And clothed as if with sunset.”
There are no sadder places in the world than Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne; those empty, deserted shells where there was once so much glory and so much gaiety, so much bustle and so much drama, and which are now hollow museums laid bare to the scrutiny of every profane sight-seer.
During the autumn of 1899, in Paris, I received a visit from Reggie Balfour, whom I had known at Cambridge, although he went to Cambridge after I had left. He was a brilliant scholar and had done great things at Cambridge. He had been staying at Angers to study French. We talked of books, of the Dreyfus case, and he suddenly said that he felt a strong desire to become a Catholic. I was extremely surprised and disconcerted. Up till that moment I had only known two people who had become Catholics: one was a relation, who had married a Catholic, and the other was an undergraduate, who had never discussed the matter except to say he must have all or nothing. When Reggie Balfour told me this I was amazed. I remember saying to him that the Christian religion was not so very old, and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of mankind; but that if he believed in the Christian revelation, and in the Sacraments of the Anglican Church, he would find it difficult to turn round and say those Sacraments had been an illusion. I begged him to wait. I said there was nothing to prevent his worshipping in Catholic churches without committing himself intellectually to a step that must cramp his freedom. I advised him to live in the porch without entering the building. I said finally: “My trouble is I cannot believe in the first proposition, the source of all dogma. If I could do that, if I could tell the first lie, I quite see that all the rest would follow.”
He took me one morning to Low Mass at Notre Dame des Victoires. I had never attended a Low Mass before in my life. It impressed me greatly. I had imagined Catholic services were always long, complicated, and overlaid with ritual. A Low Mass, I found, was short, extremely simple, and somehow or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings of the Early Christians. One felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me too. To them it was evidently real.
We worked together at some poems I had written, and Reggie arranged to have a small pamphlet of them privately printed for me, at the Cambridge University Press, which was done that Christmas.
When we got back to London, he sent me this epitaph, which is translated from the Latin, and is to be found at Rome in the Church of St. John Lateran, the date being about 1600:
“Ci-gît Robert Pechom, anglais, catholique, qui après la rupture de l’Angleterre avec l’église, a quitté l’Angleterre ne pouvant y vivre sans la foi et qui, venu à Rome y est mort ne pouvant y vivre sans patrie.”
The next year saw the opening of the Exhibition. On the 17th of March, I went with Reggie Lister to the first night of L’Aiglon. It was a momentous first night. All the most notable people in the literary and social world of Paris were there: Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Halévy, Sardou, Robert de Montesquiou, Albert Vandal, Henry Houssaye, Paul Hervieu, Coquelin, Madame Greffuhle. The excitement was tense. Sarah had a tremendous reception. When she spoke the line, which occurs in the first scene, “Je n’aime pas beaucoup que la France soit neutre,” there was a roar of applause, but this, one felt, was political rather than artistic enthusiasm. The first quiet dialogue between the Duke and the courtiers held the audience, and we felt that Sarah’s calm and biting irony portended great reserves held in store, and when the scene of the history lesson followed, which Sarah played with an increasing accelerando and crescendo, and when she came to the lines:
“Il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;
Un soir il dit au camp: ‘Demain!’ Le lendemain,