First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile gay capital of
France. It was gayest when the Duke de Morny flourished as King of the
Bourse. He was reputed the Emperor’s natural half-brother. The
breakdown of the Mexican adventure, which was mostly his, contributed
not a little to the final Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and
disappointment, and under the pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet
celebrated him in “The Nabob.”
De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had
built. Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel
de Ville and the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place
Vendôme; but later the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of
the unquenchable spirit of the irrepressible French.
Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian. Once, when
wandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets,
one of the touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary
stranger being a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to
go about his business. “This is my business,” he impudently answered.
“Get away, I tell you!” I thundered, “I am a Parisian myself!”
He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and
with a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, “Well,
you don’t look it,” and scampered off.
Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the
best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart
of Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the
metropolis of Christendom before the Midi was a region—Paris yet a
village, and Rome struggling out of the debris of the ages—with Arles
and Nîmes, and, above all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin,
for next-door neighbors. They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon
ever most caught my fancy, for there the nights seem peopled with the
ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there on festal mornings the
spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk abroad, the ramparts, which bade
defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen hordes, now giving shelter to
bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with legend
_“...tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance and Provençal song
and sun-burnt mirth.”_
Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the
picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the
times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and
have a look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is
directly on the way.
The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of
introduction in the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in
the city, the other requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of
these witnesses the whole process of fabrication from the reeling of
threads to the finishing of dress goods, and the loom painting of
pictures. It is most interesting of course, the painstaking its most
obvious feature, the individual weaver living with his family upon a
wage representing the cost of the barest necessities of life. Again,
and ever and ever again, the inequalities of fortune! Where will it
end?
The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the
survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the “fittest.”
Ten thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make
room for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed
that in some ways the conditions were improved.
Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent
men struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope
beyond! What is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe
were divided per capita, how long would it remain out of the clutches
of the Napoleons of finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately
their Waterloo, little to the profit of the poor who spin and delve,
who fight and die, in the Grand Army of the Wretched!