moved at ten o'clock, and it was four in the afternoon before it
dispersed at the Panthéon, and Deputies in evening dress and attachés
in uniform and judges in scarlet robes could be seen hurrying over
Paris in fiacres, faint and hot and cross, for the first taste of food
and drink that had touched their lips since early morning. A few hours
later there was not a soldier out of his barracks, the scaffoldings had
been taken to pieces, the spectators had been distributed in trains to
the environs, the bands played again in the gardens, and the theatres
opened their doors. Paris had taken off her mourning, and fallen back
into her interrupted routine of pleasure, and had left nothing in the
streets to show that Carnot's body had passed over them save thousands
of scraps of greasy newspapers in which the sympathetic spectators of
the solemn function had wrapped their breakfasts.
IV
THE GRAND PRIX AND OTHER PRIZES
I think the most satisfying thing about the race for the Grand Prix at
Longchamps is the knowledge that every one in Paris is justifying your
interest in the event by being just as much excited about it as you
are. You have the satisfaction of feeling that you are with the crowd,
or that the crowd is with you, as you choose to put it, and that you
move in sympathy with hundreds of thousands of people, who, though they
may not be at the race-track in person, wish they were, which is the
next best thing, and which helps you in the form of moral support, at
least. You feel that every one who passes by knows and approves of your
idea of a holiday, and will quite understand when you ride out on the
Champs Élysées at eleven o'clock in the morning with four other men
packed in one fiacre, or when, for no apparent reason, you hurl your
hat into the air.
There are two ways of reaching Longchamps, the right way and the
wrong way. The wrong way is to go with the crowd the entire distance
through the Bois, and so find yourself stopped half a mile from the
race-track in a barricade of carriages and hired fiacres, with the
wheels scraping, and the noses of the horses rubbing the backs of the
carriages in front. This is entertaining for a quarter of an hour, as
you will find that every American or English man and woman you have
ever met is sitting within talking distance of you, and as you weave
your way in and out like a shuttle in a great loom you have a chance to
bow to a great many friends, and to gaze for several minutes at a time
at all of the celebrities of Paris. But after an hour has passed, and
you have discovered that your driver is not as clever as the others in
stealing ground and pushing himself before his betters, you begin to
grow hot, dusty, and cross, and when you do arrive at the track you are
not in a proper frame of mind to lose money cheerfully and politely,
like the true sportsman that you ought to be.
The right way to go is through the Bois by the Lakes, stopping within
sound of the waterfall at the Café de la Cascade. The advantage of this
is that you escape the crowd, and that you have the pleasing certainty
in your mind throughout the rest of the afternoon of knowing that you
will be able to find your carriage again when the races are over. If
you leave your fiacre at the main entrance, you will have to pick it
out from three or four thousand others, all of which look exactly
alike; and even if you do tie a red handkerchief around the driver's
whip, you will find that six hundred other people have thought of doing
the same thing, and you will be an hour in finding the right one, and
you will be jostled at the same time by the boys in blouses who are
hunting up lost carriages, and finding the owners to fit them.
You can avoid all this if you go to the Cascade and take your
coachman's little ticket, and send him back to wait for you in the
stables of the café, not forgetting to give him something in advance
for his breakfast. It is then only a three minutes' walk from the
restaurant among the trees to the back door of the race-track, and in
five minutes after you have left your carriage you will have passed the
sentry at the ticket-box, received your ticket from the young woman
inside of it, given it to the official with a high hat and a big badge,
and will be within the enclosure, with your temper unruffled and your
boots immaculate. And then, when the races are over, you have only to
return to the restaurant and hand your coachman's ticket to the tall
chasseur, and let him do the rest, while you wait at a little round
table and order cooling drinks.
All great race meetings look very much alike. There are always the
long grandstand with human beings showing from the lowest steps to
the sky-line; the green track, and the miles of carriages and coaches
encamped on the other side; the crowd of well-dressed people in
the enclosure, and the thin-legged horses cloaked mysteriously in
blankets and stalking around the paddock; the massive crush around
the betting-booths, that sweeps slowly in eddies and currents like a
great body of water; and the rush which answers the starting-bell.
