The World of Yesterday (19 page)

He made for the door. As he was about to open it, he saw me and looked at me almost angrily. Who was this young stranger who had stolen into his studio? But next moment he remembered, and came towards me, as if ashamed of himself. “
Pardon, monsieur
,” he began. However, I would let him say no more, I just gratefully took his hand. I could happily have kissed him. In that hour I had seen opened up to me the eternal secret of all great art, indeed of every earthly achievement, every artist’s concentration, the unification of all a man’s powers and senses, a state of being outside himself, outside the world. I had learnt a lesson to last me all my life.

I had meant to leave Paris for London at the end of May. However, I had to bring my departure forward by two weeks because unforeseen circumstances made my delightful lodgings uncomfortable for me. This was a curious episode that amused me greatly, and at the same time gave me useful insight into the thinking of different parts of French society.

I had been out of Paris for the two days of the Whitsun holiday, going away with friends to look round beautiful Chartres Cathedral, which I had not seen before. When I came back to my room on the Tuesday morning, intending to change my clothes, I could not find my trunk, which had been standing in the corner all these months. I went downstairs to see the proprietor of the little hotel, who spent the day taking turns with his wife in the tiny porter’s lodge. He was a small, sturdy, red-cheeked man, a native of Marseilles. I had often joked with him, and sometimes we had gone to the café just opposite to play his favourite game of backgammon. He instantly became very upset and, as he thumped the table with his fist, bitterly uttered the mysterious words, “So that’s it!” Quickly putting on his coat—he had been sitting in his shirtsleeves, as usual—and changing his comfortable slippers for a pair of shoes, he explained what had happened,
and if my readers are to understand it perhaps I should point to a peculiarity of Parisian buildings. In Paris, the smaller hotels and most of the private houses do not have front-door keys, and instead the concierge, that is to say the caretaker, operates the automatic door-opener from the porter’s lodge as soon as someone out in the street rings the bell. In the smaller hotels and houses the owner or concierge does not spend all night in the porter’s lodge, but can open the door from his conjugal bed by pressing a button—usually while he is still half-asleep. Anyone wanting to leave the building has to call, “
Le cordon, s’il vous plaît
,” and anyone wishing to enter from outside must call his name so that, in theory, no stranger can steal into the house by night. So at two in the morning in my hotel the bell was rung outside; on coming in the new arrival gave a name which sounded like that of one of the hotel guests, and he took a key that was still hanging in the porter’s lodge. It should really have been the duty of this Cerberus to check the late-night visitor’s identity through the glass pane of the lodge, but obviously he had felt too sleepy. However, when the call of, “
Le cordon, s’il vous plaît
,” came again an hour later, this time from inside, it struck the proprietor, who had opened the front door once already, that now someone wanted to go out after two in the morning. He had got up, looked down the street, and seeing that someone had just left the hotel with a trunk set off at once in his dressing-gown and slippers to follow the suspicious figure. However, as soon as he saw the man disappear into a small hotel in the rue des Petits Champs, he naturally enough concluded that he was not a thief or burglar, and went peacefully back to bed.

Upset as he was now by his mistake, he hurried off with me to the nearest police station. The police immediately made inquiries at the hotel in the rue des Petits Champs, and found that my trunk was indeed still there, but not the thief, who had obviously gone out to drink his morning coffee in some nearby bar. Two detectives waited for the villain in the porter’s
lodge of the hotel in the rue des Petits Champs, and half-an-hour later, when the thief returned, suspecting nothing, he was arrested at once.

Now the two of us, my landlord and I, had to go back to the police station to be present at the official proceedings. We were taken into the office of the
sous-préfet
, an extremely stout, moustached gentleman of comfortable appearance, who was sitting with his coat unbuttoned at a very untidy desk covered with documents. The entire office smelt of tobacco, and a large bottle of wine on the table showed that the man was by no means one of the more cruelly austere members of the holy brotherhood of peacekeepers. First the trunk was brought in, at his request, and I was asked to look and see if anything important was missing. The only apparent object of value was a letter of credit for two thousand francs, much of which had already been spent after the months of my stay in Paris, but of course it was of no use at all to anyone else, and sure enough lay untouched at the bottom of the trunk. After a report had been drawn up, to the effect that I recognised the case as my property, and nothing had been removed from it, the official ordered the thief to be brought in. I looked at him with no little curiosity.

