PART TWO
HAROLD MUNRO’S VILLA STOOD HIGH. IT has always been my fate to have to climb when returning home. Even my apartment in the rue de Vaugirard was on the seventh floor of the beautiful old house that the Senate in its madness is now pulling down. I luxuriate in views, and generally get them before I think of the climb. Even now there is sixty feet difference between the top and bottom of my garden, so that if I have to water the cabbages I have to descend those sixty feet and then climb up again to get the wrench to turn the hose attachment, and then in turn my cigarettes, matches, black spectacles and garden hat…. Thus before I have finished that simple gardening operation I shall have climbed and descended six hundred feet…. I suppose destiny arranges these things for the benefit of what Archbishop Warham in the suppressed preface to the Bible called one’s haughty and proud stomach. It does!
And at St. Jean Cap Ferrat the mountainous hinterland comes so close to the sea that if one wanted to take a walk from the Villa des Moulins one had to descend to the Lower Corniche, dash across it to escape being knocked down by one of the innumerable automobiles and immediately begin a precipitous climb, between olive trees planted as if on a house-side. To return one had to descend as precipitously, dash back across the Corniche and then decide whether one would reach the Villa by the long, agonising path called the Chemin des Moulins or whether one would climb on hands and knees up poor Munro’s stone staircase that rose perpendicularly from the Cap Ferrat road. The staircase was more agonising—but it was sooner over.
I was once toiling up the Chemin des Moulins when an elderly, fiercely white-moustached gentleman with a sort of lustre all about him, standing on the bank above me, said:
“Seen my motor-car with Mrs. Hammerdine in it?”—The name was not Hemmerdine.
I realised that I must be in the presence of at least a Field-Marshal, so I put a “Sir” into my answer that I did not know his motor car. Pie said—as if I must be obtuse indeed:
“Got no number on it!”
I understood then where I was, and offered to go and look for his car. He said it was not necessary. He had told Mrs. Hemmerdine where he was going. He added:
“Women always keep you waiting. They shouldn’t do it. How do they know you may not have important things to do? I hate keeping people waiting to give me tea!”
He said:
“I see you’re stopping on through April! … That’s the sensible thing to do, young man…. I always tell people the year doesn’t begin to get perfect till April…. I try never to come here before April…. But they make me, you know.”
I got soundly rapped over the knuckles—but yet not contradicted—for in my last lot of reminiscences reporting the ipsissima verba of the King. I hope it is not treason to report the words of His Majesty’s uncle, who was in all but name the monarch of those regions. For the Riviera year does not get perfect till April…. Here at the gate of the Côte d’Azur it does not get really warm till April is over, and perhaps one should not come here till May…. But the greater truth is that one should not come here at all. One should live here all the year round and go away from the end of January till March. In the north, poor devils, they have to know how to heat houses. Here they build their houses against heat, and it can be cold on occasion to people softened by living here. Once every ten years or so they even have frost and, in the winter when I was in hospital at Cap Martin, as I have said, the snow even lay and the cold cut down all the olive and lemon trees, so that they have only this year begun to bear again. It completely killed the immense mimosa, whose limbs, covered with roses and ivy, still tower over any tiny bastidon.
But for the greater part of the year you can here—and I am doing it to-day at noon on the Feast of St. Servais—sit with almost no clothes in the shade and be unaware of your corporal existence. The air will be exactly flesh-heat, so that you are at one with the universe. That is why I have said that all the calamities of our poor civilisation come from humanity’s having left these shores. If you are conscious of either heat or cold you cannot think justly, and it is the final carrying out of the curse of Adam that men should have to work at the pit-face or in an atmosphere of crude mineral oil in order to keep humanity over-warmed in regions that are not fitted to support human life.
Outside a radius of a hundred miles from these shores—to north or south—barbarism is always creeping in with the north or south winds. Here those deities are the great mistral and the horripilant sirocco!
Down in the town at the foot of my hill it can be hot enough. It can be so hot that you can hardly drag your feet along the blistered pavements, the very shade of the plane trees is an offence, and the negro troops in their scarlet fezzes stagger beneath their rifles, rivers of sweat coursing down their faces. You would say it was Africa—and indeed it is Africa, for the dreaded sirocco is the fetid breath of the Sahara. It is in short Africa come to take a look at us and to make us understand that, pink as we may be, it is but a few degrees of temperature and barometer that separate us from the most abhorred anthropophages of the Central Congo.
