THERE was a lake in front of the hotel, cupped among descending pines, and in the middle of the lake a little island, naked but for a tin pagoda, with two blue boats attached to a landing-stage of which the handrail was of brown wood and the supports of pink.
It was this that made me think again of Jeanne de Hénaut.
“Je voudrais,” she had announced one evening, “si ma vie était encore à faire, habiter auprès d’un lac.”
“Quel lac?” Marstock asked. Jeanne closed contemptuous eyes at him through the brown veil of her own cigarette smoke. She did not care for Marstock: he was not, she felt, quite up to her standard: assuredly he had less intellectual distinction than her other pupils.
“Je voudrais,” she began again, “si ma vie était encore à faire….”
“Mais ça,” said her brother (it was one of the evenings when he took the late train home to Rueil), “ça, ma sœur, c’est un alexandrin.”
“Je dois ajouter,” I intervened sententiously, “que c’est aussi du Verlaine.”
“Moi,” said Eustace Percy, “je ne goute pas les vers libres.”
“Ni moi non plus,” added Marstock with sudden emphasis.
“Jeanne,” mumbled her mother, scratching the top of her bald brown head with a table fork, “Jeanne, ce que tu m’embêtes avec tes lacs! Tu as des idées saugrenues.”
As usual Jeanne allowed her mother’s interjection to pass unanswered. The eyes which she had shut abruptly at Marstock remained ruminant and half-closed. She rolled another cigarette, running the paper edge along her tongue as if closing a letter card: she swung the damp, discoloured cigarette before her with a rotatory gesture as of an acolyte swinging a censer. I knew what she was thinking about: she was thinking about gongs, and Cochin China, and (had she known it) the Lily of Malud, and white jade opium pipes and how much she disliked Mr. Marstock. But she said nothing of all this. She smoked in silence for a space of time while her brother told us a story about how a man in his office had gone off suddenly to Madagascar.
“Ça serait si calme,” commented Jeanne finally. The incense of her drab and dripping cigarette arose around her, as might well be at Tonkin, and loitered slowly-drawn among the black and wiry undulations of her hair.
We were never sure, never either absolutely or unanimously certain, whether it was a wig. On the one hand there was the parting down the middle, a brown oleaginous parting, with nothing about it of that waxen or that canvas effect which one associates, respectively, with the expensive or the cheap peruque. On the other hand, there was the texture of the hair itself, as of the tail of a black stallion, fiercely symmetrical, undulatable only by the tongs of Vulcan himself, and framing the square visage squarely—giving to it the flat and formal contour of the Queen of Spades. The face itself, the skin of the face, was uniform in texture: smooth and yet unhealthy like a large, soft, yellow apple: slightly soiled and bruised. Her figure was as indefinable as her sex. She was not a tall woman, and yet sometimes, as when her thoughts veered home to Theodora, Empress of Byzantium, her head would be flung back and upwards with an imperial gesture that added to her height. She was not a short woman, and yet, in her Mandalay moments, or when she was thinking of Mary Queen of Scots, she could become dumpy as a jade Buddha, or shrink into her ruff with a faint suggestion of the petite; and on such occasions her rich baritone voice would flatten instinctively into the betel-nut accents of the Far East or mince and narrow into the lip-consonants of the Court of France. Her clothes were equally personal and deceptive. From the faded cretonne of some discarded sofa of 1879 she had made for herself two gabardines, beginning under the jaw in a stiff ruff of the later sixteenth century, and ending around her yellow, ink-stained hands in two little frills, smocked for an inch or so around the wrists.
Her age was for us a problem of very frequent discussion. Until the coffee incident occurred we had but scanty data on which to found our theories. Jeanne was ever reticent about all but her immediate past. We knew only that as a girl she had lived at Constantinople, where her father had been instructor to the Imperial Ottoman Cavalry: we did not know, until the coffee incident, the date, or even the approximate date, of this significant sojourn. The coffee incident enlightened us: it happened in this wise. At luncheon every day we had cutlets: they were good cutlets, but we had them every day. It was thus that we looked forward, a little unduly perhaps, perhaps a little greedily, to the coffee which closed our frugal meal. Towards the end of the luncheon the aged Madame de Hénaut would shuffle out to the kitchen in her bedroom slippers and would return with a tin coffee-pot steaming at the spout On this particular morning Marstock had been very funny, in his own manner (he was a man who avoided paradox), about the fables of M. de Lafontaine. I was slightly annoyed myself, feeling that Marstock, in his indirect English way, had somehow missed the point of Lafontaine’s style. Which is good. But upon Jeanne (who did not care for Marstock) the effect of his humour had been more subjective: when her mother returned with the coffee-pot she intimated, a little sharply perhaps, that she, that morning, did not want any coffee.
