very handsome man, with a strong, kind face, smoothly shaven, and
suggesting a priest or a tragic actor. He wore the uniform of the
Academy, which Napoleon spent much time in devising. It consists of
a coat of dark green, bordered with palm leaves in a lighter green
silk; there are, too, a high standing collar and a white waistcoat and
a pearl-handled sword. The poet also wore a great many decorations,
and smiled kindly upon Mr. Eustis and myself, with apparently great
amusement. On the other side of the President, back of Mr. Eustis, was
Comte d'Haussonville; he is a tall man with a Vandyck beard, and it was
he who was to read the address of welcome to the Vicomte de Bornier.
Below in the pit, and all around in the balconies, were women
beautifully dressed, among whom there were as few young girls as
there were men. These were the most interesting women in Parisian
society--the ladies of the Faubourg St.-Germain, who at that time
would have appeared at scarcely any other function, and the ladies who
support the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and the pretty young daughters of
champagne and chocolate-making papas who had married ancient titles,
and who try to emulate in their interests, if not in their toilets,
their more noble sisters-in-law, and all the prettiest women of the
high world, as well as the sisters of pretenders to the throne and
the wife of President Carnot. The absence of men was very noticeable;
the Immortals seemed to have it all to themselves, and it looked as
though they had purposely refrained from asking any men, or that the
men who had not been given the robe of immortality were jealous, and
so stayed away of their own accord. Those who were there either looked
bored, or else posed for the benefit of the ladies, with one hand in
the opening of their waistcoats, nodding their heads approvingly at
what the speaker said. In the pit I recognized M. Blowitz, the famous
correspondent of the _Times_, entirely surrounded by women. He wore a
gray suit and a flowing white tie, and he did not seem to be having a
very good time. There were also among the Immortals Jules Simon, and
Alexandre Dumas fils, dark-skinned, with little, black, observant
eyes, and white, curled hair, and crisp mustache. He seemed to be more
interested in watching the women than in listening to the speeches,
and moved restlessly and inattentively. When the exercises were over,
and the Academicians came out of their box and were presented to Mr.
Eustis, Dumas was gravely courteous, and spoke a few words of welcome
to the ambassador in a formal, distant way, and then hurried off by
himself without waiting to chat with the women, as the others did. He
was the most interesting of them all to me, and the least interested in
what was going on. There were many others there, and it was amusing to
try and fasten to them the names of Pasteur and Henri Meilhac, Ludovic
Halévy, and the Duc d'Aumale, the uncle of the Comte de Paris, who
was then alive, and Benjamin Constant, who had the week before been
admitted to the Institute. Some of them, heavy-eyed men, with great
firm jaws and heavy foreheads, wearing their braided coats uneasily,
as though they would have been more comfortable in a surgeon's apron
or a painter's blouse, kept you wondering what they had done; and
others, dapper and smiling and obsequious, made you ask what they could
possibly do.
The Vicomte Bornier opened the proceedings by reading his address
to the beautiful ladies, with his cocked hat under his arm and his
mother-of-pearl sword at his side, and I am afraid it did not appeal to
me as a very serious business. It was too suggestive of an afternoon
tea. There was too much patting of kid-gloved hands, and too many women
altogether. It was a little like Bunthorne and the twenty maidens. If
the little theatre had been crowded with men eager to hear what this
new light in literature had to say, it might have been impressive,
but the sight of forty distinguished men sitting apart and calling
themselves fine names, and surrounded by women who believed they were
what they called themselves, had its humorous side. I could not make
out what the speech was about, because the French was too good; but it
was eminently characteristic and interesting to find that both Bornier
and D'Haussonville made their most successful points when they paid
compliments to the ladies present, or to womenkind in general, or when
they called for revenge on Germany. I thought it curious that even in
a eulogy on a dead man, and in an address of welcome to a live one,
each Frenchman could manage to introduce at least three references of
Alsace-Lorraine, and to bow and make pretty speeches to the ladies in
the audience.
