It was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, none the less--for I detect myself, as I woo it all back, disengaging a social aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed to my reflective gape or to otherwise a.s.sociated strolls; perceptive pa.s.sages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairs within the charmed circle of Guignol and of Gringalet. I suppose I should have blushed to confess it, but Polichinelle and his puppets, in the afternoons, under an umbrage spa.r.s.e till evening fell, had still their spell to cast--as part and parcel, that is, of the general intensity of animation and variety of feature. The "amus.e.m.e.nt," the aesthetic and human appeal, of Paris had in those days less the air of a great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed less to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, the detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace--character, temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. These scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears--not a little even already for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the season waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that I connect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company of W. J. Again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; Guignol and Gringalet failed to claim his attention, and Mademoiselle Danse, I make out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him perhaps a little of an _ours_--which came to the same thing. We adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in the street then bravely known as the Rue d"Angouleme-St.-Honore and now, after other mutations, as the Rue La Boetie; which we were again to exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this last after a summer"s absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life, among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected in still other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite but respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our ineluctable phase at the Inst.i.tution Fezandie in the Rue Balzac; of which latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom for. With the Rue d"Angouleme came extensions--even the mere immediate view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: our many-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung over the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied.
What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner, for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came the small cremerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secret of its own keeping, afforded, within the compa.s.s of a few feet square, prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked, to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly _bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of the ecaillere or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its sh.e.l.l; neighboured in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat f.a.ggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, are framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. s.p.a.ce and remembrance fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or less aesthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise or ouvriere to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. Which is to say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found them anywhere save in the most salient pa.s.sages of "stories"; though I must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare.
XXV
That autumn renewed, I make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own with W. J. in especial; at the same time that I have somehow the sense of the whole more broken appeal on the part of Paris, the scanter confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. Not indeed--for all my brother"s later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that there was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as I seem to conceive we were) measuring the great s.p.a.ce that separated us from the gallery of the Luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it, fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation to something n.o.bly intended? That particular walk was not prescribed us, yet we appear to have hugged it, across the Champs-Elysees to the river, and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the Rue de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself, to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the finest, which _could_ only mean the most Parisian, adventure. The further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted the long, black Rue de Seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ an intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message, expressed in we couldn"t have said what sinister way too, might have been "Art, art, art, don"t you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what _that_ is!" Oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we could, and were fairly well at it, I always felt, even by the time we had pa.s.sed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of the Rue de Tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to the Palace. Style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing old houses--very much as if wishing to say "Yes, small staring jeune homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of which good things take us--you won"t find one of them when you find (as you"re going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." This, I admit, was an abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, I maintain, tremble in the air, with the sense that the Rue de Tournon, cobbled and a little gra.s.s-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old street _de province_: I cherished in short its very name and think I really hadn"t to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate Cafe Foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted Cafe Foyot of the old Paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. The wide mouth of the present Boulevard Saint-Michel, a short way round the corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less glittering fangs; old Paris still pressed round the Palace and its gardens, which formed the right, the sober social ant.i.thesis to the "elegant" Tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious study of Les Francais Peints par Eux-Memes, rich in wood-cuts of Gavarni, of Grandville, of Henri-Monnier, which we held it rather our duty to admire and W. J. even a little his opportunity to copy in pen-and-ink. This gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was that first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the great name of Balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of his day, contributed to its pages: hadn"t I pored over his exposition there of the contrasted types of L"Habituee des Tuileries and L"Habituee du Luxembourg?--finding it very _serre_, in fact what I didn"t then know enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated by Gavarni"s two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to say.
