“Yes,” I replied, “but with fuel of Count Munster’s own providing.”
“Quite so,” he continued; “but of course we are paid to deny just such things as this. And I have heard of licensed jesters, but the world has come to a pretty pass if we are to be at the mercy of licensed truth-tellers. What will become, this side of the Orient, of our profession?”
“I agree with you,” interrupted our host; “but what does it matter so only diplomacy may be the bay-leaves of poets, and you may have time to take the world into your confidence in verse?”
This estimate, implied in the ambassador’s somewhat cynical words, has always been shared by all M. de Blowitz’s confrères. It would be more than amusing, it would be curiously instructive, to corroborate this anecdote by comparison with the hundred others that tremble in the ink of my pen. But fortunately it is many years before “Blowitziana” will be written, while now there are Hawaii and Panama and the Papal ambassador to the United States to occupy our attention. Yet because of the existence of just this assurance in the foreign offices of all the European powers, it seems necessary to set the average reader on his guard against a natural error. What it all comes to is this—M. Jules Simon has said it—“Newspapers are better served than kings and peoples.”
Everybody has been recently talking of an extraordinary scheme of M. de Blowitz for the reformation of journalism. That article, crackling with anathema against the ignorance and irresponsibility of most modern journalism, and warm with generous and high notions of what constitutes the duty and privilege of the journalist, had about it a surprising flavor of detachment and idealism which recalled the famous Utopian schemes familiar in the pedantic idiom of scholars. It was a dream, a warning—a vision of a kind of journalistic “City of God.” But the air of that city is, after all, the air of the world in which M. de Blowitz, the most surprisingly unprofessional of men, seems eternally to live.
Not that he is always an idealist. He was not, for instance, when, jumping the wall at Versailles after a dinner to the Shah of Persia, he outwitted every journalist in the palace garden, and, as he says, “made five enemies in a single well-employed evening.” No, even the most ubiquitous of American reporters would admit that he may be practical 173 enough when need be. But after all, and above all, he is an idealist, marked by a distinguished imagination and an amiable and generous sympathy. No journalistic tag is on him. He is simply a gentleman with the widest interests and uncommon capacities who succeeded in convincing the “Times” (this, of itself, is surely by way of being a vrai coup de maître), and then every other intelligent observer, of his power and usefulness. He has his own philanthropic ends, for the propagation of which it pleases him to have so esteemed a medium as the “Times.”
IN HIS PARIS HOME.
The people who come to see him—the deputies, the ministers, the ambassadors, the writers, the artists, the simple gens du monde—come more often not to his office, but to his warm and hospitable home. Here, in one of the streets that wind about the Star Arch at the head of the Champs Élysées, he receives all the world, rather as the charming gentleman than the historic journalist de Blowitz. The centre—I must add the admired centre—of a devoted family circle, he discourses at his dinner-table of the serious events of the day, volubly, picturesquely, and with conviction. Yet he is always ready to listen, and even to alter his opinions at a moment’s notice, though that notice must be good. While he himself makes the coffee, the talk becomes less exacting and more general. Often he tells you of his pictures, and points out to you the panels set into the wall of the room, works of his friends, great canvases by M. Clairin or Mme. Sarah Bernhardt; and one, a sunny view of the Norman house on the cliff, by M. Duphot. After dinner in the private study, with its high walls covered with paintings and souvenirs and autograph photographs of the greatest names of France, you smoke in the arms of your easy-chair, the wood fire burning brightly in an ample chimney; while your host, propped by divan cushions, and with one leg curled under him, drops grandly into pleasant reminiscences. One has visions of Bagdad. After an hour like this, you wonder when M. de Blowitz works. But he has been working all the time. He has been thinking in one half of a very capacious brain and talking from another. The chances are that he will have planned a column article for the “Times” newspaper, left you for a half hour to rummage in his books while he dictates the article, telephoned for his carriage to await him at nine o’clock in the court below, and asked you to accompany him to the opera—all before he has finished his cigar. But then the cigar is a remarkably good one, and knows not, as is the case with ambassadorial nicotine, the protective customs of France.
Life means to M. de Blowitz a mental activity and alertness that never sleep. Yet he is always amiable, tolerating everything except stupidity. He is a journalist by “natural selection.” But that, in the Europe of his time, and given the accidents of his fortune, made him the diplomatist that he has been and is. He can keep a secret as well as tell one. I repeat, he disproves that masterly theory of Taine, who drove facts like wild horses into a corral in order, having lassoed them, to tame them to his own uses; for, like Taine himself, he has made his own milieu, created his own series of facts, far more truly even than he is himself the striking and delightful resultant of others that have gone before.