Sensations of Paris

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

THE MOVEMENT ON THE PARIS BOULEVARDS DERIVES MUCH OF
ITS PICTURESQUENESS FROM THE PONDEROUS OMNIBUS

Frontispiece

<§*•*

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SENSATIONS OF PARIS

BY

ROWLAND STRONG

AUTHOR OF "WHERE AND HOW TO DINE IN PARIS," ETC.

WITH FIFTY-SIX ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND EDITION

LONDON
JOHN LONG, LIMITED

NORRIS STREET, HAYMARKET

MCMXII

First Edition, September, 1912
Second Edition, October, 1912

TO
MY AMERICAN FRIEND

JULES MONTANT

TO REMIND HIM OF

MANY A PLEASANT TRAMP AND

MERRY MEAL

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGB

I. THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD - "15

II. A PARISIAN MARRIAGE - - - "31

III. THE PANORAMA AND COLOUR OF PARIS - 52

IV. ALL PARIS - - - - 66
V. THE ODOURS OF PARIS - - - 78

VI. ON THE DECAY OF FRENCH MANNERS - 95

VII. PERSONALLY CONDUCTED - - - 102

VIII. THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS - - - 115

IX. THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS - - 132

X. AMERICANS IN PARIS - 142

XI. THE SHADOWS OF PARIS - - - 159

XII. A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING - - - 175

XIII. THE VOICE OF PARIS - - - "195

XIV. A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT - - - 211
XV. THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS - 225

XVI. VANISHING PARIS — I9IO - - - 240

XVII. A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER - - - 262

INDEX - - - - - - 285

IX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

THE MOVEMENT ON THE PARIS BOULEVARDS DERIVES
MUCH OF ITS PICTURESQUENESS FROM THE PON-
DEROUS OMNIBUS - - - frontispiece
THE BOULEVARD BY NIGHT - - - l6
MONSIEUR ERNEST LAJEUNESSE, THE KING OF THE

BOULEVARD - - - - -26

"LE PENSEUR," THAT SPHINX-HEARTED GARGOYLE

OF NOTRE DAME - - - 26

MADAME DUVAL AT THE DOOR OF THE COOPER'S SHOP 38
SIGNING THE REGISTER AT MADEMOISELLE DUVAL'S

WEDDING - - - - - 38

MONSIEUR LAJEUNESSE'S COLLECTION OF MINIA-
TURES - - - - - 50
THE SACRE CCEUR AT MONTMARTRE - - 52
THE WEDDING-PARTY AT THE CASCADE IN THE BOIS

DE BOULOGNE - - - - - 60

MONSD2UR LE CONCIERGE - - - 69

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS FROM MONTMARTRE - 70

THE " GRAND SEIZE " IN THE CAFE ANGLAIS - 74

xi

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

THE FRIED-FISH AND MUSSEL BOOTH - - 82

APPLE FRITTERS ON THE FORTIFICATIONS - - 82

IN ITS BIG RED RECEPTACLE, OH, MOST PITIFUL !

STANDS THE POT-AU-FEU - - - -85

THE ENTRANCE TO MADAME VAUQUER'S PENSION (Le

Pere Goriot — balzac) - - - 94

THE COURTYARD OF THE PENSION VAUQUER (Le Pete

Goriot — balzac) - - - - 94

A MURAL PAINTING BY GAVARNI AT THE ROCHER DE

CANCALE - - - - - IOO

HE, TOO, SPECIALIZES IN THE NIGHT ATTRACTIONS OF

THE " GAY CITY " - 104

" VOILA LES COOKS I" - - . I09

PARIS IS HIS IDOL - - - - - III

HER CLOTHES COST HER NOTHING - - - 112

THE CAFE WAITERS ARE SERVING " BOCKS " ON THE RUN 122
THE STATELY MOVEMENT OF THE FUNERAL STOPS ALL

OTHER TRAFFIC - - - - 122

BRANCHES OF CONSECRATED BOXWOOD ARE SOLD

OUTSIDE ALL THE CHURCHES - - "134

" IL ARRIVE, IL ARRIVE, LE MAQUEREAU !" - - 134

THERE IS NO ONE POSSESSED OF A BAD COPY OF

RUBENS WHO IS NOT LONGING FOR AN " AMERI-

CAIN RICHISSIME " - - - "144

A POET RECITING IN A MONTMARTRE CAFE - - I44

A DESERTED GRAVE IN THE OLD BOIS DE BOULOGNE

CEMETERY - - - - - 158

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

FACING PAGE

THE BROKEN CROSS IN THE OLD BOIS DE BOULOGNE

CEMETERY - 158
EARLY MORNING SHADOWS IN THE RED MILL QUARTER 164
THE MEDIEVAL SHADOWS OF THE CONCIERGERIE - 164
THE SEINE BANKS, WITH NOTRE DAME IN THE DIS-
TANCE, AND ANGLERS - 174

YOU WILL FIND YOURSELF STANDING ON A WORN

MAT ------ 177

THE STREET HOARDINGS ARE COVERED WITH ADVER-
TISEMENTS OF SEASIDE RESORTS - - - l8o
MADELEINE IS NOW SEVENTEEN - - - I90
A DESPERATE SCENE OCCURS WITH THE BAGGAGE

CLERK ------ 192

A HAWKER OF WILD HEATHER AT MONTMARTRE - 194
THE " MUGUET " BRINGS LUCK - I94

THE SPARROWS ARE TAME ENOUGH TO TAKE FOOD

FROM THE HAND - 202

THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET STAIRCASE INTO THE CATA-
COMBS ------ 202

A BLIND WOMAN WITH A HURDY-GURDY - - 210

A TUNEFUL BUT BETATTERED INFANT WITH AN

ACCORDION - - - - - 210

THE CAFE ANGLAIS, WITH ALPHONSE, THE HEAD-
WAITER ------ 2l6

THE CELLARS OF THE CAFE ANGLAIS, SHOWING THE

FAMOUS ORANGE-TREE - - - - 220

THE " BIBLIOTHEQUE," WHERE RUSSIAN GRAND DUKES

KEEP THEIR SILVER PLATE - 224

xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

SELLING WILD DAFFODILS IN THE STREETS OF PARIS 232
A PARISIAN PICKING DAFFODILS IN THE FOREST OF

SENART ------ 232

A PARIS EDITION OF " THE HOUSE OF USHER " - 242

THE GREAT PORTE-COCHERE HAS THE AIR OF A DES-
PERATE AND STURDY BEGGAR - - - 242
LA GUIMARD'S GRAVE, SEPARATED FROM THE REST OF

THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE BY A GRILLED MOAT - 254
IT WAS HERE, IN THE RUE DE FIGUIER, THAT RABELAIS

DIED ------ 254

THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS - - - - 264

CHATEAUBRIAND'S HOUSE AT AULNAY - - 264

THE GARDEN AT AUTEUIL, WHEREIN MOLIERE WALKED

AND MEDITATED ----- 274

HERE STOOD MOLIERE 'S HOUSE - - - 274

VIEW FROM NOTRE DAME ALONG THE SEINE, WITH ITS

SPARKLING BRIDGES - - - - 28o

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

CHAPTER I

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD

We had ordered coupes Jack, but the waiter
declared that but two ices remained, of which
one was a coupe Jack, and this my companion,
a young Cambridge don, expressed a preference
for. I contented myself with a glace melon,
which, shaped and coloured like a slice of cante-
loup, was delicately flavoured as to its inner
portion with the juice of fresh melon, and had a
broad green rind of pistachio. This was abso-
lutely the last ice — the last thing — served at
Tortoni' s. Tortoni, with tears upon his face,
was helping the waiter to put up the shutters.
It was midnight, the hour at which the historic
Boulevard cafe was advertised to be closed for
ever. We alone lingered upon the doomed
premises — Marshal MacMahon had just left —
and it was not the least tragic part of the
situation that the only hands stretched out in
sympathy to the grief-stricken Tortoni at that

i5

16 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

funereal moment were those of foreigners who
were in no sense of the term boulevardiers.

" Messieurs/' said Tortoni, when we asked
him why it had become necessary to close the
famous establishment, " que voulez-vous ? Le
Boulevard se meurt !" (What will you ? The
Boulevard dies !) The mot has been quoted
since by others than ourselves who were not
present when it was uttered. It forms the
burden of the lamentations of many an old
boulevardier who mistakes his own senility for
that of the Boulevard. Tortoni's is now a
boot-shop. Once it was the rendezvous of all
that was boulevardier in Paris. It was there
that the brilliant journalist and author, Aurelien
Scholl, held, in the late eighties, the undisputed
sceptre of Parisian esprit — of wit in the true
Boulevard sense. More than one familiar figure
— that of Scholl among others — disappeared
from the Boulevard after the closing of Tortoni's,
but only to be replaced by successors not less
brilliant or worthy. For the Boulevard bends,
but it does not break. It surrenders, but it
does not die. It bends architecturally in a grace-
ful curve, following the line of the old city
ramparts of pre-Revolutionary times. Note that
only that portion of the Boulevards extending
from the Madeleine to the Faubourg Montmartre

THE BOULEVARD BY NIGHT

To face page 16

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 17

constitutes the Boulevard proper. Sentimen-
tally it bends with equal grace in the directions
of new persons and new things and new ideas —
with its most gallant bow toward the American
woman, whose claim to rival the Parisienne in
beauty, esprit, and deportment, it frankly
acknowledges ; enthusiastically toward the auto-
mobile and the " Metropolitan!," which are
transforming its historic thoroughfares ; loyally
toward the entente cordiale with Great Britain,
which has revolutionized its politics and soft-
ened the tone of its voice.

I have said that it surrenders. It surren-
ders old and cherished prejudices to modern
arguments. It has something of the apathy of
Nature in the presence of the changes wrought
by Time. Its youthful suppleness never deserts
it. A mysterious force, constantly renewing its
vital saps and juices, preserves it from decay.

Whole quarters of Paris come and go. The
Palais Royal, formerly the elysium of Parisian
gaiety and dissipation; the Place des Vosges,
where the nobles of Louis XIII.'s Court had
their town residences, are but phantoms of
irrevocable splendours. Grass and the street
gamin have invaded their echoing pavements
and crumbling colonnades. The aristocratic
faubourgs of St. Honore and St. Germain, with

18 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

their old-time magnificence, their proud, closed-
in air, their territorial wealth of gardens, are
slowly fading away. The encroaching wave of
democracy narrows every year their flower-
strewn boundaries. The Ternes, after a short
chrysalis existence as a slum, has blossomed
out into a suburban Mayfair. Montparnasse,
vexed at an invasion of Anglo-Saxon artists
and art critics, packed up one day its colour-
boxes and easels, and transported itself bodily
to Montmartre. Even in the heart of the city,
revolutions and upheavals have been so com-
plete and thorough that the Paris of Balzac is,
with the exception of the Boulevard, already a
thing of the past. Who would recognize in that
grimy wine-shop in the populous Rue Montor-
gueil the once famous Rocher de Cancale, where
Rastignac, with the other witty exquisites of
the Illusions Perdues, was accustomed to dine
at the then fashionable hour of five ? Certain
mural caricatures by Gavarni, which cannot be
sold, being painted on the plastered wall, alone
survive of its former glories. But Monsieur
Pecune, its old proprietor, might still have been
met with on the Boulevard a couple of years ago,
pondering the memories of the great men and
the great festins of the past (as a child he had
known the author of the Comedie Humaine).

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 19

Paul de Kock has left us a picture of the
Boulevard as he knew it in the thirties, and in
its essence it has not changed. He noted that
the Boulevard des Italiens has been renamed
more than once, chiefly for political reasons.
But even when it was known as the Boulevard
de Gand, in honour of Louis XVI 1 1., who was
at Ghent when he recovered the French throne,
and earlier still when it was called the Boulevard
Coblentz on equally trivial grounds, it was the
chief sensory nerve, as it were, in the complex
anatomy of Paris. Its pavements were fur-
nished with chairs (since relegated to the fronts,
or " terraces/' of the cafes), which in fine
weather accommodated all the brilliant gossips
of the town, of both sexes, who met to discuss
the political situation, the latest fashion, the
latest book, the newest theatrical star, the latest
on dit, and one another. From the shock of
these contending ideas, from the multicoloured
medley of points of view, of bon mots, of witty
or scandalous anecdotes, and the intercourse of
the curiously varied personalities grouped with
them, were day by day and hour by hour
evolved the verdict and the edict of the Boule-
vard. Cigar-smoking is no longer a questionable
novelty, as it was in Paul de Kock's time, nor
do elegant Parisiennes sweep the pavement with

20 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

their crinolines, but the mentality of the Boule-
vard remains the same.

The Boulevard survives because it is essential
to Paris. The London parks have been de-
scribed as the lungs of London. The Parisians,
of whom so many are from Marseilles, are an
outdoor - living people, and they have the
loquacity of the South. The Boulevard is a
needed outlet for their expansiveness. Its pave-
ments are the widest in Paris. Its cafes and
restaurants are the most numerous and best
appointed. And if it be true that all roads
lead to Rome, it may equally be said of the
Boulevard that it is the highway to every living
point of interest in Paris — to the Chamber of
Deputies, the Presidential Palace, if you are
moving westward ; to the Senate and the
Pantheon if more aged and reposeful scenes
beckon you. The ample proportions of the
Boulevard are necessary to the Parisian for his
gesticulations, and for the breadth of his ideas
on moral, social, and political topics. Its
avenues of luxuriant trees supply in summer
a grateful shade for the lounger, the dreamer,
and the talker. The Boulevard is the throat of
Paris, and its palate as well. Nowhere are the
nuances of French popular thought and feeling
expressed with so much precision and authority

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 21

as on the Boulevard. Erudition, laborious
scientific investigation, the high intellectual life,
invest with a peculiar atmosphere of dignified
and cloistered calm the old quarters of the
Luxembourg and the Sorbonne, where the
University professors mostly live. Here are the
homes of composers, of painters, of sculptors,
of novelists, of historians. Here are the intel-
lectual cuisines or workshops of Paris. But
there is little about them that is specifically
Parisian. They have no welt-staedtisch or cos-
mopolitan interests. Their specialism escapes
immediate generalization. They are excen-
tric. It is on the Boulevard that the delicate
meats of the mind, prepared in the tranquil
seclusion of these unassuming and inexpensive
dependencies of the great city, are tasted and
judged.

The Boulevard makes and mars the reputation
of a savant with the same imperial authority
and assumption of omniscience that it applies to
politics and the arts, to cooking and religion, to
all subjects that come within the scope of human
criticism. And inasmuch as Paris leads France,
and the Boulevard inspires Paris, it is the opinion
of the Boulevard which for the time being
prevails. These judgments are often super-
ficial ; they are based in many, if not most,

22 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

cases upon a lack of knowledge as complete
as the arrogance which makes them possible ;
but they constitute an accepted formula of the
hour, a formula which, owing to the suppleness
and force of survival inherent to the Boulevard,
is never final. For the ignorance of the Boule-
vard is immense, instinctive, and wilful. It is
feminine both in its quality and in its compre-
hensiveness, this capricious, elegant, and dis-
tinguished ignorance which is at once the
limitation and part of the unique charm of the
Boulevard ; and I am not advancing too much
when I say that the brain of the Boulevard is
feminine, an intuitive, illogical, witty, and
fascinating brain, set in the prettiest and the
most mobile of heads.

The Boulevard is a kingdom — an imperium in
imperio — without any acknowledged king, but
with a large number of pretenders to the throne.
With the rise of the Republic in France, an
aristocracy of intellect has taken the place of
the old aristocracy of birth, and actually governs
the country in its stead. A similar change has
been effected on the Boulevard. The days of
the dandies, of the titled noceurs led by the
Due de Gramont-Caderousse, the Marquis of
Hertford, Lord " Arsouille/' are over. Even
the Maison Doree, on whose narrow staircase

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 23

the Duke of Hamilton, after a copious dinner,
fell and broke his neck, has been swept away.
One must go to Montmartre, to the Taverne du
Tabarin (a far less aristocratic haunt, with none
of the culinary attractions of the defunct Maison
Doree), to find a similar staircase which can
claim to have recently caused, under like cir-
cumstances— though in what company ! — the
death of an English peer. Half a century ago
the title of " King of the Boulevard " would
have been given to some great courtier and
wealthy nobleman, a Morny or a Demidoff,
whose equipage and outriders would have added
a summer radiance to the Avenue de lTmpera-
trice (now the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne),
who would have been an habitue of the M grand
sixteen," that famous dining-room at the Cafe
Anglais where, on one occasion, Cora Pearl, the
most extravagant demi-mondaine of her day,
was served up, in the costume of Eve, on a silver
platter. The automobile, with its waterproofs
and goggles, has supplanted the brilliant
equipages d la Daumont and the sumptuous
liveries of the Imperial epoch. Seekers after
mere sensual pleasure and riotous dissipation
no longer have their needs supplied by the
Boulevard ; they must go farther afield — to
Maxim's, the Rat Mort, the Abbaye de Theleme^

24 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

to the Tabarin, where the jeunesse doree of the
present generation repeat at less expense of
either taste or money the wild junketings of
their fathers and grandfathers.

The Boulevard, if less given over than of
yore to the worship of Mammon, is at the same
time more Bohemian than it was, and thus
truly reflects the most typical transfiguration
which has taken place of recent years in the
general aspect of French society. Ever since
Gambetta established the republican principles
of " graft " as the basis of the government of
the country, it is from Bohemia that France
has drawn her most representative public
forces. Bohemia, which long ago conquered
literature, art, and the press, is predominant
in the Chamber, claims a goodly contingent
in the Senate, and is encroaching upon the
higher ranks of the army, and navy. Already
it disposes of most, if not all, of the chief offices
of the magistracy and of the State. What more
typically Bohemian careers could well be imag-
ined, for instance, than that of the genial Monsieur
Clemenceau, who so short a time ago was the
most powerful Minister and the most influential
statesman in France ? If there be a King of
the Boulevard, he is a Bohemian without doubt ;
and though since Aurelien Schoirs death the

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 25

title is held by certain critics of contemporary
history to be in abeyance, the general voice
would, I am sure, attribute it without hesitation
to Monsieur Ernest Lajeunesse, were not the
brilliant author of Les Nuits et les Ennuis de
nos Plus Illustres Contemporains so anxious to
disclaim the honour.

In certain cafes which have absorbed the old
clientele of Tort oni's, Monsieur Ernest Lajeunesse
holds every morning, afternoon, and evening,
his court of wit, of which court, be it said, he
is sovereign in the widest sense of the term,
wielding an absolute power, due perhaps to a
wise concentration in his own person of other
court functions than that of king, being at once
his own court chronicler, court jester, and, in
moments of justifiable irritation with his sub-
jects, court executioner. His novel Le Boule-
vard yields in nothing for fineness of analysis
and brilliance of imagination to the most
accomplished works of Stendhal and Anatole
France. His sonnets, treating of contemporary
events and persons in a characteristic vein of
ironical paradox and impatient indulgence, are
so many encyclicals issued to the faithful from
the unholy see of the Boulevard.

Ernest Lajeunesse is a collector of bric-a-brac,
whose flair is the admiration of the old book-

26 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

sellers of the quays, and of the antiquity -dealers
who colonize the Rue Drouot and the neighbour-
hood of the Hotel des Ventes, and, like a wise
monarch, he wears the most portable treasures
of his museum on his back or carries them in
his pocket. I have seen him sipping at his
glass of white absinthe with an authentic Collar
of the Golden Fleece (a marvel of sixteenth-
century goldsmith's work) round his neck, the
waistcoat about him that Lavoisier wore upon
the scaffold, and three priceless episcopal rings
upon his index-finger. His room in an hotel in
the Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire (he has a
flat somewhere, but never occupies it) is hung
with miniatures which represent a fortune, is
heaped from floor to ceiling with books and prints
and military uniforms, and the wonder is how
he gets into bed. He has gathered unique
collections of walking-sticks and seals, of which
he makes habitual use, as also of sabres, with
which he occasionally threatens, and even pricks
(to the effusion of blood), a wearisome or unruly
subject. He is an admirable caricaturist, whose
wittiest caricature is himself. Poet and polem-
iste, novelist, dramatist, and politician ; a prince
of good fellows, but capable of the cruellest
repartee — his tongue is as sharp as a woman's ;
critic, connoisseur, gourmet, man of the world,

H

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THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 27

and wit ; hated by a few (as his duelling record
proclaims), liked and esteemed by the many,
he personifies the Boulevard in flesh and blood,
and, epitomizing its varied genius, is clothed,
like a high-priest, in its hieratic raiment and
adorned with its symbolic attributes. Thus he
presents a somewhat weird appearance, and
excites much public curiosity when walking
abroad. In the throng of admirers that daily
gathers round his throne are Dukes, Counts,
Barons, Prefects, stockbrokers, money-lenders,
composers, poets, painters, sculptors, carica-
turists, philosophers, dandies, warriors, ex-
plorers, photographers, Jews, and fair women.

To describe or even name all those who can
rightly claim the title of boulevardier, and who
daily promenade the historic half-mile of pave-
ment between the Madeleine and the corner of
the Rue Richelieu, would require a volume.
They form a corporation without definable
cohesion, a club without rules or committee,
for admission to which the possession of per-
sonality constitutes the sole claim; and being
in a sense everybody — the tout Boulevard — their
influence is immense.

The life of the Boulevard begins about eleven in
the morning, when Monsieur Ernest Lajeunesse,
who sets an excellent example to other monarchs

28 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

by never varying his habits or quitting his
kingdom, may be discovered at a certain cafe
sipping his aperitif and glancing over the
morning papers. Before the critical eyes of
the boulevardiers the ever-changing procession
of the great Capital of Light passes along in
dazzling and thunderous movement. Familiar
faces are saluted and greeted, faces that com-
plete the design and colour of the Boulevard
like the master touches which give final character
to a picture. Here comes the familiar slouch
of Ribot. There goes Deroulede, in the plaid
trousers and curly-brimmed hat of a patriotism
which is too old-fashioned to forget Alsace and
Lorraine. The erect and black-haired sports-
man, with the immaculate back parting, the
tired face, the English groom at his side, and
driving two magnificent bays, is Prince Trou-
betskoi. There is Hebrard, the editor of the
Temps. Who is the bent old man who has
already passed in front of the cafe three times ?
He is a Russian Baron who for twenty years
has paraded the Boulevard five hours daily.
He speaks to no one. No one knows the
mystery of his life. The Boulevard will miss
him when one day his wearying promenade
comes to an end. That was Rejane in the little
open carriage drawn by two mules.

THE SPIRIT OF THE BOULEVARD 29

As the day advances, the newspaper boys
yell out the evening editions of the Patrie,
the Intransigeant, the Presse, the Liberie, and
the Resultats des Courses (the latest winners).
Beggars linger at the cafe tables. They, too,
are familiar features of the Boulevard. There
is the old whitebeard with the mechanical dolls,
not one of which he has been known ever to sell ;
so the Boulevard pronounces him to be a
mouchard, or agent of the secret police. Another,
silent with outstretched hand, who wears the
military medal, is (so the waiter says) a shame-
less miser, with extensive house property.
Sinister - looking acrobats perform hurried
tricks, gather together a few coins, and then
dash round the corner to escape the police. As
the day wanes, the Boulevard becomes suffused
with a rich sunset glow, meeting the freshly-lit
electric lights, while a fine iridescent spray
scattered over the tops of the Boulevard trees
results from the collision, just as if a wave of
moonlight had struck a rainbow. From nine
to twelve the Boulevard is again in session.
The air and sky are ablaze with thousands of
luminous jewels of all hues. The electric ad-
vertisements, the transparent kiosks, mock the
moon and stars. It is past midnight. Ernest
Lajeunesse leaps on to the last Madeleine-

30 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Bastille omnibus. The pavements are deserted,
but for the policemen patrolling two by two,
with revolvers at their belts, and for certain
dark forms darting out of corners or huddling
upon benches and who are also of the Boulevard
and claim to have a king. The last cafe is
closed. The electric lights become fainter and
die out. Dawn begins to shimmer above the
heights of Montmartre. With one eye open the
Boulevard sleeps.

CHAPTER II

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE

Marie Duval was nineteen last birthday. She
is the typical Parisienne of the middle class.
Both her parents are Parisians, and all her life
has been spent at No. 28, Rue Ste. Placide,
that grimy, age-beaten, but still active street
on the left bank of the Seine, which has the
Bon Marche at one end of it, and Montparnasse,
with its colony of artists, at the other.

Marie Duval loves Paris with an all-em-
bracing love. Equally dear to her are its long,
shabby, uniform streets in what are called the
commercial districts, it pompous avenues, its
brilliance and its drabness. Every year she
accompanies her parents for a fortnight during
August to a little watering-place on the Manche
coast, called Le Bourg d'Ault, where at the
Hotel de Paris you may stop for six francs per
head and per day, with excellent board, all
included ; but she is always glad to get back
again. " Ah, Paris I" she exclaims, as she is

31

32 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

driven home from the Northern railway-station
— " there is but one Paris I" Then she kisses
her mother, and pats her father on the cheek.
She is, in fact, a thorough child of the city ; for
though her parents are respectable people, and
have devoted real care to her education, it was
largely in the street that her quite early youth was
spent. Here you have a democratic trait which
is peculiar to the middle-class life of Paris,
explained too, in some measure, by the love of
all French people for outdoor life, and by the
smallness and stuffiness of Parisian dwellings,
especially in the older parts of the city. Under
the watchful eye of the concierge, or janitor,
Marie Duval, from the age of four, was accus-
tomed to play with the other little children of
the quartier on the pavement outside the house
where her parents lived.

When she grew a bit older she would go with
the same companions (and in care of the eldest
of them) to the Luxembourg Gardens, which are
but a stone's-throw away, and great is her
affection for its tall silvery fountain, its orange
and pomegranate trees, its swaying hollyhocks
and masses of red geraniums, its great scented
rosery, and majestic palace, to say nothing of
the little wooden rocking-horses, which cost a
halfpenny to ride on, and the roped-in ground

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 33

where her uncle, with some of the retired trades-
people of the neighbourhood, still plays croquet.
It is now three years since Marie left the
convent school, and she enjoys all the liberty
of a young woman, for the old French system
of keeping girls in a kind of artificial fools'
paradise until they are married is going out of
fashion. She is tall, and slim, and blonde,
with features which are prettily irregular. Her
small nose has a tendency to turn upwards at
the tip, her lips are small and well shaped, her
complexion is a little pale, and her eyes are large
and blue-grey, neither too round nor too narrow,
and in their quick glances and dancing light,
good-humour, gaiety, gentleness, and a keen
sense of life and fun, seem to be ever at games
with one another. She is too fond of movement
to be ever lazy or fretful, and whether polishing
up the furniture in her parents' sitting-room, or
mending socks, or scraping carrots in the
kitchen, she is as bright and gay, and chirrups
as merrily, as the impudent little Parisian
sparrows who are clamoring for bread-crumbs
on the window-sill. Marie knows all about
needlework, which was taught her by the good
Sisters of the Sacre* Cceur, whom the Govern-
ment, much to her indignation, has recently
expelled, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say

3

34 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

that she could cook before she could talk. She
makes her own clothes, and possesses that magi-
cal power, almost peculiar to the Parisienne,
which foreigners notice, of looking well in things
which are perfectly hideous in themselves, if
criticized singly.

Summer and winter Marie rises at six. About
seven she sallies forth to purchase the household
bread — a two-pound loaf about a yard and a
half long, which is called a " flute/ ' At that
early hour of the morning all the streets of
Paris, including the Rue Ste. Placide, are lined
with square zinc boxes, in which the inhabitants
deposit their kitchen refuse. It is not an
appetizing sight, though no true Parisian minds
it. The rag-pickers, with their picturesque
hods and iron-pointed sticks, sort the boxes
over for anything that can be put aside and
sold at the innumerable rubbish fairs which are
held every Sunday in the Paris suburbs. Stray
dogs rummage in them for a breakfast, and
finally the municipal dust-carts carry away
what is left.

Marie was not a hundred yards from her
home when, one morning, her dress caught and
was badly torn on the jagged edge of one of
these foubelles, for so they are called from the
name of the Prefect of the Seine who first

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 35

ordained their use. At that moment there
happened to be passing the son of the iron-
monger, whose shop is at the Bon Marche end
of the Rue Ste. Placide, young Monsieur Edouard
Brunet, just returned from completing his two
years* military service in the 10th Regiment of
Dragoons. Edouard is a ruddy, well-set-up
youth, with hard, regular features, black hair,
and staring blue eyes — in fact, not unlike a
masculine Dutch doll. Marie and he used to
play together when they were both small
children, and they celebrated their First Com-
munion in the same year, she in a vast en-
veloping white cambric veil, with a bunch of
orange-blossoms — a bride's costume, in fact —
and he in a little black jacket-suit with a white
tie and white waistcoat, and a large white satin
bow with a long streamer on his right arm.
Edouard was also carrying a wheat en u flute "
in his hand ; and being more glib of speech than
his wooden appearance would lead you to
anticipate — but then, you see, he too is a
Parisian born and bred —

u Mon Dieu, Mademoiselle Marie !" he ex-
claimed, " I fear you have torn your dress."

" Thank you, Monsieur Edouard, but it is
nothing/ ' replied Marie.

" Let me fix up the tear with this safety-

36 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

pin/' said Edouard, producing one from his
pocket, and leaning his " flute " up against the
guilty refuse-box.

" But you are amiability itself I'1 said Marie,
smiling.

Edouard having deftly adjusted the safety-
pin, " Mademoiselle Marie/ ' he continued,
" there is a dressmaker at No. 10, who is a
friend of my mother's, and she will sew up your
dress in a minute, if you will let me take you
there."

" But with pleasure !" laughs Marie.

So to the dressmaker's they go, and Edouard
wants to pay ; but the dressmaker turns out to
be an old schoolfellow of Marie's, and with
silvery laughter refuses, in spite of Edouard' s
protestations, to accept the money which he is
preparing to extract from the innermost recesses
of a much-worn leather purse.

Then Marie flies off home, fearing that her
parents will think that she has been run down
by an automobile, and to them she breathlessly
relates her adventure. M He's a nice boy,
Edouard!" is the remark she winds up with.
" I always had a beguin for Edouard !"

The beguin is the wide cap worn by nuns, but
in Parisian slang it means a " special fancy "
for someone. Marie makes this frank admission

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 37

to her parents because she has no false modesty,
and has long ago made up her mind to get
married as soon as a favourable chance presents
itself. Monsieur and Madame Duval exchange
a meaning glance, and seize the first opportunity
of Marie's leaving the room to say to one
another : " I see no objection. " And each
knows perfectly well what the other has in
mind.

Also when Marie comes back, trilling a light
song, and bringing in the smoking coffee-pot
from a kitchen the size of a pocket-handker-
chief, which fits on to the back of the dining-
room like an extra-deep cupboard, she guesses,
from the look her parents give her, what they
were thinking about. So, without saying a
word, she just kisses them both. And they call
her a " sly one " and laugh, and Marie laughs,
and asks them what are they plotting, and they
both swear that they are not plotting anything,
Madame Duval adding that it is no crime to
have one's thoughts.

Monsieur Duval is a mattre-tonnelier — that is
to say, a master-cooper. Two little wooden
barrels painted red and black are hung up high
on either side of his shop as signs of his trade,
and his window is filled with little oaken
pitchers bound with polished brass of the

38 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

prettiest effect imaginable ; in fact, so artistic
are they both in shape and colour that many
of the foreign students who pass along the Rue
Ste. Placide on their way to the Montparnasse
buy them as souvenirs. One shape in particular,
which resembles a clarinet, is very popular.
But the most lucrative part of Monsieur Duval's
business consists in bottling wine. He charges
four shillings for each hogshead which he puts
in bottle, and makes a further profit by supply-
ing the corks and the sealing-wax. As he
bottles at least three hogsheads a day, most of
his waking life is spent in dark cellars lit only
by a twisted taper, a rat de cave, or cellar-rat, as
it is called. He has had six children, apart
from Marie. Three are dead, and every first
Sunday in the month Madame Duval goes to
the Bagneux Cemetery to lay flowers on their
graves. Two girls are comfortably married.
Raoul, the only son, has run away.

" Father," said Raoul one morning, " I don't
want to be a master-cooper. I must see sun-
light sometimes. I can't live always in the
dark with a ' cellar-rat.' I want to do some-
thing else."

The father was silent for a moment. Dimly
the bitter thought was forming in his mind :
" To bring my children up and keep them from

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 39

want I have gone without the light of the
sun for thirty years/' Then he said : " Very
well, my little one ; go, earn thy crust
elsewhere."

And the boy went. Within a month after-
wards Monsieur Duval's hair had turned grey,
but he never again mentioned his son's name.
For three weeks Madame Duval wept silently ;
but, as the tears simply coursed down her face,
and she made no grimaces to speak of, Monsieur
Duval pretended to take no notice. Short,
stout, and taciturn, with an overwhelming sense
of duty, especially where family, he himself, and
money matters, are concerned, Monsieur Duval
is a not uncommon type of Frenchman. The
iron-bound oak of his trade seems to have
entered into his soul. He has never owed or
loaned a cent, and never during the whole course
of their lifetime did he once thwart the wishes
of his father and mother. Raoul is a black
speck on the domestic horizon. His escapade
may quite possibly compromise his sister's
chances of marrying well. Driven to despera-
tion by poverty, Raoul may commit some
dreadful act which will disgrace the whole
family. The neighbours foresee this, and look
a little askance at the Duvals. Madame
Brunet, Edouard's mother, is a domineering,

40 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

calculating woman, and it is likely that she has
already made plans for her son's marriage.

In France young people under twenty-one
years of age cannot marry without the consent
of both their parents. Should the parents be
dead, the consent of the grandparents must be
obtained. Once the limit of twenty-one years
is reached, should the parents or grandparents
still remain obdurate, the marriage can take
place, but only after the parties have served the
opposing relatives, or guardians, with a polite
intimation on registered stamped paper that
they purpose overriding the family veto. It
sometimes happens that the parents and grand-
parents are all dead, in which case certificates
to that effect must be obtained from the Mayors
of the different communes where these deceased
persons habitually resided. This is often a
lengthy and costly affair. In the poorer classes
it not infrequently happens that the parents
have to be bribed to secure their consent.

A case came under the writer's notice of a
mother who refused to consent to her son's
marriage until the young woman he was engaged
to had made her a present of a new stove, costing
fifty francs. Then a further complication arose.
The Mayor of the commune where the mother
lived was courting her daughter, who wanted

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 41

a bicycling costume. The careful Mayor sug-
gested to the mother that she might still make
her consent to her son's marriage conditional
on the young woman he was engaged to fur-
nishing a further sum of fifty francs for the
purchase of her future sister-in-law's bloomers.
But at this point the marriage negotiations were
broken off. The would-be bride was willing
to make pecuniary sacrifices to secure her own
and her lover's happiness, but she drew the line
at giving another girl a dress.

No such disaster, however, is to befall the
matrimonial schemes of Marie Duval and
Edouard Brunet. To be sure, Madame Brunet,
who is a buxom woman with a long pink face,
pointed chin, hard brown eyes, and abundant
grey hair drawn very tightly above her forehead,
was at first strongly opposed to the engagement.
But Edouard is a serious and persevering lad.
At the age of sixteen he was still going about
with bare legs and a knickerbocker suit which
his mother has made for him, without feeling
in the least bit ridiculous. During his military
service he never once incurred the smallest
punishment for breach of discipline. He has
never revolted openly against his mother's
wishes, but he is an unconscious diplomatist of
the first rank ; for, by never contradicting

42 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

her, he invariably ends by getting his own
way.

When Madame Brunet discovered that
nothing could disturb her son's respectful
equanimity or alter his determination, she gave
in. She set herself to calculate the pros and
cons of the marriage with Marie. Monsieur
Duval had no son (Raoul having revolted) to
whom he could bequeath his business, but his
chief assistant was willing to buy the goodwill
for £2,000. This sum would ultimately have
to be divided among the four Duval children.
Monsieur Duval had given both of his married
daughters a dot of £400, so that would be
Marie's marriage portion, too. Edouard, on the
other hand, would succeed to his father's iron-
mongery business, being an only child. It repre-
sented an income of £800 a year. He would
inherit £2,000 from his mother. Furthermore,
his maternal grandfather was a retired Captain
of the army and decorated with the Cross of
the Legion of Honour. From the social point
of view, this was a serious asset. Clearly,
Edouard was a far better parti than Marie. But
Madame Brunet was alive to Marie's excellent
personal qualities. She had M order," a supreme
merit in the eyes of a clever household manager
like Madame Brunet. She was active, well

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 43

educated, and intelligent, and had the makings
of a good wife.

