Читать книгу The Life of James McNeill Whistler - Joseph Pennell - Страница 19

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ETCHING. G. 55

(See page 49)

At last they came to Aix, where there was an American Consul who knew Major Whistler, and advanced fifty francs to his son. At Liège, poor, shivering, ragged Ernest got twenty from the French Consul, and the rest of the journey was made in comfort. On his return, Whistler's first appearance at the Café Molière was a triumph. They had thought him dead, and here he was, le petit Américain! And what blague, what calling for coffee pour le petit Whistler, pour notre petit Américain! And what songs!

"Car il n'est pas mort, larifla! fla! fla! Non, c'est qu'il dort. Pour le réveiller, trinquons nos verres! Pour le réveiller, trinquons encore!"

That Herr Schmitz was paid and delivered up the plates the prints are the proof. Some years after Whistler went back to Cologne with his mother. In the evening he slipped away to the old, little hotel, where the landlord and the landlord's daughter, grown up, recognised him and rejoiced.

These stories, and hundreds like them, still float about the Quarter, told not only by Whistler, but by les vieux, who shake their heads over the present degeneracy of students and the tameness of student life—stories of the clay model of the heroic statue of Géricault, left, for want of money, swathed in rags, and sprinkled every morning until at last even the rags had to be sold, and then, when they were taken off, Géricault had sprouted with mushrooms that paid for a feast in the Quarter and enough clay to finish the statue: stories of a painter, in his empty studio, hiring a piano by the month that the landlord might see it carried upstairs and get a new idea of his tenant's assets; stories of the monkey tied to a string, let loose in other people's larders, then pulled back, clasping loaves of bread and bottles of wine to its bosom; stories of students, with bedclothes pawned, sleeping in chests of drawers to keep warm; stories of Courbet's Baigneuse in wonderful Highland costume at the students' balls; stories of practical jokes at the Louvre. It was the day of practical jokes, les charges: and Courbet, whom they worshipped, was the biggest blageur of them all, eventually signing his death-warrant with that last terrible charge, the fall of the Column Vendôme, which Paris never forgave.

In this atmosphere, Whistler's spirit, so alarming to his mother, found stimulus, and it is not to be wondered if his gaiety struck everyone in Paris as in St. Petersburg and Pomfret, West Point and Washington.

Footnotes

[1] See Chapter XLIV.