[Illustration: "PARIS HAD TAKEN OFF HER MOURNING"]
ABOUT PARIS
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
ILLUSTRATED
BY
CHARLES DANA GIBSON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1895
BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
OUR ENGLISH COUSINS. Illustrated. Post 8vo,
Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.
THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN.
Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.
THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW. Illustrated.
Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.
THE EXILES, AND OTHER STORIES. Illustrated.
Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50.
VAN BIBBER, AND OTHERS. Illustrated. Post
8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 00; Paper, 60 cents.
=Published by= HARPER & BROTHERS, =New York=.
Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.
_All rights reserved._
TO
PAUL BOURGET
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE STREETS OF PARIS 1
II. THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS--NIGHT 47
III. PARIS IN MOURNING 98
IV. THE GRAND PRIX AND OTHER PRIZES 138
V. AMERICANS IN PARIS 177
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"PARIS HAD TAKEN OFF HER MOURNING" _Frontispiece_
"THE CONCIERGE OF EACH HOUSE STOOD CONTINUALLY
AT THE FRONT DOOR" 3
"SHE LOOKED DOWN UPON OUR STREET" 9
"WITH A LONG LOAF OF BREAD" 15
"TES DANS LA RUE, VA, T'ES CHEZ TOI" 19
"THE PARTY PROMPTLY BROKE UP" 25
"AND TRANSFORM LONG-HAIRED STUDENTS INTO MEMBERS
OF THE INSTITUTE" 31
INSIDE COLUMBIN'S 37
"AND YOU BELIEVE THE GUIDES" 41
THE CHÂTEAU ROUGE 59
AT BRUANT'S 65
AT THE BLACK CAT 71
A CAFÉ CHANTANT 77
ON MONTMARTRE 83
SOME YOUNG PEOPLE OF MONTMARTRE 89
AT THE MOULIN ROUGE 93
AT THE JARDIN DE PARIS 103
PORTRAITS OF CARNOT IN HEAVY BLACK 109
"TO BRING A QUEEN BACK TO PARIS" 115
"THE GIRL WHO REPRESENTED ALSACE" 131
THE RESTAURANT AMONG THE TREES 143
INTERESTED IN THE WINNER 149
"AROUND SOME STATELY DIGNITARY" 159
"THE MAN THAT BROKE THE BANK AT MONTE CARLO" 167
"LISTENING FOR THE VOICE TO SPEAK HIS NAME ONCE
MORE" 179
"STANDING ON THEIR FEET FOR HOURS AT A TIME" 187
"THE AMERICAN COLONY IS NOT WICKED" 195
WHAT MIGHT SOME TIME HAPPEN IF THESE WERE LOVE-MATCHES 203
"'I HAVE ONE PICTURE IN THE SALON'" 215
ABOUT PARIS
I
THE STREETS OF PARIS
The street that I knew best in Paris was an unimportant street, and
one into which important people seldom came, and then only to pass on
through it to the Rue de Rivoli, which ran parallel with it, or to the
Rue Castiglione, which cut it evenly in two. It was to them only the
shortest distance between two points, for the sidewalks of this street
were not sprinkled with damp sawdust and set out with marble-topped
tables under red awnings, nor were there the mirrors and windows of
jewellers and milliners along its course to make one turn and look.
It was interesting only to those people who lived upon it, and to us
perhaps only for that reason. If you judged it by the circumstance
that we all spent our time in hanging out of the windows, and that the
concierge of each house stood continually at the front door, you would
suppose it to be a most interesting thoroughfare, in which things were
always happening. What did happen was not interesting to the outsider,
and you had to live in it some time before you could appreciate the
true value of the street. With one exception. This was the great
distinction of our street, and one of which we were very proud. A poet
had lived in his way, and loved in his way, in one of the houses, and
had died there. You could read the simple, unromantic record of this in
big black letters on a tablet placed evenly between the two windows of
the entresol. It gave a distinguished air to that house, and rendered
it different from all of the others, as a Legion of Honor on the breast
of a French soldier makes him conspicuous amongst his fellows.
ALFRED DE MUSSET
né à Paris
Le 11 Décembre 1810
est mort
dans cette maison
Le 2 Mai 1857
[Illustration: "THE CONCIERGE OF EACH HOUSE STOOD
CONTINUALLY AT THE FRONT DOOR"]
We were all pleased when people stopped and read this inscription. We
took it as a tribute to the importance of our street, and we felt a
proprietary interest in that tablet and in that house, as though this
neighborly association with genius was something to our individual
credit.
We had other distinguished people in our street, but they were very
much alive, and their tablets were colored ones drawn by Chéret, and
pasted up all over Paris in endless repetition; and though their
celebrity may not live as long as has the poet's, while they are living
they seem to enjoy life as fully as he did, and to get out of the
present all that the present has to give.