[Illustration: "THE MAN THAT BROKE THE BANK AT MONTE CARLO"]
There is a peculiarity about this second address which is worth noting.
It concerns itself with the virtues of the incoming member, and as he
is generally puffed up with honor, the address is always put into the
hands of one whose duty it is to severely criticise and undervalue him
and his words. It is a curious idea to belittle the man whom you have
just honored, but it is the custom, and as both speeches are submitted
to a committee before they are read, there is no very hard feeling.
It is only in the address read after a member's death that he is
eulogized, and then it does not do him very much good. On the occasion
of Pierre Loti's admission to the Academy he, instead of eulogizing
the man whose place he had taken, lauded his own methods and style of
composition so greatly that when the second member arose he prefaced
his remarks by suggesting that "M. Loti has said so much for himself
that he has left me nothing to add."
* * * * *
It is very much of a step from the Académie Française to the Fête of
Flowers in the Bois de Boulogne, but the latter comes under the head
of one of the shows of Paris, and is to me one of the prettiest and
the most remarkable. I do not believe that it could be successfully
carried out in any other city in the world. There would certainly be
horse-play and roughness to spoil it, and it is only the Frenchman's
idea of gallantry and the good-nature of both the French man and
woman which render it possible. It would be an easy matter to hold
a fête of flowers at Los Angeles or at Nice, or in any small city
or watering-place where all the participants would know one another
and the masses would be content to act as spectators; but to venture
on such a spectacle, and to throw it open to any one who pays a few
francs, in as great a city as Paris, requires, first of all, the
highest executive ability before the artistic and pictorial side of the
affair is considered at all, and the most hearty co-operation of the
state or local government with the citizens who have it in hand.
On the day of the fête the Allée du Jardin d'Acclimatation in the
Bois is reserved absolutely for the combatants in this annual battle
of flowers, which begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and lasts
uninterruptedly until dinner-time. Each of the cross-roads leading up
to the Allée is barricaded, and carriages are allowed to enter or to
depart only at either end. This leaves an open stretch of road several
miles in extent, and wide enough for four rows of carriages to pass one
another at the same moment. Thick woods line the Allée on either side,
and the branches of the trees almost touch above it. Beneath them,
and close to the roadway, sit thousands of men, women, and children
in close rows, and back of them hundreds more move up and down the
pathways. The carriages proceed in four unbroken lines, two going up
and two going down; and as they pass, the occupants pelt each other and
the spectators along the road-side with handfuls of flowers. For three
miles this battle rages between the six rows of people, and the air is
filled with the flying missiles and shrieks of laughter and the most
graceful of compliments and good-natured _blague_. At every fifty yards
stands a high arch, twined with festoons trailing from one arch to the
next, and temporary flagpoles flying long banners of the tricolor,
and holding shields which bear the monogram of the republic. The long
festoons of flowers and the flags swinging and flying against the dark
green of the trees form the Allée into one long tunnel of color and
light; and at every thirty paces there is the gleaming cuirass of a
trooper, with the sun shining on his helmet and breastplate, and on
other steel breastplates, which extend, like the mirrors in "Richard
III.," as far as the eye can reach, flashing and burning in the sun.
Between these beacons of steel, and under the flags and flowers and
green branches, move nearly eight miles of carriages, with varnished
sides and polished leather flickering in the light, each smothered with
broad colored ribbons and flowers, and gay with lace parasols.
It is a most cosmopolitan crowd, and it is interesting to see how
seriously some of the occupants of the carriages take the matter in
hand, and how others turn it into an ovation for themselves, and still
others treat it as an excuse to give some one else pleasure. You will
see two Parisian dandies in a fiacre, with their ammunition piled as
high as their knees, saluting and chaffing and calling by name each
pretty woman who passes, and following them in the line you will see a
respectable family carriage containing papa, mamma, and the babies, and
with the coachman on the box hidden by great breastworks of bouquets.
