Color has its importance. Before making friends with anyone, before undertaking the conquest of a woman, observe what their favorite colors are. Think at the same time of your own, and try to make happy combinations. If you are fond of red, take to yourself a dash of blue, thus forming an agreeable lilac; and if it is blue that charms you, do not reject yellow; this combination will give you all the shades of green and will assure you lifelong peace. How many misfortunes have been caused by the maladroit mixing of hostile colors! But above all, beware of violet. There is no more perfidious hue; it is, among the colors of life, the least stable and the most hypocritical.
[THE ART OF SEEING]
Mon voyage dépeint
Vous sera d'un plaisir extrême.
Je dirai: J'étais là; telle chose m'advint:
Vous y croirez être vous-même.
(The tale of my travels will be extremely pleasant to you, I'll say: "I was there; such and such things happened to me." You'll imagine that you're there yourself.)
"Alas!" the loving dove would have replied, if he had taken courses under M. Claparède, professor of psychology at the University of Geneva. "Alas! What faith may I have in your testimony? You will tell me what will take place in your head and I'll not have the consolation, as a reward for your absence, of knowing your real adventures!" But this was not what La Fontaine had in mind. In his day they believed in the value of testimony offered in good faith. An eye-witness inspired full confidence. People bowed with mute deference before the honest man who said: "I was there; such and such things happened to me." And the custom continues. Nevertheless, in certain places, they are beginning to show a little less confidence. They have been observing and reflecting and have arrived at the conclusion that the majority of men report far less what they have seen than what they believed they saw. They repeat much less what they heard than what they believed they heard. A dozen persons having witnessed an accident will present a dozen different accounts, or, at least, accounts that do not harmonize exactly. Still better, among the dozen there will be one, perhaps, who will have seen nothing, and another who will have seen the contrary to what his companions saw.
I have made many observations in regard to this subject. One of these observations is that, if by accident I have had direct and exact knowledge of an event reported by a newspaper, the newspaper report will very often be in contradiction to the facts personally known to me. Another observation is, that every time I have read the description of a place that is familiar to me, the description, in almost every case, has seemed to me inexact, incomplete,—in short, false. Huysmans was a meticulous observer; more than any one else he possessed the gift of seeing things well; his sharp eye pierced and bored into men and things. More, he had a passion for exactness, and he would scour all Paris to verify the color of a door or the height of a house. He would have considered it a sort of literary crime to describe anything he had not seen with his own eyes. Well! This man with the miraculous eye said to me one day, speaking of the Bièvre, a little stream which at that time still flowed in the open, between the fortifications and the Botanical Garden: "There is where you may see the last poplars of Paris." This old Parisian, who loved the banks of the Seine, had never beheld its poplars, some of which are truly wonderful, as at the Pont Royal,—the poplars which grow almost along its entire distance. A year ago, a group of us, all serious-minded gentlemen of Paris and of the quartier, were discussing the number of arches that comprise the bridge of Saints-Pères. One may walk every day across a bridge without knowing the number of its arches, but one of us who confessed that he had looked at this bridge from the barge or from the quay perhaps a thousand times in his life, was unable to settle the matter for us. I knew a librarian who was exceedingly fond of the Memoirs of Casanova and who mangled his name, calling him always, and emphatically, Casanova de Seignalt instead of Seingalt, which is the right form. I have been conducting regularly, in the same review, for some twelve years, a chronicle under the title Epilogues; one of my friends, a fellow staff-member of the same review, has said or written to me at least ten times: "I have read your latest Episodes...."
This reminds me of the English historian Froude, with whom Dr. Gustave Le Bon recently entertained us, dealing with this very question of testimony. Froude possessed a genius for seeing things exactly opposite to what they really were. A curious example of this is given; it concerns the description he gives of the town of Adelaide, Australia. "I saw at our feet," he said, "in the plain cut by a stream, a city of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, of which not one has ever known or ever will know, the least uncertainty upon the matter of the regular return of his three meals per day." Now, Adelaide is built upon a height, and, at the time Froude visited it, its population, half as numerous as he said it was, was a prey to a terrible famine. And this is the testimony of a grave personage, with a European reputation,—one of the English historians most esteemed by those who have not read him.