One night at the Ambassadeurs', when Duclerc had finished the first
verse of her song, a man rose suddenly in the front row of seats and
insulted her. Had he used the same words in any American or English
theatre, he would have been hit over the head by the member of the
orchestra nearest him, and then thrown out of the theatre into the
street. It appeared from this man's remarks that the actress had
formerly cared for him, but that she had ceased to do so, and that he
had come there that night to show her how well he could stand such
treatment. He did this by bringing another woman with him, and by
placing a dozen bullies from Montmartre among the audience to hiss
the actress when she appeared. This they did with a rare good-will,
while the rejected suitor in the front row continued to insult her,
assisted at the same time by his feminine companion. No one in the
audience seemed to heed this, or to look upon it as unfair to himself
or to the actress, who was becoming visibly hysterical. There was a
piece of wood lying on the stage that had been used in a previous act,
and Duclerc, in a frenzy at a word which the man finally called to
her, suddenly stooped, and, picking this up, hurled it at him. In an
instant the entire audience was on its feet. This last was an insult to
itself. As long as it was Duclerc who was being attacked, it did not
feel nor show any responsibility, but when she dared to hurl sticks
of wood at the face of a Parisian audience, it rose in its might and
shouted its indignation. Under the cover of this confusion the hired
bullies stooped, and, scooping up handfuls of the gravel with which
the place is strewn, hurled them at Duclerc, until the stones rattled
around her on the stage like a fall of hail. She showed herself a very
plucky woman, and continued her song, even though you could see her
face growing white beneath the rouge, and her legs twisting and sinking
under her when she tried to dance. It was an awful scene, breaking so
suddenly into the easy programme of the evening, and one of the most
cowardly and unmanly exhibitions that I have ever witnessed. There did
not seem to be a man in the place who was not standing up and yelling
"À bas Duclerc!" and the groans and hisses and abuse were like the
worst efforts of a mob. Of course the stones did not hurt the woman,
but the insult of being stoned did. They put an end to her misery at
last by ringing down the curtain, and they said at the stage door
afterwards that she had been taken home in a fit.
When I saw her a few months later at Pastor's, I was thankful that, as
a people, our self-respect is not so easily hurt as to make us revenge
a slight upon it by throwing stones at a woman. Of course a Frenchman
might say that it is not fair to judge the Parisians by the audience
of a music-hall, but there were several ladies of title and gentlemen
of both worlds in the audience, who a few months later assailed Jane
Harding when she appeared as Phryne in the Opéra Comique with exactly
the same violence and for as little cause. These outbursts are only
temporary aberrations, however; as one of the attendants of the
Ambassadeurs' said, "To-morrow they will applaud her the more to make
up for it," which they probably did. It is in the same spirit that they
change the names of streets, and pull down columns only to rebuild them
again, until it would seem a wise plan for them, as one Englishman
suggested, to put the Column of Vendôme on a hinge, so that it could be
raised and lowered with less trouble.
Of the public gardens and dance-halls there are a great number, and the
men who have visited Paris do not have to be told much concerning them,
and the women obtain a sufficiently correct idea of what they are like
from the photographs along the Rue de Rivoli to prevent their wishing
to learn more. What these gardens were in the days of the Second
Empire, when the Jardin Mabille and the Bal Bullier were celebrated
through books and illustrations, and by word of mouth by every English
and American traveller who had visited them, it is now difficult to
say. It may be that they were the scenes of mad abandon and fascinating
frenzy, of which the last generation wrote with mock horror and with
suggestive smiles, and of which its members now speak with a sigh of
regret. But we are always ready to doubt whether that which has passed
away, and which in consequence we cannot see, was as remarkable as it
is made to appear. We depreciate it in order to console ourselves.
And if the Mabille and the Bullier were no more wickedly attractive
in those days than is the Moulin Rouge which has taken their place
under the Republic, we cannot but feel that the men of the last
generation visited Paris when they were very young. Perhaps it is true
that Paris was more careless and happy then. It can easily be argued
so, for there was more money spent under the Empire, and more money
given away in fêtes and in spectacles and in public pleasures, and the
Parisian in those days had no responsibility. Now that he has a voice
and a vote, and is the equal of his President, he devotes himself to
those things which did not concern him at all in the earlier times.
Then the Emperor and his ministers felt the responsibility, and asked
of him only that he should enjoy himself.
