The Real Latin Quarter :: CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER VIII

THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

IN this busy Quarter, where so many people are confined throughout the day in work-shops and studios, a breathing-space becomes a necessity. The gardens of the Luxembourg, brilliant in flowers and laid out in the Renaissance, with shady groves and long avenues of chestnut-trees stretching up to the Place de l’Observatoire, afford the great breathing-ground for the Latin Quarter.

If one had but an hour to spend in the Quartier Latin, one could not find a more interesting and representative sight of student life than between the hours of four and five on Friday afternoon, when the military band plays in the Luxembourg Gardens. This is the afternoon when Bohemia is on parade. Then every one flocks here to see one’s friends—and a sort of weekly reception for the Quarter is held. The walks about the band-stand are thronged with students and girls, and hundreds of chairs are filled with an audience of the older people—shopkeepers and their families, old women in white lace caps, and gray-haired old men, many in straight-brimmed high hats of a mode of twenty years past. Here they sit and listen to the music under the cool shadow of the trees, whose rich foliage forms an arbor overhead—a roof of green leaves, through which the sunbeams stream and in which the fat, gray pigeons find a paradise.

THE CHILDREN’S SHOP—LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

There is a booth near-by where waffles, cooked on a small oven in the rear, are sold. In front are a dozen or more tables for ices and drinkables. Every table and chair is taken within hearing distance of the band. When these musicians of the army of France arrive, marching in twos from their barracks to the stand, it is always the signal for that genuine enthusiasm among the waiting crowd which one sees between the French and their soldiers.

If you chance to sit among the groups at the little tables, and watch the passing throng in front of you, you will see some queer “types,” many of them seldom en evidence except on these Friday afternoons in the Luxembourg. Buried, no doubt, in some garret hermitage or studio, they emerge thus weekly to greet silently the passing world.

A tall poet stalks slowly by, reading intently, as he walks, a well-worn volume of verses—his faded straw hat shading the tip of his long nose. Following him, a boy of twenty, delicately featured, with that purity of expression one sees in the faces of the good—the result of a life, perhaps, given to his ideal in art. He wears his hair long and curling over his ears, with a long stray wisp over one eye, the whole cropped evenly at the back as it reaches his black velvet collar. He wears, too, a dove-gray vest of fine corduroy, buttoned behind like those of the clergy, and a velvet tam-o’-shanter-like cap, and carries between his teeth a small pipe with a long goose-quill stem. You can readily see that to this young man with high ideals there is only one corner of the world worth living in, and that lies between the Place de l’Observatoire and the Seine.

Three students pass, in wide broadcloth trousers, gathered in tight at the ankles, and wearing wide-brimmed black hats. Hanging on the arm of one of the trio is a short snub-nosed girl, whose Cleo-Merodic hair, flattened in a bandeau over her ears, not only completely conceals them, but all the rest of her face, except her two merry black eyes and her saucy and neatly rouged lips. She is in black bicycle bloomers and a white, short duck jacket—a straw hat with a wide blue ribbon band, and a fluffy piece of white tulle tied at the side of her neck.

The throng moves slowly by you. It is impossible, in such a close crowd, to be in a hurry; besides, one never is here.

Near-by sit two old ladies, evidently concierges from some atelier court. One holds the printed program of the music, cut carefully from her weekly newspaper; it is cheaper than buying one for two sous, and these old concierges are economical.

In this Friday gathering you will recognize dozens of faces which you have seen at the “Bal Bullier” and the cafÉs.

The girl in the blue tailor-made dress, with the little dog, who you remember dined the night before at the PanthÉon, is walking now arm in arm with a tall man in black, a mourning band about his hat. The girl is dressed in black, too—a mark of respect to her ami by her side. The dog, who is so small that he slides along the walk every time his chain is pulled, is now tucked under her arm.

One of the tables near the waffle stand is taken by a group of six students and four girls. All of them have arrived at the table in the last fifteen minutes—some alone, some in twos. The girl in the scarlet gown and white kid slippers, who came with the queer-looking “type” with the pointed beard, is Yvonne Gallois—a bonne camarade. She keeps the rest in the best of spirits, for she is witty, this Yvonne, and a great favorite with the crowd she is with. She is pretty, too, and has a whole-souled good-humor about her that makes her ever welcome. The fellow she came with is Delmet the architect—a great wag—lazy, but full of fun—and genius.

The little girl sitting opposite Yvonne is Claire Dumont. She is explaining a very sad “histoire” to the “type” next to her, intense in the recital of her woes. Her alert, nervous little face is a study; when words and expression fail, she shrugs her delicate shoulders, accenting every sentence with her hands, until it seems as if her small, nervous frame could express no more—and all about her little dog “Loisette!”

