It was many days before I saw Peter again. I met other men and women. I visited the Louvre and at first stood humbly in the Salon Carre before the Monna Lisa and in the long corridor of the Venus de Milo; a little later, I became thuriferous before Sandro Botticelli's frescoes from the Villa Lemmi and Watteau's Pierrot. I made a pilgrimage to the Luxembourg Gallery and read Huysmans's evocation of the picture before Moreau's Salome. I sat in the tiny old Roman arena, Lutetia's amphitheatre, constructed in the second or third century, and conjured up visions of lions and Christian virgins. I drank tea at the Pavillon d'Armenonville in the Bois and I bought silk handkerchiefs of many colours at the Galeries Lafayette. I began to carry my small change in a pig-skin purse and I learned to look out for bad money. Every morning I called for mail at the American Express Company in the Rue Scribe. I ate little wild strawberries with Crème d'Isigny. I bought old copies of l'Assiette au Beurre on the quais and new copies of Le Sourire at kiosques. I heard Werther at the Opéra-Comique and I saw Lina Cavalieri in Thaïs at the Opéra. I made journeys to Versailles, Saint Cloud. and Fontainebleau. I inspected the little hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died and I paid my respects to his tomb in Pere-Lachaise. The fig-leaf was missing from the heroic figure on the monument. It had been stolen, the cemeteryguard informed me, par une jeune miss anglaise, who desired a souvenir. I drank champagne cocktails, sitting on a stool, at the American bar in the Grand Hotel. I drank whisky and soda, ate salted nuts, and talked with English racing men at Henry's, bar, under the delightful brown and yellow mural decorations, exploiting ladies of the 1880 period with bangs, and dresses with bustles, and over-drapings, and buttons down the front. I enjoyed long bus rides and I purchased plays in the arcades of the Odéon. I went to the races at Chantilly. I drank cocktails at Louis's bar in the Rue Racine. Louis Doerr, the patron, had worked as a bar-man in Chicago and understood the secrets of American mixed drinks. Doubtless, he could have made a Fireman's Shirt. He divided his time between his little bar and his atelier, where he gave boxing lessons to the students of the quarter. When he was teaching the manly art, Madame Doerr manipulated the shaker. I attended services at Les Hannetons and Maurice's Bar and I strolled through the Musée de Cluny, where I bought postcards of chastity belts and instruments of torture. I read Maupassant in the Parc Monceau. I took in the naughty revues at Parisiana, the Ba-ta-clan, and the Folies-Bergère. I purchased many English and American novels in the Tauchnitz edition and I discovered a miniature shop in the Rue de Furstenberg, where elegant reprints of bawdy eighteenth century French romances might be procured. I climbed to the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, particularly to observe a chimère which was said to resemble me, and I ascended the Tour Eiffel in an elevator. I consumed hors d'œuvres at the Brasserie Universelle. I attended a band concert in the Tuileries Gardens. I dined with Olive Fremstad at the Mercedes and Olive Fremstad dined with me at the Café d'Harcourt. I heard Salome at the Châtelet, Richard Strauss conducting, with Emmy Destinn as the protagonist in a modest costume, trimmed with fur, which had been designed, it was announced, by the Emperor of Germany. I discovered the Restaurant Cou-Cou, which I have described in The Merry-Go-Round, and I made pilgrimages to the Rat Mort, the Nouvelle Athènes, and the Elysée Montmartre, sacred to the memory of George Moore. They appeared to have altered since he confessed as a young man. I stood on a table at the Bal Tabarin and watched the quadrille, the pas de quatre, concluding with the grand ecart, which was once sinister and wicked but which has come, through the portentous solemnity with which tradition has invested it, to have almost a religious significance. I learned to drink Amer Picon, grenadine, and white absinthe. I waited three hours in the street before Liane de Pougy's hotel in the Rue de la Néva to see that famous beauty emerge to take her drive, ard I waited nearly as long at the stage-door of the Opéra-Comique for a glimpse of the exquisite Régina Badet. I embarked on one of the joyous little Seine