To the proud parents on the back seat the affair is one which is to be
met with dignified approval, and they bow politely to whoever hurls a
rose or a bunch of wild flowers at one of their children. They, in
their turn, will be followed by a magnificent victoria, glittering
with varnish and emblazoned by strange coats-of-arms, and holding two
coal-black negroes, with faces as shiny as their high silk hats. They
have with them on the front seat a hired guide from one of the hotels,
who is showing Paris to them, and who is probably telling them that
every woman who laughs and hits them with a flower is a duchess at
least, at which their broad faces beam with good-natured embarrassment
and their teeth show, and they scramble up and empty a handful of rare
roses over the lady's departing shoulders. There are frequent halts
in the procession, which moves at a walk, and carriages are often
left standing side by side facing opposite ways for the space of a
minute, in which time there is ample opportunity to exhaust most of the
ammunition at hand, or to express thanks for the flowers received. The
good order of the day is very marked, and the good manners as well. The
flowers are not accepted as missiles, but as tributes, and the women
smile and nod demurely, and the men bow, and put aside a pretty nosegay
for the next meeting; and when they draw near the same carriage again,
they will smile their recognition, and wait until the wheels are just
drawing away from one another, and then heap their offerings at the
ladies' feet.
There are a great number of Americans who are only in Paris for the
month, and whom you have seen on the steamer, or passing up the Rue de
la Paix, or at the banker's on mail day, and they seize this chance to
recognize their countrymen, and grow tremendously excited in hitting
each other in the eyes and on the nose, and then pass each other the
next day in the Champs Élysées without the movement of an eyelash.
The hour excuses all. It has the freedom of carnival-time without its
license, and it is pretty to see certain women posing as great ladies,
in hired fiacres, and being treated with as much _empressement_ and
courtesy by every man as though he believed the fiacre was not hired,
and the pearl necklace was real and not from the Palais Royal, and
that he had not seen the woman the night before circling around the
endless treadmill of the Jardin de Paris. Sometimes there will be
a coach all red and green and brass, and sometimes a little wicker
basket on low wheels, with a donkey in the shafts, and filled with
children in the care of a groom, who holds them by their skirts to
keep them from hurling themselves out after the flowers, and who looks
immensely pleased whenever any one pelts them back and points them out
as pretty children. But the greater number of the children stand along
the road-side with their sisters and mothers. They are of the good
bourgeois class and of the decently poor, who beg prettily for a flower
instead of giving one, and who dash out under the wheels for those
that fall by the wayside, and return with them to the safety of their
mother's knee in a state of excited triumph.
When you see how much one of the broken flowers means to them, you
wonder what they think of the cars that pass toppling over with
flowers, with the harness and the spokes of the wheels picked out in
carnations, and banked with shields of nodding roses at the sides and
backs.
These are the carriages entered for prizes, and some of them are very
wonderful and very beautiful. One holds a group of Rastaqouères, who
have spent a clerk's yearly income in decorating their victoria, that
they may send word back to South America that they have won a prize
from a board of Parisian judges.
And another is a big billowy phaeton blooming within and without with
white roses and carnations, and holding a beautiful lady with auburn
hair and powdered face, and with the lace of her Empire bonnet just
falling to the line of her black eyebrows. She is all in white too,
with white gloves, and a parasol of nothing but white lace, and she
reclines rather than sits in this triumphal car of pure white flowers,
like a Cleopatra in her barge, or Venus lying on the white crest of the
waves. All the men recognize her, and throw their choicest offerings
into her lap; but whenever I saw her she seemed more interested in
the crowds along the road-side, who announced her approach with an
excited murmur of admiration, and the little children in blouses threw
their nosegays at her, and then stood back, abashed at her loveliness,
with their hands behind them. She was quite used to being pelted with
flowers at one of the theatres, but she seemed to enjoy this tribute
very much, and she tossed roses back at the children, and watched them
as they carried her flowers to the nurse or the elder sister who was
taking care of them, and who looked after the woman with frightened,
admiring eyes.
