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CHAPTER V - IN WHICH I AM DOWN ON MY LUCK IN PARIS
In no part of the world is starvation an agreeable business; but I
believe it is admitted there is no worse place to starve in than
this city of Paris. The appearances of life are there so
especially gay, it is so much a magnified beer-garden, the
houses are so ornate, the theatres so numerous, the very pace of
the vehicles is so brisk, that a man in any deep concern of mind
or pain of body is constantly driven in upon himself. In his
own eyes, he seems the one serious creature moving in a world
of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe, the
queue at theatre doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-
seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the
jewellers' windows--all the familiar sights contributing to flout
his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if
he be at all after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a
childish satisfaction: this is life at last, he may tell himself, this
is the real thing; the bladders on which I was set swimming are
now empty, my own weight depends upon the ocean; by my
own exertions I must perish or succeed; and I am now enduring
in the vivid fact, what I so much delighted to read of in the case
of Lonsteau or Lucien, Rodolphe or Schaunard.
Of the steps of my misery, I cannot tell at length. In ordinary
times what were politically called "loans" (although they were
never meant to be repaid) were matters of constant course
among the students, and many a man has partly lived on them
for years. But my misfortune befell me at an awkward
juncture. Many of my friends were gone; others were
themselves in a precarious situation. Romney (for instance)
was reduced to tramping Paris in a pair of country sabots, his
only suit of clothes so imperfect (in spite of cunningly adjusted
pins) that the authorities at the Luxembourg suggested his
withdrawal from the gallery. Dijon, too, was on a leeshore,
designing clocks and gas-brackets for a dealer; and the most he
could do was to offer me a corner of his studio where I might
work. My own studio (it will be gathered) I had by that time
lost; and in the course of my expulsion the Genius of
Muskegon was finally separated from her author. To continue
to possess a full-sized statue, a man must have a studio, a
gallery, or at least the freedom of a back garden. He cannot
carry it about with him, like a satchel, in the bottom of a cab,
nor can he cohabit in a garret, ten by fifteen, with so
momentous a companion. It was my first idea to leave her
behind at my departure. There, in her birthplace, she might
lend an inspiration, methought, to my successor. But the
proprietor, with whom I had unhappily quarrelled, seized the
occasion to be disagreeable, and called upon me to remove my
property. For a man in such straits as I now found myself, the
hire of a lorry was a consideration; and yet even that I could
have faced, if I had had anywhere to drive to after it was hired.
Hysterical laughter seized upon me as I beheld (in imagination)
myself, the waggoner, and the Genius of Muskegon, standing
in the public view of Paris, without the shadow of a
destination; perhaps driving at last to the nearest rubbish heap,
and dumping there, among the ordures of a city, the beloved
child of my invention. From these extremities I was relieved by
a seasonable offer, and I parted from the Genius of Muskegon
for thirty francs. Where she now stands, under what name she
is admired or criticised, history does not inform us; but I like to
think she may adorn the shrubbery of some suburban tea-
garden, where holiday shop-girls hang their hats upon the
mother, and their swains (by way of an approach of gallantry)
identify the winged infant with the god of love.
In a certain cabman's eating-house on the outer boulevard I got
credit for my midday meal. Supper I was supposed not to
require, sitting down nightly to the delicate table of some rich
acquaintances. This arrangement was extremely ill-considered.
