Charming Violence

Tuesday, February 20th., Rue de Calais, Paris.

Opera masked ball on Saturday night. The Atkinses supped with me at the Place Blanche. We got to the restaurant too soon, and found all the waiters asleep in odd corners, and the room darkened. It was like going into an enchanted palace. We woke it up, and lighted it up, in an instant. By the time we left, 12.30, there was a noisy band playing and a crowd of guests.

We got to the ball at 12.45. Already an enormous crowd. Great cohorts of men in silk hats. I should say the men outnumbered the women by 5 to 1. The people who looked really well were the chorus girls etc. from the Opera who were thoroughly used to fancy dress and knew how to walk and how to dine.. Outside these and a few professional men, there was almost no fancy dress; but plenty of dominoes. The coup d'oeil in the salle was superb, and the orchestras (3) fine and deafening, as they ought ot be.

There was, relatively, very little dancing. Not a single well-bred Frenchwoman there, so far as I could see, and very few toilettes worth a damn. But the general effect was dazzlingly immense. And the cohorts of men, all on the lookout for 'something nice', seemed to lurch from time to time in one direction or another, as crowds do, bodily, and sometimes even to stampede. There was something undignified in these masses of masculinity. The waiters and ouvreuses seemed politer and gayer than usual. We left at 3.15. Many people had preceded us. It was an experience, one I shall remember in years to come when I look back on my time in Paris which, I can feel already, coming towards its end. It seems to me that Paris has acquired such a reputation for 'gaiety' that its denizens feel obliged to act up to it, whether that is their natural inclination or not. It is a sort of communal hysteria which someone like me is not easily caught up in.

Needless to say that I was a wreck on Sunday, and the noises of the people in the flat above got on my nerves even more than usual. As suspected the concierge has taken no action on my behalf. However I wrote a brief account of the ball for the Standard, rather sardonic, and took it down to the office. 

T.P. O'Connor dined with me last night. He still slanged Sargent, and he said that Renoir was a master. In literature, with his usual charming violence, he cursed Conrad's style (very cleverly) and was enthusiastic about Thackeray. We came back here and went through a lot of my books. He proved himself at once a fairly accomplished bookman. But late in the evening, when we were talking about religion, Malthusianism, etc. I discovered that in some matters his ideas were a strange mixture of crudity and fineness. He is certainly a unique character, and something of a minor deity in Liverpool.

Alone in Paris

Sunday, November 8th., Rue de Calais, Paris.

Today I managed to concentrate pretty nearly all day, 'til 9.30 p.m. on my story, and I collected a few decent ideas for it. I saw no one to speak to except my domestique, in the morning, and the waitresses at my restaurants. Last thing, I began to read "Don Quixote".

So, It has been such a day as ought to satisfy a man of letters. Having done my correspondence I went out at 10.15 for a walk, and to consider the plot of my story. I strolled about the Quartier de l'Europe 'til 11.30, and then lunched at my usual restaurant where I am expected, and where my maternal waitress advised me in the selection of my lunch. During lunch I read Le Journal. I came home, finished Le Journal, read "Don Quixote" and fell asleep. Then at 1.30 I amused myself on the piano. At 2 I began, in my Bruges chair, to ponder further on my story, and the plot seemed to be coming. At 3.30 I made my afternoon tea, and then read more "Don Quixote" and fell asleep for about a minute. The plot was now coming faster and faster, and at 5 I decided that I would, at any rate, begin to sketch the story. At 6.45 I had done a complete rough draft of the whole story.

Then I dressed and went to dine in my other restaurant in the Place Blanche, where the food and wine are good, and the waiters perfect models, and the chasseur charming, where men bring their mistresses, and where occasionally a 'mistress' dines alone, and where the atmosphere is a curious mixture of discretion and sans gene. The whole place seems to say: "You should see what fun we have here between midnight and 3 a.m. with our Hungarian music and our improvised dancing, and so on , and so on ..." I dined slowly and well, whilst reading Le Temps and The Pilot, and also watching the human life in the place. Then I took coffee and a cigar. I returned home at 8.30 and played the piano. 

The idea of writing my chronique for T.P.'s Weekly a day earlier than usual came into my head, the scheme of the article presented itself, and at 9.30 I suddenly began to write it, finishing it at 11.35. I then went to bed and read "Don Quixote" 'til 12.15. I felt content!

