Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting
pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings
if not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of
letters. It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that
the melancholy finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking
chapters in literary history.
His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them
relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the
Countess X to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess
was carrying a basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted,
against the protest of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and
playing; and of how they came out again, the eyes of the Countess
streaming with tears, and of her saying, as they drove away, “Never,
never forget, my child, as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin
play.” It was in one of the lubberly houses of the Place Vendôme that
the poet of the keyboard died a few days later. Just around the corner,
in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. A brass plate marks
the house.
May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous “Ballad of
Bouillabaisse,” which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud,
and part of which I may at length take to myself:
_“Ah me, how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that’s
gone, When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting In this same place—but not
alone— A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked
fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me, There’s no one now
to share my cup.”_
The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn
to discriminate?
V
It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in
the memorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian’s Coney
Island. I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian
sojourn just before the outbreak of the World War with a beloved family
party in the joyous old Common. There is none like it in the world,
uniting the urban to the rural with such surpassing grace as
perpetually to convey a double sensation of pleasure; primal in its
simplicity, superb in its setting; in the variety and brilliancy of the
life which, upon sunny afternoons, takes possession of it and makes it
a cross between a parade and a paradise.
There was a time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might
be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the
ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his
shady retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan,
bedizened with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress;
the favorites of the Tuileries, the Comédie Française, the Opera, the
Jardin Mabille, forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided
frivolity from the Port de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circling round
La Bagatelle and ranging about the Cafe Cascade, a human tiara of
diamonds, a moving bouquet of laces and rubies, of silks and satins and
emeralds and sapphires. Those were the days when the Due de Morny, half
if not full brother of the Emperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and
Cora Pearl, a clever and not at all good-looking Irish girl gone wrong,
reigned as Queen of the Demimonde.
All this went by the board years ago. Everywhere, more or less,
electricity has obliterated distinctions of rank and wealth. It has
circumvented lovers and annihilated romance. The Republic ousted the
bogus nobility. The subways and the tram cars connect the Bois de
Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes so closely that the poorest may make
himself at home in either or both.
The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a very leveller. The
crowd recognizes nobody amid the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and
taxicabs, each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration of
personalities effaces the identity alike of the statesman and the
artist, the savant and the cyprian. No six-inch rules hedge the shade
of the trees and limit the glory of the grass. The _ouvrier_ can bring
his brood and his basket and have his picnic where he pleases. The
pastry cook and his chére amie, the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon
by the lake-side as long as the moonlight lasts, and longer if they
list, with never a gendarme to say them nay, or a rude voice out of the
depths hoarsely to declaim, “allez!” The Bois de Boulogne is literally
and absolutely a playground, the playground of the people, and this
last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a million of Parisians were
making it their own.
Half of these encircled the Longchamps racecourse. The other half were
shared by the boats upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the
summer sky and the cafés and the restaurants with which the Bois
abounds. Our party, having exhausted the humors of the drive, repaired
to Pré Catalan. Aside from the “two old brides” who are always in
evidence on such occasions, there was a veritable “young couple,”
exceedingly pretty to look at, and delightfully in love! That sort of
thing is not so uncommon in Paris as cynics affect to think.
If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, that “gambling is the
recreation of gentlemen and the passion of fools,” it is equally true
that love is a game where every player wins if he sticks to it and is
loyal to it. Just as credit is the foundation of business is love both
the asset and the trade-mark of happiness. To see it is to believe it,
and—though a little cash in hand is needful to both—where either is
wanting, look out for sheriffs and scandals.
Pré Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a pretty kiosk for the sale
of milk, has latterly had a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, not
counting the groves which I have seen grow up about it thickly dotted
with booths and tables, where some thousands more may regale
themselves. That Sunday it was never so glowing with animation and
color. As it makes one happy to see others happy it makes one adore his
own land to witness that which makes other lands great.
I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an American; perhaps it is
a stretch of words to say I love Paris at all. I used to love to go
there and to behold the majesty of France. I have always liked to mark
the startling contrasts of light and shade. I have always known what
all the world now knows, that beneath the gayety of the French there
burns a patriotic and consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a
fine spirit of self-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive
spirit of freedom. In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files
deep upon the Rue St. Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women
and old men with their little all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings
to take up the tribute required by Bismarck to rid the soil of the
detested German. They did it. Alone they did it—the French people—the
hard-working, frugal, loyal commonalty of France—without asking the
loan of a sou from the world outside.