coquettishly about his neck.
"You flirt!" I said, "but let's get to business. I want a suit, un soot,
un complete, complet, comprenez-vous, veston, gilet, une pair de
panteloon--everything--do you get it?"
The tailor was now all animation.
"Ah, certainement," he said, "monsieur desires a fantasy, une fantaisie,
is it not?"
A fantasy! Good heavens!
The man had evidently got the idea from my naming so many things that I
wanted a suit for a fancy dress carnival.
"Fantasy nothing!" I said--"pas de fantaisie! un soot anglais"--here an
idea struck me and I tapped myself on the chest--"like this," I said,
"comme ceci."
"Bon," said the tailor, now perfectly satisfied, "une fantaisie comme
porte monsieur."
Here I got mad.
"Blast you," I said, "this is not a fantaisie. Do you take me for a
dragon-fly, or what? Now come, let's get this fantaisie business
cleared up. This is what I want"--and here I put my hand on a roll of
very quiet grey cloth on the counter.
"Très bien," said the tailor, "une fantaisie."
I stared at him.
"Is _that_ a fantaisie?"
"Certainement, monsieur."
"Now," I said, "let's go into it further," and I touched another piece
of plain pepper and salt stuff of the kind that is called in the simple
and refined language of my own country, gents' panting.
"This?"
"Une fantaisie," said the French tailor.
"Well," I said, "you've got more imagination than I have."
Then I touched a piece of purple blue that would have been almost too
loud for a Carolina nigger.
"Is this a fantaisie?"
The tailor shrugged his shoulders.
"Ah, non," he said in deprecating tones.
"Tell me," I said, speaking in French, "just exactly what it is you call
a fantasy."
The tailor burst into a perfect paroxysm of French, gesticulating and
waving his tape as he put the sentences over the plate one after
another. It was fast pitching, but I took them every one, and I got him.
What he meant was that any single colour or combination of single
colours--for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion
behind--is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But
any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man
is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a
Quakers' meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro
ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is a plain,
simple scene.
I thanked him. Then I said:
"Measure me, mesurez-moi, passez le tape line autour de moi."
He did it.
I don't know what it is they measure you in, whether in centimètres or
cubic feet or what it is. But the effect is appalling.
The tailor runs his tape round your neck and calls "sixty!" Then he puts
it round the lower part of the back--at the major circumference, you
understand,--and shouts, "a hundred and fifty!"
It sounded a record breaker. I felt that there should have been a burst
of applause. But, to tell the truth, I have friends--quiet sedentary men
in the professoriate--who would easily hit up four or five hundred on
the same scale.
Then came the last item.
"Now," I said, "when will this 'complete' be ready?"
"Ah, monsieur," said the tailor, with winsome softness, "we are very
busy, crushed, écrasés with commands! Give us time, don't hurry us!"
"Well," I said, "how long do you want?"
"Ah, monsieur," he pleaded, "give us four days!"
I never moved an eyelash.
"What!" I said indignantly, "four days! Monstrous! Let me have this
whole complete fantasy in one day or I won't buy it."
"Ah, monsieur, three days?"
"No," I said, "make it two days."
"Two days and a half, monsieur."
"Two days and a quarter," I said; "give it me the day after to-morrow at
three o'clock in the morning."
"Ah, monsieur, ten o'clock."
"Make it ten minutes to ten and it's a go," I said.
"Bon," said the tailor.
He kept his word. I am wearing the fantaisie as I write. For a
fantaisie, it is fairly quiet, except that it has three pockets on each
side outside, and a rolled back collar suitable for the throat of an
opera singer, and as many buttons as a harem skirt. Beyond that, it's a
first-class, steady, reliable, quiet, religious fantaisie, such as any
retired French ballet master might be proud to wear.
_II.--The Joys of Philanthropy_
"GOOD-MORNING," said the valet de chambre, as I stepped from my room.
"Good-morning," I answered. "Pray accept twenty-five centimes."
"Good-morning, sir," said the maître d'hôtel, as I passed down the
corridor, "a lovely morning, sir."
"So lovely," I replied, "that I must at once ask you to accept
forty-five centimes on the strength of it."