Let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, I make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the Palace, primarily those of the Senate of the Empire, but then also forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the great Paris museum of contemporary art. This array was at that stage a comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of which fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shocked us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the finality was to break down. Most of the works of the modern schools that we most admired are begging their bread, I fear, from door to door--that is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved state of some of the great things as to which our faith had been clearest. It had been clearer for none, I recover, than for Couture"s Romains de la Decadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised, philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this master"s school that the young American contemporary flutter taught its wings to fly straightest, and that I could never, in the long aftertime, face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush of memories and a stir of ghosts. William Hunt, the New Englander of genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frere; masters in a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau, Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern in the masterly. It was a comfortable time--when appreciation could go so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions; when we could, I mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet." We were in our immediate circle to know Couture himself a little toward the end of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up the aesthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have the designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of it--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean _as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one"s asking one"s self whence they had come and by what romantic or roundabout or n.o.bly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the arts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of the splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger with a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us to divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by what rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour and fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which it contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question of what may happen, under one"s eyes, in particular cases, before that motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really a bribe to one"s own non-departure. Especially great the interest of having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the final point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with the greatest or the least previous alt.i.tudes; since it is only when there have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our attention is most rewarded.
If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eugene Delacroix, our next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother"s than mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an effect of my brother"s sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have been as sure of Paul Delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to be arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all the queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living interest in La Barque du Dante, where the queerness, according to him, was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when he reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph.
Yet Les Enfants d"Edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and I couldn"t doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his violet legs marked by the Garter and dangling from the bed, was a reconst.i.tution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word"
modern or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or anywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless force at play. Thus if I also in my way "subtly" admired, one"s noted practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, I judge, as a vice) would appear to have at the time I refer to set in, under such encouragements, once for all; and I can surely have enjoyed up to then no formal exhibition of anything as I at one of those seasons enjoyed the commemorative show of Delaroche given, soon after his death, in one of the rather bleak salles of the ecole des Beaux-Arts to which access was had from the quay. _There_ was reconst.i.tuted history if one would, in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of Lady Jane Grey--not less than in the n.o.ble indifference of Charles the First, compromised king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as if on his throne, while the Puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that English lore which the good Robert Thompson had, to my responsive delight, rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old conservative and monarchical point of view. Yet of these things W. J.
attempted no reproduction, though I remember his repeatedly laying his hand on Delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--to the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner; and not less in the manner of Decamps, whom we regarded as more or less of a genius of the same rare family. They were touched with the ineffable, the inscrutable, and Delacroix in especial with the incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy transition, begun to yearn and languish. We were not yet aware of style, though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed was one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception, exhibited at the Louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and bewildered me.
It was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; I shall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--they filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and coloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied; which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of experience. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to Style const.i.tuted by the wondrous Galerie d"Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but a.s.sured initiation and seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by little, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. The glory meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the richest and n.o.blest expression. The world there was at the same time, by an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small imagination, of the Second Empire, which was (for my notified consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the whole scene, profiting thus, to one"s dim historic vision, confusedly though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its heritage. But who shall count the sources at which an intense young fancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdly drinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme symbol of the fair or the strange. The Galerie d"Apollon became for years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour, with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life.
The climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for me as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as in unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was, whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound, forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon him by my so surpa.s.sing him for straight aggression and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those of the Galerie d"Apollon of my childhood? The "scene of something" I had vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that immense hallucination.
Of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the Louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally on almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, I more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. The sharp and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me, for myself, I make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all, my brother"s and mine, under conduct of the good Jean Nadali, before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the Rue de la Paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in Paris (July 1855) and while they were otherwise concerned. I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on brave Nadali"s arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendours about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "European"
character: I cling to him while I gape at Gericault"s Radeau de la Meduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be a.s.sociated, along with two or three other more or less contemporary products, Guerin"s Burial of Atala, Prudhon"s Cupid and Psyche, David"s helmetted Romanisms, Madame Vigee-Lebrun"s "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with how can I say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though that description didn"t then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. It came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences, under our courier"s protection and in my brother"s company--it came just there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. The bliss in fact I think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the ma.s.sively enclosed air, that I have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness.
