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More than a quarter of a century has passed since I first entered the Café Guerbois, on the Batignolles, where begins the avenue de Clichy. A student of music, sans le sou, I lived in a little street that ran off the boulevard des Batignolles, No. 5 rue Puteaux, in a sunless room, at the top of a dark, damp building. I studied finger-problems on a tuneless upright pianoforte. Like the instrument, I was out of tune myself, for I was hungry at least eighteen hours of the twenty-four. Dining, as I grandly called it, was an important event in my day; a bowl of chocolate and a dry roll had to suffice me until the evening. Then what joy! soup, succeeded by the meat of the same, followed by a salad and cheese. The wine cost eight sous a litre; it was sharp, thin, and blue: yet it warmed, and when one is not twenty, and possesses a ferocious appetite, coupled with a yearning for the ideal, the human machine needs much stoking to keep up steam and soul.
It was not every day I could afford to sit upon the terrace of the Café Guerbois; there I proudly took my coffee and smoked in flush times, after my humble dinner lower down the Batignolles. The place was always crowded, specially fête-days and Sunday nights. I knew by sight the celebrities of the new painting crowd (a pupil of Bonnat had disdainfully named them for me): Manet, Desboutins, the engraver, giant Cladel, the novelist, Philippe Burty, Zacharie Astruc, poet-sculptor, friend of Baudelaire, and Degas, greatest of artist-psychologists. Zola came, too, though I never saw him. I had eyes for none but Manet, with his fair hair and beard, his restless gestures, so full of eloquence. He and his crowd had been sneeringly christened the Batignolles School, and the phrase stuck, much to their mingled rage and amusement.
It was one chilly March night, with occasional gusts of rain and wind, that I hugged my dreams in the Guerbois. The clicking domino games did not disturb me, nor did the high excited voices of some painters discussing divided tones distract my interior vision. I bought a mazagran of coffee, and I possessed a box of tobacco, and I had worked at the piano exactly ten hours that day, notwithstanding the icy temperature of my miserable attic and the intermittent objections of my neighbours, expressed in profane and at times wooden terms: bootjacks and sticks played a rataplan on my door, but without effect. I had mastered a page of Chopin; I was happy; I was at the Café Guerbois; I was in Paris; I was young. And being of a practical temperament, I read Browning every morning to prepare myself for the struggle with the world. The door banged violently, and in an airy blast and amid volleys of remonstrance from a dozen disturbed groups, there entered a man, who hastily advanced to my table, embraced me, dripping wet as he was, and removing a battered silk hat, sat down, crying:
"Dear young chap, order me a drink, order yourself a drink. To-night I possess money. Yes, I!"
Our neighbours hardly glanced at him now; the painters did not cease a moment in their objurgation of burnt-umber and academic brush-work. They knew the poet. So did I; but I had never seen him with money before. It was a rare event in both our lives. His frock-coat was frayed; his shirt was carefully concealed, while about his neck there was twisted a silk handkerchief. And it was clean. If he did not show his cuffs when he folded his arms on the table, his hands were those of a poet--long, beautifully modelled, and white. Despite his poverty, an air of personal purity surrounded my friend, with his uncertain, pale-blue eyes of a dreamer. What a head he exhibited when the damp, shapeless hat was lifted. The brow was too wide for its height, but yet a brow of exceeding power and meaning; it was lined with parallel wrinkles, and there were deep depressions at the temples, which made him appear older than he was. He had led such an exhausting mental and emotional life that he seemed nearer fifty than forty. His eyeballs, swimming in mystic light and prominent, were faded when his brain was not excited by some ardent thought, which was seldom. He wore a moustache and an imperial to conceal the narrowness of his weak chin; his jaws sloped abruptly to a point; his whole appearance was fantastic, a little sinister, and sometimes terrifying. But he was a gentleman. Was he not a lineal descendant of the Grand Master of Malta? Was he not the coming glory of French literature? Tossing his long, fair hair from his brow, and looking at me with those faded eyes, the expression of which could be so sparkling, so satirical, he exclaimed:
"I am a friend of Richard Wagner's." It was as if one should proudly say, "I knew Jupiter Tonans." Pride satanic was his foible.
We drank. I asked him: "Is Wagner agreeable in conversation?"
He shrugged his contempt for my idiotic question. "Mt. Etna, is it agreeable in conversation?"
"There are only romantics and imbeciles," was another of his remarks; he had forgotten time, and did not realise that we were in the full swing of realism of plein-air painting. But once a poet, always a dreamer; except Victor Hugo, who was both poet and business man.
