Читать книгу Housemaster - Major General John Hay Beith - Страница 5

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WE are now in Paris, a few days previous to the pregnant conversation just reported, and I am going to introduce you to the Faringdon family without further ado.

But first of all we must track them to what a Chicago gangster would call their ‘territory’—their operating area, in fact. That means that we must by-pass orthodox Paris, the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli, and the Champs-Élysées, and the Place Vendôme with its Hotel Ritz, cross the Pont-Neuf to the Rive Gauche, and penetrate into the Paris of Montparnasse and the Quartier Latin.

This done, if you stroll southward along that busy but bourgeois thoroughfare the Boulevard St. Germain, you will come presently to a narrow street called La Rue de Cherche-Midi, running away to your left—a street full of shops which cater for the daily wants of comparatively humble folk—shops whose contents have as a rule overflowed on to the pavement outside, and are all controlled by shrewd and garrulous ladies in felt slippers.

Turning into this and pursuing your way for a quarter of a mile or so, you will presently observe upon your right a species of archway, opening into what the English call a court, the Scots a close, and the French an impasse. The sonorous title of this particular dead-end is the Impasse Théophile Blom.

Who Théophile may have been, and why an impasse should have been dedicated to his memory, I do not know. One seldom does; one simply accepts the designation as part of the French system of street-naming. It is a picturesque and understandable system; for the French are intensely proud of their country, and of her children’s triumphs in every field, whether of war or peace. (So are we of ours, for that matter: the difference is that the French have a working knowledge of their own history.) You have only to paint a name or date up on a French street-corner to arouse in every passing citizen a glow of patriotic and well-informed satisfaction.

Men and events are alike commemorated. The Street of the Fourth of September, the Street of the Twenty-Ninth of July—do not these intrigue in themselves? Then there are stately avenues dedicated to French military triumphs, mainly Napoleonic—Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Wagram. Also to the men responsible for them—Junot, Murat, Massena. Smaller victories and less celebrated victors are duly remembered in proportionately less conspicuous thoroughfares.

But France is above all the country of the Intellect. Paris is criss-crossed with streets perpetuating the memory of poets, painters, philosophers, authors, musicians and scientists. Corneille and Racine, Molière and Beaumarchais, Meissonnier and Fragonard, Mirabeau and Renan, Gounod and Berlioz, Alexandre Dumas and Alphonse Daudet—each has his asphalt memorial. Victor Hugo has a whole boulevard. Gay-Lussac, who made the discovery (which I fear leaves most of us cold) that equal volumes of all gases contain the same number of molecules, has been allotted a considerable thoroughfare in the neighbourhood of the Sorbonne. Lavoisier, the co-discoverer (with the English Priestley) of oxygen, has a far smaller one; but it is in a much more chic district; and that makes up for a lot, as every dweller in a poky Mayfair flat consolingly reflects.

In our London street-naming we are less imaginative. We start off hopefully enough with a few provocative titles like London Wall, Barbican, and Aldermanbury. Then The Strand, which is called The Strand because it once was a strand—a strip of muddy foreshore running along Thames-side. Throw in the various Gates which once pierced the Wall—Ludgate, Aldgate, Cripplegate, and the like—add The Adelphi, commemorative of the genius of the four Adam brothers, and you have about exhausted London’s achievements in the way of remembrance.

What is left? Well, innumerable London streets bear trite and evasive Christian names, like George, or William, or Charles. (There are said to be one hundred and nine George Streets in the Metropolitan Area alone.) Others, whole acres of them, are named after their ground landlord, or the ground landlord’s numerous collaterals.

Surely there is an opportunity here. Could we not abolish a few score of the Streets of George and his collaterals and do something more stimulating to patriotic imagination? Why not start off with a Street of the Twenty-fourth of May and a Street of the Fifth of November? Then, instead of ringing the changes on the great houses of Grosvenor, Cadogan, Bentinck and Portman, give the Arts a chance. Begin with a Kipling Street, an Elgar Square, and a Gilbert and Sullivan Avenue. After that, what about Pinero Place, or Barrie Crescent—no, Gardens? And of course a Chesterton Circle. And what of our scientists—Darwin, Huxley, Oliver Lodge? So far as I can remember the only street in England dedicated to a scientist is a dingy thoroughfare in Manchester, called John Dalton Street.

Having established the principle, we could expand it indefinitely, until every Mews and Lane contributed a representative to the story of the past. We could start, in any case, by changing Leicester Square into Shakespeare Square. The statue is there already.

Of course one would not be expected to go all the way in this Gallic worship of intellectuality: there must be due consideration for our rugged island susceptibilities. I once beheld two French cruisers in Toulon Harbour named Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau respectively. Perhaps that is going too far. The imagination reels at the thought of a British Admiral’s lady breaking a bottle of champagne upon the bows of H.M.S. Bernard Shaw.

This brings us back to Théophile Blom. Who was he, we wonder, and why was he allotted his impasse? Perhaps he was a politician, the district’s representative, maybe, in the Chamber of Deputies or City Council. Perhaps he was the builder of the impasse itself. Or perhaps he was just a poet or artist who lived and died in this very quartier—died young, probably—in whose memory the impasse was named by those who loved him; a humble corner of La Rive Gauche which is for ever Théophile Blom.