by George Moore
Poor Villiers was not much to blame; it was part of Ninon’s temperament to waste her money, and the canvases round the room testified that she spent a great deal on modern art. She certainly had been a rich woman; rumour credited her with spending fifty thousand francs a year, and in her case rumour said no more than the truth, for it would require that at least to live as she lived, keeping open house to all the literature, music, painting, and sculpture done in Montmartre. At first sight her hospitality seems unreasonable, but when one thinks one sees that it conforms to the rules of all hospitality. There must be a principle of selection, and were the ratés she entertained less amusing than the people one meets in Grosvenor Square or the Champs Elysées? Any friend could introduce another, that is common practice, but at Ninon’s there was a restriction which I never met elsewhere — no friend could bring another unless the newcomer was a raté — in other words, unless he had written music or verse, or painted or carved, in a way that did not appeal to the taste of the ordinary public; inability to reach the taste of the general public was the criterion that obtained there.
The windows of Ninon’s boudoir opened upon the garden, and on my expressing surprise at its size and at the large trees that grew there, she gave me permission to admire and investigate; and I walked about the pond, interested in the numerous ducks, in the cats, in the companies of macaws and cockatoos that climbed down from their perches and strutted across the swards. I came upon a badger and her brood, and at my approach they disappeared into an enormous excavation, and behind the summer-house I happened upon a bear asleep and retreated hurriedly. But on going towards the house I heard a well-known voice. “That is Augusta Holmes singing her opera,” I said; “she sings all the different parts — soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass.” At this time we were all talking about her, and I stood by the window listening until suddenly a well-known smell interrupted her. It was Ninon’s cat that had misconducted herself. A window was thrown open, but the ventilation did not prove sufficient. Augusta and her admirers had to leave the piano, and they came from the house glad to breathe the evening air. How dear to me are flowered gowns and evening skies and women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta’s voice streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs attitudes grew more abandoned, and hands fell pensively. Among the half-seen faces I caught sight of a woman of exceeding fairness; her hair had only a faint tinge of gold in it; and Ninon remembered that she was a cousin of hers, one whom she had not seen for many years. How Clare had discovered her in the Rue la Moine she could not tell. It was whispered that she was the wife of a rich commerçant at Tours. This added to the mystery, and later in the evening the lady told me she had never been in artistic society before, and begged me to point out to her the celebrities present, and to tell her why they were celebrated.
“Who is he — that one slouching towards the pond, that one wearing grey trousers and a black jacket? — oh!”
My companion’s exclamation was caused by a new sight of Verlaine; at that moment he had lifted off his hat (the evening was still warm), and the great bald skull, hanging like a cliff over the shaggy eyebrows, shaggy as furze bushes, frightened her. The poet continued his walk round the pond, and, turning suddenly towards us, he stopped to speak to me. I was but a pretext; he clearly wished to speak to my companion. But how strangely did he suit his conversation to her, yet how characteristic of his genius were the words I heard as I turned away, thinking to leave them together— “If I were in love with a young girl or with a young man?” My companion ran forward quickly and seized my arm. “You must not leave me with him,” she said. On account of his genius Verlaine was a little slow to see things outside of himself — all that was within him was clear, all without him obscure; so we had some difficulty in getting rid of him, and as soon as he was out of hearing my companion inquired eagerly who he was, and I was astonished at the perception she showed. “Is he a priest? I mean, was he ever a priest?” “A sort of cross between a thieves’ kitchen and a presbytery. He is the poet Verlaine. The singer of the sweetest verses in the French language — a sort of ambling song like a robin’s. You have heard the robin singing on a coral hedge in autumn-tide; the robin confesses his little soul from the topmost twig; his song is but a tracery of his soul, and so is Verlaine’s. His gift is a vision of his own soul, and he makes a tracery as you might of a drawing with a lead pencil, never troubling himself to inquire if what he traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society’s point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais, — there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead — Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day. Verlaine has not cut the throats of so many little boys as Gilles de Rais, but Gilles de Rais always declared himself to be a good Catholic. Verlaine abandons himself to the Church as a child to a fairy tale; he does trouble to argue whether the Conception of the Virgin was Immaculate; the mediaeval sculptors have represented her attired very prettily in cloaks with long folds, they have put graceful crowns upon her head, and Verlaine likes these things; they inspire him to write, he feels that belief in the Church is part of himself, and his poetical genius is to tell his own story; he is one of the great soul-tellers. From a literary point of view there is a good deal to be said in favour of faith when it is not joined with practice; acceptation of dogma shields one from controversy; it allows Verlaine to concentrate himself entirely upon things; it weans him away from ideas — the curse of modern literature — and makes him a sort of divine vagrant living his life in the tavern and in the hospital. It is only those who have freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get the real taste of life — the aroma as from a wine that has been many years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but he quickly recovers. ‘After all, I have written a good many volumes.’ ‘And what would art be without life, without love?’ He has a verse on that subject; I wish I could remember it for you. His verse is always so winsome, so delicate, slender as the birch tree, elegiac like it; a birch bending over a lake’s edge reminds me of Verlaine. He is a lake poet, but the lake is in a suburb not far from a casino. What makes me speak about the lake is that for a long time I thought these verses,
Ton âme est un lac d’amour
Dont mes pensêes sont les cygnes.
