Still the Gay Capital of France—Its Environs—Walewska and De Morny—Thackeray in Paris—A Pension Adventure

I

Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breeds equally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has witnessed so much of the drama of life—of the romantic and picturesque—as the age we live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were not more delightfully tragic than the years between Serajevo and Senlis.

The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains the interest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roads led to Rome. In Dickens’ day “a tale of two cities” could only mean London and Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date the title would have now to read “three,” or even “four,” cities, New York and Chicago putting in their claims for mundane recognition.

I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent student of history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my history and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when the hum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of the Beau Quartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of what was once the Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have enabled me to learn many things not commonly known, among them that Paris is the most orderly and moral city in the world, except when, on rare and brief occasions, it has been stirred to its depths.

I have crossed the ocean many times—have lived, not sojourned, on the banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again—do not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning—I may be forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame, or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that “other life,” whereof we remember so little that we cannot recall who we were, or what name we went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse in dreams, or a “hunch” from the world of spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy we might have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra—as maybe we were!—or at least Joan of Arc, or Jean Valjean!

II

Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call existence had so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a succession of performances; has so concentrated human attention upon mundane affairs; has called such a muster roll of stage favorites; has contributed to romance so many heroes and heroines, to history so many signal episodes and personal exploits, to philosophy so much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge, to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection.

Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us as pictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about statues— that they all look alike to me? There are too many of them. They bring the ancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood. We do not really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with Æschylus and Homer. The very nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on a collection of curios in an auction room, droning the dull iteration of a catalogue. There is as little to awaken and inspire in the system of religion and ethics of the pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of the stone effigies that stare blankly upon us in the British Museum, the Uffizi and the Louvre.

We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity, the human side quite lost in the archaic. What is CÆsar to us, or we to CÆsar? Jove’s thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than the Medici Venus for the lights o’ love.

Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundred years—semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly ascribe to Athens or Rome—beginning with the exit of this our own world from the dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and continuing thence through the struggle of man toward achievement—tells us a tale more consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive, than may be found in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of the civilizations which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to yield at last to triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, from the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow luxury and culture. Refinement had done its perfect work. It had emasculated man and unsexed woman and brought her to the front as a political force, even as it is trying to do now.

The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo—even of Thackeray—could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age is as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and given each its local habitation and its name by the poet’s pen working its immemorial spell upon the reader’s credulity.

To me D’Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo’s imps and Balzac’s bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the field marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in CÆsar de Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.

I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet. Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers—a gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us—a poor, insane creature she must have been—disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond the Place des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags and did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no longer to slide down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, colored and exceeding life-like, taken the day after Ravaillac delivered the finishing knife-thrust in the Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the BÈarnais as anything but a tamer of hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say Dumas’ narrative is quite as authentic as any.

One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarter of the town to live in—and Rachael, too!—it having given such frequent shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real abode of a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the days of Diane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of statesmen and prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to Turgot.

III

I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde Park—as a well-known local section—yet how few Americans who have gone to Paris have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the town. One finds it a curious circumstance that so many if not most of the great cities somehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate toward the setting sun.

When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very “rustic dwelling” so pathetically sung in Verdi’s tuneful score and tenderly described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and a part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.

Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray’s Paris Sketches with a kind of awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street “for which no rhyme our language yields,” next door to a pastry shop that claimed to have furnished the mise en scÈne for the “Ballad of Bouillabaisse,” and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche “down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves.” Ah, well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, and my Paris has been as interesting as his Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siege and the Republic.

I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the bastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person in his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself agree. I knew them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every Frenchman rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place VendÔme, when I got there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they told me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood against the wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the Cathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as many decades.

IV

Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters. It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary history.

His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her saying, as they drove away, “Never, never forget, my child, as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin play.” It was in one of the lubberly houses of the Place VendÔme that the poet of the keyboard died a few days later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. A brass plate marks the house.

May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous “Ballad of Bouillabaisse,” which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and part of which I may at length take to myself:

“Ah me, how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a time that’s gone,
When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting
In this same place—but not alone—
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me,
There’s no one now to share my cup.”

The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn to discriminate?

V

It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in the memorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian’s Coney Island. I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian sojourn just before the outbreak of the World War with a beloved family party in the joyous old Common. There is none like it in the world, uniting the urban to the rural with such surpassing grace as perpetually to convey a double sensation of pleasure; primal in its simplicity, superb in its setting; in the variety and brilliancy of the life which, upon sunny afternoons, takes possession of it and makes it a cross between a parade and a paradise.

There was a time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shady retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizened with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favorites of the Tuileries, the ComÉdie FranÇaise, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille, forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided frivolity from the Port de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circling round La Bagatelle and ranging about the Cafe Cascade, a human tiara of diamonds, a moving bouquet of laces and rubies, of silks and satins and emeralds and sapphires. Those were the days when the Due de Morny, half if not full brother of the Emperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and Cora Pearl, a clever and not at all good-looking Irish girl gone wrong, reigned as Queen of the Demimonde.

