CONSISTENT in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis—where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine—seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosed place, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned’s vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as—barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries—a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.
For thence, often watching, speculative, he would see the scene-shifters of the early Revolution—come out in front of the high, mute screen of the prison, that closed his vista eastwards as if it were a stage-curtain—busy as bees on the alighting-board of a hive. Thence he would mark, in real ignorance of the plot of the forthcoming piece, or cycle of pieces, the motley companies gathering for rehearsal—the barn-stormers; the heavy “leads;” the slighted tragedians foreseeing their opportunity for the fiftieth time; the inflated supers canvassing the favour of phantom houses with imagined gems of inspiration, with new lamps for old in the shape of misenlightened renderings of traditional rôles; he would mark the gas, so to speak, the artificial light that informed the garish scene with spurious vitality. But the prompter he could never as yet find in his place, nor could he gather the true import of the play to which, it must be presumed, all this pretentious gallimaufry was a prelude. Theorists, agitators, pamphleteers—the open, clamorous expression of that that had been suggested only to him during his hitherto wanderings—all these and all this were present to his eyes and his ears, passionlessly alert at their vantage-point on the second floor of the corner house in the Rue Beautreillis. Daily he sought to piece, from the struttings and the disconnected vapourings, the puzzle of present circumstance, the political significance of so much apparently aimless rhetoric. Daily he listened for the prompter’s bell; daily looked for the appearance of the confident author who should discipline all this swagger and rhodomontade.
Then, by-and-by, the fancy did so master him as that he would see a veritable curtain, rounding into slumberous folds, in this silent west wall of the Bastille; a curtain—with sky-arched convent buildings for proscenium—whose every sombre crease he seemed to watch with a curious moved expectancy of the unnameable that should be revealed in its lifting. For so an impression deepened in him unaccountably that beyond that voiceless veil was shaping itself the real drama, of which this outer ranting was but as the wind that precedes an avalanche; that suddenly, and all in a moment, the screen would be rent, like a sullen cloud by lightning, and the import of an ominous foregathering find expression in some withering organisation to which the surface turmoil had been but a blind. He thought himself prophetic—en rapport with the imps of a national destiny; but nevertheless the curtain delayed to rise while he waited, though it was to go up presently to a roar that shook the world.
Still, from his window Ned could enjoy to look, as from a box in a theatre of varieties, upon a scene of possibilities infinite to an artist. He had flown from green pastures and drowsy woods—where revolutionary propagandism, however violently uttered, must waste itself on remote echo-surfaces—straight into a resounding city of narrow ways, a Paris of blusterers and mégères, of controversialists and tractarians, of winged treatises and fluttering pandects. The streets were as full of the latter as if paper-chase were the daily pastime of the populace. Only the hounds, it seemed, never ran the hares to earth; and the hares themselves were March ones, by every token of incoherence. And “Surely,” thought the young man, “it is to be needlessly alarmist to read upheaval in this yeasty ferment. Let the Bastille fall, and there behind shall show nothing more formidable than the blank brick wall of the theatre.”
But at least all his perspectives teemed with colour. The national complexion, he could have thought, revealed itself in its hottest dyes in this quarter of the town. Here were no subdued tones of speech or apparel, no powdered flunkeyism deprecating the brutal outspokenness of nature. St Antoine, even this west side of the prison bar, took life on the raw; dressed loudly as it talked; discussed its viands and its hopes with an equal appetite for un- and re-dress; was always far readier to hang a man than a joint of beef—instinctively, perhaps, to make him that was hard tender. And to this unposturing attitude Ned felt his sympathies extend. Here, at the smallest, was nakedness unashamed—material, not, as St Denys would have it, for indulgence, but for the re-ordering of a world that had confusedly strayed, not so far, from the paths of truth to itself.
Moreover, the light, the life, the movement had their many appeals to his artistic perceptives. These latter, greatly stimulated in little Méricourt, found themselves ten times awake to this second dawn of experience. He had never been in Paris before, and it was now his fate to alight and sojourn in it during an epoch-making period. He did not forget his late company: that, indeed, was for ever shadowed in the background of his mind—St Denys and Théroigne, and, most of all, the strange little lodge-keeper whose portrait he had left unfinished. But here, in the very mid-throng of vivid life, the present so taxed his every faculty of observation, so drained the inadequate resources of his skill and of his paint-box, that interests foreign to the moment must not be allowed to contribute to the pressure on his time. Like an author in actual harness who keeps from reading books for fear of assimilating another’s style, so Ned forbade a thought of Nicette to come between him and his canvas. And assuredly his business in hand was not to paint Madonnas.
