Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting
pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if
not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters.
It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy
finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary
history.
His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them
relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X
to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a
basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest
of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they
came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her
saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as
you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly
houses of the Place Vendôme that the poet of the keyboard died a few days
later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de
Musset. A brass plate marks the house.
May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and
part of which I may at length take to myself:
_"Ah me, how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a time that's gone,
When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting
In this same place--but not alone--
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me,
There's no one now to share my cup."_
The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn to
discriminate?
V
It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in the
memorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian's Coney Island.
I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian sojourn just
before the outbreak of the World War with a beloved family party in the
joyous old Common. There is none like it in the world, uniting the urban
to the rural with such surpassing grace as perpetually to convey a double
sensation of pleasure; primal in its simplicity, superb in its setting; in
the variety and brilliancy of the life which, upon sunny afternoons, takes
possession of it and makes it a cross between a parade and a paradise.
There was a time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might
be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the
ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shady
retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizened
with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favorites
of the Tuileries, the Comédie Française, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille,
forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided frivolity from the
Port de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circling round La Bagatelle and
ranging about the Cafe Cascade, a human tiara of diamonds, a moving bouquet
of laces and rubies, of silks and satins and emeralds and sapphires. Those
were the days when the Due de Morny, half if not full brother of the
Emperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and Cora Pearl, a clever and not at
all good-looking Irish girl gone wrong, reigned as Queen of the Demimonde.
All this went by the board years ago. Everywhere, more or less, electricity
has obliterated distinctions of rank and wealth. It has circumvented lovers
and annihilated romance. The Republic ousted the bogus nobility. The
subways and the tram cars connect the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de
Vincennes so closely that the poorest may make himself at home in either or
both.
The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a very leveller. The crowd
recognizes nobody amid the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and taxicabs,
each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration of personalities effaces
the identity alike of the statesman and the artist, the savant and the
cyprian. No six-inch rules hedge the shade of the trees and limit the glory
of the grass. The _ouvrier_ can bring his brood and his basket and
have his picnic where he pleases. The pastry cook and his chére amie,
the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side as long as the
moonlight lasts, and longer if they list, with never a gendarme to say them
nay, or a rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, "allez!" The
Bois de Boulogne is literally and absolutely a playground, the playground
of the people, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a million
of Parisians were making it their own.
Half of these encircled the Longchamps racecourse. The other half were
shared by the boats upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the summer
sky and the cafés and the restaurants with which the Bois abounds. Our
party, having exhausted the humors of the drive, repaired to Pré Catalan.
Aside from the "two old brides" who are always in evidence on such
occasions, there was a veritable "young couple," exceedingly pretty to look
at, and delightfully in love! That sort of thing is not so uncommon in
Paris as cynics affect to think.
If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, that "gambling is the
recreation of gentlemen and the passion of fools," it is equally true that
love is a game where every player wins if he sticks to it and is loyal to
it. Just as credit is the foundation of business is love both the asset
and the trade-mark of happiness. To see it is to believe it, and--though a
little cash in hand is needful to both--where either is wanting, look out
for sheriffs and scandals.
Pré Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a pretty kiosk for the sale
of milk, has latterly had a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, not
counting the groves which I have seen grow up about it thickly dotted with
booths and tables, where some thousands more may regale themselves. That
Sunday it was never so glowing with animation and color. As it makes one
happy to see others happy it makes one adore his own land to witness that
which makes other lands great.
I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an American; perhaps it is a
stretch of words to say I love Paris at all. I used to love to go there and
to behold the majesty of France. I have always liked to mark the startling
contrasts of light and shade. I have always known what all the world now
knows, that beneath the gayety of the French there burns a patriotic
and consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a fine spirit of
self-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of freedom.
In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files deep upon the Rue St.
Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women and old men with their
little all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings to take up the tribute
required by Bismarck to rid the soil of the detested German. They did it.
Alone they did it--the French people--the hard-working, frugal, loyal
commonalty of France--without asking the loan of a sou from the world
outside.