Arthur Strong, after he saw the play, told me it had carried him away, and the fact of Sarah Bernhardt being a woman, and not a young woman, had mattered to him no more than the footlights or the painted scenery; he had accepted it, he had been made to accept it gladly, by the fire of the play and the power of the interpretation.
The Paris Exhibition of 1900 was opened on the 14th of April, and the whole of the Embassy staff attended that ceremony in uniform. I remember little of it. The features of the Exhibition were the trottoir roulant, a moving platform, that took visitors all round the Exhibition without their having to stir a foot; the pictures in the Grand Palais; the little city on the left bank of the Seine, where every nation was represented by a house, and where, in the English house, there was a room copied from Broughton Castle, full of Gainsboroughs; the Petit Palais, a gem in itself; and, besides these, there were the usual features of all exhibitions—side-shows, bales of chocolate, and galleries full of machinery and implements.
Towards the end of April I was taken by M. Castillon de Saint Victor for an expedition in a free balloon. I had been up twice in a captive balloon in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and had not enjoyed the experience, especially once on a windy day. I was not at all sure I was not going to dislike the free balloon, and I felt a pang of fear whenever I thought of it beforehand; but when the moment of starting came, and the balloon was released, and rose as gently and as imperceptibly as a puff of smoke from Saint Denis, and soared higher and higher into the dazzling sky without noise, without our experiencing any effect of motion or breeze, I felt intoxicated with pleasure. We went up to three thousand feet. It was like reaching another planet, an Olympic region of serenity and light, and one had no desire to leave it or to descend again to the earth.
We ate luncheon from a basket and drank a little rum, which was said to be the best beverage in a balloon, and we took photographs from the air. I little thought that I should one day have something to do with aircraft, air photographs, and all the many details of air navigation. We floated on across Paris in a south-easterly direction. We came down low over a château belonging to the Rothschilds’ and over the forest of Creçy; later in the afternoon, we dropped a guide rope and floated over the country at a height of about two hundred feet, and as the evening came on, the balloon came down still lower and sailed along just over the tree-tops. Finally we landed. The balloon hopped like a football, the basket car was overturned, and the gas was let out. We landed in a deserted piece of flat country, but no sooner was the balloon on the ground than, as always happens, a crowd sprang from nowhere and helped us. The balloon was put in a cart, and we walked to the town of Provins, which was not far off, and there we took the train to Paris. The next time I visited Provins it was the General Headquarters of the French Army during the latter part of the European War.
I spent a week of that spring at Fontainebleau and Chantilly. There were a great many English people in Paris. One night, at the opera, in a box, an English lady was sitting, a large emerald poised high on her hair; the audience looked at nothing else, and an old Frenchman, who had been an ornament of the Second Empire, came up to me in the entr’acte and said: “Il est impossible d’être plus jolie que cette femme.” Shortly after this I travelled up to Paris from Fontainebleau with this same lady. The train was crowded, and we just managed to find room in the barest of provincial railway carriages. There were some private soldiers in the carriage, and some substantial women in sabots with large baskets. They gazed at her with childish delight, unmixed admiration, and surprised wonder, as she sat, making the boards of the third-class carriage look like a throne, in cool, diaphanous, lilac and white muslins and a large bunch of flowers, a vision of radiance and grace; it reminded me of the large masses of lilies of the valley and roses you suddenly meet with in a dark, narrow street corner on the first fine day of spring in Florence.
We went to a shop in Paris where she wanted to buy a pair of gloves. When she asked how much they were, the lady who was serving her said: “Pour vous rien, Madame, vous êtes trop jolie!”
I used to see a great deal of Monsieur and Madame de Jaucourt, whom I could remember ever since the early days of my childhood. Monsieur de Jaucourt had the most delightful way of expressing things. One day when Madame de Jaucourt was pressing myself and another of the secretaries to stay with them in the country, he said: “Ma chère, les jeunes gens ont beaucoup mieux à faire que d’aller passer des heures à la campagne!” He was passionately fond of Paris. “On me gâte mon cher Paris,” he used to say. After luncheon, he would interview the cook and discuss every detail of last night’s dinner, praising this and criticising that, with extraordinary nicety and precision; and when he gave a dance in his house for boys and girls, on the afternoon preceding it, he would have different samples of lemonade and orangeade sent up to taste and choose from, to see if they were sweet enough but not too sweet. The lemonade was for the juvenile buffet. Women’s bets used to amuse him, and when they talked about racing, he would say: “Les paris des femmes sont à crever de rire.” He was a connoisseur of artistic things, and enjoyed a fine house, and beautiful objets d’art. He insisted on my going to see the château of Vaux, which he said was the finest house he knew. He said what distinguished it from other houses was that it was not crammed with valuable things for the sake of ostentation, show, or ornament, but where a piece of furniture was wanted, there it would be, and it would be a good one.
Monsieur de Jaucourt had a house not far from Paris in the country, and I remember playing croquet one day there. His daughter, Françoise, aimed carefully at the ball and missed the hoop, upon which M. de Jaucourt said, with a sigh: “Ma pauvre fille, tu as joué sans réfléchir.” I often used to dine at the “Cercle de l’Union.” There were about four or five old men who used to dine there every night; a few, a very few, younger men, but no quite young Frenchmen.
One night someone arrived and asked for some cold soup. There was none. In a fury of passion this member asked for the book of complaints. When it was brought, he wrote in it: “N’ayant pas pu trouver un consommé froid j’ai dû diner hors du Club.”
One night the new house, built by Count Boni de Castellane in the Bois de Boulogne, was being discussed. Someone said it was like Trianon, and that it would be difficult to keep up. Someone else who was there said: “Mais Boni est beaucoup plus riche que Louis XIV.” M. Du Lau and General Galliffet used often to dine there to discuss the days of their youth and talk over the beauties and even the wines of the past; General Galliffet told us one night how he won sums of money by playing with a piece of rope taken from a gibbet in his pocket, and that the best wine he had ever drunk in his life was in the Rhine country. Now they are all dead, and I suppose their place is taken by those who were the older young men in those days, but I have no doubt that they sit round in the same chairs and sometimes complain if there is no consommé froid to be had.