July 29
This morning both of us slept late. Last night, as M. d’Artois led us out into the dark streets of Montmartre, sleep seemed the furthest thing from Alexandra’s mind.
The studio of the artist Jacques Gautier occupies the topmost floor of a tall, thin, ivy-covered house. We followed M. d’Artois up the stairs in single file and finding the artist’s door flung open, stepped through into a long narrow room. On this close summer evening it was horribly hot and airless. The smell that greeted us seemed compounded of coffee, candlewax , cigarettes, turpentine, and unwashed clothes; to which was added, now, the musky sweetness of M. d’Artois’s perfume.
There was another visitor in the studio when we arrived — a gentleman who appeared to have been seized by a painful fit of coughing. I could not see much of his face, as he was bent over in his chair with a handkerchief pressed to his mouth. The artist, who hovered anxiously nearby, was a pale, lean young man with luminous dark eyes and an earnest look. He acknowledged us in an offhand way, gestured to the bottle of wine on the table, and left us to our own devices.
The studio was much as I had imagined it would be, from my long-ago reading of Vie de Bohème. There was a single narrow window behind a length of black velour, a velvet chaise longue that was ripped across the back with the horsehair stuffing spilling out; a bench covered with an elaborately embroidered altar cloth; some oddly shaped candlesticks like twining serpents; a carved ebony mask —A frican, I think — and a stained and fraying India rug over bare floorboards. A folding screen in one corner likely concealed the artist’s bed. In the centre of the room was a table splashed here and there with dried paint and littered with what looked like the evening’s unwashed supper dishes. Elsewhere, hanging on the walls or propped against them, on easels or leaning against a chair, were dozens of paintings for which the only possible word was macabre.
No cheerful Paris street scenes here — instead there were crumbling pillars wound about with creeping plants and hothouse flowers; a wild-eyed Salome, reduced to a single veil, holding up the gory head of John the Baptist; dragons and skeletons and sphinxes; exploding suns; and beautiful drowned women, their long pale hair adrift like strands of weed.
M. d’Artois stepped aside to allow me a better view of spectral figures dancing on a row of coffins. “C’est intéressant, n’est-ce pas?” he said approvingly. “The art of melancholy slipping into madness” — which struck me as an apt enough description.
Behind me, the hacking cough continued. The unfortunate gentleman seemed in some distress. I turned to see M. Gautier offer him a glass of wine, which he drained in a single gulp.
On one wall, half in shadow was a large untinted photographic reproduction. My gaze distracted by M. Gautier’s acid greens and saffrons, his aubergines and brassy reds, I’d failed to notice it at first. Now I went to examine it more closely. In the background I could see the pinnacles and archways of a gothic palace or cathedral; mysterious towers half-hidden in vegetation; and on the far horizon, rocky crags. In the foreground, fantastic images were layered one upon another, bewildering to the eye: naked goddesses mounted on bulls and hippogryphs, a queen in the crown of Charlemagne stroking a unicorn’s head, a serpent-headed goat; as well as fairies, angels, witches, and all manner of fabulous birds and beasts. I could have spent an hour examining it and still found more details to discover. Our host’s own canvases by comparison seemed garish and inexpert.
“I see you are admiring M’sieu Gustave Moreau’s famous picture,” said M. d’Artois. “Les Chimères — a masterpiece of artifice and invention. He never finished it, you know. To portray all of myth, all of history, all of religion — what artist is equal to such a task?”
And I, who know so little of art, could only murmur, “It’s beautiful, and very strange, and I think quite frightening.”
“Just so. A journey through the haunted forests of the imagination. The reflection of our dreams, our terrors and our innermost desires.”
Even in black and white, the picture had the power to mesmerize. If one looked too long, one had to tear one’s gaze away. I could well imagine that beyond the distant mountains of that never-to-be- finished painting lay a still more marvellous and seductive country existing only in the artist’s mind.
I was raised to believe that in this life, at least, there is only one reality, and that is the world of ordinary experience, that has no place for unicorns and hippogryphs. But all that has happened these past months has tested that belief. If we believe in Heaven, is it so impossible to believe, as spiritualists do, that other worlds exist above and beyond our own? At that moment I remembered a long-ago moment in a London bookshop, seeing through an artist’s eyes a marvelous tropical world I had never visited, and likely never would. I had accepted those drawings not merely as vivid works of the imagination, but as a true record of the artist’s travels. How much harder, then, to imagine that in some world invisible to the untrained eye, M. Moreau’s chimeras were real?
“A world of nightmares,” remarked Alexandra, coming to join us.
M. d’Artois looked a little affronted. “I take it, mademoiselle, you are not an admirer of M’sieu Moreau’s work?”
“It reeks of romanticized despair,” said Alexandra. “And besides, it is far too cluttered. I am not surprised M’sieu Moreau did not manage to complete it. Your author M’sieu Huysmans, of whom you think highly, has described it well: “A soul exhausted by secret thoughts . . . I nsidious appeals to sacrilege and debauchery . . . ”
“Why, mademoiselle, quelle surprise! I did not imagine you were so familiar with M’sieu Huysman’s books!”
