My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  His valet Francois has told us more of the truth about the last stage than any other observer. He noticed at once that Maupassant's inamorata was extremely pretty and beautifully dressed. "C'est une bourgeoise du plus grand chic; elle a tout a fait le genre de ces grandes dames qui ont ete elevees soil aux Oiseaux, soit au Sacre-Coeur. Elle en a garde les bonnes et rigides manieres." (She's a woman of the greatest distinction, the perfect type of those noble ladies who have been brought up in some famous convent such as the Holy Heart. She has all their charm of manner and their high-bred aloofness.) As he saw the effect of her intimacy with his master, whom he loved, he grew to hate and dread her visits. Time and again he was tempted to tell the "Vampire," as he called her, to keep away.

  On the twentieth of September, 1891, about two o'clock in the afternoon, he heard the bell and at the door found the woman "who had already done my master so much harm. She passed me, as she always did, without speaking, with impassive marble face."

  After the catastrophe, he regrets he did not tell her what she was doing and slam the door in her face. He did not know that in August Maupassant had written to her, begging her to come-a piteous last appeal which I have already quoted.

  "In the evening Maupassant seemed broken (accable) and didn't speak of the visit. In spite of the constant care, he hadn't recovered a month later. Early in November they went from Paris to Cannes to the Chalet de l'Isere."

  Maupassant was still suffering from tortured nerves (malaise indicible). On the fifth of December he wrote to his lawyer: "I am so ill that I fear I shall not live more than a few days."

  Every two or three days he went across to Nice to lunch with his mother at the villa Les Ravenelles and Francois went with him to prepare his meal, for he knew exactly how to cook so that his master would get the most nourishment with the least chance of indigestion.

  On the twenty-fourth of December he paid his mother a long visit and promised to spend Christmas day with her; he was getting better slowly and wanted above all things to get to work once more and finish a sketch he had begun of Turgenev. He begged his mother to read all Turgenev s novels and send him a page or two on each; she promised she would.

  But on Christmas day he put her off: two ladies, two sisters-one married, the other unmarried-had come to see him and he went with them and spent the day on the island Ste. Marguerite in the Bay of Cannes. We all know who the married one was. Francois does not tell us anything of this change of plan, but he records that in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, Maupassant went out for a walk towards Grasse and returned ten minutes later. Francois was dressing himself but Maupassant called him loudly, imperiously, to tell him that "he had met on the road a shade, a phantom!" "He was evidently," continued Francois, "the victim of an hallucination and was afraid, though he wouldn't confess it."

  "On the twenty-seventh at breakfast he coughed a little and in all seriousness declared that he had swallowed a morsel of sole and it had gone into his lungs and he might die of it."

  This day he wrote again to his solicitors that "he was going from bad to worse and believed that he would be dead within a couple of days." As he went out for a sail on his yacht in the afternoon, the sailor Raymond remarked that he could not lift his leg properly to get on board: now he put it too high, and again too low. Francois remarks that he had already noticed this same symptom of paralytic weakness.

  On the first of January Maupassant couldn't shave himself, told Francois that there was a sort of mist before his eyes; but at breakfast he ate two eggs and drank some tea and feeling better, set off for Nice, as otherwise "my mother will think I'm very ill." Francois went with him.

  Curiously enough the reports of this last day's happenings differ widely. His mother says that they talked the whole afternoon and that she remarked nothing abnormal in him, except a sort of exaltation or subdued excitement.

  In the middle of dinner alone together (tete a tete) he talked wildly (divaguait).

  "In spite of my entreaties, my tears, instead of sleeping there in Les Ravenelles, he would go back to Cannes. I begged him to stay," she says,

  "went on my knees to him in spite of the weakness of my old bones; he would follow his own plan (il suivait sa vision obstinee). I saw him disappear in the night, excited, mad, wandering in mind, going I didn't know where, my poor child" (Et je vis s'enfoncer dans la nuit… exalte, fou, divaguante, allant je ne sais ou, mon pauvre enfant).

