IIIAND ITS SEQUEL
Whichever it is, we must be back in time for tea at one of the fashionable “fiv’ o’clocks”; for, though many ladies who buy their clothes in Paris do not know it, looking atgrandes damesis vastly different from looking at mannequins or the demi-monde; and the Frenchgrande dameis at her best at the tea hour. Someone has said, with truth, that the American woman is the best-dressed in the morning, the Englishwoman the best-dressed at night; but that the Parisienne triumphs over both in the gracious, clinging gown of afternoon.
Let us turn into this exclusive little establishment in the Place Vendôme, and from the vantage of a window-table in the mezzanine observe the lovely ladies as they enter. The first to come is in the simplest frock of leaf-green—the average American woman would declare it “positivelyplain”; there is not a sign of lace or hand embroidery about it, only at the open throat a soft fall of finest net, snowy as few American women would take pains to have it. And the lady’s hair is warm copper, and her hat a mere ingenious twist of leaf-green tulle; but amaster hand has draped it and the simple frock of green; and the whole is a beautiful blend of line and colour, as unstudied as a bit of autumn woodland.
Here is a combination more striking. The lady just stepping from the pansy limousine has chosen yellow for her costume of shimmering crêpe; a rich dull ochre, with a hint of red in its flowing folds. At the neck and wrists are bits of fragile old embroidery, yellow too with age, and that melt into the flesh-tones of the wearer till they seem part of her living self; while at the slim waist-line is a narrow band of dusky rose—the kind of rose that looks faintly coated with silver—and daringly caught up high at the right side, a single mauve petunia. The hat of course is black—a mere nothing of a tiny toque, with one spray of filmy feather low against the lady’s blond hair.
“But she is not pretty at all,” you realize suddenly; “she’s really almost ugly, andyet—”
Exactly. A Frenchwoman can be as ugly as it pleases perverse Heaven to make her; there is always the “and yet” of her overwhelming charm. You may call it artificial if you like—the mere material allurements of stuffs and bits of thread; but to arrange those stuffs there must be a fine discrimination, to know how to use those bits of thread, a subtle science no other woman has—or ever quite acquires. Look about you in the tea-room—now fast filling with women of all ages and all tastes—what is it that forms their great general attraction? White hands, shown to perfection by a fall of delicate lace, or thegleam of a single big emerald or sapphire; hands moving daintily among fragile china, the sheen of silver, the transparency of glass. And above the hands,viffaces, set in the soft coquetry of snowy ruches, graceful fichus, piquant Medici collars, but all open upon the alluring V of creamy throat.
What is it these women have? You can set down what they have on, but what is it you cannot set down, yet that you know they possess? It is the art of supreme femininity, carried out in the emphasis of every charm femininity has; by means of contrast, colour, above all by the subtlest means in everything: simplicity. And there is added to their conscious art a pervading delicate voluptuousness, that underlies the every expression of themselves as women; and that completes the havoc of the male they subjugate.
Look at him now. Do you know any man but an Englishman wholikestea? Yet here they are, these absinthe-ridden Frenchmen drinking it with a fervour; but their eyes are not within their cups! For again the highly proper little dogs are present—“dogs for the afternoon,” of course; and the management has been thoughtful in providing discreet corners and deep window-seats, where a tête-a-tête may be enjoyed without too many interruptions on the part of thechicwaitress with a windward eye to tips.
Another precaution these abandoned couples take is a third person—usually a young girl—to be with them. Madame starts out with the young girl, by chance they meet Monsieur X at the five-o’clock,and have tea with him; of course he escorts the ladies home, and equally of course the young girl is “dropped” first. If between her house and that of Madame’s, the better part of an hour is employed in threading the tangled traffic of that time of evening, who can say a word except the chauffeur—who is given no reason to regret his long-suffering silence on such subjects. Thus during the hour after tea, the hour between six and seven, when kindly dusk lends her cloak to the game, husbands and wives play at their eternal trick of outwitting one another.