Vois comme ils font le tour....
were Verlaine’s, but they are much less original; their beauty, for they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of his, really his own, poetry. His desires go sometimes as high as the crucifix; very often they are in the gutter, hardly poetry at all, having hardly any beauty except that of truth, and of course the beauty of a versification that haunts in his ear, for he hears a song in French verse that no French poet has ever heard before, and a song so fluent, ranging from the ecstasy of the nightingale to the robin’s little homily.
Oui, c’était par un soir joyeux de cabaret,
Un de ces soirs plutôt trop chauds où l’on dirait
Que le gaz du plafond conspire à notre perte
Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naïve et verte.
On s’amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on
Entendait des soupirs voisins d’accordéon
Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.
Quand la porte s’ouvrit de la salle de danse
Vomissant tout un flot dont toi, vers où j’étais,
Et de ta voix fait que soudain je me tais,
S’il te plaît de me donner un ordre péremptoire.
Tu t’écrias ‘Dieu, qu’il fait chaud! Patron, à boire!’
“She was from Picardy; and he tells of her horrible accent, and in elegy number five he continues the confession, telling how his well beloved used to get drunk.
“Tu fis le saut de ... Seine et, depuis morte-vive,
Tu gardes le vertige et le goût du néant.”
“But how can a man confess such things?” my companion asked me, and we stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape, cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with hair, I said:
“Verlaine has an extraordinary power of expression, and to be ashamed of nothing; but to be ashamed is his genius, just as it was Manet’s. It is to his shamelessness that we owe his most beautiful poems, all written in garrets, in taverns, in hospitals — yes, and in prison.”
“In prison! But he didn’t steal, did he?” and the commerçant’s wife looked at me with a frightened air, and I think her hand went towards her pocket.
“No, no; a mere love story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves’ quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling in love with drabs.”
Dans ces femmes d’ailleurs je n’ai pas trouvé l’ange
Qu’il eût fallu pour remplacer ce diable, toi!
L’une, fille du Nord, native d’un Crotoy,
Etait rousse, mal grasse et de prestance molle;
Elle ne m’adressa guère qu’une parole
Et c’était d’un petit cadeau qu’il s’agissait,
En revanche, dans son accent d’ail et de poivre,
Une troisième, recemment chanteuse au Havre,
Affectait de dandinement des matelots
Et m’... enguelait comme un gabier tancant les flots,
Mais portrait beau vraiment, sacrédié, quel dommage
La quatrième était sage comme une image,
Châtain clair, peu de gorge et priait Dieu parfois:
Le diantre soit de ses sacrés signes de croix!
Les seize autres, autant du moins que ma mémoire
Surnage en ce vortex, contaient toutes l’histoire
Connue, un amant chic, puis des vieux, puis “l’îlot”
Tantôt bien, tantôt moins, le clair café falot
Les terasses l’été, l’hiver les brasseries
Et par degrés l’humble trottoir en théories
En attendant les bons messieurs compatissants
Capables d’un louis et pas trop repoussants
Qutorum ego parva pars erim, me disais-je.
Mais toutes, comme la première du cortège,
Dès avant la bougie éteinte et le rideau
Tiré, n’oubliaient pas le “mon petit cadeau.”
“In the verses I have just quoted, you remember, he says that the fourth was chaste as an image, her hair was pale brown, she had scarcely any bosom, and prayed to God sometimes. He always hated piety when it interfered with his pleasure, and in the next verse he says, ‘The devil take those sacred signs of the Cross!’”
“But do you know any of these women?”
“Oh, yes; we all know the terrible Sara. She beats him.”
The commerçante’s wife asked if she were here.
