We returned to Drishane in October, having by that time written and illustrated the third story of the series. Which was fortunate, as on the first of November, “November Day” as we call it in Carbery, we went a-hunting, and under my eyes Martin “took a toss” such as I trust I may never have to see again. It happened in the middle of a run; there was a bar across an opening into a field. It was a wooden bar, with bushes under it, and it was not very high, but firmly fixed. I jumped it, and called to her to come on. The horse she was riding, Dervish, was a good hunter, but was cunning and often lazy. He took the bar with his knees, and I saw him slowly fall on to his head, and then turn over, rolling on Martin, who had kept too tightly her grip of the saddle. Then he struggled to his feet, but she lay still.

It was two months before she was able again to “lift her hand serenely in the sunshine, as before,” or so much as take a pen in it, and several years before she could be said to have regained such strength as had been hers. Nothing had been broken, and she had entirely escaped disfigurement, even though the eye-glasses, in which she always rode, had cut her brow; but one of the pummels of the saddle had bruised her spine, and the shock to a system so highly-strung as hers was what might be expected. The marvel was that so fragile a creature could ever have recovered, but her spirit was undefeated, and long before she could even move herself in bed, she had begun to work with me again, battling against all the varied and subtle sufferings that are known only to those who have damaged a nerve centre, with the light-hearted courage that was so conspicuously hers.

During the second half of that black November we were writing “The Waters of Strife,” which is the fourth story of the “R.M.” series. Its chief incident was the vision which came to the central figure of the story, of the face of the man he had murdered. This incident, as it happened, was a true one, and was the pivot of the story. We had promised a monthly story, and in order to keep faith, we had written it with an effort that had required almost more than we had to give. The story now appears in our book as we originally wrote it, but on its first appearance in the Badminton Magazine a passage had been introduced by an alien and unsolicited collaborator, and “various jests” had been “eliminated as unfit” for, one supposes, the sensitive readers of the magazine. Sometimes one wonders who are these ethereal beings whose sensibilities are only shielded from shock by the sympathetic delicacy of editors. I remember once before being crushed by another editor. I had drawn, from life, for the Connemara Tour, a portrait of “Little Judy from Menlo,” a Galway beggar-woman of wide renown. It was returned with the comment that “such a thing would shock delicate ladies.” So, as the song says, “Judy being bashful said ‘No, no, no’!” and returned to private life. Another and less distinguished beggar-woman once said to me of the disappointments of life, “Such things must be, Miss Somerville, my darlin’ gerr’l!” and authors must, one supposes, submit sometimes to be sacrificed to the susceptibilities of the ideal reader.

The twelve “R.M.” stories kept us desperately at work until the beginning of August, 1899. Looking back on the writing of them, each one, as we finished it, seemed to be the last possible effort of exhausted nature. Martin hardly knew, through those strenuous months, what it was to be out of suffering. Even though it cannot be denied that we both of us found enjoyment in the writing of them, I look back upon the finish of each story as a nightmare effort. Copying our unspeakably tortuous MS. till the small hours of the morning of the last possible day; whirling through the work of the illustrations (I may confess that one small drawing, that of “Maria” with the cockatoo between her paws, was done, as it were “between the stirrup and the ground,” while the horse, whose mission it was to gallop in pursuit of the postman, stamped and raged under my studio windows). By the time the last bundle had been dispatched Martin and I had arrived at a stage when we regarded an ink-bottle as a mad dog does a bucket of water. Rest, and change of air, for both of us, was indicated. I was sent to Aix, she went to North Wales, and we decided to meet in Paris and spend the winter there.

In the beginning of October, 1899, we established ourselves in an appartement in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and there we spent the next four months.

Looking back through our old diaries I recognise for how little of that time Martin was free from suffering of some kind. The effects of the hunting accident, and the strain of writing, too soon undertaken, were only now beginning to come to their own. Neuralgia, exhaustion, backaches, and all the indescribable miseries of neurasthenia held her in thrall. It is probable that the bracing tonic of the Paris climate saved her from a still worse time, but she had come through her reserves, and was now going on pluck. We wrote, desultorily, when she felt equal to it, and I worked at M. DÉlÉcluse’s studio in the mornings, and, with some others, assisted Mr. Cyrus Cuneo, a young, and then unknown, American, in getting up an “illustration class” in the afternoons. Most people have seen the brilliant black and white illustrations that Mr. Cuneo drew for the Illustrated London News and other papers and magazines, and his early death has left a blank that will not easily be filled. He could have been no more than four or five and twenty when I met him, and he was already an extraordinarily clever draughtsman. He was small, dark, and exceedingly good-looking, with a peculiarly beautiful litheness, balance, and swiftness of movement, that was to some extent explained by the fact that before he took up Art he had occupied the exalted position of “Champion Bantam of the South Pacific Slope”!

