even in death he is not forgotten. There is in Paris a special dog
cemetery. It lies among the drooping trees of a little island in the
Seine, called the Isle de la Recette, and you may find it by taking the
suburban tramway for Asnières. It has little tombstones, monuments, and
flowered walks. One sorrow-stricken master has inscribed over a dog's
grave,--"_Plus je vois les hommes, plus j'aime mon chien._" The most
notable feature of the cemetery is the monument of Barry, a St. Bernard
dog. The inscription states that he saved forty lives in the Alps.
But the dog craze is after all only a sign and sample of the prevailing
growth and extent of fashionable luxury. Nowhere in the world, I
suppose, is this more conspicuous than in Paris, the very Vanity Fair of
mundane pleasure. The hostesses of dinners, dances and fêtes vie with
one another in seeking bizarre and extravagant effects. Here is a good
example of it taken from actual life the other day. It is an account of
an "oriental fête" given at a private mansion in Paris.
It runs thus:--"The sumptuous Paris mansion of the Comtesse Aynard de
Chabrillan in the Rue Christophe-Colomb was converted into a veritable
scene from the 'Thousand and One Nights' on the occasion of a Persian
fête given by her to a large company of friends.
"In the courtyard an immense tent was erected, hung with superb Persian
stuffs and tapestries, and here the élite of Paris assembled in gorgeous
Oriental costumes.
"The countess herself presided in a magnificent Persian costume of green
and gold, with an immense white aigrette in her hair."
Notice it. The simplicity of it! Only green and gold in her costume, no
silver, no tin, no galvanized iron, just gold, plain gold; and only "one
immense white aigrette." The quiet dignity of it!
The article goes on:--"Each of the sensational entries was announced by
M. André de Fouquières, the arbiter of Parisian elegance.
"One of the most striking spectacles of the evening was the appearance
of Princesse P. d'Arenberg, mounted on an elephant, richly bedecked with
Indian trappings. Then came the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre and the
Comtesse Stanislas de Castellane in gold cages, followed by the Marquise
de Brantes, in a flower-strewn Egyptian litter, accompanied by Pharaoh
and his slaves.
"The Comtesse de Lubersac danced an Oriental measure with charming
grace, and Prince Luis Fernando of Spain, in an ethereal costume, his
features stained a greenish hue, executed a Hindoo dance before the
assembly."
Can you beat it? His features stained with a greenish hue! Now look at
that! He might have put on high grade prepared paint or clear white
lead,--he's rich enough,--but, no, just a quiet shingle stain is enough
for him.
I cannot resist adding from the same source the list of the chief
guests. Anybody desiring a set of names for a burlesque show to run
three hundred nights on the circuit may have them free of charge or
without infringement of copyright.
"Nearly everyone prominent in Paris society was present, including the
Maharajah of Kapurthala, Princess Prem Kaur, Prince Aga Khan, the
Austrian Ambassador and Countess Szecsen, the Persian and Bulgarian
Ministers, Mme. Stancioff, Duc and Duchesse de Noailles, Comtesse A.
Potocka, Marquis and Marquise de Mun, Comtesse du Bourg de Bozas, Mrs.
Moore, Comte and Comtesse G. de Segonzec and Prince and Princess de
Croy."
I am sorry that "Mrs. Moore" was there. She must have slipped in
unnoticed.
What is not generally known is that I was there myself. I appeared,--in
rivalry with Prince Luis Fernando--dressed as a Bombay soda water
bottle, with aerial opalescent streaks of light flashing from the
costume which was bound with single wire.
_IV.--A Visit to Versailles_
"WHAT!" said the man from Kansas, looking up from his asparagus, "do you
mean to say that you have never seen the Palace of Versailles?"
"No," I said very firmly, "I have not."
"Nor the fountains in the gardens?"
"No."
"Nor the battle pictures?"
"No."
"And the Hall of Mirrors,"--added the fat lady from Georgia.
"And Madame du Barry's bed"--said her husband.
"Her which," I asked, with some interest.
"Her bed."
"All right," I said, "I'll go."
