nothing with her,” Rochefort once told me. “She is at once sublime and adorable and ridiculous! When I tell her she is killing herself, she replies: ‘Tant pis, mon petit Henri. But you yourself will die one of these days.’”