  Most of this is inexact, a fiction of memory, not fact. Francois gives us the truth more nearly: he tells us that he prepared Maupassant's dejeuner and there were present, besides his mother, his brother's wife, and his niece and his aunt (Madame de Harnois), whom Guy loved greatly. At four o'clock the carriage came for them, and on the way to the station they bought a quantity of white grapes to continue his usual regimen (cure). Francois tells how on reaching home Maupassant changed his clothes, put on a silk shirt to be more comfortable, dined on the wing of a chicken, some chicory, and a souffle of rice with cream flavored with vanilla, and drank a glass and a half of mineral water.

  A little later Maupassant complained of pains in the back. Francois cured him with ventouses, gave him a cup of camomile, and Maupassant went to bed at eleven-thirty. Francois seated himself in an armchair in the next room and waited till his master should fall asleep. At twelve-thirty Francois went to his bedroom but left the door open. A moment after the garden bell rang: it was a telegram; but he found Maupassant sleeping with his mouth half open and went back to bed without waking him. He continues. "It was about twofifteen when I heard a noise. I hurried into the little room at the head of the stairs and found Maupassant standing with his throat cut."

  "See what I've done, Francois," he said. "I've cut my throat; it's a pure case of madness!"

  Francois called Raymond, the strong sailor, to help him, then sent for the doctor and helped to put the poor madman in a strait waistcoat.

  In my first sketch of Maupassant, published in the first volume of my Contemporary Portraits, I was able to go a little deeper even than Francois. I reached the Hotel at Antibes early in January, 1892, when all the world was talking of poor Maupassant's breakdown in madness. At once I went across to Nice and from the accounts of eye-witnesses reconstituted the scene at and after the dejeuner of the first of January in his mother's villa, Les Ravenelles.

  During the meal his mind had wandered and so justified his mother's fears and anxieties; after the meal he came out on the little half-moon terrace with the blue sky above and the purple dancing sea in front to mock his agony. I quote here what I wrote at the time.

  How desperately he struggled for control; now answering some casual remark of his friends, now breaking out into a cold sweat of dread as he felt the rudder slipping from his hand; called back to sanity again by some laughing remark, or other blessed sound of ordinary life, and then, again, swept off his feet by the icy flood of sliding memory and dreadful thronging imaginings, with the awful knowledge behind knocking at his consciousness that he was already mad, mad — never to be sane again, mad-that the awful despairing effort to hold on to the slippery rock and not to slide down into the abyss was all in vain, that he was slipping, slipping in spite of himself, in spite of bleeding fingers, falling- falling…

  Hell has no such horror! There in that torture chamber-did it last but a minute-he paid all debts, poor, hounded, haunted creature with wild beseeching eyes, choking in the grip of the foulest spectre that besets humanity…

  He returned to Cannes by train and at two next morning Francois heard him ringing and hurried to his bedside, only to find his master streaming with blood and mad, crying wildly, 'Encore un homme au rancart! au rancart!' (Another man on the dust-heap).

  Surely this phrase is De Maupassant's, and the remark that Francois puts in his mouth, "It's a pure case of madness," is only his own later summing up of the situation. "Another man on the dust-heap" is the despairing soul-cry of De Maupassant.

  It was found afterwards that De Maupassant had taken ou
t his revolver, but Francois had already removed the cartridges, so De Maupassant put the revolver down and took up a sort of paper-knife which did not cut deeply enough and injured his face more than his neck.

  The doctor got De Maupassant to bed and he slept while Francois and Raymond watched in the dim light and thought of the irreparable disaster.

  In the morning they found the wire from the Jewess, the "Vampire," as Francois calls her again bitterly, while he wonders whether her evil influence, by means of the telegram Maupassant never saw, could have helped to bring about the supreme catastrophe.

  Everyone knows that the great writer got rapidly worse, was taken to Paris to the asylum of Dr. Blanche, became more and more a mere animal till death took him a year and a half later on the third of July, 1893.

