Julie Romain
One spring two years ago I was tramping along the Mediterranean coast. Is there anything pleasanter than striding along a road, lost in dreams? You walk in a world full of light, through the caressing wind, on the slopes of mountains and on the edge of the sea. And you dream! What phantom loves and adventures the vagabond imagination lives through in a two hours’ tramp! Born in the warm light air, a thousand dreamy joyous expectations jostle each other in your mind; you breathe them in with the gentle wind, and in the depths of your heart they wake an appetite for happiness that grows with the hunger whetted by much walking. Happy winged thoughts soar and sing like birds.
I was tramping down the long road that runs from St. Raphael to Italy—less a road than a magnificent shifting scene that seems made to form a background for all the love poems in the world. And I thought that from Cannes, which is full of determined poseurs, to Monaco, which is full of gamblers, hardly a soul comes to this part of the world except to swagger and fling money about and to display, under this glorious sky, in this garden of roses and orange blossom, every form of mean vanity, senseless pretension and vile covetousness and to reveal the soul of man for what it is, abject, ignorant, arrogant and greedy.
Suddenly I saw, in the curve of one of those ravishing bays that each bend of the mountain road reveals, a small group of villas: there were not more than four or five and they lay at the foot of the mountain, between the sea and a dense pine wood that stretched far away behind them down two great valleys; there were no roads through the valley and probably no way out of them. One of these chalets was so charming that I stood stock-still in front of the gate: it was a small white house with brown timbers, and covered with roses climbing to the very roof.
And the garden: a veritable cloth of flowers, of all colours and all sizes, mingled in a capricious and inspired disorder. They covered the lawn; every step of the terrace had a clump of flowers at each end, blue or yellow clusters drooped from the windows over the gleaming wall; and the stone balustrade of the veranda that roofed this adorable home was garlanded with great scarlet bellflowers, like drops of blood.
Behind the house I saw a long alley of orange-trees running back to the foot of the mountain.
On the door, in small golden letters, this name: “Villa d’Antan.”
I wondered what poet or fairy lived there, what inspired recluse had discovered this place and created this dream house that seemed to have sprung up in the heart of a bunch of flowers.
A stone-breaker was crushing stones a little farther down the road. I asked him the name of the owner of this jewel.
“Mme. Julie Romain,” he answered.
Julie Romain! Long ago, when I was a child, I had heard of her, the great actress, Rachel’s rival.
No woman had ever been more applauded or more beloved, especially more beloved! What duels and suicides there were for her sake, how the town rang with tales of her adventures! How old would this Circe be now? Sixty, seventy, seventy-five? Julie Romain! Here, in this house. The woman whom our greatest musician and our greatest poet had adored! I could still remember the excitement roused through the whole of France (I was twelve years old then) when she fled to Sicily with the poet after her terrific quarrel with the musician.
She had gone one evening, after a first night at which the audience had applauded her for half an hour and called her before the final curtain eleven times; she had set out with the poet in a fast chaise; post-chaises were in use then; they had crossed the sea to enjoy their love in the island of antiquity—Sicily, daughter of a Grecian mother—under the shadow of the vast orange-grove that encircles Palermo and bears the name of “Conque d’Or.”
The story spread abroad of their ascent of Etna, and how they hung over the immense crater, locked in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek, as if they were going to fling themselves into the fiery depths.
He was dead, the man who had written that disturbing poetry, so profound that it had made a whole generation dizzy, so subtle, so mysterious that it had opened a new world to the new poets.
The other one, the man she had left, was dead too, he who had found for her melodies that lingered in the memories of all living men, melodies of triumph and despair, maddening, plucking the heart out of their bodies.
And she was here, in this house veiled with flowers.
I didn’t hesitate a moment, I rang the bell.
A small servant opened the door, an awkward boy of eighteen with clumsy hands. I wrote on my card a happy compliment to the old actress and an earnest request that she would see me. Perhaps she would know my name and consent to open her door to me.
The young footman went away, then came back and asked me to follow him. He showed me into an austerely tidy room in the style of Louis Philippe, with uninteresting heavy furniture from which a small sixteen-year-old maid, very thin but rather pretty, was removing the dust covers in my honour.
