AN ARMCHAIR ESSAY

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 175, 20 April 1929, Page 27

AN ARMCHAIR ESSAY

BOHEMIAN PARIS OF TO-DAY

(Written for “The Dominion” by Charles Wilson.)

The average tourist to Paris knows the grands boulevard, the Quartier de I’Opera, the Madelalne, Notre Dame, and oceans of other sights as well as his own acquaintance with la ville lumiere, or the “pointings out” of the average Cook’s charabanc driver will ■ permit him. But there is another Paris, the Paris described by Mr. Sidney Hiddleston, so long "The Times”' correspondent in Paris, in his entertaining volume, “Paris Salons, Cafes and Studios,” which to many will be a French capital much better worth read- • ing about, and it is of this particular Paris that I would write. It is of a Paris famous? to: its literary men and women, its poets, painters, and those whom we may call. Bohemians. Anatole France. Anatole Franc.. 'as M. Thib..ud chose to call himself as a writer, occupied, until his death, so prominent a place / among modern Frei. :h writers, as satirist, historian of the more sensational side of the great Revolution, as political propagandist, and in so many other activities, that it is no wonder that Mr. Hiddleston has much to say about him. Hiddleston knew him personally and gives a very interesting

sketch of the many-sided man who at one time was held in so much regard, but of whom, since his long-time private secretary. M. Brousson, has drawn so unamiable, some say, so scandalous a picture of him, Parisians have had to amend, their values of late. He writes:

He was simple and kindly in manner and appearance; his voice was soft, but deep. He spoke slowly, wisely, and wittily. With his ecclesiastical bands he described wide gestures. He was calm and composed, even nonchalant, and could hardly be roused to passion. His eyes were gentle, but in them was a ’glint of malice and amusement. Irony lurked about his lips. He struck me as tall, though this I believe to be not the case. His long, wrinkled, brownish face was further lengthened by a carefully-trimmed beard. On his head he wore a round skull cap. At home, in the Villa Said; at the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne, be often remained in his dressing-gown, his feet encased in black felt slippers. He had collected a wealth of books, and pictures, and bibelots, which he was fond of showing his visitors. France and the voting Poets. \ Anatole France, like. Andrew, Lang, received scores of volumes from young poets and novelists, all anxiously awaiting a word of praise from the great critic. Like Lang he could not possibly read every book sent to him. Lang used jocularly to say the parchment bound volumes were found very useful in backing rarer ~nd more valued bibliophlc treasures stored on his pet shelves. But France had not the heart to do aught but send some laudatory answer. Occasionally he had his little joke:—

He was praising a young poet somewhat too extravagantly, as was his wont. “Master,” said the young poet, "I cannot believe that you have done me the honour of reading my poems.” “What!” exclaimed France, “I will give you proof. Your best poem is on page 84.” “It is true.” murmured the poet. "Forgive me for doubting. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” “But you cannot have read page 84,” said, later, an Intimate friend of France. “Of course not,” admitted Anatole France. "It was a bow drawn at venture. But a poet thinks any poem which anyone mentions is his best.” “But suppose page 84 had been blank?” “In that case, though I should have been sorry for it my reply would have passed for a biting epigram.” Other Writers.

French writers whose names have become famous the literary world over, pass frequently through Mr. Hiddleston’s witty pages. An author who was at opposite poles to Anatole France is Charles Maurras, whom many Frenchmen hold to be the greatest of French litterateurs. Maurras is, like Leon Daudet, a fervent Catholic and ultra Monarchist, quite apart from Anatole France, yet one whose writings his political enemy greatly admired. Hiddleston describes Maurras as a very lovable man, but one with whom it is difficult to converse because of his deafness. Georges Duhamel,, whose real name is DenyC Therenin, was once a medical dudeait and still greatly addicted to scientific studies. He is a great traveller and one of the best informed of sociological writers, keen upon obtaining vital material for his books.

His appearance is that of a man who will not allow himself to be hurried. He Is tall, with a slight stoop; his eyes are quiet, behind great round glasses. His round, clean-shaven face, with the great expanse of forehead and the bald cranium, gives him a quite benevolent air. Carlcaturally, he would resemble Mr. Pickwick, but nevertheless he looks what he is—a scientist and a scholar.

A young writer, translations of whose books have, during the last two or three years, sold remarkably well in England and America, is Andre Mauros, whose fine biography of Disraeli, and much more so, his witty and penetrating war story, “The Silences of Colonel Bramble,” have been so popular with difieeming New Zealand neadera.

