The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of
Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age is
as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not
contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to
separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the
false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to
distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and
had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and
given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working its
immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.
To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's imps
and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the
tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the field
marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in Caesar de
Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent
and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and
see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol
or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is
merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.
I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.
Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly
twenty years.
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