As you walk along the Rue de la Paix [Footnote: The X being one of the few silent things in France.] and pay and pay, and keep on paying, your eye is constantly engaged by two inscriptions that occur and recur with the utmost frequency. One of these appears in nearly every shopwindow and over nearly every shopdoor. It says:
English Spoken Here.
This, I may tell you, is one of the few absolutely truthful and dependable statements encountered by the tourist in the French capital. Invariably English is spoken here. It is spoken here during all the hours of the day and until far into the dusk of the evening; spoken loudly, clearly, distinctly, hopefully, hopelessly, stridently, hoarsely, despondently, despairingly and finally profanely by Americans who are trying to make somebody round the place understand what they are driving at.
The other inscription is carved, painted or printed on all public buildings, on most monuments, and on many private establishments as well. It is the motto of the French Republic, reading as follows:
Liberality! Economy! Frugality![Footnote: Free translation.]
The first word of this—the Liberality part—is applicable to the foreigner and is aimed directly at him as a prayer, an injunction and a command; while the rest of it—the Economy and the Frugality—is competently attended to by the Parisians themselves. The foreigner has only to be sufficiently liberal and he is assured of a flattering reception wheresoever his straying footsteps may carry him, whether in Paris or in the provinces; but wheresoever those feet of his do carry him he will find a people distinguished by a frugality and inspired by an economy of the frugalest and most economical character conceivable. In the streets of the metropolis he is expected, when going anywhere, to hail the fast-flitting taxicab [Footnote: Stops on signal only—and sometimes not then.], though the residents patronize the public bus. Indeed, the distinction is made clear to his understanding from the moment he passes the first outlying fortress at the national frontier [Footnote: Flag station.]—since, for the looks of things if for no better reason, he must travel first-class on the de-luxe trains [Footnote: Diner taken off when you are about half through eating.], whereas the Frenchmen pack themselves tightly but frugally into the second-class and the third-class compartments.
Before I went to France I knew Saint Denis was the patron saint of the French; but I did not know why until I heard the legend connected with his death. When the executioner on the hill at Montmartre cut off his head the good saint picked it up and strolled across the fields with it tucked under his arm—so runs the tale. His head, in that shape, was no longer of any particular value to him, but your true Parisian is of a saving disposition. And so the Paris population have worshiped Saint Denis ever since. Both as a saint and as a citizen he filled the bill. He would not throw anything away, whether he needed it or not.
Paris—not the Paris of the art lover, nor the Paris of the lover of history, nor yet again the Paris of the worth-while Parisians—but the Paris which the casual male visitor samples, is the most overrated thing on earth, I reckon—except alligator-pear salad—and the most costly. Its system of conduct is predicated, based, organized and manipulated on the principle that a foreigner with plenty of money and no soul will be along pretty soon. Hence by day and by night the deadfall is rigged and the trap is set and baited—baited with a spurious gayety and an imitation joyousness; but the joyousness is as thin as one coat of sizing, and the brass shines through the plating; and behind the painted, parted lips of laughter the sharp teeth of greed show in a glittering double row. Yet gallus Mr. Fly, from the U.S.A., walks debonairly in, and out comes Monsieur Spider, ably seconded by Madame Spiderette; and between them they despoil him with the utmost dispatch. When he is not being mulcted for large sums he is being nicked for small ones. It is tip, brother, tip, and keep right on tipping.
I heard a story of an American who spent a month in Paris, taking in the sights and being taken in by them, and another month motoring through the country. At length he reached the port whence he was to sail for home. He went aboard the steamer and saw to it that his belongings were properly stored; and in the privacy of his stateroom he sat down to take an inventory of his letter of credit, now reduced to a wan and wasted specter of its once plethoric self. In the midst of casting-up he heard the signal for departure; and so he went topside of the ship and, stationing himself on the promenade deck alongside the gang-plank, he raised his voice and addressed the assembled multitude on the pier substantially as follows:
"If"—these were his words—"if there is a single, solitary individual in this fair land who has not touched me for something of value—if there be in all France a man, woman or child who has not been tipped by me—let him, her or it speak now or forever after hold their peace; because, know ye all men by these presents, I am about to go away from here and if I stay in my right mind I'm not coming back!"
And several persons were badly hurt in the crush; but they were believed afterward to have been repeaters.
I thought this story was overdrawn, but, after traveling over somewhat the same route which this fellow countryman had taken, I came to the conclusion that it was no exaggeration, but a true bill in all particulars. On the night of our second day in Paris we went to a theater to see one of the topical revues, in which Paris is supposed to excel; and for sheer dreariness and blatant vulgarity Paris revues do, indeed, excel anything of a similar nature as done in either England or in America, which is saying quite a mouthful.
