When you hear the postman’s loud rat-tat at your door, do not rush with joy to your letter-box, for instead of a reply which you have been impatiently awaiting, you may find a little snare, conceived in the following terms:

R.S.V.P.! The hint is good, act upon it: RÉsistez Si Vous Pouvez. Use a little diplomacy, of course: “Mr. X. presents his compliments to Mrs. John Bull, and regrets exceedingly that an engagement already made by Mrs. X. will prevent him from availing himself of her kind invitation for the.....” That’s it. Do not forget to name Mrs. X., and to make her responsible for your deep disappointment; by so doing, you will allow Mrs. John Bull to suppose that if you had made the engagement yourself, you would have done everything in your power to get out of it, in order to be able to go to her soirÉe musicale.

In these matters, you must imitate the English, who are unequalled in diplomacy: when they have something disagreeable to say to you, they will invariably say it through their wives. For instance, ask your landlord to do some repairs for you; tell him it rains in his house; that you are subject to rheumatism, and that his cardboard barrack will be your sepulchre, if he does not forthwith send you the mason and the carpenter. Perhaps you think he will take pity upon you and come to the rescue. Not he: not so silly. He sends his wife instead. That lady makes her appearance, looking anything but agreeable, and not over polite. She tells you that tenants are always full of complaints and there is no satisfying them, that she wishes the house were at Jericho, that the draughts are necessaries of existence, and if there were none, you would soon be poisoned by the exhalations from the bricks, and that it is evident you do not know when you are well off. She wishes you a more contented mind in the future, and takes her departure. Furious, you write to your landlord to complain of the unsatisfactory result of the interview, and receive a reply somewhat in this style: “Sir, if it only rested with me, you should not have to complain long, but this is how the matter stands: the rent of the house you occupy is my wife’s pin-money (there is a good kind fellow for you now!), and these matters concern her alone. I have done my best to try and persuade her to do the repairs in question, but I regret to have to tell you, without success.” So, as the law in England favours the landlord, and if your house should collapse while you held an unexpired lease on it, your landlord would not be bound to rebuild it, rather than be frozen or drowned within doors, you have the repairs done at your own expense, and there is an end of it.

But let us come back to our soirÉe musicale, or rather let us go to it, since, not suspecting what was in store for us, we have accepted the invitation.

At nine o’clock you present yourself. Your hostess comes forward, shakes hands with you, and makes you welcome.

“How good of you to come, Mr. X—.”

——“It’s very kind of you to say so.”

——“Do you sing?”

——“No, I’m afraid I do not.”

——“I congratulate you then,” Mrs. Bull has more than once whispered to me in reply.

——“Excuse me, but it is I who congratulate you. I should be sorry to spoil your charming evening....”

——“I must leave you, the music is going to begin.”

The executants follow one another with a rapidity that is bewildering. I have sometimes witnessed prodigious feats at these private concerts. I have heard as many as twenty-five songs in less than two hours, and when I thought of the number of little black dots on all those pages that had been turned over, and of the seeming inability of the performers to hit one of them right, I have said to myself: “It is really too unlucky; never was there anything so perverse. It is wonderful when one comes to take into consideration the theory of chances.”

“Concert,” says LittrÉ, “is action d’agir ensemble.” Not so in England at musical parties: rather the act of running after one another without being able to catch one another. These good folks in their duets always seem to me to be singing vigorously at each other: “You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me!”

The piano is generally good, I mean the instrument; although the French piano has more sonority, and certainly more limpidity.

“Nos pianos sont un peu sourds,” said an amiable hostess to me one day in French.

“They are lucky,” thought I.

The best thing to be done, when you find yourself in for an evening’s music of this kind, is to put a good face upon it, and keep quiet. After all it is but an affair of ear scratches. One survives it.

I was ill-inspired enough one evening to move out of my corner. I had been in torture for about two hours. “Come, old fellow,” I said to myself, “this will never do: you must rouse yourself and move about a little, you are getting tipsy listening to this noise.”

A young man, with a coppery, metallic voice, had just completed the massacre of that beautiful song of Tito Mattel’s “Non È ver.” The execution over, I rose, thinking the moment favourable, and advancing to where the singer stood, I said to him,

“What a lovely song that is, to be sure! and how exquisitely you sing it.” ——“It is my favourite,” he said to me, with a triumphant glance.

——“You sing it with such taste too. Do you know it in Italian?”

