by George Moore
She would not believe me at first, he said three months later, after telling me that he had left Alice for good; she would not believe me at first, and all she could find to say to persuade me to remain was: You couldn’t leave such a pretty pair of breasts! Soon after, I heard from him that the rupture was confirmed by Alice herself, who had passed him in her carriage in the Champs Élysées. She had looked the other way, and there was such scorn in her face that he had vowed he would prove to her that in losing her he had not lost everything. A few days after, he introduced me to a pretty blonde Swede, a woman who was well thought of, but with hardly a tithe of Alice’s reputation. I never heard from Lewis why he left her, but one day a carriage drew up by the pavement on which I was walking. The glass was let down, and the Swede told me that she had been obliged to send Lewis away because she found a voiture de remise indispensable.
Les voitures de remise et les amants de coeur sont la ruine des femmes, she said; comme combinaison, c’est aux pommes. And the wisdom of this second-rate light-o’-love, begotten no doubt of many experiences, called my thoughts back to Alice, who, since she had thrown out her amant de coeur, was rapidly becoming one of the celebrated demi-mondaines in Paris. Whilst she went up in the world Lewis sank lower, attaching himself to women who could barely afford him three hundred francs a month, the price of a grisette in the Quartier Latin; the occasional bank-note that his mother used to send him she could afford no longer; his sister was a great expense, and he came to me one day to tell me that he had decided to earn his own living.
Vanderkirko, you know whom I mean, he said, has a small china factory, and he has agreed to take me as an apprentice. I am going to live with him in the Avenue d’Italie près de la barrière.
But you’ll see nobody. You’ll be exiled.
I am weary of the life I have been leading; and you’ll come and see me sometimes, though it is a long way off.
I’ll come every Sunday, I answered, and a few Sundays later I found him and Vanderkirko building a wall.
So you’ve come at last! and he took me into the house and showed me some of his first attempts at painting china, and interested me in the manufacture, in la cuisson au petit et au grand feu.
Vanderkirko was an ex-Communist, and Lewis told me how a door had opened at the last moment when the Government troops were at his heels. He had rushed through it, and through the house, and he was now married et très rangé, and that was why he had refused my invitation to dine and to go to Constant’s afterwards. Lewis advised me that the restaurants in the quarter n’étaient pas trop fameux, but we could get some simple food au coin de la rue de la Gaieté, and afterwards at Constant’s he would introduce me to some very dangerous criminals, and he talked to me of the thieves he knew and the robberies they planned and were planning; he talked to me about their mistresses, exciting my imagination, for their nicknames were odd and picturesque. If he be not the lover of a great demi-mondaine, he likes to live among thieves and ponces, I thought; one extreme or the other of society for him. A somewhat unreal person. But, why is one person more unreal than another? I asked myself, deciding that a man without a point of view always conveys the impression of unreality. The long street that we used to walk up together rose in my vision, and Lewis growing more confidential from lamp-post to lamp-post, telling me that it was not idleness, as I supposed, that had kept him out of Julian’s studio, nor was it because he had no money to pay the fees — Julian would have let him work for nothing — but he could not accept favours from Julian. The tone of his voice in which he said this surprised me, and then becoming still more confidential, he said that he could not go to Julian’s studio because his sister was Julian’s mistress. I don’t know why I should have been so surprised, but I was surprised that such a thing should have happened and that he should have told me; and, very much concerned, I begged of him to tell me how it had all come about. Apparently in the simplest way. He had introduced her to Julian, and — my memory has dropped a stitch, something and something. He had called at her hotel, and the concierge had told him that Madame had gone away to the country, and the next time they met he asked her where she had been; she answered that she had been to the country with Julian. But you didn’t come back that night. Where did you sleep? With Fatty, she had answered coolly. He did not think it right, and he did not think it wrong, that his sister should live as it pleased her; he was always un peu veule de nature, without a point of view; and returning from the coal-box, for the fire had sunk very low, I picked up the thread of my thoughts again. He had told me that it was on account of debts he had given up work at the studio, and I remembered that he had confessed to owing Renouf one hundred francs; Julian had lent him fifty, he had had a bit off Chadwick, he had borrowed from Julian’s bonne, and it was this last debt that had convinced him that sooner or later he would have to earn his own living. And my heart warmed once more toward this handsome fellow who could take the rough with the smooth, and was as light-hearted in the Avenue d’Italie as in the Rue Duphot, and I praised him to Julian as we drank our coffee at the corner table, until one night, after listening in silence, Julian asked if it had not occurred to me that in losing Lewis Art had suffered a great loss. Lewis’s defection from the studio had never struck me in quite so serious a light before, and I asked Julian if he thought that a great genius was being wasted at the Barrière d’Italie. As if he did not hear me, Julian said that casual loans of money were no use, and that it would be better for me not to see Lewis any more unless I could do something definite for him.
