I had not been at Paris long before one evening after dinner the telephone bell rang; I went to answer it and was told that President Faure was dead. The staff of the Embassy walked in the funeral procession to Notre Dame, in uniform. It was a radiant day. The mourning decorations—a veil of crape flung negligently across the façade of the Chamber of Deputies—the banners, the wreaths, the draperies, were a fine example of the French discretion and artistic instinct in decoration. On the balcony of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Bernhardt was sitting wrapped in furs; with us were the Corps Diplomatique, some officials from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one a composer of dance tunes, Sourires d’Avril, etc., once celebrated all over Europe, now more forgotten than the songs of Nineveh or Tyre. We laughed, we chattered, we ate chocolate, we enjoyed the sunshine and the exercise, we gave no thought to the man in the gorgeous coffin who had taken so much trouble to ape and observe the forms of majesty, and who had been rewarded with such merciless ridicule.
During the first fortnight I spent in the Diplomatic Service there was a plethora of funerals which we had to attend; one at the Greek Church; one at the Madeleine. Attending funerals, and going to the station to meet royalties were both important factors in Diplomatic life. Indeed, at a small post one seemed to spend half one’s life at the railway station. Some of the secretaries were keen race-goers, and when, as sometimes happened, they were not allowed to go because of possible work, and they would point out that there was not likely to be any work to do, Reggie Lister used wisely to remark that we were not paid for the amount of work we did, but for hanging about in case there should be any work. In spite of this, he used generally to arrange things in such a manner that anyone who wanted to go to the races could go.
Reggie Lister was an artist in life and the organisation of life. He built his arrangements and those of others with a light scaffolding that could be taken down at a moment’s notice and rearranged if necessary in a different manner to suit a change of circumstance. He was radiantly sensible. He had a horror of the trashy and the affected, and his gaiety was buoyant, boyish, and infectious. If he was really amused himself, his face used to crinkle and his body shake like a jelly, “comme un gros bébé,” as a Frenchman once said. His intuition was like second-sight and his tact always at work but never obtrusive, like the works of a delicate watch. I never saw anyone either before or after who could make such a difference to his surroundings and to the company he was with. He made everything effervesce. You could not say how he did it. It was not because of any exceptional brilliance or any unusual wit, or arresting ideas; but over and over again I have seen him do what people more brilliant than himself could not do to save their lives, that is, transfigure a dull company and change a grey atmosphere into a golden one. It was not only that he could never bore anyone himself, but that nobody was ever bored when he was there. You laughed with him, not at him. He took his enjoyment with him wherever he went and he made others share it.
His taste was fastidious, but catholic, and above all things sensible. He was acutely appreciative of external things: a walk down the Champs Elysées on a fine spring morning; good cooking; dancing and skating, and he danced like mad; he was never tired of telling one of his summer travels in Greece; his first disappointment and his subsequent delight in Constantinople—and nobody in the world could tell such things as well. It was difficult to be more intelligent; but his intelligence (and after a minute’s conversation with him you could not but be aware of its acuteness), his love and knowledge of artistic things, his shrewdness, his humour, and rollicking fun, although taken all together, are still not enough to account for the fascination that his personality exercised over so many different people—over, I believe, almost anyone he pleased, if he took the trouble. If his diplomatic duties called for trouble of this kind, there was none he would not take; if only his own private social life was concerned he sometimes permitted himself the luxury of indifference; but he never indulged in “le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire”; although the company of celebrities tried him almost beyond endurance, leaving a peevish aftermath for his friends to put up with.
One instance is better than pages of explanation and analysis.
One day Reggie Lister and myself each received a letter from a friend in England asking us to be civil to a young French couple who were newly married, and were just setting up house in Paris. Reggie left cards on them, and they asked us both to luncheon.
We found them in a small but extremely clean apartment on the other side of the river, and as we went into the drawing-room it seemed to be crowded with relations in black—mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and aunts. All of them in deep mourning. It reminded me of the opening scene of a one-act play, which used to be popular many years ago, called La joie fait peur. In that play, the curtain rises on a bereaved family who are all of them steeped in inspissated gloom.
We went into the little dining-room and sat down to a shiny mahogany table. An old servant tottered and pottered about the room with a bunch of keys and a bottle of wine covered with cobwebs. A rather grim mother-in-law sat at the head of the table. The young, newly married couple were shy. There was an atmosphere of stern, rigid propriety and inflexible tradition over the whole proceeding. Formal phrases were bandied, and all the time the mother-in-law, the aunts, and the sisters-in-law, all of them dressed in crape with neat white frills, never ceased to throw on the bashful young couple the full searchlight of their critical observation. But we had not been at the table many minutes before Reggie had captivated the company, and at the end of five minutes they were all screaming with laughter and talking at the top of their voices. They were not laughing at him. They were laughing with him.
This is just what Reggie Lister could do, and what I have never seen anybody else succeed in doing, to that extent and in such difficult circumstances. He had something which made you, whoever was in the room, wish to listen to him, and made you wish him to listen to you. He had also the gift of making the witty wittier, the singer, the talker, the musician, the reciter, do better than his best, of drawing out the best of other people by his instantly responsive appreciation.
The French of all classes appreciated and loved him, and when he died they felt as if an essential part of Paris had been taken away, and a part that nothing could replace. To be with him at the same Embassy, as I was for a year and a half, was an education in all that makes life worth living. But what was life to me was, I am afraid, sometimes death to him, as I tried him at times highly.