V
AMERICANS IN PARIS
Americans who go to Paris might be divided, for the purposes of this
article at least, into two classes--those who use Paris for their
own improvement or pleasure, and those who find her too strong for
them, and who go down before her and worship her, and whom she either
fashions after her own liking, or rides under foot and neglects until
they lose heart and disappear forever.
Balzac, in the last paragraph of one of his novels, leaves his hero
standing on the top of a hill above Paris, shaking his fist at the city
below him, and cursing her for a wanton.
One might argue that this was a somewhat childish and theatrical point
of view for the young man to have taken. He probably found in Paris
exactly what he brought there, and it seems hardly fair, because the
city was stronger than he, that he should blame her and call her a
hard name. Paris is something much better than that, only the young
man was probably not looking for anything better. He had taken her
frivolous side too seriously, and had not sought for her better side at
all. Some one should have told him that Paris makes a most agreeable
mistress, but a very hard master.
There are a few Americans who do not know this until it is too late,
until they lose their heads with all the turmoil and beauty and
unending pleasures of the place, and grow to believe that the voice
of Paris is the voice of the whole world. Perhaps they have heard the
voice speak once; it has praised a picture which they have painted, or
a book of verses that they have written, or a garden fête that they
have given, at which there were present as many as three ambassadors.
And they sit breathless ever after, waiting for the voice to speak to
them again, and while they are waiting Paris is exclaiming over some
new picture, or another fête, at which there were four ambassadors; and
the poor little artist or the poor little social struggler wonders why
he is forgotten, and keeps on struggling and fluttering and biting his
nails and eating his heart out in private, listening for the voice to
speak his name once more.
[Illustration: "LISTENING FOR THE VOICE TO SPEAK HIS NAME ONCE MORE"]
He will not believe that his time has come and gone, and that Paris has
no memory, and no desire but to see and to hear some new thing. She
has taken his money and eaten his dinners and hung his pictures once
or twice in a good place; but, now that his money is gone, Paris has
other dinners to eat, and other statues to admire, and no leisure time
to spend at his dull receptions, which have taken the place of his rare
dinners, or to climb to his garret when there is a more amusing and
more modern painter on the first floor.
Paris is full of these poor hangers-on, who have allowed her to use
them and pat them on the back, and who cannot see that her approbation
is not the only reward worth the striving for, but who go on year
after year tagging in her train, beseeching her to take some notice
of them. They are like the little boys who run beside the coaches and
turn somersaults to draw a copper from the passengers on top, and who
are finally left far behind, unobserved and forgotten beside the dusty
road. The wise man and the sensible man takes the button or the medal
or the place on a jury that Paris gives him, and is glad to get it, and
proud of the recognition and of the source from which it comes, and
then continues on his way unobserved, working for the work's sake. He
knows that Paris has taught him much, but that she has given him all
she can, and that he must now work out his own salvation for himself.
Or, if he be merely an idler visiting Paris for the summer, he takes
Paris as an idler should, and she receives him with open arms. He
does not go there to spend four hours a day, or even four hours a
week, in the serious occupation of leaving visiting-cards. He does
not invite the same people with whom he dined two weeks before in New
York to dine and breakfast with him again in Paris, nor does he spend
every afternoon in a frock-coat watching polo, or in flannels playing
lawn-tennis on the Île de Puteaux. He has tennis and polo at home. Nor
did he go all the way to Paris to dance in little hot apartments, or to
spend the greater part of each day at the race-tracks of Longchamps or
Auteuil. The Americans who do these things in Paris are a strange and
incomprehensible class. Fortunately they do not form a large class, but
they do form a conspicuous one, and while it really does not concern
any one but themselves as to how they spend their time, it is a little
aggravating to have them spoiling the local color of a city for which
they have no real appreciation, and from which they get no more benefit
than they would have received had they remained at home in Newport.