Andre Maurois i', in real life, a prosperous cloth manufacturer, by name Emile Hertzog, a name which points to his Semitic origin. Mr. Hiddleston says that Maurois is personally “a well-groomed man, with sleex, silvery hair brushed fr-m the middle round a high forehead, heavy-lidded, bright eyes in a hatchet-shaped, sensitive face, nose and lips which reveal his race, and a short trimmed moustache.” Andre Gide. Then, of course, there is a pen portrait of Andre Gide, who, as all Stevensonians will recall, was so ardent an admirer of R.L.S., who has translated "Prince Otto,” and so many other of Stevenson’s writings. We read of him, as “sitting through a performance impassible, with a Mona Lisa smile lurking in the corners of his lips. His ■head almost laid, was aslant in a characteristic attitude; two Angers were pressed against his square forehead. Under the bushy eyebrows were the th ip slits of -yes, and, delicate nose, such is the portrait of Andre Gide that has impressed itself upon me.” Curious that so many leading French writers of the day, especially those of the famous groups of the “Mercure de

France’ ’and “La Nouvelle Revue Franchise”—this latter the finest literary magazine published, should have a Jewish strain in their blood. At the famous “Maison des Ames des Lures” —tourists rarely go there, but you' can spend a pleasant hour or so there under the arcade of that essentially bookish quarter, the Odeon. You can see Valery Larband or Paul Valery. If you are wise—alas, Liber, when in Paris in 1926, missed his chance of sipping a vermouth aperitif here and seeing some of the celebrities of the Parisian literary world—you will do well to give the sadly Americanised Quarters de I’Opera a miss, and spend more time on the Rive Gauche. Marcel Proust. Marcel Proust has been so much in the public eye and on the public tongue, these last-few years, so much discussed by writers so far apart as Arnold Bennett and John Middleton Murry, his wonderful novel, possibly the longest the world has ever known, “A la Richerche du. Temps Perdu,” known by the fine translations of Scott Moncrieff, that it is first and foremost of Mr. Hiddleston’s literary portraits that so many readers of his book will first turn to Proust, whose novel runs into ten volumes, is having possibly the most dominant influence over the younger Frenchmen. All his life he st "ered from asthma and was so f much a martyr to his horror of noises,' that i he Wrote in a cork-lined flat, which he rarely left save at night. He had a morbid dislike of perfumes, and so hated noise that even a,’hen he drbve

into the country, would ' insist'upon the windows being always kept closed. Hiddleston tells us that if his admirers sent him any flowers he had them removed at once; his dislike of perfumes was so great that even when n visitor pulled out a scented handkerchief, it would be handed to the housekeeper until she departed. But he was a martyr of psychology and realism, and his long-winded descriptions and his picture of a ball given by the Duchesse de Guermantes runs into close upon 200 pages— cannot be skipped. No writer of modern times has been more meticulously careful about the accuracy of his pen pictures. 11. would question cafe waiters, valets, servants, old family friends, as to the ways of the Swanns, the. Guermantes, tbe Ver•duraux, of his ■ jvels. Once, so the story goes, w’hen he was a sick man, he insisted on getting up an going to a reception at 2 o’clock in the morning, 1 "’cause he wanted to observe how a certain prince, who was regarded as an arbiter of fashion, wore his monocle.

A Passion For Accuracy. His passion for accuracy was responsible for many curious incidents, Once, when he had to describe a woman’s hat of a byegone period, he at once called upon an old friend.

Dear Madame,— Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see the little hat with Parma violets which you used to wear when I was in love with you. “But, my dear Marcel, that was 20 years ago. I have not got the hat now.” “Ah, madame, you don’t want to show it to me. You wish to tease me. You are causing me a great disappointment.” “I assure you I do not keep my old hats.” “Madame D. has kept; all her hats,” murmured Proust. “That’s a charming idea, but I have not got a museum.”

They do, say that Marcel Proust drew Robert St. Loub fror. Ropert de Flers, the critic Y the “Figaro,” a dramatist of some distinction, and in later years a member of the Academic. As a young man he wrote a satirical comedy, an impudent skit on the Academy. It is still revived in Parisian theatres. Its revival at the time of his election was a neat bit of irony.’ Chatto and Windus, I may here rema”k, have published three of Scott Moncrieff’s translations of Proust’s earlier parts of his great novel, but stopped short when that novel began to discuss subjects considered out of accordance with British taste. The series of Moncrieff’s translations is, I see, to be continued with “The Cities of the Plain,” which is announced by Alfred Knopp, but I fancy it must have suffered very, liberal blue pencilling? Two Famous Lady Writers.

