Arthur Bartlett Maurice

With a memory for literary facts that is overpowering, Arthur Bartlett Maurice has long been known to the book loving public for his “Chronicle and Comment.” This was famous in The Bookman years past, and now appears in the literary supplement of the New York “Herald”, which Mr. Maurice is editing. It is his wont to remember obscure facts about the authors of a generation past, though he, himself, is a youngish man. He has written books of such reminiscings as “The New York of the Novelist”, “The London of the Novelists”, etc., etc. For sixteen years he was connected with The Bookman, for nine of those he was its editor. His contact with writers was constant and broad. He brought to the magazine at a time when the United States had not awakened vividly to an understanding of its own writers, the charm of enthusiasm and personality. Mr. Maurice is an indefatigable worker. He pursues a literary fact with eagerness and purpose. Usually he downs it. He has an exceptional editorial sense. From a journalistic standpoint his supplement is the liveliest in the country. Maurice is a Princeton man, and a loyal one. He spends much time there. He was, in fact, born as well as educated in New Jersey and has lived for some years in East Orange. Mr. Maurice is an able editor and journalist, a rapid and engaging conversationalist, a companion of rare wit and charm.

A LANDMARK PASSES

The Pension Vauquer is no more! Till yesterday, the structure which Henry James felicitously described as “the most portentous setting of the scene in all the literature of fiction” had, for a full hundred years, remained substantially true to the picture that Honoré de Balzac drew in the pages of “Père Goriot”. The house and the garden with its well and graveled walk were there for the contemplation of the literary pilgrim. Over all there was the brooding silence of ten decades. But that was yesterday. There is little silence there to-day. For where Trompe-la-Mort whispered his cunning temptations in the ear of Eugène de Rastignac; where Goriot, the Lear of French fiction, wept over the ingratitude of his daughters; where, of an eventful evening, there came the tramping of feet, the clang of muskets against the pavement, and the ominous command: “In the name of the King and the Law!” now honks, not the horn of regal Renault or pompous Panhard, but the horn of the ubiquitous Ford, or of its French equivalent, the Citroen. The “most portentous setting of the scene in all the literature of fiction” has become an auto-service station.

“Mme. Vauquer (née de Conflams) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel”. These are the opening words of the novel that posterity seems to have accepted as Balzac’s masterpiece, the most glorious stone of that vast edifice which is the Comédie Humaine. The house stood at the lower end of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the street begins to slope down to the Rue de l’Arbalète. Balzac, in his day, found the quarter the ugliest and the least known of all the quarters of Paris. Ugly and unknown it remained all through the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. To find it to-day is like finding one’s way to the heart of a maze. That remoteness had the virtue of preserving it till the last from the invasion of the modern Hun, the apartment constructing architect. Ugly as it is, it possesses an amazing fascination. With the dirt and squalor and gloom the glamour of the dark old world is there. Here is no Haussmannized Paris, but a vestige of the ancient Lutetia that knew the Valois. The shades of the Villon of history and of the Quasimodo of Hugo’s fantastic imagination, lurk in such streets as the Rue Saint-Médard and the Rue Mouffetard.

Balzac identified the Pension Vauquer as being in the Rue Sainte-Genevieve. But the names of Paris streets are subject to frequent changes, and long ago the Rue Sainte-Genevieve became the Rue Tournefort. The actual number of what was till yesterday, by reason of its unchanged state, its romantic appearance, and its vivid associations, the show place among all the shrines of French fiction, was 24. From that doorway Eugène de Rastignac went forth in the night to make his way to the heights of the cemetery of Père Lachaise, and from its eminence to shake his fist at the city spread out beneath him with the ringing cry of defiance: “A nous deux maintenant!”