CHAPTER X
THE PARISIAN LECTURE AND SALON
In no city in the world is the public lecturer so popular as in Paris. The Conférence is almost a national institution, like the salon and the foyer. I will frankly confess that I find the average Parisian lecturer overrated, and the whole thing sadly overdone. In the winter and spring there are a great deal too many lectures, on too many subjects, but that is the way the Parisian, above all, Parisian woman, likes to take a dose of culture. When the season opens in January, you will generally find that your friends have subscribed somewhere or other for a course of lectures—six or twelve. Sometimes they take place in the lecture-hall of the Rue Caumartin, or in a lecture-hall in the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, or at the Société Géographique on the Boulevard St. Germain. Then there are the lectures of the Sorbonne, or the Collége de France, where the salaried professors of the State lecture, and a host of stray lectures on every subject under the sun, in various private dwellings or hired rooms. In spite of the competition between the well-known French lecturers, professors, men of letters and of science, foreigners are given courteous hearing, and if they have anything novel and interesting to say, are heartily thanked as well as generously paid for saying it. This I know, for I have had the honour of giving several lectures in Paris on modern English literature, and had reason to congratulate myself on my sympathetic and appreciative audience of intelligent and cultivated Frenchwomen. They dress so well, these pleasant-looking Frenchwomen, and listen with such speaking, sparkling visages, that no wonder there is so much competition between the male lecturers. Even a morose man of science, when he casts his eye over his audience, must be gladdened and freshened by their presence. He may prefer communion with the masculine intellect; but he must find his countrywoman’s alert and agreeable face, under its ever-becoming bonnet, a welcome vision.
Distinguished foreign writers, if they know enough French, are generally invited to lecture by some society. Fogazzarro was asked to lecture here on his recent visit, and a very pleasant little lecture it was, delivered in the best and easiest manner possible; and after him came Madame Pardo Bazán, the Spanish writer, with a few commonplaces about Spain. The fashionable resort for the lecture fanatic has been, for some years past, the Bodinière, in the Rue St. Lazare. This is an old theatre, a concert hall, a kind of fast musical chamber, where ballets, songs, and lectures all mingle strangely, and the lecturer, when the curtain rises, is revealed seated before a table, with ballet-girls heel-and-toe-tipped on the walls around him. The first time I attended a fashionable lecture at the Bodinière, it was to hear the Abbé Charbonnel talk to us on Lamennais. I am not easily shocked, but I found both incongruous and indecorous the picture made by an abbé in his uniform of religion, between two ballet-girls, with images everywhere of public dance and light morals. The lecture was an impressive one, far above the average Parisian lecture, eloquent, original, solemnly grave, polished as only a Frenchman’s prose is polished, with a note of burning revolt running through it. This, too, surprised me. When all London gathered to hear why an eminent clergyman of the Church of England left the faith of his fathers, they congregated in a church, and listened with a sense of solemnity to a solemn avowal. Here was a French abbé talking to us with a just indignation of the tyranny of Rome; talking with passion and admiration of Lamennais’s revolt and the injustice of Rome, talking as only a man who felt and shared the moral sufferings of his hero could talk. It was undoubtedly beautiful and thrilling. It was like hearing a heart beat, like watching a brain throb, feeling one’s self face to face with a naked soul in one of its great crises. But was a fashionable lecture-hall the place for such a public confession? Were frivolous, fluttering women of society a fitting audience in such an hour? Were these ladies of the ballet painted on the walls, this theatrical curtain, seemly environment? And was it in his abbé’s robe that Victor Charbonnel should have denounced the tyranny of Rome in public? Shortly afterwards the Abbé Charbonnel was excommunicated, which was no more than everybody expected; and though there was not a word he uttered in that remarkable lecture on a remarkable subject with which I did not sympathise, I should have preferred to hear it delivered elsewhere,—in other and more solemn surroundings.
There is one thing that I have always noticed in the Parisian lecturer,—his complete lack of timidity, of want of self-confidence. However dull he may be, however mediocre, however uneloquent,—and he is often one, or all three,—no matter, he is sure of himself. He has chosen to shine as a lecturer, and as a lecturer he will under no circumstance be induced to recognise himself as a failure. This stupendous self-conceit is a masculine characteristic, I know, but the Parisian lecturer carries it off with art. He is an artist in his genius for believing in himself. How many great men have I gone forth to hear talk of their art or of themselves, and come away amazed by the string of admirably delivered commonplaces they have uttered!