The outcome was that Monsieur and Madame
Brunet paid a ceremonious visit to Monsieur
and Madame Duval, of which the latter had
previously been warned by Edouard, though
they expressed much delighted surprise at so
unexpected an honour. On being informed by
the Brunets that they had come to demand
Mademoiselle Marie's hand for their son
Edouard, Monsieur and Madame Duval replied
that, while extremely flattered by the request,
they must first consult their daughter, whose
answer would no doubt be forthcoming on the
following day. Accordingly, the next afternoon
Monsieur and Madame Brunet receive an equally
ceremonious visit from Monsieur and Madame
Duval, who acquaint them with Marie's accept-
ance of Edouard's suit, and invite them to
dinner, together with Edouard and his grand-
parents, for a few days later. In the meanwhile
Edouard is authorized to bring Marie flowers.
The dinner is a solemn affair. Madame Brunet
and Madame Duval are in funereal black silk,
Marie wears a white blouse and a pink ribbon,
and the men are in frock-coats and white ties.
Captain Boucher, Madame Brunet' s father,
looks very dignified with his cross and ribbon

44 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

of the Legion of Honour. Over their wine he
and Monsieur Duval lament the excellence of
the vins ordinaires of half a century ago. Cap-
tain Boucher is inclined to think that the
Government is at fault, while Monsieur Duval
contends that it is the art of bottling which is
no longer, with rare exceptions, what it used
to be.

Edouard presents Marie with a ring, and
from this moment they are officially betrothed,
and he may publicly kiss her.

Sweet champagne is served at the dessert.
The chief items of the menu are a vol-au-vent
aux poissons, a piece of beef with olives, and a
roast chicken, with watercress. The vol-au-
vent comes from the best pastrycook's in the
neighbourhood, and bears the name of the firm
raised in large letters on the crust in proof of
authenticity, whilst the rest of the dinner, as
Madame Duval informs Madame Brunet, who
beams with approval, was entirely cooked by
Marie.

Dinners are given by the grandparents on
both sides, and a dinner, though of a less official
kind, follows the signing of the marriage con-
tract at the notary's.

Then the banns are put up both at the Mayor's
office and the church, and Marie and Edouard

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 45

are deluged with advertising circulars from all
kinds of tradespeople ; but their outlay is com-
paratively small. For what is not actually
provided by the parents is obtained in mysteri-
ous roundabout methods at large reductions
of price, thanks to the long-standing commercial
connections of both Monsieur Duval and Mon-
sieur Brunet. The Duvals supply the bride's
trousseau and the household linen, and the
Brunets the furniture of the little appartement
in the Ste. Placide quarter where the young
people are to live.

In France no church marriage is valid which
has not been preceded by a civil function con-
ducted by the Mayor. When the wedding-day
arrives, the entire party, numbering sixteen,
start off in four immense landaus lined with
cream-coloured silk. The coachmen, in ancient
curly-brimmed top-hats, have big bunches of
orange-blossom in their coats, and their whips
are tied with white silk bows. The entire
quartier is alive to see the bridal party set out,
and pocket-handkerchiefs are waved from all
the windows of the Rue Ste. Placide, where
Marie is a universal favourite and has been
known to the inhabitants rall her life. Marie
is in a huge white tulle veil covering a white
satin dress, with a little diadem of orange-

46 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

blossoms in her hair and a big bunch of orange-
blossoms in her white-gloved hands. The
bridegroom is in evening dress, with a shiny
black crush hat, which comes down nearly to
his ears. Similarly habited are the two gar cons
d'honneur who accompany the two bridesmaids,
to whom they have presented silver brooches.
The bridesmaids are in white, without veils.
The two temoins, or witnesses, required by the
law are Captain Boucher, in full uniform, and
Monsieur Chariot, a corporal in fidouard's regi-
ment, also in uniform.

After Edouard and Marie, in response to the
Mayor's question, put to each of them in turn,
have declared their free and full wish to be
united, the Mayor reads to them the articles of
the Legal Code, in which their respective duties
and rights as married people are defined. Then
he makes a speech. When the parties are
personally unknown to him, it is his rule to
trace in eloquent language the origin of the
marriage institution from the time " of our
common ancestors, Adam and Eve " ; but, as
both the Duval and Brunet families are promi-
nent commerfants of the quartier, and old and
valued acquaintances of the Mayor's, he intro-
duces local colour by tracing ironmongery to
the time of the Phoenicians, and declares that

.

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 47

Monsieur Duval is not only an ideal husband
and father, but, by reason of his unrivalled
skill in the bottling line, a real benefactor to
society at large. Captain Boucher he places,
in a series of brilliant historical parallels, some-
where between Achilles and Marshal Ney, and
this gives him a chance a pay a skilful compli-
ment to the regular army as represented by the
corporal. French Mayors' speeches are nothing
if not pedantic. Then he takes advantage of
the privilege attaching to his semi-paternal
functions to kiss the bride and both bridesmaids.
All the party then sign the register.

The ceremony at the church is simple and
impressive. Edouard and Marie kneel on prie-
dieu, and behind them, also kneeling, are the
parents and relatives, the witnesses, the garfons
d'honneur and the bridesmaids. The cure who
baptized Edouard and Marie, prepared them
both for their First Communion, and heard their
first confessions, makes them a charming little
address about the Christian duties of the married
state. There is some music, a couple of simple
hymns — cantiques — warbled rather than sung to
the accompaniment of the choir harmonium,
and finally the nuptial benediction. From the
church, after more signing of registers, the
party, now in the highest of spirits, is driven

48 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

to Neuilly, where the banquet, or noce, has been
ordered at one of those vast rambling restau-
rants, with saloons to seat a hundred guests,
which in the Paris suburbs make a speciality of
marriage feasts. As they drive up, a ragged
urchin thrusts through the bride's carriage
window a bouquet of lilies of the valley which
he has plucked in the woods round Paris, and
cries : " Ten sous, ten sous ! It will bring
you luck, madame." Marie utters a little half-
suppressed scream.

The boy, who has caught sight of the bride's

face, snatches back the bouquet and dashes away.

" He's mad," remarks Edouard. " The police

ought to suppress those young ruffians. Did he

frighten thee, cherished one ?"

" Only startled me a little/' says Marie, re-
covering her colour. The bride's eyes and her
father's meet in a flash of intelligence. Not a
muscle of his face has moved. Thank goodness,
Madame Duval was so busy gathering up her
daughter's veil that she did not recognize, in
the starving flower-seller, the prodigal Raoul !

Including red and white wine, and coffee, the
noce banquet costs five francs, or four shillings,
per head. Hors d'ceuvre, roast beef, chicken,
salad, cheese, and dessert, are comprised in the
menu. Four bottles of champagne at four

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 49

shillings each are ordered additionally. It is
late in the afternoon before the dessert is
reached, and then everybody is called upon to
sing a song. Monsieur Chariot, who is the life
and soul of the party (no Parisian noce is com-
plete without a soldier in uniform, whose
traditional privilege it is to make comic love
to the mothers and flirt seriously with the
bridesmaids), has just reached the second verse
of that familiar drinking-song M Un petit verre
de Clicquot !" when Madame Duval is seen to
be in tears. It is the song Raoul used to sing
on his father's birthday when a little lad. A
hard look from Marie convinces the corporal
that he has made a gaffe, which is French for
a u break," and instantly, with that histrionic
cleverness which is the birthright of every
Parisian, he begins to stammer and stutter, and
stares wildly about him in comic confusion, and
declares that he has forgotten how the song
goes on. So he starts another one, and, in the
applause that follows it, Madame Duval, with
Marie holding her hand under the table, manages,
after a few spasmodic twitchings of the lips, to
pull herself together, and her lissom old face,
which had crumpled up like a silk pocket-
handkerchief that had been unduly sat upon,
smooths out a?ain.

50 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

A photographer, brought upon the scene by
the proprietor of the restaurant, takes portraits
of the bride and bridegroom standing alone
together, and then in a group with the rest of
the party. A general move is now made to the
Bois de Boulogne. There is no prettier or more
characteristic sight in Paris on a fine day than
these bridal parties straggling about, though
always more or less in processional order, on
the lawns and under the trees of the Bois.
The background of green, pricked out with
flowers, gives charming quality to the white
dresses of bride and bridesmaids, the black-and-
white evening dress of the bridegroom and his
male friends, the blue and red of the inevitable
soldier-guest. Every stranger has been pleased
and amused by this so common vision in the
Bois — the bridal merry-making in the open air
of a Marie Duval and an Edouard Brunet.

But the fete is not yet at an end. From the
Bois the bridal party is conveyed in state to
Auteuil, to another rambling restaurant, where
aperitifs, or appetizers, are served, and a dance
takes place, followed by a dinner. It is now
time for the bride and bridegroom to depart.
Edouard is in floods of tears at the thought of
quitting his mother. Marie, too, is weeping
upon the broad shoulders of Madame Duval.

MONSIEUR LAJEUNESSE S COLLECTION OF MINIATURES

To face page 50

A PARISIAN MARRIAGE 51

Then they are driven away. Corporal Chariot
has by this time exchanged his red, peaked cap
for the hat of the principal bridesmaid, and they
are singing an amorous duet. Monsieur Brunet
and Monsieur Duval pay off the carriages, which
have cost £1 each for the day. Then each
family regains its home either by metro or
omnibus. The next morning the entire party
meets again — with the exception of Edouard
and Marie — for a luncheon in the Bois de
Vincennes. This is called the lendemain de f§tey
or the morrow of the feast. Its cost is shared
by Edouard and Marie's parents. It is not quite
so brilliant as was the noce, but the corporal
continues his melodious flirtations at a great
pace, and, in the opinion of the guests, there is
little doubt that an engagement between Mon-
sieur Chariot and the principal bridesmaid will
be announced before long.

S

CHAPTER III
THE PANORAMA AND COLOUR OF PARIS

From the steps of the Basilica of the Sacre*
Coeur, from the summit of Montmartre, that
world-famed " nipple," underneath which beats
the sacred heart of the Paris of Parisians, you
may study the panorama of the city's colour.

Paris lies at your feet, not unlike a vast
cemetery, an almost silent wilderness of stones —
almost silent, for at this height the noise of the
streets is nearly deadened, and the movement
of their traffic is absorbed into their shadows.

But, if you listen, faint sounds will strike the
ear, a rising dust of human voices, something
that resembles the chirruping of a June breeze
as it rustles over ripening wheat-fields, a dream-
like music, not sad, because it is made up in a
large measure of the calling of children one to
another, but yet pathetic, for it is disembodied
like a memory that comes from far away.

The sobbing of a calm sea's wavelets on fine
sand, the baaing of distant flocks of sheep, the

52

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS

53

bubbling of champagne, are more or less vaguely
suggested by this sound. It is not unlike the
mysterious " summer hum," unearthly yet of

THE SACRE CCEUR AT MONTMARTRE.

the earth, which still puzzles naturalists, and
might be, one fancies, first cousin to the music
of the spheres.

Rising from the stones beneath you, this

54 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

attenuated symphony of noises gives them
vibratory animation, much as the Mass music
played on the organ within an ancient church,
and heard from without, seems to be the very
voice of the building, the soul of its walls and
towers and painted windows, awakened and
warmed into throbbing expression.

Thus the comparison with the cemetery is not
altogether just, though, save for these haunting
street echoes, the city down below has all the
silence of the grave. The Invalides, the Pan-
theon, and the Opera, with their green or gilded
domes, Notre Dame, St. Sulpice, St. Vincent de
Paul, and a dozen other churches, with their
towers and spires, rise up, prouder mausoleums,
from amidst the small-fry of this ocean of tomb-
stones ; and, after all, what are these human
habitations, what is a city, but an agglomeration
of graves, a cemetery in which each succeeding
generation buries the unachieved effort and
dead ideals of its predecessor ? or, if you will,
a national fane — like royal St. Denis, whose
towers are discernible to the right of where you
stand — in which long dynasties of high thought
and brilliant actions and gorgeous dreams,
tricked out in the cloth of gold of victory, or
swathed in the black shroud of disaster, lie
magnificently sepulchred ?

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS 55

Paris is a city of stone, and her predominating
colours are white, with all its gradations of grey
and drab, added to green and blue, but particu-
larly blue. Her stone is a living stone with a
human heart-throb, and, varying in date from
a thousand years ago to yesterday, wears on
its rugged surface an infinity of stone- tints.
Her stretches of blue-tiled roofs, with their
red chimneys, form a high transparent canopy
of rose-lilac over this stoniness, which, grey in
the mass, but burning white when the sun
flashes on it, distinguishes Paris from New York
with its red brick and brown stone, and London
with its yellow brick and stucco.

One has also the impression, when gazing at
this panorama of Paris, of a wide grey-white
undulating shore, which the sea has left high
and dry, covered with differently-sized heaps
of blue-grey pebbles that are plentifully inter-
mixed with small fragments of red clay. Above
hangs a soft pearl-grey haze, which is almost
transparent ether as far as one can clearly
distinguish the forms of the houses, and then
becomes gossamer and loose white wool. Across
this limpidity light-brown streamers of smoke
from the tall factory chimneys are carried by
the wind. In the farther distance the rose-
lilac simplifies itself into plain mauve, which

56 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

in' its turn deepens on the horizon into darkening
bands of purple ; but almost purple-black as
are the ultimate stretches of the city's expanse,
a constant iridescence haunts the jagged line
where Paris seems to end. It gives to the
panorama an ethereal but at the same time arti-
ficial air, as if one were in the presence of a
marvellous piece of stage scenery, composed of
materials not wholly opaque, and cunningly
illuminated from behind and below.

Under the most typical of Parisian skies, which
should be of a liquid, not overdeep blue, flecked
with large white clouds, this theatrical sugges-
tion, this dramatic effect, is intensified by the
driving shadows and sudden flushes of white
which play upon the wrinkled, stony face of the
old city.

A few patches of green marking the waste
lands awaiting the builder, the public parks,
and the encircling woods, contrast dimly with
the greys and drabs.

From the heights of Montmartre it is not
possible to see the Seine. The inhabitants of
this essentially Parisian quarter of Paris are
shut off by an intervening barrier of many
streets of tall squalid tenements from that
gleaming vision, and few are likely to climb the
tower of Notre Dame, whence the broad blue

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS 57

sweep of the queenly river best shows itself,
dividing the city into apparently two equal
parts from east to west, flowing onwards in the
sense of the cathedral's own peerless lines.
Yet the Seine is to Paris as the tail to the
peacock, the supreme orchestral outburst of
her colour scheme. The brilliant white of the
stone embankments, as the blue and silver
stream swirls through the city, the green of the
trees that border them, will be repeated all along
the Seine's swift course to the sea in white chalk
cliffs and siliceous banks, broad green pastures,
and hanging woods.

The Seine is distinguished from all the rivers
of France by this dazzling body-robe of blue,
matching the sky, trimmed with silver and
fringed with green. Instinctively the blue and
white which are the dominant colours of Paris
have been adopted into the city's armorial blazon.

The Marne, on the other hand, which is only
a Paris river by adoption — for it flows into the
Seine at Charenton, just outside the eastern
confines of the city — is always of a deep green,
clear as crystal, owing to its bed being of a fine
white clay.

All the provinces of France have a distinctive
colouring. The Champagne, with the aqua-
marine of the Marne River running through it,

58 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

and its undulating slopes covered with vineyards,
is dark green. The blues and browns of Brittany
are sorrowful and watery. Picardy is cold and
prim in yellowish-grey. In lush Normandy the
pastures are as green velvet, while the Norman
chalk dunes have the rich friable whiteness of
cream cheese. None of them possesses just
that j oyous combination of clear blue and serene
white which is peculiar to the Department of
the Seine, the old Ile-de-France, whose capital
is Paris.

People with a sense of colour know at once
when they have passed from one to another
of these departments merely from the different
aspect of sky and earth. It may be objected
than the boundaries of the French departments
are artificial, but the designers of them have
followed certain well-considered geological and
ethnological lines, and, consciously or uncon-
sciously, it is by the subtle suggestion of the
soil itself, with its special atmosphere and
history, that they have allowed themselves to
be guided. There has been no serious mutila-
tion of the respective physiognomies which dis-
tinguished the old provinces of France before
the departments were created. Racial charac-
teristics due to environment have remained the
same, and, accompanying them, the peculiar

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS 59

atmosphere and ground colours are plainly
distinguishable.

Inevitably, in the Seine's passage through
Paris, the blue and silver of its robe are blurred
by contact with the volumes of smoke which
occasionally hang upon its surface, and stained
by the impurities which reach it from the
streets. Though it quickly recovers its pristine
blueness after the fortifications have been left
behind, it is never again quite the unsophisti-
cated river that it was before its Paris ex-
perience. Its waters are less limpid, its course
more nervous, while at its meeting with the
sea at Honfleur its colour and character have
changed completely. There the vast stretches
of mud over which it rolls — mud of Paris, mud
of Rouen — give to the waters of the wide Seine
estuary, reaching from Trouville to Le Havre,
the half-dead moire tones of oxidized silver.
The great Parisian river dies magnificently,
and no more gorgeous spectacle can be con-
ceived than when, on a fine evening, the Seine
at its juncture with the sea, where its ultimate
cliffs fade away behind the summer haze into
a powder of gold, burns, under the sunset light,
a pale turquoise blue with weird reflections of
brazen yellow, old gold, and cadaverous green.
How different from its gentler and simpler

60 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

aspect as it huddles round the heart of Paris,
warm purple and burnished gold where the
sinking sun strikes it as it softly laps against
the stone embankment of the Louvre, or
sparkling blue dappled with milk-white beneath
the silvery mists of the Paris morning !

The exceptionally pure air of Paris enhances
her statuesque beauty, but her colour gamut is
less rich and varied as compared with that of
London. Her colours have less " body," if one
may be permitted to borrow that expression
from the wine-cellar, though it would be erron-
eous to say that they have less quality. They
are less impersonal. Paris in her general atti-
tude is far more anecdotic than London. The
anecdotic, the talkative element is discernible
in her colour. In London we have infinite
colour, constantly shifting and changing, never
revealing anything but itself, admirable and
lovable as colour merely, enveloped in and
visible through mist which has the curious
double effect of promoting the general colour
harmony, while aiding the colour to maintain
its impersonality, its moral and aesthetic de-
tachment from the objects on which it rests.
There is nothing human in the colour of London ;
its spirituality is of itself ; that is why it means
nothing, or is invisible, to the vast majority of

THE WEDDING-PARTY AT THE CASCADE IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE

To face page 60

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS 61

the inhabitants. "How gloomy I" says the
" man in the street/' pointing to an unimagin-
able harmony of purples and browns and
greens and greys materialized like a spirit in
an envelope of mist, and playing, unconscious
of its human surroundings, in a slum. In Paris,
on the contrary, the colour is Parisian, with a
Parisian appeal to the Parisian heart and brain,
and it tells endless and charming little stories
about Paris.

From the artist's point of view this may con-
stitute an inferiority, but who shall deny the
documentary value or the abiding charm ?
To separate the life and movement, the human
inspiration, of the Paris streets from their colour
is not possible. On a fine morning, what fresh-
ness, what brilliance, what delicacy of colour —
blue and pearl grey always predominating — a
reflection of the Parisian spirit in its gaiety,
its keen wit, its cheerful love of labour, its social
and moral thrift, its sense of aesthetic restraint !
No too garish poster, hardly an ill-drawn one,
offends the eye. The very crowds, as Rodin
once remarked on the evidence of instantaneous
photographs, hold themselves by some mysteri-
ous and collective sense of harmony in groups
that are perfect as to balance of proportion and
composition of line.

62 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

These soft but outspoken greys, and these
blues, whose hearts verily leap, are brightened
in the spring by the pure greens of the numerous
boulevards and avenues, which in autumn are
a blaze of gold and copper. But when the trees
are bare and black in winter, the greys still
shimmer in peaceful contentment beneath the
encouraging caress of the blue. The Parisian
season is then at its height. In the tall stone
houses the fireplaces are burning more wood
than coal, so there is no black smoke. The
blue-grey shadows which these houses throw
across the streets when the sun shines, as it
generally does, are so luminous and soft as
hardly to be distinguishable from those of
summer. Paris looks for the time being a little
more clothed. Always statuesque, there is now-
more about her of the pretty mannequin than of
the Venus of Milo. But this is merely a nuance,
a note. It suffices to give you an idea of what
is going on in the changed season, which, how-
ever, as a season, lives the same life, and remains
of the same colour and aspect, year after year.
But it is at night that the anecdotic quality of
the colour of Paris most reveals itself. The
streets are aflame with myriads of multicoloured
lights, each of which has its peculiar Parisian
suggestion to convey. At the same time the

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS 63

general colour effect is extremely rich and
variegated. Paris at night is as bejewelled as
an Oriental Princess; but here, again, London
surely has the advantage of her, in variety and
beauty of colour. After the complete nightfall,
London lights have none of the harmonious
arrangement and sapphire-blue setting of those
of Paris, and their suggestion is incomparably
more mean and vile ; but Paris is rarely visited
by those fantastic mist forms, eerie fog giants,
which people the London parks after sunset,
and Paris has, comparatively speaking, little
twilight. Where in Paris could one see such
an evening as when the November sun sets upon
the gasometers on the marshy promontory at
Deptford Creek, and above the purple and green
mists their glowing outlines hang low in the sky
like a burning grille ? Remember, too, what
worlds of distinctive colour lie between two
such aesthetic poles as are represented by this
vision seen from the East End docks, and the
view from Richmond Hill, which may be con-
sidered as the extreme western point of London.
When Paris is fog-bound, which happens about
twice a year, the Parisians look upon the phe-
nomenon in the light of a huge practical joke.
They feel just as they did when the electricians
struck work, and all the lamps went out in the

64 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

streets and cafes. Paris is then behaving like
a naughty child, and must be good-humouredly
scolded or chaffed into promising not to do it
again. And her love of brightness and clearness
is so intense that these moments of sulkiness
never recur often enough to spoil the Parisian
temper.

When it rains in Paris, the effect is no greater
than that of a child's burst of tears. The aspect
of Paris is for a brief space hideous as is that of
the child ; but the fit is soon over and the tears
are dried, and smiles and gay equanimity return.
The persistent weeping of the London streets
has the quality and the high seriousness of the
gloomiest Scandinavian tragedy. London weeps
as one imagines Mrs. Siddons to have wept for
fifty consecutive performances in the role of
M the Mourning Bride," en grande artiste, making
a presentment of utter woe which has the abiding
dignity, the harmonious atmosphere, and the
colour ragout, of a great painting.

The famous floods in Paris two years ago, and
the rainy weather that accompanied them, were
so exceptional as to be without precedent in
the memory of man. They gave the impres-
sion of a sudden and violent attack of yellow
fever upon a patient of surpassing vigour and
beauty who had never been accustomed to

THE PANORAMA OF PARIS 65

illness, and whose quick collapse caused a panic-
like feeling of alarm to her friends. People
watched the Seine from its banks with horror
written on their faces, as if they were at the
bedside of a sick goddess. Its delicate com-
plexion changed to muddy yellow ; its breast
heaving, sightlessly and unconsciously it pur-
sued the wild phantoms of delirium, with
madness coursing in its veins. Every hour an
official gauge was taken, which, like the tempera-
ture noted down by a doctor, marked the
advancing stages of the Seine's malady. Then,
just when the worst was beginning to be feared,
a slight reduction in this gauge-temperature
brought to all sympathizers a feeling of relief.
The crisis was past, convalescence had set in ;
the Seine was as beautiful and brilliant as ever.

CHAPTER IV
ALL PARIS

" All Paris " is Hydra-headed — impossible of
definition in a phrase. All London, All New
York, differ from All Paris, not only by race and
language, but by the social elements composing
them. Your concierge, or house-porter, sup-
posing that you reside in Paris, might belong
to All Paris, while you, his legal master, might
not.

Take Edmond, for instance, the famous
huissier d'annonce. Firstly, he is Edmond —
Edmond tout court, superior, that is to say, to
the convention of a surname, as are princes
and prelates (he has much of the magnificence
of both). At half the social functions of Paris,
it is Edmond who shouts out the visitors' names.

Edmond is tall and robust, white-haired,
and of a sanguine complexion. Round his
shoulders he wears an idealized bicycle chain of
solid silver, which is his chain of office, while
his black knee-breeches and black silk stockings

66

ALL PARIS 67

and silver - buckled shoes are a costume of
ceremony which would be libelled were they
called a livery. For fifty years Edmond's life
has mainly resolved itself into one long fantastic
vision of all the most illustrious men and
beautiful women in the world passing in endless
procession before him.

Should you be a foreigner in Paris, and a
new-comer, and should you be invited to some
great Parisian reception, stand well within reach
of Edmond's stentorian voice, and you will learn
more as to the composition of All Paris than
any of the society papers or directories of
fashion could teach you. Edmond's counte-
nance alone is a book — a Red Book, the
Londoner might say. His every movement
has hierarchical meaning. He is contemporary
history in pantomime, but a pantomime as
finely nuanced as it is discreet. He knows
everything, because he knows everybody, and
with a gesture, a glance, which no photograph
could register, though perceptible, a change of
tone pregnant with significance, but inimitable,
he has said it.

The recording angel must have at least
Edmond's omniscience, and most of his im-
partiality. Politics, religion, art, literature,
science, music, and the drama, have no secrets

68 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

from him. Revolutions affect him not ;
Governments succeed one another with dazzling
rapidity — he does not care. " His Excellency

MONSIEUR LE CONCIERGE.

the Ambassador of Muscovy and Madame la
Princesse de Strumpfelstiltzkine !" he announces,
with a roar in which there is a hint of joyous

ALL PARIS 69

patriotism, a suppressed National Anthem, as
the popular representative of the u allied
nation M enters the blazing room, beaming
with affability, his niece, that grandest of
grandes dames, upon his arm. " Monsieur le
President du Conseil et Madame et Mesde-
moiselles Potdevin \" Edmond's voice has be-
come official and stern. Traditionally, and on
principle, All Paris is against the Government ;
but the Prime Minister, whether Radical or
Socialist, stands for France, and Edmond takes
care that you shall feel it. This does not
prevent him from proclaiming with a bravura,
which a restraining reverence just prevents
from being theatrical, the great historical names
of the French aristocracy, among whom he has
many patrons — M Monsieur le Marquis et
Madame la Marquise Duguesclin-Carabas, Mon-
sieur le Baron de Fontenoy - Cantal - Roque-
fort !" And what a delicate promise of fun
in his voice when he announces " Monsieur
Galipaux !" the comic actor, who is shortly to
recite a monologue, and how unctuous and
benedictory he used to be at the approach of
the Papal Nuncio — that was before the Church
was disestablished — and with what proud con-
fidence he flourishes into the room a popular
General ! Nor does he fail to give due dis-

70 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

tinction to the illustrious representatives of art
and science, the academician, the professor of
the faculty, the surgeon d la mode, the latest
inventor. Each in his several way is welcomed
and warmed by the approving recognition of
Edmond. But whose is this unfamiliar figure,
who is this not exactly shy, somewhat awkward,
plain- visaged, but intellectual -looking person
without uniform or decoration ? Edmond* s
face has become a stone wall. He bends his
bewhiskered head to catch the name. Mr,
Brown. " Monsieur Bourn !" roars Edward,
without the smallest hesitation. Mr. Brown
is a man of many parts, and was a personal
friend of the late King of the Belgians, but he
does not belong to All Paris — at least, not yet.

Now, somewhere or other in Paris, Edmond
is a house-porter

All Paris, and this, perhaps, is its most dis-
tinguishing trait, is both exclusive and eclectic.
It reflects the national as well as the Parisian
spirit. It is a microcosm of France, and there-
fore of the civilized world ; for France is in the
van of civilization, notwithstanding many a
wayward impulse, many a false step ; and Paris,
in spite of limitations and defects, is still the
Ville Lumiere, a Beacon to Humanity, the
Capital of Progress. All Paris is exclusive

ALL PARIS 71

because it is an aristocracy — an aristocracy in
the true sense of the term, not of birth, but of
achievement. It is eclectic, because human
achievement knows no bounds, but is daily
widening its horizons, lengthening its perspec-
tives, heightening its skies ; but, though ex-
clusive, All Paris is not a charmed circle, a
temple of mysteries to which a shibboleth is
the only open - sesame, a club with committee
and rules of admission, a social University
setting examinations and granting degrees ; it
is as elastic as the morals of its weakest member,
and pliable as a cable with unfixed ends girdling
the earth. One may be above it or below it ;
one has to fulfil certain conditions to be of it.

To enumerate these conditions in detail would
require a volume by itself. Generally speaking,
it may be said that neither birth nor wealth
is sufficient alone to procure admission to All
Paris, nor is any one of the usually recognized
social disabilities, such as excessive moral or
physical ugliness, extreme poverty or low
origin, a necessary cause of exclusion. All
Paris has its prejudices, but they are not those
of society. Thus, the Duke who is of All Paris —
and there are respectable authentic Dukes of
whom this cannot be said — accepts the fellow-
ship in All Paris of the dressmaker, the jeweller,

72 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

the advocate, the actor, the actress, the artist,
the politician, the financier, the literary man,
the shady man, the shady woman, the inter-
national adventurer, the baker, the candlestick-
maker, and the thief, whom he would not intro-
duce into his private circle or his home, with
whom he may never be on speaking terms, but
who figure in the same All Paris as himself,
who are therefore, whether he likes to admit it
or not, of the same brand and kidney. For
this and other reasons All Paris cannot be
compared with either the four hundred of New
York or the smart set of London. It is superior
and inferior to both. Its exclusiveness is of
another kind. All Paris draws its vital juices
from every stratum of the city's population,
yet it absorbs only that which is congenial to
it, rejecting every element of nutrition which
is not first-class, of a particular quality. No
one can impose himself on All Paris, whose
taste is as capricious and as delicate as that of
a woman of fashion at the close of a season ;
but certain claims take precedence of others,
are unequivocal, a priori, do not, in the natural
order of things, give rise to opposition. Royal
Princes — on condition that they are not Bourbons
or Bonapartes. with pretensions to the throne —
Ambassadors, Cabinet Ministers, Academicians,

ALL PARIS 73

have, so to speak, the grand entrSe to All Paris,
a stall reserved for them at all first performances,
a legitimate place in the pageant. They may
scorn to take advantage of their opportunities,
in which case Paris will not run after them.
To this spirit of independence, coupled with
a loose comprehensiveness which includes
Bohemianism and cosmopolitanism, All Paris
owes much of its individual force, its vitality,
the breadth and continuity of its influence, its
charm and its colour. All Paris is a flower —
the supreme efflorescence of French life. As
with the flowers of our fields and gardens, it is
preoccupied in an eminent degree with the
perpetuation of its species, and All Paris, which,
to continue the floral simile, belongs to the
order of Composite, and has a hundred fleurons
to its crown, would die of inanition if its roots
were not firmly planted in Seine mud.

Like the flower, moreover, it has the sense
of pose. Its appeal is decorative and sensual.
There is no place in All Paris for those who
decline the satisfaction of publicity and ad-
vertisement, who spurn popular applause. For
this reason certain master-minds that have shed
glory upon the nation, certain august personages
who, by their pre-eminent social position and
family traditions, stand for all that is most

74 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

memorable in the history of France, have never
been of All Paris. They have been above it.
The First Empire was of the whole world, or
very nearly ; the Second Empire was essentially
that of All Paris. Therein lay some of the
difference between Napoleon the Great and
Napoleon the Little.

It is in the essence of All Paris to be spec-
tacular ; for this reason the theatre is the hub,
the magnetic centre, of All Paris — its sub-
conscience, its alter ego, the glass in which it
dresses itself. At a dinner given recently in
Paris by James Hazen Hyde, Sardou expressed
the belief that All Paris could be mustered
within the walls of a theatre. Hebrard, the
Temps editor, thought that the audience at
an important dress rehearsal expressed All
Paris better, perhaps, than any other Paris
agglomeration. It included those who form
part of All Paris by predestined right, the All
Paris of social position, and those whom All Paris
had captured or promoted or adopted ; those
born into All Paris ; those who had had All
Paris thrust upon them, and others who had
conquered All Paris by courage, assiduity, and
address.

The loadstone of Paris is its Parisianism. It
is this which attracts thousands of English and

ALL PARIS 75

American women yearly to the Rue de la
Paix, which supplies the inimitable chic and
cachet to the Parisian gown and the manner
of wearing it. Parisianism is an intellectual
grace as well, and not far removed from a moral
quality. It sparkles in the wit which has given
the French playwright the sceptre of the
European stage from Moliere to Meilhac ; it
shines in the logic and clearness and amenity
of style which make French writers unrivalled
in the art of lively narration ; it is in the sauces
of the French chef ; it is in the gaiety and
bonhomie and broad philosophy of life which
every true Parisian professes and practises ; it
is visible in the characteristic note of French
art, which is facility combined with strength.

Parisine, the essence of Parisianism, does
not bear transplantation. The dressmaker, the
cook, those two standard-bearers of Parisianism,
heraldic supporters of its escutcheon, promptly
lose their tour de main, the cunning of their
hand, if they settle in a foreign land. They
are fish out of water. The myriad influences of
their Parisian environment are missing, and
they starve for the lack of the mental and
moral food upon which they have been reared.
This has been the experience of all their English
and American patrons. During the five years

76 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

that Henri Rochefort spent in exile in London,
so fearful was he of losing or diminishing the
Parisianism of his style by any contact with
the English language, that the only English
word he would allow himself to use was the
monosyllable " home,,, which he would fling to
his English coachman when returning there.

All Paris is a constellation with its fixed suns,
its revolving planets, its comets, and its shoot-
ing-stars. Whistler was one of the typical
shooting-stars of All Paris ; Wilbur Wright was
another. For the residential foreigner to belong
to All Paris, it is essential, however, that he
should be in no way connected, except in an
official capacity, with his own colony. All Paris
opens its arms to cosmopolitanism, but colonial-
ism, even more than provincialism, is anathema.
For Paris is a jealous mistress, and eyes with
displeasure any patriotism other than her own.
But the foreigner may console himself with the
reflection that in no other capital in the world
does the metlque so quickly acquire " right of
city." The meteque, it must be explained — a
designation derived from the ancient Greek
word applied to foreigners in Athens — differs
from the rastaquouere by reason of his irre-
proachable respectability. All Paris has room
for both, but the undesirable and often

ALL PARIS 77

dangerous rastaquouere has been gradually
yielding his place to the mild and methodical
metlque. In every domain of All Paris the
foreigner, and particularly the American, is
to be found ; in the All Paris of Finance, which
governs in a large measure the All Paris of
Politics, he is specially influential. Nor is he
absent from the All Paris of Letters, as witness
the two American poets, Stuart Merrill and
Viele-Grifnn ; while in the All Paris of Art his
name is legion. In the All Paris of Delight
and the All Paris of Desolation the foreigner
likewise abounds.

All Paris has its virtues and its vices, its
religions and its scepticisms, its tragedies and
its comedies, its great and little sides ; but with
its priests and its profligates, its poets and its
Philistines, its delegates from every school of
thought and sphere of action and realm of
dream, its admission of them is not a submission
to them. In spite of its numerous divisions,
the countless facets to its surface, All Paris is
a composite, corporate whole — a Moral Being.

CHAPTER V
THE ODOURS OF PARIS

Capital cities have a different and distinctive
odour from that of provincial towns. Obviously,
the atmosphere of capitals is the more complex,
but is this a sufficient explanation ? Is it too
much to say that all provincial towns smell
alike ? There may be local peculiarities of a
secondary kind ; Marseilles has African and
Mediterranean exhalations which are lacking to
Chartres, but both have the provincial smell,
that special mustiness which is inseparable from
what the Germans call Kleinstaedtigkeit. One
faculty of this provincial odour is to deprive
the objects it envelops of the highest quality
otherwise proper to them. A picture, however
great a masterpiece it may be, never produces
its best impression in the odour of a provincial
museum. The noblest architecture loses in
dignity by reason of the provincial odour which
may hang about it or penetrate it. Is there
anything material in the air of provincial towns

78

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 79

by which this odour can be accounted for ? I
fancy not. It is in the walls and the pavements
and the shop-windows ; it destroys the bouquet
of a good cigar ; it is fatal to the aroma of
coffee and tea ; it lessens any of the attractions
which may reasonably be attributable to the
smell of prime meat and fresh vegetables ; it
is that which makes residence in the provinces
impossible to most of us, which positively drives
us back to the cities, even when our health
really demands rest and fresh air. Defying
analysis, who shall name it ? In all probability
it is the Odour of Ennui, for, admitting that
Sanctity has an odour (as is certainly the case),
why not Dnlness also ?

Thus, the Odour of Urbanity, which is that
of every capital city, worthy to be so called, is
recognizable by the absence from its com-
position of any traces of the Provincial Odour,
from which the Suburban Odour is, moreover,
quite distinct. Speaking in a general way, the
odours of Paris are urban in even a higher
degree than those of London, Berlin, or the
other capitals of Europe. To enumerate them
all would be difficult, but it is possible to give
a briefly-sketched-in account of what may be
termed the principal " odour-scheme.' '

On arriving in Paris, you notice at once an

80 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

odour of frying ; not such an odour as assails
the shrinking nostrils in the East End of
London, which comes from the cheap fried-fish
shops that abound there, but of delicate frying
of good, palatable food in fresh butter. Then
you remember that Paris is the culinary centre
of the modern world, a gastronomic sun whose
beneficent rays help to keep civilization alive.