I knew, of course, that I had to. Every tourist in Paris has got to go
and see Versailles. Otherwise the superiority of the others becomes
insufferable, with foreigners it is different. If they worry one about
palaces and cathedrals and such--the Château at Versailles, and the
Kaiserhof and the Duomo at Milan--I answer them in kind. I ask them if
they have ever seen the Schlitzerhof at Milwaukee and the Anheuserbusch
at St. Louis, and the Dammo at Niagara, and the Toboggo at Montreal.
That quiets them wonderfully.
But, as I say, I had to go.
You get to Versailles--as the best of various ways of transport--by
means of a contrivance something between a train and a street car. It
has a little puffing steam-engine and two cars--double deckers--with the
top deck open to the air and covered with a wooden roof on rods. The
lower part inside is called the first-class and a seat in it costs ten
cents extra. Otherwise nobody would care to ride in it. The engine is a
quaint little thing and wears a skirt, painted green, all around it, so
that you can just see the tips of its wheels peeping modestly out below.
It was a great relief to me to see this engine. It showed that there is
such a thing as French delicacy after all. There are so many sights
along the boulevards that bring the carmine blush to the face of the
tourist (from the twisting of his neck in trying to avoid seeing them),
that it is well to know that the French draw the line somewhere. The
sight of the bare wheels of an engine is too much for them.
The little train whirls its way out of Paris, past the great embankment
and the fortifications, and goes rocking along among green trees whose
branches sweep its sides, and trim villas with stone walls around quaint
gardens. At every moment it passes little inns and suburban restaurants
with cool arbours in front of them, and waiters in white coats pouring
out glasses of red wine. It makes one thirsty just to look at them.
In due time the little train rattles and rocks itself over the dozen
miles or so that separate Paris from Versailles, and sets you down right
in front of the great stone court-yard of the palace. There through the
long hours of a summer afternoon you may feast your eyes upon the
wonderland of beauty that rose at the command of the grand monarch,
Louis XIV, from the sanded plains and wooded upland that marked the spot
two hundred and fifty years ago.
All that royal munificence could effect was lavished on the making of
the palace. So vast is it in size that in the days of its greatest
splendour it harboured ten thousand inmates. The sheer length of it from
side to side is only about a hundred yards short of half a mile. To make
the grounds the King's chief landscape artist and his hundreds of
workers laboured for twenty years. They took in, as it were, the whole
landscape. The beauty of their work lies not only in the wonderful
terraces, gardens, groves and fountains that extend from the rear of the
Château, but in its blending with the scene beyond. It is so planned
that no distant house or building breaks into the picture. The vista
ends everywhere with the waving woods of the purple distance.
Louis XIV spent in all, they say, a hundred million dollars on the
making of the palace. When made it was filled with treasures of art not
to be measured in price. It was meant to be, and it remains, the last
word of royal grandeur. The King's court at Versailles became the sun
round which gravitated the fate and fortune of his twenty million
subjects. Admission within its gates was itself a mark of royal favour.
Now, any person with fifteen cents may ride out from Paris on the
double-decked street car and wander about the palace at will. For a five
cent tip to a guide you may look through the private apartments of Marie
Antoinette, and for two cents you may check your umbrella while you
inspect the bedroom of Napoleon the First. For nothing at all you may
stand on the vast terrace behind the Château and picture to yourself the
throng of gay ladies in paniered skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in
sea-green inexpressibles, who walked among its groves and fountains two
hundred years ago. The palace of the Kings has become the playground of
the democracy.
The palace--or the Château, as it is modestly named--stands crosswise
upon an elevation that dominates the scene for miles around. The whole
building throughout is only of three stories, for French architecture
has a horror of high buildings. The two great wings of the Château reach
sideways, north and south; and one, a shorter one, runs westwards
towards the rear. In the front space between the wings is a vast paved
court-yard--the Royal Court--shut in by a massive iron fence. Into this
court penetrated, one autumn evening in 1789, the raging mob led by the
women of Paris, who had come to drag the descendant of the Grand Monarch
into the captivity that ended only with the guillotine. Here they
lighted their bonfires and here they sang and shrieked and shivered
throughout the night. That night of the fifth of October was the real
end of monarchy in France.