All this went by the board years ago. Everywhere, more or less, electricity has obliterated distinctions of rank and wealth. It has circumvented lovers and annihilated romance. The Republic ousted the bogus nobility. The subways and the tram cars connect the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes so closely that the poorest may make himself at home in either or both.

The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a very leveller. The crowd recognizes nobody amid the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and taxicabs, each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration of personalities effaces the identity alike of the statesman and the artist, the savant and the cyprian. No six-inch rules hedge the shade of the trees and limit the glory of the grass. The ouvrier can bring his brood and his basket and have his picnic where he pleases. The pastry cook and his chÉre amie, the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side as long as the moonlight lasts, and longer if they list, with never a gendarme to say them nay, or a rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, “allez!” The Bois de Boulogne is literally and absolutely a playground, the playground of the people, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a million of Parisians were making it their own.

Half of these encircled the Longchamps racecourse. The other half were shared by the boats upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the summer sky and the cafÉs and the restaurants with which the Bois abounds. Our party, having exhausted the humors of the drive, repaired to PrÉ Catalan. Aside from the “two old brides” who are always in evidence on such occasions, there was a veritable “young couple,” exceedingly pretty to look at, and delightfully in love! That sort of thing is not so uncommon in Paris as cynics affect to think.

If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, that “gambling is the recreation of gentlemen and the passion of fools,” it is equally true that love is a game where every player wins if he sticks to it and is loyal to it. Just as credit is the foundation of business is love both the asset and the trade-mark of happiness. To see it is to believe it, and—though a little cash in hand is needful to both—where either is wanting, look out for sheriffs and scandals.

PrÉ Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a pretty kiosk for the sale of milk, has latterly had a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, not counting the groves which I have seen grow up about it thickly dotted with booths and tables, where some thousands more may regale themselves. That Sunday it was never so glowing with animation and color. As it makes one happy to see others happy it makes one adore his own land to witness that which makes other lands great.

I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an American; perhaps it is a stretch of words to say I love Paris at all. I used to love to go there and to behold the majesty of France. I have always liked to mark the startling contrasts of light and shade. I have always known what all the world now knows, that beneath the gayety of the French there burns a patriotic and consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a fine spirit of self-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of freedom. In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files deep upon the Rue St. Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women and old men with their little all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings to take up the tribute required by Bismarck to rid the soil of the detested German. They did it. Alone they did it—the French people—the hard-working, frugal, loyal commonalty of France—without asking the loan of a sou from the world outside.

VI

Writing of that last Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne, I find by recurring to the record that I said: “There is a deal more of good than bad in every Nation. I take off my hat to the French. But, I have had my fling and I am quite ready to go home. Even amid the gayety and the glare, the splendor of color and light, the Hungarian band wafting to the greenery and the stars the strains of the delicious waltz, La Veuve Joyeuse her very self—yea, many of her—tapping the time at many adjacent tables, the song that fills my heart is ‘Hame, Hame, Hame!—Hame to my ain countree.’ Yet, to come again, d’ye mind? I should be loath to say good-by forever to the Bois de Boulogne. I want to come back to Paris. I always want to come back to Paris. One needs not to make an apology or give a reason.

“We turn rather sadly away from PrÉ Catalan and the CafÉ Cascade. We glide adown the flower-bordered path and out from the clusters of Chinese lanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their music and merry-making. Yonder behind us, like a sentinel, rises Mont Valerien. Before us glimmer the lamps of uncountable coaches, as our own, veering toward the city, the moon just topping the tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie and silver-plating the bronze figures upon the Arch of Stars.

“We enter the Port Maillot. We turn into the Avenue du Bois. Presently we shall sweep with the rest through the Champs ÈlysÉes and on to the ocean of the infinite, the heart of the mystery we call Life, nowhere so condensed, so palpable, so appealing. Roll the screen away! The shades of Clovis and Genevieve may be seen hand-in-hand with the shades of Martel and Pepin, taking the round of the ghost-walk between St. Denis and St. Germain, now le BalafrÉ and again Navarre, now the assassins of the Ligue and now the assassins of the Terror, to keep them company. Nor yet quite all on murder bent, some on pleasure; the Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and the hosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and FranÇois Villon leading the ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and the never-to-be-forgotten Four, ‘one for all and all for one;’ Cagliostro and Monte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under his cowl. Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty things, into the pale twilight of the Dawn!

“Names! Names! Only names? I am not just so sure about that. In any event, what a roll call! We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living dead men and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock and buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have endured so long and know so well!

“If I should die in Paris I should expect them—or some of them—to meet me at the barriers and to say, ‘Behold, the wickedness that was done in the world, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, not in the soul of man, which freed from its foul incasement, purified and made eternal by the hand of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of God!’”

It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I shall never come again. Neither shall I make apology for this long quotation by myself from myself, for am I not inditing an autobiography, so called?