This odour of frying, or friture, pervades the
entire city, but its quality is not everywhere
the same. In the so-called " populous " dis-
tricts, on the outskirts of the fortifications of
Paris, it degenerates into the inferior odeur de
graillon, a smell of burning grease, which issues
from the wayside gargotes, or suburban eating-
booths, in great gusts, borne along on clouds of
grey smoke, saturated with carbonized hog's
grease ; for here at every footstep something
is being fried in the open air which is both
common and unclean. Alphonse Daudet has
vividly described in Les Rois en Exit these
fritureries en plein vent — " open-air frying-shops,
surrounded by an acrid smell of burnt dripping,
with great flames rising rose-coloured in the
daylight, around which are actively engaged
cooks, dressed in white, behind piles of sugared
fritters." And his little exiled hero-Prince re-
joices " in the noise and the odour of the fair."

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 81

But the roya] mother faints into the arms of
her son's tutor. Her emotion was excusable,
for there are few things more repelling to a
sensitive, let alone royal, nose than this odeur
de graillon, this frizzle of democratic batter.
It smells of the people, and they of it ; it sounds
a savage but ironical blast of independence
and vitality, which is at once carnavalesque
and defiant like poverty. Of the vast dust-
heaps which loom large in the landscapes of these
shabby districts, it might be, and very likely
is, the quintessence. The rickety summer-
houses, and seesaws, and bowling-alleys, in their
faded and blistered green or wine red, every-
thing within range of sight or touch, reek of it,
or are greasy with its clinging emanations. It
hangs on the surface of the neighbouring Seine,
associated, at least by suggestion, with the
great patches of iridescent fat which dapple the
river. No other city in the world evolves just
this particular odour, which might be called
the Revolutionary Odour, from its suburban
slums.

But in the wealthier, central parts of Paris
how suave is the odour of frying, and, above
all, how truly French, how Parisian ! It is the
Epicurean Odour. Other cities may, if they
please, take precautions to suppress the smell of

6

82 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

cooking altogether, treating it as a public
nuisance, and by means of flues and ventilators
prevent it escaping into the house or the street.
Theirs is simply a less noble heritage of culinary
art. In France the smell of good cooking is
bound up with her living and historic glories.
Artistic ideals, zealously striven after, and never
abandoned, are revealed in this delicious odour
of frying. The learned in such matters may
object that the more penetrating smell of
onions (Parisian also), rising from the popular
ragout, or stew, bears with it a more humane
and consolatory message, especially to those
who are passing through an acute moral or
mental crisis, yet no one will contend that it
makes the same aesthetic appeal or has an equal
national significance. There is but one other
Parisian odour which can be said to rival that
of future in the same sphere. Less piquant
and more enveloping, the odour of the pot-au-
feu rises rapturously at all times from the
palaces of the rich and the cottages of the poor,
from the basements of the most aristocratic
restaurants and the humblest eating-houses,
or bouillons, as the latter are called, bouillon
being the soup made in the pot-au-feu. Readers
of Gustave Geoff roy's story VApprentie will
remember that touching passage describing

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THE ODOURS OF PARIS 83

the return of the erring daughter Celine to the
little tenement at Belleville, in the northern
workmen's quarter of Paris, where the widowed
mother and the loving young sister are waiting,
ready to welcome and forgive : " Toutes trois
s'attablerent autour du pot -au- feu qui em-
baumait la chambre M (All three women sat
down to the table from which the pot-au-feu was
spreading a balmy perfume throughout the
room). In truth, there is more than carrots
and leeks and lump of beef or aged hen in the
pot-au-feu ; there is a large slice of the heart
of France. What visions does not its fragrance
call up to every Frenchman's memory — of the
sparing mother catering for all ; of the clever
little housekeeper of a wife ; of that strenuous,
tender, sober, merry life which is the home-life
of the majority of the French people ! This
might, without exaggeration, be called the Odour
of Domestic Felicity. A scene arises in my mind,
so poignant in its tragic simplicity, that every
detail is still vivid, though it happened years
ago. Stretched upon her bed, carefully dressed
in her best clothes, peaceful, and of unaltered
beauty, as if sleeping, lies a young woman,
dead : she has poisoned herself. " What neat-
ness ! what order I" exclaims the concierge's
wife, who has begged me to accompany her

84

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

into the room. The little flat is bright and
clean as a new pin ; not a speck of dust upon
the well - polished sideboard ; the furniture
simple and cosy, without vulgarity or ostenta-
tion of superior taste ; in the armoire d glace,

IN ITS BIG RED RECEPTACLE, OH, MOST
pitiful! STANDS THE pot-au-feu.

that wardrobe with mirrored doors which is
the pride of every small Parisian housekeeper,
a quantity of spotless linen beautifully packed
away, with a modest sum of money, sufficient
for the funeral expenses, tucked in between the

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 85

piles of sheets and napkins. All alone the dead
girl lies, without a known friend or relation in
the world. Even her name is a mystery ; but
from a torn newspaper lying on the floor we
gather that someone who must have been very
dear, for whom she had been waiting on that
fatal day, had not come, and could never come
again. He, who had been, as in the Scotch
ballad, " all the world " to her, had met with
a fatal accident, had suddenly and tragically
vanished from her life forever. And in the
tiny kitchen, two yards long by a yard wide,
with the burnished copper saucepans hanging
on the wall in precise order of size, the white
enamelled spice-boxes on the shelves, and the
clean plates and glasses shining as only loving
hands can make them shine, on the polished
brass-fitted stove, in its big red earthenware
receptacle, oh, most pitiful ! stands the ftot-au-
feu, no longer fragrant, but, like the poor body,
cold, the surface of the bouillon covered with a
thin crust of congealed grease, as if Death had
touched it, too, with an icy finger !

The Odour of Majesty envelops the courtly
faubourgs of St. Germain and St. Honore, the
Place des Vosges (which some old-fashioned
people persist in calling the Place Royale),
portions of the Louvre, and, particularly, all

86 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

that district which extends from the Palace of
the Luxembourg to the Vendome Column,
taking in the filysee Palace, which is the French
" White House/' the Tuileries Gardens, and the
chief Embassies. It is a rich and velvety
odour (though the velvet sometimes degenerates
into plush). Green and gold — a faded apple
green on shot silk or morocco, and the tarnished
gold of the decorative gilding on the ironwork
of the old Imperial Palace gates — are among its
colour parallels, for all odours have their colour
parallels and their sound parallels, too. In
spite of the republican institutions which now
prevail, the Odour of Majesty is still more
noticeable in Paris than in any other European
capital. No doubt the explanation is that Paris
centralized the monarchical authority in Europe
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and commence-
ment of the nineteenth centuries, during the
reigns of Louis XIV. and Napoleon the Great,
as no other city has done since the days of
Imperial Rome. There is a pronounced Odour
of Aristocracy in some of the great houses in
England, which may still be discovered even in
mutilated London ; but it is by no means the
same as the Odour of Majesty, which is at once
more penetrating, impersonal, and imposing.
The wide stone courtyards of the Louvre are

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 87

haunted by the Odour of Majesty as by a ghost.
It enfolds Skeleton Versailles, with its moulder-
ing parks, like a shroud. At Fontainebleau
its spectral vibrations send a constant shiver
through the atmosphere and down your back.

There is something peculiar in the air of Paris
which keeps old things sweet. There is an
Old - World Odour in Paris such as is to be
found nowhere else, which has much of the
musky perfume of old gold. (It is commonly
observed that Gold has the power of retaining
scents.) It is an odour permeated by souvenirs,
mostly of Courts. It suggests the slumbering
aroma of faded rose-leaves in a pot-pourri, and
is as complex as the scent of a wardrobe which
has contained the silks and satins, the fans and
feathers and furbelows, of many generations
back, or of an old bonbonniere whose sweetmeats,
though almost fossilized, make much the same
seductive appeal as do the beaux-restes, the
lingering charms of some sugared dowager who
has been a toast in the early fifties. Old book-
shops, bric-a-brac shops, and even old clothes
shops, have in Paris an agreeable muskiness
which distinguishes them from those in London
and some other European cities, where the
mouldiness and decay, or merely the dilapida-
tion and neglect, into which antique merchandise

88 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

is generally allowed to fall, are signalized by a
combination of sickly odours of a most melan-
choly and depressing effect. It would seem
that the minute and cherishing care bestowed
upon their wares by the Paris antiquity-dealers
accounts for the dignified, museum-like perfume
which gives quality alike to themselves and
their goods, for which they are thus emboldened
to demand much higher prices than they could
otherwise. One likes to think that the ancient
objects themselves are conscious of this affection
displayed toward them, and that their delicate
and complex odours, harmonizing with their
surroundings, are an expression of their grati-
tude and contentment in at least as full a
measure as is the scent of a rose a love poem.
To deny these subtle interchanges altogether
would be to reject the evidence of one's senses.
Any book-lover familiar with both cities will
acknowledge that in Paris the books on the
quays are always warmer to the touch than their
less honoured brethren, ruthlessly heaped one
on top of the other in the so-called " rummage-
boxes " of the second-hand booksellers in
London. Their personality has been respected.
The dust of dead newspapers, of defunct
proclamations, of forgotten political programmes
and shattered political idols, emits a charac-

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 89

teristic odour, peculiar to that part of Paris in
the neighbourhood of the Rue du Croissant,
which for generations has been the home of
the popular press. It is suggestive of democ-
racy. Tobacco, garlic, and beer, enter largely
into its composition ; but, above all, the atmo-
sphere of this busy and, at night, blazing
neighbourhood is redolent of printers' ink and
of damp paper — of oceans of cheap ink and of
tons of cheap paper. It is the Odour of Free-
thought, or, in any case, of Free Expression.

Naturally enough, the Parliamentary Odour
is particularly strong in the lobbies of the
Chamber of Deputies ; it is acrid and unin-
spiring, without, I regret to say, any kind of
dignity. There is something in it of the dis-
quieting stuffiness typical of a French notary's
office, and of the bumptious insipidity peculiar
to the inside of Ministerial buildings. A sul-
phurous fogginess is never wholly absent from
these melancholy stone - flagged courts and
corridors, the largest of which is aptly named
the Salle des Pas - Perdus, the Hall of the
Wasted Footsteps, forming the antechamber
to the Salle des Phrases-Perdues, or Hall of
Wasted Words. For the French Chamber is a
temple of eloquence, and its lobby, where the
deputies receive their electors, the sacrificial

go SENSATIONS OF PARIS

chamber attached to the temple, in which die,
sooner or later, the hopes and ambitions of
those who put their trust in words. The whole
place reeks of stale rhetoric, moribund con-
victions, and corrupted souls. The Senate, on
the contrary, which is housed in the restored
portion of the ancient palace of Marie de
Medicis, now called the Palais du Luxem-
bourg, may boast of a predominating odour
which only slightly differs from that of the
neighbouring Institute ; for it is in the main
academic, it has the professorial snuffiness
which we shall find again at the Sorbonne and
in the lecture-halls of the various University
faculties. The Senate belongs by its odour, not
less than by its situation, to the Latin Quarter.
This is particularly true to-day ; for, though there
are surviving vestiges in its mural paintings
and upholstery of former royal and imperial
splendour, the Senate has the frigid solemnity of
an assembly of sages, of Conscript Fathers, but
none of the theatrical magnificence which dis-
tinguished it when it was a House of Peers. Its
debates are as tranquil and uneventful as those
of a scientific congress. The Academic and the
Ecclesiastical Odours are distinct but similar.
The Odour of Sanctity, which differs entirely
from both, has the same vibrations, on the

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 91

sound parallel, as of bell-ringing, quiet prayer,
and psalmody, and, on the colour parallel,
of old stone and of ancient painted glass.
Nowhere is the Odour of Sanctity more con-
centrated than in the ancient Gothic churches
of Paris. Not even in Rouen is it so pure and
undefiled, for there the Provincial Odour inter-
feres. It is the very breath of Notre Dame,
of St. Germain FAuxerrois, of St. Germain-des-
Pr6s, of St. Gervais, of St. Severin, of St.
fitienne-du-Mont. But in the churches of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as
St. Sulpice, Notre Dame des Blancs-Manteaux,
the Madeleine, and St. Augustin, where Jesuitical
and congregational influences are noticeable, it
yields to an inferior Ecclesiastical Odour, which,
if it were not for occasional whiffs of incense,
would be indistinguishable from the Academic
Odour of the republican and, in a general way,
anticlerical University of Paris. The rich,
warm, mellow, medieval odours which con-
tribute so much to the unique charm of Oxford
and Cambridge, and which, though ol dim
monastic origin, are to-day Academic Odours,
if ever there were any, are absent from the
buildings of the University of Paris, in spite
of its being the oldest scholastic foundation in
Europe. The Sorbonne, with the exception of

92 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

its seventeenth-century chapel, has the same
odour of new stone, of fresh paint, unseasoned
wood, and yesterday's varnish, as the modern
portions of the £cole de Droit and the Iicole
de Medecine. An Academic Odour is there,
but it is somewhat harsh, with a note of cold
formality. The bumptious insipidity, already
referred to as typifying the odour of Govern-
ment offices in France, is not altogether foreign
to it, a circumstance readily explained by the
fact that, the University of Paris being subject
to the Minister of Public Instruction, its Pro-
fessors are State officials. The human element
■ — the Alma Mater — is entirely absent, if ex-
ception be made of a strong redolence of
femininity, of the scents of smart society trace-
able to the large number of charming Pari-
siennes who frequent the lecture-halls of the
Literary Faculty, investing their approaches
with the same provocative perfumes as the
foyer of the Comedie Francaise on the afternoon
of a dress rehearsal. This lack of humanity is
what repels in the predominating odour of
those eighteenth - century churches in Paris
which were, and still are, the centres of dogmatic
teaching. Built after the Reformation, their
atmosphere has been one of theological dis-
putation rather than of the pure ethical

THE ODOURS OF PARIS 93

evangelism which spread the warm wings of
faith over the huddling multitudes in earlier
ages, when there were fewer heretics to de-
nounce. In the Ecclesiastical Odours, solemn
and sedate, which have come down to us from
the later times, when Mother Church had
become Master Church, there are vibrations
which, as they strike upon our olfactory nerves,
raise up memories of Inquisitional cruelty, of a
stern semi-military discipline, of ruthless dog-
matic feuds.

Balzac, in Le Pere Goriot, has described the
Odeur de Pension (the Boarding-house Odour),
• • which strikes cold, is damp to the nose, and
suggests mouldiness and rancidness.' ' It " ex-
plained and implied the entire person " of
the proprietress of the Maison Vauquer. It
still dominates the atmosphere of all those
retired and essentially middle - class streets
(Paris, being a fortified city, has no suburbs in
the English sense), which spread out like the
spokes of a cart-wheel from the cosmopolitan
hub. This is the Odour of Middle-class Paris,
the real Paris of the Parisians, of which the mere
passer-through knows little, though to the foreign
resident it soon becomes familiar enough, " for
it is here that old age peters out and joyous
youth is forced to work, for there is in every one

94

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

of such streets a boarding-house and a school.' '
Built of stone, on freehold land, Paris changes
very slowly. The atmosphere of the middle-
class Paris of to-day is at least half a century
old ; it belongs to the period of Louis Philippe,
and has the same bourgeois qualities and defects
for which that reign was noted — a low standard
of artistic ideals, an easy-going contentment
with the a fteu-pres, or half -achievement. A
gradual improvement is, however, taking place ;
the odours of the middle-class streets are losing
some of the depressing stuffiness, the renferme,
to use the French expression, which " explained
and implied " the routine-shaped lives of their
inhabitants three generations ago. At the end
of the eighteenth century the odours of Paris
were like those of Pekin to-day. The chief
lesson of history is that the trend of human life
is constantly towards higher things.

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CHAPTER VI

ON THE DECAY OF FRENCH MANNERS

According to the late Mr. F. Trollope (a brother
of the novelist, who was familiar with the
Continental society of half a century ago), the
last Frenchman to retain, in the perfection of
its traditions, la grande manilre was Chateau-
briand, the author, be it borne in mind, of
Le Genie du Christianisme. That this com-
plex personage, who had shown himself in
so many respects an innovator, and even,
politically speaking, an iconoclast, should have
displayed an unswerving loyalty to forms
which to a modern mind might seem to matter
as little as, or less than, any others, is attribu-
table, doubtless, to his romanticism. An in-
eradicable pride of race was one of the most
significant elements in the romanticism of this
great writer, the founder, indeed, of the
Romantic School, the literary father of Victor
Hugo ; on it was based his passion for politeness,
and out of this in turn grew in a great measure

95

96 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

his admiration for Christianity and his attitude
of veneration towards the Catholic Church,
which he upheld and defended, and whose
tenets he accepted in a spirit of chivalry which
was the very essence of good breeding. Chateau-
briand would have condemned the conduct of
the French Government of to-day towards the
Catholic Church as, above all things, un-
gentlemanly, and therein it might have been
difficult to gainsay him. Good manners are
impossible without sincere religion in one form
or another, and the converse is also true. The
decay of French manners — which is, alas ! a
real thing* — has been contemporary with the
gradual disappearance or decline of most of
the finer artistic instincts by which the life of
the French people was formerly inspired.

This is a world-wide disaster. Be it under-
stood, however, that it is not sought here to
establish invidious comparisons. It is not con-
tended that, while French manners have de-
teriorated, English manners have improved;
but France has hitherto been the fount of polite-
ness, from whose sparkling sources the rest of
the civilized world has drawn its supply. That
this fount should be running dry is as terrible
a catastrophe as was the decay of Greek art,
with the oblivion which overtook its principles

THE DECAY OF FRENCH MANNERS 97

and teachings. In a few years it is more than
likely that Europe will no longer possess any
but defunct models of savoir-vivre, dilapidated
antiques without arms or legs.

Politeness, to which the French nation has
given so subtle and suave a countenance,
probably originated in a sense of fear. To
study fear in its highest expression we must go
to the insect world. No living thing will make
way for you with greater conviction or empresse-
ment than the common insect of our fields and
roads, which through countless aeons of fear
has gradually acquired an elaborate coat of
armour, a number of eyes in its back, a habit
of only going out at night, and a thousand legs
to run away with. Such a creature is wonder-
fully adapted by Nature for the cheaper
courtesies of life. It could hardly ever make
a gaffe. In pre-Raphaelite countries, such as
Germany and in certain States of America,
politeness is, though barbaric, of a more cere-
monious description than among better-bred and
better-fed people. A more or less vague feeling
of apprehension governs it ; and even in France
to-day the cheerful " good-morning " which the
French peasant as a rule gives you is often
distinctly reassuring when you meet him at
some lonely corner of a wood. The practice of

7

98 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

handshaking is traced by certain authorities to
a desire common to the parties concerned to
show that neither is carrying a weapon. But
these origins are of small import. The art of
politeness, invented and brought to its apogee
of completeness by the French, belongs to quite
a different sphere of ideas. Politeness, instead
of being a homage to the strong, had developed
from the days of chivalry, when its chief mission
was to protect the weak, into a perfect com-
pendium of the art of living based upon un-
restrained generosity both of thought and action.
Perfect politeness is perfect liberality. A
liberal education, the liberal arts, are identical
with a polite education, the polite arts ! And
any decay in national politeness cannot fail to
react to a most alarming degree upon the
intellect and character of the civilized world at
large. Brief reflection aided by the most super-
ficial examination of the main facts in the history
of man's development will amply suffice to
show that literary and artistic decadence has
ever been accompanied by a dulling of the
instinct of liberality : the cheap church has
taken the place of the cathedral built at an
inestimable expense of labour and devotion,
and similar mental and moral degeneracy has
marked the invasion of the cheap house, the

THE DECAY OF FRENCH MANNERS 99

cheap book, the cheap objet d'art, the cheap
everything. All truly artistic effort is a labour
of love, and love never counts the cost. Art
has no price, and makes none. A perfect act
of politeness ever involves in one respect or
another an act of self-abnegation. There is the
famous example of Lord Stair and Louis XIV.,
when his lordship, being bidden by the King
to precede him into one of the royal carriages,
immediately complied. The politeness was
equal on both sides. The French Sovereign
gave proof of unrestrained liberality worthy of
so magnanimous a monarch by abandoning his
prerogative of precedence in his own dominions
to the Scotch Viscount. The English Am-
bassador returned the compliment by yielding
immediate obedience to the behest of a King
who was not his master. Neither sacrifice was
outdone by the other. In another and even
more typical instance the Due de Richelieu,
having called upon the English Ambassador,
courteously forbade the latter to see him to his
carriage. " I shall disobey your orders, Mon-
seigneur," was the Ambassador's reply. " In
that case/' said the Due with a smile, " I shall
imprison you ; " and, slipping through the door,
he deftly locked it behind him. But the English
Ambassador was equal to the occasion. He

ioo SENSATIONS OF PARIS

leapt from the second-floor window of his apart-
ment on to the stones below, and, though he
broke his leg in so doing, he was bowing at the
door when the Due de Richelieu, delighted to
have been so elegantly outwitted, entered his
carosse. It were wrong to laugh. That was
the grande maniere.

The decay of politeness in France may be
variously traced to the coarsening and levelling
effects of obligatory military service; to the
growth of democratic ideas ; to the spirit of
rapacity, which is masked under the word
egalite ; to the absence of a Court ; to political
discontent ; to financial embarrassment ; to many
causes, the analysis of which, however, possesses
but little interest. That the French are not
as polite and, concomitantly, not as cheerful as
they were is obvious to even a week-end
tripper ; for within the memory of man quite
the majority of the Parisians, even of the lower
middle class, were examples of civilized and
pleasant courtesy to their social peers across
the Channel. Did not Heinrich Heine say (who,
however, was not an altogether reliable judge
in such matters) that ladies of the Paris Central
Markets talked like Duchesses ? To-day the
elaborate phraseology of the French colloquial
tongue is giving place to slang, to idioms

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THE DECAY OF FRENCH MANNERS 101

borrowed from English, the idioms which English
can best afford to lose, to sporting abbrevia-
tions. The very grammar is being slowly but
surely uprooted ; and with the stately old
language is disappearing the environment which
was appropriate to it. The cafe* ou Von cause
has yielded up its life to the noisy beerhouse.
Art and literature are both deeply affected by
the decay of manners in France. The vulgar
automobile, whose inconsiderate movements
are everywhere the epitome of bad manners, is
acknowledged to be a chief cause of the poverty
which has befallen both artists and men of
letters. The devotees of the new sport have
neither money to buy pictures nor time to read
books.

CHAPTER VII

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED

" Want a guide, sir ? Want a guide ?" Then
various brief, whispered hints as to the multi-
coloured seductions of Paris, especially by night.
Mr. Bob Smith, the guide, is a tall shabby man
with near eyes and red bottle nose, a half-effaced
Anglo-Saxon call-back in the watery blue stare
and horsey cut of cheek and chin, but a general
configuration forced by impecuniosity into a
Continental and cosmopolitan mould. He will
confide to you, should you ever give him the
chance of five minutes' conversation, that,
though he " has come down a bit in the world,"
he once had the honour of holding Her Majesty's
commission. In spite of his looks, he is neither
dangerous nor dishonest, merely incompetent
and alcoholic. His knowledge of French is
limited ; indeed, he can do little more than
conduct his clients from one American bar to
another, and purchase their entrance tickets to
the Moulin Rouge and similar haunts of dissipa-

102

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED 103

tion. His price, which starts at twenty francs,
is reducible to two, with a couple of whiskies
thrown in to clinch the bargain. Cutting the
forlorn figure that he does, his clients are limited
to the circle of Anglo-Saxons newly arrived
from London or New York who are hopelessly
" abroad " morally and mentally, speechless in
every sense, tongue-tied by total ignorance of
the native lingo, and the absorption of innumer-
able cocktails to drive away despair. Let them
beware of his friend and colleague Andrews, to
whom he will seek to introduce them. Andrews
is even redder and more blear-eyed than himself,
with a bigger nasal development. Andrews's
manner, moreover, is more independent than
Mr. Bob Smith's ; without being intentionally
insolent, it is aggressively condescending, for
Andrews has a wife who supports him, so he
can afford to put on airs. A black eye — for his
wife also beats him — will occasionally detract
from the aristocratic impression ; but Andrews
has some claim to swagger, his father having
carried the Diplomatic Valise as a Queen's Mes-
senger, while his grandfather was a British Ad-
miral— facts, however, which do not hinder him,
when times are very bad, or his wife has turned
him into the street, from hawking British kippers
in places where his compatriots foregather. For

104 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Madame Andrews is a blanchisseuse, a hard-
working Frenchwoman with the biceps of a
bargee, quick with a flat-iron, and quicker still
of temper and repartee. Wherever Bob Smith
takes his Anglo-Saxon customers, Andrews, by
a miraculous coincidence, will be found. It is
impossible to shake him off. He is constantly
saying to Mr. Bob and his friends, " Now it's
my turn," but he never really pays for any-
thing, and so shares gratuitously in all their
monotonous enjoyments. It is one of the
" humours " of French official organization that
these two loafers actually pay a tax to the
Government of five francs (four shillings) a year
for the privilege of being Paris guides. So they
are in the strictest sense professionals, and carry
about with them an inscribed brass medal to
prove it.

In the same professional capacity, on as low,
and perhaps even a lower moral level, is that
sharp-looking Levantine, with beady brown
eyes and thick nose drooping over a protruding
blue chin, who speaks all languages with the
painful precision, the deliberate inaccuracy, of
the polyglot. He drives a harder bargain than
Mr. Bob Smith or Mr. Andrews, and, indeed, never
for one moment ceases to bargain. You must
have seen him before, if you have been about

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED 105

at all, selling carpets in
Bombay ; post-cards out-
side the cafes in Algiers,
when he wore a fez ; pea-
nuts and sporting tips at
Trouville; Greek slippers
at Patras ; oranges at Con-
stantinople. He, too,
specializes in the night
attractions of the M gay
city/' The Anglo-Saxon
would be wise not to trust
him too far. In that big
hotel at whose portals he
lurks there are stacks of
unclaimed luggage belong-
ing to visitors who appar-
ently went out in the
evening to take the air,
but who have never re-
turned, whose disappear-
ance is a mystery which
even the Morgue has not
cleared up. There may
be one or two of these
mysteries upon which the HE> T00' specializes

. r IN THE NIGHT ATTRAC-

droopmg-nosed Levantine
might be able to throw

TIONS OF THE
CITY."

GAY

io6 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

some light if he would, but there are chances that
he will keep his information to himself, and not
even communicate it to his friends the police,
with whom he passes, nevertheless, for being
on confidential terms. Three types of the
" rogue u guide, in plain clothes.

Under the wing of the uniformed guide,
attached to one of the tourist agencies, you
may escape from the dreary round of the sham
" gay Paree," with its meretricious amusements
invented for the satisfaction of the foreigner,
and bearing no relation whatever to the native
life of Paris, and visit with profit sights worth
seeing ; for at least George has a nodding ac-
quaintance with the principal museums and
their most notable treasures. He can explain
the Obelisk and the Eiffel Tower and the Hotel
des Invalides. His information is often in-
accurate, but it has the merit of being brief.
It is unnecessary that it should be more accurate
or lengthier than it is, for though he speaks
plainly (with a German accent) and in a loud
voice — the use of the megaphone is, happily,
forbidden — his listeners pay him as a rule but
scant attention, being, like most English people
in unusual surroundings, mainly preoccupied
with the feeling that they are being stared at by
strangers to whose uncalled-for interest in them

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED 107

they must display resentment. It is difficult
to arouse them from their state of savage self-
consciousness, though exception must be made
for the one unfailing and untiring questioner,
always an Englishman of the bland and blond
type, who takes an interest in the guide, treats
him with exaggerated attention, remarks in a
loud aside to his wife that "he is an extra-
ordinarily well-informed chap/1 is half inclined
to call him " sir," to invite him to dinner, to
bid him " look them up " when he comes to
London, and all this in honour of the Entente
Cordiale (having failed, innocent Britisher, to
discover that the guide is a Swiss) — all things
which strike confusion and alarm into the breast
of the guide, and cause him to muddle his dates.
The tourist agency guide takes his customers
round the city in bands, and by daytime in
huge chars-a-bancs, or, to use the more correct
French expression, tapissi&res ; of recent date
big motor-cars have been introduced. " Voila
les Cooks !" exclaims the Parisian, as he watches
the procession passing rapidly along the boule-
vards. He envies their well-fitting tweed
clothes, thinks the cloth caps which they mostly
wear, which he calls " jockey " caps, a little
disrespectful to the " city of light," disapproves
of their briar pipes, and wonders why they look

io8

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED 109

so solemn and so sad. Sometimes the wild
scheme enters his head to accompany them,
and then he is amazed at, and expresses childish
pleasure with, all he hears and sees, and next
day writes a witty letter to the Figaro to explain
that, though an old Parisian born and bred,
he had never seen Paris, knew nothing of Paris,
until he became a " Cook " !

In three rooms on the burning slope of Mont-
martre there dwells a grey-haired man, with thin
features, soft spectacled eyes, a smile which
always seems to be fading away, but never does,
a chronic cough, and long, delicate, blue- veined
hands with red knuckles. Graduate of an
ancient University, the passion for research and
an instinctive turn for teaching have kept him
poor. An American of Irish name and Irish
extraction, he is at home anywhere, except per-
haps in Ireland, but nowhere so completely at
home as in Paris. Paris is the object of his
unceasing and unyielding admiration and affec-
tion. Paris is his idol, his church. He loves
her as a mistress, and obeys her as a slave. He
is the passionate shepherd of all the intellectual
and artistic glories which make up her blazing
train as she steps coquettishly through the days
and the nights. Her faults fascinate him equally
with her perfections. You must never say a

no

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

word against Paris to Mr. O'Shaughnessy, or his
eyes will glitter, his fingers will twitch nervously,

a spasm of pain
will shadow his lips,
and he will never
speak to you again !
He will take it as a
personal insult. He
loves Paris with the
whole and unquail-
ing love which only
men who are essen-
tially women's men
give to women ; the
only love which
women — or at least
French women —
really want and are
grateful for. Her
beauty, whenever
he contemplates it
— and he is ever
contemplating it —
intoxicates him,
and he adores every
atom of her, just as
she is, to the very rouge upon her cheeks and the
dye on her hair. She is his one and only love.

PARIS IS HIS IDOL.

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED in

For the sake of Paris he has remained a bachelor ;
for the sake of Paris he undertakes translations
and teaching ; for the sake of Paris he maintains
himself on a superb level of indifference to the
commercial advantages of any kind of a career.
"Oh no, that is too much; you would dis-
oblige me if you were to pay more than so
much/' is a favourite phrase with him if he
thinks that he is being remunerated for his work
at a higher rate than it merits. He is the most
disinterested and the least self-indulgent of men
apart from his hobby — Paris. Now, there is
no city in the world where the thirst for guidance
is so intense as in Paris, and no foreigner who
develops that thirst more acutely than the
American. He wants to probe to the depths, to
see and touch all that he has ever heard or read
of as being worth the seeing and touching, to
be shown Old Paris, to dine at restaurants which
have literary or historic interest, to visit the
little gargote where Thackeray, when an art
student, ate his beefsteak, the street close by
where Trilby lived, the hotel, not a stoneVthrow
away, where Paul Jones died, the Louis Quinze
mansion in the Rue de Braque where the Mar-
quis de Vergennes drew up the preliminaries to
the treaty of peace between America and Eng-
land after the War of Independence. Discreet

ii2 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

questioning at certain American bookshops will
reveal to this American the personality and the
address of Mr. O'Shaughnessy, who will for a
modest remuneration act as his guide. With
the money thus earned Mr. O'Shaughnessy
will purchase some rare book or engraving
connected with Paris, some long-sought-for
document to be utilized in the preparation of his
erudite work, " The Irish Americans in the
French Revolution " — so many offerings which
he places upon the altar of his divinity, Paris.

The woman guide. Neither quite young nor
quite plain.

A bachelor woman of tireless energy, with a
long stride in her walk which repeats itself in her
voice. She lives rent-free in one room in an
hotel close to the boulevards. Her existence is
purely one of commission. Whatever she does
brings her in at least ten per cent. ; at the
restaurants, where she takes her hurried meals,
she obtains a reduction of ten per cent. The
theatre managers love her, and give her free
tickets, which she sells for half-price at the little
tobacco shop in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin.
Her clothes cost her nothing. Publishers in-
undate her with books. Her collection of pic-
tures and other works of art is worth a small
fortune. She knows Paris as only a woman can

PERSONALLY CONDUCTED 113

HER CLOTHES COST HER NOTHIKG.

H4 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

know it, as only a woman wants to know it.
She is rapidly becoming rich, for the smart
American women whom she chaperones and
guides pay her handsomely. She takes them
to the races, and makes money there, too ; for
she bets brilliantly. She has no unnecessary
prejudices, but all the prejudices that are
necessary she cherishes, and displays to their
fullest advantage. She knows nothing that she
cannot use. She is engaged to be married, and
has been so for years ; but nobody knows to
whom, for that is her secret, and perhaps by
now she herself has forgotten. She is too hard-
working to be elegant, but is careful of her
person in the interests of the commission busi-
ness. Miss Grace Green from Chicago can be
heard of at the offices of the tourist agencies,
at the women's clubs, at the American churches.
Every Sunday she dines in the palatial flat of
an American dentist whose wife is her dearest
friend. Soon she will give up being a guide, to
plunge into some even more profitable and un-
scrupulous occupation, such as canvassing for
advertisements or writing plays. Or perhaps —
for to her energy and spirit of enterprise there
are no limits — she may become an air-woman,
and break her neck.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS

In no city in the world is there a greater sense
of movement than in Paris. The masses which
London sets in movement are more ponderous ;
there is more " hustle " in New "York ; but the
impression of movement, intricate to the point
of entanglement, animated, gesticulatory, and
almost frenzied, is nowhere more intense than
in Paris. For this, of course, the French char-
acter is responsible. The Parisian is never still
for a moment at any hour of the day. He may
remain, and every often does, seated for long
spells in a cafe, apparently doing nothing ; but
during the whole time his jaws and tongue, his
eyebrows and his eyes, his arms, hands, and
fingers, will be working furiously, and so, too,
will his brain. Everybody around him will be
equally on the move. The cafe waiters are
serving bocks on the run. Their endurance is
amazing, unparalleled. They keep up a con-
stant sprint from one end of the establishment

115

n6 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

to the other, without apparently tiring or losing
their patience, or, what is quite as wonderful,
their memory, which remains to the end phe-
nomenally accurate as to the minutest details
of the orders which they have received. The
messenger, or chasseur, who is at the service of
the customers, never dreams of walking. His
favourite method of progression is a kind of
long-flying hop, varied with leaps and skips,
except when he is provided with a bicycle ; and
then he shoots and winds his way at headlong
speed through the complicated traffic of the
streets, risking his life at every corner, for no-
where is the danger of being run over greater
than it is in Paris. He earns nothing in addi-
tion to his ordinary fee by taking these shocking
chances. But it is in his Parisian blood, and he
cannot help it. The Frenchman has always
been the pioneer of speed. For many years,
and until quite recently (perhaps it is so still),
it was a French railway that held the world's
record for the fastest train. This was the mail
express between Paris and Calais. The French-
man cared nothing for sport until the bicycle
was invented, and then he showed the world
how to ride to death on it ; and it was his passion
for speed which called the automobile into being.
The furia francesca is as visible to-day in the

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 117

charge of an u autobus " along the Boulevard
Montmartre as in its historical application to
the French soldier's onslaught at the Battle
of Pavia. The French tempo marks with its
demon rage the wave of the conductor's baton
at musical entertainments, the waltzing at
public balls, the debates in Parliament, and,
generally speaking, every public and particular
function common to humanity, from the use of
the knife and fork to falling in love.

