Echo de Paris

The echo is from as far back as the year 1899. It is late September. By the entrance of a café, on a street opening into the Place de l’Opera, three Englishmen sit waiting at a small table, relieved for the moment from the solicitations of the garçon anxious to serve them their aperitifs. It is all very well for the café to call itself the “Vieille Rose”: no doubt by gaslight it lives charmingly up to its name; but seen in the noonday’s glare, its interior upholsterings are unmistakably magenta. From the warm sunshade of its awning the street view is charming; and while one of the trio watches it benevolently with an accustomed eye, the other two, encountering Paris for the first time, find in its brisk movement the attraction of novelty. But it is a reversion to English habit which makes one of them presently look at his watch a little anxiously.

L.H. Is he generally so late as this?

R.R. Generally never as early.

L.H. You are sure you said the Café Vieille Rose?

R.R. (with a disarming smile). As well as I could, my dear L.H. I can’t say it quite like you.

L.H. I don’t pretend to talk French: hearing it spoken absorbs all my faculties.

R.R. Oh, but you should! They are so charming about it: they pretend to understand you.

L.H. Well, I did screw up courage to go to a French barber yesterday.

R.R. Ah! That explains it. I was wondering.

L.H. You might well. When I looked in the glass after he had finished me I saw myself no longer English, but Parisian.

R.R. (enjoying himself). No, L.H., no! Not Parisian, I assure you!—Alsatian.

L.H. No longer English was all that mattered: “tout à fait transformé,” as I managed to say to the man. And he—magnificently: “Mais oui, Monsieur, c’était bien necessaire!” Is that what you call French politeness?

R.R. Rather the “amour propre” of the artist, I should say.

L.H. In this nation of artists one gets too much of it.

H.A. There isn’t such a thing as a nation of artists. The French only appear so because they take a more transparent pride in themselves than we do. They haven’t yet discovered that modesty is the best vanity.

R.R. Is that your own, Herbie, or did you get it from Oscar yesterday?

H.A. No. I didn’t see him. I invented it as I got up this morning, meaning to let it occur as an impromptu. Now it’s gone.

R.R. Oh, no. Say it again, my dear boy, say it again! We shall all be charmed: so will he.

L.H. Look; there he is! Who’s with him?

R.R. Davray. I asked Davray to go and bring him, so as to make sure. You know him, don’t you? You like him?

L.H. A Frenchman who can talk English always goes to my heart.

R.R. Davray is Anglomaniac: he not only talks it, he thinks it: signs himself “Henry,” like an Englishman, and has read more of your books than I have.

L.H. One?

R.R. Don’t be bitter, L.H. I read them—in the reviews—regularly.

(While they talk, a fiacre, disentangling itself from the traffic of the main thoroughfare, draws up at the newspaper-kiosk on the further side of the street, and discharges its occupants: one small, alert, and obviously a Frenchman; the other large and sedate, moving with a ponderous suavity, which gives him an air of importance, almost of dignity. But though he has still a presence, its magnificence has departed. Threading his way indolently across the traffic, his eye adventures toward the waiting group. Met by the studied cordiality of their greetings, his face brightens.)

R.R. Oscar, L.H. thinks you are late.

O.W. Thought I was going to be late, you mean, my dear Robbie. If I were, what matter? What are two minutes in three years of disintegrated lifetime? It is almost three years, is it not, since we missed seeing each other?

(This studied mention of a tragic lapse of time is not quite as happy as it would like to be, being too deliberate an understatement. The tactful “Robbie” hastens to restore the triviality suitable to the occasion.)

R.R. Oscar, when did you learn to cross streets? I have just seen you do it for the first time. In London you used to take a cab.

O.W. No, Robbie, the cab used to take me. But here the French streets are so polite; one gets to the right side of them without knowing it. (He turns to L.H.) How delightfully English of you to think that I was going to be late!

L.H. I thought you might have done as I am always doing—gone to the wrong place, or lost your way.

O.W. But that is impossible! In Paris one can lose one’s time most delightfully; but one can never lose one’s way.

H.A. With the Eiffel Tower as a guide, you mean?

O.W. Yes. Turn your back to that—you have all Paris before you. Look at it—Paris vanishes.

R.R. You might write a story about that, Oscar.

O.W. In natural history, Robbie, it has already been done. Travellers in South America tell of a bird which, if seen by you unawares, flies to hide itself. But if it has seen you first, then—by keeping its eye on you—it imagines that it remains invisible, and nothing will induce it to retreat. The bird-trappers catch it quite easily merely by advancing backwards. Now that, surely, is true philosophy. The bird, having once made you the object of its contemplation, has every right to think (as Bishop Berkeley did, I believe) that you have no independent existence. You are what you are—the bird says, and the Bishop says—merely because they have made you a subject of thought; if they did not think of you, you would not exist. And who knows?—they may be right. For, try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearance of things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.

H.D. You English are always talking what you think is philosophy, when we should only call it theology.

O.W. How typical of the French mind is that word “only”! But what else, my dear Davray, was the thought of the eighteenth century, so far as it went, but an attempt to bring Religion and Philosophy together in the bonds of holy matrimony?

R.R. The misalliance which produced the French Revolution.

O.W. Robbie, you must not be so brilliant before meals! Or do you wish to divert my appetite? May a guest who was supposed to be late enquire—when, precisely?