boats and I went slumming in the Place d'Italie, La Villette, a suburb associated in the memory with the name of Yvette Guilbert, and Belleville. I saw that very funny farce, Vous n'avez rien à declarer at the Nouveautés. In the Place des Vosges, I admired the old brick houses, among the few that Napoleon and the Baron Haussmann spared in their deracination of Paris. On days when I felt poor, I dined with the cochers at some marchand de vins. On days when I felt rich, I dined with the cocottes at the Café de Paris. I examined the collection of impressionist paintings at the house of Monsieur Durand-Ruel, No. 37, Rue de Rome, and the vast accumulation of unfinished sketches for a museum of teratology at the house of Gustave Moreau, No. 14, Rue de La Rochefoucauld, room after room of unicorns, Messalinas, muses, magi, Salomes, sphinxes, argonauts, centaurs, mystic flowers, chimerae, Semeles, hydras, Magdalens, griffins, Circes, ticpolongas, and crusaders. I drank tea in the Ceylonese tea-room in the Rue Caumartin, where coffee-hued Orientals with combs in their hair waited on the tables. I gazed longingly into the showwindows of the shops where Toledo cigarette-cases, Bohemian garnets, and Venetian glass goblets were offered for sale. I bought a pair of blue velvet workman's trousers, a beret, and a pair of canvas shoes at Au Pays, 162 Faubourg St. Martin. I often enjoyed my chocolate and omelet at the Café de la Regence, where everybody plays chess or checkers and has played chess or checkers for a century or two, and where the actors of the Comédie Française, which is just across the Place, frequently, during a rehearsal, come in their makeup for lunch. I learned the meaning of flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette, and rigolo. I purchased a dirty silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV brass candlesticks, which I still possess, in the Marché du Temple. I tasted babas au rhum, napoléons, and palmiers. I ordered a suit, which I never wore, from a French tailor for 150 francs. I bought some Brittany ware in an old shop back of Notre-Dame. I admired the fifteenth century apocalyptic glass in the Sainte-Chapelle and the thirteenth century glass in the Cathedral at Chartres. I learned that demi-tasse is an American word, that Sparkling Burgundy is an American drink, and that I did not like French beer. I stayed away from the receptions at the American embassy. I was devout in Saint Sulpice, the Russian Church in the Rue Daru, Saint Germain-des-Prés, Saint Eustache, Sacré-Cœur, and Saint Jacques, and I attended a wedding at the Madeleine, which reminded me that Bel Ami had been married there. I passed pleasant evenings at the Boîte à Fursy, on the Rue Pigalle, and Les Noctambules, on the Rue Champollion. I learned to speak easily of Mayol, Eve Lavallière, Dranem, Ernest la Jeunesse, Colette Willy, Max Dearly, Charles-Henry Hirsch, Lantelme. André Gide, and Jeanne Bloch. I saw Clemenceau, Edward VII, and the King of Greece. I nibbled toasted scones at a tea-shop on the Rue de Rivoli. I met the Steins. In short, you will observe that I did everything that young Americans do when they go to Paris.
On a certain afternoon, early in June, I found myself sitting at a table in the Café de la Paix with Englewood Jennings and Frederic Richards, two of my new friends. Richards is a famous person today and even then he was somebody. He had a habit of sketching, wherever he might be, on a sheet of paper at a desk at the Hotel Continental or on a program at the theatre. He drew quick and telling likenesses in a few lines of figures or objects that pleased him, absent-mindedly signed them, and then tossed them aside. This habit of his was so well-known that he was almost invariably followed by admirers of his work, who snapped up his sketches as soon as he had disappeared. I saw a good collection of them, drawn on the stationery of hotels from Hamburg to Taormina, and even on meat paper, go at auction in London a year or so ago for £1,000. When I knew him, Richards was a blond giant, careless of everything except his appearance. Jennings was an American socialist from Harvard who was ranging Europe to interview Jean Jaurès, Giovanni Papini, and Karl Liebknecht. He was exceedingly eccentric in his dress, had steel-grey eyes, the longest, sharpest nose I have ever seen, and wore glasses framed in tortoise-shell.
