Nights Part 7

J. and I have written his Life in vain if everybody who cares to know anything about him does not know that from 1895 and 1896, the greater part of his time was spent in London and that many of his nights were then given to us, more particularly towards the end of the amazing decade. We paid for the privilege by the loss of some of our friends who, for one reason or another, cultivated a wholesome fear of Whistler.

Men who had been most constant in dropping in, dropped in no longer--nor, in many cases, have they ever begun to drop in again. More than one would have run miles to escape the chance encounter, trembling with apprehension when in a desperate visit they seemed to court it, and often the several doors opening into our little hall served as important a part in preventing a meeting between Whistler and the enemy as the doors in the old-fas.h.i.+oned farce played in the husband and wife game of hide-and-seek.

It was not too big a price to pay. Whistler's talk was worth a great deal, and the twelve years that have pa.s.sed since we lost it forever have not lessened its value for us. Ours is a sadder world since we have ceased to hear the memorable and unmistakable knock and ring at our front door, the prelude to the talk, rousing the whole house until every tenant in the other chambers and the housekeeper in her rooms below knew when Whistler came to see us. Our nights, since those he animated and made as "joyous" as he liked to be in his hours of play and battle, have lost their savour. We are perpetually referring to them, quoting, regretting them. Even Augustine looks back to them as making a pleasant epoch in her life. Often she will remind me of this night or that, declaring we have grown dull without him--but do I remember the night when M. Whistlaire argued so hard and with such violence that the print of the rabbit fell from the wall in its frame, the gla.s.s s.h.i.+vering in a thousand pieces, just when M. Kennedy was so angry we thought he was going to walk away forever, and how after that there could be no more arguing, and M. Whistlaire laughed as she swept up the pieces, and M.

Kennedy did not walk away alone, but later they both walked away together, arm-in-arm, to the hotel where they always stayed?--and do I remember how, during the Boer War, he would come and dine with me alone, his pockets stuffed with newspaper clippings, and how he would put them by his plate, and how long we would sit at table because he would read every one of them to me, with that gay laugh n.o.body laughs nowadays?--and do I remember that other evening when he and Monsieur disputed and disputed she didn't know about what, and how excited they got, and how he kept banging the table with his knife, the sharp edge down, until he cut a long slit in the cloth, and it was our best tablecloth too?--and do I remember the long stories he would tell us some evenings and his little mocking laugh when she, who could not understand a word, knew he was saying something malicious about somebody?--and do I remember how he liked a good dinner and her cooking because it was French, and how he would never refuse when she promised him her _pot-au-feu_ or one of her salads--and do I remember one after another of those old nights the like of which we shall never see again?

Do I remember indeed? They fill too big a s.p.a.ce in memory, they overshadow too well the lesser nights with lesser men, they were too joyous an episode in our thirty long years of talk for me ever to forget them. The three cla.s.sical knocks of the _Theatre Francais_ could not announce more certainly a night of beauty or wit or fun or romance than the violent ring and the resounding knock at the old battered door of the Buckingham Street chambers where, for Whistler, the oak was never sported.

But of our Whistler nights we have already made the record--this is another tale that is already told. I think Whistler knew their value as well as we did, knew what they cost us in the loss of friends, knew what he had given us in return, knew what he had revealed to us of himself in all friendliness, and that this was the reason he looked to us for the record not only of his nights with us, but of his life. Once he had confided that charge to us, the old Buckingham Street nights grew more marvellous still, full of reminiscences, of comment, of criticism, of friendliness, his talk none the less stimulating and splendid because, at his request, the cuff or note-book was always ready. And they continued until the long tragic weeks and months when he was first afraid to go out at night and then unable to, and when the talks were by day instead--not quite the same in the last, the saddest months of all, for weakness and thoughts of the work yet to be done and the feebleness that kept him from doing it fell like a black cloud over all our meetings, even those where the old gaiety a.s.serted itself for a moment and the old light of battle gleamed again in his eyes. To the end he liked the talk no less than we, for to the end he sent for us, to the end he would see us when few besides were admitted. There, for those who would like to question his friends.h.i.+p with us, for those who believe that Whistler never could keep a friend because he never wanted to, is the proof dear to us of the good friend he could be when his friends.h.i.+p was not abused or taken advantage of behind his back.