At that juncture we were all mad about a peculiar style of crayon drawing, which, as far as we were concerned, had been originated by Cuneo, and about a dozen of us took a studio in the Passage Stanilas, and worked there, from the most sensational models procurable. Cuneo was “Massier”; he found the models, and posed them (mercilessly), and we all worked like tigers, and brutally enjoyed the strung-up sensation that comes from the pressure of a difficult pose. Each stroke is Now or Never, every instant is priceless. Pharaoh of the Oppression was not firmer in the matter of letting the Children of Israel go, than we were with those unhappy models. I console myself by remembering that a good model has a pride in his endurance in a difficult pose that is as sustaining as honest and just pride always is. Nevertheless, when I look over these studies, and see the tall magician, peering, on tip-toe, over a screen, and the High-priest denouncing the violation of the sanctuary, and the unfortunate Arab, half rising from his couch to scan the horizon, I recognise that for these models, though Art was indisputably long, Time could hardly have been said to be fleeting.

Mr. Whistler was at that time in Paris, and had a morning class for ladies only, and it was in their studio that we had our class. It was large, well-lighted, with plenty of stools and easels and a sink for washing hands and brushes. It also was thoroughly insanitary, and had a well-established reputation for cases of typhoid. As a precautionary measure we always kept a certain yellow satin cushion on the mouth of the sink; this, not because of any superstition as to the colour, or the cushion, but because there was no other available “stopper for the stink.” (Thus Cuneo, whose language, if free, was always well chosen.) One of our members was a very clever American girl, who had broken loose from the bondage of the Whistler class. There, it appeared from her, if you had a soul, you could not think of calling it your own. It was intensively bossed by Mr. Whistler’s MassiÈre, on the lines laid down by Mr. Whistler, until, as my friend said, you had “no more use for it, and were just yelling with nerves.” The model, whether fair, dark, red, white, or brown, had to be seen through Mr. Whistler’s spectacles, and these, judging by the studies that were occasionally left on view, were of very heavily smoked glass. When it came to the MassiÈre setting my American friend’s palette, and dictating to her the flesh tones, the daughter of the Great Republic

observed that she was used to a free country, and shook the dust off her feet, and scraped the mud off her palette, and retired. An interesting feature of the studio was that many sheets of paper on which Mr. Whistler had scribbled maxim and epigram were nailed on its walls, for general edification, and it might have served better had his lieutenant allowed these to influence the pupils, unsupported by her interpretations. Since then I have met some of these pronouncements in print, but I will quote one of those that I copied at the time, as it bears on the case in point.

“That flesh should ever be low in tone would seem to many a source of sorrow, and of vast vexation, and its rendering, in such circumstance, an unfailing occasion of suspicion, objection, and reproach; each objection—which is the more fascinating in that it would seem to imply superiority and much virtue on the part of the one who makes it—is vaguely based upon the popular superstition as to what flesh really is—when seen on canvas, for the people never look at Nature with any sense of its pictorial appearance, for which reason, by the way, they also never look at a picture with any sense of Nature, but unconsciously, from habit, with reference to what they have seen in other pictures. Lights have been heightened until the white of the tube alone remains. Shadows have been deepened until black only is left! Scarcely a feature stays in its place, so fierce is its intention of firmly coming forth. And in the midst of this unseemly struggle for prominence, the gentle truth has but a sorry chance, falling flat and flavourless and without force.”

No one who has not lived, as we did, the life of “The Quarter” can at all appreciate its charm. In description—as I have already had occasion to say—it is usual, and more entertaining, to dwell upon the disasters of daily life, but though these, thanks to a bonne À tout faire, and a perfidious stove, were not lacking, Martin and I, and our friends, enjoyed ourselves. Small and select tea-parties were frequent; occasionally we aspired to giving what has been called by a gratified guest in the County Cork “a nice, ladylike little dinner,” and in a letter of my own I find an account of a more unusual form of entertainment which came our way.

“A friendly and agreeable American, who works in the Studio, asked us to come and see her in her rooms, away back of Saint Sulpice. When we got there we found, as well as my American friend, a little incidental, casual mother, whom she had not thought worth mentioning before. She just said, briefly,

“‘Oh, this is Mother,’ which, after all, sufficed.

