Читать книгу Sidetracks - Richard Holmes - Страница 12

AS HE WALKED DOWN the Strand one surprisingly sunny morning in March, examining the patriotic engravings of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert smiling domestically from the royal tilbury, Théophile Gautier came upon a barrow boy selling waterproof mackintoshes. It was a matter of generally received knowledge that the imperméable, like those other viscous phenomena, the English glass of stout, the English fog, and the English phlegm, contained something of the philosophical essence of Britain. So Théophile Gautier, poet, litterateur, and – more practically – regular columnist for Paris’s leading daily newspaper La Presse, drew aside to observe.

It was March 1842. Gautier’s first and most brilliant ballet Giselle had just opened to packed houses in Her Majesty’s Theatre. The manager, Mr Benjamin Lumley, had remarked that the piece was ‘admitted to be vastly pretty’, a judgement which Gautier, who spoke little or no English, received as a generous compliment.

In the peculiar absence of rain, the barrow boy was obviously anxious to demonstrate that his mackintoshes were genuinely waterproof. To Gautier’s perplexity, he proceeded to nail the circumference of one of the sacred garments to a horizontal wooden frame, suspended alongside the stall. Into the shallow canvas depression thus formed, he emptied a large enamel jug of water. Into the water he tipped a bowl-full of engaging goldfish. He then produced a handful of small fishing lines and, flourishing them, inquired whether any of his customers would care to go fishing.

Gautier walked on towards Trafalgar Square, where Lord Nelson’s column was gradually arising from a primal chaos of scaffolding and publicity hoardings. He passed the Duke of Northumberland’s house, where a sculpted lion guarded the portal with its tail raised vertically in the air. ‘It is the lion of Percy’, Gautier noted with unaccountable irritation, ‘and never has heraldic lion so grossly abused its right to affect fabulous shapes and forms.’ The English were not only an unreliable and eccentric nation, they were positively bizarre.

It was Gautier’s first visit to London. He was thirty-one, the esteemed author of an erotic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, and an arbiter of French literary fashion. In the next twenty years he was to make some five more trips to the British capital, reporting for his newspaper, or simply for his friends, on a variety of national peculiarities, including the Ascot Races, methods of surviving ‘incendiary’ turtle soup, the paintings of Hogarth, the depressions of Sunday afternoon, the camels of Regent’s Park Zoo, Covent Garden, and the Great Apotheosis at the Crystal Palace. Gautier came both as a private citizen of Paris, and as a public representative of civilization, roles that were not easily to be distinguished. Though he could not therefore, on principle, admire – he found himself by rapid turns amused, charmed, distressed, perplexed, outraged. But he never lost that original sense of strangeness, of the obstinate shadows clinging to that metropolis of the northern isles, like the ubiquitous soot which, he recorded with gallic frankness, made one blow black into one’s handkerchief.

It had struck him, in the larger perspective, even as his steamboat the Harlequin first swung west into the yellow waters of the Thames Estuary at sunset, and a forest of dark chimneys gathered along the low banks, sculpted like colossal towers and obelisks, ‘giving to the horizon an Egyptian air, a vague profile of Thebes or Babylon, of an antediluvian city, a capital of enormities and rebellious pride, something altogether extraordinary’. It was an impression that anticipated another European’s, Joseph Conrad’s in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, by some fifty years.

Gautier saw the evidence of Empire in the jostling host of merchant craft, running between the lightships with their great lamps and scarlet paintwork: ships from India, reeking of oriental perfumes and with Lascar crews crowding the rigging, ships from the Baltic and the North Sea with crusts of ice still frozen to their bulwarks, ships from China and America freighted down with tea and sugar cane. But among all that vast fleet, ‘you always recognise the English ships: their sails are black like those of Theseus’s galleon departing for the Isle of Crete, a sombre livery of funeral mourning, rigged by the sad climate of London’. Gautier caught at the dominant motif, hanging there, mute, unexplained. ‘London! –’ he exclaimed almost with enthusiasm, ‘– la ville natale du spleen’.

Yet returning from that first brief encounter, he was nonchalant, even rather knowing. He recorded the following dialogue at a family dinner table in the rue la Boétie. ‘Did you see the Tunnel? – No, I didn’t see the Tunnel. – And Westminster? – No, indeed. – And St Paul’s? – Oh, no. – Then what on earth did you do in London? – I wandered about town observing Englishmen and, more particularly, observing English women. One cannot find their description in any guidebook, and they seemed to me quite as interesting as stones arranged one upon the other after a certain fashion.’ Gautier added with some pain: ‘since this occasion the good bourgeois have regarded me as somewhat mad, suspecting me vaguely of harbouring cannibalistic tendencies, and send their children up to bed when I come to call. I am seriously afraid that this will prejudice my marriage prospects.’