It had become my custom to pass two hours of every afternoon on this busy corner, first ordering tea with two brioches, and later a succession of absinthes, which I drank with sugar and water. In time I learned to do without the sugar, just as eventually I might have learned, in all probability, to do without the water, had I not been compelled to do without the absinthe.[1] I was enjoying my third pernod while my companions were dallying with whisky and soda. We were gossiping, and where in the world can one gossip to better advantage than on this busy corner, where every passerby offers a new opportunity? But, occasionally, the conversation slipped into alien channels.
How can the artist, Jennings, for instance, was asking, know that he is inspired, when neither the public nor the critics recognize inspiration? The question is equally interesting asked backwards. As a matter of fact, the artist is sometimes conscious that he is doing one thing, while he is acclaimed and appreciated for doing another. Columbus did not set out to discover America. Yes, there is often an accidental quality in great art and oftener still there is an accidental appreciation of it. In one sense art is curiously bound up with its own epoch, but appreciation or depreciation of its relation to that epoch may come in another generation. The judgment of posterity may be cruel to contemporary genius. In a few years we may decide that Richard Strauss is only another Liszt and Stravinsky, another Rubinstein.
Inspiration! Richards shrugged his broad shepherd's plaid shoulders. Inspiration! Artists, critics, public, clever men, and philistines monotonously employ that word, but it seems to me that art is created through memory out of experience, combined with a capacity for feeling and expressing experience, and depending on the artist's physical condition at the time when he is at work.
Are you, I asked, one of those who believes that a novelist must be unfaithful to his wife before he can write a fine novel, that a girl should have an amour with a prize-fighter before she can play Juliet, and that a musician must be a pederast before he can construct a great symphony?
Richards laughed.
No, he replied, I am not, but that theory is very popular. How many times I have heard it thundered forth! Asa matter of fact, there is a certain amount of truth in it, the germ, indeed, of a great truth, for some emotional experience is essential to the artist, but why particularize? Each as he may!
I know a man, I went on, who doesn't believe that experience has anything to do with art at all. He thinks art is a matter of arrangement and order and form.
His art then, broke in Jennings, is epistemological rather than inspirational.
But what does he arrange? queried Richards. Surely incidents and emotions.
Not at all. He arranges objects, abstractions: colours and reaping-machines, perfumes and toys.
Long ago I read a book like that, Jennings went on. It was called Imperial Purple and it purported to be a history of the Roman Empire or the Roman Emperors. It was a strangely amusing book, rather like a clot of blood on a daisy or a faded pomegranate flower in a glass of buttermilk.
At this period, I avidly collected labels) Who wrote it? I asked.
I don't remember, but your description of your friend recalls the book. What is the name of your friend's book?
He hasn't written a book yet.
I see.
He is about to write it. He knows what he wants to do and he is collecting the materials. He is arranging the form.
What's it about? Jennings appeared to be interested.
Oh, it's about things. Whiffle told me, I suppose he was joking, that it would be about three hundred pages.
Richards set down his glass and in his face I recognized the portentous expression of a man about to be delivered of an epigram. It came: I dislike pine-apples, women with steatopygous figures, and men with a gift for paronomasia.
Jennings ignored this ignoble interruption. George Moore has written somewhere, he said, that if an author talks about what he is going to write, usually he writes it, but when he talks about how he is going to write it, that is the end of the matter. I wonder if this is true? I have never thought much about it before but I think perhaps it is. I think your friend will never write his book.
Richards interrupted again: Look at that maquereau. That's the celebrated French actor who went to America after a brilliant career in France in the more lucrative of his two professions, which ended in a woman's suicide. His history was well-known to the leading woman of the company with which he was to play in America, but she had never met him. At the first rehearsal, when they were introduced, she remarked, Monsieur, la connaissance est dèjá faite! Turning aside, he boasted to his male companions, La gueuse! Avant dix jours je l'aurai enfilée! In a week he had made good his threat and in two weeks the poor woman was without a pearl. He should meet Arabella Munson, said Jennings. She is always willing to pay her way. She fell in love with an Italian sculptor, or at any rate selected him as a suitable father for a prospective child. When she became pregnant, the young man actually fell ill with fear at the thought that he might be compelled to support both Arabella and the baby. He took to his bed and sent his mother as an ambassadress for Arabella's mercy. Choking with sobs, the old woman demanded what would be required of her son. My good woman, replied Arabella, dry your tears. I make it a point of honour never to take a penny from the fathers of my children. Not only do I support the children, often I support their fathers as well!