_That_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feel afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. The beginning in short was with Gericault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread; so that one"s stretched, one"s even strained, perceptions, one"s discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. I have dim reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile though I might still be, during which the house of life and the palace of art became so mixed and interchangeable--the Louvre being, under a general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the most hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures would have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo"s moon-borne Madonna, at Leonardo"s almost unholy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the Salon Carre as that display was then composed; but I had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners, types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as I supposed it, though we hadn"t then that perfection of slang, and of (in especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable Seine-side front of the Palace against which young sensibility felt itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the friction of a protective piece of furniture. Such were at any rate some of the vague processes--I see for how utterly vague they must show--of picking up an education; and I was, in spite of the vagueness, so far from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn"t pick one up and that that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an education might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yet didn"t--I was so far dissentient, I say, that I think I quite came to glorify such pa.s.sages and see them as part of an order really fortunate.
If we had been little a.s.ses, I seem to have reasoned, a higher intention driving us wouldn"t have made us less so--to any point worth mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the worst, from redemptive accidents (to call Louvres and Luxembourgs nothing better) why we weren"t little a.s.ses, but something wholly other: which appeared all I needed to contend for. Above all it would have been stupid and ign.o.ble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and disengaging as we happily did, I felt, the gold and the silver ones, whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and not to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. Instinctively, for any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and I positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of the too fine tissue.
XXVI
I allude of course in particular here to the aesthetic clue in general, with which it was that we most (or that I at any rate most) fumbled, without our in the least having then, as I have already noted, any such rare name for it. There were sides on which it fairly dangled about us, involving our small steps and wits; though others too where I could, for my own part, but clutch at it in the void. Our experience of the theatre for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was perceptibly more theatrical. And there were other reasons, whether definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the French drama, great, strange and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so little native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the American and English had been directly addressed to them. To the Cirque d"ete, the Cirque d"Hiver, the Theatre du Cirque we were on occasion conducted--we had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a safety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it, the especial home at that time of the glittering and mult.i.tudinous _feerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes, into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. I recall Le Diable d"Argent as in particular a radiant revelation--kept before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which was quite right for the _donnee_, the gradual shrinkage of the Shining One, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw through a keyhole. That was the striking moral, for the young man, however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn"t in the least been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever this was to be. I was to repine a little, in these connections, at a much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come in for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the richest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised that braver art and finer finish which a comparatively h.o.m.ogenous public, forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive, but dying; the memory of Mademoiselle Mars, at her latest, was still in the air; Mademoiselle Georges, a ma.s.sive, a monstrous antique, had withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we missed Dejazet and Frederic Lemaitre and Melingue and Samson; to say nothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood that actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which I remember to have heard Gustave Flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the a.s.sumption of judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain.
I enjoyed but two s.n.a.t.c.hes of the older representational art--no particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier and rarer of these an evening at the Gymnase for a _spectacle coupe_, with Mesdames Rose Cheri, Melanie, Delaporte and Victoria (afterwards Victoria-La-fontaine). I squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my brother into the stuffy baignoire, and I take to my memory in especial Madame de Girardin"s Une Femme qui Deteste son Mari; the thrilling story, as I judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist husband, during the Revolution, feigns the most Jacobin opinions, represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the more safely concealed in her house. He flattens himself, to almost greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine"s _tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the invading, investigating Terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but successfully baffled, and on the other her n.o.ble relatives, her husband"s mother and sister if I rightly remember, who are not in the secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her, in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. One"s sense of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for others; but I myself trust my vision of Rose Cheri"s fine play just as I trust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd and positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging forehead, somewhat of the form of Rachel"s, for whom the triumphs of produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother"s company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce qui Plait aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success, but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible, I wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than Mademoiselle Fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rival lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fete, a little play within a play, at which we a.s.sist, and in the other to the inside view of an attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a prowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which so pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. Her happier sister, the courted young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most is the exercise of charity.