Mr. Hiddleston waxes quite enthusiastically eulogistic of the poetess, the Comtesse Matthieu de Noailles, although she is far too great a grande dame to be seen at Parisian Bohemian haunts. 'Not only is she the greatest “living woman poet of France,” but she is one of the most brilliant women of letters of our time, is Mr. Hiddleston’s opinion. A Roumanian princess by birth, half a Greek by blood, she married into the oldest of France’s aristocratic ' families. Mr. Hiddleston describes her as “extraordinarily beautiful, with exquisitely-chiselled features, large, brooding eyes, and her frail figure has the charm of a flower.” But for the average Frenchwoman, especially the lover of fiction, “Gyp.” is at once the most fertile, the most witty, and despite she' must be getting on in age, still one of the most popular of French writers. She must have written well nigh a hundred stories, but one of-her latest was, I can answer for it, as amusing as ever. She skates, it is true, over some rather thin ice at times, but she always emerges with a whole skin —morally. One need not wonder at her choice of a nom de plume for her full name would be a trifle over long for the average title page, being no less than Sybille-Gabrielle-Marie Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirateau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville. “Gyp” comes of a literary lineage, for her grand-uncle was that famous Miribeau of the French Revolution, who was possessed bf such magnificent aplomb and almost titanic vigour. Some Painters. ,

Hiddleston has known many French artists in his day, from Manet, who did a famous portrait of Gebrge Moore, and whose “Olympia,” over which there was such an artistic row, is now housed in the Luxembourg, and Degas, the great realist who first painted the Parisian ballet girl as she really looks, down to Roland Dorgeles, the novelist, who, the yarn goes, once tied a paint brush to a donkey’s tail and let it swish colours on a canvas which, by the way, was actually hung in the Salon, and being labelled “Sunset on the Adriatic,” received serious admiration from the critics. He also knew "Picasso who, being asked by a young disciple, : “Can you explain to me, Master, why you never draw the feet in your paintings,” replied, “Because there are no feet in Nature.”, Sein, he appears to regard as the leading Paris-

ian caricaturist, and Van Dongen a most prominent painter. But he can go back to Jimmy Whistler’s time in Paris, when an American admirer, having compared Whistler to Velasquez, the impurbable Jimmy promptly said: “Well, why drag in Velasquez?" Mr. Hiddleston, like all who have known the Quartier Latin and Montmartre, is full of anecdotes concerning French art and professors, not despising that famous Marche aux Crontes —Daub Fair—-which two or three times a year is held by the younger and struggling artists on the Boulevard Raspail, not far from Lavenues, which R.L.S., when in funds, used to frequent. Americans in Paris.

Hiddleston rightly does not disregard the Americans’ love for Paris —“When good Americans die they go to Paris.” Turning over his anecdote-crammed pages you may read how Ford Madox Ford, who was Conrad’s collaborateur, and who now lives in Paris, “dances like an elephant, and with his blue eyes, blond hirir, and drooping moustaches” is supposed to be greatly annoyed by his supposed likeness to George Moore—would that his writings had half Moore’s' pungency and point 1 f Or he will amuse you by his story of how Ambassador Herrick, fresh from virtuous Washington, got quite angry when he was kissed behind the scenes at the Folies Bergeres by one of the Tiller dancing girls ; how the American artist, Harold Stearns, had a .fight with Sinclair Lewis, of Main Street and'“Babbitt” notoriety: how Ezra Pound, the poinilliste and writer of “vers libie, is a shocking poseur in his velvet coat and studiously artistic tie”; of yarns about Josephine Baker, quadroon star at the Folies Bergere. at whose notorious night cabaret rich Americans, glad to be free from the Volstead amendment, swill champagne at £5 a bottle; of James Joyce, the Irish author of the much-tabooed “Ulysses,” published for him by the American bookseller of the Odeon quarter; Sylvia - Beech Joyce’s smart “mot” at the desire of the moth for the star went the rounds of the Montparnasse quartier, when a moth flew too near the mouth of a famous cantatrice at a party—of all these and many more famous foreigners who make the i gay city their own, Mr. Hiddleston has good stories to tell. His book —one of the most readable it has fallen to my lot to read —contains portraits, caricatures, and pictures all and sundry, which are vastly life-like and amusing. “Paris Salons, Cafes, and Studios” is, in its own way, as good ns the late Albert Vandaur’s “An Englishman in Paris.” But whereas Vandaur’s book was written in London, and is a clever melange of forgery and reality, Sisley Hiddleston’s volume is the real thing.