sleep.'
The Prince laughed so consumedly that I continued with old schoolboy 'chestnuts' that I should have thought everyone knew. Evidently he had never heard one of them, for he walked up and down the gambling room for half an hour with his arm on my shoulder, shaking with laughter. It was the limericks he seemed to like most; one in especial pleased him so much that he tried to learn it by heart. Here it is.
There was a young lady at sea Who said, 'God, how it hurts me to pee.'
'I see,' said the Mate,
'That accounts for the state
Of the captain, the purser and me.'
I noticed that both Lord Hartington and Randolph Churchill were waiting for a chance of speech with the Prince. I told him this and as a sudden thought came into my head, I blurted it out: 'Jeanne Granier, the great French actress is here, Sir, and she's one of the wittiest women in Paris and a great story teller. If you'd do me the honour to sup with me tonight at the Grand Hotel, I'd have Granier and we'd try to amuse you.'
'I'd love it,' he said at once, 'but the d… d journalists might talk. Get Lord Randolph Churchill to come too and it'll all be put to his account; more talk about him than me, see?'
'All right, Sir,' I said. 'Shall we say ten o'clock?'
'Sure, sure!' he replied. 'At ten I'll be with you.'
On my way to find Jeanne Granier I saw Randolph and he consented to come, but with some unwillingness. 'If you don't wish to come,' I said, 'I can get Lord Hartington, but the worst of it is, he knows no French, while your French is very good.'
'That settles it,' he said whimsically. 'I'll call it a command and come.'
I soon found Granier and took her to dinner; she was the best type of French woman and I think we liked each other sincerely. When I told her about the Prince and how I had won him by risque stories which no one had ever dared to tell him before, she laughed with keen appreciation. 'We are all won by the lives we know nothing about,' she said. 'I'll tell him stories he has never imagined; leave it to me.'
We had an excellent dinner and a little before ten made our way to the Grand Hotel. At the very door of the hotel we came across the Prince. It was a wonderful night: the heavens like one deep sapphire set off by the radiance of a full moon. Scarcely had I presented Mile. Granier to the Prince and he had said how delighted he was to know personally such a queen of the stage, when she struck an attitude and pointing to the moon cried: 'Qu'elle est belle et pale cette lune-la.' And then in a man's voice she rejoined, 'Pour belle je n'en sais rien; pour pale, elle doit bien I'etre, elle a passe tant de nuits!' The Prince laughed, delighted with the witty innuendo, and indeed I was surprised by it, till some years afterwards I found that the witty word was from Henri Becque, the dramatist, who passed almost unnoticed and unknown through life, in spite of possessing a great talent.
When we got upstairs to my rooms Randolph soon put in an appearance, but he didn't add much to the gaiety of the evening. All the burden was carried by Jeanne Granier, who immediately, after a little supper, began telling us stories of her early life on the stage with incomparable verve and humor. She had been on the boards as a child and from ten years of age on had hardly known an evening without being annoyed by the desire of some old man.
'What did they do?' asked the prince.
'This manager kissed me, Sir,' she said; 'that director pinched my bottom (fesses) as I passed; the other told me I was pretty and tempting: all of them without exception persecuted me. Yet I liked it all, I must confess, and the bolder they were, the more I liked 'em!' We could not but laugh!
The Prince was rejuvenated, and towards the end Randolph, too, began to take an interest in Granier's stories; and really they were excellent and formed a complete intimate picture and chronicle, so to say, of the French stage. The name of Sarah Bernhardt having come up, she recited a witty little verse as an epitaph of the great cabotine:
Artiste adoree aux deux poles
Ci-git Sarah, qui remplissait
Mieux ses roles
Que son corset.
Of course we all talked of Sarah for some time and then went off upon Coquelin, whom I always thought the best actor I had ever seen on any stage.
To my amazement Randolph agreed with me; he had seen him in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and like myself thought him inimitable.
Curiously enough, Granier knew a witty epitaph on him, too, and gave it with astounding brio and a shade of malice.
Ci-git sous le marbre et le lierre Le petit-flls, le digne heritier de Moliere:
Seulement trop modest, au lieu de Poquelin Il s'est appele Coquelin.
I don't know why we all laughed so consumedly or why the hours fled so delightfully, but when we separated it was nearly three o'clock and the Prince thanked me for one of the most charming evenings he had ever spent.
He praised Granier, too, to the nth and sent her away happy, and even Randolph said that it was a great and memorable night. Before leaving he confessed to me that his inexplicable depression came from losses at the tables. 'I must stop gambling,' he said. 'I have no luck.' His luck was out forever, as I shall tell in a later chapter.
It seems to me that it was about this time that the great brewing firm of Guinness turned its business into a limited liability company. The company was brought out by the house of Baring and no one ever saw such a success in company promoting in the city of London. All day long hundreds of people besieged the banking offices and when the doors were shut, some daring spirits put stones in their checks and threw them through the windows, determined to get their applications accepted. The shares went immediately to a large premium and everyone was congratulating Lord Revelstoke as the head of the great bank. I saw him one afternoon and he admitted to me that Barings had made over a million pounds sterling on the one transaction, and in the one day, a stroke unparalleled, save by some performances of Hooley some years later.
A day or two afterwards I met Lord Rothschild at dinner at Sir Charles Dilke's, and I was very curious to find out whether the man's ability in any way matched his great position. I told the story of the Guinness promotion as Lord Revelstoke had told it to me and Lord Rothschild listened with seeming interest. When I had finished he said, 'The Guinness promotion was offered to us first but we refused it!'
'That must cause you some regret,' I said, 'seeing that it was such a success: even Rothschild's must think a million worth putting in their pockets.'
'I don't look at it quite in that way,' retorted Lord Rothschild. 'I go to the House every morning and when I say 'No' to every scheme and enterprise submitted to me, I return home at night carefree and contented. But when I agree to any proposal, I am immediately filled with anxiety. To say 'Yes' is like putting your finger in a machine: the whirring wheels may drag your whole body in after the finger.'
'Goodness gracious,' I cried, 'I never thought of looking at it from that point of view.' The great financier seemed to me extra cautious, rather than clever, but he had clever people about him, strange to say, and notably Carl Meyer, whom I shall tell about in a later volume.
Talking of Lord Rothschild with Dilke later, I found that he agreed with me in my estimate of the gentleman. 'When you get to the top of life's pyramid,' he said, 'caution becomes a virtue, and you have no idea how broad the foundation is laid. The Baron one day took me over the great banking house and showed me in the strong room a million sterling, in sovereigns, that had been put there by his grandfather with the injunction that his father should never touch it, except in case of great emergency. 'Wouldn't a draft on the Bank of England,' said the son, 'be just as good and bring us in thirty thousand a year interest?'
'No,' said the grandfather, 'there are moments when you need gold if it were for nothing but to give you the sense of security.'
I heard later a story of William Waldorf Astor which bore out the same lesson. I shall probably tell it in my next volume.