This feverish vivacity is the first thing that
strikes the foreigner on arriving in Paris. He
is conscious at once of an atmosphere of turmoil.
The porters on the railway platform are around
him like angry bees, or, in spite of any effort to
attract their attention, they neglect him for
the sake of endless disputes with one another
about matters into which it is hopeless to in-
quire. Curiosity would even be resented. It
is, alas ! too often a case of cherchez la femme.
But once you have induced the porter to cease
his private and, at the same time, too public
quarrel and take your bag, and you have noticed
how the solemn and slow-moving Anglo-Saxons,
who have been your fellow-travellers, have
suddenly been infected by the Parisian spirit of
bustle, how promptly they have adopted the
same tempo, pushing, clamouring, and pro-

n8 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

testing, seeking even to invent on the spur of the
moment a language of gesticulation in response
to a language wholly or mainly unknown to
them, but to all appearances chiefly gesticula-
tory, you will find yourself and your baggage
in the hands of the Paris cabman, who is one of
the princes or leading spirits of the city's move-
ment. This is true still, although the advent
of the motor-car has threatened the Paris cab-
man's throne without having overturned it, as
is the case with the London cabman. The Paris
cabman is still a potentate, a feudal despot,
monarch of all he surveys, wielding his untiring
whip as if it were a royal sceptre — the most
arrogant, proud, cruel, godless, feckless, san-
guinary tyrant that Christendom and modern
civilization have suffered to survive. Of all
men in the world, it is he who gives and claims
the minimum of sympathy. If it were so to
happen that to-morrow all the Paris cabmen
were to find themselves on the brink of starva-
tion, not one little finger would be raised
throughout the entire metropolis to save or
succour them. In London, on the contrary,
the cabman, who has always been a respected
institution, has found himself raised to the
dignity of a national martyr, since the introduc-
tion of the motor-car seemed destined to deprive

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 119

him of his livelihood. Paris would never have
subscribed eight thousand pounds, as London
did, or even ten cents, to rescue her cabmen
from any fate, however horrible. She hates
them too much, and she knows how richly and,
in a measure, deservedly that hatred is returned.
That this should be so is due in a large measure
to the fact that the French are the most belli-
cose race on earth. The peculiarity was noticed
some centuries ago by no less a personage than
Julius Caesar, and the Gauls have since amply
maintained their reputation for internecine
quarrelling. Among Anglo-Saxons there is a
general and instinctive desire to do business on
the basis of an entente cor Male. In Paris the
hailing of a cabman is looked on by both parties
to the transaction as an implied declaration of
war. The cabman takes your measure, and
you take his number (if you are wise) . At once
he will give you reason to remark that he has
a rooted and premeditated objection to drive
you where you wish to go. Perhaps he prefers
the Opera quarter because it is central, or,
should the weather be fine, his heart is probably
set upon driving in the Bois, while you may
have business at the Bourse. He explains his
views on the subject selfishly and rudely. A
foreigner alighted recently from the Calais train

120 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

at the Northern Railway station in Paris, and
ordered a typical Parisian cabman, bloated,
pale, and absinth-soaked, to drive him to the
Rue Blomet, which is a street in the relatively
distant Vaugirard quarter. " Peut on habiter
la Rue Blomet ?" (Is it possible to inhabit the
Rue Blomet ?) exclaimed the ragged ruffian on
an epigrammatic note of disdain which would
have done honour to Beau Brummell. But it
is when the Paris cabman has once started on
his " course " — a warpath in the strict sense of
the term — that he proves to what a limitless
extent he is the enemy of mankind. His hatred
of the bourgeois — the " man in the street " — in
spite of, and indeed because of, his being a
potential client, is expressed at every yard.
He constantly tries to run him down, which
makes strangers to Paris accuse the Paris cab-
man of driving badly, while in point of fact he
is not driving at all, but playing with miraculous
skill a game of his own, which suggests cannon
billiards in the hands of a world's champion.
But it is not with the public alone that he is at
war. On all other cabmen whose path he crosses,
on omnibus drivers, motor-car men, bicyclists,
private coachmen, costermongers with barrows,
and (sotto voce) the police, he heaps deadly
insults, the least outrageous of which are

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 121

"Ours!" (Bear!) and " Fourneau !" (Oven!),
the latter containing a subtle double meaning,
intelligible only to those who have Paris argot,
or slang, at their finger-ends, and too long to
explain. The cabman's wild career through the
streets, the constant waving and slashing of his
pitiless whip, his madcap hurtlements and col-
lisions, the frenzied gesticulations which he
exchanges with his " fare," the panic-stricken
flight of the agonized women whose lives he
has endangered, the ugly rushes which the
public occasionally make at him with a view to
lynching him, the sprawlings and fallings of his
maddened, hysterical, starving horse, con-
tribute as much as anything to the spasmodic
intensity, the electric blue-fire diablerie, which
are characteristic of the general movement of
Paris.

All that can be said in mitigation of the Paris
cabman's methods is that " he has them in the
blood." Every Parisian (and the cabman is no
exception) has the soul of a dictator and the
spirit of an artist. To exercise autocratic
power, and failing this to enjoy the maximum
of personal freedom from all restraint, moral or
social, is the goal at which he is ever aiming,
openly or secretly. Watch a Paris cabman,
for instance, on a wet day, or on some festival

122 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

occasion, such as the New Year, when there is
a big demand for his services. With what
haughty disdain does he drive along the streets,
deaf to every appeal, refusing every fare, re-
joicing in the discomfort and inconvenience he
is causing, triumphant in the thought that at
last he has the bourgeois at his feet, that the
clientele which he detests and which detests
him is now a humiliated, bemuddled, or be-
draggled mob of supplicants waiting on his will,
whom he can enrage to boiling-point with his
sneers and his silence, or lash with his sarcasms
as cruelly as he beats his horse. Cheerfully
does he sacrifice half a day's earnings to the
enjoyment of this exquisite revenge, for at
least he can say to his hungry wife and children,
when he gets home, " J'ai v6cu." They may
not have dined, but he has lived. It is because
the Parisian recognizes in himself a certain com-
munity of sentiment with the cabman in this
attitude toward life that he tolerates him,
though he does not forgive him. The Imperial,
the Napoleonic pose (and no one can assume it
with more superb arrogance than the cabman
when he pleases) is ever dear to him, and the
historic phrase, " Qu'importent de vagues hu-
manites pourvu que le geste soit beau I" (What
does the fate of vague human beings matter, so

<

W
Z

o
fe o

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 123

long as one's gesture is beautiful !), is among
his treasured maxims.

The motor-car driver, if less of an artist than
the cabman, is a man of science, with the added
dignity and trustworthiness derived from a
superior education, and from a sense of belong-
ing to the inscrutable future ; while the cab-
man confessedly belongs to the past, and has,
indeed, always placed his political influence,
which is considerable, at the service of reac-
tionary movements. The last great conspiracy
in France, that of General Boulanger, by which
the Republican regime came within an inch of
being overthrown, had no more enthusiastic
backers than the Paris cabmen. The Paris
chauffeur is the best in Europe, and perhaps in
the world ; and though he seldom respects the
limit of speed imposed by the police regulations,
it is not often that a serious accident can be
attributed to his negligence or incapacity.
This excellent reputation he shares with the
omnibus drivers and the chauffeurs, or M watt-
men,' ' as they are called (for an unknown reason),
of the electric tramways — all sober and experi-
enced men. The omnibus and the tramway
systems, protected by strict monopolies, organ-
ized with meticulous method, conducted by
uniformed officials who bully the public, are

124 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

an exact reflection of Parisian middle-class life.
The innate conservatism of this monopoly -
loving country has prevented both omnibus
and tramway from moving with the times, and
Paris, of all the great capitals of the world, is
unique in this respect — that she still possesses
a one-horse tramway, the strange old-fashioned
thing, a relic of the Second Empire, which runs
between St. Sulpice and Auteuil, drawn by a
phantom-like white horse, which, in spite of
its phenomenal age and extraordinary thinness,
gallops along with uncanny speed. The move-
ment on the Paris boulevards derives much of
its picturesqueness from the ponderous omnibus
plunging and thundering along with its varie-
gated load of human beings, a perambulating
parterre of flowers in leafy June, a black and
hearse-like object, with its compact hooding of
streaming umbrellas, in cheerless winter. The
motor-cars flashing in swiftest procession along
a central passage specially reserved for them ;
the skimming bicycles; the handsomely-equipped
carriages ; the occasional four-in-hand, or " mail-
coach/ ' with its echoing horn; the open cabs
whose drivers are partially reconciled to hu-
manity by the beauty and gaiety around them ;
the smart riders on their gleaming horses ; the
shimmer and glitter of the lovely gowns and

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 125

the dazzling faces of their wearers; the slow-
moving crowds of well-dressed and leisured folk
beneath the blazing green trees, with little chil-
dren, bright as butterflies, darting in and out
among them ; the martial bravery of a squadron
of cuirassiers escorting the President in a
carriage, with red-cockaded coachmen and foot-
men ; the lumbering water-carts, spreading out
from behind them their silver fans of liquid
freshness, make up the typical movement on a
spring afternoon in the Champs filysees; and
an exquisite combination it is of colour, light,
and sound, all in harmonious movement to-
gether, a veritable polonaise worthy of Chopin,
with the Arc de Triomphe, a symbolic portal,
towering in the distance.

This is the movement of wealthy, easy-going
Paris, from which the coarser elements of com-
mercial and industrial traffic are by special
regulation excluded. But all roads in France
lead to Paris, and through the various gates of
the city there passes all day long a steady stream
of carts and drays and tumbrils loaded with the
produce of the most fertile country in Europe,
and these cumbersome vehicles have a tendency
to concentrate at busy points, notably in the
neighbourhood of the Central Markets. Wine,
after its passage through the great depot at

126 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Bercy, arrives in mighty casks attached to two
immensely long tree-trunks, parallel with one
another, and balanced between two high wheels ;
and this primitive and barbarous carriage drags
its slow length along the teeming thoroughfare
like a huge alligator. A string of twenty horses
or more of the splendid Percheron breed from
Normandy draws painfully up the steep inclines,
leading from the quays a monumental load of
white stone blocks which have been quarried
in Normandy from the flanks of those selfsame
cliffs and dunes which a thousand years ago
supplied the stones for Notre Dame. Tall
Normans with white blouses and enormous white
felt hats urge on the teams in a patois which is
still the legal language of England, cracking
whips which are many yards in length, while
the bells on the harness jingle sweetly, and the
parti-coloured ribbons and plumes, with which
the horses' heads are bedizened, flutter and nod.
This black tumbril filled with coal, which is
coming up behind, is exactly similar to the
ignoble cart in which Marie Antoinette was con-
veyed to the guillotine. An awkward, almost
square thing, on two high wheels, with sides
slanting outward from the bottom, it has a
sinister appearance, due no doubt in part to
the gruesome associations of a shape which has

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 127

not changed since the sanguinary days of the
Revolution. It is a ramshackle contrivance,
and the sight of a tumbril with one of its wheels
broken to pieces, and most of its burden of coal
lying in the middle of the road, is of such con-
stant occurrence at the foot of the hill in the
Rue Lafayette that it may be accounted among
the daily amusements of the Parisian lounger.
On the other hand, a really admirable spectacle
is the arrival after midnight of the great country
carts from the market-gardens around Paris,
piled to a giddy height with tier upon tier of
vegetables. In the deep blue atmosphere of
the night, against the gleam of the rare gas-
lamps, the red of the carrots, the dead white of
the turnips, and the sea-greens of the cabbages,
acquire such a splendour and richness of quality
as make the heart leap if one has any love of
colour.

" Processional colour,' ' if one may use such a
term, is specially dear to the Parisian, and he
manipulates it with rare skill, boldly but har-
moniously, without vulgar or garish effects.
The solemn funerals, with their flower-heaped
hearses, at the passage of which every man and
boy raises his hat, while the womankind cross
themselves ; the marriage corteges, with masses
of white — whiteness of bridal gowns, bouquets,

128 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

displayed shirt-fronts and cream-lined coaches,
supply daily notes of colour to the ever-moving
vision of Paris. The stately movement of the
funeral stops all other traffic, hushes it into
reverent silence — such is the Parisian respect
for the dead ; and if it be some naval or military
officer or dignitary of the Legion of Honour who
is being buried, the bJack line of the mourners
passes along the streets relieved by the red and
blue uniforms of the military escort, or perhaps
by the green of an academician's livery ; the
yellow, red, or purple, or a professor's robe, with
its dappled ermine ; the white ostrich plumes
of an ambassadorial cocked hat.

Bitterness of feeling between political parties
is such that religious processions and parades,
with display of insignia and banners and accom-
paniment of bands, by patriotic leagues, free-
masons, trade corporations, and guilds of all
kinds, have gradually been discouraged to the
point of practical suppression. But Paris
does not forget that, while rivalling other
capitals in respect of commercial and cosmo-
politan development, she possesses a unique
interest as the home of the most powerful Uni-
versity in the world, the centre of attraction to
the youth of France, the educational nursery of
her statesmen and of the vast array of function-

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 129

aries by whom the affairs of the country are
administered. She is therefore indulgent to the
high spirits of her student population, whose
monomes (long processions in Indian file) , gener-
ally undertaken for the purpose of protesting
against some unpopular action by the Minister
of Public Instruction, who is ex-officio Grand
Master of the University, occasionally " de-
scend " from the Latin Quarter on the left bank
of the Seine, and invade the more decorous
boulevards of the right bank. Wearing large
velvet berets, or tam-o'-shanter caps, trimmed
and beribboned with the colours of their respec-
tive faculties — the last vestiges in France of the
student costume of the Middle Ages, and sur-
viving in the stiffened mortar-board variety
peculiar to England and America — the students
speed along at an amazingly rapid pace, cutting
through the traffic like a knife, chanting their
protestations as they go, to some popular tune.
Sudden and spontaneous, and with a brightness
of colour and a youthful gaiety all its own, the
students' monome is one of the many expressions
of wit and humour which characterize the move-
ment of Paris. At carnival time, and on the
great national fete-day of July 14, the city is
one moving sea of exuberant fun and saturnalian
jollity. The main thoroughfares are given up

9

130 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

to the exclusive possession of the holiday-
makers. The multicoloured paper confetti
and the serpentins, which, by the way, are
Parisian inventions now adopted for festival
occasions all the world over, give to the streets
the same vibratory colour and effect of disinte-
grated sunshine which the impressionist painters
seek to render in their pictures — an atmosphere
in brilliant movement, palpitating with the joy
of living. But, of all movement in the Paris
streets, none stirs the emotions more than that
of the national flag when it flutters in the breeze.
Its red, white, and blue, in plain juxtaposition
without device or added design, have a charm
of dignity and simplicity which explains much
of the passionate devotion which all Frenchmen
feel for it, and is a preponderating reason why,
in spite of many changes of regime, no other
flag has taken its place. All flags hide in their
folds the power of arousing subtle and delicate
sensations. Prone upon the cofnn of a hero, or
brooding in the stillness of a panoply, they strike
a note of majestic pathos peculiar to themselves,
while in the endless variety of movements which
they snatch from the wind as they fly at a mast-
head they seem to be signalling, to all who have
eyes to see, ineffable things, the tale of " battles
long ago," the epic of dead glories and great

THE MOVEMENT OF PARIS 131

examples. Above much that is sordid and
sorrowful in the record of the French Republic,
the tricolour still maintains its spotless sym-
bolic character. Its red, white and blue stand
for the three great humane ideals of the re-
publican motto — liberty, equality, and frater-
nity, the gospel of the Revolution, and the
burden of the message which the victorious
eagles of Napoleon spread over the Old World.
On July 14, the anniversary of the capture
and the destruction of the Bastille, the streets
of Paris, particularly in the populous quarters,
are vistas of red, white, and blue, myriads of
tricolour flags being suspended from windows
and balconies, and stretched across the road-
ways in a kind of patriotic and republican em-
brace from house to house. All Paris is in a
flutter with these waving emblems of joy and
peace and good-will, and the delirious crowds
dancing beneath them in a spirit of perfect de-
mocracy which admits of no social distinctions,
but is none the less governed and restrained by
an innate polish of manners, realize under the
magic of their spell, for the few hours that the
fete lasts, the three ideal conditions of the
national device.

CHAPTER IX
THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS

There is no individual type of Frenchmen to
which some French paper does not respond. It
may be doubted whether in any other country
the analogy is so complete. A German pro-
fessor of psychology has commented on the
subtle affinity between the slices of roast beef
in the London restaurants and the size of the
Times. But neither in America nor England
is the national life reflected by the political
press so completely as in France.

Take the sober and serious Frenchman, re-
served in speech, inexpansive except when em-
bracing relatives on railway platforms, cultured,
keen in business, a little " near," moderate in
politics as in all things. He is a republican, for
it would be repugnant to him to be " agin the
Government M ; but he has no more faith in
Socialism than in the possible restoration of a
monarchy. He is sceptical, but respects re-
ligion. He is patriotic, yet a lover of peace.

132

THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS 133

Towards foreign countries he is polite without
enthusiasm ; his sincere admiration for America
is tempered by a little bewilderment ; he has
loyally accepted the entente cordiale, while hold-
ing that England has much the best of the bar-
gain. He is sometimes gay, but with a rigid
decorum ; frequents the Comedie Francaise ;
and, while never exceeding a proper limit, has a
rational taste for good wine, good cheer, and a
pretty face. This first-class citizen reads the
Temps. His family name is Prudhomme, but he
is an improvement on that famous ancestor of his
who gave lustre to the reign of Louis Philippe.
His antithesis is talkative, passionate Mon-
sieur Chauvin, who, with his wild gestures and
wilder statements, his incredible credulity, his
fantastic hatreds, and equally inexplicable en-
gouments, is all that is left to us (ladies and
gentlemen !) of Don Quixote — a Don Quixote
of the boulevard, with flat-brimmed Montmartre
hat in place of the barber's basin, and an um-
brella as obese and as faithful as Sancho Panza.
Chauvin' s materializations are many. If a
Bonapartist, and haunted by the Napoleonic
legend, he subscribes to the Autorite — that
Bobadil of one-cent dailies ; to the Libre Parole,
if his creed be the extermination of the alien and
the Jew ; to the Verite Franfaise, if he confound

134 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

patriotism with orthodoxy, and look upon the
Protestant nations as the inveterate enemies of
France. Monsieur Chauvin shakes hands with
Henri Rochef ort (when the great pamphletist has
not managed to avoid him, as he generally tries
to), and acknowledges the inextinguishable verve
of the Patrie' s leading article. For the Patrie is
Henri Rochefort — and naught else. And Henri
Rochefort is the reincarnation of that same
aristocratic and revolutionary spirit which ani-
mated Mirabeau. Like Mirabeau, he has over-
thrown a monarchy by the power of the word,
written if not spoken. He has the same
passionate love of freedom and mistrust of the
mob. He remains a Marquis to the finger-tips,
in spite of himself. And, as he has humorously
remarked, when his enemies wish to wound him
most, they remind him of his title. Every cab-
man and cafe waiter in Paris reads the Patrie.
Henri Rochefort is nearly eighty, but he is still
the youngest and wittiest leader-writer in the
world.

But Mirabeau redivivus and Monsieur Chauvin
are but voices in the wilderness of the republican
press. In the Humanite of M. Jaures we have,
typified, the popular tribune of to-day, upon
whom has fallen the mantle of Gambetta, with
an eloquence as unquenchable as was that of

)■

THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS 135

the inspired Jew of Genoa, but with a pro-
gramme which is not yet " ministrable," be-
cause it is still professedly Collectivism Here
we have oratory " with the paunch " which
Lavengro found to be indispensable, and that
wealth of rolling M rt *• without which the
French demagogue would be lost. C est VHu-
manite toute entilr-r-re, monsieur ! M. Jaures is
merely Gambetta's rhetorical Elijah, but among
the numberless " favourite disciples " of the
" Master " are Joseph Reinach, the editor of
Gambetta's speeches, whose influence is pre-
dominant in the Republique Franfaise, the organ
of discreet Moderantism ; and Yves Guyot, who
in the Steele has for years advocated free trade
and friendship with England ; while over a host
of other organs, both in Paris and the provinces,
the cult of Gambetta throws a mysterious
politico-religious light similar to that of Buddha
over the East. The Gambettists, who include
Deroulede and Delcasse, the opposite poles of
political thought, dispute among themselves as
to which interprets the " Master's " ideas, for-
getting that he was the inventor of Opportunism,
which means changing one's coat.

Your out-and-out radical, atheist, freemason,
and devour er of cures, reads the Lanterne. To him
the sight of a priest is like a red rag to a bull.

136 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

So he thinks and talks of little else but religion.
Frankly anticlerical, but less rabid, are the
Radical and the Rapftel. These three are one-
cent papers. Parisians of the lower middle
class are, as a rule, Voltairean. But your con-
cierge, having to satisfy many consciences before
he can expect his annual tip, takes in the Petit
Journal or the Petit Parisien, which, having no
clearly defined religious opinions, can be dis-
played in his loge without danger. And these
papers make a speciality of city news — the fait
divers — which keenly appeals to " Monsieur
Pipelet's " notorious love of gossip.

In addition to the Verite Franpaise, the
Churchman has the Croix, the Univers, the
Monde, the Patrie, the Presse. Monarchy's
fading charms are celebrated in the Gaulois and
the Soleil, but the only official organ of the Due
d' Orleans is the Correspondance Nationale, et
Nouvelles, a lithographed sheet distributed to
about five hundred papers throughout France . A
journal that does justice to its name is the Figaro.
It appeals to the curious and leisured class. It
whispers the latest on dit into its client's ear,
while recommending at the same time, on its
front page,|so wittily and insinuatingly, the
newest brandjof soap, that the Barber of Seville
in person seems to be bending over him. Nation-

THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS 137

alism claims the Echo de Paris, with an admir-
able foreign news service, and the Eclair ; but
the one is pro and the other anti Anglo-Saxon.
The Matin belongs to a class of newspaper
whose main principle, or lack of principle, is the
business principle, as does the Gil Bias, and in
some measure the Journal. The Liberte is a
moderate and well-spoken Republican sheet,
preferring news to views. It traces its inspira-
tions to Gambetta. With the oldest and most
brilliant Republican record in France, the
Journal des Debats, to which Taine, Renan, and
all the great French thinkers since the Revolu-
tion, have contributed, remains Republican ; but
it has gradually veered round to a sage Con-
servatism, and frankly sided with the Church
during the debates on the Concordat.

A word now as to the relative political im-
portance and inner workings of the principal
French papers. The most influential is the
Temps, the most widely circulated the Croix.
The Temps, which is edited by Senator Hebrard,
is Progressist, Protestant, and Swiss. It favours
the establishment of a working compact be-
tween all the Republican groups on the basis
of a moderate and conciliatory Liberalism.
Some of the most valued writers on the Temps
staff are of the Protestant faith, and in touch

138 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

with Geneva. Its financial information is of the
best. The Croix is the organ of the cures, and,
apart from the parent edition, published in
Paris, there are nearly two hundred local Croix's,
which circulate in different parts of the prov-
inces, the most important being the Croix du
Nord. Its influence is therefore vast. The
Croix belongs to M. Vrau, a wealthy manufac-
turer of sewing-thread at Rouen, who is backed
by the Assumptionist Fathers. M. Vrau has
also just purchased the Patrie and the Presse,
formerly Nationalist organs, which came into
the market in consequence of the bankruptcy
of their owner, the Cotton King, M. Jules Jalu-
zot. After the Croix, the most widely circu-
lated papers are the Petit Journal and the Petit
Parisien. Ex-Senator Privet, a Nationalist, con-
trols the former, which was founded by Mari-
noni, the inventor of the rotatory printing-press.
The Petit Parisien is the property of Senator
Jean Dupuy, formerly Minister of Agriculture,
and, like the Petit Journal, its circulation ap-
proaches the million. Its great rival is the
Matin, which is the property of a company con-
trolled by M. Bunau-Varilla, the brother of the
Panama expert, and is the only exponent, now
that the Petit Bleu has disappeared, of a yellow
journalism ostensibly imitated from America.

THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS 139

The offspring of the Morning News, the first
Anglo-Saxon paper on American lines published
in Paris, which was owned by the late Dr.
Thomas Evans, the American dentist and
diplomat, but succumbed to the competition of
the New York Herald, the Matin is edited by
an adopted son and nephew of a former Paris
correspondent of the Times. The Journal runs
the Matin close both as to circulation and news,
but attains to a much higher literary standard.
It belongs to M. Letellier, the wealthy Govern-
ment contractor, and, like the Matin, is con-
stitutionally Ministerial. None of the other
Paris papers attain to anything like the circula-
tion of those just mentioned. The Figaro,
which is the French paper best known abroad,
lost caste with a section of its subscribers
through the Dreyfus case, but is recovering its
ground under the editorship of M. Gason Cal-
mette. Its misfortunes have mainly benefited
its younger rival, the Gaulois, which, under the
direction of M. Arthur Mayer, is an uncompro-
mising champion of Orleanism and the Church.
The personal relations between M. Mayer and
the Orleanist pretender, the present Due d' Or-
leans, are officially known to be something less
than cordial, but the editor of the Gaulois per-
sists in being more Royalist than the u Roy,"

140 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

just as he conducts an antisemitic campaign,
although himself an Israelite. The Due d' Or-
leans, in his lithographed organ, Correspondence
Nationale, et Nouvelles, has declared strongly in
favour of an alliance with England, and the
concentration of all the national forces against
Germany ; but M. Mayer, whose bons mots,
especially the unconscious ones, are traditional,
is opposed to the nation that burned Jeanne
d'Arc, and sums up the present situation in the
words, " Soyons nous-meme !" Another inde-
pendent Monarchist organ which was hit hard
by the Dreyfus affair (its editor went mad) is
the Soleil, founded and raised to a fine pitch of
prosperity by that brilliant historian and Aca-
demician, the late Edouard Herve, but now
sadly fallen from its high estate. There are
three political daily papers in the provinces
which deserve mention — the Petit Marseillais,
the Depiche de Toulouse, and the Nouvelliste de
Lyon. They are all Republican and Ministerial.
Their success, however, is largely due to the fact
that they are outside the range of the Petit
Journal and the Petit Parisien.

To describe in detail the many other, but less
significant, organs of public opinion in France
would need a volume, which by the time it was
completed would have to be written all over

THE NEWS OF THE DAY IN PARIS 141

again ; for, fickle as a woman, the French Press
is constantly changing its coat, or, at least, the
cut and colour of it. You may safely say that
no Paris paper is to-day, from the point of view
of its political opinions, the same that it was
ten, or even five, years ago ; but in respect to
its editorial methods and general machinery, the
French Press is an antiquated survival as com-
pared with that of England and America. Its
very print seems to be perfumed with memories
of the eighteenth century. Its paper has a
ghostly transparency, the thinness and greyness
of a souvenir. Bright exceptions there are, but
they are few, and the true Frenchman looks at
them askance, holding their origin to be sus-
picious and their attitude disloyal.

CHAPTER X
AMERICANS IN PARIS

Someone has said that, whereas the American
Colony " run •' London, the reverse is the case
in Paris. There is truth in this, though the
statement must not be taken as final. Paris
boasts, and for many reasons rightly, of being
the City of Light [a Ville Lumiere), and would
resent a suggestion that she was profoundly
affected by foreign influences. None the less,
Paris society, whether it likes to admit it or not,
has been undergoing for years past a slow
process of Americanization. Ever since the
United States have been an independent nation
the American has been popular in Paris. Just
before the French Revolution broke out, Ben-
jamin Franklin was the social hero of the hour.
Everything was a la Franklin — the Franklin
hat, the Franklin perruque, the Franklin stick.
He was the first American to live at Passy. And
Passy, the picturesque suburb to the west of
Paris, where a seated statue of him by an

142

AMERICANS IN PARIS 143

American sculptor preserves his memory, has
since become a favourite place of residence for
Americans, who like the quiet seclusion of its
wide streets and leafy avenues, the comfort of
its spacious villas, and the charm of its vast
gardens, with their walls muffled in old-world
ivy.

With but one break since Benjamin Franklin's
time, the French have been animated by a feeling
of personal affection for Americans — for the
" Sister Republic " — based upon a communion
of democratic ideas, a feeling which has been
extended to no other country.

One notices this sentiment on all the public
occasions that bring Americans and Parisians
together. When the American Chamber of Com-
merce gives its annual banquet, the speeches
delivered by the president of the chamber,
by the American Ambassador, who is always
present, and the replies made to them by the
representatives of the French Government, of
whom the Prime Minister for the time being is
generally one, show an absence of diplomatic
reserve, which is lacking to similar functions
organized by the Chambers of Commerce of
other nationalities. The French Government
adds a further distinction by surrounding the
banqueting-hall with a special guard of honour,

144 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

composed of troopers of the Republican Guard
in their brilliant helmets and breastplates. The
entente cordiale with England, the alliance with
Russia, are political and commercial under-
standings with ancient rivals. The sisterly love
which France cherishes for the great Trans-
atlantic Republic, which she helped to create,
persists unto the present day. However, it
must be admitted, Parisians sometimes express
a good-humoured alarm at what they call the
Americanisation of their capital.

This is of two sorts. The influence of the
American who is travelling is different from that
of the American Colony, but it has had perma-
nent and overwhelming consequences. All that
is superficial in the life of Paris, all those special
elements of Parisianism of which the most
ignorant visitor has a vague knowledge before
leaving his native country — for to him they are
the chief attraction of Paris — have been of
recent years affected by American influence as
they never were before. The American traveller,
whose numbers are yearly increasing, has revo-
lutionized the " gay " side of the city. He has
rendered it more pompous, and therefore less
gay in the strictly Parisian sense, but more
dazzling and more noisy. Montmartre, which
was so truly and wittily Parisian, has undergone

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AMERICANS IN PARIS 145

an entire change. Its one-time gentle denizens
— for, in spite of their extravagance of manners
and audacity of imagination, they had the in-
stinctive and natural gentleness of artists — have
fled from their old haunts like a herd of giraffes
from their native prairies before the invasion of
a crowd of big-game shooters. It was the in-
expressible charm of its feckless and reckless
devotion to the twin divinities of Bohemia — Art
and Beauty — which made Montmartre such a
magnet : " the hub of the universe/ ' as one of
its illustrious inhabitants baptized it. It has
succumbed to its own popularity. Famous
places of amusement, where formerly the long-
haired poet with the flat-brimmed hat would, in
the early hours of the morning, recite one of
those humorous-pathetic poems so typical of
Montmartre, amid the applause of a company in
which painters, sculptors, writers, riffraff, and
mere amateurs of beer-drinking and late hours,
consorted without pose and on terms of equality,
have now, while retaining their old " Chatnoir-
esque " names, taken on a cosmopolitan and
braggadocio air. The quaint pictures on the
walls have given way to brilliant mirrors.
Niggers in red swallowtail coats and black
u smalls/ ■ dancing a cake-walk with Spanish
ballerinas, have driven out poets and artists,

10

146 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Where beer flowed only champagne is now
served. The men are in evening - dress, and
nine-tenths of them are Americans. Pierrot and
Pierrette have fled. Oddly enough to the
American, fresh from New York or Boston, there
is nothing in these extravagant scenes of gaiety
which is in the least degree American. He
enjoys the scene because it is so different from
anything that he is accustomed to witness at
home. Nor is it French. Yet, from the honest
effort of the restaurant cook to produce Boston
baked beans, to the strugglings of the orchestra
with " rag-time " music, the whole is a distorted
reflection, as in a freak mirror, of what the
American might be imagined to want. The
Parisian thinks it is American. By his applause
the American confirms this view, but is all the
time under the impression that the entertain-
ment is typically Parisian. The experienced
American knows full well that there is nothing
of the real Paris in these weird performances.
To the old-time inhabitant of the Montmartre
Bohemia, which at the apogee of its sway sent
an artistic, and at the same time humane and
individual, throb throughout the intellectual
world, this hybrid Americainisation is fruitful
of sentimental regrets. " Where," they mutter,
adapting the language of their beloved patron,

AMERICANS IN PARIS 147

Villon — " where are the Black Cat and the Dead
Rat of yester-year !"

Time was — it was in the fifties — when the
average Parisian of neglected education — and
he was in the majority — was under a vague
impression that all Americans were black. It
was habitual with him to express astonishment
at the appearance of a purely white specimen.
To-day he is convinced that all Americans are
millionaires, and in this sweeping generalization
he is encouraged by the obstinate refusal of the
Paris papers to refer to an American, visiting or
residing in Paris, otherwise than as the rich-
issime (enormously rich) Mr. and Mrs. So-and-
So. This possession of enormous wealth is
widely supposed to be coincident with an un-
limited gullibility in all that concerns the
acquisition of works of art. There is no one in
Paris possessed of a bad copy from Rubens, a
sham Corot, an eighteenth-century panel falsely
attributed to Fragonard, who is not longing for
an Americain richissime to drop in and buy
it for a fantastic price. " Ah, my American !"
sighs such a one (the American whom his fancy
has so long depicted has at last become his
chattel) — M when will he arrive ? Why does he
tarry ? One million five hundred thousand
francs is all that I ask for this unrivalled Gobelin

148 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

tapestry, originally presented to Benjamin
Franklin by Louis XVI." (it is a bad Flemish
" fake "). " Alas ! if he does not come soon, I
shall have to double the price !" It not in-
frequently happens that the deluded Frenchman
spends the rest of his life thus mentally beckon-
ing to, and impatiently awaiting, the impalpable
American of his dreams. The delusion, of
course, is complete. The American demand for
European works of art has caused a great rise in
prices, but it would dawn on anybody but a
Frenchman that the American millionaire is
invariably a keen man of business, even when he
happens to be a spendthrift, and that when he is
not himself an expert in art matters, at least he
knows the conditions of the market in which he
is dealing, and surrounds himself with the neces-
sary guarantees.

What is responsible for a general rise in the
price of living in those parts of Paris where
Americans reside, either as casual visitors or
permanent members of the colony, is the
American habit of wastefulness. To this is
largely due the general belief in Paris that all
Americans have a great deal more money than
they know what to do with. The French never
waste anything. It was that trait in their
character which, more than anything else, struck

AMERICANS IN PARIS 149

one of the wealthiest of America's millionaires
when, a short time ago, he visited this country
for the first time. Not a scrap of land that can
possibly bear cultivation is lying fallow. The
French housewife throws practically nothing
away. Even the ultimate refuse of her dust-
bin is carefully gone over every morning by
diligent ragpickers, sorted out into a dozen
different categories, and sold for further utiliza-
tion. Such a narrow margin to life is incompre-
hensible to the American, with his native sense of
space and the boyish extravagance which is part
of his national birthright. In Paris it is the
passage and presence of Americans, especially of
the womenfolk, which have largely contributed
to raise prices all round in the wealthier districts,
and have tripled the demands of hotel-keepers
and dressmakers. But fifteen years ago there
was not one good hotel in Paris. Now there are
several. They have been built with a view to
meeting the American demand. The American
love of cleanliness has revolutionized the Paris
hotel, and has proved a great boon to the city,
having brought about a vast improvement in
general sanitary conditions, and thus helped,
without any doubt, to reduce the annual death-
rate. This beneficial influence has been ex-
tended far and wide in France by the numerous

150 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

families of American motorists, who have ex-
plored every nook and corner of the provinces.
Paris dressmakers have been inspired to more
artistic efforts by the American demand. Genius
is helpless without an intelligent Maecenas. If
the French dressmakers had had to rely for the
foreign patronage which constitutes so important
an element of their clientele mainly on the
English and the Russians, their art would have
been like a ship waterlogged in a dead sea or
stranded on barbarian shores. That their art
has successfully avoided these two forms of
shipwreck, by which it was seriously menaced
twenty years ago, is due to the quick American
appreciation of all that is novel and inventive,
the American willingness to encourage, regard-
less of expense, explorations along untrodden
paths in the boundless realm of the beautiful,
and, above all, to the unrivalled capacity of the
American woman for giving quality and dignity
to whatever she wears.

To understand the position occupied by the
American Colony in Paris society, it must be
remembered that, unlike any other European
country of first-class importance, France is a
republic, governed in the main by an aris-
tocracy of intellect. There is an aristocracy of
birth, with which many splendid historical tra-

AMERICANS IN PARIS 151

ditions are bound up, but the absence of a Court
has deprived it of the central point to which it
would naturally gravitate, and has caused it
to break up into cliques. These cliques may,
roughly speaking, be divided into the monar-
chical set, which includes Royalists and Im-
perialists, who, though politically at logger-
heads, are united in the determination to have
the best of all that life can afford ; the clerical
set, austere and unyielding, collet-montS (high-
necked), as the French say, and socially the
most exclusvie of all ; and the Academy set,
which is bound to the republic by administra-
tive and official ties, but has monarchical lean-
ings. The combination of these three makes up
the smart set of Paris, though the Academy is,
socially speaking, so mixed that, were it not for
the membership and predominating influence of
certain aristocrats who cling pathetically to this
institution as the last shred of officialdom within
their grasp in the democratic state, Academi-
cians would not be admitted as freely as they
are to the fashionable circles.

In these three sets, Americans, and more par-
ticularly American women, play a prominent
part. Their influence is considerable, and, if
they do not actually lead as in England, the
cause is independent of themselves. The dim-

152 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

culties presented by a foreign language consti-
tute a primary obstacle, though it is noticeable
that no foreigners speak French (with the sole
exception, perhaps, of the Russians) with so
little accent and in so natural a manner as
American women.. Then there is the religious
question. In the smart set of Paris there are
Catholics and many Jews, but the Protestants
could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Protestantism does not, at least in the case of
foreigners, exclude from the smart set ; but those
who hold its tenets are naturally on a basis of
inferiority, so far as leadership is concerned, with
regard to a class whose social and political tra-
ditions are so intimately bound up with the pro-
fession, if not with the practice, of their religion.
The Paris Upper Ten class Protestants with
Jews, and tolerate their society solely on account
of their money. Undoubtedly, not a few bril-
liant American men and women are to be met
with in the highest Paris circles whose moral and
intellectual influence on their environment is
real and active, but it is above all individual.
In London the American Colony has in a
measure transformed the very basis upon which
the social structure is built up. This is not the
case in Paris. Obviously, a dispossessed and
somewhat discredited aristocracy, without a

AMERICANS IN PARIS 153

head, such as that in France, is instinctively op-
posed to innovation or reform. Otherwise its
last shadow of prestige and claim on existence
would disappear.

