Part 14

The selection was made on a principle which young writers too rarely consider when they attempt to place their wares, and that is understanding of the tastes and prejudices and hobbies of periodicals. Useless in 1890 to send a story on “France Adorée” to a magazine which was interested purely and simply in realistic literature; but the inexperienced writer frequently does not realize that. Naturally I had learned in my work on The Chautauquan something of the pet interests of the leading publishing houses. I knew that Scribner’s enjoyed French cultivation, French character, French history. I hoped my sentimental title “France Adorée” would not antagonize the editor of Scribner’s Magazine.

But I had expected nothing from it, being in that state of mind where I had ceased to expect, only to accept. So that when I received a friendly letter from Mr. Burlingame, the editor of the magazine, saying that he liked the story, that he accepted it, I felt as one must who suddenly draws a fortune in the sweepstakes.

In due time a check for $100 arrived. What excitement in our little salon when I showed my companions that check! “Now,” declared our beautiful Mary, “we can move to the Champs Elysées.” And she would have done it, for she was one of those who always see spring in a single sparrow. We stayed where we were, I requiring a whole flock of sparrows to convince me that it was spring.

The influence of the story on my fortunes was all out of proportion to its value. Most important was the courage it gave me. If I, a stranger, could do something that a great editor of a great magazine thought good enough to accept, why, after all, I might work it out. That which moved me most deeply, gave me joy that made me weep, was that now I should have something to show to my family. I had felt a deserter. Times were hard in the Titusville household in these early nineties. My father’s and brother’s experiences in the oil business—of which I want to speak later—were more than discouraging; they were alarming. My sister was ill and in the hospital; my mother’s letters were saturated with anxiety. And here was I—the eldest child in the family, a woman of years and of some experience, who had been given an education, whose social philosophy demanded that she do her part in working out family problems—here was I across the ocean writing picayune pieces at a fourth of a cent a word while they struggled there. I felt guilty, and the only way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was the hope that I could eventually make a substantial return. If any one of the family felt that I should have been at home there never was a hint of it. From them I had unwavering sympathy and encouragement.

But if in three months’ time I could do what I had done, and I made the most of it in my letters home, why, then they would see some hope for the future. Not only would the story help them to believe in me, it would give something more imposing to show to inquiring friends than the newspaper articles which had been their only exhibit.

When the story appeared in the following spring the reverberations in my Paris circle were encouraging and useful. I even heard of it from “the other side,” as we called the Right Bank, for Theodore Stanton (at that time the head of the Associated Press in Paris) came with Mrs. Stanton to call on me and tell me he liked the story.

The most important fruit was that Mr. Burlingame looked me up when he made his annual spring visit to Europe. Here was my chance to tell him about Madame Roland, to ask if he thought his house would be interested in such a biography if it turned out to be a good piece of work. “The suggestion would have to be considered in New York,” he replied. But he promised me it would be considered. And it was, for not long afterwards he wrote me that the house was interested in my project, certainly wanted to see the manuscript.

This was enough to settle finally a struggle that had tormented me for many weeks. I had come to Paris determined to fit myself for magazine work along historical and biographical lines; but once close to the world of the scholar, surrounded by men and a few women who lived stern, self-denying lives in order to master a field however small I was seized with an ambition to be a scholar. It was a throwback to my old passion for the microscope. I would specialize in the French Revolution—I would become a professor.

But Mr. Burlingame’s answer to my inquiry as to whether the Scribner company would be friendly to a biographical study of my lady settled the matter; which shows, I take it, how shallow my scholarly ambitions really were.

The Scribner connection was not the only one putting heart into me. Among my early trial balloons was one marked for McClure’s Syndicate, New York City. It carried an article of two thousand words with a catchy title—“The King of Paris”—cribbed from a French newspaper. It was the story of Jean Alphand and his services to the city. The balloon reached its destination. The article was promptly accepted with a promise of $10 when it was published, also a suggestion that they would be glad to consider other subjects if I had them to offer—which I did. Indeed, I gave them no time to forget me; not that they took all I hustled across the Atlantic, but they took enough to make me feel that this might be a stable and prosperous market for short and timely articles. When suggestions finally began to come from them I felt the ground firmer on my feet. One of these suggestions led me into an especially attractive new field, and in the long run had important bearing on my major interest, Madame Roland. It was that I try a series of sketches of French women writers. There was a respectable group of them, and I asked nothing better than to look them up.

I began with a woman who at that time was introducing leading contemporary English and American writers to the French through the Revue des deux Mondes—Madame Blanc, her pen name Théodore Bentzon, a person of rare distinction and of gallant soul. She had been a lady in waiting at Napoleon III’s court, had made an unfortunate marriage, was now living on a small income and what she could earn by writing. In her salon there was a portrait taken in her young womanhood which charmed me, but when I spoke of it she shook her head as if she did not want to remember it. “Une femme qui n’existe plus,” she said.

Hard worker as Madame Blanc was, she found time to start me on my rounds among the French women writers. I doubt if there was an American writer of our day who would have had both the kindness of heart and the sureness of herself to take so much trouble for an unknown woman. She started me off, and I turned out ten or a dozen little pieces before I was through. With one of my subjects I had an amusing flirtation—I think I may call it a flirtation. This was Madame Dieulafoy who with her husband had done eminent work in archaeology, and who had a roomful of exhibits in the Louvre to her credit—a very great person indeed. Madame Dieulafoy was the only woman I had ever seen at that time who wore men’s clothes. It had been found necessary to put her into trousers for excavating work, and she liked them so well and Monsieur Dieulafoy loved her so in them that they had obtained permission from the French Government for her to wear them in Paris. From more than one source I heard of the sensation she created among servants when she came to call. They abandoned their duties to peep from dark places at the woman in men’s clothes.

