AN INTERLUDE
A DECISION FIN DE SIÈCLE AT THE CAFÉ LANDER
IN the middle of the rue Taitbout, there is a little café, which was not so well known twenty years ago as it is now, at the end of the nineteenth century. Then it was only beginning to emerge from the inferior position of crémerie. Came one day, from the unconventional region of the Latin Quarter, somewhere in the seventies, an enterprising proprietor; and in his wake followed a train of noble youths, enthusiastic in the praises of Lander, wishful for the further enjoyments of his hospitalities, and with kindly memory of his generosity in the matter of credit.
Lander brought the pleasant ways of the Quarter across the town with him, and the band of noble youths stood by him, encouraged and sustained him. In consequence, the Café Lander flourished exceedingly, and its circle of clients daily increased, until it was known, far and wide, as the resort of embryo genius. For all the boisterous and good-tempered young fellows who crowded round its tables, and emptied bocks and consumed coffee (fifty centimes a cup with fine champagne), were coming great men. They were the future lights in literature, art, philosophy, and politics. The real living great man they professed to regard with respectful admiration, but they wanted none of him in their midst. In the slang of the day, he had made his pile, and reposed on velvet and laurels among the Immortals. When he would have become a part of the past, and the future was their present, they could afford to be on more intimate terms with him. But for the present, they belonged exclusively to the future.
These young fools had their place a while, and expectation dwelt indulgently upon them. They chatted loudly of isms and ologies and oxies, with refreshing crudeness: upheld the realistic, the romantic, the psychological, and Heaven knows what other schools of literature. They prated of form, and matter, and art, and style, as only Frenchmen, bitten by love of these things, can prate. And then, one by one, they dropped out of the ranks of embryo genius, having accomplished nothing, with the great epic unwritten, unwritten the drama, the psychological novel that was to teach M. Bourget something new about women; unwritten the important History of the Franks, that was to throw into relief hitherto unrevealed aspects of the character of their conquerors; unsolved the problems of metaphysics under discussion, undiscovered the great political panacea of the age, unpainted the grand masterpiece. With the first stone of their reputation still to be laid, they went, and the café saw them no more.
Some of them became commonplace advocates, and made uninteresting citizens and fairly reputable fathers of families: or sordid notaries, or humdrum bourgeois. Romance shook its bridle rein with a regretful backward glance: ‘Farewell for evermore,’ and the converted fool turned upon his heel to enter into the ignoble strife with his fellows in quest of daily bread. Others there were who had a troublesome way of right-about-facing upon fond expectation. They jilted the muse for historical research, or discarded art for literature, or drifted from sonnets to the stage. One youth of philosophic tastes was known, with inexcusable fickleness, to shake off the secular garb, and array himself in the white of the cloister. He was the only one who made a serious reputation; he became a fashionable preacher, and wrote a History of the Church which brought upon him the wrath of Rome.
But if they were mostly crude, ineffectual youths, they had bright faces, and eager glances, and hearts full of hope and enthusiasm. They were each confident of his own powers, inapprehensive of defeat or failure, bound upon a fiery race for experience and new sensations, contemptuous of the past, and looked gaily toward a future of glorious achievement. Not a city but furnishes the type, and in no other city is it so persistent as in Paris. Paint one such, and you paint all her young men, nourished upon vivid imagination, upon inexhaustible hope and unconquerable self-faith.
Into this circle of frank and amiable egotists, Dr. Vermont dropped accidentally some ten years ago. Being of an experimental turn of mind, and apt to fall upon mild curiosity in his casual scrutiny of impetuous youth, he stayed. It is a mistake to assume that an interest in youth, and a tolerance of its nonsense, is an indication of lingering kindness of heart Dr. Vermont liked youth as a vivisectionist likes animals. It taught him much that he desired to know, and where it did not teach him precisely, it helped him along the path of observation. Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers, artists, poets, what you will.
A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to indulge his passion for experimental psychology.