In the French revue the members of the chorus reach their artistic limit in costuming when they dance forth from the wings wearing short and shabby undergarments over soiled pink fleshings and any time the dramatic interest begins to run low and gurgle in the pipes a male comedian pumps it up again by striking or kicking a woman. But to kick her is regarded as much the more whimsical conceit. This invariably sets the audience rocking with uncontrollable merriment. Howsomever, I am not writing a critique of the merits of the performance. If I were I should say that to begin with the title of the piece was wrong. It should have been called Lapsus Lingerie—signifying as the Latins would say, "A Mere Slip." At this moment I am concerned with what happened upon our entrance.
At the door a middle-aged female, who was raising a natty mustache, handed us programs. I paid her for the programs and tipped her. She turned us over to a stout brunette lady who was cultivating a neat and flossy pair of muttonchops. This person escorted us down the aisle to where our seats were; so I tipped her. Alongside our seats stood a third member of the sisterhood, chiefly distinguished from her confreres by the fact that she was turning out something very fetching in the way of a brown vandyke; and after we were seated she continued to stand there, holding forth her hand toward me, palm up and fingers extended in the national gesture, and saying something in her native tongue very rapidly. Incidentally she was blocking the path of a number of people who had come down the aisle immediately behind us.
I thought possibly she desired to see our coupons, so I hauled them out and exhibited them. She shook her head at that and gabbled faster than ever. It next occurred to me that perhaps she wanted to furnish us with programs and was asking in advance for the money with which to pay for them. I explained to her that I already secured programs from her friend with the mustache. I did this mainly in English, but partly in French—at least I employed the correct French word for program, which is programme. To prove my case I pulled the two programs from my pocket and showed them to her. She continued to shake her head with great emphasis, babbling on at an increased speed. The situation was beginning to verge on the embarrassing when a light dawned on me. She wanted a tip, that was it! She had not done anything to earn a tip that I could see; and unless one had been reared in the barbering business she was not particularly attractive to look on, and even then only in a professional aspect; but I tipped her and bade her begone, and straightway she bewent, satisfied and smiling. From that moment on I knew my book. When in doubt I tipped one person—the person nearest to me. When in deep doubt I tipped two or more persons. And all was well.
On the next evening but one I had another lesson, which gave me further insight into the habits and customs of these gay and gladsome Parisians. We were completing a round of the all-night cafes and cabarets. There were four of us. Briefly, we had seen the Dead Rat, the Abbey, the Bal Tabarin the Red Mill, Maxim's, and the rest of the lot to the total number of perhaps ten or twelve. We had listened to bad singing, looked on bad dancing, sipped gingerly at bad drinks, and nibbled daintily at bad food; and the taste of it all was as grit and ashes in our mouths. We had learned for ourselves that the much-vaunted gay life of Paris was just as sad and sordid and sloppy and unsavory as the so-called gay life of any other city with a lesser reputation for gay life and gay livers. A scrap of the gristle end of the New York Tenderloin; a suggestion of a certain part of New Orleans; a short cross section of the Levee, in Chicago; a dab of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco in its old, unexpurgated days; a touch of Piccadilly Circus in London, after midnight, with a top dressing of Gehenna the Unblest—it had seemed to us a compound of these ingredients, with a distinctive savor of what was essentially Gallic permeating through it like garlic through a stew. We had had enough. Even though we had attended only as onlookers and seekers after local color, we felt that we had a-plenty of onlooking and entirely too much of local color; we felt that we should all go into retreat for a season of self-purification to rid our persons of the one and take a bath in formaldehyde to rinse our memories clean of the other. But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that the evening would not be complete without a stop at a cafe that had—so he said—an international reputation for its supposed sauciness and its real Bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might be. Overcome by his argument we piled into a cab and departed thither.
This particular cafe was found, in its physical aspects, to be typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated, underlighted, and stuffy to suffocation with the mingled aromas of stale drink and cheap perfume. As we entered a wrangle was going on among a group of young Frenchmen picturesquely attired as art students—almost a sure sign that they were not art students. An undersized girl dressed in a shabby black-and-yellow frock was doing a Spanish dance on a cleared space in the middle of the floor. We knew her instantly for a Spanish dancer, because she had a fan in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. Another girl, dressed as a pierrot, was waiting to do her turn when the Spanish dancer finished. Weariness showed through the lacquer of thick cosmetic on her peaked little face. An orchestra of three pieces sawed wood steadily; and at intervals, to prove that these were gay and blithesome revels, somebody connected with the establishment threw small, party-colored balls of celluloid about. But what particularly caught our attention was the presence in a far corner of two little darkies in miniature dress suits, both very wally of eye, very brown of skin, and very shaved as to head, huddled together there as though for the poor comfort of physical contact. As soon as they saw us they left their place and sidled up, tickled beyond measure to behold American faces and hear American voices.
