AN INTERVIEW WITH A GAMIN.
They knew not what they were fighting for, nor cared. They only felt it was the people against the recognized authorities, and that was enough. The Parisian gamin hates the authorities, for his chief idea is that the name means a prison, police, and everything else that a brigand in a small way don’t like. He loves commotion, for commotion signifies excitement,and excitement is as necessary to him as bread itself. He will stand behind a barricade and load and fire as long as the oldest man, and, firing with a musket, he is as good as a giant.
There are theaters which he patronizes regularly, for next to a revolution he loves the theater. Where he procures the money for admission, small as it is, heaven only knows; but he gets it somehow, for he is there nearly every night. If he cannot get in at the beginning, he hangs about the entrances, waiting for some good-natured man, who does not care to see the performance out, to give him his check, or he wheedles a good natured doorman into letting him pass. And once in, there is no adult in the audience who is so critical an auditor. He knows all about the drama, all about the music, and all about everything connected with it. He applauds at the right place, and if there be the slightest fault of omission or commission in the representation, his hiss is the first and the most distinct and deadly.
The Parisian actor dreads the gamin almost as much as he does the newspaper critics. They have made and unmade many an aspirant for public favor.
I gave a sou to one for the privilege of a minute’s conversation. (I had a friend to translate—a street boy would not understand my French.)
“Where were you born?”
There was a comprehensive wave of the hand which took in all Paris. He might have been born all over the vast city.
“How do you live?”
There was an expressive shrug of the shoulders that meant anything you chose.
“What are you intending to do when you are older?”
Another expressive shrug, as if to say “Who knows?” (These French boys can talk more with their arms and shoulders than other people can with their tongues.)
But when he saw the sou in hand he had expression enough all over him for a dozen boys. He took it with the invariable “Merci, Monsieur,” and darting away, in a minute re-appeared with a loaf of black bread, and was as willing to be communicative as you desired.
All that could be gathered from him was that his motherwas a washerwoman, his father the Lord only knew, and he had been living on the streets as long as he could remember anything. That was all. That was his beginning—his end was in the hands of fate; possibly one thing, and possibly another, but, one thing or another, he had bread enough to last him twenty-four hours, and he was more happy than many a man in a palace.
A TALK WITH A GAMIN.
A TALK WITH A GAMIN.
A TALK WITH A GAMIN.
They are ubiquitous, and all alike. Their being all alike is what makes them ubiquitous. You see him on the boulevards—you dive down from those dizzy heights of splendor, from the broad glare of that magnificence, to the poverty-made twilight of the Latin quarter, or the Cimmerian gloom of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and you see him.
Just the same. He wears the same reminiscence of a hat, the same remnants of trowsers, the same shirt with holes torn in it in the same places, the flag of distress floats from the same quarter, if, indeed, the shirt is long enough to boast a lower end, and the bare feet in the summer, and the dilapidated shoes in the winter, are the same. It is not the same boy, but it is the boy cast in the same mold, and with all the others, subject to the same conditions, and consequently exactly like as peas.
Nature makes men in molds. Noblemen’s sons have something in their make-up besides their clothes, and so have the children of poverty. A pallet in a garret, or, more usually, the bare floor; a crust, or the core of an apple at rare and uncertain intervals, are as certain to produce one typical face and a typical body as luxurious beds and rich food do another.
WHAT BECOMES OF THE GAMIN.
The Parisian gamins are alike wherever you see them, forthey all come from one stock, and are all brought up in one way. So nearly are they alike that the old saying might well be reversed. Instead of its being “It’s a wise child that knows its own father,” it should read “It’s a wise mother that knows her own child.” With these waifs, a child’s knowing, or even guessing, at its own father, would be an idea utterly chimerical.
Yet they are good-natured, and even kind to each other. There are girl vagabonds and girl waifs as well as boy waifs. The boys are wonderfully good to the little homeless girls who are too Arab-like to go to the retreats provided for them by the Government. If the boy has a warm place under a bridge or over a lime kiln, he gives it up to the wandering female rat, with as much chivalry as any grand Seigneur could display, and he shares with her the result of his predatory excursions, even going a trifle more hungry himself that she may not entirely starve. They are always hungry—it is only a question of how hungry they may be.
What becomes of them? I don’t know. Sometimes they get into other ways and grow into respectable citizens. Occasionally one of them is sufficiently tamed to learn a trade, if some citizen picks him up and cares for him, and now and then a street boy or girl drifts, by accident, into a profession and becomes eminent. The great French actress, Rachel, was a street girl, whose only fortune was her guitar, and whose living was made by singing in front of cafés. By hook or crook she got upon the stage, and once there her genius made her way for her. The Frenchman cares nothing for birth or position in the matter of genius. He wants good singing and good acting, and he cares not whether the singer or actor comes from the gutter or the palace. If from the gutter, the genius which delights him removes the slime, and he does it even greater honor than as though it had been pushed by more favorable circumstances.
