PARISIAN CHARACTERISTICS.
Parisian Characteristics--Gaiety, Flippancy, Wit--A String of Favourite
Anecdotes.
In our last few chapters we have been glancing about Paris for different
types of character. These are sufficiently varied even where they are
not absolutely dissimilar from each other. But there is one
characteristic which runs through the whole of them; the Parisian, be he
great or small, rich or poor, never loses his national gaiety. He laughs
through his tears and sometimes jests with his last breath.
This gaiety finds expression in manifold ways, and shows itself above
all in innumerable anecdotes. If, as Dr. Johnson maintained, the dullest
book is worth wading through if only it contains a couple of good
anecdotes, no apology need be made for presenting in this chapter a few
of those “bonnes histoires” in which Parisians delight, and which so
often illustrate their character.
Let us begin with one which is very French and particularly Parisian. A
poverty-stricken author, awaking suddenly at midnight, discerned in his
garret a burglar feeling in his empty cash-box. The author burst into a
laugh. The burglar, annoyed to find himself an object of ridicule,
inquired what the author could find so particularly amusing. “A thousand
pardons,” was the polite reply, “but I could not help smiling to see you
searching in the dark for what I shall be unable to find in the
daylight.”
A Parisian had been accustomed for twenty years to pass his evenings at
the house of a certain Mme. R----. He lost his wife, and everyone
expected he would marry the lady whom he had so assiduously visited.
When however, his friends urged him to do so, he refused, saying, “I
should no longer know where to pass my evenings.”
A general who had been beaten in Germany and in Italy perceived one day,
hanging over his door, a drum inscribed with this device: “I am beaten
on both sides.”
The Regent of Orleans wished to go to a masked ball without being
recognised. “I know how to manage it,” said the Abbé Dubois. During the
ball he set the Regent on his guard against disclosing his identity, by
dint of sundry admonitory kicks. The victim, finding the clerical foot
by no means a light one, whispered, “My dear Abbé, you disguise me too
much.”
A French soldier, not knowing how otherwise to pass his time, entered
the fashionable church of Saint-Roch. When the woman who receives money
for the use of chairs approached him and asked for five sous, “Five
sous?” he exclaimed. “If I had five sous I should not be here.”
A lady had a spoilt child, whose praises she was never tired of
sounding. “Your child is delightful,” said a visitor. “At what time does
he go to bed?”
Someone, in presence of the Abbé Trublet, was praising one day the soft
seductive manners of Mme. de Tencin, who was fascinating but without
principle. “Yes,” said the abbé, “if she wished to poison you she would
use the sweetest poison she could find.”
A Paris cabdriver, much vexed by the success of the omnibus, then just
introduced, determined to start an opposition. He proposed to take
passengers at four sous a head, and put this inscription outside his
vehicle: “Fiacribus at four sous.”
A Parisian boy was receiving a long lecture from his father on the
subject of his inattention, no matter what good advice might be given to
him. The boy lowered his head and seemed to be earnestly engaged in
listening to his parent’s observations. Suddenly, however, he exclaimed,
“Ninety-nine--one hundred! That is the hundredth ant, father, that has
gone into that little hole since you have been talking to me.”
[Illustration: PARISIAN TYPES--IN THE BARRACKS.]
A Parisian, who could not brook contradiction, fought fourteen duels by
way of maintaining his opinion that Dante was a greater poet than
Petrarch. When dying from the effects of a wound received in his last
encounter, he admitted to a friend that he had never read a line of
either poet.
A Parisian candidate for the degree of bachelor in letters was being
examined in history. He gave satisfactory answers to every question
until at last he was asked when Charlemagne lived. “Eight centuries
before Christ,” he replied. “You mean after Christ?” said the questioner
with a smile. “I am sorry to disagree with the board of examiners,”
answered the young man with some modesty, “but I maintain my opinion
that Charlemagne must have lived eight centuries before Christ.” This
determined student had, as a matter of course, to be plucked.
Two daughters of Paris, at the bedside of their dying father, who had
gained millions by usury, were shocked to hear the priest, who had just
received his confession, enjoin restitution as the only condition on
which he could possibly be saved. “For pity’s sake, father,” said the
girls, when the priest had left the room, “do nothing of the kind. You
will suffer for a short time, but after the first quarter of an hour you
will be like a fish in water.”
An impressionable Paris banker, the owner of immense riches, died of
grief on hearing that he had lost everything in the world except 100,000
francs. His pauper brother, on inheriting the sum, died of joy.
A Parisian husband, to whom his wife rendered but scant obedience, asked
her one day, when she was leaving the house, where she was going.
“Wherever I like,” she answered. “And when do you propose to come back?”
“Whenever I think fit,” she replied. “If you return one moment later,”
said the husband, with an air of menace, “I shall have a word with you.”
A Parisian schoolboy, meeting a little beggar in the street who declared
himself to be the most miserable boy alive, said to him, with an accent
of deep sympathy, “What! are you learning the Latin grammar?”
The Prince de Condé was one of the wittiest of Parisians. He had been
criticising severely a tedious tragedy called Zenobia, the work of the
Abbé d’Aubignac. “It is written strictly in accordance,” said one of the
Abbe’s defenders, “with the rules of Aristotle” “I don’t blame the
abbé,” replied Condé, “for having followed Aristotle, but I shall never
forgive Aristotle for having caused him to write so tedious a piece.”