They belonged, it seemed, to a troupe of jubilee singers who had been imported from the States for the delectation of French audiences. At night, after their work at a vaudeville theater was done, the members of their company were paired off and sent about to the cafes to earn their keep by singing ragtime songs and dancing buck dances. These two were desperately, pathetically homesick. One of them blinked back the tears when he told us, with the plaintive African quaver in his voice, how long they had been away from their own country and how happy they would be to get back to it again.
"We suttin'ly is glad to heah somebody talkin' de reg'lar New 'Nited States talk, same as we does," he said. "We gits mighty tired of all dis yere French jabberin'!"
"Yas, suh," put in his partner; "dey meks a mighty fuss over cullud folks over yere; but 'tain't noways lak home. I comes from Bummin'ham, Alabama, myse'f. Does you gen'lemen know anybody in Bummin'ham?"
They were the first really wholesome creatures who had crossed our paths that night. They crowded up close to us and there they stayed until we left, as grateful as a pair of friendly puppies for a word or a look. Presently, though, something happened that made us forget these small dark compatriots of ours. We had had sandwiches all round and a bottle of wine. When the waiter brought the check it fell haply into the hands of the one person in our party who knew French and—what was an even more valuable accomplishment under the present circumstances—knew the intricate French system of computing a bill. He ran a pencil down the figures. Then he consulted the price list on the menu and examined the label on the neck of the wine bottle, and then he gave a long whistle. "What's the trouble?" asked one of us.
"Oh, not much!" he said. "We had a bottle of wine priced at eighteen francs and they have merely charged us twenty-four francs for it—six francs overcharge on that one item alone. The total for the sandwiches should have been six francs, and it is put down at ten francs. And here, away down at the bottom, I find a mysterious entry of four francs, which seems to have no bearing on the case at all—unless it be that they just simply need the money. I expected to be skinned somewhat, but I object to being peeled. I'm afraid, at the risk of appearing mercenary, that we'll have to ask our friend for a recount."
He beckoned the waiter to him and fired a volley of rapid French in the waiter's face. The waiter batted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders; then reversing the operation he shrugged his eyelids and batted his shoulderblades, meantime endeavoring volubly to explain. Our friend shoved the check into his hands and waved him away. He was back again in a minute with the account corrected. That is, it was corrected to the extent that the wine item had been reduced to twenty-one francs and the sandwiches to eight francs.
By now our paymaster was as hot as a hornet. His gorge rose—his freeborn, independent American gorge. It rose clear to the ceiling and threw off sparks and red clinkers. He sent for the manager. The manager came, all bows and graciousness and rumply shirtfront; and when he heard what was to be said he became all apologies and indignation. He regretted more than words could tell that the American gentlemen who deigned to patronize his restaurant had been put to annoyance. The garcon—here he turned and burned up that individual with a fiery sideglance—was a debased idiot and the misbegotten son of a yet greater and still more debased idiot. The cashier was a green hand and an imbecile besides. It was incredible, impossible, that the overcharging had been done deliberately; that was inconceivable. But the honor of his establishment was at stake. They should both, garcon and cashier, be discharged on the spot. First, however, he would rectify all mistakes. Would monsieur intrust the miserable addition to him for a moment, for one short moment? Monsieur would and did.
This time the amount was made right and our friend handed over in payment a fifty-franc note. With his own hands the manager brought back the change. Counting it over, the payee found it five francs short. Attention being directed to this error the manager became more apologetic and more explanatory than ever, and supplied the deficiency with a shiny new five-franc piece from his own pocket. And then, when we had gone away from there and had traveled a homeward mile or two, our friend found that the new shiny five-franc piece was counterfeit—as false a thing as that manager's false smile. We had bucked the unbeatable system, and we had lost.
Earlier that same evening we spent a gloom-laden quarter of an hour in another cafe—one which owes its fame and most of its American customs to the happy circumstance that in a certain famous comic opera produced a few years ago a certain popular leading man sang a song extolling its fascinations. The man who wrote the song must have had a full-flowered and glamorous imagination, for he could see beauty where beauty was not. To us there seemed nothing particularly fanciful about the place except the prices they charged for refreshments. However, something unusual did happen there once. It was not premeditated though; the proprietor had nothing to do with it. Had he known what was about to occur undoubtedly he would have advertised it in advance and sold tickets for it.