“Comment, Jeanne,” squeaked Madame de Hénaut from the doorway, “alors tu n’aimes pas mon café?”
Jeanne assumed the Theodora manner. She raised a deliberate head and the black eyes glittered imperially. “Vous comprendrez, messieurs,” she said, “que quand on a bu le café préparé pour Sa Majesté le Sultan, alors …” and this with a wide sweep of the cigarette dismissive of all ersatz concoctions. Dismissive also, on that occasion, of our own coffee: for by then her mother had bolted backwards with the coffee-pot and slammed the door behind her, squeaking, “Jeanne, ce que tu m’ennuies avec tes Sultans!”
“… pour le Sultan,” continued Jeanne imperially, and unperturbed, “ce pauvre, cher Sultan. Il s’est suicidé quelques jours après….”
The door opened again suddenly and the brown medlar head of Madame de Hénaut (who had been listening outside) darted through it and hung there with sparse dishevelled locks like some trophy of the Borneo head-hunters.
“… et dans notre jardin,” the old woman added.
“Et dans notre jardin,” continued Jeanne, the imperial baritone flattening into the minor key of reminiscence, “c’était à Ortakeui: le pavilion de Sa Majesté donnait sur notre jardin. On l’appellait le petit, dit Kutchuk, Tchéragan. C’etait un beau soir tiède d’Avril. Les arbres de judée etaient en fleur J’avais à peine seize ans….”
Our attention, which, during Jeanne’s adagio movement, had been wandering somewhat into vague regrets of coffee, was arrested by this remark. Abdul Hamid, I seemed to remember, perhaps inaccurately, had succeeded as Padishah in the later ’seventies, and his deposed brother had cut his throat soon after. It would have been in ’76 or ’78. Jeanne, by her own confession, was sixteen at the time. She must, therefore, be about fifty or fifty-three: we put it at fifty-five to be safe.
The security of our deduction was shaken by another incident which occurred a few weeks later. It is tabulated in my memory as the “de Musset incident.” For we had been talking about Madame de Polignac and electric light, and M. Jacques Blanche (for Coleridge Kennard had by that time succeeded Marstock), and this led inevitably to Alfred de Musset. Coleridge Kennard said that the man was a bore. I interposed something deprecatory, but at the same time defensive about the plays, and then (for I was at that date beginning to summon up the courage of my convictions) about the Nuit de Mai. Coleridge Kennard flickered for a moment with his fair entangled eyelashes and began to talk hastily about the law of diminishing returns. But Jeanne, whose interest had been aroused by the mention of de Musset, quickly assumed the Georges Sand manner, squared her yellow jaw, and pointed with her ink-stained finger (it was green ink) at the little withered, wizened, crouching figure of her mother.
“Ma mère!” she exclaimed peremptorily. It was as the crack of the showman’s lash. Her mother started and ceased suddenly to scratch the bald brown place on the top of her head.
“Moi,” she tittered with senile coyishness, “vous n’y croirez pas, messieurs, mais j’ai dansé avec Alfred de Musset.”
Jeanne, still the ringmaster, surveyed us with triumph. “Figurez-vous, messieurs,” she concluded, pointing at her mother as if at some particularly revolting specimen in a medical museum, “ça, a dansé avec Alfred de Musset.”
“Avec Alfred de Musset,” repeated her mother, raising a brown hand, withered like the claw of an old hen. “Avec Alfred de Musset.”
