The bells on the shaggy Tarbes ponies she was driving along the Languedoc road drew, on nearing her residence, a number of peasant children from their play.

As the ruddy urchins ran shouting around our carriage wheels and scrambled in the dust for the sous we threw them, my hostess pointed laughing to a scrubby little girl with tomato-colored cheeks and tousled dark hair, remarking, I looked like that twenty years ago and performed just those antics on this very road. No punishment would keep me off the highway. Those pennies, if Im not mistaken, will all be spent at the village pastry cooks within an hour.

This was said with such a tender glance at the children that one realized the great artist was at home here, surrounded by the people she loved and understood. True to the homing instinct of the French peasant, Madame Calvé, when fortune came to her, bought and partially restored the rambling château which at sunset casts its shadow across the village of her birth. Since that day every moment of freedom from professional labor and every penny of her large income are spent at Cabrières, building, planning, even farming, when her health permits.

I think, she continued, as we approached the château, that the happiest day of my lifeand I have, as you know, passed some hours worth living, both on and off the stagewas when, that wing completed, a Paris train brought the first occupants for my twenty little bedrooms; no words can tell the delight it gives me now to see the color coming back to my patients pale lips and hear them laughing and singing about the place. As I am always short of funds, the idea of abandoning this work is the only fear the future holds for me.

With the vivacity peculiar to her character, my companion then whipped up her cobs and turned the conversation into gayer channels. Five minutes later we clattered over a drawbridge and drew up in a roomy courtyard, half blinding sunlight and half blue shadow, where a score of girls were occupied with books and sewing.

The luncheon bell was ringing as we ascended the terrace steps. After a hurried five minutes for brushing and washing, we took our places at a long table set in the cool stone hall, guests stopping in the château occupying one end around the chatelaine, the convalescents filling the other seats.

Those who have only seen the capricious diva on the stage or in Parisian salons can form little idea of the proprietress of Cabrières. No shade of coquetry blurs the clear picture of her home life. The capped and saboted peasant women who waited on us were not more simple in their ways. Several times during the meal she left her seat to inquire after the comfort of some invalid girl or inspect the cooking in the adjacent kitchen. These wanderings were not, however, allowed to disturb the conversation, which flowed on after the mellow French fashion, enlivened by much wit and gay badinage. One of our hostesss anecdotes at her own expense was especially amusing.

When in Venice, she told us, most prima donnas are carried to and from the opera in sedan chairs to avoid the risk of colds from the draughty gondolas. The last night of my initial season there, I was informed, as the curtain fell, that a number of Venetian nobles were planning to carry me in triumph to the hotel. When I descended from my dressing-room the courtyard of the theatre was filled with men in dress clothes, bearing lanterns, who caught up the chair as soon as I was seated and carried it noisily across the city to the hotel. Much moved by this unusual honor, I mounted to the balcony of my room, from which elevation I bowed my thanks, and threw all the flowers at hand to my escort.

Next morning the hotel proprietor appeared with my coffee, and after hesitating a moment, remarked: Well, we made a success of it last night. It has been telegraphed to all the capitals of Europe! I hope you will not think a thousand francs too much, considering the advertisement! In blank amazement, I asked what he meant. I mean the triumphal progress, he answered. I thought you understood! We always organize one for the stars who visit Venice. The men who carried your chair last night were the waiters from the hotels. We hire them on account of their dress clothes! Think of the disillusion, added Calvé, laughing, and my disgust, when I thought of myself naïvely throwing kisses and flowers to a group of Swiss garçons at fifteen francs a head. There was nothing to do, however, but pay the bill and swallow my chagrin!

How many pretty women do you suppose would tell such a joke upon themselves? Another story she told us is characteristic of her peasant neighbors.

When I came back here after my first season in St. Petersburg and London the curé requested me to sing at our local fête. I gladly consented, and, standing by his side on the steps of the Mairie, gave the great aria from the Huguenots in my best manner. To my astonishment the performance was received in complete silence. Poor Calvé, I heard an old friend of my mothers murmur. Her voice used to be so nice, and now its all gone! Taking in the situation at a glance, I threw my voice well up into my nose and started off on a well-known provincial song, in the shrill falsetto of our peasant women. The effect was instantaneous! Long before the end the performance was drowned in thunders of applause. Which proves that to be popular a singer must adapt herself to her audience.

Luncheon over, we repaired for cigarettes and coffee to an upper room, where Calvé was giving Dagnan-Bouveret some sittings for a portrait, and lingered there until four oclock, when our hostess left us for her siesta, and a break took those who cared for the excursion across the valley to inspect the ruins of a Roman bath. A late dinner brought us together again in a small dining room, the convalescents having eaten their simple meal and disappeared an hour before. During this time, another transformation had taken place in our mercurial hostess! It was the Calvé of Paris, Calvé the witch, Calvé the capiteuse, who presided at the dainty, flower-decked table and led the laughing conversation.

A few notes struck on a guitar by one of the party, as we sat an hour later on the moonlit terrace, were enough to start off the versatile artist, who was in her gayest humor. She sang us stray bits of opera, alternating her music with scenes burlesqued from recent plays. No one escaped her inimitable mimicry, not even the divine Sarah, Calvé giving us an unpayable impersonation of the elderly tragédienne as Lorenzaccio, the boy hero of Alfred de Mussets drama. Burlesquing led to her dancing some Spanish steps with an abandon never attempted on the stage! Which in turn gave place to an imitation of an American whistling an air from Carmen, and some coon songs she had picked up during her stay at New York. They, again, were succeeded by a superb rendering of the imprecation from Racines Camille, which made her audience realize that in gaining a soprano the world has lost, perhaps, its greatest tragédienne.

At eleven oclock the clatter of hoofs in the court warned us that the pleasant evening had come to an end. A journalist en route for Paris was soon installed with me in the little omnibus that was to take us to the station, Calvé herself lighting our cigars and providing the wraps that were to keep out the cool night air.

As we passed under the low archway of the entrance amid a clamor of adieu and au revoir, the young Frenchman at my side pointed up to a row of closed windows overhead. Isnt it a lesson, he said, for all of us, to think of the occupants of those little rooms, whom the generosity and care of that gracious artist are leaning by such pleasant paths back to health and courage for their toilsome lives?



CHAPTER 11A Cry For Fresh Air

Once upon a time, reads the familiar nursery tale, while the fairies, invited by a king and queen to the christening of their daughter, were showering good gifts on the baby princess, a disgruntled old witch, whom no one had thought of asking to the ceremony, appeared uninvited on the scene and revenged herself by decreeing that the presents of the good fairies, instead of proving beneficial, should bring only trouble and embarrassment to the royal infant.

A telling analogy might be drawn between that unhappy princess over whose fate so many youthful tears have been shed, and the condition of our invention-ridden country; for we see every day how the good gifts of those nineteenth century fairies, Science and Industry, instead of proving blessings to mankind, are being turned by ignorance and stupidity into veritable afflictions.

If a prophetic gentleman had told Louis Fourteenths shivering courtierswhom an iron etiquette forced on winter mornings into the (appropriately named) Galerie des Glaces, stamping their silk-clad feet and blowing on their blue fingers, until the king should appearthat within a century and a half one simple discovery would enable all classes of people to keep their shops and dwellings at a summer temperature through the severest winters, the half-frozen nobles would have flouted the suggestion as an iridescent dream, a sort of too-good-to-be-true prophecy.

What was to those noblemen an unheard-of luxury has become within the last decade one of the primary necessities of our life.

The question arises now: Are we gainers by the change? Has the indiscriminate use of heat been of advantage, either mentally or physically, to the nation?

The incubus of caloric that sits on our gasping country is particularly painful at this season, when nature undertakes to do her own heating.

In other less-favored lands, the first spring days, the exquisite awakening of the world after a long winter, bring to the inhabitants a sensation of joy and renewed vitality. We, however, have discounted that enjoyment. Delicate gradations of temperature are lost on people who have been stewing for six months in a mixture of steam and twice-breathed air.