The two most distinctive features of the Grand Prix are the numbers
of beautifully dressed women who mix quietly with the men around the
booths at which the mutuals are sold, and the fact that every one
speaks English, either because that is his native tongue, or because,
if he be a Frenchman, he finds so many English terms in his racing
vocabulary that it is easier for him to talk entirely in that tongue
than to change from French to English three or four times in each
sentence.
But the most curious, and in a way the most interesting feature of the
Grand Prix day, is the queer accompaniment to which the races are run.
It never ceases or slackens, or lowers its sharp monotone. It comes
from the machines which stamp the tickets bought in the mutual pools.
If you can imagine a hundred ticket-collectors on an elevated railroad
station all chopping tickets at the same time, and continuing at this
uninterruptedly for five hours, you can obtain an idea of the sound
of this accompaniment. It is not a question of cancelling a five-cent
railroad ticket with these little instruments. It is the same to them
whether they clip for the girl who wagers a louis on the favorite for
a place, and who stands to win two francs, or for the English plunger
who has shoved twenty thousand francs under the wire, and who has
only the little yellow and red ticket which one of the machines has
so nonchalantly punched to show for his money. People may neglect the
horses for luncheon, or press over the rail to see them rush past, or
gather to watch the President of the Republic enter to a solemn fanfare
of trumpets between lines of soldiers, but there are always a few left
to feed these little machines, and their clicking goes on through
the whole of the hot, dusty day, like the clipping of the shears of
Atropos.
[Illustration: THE RESTAURANT AMONG THE TREES]
The Grand Prix is the only race at which you are generally sure to win
money. You can do this by simply betting against the English horse. The
English horse is generally the favorite, and of late years the French
horse-owners have been so loath to see the blue ribbon of the French
turf go to perfidious Albion that their patriotism sometimes overpowers
their love of fair play. If the English horse is not only the favorite,
but also happens to belong to the stable of Baron Hirsch, you have a
combination that apparently can never win on French soil, and you can
make your bets accordingly. When Matchbox walked on to the track last
year, he was escorted by eight gendarmes, seven detectives in plain
clothes, his two trainers, and the jockey, and it was not until he was
well out in the middle of the track that this body-guard deserted him.
Possibly if they had been allowed to follow him round the course on
bicycles he might have won, and no combination of French jockeys could
have ridden him into the rail, or held Cannon back by a pressure of one
knee in front of another, or driven him to making such excursions into
unknown territory to avoid these very things that the horse had little
strength left for the finish.
But perhaps the French horse was the better one, after all, and it was
certainly worth the loss of a few francs to see the Frenchmen rejoice
over their victory. To their minds, such a defeat of the English on
the field of Longchamps went far to wipe away the memory of that other
victory on the field near Brussels.
Grand Prix night is a fête-night in Paris--that is, in the Paris of the
Boulevards and the Champs Élysées--and if you wish to dine well before
ten o'clock, you should engage your table for that night several days
in advance.
You have seen people during Horse Show week in New York waiting in
the hall at Delmonico's for a table for a half-hour at a time, but on
Grand Prix night you will see hundreds of hungry men standing outside
of the open-air restaurants in the Champs Élysées, or wandering
disconsolately under the trees from the crowded tables of l'Horloge
across the Avenue to those of the Ambassadeurs', and from them to the
Alcazar d'Été, and so on to Laurent's and the Café d'Orient. Every one
apparently is dining out-of-doors on that night, and the white tables,
with their little lamps, and with bottles of red wine flickering in
their light, stretch under the trees from the Place de la Concorde up
to the Avenue Matignon. There are splashing fountains between them and
bands of music, and the voices of the singers in the cafés chantants
sound shrilly above the chorus of rattling china and of hundreds of
people talking and laughing, and the never-ceasing undertone of the
cabs rolling by on the great Avenue, with their lamps approaching and
disappearing in the night like thousands of giant fire-flies. You are
sure to dine well in such surroundings, and especially so after the
great race--for the reason that if your friends have won, they command
a good dinner to celebrate the fact; or should they have lost, they
design a better one in order to help them forget their ill-fortune.