And he was worth a look. Between two powerful sergeants, who made his thin, weedy figure look even more grotesque, stood a poor devil, rather shabby and wearing no collar. He had a small, drooping moustache and a sad, visibly half-starved, mouse-like face. Evidently he was not much of a thief, as witness his error of judgement in failing to make off with the trunk early in the morning. He stood there with his eyes cast down, trembling slightly as if he were freezing in front of the power of the law, and to my shame be it said that not only did he arouse my pity, I even felt a kind of sympathy for him. And my sympathetic interest increased when a police officer solemnly laid out on a large board all the items that had been found on him when he was searched. A stranger collection can hardly be
imagined—a very dirty, torn handkerchief; a dozen duplicate and skeleton keys of all shapes and sizes, jingling musically against each other on a keying; a shabby wallet, but fortunately no weapon, which at least showed that this thief went about his job in a fairly knowledgeable but non-violent way.

First the wallet was investigated before our eyes. The result was surprising. It did not contain thousand-franc or hundred-franc notes, or indeed a single banknote of any denomination—no, it held no less than twenty-seven photographs of dancers and actresses in low-cut dresses, as well as three or four nude photographs, evidence of nothing criminal, only of the fact that this thin, melancholy character was a passionate devotee of feminine beauty. Far beyond his reach as these stars of the Parisian theatre were, he wanted at least their pictures resting against his heart. Although the
sous-préfet
examined the nudes and the risqué photographs with a severe expression, I realised that this strange collector’s passion in a delinquent like our thief amused him as much as it amused me. My own sympathy for this poor wrongdoer had been considerably increased by his love of the aesthetically beautiful, and when the official, solemnly picking up his pen, asked me if I wished to
porter plainte
, meaning to lay a complaint against the thief, I replied with a quick “No”, as if that reply were to be taken for granted.

A little parenthesis may be useful here for an understanding of the situation. While in Austria and many other countries a complaint follows
ex officio
when a crime has been committed, that is to say the state imperiously takes justice into its own hands, in France the injured party can choose whether or not to bring charges. Personally I see this concept of justice as more evenhanded than the severity of inflexible justice, since it offers you a chance of forgiving the person who has wronged you, while in Germany, for instance, if a woman fires a revolver at her lover in a fit of jealousy and wounds him, no begging and pleading from the injured party can protect her from the rigours of the
law. The state steps in to tear the woman forcibly away from the man she has wounded in a moment of agitation, and who perhaps loves her all the more for her passion, and throws her into prison, while in France, once the man has forgiven her, the couple can go home arm-in-arm and consider the case settled between themselves.

As soon as I had said my decided ‘no’ three things happened. The thin man between the two policemen suddenly straightened up and gave me an extraordinary glance of gratitude, one I shall never forget. The
sous-préfet
, satisfied, laid his pen down again, and he too was visibly pleased that my decision not to prosecute the thief further saved him any more paperwork. My landlord, however, did not take it in the same way at all. He went scarlet in the face and began shouting angrily at me, saying I couldn’t do that, such scum—
cette vermine—
had to be exterminated. I had no idea, he told me, of the harm characters of that kind did. A decent man must be on his guard day and night against such rogues, and if you let one of them go it would only encourage a hundred others. His was an explosion of all the upright principles and honesty of a
petit bourgeois
disturbed while minding his own business, and at the same time showed his pettiness; in view of all the trouble the matter had given him, he said, roughly and even menacingly, he insisted on my withdrawing my decision not to prosecute. But I stuck to my guns. I had my trunk back, I told him firmly, so I could not complain of suffering any damage, and that settled the matter so far as I was concerned. I had never in my life, I added, brought legal proceedings against another human being, and I would enjoy a good beefsteak at lunch today with a far easier mind if I knew that no one else was obliged to subsist on a prison diet on my account. My landlord answered back, more agitated than ever, and when the officer of the law explained that the decision had been not his but mine, and that once I refrained from laying charges the case was closed, he suddenly turned on his heel, left the room in a rage, and
slammed the door after him with a loud bang. The
sous-préfet
got to his feet, smiled as he watched the infuriated man storming out, and shook hands with me in silent concord. With that the official business was over, and I reached for my trunk to carry it back. But then an odd thing happened; the thief approached with an air of humility. “
Ah non, monsieur
,” he said. “I’ll carry it back for you.” And so I marched along the four streets back to my hotel, with the grateful thief carrying my trunk behind me.