What pleasure can an early April day afford the man who has slept in an overheated flat and is hurrying to an office where eighty degrees is the average all the year round? Or the pale shop-girl, who complains if a breath of morning air strays into the suburban train where she is seated?

As people who habitually use such relishes as Chutney and Worcestershire are incapable of appreciating delicately prepared food, so the soft mortals who have accustomed themselves to a perpetual August are insensible to fine shadings of temperature.

The other day I went with a friend to inspect some rooms he had been decorating in one of our public schools. The morning had been frosty, but by eleven oclock the sun warmed the air uncomfortably. On entering the school we were met by a blast of heated air that was positively staggering. In the recitation rooms, where, as in all New York schoolrooms, the children were packed like dominoes in a box, the temperature could not have been under eighty-five.

The pale, spectacled spinster in charge, to whom we complained of this, was astonished and offended at what she considered our interference, and answered that the children liked it warm, as for herself she had a cold and could not think of opening a window. If the rooms were too warm it was the janitors fault, and he had gone out!

Twelve oclock struck before we had finished our tour of inspection. It is to be doubted if anywhere else in the world could there be found such a procession of pasty-faced, dull-eyed youngsters as trooped past us down the stairs. Their appearance was the natural result of compelling children dressed for winter weather to sit many hours each day in hothouses, more suited to tropical plants than to growing human beings.

A gentleman with us remarked with a sigh, I have been in almost every school in the city and find the same condition everywhere. It is terrible, but there doesnt seem to be any remedy for it. The taste for living in a red-hot atmosphere is growing on our people; even public vehicles have to be heated now to please the patrons.

When tiresome old Benjamin Franklin made stoves popular he struck a terrible blow at the health of his compatriots; the introduction of steam heat and consequent suppression of all health-giving ventilation did the rest; the rosy cheeks of American children went up the chimney with the last whiff of wood smoke, and have never returned. Much of our home life followed; no family can be expected to gather in cheerful converse around a radiator.

How can this horror of fresh air among us be explained? If people really enjoy living in overheated rooms with little or no ventilation, why is it that we hear so much complaining, when during the summer months the thermometer runs up into the familiar nineties? Why are children hurried out of town, and why do wives consider it a necessity to desert their husbands?

Its rather inconsistent, to say the least, for not one of those deserters but would kick if the theatre or church they attend fell below that temperature in December.

It is impossible to go into our banks and offices and not realize that the air has been breathed again and again, heated and cooled, but never changed,doors and windows fit too tightly for that.

The pallor and dazed expression of the employees tell the same tale. I spoke to a youth the other day in an office about his appearance and asked if he was ill. Yes, he answered, I have had a succession of colds all winter. You see, my desk here is next to the radiator, so I am in a perpetual perspiration and catch cold as soon as I go out. Last winter I passed three months in a farmhouse, where the water froze in my room at night, and we had to wear overcoats to our meals. Yet I never had a cold there, and gained in weight and strength.

Twenty years ago no palatial private residence was considered complete unless there was a stationary washstand (forming a direct connection with the sewer) in each bedroom. We looked pityingly on foreigners who did not enjoy these advantages, until one day we realized that the latter were in the right, and straightway stationary washstands disappeared.

How much time must pass and how many victims be sacrificed before we come to our senses on the great radiator question?

As a result of our population living in a furnace, it happens now that when you rebel on being forced to take an impromptu Turkish bath at a theatre, the usher answers your complaint with It cant be as warm as you think, for a lady over there has just told me she felt chilly and asked for more heat!

Another invention of the enemy is the revolving door. By this ingenious contrivance the little fresh air that formerly crept into a building is now excluded. Which explains why on entering our larger hotels one is taken by the throat, as it were, by a sickening long-dead atmospherein which the souvenir of past meals and decaying flowers floats like a regretsuch as explorers must find on opening an Egyptian tomb.

Absurd as it may seem, it has become a distinction to have cool rooms. Alas, they are rare! Those blessed households where one has the delicious sensation of being chilly and can turn with pleasure toward crackling wood! The open fire has become, within the last decade, a test of refinement, almost a question of good breeding, forming a broad distinction between dainty households and vulgar ones, and marking the line which separates the homes of cultivated people from the parlors of those who care only for display.

A drawing-room filled with heat, the source of which remains invisible, is as characteristic of the parvenu as clanking chains on a harness or fine clothes worn in the street.

An open fire is the eye of a room, which can no more be attractive without it than the human face can be beautiful if it lacks the visual organs. The gas fire bears about the same relation to the real thing as a glass eye does to a natural one, and produces much the same sensation. Artificial eyes are painful necessities in some cases, and therefore cannot be condemned; but the household which gathers complacently around a gas log must have something radically wrong with it, and would be capable of worse offences against taste and hospitality.

There is a tombstone in a New England grave-yard the inscription on which reads: I was well, I wanted to be better. Here I am.

As regards heating of our houses, its to be feared that we have gone much the same road as the unfortunate New Englander. I dont mean to imply that he is now suffering from too much heat, but we, as a nation, certainly are.

Janitors and parlor-car conductors have replaced the wicked fairies of other days, but are apparently animated by their malignant spirit, and employ their hours of brief authority as cruelly. No witch dancing around her boiling cauldron was ever more joyful than the fireman of a modern hotel, as he gleefully turns more and more steam upon his helpless victims. Long acquaintance with that gentleman has convinced me that he cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for falling into these excesses. It is pure, unadulterated perversity, else why should he invariably choose the mildest mornings to show what his engines can do?

Many explanations have been offered for this love of a high temperature by our compatriots. Perhaps the true one has not yet been found. Is it not possible that what appears to be folly and almost criminal negligence of the rules of health, may be, after all, only a commendable ambition to renew the exploits of those biblical heroes, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?



CHAPTER 12The Paris of our Grandparents

We are apt to fall into the error of assuming that only American cities have displaced their centres and changed their appearance during the last half-century.

The oldest inhabitant, with his twice-told tales of transformations and changes, is to a certain extent responsible for this; by contrast, we imagine that the capitals of Europe have always been just as we see them. So strong is this impression that it requires a serious effort of the imagination to reconstruct the Paris that our grandparents knew and admired, few as the years are that separate their day from ours.

It is, for instance, difficult to conceive of a Paris that ended at the rue Royale, with only waste land and market gardens beyond the Madeleine, where to-day so many avenues open their stately perspectives; yet such was the case! The few fine residences that existed beyond that point faced the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with gardens running back to an unkempt open country called the Champs Elysées, where an unfinished Arc de Triomphe stood alone in a wilderness that no one ever dreamed of traversing.

The fashionable ladies of that time drove in the afternoon along the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Château dEau, and stopped their ponderous yellow barouches at Tortonis, where ices were served to them in their carriages, while they chatted with immaculate dandies in skin-tight nankeen unmentionables, blue swallow-tailed coats, and furry beaver hats.

While looking over some books in the company of an old lady who from time to time opens her store of treasures and recalls her remote youth at my request, and whose spirituel and graphic language gives to her souvenirs the air of being stray chapters from some old-fashioned romance, I received a vivid impression of how the French capital must have looked fifty years ago.

Emptying in her company a chest of books that had not seen the light for several decades, we came across a Panorama of the Boulevards, dated 1845, which proved when unfolded to be a colored lithograph, a couple of yards long by five or six inches high, representing the line of boulevards from the Madeleine to the Place de la Bastille. Each house, almost each tree, was faithfully depicted, together with the crowds on the sidewalks and the carriages in the street. The whole scene was as different from the effect made by that thoroughfare to-day as though five hundred and not fifty years had elapsed since the little book was printed. The picture breathed an atmosphere of calm and nameless quaintness that one finds now only in old provincial cities which have escaped the ravages of improvement.

My companion sat with the book unfolded before her, in a smiling trance. Her mind had turned back to the far-away days when she first trod those streets a bride, with all the pleasures and few of the cares of life to think about.