Up on our hill we wake up one morning in what seems the breath from an oven-mouth. Everyone we see, the most cherished member of the household, the most attached domestic, the most faithful hound, the cat of the house and the very canary in its cage, wear hateful faces. The garden is a wilted desert, the. sea a hideous disc of black steel, the very dolphins and tarpons that spring from it, seeking in the air, in vain, a moment’s relief from the tepid bath—even they are outrages to the eye. To serve the salad at lunch is to transport hopeless burdens across vast spaces; in dressing it one struggles against the temptation to substitute prussic acid for the vinegar. But that one cannot drag oneself about one would do murder or be murdered by the whispering conspirators that are one’s household familiars…. Disaster, treachery, pestilence, fill the heavy air above the drooping flowers…. So it goes through the dreadful day.
And then suddenly, towards six, there is a little rustle from far away behind the house! You perceive that your garden smiles; the sea is innumerable little laughs; your companions recline above it in Hellenic serenity; your hound is fit to run with the coursing dogs of Diana; your cat is a black leopard of the breed of Circe; your canary shakes the sky with his notes. With a roar the great mistral springs at the throat of his eternal enemy! And you thank the beneficent deities who have made the world so fair and so full of laughing motion….
That was the sirocco—the south wind of Mr. Norman Douglas.
Fortunately his visits are few. The great feasts of our year are the St. Sylvestre, which ushers in the Jour de l’An; Easter; the Ascension; Pentecost; the 14th July; the Assumption; the Toussaint, which is the eve of the Feast of All the Dead; the Fête des Victoires, which celebrates those who died in the war—and so Christmas. Ten in all. The visits of the sirocco are about as many. It is as if the beneficent deities, to please whom we must live a life of frugality and high thought, allowed one ten days on which to faire la bombe, which you may translate into the Nordic “go on a bust.” … And then they send the sirocco ten times a year—to teach us to be toads. Or perhaps to make the return from our saturnalia less hard. For the feasts are lovely: but after the visits of the sirocco our frugal life seems even lovelier.
Of course it can be hot without the sirocco. Hot with a natural torridity that no taking off of garments can even temper. It is then that one should learn to appreciate the natural wisdom of the Moor, who piles garment on garment upon himself—to keep out the heat. One does not, however, learn that. Some years ago when I was merely writing and not, as is normally my habit, part writing, part market-gardening, I used to live for some months of each year in a hotel in the town. I was still writing away at the work which began in Munro’s bastide.
One day of unspeakable heat I was sitting writing in my hotel room, with all the jalousies closed and in the garb in which I had got out of my bath—or all but. It was the costume that Achilles might have worn on a hot day in his tent—except that the Greeks didn’t wear running-shorts. I was writing quietly and contentedly when the door was slightly pushed open by the valet de chambre. He said someone wanted to see me. He was one of those polyglot White Russians of the rank of ex-colonel, who wear striped waistcoats, and neither understand nor speak any known Occidental language. He said the name of my visitor was something like the bubbling of a pot for a second or two, and then something like Monsieur Geese…. It might have been any one of three painters whom I saw nightly in the café down the main street—poor Juan Gris, who died next year, or M. Othon Friesz, who is now my next-door neighbour, or even M. Matisse…. Their names all contained an “eese” sound, and any one of them might well have called on me. I told the waiter to send up whoever it was and went on writing. I may make the note that, fortunately, my ante-room, which was lit from the corridor, fairly blazed with light, whereas my writing-room was as dim as a cavern.
When the knock on the door sounded after the hollow mumbling of the elevator, I cried: “Entrez!” and then made one spring for my bathroom. My ante-room was crammed with ladies and gentlemen all in the white of tropical costumes—but all in costumes that must have come from Fifth Avenue above Thirty-second Street. And there were more in the corridor.
They cannot have seen me, for they completely filled my room—that is to say, there were twenty-seven of them, and I gave them audience from my bathroom door. I was enveloped in a voluminous bathrobe of white towelling, and I hope that, against the light behind me, I looked a little like the Emperor Nero….