  Maupassant's life story and tragic end are full of lessons for all artists. What I find in it is the moral I am continually emphasizing, that every power given to us is almost of necessity a handicap and a danger.

  It was said of Byron, and is surely no less true of Maupassant, that he "awoke one morning to find himself famous." The publication of Boule de Suif put Maupassant in one day among the great masters of the short story. He was praised on all sides as an impeccable artist; it is scarcely to be wondered at that he afterwards neglected self-criticism and hardly ever bettered the workmanship he had shown in that early story. He wrote over two hundred short stories in the next ten years, but perhaps no single tale shows finer artistry.

  Again: he was gifted with extraordinary virile power; the consequence was that he got syphilis before he was of age and brought himself to an untimely end because he was determined to show off his prowess as a lover.

  When shall we artists and lovers learn that the most highly-powered engines require the strongest brakes?

  But how dare I judge him? How inept all criticism appears when I think of his personal charm; the gladness in his eyes when we met; the clasp of his hand; his winged words in the evenings spent side by side; the unforgettable glint when a new thought was struck out; the thousand delights of his alert, clear intelligence; ah, my friend, my dear, dear friend! Gone forever! Guy, swallowed up and lost in the vague vast of uncreated night, lost forever!

  I reread his last volume: it begins with a masterpiece: L'Inutile Beaute; at the end Un Cas de Divorce and Qui Sait. And now Un Cos de Divorce seems more characteristic to me and more terrible than Qui Sait, with deeper words, words wrung from the soul of a great lover-the man's adoration of the beauty of flowers, his passionate love of the orchid with its exquisite roseate flanks and ivory pistils giving forth an intoxicating perfume stronger far and sweeter than the scene of any woman's body.

  And he watched the flower fade, wither and die, losing all loveliness, and instead of the seductive perfume, the vile odor of decay.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Robert Browning's funeral; Cecil Rhodes and Barnato; a financial duel; actress and prince at Monte Carlo

  Early in December, 1889, Smith Elder, the publishers, sent me a copy of Asolando: Fancies and Facts, by Robert Browning. I spent the night reading it: good stuff but not a first-rate thing in the booklet. By the bye, where did he get the title? From Asolo, the little place in the hills looking down on Venice and mentioned in Sordetto? Or perhaps from asolare: to wander about? A few days later the news reached us that Browning had died in Venice, aged seventy-seven. For half a dozen years I had had the greatest love and admiration for glorious Robert Browning; indeed, until I met him at Lady Shrewsbury's at lunch, he was, after Carlyle, my hero. I had found a certain likeness between us: his best work was a thinker's and not a singer's; his poetic endowment was not extraordinary. When a youth he had worked through an English dictionary, and I had done the same thing, without knowing that he had set the example, forty years before. My friend Verschoyle had given me a Johnson's dictionary in two huge leather-bound volumes and I had gone through them in a little over a year, putting down in red ink at the bottom of each page all the words that were unfamiliar to me.

  When this labour was finished I went again through the words in red ink, marking any I had forgotten in blue pencil. Finally, I went through these once more; yet there were still thirty words or so that had not stuck in my memory, but that I did not mind. The mere fact that I had felt the same need as Browning intensified my sympathy for him. Then, too, had he not written to the British public: "Ye who love me not but one day will love"-my feeling from boyhood on, and only now at thirty-odd was I getting near the hope that one day I too should win their liking.

  "Glorious Robert Browning," I always called him to myself; but when we met I was disillusioned. I did my best to win him, time and again, and at length. At Lady Jeune's lunch, when he showed his disdain for Lowell, who was feted and honoured, I thought I had won him. When he saw that I too felt nothing but contempt for Lowell's poetry, he thawed to me and we walked across Hyde Park together and he took tea in my little house in Kensington Gore opposite the park. I made up a dinner party soon after with Frederick Harrison, who was an old friend of his, and Lord and Lady Folkestone; and after the dinner, having primed Lord Folkestone to ask me, I told the company what Browning had meant to me; evidently he was pleased.

