A Parisian Pension—The Widow of Walewska—Napoleon’s Daughter-in-Law—The Changeless—A Moral and Orderly City

I

I have said that I knew the widow of Walewska, the natural son of Napoleon Bonaparte by the Polish countess he picked up in Warsaw, who followed him to Paris; and thereby hangs a tale which may not be without interest.

In each of our many sojourns in Paris my wife and I had taken an apartment, living the while in the restaurants, at first the cheaper, like the CafÉ de Progress and the Duval places; then the Boeuf À la Mode, the CafÉ Voisin and the CafÉ Anglais, with Champoux’s, in the Place de la Bourse, for a regular luncheon resort.

At length, the children something more than half grown, I said: “We have never tried a Paris pension.”

So with a half dozen recommended addresses we set out on a house hunt. We had not gone far when our search was rewarded by a veritable find. This was on the Avenue de Courcelles, not far from the Pare Monceau; newly furnished; reasonable charges; the lady manager a beautiful well-mannered woman, half Scotch and half French.

We moved in. When dinner was called the boarders assembled in the very elegant drawing-room. Madame presented us to Baron ——. Then followed introductions to Madame la Duchesse and Madame la Princesse and Madame la Comtesse. Then the folding doors opened and dinner was announced.

The baron sat at the center of the table. The meal consisted of eight or ten courses, served as if at a private house, and of surpassing quality. During the three months that we remained there was no evidence of a boarding house. It appeared an aristocratic family into which we had been hospitably admitted. The baron was a delightful person. Madame la Duchesse was the mother of Madame la Princesse, and both were charming. The Comtesse, the Napoleonic widow, was at first a little formal, but she came round after we had got acquainted, and, when we took our departure, it was like leaving a veritable domestic circle.

Years after we had the sequel. The baron, a poor young nobleman, had come into a little money. He thought to make it breed. He had an equally poor Scotch cousin, who undertook to play hostess. Both the Duchess and the Countess were his kinswomen. How could such a mÉnage last?

He lost his all. What became of our fellow-lodgers I never learned, but the venture coming to naught, the last I heard of the beautiful high-bred lady manager, she was serving as a stewardess on an ocean liner. Nothing, however, could exceed the luxury, the felicity and the good company of those memorable three months chez l’Avenue de Courcelles, Pare Monceau.

We never tried a pension again. We chose a delightful hotel in the Rue de Castiglione off the Rue de Rivoli, and remained there as fixtures until we were reckoned the oldest inhabitants. But we never deserted the dear old Boeuf À la Mode, which we lived to see one of the most flourishing and popular places in Paris.

II

In the old days there was a little hotel on the Rue Dannou, midway between the Rue de la Paix and what later along became the Avenue de l’OpÉra, called the HÔtel d’Orient. It was conducted by a certain Madame Hougenin, whose family had held the lease for more than a hundred years, and was typical of what the comfort-seeking visitor, somewhat initiate, might find before the modern tourist onrush overflowed all bounds and effaced the ancient landmarks—or should I say townmarks?—making a resort instead of a home of the gay French capital. The d’Orient was delightfully comfortable and fabulously cheap.

The wayfarer entered a darksome passage that led to an inner court. There were on the four sides of this seven or eight stories pierced by many windows. There was never a lift, or what we Americans call an elevator. If you wanted to go up you walked up; and after dark your single illuminant was candlelight. The service could hardly be recommended, but cleanliness herself could find no fault with the beds and bedding; nor any queer people about; changeless; as still and stationary as a nook in the Rockies.

A young girl might dwell there year in and year out in perfect safety—many young girls did so—madame a kind of duenna. The food—for it was a pension—was all a gourmet could desire. And the wine!

I was lunching with an old Parisian friend.

“What do you think of this vintage?” says he.

“Very good,” I answered. “Come and dine with me to-morrow and I will give you the mate to it.”

“What—at the d’Orient?”

“Yes, at the d’Orient.”

“Preposterous!”

Nevertheless, he came. When the wine was poured out he took a sip.

“By ——!” he exclaimed. “That is good, isn’t it? I wonder where they got it? And how?”