Many other nights besides there have been--long series of American nights--John Van d.y.k.e nights I might say, Timothy Cole nights,--but no, I am not going to name names and make a catalogue, I am not going to write their story, I am not going to run the risks of the folly I have protested against. I have confessed my safe belief that of the living only good should be spoken, and good only when it is within the bounds of discretion. It is not my ambition to rival at home the unpopularity of N.P. Willis in England after the first of his indiscretions, which seem discretion itself now in the light of to-day's yellow and society journalism.

And there have been English nights--many--nights with old friends who are faithful and new friends who are devoted--nights of late so like the old Thursday nights that both Hartrick and Sullivan, now twenty years older and with no Phil May to revolve round, asked why those old memorable gay nights could not be revived? But would they be gay? Would they not turn out the dust and ashes, the worse than Lenten fare, from which I shrink? Would they not, as I have said, prove as mournful as that banquet of Zola's Conquerors of Paris?

Recently there have been Belgian nights--nights with those Belgian artists whose habit was never to travel at all until they started on their journey as exiles to London--a journey to which the end in a return journey seems to them so tediously long in coming. And there have been War nights when the clash of our battle, in the grim consciousness of that other battle not so far away, is less cheerful. And there have been nights with the great search-lights over the Thames that tell us as much as those young insistent voices in Buckingham Street could tell, but only of things so tragic and so sombre that I am the more eager to finish the story of our London nights with our Thursdays, in the years when we were burdened by no more serious fighting than the endless fight of friend with friend, of fellow worker with fellow worker, fought in the good cause of work and play, faith and doubt, fear and hope--a stirring fight, but one in which words are the weapons, one which can never be won or lost, since no two can ever be found to agree when they talk for pleasure, nor any one man forced to agree with himself for all time.

V

NIGHTS

IN PARIS

IN PARIS

I

I still go to Paris every year in May when the _Salons_ open, but now I go alone. The lilacs and horse-chestnuts, that J. used to reproach me for never keeping out of the articles it was my business to write there, still bloom in the _Champs-Elysees_ and the _Bois_, but now I am no longer tempted to drag them into my MS. The spring nights still are beautiful on the _Boulevards_ and _Quais_ but only ghosts walk with me along the old familiar ways, only ghosts sit with me at table in restaurants where once I always ate in company. Paris has lost half its charm since the days when, as regularly as spring came round, I was one of the little group of critics and artists and friends from London who met in it for a week among the pictures.

It was much the same group, if smaller, that met on our Thursday nights in London. Some of us went for work, to "do" the _Salons_ after we had "done" the Royal Academy and the New Gallery, then the Academy's only London rival: Bob Stevenson for the _Pall Mall_, D.S. MacColl for the _Spectator_, Charles Whibley for the _National Observer_. J., during several years, spared the time from more important things to fight as critic the empty criticism of the moment, the old-fas.h.i.+oned criticism that recognised no masterpiece outside of Burlington House and saw nothing in a picture or a drawing save a story: a thankless task, for already the old-fas.h.i.+oned criticism threatens to become the new-fas.h.i.+oned again. I, for my part, was kept as busy as I knew how to be, and busier, for the _Nation_ and my London papers. Others went because they were artists and wanted to see what Paris was doing and May was the season when Paris was doing most and was most liberal in letting everybody see it. Beardsley and Furse seldom failed, and I do not suppose a year pa.s.sed that we did not chance upon one or more unexpected friends in a gallery or a _cafe_ and add them to our party. Sometimes a Publisher was with us, his affairs an excuse for a holiday, or sometimes an Architect to show the poor foreigner how respectable British respectability can be and, incidentally, to make his a guarantee of ours that we could have dispensed with. Harland and Mrs. Harland were always there, I do believe for sheer love of Paris in the May-time, and I rather think theirs was the wisest reason of all.