The Tunnel in question was Monsieur Brunel’s tiled passageway between Wapping and Rotherhithe, and could not strictly be classed as a British marvel. Gautier later reported in La Presse that a friend, presumably English, was working on plans for a Tunnel beneath the entire Manche, connecting Folkestone with Calais, and containing railway carriages fired along by compressed air. He remarked that he had, as a conscientious journalist, already reserved his seat for the first crossing, scheduled to take place four years hence, in 1847.

But Gautier was in no sense, as he frequently pretended, and as Henry James later brashly assumed (‘the broad-eyed gaze of a rustic at a fair’), an innocent abroad. As drama critic for La Presse, whose feuilletons ran on the front page beneath the political and business leaders of his exacting editor, the publishing magnate Émile de Girardin, he was normally tied to his regular evening descents upon the Paris boulevards. But in the formula of his lifelong friend and collaborator on La Presse, Gérard de Nerval, he was ‘a traveller by instinct, a critic by circumstance’.

Almost every spring or summer for thirty years, Gautier made good his escape from Paris, usually in a retrospective flurry of apologies, forwarding addresses, and promises of exotic copy. These flights of the swallow, as they became in one of his most famous poems, ‘Ce que disent les Hirondelles’, were made to Germany, Italy, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Turkey, even eventually to Russia, and he subsequently published brilliantly coloured imagist accounts of all of them.

Even his apartment, in an italianate hotel particulier at 14 rue Navarin, off the place Pigalle on Montmartre’s lower side, expressed his search for spiritual displacement. Indeed, it was almost a caricature of French Romantic aspirations, furnished as it was with Turkish carpets, Siamese cats, and Italian theatrical ladies, and perfumed with Spanish cooking, Cuban cigars and Algerian hashish. There was, finally, to be an English element, but that was to prove part of the more intimate moeurs.

Moreover, Gautier was acutely conscious of the curiously modern desperation, almost the death-wish, implicit in this passionate longing for other shores, other climes, the other itself. Many of his springtime feuilletons each year played upon this theme with deliberate irony, heralding the age of mass tourism in a distinctly minor key:

‘Nowadays the dream of the masses is – Speed. By iron or steam they seek to conquer that “ancient weight upon all things suspended”. It would seem that their sole concern is to devour Space. Do they do 12 or 15 leagues an hour simply to flee from ennui? If so, the enemy awaits them at the farther platform. Yet how strange is this wild urge for rapid locomotion, seizing people of all nations at the same instant. “The dead go swiftly”, says the ballad. Are we dead then? Or could this be some presentiment of the approaching doom of our planet, possessing us to multiply the means of communication so we may travel over its entire surface in the little time left to us?’ It feels odd to read this paragraph on the faint, blue microfilms for La Presse of 1843.

Yet Gautier’s journeys to London, while part of this lifelong centrifugal urge, seem to have been of a different order. His notes have remained scattered through a score of essays, letters, articles, poems and reviews. London was less a place to visit, than a state of mind to ponder upon. It was a dark mirror, a smoky crystal ball. You could turn it in your hand. Gautier remained profoundly uninterested in its institutions, its monuments, even its literary associations. Rather, it was its atmosphere, its tone, its iridescent qualities, its curious undercurrent of black comedy, which continually drew him back.

On his second visit he summoned an English barber to his rooms at the Hotel Sablonniere, in Leicester Square. His ballet La Péri, with his untouchable amour Carlotta Grisi dancing the title role, was playing at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He was due at the Lord Mayor’s procession and banquet. He needed a shave. The barber knocked, entered, bowed: a thin man with the English whiteness of jowl, dressed entirely in black. In complete silence, with the flowing rapidity of a phantom, he shook out a crisp, white apron, adjusted a chair, and stropped a long razor. Gautier grew increasingly uneasy at each stroke, a victim of those unspeakable suspicions that separate native from foreigner, living from dead.

‘Seeing him so chill, so pale, so mournful, I asked myself if he were not some ill-provisioned resurrectionist who wished to acquire a new subject. At the same time, I instinctively cast my eyes upon that part of the floorboards where my chair rested, anxious to ascertain whether or no there was a hidden trap door through which I should plunge into the cellar bearing a large slit in my throat.’ On the point of calling off the whole operation, Gautier was saved by the inherited logic of Pascal and Voltaire. ‘I made the calming reflexion that, since I was lodged upon the second floor of the hotel, there could hardly be a cellarage beneath my parquet, and that a trap door in opening would make me fall to the first floor, depositing me exactly on top of the pianoforte of an extremely pretty young opera-singer.’ The jolie cantatrice was Ernesta, who subsequently bore Gautier twin daughters. So the English barber was possibly a better Figaro than Gautier concluded at the time.