By reason of circumstances over which he had no control, but which had mainly to do with a locked-up wardrobe, an American of convivial mentality was in his room at his hotel one evening, fairly consumed with loneliness. Above all things he desired to be abroad amid the life and gayety of the French capital; but unfortunately he had no clothes except boudoir clothes, and no way of getting any, either, Which made the situation worse. He had already tried the telephone in a vain effort to communicate with a ready-made clothing establishment in the Rue St. Honore. Naturally he had failed, as he knew he would before he tried. Among Europeans the telephone is not the popular and handy adjunct of every-day life it is among us. The English have small use for it because it is, to start with, a wretched Yankee invention; besides, an Englishman in a hurry takes a cab, as his father before him did—takes the same cab his father took, if possible—and the Latin races dislike telephone conversations because the gestures all go to absolute waste. The French telephone resembles a dingus for curling the hair. You wrap it round your head, with one end near your mouth and the other end near your ear, and you yell in it a while and curse in it a while; and then you slam it down and go and send a messenger. The hero of the present tale, however, could not send a messenger—the hotel people had their orders to the contrary from one who was not to be disobeyed.
Finally in stark desperation, maddened by the sounds of sidewalk revelry that filtered up to him intermittently, he incased his feet in bed-room slippers, slid a dressing gown over his pajamas, and negotiated a successful escape from the hotel by means of a rear way. Once in the open he climbed into a handy cab and was driven to the cafe of his choice, it being the same cafe mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago.
Through a side entrance he made a hasty and unhindered entrance into this place—not that he would have been barred under any circumstances, inasmuch as he had brought a roll with him. A person with a cluster of currency on hand is always suitably dressed in Paris, no matter if he has nothing else on; and this man had brought much ready cash with him. He could have gone in fig-leaved like Eve, or fig-leafless like September Morn, it being remembered that as between these two, as popularly depicted, Morn wears even less than Eve. So he whisked in handily, and when he had hidden the lower part of himself under a table he felt quite at home and proceeded to have a large and full evening.
Soon there entered another American, and by that mental telepathy which inevitably attracts like-spirit to like-spirit he was drawn to the spot where the first American sat. He introduced himself as one feeling the need of congenial companionship, and they shook hands and exchanged names, and the first man asked the second man to be seated; so they sat together and had something together, and then something more together; and as the winged moments flew they grew momentarily more intimate. Finally the newcomer said:
"This seems a pretty lachrymose shop. Suppose we go elsewhere and look for some real doings."
"Your proposition interests me strangely," said the first man; "but there are two reasons—both good ones—why I may not fare forth with you. Look under the table and you'll see 'em."
The second man looked and comprehended, for he was a married man himself; and he grasped the other's hand in warm and comforting sympathy.
"Old Man," he said—for they had already reached the Old Man stage—"don't let that worry you. Why, I've got more pants than any man with only one set of legs has any right to have. I've got pants that've never been worn. You stay right here and don't move until I come back. My hotel is just round the corner from here."
No sooner said than done. He went and in a surprisingly short time was back, bearing spare trousers with him. Beneath the shielding protection of the table draperies the succored one slipped them on, and they were a perfect fit. Now he was ready to go where adventure might await them. They tarried, though, to finish the last bottle.
Over the rim of his glass the second man ventured an opinion on a topic of the day. Instantly the first man challenged him. It seemed to him inconceivable that a person with intelligence enough to have amassed so many pairs of trousers should harbor such a delusion. He begged of his new-found friend to withdraw the statement, or at least to abate it. The other man was sorry, but he simply could not do it. He stood ready to concede almost anything else, but on this particular point he was adamant; in fact, adamant was in comparison with him as pliable as chewing taffy. Much as he regretted it, he could not modify his assertion by so much as one brief jot or one small tittle without violating the consistent principles of a consistent life. He felt that way about it. All his family felt that way about it.
"Then, sir," said the first man with a rare dignity, "I regret to wound your feelings; but my sensibilities are such that I cannot accept, even temporarily, the use of a pair of trousers from the loan collection of a person who entertains such false and erroneous conceptions. I have the pleasure, sir, of wishing you good night."
With these words he shucked off the borrowed habiliments and slammed them into the abashed bosom of the obstinate stranger and went back to his captivity—pantless, 'tis true, but with his honor unimpaired.