Rachel not only made a world-wide fame, but she raised her family, all of whom were as poor and low down as herself, to the very heights of French grandeur. One of the Felix girls—that is their name—is now the wealthy and prosperous manufacturer of a face powder, which is the delight of theupper classes. With the shrewdness of the Israelite, she did not go into groceries or such trifles. She knew the French people too well. She invented a face powder and hair restorative, and waxed rich. She will marry her daughters to noblemen, and possibly Kings may spring from a line that once was delighted with a sou thrown into the gutter for them to scramble for.
One of the great chocolate manufacturers, whose name is known wherever there is civilization, who counts his residences by the dozen, and his wealth by millions, was a gamin till he was eighteen.
Some of them, like Rachel, from their intense love of the drama, get to be actors, when they are old enough. Some of them become rag-pickers, or work into other employments of a semi-vagabondizing nature; some of them become thieves, and take in all the range of crime from picking a pocket to committing murder, and numbers of them go into the army and navy.
But these instances are comparatively rare. The gamin grows, as a rule, into a vagabond, the vagabond into a criminal, and the criminal either ends at the guillotine or in the prison hospital. A lucky chance may graft something better on them, or a revolution may afford them opportunities for distinction in a military way, but those so promoted are exceptions. The rule is quite the other way.
In New York these human rats sell newspapers, clean boots, and do things of that nature, nominally. The genuine Parisian gamin might do this, for there are papers cried and sold on the street, though the most of this trade is transacted in picturesque little buildings called “Kiosques.” But he will have none of it. Should he labor or do anything approaching labor, he would lose caste with his fellows, and become to them a social pariah.
One important specimen of the kind, nine years old, and weighing, perhaps, fifty pounds, saw a former member of the fraternity, who had seceded, passing with packages to deliver, neatly dressed, and with a general air of being well cared for, and comfortably fed and housed.
THE SECEDING GAMIN.
The ragamuffin looked upon him with an expression ofcontempt never equalled off the stage, and he called the attention of a score of his ragged comrades to the seceder:—
“Look at him! just look at him! He has got to be a baker’s boy! Poor devil! Poor devil! He has clothes, he has a cap on his head, and shoes on his feet. He sits at a table with the maid, and eats three times a day, and has a bed to sleep in! He will never more be one of us! He is ruined! Poor devil! Why can’t everybody have spirit? Bah! A bed to sleep in, and regular meals!”
And the mob of ragamuffins jeered and hooted at him as he passed, and the boy himself looked as though he had been a traitor to his class, and as if he had half a mind to confiscate the bread he was carrying and return to his former fellows.
The young bundle of rags felt all that he said. To him this desertion from a life of vagabondage was a betrayal, as it were, and he felt, actually, a supreme pity for the gamin who could be anything else for so small a consideration as a comfortable life. To him the liberty of the streets was better than any house that required regularity. He would not have dined at the Grand Hotel if it required his coming at regular hours.
And after venting his opinion he went out in search of something to eat, and if he found that something he was happy—if not it was a shrug of the shoulders, and to sleep an hour or two sooner. They have a trick of making a dinner upon an hour or two of sleep, and an enjoyable breakfast by not waking up till dinner time. It is an economical way of living, but not conducive to increase of flesh. How long they can stand it has never been determined, for, not regarding the interests of science, they always manage to find a crust, or a bone, or something, just as the experiment is getting to be interesting. None of them have ever been willing to die in the interest of science. They are largely devoted to themselves.
The gamin of Paris is deserving of more credit than the gamin of New York, for he has nothing especially cheerful before him. When he ceases to be a vagabond boy he becomes a vagabond man, except in the rare cases I have mentioned, and ends his career, as vagabond men do, the world over.
In New York the ending is quite different—indeed thevagabond boy has better opportunities than the good boy. For in New York he loafs about gin mills, and he has the advantages of free lunches, an institution unknown in Paris, and the good old ladies get up excursions for him, and give him sandwiches and ice cream, in the hopes of reaching his better nature through the medium of his stomach, they firmly believing there is a better nature, and as it has never been seen it must be in the stomach. In time he grows up and gets as far along as to have that blessed boon of the ballot, and becomes useful to the politicians, who transfer him from the front of the bar to the back of it, and he has a gin mill of his own, and controls votes, and “hez inflooence in my warrud.”
When his “inflooence” is sufficient, he boldly demands office for himself and becomes a School Commissioner, or an Alderman, and finally goes to the Legislature and waxes enormously rich, and his wife—for this sort of a fellow marries when he gets off the streets and has a gin mill of his own—wears diamonds and has a carriage.