It was sufficiently warm. I lazily sipped my absinthe. The terrasse was crowded and there was constant movement; as soon as a table was relinquished, another group sat down in the empty chairs. Ephra Vogelsang, a pretty American singer, had just arrived with a pale young blond boy, whom I identified as Marcel Moszkowski, the son of the Polish composer. Presently, another table was taken by Vance Thompson and Ernest la Jeunesse, whose fat face was sprinkled with pimples and whose fat fingers were encased to the knuckles in heavy oriental rings. I bowed to Ephra and to Vance Thompson. On the sidewalk marched the eternal procession of newsboys, calling La Pa—trie! La Pa—trie! so like a phrase at the beginning of the second act of Carmen, old gentlemen, nursemaids, painted boys, bankers, Americans, Germans, Italians, South Americans, Roumanians, and Neo-Kaffirs. The carriages, the motors, the buses, formed a perfect maze on the boulevard. In one of the vehicles I caught a glimpse of another acquaintance.
That's Lily Hampton, I noted. She is the only woman who ever made Toscanini smile. You must understand, to appreciate the story, that she is highly respectable, the Mrs. Kendal of the opera stage, and the mother of eight or nine children. She never was good at languages, speaks them all with a rotten accent and a complete ignorance of their idioms. On this occasion, she was singing in Italian but she was unable to converse with the director in his native tongue and, consequently, he was giving her directions in French. He could not, however, make her understand what he wanted her to do. Again and again he repeated his request. At last she seemed to gather his meaning, that she was to turn her back to the footlights. What she asked him, however, ran like this: Est-ce que vous voulez mon derrière, maestro?
Now there was a diversion, an altercation at the further end of the terrasse, and a fluttering of feathered, flowered, and smooth-haired and bald heads turned in that direction. In the midst of this turbulence, I heard my name being called and, looking up, beheld Peter Whiffle waving from the impériale of a bus. I beckoned him to descend and join us and this he contrived to do after the bus had travelled several hundred yards on its way towards the Madeleine and I had abandoned the idea of seeing him return. But the interval gave me time to inform Richards and Jennings that this was the young author of whom I had spoken. Presently he came along, strolling languidly down the walk. He looked a bit tired, but he was very smartly dressed, with a gardenia as a boutonnière, and he seemed to vibrate with a feverish kind of jauntiness.
I am glad to see you, he cried. I've been meaning to look you up. In fact if I hadn't met you I should have looked you up tonight. I'm burning for adventures. What are you doing?
I explained that I was doing nothing at all and introduced him to my friends. Jennings had an engagement. He explained that he had to talk at some socialist meeting, called our waiter, paid for his pile of saucers, and took his departure. Richards confessed that he was burning too.
What shall we do? asked the artist.
There's plenty to do, announced Peter, confidently; almost too much for one night. But let's hurry over to Serapi's, before he closes his shop.
We asked no questions. We paid our saucers, rose, and strolled along with Peter across the Place in front of the Opéra and down the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin until we stood before a tiny shop, the window of which was filled with bottles of perfume and photographs of actresses and other great ladies of various worlds and countries, all inscribed with flamboyant encomiums, relating to the superior merits of Serapi's wares and testifying to the superlative esteem in which Serapi himself was held.
Led by Peter, in the highest exuberance of nervous excitement but still, I thought, looking curiously tired, we passed within the portal. We found ourselves in a long narrow room, surrounded on two sides by glass cases, in which, on glass shelves, were arranged the products of the perfumer's art. At the back, there was a cashier's desk without an attendant; at the front, the show-window. In the centre of the room, the focus of a group of admiring women, stood a tawny-skinned Oriental—perhaps concretely an Arabian—with straight black hair and soft black eyes. His physique was magnificent and he wore a morning coat. Obviously, this was Serapi himself.