The spirit of adventure and excitement that has been growing and
feeding upon itself throughout the day of the Grand Prix reaches its
climax after the dinner hour, and finds an outlet among the trees and
Chinese lanterns of the Jardin de Paris. There you will see all Paris.
It is the crest of the highest wave of pleasure that rears itself and
breaks there.
You will see on that night, and only on that night, all of the most
celebrated women of Paris racing with linked arms about the asphalt
pavement which circles around the band-stand. It is for them their
one night of freedom in public, when they are permitted to conduct
themselves as do their less prosperous sisters, when, instead of
reclining in a victoria in the Bois, with eyes demurely fixed ahead of
them, they can throw off restraint and mix with all the men of Paris,
and show their diamonds, and romp and dance and chaff and laugh as
they did when they were not so famous. The French swells who are their
escorts have cut down Chinese lanterns with their sticks, and stuck the
candles inside of them on the top of their high hats with the burning
tallow, and made living torches of themselves. So on they go, racing
by--first a youth in evening dress, dripping with candle-grease, and
then a beautiful girl in a dinner gown, with her silk and velvet opera
cloak slipping from her shoulders--all singing to the music of the
band, sweeping the people before them, or closing in a circle around
some stately dignitary, and waltzing furiously past him to prevent his
escape. Sometimes one party will storm the band-stand and seize the
musicians' instruments, while another invades the stage of the little
theatre, or overpowers the women in charge of the shooting-gallery, or
institutes a hurdle-race over the iron tables and the wicker chairs.
[Illustration: INTERESTED IN THE WINNER]
Or you will see ambassadors and men of title from the Jockey Club
jostling cockney bookmakers and English lords to look at a little girl
in a linen blouse and a flat straw hat, who is dancing in the same
circle of shining shirt-fronts _vis-à-vis_ to the most-talked-of young
person in Paris, who wears diamonds in ropes, and who rode herself into
notoriety by winning a steeplechase against a field of French officers.
The first is a hired dancer, who will kick off some gentleman's hat
when she wants it, and pass it round for money, and the other is the
companion of princes, and has probably never been permitted to enter
the Jardin de Paris before; but they are both of the same class, and
when the music stops for a moment they approach each other smiling,
each on her guard against possible condescension or familiarity; and
the hired dancer, who is as famous in her way as the young girl with
the ropes of diamonds is in hers, compliments madame on her dancing,
and madame calls the other "mademoiselle," and says, "How very warm
it is!" and the circle of men around them, who are leaning on each
other's shoulders and standing on benches and tables to look, smile
delightedly at the spectacle. They consider it very _chic_, this
combination. It is like a meeting between Madame Bernhardt and Yvette
Guilbert.
But the climax of the night was reached last year when the band of a
hundred pieces struck buoyantly into that most reckless and impudent of
marches and comic songs, "The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."
The cymbals clashed, and the big drums emphasized the high notes, and
the brass blared out boastfully with a confidence and swagger that
showed how sure the musicians were of pleasing that particular audience
with that particular tune. And they were not disappointed. The three
thousand men and women hailed the first bars of the song with a yell of
recognition, and then dancing and strutting to the rhythm of the tune,
and singing and shouting it in French and English, they raised their
voices in such a chorus that they could be heard defiantly proclaiming
who they were and what they had done as far as the boulevards. And
when they reached the high note in the chorus, the musicians, carried
away by the fever of the crowd, jumped upon the chairs, and held their
instruments as high above their heads as they could without losing
control of that note, and every one stood on tiptoe, and many on one
foot, all holding on to that highest note as long as their breath
lasted. It was a triumphant, reckless yell of defiance and delight;
it was the war-cry of that class of Parisians of which one always
reads and which one sees so seldom, which comes to the surface only
at unusual intervals, and which, when it does appear, lives up to its
reputation, and does not disappoint you.