So an affair that had begun badly seemed to have concluded in the best and happiest way. But two epilogues followed in rapid succession—incidents which made some illuminating contributions to my understanding of the French mind. When I went to see Verhaeren next day, he welcomed me with a mischievous smile. “You certainly have some strange adventures here in Paris,” he said jovially. “I never knew that you were such a rich man!” At first I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he handed me the newspaper, and lo and behold, there was a long account of yesterday’s events, except that I hardly recognised the real facts in this romanticised version. The reporter, with great journalistic skill, described the theft from a distinguished foreigner—I had been made ‘distinguished’ so as to sound more interesting—who was staying at a hotel in the city centre, of a case containing a number of objects of great value, including a letter of credit for twenty thousand francs—the two thousand had multiplied by ten overnight—as well as other irreplaceable items (in fact consisting exclusively of shirts and ties). At first, said the report, it had seemed impossible to find any clues, since the thief had committed his crime with the utmost dexterity and was apparently closely acquainted with the neighbourhood. But the
sous-préfet
of the arrondissement, Monsieur So-and-so, with his “well-known energy” and “
grande perspicacité
”, had immediately taken all the proper steps. On his instructions, conveyed by telephone, all the hotels and boarding houses in Paris had been thoroughly searched within the hour, and
these inquiries, carried out with the usual meticulous precision of the police, had very quickly led to the arrest of the miscreant. The head of the police force had immediately expressed his particular appreciation of the outstanding achievement of the excellent
sous-préfet,
whose vigorous and far-sighted actions had, yet again, provided a shining example of the model organisation of the Parisian police.

Of course none of this story was true; the excellent
sous-préfet
had not had to make the effort of leaving his desk for so much as a minute, and we had delivered the thief and the trunk to him ourselves. However, he had taken this good opportunity to make capital for himself in the press.

The whole episode might have turned out well for both the thief and the high-ranking police, but not for me. From then on my once-jovial landlord did all he could to spoil my pleasure in staying at his hotel any longer. I would walk downstairs and give his wife a civil greeting as she sat in the porter’s lodge; she did not answer, but with an injured expression turned away her face—the face of a good citizen. The servant no longer cleaned and tidied my room properly; letters mysteriously disappeared. Even in the nearby shops and the tobacconist’s, where I was usually welcomed as a true
copain
because of my large consumption of tobacco, I suddenly encountered frosty faces. The injured
petit bourgeois
morale not only of the household but of the whole street and even the arrondissement closed ranks against me because I had ‘helped’ the thief. In the end there was nothing for it but for me to move out, with the trunk I had retrieved, and leave the comfortable hotel under as much of a cloud as if I had been the criminal myself.

After Paris, the effect of London on me was like stepping suddenly into shade on a day that is rather too hot—at first you instinctively shiver, but your eyes and senses soon get used
to the change. I had planned to spend two or three months in England as a kind of duty—for how was I to understand and evaluate our world without knowing the country that had kept the wheels of that world on the rails for centuries? I also hoped to improve my rusty English—which has never become really fluent—by working hard at conversation and keeping lively company. My plan did not work; like all of us Continentals, I had few literary contacts on that side of the Channel, and I felt miserably inadequate in all the breakfast conversations and small talk at my little boarding house about the court and racing and parties. When people discussed politics I couldn’t follow them; they talked about ‘Joe’ and I didn’t know that they meant Joseph Chamberlain. Similarly I was unaware that a knight is called only by his first name after the honorific ‘Sir’, and for a long time my ears, closed as if by wax, could make no sense of the cabbies’ cockney accent. So I did not improve my English as quickly as I had hoped. I did try to study good diction by listening to preachers in the churches, two or three times I watched proceedings in the law courts; I went to the theatre to hear English well spoken—but I always had difficulty in finding company, camaraderie and cheerfulness, all of which came flowing towards a visitor to Paris. I found no one with whom to discuss the things that mattered most to me, and to those of the English who were well disposed to me I, in turn, probably seemed rather uncouth, tedious company with my boundless indifference to sport, gambling, politics and the other subjects that interested them. I did not manage to forge close links with any group or circle, so I spent nine-tenths of my time in London working in my room or in the British Museum.