They were introduced by a charming and very elegant stranger, who comes back to me as exactly resembling the American narrator of what I consider to be my best book. He was like a gentle and reduced imitation, in his white ducks and with his white, pointed beard and the beautiful Panama straw in his hand, of the Southern Judge of the Broadway melodrama. He said—these things do happen!—in almost the immortal words of Mark Twain, that they were a deputation of American citizens from the good ship So-and-So that was on her way to the Isles of Greece. That was no doubt the “Eece” sound of the valet de chambre, or it may have been “Nice.” Their ship had touched at Villefranche, and they had seen that I was stopping where I was in the local paper. So, each of them having a copy of my then latest book on board, they had taken the train from Nice in order to say nice things to me and to ask for my autograph…. And each one defiled in turn before me and offered his or her copy and his or her fountain-pen. They were nearly all from the states of Missouri, Ohio and Illinois—which was near enough to my imagined audience for that book! And what touched me most was that the last lady who came from Memphis, Tenn., asked me to keep the fountain-pen with which I signed her copy and, if I liked it, to go on writing that work with it.
So I made a little speech of gratitude. And it really was gratitude, for, since I do not have Press cuttings, that was the first intimation I had that the book was, as the saying is, getting over, and just to the audience to which it had been addressed. So I told them that if from the deck of their ship, in Villefranche harbour, they would look almost vertically up and to the east, they would see the ceiling under which I had written the first words of that work and the terraces of the garden beneath whose olive trees it had been planned. And I said that that nice little bundle of coincidences might well have been kindly planned by Pallas Athene, who, if she had occupied herself a little longer with the affairs of us mortals, would have been, with her emblem of the olive, the patron saint of writers—and of readers! so that if, when they got to Athens, they would release an owl before the statue of Minerva they might well for the rest of their lives be inspired to read nothing but very good books!
They went away pleased, I think. Certainly they left me pleased…. For myself I like these demonstrations. Higher and more stern natures find them superfluous. They may be impulsive—but it is better to act on your generous impulses than to wait, finger on your pulse, until you do not act at all. They may be, in part, inspired by hypocrisy, lip-service or even the desire to profit—but hypocrisy and lip-service, those homages paid to virtue, are at least homage to Literature. And if ten thousand people think that by making autograph collections they may make a little money, two per cent of them may, in that pursuit, be turned towards a real liking for good books. And literature has so hard a row to hoe that two hundred readers of good things are not to be sneezed at on Parnassus. In any case, writing is a lonely job, and out of these tributes, illusory as you may know them to be, you may get, precisely, the illusion that, somewhere in the world are friendly hands that might be held out to you. For myself, if I pass many days without two or three requests, at least for my autograph, I feel lonelier!
As for the fountain-pen. I should now be writing this manuscript with it. But, alas, at the moment it was given to me I was suffering from writer’s cramp and had to write with a machine—to the considerable deterioration of my work. So I put the pen carefully away somewhere—and have never been able to find it again! … My mother had a watch she much valued. My father had bought it for her in Strasbourg, and it had belonged to Marie Antoinette. It had that queen’s portrait surrounded with diamonds in a plaque on its back. One summer she was going into the country, leaving her house in Chiswick unoccupied. She put the watch away carefully. Remembering the advice of Inspector Trench at the time her house had been burgled by the emissary of the Russian Embassy, she left all her cupboards, drawers and closets unlocked. You lock your receptacles, the Inspector said, against the members of your household. When there are none in the house you should unlock them all. No fastening you have will stand against the tools of a burglar, and he will smash your best pieces in opening them. On the other hand, give the constable on the beat half a sovereign, and every night he will tie a piece of black cotton across your garden gateway….
My mother came back from her holiday and the watch was nowhere to be found. There were no signs of burglarious entry: not once had the piece of cotton been disturbed. She remembered distinctly having put the watch somewhere. She searched the house for months and months. No watch! … In the family we lamented that beautiful thing. It became a legend.
Years after—fifteen, I think—she moved further into town. In turning out her lumber-room she found under an old bedstead a pair of old shoes. In the toe of one was something heavy and hard….