As he sat evening after evening, and drank his coffee and little glass, and smoked a meditative cigar, it amused him to encourage the vivacious contentment around him, and lead the unborn reputations to reveal their bent. His influence upon young men was a thing to make older and saner persons gape. It was, perhaps, all the stronger and more subtle because it was unrecognised. He was feared, and yet admired, to an incredible degree. His mild, sarcastic face, with its finished features and wholly effaced humanity of expression, put a point upon emulation and goaded to rash display. But none were made to feel the rashness of their flights, or the absurdity of their theories. Dr. Vermont was too clever a man to scare expansion, or cow ambition. This was how he kept his hold upon the fresh-moustached lads around him. This was how they spoke of him among themselves as a good fellow—un bon garçon, malgré—well, in spite of a great many things.
Thus he sat, and smoked, and listened, while the years passed, and out of the circle familiar faces went and new ones came. It must be admitted there was not much variety in the entertainment. Always the same questions of form and expression, of style and matter; always the same comparison of international literatures and the relative virtues of different forms of government; above and beyond all, sex and its unexplained and stinging problems. They never tired, and each batch came up, fresh and eager for the old discussions. Names may vary, fashions may alter, but the rough, broad facts of life are there, immutable like nature, ever recurrent like the ebb and flow of the tide.
A sense of weariness was upon Dr. Vermont the December night I write of, as he walked toward the Café Lander. Most of the lads were dispersed by the Christmas vacation. But he knew precisely those who were expecting him. Anatole Buzeval, his favourite, a charming young fellow, with healthy Norman blood in his veins, and in spite of the disastrous environment of Paris fin de siècle, with something throbbing under his coat that suspiciously resembled a boy’s free heart. He came from a Norman fishing town, near the beat of the channel, washed by a friendly old river and wooded by still friendlier trees. In boyhood, he had walked in the woods, he had fished in the river, he had known the delights of amateur seafaring, and rode, and shot live things, and was first awakened by love to the melody of the birds, and to heroism by the genial spirit of endurance of the fishermen. These influences kept him partially sheltered from the century-worn cynicism and exhausted emotions prevailing. It accounted for the ring of sincerity in his laughter, for the zest of his ephemeral enthusiasms and the courageous freedom of his blue eyes. But he was nevertheless bitten by the disease of the hour, and his speech was tainted with the cheap fin de siècle indifference and dejection. He was the youngest of the party, the most intelligent and the brightest. Beside him sat Gaston Favre, a youth who would have been an artist if the death-throes of the century left him any room to believe in art. Nothing any longer interested him, but he was still capable of remarking upon sight of a bad picture—
‘Now, if it were worth the trouble, or really mattered, there is food for indignation in that picture.’
Whereupon he would survey it in the spirit of ostentatious tolerance, without a wince or a critical flash of eye.
The third, Julien Renaud, was a little older than these two, and professed a dead interest in politics. Time was when Lander’s echoed with the noble flow of his eloquence. Time was when it was confidently believed that he was destined, not only in his own imagination, to reach the tribune, and thunder effectively against the abuses of government. But that was in M. Constans’ hour, and M. Constans was notoriously Julien’s pet aversion. In those remote days, he was antagonistic toward what he called ‘the whole shop of the Elysian Fields,’ and relished M. Carnot as little as he had ever relished ‘old Father Grévy.’ But these were now half-forgotten ebullitions of youth, and like his beloved France, he was battered and bruised by the defeats of life into complete indifference. Nothing mattered. In reply to everything, he had but one response, a quiet shrug, a weariedly lifted eyebrow, and a murmured cui bono upon a long-drawn sigh. On this evening the chosen drink was punch, which resulted in more boisterous converse, and showed Anatole in almost a lyric mood. The first mention of the insipidly recurrent phrase of the hour—‘end of the century’—inspired him to fall upon mirthful reminiscences, just as Dr. Vermont entered the café.
‘M. le docteur désire?’ said the waiter, helping him off with his overcoat.
The doctor named his drink as he took a seat, and blandly scrutinised each flushed and smiling face.
‘We were talking, Doctor,’ Anatole cried, ‘of ways of ending the year. Do you remember, two years ago, when I first joined you, coming straight from Barbizon, where I chummed with a queer and amusing Scotch artist? how I taught you all to sing what I conceived to be a Scotch melody—Les Temps Jadis—and we drank at midnight an execrable decoction called in Scotland a tod-dy, standing, and gave an English shake-hands all round, which I am told is the way in Scotland of toasting the departing year?’
