PARIS OF TO-DAY
BY RICHARD WHITEING
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Copyright, 1900, by
The Century Co.
The DeVinne Press,
il^onteiitd
PAGE
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE . . . i
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS .... 49
FASHIONABLE PARIS 93
PARISIAN PASTI.MES \}\
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS . . .171
ARTISTIC PARIS 21s
Joidt of cJlludttationj
PAGB
Flower Fete in the Bois de Boulogne . Frontispiece
Palace of Electricity and Illuminated Fountain . xiv
A Pensioner of the Invalides .... 2
Arrival of the President of the Republic. Outside
THE Hotel de Ville, during a Municipal Ball . s
The Place de la Concorde, looking toward the
Seine 6
A Ball at the Elvsee Palace .... 7
Morning Scene in a Paris Police Court . . 9
The Longchamp Review on the Fourteenth of
July 1=;
'•Old Paris, " as seen from the Seine at Night . 19
A Civil Marriage 2^
The PatsiDENT (Felix Faure) bestowing the Hat
UPON A Cardinal 33
The Downeall oe a Ministry in the Chamber of
L)EPUTii;s )g
Evening at the Great Gate oe the Exposition . 46
The Canal Port oe La Villettk . . . . 31
Scene at a Creche 54
Toy-makers ^7
WiNE-TRL'CKS AT THE WiNE MaRKET . . . t)0
The Afternoon Bite (Working-men at a Brasserie) 6^
The Exhibition Gate opposite the Invai.iues . 66
Collecting Customs at the Barriers . . . bq
Early Morning Scene at the Central Market
(Halles Centrales) 7s
Daughters oe the I^opi.e leaving a Factory . . 81
A Funeral of the Eighth Class .... 87
A Bird's-eye View of the Exposition Grounds . qo
Five O'Clock in a Private House of the Faubourg
St. -Germain 9,
Children of the Rich qS
The Charity Bazaar . . . . . . 101
Club dhs Panni-:s (Ci.ub oi- thi. "Hard-L'p") watch-
ing THH l^AKADl' OK FASHION Io8
Thb Fauuock AT -iHi: AuTi-.uiL Racf.-coukse, Bois DE
Boulogne in
Entrance to a Pkivate Housi; durinc; an Evening
Reception ii6
An Old Parisian Beau 119
On Common Ground — Rich and I^oor at the Con-
fessional 12 ^
Palaces of the Nations on the Seine, Night Effect 128
Sunday Picnics in the Bois de Vincennes . . \^'-<
A Popular Concert in the Luxembourg Gardens . 140
Crowds leaving a Railway-station after a Day
IN THE Country 145
Night Scene in a Faubourg Street . . . 149
A Bicycle Trailer i=,2
A Gingerbread Fair i=>=.
Open-air Dances on the Fourteenth of July . 1=18
The Ferris Whi-.ei. in Paris — A Oueer Landscape . lOi
An Excursion on the River . . . . lO,'?
The Esplanade of ■ihl Invalidi;s, from the new
Alexander 111 Bridge at Sunset .... ibS
The Green Hour (" L'Heure Verte") — Five O'Clock
AT A Boulevard Caee 17s
A First-class Funerai 178
The Noon Meal at a Restaurant . . . .18^
A Boulevard Art-shop i8c)
The Passing Regimi;nt — A Scene in the Place de
LA REPUBLiaUE 102
The Boulevard at Midnight . . . . 197
Cafe Scavengers 202
An Arcade 20s
Schemers for Political Preferment . . . 207
A Cafe Chantant in the Champs-Elysees . . 209
The New Palais D[;s Beaux Arts, as seen from the
Left Bank of the Seine at Night . . .212
In the Studio of a Master 218
Working for the Prix de Rome . . . .22 s
Members of the French Academy, after a Session,
crossing the Pont des Arts from the Institute 227
Varnishing Day at the Salon . . . .2^1
A First Night at the Theatre pRANgAis . . 237
Public Competition at the Conservatoire . . 24^
In the Reading-room at the National Library . 247
A "Monome" (Procession of Students) . . 240
PALACE OF ELECTRICITY AND ILLUMINATED FOUNTAIN
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
THE
GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
A HOT August afternoon, and the cage slowly
mounts with a handful of travelers to the top of
^ the Eiffel Tower. We are not all sisjht-seers ;
at any rate, I can answer for one. The Paris plain is
so hot that the ascent is, with me, a last despairing effort
for a mouthful of air. It has unexpected advantages
now that I am on the move. I see Paris as I ha\e never
seen it before. There is the Exhibition Building of
1900, yet to be in all its glory, and at present only a
skeleton of timber. The monstrous litter of building-
material fills all the Champ de Mars and lines the
Seine on both banks, far beyond the esplanade of the
Invalides — a perspective with no terminal point. Paris
is once more being torn down. Were there a speak-
ing-trumpet at hand, one would fain cry, " Why can't
you let well enough alone ? " to the pygmies below.
PARIS OF TO-DAY
This nidotl lasts until w c reach the suinniit, w h<n there
is abundant ex'idence that the\- set up faster than they
lay low. The Champ de Mars is ccneretl and well-
A I'HNSIONER OK THE INVAI IDKS
nigh roofed. The banks, if still a might\- nia;<e, are
not w ithout a plan. So the saving power is once more
in the constructive activities of this mar^•elous race.
They ha\'e wiped out Paris a dozen times, and every
time have left something better in its place. The
legacy of the last exhibition was the permanent Mu-
seum of the Trocadero. One legacy of this transfor-
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
matiun is to be the Czar's Bridge. The first span is
up, and its lines of red-coated iron, with the masses of
masonry on each side, show that we are going to have
one more of the finest things in the world.
The bridge does one the service of taking the view
from the exhibition, which is, after all, only a secondary
affair to Paris itself. There is the everlasting specta-
cle, more grandiose to-day than ever. From this ele-
vation the city is manifestly outgrowing its mere walls,
as a healthy boy outgrows last year's jacket. But for
these walls Paris might enter into hopeful competition
with London for primacy among the largest cities of
the world. It stretches away in unbroken lines of
milk-white masonry at every point. The inner circle,
as one may already call the space within the fortifica-
tions, has yet an innermost ring — the Paris of the for-
eigner. This Tatar City may easily be traced from
our present elevation, by taking the Round Point as its
center, and the Arch as its circumference. Here are
all the braveries of the fair for the happy few from
many parts of the world — a multitude in their aggre-
gate. The British are an ever-diminishing colony;
London is now their capital of pleasure for the whole
empire, (iood Americans have a tendency to look for
their earthly paradise in the same quarter, consistently
enough, for the site of that region is notoriously a
speculative point. But the "balance" of mankind
still seeks its cosmopolis here. Wealthy planters and
traders from the four seas, yasiaqitoncyes^ from South
America, the pick of the Continental aristocracies, all
• " Foreign adventurer or swindler, generally hailing from the sunny .South, or
from .South .America." — A. liarrerc.
PARIS OF TO-DAY
Hock this way in the season, and where they fail the
Trench of the same category are quite ready to supply
their place.
But, after all, these do not make Paris or the wealth
of Paris. The city quite suffices to itself, with the
good help of France in the background. It knows as
much, and for years past has marked its sense of the
fact by a certain want of deference to the outlander.
Paris is one of the greatest manufacturing cities of
France. Its industries are on the colossal scale. It is
a huge exporter, not only of the articles that bear its
name, the " Yankee notions " of taste for the bazaars of
the world, but of all the wares of the market-place. So
it has its own life, and that life lies far beyond the strag-
gling band of fire which is to be traced every night in
the Champs- Elysees and the boulevards. To my
thinking, it is best seen in its own labor quarters. If
we were on the hill of Montmartre instead of on this
tower, we should find Paris at home. But, after all, we
have it at home in Montparnasse, not far from our
feet. Here are the people in their habit as they live,
and in their ways untainted by the desire to please any
but themselves.
The real problem at issue in all this prodigious
activity is, Can an old people make itself young again ?
It is almost answered in its terms. Yet the hope is so
fascinating that it tempts to new experiments again
and again. Japan began it the other day, and is still
encouraged or deluded with the belief that it is renew-
ing its youth. The French began more than a hun-
dred years ago, when they were still mus,t ancient of
days — of the moderns, unquestionably, the oldest folk
ARRIVAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC. OUTSIDE THE HOTEL
DE VILLE, DURING A MUNICIPAL BALL
in Europe. They were a polity and a civilization
when the P2nglish analogue of the man in the street
was Gurth the swineherd, and when Italy had for the
moment crumbled back into the animate dust of the
races out of which Rome was made. Oh, how old they
are! It flashes on you without preoccupation and
without warning in modern Paris as well as in the
remote provinces. The wrinkles show in the majestic
dela}-s of their bureaucracy, in a thousand medie\alisms
of their ways of thought. I will not say they show
PARIS OF rO-DAY
under the paint, for that would do injustiee to my
meaning in doing injustice to them ; for it is an honest
attempt to effect the change by the diet of ideas and by
the regimen of institutions. In the Revolution they
were for doing away with the old Adam in a day and
a night. It was the most prodigious day and night in
all history ; but when it was past the would-be strij^ling
sat down and wiped his still furrowed brow, and re-
lapsed into the habits of age — into aristocracy with
the Empire, into limited suffrages, into the theory of
statehood as mere organized conquest. The new effort
came with the downfall of the Second Empire, a catas-
trophe brought about solely by the failure of that sys-
tem to serve the old military ideals. It is going on
to-day. The problem is still unsolved. Is it better
for a nation, as for an individual, to accept the inevita-
ble, to take itself frankly at its actual count of years,
and to make the best of it ? Is there anything more to
M\
KING TOWARD THE SEISh
strixe for than a mere artful pro-
longation of forces whi-ch are still
A BALL AT THE ELYSEE PALACE
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHIN1<
necessarily on the decline ? I have sometimes had
a curious fancy that these ages of nations might be
fixed by a sort of typical correspondence with the ages
of individual man.
In this view England has turned sixty, but is still
hale, hearty, and well preserved, still better equipped
for a day on the moors of empire than many a young-
ster of them all, yet still within measurable distance of
an allotted span. Poor Spain, as we have seen, is as
rusty in the joints as her national hero of romance, and
has manifestly entered her dismal inheritance of labor
and sorrow. So has Italy. The grand republic is in
MORNING SCENE IN A PARIS POLICE COURT
PARIS OF rO-DAY
the \cr)' prime of manhood, and therefore past the
period of his first youth. He has lost some of his illu-
sions, for he lives fast. He w ill be thirty next birth-
day — I hope I am not rude. Russia is younger, in
spite of the chronologies, and the shock-headed young
giant has not yet attained to the proper combing of
his hair. Germany is fi\e-and-forty if a day, but
amazingly well preserved, thanks to an elaborate
chamber gymnastic, the results of which have yet to
be tested in the field-work of the world. France — well,
it is an ungracious exercise of fancy at the best, and I
leave it an open question, as I am at this moment in
her presence. Sometimes you hesitate to give her a
day over twenty. Then comes an affaire, or some
other disenchantment, and you are sure she Mill never
see ninety again, and that, do what she may, she can
never shake oft' the enemy as he creeps on with his
fateful burden of old habits, old ways of life and
thought.
But the activity, the mere civic and industrial
energy, is j^rodigious. \'ou return ex'ery few years to
find a new city. The boasted Paris of the Empire was
a village compared with the Paris I see, as in pano-
rama, to-day. The houses are more like palaces than
ever they were before. " They cut the Pentelican mar-
ble as if it were snow," says Emerson of his Greeks.
So the Parisian sculpteur en bdtinieiit cuts the softer
stone of the Normandy quarries. The Empire is no-
thing to the Republic in the count of new avenues, of
new public works of every kind. The perpetual
advance of mere splendor and lu.xury, for what it is
worth, may be traced in the Champs-Elysees. There
lO
THE GOVKRNMENTAL MACHINE
are still left (jnc or two (juaint plaster-fronted houses,
which represent the modest ideals of the time of Louis
Philippe. Hard by, in any number, are the stone
fronts of the Empire, and, rapidly replacing these, the
Cyclopean masses in wliich the modern millionaire
swaggers in his pride — a perfect riot of carving in
their rather gaudy fronts. Naturalistic mfants disport
themselves over all the vast facade of the new Palace
Hotel, with other figures that may charitably be re-
garded as their mamas. It is not exactly good taste,
but, with its still inalienable "quality," what foreign
city might not be glad to ha\e half of its complaint of
bad? Those white patches in the distance, beyond the
walls, are buildings only less superb and less opulent.
The mere movement of human beings is amazing.
While waiting for its underground railway, now more
than half done, Paris travels by automobile and by
huge two-decker street-trains, drawn by locomotives,
which quite destroy the amenities of the interior scene.
The old peaceful cross-roads near the Printemps are
a terror, what with trumpeting engines, broughams,
cycles, cJiars-d-banc, all driven by steam or electricity.
The tramways here, as elsewhere, are destroying the
streets, and the light fiacres bob and dance about over
the tormented surface like dinghies in a gale.
I do not say that it is edifying; still less do I call it
delightful. I cite it only in proof of the intensity of the
movement. Those \\\\o find their account in mere rush
and hurry should be in paradise here. The horse w ill
soon have the air of a survival ; the motor, for e\ cr\'
kind of street use, is Ijecoming a matter of course. In
this invention England, and even America, have been
II
PARIS OF TO-DAY
left far behind. The pace is fearful, the accidents are
fearful, but such as they are the administration seems to
be thankful for them as a safety-valve for the energies
that might otherwise ha\'e an explosive force in politics.
It is a race to the de\il that threatens the individual
only, and not the state, b'or good or ill the giant city
is all alive at every point. Everything seems to be re-
building or rebuilt. The Saint-Lazare station is new;
the Gare de Lyon is newer still. The Orleans line is
pushing its way into town by a stupendous settlement
that is to occupy the entire site of the Cour des
Comptes, burned under the Commune. The whole
square of the Invalides is to be undermined by another
huge structure of the same sort. This is for Paris
only, and, to scale, much the same thing is going on
all over the territory in ports, harbors, branch railways,
and vicinal roads. It is a rage of renewal. France
will be young again if she dies for it. The mere growth
is l)cyond question. If we ct)uld peer through the roofs
from here we should see a working population of nearly
a million and a half, which forms only a part of the
total population of "all souls." It is one of the great-
est manufacturing cities, as well as the greatest city of
pleasure on the planet. Ninety-six thousand of these
workers — Lilliputian from the level — would be found
in the tailoring and dressmaking trades, helping to
clothe the universe, and to make good Victor Hugo's
boast, " I defy you to wear a bonnet that is not of Paris
fashion or of Paris make." One hundred and twelve
thousand are in metals, precious or otherwise. Over
forty-four thousand of the wondrous pygmies would be
hard at it in the book and printing trades ; they were
12
THE GOVKRNMENTAL MACHINE
but twenty-se\cn thousand a dozen years ago. I could
go on, with the help of a jubilant return lately issued by
the Office of Labor, but I generously forbear.
So this may serve to prepare the way for my para-
do.x, that the French are really the most serious and
purposeful folk in the world — a great, sad race, too,
with a pessimistic bitter for the subflavor of their na-
tional gaiety, as it is the subflavor of their absinthe.
They put on their high spirits as a garment, and, like
the Figaro of their ideal, they laugh lest they should be
obliged to weep. "Our lively neighbor," "the light-
hearted Gaul" — what thoughtless locutions are these!
Our Gauls are a gloomy and a brooding swarm, ever
haunted with the fear of being left behind in the race of
life, their clear, keen intellect marred and thwarted by
wretched nerves. It is the artistic temperament with
its penalty. With those nerves there is no answering
for their best-laid schemes. They start at shadows,
and once started in suspicion, rage, or hate, they have
the desperation of the bolting horse. They bolted
under the Revolution, in spite of the warning entreaties
of Jefferson, who tried to show them how they might
run a profitable course to constitutional reform. They
are not always bolting, be it well understood. They
have long and blessed intervals of national self-posses-
sion, ease, and grace, when butter would hardly melt in
their mouths. But Mme. France xs joitynaliere, rising
without any volition of her own in the humor tliat is to
rule the day. When she comes down in the morning
with one of her headaches, her nearest and dearest had
better find an excuse for getting out of the wa\'. The
personification, however, is scarcely felicitous. In point
13
PARIS OF TO-DAY
of tcinpcranicnt the men here are the women, and the
women the men. The quiet, hiborious, cool-headed
housewife runs France. The secret of the malady is
nature's ; the secret of the cure is the people's own.
There is none other so ploddini^ly, so remorselessl)' in-
dustrious. After every outbreak France picks up the
pieces, and out of the ruin wrought by the paroxysm
makes something" finer than before. The fatal war was
an attack of nerves. The Jew-baiting is another, and
it may be described as a desperate attempt to reconcile
Panama to national self-respect. The awful " affaire"
is a third on the same lines. Each attack has been
intensified by the new regime of liberty — still new,
though it is nearly as old as the constitution of the
present Republic. Freedom as a habit is the growth of
centuries, and these recently converted sinners of des-
potism are still subject to many a slip. So one part of
the press of Paris — not the largest part, l)y a long way,
thank (iod! — is still drunk with the license of invective
and denunciation. The sots will sleep it off in the long
run, I feel sure, and the better part of the nation w ill
find a hearing for the still, small voice. But oh, just
now it is weary waiting for the friends of France, and
it is no time to take up the cry, "Courage, mon ami, le
diable est mort! "
They know perfectly well what is the matter with
them, and for their strait-jacket they have invented the
administrati\'e machine. This is by no means to be
confounded with the purely political variety of the con-
trivance in use in other latitudes. It is the permanent
civil service, the government — in a word, the great au-
tomatic contrivance that keeps them going in national
THE LONGCHAMP REVIEW ON THE
FOURTEENTH OF JULY
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
housekeeping while they are on the rampage. No-
where else, except perhaps in Germany, is there any-
thing like it for efficiency of a kind. It is everything
that they are not — stable, unchanging, the slave of tra-
dition, a thing that moves from precedent to precedent,
but with restraint instead of freedom for its aim. The
first Napoleon was the inventor of it. The material
with which he wrought was the wreckage of the old
monarchy, still extremely serviceable in parts as a thing
approved to the genius of the people by the experience
of a thousand years. Dynasties, presidents, ministers,
come and go, but the machine grinds on forever to do
the work of the day. No matter what the tumult in
Paris or at Versailles, the prefects are at their posts in the
provinces, and their orders issue as calmly as if there
was sleep at the center of the system. It is a Chinese
bureaucracy in completeness, with the difference that it
is in thorough repair. As a piece of clockwork it is one
of the greatest of human inventions. At one end of the
mechanism is the President of the Republic; at the other
the humblest of the thirty-six thousand odd mayors of
the communes of France — say the little fellow who
rules over Blanche-Fontaine in the Doubs, with its pop-
ulation of four-and-twenty souls, ten of them, if you
please, municipal councilors. Each of these mayors is
a president in his way, as the President is only a glori-
fied mayor. There is no overlapping of areas, no con-
flict of jurisdictions, and lest there should be, the special
contrivance of the Council of State provides for instant
appeasement. If my view could extend from this tower
to the whole of the territory, I should see one vast
nerve system of centralized rule. The village mayor
17
PARIS OF TO-DAY
in his sabots stuffed with straw, and with his council
equally fresh from the stable, is only the reduced image
of the great man at the Elysde surrounded b}- his min-
isters. So many mayors and so many communes make
a canton, with another council, and generally a superior
mayor for its chief. So many cantons make an arron-
dissement, like the canton, less corporate in its person-
ality, but with yet a council more, — always of superior
persons, naturally, as we rise in the scale, — and with a
subprefect at its head. With the arrondissement comes
the electoral district for the Chamber. So many arron-
dissements make a department, and here the prefect sits
enthroned -again with his council, now a little parlia-
ment, for his guide and check. Beyond him is the min-
ister of the interior in the capital, who commands the
wires in every sense, and whose touches thrill by devo-
lution and subtransmission throughout the mighty sys-
tem. Beyond the minister of the interior there is really
nothing but the Maker of the universe, and he, I believe,
is not officially recognized in the constitution. Uni-
formity is the note, with certain exceptions of detail that
are immaterial in the bird's-eye view. Paris is only a
larger commune, though it has eighty mayors, because
if it had seventy-nine less, the one left might rival the
President in power. The twofold election of the coun-
cil by the citizens, and of the mayor by the council, is
the corner-stone of the system. The nation elects the
Parliament and the Parliament the President in pre-
cisely the same way. The mayor, however, is still under
control. He can be suspended for a month by the pre-
fect, for three months by the minister of the interior,
and forever by the President.
i8
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
This, as I have said, was Napoleon's gift to France,
and the wiser sort, who dread her moods and their own,
esteem it above all his victories. France rails against
it from time to time, but she would not get rid of it for
"OLD PARIS," AS SEEN EROM THE SEINE AT NIGHT
the world. The machine carries on the business. It
collects the taxes, spends them, welcomes the entry of
every citizen into the world, educates, marries, tends
him in sickness and in health, and buries him when all
is done. It suits everybody in his heart of hearts as a
sort of fixed point in a world of flux. All but the wildest
aspire to no more than the control of the motive power,
only to find, in the long run, that, by its immutable
19
PARIS OF TO-DAY
laws of mechanics, it controls them. If they strained it
to bursting, they would be the first to mount sky-high.
All the revolutions, with perhaps the single exception
of the Commune, and I am not quite sure as to that,
were really only schemes for securing the control of the
machine. They aim merel)- at changing the course,
not the engine. The institution is satisfactory; its oc-
casional uses only lea\-e something to be desired. I re-
member once calling on a friend who had been shut up
in the old prison of Sainte-Pelagie for some offense
under the press law^s. I condoled with him, less on the
hardships of his lot than on the want of respect for free-
dom of opinion which it involved. " W'e must abolish
these detestable cages for free thought," I cried, look-
ing round on the comfortably furnished room. "\'ou
are right," he said; "all 1 li\'e for now is to put the op-
posite party here." This is the moral of French tol-
erance for the machine. It is a very good instrument
when you have the vaKes under your own hand.
The interior of a ministry — what a soothing sugges-
tion of immutability ! For the perfect association of
ideas I prefer that it should be one of the ministries on
this left bank, the other one abounding in patches of
raw modernity that spoil the impression. Let it be in
the Rue de Grenelle, for choice, or in the Rue de
Varenne, not much more than a good stone's throw
from our tower. Oh, the repose of its massive outer
defenses of plain stone that keep the courtyard sacred
to the sparrows and to the suitors for place ! Within,
it is cool, and echoing to the footfall, with, at first sight,
the frequent porter for its only inhabitant. He is there
for life. You may know it by his urbanity, his unhast-
20
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
ingncss, which betoken perfect freedom from the irrita-
tion of uncertainty. He exacts a first rough sketch of
your business, as in duty bound, then passes you on to
a man on the first flight, for whose further information
you fill in the drawing with a sort of color-wash of sym-
pathies and hopes. This man may be a little cassaut
(curt) if he has had words a\ ith his wife in the morning,
but you are not to take it as personal to yourself.
Now you are just on the fringe of the life of the hive.
It is a slippered life, and it is still ease. The messen-
gers who pass to and fro between the porter's lodge
and the rooms still suggest peace ineftable and the con-
tinuity of things. Some of them wear long brown
holland blouses that eke out their modest incomes by
saving their coats. They carry huge dossiers, or port-
folios, which seem to memorialize the business of the
world, and which, in their bulky universality, are ser-
mons in leather on the insignificance of events. The
imaginary perspective of these dossiers, as you might
see them stored in the archives, would naturally
strengthen the moral. They are the connecting-links
of all the little systems, monarchical or republican, that
have ceased to be, and they maintain the perfect se-
quence of administrative policy. Those under which
the porters stagger for the moment are only the dos-
siers of the day, the passing wrinkles on the brow of
France, which have come here to be smoothed out.
They will be smoothed out by means of letters, fault-
less alike in st\le and handwriting, the very oftice-
marks of which seem to link you with the present and
the past. Now, haply, you come in touch with the
clerical staff, but always in a discreet, secluded, monastic
PARIS OF TO-DAY
sort of way. The beardless dandies are often cadets of
good families, who, with sub\entions from the private
purse, are able to cut a figure on the stipend of a
laborer. The employment in a ministry gives them
position, and that is enough in a country which betrays
its age by still cherishing a sort of prejudice against
trade. Some of them scribble things for the papers in
their abundant leisure ; the detestable Rochefort began
in this way. Others sax'e themselves for social suc-
cesses and a good match. The little bits of red ribbon
in the buttonholes betoken the higher grades.
To see all the grades as in review, we must wait for
the sacred hour of noon — the hour at which we might
see the whole city below us black with the shifting
specks that mark a whole population pouring out to
luncheon. Then the bureaus begin to empty for a
solemn lull of business, which lasts for the better part
of two hours. The place looks more than ever perma-
nent and unchanging in this view. The French de-
jeuner, the French dinner, gives one faith in the stability
of things. They are so purposeful, so deliberate ; they
betoken so much the assurance of the continuing city,
in their orderly courses, with the coffee and chasse-cafe
to follow, and the billiards, cards, or dominoes for the
wind-up. The dejeuner is the solid break in the day,
and the strange thing is that its associations of rest and
ease do not tend to render the resumption of toil impos-
sible. The staff comes back to new labors, though
these are not unduly prolonged. Its output of work is
still considerable, although it is slow — perhaps because
it is slow. The plodding method makes each step sure,
and precludes the delays of revision.
22
THK GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
The crown of things in stabihty is the old head
porter, who has seen them all come and go, the young
sparks into the prefectures or into literature, the chief
ministers into private life or into a sort of public ob-
scurity after their brief average of the lime-light of
office. The man at the head is the only uncertain ele-
ment of the composition. The underlings of every
grade may remain forever if they like, rising by suc-
cessive steps until they write chef de bureau after their
names. Mutation is reserved for those who have made
their mark in the struggles of the political arena, and
have suddenly been "bombarded" from the outside
into the highest seats by explosions of parliamentary
applause. Many of these, under our modern scheme
of equality of opportunity, have come from the hum-
blest stations, and go back to them after their fall in a
way which has something of Roman dignity. Once
they might have hoped to save during their tenure of
power.
Under the Empire the ministers received a hundred
thousand francs a year, with allowances; but in 1871
the salary was cut down to sixty thousand. This, in
spite of free residence at the expense of the state, and
other pecuniary privileges amounting in value to about
forty thousand francs more, is insufficient. No minister
can now make ends meet without a pri\'ate fortune.
They retire from their official state perhaps to the
modest pay of a deputy, nine thousand francs a year,
and to occasional earnings with the pen ; from glitter-
ing banquets and receptions, at which they entertained
the magnates of the official world, home and foreign, to
the omelet with the cutlet to follow, served by some old
23
PARIS OF TO-DAY
peasant woman from Brittany in the fifth-floor flat from
which they emerged. From this cage we might
almost shake hands with some ministers in their exalted
retirement. Their height of disgrace has its consola-
tions. It removes them farther from an unjust earth,
and nearer to the compensating stars. I used to find
M. Jules Simon at a great elevation, moral as well
as material, after a fall from power which perplexed
the nations w^ith fear of change. I found AI. Yves
Guyot au qitatricme the other day, draw'ing his breath
with difticulty, I thought, amid a too dense undergrowth
of economic literature, and writing his daily article for
the " Siecle "' in championship of the prisoner of
Rennes.