It may be a game that disgusts you, you may find it sordid, even repellent, to watch; but, among people with whom the marriage of convenience is universal (and in most respects turns out excellently well), what can you expect? A lover or a divorce, for both parties; and the French man and woman prefer to maintain the stability of house and name, and to wink at one another’s individual peccadilloes. They are generally very good friends, and devoted to their children; and never, never do they commit that crassness of the Anglo-Saxon, in bringing their amours within the home.
L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS. RUE DE LA PAIX
L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS. RUE DE LA PAIX
L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS. RUE DE LA PAIX
So let us watch the departing couples whirl away from the little tea-room, without too great severity; and ourselves wander out into the Place, and up the short, spectacular Rue de la Paix. This above all others is the hour to see it—when fashion throngs the narrow pavements, or bowls slowly past in open motor cars; and when the courts of the great dressmaker’s shops are filled with young blades, waiting for themannequins to come down. One by one these marvellously slim, marvellously apparelled young persons appear; each choosing the most effective moment she can contrive for her particular entrance into the twilight of the street. A silken hum of skirts precedes her; the swains in the doorway eagerly look up—adjust their scarf-pins, give a jauntier tilt to their top-hats—and the apparition, sweetly smiling and emphatically perfumed, is among them.
There are murmured greetings, a suggestion from two of the bolder of the beaux, a gracious assent from the lady; and the three spin away in a taxi, to Armenonville or Château Madrid, for dinner. They have a very pleasant life, these mannequins; for lending the figure thebon Dieugave them—or that they painstakingly have acquired—they receive excellent salaries from the greatcouturiers. In consideration of which they appear at the establishment when they please, or not at all, when they have the caprice to stay away. If the figure is sufficiently remarkable, there is no limit to the whims they can enjoy—and be pardoned, even eagerly implored to return to their deserted posts. And then, as we see, after professional hours—what pleasaunce of opportunity! What boundless possibilities ofla vie chic! Really, saith the ex-midinette complacently, it is good to have become a mannequin.
Some there are who at this excellent business-hour of evening, make a preoccupied exit; sweep past the disappointed gentlemen in waiting, and walk swiftly towards the maze and glitter of the Boulevard.The gentlemen shrug, comprehending. Arendez-vous. Out of idle curiosity, one of them may follow. “Mais, ma chère!” he murmurs reproachfully, at sight of the ill-restored antiquity the lady annexes at the corner.
She makes a deprecatory little face, over her shoulder, which says, “You ought to understand, one must be practical. But what about tomorrow night?” And a bit of paste-board flutters from her gold purse and at the feet of the reproachful gentleman; who smiles, picks it up, reads it, shrugs, and strolls back to his doorway, to find other extravagance for this evening.
What a Paris! you exclaim; is there anything in it besides therendez-vous? Not at this hour. For mechanics and midinettes, bank-clerks andvendeuses, shop-keepers and ever-thrifty daughters of joy, pour into the boulevards in a human flood; and always, following Biblical example, they go two by two. In another hour they will be before theircroute-au-pot, in one of these omnipresent cafés; for the present they anxiously wait on corners, or, with a relieved smile, link arms and move off at an absorbed, lingering gait down the boulevard.
Some halt, to sit down at the little tables on the side-walk, and drink anapéritif. Here too, the old dogs of commerce and industry get together over aPernodor aDubonnet, and in groups of twos and threes heatedly thrash out the unheard-of fluctuations of the Bourse today. Thebon bourgeoismeets his wife, and hears of the children’s cleverness, theservant’s perfidy, over asirop; two anæmic young government clerks gulp Amer Picon, and violently contradict one another about the situation in Morocco; a well-knowndanseusesips vermouth with the long-haired youth who directs the orchestra at the Folies Bergères: it is as though, between six and seven, all Paris is strung along outside the cafés that link the boulevard into a chain of chairs and tables. And in the street, down the middle, motor-buses honk their horns, horse-buses crack their whips, cochers and chauffeurs shout anathema to one another and malediction on policemen and the human worm in general; while the traffic thickens and crawls slower with every minute, and a few helplessgendarmesstruggle in vain to preserve order.