The Doctor paused in the act of lifting his glass, and nodded, as he threw out a couple of absent names in signification of his keen remembrance of the evening.
Followed good-natured and regretful words for each absent face. Les temps jadis were not such bad times after all, though the melancholy Scotch might chant them with more melody than the vivacious sons of Gaul. Jean this was an excellent heart; Henri that, a capital good fellow, the pity was he stuttered so. Frédéric, poor fool, had settled down, and married a dot and a squint, and the squint, alas! was so marked, that the dowry was a totally inadequate compensation. Upon which, Julien made cynical mention of the greater security of marital rights when backed by aid so powerful as a squint.
‘But, since women are only happy in virtue of their lovers and not in virtue of their husbands,’ shouted Anatole, with a charming look of rouerie, ‘what a dismal future for Frédéric’s wife! I declare I could find it in my heart to rush off and console her. I should be so blinded by my own burning eloquence, as I flung myself at her feet, that I would have no eyes left for the squint.’
‘Not until you came to yourself in a revulsion of feeling, my friend,’ sneered Julien Renaud.
‘Has any one seen Henri Lemaître since the night we drank our Scotch tod-dy, Anatole, and sang, or tried to sing, Les Temps Jadis?’ asked Dr. Vermont.
‘No. He was last heard of in Japan, studying the gentle art of self-defence, as practised by the gentle Japanese. He derided the duel, and loathed European pugilism, and he thought something might be done towards a more civilised settlement of disputes by borrowing of the remoter civilisation of the land of the chrysanthemum. What will you? Did he not study the washy water-colours of the immortal Monsieur Loti?’
‘Oh, an affection for Pierre Loti would explain any absurdity!’ said Gaston Favre, with a grim smile. ‘If we could hope to sit here a hundred years hence, and make a summary of the gods of the coming century, I wonder what sort of intellectual company should we have under discussion.’
‘Finished humbugs, I dare swear,’ shouted Anatole. ‘Already, from force of mere good writing, we have fallen upon intellectual inanition. The last century wound up by unveiling the goddess of reason; we’ve unveiled the goddess of form, and the devil swallow me, if there is anything to be found behind our excellent style. Each light of a new school sounds a loud trumpet to inform the world that he has at last discovered truth. So does a silly hen who lays an ordinary egg, the counterpart of her fellow-hen’s. You can’t convince her of the fatuous impertinence of her cackle, nor prove to her that there is nothing particularly great in the laying of eggs. I declare, nowadays, every trumpery artist and scribbler takes himself as seriously as the hen, and divides his time between laying and cackling.’
‘Each one has his theory, and it is more important that he should reveal that theory to the public than even paint his picture, write his play, or novel, or story upon it. So much has America taught him by means of that strange institution, the interviewer.’
‘Ah,’ cried Anatole, in a burst of exaggerated despair, ‘I gave up France when she took the American interviewer to her bosom, and the best papers were not ashamed to give us the opinions of the latest Minister, and expose the lack of taste and modesty in the youngest Master.’
‘Not France alone, mon cher,’ interposed Dr. Vermont; ‘English journalism has become no whit less vulgar and personal. Vulgarity, ostentation, fraud, rapacious advertisement—these are all the symptoms of the great moral disease of the century. Were a Lycurgus to rise up for each state, I doubt if the nations of the earth would have the wisdom to return to frugality, courage, and simplicity—so much have we lost by the long race of civilisation, so much our superiors were the old Pagan Spartans, and so dead are we to all promptings of delicacy,—without moral or physical value, without even valour.’
The Doctor spoke dejectedly, as if the hope of all good had died within him. The young men suddenly remembered that they, too, were weighted with a like lassitude and unbelief, and finished their punch in silence.
‘I expect we shall see the century out in a lugubrious spirit,’ sighed Anatole, when, upon a sign from Dr. Vermont, the waiter had replenished their glasses.
‘Where’s the use of facing a new one?’ asked the Doctor, with a vague, dull glance into space. ‘The same chatter, the same humbug, the same vulgarity and fraud. Always the same, and inevitably the same. New idols, new theories, new habits start up to prove more monotonous than the old ones——’
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ interrupted Gaston Favre.