M. Gustave Larroumet is a lecturer all Paris was wild about some years ago. I was told that for love or money you could not get a place at one of his lectures, unless you subscribed beforehand for the whole course, and even then that he was bombarded with declarations, like a popular tenor, and that young girls died of undeclared love for him. Never was such a popular lecturer as M. Larroumet! I went in dread and awe. Should I, too, succumb, and add one more to the daily thousand and one declarations of a hopeless passion? The vast hall was thronged, the dresses were exquisite, the bonnets dazzling. All the young girls of fashionable Paris were there, with note-books and scented pocket-handkerchiefs for the expected great emotions. He came, the popular lecturer, and never was I more grievously disillusioned. He spoke well, his gesticulation and enunciation were equally delightful to hear and behold. He was, what one might expect him to be after such a course of public worship, the blasé fine gentleman of the lecture-hall, good-looking, youngish, the very tenor of lecturers. But to what hopeless mediocrities he treated us, what lieux-communs he imperturbably walked us through! It was one of Gresset’s plays he analysed. The gist of it all was that our grandmothers were better bred than we are, because they indulged in persiflage and we in blagues. And this was the great lecturer of the hour!
Everybody knows the initial story of the French salon, and the fortunate influence on manners and literature of the prestige of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; Molière, who laughed at everything, even at his own desperate sufferings, laughed at it in his Les Précieuses Ridicules, for nothing on earth is sacred to a Frenchman. Whatever his name, in whatever century he was born, he must, in consistency with his nationality, prove himself a scoffer; and as he has the art of mocking admirably, it is always very difficult to know when he is serious or when he is laughing in his sleeve. A Frenchman will work night and day with frenzy for a purpose dearer to him than anything on earth, and all the while will deliberately make a mockery of his labour and his devotion. Writing to me on this subject, the eternal passion of the French for blagues (my correspondent defines in lucid English the word blaguer, “To say about somebody or something one admires or respects, jokes of which one does not believe the first word,” and I leave the definition with its pleasing French savour of composition and sentiment), a Frenchman says: “There is not a man in the whole of France about whom we have more joked than about M. Brisson, the ancient minister, the only political man to whom nothing could ever be reproached, but the epithet ‘austere’ deprived him of three-fourths of his authority, though Frenchmen are, after all, as sensible as other people to the virtue of honesty.” And so may be said of Molière. He was as well aware as anyone could be of the immense benefit to his race and to his language of the establishment of the salon, even when he laughed at it.
Though the century of the salon has passed away, and carried along with it some of the glory of French literature, some of its traditions still linger, and will never be lost as long as the race delights in good conversation. English people visit to kill time, to fulfil a social obligation, and consider that their duty to themselves and their neighbours is done if they happen to remark that it is a fine day. Now, the French visit to talk. A pretty and well-dressed woman will, perhaps, have other more private and personal preoccupations, and wish to distract masculine attention to an adorable gown or a bewitching bonnet; this was one of the reasons why that model keeper of a salon, Madame Geoffrin, excluded women from hers. She found they interfered with serious conversation. I advisedly call Madame Geoffrin the “keeper” of a salon, because she made a business of it, and ruled and tamed her literary menagerie by a discreet and liberal use of her purse. I have often wondered if her great men in their hearts did not sometimes revolt against the thraldom in which they lived from the moment they became celebrated. To be bound to be brilliant and witty, in return for a good dinner and a consideration every evening of one’s life! And to be condemned to meet none but brilliant and witty persons, and listen to their splendid talk when not talking splendidly oneself! There is matter for reflection here to make dull and obscure persons occasionally thank their stars. If good talk is not spontaneous, I own it has no charm for me, but then I have never aspired to hold a salon, and if you hold a salon and wish it to be a success, talk cannot be spontaneous.
Quite recently Madame Aubernon died, and Paris lost a literary salon, modelled, at a long distance, on that of Madame Geoffrin. Madame Aubernon was a rich bourgeoise, with no pretensions on the score of age, good looks, or dress. Her only ambition was to form a menagerie of celebrities. She gave them every evening dinners by no means as good as those of Madame Geoffrin, and checked, controlled, made them march to her liking. She, too, professed mistrust of pretty women, whom she invited only to lunches and teas and such entertainments, because she feared that their pretty frocks, their arms and shoulders, would divert the attention of her great men from their duty to her and her salon. She kept a little bell beside her, and only allowed the great men to talk in turn. “Now, M. Renan,” and Renan poured forth to order. “If you please, M. Dumas,” and behold M. Dumas acquitting himself with docility and force. The famous story of the petits pois is told of every distinguished guest of Madame Aubernon. Sometimes you hear it with Dumas’s name, or Renan’s, or Pailleron’s. It does not matter, but the incident remains a delightful illustration of the inconveniences of eating your dinner on the understanding that you are to pay for it in wit. The great man opened his lips out of turn, when the hostess stormily rang the bell, and ordered him to shut them again. Somebody else was speaking with permission. When he ceased, Madame Aubernon turned graciously to her tame lion, and said: “Now you may speak. What was it you wanted to say?” “Oh, nothing, madame. I only wanted to ask for another helping of peas.” Musical celebrities are not so easily trained. When, after dining at some Parisian countess’s, Chopin was asked to play, he quietly retorted: Madame, j’ai si peu mangé. But if the great men of letters had been such bears as Chopin there would never have been the salon, and the story of Parisian life would be the poorer. And, after all, it is an excellent discipline. Men acquire the art of listening as well as that of talking, and it is a virtue of national importance to teach people not to be dull. For if you are dull you have no possible place in a salon. Your hostess has no desire to crowd her rooms with inanimate or bored figure-heads. You come on a distinct treaty, the conditions of which are accepted by your appearance,—to amuse and be amused. If you speak, either you must have something to say, or you must say whatever you wish to utter well.