AT THE HEAD OF THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

“Yes, the villain of a concierge at Edmond’s studio swore at him twice, and Sunday, when Edmond and I were breakfasting late, the old beast saw ‘Loisette’ on the stairs and threw water over her; she is a sale bÊte, that grosse femme! She shall see what it will cost her, the old miser; and you know I have always been most amiable with her. She is jealous of me—that is it—oh! I am certain of it. Because I am young and happy. Jealous of me! that’s funny, is it not? The old pig! Poor ‘Loisette’—she shivered all night with fright and from being wet. Edmond and I are going to find another place. Yes, she shall see what it will be there without us—with no one to depend upon for her snuff and her wine. If she were concierge at Edmond’s old atelier she would be treated like that horrid old Madame Fouquet.”

The boys in the atelier over her window hated this old Madame Fouquet, I remember. She was always prying about and complaining, so they fished up her pet gold-fish out of the aquarium on her window-sill, and fried them on the atelier stove, and put them back in the window on a little plate all garnished with carrots. She swore vengeance and called in the police, but to no avail. One day they fished up the parrot in its cage, and the green bird that screamed and squawked continually met a speedy and painless death and went off to the taxidermist. Then the cage was lowered in its place with the door left ajar, and the old woman felt sure that her pet had escaped and would some day find his way back to her—a thing this garrulous bird would never have thought of doing had he had any say in the matter.

So the old lady left the door of the cage open for days in the event of his return, and strange to tell, one morning Madame Fouquet got up to quarrel with her next-door neighbor, and, to her amazement, there was her green pet on his perch in his cage. She called to him, but he did not answer; he simply stood on his wired legs and fixed his glassy eyes on her, and said not a word—while the gang of Indians in the windows above yelled themselves hoarse.

It was just such a crowd as this that initiated a “nouveau” once in one of the ateliers. They stripped the new-comer, and, as is often the custom on similar festive occasions, painted him all over with sketches, done in the powdered water-colors that come in glass jars. They are cheap and cover a lot of surface, so that the gentleman in question looked like a human picture-gallery. After the ceremony, he was put in a hamper and deposited, in the morning, in the middle of the Pont des Arts, where he was subsequently found by the police, who carted him off in a cab.

But you must see more of this vast garden of the Luxembourg to appreciate truly its beauty and its charm. Filled with beautiful sculpture in bronze and marble, with its musÉe of famous modern pictures bought by the Government, with flower-beds brilliant in geraniums and fragrant in roses, with the big basin spouting a jet of water in its center, where the children sail their boats, and with that superb “Fontaine de Medicis” at the end of a long, rectangular basin of water—dark as some pool in a forest brook, the green vines trailing about its sides, shaded by the rich foliage of the trees overhead.

On the other side of the Luxembourg you will find a garden of roses, with a rich bronze group of Greek runners in the center, and near it, back of the long marble balustrade, a croquet ground—a favorite spot for several veteran enthusiasts who play here regularly, surrounded for hours by an interested crowd who applaud and cheer the participants in this passÉ sport.

This is another way of spending an afternoon at the sole cost of one’s leisure. It takes but little to amuse these people!

Often at the Punch and Judy show near-by, you will see two old gentlemen,—who may have watched this same Punch and Judy show when they were youngsters,—and who have been sitting for half an hour, waiting for the curtain of the miniature theater to rise. It is popular—this small “ThÉÂtre Guignol,” and the benches in front are filled with the children of rich and poor, who scream with delight and kick their little, fat bare legs at the first shrill squeak of Mr. Punch. The three who compose the staff of this tiny attraction have been long in its service—the old harpist, and the good wife of the showman who knows every child in the neighborhood, and her husband who is Mr. Punch, the hangman, and the gendarme, and half a dozen other equally historical personages. A thin, sad-looking man, this husband, gray-haired, with a careworn look in his deep-sunken eyes, who works harder hourly, daily, yearly, to amuse the heart of a child than almost any one I know.

The little box of a theater is stifling hot in summer, and yet he must laugh and scream and sing within it, while his good wife collects the sous, talking all the while to this and to that child whom she has known since its babyhood; chatting with the nurses decked out in their gay-colored, Alsatian bows, the ribbons reaching nearly to the ground.