The petits employes have the best of it. X'enerable
figures, you may trace them in their old age to calm
retreats in the leafy suburbs that bound our view, where
they take the evening air in the zinc summer-houses of
gardens relatively as small as their own souls, or under
the shadow^s of plaster busts which figure the transient
and embarrassed phantoms of forgotten ministers of
the day, to whose favor they owed their place. They
are reposing before dinner, after their game of bowls in
the public avenue, played to a treble of applause from a
circle of their own order.
Law^ and police form an integral part of the machine,
enduring, unchanging, in their hierarchical condition a
solid bulwark against the vagaries of the popular spirit.
To feel this to the full one should attend the red mass
at the Palais de Justice in early November, which
marks the reopening of the courts after the long vaca-
tion. The Archbishop of Paris presides in person, as
2+
A CIVIL MARRIAGE
THK GOVKRNMKN J AL MACHINE
though to show the sohdarity l)ct\\ccn all the powers
that be. Here again one sees that this shifting society
has still its foundation of conservative forces. It is the
old order of this old, old people, still holding its own
amid the new. The Revolution may have changed
the forms; it could not change the spirit — the way of
looking at things, in which habit proves itself the true
heir of the ages. The great judges are in their robes
of red ; hence the name of the function. Nothing
much seems to have happened for centuries, as they
file in. So they robed and so they filed when the Bas-
tille still frowned over Paris, and when the oubliettes of
the feudal castles were the best-remembered things in
France. It is all pure middle age. The black-robed
judges of the Tribunal of Commerce — a touch of nov-
elty by virtue of their office — might be visible from
here as they pass from their court on the other side of
the boulevard, through a dense crowd. Within the
palace the Council of the Order of Advocates, with the
bdtoiinier at its head, defiles from the prisoners' gallery
to join the judges. The procession moves toward the
Sainte-Chapelle, where Saint Louis went to church
seven centuries and a half ago, as we may go to church
to-day. The rich toilets of the visitors feed the blaze
of color. Here, on the front benches, is the red of the
Court of Appeal and of the Court of Cassation, that
famous court which stemmed the torrent of popular
fanaticism in the "affaire." Silk and ermine, velvet and
lace, nothing is wanting in the trappings to carry the
mind back to the ages of faith. Justice is solidly estab-
lished in France, and it is organized on much the same
principle as the administration. The justice of the
27
PARIS OF TO-DAY
peace, who is the magistrate of the first degree, sits in
the chief town of the canton. He is removable only by
the President.
The members of the higher cotirts hold their places
for life. Their social sympathies sometimes tincture
their judgments. They cannot always forget that they
belong by tradition to an order which was one of the
nobilities of France — the nobility of the robe. They
have therefore a sort of fellow-feeling with the nobility
of the sword. The bar is a great trade-union, in spite
of republican reforms. It is one of the few privileged
institutions left, the last of the corporations, and as such
about the only complete survival of prerevolutionary
France. Its council decides on the admission of can-
didates, and has a tendency to reject them if they are
not of the right sort. In spite of this, the country is
overrun by needy lawyers, who push up to Paris as
deputies, get dazzled there by the social splendors, and
go into isthmian canals, unfortunately not to drown
there, but to make their fortunes and enjoy bon soitper,
bon gite, ct le reste with the glittering crowd. The
council is most favorably disposed to those who keep
the right company, think, and even shave, in the right
way. Its upper lip, like that of the bench, is generally
a terror, in the pitiless severity of its naked lines. The
bar has its own cafes, its own drawing-rooms, its own
jokes. The oratory is just what you might expect from
the lips. It is the revived oratory of the old school,
which went straight to the reason, and left the feelings
to take care of themselves. Some of these men —
some of the judges especially — glory in the thought
that they have not read a work of literature of later
28
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
date than the earher eighteenth century, when, accord-
ing to them, classic prose reached its high-water mark.
Their art, hke all art whatsoever in France, is a struc-
ture with a plan. They know exactly what they are
going to say, and how they are going to say it, and
when, by chance, their voice trembles, be sure it trem-
bles to order. The looking-glass has had their first
confidences in every effect of gesture. Their hearers
know it and expect it, and applaud the structural skill.
Clery, whom I used to meet in old days, sometimes
terrified me by his facility as a speaking-machine. He
even sounded the two ;/s whenever they came together,
as they pride themselves on doing at the Frangais.
Nothing was wanting but the suggestion that the driv-
ing power of the amazing organism came from the
blood. Maitre Rousse was a master of this style —
hard, glittering, impeccable. But the hardness was
grit. He stuck to his post during the Commune, and
fought that usurpation all through with the weapons of
law. He must have congratulated himself every night
that he still had, not so much a pillow to lie on, as a
head to lay on it. Maitre Demange, who has fought
so valiantly for justice at Rennes and elsewhere, is an-
other strong man. He has more animation, but, whether
gay or grave, his manner is throughout tempered by
finished ease, and he always keeps within the bounds
of the natural note. In spite of recent reforms, the pro-
cedure is still absolutely antiquated in its presumption
of the original sin of the accused, and in its regard for
the sanctity of the accusation. How often has that
dismal prison hard by seen wretched suspects in murder
cases confronted with the remains of the victim, to the
29
PARIS OF TO-DAY
end of drawinj; conclusions from their tremors, and
from the pallor of their cheek ?
Believ^e me, you cannot ha\e been a power and a
polity as far back as Charlemagne for nothing. We
have seen lately how they still watch the slumbers of
captives, and flash search-lights, the rays of which are
expected to reach the conscience, on the blinking eyes.
The rule of prudence in France is to contrive always to
be the accuser, and to get the first blow in with your
charge. Perhaps that is why they exhibit such a ten-
dency to arrest one another all round in street rows. I
lia\e seen them standing in a sort of charmed circle of
nervous excitement, each with a hand on a neighbor's
necktie. Do not be too hard on them ; they have
been brought up on theories of the innate depravity of
human nature. Then they are so quick-minded, so
acute. A very little knowledge of your own heart soon
constrains you to the sorrowful admission that the other
man must be a bad lot.
To see a poor devil at his worst, I think, one must
see him, not in the rat-pit of a court of justice, but in
the preliminary stage of his examination by \l. Bertil-
lon. You know him, the official in charge of the bureau
of anthropometric measurement for criminals, the March
Hare turned e.^pert in handwriting at the Dreyfus trial.
He has the genius and, at. the same time, the disease
of minutias. He has found out that, if you can only
measure a man by certain bone-measurements that
never vary, the coincidence of, say, half a dozen of these
is a certain clue to his identity. You have no doubt
heard the invention described a thousand times. Have
you ever seen it put into use? I have, in that very
30
THE COVKRNMKNTAL MACHINE
Palais de Justice, when they bring the prisoners in for
identification before taking them into the presence of
the magistrate. The drift of the inquiry hes in the
question, "Have you ever been here before?" "No,
monsieur; ne\er,"' is, of course, but the one thing to
say. At this early stage they never expect you to con-
fess; it would spoil sport for the machine. The morn-
ing charges at the Paris police courts are, I suppose,
with a difference of local color, the morning charges
everywhere. It is no doubt a terrible thing to be a
suspect; the unsuspected are against you almost in spite
of themselves. The \ery contrast of each unkempt,
unshaven creature w ith the trim garde de Paris by his
side is to his detriment. Then he is led to the measur-
ing-stand, — invited to place himself there is, I believe,
the proper phrase, — and the attendant, who might be
cutting his hair or taking his orders for a suit of clothes,
cries out measurement No. i. It is noted on a card.
There may be a thousand measurements like it, among
the hundreds of thousands of records to which they have
constant access, so our old offender may still keep a
good heart. But at the second call, of course, assum-
ing a further correspondence, we make a huge stride
from the general to the particular. Somebody, clearly,
has been here before with the two measurements, say of
mid-finger joint and frontal bone, exactly answering to
these new ones. Should a third correspondence be es-
tablished, all but the "dead beats" begin to look grave.
Yes, there is certainly another card up there in the ar-
chives in perfect agreement so far with the one we are
making out. At this point M. Bertillon, feeling that
there is no more sport with this bird, seems politely to
3^
PARIS OF TO-DAY
inquire if he is to go on: "Come, own up!" Rut most
hunted things run till they die; and " No, monsieur;
never here before," is still the rule. I'inally they close
down on him, by taking down the old card, and show-
ing him his old photograph neatly pasted on the back,
and dated perhaps a dozen years ago. With this the
baffled \vretch shrugs his shoulders as a sign that the
game of hide-and-seek is up, and is marched off into
another room to have his portrait taken anew for the
appendix to the record. He is often betrayed by his
stare of amused curiosity at the old one, as he recog-
nizes a forgotten necktie, a forgotten trimming of the
hair, jjcrhaps some traces of a forgotten candor of
youth. The Bertillon method is the perfection of the
governmental machine, in one of its purely mechanical
developments. It is fascinating to an eminently scien-
tific nation to think that, with the aid of science, justice
can work with this positive certainty. Some of them,
no doubt, dream of a day when the Rontgen rays w ill
be turned with success into the criminal mind, and trials
and confessions will alike become a superfluity.
The towers of Notre Dame, standing clear against
the sky, may serve to remind us of the great struggle
on the part of the statesmen to bring the church into the
machine, as a real effective force working heart and
soul for the Republic. But they are thwarted by the
free-thinkers on the one side, who would like to make
agnosticism a cult, and by the church itself, with its tra-
ditional respect for the monarchical system. The too
logical mind of the French abhors a transaction on the
principle of give and take. It is for all or none, and it
better understands the tyranny of an opponent's usur-
32
THE PRESIDENT (FELIX FAURE) BESTOWING THE HAT
UPON A CARDINAL
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
pation than what it regards as the weakness of his c()ni-
promise. The Pope has made unheard-of efforts to
bring the parties together by enjoining a hearty accep-
tance of the RepubHc on the part of the Clerical and Mo-
narchical parties. And it is to be noted that, at the last
elections, the "Rallies," who represent the Royalists
that have come over to the Republic, returned in in-
creased numbers. But, then, so did the Socialists, and
between these two there is, I think, racial war. The
Radicals, as a free-thinking party, dream of a scheme
of reasoned morality that shall take the place of the old
religion and be a new^ one. So they issue neat little
manuals, in which they show, Socratically, the logical
necessity of doing good to your neighbor, and, as it
were, defy you to be other than virtuous if you have a
due regard for the syllogism. The late Paul Bert spent
no little of his precious time in these exercises. The
church, all the churches, are constitutionally parts of
the machine. They are subventioned by the state —
Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and exen Mohammedans,
alike. They are under the supervision of the minister
of public worship. The bishops are nominated by the
government, and even when the French cardinals have
received their appointment from the Pope, they still
come back to have their hats handed to them by the
President in solemn audience. It has been said that if
the church could see its way to a perfect reconciliation,
it might yet form the basis of a dominant conservative
party, and that most P'renchmen want no more than to
have the priest in his place. I doubt it. Besides, can
he consent to take a mere place with the rest? By vir-
tue of his profession, he aspires to nothing less than the
35
PARIS OF rO-DAY
dominion of the whole of hfe. The Radicals are just as
strenuous in their determination to find a substitute for
him. Ingersoll was only a criticism, after all. Free
thought here is, in thousands of minds, a working
scheme. "Ni Dieu ni Maitre" was the device of fierce
old Blanqui, that tameless lion of revolt. There is a
whole literature of religion without God.
Right below us lies the sinister military school. The
men that rule there form part of the machine, and the
difficulty with them just now is that they want to be the
whole of it. They sulk with the civil power on the one
side, as the church sulks with it on the other. The hold
of the arm)- on opinion is enormous, just because it has
become identified with the people as a vast national
militia. Every man serves, and most men bring away
with them some professional sympathy with the service.
As the grocer watches the passing regiment at Long-
champ, he feels that he is with comrades, and that their
very cloth is only a sort of best suit he has in reserve.
The whole future of free institutions in I -ranee lies in
that grocer's frame of mind. If he remembers that he
is a citizen first and a soldier afterward, the Republic is
safe. If not, and he keeps the citizen in the back-
ground, then there is no knowing wdiat usurpations may
not be dared and done. I am assured by one who
ought to know that the soldier is still the citizen, and
the republican citizen, in arms. But the same authority
admits that, when he served his term, he scarcely looked
at a newspaper, or took any interest in the questions oi
the day. The barrack spirit had marked him for its
own. The prevalent uncertainty on this point is
sometimes ludicrous in its eftects. On the return of a
36
THE GOVERNMENTAL MACHINE
successful cunuiiander the first care of the go\ernuient
is to keep him out of the way. When General Dodds
came back from Dahomey he was isolated as though
he had brought the plague with him. It was the same
with poor Major Marchand the other day. If America
were France, Admiral Dewey would be invited, not to
say ordered, to recruit his health in the country, and
the government, while still constrained to offer him a
smiling welcome, would tremble every time he ap-
proached Washington or New York. In distant colo-
nies, far, far beyond the purview of the tallest of
conceivable Eiffel Towers, the generals have sometimes
flatly refused obedience to the civil governor. The
trembling government, which would have liked to shoot
them, has had to go on smiling. Take with all this, as
symptomatic, the despatches just to hand from the
French Sudan. An officer was recalled for cruelties.
He turned, with his native following, on another officer
who bore the message, and massacred him and the
whites of his mission to a man. Such is the official ac-
count of an un\erified report, and they may still suc-
ceed in shifting the blame to the natives; but some of
the wilder newspapers say that an African satrapy un-
der a soldier of fortune would be entirely to their taste.
The machine is only less strong in social than in po-
litical influence. The administrative institutions are
coyps lie societe as well as corps d'etat. Each of them
has its salons, managed by clever women who, in in-
triguing for their husbands, often against one another,
still strengthen the general framework. The prefect's
wife looks after the dejjartment, as the President's wife
is supposed to look after the state. She encourages
11
PARIS OF TO-DAY
waverers, gives the disaffected to understand that they
need not be altogether without hope. Society proper,
or improper, may think itself entitled to gibe and scoff,
as it sometimes does, I believe, in other republics. But
nothing can deprive the official world of influence, since
it holds patronage and power. Every one of the pro-
vincial capitals lying beyond us on all sides in the
depths of the haze has its official circle, where the
powers that be try to agree not to differ too openly, in
the interest of the general stability of things. The uni-
versity professors and their wives belong to this set.
The superior clergy do not refuse their countenance
when the professors show a proper outward conformity
of respect for the church, and reserve the Voltairean
epigram for the fireside. The general in command of
the district, or, more strictly speaking, Mme. la Gene-
rale, brings the officers to the official dances, at which
also the district bench and bar shake a loose leg.
A ball at the Elysee is a great function which has
been in process of gradual democratization ever since
the foundation of the Republic. Mme. de MacMahon
was about the last who tried to keep it select. It was
an anachronism. The old couches sociales sulked, and
begged to reserve themselves for her private parties.
The new were not asked. The true theory of such a
gathering is the one that now prevails. It is a review
of all the forces that make for order and for stability,
and it excludes no one who has a place of importance
in the administrative machine.
The diplomatists still have the privilege of a room to
themselves. But this is more or less open to the pub-
lic fraze, and it serves to concentrate some of the most
is'
38
THE DOWNFALL OL A MINISTRY IN THE
CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES
THE GOVERNMKN lAL MACHINE
striking effects of the spectacle. To-night"s ball at tiie
Hotel de Ville, which, if we could stay long enough,
might presently signalize itself to us as a scheme of illu-
mination, is a still more characteristic sight. It is a
festival of all the civic forces, where the municipal
councilor and the district mayor may feel that they
have been admitted to the great partnership of the gov-
ernment. The note of brotherhood, rather than of
class distinction, at all these gatherings is the cross of
the Legion of Honor, in all its glittering grades. Most
other orders seem to cry, " Stand off! " to the mass of
mankind. This one cries, "Come over and helj) us!"
to every active brain and strong hand. To have it
not is more of a re])roach than to have it is a distinc-
tion. Its true and entirely sound significance is there.
It is a public certificate of the fact that, whatever your
work may be, you have done that work well — a uni-
versal brevet of eminence in every line of lal)()r and of
effort conducive to the common good. You ma\- not
want it, but — wliat will people think? One day (ius-
tave Dore began to languish with a sort of green-
sickness of melancholy wliich no one could precisely
diagnose. His aged mother was called into consulta-
tion, and affirmed with emphasis that he was pining for
the Legion of Honor. The matter was immediately
referred, in confidence, to the minister of fine arts, and
the result was a cross and a cure.
Such is the great governmental machine — a national
invention, like the corset, and indispensable to the figure
of France. It keeps the country in shape amid a tht)u-
sand shocks. It has scarcely known change since the
time of its founder. It has served the varying purposes
41
PARIS OF TO-DAY
of Louis XVIII and Charles X and Louis Philippe, of
the Republic of 1848 and the Second Empire, and while
the servant, it has also been the master of all. It has
kept up the real continuity of institutions, and has saved
the democracy from itself by opposing a solid rampart
to social, as distinct from merely political, innovation.
It is a sort of supreme court in the domain of action,
ever engaged in looking after the foundations of things,
and tempering the wind of crude doctrine to the lamb
of the body politic so frequently shorn. Without it, or
something like it, that is to say without a strong execu-
tive of a kind, Trance would have gone to pieces a
dozen times this century.
But no human contrivance is perfect, and the ma-
chine has one weak spot. Its heel of Achilles is the
Parliament, and especially the Chamber of Deputies.
The Chamber would be well enough if it were d
r Aniericaiiie, instead of d VAuglaise — if it had nut
the fatal power of unmaking ministries by a vote. With
reasonably permanent cabinets, policy would be fairly
continuous, as well as administration. As it is, almost
any determined minority can upset the ministerial
apple-cart by an intrigue. The malcontents have only
to lie in wait, and snatch a hostile division when nobody
is looking, and out the government goes, though it may
have just given itself the proud title of the " strongest
of modern times." Something is wanted that would
confine the deputies to their business of making the
laws, and secure the administration in its function of
executing them.
The wrecking of ministries has become a mere trick,
Hke the spot stroke in billiards, and, in the interests of
+2
THK GOVERNMENTAL iMACHINE
France, it should he barred. It was a reproach as far
back as the time of Louis Philippe. Murger's Bohe-
mian, on moving into new lodgings, orders the con-
cierge to wake him every morning by calling through
the keyhole the day of the week and of the month, the
moon's cjuarter, the state of the weather, and " the gov-
ernment under which we live." Amid Moderate Re-
publicans, Radical Republicans, Radical Socialists, So-
cialists dyed in the wool, Reactionary Monarchists ditto,
and Rallies, who have graciously accepted the Republic
under the promise of a reasonable share of the loaves
and fishes, there is always sure to be somebody to
offend. If you hold the disinterested position of a
mere observer, and have access to the lobbies, you may
spy the tempest on the horizon when the cloud is no
bigger than a man's hand. I have seen M. Clemen-
ceau as storm-fiend-in-chief, and M. Clovis Hugues in
subcharge of the Cave of the Winds — the latter per-
haps with a twitching palm which manifestly itches for
its threatened application to another member's face.
The cloud bursts as by order ; the ministry is laid on
its back. Sometimes there is no warning, and the ca-
tastrophe comes as by a bolt out of a clear sky. The
machine, of course, is no more disturbed by it than the
solid rock would be in the like case ; but the moral
effect is none the less to be deplored. The worst evil
is the way in which it uses up the governing men.
They get tired of being laid on their backs for nothing,
and at every fresh crisis there is a greater difficulty in
finding entries for this foolish sport. The positive re-
fusals to serve become more numerous and more em-
barrassing, and the fear grows that the President will
4;>
PARIS OF TO-DAY
finall}' have to athcrtisc in the newspapers for a min-
ister. There ought to he a club of ex-ministers, or a
monthly dinner of them, where they might meet and
compare notes on the futility of all effort to please a
people with disease of the nerves.
As the bell gives the signal, and it is "all aboard"
for the descent, I reflect that France will have to watch
herself, or she may find this disease incurable. Her
misfortune is that she has been taught to live from this
part of the organism in public affairs. Her private life
is free from all reproach of the kind. There the nation
is serious, calculating, close, ever haunted by the mel-
ancholy of a too keenly prophetic vision of the possi-
bilities of ill. It must find an outlet somewhere for the
mere spiritual waste of its despondency, and, like the
rest of us, it has a tendency to dump its rubbish into
the public domain. I am convinced that it would be
less frivolous in conduct if it were less sad at heart.
44
EVENING AT THE GREAT GATE OF THE EXPOSITION
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
PARIS being a great manuiacturing city, its plebs
have naturally had the ambition to rule the
roast. This is what has given it the importance
it has had all through French history. Multiply the
natural quickness of the race into the development of
that quickness by the practice of the skilled crafts, and
this product again into the sense of great events ever
passing on a great stage, and you have, in the colossal
result, the medium in which the Paris man in the street
has ever moved. He is the heir of the ages of the
most stimulating suggestions of glory and power. So
fashioned, like the Athenian of old, he has naturally
come to regard himself as a sort of center of things.
He is one to whom the making of a new constitution
for his country, or, for that matter, for the human race,
is the easiest thing in the world.
Hence the self-importance of the faubourgs from a
very early stage of their history. The word is used
here, not in its etymological sense of a suburb, an out-
skirt, a part without the gates, but, on the contrary, of
a part that has come very much within them as the city
4-9
PARIS OF TO-DAY
has enlarged its boundaries. Nor, even in this sense,
does it apply to those faubourgs whieh are still the
haunt of the richer class. The faubourg of my theme
is any part to which the poor have been pushed from
the center to the circumference, or shut out from the
center on their invading march from the outside. Even
in this sense it is still hardl}' to be regarded as a geo-
graphical expression, and is not much more than a con-
\'entional term. Wherever the toilers and the small
folk of every social category are gathered together,
there you have a faubourg "within the meaning of the
act." The great manufacturing plain of St.-Denis is
still a faubourg beyond the walls, but it has a street of
the faubourg within them.
The faubourg has ever played its part with the most
perfect good faith. Its successive generations have
been animated by the hope of ultimate success in the
invention of a perfect governmental machine. This
contrivance is to do the trick for the regeneration of
mankind by a device as simple as that of putting a
penny in the slot. It is to turn out equality, fraternit}-,
and e\'en liberty itself, as a kind of bonus, by an auto-
matic process that precludes the need of personal exer-
tion. The convenience of this arrangement is that it is
less concerned with the conduct of the regenerators
than with the conduct of those who are to be regen-
erated. \'ou look after your neighbor, and allow your-
self a reasonable exemption from watchfulness as
inventor's royalty.
The people of the faubourgs, the humble folk gen-
erally, — small traders and small annuitants as well as
workmen, — like all the rest of us, are the product of
50
THE CANAL F^ORT OF LA VILLETTE
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
their surroundings. They arc shaped by the private
life and l)y the pubHc hfe, by the street and the home.
These people in Paris owe a great deal to the public
life. It condescends to their needs for color, variety,
movement, in a way universal among the Latin nations.
Out of doors is merely their larger home, and they
expect to find adequate provision there for every kind
of enjoyment. Our own race tends to regard that
domain as a mere thoroughfare between the workshop
and the fireside, where all our interests are centered. If
it serves that purpose that is about all we ask of it. It
may be as ugly as it likes, and, within certain limits of
indulgence, almost as dirty. To the Frenchman it is
more than a place of transit; it is almost a place of
sojourn.
So the Parisian common man has his share of the
Champs-Elysees and of the boulevards in his freedom
of access to their fountains and promenades and their
bordering alleys of tender green. He comes down-
stairs to them, so to speak, as soon as the scavengers
have done their timely work. He descends to his
thoroughfare as the millionaire expects to descend to
his breakfast-room or his study, with all its appoint-
ments fresh from the broom, and shining in their bright-
ness of metal and glass. So, whatever the gloom of
tlie domestic prospect, his street helps him to feel good.
The beauty of the statuary, of the public buildings, is a
means to the same end. For nothing the poorest of
poor devils may see the glorious bronzes in the terrace
garden of the Tuileries, the outdoor figures of the Lux-
embourg, the great horses of the Place de la Concorde,
the magnificent compositions of the Arch. The very
53
PARIS OF TO-DAY
lamp-post that will light his way at nightfall serves the
purpose of a thing of beauty all through the day. Com-
pare it with the English bar of cast-iron, hideous to the
eye in form and color, foul with the mud-stains of years
SCENE AT A CRECHE
of traffic. The Frenchmen must have it suave and
shapely in its lines, a model of good Renaissance orna-
ment in its decorations, bronze in its material, and
washed and polished every week or so to keep it smart.
Extend this difference in the point of view to the
whole public scene, and one can understand why the
54-
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
street is the distinctive thing in Paris. The very plans
for the houses have to pass municipal muster. You
build as you please only within certain limits, and your
right of purchase includes no license of monstrosity.
The very letters in which you advertise your name and
business must be in gold-leaf — at any rate, in the prin-
cipal thoroughfares. Compare the obelisk of the Place
de la Concorde with the obelisk of the Thames Em-
bankment — the first standing clean and clear-cut on its
fine pedestal, with its whole message like a sheet of
print to any one who knows the character; the other
begrimed with the London soot, and with the fine
figures at its base bearing innumerable traces of their
degradation of use as a playground for the hobnailed
urchins. The Parisian has looked on such things from
his earliest infancy. He has never, except by pure
mischance, looked on anvthing that is not beautiful in
the public domain. The very house-fronts must be
scraped for him into their original tint of still cream
every two or three years. He is born to a splendid
tradition of culture in the principles of taste. The
poorest wretch who munches his crust in the open sees
nothing that is not fine, whatever his luck in his nightly
lair. For all the daylight hours he may be as lucky in
that respect as the porter in the halls of Sindbad. And
he has the equivalent of the purse of sequins in his share
of the millions that ha\e been spent on his morning
promenade, from the shady Bois, at one end of the
prospect, to the tiniest garden that gives him an oasis
of comfort on his way to the gate of X'incennes, at the
other.
The boulevard is all life, and well-nigh all beauty, in
55
PARIS OF lO-DAY
the stately frfintas^es — beauty of high art at Rarbe-
dienne's and in the picture-shops, beauty of texture and
dyes, of fine craftsmanship in a thousand articles of lux-
ury, in the others. Especially is it all life. The appeal
to the fancy and the imagination is not to be missed in
its insistency. The kiosks give our quidnunc a sense
of all-abounding vitality. Here the hawkers shout
their latest sensation from the uttermost ends of the
earth, new editions piping hot with nothing in them,
and yet with everything in their power of providing for
the passing moment, which is the all in all. His ene-
mies, home and foreign, are caricatured in the gaudy
colored prints. The soldiers pass, the idlers take their
afternoon absinthe. It is a pageant which does not
depend for its effect on the consideration whether you
see it from a bench on the trottoir or from a fauteuil
under the awning, for, thanks to the municipal foliage,
the bench is shaded just as pleasantly as the chair.
The general result gives every beholder to the
manner born the sense that he is a citizen of no mean
city. If the appeal lies too directly to the sensations
and too little to the reflective part, that need not count.
The creature, at any rate, lives in every nerve, and his
tendency to go off half primed in every fugitive fancy
entails no personal inconvenience, since, in the long run,
it is France that pays. This is the street of our prole-
tarian of the Latin races. You see it, with dififerences
which are only local, in Barcelona and in Seville, in
P^lorence and in Naples. It is a place made for the
waking hours, the sleeping-quarters being very much
of an accident, as they were in old Rome.