Since the Faubourg has been sulking, and the aristocracy is no longer a power in the land, the aristocratic salon has dwindled into a tradition. The young men are so desperately taken up with sport, with automobiles, that they have not the leisure their elders had for the arts and graces of life. The rosse literature has spoiled the traditions of the Faubourg for us. The French aristocracy has come to mean Gyp and Lavedan for us, and a course of those writers may be warranted to drive any intelligent reader into the society of washerwomen and tramps as a pleasing change. The absence from all these heraldic pages, in which everybody is more or less titled, of such a thing as a gentleman, or even an ordinarily honest man, is what stupefies me. What their admirers can imagine would be the benefit to France in upsetting the Republic in order to place in power a party, upon its own testimony, so scantily furnished with brains or honour, is what I am unable to grasp. And if their women-folk had their way, we should have back the “White Terror,” and science and liberal thought would receive an emphatic blow. But happily there is no immediate fear of their triumph. The Duc d’Aumale and the Prince de Joinville took with them to the grave all the prestige that was left the House of France, and not even his followers take the Duke of Orleans seriously.
Political intrigue is, of course, worked in the salon, as Academy elections are helped. The Frenchwoman’s influence is too great not to find an opening in every question of the hour. If she has no vote, she inhabits a land where the sorcery of her sex exercises a wider and deeper, a more permanent power than any political rights could ever give her, though, for many reasons, I am inclined to believe that it would be better for her and for her race if the significance of this power were other than it is. In a country where the courtesan plays a triumphant part, where newspapers solemnly recount her doings, describe her toilettes at Longchamps, at Auteuil, and interview her, we can scarcely expect women not to misuse their sovereignty. They know that the day it bores them to be chaste, they need not cloak sin in the mantle of night. They may wear their lovers on their sleeves in broad daylight, and lose not a pennyweight of consideration. The salon of the woman who is known to have had (or to have) sentimental adventures will be thronged, and people will only smile and say of her that she “distracts” herself. I remember hearing an extraordinary story once of a beautiful woman, the admired and courted holder of a famous salon. The cousin of the friend who told me the story fell a victim to her charms, and was staying with his mother at some Mediterranean resort, when he learnt of the siren’s arrival at a neighbouring town. He forsook his mother to rush after her, and remained with her during the greater part of the long summer vacation. When their holiday had drawn to a close, the lady took the train, and called on her lover’s mother, and in the highest ancien régime manner, said: “Madame, I come to return your dear son to you.” His little fugue, she said, was at an end. The two ladies parted on the best of terms, the one to welcome back the erring sheep (not that a French mother regards her son under these circumstances as an erring sheep), and the other to open the doors of her closed salon in Paris to all the notabilities she had left sighing for her brilliant and hospitable roof. What will you? When a woman is not his own wife, a Parisian does not put any price upon her honour. True, he makes up for this laxity in regard to his neighbour’s wife by arrogating to himself the right to murder his own faithless wife with impunity. By this legal ferocity he buys back the privilege of considering himself at times a model of Roman virtue.
The salon is all very well, so are the songs of Montmartre, the Théâtre Rosse, but there is just one little point, a solitary point, on which the Frenchman is in no mood to blaguer, not being Molière, and that is his wife’s fidelity to the marriage vow, which vow, if we are to believe him (I confess I do not) he spends his own life in breaking. He laughs at most other things, but here he displays a desperate and unhumorous gravity. The law considerately assists him, by telling him that killing is no murder. But if he doesn’t laugh, his neighbours round him laugh joyously for him. The infidelity of another man’s wife is the best of all jokes in France, and public sympathy always goes with the wife.
GLEANERS
J. A. Breton
And yet, while laughing at himself, and at all things round him, the Frenchman offers us the ideal of an indefatigable worker in whatever road he has elected to run his career. If he can talk well, he can work hard, and no race seeks so strenuously as his to achieve perfection in every path. The alacrity and precision of his speech he brings into all he does, and I know no men who have won renown able to wear it so simply, with such a delightful absence of pompousness, as distinguished Frenchmen. Victor Hugo was, of course, the big exception indispensable for the proof of the rule, for Victor Hugo sat in pontifical state on his Throne of Letters, and posed as a sort of Napoleon. But that was a part of his flamboyant genius, which had to make a life apart for itself. Renan, with his delicate scepticism, his good-humoured tolerance, was a much more convincing figure of French genius; he was more in keeping with the urbane, gentle traditions of his race. The French language lends itself to such a daily dignity of existence, that this may partly be the reason there always seems to me something peculiarly and indescribably harmonious about intimate life in France, as well as in its larger social phases. Everybody about you, beginning with your servant, speaks so well, that long intercourse with them unfits you for latitudes where speech is less admirable and less choice.
