[Illustration]
The lamps were all lighted on the long bridge over the Garonne; the
lights quivered and lengthened in the sleek broad ripples; other lights
twinkled on the masts and in the rigging of the half-seen shipping, and
but for the trams and the traffic all things were as they had been at
our midnight arrival in Bordeaux. It was only 6.30 o’clock, but autumn
was catching up to us even in the Médoc, robbing us daily of more and
more light, and blunting our regret for a portmanteauful of soiled white
skirts by impressing the melancholy fact that this year we should have
no further need of them. We had said good-bye to the Médoc and its kind
people, and our faces were turned for the bleak North.
There were four large dark hours to be disposed of before the departure
of the Paris train, and, as we stood in the blue electric glare of the
station, the question of what we were going to do with ourselves rose
solemnly and awfully before us. Shopping in the dark was intolerable,
even if we had known one shop from another, and there had been anything
we wanted to buy; the conventional resource of going to see a church
was obviously out of the question; the rather unconventional one of
going to see ‘_La Femme à Papa_’ at the big colonnaded theatre was
tempting, but would either impose in the future an exhausting burden of
secrecy upon us, or would finally overthrow whatever confidence our
relations might still retain in our discretion. There remained dinner as
an occupation, and, leaving the arid brilliance of the station, we
prowled forth along the quays in search of a suitable restaurant. We
were ready to endure much for the sake of interest or picturesqueness,
but there is neither one nor the other to be found in a room with a
sawdusted floor, a block tin bar, and a contiguous billiard-table; and
these features discounted successively the charms of the restaurants of
‘The Antilles,’ ‘The Brazil,’ ‘The Spain and Portugal,’ the ‘Hôtel à la
Renommée de l’Omelette,’ and the ‘Café au Bon Diable,’ outside all of
whose flaring windows we paused and surveyed with exceeding disfavour
the company within.
We reached again the long bridge, with the trams going to and fro upon
it like fireflies, and with the power of fulfilling it came the desire
for respectable comfort at the Hôtel de Bayonne, where we had lunched
with the A.’s on our way to Loudenne. We stopped a tram and confided our
wishes to the conductor. His tram did not go there, but we could
‘correspond;’ it would be quite simple--The end of the explanation was
lost in the jerk with which we were hoisted on to the step, and in the
blatant braying of the driver’s signal-horn as the tram plunged forward
again. We began our journey by standing in a throng on the platform of
the tram, and though a light rain had begun, the samples of the
atmosphere of the interior that from time to time were wafted to us
prevented us from being specially grateful when two gorgeous
red-and-blue soldiers politely gave us their seats. After ten or fifteen
minutes, however, there was no lack of room; the tram, having taken its
way through promising thoroughfares, shook itself free of all passengers
saving ourselves, and headed for the open country at a round pace.
Before the conductor permitted us to part from him it seemed to us that
we might have corresponded not only with every other line in Bordeaux,
but with our relatives in Galway as well; and when, somewhere in a dark
and silent suburb, we changed to the rival tram, there was a further
half-hour before we sank exhausted on our chairs in the Hôtel de
Bayonne.
The advantages of an introduction were shown in the effusion of the
proprietor’s greeting, and under the ministrations of Alphonse, the head
waiter, we revived. We were late for the ordinary dinner, and for some
time the clean, electric-lighted dining-room had us for its only
occupants, as we sat in a trance of repose and quietness, while
Alphonse, with his decorous hooked nose and clerical black whiskers,
gave us his serious and undivided attention. It was not until after the
delicious _omelette au rhum_ had come in, in its winding-sheet of
spectral blue flame, that a party entered and took possession of a table
near us. From the unhurried way in which they
[Illustration: ALPHONSE.]
came in and seated themselves it was easy to guess that to dine was the
only amusement they proposed to themselves for the evening, and as we
drank our coffee and watched their dinner through its stately and solid
progress, we began to think that there are few greater fallacies than
the general belief that the French middle-classes are small eaters as
compared with the English. That the shopkeeper-like man and the
fuzzy-headed woman were the givers of the feast, and the parents of the
frightful and gluttonous child, was apparent from their disparaging
criticisms of the soup and their indulgence of their offspring, but it
was necessary for the guest to endure from the child a kiss that, as
some one says, was also a baptism, for us to feel that she was no
relation to it, unless one of the very poorest kind. The whole party, as
it went steadily through their _menu_ of ten courses, without omitting
the nethermost leek in the salad, opened our eyes, as we have said, to
the staying qualities of the French appetite, and it was privileged to
demonstrate for us that the mysterious little tumblers of water and
peppermint that had been brought in with our finger-glasses were for the
fell purpose of rinsing out the mouth before proceeding to coffee and
liqueurs. It was a solace to us during our long wait at the hotel; and
monsieur’s dexterity with the macaroni cheese and his knife, and
madame’s gesticulations with a bitten peach, were each in their way
agreeable and instructive.