During no week throughout my hard-working year did I have to work harder than during that May week spent in Paris. I am inclined now, in the more leisurely period of life at which I have arrived, to admire myself when I recall how many articles I had to write, how many prints and drawings, statues and pictures, I had to look at in order to write them, and my success in never leaving my editors in the lurch. My admiration is the greater because n.o.body could know as well as I how slow I have always been with my work and also, to do myself justice, how conscientious, as I do not mind saying, though to be called conscientious by anybody else would seem to me only less offensive than to be called good-natured or amiable. As a critic I never could get to the point of writing round the pictures and saying nothing about them like many I knew for whom five minutes in a gallery sufficed, nor, to be frank, did I try to. Neither could I hang an article on one picture. I might envy George Moore, for an interval the critic of the _Speaker_, now the London _Nation_, because he could and did. I can remember him at an Academy Press View making the interminable round with a business-like briskness until, perhaps in the first hour and the last room, he would come upon the painting that gave him the peg for his eloquence, make an elaborate study of it, tell us his task was finished, and hurry off exultant. But envy him as I might, I couldn't borrow his briskness. I had to plod on all morning and again all afternoon until the Academy closed, to look at every picture before I could be sure which was the right peg or whether there might not be a dozen pegs and more. And I had to collect elaborate notes, not daring to trust to my memory alone, and after that to re-write pages that did not satisfy me. Just to see the Academy meant an honest day's labour and in Paris there were two _Salons_, each immeasurably bigger, and innumerable smaller shows into the bargain. And yet, that laborious May week never seemed to me so much toil as pleasure.

There was a great deal about Paris the toil left me no chance to find out. I should not like to say how many of its sights I have failed regularly to see during the visit I have paid to it every year now for over a quarter of a century. But at least I have learned the best thing worth knowing about it, which is that in no other town can toil look so uncommonly like pleasure, in no other town is it so easy to play hard and to work hard at the same time: precisely the truth the Baedeker student has a knack of missing, the truth the special kind of foreigner, for whom Paris would not be Paris if he could not believe it the abomination of desolation, goes out of his way to miss. I have met some of my own countrymen who have seen everything in Paris but never Paris itself--the old story of not seeing the wood for the trees--and who are absolutely convinced that it is a town in which all the people think of is amus.e.m.e.nt and that a more frivolous creature than the Parisian never existed. From their comfortable seat of judgment in the correct hotels and the correct show places, they cannot look as far as the schools and factories that make Paris the centre of learning for the world and of industry for France, and they are in their way every bit as dense as the English who take their pleasure so seriously they cannot understand the French who take their work gaily. "_Des blagueurs meme au feu_," a Belgian officer the other day described to me the French soldiers who had been fighting at his side, and I think it rather finer to face Death--or Work--laughing than in tears. If Paris were not so gay on the surface I am sure I should not find it so stimulating, though how it would be if I lived there I have never dared put to the test, unwilling to run whatever risk there might be if I did. I prefer to keep Paris in reserve for a working holiday or, indeed, any sort of holiday, a preference which, if Heine is to be trusted, I share with _le bon Dieu_ of the old French proverb who, when he is bored in Heaven, opens a window and looks down upon the _Boulevards_ of Paris.

At the first sight, the first sound, the first smell of Paris, the holiday feeling stirred within us. The minute we arrived we began to play at our work as we never did in London, as it never would have occurred to us there that we could.

The Academy, only the week before, had given us the same chance to meet, the same chance to talk, the same chance to lunch together, and of the lunch it had got to be our habit to make a Press Day function. Nowadays at the Academy Press View, when I am hungry, I run up to Stewart's at the corner of Bond Street for a couple of sandwiches, and excellent they are, but, as I eat them in my solitary corner, no flight of my sluggish imagination can make them seem to me more than a stern necessity. There was, however, a festive air about the old Press Day lunch when, towards one o'clock, some six or eight of us adjourned to Solferino's, another vanished landmark of my younger days in London. It was in Rupert Street, the street of Prince Florizel's Divan, which was appropriate, for Bob Stevenson was always with us and but for Bob Prince Florizel might never have existed to run a Divan in Rupert or any other street. Solferino's had a Barsac that Bob liked to order, chiefly I fancy for all it represented to him of Paris and Lavenue's and Barbizon and student days, and the old memories warming him over it as lunch went on, he would unfold one theory of art after another until suddenly a critic, more nervous than the rest, would take out his watch, and the hour he saw there would send us post-haste back to Piccadilly and the Academy, which at that time thought one Press Day sufficient.

But the lunch that seemed a festivity at Solferino's never gave us the holiday sense Paris filled us with from the early hour in the morning when, after our little breakfast, we met downstairs in the unpretentious hotel in the Rue St. Roch where most of us stayed--if we did not stay instead at the Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal for the sake of the name.

