Henry Harland

“ The Luxembourg is fragrant with budding trees, and vocal with half a thousand romping children; the Boule-Miche is at its liveliest, with a ceaseless ebb and flow of laughing young men and women; the terrasse of the Vachette is a mass of gleaming top-hats and flaunting feminine bonnets ”

“ Turn where I will, I find the same awful sense of emptiness. The streets are deserted, in spite of the crowds: I can hear my solitary footsteps echo gruesomely through them. Paris is like Pompeii.
After luncheon, thinking to obtain relief by fleeing the Quarter (where every blessed stick and stone has its bitter-sweet association with her) , I crossed the river, mixed with the throng in the Boulevard, sat for a while at the Café de la Paix. But things were no whit better. The sun shone with the same cheerless brilliancy; the air touched one with the same light, uncomforting caress ”

“ I heard Zizi boasting to her, in a whisper, “it is forbidden for women to come alone to this café. But I am an honest girl. The gérant knows me. They make no objection to me or to my friends. Adieu, madame. Au revoir, proche,”—this last to me. Proche, indeed! But in the Latin Quarter the word is often used as a substitute for voisin. Then Zizi took her small self off, followed by Germaine.
“Well,” I queried, as soon as Elinor and I were alone, “is your thirst for experience satisfied? Are you happy at last?” ”

“ She was tremendously patriotic, and appeared shocked and grieved when she learned that he had remained continuously absent from his country for a score of years.
“Why, the more I saw of Europe, the more I loved dear old America,” she declared, in her deep voice.
She was just as homesick as she could be, she said, and couldn’t get back to Minneapolis fast enough. Did he know the West?—and again she appeared shocked at discovering the profundities of his ignorance concerning it. Oh, he must certainly see the West. No American could begin to appreciate his country till he had seen the West. ”

“ A young woman going to Bruants (than which there is scarcely a shadier resort in all the shady by-ways of Bohemia) —going to Bruant’s for the first time in her life, boldly gets up, and takes part in the performance! How were we to penetrate beneath the surface of her conduct, and perceive the world of innocence, the supreme unconsciousness of evil, that lay hidden there, and accounted for it? Bruant himself, to our shame be it owned,—rough, ribald, rowdy Aristide,—saw what we were blind to. ”

“ Paris is the gloomiest town in Christendom to-day,—though it is a lovely day in April, and the breeze is full of softness, and the streets are gay with people,—and the Latin Quarter is quite the dullest bit of Paris: Mademoiselle Miss left last night for England. ”

“ One is judged by the company one keeps; and she kept—ours. It is now some nine months ago that she appeared in it, at the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere, in the Rue Racine. We were just hasty enough, unobservant enough, blunt enough of perception, to judge her accordingly,—to take for granted, in a casual, matter-of-course fashion, that she would be a vessel of like clay to our own. ”

“ He reminded her that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel; and anyhow, he pleaded, it was too much to expect of one small man that he should be patriotic for a continent. But she shook her head at his perversity, and guessed he’d be proud enough of his Continent if he had seen it, and insisted that he must come to Minneapolis, and look round.
He liked her amazingly. As their voyage grew older, he found himself taking a greater and greater pleasure in her propinquity; looking forward with something akin to eagerness to meeting her on deck, as he accomplished his morning toilet ”

“ Of course I took her to the Moulin Rouge, which disgusted her, as I had warned her that it would; and to the Chat Noir, which amused her; and I was fortunate enough to get two seats for a performance at the Théâtre Libre, which both amused and disgusted her at once; and I introduced her to the jerry-built splendours of Bullier; and we took long delightful walks together in the Luxembourg, where she would feed the sparrows with crumbs of unnutritious bread; and we lunched, dined, and supped together in an infinite number of droll restaurants ”

“ And all her trumpery, twopenny fripperies round about her, their occupation gone: her sham jewels, and her flounces, and her tawdry furs and laces, and her powder-puffs and rouge-pots—though it was only towards the end that Zizi took to rouge. It is as if they were to tell you that a doll is dead: can such things die? They are not wholly inhuman, then?
They have viscera? are made of real flesh and blood? can experience real pains? ”

“ The presence of Elinor, whom, for all that she was alone with a man in the Café de la Paix, they could perceive with half an eye to be a bird of a totally different feather to their own, embarrassed them a good deal. Their desire to appear well before her, their determined best behaviour, tied their tongues, and made them surpassingly dull ”

“ I can understand a great deal more than I could when I first came. Do all French girls smoke cigarettes? I knew that Spanish and Russian women did, but I didn’t know it was the custom in France.”
“Yes, decidedly,” I said to myself,
“Chalks is right. There’s something ‘queer,’ about her.”
But how to reconcile the theory of her “queerness” with the fact of her residence here alone among us in the Latin Quarter of Paris? Assuming her to be a well brought-up, innocent young English girl, how in the name of verisimilitude had she contrived to get so far astray from her natural orbit? ”

“ We all know what it is like when a person who has been an absorbing interest in our lives suddenly goes away: how, apart from the immediate pang of the separation and the after-pain of more or less consciously missing the fugitive, there is a wide, complex, dim underworld of emotion, that may be compared to the thorough-bass of a sad tune, and seems in some sort to relate itself to the whole exterior universe. ”