[Illustration: SOME YOUNG PEOPLE OF MONTMARTRE]
But whatever may have been true of the spirit of Paris then, the man
who visits it to-day expecting to see Leech's illustrations and Mark
Twain's description of the Mabille reproduced in the Jardin de Paris
and the Moulin Rouge will be disappointed. He will, on the contrary,
find a great deal of light and some very good music, and a mixed
crowd composed chiefly of young women and Frenchmen well advanced in
years and English and American tourists. The young women have all the
charm that only a Frenchwoman possesses, and parade quietly below
the boxes, and before the rows of seats that stretch around the hall
or the garden, as it happens to be, and are much better behaved and
infinitely more self-respecting and attractive in appearance than the
women of their class in London or New York. But there are no students
nor grisettes to kick off high hats and to dance in an ecstasy of
abandon. There are in their places from four to a dozen ugly women
and shamefaced-looking men, who are hired to dance, and who go sadly
through the figures of the quadrille, while one of the women after
another shows how high she can kick, and from what a height she can
fall on the asphalt, and do what in the language of acrobats is called
a "split;" there is no other name for it. It is not an edifying nor
thrilling spectacle.
[Illustration: AT THE MOULIN ROUGE]
The most notorious of these dance-halls is the Moulin Rouge. You must
have noticed when journeying through France the great windmills that
stand against the sky-line on so many hilltops. They are a picturesque
and typical feature of the landscape, and seem to signify the honest
industry and primitiveness of the French people of the provinces. And
as the great arms turn in the wind you can imagine you can hear the
sound of the mill-wheel clacking while the wheels inside grind
out the flour that is to give life and health. And so when you see
the great Red Mill turn high up where four streets meet on the side
of Montmartre, and know its purpose, you are impressed with the grim
contrast of its past uses and its present notoriety. An imaginative
person could not fail to be impressed by the sight of the Moulin Rouge
at night. It glows like a furnace, and the glare from its lamps reddens
the sky and lights up the surrounding streets and cafés and the faces
of the people passing like a conflagration. The mill is red, the
thatched roof is red, the arms are picked out in electric lights in red
globes, and arches of red lamp-shades rise on every side against the
blackness of the night. Young men and women are fed into the blazing
doors of the mill nightly, and the great arms, as they turn unceasingly
and noisily in a fiery circle through the air, seem to tell of the
wheels within that are grinding out the life and the health and souls
of these young people of Montmartre.
If you have visited many of the places touched upon in this article
in the same night, you will find yourself caught in the act by the
early sunlight, and as it will then be too late to go to bed, you can
do nothing better than turn your steps towards the Madeleine. There
you may find the market-people taking the flowers out of the black
canvas wagons and putting up the temporary booths, while the sidewalk
is hidden with a mass of roses in their white paper cornucopiæ and the
dark, damp green of palms and ferns.
It will be well worth your while to go on through the silent streets
from this market of flowers to the market of food in the Halles
Centrales, where there are strawberry patches stretching for a block,
and bounded by acres of radishes or acres of mushrooms, and by queer
fruits from as far south as Algiers and Tunis, just arrived from
Marseilles on the train, and green pease and carrots from no greater a
distance than just beyond the fortifications. It is the only spot in
the city where many people are awake. Everybody is awake here, bustling
and laughing and scolding--porters with brass badges on their sleeves
carrying great piles of vegetables, and plump market-women in white
sleeves and caps, and drivers in blue blouses smacking their lips over
their hot coffee after their long ride through the night. It is like a
great exposition building of food exhibits, with the difference that
all of these exhibits are to be scattered and are to disappear on the
breakfast-tables of Paris that same morning. Loud-voiced gentlemen are
auctioneering off whole crops of potatoes, a sidewalk at a time, or a
small riverful of fish with a single clap of the hands; live lobsters
and great turtles crawl and squirm on marble slabs, and vistas of red
meat stretch on iron hooks from one street corner to the next.
You are, and feel that you are, a drone in this busy place, and salute
with a sense of guilty companionship the groups of men and girls in
dinner dress who have been up all night, and who come singing and
chaffing in their open carriages in search of coffee and a box of
strawberries, or a bunch of cold, crisp radishes with the dew still on
them, which they buy from a virtuous matron of grim and disapproving
countenance at a price which throws a lurid light on the profits of
Bignon's and Laurent's.
And then you become conscious of your evening dress and generally
dissolute and out-of-place air, and hurry home through the bright
sunlight to put out your sputtering candle and to creep shamefacedly to
bed.
III
PARIS IN MOURNING
[Illustration]
The news of the assassination of President Carnot at Lyons reached
Paris and the Café de la Paix at ten o'clock on Sunday night. What
is told at the Café de la Paix is not long in traversing the length
of the boulevards, and in crossing the Place de la Concorde to the
cafés chantants and the public gardens in the Champs Élysées, so that
by eleven o'clock on the night of the 24th of June "all Paris" was
acquainted with the fact that the President of the Republic had been
cruelly murdered.
