1877
It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with
another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of
neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the
world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the
case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the
cosmopolite--that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and
feeling at home in none. To be a cosmopolite is not, I think, an ideal;
the ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is
an accident, but one must make the best of it. If you have lived about,
as the phrase is, you have lost that sense of the absoluteness and the
sanctity of the habits of your fellow-patriots which once made you so
happy in the midst of them. You have seen that there are a great many
_patriæ_ in the world, and that each of these is filled with excellent
people for whom the local idiosyncrasies are the only thing that is not
rather barbarous. There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever
it may be found, grows to seem to you about as provincial as another;
and then I suppose it may be said of you that you have become a
cosmopolite. You have formed the habit of comparing, of looking for
points of difference and of resemblance, for present and absent
advantages, for the virtues that go with certain defects, and the
defects that go with certain virtues. If this is poor work compared with
the active practice, in the sphere to which a discriminating Providence
has assigned you, of the duties of a tax-payer, an elector, a juryman or
a diner-out, there is nevertheless something to be said for it. It is
good to think well of mankind, and this, on the whole, a cosmopolite
does. If you limit your generalisations to the sphere I mentioned just
now, there is a danger that your occasional fits of pessimism may be too
sweeping. When you are out of humour the whole country suffers, because
at such moments one is never discriminating, and it costs you very
little bad logic to lump your fellow-citizens together. But if you are
living about, as I say, certain differences impose themselves. The worst
you can say of the human race is, for instance, that the Germans are a
detestable people. They do not represent the human race for you, as in
your native town your fellow-citizens do, and your unflattering judgment
has a flattering reverse. If the Germans are detestable, you are
mentally saying, there are those admirable French, or those charming
Americans, or those interesting English. (Of course it is simply by
accident that I couple the German name here with the unfavourable
adjective. The epithets may be transposed at will.) Nothing can well be
more different from anything else than the English from the French, so
that, if you are acquainted with both nations, it may be said that on
any special point your agreeable impression of the one implies a
censorious attitude toward the other, and _vice versa_. This has rather
a shocking sound; it makes the cosmopolite appear invidious and
narrow-minded. But I hasten to add that there seems no real reason why
even the most delicate conscience should take alarm. The consequence of
the cosmopolite spirit is to initiate you into the merits of all
peoples; to convince you that national virtues are numerous, though they
may be very different, and to make downright preference really very
hard. I have, for instance, every disposition to think better of the
English race than of any other except my own. There are things which
make it natural I should; there are inducements, provocations,
temptations, almost bribes. There have been moments when I have almost
burned my ships behind me, and declared that, as it simplified matters
greatly to pin one's faith to a chosen people, I would henceforth cease
to trouble my head about the lights and shades of the foreign character.
I am convinced that if I had taken this reckless engagement, I should
greatly have regretted it. You may find a room very comfortable to sit
in with the window open, and not like it at all when the window has been
shut. If one were, to give up the privilege of comparing the English
with other people, one would very soon, in a moment of reaction, make
once for all (and most unjustly) such a comparison as would leave the
English nowhere. Compare then, I say, as often as the occasion presents
itself. The result as regards any particular people, and as regards the
human race at large, may be pronounced agreeable, and the process is
both instructive and entertaining.
So the author of these observations finds it on returning to Paris after
living for upwards of a year in London. He finds himself comparing, and
the results of comparison are several disjointed reflections, of which
it may be profitable to make a note. Certainly Paris is a very old
story, and London is a still older one; and there is no great reason why
a journey across the channel and back should quicken one's perspicacity
to an unprecedented degree. I therefore will not pretend to have been
looking at Paris with new eyes, or to have gathered on the banks of the
Seine a harvest of extraordinary impressions. I will only pretend that a
good many old impressions have recovered their freshness, and that there
is a sort of renovated entertainment in looking at the most brilliant
city in the world with eyes attuned to a different pitch. Never, in
fact, have those qualities of brightness and gaiety that are half the
stock-in-trade of the city by the Seine seemed to me more uncontestable.
The autumn is but half over, and Paris is, in common parlance, empty.