The majority of these all-night places in Paris are singularly and monotonously alike. In the early hours of the evening the musicians rest from their labors; the regular habitues lay aside their air of professional abandon; with true French frugality the lights burn dim and low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike up the band; here comes a sucker! Somebody resembling ready money has arrived. The lights flash on, the can-canners take the floor, the garcons flit hither and yon, and all is excitement.
Enter the opulent American gentleman. Half a dozen functionaries greet him rapturously, bowing before his triumphant progress. Others relieve him of his hat and his coat, so that he cannot escape prematurely. A whole reception committee escorts him to a place of honor facing the dancing arena. The natives of the quarter stand in rows in the background, drinking beer or nothing at all; but the distinguished stranger sits at a front table and is served with champagne, and champagne only. It is inferior champagne; but because it is labeled American Brut—what ever that may denote—and because there is a poster on the bottle showing the American flag in the correct colors, he pays several times its proper value for it. From far corners and remote recesses coryphees and court jesters swarm forth to fawn on him, bask in his presence, glory in his smile—and sell him something. The whole thing is as mercenary as passing the hat. Cigarette girls, flower girls and bonbon girls, postcard venders and confetti dispensers surround him impenetrably, taking him front, rear, by the right flank and the left; and they shove their wares in his face and will not take No for an answer; but they will take anything else.
Two years ago at a hunting camp in North Carolina, I thought I had met the creature with the most acute sense of hearing of any living thing. I refer to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was a reliable family animal too—had a colt every year—but in her affiliations she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life listening for somebody to say Whoa! Her ears were permanently slanted backward on that very account. She belonged to the Whoa Lodge, which has a large membership among humans.
Riding behind Pearl you uttered the talismanic word in the thinnest thread of a whisper and instantly she stopped. You could spell Whoa! on your fingers, and she would stop. You could take a pencil and a piece of paper out of your pocket and write down Whoa!—and she would stop; but, compared with a sample assortment of these cabaret satellites, Pearl would have seemed deaf as a post. Clear across a hundred-foot dance-hall they catch the sound of a restless dollar turning over in the fob pocket of an American tourist.
And they come a-running and get it. Under the circumstances it requires self-hypnotism of a high order, and plenty of it, to make an American think he is enjoying himself. Still, he frequently attains to that happy comsummation. To begin with, is he not in Gay Paree?—as it is familiarly called in Rome Center and all points West? He is! Has he not kicked over the traces and cut loose with intent to be oh, so naughty for one naughty night of his life? Such are the facts. Finally, and herein lies the proof conclusive, he is spending a good deal of money and is getting very little in return for it. Well, then, what better evidence is required? Any time he is paying four or five prices for what he buys and does not particularly need it—or want it after it is bought—the average American can delude himself into the belief that he is having a brilliant evening. This is a racial trait worthy of the scientific consideration of Professor Hugo Munsterberg and other students of our national psychology. So far the Munsterberg school has overlooked it—but the canny Parisians have not. They long ago studied out every quirk and wriggle of it, and capitalized it to their own purpose. Liberality! Economy! Frugality!—there they are, everywhere blazoned forth—Liberality for you, Economy and Frugality for them. Could anything on earth be fairer than that?
Even so, the rapturous reception accorded to a North American pales to a dim and flickery puniness alongside the perfect riot and whirlwind of enthusiasm which marks the entry into an all-night place of a South American. Time was when, to the French understanding, exuberant prodigality and the United States were terms synonymous; that time has passed. Of recent years our young kinsmen from the sister republics nearer the Equator and the Horn have invaded Paris in numbers, bringing their impulsive temperaments and their bankrolls with them. Thanks to these young cattle kings, these callow silver princes from Argentina and Brazil, from Peru and from Ecuador, a new and more gorgeous standard for money wasting has been established. You had thought, perchance, there was no rite and ceremonial quite so impressive as a head waiter in a Fifth Avenue restaurant squeezing the blood out of a semi-raw canvasback in a silver duck press for a free spender from Butte or Pittsburgh. I, too, had thought that; but wait, just wait, until you have seen a maitre d'hotel on the Avenue de l'Opera, with the smile of the canary-fed cat on his face, standing just behind a hide-and-tallow baron or a guano duke from somewhere in Far Spiggottyland, watching this person as he wades into the fresh fruit—checking off on his fingers each blushing South African peach at two francs the bite, and each purple cluster of hothouse grapes at one franc the grape. That spectacle, believe me, is worth the money every time.