The one in which we all took the most interest lived just across the
street from me, and by looking up a little you could see her looking
out of her window, with her thick, heavy black hair bound in bandeaux
across her forehead, and a great diamond horseshoe pinned at her
throat, and with just a touch of white powder showing on her nose and
cheeks. She looked as though she should have lived by rights in the
Faubourg St.-Germain, and she used to smile down rather kindly upon
the street with a haughty, tolerant look, as if it amused her by its
simplicity and idleness, and by the quietness, which only the cries
of the children or of the hucksters, or the cracking at times of a
coachman's whip, ever broke. She looked very well then, but it was in
the morning that the street saw her at her best. For it was then that
she went out to ride in the Bois in her Whitechapel cart, and as she
never awoke in time, apparently, we had the satisfaction of watching
the pony and the tiger and cart for an hour or two until she came. It
was a brown basket-cart, and the tiger used to walk around it many
times to see that it had not changed in any particular since he had
examined it three minutes before, and the air with which he did this
gave us an excellent idea of the responsibility of his position. So
that people passing stopped and looked too--bakers' boys in white linen
caps and with baskets on their arms, and commissionnaires in cocked
hats and portfolios chained to their persons, and gentlemen freshly
made up for the morning, with waxed mustaches and flat-brimmed high
hats, and little girls with plaits, and little boys with bare legs; and
all of us in-doors, as soon as we heard the pony stamp his sharp hoofs
on the asphalt, would drop books or razors or brooms or mops and wait
patiently at the window until she came.
When she came she wore a black habit with fresh white gloves, holding
her skirt and crop in one hand, and the crowd would separate on either
side of her. She did not see the crowd. She was used to crowds, and she
would pat the pony's head or rub his ears with the fresh kid gloves,
and tighten the buckle or shift a strap with an air quite as knowing
as the tiger's, but not quite so serious. Then she would wrap the
lap-robe about her, and her maid would take her place at her side with
the spaniel in her arms, and she would give the pony the full length
of the lash, and he would go off like a hound out of the leash. They
always reached the corner before the tiger was able to overtake them,
and I believe it was the hope of seeing him some morning left behind
forever which led to the general interest in their departure. And when
they had gone, the crowd would look at the empty place in the street,
and at each other, and up at us in the windows, and then separate,
and the street would grow quiet again. One could see her again later,
if one wished, in the evening, riding a great horse around the ring,
in another habit, but with the same haughty smile; and as the horse
reared on his hind-legs, and kicked and plunged as though he would
fall back on her, she would smile at him as she did on the children in
our street, with the same unconcerned, amused look that she would have
given to a kitten playing with its tail.
The houses on our street had tall yellow fronts with gray slate roofs,
and roof-gardens of flowers and palms in pots. Some of the houses had
iron balconies, from which the women leaned and talked across the
street to one another in purring nasal voices, with a great rolling
of the r's and an occasional disdainful movement of the shoulders.
When any other than a French woman shrugs her shoulders she moves the
whole upper part of her body, from the hips up; but the French woman's
shoulders and arms are all that change when she makes that ineffable
gesture that we have settled upon as the characteristic one of her
nation.
[Illustration: "SHE LOOKED DOWN UPON OUR STREET"]
In a street of like respectability to ours in London or New York those
who lived on it would know as little of their next-door neighbor as
of a citizen at another end of the town. The house fronts would tell
nothing to the outside world; they would frown upon each other like
family tombs in a cemetery; but in this street of Paris the people
lived in it, or on the balconies, or at the windows. We knew what
they were going to have for dinner, because we could see them
carrying the uncooked portions of it from the restaurant at the corner,
with a long loaf of bread under one arm and a single egg in the other
hand; and when some one gave a fête we knew of it by the rows of
bottles on the ledge of the window and the jellies set out to cool
on the balcony. We were all interested in the efforts of the stout
gentleman in the short blue smoking-jacket who taught his parrot to
call to the coachman of each passing fiacre; he did this every night
after dinner, with his cigarette in his mouth, and with great patience
and good-nature. We took a common pride also in the flower-garden of
the young people on the seventh floor, and in their arrangement of
strings upon which the vines were to grow, and in the lines of roses,
which dropped their petals whenever the wind blew, upon the head of the
concierge, so that she would look up and shake her head at them, and
then go inside and get a broom and sweep the leaves carefully away.
When any one in our street went off in his best clothes in a fiacre we
looked after him with envy, and yet with a certain pride that we lived
with such fortunate people, who were evidently much sought after in
the fashionable world; and when a musician or a blind man broke the
silence of our street with his music or his calls, we vied with one
another in throwing him coppers--not on his account at all, but because
we wished to stand well in the opinion of our neighbors. It was like
camping out on two sides of a valley where every one could look over
into the other's tent.
There was a young couple near the corner, who, I think, had but lately
married, and every evening she used to watch for him in a fresh gown
for a half-hour or so before he came. During the day she wore a very
plain gown, and her eyes wandered everywhere; but during that half-hour
before he came she never changed her position nor relaxed her vigil.