They treat Paris as they would treat Narragansett Pier, only they act
with a little less restraint, and are very much more in evidence. They
are in their own environment and in the picture at the Pier or at
the Horse Show, and if you do not like it you are at perfect liberty
to keep out of it, and you will not be missed; but you do object to
have your view of the Arc de Triomphe cut in two by a coach-load of
them, or to have them swoop down upon D'Armenonville or Maxim's on the
boulevards, calling each other by their first names, and running from
table to table, and ordering the Hungarians to play "Daisy Bell," until
you begin to think you are in the hall of the Hotel Waldorf, and go out
into the night to hear French spoken, if only by a cabman.
I was on the back seat of a coach one morning in the Bois de Boulogne,
watching Howlett give a man a lesson in driving four horses at once.
It was very early, and the dew was still on the trees, and the great,
broad avenues were empty and sweet-smelling and green, and I exclaimed
on the beauty of Paris. "Beautiful?" echoed Howlett. "I should say it
was, sir. Now in London, sir, all the roads lie so straight there's
no practice driving there. But in Paris it's all turns and short
corners. It's the most beautiful city in the world." I thought it was
interesting to find a man so wrapped up in his chosen work that he
could see nothing in the French capital but the angles which made the
driving of four horses a matter of some skill. But what interest can
you take in those Americans who have been taught something else besides
driving, and who yet see only those things in Paris that are of quite
as little worth as the sharp turns of the street corners?
You wonder if it never occurs to them to walk along the banks of the
Seine and look over the side at the people unloading canal-boats, or
clipping poodles, or watering cavalry horses, or patiently fishing;
if they never pull over the books in the stalls that line the quays,
or just loiter in abject laziness, with their arms on the parapet of
a bridge, with the sun on their backs, and the steamboats darting to
and fro beneath them, and with the towers of Notre Dame before and the
grim prison of the Conciergerie on one side. Surely this is a better
employment than taking tea to the music of a Hungarian band while your
young friends from Beverly Farms and Rockaway knock a polo-ball around
a ten-acre lot. I met two American women hurrying along the Rue de
Rivoli one morning last summer who told me that they had just arrived
in Paris that moment, and were about to leave two hours later for Havre
to take the steamer home.
"So," explained the elder, "as we have so much time, we are just
running down to the Louvre to take a farewell look at 'Mona Lisa' and
the 'Winged Victory;' we won't see them again for a year, perhaps."
Their conduct struck me as interesting when compared with that of about
four hundred other American girls, who never see anything of Paris
during their four weeks' stay there each summer, because so much of
their time is taken up at the dress-makers'. It is pathetic to see
them come back to the hotel at five, tired out and cross, with having
had to stand on their feet four hours at a time while some mysterious
ceremony was going forward. It is hard on them when the sun is shining
out-of-doors and there are beautiful drives and great art galleries and
quaint old chapels and curious museums and ancient gardens lying free
and open all around them, that they should be compelled to spend four
weeks in this fashion.
There was a young woman of this class of American visitors to Paris who
had just arrived there on her way from Rome, and who was telling us how
much she had delighted in the galleries there. She was complaining that
she had no more pictures to enjoy. Some one asked her what objection
she had to the Louvre or the Luxembourg.
"Oh, none at all," she said; "but I saw those pictures last year."
These are the Americans who go to Paris for the spring and summer only,
who live in hotels, and see little of the city beyond the Rue de la
Paix and the Avenue of the Champs Élysées and their bankers'. They get
a great deal of pleasure out of their visit, however, and they learn
how important a thing it is to speak French correctly. If they derive
no other benefit from their visit they are sufficiently justified, and
when we contrast them with other Americans who have made Paris their
chosen home, they almost shine as public benefactors in comparison.
For they, at least, bring something back to their own country:
themselves, and pretty frocks and bonnets, and a certain wider
knowledge of the world. That is not much, but it is more than the
American Colony does.
[Illustration: "STANDING ON THEIR FEET FOR HOURS AT A TIME"]