Sidetracks. Richard Holmes
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tea and sugar cane. But among all that vast fleet, ‘you always recognise the English ships: their sails are black like those of Theseus’s galleon departing for the Isle of Crete, a sombre livery of funeral mourning, rigged by the sad climate of London’. Gautier caught at the dominant motif, hanging there, mute, unexplained. ‘London! –’ he exclaimed almost with enthusiasm, ‘– la ville natale du spleen’.
Yet returning from that first brief encounter, he was nonchalant, even rather knowing. He recorded the following dialogue at a family dinner table in the rue la Boétie. ‘Did you see the Tunnel? – No, I didn’t see the Tunnel. – And Westminster? – No, indeed. – And St Paul’s? – Oh, no. – Then what on earth did you do in London? – I wandered about town observing Englishmen and, more particularly, observing English women. One cannot find their description in any guidebook, and they seemed to me quite as interesting as stones arranged one upon the other after a certain fashion.’ Gautier added with some pain: ‘since this occasion the good bourgeois have regarded me as somewhat mad, suspecting me vaguely of harbouring cannibalistic tendencies, and send their children up to bed when I come to call. I am seriously afraid that this will prejudice my marriage prospects.’
The Tunnel in question was Monsieur Brunel’s tiled passageway between Wapping and Rotherhithe, and could not strictly be classed as a British marvel. Gautier later reported in La Presse that a friend, presumably English, was working on plans for a Tunnel beneath the entire Manche, connecting Folkestone with Calais, and containing railway carriages fired along by compressed air. He remarked that he had, as a conscientious journalist, already reserved his seat for the first crossing, scheduled to take place four years hence, in 1847.
But Gautier was in no sense, as he frequently pretended, and as Henry James later brashly assumed (‘the broad-eyed gaze of a rustic at a fair’), an innocent abroad. As drama critic for La Presse, whose feuilletons ran on the front page beneath the political and business leaders of his exacting editor, the publishing magnate Émile de Girardin, he was normally tied to his regular evening descents upon the Paris boulevards. But in the formula of his lifelong friend and collaborator on La Presse, Gérard de Nerval, he was ‘a traveller by instinct, a critic by circumstance’.
Almost every spring or summer for thirty years, Gautier made good his escape from Paris, usually in a retrospective flurry of apologies, forwarding addresses, and promises of exotic copy. These flights of the swallow, as they became in one of his most famous poems, ‘Ce que disent les Hirondelles’, were made to Germany, Italy, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Turkey, even eventually to Russia, and he subsequently published brilliantly coloured imagist accounts of all of them.
Even his apartment, in an italianate hotel particulier at 14 rue Navarin, off the place Pigalle on Montmartre’s lower side, expressed his search for spiritual displacement. Indeed, it was almost a caricature of French Romantic aspirations, furnished as it was with Turkish carpets, Siamese cats, and Italian theatrical ladies, and perfumed with Spanish cooking, Cuban cigars and Algerian hashish. There was, finally, to be an English element, but that was to prove part of the more intimate moeurs.
Moreover, Gautier was acutely conscious of the curiously modern desperation, almost the death-wish, implicit in this passionate longing for other shores, other climes, the other itself. Many of his springtime feuilletons each year played upon this theme with deliberate irony, heralding the age of mass tourism in a distinctly minor key:
‘Nowadays the dream of the masses is – Speed. By iron or steam they seek to conquer that “ancient weight upon all things suspended”. It would seem that their sole concern is to devour Space. Do they do 12 or 15 leagues an hour simply to flee from ennui? If so, the enemy awaits them at the farther platform. Yet how strange is this wild urge for rapid locomotion, seizing people of all nations at the same instant. “The dead go swiftly”, says the ballad. Are we dead then? Or could this be some presentiment of the approaching doom of our planet, possessing us to multiply the means of communication so we may travel over its entire surface in the little time left to us?’ It feels odd to read this paragraph on the faint, blue microfilms for La Presse of 1843.