Still the question remains. What sort of home does he
56
TOY- MAKERS
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
go home to? It is not a l)ad one if lie is a Parisian of
the working-class. The wife is still apt to he the angel
of the house in cleanliness, neatness, and management,
and she runs no risk of losing her wings by taking to
drink. The poorer classes throughout the world have
to make their choice between the life out of doors and
the life within. Even with the help of the angel in the
house, the Parisian workman is but poorly off. She
can but do her ])est in her domain, and when that
domain is only one half or one quarter story out of
seven, she can hardly be called a controller of events.
The family of the faubourg is still too commonly
lodged in the tenement-house, and that house in Paris
wants what it wants pretty much everywhere else. It
towers to the sky, though in comparison with the ele-
vations common in Chicago and in New York it is an
ant-hill. It gets light and air for the back rooms from
a fetid court. Its sanitary arrangements — but wh)- in-
sist? See one of these places in any latitude, and you
see them in all the broad earth. This is no new tliincr.
Paris has built in the air for generations. New \'ork
probably learned the trick from her as a grain of the
wisdom brous^ht home in the close fist of "Poor
Richard" on his return from abroad. All the old for-
tified cities built in the air — built high and built narrow
so as to lessen the circuit of the walls. In its origin it
is rather ancient need than modern greed. To this day
some of the highest houses and the narrowest streets
of Paris are to be found in the old quarters near the In-
stitute, and by no means a hundred miles from the Rue
de Seine and the Rue du Bac. The latter was once a
real "street of the brook" — a brook gradually fouled
59
PARIS OF TO-DAY
into a gutter, and running so fouled within the memory
of those now hving.
The contrast in the workmen's homes is between the
fairly neat and wcll-ordcrcd interiors and the abomina-
WINE-TRUCKS AT THE WINE MARKET
tions that begin at the staircase. Our race strives
more for the amenity and the independence of the small
house. Within the fortifications of Paris the small
house is almost unknown, the yard or garden patch, as
the possession of a single family, quite unknown.
There are great possibilities in the small house, if you
60
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
choose to make the best of them, and there is still the
individualized independence dear to the Anglo-Saxon,
even if you make the worst. The hideous neglect of
cleanliness and beauty in the public domain, in the
poorer quarters of London, is one result of the differ-
ence of conditions. The poor man is content to find
nothing attractive in the thoroughfares, because there
is his own " little bit of a place " at the journey's end.
As the great model lodging-houses multiply, however,
he is losing this compensation. His demand for its
equivalent out of doors is therefore beginning to tell in
the labors of the County Council for the planting of
gardens and for the merely decorative improvement of
the streets.
The poor man of the Latin race met smiling on the
promenades seems to say, " Please don't follow me
home." His nights, then, are something of a terror if
his days are a delight. One is reminded of the choice
presented to fancy in the nursery tale. Under which
fairy will you take service — the one who gives a wak-
ing experience of every kind of happiness, with a sleep-
ing life of all the horrors of nightmare, or the other,
who offers the experience the other way about? Be
careful how you choose offhand. The Frenchman of
the great cities may sleep in a cupboard after roaming
all day in a pleasance.
The workman lives in a barrack. The small house
has vanished. Sheer necessity has compelled the
builders to forget the Stoic warning against raising the
roofs of the houses instead of the souls of the citizens.
The evil is that rich and poor now dwell by tribes, each
in its own ([uarter. The very poor are in one ward,
6i
PARIS OF TO-DAY
the half poor in another, and so on until you reach dis-
tricts where it is all millionaire. In the old days the
poor of Paris, like the poor of London, abode all over the
place. It was the lower part of the house for the rich, the
upper part for the less prosperous, but the whole social
order under one roof. There have been many laws to
amend this state of things in France, one of the earliest
of the modern dating from 1850. It failed because it was
permissive. It is thought that the state should make
some gigantic effort to house everybody in the right
way. The money might be found in the savings-bank
fund, now amounting in paper to betw^een two and
three thousand millions of francs. Rut where is the
savings-bank fund? Nobody can say. It is dis-
tributed all over the surface of French finance. It has
served as a sort of lucky bag into which the embar-
rassed minister dips when he is at a loss for a balance.
Some fear national bankruptcy on this issue alone, and
a second Revolution as bad as the first.
For all the years since the beginning of the century
these thrifty and industrious people have been pouring
their savings into the hands of the state in the sure and
certain hope of finding them at call. They could tiot
find them in the lump, and a panic might have the most
fearful consequences. Then, money or no money,
where are you to build ? It is impossible to continue
the invasion of the skies, so there is nothing for it but
lateral extension. \\'hy not take the fortifications, just
as they have already done in Vienna, raze the walls, fill
the ditches, and make a workman's zone ? The scheme
is feasible. It would put the people on the circumfer-
ence of Paris within striking distance of the center or
62
THH AFTHRNOON BITE
WORKINO-MHN AT A BKASSKKIE
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
of the suburbs. But it supposes a good civic railway
system, and, happily, there is just a beginning of this in
the new line (to be finished for the Exposition) which
runs through the city from east to west. It has already
burrowed under the Champs-Elysees, and it is now well
on its way down the Rue de Rivoli.
Without this and a good deal more of the same kind
Paris would soon be impossible. The omnibus sys-
tem, even with its enormous supplementary force of the
tramways, has completely broken down as a service for
the needs of this vast population ; for Paris grows
worse overcrowded than ever, owing to the work for
the Exposition, and, indeed, to the rebuilding generally.
This brings up thousands from all parts of the country,
and most of them come to stay. Some, like the
masons, come only for the summer work, and in the
winter go back to their villages. While they are here
they lodge in wretched garnis, or furnished lodgings,
like Chinese, sleeping no one quite knows how many in
a room.
Of eight hundred and twenty-five thousand habita-
tions, great and small, six hundred thousand are at a
yearly rental below five hundred francs, or a hundred
dollars. Of course by habitations I do not mean sepa-
rate houses, but merely separate dwellings of any and
every sort. Think of what this means, and of how-
little in the way of house-room and of the decencies of
domestic life those who pay so little can expect. But
there is worse behind. Some habitations are below
sixty dollars. This surely cannot give the right to
much more than a cupboard, and a very dirty cupboard
at that. Nor is this the lowest depth. I ha\'e seen the
PARIS OF TO-DAY
rag-pickers in shanties with mere ground for the floor.
In one and the same hut they sorted the filth, housed
the family, worked, cooked, and slept, were born, and
died. An infant, who had just gone through the former
THE EXHIBITION GATE OPPOSITE THE INVAI.IDES
process, lay in its cradle in one corner, and beside the
cradle was a crib, where two others slept ; a bed for
father, mother, and yet an infant more, occupied another
corner. Rags, bones, broken bottles, and bits of rusty
iron completed the furniture.
This is all the more trying in Paris, because in their
work the Parisians are a highly domesticated folk.
66
PARIS OF THK FAUBOURGS
Wherever they can do it, they work at home. The
hardest thing in the world is to bring the artificial-
flower makers into a factory. All the fine taste of these
girls seems to go out of them when you range them in
rows. What they like is to be left in their own garrets and
to feign nature at their ease with a modeling-tool and a
tinted rag. It is, in one view, the French passion for little
industries of all kinds. They put off the evil day of
machinery as long as they can. Whole districts are still
cultivated with the spade. Many Parisian industries
depend only less on hand-labor than the Japanese.
This is specially the case in the toy trade, a consider-
able item in the exports of France. All those fanciful
creations which are the delight of the boulevards on
the I St of January are more or less traceable to dismal
back rooms, looking out on walls of giant buildings
which know no visitation of the sun. Even where the
curious industry is established on the larger scale it
still has something domestic in its character. There
may be twenty people under a master as petty as them-
selves, but they still have to contrive to work in the
master's lodgings. He finds room somehow, and as
they turn out of his impoverished workshop he turns in
to go to bed. In this medium, and in this medium
only, his serene spirit works at its ease in inventions
for the toy market. Here he elaborates his wonderful
buzzing bees and skipping monkeys, his industrious
mechanical mice that creep up a string and down a
string, and all the rest of it. A popular toy is a for-
tune. The man who first found out how to make a
puppet walk, with his girl on his arm, and his poodle-
dog in leash, must long since have retired in affluence.
67
PARIS OF TO-DAY
A thousand considerations of policy and prudence affect
this industry. Pohtical toys are of no use except for
the purely Parisian market, and the inventor strikes
both for that and for the export trade. For the latter
the non-political puppet with the poodle elbows the
heroes out of the field.
Many of the great manufacturing houses try to lodge
their own work-people in comfort and decency. At the
iron-works of Creusot they make endless efforts of this
sort, and are, on the whole, fairly successful. The
working-class city founded by Jean Dolfus at Mul-
house is a wonderful creation. The well-known Pha-
lanstere de Guise is a sort of Republic of Plato, or
Utopia of More, adapted to \\-orking-class needs. These
philosophic employers of labor, who have tried to rear
men as others rear pheasants, have a good deal to
show for their pains, in settlements in which every one,
down to the humblest, is lodged in a way that differen-
tiates the human beinij from the brute. These are the
industrial experiments.
Then there are the religious ones. The revivalist
movement in the Catholic Church that began after the
Franco-Prussian war is very active in the industrial
domain. The church tried to turn the moral of that
awful catastrophe entirely to its own profit. It has
just completed its monumental temple at Montmartre,
visible from every quarter of the city, and designed to
warn the populace fore\'er and forever of the wicked-
ness of the Commune, and of the need of intercessory
prayers. In the same way it has started all over the
country workmen's clubs "to combat democracy and
infidelity " — clubs which are intended to procure work
68
COLLECTING CUSTOMS AT THE BARRIERS
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
for the faithful from the faithful, and which put the
poor and pious tailor in the way of mending the
breeches of the Catholic millionaire. These have some
success, though the artisan, as a rule, fights shy of them,
and regards their members with the utmost scorn.
They give free social entertainments, not to say free
lunches, all on the easy condition of a due submission
to the powers that be, both in church and state.
Connected w^ith the religious organizations is the
scheme of cheap houses. There is a great society for
the building of Jiabitations a bou marcJie, and it does
good work, but still on what seems to me the unsatis-
factory basis of charity. Some of its houses are built
on the conception that a small house and garden belong
to the natural state of civilized man. This idea, of
course, can be carried out only in the country, where
space is not so precious. At Auteuil there is a whole
street of niaisouiicttes of this description, and of three-
story houses in which two or more families may lodge
in comfort and decency on the tenement system. With
these, and forming part of the scheme, is a cooperative
store, where the tenants get nearly all necessaries at
cost price. There are other dwellings of the same
society at St. -Denis, the great manufacturing plain
beyond the walls, and in other parts of France.
But the dwelling-house is only one of the conditions.
The workshop is another. In fact, where you work is
perhaps more important than where you lodge, for
there you spend the greater part of your time under
one roof A good deal has been done by legislative
and administrative supervision to put the workshops in
a healthier state. All this, however, is to be judged by
7^
PARIS OF TO-DAY
the standard of the country, and it must be confessed
that in certain matters the French standard is not high.
Workshops that would pass muster in France as being
quite on the improved jjlan would be considered by
other communities as only less objectionable than a
Kafir kraal. You are to bear in mind that it is an old
country, and that it does all things in a more or less
old-fashioned way. Its own idea that it is the newest of
the new is merely its fun. The apprenticeship laws
abound in all sorts of quaint provisions. Boys and
girls are to have one day's rest a week, though the day
is not fixed. There are strict regulations as to the
weight of burdens that may be carried by the appren-
tice, according to sex and age.
Then there is another sobering influence in the ques-
tion of wages. The skilled workman in the Dejjart-
ment of the Seine — that is to say, in Paris and its
neighborhood — earns from six to eight francs a day.
This is only the average. It means much higher
wages for some in the highly skilled and purely artistic
trades, and much lower wages for others. The same
kind of workmen earn from four to five francs in the
provinces. This may serve to mark the difference in
the proportion throughout. The lowest-paid — the un-
skilled in the country — earn from two to three francs a
day; the same class, of course, take relatively higher
wages in the capital. There is a sort of middle term
of the half-skilled trades, ranging in earnings between
the two. All these rates, low as they are, represent an
increase of a hundred per cent, in the last fifty years.
Of course they have to be considered strictly in relation
to their purchasing power, which is fairly high. If the
72
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
Frcncli workman lived now exactly as he lived half a
century ago, the cost of living would be only twenty-
five per cent, higher as against the hundred per cent, of
income. But his claim in li\ing has naturally gone
up. He wants better things, so his actual outlay is
doubled. The net result, however, is an enormous in-
crease in well-being. If in one way he receives more
only to spend more, the more he spends now gives him
comforts undreamed of in the philosophy of his grand-
father. Watch him at his midday meal at the brasserie,
and you will see that he is fairly well provided with
food. He gets a better dinner — a dinner with more
meat in it, and less onion and thin soup — than his
father had. It is meat, if only meat of a kind.
The purchasing power of wages is increased to the
utmost by the excellent system of markets. They are
a wholesome survi\al of the old economy in which
there was no middleman. The country folk brought
their wares into town, and the townspeople went to buy
them. That system obtains almost in its primitive sim-
plicitN" in the Paris of to-day. All over the city there
are local markets which are supplied directly by the
growers in the suburbs. Here you may meet all
classes — the workman's wife and the smart young
housekeeper, followed by her servant, who carries the
basket. The city dues have, of course, to be reckoned
in the cost. There is the charge of the octroi at the
gates, and there arc the market charges ; but, with all
this, the buyer gains a good deal by not having to go
to a costly shop. The octroi is a sur\ival that prom-
ises to be perpetual. The French people will not en-
dure direct taxation. Thcv \\\\\ pay to any extent
73
PARIS OF TO-DAY
through the nose, but it is hateful to them to have to
put their hands into their pockets and bring out a sub-
stantial sum for any public service. You have to take
toll of them in advance by laying a charge on every-
thing they eat, drink, or wear. It is only the ha'penny
or the penny in the franc, which they don't miss. It is
just the same in their contributions to charity. They
are seldom capable of writing a check in cold blood,
but they will do anything in reason, or in unreason, to
see a charity performance, or to buy a trinket at a char-
ity bazaar.
Most foreigners who study the markets generally
make the mistake of going to the great central establish-
ment of the Halles. It is wonderful, of course, but the
smaller markets give one a clearer insight into the true
civic life. The Halles is the place for the supply of the
great shops, and the greater part of its trade is really
wholesale. Its twenty-two acres, its two or three thou-
sand stalls, its twelve hundred cellars, are on a scale
that precludes profitable observation. It is a w ondrous
scene, but so are all great markets of the kind. The
carts rumble along all the night through from the
market-gardens, with freights of eatables, alive or dead,
that give one a positive horror of the human appetite.
It is a still more awful sight at the cattle market at La
Villette, with its six thousand oxen, its nine thousand
calves and pigs, its twenty-five thousand sheep, march-
ing in every Monday and Thursday to fill the insatia-
ble maw of Paris. Most of these are brought in by the
river port of La Villette.
The great wine market is another extraordinary
sight, and with its thousands of barrels ranged along
74
EARLY MORNING SCENE AT THE CENTRAL MARKET
HALLES CENTRALES
PARIS or THE FAUBOURGS
the quays it reminds one of the Lilhputian preparations
for a meal of (iuHiver. Near this market is a wonder-
fully good restaurant, almost wholly unknown to the
general diner in Paris, but exceedingly well known to
the prosperous wine-merchants who visit this remote
quarter to trade. There are such restaurants, good,
and little known to the outsider, near most of the great
markets. The Pied de Mouton, in the neighborhood
of the Halles, is a famous one, and its cellar is one of
the best in Paris. There is another overlooking the
neighboring square in which stands the beautiful foun-
tain by Jean Goujon.
So the French workman is the creature of the
street for the sense of the joy of life, and the crea-
ture of the home and the workshop for the sense of
the hardship, and sometimes of the sorrow. Fash-
ioned as he is in this way, two outside forces con-
tend for the possession of him. The question of
questions is, Will he take his guidance from the recog-
nized agencies within the law, or from the agencies of
revolt ? The state, and also, as we have seen, the
church, offer him all sorts of bribes and bonuses to con-
sent to work in their way. They recognize his trade
and self-help societies. They try to get him to the
altar as a devotee, and to the urn as a voter. But he
has heard of Utopias, and he longs to have one more
struggle for absolute perfection at short notice, though
he may have to lay down his life in the attempt. The
key to modern French history is to be found here.
Every political movement has to be a compromise be-
tween the aspirations of the faubourg and the world as
it wags. The French workman has been bred in the
77
PARIS OF TO-DAY
belief in revolution as a recognized agency of progress,
and by instinct and habit he loathes second-best. The
old order offers him the churches, the thrift and benefit
societies, cooperation, insurance against accidents, edu-
cation, technical and other — the old political economy,
in a word, and the paternal state. The new whispers
socialism, the Commune, anarchy sometimes, and with
these the barricade.
The societies of mutual help form an enormous force
on the side of the established order. Their numbers
are ccnmted by thousands ; their capital is over a hun-
dred million francs. Some are " municipal," and this
means 'they are helped by public funds. In this in-
stance they give help in sickness only. The " profes-
sional," those formed without such help among the
crafts themselves, give aid to men out of work, and
sometimes pensions to the aged and infirm. The state
"approves" those of the first type, and only "author-
izes" the others. The savinrfs-banks ha\-e been under
government patronage for the better part of one cen-
tury, or, to carry it still further back to the origin of the
Society of Deposits, for more than three. The organi-
zation of that petty thrift which is the foundation of
national wealth dates from a decree of Henry III issued
in 1578.
The cooperative movement in France has two as-
pects, and one of them is revolutionary. The \\ilder
spirits are always trying to capture cooperation as it
was captured in 1848 for the national workshops. Their
aim is the forcible abolition of the middleman — in one
word, of the boss. The more thoughtful are content to
work out their own sahation b)- the slower processes
78
PARIS OF IHE FAUBOURGS
of thrift, self-denial, and self-control. The revolution-
ary line is indicated by what was once the great supe-
riority of the productive over the distributive societies.
The workmen wanted to begin at the beginning, by
getting hold of the workshops. Everything, they said
to themselves, is, at first, a thing made, and if they, and
they alone, could make it, the question of distribution
would already be half solved. The less theoretical
English workman was content to take the thing as
made — no matter by what agency of the lordship of
capital — and to buy it at the cheapest rate for distribu-
tion to the consumer. The French seem slowly com-
ing round to that view. At any rate, the consuming
societies are now very far in excess of the others. As
it is, they have no affinity with the English trading-
stores, which virtually sell to everybody, and they are
compelled to confine their operations strictly to the cir-
cle of membership.
On the other hand, some of the productive societies
are highly prosperous, and under the republican system
they get a share of the government work. Two socie-
ties of printers used to have the contract for the "Jour-
nal Officiel," and, for aught I know to the contrary,
have it to this day. The relations of all these societies
with the state are regulated by a special bureau, very
much to the disgust of the "clubs of social studies," who
want to be as free as air. The play of the two oppos-
ing forces of liberty and authority is incessant in this
as in every other institution in France. Cooperation
now moves all along the line, not only in manufactures,
but in agriculture, for cheap houses and for cheap loans.
A newer type is one in w hich masters and workmen
79
PARIS OF TO-DAY
combined, each contributing their capital, large or small,
and sharing benefits, of course in proportion to the
amount of their subscription. This, it was hoped,
would bring cooperation into the department of "grand
industry," and proxide for the purchase of extensive and
costly plant. But it has not had much success, owing
to constant discussion between the workmen and the
syndicate, and there is now a tendency to revert to the
earlier system of small cooperators, providing every-
thing for themselves.
The man who has tried most to make the social
movement evolutionary, instead of revolutionary, is the
Comte de Chambrun. He is the great patron of the
cooperative movement, and he has given his mone)-
and his time to it. In nights of insomnia great \\aking
thoughts that were better than visions came to him,
and urtjed him to make himself useful to his kind. So
the " Social Museum " of his creation is now a govern-
ment department, where you may study every branch
of the subject with the aid of one of the best special
libraries in the world. His Temple of Humanity at the
It.xposition — still perhaps a temple of fancy only — is
to have two doors. One is to bear the date of the
expiring century, and is to be labeled "Salary"; the
other the date of the century to come, ^\■ith the title
"Association." TVance has scores of men of this sort,
all working to the same end by different means, some
of them revolutionary. Edmond Potonie, whom I used
to know, sacrificed the succession to a large business
to liv^e on a fifth floor at the East End and promote the
cause of universal peace. The brothers Reclus — one
of them the great geographer, who was just saved from
80
DAUGHTERS OF THE PEOPLE
LEAVING A FACTORY
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
the worst after the Commune by a memorial widely
signed throughout the world — were for blood and fire.
Yves Guyot, journalist, ex-minister, and a man of per-
fect honor and integrity all through, is a free-trader of
the old school. His life has been in a mild sort of way
a martyrdom, because he insists on the perfect harmony
of interests between labor and capital. This is ever
the great line of division between the tw^o schools. In
labor insurance, for instance, one school cries, " State
aid," and the other, " Self-help." The state-aid schools
stand for the taxation of wealth, the self-help schools
for frugality. The new law is received with only par-
tial favor by the advanced party.
It is the same in technical education. Nobody dis-
putes the need of it, but many think that the old gild
schools were the best. The municipality, however, has
long had possession of the greater part of the field, and
it does wonders in training the poorest children in those
principles of taste which come by nature, in the first
place, to the majority of Frenchmen. A municipal
crafts-school is a wonderful sight. The pupils study
high art, in its application to all the superior industries,
without spending a penny for the best teaching in the
world. They draw, model, and paint from the best
examples. They are the pick of the elementary schools,
where drawing is one of the subjects, though naturally
it is taught onl\- in its elements; but whenever special
aptitude is shown, the higher school seeks the parents
out, and takes counsel with them as to the propriety of
giving the pupil a chance in one of the art trades. If
all goes well the child is sent to the school. If the
earlier promise is not fulfilled, the parents are again
83
PARIS OF TO-DAY
warned that they had better think of something else.
If it is fulfilled, the school does its very best for three
or four years. Then one of the great art houses in
bronze or marble or stone carving or engraving, or
some other of the many applied arts, makes an opening
for the new hand. Fame and, in a modest way, for-
tune is the next step. This, and this alone, is the secret
of the French supremacy in the precious metals. It
comes by no accident; it is the result of a careful selec-
tion of the fittest at e\x'ry stage.
The w ives and womankind generally of the laboring
class are a great force on the side of the domestic \'ir-
tues. The well-brought-up Frenchwoman of whatever
class is order, method, thrift, and industry personified.
If a representative goddess of these virtues were
wanted, there she is ready to hand. W'ithin her degree
she is, as I have said, neat from top to toe, well shod,
trim in her attire. W'ithin the same limit of opportu-
nity she is notoriously a good cook. She will work
early and late. Her children rise up and call her
blessed as they put on the shirts and stockings \\hich
she has mended overnight. Strong drink is a vice
almost unknown to her experience in so far as it is one
affecting her own sex. So far as I know there is no
analogue in France to the British matron of the w^ork-
ing-class who tipples at the public-house bar. It is an
insistent fancy of mine that the Frenchwoman, both for
good and ill, is the stronger of the sex combination for
the whole race. Like the person in the nursery rhyme,
when she is bad she is horrid, because of the will and
the mental power that she puts into her aberrations.
But \\hen she is good — and she is generally so (for in
84
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
all life, thank Heaven ! the averages are usually on the
right side) — she is a treasure. She keeps the poor
man's home straight.
Her daughter grows up like her, with the most ele-
mentary notions as to rights and pleasures, with the
sternest notions as to duties. The home is, of course,
the best nursery of these virtues, and I could wish that
the girl had never to pass its bounds for the indiscrimi-
nate companionship of the factory. She has been taught
to look for a sort of maternal initiative in all things, and
she is apt to feel like a corporal's file without its cor-
poral when she stands alone. She is not so well forti-
fied as the English — above all, as the American — girl
by pride in her self-reliance. She is best where she
best likes to be — at home. After all, the best of facto-
ries is only the second-best of this ministrant sex, as
the best of creches, where one day, I suppose, the cra-
dles \v\\\ be rocked by steam-power, is only second-
best for her baby brother or sister. Both are very
much better than nothing; no more can be said. In
France, as in England, the workman's ideal is to keep
the woman at home.
These in their sum are the great steadying influences
that correct the boulevard and the wine-shop for the
French working-man. They also correct the platforms
of the revolution. Where they are not well developed
he is apt to run a little wild. His parting of the ways
points to thrift, toil, hardship, on the one hand ; on the
other, to revolution as the promised short cut to the
temple of happiness. In one section, and a large one,
the faubourg is invincibly revolutionary, and as much
given to the formula and the nostrum of curative regen-
85
PARIS OF TO-DAY
cration as an\- inalade iniaginnirc. Sometimes the
workman thinks that if you can simply overturn the
existing order and set forth Hberty, equahty, and fra-
ternity by decree, you will at once change the face of
the world. Disappointed in that, and disappointed, if
he could only see it, by the play of his o\\n passions
and appetites as much as by aught else, he turns with
hope and longing to equally fantastic schemes. He
perished in his thousands after the w^ar to make Paris
one of thirty-six thousand communes of PVance, sov-
ereign within its own borders, and uniting with the
others for any and every purpose of law, government,
and commerce only at its sovereign pleasure. The lit-
erature of these movements is based on the Genevese
dreamer's concept of man as naturally good, and want-
ing only a single bath of light to reveal him in his na-
tive purity. That is why the faubourg so contentedly
dies — just to provide the bath for the human race.
The well-known institution of the Bourse du Travail
is an instructive case. In its origin it was a sort of
labor exchange, founded at the public expense to bring
employers and workmen together in their relations of
demand and supply, and to enable the latter to study
all the economic problems affecting the welfare of their
order. With this it was a teaching institution officered
by some of the best specialists in Paris ; but its work-
ing-class members, being of those who think that all
roads lead to socialism, soon proposed that as the end
of the journey, and the government took the alarm.
The institution was closed ; but the influence of the
essentially democratic constituency of the municipal
council was strong enough to have it reopened, and
86
PARIS OF THE FAUBOURGS
there it is to-day, in tiie Rue du Chateau d'Eau, more
flourishinij than c\er.
It has a workmanhke look. You are received by-
men in blouses at the door; you find men in blouses
in many of the offices ; and you may haply discover a
A FUNERAL OF THE EIGHTH CLASS
meeting of men on strike in the great hall. They come
there when they are out of work, either by their own
volition, or by the chances of the market. In the latter
case they expect the Bourse to let them know of all
the work that is going. In the former thev discuss
their grievances, and choose deputations to lay them
87
PARIS OF TO-DAY
before the employers. They have their own organs,
monthl) ;uh1 annual, and other organs which, perhaps,
speak more effectually in their name because they have
no official sanction. The trend toward extreme doc-
trine is seen in their " Ouvrier des Deux Mondes," a
monthly review. (3ne of the numbers of this publica-
tion celebrates the International and condemns the
"atrocious suppression" of the Commune. Another
declares that the policy of the revolutionary party is to
get all it can while waiting for " the coming revolution."
" Not that we ought to ask anything of capital," pur-
sues the writer, " though we should take something at
once." And in the official " Annual " I find an account
of a little festival on which one of the guests toasted
the Commune, and boasted that the organization of the
Bourse du Travail was a benefit "snatched from the
egotism of the bourgeoisie." This, in fact, is the domi-
nant note. It means that capital and labor in France
are still as wide apart as the poles, and that the vast
majority of the poor of Paris still take their " funeral of
the eighth class" as much under protest as ever.
