And sparks of originality gleamed here and there; the passion 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 nobody 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-fashioned. 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 illustrated 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 hoardings could accommodate.

And the Sculpture court was not the accustomed chill waste, dreary as the yard crowded with marble tombstones. If nobody 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 brimming 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, assured 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 butter 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 butter to lead to indiscretion, and nothing more elaborate was served than a sandwich or a brioche, a cup of coffee or the glass 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 classic 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.



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, nobody 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-cushioned 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 classical Paris restaurant, and assured us beforehand of a good dinner and a price in keeping. That we ate asparagus from Argenteuil and petites 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 astonishing 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 assuredly 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 multitude.

Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparnasse, 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 Cheshire 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 passed 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 banal as I look back to it, for fashion 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 assurance 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 associating itself forever with the perfume of the onion. And, as in the Provinces, the wine was the petit vin gris which I never can drink without a vision of the straight, white, poplar-lined roads of France, sunshine, 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. Once we were so reduced that at noon I was left to a lonely brioche at the Salon, and the men went to breakfast at the nearest cabman's eating-house, where they made the sensation of their lives, without meaning to and without finding in it any special compensation. The most respectable of the respectable architectural group of our Thursday nights was of the party and where he went the top hat and frock coat, in which I used to think he must have been born, went too. If his fashion-plate correctness—men wore frock coats then—made him conspicuous at our Thursday nights it can be imagined what he was sitting with his coat tails in the gutter at the cabman's table where the glazed hat and the three-caped coat of the Paris cocher set the fashion. He had the grace to be ashamed of himself, often apologizing for his clothes and assuring us that he could not help himself, which was his reason, I fancy, for accepting at an early age the professorial chair where the decorum of his hat and coat was in need of no apology.

IV

I have said we were young. It seems superfluous to add that now and then, in the sunshine of the perfect May day, with the call of the lilacs and the horse-chestnuts getting into our heads as well as into my copy, the Salon grew stuffy beyond endurance, work became a crime, and we put up our catalogues and note-books before the closing hour and hurried anywhere just to be out-of-doors, as if our sole profession in life was to idle it away. After all, only the prig can be in Paris when May is there and not play truant sometimes.

The year Paris chose our week to show how hot it can be in May when it has a mind to, was the year I got to learn something of the Paris suburbs. The joyous expedition which ended our every day that year was so in the spirit of Harland that I should be inclined to look upon him as the tempter, had we not, with the usual amiability of the tempted, met him more than half way. Still, he excelled us all in the knack of collecting us from our work, no matter how it had scattered us or in what quarter of the town we might be, and carrying us off suddenly out of it in directions we none of us had dreamed of the minute before, just as he would collect and carry us off suddenly in London. Only, he was more resourceful in Paris because in Paris more resources were made to his hand. There are as beautiful places round London—that is, beautiful in the English way—as round Paris, but they do not invite to a holiday with the charm no sensible man can resist. The loveliness of Hampton Court and Richmond and Hampstead Heath and the River is not to be denied and yet, gay as the English playing there manage to look, the only genuine gaiety is the Bank Holiday maker's. Tradition consecrates the loveliness bordering upon Paris to the gaiety to which Gavarni and Muerger are the most sympathetic guides, and none could have been more to Harland's fancy. He was very like his own favourite heroes, or I ought to say his own favourite heroes were very like him. For it is Harland who talks through his own pages with his own charming fantastic blend of philosophy and nonsense, Harland who refuses to believe in an age of prose and prudence, Harland who is determined to see the romance, the squalor, the pageantry, the humour of this jumble-show of a world, not merely at ease from the stalls, but struggling with the principal role on the stage, or prompting from behind the scenes. When he was bent upon leading us to the same near, inside, part in the spectacle, it was extraordinary how, as if by inspiration, he always hit upon the right expedition for the time of the year and the mood of the moment.

I remember the afternoon he said St. Cloud it seemed as inevitable that we must go there as if St. Cloud had been our one thought all day long, the evening reward promised for our day's labour; just as on the boat steaming down the Seine and in the park wandering under the trees and among the ruins, I felt that the afternoon was the one of all others predestined for our delight there. The beauty provided by St. Cloud and the mood we brought for its enjoyment met at the hour appointed from all eternity.

