Part 15

But we had what was for us an exciting evening, and when we left and they all begged “Come again” we promised that we would.

It was the beginning of a weekly party. Madame Bonnet gave the Egyptians their dinners. We agreed to take dinners once a week with her. We couldn’t afford more, and besides we wanted to be on the safe side in our relations. There must be no question in their minds about our entire respectability—respectability as we understood it. What interested me particularly was that at once they wanted to understand our conventions, social and religious and political. Nothing disturbed them more, I found, than a feeling that perhaps they had not quite understood, that unintentionally they had infringed on our customs. Once convinced of this, we could go with entire freedom to our weekly Egyptian evenings. As I recall them they were happy evenings much like children’s parties at home, for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any sort. They laughed and shouted and, if something went wrong, flew into a rage like children.

The meat of the connection was the talk which sometimes ran far into the night. All of these young men were in training for some kind of professional or official position. Two or three of them had taken from three to four years at German gymnasia or English universities. All of them spoke three or four languages. The Prince’s English was perfect, and no one of us could ever hope to approach the French of the group, learned for the most part in Switzerland as children. They had much more curiosity and real information about the social customs of other countries than we had. They were eager to know all about our ways, particularly the life of women, their relation to men before and after marriage.

There were would-be reformers of Egyptian marriage customs among them; especially did they resent the convention which prevented them looking at the face of the bride before the marriage ceremony. One of the group had made a vow never to marry as long as that custom existed and was urging his compatriots to join him. Nearly all of them insisted that they would never marry more than one woman. They asked with a frankness startling to our ears about the way monogamy worked in the United States. They were curious to know the position of the mistress, and when we were shocked and insisted that a good man never had a mistress they were frankly incredulous. It would never work out, they insisted. One wife they understood; but one wife and no mistress seemed entirely impractical.

Politics interested them profoundly. Particularly did they hate England—how deeply and bitterly I did not realize until in January of ’92 news of the death of the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha son of Ismail Pasha, great-grandson of Mehemet Ali, came to the Rue du Sommerard. Madame Bonnet came in at once to tell us how sorrowful our friends were and to ask that we dine with them that night. We found them very grave. “He was a good man,” they insisted, “our friend.” What was going to happen now? I took it they feared changes in government which might make their own futures uncertain. They were uneasy, frightened and wanted us to understand the reason behind their anxiety.

After dinner a large number of their compatriots filed into the room. We were begged to stay. They evidently wanted us to understand better their suspicion of what England might do in this crisis. The longer the talk, the more bitter they grew.

“Down with England!” they began to cry.

Indignation and enthusiasm are qualities as contagious as disease. Before I realized it, I shared their anger and was drinking repeatedly in l’eau sucrée—good Mohammedans that our Egyptians were, they never touched wine—drinking repeatedly to loud and angry roars of “A bas l’Angleterre!”

The Egyptians were not only a picturesque and enlivening feature in our life: they had a social value which they never suspected. We used them rather shamelessly to impress wandering Americans who looked with badly concealed scorn on the Latin Quarter and particularly on our narrow and stuffy rooms. “A Prince was our neighbor,” we said loftily, and to prove it we could show an autographed photograph which the Prince on his own notion had given me. I kept it on the mantel in the little salon. When we felt particular need of asserting ourselves we told of our weekly dinners and they lost nothing of their gaiety and interest in our telling. There was so much more flavor in them, we always assured those who tried to high-hat us, than ordinary sightseeing offered!

I have always felt rather proud of the way we handled ourselves in that year, keeping the entire respect of our Egyptians. It was not always so easy. It fell into my awkward hands to handle one rather violent love affair. A pretty and vivacious young girl had joined our party at the request of her brother: “Will you look after her?” The Egyptians were delighted with her, and she treated them as she might a group of American boys, could see no reason why she should not go out with them. Only our combined disapproval, our insistence that if she did she soon would be classed in the Quarter as little better than the gay little girls who swarmed about, and with whom we occasionally out of the corner of our eyes saw our Egyptians: she must not run that risk. But while that was managed the inevitable stir of youth could not be managed, and it was not long before I had one of the nicest of the boys begging me on his knees to let him pay his addresses to my little friend, insisting that he would marry her, never take another wife. He wept and pleaded, but I held my ground until finally the young girl who loved his suit but not the boy was safely on the ocean.

A long time afterwards I had proof that we did look after ourselves. When a couple of our party were going to Italy one of these young men gave them a letter of introduction to an Egyptian friend in Milan. The letter was not presented, and not opened until two or three years later, when my friend showed me the postscript. It read: “Surtout soyez convenable avec ces dames.”

