The Yellow Book Volume II Part 4

Tourtel let his pipe go out, and rapped it down brusquely upon the table.

"It must come to an end," he said, with suppressed ferocity; "are we eider to spen' de whole of our lives here, or else be turned off at de eleventh hour after sufferin' all de heat an' burden of de day? Its onreasonable. An' dere's de cottage at Cottu standin' empty, an' me havin' to pay a man to look after de tomato houses, when I could get fifty per cent. more by lookin' after dem myself.... An' what profit is such a sickly, s.h.i.+ftless life as dat? My good! dere's not a man, woman, or chile in de Islan's as will shed a tear when he goes, an'

dere's some, I tells you, as have suffered from his whimsies dese tirty years, as will rejoice. Why, his wife was dead already when we come here, an' his on'y son, a dirty, drunken, lazy vaurien too, has never been near him for fifteen years, nor written neider. Dead most likely, in foreign parts.... An' what's he want to stay for, contraryin' an' thwartin' dem as have sweated an' laboured, an' now, please de good G.o.d, wan's to sit 'neath de shadow of dere own fig-tree for de short time dat remains to dem?... An' what do we get for stayin'? Forty pound, Island money, between de two of us, an' de little I makes from de flowers, an' poultry, an' such like. An' what do we do for it? Bake, an' wash, an' clean, an' cook, an' keep de garden in order, an' nuss him in all his tantrums.... If we was even on his testament, I'd say nuddin. But everything goes to Pedvinns, an'

de son John, and de little bit of income dies wid him. I tell you 'tis 'bout time dis came to an end."

Owen recognised that Destiny asked no sin more heinous from him than silence, perhaps concealment; the chestnuts would reach him without risk of burning his hand. "It's time," said he, "I thought of going home. Get your lantern, and I'll help you with the trap. But first, I'll just run up and have another look at Mr. Rennuf."

For the last time the five personages of this obscure little tragedy found themselves together in the bedroom, now lighted by a small lamp which stood on the wash-hand-stand. Owen, who had to stoop to enter the door, could have touched the low-pitched ceiling with his hand.

The bed, with its slender pillars, supporting a canopy of faded damask, took up the greater part of the room. There was a fluted headpiece of the damask, and long curtains of the same material, looped up, on either side of the pillows. Sunken in these lay the head of the old man, crowned with a cotton nightcap, the eyes closed, the skin drawn tight over the skull, the outline of the attenuated form indistinguishable beneath the clothes. The arms lay outside the counterpane, straight down on either side; and the mechanical playing movement of the fingers showed he was not asleep. Margot and Mrs.

Tourtel watched him from the bed's foot. Their gigantic shadows thrown forward by the lamp, stretched up the opposite wall, and covered half the ceiling. The old-fas.h.i.+oned mahogany furniture, with its fillets of paler wood, drawn in ovals, upon the doors of the presses, their centrepieces of fruit and flowers, shone out here and there with reflected light; and the looking-gla.s.s, swung on corkscrew mahogany pillars between the damask window curtains, gleamed lake-like amidst the gloom.

Owen and Tourtel joined the women at the bedfoot; though each was absorbed entirely in his own egotisms, all were animated by the same secret desire. Yet, to the feeling heart, there was something unspeakably pleading in the sight of the old man lying there, in his helplessness, in the very room, on the very bed, which had seen his wedding-night fifty years before; where as a much-wished-for and welcomed infant, he had opened his eyes to the light more than seventy years since. He had been helpless then as now, but then the child had been held to loving hearts, loving fingers had tended him, a young and loving mother lay beside him, the circ.u.mference of all his tiny world, as he was the core and centre of all of hers. And from being that exquisite, well-beloved little child, he had pa.s.sed thoughtlessly, hopefully, despairfully, wearily, through all the stages of life, until he had come to this--a poor, old, feeble, helpless, worn-out man, lying there where he had been born, but with all those who had loved him carried long ago to the grave: with the few who might have protected him still, his son, his cousin, his old friend Le Lievre, as powerless to save him as the silent dead.

Renouf opened his eyes, looked in turn at the four faces before him, and read as much pity in them as in masks of stone. He turned himself to the pillow again and to his miserable thoughts.

Owen took out his watch, went round to count the pulse, and in the hush the tick of the big silver timepiece could be heard.

"There is extreme weakness," came his quiet verdict.

"Sinking?" whispered Tourtel loudly.

