Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 16

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The family to which C. was now introduced consisted of an old man and an old lady called Maartens. The professor and his wife were both Dutch by birth, but they had lived many years in France, and the French people simply called them Martin. They had once been well-to-do landed proprietors, but they had lost all their money in a financial crisis, and were obliged to receive pupils in order to live. Professor Maartens gave music lessons, and his wife taught French. The professor had only adopted the title of Professor since the change in his fortunes. He was not a professional musician, but he was intensely musical, and he played the pianoforte with a soft touch and great delicacy of feeling. He had composed a barcarolle which had been published and publicly performed in happier days before the Emperor Napoleon III. They lived in a small flat in a side street on the left-hand side of the palace. It was small, but scrupulously clean. Madame Maartens had been brought up from her earliest years in France, and she had not only known Lady Hengrave, but Lady Hengrave's mother, who had lived in Paris. She was refined and cultivated and devoted to the pupils she received in her house.

She took to C. at once. When he arrived at Versailles he had not finished growing, and he was already tall for his age, but he had lost the look of immaturity and awkwardness that had seemed to hang about him during all the end of his Eton career. Nobody now would have called him the ugly duckling. In fact, Madame Maartens was extremely struck by his looks, and in writing to Lady Hengrave congratulated her on having a son who promised to be so good-looking, and who was "plein d'esprit." Lady Hengrave was astonished by these comments, and thought that Madame Maartens must be suffering from senile decay. A photograph of C. as he was in those days is still in existence. He looks in it curiously old for his age, and almost like the hero of an 1830 romance, with a touch of Balzac and Dickens about him. In real life he probably did not look as old as that, or did not look old at all, but Madame Maartens frequently remarked that he was old for his age, and said on one occasion that at times he behaved like a child of ten, and at others he reasoned like a man of forty.

He was very dark, his hair was thick and undisciplined, his cheeks a little hollow, and his eyes very bright and very dark. His manners were shy, reserved and diffident, and the French people liked him at once. He was happy at Versailles, and felt once more that he had found a home which might, to a certain extent, make up for having left Eton so prematurely.

His life settled down into a regular routine. Madame Maartens gave him a French lesson every day, and three times a week he had a lesson from a French schoolmaster, Monsieur Jollivet, who lived at the other end of the town--rather a long tram drive--in a neat little villa. Monsieur Jollivet taught him French literature and French composition. The other pupil in the Maartens' house was a French boy called Henri Marcel, to whom Madame Maartens was teaching English. Madame Maartens suggested that C. should from time to time go to Paris, dine there, go to the theatre, and come back by a late train; but C. made excuses. The truth was that he had no money, and would not have any till the end of the month. He had not even enough money to pay for the bi-weekly tram journey to Monsieur Jollivet's house, and every time he went there during the first month he was obliged to walk, which meant starting three-quarters of an hour before his lesson began.

Monsieur Jollivet was a small, dark, bearded, fiery and lucid teacher, with a great contempt for his own countrymen and a great love of what he called real French literature, which meant Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Voltaire, André Chénier, and Guy de Maupassant, but not Zola.

Lucidity, simplicity, logic and ease were the qualities he rated highest. He made C. read Corneille and Racine, and was stupefied to find that he was already familiar with both these authors, and could quote them by the yard. The fact gave him great satisfaction, as he was able to use it against the class of French boys he taught at school.

"Pas un de vous n'est à la cheville de cet Anglais," he would say to them.

He made C. read the plays and write analyses of them afterwards, and also translations and compositions of his own.

Monsieur Jollivet did not despise all the modern poets. He thought that Victor Hugo had sinned colossally against the canons of taste and the laws of proportion, but he would sometimes say: "quand il est grand, il est grand comme le monde," and in support of this he would quote the lines from Napoléon II.:

Demain, c'est le cheval qui s'abat blanc d'écume.

Demain, O conquérant, c'est Moscou qui s'allume,

Foreign literature and languages he ignored.

One day he asked C. to translate something from one of the English poets, and C. tried his hand at Swinburne's Garden of Proserpine.

Monsieur Jollivet was not pleased by the result.