88
A BIRD'S-RYH VIEW OF THE
EXPOSITION GROUNDS
FASHIONABLE PARIS
IN October and November fashionable persons pour
into Paris for the season. From this time forward,
for about six months, town will be their head-
quarters. Sometimes they make short winter trips to
the southern watering-places, but they are still more or
less in touch with the capital. The immigrant swarm
includes all sorts of outlandish figures, pleasure-seekers
of the world at large. These do not visit the shrines
w'ith quite the same devotion as of old. Still, to any
one on this continent whose pursuit is " a good time,"
Paris is always, more or less, a matter of course. It
can never be left wholly out of the reckoning.
Our older European societies make leisure a very
serious vocation. They are deliberately trained for it,
and they chase the butterfly w ith more conviction than
the younger communities of the world. For instance,
in a general sense, the dandy in x'\merica, while on his
way to more generous recognition, is still onl)' the
transient and embarrassed phantom of Disraelian
phrase. The urgent crowd yet mocks at him and his
like, and he has no regular course of frivolity that keeps
93
PARIS OF TO-DAY
him hard at it, in a stately progress from trifle to trifle,
for the rev^olving year. In France the science of not
earning your own li\'ing is carried to high perfection.
So it is in England, though in a more serious way,
thanks to the larger resource of public life. In both
you see the same thing in different forms — the neces-
sity of making pleasure an organized energy.
Years ago, when there was a temporary lull in the
performances at the Salle Ventadour, the society papers
were much exercised as to what should be done to fill
the blank. There was a Tuesday night left unoccupied.
The necessary man, however, came at the right mo-
ment in the shape of a viscount, who imagined a Tues-
day at the Theatre Fran^ais. It was "created," and
with the greatest care. Society subscribed. The " Fi-
garo " published a plan of the house, showing exactly
where the Rothschilds, the Pourtales, the Sagans, and
other shining lights might l)e discerned with the naked
eye. The contriver was considered to have deserved
well of his country.
Theoretically, there is now no season in Paris, just
as, theoretically, there are no fashions. This means
that one section of society is still sulking with the
Republic. The idea is that it will be inconsolable until
the King comes back, and that it disdains all those
mundane vanities in which it has no better leader than
a President and his wife. I remember once seeking
out M. Worth, now long since gone to his account, to
inquire of him, in a spirit of philosophic investigation,
how the fashions were started. I had imagined that it
would be interesting to discover the very fount of in-
spiration in these matters, to find out exactly how a new
94
FIVE O'CLOCK IN A PRIVATE HOUSE OF THE
FAUBOURG ST. -GERMAIN
FASHIONABLK PARIS
skirt or a new bodice was revealed to the race. He
satisfied my curiosity in the most obliging manner,
though, at the outset, he assured me that, under the
Republic, the fashions were not started at all. They
simply occurred, in a more or less fugitive fashion,
because there was no one to set the needful example.
In the old days, he said, it was simple enough. He
hit upon an idea, and submitted it to two or three ladies
of taste in the court of the Empress. They liked it, or
did not like it, and taking counsel with him, they finally
shaped it into something which they might feel justi-
fied in laying before the throne. It was then further
modified on its way to perfection. At length came the
great day, say the opening of the spring races, when
one or two of them imposed it on the mass of woman-
kind as a sort of edict from above. With that it started
on its travels round the world.
But, virtually, of course, life has to be lived, just as
women have to be dressed, and so, no matter what the
regime, things get themselves done after a fashion.
The science of sulking with the Republic has to own
certain limitations. Rich and idle people must amuse
themselves, and if they cannot get the social leadership
they want, they have to invent some working substi-
tute. As a class, the French aristocracy have no par-
ticipation in public affairs. They go into political life
in the unit, not in the mass, and on the same principle
of equality as the notary of a country town who works
his way into the Chamber or into office. So, many of
them fall back on pleasures of the more frivolous kind,
but for these all who seek to enjoy them, high and low-
alike, train with exquisite care. It is mainly a training
97
PARIS OF TO-DAY
for moderation. They know that excess is a mistake.
The object is the luxury of agreeable sensation, and
this precludes riot.
There is nothing more wonderful in nature, or rather
CHILDREN OF THE RICH
in art, than a French man or woman who has suc-
ceeded in perfectly realizing this racial ideal. The man
especially eats and drinks well, but only by virtue of
the most rigorous self-control. His dishes are ar-
ranged in a certain succession of flavors that help one
98
FASHIONABLE PARIS
another. His drinks arc sipped in a scale of stimula-
tion rising from grave to gay. I have known little
partnerships for this purpose, in which men dining out
at a strange place have agreed that one shall serve as
taster for the two, on the principle that if indigestion is
to be the penalty, there shall still be a survivor. As
the different dishes are served, the taster smiles or
shakes his head, and the other instantly partakes or
refrains. It marks their sense of reverence for the
temple of the body, and so brings them as near to
religion as some are likely to get.
This training for trifles begins at birth with the infant
of fashion. It is very much the business of his nurse to
see that light and air do not visit him too roughly. His
swaddling-clothes are a marvel of completeness as non-
conductors of the winds of heaven. As soon as he is
old enough to understand things, you see him toddling
out with his tutor, a grave ecclesiastic, who watches
over him at work and play, and puts the right notions
into his mind. The ties thus formed are never wholly
severed. The priest attends to all the goings out and
the comings in. When ball is the game, he is there to
see that his charge does not hurt himself, nor hurt the
ball. He makes the lad gravely polite, and grounds
him in the secondary religion of the salute, on the prin-
ciple of no game of shuttlecock without a bow to your
partner. He also, of course, grounds him in the
humanities. At this early age the child is not sent to
school. He is coached at home by the priest, and
taken once or twice a week to what is called a coiir, an
establishment where private teaching is tested by public
examinations. The cour directs the studies, and deter-
99
PARIS OF TO-DAY
mines proficiency in them by question and answer.
Tutor and pupil prepare as best they can in the
interval.
The essence of the system is the exclusion of every-
thing from the boy's mind that ought not to be there.
So he is under the strictest supervision from first to
last. The priest takes him to the cour and fetches him
away again. When he goes to the lycce, or public
school, it is much the same. The valet takes the place
of the priest, and fetches and carries, with due provision
of muffler and umbrella for rainy days. So it goes on
until the time of the great change, when, perhaps, the
youngster is sent to Saumur, the great cavalry school.
Then, for the first time, he has to stand alone, and
father, mother, nurse, valet, and priest have to say
good-by. It is always an anxious moment — espe-
cially so for the neophyte.
The bound from tutelage to the very license of
liberty, moral and intellectual, is a marked character-
istic of the French system. Marriage makes the trem-
bling ninny of a girl a finished woman of the world. A
first shave converts the gawky school-boy into the ape
of a boulevardier, vices and all. The transformation is
as sudden as anything in Eastern magic. He was a
boy after his time under the tutelage system. He
becomes a man before his time at Saumur, and he
generally goes through a stage of puppyism which is a
trial for his friends. This is the period of his first duel,
a thing done on the sly, and revealed to his horrified
mother only after the scratch has healed. By and by
there may be other escapades of a more serious nature.
But the mother is still there to find out all about them
lOO
THE CHARITY BAZAAR
FASHIONABLE PARIS
almost before they happen, and the watchful father is at
hand to see that they entail a minimum of scandal.
At this stage his people begin to think of marrying
him, and here again all is provided for by the ever-
watchful system. It is the mother's business to learn
the whereabouts of ingenues doubly dowered with
virtue and with millions. The marriage is arranged, —
the term has a more than usually deep significance in
France, — and the pair have a chance of living happily
ever after, if they know how to make the best of it. It
is no bad chance. Though the French marriage is not,
in the first instance, based on love, it is supposed never
to take place until liking, at least, is assured. The rest
is expected to come as a matter of growth. The theory
is that any two persons of about equal age, circum-
stances, and breeding, if only they start fair in friend-
ship, will learn to love each other by the mere accident
of companionship and the identity of interests. The
odd thing is that they very often do.
The wife has been still more carefully brought up, in
her way. Nothing can exceed the more than Hindu
sanctity of know-nothingism in which the mind of the
young French girl is shrouded from birth. At the
convent she has had the wall between her and a wicked
world. Her whole art of polite conversation with a
man is little more than "Oui, monsieur," "Non, mon-
sieur." After a dance she must be safely and swiftly
deposited — a sort of returned empty — by her mother's
side, and during that brief flutter of freedom it is not
good form to take advantage of the absence of the
parent bird. A few observations on the weather and
the picture-galleries are considered to mark the limit
PARIS OF lO-DAY
of taste. " Gyp " has assured us in many a cynic page
that the ingenue is not half such a simpleton as she
looks. But it must not be forgotten that " Gyp " has
largely invented a type for her own business uses. The
real article, while it is not exactly a lamb in innocence,
is still happily unaware of most of the evil going on in
the world. Here, as military life was the great change
for the boy, marriage is the greater change for the girl.
She passes at once into a sphere in which she is con-
sidered fair game for any allusion to anything within
the bounds of good breeding. She rises to her oppor-
tunity, or to the stern duties of her station, whichever
way you choose to put it, and in a surprisingly short
time comes out as the finished woman of the world.
This is the French way. I neither blame it nor defend
it; I do not even try to account for it. I simply say
what it is.
In this new state of development you will probably
find the young wife at the head of a salon. Her voca-
tion in this respect will be determined by her rank, her
wealth, or her talents ; but with or without them, if she
holds any position, she will aspire to this kind of social
leadership. It is difficult to define the French salon in
a phrase. It is by no means a mere drawing-room
filled with company. It is something distinctly organ-
ized with a purpose of leadership. The hostess tries to
make her house a center of influence. But why go on?
At Washington you have the thing itself in fair perfec-
tion of development. People come and go; they bring
the news, they hear the news, and they work out their
little schemes. The main art of the salon is, of course,
conversation. As men at the bar talk to live, people in
104
FASHIONABLE PARIS
the salon live to talk. With this they have to cultivate
the social graces. They learn to listen well, to keep
their tempers, to amuse — in a word, to make life pass
smoothly for themselves and for others. The salon is
really a great school of manners, and it is part of that
art of painless pleasure which, as we have seen, is
widely cultivated in France. If the wife belongs to the
aristocracy her salon will be of the grand nioiide. If
she only wants to belong to it, her salon will probably
be political. If she shines by taste or talent it will be
literary or musical. There are salons for everything,
even for settling elections to the Academy. If you
attend them you are expected to be amusing as well as
to be amused.
Salons have their fortunes, like little books. They
go up and down, according to the circumstances of the
time, and sometimes the literary salon is most in vogue,
and sometimes the political. The old-fashioned Legiti-
mist salon has had all sorts of fortunes. It ^^'as in
great force when Louis XVIII was brought back by
the allies after Waterloo. Then the scheme was to
undo the work of the Revolution, and the women of the
Restoration, with their priests at their back, set about it
with a will. They organized the " White Terror," a
sort of counterpoise to the " Red," which had just
passed away, and they gave the whole Liberal school
of thought an exceedingly lively time.
There was some attempt to revive the Legitimist
salon when Marshal MacMahon had his brief innings.
The Duchcsse de Chevreuse held gloomy state, and
people prophesied the coming catastrophe of the Re-
public over afternoon tea. But the duchess was only
105
PARIS OF TO-DAY
less belated than her old master, the Comte de Cham-
bord, and it was felt that if Legitimism was to get the
whip-hand of France it must still condescend a little to
notice the time of day. So the most typical salon of
this period was the one managed by the Uuchesse de
la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia. It was the requisite blend
of old and new. She was active, much in e\idence, a
great patron of charities — in short, a person with a
finger in every pie, and all to the end of the restoration
of throne and altar. But she failed for want of a good
partner. The duke was an amiable nullity in affairs.
He could drive a four-in-hand ; he was an authority
on the laws of sport, a noisy politician, but no more.
They tried to make a diplomatist of him by the simple
process of sending him as ambassador to the court of
St. James, but he was soon recalled.
The salons of finance lent a hand in this pious work
Mme. Bischoffsheim spent money like water to keep the
cause in heart. So did the Duchesse d'Uzes — a Clic-
quot in her origin. The development of her salon, the
way in which it rose from small ambitions to greater
ones, was peculiar. It began merely as the best match-
making salon in the Faubourg St.-Germain ; it ended
as the best salon of political intrigue. Long after the
1 6th of May had been swept into limbo, the influence of
the duchess survived in her championship of the Bou-
langist movement. She rallied to the Comte de Paris,
as she had been ready to rally to his cousin, and she is
said to have put up no small part of the money for that
gigantic trust of sedition which was to be managed by
the man on the black horse.
In this way we see how easily the social salon passes
1 06
FASHIONABLE PARIS
into the political. In fact, the dividing-lines as I haxe
given them are only for purposes of classification.
There are few drawing-rooms where they stick solely
to one thing. The more or less purely political salons
exhibit an agreeable diversity. They are of all shades,
and of course they are especially Republican. At pres-
ent, however, the salons of this variety are in a state
which the grammarians define as "being about to be."
They have been, and they are to be again. But they
are still waiting for such leadership as they had under
Mme. Adam, Mme. Floquet, and Mme. Lockroy. Mme.
Lockroy, indeed, survives as a ruler. She is the wife
of the pushing politician, late minister of marine, who
has more than once occupied that position, and she was
the daughter-in-law of Victor Hugo. She is charming
and sociable, and is altogether a person that no rising
Republican politician, with convictions and an enlight-
ened sense of self-interest, can afford to neglect.
Still, she is not what Mme. Adam was. That lady
still holds receptions, but she, too, is only an object of
comparison beside her former self Her great day was
at the time of that \'ery i6th of May when she held
aloft the banner of the Republic, as the duchesses held
the banner of the reaction. Her house was a kind of
citadel, amply provisioned with tea and cake, where the
struggling Radicals, with Gambetta at their head, held
the councils that saved their cause. The hostess had
an almost ideal equipment of gifts for this part — beauty,
widowhood (which meant freedom), and the inheritance
of a wealthy Republican senator. Then she touched
life at other points, as a busy, if not a great, writer in
romance, as in politics, and as a champion of woman's
107
PARIS OF TO-DAY
rights. Add to this, as might be expected, a boundless
self-confidence. Her failings were those that leaned to
the side of this virtue. She grew too pushing, too
CLUB DES PANNES (CLUB OF THE " HARD-LIP ") WATCHING
THE PARADE OF FASHION
energetic, and became one of that imperious band who
rule our spirits from their urns — in this case, the urn
for tea. She was for giving laws to the lawmakers of
the Republic, and settling the rise and fall of ministries
1 08
FASHIONABLK PARIS
from her boudoir. When that ambition was fairly de-
veloped the Republican chiefs had to part company
with her. But, before the change, she exercised a wide
influence. She virtually gave away places. Her salon
used to be thronged with all sorts of people who had
their way to make in the w^orld. Men who wanted a
prefecture paid assiduous court. Dramatists who had
hopes of production at the Frangais, a state matter in
its further reaches, elbowed them on the stairs. It was
a busy and a brilliant scene. It lost its essential glories
when Gambetta and his associates no longer appeared,
to keep their hostess in countenance in her promises of
political favor. With them, naturally, \\ent the place-
hunters. Still, she struggled on, and kept up the fight
by founding the " Nouvelle Revue," and making her-
self exceedingly disagreeable at times as the candid
friend of the party in power.
She is visited and honored yet, if only as a memory,
but, from ill health and the other causes, she is no longer
what she was. She reached her height of influence
when the obsequious municipality of Paris named a
street after her pseudonym of "Juliette Lamber." Her
decline was marked by a proposal in the same assem-
bly to take her street away from her and give it to
some new Egeria. For all that she holds it to this
day. Poor General L'hrich at Strasburg went up and
down in thoroughfares in this manner during the war.
In the earlier stages of the siege he w^as rapidly pro-
moted from streets to boulevards and squares ; but as
the Germans tightened their grip on the city, and the
reports grew less favorable, he lost all.
Another and an interesting variety of the political
109
PARIS Ol- iO-DAY
salon is the salon of the lady spy. This is exceedingly
well appointed, and is altogether a curiosity of its kind.
You are cordially \\ elcomed if you have any informa-
tion to impart. You gi\e it as to an intelligent woman
of position who happens to be keenly interested in pub-
lic aftairs, and whose little dinners are a refreshment of
all the senses. If you are a foreign attache you are
expected to turn a side-light on the international in-
trigue of the moment; if a rising politician, you show
the inwardness of a forthcoming debate ; if a journalist,
you give and you receive from all the four winds of
the spirit as they blow. It goes on quite merrily for a
time, until the hostess suddenly disappears under the
imputation that she was in the pay of a foreign power,
or perhaps of the Prefecture of Police.
The literary salon was in its perfection when M. Caro
was the favorite lecturer at the Sorbonne. There is
generally a fashionable professor in Paris, as there is a
fashionable preacher. The smartest women attend his
lectures, and take copious notes on points of meta-
physics or theology. The strength of Caro's position
was that they actually read the notes when they got
home. He came to strengthen that reaction in favor of
the Catholic faith which was one effect of the war.
People were so humbled by the national disasters that
their thoughts were easily turned to religion. So there
began a movement against skepticism, and Caro led it
at the Sorbonne. He lectured, with exceeding grace
and charm, to prove that there was no necessary divorce
between philosophy and faith. The fine ladies were
edified and delighted. They formed rival salons in
honor of him, both known as the " Carolines," after his
I lO
THE PADDOCK AT THE AUTEUIL RACE-COURSE,
BOIS DE BOULOGNE
FASHIONABLE PARIS
name — one set as the " Carolines " of the north of
Paris, and the other as the " CaroHnes " of the south.
This went on until Pailleron put him and his wor-
shipers on the stage in a famous comedy, " Le monde
oil Ton s'ennuie." It was meant to crush Caro, but it
did nothing of the sort. Ridicule gave him the benefit
of an advertisement. He met the attack by taking a
box in the theater and watching the whole performance,
sometimes applauding his own counterfeit on the stage.
He died as he had lived, successful, and deservedly so,
for he was a man of erudition, and of great refinement
of manner and of literary style. The interest of his
personality in this connection is that it shows how
society, when it is in the mood, knows how to get en-
tertainment out of everything. Here \\'as a lecturer at
the Sorbonne who gave Paris not only two literary
salons, but even a new play.
The French club takes its character from the French
salon. It has to be amusing or die. The French have
a highly developed club life, only it is necessarily a
club life of their own. They take less joy than the
English, from whom they are supposed to derive the
institution, in those negative clubs in which you simply
dine and read your paper. They expect the club to do
a good deal for them. It is to have an active function,
and is to be much more than a mere place of meeting.
So the really typical club of Paris is the one formerly
known as the Mirlitons, now fused with another, but
still carrying its principles into the partnership. The
Mirlitons is a club of the united arts. It is for painters,
men of letters, and the like. They are not left to their
own devices. The committee organize all sorts of en-
113
PARIS OF TO-DAY
tertainments. They hold choice concerts in the season,
at which some of the best amateurs in Paris are to be
heard. At another time it is a picture exhibition, to
which, as to the concerts, members may invite their
friends. Now and then you have an amateur dramatic
performance, or a great assault of arms, which brings
together, as deadly opposites, some of the most noted
swordsmen in Paris.
Another variety of appeal to tliis universal desire for
something to do is the dining club. Many Frenchmen
who do not need an all-the-year-round club are still
glad to meet their friends at intervals of the week, fort-
night, or month. The clubs for this purpose are legion,
and they need a new directory for every year, for they
come and go. They unite men with the same pursuits
or the same tastes. They are of all sorts. There is a
dining club of men of letters. There are clubs (or
there used to be) for the subdivisions of schools, for the
Parnassians and for the Plastics, as there was a Boiled
Beef Club, for the naturalists, under Zola. Add to
these a club for failures in literature, a club for men
whose plays have been hissed off the stage, a club for
blockheads, clubs for painters, etchers, and so on. Then
there are the clubs of provincials — the Club of the
Apple, which brings the Normans together, as men
from the cider country ; the Club of the Cigale, which
unites the poets of Provence; the Celtic Club, at which
Renan used often to preside. This is one of the
simplest modes of reunion. It entails no cost for
premises, and but little for management. The mem-
bers meet at a restaurant, and as they do not have too
much of one another, they are usually at their best.
114.
FASHIONABLK I'ARIS
The same craving for something to give a pulse to
life may largely account for the number of gambling
clubs in Paris. There are clubs that are for nothin<jf
but gambling, and, apart from these, there is high play
at prett)' well every institution of the kind. The
Frenchman is almost incapable of sitting still, of a state
of mere being without doing, in club life. The con-
centration of baccarat is an agreeable variant of pas-
sionless repose. The gambling clubs proper — or
improper — take a fine-sounding name, sometimes de-
rived from literature or art, Ijut they are well under-
stood to be simply places for the rigor of the game.
They are mostl)' proprietary, and are magnificently
appointed. The owner can aftord to do the thing well
at a moderate and, indeed, a merely nominal subscrip-
tion. A good dinner is supplied at little above cost
price. It brings customers to the house, and inspires
them with hope for the chances of the green table.
Of course the English variety of club is not un-
known. The old-fashioned Union, for instance, is
quite as select as Boodle's or White's. It is almost a
mark of good form to wear your hat there. You go to
the Union as you might go to church. So you do to
the Jockey. It has long since got rid of its wildness of
youth, when Lord Henry Seymour, a brother of the
Marquis of Hertford, was one of its members, and used
to drive down in his coach and four, to the edification
of the boulevard. It is exclusive and correct. Its
surviving dissipations have a stateliness about them
which might almost make them the dex^otional exer-
cises of any other institution.
All the recreations of society have this note of special
115
PARIS OF TO-DAY
adaptation. There is always an attempt to rr'we the
turn of taste or of luxury. The inventor of the bran-
bath must have been a Frenchman. The very sports
of the field are something of a garden entertainment.
If the racing is not quite so serious as it is in Flngland,
ENTRANCE TO A PRIVATE HOUSE DURING AN EVENING RECEPTION
it is prettier and more comfortable. Still, it is good
racing, too. Nothing need be better than the great
meetings at Chantilly, at Auteuil, at Longchamps, and
a dozen other places that might be named. But even
there, and I am not saying it in the least in blame,
there is still the search for elegance. The stands are
more tasteful, the President's box is better, the ap-
proaches are better. The French have almost the
honor of the invention of the private meeting. They
certainly have brought it to its perfection. The scene
n6
FASHIONABLE PARIS
varies. Sometimes it is La Marche, sometimes the
Croix de Berny, sometimes Marly-le-Roi. This amuse-
ment they combine with coaching. You are driven
down in a party to some dehghtful httle place all among
the green trees, and there you ha\e your race all to
yourselves, your picnic after, and, perhaps, your dance
to follow. The sport is only a piece dc Fcsisfaiicc, and
the true feast is in the side-dishes.
There is a classic simplicity about such things in
England which has its charm too, but the world is wide
enough for both styles. An English coach drive is a
drive in a coach, and there an end. You go a long:
way, have something to eat in an inn parlor, and come
back as you went. The French shorten the drive and
lengthen the lunch. When the horses get home they
will be put up in crack stables, wonderful to behold.
The fittings in German silver, if not in the real article,
in patent leather, and in deep-toned mahogany, or what
not, arc usually covered up, like drawing-room furni-
ture in its chintzes. The horses themselves see so
little of these braveries in a general way that they have
a tendency to shy at them, on company days, when the
cloths are removed. In Baron Hirsch's stables the
family colors used to be woven into the very matting
which covered the floor. It is so with all French sports
— with their polo, for instance, where still they do good
work. Compare the polo-ground at Bagatelle for no-
tions — as distinct from the beauty of the scene — with
the same thing at Hurlingham or at Ranelagh.
It is the same with the riding. The Row in the
Bois is prettier in its surroundings than the Row in
Hyde Park. It is more ample, and it commands a finer
117
PARIS OF TO-DAY
landscape. The sense of the time of year, spring,
summer, or even winter, is more insistent. The per-
sonnel may not be quite so impressive as in the Row,
but that is another matter. The riding is a little mixed.
Everybody thinks himself entitled to have a try. The
freedom from fear and trembling with which some
Frenchmen will mount a horse must ever cause fear
and trembling in the beholder. The beggar on horse-
back is not half so objectionable as the rich man who
has mounted late in life. The park riding is good, Init
here once more, as in all else, it tends to err on the side
of finesse, and to suggest the Hippodrome. There are
no better circus-riders in the world. Who but they
have taught the horse to waltz and to make his bow?
A little of this affectation has crept into the manage-
ment of the cob. I'inesse! finesse! you find it every-
where — even in the institution of afternoon tea. The
bread and butter is a trifle too diaphanous for human
nature's daily food. The sense of a religious rite is a
little too intrusive. When the French copy the for-
eigner, they copy with the exaggeration of idolatry.
With the Grand Prix the season comes to an end.
People then begin to think of flight to the spas, to
Marienbad, or to Ischl, where they catch a glimpse of
the Austrian court, or to Aix-les-Bainsand other places
at home. Then, too, comes the time for the country
houses. The country-house life is highly developed,
only less so than in England, and there is everything
but liberty. They will " entertain " you morning, noon,
and night, and they have yet to acquire the art of letting
you alone. There are picnics and excursions all day
long, with dances and jeiix de societe at night. It is
ii8
AN OLD PARISIAN BEAU
FASHIONABLE PARIS
distracting. Some of the best houses are those asso-
ciated with the names of the old vineyards, such as the
Chateau Laffitte, the Chateau d'Yquem, the Chateau
Margaux, the Cos d'Estournel. The capitaHsts are
gradually buying up these ancient seats and turning
them into pleasure-houses, as well as places of business.
The vintage pays the piper, and it is also part of the
sport. You play at pressing the grapes.
Then apart from all this, or with it, there are the
hunting and the shooting. These are serious sports
in France, taking the country as a whole, and they are
not to be rashly despised by those who are familiar
with only the exploits of the cockney sportsman. The
hunting of the boar, the hunting of the wolf, are both
dangerous, and both associated with fine breeds of
hounds. Boar-hunting, in particular, is no joke. The
wolf-hunting is chiefly a scheme for the destruction of
vermin. In some parts of the country these marauders
are very troublesome to the flocks, and do any amount
of damage. Then there is the hunting of the stag,
where, once more, the decorative tendency comes in.
Their art of hunting is as old as their countrv. They
have given a name to most of the terms of sport, and
they have invented most of the forms and ceremonies.
We have all laughed over the great curling horns
round the body of the sportsman, but these have their
uses at the close of a long run, when you hear them
through the silence of the woods and the witchery of the
twilight, sounding the death of the stag. It is like
something from the tale of Arthur or of Roland. The
horns wind for every stage of the process — for the view,
for the turn at bay, and, as we have seen, right on to
121
PARIS OF TO-DAY
the end. There is quite a rubric for the death, and still
another for the distribution of the daintily carved mor-
sels of the quarry among the hounds that have run him
down. This is generally done by torch-light, in the
courtyard of the chateau. Another great ceremonial
observance is the benediction of the hounds on St.