"No; care and constant nourishment are all that are required; strong beef-tea, port wine jelly, cream beaten up with a little brandy at short intervals, every hour say. And of course no excitement; nothing to irritate, or alarm him" (Owen's eye met Margot's); "absolute quiet and rest." He came back to the foot of the bed and spoke in a lower tone. "It's just one of the usual cases of senile decay," said he, "which I observe every one comes to here in the Islands (unless he has previously killed himself by drink), the results of breeding in. But Mr. Renouf may last months, years longer. In fact, if you follow out my directions there is every probability that he will."

Tourtel and his wife s.h.i.+fted their gaze from Owen to look into each other's eyes; Margot's loose mouth lapsed into a smile. Owen felt cold water running down his back. The atmosphere of the room seemed to stifle him; reminiscences of his student days crowded on him: the horror of an unperverted mind, at its first spectacle of cruelty, again seized hold of him, as though no twelve callous years were wedged in between. At all costs he must get out into the open air.

He turned to go. Louis Renouf opened his eyes, followed the form making its way to the door, and understood. "You won't leave me, doctor? surely you won't leave me?" came the last words of piercing entreaty.

The man felt his nerve going all to pieces.

"Come, come, my good sir, do you think I am going to stay here all night?" he answered brutally.... Outside the door, Tourtel touched his sleeve. "And suppose your directions are not carried out?" said he in his thick whisper.

Owen gave no spoken answer, but Tourtel was satisfied. "I'll come an'

put the horse in," he said, leading the way through the kitchen to the stables. Owen drove off with a parting curse and cut with the whip because the horse slipped upon the stones. A long ray of light from Tourtel's lantern followed him down the lane. When he turned out on to the high road to St. Gilles, he reined in a moment, to look back at Les Calais. This is the one point from which a portion of the house is visible, and he could see the lighted window of the old man's bedroom plainly through the trees.

What was happening there? he asked himself; and the Tourtel's cupidity and callousness, Margot's coa.r.s.e cruel tricks, rose before him with appalling distinctness. Yet the price was in his hand, the first step of the ladder gained; he saw himself to-morrow, perhaps in the drawing-room of Rohais, paying the necessary visit of intimation and condolence. He felt he had already won Mrs. Poidevin's favour. Among women, always poor physiognomists, he knew he pa.s.sed for a handsome man; among the Islanders, the a.s.surance of his address would pa.s.s for good breeding; all he had lacked hitherto was the opportunity to s.h.i.+ne. This his acquaintance with Mrs. Poidevin would secure him. And he had trampled on his conscience so often before, it had now little elasticity left. Just an extra gla.s.s of brandy to-morrow, and to-day would be as securely laid as those other episodes of his past.

While he watched, some one s.h.i.+fted the lamp ... a woman's shadow was thrown upon the white blind ... it wavered, grew monstrous, and spread, until the whole window was shrouded in gloom.... Owen put the horse into a gallop ... and from up at Les Calais, the long-drawn melancholy howling of the dog filled with forebodings the silent night.

The Lamplighter

By A. S. Hartrick

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Lamplighter]

The Composer of "Carmen"

By Charles Willeby

What little has been written about poor Bizet is not the sort to satisfy. The men who have told of him cannot have written with their best pen. Even those who, one can see, have started well, albeit impelled rather than inspired by a profound admiration for the artist and the man, have fallen all too short of the mark, and ultimately drifted into the dullest of all dull things--the compilation of mere dates and doings. I know of no pamphlet devoted to him in this country. He was much misunderstood in life; he has been, I think, as much sinned against in death. The symbol of posthumous appreciation which a.s.serts itself to the visitor to Pere Lachaise, is exponential of compliment only when reckoned by avoirdupois. Neglected in life, they have in death weighed him down with an edifice that would have been obnoxious to every instinct in his sprightly soul--a memorial befitting perhaps to such an one as Johannes Brahms, but repugnant as a memento of the spirit that created "Carmen." It is an emblem of French formalism in its most determined aspect. And in truth--as Sainte-Beuve said of the Abbe Galiani--"they owed to him an honourable, choice, and purely delicate burial; _urna brevis_, a little urn which should not be larger than he." The previous inappreciation of his genius has given place to posthumous laudation, zealous indeed, but so indiscriminating as to be vulgar. Like many another man, he had to take "a thras.h.i.+ng from life"; and although he stood up to it unflinchingly, it was only in his death certificate that he acquired pa.s.sport to fame.