Peter, who had now arrived at a state in which he could with difficulty contain his highly wrought emotion—and it was at this very moment that I began to suspect him of collecting amusements along with his other objects—, in a whisper confirmed my conjecture. The ladies, delicately fashioned Tanagra statuettes in tulle and taffeta and chiffon artifices from the smartest shops, in hats on which bloomed all the posies of the season and posies which went beyond any which had ever bloomed, were much too attractive to be duchesses, although right here I must pause to protest that even duchesses sometimes have their good points: the Duchess of Talleyrand has an ankle and the Duchess of Marlborough, a throat. The picture, to be recalled later when Mina Loy gave me her lovely drawing of Eros being spoiled by women, was so pleasant, withal slightly ridiculous, that Richards and I soon caught the infection of Peter's scarcely masked laughter and our eyes, too, danced. We made some small pretence of examining the jars and bottles of Scheherazade, Ambre, and Chypre in the cases, but only a small pretence was necessary, as the ladies and their Arab paid not the slightest attention to us.
At length, following a brief apology, Serapi broke through the ranks and disappeared through a doorway behind the desk at the back of the room. As the curtains lifted, I caught a glimpse of a plain, business-like woman, too dignified to be a mere clerk, obviously the essential wife of the man of genius. He was gone only a few seconds but during those seconds the chatter ceased abruptly. It was apparent that the ladies had come singly. They were not acquainted with one another. As Serapi reentered, they chirped again, peeped and twittered their twiddling tune, the words of which were Ah! and Oh! In one hand, he carried a small crystal phial to which a blower was attached. He explained that the perfume was his latest creation, an hermetic confusion of the dangers and ardours of Eastern life and death, the concentrated essence of the unperfumed flowers of Africa, the odour of their colours, he elaborated, wild desert existence, the mouldering tombs of the kings of Egypt, the decaying laces of a dozen Byzantine odalisques, a fragrant breath or two from the hanging gardens of Babylon, and a faint suggestion of the perspiration of Istar. It is my reconstruction, the artist concluded, of the perfume which Ruth employed to attract Boaz! The recipe is an invention based on a few half-illegible lines which I discovered in the beauty-table book of an ancient queen of Georgia, perhaps that very Thamar whose portrait has been painted in seductive music by the Slav composer, Balakireff.
The ladies gasped. The fascinating Arab pressed the rubber bulb and blew the cloying vapours into their faces, adjuring them, at the same time, to think of Thebes or Haroun-Al-Raschid or the pre-Adamite sultans. The room was soon redolent with a heavy vicious odour which seemed to reach the brain through the olfactory nerves and to affect the will like ether.
He is the only man alive today, whispered Peter, not without reverence, who has taken Flaubert's phrase seriously. He passes his nights dreaming of larger flowers and stranger perfumes. I believe that he could invent a new vice!
Serapi went the round of the circle with his mystic spray, and the twitterings of the ladies softened to ecstatic coos, like the little coos of dismay and delight of female cats who feel the call of pleasure, when suddenly the phial fell from the Arab's unclasped hand, the hand itself dropped to his side, the brown skin became a vivid green, all tension left his body, and he crumbled into a heap on the floor. The ladies shrieked; there was a delicious, susurrous, rainbow swirl and billow of tulle and taffeta and chiffon; there was a frantic nodding and waving of sweet-peas, red roses, dandelions, and magenta bellflowers; and eight pairs of white-gloved arms circled rhythmically in the air. The effect was worthy of the Russian Ballet and, had Fokine been present, it would doubtless have been perpetuated to the subsequent enjoyment of audiences at Covent Garden and the Paris Opéra.
Now, an assured and measured step was heard. From a room in the rear, the calm, practical presence entered, bearing a glass of water. The ladies moved a little to one side as she knelt before the recumbent figure and sprinkled the green face. Serapi almost immediately began to manifest signs of recovery; his muscles began to contract and his face regained its natural colour. We made our way into the open air and the warm western sunlight of the late afternoon. Peter was choking with laughter. I was chuckling. Richards was too astonished to express himself.
Life is sometimes, artistic. Peter was saying. Sometimes, if you give it a chance and look for them, it makes patterns, beautiful patterns. But Serapi excelled himself today. He has never done anything like this before. I shall never go back there again. It would be an anticlimax.