And it made us all quite uncomfortable, and we could not give our
attention to anything else until he had turned the corner and waved
his hand, and she had answered him with a start and a little shrug of
content. After dinner they appeared together, and he would put his arm
around her waist, with that refreshing disregard for the world that
French lovers have, and they would smile down upon us in a very happy
and superior manner, or up at the sun as it sank a brilliant red at
the end of our street, with the hundreds of chimney-pots looking like
black musical notes against it. There was also a very interesting old
lady in the house that blocked the end of our street, a very fat and
masculine old lady in a loose white wrapper, who spent all of her time
rearranging her plants and flowers, and kept up an amiable rivalry with
the people in the balconies above and below her in the abundance and
verdure of her garden. It was a very pleasant competition for the rest
of us, as it hung that end of the street with a curtain of living green.
[Illustration: "WITH A LONG LOAF OF BREAD"]
For a little time there was a young girl who used to sit upon the
balcony whenever the sun was brightest and the air not too chill; but
she took no interest in the street, for she knew nothing of it except
its noises. She lay always in an invalid's chair, looking up at the
sky and the roof-line above, and with her profile against the gray
wall. During the day a nurse in a white cap sat with her; but after
dinner a stout, jaunty man of middle age came back from his club or
his bureau, and took the place beside her until it grew dark, when he
and the nurse would lift her in-doors again, and he would take his
hat and go off to the boulevards, I suppose, to cheer himself a bit.
It did not last long, for one day I came home to find them taking
down a black-and-silver curtain from the front of the house, and the
concierge said that the girl had been buried, and that her father was
now quite alone. For the first week after that he did not go to the
boulevards, but used to sit out on the balcony until late into the
evening, with the night about him, so that we would not have known he
was there save for the light of his cigar burning in the darkness.
The step from our street to the boulevards is a much longer one in
the imagination than in actual distance. Our street, after all, was
only typical of thousands of other Parisian streets, and when you have
explained it you have described miles after miles of other streets like
it. But there is nothing just like the boulevards. If you should wish
to sit at the exact centre of the world and to watch it revolve around
you, you have only to take your place at that corner table of the Café
de la Paix which juts the farthest out into the Avenue de l'Opéra
and the Boulevard Capucines. This table is the apex of all the other
tables. It turns the tides of pedestrians on the broad sidewalks of
both the great thoroughfares, and it is geographically situated exactly
under the "de la" of the "Café de la Paix," painted in red letters
on the awning over your head. From this admirable position you can
sweep the square in front of the Opera-house, the boulevard itself,
and the three great streets running into it from the river. People
move obligingly around and up and down and across these, and if you
sit there long enough you will see every one worth seeing in the known
world.
There is a large class of Parisians whose knowledge of that city is
limited to the boulevards. They neither know nor care to know of
any other part; we read about them a great deal, of them and their
witticisms and café politics; and what "the boulevards" think of this
or that is as seriously quoted as what "a gentleman very near the
President," or "a diplomat whose name I am requested not to give, but
who is in a position to know whereof he speaks," cares to say of public
matters at home. For my part, I should think an existence limited to
two sidewalks would be somewhat sad, especially if it were continued
into the middle age, which all boulevardiers seem to have already
attained. It does not strike one as a difficult school to enter, or
as one for which there is any long apprenticeship. You have only to
sit for an hour every evening under the "de la," and you will find
that you know by sight half the faces of the men who pass you, who
come up suddenly out of the night and disappear again, like slides in
a stereopticon, or whom you find next you when you take your place,
and whom you leave behind, still sipping from the half-empty glasses
ordered three hours before you came.
The man who goes to Paris for a summer must be a very misanthropic
and churlish individual if he tires of the boulevards in that short
period. There is no place so amusing for the stranger between the
hours of six and seven and eleven and one as these same boulevards;
but to the Parisian what a bore it must become! That is, what a bore
it would become to any one save a Parisian! To have the same fat man
with the sombrero and the waxed mustache snap patent match-boxes in
your face day after day and night after night, and to have "Carnot at
Longchamps" taking off his hat and putting it on again held out for
your inspection for weeks, and to seek the same insipid silly faces
of boys with broad velvet collars and stocks, which they believe are
worn by Englishmen, and the same pompous gentlemen who cut their white
goatees as do military men of the Second Empire, and who hope that the
ruddiness of their cheeks, which is due to the wines of Burgundy, will
be attributed to the suns of Tunis and Algiers. And the same women,
the one with the mustache and the younger one with the black curl, and
the hundreds of others, silent and panther-like, and growing obviously
more ugly as the night grows later and the streets more deserted. If
any one aspires to be known among such as these, his aspirations are
easily gratified. He can have his heart's desire; he need only walk the
boulevards for a week, and he will be recognized as a boulevardier. It
is a cheap notoriety, purchased at the expense of the easy exercise of
walking, and the cost of some few glasses of "bock," with a few cents
to the waiter. There is much excuse for the visitor; he is really to be
envied; it is all new and strange and absurd to him; but what an old,
old story it must be to the boulevardier!