Artists, it is supposed, and not without reason, are trained to see beauty more clearly and therefore to feel it more acutely than other people. But my long experience has taught me that it is the lover of beauty who can dare to be flippant in the face of it, just as it is the devout who can afford to talk familiarly of holy things. Besides, artists work so hard that they have the sense to know how important it is to be foolish at the right time. That is the secret of all the delicious absurdities of what the French called the Vie de Boheme until the outsider who did not understand made a tiresome cliche of it. The right time for our folly we felt was the golden May evening and the right place a beautiful Paris suburb, time and place consecrated to folly by generations of artists and students. Below us, at St. Cloud, stretched the wide beautiful French landscape, with its classical symmetry and its note of sadness, in the pure clear light of France, the Seine winding through it towards Paris; round us was the park as classical in its lines and masses, and with its note of sadness the stronger because of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect, an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who passed by chance looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries, at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.

Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he knew everything.

We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the Vernissage in the New Salon. I think he had planned the dramatic effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and art demanded of him. He was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey Suede gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring Vernissage crowd with the clou of the year's New Salon: that portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the unbecoming if fashion decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places with anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the cher maitre et president strolled into the restaurant at the supreme moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their attention and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon, and got.

It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it was simply because he was still young enough to believe nobody had ever been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "Apres vous, madame! Apres vous, monsieur!" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his first glass of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he thought about les vieux and their stultifying observance of worn-out laws and principles.

That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it, became ponderously patriarchal, hoary with convention. In point of years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his age according to the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the character or pose he assumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state, at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new role, he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age, so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.

The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peacock at a cafe in the Bois, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a severity, a solemnity, that alarms me. Their inability to take themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, but it struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us, accessories to the crime, was the fact that the cake stuck, a conspicuous lump, in the peacock's conspicuous throat. For what seemed hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But the peacock was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.

There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which, had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in the art and occupation of shocking the bourgeois. We had been tempted and had yielded as unreservedly as the peacock, with the difference that our temptation took the form of the sunshine and the convenience of the train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such sunshine out-of-doors could stay shut up in the Salon and a train was ready at St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.

Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from the grey palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the dead past blot out the new life rekindling—to give its chill to the young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a holiday—to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive, just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.

I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the National Observer. The chances are we were talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.

We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park, alone in the alleys and avenues, alone in the gardens,—and the palace and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the sunshine. But such good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, harassed, conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of, pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as, after a fashion, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning—the same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove Hugo to writing his Hernani, and Gautier to wearing his red waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of shocking the bourgeois. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the bourgeois in our own fashion or, to be exact, in Furse's fashion. He was then blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club, from whom an attitude of general defiance was required. He raged and raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideous blot on the landscape, that the guide-books were disgracefully out of tone, that it was unbearable and he wasn't going to bear it, and by his sudden satisfied smile I saw he had found out how not to. As the school-ma'ams came within earshot:

"It's beastly hot," he boomed to us, "what do you say to a swim?"

And he took off his coat, he took off his waistcoat, he took off his necktie, he unbuttoned his collar,—but already the school-ma'ams had scuttled away, the more daring glancing back once or twice as they went, their dismay tempered by curiosity.

Furse was pleased as a child over his success, vowed he was ready for all the tourists impudent enough to think they had a right to share Versailles with us, and, when a group of Germans talked their guttural way towards us, he had us all down on our knees, before we knew it, nibbling at the grass like so many Nebuchadnezzars escaped from Charenton—an amazing sight that brought the chorus of "Colossals" to an abrupt stop, and sent the Germans flying.

It may be objected that we were behaving in a fashion that children would be sent to bed without any supper for, that it was worse than childish to take pleasure in shocking innocent tourists much better behaved than ourselves. But there wasn't any pleasure in it. If we set out to shock them, it was to get rid of them, that was all we wanted, and it made me see that the succession of young rebels who have loved to epater le bourgeois never wanted anything more either—except the self-conscious young rebels who play at rebellion because they fancy it the surest and quickest way "to arrive."

It is less easy to say why a beautiful day at Versailles should have sent us back to Paris singing American songs—or to give credit, if credit is due, it was the rest of the party who returned to the music of their own voices; I, who to my sorrow cannot as much as turn a tune, never am so imprudent as to raise my voice in song and so add my discord to any singing in public or in private. Had they been heard above the noise of the train, the explanation of those who saw us when we got to St. Lazare probably would have been that we were a company of nigger minstrels. By accident, or sheer inattention, when we climbed upstairs on the double-decked suburban train, we chose the car just behind the locomotive and memory has not cleaned away the black that covered our faces when we climbed down again.

It was all very foolish—and no less foolish were the afternoons in the depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of Saint-Germain—no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris, "the enchanted city with its charming smile for youth,"—that once I believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of his books.

V

The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however gay the sunshine and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great hardship not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in the Salon until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs. It was an amusement simply to drink our coffee in front of a cafe, to go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere, but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the Paris streets.