Then I was left alone.
There were three portraits on the walls, one of the actress in one of her roles; one of the poet in a long, close-fitting frock-coat and frilled shirt, and one of the musician sitting at a clavichord. She was fair, charming and blue-eyed, with the mannered beauty of her age, and her mouth curved into a gracious smile; the painting was done with a patient care, detailed, elegant and lifeless.
They seemed to have an eye to their effect on posterity even then.
All three belonged to another age, to days that were no more and a generation that had passed.
A door opened and a little woman came in; old, very old, very little, with folds of white hair, white eyebrows, a veritable white mouse, moving with swift furtive steps.
She held out her hand, and said in a voice that was still clear and rich and thrilling:
“I am glad to see you. How kind it is of a young man to remember an old woman! Please sit down.”
And I told her how I had been fascinated by her house and had wanted to know the owner’s name, and how, hearing it, I had not been able to resist the desire to knock at her door.
“I am all the more delighted,” she answered, “because this is the first time that such a thing has happened. When they brought me your card, with its charming little phrase, I trembled as if they had announced an old friend not seen for twenty years. I am dead, you see, and no one remembers me, no one will think of me, until the day when I die for good; and then for three days all the papers will write about Julie Romain, with anecdotes, details, memories of my past, and enthusiastic eulogies. Then that will be the end of me.”
She paused, and, after a silence, added:
“And that won’t be long now. In a few months, in a few days, nothing will remain of this little living woman but a little skeleton.”
She lifted her eyes to her portrait, which smiled at her, smiled at this old woman, this caricature of itself; then she looked at the two men, the haughty poet and the inspired musician who seemed to say: “What has this ravaged creature to do with us?”
A poignant indefinable grief overwhelmed me, wringing my heart, grief for the living dead who go on struggling in their memories like a man drowning in deep waters.
From my chair I could see smart swiftly driven carriages rolling along the road from Nice to Monaco. Inside them sat young women, lovely, rich, happy women, and smiling complacent men. She followed my glance, guessed what I was thinking, and murmured, with a smile of resignation:
“One can’t live and have lived.”
“How wonderful your life must have been!” I said.
She sighed deeply:
“Wonderful and sweet. That is why I regret it so bitterly.”
I saw that she was in a mood to talk about herself, and very gently, with the utmost care, as if I were touching a painful wound, I began to question her.
She told me about her successes, her wild joys, her friends, the whole story of her triumphant life. I asked her:
“Did you find your keenest joys and your real happiness in the theatre?”
“Oh, no,” she said emphatically.
I smiled: she threw a sorrowful glance at the two portraits and added:
“I found it in them.”
I could not resist asking: “Which of them?”
“Both. Sometimes I even confuse them with each other when I recall the past, and besides I feel remorseful towards one of them now.”
“Then, madame, it’s not to them but to love itself that you are grateful. They were only love’s interpreters.”
“Perhaps so. But what interpreters!”
“Are you sure that you haven’t, that you wouldn’t have been as well loved, better loved, by a simple gentleman, a man who would not have been famous, who would have given you his whole life, his whole heart, all his thoughts, his every hour, his whole being; whereas those two men gave you two formidable rivals, Music and Poetry?”
She cried out passionately, in that still youthful voice of hers with its strange thrilling note:
“No, monsieur, no. Another man might have loved me better, but he wouldn’t have loved me as they did. They two sang me music and love as no one else in the world could have sung them. What ecstasy I had of them! Could another man, any other man, have drawn what they two were able to draw from sounds and words? Is it enough to love, if you can’t put into your love all the music of heaven and earth? They knew how to sweep a woman off her feet with song and words. Yes, perhaps there was more illusion than reality in our passion; but illusions lift you to the clouds while realities always leave your feet planted on the ground. Others may have loved me more, but only through them did I understand love, and know it and adore it.”
And she fell into a sudden weeping.
She wept without a sound, hopeless tears.
I pretended not to see her, and sat looking into space. After a while she went on:
“You see, monsieur, for most people the heart ages with the body. It hasn’t been so with me. My poor body is sixty-nine years old and my poor heart is twenty. … And that is why I live alone, with my flowers and my dreams.”
