Fragments of an Autobiography. Felix Moscheles
may possibly want a little disguise. It is easier to control the eyes, where there is an emotion to conceal, than the lips with their tell-tale quiver: they need protection. Bold indeed is the man who dares to shave, and reveal, say to a young and confiding wife, who has known him only with a beard, all that underlies the hirsute mask, thus laying bare his true nature, whatever that may be, good, bad, or indifferent. We may safely assume, I think, that under the beard she will find a man she does not know.
But all those considerations are, at best, after-thoughts. When my time came to twirl the first threads of my moustache, I suppose I did not feel anything intuitively, but greeted the badge of manliness with satisfaction. Then, to be sure, I was not going to be an actor, who wants every square inch of his face for his work, nor a priest who has nothing to conceal, nor a lawyer who is not worth his salt if he cannot conceal anything or everything. I was going to be an artist, and as such, I meant to look my part, at any rate as regards the beard.
My school-days had come to an end; some dreaded examinations were satisfactorily passed, and I sallied forth, backed by a grandiloquent Latin document describing me as "F. S. M. Londiniensis," an "honest youth" who had never done anything "reprehensible," and who was now "omnino" worthy to be admitted to the higher universities.
Instead of accepting the advantages thus offered to me, I disposed of some of those old school-books I hated, and packed up others that I loved, in a green carpet-bag, which was adorned with a worsted-work presentment of a shepherdess tending her sheep under a very small tree. This bag was of a style much admired in the Fatherland of those days, and had been presented to me by a very dear friend. Another parting gift I much prized was a woollen comforter knitted by Bella's own hands. Thus equipped, I started for Paris. The Traumanns saw me off. They were characteristic in their parting words. The Magister said—
"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Never look at things superficially, my boy, go deeper for the cause of things."
The Magisterin said—
"Remember, mine Lixchen, wear those woollen socks and keep your feet dry."
Bella said—
"You will write, won't you? I shall be so anxious to know all about—I mean something—about what you are doing."
Frida said—
"Ach, Felix, do see if you can't get me one of those lovely black cats they have in Paris."
What a change from Leipsic to Paris, from home to the unknown, supervision to independence! When I speak of Paris, it must be borne in mind that it is the Paris of 1850–51, not the one we evoke when we think of the Imperial capital of later days. It was the old city with its high houses and crooked streets, with its nooks and rookeries, suggestive of revolution and barricades; not the Paris we know with its gloriously disciplined palaces, standing shoulder to shoulder, and with its splendid military avenues that can carry conviction in the straightest and most direct of lines from the mouth of the cannon to the heart of the canaille.
The first restaurant I went into—it was a "Marchand de vins, Traiteur"—I was addressed as "Citoyen," rather a startler for a newly imported Leipsic schoolboy; but those were the days of the Republic that had followed Louis Philippe's flight, and there was a great show of "Liberté, Égalité', Fraternité," on walls, churches, and other public buildings; whilst, as far as I could see, everybody seemed to be just as anxious as before to be fraternally equal with his neighbour in the matter of taking liberties, and whilst Prince Louis Napoleon and his friends were looking round for a favourable opportunity to daub out the foolish words and replace them with a capital "N," protected by an imperial eagle with rather sharp claws.
The coup d'état came. I saw it all; first the soldiers bivouacking on the quais and in the streets, eating and drinking to their hearts' content; then the Prince President riding across the Place de la Concorde on a proudly prancing horse, followed at some distance by a brilliant staff of officers on more modestly prancing horses (according to the rules of etiquette), and I heard the troops shouting "Vive Napoleon! À bas la République!" and the crowd hooting "À bas Napoleon! Vive la République!" and saw the future emperor bowing impartially left and right, to the loyal and to the disloyal, and fulfilling his destiny with the imperturbable passiveness of the fatalist. He really looked the picture of Fate in the uniform of a General, and adorned with a moustache waxed to inordinate lengths and culminating in sharp points.
Then I was run in, not for shouting, but because I was with a friend who carried a stick with a lead-weighted knob. At the police-station they proceeded to "dresser procès verbal," as they call it, and we were temporarily released; that process, however, within the next few hours, got so mixed up with human blood, ashes, and brick-rubbish, for the station had been fired, that when I called a few days later there was no trace of it left. So I was never sent to Cayenne or any other penal settlement.
On the contrary, Prince Napoleon had saved France, and he could not do without me to consolidate it. Achille Fould was his Chancellor of the Exchequer, his right hand, and as Madame Achille and her sister were old friends of my parents, and had been amongst the first to welcome me into this big world, it was but natural they should now take me in hand and wish to introduce me into their particular world. So wherever golden dust was to be thrown into the eyes of the pleasure-seeking Parisian, my presence was politely requested. On my side I accepted favours with princely condescension, and got into the Tuileries, when there was a ball or a fête on, hours before other poor mortals of inferior clay. The coachman of our ministerial carriage holding a card with the injunction, "Laisser passer, s'il n'y a pas empèchement de force majeure," we had not to wait our turn in the interminable queue that stretched through Paris for miles. I might be dancing at the Tuileries one night in the same room with the Prince President, who would perhaps be walking a quadrille with the wife of the British ambassador, and the next night—there comes the other side of my life—I was accoutred in a blouse and a workman's cap, and was diving into the haunts of destitution and misery, into those privileged places where unpoetical license reigns supreme. I learnt French argot, the thieves' language, at the fountain-source, and studied political economy under Communists—some of them philosophers, some firebrands. All that, to be sure, I could not have done alone, but I had some trusty friends amongst my studio comrades who initiated me and taught me French, as according to them she should be spoke. I had to learn a poetical effusion by heart of which I just recollect the two lines—
| "Le jour viendra où le père éclairé |
| Donnera sa fille au forçat libéré." |
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