My fable, credible enough at first, and so long as my clothes
were in good order, must have seemed worse than doubtful
after my coat became frayed about the edges, and my boots
began to squelch and pipe along the restaurant floors. The
allowance of one meal a day besides, though suitable enough to
the state of my finances, agreed poorly with my stomach. The
restaurant was a place I had often visited experimentally, to
taste the life of students then more unfortunate than myself; and
I had never in those days entered it without disgust, or left it
without nausea. It was strange to find myself sitting down with
avidity, rising up with satisfaction, and counting the hours that
divided me from my return to such a table. But hunger is a
great magician; and so soon as I had spent my ready cash, and
could no longer fill up on bowls of chocolate or hunks of bread,
I must depend entirely on that cabman's eating-house, and upon
certain rare, long-expected, long-remembered windfalls. Dijon
(for instance) might get paid for some of his pot-boiling work,
or else an old friend would pass through Paris; and then I
would be entertained to a meal after my own soul, and contract
a Latin Quarter loan, which would keep me in tobacco and my
morning coffee for a fortnight. It might be thought the latter
would appear the more important. It might be supposed that a
life, led so near the confines of actual famine, should have
dulled the nicety of my palate. On the contrary, the poorer a
man's diet, the more sharply is he set on dainties. The last of
my ready cash, about thirty francs, was deliberately squandered
on a single dinner; and a great part of my time when I was
alone was passed upon the details of imaginary feasts.
One gleam of hope visited me--an order for a bust from a rich
Southerner. He was free-handed, jolly of speech, merry of
countenance; kept me in good humour through the sittings, and
when they were over, carried me off with him to dinner and the
sights of Paris. I ate well; I laid on flesh; by all accounts, I
made a favourable likeness of the being, and I confess I thought
my future was assured. But when the bust was done, and I had
despatched it across the Atlantic, I could never so much as
learn of its arrival. The blow felled me; I should have lain
down and tried no stroke to right myself, had not the honour of
my country been involved. For Dijon improved the opportunity
in the European style; informing me (for the first time) of the
manners of America: how it was a den of banditti without the
smallest rudiment of law or order, and debts could be there
only collected with a shotgun. "The whole world knows it," he
would say; "you are alone, mon petit Loudon, you are alone to
be in ignorance of these facts. The judges of the Supreme
Court fought but the other day with stilettos on the bench at
Cincinnati. You should read the little book of one of my
friends: _Le Touriste dans le Far-West_; you will see it all
there in good French." At last, incensed by days of such
discussion, I undertook to prove to him the contrary, and put
the affair in the hands of my late father's lawyer. From him I
had the gratification of hearing, after a due interval, that my
debtor was dead of the yellow fever in Key West, and had left
his affairs in some confusion. I suppress his name; for though
he treated me with cruel nonchalance, it is probable he meant
to deal fairly in the end.
Soon after this a shade of change in my reception at the
cabman's eating-house marked the beginning of a new phase in
my distress. The first day, I told myself it was but fancy; the
next, I made quite sure it was a fact; the third, in mere panic I
stayed away, and went for forty-eight hours fasting. This was
an act of great unreason; for the debtor who stays away is but
the more remarked, and the boarder who misses a meal is sure
to be accused of infidelity. On the fourth day, therefore, I
returned, inwardly quaking. The proprietor looked askance
upon my entrance; the waitresses (who were his daughters)
neglected my wants and sniffed at the affected joviality of my
salutations; last and most plain, when I called for a suisse
(such as was being served to all the other diners) I was bluntly
told there were no more. It was obvious I was near the end of
my tether; one plank divided me from want, and now I felt it
tremble. I passed a sleepless night, and the first thing in the
morning took my way to Myner's studio. It was a step I had
long meditated and long refrained from; for I was scarce
intimate with the Englishman; and though I knew him to
possess plenty of money, neither his manner nor his reputation
were the least encouraging to beggars.
I found him at work on a picture, which I was able
conscientiously to praise, dressed in his usual tweeds, plain,
but pretty fresh, and standing out in disagreeable contrast to my
own withered and degraded outfit. As we talked, he continued
to shift his eyes watchfully between his handiwork and the fat
model, who sat at the far end of the studio in a state of nature,
with one arm gallantly arched above her head. My errand
would have been difficult enough under the best of
circumstances: placed between Myner, immersed in his art,
and the white, fat, naked female in a ridiculous attitude, I found
it quite impossible. Again and again I attempted to approach
the point, again and again fell back on commendations of the
picture; and it was not until the model had enjoyed an interval
of repose, during which she took the conversation in her own
hands and regaled us (in a soft, weak voice) with details as to
her husband's prosperity, her sister's lamented decline from the
paths of virtue, and the consequent wrath of her father, a
peasant of stern principles, in the vicinity of Chalons on the
Marne;--it was not, I say, until after this was over, and I had
once more cleared my throat for the attack, and once more
dropped aside into some commonplace about the picture, that
Myner himself brought me suddenly and vigorously to the
point.