Yet Gautier’s journeys to London, while part of this lifelong centrifugal urge, seem to have been of a different order. His notes have remained scattered through a score of essays, letters, articles, poems and reviews. London was less a place to visit, than a state of mind to ponder upon. It was a dark mirror, a smoky crystal ball. You could turn it in your hand. Gautier remained profoundly uninterested in its institutions, its monuments, even its literary associations. Rather, it was its atmosphere, its tone, its iridescent qualities, its curious undercurrent of black comedy, which continually drew him back.
On his second visit he summoned an English barber to his rooms at the Hotel Sablonniere, in Leicester Square. His ballet La Péri, with his untouchable amour Carlotta Grisi dancing the title role, was playing at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He was due at the Lord Mayor’s procession and banquet. He needed a shave. The barber knocked, entered, bowed: a thin man with the English whiteness of jowl, dressed entirely in black. In complete silence, with the flowing rapidity of a phantom, he shook out a crisp, white apron, adjusted a chair, and stropped a long razor. Gautier grew increasingly uneasy at each stroke, a victim of those unspeakable suspicions that separate native from foreigner, living from dead.
‘Seeing him so chill, so pale, so mournful, I asked myself if he were not some ill-provisioned resurrectionist who wished to acquire a new subject. At the same time, I instinctively cast my eyes upon that part of the floorboards where my chair rested, anxious to ascertain whether or no there was a hidden trap door through which I should plunge into the cellar bearing a large slit in my throat.’ On the point of calling off the whole operation, Gautier was saved by the inherited logic of Pascal and Voltaire. ‘I made the calming reflexion that, since I was lodged upon the second floor of the hotel, there could hardly be a cellarage beneath my parquet, and that a trap door in opening would make me fall to the first floor, depositing me exactly on top of the pianoforte of an extremely pretty young opera-singer.’ The jolie cantatrice was Ernesta, who subsequently bore Gautier twin daughters. So the English barber was possibly a better Figaro than Gautier concluded at the time.
At Drury Lane, Gautier made extensive notations on the flesh tones of the English girls in the audience. No native painter had ever done justice to their exquisiteness, Gautier felt, except possibly Sir Thomas Lawrence, who could be held ultimately responsible for the creation of the English Rose type, the bloom of a thousand keepsakes, whose torn and treasured leaves were pinned across the dressing-rooms of Europe. A connoisseur of textures, Gautier distinguished sharply between the opulent blonde and the tea-rose blonde, and gazed appreciatively at the complexion of cheek, neck and gorge, which made ‘rice-paper, or the pulpy petal of the magnolia, or the inner pellicle of the egg, or the vellum on which the gothic miniaturists traced their delicate illuminations’ look like coarse cloth by comparison. Yet the genial English passion for decorative gardens, when carried in all its stunning completeness of fruit trees, herbaceous borders and cockle shells, to the top of the English lady’s hat, left him merely stoical.
In the middle of the ballet, Carlotta was required to perform a daring leap in the pas de songe, representing the descent of the péri from the heavenly sphere. It called for the greatest agility and nerve on her part, and perfect timing from her partner Petipa, whose task was to receive her bodily presence on the earth beneath. Occasionally, in Paris, this saute de gazelle had been muffed, and the French audiences, recalled Gautier, had hissed without mercy. At the third performance in London, Carlotta once more misjudged the dangerous jump. As she prepared for another attempt, a ripple ran through the English audience, and murmurs from the stalls were heard begging her not to risk such a frightful plunge a second time. Then a sympathetic voice, from the gods, loudly suggested that it would be better to give Petipa ‘a stiff drink’ first, as he could scarcely ‘stand up on his pins’. Amidst a profound stillness, Carlotta leapt into space, Petipa fielded sinuously, and the house sprang to its feet and gave them three cheers.
But then the English were different in sporting matters. Boats and horses alone really brought out their enthusiasm. There were even moments suggesting lyrical depths, as