At Drury Lane, Gautier made extensive notations on the flesh tones of the English girls in the audience. No native painter had ever done justice to their exquisiteness, Gautier felt, except possibly Sir Thomas Lawrence, who could be held ultimately responsible for the creation of the English Rose type, the bloom of a thousand keepsakes, whose torn and treasured leaves were pinned across the dressing-rooms of Europe. A connoisseur of textures, Gautier distinguished sharply between the opulent blonde and the tea-rose blonde, and gazed appreciatively at the complexion of cheek, neck and gorge, which made ‘rice-paper, or the pulpy petal of the magnolia, or the inner pellicle of the egg, or the vellum on which the gothic miniaturists traced their delicate illuminations’ look like coarse cloth by comparison. Yet the genial English passion for decorative gardens, when carried in all its stunning completeness of fruit trees, herbaceous borders and cockle shells, to the top of the English lady’s hat, left him merely stoical.

In the middle of the ballet, Carlotta was required to perform a daring leap in the pas de songe, representing the descent of the péri from the heavenly sphere. It called for the greatest agility and nerve on her part, and perfect timing from her partner Petipa, whose task was to receive her bodily presence on the earth beneath. Occasionally, in Paris, this saute de gazelle had been muffed, and the French audiences, recalled Gautier, had hissed without mercy. At the third performance in London, Carlotta once more misjudged the dangerous jump. As she prepared for another attempt, a ripple ran through the English audience, and murmurs from the stalls were heard begging her not to risk such a frightful plunge a second time. Then a sympathetic voice, from the gods, loudly suggested that it would be better to give Petipa ‘a stiff drink’ first, as he could scarcely ‘stand up on his pins’. Amidst a profound stillness, Carlotta leapt into space, Petipa fielded sinuously, and the house sprang to its feet and gave them three cheers.

But then the English were different in sporting matters. Boats and horses alone really brought out their enthusiasm. There were even moments suggesting lyrical depths, as on the day’s outing at Royal Ascot. Clutching his Oxley’s Authentic Racing Card – which with Robinson Crusoe and the Mansion House menu, was one of the few British texts Gautier ever claimed to have read in the original – he stared round him with calm satisfaction at the scene. There were lawns of ‘vegetable velvet’, ladies with shot-silk dresses and fringed parasols, champagne and Scotch Ale corks flying into the cerulean blue, gypsies dancing round the carriage wheels telling endlessly optimistic fortunes. In the distance, over the undulations of emerald turf, the ‘cherry-red horses ran’. At the far turn, the brightly coloured silks of the jockeys’ caps were ‘like poppies, cornflowers and anemones carried away on the wind’. At the close of each race, the winner stood steaming peacefully in the Royal Enclosure, and a cluster of white pigeons were released into the sky like a shout of purest joy.

It was only later that Gautier learnt that the pigeons simply carried the listings of the betting odds and results to a hundred murky gambling parlours across the nation, which sufficed to transform the occasion into a rather more utilitarian event, ‘a roulette or a Stock Exchange’.

After the mixed triumphs of La Péri, six years elapsed before Gautier next slipped across the Channel. Though his friend’s Tunnel was still inexplicably incomplete, the years of middle age had brought increased travelling comforts. The Chemin de Fer du Nord already ran as far as Rouen, and together with the regular steam packet services, and the celebrated express from Dover, this combined to bring the two capitals within a single day of each other. By the spring of 1849, after nine months of almost continuous political upheavals in Paris, Gautier was already restive for London’s paradoxes and gloomy, introspective charm. His feuilleton of 21 May complained of not being able to take advantage of a newly created package tour, which for 175 francs transported you, housed you, took you on guided tours round the Court, the museums, Richmond, Hampton Court Palace, Greenwich, and even brought you back ‘with all intelligence and care’.

A month later, his column began mysteriously. ‘In this unhappy week of cholera and insurrection which has just gone by, the theatres of Paris have played nothing. The announcement of some major performance would have brought us back in the twinkling of an eye, despite pestilence and politics: for it is on such evil days that Art has need of all its supporters. But the thunder in the street makes the Muses fall silent, and we would have had nothing to do at our post. So we have profited from this sad congé by accomplishing a voyage to China, no less than the intrepid MacCarthy or Monsieur de Langrenée. This voyage cost us two hours and two shillings.’

This unexpectedly exotic expedition turned out to have been a visit by the ferry from Hungerford Bridge to a Chinese junk moored at St Katharine’s Dock. It brought Gautier a new sense of the equivocations of Progress and Empire, almost, very distantly, a sense of menace. Below decks on the junk, he listened distractedly to a Chinese orchestra, with four young men in dark blue silken smocks and pigtails, playing a melancholy composition on drums, gongs, violins and tambourines. Around them the cabin was cluttered with ornate, open-work ivory boxes, porcelain pots and huge grotesque mandrake roots, twisted into fantastical shapes. Gautier meditated on a pile of Chinese coffins in a dark corner, each hewn out of a single log, and painted a glistening vermilion, ‘stacked there, no doubt, for the benefit of the crew in case of cholera or nostalgia’. He was thoughtful. ‘When a concert is finished, one replaces the instrument in its case: when a life is finished, one slips the man into his coffin: and the rest is silence … But why do violins have cases that resemble the bier? Is it because they have souls and voices, and groan like us?’