"You didn't come here to talk this rot," said he.
"No," I replied sullenly; "I came to borrow money."
He painted awhile in silence.
"I don't think we were ever very intimate?" he asked.
"Thank you," said I. "I can take my answer," and I made as if
to go, rage boiling in my heart.
"Of course you can go if you like," said Myner; "but I advise
you to stay and have it out."
"What more is there to say?" I cried. "You don't want to keep
me here for a needless humiliation?"
"Look here, Dodd, you must try and command your temper,"
said he. "This interview is of your own seeking, and not mine;
if you suppose it's not disagreeable to me, you're wrong; and if
you think I will give you money without knowing thoroughly
about your prospects, you take me for a fool. Besides," he
added, "if you come to look at it, you've got over the worst of it
by now: you have done the asking, and you have every reason
to know I mean to refuse. I hold out no false hopes, but it may
be worth your while to let me judge."
Thus--I was going to say--encouraged, I stumbled through my
story; told him I had credit at the cabman's eating-house, but
began to think it was drawing to a close; how Dijon lent me a
corner of his studio, where I tried to model ornaments, figures
for clocks, Time with the scythe, Leda and the swan,
musketeers for candlesticks, and other kickshaws, which had
never (up to that day) been honoured with the least approval.
"And your room?" asked Myner.
"O, my room is all right, I think," said I. "She is a very good
old lady, and has never even mentioned her bill."
"Because she is a very good old lady, I don't see why she
should be fined," observed Myner.
"What do you mean by that?" I cried.
"I mean this," said he. "The French give a great deal of credit
amongst themselves; they find it pays on the whole, or the
system would hardly be continued; but I can't see where WE
come in; I can't see that it's honest of us Anglo-Saxons to profit
by their easy ways, and then skip over the Channel or (as you
Yankees do) across the Atlantic."
"But I'm not proposing to skip," I objected.
"Exactly," he replied. "And shouldn't you? There's the problem.
You seem to me to have a lack of sympathy for the proprietors
of cabmen's eating-houses. By your own account you're not
getting on: the longer you stay, it'll only be the more out of the
pocket of the dear old lady at your lodgings. Now, I'll tell you
what I'll do: if you consent to go, I'll pay your passage to New
York, and your railway fare and expenses to Muskegon (if I
have the name right) where your father lived, where he must
have left friends, and where, no doubt, you'll find an opening. I
don't seek any gratitude, for of course you'll think me a beast;
but I do ask you to pay it back when you are able. At any rate,
that's all I can do. It might be different if I thought you a
genius, Dodd; but I don't, and I advise you not to."
"I think that was uncalled for, at least," said I.
"I daresay it was," he returned, with the same steadiness. "It
seemed to me pertinent; and, besides, when you ask me for
money upon no security, you treat me with the liberty of a
friend, and it's to be presumed that I can do the like. But the
point is, do you accept?"
"No, thank you," said I; "I have another string to my bow."
"All right," says Myner. "Be sure it's honest."
"Honest? honest?" I cried. "What do you mean by calling my
honesty in question?"
"I won't, if you don't like it," he replied. "You seem to think
honesty as easy as Blind Man's Buff: I don't. It's some
difference of definition."
I went straight from this irritating interview, during which
Myner had never discontinued painting, to the studio of my old
master. Only one card remained for me to play, and I was now
resolved to play it: I must drop the gentleman and the frock
-coat, and approach art in the workman's tunic.
"Tiens, this little Dodd!" cried the master; and then, as his eye
fell on my dilapidated clothing, I thought I could perceive his
countenance to darken.
I made my plea in English; for I knew, if he were vain of
anything, it was of his achievement of the island tongue.
"Master," said I, "will you take me in your studio again? but
this time as a workman."
"I sought your fazer was immensely reech," said he.