I had got my initiation into cafe life that first year in Italy and had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening taught me the difference between the country where there is a cafe to pass an hour in over a glass of coffee after dinner, and England where choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a cafe; the Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.

"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't bothered by people."

But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more so if the background is the Street of a French or an Italian town.

Some nights we went to the Cafe de la Paix on the Rive Droite; other nights, to the Cafe d'Harcourt on the Rive Gauche; and occasionally to the Cafe de la Regence where many artists went, especially foreign artists, and more especially Scandinavians. I seem to retain a vision of Thaulow, a blond giant more than fitting in the corner of the little raised enclosure in the front of the cafe. My one other recollection is of a story I heard there, though of the painter who told it I can recall only that he was a Belgian. If I recall the story so well, it must be because it struck me at the time as characteristic and in memory became forever after associated with the little open space I was looking over to as I listened, amused and interested, while the flower women pushed past their barrows piled high with the big round bunches of budding lilies-of-the-valley you see nowhere save in Paris. It is impossible for me to think of the cafe without thinking of the little Place, nor of the little Place without at once hearing again the artist's voice lingering joyfully over the adventures of his youth.

The story was one of a kind I had often listened to at the Nazionale in Rome and the Orientale in Venice—a story of student days—a story of two young painters coming to Paris in their first ripe enthusiasm, with devotion to squander upon the masters, upon none more lavishly than upon Jules Breton, which explains what ages ago it was and how young they must have been. They were at the Salon, standing in silent worship before Breton's peasant woman with a scythe against a garish sunset, when they heard behind them an adoring voice saying the things they were thinking to one they knew must be the cher maitre himself, and they felt if they could once shake his hand life could hold no higher happiness. The worship of the young is pleasant to the old. Breton let them shake his hand and, more, he kept them at his side until his visit to the Salon was finished, and then sent them away walking on air. They were leaving the next day. In the morning they went to the Rue de Rivoli to buy toys to take home to their little brothers and sisters, and one selected a dog and the other a mill, and when wound up the dog played the drum and cymbals and the mill turned its wheel and, children themselves, they were ravished and would not have the toys wrapped up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in the Avenue de l'Opera to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning, who should come towards them but the cher Maitre. It was too late to run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their mortification—they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.

"Tiens," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"

Cannot you see the little comedy,—the fine old prophet with the red ribbon in his button-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the Avenue de l'Opera, and not a passer-by troubling to look because it was Paris where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to worship at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the sunset.

One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Puree, and many another poet for all time and celebrity for the day, in the cafes where they waited to be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when the cafe they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with so much else London was labelling fin-de-siecle. To have met them, to be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what, their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on, and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these lions to their lair. However, at least one of our party had better luck when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight with the Reine de Golconde on his arm, walking down the Boul' Mich' at the head of a band of poets.

Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and the subject as announced was "Contemporary French Poetry," and through all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below, a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing, Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically could write the verse I had loved ever since his Romances sans Paroles first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in Tchekhof's play—so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and his photograph in shop windows—whose crime was to condescend to fish and to be pleased when he caught something.

VI

The Nineties would not let us off from another entertainment as characteristic—as fin-de-siecle, the Englishman under the impression that he knew his Paris would have classified it—nor did we want to be let off, though it lured us indoors.

The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw up hands of horror and say what an immoral place it was.

Once or twice we tried the out-door Cafe-Chantant, and we heard Paulus in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.

Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the Folies-Bergere which cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up and down the Boulevards of the Rive Gauche in pursuit of its poets, sent us to the Casino de Paris and the Moulin Rouge. But a first visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not have missed the Casino if only for the imperishable memory of the most solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the Moulin Rouge for another memory as imperishable of the most socially pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge calculated to epater le bourgeois at home, referring by name with easy familiarity to the dancers in the Quadrille Naturaliste, as celebrated in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining solemnly the chahut and the grand ecart and le port d'armes and every evolution in that unpleasant dance. How it brought it all back to me the other day when I found in The Gypsy—the direct but belated offspring of The Savoy—a poem to Nini-patte-en-l'air. And does anybody now know or care who Nini-patte-en-l'air was? Or who La Goulue and the rest? Would anybody now go a step to see the Quadrille were any graceless acrobats left to dance it? These things belonged to the lightest of light fashions that passed with the Nineties, and the Moulin Rouge itself could burn down to the ground a few months ago and hardly a voice be heard in lament or reminiscence. Upon such rapidly shifting sands did the young would-be revolutionaries of London build their House of Decadence.