It was Teddy McShane, and Mickey O’Finnegan, two of this class, who got into the Board of Aldermen of New York. Alderman McShane had heard of gondolas and wanted a few in the little lakes in the park, for, of course, had his motion prevailed he would have got his commission from the builder thereof. And so he spoke:—
“Misther Prisidint—We cannot be too liberal in ornamintin’ our parruks. A parruk is for the paple, and they should be ornamintid. To this ind, I move ye sorr, that twinty gondolas be purchast for the lakes in Cintril Parruk to-wanst.”
Alderman McFinnegan, who saw a job in this, decided to oppose it till McShane should come to him and propose a divide. And so he said:—
“Misther Prisidint—No man in New Yorrick will go furdther in ornamintin’ the city than mesilf; but the paple’s money musht not be squandered. Why buy twinty gondolas, to-wanst? Why not buy two—a male and a faymale, and breed thim ourselves?”
A CONTENTED BEING.
The Parisian gamin can do nothing of this kind—indeed, it is impossible in Paris, and he would not want to do it if it were possible. He does not care for money; he does not longfor houses and lands or a fixed habitation. If he had the best house in Paris, with silken beds and all that sort of thing, the second night he would steal away and sleep comfortably under an arch, or in one of his accustomed places. He is very like one of the chiefs of the Onondaga Indians, who was persuaded to build him a house in the civilized fashion. He slept in it one night and the next morning broke every pane of glass out of the windows. That night he slumbered with the rain and sleet pouring in upon him, and was happy. That was something like.
The Parisian gamin, grown to be a man, could not sit still long enough to make an efficient Alderman, and he would not give a turn of his hand for all the money that could be made out of the position. He can be happy with rags and a crust, and what is money to such a being? He understands better than any philosopher, that riches consist in not how much you have, as how little you can get on with. If rags and apple cores suffice, why more?
And so he doesn’t go about speculating in stocks, and getting “politikle inflooence,” as his counterpart in New York does, but he is content with what he finds himself. No one ever heard of a Parisian grown-up gamin attempting to control railroads, or build steamships, or anything of the sort. He dies as he lived, and is always happy. Possibly he is the wise man. Who shall say?
But he is a part and parcel of French civilization—a natural outgrowth of French habits and customs. Without the gamin, Paris would not be Paris. Bad as he may be, he is always like Artemus Ward’s kangaroo, “an amoosin’ little cuss,” a perpetual mystery, an everlasting study, and something that no other city in the world possesses. He can live on less and get more happiness out of it than any other human being on earth; but he could not exist out of Paris. He had rather be in prison in Paris than to have a palace anywhere else. He belongs to that atmosphere, to those surroundings, and can exist nowhere else in the world. He is a savage in the midst of the highest civilization, a drone in a hive of industry, and hungry in the midst of plenty. He is everything that he should not be. Nevertheless, I rather like him, to say the least. He is picturesque.
THEaverage Parisian thinks of but two things—how to get the wherewith to amuse himself, and how to get the most amusement out of that wherewith. I doubt if he ever thinks of any hereafter beyond to-night. His religion is admirably adapted to his nature. He is either a Catholic or an infidel. If a Catholic, a few minutes at the end suffices to fix him for the next world; if an infidel, death is annihilation, and therefore he proposes to have as much enjoyment as possible out of the present.
Paris would not be a good place for a series of revival meetings. The Parisian would jeer at the exhorters, and say, “Go to!”
Paris supports seventy theaters, good, bad, and indifferent. It is not fair to use the words “bad and indifferent,” with reference to the quality of acting, for there is no bad acting in Paris. It is as to the quality and material of the representations. They have all kinds, from the gorgeous Italian opera down to the small and cheap affairs in which burlesque comic opera of the funniest, and melodrama of the most lurid character is performed, for the especial delectation of the lower classes.
The theaters devoted to the melodrama are of the most melodramatic kind. There can be no crime too horrible for representation, and the situations cannot be too intense, or the plot too complicated. French life, like French cooking, must have any quantity of pepper in it.
A MELO-DRAMA.
About the least thrilling situation that would be considered good in these theaters would be the chopping up of the villain’s grandmother, and the roasting alive of a parcel ofillegitimate children, to hide the consequences of a “damning crime.” There is always any quantity of blowing up of towers, of stabbings and shootings and bludgeonings, and all that sort of thing. There are secret passages in ancient castles, and paid cut-throats, and blue lights, and heroines with hair hanging down their backs, and everything pertaining to what in America is known as the “blood and thunder drama.”