Quite a number of eminent statesmen and
influential public men in France have American
wives. But in this country women do not
address political meetings. They do not can-
vass for their husbands at Parliamentary elec-
tions as in England. They do not lay founda-
tion-stones or open hospitals. At most they
may preside at the baptizing of a new battleship.
Yet in some important ways the influence of
women in France is greater than in America or
England. It is very difficult to get a Frenchman
to look at any scheme, whether of a commercial
or a political nature, until he has consulted his
wife. It is the wife's opinion that prevails nine
times out of ten. In public affairs, therefore,
the Frenchman's American wife remains in the
coulisses, behind the scenes, but nowhere more
successfully than in France do women pull the
wires.

Certainly the smart set of Paris owes much of
its lively modernity to the American woman.
She has taught her French sister the value of
self-reliance. Brought up almost invariably in
a convent, the aristocratic French girl acquired

i 1

154 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

no real knowledge of the world until after her
marriage. A cruel measure of self-effacement
was imposed upon her. Her sole business was to
look pretty and to dress to perfection, and she
would have been little better than a lay figure
if her natural French gift of liveliness had not
made her, as a rule, a delightful and witty talker.
To-day she plays tennis and golf, shoots, fishes,
and hunts ; belongs, after her marriage, to a
woman's club ; and her emancipation is almost
entirely due to the precept and example of her
American women friends. Withal she has lost
nothing of her pristine charm. On the contrary,
the American woman has taught her to walk,
and initiated her into mysteries of hygiene,
which were a closed book to her before, thus
enabling her to enchance and preserve her
natural beauty. If her conversation was always
brilliant and gay, it is now rendered the more
entertaining by her increased stock of knowledge
and ideas, and the widening of her worldly
horizon.

It is as an intellectual and artistic centre that
Paris most appeals to the American Colony.
The great majority of the Americans who reside
here for any length of time have a literary 01
artistic preoccupation of one kind or another.
Even if they had none when they arrived, there

AMERICANS IN PARIS 155

is that in the atmosphere of Paris which forces
some such interest upon them sooner or later.
Only the veriest dolt could remain insensible to
the aesthetical magnetism of a city of which it
has been truly said that it daily trembles and
quakes with ideas, so volcanic is the core of its
mentality. It is fair to assert that in the artistic
domain the Americans have given as much as
they have received. In the world of paint the
American colony has for years past played a con-
spicuous role. It is in the main due to the
American example, backed by the dollars of
American picture-buyers, interested in new artis-
tic formulas, that the rising generation of French
painters has broken loose from the trammels of
the old French academic school whose hard-
and-fast doctrines were rapidly proving fatal
to all individual development. Among foreign
painters, recognized by the Frenchmen them-
selves as being of the first class, who reside
permanently in Paris, by far the largest con-
tingent is supplied by the Americans. The
American art students, men and women, form
an important element of the colony in point of
view of numbers. They have their clubs, whose
artistic entertainments count among the most
brilliant and amusing in Paris ; they have their
special art shows, where the State not infre-

156 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

quently makes purchases ; and they have intro-
duced baseball into the public playground of
the old Luxembourg Palace gardens. These
are features which distinguish the American
Colony in Paris from that of London or of any
European capital. The art colony has its off-
shoots in the French provinces. At Giverny,
in Normandy ; at Crecy, a medieval town in the
Brie country, where the famous Brie cheese
comes from ; at Pont-Aven, in Brittany ; at
Auvers, where Corot painted his masterpieces ;
at Nesles - la - Vallee, on the Oise, there are
American art colonies, whose members live the
simplest of simple lives in provincial inns, on the
dining-room walls of which pictorial souvenirs
of their sojourn are frequently to be seen. Some
of these have aroused the cupidity of passing
picture-dealers, but there is no instance on record
of any of them having been sold. In the nature
even of a French innkeeper there is a respectful
sympathy for the artist, and an instinctive sense
of etiquette in matters concerning art which
would make such a transaction impossible. The
Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts in all its depart-
ments, but particularly that of architecture,
attracts numerous students from the United
States, and at no hour of the day can one pass
along the old-fashioned streets which surround

AMERICANS IN PARIS 157

the Ecole, in the district which lies between
the Louvre and Montparnasse, a veritable citadel
of the American art colony, without hearing
more American spoken than French.

The American resident in Paris bears a well-
deserved reputation for rare courtliness of
manners, a punctiliousness as concerns social
etiquette which smacks of the ancien regime,
and a large and tasteful hospitality. Rightly
or wrongly, the Parisians saddle the Englishman
with an accusation of bearishness and arrogance.
No doubt the great majority of the Americans
who visit or reside in Paris are tries sur le volet —
in other words, are gentlemen of birth and
breeding ; while, naturally, the greater facilities
of travel bring over a very different class of
individual from London. One characteristic of
the American Colony is its affection for the
national flag. It may be safely said, without
fear of contradiction, that no house, flat, or
office, in Paris, tenanted by an American, is
without " Old Glory " displayed somewhere.
It may conspicuously drape an entire wall, or
be merely a little object ornamenting a mantel-
piece ; but of whatever size it may be, or wher-
ever it may be, sooner or later you will dis-
cover it.

As for the American visiting Europe, he may

158

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

be pleased with the beautiful uniformity of
Berlin, or prefer the total lack of uniformity
which is the chief charm of London, but it is
only in Paris that he is fully at home. The
gaiety and good-humour which he brings with
him from America find the readiest response
from the Parisians. Their wit is of the same
subtle and light-feathered quality as his own.
Their women resemble his in beauty, elegance,
and esprit. His palate fully appreciates the
delicacy of their choicest wines. He sees eye
to eye with them on most subjects — political,
social, or artistic. When the good American
dies he goes to Paris, in which fact there is a
backhanded but well- justified compliment to the
American Colony.

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CHAPTER XI
THE SHADOWS OF PARIS

" And above all be careful of your planes V-
This was, according to M. Felix Bracquemond, a
pupil of a pupil of Ingres, the supreme dictum
of the great classical French painter. Drawing,
taught Ingres, is merely an indication of the
luminous and sombre masses, and of the classi-
fied light, which determine the values of the
objects to be represented.

The luminous and sombre masses, the shadows
of this great capital, whose history covers so
many hundreds of years, are instinct with
delicate suggestions, with subtle lessons. Every
city has the shadows that it deserves, the
shadows that it makes for itself, just as the deeds
of men and women colour and model their lives.
The Old World and the New have their char-
acteristic shadows — shadow-marks as full of
significance, if not as tangible, as landmarks.
In respect of its shadows, London differs no less
from New York than Bruges from Pittsburg t

i59

i6o SENSATIONS OF PARIS

though the contrast may not be so striking.
New shadows, varying in sharpness and inten-
sity, are cast by new events, new people, new
buildings ; and the old shadows linger even when
that which gave them birth has long passed
away, enveloping in a ghostly atmosphere the
impalpable spirit-world in which we live with
our ancestors. Not even the levelling of a house
or a street can banish the old shadows altogether,
can exorcise them wholly. Their immaterial
presence still clings to the sites of razed cities
and abandoned temples. They are, as it were,
" earth-bound " for generations ; and when at
last they take their leave, Time has indeed made
a complete revolution, and so troubling have
been their reproachful or merely reminiscent
whisperings, their evocative note becomes so
penetrating and acute by its mere attenuation,
as change follows change, that our coarser
natures not infrequently hail their departure
with something like a feeling of relief. Shadows
are the better half of history.

Modern Paris is statuesque. She poses, a
magnificent stone statue ; and, generally speak-
ing, her shadow is soft and blue, of great depth
under an appearance of lightness. Her features
are classical, her look and bearing imperial ; but
wars and revolutions, the passions of love and

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 161

hate, have left deep lines upon her face and
furrows upon her brow, which, if examined
singly, may appear harshly sceptical, cruelly
ironical, bitter or sad, but they do not destroy
the antique nobility or the intellectual serenity
of the expression as a whole. The mask of
Napoleon with the smile of Voltaire ! The
beauty of the bust is heightened, not marred, by
its patina.

The old shadows commingle and contrast
with the new. The sharply-cut, new-thrown
shadows of tall twentieth-century mansions
seem all the harsher and colder when they come
in contact with the warm if dingy tones of some
such quaint relic of pre-Revolutionary days as
that little old patched and red-tiled wine-shop
on the Quai de Passy, with its ragged festoons of
ancient ivy still clinging to its roof, and all
around it the stone-faced apartment-houses of
the wealthy — a company of modern millionaires
gazing in horror at a mummified sans-culotte.
Then to go back to almost prehistoric times, to
the brick and marble period of the Roman
occupation, we have mystical shadows such as
fall in deep amber and russet folds from the
broken walls which now surround the Cluny
Museum, and at different epochs have encircled
a Roman bath and a Carlovingian abbey. The

ii

162 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Middle Ages still contribute their share to the
shadows of Paris, notably on the quays, where
the cross-hatching of the long fishing-rods bend-
ing over the swirling Seine from the embank-
ments and the river-shore give to the black and
white of city, Seine, and sky, a quality and tone
which you may look for in vain outside of a
Callot etching. And, with their medieval dignity
unimpaired by inheritance, the successors —
themselves centenarians — of these ancient trees,
whose roots ages ago were bathed by the Seine
waters, turn aside from the surging life behind
them, indifferent to the human bustle, as if
nothing worthy of the notice of a tall and noble
poplar had been or ever could be going on. The
river breeze, with its song and cajolery, its
eternal caress, is still their one playfellow — leur
seul amour ! And their deep greens and shaggy
masses of branch and foliage are those of the
old French " verdure " tapestries, spun in
homely wool by high-coiffed maidens and
leather- jerkined youths long before the Gobelin
looms, with their silk and gold threads, were
set up in rivalry. Also of medieval shadow are
the sugar-loaf turrets of the Palais de Justice
which overlook these same Seine banks, recalling
the steel-peaked caps and spiked armour of the
feudal gardiens de la ftaix, grim and iron-handed

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 163

sentinels over virtue. Here, indeed, is the
antique shadow of the law. And hard by at
Notre Dame, in deep shrouds of serene obscurity,
tremulous with divine harmonies and perfumed
with immemorial incense, from hundreds of
saint-burdened niches, from the intricate tracery
of the great rose-windows with their wheeling
kaleidoscopes of painted glass, from the fluted
pillars rising in pure jets of stone to dimmer and
dimmer heights, from the roof of the vast nave
poised like a moth on wings of Gothic lace, from
the two mighty towers lifting their skeleton
arms to heaven, falls the Shadow of the Church.
From nowhere can the shadows of Paris be
better observed than from the North Tower of
Notre Dame on a sunlit afternoon, with, for
preference, big bellying white clouds driving
across the blue sky — immediately beneath you
the myriad convolutions of the old Island City,
through whose archaic streets, as through a
brain (to quote the subtle poet of M The City
of the Soul"), "men creep like thoughts";
farther away, the serried ranks of those chest-
nut groves, lit up in spring by their lamp-like
cones of bloom, which Napoleon I. planted as a
guard to the ancient splendours of the Luxem-
bourg ; farther to the left, the " brooding brow "
of the Pantheon, the seventeenth-century mag-

164 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

nificence of the two round towers of Saint-
Sulpice, crowning the classical and reposeful
lines of that vast Louis Quinze pile like the curls
of a monumental peruke of the period ; then
along the white Seine, with its score of sparkling
bridges like so many rings on the white fingers
of a Queen, to the blue and black and grey of
succeeding divisions of the city, bluer as the
eye reaches the more distant and modern
quarters, to the Paris as yet unbuilt that lies
bare and formless — terrains vagues— outside the
fortifications, and beyond to the misty purple
horizons and the wooded summits of Bellevue,
Meudon, Saint -Cloud, and Versailles. From
laughing youth to extreme old age, in all its
moods grave and gay, the life-story of the great
city lies before you, and at your side the " Pen-
seur," that sphinx-hearted gargoyle of Notre
Dame, which, in imagination at least, has gazed
out since the Middle Ages upon the slowly-
changing scene, and watched its multitudinous
and multicoloured shadows with the prophetic
mystery in its eyes and grim humour on its lips,
thinks your thoughts and dreams your dreams ;
for in the direct line of its vision rises up the
Eiffel Tower, menacing symbol of a world yet
to be born, monstrous finger-post of progress.
Not less suggestive than the shadows of the

EARLY MORNING SHADOWS IN THE RED MILL QUARTER

THE MEDIEVAL SHADOWS OF THE CONCIERGERIE

To face page 164

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 165

Paris that dreams are the shadows of the Paris
that thinks and works, and of the Paris that
plays.

In the Luxembourg quarter, where the aris-
tocracy of intellect expands the edifying in-
fluence of its grave presence, the shadows have a
quality of their own, born of their environment,
and determining it. Take any of its old streets
— say the Rue Cassette. Owing to the solemn
companionship of Saint-Sulpice, a stone' s-throw
away, and the aristocratic survival in its midst
of the Hotel d'Hinnisdal, now the Catholic
Institute, but until recently the town mansion
of one of those great French families that have
preserved intact their religious and social tra-
ditions, the Rue Cassette wears an outward air
of pious contemplation, a mask of spiritual
decorum, the sedate livery, as it were, of a
domestic of the upper clergy. Mainly com-
posed of old-fashioned printing-houses, including
that of the Archiepiscopate of Paris, no family
Bible was ever bound in more mournful black
or roan. Across the strait-laced facades of its
whitey-brown walls the shadows fall narrow like
black stoles. Two moribund monarchist and
clerical organs issue daily from its presses.
Look at those high-pointed cobblestones which
constitute its pave, its " metal " — resounding,

166 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

too, like metal to the horses' hoofs and the
wheels of passing vehicles. Note the delicate
dark grey shadows which surround them at their
base, growing less as the road gradually sinks to
the curbstone on either side. By their constant
ripple they suggest a babbling brook. The
heightening of the dark grey shadows of these
old-fashioned cobbles teaches you the meaning
of that idiomatic expression le haut du pave.
That part of the old Paris thoroughfare, before
the introduction of trottoirs, or paved sidewalks,
which was farthest away from the gutter, and
therefore at the highest level, was the haut du
pave, a favoured position, to hold which was the
privilege of wealth and rank. In those days
the gutters ran through the middle of the street,
and the haut du pave was nearest to the wall,
where the sidewalks now are. A few old
thoroughfares paved in this way are still to be
seen in Paris, notably the Rue Berton in the
sixteenth arrondissement, and the Cour du
Dragon at the corner of the Rue de Rennes.
And though it is no longer permitted to the
insolent lackeys of great nobles to push mere
citizens into the gutters of these narrow streets,
a certain aristocratic air still pertains to them
by reason of these humble stones which yielded
every prerogative to the " carriage folk," and

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 167

nothing to the pedestrian. In the Rue Cassette
the haut du pave is now in the middle, two little
strips of sidewalk having been added on either
side ; but the cobbles are of the ancient shape,
which for three centuries has not been modified,
and their shadows are the same. Shaded in
summer by trees, the tops only of which are
visible above high walls that once surrounded
extensive gardens, streets of the type of the
Rue Cassette, equally sedate, erudite, and con-
templative, are common enough on the left bank
in the neighbourhood of Saint-Sulpice and in the
University quarter. At most times of the day
a subdued and harmonious illumination fills
them, spreading over their surface a kind of
rich atmospheric varnish, such as was used by
the old masters, banishing all crudities of light
and shade ; the very sunshine seems to reach
these solemn alleys through a patine or veil,
which exists perhaps only in our imaginations,
but is suggested by the elderly spirit of the place,
its almost silenced echoes. In any case the
impression is there, and if so many of the
dealers in old furniture and bric-a-brac have
opened shop in the Rue de Rennes, which is a
kind of highway through this old - world
quarter, but yet so far from the track beaten by
most English and American tourists, it must be

i68 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

that here are constant atmospheric qualities
peculiarly precious to them, and that the back-
ground, or rather the circumambience of grey-
green wall, with the ancient boughs of chestnut-
trees floating above, and the rich stippling of
the cobbled roads, is just what is needed to
show off their faded treasures to the fullest
advantage. Certainly the exorbitant prices
which they charge would amply justify this
supposition.

Here also the shadows of the human face tend
to accentuate particular lines and develop
typical expressions. In both look and dress, the
Parisian who belongs as a native to these
regions would present an unusual, if not
eccentric, appearance in any other part of the
world. He is both graver and greyer than the
inhabitant of the right bank of the Seine. It is
here that the bord-plat, the " stovepipe " hat
with the flat and somewhat downward- slanting
brim, forms part of the local dress, and the
tromblon, or blunderbuss, of half a century ago,
that wobbly revolutionary infant of the Im-
perial beaver, is still to be seen, though its
proportions, lessening with succeeding genera-
tions, only just suffice to indicate a true but
diminutive descendant of the giants. Fashion
moves slowly in this neighbourhood, where

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 169

plodding work and unostentatious comfort,
proud characteristics of a highly cultivated
bourgeoisie, are the order of the day. The
frock-coat is constantly worn, and is long and
ample in the skirts ; trousers disdain the pressed
median line ; the brown boot is rare ; patent
leather and the pointed toe are rarer still ;
the elegancies are subdued, though real. The
swallowtail coat, together with an elaborately
pleated white shirt-front, is still de rigueur at
marriages, at funerals, and on all occasions of
official ceremony ; and these old-fashioned pleat-
ings seem to be imitated or repeated in the
thousands of white-slatted shutters that enframe
the windows of all but the most modern houses,
and give to them a fresh and dignified air of
being always in clean linen. There is a pro-
vincialism, too, in this well-laundered look which
has its charm. There are streets in this working
and thinking quarter of Paris which have all
the appearance of respectable public notaries,
such as, for instance, the Rue de Fleurus,
with the Luxembourg Garden as its vernal back-
ground. The older and smaller and darker
streets take us back to earlier epochs of fashion,
before Brummell had invented the clean collar,
to the days of laced ruffies of such delicate
cambric that they shunned a too frequent

170 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

starching, and remained beautiful, but yellow ;
and there are quite poor streets where poets and
students live, whose dilapidated shutters are
nearly black.

That the left bank of the Seine monopolizes
all that is treasurable in the ancient harmonies
of line and shadow that enfold the heart and
history of Paris is a popular error, but that the
right bank is, on the whole, junior to the left
cannot be denied, though, with eternity before
us, the past is in a sense ageless. As Burger
says : * Hin ist Hin !" But that the right bank
is entirely distinguished from the left by the
diversity of its shadows is perfectly true. In the
zone of the comparatively new houses of which
the Opera is the centre, the shadows, owing to
the prevalence of fresh stone, are harder and
bluer ; the wide streets, the broader pavements,
leave a freer inlet to air and sun ; the planes are
fewer, and the backgrounds have a relative
absence of chiaroscuro. Where a bright and
burning sun can play with unbroken rays upon
such massive walls as those of the Madeleine and
the Bourse, with their colonnades in pure Greek
style, we have shadows so clear-cut and of such
a rich deep blue as to transport us in imagination
to those rugged and stony landscapes of the
Midi and the Mediterranean, where, to quote a

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 171

recent outburst of M. Jules Jaures, the sun
shines with such force upon the bare rocks that
the birds as they wing past se dedoublent (double
themselves) as in a mirror. There are no such
luminous effects as these on the left bank, where
the bluest shadows are in the outlying and
artisan quarters, but are as hard, dreary, and
cold, as the lives of the toiling folk who dwell
there. The Chamber of Deputies and the official
buildings that are in line with it, the palace of the
President of the Chamber, and of the Minister
of Foreign Affairs, forming an architectural se-
quence to the Bridge and the Place de la Con-
corde, the Madeleine, and the Rue Royale,
although actually on the left bank, belong, by
the nature of their shadows and planes, to the
right bank. They speak its language and obey
its customs. The zone of the right bank extends
as far as the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the
south, and to the Pont des Arts on the east. Its
line of demarcation literally cuts in two the
Chamber of Deputies, of which the facade
opposite the Seine is a Parliamentary incrusta-
tion upon the more ancient town residence of
the Duchesse de Bourbon, the real front of which
looks towards the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and
is of the left bank proper. Such overlapping is
inevitable in a city where centralizing tendencies

172 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

are constantly on the increase, whose adminis-
trative maw is ever opening wider; but in all
other respects the left bank remains intact
without any influence from the right to seriously
affect its intimate spirit, and the right continues
its development towards the west and north,
multiplying streets of classic line, which with
their tree borders are merely green and white
in summer, or white and grey-black in winter.
Then, after a lengthy stroll, we reach the nine-
teenth-century splendour, the real if somewhat
insipid beauty of that vast avenue leading to
the Bois de Boulogne, with its plethora of florid
brick and decorated stone and blue slate,
recalling the rigid domestic propriety, the
flounced crinolines and shot silks of the mid-
Victorian era, which was once named, and in
point of shadow and souvenir still is, the
Avenue of the Empress. We have passed
through the Ministerial and Ambassadorial
suburbs, neat and patched with gilt like a diplo-
matic uniform ; we have left behind us that
other section of Paris that thinks and works.

To the west, but farther to the north, lies a
vast and seething quarter, of all periods and of
none, whose streets are populous and squalid,
or so solitary and silent as to appear to be
hushing up a crime ; but they have this in com-

THE SHADOWS OF PARIS 173

mon, that their shadows are, as it were, deaf and
dumb, without receptivity or power of ex-
pression, being, indeed, merely shadows of
shadows — shadows of scenes which are dormant
during the day, and whose echoes are for the
moment mute. This is the so-called European
Quarter, and it is here that Paris plays — a
quarter that gets up very late in the morning,
in a state of somnolent frowsiness, pallid, and
not over-tidy, the dejection of mal anx cheveux,
or katzenjammer, visible upon its tired face, in
its sordid deshabille. Those eyes of a street
which are its windows remain in the European
Quarter, or at least with respect to most of its
dwelling tenements, sleepily closed till noon,
and in some cases for the whole of the day, only
opening at supper-time, when the rattle of cabs
and carriages and automobiles on the cobbled
pavements below announce that the nocturnal
pandemonium of Montmartre and Clichy and
Rochechouart, of the Place Blanche, the Place
Pigalle, and the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, is
once more in full swing. Then the Paris that
plays becurtains and bemantles itself in vast
masses of shadow, the depth and concealing
powers of which are intensified and added to by
the brilliance of the illumination which streams
from cafes and restaurants and the facades of

174 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

music-halls and dancing-saloons, from a thou-
sand and one dens of delirium and doubtful
delight. Draped in these fantastic shadows, the
circular Place Clichy and Place Pigalle, with
their flaring all-night houses, the Abbaye de
Theleme, the Rat Mort, or Dead Rat, the
Nouvelle Athenes, or New Athens (save the
mark !), resemble huge merry-go-rounds, in-
vaded by madmen and madwomen. The whole
European Quarter turns itself into a roaring
Vanity Fair ; and when at last the frantic scene
is over, its black masses of shadow, of which the
blazing sails of the Red Mill are perhaps the
most notable luminous foyer, gradually fade
into relative nothingness, and powerless now
to hide the red-handed Apache, or " Thug,"
from the belated reveller, his unsuspecting prey,
having lost all character, or raison d'itre as
shadows of Paris that plays, as shadows of evil
or shadows of death, they flee the daylight,
what time a pale sunbeam creeps along the
balconies of the Rue de Clichy like some shame-
ful yellow cat climbing furtively home at dawn
after a night's debauch upon the tiles.

CHAPTER XII
A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING

If you enter No. 8, Rue Maubeuge, an uphill,
unimpressive, but busy street in Paris, which
connects as with a long tube the " quarter n of
the Opera with that of the Northern Railway
Station; if you pass up the dingily carpeted
staircase to the fourth-floor (there is no lift in
the house, which is still lit with gas), you will
find yourself standing on a worn mat in front
of an oak-stained door, affixed to which is a
well-polished brass plate, with the words en-
graved on it :

M. Adolphe Delprat,

ARCHITECTE.

Monsieur Delprat is a Parisian of the type
known as the bon bourgeois, or respectable citizen
of moderate means. So his flat is composed of
only four pieces, or living-rooms — namely, a
dining-room and a sitting-room, which look out
on to the street, and two chambres, or bedrooms,

i75

176 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

which receive their light from the courtyard at
the back of the house. It has, moreover, an
" entrance/ ' which to the uninitiated mind
might seem even more indispensable than the

YOU WILL FIND YOURSELF STANDING ON A WORN MAT.

staircase. But in Paris houses an entree means
an entrance-hall, often little more, as in the
present case, than a narrow corridor, in which it
is just possible to place a hat-rack and an um-

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 177

brella-stand. There is also a diminutive room
which Monsieur Delprat uses as an office, having
filled it with a wooden board on trestles, and
two cane-bottomed chairs. Architect's instru-
ments and plans strew the wooden board. Then
there is a kitchen exactly a yard and a half
square, and on the sixth-floor is a chambre de
bonne the same size as the kitchen, which is the
bedroom of Monsieur Delprat' s one domestic ser-
vant, a bonne d toutes mains, who works steadily
fourteen hours a day in return for thirty
shillings a month wages, with lodging, board,
and washing. Monsieur Delprat pays two thou-
sand francs (£80) a year for his flat, including fifty
francs (£2) for the chambre de bonne, and it is
now ten years that he has lived in it with his
wife, one daughter, and a son. He and his wife
occupy one of the bedrooms, his daughter the
other, and the son sleeps in the dining-room
on a folding-bed, which during the daytime is
disguised as a sofa. Madame Delprat is from
Bordeaux. She has the Bordelais features,
round and classical, somewhat full, with black
hair and dark eyes, and she has something of
the Bordelais languor. Her daughter, Made-
leine, is now seventeen, a tall fair girl with dark
eyes, livelier than her mother. The son, Louis,
is fifteen, and an externe, or dayboy, at the

12

178 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

neighbouring College Chaptal. He is thin,
sallow, angular, and talks with lightning volu-
bility. His sister teases, bullies and caresses
him in turn. He treats her as a kind of being
apart, whose ideas are necessarily outside the
sphere of reason. She revenges herself by
passing criticisms on his occupations, and getting
him into scrapes with his father. His constant
retort is : " Thou art a girl. Thou understandest
nothing therein f" He bears no malice, and
keeps up such an incessant chatter about pho-
tography, postage-stamps, school politics, and the
invention of a new flying-machine, that the
sarcasms of Madeleine have exactly the same
effect upon him as have the midgets and flies
with which a chauffeur comes into stinging col-
lision when whirling along at the rate of sixty
miles an hour. His father M destines him for
commerce,' ' but his secret intention is to be an
airman. There are thousands of Parisian boys
like Louis, leading identically the same lives,
just as there are thousands of Parisian girls cut
to the same pattern as is Madeleine, vivacious,
active young creatures, revelling in the simple
pleasures of their little world.

Monsieur Delprat is tall, lanky, with an
immense shock of reddish-brown hair and a big
reddish beard. His expression is one of con-

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 179

stant amazement, which is ready at any moment
to develop into indignation. Some of his friends
describe him as a hurluberlu, others as a ahuri,
and both words characterize him well enough.
His mind is mostly in a state of hurly-burly.
The ahuri is the chronically flabbergasted man.
It is wonderful how many ahuris there are
among French architects of the less prosperous
kind. Can it be that architecture, more than
any other art, fosters the grain of insanity in-
separable from genius ? Monsieur Delprat
would not accuse you of exaggerating if you
were to describe him as a genius, but nonethe-
less he has been obliged, in order to earn a living,
to limit his architectural activity almost ex-
clusively to the gerance, or management of
apartment houses ; in other words, he is a land-
lord's agent. This rate, or half -failure of a man,
is, without knowing it, one of the happiest of
human beings, for, like all disappointed people,
he has the whole field of criticism open to him,
and his excursions across it are frequent and
varied. He is a frantic politician, opposed to
any government for the time being, and is a
fervent antisemite. To listen to him, France
is the most hopeless, helpless, and ill-governed
of countries. He is constantly holding up to her
the examples of America and England, where

i8o SENSATIONS OF PARIS

he has never set foot. " Ah," he says, " how
differently the English would have managed that !
In America, my dear sir, it is impossible for
such things to happen. In England or America
the law enforces this, or the nation insists upon
that/ ' England and America would be very odd
places indeed if Adolphe Delprat's Utopian
descriptions of their customs and laws bore any
resemblance to the truth.

With the interest of his wife's dot, Monsieur
Delprat's income is £480 a year, of which he
manages to put by about £20, and to have £30 to
spare for an annual fortnight's outing with his
family to the seaside. Every summer the
question where they shall go is debated with
fervour by the Delprat family.

Already in the middle of June the street
hoardings in Paris are covered with advertise-
ments of rural and seaside resorts. Le Treport,
on the Norman border, is personified by a
charming girl, with yellow hair, tripping back
from her dip in the sea. At Sables d'Olonne,
in Brittany, a pretty Breton peasant-woman is
represented in national costume, sitting in the
shrouds of a sailing-ship. To Jean Veber, the
illustrious caricaturist, is due a fantastic depict-
ment of the Hotel de la Foret at Fontainebleau,
where, so the public is informed, there is neither

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 181

" casino, theatre, nor tziganes," but, in place
of them, " urbanity, good cooking, and French
comfort." In the foreground of Monsieur Veber's
composition, in which the gnarled oaks have
foliage which resembles clouds of blond smoke,

THE STREET HOARDINGS ARE COVERED WITH ADVERTISE-
MENTS OF SEASIDE RESORTS.

a bandy-legged landlord is opening wide his
arms to a number of little fat dwarfs who have
arrived in an automobile apparently carved out
of a pumpkin. In a highly-coloured plan, Sainte-
Adresse, " the Nice-Havrais," a watering-place

r

182 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

entirely built and owned by the millionaire pro-
prietor of a vast emporium at Montmartre, looks,
with its perfectly straight streets, rising tier
upon tier in front of a very blue sea, covered
with strange craft, like an agglomeration of
doll's-houses. But it has the spick-and-span
neatness and newness which appeal to most
middle-class Parisians. On another poster, an
elderly Parisian, with white eyebrows, spectacles
poised on the tip of his nose, and a huge pointed
straw hat, sits, bare-armed and bare-legged, in
a punt lazily fishing. This scene is laid at Vaires,
on the Marne, at twenty kilometres' distance
from Paris. At Cabourg, where the main at-
tractions are " a new kursaal, golfing, lawn-
tennis, and yachting/ ' two unusually stout ladies
are figured in the water, bathing and splashing
each other, one in a black, the other in a red
costume. The artist in this case is plainly an
impressionist.

Louis Delprat is describing these posters in his
voluble way at the dinner-table, when his father,
letting the ladle fall into the soup with a splash,
exclaims : " Cabourg ! But thou art mad, my
poor child ! Thou thinkest not therein ! Every-
thing at Cabourg costs the eyes of the head.
It is the most expensive place in France, and,
besides, chock-full of Jews. Thou wouldst not

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 183

that thy father should thither go." Further-
more, says Monsieur Delprat, Cabourg is so
crowded with automobiles that all the roads
around it are quite unsafe for people on foot.
Naturally, in a democratic country like France,
it suffices to be rich enough to possess a motor-
car to have the right to endanger human lives
with impunity. Now, in America or England
such a thing would not be tolerated for a
moment. " Oh, bother England and America I"
interposes Madeleine undutifully. " Why not
go to Trouville ? I am sick of the petits trous
pas chers (the inexpensive little holes) which
you and mother are so fond of. They are just
as dear in the long-run/ ' But her father, after
begging her to be calm and reasonable, maintains
that during the very brief season at Trouville
everything is abominably dear and proportion-
ately bad to an even greater degree than at
Cabourg, and that there is nothing more mortally
dull than a fashionable resort when the season
is over. The chief charm of Trouville, the
lovely winding road along the coast to the mouth
of the Seine at Honfleur, called the " Corniche
Normande," because it is, if anything, more
beautiful than the famous " Route de la Cor-
niche " at Cannes, has also been spoilt by in-
numerable automobiles driven at frantic speed

184 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

by arrogant and cosmopolitan parvenus. Viller-
ville, between Trouville and Honfleur, is far
prettier, and, though cheaper, attracts a better
class of visitor. " I know one delightful inn
there," says Monsieur Delprat, " the Hotel des
Parisiens — embowered in roses and honeysuckle,
where the pension, including the room, does not
exceed eight shillings a day. Villerville, more-
over, has an ancient fame for its mussels, and,
as you know very well, your poor father adores
mussels, which is, I suppose, the reason why
Madame Delprat never dreams of having them
on the table."

