Still the Gay Capital of France—Its Environs—Walewska and De
Morny—Thackeray in Paris—A _Pension_ Adventure
I
Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breeds
equally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has
witnessed so much of the drama of life—of the romantic and
picturesque—as the age we live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and
Waterloo were not more delightfully tragic than the years between
Serajevo and Senlis.
The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains
the interest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all
roads led to Rome. In Dickens’ day “a tale of two cities” could only
mean London and Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date
the title would have now to read “three,” or even “four,” cities, New
York and Chicago putting in their claims for mundane recognition.
I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent student
of history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my
history and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when
the hum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of
the Beau Quartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of
what was once the Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have
enabled me to learn many things not commonly known, among them that
Paris is the most orderly and moral city in the world, except when, on
rare and brief occasions, it has been stirred to its depths.
I have crossed the ocean many times—have lived, not sojourned, on the
banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again—do
not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning—I may be
forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I
not say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance
it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take
a turn with a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear
sir, or madame, or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that
“other life,” whereof we remember so little that we cannot recall who
we were, or what name we went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse
in dreams, or a “hunch” from the world of spirits, or spirts-and-water,
which makes us fancy we might have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra—as
maybe we were!—or at least Joan of Arc, or Jean Valjean!