* * * * *
It happened a short time ago, when I was in Paris, that the ranks of
those members of the Institute of France who are known as the Forty
Immortals were incomplete, one of the Forty having but lately died. I
do not now recall the name of this Immortal, which is not, I trust,
an evidence of ignorance on my part so much as it is an illustration
of the circumstance that when men choose to make sure of immortality
while they are alive, in preference to waiting for it after death, they
are apt to be considered, when they cease to live, as having had their
share, and the world closes its account with them, and opens up one
with some less impatient individual. It is only a matter of choice,
and suggests that one cannot have one's cake and eat it too. And so,
while we can but envy François Coppée in his green coat and his laurel
wreath of the Immortals of France, we may remember the other sort of
immortality that came to François Villon and François Millet, who were
not members of the Institute, and whose coats were very ragged indeed.
I do, however, remember the name of the gentleman who was elected to
fill the vacancy in the ranks of the Forty, and in telling how he and
other living men take on the robe of immortality I hope to report the
proceedings of one of the most interesting functions of the French
capital. He was the Vicomte de Bornier, and his name was especially
impressed upon me by a paragraph which appeared in the _Figaro_ on the
day following his admittance to the Academy.
"M. Manel," the paragraph read, "the well-known journalist, has
renounced his candidacy for the vacant chair among the Forty Immortals.
M. Manel will be well remembered by Parisians as the author who has
written so much and so charmingly under the _nom de plume_ of 'Le
Vicomte de Bornier.'" Whether this was or was not fair to the gentleman
I had seen so highly honored I do not know, but it was calculated to
make him a literary light of interest.
You are told in Paris that the title of Academician is the only one
remaining under the republic which counts for anything; and, on the
other hand, you hear the Academy called a pleasant club for old
gentlemen, to which new members are elected not for any great work
which they are doing in the world, but because their point of view
is congenial to those who are already members. All that can be said
against the Academy by a Frenchman has been printed by Alphonse Daudet
in _The Immortals_. In that novel he charges that the Academy numbs
the style of whosoever wears its green livery; he says that he who
enters its door leaves originality behind, that he grows conservative
and self-conscious, and that whatever freshness of thought or literary
method may have been his before his admittance to its venerable portals
is chilled by the severe classicism of his thirty-nine brethren.
This may or may not be true of some of the members, but it certainly
cannot be true of all, as many of them were never distinguished
as authors, but were elected, as were De Lesseps and Pasteur, for
discoveries and research in science, medicine, or engineering.
Nor is it true of M. Paul Bourget, who is the last distinguished
Frenchman to be received into the ranks of the Immortals. The same
observations which he made to me while in this country, and when he
was not an Academician, upon Americans and American institutions, he
has repeated, since his accession to the rank of an Immortal, in _Outre
Mer_. And the freedom with which he has spoken shows that the shadow of
the palm-trees has not clouded his cosmopolitan point of view, nor the
classicism of the Academy dulled his wonderful powers of analysis. In
his election, representing as he does the most brilliant of the younger
and progressive school of French writers, the Academy has not so much
honored the man as the man has honored the Academy.
M. Daudet's opinion, however, is interesting as being that of one of
the most distinguished of French writers, and it is a satire which
costs something, for it shuts off M. Daudet forever from hope of
election to the body at which he scoffs, and at the same time robs
him of the possibility of ever enjoying the added money value which
attaches to each book that bears the leaves of the Academy on its
title-page. Since the days of Richelieu, Frenchmen have mocked at
this institution, and Frenchmen have given up years of their lives in
working, scheming, and praying to be admitted to its councils, and died
disappointed, and bitterly cursing it in their hearts. We have on
the one hand the familiar story of Alexis Piron, who had engraved on
his tombstone,
"_Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien._"
And on the other there is the present picture of M. Zola knocking
year after year at its portals, asking men in many ways his inferior
to permit him a right to sit beside them. If you look over its lists
from 1635 to the present day you will find as many great names among
its members as those which are missing from its rolls; so that proves
nothing.