‘Exactly, and Alphonse Karr was not the first to find it out. I have a better plan, lads, for saluting the new century than your Scotchman’s tod-dy and Les Temps Jadis,—than even the insipid shake-hands of Albion.’
The punch had gone to the young heads, and gave them a craving for excitement. Each one leant forward over his glass, with shining eyes and flushed cheeks, eager and expectant. It was not often that Dr. Vermont condescended to plan for their amusement.
‘Let us suppose ourselves singing Les Neiges d’Antan, and toasting our old acquaintances. We shall awaken into a new century, just the same as the old. The more it changes, the more it will be the same. Are you not prospectively tired of it already?’
He looked round gravely upon the young men, and excitement died out of each glance under the sad indifference of his. They felt upon their honour to be no less weary and cynical than he. A nod of emphatic agreement from the three young pessimists was supplemented to the Doctor’s monologue, as he continued—
‘Suppose we salute the twentieth century—already worn before birth—by a single pistol-shot, the mouth of each man’s to his brains. As we are none of us likely to do anything with our brains, more than the hundreds of other young men I have seen vanish from these tables into nothingness, there can be no patriotic objection to our blowing them out in company.’
The young men sat back in their chairs, and drew a long, deep breath. They were almost sobered for the moment, and profoundly troubled by their leader’s extraordinary proposition. However firmly we may be convinced of the nothingness of life, such a method of toasting the new year is calculated to give the stoutest courage pause. Not that they held any squeamish objections to suicide—quite the contrary, they professed to regard it as the natural and legitimate remedy for a broken heart, damaged honour, or a ruined life. But, tudieu! they all sat there drinking their punch in freedom and security, with pockets not inconveniently full, it is true, but with sound hearts and sounder appetites. The prison was not before them: then, why the deuce should they be offered the grave?
‘I thought, like Solomon, you were disposed to complain of the sameness of all things under the sun,’ sneered the Doctor.
‘That is true, Doctor,’ assented Anatole. ‘But suppose we were to find things just as same beyond the sun—or a good deal worse? For, after all, we may flatter ourselves with being sceptics, but what security have we that the pistol-shot will be the end of it all? and what if it happened to be infernally disagreeable somewhere else, and there was no getting back?’
‘Bah, another glass of punch will put you all right,’ laughed Julien. ‘On reflection, I find the Doctor’s proposal an excellent one. We are sick of everything here—wine, women, and song, such as Paris now furnishes. Then, let us go and see for ourselves what is going on among the stars. There’s this comfort, Anatole, we go in a body, if there is anything ugly to face. That’s the difficulty about suicide,—its lugubrious solitude. In company, one may snap his fingers at fear. To see three friendly faces round you, all ready to plunge at once into the same boat, and exchange jokes simultaneously with old Father Charon! When you lift your own cocked pistol to your forehead, to see three other hands and all four be shot together out of the mystery, either into eternity or—le néant.’
‘Ah, there, you’re not sure either, Gaston,’ Anatole protested, reproachfully.
‘That’s just it, boy; I know nothing now, but with the dawn of the new century I should know everything.’
‘My humble contribution to the Doctor’s plan is the proposal that we blow our brains out together—I mean in the same room,’ suggested Julien.
‘Precisely; I have just been thinking the matter out. Now here in Paris, we should excite excessive attention. But it might better be managed in some quiet place—near the sea, or close to a river bank, where our bodies might disappear easily, without giving rise to immediate alarm. I know of a half deserted island down near Beaufort, my native town. You will hardly believe that a place so near a busy factory town—one of the largest provincial cities of France—could be so forsaken and desolate. I doubt if any one lives on it now. My father-in-law had a big gloomy house on that island. I don’t think there was another inhabitant but himself. We might go down there, and toast the new century in among the dark rocks above the river.’
‘Beaufort! a commonplace train with such an end in view,’ sighed Anatole.
‘Not necessarily a train. What is to prevent us from taking horse, as your favourite heroes of Dumas did?’ said the Doctor, smiling a little at him.
‘With all my heart, if we are going to ride to Beaufort,’ cried Anatole. ‘I don’t care if I am shot then.’