Madame Dieulafoy and I grew friendly over the history of the exploits of women in the world, and it took no time at all for me to decide to write the history of women from Eve up, as if I had not already enough on my hands. She applauded my idea, gave me many suggestions, but it never went any further than my few visits, which as I say were more or less flirtations. She was such a pretty little man, so immaculate (the best tailors in Paris did her, I was told), that I could not keep admiring eyes off her. She used her eyes, too, and loved to pat me on the knee, partly I suppose because I always blushed when she did it. It was an amusing acquaintance and a profitable one to me, for she was as interested in my plans for articles as if I had been one of her own.

Another woman who interested me greatly was Judith Gautier. My interest was stirred by my indignation that her name had been left off the list of living women distinguished in French literature sent to the Chicago Exposition of 1893. There was much speculation among my friends as to how it happened. My own conclusion was that it was because of her long and impassioned devotion to the music of Richard Wagner.

The first Wagner opera to be given in Paris was “Tannhäuser.” This was in the early sixties, when Judith Gautier was about fourteen years old. She went to the opera with her father—Théophile Gautier—and was enthusiastic although the house received it coldly. As they were walking home a little fellow with hollow cheeks, eagle nose, and very bright eyes joined them. He rejoiced with cheerful violence over the failure of the opera. The girl, angered, forgot her manners and blurted out, “It is clear, sir, that you know you have heard a masterpiece, and that you are talking of a rival.”

“Do you know who that was, saucebox?” her delighted father asked as they passed on.

“No, who?”

“Hector Berlioz.”

It was the beginning of a lifelong devotion. Wagner was to her not only the master musician but a species of divinity. In 1882 she published a volume on him—valuable for its reminiscences.

Early in the winter of 1892 “Lohengrin” was announced for the season of Grand Opera. I was amazed at the loud and bitter protests. Among the few lovers of Wagner who had courage to come to the defense of the master was Judith Gautier. She was abused for it. As this was my first realization that political hatred ever influences the judgment in matters of art, I took the incident very much to heart. I could understand why people might dislike Wagnerian music, but that the soldiers should be called out to protect the Opera House when one of his greatest works was to be given shocked me. You could then so hate an enemy that beauty herself was outraged!

It was easy for me to conclude that Judith Gautier’s name had been left off the list of writing women sent to the Chicago Exposition because the committee wanted to punish her for defending the works of a great artist in whom she profoundly believed.

The opening up of opportunities so much more quickly than I had dared dream spurred me to longer and harder hours at work. There were few mornings that I was not at my desk at eight o’clock; there were few nights that I went to bed before midnight, and there was real drudgery in making legible copy after my article was written. It was all done by longhand—careful and painstaking handwriting, it was. I was to find later that Mr. McClure’s partner in the Syndicate, Mr. J. S. Phillips, trying to estimate the possibilities in this correspondent bombarding them with articles and suggestions, set me down from my handwriting as a middle-aged New England schoolteacher.

But if life was hard and life was meager, and if down at the bottom of my heart it was continuously in question to which class of the poor I would finally belong, life to my surprise was taking on a varied pattern very different from the drab existence of hard work and self-denial that I had planned and was prepared to endure to the end. It began at the Rue du Sommerard, where at the outset we stumbled on what turned out to be the most colorful, unusual, and frequently perplexing association that had ever come the way of any one of us.

When we took our rooms from Madame Bonnet she had told us that one room in the apartment was reserved for an Egyptian Prince who came only for the week ends. He was bien comme il faut, très riche, très everything desirable. He would not disturb us, we might never see him. Upon inquiry we discovered that all Madame Bonnet’s rooms save those we were taking were occupied by Egyptian students of law or medicine or diplomacy. The Prince, himself, a cousin of the Khedive, was in the military school at Saint-Cyr. He kept a room at Madame Bonnet’s to spend an occasional holiday or Sunday with his compatriots, all of his age and all of the upper classes.

We all shared the American flutter over titles, and when we caught a first glimpse of the Prince and his friends we were still more excited. They were quite the most elegant-looking male specimens so far as manners and clothes went that any one of us had ever seen. Here was more in the way of flavor than we had bargained for. We had come to study the French and had dropped into an Egyptian colony.

We soon discovered that they were as curious about us as we were about them, for hardly were we settled when Madame Bonnet came to say that the messieurs were all in her salon. Wouldn’t we come in and make their acquaintance? Of course we went. They wanted us to dance. Now it was Sunday, and we had all been brought up under the Methodist discipline. Sunday was a day of rest and worship and no play, no amusement of any kind. In my household at least I was supposed to play only hymns on the piano as we were supposed to read only religious books. My mother and I compromised at last on Gottschalk’s “Last Hope”; she, being moved by the story of its composition, thought that it must be religious, but “Martha” and “Poet and Peasant,” my two other show pieces, were forbidden.

Indeed, when I was forty years old my father, catching me reading a volume of a certain Congressional trust investigation on a Sunday afternoon, reproved me in his gentle way. “You shouldn’t read that on Sunday, Ida.” I quickly exchanged it for “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is not without suggestion for a student of the trust.

My young companions were particularly shocked at the Egyptians’ invitation to dance. I think it had never occurred to them that all people did not keep Sunday. “No,” we said a little severely, “we don’t dance on Sunday.” I had the satisfaction of hearing them whisper soberly to one another, “très religieuses.” It was just as well, I thought, they should have that idea to start with; better than starting with the degree of intimacy they might see in our dancing in their landlady’s salon on a first meeting.