Indolent Madame Delprat, who helps in the
kitchen, hates mussels because they take so long
to clean, but she answers : " I am so dreadfully
afraid of them." " Bah !" murmurs her hus-
band. He admits, however, that the bathing
at Villerville is poor, owing to mud deposits
from the Seine. Even at Trouville the water
is more brackish than salt, and it is only at
Deauville, Trouville' s aristocratic suburb, that
you come to the real sea. But Deauville is one
of the many places where it is a rule in the
hotels to dress for dinner, and this Monsieur
Delprat resolutely refuses to do. "I agree," he
says, " with Whistler, the great American
painter (ah, there was an artist !) who said

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 185

one might just as well dress to sit in an omnibus
as go dressed to a table d'hote/' For this reason
fitretat is barred, though greatly frequented by
Americans and English ; but it is strait-laced
and formal, and too much uphill for Madame
Delprat, who hates walking. As for Sainte-
Adresse, Monsieur Delprat trusts that his chil-
dren will kindly remember that their father is
an architect of some distinction, who, but for
the notoriety of his political opinions, would
long ago have been created a Knight of the
Legion of Honour, and that they will therefore
have sufficient respect for him not even to
mention Sainte-Adresse in his hearing. Only in
a country on the eve of collapse would such an
architectural abomination have been permitted.
Boulogne is pestered by the cheapest class of
Saturday to Monday excursionists, and Monsieur
Delprat can never forget spending twelve mortal
hours on a hundred-mile excursion to the sea in
the company of his late maiden aunt. She had
taken her canary-bird with her so that it also
might benefit from the sea-air ! It died the
next day from nervous exhaustion, and Monsieur
Delprat was subsequently omitted from his
aunt's will. Dieppe attracts Madeleine on
account of its casino, with the " little horses "
(for both she and her mother are fond of a

186 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

cheap gamble) ; but Monsieur Delprat, while
recognizing that the daily spectacle of the
British passengers arriving from Newhaven is
morally invigorating, objects to the dirtiness
and narrowness of the Dieppe streets, the
inferiority of the cuisine in the Dieppe hotels,
and to the lack of shade on the promenades.
Besides, the beach is pebbly. Le Treport has
an evil-smelling harbour. Vaires, he insists, is
far more to his liking than any seaside place.
" I don't know/' he argues, " why you should
all be so mad on spending your holiday by the
sea. There is no rest to be got there. The
sea is always making a noise. It rants, roars,
screams, and whistles, and is never still for a
minute/ ' Madeleine exchanges a look with her
mother. Vaires, acording to Monsieur Delprat,
is far more the typical villegiature, or holiday
resort, of the real Parisian. He grows senti-
mental over the recollection of his boyhood's
vacations spent on the banks of the green and
crystal-clear Marne. Joinville-le-Pont, Nogent-
sur-Marne, Le Perreux, were then at the height
of their glory — places fallen now, owing to the
outspread of Paris, which has practically swal-
lowed them up, to the general preference for the
seaside, and the passion for long distances
which came in with the bicycle and the auto-

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 187

mobile. But, oh, the joys of the little river-
side pavilion, or cottage, with its big garden
filled with flowers and vegetables and fruit-
trees, en plein rapport, with laden branches.
It was but a cab-drive to get there ! No need
of railways. Boating, fishing, and bathing, were
the day-long amusements. The boats would be
called " tubs " nowadays, but you could " do "
the tour de la Mame with them, that adorably
picturesque loop which the Marne makes at its
junction with the Seine, and some adventurous
spirits had even rowed in them as far as
Meaux. What futures of gudgeon and roach
were caught ! And the bathing in the river —
hundreds of pretty Parisiennes jumping in and
out of the water from the vast bathing pontoons.
Their laughter could be heard almost as far as
Paris. But all this is now a thing of the past.
Even the pontoons have been removed, and the
little Parisiennes have gone farther afield ; in
fact, Paris-Plage is now about the nearest place
where you are likely to find them. But Paris-
Plage is a bit too democratic for Madame
Delprat and Madeleine. It is there that you
are sure to meet your concierge, and the grocer
and his family from the corner of the street,
conditions incompatible with " a thorough
change.' ! Veules-les-Roses, close to Valery in

188 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

the Norman Caux country, has a romantic name
which appeals to Madeleine's imagination, but
her father holds that its former unsophisticated
charms are on the decline, that its roses have
withered, and, moreover, the shadow of the
swallow-tail coat (Monsieur Delprat uses the
expression queue de morue, or " cod-tail ") has
fallen on its tables d'hote. Clearly, the choice
for the Delprats lies between the coasts of
Normandy and Brittany. Louis does not care
where they go, as long as the roads are fit for
bicycling and he can fly a kite on the seashore.
In Brittany prices rule lower than in Normandy,
and the scenery, if not so pretty, is more varied ;
but, the distances being greater, the travelling
expenses are double or treble. Monsieur Delprat
proposes to study the special conditions for
" collective family tickets M on the Northern
line, and sends Louis for the latest " Chaix/' or
Official Railway Guide. His anger is excessive
when he is referred in the ordinary ' ' Chaix " to
the " Illustrated Chaix Guide " for this par-
ticular information. " A trick to make you
buy two books ! Ah, France ! France !" he
mutters. But, from the data supplied by the
other railway companies, he gathers that for
the first three persons of a family party there
is no reduction, but for every additional person

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 189

the price of the return ticket is the same as that
of a single ticket. Two children aged from
three to seven count as one person. The family
is defined as consisting of father, mother, sons,
daughters, father-in-law, mother-in-law, uncles,
aunts, and domestic servants. By a special
privilege the head of the family — and this, at
least, says Monsieur Delprat, is an intelligent
arrangement — may return alone to his point of
departure. In Paris and some of the larger
French towns the collective family ticket must
be applied for half an hour before the train starts,
but three hours beforehand is the limit at all
other stations. A similar rule applies to the
voiture d galerie, or cab, with a roof railed in to
secure the baggage. It transports the family
from any address in Paris to or from the station,
and is supplied by the railway companies for
two francs fifty centimes, or two shillings. It
must be ordered at least six hours in advance,
but if ordered earlier an additional fee of one
franc is charged. Monsieur Delprat expresses
the utmost contempt for these chinoiseries (chi-
nes eries), as he calls them. The same ridicu-
lous system prevails in the French theatres,
where you pay more for your tickets if you buy
them in advance, when reasonably you ought,
in the circumstance, to pay less.

igo SENSATIONS OF PARIS

It is not until some days after this inconclusive
debate at the dinner-table that the Delprats
finally decide to spend the holidays at Fort-
Mahon, a new seaside place on the Northern
line halfway between Saint-Valery and Berck.
Saint-Valery itself they hold to be too near the
mouth of the Somme, while Berck is objectionably
full of little consumptive patients belonging to a
local sanatorium. From a neatly-printed book-
let, illustrated with photographs, and sent to
him by the Initiative Committee of Fort-Mahon
— an act of enterprise to which he approvingly
attributes an American inspiration — Monsieur
Delprat discovers that the proprietor of the
principal hotel there is an old schoolmate, from
whom he can, therefore, expect a specially
hospitable welcome. Fort-Mahon is the nearest
sand-beach to Paris, whence it can be reached
in three hours. It is a family place. Madame
Delprat will be able to spend all her days lolling
in a cabane, or little summer-house, built of
planks, on the sand, and facing the sea. The
hire of one of these diminutive constructions
will not exceed twenty francs. Among the
various amusements promised by the booklet is
a kite competition, which will amuse Louis.
Madeleine will have to do without a casino and
" little horses," but the Committee of Fetes,

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 191

presided over by a real Marquis, seems to be a
" live " corporation, and what with innumerable
dances, photographic competitions, torchlight
processions, musical festivals, rabbit-hunts, the
Beach Fete on the first Sunday in August,

MADELEINE IS NOW SEVENTEEN.

and the picturesque Benediction of the Sea,
Madeleine will find ample scope for frolic and
flirtation. The magnificent chapel of the Saint-
Esprit, a gem of late Gothic architecture, in
the neighbouring village of Rue, will supply
Monsieur Delprat with an endless subject of

ig2 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

controversy with his neighbours at the table
d'hote. So the Delprats fix the day for their
departure. Their " collective family ticket "
costs them four pounds eight shillings. They
pay an extra eight shillings for the registration
of their excess baggage, and a desperate scene
occurs between Monsieur Delprat and the
baggage clerk, who has tried to pass off upon
him a Spanish five-franc piece. At last, after
a hot struggle through the crowds that are also
leaving Paris for the holidays, the Delprats are
safely seated in a second-class carriage, of which
they occupy the four corners. Madame Delprat
has already opened a packet of sandwiches, and
is eating them, in spite of the fact that she
breakfasted only an hour previously. She
champions that ancient belief still widely spread
in Europe, that, on any railway journey lasting
more than an hour, it is imperative to take
stringent precautions against suddenly dying
from hunger en route. Monsieur Delprat is
attracting more or less sympathetic attention
from the six other people in the carriage by his
violent denunciations of the French monetary
system, apropos of his dispute with the baggage
clerk, who, he swears, was a Jew. " In what
other civilized country in the world," he asks,
4 ' is it permitted to circulate certain foreign

A PARISIAN HOLIDAY-MAKING 193

coins to the exclusion of certain others ? An
Italian five-franc piece is good, but a Spanish
one you must refuse. If the figure of Helvetia
on a Swiss coin is sitting down, you may accept
it ; if it is standing up, you mustn't ; or, according

A DESPERATE SCENE OCCURS WITH THE
BAGGAGE CLERK.

to some people, it is the other way round.
Nobody seems to know. If Louis Philippe^ is
crowned on a one-franc piece, well and good •
if he's not crowned, then you've been swindled.
Do you suppose that in America such folly

13

194 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

would be tolerated for an instant ?" And as a
bilious-eyed listener volunteers a hesitating
" No," Monsieur Delprat, emboldened, launches
into a noisy demonstration of the general
superiority of Anglo - Saxon institutions over
those of France. He calls attention to the
notice posted up in the carriage in French and
English, " II est dangereux de se pencher en
dehors M (Dangerous to lean out), and shows
his son Louis that it takes exactly eight words
to say in French what can be said in English
in four. He attacks the French judicial system
as tending to bring about the miscarriage of
justice, while the French marriage laws, he says,
are responsible for the decline in the birth-rate,
and actually encourage race suicide. His dis-
course is beginning to get on the nerves of his
audience, and an explosion from Madeleine is
imminent, when the ticket-collector, who is a
wag, good - humoredly interrupts him with :
" Now, Monsieur Roosevelt — tickets please I"

CHAPTER XIII

THE VOICE OF PARIS

. . . Like banners, from those turrets old,
Your bells shake forth their clouds of gold !
Their voice is in the light and shade,

The radiant gloom,
Which bathe this Renaissance facade.
It lingers in the dark cascade

Of that green fountain-tomb,
With black leaves spread,
Where Polyphemus bends his head,

And all around
This temple's domed and brooding brow,

With laurel crowned,

It wreathes the incense of its sound.
It shrives the dying flowers, and now
Chases the swallows out of sight,
Rising and falling with their flight !

Thus a poet has described the chiming of the
bells of Saint-Sulpice Church heard from the
Luxembourg Gardens, with the ancient Renais-
sance Palace of the Luxembourg in front of him,
and to the right Marie de M6dicis* funereal
fountain and the incomparable dome of the
Pantheon. Nothing characterizes a city more
than its noises. An American friend of mine

i95

196 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

was driven away from Venice, which is said to
be the quietest city in the world, by the noise
of voices. With no horse traffic, no motor
omnibuses, no electric tramways, to drown it
with their din, the human voice acquires in
Venice a resonance, a force of penetration, which
it lacks in other centres of activity, so that
conversation carried on between two people in
a Venetian street, even in a low tone, is so
acutely audible as to cause torture, if the ear
upon which it persistently falls be at all delicate
or sensitive. When Alphonse Daudet returned
from his first and last visit to London, some
ten or twelve years ago, he told me that what
had struck him most was the silence of the
London streets as compared with those of Paris.
This impression was, he thought, mainly to be
ascribed to the coldness and taciturnity of the
English population. Perhaps if he were to be
in London now he would have reason to modify
his opinion. There is certainly more vocal
noise in the streets of all the European capitals
than there was a decade ago, and it is on the
increase. The foreigners are more numerous,
facilities for travel having so much developed,
and it is the tendency of all foreigners to be
vociferous when travelling. In London, par-
ticularly, the drifting population of French

THE VOICE OF PARIS 197

visitors is ten times what it was at the beginning
of the century, and their gesticulatory talka-
tiveness violently contrasts with the mono-
syllabic stolidity of the natives. " Straight
ahead !" says the London " bobby/ ' if you ask
him the way, or he may content himself with a
mere jerk of the forefinger. " Mais nous n'avez
qu'a poursuivre directement cette rue dans
laquelle vous vous trouvez, monsieur, et vous
verrez la maison en question au coin de la
premiere rue a votre gauche." "Je vous
remercie infiniment, monsieur." " II n'a a pas
de quoi, monsieur." Thus the French " agent/
the policeman of Paris. Or he will carefully
enumerate the streets that you must not take ,
and if he happens to wear upon his arm a
tricolour band with the word " Interpreter " or
' Dolmetscher " upon it, he will repeat his
information in English or German with the same
discursiveness.

Paris is eloquent. Above the multifarious
noises of the street, which are of a mechanical
origin, or may proceed from the brute creation,
there constantly arises the wail of protestation,
the yell of denunciatory wrath. Two Paris
drivers collide with each other, or narrowly
escape a collision. " Ours !" (Bear !) shouts
one. " Fourneau !" (Fire - stove !) bellows

198 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

the other. If damage has been done, a police-
man intervenes. He produces a pocket-book
and a pencil, and takes down in longhand a
verbatim report of the speeches on both sides.
During the careful performance of this task a
crowd collects. The debate becomes general.
Two parties are formed. Orator vociferates
against orator. The language is not always
parliamentary, but, if a little surcharged with
adjective, like the earlier efforts of the Roman-
ticists, it is amazingly eloquent. At last the
14 agent " takes a platform — il prend la parole —
and imposes silence with Speaker-like authority
in a voice louder than anybody else's. His is
at once a summing-up, a verdict, a passing of
sentence, a Ministerial declaration. The crowd
passes a vote of confidence in the Government
by adjourning to the next street corner. For
the time being, at any rate, a revolution has
been averted.

Paris, in many of its districts, is built over
the catacombs. These vast subterranean
chambers and galleries produce that peculiar
cavernous sound which is heard in the Luxem-
bourg, Montparnasse, Vaugirard, Montrouge, and
Montsouris quarters when heavy carts pass
rapidly along the coarsely metalled roads. The
streets are then like monstrous drums beating

THE VOICE OF PARIS 199

funeral marches to the grave over that vast
common grave of generations of Parisians, with
its millions of skeleton dead. That quaint little
Gothic house at the corner of the recently-
prolonged Boulevard Raspail, which many an
American artist must remember from his student
days, actually has a private staircase leading to
the catacombs from beneath a hermetically-
closed stone slab just in front of the doorstep.
From time to time certain municipal officials
visit this grim entrance, the existence of which
is known to only very few people. A former
occupant of the house, surprised by one of these
visits, the reason of which was mysterious to
him, was accustomed to relate that once, in
the dead of night, while he watched, quaking,
from the room above, convinced that he was
witnessing the final scene in some Borgia-like
political tragedy, a party of men, the chief of
whom wore half concealed under his coat the
tricolour scarf of a police commissary, had con-
veyed a body through this entrance into the
catacombs below. A few days later he was
annoyed by a cadaverous smell rising through
the boards of his dining-room floor. The
nuisance was almost certainly attributable to
a dead rat, but, to complete his discomfort,
every morning at five o'clock an empty school

200 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

omnibus, belonging to the College Stanislas,
passed through the narrow street on its way to
pick up pupils, rousing the thunderous and
sepulchral echoes of the catacombs with such
vibratory effect as to give him alarming pal-
pitations of the heart. Being a man of imagina-
tive temperament, he decided to transfer his
residence to the right bank of the Seine. He
had also been much troubled by the noise of
cats. Formerly he had lived on the skirts of
Montmartre, and it was only when he had
crossed the Seine to the left bank that he learned
that Paris is divided, by those who know her
intimately well, into the dog zone and the cat
zone. He had entered the cat zone. He had
penetrated to the very heart or citadel of it, for
countless cats, evidently without homes, and in
a wild state, rendered the days nervous and
electric by their ceaseless squabbles, and the
nights sleepless by their caterwauling. He had
tried to entice them into his house, but they
had been proof against all his persuasions.
Evidently they were cats that had never tasted
dairy milk or any Christian food. Pariahs,
sleeping on house-roofs, under bridges, in the
Luxembourg Gardens, where they not infre-
quently coil themselves up in the laps of the
seated statues, haunting the many private

THE VOICE OF PARIS 201

gardens for which the left bank is still noted,
there is reason to believe that they are the
wild descendants of the pet cats which were
turned into the streets during the most san-
guinary period of the Revolution. It was pre-
cisely these suburbs, with their ancient family
mansions and convents, that suffered most from
the dreadful visitations of the Comite de la
Surete. Every day during the Terror some
hapless family of aristocrats was dragged to
the Revolutionary Tribunal, and, after a mock
trial lasting a few moments, conveyed to the
Place de la Nation for immediate execution.

It was here, on the left bank of the Seine, in
the zone which comprises the Faubourg Saint-
Honore\ the site of the Abbaye des Bois (just
pulled down), the stately palaces of the Rue de
Sevres, the Rue de Vaugirard, the Rue Cassette,
the Rue de Tournon, that Fouquier-Tinville,
the tigrish public accuser of the Commune de
Paris, selected his most distinguished and noble
victims. Each devastated house contained, as
a rule, a cat, which henceforward became an
outcast and a wanderer, the servants having
in many cases shared the fate of their masters
and mistresses. If the domestic pet happened
to be a dog, it was most probably destroyed, or
it found a new master, but the cat is less adapt-

202 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

able to changed conditions. Like a Corsican
bandit, but with the vendetta against all
humanity in its heart, it took to the tnaquis,
or M bush," as it were, afforded by the richly
wooded parks and gardens, which at that period,
and until some half-century ago, made the left
bank of Paris famous throughout the world.

No doubt these cats subsisted chiefly on the
rats which swarm in these parts, and it was to
keep down this pest that they had been primarily
employed. To-day the rats are still very
numerous. Their presence in this neighbour-
hood is another cause of attraction to all the
homeless cats of Paris, which, when they are
not on a rat-hunt, fraternize or fight with the
pet cats belonging to the numerous old maids
the quiet professors, the retired tradespeople,
senators, literary men, and composers, who form
the mainstay of its human population. At mid-
night the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Boule-
vard Montparnasse, the Boulevard Saint-Michel,
are alive with rats, gambolling round the trees
which line the side-walks — rats of the big
brown species, which years ago exterminated
the old indigenous grey rat of Paris, fearless
and familiar almost to the point of being tame.
" What is that shrill squeaking which I hear
around me?" asks the inexperienced visitor of

THE VOICE OF PARIS 203

his Parisian friend as he sits in the summer on
one of these boulevards sipping the nocturnal
bock. " That, monsieur, is a rat which a cat
has just caught. Look! don't you see the rats
— dozens of them — popping in and out of the
iron cages, shaped like crinolines, which protect
the trunks of the trees ?"

The vocal drawbacks of the cat and dog zones
of Paris are serious, but they are relieved by
more harmonious animal noises. In spite of
the modernization of the left bank of the Seine,
which has left little of the old verdure and wealth
of ancient trees, the nightingale may still be
heard on summer nights in the garden of the
convent of Cistercian nuns in the Rue Notre
Dame des Champs. The blackbird, the thrush,
and the starling, make melodious the leafy glades
and avenues of the Tuileries Gardens, and of
the public parks at Buttes Chaumont, Monceau,
and Montsouris. In all open spaces of Paris fat
pigeons coo. They, and the sparrows, whose
constant chorus of twittering is so loud some-
times as to be seriously interruptive of brain-
work, are tame enough to take food from the
hand, and flourish in such numbers that in the
Luxembourg Gardens the flower-beds have to
be protected from their depredations and wallow-
ing propensities by thin copper netting.

204 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Police regulations have been framed to protect
the Parisian population from certain classes of
noises, but they are not always heeded. Barrel-
organs have been suppressed. The hideous
barking of draught dogs, which is such a nuisance
in Berlin and Brussels, is unknown in the French
capital, where dogs may not be employed to
pull carts. On the other hand, the police have
found it impossible to prevent the cracking
of whips. Though forbidden by a law, whip-
cracking enters so instinctively into the character
of the French driver, whether he be cabman or
drayman, that, unless a definite complaint be
lodged, there is no official interference. Hu-
manitarians, moreover, contend that whip-
cracking is in some measure a protection for
the Parisian horse. It is a relief to the French
drivers feelings, it is dramatic and eloquent, and,
while serving to rouse a lethargic animal, does
not cause him physical pain. This is a point
that deserves to be brought home to the
numerous kind-hearted English and Americans,
principally ladies, who, when in Paris, demon-
strate so vigorously against what they call the
brutal whipping of the cab-horses.

The ringing of the church bells in Paris is
permissible only with the consent of the Mayors
in each municipal district, except on Sundays

THE VOICE OF PARIS 205

and public holidays. In the Socialist districts
it is reduced to a minimum. In the wealthier
quarters one can form some idea of what Paris
must have been in the middle of the eighteenth
century, when it was celebrated above all cities
in Europe, including even Rome, for its bell-
ringing. This echo, faint as it is, has an in-
describable charm.

It is a police regulation which obliges every
cab with pneumatic tyres — and there are few
now that are not so provided — to carry a jingling
bell, which makes the approach of the cab
distinctly audible on the noiseless asphalt.
The ringing of bells enters largely into the
orchestral composition of the Paris noises.
Bicyclists jingle them, and on the gaily be-
ribboned harness of the great dray-horses there
are clusters of the little bells called grelots,
which keep up a silvery chatter, a tinkling chime,
adding much to the musical colour of the
Parisian atmosphere. It is like a continuous
ripple of laughter in perfect accord with the
bright gaiety and movement of the streets.
Then the drivers of the tramways sound a gong,
or blow a whistle, the note of which varies with
the different lines ; and the tramway conductors
have a little brass horn which they sound as a
signal for starting or stopping. There are tram-

206 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

cars which are provided with hooters, and the
noise they make must, by law, be easily dis-
tinguishable from that of the fire-engine hooter.
The public chair-mender also has a horn. The
itinerant seller of goat's milk, wearing the
Basque cap (the beret), and followed by his docile
herd of she-goats, plays a diminutive bagpipe
or else a rustic flute. The marchand de
plaisir [plaisir is a thin cake made with flour
and sugar) rattles a wooden clapper. The
motor-car, which in the open country is allowed
to blow a siren or a whistle, is restricted in
Paris to the use of the horn. The rare four-in-
hands which have survived the motor craze
sound a horn when driving through the central
streets of the city, but are forbidden by an old
imperial restriction to play in the Avenue du
Bois de Boulogne, and in the Bois itself.

Clearly, amidst this babel of mechanical sound,
to which must be added the shriek of the loco-
motives on the Ceinture Railway and the hollow
raw hoot of the steam-tugs on the Seine, the
old street-cries of Paris have but little chance
of making themselves heard, and this explains
their increasing tendency to disappear. A few
however, survive. The hawker of cherries still
sanctifies the spring afternoons with his " La
douce cerise . . . la douce !" (The sweet cherry

THE VOICE OF PARIS 207

. . . the sweet!), on a long-drawn-out wail,
psalmodic in its melancholy reminder that the
end of all good things is at hand. A more
vitalizing because a more peremptory cry is
that of the mussel-man, with his harsh " Voila
la moule ! Elle est bonne. Elle est fraiche.
Achetez la moule !" (Behold the mussel ! She
is good. She is fresh. Buy the mussel!).
In addition to blowing his horn, the chair-
mender and the itinerant cobbler, for a reason
which has never been explained, give vent to
savage roars, lion-like in their ear-splitting
reverberations, which in the quieter suburbs
startle the entire street, and people the window-
casements with terrified housemaids, " Voila
le cor-r-r-rdonnie-e-e-er-r-r I" as if the last
trump were being sounded. On a gentler note
are the cries of " Fresh lavender !" "Good
asparagus I" u Chand d' habits I" (the old-clothes
dealer), " Buy my roses !" "II arrive, il arrive,
le maquereau I" (Just arrived, just arrived,
mackerel !) ; " Fromage a la cr&me . . . fro-
mage I" (Cream cheese . . . cheese !). The
window-mender is almost as strident as the
cobbler, while the plumber, whether itinerant
or not, has a peculiar whistle, which, like the
college cries of America, is peculiar to his cor-
poration, making his presence known to any

208 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

other plumber who may happen to be at work
in the neighbourhood — a valuable resource for
thirsty or lonely plumbers.

The charm of these old cries is that they are
echoes of a Paris which in nearly every detail,
whether of architecture or the customs and
costumes of its inhabitants, has vanished or is
vanishing. They call up the vision of a city
without any of the modern noisy traffic, in the
days when the Champs filysees were covered
with wild-flowers, and, in the absence of steam,
electricity, and petrol, the hours moved more
slowly. Then the sale of sweetmeats to small
children was accompanied by the chanting of
a plaintive tune which was as old as the fairies.
To-day a ten-centime piece is placed in the slot
of an automatic machine.

Quite as ancient a corporation as the street
criers are the street musicians. It is only on
the great national fete-days that they are
allowed real freedom, and in the wealthier
quarters their entrance to the courtyards of the
houses is forbidden, though it is rare that the
concierge, with the sentimentality of her class,
does not allow this order to be infringed. Their
music is rarely without a local or national note,
and this, perhaps, is its most marked pecu-
liarity. The Midi is represented by the classic

THE VOICE OF PARIS 209

pan-pipes and the semi-Oriental heart-throb-
bings of the French tambourine, which, unlike
the Spanish tambourine, is an elongated drum.
The Celtic centre of France, the Berri, sends
us its vielle, or hurdy-gurdy, with the plumed
bravuras, the amorous trills, and martial dancing
notes, of its rustic keyboard. The very last of
the Provencal troubadours, with that inde-
fatigable baritone voice which, through all ages
and all weathers, has remained true to the
romantic ideal, is here with his guitar. Alsatia
asserts her attachment to the mother-country
on trombones and clarinets. Savoy is personi-
fied by a tuneful but betattered infant with a
marmoset and an accordion. Except on special
occasions when the street corners are taken
possession of by the chanteurs de complaintes
(a survival, peculiar to Paris, of the old political
and topical ballad-mongers), who reel out in-
terminable relations of national events or sensa-
tional crimes, to an ancient argumentative
recitative which never varies, and is accompanied
by an excitable fiddle, the vocal music in the
streets and courtyards of Paris is blood-curdling
in its mournful appeal to charity. Each singer
has his day. In a certain house, near the
Church of St. Vincent de Paul, one used to know
that it was Tuesday afternoon by the arrival

14

210 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

of the man who had no tongue, and sang an
awful caricature of the " Marseillaise " through
a silver tube surgically inserted in his larynx.
On Wednesday it was the turn of that drunken
ruffian with the brow-beaten wife, who bawled
out with sentimental tremolos, " Petits oiseaux,
n'allez pas sur la plai-ai-ai-ne-e " (a warning
to the little birds of the cruel traps that are set
for them in the fields), while between each
verse he addressed a kick, or some shocking
oath, to his wretched companion : " Chante,
done, espece de brute !" (Sing up, you brute !)
For years it was on Friday afternoon that a
very old man with long white hair and beard,
and his foot in a sling, whined out on a note of
immeasurable melancholy an ancient ditty with
the refrain : " Buvons, buvons a la sante de nos
cent ans I" (Let us drink, let us drink to the
health of our hundredth year!). Then, one
Friday afternoon, the courtyard knew him no
more. His quavering voice was never again
to draw to the windows the little bonnes with
their wide, sympathetic stare and their willing
sous. He had drained the last glass. Every
winter freezes for all time one of these courtyard
voices.

CHAPTER XIV
A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT

When the two official blue bills appeared on the
white walls of the Cafe Anglais, announcing
that the place was shortly to be sold, it is not
too much to say that the whole gastronomic world
of Paris received a severe shock to the stomach.
What would the boulevard be without the
Cafe" Anglais ? Already the pitiless hand of
Time had been busy — especially of recent years
— in effacing many, and indeed most, of its
typical culinary landmarks. Tortoni's went
two lustres ago, and with it the famous flight
of three stone steps leading to its front door,
up which had walked every illustrious Parisian
from the Napoleonic days of Talleyrand and
Wellington to these latter times of Clemenceau
and Aurelien Scholl — a brilliant procession of
diplomatists, politicians, conquerors, dandies,
dreamers, and wits. Tortoni's is a fading
memory. Then the Maison Doree, just opposite
the Cafe Anglais, after a patriotic struggle

211

212 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

against the democratic wave which is inundating
the boulevard, heeled over and sank. Bignon's
had already gone down, and with it the evoca-
tive name of the Cafe Foy. The Cafe Riche was
not long in following the tragic example of the
Maison Doree. Brebant's, where Turgenieff,
Daudet, Renan, and Prince Jerome Napoleon,
were wont to foregather, had been better dead,
for it had dwindled to the level of a beer-saloon.
The Cafe Julien had struck its flag to a dry-
goods store. But none of these houses, essen-
tially boulevardier as they were, could vie with
the Cafe Anglais in Parisianism. Tortoni's, like
the Cafe Napolitain, which is still with us, had
an Italian inspiration which found material
expression in a speciality of ice-creams. The
Maison Doree, the one serious rival of the Cafe
Anglais, was its junior in years, and, though an
acknowledged temple of French cooking accord-
ing to the most sacred rites, lacked the serene
dignity and the exclusive royal and imperial
custom which give the Cafe Anglais its unique
tone. And as for the others — well, all the others
were, to use Verlaine's phrase, litter ature ; that
is to say, they exhibited objective forms, from
which pure art, in this case the art of living, on
the principle of living to eat and drink, was in
some essential detail lacking.

A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT 213

It was felt that the disappearance of the Cafe

Anglais would be the end of a world. For it

is now more than a hundred years since the Caf 6

Anglais was founded. The story of its genesis

is not without human and dramatic interest.

Before the French Revolution broke out, the

space behind the ramparts of the city (now the

boulevard), lying between what are to-day the

corners of the Rue de Richelieu, and the Rue

de Grammont, was occupied by the country

mansion and park of the Due de Choiseul, the

Foreign Minister of Louis XV. This was

pulled down on the Due's death, and in the

grounds surrounding it the existing streets

were then built. The boulevards, which had

been planted with trees some years before, were

just becoming fashionable as a promenade, and

so a number of minor restaurants sprang up

in their vicinity. Among these was the little

wayside eating-house, or cabaret, at the corner

of the Rue de Marivaux, which was to become

world-famous as the Cafe Anglais.

The name of its original owner has been lost
in the fog of ages. His establishment was
modest in appearance, and possessed this in-
convenience, that its floor was more than a yard
lower than the level of the boulevard. Even
now, on entering the Cafe Anglais, a step down-

214 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

ward must be taken. Its customers were few ;
but one day a band of gilded youths invaded
its precincts, and, finding the food good, and
the wine even better, they consecrated it to
their use. Chief among them was the very odd
Monsieur de Sourdeval. As soon as the vogue
of the little half-rustic cabaret was assured,
Monsieur de Sourdeval made a point of dining
there daily, after which he would invariably
proceed, in any sort of weather, to the Jardin
des Plantes, to look at the wild beasts, reciting
Latin verses on the way, and every night he
listened to the last act — never more than the
last act — of an opera, placing himself full in
view of the audience on the steps leading to the
orchestra. This is all that is known of Monsieur
de Sourdeval ; still, it sufficed to make him
immortal, and he was the first of a long line
of eccentric viveurs whose extravagancies helped
to give fame to the Cafe Anglais. But it was
not until the beginning of the last century,
after the Peace of Amiens, when the English were
free again to visit Paris, that the Cafe Anglais
achieved its present designation. The English
were then the only people in Europe who had
money " to burn," and they showed, regardless
of expense, their appreciation of the excellent
French cheer which was to be found at the little

A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT 215

boulevard house. They constituted, in fact, its
mainstay, and thus it took its name from them.
When war again broke out between the France
of Napoleon and the England of George III., the
Cafe Anglais, perforce abandoned by its best
customers, was on the verge of ruin. It was
saved by one dinner, a feast of such Gargantuan
proportions and culinary ingenuity that all
Paris rang with its fame, and then flocked to
the restaurant where every previous kitchen
record had been beaten. The menu led off with
a M potage Cameram," so named after its inven-
tor, an actor at the Theatre Feydeau. The chief
ingredient of this phenomenal soup was the
concentrated essence of forty fat chicken livers,
and its successful preparation depended on the
chickens having been killed by electricity,
according to a method invented by Beyer, the
organizer of the dinner, an eminent scientist of
the day, and, clearly, the discoverer of electro-
cution.

The fortunes of the Cafe Anglais were now on
the uphill grade, and it became necessary to
enlarge the premises. At No. 13 of the Rue de
Marivaux, which forms an angle with No. 13 of
the Boulevard des Italiens, there was a gambling
den known as the U Grand Treize.,, This was
absorbed by the Cafe Anglais, which thus bears

216 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

the double No. 13 — of the Rue de Marivaux,
and also of the Boulevard des Italiens — but does
not seem to have been unlucky on this account.
A year after Waterloo, a new proprietor, who
was from Bordeaux, Monsieur Chevreuil, set
himself to arrange the cellars on a scale which
should be worthy of the growing reputation of
the restaurant. His clarets and foreign wines
were selected with immense care and skill, but,
being from Bordeaux, he disliked burgundies,
and disliked the customers who drank them,
though willing to minister at extravagant prices
to the taste that he condemned. The eccen-
tricities of the habitues and the crankiness of
its successive proprietors have ever distinguished
the Cafe Anglais. Its cellars, which extend
under three neighbouring houses, are kept as
neatly as a lady's boudoir. The intersecting
passages have a little railway running along them,
and converge to a four-cross road, in the centre
of which is an artificial orange-tree with luminous
oranges. The cellar walls are decorated with
festoons of grape-vines hiding electric lamps.
Here are wines, in the strictest sense of the
term, fit for Kings : Chateau Lafite of 1804 (of
which the magnum is priced 120/-) and of 1805 ;
Haut Brion of 1880 (120/-) ; Chateau Margaux
1848 (80/-) ; Clos d'Estournelles, 1834; Chateau

A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT 217

Latour, 1871 ; old brandies of 1784, 1797, and
1809, and green Chartreuse of 1869 and 1877,
all of which are priceless ; port of 1820 and 1834.
It was in the heyday of the Second Empire,
about fifty years ago, that the Cafe Anglais
reached the zenith of its prosperity. At that
epoch supper meant more than dinner to the
smart men and women about Paris. The Cafe
Anglais was essentially a supper-place, to which
resorted after the theatre the illustrious dandies
of the time — the Due de Gramont-Caderousse ;
the ill-fated young Prince of Orange, heir to the
throne of Holland, and nicknamed " Citron " ;
the late King Edward, then Prince of Wales ;
the Duke of Hamilton, who was finally to break
his neck on the staircase of the Maison Doree
opposite, his bosom friend, Lord Seymour, or
" Milor' Arsouille," as he preferred to call
himself ; the late Prince de Sagan ; Mr. Bryan,
an eccentric American member of the Jockey
Club, whose joyous practice it was to pour a
bottle of curacao into the piano, doubtless to
give it tone. The " Grand 16," the first-floor
room overlooking the corner of the Rue de
Marivaux and the boulevard, where the most
notable suppers were served, no longer has a
piano ; and this is a sign of the changing times,
sedate dinners having taken the place of noisy

218 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

suppers. More than once Napoleon III. came
incognito to the M Grand 16," where, in the
Exhibition year, just before the Empire fell,
was served the famous dinner " of the three
Emperors/' so called because the amphitryon
was the then Tsar of Russia, and with him were
the Tsarewitch, afterward Tsar Alexander III.,
and William, King of Prussia, afterward German
Emperor. The " Grand 16 " is, on account of
the many imperial and royal personages who
have dined within its red-damask-hung walls,
of all the restaurant dining-rooms in the world,
the one in which the souvenirs of monarchy
are thickest. Once the " Grand 8 " of the
defunct Maison Doree ran a close second to it ;
but the proprietors of the Maison Doree made
the mistake of purchasing a quantity of wines
taken from the Tuileries, and sold at public
auction after the imperial palace had been
destroyed by the mob, and the sight of these
famous cms on the wine-card may well have
proved an eyesore to the illustrious personages
who, in more peaceful times, had enjoyed the
fallen Emperor's hospitality.

The " Grand 16 " of the Cafe Anglais has
retained its First Empire aspect on the original
Louis Quinze setting, without a trace of modern
garishness having been added. Yet, in spit(

A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT 219

of its prim and demure outlook, what fantastic
scenes has it not witnessed in those old supping
days to which Balzac and the memorialists of
two generations ago so constantly refer ? It
was here that Cora Pearl, the Salome of the
effete Second Empire, was served up in the
costume of Eve on a silver platter hidden beneath
a dish-cover, at a supper given by the Due de
Gramont-Caderousse. It was from the u Grand
16 ' ' that Rigolbroche, the Polaire of her day,
set out in similarly light attire on her famous
trip across the boulevard to the Maison Doree.
Often enough the supper service was sent
hurtling through the windows on to the boule-
vard below, by the frenzied young bloods of the
period, of whom, perhaps, the maddest was the
recently deceased General Marquis de Galliffet,
in whose memory a dinner is now held at the
Cafe Anglais every first and second Friday of
the month. Prince Bismarck frequently supped
there before the Franco- German War. The
Cafe Anglais has helped to reconcile with the
vicissitudes of life more than one deposed and
exiled monarch. The ex-King Milan of Servia
rarely dined elsewhere, and Queen Isabella of
Spain, leaving her carriage a few doors farther
down the boulevard, so as not to be seen, and
accompanied by her suite, has many a time plied

220 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

an assiduous knife and fork in the " Grand 16."
During the revolution which followed the collapse
of the French army at Sedan, the Comtesse de
Castiglione, the most beautiful woman of her
time, not excepting the Empress Eugenie, who
thought she had reasons to be jealous of her,
was hidden in an apartment over the Cafe
Anglais by the head-waiter. This saved her
from the sanguinary fury of the Communist mob,
who attributed the national disasters in part
to her supposed influence over Louis Napoleon.
The figure of the head-waiter Ernest, to whom
the Comtesse de Castiglione was indebted for
this chivalrous rescue, lingers in the memories
of old-timers as the model of what a maitre
d'hotel should be — clean-shaven, soft of speech,
with the manners, but not the morals, of a
diplomatist, for he should never say the thing
that is not, a sincere but not obtrusive coun-
sellor, a living and loving encyclopaedia of gas-
tronomic lore. Ernest's present successor,
Alphonse, worthily maintains the traditions
of these weighty functions. For the maitre
d'hotel is the ambassador of the chef. At the
Cale Anglais there has been an unbroken line
of great cooks, of whom each in turn has in-
herited the mantle of the illustrious Careme.
What Berlioz and Wagner were to music, and

A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT 221

Chateaubriand to the written word, Careme
was to cooking, the first of the great Romantics.
After being cook to Napoleon I., Careme
entered the service of George I V. ; but his artistic
spirit, cramped within the stony confines of
Windsor Castle, quickly sought release from
insular surroundings, and his description, in
the preface of his monumental work on cooking,
of the why and the how of his resignation
from the service of the British Sovereign is a
page of blazing eloquence, instinct with patriotic
and artistic ardour, which, if the " First Gentle-
man in Europe " ever read it, must have made
him feel cheap indeed. Careme found refuge in
Paris, with Baron de Rothschild, and there
formed his most famous pupil, the great Duglere.
Quitting Baron de Rothschild, Duglere became
chef at the Cafe Anglais, where he invented the
potage Germiny, dedicated to the eminent
financier, Comte de Germiny, the barbue (brill)
a la Duglere, the pommes Anna, the poulet a
la d'Albufera, dishes now celebrated through-
out the world. A pupil of Duglere is the
present chef and proprietor of the Cafe Anglais,
whose name I would willingly have written
down here, had he not, with the modesty so
becoming to the true artist, particularly begged
me not to do so. " The name of the Cafe

222 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Anglais/' he said, " is quite glorious enough
by itself."

The imperial and royal crowned heads of
Europe have borne no grudge against the
artistic descendants of Car erne for the master's
refusal to accompany Napoleon to St. Helena,
and his rupture with George IV. On the
contrary, they are among the most assiduous
and faithful customers of the Cafe" Anglais,
where several of them — notably the Grand-Dukes
of Russia — have their own dinner services of
silver plate, bearing their crowned monograms.
Other noble habitues have simply their private
finger-bowls and rince-bouche, some of which
are silver gilt, and one is pure gold. These are
kept in a large cupboard with glass doors, which
is called the bibliotheque. The service on the
first set of shelves in the right-hand division of
this bibliotheque was that used for the late
King of England when, being on a brief visit
to the French capital with Queen Alexandra,
he dined at the Cafe Anglais for the last,
time. The old King was giving Queen Alex-
andra the treat of " doing M Paris with him as
if they were a newly-married couple on their
honeymoon. Grave politicians were convinced
that the King's presence was motived by some
deep political scheme. But it was nothing of

A GREAT PARIS RESTAURANT 223

the sort. The King, accompanied by his Queen,

was visiting the scenes associated with his

joyous youth and manhood, when, as Prince

of Wales, he was the most popular of Parisians,

and there they sat in the " Grand 16," with

just a few intimate friends, almost like Darby

and Joan — she, no doubt, with indulgent love

in her thoughts, and he with the mist of fading

memories in his eyes. This was the menu :

Potage chiffonade.
Truite de rivi&re frite, sauce madere.
Poularde brais£e au gros sel.
Ragout de truffes.
Baron de Pauillac roti, pommes de terre nouvelles.
Pur6e d'6pinards nouveaux.
Salade, pommes, chicoree.
Asperges, sauce hollandaise.
Poires a la Bourdaloue.
Desserts.