Just eighteen years before it was that Bizet had written from Rome: "We are indeed sad, for there come to us the tidings of the death of Leon Benouville. Really, one works oneself half crazy to gain this Prix de Rome; then comes the huge struggle for position; and after all, perchance to end by dying at thirty-eight! Truly, the picture is the reverse of encouraging." Here was his own destiny, _nu comme la main_, save that the fates begrudged him even the thirty-eight years of his brother artist--called him when he could not but

"contrast The petty done--the undone vast."

But his early life was not unhappy. He had no pitiful struggle with poverty in childhood, at all events. Some tell us he was precocious--terribly so; but I had rather take my cue from his own words, "Je ne me suis donne qu'a contre-coeur a la musique," than dwell upon his precocity, real or fictional. It was only hereditarily consistent that he should have a musical organisation. His father was a teacher of music, not without repute; his mother was a sister of Francois Delsarte, who, although unknown to Grove, has two columns and more devoted to him by Fetis, by whom he is described as an "artiste un peu etrange, quoique d'un merite incontestable, doue de facultes tres diverses et de toutes les qualites necessaires a l'enseignement."

What there was of music in their son the parents sought to encourage a.s.siduously, and Bizet himself has shown us in his work, more clearly than aught else could, that the true dramatic sense was innate in him.

And that he loved his literature too, was well proved by a glance at the little _appartement_ in the Rue de Douai, which he continued to occupy until well-nigh the end.

In 1849--he was just over his tenth year--Delsarte took him to Marmontel of the Conservatoire. "Without being in any sense of the word a prodigy," says the old pianoforte master, "he played his Mozart with an unusual amount of taste. From the moment I heard him I recognised his individuality, and I made it my object to preserve it."

Then Zimmerman, with whom _l'enseignement_ was a disease, heard of him and sought him for pupil. But Zimmerman seems to have tired of him as he tired of so many and ended by pa.s.sing him on to Gounod. From entry to exit--an interval of eight years--Bizet's academic career was a series of _premiers et deuxiemes prix_. They were to him but so many stepping-stones to the coveted Grand Prix de Rome. He longed to secure this--to fly the crowded town and seek the secluded shelter of the Villa Medici. And in the end he had his way. In effect, he commenced to live only after he had taken up his abode on the little Pincian Hill. Even there life was a trifle close to him, and some time pa.s.sed before he really fixed his focus.

In Italy, more than in any other part of the world, the life of the present rests upon the strata of successive past lives. And although Bizet was no student, carrying in his knapsack a superfluity of culture, this place appealed to him from the moment that he came to it, and the memory of it lingered long in after days.

The villa itself was a revelation to him. The masterpiece of Renaissance facade over which the artist would seem to have exhausted a veritable mine of Greek and Roman bas-reliefs; the garden with its lawns surrounded by hedges breast-high, trimmed to the evenness of a stone-wall; the green alleys overshadowed by ilex trees; the marble statues looking forlornly regretful at Time's defacing treatment; the terrace with its oaks gnarled and twisted with age; the fountains; the roses; the flower-beds; and in the distance, "over the dumb Campagna-sea," the hills melting into light under the evening sky--all these made an _intaglio_ upon him such as was not readily to be effaced, and which he learned to love. Perhaps because, after all, Italy is even more the land of beauty than of what is venerable in art, he did not feel the want of what Mr. Symonds calls the "mythopoeic sense." It is a land ever young, in spite of age. Its monuments, a.s.sertive as they are, so blend with the landscape, are so in harmony with the surroundings, that the yawning gulf of years that would separate us from them is made to vanish, and they come to live with us.

And the place was teeming with tradition. From the time, 1540, when it had been designed by Hannibal Lippi for Cardinal Ricci, pa.s.sing thence into the hands of Alexandro de' Medici, and later into those of Leo XI., it had been the home of art; and then, on its acquisition by the French Academy in 1804, it became the home of artists. Here had lived and worked and dreamed David, Ingres, Delaroche, Vernet, Herold, Benoist, Halevy, Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod, and the minor host of them.