[Illustration: "TES DANS LA RUE, VA, T'ES CHEZ TOI"]
The visitor, perhaps, has never sat out-of-doors before and taken his
ease on the sidewalk. Yet it seems a perfectly natural thing to do,
until he imagines himself doing the same thing at home. There was a
party of men and women from New York sitting in front of the Café de
la Paix one night after the opera, and enjoying themselves very much,
until one of them suggested their doing the same thing the next month
at home. "We will all take chairs," he said, "and sit at the corner of
Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway at twelve o'clock at night and drink
bock-bier," and the idea was so impossible that the party promptly
broke up and went to their hotels.
Of course the visitor in Paris misses a great deal that the true
boulevardier enjoys through not knowing or understanding all that he
sees. But, on the other hand, he has an advantage in being able to
imagine that he is surrounded by all the famous journalists and poets
and noted duellists; and every clerk with a portfolio becomes a Deputy,
and every powdered and auburn-haired woman who passes in an open fiacre
is a celebrated actress of the Comédie Française. He can distribute
titles as freely as the Papal court, and transform long-haired students
into members of the Institute, and promote the boys of the Polytechnic
School, in their holiday cocked hats and play-swords, into lieutenants
and captains of the regular army. He believes that the ill-looking
individual in rags who shows such apparent fear of the policeman on
the corner really has forbidden prints and books to sell, and that
the guides who hover about like vultures looking for a fresh victim
have it in their power to show him things to which they only hold the
key--things which any Frenchman could tell him he could see at his own
home if he has the taste for such sights.
The best of the boulevards is that the people sitting on their
sidewalks, and the heavy green trees, and the bare heads of so many
of the women, make one feel how much out-of-doors he is, as no other
street or city does, and what a folly it is to waste time within walls.
I do not think we appreciate how much we owe to the women in Paris who
go without bonnets. They give the city so homelike and friendly an
air, as though every woman knew every other woman so well that she did
not mind running across the street to gossip with her neighbor without
the formality of a head-covering. And it really seems strange that the
prettiest bonnets should come from the city where the women of the
poorer classes have shown how very pretty a woman of any class can look
without any bonnet at all.
The enduring nature of the boulevards impresses one who sees them at
different hours as much as does their life and gayety at every hour.
You sometimes think surely to-morrow they will rest, and the cafés
will be closed, and the long passing stream of cabs and omnibuses
will stop, and the asphalt street will be permitted to rest from its
burden. You may think this at night, but when you turn up again at nine
the next morning you will find it all just as you left it at one the
same morning. The same waiters, the same rush of carriages, the same
ponderous omnibuses with fine straining white horses, the flowers in
the booths, and the newspapers neatly piled round the colored kiosks.
[Illustration: "THE PARTY PROMPTLY BROKE UP"]
The Champs Élysées is hardly a street, but as a thoroughfare it is
the most remarkable in the world. It is a much better show than are
the boulevards. The place for which you pay to enter is generally
more interesting than the place to which admittance is free, and any
one can walk along the boulevards, but to ride in the Champs Élysées
you must pay something, even if you take your fiacre by the hour.
Some Parisians regret that the Avenue des Champs Élysées should be so
cheapened that it is not reserved for carriages hired by the month,
and not by the course, and that omnibuses and hired cabs are not kept
out of it, as they are kept out of Hyde Park. But should this rule
obtain the Avenue des Champs Élysées would lose the most amusing of
its features. It would shut out the young married couples and their
families and friends in their gala clothes, which look strangely
unfamiliar in the sunlight, and make you think that the wearers have
been up all night; and the hundreds of girls in pairs from the Jardin
de Paris, who have halved the expense of a fiacre, but who cannot yet
afford a brougham; and the English tourists dressed in flannel shirts
and hunting-caps and knickerbockers, exactly as though they were
penetrating the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Syria, and
as unashamed of their provincialism as the young marquis who passes on
his dog-cart is unashamed of having placed the girl with him on his
right hand instead of his left, though by so doing he tells every one
who passes who and what she is. It would shut out the omnibuses, with
the rows of spectators on their tops, who lean on their knees and look
down into the carriages below, and point out the prettiest gowns and
faces; and it would exclude the market-wagons laden with huge piles
of yellow carrots and purple radishes, with a woman driving on the
box-seat, and a dog chained beside her. There is no other place in the
world, unless it be Piccadilly at five o'clock in the afternoon, where
so many breeds of horses trot side by side, where the chains of the
baron banker and the cracking whip of a drunken cabman and the horn
of some American millionaire's four-in-hand all sound at the same
time. To be known is easy in the boulevards, but it is a distinction
in the Avenue des Champs Élysées--a distinction which costs much
money and which lasts an hour. Sometimes it is gained by liveries and
trappings and a large red rosette in the button-hole, or by driving
the same coach at the same hour at the same rate of speed throughout
the season, or by wearing a fez, or by sending two sais ahead of your
cart to make a way for it, or by a beautiful face and a thoroughbred
pug on a cushion at your side, although this last mode is not so easy,
as there are many pretty faces and many softly cushioned victorias
and innumerable pug-dogs, and when the prevailing color for the hair
happens to be red--as it was last summer--the chance of gaining any
individuality becomes exceedingly difficult. When all of these people
meet in the afternoon on their way to and from the Bois, there is no