Chablis moutonne.

Moet 1893 frappe\

Chateau Latour 1875.

Grande fine champagne 1800.

A dinner in every way suitable to British
Sovereigns, simple and substantial.

One of the most treasured souvenirs in the
possession of Monsieur Burdel (there goes the
name!), the present owner of the Cafe Anglais,
is the autograph letter which Queen Alexandra
wrote to him in reply to his respectful letter of
condolence on King Edward's death.

224 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

In three to four years from now the Cafe
Anglais, so well known to all the wealthy
Americans living in or passing through Paris,
will be driven from its ancient abode to make
room for a Belgian bank. Will it be closed
for ever, or merely transferred to another and,
if possible, equally congenial locality ? That is
the secret of Monsieur Burdel.

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CHAPTER XV
THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS

There is a wild-flower in the heart of every
Parisian, and to this is traceable his passionate
love of wild-flowers, which is one of the nuances,
or shades, of his character ; for the everyday
life of Paris is constantly oscillating between the
extremes of tragedy and, comedy, and, of all
flowers, it is the wild-flower that has emotional
temperament and wide dramatic possibilities.
Never, for instance, was there such a skirt-
dance in the world as that which the ordinary
poppy of the fields dances every minute of its
life with the wanton breezes. Since the reign
of Louis Treize the Parisian has been frondeur,
or a potential rebel, refractory to any established
form of government ; and the wild-flower, too,
lives its own brief life independently, pre-
occupied with a question of form rather than
ambitious to outdo, either as to colour or
perfume, the artificially cultivated and richer
garden plants. The wild-flower is a Bohemian

225 15

226 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

and a democrat, and so appeals to the Parisian's
sense of liberty and fraternity. Moreover, the
Parisian, like the wild-flower, loves the " out
of doors' ' ; and highly complex, if you analyze
him, as is also the wild-flower, he is in an equal
degree a true child of Nature.

In England, and more particularly in London,
the folk are greatly fond of flowers ; but their
preference goes to the old-fashioned mixed
border and pot plants, such as stocks and
pansies, geraniums and calceolarias, which they
cultivate in their narrow gardens or window-
boxes, and feed and pamper up with affectionate
solicitude and pride until each plant becomes
as unwieldly and fleshy as an old-maid's pet
poodle. Size and brilliance of colour are what
the Londoners aim at, taking John Bull, no
doubt, as their model. These smug and well-
groomed flowers, which have all won prizes for
good conduct, have the virtues, but also the
limitations, of the English middle-class. Their
floral hearts, no doubt, are in the right place,
to judge from the good-tempered vigour with
which they bloom, and the strong conscientious
perfumes that they give forth. They are law-
abiding but passionless. They brighten up,
with a note not so much of increased gaiety as
of heightened respectability, the buttonhole of

THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 227

Charles and the bodice of Mary Ann when those
two honest but unromantic lovers sally forth
from the counting - house and the kitchen to
keep the most innocent of company on solemn
Sunday afternoons. They are not of the kind
that Ophelia would have woven into her tragic
wreath. These simple garden flowers enter into
the Londoners scheme of home, enhancing the
beauty of home, its comfort, or its cosiness,
cheering and perfuming the memory of home
in the after-years. They are the floral offerings
which he lays upon the domestic altar. Parisian
sentimentality, however, is less bound up with
the chez soi, the domestic domain. There is no
French word for " home/' {foyer does not
exactly fit it), and many a Frenchman, and a
typical Frenchman at that, would just as soon
see onions as roses flourishing in his garden.
When he talks of the home, he calls it le home,
using the English word, and credits it with many
strange oversea characteristics which are largely
the outcome of his imagination. It is not
unusual for French savants to make a special
voyage to London solely to study the English
institution of the " home." When the French-
man speaks of la belle France, he means a
country flowing with milk and honey, with
every available acre of it under wheat. The

228 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

almost universal ambition of the Parisian
belonging to the middle-class of small shop-
keeper, inferior Government employe, and
railway official, is to retire to some little cottage
in the country, there to shed his Parisianism like
a slough, and in blouse and sabots, muddy,
unshaven, and unshorn, to become a peasant
as were most likely, his fathers before him.
Thus he returns to the land, reverts to the
original stock. Wild-flowers remind him in
Paris of the country life for which he yearns.
They have this special message for him, which
is not quite so intelligible to the Londoner, who
is more purely city-bred. Hence a reason,
among others, why the Parisian is so fond of
wild-flowers. In no other capital in the world
are there so many wild-flowers sold in the streets
as in Paris, and this humble trade begins in
January, and lasts practically all the year round.
It used to be said that what distinguished a
London-bred child more than anything was that
he had never seen a cowslip growing. Such a
definition could not be applied to a Parisian
child, for cowslips grow wild in the grass-plots
of the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens.
Cowslips and oxlips are among the first spring
flowers which the hawkers, with their picturesque
wicker hods, the shape of which has not changed

THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 229

since the seventeenth century, sell in the streets
of Paris. But the first great wild-flower harvest
is that of the daffodils. If the winter has not
been too prolonged or severe, from about the
twentieth of March until the end of the first week
in April, Paris is encircled by a great natural
chaplet of daffodils. The wide forests of Senart
and Chantilly, which spread to the north-east
and south-west of Paris respectively, each being
about six miles in extent, are carpeted with
millions and millions of daffodils as with a cloth
of gold. Unlike the artificially cultivated daffo-
dils which reach England, though not France,
in such enormous numbers from Scilly, the wild
Parisian daffodil has a most delicate scent, which
suggests the very breath of spring in all its
freshness and purity. It is impossible to con-
ceive anything more ethereally beautiful than
these vast nodding plains of gold under the still
leafless trees — of gold lambent and cool, like
that of late afternoon sunlight upon a green
lawn. The flower itself is of the simplest and
purest type, the central crown being of a deeper
yellow than the petals at its base, which are
nun-like in their virginal pallor. These are the
true Lenten lilies in their cassocks of dark
green, unsoiled by the sacrilegious hybridizer,
who is proud when he has made one of their

230 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

luckless sisters turn her chalice into a cabbage,
or has sprinkled her golden crown with an
indelible stain of blood, and called her by a new
and foolish name. These are the holy flowers
which inspired old Herrick to say to them :
" When we have pray'd together, we will go
with you along/ ' Of just this scene Words-
worth wrote :

" I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
*****

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
*****

A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company."

They will bring into the streets and humble
dwelling-places of Paris their atmosphere of
spotless feminine grace, of youthful melancholy
and pure tenderness. No Parisian can see for
the first time this golden paradise of daffodils,
which is just twelve miles from his city gates,
without breaking into raptures of enthusiasm ;
and then the wild longing for possession comes
over him, and he will spend a delirious hour in
picking an enormous bunch of the flowers,
and wallow in an ocean of gold.

THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 231

If about mid-Lent you mount the steep street
which leads through the little village of Epinay-
sous-Senart, on all sides you will see daffodils
withering and crushed on the path, which wanton
children have plucked and thrown away. And
you can find your way easily to the daffodil
regions simply by following this track. Every
cottage on the outskirts of the forest has huge
bunches of daffodils in its windows. You will
see boys and girls carrying long poles on their
shoulders, upon which hang bundles of daffodils
in rows. They are on their way to the Paris
market. In the forest itself you will find
peasants with barrows and carts heaped high
with hundreds of bunches of daffodils, which
have the same destination. Many pickers trudge
twice from Senart to Paris in the day with their
loads of daffodils on their backs ; others spend
the whole night in the forest, braving the early
spring frosts, so as to be the first in the field.
The Paris market can absorb only a small pro-
portion of the incalculable quantity of daffodils
which flower every year in this ancient forest
of Senart. (It was there that Louis Quinze first
set eyes on the beautiful maiden, from the
neighbouring village of Etiolles, who was after-
wards to change her plebeian name of Poisson
for that of Marquise de Pompadour.) In Paris

232 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

a fairly large bunch of these wild-daffodils is
sold for seventy-five centimes, or sixpence, so
that the value of the annual crop must run into
many thousands of francs.

In a few days this vast carpet of gold will
change from dazzling yellow to a deep blue.
The bluebells, or wild-hyacinths — les clochettes,
as the Parisian calls them — have taken the
place of the daffodils. All the woods round
Paris are blue with them, and they have managed
to survive in the wild state even in the less
frequented thicknesses of the Bois de Boulogne.
There are few parts of France where the blue-
bell grows in greater abundance than close to
the capital, so that it might well be considered
the Parisian wild - flower above all others.
Children are fond of making wreaths of it, to
which it lends itself easily, with its long flexible
stalk. The vista of a woodland glade drowned
in the blue shimmer of these flowers in myriads,
from beneath one's feet to the vanishing-point
of the perspective, is a sight not to be forgotten,
and is common around Paris in the months of
April and May ; while in the city itself the long
lines of barrows heaped with the wild blue
hyacinths, and the hawkers' hods and baskets
full of them, paint the streets with a ribbon of
deep dreamy blue, especially in the neighbour-

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THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 233

hood of the railway-stations, in the open spaces
round the churches, and at the entrances to the
local markets, where the sellers of wild-flowers
chiefly take their stand. The very air is faint
with their powerful and exquisite perfume.
But the bluebells are not the favourite wild-
flowers of the ordinary Parisian. The palm of
popularity must be given to the lily of the
valley — the muguet des bois.

What the forget-me-not is to the German
Gretchen, the muguet des bois (the wild lily of the
valley) is to the Paris grisette, and thus it has
been for untold generations. The first of May is
known as the Fete du Muguet, and on that
day, not only is it traditional for children to
make presents of bunches of wild lilies of the
valley to their elder brothers and sisters — the
flower seems to be dedicated to youth — but
in the streets surrounding the opera-house,
where all the big dressmakers are, you will
see at luncheon-hour troops of the young girl
apprentices wearing bunches of muguet in their
simple bodices. The muguet brings luck, and
it appeals more than any other flower to the
humble little Parisienne's sense of poetry, this
delicate spike with its double row of little milk-
white bells, its broad tapering leaf, and its
peculiarly evocative scent. No doubt she feels

234 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

that in a sense it reflects herself. Is not her life
just such another ringing of the changes on
a chime of little silver bells, whose flash and
tinkle last for the brief space of a spring season ?
She has the same native wildness, and simple
unconscious elegance. To start forth on a
bright Sunday morning for one of the woods
near Paris, and pick muguet, is her ideal of a
holiday excursion.

M En cherchant du muguet,
Du muguet dans la clairiere ;
En cherchant du muguet,
Du muguet d-a-ans 1-a-a f-6-r-e-t X"

she sings, and on her way back she pets her lilies
of the valley as if they were human beings :
" Oh, the beautiful muguet, how sweetly it
smells I" Elaborate are her plans for disposing
of it. One large bouquet will remain in her
room for at least a week, reminding her every
moment of the delightful day she has spent.
A few sprays will be given to the concierge,
or janitor, whose good graces are to be culti-
vated ; while the remainder will go to grand,
maman, who will not fail to be tearfully re-
minded thereby of her own sylvan excursions
in search of muguet in those far-off days when
there were hardly any railways, and it was half
a day's journey to the woods at Meudon.

THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 235

According to the herbalists, the petals of the
lily of the valley contain a toxic substance, which,
like digitalis, has a directly stimulating effect
upon the heart. Perhaps this may account,
by some subtle process of sentimental telep-
athy or suggestion, for the charm which the
mnguet so potently exercises over the heart of
those essentially Parisian little beings, all made
up of nerves, gaiety, and emotions, the midi-
nette of the dress-making atelier, and the
grisette of the Latin Quarter. The street-cry,
" Fleurissez-vous, mesdames : voila le muguet IV
(Beflower yourselves, ladies : behold the lily
of the valley !), followed by, " Du muguet !
Achetez du muguet ! Du bon muguet par-
fume I" (Lilies of the valley ! Buy the lilies
of the valley ! Fine scented lilies of the
valley !), is one of the oldest in Paris. The
muguet harvest is as much a godsend to the
pariahs of the Paris pavement as is the hop-
picking in Kent to the submerged tenth of the
London East End. The May morning has
hardly dawned before a procession of ragged,
footsore tramps comes streaming into the city
from the neighbouring woods, loaded with
muguet. On May Day waggon-loads of muguet
arrive by train. The flowers are picked when
they are still in the earliest bud, for the little

236 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Parisian lady likes to see them open out under
her own eyes, and so have the illusion that their
lives are linked with hers. In some of the great
forests round Paris it is forbidden to pick the
muguet on pain of a fine ; for the pheasants are
laying at this season, and to steal the eggs on
the pretence of looking for lilies of the valley
is a common trick with the villagers.

The primrose, so common in the woods round
London, is rare in the immediate vicinity of
Paris, and to find it in anything like such pro-
fusion as in England one must go into Normandy.
The vast and ancient forests in the Department
of the Eure, at Bizy, Louviers, and Dreux, are
covered with primroses; and though the pale
yellow variety is by far the most common, the
purple and white, particularly the white, are
by no means rare. White and purple oxlips,
which do not, to my knowledge, grow near
London, are common in the woods of St. Cloud,
which is only a stone's-throw from the Paris
fortifications. The allied cowslip, which the
French call coucou, is the most widely dis-
tributed of all the spring wildings in the cop-
pices and meadows of the Parisian district.
The village lads and lasses make wreaths and
balls and Easter eggs of its delicately yellow-
tinted and exquisitely-scented flowers; a delicious

THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 237

sweetmeat is also obtained by dipping its petals
into molten sugar. Enormous quantities of
these cowslips, or coucous, are sold in the Paris
streets. Sweet-smelling violets, both blue and
white, grow in profusion round Paris, and even
in certain favoured spots within the city area, as
at Auteuil, in the deep sward of the steeple-
chase course, and in the old abandoned ceme-
tery in the Bois. But the violets sold in the
Paris streets are not all wild ; it is only in the
spring that they are culled from the surrounding
country. An article of faith with the Parisian
is that la vraie violette de Paris (the true Pari-
sian violet) has a far finer perfume than that
which comes from the South of France.

Pink and white wood - anemones are con-
temporaneous with the first oxlips, and as spring
merges into summer the hawkers' baskets will
be filled with celandines (chelidoines) and king-
cups (soucis d'eau), from the neighbouring
streams and marshes. Flaming bundles of
yellow broom and large bunches of yellow
buttercups make their appearance, with
branches of red and white hawthorn, of wild
apple and pear blossom, and of the wild though
not native lilac, of which huge bunches may be
gathered in the woods of Vaucresson, twelve
miles to the west of Paris. The stone walls of

238 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

the medieval ruins, so numerous in the depart-
ments of the Seine, the Seine-et-Oise, and the
Seine-et-Marne, are topped and tufted at this
season with the wild wallflower, whinflower,
giroflee, or ravenelle, according as you give it
the English, the Scotch, or the two French
names, armfuls of which the holiday excur-
sionist will carry home with him. The robinia,
or false acacia, is now in bloom on the highways
and in the woods, spreading on the ground a
mantle of its white petals, as of snow. The
yellow laburnum, called ftluie d'or (golden rain),
lights up the coppices and hillsides. The
fields are full of the white and yellow mar-
guerite, or anthemis ; ditches and rivulets are
blue with forget-me-nots. Red poppies, and
blue and purple and blue-grey corn - flowers
mingle with the as yet unripe wheat. A few
weeks later the large ponds at St. Cloud, Ville
d'Avray, Meudon, and Boulogne-sur-Seine, will
be glowing with water-lilies. Foxglove reaches
Paris from the Norman dunes, wild-lavender
from the South. The banks of the Seine, the
Marne, and the Oise, supply the yellow-flag lily
(the original fleur-de-lis of France), and later on
the bulrush. The marshlands yield up their
feathery and tufted reeds and tall grasses.
The flowering willow is a familiar sight in the

THE WILD-FLOWERS OF PARIS 239

Paris streets at the period of Les Rameaux
(Palm Sunday), when branches of consecrated
box are also sold outside all the churches. When
summer is over, the hawkers fall back upon
heather, which they sometimes dye blue, upon
char dons, or wool-carder's teasels ; ferns ; and at
last, when Christmas approaches, upon holly
and mistletoe. The French forests teem with
mistletoe, so much so that tons of it are ex-
ported to England, and farmers are required
by law to remove this maleficent parasite from
their orchards under pain of a fine. But
barely has the last hawker, with great bunches
of mistletoe suspended from either end of a
pole, vanished from the streets, than the first
baskets of snowdrops make their appearance.

CHAPTER XVI

VANISHING PARIS— 1910

Old Paris is vanishing apace. Not a month,
not a week, not a day, passes but some new
demolition is undertaken of buildings, and whole
blocks of buildings, whose early history is lost
in the mist of time. Just now the house-
breakers are busy upon an ancient mansion in
the Boulevard dTtalie which for tragic dilapi-
dation and solitary sorrowfulness has always
seemed to me to have no rival in any capital
of Europe. Untenanted bourgeoisement — that
is to say, for residential purposes — for more
than half a century, it stands, or rather totters
— for at the moment of writing it is being
battered to the ground — in the centre of a vast
garden, the coarse grass and bushes of which
grow thick about it like the unkempt beard
upon a vagabond's chin. Only the pen of Poe
could do justice to the atmosphere of concen-
trated sadness and despair which surrounds this
Paris edition of " The House of Usher." Like

240

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 241

the pensive nun who " forgot herself to marble/'
it seems to have brooded itself into a kind of
ethereal disembodiment ; for at a certain dis-
tance, notably from the aerial track of the
Metropolitan Railway, whence it can be seen,
it suggests a large blue-green cloud which has
momentarily settled on this wasted plot of
ground, and has shaped itself into vague archi-
tectural forms ; then, on coming nearer, it looks
as if its walls might be built of century-old cob-
webs, petrified in dust and dirt. A hard blow
with a stick would, one would think, suffice to
knock the whole fantastic edifice, which has
both the cinder-like hue and apparent incon-
sistency of calcined paper, into thin air. The
slatted shutters, always closed, the stone colon-
nades, the Doric pillars which frame the en-
trance-door, the tiled roof, the classical mould-
ings on the pediments, the great porte-cochere
which, gaunt and hungry, in the rags of the
multicoloured posters clinging to it, has the air
of a desperate and sturdy beggar to whom it
would be dangerous, after nightfall, to refuse an
alms, are all of the same dark, dank, mouldy
green-black, veiled in the blueish haze which
rises from the neighbouring Bievre, once a
sparkling river, now a reeking drain. Upon
the cadaverous background of the time-stained

16

242 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

walls the broken, sightless windows show a faint
vitreous gleam.

Here, indeed, is a haunted house — haunted
by mysterious memories, if not by materialized
spirits. So complete is the picture of its grief,
with such histrionic perfection does it wear its
weeds of woe, that one barely needs or wants
to know its real story, as if no facts could outdo
the suggestiveness of the unspoken tragedy.
But the facts are gruesome enough, for it was
here, in the grounds of this old mansion, that
the " Goatherdess of Ivry " was murdered some
eighty years ago. Aimee Millot, known as the
" Bergere d'lvry " (Ivry. is a suburb hard by),
was a virtuous girl, of singular prettiness, who
tended her mistress's goats in the Champ de
l'Alouette, or " Lark's Field," also called — and
this was a more ancient designation — the Clos
Payen, in the centre of which stands the old
house. The Champ de l'Alouette was then, as
Alfred Delvau tells us — and he speaks with
authority, for his boyhood was spent close by —
" so full of sun, of verdure, of scent, and of
gaiety." The Bievre had not yet been con-
verted into a sewer, and the gloomy streets and
alleys which surround it now were — in part, at
least — tree-shaded roads and country lanes. In
the sentimental imagination of the Parisians of

w &

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 243

those days (it was the period of Louis Philippe),
the picturesque figure of the " Goatherdess of
Ivry " struck the last genuine note of Watteau-
esque rusticity within the city's limits. She
must have been to them in a measure what the
M Lass of Richmond Hill " was to the Londoners
of three generations ago. All Paris went wild
over her murder. A half-witted waiter, named
Ulbach, was tried, condemned, and executed for
the crime. He stabbed her, he said, " during a
clap of thunder/' because she had repelled his
advances. But his confession is now believed
by some to have been the mere babbling of a
lunatic, which conveniently covered a much
more scandalous story. Already at that time
the old house was a lonely and sinister place,
used for clandestine rendezvous, and the
wretched girl had, it is believed, been enticed
or dragged there by a band of ruffians under
the direction of a personage of high and even
princely rank, enamoured of her Watteauesque
charms, but whose head, when his guilt was
discovered, was considered by the police
authorities of that time to be too august for
the guillotine. Such, at any rate, is the legend
still current in the neighbourhood, and at least
it is worthy of Ingoldsby.

Here, then, is a suggestion of the mystery of

244 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

these old stones, a secret which has been their
ban and their spell, and they are carrying it to
the grave. Not a soul has slept in the house
since the murder was committed. August e
Rodin, the sculptor, has used the premises as a
studio, but that was years ago. He did not
live there. Now that the place is being pulled
down he has purchased from the demolisseur,
the amiable and erudite M. Ragu, to whom I
am indebted for some of the foregoing details,
the wood-carvings and mantelpiece from its
dining-room, and they will henceforth help to
adorn M. Rodin's palatial studio at Meudon, so
that the memory of one of the weirdest among
the many strange houses of Paris will not be
entirely lost. A literary interest also attaches
to this blue ruin. It was originally built in 1762
by Peyre Aine, the Royal architect, as a country
house for M. Le Pretre de Neufbourg, one of
Louis XV.'s " Intendants des Finances." This
commercially-minded nobleman (there is nothing
new under the sun) established all around it a
huge blanchisserie, or laundry, for the washing
and " getting-up " of new linen for the retail
market. Later on the laundry was taken over
by the Paris hospitals, and when it had ceased
to serve their purpose its dilapidated and aban-
doned premises — long, one-storeyed outhouses-

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 245

were converted into tenements for the very poor.
Victor Hugo, wandering on the banks of the
Bievre in search of local colour for Les Miser-
ables, saw them, and appreciated their uniquely
picturesque squalor. They became the masure
Gorbeau which he has etched with so Rem-
brandtesque a needle, where lived the philan-
thropic felon Valjean, Marius, the Quixotic
student, and Gavroche, the gamin de Paris —
surely the truest and most human of all Victor
Hugo's creations. The masure Gorbeau disap-
peared some years ago.

The old house has also an historic interest.
It was here that Corvisart lived — Corvisart,
surgeon to Napoleon the Great, who gives his
name to the Rue Corvisart, which is close by, a
brilliant adventurer of science, who had never
passed an examination with credit, but was,
none the less, one of the pioneers of modern
surgery, the diplomatist and wit, who could
presume with safety to reply, when Napoleon
inquired of him at the New Year's levee, " And
how many people do you expect to kill this year,
cher maitre ?" " That was the very question
which I was about to ask of Your Majesty."

Destruction threatens another ancient dwell-
ing in Paris — No. 24, Rue Tournefort — the in-
terest attaching to which is, however, purely

246 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

literary — et comment! as the French say. In-
deed, if all the writers of fiction who owe their
art to Balzac had been grateful enough to make
pilgrimages to it the house would long ago have
become a literary Mecca. For the governing
principles upon which have been based the
methods of the Realistic, the Naturalistic, and
the Impressionist schools of novel-writing are
indisputably derived from the Comedie Hu-
maine, and never in that immortal series of
tales were they more triumphantly proclaimed
and vindicated than in the amazing picture
which Balzac has painted in Le Pere Goriot
of the Pension Vauquer. In that descrip-
tion the genius of Balzac gave the full measure
of its capacity for exteriorizing the souls of
material things in their relations with the
human souls around them. When he wrote
the undying phrase which sums up the pension,
and Madame Vauquer, its proprietress, " Enfin
toute sa personne explique la pension, comme
la pension implique sa personne/ ' (her whole
person explained the boarding-house, just as the
boarding-house implied her person), he was
putting in a nutshell what was then, to all in-
tents and purposes, a new theory of Art, the
practice of which was destined to bring about a
literary revolution, to sweep away |the old

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 247

romance of sentiment and convention in favour
of the modern novel of observation and analysis.
At the same time he was propounding, as against
the purely materialistic doctrines which after-
wards led astray some of his professed disciples,
notably Zola, the truth, nowadays more and
more widely recognized by psychologists and
biologists, of the spiritual unity of matter.
Then, with a burst of that ironic eloquence in
description which makes him, whatever the
purists may say, a stylist of the very first rank,
he continues : " The sallow plumpness of the
little woman is the product of this life, as typhus
is the consequence of the exhalations of a hos-
pital. Her knitted woollen petticoat, which
from underneath displays her upper skirt, made
of an old gown, of which the cotton-wool
stuffing escapes through the rents in the split
material, sums up the salon, the dining-room,
the little garden, introduces the kitchen, and
foreshadows the boarders. When she is there
the spectacle is complete. Aged about fifty
years, Madame Vauquer resembles all women
who have had misfortunes." "All is true" adds
Balzac in English, for he must have felt (and he
was right) that only the language of Shakespeare,
to whose sublimest heights of tragedy he was
about to climb, suited the splendour of this boast.

248 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

The spectacle, alas ! is no longer complete,
precisely for the reason that Madame Vauquer
is necessarily absent from it, except in the
spirit, to which Balzac gave firstly flesh and
then immortality. In the natural order of
things Madame Vauquer would long ago have
been laid in her grave. Still, all is true in the
main details, allowing for the superficial changes
due to the lapse of time — the action of Le
Pere Goriot opens in 1819 — all is true, save
for the beings, imaginary, but of so intense a
life, with whom Balzac peopled this house. It
is no longer a pension. Its fortunes, already
ebbing, when under the direction of Madame
Vauquer its respectability was so zealously
assured, have greatly declined during the inter-
vening ninety years. Originally the suburban
mansion of M. Boyleve de Chambellan, in
1777 — those were the days of its splendour — it
had reached in its pension phase an advanced
stage of the shabby-genteel, and now it is a
workman's tenement. Naturally the odeur de
pension, which Balzac described, has fled, and
given place to even more nauseous smells. But
the walls are still " daubed with that yellow
colour which gives an ignoble character " (Bal-
zac was speaking of the Paris of Louis XVIII.)
" to almost all the houses of Paris.' ' Gone is

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 249

the great mantle of ivy upon the wall of the
neighbouring house overlooking the garden,
from which the fruit-trees and all but one vine
have disappeared, their places being now taken
by roses and flowering shrubs. But the alley
of lime-trees, which Madame Vauquer, though
nee de Conflans, insisted on calling tieuilles, in
spite of the grammatical observations of her
boarders, and where the escaped convict, Vau-
trin, walked with Eugene de Rastignac, and
held that memorable conversation with him, is
still there. A black cat scrambles about in it,
which may well be a direct descendant of
" Mistigris." And you may still see at the
back of the house, to the left of the little
garden, the shed for storing wood, with the
rabbit-hutches and hen-coops. It was in one
of the four rooms on the third floor, whose
windows overlook the garden, that " le Pere
Goriot " died. The concierge of the house
maintains — quite mistakenly, I think — that
Balzac lived and worked in the two miserable
little rooms of which one is lighted by the
gable window seen in the photograph, " while
as for ' Monsieur Goriot,' he lived," she says,
" in the house next door." There is no evidence
that Balzac ever inhabited No. 24, Rue Tourne-
fort, known to him as the Rue Neuve-Sainte-

250 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

Genevieve, though it is possible that he may
have done so. In any case the room with the
gabled window has no place in Balzac's descrip-
tion of the Maison Vauquer. Soon this vener-
able landmark must disappear, for it is too
much to hope that an enlightened Minister of
Public Instruction will cause it to be included
among French " Monuments Historiques," and
so save it from destruction. Already a large
painted notice has been affixed to its outer wall,
announcing that it is for sale, " either in whole
or in lots," and surely before many months are
over it will have disappeared down the hungry
maw of M. Ragu, or some equally enterprising
demolisseur.

To be covered with modern constructions is
also the fate that awaits at Auteuil, that ex-
treme western suburb of Paris, the garden,
" 4,863 metres square," which surrounds a little
shrine-like edifice of eighteenth-century style,
visible from the contiguous street, the Rue de
Remusat, on whose fronton, in large deep letters
of gold, still blazes this proud inscription: "Ici
ftit la maison de Mon^re." Whether or not this
is the exact spot where Moliere's house stood
cannot now be demonstrated. The monument,
though repaired in 1858, was erected at the
beginning of the last century, at a time when

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 251

the memory of Moliere was still comparatively
fresh, so that the tradition is very probably
true. In any case, the garden must have been
the one wherein he walked, and meditated, and
took his ease, in company very often of Racine,
who had the opposite house to the left, where
Les Plaideurs was written, of Boileau, who
dwelt a stone's throw to the right, and of le bon
La Fontaine, and it was across this garden to
the river's edge that the three friends — Boileau,
La Fontaine, and La Chapelle — ran on that
memorable evening when, after a too-copious
dinner, their heads inflamed with wine, they
conceived the mad idea of flinging themselves
into the Seine, and were only restrained from
carrying out this suicidal project by Moliere' s
witty manoeuvring. In that village of ruined
and expiring gardens — Auteuil — none has a
more woebegone and melancholy aspect, and
its funereal tones are intensified by the curtain
of black-green cedar-trees which closes it in at
the back. A mantle of tragic souvenir hangs
over it. It was here, or rather in the mansion
which formerly stood in its midst — pulled down
some months ago — that the Princesse de Carig-
nan, whose elder little boy was presumptive heir
to the throne of Sardinia, was accidentally
burnt to death (February n, 1829). It had

252 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

been lent to her by the descendants of the
Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin, whose own heart
lies buried in the garden beside the body of a
dearly-loved son. This Duchesse de Choiseul-
Praslin was the grandmother of that Due de
Choiseul-Praslin, illustrious in the annals of
crime, who in 1847 murdered his wife, the
daughter of Marshal Sebastiani, in their town
house in the Faubourg St. Honore, and com-
mitted suicide in prison, or, according to another
widely-believed story, escaped with the con-
nivance of the Government to England, where
he died many years afterwards. Thus Moliere's
garden is now a cemetery, though in ever so
limited a sense of the word, for it contains the
two ducal graves, of which, however, no trace
is now to be found, and a cenotaph to the
memory of Moliere. Broken pots and pans,
waste paper, discarded birch-brooms, a few still-
budding rose-trees, masses of rubble, lie half-
buried in the tangle of withered yellow weeds
and sodden grass with which in this winter
season its surface is covered. A ragged path
leads across it to the Moliere monument. The
last tenants of the demolished house were
Dominican sisters, gentle, charitable folk, whom
foolish persecution has put to flight. Soon a
great block of middle-class flats will rise in this

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 253

empty space. The cedars, centuries old, will be
hewn down, and all traces of Moliere's erstwhile
presence will have disappeared.

Apropos of cemeteries, what foreigner, what
Parisian even, has ever heard of, let alone
visited, that old, old cemetery which nestles
behind crumbling grey walls and tall sentinel
trees in the very heart of the Bois de Boulogne ?
How few people there are who know of its
existence ! Yet there it is, and there it must
remain, until its last concession perpetuelle, the
duration of which is limited to one hundred
years, has expired, and that will not be for
another ten years. Then the skeletons will be
removed, and the old cemetery will be absorbed
into the Bois. I know fewer more picturesque
or tranquil spots. In the summer it is a wilder-
ness of luxuriantly growing shrubs and flower-
ing plants, with lush grass rising knee-high,
masking the broken and abandoned tombs when
they are not entirely covered with thick-set
brambles. In the spring the ground is sprinkled
all over with myriads of sweet-smelling violets,
both purple and white, and, later on, purple and
white lilac, and roses of every imaginable hue
and of forms run wild, perfume and embower
it. This ancient cemetery, which originally
formed part of the famous and, in the end, in-

254

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

famous Abbey of Longchamp (destroyed during
the Revolution), has been closed for nearly
twenty years. Till then the public was allowed
free ingress to it, but this permission had to be
withdrawn, owing to the indecorous conduct of
a painter who had chosen the old cemetery as a
suitable place in which to paint the nude en
filein air. Students of de Goncourt will re-
member that it was here, one hot Sunday after-
noon in summer, that the " Fille Eliza " mur-
dered her soldier-lover as he lay dozing on one
of the tombstones. Mile. Guimard, the famous
courtesan and dancer of the time of Louis
Quinze, is actually buried here, and her tomb-
stone, though it bears no inscription, has been
identified to the satisfaction of at least one local
antiquary. " La Guimard/' who in the days
of her splendour, when she numbered among
her lovers the Prince de Soubise and a profligate
Bishop, owned the house in the Rue d'Antin,
which was indifferently known as the Temple
of Dance and the Temple of Venus, died, ex-
tremely old, in 1818. The grave declared to be
hers is up against the old cemetery wall, which
is separated from the rest of the Bois by a
grilled moat. On this wall, at its further ex-
tremity, sporting roughs are wont to climb to
watch the races at Longchamps, for the ceme-

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 255

tery wall faces the Longchamp race-course,
which is only a few yards off. In their excite-
ment their hats not infrequently fall into the
moat, and are then unrecoverable, and this zone
of old hats, each more shapeless and shabby
than the other, which encircles the old ceme-
tery, but is only visible when the moat is ap-
proached, is not the least strange and fantastic
feature of the abandoned, death-haunted en-
closure.

Now let us go eastward, along the Seine, to
the corner of the Rue du Figuier, and the Quai
des Celestins. There in front of the magnifi-
cent, feudal, and still frowning Hotel de Sens
— once the residence of the Archbishops of Sens,
to whom the Bishops of Paris were mere suf-
fragans, and afterwards of Queen Margot, the
enigmatical first wife of Henri Quatre — is a
bunch of houses so ancient that no one can say
exactly when they were built, but they are as
medieval as anything to be seen in Paris. To
the angle which their walls form with the Rue
Fauconnier clings a broken Gothic niche which
once contained the statue of a saint. Originally
they must have been dependencies of the great
Royal Hotel or Palace of St. Paul, built by
Charles V., which extended from this spot to
where formerly stood the Bastille. According

256 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

to a tradition, which is sufficiently creditable,
it was here that lived and died Rabelais. The
rambling construction, extending all along the
edge of the gardens of the Hotel St. Paul —
gardens whose existence is recalled by the very
names of the Rue du Figuier, and of the Rue
des Jardins St. Paul, and the Rue Beautreillis
just behind it — has now been divided up into
squalid lodging-houses, the tenants of which are
principally foreign Jews. It forms, in fact, the
south-western boundary of the Ghetto of Paris.
The late M. Charles Nodier, librarian of the
neighbouring Arsenal, a learned archaeologist
and charming writer, was convinced that it
was in this end bit of the Rue du Figuier — he
specially singled out No. 8, but 8, 6, 4, and 2,
all originally formed one building — that Rabe-
lais passed his last years, and Charles Nodier,
good Pantagruelist that he was, never passed
the spot without raising his hat. A few days
ago the crooked, bulging, venerable walls of
this most ancient demise, which are daubed a
dark red — a favourite colour in the Paris Ghetto
— bore on them a notice printed upon paper of
a slightly lighter red, announcing that the
entire property, comprising the angle of the
Rue du Figuier and the Rue Fauconnier, was
to be sold at public auction, the upset price

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 257

being 130,000 francs. This announcement has
since disappeared, the proprietor having ar-
ranged matters otherwise, but the existence of
the old fourteenth-century building, which was
almost certainly Rabelais' last home, is none
the less doomed, for the Government has de-
cided to expropriate the site at no distant date.
The expulsion of the religious orders is re-
sponsible for the vanishing of many a pic-
turesque feature of Old Paris. Thus the Abbaye
des Bois, which some months ago existed at the
back of the M Bon Marche," and was famous
from the fact that in the last century Madame
Recamier, the most beautiful woman of her
generation, held a literary salon there, the chief
lions of which were Chateaubriand, Benjamin
Constant, Ampere, and Lamartine, is now being
covered with modern houses, the white-coiffed
nuns who formerly owned it having been driven
away. A few yards farther south, in the Rue
de Sevres, a vast yawning gap shows where, a
little while ago, stood the Convent of the Hos-
pitalieres de St. Thomas, the only nunnery
which remained open during the Terror, where
was an extremely old black statue of the Virgin .
which had been an object of veneration to no
less a personage than St. Francis de Sales. One
used to enter by a faded green door, always

17

258 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

ajar, on which was a seventeenth - century
knocker of primitive, quaintly-charming shape,
worn bright by the fingers of seekers after con-
solation for life's woes as the toe of St. Peter's
statue at Rome by the kisses of the faithful,
while above it was a little grated " judas," or
spy-hole. The simple-hearted, charitable souls
behind that door, who, inspired by the never-
faltering spirituality of their black doll's smile,
lived solely to do good, whom even the Revolu-
tion in its most epileptic phases had respected,
have, nevertheless, been counted as a serious
danger to the State, for which reason they have
been obliged to flee to foreign lands, and their
house has been razed to the ground. The same
fate has befallen all the other monastic buildings
in Paris, with very few exceptions, and if I
mention one other — the Convent of the Dames
de St. Michel ^the " Ladies of Silence ") — it is
because their departure has left at the disposal
of the builder ox modern constructions one of
the largest open spaces not a public park, which
is still to be i<<und in the heart of Paris. The
vast gardens of this convent extended from the
Rue d'Ulm to the Rue St. Jacques, in the Pan-
theon quarter, and covered over an acre of
ground. The only vestige now remaining of its
former inhabitants, if exception be made of the

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 259

hundreds of brown rats which play about in its
shattered foundations, is a big pented shrine,
hanging in ruins on the east wall, in the centre
of which is the shadow — the ghost, as it were —
of a cross, marking the place from which a huge
crucifix has been torn. It was here that Ste.
Jeanne de Chant al founded the Order of the
Visitandines — nuns whose self-imposed mission
was, as their name implies, to visit and succour
the poor. Ste. Jeanne had a very illustrious
granddaughter — Madame de Sevigne, the
greatest letter-writer that ever lived — the
woman who, indeed, created the art of letter-
writing, which ever since her time has remained
essentially a woman's art. And here she fre-
quently came to seek solitude and to write her
letters. It was in this convent that her super-
cilious daughter, Madame de Grignan, was
educated. In the gorgeous mansion which
Madame de Sevigne occupied at the corner of
the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, which is now
the Musee Carnavalet, she had neither the
leisure nor the tranquil atmosphere that she
needed for the composition of that exquisitely
spontaneous, wittily descriptive correspondence
which has immortalized her as one of the best
and subtlest artificers of modern French. So
she came here. Men have long ago adopted

260 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

the custom of placing marble tablets to com-
memorate the haunts of male genius. It is true
that Madame de Sevigne has her tablet at the
Carnavalet Museum, but surely the women
should insist upon an inscription being placed
near this spot in honour of that most brilliant
of all women letter- writers. A large portion of
the ancient gardens of the convent has already
been utilized for the construction of the new
11 Institut Oceanographique de Paris.' ' The
philanthropic Prince of Monaco, who has done
so much for Monte Carlo in particular and for
humanity at large, is arranging to substitute
an aquarium for those old-fashioned flower-beds
where formerly walked the " Ladies of Silence."
The new building, which is in the most approved
Monaco style, and looks like a provincial Casino —
neo-Semitic is the right architectural designation
— will soon be filled with all kinds of queer Medi-
terranean fish. Autres mcettrs, autres guitar es!