I explained to him that I was now an orphan and penniless.
He shook his head. "I have betterr workmen waiting at my
door," said he, "far betterr workmen.
"You used to think something of my work, sir," I pleaded.
"Somesing, somesing--yes!" he cried; "enough for a son of a
reech man--not enough for an orphan. Besides, I sought you
might learn to be an artist; I did not sink you might learn to be
a workman."
On a certain bench on the outer boulevard, not far from the
tomb of Napoleon, a bench shaded at that date by a shabby
tree, and commanding a view of muddy roadway and blank
wall, I sat down to wrestle with my misery. The weather was
cheerless and dark; in three days I had eaten but once; I had no
tobacco; my shoes were soaked, my trousers horrid with mire;
my humour and all the circumstances of the time and place
lugubriously attuned. Here were two men who had both
spoken fairly of my work while I was rich and wanted nothing;
now that I was poor and lacked all: "no genius," said the one;
"not enough for an orphan," the other; and the first offered me
my passage like a pauper immigrant, and the second refused
me a day's wage as a hewer of stone--plain dealing for an
empty belly. They had not been insincere in the past; they were
not insincere to-day: change of circumstance had introduced a
new criterion: that was all.
But if I acquitted my two Job's comforters of insincerity, I was
yet far from admitting them infallible. Artists had been
contemned before, and had lived to turn the laugh on their
contemners. How old was Corot before he struck the vein of
his own precious metal? When had a young man been more
derided (or more justly so) than the god of my admiration,
Balzac? Or if I required a bolder inspiration, what had I to do
but turn my head to where the gold dome of the Invalides
glittered against inky squalls, and recall the tale of him
sleeping there: from the day when a young artillery-sub could
be giggled at and nicknamed Puss-in-Boots by frisky misses;
on to the days of so many crowns and so many victories, and so
many hundred mouths of cannon, and so many thousand war-
hoofs trampling the roadways of astonished Europe eighty
miles in front of the grand army? To go back, to give up, to
proclaim myself a failure, an ambitious failure, first a rocket,
then a stick! I, Loudon Dodd, who had refused all other
livelihoods with scorn, and been advertised in the Saint Joseph
_Sunday Herald_ as a patriot and an artist, to be returned upon
my native Muskegon like damaged goods, and go the circuit of
my father's acquaintance, cap in hand, and begging to sweep
offices! No, by Napoleon! I would die at my chosen trade; and
the two who had that day flouted me should live to envy my
success, or to weep tears of unavailing penitence behind my
pauper coffin.
Meantime, if my courage was still undiminished, I was none
the nearer to a meal. At no great distance my cabman's eating-
house stood, at the tail of a muddy cab-rank, on the shores of a
wide thoroughfare of mud, offering (to fancy) a face of
ambiguous invitation. I might be received, I might once more
fill my belly there; on the other hand, it was perhaps this day
the bolt was destined to fall, and I might be expelled instead,
with vulgar hubbub. It was policy to make the attempt, and I
knew it was policy; but I had already, in the course of that one
morning, endured too many affronts, and I felt I could rather
starve than face another. I had courage and to spare for the
future, none left for that day; courage for the main campaign,
but not a spark of it for that preliminary skirmish of the
cabman's restaurant. I continued accordingly to sit upon my
bench, not far from the ashes of Napoleon, now drowsy, now
light-headed, now in complete mental obstruction, or only
conscious of an animal pleasure in quiescence; and now
thinking, planning, and remembering with unexampled
clearness, telling myself tales of sudden wealth, and gustfully
ordering and greedily consuming imaginary meals: in the
course of which I must have dropped asleep.
It was towards dark that I was suddenly recalled to famine by a
cold souse of rain, and sprang shivering to my feet. For a
moment I stood bewildered: the whole train of my reasoning
and dreaming passed afresh through my mind; I was again
tempted, drawn as if with cords, by the image of the cabman's
eating-house, and again recoiled from the possibility of insult.