We dined somewhere, where I have forgotten. It is practically the only detail of that evening which has escaped my memory. I remember clearly how Richards sat listening in silent amazement to Peter's arguments and decisions on dreams and circumstances, erected on bewilderingly slender hypotheses. He built up, one after another, the most gorgeous and fantastic temples of theory; five minutes later he demolished them with a sledge-hammer or a feather. It was gay talk, fancy wafted from nowhere, unimportant, and vastly entertaining. Indeed, who has ever talked like Peter?
We seemed to be in his hands. At any rate neither Richards nor I offered any suggestions. We waited to hear him tell us what we were to do. About 9 o'clock, while we were sipping our cognac, he informed us that our next destination would be La Cigale, a music hall on the outer circle of the boulevards in Montmartre, where there was to be seen a revue called, Nue Cocotte, of which I still preserve the poster, drawn by Maës Laïa, depicting a fat duenna, fully dressed, wearing a red wig and adorned with pearls, and carrying a lorgnette, a more plausible female, nude, but for a hat, veil, feather boa, and a pair of high boots with yellow tops over which protrude an inch or two of blue sock, and an English comic, in a round hat, a yellow checked suit, bearing binoculars, all three astride a remarkably vivid red hobby horse whose feet are planted in the attitude of bucking. The comic grasps the bobbed black tail of the nag in one hand and the long yellow braid of the female in the other.
The cocottes of the period were wont to wear very large bell-shaped hats. Lily Elsie, who was appearing in The Merry Widow in London, followed this fashion and, as a natural consequence, these head-decorations were soon dubbed, probably by an American, Merry Widow hats. Each succeeding day, some girl would appear on the boulevards surmounted by a greater monstrosity than had been seen before. Discussion in regard to the subject, editorial and epistolary, raged at the moment in the Paris journals.
Once we were seated in our stalls on the night in question, it became evident that the hat of the cocotte in front of Peter completely obscured his view of the stage. He bent forward and politely requested her to remove it. She turned and explained with equal politeness and a most entrancing smile that she could not remove her hat without removing her hair, surely an impossibility, Monsieur would understand. Monsieur understood perfectly but, under the circumstances, would Madame have any objection if Monsieur created a disturbance? Madame, her eyes shining with mirth, replied that she would not have the tiniest objection, that above all else in life she adored fracases. They were of a delight to her. At this juncture in the interchange of compliments the curtain rose disclosing a row of females in mauve dresses, bearing baskets of pink roses. Presently the compère appeared.
Chapeau! cried, Peter, in the most stentorian voice I have ever heard him assume. Chapeau!
The spectators turned to look at the valiant American. Several heads nodded sympathy and approval.
Chapeau! Peter called again, pointing to the adorable little lady in front of him, who was enjoying the attention she had created. Her escort, on the other hand, squirmed a little.
The cry was now taken up by other unfortunate gentlemen in the stalls, who were placed in like situations but who had not had the courage to begin the battle. The din, indeed, soon gained such a degree of dynamic force that not one word of what was being said on the stage, not one note of the music, could be distinguished. Gesticulating figures stood up in every part of the theatre, shrieking and frantically waving canes. The compère advanced to the footlights and appeared to be addressing us, much in the manner of an actor attempting to stem a fire stampede in a playhouse, but, of course, he was inaudible. As he stepped back, a sudden lull succeeded to the tumult. Peter took advantage of this happy quiet to interject: Comme Mélisande, je ne suis pas heureux ici!
The spectators roared and screamed; the house rocked with their mirth. Even the mimes were amused. Now, escorted by two of his secretaries in elaborate coats decorated with much gold braid, the manager of the theatre appeared, paraded solemnly down the aisle to our seats and, with a bow, offered us a box, which we accepted at once and in which we received homage for the remainder of the evening. At last we could see the stage and enjoy the blond Idette Bremonval, the brunette Jane Merville, the comic pranks of Vilbert and Prince, and the Festival of the Déesse Raison.
The performance concluded, the pretty lady who had not removed her hat, commissioned her reluctant escort to inquire if we would not step out for a drink with them. The escort was not ungracious but, obviously, he lacked enthusiasm. The lady, just as obviously, had taken a great fancy to Peter. We went to the Rat Mort, where we sat on the terrasse, the lady gazing steadily at her new hero and laughing immoderately at his every sally. Peter, however, quickly showed that he was restless and presently he rose, eager to seek new diversions. We hailed a passing fiacre and jumped in, while the lady waved us pathetic adieux. Her companion seemed distinctly relieved by our departure. Peter was now in the highest animal spirits. All traces of fatigue had fled from his face. The horse which drew our fiacre was a poor, worn-out brute, like so many others in Paris, and the cocher, unlike so many others in Paris, was kind-hearted and made no effort to hasten his pace. We were crawling down the hill.