The private houses are closed, the lions have returned to the jungle,
the Champs Elysées are not at all "mondains." But I have never seen
Paris more Parisian, in the pleasantest sense of the word; better
humoured, more open-windowed, more naturally entertaining. A radiant
September helps the case; but doubtless the matter is, as I hinted
above, in a large degree "subjective." For when one comes to the point
there is nothing very particular just now for Paris to rub her hands
about. The Exhibition of 1878 is looming up as large as a mighty mass of
buildings on the Trocadéro can make it. These buildings are very
magnificent and fantastical; they hang over the Seine, in their sudden
immensity and glittering newness, like a palace in a fairy-tale. But the
trouble is that most people appear to regard the Exhibition as in fact a
fairy-tale. They speak of the wonderful structures on the Champ de Mars
and the Trocadéro as a predestined monument to the folly of a group of
gentlemen destitute of a sense of the opportune. The moment certainly
does not seem very well chosen for inviting the world to come to Paris
to amuse itself. The world is too much occupied with graver cares--with
reciprocal cannonading and chopping, with cutting of throats and burning
of homes, with murder of infants and mutilation of mothers, with warding
off famine and civil war, with lamenting the failure of its resources,
the dulness of trade, the emptiness of its pockets. Rome is burning
altogether too fast for even its most irresponsible spirits to find any
great satisfaction in fiddling. But even if there is (as there very well
may be) a certain scepticism at headquarters as to the accomplishment of
this graceful design, there is no apparent hesitation, and everything is
going forward as rapidly as if mankind were breathless with expectation.
That familiar figure, the Parisian _ouvrier_, with his white, chalky
blouse, his attenuated person, his clever face, is more familiar than
ever, and I suppose, finding plenty of work to his hand, is for the time
in a comparatively rational state of mind. He swarms in thousands, not
only in the region of the Exhibition, but along the great
thoroughfare--the Avenue de l'Opéra--which has just been opened in the
interior of Paris.
This is an extremely Parisian creation, and as it is really a great
convenience--it will save a great many steps and twists and turns--I
suppose it should be spoken of with gratitude and admiration. But I
confess that to my sense it belongs primarily to that order of benefits
which during the twenty years of the Empire gradually deprived the
streets of Paris of nine-tenths of their ancient individuality. The
deadly monotony of the Paris that M. Haussmann called into being--its
huge, blank, pompous, featureless sameness--sometimes comes over the
wandering stranger with a force that leads him to devote the author of
these miles of architectural commonplace to execration. The new street
is quite on the imperial system; it must make the late Napoleon III.
smile with beatific satisfaction as he looks down upon it from the
Bonapartist corner of Paradise. It stretches straight away from the
pompous façade of the Opera to the doors of the Théâtre Français,
and it must be admitted that there is something fine in the vista that
is closed at one end by the great sculptured and gilded mass of the
former building. But it smells of the modern asphalt; it is lined with
great white houses that are adorned with machine-made arabesques, and
each of which is so exact a copy of all the rest that even the little
white porcelain number on a blue ground, which looks exactly like all
the other numbers, hardly constitutes an identity. Presently there will
be a long succession of milliners' and chocolate-makers' shops in the
basement of this homogeneous row, and the pretty bonnets and
bonbonnières in the shining windows will have their ribbons knotted
with a _chic_ that you must come to Paris to see. Then there will be
little glazed sentry-boxes at regular intervals along the curbstone, in
which churlish old women will sit selling half a dozen copies of each of
the newspapers; and over the hardened bitumen the young Parisian of our
day will constantly circulate, looking rather pallid and wearing very
large shirt-cuffs. And the new avenue will be a great success, for it
will place in symmetrical communication two of the most important
establishments in France--the temple of French music and the temple of
French comedy.
I said just now that no two things could well be more unlike than
England and France; and though the remark is not original, I uttered it
with the spontaneity that it must have on the lips of a traveller who,
having left either country, has just disembarked in the other. It is of
course by this time a very trite observation, but it will continue to be
made so long as Boulogne remains the same lively antithesis of
Folkestone. An American, conscious of the family-likeness diffused over
his own huge continent, never quite unlearns his surprise at finding
that so little of either of these two almost contiguous towns has rubbed
off upon the other. He is surprised at certain English people feeling so
far away from France, and at all French people feeling so far away from
England. I travelled from Boulogne the other day in the same
railway-carriage with a couple of amiable and ingenuous young Britons,
who had come over to spend ten days in Paris. It was their first landing
in France; they had never yet quitted their native island; and in the
course of a little conversation that I had with them I was struck with
the scantiness of their information in regard to French manners and
customs. They were very intelligent lads; they were apparently fresh
from a university; but in respect to the interesting country they were
about to enter, their minds were almost a blank. If the conductor,
appearing at the carriage door to ask for our tickets, had had the leg
of a frog sticking out of his pocket, I think their only very definite
preconception would have been confirmed. I parted with them at the Paris
station, and I have no doubt that they very soon began to make precious
discoveries; and I have alluded to them not in the least to throw
ridicule upon their "insularity"--which indeed, being accompanied with
great modesty, I thought a very pretty spectacle--but because having
become, since my last visit to France, a little insular myself, I was
more conscious of the emotions that attend on an arrival.