“‘Mother’ was a perfect specimen of one of the secret, serf-like American mothers, who are concealed in Paris, put away like a pair of warm stockings, or an old waterproof, for an emergency. She was a nice, shrivelled, little old thing, very kind and polite. Their room, which was about six inches square, had little in it save a huge and catafaltic bed with deep crimson curtains; the window curtains were deep crimson, the walls, which were brown, had panels of deep crimson. Hot air welled into the room through gratings. We sat and talked, and looked at picture postcards for a long time, and our tongues were beginning to hang out, from want of tea, and suffocation, when the daughter said something to the mother.

“There was then produced, from a sort of hole in the wall, sweet biscuits, and a bottle of wine, the latter also deep crimson (to match the room, no doubt). It was a fierce and heady vintage. I know not its origin, I can only assure you that in less than two minutes from its consumption our faces were tremendously en suite with the curtains. We tottered home, clinging to each other, and lost our way twice.”

We had ourselves an opportunity of offering a somewhat unusual form of hospitality to two of our friends, the occasion being nothing less than the expected End of the World. This was timed by the newspapers to occur on the night of November 15, and I will allow Martin to describe what took place. The beginning part of the letter gives the history of one of those curious and unlucky coincidences of which writing-people are more often the victims than is generally known, and for this reason I will transcribe it also.

The South African War made life in Paris, that winter, a school of adversity for all English, or nominally English, people. Each reverse of our Army—and if one could believe the French papers it would seem that such took place every second day—was snatched at by the people of Paris and their newspapers with howls of delight. Men in the omnibuses would thrust in our faces La Patrie, or some such paper, to exhibit the words “Encore un Écrasement Anglais!”, in large, exultant letters, filling a page. Respectable old gentlemen, in “faultless morning dress,” would cry “Oh yais!” as we passed; large tongues would be exhibited to us, till we felt we could have diagnosed the digestions of the Quarter. At last our turn came, and when the Matin had a line, “Capitulation de CronjÉ,” writ large enough for display, Martin made an expedition in an omnibus down “The Big Boulevards” for no purpose other than to flaunt it in the faces of her fellow passengers.

To Martin, who was an intensely keen politician, the aloofness of many of the art-students whom she met, from the War, the overthrow of the French Government, from, in fact, any question on any subject outside the life of the studio, was a constant amazement.

In a letter from her to one of her sisters she releases her feelings on the subject.

V. F. M. to Mrs. Cuthbert Dawson.
(Paris, Nov. 29, 1899.)

“The French papers are realising that a mistake has been made in the attacks on the Queen, and the better ones are saying so. But the Patrie, the Libre Parole, and all that fleet of halfpenny papers that the poor read, have nailed their colours to the mast, and it seems as if their idea is to overthrow their present Government by fair means or foul. As long as this Government is in there will be no quarrel with England, but it might, of course, go out like a candle, any day. I daresay you have heard the Rire spoken of as one of the papers that ought to be suppressed. We bought the number that was to be all about the English, and all about them it was, a sort of comic history of England since the Creation, with Hyde Park as the Garden of Eden. The cover was a hauntingly horrible picture of Joan of Arc being burned. The rest of the pictures were dull, disgusting, and too furiously angry to be clever. We had pleasure in consigning the whole thing to the stove.... The students here, with exceptions, of course,—appear deaf and blind to all that goes on, and Revolutions in Paris, and the War in the Transvaal, are as nothing to them as compared with the pose of the model. In every street are crowds of them, scraping away at their charcoal ‘academies’ by the roomful, all perfectly engrossed and self-centred, and, I think, quite happy. Last Sunday we went to a mild little tea-party in a studio, where were several of these artist-women, in their best clothes, and somewhere in the heart of the throng was a tiny hideosity, an American, (who has a studio in which R. B. once worked,) fat, bearded, and unspeakably common, but interesting.[14] Holding another court of the women was a microbe English artist, an absurd little thing to look at, but, I believe, clever; I hear that on weekdays he dresses like a French workman and looks like a toy that you would buy at a bazaar. No one talked anything but Art, except when occasionally one of the hostesses (there were four) hurriedly asked me what I thought of the Rubaiyat of Omar KhayyÁm, or how two people managed to write together, just to show what good hostesses they were, while all the while they tried to listen to the harangues of the microbe or the hideosity. Poor things, it was very nice of them, and I was touched. There are about half a dozen, that I know here, who take an English paper; it is a remarkable thing that they are nearly all Irish and Scotch, and have baths.”