FRENCH DRINKING.
The French are the most temperate people on the globe. Why this is so is
not easily explained, for it would be naturally supposed that so
excitable a people ought, in the very nature of things, to be
intemperate. They have no fixed code of morals, as the Saxon people
have, and they make no pretense of anything of the kind. They are
intemperate enough, heaven knows, in their politics, and apparently so,
to a stranger who does not understand French, in their conversation; but
in the matter of drinking they don't do enough of it to injure an
English baby, and an American is lost in amazement at the little
stimulant they get on with.
There are drinkers of the deadly absinthe, and occasionally indulgers in
the more immediate but less fearful brandy, but they are rare. The
absinthe drinkers are, as a rule, literary men, reformers, and the
long-haired visionaries who have a notion that in stimulants there is
inspiration, and the reckless ones who hold that the more they get out
of life in ten minutes the more they enjoy. They are the men who invite
the guillotine, and walk to the scaffold with great alacrity, and shout
"Vive La France," in the most picturesque and absurd manner. The devotee
of absinthe drinks it as a part of his social system, and generally dies
of softening of the brain at about thirty-five. He thinks he has a good
time, but he does not.
[Sidenote: THE WATER OF PARIS.]
There are low people who stupefy themselves with cheap brandy, but they
are not common. The Frenchman does not take kindly to the fierce
stimulant so common across the channel, and the amount of raw whisky
consumed each day by the average whisky-drinking American would fill him
with astonishment. He cannot comprehend it at all, and regards such a
man as a brute. Possibly he is not very much out of the way. I, for one,
quite agree with him.
And when it comes to wine he is very moderate. There is very little
alcohol in the red wine he drinks, so little that Tibbitts, after taking
a glass of it, remarked that he had known water in America that was more
exhilarating. And that wine, mild as it is, he dilutes fully one-half
with water, and sips it very slowly. In an evening he consumes not more
than a pint of it, getting out of that pint about as much stimulation as
is held in one drink of American sod-corn whisky.
But it suffices him. He sits and laughs and talks just as well over this
mild swash as the American does over his fiery, bowel-burning,
stomach-destroying, brain-shriveling liquor, and a great deal more, for
he enjoys himself, and the American does not. At least, so I have been
informed.
The use of wine is universal. It is in the bed-room in the morning, on
the table at twelve o'clock breakfast, it is taken at dinner at six
o'clock, and during the evening till bed-time.
The water of Paris is very bad; at least, so all Parisians tell you,
though I cannot see why it should be. I tasted it several times, and I
saw no especial difference between Paris water and any other, except, as
they do not use ice, it does get rather insipid in the Summer, when the
thermometer reaches ninety-five. But there is a superstition prevalent
that it is unhealthy, and hence it is never used as a beverage unless it
is qualified. The Frenchman drops a lump of sugar in it when he takes it
raw, though, as a rule, wine is used as a corrective.
Tibbitts had a bottle of cognac in his room to mix with the water. He
insisted that he thought too much of his mother and her happiness to
endanger his life by taking the water, bad as it was, clear, and the
wine of the country did not agree with him. He wanted to get back to
America, he did, that his friends might have the benefit of his foreign
experience.
An American in London remarked, that in all the time he spent in that
city he met but one cordial Englishman, and he was a Dublin man. So with
me in Paris. In all the time I spent there I saw very few drunken
Frenchmen, and they were to a man from either London or New York, and I
made very thorough search. The sobriety of the people is something
wonderful.
[Illustration: THE CORRECTIVE USED BY MR. TIBBITTS.]
I saw plenty of men exhilarated; I heard more laughter than I ever heard
in twice the time in any other country; but drunkenness, the drunkenness
that maunders, and is idiotic, or the drunkenness that tends to
destroying property or life, I saw none of. In the Jardin Mabille, where
in England or America drunkenness would be co-extensive with the
attendance, at the students' balls, at the Chateau Rouge or at even the
less pretentious places, there was hilarity in plenty, but no vinous or
spirituous excess. The same condition of affairs obtains in Switzerland
and Germany. I don't want any man to say this is not so, for I assert
that drunkenness is comparatively unknown in the two countries where
wine and beer are the staple drinks of the people of all classes. I am
aware that the same statement has been made hundreds of times before and
disputed a thousand times, and therefore I was at pains to get at the
truth of the matter.
The use of wine in France is universal. It is drank by the commonest
laborer and the most aristocratic citizen. You go nowhere that you do
not see it--it is everywhere present, and is the one drink of the
country. The fruitful vineyards of France make it almost as cheap as
water, and the pampered wives and daughters of the ancient nobility who
bathed in wine were not guilty of a very frightful extravagance after
all.
[Sidenote: THE MILD SWASH.]
What a Frenchman satisfies his appetite with for drink is
[Illustration: THE COCO SELLER.]
something astonishing. The middle-aged man in America who would
deliberately ask for the root-beer of his youth would be laughed at as a
milk-sop. In America even the lemonade drinker is not looked upon with
favor, although that is admissible.
But in Paris you shall see a sturdy man walking the streets with an
immense can upon his back with cups attached, and men of all ages stop
him. He draws from the can a cup full of a liquid. He drinks it and pays
for it. What do you suppose this liquid is? Merely a decoction of herbs
and Spanish licorice, and coco, as harmless as mother's milk, and a
great deal more insipid. Of mother's milk I cannot speak, for it is a
long time since I have tasted it. I wish to heaven that the gap between
the present and the mother's milk period were less. But the Frenchman
patronizes the coco seller, and his Chinese pagoda arrangement is always
well patronized.
There is no drunkenness. It may be that the Frenchman does not want to
get drunk, but I am convinced that the nature of the regular beverage of
the country is to be credited with this delightful exemption from the
great curse that devastates other countries. I am compelled to this
conclusion, for I have noticed that the French in America and England,
where spirituous liquors are the rule, come to be as frightful drunkards
as anybody; and, per contra, I know scores of Americans in Paris who at
home drank whisky habitually, and in consequence rarely went to bed
sober--so seldom that when it did happen their wives needed an
introduction to them--I know scores of these men here who have fallen
into the French habit, and drink nothing but wine, and are as sober as
the French themselves. They are getting to be so good that some of them
have felt justified in taking on other sins to keep them down to the
true American average. They have discovered that they can get on very
well with wine, and do not crave the fiery liquid they considered so
necessary at home.
[Sidenote: A WOEFUL LACK OF MORAL.]
I made a point of investigating this very thoroughly, for in days past I
have seen some drunkenness and the effects thereof. I have seen the dead
bodies of women murdered by drunken husbands; I have seen the best men
in America go down to disgraceful graves; I have seen fortunes wrecked,
prospects blighted; and I have perused a great many pages of statistics.
There are crimes on the calendar not resulting from rum, but, were rum
eliminated, the catalogue would be so reduced as to make it hardly worth
the compiling. Directly or indirectly, rum is chargeable with a good
ninety per cent, of the woes that afflict our country.
The moral to all this is--but come to think of it I am not here to point
out morals. I have made a true statement, and each one may extract from
it any moral he chooses. This is all there is of it: The French drink
all the wine they want, and the French are a sober people. It hasn't
much to do with foreign travel; but to see thousands of men sitting and
drinking without a fight, an angry word, a broken head, or a black eye,
was so delightful an experience that I felt it must go upon paper.