A Parisian _grande dame_, before whom a gentleman had just taken out a
cigar, was asked whether she disliked the smell of tobacco. “I cannot
say,” she replied. “No one has ever smoked in my presence.”
The French are perhaps less celebrated than of old for their politeness.
It was a French preacher, however, who, in a sermon delivered before
Louis XIV., observed deferentially “we are nearly all mortal”; and it
was a French professor who, when Louis XVIII. had requested from him
some lessons in chemistry, began his explanations by saying, “These two
bodies, of opposite properties, will now have the honour of combining in
presence of your Majesty.”
A Parisian, in the midst of a dissipated life, was prevailed upon to
enter a monastery. Ere long he confessed to the Superior that in his
moments of solitude he was constantly assailed by a desire to return to
his former mode of existence. The Superior recommended him on these
occasions to ring the great bell of the monastery, which would at once
give him bodily exercise, distract him from evil thoughts, and be a
signal to the other monks to pray for him. He rang, however, so
frequently that the bell went on tolling all night, until at last
representations on the subject were made from the entire neighbourhood.
A cuirassier, who had seen and admired Horace Vernet’s military
pictures, called upon the great painter and asked how much he would
charge him for his portrait. “How much are you prepared to pay?” asked
Vernet. “I could go as high--as high as a franc and a half,” replied the
soldier. “Done,” said Vernet, and in a few minutes he had made a rapid
sketch of the warrior. As the cuirassier left the room he said to a
comrade who had been waiting for him at the door, “I got it done for a
franc and a half. But I am sorry, now, I did not bargain. He might have
taken a franc.”
Sophie Arnould’s dog having fallen ill, the celebrated actress sent him
for treatment to her friend Mesmer, inventor of the pretended science
which bears his name. In a few days the German physician returned the
dog with a letter certifying that it was quite well. The dog, however,
died on the way home. “What a comfort it is,” said Sophie, on seeing the
letter and the dead body, “to know that the poor animal died in good
health.”
On seeing the dancer, Madeleine Guimard, who was thin even to
scragginess, perform in a “pas de trois” with a robust male dancer
leaping about on each side of her, Sophie Arnould said that it was like
two dogs fighting for a bone.
A Parisian lady observed one day, in the presence of a man six feet high
who greatly admired her, that she did not like tall men. He redoubled
his attentions until, seeing her one day in rather a dreamy condition,
he asked her what she was thinking about. “I am wondering how it is,”
she replied, “that you seem to get smaller and smaller every day.”
The Abbé Fouquet was Mazarin’s spy, and he threw numberless Parisians
into the Bastille. One man, whom he sent there one day, saw a large dog
in the court-yard of the fortress-prison. “What has that dog done?” he
asked, “to get in a place like this?” “He has probably bitten the Abbé
Fouquet’s dog,” replied a veteran prisoner.
An amorous youth wished to send to the object of his affections a
passionate, but at the same time witty, epistle. After cudgelling his
brains for some hours to no purpose he went to a bookseller’s, bought a
“complete letter-writer,” and copied out what seemed to him the most
suitable missive, which he duly despatched. The young lady replied to
him next day as follows: “Turn to the next page and you will find my
answer.”
A Parisian publisher, extremely annoyed at having printed a big book of
which he could only sell four copies, bitterly reproached the author,
telling him that his works would not even give him bread. A vigorous
blow with the fist, which knocked out several of the publisher’s teeth,
was the only reply made by the haughty writer. Arrested by the police,
the latter, called upon to explain his conduct, extricated himself by
the following ingenious defence, at which the judge, the audience, and
even the plaintiff could not restrain their laughter. “Gentlemen,” he
said, “I confess that I acted with rather too much warmth. I knocked out
his teeth; but after all, what mischief is done? He told me my works
would not give him bread, and teeth are useless when there is nothing to
eat.”
The Marquis de Favières, a great borrower and notorious for never
returning his loans, went one day to the financier Samuel Bernard, and
said to him: “I am going to astonish you, sir. I am the Marquis de
Favières. I do not know you, and I have come to borrow five hundred
louis.” “Sir,” said Bernard, “I shall astonish you still more. I know
you, and I am going to lend you the money.”
The Parisian “badaud,” an intensification of the London Cockney, has a
reputation, moreover, for making blunders and bulls of the Irish kind.
One of them, hazarding some speculations on the subject of astronomy, is
said to have observed that the moon was a much more important orb than
the sun, because the sun “comes out only in the day-time, when everyone
can see perfectly well. The moon, on the other hand, shines in the
darkness, when a light to guide us is really wanted.”
Another Parisian of the dull species once wrote to a friend as follows:
“A man has just called me a villain, and threatened, if I ever speak to
him again, to kick me. What do you usually do in such a case?”
A Parisian who, without knowing much about horse-flesh, had just bought
a horse, was asked whether the animal was timid. “Not at all,” he
replied. “He has slept three nights running in the stable by himself.”
Another Parisian “sportsman” was reproached by a connoisseur with having
clipped his horse’s ears. He explained that the animal was in the habit,
whenever alarmed, of pricking up his ears, and that he had cut them in
order to cure him of his timidity.
A literary specimen of the Parisian Cockney is said to have written, in
an historical novel, the following remarkable sentence. “Before the year
1667 Paris at night was plunged in total darkness, which was made darker
than ever by the absence of gas-lights, not yet invented.”
In a Russian history of Poland, the Poles were seriously reminded that
it was not until after the partition of Poland that the streets of
Warsaw were lighted with gas.
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