Hubert's day. This was revived by the Due d'Aumale
when he came back to live at Chantilly, with a deter-
mination to revive its glories. All who wore the duke's
livery of the chase had to attend a solemn mass, with
the pack at the door of the church, under the eye and
whip of the huntsman. At the moment of the elevation
of the host the hounds were expected to bark in chorus,
but too often they only howled in sections as they felt
the thong. In all this we see the tendency of the
French to dramatize everything in life. The English
rules of sport are for business, the French for beauty
and grace.
These amusements run into money, and so, once
more, the rising men of the time, who are the architects
of their own fortunes, have their chance. There is no
holding them back here, as there is no holding them
back anywhere. They buy their way into rich families
and into great chateaux. They, and the families into
which they buy, make society. Beyond these there is
a fringe of betitled impostors. In no other country in
the world are there so many dukes, marquises, and
counts who can give no intelligible account of their
blazon. They form a society of their own. They are
on terms of tolerance with one another, for their prin-
ciple is, " Live and let live." It is understood that I
go on calling you " count " as long as you go on call-
122
ON COMMON GROUND-RICH AND F'OOR
AT THE CONFESSIONAL
FASHIONABLE PARIS
ing mc " baron," and no cjuestions asked. Their nutri-
ment is the wild gull from oversea. It is with their aid
that the fresh-caught millionaire from Brazil begins to
furnish his salon. The house-agent will contract for
them at a pinch, as for the chairs and tables. The
sham nobility take their seats at the newcomer's board,
and if they respect his spoons, he may be a long time
before he finds out the difference between them and the
real article.
A more respectable member of "the fringe" is the
broken-down gentleman w ho has lived in good society,
and who, for a variety of possible reasons, has lost his
footing. These dejected spirits tend generally to haunt
the scenes of former bliss. One of their gathering-
places is at the junction of the Avenue of the Bois with
the Place de I'Etoile. They take their seats there on
fine afternoons, to watch the long procession of car-
riages and live again in their memories of former
splendor. The mention of them is not without signifi-
cance at the end of this survey. Truly they represent
a dead and gone state of things, or, at any rate, a dying
one. The fine folks of their memories are really pass-
ing away as an order. Fashionable Paris is no longer
to be confounded with aristocratic Paris. The two
things are separate and distinct. Fashion has out-
grown its old bounds of the old families, and aristoc-
racy, as a governing force, has become a mere survival
of habit. The two aristocracies, the old and the new,
the Legitimist and the Bonapartist, — not to speak of
the Orleanist, as shoddy as the last, — are mutually de-
structive. As they cannot agree to revere one another,
they have helped the crowd to despise them all. A
125
PARIS OF TO-DAY
new society has come into power by process of natural
change. Education, which is the real basis, is within
the reach of all.
Republics must educate or perish. Under this one no
nimble spirit need be ignorant for want of the chance of
knowledge. There is small difference of opportunity
between the duke's son and the cobbler's. Manner is a
heritage which the French have in common. All that
remains to win social importance — and I put it last in
no parado.xical spirit — is to win wealth. There again,
whatever the dignity of the pursuit, the career is at least
open. Access to political power is equally a part of the
heritage. With this and with wealth, education, and
manners, social importance comes at call, and the mere
handle to the name becomes a pure superfluity. This
is the real meaning of what is now going on in France.
The old hereditary sets are being cjuiedy elbowed out
of the way by the new claimants for a place in the sun.
The big names, as they appear in society journals and
in the letters of foreign correspondents, have a quite
fictitious importance. Fashionable Paris is now one of
the newest things in the place.
126
PALACES OF THE NATIONS, ON THE SEINE
NIGHT EFFECT
PARISIAN PASTIMES
<Joazidian .J^adtuned
THE Parisian is more given to pastimes than to
sports. The distinction is, in his view, that
pastimes are made for man, whereas man is
notoriously made for sports. He carries a sport as far as
it may go, for sheer amusement, and stops there. All the
rest — that tends to the ideal perfection of the athlete — he
counts but labor and sorrow. This is in harmon)' with
his entire outlook on life. He is mainly sociable in his
amusements, rather than mainly competitive. To me
he never seems less himself than when racing for a
prize, by day and by night, on a cycle track that re-
minds one of some foolish adaptation of the scheme of
the praying-wheel. So the best of his recreative life is
a day in the country, with only just such amusements
as comport with rural ease. Between his setting forth
in the morning and his coming back at night, weary
with blessedness, he has picnicked in one of the outly-
ing woods of the capital, perhaps with his entire family,
including the mother-in-law.
The returning crowds at the stations have not all
been to Versailles, St.-Cloud, and St. -Germain. These
13*
PARIS OF TO-DAY
places are more or less inevitable to the many; but the
wiser know where to find the less-known woods and
heights, and the scenes that have as yet escaped adver-
tisement. Starting, maybe, from Bougival, they have
looked at the site of Josephine's country house, now
but a memory, and have thought perhaps what curious
inclosures and reinclosures busy man is ever making
for himself in space. An old house is but a little set-
ting in the void for scenes from the drama of life. It
vanishes; a newer takes its place; and one cubic inclo-
sure in its time witnesses the play of many parts. To
think of these scenes in their succession through the
ages is to have the very air peopled with ghosts, and to
risk the mental distraction of a witches' revel But to
consider so is to consider too curiously in this con-
nection.
The stroll is across corn-fields with woody heights
on one side. The painters of Corot's generation used
to harbor here, and many of them left pictures for their
score at Souvent's restaurant. The more knowing
wayfarers, of course, avoid these vanities of anecdote,
but everything may be excused to the sight-seer. At
the utmost, the others have walked by the river-bank
to look at the Machine de Marly, a huge wheel that
carries water to the settlements on the height. If they
were still for civilization they mounted by Le Pecq to
St.-Germain. If they wanted a change after that, they
branched off to Les Loges, and registered vows to
return for the annual fair in September, to dance and
sup by torch-light according to immemorial custom,
and so home. Some, again, have started for Sannois,
on the Northern and Western railways, for the pano-
132
PARISIAN PASTIMES
rama seen from the windmill on the height, and have
pushed on to Cormeilles, by way of the hills, with the val-
ley and the river at a cozy distance below; or they have
tarried at Herblay to play at fishing under the trees.
Innumerable are the ways in which you may tire
yourself in these environs on a summer afternoon. The
ultra-civilized way is to take train to Enghien, the
township of pleasure which has grown up, with the
help of capital, as the gaudy framework of a sulphur-
spring. Another, and a better, is to make for Mont-
morency, where Jean Jacques set up his hermitage at
the top of the hill, and at a point in time when the place
was still most ancient of days, and mellowing in a rich
decay of historic associations. Here again, and right
on from here to Andilly, it is all fairyland from the
heights — Paris in the far distance, picked out in the
white of its stonework and the geld of the dome, with
verdant belts of flowers and market-gardens midway.
At Andilly you are on the verge of the forest of Mont-
morency, and may go right through to Bethemont, or
partly through to St.-Lcu for the train. And even by
this compromise you may get dusty and tired and
parched enough for the mood of rural happiness.
Paris is fringed all about with these woods and
forests, anything but primeval, of course, under modern
administration, yet still w ild enough for proxocation to
much of the fugitive verse of the time. Fontainebleau,
beyond this inner circle of umbrage, is a larger order,
and if only you have enough self-control to keep from
the chateau and from Harbison, it is more majestic with
its giant oaks and its titanic boulders. Yet the tourist
will inevitably go to the one for its association with the
^33
PARIS Ol- TO-DAY
painters Millet and Rousseau, and to the other on the
gentle compulsion of the guide-books. Michelet, in
his study of the insect life of the forest, keeps through-
out to the note of its savage charm. Dearer to the
elect of these pilgrim crowds is Sceaux, almost due
south of the capital, and, in a sense, within a stone's
throw of it, as befits a scene of natural beauty that was
accessible in the time of Paul de Kock. To readers of
that half-forgotten wTiter it is still haunted by the
shadow of the "Jeune Homme Charmant," and of his
brotherhood in that larger sense which includes sister-
hood as well.
But the glory of Sceaux is that it is a stepping-stone
to " Robinson." Robinson is our realized ideal of a
cockney paradise. It includes a certain suggestion of
savage freedom, with due facilities for the fun of the
fair— the wilderness tempered by Coney Island. It is
a restaurant, and the subject of its votive title is no
other than our old friend Crusoe. The idea is that you
leave teeming Paris for this retreat, in which you may
meditate on the shows of things, and, between train
and train, play at being cut off from civilization. So, in
its garden, you find a stately tree w^here you may lunch
or dine in bowers cunningly perched high in the
branches. There are two or three of these in tiers, and
all of them, especially the topmost, command views of
charming scenery. The vogue of Robinson has led to
the invention of many fraudulent trade-marks. The
village abounds in restaurants dedicated to "Old Rob-
inson," to "Crusoe," and to different variants of the
name, including one which boldly starts on a new line
by a titular invocation to Man Friday.
13+
'p^"
\'VT^^^-
\e\
)
:^
-V
/^
jS
SUNDAY I'ICNICS IN THE BOIS DE VINCENNES
PARISIAN PASTIMES
But Robinson, ]jure and simple, is the genuine
article. The title illustrates the tendency of the French
to grasp at the first thing that conies handy in English
names. The surname they generally give up for a
bad joJj, but they clutch at the Tom, Dick, or Harry
that precedes it, and hold on for dear life. Even when
they have it by the right end, they sometimes contrive
to go wrong. Crabb Robinson tells us that, all through
a ceremonial dinner in his honor, Mme. Guizot over-
whelmed him with compliments on the creation of ce
cJiarinant Vcndredi, in a haz\ Ijelief that he was the
author of the famous work.
Robinson may serve to illustrate what I mean as to
the ordinary Parisian relation to sports and games. The
throngs set out, in the first place, for fresh air and land-
scape; and for diversions they take anything that comes
in their way. Sometimes they carry a ball to play with,
more often they find their toys in the suburban res-
taurant. An open-mouthed frog into which they pitch
a leaden nicker will amuse them for hours.
Those of nicer taste will perhaps prefer the Port
Royal country. This is not so much for the sake of
the country as of that ruined memorial of a community
of men and women who tried a fall with the Church of
Rome, in the interests of the higher spiritual life, and
got very much the worst of it. The route is by train
from Montparnasse to Trappes, beyond Versailles, and
thence on foot through Voisins to the old abbey which
was the seat of the settlement. For others there is
C'ernay la \'ille, a woodland haunt of artists, exquisite
in hill and valley, hamlet and ruin. Or, again, the idler
may take train to Le Plessis Belleville, in the north-
^11
PARIS OF TO-DAY
east, and walk to Ermenonville for more souvenirs of
Rousseau.
But why go on? The whole vernal basin, in the
center of which Paris lies, is a scene of witching beauty
— beauty of hill and dale, beauty of association suited
to every taste. So, as we have seen, if you like to
flavor the picturesque with literature, there are Erme-
nonville, Port Royal, Montmorency. If you arc for
things " paintable," you have Cernay, Fontaineblcau,
and Gretz. If angling is the excuse, there are Mantes,
Marly, Andresy, Lagny, and Charenton ; while for
boating you can hardly go wrong at Rueil, Herblay,
Bougival, and Nogent on the Marne. In one of their
aspects these are sports highly cultivated. In their
relation to the ordinary life of the people they are mere
incidents of an outing. The ordinary Parisian rowing
is but three men in a boat, who, in spite of their being
on a river, are still very much at sea. More commonly
still, it is but one man with a girl, both happily un-
aware that they arc in peril of their lives. They have
not far to go. Their mark is the little restaurant on the
island which is the sole aim of the excursion. Hiey
have come out not so much to row as to breakfast in
rowing toggery, to chatter aquatics and scandal, and to
sing chansonettes.
In the same way, the holiday fishing is often very
little better than the line and the bent pin, as the foot-
ball is only a vindictive punishment of a leaky india-
rubber sphere which requires frequent inflation by a
united family. So, too, cycling, although the French
are capable of carrying it to great perfection on the
track, is often, for the purpose of these excursions, a
138
PARISIAN PASTIMES
young man giving a young woman a ride in a bicycle
gig, in which she courteously affects to sit at ease, while
he toils up the rural slope. Some of these contrivances
are fearfully and wonderfully made, and include storage
for the baby, and for the provisions for the day.
For rowing, as a sport, there are clubs all about
Paris and all about France, with a Parisian Club of the
Oar as lawmaker. The laws are made in a congress
held annually in the capital, and timed for the match
between the eights of the Seine and the Marne, the
first event of the rowing year. Asnieres was once the
great metropolitan center, but avoid it now exactly as
you would avoid the plague, for it has guilty relations
with the drains of Paris. Everywhere there is difficulty
in getting good boats for hire. The supply is naturally
adjusted to the demand of the majority, who need tubs
in which they may paddle, but may with difficulty
drown. One of the great annual races is between the
Rowing Club dc Paris and the Societe Nautique de la
Marne. The championship of the Marne is for the
early part of September. About a month later comes
the fi.xture for the great race on the Seine for the cham-
pionship of France. This is in three heats, each of two
thousand meters, and it is open to all nations. It is an
old institution. At first the English had matters all
their own way, l)ut the French submitted with a good
grace for the sake of the lesson. Then, gradually
learning the management of scull and skiff, they sent
men like Armet and Lein to victory on their own
course, the latter to the more daring venture at Henley,
where, however, he had to lower his colors in the home
of the sport.
139
PARIS OF TO-DAY
The Parisians have little to learn from anybody in
scientific cycling. Without entering into too technical
scrutiny of records, it may be said that they have
brought the machine to high perfection as an instru-
iirilAK i.ONCliKl IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS
ment of sport, and to higher perfection as one of use.
They not only cultivate heart-disease on the racing-
track with as much assiduity as other people, and hold
frequent race meetings, but they use the machine
extensively in daily life, on ordinary errands of busi-
ness or pleasure. This is the true test of any new
14.0
PARISIAN PASTIMES
nicthcjd of locomotion. The}' arc admirably seconded
by the administration of Paris, which gives them good
roads everywhere, and sometimes roads all to them-
selves, as in the approaches Ui the Bois, which, for all
the qualities of a cycling course, is about the best in
the world. The revolution, in this land of the motor, is
naturally the motor cycle. The rate at which the Pa-
risians charge through the public thoroughfares on this
fearful contrivance, I have already mentioned. None
but the most nimble can hope to a\'oid them. The
motor is the modern short cut to the survival of the
fittest.
They have made many laudable attempts to acclima-
tize foot-ball, and have taken a beating, at regular
intervals, from one of the English visiting teams. If
they do not succeed in this as well as they might, it is
in part to be imputed to them as merit. As persons of
taste, they have a great horror of brutalite in sport.
" We do not want to turn Erench lads into English
ones," cries M. Ribot, in his important work on educa-
tional reform published the other day. " Rough sports
do not suit our race, more refined in its vigneiir ele-
gante than that of the Anglo-Saxon." In the last
resort, they usually fail to see why they should suffer
for their enjoyments, and they sicken with disgust,
rather than with fear, when the dhooli-bearers and the
surgeons follow the teams into the foot-ball field.
This is the Erench note, always the touch of ele-
gance, and this is why a certain association with
" fashion " is of the essence of Erench sport. It does
not, like English sjiort, usuallv begin among the people
retaining something of the primitive wildness of its
141
PARIS OF 1()-DAY
origin; or, if it does, it is always trying to mount to
select circles. Foot-ball will take a long time to reach
the French masses. Their instincts know not the
stern joy of the scrimmage. For all their combative-
ness, they regard life as a progression, an orderly
development, not as a battle and a march. For this
sport, as for most of the others that involve danger, we
must wait on the upper classes. They have imported
foot-ball and polo and what not, and have done their
best to tame them into diversions fit for a man who
values a whole skin.
Their chalet of the Racing Club in the Bois de
Boulogne is a model of taste in the rustic style. It is
all prettiness without and within ; and, in the latter, it
does not disdain the aid of millinery. The hall is hung
in sky-blue and white, and with the diplomas of honor
won in the field. To-day the club, with its four hun-
dred and fifty members, claims the lead among French
societies of athletic sport. It began in the humblest
way, but still among the " directing classes." A few
young fellows at the Lycee Condorcet wanted to stretch
their legs, and bethought them of foot-racing in the
English style. But first they tried it in the French,
that is to say, with prettiness as the first end and aim.
They ran in satin blouses, in jockeys' breeches, in
jockeys' hats, in jockeys' boots, nay, some positively
with jockeys' whips in their hands, as though with
some covert design of touching themselves up behind.
Then gradually they swept all this nonsense away,
crossed the Channel for their lesson, and rigged them-
selves in the style approved to experience. From that
time forth they did exceedingly well. They invited
14.2
PARISIAN PASTIiVIES
English amateurs to compete, and held against them,
year by year, the championship in three of the four dis-
tances, the shorter ones. Even the mile they won
three times out of six ; and though their champion,
Borel, was beaten in 1891 by an American, he made a
good fight for it. They train for their work, though,
characteristically, always under the doctor's orders for
moderation. In the same way they brought in foot-
ball, where they have yet to beat their masters, and
they are now introducing it into the playgrounds of the
lyceums.
Then they busied themselves with lawn-tennis, and
with success. For their best in this line we must go
to the club of the lie de Puteaux on the Seine, a charm-
ing rural retreat lying under the guns of Mont Vale-
rien. There you have about a dozen courts, with great
refinement in the domestic service, as well as the rigor
of the game. Still toiling, and not in vain, after its
English masters, our 'high life" has now its Polo Club
near Bagatelle, in the Bois. It exacts strict guaranties
of respectability. On the ornamental side none are
eligible for admission but the mothers, wives, and un-
married sisters and daughters of members. For their
benefit there is a regular service of five-o'clock tea, under
umbrella tents. It is not only polo, but polo with a
background of dwarf forests, of the spires of St.-Cloud,
of the meadows of Longchamp.
In like manner the French are acclimatizing- grolf,
especially on the shores of the Mediterranean. At the
same time Paris is reviving for its own benefit several
of the national games. To see some pretty play of
longue pcmme, the old longue paume of the South, go
1+3
PARIS OF lO-DAY
on Tuesdays and Fridays at about five, and on Sun-
days all day long, to the Gardens of the Luxembourg.
It is played there with rackets according to the
best tradition, not with the hand, the tambourine, or
the wicker glove, which are still in vogue in the
Pyrenees.
This is a popular game, since it is played both by
and before the crowd. The fashionable sports aftect
seclusion and take great pains to secure it. Most of
them had their modest beginnings at the old ///' mix
pigeons in the Hois, until they grew strong enough, as
we have seen, to set up housekeeping for themselves.
The tir au.x pigeons, in its turn, began as a skating
club, where the happy few might enjoy themselves in
winter without intrusion from their fellow-creatures.
The antiquary may find it worth while to examine the
archives of these institutions for traces of English
origin. In the old rules of the Paris Gun Club, for
instance, he will find: "II est interdit de tirer les deux
coups de fusil a la fois: si le pigeon est tue il est compte
'No Bird.'" " Le tireur en place, et pret a tirer, doit
crier 'Pull.' "
Pistol-shooting is much more nearly indigenous. As
duelists, the French naturally have to learn to kill in
both kinds. The crack shots are celebrated in luxuri-
ous monographs of sport, adorned with their portraits,
and doing full justice to their " records." The day of
the perfect young man of fashion includes some prac-
tice with the pistol at one of the private galleries.
Sometimes he has a shooting-gallery in his garden,
and fires a few shots on rising as a substitute for
morning prayer. Then he usually takes a turn on
144
CROWDS LEAVING A RAILWAY-STATION AFTER
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
PARISIAN PASTIMES
horseback in the Bois — I speak by the card. After
breakfast he fires more shots, at some rendezvous in
town. He discusses the day's shooting with his
friends, and when this weighty business is over, I am
assured, he has cleared his conscience of more than
half of its burden of duties. A few \'isits, the theater,
and the club complete the day.
Shooting proper, the sport of the gun in the coverts,
is a more serious matter. It is hard to get your co\'ert
to yourself in this democratic country. What I wrote
years ago on this subject is truer than ever to-day.
The most familiar type of sportsman is the small rural
proprietor, whose shots, perforce, trespass on his neigh-
bor's field because of the narrow limits of his own. He
is abroad on Sundays and on holidays with his solitary
dog, picking up the crumbs of sport, and it is danger-
ous to interfere with him in his own commune, because
he is an elector as well as a proprietor, and perhaps his
voice counts in the election of M. le Maire. The better
kind of sportsmen form small syndicates, or shooting
societies, and at the end of the day's shooting they di-
vide the bag in equal portions, drawing lots for the odd
pieces, or offering them, as a sop to Cerberus, to the
peasants on whose grounds they have trespassed. In
many instances, however, they buy the right to pass
over certain fields, and this is the main object of their
association. The great subdivision of landed property
in France tends to confront you with a proprietor at
every step, and the peasant often derives no small part
of his revenue from the shooting.
But the great cities send the most numerous contin-
gent into the fields, for almost every notary, doctor, and
H7
PARIS OF TO-DAY
government clerk has his weekl) or monthly holidu)'
with the gun. The preserves of the Seine-and-Oise,
of the Seine-and-Marne, and of the Oisc, in the neigh-
borhood of Paris, probably contain as much game as
all the rest of Prance. The best of these, of course, be-
long to the great proprietors, the bankers and other
millionaires, and the ne.xt in value are those that lie
near enough to get the stray game from the rich man's
field. These adjacent lots are much sought after by
the humbler syndicates. The shooting at the chateaux,
on the great country estates, presents much the same
features as in England — invitations to a large circle
and a generous hospitality. The main difference is
that the invitations are select only in regard to social
standing, not to skill with the gun. The keenness of the
French sense of the ridiculous does not extend to fail-
ure in sport : you miss, and there is an end of it ; and
as nobody thinks much the worse of you, you do not
think any the worse of yourself. The standard of com-
petence is not a high one, and even shooting is more
of a pastime than a sport. Ladies sometimes take the
field along with the men, and the Orleans princesses
and the Princesse Murat used to stand in the front rank.
The finest shooting-estates in Prance are those of the
late Due d' Aumale and of the Rothschilds.
Sometimes, in the more remote excursions after
smaller game, a wild boar crosses the patli ; so the
prudent sportsman takes his hunting-knife or even his
revolver with him, as well as his gun. The Prench list
of necessaries for the field is alarmingly large ; the sta-
tions at Rambouillet and Pontainebleau, on nights when
people are going down for the shooting, are encum-
14.8
PARISIAN PASTIMES
bered with materiel de guerre in a manner that sug-
gests a mobilization of the army. The Revolution saw
NIGHT SCENE IN A FAUBOURG STREET
the last of the grand battues of the old school ; and then
the infuriated people held the gun, and slaughtered
without mercy, for food, without a thought of the fu-
1+9
PARIS OF TO-DAY
turc. The partridge never fairly recovered from that
blow.
Fencing has been democratized like all else. At one
time the management of the rapier was confined ex-
clusively to the upper classes. Now there is an excel-
lent fencing-school at the dry-goods store of the Bon
Marche. The young men at the counters take their
exercise in that way after working-hours.
As our business is with the people rather than with
the dandies, let us now go a-fishing with the loungers
of the quays. Their pastime imports no great harm to
the fish, because it must not import any great fatigue
to the fisherman. The Seine, as it flows in or near
Paris, has been fouled by the sewage. Still, as these
people preeminently live in their traditions, they fish in
the new waters as they fished in the old. No other
capital can show so many anglers to the mile of bank.
They angle in the suds of the riverine laundries, in the
brown waterfalls of the sewers. They crowd the Ecluse
de la Monnaie at the Pont Neuf, which, in spite of its
position in the very heart of Paris, is comparatively
calm. This, of course, in its independence of raw
result, is the true principle of enjoyment alike in sport
and in life. Nor are the results unimportant: with an
average of one bite to the thousand baits, great is the
joy of fruition for the man who lands his fish, and of
expectation for the huge remainder. There is a streak
of passivity in the French nature, in needful balance
with its known tendency to excitement. The sight of
the quays on a summer morning strengthens the proba-
bility that one Frenchman wrote the " Imitation,"' and
explains how others founded Port Royal. Those who
150
PARISIAN PASTIMKS
are not fishing are washing and combing the dog;
those who are doing neither are looking on.
The preference of the pastime to the sport accounts
for the continued popularity of the Parisian fair.
Elsewhere, in all save in its primitive trading uses, the
fair is on the decline. As a revel, it is but a memory
in London. Greenwich and " Bartelmy " became too
much of a good thing. In Ireland they hold that,
when a skull comes to ill hap at one of these gather-
ings, what might otherwise be a verdict of man-
slaughter becomes a verdict of felo de se. The owner
has literally brought it on his own head. The mere
fun of the fair, as an industry, flourishes in full luxu-
riance in France. Families are born into the business,
and die out of it — sometimes with large fortunes to
their credit, computed in live stock of the desert and
freaks of nature, as well as in bank-notes.
They pitch by the calendar in the environs, and
even in the capital at Faster. This is for the ginger-
bread fair, held in the Place de la Nation, better known
as the old Place du Trone. At other times they
occupy the great avenues which stretch from the bar-
riers to the open country — for instance, the one that
runs from the Port Maillot to the river, a good four or
five miles of booths, counting the two rows. Through-
out the summer season there is not a fete-day without
its fair in one or other of the little townships beyond
the walls. It is only a short journey by tram or train,
and you are at Versailles, St. -Cloud, Meudon, or what
not. The motto is, " Every man in his humor." for the
trivialities of popular amusement, ^"ou ma\- do no-
thing in ten thousand ways — by gambling for cakes or
PARIS OF TO-DAY
for pocket-knives, by throwini^ a ball at rag dolls, by
trying your strength at rickety machines which some-
times yield their whole internal economy to one vigor-
ous pull of a plowman, or by having your fortune told.
The daughter of Egypt stands on the tail-board of her
van, and gives the gaping throng a gratuitous sample
of her wares. For this purpose she whispers fates
A BICYCLE TKAILER
through a long speaking-trumpet, usually directed by
judicious preference to the longest ear. In these con-
fidences you may learn that )'ou have wasted your
time in the hopeless pursuit of a fair beauty, while
another, as yet in the nature of the dark horse, appeals
in vain to your fatuous blindness for a glance. The
promise of full particulars for fivepence proves an
almost irresistible temptation.
When you tire of this, you may go shooting for many
PARISIAN PASTIMES
varieties of game, on a system which giv'es you the ex-
citement of the chase in the open without its fatigues,
and, in fact, once more reduces sport to its due propor-
tion of pastime. The prey — hares and rabbits, and
wild fowl by courtesy so called — form a hajjpy family,
and await their doom in a cage with an edifying resig-
nation that is manifestly quite consistent with good
appetite. It is supposed to be determined by your suc-
cess in attaining a bull's-eye just above their heads,
with the aid of a rifle supplied by the proprietor. You
have only to hit the mark to have your choice among
these living prizes, and to dine on fresh game at a
merely nominal cost. Needless to say, you never hit
that mark, though you may almost touch it with the
muzzle of the weapon. The secret perhaps is in the
rifling, and it may one day put inventors in gunnery on
the track of that art of firing round a corner which is
their philosopher's stone. The animals know, by long
experience, that the vicissitudes of the day involve no
mischance to them, and that they will invariably sleep
in their beds at night instead of stewing in the />o^ at(
feu of the citizen. They gulp and nibble and chew,
therefore, with the full assurance of a natural span of
life. Old age and gray hairs overtake them in this
honorable service, and the returning traveler may rec-
ognize them after long intervals, during which things
of moment ha\e happened in the world.