C.'s version of

"And gathers all things mortal

With cold immortal hands."

"Et cueille toutes choses mortelles de ses mains froides et immortelles" shocked him.

"Ce n'est pas clair," he said, "et c'est d'un goût douteux."

Monsieur Jollivet advised him in the future to confine his translations to the English prose authors. On the other hand, he was pleased with C.'s French prose, which he said was pure, except on one occasion, when C. unfortunately used a phrase of current journalistic slang, "le clou de la pièce"--harmless enough, one would have thought. This incensed Monsieur Jollivet, who went so far as to say that it was the fabrication and use of such idiotic, meaningless and vulgar expressions which had caused the French to lose the Franco-Prussian War.

In politics Monsieur Jollivet was a pessimist, and was for ever prophesying disasters to his country. Were the French to fight the Germans to-morrow, he would say, the latter would walk into France "comme dans du beurre," and he attributed this to the incurable vanity, complacency and frivolity of his countrymen.

Curiously enough, he introduced C. to the name of Wagner. At least he made C. realise that Wagner was an out-of-the-way phenomenon. Monsieur Jollivet said he seldom went to the theatre--the modern plays were so stupid, and the modern actors massacred the classics--but he did go to the opera, whenever Wagner was performed, and the Valkyrie and Tristan had stupefied him.

"Cette musique," he went on repeating, "qui ne resemble à rien."

C. checked this opinion by asking Professor Maartens and his wife what they thought about Wagner, and both the Professor and Madame Maartens (and she was extremely musical as well as her husband) agreed with Monsieur Jollivet that Wagner was a great genius, and that evening after dinner the Professor played C. some selections from the Ring, which impressed him greatly.

"You must go to Paris the next time they do one of the operas," they said, "and hear one."

"Yes," said C., blushing and thinking of his straitened finances.

And they, too, said they had no wish to go to the theatre, but they did enjoy more than anything else an evening at the opera, only--

C. felt they could not afford it, and felt, too, the right thing for him to do would be to take them to Paris one night, and give them the treat they so greatly enjoyed. However, the state of his budget made it, for the moment, quite impossible. Pelly wrote to him, and asked him to meet him in Paris and share his delightful discoveries. C. was only too willing, but he felt cramped at every turn for want of money. At last he thought of selling something. He had a gold watch-chain and two pearl studs which had been given him by his godmother. He spent his last francs in registering these and posting them to a silversmith in London. He asked him to make an offer for them. The silversmith sent him back a cheque for five pounds and kept the jewels--this, for the moment relieved the situation. On receipt of the money he wrote to Pelly, and suggested they should meet and go to the play. He did not suggest dinner, as he was still under the impression that to feed at a restaurant in Paris was a pleasure which could only be indulged in by the very rich. Pelly accepted the invitation and met him at the station, and suggested that they should go and have some food somewhere, but C. said he thought it too expensive.

Pelly had now gained sufficient experience of Parisian life to be able to convince C. that cheaper restaurants than Bignon existed. They went to a Bouillon Duval, where they had an excellent meal for two francs fifty. After dinner they decided to go to the play. In looking through the list of theatres in the newspaper, C. caught the name of Fanny Talbot, his early adoration. She was playing in a historical drama. He said they must go and see her, so they went to the Porte Saint Martin, where the drama was being played.

Fanny Talbot's art had improved in the interval, and although her hair had been dyed a dark colour, and her face had lost its look of youth, she was still strikingly beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful, and certainly the best dressed actress on the stage at that time. But she was not the same person to C. as she had been when he had first seen her at Brighton. Then he had not thought of her as an actress at all. He had identified her with the romantic, proud and persecuted personage she had interpreted on the stage. He had thought of her as the embodiment of youth, thwarted romance, and outraged virtue. Now he looked at her as a beautiful and finished actress, and her art, although competent enough to deserve the praises of the French critics, was neither sufficiently inspired nor artistic to sweep these two boys off their feet, nor to make up for its commonplace setting. The play in which she was appearing was a historical melodrama which was more like a series of tableaux vivants than anything else, with not sufficient life in it to afford one thrill. The two boys enjoyed themselves nevertheless. Pelly was by this time a great theatre-goer, and he said that C. really must see the great actors of Paris, the artists of the Comédie Française: Got, Bartet, Baretta, Samary, as well as Réjane and Dupuis, and also the adventurous pioneers of the Théâtre Libre.