The brightness always seems to begin while you are still out in the
channel, when you fairly begin to see the French coast. You pass into a
region of intenser light--a zone of clearness and colour. These
properties brighten and deepen as you approach the land, and when you
fairly stand upon that good Boulognese quay, among the blue and red
douaniers and soldiers, the small ugly men in cerulean blouses, the
charming fishwives, with their folded kerchiefs and their crisp
cap-frills, their short striped petticoats, their tightly-drawn
stockings, and their little clicking sabots--when you look about you at
the smokeless air, at the pink and yellow houses, at the white-fronted
café, close at hand, with its bright blue letters, its mirrors and
marble-topped tables, its white-aproned, alert, undignified waiter,
grasping a huge coffee-pot by a long handle--when you perceive all these
things you feel the additional savour that foreignness gives to the
picturesque; or feel rather, I should say, that simple foreignness may
itself make the picturesque; for certainly the elements in the picture I
have just sketched are not especially exquisite. No matter; you are
amused, and your amusement continues--being sensibly stimulated by a
visit to the buffet at the railway station, which is better than the
refreshment-room at Folkestone. It is a pleasure to have people offering
you soup again, of their own movement; it is a pleasure to find a little
pint of Bordeaux standing naturally before your plate; it is a pleasure
to have a napkin; it is a pleasure, above all, to take up one of the
good long sticks of French bread--as bread is called the staff of life,
the French bake it literally in the shape of staves--and break off a
loose, crisp, crusty morsel.
There are impressions, certainly, that imperil your good-humour. No
honest Anglo-Saxon can like a French railway-station; and I was on the
point of adding that no honest Anglo-Saxon can like a French
railway-official. But I will not go so far as that; for after all I
cannot remember any great harm that such a functionary has ever done
me--except in locking me up as a malefactor. It is necessary to say,
however, that the honest Anglo-Saxon, in a French railway-station, is in
a state of chronic irritation--an irritation arising from his sense of
the injurious effect upon the genial French nature of the possession of
an administrative uniform. I believe that the consciousness of brass
buttons on his coat and stripes on his trousers has spoiled many a
modest and amiable Frenchman, and the sight of these aggressive insignia
always stirs within me a moral protest. I repeat that my aversion to
them is partly theoretic, for I have found, as a general thing, that an
inquiry civilly made extracts a civil answer from even the most
official-looking personage. But I have also found that such a
personage's measure of the civility due to him is inordinately large; if
he places himself in any degree at your service, it is apparently from
the sense that true greatness can afford to unbend. You are constantly
reminded that you must not presume. In England these intimations never
proceed from one's "inferiors." In France the "administration" is the
first thing that touches you; in a little while you get used to it, but
you feel somehow that, in the process, you have lost the flower of your
self-respect. Of course you are under some obligation to it. It has
taken you off the steamer at Folkestone; made you tell your name to a
gentleman with a sword, stationed at the farther end of the plank--not a
drawn sword, it is true, but still, at the best, a very nasty weapon;
marshalled you into the railway-station; assigned you to a carriage--I
was going to say to a seat; transported you to Paris, marshalled you
again out of the train, and under a sort of military surveillance, into
an enclosure containing a number of human sheep-pens, in one of which it
has imprisoned you for some half-hour. I am always on the point, in
these places, of asking one of my gaolers if I may not be allowed to
walk about on parole. The administration at any rate has finally taken
you out of your pen, and, through the medium of a functionary who
"inscribes" you in a little book, transferred you to a cab selected by a
logic of its own. In doing all this it has certainly done a great deal
for you; but somehow its good offices have made you feel sombre and
resentful. The other day, on arriving from London, while I was waiting
for my luggage, I saw several of the porters who convey travellers'
impedimenta to the cab come up and deliver over the coin they had just
received for this service to a functionary posted _ad hoc_ in a corner,
and armed with a little book in which he noted down these remittances.