One that I saw reminded me of an incident that happened at home many years ago. In a village in which I was residing, there came the usual strolling company of players of the olden time, the sad-faced men and wan women, who knew by actual walking all the various roads in the United States, to whom a good house would be a novelty that would make them uncomfortable. They had played to empty benches so long that they could not do well if living people occupied the seats.
I was fond of the drama, and the variety that we had there was better than none at all; so that I always patronized the strolling companies, attended invariably by a German physician who was quite as fond as myself of theatrical representations, and who, like myself, preferred a half loaf to no bread. We went together that night.
The play on the occasion was that cheerful drama from the French, “La Tour de Nesle.” The plot is variegated, to say the least. Margaret of Burgundy is afflicted with a desire for lovers, and she has a tower in which she receives them and holds her orgies. It is a pleasant thing to be invited to sup with the fair Margaret, while the supper lasts, but the pleasure doesn’t hold out. It is not continuous. For when you have bidden her good-evening, and get your hat on, you come across a trap door on which you step, and you go down several hundred feet, and alight on spikes situated conveniently in a bed of quick-lime, and your friends never know what has become of you; and if your life is insured there is always trouble about that, for there can be no proof of your death. Margaret loved amusement, but, for reasons, she desired no living witnesses of her escapades.
She fell in love once with a captain in the French army, one Buridan, and invited him to one of her little receptions.The disappearance of so many of her gallants had made the youth in the neighborhood rather wary of her, and Buridan was advised not to go, and good reason was given. An intimate friend of his had disappeared mysteriously a little while before, and the last that was ever heard of him was when he entered the tower.
Hearing of this, Buridan determined to go anyhow, and find out whether this friend had really dropped out of the way,viathe tower. He went and supped with the fair Margaret, with whom he fell in love in the regular French fashion. For reasons of her own, Margaret did not want him to take the regular walk over the trap-door, but desired to let him out another way. All would have been well had not Buridan discovered, inopportunely, that his friend had been in the same room, and had stepped on and gone through the trap, and that the lime had finished him. Margaret confessed it, whereupon Buridan drew his sword and killed her to avenge his friend. Before Margaret passed out she informed Buridan that he was her son! Buridan then immediately killed somebody else, and that one, before dying, stabbed another, and so on, till the entire company, fifteen in all, were piled upon the stage like cord-wood, which ended the play, there being no living actors to continue it.
My friend, the German physician, rose and remarked:
“My frendt, dere ish shoost one ding lacking to make dish blay gomplete. Der beople on der stage ish all deadt. De first violin shood now stab der second violin mit his bow, and gommit soocide mit himself by schwallowing his fiddle. Dot wood endt de entire gompany.”
As we were leaving the hall a young man named Smith, who was always blatting about art, and music, and the drama, and such things, having been in New York once, seized the doctor and said, “Was it not a good performance? There is power in this company. Have you anything better in Germany?”
The doctor looked at him pityingly.
“My tear young man, you are not to plame. I pity you. When de Almighty rained common sense, de Schmidt family all shtood unter umbrellas.”
THE GRAND OPERA.
“La Tour de Nesle,” as lurid as is its plot, would be mild meat for the frequenters of the minor theaters of Paris. They would insist upon seeing the actual trap-door, and the lovers of Margaret falling through it, and I am not sure but what they would demand real spikes and lime.
You pay enormous prices in the one class and next to nothing at the other; but in both the standard of performance is a very high one, and is rigidly maintained. The Parisian, gamin or marquis, will have no bad music or acting. He may tolerate adulteration in his food, but none in his amusements.
It was always the policy of the French government to see that the people were sufficiently amused, and also to do every thing possible to attract strangers to the gay capital. Therefore, the theaters are the most gorgeous in the world, and as it would be impossible to maintain them from the admission receipts, the deficiencies are made up from the public treasury. The Grand Opera receives from the government nearly two hundred thousand dollars per year, and a number of other theaters receive like support, the entire amount thus paid aggregating something over six hundred thousand dollars per year. The citizen who may never see the inside of the Opera House is content with this, for it attracts to Paris the foreign sheep whose fleece is his living. Without the Opera the rich American would not come to Paris, and then what would trade be? The Parisian shopkeeper pays that tax willingly; and they pay their artists well, so as to have and keep the best. Any eminent tenor has a salary of twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars per annum; and other talent in proportion. It is not a bad thing to be a tenor in Paris. The salary is very comfortable.
In addition to the regular theaters there are numberless open-air concerts and variety performances in gardens, the spectators sitting on benches on the sand, the stage only being covered. These are always brilliantly lighted, and most artistically and profusely ornamented, and as attractive to the Parisian as to the stranger.