I must have inherited that talent. At a moment’s notice I can—and do—invent completely burglar-proof hiding-places. But I never remember them afterwards, so I leave the world full of treasure. On such occasions it is of no use to appeal to St. Anthony. On leaving the Bank of England you go up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral and throw away a thousand-pound note, putting your cigarette carefully in your note-case. You are warned of your loss by heat in your breast pocket. You mutter a short invocation to St. Anthony, and, in the gutter below the steps, you find your note. That is mere absence of mind. I have told so many times how, on a Sunday in Blois, I left all my money in a wallet on the telegraph desk in the chief post-office, that I will not tell the story again. … The Saint, in fact, is kind to those who lose by absence of mind. But if your haughty and proud stomach leads you, not trusting to his offices, to devise caches of your own, it is useless to appeal to him….
With regard to methods of writing…. For myself I dislike writing with a pen. My writer’s cramp has never completely left me, and every word I write is accompanied by a little pain. Towards the end of my morning’s work it will be a very severe pain running from the knuckle of my third finger to my elbow. But for me, it is worth while…. After the volume I began at St. Jean Cap Ferrat the cramp became so severe that I could not hold a pen at all. I took to writing with a machine and then, worst of all, to dictating! I am not to that extent machino-phobe—or even a hater of stenographers—that I consider the one or the other below my dignity. It is that the one—and still more the other!—make me become too fluid. It is as if they waited for me to write, and write I do. Whereas if I have to go to a table and face pretty considerable pain I wait until I have something worth saying to say and say it in the fewest possible words.
The very ease and speed of a typewriter make tautology thus likely. And, in myself, there is something worse. On a machine corrections whilst you are writing are relatively difficult to make. You must rub out words and replace them and your rubber is somewhere else…. Then, too, I detest a typewritten page showing any corrections. Horrible as it may seem, if I happen to type an entirely wrong word—say, “almanach” when I mean “autograph,” I will go through the most excruciating mental gymnastics sooner than erase the word and make the correction. I am quite capable, I mean, of writing, when I want to say: “He asked me for an autograph”—“he asked me for an almanach on which, with a red stone, he might mark the happy date of his receiving a specimen of my handwriting.” … I do not say that I do this very often. But I do do it.
The patient and faithful secretary is even more fatal. With his or her services you become a perfect fountain of words. It is so easy to try on any effect that you try them on galore, hoping that, if they do not come off, you will have the strength of mind to correct or eliminate offending passages. But often you do not find the strength of mind to correct or eliminate. Then you will have a terrible page or two of longueurs. Or if you do correct, the passage will lose all spontaneity…. Elimination is always good. … Conrad and I used, in humorous moments, to shut our eyes—and, at random, scratch out passage after passage of our work in hand.—The result was always improvement. It was the Beau Christ d’Amiens who gave the casting vote for verse as against prose. Because there are fewer words to the page!
Then, too, there is the personal element. The creature of doom rings your bell at ten. If you are in a base mood you say: “I pay this creature to write for me…. Quick then, let me give him or her something to do….” In better moments the mere aspect—the reproachful air—of that amanuensis makes you plunge into work…. I have even had secretaries who sighed when I did not keep them busy!
And, worst of all, there is the almost irresistible temptation to write at the secretary—that, I am convinced, was responsible for the decadence of Henry James’s prose in its latest and most faisandé developments…. You have the silent back or the emotionless face of the doomful creature presented to you. You dictate for a little while and nothing happens. And nothing and nothing. It gets to be like being in the presence of a marble block. At last you say: “Damn it all, I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!” Then you are lost…. When I was dictating the most tragic portion of my most tragic book to an American poetess she fainted several times. One morning she fainted three times. So I had to call in her husband to finish the last pages of the book. He did not faint. But he has never forgiven me. Having since become an eminent English literary critic, he attacks me with a hatred and acridity that surpass all those of my worst detractors—with or without occasion. I don’t wonder. I should hate anyone whose secretary I was forced to become. I should think I could write so much better than that fellow….
So one day—it was on board the Berengaria—I was correcting the typescript of a book I had finished some months before. It was a horrible experience. Partly I had typed the book; partly I had dictated it to a secretary who wrote longhand, partly to another who used a machine, and partly to a third who was a remarkable stenographer. At the time of my final correction the book was about six months old. It is six months after finishing a book that it becomes most like stale fish to you. In ten years’ time you may be wondering how it was you used to be able to write so well! There are these bitter compensations!