The _pour-boires_ are apparently thrown into a common fund and divided
among the guild of porters. The system is doubtless an excellent one,
excellently carried out; but the sight of the poor round-shouldered man
of burdens dropping his coin into the hand of the official arithmetician
was to my fancy but another reminder that the individual, as an
individual, loses by all that the administration assumes.
After living a while in England you observe the individual in Paris with
quickened attention; and I think it must be said that at first he makes
an indifferent figure. You are struck with the race being physically and
personally a poorer one than that great family of largely-modelled,
fresh-coloured people you have left upon the other side of the channel.
I remember that in going to England a year ago and disembarking of a
dismal, sleety Sunday evening at Folkestone, the first thing that struck
me was the good looks of the railway porters--their broad shoulders,
their big brown beards, their well-cut features. In like manner, landing
lately at Boulogne of a brilliant Sunday morning, it was impossible not
to think the little men in numbered caps who were gesticulating and
chattering in one's path, rather ugly fellows. In arriving from other
countries one is struck with a certain want of dignity in the French
face. I do not know, however, whether this is anything worse than the
fact that the French face is expressive; for it may be said that, in a
certain sense, to express anything is to compromise with one's dignity,
which likes to be understood without taking trouble. As regards the
lower classes, at any rate, the impression I speak of always passes
away; you perceive that the good looks of the French working-people are
to be found in their look of intelligence. These people, in Paris,
strike me afresh as the cleverest, the most perceptive, and,
intellectually speaking, the most human of their kind. The Paris
_ouvrier_, with his democratic blouse, his expressive, demonstrative,
agreeable eye, his meagre limbs, his irregular, pointed features, his
sallow complexion, his face at once fatigued and animated, his light,
nervous organisation, is a figure that I always encounter again with
pleasure. In some cases he looks depraved and perverted, but at his
worst he looks refined; he is full of vivacity of perception, of
something that one can appeal to.
It takes some courage to say this, perhaps, after reading _L'Assommoir_;
but in M. Emile Zola's extraordinary novel one must make the part, as
the French say, of the horrible uncleanness of the author's imagination.
_L'Assommoir_, I have been told, has had great success in the lower
walks of Parisian life; and if this fact is not creditable to the
delicacy of M. Zola's humble readers, it proves a good deal in favour of
their intelligence. With all its grossness the book in question is
essentially a literary performance; you must be tolerably clever to
appreciate it. It is highly appreciated, I believe, by the young ladies
who live in the region of the Latin Quarter--those young ladies who
thirty years ago were called grisettes, and now are called I don't know
what. They know long passages by heart; they repeat them with infinite
gusto. "Ce louchon d'Augustine"--the horrible little girl with a squint,
who is always playing nasty tricks and dodging slaps and projectiles in
Gervaise's shop, is their particular favourite; and it must be admitted
that "ce louchon d'Augustine" is, as regards reality, a wonderful
creation.
If Parisians, both small and great, have more of the intellectual stamp
than the people one sees in London, it is striking, on the other hand,
that the people of the better sort in Paris look very much less
"respectable." I did not know till I came back to Paris how used I had
grown to the English _cachet_; but I immediately found myself missing
it. You miss it in the men much more than in the women; for the
well-to-do Frenchwoman of the lower orders, as one sees her in public,
in the streets and in shops, is always a delightfully comfortable and
creditable person. I must confess to the highest admiration for her, an
admiration that increases with acquaintance. She, at least, is
essentially respectable; the neatness, compactness, and sobriety of her
dress, the decision of her movement and accent suggest the civic and
domestic virtues--order, thrift, frugality, the moral necessity of
making a good appearance. It is, I think, an old story that to the
stranger in France the women seem greatly superior to the men. Their
superiority, in fact, appears to be conceded; for wherever you turn you
meet them in the forefront of action. You meet them, indeed, too often;
you pronounce them at times obtrusive. It is annoying when you go to
order your boots or your shirts, to have to make known your desires to
even the most neat-waisted female attendant; for the limitations to the
feminine intellect are, though few in number, distinct, and women are
not able to understand certain masculine needs. Mr. Worth makes ladies'
dresses; but I am sure there will never be a fashionable tailoress.