better entertainment of the sort in the world, and the avenue grows
much too short, and the hours before dinner even shorter. There are
women in light billowy toilets, with elbows squared and whip in hand,
fearlessly driving great English horses from the top of a mail-phaeton,
while a frightened little English groom clutches at the rail and peers
over their shoulder to grasp the reins if need be, or to jump if he
must. And there are narrow-chested corseted and padded young Frenchmen
in white kid gloves, who hold one rein in each hand as little girls
hold a skipping-rope, and who imagine they are so like Englishmen
that no one can distinguish them even by their accent. There are fat
Hebrew bankers and their equally fat sons in open victorias, who,
lacking the spirit of the Frenchmen, who at least attempt to drive
themselves, recline consciously on cushions, like the poodles in the
victorias of the ladies with the red hair. There are also visiting
princes from India or pashas from Egypt; or diplomats of the last
Spanish-American republic, as dark as the negroes of Sixth Avenue, but
with magnificent liveries and clanking chains; the nabobs of Haiti, of
Algiers and Tunis, and with these the beautiful Spanish-looking woman
from South America, the wives of the _rastaqouères_; and mixed with these
is the long string of bookmakers and sporting men coming back from
the races at Longchamps or Auteuil, red-faced and hot and dusty, with
glasses strapped around them, and the badges still flying from their
button-holes. There are three rows of carriages down and three of
carriages up, and if you look from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries
you see a broken mass of glittering carriage-tops and lace parasols,
and what looks like the flashing of thousands of mirrors as the setting
sun strikes on the glass of the lamps and windows and on the lacquered
harness and polished mountings. Whether you view this procession from
the rows of green iron seats on either side or as a part of it, you
must feel lifted up by its movement and color and the infinite variety
of its changes. A man might live in the Champs Élysées for a week or a
month, seeing no more of Paris than he finds under its beautiful trees
or on its broad thoroughfare, and be so well content with that much of
the city as to prefer it to all other cities.
There was a little fat man in his shirt sleeves one morning in front of
the Theatre of the Republic, which, as everybody knows, stands under
the trees in the Champs Élysées, on the Rue Matignon, hanging a new
curtain, and the fat man, as the proprietor and manager, was naturally
anxious. Two small boys with their bare legs, and leather belts about
their smocks, and a nurse with broad blue ribbons down her back, and
myself looked our admiration from the outside of the roped enclosure.
The orchestra had laid down its fiddle, and was helping the man who
takes the twenty centimes to adjust the square yard of canvas. The
proprietor placed his fat fingers on the small of his back and threw
his head to one side and shut one eye. We waited breathlessly for his
opinion. He took two steps backward from the ten-centime seats, and
studied the effect of the curtain from that distance, with his chin
thrown up and his arms folded severely. We suggested that it was an
improvement on the old curtain, and one that would be sure to catch the
passer's eye.
[Illustration: "AND TRANSFORM LONG-HAIRED STUDENTS INTO MEMBERS OF THE
INSTITUTE"]
"Possibly," the proprietor said, indulgently, and then wiped his brow
and shook his head. He told us we had little idea how great were the
trials of an _impresario_ of an open-air theatre in the Champs Élysées.
What with the rent and the cost of the costumes and the employment
of three assistants--one to work the marionettes, and one to take up
the money, and one to play in the orchestra--expenses did run up. Of
course there was madame, his wife, who made costumes herself better
than those that could be bought at the regular costumers', and that was
a saving; and then she also helped in working the figures when there
were more than two on the scene at once, but this was hard upon her,
as she was stout, and the heat at the top of the tin-roofed theatre
up among the dusty flies was trying. And then, I suggested, there was
much competition. The proprietor waved a contemptuous dismissal of the
claims of the four little theatres about him. It was not their rivalry
that he cared for. It is true the seats were filled, but with whom?
Ah, yes, with whom? He placed his finger at the side of his nose,
and winked and nodded his head mysteriously. With the friends of the
proprietor, of course. Poor non-paying acquaintances to make a show,
and attract others less knowing to a very inferior performance. Now
here with him everybody paid, and received the worth of his money many
times. Perhaps I had not seen the performance; in that case I should
surely do so. The clown and the donkey-cart were very amusing, and
the dancing skeleton, which came to pieces before the audience and
frightened the gendarme, was worthy of my approval. So the two small
boys and the nurse and the baby and I dodged under the rope and waited
for the performance.
The idle man, who knows that "they also serve who only stand and
wait," must find the Champs Élysées the most acceptable of all places
for such easy service. There are at one corner the stamp-collectors
to entertain him, with their scrap-books and market-baskets full of
their precious bits of colored paper, gathered from all over the known
world, comparing and examining their treasures, bargaining with easy
good-nature and with the zeal of enthusiasts. Three times a week he
will find this open market or exchange under the trees, where old
men and little boys and pretty young girls meet together and chatter
over their common hobby, and swap Columbian stamps for those of some
French protectorate, and of many other places of which they know
nothing save that it has a post-office of its own. At another corner
there are smoothly-shaven men and plump, well-fed-looking women
waiting to take service on some gentleman's box-seat or in front of
some lady's cooking-stove--an intelligence office where there is no
middleman to whom they must pay a fee, and where, while they wait for a
possible employer, they hold an impromptu picnic, and pay such gallant
compliments that one can see they have lived much in the fashionable
world.
