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 café, 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 Lousteau 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 lee-shore, 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 shot-gun.
“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 lé 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 Châlons 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 a while 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 fazér 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 yés!”
he cried; “énough for a son of a reech man not
énough 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 warhoofs 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 St. 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 lace 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 to sleep.
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 dîne,” 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.
“Oh,” 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 napoléons 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 Café 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 Café 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 Café Cluny!
In the midst of these lamentations
the famous registered letter came to my door, with
healing under its seal. 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 night-shirt 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 St. Lazare; all alone, though in a carriage full
of people, that I watched the moon shine on the Seine
flood with its tufted isles, 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.