I watched her in silence (it seemed a sacrilege to break in on such a train of thought), until gradually her eyes lost their far-away expression, and, turning to me with a smile, she exclaimed: How we ever had the courage to appear in the street dressed as we were is a mystery! Do you see that carriage? pointing in the print to a high-swung family vehicle with a powdered coachman on the box, and two sky-blue lackeys standing behind. I can remember, as if it were yesterday, going to drive with Lady B-, the British ambassadress, in just such a conveyance. She drove four horses with feathers on their heads, when she used to come to Meurices for me. I blush when I think that my frock was so scant that I had to raise the skirt almost to my knees in order to get into her carriage.

Why we didnt all die of pneumonia is another marvel, for we wore low-necked dresses and the thinnest of slippers in the street, our heads being about the only part that was completely covered. I was particularly proud of a turban surmounted with a bird of paradise, but Lady B—- affected poke bonnets, then just coming into fashion, so large and so deep that when one looked at her from the side nothing was visible except two curls, as damp and as black as leeches. In other ways our toilets were absurdly unsuited for every-day wear; we wore light scarves over our necks, and rarely used furlined pelisses.

Returning to an examination of the panorama, my companion pointed out to me that there was no break in the boulevards, where the opera-house, with its seven radiating avenues, now stands, but a long line of Hôtels, dozing behind high walls, and quaint two-storied buildings that undoubtedly dated from the razing of the city wall and the opening of the new thoroughfare under Louis XV.

A little farther on was the world-famous Maison Dorée, where one almost expected to see Alfred de Musset and le docteur Véron dining with Dumas and Eugene Sue.

What in the name of goodness is that? I exclaimed, pointing to a couple of black and yellow monstrosities on wheels, which looked like three carriages joined together with a buggy added on in front.

Thats the diligence just arrived from Calais; it has been two days en route, the passengers sleeping as best they could, side by side, and escaping from their confinement only when horses were changed or while stopping for meals. That high two-wheeled trap with the little tiger standing up behind is a tilbury. We used to see the Count dOrsay driving one like that almost every day. He wore butter-colored gloves, and the skirts of his coat were pleated full all around, and stood out like a ballet girls. It is a pity they have not included Louis Philippe and his family jogging off to Neuilly in the court carryall,the Citizen King, with his blue umbrella between his knees, trying to look like an honest bourgeois, and failing even in that attempt to please the Parisians.

We were in Paris in 48; from my window at Meurices I saw poor old Juste Milieu read his abdication from the historic middle balcony of the Tuileries, and half an hour later we perceived the Duchesse dOrléans leave the Tuileries on foot, leading her two sons by the hand, and walk through the gardens and across the Place de la Concorde to the Corps Législatif, in a last attempt to save the crown for her son. Futile effort! That evening the Citizen King was hurried through those same gardens and into a passing cab, en route for a life exile.

Our balcony at Meurices was a fine point of observation from which to watch a revolution. With an opera-glass we could see the mob surging to the sack of the palace, the priceless furniture and bric-à-brac flung into the street, court dresses waved on pikes from the tall windows, and finally the throne brought out, and carried off to be burned. There was no keeping the men of our party in after that. They rushed off to have a nearer glimpse of the fighting, and we saw no more of them until daybreak the following morning when, just as we were preparing to send for the police, two dilapidated, ragged, black-faced mortals appeared, in whom we barely recognized our husbands. They had been impressed into service and passed their night building barricades. My better half, however, had succeeded in snatching a handful of the gold fringe from the throne as it was carried by, an act of prowess that repaid him for all his troubles and fatigue.

I passed the greater part of forty-eight hours on our balcony, watching the mob marching by, singing La Marseillaise, and camping at night in the streets. It was all I could do to tear myself away from the window long enough to eat and write in my journal.

There was no Avenue de lOpéra then. The trip from the boulevards to the Palais-Royal had to be made by a long detour across the Place Vendôme (where, by the bye, a cattle market was held) or through a labyrinth of narrow, bad-smelling little streets, where strangers easily lost their way. Next to the boulevards, the Palais-Royal was the centre of the elegant and dissipated life in the capital. It was there we met of an afternoon to drink chocolate at the Rotonde, or to dine at Les Trois Frères Provençaux, and let our husbands have a try at the gambling tables in the Passage dOrléans.

No one thought of buying jewelry anywhere else. It was from the windows of its shops that the fashions started on their way around the world. When Victoria as a bride was visiting Louis Philippe, she was so fascinated by the aspect of the place that the gallant French king ordered a miniature copy of the scene, made in papier-mâché, as a present for his guest, a sort of gigantic dolls house in which not only the palace and its long colonnades were reproduced, but every tiny shop and the myriad articles for sale were copied with Chinese fidelity. Unfortunately the pear-headed old king became Englands uninvited guest before this clumsy toy was finished, so it never crossed the Channel, but can be seen to-day by any one curious enough to examine it, in the Musée Carnavalet.

Few of us realize that the Paris of Charles X. and Louis Philippe would seem to us now a small, ill-paved, and worse-lighted provincial town, with few theatres or hotels, communicating with the outer world only by means of a horse-drawn post, and practically farther from London than Constantinople is to-day. One feels this isolation in the literature of the time; brilliant as the epoch was, the horizon of its writers was bounded by the boulevards and the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Dumas says laughingly, in a letter to a friend: I have never ventured into the unexplored country beyond the Bastille, but am convinced that it shelters wild animals and savages. The wit and brains of the period were concentrated into a small space. Money-making had no more part in the programme of a writer then than an introduction into society. Catering to a foreign market and snobbishness were undreamed-of degradations. Paris had not yet been turned into the Foire du Monde that she has since become, with whole quarters given over to the use of foreigners,theatres, restaurants, and hotels created only for the use of a polyglot population that could give lessons to the people around Babels famous tower.



CHAPTER 13Some American Husbands

Until the beginning of this century men played the beau rôle in lifes comedy. As in the rest of the animal world, our males were the brilliant members of the community, flaunting their gaudy plumage at home and abroad, while the women-folk remained in seclusion, tending their children, directing the servants, or ministering to their lords comfort.

In those happy days the husband ruled supreme at his own fireside, receiving the homage of the family, who bent to his will and obeyed his orders.

During the last century, however, the part of better half has become less and less attractive in America, one prerogative after another having been whisked away by enterprising wives. Modern Delilahs have yearly snipped off more and more of Samsons luxuriant curls, and added those ornaments to their own coiffures, until in the majority of families the husband finds himself reduced to a state of bondage compared with which the biblical hero enjoyed a pampered idleness. Times have indeed changed in America since the native chief sat in dignified repose bedizened with all the finery at hand, while the ladies of the family waited tremblingly upon him. To-day it is the American husband who turns the grindstone all the year round, and it is his pretty tyrant who enjoys the elegant leisure that a century ago was considered a masculine luxury.

To America must be given the credit of having produced the model husband, a new species, as it were, of the genus homo.

In no rôle does a compatriot appear to such advantage as in that of Benedict. As a boy he is often too advanced for his years or his information; in youth he is conspicuous neither for his culture nor his unselfishness. But once in matrimonial harness this untrained animal becomes bridle-wise with surprising rapidity, and will for the rest of life go through his paces, waltzing, kneeing, and saluting with hardly a touch of the whip. Whether this is the result of superior horse-womanship on the part of American wives or a trait peculiar to sons of Uncle Sam, is hard to say, but the fact is self-evident to any observer that our fair equestrians rarely meet with a rebellious mount.

Any one who has studied marital ways in other lands will realize that in no country have the men effaced themselves so gracefully as with us. In this respect no foreign production can compare for a moment with the domestic article. In English, French, and German families the husband is still all-powerful. The house is mounted, guests are asked, and the year planned out to suit his occupations and pleasure. Here papa is rarely consulted until such matters have been decided upon by the ladies, when the head of the house is called in to sign the checks.

I have had occasion more than once to bewail the shortcomings of the American man, and so take pleasure in pointing out the modesty and good temper with which he fills this role. He is trained from the beginning to give all and expect nothing in return, an American girl rarely bringing any dot to her husband, no matter how wealthy her family may be. If, as occasionally happens, an income is allowed a bride by her parents, she expects to spend it on her toilets or pleasures. This condition of the matrimonial market exists in no other country; even in England, where mariages de convenance are rare, settlements form an inevitable prelude to conjugal bliss.