No one, I think--not even my friend from Kansas who boasted that he had
"put in" three hours at Versailles--could see all that is within the
Château. But there are certain things which no tourist passes by. One
of them is the suite of rooms of Louis XIV, a great series of square
apartments all opening sideways into each other with gilded doors as
large as those of a barn, and with about as much privacy as a railway
station. One room was the King's council chamber; next to this, a larger
one, was the "wig-room," where the royal mind selected its wig for the
day and where the royal hair-dresser performed his stupendous task.
Besides this again is the King's bedroom. Preserved in it, within a
little fence, still stands the bed in which Louis XIV died in 1715,
after a reign of seventy-two years. The bedroom would easily hold three
hundred people. Outside of it is a great antechamber, where the
courtiers jealously waited their turn to be present at the King's
"lever," or "getting up," eager to have the supreme honour of holding
the royal breeches.
But if the King's apartments are sumptuous, they are as nothing to the
Hall of Mirrors, the showroom of the whole palace, and estimated to be
the most magnificent single room in the world. It extends clear across
the end of the rear wing and has a length of 236 feet. It is lighted by
vast windows that reach almost to the lofty arch that forms its ceiling;
the floor is of polished inlaid wood, on which there stood in Louis the
Great's time, tables, chairs, and other furniture of solid silver. The
whole inner side of the room is formed by seventeen enormous mirrors set
in spaces to correspond in shape to the window opposite, and fitted in
between with polished marble. Above them runs a cornice of glittering
gilt, and over that again the ceiling curves in a great arch, each panel
of it bearing some picture to recall the victories of the Grand Monarch.
Ungrateful posterity has somewhat forgotten the tremendous military
achievements of Louis XIV--the hardships of his campaign in the
Netherlands in which the staff of the royal cuisine was cut down to one
hundred cooks--the passage of the Rhine, in which the King actually
crossed the river from one side to the other, and so on. But the
student of history can live again the triumphs of Louis in this Hall of
Mirrors. It is an irony of history that in this room, after the conquest
of 1871, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor by his
subjects and his allies.
But if one wants to see battle pictures, one has but to turn to the
north wing of the Château. There you have them, room after room--twenty,
thirty, fifty roomsful--I don't know how many--the famous gallery of
battles, depicting the whole military history of France from the days of
King Clovis till the French Revolution. They run in historical order.
The pictures begin with battles of early barbarians--men with long hair
wielding huge battle-axes with their eyes blazing, while other
barbarians prod at them with pikes or take a sweep at them with a
two-handed club. After that there are rooms full of crusade
pictures--crusaders fighting the Arabs, crusaders investing Jerusalem,
crusaders raising the siege of Malta and others raising the siege of
Rhodes; all very picturesque, with the blue Mediterranean, the yellow
sand of the desert, prancing steeds in nickel-plated armour and knights
plumed and caparisoned, or whatever it is, and wearing as many crosses
as an ambulance emergency staff. All of these battles were apparently
quite harmless, that is the strange thing about these battle pictures:
the whole thing, as depicted for the royal eye, is wonderfully full of
colour and picturesque, but, as far as one can see, quite harmless.
Nobody seems to be getting hurt, wild-looking men are swinging maces
round, but you can see that they won't hit anybody. A battle-axe is
being brought down with terrific force, but somebody is thrusting up a
steel shield just in time to meet it. There are no signs of blood or
injury. Everybody seems to be getting along finely and to be having the
most invigorating physical exercise. Here and here, perhaps, the artist
depicts somebody jammed down under a beam or lying under the feet of a
horse; but if you look close you see that the beam isn't really pressing
on him, and that the horse is not really stepping on his stomach. In
fact the man is perfectly comfortable, and is, at the moment, taking
aim at somebody else with a two-string crossbow, which would have deadly
effect if he wasn't ass enough to aim right at the middle of a cowhide
shield.