The Berengaria rolled towards Paris over the winter seas…. No, I have never been sea-sick! … I slashed at that horrible prose. I cut out miles of passages intended for one or another of those secretaries. As if with a chaff-cutter I cut, into five or six, sentences that, fluidly, I had composed on my new Corona. Time after time I threw that typescript from end to end of the smoking-room at six in the morning. Then one’s head is at its clearest and there is no one to mark your despair…. Even nowadays I almost cry when I see the back of that book and of others written in New York at about the same period. So I have locked all my own books that I possess in a press of which I have mislaid the key….
And then one day, just before breakfast, at the hour most fitted for morning prayer and virtuous resolution, I swore solemnly that I would never write a book again save with a pen. And I never have….
I think it is best to write with a pen—or with a pencil if you dislike the grating of metal on paper. My friends—who are all American and all of whom were born after there were machines with which to write—raise their eyebrows if they happen to see a sheet of my manuscript lying about. They say:
“Oh, you write with a pen!” According to their natures they will become patronising, as if it is because of my great age and growing feebleness that I employ that obsolete instrument. Or they will grow rather cold—as if I were high-hatting them.
But I am certainly not high-hatting them. Even in the age of the triumph and decadence of the machine it is as unreasonable to say that you must use a machine for your art as it would be if one said that a machine is a vulgar instrument not to be seen in the purlieus of a devotee of the muse. It is indeed a matter of expediency alone—a matter of the mechanical difficulty of correction with the machine and of creative difficulty of composition pen in hand. If I had to give advice to a writer, that is the advice I should give: In composing make your circumstances as difficult as possible, but in correcting let not so much as a shadow or a whispered sound interfere between you and your sheet of paper. And erase with bold, remorseless black strokes that hiss as the pen traverses the lines. So you will know virtue…. You will have the fewest possible words on your page.
I have used this digression about the mechanics of writing to indicate the lapse of time that I spent at St. Jean Cap Ferrat, writing away at the first part of my book.
And though I was on the Riviera at the height of the season I did little else but write and take uphill and downhill walks. A Riviera Season is an annex of Coney Island, Blackpool, Hampstead Heath and all the Magic Cities and Luna Parks of a polyglot and “rasta” world. There is, perhaps, no reason why they should not be, these Occidental yoshiwaras. But it seems a pity that they should have chosen for their ephemeral saturnalia the most beautiful, the most legendary and the most nobly historical strip of sea coast in the world. An afternoon at Rockaway Beach or Southend, a couple of days in one of the marble caravanserais that the French call palaces may, on occasion, be salutary. Cela change, perhaps, les idées, as they say here. But more prolonged sojourns must be anodyne—and there are too many refuges from thought already in the world. Jazz-dancing is an admirable and health-giving pursuit. But if you dance jazz in the moonlight on the Acropolis you display indifferent taste and Apollo, god of Harmony and father of Æsculapius, will probably see that your health suffers.
For me, whilst disclaiming any doctrinaire connection with nudism and deprecating sun-bathing as being dangerous to the unskilled, I like to be able to sit in the shade of an olive tree, on a flat rock, extremely lightly clad. And then to think. It seems to me that that is the proper occupation of a proper man. And when Humanity leaves shores where such a passing of the time is practicable or, still more, when Humanity converts such shores into arenas for competitions in dispendiousness and brayings, Humanity makes a mistake and offends the gods. The story of Pompeii, the Riviera pleasure-city of the Romans, sufficiently confirms that view…. But Humanity must make mistakes and there will always remain above the Mediterranean enough flat stones and a sufficiency of the shadows of olive branches….