I was sorry then that Marstock had left us. He would, assuredly, have asked,” And what was he like?” As it was, we received the triumphant circular glance of Jeanne with courtesy, with appreciative interest, but in silence. I have an impression that Coleridge Kennard, who was then in his symbolist period, slightly sniffed. Eustace Percy assumed that firm cognisant expression which has subsequently, and how rightly, endeared his personality to the Mother of Parliaments. And I was merely doing sums in my head. Surely, if Madame de Hénaut had danced with de Musset, it must have been before that most under-estimated poet had been cradled by Georges Sand into dipsomania: before, that is, he became incapable of any such gratuitous gyrations: let us say in the year 1834. So that Jeanne, biologically speaking, must be much more than fifty-five.
We all, if I remember rightly, became a little thoughtful that evening.
The flat which Jeanne shared, in tolerant but ill-masked disdain, with her mother was on the top floor, the fifth floor, of number 174 rue de la Pompe, Paris, XVI. On the street level there was a glass door, the smell of beeswax, the concierge Madame Stefjane (“Mais elle exagère, cette femme. On ne s’appelle pas ainsi”), and a little lift with the most menacing instructions printed on a card. Coleridge Kennard wrote a prose poem about that lift (it was during his symbolist period), which appeared in the Westminster Gazette. It took one up the five stories with a persistent grunt of protest, and, when one had clanged the iron gate and pressed the push marked “descente,” it would sink down with a sudden, and rather pointed, exhalation of relief. The same dutiful hostility was noticeable in the manner of Madame Stefjane herself. In front of the door to Jeanne’s flat there was a horse-hair mat under which, on the rare occasions on which any of us dared to venture out after 9 p.m., Jeanne would hide the latchkey. “Je mettrai la clef pour vous sous le paillasson,” she would say, in the tone of Catherine the Second sending Potemkin on a mission to Vienna. And at 11.45 p.m. the same evening, there the key would be.
But in general one rang the bell. It rang very loudly, and the maid (Eugénie her name was) would open the door somewhat nervously. The first impression was a smell of fish For Jeanne would buy the discarded fish of the quarter and let it simmer from 1 p.m. till dinner-time, when it was given to her cats. Behind the smell of simmering fish was the flat itself. A little hall in the first place with a Bokhara rug. The kitchen beyond, and opposite to it the dining-room. And then the dark, unlighted passage which swerved to the right round the well of the staircase and formed the backbone of the flat. There was a drawing-room next to the dining-room, into which we never entered: it was used at night as a bedroom by Madame de Hénaut. She slept presumably upon one of the divans which decayed against the wall: in the morning sometimes she could be met emerging from that room in a nightgown and a dirty fur cape, a cigarette in one hand and in the other a round enamelled object of the most domestic significance.
At the period which recurs to me more vividly there were only three of us living and learning at 174 rue de la Pompe. Eustace Percy had the room beyond the salle à manger. He would emerge energetically from his books, pass a hurried white hand over a harried white brow and engage in the conversation with force, fluency and distinction. I was, and still am, immensely impressed by Eustace Percy. So was Jeanne. She cherished the idea that one day he would be King of France. “Voilà,” she would say, “mon candidat.” I imagined for some stretch of time that she meant by this cryptic and so recurrent tribute that he was her favourite for the Foreign Office examination, which indeed was a cert. But she explained to us all one evening that I was wrong: for had not the son of a French duke ascended not so very long ago, if one considered the Palæologi, to the throne of England? “Et en somme il était bâtard, tandis que Lor’ Eustache, à ce que je sache…” She was a most ambitious woman. She was also a royalist; but one who had to admit that the official candidates to the throne were not very inspiring. So she was obliged to fall back upon compromises such as Eustace Percy, and stamping her letters upside down, and referring generally to the Third Republic as “la grosse Marianne.”
Marstock had the room next to Jeanne, between it and the cubicle drawing-room. It opened out of the passage on the left, and was small and tidy. Marstock was large but also tidy. On his mantelpiece he had a set of the English Men of Letters Series which began with those square red ones and ended with those thin yellow ones. “My tutor,” Marstock would say, “told me that the examiners expect one to have read the E. M. of L. S.” He had a way of abbreviating the classics; he rolled his r’s when he spoke French. Jeanne, as I have said, did not care for Mr. Marstock: “il ne me plaît pas,” she would say, “ce goujat.” Such a word was unusual with her, and, as such, all the more impressive.