You notice this quality more and more in the pictures as the history
moves on. After the invention of gunpowder, when the combatants didn't
have to be locked together, but could be separated by fields, and little
groves and quaint farm-houses, the battle seems to get quite lost in the
scenery. It spreads out into the landscape until it becomes one of the
prettiest, quietest scenes that heart could wish. I know nothing so
drowsily comfortable as the pictures in this gallery that show the
battles of the seventeenth century,--the Grand Monarch's own particular
epoch. This is a wide, rolling landscape with here and there little
clusters of soldiers to add a touch of colour to the foliage of the
woods; there are woolly little puffs of smoke rising in places to show
that the artillery is at its dreamy work on a hill side; near the
foreground is a small group of generals standing about a tree and
gazing through glasses at the dim purple of the background. There are
sheep and cattle grazing in all the unused parts of the battle, the
whole thing has a touch of quiet, rural feeling that goes right to the
heart. I have seen people from the ranching district of the Middle West
stand before these pictures in tears.
It is strange to compare this sort of thing with some of the modern
French pictures. There is realism enough and to spare in them. In the
Salon exhibition a year or two ago, for instance, there was one that
represented lions turned loose into an arena to eat up Christians. I can
imagine exactly how a Louis Quatorze artist would have dealt with the
subject,--an arena, prettily sanded, with here and there gooseberry
bushes and wild gilly flowers (not too wild, of course), lions with
flowing manes, in noble attitudes, about to roar,--tigers, finely
developed, about to spring,--Christians just going to pray,--and through
it all a genial open-air feeling very soothing to the royal senses. Not
so the artist of to-day. The picture in the Salon is of blood. There
are torn limbs gnawed by crouching beasts, as a dog holds and gnaws a
bone; there are faces being torn, still quivering, from the writhing
body,--in fact, perhaps after all there is something to be said for the
way the Grand Monarch arranged his gallery.
The battle pictures and the Hall of Mirrors, and the fountains and so
on, are, I say, the things best worth seeing at Versailles. Everybody
says so. I really wish now that I had seen them. But I am free to
confess that I am a poor sightseer at the best. As soon as I get
actually in reach of a thing it somehow dwindles in importance. I had a
friend once, now a distinguished judge in the United States, who
suffered much in this way. He travelled a thousand miles to reach the
World's Fair, but as soon as he had arrived at a comfortable hotel in
Chicago, he was unable to find the energy to go out to the Fair grounds.
He went once to visit Niagara Falls, but failed to see the actual water,
partly because it no longer seemed necessary, partly because his room
in the hotel looked the other way.
Personally I plead guilty to something of the same spirit. Just where
you alight from the steam tramway at Versailles, you will find close on
your right, a little open-air café, with tables under a trellis of green
vines. It is as cool a retreat of mingled sun and shadow as I know.
There is red wine at two francs and long imported cigars of as soft a
flavour as even Louis the Fourteenth could have desired. The idea of
leaving a grotto like that to go trapesing all over a hot stuffy palace
with a lot of fool tourists, seemed ridiculous. But I bought there a
little illustrated book called the _Château de Versailles_, which
interested me so extremely that I decided that, on some reasonable
opportunity, I would go and visit the place.
[Illustration: Personally I plead guilty to something of the same
spirit.]
_V.--Paris at Night_
"WHAT Ah'd like to do," says the Fat Lady from Georgia, settling back
comfortably in her seat after her five-dollar dinner at the Café
American, while her husband is figuring whether ten francs is enough to
give to the waiter, "is to go and see something real wicked. Ah tell him
(the word 'him' is used in Georgia to mean husband) that while we're
here Ah just want to see everything that's going."
"All right," says the Man from Kansas who "knows" Paris, "I'll get a
guide right here, and he'll take us round and show us the sights."
"Can you get him heah?" asks the gentleman from Georgia, looking round
at the glittering mirrors and gold cornices of the restaurant.
Can you get a guide? Well, now! Can you keep away from them? All day
from the dewy hour of breakfast till late at night they meet you in the
street and sidle up with the enquiry, "Guide, sir?"
Where the Parisian guide comes from and how he graduates for his job I
do not know. He is not French and, as a rule, he doesn't know Paris. He
knows his way to the Louvre and to two or three American bars and to the
Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. But he doesn't need to know his way. For
that he falls back on the taxi-driver. "Now, sir," says the guide
briskly to the gentleman who has engaged his services, "where would you
like to go?" "I should like to see Napoleon's tomb." "All right," says
the guide, "get into the taxi." Then he turns to the driver. "Drive to
Napoleon's tomb," he says. After they have looked at it the guide says,
"What would you like to see next, sir?" "I am very anxious to see Victor
Hugo's house, which I understand is now made open to the public." The
guide turns to the taxi man. "Drive to Victor Hugo's house," he says.