And I will confess to not being as highbrow as all that. I made my excursions from the Villa des Moulins mostly in the company of local French residents. And there were occasions when their frugality disconcerted even me. I found it, for instance, very trying, to sit on a public seat beneath the bandstand on Mentone parade with the Professor of Senatorial rank, and the heiress of Judith Gautier, whilst all the beau monde of the Côte d’Azur butterflied it in the sun around us to the strains of music. For those two insisted that there we should eat hard-boiled eggs and slices of smoked ham from pieces of brown-paper spread on our legs. And, similarly, when going to call, at Antibes, on the niece of Flaubert, in company with the grand-niece of Lamartine and the granddaughter of Turgenev, it was trying to spend more than half the time allotted for our visit in the midst of a small crowd, mostly Anglo-Saxon, whilst these highly-descended ladies denounced the driver of a fiacre who had demanded of me—not of them!—two francs fifty more than his legal fare. But it was worth it, to be within sound of such names. And who knows? That minute attention to a few sous may have been the heredity of the men who paid such minute attention to little, valueless words that they made of their country the cynosure and the glory of the Western World. Artists—witness Cézanne, whose father died a banker—are not infrequently descended from economists. Then why should not the descendants of the greatest artists be economical….
So the year wore on and it became time to drift through Provence northwards to Paris. And, indeed, at that time I still thought that I should end up on the northern side of the Channel. So the drifting was reluctant and as I drifted I continued to write furiously on great sheets of foolscap. For a time I wrote in a great dim old room with alcoves in a great, dim old hotel at Tarascon—the city of the good King René and of St. Martha; the city that I have always loved best in the world…. It would be then May; the jalousies tight-closed against the sun and the nightingales singing like furies….
I have jeered against the nature-love of the English. But I will confess that I am never completely easy unless I have the sense of feathered things near me…. In the garden of the studio that I was soon to occupy in Paris there was, positively, a nest and brood of white blackbirds. And I stayed much longer than I should have in that horrible and dank abode—it was on the site of a temple to Diana. It is not that I have the patience, like Hudson, for spending hours looking at a bird…. But I like to think that one—or two—are sometimes near, creeping through a hedge or a vine. And New York was always a little sad to me, for there seemed to be no birds there except the insupportable sparrow. But one day, a couple of years ago, in the hospitable study of the New York doctor to whom, and his wife, the predecessor of this book is dedicated, I looked aside from my writing and saw, in the vine that trailed down an outside staircase, a couple of birds, creeping and examining each tendril. For all the world as if it had been here in Provence. Both were quite unknown to me. One was as big as—and rather like—the European shrike, grey, with a black head and bill, and the other black and as small as the European tom-tit. It was at the rear of a house in West 12th Street just off Fifth Avenue, and there are neither shrikes nor tom-tits within four thousand miles of those parages. But then I understood why I had been writing rather happily and felt sure that what I was writing would be liked by men of good will.
The nightingale heard from quite near—as I hear no less than three of them at this minute, one being certainly not ten yards away—has a voice of amazing volume for so small a bird, so that how such a quantity of air can come from such a small throat is incomprehensible. Yesterday Mrs. Worthington, the authoress of Mrs. Taylor, said that the first time she heard the nightingale she was disappointed.
“I suppose you expected to be handed a box of candy and five free tickets for the movies.”
And she answered:
“Well—ye-es! … I suppose I did.”
… I think that is what is the matter with most people who are disappointed. One should not hear the nightingale for the first time—only for the first time of the year! One should be born while a nightingale is singing, and never know when one first realises that it is a nightingale. Then it is as if the bird’s song was a part of oneself. And, when for the first time of the year, you hear through the breathless stillness of the black night down the hill, that amazing bouquet of sounds that are like an incredible spray of sparks from an anvil, and the following intolerably prolonged wail of agony—ah, then you know that, come what may, the year is sanctified for you.
So the nightingales of Tarascon did not disturb my tranquil penmanship, any more than the bird that, five yards from my head, wakes me most mornings a little before five, much harasses me. I do not mind sounds that I cannot prevent when I am writing, though if someone or something over whom I have authority make the smallest sound I can become very nasty indeed! But I can bow to—and forget—the inevitable, so that I can write as well in a railway carriage as elsewhere. But twelve steam organs under my Tarascon window did drive me away at last…. The yearly world-fair at Beaucaire, across the Rhône, lasts two months, and such showmen and gipsies as come from the East spend a preliminary month in the place of that little city where, as I have said, I hope to die.
So I drifted away, rather imprudently, to St. Agrève, a little market town that I did not know, on the highest point of the plateau of the Massif Central. I was recommended to go there by Maître Laurent, the Notaire of Tarascon. Maître Laurent, in spite of living in that crumbling city, is one of the most elegant of men, and in a house that looks as if it must have been mouldering away before the Conquest, has the most perfectly elegant office, the most elegantly shining typewriters, manifolders, dictaphones and secretaries so ravishing in their elegance that you would think that it would be impossible to find them outside the millionaires’ offices round Wall Street.