There is a lot to be said for the solitary life as exemplified by this day of mine. Did I feel lonely at any time? Positively not. It almost seems that time expands when one is alone, and so much more is achieved. Social contact is time consuming and rarely beneficial, particularly for an artist. Even fleeting attention to the concerns and ideas of others means a loss of focus on one's own creativity. Not to say that all society should be foresworn. Bread rises better when leavened. I think I should have more days like today. Of course if I had a mistress myself .......

Parisian life

Monday, September 28th., Paris

Illustration of the sans-gene of Montmartre. As I was sitting on the terrace of the Cafe de la Place Blanche, a voiture drove up containing two men, two women and a white puppy. One of the men was clearly an actor or singer of some sort, he had the face and especially the mouth; one of the women, aged perhaps 25, short, getting plump, and dressed with a certain rough style, especially as to the chic hat and the jupon, was evidently his petite amie; the other woman was a servant, nu-tete and wearing a white apron; the other man had no striking characteristic. The two men and the petitie amie got out and sat near me. the driver turned away.

La Place Blanche 1911

"Ou allez-vous?" the petite amie shouted curtly in a hoarse, vulgar voice. Whereupon the driver gave a shout of laughter and the servant, who was nursing the puppy, laughed too. "Oh! Il tourne," murmured the petite amie, grimly enjoying the joke at her expense. The driver was only turning round to a quiet corner where he might wait without impeding the traffic. Having drawn up his vehicle he got down and sat in the carriage and produced a coloured comic paper, and shared his amusement over it with the servant. From time to time, the petite amie from her table shouted remarks to the servant.

Afterwards I dined with the Schwobs.

Marcel Schwob was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine on 23 August 1867. He studied Gothic grammar under Ferdinand de Saussure at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1893-4, and later earned a doctorate in classic philology and oriental languages. In 1884 he discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, who became one of his models, and whom he translated into French. He was a true symbolist, with a diverse and an innovatory style. He is the author of six collections of short stories: Cœur double ("Double Heart", 1891), Le Roi au masque d’or ("The King in the Golden Mask", 1892), Mimes(1893), Le Livre de Monelle ("The Book of Monelle", 1894), La Croisade des Enfants ("The Children's Crusade", 1896), and Vies imaginaires ("Imaginary Lives", 1896). Alfred Vallette, director of the leading young review, the Mercure de France, thought he was "one of the keenest minds of our time", in 1892. Marcel Schwob worked on Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which was written in French to avoid a British law forbidding the depiction of Bible characters on stage. Wilde struggled with his French, and the play was proof-read and corrected by Marcel Schwob for its first performance, in Paris in 1896.  His work pictures the Greco-Latin culture and the most scandalous characteristics of the romantic period. His stories catch the macabre, sadistic and the terrifying aspects in human beings and life. He became sick in 1894 with a chronic incurable intestinal disorder. He also suffered from recurring illnesses that were generally diagnosed as influenza or pneumonia and received intestinal surgery several times. In the last ten years of his life he seemed to have aged prematurely. In 1900, in England, he married the actress Marguerite Moreno, whom he had met in 1895. His health was rapidly deteriorating, and in 1901 he travelled to Samoa, like his hero Stevenson, in search of a cure. On his return to Paris he lived the life of a recluse until his death in 1905. He died of pneumonia while his wife was away on tour.

First night of Jean Aicard's drama in verse, "La Legende du Coeur", at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in which Mme. Schwob plays the hero-troubadour.

Marguerite Moreno (1871–1948) born Lucie Marie Marguerite Monceau was a French stage and film actress. The French writer Marcel Schwob, who was madly in love with her, wrote in 1895: "I am at Marguerite Moréno's complete disposal. She is allowed to do everything she wants with me and that includes killing me". 

Schwob ill and very pale and extremely gloomy and depressed. neither of them could eat and each grumbled at the other for not eating. Before dinner Schwob had described to me the fearful depression of spirit accompanied by inability to work, which has held him for several months. Every morning he got up feeling, "Well, another day and I can do nothing, I have nothing to look forward to, no future." And, speaking of my novel, "Leonora", he said: "You have got hold of the greatest of all themes, the agony of the older geberation in watching the rise of the younger." Yet he is probably not 40. In talking of Kipling's literary power, he said that an artist could not do as he liked with his imagination; it would not stand improper treatment, undue fatigue etc. in youth; and that a man who wrote many short stories early in life was bound to decay prematurely. He said that he himself was going through this experience.