Then it was I first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage, Mademoiselle Pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later generations, to the Theatre Francais, the span of whose career thus strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in the small _feerie_ or allegory forming M. Ponsard"s second act. She has been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and still indeed much as a juvenile beauty. Not that light circ.u.mstance, however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given all Sardou"s earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when she had pa.s.sed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--not less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou"s Patrie as a bridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of melodrama. The sense, such as it is, that I extract from the pair of modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given various other things, had to be, of the essence. That one thing was the quality, to say nothing of the quant.i.ty, of the actor"s personal resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere starved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, a more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more and more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ the picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the play from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with our immediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does half the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old masterful _a.s.soupliss.e.m.e.nt_ of its victims--who were not the expert spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material suffering for the sake of their pa.s.sion, that, as the suffering was only material, they found the aesthetic reward, the critical relish of the essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of large application. Everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly impatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic and melodramatic "output." It _paid_ apparently, in the golden age of acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--since to a.s.sume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (for which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the patience of the public. With the public the _actors_ were, according to their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as in the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laid on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; not least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All of which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth, the truth that you can"t have more than one kind of intensity--intensity worthy of the name--at once. The intensity of the golden age of the histrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. The intensity of our period is that of the "producer"s" and machinist"s, to which add even that of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind of that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it would appear that you have absolutely to choose.
XXVII
I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of the Inst.i.tution Fezandie, and I see the Inst.i.tution Fezandie, Rue Balzac, in the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet"s lean asylum for the _pet.i.ts pays chauds_, of which I have felt the previous inst.i.tutions of New York sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of which the great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysees flings, at its hours, by its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone." They gather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoy at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big square villa of the Rue Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. Lerambert, an establishment that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most indescribable--or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and touches of Daudet"s best method. The picture indeed should not be invidious--it so little needs that, I feel, for its due measure of the vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to its air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and loose and vague, as confused and embarra.s.sed and helpless; I see it, I fear, as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it played before us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of a sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. It was a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house; which fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with our parents, when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they asked themselves, with their considerable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so many free spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been much interested in the writings of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the "phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that he must have met or in other words heard of M. Fezandie as an active and sympathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only ex-Fourierists by that time,) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not absolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a bold idealism. I like to think of the Inst.i.tution as all but phalansteric--it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary.
I recall this one as positively gay--bristling and bustling and resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne"s co-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almost suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively uniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life, though I question its ident.i.ty--as for a while I tried not to--with the scene itself of the great man"s catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden at all events he would have come and gone--a throb of inference that had for some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an a.s.sociation displacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. I in any case can"t pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especial phase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonly understood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect, the Fezandie phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows, for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its wealth. We were _externes_, the three of us, but we remained in general to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beauty of it all was that the Inst.i.tution was, speaking technically, not more a _pensionnat_, with prevailingly English and American pupils, than a _pension_, with mature beneficiaries of both s.e.xes, and that our two categories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. This had been M. Fezandie"s grand conception; a son of the south, bald and slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rather melancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied herself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how to turn; I see him as a Daudet _meridional_, but of the sensitive, not the sensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather down hill--he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in America--and as ready always again for some new application of faith and funds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particular application in the Rue Balzac--the body of pensioners ranging from infancy to h.o.a.ry eld--shouldn"t have been a bright success could have made it one, it would have been a most original triumph.
I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons." We _had_ lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and gentlemen, young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat at long boards of green cloth with us and with several of our contemporaries, English and American boys, taking _dictees_ from the head of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable M.
Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he above all such a model for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readings aloud to him of the French cla.s.sics older and newer by wondrous reminiscences and even imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a cloud of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impa.s.sioned, though I think alas underfed, M. Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," beyond the first Empire, to the scenes of the Revolution--this perhaps partly by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our p.r.o.nunciation, when we met it, of the sovereign word _liberte_, the poverty of which, our deplorable "libbete," without r"s, he mimicked and derided, sounding the right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r"s, the prolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artistically conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe, cautiously for fear of the _mouchards_ of the tyrant; we knew all about mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or suffragettes--to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious of them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times when he but paced up and down and round the long table--I see him as never seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the _cla.s.se_; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the Moors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouch down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the height of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if on the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he didn"t like the Anglo-Saxon--of the children of Albion at least his view was low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; and this imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested, it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our dest.i.tution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old equalitarian certain accessibilities _quand meme_. Besides, we of the younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence than those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part I seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but I think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. We piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly offensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for there were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual or the "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I remember an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was at the Inst.i.tution little of a staff--besides waiters and bonnes; but it embraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well as M. Bonnefons--M. Mesnard of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among the arts, that didn"t consist of our rolling our r"s, and with them, to help us out, more or less our eyes. It is significant that this elegant branch is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mesnard, in fine, as no less modern and cheap than M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. He had nevertheless given me his attention, one morning, doubtless patiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the moment practically to ourselves--I seem to see a small empty room looking on the garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by Madame Fezandie, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me, a pupil newly arrived. I remember of him mainly that he had a sort of nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoa.r.s.e voice with which French children used to excite our wonder. M. Mesnard asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his p.r.o.nouncing it sought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of M.