The fact that she contributes little or nothing to the common income in no way embarrasses an American wife; her pretensions are usually in an inverse proportion to her personal means. A man I knew some years ago deliberately chose his bride from an impecunious family (in the hope that her simple surroundings had inculcated homely taste), and announced to an incredulous circle of friends, at his last bachelor dinner, that he intended, in future, to pass his evenings at his fireside, between his book and his pretty spouse. Poor, innocent, confiding mortal! The wife quickly became a belle of the fastest set in town. Having had more than she wanted of firesides and quiet evenings before her marriage, her idea was to go about as much as possible, and, when not so occupied, to fill her house with company. It may be laid down as a maxim in this connection that a man marries to obtain a home, and a girl to get away from one; hence disappointment on both sides.

The couple in question have in all probability not passed an evening alone since they were married, the lady rarely stopping in the round of her gayeties until she collapses from fatigue. Their home is typical of their life, which itself can be taken as a good example of the existence that most of our smart people lead. The ground floor and the first floor are given up to entertaining. The second is occupied by the spacious sitting, bath, and sleeping rooms of the lady. A ten-by-twelve chamber suffices for my lord, and the only den he can rightly call his own is a small room near the front door, about as private as the sidewalk, which is turned into a cloak-room whenever the couple receive, making it impossible to keep books or papers of value there, or even to use it as a smoking-room after dinner, so his men guests sit around the dismantled dining-table while the ladies are enjoying a suite of parlors above.

At first the idea of such an unequal division of the house shocks our sense of justice, until we reflect that the American husband is not expected to remain at home. Thats not his place! If he is not down town making money, fashion dictates that he must be at some club-house playing a game. A man who should remain at home, and read or chat with the ladies of his family, would be considered a bore and unmanly. There seems to be no place in an American house for its head. More than once when the friend I have referred to has asked me, at the club, to dine informally with him, we have found, on arriving, that Madame, having an evening off, had gone to bed and forgotten to order any dinner, so we were obliged to return to the club for our meal. When, however, his wife is in good health, she expects her weary husband to accompany her to dinner, opera, or ball, night after night, oblivious of the work the morrow holds in store for him.

In one family I know, paterfamilias goes by the name of the purse. The more one sees of American households the more appropriate that name appears. Everything is expected of the husband, and he is accorded no definite place in return. He leaves the house at 8.30. When he returns, at five, if his wife is entertaining a man at tea, it would be considered the height of indelicacy for him to intrude upon them, for his arrival would cast a chill on the conversation. When a couple dine out, the husband is always la bête noire of the hostess, no woman wanting to sit next to a married man, if she can help it.

The few Benedicts who have had the courage to break away from these conditions and amuse themselves with yachts, salmon rivers, or grass-bachelor trips to Europe, while secretly admired by the women, are frowned upon in society as dangerous examples, likely to sow the seeds of discontent among their comrades; although it is the commonest thing in the world for an American wife to take the children and go abroad on a tour.

Imagine a German or Italian wife announcing to her spouse that she had decided to run over to England for a year with her children, that they might learn English. The mind recoils in horror from the idea of the catastrophe that would ensue.

Glance around a ball-room, a dinner party, or the opera, if you have any doubts as to the unselfishness of our married men. How many of them do you suppose are present for their own pleasure? The owner of an opera box rarely retains a seat in his expensive quarters. You generally find him idling in the lobbies looking at his watch, or repairing to a neighboring concert hall to pass the weary hours. At a ball it is even worse. One wonders why card-rooms are not provided at large balls (as is the custom abroad), where the bored husbands might find a little solace over bridge, instead of yawning in the coat-room or making desperate signs to their wives from the doorway,signals of distress, by the bye, that rarely produce any effect.

It is the rebellious husband who is admired and courted, however. A curious trait of human nature compels admiration for whatever is harmful, and forces us, in spite of our better judgment, to depreciate the useful and beneficent. The coats-of-arms of all countries are crowded with eagles and lions, that never yet did any good, living or dead; orators enlarge on the fine qualities of these birds and beasts, and hold them up as models, while using as terms of reproach the name of the goose or the cow, creatures that minister in a hundred ways to our wants. Such a spirit has brought helpful, productive better halves to the humble place they now occupy in the eyes of our people.

As long as men passed their time in fighting and carousing they were heroes; as soon as they became patient bread-winners all the romance evaporated from their atmosphere. The Jewish Hercules had his revenge in the end and made things disagreeable for his tormentors. So far, however, there are no signs of a revolt among the shorn lambs in this country. They patiently bend their necks to the collarthe kindest, most loving and devoted helpmates that ever plodded under the matrimonial yoke.

When in the East, one watches with admiration the part a donkey plays in the economy of those primitive lands. All the work is reserved for that industrious animal, and little play falls to his share. The camel is always bad-tempered, and when overladen lies down, refusing to move until relieved of its burden. The Turk is lazy and selfish, the native women pass their time in chattering and giggling, the children play and squabble, the ubiquitous dog sleeps in the sun; but from daybreak to midnight the little mouse-colored donkeys toil unceasingly. All burdens too bulky or too cumbersome for man are put on his back; the provender which horses and camels have refused becomes his portion; he is the first to begin the days labor, and the last to turn in. It is impossible to live long in the Orient or the south of France without becoming attached to those gentle, willing animals. The rôle which honest Bourico fills so well abroad is played on this side of the Atlantic by the American husband.

I mean no disrespect to my married compatriots; on the contrary, I admire them as I do all docile, unselfish beings. It is well for our women, however, that their lords, like the little Oriental donkeys, ignore their strength, and are content to toil on to the end of their days, expecting neither praise nor thanks in return.



CHAPTER 14Carolus

In the early seventies a group of studentsdissatisfied with the cut-and-dried instruction of the Paris art school and attracted by certain qualities of color and technique in the work of a young Frenchman from the city of Lille, who was just beginning to attract the attention of connoisseurswent in a body to his studio with the request that he would oversee their work and direct their studies. The artist thus chosen was Carolus-Duran. Oddly enough, a majority of the youths who sought him out and made him their master were Americans.

The first modest workroom on the Boulevard Montparnasse was soon too small to hold the pupils who crowded under this newly raised banner, and a move was made to more commodious quarters near the masters private studio. Sargent, Dannat, Harrison, Beckwith, Hinckley, and many others whom it is needless to mention here, willif these lines come under their noticedoubtless recall with a thrill of pleasure the roomy one-storied structure in the rue Notre-Dame des Champs where we established our atelier délèves, a self-supporting cooperative concern, each student contributing ten francs a month toward rent, fire, and models, Carolusthe name by which this master is universally known abroadnot only refusing all compensation, according to the immutable custom of French painters of distinction, but, as we discovered later, contributing too often from his own pocket to help out the massier at the end of a difficult season, or smooth the path of some improvident pupil.

Those were cloudless, enchanted days we passed in the tumbled down old atelier: an ardent springtime of life when the future beckons gayly and no doubts of success obscure the horizon. Our young masters enthusiasm fired his circle of pupils, who, as each succeeding year brought him increasing fame, revelled in a reflected glory with the generous admiration of youth, in which there is neither calculation nor shadow of envy.

A portrait of Madame de Portalais, exhibited about this time, drew all art-loving Paris around the new celebritys canvas. Shortly after, the government purchased a painting (of our masters beautiful wife), now known as La Femme au Gant, for the Luxembourg Gallery.

It is difficult to overestimate the impetus that a masters successes impart to the progress of his pupils. My first studious year in Paris had been passed in the shadow of an elderly painter, who was comfortably dozing on the laurels of thirty years before. The change from that sleepy environment to the vivid enthusiasm and dash of Carolus-Durans studio was like stepping out of a musty cloister into the warmth and movement of a market-place.

Here, be it said in passing, lies perhaps the secret of the dry rot that too often settles on our American art schools. We, for some unknown reason, do not take the work of native painters seriously, nor encourage them in proportion to their merit. In consequence they retain but a feeble hold upon their pupils.

