Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

In a vast plain of glowing embers, he saw Nadar who was collecting salamanders.

Salamanders: those darting legendary ephemerae, who feed upon a flash of light, and flourish in the fiery heart of destruction.

AS HE WALKED DOWN the Strand one surprisingly sunny morning in March, examining the patriotic engravings of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert smiling domestically from the royal tilbury, Théophile Gautier came upon a barrow boy selling waterproof mackintoshes. It was a matter of generally received knowledge that the imperméable, like those other viscous phenomena, the English glass of stout, the English fog, and the English phlegm, contained something of the philosophical essence of Britain. So Théophile Gautier, poet, litterateur, and – more practically – regular columnist for Paris’s leading daily newspaper La Presse, drew aside to observe.

It was March 1842. Gautier’s first and most brilliant ballet Giselle had just opened to packed houses in Her Majesty’s Theatre. The manager, Mr Benjamin Lumley, had remarked that the piece was ‘admitted to be vastly pretty’, a judgement which Gautier, who spoke little or no English, received as a generous compliment.

In the peculiar absence of rain, the barrow boy was obviously anxious to demonstrate that his mackintoshes were genuinely waterproof. To Gautier’s perplexity, he proceeded to nail the circumference of one of the sacred garments to a horizontal wooden frame, suspended alongside the stall. Into the shallow canvas depression thus formed, he emptied a large enamel jug of water. Into the water he tipped a bowl-full of engaging goldfish. He then produced a handful of small fishing lines and, flourishing them, inquired whether any of his customers would care to go fishing.

Gautier walked on towards Trafalgar Square, where Lord Nelson’s column was gradually arising from a primal chaos of scaffolding and publicity hoardings. He passed the Duke of Northumberland’s house, where a sculpted lion guarded the portal with its tail raised vertically in the air. ‘It is the lion of Percy’, Gautier noted with unaccountable irritation, ‘and never has heraldic lion so grossly abused its right to affect fabulous shapes and forms.’ The English were not only an unreliable and eccentric nation, they were positively bizarre.

It was Gautier’s first visit to London. He was thirty-one, the esteemed author of an erotic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, and an arbiter of French literary fashion. In the next twenty years he was to make some five more trips to the British capital, reporting for his newspaper, or simply for his friends, on a variety of national peculiarities, including the Ascot Races, methods of surviving ‘incendiary’ turtle soup, the paintings of Hogarth, the depressions of Sunday afternoon, the camels of Regent’s Park Zoo, Covent Garden, and the Great Apotheosis at the Crystal Palace. Gautier came both as a private citizen of Paris, and as a public representative of civilization, roles that were not easily to be distinguished. Though he could not therefore, on principle, admire – he found himself by rapid turns amused, charmed, distressed, perplexed, outraged. But he never lost that original sense of strangeness, of the obstinate shadows clinging to that metropolis of the northern isles, like the ubiquitous soot which, he recorded with gallic frankness, made one blow black into one’s handkerchief.

It had struck him, in the larger perspective, even as his steamboat the Harlequin first swung west into the yellow waters of the Thames Estuary at sunset, and a forest of dark chimneys gathered along the low banks, sculpted like colossal towers and obelisks, ‘giving to the horizon an Egyptian air, a vague profile of Thebes or Babylon, of an antediluvian city, a capital of enormities and rebellious pride, something altogether extraordinary’. It was an impression that anticipated another European’s, Joseph Conrad’s in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, by some fifty years.

Gautier saw the evidence of Empire in the jostling host of merchant craft, running between the lightships with their great lamps and scarlet paintwork: ships from India, reeking of oriental perfumes and with Lascar crews crowding the rigging, ships from the Baltic and the North Sea with crusts of ice still frozen to their bulwarks, ships from China and America freighted down with 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.