There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter love and revere more deeply than they love a downy, squabbling scion of some rich South American family, and that is a large, broad negro pugilist with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirtfront full of yellow diamonds. To an American—and especially to an American who was reared below Mason and Dixon's justly popular Line—it is indeed edifying to behold a black heavyweight fourthrater from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his ease in a smart cafe, entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers, both male and female.
Now, as I remarked at an earlier stage of these observations, there is another Paris besides this—a Paris of history, of art, of architecture, of literature, of refinement; a Paris inhabited by a people with a pride in their past, a pluck in their present, and a faith in their future; a Paris of kindly aristocrats, of thrifty, pious plain people; a Paris of students and savants and scientists, of great actors and great scientists and great dramatists. There is one Paris that might well be burned to its unclean roots, and another Paris that will be glorified in the minds of mankind forever. And it would be as unfair to say that the Paris which comes flaunting its tinsel of vice and pinchbeck villainy in the casual tourist's face is the real Paris, as it would be for a man from the interior of the United States to visit New York and, after interviewing one Bowery bouncer, one Tenderloin cabman, and one Broadway ticket speculator, go back home and say he had met fit representatives of the predominant classes of New York society and had found them unfit. Yes, it would be even more unfair. For the alleged gay life of New York touches at some point of contact or other the lives of most New Yorkers, whereas in Paris there are numbers of sane and decent folks who seem to know nothing except by hearsay of what goes on after dark in the Montmartre district. Besides, no man in the course of a short and crowded stay may hope to get under the skin of any community, great or small. He merely skims its surface cuticle; he sees no deeper than the pores and the hair-roots. The arteries, the frame, the real tissue-structure remain hidden to him. Therefore the pity seems all the greater that, to the world at large, the bad Paris should mean all Paris. It is that other and more wholesome Paris which one sees—a light-hearted, good-natured, polite and courteous Paris—when one, biding his time and choosing the proper hour and proper place, goes abroad to seek it out.
For the stranger who does at least a part of his sight-seeing after a rational and orderly fashion, there are pictures that will live in the memory always: the Madeleine, with the flower market just alongside; the green and gold woods of the Bois de Boulogne; the grandstand of the racecourse at Longchamp on a fair afternoon in the autumn; the Opera at night; the promenade of the Champs-Elysees on a Sunday morning after church; the Gardens of the Tuileries; the wonderful circling plaza of the Place Vendome, where one may spend a happy hour if the maniacal taxi-drivers deign to spare one's life for so unaccountably long a period; the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, with their exquisite shops, where every other shop is a jeweler's shop and every jeweler's shop is just like every other jeweler's shop—which fact ceases to cause wonder when one learns that, with a few notable exceptions, all these shops carry their wares on commission from the stocks of the same manufacturing jewelers; the old Ile de la Cite, with the second-hand bookstalls stretching along the quay, and the Seine placidly meandering between its man-made, man-ruled banks. Days spent here seem short days; but that may be due in some part to the difference between our time and theirs. In Paris, you know, the day ends five or six hours earlier than it does in America.
The two Palaces of Fine Arts are fine enough; and finer still, on beyond them, is the great Pont Alexandre III; but, to my untutored instincts, all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards and their grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching-white to the eye in the sunlight, seemed overly suggestive of a World's Fair as we know such things in America. Seeing them I knew where the architects who designed the main approaches and the courts of honor for all our big expositions got their notions for color schemes and statuary effects. I liked better those two ancient triumphal arches of St.-Martin and St.-Denis on the Boulevard St.-Denis, and much better even than these the tremendous sweep of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares in the world, and the one with the grimmest, bloodiest history, I reckon.
The Paris to which these things properly appertain is at its very best and brightest on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the parks where well-to-do people drive or ride, and their children play among the trees under the eyes of nursemaids in the quaint costumes of Normandy, though, for all I know, it may be Picardy. Elsewhere in these parks the not-so-well-to-do gather in great numbers; some drinking harmless sirupy drinks at the gay little refreshment kiosks; some packing themselves about the man who has tamed the tree sparrows until they come at his call and hive in chattering, fluttering swarms on his head and his arms and shoulders; some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name—could not find anybody who seemed to know its name—but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, and a tremendous amount of speed and skill. If the ball gets lost in anybody's whiskers I think it counts ten for the opposing side; but I do not know the other rules.
