THE PENSION IN THE RUE MADAME
We started our search for a temporary home at the Observatoire, and good
fortune took our footsteps down the Rue d'Assas rather than down the
Boulevard Saint-Michel. Had we turned to the right instead of to the
left, we should probably have found a _pension_ that satisfied our
requirements on the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Rue Claude Bernard, the Rue
Soufflot, or behind the Panthéon. But a short distance down the Rue
d'Assas, we turned into the Rue Madame, which held two possibilities on
our list. The first place advertised proved to be a private apartment,
whose mistress was looking for boarders for one room who would not only
pay her rent but her food and her old father's as well. We got out
quickly, and kept our hopes up for the second place. It was a small
private hotel just below the Rue de Vaugirard, with a modest sign:
_Pension de Famille_.
A beaming young woman, who told us that she was Mademoiselle Guyénot,
_propriétaire et directrice de la maison_, answered our first question
in a way that won our hearts forever. "Do I mind a baby!" she exclaimed.
"I love them. No trouble in the world. Wish the _bon dieu_ would allow
me to have one myself. If any boarder complains about babies crying in
my house, I ask them how they expect the world to keep on going.
_Parfait!_ Bring the little rabbit right along. Of course there is no
charge. Is it I who will feed her? Think of it, then!" And Mademoiselle
Guyénot opened wide her arms and lifted them Heavenward. Her eyes shone,
and she laughed.
We engaged a room on the court, two flights up, for seventy francs a
week _tout compris_, lodging, food, boots, wine. Lights would not amount
to more than a franc a week. We could give what we wanted for
attendance. The arrangement with Marie was perfect. She would stay at
home and come for the days we wanted her. That meant only her noonday
meal on our _pension_ bill--one franc-fifty.
We got out of the Boulevard Diderot hotel none too soon. The charges
were fully as much as at a first-class hotel (I have frequently since
found this to be the case in trying to economize in travel) and made a
serious dent in our nest-egg. When we reached the _pension_ with our
baby and baggage, we felt that it was only the square thing to acquaint
the new friend who loved babies with our financial situation.
"Oh! la, la," cried Mademoiselle Guyénot, "you may pay me when you
like!"
"You must understand," said my husband, "that we have just come out of
Turkey and have very little money. Of course, as soon as we get
settled, things will be all right again."
Mademoiselle received us in the _bureau_ of her pension with open arms
and lightning French. I could not get it all, but we knew she was glad
to see us. She turned around on her chair and faced us as we sat on an
old stuffed sofa surrounded by our suitcases.
"You must not worry," she exclaimed, "you must not worry _du tout, du
tout, du tout, du tout_.... If you don't pay me I'll keep the baby,
_pauvre chou_."
Mademoiselle's voice went up the scale and down again, dying away only
when she opened her mouth wider to laugh.
Mademoiselle ran the _pension_ single-handed in those days. Now she is
Madame and the mother of two little girls. Monsieur is a mechanical
genius and has himself installed many conveniences. He can paper a room,
rig up a table lamp at the head of a bed, carry in the coal, forage for
provisions with a hand-cart and a cheerful _jusqu'au boutisme_ that
stops at nothing. He is also able to make a quick change in clothes and
bobs up serenely within fifteen minutes after unloading the potatoes,
quite ready to make you a cocktail.
Mademoiselle handled her clients with cheerful firmness. She used to
marshal the forces of her house with a strong and capable hand. You
could not put one over on her then any more than you can now, as some
transients discovered to their confusion. The regulars knew better than
to try. On the other hand if your case was good and your complaint
justified, she defended you with energy. _Liberté_, _égalité_,
_fraternité_ were realities in the Rue Madame.
The clientele was French for the most part: elderly people who had got
tired of keeping house. Folks from the provinces who had come to town to
spend the winter after Monsieur retired from business. Young people,
mostly men, some of them long haired who were studying at the Sorbonne
or elsewhere. And a sprinkling of transients whose chief effect upon the
regulars was allowing them to shift about until they had possession of
the rooms they wanted to keep at a monthly rate. When we went to the
pension we were the only Americans. We paid five francs a day for room
and board like everybody else excepting the old lady who had come to the
house years ago when the rate was four francs fifty. German Hausfraus
may be marvels in management, but I defy any lady Boche to beat
Mademoiselle's efficiency. She got all the work of kitchen and
dining-room done, and well done too, by Victorine the tireless, Louis
the juggler and François the obsequious. Guillaume and Yvonne, a working
menage, looked after the rooms until they got a swell job at the Ritz
Hotel, where tips would count. The other three were fixtures.