The entertainment worth the exchange of the pure May night for a smoke-laden, stuffy interior was in none of these places. Where we looked for it—and found it—was in the little cafe or cabaret—the cabaret artistique as it was then known in Paris—with a flair for the genius the world is so long in discovering, where the young poet read his verses, the young musician interpreted his music, the young artist showed his work in any manner the chance was given him to, to say nothing of the posters he sometimes designed for it and decorated Paris with: theatre and performance and advertisement impossible in any other town or any other atmosphere. London is too clumsy. Berlin is too ponderous, New York has not the right material home-grown, and the spirit of the original dies in the self-conscious imitation. Even in Paris a Baedeker star is its death-blow, the private guide's attention spells immediate ruin, nor can it survive more legitimate honours at home when they come. Like most good things it has its times and its seasons, and it was in the Nineties it gave forth its finest blossoms. We knew it was a pleasure to be snatched this year, for next who could say where it might be, and we set out to snatch it with the same diligence we had devoted one spring to eating dinners and another to playing in the suburbs, though we could make no pretence in a week to exhaust it.

Night after night we dined, we drank our coffee at the nearest cafe, we scrambled to the top of the big omnibus with the three white horses, now as dead as the performance it was taking us to, we journeyed across Paris to see or to hear the work of the young genius on the threshold of fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt the need—as we never did—of a reason for our eagerness, we might have had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a cabaret of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance known as a Revue, which is all the vogue just now in the London music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall Revue and the old Cabaret performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.

If one night the end of the journey was the Treteau de Tabarin—the hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and recited and sang the chansons rosses that "all Paris" flocked there to hear—it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in the centre of the sculpture court at the New Salon, and the summing up was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter because the wit was so fine.

A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for the Chat Noir. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the cafe and the drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room upstairs, was by the men over whose work we had been arguing all day at the Salon and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and bookshops on the way back.

To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by decorating its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!

But Salis,—the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the Chat Noir, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his cafe by letting poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny—some of them, Maurice Donnay for one—as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least two—Charpentier and Debussy—were afterwards to reach; and by allowing the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in black-and-white, the Ombres Chinoises that were the crowning glory of the night's performance. From days in the Salons, from the illustrated papers and magazines and books we filled our bags with to take back to London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and Caran d'Ache and Riviere and Louis Morin until we had seen also The Prodigal Son, The March of the Stars, and all the stories they told in those dramatic silhouettes—those marvellous little black figures, cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as to give the swing and the movement and the passing of great armies until one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call, or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the Chat Noir was gone, and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his artist, young,—that is where he scored.

It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show because it was not of that side of the Chat Noir I had heard most. Its British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send her young hero from the English provinces to the Chat Noir in the course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the Chat Noir, refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade—"I never liked smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but firmly, showing her the door.

A third night, and I do not know that it was not the most amusing, the end of our journey was Bruant's Cabaret du Mirliton, in the remote Boulevard Rochechouart. I daresay there was not one of us who did not own a copy of Bruant's Dans la Rue, but we had bought it less because of his verses—some of us had not read a line of them—than because of Steinlen's illustrations, and I can still hear Harland upbraiding us for our literary indifference and urging it as a duty that we should not only read Bruant's songs, but go at once to hear him sing them. Harland had the provoking talent of looking as if his stories were the last thing he was bothering about, as if he was too busy enjoying the spectacle of life to think of work, when he was really working as hard as the hardest-working of us all. And as it was not very long after that his Mademoiselle Miss appeared, I have an idea that he hurried us off to Bruant's not solely to improve our literary taste, but quite as much to collect incidents for that gay little tale.



Bruant ran the Mirliton on the principle that the less easily pleasure is come by, the more it will be prized. There was no walking in as at the ordinary cafe, no paying for admission as upstairs at the Chat Noir. Instead, it amused him to keep people who wanted to get in standing outside his door while he examined them through a little grille, an amusement which, in our case, he prolonged until I was sure he did not like our looks and would send us away, and that the reason was the responsibility he laid upon us all for the frock coat and top hat which the Architect could never manage to keep out of sight, skulk as he might in the background. But, of course, Bruant had no intention of sending us away and he kept up his little farce only to the point where our disappointment was on the verge of turning into impatience. It simply meant that he did not hold to the hail-fellow-well-met free-and-easiness which was the pose of Salis at the Chat Noir, but, at the Mirliton, was all for ceremony and dramatic effect. At the psychological moment he opened the door himself, a splendid creature, half brigand, half Breton peasant, in brown corduroy jacket and knee-breeches, high boots, red silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, big wide-brimmed hat on the back of his head, the passing pose of a poet who, I am told, rejoiced to give it up for a costume fitted to the more congenial pastime of raising potatoes. To have seen Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of him and his Cabaret was to recognize him at a glance.