“ I’ll go touting among the men at the school. Easy enough to bag a half a dozen.”
“But what about Lucile?”—Lucile, it will be remembered, was Madame’s niece.
“That’s so,” confessed Chalks, dashed for a moment. “Lucile’s the snag. But I guess on the whole Lucile will have to go too. I’ll hire a man I know to want her room. Madame won’t let family feeling stand in the way of trade. Especially the sky-pilot won’t, not he. And I’d like to know who’s the boss of this shebang, if not Monsieur the Abbé? There’s no love lying around loose between him and Lucile, as it stands. ”

“ Who does not know the sensation that besets an ordinary man on entering a familiar room, where, during his absence, some change has been made?—a piece of furniture moved, an old hanging taken down, a new picture put up?—that teasing sense of strangeness, which, if subordinate to the business of the moment, yet persists, uncomfortably formless, till, for instance, the presiding genius of the place inquires, “How do you like the way we have moved the piano?” ”

“ Our yearning to make amends was singularly complicated by the necessity we were under, as much for her sake as for our own, to prevent her ever guessing how (or even that) we had offended. Not to confess is to shirk the better half of atonement; yet confession in this case was impossible, concealment was imperative. That, if she should get so much as a glimmer of the truth, it would blast us forever in her esteem, was a consideration, but a trifling one to the thought of what her emotions must be like to realise the sort of place she had lately held in ours. No, she must never guess. ”

“ And she tried to pump me, in a naughty insinuating way, about Elinor, her benefactress.
But Zizi was launched upon her descent into Avernus. Her cough got worse and worse; her cheeks grew hollow, her whole face dragged-looking; her figure lost its elasticity. She took to rouge and powder, and introduced falsetto notes into her toilet. With her failing health, her friends began to fail her too: coughs and fevers and eyes unnaturally bright are disturbing elements, and put a strain on friendship. She had to seek for new ones, and was to be met with a good deal in the Boulevards. ”

“ Our ladies dined abroad a good deal, being inconstant quantities, according to the custom of their sex; but the men were almost always present in full number. We counted seven: Chalks, Schaas-Keym, Aubêmont, Jeanselme, Campbell, Norton, and myself. We formed a sort of close corporation, based upon a community of tastes, interests, and circumstances. We were all “arts,”—except Jeanselme, who was a “mines,” with a disordered tendency to break out in verse: we were all ridiculously poor, and we were all fond of bohemianising up and down the face of Paris. ”

“ It was a smile that seemed to promise a hundred undefined pleasantnesses, and it warmed his heart. “If I should go to Minneapolis——” he began; then he sat stockstill in his chair for twenty minutes; and then he got up with the air of a man who has taken a vigorous resolve. ”

“ Harold remarked, after an interval.
“Oh, I should ruin myself in cab-fares, you know,” Weir explained.
“I presume London is a pretty dear city?”
“Oh, for that—shocking!”
“I came down on the cars third-class. I want to get near the people while I am over here, and see for myself how their status compares to that of ours. I want to get a thorough idea of the economic condition of England, and see whether what David A. Wells claims for free trade is true.” ”

“ The entrance to the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere, a narrow, dark, ambiguous-looking entrance, is flanked by two tin signs. That at the right hand reads, “Chambres ci Cabinets Meublés,” that at the left, “Pension de Famille.” Call it a Pension de Famille, if you will: at the epoch when Mademoiselle Miss arrived among us, we were, to put it squarely, the most disreputable family in Europe.
Our proprietress, Madame Bourdon, was a gelatinous old person from Toulouse, with a pair of hazy blue eyes, a mottled complexion, a worldly-wise smile, an indulgent heart, and an extremely nasal accent. ”

“ Emerging into the Bischofsplatz, from the street that I had followed, I found a great crowd gathered before the Marmorhof, shouting, “Death to Conrad!” and “Where is Mathilde?” with all the force of its collective lungs. The Marmorhof was the residence of Prince Conrad, brother to the reigning Grand Duke Otto—reigning, indeed, but now very old and ill, and like to die. The legitimate successor to the throne would have been Otto’s grand-daughter, Mathilde, the only surviving child of his eldest son, Franz-Victor, who had been dead these ten years. ”

“ It is not every night of my life that I am arrested, and sit on a barrel smoking cigarettes with an enlightened foreigner. The English are not generally accounted a lively race, but by comparison with the inhabitants of X———they shine like diamonds.”
“I dare say,” I acquiesced. “But I’m not English—I’m American.”
“So I perceive from your accent,” answered he impertinently. “But as I told you once before, it amounts to the same thing. You wear your rue with a difference, that is all.”
“Speaking of sensations,” said I, “I would sell my birthright for a cup of coffee.” ”

“ Zizi was a quarter-hour late, but she didn’t mind that, apparently; at any rate she vouchsafed no apology for having kept me waiting. She made haste to let me know that she couldn’t possibly change her lodgings; she hadn’t even looked for others: her mother wouldn’t hear of it, for one thing; and then—her friends? They all have mothers, somehow or other, though the notion seems incongruous: yet I suppose it’s only natural. Zizi’s was a purple-faced old sage femme from the purlieus of ‘Montmartre. ”

“ It is always dispiriting to see one of these creatures anything but gay and flippant: serious feeling is so crudely, so garishly, at variance with your preconception of them, with the mood in which you approach them. ”