There is no entrance fee to these places. You wonder at the liberality of the proprietor, and say to yourself, if you could only find a hotel with similar views, you would immediatelyremove to Paris, and make it a permanent residence. But once inside, you find a pang in store for you. The free entrance is merely to evade some ordinance or other, and you are required to purchase refreshments, and no matter what it is, an ice or a glass of beer, the price is the same, three francs, or sixty cents, which makes really a high admission, even for Paris. It is the same as though a landlord should make no charge for his rooms, but compel you to pay two dollars for the privilege of getting into bed. Nowhere can something be had for nothing, and the more liberal it is at the beginning, the dearer it is at the ending.
But the chief delight of the middle and lower class of Parisians is the ball at night. There are scores and scores of gardens in every part of the city, immense enclosures, with a magnificent orchestra in the center, in which the Parisian dances and dances, seemingly never tiring. He stops now and then for a glass of wine, or the non-exhilarating syrup with which he lights his soul and ruins his stomach, if he has soul and stomach, but he seems to regret even this loss of time. The women are even more intoxicated with the dance than the men. A man may stop a minute and be easy, but the women chafe under the pauses in the music, and are impatient to be in motion.
There are gardens for the very poor, where the admission is a sou, or such a matter, for the men, and nothing for the women. The grounds outside are rather diminutive, and the ornamentation somewhat scanty, but the dancing floor is there and the orchestra likewise, and the blouses and calico enjoy themselves as thoroughly as the broadcloth and silk that frequent the higher priced places.
The Jardin Mabille, near the Champs Elysées, is the best known in Paris. It has world-wide celebrity, and no foreigner, no matter of what nation, ever leaves Paris without paying it, at least, one visit. It is a wondrously beautiful place, gorgeously illuminated with colored lights, and full to excess of trees, shrubbery, flowers and everything else that is beautiful. There are long walks, tortuous labyrinths, tables everywhere under trees, and it is filled with all sorts of attractions to take money from the visitor.
THE WICKED MABILLE.
The foreigner goes there to see the peculiar dancing, of which he or she has heard so much. The whole world knows of the can-can, and the whole world has heard of the frightfully immodest exposure of person visible at these bacchanalian orgies. I doubt if a youth ever left his native home in America that his mother did not exact a promise from him that he would not visit this horrible Mabille, which promise he gave, with, “Why, mother, do you suppose I would go to such a place? Never!” And then he went there the first time he was in Paris. He wasted no time.
THE MABILLE AT NIGHT.
THE MABILLE AT NIGHT.
THE MABILLE AT NIGHT.
Inasmuch as the Mabille has, ere these pages will be printed, gone the way of the world (the ground has been sold, and is to be used for legitimate business purposes), some little account of it is proper, even though it is like embalming a fly in precious ointment.
Mabille was established in 1840 by an old and not very popular dancing master named Mabille, by virtue of his age known as Père (Father) Mabille. He purchased or leased a piece of ground on the Allée des Veuves and the Champs Elysées,and built thereon a dance house. Originally it was a dingy structure and the admission, male and female, was only ten sous. It prospered, for it was the resort of the doubtful classes who always pay.
A MABILLE DIVINITY AND THE IDIOT WHO PAYS.
A MABILLE DIVINITY AND THE IDIOT WHO PAYS.
A MABILLE DIVINITY AND THE IDIOT WHO PAYS.
The sons of Père Mabille took the money the old gentleman had saved, and enlarged it. They substituted gas for oil; they enlarged and decorated the grounds; they planted shrubbery and introduced decorations; they had better music, and made it the resort of the better, that is, richer class of thedemi-monde, the wild Bohemians and that enormous class in Paris who live from hour to hour like butterflies.
Then commenced its prosperity. It became the fashion among all classes. The rich and aristocratic went there to get the dissipation that more correct amusements would not afford them; the foreigners flocked thither in droves, for the Jardin Mabille was one phase of Parisian life which must be seen, and every girl who wanted to display her charms and graces in a way to excite attention, chose Mabille as the stage upon which to make her essay.
Enter a girl from the Provinces of any peculiar type of beauty, any especial beauty of face and figure, with the wit and boldness for the venture. She danced at the Mabille. Some rich or notorious debauchee picked her up at once, and made her the fashion. He gave her carriages, costumes, palaces. Poets, who are never so divine as when a responsible spendthrift inspires them, sang the beauties of the new sensation, and all Paris talked of her. Of course she did not dance at Mabille after she had made her conquest—Mabille was her opportunity.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AT THE MABILLE.
They lived their brief existence, they were attired like the butterfly while they lived but, alas! they died as does the butterfly.
