It was a serious thing for me. For the life of me I could not get them into focus again for my grand pictorial composition of a community all playing the game of life for mutual diversion. Theirs was rather that infernal game of bowls in the Fourth Circle, where the tormented wretches will roll the balls in one another’s faces, when a more sensible direction would give them delightful sport. I drove home, telegraphed an excuse to the Constitutional Association, and, I am ashamed to say, went to bed.
I was no better next morning. Human society was still out of focus. I describe the complaint with some minuteness, because I believe it is quite a new case for the books, and I may go down to posterity, with my name tacked to this disease, like a second Bright. The anguish is insufferable: it is a sort of intense vertigo, with a very disagreeable accompaniment of sickness in the region of the heart, that robs life of all joy. The men and women about you, instead of having any relation to one another of love, friendship, trust, sympathy, and use, become a mass of gyrating atoms, with nothing but repulsions for their principle of movement. At times you do not know your own brother for such. They form no whole; they will not compose; say, rather, they are out of focus, I come back to that. How to get them in?
I consulted a friend of a most practical order of mind, and, while frankly confessing his ignorance of the complaint, he thought, from my persistent mention of the word focus, that distance might be the remedy. ‘You were too near,’ he said, ‘get further off. Go down to Richmond, and dine.’ I thought there might be something in that, and I took his advice. Still it would not come right. So I started for Paris by the night mail.
CHAPTER II.
FURTHER AFIELD.
London was now quite out of the question: Paris compelled me to be so busy with itself. I had not seen it for years, and had never gone below the surface. The tomb of Napoleon, and the view from the Arch (see Guide) were about the measure of my experience. This time I found a guide of another kind, and he gave me a glimpse of the real show.
He put me down at the Flute, a delightful club, where they try to amuse themselves all the year round. When they are not fiddling, at select evening concerts, they are showing their pictures; and when they are not showing their pictures, they are holding an assault-at-arms—the Flute is a great school of fence—or reviewing the year in a fancy piece, written, mounted, and played by their own men, in their own theatre. My Mentor gave me a month—as he facetiously put it—at another club, the choicest thing there. Through an acquaintance at the Jockey, I found a box-seat on a coach for the private race meeting at La Marche—very pretty, very select; no coming in your thousands, as at the Grand Prix, but just a snug thing between you and me, and a few others, of entirely the right sort. The women looked sweet and fresh as a bed of primroses; the course was like a tennis lawn; we lunched al fresco, and no one threw bones on the grass. Far, far away the yell of the bookmaker, and the smell of town. I never enjoyed anything more.
I was presented all round, and was engaged for a reception that night, at the house of one of the chaperones.
‘You will see the best salon in Paris,’ said A.
‘And what is a salon?’
‘Well, I don’t know; they say nobody knows but themselves. Perhaps a crowd of clever people trying to kill the worm of ennui. Nothing like that at home, where the beast is as sacred as the cow at Benares.’