To the noise of a strident chorus in choice argot, which I was told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into his cafe. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge Mirliton hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at the Carnavalet by the side of the sign of the Chat Noir. When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of the Quartier Latin, a petit piou-piou or so, two or three stray workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt to classify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.

It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome face as he strode up and down his cafe-museum, for the striding, it seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician—her name was not Mademoiselle Miss—and when she discovered what was the matter, and why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to her, he sang us his St. Lazare and La Soularde, all the while striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle Miss back to us, ordered bocks for her, for me—the only other woman at our table—and for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our glasses in the fashion approved of at the Mirliton.

So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the most of it—I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually, as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his cafe, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the sense to know that, as we had come to the Mirliton of our own free will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to show our press ticket at the Salon turnstile, or to give up our umbrellas at the door of the Louvre, or to question the regulations of any other place in Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve matters?

It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in. We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however, could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony. Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized our embarrassment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his gratitude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed hat—the only time that night—and to bow us out into the darkness of the Boulevard Rochechouart.

Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at the Mirliton by eating supper at the Rat Mort. It was an experience I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the Casino de Paris and the Moulin Rouge. As light and satisfying a supper could have been eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art entered into the entertainment as at the Chat Noir and Bruant's. Vice was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the Nouvelle Athenes scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point of view.

Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the Rat Mort, in the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it crawled down one of the steep streets from Montmartre there was a creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round, made a pitiful tale of le pauvr' cocher and his hungry wife and children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the cocher with an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The cocher, the least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft, clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and disappeared into the night. A sergent-de-ville, who had been looking on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, cet animal la was in luck and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such generosity. Allez! Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present—Voila tout!

And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent streets between Montmartre and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end.

VII

In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted, resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.

Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac rez-de-chaussee opening upon the spacious garden where, in the twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days—nights in the dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre, many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other, always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them, witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;—nights in the blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel, and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it—nights that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in them lives to remember;—Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Theodore Duret who had been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris, as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them is told.

And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who studied and worked and lived in Paris—nights that have bequeathed to me the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases, and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a friendly war of words—nights with men irrevocably in the movement, whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New Salon and had probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and writing voluminous notes in our note-books—nights not the least stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids me to tell the tale.

And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St. Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed swallowed up in the International Society's business—not the International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation—J. included in it—to collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the Salons for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working in Paris—a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.

And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into American nights—nights with old friends, established there or passing through and run across by chance—nights of joy in being with my own people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone—the zone where Silence is Golden.

VIII

I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its galleries, no Salon has opened to take me there in the springtime. With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the old beauty and fragrance along the Champs-Elysees outside the Grand Palais, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut fast the Salon door means the end of the old order of things in the Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over it by night at a cafe table, or in the peaceful twilight of the suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with the past I had in the Salon, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say at the moment of my writing, when the echo of shells and bullets is thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new occupation.



INDEX

Abbey, Edwin A., 54

Addiscombe, Henley's house at, 137, 145, 149

"Admiral Guinea," by Henley, 147

Albano, 66

Albergo del Sole, Pompeii, 67

"Allahakbarries," 214, 215

Aman-Jean, E., 261

American Consul at Venice, 86

American tourists, 91

American visitors, 221

Anthony, Venice, 97

Antica Panada, 76

"Arabian Nights' Entertainment," by Henley, 132

Arnold, at Venice, 86, 87

"Arrangement in Trousers," 96

Arrested, 29

Art critics in Paris, 227-229

Artists in Rome, 44-64

"Art Journal," London, 129

"Art Weekly," London, 202

"Association Books," 214

Astor, William Waldorf, 152, 153

"Atlantic Monthly," 83, 96

Augustine (Mme. Bertin), 218

Austen, Louis, 174

Ballantyne & Co., 125

Barnes, Henley's house at, 149

Barrie, J.M., 148, 214

Baseball, 87, 88

Bauer's, at Venice, 107

Beardsley, Aubrey, 138, 177-191, 197, 211, 228, 260-264

Beardsley's illness, 190

Beaux-Arts, Paris, 47

Beerbohm, Max, 185, 187

Befana Night, 66

Beggarstaff Brothers, 194

Belgian exiles, 222

Belgium, 17

Beraud, Jean, 239

Bibi-la-Puree, 276, 281

Bicycle, 17, 32, 254

Bisbing, Henry S., 102

Black magic, 89

Black and white at the Salons, 239

Blackburn, Vernon, 152

Blakie, W.B., 148

Blanche, J.E., 261

"Blast, The," 176

"Bodley Head," 187

Boer War, 219

Borghese, The, 29

"Boys, The," at Venice, 84, 88, 93, 95, 96, 102

Breton, Jules, 274

Bridge of Sighs, Venice, 75

Brillat-Savarin, 245

British Museum, 65

Bronsons, the, at Venice, 98

Brown, Horatio, at Venice, 98

Brown, Professor Fred, 203

Bruant, Aristide, 289-295

Buckingham Street, our rooms in, 117, 121, 125, 126, 129-223, 142, 158, 161, 172, 174, 179, 199, 220, 260