With him and the Avocat, Maître Montagnier and some long, silent officers of the famous Fourth Cavalry, that was once the regiment of Ney, but is now disbanded, I used to pass all my evenings—except one when, as I have related, I passed some hours consoling a mournful Englishman who had been driven from his home in Ottery St. Mary’s by an elephant. Those evenings were usually tranquil. But now and then Maîtres Laurent and Montagnier would discuss a point in French grammar. Me Montagnier was an Anglophil—the most amazing I have ever met. He wore a cricket cap of the kind worn by professional cricketers in the early ’eighties; he was extremely short and his figure was exactly that of a cricket ball mounted on two wax vestas. When he was not discussing grammar with the notaire he instructed me for hours on my habits as an Englishman. But when he could get me to his home—and he had the most marvellous vins du Rhône of his own growing, and a cook who would have ravished the palate of Gargantua—but when he got me planted immovably in an arm-chair, he would read me pages and pages of Dickens.
His accent in French was more amazingly Marseillais than was even Conrad’s. I have never heard such an accent. And with exactly that pronunciation he read—or made his unfortunate little daughter read:
“E weell nayvair . . r … re dayser . . r . . re Meestai . r . re Micko … baire . r . e …” the child’s voice would pipe … and:
“Sapr—r—r—isti! Magnifiqu …. ë! R—r—r—avissant … ë! E weell nayvair—r—r—re dayser—r—re ….” her father would roar.
His voice gave the effect of an earthquake and when he discussed what tense should follow the substantive preterite with Me Laurent or asserted that it was just as correct to say “causer à” as to say “causer avec …” all the strangers in the town would rush to that café. I really might have learned some of the nice points of French as it is used in the law-courts, if my whole time had not been given to keeping the glasses on the table. And meanwhile the poor cavalry officers pulled their long moustaches or inspected the spurs at the ends of their shining leggings. I don’t know what they got out of it.
So those two kindly men of the robe advised me to go to St. Agrève. They said I should escape the Tarascon heat. I did. The snow still lay at St. Agrève and, on my second day there I was so badly hit by my old lung trouble, that I almost lost all chance of dying in Tarascon. The year on those Cévennes heights is a very extraordinary and kaleidoscopic close-up. I am no good at estimating or recording heights, but I know that St. Agrève is at a respectable altitude as compared to Mont Blanc, all the Alpine peaks and their eternal snow being visible from there.
There, the snow disappears towards the middle of May. Immediately the fields are covered with grass of an amazing emerald green and enamelled with blazing flowers of primary hues, so that the grass disappears. The beasts are let out of their stalls and byres; the birds pair and nest with furious haste and seem to hatch out far faster than in the valleys. The woods are green and filled with foxes; the rivulets teem with otters, trout and crayfish. The shop windows are full of pelts—fox, otter, mole, squirrel, badger. In a moment the hay is cut and the fields are brown: in a moment the same fields are green for the second hay crop. The markets swarm with the different sects—for there are different religious sects in each of the innumerable valleys. There are Macdonaldites, Brunonians, Campbellites, Adventists, Huguenots, Lutherans…. Each of these wears a different headdress…. In a moment the corn is golden, in the next the rays of the sun are white, like magnesian light. They say that here there are more violet rays in the sunlight than anywhere else in the world, except for the Mediterranean littoral. It is perhaps true…. The streets, the houses, the fields, are filled with holiday-makers from Marseilles, Lyons, Valence, Avignon…. It was in the hotel dining-room here that I heard the whole roomful violently debating the respective merits of the styles of Paul Bourget, Barrès and Stendhal. They were all small shopkeepers….
And then—they are all gone. The skies grow heavy; the first flakes fall. The cattle are hurried back to the byres and stalls, which they will not leave again till May. Every garret and every inch of roofspace are crammed with fodder. It falls and falls. The entire earth is bedded and softened by a mantle of soundless white… The living year here lasts from May to the beginning of September. There are, in the hidden valleys, whole families who, snowed up, never set foot outside their houses from September till May. I saw a woman whose husband died in the early fall. They had to live with him there for eight months. They could not get out to bury him….