The _dame seule_ is an unusual feature in French travelling, especially
at night, and it seemed to us, while we wandered down the long platform
of the Bastide, with twenty minutes to spare, that we could not do
better than get into the carriage reserved for ladies only. But one
glance into that fastness was enough. A mamma, a white-capped
‘_nou-nou_,’ an underling, an infant, and three children (two of them in
tears) were already in possession, and beginning the first of the meals
that experience had taught us would continue through the night. The next
carriage was empty; better the maniac or the inebriate, better even the
Government cigar--these things were among the possibilities, but we
chanced them. They none of them happened. We adopted the tried stratagem
of pulling down the blinds and holding the handle from inside, and had
the satisfaction of hearing the possible maniacs, drunkards, and smokers
of French tobacco remark to each other, after they had tried the handle,
that it was either a mail-van or a reserved carriage.
We had hired two pillows at a franc each, according to the convenient
custom on the Paris-Orléans railway, and thanks to them, the worst part
of the eleven hours was spent in sleep that was just pleasantly
conscious of the stops at the stations, and was lulled into blander
repose by an occasional muffled squall from the pandemonium next door.
At Blois the daylight began, and it was then, in the cold dawn, while
the train shuffled uneasily to and fro on meaningless sidings, and the
green-grey mass of a great castle deepened each time we looked from
behind the blinds, that we drew forth the half bottle of Grand St.
Lambert that had for the last few days been carried perilously about in
a bonnet-box, and with grapes and _croissants_ began a repast that
continued through stages of bovril, tea, and gingerbread biscuits till
we neared Paris. The water for the tea was near proving a difficulty. To
get it, it was necessary to shuffle in ‘night’s disarray’ to the buffet,
and a fair amount of nerve was required to advance through the crowd of
sleepily devouring men and fill a disreputable tin kettle from a carafe
of water under the very eyes of an indignant waiter. We flatter
ourselves that the most courageous man of our acquaintance would have
been afraid to do it.
There is on the south side of the Seine, not far from the Gare
Montparnasse, a hotel beloved of art students. It is clean and cheap,
and is bounded on all sides by the tram lines that cleave Paris through
and through, and put the whole town in the hollow of one’s hand for six
sous (_avec correspondance_). The Quartier Latin looked as fresh and
clean and respectable on this October morning as if it had not a
world-wide reputation for opposite qualities, and as mademoiselle of
the hotel rushed out and greeted us in such strange English as is learnt
from American art students, and with the effusion that is reserved by
her for old friends, a serene assurance settled down upon us that here,
at least, our appearance, manners, and accents would excite no surprise.
We had our luncheon at a _crêmerie_, a place known of yore, where a
beefsteak (_saignant_, according to French custom, unless specially
forbidden), _confiture_, a saucerful of curd known as _fromage à la
crême_, and a cup of black coffee could be obtained in sufficient
cleanliness for a franc or less. It was rather too early in the season
for the art student to be in full bloom; the two hot little rooms that
were so like the cabins of an inferior steamer were almost empty,
instead of being stuffed to their utmost capacity and resounding with as
many languages as the Tower of Babel, and when we went on to the studio,
and, with pleasurable anticipation, climbed the long staircase and
knocked at the door, no voice responded. There was no one there. The
easels were heaped up in one corner, the stools in another, the clock
had stopped, the model stand was covered with dust, and desponding
sketches of undressed deformities dangled from the walls, each by a
single drawing-pin. Angelo, the hoary and picturesque attendant,
followed us into this desolation, and said that such _monde_ as there
was, with a contemptuous shrug, was _là-bas_. A glance into the lower
studio, where half-a-dozen unknown Englishwomen were fighting over the
position of a sulky model in the dress of a cardinal, was enough for us.
We felt that ‘superfluous lags the veteran on the stage.’
We wandered on by familiar ways to the Luxembourg galleries--there, at
least, we should find old friends; and we looked at Rosa Bonheur’s oxen
with the eye of knowledge, and found them by no means up to the standard
of Château Loudenne. When we got out into the gardens again, with their
linked battalions of perambulators, and their thousand children courting
sea-sickness on the zoological merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still
young. The tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the
sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel Tower looked down
on us, suggesting absurdly the elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland,
when the pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent challenge
could no longer be resisted; in spite of the needle-cases,
yard-measures, and paper-weights that had horridly familiarised us with
its outlines, it was decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go
to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards, would wake to active
contempt if they heard we had not been to the Eiffel Tower.