“And who in Paris is not?” said Alexandra.
It is unlike Alexandra to be so critical, even in the presence of the frequently annoying M. d’Artois. I wondered if something in M. Moreau’s dreamworld affected her more than she cared to admit.
Just then the coughing gentleman put away his handkerchief, and M. d’Artois gave a cry of happy recognition.
“Mon Dieu! Can it be?”
The gentleman glanced up with a somewhat absent expression.
“Mademoiselle David, Mademoiselle Guthrie, allow me the great honour of introducing you to the most famous poet in France, M’sieu Paul Verlaine.”
Alas, the most famous poet in France, on close inspection, appeared to have fallen on hard times. His graying beard was shaggy and untrimmed. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face had an unhealthy yellowish tinge. The high dome of his forehead was slick with perspiration. There were stains on his jacket, a button was missing, and a shoulder seam had given way.
“M’sieu Verlaine,” M. d’Artois addressed the poet in his rather affected French, “Do you remember when we met one night at Le Chat Noir, and you read from your Poèmes saturniens?
In a palace of silk and gold in Echbatan
Beautiful demons, youthful Satans,
To the sound of Mohammedan music
Dedicate their five senses to the seven sins.
M. Verlaine dismissed this intrusion with an irritable shrug. “A young man’s fantasizing. In fact, a piece of derivative garbage . . . ” And waving away M. d’Artois’s protests, he added, “It is true, I was once a genius. But now I am old and sick, and there will be no more poems.”
“Indeed,” cried M. d’Artois, “you are not at all old; you are in your prime!”
“But let us not pretend for courtesy’s sake, M’sieu, that I am not ill. You see the evidence before you. I am a drunk, and in consequence have destroyed both liver and stomach.” He held out his glass for more wine, obligingly poured by M. Gautier. “Let us add to the list, diabetes, and also a shrunken heart, which you will agree is a tragic condition for a poet. And from sleeping rough in Paris slums, I have developed rheumatism.”
M. d’Artois was clearly at a loss for a reply. Alexandra, adroitly rescuing the conversation, said, “I possess a volume of your poetry, M’sieu Verlaine, I read it often, with the greatest pleasure. M’sieu d’Artois has his favourite among your lines —I have mine:
In a street, in the heart of a city of dreams,
that seems like a place where you have already been,
an instant at once very vague and very clear . . .
For a moment M. Verlaine’s haggard, dissipated features softened. “You do me honour, mademoiselle — but tell me, have you ever travelled to that city of dreams?”
What a curious question, I thought. But Alexandra replied, in all seriousness, “Not I, M’sieu. Not yet. But I have known those who have found themselves, that is, a part of themselves, in a place they had not meant to go, which was unknown to them: a place they could only say was ‘elsewhere’.”
“Ah yes, I have done that,” said M. Gautier. “Many times.”
“But we are not speaking of drugs,” said M. Verlaine. “Is that not so, Mademoiselle David?”
“No, nor of sleep, in the ordinary way,” said Alexandra. “I once spoke to a woman who had made this kind of spirit voyage. All the while she was sitting in her chair, in a Paris drawing room, in the presence of two friends. She was not asleep, she had taken no drugs. Yet she slipped into an unconscious state, as though she had been given anaesthetic. All her senses were muffled, she could not move. And then she saw in the distance her other self, her spirit double, attached to her body by a thin, hazy cord.”
“And where did she go, this other self?” asked M. d’Artois, clearly fascinated.
“She said, to a country that seemed familiar to her, though it was a place where she had never been.”
“And who is to know,” said M. Verlaine, “which is real, and which is not — the Paris drawing room? Or the city of dreams? That is a question for which I have long sought an answer. And you, Mademoiselle David —I think you have puzzled over it as well.”
Alexandra, oddly, did not reply. I could not have guessed, at that moment, what was in her mind.
It is a puzzle for me as well, the nature of this place called “Elsewhere” — this paradoxical country, unknown and yet familiar, where we travel not in body but in spirit. For M. Verlaine it is the magical city he has only visited in dreams. For Madame Blavatsky surely it must be an otherworldly version of the Himalayas, a treasure house of ancient knowledge guarded by Tibetan sages. And as for Alexandra —I think she would see it as a dazzling instant of illumination, when all the mysteries of this world and the next are finally revealed.
By the time we were ready to be escorted home by M. d’Artois, M. Paul Verlaine had finished a second bottle of the artist’s cheap, vinegary wine. His speech was slurred, his voice thick with drink and despair as he muttered, as though to himself, “I have squandered my art as I have squandered my life, searching for that other country.”
And then, as we turned to go down the stairs at the end of that long, extraordinary day, he called after us, “You and I, we could search together, Mademoiselle David. My good friend Gautier will know where to find me.”