A certain indefinable, unmistakably Gallic flavor or piquancy savors the life of the people; it disappears only when they cease to be their own natural selves. A woman novelist, American by birth, but a resident of several years in Paris, told me a story illustrative of this. The incident she narrated was so typical that it could never have happened except in Paris, I thought. She said she was one of a party who went one night to dine at a little cafe much frequented by artists and art students. The host was himself an artist of reputation. As they dined there entered a tall, gloomy figure of a man with a long, ugly face full of flexible wrinkles; such a figure and such a face as instantly commanded their attention. This man slid into a seat at a table near their table and had a frugal meal. He had reached the stage of demitasse and cigarette when he laid down cup and cigarette and, fetching a bit of cardboard and a crayon out of his pocket, began putting down lines and shadings; between strokes he covertly studied the profile of the man who was giving the dinner party. Not to be outdone the artist hauled out his drawing pad and pencil and made a quick sketch of the long-faced man. Both finished their jobs practically at the same moment; and, rising together with low bows, they exchanged pictures—each had done a rattling good caricature of the other—and then, without a word having been spoken or a move made toward striking up an acquaintance, each man sat him down again and finished his dinner.
The lone diner departed first. When the party at the other table had had their coffee they went round the corner to a little circus—one of the common type of French circuses, which are housed in permanent wooden buildings instead of under tents. Just as they entered, the premier clown, in spangles and peak cap, bounded into the ring. Through the coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face: it was the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an hour before.
Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown. His ears were painted bright red—the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown—and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the drollest master of pantomime I ever saw. On leaving the circus, very naturally we went to the cafe—where the first part of the little dinner comedy had been enacted. We encountered both artists, professional or amateur, of blacklead and bristol board, but we met a waiter there who was an artist—in his line. I ordered a cigar of him, specifying that the cigar should be of a brand made in Havana and popular in the States. He brought one cigar on a tray. In size and shape and general aspect it seemed to answer the required specifications. The little belly band about its dark-brown abdomen was certainly orthodox and regular; but no sooner had I lit it and taken a couple of puffs than I was seized with the conviction that something had crawled up that cigar and died. So I examined it more closely and I saw then that it was a bad French cigar, artfully adorned about its middle with a second-hand band, which the waiter had picked up after somebody else had plucked it off one of the genuine articles and had treasured it, no doubt, against the coming of some unsophisticated patron such as I. And I doubt whether that could have happened anywhere except in Paris either. That is just it, you see. Try as hard as you please to see the real Paris, the Paris of petty larceny and small, mean graft intrudes on you and takes a peck at your purse.
Go where you will, you cannot escape it. You journey, let us assume, to the Tomb of Napoleon, under the great dome that rises behind the wide-armed Hotel des Invalides. From a splendid rotunda you look down to where, craftily touched by the softened lights streaming in from high above, that great sarcophagus stands housing the bones of Bonaparte; and above the entrance to the crypt you read the words from the last will and testament of him who sleeps here: "I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have so well loved." And you reflect that he so well loved them that, to glut his lusting after power and yet more power, he led sundry hundreds of thousands of them to massacre and mutilation and starvation; but that is the way of world—conquerors the world over—and has absolutely nothing to do with this tale. The point I am trying to get at is, if you can gaze unmoved at this sepulcher you are a clod. And if you can get away from its vicinity without being held up and gouged by small grafters you are a wonder.
Not tombs nor temples nor sanctuaries are safe from the profane and polluting feet of the buzzing plague of them. You journey miles away from this spot to the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise. You trudge past seemingly unending, constantly unfolding miles of monuments and mausoleums; you view the storied urns and animated busts that mark the final resting-places of France's illustrious dead. And as you marvel that France should have had so many illustrious dead, and that so many of them at this writing should be so dead, out from behind De Musset's vault or Marshal Ney's comes a snoopy, smirky wretch to pester you to the desperation that is red-eyed and homicidal with his picture post cards and his execrable wooden carvings.
You fight the persistent vermin off and flee for refuge to that shrine of every American who knows his Mark Twain—the joint grave [Footnote: Being French, and therefore economical, those two are, as it were, splitting one tomb between them.] of Hell Loisy and Abie Lard [Footnote: Popular tourist pronunciation.] and lo, in the very shadow of it there lurks a blood brother to the first pest! I defy you to get out of that cemetery without buying something of no value from one or the other, or both of them. The Communists made their last stand in Pere Lachaise. So did I. They went down fighting. Same here. They were licked to a frazzle. Ditto, ditto.