I will race you! cried Peter, leaping out (he told me afterwards that he had once undertaken a similar exploit with a Bavarian railway train).
Meet me at the Olympia Bar! he cried, dashing on ahead.
The cocher grunted, shook his head, mumbled a few unintelligible words to the horse, and we drove on more slowly than before. Peter, indeed, was soon out of sight.
Ten minutes later, as we entered the café under the Olympia Music Hall, we noted with some surprise that the stools in front of the bar, on which the cocottes usually sat with their feet on the rungs, their trains dragging the floor, were empty. The crowd had gathered at the other end of the long hall and the centre of the crowd was Peter. He was holding a reception, a reception of cocottes!
Ah! Good evening, Mademoiselle Rolandine de Maupreaux, he was saying as he extended his hand, I am delighted to greet you here tonight. And if this isn't dear little Mademoiselle Célestine Sainte-Résistance and her charming friend, Mademoiselle Edmée Donnez-Moi! And Camille! Camille la Grande! Quelle chance de vous voir! Et Madame, votre mère, elle va bien? Et Gisèle la Belle! Mais vous avez oublié de m'écrire! Do not, I pray you, neglect me again. And the charming Hortense des Halles et de chez Maxim, and the particularly adorable Abélardine de Belleville et de la Place d'Italie. Votre sœur va mieux, j'espére. Then, drawing us in, Permettez-moi, mesdemoiselles, de vous presenter mes amis, le Duc de Rochester et le Comte de Cedar Rapids. Spécialement, mesdemoiselles, permettez-moi de vous recommander le Comte de Cedar Rapids.
He had never, of course, seen any of them be' fore, but they liked it.
Richards grumbled, It's bloody silly, but he was laughing harder than I was.
I heard one of the girls say, Le jeune Américain est fou!
And the antiphony followed, Mais il est charmant.
Later, another remarked, Je crois que je vais lui demander de me faire une politesse!
Overhearing which, Peter rejoined, Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle. Quel genre?
It was all gay, irresponsible and meaningless, perhaps, but gay. We sat at tables and drank and smoked and spun more fantasies and quaint conceits until a late hour, and that night I learned that even French cocottes will occasionally waste their time, provided they are sufficiently diverted. Towards four o'clock in the morning, however, I began to note a change in Peter's deportment and demeanour. There were moments when he sat silent, a little aloof, seemingly the prey of a melancholy regret, too well aware, perhaps, that the atmosphere he had himself created would suck him into its merry hurricane. I caught the lengthening shadows under his eyes and the premonitory hollows in his cheeks. And this time, therefore, it was I who suggested departure. Peter acceded, but with an air of wistfulness as if even the effort of moving from an uncomfortable situation were painful to him. Rising, we kissed our hands to the band of sirens, who all pressed forward like the flower maidens of Parsifal and with equal success. Three of the pretty ladies accompanied us upstairs to the sidewalk and every one of the three kissed Peter on the mouth, but not one of them offered to kiss Richards or me.
We engaged another fiacre and drove up the Champs-Elysées. Now, it was Richards and I who had become vibrant. Peter was silent and old and apart. The dawn, the beautiful indigo dawn of Paris was upon us. The cool trees were our only companions in the deserted streets until, near the great grey arch, we began to encounter the wagons laden with vegetables, bound for the Halles, wagons on which carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, radishes, and heads of lettuce were stacked in orderly and intricate patterns. The horses, the reins drooping loosely over their backs, familiar with the route, marched slowly down the wide avenue, while the drivers in their blue smocks, perched high on the fronts of their carts, slept. We drove past them up the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne into the broadening daylight. On Peter Whiffle's countenance were painted the harsh grey lines of misery and despair.
- ↑ Since absinthe has come under the ban in Paris, I am informed that the correct form of approach is to ask not for a pernod, but for un distingué.