Fair Margaret - Page 14/206

What should we get, if we could blend into one picture the English

descriptions of Paris left us by Thackeray, Sala, Du Maurier? Would it

not show us that face as it is still, when we see it in spring? And

drawn by loving hands too, obeying the eyes of genius. An empty square

in Berlin suggests a possible regimental parade, in London a mass

meeting; in Paris it is a playground waiting for the Parisians to come

out and enjoy themselves after their manner, like pretty moths and

dragon-flies in the sun.

But there is another side to it. More than any city in the world, Paris

has a dual nature. Like Janus, she has two faces; like Endymion, half

her life is spent with the gods, half with the powers of darkness. She

has her sweet May mornings, but she has her hideous nights when the

north wind blows and the streets are of glass. She has her life of art

and beauty, and taste and delight, but she has her fevers of blood and

fury, her awful reactions of raw brutality, her hidden sores of strange

crime. Of all cities, Paris is the most refined, the most progressive

in the highest way, the most delicately sensitive; of all cities, too,

when the spasm is on her, she is the most mediæval in her violence, her

lust for blood, her horrible 'inhumanity to man'--Burns might have

written those unforgettable lines of her.

Margaret was not thinking of these things as she took her way through

the Parc Monceau, not because it was nearer but because she loved the

old trees, and the contrast between the green peace within its gates

and the intense life outside. She was nearer than she had perhaps ever

been to fright, just then, and yet would not for the world have turned

back, nor even slackened her pace. In five minutes she would be ringing

the bell at Madame Bonanni's door.

She had heard the prima donna several times but had never met her. She

knew that she was no longer young, though her great voice was

marvellously fresh and elastic. There were men, of that unpleasant type

that is quite sure of everything, who recalled her first appearance and

said that she could not be less than fifty years old. As a matter of

fact, she was just forty-eight, and made no secret of it. Margaret had

learned this from her own singing teacher, but that was all she knew

about Madame Bonanni, when she stopped at the closed door of the

carriage entrance and rang the bell. She did not know whether she was

to meet a Juliet, an Elsa, a Marguerite or a Tosca. She remembered a

large woman with heavy arms, in various magnificent costumes and a

variety of superb wigs, with a lime-light complexion that was always

the same. The rest was music. That, with a choice selection of absurdly

impossible anecdotes, is as much as most people ever know about a great

singer or a great actress. Margaret had been spared the anecdotes,

because most of them were not fit for her to hear, but she had more

than once heard fastidious ladies speak of Madame Bonanni as 'that

dreadful woman.' No one, however, denied that she was a great artist,

and that was the only consideration in Margaret's present need.