After the Egyptians came our French professor, a woman of forty, buxom, competent, gay-hearted, an able teacher. I have never known man or woman more shrewd in gauging character or more expert in turning the qualities she found to her own advantage. If she respected or admired them she took no more than she gave—frequently, as in my case, much less. But if she found a pupil lazy or dishonest or stingy or rich and irresponsible, she took mercilessly. “Such people deserve nothing—nothing,” she declared once when I protested.

She respected me because I worked, but she always told me frankly that although I read French easily and wrote it pas mal I should always speak it with the “detestable” English accent. “No ear—too old.” However, I could be made more fluent, my vocabulary enlarged, my grammar perfected. And to that end she bent all her efforts, establishing several useful exchange relations. The chief of these was her most intimate friend, Monsieur X, a man who I suppose had been for many years her lover.

Monsieur X had no superior intelligence; but he was industrious and bon enfant, and partly at least through the help of Madame A had come to hold an excellent official position. She kept him busy improving his chances. At the moment she took me on she had him translating a big volume on the English system of handling the unemployed and the helplessly poor, an acute problem for France in the early nineties. As she already had pried out of me full information of all I was trying to do, she saw at once the possibility of a trade. If I would help him in translating, he would secure reports and information on subjects in which I was interested. It seemed a good thing for me at any rate, and the arrangement was made.

I continued to help with the book until it was published. It was well received, even couronné by the Academy of Science. To my astonishment I found then that Madame A’s interest in this book and its success was that it would help her in making a more profitable marriage for Monsieur X. They had settled on a wife—that, I knew—but, as she told me, his position was so much improved by the success of his book that he was worth a much larger dot. Therefore, she set out with his help, I suppose, to find another wife. They succeeded, and the affair was arranged.

I was deeply disturbed by the matter. I believed, as I still do, that the only safe basis for a happy marriage is a compound of physical harmony, capacity for companionship combined with understanding and acceptance of each other’s ideals. I could see little chance where it was a matter chiefly of balanced income. But Madame A had no sympathy with my idealistic attitude towards marriage.

Of course it left her high and dry. The little dinners which the three of us had shared almost every week became dinners à deux. The first night I was torn with sympathy.

“Will you never see him again?” I asked.

“Of course, not now, later perhaps. These things arrange themselves, mademoiselle.”

But I noticed she ordered a double cognac that night.

Madame A rendered one very great service to our group, one which we could never repay. We had been but a short time in Paris before we realized that one of our duties was to be helping out American girls and women who had come to Europe to study a little, sight-see a little, travel a little, expecting easily to form congenial relations with the people of the country, and who for one reason or another had never been able to do this. They were disappointed and unhappy. The four of us standing together made a nucleus they envied. We made it a rule to do our best to help them out; but at least in one case it involved us in serious trouble.

Among those who had attached themselves to us was a woman of some forty or more years with a curiously repellent personality. I have never known a person to produce a more melancholy effect on strangers. I have seen our little salon empty itself if she dropped in on our evening at home. Even Madame Bonnet’s little black dog Riquet, who had adopted us, would slink around the edge of the room and beg to be let out if she came in. What was the matter? We could not imagine. More than once she threw herself into my arms and sobbed that she was unhappy, in great trouble, of which she could not speak.

Miss C had been some three months in the house when we came home from a week-end trip to be met by an outraged Madame Bonnet. Miss C, she told us, had been arrested, arrested for stealing at the Bon Marché and the Louvre. She was in Saint-Lazaire. There was a note for me. I must do something. Think of the disgrace to her establishment!

The note told me only where she was, that she had engaged a lawyer, asked me to see him. I did, and found him of the type which I suppose hangs around all prisons into which great cities dump women of the street and petty criminals. His only interest was in a possible retainer. How much would I pay him for taking the case? Nothing, I assured him, until I had talked to the American authorities. I went to the consulate, where an irate and worried official swore loudly at the faculty of American women for getting into trouble in France.

“Here I am,” he said, “saddled with a girl who is going to have a baby and who swears she’ll kill herself if I don’t arrange for her to have it so her family will never know.

“I was afraid she would do it too, and then there would be another nasty scandal to hush up, so I got the man here and told him he must put up the money to see her through.

“He laughed at me; but I pulled this revolver out of the drawer” (suiting the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to shoot him, but that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see that he did. Well, he settled for ten thousand francs. But that does not let me off. What am I going to do with the baby? And now here you are with one of the nastiest kind of cases for a French court. They can’t stand foreigners stealing from them.”

“But what am I to do?” I wailed.