Carolus, handsome, young, successful, courted, was an ideal leader for a band of ambitious, high-strung youths, repaying their devotion with an untiring interest and lifting clever and dull alike on the strong wings of his genius. His visits to the studio, on which his friend Henner often accompanied him, were frequent and prolonged; certain Tuesdays being especially appreciated by us, as they were set apart for his criticism of original compositions.

When our sketches (the subject for which had been given out in advance) were arranged, and we had seated ourselves in a big half-circle on the floor, Carolus would install himself on a tall stool, the one seat the studio boasted, and chat à propos of the works before him on composition, on classic art, on the theories of color and clair-obscur. Brilliant talks, inlaid with much wit and incisive criticism, the memory of which must linger in the minds of all who were fortunate enough to hear them. Nor was it to the studio alone that our masters interest followed us. He would drop in at the Louvre, when we were copying there, and after some pleasant words of advice and encouragement, lead us off for a stroll through the galleries, interrupted by stations before his favorite masterpieces.

So important has he always considered a constant study of Renaissance art that recently, when about to commence his Triumph of Bacchus, Carolus copied one of Rubenss larger canvases with all the naïveté of a beginner.

An occasion soon presented itself for us to learn another side of our trade by working with our master on a ceiling ordered of him by the state for the Palace of the Luxembourg. The vast studios which the city of Paris provides on occasions of this kind, with a liberality that should make our home corporations reflect, are situated out beyond the Exhibition buildings, in a curious, unfrequented quarter, ignored alike by Parisians and tourists, where the city stores compromising statues and the valuable débris of her many revolutions. There, among throneless Napoleons and riderless bronze steeds, we toiled for over six months side by side with our master, on gigantic Apotheosis of Marie de Médicis, serving in turn as painter and painted, and leaving the imprint of our hands and the reflection of our faces scattered about the composition. Day after day, when work was over, we would hoist the big canvas by means of a system of ropes and pulleys, from a perpendicular to the horizontal position it was to occupy permanently, and then sit straining our necks and discussing the progress of the work until the tardy spring twilight warned us to depart.

The year 1877 brought Carolus-Duran the médaille dhonneur, a crowning recompense that set the atelier mad with delight. We immediately organized a great (but economical) banquet to commemorate the event, over which our master presided, with much modesty, considering the amount of incense we burned before him, and the speeches we made. One of our number even burst into some very bad French verses, asserting that the painters of the world in general fell back before him

. . . épouvantès Craignant ègalement sa brosse et son èpèe.

This allusion to his proficiency in fencing was considered particularly neat, and became the favorite song of the studio, to be howled in and out of season.

Curiously enough, there is always something in Carolus-Durans attitude when at work which recalls the swordsman. With an enormous palette in one hand and a brush in the other, he has a way of planting himself in front of his sitter that is amusingly suggestive of a duel. His lithe body sways to and fro, his fine leonine face quivers with the intense study of his model; then with a sudden spring forward, a few rapid touches are dashed on the canvas (like home strokes in the enemys weakest spot) with a precision of hand acquired only by long years of fencing.

An order to paint the king and queen of Portugal was the next step on the road to fame, another rung on the pleasant ladder of success. When this work was done the delighted sovereign presented the painter with the order of Christ of Portugal, together with many other gifts, among which a caricature of the master at work, signed by his sitter, is not the least valued.

When the great schism occurred several years ago which rent the art world of France, Carolus-Duran was elected vice-president of the new school under Meissonier, to whose office he succeeded on that masters death; and now directs and presides over the yearly exhibition known as the Salon du Champ de Mars.

At his château near Paris or at Saint Raphael, on the Mediterranean, the master lives, like Leonardo of old, the existence of a grand seigneur, surrounded by his family, innumerable guests, and the horses and dogs he loves,a group of which his ornate figure and expressive face form the natural centre. Each year he lives more away from the world, but no more inspiriting sight can be imagined than the welcome the president receives of a varnishing day, when he makes his entry surrounded by his pupils. The students cheer themselves hoarse, and the public climbs on everything that comes to hand to see him pass. It is hard to realize then that this is the same man who, not content with his youthful progress, retired into an Italian monastery that he might commune face to face with nature undisturbed.

The works of no other painter give me the same sensation of quivering vitality, except the Velasquez in the Madrid Gallery and, perhaps, Sargent at his best; and one feels all through the American painters work the influence of his first and only master.

Tout ce qui nest pas indispensable est nuisible, a phrase which is often on Carolus-Durans lips, may be taken as the keynote of his work, where one finds a noble simplicity of line and color scheme, an elimination of useless detail, a contempt for tricks to enforce an effect, and above all a comprehension and mastery of light, vitality, and texturethose three unities of the painters artthat bring his canvases very near to those of his self-imposed Spanish master.

Those who know the French painters more important works and his many splendid studies from the nude, feel it a pity that such masterpieces as the equestrian portrait of Mlle. Croisette, of the Comédie Française, the Réveil, the superb full length of Mme. Pelouse on the Terrace of Chenonceau, and the head of Gounod in the Luxembourg, could not be collected into one exhibition, that lovers of art here in America might realize for themselves how this masters works are of the class that typify a school and an epoch, and engrave their authors name among those destined to become household words in the mouths of future generations.



CHAPTER 15The Grand Opera Fad

Without being more curious than my neighbors, there are several social mysteries that I should like to fathom, among others, the real reasons that induce the different classes of people one sees at the opera to attend that form of entertainment.

A taste for the theatre is natural enough. It is also easy to understand why people who are fond of sport and animals enjoy races and dog shows. But the continued vogue of grand opera, and more especially of Wagners long-drawn-out compositions, among our restless, unmusical compatriots, remains unexplained.

The sheeplike docility of our public is apparent in numberless ways; in none, however, more strikingly than in their choice of amusements. In business and religion, people occasionally think for themselves; in the selection of entertainments, never! but are apparently content to receive their opinions and prejudices ready-made from some unseen and omnipotent Areopagus.

The careful study of an opera audience from different parts of our auditorium has brought me to the conclusion that the public there may be loosely divided into three classesleaving out reporters of fashionable intelligence, dressmakers in search of ideas, and the lady inhabitants of Crank Alley (as a certain corner of the orchestra is called), who sit in perpetual adoration before the elderly tenor.

Firstbut before venturing further on dangerously thin ice, it may be as well to suggest that this subject is not treated in absolute seriousness, and that all assertions must not be taken au pied de la lettre. First, then, and most important, come the stockholders, for without them the Metropolitan would close. The majority of these fortunate people and their guests look upon the opera as a social function, where one can meet ones friends and be seen, an entertaining antechamber in which to linger until its time to go on, her Box being to-day as necessary a part of a great ladys outfit as a country house or a ball-room.

Second are those who attend because it has become the correct thing to be seen at the opera. There is so much wealth in this city and so little opportunity for its display, so many people long to go about who are asked nowhere, that the opera has been seized upon as a centre in which to air rich apparel and elbow the world. This list fills a large part of the closely packed parquet and first balcony.

Third, and last, come the lovers of music, who mostly inhabit greater altitudes.

The motive of the typical box-owner is simple. Her night at the opera is the excuse for a cosy little dinner, one woman friend (two would spoil the effect of the box) and four men, without counting the husband, who appears at dinner, but rarely goes further. The pleasant meal and the subsequent smoke are prolonged until 9 or 9.30, when the men are finally dragged murmuring from their cigars. If she has been fortunate and timed her arrival to correspond with an entracte, my lady is radiant. The lights are up, she can see who are present, and the public can inspect her toilet and jewels as she settles herself under the combined gaze of the house, and proceeds to hold an informal reception for the rest of the evening. The men she has brought with her quickly cede their places to callers, and wander yawning in the lobby or invade the neighboring boxes and add their voices to the general murmur.