At the same time, Paris wrought upon him something beneficially. Its numerical vastness—more forcibly expressed, by reason of the intenseness of its individual feeling, than that of London—amused him with a sense of his own insignificance; the conviction driven home into his mind, as he turned bewildered in a snow of pamphlets, that his profound theories of government were but childish essays in a craft, in the complicated ramifications of which there was not a street orator but left him miles behind, taught him a modesty to which he had been hitherto a part stranger. But he grew in self-reliance as he dwindled in self-sufficiency; and that was like exchanging fat for muscle—an admirable quid pro quo in a city of gauntest shadows.
To all the concentration of his faculties upon a seething pandemonium; to all his earnest efforts to record armies of fugitive impressions, and to interpret of their sum-total the nature of the force that set them in motion, Madame Gamelle acted, in unconscious humour, the part of chorus.
“But, yes,” she would say; “the philosophers have proved the world misgoverned, and these that you see are the agents of the philosophers. They are travellers who trade in the article of truth. They teach the people to know themselves; that every one may have liberty of speech; that licence shall no longer be the privilege of aristocrats.”
“And you would know yourself licentious, mother?”
“As to that—do not ask me. I recognise it only for an admirable creed. My Zoïle would call it so. He looked to the time when he would be legally entitled to ignore the marriage vow. The poor blondin! He was a fine man, monsieur, but always unlucky. He died in the heyday of his hopes, leaving me the one precious pledge of his affection.”
Then she would poke the little frowzy baby on her arm with a stunted finger, and nod to and address it in a strain of superfluous banter:—
“Eh, mon p’tit godichon! Thou wouldst teach me to know myself in thy little dirty face? Fie, then! Hast thou been seeking for my image or thine own in the basin of fine gravy soup I set aside for monsieur the lodger’s dinner?”
So it was ever with this gruesome infant. Its presentment, or that of some part of it, haunted Ned through every course of an attenuated cuisine. The butter would exhibit a mould of its features, the milk-jug a print of its lips. The rolls appeared indented with suspicious crescents in the crusty parts; the omelettes confessed a flavour, and often an impression, of a small sticky hand. The creature itself, moreover, was a shockingly ubiquitous Puck. It was always being mislaid, as was everything portable in the house. Its shrill waking cry would issue from the depths of the lodger’s bed, into which it had burrowed with a precocious sense of the humour of appropriation; its red face rise suddenly, like an October moon, from behind a cloud of sacking on the floor. It was brought up with the fagots, and ran some narrow risks of premature cremation; it was included in the week’s washing, and its little fat stomach menaced with a flat-iron. Sometimes, when one opened a cupboard, it would fall out in company with half-a-dozen plates; sometimes madame would deposit it on a table, and, forgetting that she had done so, would heap it with casual litter as she transacted her domestic business. “No doubt,” Ned thought, “it is destined to eventual immolation in a pasty.”
Indeed, his nerves were always on the jump when there was cooking forward—a lively knowledge of which fact he could by no means evade. For the process being conducted on the floor above his head, and it being customary with madame to let everything boil over, it became a familiar experience with him to see successive samples of his menu appear and hang in sebaceous drops from a certain seasoned patch on the ceiling, whence in time they would contribute their quota of peril to a perfect little slide of grease that had formed on the boards below. Then, at such a stage, it would be not unusual for his landlady to come into view, pledge-on-arm, at the door, her borné face irradiated with some eagerness of triumph.
“But only think, monsieur!” she would begin.
“Pardon,” Ned would interpose; “but is it well for the child to be gnawing that great lump of cheese?”
“Cheese! Oh, mon Dieu! I must have put it on the trencher, thinking it was bread, and he has taken it, the thief!”
Then the lodger must discipline his impatience, while the comestible changed hands, to a shrill clamour, the infant finally being deposited outside the door like boots to be cleaned.
“Only think, monsieur!” cries the lady again; “the delicate compote I could have sworn to having prepared for monsieur’s dinner a week ago, when monsieur, nevertheless, had to go fasting for an entremet! I was right; it was made, and it was not stolen. This morning I find it thrust to the very back of the oven—baked for a week, and no more eatable than a brigadier’s wig.”
Well, all this provoked Master Ned into no desire to change his quarters. He was a genially stoic rascal, and one that could wring interest out of investments that would have repelled less imperturbable natures. So, through that autumn and winter, and deep into the spring of ’89, he stuck to his corner of the Rue Beautreillis, going little into the more fashionable centres of the town, seeking artistic adventure like a knight-errant of the pencil, and doubtless elaborately misreading, in common with many thousands about him, the signs that came and went, like a moaning wind, in the channels of the rushing life of St Antoine.