  Madame: There are moments when one seems to come to life. One looks about and distinguishes a creature whose foot-print closely resembles the ace of spades. The thing says: bow-wow. It is a dog. One looks again. The ace of spades is now an ace of clubs. The thing says: pffffffff—and it is a cat. This is the history of the visible world and in particular, that of my god-children, Toby-Dog and Kiki-the-Demure. They are so natural—I use the word in the sense in which it is applicable to the savages of Oceania—that all their acts conspire to make of life, a very simple proposition. These are animals in the fullest sense of the word—animos—if I may employ the original orthography, capable of exclaiming with those of Faust: "The fool knows it not! And as such, Madame, you have placed them exactly where they should be: their earthly Paradise is the apartment of Monsieur Willy. In your salon, the probable palm and rubber-plant give the impression of luxuriant Edenic flora, relatively speaking, and illustrate the transmogrification which is to allow M. Gaston Deschamps—critic of a "Temps" plus-que-passÉ—to announce to the wilderness (where he speaks familiarly of Chateaubriand), and to the CollÈge de France, how well he can admire and understand a true poet. For you are a true poet and I will declare it freely, not concerning myself more with the legends Parisians have the habit of weaving about every celebrity. They admire Gauguin and Verlaine, not so much for their originality, as for their eccentricities. And so it happens that certain persons, unacquainted with the nameless sentiment, the order and purity, the thousand interior virtues which guide you, persist in saying that you wear your hair short and that Willy is bald. Must I then—living at Orthez—tell Tout-Paris who you are, present you to all who know you—I who have never seen you? I will say then, that Madame Colette Willy never had short hair, that she does not wear masculine attire; that her cat does not accompany her when she goes to a concert, that her friend's dog does not drink from a tumbler. It is inexact to say that Mme. Colette Willy works in a squirrel's cage, or performs upon trapeze and flying rings, and can reach with her toe the nape of her neck. Madame Colette Willy has never ceased to be the plain woman par excellence, who rises at dawn to give oats to the horse, maize to the chickens, cabbage to the rabbits, groundsel to the canaries, snails to the ducks and bran-water to the pigs. At eight o'clock, summer and winter, she prepares the cafÉ au lait for her maid—and herself. Scarcely a day passes that she does not meditate upon this admirable book:
Orchard, kitchen-garden, stable, poultry-yard, bee-hive and hot-house, have no further mysteries for Madame Colette Willy. They say, she refused to divulge her secret for the destruction of mole-crickets to "a great statesman, who prayed her on his knees." Madame Colette Willy is in no way different from the description I have just given of her. I am aware that certain folk, having met her in society, insist upon making her very complex. A little more, and they would have ascribed to her the tastes of the mustiest symbolists—and one knows how far from pleasing are those Muses' robes, how odious the yellow bandeaux above faces expressionless as eggs. Robes and bandeaux are to-day relegated to drawers in the Capitol at Toulouse, from which they will never be taken more, except when occasion calls for the howling of official alexandrines in honor of M. Gaston Deschamps, JaurÈs, or VercingÉtorix. Madame Colette Willy rises to-day on the world of Letters as the poetess—at last!--who, with the tip of her slipper sends all the painted, laureled, cothurnÈd, lyre-carrying Muses—that, from Monselet to Renan, have roused the aspirations of classes in Rhetoric—rolling, from the top to the bottom of Parnassus. How charming she is thus—presenting her bull-dog and her cat with as much assurance as Diana would her hound, or a Bacchante her tiger. See her apple-cheeks, her eyes like blue myosotis, her lips—poppy-petals, and her ivy-like grace! Tell me if this way of leaning against the green barrier of her garden-close, or of lying under the murmurous arbor of mid-Summer, is not worth the starched manner, that old magistrate de Vigny—with his neckcloth wound three times around, and rigid in his trousers' straps—imposed upon his goddesses? Madame Colette Willy is a live woman, a real woman, who has dared to be natural and who resembles a little village bride far more than a perverse woman of letters. Read her book and you shall see how accurate are my assertions. It has pleased Madame Colette Willy to embody in a couple of delightful animals, the aroma of gardens, the freshness of the field, the heat of state-roads,—the passions of men.... For through this girlish laughter ringing in the forest, I tell you, I hear the sobbing of a well-spring. One does not stoop to a poodle or tom-cat, without feeling the heart wrung with dumb anguish. One is sensible, in comparing ourselves to them, of all that separates and of all that unites us. A dog's eyes hold the sorrow of having, since the earliest days of creation, licked the whip of his incorrigible persecutor in vain. For nothing has mollified man—not the prey brought him by a famishing spaniel, nor the humble guilelessness of the shepherd-dog, guarding the peace of the shadowy flocks under the stars. A tragic fear shines in the cat's eyes. "What are you going to do to me now?" it seems to ask, lying on a rubbish-heap, a prey to mange and hunger—and feverishly it waits the new torture that will shatter its nervous system. But have no fear... Madame Colette Willy is very kind. She quickly dispels the hereditary dread of Toby-Dog and Kiki-the-Demure. She meliorates the race, so that dogs and cats will learn in the end that it is less dull to frequent a poet than an unhappy CollÈge de France candidate—had this candidate proven more copiously still, that the author of "MÉmoires d'Outre-Tombe" had topsyturvily described the jawbone of the Crocodile. Toby-Dog and Kiki-the-Demure well know that their mistress is a lady who would do no harm—neither to a piece of sugar nor to a mouse; a lady who, for our delight, jumps a rope she has woven of flower-words which she never bruises, and with which she perfumes us; a lady who sings, with the voice of a clear French rivulet, that wistful tenderness which makes the hearts of animals beat so fast. FRANCIS JAMMES. |
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