“I must not let the occasion of your being in town pass,” he wrote, “without acknowledging the gratuitous zeal with which you have done your best to further the circulation of one of the most malignant innuendos, in the way of scurrilous half-assertions, it has been my fate hitherto to meet.  Mr. Brown very properly sent on to me the pamphlet you had promptly posted to him.  Mr. Pennell, also, I find, you had carefully supplied with a copy—­and I have no doubt that, with the untiring energy of the ‘busy’ one, you have smartly placed the pretty work in the hands of many another before this.”

* * * * *

Mr. Keppel replied in kind, but Whistler never wrote him directly again.  Some business letter of the former requiring a reply, he summoned the house-porter, who wrote under dictation, beginning his crude epistle thus:  “Sir:—­Mr. Whistler, who is present, orders me to write as follows.”  Roiled by this beyond measure, Mr. Keppel resorted to verse to relieve his feelings, after which Whistler twice sent verbal messages through friends that if he ever saw him again he would kill him!

* * * * *

John M. Cauldwell, the United States Commissioner for the Department of Art at the Paris Exposition of 1900, sent a circular letter to American artists in the city announcing his arrival and making appointments to discuss the hanging of their work.  Whistler received one, asking him to call at “precisely four-thirty” on the afternoon of the following Thursday.

“I congratulate you,” he replied.  “Personally, I never have been able and never shall be able to be anywhere at precisely four-thirty.”

* * * * *

“Parbleu! This is a nice get-up to come and see me in, to be sure!” was his greeting to a newspaper writer who called to tap him on art, clad in a brown jacket, blue trousers, and decked with a red necktie.  “I must request you to leave this place instantly!  These scribblers, rag-smudges, incroyable!  Why, it is perfectly preposterous!  Did you ever hear such dissonance?  His tie is in G major, and I am painting this symphony in E minor.  I will have to start it again.  Take that roaring tie of yours off, you miserable wretch!  Remove it instantly!”

The visitor removed the “roar.”  “Thank goodness!” said Whistler.  “My sight is perfectly deaf!”

“I am so sorry, Mr. Whistler,” apologized the scribe.

“Whistler, sir?  Whistler?  That’s not my name!” he cried, in a highly wrought voice.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That is not my name.  I say, you don’t seem to know your own language.  W-h is pronounced Wh-h-h—­Wh-h-histler.  Bah!”

* * * * *

Max Beerbohm, the caricaturist, was rather clumsy with the Gallic tongue.  Whistler used to term it “Max Beerbohm’s Limburger French.”

The carefully cultivated and insistently displayed white lock played a part in many amusing incidents.  Sir Coutts Lindsay’s butler whispered to him excitedly one evening:  “There’s a gent downstairs says he’s come to dinner, wot’s forgot his necktie and stuck a feather in his ’air.”