A French nurse is a gorgeous spectacle of neatness and cleanliness, and many of the younger ones, fresh from country homes in Normandy and Brittany, with their rosy cheeks, are pictures of health. Wherever you see a nurse, you will see a “piou-piou” not far away, which is a very belittling word for the red-trousered infantryman of the RÉpublique FranÇaise. Surrounding the Palais du Luxembourg, these “piou-pious,” less fortunate for the hour, stand guard in the small striped sentry-boxes, musket at side, or pace stolidly up and down the flagged walk. Marie, at the moment, is no doubt with the children of the rich Count, in a shady spot near the music. How cruel is the fate of many a gallant “piou-piou”!

Farther down the gravel-walk strolls a young Frenchman and his fiancÉe—the mother of his betrothed inevitably at her side! It is under this system of rigid chaperonage that the young girl of France is given in marriage. It is not to be wondered at that many of them marry to be free, and that many of the happier marriages have begun with an elopement!

THE PALACE OF THE LUXEMBOURG

The music is over, and the band is filing out, followed by the crowd. A few linger about the walks around the band-stand to chat. The old lady who rents the chairs is stacking them up about the tree-trunks, and long shadows across the walks tell of the approaching twilight. Overhead, among the leaves, the pigeons coo. For a few moments the sun bathes the great garden in a pinkish glow, then drops slowly, a blood-red disk, behind the trees. The air grows chilly; it is again the hour to dine—the hour when Paris wakes.

In the smaller restaurants of the Quarter one often sees some strange contrasts among these true bohemians, for the Latin Quarter draws its habituÉs from every part of the globe. They are not all French—these happy-go-lucky fellows, who live for the day and let the morrow slide. You will see many Japanese—some of them painters—many of them taking courses in political economy, or in law; many of them titled men of high rank in their own country, studying in the schools, and learning, too, with that thoroughness and rapidity which are ever characteristic of their race. You will find, too, Brazilians; gentlemen from Haiti of darker hue; Russians, Poles, and Spaniards—men and women from every clime and every station in life. They adapt themselves to the Quarter and become a part of this big family of Bohemia easily and naturally. In this daily atmosphere only the girl-student from our own shores seems out of place. She will hunt for some small restaurant, sacred in its exclusiveness and known only to a dozen bon camarades of the Quarter. Perhaps this girl-student, it may be, from the West and her cousin from the East will discover some such cosy little boÎte on their way back from their atelier. To two other equally adventurous female minds they will impart this newest find; after that you will see the four dining there nightly together, as safe, I assure you, within these walls of Bohemia as they would be at home rocking on their Aunt Mary’s porch.

There is, of course, considerable awkwardness between these bon camarades, to whom the place really belongs, and these very innocent new-comers, who seek a table by themselves in a corner under the few trees in front of the small restaurant. And yet every one is exceedingly polite to them. Madame the patronne hustles about to see that the dinner is warm and nicely served; and Henriette, who is waiting on them, none the less attentive, although she is late for her own dinner, which she will sit down to presently with madame the patronne, the good cook, and the other girls who serve the small tables.

WHAT IS GOING ON AT THE THEATERS

This later feast will be augmented perhaps by half the good boys and girls who have been dining at the long table. Perhaps they will all come in and help shell the peas for to-morrow’s dinner. And yet this is a public place, where the painters come, and where one pays only for what one orders. It is all very interesting to the four American girls, who are dining at the small table. “It is so thoroughly bohemian!” they exclaim.

But what must Mimi think of these silent and exclusive strangers, and what, too, must the tall girl in the bicycle bloomers think, and the little girl who has been ill and who at the moment is dining with Renould, the artist, and whom every one—even to the cook, is so glad to welcome back after her long illness? There is an unsurmountable barrier between the Americans at the little table in the corner and that jolly crowd of good and kindly people at the long one, for Mimi and Henriette and the little girl who has been so ill, and the French painters and sculptors with them, cannot understand either the language of these strangers or their views of life.

“Florence!” exclaims one of the strangers in a whisper, “do look at that queer little ‘type’ at the long table—the tall girl in black actually kissed him!”

“You don’t mean it!”

“Yes, I do—just now. Why, my dear, I saw it plainly!”

Poor culprits! There is no law against kissing in the open air in Paris, and besides, the tall girl in black has known the little “type” for a Parisienne age—thirty days or less.

The four innocents, who have coughed through their soup and whispered through the rest of the dinner, have now finished and are leaving, but if those at the long table notice their departure, they do not show it. In the Quarter it is considered the height of rudeness to stare. You will find these Suzannes and Marcelles exceedingly well-bred in the little refinements of life, and you will note a certain innate dignity and kindliness in their bearing toward others, which often makes one wish to uncover his head in their presence.

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