——“Sir! But I have just sung it in Italian.”

——“Really? I beg your pardon, I was so much under the influence of the melody that I was not listening to the words.”

“I am not in luck to-night decidedly,” I said to myself as I returned to my seat, feeling rather silly. “But, after all, I brought it on myself.”

A quarter of an hour later, my Briton seated himself at the piano, and played a nocturne rejoicing in the title of “Evening Breeze,” or something equally original. I was told in confidence that it was a piece of his own composition. He played it correctly enough to satisfy a mathematician, without putting more expression into it than a musical-box would have done. For that matter, if you would please a drawing-room audience here, you must sing or play like a machine; no refractory muscle must compromise the British dignity.

The Englishman who shows his feelings loses his self-control, and becomes an object for the contemptuous pity of his compatriots. It is bad form.

The sympathetic voice is unknown: people sing more or less loudly, more or less out of tune. When the hostess comes and tells you: “This gentleman is going to sing; he has a magnificent voice,” that means that he has the voice of a Stentor.

If I had to describe the nearest approach to the effect produced on one by Mrs. John Bull’s soirÉes musicales, I should say, intense pains which I can only compare to toothache in the intestines. Imagine yourself to be having a molar tooth extracted from the depths of your stomach.

The musical evenings, passe encore: people make a good deal of noise, and you have the satisfaction of feeling that you are alive. Besides, when the row is over, you sup; and, as I have told you, Mrs. John Bull’s suppers are very good.

But there is something worse than the musical party; it is the conversazione, so called, because at this entertainment, you walk about a great deal and converse very little.

On your arrival, you go and shake hands with your host and hostess, then off you go: your card of invitation is as good as a feuille de route. You walk at a funeral pace, with slow and solemn steps, until your knees give way, or your head swims. Then you steer for the buffet, and if you know how to use your elbows, you get a cup of tea or coffee, an ice, or a few biscuits. The buffet, being generally the great attraction of the evening, sustains a formidable siege, and you will not get at it without a struggle or even a few bruises. But after your first stage, you feel you must halt and take some refreshment, even though it cost you two or three blows: it is a case of necessity.

As soon as the inner man is refreshed, you must put your best foot foremost and be off once more. England expects every man to do his duty. As to passing the evening at the buffet, it is not to be thought of. You cast a sad glance at the ices À la vanille and other nice things that you turn your back on regretfully, and you start on your second round, hoping on the way to be introduced to some lady and to have an occasion to return to the buffet with her. No whist tables at the conversazione, few chairs, some albums to turn over. These meetings, called conversazioni, but which might as appropriately be called walking parties (or ambulazioni?), are very favourite forms of amusement. If they were not so crowded, you might perhaps feel inclined to give your calves a good rubbing, and start ahead to do in an hour the three or four miles that are expected of you. When you feel your legs becoming a prey to thousands of needles and pins, you seek out the master of the house, and say to him, “Thank you so much for a very charming evening.” He invariably answers, “I am so glad you have enjoyed yourself.” It is good form to make these remarks without bursting out laughing in each other’s faces.

John Bull, consummate master of the art de s’ennuyer, never invented anything duller than the conversazione; it is the ne plus ultra of the art.

The Royal Academy of Paintings, the London Salon, opens on the 1st of May. If you call on Mrs. John Bull during the months of May or June, the first thing she will ask you is: “Have you been to the Academy? What pictures did you like best?” Now, the English are very good judges of painting, and I am ashamed to say that, for my part, I do not know a Van Dyck from a Van Daub. As I might venture to reply: “I noticed such and such a picture,” and create a poor impression, I have found a way out of the difficulty by the following very simple means. I get some artist friend to point out to me a score of the best pictures in the collection; I have a good look at them, carefully commit their names to memory, and set off to pay my calls.

“Have you been to...?” says Mrs. Bull. ——“Oh! yes.... By-the-bye, did you notice such and such a picture...?”

Thus I spare myself a great deal of trouble and many blunders: first, two whole days looking at the pictures, a stiff neck ... and, last but not least, the annoyance of passing for an ignoramus, which is always unpleasant ... especially when it is the case.

I suspect many a worthy Englishwoman of going to the Academy to see the new summer fashions. As to the sons of Old Merry England, I have often seen them take up their position at the buffet, and devote their attention to the whisky and brandy until the return of the ladies they brought with them. By this means they are enabled to see at the Academy twice as many pictures as the hanging Committee have admitted.