Why shouldn’t you invite him to live with you for a year, eighteen months? — two years will be sufficient.
But I live in the Hôtel de Russie.
The proper thing for you to do is to take an appartement give him a room and let him be certain of his breakfast and his dinner, and pay for his washing. His mother will send him a little pocket-money, and he can work at my studio.
But the studio fees?
Of course I couldn’t take your money.
Julian had caught me, and feeling that I lacked courage to say No, and bear the blame of allowing a great genius to wither unknown down by the Barrière d’Italie, I wrote to Lewis telling him of Julian’s proposal to me, and next day he came up to thank me and to assure me that he would try to justify the confidence that we placed in him. He did not give me time to consider the wisdom of the sacrifice I was making, and very wisely, but set out at once to find an appartement that would suit us, coming next day to me with the joyful tidings that he had seen one in the Passage des Panoramas in the Galerie Feydeau. But I don’t think I could live in the Passage des Panoramas, and I begged him to look out for another appartement.
But this one is on the first floor, he urged; we shan’t have to go up many stairs, and we shall only have to run round the galleries to Julian’s studio. That will save us getting up half an hour earlier in the morning and walking through the wet streets. We shall never see the sky nor feel the wind blowing, and I looked up at the glass roofing through which trickled a dim sordid twilight. The sky and wind are well enough out of doors, he said, but once we are within doors the more we are within the better. I have seen other appartements, but nothing as suitable to our convenience. You are going to work, aren’t you? And if you are, nothing else matters.
It was with such specious argument that I was inveigled into my prison, and more or less feebly I agreed to forgo light and air for eighteen months or two years.
V
THE FIRE WAS now burning brightly, and I recalled my memories one by one till the three months we had spent in the studio became visible.
The first week my drawing was no worse than Lewis’s; indeed, it was rather better, but the second week he had outstripped me, and whatever talent I had, the long hours in the studio wore it away rapidly, and one day, horrified at the black thing in front of me, I laid down my pencil: saying to myself, I will never take up pencil or brush again, and slunk away out of the studio home to the Galerie Feydeau t
o the room above the umbrella shop, to my bed, my armoire à glace, my half-dozen chairs; and on that bed under its green curtains I lay all night weeping, saying to myself: My life is ended and done. There is no hope for me. All I wanted was Art, and Art has been taken from me. Je suis fichu, fichu, bien fichu, I repeated, and the steps of the occasional passer-by echoed mournfully under the glass roofing.
The Galerie Feydeau had never seemed a cheerful place to live in; it was now as hateful to me as a prison, and Lewis was my gaoler. He went away every morning at eight o’clock, and I met him at breakfast in the little restaurant at the end of the Galerie Feydeau. After breakfast he returned to the studio, and I was free to wander about the streets or to sit in my room reading Shelley. He came home about five, and we went for a walk, and he told me what was happening in the studio. Everything that happened seemed to be for his greater honour and glory. He had won the medal and the hundred francs that Julian offered every month for the best drawing — an innovation this was to attract custom — and a little spree had to be given to commemorate his triumph. He organised the spree very well; of course it was my money that paid for it; and the best part of the studio came to the Galerie Feydeau one evening, and we sang and smoked and drank punch and played the piano. Lewis played the violin, and Julian, drawing his chair up to mine, told me that in ten years hence Lewis would be hors concours in the Salon, and living in a great hotel in the Champs Élysées painting pictures at thirty thousand francs apiece. Les grandes tartines we used to call the pictures that went to the Salon, or les grandes machines: I am forgetting my studio slang. Julian had a difficult part to play. If he were to depreciate Lewis’s talent I might throw up the sponge and go away; he thought it safer to assure me that my sacrifices were not made in vain; but man is such a selfish and jealous animal that it had begun to seem to me I would prefer a great failure for Lewis to a great success. Not a great failure, I said to myself; for if he fail I shall never get rid of him. There will be no escape from the Galerie Feydeau for me, so I must hope for his success. He will leave me when he begins to make money. When will that be? and the cruel thought crossed my mind that he was laughing at me all the while, looking upon me as the springboard wherefrom he would jump into a great Salon success. It seemed to me that I could see us both in the years ahead — myself humble and obscure, he great and glorious, looking down upon me somewhat kindly, as the lion looks upon the mouse that has gnawed the cords that bound him. I think I was as unhappy in the Galerie Feydeau as I had been in Oscott College. I seemed to have lost everybody in the world except the one person I wished to lose, Lewis. I was a stranger in the studio, where I went seldom, for