He asked me if he could visit me and play some of his compositions. He had set certain verses of Baudelaire's. "Wagner likes it," he said with simplicity. I had met him a few months before, but I knew him for a man of genius. Genius! Those were the mad days when a phrase made one ecstatic, when a word became a beckoning star. Genius was a starry word. I had talked to Walt Whitman at Camden in 1877; but Walt looked more like a Quaker farmer than a genius. Vaguely romantic, I felt that genius must be poor, unrecognised, long in hair, short as to purse. Even disrepute could not destroy my ideal. My French poet was naturally neat, charming in his manner, and the most wonderful talker in the world. Barbey d'Aurevilly could discourse with the magic tongue of a lost archangel; but Barbey, with all his coloured volubility, could not improvise for you entire stories, books, plays, during an evening in a hot, crowded, clattering café. These miracles were nightly performed by my poor dear friend. How did he do it? I do not know. He was a genius, and lived somewhere in the rue des Martyrs. That he barely managed to make ends meet we knew; we also knew that he never sold any of his stories or novels or plays. True, he seldom wrote them. He only talked them, and the prowling animals of Bohemian journalism, sniffing the feast of good things, would pay for the drinks, and later the poet had the pleasure of reading his stolen ideas, in a mediocre setting, filling some cheap journal. How he flayed the malefactors. How he reproached them in that passionate, trembling baritone of his. No matter, he always returned to the café, drank with the crew, and told other tales that were as haunting. I firmly believe he had at last come to tolerate me because I did not parody his improvisations.
This night he was uneasy. He asked me the whereabouts of Manet. No, I had not seen him. Then he repeated Manet's latest mot: Manet, before a picture of Meissonier, the famous Charge of the Cuirassiers.
"Good, very good!" exclaimed the painter of Olympe. "All is steel except the breastplates." Meissonier was furious when a kind friend repeated this story of the painter, derided then, a king among artists to-day. The poet predicted this. "Wait," he said--"wait. Richard Wagner, Manet, the crazy Ibsen, myself--wait. Our day is to come." Remember, all this was long ago. He was a critic as well as a poet, as might be guessed of Baudelaire's cherished companion.
We drank in silence. He rattled coin in his pocket, and smiled at me imperiously. "Yes," he seemed to say, "my hour of triumph is at hand." I asked him questions with my eyes. He stretched a friendly hand across the table, fairly bursting with pride.
"Holà, young American! It is true; to-day I have sold a play. Here is the earnest money." He showed a palm full of gold pieces. Then he glanced furtively about him. Not a literary buzzard was in the café. Some one back of us cried the praises of a monster magic-lantern exhibition that had been given in the Clichy Quarter. I saw that my poet was interested. He turned his head, listened for a few moments, then he scornfully said:
"They call that a magic lantern! I saw a magic lantern once, and on a scale that would have frightened these poor devils." I felt that something was coming; but I sat still, knowing the slightest interruption might arrest the story. He leaned back, put his pipe between his teeth, and in the tones of a noctambulist improvised his tale. His eyes at times seemed to have a delicate film over them, yet sufficiently translucent to allow a gleam of blue to penetrate the misty covering. I trembled. He spoke slowly,--and Rémy de Gourmont, philosopher and prose-master, will bear witness to the outline of the story; once Villiers had sketched it for him:
"When I was in Africa--don't stare, I've been all over the world--I found myself, some fifteen years ago, on the border of the Red Sea. Though winter by the calendar, it was furnace-hot in this gehenna of cactus and sand. I had affiliated with a small tribe of Arabs,--I was disguised en Arabe,--and we rode all night to escape the English, who were behind us with two battalions. El-Ferenghy, our chief, a man of profound learning and unheard-of bravery, did not act as if discouraged when the scouts he had posted at our rear reported that the red-coats were not far away. We skirted the sandy shores of the horrible sea, and reached finally a vast ravine between two gigantic heaps, rather mountains, of sand. El-Ferenghy deployed his forces into the deepest of the ravines and the most inaccessible part of this arid wilderness. It looked like the bottom of a sea the water of which had vanished after some cataclysm in a prehistoric past. We pitched no tents, but squatted under the rays of the burning sun and waited. My nerves drove me to imprudence. I ventured to ask the chief if we were not in a trap: our horses' hoofs had left clear traces for the enemy; and to give battle against such odds would be impossible. He pierced me with his magnetic eyes. 'Frank,' he proudly said, and oh! the indescribable pride of his voice--'Frank, let us trust to Allah. I have magic, too. Rest.'
"The sun was still overhead; the earth a gigantic reflector; my brains wabbled in my skull as if cooking. Suddenly our captain gave orders in a harsh voice. The Arabs jumped to their feet and, in single file, raced about in circles, firing their long, archaic muskets, yelling like devils. 'We are lost,' I muttered, for my ear had distinguished the sound of answering guns from a distance. 'The English--they must be advancing.' Quivering, I awaited the onslaught. I saw El-Ferenghy in the background, on a hillock, holding a glittering dial full in the sunshine. He shifted it at every angle in the most incomprehensible manner, his devil's eyes puckered with cold malice. Was it madness? Again there was distant firing, and new pantomime on our part. A word from the chief, and his men dropped in their tracks, crouching earthward. The rattling of shots ceased. Our men dispersed, as the captain hid the dial in his robes, and we sat down silently to our evening meal.