There are, however, points at which, from the commercial point of view,
feminine assistance is invaluable. For insisting upon the merits of an
article that has failed to satisfy you, talking you over, and making you
take it; for defending a disputed bill, for paying the necessary
compliments or supplying the necessary impertinence--for all these
things the neat-waisted sex has peculiar and precious faculties. In the
commercial class in Paris the man always appeals to the woman; the woman
always steps forward. The woman always proposes the conditions of a
bargain. Go about and look for furnished rooms, you always encounter a
concierge and his wife. When you ask the price of the rooms, the woman
takes the words out of her husband's mouth, if indeed he have not first
turned to her with a questioning look. She takes you in hand; she
proposes conditions; she thinks of things he would not have thought of.
What I meant just now by my allusion to the absence of the "respectable"
in the appearance of the Parisian population was that the men do not
look like gentlemen, as so many Englishmen do. The average Frenchman
that one encounters in public is of so different a type from the average
Englishman that you can easily believe that to the end of time the two
will not understand each other. The Frenchman has always, comparatively
speaking a Bohemian, empirical look; the expression of his face, its
colouring, its movement, have not been toned down to the neutral
complexion of that breeding for which in English speech we reserve the
epithet of "good." He is at once more artificial and more natural; the
former where the Englishman is positive, the latter where the Englishman
is negative. He takes off his hat with a flourish to a friend, but the
Englishman never bows. He ties a knot in the end of a napkin and thrusts
it into his shirt-collar, so that, as he sits at breakfast, the napkin
may serve the office of a pinafore. Such an operation as that seems to
the Englishman as _naïf_ as the flourishing of one's hat is
pretentious.
I sometimes go to breakfast at a café on the Boulevard, which I
formerly used to frequent with considerable regularity. Coming back
there the other day, I found exactly the same group of habitués at
their little tables, and I mentally exclaimed as I looked at them over
my newspaper, upon their unlikeness to the gentlemen who confront you in
the same attitude at a London club. Who are they? what are they? On
these points I have no information; but the stranger's imagination does
not seem to see a majestic social order massing itself behind them as it
usually does in London. He goes so far as to suspect that what is behind
them is not adapted for exhibition; whereas your Englishmen, whatever
may be the defects of their personal character, or the irregularities of
their conduct, are pressed upon from the rear by an immense body of
private proprieties and comforts, of domestic conventions and
theological observances. But it is agreeable all the same to come back
to a café of which you have formerly been an habitué. Adolphe or
Edouard, in his long white apron and his large patent-leather slippers,
has a perfect recollection of "les habitudes de Monsieur." He remembers
the table you preferred, the wine you drank, the newspaper you read. He
greets you with the friendliest of smiles, and remarks that it is a long
time since he has had the pleasure of seeing Monsieur. There is
something in this simple remark very touching to a heart that has
suffered from that incorruptible dumbness of the British domestic. But
in Paris such a heart finds consolation at every step; it is reminded of
that most classic quality of the French nature--its sociability; a
sociability which operates here as it never does in England, from below
upward. Your waiter utters a greeting because, after all, something
human within him prompts him; his instinct bids him say something, and
his taste recommends that it be agreeable. The obvious reflection is
that a waiter must not say too much, even for the sake of being human.
But in France the people always like to make the little extra remark, to
throw in something above the simply necessary. I stop before a little
man who is selling newspapers at a street-corner, and ask him for the
_Journal des Débats_. His answer deserves to be literally given: "Je ne
l'ai plus, Monsieur; mais je pourrai vous donner quelque chose à peu
près dans le même genre--_la République Française_." Even a person
of his humble condition must have had a lurking sense of the comicality
of offering anything as an equivalent for the "genre" of the venerable,
classic, academic _Débats_. But my friend could not bear to give me a
naked, monosyllabic refusal.
There are two things that the returning observer is likely to do with as
little delay as possible. One is to dine at some _cabaret_ of which he
retains a friendly memory; another is to betake himself to the Théâtre
Français. It is early in the season; there are no new pieces; but I
have taken great pleasure in seeing some of the old ones. I lost no time
in going to see Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt in _Andromaque_.