Let us out of it all, and to dine. We can go to Château Madrid, and eat under the trees, and watch the gorgeous Parisiennes in the gallery as instinctively they group themselves to lend heightened effect to theensemble; or we can go to Paillard’s and pay ten dollars apiece for the privilege of sitting against the wall and consuming such sauces as never were in Olympus or the earth beneath; or we can dine above the gardens of theAmbassadeurs, in the elegant little balcony that overhangs a miniature stage, and later look on at therevue. Or we can sail up the river in the balmy gloaming, and eat afritureof smelts on the terrasse of thePêche Miraculeuse—there are a score of places where we can find a delicious meal, and in each observe a different world; running fromdotodoin the scale of the race.
I suggest, however, that we choose a café in the Quarter—not one of the tiny eating-houses like Henriette’s where we lunched, but a full-fledged, prosperous café; frequented by the better-off artists and the upper-class Quarter grisettes. Ten minutes in the Underground lands us at the door of one of the best-known of these places. In the front room, with big windows open to the street, is thecafé des consommateurs; in the rear, the restaurant and card rooms, and a delightful galleried garden, where also one may dine. Alluring strains of Hoffmann’sBarcarolleentice us thither with all speed; and soon our enthusiasm is divided between chilled slices of golden melon and the caressing sensuousness of themaître d’orchestre’sviolin.
In passing, one may note that good music in Paris is a rare quantity. Though many people come to study singing, there are few vocal concerts, and theToucheand theRougeare the only orchestras of any importance. They give weekly concerts in small halls, hardly bigger than an ordinary-sized room, and the handful of attendants smoke their fat porcelain pipes and extract cherries out of glasses ofkirsch, and happily imagine themselves music-lovers. But the greatartisteis an artist through sight rather than through sound; and even in opera, where the dramatic element is or should be subservient to the music, the superdramatic French are ill-at-ease and hampered. Some of the performances at the Opéra Comique are delightful, for here the lighter pieces of Massenet and Debussy are given, with the French liltand dash peculiar to these masters. But, at the Opéra itself, the Wagnerian compositions are poorly conducted, the audience uninterested and uninteresting; and even the beautiful foyer—which, since the famous New Year’s Eve balls have been done away with, knows no longer its former splendours—cannot compensate for the thoroughly dull evening one endures there.
Far happier is one listening to the serenades and intermezzos of the cherubic Alsatian violinist at the Quarter café-restaurant. And, after dinner, he plays solos out in the café proper, for the same absorbed polyglot audience that has listened to him for years. Let us range ourselves in this corner against the wall, between the two American lady artists of masculine tailoring and Kansas voices, and the fierce-mustachioed Czek, mildly amused over a copy of theRire. Every seat in the big double room is taken now, and we are a varied crew of Frenchbourgeois, Russian, Norwegian, and German students, English and American tourists, Japanese attachés (or so one supposes from their conversation, in excellent French, with our neighbour Czek), and blond and black bearded artists who might be of any nation except the Oriental.
They all know each other, and are exchanging jokes and cigarettes over theircafé crême—which they drink, by the way, out of glass tumblers—and paying goodnaturedly for abockfor Suzanne or Madeleine, whosebockssome other person should be paying. The room has taken on the look of a bigfamily party, some talking, some writing letters, others reading from the shiny black-covered comic papers; all smoking, and sipping absently now and then from their steaming glasses or littleverres de liqueur. The music drifts in soothingly, between spurts of conversation, and one is conscious of utter contentment and well-being.
Suddenly a door is flung open. In whirls a small hurricane, confined within a royal purple coat and skirt; gives one lightning glance round the circle of surprised merry-makers, and with a triumphant cry pounces on Suzanne yonder, with the fury of a young virago. “So!” pants the vixen, shaking poor Suzanne. “So you thought to outwit me, you thought to oust me, did you?Me, whom he knew six months before ever he saw you—me whom he took to Havre, to Fontainebleau, to—to—traitress! Coward!Scélérate!Take that—and that—and that!”
She slaps Suzanne soundly on both cheeks; Suzanne pulls her hat off—each makes a lunge at the other’s hair. “Mesdames, mesdames,” cries thepatron, hurrying forward. “Je vous en prie—and monsieur,” reproachfully, “can you do nothing?”