When C. told Monsieur Jollivet that he had been to see Fanny Talbot in the historical drama of Mal-maison, he snorted with contempt. He advised C., if he must go to the play, to try the Théâtre Français on a night when they were not playing Racine; in Molière there were still a few passable actors who knew how to speak, but there wasn't one who could interpret Racine. Nowadays directly an actor made the slightest success he was obliged to have a troup, if not a theatre, of his own to tour in America and round the world, to gather dollars and exaggerate his effects, and cheapen them until his art became as coarsened and travel-stained as his much labelled travelling trunks.

The age of art was rapidly fading away. Few people know how to write French, and still fewer how to speak it. In twenty years' time French written in the classical tradition would be unintelligible, and what was it replaced by? A shoddy journalese in prose--expressions such as le clou--and cryptic and senseless mystifications in shapeless verse.

In the meantime, C. was making discoveries for himself in French literature. M. Jollivet made him read the classics, but he surreptitiously read the moderns as well--novels: Zola, Daudet and Flaubert; and Pelly brought him echoes from the Quartier Latin, and of the enthusiasms of the young generation; the names of obscure symbolists and decadents, few of whom were destined to achieve more than a passing notoriety.

Pelly also got wind of Norwegian literature. Ibsen was just emerging above the European horizon, and Hedda Gabler was being acted at the Vaudeville. The Théâtre Libre introduced him to Paris by producing Ghosts two years before. Pelly was immensely interested, but failed to find great response in C., who was drawn to the more romantic drama, and was revelling in Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset. One night C. and Pelly watched a performance of Hernani from the gallery of the Théâtre Français, and they were moved to tears. The time went on, the winter, which was a long and cold one, began to show slight signs of surrender before the invasion of spring.

With the exception of occasional visits to Paris, C.'s life was a monotonous one. He would work all the morning. In the afternoon he would go for a walk with Henri Marcel, the French pupil who lived in the house, who was a conscientious, unassuming, industrious, but unimaginative boy. Twice a week he had lessons from Monsieur Jollivet, and on Monday afternoons he would attend Madame Maartens' day. She would sit in a red silk and somewhat faded armchair, dressed in mauve velvet, which was her one dress for occasions, and receive the guests, who were varied. They consisted of members of the Versailles aristocracy, with a sprinkling of musicians, and on one occasion a French-Canadian Professor of Christian Science. Madame Maartens was proud of C., and liked showing him off to her friends. Some of these used to invite him to breakfast or dinner, exquisitely served meals in small panelled dining-rooms, on smooth polished mahogany tables without table linen, presided over by an old retainer, who would dangle a bunch of keys.

On one occasion Madame Maartens took him to dine with two American old maids who lived in an apartment on the top story of a house near the Hôtel des Réservoirs. When they entered the drawing-room Madame Maartens announced C. solemnly as "The Honourable Caryl Bramsley," and the two old maids each made a low curtsey. They came from a Virginian family, and seemed to belong to an older and more refined civilisation. They were cousins. They seemed to be the living ghosts of pre-revolutionary Versailles, and the mother of one of them had been born seventeen years before the Revolution, so that her links with the past went back to an incredible distance, and she herself remembered Napoleon at Trianon, and the Cent Jours, and the Battle of Waterloo with perfect distinctness.

They were both beautiful to look at, with exquisite lace frills, lace caps and cuffs, and one of them took snuff with a little gold spoon from a tiny gold snuffbox. They had lived at Versailles all their lives, and so had their parents, even through the Revolution and the Terror. The mother of the eldest remembered seeing the Dauphin playing in the gardens of Versailles. They spoke of the Place de la Concorde as the Place Louis Quinze, and Rachel seemed to them a modern, a revolutionary actress.

They spoke exquisite French, and still more exquisite English, and they were delighted with C. He called on them after he dined there, and they offered him preserved fruits, and entertained him with anecdotes and reminiscences of the past.