_Andromaque_ is not a novelty, but Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt has a
perennial freshness. The play has been revived, to enable her to
represent not the great part, the injured and passionate Hermione, but
that of the doleful, funereal widow of Hector. This part is a poor one;
it is narrow and monotonous, and offers few brilliant opportunities. But
the actress knows how to make opportunities, and she has here a very
sufficient one for crossing her thin white arms over her nebulous black
robes, and sighing forth in silver accents her dolorous rhymes. Her
rendering of the part is one more proof of her singular intelligence--of
the fineness of her artistic nature. As there is not a great deal to be
done with it in the way of declamation, she has made the most of its
plastic side. She understands the art of motion and attitude as no one
else does, and her extraordinary personal grace never fails her. Her
Andromaque has postures of the most poetic picturesqueness--something
that suggests the broken stem and drooping head of a flower that had
been rudely plucked. She bends over her classic confidant like the
figure of Bereavement on a bas-relief, and she has a marvellous manner
of lifting and throwing back her delicate arms, locking them together,
and passing them behind her hanging head.
The _Demi-Monde_ of M. Dumas _fils_ is not a novelty either; but I quite
agree with M. Francisque Sarcey that it is on the whole, in form, the
first comedy of our day. I have seen it several times, but I never see
it without being forcibly struck with its merits. For the drama of our
time it must always remain the model. The interest of the story, the
quiet art with which it is unfolded, the naturalness and soberness of
the means that are used, and by which great effects are produced, the
brilliancy and richness of the dialogue--all these things make it a
singularly perfect and interesting work. Of course it is admirably well
played at the Théâtre Français. Madame d'Ange was originally a part
of too great amplitude for Mademoiselle Croizette; but she is gradually
filling it out and taking possession of it; she begins to give a sense
of the "calme infernal," which George Sand somewhere mentions as the
leading attribute of the character. As for Delaunay, he does nothing
better, more vividly and gallantly, than Olivier de Jalin. When I say
gallantry I say it with qualification; for what a very queer fellow is
this same M. de Jalin! In seeing the _Demi-Monde_ again I was more than
ever struck with the oddity of its morality and with the way that the
ideal of fine conduct differs in different nations. The _Demi-Monde_ is
the history of the eager, the almost heroic, effort of a clever and
superior woman, who has been guilty of what the French call "faults," to
pass from the irregular and equivocal circle to which these faults have
consigned her into what is distinctively termed "good society." The only
way in which the passage can be effected is by her marrying an
honourable man; and to induce an honourable man to marry her, she must
suppress the more discreditable facts of her career. Taking her for an
honest woman, Raymond de Nanjac falls in love with her, and honestly
proposes to make her his wife. But Raymond de Nanjac has contracted an
intimate friendship with Olivier de Jalin, and the action of the play is
more especially De Jalin's attempt--a successful one--to rescue his
friend from the ignominy of a union with Suzanne d'Ange. Jalin knows a
great deal about her, for the simple reason that he has been her lover.
Their relations have been most harmonious, but from the moment that
Suzanne sets her cap at Nanjac, Olivier declares war. Suzanne struggles
hard to keep possession of her suitor, who is very much in love with
her, and Olivier spares no pains to detach him. It is the means that
Olivier uses that excite the wonderment of the Anglo-Saxon spectator. He
takes the ground that in such a cause all means are fair, and when, at
the climax of the play, he tells a thumping lie in order to make Madame
d'Ange compromise herself, expose herself, he is pronounced by the
author "le plus honnête homme que je connaisse." Madame d'Ange, as I
have said, is a superior woman; the interest of the play is in her being
a superior woman. Olivier has been her lover; he himself is one of the
reasons why she may not marry Nanjac; he has given her a push along the
downward path. But it is curious how little this is held by the author
to disqualify him from fighting the battle in which she is so much the
weaker combatant. An English-speaking audience is more "moral" than a
French, more easily scandalised; and yet it is a singular fact that if
the _Demi-Monde_ were represented before an English-speaking audience,
its sympathies would certainly not go with M. de Jalin. It would
pronounce him rather a coward. Is it because such an audience, although
it has not nearly such a pretty collection of pedestals to place under
the feet of the charming sex, has, after all, in default of this degree
of gallantry, a tenderness more fundamental? Madame d'Ange has stained
herself, and it is doubtless not at all proper that such ladies should
be led to the altar by honourable young men. The point is not that the
English-speaking audience would be disposed to condone Madame d'Ange's
irregularities, but that it would remain perfectly cold before the
spectacle of her ex-lover's masterly campaign against her, and quite
fail to think it positively admirable, or to regard the fib by which he
finally clenches his victory as a proof of exceptional honesty. The
ideal of our own audience would be expressed in some such words as, "I
say, that's not fair game. Can't you let the poor woman alone?"