Or the idler can drop into a chair in one of the cafés chantants on
an off day, when there is no regular performance, but a rehearsal,
to which the public is neither invited nor forbidden. It is an
entertaining place in which to spend an hour or two, with something to
drink in front of you, and a cigar, and the sun shining through the
trees upon the mirrors and artificial flowers and the gaudy hangings
of the stage. Here you will see Mlle. Nicolle as she is in her moments
of leisure. The night before she wore a greasy gingham gown, with her
hair plastered over her forehead in oily flat curls, as a laundress or
charwoman of Montmartre might wear them. Now she is fashionably dressed
in black, with white lace over it, and with a lace parasol, which she
swings from her finger in time to the music, while the other artists
of the Ambassadeurs' stand farther up the stage waiting their turn, or
politely watch her from the front. The girl who chalked her face as
Pierrot the evening before follows her in a blue boating-dress and a
kick at the end of it, which she means to introduce later in the same
day; and the others comment audibly on it from their seats, calling her
by her first name, and disagreeing with the leader of the orchestra as
to the particular note upon which the kick should come, while he turns
in his seat with his violin on his knee and argues it out with them,
shrugging his shoulders, and making passes in the air with his lighted
cigarette as though it were a baton.
[Illustration: INSIDE COLUMBIN'S]
Two gendarmes, with their capes folded and thrown over their shoulders,
come in and stand with the waiters, surveying the rehearsal with
critical disapproval, and the woman who collects the pennies for the
iron seats in the avenue takes a few moments' recess, and brings with
her two nurse-maids, with their neglected charges swinging by the
silken straps around their silken bodies. And so they all stand at one
side and gaze with large eyes at the breathless, laughing young woman
on the stage above them, who runs and kicks and runs back and kicks
again, reflected many times in the background of mirrors around her;
and then the two American song-and-dance men, and the English acrobats,
and the Italian who owns the performing dogs, and the smooth-faced
French comédiennes, and all the idle gentlemen with glasses of bock
before them, sit up as though some one had touched their shoulders with
a whip, and all the actresses smile politely, and look with pressed
lips and half-closed eyes at a very tall woman with red hair, who walks
erectly down the stage with a roll of music in her gloved hands. This
is Yvette Guilbert, the most artistic and the most improper of all the
women of the cafés chantants. She is also the most graceful. You can
see that even now when she is off her guard. She could not make an
ungraceful gesture even after long practice, and when she shudders and
jumps at a false note from the orchestra she is still graceful.
When the rehearsal is finished you can cross the Place de la Concorde
and hang over the stone parapet, and watch the Deputies coming over
the bridge, or the men washing the dogs in the Seine, and shaving and
trimming their tufts of curly hair, and twisting their mustaches into
military jauntiness; or you can turn your back to this and watch the
thousands of carriages and cabs and omnibuses crossing the great square
before you from the eight streets opening into it, with the water of
the fountains in the middle blown into spray by the wind, and turned
into the colors of the rainbow by the sun. This great, beautiful open
place, even to one accustomed to city streets and their monuments,
seems to change more rapidly and to form with greater life than any
other spot in the world, and its great stupid obelisk in the centre
appears to rise like a monster exclamation-point of wonder at what it
sees about it, and with the surprise over all of finding itself in the
centre of it.
[Illustration: "AND YOU BELIEVE THE GUIDES"]
You cannot say you have seen the streets of Paris until you have
walked them at sunrise; every one has seen them at night, but he must
watch them change from night to day before he can claim to have seen
them at their best. I walked under the arches of the Rue de Rivoli one
morning when it was so dark that they looked like the cloisters of
some great monastery, and it was impossible to believe that the empty
length of the Rue Cambon had but an hour before been blocked by the
blazing front of the Olympia, and before that with rows of carriages
in front of the two Columbins. There were a few belated cabs hugging
the sidewalk, with their drivers asleep on the boxes, and a couple
of gendarmes slouching together across the Place de la Concorde made
the only sound of life in the whole city. The Seine lay as motionless
as water in a bath-tub, and the towers of Notre Dame rising out of
the mist at one end, and the round bulk of the Trocadéro bounding it
at the other, seemed to limit the river to what one could see of its
silent surface from the Bridge of the Deputies. The Eiffel Tower, the
great skeleton of the departed exposition, disappeared and reformed
itself again as drifting clouds of mist swept through it and cut its
great ugly length into fragments hung in mid-air. As the light grew in
strength the façades of the government buildings grew in outline, as
though one were focussing them through an opera-glass, and the pillars
of the Madeleine took form and substance; then the whole great square
showed itself, empty and deserted. The darkness had hidden nothing
more terrible than the clean asphalt and the motionless statues of the
cities of France.
