He will not believe that his time has come and gone, and that Paris has no memory, and no desire but to see and to hear some new thing. She has taken his money and eaten his dinners and hung his pictures once or twice in a good place; but, now that his money is gone, Paris has other dinners to eat, and other statues to admire, and no leisure time to spend at his dull receptions, which have taken the place of his rare dinners, or to climb to his garret when there is a more amusing and more modern painter on the first floor.

Paris is full of these poor hangers-on, who have allowed her to use them and pat them on the back, and who cannot see that her approbation is not the only reward worth the striving for, but who go on year after year tagging in her train, beseeching her to take some notice of them. They are like the little boys who run beside the coaches and turn somersaults to draw a copper from the passengers on top, and who are finally left far behind, unobserved and forgotten beside the dusty road. The wise man and the sensible man takes the button or the medal or the place on a jury that Paris gives him, and is glad to get it, and proud of the recognition and of the source from which it comes, and then continues on his way unobserved, working for the work's sake. He knows that Paris has taught him much, but that she has given him all she can, and that he must now work out his own salvation for himself.

Or, if he be merely an idler visiting Paris for the summer, he takes Paris as an idler should, and she receives him with open arms. He does not go there to spend four hours a day, or even four hours a week, in the serious occupation of leaving visiting-cards. He does not invite the same people with whom he dined two weeks before in New York to dine and breakfast with him again in Paris, nor does he spend every afternoon in a frock-coat watching polo, or in flannels playing lawn-tennis on the Île de Puteaux. He has tennis and polo at home. Nor did he go all the way to Paris to dance in little hot apartments, or to spend the greater part of each day at the race-tracks of Longchamps or Auteuil. The Americans who do these things in Paris are a strange and incomprehensible class. Fortunately they do not form a large class, but they do form a conspicuous one, and while it really does not concern any one but themselves as to how they spend their time, it is a little aggravating to have them spoiling the local color of a city for which they have no real appreciation, and from which they get no more benefit than they would have received had they remained at home in Newport.

They treat Paris as they would treat Narragansett Pier, only they act with a little less restraint, and are very much more in evidence. They are in their own environment and in the picture at the Pier or at the Horse Show, and if you do not like it you are at perfect liberty to keep out of it, and you will not be missed; but you do object to have your view of the Arc de Triomphe cut in two by a coach-load of them, or to have them swoop down upon D'Armenonville or Maxim's on the boulevards, calling each other by their first names, and running from table to table, and ordering the Hungarians to play "Daisy Bell," until you begin to think you are in the hall of the Hotel Waldorf, and go out into the night to hear French spoken, if only by a cabman.

I was on the back seat of a coach one morning in the Bois de Boulogne, watching Howlett give a man a lesson in driving four horses at once.

It was very early, and the dew was still on the trees, and the great, broad avenues were empty and sweet-smelling and green, and I exclaimed on the beauty of Paris. "Beautiful?" echoed Howlett. "I should say it was, sir. Now in London, sir, all the roads lie so straight there's no practice driving there. But in Paris it's all turns and short corners. It's the most beautiful city in the world." I thought it was interesting to find a man so wrapped up in his chosen work that he could see nothing in the French capital but the angles which made the driving of four horses a matter of some skill. But what interest can you take in those Americans who have been taught something else besides driving, and who yet see only those things in Paris that are of quite as little worth as the sharp turns of the street corners?

You wonder if it never occurs to them to walk along the banks of the Seine and look over the side at the people unloading canal-boats, or clipping poodles, or watering cavalry horses, or patiently fishing; if they never pull over the books in the stalls that line the quays, or just loiter in abject laziness, with their arms on the parapet of a bridge, with the sun on their backs, and the steamboats darting to and fro beneath them, and with the towers of Notre Dame before and the grim prison of the Conciergerie on one side. Surely this is a better employment than taking tea to the music of a Hungarian band while your young friends from Beverly Farms and Rockaway knock a polo-ball around a ten-acre lot. I met two American women hurrying along the Rue de Rivoli one morning last summer who told me that they had just arrived in Paris that moment, and were about to leave two hours later for Havre to take the steamer home.

"So," explained the elder, "as we have so much time, we are just running down to the Louvre to take a farewell look at 'Mona Lisa' and the 'Winged Victory;' we won't see them again for a year, perhaps." Their conduct struck me as interesting when compared with that of about four hundred other American girls, who never see anything of Paris during their four weeks' stay there each summer, because so much of their time is taken up at the dress-makers'. It is pathetic to see them come back to the hotel at five, tired out and cross, with having had to stand on their feet four hours at a time while some mysterious ceremony was going forward. It is hard on them when the sun is shining out-of-doors and there are beautiful drives and great art galleries and quaint old chapels and curious museums and ancient gardens lying free and open all around them, that they should be compelled to spend four weeks in this fashion.

There was a young woman of this class of American visitors to Paris who had just arrived there on her way from Rome, and who was telling us how much she had delighted in the galleries there. She was complaining that she had no more pictures to enjoy. Some one asked her what objection she had to the Louvre or the Luxembourg.

"Oh, none at all," she said; "but I saw those pictures last year."

These are the Americans who go to Paris for the spring and summer only, who live in hotels, and see little of the city beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue of the Champs ÉlysÉes and their bankers'. They get a great deal of pleasure out of their visit, however, and they learn how important a thing it is to speak French correctly. If they derive no other benefit from their visit they are sufficiently justified, and when we contrast them with other Americans who have made Paris their chosen home, they almost shine as public benefactors in comparison.