If you are for sport more worthy of the name, though
still without the fatigue of personal exertion, you may
have even that at the fair. There are the wrestling-
booths, where real work is done by brawnv cham])ions
whose trade is that of the strong man. It is a sight for
PARIS OF TO-DAY
an impressionist painter — the great dingy tent with
its dim lights, the throng of onlookers, open-mouthed,
not so much with wonder as with a mocking chaff which
is often the perfection of gutter-wit, the snorting pair
in the midst pawing each other for the grip. Some-
times fashion takes a turn in this direction, and the
smartest sets of our Romans of the decadence drive
down after dinner to look on. This supplies a needful
contrast. The little Twelfth-cake figures of the dandies,
men and women, in their finery, stand out in sharp re-
lief against the laboring champions in the ring, and the
ragamuffins of the barrier in the cheap seats. An inde-
scribable repulsion of feeling is the effect of the whole
scene. It is due, I think, to a sense of the difference
between the ease of the onlooker and the little ease of
the performer. When two struggle alone, it is some-
thing between the two, and there an end. Each does
his best and his worst. When a third comes merely
to gaze for his pleasure, our disgust begins. You can
hardly watch a cat worrying a mouse without an uneasy
feeling that, as one overmuch on the safe side, you are
a bit of a coward.
These visits of fashion to the wrestling-booths will,
I think, be quoted against us, with the bull-fights of
far more serious import, when the time comes to write
the history of our decline and fall. I knew a little girl
who, once, without seeing the struggle inside the
booths, heard the champions announcing outside that
they were about to stake their whole fortune on the
issue. She waited spellbound for that issue, until
presently they returned, and one declared, with heroic
composure, that he had lost the savings of a lifetime.
15+
A GINGERBREAD FAIR
PARISIAN PASTIMES
She ran home, emptied her money-box, groped her way-
back to the fair, amid the gHmmering Hghts of closing-
time, and laid her hoard on the hip of the ruined man,
now quietly smoking his pipe with the champion who
was supposed to have reduced him to beggary. The
story should have its climax in his tearful refusal to
touch a penny of her money, but it has not. He pock-
eted the offering, led her to the outskirts of the fair, and
told her to be a good little girl and run straight home.
Still it remains beautiful for all that.
Sometimes, but not often, you may see a bout of
French boxing at the fair — the savate. It is a sport
that hovers between those lower reaches of the street
fight, which it somewhat disdains, and the higher one
of the duello, to which it is never admitted. It is taught
at the gymnasiums as part of the athletic course. It is
an art of kicking, and it trains the foot to take the place
of the fist in the personal encounters of the plebs, the
hand serving mainly to parry. The foot is a terrible
substitute ; its strokes are murderous, especially when
none are barred. One was barred in a late encounter
between the leading French professional and a British
boxer. But the French, or rather the Belgian, cham-
pion delivered it, all the same, when he found that he
was getting the worst of the bout. His opponent was
supposed to be maimed for life. On the other hand, to
judge by the cries of the delighted crowd, Fashoda
was avenged.
After Sedan there was a great growth of gymnastic
societies in France, just as there was in Germany after
Jena. They sprang up in all parts of the country, with
the same patriotic ardor for physical training to the end
157
OPEN-AIR DANCKS ON THI£ I4TH OK JULY
of national regeneration. They were the first and the
least offensive form of Deroulede's patriotic labors.
But the poor creature could not keep politics out of
them, and they languished in due course. The mis-
fortune of the French is that their athletic exercise is
.58
PARISIAN PASTIMES
still rather a system than a growth. It has not its
proper beginning in the playground. The playground
pastimes are still anything but what they should be.
The larger boys often take no part in them, such as
they are, but merely walk to and fro and contract pim-
ples. The others toy aimlessly with a ball or play at
"touch." It is formless amusement, in fact, instead of
organized sport. There is no time to repair the omis-
sion in later life.
There used to be wild dancing at the fairs. There
is less of it now, if only because there is less every-
where. Dancing, in the cheap public halls, there still
is, all the year round, but it is more or less professional,
especially on the part of the men. These are of a pariah
race which is still lower than that of their partners.
Even the student no longer dances with conviction as
he used to do when Murger's famous book was young.
He goes to the prominent cafe chantants of the worse
type, but rather as an observer. The thing is a little
too low on gala days, and a little too dull on the others.
Many of the old halls are now the sites of stately
dwelling-houses in which the citizen enjoys the ameni-
ties of a service of w ater, of gas, and of tradesmen in
procession on the back stairs. The old bal des cano-
tiers, at the riverside resorts, in its old style, is but a
memory, and not a very savory one at that. The
Parisians have lost the energy for this amusement,
which in its prime was a strong rival to gymnastics.
There are many ways of taking exercise, and one is to
take leaps and bounds in an atmosphere of foul air and
tobacco-smoke. Self-respect now holds the better sort
back.
^59
PARIS OF TO-DAY
In the remote quarters the washerwomen and the
laborers still have their elephantine revels to round the
day of toil. In their rude assemblies you meet on a
system of free admission, tempered by a sou paid to the
master of ceremonies every time you dance. For popu-
lar dancing of the old-fashioned sort you must wait for
the 14th of July, which marks the fall of the Bastille
and the date of the national fete. The complaisant
municipality keeps a ring in the open spaces, and puts
up stands for the musicians. The passers-by join in,
and the thing is real as far as it goes. It is the people
dancing, and this is now the rarest of Paris sights.
Even at the great bal de V opera public dancing has
long since become a mere industry. Our grandfathers
and grandmothers went there to take a part ; they now
go only to take bo.xes and to look on. The business
circle is peopled by the scum of the boulevard and by
the male supers of the Opera, who positively contract
with the management for their attendance and their cos-
tumes, and who undertake to forget themselves in cory-
bantic revel at so much an hour.
The parks and gardens of the capital are the country
reduced to scale for those who have to take the air on
the wrong side of the fortifications. The most perfect
miniature of this kind is the Pare de Monceaux, near
the Arch, on the side of the wicked old Pare aux Cerfs.
There is a little bit of everything, prairie and ruin and
flowery slope, and all in a space that might almost be
covered by a hat of Brobdingnag. It is about the
most exquisite thing of its kind in the world. The
Bois de Boulogne is known to everybody. This is the
same thing on a larger scale, every bit pretty, every bit
160
THE FERRIS WHEEL IN PARIS — A aUEER LANDSCAPE
created, if only by the judicious treatment of original
wild and marsh. It is a keepsake fairyland in which
nothing is left to chance, and which has an air of being
combed and brushed every morning, not to say per-
i6i
PARIS OF TO-DAY
fumed from the scent-bottle. Such as it is, it is the best
of its kind, and both in extent and cuUivation it leaves
the London parks far behind. Its faults are those of
its qualities. The French with difficulty apply to a
scene of nature the precept implied in the appeal,
" Can't you leave it alone ? "
Even Fontainebleau is laid out as geometrically as a
Paris arrondissement, and though, happily, you cannot
see the plan for the trees, it is a sad disenchantment on
the map. This people would turn the very Yellow-
stone into a promenade, dotted all over with chalets for
papers, and with kiosks for lemonade. The Buttes-
Chaumont, on the northeast side of Paris, has been
tamed in the same way. It was an old quarry when
Napoleon III took it in hand and reduced it to the
ordered wildness of early Italian landscape. The rocky
bits are there, but clearly they have been made with
hands, and all they seem to want is a saint, praying
from a missal, to complete the link with civilization.
They reverted to primitive savagery under the Com-
mune ; for here the fight was hottest, and there was no
quarter given or received.
Paris is well provided with its little oases of verdure
and flowers. So is London, but there is this difference:
in the French city all the oases are free ; in the English
most are reserved for the occupants of the squares.
The square garden is obtained by the sacrifice of what
would otherwise have been the private gardens, and the
residents keep it to themselves. In Paris this would
be impossible. It would be foreign to the genius of
the people, and ridicule would kill the privilege, or
finally revolution. Only a few years ago we had whole
162
-m
AN EXCURSION ON THE RIVER
PARISIAN PASTIMES
quarters in London closed to the outer world by gates
and gate-keepers. They were solemnly abolished amid
rejoicings, but the gardens of the squares still remain
private property. One day they will go into the com-
mon domain, as the fine garden of Lincoln's Inn Fields
has already gone, to the huge benefit of the inhabitants
of the adjacent slums. The owners, many of them law-
yers who had their offices round about, never missed a
pleasance which they never used. But they claimed
handsome compensation for all that, and got it, too.
When all London follows the same example of com-
pulsory renunciation, with or without damages, the me-
tropolis will be the garden city of the world. It almost
is so now, thanks to the happy idea of laying out the
old graveyards as pleasure-grounds. In this matter
the English capital, after long lagging behind the
French, has now bettered the example. Already we
Londoners have music in the parks, though it will take
us some time to reproduce all the essential features of a
military concert in the Gardens of the Luxembourg or
of the Palais Royal.
The French have had a century's familiarity with
the conception that the first duty of a community, in
the distribution of the blessings of life, is to itself as a
whole. Everything strengthens this idea in your
Parisian, and it governs his beliefs with the automatic
action of a truism. He expects the government to do
all sorts of things that are rarely regarded as obligations
elsewhere. It has not only to fix the date of the
national holiday, but to provide the entertainment. The
national fete, with its free places at the theaters, free
treats to the school-children, free illuminations and fire-
165
PARIS ()!• rO-DAV
works, is a marvel of administrative hospitality. There
is no sense of faxor in all this on the part of the giver,
but there is a strong sense of right on the part of the
receiver.
So with the enjoyment of the public galleries. What-
ever higher uses they may be intended to serve, the
first care of the government is to make them minister
to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. All
the regulations as to hours and days of opening and
general conditions of use are framed to this end. The
people like to think that their art treasures at the
Louvre or at the Luxembourg — their very own — beat
all private collections in the world, and are managed
by the best experts, ever on the lookout for new acc[ui-
sitions. Their sense of personal property in the
" Mona Lisa" or the "Belle Jardiniere," in the Nike
of Samothrace or the Venus of Melos, is deep down in
them ; and while they might take off their hats to these
masterpieces, they would never think of doing so to
their own servants who have them in charge. I have
seen a milliner's apprentice smiling contemptuously at
the waist of the last-named lady, left as it is without
the correction of the corset. It was bad taste, no doubt,
but still it showed the saving sense of one's right to
laugh as one likes at one's own. The English visitor
to the National Gallery still finds it hard to divest him-
self of a sense of personal obligation to the policeman.
i66
THE ESPLANADE OF THE INVALIDES, FROM THE NEW
ALEXANDER III BRIDGE AT SUNSET
►^S-
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IK '"
1
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THK LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
THE very paving-stones of great cities might
sometimes cry out, " Let us have peace."
Some of them may well complain that the foot
of man makes too short work of them, considering the
time and trouble it took them to grow. Those of the
boule\ard are surely entitled to this grievance, as they
are ground to premature dust by an army everlastingly
on the march. It is a stage army, for it turns on its
steps, to repeat the trick of entrance and exit half a
dozen times a day. The entrance, I may observe as
a stage direction, is by the Rue Royalc ; the exit very
little higher than the Boulevard des Italiens. Beyond
that point the long line is simply a place of transit
on lawful business, like any other street. The short
stretch between the Madeleine and the Rue Richelieu
forms the Grand Boulevard ancient of days.
When the New Caledonian of the future seeks his
arch of the opera-house to sketch the ruins of the
Madeleine, he will not fail to observe that the asphalt
here is ground to a finer surface than elsewhere. Its
air of fatigue will be as eloquent of a too busy past as
171
PARIS OF 1'()-DAY
the rutted ways of Rome. The eustuni of a<^^es, since
these sites ceased to be open country, or open ditch,
just beyond the city wall, has sent the people here for
news and gossip every day. Once they came for fresh
air as well ; and havint^ contracted the habit, they are
loath to part with it, though now they are naturally
rationed in that commodity like other inhabitants of
walled cities. They seldom, however, fail to get a
good blow of the winds of the spirit. The boulevard
is the source or the distributing center of all the flitting
fancies of France. You come here m the daytime for
the sensation of the day. You get it of a surety, what-
ever else you may miss ; and while you enjoy it, hot
and hot, truth seems but a spoil-sport. The art of life
is, after all, but an art of impressions ; and this impres-
sion, while it lasts, is sure to be to your taste. The
boulevard asks no more. There \\ill be something
new to-morrow, and what you have is sufficient unto
the day.
When the boulevard ends, and the mere boulevards
begin, the thing soon rights itself. At Poissoniere, if
you go so far, you take your sensation for little more
than it is worth. By the time you have reached Bonne
Nouvelle, you are for crying, "What's in a name?"
Yet these thoroughfares, after all, are in the grand line,
and for many of the humbler sort they have something
of its subtle charm. The countless boulevards in other
quarters have no such relation to the pulsing life of the
city. There are boulevards of communication, boule-
vards of industry, boulevards of silence, meditation, and
prayer. Be sure, therefore, to see that you get the
right label when you make your choice. Without this,
172
THE LIFE OF THE liOULEVARDS
indeed, you may know the boulevard by the composi-
tion of its crowds. Their appointed hour is the hour
of absinthe, within measurable distance of the time for
dinner. They are sleek and stall-fed, and they look
forward to their meal with a sure and certain hope.
With some, not with many, the whole day has been
little more than a preparation for this great act of life.
I knew one — still to narrow it down to exceptions that
by no means prove the rule — with whom the absinthe
was only a final stage of the treatment for appetite.
Before that came the douche. When a lusty fellow-
had jjumped on him, as with strokes of a whip of cold
water, to urge the sluggish blood into a trot, he was
driven to the cafe for the inward application. Then
the green corrosive gnawed him into hunger, and he
sought his club to do justice to its cook, if not exactly
to his Maker.
The club, it must be owned, is the enemy of the
boulevard, in being the enemy of its cafes and of its
restaurants. At the beginning of things it was these
institutions or nothing if you wanted to exchange a
word with your shopmates in the work of life, or to
take bite and sup in their company. This has passed.
The club cuisine gives points to the cuisine of the res-
taurant. The club company is necessarily more select
than any cafe of artists, cafe of poets, or what not, sub-
ject to the intrusion of the outsider. The club, too, has
its own town-talk ; and since this is but the gossip of
the boulevard, with some improvement in the inflections,
it gives members all they want. But what the boulevard
loses in this way it gains in many another, and its masses
of mere human beings make a society of their own.
^7Z
PARIS OF TO-DAY
Yet the Parisian cUjcthier an restaurant is still an
institution. I know of nothing better in the world. In
the general competition among nations in the arts of
life, France has fixed the form for this repast, if we
call it by its proper name of lunch. There are, indeed,
midday meals of every variety, all o\er the planet, for
those who are able to get them ; but the I\'irisian
dejeuner is the only realized ideal. The breakfasts of
the Autocrat were but the ideal ; he probably li\ed on a
cracker, in the interest of his splendid conversational
dreams. The luncheons of the mighty in London
society are the nearest English approach to the realiza-
tion. What there is of light and grace about them is
French by origin or by suggestion. The delicate
courses succeed one another with ever richer promise
to the eye than to the palate, and \ki<i petit verre seems
to close the vista with flowers.
In the Champs-Elysees you may breakfast under
the trees, with manufactured surroundings of nature
which, for this purpose, are an improvement on the
real article. The tame sparrows are probably on the
staff of the establishment, but they please. Yet, for
profit and pleasure, as for scenery of another kind, the
rendezvous may still be the boulevard. The main
things are ever the same — lightness and brightness,
the former extending from the mode of service to the
thing served. There is nothing out of the way in the
cjuality of the viands. The Paris market is ill supplied
with fish from the great deep, and the roasts of the
Paris kitchen sometimes produce a longing for home
that is not purely patriotic. Yet the French cook
rarely fails to hold you with the magic of his kick-
174
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'Sj^-YV
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bi
4
THE GREHN HOUR (" L'HF.URE VERTE ■■)-HIVE O'CLOCK
AT A BOULEVARD CAFE
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
shaws ; and if you choose your restaurant with judg-
ment you will find the fare quite good enough for
human nature's daily food. The one thing needful is
to approach the table in the right spirit, or all the
magic goes for naught. That spirit is the spirit of ex-
pectation, of longing, of desire for the good things of
the body, and the good humor which is its natural
expression. The doctors say that this lickerishness is
an important part of the business of eating, as the
mouth that honestly waters for its morsel lightens
the labor of the digestive juices.
The Frenchman makes no apology for enjoying his
victual, and he knows nothing of the rather artificial
humility of our forms of grace before meat. He does
not pray that the food may be sanctified to his use and
to the most exalted service. It is enough for him to
have it agreeable to his palate. So he avoids the
hypocrisy exposed in the rebuke of Dr. Johnson's wife:
" Where is the use, Mr. Johnson, of returning thanks
for a dish which, in another minute, you will declare is
unfit for a dog?" He holds, the incorrigible pagan,
that the gratifications of sense are as legitimate as all
others, and that a filet Chateaubriand is quite as much
of an absolute good as the virtue of the Socratic sys-
tem. Good things to eat, beautiful things to look at,
especially women, the quickening appeals of music,
oratory, conversation, all these are main parts of his
scheme of life.
The very scavenger in his gargote will smack his
lips over a glass of wine limed with plaster of Paris,
if he can find no better. The moral it carries, as it
goes down, is not exactly thankfulness for the kindly
177
PARIS OF TO-DAY
fruits of the earth. He feels only that it is good to be
alive; or, to put it inside out, that " when one dies it is
for a long time." In rustic wine-shops, here and there,
A FIRST-CLASS FUNERAL
the motto may still be read beneath a faded lithograph
wherein three citizens of the time of Louis Philippe
touch glasses in an arbor in spring. They are all as
dead now as lithogra])hy itself, but, while they had
their chance, they made the cannikin clink. It was
178
THK LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
their national application of the text, " Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die." The compassion of
these people for those who devote their entire thought
to riches and the toil of ambition might make some of
us pause.
This is the French philosophy of the French table —
of the breakfast-table especially. I do not criticize, of
course ; I only try to explain. Its hours are times
of truce in the more or less meaningless battle of life,
wherein both sides try to find out what it is all about,
and to penetrate to the real purpose of Renan's "prom-
enade through the Real." All is in harmony. The very
waiters are in keeping with this kindly and tolerant
scheme. In their unpretentious jackets and aprons
and slippers, in their civility, and readiness to give
counsel on the bill of fare, each of them is a humble
friend of man. No such character is to be attributed
at sight to the creatures of the same species in foreign
restaurants, uniformed like undertakers, and obtruding
dress-coats on you in the garish day. Life advances
pleasantly, with such aids, in its most serious affairs.
Merchants breakfast over bargains, lawyers over cases,
lovers over meetings. Blessed are these breakfasters, —
while they breakfast, — though they may have to re-
member, before and after, that they are one of the great
sad races of mankind. Joyous is their chatter of irre-
sponsible frivolity, tempered by wit ; joyous their brag,
untrammeled by the modesty which they appraise as a
mean \\ay of seeking condonation for success. All is
flowing and gracious as the courtesy of kings. The
art of its flow is simply an art of thinking aloud. The
dullest of us is always thinking of something, if onl\-
179
PARIS OF TO-DAY
of what he ought to think about. Let him but think in
spoken words, and he has the wherewithal for the com-
panionship of the table. Their strong point is the
generous fullness with which they give themselves
away to the adversary by saying just what comes into
their heads. But it is less generous than it seems, for
they know that no one is in ambush at breakfast-
time.
The meal over, there is still the balance of the day,
and what is to be done with it? This difficulty is the
bane of breakfast for the idler. Let us consider, then,
only the few — a very few — in Paris who ha^'e no
business to resume. The break-up may be for a stroll
and a peep at the shops. An art-shop will do to begin
with, for this will best keep us in touch with that life of
old Rome of which you have the perpetual suggestion
in all that passes here. A famous shop for bronzes
will do as the highest possible of its kind in our time,
since no importations from Athens can now put the
native work to shame. Its exquisitely rendered types
of the humanity of all the ages keep us true to the
mood of the hour. We are on a higher table-land of
dream than the one we have just left, amid these
nymphs and fauns, troubadours and men-at-arms, who
seem to assure us upon their sacred honor that there is
nothing like living for the splendid shows of things.
They may be right or wrong, but the mastery of art
with which they are set before us makes it exceedingly
hard to contradict them. Every form of the nobler
animal life lives, breathes, moves, in the still, reposeful
metal. The crouching tigers on the spring might win
a roar of recognition from the real article, as, according
i8o
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
to Haydon, a horse of the Elgin Marbles won a neigh
of fraternity from an English thoroughbred. The lions
stalking with the stride of Artemis, the sun-affronting
eagles, are manifestly lords of earth and air.
The Frenchman's eye for character in form is unfail-
ing, as though he had in him the potentiality of all the
moods and passions of animate life. And it is the same
with his feeling for nature at large, as you may see
when you leave this shop for a picture-dealer's. It is
the other part of his intense, sympathetic delight in the
whole visible, tangible world, the world of men and
women, of plains and trees and flowers. You are as
Prospero s band, dazzled by the sheer beauty of the
brave creatures that have just swum into your ken.
The demonstration stops short at their braveries, and
is in no wise concerned to weight itself with a moral.
The little gems in oil and water-color are conceiva-
ble altar-pieces of a new religion — a religion for men
of taste, and that category perhaps includes the largest
of the dissenting bodies here. The very bonnets in a
neighboring shop have their modest use in the same
service. In their present state of unsoiled perfection
they look as if they could do no wrong. So of the
trailed skirts of the dress-shops ; of the exquisite fancies
in the windows of the jewelers. And so of the regi-
ment that passes, clarion in front, going now only to its
barracks, perhaps in the Place de la Republique, but
beyond that to deeds and to fortunes determinable by
the turning of a hair.
What a world of the senses, if not exactly what a
world of sense ! The stately cortege of the poinpcs
fimcbrcs, that was for the earlier part of the day. per-
i8i
PARIS Ol" 1()-UAY
haps should have come at this hour to remind us that
other things pass besides the regiment and the applaud-
ing crowd. But with these invincible sight-seers that
would have been only one more of the shows of life.
" So may I live as to merit a great public funeral,"
cried Claretie one day, in a mood of high resolve.
Victor Hugo ordained by will a pauper's shell for his
remains. He forgot to forbid them to set his cata-
falque under the Arc de Triomphe, and to call out the
horse and foot of the garrison of Paris to carry him to
his grave. So they did it — with apologies to his not
implacable shade.
The boulevard at night is a very different affair.
The later the better. Paris, though the most northerly,
is still one of the Latin cities, and the Latin cities sit
up late. The farther south the more incorrigible. At
Madrid the newsboys find it worth their while to cry
the papers till one in the morning. The best of the
night hours, for Paris, is the hour after the play. The
audiences pour into the cafes to celebrate with mild
refreshment their recovery of the atmosphere. It is
the hour of high change for the affairs of the boule-
vard. A haze of illuminating fire falls on a haze of
dust rising from the vexed pavement, and, if one may
put it so, on a haze of sound. The huge multitude
has come out to see itself That is the spectacle ; just
that and nothing more. The settled swarm under the
awnings of the cafes — twenty deep, if you carry your
eye to the indoor recesses — seem to pass the moving
swarm in review. The pavement, in like manner, sur-
veys the cafes on one side, and on the other the busy
road. It is a promenade of curiosity in which, no mat-
182
THE NOON MEAL AT A RESTAURANT
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
ter how often you have seen it, you are sure of your
reward. Perhaps the seated crowd has the best of it.
The others seem to ghde past Hke so many figures of
the new-fashioned scheme for painless locomotion. In
this, as you remember, a sidewalk on wheels does all
the work, and the wayfarer has only to keep still to find
himself at his journey's end. The whole scene is a
good deal better than the play the spectators have just
left. And there is nothing to grumble at in the price
of the seats — a bock or a sherry cobbler not more than
three hundred per cent, above cost price.
Many old stagers come here, night after night, as
though to stock their imagination with the stuff of
which they hope to make their dreams. It at once
quickens and soothes, with a sense of Paris as the hub
of the universe and the glory of the world. And glory
of a kind it is in good faith. The whole broad space
between the two sides of the way is filled with life and
movement. In the stretch betw^een curb and curb you
have hundreds of light ramshackle cabs rolling home
with their freight of lovers from the Bois, or their
heavier burden of " blouses," packed six deep, and vocal
with the message of the music-halls. The "victoria"
is the gondola of Paris, with a better title, perhaps,
than the hansom has to being the gondola of London.
Its long nightly procession to the Cascade, thousands
strong, is best seen in the Champs-Elysees, all one
side of the road alive with dancing light from the front
lamps. As for the occupants, the vehicle is roofless, so
they have nothing between them and the stars. The
passing regiment is not wanting, even at this late
hour, as the smart municipal guards return to barracks
i8^
PARIS OF TO-DAY
from their service of order at the places of pubhc
resort. More rarely, at this time, you may see a stray
dragoon passing from late duty at one of the minis-
tries to the palace of the President. But this is only
for emergencies. The daytime is the Ijest for these
huge military postmen, who fetch and carry as a regu-
lar thing between the dc])artmcnts, and whose pouches
are sometimes laden with nothing more important
than a three-cornered note bidding an opera-dancer
to lunch.
But the sidewalk is, after all, the distinctive sight of
the boulevard. It is much more than all Paris in its
best-known types, and it might pass for all France, or,
for that matter, all the world. The small shopkeeper —
whose person, as a rule, has shrunk to the fit of his
premises — has come out with his wife to take the air.
Their little " magazine of novelties " in the haber-
dashery line has so far yielded in its strife with the
temple of Janus as to close at eleven o'clock. Their
stroll tends to relieve an otherwise intolerable tedium
of existence with a sense of the larger movement of
life. The flamboyant provincials from Normandy or
from the country of Tartarin have just been disgorged
by an excursion-train. These, and the soldiers on leave
from distant garrisons, have come up for a bath of light
in this all-abounding flame. The unhealthy-looking
lads, bourgeoning with stray hairs and pimples, have
evidently given maternal vigilance the slip. The stu-
dents from the Quarter have left a like scene on the
Boulevard "Mich" for the richer variety of this one.
The bloused workmen with their wives, and here and
there, even at this late hour, with their children as well,
i86
THE LIFE OF IHE BOULEVARDS
give the note of gravity and purpose, and correct the
cruder frivolities of the scene. Yet, in the main, it is
quite a "respectable" crowd, and the revelers are still
its minority.
The French have so much the sense of character and
the sense of spectacle that they are capable, at need, of
an entire disinterestedness on the moral side in regard
to the shows of things. Our pair from the magazine
of novelties take the moral judgment for granted, and
come here just for the stimulus of the thought that Paris
is a fine feast for the eye. The wife, no doubt, has her
thoughts as she sees some of the women in the crowd.
But these thoughts permit her to feel that she has her
reward in self-respect for the weariness of trying to
save for old age on the fractional profits of the sale of
ha'p'orths of thread. The little man himself may make
the like improving reflections as he catches sight of the
gray-headed old lounger who is at his perch in the cor-
ner when he ought to be in bed. There was a sort of
parting of the ways, perhaps, when our mercer repented
of his leadership of the dance at vanished^ Valentino,
and gave security for future good behavior by taking
the wife and the shop.
The baser crowd is not edifying. There are the cafe
scavengers, who live by picking up the ends of cigars
and cigarettes, to be worked up again into a sort of
resurrection pic for the refreshment of poor smokers.