There are many people in America who remember the night when President
Garfield died, and how, when his death was announced from the stage of
the different theatres, the audience in each theatre rose silently as
one man and walked quietly out. To them the President's death was not
unexpected; it did not stun them, it came with no sudden shock, but it
was not necessary to announce to them that the performance for that
evening was at an end. They did not leave because the manager had rung
down the curtain, but because at such a time they felt more at ease
with themselves outside of a place of amusement than in one.
This was not the feeling of the Parisians when President Carnot died.
On that night no lights were put out in the cafés; no leader's bâton
rapped for a sudden silence in the Jardin de Paris, and the Parisians
continued to drink their bock and to dance, or to watch others dance,
even though they knew that at that same moment Madame Carnot in a
special train was hurrying through the night to reach the death-bed of
her husband. It is never possible to tell which way the French people
will jump, or how they will act at a crisis. They have no precedents
of conduct; they are as likely to do the characteristic thing, which
in itself is different from what people of any other nation would
do under like circumstances, as the uncharacteristic thing, which is
even more unexpected. They complicate history by behaving with perfect
tranquillity when other people would become excited, and by losing
their heads when there is no occasion for it. As the Yale captain said
of the Princeton team, "They keep you guessing."
So when I was convinced by the morning papers, after the first shock
of unbelief, that the President of France was dead, I walked out into
the streets to see what sign there would be of it in Paris. I argued
that in a city given to demonstrations the feelings of the people would
take some actual and visible form; that there would be meetings in
the street, rioting perhaps in the Italian quarter, and extraordinary
expressions of grief in the shape of crêpe and mourning. But the people
were as undisturbed and tranquil as the sun; the same men were sitting
at the same round tables; the same women were shopping in the Rue de
la Paix, and but for an increased energy on the part of the newsboys
there was no sign that a good man had died, that one who had harmed no
one had himself been cruelly harmed, and that the highest office of the
state was vacant.
When I complained of this to Parisians, or to those who were Parisians
by choice and not by birth, they explained it by saying that the
people were stunned. "They are too shocked to act. It is a horror
without a precedent," they said; but it struck me that they were an
inordinately long time in recovering from the blow. At one o'clock on
Monday morning a workman crawled out upon the roof of the Invalides,
and, gathering the tricolored flag in his arms, tied a wisp of crêpe
about it. The flags in the Chamber of Deputies and in the War Office
were draped in the same manner, and with these three exceptions I saw
no other visible sign of mourning in all Paris. On Monday night those
theatres subsidized by the government, and some others, but not all,
were closed for that evening. At three o'clock on Tuesday, two days
after the death of the President, I counted but three flags draped with
crêpe on the boulevards; but on the day following all the shops on
the Rue de la Paix and the hotels on the Rue de Rivoli put out flags
covered with mourning, and so advertised themselves and their grief. It
is interesting to remember that the most generous display of crêpe in
Paris was made by an English firm of ladies' tailors. During this time
the correspondents were cabling of the grief and rage of the Parisians
to sympathetic peoples all over the world; and we, in our turn, were
reading in Paris the telegrams of condolence and the resolutions of
sympathy from as different sources as the Parliament of Cape Town and
the Congress of the United States. What effect the reading of these
sincere and honest words had upon the people of Paris I do not know,
but I could not at the time conceive of their reading them without
blushing. I looked up from the paper which gave Lord Rosebery's speech,
and the brotherly words which came from little colonies in the Pacific,
from barbarous monarchs, and from widows to Madame Carnot, and from
corporations, Emperors, and Presidents to the city of Paris, and saw
nothing in the countenances of the Parisians at the table next to mine
but smiles of gratification at the importance that they had so suddenly
attained in the eyes of the whole world.
[Illustration: AT THE JARDIN DE PARIS]
It was also interesting to note by the Paris papers how the French
valued the expressions of sympathy which poured in upon them. The fact
that both Houses in the United States had adjourned to do honor to
the memory of M. Carnot was not in their minds of as much importance
as was the telegram from the Czar of Russia, which was given the
most important place in every paper. It was followed almost invariably
by the message from the German Emperor, whose telegram, it is also
interesting to remember, was the second one to reach Paris after the
death of the President was announced. When one reads a congratulatory
telegram from the German Emperor on the result of the Cambridge-Oxford
boat-race, and another of condolence to the King of Greece in reference
to an earthquake, and then this one to the French people, it really
seems as though the young ruler did not mean that any event of
importance should take place anywhere without his having something to
say concerning it. But this last telegram was well timed, and the line
which said that M. Carnot had died like a soldier at his post was well
chosen to please the French love of things military, and please them
it did, as the Emperor knew that it would. But the condolence from the
sister republic across the sea was printed at the end of the column,
after those from Bulgaria and Switzerland. In the eyes of the Parisian
news editor, the sympathy of the people of a great nation was not so
important to his readers as the few words from an Emperor to whom they
looked for help in time of war.