"Qui dort dine," thought I to myself; and took my homeward
way with wavering footsteps, through rainy streets in which the
lamps and the shop-windows now began to gleam; still
marshalling imaginary dinners as I went.
"Ah, Monsieur Dodd," said the porter, "there has been a
registered letter for you. The facteur will bring it again
to-morrow."
A registered letter for me, who had been so long without one?
Of what it could possibly contain, I had no vestige of a guess;
nor did I delay myself guessing; far less form any conscious
plan of dishonesty: the lies flowed from me like a natural
secretion.
"O," said I, "my remittance at last! What a bother I should
have missed it! Can you lend me a hundred francs until
to-morrow?"
I had never attempted to borrow from the porter till that
moment: the registered letter was, besides, my warranty; and
he gave me what he had--three napoleons and some francs in
silver. I pocketed the money carelessly, lingered a while
chaffing, strolled leisurely to the door; and then (fast as my
trembling legs could carry me) round the corner to the Cafe de
Cluny. French waiters are deft and speedy; they were not deft
enough for me; and I had scarce decency to let the man set the
wine upon the table or put the butter alongside the bread,
before my glass and my mouth were filled. Exquisite bread of
the Cafe Cluny, exquisite first glass of old Pomard tingling to
my wet feet, indescribable first olive culled from the hors
d'oeuvre--I suppose, when I come to lie dying, and the lamp
begins to grow dim, I shall still recall your savour. Over the
rest of that meal, and the rest of the evening, clouds lie thick;
clouds perhaps of Burgundy; perhaps, more properly, of famine
and repletion.
I remember clearly, at least, the shame, the despair, of the next
morning, when I reviewed what I had done, and how I had
swindled the poor honest porter; and, as if that were not
enough, fairly burnt my ships, and brought bankruptcy home to
that last refuge, my garret. The porter would expect his money;
I could not pay him; here was scandal in the house; and I knew
right well the cause of scandal would have to pack. "What do
you mean by calling my honesty in question?" I had cried the
day before, turning upon Myner. Ah, that day before! the day
before Waterloo, the day before the Flood; the day before I had
sold the roof over my head, my future, and my self-respect, for
a dinner at the Cafe Cluny!
In the midst of these lamentations the famous registered letter
came to my door, with healing under its seals. It bore the
postmark of San Francisco, where Pinkerton was already
struggling to the neck in multifarious affairs: it renewed the
offer of an allowance, which his improved estate permitted him
to announce at the figure of two hundred francs a month; and in
case I was in some immediate pinch, it enclosed an
introductory draft for forty dollars. There are a thousand
excellent reasons why a man, in this self-helpful epoch, should
decline to be dependent on another; but the most numerous and
cogent considerations all bow to a necessity as stern as mine;
and the banks were scarce open ere the draft was cashed.
It was early in December that I thus sold myself into slavery;
and for six months I dragged a slowly lengthening chain of
gratitude and uneasiness. At the cost of some debt I managed
to excel myself and eclipse the Genius of Muskegon, in a small
but highly patriotic Standard Bearer for the Salon; whither it
was duly admitted, where it stood the proper length of days
entirely unremarked, and whence it came back to me as
patriotic as before. I threw my whole soul (as Pinkerton would
have phrased it) into clocks and candlesticks; the devil a
candlestick-maker would have anything to say to my designs.
Even when Dijon, with his infinite good humour and infinite
scorn for all such journey-work, consented to peddle them in
indiscriminately with his own, the dealers still detected and
rejected mine. Home they returned to me, true as the Standard
Bearer; who now, at the head of quite a regiment of lesser
idols, began to grow an eyesore in the scanty studio of my
friend. Dijon and I have sat by the hour, and gazed upon that
company of images. The severe, the frisky, the classical, the
Louis Quinze, were there--from Joan of Arc in her soldierly
cuirass to Leda with the swan; nay, and God forgive me for a
man that knew better! the humorous was represented also. We
sat and gazed, I say; we criticised, we turned them hither and
thither; even upon the closest inspection they looked quite like
statuettes; and yet nobody would have a gift of them!