The Rue St. Roch was convenient and if we were willing to climb to the top of the narrow house, where the smell of dinner hung heavy on the stairs all through the afternoon and evening, we could have our room for the next to nothing at all that suited our purse, and the dining-room--the Coffee Room in gilt letters on its door would have frightened us from it in any case--was so tiny it was a kindness to the _patron_ not to come back for the midday breakfast or the dinner that we could not have been induced to eat in the hotel, under any circ.u.mstances, for half the big price he charged. The day's talk was already in full swing as we steamed down the Seine, or walked under the arcade of the _Rue de Rivoli_ and along the _Quais_, in the cool of the May morning, to the new _Salon_ which was then in the _Champ-de-Mars_.

And one morning at the _Salon_ made it clear to me, as years at the Academy could not, why French criticism permits itself to speak of art as a "game" and of the artist's work as "amusing" and "gay." There were words that got into my article as persistently as the lilacs and the horse-chestnuts.

II

If we brought to Paris a talent for talk and youth for enjoyment, Paris at the moment was providing liberally more than we could talk about or had time to enjoy. London may have been wide awake--for London--in the Nineties, but it was half asleep compared to Paris and would not have been awake at all if it had not gone to Paris for the "new" it bragged of so loud in art and every excitement it cultivated, and for the "_fin-de-siecle,_" that chance phrase pa.s.sed lightly from mouth to mouth in Paris of which it made a serious cla.s.sification.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Etching by Joseph Pennell IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSeES]

I have watched with sympathetic amus.e.m.e.nt these late years one new movement, one new revolt after another, started and led by little men who have not the strength to move anything or the independence to revolt against anything, except in their boast of it, and who would be frightened by the bigness of a movement and revolt like the Secession from the old _Salon_ that followed the International Exposition of 1889.

I feel how long ago the Nineties were when I hear the young people in Paris to-day talk of the two _Salons_ as the _Artistes-Francais_ and the _Beaux-Arts_. In the Nineties we, who watched the parting of the ways, knew them only as the Old _Salon_ and the New _Salon_ because that is what we saw in them and what they really were--unless we distinguished them as the _Champ-de-Mars Salon_ and the _Champs-Elysees Salon_, for another ten years were to pa.s.s before there was a _Grand Palais_ for both to move into. We could not write about either without a reminder of the age of the one and the youth of the other, the Old _Salon_ remaining the home of the tradition that has become hide-bound convention, and the new _Salon_ offering headquarters to the tradition that is being "carried on," as we were forever pointing out, borrowing the phrase from Whistler. We were given in the Nineties to borrowing the things Whistler said and wrote, for we knew, if it is not every critic who does to-day, that he was as great a master of art criticism as of art.

What the men who undertook to carry on tradition did for us was to arrange a good show. They had to, if it meant taking off their coats and rolling up their sleeves and putting themselves down to it in grim earnest, for it was the only way they could justify their action and the existence of their Society, and their choice of a President, the very name of Meissonier seeming to stand for anything rather than secession and experiment and revolt. For the first few exhibitions many of the older men got together small collections of their earlier work that had not been shown publicly for years, and the new _Salon's_ way of arranging each man's work in a separate group or panel made it tell with all the more effect. And then there was the excitement of coming upon paintings or statues long familiar, but only by reputation or reproduction. I cannot forget how we thrilled in front of Whistler's _Rosa Corder_, which we were none of us, except Bob Stevenson, old enough to have seen when Whistler first exhibited it in London and Paris to a public unwilling to leave him in any doubt as to its indifference, how we talked and talked and talked until we had not time that morning to look at one other painting in the gallery, how it was not the fault of our articles if everybody did not squander upon it the attention refused not much more than a decade before. And the younger men of the moment had to summon up every sc.r.a.p of individuality they possessed to be admitted, and not to be admitted meant too much conservatism or too much independence. And credentials of fine work had to be presented by the artists from all over the world--Americans, Scandinavians, Dutchmen, Belgians, Russians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards,--who couldn't believe they had come off if the New _Salon_ did not let them in, and half the time they hadn't. And with all it was just for the pride of being there, they were not out for medals, since the New _Salon_ gave no awards. And altogether there was about as wide a gulf of principle and performance as could be between the two _Salons_ that are now separated by not much more than the turnstiles in the one building that shelters them both.