Originally it was the resort of the middle class of Parisians, who worked for their living, clerks, students, and that class, and grisettes, and the women who skirted the edges of decency. The dances that made the place famous were born of the natural extravagance of feeling that possesses these classes of Frenchmen, and they were done with an abandon which their paid imitators never rivaled. It was grotesque, wild and suggestive, but it was genuine. If Finette flung herself into a position that procured applause, Marie would excel her or die in the attempt. These people, forty years ago, did the grotesque because it pleased them to do it—the paid dancers last summer were mere imitations, and bad ones at that.
The proprietors encouraged this kind of thing, for in it was their profit. And they engaged other women, not beautiful enough to become sensations, but accommodating enough to stay in the place nights, who were ready to endure the attentions of any man who had francs enough in his pocket to afford it, and who, for their society, would pay ten prices for refreshments; they getting their percentage regularly in the morning.
We saw them by the hundred, each one with some wealthy idiot attached to her, spending his money supposing that he was seeing “life.” He was, the dirty end of it, and he was paying roundly for it.
Who went to Mabille? Everybody. Thirty years ago, Harriet Beecher Stowe visited it, and described it as follows:
We entered by an avenue of poplars and other trees and shrubs, so illuminated by jets of gas sprinkled among the foliage as to give it the effect of enchantment. We found flower-beds laid out in every conceivable form, with diminutive jets of gas so distributed as to imitate flowers of the softest tints and the most perfect shape. In the centre there is a circle of pillars, on the top of each of which is a pot of flowers with gas jets, and between them an arch of gas jets. In the midst of this is another circle, forming a pavilion for musicians, also brilliantly illuminated, and containing a large cotillion band of the most finished performers. Around this you find thousands of gentlemen and ladies strolling, singly, in pairs, or in groups. While the musicians repose they loiter, sauntering round, or recline on seats. But now a lively waltz strikes the ear. In an instanttwenty or thirty couples are whirling along, floating like thistles in the wind, around the central pavilion. Their feet scarce touch the smooth-trodden earth. Round and round, in a vortex of life, beauty and brilliancy they go, a whirlwind of delight, eyes sparkling, cheeks flushing, and gauzy draperies floating by, while the crowds outside gather in a ring and watch the giddy revel. There are countless forms of symmetry and grace, faces of wondrous beauty; there, too, are feats of agility and elasticity quite aerial. One lithe and active dancer grasped his fair partner by the waist; she was dressed in red, was small, elastic, agile, and went by like the wind, and in the course of a very few seconds he would give her a whirl and a lift, sending her spinning through the air, around himself as an axis, full four feet from the ground. It is a scene perfectly unearthly, or rather perfectly Parisian, and just as earthly as possible; yet a scene where earthliness is worked up into a style of sublimation the most exquisite conceivable. Aside from the impropriety inherent in the very nature of waltzing, there was not a word, look or gesture of immorality or impropriety. The dresses were all decent, and if there was a vice it was vice masked under the guise of polite propriety.
We entered by an avenue of poplars and other trees and shrubs, so illuminated by jets of gas sprinkled among the foliage as to give it the effect of enchantment. We found flower-beds laid out in every conceivable form, with diminutive jets of gas so distributed as to imitate flowers of the softest tints and the most perfect shape. In the centre there is a circle of pillars, on the top of each of which is a pot of flowers with gas jets, and between them an arch of gas jets. In the midst of this is another circle, forming a pavilion for musicians, also brilliantly illuminated, and containing a large cotillion band of the most finished performers. Around this you find thousands of gentlemen and ladies strolling, singly, in pairs, or in groups. While the musicians repose they loiter, sauntering round, or recline on seats. But now a lively waltz strikes the ear. In an instanttwenty or thirty couples are whirling along, floating like thistles in the wind, around the central pavilion. Their feet scarce touch the smooth-trodden earth. Round and round, in a vortex of life, beauty and brilliancy they go, a whirlwind of delight, eyes sparkling, cheeks flushing, and gauzy draperies floating by, while the crowds outside gather in a ring and watch the giddy revel. There are countless forms of symmetry and grace, faces of wondrous beauty; there, too, are feats of agility and elasticity quite aerial. One lithe and active dancer grasped his fair partner by the waist; she was dressed in red, was small, elastic, agile, and went by like the wind, and in the course of a very few seconds he would give her a whirl and a lift, sending her spinning through the air, around himself as an axis, full four feet from the ground. It is a scene perfectly unearthly, or rather perfectly Parisian, and just as earthly as possible; yet a scene where earthliness is worked up into a style of sublimation the most exquisite conceivable. Aside from the impropriety inherent in the very nature of waltzing, there was not a word, look or gesture of immorality or impropriety. The dresses were all decent, and if there was a vice it was vice masked under the guise of polite propriety.