[Illustration: "AROUND SOME STATELY DIGNITARY"]
No ridicule can disestablish the importance of the work done by the
Academy in keeping the French language pure, or the value of its
Dictionary, or the incentive which it gives to good work by examining
and reporting from time to time on literary, scientific, and historical
works.
A short time ago the anarchists of Paris determined to actively
ridicule the Académie Française by putting forth a foolish person,
Citizen Achille Le Roy, as a candidate for its honors. As a
preliminary to election to the Academy a candidate must call upon all
of its members. It is a formality which may be considered somewhat
humiliating, as it suggests begging from door to door, hat in hand; but
Citizen Le Roy made his round of visits in triumphal state, dressed
in the cast-off uniform of a Bolivian general, and accompanied by a
band of music and a wagonette full of journalists. Wherever he was
not received he deposited an imitation bomb at the door of the member
who had refused to see him, either as a warning or as a joke, and
much to the alarm of the servants who opened the door. He concluded
his journey, which extended over several days, by being photographed
outside of the door of the Institute, which was, of course, the only
side of the door which he will ever see.
The Institute of France stands beyond the bridges, facing the Seine.
It is a most impressive and ancient pile, built around a great court,
and guarded by statues in bronze and stone of the men who have been
admitted to its gates. The ceremony of receiving a new member takes
place in one end of this quadrangle of stone, in a little round hall,
not so large as the auditorium of a New York theatre, and built like
a dissecting-room, with three rows of low-hanging stone balconies
circling the entire circumference of its walls. One part of the
lowest balcony is divided into two large boxes, with a high desk
between them, and a flight of steps leading down from it into the pit,
which is packed close with benches. In one of these boxes sit some
members of the Institute, and in the other the members of the Académie
Française, which is only one, though the best known, of the five
branches into which the Institute is divided. Behind the high desk sits
the President, or, as he is called, the Secrétaire Perpétuel, of the
Academy, with a member on either side. It is the duty of one of these
to read the address of welcome to the incoming mortal.
It is a very pretty sight and a most important function in the social
world, and as there are no reserved places, the invited ones come as
early as eight o'clock in the morning to secure a good place, although
the brief exercises do not begin until two o'clock in the afternoon.
At that hour the street outside is lined with long rows of carriages,
guarded by the smartest of English coachmen, and emblazoned with the
oldest of French coats-of-arms. In the court-yard there is a fluttering
group of pretty women in wonderful toilets, surrounding a few
distinguished-looking men with ribbons in their coats, and encircled
by a ring of journalists making notes of the costumes and taking down
the names of the social celebrities. A double row of soldiers--for the
Institute is part of the state--lines the main hall leading to the
chamber, and salutes all who pass, whether men or women.
I was so unfortunate as to arrive very late, but as I came in with
the American ambassador I secured a very good place, although
a most awkwardly conspicuous one. Three old gentlemen in silk
knickerbockers and gold chains bowed the ambassador down the hall
between the soldiers, and out on to the steps which lead from the
desk between the boxes in which sat the Immortals. There they placed
two little camp-stools about eight inches high, on which they begged
us to be seated. There was not another square foot of space in the
entire chamber which was not occupied, so we dropped down upon the
camp-stools. We were as conspicuous as you would be if you seated
yourself on top of the prompter's box on the stage of the Grand
Opera-house, and I felt exactly, after the audience had examined us at
their leisure, as though the Secretary was about to suddenly rap on
his desk and auction me off for whatever he could get. Still, we sat
among the Immortals, if only for an hour, and that was something. The
venerable Secretary peered over his desk, and the other Immortals gazed
with polite curiosity, for the ambassador had only just arrived in
Paris, and was not yet known.