In truth the list awed Bizet not a little, and had he needed an incentive here it was. For the rest, he was supremely content. As a _pensionnaire_ of the Academy he had two hundred francs a month, and he apportioned them in this wise: _Nourriture_, 75fr.; _vin_, 25fr.; _retenue_, 25fr.; _location de piano_, 15fr.; _blanchissage_, 5fr.; _bois_, _chandelles_, _timbre-poste_, _&c._, 10fr.; _gants_, 5fr.; _perte sur le change de la monnaie,_ 5fr. Even then he wrote: "I have more than thirty francs _pour faire le grand garcon_." In another letter he says: "I seem to cling to Rome more than ever. The longer I know it, the more I love it. Everything is so beautiful. Each street--even the filthiest of them--has its own charm for me. And perhaps what is most astonis.h.i.+ng of all, is that those very things which startled me most on my arrival, have now become a part of and necessary to my very existence--the madonnas with their little lamps at every corner; the linen hanging out to dry from the windows; the very refuse of the streets; the beggars--all these things really divert me, and I should cry out if so much as a dung-heap were removed.... More too, every day, do I pity those imbeciles who have not been more fully able to appreciate their good fortune in being _pensionnaires_ of the Academy. But then one cannot help observing that they are the very ones who have achieved nothing. Halevy, Thomas, Gounod, Berlioz, Ma.s.se--they all loved and adored their Rome."

Then on the last day of the same year: "I seem to incline more definitely towards the theatre, for I feel a certain sense of drama, which, if I possessed it, I knew not of till now. So I hope for the best. But that is not all. Hitherto I have vacillated between Mozart and Beethoven, between Rossini and Meyerbeer, and suddenly I know upon what, upon whom to fix my faith. To me there are two distinct kinds of genius: the inspirational and the purely rational, I mean the genius of nature and the genius of erudition; and whilst I have an immense admiration for the second, I cannot deny that the first has all my sympathies. So, _mon cher_, I have the courage to prefer, and to say I prefer, Raphael to Michael Angelo, Mozart to Beethoven, Rossini to Meyerbeer, which is, I suppose, much the same as saying that if I had heard Rubini I would have preferred him to Duprez. Do not think for a moment that I place one above the other--that would be absurd. All I maintain is that the matter is one of taste, and that the one exercises upon my nature a stronger influence than does the other.

When I hear the 'Symphonie Heroque,' or the fourth act of the 'Huguenots,' I am spell-bound, aghast as it were; I have not eyes, ears, intelligence, enough even to admire. But when I see 'L'ecole D'Athenes,' or 'La Vierge de Foligno,' when I hear 'Les Noces de Figaro,' or the second act of 'Guillaume Tell,' I am completely happy; I experience a sense of comfort, a complete satisfaction: in effect, I forget everything."

This, then, is what Rome did for Bizet; but, be it said, for Bizet _tres jeune encore_. For a time the result is patent in his work, but afterwards there comes, although no revulsion, a distinct variation of feeling, which has in it something of compromise. The genius innate in him was inspirational before it was--if it ever was--erudite. Even in his later days there was for him no cowering before his culture. In 1867 he wrote in the _Revue Nationale_--the only critique, by the way, he ever wrote--under the pseudonym of Gaston de Betzi: "The artist has no name, no nationality. He is inspired or he is not. He has genius or he has not. If he has, we welcome him; if he has not, we can at most respect him, if we do not pity and forget him."

He was the same in all things: "I have no comrades," he said, "only friends." And there is one sentence that he wrote from Rome that might well be held up to the _gamins_ of the French Conservatoire. "Je ne veux rien faire _de chic_; je veux avoir des _idees_ avant de commencer un morceau."

In August of his second year Bizet left Rome on a visit to Naples. He carried a letter to Mercadente. On his return good news and bad awaited him. Ernest Guiraud, his good friend and quondam fellow-student in the cla.s.s of Marmontel, has just been proclaimed Prix de Rome. And this at the very moment Bizet was to leave the Villa; for the Academy would have it that their musical _pensionnaires_ should pa.s.s the third year in Germany. The prospect was entirely repugnant to Bizet. So he went to work against it, directing his energies in the first place against Schnetz, "the dear old director" as they called him. Schnetz, owning to a soft spot for his young _pensionnaire_, was overcome, and through him I fancy the powers that were in Paris. However, Bizet was permitted to remain in his beloved Rome. Delighted, he wrote off to Marmontel: "I am daily expecting Guiraud, and words cannot express how glad I shall be to see him. Would you believe it, it is two years since I have spoken with an intelligent musician? My colleague Z---- bores me frightfully. He speaks to me of Donizetti, of Fesca even, and I reply to him with Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Gounod."