My own room was at the end of the passage, beyond the locked door which was that of Jeanne. Often as I groped for the handle I could hear her talking to her cats. “Cochon,” she would hiss at them, “Ramasès tu n’es qu’un cochon; et toi, Zénobie, tu es pire.” But we never saw the cats. The door was locked against us: it was only by the faint smell that hung about the passage, and by the angry scratches upon Jeanne’s hands, that we knew where they were housed. She seldom spoke of them. They belonged to that inner life from which we were excluded: to that inner life which was a jumble of theosophy, and Buddhism, and howdahs and punkahs, and chutney, and the repetition to herself of “Om mani padhi om”—all of which she had culled from the excellent encyclopædia of M. Larousse.
My own room, as I have said, was at the end of the passage. From my part of the balcony I could overlook the garage opposite and out beyond the trees of the Bois to the domed height of the Mont Valérien. If I leant forward and looked to the right I could see the pink marble of the Castellane Mansion in the avenue de l’Impératrice (Jeanne called it that to humiliate M. Fallières). If I looked to the left I saw only the narrow cañon of the rue de la Pompe diminishing to a point of perspective. Between the two windows there was a book-case, and a table below with a crochet cloth: there was also a bed and a red marble mantelpiece with a brass lamp and a papier-mâché tray on which I kept my yellow packets of Maryland. Under the bed was a flat tin bath.
We all, in those days, came to work for a month or so at a time under the enigmatic discipline of Jeanne. One could go to Paris for a bit, and then to Hanover, and then to Siena or St. Sebastian, and then back to Paris. But as French and German were the two most important languages, we tended to spend most of those preparatory two years either with Jeanne in Paris or with Lili and Hermine at Hanover. The Foreign Office examination was held in August of every year, and we inclined generally to pass the last three months at rue de la Pompe. There was something in the discipline of the establishment which aided that last summer sprint: besides, one could keep up one’s German with Herr Schmidt, and there were Spaniards and Italians also who arrived at strange hours at 174. It was a strenuous existence.
In the years that have since intervened I have often endeavoured to recapture and to analyse the secret of the hypnotic spell which Jeanne was able to cast upon us. For, after all, we were not children at that time: we were graduates of the University of Oxford: we had by then asserted and acquired our independence; we were, to say the least, of age. But in the white-heat discharged from Jeanne’s convictions, Balliol and Christ Church, Annandale and Bullingdon, became but as the snow upon the desert’s dusty face: within a week we would be assailed by the furtive submissiveness of a private school-boy: we would find ourselves throwing bread at each other when her back was turned: and within a fortnight our scale of values had so altered that we welcomed Jeanne’s cloud-capped illusions as our own. For such is the force of faith, and such the mesmeric influence of legend; and it was on these two foundations that Jeanne based her system and her power.
The new-comer in this way would, during the period of his novitiate, be subjected to an intensive course of the great historic legends of the past. There had been Robert Vansittart: he had written a French play at the age of sixteen and it had been performed at the Odéon: he had, after a bare six weeks of Jeanne, passed first into the Diplomatic Service. There was Lor’ Moore who, beneath an exterior of gentle distinction, concealed a will of iron—“que dis-je? Une volonté d’acier.” There was Mr. Tyrrwhitt who would assuredly have proved an archi-first at the examination had he not, that August, been stricken with ophthalmia; to become thereafter “ce pauvre M. Tyrrwhitt, si spirituel, si génial enfin, mais qui avait ses mouches.” A later epic was that of Colum Crichton Stuart, who was descended, whatever he might say, from Mary Queen of Scots, and who had smuggled grouse for Jeanne through the Calais customs, and who spoke French in the manner of the late Duc d’Aumale. And finally, and, as it were, contemporaneously, there was “M. le Baron Kennard, qui était d’une élegance, mais d’une élégance …” and who was the intimate friend of that important but deleterious writer M. Maurice Barrès.