A solitary fiacre passed me slowly with no one on the box, but with
the coachman sitting back in his cab. He was returning to the stables,
evidently, and had on his way given a seat to a girl from the street,
whom he was now entertaining with genial courtesy. He had one leg
thrown over the other, and one arm passed back along the top of the
seat, and with the other he waved to the great buildings as they sprang
up into life as the day grew. The girl beside him was smiling at his
pleasantries, while the rising sun showed how tired and pale she was,
and mocked at the paint around her sleepy eyes. The horse stumbled at
every sixth step, and then woke again, while the whip rocked and rolled
fantastically in its socket like a drunken man. From up the avenue of
the Champs Élysées came the first of the heavy market-wagons, with the
driver asleep on the bench, and his lantern burning dully in the early
light. Back of him lay the deserted stretch of the avenue, strange
and unfamiliar in its emptiness--save for the great arch that rose
against the dawn, and seemed, from its elevation on the very top of the
horizon, to serve as a gateway into the skies beyond. The air in the
Champs Élysées was heavy with a perfume of flowers and of green plants,
and the leaves dripped damp and cool with the dew. Hundreds of birds
sang and chattered as though they knew the solitude was theirs but
for only one more brief hour, and that they then must give way to the
little children, and later to crowds of idle men and women. It seemed
impossible that but a few hours before Duclerc had filled these silent,
cool woods with her voice--Duclerc, with her shoulder-straps slipping
to her elbows and her white powdered arms tossing in the colored lights
of the serpentine dance. The long, gaudy lithographs on the bill-boards
and the arches of colored lamps stood out of the silence and fresh
beauty of the hour like the relics of some feast which should have been
cleared away before the dawn, and the theatres themselves looked like
temples to a heathen idol in some primeval wood. And as I passed out
from under the cool trees to the silent avenues I felt as though I had
caught Paris napping, and when she was off her guard, and good and
fresh and sweet, and had discovered a hidden trait in her many-sided
character, a moment of which she would be ashamed an hour or two later,
as cynics are ashamed of their secret acts of charity.
II
THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS
NIGHT
Paris is the only city in the world which the visitor from the outside
positively refuses to take seriously. He may have come to Paris with
an earnest purpose to study art, or to investigate the intricacies
of French law, or the historical changes of the city; or, if it be
a woman, she may have come to choose a trousseau; but no matter how
serious his purpose may be, there is always some one part of each day
when the visitor rests from his labors and smiles indulgently and does
as the Parisians do. Whether the city or the visitor is responsible for
this, whether Paris adopts the visitor, or the visitor adapts himself
to his surroundings, it is impossible to say. But there is certainly no
other capital of the world in which the stranger so soon takes on the
local color, in which he becomes so soon acclimated, and which brings
to light in him so many new and unsuspected capacities for enjoyment
and adventure.
Americans go to London for social triumph or to float railroad shares,
to Rome for art's sake, and to Berlin to study music and to economize;
but they go to Paris to enjoy themselves. And there are no young men of
any nation who enter into the accomplishment of this so heartily and
so completely as does the young American. It is hardly possible for
the English youth to appreciate Paris perfectly, because he has been
brought up to believe that "one Englishman can thrash three Frenchmen,"
and because he holds a nation that talks such an absurd language in
some contempt; hence he is frequently while there irritable and rude,
and jostles men at the public dances, and in other ways asserts his
dignity.
But the American goes to Paris as though returning to his inheritance
and to his own people. He approaches it with the friendly confidence of
a child. Its language holds no terrors for him; and he feels himself
fully equipped if he can ask for his "edition," and say, "Cocher, allez
Henry's tout sweet." There is nothing so joyous and confiding as the
American during his first visit to the French metropolis. He has been
told by older men of the gay, glad days of the Second Empire, and by
his college chum of the summer of the last exposition, and he enters
Paris determined to see all that any one else has ever seen, and to
outdo all that any one else has ever done, and to stir that city to
its suburbs. He saves his time, his money, and his superfluous energy
for this visit, and the most amusing part of it is that he always
leaves Paris fully assured that he has enjoyed himself while there more
thoroughly than any one else has ever done, and that the city will
require two or three months' rest before it can readjust itself after
the shock and wonder due to his meteoric flight through its limits.
London he dismisses in a week as a place in which you can get good
clothes at moderate prices, and which supports some very entertaining
music-halls; but Paris, he tells you, ecstatically, when he meets you
on the boulevards or at the banker's, where he is drawing grandly on
his letter of credit, is "the greatest place on earth," and he adds, as
evidence of the truth of this, that he has not slept in three weeks. He
is unsurpassed in his omnivorous capacity for sight-seeing, and in his
ability to make himself immediately and contentedly at home. There is a
story which illustrates this that is told by a young American banker
who has been living in Paris for the last six years. He met one day
on the boulevards an old college friend of his, and welcomed him with
pleasure.
