In Paris, a famous city in France,
That lies by the banks of the sluggish Seine,
Where you and I may never have been,
But which we know all about in advance;—
A place of wild and wicked romance,
A place where they gamble, and fiddle and dance,
And the slowest coach has always a chance
To get put over the road, I ween,
Where women are naughty, and men are gay,
And the suicides number a dozen a day,
And one of the gallant jeunesse dorÉe
Will spend the night at prodigious play,
And in the morning go out and slay
His bosom friend with a rapier keen,
Because he loses and cannot pay,—
Lived a nice young man named Didier.
This nice young man had run aground,
As such young men are apt to do;
His creditors swore and his mistress frowned,
His breeches pockets held ne'er a sou,
His boots were getting out at the toes,
His hat was seedy, and so were his clothes,
And, as he wandered the city around,
He could not think of a single friend
Slow to dun and prompt to lend,
Whose purse he thought he could venture to sound;
In such extremities friends are few;
At least I think so, friend, don't you?
At length, on the brink of a grim despair,
He happened to think of a quaint old fellow,
A comical customer, rusty and slow,
But who used to be an elegant beau,
In dress and manner quite comme il faut;
And who, because he happened to know
How to play on the violoncello,
Which he'd learned for fun long time ago,
Before his finances got so low,
Had obtained a place in an orchestra choir,
And played that beautiful instrument there;
And to him monsieur determined to go;
And so,
Up to the top of a rickety stair,
To a little attic cold and bare,
He stumbled, and found the artist there.
He told his tale; how his former pride
Was crushed and humbled into the dust;
He swore he had thought of suicide,
But the charcoal venders wouldn't trust;
He had no profession or trade or art,
Money or food, and perish he must;
And then like a blacksmith's forge he sighed,
A sigh that touched the fiddler's heart.
'Cheer up, mon cher, and never mind;
You're the very man I was trying to find.
You know at the grand Theatre FranÇais
The leading violoncello I play,
And my salary is two francs a day.
There's a vacant place; if you are inclined
To take the same, you'll find 'twill pay.'
Didier looked up in a vast amaze:
'Why, I can't do so, you very well know,
For I never fiddled in my born days.'
'Qu'a cela ne tienne,' his friend replied,
'Don't be too certain,—you never have tried;
You ought to give your abilities scope;
There is an anxiety most of us feel,
We may be out of time or tune,
Leave off too late, or begin too soon,
May pitch too sharp, or perhaps too flat;
So here is a cake of excellent soap,
The old, original, pure Castile,
Just rosin your bow with that.'
He took his seat in an orchestra chair,
'Twould have made you stare
Had you been there
To see his knowing and confident air,
And to hear the considerate manager say,
'There is nobody like young Didier;
So nice and exact, so quite au fait,
With a style so thoroughly recherchÉ,
Some other concern may get him away,
So I think I shall have to double his pay!'
In clover the youth continues to graze,
And still in the orchestra he plays;
He's the man who never was known to make
The smallest shadow of a mistake,
And there's only one drawback on his praise,—
He is too modest by fifty per cent
For such a master of the art,
For the story went he would never consent
To play a solo part.
There's a moral, my juvenile friend, in this,
And you need not stumble and grope;
Just look for it sharp, and you can't go amiss;
You will find, there is nothing like soap!
Don't suffer yourself to be cast down
If capricious luck should happen to frown,
Go through with the motions, and if you're acute
None will ever suspect that your fiddle is mute;
But be sure and do as the rest of us do,
And don't flourish your stick till you get your cue.
Thus, let prosperity ebb or flow,
Still bate no jot of hope,
You may draw the longest kind of a bow
If 'tis only rosined with soap!