ETRETAT

A great English poet has just crossed over to France in order to greet
Victor Hugo. All the newspapers are full of his name and he is the great
topic of conversation in all drawing-rooms. Fifteen years ago I had
occasion several times to meet Algernon Charles Swinburne. I will
attempt to show him just as I saw him and to give an idea of the strange
impression he made on me, which will remain with me throughout time.

I believe it was in 1867 or in 1868 that an unknown young Englishman
came to Etretat and bought a little but hidden under great trees. It
was said that he lived there, always alone, in a strange manner; and he
aroused the inimical surprise of the natives, for the inhabitants were
sullen and foolishly malicious, as they always are in little towns.

They declared that this whimsical Englishman ate nothing but boiled.
roasted or stewed monkey; that he would see no one; that he talked
to himself hours at a time and many other surprising things that made
people think that he was different from other men. They were surprised
that he should live alone with a monkey. Had it been a cat or a dog
they would have said nothing. But a monkey! Was that not frightful? What
savage tastes the man must have!

I knew this young man only from seeing him in the streets. He was short,
plump, without being fat, mild-looking, and he wore a little blond
mustache, which was almost invisible.

Chance brought us together. This savage had amiable and pleasing
manners, but he was one of those strange Englishmen that one meets here
and there throughout the world.

Endowed with remarkable intelligence, he seemed to live in a fantastic
dream, as Edgar Poe must have lived. He had translated into English a
volume of strange Icelandic legends, which I ardently desired to see
translated into French. He loved the supernatural, the dismal and
grewsome, but he spoke of the most marvellous things with a calmness
that was typically English, to which his gentle and quiet voice gave a
semblance of reality that was maddening.

Full of a haughty disdain for the world, with its conventions,
prejudices and code of morality, he had nailed to his house a name that
was boldly impudent. The keeper of a lonely inn who should write on his
door: "Travellers murdered here!" could not make a more sinister jest. I
never had entered his dwelling, when one day I received an invitation to
luncheon, following an accident that had occurred to one of his