A long silence fell on us. She recovered her self-control and began to talk again, with a smile:
“How you would laugh at me if you knew … if you knew how I spend my evenings … when it is fine! … I am ashamed and sorry for myself both at once.”
I begged her in vain: she would not tell me what she did; then I rose to go:
“Already?” she cried.
And when I announced that I must dine in Monte Carlo, she asked me diffidently:
“You wouldn’t care to dine with me? I should be so glad if you would.”
I accepted at once. She was delighted, and rang the bell; then, when she had given some orders to the little maid, she took me round the house.
The dining room opened on to a kind of glass veranda filled with shrubs, and through it I could see from one end to the other of the long alley of orange-trees that stretched away back to the mountain. A low seat, hidden under the plants, indicated that the old actress often sat there.
Then we went into the garden to look at the flowers. The evening stole down, one of those warm quiet evenings that release all the scents of earth.
It was almost dark when we sat down to the table. The dinner was a long and excellent one, and we became intimate friends, she and I, when she realised what profound sympathy for her filled my heart. She had drunk two fingers of wine, as they used to say, and was becoming more confidential and expansive.
“Let us go and look at the moon,” she said. “I adore the kind moon. She has witnessed all my dearest joys. I think sometimes that all the things I remember are in her, and that I have only to look at her to have them come back to me at once. And even … sometimes, in the dusk … I allow myself a pretty sight … pretty … pretty … do you know? But no, you’d laugh too much at me. … I can’t. … I daren’t … no … no … indeed I daren’t.”
I implored her.
“Let me see it … what is it? Tell me; I promise you I won’t laugh. … I promise … let me see it.”
She hesitated. I took her hands, her poor little hands, so thin and cold, and I kissed them one after the other, several times, as her lovers had done in the old days. She was touched. She hesitated.
“You promise you won’t laugh?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“Then come.”
She rose. And as the little servant, awkward in his green livery, drew away her chair, she spoke a few low quick words in his ear.
“Yes, madame,” he answered, “at once.”
She took my arm and led me on to the veranda.
The orange-grove was truly a marvellous sight. The risen moon, a full moon, flung down it a thin silver path, a long line of light that fell across the yellow sand between the thick round tops of the sombre trees.
The trees were in blossom and their sweet heady scent filled the night. In their dark green shadows flitted a cloud of gleaming fireflies like star dust.
I cried:
“Oh, what a setting for a love scene!”
She smiled:
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Wait and see.”
She made me sit beside her.
“This is what makes me regret my spent life. But you hardly think of these things, you modern men. You are all stockbrokers, tradesmen, men of affairs. You are hardly able to talk to us. When I say ‘us’ I mean the young. Love affairs have become intrigues that often begin with an unpaid dressmaker’s bill. If you think the bill is dearer than the lady, you withdraw; but if you think more of the lady than of the bill, you pay. Charming ways … charming loves.”
She took my hand.
“Look!”
I sat there in an ecstasy of surprise and delight. From the far end of the alley, down the path of moonlight, came two young people with arms round each other’s waists. They came towards us, locked together, charming, walking with tiny steps, stepping through pools of light that flung a sudden glory round them before they were lost in the shadows again. He was dressed in the white satin coat of a past century and a hat covered with an ostrich feather. She wore a panniered gown, and the high powdered hair of the lovely ladies of the Regency.
A hundred paces from us they paused, standing in the middle of the alley, and embraced with a pretty ceremony.
And all at once I recognised the two little servants. Then one of those dreadful spasms of mirth that grip your very bowels bent me double in my chair. I did not laugh out, however. Sick and convulsed, I fought it down as a man whose leg is being cut off fights down the cry that forces open his throat and his jaw.
But the children were turning back towards the end of the alley; and once more they were enchanting. They went slowly farther and farther away and at last vanished, like the vanishing of a dream. Now they were out of sight. The empty alley wore an air of sadness.
And I went away too, I went away so that I shouldn’t see it again; for I realised that it would go on for a very long time, this spectacle that recalled all the past years, the past years of love and playacting, the mannered deceitful seductive past, with all its false and all its real charms, this spectacle that could still stir the pulses of the old woman who had been an actress and a great lover.