Buhot, Felix, 120, 199, 203

Bunney at Venice, 92

Burano, 111

Burlington House, 228

Burly, Stevenson's, 134

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 178

Bussy, Simon, 127

"Butterfly," the, 177, 198

Cabaret du Mirliton, Paris, 289, 295 Lyonnais, Paris, 252, 254

Cafe d'Harcourt, Paris, 273 de la Paix, Paris, 273 de la Regence, Paris, 273 de Venise, Rome, 41 Nazionale Aragno, Rome, 41, 43, 49, 52, 67, 121, 274 Orientale, Venice, 76, 82-97, 107, 113, 121, 274 Royal, London, 121, 176, 208

Cafes at Rome, 34, 40-44 at Venice, 76-113

Calcino, Venice, 77

Campagna, the, 33, 35, 65

Campanile, the, Venice, 75

Canaletto, 100

"Captain's Girl," 214

Carlyle, Thomas, 54

Carnavalet Museum, 285, 292

Carolus-Duran, 261

Carpaccio, 94

Casa Kirsch, Venice, 73, 74, 75,77

Casino de Paris, 280, 296

Cavour, the, Rome, 38, 43

Cazin, C., 262

Cezanne, Paul, 248, 249

Chamberlain, Dr., 62

Champ de Mars, 234

Champs-Elysees, 227, 243, 302

Chantrey bequest, 119

Charles V ball, at Munich, 105

Charpentier, E., 286

Chat Noir, the, Paris, 285-291

Cheret, Jules, 240

Cheshire Cheese, the, London, 38

Chioggia, 111

"Chronicle of Friendships," by Will Low, 165

Church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, 94

Cleopatra's Needle, 147

Clothes, 31-32, 44, 57, 76, 98, 123, 185, 193-194, 207, 255, 260, 261

Cole, Timothy, 221

Coleman at Rome, 61

Conder, Charles, 203, 241

Coney Island, 110

Constable, T. and A., 213

Cook, Clarence, 63

Cookery, the Author's articles on, 142, 149, 158, 186

Cooking books, 245

Corder, Rosa, 237

Cornford, Cope, 128

"Courrier Francais," Paris, 203

Covent Garden, 125

Crane, Walter, 138, 204

Crawford, Marion, 60

Crockett, S.R., 157

Cubists, the, 248

Cust, Henry, 153

D'Ache, Caran, 240, 287

"Daily Chronicle," the, London, 170, 173, 174

"Daily News," London, 41

Davies, 59, 112

Dayrolles, Adrienne (Mrs. W.J. Fisher), 174

Debussy, Achille Claude, 286

Degas, H.G.E., 119, 296

Desboutin, 296

"Dial, The," London, 177

Dinners in Paris, 244-247

"Diogenes of London," 215

Discussions over art, 46-65

Dodge, Miss Louise, 65, 159

"Dome," the, London, 177

Donnay, Maurice, 286

Donoghue the sculptor, 48-49, 50, 53

Dowie, Menie Muriel, 185

Drouet, C., 300

Ducal Palace, Venice, 75, 100

Duclaux, Madame, 129

Dumas's Dictionnaire de la Cuisine, 149, 245

Duret, Theodore, 300

Duveneck, Frank, 76-108

Edelfelt, 239

Eighteen-eighties, 27-114

Eighteen-nineties, 115-304 Their so-called decadence, 118

English tourists, 92

Etty, William, 123

"Evergreen," the, London, 177

Falcone, the, Rome, 37, 38, 43

Fig-Tree House, 130

Fighting nineties, 118

Finck, Henry T., 245

"Finsbury, Michael," 131, 132

Fisher, W.J., 174

Fitzgerald, Edward, 62

Flaubert, Gustave, 173

Florence, 29, 74, 84, 97

Florian's, Venice, 77, 82, 99

Florizel, Prince, 163, 168, 173, 232

Folies-Bergere, Paris, 280

Fontainebleau, Forest of, 271

Forain, 203, 240

"Forepaugh," 52-56, 89

Frederic, Harold, 156, 214, 215

Furse, Charles W., 200, 201, 211, 228, 269, 270

Futurists, the, 248

Garnett, Dr. Edward, 65

Gauguin, 249

Gautier, Theophile, 268

Gavarni, 257

"Gazette, Pall Mall," 153

"Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The," 85, 217

"Germ, The," 176

German tourists, 77, 270

Germany, 17

Ghetto, Rome, 30

Gigi, 53

Gosse, Edmund, 174, 188

Goupil Gallery, London, 119

Graefe, Meier, 204

Grahame, Kenneth, 148, 185, 213

Grand Palais, Paris, 302