"You must let me be your guide," the banker said. "I have been here
so long now that I know just what you ought to see, and I shall enjoy
seeing it with you as much as though it were for the first time. When
did you come?" The new arrival had reached Paris only three days
before, and said that he was ready to see all that it had to show. "You
have nothing to do to-night, then?" asked the banker. "Well, we will
drop in at the gardens and the cafés chantants. There is nothing like
them anywhere." His friend said he had made the tour of the gardens
on the night of his arrival, but that he would be glad to revisit
them. But that being the case, the banker would rather take him to the
cafés--"The Black Cat," and Bruant's, and "The Dead Rat." These his
friend had visited on his second evening.
"Oh, well, we can cross the river, then, and I will show you some
slumming," said the banker. "You should see the places where the
thieves go--the Château Rouge and Père Lunette."
"I went there last night," said the new-comer.
The man who had lived six years in Paris took the stranger by the arm
and asked him if he was sure he was not engaged for that evening. "For
if you are not," he said, "you might take me with you and show me some
of the sights!"
The American visitor is not only undaunted by the strange language,
but unimpressed by the signs of years of vivid history about him. He
sandwiches a glimpse at the tomb of Napoleon, and a trip on a penny
steamer up the Seine, and back again to the Morgue, with a rush through
the Cathedral of Notre Dame, between the hours of his breakfast and
the race-meeting at Longchamps the same afternoon. Nothing of present
interest escapes him, and nothing bores him. He assimilates and
grasps the method of Parisian existence with a rapidity that leaves
you wondering in the rear, and at the end of a week can tell you that
you should go to one side of the Grand Hôtel for cigars, and to the
other to have your hat blocked. He knows at what hour Yvette Guilbert
comes on at the Ambassadeurs', and on which mornings of the week
the flower-market is held around the Madeleine. While you are still
hunting for apartments he has visited the sewers under the earth, and
the Eiffel Tower over the earth, and eaten his dinner in a tree at
Robinson's, and driven a coach to Versailles over the same road upon
which the mob tramped to bring Marie Antoinette back to Paris, without
being the least impressed by the contrast which this offers to his own
progress. He develops also a daring and reckless spirit of adventure,
which would never have found vent in his native city or town, or in
any other foreign city or town. It is in the air, and he enters into
the childish good-nature of the place and of the people after the same
manner that the head of a family grows young again at his class reunion.
One Harvard graduate arrived in Paris summer before last during those
riots which originated with the students, and were carried on by the
working-people, and which were cynically spoken of on the boulevards
as the Revolution of Sarah Brown. In any other city he would have
watched these ebullitions from the outskirts of the mob, or remained
a passive spectator of what did not concern him, but being in Paris,
and for the first time, he mounted a barricade, and made a stirring
address to the students behind it in his best Harvard French, and was
promptly cut over the head by a gendarme and conveyed to a hospital,
where he remained during his stay in the gay metropolis. But he still
holds that Paris is the finest place that he has ever seen. There was
another American youth who stood up suddenly in the first row of
seats at the Nouveau Cirque and wagered the men with him that he would
jump into the water with which the circus ring is flooded nightly, and
swim, "accoutred as he was," to the other side. They promptly took him
at his word, and the audience of French bourgeois were charmed by the
spectacle of a young gentleman in evening dress swimming calmly across
the tank, and clambering leisurely out on the other side. He was loudly
applauded for this, and the management sent the "American original"
home in a fiacre. In any other city he would have been hustled by the
ushers and handed over to the police.
Those show-places of Paris which are seen only at night, and of which
one hears the most frequently, are curiously few in number. It is their
quality and not their quantity which has made them talked about. It is
quite as possible to tell off on the fingers of two hands the names and
the places to which the visitor to Paris will be taken as it is quite
impossible to count the number of times he will revisit them.
In London there are so many licensed places of amusement that a man
might visit one every night for a year and never enter the same place
twice, and those of unofficial entertainment are so numerous that
men spend years in London and never hear of nooks and corners in it
as odd and strange as Stevenson's Suicide Club or Fagan's School for
Thieves--public-houses where blind beggars regain their sight and the
halt and lame walk and dance, music-halls where the line is strictly
drawn between the gentleman who smokes a clay pipe and the one who
smokes a brier, and arenas like the Lambeth School of Arms, from which
boy pugilists and coal-heavers graduate to the prize-ring, and such
thoroughfares as Ship's Alley, where in the space of fifty yards twenty
murders have occurred in three years.
In Paris there are virtually no slums at all. The dangerous classes are
there, and there is an army of beggars and wretches as poor and brutal
as are to be found at large in any part of the world, but the Parisian
criminal has no environment, no setting. He plays the part quite as
effectively as does the London or New York criminal, but he has no
appropriate scenery or mechanical effects.
If he wishes to commit murder, he is forced to make the best of the
well-paved, well-lighted, and cleanly swept avenue. He cannot choose a
labyrinth of alleyways and covered passages, as he could were he in
Whitechapel, or a net-work of tenements and narrow side streets, as he
could were he in the city of New York.