After looking through the house the visitor says in a furtive way, "I
was just wondering if I could get a drink anywhere in this part of the
town?" "Certainly," says the guide. "Drive to an American bar."
Isn't that simple? Can you imagine any more agreeable way of earning
five dollars in three hours than that? Of course, what the guide says to
the taxi man is said in the French language, or in something resembling
it, and the gentleman in the cab doesn't understand it. Otherwise, after
six or seven days of driving round in this way he begins to wonder what
the guide is for. But of course, the guide's life, when you come to
think of it, is one full of difficulty and danger. Just suppose that,
while he was away off somewhere in Victor Hugo's house or at Napoleon's
grave, the taxi-driver were to be struck by lightning. How on earth
would he get home? He might, perhaps, be up in the Eiffel Tower and the
taxi man get a stroke of paralysis, and then he'd starve to death trying
to find his way back. After all, the guide has to have the kind of pluck
and hardihood that ought to be well rewarded. Why, in other countries,
like Switzerland, they have to use dogs for it, and in France, when
these plucky fellows throw themselves into it, surely one wouldn't
grudge the nominal fee of five dollars for which they risk their lives.
But I am forgetting about the Lady from Georgia and her husband. Off
they go in due course from the glittering doors of the restaurant in a
huge taxi with a guide in a peaked hat. The party is all animation. The
lady's face is aglow with moral enthusiasm. The gentleman and his friend
have their coats buttoned tight to their chins for fear that thieves
might leap over the side of the taxi and steal their neckties.
So they go buzzing along the lighted boulevard looking for "something
real wicked." What they want is to see something really and truly
wicked; they don't know just what, but "something bad." They've got the
idea that Paris is one of the wickedest places on earth, and they want
to see it.
[Illustration: The lady's face is aglow with moral enthusiasm.]
Strangely enough, in their own home, the Lady from Georgia is one of
the leaders of the Social Purity movement, and her husband, whose skin
at this moment is stretched as tight as a football with French brandy
and soda, is one of the finest speakers on the Georgia temperance
platform, with a reputation that reaches from Chattanooga to
Chickamauga. They have a son at Yale College whom they are trying to
keep from smoking cigarettes. But here in Paris, so they reckon it,
everything is different. It doesn't occur to them that perhaps it is
wicked to pay out a hundred dollars in an evening hiring other people to
be wicked.
So off they go and are whirled along in the brilliant glare of the
boulevards and up the gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre.
They visit the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Tabarin, and they see the
Oriental Dances and the Café of Hell and the hundred and one other
glittering fakes and false appearances that poor old meretricious Paris
works overtime to prepare for such people as themselves. And the Lady
from Georgia, having seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least is
pure--which is a beginning--and they go home more enthusiastic than ever
in the Social Purity movement.
But the fact is that if you have about twenty-five thousand new visitors
pouring into a great city every week with their pockets full of money
and clamoring for "something wicked," you've got to do the best you can
for them.
Hence it results that Paris--in appearance, anyway--is a mighty gay
place at night. The sidewalks are crowded with the little tables of the
coffee and liqueur drinkers. The music of a hundred orchestras bursts
forth from the lighted windows. The air is soft with the fragrance of a
June evening, tempered by the curling smoke of fifty thousand cigars.
Through the noise and chatter of the crowd there sounds unending the
wail of the motor horn.
The hours of Parisian gaiety are late. Ordinary dinner is eaten at about
seven o'clock, but fashionable dinners begin at eight or eight thirty.
Theatres open at a quarter to nine and really begin at nine o'clock.
Special features and acts,--famous singers and vaudeville artists--are
brought on at eleven o'clock so that dinner-party people may arrive in
time to see them. The theatres come out at midnight. After that there
are the night suppers which flourish till two or half past. But if you
wish, you can go between the theater and supper to some such side-long
place as the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin, which reach the height of
their supposed merriment at about one in the morning.