Julie Romain
One spring two years ago I was tramping along the Mediterranean coast. Is there anything pleasanter than striding along a road, lost in dreams? You walk in a world full of light, through the caressing wind, on the slopes of mountains and on the edge of the sea. And you dream! What phantom loves and adventures the vagabond imagination lives through in a two hours’ tramp! Born in the warm light air, a thousand dreamy joyous expectations jostle each other in your mind; you breathe them in with the gentle wind, and in the depths of your heart they wake an appetite for happiness that grows with the hunger whetted by much walking. Happy winged thoughts soar and sing like birds.
I was tramping down the long road that runs from St. Raphael to Italy—less a road than a magnificent shifting scene that seems made to form a background for all the love poems in the world. And I thought that from Cannes, which is full of determined poseurs, to Monaco, which is full of gamblers, hardly a soul comes to this part of the world except to swagger and fling money about and to display, under this glorious sky, in this garden of roses and orange blossom, every form of mean vanity, senseless pretension and vile covetousness and to reveal the soul of man for what it is, abject, ignorant, arrogant and greedy.
Suddenly I saw, in the curve of one of those ravishing bays that each bend of the mountain road reveals, a small group of villas: there were not more than four or five and they lay at the foot of the mountain, between the sea and a dense pine wood that stretched far away behind them down two great valleys; there were no roads through the valley and probably no way out of them. One of these chalets was so charming that I stood stock-still in front of the gate: it was a small white house with brown timbers, and covered with roses climbing to the very roof.
And the garden: a veritable cloth of flowers, of all colours and all sizes, mingled in a capricious and inspired disorder. They covered the lawn; every step of the terrace had a clump of flowers at each end, blue or yellow clusters drooped from the windows over the gleaming wall; and the stone balustrade of the veranda that roofed this adorable home was garlanded with great scarlet bellflowers, like drops of blood.
Behind the house I saw a long alley of orange-trees running back to the foot of the mountain.
On the door, in small golden letters, this name: “Villa d’Antan.”
I wondered what poet or fairy lived there, what inspired recluse had discovered this place and created this dream house that seemed to have sprung up in the heart of a bunch of flowers.
A stone-breaker was crushing stones a little farther down the road. I asked him the name of the owner of this jewel.
“Mme. Julie Romain,” he answered.
Julie Romain! Long ago, when I was a child, I had heard of her, the great actress, Rachel’s rival.
No woman had ever been more applauded or more beloved, especially more beloved! What duels and suicides there were for her sake, how the town rang with tales of her adventures! How old would this Circe be now? Sixty, seventy, seventy-five? Julie Romain! Here, in this house. The woman whom our greatest musician and our greatest poet had adored! I could still remember the excitement roused through the whole of France (I was twelve years old then) when she fled to Sicily with the poet after her terrific quarrel with the musician.
She had gone one evening, after a first night at which the audience had applauded her for half an hour and called her before the final curtain eleven times; she had set out with the poet in a fast chaise; post-chaises were in use then; they had crossed the sea to enjoy their love in the island of antiquity—Sicily, daughter of a Grecian mother—under the shadow of the vast orange-grove that encircles Palermo and bears the name of “Conque d’Or.”
The story spread abroad of their ascent of Etna, and how they hung over the immense crater, locked in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek, as if they were going to fling themselves into the fiery depths.
He was dead, the man who had written that disturbing poetry, so profound that it had made a whole generation dizzy, so subtle, so mysterious that it had opened a new world to the new poets.
The other one, the man she had left, was dead too, he who had found for her melodies that lingered in the memories of all living men, melodies of triumph and despair, maddening, plucking the heart out of their bodies.
And she was here, in this house veiled with flowers.
I didn’t hesitate a moment, I rang the bell.
A small servant opened the door, an awkward boy of eighteen with clumsy hands. I wrote on my card a happy compliment to the old actress and an earnest request that she would see me. Perhaps she would