Monsieur—the monsieur who kindly, and quite disinterestedly, paid Suzanne’s book—sits by, lazily tapping his fingers against the glass. “What would you?” he says, with a shrug. “Women—” another shrug—“one had as well let them finish it.”
But thepatronis by no means of this mind. He begins telling those ladies that his house is a serious house; that his clients are of the most serious, thathe himself absolutely demands and insists upon seriousness; and that if these ladies cannot tranquillize themselvesinstantly——
But of a sudden he halts—pulled up short by the abrupt halt of the ladies themselves. In the thick of the fray Suzanne has flung contemptuous explanation; Gaby, the virago, has caught it. A truce is declared. Curt conversation takes place. Monsieur, still lazily tapping, consents to confirm the defendant’s statement as fact. Gaby, though still suspicious, consents to restore the hated rival’s hat; and in ten minutes the three are tranquilly discussing Cubism and a new round ofdemi-brunes. The audience, who have gazed on the entire comedy with keen but quite impartial interest, shrug their shoulders, light fresh cigarettes, and return to their papers and pens. Since the first start of surprise, there has not been a murmur among them; only complete concentration on the drama, which the next minute they as completely forget.
There are a dozen such scenes a day, in one’s wandering about Paris; that is, a dozen scenes as sudden, as intense, and as quickly over. The everyday life of the people is so vivid, of such swift and varied contrast, that the theatre itself, to satisfy them, must overreach into melodrama before it rouses. I believe that no other city in the world, unless it be the next most dramatic, New York, could support a theatre like theGrand Guignolfor example. I have seen there, in one evening, gruesomely realistic representations of a plague scene in India; the destruction of asubmarine, with all the crew on board; and the operating-room of a hospital, where a woman is unnecessarily murdered to pay the surgeon’s wife’s hat bill.
The French imagination, turned loose on dramatic situations, is like a cannibal before a peck of missionaries; only instead of eating ’em alive, the Frenchman makes them live—and diabolically accurate. But not for the doubtful interest of studying French psychology through its horrors, shall we end our day by a visit to theGuignol. Nor yet to theFrançaisor theOdéon, as we are a bit tired to follow Molière or Racine tonight. What do you say to looking in at the cheerful rowdyism of theMoulin Rouge, and then on for a bite at one of the restaurants on “the Hill”? It would never do for you, as a self-respecting American, to leave Paris without properly “doing” Montmartre; and as for me, I want to prove to you my assertion that Montmartre exists for and off visiting strangers like ourselves.
Let us make short work of theMoulintherefore—which is neither more nor less raw than the rest of the variétés prepared for foreign consumption—and go on up to the Place Pigalle; to the racket and ribaldry of theCafé Royal. Other night-restaurants make some pretense of silver-gilding their vulgarity; theAbbayeand theRat Morthave their diamond dust of luxury to throw into one’s eyes. But theRoyalis unadulterated Montmartre: the girls, most of them, shabby—their rouge put on without art; the harsh red coats of the tziganes seemingly made ofpaper, and their songs lacking even the thinnest veneer of French wit.
In the small low room upstairs fresh air is left behind by those who enter. Instead, the heavy-scented powder of the dancing girls, the sweet sickening perfume of great baskets of roses on sale, and the pervading odour of lobster, combine to assail us as we steer through the crowded room to a table. These last are arranged in the familiar hollow square round the wall, leaving a cleared space in the centre for dancers.
We order supper, and then look about us. It is still a different world from the many we have seen today: a world of “wire-pulled automatons,”, who laugh dead laughter, and sing dead tuneless songs, in their clock-work dance of pleasure. There is a sinister host of these puppet-people: girls of seventeen and eighteen, with the hard, settled features of forty; Englishmen, very red and embarrassed, blatantly over for a “larky weed-end”; next them a mere baby of fourteen, with sleek curls to her shoulders, and a slazy blue frock to her knees—chattering shrilly to the Polish Jew with the pasty white face, and the three pasty-white necks rolling over his collar. Yonder, a group of Brazilians, most of them very boys, who have captured the prettiestdanseuseand carried her off for champagne; beyond them, torpid-eyed Germans seeking shatzkinder, and American drummers by the dozen—their feet on the bar-rail, their hats on the back of their heads, grinning halfsheepishly like nasty little boys on a forbidden holiday.