"Graphic," the, London, 203

Great College Street office, Henley's, 130-137, 139, 149

"Greedy Autolycus," 186, 254

Guardi, 100

Guilbert, Yvette, 280

"Gypsy, The," 176, 281

Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 188

Hamilton, Lord Frederick, 153

Harland, Henry, 160, 172-177, 197, 211, 228, 257, 258, 264, 265, 266, 290-294, 297

Harrison, Alexander, 250

Harte, Bret, 51

Hartrick and Sullivan, 196, 198, 222

Henley, Madge, 214

Henley, William Ernest, 118, 125-149, 163, 166, 196, 197, 211, 213, 240

Henley's "Young Men," 125, 133, 134, 142, 145, 149, 150, 176, 179, 196, 213, 214

Hill, L. Raven, 198

Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs. Cragie), 185

"Hobby-horse," the, 176

Horne, Herbert P., 278

"Hospital Verses," 126, 147

Hostess, author as, 126, 198

Hotel de l'Univers et Portugal, Paris, 233 d'Italie, London, 185, 187

Howells, William Dean, 83, 109

Hueffer, Ford Madox, 209

Hugo, Victor, 268

Hunt, Holman, 204, 239

Hunt, Violet, 158

Huysmans, Joris Karl, 89, 238

Ibsen, 199, 251

Impressionism, 238

Indolence, 22, 60, 84, 86, 108, 112, 122

"Inland Voyage, An," 165

International Exhibitions, 19

International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, 301

Italian Primitives, 204

Italy, 17, 29

Iwan-Mueller, 154, 211

"J—" (Joseph Pennell), 13, 20, 24, 29, 40, 44, 45, 53, 73, 81, 85, 91, 98, 108, 113, 117, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130, 137, 154, 161, 174, 178, 179, 184, 204, 205, 210, 214, 217, 227, 228, 245, 254, 301

James, Henry, 188

Japanese art, 178

Jobbins, 90, 95, 111

Journalism, 19, 117, 228-229

Journeyings in Europe, 15-19

Kelly, FitzMaurice, 148

Kelmscott Press, 178, 213

Kennedy, E.G., 218, 219

Kensington Gardens, London, 52, 176

Khayyam, Omar, 62, 63

Khnopf, 240

Kipling, Rudyard, 148, 213

Kitchener, Lord, 155

La Perouse, Paris, 247

Lagoon, the, Venice, 77, 107, 111, 112

Lamb, Charles, 22

"Land of the Dollar," 215

Lane, John, 185, 187

Lang, Andrew, 41, 63

"Lantern Bearers, The," 165, 173

Latin Quarter, 194

Lavenue's, Paris, 249

Le Puy, 18

Legge, James G., 159

Legrand, Louis, 203, 240

Leighton, Lord, 195

Leland, Charles Godfrey, 20, 56

Lhermitte, 239

Lido, the, 76, 88, 112

London, 38, 115-223, 253

"London Impressionists," 199

"London Voluntaries," by Henley, 147

Low, Will, 165

Lucca, 74

Luska, Sydney (Henry Harland), 173

Luxembourg, Paris, 103

MacColl, D.S., 201, 227, 241

"Mademoiselle Miss," 290, 294, 296

"Magazine of Art," London, 129

Manet, Edouard, 249, 280

Margherita, Queen, 66

Marguery's, Paris, 250

Marino, 66

Marriott-Watson, Rosamund, 157

Martin, at Venice, 86

May, Phil, 191-199, 211, 222

McFarlane, Venice, 97, 98, 100, 106, 107

Meissonier, J.L.E., 236

Merceria, the, Venice, 99

Meynell, Mrs. Alice, 158, 159

Millet, F.D., 54

Mistral, 65

Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 142

Monet, Claude, 238

Montepulciano, 42

Montmartre, 297

Moore, George, 159, 185, 215, 229

Morelli, 46

Morin, Louis, 287

Morris, William, 209

Morrison, Arthur, 148, 213

"Morte d'Arthur," illustrated by Beardsley, 178

Moulin Rouge, 280, 281, 296

Munich, 84, 97, 98, 102 Accident at ball, 105

Murano, 111

Muerger, Henri, 257

Music of "Carmen," the, 106

Naples, 66, 67, 74, 110

"Nation," the, London, 228, 229

"National Observer," London, 125, 128, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 151, 155, 157, 211, 214, 229, 267