Next, we will say, Notre Dame draws you. Within, you walk the clattering flags of its dim, long aisles; without, you peer aloft to view its gargoyled waterspouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the very act of leering and congealed into stone. The spirit of the place possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above; and at the precise moment a foul vagabond pounces on you and, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth, he draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs—things which no decent man could look at without gagging and would not carry about with him on his person for a million dollars in cash. By threats and hard words you drive him off; but seeing others of his kind drawing nigh you run away, with no particular destination in mind except to discover some spot, however obscure and remote, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary may be at rest for a few minutes. You cross a bridge to the farther bank of the river and presently you find yourself—at least I found myself there—in one of the very few remaining quarters of old Paris, as yet untouched by the scheme of improvement that is wiping out whatever is medieval and therefore unsanitary, and making it all over, modern and slick and shiny.
Losing yourself—and with yourself your sense of the reality of things—you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses with tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids like hostile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers and coops where caged larks and linnets pipe cheery snatches of song; and on beyond, between the eaves, which bend toward one another like gossips who would swap whispered confidences, is a strip of sky. Below are smells of age and dampness. And there is a rich, nutritious garlicky smell too; and against a jog in the wall a frowsy but picturesque rag-picker is asleep on a pile of sacks, with a big sleek cat asleep on his breast. I do not guarantee the rag-picker. He and his cat may have moved since I was there and saw them, although they had the look about them both of being permanent fixtures.
You pass a little church, lolling and lopped with the weight of the years; and through its doors you catch a vista of old pillars and soft half-lights, and twinkling candles set upon the high altar. Not even the jimcrackery with which the Latin races dress up their holy places and the graves of their dead can entirely dispel its abiding, brooding air of peace and majesty. You linger a moment outside just such a tavern as a certain ragged poet of parts might have frequented the while he penned his versified inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet satisfactorily answered, touching on the approximate whereabouts of the snows that fell yesteryear and the roses that bloomed yesterweek.
Midway of a winding alley you come to an ancient wall and an ancient gate crowned with the half-effaced quarterings of an ancient house, and you halt, almost expecting that the rusted hinges will creak a warning and the wooden halves begrudgingly divide, and that from under the slewed arch will issue a most gallant swashbuckler with his buckles all buckled and his swash swashing; hence the name.
At this juncture you feel a touch on your shoulder. You spin on your heel, feeling at your hip for an imaginary sword. But 'tis not Master Francois Villon, in tattered doublet, with a sonnet. Nor yet is it a jaunty blade, in silken cloak, with a challenge. It is your friend of the obscene photograph collection. He has followed you all the way from 1914 clear back into the Middle Ages, biding his time and hoping you will change your mind about investing in his nasty wares.
With your wife or your sister you visit the Louvre. You look on the Winged Victory and admire her classic but somewhat bulky proportions, meantime saying to yourself that it certainly must have been a mighty hard battle the lady won, because she lost her head and both arms in doing it. You tire of interminable portraits of the Grand Monarch, showing him grouped with his wife, the Old-fashioned Square Upright; and his son, the Baby Grand; and his prime minister, the Lyre; and his brother, the Yellow Clarinet, and the rest of the orchestra. You examine the space on the wall where Mona Lisa is or is not smiling her inscrutable smile, depending on whether the open season for Mona Lisas has come or has passed. Wandering your weary way past acres of the works of Rubens, and miles of Titians, and townships of Corots, and ranges of Michelangelos, and quarter sections of Raphaels, and government reserves of Leonardo da Vincis, you stray off finally into a side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man.
Some day somebody will take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect powder and destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture on the streets unaccompanied.
Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round tables which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the boulevards. All about you are French people, enjoying themselves in an easy and a rational and an inexpensive manner. As for yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of street life. That emphatically is all you ask; merely that and a little privacy. Are you permitted to have it? You are not.
Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions. Sidewalk venders cluster about you. And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids. They hover about you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for you. Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience of their own selection; so before your cigar is half finished you toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap forward and squabble under your feet for the prize. Then the winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled on his steel-pointed tool of trade.
In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel and hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and begin to study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the first train leaving for anywhere, the only drawback to a speedy consummation of this happy prospect being that no living creature can fathom the meaning of French timetables.
It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have despoiled you—it is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking and planning to nick you for some sum, great or small; it is the realization that, by reason of your ignorance of the language and the customs of the land, you are at their mercy, and they have no mercy—that, as Walter Pater so succinctly phrases it, that is what gets your goat—and gets it good!
So you shake the dust from your feet—your own dust, not Paris' dust—and you depart per hired hack for the station and per train from the station. And as the train draws away from the trainshed you behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and reiterated everywhere on the walls of the French capital.
One of them says: English Spoken Here!
And the other says: Liberality! Economy! Frugality!