I was sitting one evening after dinner in the hostess’s private room playing, I think, dominoes, when a familiar voice boomed out from the passage. It demanded a bedroom for less than I could have imagined possible and got it. It was rich, fruity of the soil and oratorical. It went straight up to bed. It was the voice of Mr. Hilaire Belloc. I saw him next morning at the other end of the market talking to a farmer and punching a fat bullock as if he had been a grazier all his life. Before I could get round to him he had gone, and when I got back to the hotel he had left—to my regret….
Some days afterwards I read in the Morning Post a full-page article—I am not sure there were not two. It was all about St. Agrève, and it was signed by Mr. Belloc. It recounted not only all the history of St. Agrève, but the most intimate gossip about its inhabitants and singular details about their habits, clothes, ancestry…. All with profusion and in the admirable writing of that genius. Now Mr. Belloc reached that town a little after nine and left it before seven. So he was there for not more than ten hours, some of which must have been devoted to sleep. How did he do it? …
It became time to get back to Paris, and afterwards to Mr. Belloc’s county of Sussex, where I intended to finish my first volume. I finished it, however, in the studio in the Boulevard Arago—or rather in the pavilion in the garden where the white blackbirds lived…. And I have been a resident of Paris ever since—except for the fact that I have passed the greater part of the intervening years either in New York or here on the Côte d’Azur.
I have said that I do not like Paris. The statement needs qualifying. I detest the Quartier de l’Etoile—the region not so much of the idle rich as of the too industrious rich—the bankers. I dislike all the boulevards built by Haussmann and his imitators. On the other hand I really love the real Quartier Latin, the Faubourg St. Germain, the streets between the Sorbonne and the Panthéon. I can even support the Boulevard Montparnasse, though my Paris ends with the parallel rue Notre Dame des Champs. It is a grey, very quiet quarter, with the gardens of the Luxembourg like a great green jewel on its breast. That I love and I am never quite content if no string attaches me to it. It may be the merest one-room pied-à-terre: as long as I have that I feel a complete man. Without it I sit forlorn. But I do not want to be there too long or too often. The highest thoughts in the world have been thought in those grey buildings and streets, and I find it too tiring to keep that pace. There you may dress like a tramp and no one will look askance at you: but you may never, even to yourself, let your thoughts stray about in dressing-gown and slippers. They must be precise.
For me, I like to be precise when I am in the mood—but to have to be so when that mood is not on me is rather torturing. It is not merely the French language. It is that there every stone calls up the memory of a great artist. Nay, every table in a restaurant does. At that one, Cézanne sat; at that other, Verlaine. Before them you cannot sit in your dressing-gown and slippers. Even the chimney pots spur you on. From the back window of my apartment in the rue Vaugirard you could see an incredible number of chimney pots, and under everyone a masterpiece had been produced. My apartment itself had housed the servants of the great Condé; beneath its windows Mirabeau had been born. Latterly it had housed Jules Janin and Professor Darmesteter, the philologist. Jules Janin was no great shakes, but beneath his shade and that of a philologist you have to be very careful of your words … and your thoughts.
My brain, I think, is a sort of dove-cote. The thoughts from it fly round and round, seem about to settle and circle even further than before and more and more swiftly. I try in the end to let them come home with the velocity and precision of swifts that fly at sixty miles an hour into their apertures that you would say could not let them through. I hope thus to attain to a precision of effect as startling as any Frenchman who is for ever on the make. Perhaps I do.
During my first days of each stay I make in that august Quarter I feel exactly like Dick Whittington. But without even a cat for capital. After directionless wanderings I sometimes find a sou of thought and get along somehow with that. But sometimes I do not.
It is a curious and, to me, a tragically suggestive fact that Paris is equidistant from the Rhine at every point from where it takes its rise to where it loses itself in the sands of Holland. It is also, like London, situated on the first ford from the sea that is practicable for heavy wagons bearing merchandise. But for that the art-centre of the world might have been near the birthplace of all the world—might have been in a clime less rigorous and less open to Nordic dangers. It would have been in the territory of those mighty rulers, the Counts of Toulouse…. In Provence!