"A beautiful day, monsieur," said the head waiter, rubbing his hands, "I
trust that monsieur has slept well."
"So well," I answered, "that monsieur must absolutely insist on your
accepting seventy-five centimes on the spot. Come, don't deny me. This
is personal matter. Every time I sleep I simply have to give money
away."
"Monsieur is most kind."
Kind? I should think not. If the valet de chambre and the maître
d'hôtel and the chef de service and the others of the ten men needed to
supply me with fifteen cents worth of coffee, could read my heart, they
would find it an abyss of the blackest hatred.
Yet they take their handful of coppers--great grown men dressed up in
monkey suits of black at eight in the morning--and bow double for it.
If they tell you it is a warm morning, you must give them two cents. If
you ask the time, it costs you two cents. If you want a real genuine
burst of conversation, it costs anywhere from a cent to a cent and a
half a word.
Such is Paris all day long. Tip, tip, tip, till the brain is weary, not
with the cost of it, but with the arithmetical strain.
No pleasure is perfect. Every rose has its thorn. The thorn of the
Parisian holiday-maker is the perpetual necessity of handing out small
gratuities to a set of overgrown flunkies too lazy to split wood.
Not that the amount of the tips, all added together, is anything
serious. No rational man would grudge it if it could be presented in a
bill as a lump sum at breakfast time every morning and done with for the
day.
But the incessant necessity of handing out small tips of graded amounts
gets on one's nerves. It is necessary in Paris to go round with enough
money of different denominations in one's pocket to start a bank--gold
and paper notes for serious purchases, and with them a huge dead weight
of great silver pieces, five franc bits as large as a Quaker's
shoebuckle, and a jingling mass of coppers in a side pocket. These one
must distribute as extras to cabmen, waiters, news-vendors, beggars,
anybody and everybody in fact that one has anything to do with.
The whole mass of the coppers carried only amounts perhaps to
twenty-five cents in honest Canadian money. But the silly system of the
French currency makes the case appear worse than it is, and gives one
the impression of being a walking treasury.
Morning, noon, and night the visitor is perpetually putting his hand
into his side pocket and pulling out coppers. He drips coppers all day
in an unending stream. You enter a French theatre. You buy a programme,
fifty centimes, and ten more to the man who sells it. You hand your coat
and cane to an aged harpy, who presides over what is called the
vestiaire, pay her twenty-five centimes and give her ten. You are shown
to your seat by another old fairy in dingy black (she has a French name,
but I forget it) and give her twenty centimes. Just think of the silly
business of it. Your ticket, if it is a good seat in a good theatre, has
cost you about three dollars and a half. One would almost think the
theatre could afford to throw in eight cents worth of harpies for the
sake of international good will.
Similarly, in your hotel, you ring the bell and there appears the valet
de chambre, dressed in a red waistcoat and a coat effect of black
taffeta. You tell him that you want a bath. "Bien, monsieur!" He will
fetch the maître d'hôtel. Oh, he will, will he, how good of him, but
really one can't witness such kindness on his part without begging him
to accept a twenty-five centime remembrance. "Merci bien, monsieur."
The maître d'hôtel comes. He is a noble looking person who wears a dress
suit at eight o'clock in the morning with patent leather shoes of the
kind that I have always wanted but am still unable to afford. Yet I know
from experience that the man merely lives and breathes at fifty centimes
a breath. For fifty centimes he'll bow low enough to crack himself. If
you gave him a franc, he'd lie down on the floor and lick your boots. I
know he would; I've seen them do it.
So when the news comes that you propose to take a bath, he's right along
side of you in a minute, all civility. Mind you, in a really French
hotel, one with what is called the old French atmosphere, taking a bath
is quite an event, and the maître d'hôtel sees a dead sure fifty
centimes in it, with perhaps an extra ten centimes if times are good.
That is to say, he may clear anything from ten to twelve cents on the
transaction. A bath, monsieur? Nothing more simple, this moment, tout de
suite, right off, he will at once give orders for it. So you give him
eleven cents and he then tells the hotel harpy, dressed in black, like
the theatre harpies, to get the bath and she goes and gets it. She was
there, of course, all the time, right in the corridor, and heard all
that proceeded, but she doesn't "enter into her functions" until the
valet de chambre tells the maître d'hôtel and the maître d'hôtel informs
her officially of the coming event.