And sparks of originality gleamed here and there; the pa.s.sion for adventure had not flickered out--at every step through the galleries some subject for the discussion we exulted in stopped us short. It might be Impressionism, Sisley still showing if Monet did not, and Vibrism and Pointillism and all the other _isms_ springing up and out of it. It might be Rosicrucianism and Symbolism which had just come in, and Sar Peladan--does anybody to-day read the Sar's long tedious books, bought by us with such zeal and promptly left to grow dusty on our shelves?--and Huysmans and their fellow teachers of Magic and members of the _Rose-Croix_ were being interpreted in paint and in black-and-white, and if the interpretations did not interpret to so prosaic a mind as mine, it mattered the less because they were often excuse for a fine design. And the square brush mark lingered, and much was heard of the broken brush mark, and values had not ceased to be absorbing, nor _la peinture au premier coup_ and _la peinture en plein air_ to be wrangled over. And a religious wave from n.o.body knew where swept artists to the Scriptures for motives and sent them for a background, not with Holman Hunt to Palestine, but to their own surroundings, their own country, to the light and atmosphere each knew best--Lhermitte's Christ suffered little children to come unto Him in a French peasant's cottage; Edelfelt's Christ walked in the sunlight of the North; Jean Beraud's Christ found Simon the Pharisee at home in a Parisian club; and no landscape, realistic, impressionistic, decorative, was complete unless a familiar figure or group came straying into it from out the Bible. Much that was done perished with the group or the fad that gave it birth, much when suddenly come upon now on the walls of the provincial gallery looks disconcertingly old-fas.h.i.+oned. But nevertheless, the movement, the energy, the life of the Nineties was a healthy enemy to that stagnation which is a death trap for art.

And Black-and-White was a section to be visited in the freshness of the morning, not to be put off, like the dull, shockingly over-crowded little room at the Academy, to the last hurried moments of fatigue--a section to devote the day to and then to leave only for the bookstall or bookshop where we could invest the money we had not to spare in the books and magazines and papers ill.u.s.trated by Carlos Schwabe and Khnopf and Steinlen and Willette and Caran D'Ache and Louis Legrand and Forain and the men whose work in the original we had been studying and laying down the law about for hours. And the artist's new invention, his new experiment, came as surely as the spring--now the original wood block and now the colour print, one year the draughtsman's Holbein-inspired portrait and another the poster that excited us into collecting Cheret and Toulouse-Lautrec at a feverish rate and facing afterwards, as best we could, the problem of what in the world to do with a collection that nothing smaller than a railroad station or the h.o.a.rdings could accommodate.

And the Sculpture court was not the accustomed chill waste, dreary as the yard crowded with marble tombstones. If n.o.body else had been in it--and many were--Rodin was there to heat the atmosphere, his name kindling a flame of criticism long before his work was reached. Beyond his name he was barely known in London, where I remember then seeing no work of his except his bust of Henley, who, during a visit to Paris, I believe his only one, had sat to Rodin and then, ever after, with the splendid enthusiasm he lavished on his friends, had preached Rodin. But in Paris at the New _Salon_ there was always plenty of the work to explain why the name was such a firebrand--disturbing, exciting, faction-making--as I look back, culminating in the melodramatic Balzac that would have kept us in hot debate for all eternity had there not been innumerable things to interest us as much and more.

The critic has simply to take his task as we took ours and not another occupation in life can prove so br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with excitement. In the early Nineties I had not a doubt that it could always be taken like that. I would not have believed the most accredited prophet who prophesied that we would outlive our interest in the New _Salon_. And yet, a year came when, of the old group, only D.S. MacColl and I met in the _Champ-de-Mars_ and he, with boredom in his face and voice, a.s.sured me he had found nothing in it from end to end except a silk panel decorated by Conder, and so helped to kill any belief I still cherished in the emotion that does not wear itself out with time.

However, this melancholy meeting was not until the Nineties were nearing their end, and up till then our days were an orgy of art criticism and excitement in it. In Paris, as in Rome, as in Venice, as in London, only night set me free for the pleasure that was apart from work. As a rule, none of us dared at the _Salons_ to interrupt our work there even to make a function of the midday breakfast, as we did of lunch at the Academy, the days in Paris being so remarkably short for all we had to do in them. We were forced to treat it as a mere halt, regrettable but unavoidable, in the day's appointed task, whether we ate it at the _Salon_ to save time or in some near little restaurant to save money.

Often we were tempted, and few temptations are more difficult to resist than the unfolding of the big, soft French napkin at noon and the arrival of the radishes and b.u.t.ter and the long crisp French bread. When I was alone I escaped by going to one of the little tables in that gloomy corner of the _Salon_ restaurant where there was no napkin to be unfolded, no radishes and b.u.t.ter to lead to indiscretion, and nothing more elaborate was served than a sandwich or a _brioche_, a cup of coffee or the gla.s.s of Madeira which sentiment makes it a duty for the good Philadelphian to drink whenever and wherever it comes his way. The temptation being so strong, it is useless to pretend that we never fell.