Around these gigantic figures Jeanne would weave her saga; and we, the tyros and the aspirants, would gaze at each other with a vague surmise, wondering whether any of us would be able, would be worthy, in our turn, to enter such a pantheon. I realise, on looking back, that Eustace Percy must have attained his apotheosis. I have an uneasy feeling, however, that I myself never figured with any striking prominence in Jeanne’s mythology. I have questioned my successors (frank and friendly people like Tommy Lascelles and Alan Parsons, and Charles Lister and Duff Cooper), and they have been obliged in honesty to reveal to me that in the blaze of Eustace Percy’s legend my own little star became a trifle dimmed, I cherish no rancour and but little envy in the matter: merely a slight and quite recurrent regret.
Be this as it may, the models of what we should, and after all could, become, were kept constantly before us: they had been men fashioned in our shape, leading the lives we led, sitting at the very table that we then surrounded. And now they were gods: nay more, they were in the Foreign Office. Of course we were impressed: we had never, somehow, seen ourselves and our impending career from so cosmic an angle: and with this sudden realisation of our privilege came a fiery sense of responsibility towards ourselves, towards our country, towards Europe, towards posterity, and predominantly towards Jeanne herself. Deliberately, she exploited the impression thus created: whilst keeping before our eyes the Olympian heights attained by the successful, she would indicate at moments that for those who did not conform there was the Malebolge of failure; there was even the possibility that they might be asked to leave. The dread of such a disgrace, the fear of the dark and voiceless limbo into which the unsuccessful were plunged, fired our nerves and galvanised our muscles into prodigies of endurance. We accepted without a murmur the squalor and the discomfort of our surroundings. It never occurred to us to protest or to escape. We would rise at five and drop exhausted to our beds at midnight: and it was in vain that around and below us the delights of Paris glittered to the throb of circean violins.
The passionate though restrained emotionalism with which Jeanne flung herself into the task of our education produced, as I have said, a phenomenal change of values. We began to share her fakir-like, her hypnotic, powers of concentration; we also began to feel that nothing in this life or after was of any import except the examination: mesmerised by Jeanne’s incantations, by the glittering crystal of her own conviction, we abandoned to her our will, our liberty, and our reason. She held us enthralled.
That there was something mesmeric in Jeanne’s hold upon us occurred to me long afterwards when I was told by Alan Parsons of the incident of Patrick Shaw Stewart. For Shaw Stewart, who imagined that the rue de la Pompe was some sort of pension, actually called there one evening after eleven o’clock and rang the bell. The door was opened finally by Jeanne in her dressing-gown: Shaw Stewart asked politely but firmly if he might see Bunt Goschen: he was taken grimly along the passage and shown the room that once was mine. He failed entirely to understand the enormity of his action: they tried in hushed whispers to explain it to him, but he simply could not grasp what it was all about: in the end he left in a huff—slamming the flat door behind him, and leaving the front door open upon the street. Jeanne announced next day that Shaw Stewart’s action “l’avait blessé jusqu’au cœur”: and it was months before his friends could rid themselves of the impression that the latter had in fact behaved very badly, or that Jeanne’s indignation was not splendidly justifiable.
A similar exercise of hypnotic suggestion centred around the “cahier.” This was a notebook in which were inscribed the most brilliant compositions of her most brilliant pupils. It was the palladium of the establishment. To be included in the “cahier” became the devouring ambition of us all: in the flare of that aspiration such University honours as we had, or had not, attained waned into insignificance. She kept it in tissue-paper. When one had qualified or almost qualified for inclusion, she would bring it with her to the morning lesson. She would arrive with her crocodile-skin writing-case, her travelling clock, and the little khaki fountain pen with the green ink, and one’s ear would catch with greed and apprehension the rustle of the tissue paper which enshrined the “cahier.” She would not mention the latter, but put it down on the chair beside her; and, in general, she would take it away with her when the hour was over. But one felt that one had at last been accorded a glimpse of the Holy Grail.
And then, I suppose, behind the fear and veneration with which she inspired us, there burned a very real, if at the time unrealised, feeling of pity. For Jeanne was a lonely woman. Her mother she most cordially disliked. Her brother, whom she adored, was married and had a family, of which she was acutely jealous, out at Rueil. They had no friend except an old Colonel who would come sometimes on Thursdays to visit Madame de Hénaut, until my dog bit him in the leg. At which Jeanne was delighted. They had no relations except a cousin, a certain Major Mangin, who had served in the colonies and who had once given a lecture at the Institut Géographique. He was no more than a vague name to us: he never came to the flat.