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man:
but about the sixth month, when I already owed near two
hundred dollars to Pinkerton, and half as much again in debts
scattered about Paris, I awoke one morning with a horrid
sentiment of oppression, and found I was alone: my vanity had
breathed her last during the night. I dared not plunge deeper in
the bog; I saw no hope in my poor statuary; I owned myself
beaten at last; and sitting down in my nightshirt beside the
window, whence I had a glimpse of the tree-tops at the corner
of the boulevard, and where the music of its early traffic fell
agreeably upon my ear, I penned my farewell to Paris, to art, to
my whole past life, and my whole former self. "I give in," I
wrote. "When the next allowance arrives, I shall go straight
out West, where you can do what you like with me."
It is to be understood that Pinkerton had been, in a sense,
pressing me to come from the beginning; depicting his isolation
among new acquaintances, "who have none of them your
culture," he wrote; expressing his friendship in terms so warm
that it sometimes embarrassed me to think how poorly I could
echo them; dwelling upon his need for assistance; and the next
moment turning about to commend my resolution and press me
to remain in Paris. "Only remember, Loudon," he would write,
"if you ever DO tire of it, there's plenty of work here for you
--honest, hard, well-paid work, developing the resources of this
practically virgin State. And of course I needn't say what a
pleasure it would be to me if we were going at it SHOULDER
TO SHOULDER." I marvel (looking back) that I could so long
have resisted these appeals, and continue to sink my friend's
money in a manner that I knew him to dislike. At least, when I
did awake to any sense of my position, I awoke to it entirely;
and determined not only to follow his counsel for the future, but
even as regards the past, to rectify his losses. For in this
juncture of affairs I called to mind that I was not without a
possible resource, and resolved, at whatever cost of
mortification, to beard the Loudon family in their historic city.
In the excellent Scots' phrase, I made a moonlight flitting, a
thing never dignified, but in my case unusually easy. As I had
scarce a pair of boots worth portage, I deserted the whole of my
effects without a pang. Dijon fell heir to Joan of Arc, the
Standard Bearer, and the Musketeers. He was present when I
bought and frugally stocked my new portmanteau; and it was at
the door of the trunk shop that I took my leave of him, for my
last few hours in Paris must be spent alone. It was alone (and
at a far higher figure than my finances warranted) that I
discussed my dinner; alone that I took my ticket at Saint
Lazare; all alone, though in a carriage full of people, that I
watched the moon shine on the Seine flood with its tufted
islets, on Rouen with her spires, and on the shipping in the
harbour of Dieppe. When the first light of the morning called
me from troubled slumbers on the deck, I beheld the dawn at
first with pleasure; I watched with pleasure the green shores of
England rising out of rosy haze; I took the salt air with delight
into my nostrils; and then all came back to me; that I was no
longer an artist, no longer myself; that I was leaving all I cared
for, and returning to all that I detested, the slave of debt and
gratitude, a public and a branded failure.
From this picture of my own disgrace and wretchedness, it is
not wonderful if my mind turned with relief to the thought of
Pinkerton, waiting for me, as I knew, with unwearied affection,
and regarding me with a respect that I had never deserved, and
might therefore fairly hope that I should never forfeit. The
inequality of our relation struck me rudely. I must have been
stupid, indeed, if I could have considered the history of that
friendship without shame--I, who had given so little, who had
accepted and profited by so much. I had the whole day before
me in London, and I determined (at least in words) to set the
balance somewhat straighter. Seated in the corner of a public
place, and calling for sheet after sheet of paper, I poured forth
the expression of my gratitude, my penitence for the past, my
resolutions for the future. Till now, I told him, my course had
been mere selfishness. I had been selfish to my father and to
my friend, taking their help, and denying them (which was all
they asked) the poor gratification of my company and
countenance.
Wonderful are the consolations of literature! As soon as that
letter was written and posted, the consciousness of virtue
glowed in my veins like some rare vintage.
Content of CHAPTER V - IN WHICH I AM DOWN ON MY LUCK IN PARIS [Robert Louis Stevenson's novel: The Wrecker]
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