, at least one of our party had better luck
when he started on the hunt without us. According to a rumour at the
time, the respectable British author, sober father of a family, who fed
the peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, was once seen in broad daylight
with the _Reine de Golconde_ on his arm, walking down the _Boul' Mich'_
at the head of a band of poets.

Verlaine I did meet, but it was in London, where admiring, or
philanthropic, young Englishmen brought him one winter to lecture and
the subject as announced was "Contemporary French Poetry," and through
all these years I have managed to preserve the small sheet of
announcement with Arthur Symons's name and "kind regards" written below,
a personal little document, for it was Symons who got up the show, and
he and Herbert P. Horne who sold the tickets. Instead of lecturing,
Verlaine read his verses to the scanty audience, all of whom knew each
other, in the dim light of Barnard's Inn Hall, and the music of their
rhythm was in his voice so that I was not conscious of the satyr-like
repulsiveness of his face and head so long as he was reading. When he
was not reading, the repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank
from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with
him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to
his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow
skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of
the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got
back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The
prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, was the only good
he had got out of his visit to London. The beauty of his own beautiful
poems, I felt in disgust, should have made such vicious sordidness
impossible. It revolted me that a man so degraded and hideous physically
could write the verse I had loved ever since his _Romances sans Paroles_
first fell into my hands, or, writing it, could be content to remain
what he was. To be sure, the genius is rare whom it is not a
disappointment to meet, and the hero-worshipper may be thankful when his
great man is guilty of nothing worse than the famous writer in
Tchekhof's play--so famous as to have his name daily in the papers and
his photograph in shop windows--whose crime was to condescend to fish
and to be pleased when he caught something.

VI

The Nineties would not let us