Terrible creatures some of these — lean, unwashed,
slouching, saturnine, with murder as an occasional al-
ternative to their industries of poverty or shame. The
opportunity comes when they meet a drunken carter
reeling home at night by one of the bridges. Then
187
PARIS OF TO-DAY
the silent knife does its work, and the rifled body is
tossed into the water to vanish forever, save for the
brief interval of its reappearance at the morgue. There
is a more sickening \'illainy in these lower types of
Paris than in the London rough of the same calling.
He kills with violence, but without finesse, and he is
wicked with his appetites rather than with his reason.
He wants his toke and his beer, and he robs or, at need,
slays to get them. His French colleague affects the
niceties of the band and the password, and lays out his
booty in diversions of infamy in which mere tipple has
but a small share. Not unfrequcntly he is quite a
philosopher in his way. When Ravachol was not
murdering solitary misers for their hoards, or breaking
open graves for trinkets, he used to spout at public
meetings on the wrongs of the proletariat; and, at the
end, he raised the " Carmagnole " as his death-song,
though, it must be owned, in a cracked voice, as he
danced his way to the guillotine.
The very paralytic who prowls the boulevard with
his hand twisted by art or nature into a cup for alms
has his social theory. It is in the character of the race.
They are constructive artists even in their vices, and
they like to feel that ^\•hat they are doing is a thing that
admits of being done with an air. The boulevard is
the happy hunting-ground of these castaways, but, be-
yond it, each one has a boulevard of his own. Here,
on off days, he too sits and sips with his mates, reads
his paper, and chucks his forlorn Thais under the chin.
In times of trouble they all descend upon the boulevard,
and play sad havoc with the furniture of existing con-
stitutions in the brief interval between the scamper of
188
A BOULEVARD ART-SHOP
THE I.IFK OF THK BOULEVARDS
the policemen and the arrival of the guard. During
the troubles at "Fort Chabrol," in the summer of 1899,
they sacked a church and defiled its altars under the
stimulus of a liberal allowance in promotion-money by
the factions interested in the proceeding. They work
by the job, and the secret agents of the Orleanist Pre-
tender know where they are to be found when the time
has come to demonstrate the need of a monarchical
savior of society.
The newspaper-hawker is sometimes of their corpora-
tion, and he is always an essential figure of the boule-
vard. This crowd that has come out for the new thing
must be fed with it, especially at night, when its mind
is most free for impressions. The busy couriers shout-
ing their wares in cavernous head voice are but one
sign of the insistence of the demand. The kiosk is,
above all things, a Parisian institution, gorged as it is
to overflowing with flying sheets and flying fancies
from every part of the planet, from every corner of the
human mind, even the foulest. Its budgets of papers
hang from the pointed roof, obscure the windows, over-
flow from the narrow ledge of the half-door into sup-
plementary counters outside. They are of all sorts —
the academic " Debats," the solid and serious " Temps,"
the wild " Libre Parole," with its sensational shriek
of the hour against the Protestants or against the
Jews.
The kiosk is a picture-gallery as well as a library, its
whole surface exhibiting a very rash of illustration, oc-
casionally symptomatic of deep-seated disease. Here,
in colored lithograph, the)' murder a w^oman, and the
red stream trickles from the knife driven to the hilt in
191
PARIS OF TO-DAY
her breast. The mincing misses of the fashion sheets
are close by. The society journals spread themselves
in large cartoons of ball and bathing-place. The
THE PASSING REGIMENT — A SCENE IN THE PLACE DE LA Rhl'lBIlQUK
"Amusing Journal" — save the mark! — displays wares
of a kind to suggest that, at last, the very Yahoos
have learned to read. The " almanacs " of the different
orders touch every social interest from religion to de-
192
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
bauchery. Add to this American and English papers,
with Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, and Levantine,
the latest pamphlets for and against everything in church
and state, the time-tables of the railways, the quota-
tions of the Bourse, and you have a hurly-burly of
imaginative suggestion amid which the old woman
who sits wedged among these explosive forces, with
her feet on a brazier, is serviceable as a fixed point.
The midnight boulevard is a sort of first " finish "
for most of the pleasures of the town. You come here
for the wind-up, if you are for keeping within the limits
of discretion. So, among the many roads leading this
way, is the Avenue of the Champs- Ely sees. These
lamp-lit gardens begin to pale their fires as the night
wears on. Very pretty they are when the lights are in
the fullness of their mellowed blaze, with the screen of
foliage to soften them still more into a suggestion of
tender mystery. I think those who see them through
the screen, that is to say, from the outside, have the
best of it. Within, these cafes have the hardness of a
cage of performing birds that sing by command. Still
the stranger must not pass them by. Their songs are
brief chronicles of the time, studies of manners, signs
of the point of view. Their singers are like such
singers everywhere, never less to be mistaken for their
betters than when they are most carefulh' dressed for
the [)art; but the business of these artists is the humor
of the moment, and their tuneful truisms are fresh from
the surface of the popular mind. It is not that what
they sing to-day Paris does to-morrow. But you may
put it the other way : they would not sing it if Paris
had not done something of the sort yesterday. So,
PARIS OF TO-DAY
one of them, figuring as an ex-cabman, tells us in
somewhat interminable verse that he has now become
the driver of a motor-car. And another — lliis time a
woman — warbles the fascinations of the little work-girl
of the capital — her smile, her mocking air.
The newcomer, who appears in the character of the
poor workman, is a social satirist. Such, he assures
you, is his positive adoration of work that he could sit
still a whole day seeing other people do it. This
means that the cafe chantant does not exactly strike the
democratic note — at any rate, when the cafe is in the
Champs- Elysees. When it is farther east, this song
would never do. Next, perhaps, we ha\e the " Polka
of the Englishes," which of course is but another shy at
the universal Aunt Sally of the Continent. Why the
American escapes in Paris I know not, but escape he
does. I have seen him from time to time in drama, but
never on the music-hall statre. Yet the Americans of
this capital, as I should judge at a guess, outnumber
the English. Chorus :
Tra la la la la, la la la la la!
Voila les Englishes ! Ach, yes ! Very well !
Tra la la la la, la la la la la !
Plats comm' des sandwiches ! Ach, yes ! Very well !
The last line is an unkind allusion to the figures of
the ladies. The singer goes on to say that when the
Englishes have made their millions in Paris they go
back to "eat" them at their ease in London. No
wonder, since they receive this hard measure from the
Paris bards.
Now it is the turn of the latest idol of the music-
194
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
halls. He figures as the common soldier, the " piou-
])i()U, " with his simple virtues of good humor and
fidelity to the flag, and his simple tastes for good eating
and drinking and fat nurse-maids — gallantry, gaiety,
and courage, the irresistible combination for the French
mind. It will be conducive to your comfort if you are
not able to understand quite all that he sings. Hap-
pily, you w ill ne\er be able to do it if \'ou have con-
fined \our studies of French to the classic models. He
and a clever songstress blaze together in the firma-
ment. Her muse is more subtle, and its eccentricities
are better composed. But composed they are. The
story goes that some art students, foreseeing the pos-
sibilities of a new music-hall type, resolved to create
a feminine decadent. Thev searched lon^r for their
model, and at length found it in this slender and
cU'chaic-looking woman. Then the}' trained her for
tones, gestures, tricks of manner — in a word, for style.
She was an apt pupil, and when they had done with
her she seemed to have stepped out of some picture of
Botticelli as the languidly graceful embodiment of all
the wickedness and cynicism of an empty day. She is
really an artist, and that is perhaps why she has lasted
so long. But let her make hay while the sun shines,
remembering a once beautiful and incomparable crea-
ture who has fallen from her high estate, and now
twinkles in a mere milky way of unmappable stars.
Nor is the man who nearly sang France into a re\olu-
tion, as the Pindar of Cjcneral Boulanger, now \er}'
much in evidence. Yet the historian of the future will
have to take account of " En Revenant de la Re\ue."
He must, howe\er, not fail to remark that the song has
PARIS OF TO-DAY
been altered to suit the times, and that, in place of
Moi j' faisais qu' admirer
Notr' brav' General Boulanger,
we must sing,
Moi tres fort je criais,
" Vive le President Loubet ! "
As the boulevard is the finish for the Champs-Ely-
sees, so Montmartre is the finish for the boulevard.
The whole hillside keeps it up very late ; in fact, one of
the cafes is open all night. Montmartre by night is a
thing that many go to see just to make sure that it is
not worth seeing. The goal of this pilgrimage is the
group of cafes, artistic, literary, and other, which are
now among the shows of Paris. They never were any-
thing but shows, as their proprietors were never any-
thin tr but showanen. Some of the Bohemians for the
decorative part of the scheme are hired precisely like
the waiters. The net result is the patronage of provin-
cials and of foreigners, especially of candid souls from
oversea who think they are looking on something
peculiarly Parisian. As a matter of fact, the showman
has these fresh importations in view from first to last.
The cafes of poets are always changing, and always
the same. At one time the Cafe of the Black Cat had
all the vogue. Then, when this grew tiresome, com-
mercial enterprise proved equal to the invention of the
Cafe of the Dead Rat. Now the names have changed
again, but not the things. The Rat was the Cat, as Cat
and Rat together are in palingenesia, in our latest birth
of time, the Red Ass, whose name might be enough to
196
THE BOULEVARD AT MIDNIGHT
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
excite misgiving in the minds of its customers. The
poets and artists of the Ouarter come here for refresh-
ment, spiritual and other ; that is the humor of it.
They are supposed to come to recite their pieces to one
another, or to show their sketches, as they might offer
their confidences of genius to the family circle, if they
had ever heard of such a thing. Their nearest ap-
proach to the conception of family is in their touching
filial relation to the landlord of the house — another
supposition expressly started for the crowd. He is their
father rather than their Uinonadier. He lets them run
up scores during the sharp frosts of the Muse. Nay,
he sometimes helps to bring them out, such is the
legend. Then, when they win fame and riches, — and
they all win these in due course, — they make him free
of their palaces in the Avenue de \'illiers, and of their
chalets at Poissy or at Ecouen.
Alas and alas ! it is all moonshine in purest ray se-
rene. The Montmartre poets are mostly an even poorer
lot in spirit than they are in purse, and they will never
be anything else. The writers and artists of repute
know nothing of these cafes, or, at most, see them once
and never see them again. Such men are mostl)'
steady as a mere condition of success. X'ictor Hugo
was temperate and a hard worker in his youth — a youth
of iron, not a youth of gold. So was Leconte de
Lisle. So was Coppee. So was Sully- Prudhomme.
De Musset sometimes took more than was good for
him, but not in places like these. The new model was
started by Verlaine, but one swallow does not make a
summer, and it is needless to say you do not exactly
imitate his talent by imitating his infirmities.
199
PARIS OF TO-DAY
Montmartrc is not so much as the Grub Street of
Paris, for Grub Street was actually productive-, and it
was at least sincere. Most of these poets and painters
are simply the failures of the schools masquerading as
the coming man. They arc put out of doors as soon
as they cease to draw. Their very wickedness is
scenic, and it bears a strong family likeness to the pota-
tions from the skull in the revels of Newstead Abbey.
The contemplative ratepayer looks in, drinks his glass
of beer, and goes his way, thanking Heaven he was not
born clever. The tourist lavs out a few francs in a
copy of a song or a copy of a volume, and writes well-
meant but misguiding letters to his native papers to
say that he has been at supper with the gods.
If the Red Ass is your mark, you must steer for the
Rue des Martyrs. Its walls are covered with pictures
and sketches, with here and there a bust of some celeb-
rity of the Quarter. There is a piano, as a matter of
course, and near it hangs a monstrous crown sur-
mounted by a star, which, from time to time, is solemnly
placed on the brows of the local master of song. The
coronation, to be fair, is sometimes a joke, and the ut-
most refinement of local humor is to offer it to the big-
gest fool of the company, and to enjoy his fatuous smile
of self-satisfaction. The room is crowded, the drinks
are in brisk demand ; and through the haze of smoke
one may get a glimpse of a sibyl of the moment in her
incantation scene of a sentimental song. It may be a
pretty song, for the singers do not always cry their
own wares. The company is too busy with itself
to pay much attention to her at the close, but it is
brought to a sense of its duties by a master of ceremo-
200
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
nies. This personage, who is in evening dress, may
possibly be a bard, but he is certainly on the staff of
the estabhshment. He calls for three rounds of ap-
plause, which are given in a French variety of the Kent-
ish fire, and the sibyl abates something of the rigor of
her frown. His business is to force the fun, and he
has evidently begun with himself by getting considera-
bly alcoholized. His hat is on the back of his head, as
though to temper the severity of his scheme of cos-
tume with a suggestion of Bohemian freedom. The
sibyl is succeeded by a young man whose song is of
" poor mad Jean," who passes for a sort of village idiot,
but who, nevertheless, apostrophizes all the pillars of
society with the most withering effect. No deputy, no
banker, no mayor in his scarf, can cross Jean's path
without a word of invective : " You take bribes." "You
get up bogus companies." "Your popular cry of the
hour is but a juggler's password." But these crafty
villains are equal to the occasion, and they juggle away
his censures with their pitying smile. " It is only
'poor mad Jean.'" One of the verses might almost
provoke Mr. Sheldon to enter an action. The song is
well written, and still better conceived. But the odd
thing is to find it but an item of an entertainment by
which the man of business who owns the establishment
is making his fortune as fast as he can. It seems to
lack conviction on the part of the management. How-
ever, it breathes the sentiment which is proper to the
quarter where the Commune made its last stand — and,
besides, there is a policeman at the door.
The Conservatoire, hard by the Place Pigalle, is just
such another cafe — sketches, paintings, portraits of
20I
PARIS Ol' TO-DAY
degenerate jjocts, ehiefly of Montmartre, a iiiotleN' com-
pany. The portrait of \'erlaine of course is not w ant-
ing-. He is the j^atron saint of these houses, and e\ery
one of them makes believe to have a shrine of his " fa-
CAFE SCAVENGERS
\orite corner." The wahs and ceihng are wrought
into the hkeness of a (lOthic vault. The songs are the
songs of the Red Ass ; the singers are sometimes the
singers of that establishment on their rounds; the ap-
])lause is manufactured, as before, by another leader of
the claque. The impression which these mechanics
labor to convey is that everybody concerned is having a
deuce of a time. Some of the poets rush from cafe to
202
THE LIFE OF THE BOULEVARDS
cafe in fcxcrish pursuit of applause, and may be found
now in the Latin Quarter, now at Montmartre, with
their baggage of a new ode. One I have visited in his
workshop on a sixth floor, and, sitting on his narrow-
bed, for want of a second chair, have had the honor
of hstening to a theory of decadent literature which I
should have thought beyond the dreams of the asylum
at Charenton. \ et he was a mild-mannered nouul''
fellow, and, as I should judge, a man of convictions,
the chief one being that you must be, abo\e all things,
desperately wicked if y(ni want to succeed in the arts.
The attempt to surpass these institutions, still for the
benefit of the same set of customers, has led to the cafes
devoted to horrors. Here the subjects are crime and
the terrors of death. It is infinitely puerile, and to con-
sider it with indignation would be to consider it to(j
seriously. The proprietors are showmen once more.
One of the weaknesses of the French is a taste for
make-believe wickedness, and they play at being
naughty as others play at being good. Their I'artiiffe,
though he is a national creation, is no national tyjje.
To make that of him we should have to turn him the
other w ay about, and portray, not a h}-pocrite of \irtue,
but a h)pocrite of vice. Thus, in the Place Pigalle,
we have a cafe of the hulks, an establishment devoted
entirely to the glorification of crime. Its proprietor
would no doubt be highly indignant with anybody who
picked his pocket or broke into his house, and would
claim the same immunity from the imputation of moral
per\ersity as the proprietor of the chamber of horrors
in a waxwork show. So he has fitted uj) his place as a
museum, w ith scraps of furniture and fittings from the
203
PARIS OF TO-DAY
old prison of Mazas, lately demolished. Here )()U
have the door of the cell in \\ hicli some famous crimi-
nal, Pranzini or other, passed his last nii;ht on earth,
with perhaps the suit of clothes in which he was exe-
cuted, or, it may be, a mortuary tablet of some other
noted hand, " guillotined on " such a day. The {]cn is
ill lighted, and to keep it in the note of doom you enter
to a kind of infernal discord due to the joint efforts of a
cracked piano and a big drum. The master of ceremo-
nies, attired as a Russian muzhik, but in black \'elvet
at that, offers you a sort of disdainful welcome, and af-
fects to regard you as a convict or a murderer at large.
The songs anci recitations are in honor of the fraternity
of crime to which you are supposed to belong. It is
dreadfully tedious, and five minutes of it is more than
enough for the most robust endurance. If you ask for
explanation, you are informed that it is a sort of object-
lesson on the theories of the realist school. The man
in velvet occasionally contributes to the harmony, in
the character of a desperate ruffian glorying in a deed
of blood, but, as one may judge, he is, at the heart of
him, a finished noodle and nincompoop. In private
conversation he alludes to the little villa in the suburbs
which is the reward of his steady attention to business.
A yawning policeman in the background takes the sting
out of the whole entertainment by showing that it is
under the protection of order and of law.
If you care for any more of it, there is a neighboring
Cafe du Neant, otherwise a cafe of nothingness or cafe
of death. There the tables at which you are served
are shaped as coffins, and the whole place is lighted with
corpse-lights. A waiter rigged up as an undertaker's
20-f
AN ARCADE
SCHHMERS TOR POLITICAL PRl-KLRMENT
man accosts you w ith a " Good evening, moribund,"
and serves you with refreshment, which, by its quahty,
seems designed to hasten your passage to the other
^\•orld. There are emblems of death all round the walls,
with mottos, such as, " To be or not to be," or " Life is
207
PARIS OF lO-DAY
a folly which Death corrects." From the cafe you
pass into a vaulted chamber at the back of the premises,
with a stage which is simply furnished with a coffin,
standing upright. A man takes his place in the coffin,
kisses his hand to the audience, and then by some optical
illusion he gradually fades away into the likeness of a
skeleton outlined in light. In a moment he comes
back to life again, steps out, and w ith a bow disap-
pears. This is the Cafe of Death.
The Cafe of the Infernal Regions, close by, is an
equally finished contrivance in absurdity. Here, as you
enter, you find yourself in a scene of penal fire, very
red, and your orders are taken by devils. Then, as
before, you troop into the room at the back, in which
twining serpents form the scheme of decoration. When
the curtain goes up, you are introduced by the show-
man to Satan, and to madame, his wife. The enemy
of mankind is simply an acrobat, dressed in red, and
illuminated with lime-light of the same color as he turns
and twists before the audience. Madame is a lady in
the scanty costume of the ballet, and she stands in
flames of many colors, and finally seems to be con-
sumed by them and to disappear. Other ladies of her
court burn down to the vanishing-point in the same way.
The final stage of this pilgrimage of tomfoolery is the
Cabaret of Heaven, a few doors farther off. Here it is
needless to say the waiters wear wings, and the place is
made up like a Gothic cathedral, while a sort of deacon
ushers customers to their places. You are then invited
to mount to the abode of bliss, and you pass into an
upper room where other members of the gang go
through a blasphemous masquerade.
208
TH1{ Lll'E OF THF. B()IM.1{VARDS
These cafes are not to be taken as a sign of the utter
wickedness and degradation of Paris. They are but a
corner of the city, at the worst, and a corner in which
A CAFE CHANTANT IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES
you will, as a rule, find more foreigners and provincials
than you will find Parisians.
The Empire, with all its faults, kept a tighter hand
on the dissipations of the capital, and, whatexer it did
on its own account, it knew how to govern in the inter-
ests of public order. If follies now enjoy more tolera-
209
PARIS OF TO-DAY
tion, it is because they are merely the accidents and the
excesses of the freedom that France has won. We
must take the good with the bad. The administration
is less powerful ; people are better able to do as they
like for good, and that implies, in rare and exceptional
instances, the power of doing as they like for e\'il. The
all-night cafes should be closed. There is a huge one
in the Rue Royale which casts a ruddy light across the
way until the dawn comes to put it to shame. By that
ray we may see the neighboring flower-market of the
Madeleine, now being stocked for the day, in time for
the morning visit of fashion. This brings us to the
boulevard once more, and, as the boulevard is at last
at peace, it had better lead us home to bed.
2 10
THE NEW I'ALAIS DES BEAUX ARTS, AS SEEN FROM THE
LEFT BANK OF THE SEINE AT NIGHT
ARTISTIC PARIS
A RT, literature, the drama, are not only the great-
/% est spiritual forces in France ; they are among
^/ ^ the greatest of national industries. A man
may purpose to live by them without having to feel
that the first step is to run away from home. There is
nothing that need shun the light in the pursuit. It
leads to no grandmotherly shaking of the head, and it
is not mentioned — at any rate, for banning, as distinct
from blessing — at family prayers.
The French are not only ready to admire a great
artist, but they are exceedingly proud to take ser-
vice in his corps. Perhaps the crowning achieve-
ment in the career of Meissonier was his instal-
ment as mayor of Poissy, his country place, a few
miles from Paris. It signified the full and perfect
acceptance of him by the ratepayer. So, while Paris
was at his feet, you might find him, in the intervals of
homage, at the beck and call of this humble commune,
laboring in its little council, and fighting the good fight
of local self-government on the question of a new foot-
path or of a new lamp. He went from the council-
215
PARIS OF rO-DAY
board to his fine chateau, and from there to his finer
mansion by the Avenue de VilHers, twin splendors that
were well-nigh the ruin of him. The last was a veri-
table palace of art. He designed it himself, or, at any
rate, he drew every detail of the wood-carving, and you
went from floor to floor by a staircase of the Italian
Renaissance, until you found the little man and the
little picture in the recesses of the shrine. Art was his
industry, and he devoted its rewards to ambitions
worthy of the king of an oil trust. He earned by tens
of thousands and spent by hundreds of thousands, and
he ended his life as a hostage in the hands of the
dealers, painting masterpiece after masterpiece to liqui-
date their claims, with only a bare percentage for his
own share. The very colorman once struck for a pay-
ment on account.
The palace near the Avenue de Villiers is the ruin of
many a good man. He begins to build as soon as he
begins to sell, and his building may soon become a
Frankenstein monster. Its claims compel him to paint
for the market, instead of painting, in the first place,
for his own good pleasure ; and that way lies the
lowest deep of ruin, the ruin of the artistic soul. Still,
the very temptation implies that his craft is, in a certain
vulgar sense, one of the most profitable of trades —
one that enables a man to look the successful grocer
in the face without a blush for the poverty of his own
calling.
So it is with all the arts in France. Happily, most
of their professors are content to live at home at ease,
and to " put by," with never a thought of sumptuary
glories. I have known a successful producer of Holy
2 l6
ARTISTIC PARIS
Families who lived in great simplicity, though his time
was worth so much that he was said to lose two hun-
dred francs every time he sat down to lunch. Degas
is another and a more honorable example of the same
sort. He has never painted for the market ; he has
painted only to please himself and a circle of devotees.
But these have been numerous enough to provide him
with all the essentials of a happy life. He paints, sells
when the wind blows a customer his way, hangs up
on his own walls what he does not sell, rails at the
Salon and at the Academy, and altogether enjoys
himself immensely in a habitation which, by com-
parison, is but a tub of Diogenes. It used to be de-
lightful to see the old man in the greenroom of the
Opera studying the flying squadrons of the ballet in
their exercises at the bar. His passion was the ren-
dering of movement — movement caught in its fugi-
tive grace of pause. His tulle in the moment of
transition to fleecy cloud, his twinkling feet on their
way to become stars of the firmament, are abiding
joys-
Nowadays, therefore, students may enter the arts,
as they have long since entered the professions, as
recognized careers commending themselves alike to
ambition and to the prudence of the chimney-corner.
The change is not confined to France. But there is
a difference. A lad who goes to school at the London
Royal Academy goes for his teaching and no more.
He still follows his earlier way of life and his social
traditions, and his day's work is only one of the things
of the day. A lad who enters the Beaux Arts at once
belongs to a veritable students' corps. He is a new
217
PARIS OF TO-DAY
man. The tDinloolerics of the reeeptiun by the class
— so often described — have still a meaning. It is
not merely that the freshman has to sing a song by
IN THE STUDIO OF A MASTER
order, to do the meanest " chores," and generally to
make an ass of himself. The real purpose is to take
the nonsense of mere individualism out of him, and to
make him feel that hereafter he belongs to a frater-
nity. The processions of the students, their mighty
2l8
ARTISTIC PARIS
hall of the four arts, their very street rows, are all
parts of the same process. Every neophyte has still
his eye on the great possibilities of his career, and a
sense of the unity that is strength. His hopes make
all his hardships easy. The horse-beef of the res-
taurants, where they manage the whole dinner of four
courses and dessert well under two francs, is only an
accident of the pursuit of glor)-. All things conspire
to put the famished customer into good conceit with
himself.
Paris lives even more obtrusively for art than it
lives for commerce. There is art everywhere — in the
streets and gardens as well as in the picture-galler-
ies, in the churches and town halls, decorated by
liberal commissions from government. The very bill-
boards are galleries of black and white. The govern-
ment does its part just as if the industry were a question
of coal or iron. It is fostering and protecting, if not
protective. The elementary-school system, as we have
already seen, is a net thrown over all France to catch
children of promise. If they do well in their rudi-
ments of drawing, they are passed on to schools where
they may do better. If they do supremely well in these
schools, they will assuredly be urged to go to the
Beaux Arts.
Of course most of the students enter that institution
without any call but the inner one. However, there
the school is, for all. It is a masterpiece of contri\-
ance to a given end, with its grade upon grade of
teaching right up to the highest. Nothing is left to
chance. You are supposed to know^ your rudiments,
and more, when you go there: it is no school for the
2 19
PARTS OF TO-DAV
a-b-c. You must bring drawings or paintings to the
professor as evidence of vocation. If he thinks there
is promise, he gives you leave to "aspire." This
means that you may enter the section of the antique,
where he will quietly keep an eye on your work. If
you fail there, you go no further. If you succeed,
you one day get your promotion to the life-class, and
rank as a member of the atelier of your chosen master.
From this time forth he takes something of a personal
interest in you. His devotion to art, if not to the
student, never fails. I have seen Gerome propped
up on a bed of sickness to look at the drawings of a
raw hand from the other side of the sea, a lad who
was not even his countryman. And remember that
men like Gerome teach \'irtually for nothing. Their
stipend from the state is ridiculous — a mere drop in
the bucket of their earnings. They come down to give
of their best to all these youngsters, from all quarters
of the world, just for love of their art and pride in it.
In the atelier you have the stimulus of all sorts of
competitions. There is the monthly contest for the
right to choose your place. The professor looks at
your work, marks it as first, second, third, and so on,
in the order of merit; and as it is marked, so you have
the right to plant your easel where you will for all the
month to come. It registers a step in honor, and it
precludes bad blood. Then comes the annual com-
petition for the medal, or a tremendous struggle for a
place in some special class. Yvon's used to be a fa-
vorite for the rigor of the game in drawing. The pro-
fessor held that, whatever else a man carried away with
him from the Beaux Arts, he should not fail to have an
220
ARTISTIC PARIS
impeccable perception of the niceties of form. The
other things were for other teaching, for other stages.