Although there is much less talking than formerly, it is the toleration of this custom at all by the public that indicates (along with many other straws) that we are not a music-loving people. Audible conversation during a performance would not be allowed for a moment by a Continental audience. The little visiting that takes place in boxes abroad is done during the entractes, when people retire to the salons back of their loges to eat ices and chat. Here those little parlors are turned into cloak-rooms, and small talk goes on in many boxes during the entire performance. The joke or scandal of the day is discussed; strangers in town, or literary and artistic lightsfreaks, they are discriminatingly calledare pointed out, toilets passed in review, and those dreadful two hours passed which, for some undiscovered reason, must elapse between a dinner and a dance. If a favorite tenor is singing, and no one happens to be whispering nonsense over her shoulder, my lady may listen in a distrait way. It is not safe, however, to count on prolonged attention or ask her questions about the performance. She is apt to be a bit hazy as to who is singing, and with the exception of Faust and Carmen, has rudimentary ideas about plots. Singers come and go, weep, swoon, or are killed, without interfering with her equanimity. She has, for instance, seen the Huguenots and the Rheingold dozens of times, but knows no more why Raoul is brought blindfolded to Chenonceaux, or what Wotan and Erda say to each other in their interminable scenes, than she does of the contents of the Vedas. For the matter of that, if three or four principal airs were suppressed from an opera and the scenery and costumes changed, many in that chattering circle would, I fear, not know what they were listening to.

Last winter, when Melba sang in Aida, disguised by dark hair and a brown skin, a lady near me vouchsafed the opinion that the little black woman hadnt a bad voice; a gentleman (to whom I remarked last week that as Sembrich had sung Rosina in the Barber, it was rather a shock to see her appear as that ladys servant in the Mariage de Figaro) looked his blank amazement until it was explained to him that one of those operas was a continuation of the other. After a pause he remarked, They are not by the same composer, anyway! Because the firsts by Rossini, and the Mariage is by Bon Marché. Ive been at his shop in Paris.

The presence of the second categorythe would-be fashionable peopleis not so easily accounted for. Their attendance can hardly be attributed to love of melody, as they are, if anything, a shade less musical than the box-dwellers, who, by the bye, seem to exercise an irresistible fascination, to judge by the trend of conversation and direction of glasses. Although an imposing and sufficiently attentive throng, it would be difficult to find a less discriminating public than that which gathers nightly in the Metropolitan parterre. One wonders how many of those people care for music and how many attend because it is expensive and swell.

They will listen with the same bland contentment to either bad or good performances so long as a world-renowned artist (some one who is being paid a comfortable little fortune for the evening) is on the stage. The orchestra may be badly led (it often is); the singers may flator be out of voice; the performance may go all at sixes and sevensthere is never a murmur of dissent. Faults that would set an entire audience at Naples or Milan hissing are accepted herewith ignorant approval.

The unfortunate part of it is that this weakness of ours has become known. The singers feel they can give an American audience any slipshod performance. I have seen a favorite soprano shrug her shoulders as she entered her dressing-room and exclaim: Mon Dieu! How I shuffled through that act! Theyd have hooted me off the stage in Berlin, but here no one seems to care. Did you notice the baritone to-night? He wasnt on the key once during our duo. I cannot sing my best, try as I will, when I hear the public applauding good and bad alike!

It is strange that our pleasure-loving rich people should have hit on the opera as a favorite haunt. We and the English are the only race who will attend performances in a foreign language which we dont understand. How can intelligent people who dont care for music go on, season after season, listening to operas, the plots of which they ignore, and which in their hearts they find dull?

Is it so very amusing to watch two middle-aged ladies nagging each other, at two oclock in the morning, on a public square, as they do in Lohengrin? Do people find the lecture that Isoldes husband delivers to the guilty lovers entertaining? Does an opera produce any illusion on my neighbors? I wish it did on me! I see too plainly the paint on the singers hot faces and the cords straining in their tired throats! I sit on certain nights in agony, fearing to see stout Romeo roll on the stage in apoplexy! The sopranos, too, have a way, when about to emit a roulade, that is more suggestive of a dentists chair, and the attendant gargle, than of a love phrase.

When two celebrities combine in a final duo, facing the public and not each other, they give the impression of victims whom an unseen inquisitor is torturing. Each turn of his screw draws out a wilder cry. The orchestra (in the pay of the demon) does all it can to prevent their shrieks from reaching the public. The lovers in turn redouble their efforts; they are purple in the face and glistening with perspiration. Defeat, they know, is before them, for the orchestra has the greater staying power! The flutes bleat; the trombones grunt; the fiddles squeal; an epileptic leader cuts wildly into the air about him. When, finally, their strength exhausted, the breathless human beings, with one last ear-piercing note, give up the struggle and retire, the public, excited by the unequal contest, bursts into thunders of applause.

Why wouldnt it be a good idea, in order to avoid these painful exhibitions, to have an arrangement of screens, with the singing people behind and a company of young and attractive pantomimists going through the gestures and movements in front? Otherwise, how can the most imaginative natures lose themselves at an opera? Even when the singers are comely, there is always that eternal double row of stony-faced witnesses in full view, whom no crimes astonish and no misfortunes melt. It takes most of the poetry out of Fausts first words with Marguerite, to have that short interview interrupted by a line of old, weary women shouting, Let us whirl in the waltz oer the mount and the plain! Or when Scotch Lucy appears in a smart tea-gown and is good enough to perform difficult exercises before a half-circle of Italian gentlemen in pantalets and ladies in court costumes, does she give any one the illusion of an abandoned wife dying of a broken heart alone in the Highlands? Broken heart, indeed! Its much more likely shell die of a ruptured blood-vessel!

Philistines in matters musical, like myself, unfortunate mortals whom the sweetest sounds fail to enthrall when connected with no memory or idea, or when prolonged beyond a limited period, must approach the third group with hesitation and awe. That they are sincere, is evident. The rapt expressions of their faces, and their patience, bear testimony to this fact. For a long time I asked myself, Where have I seen that intense, absorbed attitude before? Suddenly one evening another scene rose in my memory.

Have you ever visited Tangiers? In the market-place of that city you will find the inhabitants crouched by hundreds around their native musicians. When we were there, one old dufferthe Wagner, doubtless, of the placewas having an immense success. No matter at what hour of the day we passed through that square, there was always the same spellbound circle of half-clad Turks and Arabs squatting silent while Wagner tinkled to them on a three-stringed lute and chanted in a high-pitched, dismal whinelike the squeaking of an unfastened door in the wind. At times, for no apparent reason, the never-varying, never-ending measure would be interrupted by a flutter of applause, but his audience remained mostly sunk in a hypnotic apathy. I never see a Ring audience now without thinking of that scene outside the Bab-el-Marsa gate, which has led me to ask different people just what sensations serious music produced upon them. The answers have been varied and interesting. One good lady who rarely misses a German opera confessed that sweet sounds acted upon her like opium. Neither scenery nor acting nor plot were of any importance. From the first notes of the overture to the end, she floated in an ecstatic dream, oblivious of time and place. When it was over she came back to herself faint with fatigue. Another professed lover of Wagner said that his greatest pleasure was in following the different motives as they recurred in the music. My faith in that gentleman was shaken, however, when I found the other evening that he had mistaken Van Dyck for Jean de Reszké through an entire performance. He may be a dab at recognizing his friends the motives, but his discoveries dont apparently go as far as tenors!

No one doubts that hundreds of people unaffectedly love German opera, but that as many affect to appreciate it in order to appear intellectual is certain.

Once upon a time the unworthy member of an ultra-serious Browning class in this city, doubting the sincerity of her companions, asked permission to read them a poem of the masters which she found beyond her comprehension. When the reading was over the opinion of her friends was unanimous. Nothing could be simpler! The lines were lucidity itself! Such close reasoning etc. But dismay fell upon them when the naughty lady announced, with a peal of laughter, that she had been reading alternate lines from opposite pages. She no longer disturbs the harmony of that circle!

Bearing this tale in mind, I once asked a musician what proportion of the audience at a Ring performance he thought would know if alternate scenes were given from two of Wagners operas, unless the scenery enlightened them. His estimate was that perhaps fifty per cent might find out the fraud. He put the number of people who could give an intelligent account of those plots at about thirty per hundred.

