“Sir,” she said harshly, “I was as much fatigued when I first played that scene—was it thirty years ago, or forty?—I have forgotten. It is the exhaustion of art, and not of nature.”
X
As a special correspondent of The Daily Chronicle (after a spell of free-lance work) I went abroad a good deal on various missions, and occasionally took charge of the Paris office in the absence of Martin Donohue who held that post but was frequently away on some adventure in other countries.
I came to know and to love Paris, by day and night, on both sides of the Seine, and in all its quarters, rich and poor. To me it is still the most attractive city in the world, and I have an abiding passion for its ghosts, its beauty, and its people. To “feel” Paris one must be steeped in the history and literature of France, so that one walks, not lonely, but as a haunted man along the rue St. Honoré, where Danton lived, and where Robespierre closed his shutters when Marie Antoinette passed on her tumbril; in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins plucked leaves from the trees and stuck them in his hat as a green cockade; in the great nave of Notre Dame, where a thousand years of faith, passion, tragedy, glory, touch one’s spirit, closely, as one’s hand touches its old stones; across the Pont Neuf, where Henry met his murderer, and where all Paris passed, with its heroes, cutthroats, and fair women; on the left bank, by the bookstalls, where poets and scholars roved, with hungry stomachs and eager minds; up in the Quartier Latin, where centuries of student life have paced by the old gray walls, and where wild youth has lived its short dream of love, quaffed its heady wine, laughed at life and death; up the mountain of Montmartre where apaches used to lurk in the darkness, and Vice wore the false livery of Joy; in the Luxembourg Gardens, where a world of lovers have walked, hand in hand, while children played, and birds twittered, and green buds grew to leaf, which faded and fell as love grew old and died.
Paris is nothing but an exhibition of architecture and a good shopping place, unless one has walked arm in arm with D’Artagnan, seen the great Cardinal pass in his robes, stood behind the arras when Marguérite de Valois supped with her lover, wandered the cold streets o’ nights with François Villon, listened to the songs of Ronsard, passed across the centuries to the salons of Madame de Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, supped with the Encyclopædists, and heard the hoarse laughter of the mobs when the head of the Princesse de Lamballe was paraded on a pike, and the fairest heads of France fell under the knife into the basket of the guillotine. It was Dumas, Victor Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, Eugène Sue, Murger, Guy de Maupassant, Michelet’s “France,” and odd bits of reading in French history, fiction, and poetry, which gave me the atmosphere of Paris, and revealed in its modernity, even in its most squalid aspects, a background of romance.
So it has been with millions of others to whom Paris is an enchanted city. But, as a journalist, I had the chance to get behind the scenes of life in Paris, and to put romance to the test of reality.
One of my earliest recollections of Paris was when I went there for a fortnight with my wife, in the first year of our marriage, on savings from my majestic income of £120 a year. We stayed in a little hotel called the Hôtel du Dauphin, in the rue St. Roch—where Napoleon fired his “whiff of grapeshot”—and explored the city and all its museums with untiring delight, although at that time, during the Dreyfus trial and the Fashoda crisis, England was so unpopular that we—obviously English—were actually insulted in the streets. (It was before the Entente Cordiale!)