If we had not, I should not have memories of breakfasts in the _Salon_, under the trees at Ledoyen's, on the _Tour Eiffel_, in the cla.s.sic shade of the Palais Royal from which all the old houses had not been swept away, and as far from the scene of work as the close neighborhood of the _Bourse_ where we could scarcely have got by accident. But the thought of the work waiting was for me the disquieting mummy served with every course of the feast. Not until the _Salon_ door closed upon my drooping back and weary feet, turning me out whether I would or no, in the late hours of the afternoon, was I at liberty to remember how many other things there are in life besides work.

III

The hour when all Paris had settled down to the business of pleasure--to proving itself the abomination of desolation to those who were already too sure to be in need of a proof--was an enchanting hour to find one's self at liberty. The heat of the day was over, the air was cool, the light golden, the important question of dining could be considered in comfort on enticing little chairs in the shady alleys of the _Champs-Elysees_ or, better still, on little chairs no less enticing with little tables in front of them at the nearest _cafe_, where an _aperitif_ was to be sipped even if it were no more deadly than a _groseille_ or a _grenadine_. What the _aperitif_ was did not matter; what did, was the reason it gave for half an hour's loafing before dinner with all the loafing town.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Etching by Joseph Pennell THE HALF HOUR BEFORE DINNER]

Had we lived in Paris, no doubt we would have done as we did in Rome and Venice and have gone every night to the same restaurant where the same greeting from the same smiling _patron_ and the same table in the same corner awaited us. But change and experiment and a good deal of preliminary discussion over an _aperitif_ were more in the order of a week's visit. As a rule, we preferred the small restaurant that was cheap, as we were most of us impecunious, also the restaurant that was out-of-doors, out-of-doors turning the simplest dinner into a feast.

However, n.o.body yet was really ever young who was never reckless.

Occasionally we dined joyously beyond our means, and one memorable year we devoted our nights to giving each other dinners where the best dinners were to be had. Those alone who are blest with little money and the obligation of making that little can appreciate the splendour of our recklessness, just as those alone who work all day and eat sparingly can have the proper regard for a good dinner. I do not regret the recklessness, I am not much the poorer for it to-day whatever I was at the time, and I should have missed something out of life had I not once dined recklessly in Paris. Moreover, our special business was the study of art and in Paris dining and art are one, though the foolish man in less civilized countries preaches that to eat for any other purpose than to live is gluttony. The clear intellect of the French saves them from that mistake, and I have entertained hopes for the future of my own country ever since one wise American,--Henry T. Finck,--discovering the truth that the French have always had the common sense to know, proclaimed it in a book which I have honoured by placing it in my Collection of Cookery Books with Grimod de la Reyniere, Brillat-Savarin and Dumas.

At the time we were more concerned with the dinner than the philosophy of dining. Our one aim was to dine well, whether it was the right thing or the wrong, even whether or no it sent us back to London bankrupt. We did not flinch before the price we paid, and if we were too wise to measure the value of the dinner by its cost, we were proud of the bigness of the bill as the "visible sign," the guarantee of success. It was a tremendous triumph for J. when he paid the biggest of all, which he did, not so much because he set out to deliberately as because, by the choice of chance, he had invited us to Voisin's in the Rue St.

Honore, where the red-cus.h.i.+oned seats, the mirrors, the white paint, the discreet gilding, the air of retirement, the few elderly, rotund, meditative diners, each dining with himself, were all typical of the old cla.s.sical Paris restaurant, and a.s.sured us beforehand of a good dinner and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and _pet.i.tes fraises des bois_ I know because the season was spring; that the wine was good I also know because the reputation of Voisin's cellar permitted of no other. And I am as sure that the _menu_ was so short that ours would have seemed the dinner of an anchorite in the City of London, for if we could not dine often we were masters of the art of dining when we did, and we understood, as the Lord Mayor and the City Companies of London, celebrated for their dinners, do not, that dining is not an art when the last course cannot be enjoyed as much as the first. As I keep the family accounts, I was obliged to pay in another way for J.'s triumph at Voisin's when I got back to London and faced a deficit that had to be balanced somehow in my weekly bills for the rest of the month. But, at least, if abstaining has to be done, London is the easiest place to abstain in as Paris is the best to dine in.