This last year spent with Guiraud was perhaps the happiest of his life. At the close of it the two set off together on a ramble through the land, with fancy for their only guide. They had got so far as Venice when news of his mother's dangerous illness called Bizet to her side. He arrived in time to say farewell, and he never returned to Italy.

Of work done at the Villa, "Vasco de Gama" is the only tangible sample; "but I have not wasted my time," he wrote, "I have read a good many volumes of history, and ever so much more literature of all kinds. I have travelled, I have learned something of the history of art, and I really am a bit of a connoisseur in painting and sculpture.

All I want now, on my return, are _trois jolis actes_ for the Theatre Lyrique."

And shortly we find him in full swing with "Les Pecheurs des Perles."

It was produced on the 30th September of 1863, and had some eighteen representations. "La Jolie Fille de Perth," which followed it four years later, had, I think, twenty-one. In between these two works, we are told, Bizet, in a fit of violent admiration for Verdi, strove to emulate him in an opera ent.i.tled "Ivan le Terrible." It is said to have been completed and handed to the management of the Theatre Lyrique. Then Bizet, recognising as suddenly that he had made a mistake, withdrew the score and burned it.

M. Charles Pigot, who is chiefly responsible for this story, goes on to say that the libretto was the work of MM. Louis Gallet and Edouard Blau. But in that he is not correct, for Gallet himself tells us that he knew Bizet only ever so slightly at the time, and that neither to him nor to Blau is due a single line of this "Ivan."

Then there were "Griselidis," of which, in a letter dated February of 1871, Bizet speaks as _tres avancee_; "Clarisse Harlowe"; and the "Calendal" of M. Sardou, to each of which he referred in the same year as _a peine commencee_. There was also an opera in one act written by M. Carvalho, and actually put into rehearsal at the Opera Comique. But none of these saw the light, and I have little doubt they all met their fate on a certain eventful day, shortly before he died, when Bizet remorselessly destroyed a whole pile of ma.n.u.script. And in truth these early works had little value of themselves. They were but so many rungs of the ladder by which he climbed to the heights of "Djamileh," of "L'Arlesienne," and of "Carmen." No musician ever took longer to know himself than did Georges Bizet. His period of hesitation, of vacillation, was unduly protracted. For why, it is hard to tell; but one cannot help feeling that the terrible _lutte pour la vie_ had a deal to do with it. Those early years in Paris were very hard ones. "Believe me," he wrote from le Vesinet (always a favourite spot with him), "believe me, it is exasperating to have one's work interrupted for days to write _solos de piston_. But what would you? I must live. I have just rushed off at a gallop half-a-dozen melodies for Heugel. I trust you may like them. At least I have carefully chosen the verses. ... My opera and my symphony are both of them _en train_. But when, oh when, shall I finish them? Yet I do nothing but work, and I come only once a week to Paris. Here I am well out of the way of all _flaneurs_, _raseurs_, _diseurs de riens_, _du monde enfin_, _helas_." Then a few days later: "I am completely prostrate with fatigue. I can do nothing. I have even been obliged to give up orchestrating my symphony; and now I feel it will be too late for this winter. I am going to lie down, for I have not slept for three nights, and all seems so dark to me. To-morrow, too, I have _la musique gaie_ to write."

Just then time was pressing him hard. He was under contract to produce "La Jolie Fille de Perth" by the end of the year, and he was already well into October. It became a matter of fifteen and sixteen hours work a day; for there were lessons to be given, proofs to be corrected, piano transcriptions to be made, and the rest. And, truth to tell, he was terribly lacking in method. He was choke-full of ideas, he was indeed borne along by a very torrent of them; and if only he could have stopped to collect himself it would have been well for him. But no; before he realised it, "La Jolie Fille" was finished and in rehearsal. Then for the time he was able to put enough distance between himself and his work to value it. And it seems to have pleased him. "The final rehearsal," he writes to Galabert (by this time his confidant in most things), "has produced a great effect. The piece is really highly interesting, the interpretation is excellent, and the costumes are splendid. The scenery is new and the orchestra and the artists are full of enthusiasm. But more than all this, _cher ami_, the score of 'La Jolie Fille' is _une bonne chose_. The orchestra lends to all a colour and relief for which, I confess, I never dared to hope. I think I have arrived this time. Now, _il faut monter, monter, monter, toujours_."

Shortly after this he married Genevieve Halevy, the daughter of the composer of "La Juive," and lived almost exclusively at le Vesinet.