Her whole life, her whole existence, was concentrated upon her work. She believed sincerely that God had granted to her the mission to coach young Englishmen for the Diplomatic Service, and her flaming faculty of self-deception had invested this mission with a gigantic import. She was an uneducated woman. The foundation of her learning was the encyclopædia of Larousse. She had at one period been through every word in that dictionary and evolved therefrom a little yellow book in which she analysed (quite inconclusively) the genders of all French substantives. Of literature she knew nothing: “Pour moi,” she would announce when the conversation led her into deep waters, “il n’y a que Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Racine—et rien d’autre.” And there was nothing more to be said. And yet with all this she had an amazing sense of the French language, of the frigidity of the thing and its balance. Her intuitions, at moments, amounted to genius. She knew instinctively just the sort of phrasing and idiom which would convey to the examiners the impression that one possessed “toutes les aisances de la langue française.”
And predominantly, perhaps, there was her passionate interest in the examination for which we were working. She could tell one the exact marks which had been obtained in any subject by any given candidate in the last ten years. She believed with an unswerving faith that no one could succeed unless they had been through the mill of the rue de la Pompe. She resolutely ignored the fact that French represented only a tenth of the marks required, or that there were other teachers in other places who could teach, and actually had taught, the language. The brilliant Monsieur Turquet of Scoones she could not absolutely ignore; but she got round him: she recommended to her pupils “une legère couche de Turquet avant de venir içi,” by which M. Turquet was relegated to his place. And as for Hanover, or St. Sebastian, or Siena, she conveyed the impression that these were subsidiary establishments vaguely within her empire.
As the date for the examination approached, her excitement (nobly controlled) and her solicitude equalled that of M. Descamps supervising the training of Georges Carpentier. Nothing was omitted that her own ingenuity or the ministration of Larousse’s encyclopædia could suggest. She would put large chunks of sulphur in our bath water: I strongly suspected her of mixing “tamar indien” with the soup: she would arrive in the morning with a nectarine on a plate; and in the evening she would ask us to rub little bits of camphor behind our ears. It was Larousse also who suggested to her the expedient, one hot July day, of draping the dining-room window in dripping blankets: the experiment was not a success: the room was completely darkened: the people in the flat below sent up to complain of the cascade which had descended upon them: and Madame de Hénaut became definitely disagreeable: “Ça te dit quelque chose, Jeanne, tout ce tra-la-la? Pour moi ça n’a ni queue ni tête.” So the blankets were taken down.
And then, at the end of July, I left for London. As my cab turned the corner of the avenue de l’Impératrice I could see Jeanne upon the balcony in her nightgown waving a bath towel.
It was not till after the war that I saw her again. I had come to Paris for the Peace Conference and one of my first visits was to the rue de la Pompe. Jeanne received me in the drawing-room. Her mother had died some time in 1915. She had since the war had no pupils. She was looking ill and underfed. In comparison with the old Jeanne she appeared a little shy and uncertain. The former jet-like glitter was gone. As I was leaving I asked her if she had minded the air-raids. She admitted that she had minded them terribly. “But of course,” I said, “you could go down to the ground floor—in a tall house like this there cannot have been so great a danger.” The eyes flashed for a moment with their old fire: she drew herself up with the old Theodora manner: “Non, monsieur!” she exclaimed in her resonant baritone, “Non, monsieur! La cousine germaine du Général Mangin couche au cinquième.”
I did not see her again: she died soon afterwards; and in 1919, meeting General Mangin at a dinner party I told him about Jeanne and the air-raids, thinking he would be diverted by the story. He was not diverted. He failed, I think, to observe in it anything either of pathos or of humour. He drew himself rigidly to attention. He struck his chest so that all the medals thereon danced like harebells upon the Downs. And then he started shouting “Ah ça!” he shouted. “Ah ça! C’est bien elle: c’est bien la France!”
On recovering from my astonishment at this outburst, I reflected that, after all, the General might be right.