The Publisher who was with us that year gave his dinner at the LaPerouse on the _Quai des Grands-Augustins_, and it was not his fault if he fell short of J.'s triumph by a few francs. The giver of a dinner at the LaPerouse in the happy past enjoyed the fearful pleasure of not knowing how much he was spending until he called for his bill, price being too trivial a detail for a place in the _menu_, and usually when the bill came it exceeded his most ambitious hopes. The Publisher must have hit upon Friday, for the perfume of _Bouillabaisse_ mingles with my memories of the dinner in the little low _entresol_ where, by stooping down and craning our necks, we could see the towers of _Notre-Dame_ from the window, and where the big, tall, handsome, black-bearded _patron_, alarmingly out of scale with the room, came to make sure of our pleasure in his dishes--he would rather the bill had gone unpaid than have seen the dinner neglected. I think there was a bottle of some special Burgundy in its cradle, for rarely in his life, I fancy, has the Publisher felt so in need of being fortified. Early in the day he had been guilty of the astonis.h.i.+ng indiscretion, as it then seemed, of buying three Van Goghs. For this happened years before anybody had begun to buy Van Gogh--years before anybody had begun to hear of Van Gogh--years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants of Van Gogh and Cezanne who would a.s.suredly have been the first to repudiate them. The Publisher had gone unsuspectingly, confidingly, with J. to _Montmartre_ and there, among other haunts, into the now celebrated little shop where the paintings Van Gogh used to give in exchange for paints littered the whole place, and where the dealer thought it a bargain if, for a few francs, he could get rid of canvases that now fetch their hundreds and thousands of pounds. J. would have invested had he had the few francs. Not having them, he persuaded the Publisher to, and to buy three of the best into the bargain, and never did his own empty pockets stand in the way of a more profitable investment, for had he bought not all but only a few in this wilderness of Van Goghs, and had he sold them again as he would never have done, we might now, if we chose, dine every night at the LaPerouse or Voisin's and prepare for the reckoning without a tremor. If I write of the buying of these pictures as if they were stocks and shares, it is because that is the way the creators of the "Van Gogh-Cezanne-Gauguin boom" have appraised them, appealing to the modern collector who collects for the money in art, not the beauty. That night at the LaPerouse the Publisher was dazed by his unexpected rashness as art patron; to-day, when he points to the one of the three paintings still hanging on his walls, he flatters himself that he discovered Van Gogh before the mult.i.tude.

Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparna.s.se, and if he had not of his own free will we should have compelled him to. He belonged there. At Lavenue's he and Louis Stevenson dined when they were young in Paris, it was always cropping up in Bob's talk of the old days, it plays its part--"the restaurant where no one need be ashamed to entertain the master"--in the opening chapters of _The Wrecker_, which I think as entertaining as any chapters Louis Stevenson ever wrote in that or any other book. The dinner, of which I recall nothing in particular, did not interest me as much as the place itself. To see Bob Stevenson at Lavenue's was like seeing Manet at the _Nouvelle Athenes_ or Dr. Johnson at the Ches.h.i.+re Cheese, and to make the background complete Alexander Harrison, with two or three American painters of his generation, was dining at a near table.

He shall be nameless who gave the dinner at Marguery's. The dinner was all it should have been, for we ate the sole called after the house. It was the provider of it who proved wanting. I was brought up to believe that the host, when there is a host, should pay his bill. A large part of my life has been spent in getting rid of the things I was brought up to believe, but this particular belief I have never been able to shed and I confess I was taken aback--let me put it at that--when the white paper neatly folded in a plate, served at the end of dinner, was pa.s.sed on to one of the guests. If the debt then run into was not paid does not much matter after all these years, or perhaps if it was not it has the more interest for the curious observer of modes and moods. In this case, the whole incident could be reduced to a kindness on the part of the debtor, sacrificing himself to show how right Bob Stevenson was when he said, as Robert Louis Stevenson repeated after him in print, that while the Anglo-Saxon can and does boast that he is not as Frenchmen in certain matters of morals, it is his misfortune to be as little like them in their vigorous definition of honesty and the obligation of paying their debts.

