30 August 1900

 

Society frightens me, but solitude disturbs me more.  I feel it all the more acutely in a hotel such as this.  I live in disorder for 90 francs a month, in a room which is saved from the horror of a boudoir only by a very high ceiling.  The furnishings have faded to a disagreeable shade of burgundy, and the wallpaper is one of the few remaining victims of the ancien régime.  How I long for Lincrusta Walton.  I had my smoking room in Tite Street covered with that material, and I always believed that I gained inspiration from its peculiar mottled surface.  I would run my hand against it and, much to the indignation of my wife, tear off little strips and place them in my mouth as I wrote.  I suppose that I have always eaten that which is dear to me.

      There is a mirror in my room here, but I never look into it: the mirror itself would be quite safe, of course, but I might crack.  Next to it there rests an ormolu clock decorated with sham onyxes: it is far too large, and too ornate for its purpose.  It bears all the marks of time while remaining implacably solemn: even if it knew that it was going to be destroyed on the next hour, it would keep on striking until that hour came.  And my friends wonder why I have grown so fond of it!

      I possess also an iron bed with four copper balls mounted upon it, a small bookcase carved out of a wood so dark that it quite matches the books, a combination of washstand and chest-of-drawers, a table covered with red cloth on which I am writing at the moment, one wooden chair where I now sit, and two 'Armenian armchairs' which can be purchased for twelve francs at the Bazaar de l'Hôtel de Ville.  A linoleum carpet completes the picture: it is hard on one's shoes, and also rather a strain on one's imagination.

      Have I told you that I am now in constant pain from my ear?  There is nothing to do with one's burdens except pass them on and so I sent a message to Maurice inviting him to lunch - he only listens to my bad news after he has been fed - but I have as yet received no answer.  I have become accustomed to his presence on certain occasions each week and now, with my imagination in disorder and my life in ruins, it is not strange that I should cling to the trivial order of daily events.  I shave each morning, for example, and I dress with care, arranging my limited wardrobe of Doré suits with effects that even Ada Rehan might wonder at.  Then I light a cigarette and, if I have nothing wonderful to say, I write this journal.

      My food is always the same.  At nine o'clock I have coffee and a roll with butter.  At luncheon, two hard-boiled eggs and a chop of mutton.  In the summer, I pass my afternoon reading in the courtyard of the hotel.  There are two trees there which shade me, and we speak of many things.  The wind, however, has recently grown jealous of our intimacy and blows upon my ear in a quite painful manner.

      Earlier in the year, I passed my days at the Exhibition, like Iphigeneia among the barbarians: although, alas, I am my own sacrifice.  Half the strength of the modern period comes from its entire lack of a sense of humour, and so I was sadly out of place there.  The tourists would sneer at me, and there would be whisperings behind my back.  In order to disguise myself I bought a camera, but I was at once deprived of all powers of sight and started taking pictures of the Louvre.

      I understand now why certain Eastern deities are too holy to be represented by an image - there is an element of perverse ingenuity in the photograph which robs one's friends of reality and reduces architecture to a shadow.  Of course I have no objection myself to being photographed: I owe so little to realism now that I am the perfect subject and, fortunately, I rarely move.  Alas, in a moment of generosity, I gave my camera to a boy in Rome who begged for it as though it were a papal blessing - no doubt it will become one.  In any case, in Paris I haunt places where a camera would be quite unsuitable.

      Only yesterday evening, for example, Maurice led me to the Château Rouge.  I told him that I had been to that café many times in my youth, and he looked at me with astonishment.   The young never understand youth in others: that is their tragedy.  The old do, always:  that is theirs.  But I had never before entered the large room above the public area.  I had heard of it, naturally: it is where the poor and the vagabond sleep, and for the first time I was moved by curiosity to see it.  Perhaps it is where one day I will rest my own head.

      I mounted a flight of wooden steps and entered the attic.  Here huddled before me where the outcasts of the city.  The place is called popularly 'The Morgue' or 'La Salles des Morts', and no more appropriate name could have been given to it.  It lends to it that element of dignity - the dignity of last, extreme things - which wretchedness seems to me always to possess: Jesus became an outcast in order that he might represent the true image of mankind.  And, where once I would have shrunk back in horror from the sight, now I looked on with interest.  I have seen into the heart of the world: why should I not look upon its face also?

      That is why I wander.  I am not a Bohemian by temperament - only, you might say, by conviction.  My friends tell me that I am disordered and wasteful of my talent but I have been explaining, have I not, that I lead a quite ordinary life?  I leave the courtyard when the trees whisper to me of evening, and go to my room to change.  I dine in restaurants for two or three francs on éperlans frits.  When I am in funds I go to Sylvain's for truite à la rivière, the rouget and the choux à la crème, and then I proceed to the Grand Café where I watch the primitive tragedies of real life.  I meet artists and writers in Pousset's.  I go to Maire's for the brandy, the Café de la Paix for conversation and the Kalisaya for love.  Here we shock the tourists by speaking 'with a difference'.  In the Kalisaya are whispered the secrets of Paris - so secret, indeed, that they are often quite untrue.

      Sometimes, after a more than usually agreeable evening, I am smuggled to the Quartier Latin where by some strange paradox we speak of Greek things.  The company is not always immaculate: some of them believe literature to consist entirely of stories from the Petit Journal.  I do not disabuse them of this charming notion, since they would lose all sense of their own importance if I did so.  I do not return until late and I make a point of never carrying money home with me: it would only be wasted.  As Baudelaire put it in a moment of unusual clarity, 'Le superflu était le nécessaire.'  Sometimes I return with vine-leaves in my hair; sometimes, even, with an entire harvest.

      I give myself, I admit it, to the companionship of drink and boys; the boys are more expensive but, then, they are far more mature.  In truth drink has the better effect, for I am told that it prevents me from becoming boring.  Some people drink to forget, I drink to remember.  I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know.  Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.  I am walking evidence that oral literature did not perish with Homer, for I carry my verses in my mouth and in my heart.  Sometimes, towards the end of the evening, I see a light coming towards me like the light that moved towards Dante and led him towards Purgatory.  But I imagine I am in Paradise - I believe that, in these moods, my companions find me rather wonderful.

      Drink has always held a terrible fascination for me.  It is some strange fatality carried in the blood: my mother, in her loneliness, grew to depend on brown and opal liquids with curious names, and I am told that Willie died from the effects of excessive whisky.  It was absinthe which I drank last night with Maurice: absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down.  Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I drink it, I understand the symbolic mysteries of odour and of colour.  It is strangely reminiscent of the essence santonin which, even in small quantities, allows one to see violet in all things.  Small quantities of Maeterlinck have, I am told, a similar effect.

      But at these times I feel the burden of my existence lifted from me: everything has happened as it should happen.  Whatever is realised is right.  I think I shall write an essay, 'In Defence of Drunkenness', to be handed to the faithful - but only after they have completed their devotions.  Where is Maurice?