In spirit the Rue Madame _pension_ has not changed. The atmosphere
to-day is as it was in nineteen hundred and nine. The table is good,
plentiful, appetizing--and, oh, what a variety of meats and vegetables!
The potatoes are never served in the same way twice in a week, and
Madame Primel, as Mademoiselle is now called, cooks as many different
_plats de jour_ as her number in the street, which is forty-four. There
the reader has my secret! But five francs a day no longer holds. In
nineteen hundred and nineteen five francs will barely pay for a single
meal. Not only has the price of food more than doubled, but the traveler
is beginning to demand comforts that cost. We used to have buckets of
coal brought up, and make a cheerful fire. We used to grope in the dark
when we came home, strike a match, and look for our candle on the hall
table. We used to have a lamp--the best light in the world--in our room.
But now the _pension_ in the Rue Madame has yielded to the demands of a
discontented world. Steam heat, electric lights--these have had their
part in making five francs a day disappear forever. The five franc
_pension_ exists only in the memory of Paris lovers, or in story books
like mine.
At our table were Mrs. Reilly, a sprightly Irish woman called by the
pensionnaires Madame Reely; Monsieur Mazeron, a law student with an
ascetic blond face and hair like a duckling; an elderly couple from
Normandy who had adopted Madame Reely, swallowed her at one gulp of
perfection, only to discover afterwards that they did not understand
her; a Polish doctor and his wife from Warsaw; and others. Madame Reely
made a pretty speech the first night at dinner, proposing that our table
volunteer to help us take care of the baby.
"To-morrow is the Fête Dieu," said she. "I'll go to the early mass so
that I can come back and stay with the baby while you two go to the
later mass. You will see the priests in their robes of ceremony, the
Holy Relics, and a thousand children in the procession. It is too
lovely,--all those little things with their baskets of flowers, throwing
petals in the path of the priests. Who can tell," she went on in a
whispered aside to her neighbor, "it may impress them. One never knows
when new converts are to be added to the blessed Church!"
"And I shall look at the baby," said the Doctor from Warsaw. "Children
are my specialty. That is why I am here, observing in the clinics of
Paris, you see. I shall come to your room to-morrow after breakfast.
Being an American mother, I suppose you give your baby orange juice?"
"Certainly I give her orange juice," said I; "it is good for her."
"_Au contraire! au contraire!_" cried the Doctor, waving his hands. The
Doctor was always "au contraire" no matter what was said and who said
it. Polish character.
In a corner was a tiny table for one. It was for the starboarder, a
young Roumanian, who wore a purple tie held together by a large amethyst
ring. Possibly he wore it because he believed in the ancient legend
about amethysts being good to prevent intoxication. When we entered upon
the scene he was still in high favor. His downfall came later and had to
do with a wide-awake concierge and a luckless kiss at the front door.
The food we had was the kind we used to have in Paris when many visitors
came here with no better excuse than to enjoy the _cuisine_.
Mademoiselle gave us two meat dishes for each meal. If you did not like
calves' liver, Louis would do a trick that landed a steaming plate of
crisp fried eggs (fried in butter, you remember) before you. And that
without being told. Behind the scenes was Victorine.
Victorine invited me into her kitchen to learn how to make _sauce
piquante_.
"Are you married, Victorine?" I queried.
"My cookstove is my husband," she laughed; "his heart is good and warm
and he never leaves me."
During meals Mademoiselle was to be found in the kitchen. She did the
carving herself and tasted everything before it was passed through a
window to Louis.
There was no felt covering under the table-cloth. The serving of the
meal competed with piping, high-pitched, excited voices. Perhaps I
oughtn't to say excited, but the Frenchman in his most ordinary matter
of fact conversation sounds excited to the Anglo-Saxon. He asks you to
pass the bread in the same tone you would use in announcing an event of
moment. At each place was a glass knife-and-fork rest. In France, unless
the first dish happens to be fish, you keep the same knife and fork.
This is the custom in the best of homes. We are prodigal of cutlery
where the French are prodigal of plates. The same knife and fork didn't
matter, because the food was so good. Nor does it matter to-day, because
now there is only one meat dish. Times have changed.
If fruit or pudding ran out, Mademoiselle opened a section of the wall,
finding the key on a bunch that was suspended from her belt on a piece
of faded black tape. From the cupboard she took tiny glasses filled with
confiture or perhaps a paste made of mashed chestnuts and flour slightly
sweetened. The glasses, to the touch, were cylindrical, but when you had
broken the paper pasted across the top and had eaten half way down, the
space was no wider than the fat part of your tea spoon. If your glass
was a cylinder outside, on the inside it was an inverted cone.