"At moonrise, after we had slept a few hours, there was another call to arms, and once more the mysterious manoeuvres were repeated. This time I could distinctly hear the cries of the English. They betrayed an accent of surprise--shall I say terror? El-Ferenghy manipulated his medal of metal, and the firing, screaming, racing, and confusion ceased only at the break of dawn. We tethered our horses, which in this second mock sortie had been driven full speed around the sandy, moon-shaped enclosure. At noon it was all begun over again. There was half-hearted firing from the English lines. Their men no longer cheered. We must have been only a few hundred yards from them, for we could note certain movements. A despairing silence settled on their encampment. During the afternoon they neither fired nor answered our unseen challenges. What had occurred? I asked the chief. This time he smiled indulgently:
"'To-morrow night,' he whispered--'to-morrow night they will no longer fight with ghosts, but the ghosts will fight them.' I understood. I shivered. Unhappy men, what chance had they against devils! I am a Frenchman, I am not a lover of the English; but, after all, are of our white race. I pitied them.
"The chief had spoken the truth: they were fighting ghosts--worse still, shadows from the sky; they were warring against the impalpable, and at first, flushed by the success of their attack, by the number of seeming slain that had fallen before their volleys, they had dashed upon the Arabs only to grasp at--nothing. Even our dead had been carried away. This comedy of terror had been enacted under the moon, and the bewilderment of our foe was supplemented by something disquieting. The white soldiers refused to fight phantoms. There were devils abroad, they asserted. The troops turned sulky, and we heard the officers' agitated voices berating their cowardice, and urging them to the conflict. Then brandy must have been dealt out; during the afternoon of the third day there was a determined and vigorous sally, accompanied by a frightful fusilade. But to no avail. They felt the returning fire of the Arabs, they saw them tumble in heaps upon the ground, but when they attacked them with their brutal bayonets, they prodded only the sand. All this time the demon El-Ferenghy, immobile as a statue, consulted his little hellish chronometer, while his men spun around, shrieked, and shot off their pieces into the empty air. It was no longer an enigma. I gazed into the sky, knowing that there the battle was fiercest waged.
"The moon sank from sight soon after midnight. A whistle summoned us to action. This time it was no mimic war, or cruel hoax. We clambered up the sand-dunes and without warning fell upon the English. It was a too easy victory. Half of them were bloated corpses; hideous exertions under the blaze of the African sun had killed them; the others were too weak or frightened to resist. We slew them to a man. And upon their congested faces, when the sun shot its level beams in the morning, the expression was one of supreme horror. We rode away to the nearest oasis, leaving our enemy with the vultures. I refused an English sword offered me by El-Ferenghy, for I loathed the man, loathed his magic. A week later I escaped. I had been told that the motto of his band was that of the Ancient of Assassinations: 'All is permitted. Nothing is true.' Ah, my friend, in the East everything may be expected. There the old magic still prevails. There the age of miracles has not passed."
His voice came in whispers. From my corner I blinked at him with the eyes of the hypnotised. Yet I was not satisfied. What had really happened? What the magic employed? Why the tactics of the Arabs and the senseless behaviour of the brave British? I stammered:
"And--wherefore--tell me--"
He smiled, answering:
"You spoke of magic lanterns. El-Ferenghy had a real magic lantern." I betrayed my ignorance of his meaning.
"Must one, then, explain everything in this stupid world, where electricity is performing such wonders, where my master Edison
I interrupted his impending rhapsody:
"Yes, cher maître, I understand as far as the shining dial, but there I stop. Why should the English continue firing in the air at nothing?"
"They did not fire in the air at nothing. They fired at living Arabs; they saw them fall; and when they attempted to seize them, they had disappeared; their dead, too, had disappeared with them."
"I give it up," I sourly replied; "I never was good at riddles."
"Ha! You give it up, you young materialist who will not acknowledge that life is a miracle, living as we do on a ball of mud and fire balanced in space, you give up this story of a magic toy --a mere toy, I tell you, in the hands of a man who knew more than all our men of science. Yet you pretend there is no devil in our universe--you, prophet and seer not out of your teens--" He paused for want of breath. The café was quite empty. Soon the lights would be extinguished.
I grasped my chance:
"And do you, dear poet, believe in the devil?"
He crossed himself piously, for he was, even in his most blasphemous moods, a sincere Roman Catholic. Then, in a hollow voice that froze my youthful blood, he quaveringly concluded:
"El-Ferenghy was not the devil; but he understood the mechanism of the mirage. Mirages are frequent phenomena in that steaming-hot region. He knew how to control the mirage--that's all. With his round steel mirror, his magic lantern, he threw a mirage of his band upon the sands, making a false picture, which the English mistook for reality. Hence the alarums, the attacks, the firing, the ghostly pursuits, the sickening discouragement, and the cruel dénouement. Have I made myself clear, jeune fumiste?"
"Oh," I cried, "there is but one master of the mirage in Paris, and his name, his name--"
The head waiter turned out the lights, and we found ourselves in the avenue de Clichy. He bade me a short, disagreeable good-night, and I walked in a very depressed humour down the Batignolles. It was the last time I ever enjoyed the irony, fluted and poignant, of that rare clairvoyant soul, Villiers de l'Isle Adam.