This is the love-story of René Beauregard and O Maru San. It does not illustrate the cynical conceit of a French dandy, æsthetically explaining and profaning love to amuse an indelicate public, nor does it demonstrate the folly of mixed marriages, in which nuptial ceremonies, high-flown speeches, adultery, and suicide are hypocritically served up to suit the British palate. It is the straightforward story of an ordinary attachment in the Far East between two rather bad and rather good friends of mine, whose notions of “good” and “bad” as translated into deeds were lax, but, in their eyes and in that region, not absolutely damnable.
M. René Beauregard had been in Tōkyō about a fortnight, when I found him one evening at a print-seller’s shop in the Ginza, surrounded by an inquisitive crowd of admirers and much embarrassed by inability to declare his meaning in Japanese. He was accompanied by an hotel-boy, who, knowing no French words but _Oui_, _monsieur_, and _Bon jour_, recognised me with relief and solicited assistance. I was able to extricate him from the curiosity of the bystanders and the plurality of prices to our mutual satisfaction, for we returned together to the Métropole, the richer by some rare prints and the promise of congenial companionship. Literary reminiscence furnished many bonds of common interest. We had witnessed, it seemed, simultaneously several incidents which marked the waning of old and the rising of new constellations in the firmament of French art. The _première_ of Rodenbach’s “Le Voile” and Rostand’s “Les Romanesques,” the funeral of Paul Verlaine, the students’ repudiation of Brunetière and acclamation of Zola at the Sorbonne, the banquets to Puvis de Chavannes and Emile Verhaeren, had strangely enough united us in the same company without opportunity of introduction. But community of tastes counts for less in friendship than charm of character. What particularly pleased me in M. Beauregard was a modesty, not too common among his compatriots, and a chivalry towards women which the Quartier Latin had failed to destroy. I had known so many _petits féroces_ (as Daudet called them), vaunting their talents and their _bonnes fortunes_, for whom a mistress ranked somewhere between an advertisement and an absinthe. He was not an _arriviste_, then; but neither was he a worker. Too self-critical to write badly, too lazy to write well, he ended by not writing at all, and, as his means permitted him to play the _rôle_ of spectator, he followed various movements in art and letters with amiable, intelligent passivity. He had come to Japan with the object of studying on the spot the Kōrin and Shijō schools of painting, but found his progress much hindered by ignorance of the language, which he had not seriously tried to learn. As we were both anxious to see the _Matushima_, or Pine Islands, perhaps the most lovely of the _Sankei_, or Three Views, which the Japanese celebrate above all others, it was resolved to travel there together in search of grammar and scenery.