She gets the bath. What does she do? Why, merely opens the door of the
bathroom, which wasn't locked, and turns on the water. But, of course,
no man with any chivalry in him could allow a harpy to be put to all
that labour without pressing her to accept three cents as a mark of
personal appreciation.
Thus the maître d'hôtel and the valet de chambre and the harpy go on all
day, from six in the morning when they first "enter into functions"
until heaven knows when at night when they leave off, and they keep
gathering in two cents and three cents and even five cents at a time.
Then presently, I suppose, they go off and spend it in their own way.
The maître d'hôtel transformed into a cheap Parisian with a dragon-fly
coat and a sixty cent panama, dances gaily at the Bal Wagram, and
himself hands out coppers to the musicians, and gives a one cent tip to
a lower order of maître d'hôtel. The harpy goes forth, and with other
harpies absorbs red wine and indescribable cheese at eleven at night in
a crowded little café on the crowded sidewalk of a street about as wide
as a wagon. She tips the waiter who serves her at the rate of one cent
per half hour of attendance, and he, I suppose, later on tips someone
else, and so on endlessly.
In this way about fifty thousand people in Paris eke out a livelihood by
tipping one another.
The worst part of the tipping system is that very often the knowledge
that tips are expected and the uncertainty of their amount, causes one
to forego a great number of things that might otherwise be enjoyable.
I brought with me to Paris, for example, a letter of introduction to the
President of the Republic. I don't say this in any boasting spirit. A
university professor can always get all the letters of introduction that
he wants. Everyone knows that he is too simple to make any commercial
use of them. But I never presented this letter to the President. What
was the use? It wouldn't have been worth it. He would have expected a
tip, and of course in his case it would have had to be a liberal one,
twenty-five cents straight out. Perhaps, too, some of his ministers
would have strolled in, as soon as they saw a stranger, on the chance of
picking up something. Put it as three ministers at fifteen cents each,
that's forty-five cents or a total of seventy cents for ten minutes'
talk with the French Government. It's not worth it.
In all Paris, I only found one place where tipping is absolutely out of
the question. That was at the British Embassy. There they don't allow
it. Not only the clerks and the secretaries, but even the Ambassador
himself is forbidden to take so much as the smallest gratuity.
And they live up to it.
That is why I still feel proud of having made an exception to the rule.
I went there because the present ambassador is a personal friend of
mine. I hadn't known this till I went to Paris, and I may say in
fairness that we are friends no longer: as soon as I came away, our
friendship seemed to have ceased.
I will make no secret of the matter. I wanted permission to read in the
National Library in Paris. All Frenchmen are allowed to read there and,
in addition, all the personal friends of the foreign ambassadors. By a
convenient fiction, everybody is the friend of this ambassador, and is
given a letter to prove it, provided he will call at the Embassy and get
it. That is how I came to be a friend of the British Ambassador. Whether
our friendship will ripen into anything warmer and closer, it is not for
me to say.
But I went to the Embassy.
The young man that I dealt with was, I think, a secretary. He was--I
could see it at once--that perfect thing called an English gentleman. I
have seldom seen, outside of baseball circles, so considerate a manner.
He took my card, and from sheer considerateness left me alone for half
an hour. Then he came back for a moment and said it was a glorious day.
I had heard this phrase so often in Paris that I reached into my pocket
for ten cents. But something in the quiet dignity of the young man held
me back. So I merely answered that it was indeed a glorious day, and
that the crops would soon head out nicely if we got this sunshine,
provided there wasn't dew enough to start the rust, in which case I was
afraid that if an early frost set in we might be badly fooled. He said
"indeed," and asked me if I had read the last London _Weekly Times_. I
said that I had not seen the last one; but that I had read one about a
year ago and that it seemed one of the most sparkling things I had ever
read; I had simply roared over it from cover to cover.
He looked pleased and went away.
When he came back, he had the letter of commendation in his hand.
