And to think that on my last trip to England I had to pay the same Quaritch, now finely established in Piccadilly, four hundred pounds sterling for a copy which he had kept from that first edition!
However, success was not immediate in London. It had to come from Paris where M. Nicolas published his translation, where Théophile Gautier had to write, in the pages of the Moniteur Universel a resounding ‘Have you read the Quatrains of Kéyam?’ And welcome ‘this absolute freedom of spirit which the boldest modern thinkers can hardly equal’, and Ernest Renan had to add: ‘Khayyam is perhaps the most curious man to study in order to understand what the unfettered genius of Persia managed to become within the bounds of Muslim dogmatism’ — in order for Fitzgerald and his ‘poor old Omar’ to come out of their anonymity. The awakening was thunderous. Overnight all the images of the orient were assembled around the sole name of Khayyam. Translation followed translation, editions of the work multiplied in England and then in several American cities ‘Omar’ societies were formed.
To reiterate, in 1870 the Khayyam vogue was just starting. The circle of fans of Omar was growing every day, without yet having transcended the circle of intellectuals. After this shared reading matter brought my father and mother together, they started to recite the quatrains of Omar and to discuss their meaning: were wine and the tavern, in Omar’s pen, purely mystical symbols, as Nicolas stated? Or were they, on the other hand, the expression of a life of pleasure, indeed of debauchery, as FitzGerald and Renan claimed? These debates took on a new taste in their mouths. When my father evoked Omar, as he caressed the perfumed hair of his beautiful girl, my mother blushed. It was between two amorous quatrain that they exchanged their first kiss. The day they spoke of marriage, they made a vow to call their first son Omar.
During the 1890s, hundreds of little Americans were also given that name: when I was born on 1 March 1873 it was not yet common. Not wishing to encumber me too much with this exotic first name, my parents relegated it to second place, in order that I might, if I so desired, replace it with a discrete O; my school friends supposed that it stood for Oliver, Oswald, Osborne or Orville and I did not disabuse anyone.
The inheritance which was thus handed down to me could not fail to arouse my curiosity about this remote godfather. At fifteen I started to read everything about him. I had made a plan to study the language and literature of Persia and to make a long visit there. However, after a bout of enthusiasm I cooled down. Indeed, in the opinion of all the critics, FitzGerald’s verses constituted a masterpiece of English poetry, but they had only a remote connection with what Khayyam could have composed. When it came to the quatrains themselves, some authors quoted almost a thousand, Nicolas had translated more than four hundred, while some thorough specialists only recognized a hundred of them as being ‘probably authentic’. Eminent orientalists went as far as to deny that a single one could be attributed to Omar with certainty.
It was believed that there could have existed an original book which once and for all would have allowed the real to be distinguished from the false, but there was nothing to lead one to believe that such a manuscript could be found.
Finally I turned away from the person, as I did from the work. I came to see my middle initial O as the permanent residue of parental childishness — until a meeting took me back to my first love and directed my life resolutely in the footsteps of Khayyam.
CHAPTER 26
It was at the end of the summer of 1895 that I embarked for the old world. My grandfather had just celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday and had written tearful letters to me and my mother. He was eager to see me, even if it were only once, before his death. Having finished my studies I rushed off and on the ship I readied myself for the role I would have to play — to kneel down at his bedside, to hold his frozen hand bravely while listening to him murmur his last orders.
That was all absolutely wasted. Grandfather was waiting for me at Cherbourg. I can still see him, on the quai de Caligny, straighter than his cane with his perfumed moustache, his lively gait and his top hat tipping automatically when a lady passed by. When we were seated in the Admiralty restaurant, he took me firmly by the arm. ‘My friend,’ he said, deliberately theatrical, ‘a young man has just been reborn in me, and he needs a companion.’
I was wrong to take his words lightly. Our time there was a whirl. We would hardly have finished eating at the Brébant, at Foyot or at Chez le Père Lathuile before we would have to run to the Cigale where Eugénie Buffet was appearing, to the Mirliton where Aristide Bruant reigned or to the Scala where Yvette Guilbert would sing les Vierges, le Foetus and le Fiacre. We were two brothers, one with a white moustache, the other with a brown one. We had the same gait, the same hat and he was the one the women looked at first. With every champagne cork that popped I studied his gestures and his behaviour, and I could not even once find fault with them. He arose with a bound, walked as quickly as I did, his cane being hardly more than an ornament. He wanted to gather every rose of this late spring. I am happy to say that he would live to be ninety-three — another seventeen years, a whole new youth.
One evening he took me to dine at Durand in the place de la Madeleine. In an aisle of the restaurant, around several tables which had been placed together, there was a group of actors, actresses, journalists and politicians whose names grandfather audibly reeled off for me one by one. In the middle of these celebrities there was an empty chair, but soon a man arrived and I realised that the place had been saved for him. He was immediately surrounded and adulated. Every last word of his gave rise to exclamations and laughs. My grandfather stood up and made a sign to me to follow him.
‘Come on, I must present you to my cousin Henri!’
As he said that, he dragged me over to him.
The two cousins greeted each other before returning to me.
‘My American grandson. He wanted to meet you so much!’
I did not hide my surprise too well, and the man looked at me with some scepticism before stating:
‘Let him come and see me tomorrow morning, after I have had my tricycle ride.’
It was only upon sitting back at my table that I realised to whom I had been presented. My grandfather was very eager for me to know him, and had spoken of him often with an irritating pride of clan.
It is true that the aforementioned cousin, who was little known on my side of the Atlantic, was more famous in France than Sarah Bernhardt, as he was Victor-Henri de Rochefort-Luçay, now known in democratic France as Henri Rochefort, a marquis and a communard, former deputy, minister and convict. He had been deported to New Caledonia by the regular troops. In 1874 he effected a swashbuckling escape which inflamed his contemporaries’ imagination, and which Eduard Manet depicted in his painting The Flight of Rochefort. However, in 1889 he was sent off into exile again for having plotted against the Republic with General Boulanger, and it was from London that he managed his influential newspaper l’Intransigeant. Returning in 1895 thanks to an amnesty, he had been welcomed back by two hundred thousand delirious Parisians — both Blanquistes and Boulangistes, revolutionaries of the left and the right, idealists and demagogues. He had been made the spokesman of a hundred different and contradictory causes. I knew all of that, but I was unaware of the most important thing.