We were deluded into getting off our tram too soon, and consequently had
a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds before
we reached our destination. To this, however, we owed the sight of the
strange row of variety entertainments which we passed _en route_. A cup
of coffee at forty-five centimes, or even a glass of beer at thirty
centimes, would have entitled us to a chair or a marble table at any of
these spectacles; but having taken a cursory view, from outside the
crowd at the barriers, of the man in evening clothes mournfully
bellowing something that sounded like a funeral ode to his mother, of
the young lady with long yellow hair and short yellow petticoats giving
a comic recitation flavoured with dancing, and of the infant phenomenon,
whose performance on the piano was unfortunately reduced to dumb show by
the success of the funny man next door, we were disposed to think that
the coffee would be dear at the price.
We found ourselves at last under the four arching dachshund legs from
which the Tower tapers improbably into space, and strayed round on the
gravel underneath it, lavishing upon each other truisms appropriate to
the occasion, and expressing artificial regrets that we had apparently
come too late in the afternoon for the lift. While we spoke, a clicking
sound dropped to us from the sky; we looked up, and saw amidst the
cobwebs of iron a large square fly descending. I hardly know how we came
to find ourselves at the entrance of the _ascenseur_. We both dislike
lifts; and my cousin can repeat many rousing tales of lift-accidents, in
which the point is usually the apparent identity of the attendant with
the leading character in a thrice-repeated nightmare; but some form of
false shame impelled us to the first stage. We held our breaths as we
slid upwards through the girders that looked like all the propositions
in Euclid run mad, and it was not till the horrible hiccough came, that
told us we had stopped at the first platform, that we ventured to glance
at the lift-man.
We walked round the long galleries, my cousin making herself both
conspicuous and absurd by her determination to find out how many
dragoon-like strides went to each side. It will doubtless be a blow to
the designer to hear that the four faces of the Tower vary in length,
two of them measuring ninety-seven yards, another a hundred, and the
fourth ninety-nine and a hop. We had thought of going to the
top--thought of it vaguely and valiantly for some little time after the
lift had shaken us out on the first _étage_, and before we had looked
over the edge. One glance, however, down at the black specks crawling on
the strips of tape that represented the gravel paths of the Exhibition
grounds satisfied us that we were as high as we wished to go. Even here
the height was making my fingers tingle, and my cousin had retired
unsteadily from the verge under the pretext of buying a photograph at a
neighbouring stall; while as to the view, all Paris was already far
below us, a marvellous gray and green toy, with the afternoon sun
striking flame out of the tiny gilded domes and spires, and the pale
thread of a river winding from one microscopic bridge to another, all
showing clear in the smokeless air with a magical precision of detail.
There is a staircase that circles dizzily down the Tower, a Jacob’s
ladder that would make an angel giddy, and rather than enter again the
lift that was even now sliding down to us on its steel cable through the
iron network, my cousin said she would walk down. It was the final
dispute of the expedition, and, after affording much amusement to the
bystanders, it ended in my leading my cousin, with her eyes tightly
shut, and the expression of Lady Jane Grey on her way to execution, into
the box with the sloping floor, in whose safety it was so impossible to
believe. We sit safely now in the ground floor of a two-storeyed house,
and as we look back to that experience, it seems to us that no dentist’s
chair can have cradled more suffering than the lift of the Eiffel Tower.
We left Paris by a late train that night. Summer and its habiliments had
alike been crushed out of sight by dint of a final war-dance upon our
portmanteaus. Everything connected with the Médoc was put away; the
Kodak, with its hidden store of vintage pictures, the apparatus of
afternoon tea, even the well-thumbed and invaluable copy of Bellows’
Dictionary that had up to this abided immutably in our pockets, was laid
sorrowing to rest in the crown of the Libourne straw hat. What use was
it to us on a degraded line of railway on which all the porters spoke
English?
[Illustration: SUCCESS TO THE VINTAGE OF 1891.]
We took a last look out of the train window at the electric star of the
Eiffel Tower, perched among the elder stars in the sky behind us, and my
cousin opened her bonnet-box and drew forth for the last time that
widow’s cruse, the bottle of Grand St. Lambert. There was about a
wine-glassful left, and out of a thick green Pauillac mug we solemnly
drank success to our first vintage.
[Illustration: FINIS]
MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.