Paris Nights, and Other Impressions of Places and People - Arnold Bennett

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wings of the Moulin Rouge, jewelled now with crimson lamps, began to revolve slowly. The upper chambers of the restaurant showed lights behind their mysteriously-curtained windows. The terrace was suddenly bathed in the calm blue of electricity. No austere realism of the philosopher could argue away the romance of the scene.

      I turned down the steep Rue Blanche, and at the foot of it passed by the shadow of the Trinité, the great church of illicit assignations, at whose clock scores of frightened and expectant hearts gaze anxiously every afternoon; and through the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where corsets are masterpieces beyond price and flowers may be sold for a sovereign apiece, and then into the full fever of the grand boulevard with its maddening restlessness of illuminated signs. The shops and cafés were all on fire, making two embankments of fire, above which rose high and mysterious façades masked by trees that looked like the impossible verdure of an opera. And between the summits of the trees a ribbon of rich, dark, soothing purple—the sky! This was the city. This was what the race had accomplished, after eighteen Louises and nearly as many revolutions, and when all was said that could be said it remained a prodigious and a comforting spectacle. Every doorway shone with invitation; every satisfaction and delight was offered, on terms ridiculously reasonable. And binding everything together were the refined, neighbourly, and graceful cynical gestures of the race; so different from the harsh and awkward timidity, the self-centred egotism and artistocratic hypocrisy of Piccadilly. It seemed difficult to be lonely amid multitudes that so candidly accepted human nature as human nature is. It seemed a splendid and an uplifting thing to be there. I continued southwards, down the narrow, swarming Rue Richelieu, past the immeasurable National Library on the left and Jean Goujon’s sculptures of the rivers of France on the right, and past the Theatre Français, where nice plain people were waiting to see L’Aventurière, and across the arcaded Rue de Rivoli. And then I was in the dark desert of the Place du Carrousel, where the omnibuses are diminished to toy-omnibuses. The town was shut off by the vast arms of the Louvre. The purple had faded out the sky. The wind, heralding October, blew coldly across the spaces. The artfully arranged vista of the Champs Elysées, rising in flame against the silhouette of Cleopatra’s needle, struck me as a meretricious device, designed to impress tourists and monarchs. Everything was meretricious. I could not even strike a match without being reminded that a contented and corrupt inefficiency was corroding this race like a disease. I could not light my cigarette because somebody, somewhere, had not done his job like an honest man. And thus it was throughout.

      I wanted to dine, and there were a thousand restaurants within a mile; but they had all ceased to invite me. I was beaten down by the overwhelming sadness of one who for the time being has no definite arranged claim to any friendly attention in a huge city—crowded with pre-occupied human beings. I might have been George Gissing. I re-wrote all his novels for him in an instant. I persisted southwards. The tiny walled river, reflecting with industrious precision all its lights, had no attraction. The quays, where all the book shops were closed and all the bookstalls locked down, and where there was never a café, were as inhospitable and chill as Riga. Mist seemed to heave over the river, and the pavements were oozing damp.

      I went up an entry and rang a bell, thinking to myself: “If he isn’t in, I am done for!” But at the same moment I caught the sound of a violoncello, and I knew I was saved, and by a miracle Paris was herself again.

      “Not engaged for dinner, are you?” I asked, as soon as I was in the studio.

      “No. I was just thinking of going out.”

      “Well, let’s go, then.”

      “I was scraping some bits of Gluck.”

      The studio was fairly large, but it was bare, unkempt, dirty, and comfortless. Except an old sofa, two hard imperfect chairs, and an untrustworthy table, it had no furniture. Of course, it was littered with the apparatus of painting. Its sole ornamentation was pictures, and the pictures were very fine, for they were the painter’s own. He and his pictures are well known among the painters of Europe and America. Successful artistically, and with an adequate private income, he was a full member of the Champ de Mars Salon, and he sold his pictures upon occasion to Governments. Although a British subject, he had spent nearly all his life in Paris; he knew the streets and resorts of Paris like a Frenchman; he spoke French like a Frenchman. I never heard of him going to England. I never heard him express a desire to go to England. His age was perhaps fifty, and I dare say that he had lived in that studio for a quarter of a century, with his violoncello. It was plain, as he stood there, well dressed, and with a vivacious and yet dreamy eye, that the zest of life had not waned in him. He was a man who, now as much as ever, took his pleasure in seeing and painting beautiful, suave, harmonious things. And yet he stood there unapologetic amid that ugly and narrow discomfort, with the sheet of music pinned carelessly to an easel, and lighted by a small ill-regulated lamp with a truncated, dirty chimney—sole illumination of the chamber! His vivacious and dreamy eye simply did not see all that, never had seen it, never saw anything that it did not care to see. Nobody ever heard him multiply words about a bad picture, for example—he would ignore it.

      With a gesture of habit that must have taken years to acquire he took a common rose-coloured packet of caporal cigarettes from the table by the lamp and offered it to me, pushing one of the cigarettes out beyond its fellows from behind; you knew that he was always handling cigarettes.

      “It’s not really arranged for ’cello,” he murmured, gazing at the music, which was an air from Alceste, arranged for violin. “You see it’s in the treble clef.”

      “I wish you’d play it,” I said.

      He sat down and played it, because he was interested in it. With his greying hair and his fashionable grey suit, and his oldest friend, the brown ’cello, gleaming between his knees, he was the centre of a small region of light in the gloomy studio, and the sound of the ’cello filled the studio. He had no home; but if he had had a home this would have been his home, and this his home-life. As a private individual, as distinguished from a public artist, this was what he had arrived at. He had secured this refuge, and invented this relaxation, in the middle of Paris. By their aid he could defy Paris. There was something wistful about the scene, but it was also impressive, at any rate to me, who am otherwise constituted. He was an exile in the city of exiles; a characteristic item in it, though of a variety exceedingly rare. But he would have been equally an exile in any other city. He had no consciousness of being an exile, of being homeless. He was above patriotisms and homes. Why, when he wanted even a book he only borrowed it!

      “Well, shall we go out and eat?” I suggested, after listening to several lovely airs.

      “Yes,” he said, “I was just going. I don’t think you’ve seen my last etching. Care to?”

      I did care to see it, but I also desired my dinner.

      “This is a pretty good print, but I shall get better,” he said, holding the sheet of paper under the lamp.

      “How many shall you print?” I asked.

      “Thirty.”

      “You might put me down for one.”

      “All right. I think it will give you pleasure,” he said with impartial and dignified conviction.

      After another ten minutes, we were put on the quay.

      “Grand autumn night?” he said appreciatively. “Where shall we have the apéritif?

      “Apéritif! It’s after eight o’clock, man!”

      “I think we shall have time for an apéritif” he insisted, mildly shocked.

      Drawing-rooms have their ritual. His life, too, had its ritual.

      At nearly midnight we were sitting, three of us, in a café of the Montparnasse quarter, possibly the principal café of the Montparnasse quarter. Neither notorious nor secretly eccentric; but an honest café, in the sense of “honest” applied to certain women. Being situated

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