TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 14290, 28 February 1912, Page 8

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

The cheapest kind of Laughter funeral procession, what and the Parisians call an "enTcare. terrement dcs pauvres," stopped the other day in a by-quarter of Paris. Much is told by the quoted phrase, for in English there is no word to equal the colloquial "pauvre." ' Briefly, he is the man whom Fate has not. loved, with .whom man has dealt harshly. Nearly all the men who followed that last solemn journeying wore their hair long, and were quite obviously painters of the Latin Quarter, and nearly all the woman were extremely pretty— painters' models., Who is deadP" enquired tho representative of an English paper. "Rousseau," said his informant, "poor old Rousseau,*' and his eyes twinkled. It was the burying of Henri Rousseau, the man who his whole life long had been the happy victim of a great joke. He was, till a few months before his death, a Custom House official, and was the most unlikely man to make his name in art. Henri Rousseau painted pictures when he was not fumbling for contraband, and he believed himself a man of genius. Ho was, he said,' the true primiftive, the first of the post impressionists. In evidence he showed his canvases. Fifteen years before the students had found him, and had made him a member of the Salon dcs Indepondants, hung his pictures on the line, and until tho day of his death kept up the jest of his genius. It was a wild jest, for poor Rousseau's pictures were extraordinary things. For example, one of them was a triumph of postimpressionism. He called it Jadwigha ("after a Polish girl whom I knew in my youth," he said). It was a life-size picture of a woman, nude, reclining on a sofa of red velvet in a forest. In the middle of a tangle of tropical vegetation, in a forest which the foot of civilised man had obviously never trodden, was a huge red velvet sofa with copper nails, and on the sofa Jadwigha was lying. Perhaps because they loved him they never let him know that his pictures were ridiculous. His work always found buyers at some very small price. It never occurred to him that his work was absurd. His art was food and drink for him, he would say. He was more than delighted when he visited the Saion dcs on varnishing day, to find a circle of young artists dancing round his picture and singing the refrain which he had painted on the grass. "This," he said, bursting into tears, "is really fame!" And nobody undeceived him. Presently when real buyers grey weary of buying his work as a curiosity, the students clubbed together, bought it, and wrote him letters from imaginary Grand Dukes. His last speech was typical, typically sad: — "Perhaps the German Emperor would give Jadwigha back to France? Now that I am dying I should like to think that Jadwigha would hang in the Louvro." All being said, there's not a hand's breadth between laughter and tears. Last week in this column Tbe appeared a summary of the Lap intentions of John Mcof Devitt, the American who Luxury, was to spend all his savings on playing the millionaire for a day. The papers to hand by yesterday's mail tell what he did, and the story is so amazing, and casts such a significant light on American life, that it is well worth referring to again. The doings of McDevitt on his visit to New York were marked by vulgar ostentation. "When he dined in his special train a valet wiped his lips with an

embroidered handkerchief, and washed his fingers. The railway authorities endeavoured to ciako the run to New York in record speed, and McDevitt announced that for every minute ! knocked off tho record he would make a present of £20 to the conductor and driver— 'if i j iaTo as m uch left." He took a doctor with him, and paid him a handsome fee, with the curious understanding that if he fell ill as tho result of tho trip the physician should pay him a guinea a day until he recovered. Nature, however, was unkind enough not to suspend her rules to assist him in having a royal time. A princely late lunch on his train left him with no appetite for dinner at the WaldorfAstoria, and he declined all the things on the menu in favour of scrambled eggs. After the theatre, however, his appetite returned, and he visited a famous chop-house and supped on caviare, oysters, and pate-de-foie-gras, explaining that he did so as a duty, for he did not like sturgeon roe or gooseliver. Then followed a visit to the Friars' Club, and finally bed in the Waldorf's regal suite at 4 a.m. He was photographed in bed next day, and had a milk bath. Tips he scattered broadcast, and he would buy a newsboy's wholo stock, give him a pound, and tell him to keep the 18s 6d change. When it was all over he declared ho did not want to bo a millionaire permanently. "I never had to work like this before." Xew York, to its credit, wants to know why he did it. The "Sun" suggests in a leader that some unknown real millionaire, himself condemned to buttermilk and porridge, subsidised McDevitt for the sake of satirising tho ambitions of many Americans. "Laugh at him if you choose," says the "Sun." "Like enough he is laughing at you, for he plays the favourite American part in the conventional American manner. Spend vulgarly, tip monstrously, eat and drink excessively, live in special trains and bridal suites —there is the millionaire's complete duty as understood by his imitators. 7 ' When an American paper says this, comment hero is unnecessary.