“He wanted to bring her here, in fact he did bring her once, only she was so drunk that she could not get beyond the threshold, and Ninon’s lover, the painter you saw painting the steam engines, was charged to explain to the poet that Sara’s intemperance rendered her impossible in respectable society. ‘I know Sara has her faults,’ he murmured in reply to all argument, and it was impossible to make him see that others did not see Sara with his eyes. ‘I know she has her faults,’ he repeated, ‘and so have others. We all have our faults.’ And it was a long time before he could be induced to come back: hunger has brought him.”
“And who is that hollow-chested man? How pathetic he looks with his goat-like beard.”
“That is the celebrated Cabaner. He will tell you, if you speak to him, that his father was a man like Napoleon, only more so. He is the author of many aphorisms; ‘that three military bands would be necessary to give the impression of silence in music’ is one. He comes every night to the Nouvelle Athènes, and is a sort of rallying-point; he will tell you that his ballad of ‘The Salt Herring’ is written in a way that perhaps Wagner would not, but which Liszt certainly would understand.”
“Is his music ever played? Does it sell? How does he live? Not by his music, I suppose?”
“Yes, by his music, by playing waltzes and polkas in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet. His earnings are five francs a day, and for thirty-five francs a month he has a room where many of the disinherited ones of art, many of those you see here, sleep. His room is furnished — ah, you should see it! If Cabaner wants a chest of drawers he buys a fountain, and he broke off the head of the Vénus de Milo, saying that now she no longer reminded him of the people he met in the streets; he could henceforth admire her without being troubled by any sordid recollection. I could talk to you for hours about his unselfishness, his love of art, his strange music, and his stranger poems, for his music accompanies his own verses.”
“Is he too clever for the public, or not clever enough?”
“Now you’re asking me the question we’ve been asking ourselves for the last ten years.... The man fumbling at his shirt collar over yonder is the celebrated Villiers de L’Isle Adam.”
And I remember how it pleased me to tell this simple-minded woman all I knew about Villiers.
“He has no talent whatever, only genius, and that is why he is a raté,” I said.
But the woman was not so simple as I had imagined, and one or two questions she put to me led me to tell her that Villiers’s genius only appeared in streaks, like gold in quartz.
“The comparison is an old one, but there is no better one to explain Villiers, for when he is not inspired his writing is very like quartz.”
“His great name — —”
“His name is part of his genius. He chose it, and it has influenced his writings. Have I not heard him say, ‘Car je porte en moi les richesses stériles d’un grand nombre de rois oubliés.’”
“But is he a legitimate descendant?”
“Legitimate in the sense that he desired the name more than any of those who ever bore it legitimately.”
At that moment Villiers passed by me, and I introduced him to her, and very soon he began to tell us that his Eve had just been published, and the success of it was great.
“On m’a dit hier de passer à la caisse ... l’edition était épuisée, vous voyez — il paraît, la fortune est venue ... même à moi.”
But Villiers was often tiresomely talkative about trifles, and as soon as I got the chance I asked him if he were going to tell us one of his stories, reminding him of one I had heard he had been telling lately in the brass
eries about a man in quest of a quiet village where he could get rest, a tired composer, something of that kind. Had he written it? No, he had not written it yet, but now that he knew I liked it he would get up earlier to-morrow. Some one took him away from us, and I had to tell my companion the story.
“Better,” I said, “he should never write it, for half of it exists in his voice, and in his gestures, and every year he gets less and less of himself onto the paper. One has to hear him tell his stories in the café — how well he tells them! You must hear him tell how a man, recovering from a long illness, is advised by his doctor to seek rest in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all to be robbers and assassins.
“He would escape but he dare not, for he is being followed, so turning on his pursuers he asks them if they can direct him to a lodging. The point of Villiers’s story is how a suspicion begins in the man’s mind, how it grows like a cancer, and very soon the villagers are convinced he is an anarchist, and that his trunks are full of material for the manufacture of bombs. And this is why they dare not touch them. So they follow him to the farmhouse whither they have directed him, and tell their fears to the farmer and his wife. Villiers can improvise the consultations in the kitchen; at midnight in the café, but when morning comes he cannot write, his brain is empty. You must come some night to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear him; leaning across the table he will tell the terror of the hinds and farmer, how they are sure the house is going to be blown up. The sound of their feet on the staircase inspires terror in the wretched convalescent. He sits up in bed, listening, great drops of sweat collected on his forehead. He dare not get out of bed, but he must; and Villiers can suggest the sound of feet on the creaking stairs — yes, and the madness of the man piling furniture against the door, and the agony of those outside hearing the noise within. When they break into the room they find a dead man; for terror has killed him. You must come to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear Villiers tell his story. I’ll meet you there to-morrow night.... Will you dine with me? The dinner there is not really too bad; perhaps you’ll be able to bear with it.”