a.r.s.ene Houssaye, lately director of the Theatre Francais. To this distinction the boy confessed--all to such intensification of our repet.i.teur"s interest that I knew myself quite dropped, in comparison, from his scheme of things. Such an origin as our little visitor"s affected him visibly as dazzling, and I felt justified after a while, in stealing away into the shade. The beautiful little boy was to live to be the late M. Henry Houssaye, the shining h.e.l.lenist and historian. I have never forgotten the ecstasy of hope in M. Mesnard"s question--as a light on the reverence then entertained for the inst.i.tution M. Houssaye the elder had administered.
XXVIII
There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection, a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the _beaux jours_ of the Inst.i.tution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconst.i.tute, that the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber the candid _jeunesse_; so that I wonder by the same token on what theory of the Castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, M.
Houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn taken--and quite in spite of the high Fezandie ideals--by the _invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the a.s.similation of no form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which our good princ.i.p.al may well have first drawn his liveliest rea.s.surance: I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in especial and such odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or "cut," no suggested application at all as garments--application, that is, to anything in the nature of character or circ.u.mstance, function or position--gathered about in the groups that M. Bonnefons almost terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any approach to his view of the great principle of Diction. I remember deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; I remember above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature _wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional s.p.a.ces, no imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed of the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of the alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman.
The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which might easily have been p.r.o.nounced profitless, with their attendant impressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did, harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might still have hung about there--I mean on the very spot--from the vital presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The Pension Vauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le Pere Goriot, on the other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, const.i.tuents of the Pension Fezandie. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity, of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air, to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough I should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate meanwhile to think of the Fezandie young men, young Englishmen mostly, who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what I supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic, commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn"t altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such as might naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of poor old Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandie himself, they spoke more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served to us at dejeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my brothers and I didn"t partake) but as rotten. These were expressions, absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward stirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have now begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general outward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroad took place. The Fezandie young men were as much abroad as might be, and yet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence, all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingest creatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending the Champs-Elysees with fine long strides and in the costume of the period, for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," the fact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother or my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the spark of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for adventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a general thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but I recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I had accompanied my mother to the Hotel Meurice, where one of the New York cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles--that is of the Rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, so incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of fate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d"Angouleme had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might have made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the whole impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering _vitrines_ about the poor Pendletons" bereavement, their loss of their only, their so st.u.r.dily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which I find my recall of Paris from those years so disproportionately and so quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is simply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of the great bazaar (of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as I at least esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed in his step, a.s.surance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly to _be_ on the way. He gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a grand big-boy good-humour that--as I remember from childhood the so frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most overlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent to the difference. As if he cared, or could have, that I but went forth through the Paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! Of such shreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young sensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it) rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful and every shred seems tangled with another.
Gertrude Pendleton"s mere name, for instance, becomes, and very preferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to it cognate a.s.sociations, those of that element of the New York cousinship which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as it were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"--which preference, during the period of the Rue d"Angouleme and the Rue Montaigne, we wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the inimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over; a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encircling walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my own whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently I discriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of their enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ of the Rue-St.-Honore, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes and looking almost straight across to the British Emba.s.sy; rather a low premier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as if to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe, to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--to one"s greater a.s.sault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption, say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate and other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something for one"s developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins" inbred ease, from far back, in all such a.s.sumable relations; and of how, four of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and a hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at the Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so great didn"t perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe (that of the Lord"s day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries.
But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New York cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember to have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow me, when I was otherwise allowed, to partic.i.p.ate: health-giving walks, of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulous rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement herself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our shepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity, our