And so, one fine autumn day, the son of a little Jewish tailor became the husband of a girl whose ancestry had helped in the making of some of the most glorious pages in the history of France. Verily, life holds strange surprises in reserve for those who care to watch it.
Arthur Meyer is altogether a curious type both as a man and as a journalist. One cannot help liking him even when one does not sympathise with his opinions, or with his person. He is an anomaly in everything, and no one would ever feel surprised at anything he might do or say. He has certainly forsaken his race and his creed, yet so thoroughly has he succeeded in impressing those who know him with his good qualities that he has never been repulsed for the light-heartedness with which he has burned the boats of his faith.
M. Arthur Meyer is the proprietor of the Gaulois, the fashionable organ of fashionable Paris, of the upper ten thousand who constitute Parisian society, that motley crowd in which unfortunately money is the only passport needed to ensure an entrance. It has one rival, the Figaro. The Figaro is extremely well informed, has contributors of great talent, and is as eminently respectable as that kind of paper can be which devotes a large part to gossip more or less good-natured. But it is no longer what that king among journalists, Villemessant, had made it.
Of papers in which popular passions are constantly appealed to, and in which one only seeks the criticism of the existing government, only one, the Presse, deserves more than a passing mention, and that only because its editor was M. Henri Rochefort, who up to his death in 1913 always wrote the leading article which figures at the head of the paper. M. Rochefort was one of the most extraordinary productions of modern journalism, to which he gave a direction that had been unknown until he initiated it. His talent, which was essentially critical, bordering on satire when it did not frankly take that tinge, procured for him a celebrity which spread far and wide beyond the frontiers of France.
No one ever succeeded as he did in finding words that appealed to the mob, and which in a few words expressed so much. His Lanterne contributed more than anything else to the fall of the Empire, and Napoleon III., who knew humanity perhaps better than anyone else, did not despise him as an adversary, although his importance was denied by Napoleon’s ministers and entourage, who advised him to pay no notice to the weekly attacks of the Lanterne against his person and his government. One day M. Rouher tried to minimise the influence of that sheet, saying that though people read it, its attacks were despised. The Emperor replied that he knew it, but, he added, “I am also aware that there exist women whom we despise but to whom, nevertheless, we pay attention.”
There was a deep meaning in this simple phrase. Certain it was that all reasonable and well-thinking people despised the attacks against everything that others held sacred in which the Marquis de Rochefort Luçay continually indulged, but nevertheless the seeds blossomed in time; indeed, no one more than himself contributed to discredit authority. By this Rochefort became the idol of the Parisian masses, and remained its favourite until his death.
I was very fond of M. Rochefort, and used to find great pleasure in spending a few hours in his company whenever I found an opportunity. Nothing could be more amusing than his conversation; the mixture of cynicism and irony that now and then came out in brilliant paradoxes full of wit if devoid of common sense, constituted something quite unique, which was bound to appeal to the imagination of his listeners, and make them smile even when they felt a sense of distaste.
He believed in nothing, not even in himself; respected nothing, loved nothing, but liked many things—his collections, his pictures, his work, the influence which he imagined that he wielded around him, and which in reality was not so considerable as he thought. And he never hesitated before uttering one of his bon mots, or writing one of his bitter scathing articles, even when he was perfectly aware that by doing so he was hurting innocent people—people who had done no wrong, and who had only incurred his displeasure by being either related or connected with those who had become the subject of his criticism.
The best description that one can make of M. Rochefort would be that he was “perfectly unscrupulous,” and if he were still living I do not think he would deny that this was so. Rather, he would glory in it, because, as he once told me, “Dans ce monde il faut toujours mordre, ne fut ce que pour ôter aux autres la possibilité d’en faire autant avec vous” (“In this world one must always bite, if only to prevent others doing the same to you”). One could have replied to this remark that there are some mortal and some insignificant bites, and that it was not always the latter that he indulged in.
A curious peculiarity of M. Rochefort was that, fierce Republican though he pretended to be, yet he was inordinately fond of his name and of his title, and a servant who would forget to call him Monsieur le Marquis would be dismissed instantly. Bereft of his parents, and so without experience of the affection of home life, his earliest days were most difficult.