Would you believe it? The civility of it! They had printed the letter,
every word of it--except my own name--and it explained all about the
ambassador and me being close friends, and told of his desire to have me
read in the National Library.
I took the letter, and I knew of course that the moment had come to do
something handsome for the young man. But he looked so calm that I still
hesitated.
I took ten cents out of my pocket and held it where the light could
glitter from every point of its surface full in his face.
And I said----
"My dear young friend, I hope I don't insult you. You are, I can see it,
an English gentleman. Your manner betrays it. I, too, though I may seem
only what I am, had I not been brought up in Toronto, might have been
like you. But enough of this weakness,--will you take ten cents?"
[Illustration: Something in the quiet dignity of the young man held me.]
He hesitated. He looked all round. I could see that he was making a
great effort. The spirit of Paris battled against his better nature.
He was tempted, but he didn't fall.
"I'm sorry, sir," he said. "I'd like to take it, but I'm afraid I
mustn't."
"Young man," I said, "I respect your feelings. You have done me a
service. If you ever fall into want and need a position in the Canadian
Cabinet, or a seat in our Senate, let me know at once."
I left him.
Then by an odd chance, as I passed to the outer door, there was the
British Ambassador himself. He was standing beside the door waiting to
open it. There was no mistaking him. I could tell by his cocked hat and
brass buttons and the brass chain across his chest that it was the
Ambassador. The way in which he swung the door back and removed his hat
showed him a trained diplomat.
The moment had come. I still held my ten cents.
"My lord," I said, "I understand your position as the only man in Paris
who must not accept a tip, but I insist."
I slipped the money into his hand.
"Thank'ee kindly, sir," said the Ambassador.
Diplomatically speaking, the incident was closed.
_III.--The Simple Life in Paris_
PARIS--at least the Paris of luxury and fashion--is a childless city.
Its streets are thronged all day with a crowd that passes in endless
succession but with never a child among them. You may stand on the
boulevards and count a thousand grown-up persons for one child that goes
by.
The case, of course, is not so extreme in the quieter parts of the city.
I have seen children, sometimes two or three together, in the Champs
Elysées. In the garden of the Tuileries I once saw six all in a group.
They seemed to be playing. A passer-by succeeded in getting a snapshot
of them without driving them away. In the poorer districts, there are
any quantity of children, even enough to sell, but in the Paris of the
rich, the child is conspicuous by its absence. The foreign visitors come
without their children. The true Parisian lady has pretty well gone out
of the business.
Here and there you may see driving past with its mother in an open
barouche, or parading the Rue de la Paix on the hand of its nurse, the
doll-like substitute for old-time infancy, the fashionable Parisian
child. As far as the sex can be determined by looking at it, it is
generally a girl. It is dressed in the height of fashion. A huge picture
hat reaches out in all directions from its head. Long gloves encase its
little arms to prevent it from making a free use of them. A dainty coat
of powder on its face preserves it from the distorting effect of a
smile. Its little hundred dollar frock reaches down in a sweet
simplicity of outline. It has a belt that runs round its thighs to
divide it into two harmonious parts. Below that are bare pink legs
ending in little silk socks at a dollar an inch and wee slippers clasped
with a simple emerald buckle. Therein, of course, the child only obeys
the reigning fashion. Simplicity,--so I am informed by the last number
of _La Mode Parisienne_,--is the dominant note of Parisian dress
to-day,--simplicity, plainness, freedom from all display. A French lady
wears in her hair at the Opera a single, simple tiara bound with a plain
row of solitaire diamonds. It is so exquisitely simple in its outline
that you can see the single diamonds sticking out from it and can count
up the price of each. The Parisian gentleman wears in his button-hole
merely a single orchid,--not half a dozen,--and pins his necktie with
one plain, ordinary ruby, set in a perfectly unostentatious sunburst of
sapphires. There is no doubt of the superiority of this Parisian
simplicity. To me, when it broke upon me in reading _La Mode
Parisienne_, it came as a kind of inspiration. I took away the stuffy
black ribbon with its stupidly elaborate knot from my Canadian Christie
hat and wound a single black ostrich feather about it fastened with just
the plainest silver aigrette. When I had put that on and pinned a piece
of old lace to the tail of my coat with just one safety pin, I walked
the street with the quiet dignity of a person whose one idea is not to
be conspicuous.