The popularity of music, he added, is largely due to the fact that it saves people the trouble of thinking. Pleasant sounds soothe the nerves, and, if prolonged long enough in a darkened room will, like the Eastern tom-toms, lull the senses into a mild form of trance. This must be what the gentleman meant who said he wished he could sleep as well in a Wagner car as he did at one of his operas!

Being a tailless old fox, I look with ever-increasing suspicion on the too-luxuriant caudal appendages of my neighbors, and think with amusement of the multitudes who during the last ten years have sacrificed themselves upon the altar of grand operasimple, kindly souls, with little or no taste for classical music, who have sat in the dark (mentally and physically), applauding what they didnt understand, and listening to vague German mythology set to sounds that appear to us outsiders like music sunk into a verbose dotage. I am convinced the greater number would have preferred a jolly performance of Mme. Angot or the Cloches de Corneville, cut in two by a good ballet.

It is, however, so easy to be mistaken on subjects of this kind that generalizing is dangerous. Many great authorities have liked tuneless music. One of the most telling arguments in its favor was recently advanced by a foreigner. The Chinese ambassador told us last winter in a club at Washington that Wagners was the only European music that he appreciated and enjoyed. You see, he added, music is a much older art with us than in Europe, and has naturally reached a far greater perfection. The German school has made a long step in advance, and I can now foresee a day not far distant when, under its influence, your music will closely resemble our own.



CHAPTER 16The Poetic Cabarets of Paris

Those who have not lived in France can form little idea of the important place the café occupies in the life of an average Frenchman, clubs as we know them or as they exist in England being rare, and when found being, with few exceptions, but gambling-houses in disguise. As a Frenchman rarely asks an acquaintance, or even a friend, to his apartment, the café has become the common ground where all meet, for business or pleasure. Not in Paris only, but all over France, in every garrison town, provincial city, or tiny village, the café is the chief attraction, the centre of thought, the focus toward which all the rays of masculine existence converge.

For the student, newly arrived from the provinces, to whose modest purse the theatres and other places of amusement are practically closed, the café is a supreme resource. His mind is moulded, his ideas and opinions formed, more by what he hears and sees there than by any other influence. A restaurant is of little importance. One may eat anywhere. But the choice of his café will often give the bent to a young mans career, and indicate his exact shade of politics and his opinions on literature, music, or art. In Paris, to know a man at all is to know where you can find him at the hour of the apéritifwhat Baudelaire called

Lheure sainte De labsinthe.

When young men form a society among themselves, a café is chosen as their meeting-place. Thousands of establishments exist only by such patronage, as, for example, the Café de la Régence, Place du Théâtre Français, which is frequented entirely by men who play chess.

Business men transact their affairs as much over their coffee as in their offices. The reading man finds at his café the daily and weekly papers; a writer is sure of the undisturbed possession of pen, ink, and paper. Henri Murger, the author, when asked once why he continued to patronize a certain establishment notorious for the inferior quality of its beer, answered, Yes, the beer is poor, but they keep such good ink!

The use of a café does not imply any great expenditure, a consummation costing but little. With it is acquired the right to use the establishment for an indefinite number of hours, the client being warmed, lighted, and served. From five to seven, and again after dinner, the habitués stroll in, grouping themselves about the small tables, each new-comer joining a congenial circle, ordering his drink, and settling himself for a long sitting. The last editorial, the newest picture, or the fall of a ministry is discussed with a vehemence and an interest unknown to Anglo-Saxon natures. Suddenly, in the excitement of the discussion, some one will rise in his place and begin speaking. If you happen to drop in at that moment, the lady at the desk will welcome you with, You are just in time! Monsieur So-and-So is speaking; the evening promises to be interesting. She is charmed; her establishment will shine with a reflected light, and new patrons be drawn there, if the debates are brilliant. So universal is this custom that there is hardly an orator to-day at the French bar or in the Senate, who has not broken his first lance in some such obscure tournament, under the smiling glances of the dame du comptoir.

Opposite the Palace of the Luxembourg, in the heart of the old Latin Quarter, stands a quaint building, half hotel, half café, where many years ago Joseph II. resided while visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette. It is known now as Foyots; this name must awaken many happy memories in the hearts of American students, for it was long their favorite meeting-place. In the early seventies a club, formed among the literary and poetic youth of Paris, selected Foyots as their home during the winter months. Their summer vacations were spent in visiting the university towns of France, reciting verses, or acting in original plays at Nancy, Bordeaux, Lyons, or Caen. The enthusiasm these youthful performances created inspired one of their number with the idea of creating in Paris, on a permanent footing, a centre where a limited public could meet the young poets of the day and hear them recite their verses and monologues in an informal way.

The success of the original Chat Noir, the first cabaret of this kind, was largely owing to the sympathetic and attractive nature of its founder, young Salis, who drew around him, by his sunny disposition, shy personalities who, but for him, would still be mute, inglorious Miltons. Under his kindly and discriminating rule many a successful literary career has started. Saliss gifted nature combined a delicate taste and critical acumen with a rare business ability. His first venture, an obscure little café on the Boulevard Rochechouart, in the outlying quarter beyond the Place Pigalle, quickly became famous, its ever-increasing vogue forcing its happy proprietor to seek more commodious quarters in the rue Victor Massé, where the world-famous Chat Noir was installed with much pomp and many joyous ceremonies.

The old word cabaret, corresponding closely to our English inn, was chosen, and the establishment decorated in imitation of a Louis XIII. hôtellerie. Oaken beams supported the low-studded ceilings: The plaster walls disappeared behind tapestries, armor, old faïence. Beer and other liquids were served in quaint porcelain or pewter mugs, and the waiters were dressed (merry anachronism) in the costume of members of the Institute (the Immortal Forty), who had so long led poetry in chains. The success of the Black Cat in her new quarters was immense, all Paris crowding through her modest doors. Salis had founded Montmartre!the rugged old hill giving birth to a generation of writers and poets, and nourishing this new school at her granite breasts.

It would be difficult to imagine a form of entertainment more tempting than was offered in this picturesque inn. In addition to the first, the entire second floor of the building had been thrown into one large room, the walls covered with a thousand sketches, caricatures, and crayon drawings by hands since celebrated the world over. A piano, with many chairs and tables, completed the unpretending installation. Here, during a couple of hours each evening, either by the piano or simply standing in their places, the young poets gave utterance to the creations of their imagination, the musicians played their latest inspirations, the raconteur told his newest story. They called each other and the better known among the guests by their names, and joked mutual weaknesses, eliminating from these gatherings every shade of a perfunctory performance.

It is impossible to give an idea of the delicate flavor of such informal eveningsthe sensation of being at home that the picturesque surroundings produced, the low murmur of conversation, the clink of glasses, the swing of the waltz movement played by a master hand, interrupted only when some slender form would lean against the piano and pour forth burning words of infinite pathos,the inspired young face lighted up by the passion and power of the lines. The burst of applause that his talent called forth would hardly have died away before another figure would take the poets place, a wave of laughter welcoming the new-comer, whose twinkling eyes and demure smile promised a treat of fun and humor. So the evening would wear gayly to its end, the younger element in the audience, full of the future, drinking in long draughts of poetry and art, the elders charmed to live over again the days of their youth and feel in touch once more with the present.

In this world of routine and conventions an innovation as brilliantly successful as this could hardly be inaugurated without raising a whirlwind of jealousy and opposition. The struggle was long and arduous. Directors of theatres and concert halls, furious to see a part of their public tempted away, raised the cry of immorality against the new-comers, and called to their aid every resource of law and chicanery. At the end of the first year Salis found himself with over eight hundred summonses and lawsuits on his hands. After having made every effort, knocked at every door, in his struggle for existence, he finally conceived the happy thought of appealing directly to Grévy, then President of the Republic, and in his audience with the latter succeeded in charming and interesting him, as he had so many others. The influence of the head of the state once brought to bear on the affair, Salis had the joy of seeing opposition crushed and the storm blow itself out.

From this moment, the poets, feeling themselves appreciated and their rights acknowledged and defended, flocked to the Sacred Mountain, as Montmartre began to be called; other establishments of the same character sprang up in the neighborhood. Most important among these were the 4 zArts, Boulevard de Clichy, the Tambourin, and La Butte.