It was different in the Summer of 1881. The dancers were professionals; the poor, painted, broken down danseuses of the minor theaters, and the male dancers were professionals, or semi-professionals, who came every night and went through the same dreary performance.
Now it is no more. It existed forty years; poets have raved over its habitues; women who made theirdebuton the treacherous surface of Parisian life, survive only in their rhymes, and the visitor to Paris next season will find in its place imposing structures devoted to trade. It is well. The more trade and the less Mabille the better for the world.
THE PROFESSIONAL DANCER AT THE GARDENS.
But the American youth who thought to have a bacchanalian orgie was terribly disappointed, for there is nothing bacchanalian about it. All he saw was the entire dancing platform occupied by waltzers, who waltzed just as everybody does in good society, nothing more or less. Only after each waltz comes the terribly immoral can-can, and the eyes of the young American, or English, man or woman glitter with expected enjoyment. Alas! they do not get it. The can-can is simply a quadrille danced by two or more couples; there is no prompter, no set figure as I could see, and nothing about it singular except the extravagant poses of the dancers. They advance and retreat, not with the dignified walk-through that the English speaking races affect, but more like ComancheIndians. The male being who dances, always with his hat on, will indulge in the most terrific leaps; he will twist his body into every possible shape that the human body is capable of, and will do more grotesque work than any pantomimist on any stage. He twirls, he twists, he leaps, he dances on one foot, and then on the other. He throws his body into the air in all sorts of shapes; he squats, he lolls his tongue out of his mouth, he makes play with his hat, he puts it back on his head, either at the back or over his eyes; he springs and knocks his feet together; all without system or design, but always in time with the music. It is not the poetry, it is the delirium tremens, of motion. It is such a dance as one might expect to see in a lunatic asylum containing only incurables.
PROFESSIONALS IN A QUADRILLE AT THE MABILLE.
PROFESSIONALS IN A QUADRILLE AT THE MABILLE.
PROFESSIONALS IN A QUADRILLE AT THE MABILLE.
As an exhibition of absurd posturing, it is always a success; as a specimen of dancing, as we understand dancing, it is anything else. But for just once it is amusing. As between seeing it every night and serving an equal time in the penitentiary, I would unhesitatingly choose the penitentiary. The human body is a thing of joy when naturally carried, but you do not want too much of it in the can-can.
The women are, it must be confessed, a trifle freer. They will kick a bystander’s hat from his head, and in some of the movements there is a very free exhibition of leg; that is to say, if the leg be shapely. I noticed that the ladies whose general contour suggested pipe-stemmy support were as modest about their displays as though they had been nuns, and I fancied I could detect a shade of anguish pass over their faces as they observed the shapely proportions of their more favored sisters.
But be it known that the especial dancers, those who do these extraordinary leaps and contortions, are such by profession, who get so much per night, the same as at any other theater. This style of dancing was always in favor in Parisamong the people, and the proprietor of the place, finding that it attracted strangers, reduced it to a system. He hires a certain number of dancers, the same as he does his orchestra, and these set the fashion for the citizens who indulge in terpsichorean gymnastics.
You can easily detect the professionals. They come on the floor at regular intervals and do their dreary performance coolly and in a purely professional way, without any more emotion than they would manifest in combing their hair.
I do not know what it might have been in other days, but at present writing it is about the tamest place I know of. I overheard this conversation between two young ladies one morning:—
“Mary, dear, where did you go last evening? I could not find you.”
“Ah, don’t tell anybody, but Mamie, and Charlie, and I, went to the Mabille.”
“Is it good?”
“Good! It is nothing.It is the most shockingly moral place I ever saw. Why, anybody can go there.”
Mary dear had expected to be shocked, but she was not. Possibly the world never saw so much of her lower limbs as it did of the ladies dancing at the Mabille, but I will venture to say that she, herself, under the eyes of her prudish mamma at home, had more than made that up by display from the neck downward, a great many times.
A MALE DANCER AT JARDIN BULLIER.
A MALE DANCER AT JARDIN BULLIER.
A MALE DANCER AT JARDIN BULLIER.
GARDENS OTHER THAN MABILLE.
It is not altogether pleasant for young Americans of the gentler sex to visit Mabille, no matter how good their escort. There are too many draw-backs to the pleasure, and it is being continually marred. I noticed one party, a young lady and gentleman who were perpetually troubled; they would be observing something that interested them, when very suddenly the girl would exclaim, “Charley, this way! quick! Therecomes Sadie Mercer, and I would not have her see me here for anything. Sammy Burton is with her!”
They rose and darted down a path-way, only to turn and meet another party whom they knew, and so on. The most of the evening was spent in vain endeavors to keep their acquaintances from knowing they were there, and their friends were similarly employed.