But this is a digression. The child, I was saying, wears about two
hundred worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you
were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down,
you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been
converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of
show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and
parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or
plaything.
Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is
rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an
implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of
ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child
forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more
intelligent, behave better, bark better,--in fact, the child is simply
not in it.
[Illustration: The Parisian dog.]
This is why, I suppose, in the world of Parisian luxury, the dog is
ousting the infant altogether. You will see, as I said, no children on
the boulevards and avenues. You will see dogs by the hundred. Every
motor or open barouche that passes up the Champs Elysées, with its
little white cloud of fluffy parasols and garden-hats, has a dainty,
beribboned dog sitting among its occupants: in every avenue and
promenade you will see hundreds of clipped poodles and toy spaniels; in
all the fashionable churches you will see dogs bowed at their devotions.
It was a fair struggle. The child had its chance and was beaten. The
child couldn't dress: the dog could. The child couldn't or wouldn't
pray: the dog could,--or at least he learnt how. No doubt it came
awkwardly at first, but he set himself to it till nowadays a French dog
can enter a cathedral with just as much reverence as his mistress, and
can pray in the corner of the pew with the same humility as hers. When
you get to know the Parisian dogs, you can easily tell a Roman Catholic
dog from a Low Church Anglican. I knew a dog once that was
converted,--everybody said from motives of policy,--from a
Presbyterian,--but, stop, it's not fair to talk about it,--the dog is
dead now, and it's not right to speak ill of its belief, no matter how
mistaken it may have been.
However, let that pass, what I was saying was that between the child and
the dog, each had its chance in a fair open contest and the child is
nowhere.
People, who have never seen, even from the outside, the Parisian world
of fashion, have no idea to what an extent it has been invaded by the
dog craze. Dogs are driven about in motors and open carriages. They are
elaborately clipped and powdered and beribboned by special "coiffeurs."
They wear little buckled coats and blankets, and in motors,--I don't
feel quite sure of this,--they wear motor goggles. There are at least
three or four--and for all I know there may be more--fashionable shops
in Paris for dogs' supplies. There is one that any curious visitor may
easily find at once in the Rue des Petits Champs close to the Avenue de
l'Opera. There is another one midway in the galleries of the Palais
Royal. In these shops you will see, in the first place, the chains,
collars, and whips that are marks of the servitude in which dogs still
live (though, by the way, there are already, I think, dog suffragettes
heading a very strong movement). You will see also the most delicious,
fashionable dog coats, very, very simple, fastened in front with one
silver clasp, only one. In the Palais Royal shop they advertise, "Newest
summer models for 1913 in dogs' tailoring." There are also dogs' beds
made in wickerwork in cradle shape with eider-down coverlets worked over
with silk.
A little while ago, the New York papers were filled with an account of a
dog's lunch given at the Vanderbilt Hotel by an ultra-fashionable
American lady. It was recorded that Vi Sin, the Pekin Spaniel of Mrs. H.
of New York, was host to about ten thousand dollars worth of "smart"
dogs. I do not know whether or not this story is true, for I only read
it in the Parisian papers. But certain it is that the episode would have
made no sensation in Paris. A dog eating in a restaurant is a most
ordinary spectacle. Only a few days ago I had lunch with a dog,--a very
quiet, sensible Belgian poodle, very simply dressed in a plain morning
stomach coat of ultramarine with leather insertions. I took quite a
fancy to him. When I say that I had lunch with him, I ought to explain
that he had a lady, his mistress, with him,--that also is quite usual in
Paris. But I didn't know her, and she sat on the further side of him, so
that I confined myself to ordinary table civilities with the dog. I was
having merely a plain omelette, from motives of economy, and the dog had
a little dish of _entrecote d'agneau aux asperges maître d'hôtel_. I
took some of it while the lady was speaking to the waiter and found it
excellent. You may believe it or not, but the entry of a dog into a
French restaurant and his being seated at a table and having his food
ordered creates not the slightest sensation. To bring a child into a
really good restaurant would, I imagine, be looked upon as rather a
serious affair.