Trombert, who, together with Fragerolle, Goudezki, and Marcel Lefèvre, had just ended an artistic voyage in the south of France, opened the 4 zArts, to which the novelty-loving public quickly found its way, crowding to applaud Coquelin cadet, Fragson, and other budding celebrities. It was here that the poets first had the idea of producing a piece in which rival cabarets were reviewed and laughingly criticised. The success was beyond all precedent, in spite of the difficulty of giving a play without a stage, without scenery or accessories of any kind, the interest centring in the talent with which the lines were declaimed by their authors, who next had the pleasant thought of passing in review the different classes of popular songs, Clovis Hugues, at the same time poet and statesman, discoursing on each subject, and introducing the singer; Brittany local songs, Provençal ballads, ant the half Spanish, half French chansons of the Pyrenees were sung or recited by local poets with the charm and abandon of their distinctive races.

The great critics did not disdain to attend these informal gatherings, nor to write columns of serious criticism on the subject in their papers.

At the hour when all Paris takes its apéritif the 4 zArts became the meeting-place of the painters, poets, and writers of the day. Montmartre gradually replaced the old Latin Quarter; it is there to-day that one must seek for the gayety and humor, the pathos and the makeshifts of Bohemia.

The 4 zArts, next to the Chat Noir, has had the greatest influence on the taste of our time,the pleiad of poets that grouped themselves around it in the beginning, dispersing later to form other centres, which, in their turn, were to influence the minds and moods of thousands.

Another charming form of entertainment inaugurated by this group of men is that of shadow pictures, conceived originally by Caran dAche, and carried by him to a marvellous perfection. A medium-sized frame filled with ground glass is suspended at one end of a room and surrounded by sombre draperies. The room is darkened; against the luminous background of the glass appear small black groups (shadows cast by figures cut out of cardboard). These figures move, advancing and retreating, grouping or separating themselves to the cadence of the poets verses, for which they form the most original and striking illustrations. Entire poems are given accompanied by these shadow pictures.

One of Caran dAches greatest successes in this line was an Epopée de Napoléon,the great Emperor appearing on foot and on horseback, the long lines of his army passing before him in the foreground or small in the distance. They stormed heights, cheered on by his presence, or formed hollow squares to repulse the enemy. During their evolutions, the clear voice of the poet rang out from the darkness with thrilling effect.

The nicest art is necessary to cut these little figures to the required perfection. So great was the talent of their inventor that, when he gave burlesques of the topics of the day, or presented the celebrities of the hour to his public, each figure would be recognized with a burst of delighted applause. The great Sarah was represented in poses of infinite humor, surrounded by her menagerie or receiving the homage of the universe. Political leaders, foreign sovereigns, social and operatic stars, were made to pass before a laughing public. None were spared. Paris went mad with delight at this new art, and for months it was impossible to find a seat vacant in the hall.

At the Boite à Musique, the idea was further developed. By an ingenious arrangement of lights, of which the secret has been carefully kept, landscapes are represented in color; all the gradations of light are given, from the varied twilight hues to purple night, until the moon, rising, lights anew the picture. During all these variations of color little groups continue to come and go, acting out the story of a poem, which the poet delivers from the surrounding obscurity as only an author can render his own lines.

One of the pillars of this attractive centre was Jules Jouy, who made a large place for himself in the hearts of his contemporariesa true poet, whom neither privations nor the difficult beginnings of an unknown writer could turn from his vocation. His songs are alternately tender, gay, and bitingly sarcastic. Some of his better-known ballads were written for and marvellously interpreted by Yvette Guilbert. The difficult critics, Sarcey and Jules Lemaître, have sounded his praise again and again.

A cabaret of another kind which enjoyed much celebrity, more on account of the personality of the poet who founded it than from any originality or picturesqueness in its intallation, was the Mirliton, opened by Aristide Bruant in the little rooms that had sheltered the original Chat Noir.

To give an account of the Mirliton is to tell the story of Bruant, the most popular ballad-writer in France to-day. This original and eccentric poet is as well-known to a Parisian as the boulevards or the Arc de Triomphe. His costume of shabby black velvet, Brittany waistcoat, red shirt, top-boots, and enormous hat is a familiar feature in the caricatures and prints of the day. His little cabaret remains closed during the day, opening its doors toward evening. The personality of the ballad-writer pervades the atmosphere. He walks about the tiny place hailing his acquaintances with some gay epigram, receiving strangers with easy familiarity or chilling disdain, as the humor takes him; then in a moment, with a rapid change of expression, pouring out the ringing lines of one of his balladsalways the story of the poor and humble, for he has identified himself with the outcast and the disinherited. His volumes Dans la Rue and Sur la Route have had an enormous popularity, their contents being known and sung all over France.

In 1892 Bruant was received as a member of the society of Gens de Lettres. It may be of interest to recall a part of the speech made by François Coppée on the occasion: It is with the greatest pleasure that I present to my confrères my good friend, the ballad-writer, Aristide Bruant. I value highly the author of Dans la Rue. When I close his volume of sad and caustic verses it is with the consoling thought that even vice and crime have their conscience: that if there is suffering there is a possible redemption. He has sought his inspiration in the gutter, it is true, but he has seen there a reflection of the stars.

In the Avenue Trudaine, not far from the other cabarets, the Ane Rouge was next opened, in a quiet corner of the immense suburb, its shady-little garden, on which the rooms open, making it a favorite meeting-place during the warm months. Of a summer evening no more congenial spot can be found in all Paris. The quaint chambers have been covered with mural paintings or charcoal caricatures of the poets themselves, or of familiar faces among the clients and patrons of the place.

One of the many talents that clustered around this quiet little garden was the brilliant Paul Verlaine, the most Bohemian of all inhabitants of modern Prague, whose death has left a void, difficult to fill. Fame and honors came too late. He died in destitution, if not absolutely of hunger; to-day his admirers are erecting a bronze bust of him in the Garden of the Luxembourg, with money that would have gone far toward making his life happy.

In the old hôtel of the Lesdiguières family, rue de la Tour dAuvergne, the Carillon opened its doors in 1893, and quickly conquered a place in the public favor, the inimitable fun and spirits of Tiercy drawing crowds to the place.

The famous Tréteau de Tabarin, which to-day holds undisputed precedence over all the cabarets of Paris, was among the last to appear. It was founded by the brilliant Fursy and a group of his friends. Here no pains have been spared to form a setting worthy of the poets and their public.

Many years ago, in the days of the good king Louis XIII., a strolling poet-actor, Tabarin, erected his little canvas-covered stage before the statue of Henry IV., on the Pont-Neuf, and drew the court and the town by his fun and pathos. The founders of the latest and most complete of Parisian cabarets have reconstructed, as far as possible, this historic scene. On the wall of the room where the performances are given, is painted a view of old Paris, the Seine and its bridges, the towers of Notre Dame in the distance, and the statue of Louis XIII.s warlike father in the foreground. In front of this painting stands a staging of rough planks, reproducing the little theatre of Tabarin. Here, every evening, the authors and poets play in their own pieces, recite their verses, and tell their stories. Not long ago a young musician, who has already given an opera to the world, sang an entire one-act operetta of his composition, changing his voice for the different parts, imitating choruses by clever effects on the piano.

Montmartre is now sprinkled with attractive cabarets, the taste of the public for such informal entertainments having grown each year; with reason, for the careless grace of the surroundings, the absence of any useless restraint or obligation as to hour or duration, has a charm for thousands whom a long concert or the inevitable five acts at the Français could not tempt. It would be difficult to overrate the influence such an atmosphere, breathed in youth, must have on the taste and character. The absence of a sordid spirit, the curse of our material day and generation, the contact with intellects trained to incase their thoughts in serried verse or crisp and lucid prose, cannot but form the hearers mind into a higher and better mould. It is both a satisfaction and a hope for the future to know that these influences are being felt all over the capital and throughout the length and breadth of France. There are at this moment in Paris alone three or four hundred poets, ballad writers, and raconteurs who recite their works in public.