Returning on deck, under the leaden sky of London, Gautier gazed curiously at a large lacquer cabinet fitted under the poop of the junk which was carved like some gigantic dream-bird. The cabinet formed an open shrine for Buddhist worship, and in it three golden figurines representing the Chinese trinity. In front of them, coloured spills, jossticks and aromatic tapers sent their sweet oriental perfumes drifting heavily over the dark waters of the Thames.

Perhaps, thought Gautier, the traditional piety of the Chinese crew had not been dissolved ‘by contact with the sceptical barbarians …’ He bent down and peered closely at the little, squat buddhas, miniature replicas of the mighty idols he had earlier seen on display at an antiquarian collection in Hyde Park. He studied their impenetrable good humour … ‘but as for the gods themselves, those circumflex eyebrows, those equivocal smiles, and those gross little bellies, all express an attitude towards the worshipper that is ironic, and even irreverent. The devotee does not lack faith; but it seems that the idol itself lacks conviction. Perhaps all religions will come to an end through the agnosticism of their gods.’

It was a foretaste of a sensation he was to have on one of his last visits, in 1851, as he wandered through the imperial splendours of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Dazzled by the endless displays of jewelled armaments, exotic plants, stuffed elephants, priceless fabrics, and amorous potions of liquid pearl, he yet remained inexplicably unexalted, doubtful. What he finally remembered was a barred compartment containing several imprisoned Thuggees, the religious stranglers of Durga, the ‘monsterous wife of Shiva, god of destruction’. These men were sullenly engaged in weaving an immense carpet, ‘of evidently European design … with a greyish background spotted with black and red ornaments resembling burns and badly cleaned bloodstains. Its appearance was infinitely sinister and funereal. (Indeed it was as ugly as a home-made English carpet.) What torture it must have been for those poor Thugs, instinctive lovers of beautiful patterns and harmonious colours, to sit weaving this abominable tapestry of expiation!’ This was the picture that stayed in his mind, from all that palace of wonders. This, and the massive pistons and flywheels of the engineering displays.

Yet in the midst of these later trips, with their thickening associations and suggestions, fell a bright shaft. For London unexpectedly and generously provided Gautier with the last great romance of his life, in the elegant shape of a very pretty Italian widow whom he encountered in Bond Street. Marie Mattei had adopted a smart, fast, modern English style, wore charming white waistcoats, rolled her own cigarettes in ‘papelitos’, sucked peppermints and sipped tea, as Gautier fondly recorded in his sonnets. He rapidly made her his mistress, and back in Montmartre she transformed his ‘small red bed with its spiral bedposts’ into a paradise of sexual blue. And there, with a touch of the renowned English coolness in the heat of battle

… quand le plaisir a brisé nos forces,

Nonchalant entr’acte à la volupté,

Nous fumons tous deux en prenant le thé.

But passion, like all things – except perhaps the art that recorded it – was transitory, no permanent gift. As Gautier grew old, and Paris closed round them like a familiar shawl, there came back the memory of the English Sunday, that Feast of Limbo, when shops and pubs and theatres closed, streets were deserted, and everyone seemed to flee the city by boat or coach or charabanc, until it was like a place of the dead, ‘one of those cities peopled by inhabitants who have turned to stone, as Eastern Tales relate’. It haunted him, that vision of melancholy exuding from the very walls, and he wrote wryly: ‘At such times one longed to have a little portable chemist’s outfit, consisting of opium, prussic acid, and acetate of morphine. The thought of suicide is born in the most resolute heart; it is not prudent to fiddle with your pistols or to lean over the balustrades of the bridges … There is but one recourse, to make oneself abominably drunk, to fill one’s stomach with a blazing sunset of rum-punch … but you have to be English for that.’

On those days the only serious British activity seemed to be attending funerals. But the London cemetery, so icy, stark, flowerless and abandoned, with its low graves retaining ‘like mummies, sarcophagi with a vague appearance of the human corpse’ filled him with nothing but lugubrious imaginings, and gave him only an intense desire to remain alive. He turned the dark shape in his hand. But then, finally, was one not a Parisian? He pulled upon a fresh cigar, and stroked the receptive fur of an attendant cat. He thought of the baroque magnificence of the cemetery of Père Lachaise, the swept alleys, the carved chapels, the bright wreaths of blossom. ‘How can the English, a nation so absolutely wedded to “home and comfort”, how can the English resign themselves to being so dreadfully ill at ease in the next world?’