That the fifth dinner was at the _Tour d'Argent_ is not an achievement to be particularly proud of. On the contrary, it appears to me a trifle ba.n.a.l as I look back to it, for fas.h.i.+on was at the time sending Americans and English to the _Tour d'Argent_ just as it was driving them on beautiful spring days into that horribly crowded afternoon tea place in the _Rue Daunou_--wasn't it?--or to order their new gowns at the new dressmakers in the _Rue de la Paix_, or to do any of the hundred and one other things that proved them up to the times, at home in Paris, initiated into _le dernier cri_ or whatever new phrase they thought set the seal upon Parisian smartness. Frederic's face was as well known as Ibsen's which it so resembled, his sanded floor was the talk of the tourists, the distinguished foreigner struggled to have his name on Frederic's _menu_, and as for Frederic's pressed duck it had degenerated into as everyday a commonplace as an oyster stew in New York or a chop from the grill in London. The bill at the end of the evening might be all that the occasion demanded of the man who was giving the dinner, but his choice of restaurant could not convict him of originality, or of sentiment either. But I do not know why I grumble when the dinner was so good. The _Tour d'Argent_ had not fallen as most restaurants fall when they attract patrons from across the Channel. Frederic's cooking was beyond reproach. Even the theatrical ceremony over his pressed duck could not spoil its flavour.

The sixth evening saw us at _Prunier's_, eating the oysters that it would have been useless to go to _Prunier's_ and not to eat (we must have been in Paris unusually early in May that year), and if it was not the season to eat the snails for which _Prunier's_ is equally renowned, my heart was not broken. It may give me away to confess that I do not like them, since snails are one of the unconsidered trifles that no Autolycus posing as _gourmet_ should turn a disdainful back upon. But what can I do? It is a case of Dr. Fell, and that is the beginning and end of it. And if it wasn't the season for snails, and if I wouldn't have eaten them if it had been, in _Prunier's_ gilded halls other delicacies are served, and when I summon up remembrance of those dinners past, _Prunier's_ does not exactly take a back seat.

But naturally, the most important dinner in my opinion was mine at the _Cabaret Lyonnais_ in the _Rue de Port-Mahon_, where never again can I invite my friends, for the _Cabaret_ has gone into the land of shadows with so many of the group who sat round my table. At the time, there was no looking back, no sad straying into a dead past to spoil a good dinner--at the worst, a fleeting moment of discomfort when we selected the tench swimming in the tank close to our table and saw them carried off to the kitchen to be cooked for us. It was the custom of the house, intended to be a pleasing a.s.surance that our fish was fresh, but a custom with just a savour in it of cannibalism. I have never cared to be on speaking terms with the creatures I am about to eat. I squirm when I see the lobster for my salad squirming, though I know the risk if it should not squirm at all. Had I lived in the country among my own chickens and pigs and lambs, I should have been long since a confirmed vegetarian. But to go to the _Cabaret Lyonnais_ unwilling to swallow my scruples with my fish would have been as useless as to go to Simpson's in London and object to a cut from the joint, as I do object, which is why I seldom go. Anyway, we did not have to see the beef killed for the _filet_ which at the _Cabaret_ we were expected to eat after the tench and with the potatoes to which the city of Lyons also gives its name, so a.s.sociating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in the Provinces, the wine was the _pet.i.t vin gris_ which I never can drink without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France, suns.h.i.+ne, a tandem tricycle or two bicycles, J. and myself perched upon them, and by the way friendly little inns with a good breakfast or dinner waiting, and a big carafe of the pale light wine served with it.

That my dinner was comparatively cheap would at normal times have been for me delightfully in its favour. But that it was the cheapest of all in that week of dinners meant that I came out last in the race when, by every law of justice, I should have been first. In Paris as in London my "greedy column," as my friends called it with the straightforwardness peculiar to friends, had to be written every week for the _Pall Mall_ and mine was the enviable position of finding my copy in eating good dinners no less than in going to the _Salons_. If any one had an irreproachable excuse for extravagant living, it was I.

But even I, with the excuse, could not afford the extravagance--one weekly article did not pay for one cheap dinner for eight--at the _Cabaret Lyonnais_. And as the rest of the party were without the excuse and no better equipped for the extravagance, we never again gave each other dinners on the same lavish scale and rarely on any scale, henceforward ordering them on the principle of what Philadelphia in my youth called "a Jersey treat." I do not say that economy was invariably our rule. We could be, on occasions, so rash that before our week was up we had to begin to count our francs, put by for the boat sandwich and the reluctant tips of the return journey, and eat the last meals of all in the Duval, which, if admirable as a place to economize in, is no more conducive to gaiety than a London A.B.C. shop or Childs's in New York.