Well, does it amuse you—this “typical slice of French life,” as the guidebooks label it? And what of the dances—but, rather than look at them, let us talk to this girl who is passing. She seems different from the rest, in her dark “tailor-made” and plain white shirt; among the satin and tinsel of the other women, her costume and her white, almost transparent face cry attention to themselves by very modesty. Perhaps she will talk real talk; occasionally—when she finds she has nothing to gain as marionette—one of them will.
We ask her to have some champagne. Nonchalantly she accepts, and sits down. Is she new at theRoyal? is the leading question. Oh no, she has been coming here for nearly a year. But this gentleman is new (quickly)? You reply, with a certain intonation, that you will always be “new,”—that you will not come again. She sends you a searching side-glance—and understands.
The preliminaries clearly disposed of, we get to the meat of things; baldly and with no apology, now that we have thrown down our hand. What is she doing here? Can’t she find a better place? Has she no family to help her?
She smiles, flicks the ash from her cigarette. But yes, she has a family: a blind mother, two little sisters, and a half-witted brother. She is sole bread-winner for the lot. As for this place—a shrug, laconic, unresentful, as she throws a glance round the murkyroom—it is notchic, true it is second-rate; but the commissions are good, and clothes here do not cost much, and— “the simple fact,” says she, gazing quietly over our shoulder into the glass, is, “that to work any trade successfully, one must have the proper tools. I was young, or I should have thought of that before I began.”
You gasp, under your breath. This French girl, when she draws aside the curtain, draws it to reveal—with terrible sincerity—a thin white face. She tells no tale of an attempt to live “honestly,” of pitiful struggles as dressmaker, shop-girl, and the rest of the sentimental dodges. She bares her tragedy simply as only a French person can; and it is that she has not the proper tools!
You mumble something meant to be consoling, and shamefacedly slip a louis under her plate. She accepts it with no trumped-up emotion, but a frank “merci!” And evidently fearing to bore us, moves away with the nonchalance characteristic of her type.
When she is gone, we are suddenly aware of wanting to leave. For, among the grinning ghosts, reality has passed; touching with her grim wand the puppets, to show them as naked souls—each with its uncovered reason. So seen, they send a shudder through us: the baby-faced girl in her blue frock, now sleepily batting kohl from her eyes in desperate effort to remain amusing; the dancing-girls with their high nervous laughter; the set, determined smiles of the better-dressedcocottes: it is the artist playing in the meanest of all theatres, the artist born without the“proper tools,” or who lost hers, but playing stoically to the end.
And the tziganes are twanging deafening accompaniment on their guitars, and shouting “Patita” at the top of their execrable voices; and smoke and the thick smell of sauces and the scent of the women’ssachethangs in sickening haze through the place. Let us go—let us flee from it! For this is not Paris; it is the harlot’s house: and that is the loathsome property of the universe.
We rush from it out into the silent street—the air strikes sharp and fresh upon our faces. For it rains, a pearly mist, and the thousand lights make rainbows on the flat wet flags of paving. We hail a cab, but leave the top open to the grateful dampish cool; and glide away down the slippery hill into what looks like dawn.
But it is only other lights—mist-veiled, and gleaming more intimately now; like the gems of a woman who has gone to her boudoir, but not yet taken off her jewels. The woman calls, softly. Can you keep yourself from answering? You may have your loyalty to faithful London, the Comrade; you may burn your reverential candle before the mystic vestal, Rome; or shout yourself hoarse before the triumph of New York, the star: but can you resist the tugging, glowing, multiple allurement of everyman’s One Woman, Paris?
Can you go back over this night when her jewels flashed for you into the Seine, when the rich rumble of her voice called to you across the bridges, when thecool, sweet smell and the throb and cling of her were for you—you; and not thrill to her and yearn for her, as men in spite of their inconstancy have thrilled and yearned and come back to One out of all the rest, throughout the history of women?
I hope that you cannot. For, as you return again and again, the “make-up” of the woman fades; the great artist lays aside the cautious mask, steps down from the stage, and for you becomes that greatest of all: a simple human being.