New English Art Club, London, 119, 199, 200, 201, 269

New Gallery, 227

New York "Times," 156

Nicholson, William, 127, 128, 194

Norman, Henry, 159

Norwegian at Rome, the, 60

Nouvelle Athenes, the, Paris, 249

"Observations in Philistia," by Harold Frederic, 156

Orvieto, 74

Ostia, 66

Oulevey, H., 300

"Pageant," the, London, 177

Palais Royal, 243

Pall-Mall, the, "Budget," "Gazette" and "Magazine," 142, 149, 152, 155, 161, 186, 227, 254

"Pan," London, 204.

Panada, the, Venice, 78-82

Paris, 19, 227-303 Studios, 102-103

"Parson and the Painter, The," 197

Parsons, Harold, 152

Paulus, 280

"Penn, William," 123, 157, 185

Philadelphia, 13, 23, 34, 37, 40, 50, 64, 137, 242, 255

Piazza Navona, Rome, 66

"Pick-me-up," 198

Pincian, the, Rome, 33, 59

Pisa, 74

Pistoia, 74

Pointillism, 238

Pollock, Wilfred, 152

Pompeii, 67

Porta del Popolo, Rome, 29

"Portfolio, The," 59

Posta, the, Rome, 43

Post-impressionism, 204, 248

Pre-Raphaelitism, 204, 207

Preston, Miss Harriet Waters, 65, 159

"Private Life of the Romans," 65

Prunier's, Paris, 252

Pryde, James, 194

Pulcinello, 67-69

"Punch," 213

"Rape of the Lock," illustrated by Beardsley, 182, 213

Rat Mort, Paris, 296

Renouard, Paul, 203

"Return of the O'Mahoney," 215

Reyniere, Grimod de la, 245

Rico, 100

Riviere, 287

Robinson, Miss Mary, 129

Rocca di Papa, 66

Rodin, Auguste, 128, 240, 271, 284

Rome, 27-69, 121

Rooms at Rome, 33-34, 64

Roque, Jules, 203

Rosicrucianism, 238

Ross, Robert, 182

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 207, 209

Rossetti, William Michael, 209

Royal Academy, 77, 119, 200, 212, 227, 232

Rubaiyat, illustrated by Vedder, 62

Rubens, 101, 108

Ruskin, John, 46, 73, 77, 92, 94, 99, 100, 102, 110

Ruskin, never quoted by artists, 92

Sailing for Europe, 14

Salis, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291

Salisbury, Lord, 165

"Salome," illustrated by Beardsley, 213

Salons, the, Paris, 103

Sandro, 42, 43

Sandys, Frederick, 121, 204-208

San Francisco Exposition, 84, 97

San Giorgio, Venice, 75, 82

San Peladan, 238

"Saturday Review," London, 202

"Savoy, The," 189, 190, 198, 281

Schwabe, Carlos, 239

"Scots Observer," Edinburgh, 129

Shannon, J.J., 193

Shaw, George Bernard, 159, 215

Shinn, at Venice, 86

Sickert, Walter, 201

Simpson's, London, 253

Sisley, Alfred, 238

Sixties, illustrations of the, 205, 206, 208

Societies in the nineties, 134

Solferino's, London, 232, 233

South Kensington, London, 58, 90

"Speaker, The," London, 229

"Spectator," London, 202, 227

"Spring-heeled Jack," 160, 164

Spring in Venice, 108

"Standard," London, 83, 98

St. Cloud, Paris, 258, 259, 263

Steer, Wilson, 203

Steevens, George W., 154, 211, 213, 215

Steinlen, 240, 290

Stennis Brothers, 165

Stevenson, "Bob" (Robert Alan Mowbray), 160, 162, 170, 173, 197, 211, 227, 233, 237, 249, 250, 262

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 127, 128, 136, 146, 160, 163, 164, 167, 181, 249, 250, 263

Stewarts, London, 232

St. Mark's, Venice, 75, 86, 100, 109

St. Paul's, London, 147

Street, George S., 148, 213

"Strike at Arlingford, The," 215

Stuart, Jack, 152

"Studio, The," 178

Symbolism, 238

Symonds, John Addington, 77

Symons, Arthur, 183, 190, 278

"Talk and Talkers," 160

Talk on Thursday nights, 124-125

Thaulow, Fritz, 273

Theatre Francais, 220

Theosophy, 55

Thompson, Venice, 97

THE END