Rostand enjoyed the tale ingenuously, and the talk turning on noses, I could not help reciting the witty remark made about Baron Hirsch. Some one said:
"You'd hardly believe he was a Jew were it not for his nose." "True," replied the listener, "God forgives and the world forgets, but the nose remains."
Suddenly we found it was time to go if we would not lose part of the play, and then Rostand told us that he also wanted to see Foil de Carotte (Carrots!), I think it was, with Madame Nau in the title part, so we turned down the boulevard together and went to our seats like old friends.
On reflection, Rostand seemed to me a richly endowed romantic nature, dwarfed by wealth and wanting the spur of desperate incentive. But he came at the psychological moment. The second generation since the great defeat was growing up and full of the old Gallic vanity and the courage which was resolved to act and not to talk. The French youths all took up athletics, went in for boxing, even; left realism for romance and began to affirm, instead of denying. The romance of daring was in the air and Rostand gave it a voice. In almost everything he was a herald of the new time; his family life was very happy; in fine, in spite of surface faults, he was a good representative of the new France. It is almost symbolical to me that he should have been born in 1870, in the year of disaster, and died in 1919, in the assurance of victory.
I have written a good deal about Meredith and tried to give a true picture of him as one of the greatest writers of the time and a charming personality.
Shortly after I took over the Saturday Review, he came up to London to undergo an operation, and I met him again and was of course as cordial as I could be, but I could never forgive him for having refused his name to the petition in favor of Oscar Wilde. Up to that time, I used to go down to Boxhill to spend some hours with him nearly every week. Afterwards I only met him on rare occasion by chance. His operation seemed to have weakened him a good deal, for afterwards he took to riding about in a little carriage which he drove himself, and almost ceased to walk. I excused myself for not seeing him more often by telling him that I spent fully six months of every year in the south of France, whereas he preferred Boxhill and the Sussex Downs.
It was on one of these visits to Nice that I got to know Maeterlinck and Georgette Le Blanc whom I regarded as his wife. Maeterlinck was an interesting personality, but I never got much out of him beyond what any one could get from his books. He never seemed able to reveal new sides of himself in talk.
I remember he asked me once why I didn't review his translation of the Macbeth, which he had sent to me. I told him I would if he liked, but I didn't think his knowledge of English was sufficient; however, I promised to do my best. Later, in London, remembering the promise, I picked up his translation; I looked at one line in it: "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," and I found Maeterlinck had translated it: "Apres les convulsions fievreuses de la vie il dort bien." I saw at once that he had taken "fitful" to mean full of fits, as "painful" is full of pain, and had no conception that it simply meant intermittent. Therefore I sent a friend to the British Museum, who brought me back the information that of the one hundred translations of Macbeth in French, about eighty-five had followed Francois Victor Hugo in this misrendering of "fitful"; and the other had left it out altogether: "Apres le fievre de la vie il dort bien."
I sent this to Maeterlinck, thinking he would laugh over the matter, but when I met him again in Nice the next year, he and Georgette came and lunched with us and he broached the subject at once by saying that the translations of Shakespeare were quite impossible. I tried to agree with him by saying that of course it took an equal poet to try to translate from one language into the other adequately.
But he would have it that Shakespeare was quite impossible, and he gave an example from Hamlet where Ophelia says:
Here's rosemary-that's for remembrance;
Here are pansies-that's for thoughts…
"The first sentence can be translated," he said, "but the second can't, because in French the word for pansies is almost the same as the word for thoughts; you cannot say, 'Voila des pensees-c'est pour penser.'"
"Oh," I retorted, "I think it quite possible. Picture the scene to yourself:
Ophelia is speaking before the King and Queen and she knows, with a woman's divination, that the Queen is the real culprit, so she says, 'Voila des pensees,' and then, looking at the Queen, adds, stuttering, 'c'est pour penser.'"
Francis Carco, who was also at the lunch, applauded me for the thought, but Maeterlinck pretended not to understand. Really, whenever Frenchmen translate from English, they are apt to come to grief. The other day I saw that one of them had translated "Love's last shift" into "La derniere chemise de l'amour."
I knew Albert, Prince of Monaco, fairly well for more than a quarter of a century. The New York Times gave a column article to him while he was visiting America shortly before his death; it said that "he belonged to the Grimaldis of Genoa… one of the most ancient houses of Europe"; described him as "a wise old man of the world, honorably distinguished as a savant; an enlightened ruler… sagacious and experienced," and God knows what besides. Now, Albert of Monaco was not a Grimaldi at all, but a Matignon of little Breton squire stock, and his "wisdom and enlightenment" were low cunning.
One incident will give a better picture of this Princelet than pages of word painting. When I first knew him he was always talking of his dislike of "the gambling house" of Monte Carlo, which gave him his princely revenue and paid besides all the expenses of his three miles long and half a mile wide kingdom. Every one staying in the palace was requested not to visit or even enter "the gambling house," and the Prince was continually complaining that his father had given M. Blanc a lease of the place till 1907, or else "I'd shut it up tomorrow. I hate the corruptions of it. It is really wrong for a father so to bind and fetter a son; I loathe the place," so he used to preach.
It seemed to me that the Prince protested too much; in any case, surely he need not have accepted "the wages of sin," had he had not been so inclined.
But bit by bit his protests affected me; I came to believe in his honesty.
For there was a side to the Prince which pleased me. He was a sportsman. He had a great country house at Marchais on the borders of Lorraine; it had at one time belonged to the Dues de Guise and was set, a great house, in the midst of marshes.
There was most excellent shooting to be had in the swamps of Marchais; wild geese and ducks by the myriad flocked there from the north in cold weather, and wild swans, too, and the woods were well stocked with pheasants and rabbits and hares.
But there were other amenities at Marchais. So long as the Princess Alice ruled there, the food was excellent and there used to be wonderful music in the evenings.
One met at Marchais all the literary geniuses and the leaders of French thought: Bourget and Loti, Saint-Saens and Sarah Bernhardt. In Marchais, more than in any other French house, one touched life at many points.
Naturally, I was delighted to go to Marchais and spend long days with the Prince shooting. I have been awakened at four o'clock in the morning with the news that wild swans had just come in and in ten minutes I was up and dressed. Before we started out I had a cup or two of delicious hot coffee and such eggs and bacon, preserves and bread as one seldom finds. Then down in the cold night to ride six or seven miles to the ground, and when there to crawl for perhaps another mile on one's stomach between straw fences to the huts, out of which one could watch the great swans sailing the water and shoot them, if one wanted to. Then as day dawned we would take this wood for pheasants, and that stubbled plain for red-legged partridge, and so fleet the day in healthy exercise. Then home to a hot bath and a superb dinner with super-excellent French wine and coffee, and a great evening with good music by Tosti or De Lara, or a talk in a quiet room with a member of the Institute or the Academy.