There was no occasion for all this effort. Everybody goes to the Mabille, once at least, because everybody must. But it isn’t worth the time, however.
THE GRISETTE WHO PREFERS THE JARDIN BULLIER.
THE GRISETTE WHO PREFERS THE JARDIN BULLIER.
THE GRISETTE WHO PREFERS THE JARDIN BULLIER.
At theJardin Bullier, in the Latin quarter, there is wilder dancing and more freedom than the Mabille. It is the resort of the students and the grisettes proper, and the spectacle is genuine. There are no professionals there, and the dancing is done by those who have paid for it, and do it for the pleasure they find in it. The high-kicking girl kicks as a colt does, because she enjoys it, and not in the languid way of the paid dancers. The brigandish youth who can contort the wildest is cheered on to renewed exertions, and the grisette who can kick the highest or do the most grotesque things is applauded to the echo. And when in these extravaganzas one slips uponthe waxed floor, and falls, what a shout goes up from the excited spectators! She cares nothing for it—slips are common on these floors. She laughs more heartily than the rest, and rises and resumes her place.
The French quadrille is like American hash—a mystery. There is no earthly system in it. Like volunteer soldiers, each one operates upon his own hook. They forward and back with the most sublime disregard of everybody else; they combine in the one dance the American quadrille, the German and French waltz, the Spanish fandango, the galop, the polka, and every other dance known to ancient and modern times. The only reason that they do not incorporate other dances into their alleged quadrille, is because they do not know any more. They put in all they have heard of, and one would be unreasonable to expect more of them.
But they have a good time, and, as the French world goes, an innocent one. There is perhaps more freedom in gesture than would be considered proper in England or America, but there is no drunkenness, and the utmost decorum is observed. Such a thing would be impossible with the fighting whisky of America, or face-bruising brandy of England. Get together a thousand of the lower classes in either of those excessively moral countries, and the affair would break up in a row in an hour. There would be knock-downs and dragging-outs without number; there would be bruised heads and mashed faces, and the broken nose brigade would be largely recruited.
The Frenchman does not get drunk. He drinks his light wine to the point of exhileration, and that is all. The student of art, or law, or medicine, who finds his enjoyment at these places, keeps as sober as a judge, and a great deal more sober than a great many judges in America I wot of. He looks to be capable of any enormity, but he is the most inoffensive being on earth. Indulging in the wildest vagaries—dressed in the most rakish and brigandish costume, he is scrupulously polite and intensely considerate. He could not be more so were the grisettes his sisters, and the spectators his father, mother and aunts.
AT THE JARDIN BULLIER.
One evening at theJardin Bullierone young fellow, utterly and entirely brainless, evidently the fop of his quarter, appeareddressed, to his taste, gorgeously. He wore a pearl gray suit; the bottoms of his trowsers were so absurdly wide that they covered his boot; his coat sleeves were so wide that they made a fair match for his trowsers; his cuffs (with a showy sham button) came down to his knuckles; his shirt collar was cut half way down his breast, and his hat was the most painful in shine that I had ever seen. He was, in short, gotten up regardless of expense, and entirely for effect.
This young fellow offered some slight indignity to a girl with whom he was dancing. Very promptly she cried out, and in an instant the dancing was suspended. “Put him out!” cried those near them, who comprehended the matter. “Put him out! Put him out!” was echoed from one side to the other of the vast hall, and a rush of excited Frenchmen was made toward that part of the room. The fellow attempted some sort of an explanation, but it was of no avail. Out he went, guilty or not. In that place everybody must be like Cæsar’s wife—above suspicion. Out he went, and the dancing was resumed with redoubled fury. A duty discharged, they might abandon themselves to pleasure with increased zest. All the difference was those who had yelled “Put him out” the loudest, kicked a trifle higher than before, and went crab-like sideways with more extraordinary contortions.
Tibbitts and the Professor had an awkward experience the first night they were in Paris. The Professor had received a letter from Tibbitts’ father requesting him to look after the young man, and see that he attended to legitimate matters and be not carried away with the frivolities of Parisian life, which destroy so many inexperienced youth. In fact, he gave the Professor authority in the matter, and made him a sort of a guardian over him.
After dinner the Professor showed Tibbitts the letter and assumed control at once.
“To-night, Lemuel, I have to meet the American delegates to the International Science Congress, and I cannot be with you. But I must exact a promise from you that you will not go to any of those public balls, such as the Mabille. I have no objection to your visiting the Opera, for I understand the building itself is a study, and it is perhaps well that you shouldhear and enjoy the music of the masters. This is as far as I can permit you to go. You promise?”
“Certainly,” replied Tibbitts, “though it is not necessary. Without a promise I should not go to those wicked places.”