For they, at least, bring something back to their own country: themselves, and pretty frocks and bonnets, and a certain wider knowledge of the world. That is not much, but it is more than the American Colony does.

[Pg 187-88]

There is something fine in the idea of a colony, of a body of men and women who strike out for themselves in a new country, who cut out their homes in primeval forests, and who make their peace with the native barbarians. The Pilgrim Fathers and the early settlers in Australia and South Africa and amidst the snows of Canada were colonists of whom any mother-nation might be proud; but the emigrants who shrink at the crudeness of our present American civilization, who shirk the responsibilities of our government, who must have a leisure class with which to play, and who are shocked by the familiarity of our press, are colonists who leave their country for their country's good. The American Colony in Paris is in a strange position. Its members are neither the one thing nor the other. They cannot stand in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe and feel that any part of its glory falls on them, nor can they pretend an interest in the defeat of Tammany Hall, nor claim any portion in the magnificent triumph of the Chicago Fair. Their attitude must always be one of explanation; they are continually on the defensive; they apologize to the American visitor and to the native Frenchman; they have declined their birthright and are voluntary exiles from their home. The only way by which they can justify their action is either to belittle what they have given up, or to emphasize the benefits which they have received in exchange, and these benefits are hardly perceptible. They remain what they are, and no matter how long it may have been since they ceased to be Americans, they do not become Frenchmen. They are a race all to themselves; they are the American Colony.

On regular occasions this Colony asserts itself, but only on those occasions when there is a chance of its advertising itself at the expense of the country it has renounced. When this chance comes the Colonists suddenly remember their former home; they rush into print, or they make speeches in public places, or buy wreaths for some dead celebrity. Or when it so happens that no one of prominence has died for some time, and there seems to be no other way of getting themselves noticed, the American Colony rises in its strength and remembers Lafayette, and decorates his grave. Once every month or so they march out into the country and lay a wreath on his tomb, and so for the moment gain a certain vogue with the Parisians, which is all that they ask. They do not perform this ceremony because Lafayette fought in America, but because he was a Frenchman fighting in America, and they are playing now to the French galleries and not to the American bleaching-boards. There are a few descendants of Lafayette who are deserving of our sincere sympathy. For these gentlemen are brought into the suburbs many times a year in the rain and storm to watch different American Colonists place a wreath on the tomb of their distinguished ancestor, and make speeches about a man who left his country only to fight for the independence of another country, and not to live in it after it was free. Some day the descendants of Lafayette and the secretaries of the American embassy will rise up and rebel, and refuse to lend themselves longer to the uses of these gentlemen.

They will suggest that there are other graves in Paris. There is, for instance, the grave of Paul Jones, who possibly did as much for America on the sea as Lafayette did on shore. If he had only been a Frenchman, with a few descendants of title still living who would consent to act as chief mourners on occasion, his spirit might hope to be occasionally remembered with a wreath or two; but as it is, he is not to be considered with the French marquis, who must, we can well imagine, turn uneasily beneath the wreaths these self-advertising patriots lay upon his grave.

The American Colony is not wicked, but it would like to be thought so, which is much worse. Among some of the men it is a pose to be considered the friend of this or that particular married woman, and each of them, instead of paying the woman the slight tribute of treating her in public as though they were the merest acquaintances, which is the least the man can do, rather forces himself upon her horizon, and is always in evidence, not obnoxiously, but unobtrusively, like a pet cat or a butler, but still with sufficient pertinacity to let you know that he is there.

As a matter of fact the women have not the courage to carry out to the end these affairs of which they hint, as have the French men and women around them whose example they are trying to emulate. And, moreover, the twenty-five years of virtue which they have spent in America, as Balzac has pointed out, is not to be overcome in a day or in many days, and so they only pretend to have overcome it, and tell risquÉs stories and talk scandalously of each other and even of young girls. But it all begins and ends in talk, and the risquÉs stories, if they knew it, sound rather silly from their lips, especially to men who put them away when they were boys at boarding-school, and when they were so young that they thought it was grand to be vulgar and manly to be nasty.

It is a question whether or not one should be pleased that the would-be wicked American woman in Paris cannot adopt the point of view of the Parisian women as easily as she adopts their bonnets. She tries to do so, it is true; she tries to look on life from the same side, but she does not succeed very well, and you may be sure she is afraid and a fraud at heart, and in private a most excellent wife and mother. If it be reprehensible to be a hypocrite and to pretend to be better than one is, it should also be wrong to pretend to be worse than one dares to be, and so lend countenance to others. It is like a man who shouts with the mob, but whose sympathies are against it. The mob only hears him shout and takes courage at his doing so, and continues in consequence to destroy things. And these foolish, pretty women lend countenance by their talk and by their stories to many things of which they know nothing from experience, and so do themselves injustice and others much harm. Sometimes it happens that an outsider brings them up with a sharp turn, and shows them how far they have strayed from the standard which they recognized at home. I remember, as an instance of this, how an American art student told me with much satisfaction last summer of how he had made himself intensely disagreeable at a dinner given by one of these expatriated Americans. "I didn't mind their taking away the character of every married woman they knew," he said; "they were their own friends, not mine; but I did object when they began on the young girls, for that is something we haven't learned at home yet. And finally they got to Miss ——, and one of the women said, 'Oh, she has so compromised herself now that no one will marry her.'"

At which, it seems, my young man banged the table with his fist, and said: "I'll marry her, if she'll have me, and I know twenty more men at home who would be glad of the chance. We've all asked her once, and we're willing to ask her again."

[Pg 195-96]