The quantities of bread consumed in that house would be appalling to
anybody but a Frenchman. A Turk can live on bread and olives. But a
Frenchman can live on bread alone. If he had to choose between bread and
wine he would forget the wine. When the basket was passed around, the
_pensionnaires_, with a delightful absence of self-consciousness, would
cast their eye over it in order to select the biggest piece. There was
always one person who would look around the room furtively, take the
biggest piece on the plate, slip the second biggest piece into the lap
under the serviette, and then, gazing far away in ostrich fashion, glide
the bread into pocket or reticule. If the dessert happened to be fruit,
an orange or an apple would follow the bread for private consumption
later in the day. Perhaps these people came in for luncheon only and the
bread and fruit was devoured at twilight at some little café where it is
permitted to customers to bring their own supplies, if they buy a drink.
This stretching of luncheon procured the evening meal. If necessity is
the mother of invention, the students of Paris are necessity's
grandmother.
Louis, the arch-juggler, was forced by public opinion to alternate day
by day his point of departure when passing the steaming _plat du jour_.
_Egalité_, you remember, is one-third of French philosophy. It would
never do for the same end of the dining-room to enjoy for two days
running the little privilege of having the first pick at the best piece
of meat in the plate.
François helped in the dining-room. But he was everywhere else too. He
was useful for Louis to swear at and to blame. He was bell-hop,
scullery-boy, errand-man, who needed all of his amazing reserves of
cheerfulness. I wondered when François slept. He was on hand with his
grin and his _oui, madame_, early and late. Once when we slid out of the
house at five in the morning to go on an excursion, we found him in the
lower hall surrounded by the boots of the house. Back of his ear was a
piece of chalk used for marking the number of the room on the soles of
the boots. He was polishing away, moving his arm back and forth with a
diminutive imitation of the swing his legs had to accomplish when his
brush-clad feet were polishing the waxed floors. As a concession to the
early hour, he was whistling softly instead of singing. The whistling of
François fascinated everyone because it came through a tongue folded
funnel-wise and placed in the aperture where a front tooth was missing.
And we would often find him up and about when we came home late at
night. It was a pleasant surprise, when, after calling out your name,
you made ready to walk back to the candlestick table, hands stretched
out before you, to have François suddenly appear with a light. He would
hold out over the table his little hand lamp with the flourish a Gascon
alone can make. You picked out your candlestick by the number of your
room cut in its shining surface. The number had an old-fashioned swing
to its curve, suggesting that the solid bit of brass might have been dug
up from the garden of some moss-grown hostelry after a passage of the
Huns.
Mademoiselle Guyénot insisted that the flagged pavement be washed every
day. François used to fill with water a tin can in the bottom of which
he had punched half a dozen holes. He swung it about the court until
figure eight shaped sprinkle-tracks lay all over the twelve-by-twenty
garden. Afterwards he would take a short-handled broom, bend himself
over like a hairpin, and sweep up the flag-stones. The dirt he
accumulated was made into a neat newspaper package and set aside to wait
until early to-morrow morning when it was put out on the street in the
garbage-pail. François' thin high voice sang incessantly and sounded for
all the world like the piping of a Kurdish shepherd above the timber
line in the Taurus Mountains. In those days woe betide you if you put
trash or garbage on a Paris street later than 8 A. M. It was as unseemly
an act as shaking carpets out of your window after the regulation hour.
Now, even if you are a late and leisurely bank clerk or fashionable
milliner and you don't have to show up at work before 10 o'clock, you
will see garbage-pails along curb-stones and likely as not get a dust
shower furious enough to make you wish you hadn't left your umbrella at
home. The old days--will they come back?
When the band plays soft Eliza-crossing-the-ice music, my mind flies to
several Home-Sweet-Homes. I think of Tarsus, Constantinople, Oxford and
Princeton. But there is no twinge of homesickness. Paris and my present
home there satisfy every want and longing. Among the homes of the past,
however, I think of others in Paris as well as of those of other places.
I never forget the _pension_ in the Rue Madame. Thankfully it is still a
reality. During the past decade it has housed our mothers and sisters
and cousins and friends. We have gone there to see them. And we go there
to see our first warm friend in Paris and her husband and children. From
time to time we have a meal in the old dining-room. We hope the
_pension_ will not disappear or will not be converted into too grand a
hotel. For us it is a Paris landmark.