Coming to a decision has a loosening, tonic effect on a mind which has been floundering in uncertainty. Liberated, it rushes gaily, hopefully, to the charting of a new course. I had no sooner resolved to strike out on my own than my mind was bubbling with plans. I forgot that I was thirty-three years old and, according to the code of my time and my society, too old for new ventures; I forgot that outside of my very limited experience on _The Chautauquan_ I knew nothing of the writing and publishing world, had literally no acquaintance among editors; I forgot that I was afraid of people, believed them all so much greater and more important than they often turned out to be that it cost me nervous chills to venture with a request into a stranger’s presence.
Dismissing all these real handicaps, I plunged gaily into planning for a career in journalism, self-directed, free-lance journalism. Surely I could find subjects enough in Paris to write about, subjects that would interest American newspapers. We were in the thick of a great agitation over the condition and the conduct of American cities. _The Chautauquan_ had touched it occasionally. How did Paris keep house? I planned a syndicate of my own which would answer all questions. Out of my newspaper work might not articles grow for magazines? I thought so, and books, beginning of course with my study of Madame Roland. So long as I told nobody about my plans, they worked beautifully, carried me upward and onward into a new and happier, more profitable, more satisfying world. But when I announced my decision, laid out what I proposed to do, all the glow and confidence went out of me, all the weaknesses in my venture came again to the top. There were friends who said none too politely: “Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places for themselves after thirty.” There were friends who resented my decision as a reflection on themselves. A woman whose friendship I valued said bluntly: “You are one of us. Aren’t we good enough for you?” My act was treason in her eyes. The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me and so out of friendliness.
When I told my editor-in-chief I was leaving, going to Paris to study, he was shocked. “How will you support yourself?” he asked, really anxious, knowing that I must depend on my own efforts.
“By writing,” I said.
“You’re not a writer,” he said. “You’ll starve.”
He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and I knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor the passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student, wanting to understand things quite regardless of how I could use that understanding if I reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting to know for the sake of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that dead scholar has always hung, more or less a weight, about my neck.
But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice of the modest kind of journalism on which I had decided. I counted no little on my habit of planning in advance what I was going to do, and I had a strong conviction that a plan of my own was worth more than any plan which was made for me. Again, if I could not write, I did have a certain sense of what mattered in a subject and a strong conviction that it was my sense of what mattered, and not somebody else’s, that would give my work freshness and strength if it was to have any.
Then there was my habit of steady, painstaking work—that ought to count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write. If I were to do so, could I do better than soak myself in French prose? I had read French steadily from my school days; I had done not a little translating of articles from the big reviews for _The Chautauquan_. If I could live with the language, might I not master something of what seemed to me its essential qualities, those which gave it both body and charm? These qualities were the soundness of structure, the way it held together, and the beautiful clarity of expression. At least I could try for them.
But when I tried to explain all this to my critical friends they continued frankly skeptical, indignant. It was my father and mother who backed me up, though I think they were both puzzled and fearful. “I don’t know what you can do, Ida,” my father said, “that’s for you. If you think you can do it, try it.” But in the end it took all the grit I had to go ahead.
Breaking up established relations is not easy. You begin by pulling up deeply rooted things, rooted in your heart; you abandon once cherished purposes. When I left _The Chautauquan_ I was no longer the eager and confident young woman who ten years before had started out for herself in Poland, Ohio; I was ten years older, and I was keenly conscious that I had in those ten years accumulated a fairly complete collection of shattered idols. That I could forget them as quickly and as completely as I did, I owe to the Paris of the nineties. I had scarcely passed her gates before I had fallen under her spell. At once I was experiencing all the amazing rejuvenation that comes from falling in love, whatever the object. It was not to be “See Paris and die,” as more than one friend had jeered. I knew with certainty it was to be “See Paris and live.”
6 I FALL IN LOVE
Falling in love with Paris at first sight—a _coup de feu_, it was—in no way dimmed the energy and the care with which on the day of my arrival I began to put into operation the cautious and laborious Plan for self-support I had brought along. It rather intensified it. As I must begin at the bottom to build up contacts with strangers on the other side of the ocean, and as there was but $150 in my pocket, there was no time to waste.
In the ten years I had been trying to support myself I had learned that the art of spending money is quite as important in a sound financial program as the art of earning it. I had been going on the theory, as I still am—practice is another story—that what I earned must cover my expenses and leave a surplus for emergencies and expansion. I had applied my principles to my small salary on _The Chautauquan_—never over $100 a month—well enough to get myself to Paris and have this little reserve to care for myself while I was proving or disproving that I could convince a few American editors whom I had never seen that my goods were worth buying.
The first step, obviously, in carrying out my program was cheap living. Luckily for me, two of my associates on _The Chautauquan_, excited by my undertaking, had decided to join me. One, Josephine Henderson, was a friend of Titusville days and like myself a graduate of Allegheny College. Jo, as we called her, was a handsome woman with a humorous look on life—healthy for me. I have never had a friend who judged my balloons more shrewdly or pricked them so painlessly. With us was a beautiful girl, Mary Henry, the daughter of one of the militant W.C.T.U. workers of that day, a neighbor and a friend as well as a co-worker of the great temperance leader Frances Willard. At the steamer a friend of Mary’s appeared, announcing that she, too, was going along. This meant four of us to share rent and food.
Back in Titusville I had picked on the Latin Quarter as at once the cheapest and the most practical place in Paris for one to live who must go on the cheap. Then, too, the University was in the Latin Quarter, and we were all planning to take lectures. I was even flirting with the idea that I might find time to take a degree.
So on arrival, putting our bags in the little room of the cheap hotel on the Right Bank to which we had gone, we headed at once for the Latin Quarter. I had picked on the neighborhood where I wanted to settle, near the Musée de Cluny. Not that I knew a thing about the Musée or what was in it; simply Cluny was one of the words that had always pulled me. This magic was largely responsible for our settling in the Rue du Sommerard almost next door to the spot in the city which save one was to have the greatest fascination as well as the deepest consolation for me.
But finding these quarters was no easy task. My friends gulped as I did at the stuffiness, the dinginess, the primitive sanitation, the obvious fleas, and the suspicion of other unmentionable pests in the places at which we looked. But settle I would, and so with groans they consented finally to the taking of two tiny bedrooms, a salon, along with the use of a kitchenette in one of the four apartments controlled by a Madame Bonnet. Our selection was not as unwise as it looked at the moment. Indeed, as it turned out, Madame Bonnet remained my landlady throughout the coming three years.
As quickly as we had found our lodging we established relations with the little shops in the neighborhood where one could for a few sous buy all the makings of a meal. You bought exactly what you needed and no more—a single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk, two cups apiece of café au lait, never having a drop left in the pot. Brought up as we had all been at loaded tables, the close calculation shocked us at first as something mean, stingy. “Why, the very scraps from a meal at home would feed us here.” And that was true—more shame to our bringing up. But we learned to buy as our thrifty neighbors did and to like it, and we learned how to order at the cheap and orderly little restaurants of the Quarter so as to get a sufficient meal of really excellent food for a franc (then nineteen cents or, as we carelessly reckoned it, twenty-one hundred centimes to a franc). Only on grand occasions did we allow ourselves two francs.