When I went round the world for the second time twenty years later, I tried to find the Hofmeyrs of every country and so learned all manner of things worthful and strange that I shall tell of, I hope, at the end of my next volume. The only short cut to knowledge is through intercourse with wise and gifted men. Now I must confess something of my first six months of madness and pleasure in Paris, and then speak of England again and Thomas Carlyle and his incomparable influence upon me, and so lead you, gentle reader, to my later 'prentice years in Germany and Greece. There in Athens I learned new sex-secrets which may perchance interest even the Philistines, though they can be learned in Paris as well, and will be set forth simply in the second volume of these «confessions,» which will tell the whole «art of love,» as understood in Europe, and perhaps contain my second voyage round the world and the further instruction in the great art which I received from the adepts of the East-unimaginable refinements, for they have studied the body as deeply as the soul.
Chapter XV. Europe and the Carlyles
I returned to Europe, touching at Bombay and getting just a whiff of the intoxicating perfume of that wonderland with its noble, though sad, spiritual teaching, which is now beginning, through the Rig Veda, to inform the best European thought.
I stopped also at Alexandria and ran up to Cairo for a week to see the great Mosques. I admired their splendid rhetoric, but fell in love with the desert and its pyramids, and above all the sphinx and her eternal questioning of sense and outward things. Thus by easy, memorable stages that included Genoa and Florence and their storied palaces and churches and galleries, I came at length to Paris. I distrust first impressions of great places or events or men. Who could describe the deathless fascination of the mere name and first view of Paris to the young student or artist of another race! If he has read and thought, he will be in a fever; tears in his eyes, heart thrilling with joyful expectancy, he will wander into that world of wonders!
I got to the station early one summer morning and sent my baggage by fiacre to the Hotel Meurice in the rue Rivoli, the same old hotel that Lever the novelist has praised, and then I got into a little Victoria and drove to the Place de la Bastille. The obvious cafe life of the people did not appeal to me, but when I saw the glory springing from the Column of July, tears flooded my eyes, for I recalled Carlyle's description of the taking of the prison. I paid the cocker and wandered up the rue Rivoli, past the Louvre, past the blackened walls with the sightless windows of the Tuileries palace-a regret in their desolate appeal, and so to the Place de la Greve with its memories of the guillotine and the great revolution, now merged in the Place de la Concorde. Just opposite I could distinguish the gilt dome of the Church of the Invalides where the body of Napoleon lies as he desired: «On the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people I have loved so passionately!» And there were the horses of Marly champing at the entrance to the Champs Elysees and at the far end of the long hill, the Arch! The words came to my lips:
Up the long dim road where thundered The army of Italy onward By the great pale arch of the Star. It was the deep historic sense of this great people that first won me, and their loving admiration of their poets and artists and guides. I can never describe the thrill it gave me to find on a small house a marble plaque recording the fact that poor De Musset had once lived there, and another on the house wherein he died. Oh, how right the French are to have a Place Malherbe, an Avenue Victor Hugo, an Avenue de la Grande Armee, too, and an Avenue de l'Imperatrice as well, though it has since been changed prosaically into the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. From the Place de la Concorde I crossed the Seine and walked down the quays to the left and soon passed the Conciergerie and Ste. Chapelle with its gorgeous painted glass-windows of a thousand years ago; and there before me, on the lie de la Cite, the twin towers of Notre Dame caught my eyes and breath; and finally, early in the afternoon, I turned up the Boul Mich and passed the Sorbonne, and then somehow or other lost myself in the old rue St.
Jacques that Dumas pere and other romance-writers had described for me a thousand times. A little tired at length, having left the Luxembourg gardens far behind with their statues, which I promised myself soon to study more closely, I turned into a little wine shop-restaurant kept by a portly and pleasant lady, whose name, I soon learned, was Marguerite. After a most excellent meal I engaged a large room on the first floor looking on the street for forty francs a month, and if a friend should come to live with me, why, Marguerite promised, with a large smile, to put in another bed for an additional ten francs monthly, and supply us besides with coffee in the morning and whatever meals we wanted at most reasonable prices. There I lived gaudy, golden days for some three heavenly weeks. I threw myself on French like a glutton and this was my method, which I don't recommend but simply record, though it brought me to understand everything said by the end of the first week. I spent five whole days on the grammar, learning all the verbs, especially the auxiliary and irregular verbs by heart, till I knew them as I knew my alphabet. I then read Hugo's Hernani with a dictionary in another long day of eighteen hours, and the next evening went to the gallery in the Comedie Francaise to see the play acted by Sarah Bernhardt as Dona Sol and Mounet-Sully as Hernani. For a while the rapid speech and strange accent puzzled me, but after the first act I began to understand what was said on the stage, and after the second act I caught every word; and to my delight, when I came out into the streets I understood everything said to me. After that golden night with Sarah's grave trainante voice in my ears, I made rapid because unconscious progress.
Next day in the restaurant I picked up a dirty, torn copy of Madame Bovary that lacked the first eighty pages. I took it to my room and swallowed it in a couple of breathless hours, realizing at once that it was a masterwork, but marking a hundred and fifty new words to turn out in my pocket dictionary afterwards. I learned these words carefully by heart and have never given myself any trouble about French since. What I know of it, and I know it fairly well now, has come from reading and speaking it for thirty odd years. I still make mistakes in it, chiefly of gender, I regret to say, and my accent is that of a foreigner; but taking it by and large I know it and its literature, and speak it better than most foreigners, and that suffices me. After some three weeks Ned Bancroft came from the States to live with me. He was never particularly sympathetic to me and I cannot account for our companionship, save by the fact that I was peculiarly heedless and full of human, unreflecting kindness. I have said little of Ned Bancroft, who was in love with Kate Stephens before she fell for Professor Smith; but I have just recorded the unselfish way he withdrew while keeping intact his friendship both for Smith and the girl. I thought that very fine of him. He left Lawrence and the university shortly after we first met and by «pull» obtained a good position on the railroad at Columbus, Ohio. He was always writing to me to come to visit him, and on my return from Philadelphia, in 1875, I think, I stopped at Columbus and spent a couple of days with him. As soon as he heard that I had gone to Europe and had reached Paris, he wrote to me that he wished I had asked him to come with me; and so I wrote setting forth my purpose, and at once he threw up his good prospects of riches and honor and came to me in Paris. We lived together for some six months. He was a tall, strong fellow, with pale face and grey eyes; a good student, an honorable, kindly, very intelligent man; but we envisaged life from totally different sides, and the longer we were together, the less we understood each other. In everything we were antiposed; he should have been an Englishman, for he was a born aristocrat with imperious, expensive tastes, while I had really become a western American, careless of dress or food or position, intent only on acquiring knowledge and, if possible, wisdom, in order to reach greatness.