  Harrison afterwards said my praise was too enthusiastic-"over-pitched," he called it, but that's a good fault. After this Browning treated me with some cordiality. He came to my house twice or three times but he wouldn't drink, was indeed of an astonishing sobriety. He told me that health came through self-denial; yet he was a little too stout for my ideal of perfect health. He was not as wise in physical things as he thought himself, but he was kindly till I "presumed," I supposed he'd have called it. I tried one day to find out from him where he got the passion of James Lee's Wife. I wanted to know whether he had learned the whole gamut of passion from one woman, his wife. At once he drew into himself like a hurt snail and tried to be indignant. I told him Shakespeare was infinitely franker. He quoted the last three lines of his poem to me, beginning with Wordsworth's statement, which he prints in italics. … "With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart; once more!

  Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he."

  Which seemed to me a dire example of the smaller man judging the greater and in itself mere drivel. I undertook to prove to him that Shakespeare had told a good deal even about his own sensual experiences. I cited the sonnet on lust:

  Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

  "The man who could write that at thirty-five must have been very weak," I began. "It's a confession of weakness: the ordinary healthy man doesn't hate lust after enjoyment; on the contrary-"

  But Browning would not discuss or even consider it. "There are things that should not be told," he persisted, "things that the public has no right to know"; whereas I was just as sure that all men could learn even from the weaknesses of a great man. Blake knew that The errors of a wise man make your rule Rather than the perfections of a fool.

  I could not get Browning even to argue or think; he preferred to take my wish to know as an impertinence and we parted in some coldness, though of course as soon as I saw that I could not prevail, I drew back and sought to excuse myself. We met afterwards half a dozen tunes half casually; he never came to my house again nor had I ever again the chance of a private talk with him.

  And now he was gone … to where on high

  Love weighs the counsel of futurity

  Browning-that vivid soul-

  Covered with silence and forgetfulness.

  The passing of such men makes life poorer.

  When I heard that Browning was to be buried in the Abbey I was heart-glad; an everlasting rest in the great Temple of Silence and Reconciliation was surely due to him. I spoke to Froude about this ceremony on the last day of the dying year and he asked me to go with bun. Of course I was only too glad to promise.

  It was a foggy, gloomy mornin
g, bleak, too: in the Abbey itself Froude introduced me to Lecky. I was glad that I had read his Rationalism with great interest, for he became friendly when I told him what his phrase for prostitutes-"the sisterhood of sorrow"-had meant to me. "One of the great phrases of our literature," I called it, but I could not help wondering whether with a little loving-kindness the oldest profession could not be made "a sisterhood of joy." But neither he nor Froude would consider it; they called it "a poor French invention," and when I cited what I think the noblest thought in Proudhon, f they still remained entirely unconvinced. Proudhon proposed that the lowest forms of labour, the cleansing of sewers and the most dangerous trades, should be undertaken by the chivalry of youth-a sacred band of volunteers. Men become soldiers, he said, for scant pay and risk their lives for almost nothing. Why not hearten them to take up the vilest and most dangerous work in the same chivalrous spirit? "The sewer brigade would soon win distinction," Proudhon declared, and in the same way it seemed to me that the sisterhood of sorrow might accept even the degradation of lust as a new distinction!

  But they would not have it; the majority of even able men cannot take up a new idea and give it a reasonable hospitality.

  While we were talking, the great bell began to toll and the deep tones brought a solemn silence. The whispering was at once hushed.

  As I looked about me, I was astonished by the number of well known faces even I with my short sight could distinguish: Meredith and Wolseley and, strange to say, Whistler and Irving and Frederic Harrison, Bret Harte, too, and du Maurier. The whole space was crowded and the faces gleamed oddly in the grey mist shot through by the gold of a few candles and lamps.

  Suddenly the organ rang out in Purcell's burial mass and the bier, preceded by choir and clergy, with Browning's son as chief mourner, was borne to the chancel steps. The papers next day gave a long list of those who followed the coffin, but I could only recognize the fine head of Sir Frederick Leighton.