During the week after we had it every day. Then no more. The headwaiter, with many apologies, explained that he had found those few bottles in a forgotten bin, where they had lain for years, and he begged a thousand pardons of monsieur, but we had drunk them all—rien du plus—no more. I might add that precisely the same thing happened to me at the HÔtel Continental. Indeed, it is not uncommon with the French caravansaries to keep a little extra good wine in stock for those who can distinguish between an ordinaire and a supÉrieur, and are willing to pay the price.

III

“See Naples and die,” say the Italians. “See Paris and live,” say the French. Old friends, who have been over and back, have been of late telling me that Paris, having woefully suffered, is nowise the Paris it was, and as the provisional offspring of four years of desolating war I can well believe them. But a year or two of peace, and the city will rise again, as after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, which laid upon it a sufficiently blighting hand. In spite of fickle fortune and its many ups and downs it is, and will ever remain, “Paris, the Changeless.”

I never saw the town so much itself as just before the beginning of the world war. I took my departure in the early summer of that fateful year and left all things booming—not a sign or trace that there had ever been aught but boundless happiness and prosperity. It is hard, the saying has it, to keep a squirrel on the ground, and surely Paris is the squirrel among cities. The season just ended had been, everybody declared, uncommonly successful from the standpoints alike of the hotels and cafÉs, the shop folk and their patrons, not to mention the purely pleasure-seeking throng. People seemed loaded with money and giddy to spend it.

The headwaiter at Voisin’s told me this: “Mr. Barnes, of New York, ordered a dinner, carte blanche, for twelve.

“‘Now,’ says he, ‘garÇon, have everything bang up, and here’s seventy-five francs for a starter.’

“The dinner was bang up. Everybody hilarious. Mr. Barnes immensely pleased. When he came to pay his bill, which was a corker, he made no objection.

“‘GarÇon,’ says he, ‘if I ask you a question will you tell me the truth?’

“‘Oui, monsieur; certainement.’

“Well, how much was the largest tip you ever received?”

“Seventy-five francs, monsieur.”

“‘Very well; here are 100 francs.’

“Then, after a pause for the waiter to digest his joy and express a proper sense of gratitude and wonder, Mr. Barnes came to time with: ‘Do you remember who was the idiot that paid you the seventy-five francs?’

“‘Oh, yes, monsieur. It was you.’”

IV

It has occurred to me that of late years—I mean the years immediately before 1914—Paris has been rather more bent upon adapting itself to human and moral as well as scientific progress. There has certainly been less debauchery visible to the naked eye. I was assured that the patronage had so fallen away from the Moulin Rouge that they were planning to turn it into a decent theater. Nor during my sojourn did anybody in my hearing so much as mention the Dead Rat. I doubt whether it is still in existence.

The last time I was in Maxim’s—quite a dozen years ago now—a young woman sat next to me whose story could be read in her face. She was a pretty thing not five and twenty, still blooming, with iron-gray hair. It had turned in a night, I was told. She had recently come from Baltimore and knew no more what she was doing or whither she was drifting than a baby. The old, old story: a comfortable home and a good husband; even a child or two; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, and the inevitable desertion. Left without a dollar in the streets of Paris. She was under convoy of a noted procuress.

“A duke or the morgue,” she whimpered, “in six months.”

Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of the Seine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out.

V

If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the record of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the MarchÉ des Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the restaurants.

Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly to my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature and art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when the Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the HÔtel de Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the Place VendÔme, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe.

There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity and regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and New York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatly exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is on the decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying and enforcing the pure-food laws.

As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good glass of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and as the wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always considered, with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent temperance society. That which works otherwise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers. They are drinking more beer in France—even making a fairly good beer. And then—

But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there is anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!

Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room for the five-o’clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone to her meals—sick from shore to shore—until the gods ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery paradise—where the billows ceased from troubling and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged À la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine with perfect contentment. Coming ashore from our last crossing a friend found her in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the evening before on shipboard.

“Seems hardly any motion at all,” she said, looking about her and fancying herself still at sea, as well she might.