In the face of so much destruction, it is satis-
factory to note that there is no truth in the
report recently published in a Paris paper that
the country-house, with its lovely surrounding
park, at Aulnay, in the suburbs of Paris, where
Chateaubriand wrote the first part of his
" Memoires d' Outre Tombe," is to be sold for
building purposes. Its present proprietor, the

VANISHING PARIS— 1910 261

Due de la Rochefoucauld, has no such intention,
either for the present or the future. De visu, I
have ascertained that the little old pseudo-
Gothic villa, the genesis of which Chateaubriand
has so amusingly described, is still intact, as is
also the porch designed by him, of which he
was so proud, with its two columns of black
(now whity-blue) marble and two female carya-
tides of white marble, for, as he tells us, he
11 remembered that he had passed through
Athens.' ' The trees which he took such delight
in planting with his own hands still flourish in
the park, notably a magnificent pine which was
sent to him from Canada, whose branches now
form a superb nave, like that of a cathedral,
before sweeping the lawn beneath. The little
pavilion in which he wrote so many immortal
pages is also intact. Englishmen and Americans
owe so great a debt of gratitude to the prose poet,
who by the best and most conscientious transla-
tion ever made by one great master of another's
work, first made audible to French ears the sub-
lime sonorities of Milton, and had previously
demonstrated to an enraptured world the natural
beauties of America, that it may be a satisfaction
to them to know that the sylvan retreat, where
were spent the few happy years of his tempestuous
and sorrow-stricken life, is not to be desecrated.

CHAPTER XII

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER

Emile Duvernoy, a posthumous child, born
six months after his father's death, is the only
son of his mother, and all his youth has been
spent alone with her in a tiny sixth-floor flat at
Montmartre. His earliest recollection is of a
yellow photograph surrounded by forget-me-
nots, rudely snipped out of coloured paper,
hanging in a black wooden frame on the wall
of their one living-room. It represents a stern,
hollow-cheeked man in a sergeant's uniform of
loose, old-fashioned cut ; in the hard, intense
eyes a flame which has outlived the fading of
all the rest of the picture ; big pointed black
moustaches ; on the left breast eight medals
and a cross. And, when Emile is old enough to
understand, he learns from his mother that one
of the medals is the " Medaille Militaire,"
awarded for fifteen years' faithful service in the
army. And the cross is that of the Legion of
Honour. " Yes," Emile's mother says, as she

262

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 263

kisses him fondly on his little red cheeks, " thy
papa M — for the photograph is that of Emile's
father — " was a knight of the Legion of Honour,
and thou must promise me to become one, too,
is it not, my little man ?" And the little man
promises with wondering eyes.

The late Sergeant Duvernoy was the model
French non-commissioned officer — twelve cam-
paigns, eight wounds ; saved the life of his Cap-
tain in one of the hottest engagements of the
Tonkin Expedition, thus winning the Cross.
Attached to the " Bats d'Afs " (Bataillons
d'Afrique, ire Section, Compagnies de Disci-
pline), and thoroughly detested for his severity
by the men under him (poor wretches ! slaves in
soldier's uniform), he never during the whole
course of his life felt any remorse for the acts of
cruelty which his devotion to duty made him
commit ; and when in retirement at Montmartre
during the five years which preceded Emile's
posthumous birth, his favourite theme of con-
versation, though he was not much of a talker,
was the system of rigorous punishments em-
ployed in the " Bats d'Afs " for the mainten-
ance of discipline. Thus his open-mouthed and
not altogether admiring audience came to know
about the crapaudine, which is a way of tying a
refractory soldier by neck, wrist, and heels, so

264 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

that he is forced to lie helpless on his stomach
until released, which may not be for two or
three days at a time. " There lies my ■ cheru-
bin ' " (cherub), the Sergeant used to say, " in
the blazing sun, just out of reach of his water-
can, and if by a superhuman effort he rolls him-
self up to it, and tries to lap from it like a dog,
nine times out of ten over it goes ! Oh, la, la,
la ! No more water till next day ! And forty
degrees in the shade !" They learned, too, that
a silo is a deep hole in the sand, where the un-
disciplined soldier is buried alive for many hours,
with only just a little aperture through which
the light and air can reach him. They were in-
formed that in the ateliers of the " Travaux
Publiques," a section of the " Bats d'Afs," in
which the soldiers are really convicts, the daily
task of digging that each man has to accomplish,
working in the sun from 6 a.m. to 9.30 a.m.,
and from 2 p.m. to 5.30 p.m., is a trench, 8 metres
in length, i-io metres in breadth, and 80 centi-
metres in depth — just three times what the local
contractors expect from the average nigger
coolie. But the scene, the depicting of which
gave Sergeant Duvernoy the keenest relish, was
the pursuit of a deserter — the three sharp sum-
monses to surrender, " then, ping-pang, and my
cherubin to spring into the air, beat his arms

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 265

together, and fall dead on his face. And serve
him right ! A deserter betrays both honour and
fatherland, and does not deserve to live — a dog,
an assassin, an — ugh — eh — what ? Yes, gentle-
men, there you have what we call the ' Bats
d'Afs,' or ' Biribi ' — a hell upon earth, if you
like, but the right place for an undisciplined
soldier. Suppress ' Biribi/ and you may as
well suppress the army, and where will France
be then ?" A poser which left his hearers
dreaming a little sullenly. As the Sergeant
always referred to his former subordinates as
" cherubins," this was the ironical nickname his
Montmartre neighbours gave him — " le Pere
Cherubin " (Father Cherub). Little Emile,
having been told by his mother that a " cheru-
bin " is an angel, thinks that to call his father
the "Pere Cherubin " merely means that he
has gone to heaven, and is secretly alarmed at
the prospect of one day meeting him there, for
in the photograph he looks so grim.

After the great Dreyfus affaire, a change came
over the Sergeant. He became thinner, more
and more hard-eyed, and spent every fine day
sitting alone in the little square at the foot of
Montmartre staring stupidly in front of him,
smoking an interminable pipe. When asked
what was the matter, he growled out that it

266 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

was his first wound that was giving him trouble.
The doctor, called in at the last moment, diag-
nosed consumption. This did not deceive his
wife. She alone knew that her husband had a
heart — not the common workaday heart that is
turned out by the gross — but a heart of his own,
and not a bad heart, either — and it was broken.
What he thought about the affaire no one ever
knew — to have expressed an opinion when so
many officers of high rank were at variance
would have seemed to him an act of indiscipline
— but the squalid horror of it all literally killed
him. Just before the end came, he took in his
wasted hand the Cross of the Legion of Honour
which his wife had laid upon his pillow, close to
his cheek, and, looking into her eyes with the
hard stare which his illness had rendered more
glaring than ever, he said : " Cherished one, if
it be a son, I count upon thee that he never
forget these words : ' Honneur, Patrie.' " And
he pointed to the motto encircling in gold letters
the centre of the cross. She kept the tears
from her eyes by an effort which left her dumb,
kissed him, and he died.

Jeanne Duvernoy, though twenty years
younger than her husband, loved him with
devotion. Not altogether blind to some of his
failings, still, she understood him, and knew at

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 267

least that she herself had nothing to fear from
the primitively savage nature whose attach-
ment to her was that of a wild beast to its mate.
She has been his feminine counterpart, with this
difference — that her ideals are poetized. Her
patriotism is no less intense than was his, but
it is of the lyrical order. Often she says she
wishes she had been born a man, so that she
might have been a soldier. It is likely enough
that she would not have been deterred by the
hardships of a soldier's life, for hard work from
early morning till late at night is what Jeanne
revels in. Her little flat is a model of orderli-
ness ; her furniture and floors as highly polished
as ever a soldier's buttons. A small, blue-eyed
woman is Jeanne, with raven black hair reaching,
when she lets it down, almost to her feet, and
bright and active as a bird. It is not uncommon
to find Frenchwomen in whom there is a strain
of pure heroism — heroism of the romantic order
— and she is one of these. Daughters of the
Revolution, granddaughters of Joan of Arc,
great-granddaughters of Eve, whatever may be
their rank in life, they are charming as girls,
faithful as wives, and incomparable as mothers.
It is in poverty, sickness, and danger — indeed,
in all the complex difficulties of life — that their
best qualities come out. " Messieurs les mal-

268 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

heurs, tirez les premiers/ ' they seem to say,
almost like the French Guard at Fontenoy. In
the presence of a catastrophe their tempers
remain high and brave ; when they succumb,
then, indeed, is the end of all things. And
debrouillardes (managing and resourceful) that
they are, too.

Debrouillarde Jeanne needs to be, for the ex-
penses of the Sergeant's funeral sweep away
most of his little savings — just £28. It is quite
a ceremonious affair — a detachment of infantry
commanded by a Lieutenant (this is due to his
rank as a Knight of the Legion of Honour) fol-
lows in the procession, together with a delega-
tion of the Veterans' Society, to which Duvernoy
belonged, with banner, band, and bluster. The
banner bears the words embroidered in gold,
" Honneur, Patrie." In spite of her condition,
the widow follows as chief mourner, and General
X (the Sergeant's former Captain, whose life he
saved), in civilian clothes, supports her respect-
fully on his arm as the coffin is lowered into the
grave.

Then comes the dreary fortnight at the
Maternite Hospital, with the misery of its
prison-like walls and gratuitous nursing, through
which Jeanne Duvernoy retains, if not cheerful-
ness, at least uncomplaining resignation. As

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 269

soon as she can get about, she trips round to the
shops in the neighbourhood where she is accus-
tomed to deal, and tells the shopkeepers' wives
that she wants work as a femme de menage.

The femme de menage is an institution in
many respects peculiar to France. To trans-
late the term into English as " charwoman "
would be an insult to a good femme de menage,
and not disparaging enough for a bad one. A
first-class housekeeper, an excellent cook, to
whom the purchase of the provisions may be
entrusted with all security, an admirable needle-
woman— such is the best type of femme de
menage, and she will do the work of a staff of
servants for a charge of only 40 centimes (just
under 4d.) per hour.

Jeanne's reputation is high in the M quarter,"
for she has always paid what she owed. Soon
all her morning is disposed of. Before going to
her work she takes little Emile to the Municipal
Creche, paying 5 centimes for him to be fed and
cared for till she fetches him in the afternoon.
Easily she can find enough menages to occupy
all her time, but she prefers to do embroidery
at home, so that the presence of little Emile
may brighten at least a portion of her day.

Jeanne's special talent is the embroidering of
initials upon fine linen, and she is paid 25 cen-

270 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

times for each letter — a poor remuneration, con-
sidering how fine and elaborate is her workman-
ship. To earn 2 francs at this eye-straining task,
she must toil far into the night ; but she sings
a gay lullaby to little Emile over her needle :

" Et maintenant sur mes genoux
Brave general, endormez-vous !" . . .

— and to tend him and love him is an unfailing-
source of courage and happiness. Her hus-
band's pension, after fifteen years' loyal service,
and the award of the Medaille Militaire, was
1,100 francs per annum, or £44. His Cross of
the Legion of Honour brought him in £10 a year,
which ceased, however, at his death. Of the
original pension, the widow receives just one-
third, or £14 odd. Thanks to the influence of
General X, she has been accorded a barrow-
hawker's medal. To understand the meaning
of this, the reader must know that in Paris the
costermongers (marchands de quatre saisons),
male and female, are a privileged corporation,
or, to put it more accurately, they may not
exercise their calling without a special licence
from the Prefect of Police. Those to whom the
licence has been granted — and for this they pay
5 francs (4s.) a year — are obliged to wear a brass
medal, bearing the name and address of the
holder, which is worn suspended round the neck

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 271

by a chain. Jeanne farms out her medal for
15 francs a month, in breach, it must be added,
of the city regulations, but the police are good
enough to wink at it, for her deputy is an old
lady of unimpeachable virtue, who never ob-
structs the traffic, and always moves on when
she is told to. Thus, on a monthly income of
120 francs, or 24s. a week, Jeanne, by prodigies
of hard work and economy, manages to make
two ends meet, and to maintain the same dig-
nified appearance as in her late husband's life-
time, and this in Paris, where the cost of living
is, even at Montmartre, at least one-third higher
than in London. Her constant, if not her
greatest, preoccupation is the rent. For two
rooms and a very diminutive kitchen on the
sixth floor of the Rue Baudelique she pays
120 francs (£4 16s.) a year.

In Paris rents under 500 francs are payable
quarterly on the eighth day of the month before
noon. On that day Jeanne must hand over
30 francs to the concierge, or house-porter, to
be remitted to the landlord. It was the Ser-
geant's invariable habit to pay in gold — one
20-franc piece, and one 10-franc piece — this
being more dignified than a pile of silver change,
and Jeanne maintains the tradition. Never in
the whole course of her housekeeping life has

272 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

she been a day or an hour late with the quarter's
rent, paid in advance, and in gold.

The rent ! How reverent is the attitude of
the majority of Parisians towards the rent !
Other accounts may be allowed to stand over,
but a garment of peculiar sanctity drapes the
rent. It is a certificate of respectability to be
exact with the rent. In the worst criminal
cases, such as wife-murder or parricide, if it can
be proved in favour of the guilty party that he
always paid his rent with punctuality, this is
an extenuating circumstance, which never fails
of its effect upon the jury, and may even secure
his acquittal. The rent is constantly in Jeanne's
thoughts. The sight of the big louis and the
small louis gleaming golden, on the eve of rent-
day, in the ragged old leather purse which had
been her husband's, is a perfect joy to Jeanne,
and her pleasure and pride are hardly less great
when the concierge, on handing her the stamped
receipt for the 30 francs, exclaims, as he never
fails to do : " Ah, with Madame Duvernoy there
is nothing to fear. Just like your poor hus-
band— never behind by a minute. Ah, madame,
if all the world were like you !" Regularly, on
the eve of every eighth day of the quarter
month, Jeanne jingles the two gold pieces before
the delighted eyes of little Emile, eager to seize

A FRENCH SOLDIERS MOTHER 273

them, and vexed that they should be the only
bright things in his mother's possession, envied
for playthings, which she will not let him have.
" No," she says, M they are very beautiful, but
they are not for little Emile. ' On n'y touche
pas ! ' (Paws off !) It's the rent /"

Laboriously but peacefully the years glide
by. Jeanne is happy, sitting with her em-
broidery on fine summer afternoons in the little
Montmartre Square, gay with flowers, while
three-year-old Emile plays beside her with the
other small children of the quarter. She is
happy when, a couple of years later, he parades
Montmartre at Carnival time, to the admiration
of all beholders, in a miniature soldier's uni-
form, all of which she has made for him herself,
except the tin sword. She is happy when, a
strong rosy boy of fourteen, he joins the Mont-
martre Gymnastic Society, and at the head of
his company, in a graceful costume of white
calico trimmed with blue, he rouses the echoes
of the old Montmartre Butte with a bugle.

Emile has a nice voice, and sings Paul Derou-
lede's inspiring soldier's song, " Le Clair on"
(" The Bugler ") with great conviction and
success :

" L'air est pur, la route est large,
Le clairon sonne a la charge." . . .

18

274 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

— and this, too, makes his mother happy, for
she feels that he is his father's own boy. The
thought softens her sorrow when she visits — as
she does every Sunday — the Pantin Cemetery,
to tend and put flowers upon the Sergeant's
grave — a task which, throughout all the inter-
vening years since her husband's death, she has
never once missed.

Yet Jeanne sees clearly that Emile only
slightly resembles his father. He is a thorough
Parisian, while both his parents came from the
provinces — the Sergeant from the lost province
of Lorraine, and Jeanne from sunny Avignon.
Emile has the vivacity, the restlessness, the
hatred of restraint, the spendthrift tastes so
common in the youthful Parisian of the present
generation. He talks glibly, especially on
politics, and has a highly acute, though one-
sided, sense of injustice. He is self-willed, but
not always along the line of duty. The Ser-
geant never admitted himself to be in the
wrong, but he took some pains to be in the
right. Like so many Parisian lads, Emile has
several useless little gifts — draws cleverly, has
a prodigious memory for popular songs, and
takes a huge pleasure in anything that resembles,
ever so distantly, a theatrical entertainment.
Chariot, Emile's chosen companion in the

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A FRENCH SOLDIERS MOTHER 275

Gymnastic Society, has the same tastes as
himself, and evenings spent with him at the
Gaiete Rochechouart, at the Elysee Montmartre,
and the Cigale, not only drain the widow's re-
sources of many a 2-franc piece, but involve the
keeping of late hours and a disinclination to rise
early in the morning on the part of Emile —
failings, however, which his mother is certain
the regiment will correct. For it has always
been understood between Emile and his mother
that as soon as he is eighteen years of age he is
to enlist in the army on a five years' engage-
ment.

It is then that Jeanne's dream is to enter
upon the first stage of its realization. From
private soldier to corporal, then through the
successive grades of Sergeant, Sergeant-major,
and Adjutant, she sees him rise. In democratic
France this is quite possible. The non-com-
missioned officers' school at Saumur (Emile will
choose the cavalry) comes next, and a couple of
years afterwards he will don the officer's uni-
form. " Tu me reviendras un gentil petit
officier " (Thou shalt come back to me a nice
young officer), she whispers to him between
mother's kisses. " Captain, Major, Knight of
the Legion of Honour, Colonel, General, per-
haps ! Who knows what brilliant career fate

276 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

may not reserve for her darling Emile, who,
with all the military fervour which his late
father possessed, has had the excellent modern
education supplied by the Paris Municipal
Schools, writes such a good hand, and con-
verses with so much apropos on so many
topics ?"

When the great day comes, Emile, taller and
nearly twice as heavy as the late Sergeant, is
drafted into a regiment of Cuirassiers.

How his mother's heart beats with pride
when first she clasps him in her arms in his big
blue trooper's coat and red breeches ! How
warlike he looks in the gleaming steel helmet
with its great brass crest, from the back of
which hangs the black criniere, or " horse-tail,"
destined to turn a sabre-cut dealt at the neck
or the shoulders ! The criniere is not really
made of horse-hair, but of fanons it baleine, or
shredded whale-bone. That is a detail which
will be new to many people, but what Jeanne,
although a soldier's widow, did not know before
is that in the French Cuirassier and Dragoon
regiments the chic or " swagger thing " for
troopers who can afford it is to wear a criniere
made of woman's tresses. It is really a very
pretty idea. There is something in the notion
which is very chivalrous and very French. But

A FRENCH SOLDIERS MOTHER 277

the cheapest criniere de femme costs 200 francs
(£8), and that, too, at second-hand. The very
fine glossy and quite black hair which adorns
some of the officers' helmets is of Chinese origin,
and may cost as much as 1,500 francs (£60).
As Jeanne listens to these details related by
Emile, there flashes across her brain an idea
which is at once maternally and patriotically
sublime. Her own raven-black hair, in which
there is barely one thread of silver, so glossy
and bountiful that it is the pride of the quarter
— il les beaux cheveux de Madame Duvernoy "
is a phrase often on the lips of the concierge,
and the baker's wife at the corner of the street
— shall be offered up (as it were) on the altar
of Emile's military glory to make a crinihe for
his helmet. And in this divine sacrifice, at the
thought of which she at no moment feels one
pang of regret or the smallest revulsion of female
vanity, she achieves some part at least of the
unattainable ambition of her girlhood — to be,
not only a soldier's wife and a soldier's mother,
but something of a soldier, too. Something of
her, of herself, will accompany Emile throughout
his soldiering. Her hair will float around his
head when he charges with his squadron ; her
hair will caress his cheek in the hour of battle,
if ever there shall be war ; her hair will turn the

278

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

blows which the enemy may aim at his neck
and back ; her hair may save a French
soldier's life, and her son's as well. Vive la
France !

When Emile receives from the vaguemestre of
his regiment the registered postal package which
contains his mother's hair, he knows well enough
what is inside the box, for he has guessed his
mother's intention from certain vague expres-
sions in her letters, though she, fearing that he
might protest against her sweet sacrifice, and
wishing her gift to come as a surprise, believes
that she has kept him completely in the dark.
His comrades crowd round him. " Ah, the
lucky youth ! Ah, the gay boy ! Ah, the pig
— the fat, the immeasurably fat pig ! It is his
sweetheart who has sent him her head of hair !
Ha, ha, ha ! He must pay us a bottle of wine !"
And they pat him on the back and dig him in
the ribs as he fixes the splendid black tresses in
his helmet. "It is his sweetheart !" they yell
in chorus. " Sacred pig ! Sacred Emile ! Thy
sweetheart, eh ? Is it not — is it not ? Useless
to deny it, you ruffian !" Emile does not say
that it is his sweetheart, but he is just too much
of a Parisian to deny it altogether. So he answers
neither " yea " nor "nay," but jocularly asks
his friends to admire him, and they admire him

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 279

on every note of the scale and from every point
of view.

A year afterwards Emile gets into serious
trouble, but through no fault of his own. He
is an Sieve brigadier (or lance-corporal), and a
comrade, also an eleve brigadier, steals a docu-
ment from the office of the regiment, where both
are employed as clerks, and is caught red-handed.
The thief, a silly youth whose brain has been
addled by reading the endless adventures of
M Nick Carter," and similar American trash, sold
in illustrated penny numbers, not only denounces
himself as a spy in the pay of a foreign Govern-
ment, but accuses Emile of being his accomplice.
The stolen document is of no value, the whole
story is the invention of a hysterical idiot, and
Emile' s innocence is, after an elaborate inquiry,
made clear. But he has spent three weeks in
prison, and when he is sent back, without
apology or compensation, to his regiment, he
finds that he is, as French soldiers say, consigne
— there is a black mark against him, his
superiors look upon him with suspicion. The
fact is that the prosecutor, the military juge
instructeur , who had the case in hand, was con-
vinced from the beginning that Emile, together
perhaps with his mother, was the chief mover
in a vast system of espionage, with ramifications

280 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

all over the world, and its centre in Berlin, and,
having hoped to make the great hit of his life
by unravelling this black conspiracy, he is dis-
appointed with the result, and therefore deeply
displeased with Emile. Emile may change into
another regiment, but the ban, the consigne,
will follow him wherever he goes.

The Colonel is in a bad temper when Emile,
duly introduced by his Sergeant, respectfully
asks for a month's leave to visit his mother, in
order to console her for his long silence and to
re-establish his health, broken by confinement.
Gazing in wrath at Emile' s rosy cheeks, the
Colonel roars : " 111, you say ! Clear out ! You
have already been absent from your duties too
long, and if I hear any more nonsense from you,
you shall be punished severely." The conse-
quence is that Emile has a bad attack of what
in French military slang is called le cafard. A
cafard is a black-beetle, and why the word should
be employed to designate an odd mental, or,
more strictly speaking, moral, malady peculiar
to soldiers has never been clearly explained.
The symptoms of the cafard combine the after-
effects of too much to drink, with a touch of
ambulatory mania, or mad longing to bolt.
That night Emile, who has a permission de
minuit (leave till midnight), does not return to

THE VIEW FROM NOTRE DAME ALONG THE SEINE, WITH ITS
SPARKLING BRIDGES

To face page 280

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 281

the barracks. Six days he spends in riotous
living in Paris with his old chum Chariot ; on
the seventh (for such is the rule in the French
Army) he is notified to the police authorities as
a deserter. He no longer dares to seek out his
mother in the little flat at Montmartre, for that
is the place where, before all others, the police
will be on the look-out for him.

" But to-morrow," says Emile to himself, " is
Sunday, and mother will be at the cemetery.
It will be quite safe to meet her there.' ? So he
sends a message to her by Chariot, who has in-
structions to tell her just as much as may be
wise. " Bear in mind," he says, " she is a bit
excitable.' ' Chariot's preamble is in the nature
of circumlocution, but he ends by telling Jeanne
all he knows, and a little more. " He's a good
fellow all the same," says Chariot, when he sees
in the blazing eyes and white face of the mother
the terrible effect of his story. " Of course, it's
no joke what he's done. Sacred Emile ! A
very bad joke, anyway. He did not know when
he was well off. Sacred Emile !"

At the cemetery Madame Duvernoy is dressed
in the deep mourning she always wears when
she visits the Sergeant's grave. Her face is
buried in her hands. At first she does little
but weep and shake her head.

282

SENSATIONS OF PARIS

" Tell me everything/ ' the mother insists, as
if she did not already know all.

" They treated me with injustice, mother,"
says Emile, " and I cannot stand that !"

" There is much injustice in the world," sobs
his mother. " The world isn't perfect."

"It's no good going back now to the regi-
ment ; it would be folly," says Emile.

The mother nods her head violently in con-
tradiction. u Thou must — thou must go back,
whatever happens ! It's thy duty, my little
Emile. Thy honour bids thee. Thou must
submit to thy punishment like a brave lad."

Emile (after a pause) : " Mother, I am leaving
for Brussels to-night. There's the ticket to be
bought. Canst thou give me some money — just
a little ? With ten francs "

The mother : " Help thee to run away ?
Thou knowest not what thou askest, my poor
Emile. Then I should be as bad as thou art.
The innocent dead one, who is lying here, would
rise from the grave to strangle us both if he
could know that I had helped thee to desert
from the army, to betray thy country, to break
thy word of honour. Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,
the honour that he held so dear !"

" Mother," insists the lad in a hoarse whispei
"if I go back it is the conseil de guerre (courl

A FRENCH SOLDIER'S MOTHER 283

martial) that will judge me. / have been absent
six whole days. Do you hear ? Six whole days !

I am a deserter, and they will have no pity.
It is because they have acted unjustly towards
me that they will have no pity, for never will
they admit themselves to have been in the
wrong. There is a black mark against me. I
am consigne, and so it's biribi for me."

Biribi I The word strikes straight to the
mother's heart. Pere Cherubin's widow feels
an icy thrill through all her veins. " Yes,
mother," repeats Emile, seeing the advantage
he has gained — M biribi /"

Jeanne withdraws her hand from her face,
which is swollen and reddened with tears. In
a second her mind has been made up. Her
hand creeps to her pocket, from which she
takes out the old purse that Emile knows so
well, and thrusts it into his hand. Two gold
pieces are inside it — a twenty-franc and a ten-
franc piece. She has brought them with her.

It dawns on the lad that the quarter-day is
approaching. Those two sacred louis d'orf

II Mother," cries Emile in a choked voice, and
stooping (for she has sunk to a sitting posture
on the grave), he tries to fold her in his arms,
to kiss her, " this is too much ! Mother, for-
give me. I will go back if thou willst."

284 SENSATIONS OF PARIS

" Va-t'en ! Va-t'en !" she cries in agony,
and pushes him from her. " Be off ! be off !"

" Mother, let me kiss you — perhaps it is for
the last time !"

As Emile bends down, the criniere of his
helmet — her hair — has swept his mother's tear-
riven cheek. " Thou art killing me — thou art
killing me I" she gasps. " Oh, my son, my son !"

Violently, with a revulsion of horror, she frees
herself from his embrace. " Va-t'en ! Va-t'en !"
He looks wildly about him, then slinks away.
And prone upon Sergeant Duvernoy's grave lies
the poor widow, a pitiful figure, with her hair
cut short like a boy's, weeping out her heart.

INDEX

Abbaye des Bois, 201
Academicians, 72
Academy set, the, 151
Acrobats, 29
Ambassadors, 72
American picture-buyers,

155

American wives, 153
American woman, the, 150
Ancien regime, the, 157
Architects, French, 180
Arts, Pont des, 171
Ault, le Bourg d', 31
Auteuil, 50, 124, 251

Bachelor woman, a, 113

Bagneux, 38

Balzac, 246

Beguin, a, 36

Bellevue, 164

Bells, ringing of, 204

Bercy, wine depot at, 126

Berlin, uniformity of, 158

Berton, Rue, 166

Bievre, la, 241

" Biribi," 265

Bizy, 236

Black Cat, the, 147

Blanche, Place, 173

Boileau, 251

Bonne a toutes mains, 177

Boston baked beans, 146

Bottling, art of, 44

Boulogne, Bois de, 50

Boulogne, Bois de, cemetery

in, 253
Bracquemond, M. Felix,

159
Braque, Rue, 11 1
Brebant's, 212
Brittany, colour of, 58
Bryan, Mr., 217
Buttes Chaumont, 203

Cabinet Ministers, 72
Cabman, the Paris, 118
Cabourg, Cafard, le, 281
Cafe Anglais, 211
Cafe waiters, 115
Careme, 220

Carignan, Princesse de, 251
Cassette, Rue, 165
Castiglione, Comtesse de,

220
Catacombs, the, 198
Catholic Institute, the, 165
Cat zone, 200
Central Markets, the, 125
Chair-mender, the, 206
Champs Elysees, the, 125
Chantal, Ste Jeanne de,

259

Chanteurs de complaintes,

209
Charenton, 57
Chateaubriand, 95
Chateaubriand at Aulnay,

260

285

286

INDEX

Chauvin, Monsieur, 133
Choiseul-Praslin, Due de,

252
Clichy, Rue de, 174
Cliques, 151
Clochettes, les, 232
Cobbles, 167
College Chaptal, 177
Colonialism, 76
Colour, processional, 127
Comedie Francaise, the, 92
" Corniche Normande," the

183

Corvisant, 245
Cowslips, 228
Crecy-en-Brie, 156
Criniere defemme, 277

Daffodils, 229
Daudet, Alphonse, 80
Dead Rat, the, 147
Deptford Creek, 63
Diablerie, 121
Dog zone, 200
Duglere, 221

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 156
Ecole de Droit, 92
Etiolles, village of, 231
European Quarter, the, 173

Figuier, Rue du, 256
Fleurus, Rue de, 170
Franklin, Benjamin, 142
French dressmakers, 150

Gaiete Rochechouart, 275
Galliffet, Marquis de, 219
Gambetta, 134
Gand, Boulevard de, 19
Giverny, 156
Gobelin tapestry, 147
Goncourt, Edmond de, 254
Gramont-Caderousse, Due
de, 22

Grand Seize, the, 217
Green, Miss Grace, 114
Grisette, the, 235
Guide, the, 102
Guimard, la, 254

Hawkers' hods, 232
Home, le, 227
Honfleur, 59
Hospitalieres de St. Thomas,

Convent of, 257
Humanite, V, 134
Hyde, J. H., 74
Hygiene, mysteries of, 154

Institut Oceanographique,

260
Invalides, the, 54
Italie, Boulevard d', 240
Italiens, Boulevard des, 19
Ivry, 242

Jack, coupes, 15
Jaures, M., 134
Jews, 152

Kippers, British, 103
Kleinstaedtigkeit, 79

Lafayette, Rue, 127
Lajeunesse, Ernest, 25
Longchamp, Abbey of, 254
London, colour of, 60
London, lights of, 63
Louis XIV., 99
Luxembourg, the, 21

" Mail-coach/' the, 124
Maison Doree, 211
Maitre-tonnelier, a, 37
Manners, French, 96
Marchand de plaisir, 206
Marie Antoinette, 126
Marie de Medicis's fountain
193

INDEX

287

Marne, the, 57
Marne, tour de la, 187
Maternite Hospital, the, 268
May Day, 236
Menage, femme de, 269
Meteque, le, 76
Midinette, the, 235
Moliere, 252
Moliere's house, 250
Monaco, Prince of, 260
Monomes, 129
Montmartre, 30
Montorgueil, Rue, 18
Morgue, the, 105
Moulin Rouge, the, 102
Muguet, Fete du, 233
Mussels, 184

Nesles-la-Vallee, 156
Neuilly, 48

Newspapers, French, 136
Noce, the, 48
Normandy, colour of, 58
Northern Railway Station,

the, 175
Notre Dame, 54

Odour, the Suburban, 79
" Old Glory," 157
Orleans, Due d', 139
O'Shaughnessy, Mr., no

Paint, world of, 155
Palais de Justice, 162
Palais Royal, 17
Pantheon, the, 54
Papal Nuncio, the, 69
Paris, colour of, 60
Paris, floods in, 64
Paris, foreigner in, 66
Paris, Ghetto of, 256
Paris, heart of, 60
Paris, mud of, 59
Paris, Old, 241
Paris, panorama of, 55

Paris, smart set of, 151

Paris, throat of, 20

Paris, University of, 91

Parisine, 75

Passy, Quai de, 161

Pave, le haut du, 166

Pearl, Cora, 23

Penseur, the, 164

Pere Goriot, le, 93

Peyre, Aine, 244

Picardy, colour of, 58

Place des Vosges, 17, 85

Plumber, the, 206

Politeness, art of, 98

Pompadour, Marquise de,
231

Poppy, skirt-dance of, 225

Pot-au-feu, the, 82

Poubelles, 34
I Primrose, 236
j Protestants, 152

J Quatre saisons, marchands
de, 270

Rabelais, last home of, 257
Rag-pickers, 34, 149
Rameaux, Les, 239
Raspail, Boulevard, 199
Richelieu, Due de, 99
Rochefort, Henri, 76
Rodin, 61, 224
Rouen, mud of, 59

Sacre Cceur, the, 32, 52

Sainte-Adresse, 181

St. Cloud, 236

St. Denis, Royal, 54

St. Germain, Faubourg, 17

St. Germain, l'Auxerrois, 91

St. Honore, Faubourg, 17

St. Michel, Dames de, 258

St. Paul, Hotel, 256

St. Severin, 91

St. Sulpice, 54

288

INDEX

St. Vincent de Paul, 54
Salle des Pas-Perdus, 89
Seine, the, 57
Seine's robe, the, 59
Senart, forest of, 229
Sens, Hotel de, 255
S6vigne, Madame de, 259
Shutters, 169
Smell, the provincial, 78
Sorbonne, 21
Sourdeval, M. de, 214
Spheres, music of, 53
Stair, Lord, 99
Street musicians, 208
Stuart Merrill, 77

Tapissieres, 107
Tempo, the French, 117
Ternes, the, 18
Thackeray, 111
Times, size of, 132
Tortoni, 15
Tournefort, Rue, 245

Tricolour, the, 131
Trilby, n 1

Ulbach, 243

Vaucresson, woods of, 237
Vauquer, the Maison, 93,

246
Vendome Column, the, 86
Venus, Temple of, 254
Vergennes, Marquis de, in
Viele-Grimn, yy
Ville d'Avray, 238
Vincennes, Bois de, 51
Vins ordinaires, 44
Violette de Paris, la vraie, 237
Voiture a galerie, 189
Voltaire, smile of, 161
Vrau, M., 138

Wastefulness, American, 148
" Watt-men," 123
Whips, cracking of, 204

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