every one there knew of my failure; even the models I feared to invite to my rooms lest they should tell tales afterwards. At last the thought came of my sister’s school friend, and at her home I met people who knew nothing of Julian and L’École des Beaux-Arts, and at a public dinner I was introduced to John O’Leary and his Parisian circle, and all these people were interested in me on account of my father. One can always pick one’s way into Society, and three months later I was moving in American and English Society about the Place Wagram and the Boulevard Malesherbes, returning home in the early morning, awaking Lewis frequently to describe the party to him, awaking him one morning to tell him that a lady whose boots I was buttoning in the vestibule had leaned over me and whispered that I could go to the very top button ... if I liked. A very pretty answer it had seemed to Lewis, and it was clear that he was affected by it, though he resisted for a long time my efforts to persuade him to allow me to introduce him to my friends. I had intended only an outing, an exhibition of my cousin, after which he was to return to his kennel. But I had interrupted his life, and fatally; invitations came to him from every side; he accepted them all, and we started to learn the Boston before the armoire à glace. He learnt it quicker than I did, and when he returned from Barbizon, whither he had gone to meet the wife of an American millionaire, I told him I could live no longer in the Galerie Feydeau and was going away to Boulogne to meet some people whom I had met at Madame Ratazzi’s, into whose circle I had happily not introduced him, and wishing to take him down a peg I mentioned that I had acted with her in La Dame aux Camélias. He flew into a violent rage. I was going away with swagger friends to enjoy myself, careless whether he ate or starved. He was right from this point of view. I was breaking my promise to him. But is there anybody who would be able to say he would not have broken his in the same circumstances? None! It was at once a shameful and a natural act; he was my friend; it was shameful, it was horrible, but there are shameful and horrible things in other lives beside mine. His presence had become unendurable. But why excuse myself further? Let the facts speak for themselves and let me be judged by them. They have already been published in The Confessions of a Young Man, but I wonder now if I told in that book enough of the surprise that I experienced on finding him still in the appartement in the Galerie Feydeau when I returned from Boulogne? He should have moved out of my rooms after the quarrel, but instead of that he had converted the sitting-room into a workshop, and his designs for lace curtains occupied one entire wall. He’ll go tomorrow, of course, I said, but he did not go on the morrow or the day after, and at the end of the week he was still there, and annoying me by whistling as he worked on his design. At last, unable to bear it any longer, I opened the door of my bedroom and begged him to cease, and it is to this day a marvel to me how he restrained himself from strangling me. He looked as if he were going to rush at me, and on the threshold of my room indulged in the most fearful vituperation and abuse, to which I felt it would be wiser not to attempt an answer, for his arms were long and his fists were heavy; he was always talking about striking out, and it is foolish to engage in a combat when one knows one is going to get the worst of it, so I just let him shout on until he retired to his lace curtains, and I resolved to give notice.
He can’t stay after quarter-day.
But the quarter was a long way off, and every day I met him in the Passage des Panoramas among my friends, flowing away in a new ulster past the jet ornaments and the fans; a splendid fellow he certainly was with his broken nose and his grand eyes, and the ulster suited him so well that I began to regret a quarrel which prevented me from asking him questions about it. He came and went as he pleased, passing me on the staircase and in the rooms, his splendid indifference compelling the conclusion that however lacking in character a reconciliation would prove me to be, I could no longer forego one, and after many hesitations I called after him and begged that he would allow bygones to be bygones. I think that he said this was impossible; he must have been counting on my weakness; however this may be, he played with me very prettily, forcing me to plead, practically to ask his forgiveness, and when we were friends again he related that he was looking out for a studio, and in the effusion of reconciliation I very foolishly asked him to tell me if he should happen upon an appartement that he thought would suit me, for live another quarter in the Galerie Feydeau I couldn’t. He promised that he would not fail to keep his eyes open, and a few days after he mentioned that he had seen a charming appartement in the Rue de la Tour des Dames — the very thing that would suit me. As there was not nearly enough furniture in the Galerie Feydeau to fill it, he entered into negotiations with an upholsterer, and dazzled me with a scheme of decoration which would cost very little to carry out, and which would give me as pretty an appartement as any in Paris. He was kind enough to relieve me of all the details of un déménagement, and what could I do in return but invite him to stay with me until he had painted a picture?
