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Despite the different phases of the spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes, it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a sphere of activities of the utmost importance, that poetry was something to be reckoned with.
Of course, when I use these words, I do not mean to apply them to La Carlotta, who sings like a squirt and who ought never to have been allowed to leave the Ambassadeurs and the Cafe Jacquin; nor to La Sorelli, who owes her success mainly to the coach-builders; nor to little Jammes, who dances like a calf in a field.
Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment to "run through" the speech which she was to make to the resigning managers, looked around angrily at the mad and tumultuous crowd. It was little Jammes the girl with the tip-tilted nose, the forget-me-not eyes, the rose-red cheeks and the lily-white neck and shoulders who gave the explanation in a trembling voice: "It's the ghost!"
I think we shall wait long for that, for the time when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren as it was once to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of distinguished painters who are now famous among us.
The house was still and desolate, and I took a book that I had brought with me the "Le Deuil des Primeveres" of François Jammes.
This horse-shoe was not invented by me any more than any other part of this story, alas! and may still be seen on the table in the passage outside the stage-door-keeper's box, when you enter the Opera through the court known as the Cour de l'Administration. To return to the evening in question. "It's the ghost!" little Jammes had cried. An agonizing silence now reigned in the dressing-room.
It was empty; a gas-flame, in its glass prison, cast a red and suspicious light into the surrounding darkness, without succeeding in dispelling it. And the dancer slammed the door again, with a deep sigh. "No," she said, "there is no one there." "Still, we saw him!" Jammes declared, returning with timid little steps to her place beside Sorelli. "He must be somewhere prowling about.
I had an hour of bitterness then, as I had so often done before, I laughed, drove the little devil into his cage, locked it, dropped the thick curtain in front of it. I claimed the company of M. François Jammes. He has a delightful poem about donkeys and as I read it I regained my tranquillity.
Jammes yelled these words in a tone of unspeakable terror; and her finger pointed, among the crowd of dandies, to a face so pallid, so lugubrious and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under the straddling eyebrows, that the death's head in question immediately scored a huge success. "The Opera ghost! The Opera ghost!"
I was just passing with mother. We picked him up. He was covered with bruises and his face was all over blood. We were frightened out of our lives, but, all at once, he began to thank Providence that he had got off so cheaply. Then he told us what had frightened him. Jammes had told her story ever so quickly, as though the ghost were at her heels, and was quite out of breath at the finish.
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