Yvon's best man was able to draw anything in any
position, and to be beyond the reach of surprise by the
eccentricities of contour. With this we have examina-
tions in history, ornament, perspective, anatomy. Stu-
dents are supposed to know something about these col-
laterals of their great subject. Many take the history
and the perspective in a perfunctory way, feeling that
the strain is not there, and that drawing and painting
are still the heart of the mystery. In the final heat for
Yvon's the few that were left did their best in a drawing
from the figure, \\hich had to be cf)mpleted in so many
days of two hours each.
Beyond this, of course, there is the struggle for the
Prix de Rome — very properly restricted to French-
men. It is something like a prize — the winner has
free quarters in the art capital of the world on a liberal
allowance from the state. The first heat is a sketch in
oils, and the result, of course, lea\'es many out of the
race. The second is a figure in oils. For the third,
the few left standing are sent to paint against one an-
other for their lives on a subject given by the school.
Now, there are all sorts of possibilities of unfair play in
a competition of this sort, and against them authority
has taken due precaution. A man ma)- get outside
help, and bring in a work that is only half his own ;
and even if he does every bit of it, he may still have
fed his invention on the contraband of borrowed ideas.
So, to prevent all that, they put him in a kind of mo-
nastic cell in the school itself, and there for three mortal
months, until his task is done, he has to live and work,
22 I
PARIS OF lO-DAY
with no communication from tlic outer world. He is
what is called en logc. He brin^^s in his own traps,
and he is as effectually under lock and key as any Chi-
nese scholar competing for the prize of Peking. The
moving-in day for the Prix de Rome is one of the sights
of the Latin Quarter, with its baggage-trains of per-
sonal gear ranging from the easel of study to the fiddle
of recreation. When it is all over, and the best man
has won, he settles for four years in the capital of Italy
to rummage at his ease in its treasure-houses of the art
of all time. ( )f course he has to rummage on a plan.
Paris requires of him a work every year, to show that
he has been making good use of his time. If this is of
unusual merit, it is bought by the government.
The Beaux Arts is an all-round institution, like most
others in France. It is for sculpture as well as for
painting; for architecture, for line-engraving ; even for
the cutting of gems. In every one of these branches
the government offers encouragement by the purchase
of good work. In every one it stores the best exam-
ples, many of them the spoil of vanquished nations, and
provides the best teaching and the best libraries of
critical and historic reference. The lectures cover the
whole field. \'et, complete as it is in itself, the great
school is only one of the sections of the Institute of
France.
The Institute is for the higher learning in all its
branches. Its five academies include the Academie
Fran^aise, which, be it remembered, is only another
sovereign state of this mighty federation of the things
of the mind. For others still, we have the academies
of Inscriptions and Belles- Lettres, of Science, and of
222
WORKING FOR THE I'RIX DE ROME
ARTISTIC PARIS
Moral and Political Sciences. In its cnlircts' it is a
sort of " pKiuirc within for everythinj;- " — 1 'Vance luxu-
riating in the sense of universalisni of master\' over
all that pertains to knowledge. Nothing ought to come
amiss to it. When the Chinaman in " Cham's " carica-
ture boggles over the bill of fare, the waiter leads him
by his pigtail to the Institute to ask for an interpreter.
Literature is another of the great industries, for
France still does a consideral)le export tratle in that
article. Nothing is wasted. The still-born fiction of
the year is regularly exported to South America as the
latest rage of the boulevard. Most of its job lots are
simply paradoxes that have failed. The French are
always on the lookout for the new thing, and this is at
once the worst danger of their literature and its alluring
charm. They have their spring patterns in ideas, as in
muslins, and a fashion seldom outlasts the season. The
literary schools are about as short-lived as the govern-
ments, and founders come and go just like ministers of
state. You meet young fellows who have had their
day — graybeards of failure still with raven locks. For
they must be very young at the start. Paris likes them
tender, since she means to eat them up. I have known
a lad of parts quite put out because his " system " was
not ready for publication before he had turned eighteen.
France believes in youth just because of her age. The
contact warms her blood. She has believed in it more
than ever since the German war. The school-boy lauds
it in all the arts, and the salons discover an infant
prodigy every day. It leads to some waste of effort,
of course. The eccentricities of these young men in a
hurry are appalling. Critical indignation is thrown
225
PARIS OF lO-DAY
away upon thcni, and the only corrective is the rude
justice of their struggle for survival.
The history of French schools from the beginning of
the century is a history of nature working by tooth and
claw. The pure romantics, after a vigorous attempt to
destroy the classicists, were themselves destroyed by
their own offspring of diabolism, as these, in turn, fell
before the romantics of the epileptic variety. These
revolutions in art devour their own children, just like
the others ; and there is always a Mountain brooding
rapine at the expense of the fatness of tlie plain. The
Parnassians and the plastics, who swept the last roman-
tics out of the field, are themselves only a memory.
It seems a far cry to the time when the first care of
the intellio'ent forei'^ner on reachinsj' the boulevard was
to buy the latest volume of the " Parnasse Contempo-
rain." Charming little \'olumes they all were, creamy
to the eye and to the mind. But their cream is now
the yellow of age, and they mature for the collectors in
covers of price. What futile headaches are between the
boards !
Zola and his naturalists are graybeards in every
sense, yet it seems not so \'ery long since they went out
every day to take the scalps of the sachems of more
ancient lodges, and seldom returned without a trophy.
They were wont to celebrate their triumphs by feasts in
tlie w igwam of the patron, with much boiled and roast,
and still more talk, in the twilight, of that literature of
dautier and his mates to which they had given the
death-blow, and of the other literature which was to
take its place. Of this last, " O king, live forever!"
was to be read between the lines on every page. Well,
226
ARTISTIC PARIS
well, \\ here is it now ? P.ut why say more than Mr.
Justice Shallow has said ah-cad\' — "All shall die"?
te'- ^
X
^*\.
^ m.
MEMBERS OF THE EKENCll Al'.ADh.MY. AFTER A SESSION, CROSSING
THE PONT Ui;S ARTS FROM THE INSTITLTE
And has not Beranp^er sung the " old clo' " of the war-
riors who ha\c IkuI their day? The imperious neces-
sity of the new thing dro\ e the disciples themselves into
227
PARIS OF lO-DAY
revolt ajj^ainst the master, and one b)' one they set up
rival schools, and demolished him in epis^rammatic
prefaces — generally the best things in their books.
For naturalism is by no means to be confounded with
naturism, which is one of our later births of time. The
schools generate just as the midges do, and each may
suffice for its hour. One springs out of the other.
" Rousseau," said Tocque\'ille, " begat Bernardin de
St.-Pierre, who begat Chateaubriand, who begat X'ictor
Hugo, who, being tempted of the devil, is begetting
e\'ery day." It might be put in still another ^^■ay :
Zola hunted Hugo, Huysmans hunted Zola, and now
Saint-Georges de Bouhelier hunts Huysmans. and \\ ith
him the symbolists and the decadents. This stripling's
new pattern for the shop-windows is the rehabilitation
of virtue, and the simplicity of nature, — always, of
course, of nature as an article de Paris, — and the re-
establishment of the old friendly relations " between the
])lant, the bird, and the emotion of a man." It is all very
well, but it tends to bring literature down to a question
of mere procedure, and to reduce its entire ])riest-
hood to a gang of workmen squabbling over the
make of their tools. Lemaitre is right ; if we do not
take care, letters will become but " a mysterious di-
version of mandarins." The peril drew \'ery near when
Stevenson tried to reduce the magic of a fine passage
from " Troilus and Cressida " to a series of cunning al-
ternations of p. V. f. s.'sand p. s. f. v.'s. Amid all these
distracted and distracting novelties \\e have Brunetiere
still hitting out for the classical tradition, as Nisard hit
out in Hugo's time — striking too short at Zola and the
naturalists ; at Lemaitre and at Anatole France as mere
228
ARTISTIC PARIS
impressionists of criticism ; at modern science for its
" bankruptcy " in regard to the solution of the mystery
ofbeintr. He would bring all these innovators under
the wholesale tyranny of great critical laws, and teach
them that indi\iilua]ism is the enemy, alike in art
and faith. Xo wonder that Edouard Rod, with an
equal concern for indixidualism and for law, is one of
the most interesting literary figures of the day.
The literature is backed by the institutions, above all
by the French Academy. It is an error to suppose that
the Academy exists mainly for the purification of the
language and for the completion of the dictionary.
Its great aim is the production of the normal man
of letters, the ec[uipoised personality of wisdom, wit,
gravity, gaiety, the harmony of sometimes conflicting
opposites which old-fashioned people look for in the per-
fect writer. This product of fancy is as exc[uisitely
proportioned as a (^reek temple. All his powers are
subordinate to soxereign reason, working in a metlium
of good taste. Taste is the enemy of excess, so he has
to be not too much of anything, but just exactly enough
— a sort of Grandison of the desk.
The attempt to create such a type in its wider appli-
cation to life at large has been the delight of every age.
Newman sketched it with a master hand in his character
of the gentleman. The gentleman of his and the British
ideal is verv much the perfect writer of the French ideal.
Our greatest stress of admiration lies in the domain of
manners; theirs in the domain of the arts. Newman's
great exemplar carefully avoids whatever may cause a
jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast,
lie is against all clashing of ttpinion, all collision of
229
PARIS OF TO-DAY
fcclini;', all restraint or suspicion or gloom or resentment,
his concern being to make every one at case and at
home. He has his eyes on all his company ; he is
tender toward the bashful, gentle toward the distant,
merciful toward the absurd. lie guards against un-
seasonable allusions or topics. He is seldom prominent
in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light
of favors while he does them, and seems to be recei\ing
when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself,
and, except when compelled, never defends himself by
a mere retort; has no ears for slander or gossip; is
scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere
with him; interprets everything for the best. He is
never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair
advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp say-
ings for argument, or insinuates evil which he dare not
say out. In short, he is "just so."
Of course he is only Chesterfield, with the difference
of the application to ethical character, and Chesterfield,
it is needless to say, was French to the lieart's core.
That noble lord's ideal in manners is the Academy's
ideal in literary art. His forgotten and overmuch de-
rided letters should be read again as a help to the com-
prehension of this singular institution whose concern is
the good breeding of style. Where he enjoins dignity
of demeanor, and warns against horse-play, romping,
loud fits of laughter, jokes, and waggishness in com-
pany, the Academy condemns their analogues in books.
The man who takes the floor in print is, in the Acad-
emy's \'\c\\-, only the buffoon of a larger society than
the one that Chesterfield had in his mind. As the good
little child of nursery ethics is seen, not heard, so the
230
VARNISHING DAY AT THE SALON
ARTISTIC PARIS
good littK' w I'itcr of the academic ideal is heard, l)iit not
seen. Lie low in self-assertion; disdain to shine l)y
tricks, says the Academy. \Vhoe\eris known in com-
pany, says my lord, for the sake of any one thing singly,
is singly that thing, and will ne\er be considered in
any other light. It is the plea for universals, for bal-
ance. Chesterfield's contempt for the man who boasted
that he had written for three years with the same pen,
and that it was an e.xcellent good one still, is the Acad-
emy to a hair. It was an individualizing l)oast, and
the <'rand style knows nothing' of indi\idualism. His
horror of those who haye a constant smirk on the face
and a " whiffling" (precious word) acti\'ity of the body
may be matched by the Academy's horror of the pro-
fessional humorist. His scorn of proverbs and of cant
sayings is the Academy's scorn of cheap and easy refer-
ence. His atlmiration of the man who comes into
company without the least bashfulness or sheepishness,
but w ith a modest confidence and ease, is the Acad-
emy's admiration of the writer who makes no attempt
to recommend his work by tricks of apology, but just
leaves it to speak for itself. His pregnant saying that
the wise man will live at least twice as much within
his wit as within his income is the Academy once
more.
That illustrious body, as it is ever represented in
French critical literature by some great pedagogic
figure, is constantly rapping the whole class of success-
ful writers o\'er the knuckles, and ordering them to
leave ofi' making a nt)ise. It was represented b)' Xi-
sard when the fierce torrent of romanticism burst over
the classic plain ; it is represented to-da}' by Brune-
233
PARIS OF TO-DAV
ticrc, wlio may he fi<;'urctl as some weary schoolmaster
floggini; an unrul\- class — rtt)gging till he tlrops. He
has flogged them all in turn, — I'laubert, Zola, Daudet,
Loti,and Maupassant. — yet still, somehow, too much of
their lawless riot goes on, with all the base trickery of
the devices by which the\- win the kingship of their
despicable w^orld. It is nothing to the purpose to say
that those he castigates are sometimes of his own
household. He would flog half his brother Academi-
cians, if he dared, for their occasional treason to the
tradition.
The tragedy of his life is that the balanced man has
gone out of fashion, and that the shifting, wayward
million has come into the. judgment-seat. These law-
givers of an hour, careless of what is true, ever demand
something new, and the popular writer prefers a first
place in the meanest village to a second in Rome itself.
Tocquexille, who in politics could judge on the evi-
dence, was the slave of tradition in literature. For him
the seventeenth century was the last of the great style,
and its goose-quill was the true pen of gold. Men
wrote for fame, he said, as fame was bestowed by the
small but enlightened public. A century later the pro-
cess of disintegration had begun. Manner took the
place of matter ; ornament was added, since clearness
and brevity were no longer enough. In a succeeding
age the ornamental ran into the grotesque, just as the
clear style of the old Norman architecture gradually
became florid, and ultimately flamboyant. For these
principles of liking and of aversion the French Academy
stands ; on these principles it was created ; and, to pro-
mote them, it has become a dictionary-maker only as a
23+
ARTISTIC PARIS
means to an end. The rit^Hit word in literature is only
its test of the rit^ht thing-.
Hence the philosophy of the Academic discourse.
The occasions of such discourses are easily found. A
member dies ; another member takes his place. The
newcomer has to pronounce a eulogy on his predeces-
sor ; a member, deputed by the Academy, pronounces
a eulogy on both. It is merely an opportunity of show-
ing by example how a discourse shcnild be written. It
is a masterpiece of the most elaborate art. It must not
contain a single expression foreign to the usage of the
best writers. It must not contain a single thought
that is too obtrusive in form or in manner. It must deal
with the whole subject as if men dwelt in a paradise of
reason, temper, urbanity, taste, and all the virtues, set
off by all the graces. It assumes the like perfection in
its auditory. The discourse is polished to the last
turn, — by the writer himself in the first instance, by the
Academy in the second, — until it shines without glit-
ter, like so much table-talk of the gods.
When M. Dufaure departs this life, early in the eigh-
ties, M. Cherbuliez takes his place. M. Cherbuliez
pronounces the discourse on M. Dufaure. M. Renan,
director of the Academy, replies to M. Cherbuliez. M.
Renan, after his wont, is unctuously appreciative, can-
did, tolerant — in short, everything that human beings
might be if they were able to send in specifications for
their own make-up before birth. M. Cherbuliez has
nothing but nice things to say of M. Dufaure's career
in politics and in public life. M. Renan has nothing
but nice things to say of M. Cherbuliez for having
said them. " M. Dufaure [I do not translate literally]
^3S
PARIS OF TO-DAY
belonged to an age when political life was l)ut a tourney
between rivals full of courtesy, who had a jjcrfcct un-
derstanding in regard to fundamentals. lie could
make allowance for political opponents. He had none
of the spirit of party which was the bane of politics later
on. To the eight Beatitudes of the Gospel I am some-
times tempted to add a ninth: ' Happy the blind, for
they alone are sure of everything.' \Vc thank you,
monsieur, for having set before us, in enduring praise,
this generous and noble character," and so on. M.
Cherbuliez was a Swiss who had become a naturalized
Frenchman, and had joined his new country shortly
after the war. It was necessary to say as much with
discretion and with taste. " How well you chose your
hour, monsieur, to attach yourself anew to a country
from w hich you had been separated by a fatal error of
the politics of the past ! The issue of one of our Prot-
estant families compelled two centuries ago to choo.se
between their nationality and their freedom of thought,
you have always cherished an affectionate sentiment for
the land of your fathers. While France prospered,
that was enough for you. But there came a moment
when this venerable mother, abandoned by those who
owed her most, had to bear the taunt, ' She saved others;
herself she cannot save.' On that day, when ingrati-
tude became one of the laws of the world, you felt a
new love for your country of the past, and you conse-
crated your talent to a vancjuished cause."
The thing is said, in a certain sense, just for the sake
of saying it, and no one cares to apply to it the test of
sincerity, so long as it bears the test of expression.
The Academy exists to get it said well, and to set off
236
A I-IRST NIGHT AT THE THKATRF FRANQAIS
ARTISTIC PARIS
precept by exam))le. The one condition, the one
sovereign obHgation, is the grand style, the grand
manner. At another time the author of the " Dame
aux Camehas" discourses on virtue at the distribution
of the Montyon prizes. His tongue may be in his
cheek all the while, but it does not spoil his accent,
and that is enough.
The evil is that the Academy has brought this solici-
tude for form so far that some who live by its laws have
hardly a word to bless themselves with. They are like
those masters of fence who are afflicted with a sort of
paralysis of the power to attack. With the everlasting
refinement of style, the writing of Academic French has
become the labor of a lifetime. You had better say
nothing than say anything less than perfectly well.
Hence a misunderstanding between the Academy and
the world that is \ery much like the misunderstanding
between the church and the world. The Academy is
apt to be remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow in regard
to the time-spirit as it moves. It clutches now and then
at the skirts of a celebrity just to show that it is not
altogether out of the running, but, in its heart of hearts,
it would fain do without him and resume its quietism of
the worship of ancestors. It recognizes no books that
are not formally sent in for its approval. It never seeks
out a work, but waits until the author inxitcs a judg-
ment ; and if he is too proud or too modest to present
himself before the judgment-seat, it leaves him without
notice. Hence, as M. Zola complained, in a notable
diatribe, it affects ignorance of nearly the whole body
of contemporary literature. Only the mediocrities, it is
said, send in for the ceremony of the " coronation," and,
239
PARIS OF TO-DAY
necessarily, none but they receive the crown. With ail
this, the Academy is true, after a fashion, to the purpose
of its being — the production of the perfect gentleman of
the printed page, a perfect gentleman, it may be re-
marked, who enjoys a good deal of latitude of manners
when out of his uniform of pen and ink.
The drama and music are other great interests backed
by other great institutions. The state does just as much
for them as it does for the vine, the beet, or the codfish.
It subventions them, when needful, keeps them in good
technical repair. It helps the stage of Paris by helping
the Frangais and the Odeon, as also the Conservatoire
in the dramatic department of that multiplex personality.
These things in France are of such as go on forever.
For all that, there are changes, and the most wholesome
of them is that the actor is rapidly acquiring a proper
social status. He has yet to acquire it full) : to this day,
in this land of players, the player is still under a ban.
Many affect to regard him as merely a cabotiii — a
stroller, or barn-stormer, to wit. ( )f course they do it
only w hen they are angry, and when they do it, they
know that they are doing wrong.
When Octave Mirbeau, forgetful of the time of day,
once wrote an insolent attack on the profession, a hundred
challenges came to him by return of post, and he seemed
to stand in a ring of s\\ ords that were by no means the
toys of the property-roorii. Yet there was quite a com-
motion in the Le<.rion of Honor when Got, the veteran
of the Frangais, received the Cross — Got, who had done
so very much for French culture and happiness. How-
ever, it frightened the minister, and he held back a like
decoration which Got's comrade, Delaunay, thought he
240
ARTISTIC PARIS
had every right to expect. The disappointed artist
took strong measures. He announced his retirement,
and began to give farewell performances. The Fran-
gais could not do without him, and the repentant minis-
ter had to come down in a hurry and decorate him
behind the scenes. Perhaps the highest register of rec-
ognition was attained when Coquelin was seen arm in
arm with (iambetta at the height of his power. Before
that, the dramatic patronage of great men was con-
fined exclusively to the ladies of the stage, and was
more or less without prejudice to the denial of social
claims.
The new state of things has its attendant evils. If
you bring the actor into the great world, he naturally
wishes to live according to its laws, and that costs
money. A fine house, a dainty picture-gallery, —
Coquelin has one of the choicest in this line, — and
stylish entertainments are essentially things of price.
So, of late years, there has been a tendency among lead-
ing actors to break away from the Frangais, or to in-
troduce the starring system, for their own benefit, into
the House of Moliere. The old system — happily, it
ought rather to be called the still existing one — was
altogether against that practice. The company was a
community, and, though there were some differences in
the pay according to talent and standing, all full mem-
bers shared profits in due proportion. They were
theoretically equal, and sometimes the most distin-
guished of them gave practical proof of it by taking the
humblest parts. Once in the brotherhood, you were
never to be out of it, except by your own default of con-
duct or desire. You could look forward to a pension
241
PARIS OF TO-DAY
and a handsome lump sum on retirement, and the bonus
made a substantial addition to your salary.
Sarah Bernhardt was the first to tire of this. She
listened to the tempter who invited her to star for her
own benefit in the four quarters of the globe, and she
broke loose from the great house by the simple process
of breaking her engagement. The administration sued
her ; she was cast in heavy damages ; she never paid
them, and she never came back. Coquelin, tempted in
the same way, quarreled with his mates because they
denied him long vacations, which it was notorious he
meant to use by starring on his own account.
It is to be hoped that the present reconstruction of
the Frangais may include some better provision for the
security of the historic treasures. They symbolize the
history of the French stage in their paintings, engrav-
ings, drawings, marbles, each a memory of a rich and
glorious past. The mere historical properties are
worthy of a state museum. The walking-sticks have
been actual playthings of generations of dandies who
have lived for "the nice conduct of a clouded cane."
The bell that sounds the death-knell in " Marion De-
lorme " is fabled as the \cry bell that gave the signal
for the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The arm-chair
in which Moliere had his fatal seizure while playing in
his own piece is still used in " Le Malade Imaginaire."
The company of such a house is bound to take itself
seriously, and this one does so. At a rehearsal of
" Ruy Bias," I once saw them dispute by the hour as
to the particular way in which a handkerchief should be
dropped and a handkerchief picked up again. When
Mounet-Sully was disposed to be a little too noisy in
242
'UBI.U: COMPF.TITION AT THE CONSERVATOIRE
ARTISTIC PARIS
an invocation to a departed spirit, he was reminded that
it was hopeless to attempt to call the hero from his
grave. They still play the " Malade " on an almost
absolutely bare stage, just as they did when it was
written, but in many of the modern pieces they now
condescend to fine scenery. The late M. Sarcey was
forever worrying the administration on this point, and
at last they met him half-w^ay, but still only half. The
decorations are always kept in a certain classic subordi-
nation to the te.xt and the playing. The " fashionable
night," when the best seats are let to persons who are
known by their names rather than by their works, is
another concession to the spirit of the age. In the old
days every night was a night of really noteworthy
people who had dropped in, not to be seen, but only to
see the play. The first night is still what it has ever
been, one of the most wonderful scenes of civilized life.
The other state theater in Paris, the Odeon, occupies
a lower rank. It is sometimes used as a sort of half-
way house between the Francais and the outer world,
where plays or authors on which the greater institution
has its eye may be tried without a compromise of
dignity. With this view, M. Antoine, the actor-
manager of the Theatre Libre, was once made director
of the Odeon. He represented much that the Francais
hated, but the public were beginning to take to him,
and it was thought prudent to give him a trial. He had
an idea of a totally new kind of drama, — realistic,
naturalistic, or what not, — in which the stage was to be
little more than an enlarged photograph of actual life,
with humdrum verities just as they pass. This was a
reaction against the highly wrought constructive drama
24.5
PARIS OF rO-DAV
of Sardou, and the still more highly wrought philosophi-
cal drama of Dumas, wherein everything is arranged to
a given end. The Prancais itself, I remember, toyed
with the innovation by mounting a piece of Henri
Becque called " Les Corbeaux," which was all but
sterile of incident, and as tailless as a Manx cat. There
was no end to speak of, and no plot, except that
a rascally lawyer, who had ruined a family, took a
fancy to one of the daughters, and won her, though
she despised him with all her heart. She married
just to save the others, and the exasperating curtain fell
without any reward of \irtue or punishment of \ice.
The author's theory was that so things happen in real
life. He was equally faithful to reality in the dialogue,
which seldom rose abo\'e utter commonplace.
It did not answer. But Antoine, who was of
Becque's school, had better fortune, owing to the star-
tling novelty of his histrionic method. He held that
character should be represented, not in its many-sided-
ness, but in its dominant note, and that this insistent
Leitmotiv should be kept remorselessly before the audi-
ence in every detail of the performance. Since then
there have been all sorts of other experiments — in
dramatic symbolism, dramatic mysticism, and anything
else you please. Such things may be right or wrong,
but they are the life of art, as laboratory work is the
life of science. The artist who has ceased to be curious
has entered upon his decline.
Music is cared for in much the same way. The
French Opera is not merely for performances. It is an
Academy of Music, and that is its full title. It is sub-
ventioned by the state as one of the great teaching
246
ARllSllC TARIS
institutions — a sort of school of application for the
Conservatoire. The house is somethinsj of a white
elephant, for its keep is dear. It has sometimes ruined
l\ THK Rl-AOlNTi-ROOM AT THI- NATIONAI. LIBRARY
directors who have held under the state on the system
of a public grant in aid for expenses, supplemented by
their own private investments. The state makes too
many conditions. The Opera has too many privileges.
The ladies of the ballet, nay, the very scene-shifters in
PARIS OF lO-DAY
their corporate capacity, are sometimes a thorn in the
flesh to manafjers. The buildin*^ itself entails enor-
mous expense, and its palatial splendors are by no
means confined to the front of the house. The green-
room of the dance is a marvel of painting, carving, and
all the allied arts. The ballets themselves are an es-
sential part of the performance, for the Opera is a school
of dancing as well as a school of music.
The Conservatory of Music is managed in much the
same way as the School of Fine Arts. The students
get the best teaching in the world. They, too, have
their Prix de Rome, or great traveling studentship, and
they compete for it by an cittrce cii loge. They are
shut up for some days in close custody for the com-
position of a cantata, and the winning piece is finally
performed at the Institute. Some of the greatest mu-
sicians of the time take the classes, or sit in judgment
on the work. It is sometimes a tedious task, as one
and the same composition is rendered over and over
again by successive students. Auber, it is said, used
to sit up the whole night before the competition, just
to sharpen his appetite for sleep for the following after-
noon. It is not true, though that consideration, of
course, has scarcely any place in the ethics of anecdote.
Its defect lies in the falsity to character and circum-
stance. The note of the race is its devotion to art. Art
is almost the only real- priesthood left in France, and
by that, or nothing. Frenchmen hope to be saved. In
its various forms it is regarded as a working substitute
for religion. It probably is not, in the full measure in
which they pin their faith to it ; but that is nothing to
the purpose. They think it is. It might become so,
if they suffered it to recover its old alliance with moral
248
ARTISIIC: PARIS
ideals. But they have banished these from the partner-
ship, forgetting that mere exercises in virtuosity can
never sufifice to the spirit of man. The point is that,
in things which they regard as serious, the French
are among the most serious and purposeful peoples in
the world. Their position in literature, in painting, in
music, in the sciences, is theirs by no accident. They
work for it with their whole heart and soul, and adapt
means to ends as patiently as the maker of a watch.
They are a people founded in institutions ; when they
come to grief, it is because the institutions have got out
of repair. The fate reserved for them in the providence
of God is God's secret. Whatev-er it be, they may say
w^ith Dryden, in his noble paraphrase :
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power ;
But what has been, has been, ;uk1 I have had mv hour.
A "monome" (procession of students)
249
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BY RICHARD WHITEING
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WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ANDRE CAS T A I ON E