This was not probably true of the whole of France, but it was true of
the Parisians. Two years from now Carnot's assassination will have
become history, and will impress them much more than it did at the
time of his death. The next Salon will be filled with the apotheosis
of Carnot, with his portrait and with pictures of his murder, and of
France in mourning laying a wreath upon his tomb. His son will find
quick promotion in the army, and may possibly aspire to Presidential
honors, or threaten the safety of the republic with a military
dictatorship. It sounds absurd now, but it is quite possible in a
country where General Dodds at once became a dangerous Presidential
possibility because he had conquered the Dahomans in the swamps of
Africa.
Where the French will place Carnot in their history, and how they
will reverence his memory, the next few years will show; but it is
a fact that at the time of his death they treated him with scant
consideration, and were much more impressed with the effect which their
loss made upon others than with what it meant to them. It is not a
pleasant thing to write about, nor is it the point of view that was
taken at the time, but in writing of facts it is more interesting to
report things as they happened than as they should have happened.
It is also true that those Parisians who could decently make a little
money out of the nation's loss went about doing so with an avidity that
showed a thrifty mind. Almost every one who had windows or balconies
facing the line of the funeral procession offered them for rent, and
advertised them vigorously by placards and through the papers; venders
of knots of crêpe and emblems of mourning filled the streets with their
cries. Portraits of Carnot in heavy black were hawked about by the same
men who weeks before had sold ridiculous figures of him taking off
his hat and bowing to an imaginary audience; the great shops removed
their summer costumes from the windows and put stacks of flags bound
with crêpe in their place; the flower-shops lined the sidewalks with
specimens of their work in mourning-wreaths; and the papers, after
their first expression of grief, proceeded to actively discuss Carnot's
successor, quoting the popularity of different candidates by giving the
betting odds for and against them, as they had done the week before,
when the horses were entered for the Grand Prix. This was three days
after Carnot's death, and while he was still lying unburied at the
Élysée.
The French constitution provides that in such an event as that of
1893 the National Assembly shall be convened immediately to select a
new President. According to this the President of the Senate, in his
capacity as President of the National Assembly, decided that the two
Chambers should convene for that purpose at Versailles on Wednesday,
June 27th, at one o'clock. This certainly seemed to promise a scene of
unusual activity, and perhaps historical importance. I knew what the
election of a President meant to us at home, and I argued that if the
less excitable Americans could work themselves up into such a state of
frenzy that they blocked the traffic of every great city, and reddened
the sky with bonfires from Boston to San Francisco, the Frenchman's
ecstasy of excitement would be a spectacle of momentous interest.
This seemed to be all the more probable because to the American an
election means a new Executive but for the next four years, while to
the Frenchman the new state of affairs that threatened him would extend
for seven. Young Howlett had a vacant place on the top of his public
coach, and was just turning the corner as I came out of the hotel; so
I went out with him, and looked anxiously down on each side to see
the hurrying crowds pushing forward to the palace in the suburbs;
and when I found that all roads did not lead to Versailles that day, I
decided that it must be because we were on the wrong one, which would
eventually lead us somewhere else.
[Illustration: PORTRAITS OF CARNOT IN HEAVY BLACK]
It did not seem possible that the Parisians would feel so little
interest as to who their new President might be that they would
remain quietly in Paris while he was being elected on its outskirts.
I expected to see them trooping out along the seven-mile road to
Versailles in as great numbers as when they went there once before to
bring a Queen back to Paris. But when we drove into Versailles the
coach rattled through empty streets. There were no processions of
cheering men in white hats tramping to the music of "Marching through
Georgia." No red, white, and blue umbrellas, no sky-rocket yells, no
dangling badges with gold fringe, nothing that makes a Presidential
convention in Chicago the sight of a lifetime. No one was shouting the
name of his political club or his political favorite; no one had his
handkerchief tucked inside his collar and a palm leaf in his hand;
there were no brass-bands, no banners, and not even beer. Nor was
there any of the excitement which surrounds the election of even a
Parliamentary candidate in England. I saw no long line of sandwich-men
tramping in each gutter, no violent Radicals hustling equally elated
Conservatives, and crying, "Good old Smith!" or "Good old Brown!" no
women with primrose badges stuck to their persons making speeches or
soliciting votes from the back of dog-carts. And nobody was engaged
in throwing kippered herring or blacking the eyes of anybody else.
Versailles was as unmoved as the statues in her public squares. Her
broad, hospitable streets lay cool and quiet in the reflection of her
yellow house-fronts, and under the heavy shadows of the double rows of
elms the round, flat cobble-stones, unsoiled by hurrying footsteps,
were as clean and regular as a pan of biscuit ready for the oven.