Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2
Henry Edwards

H. Sutherland Edwards

Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

CHAPTER I.

STREET CHARACTERS

The Cocher – The Bus-driver – The Private Coachman – The Hackney Coachman – The Public Writer – The Flower-girl – The Oyster-woman

A PARISIAN who is not rich enough to keep a distinguished chef of his own will occasionally order a dainty dinner to be forwarded to him from some hotel or restaurant; and in these cases the repast, as soon as it is ready, is sometimes put into a hackney cab and driven to the house of the consignee by the cocher, who is not unaccustomed to find this “fare” more remunerative than the fare he habitually conveys.

A glance at the cocher, as another of the Parisian types of character, may here be not inopportune. As a matter of fact, however, the cocher is not one type but several. The name applies to the driver of the omnibus, of the fiacre, and of the private carriage. As to the omnibus driver, he is more amiable, more easy-going, less sarcastic than his counterpart in London. Nobody would ever hear an omnibus driver in Paris say, as one has been heard to say in London, when a lady passenger requested to be put down at 339½ – Street, “Certainly, madam, and would you like me to drive upstairs?” Nor is the Paris cabman so extortionate as his London brother; for the fare-regulations, by which there is one fixed charge for the conveyance of a passenger any distance within a certain radius, precludes the inevitable dispute which awaits the lady or gentleman who in our metropolis dares to take a four-wheeler or a hansom.

Already in the sixteenth century hackney carriages were driven in the streets of Paris; and any differences arising between the cocher and his passenger were at this period referred to the lieutenant of the police. The private coachmen, attached to the service of the nobility, found their position a somewhat perilous one in an age when quarrels were so frequent on the question of social precedence. If two aristocratic carriages met in some narrow street, barring each other’s way, the footmen would get down and fight for a passage. Serious wounds were sometimes inflicted, and even the master would now and then step out of his vehicle and, with drawn sword, join in the affray. The coachman, meanwhile, prouder in livery than his master in braided coat, remained motionless on his box in spite of the blows which were being dealt around. It is related that when on one occasion a party of highwaymen attacked the carriage of Benserade, poet, wit, and dramatic author, his coachman sat calmly at his post, and amused himself with whistling whilst his master was being stripped of everything. From time to time he turned towards the robbers and said, “Gentlemen, shall you soon have finished, and can I continue my journey?”

The private coachman varied in those days, as he has always done, according to the position of the master or mistress whom he served; and Mercier, writing at a later period, indicates a sufficient variety of cochers of this class. “You can clearly distinguish the coachman of a courtesan,” he says, “from that of a president; the coachman of a duke from that of a financier; but, at the exit from the theatre, would you like to know where such and such a vehicle is going? Listen to the order which the master gives to the lackey, or rather which the latter transmits to the coachman. In the Marais they say ‘Au logis’; in the Isle of St Louis ‘À la maison’; in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ‘À l’hôtel’; and in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré ‘Allez!’ With the grandeur of this last word no one can fail to be impressed. At the theatre door stands a thundering personage with a voice like Stentor, who cries: ‘The carriage of Monsieur le Marquis!’ ‘The carriage of Madame la Comtesse!’ ‘The carriage of M. le Président!’ His terrible voice resounds to the very interior of the taverns where the lackeys are drinking, and of the billiard rooms where the coachmen are quarrelling and disputing. This voice quite drowns the confused sounds of men and horses. Lackeys and coachmen at this re-echoing signal abandon their pint-pots and their cues, and rush out to resume the reins and open the doors.”

The profession of the hackney coachman has always been and still is subjected to a special legislation. In Paris anyone exercising it must be at least eighteen years of age; carry upon him the official documents in virtue of which he wields his whip; present to his fare the card which indicates the number and tariff of the vehicle, and which the passenger must retain in view of possible disputes; show politeness to the public; receive his fare in advance when he is driving to theatres, halls, or fêtes where there is likely to be a crush of vehicles; never carry more than his legal number of passengers, and not smoke on duty. When travelling he must take the right side of the road, avoid intercepting funeral processions and bodies of troops, go at walking pace through the markets and in certain other specified places; and, from nightfall, light up his vehicle with a couple of lamps. The lamps used for the cabs of the Imperial Company are blue, yellow, red, or green. These different colours are intended to induce passengers leaving the theatre at night to take, by preference, those vehicles which belong to the quarter in which they live; blue indicating the regions of Popincourt and Belleville; yellow those of Poissonière-Montmartre; red those of the Champs Élysées, Passy, and Batignolles; and green those of the Invalides and the Observatory. Besides the penalties pronounced by the penal code for causing death or personal injury through careless driving, minor infractions of the regulations are punished, by the prefect of police, with suspension of licence or, in certain cases, final withdrawal. The proprietors and masters are responsible for any offences committed by the coachmen, and for any loss or injury to luggage or other goods confided to their vehicles for transport.

The law which prescribes to Paris cabmen one uniform fare for journeys of no matter what length within a certain radius would at first appear to be very much to the advantage of the public, who are thus protected from extortion. It has a great drawback, all the same. In London a cabman is always delighted to see a gentleman step into his vehicle, even though the welcome he evinces be rather that of the spider to the fly. He unhesitatingly drives him to his destination, and the gentleman, even though he is fleeced at the end of the journey, at least gets where he wished to go. But the Paris cabman is fastidious. If the destination mentioned by the intending passenger does not exactly suit him, he is prone to shake his head, ply his whip, and drive away with an empty vehicle.

The alacrity and enthusiasm of the London cabman are due to the fact that when he has his passenger safely inside the hansom or “growler” his soul is animated by the hope of obtaining a fare indefinitely in excess of the legal tariff. The uniformity of fares in Paris deprives the cabman of any enthusiastic interest in his work, as it likewise strips him of some of the curious and amusing characteristics which he might otherwise exhibit.

In our own metropolis a famous millionaire, having ridden one day in a cab for the distance of a mile and a half, tendered the driver a shilling in payment of his fare. The driver stared at the coin in the palm of his hand and then proceeded to remonstrate. “Both your sons, sir,” he said, “whenever they ride in my hansom, pay me at least half-a-crown.” “I dare say they do,” replied the millionaire, “for they have an old fool of a father to back them up.” In Paris, where this millionaire had a brother as rich as himself, such an incident would have been impossible.

Another figure of the Paris streets is, or rather until some twenty-five years ago was, the Public Writer; not the contributor to an important daily paper, but an unhappy scribe whose task it was to put into epistolary form such matter as was entrusted to him for the purpose by illiterate cabmen, workmen, and servant girls. The little booths with desks in front where he exercised his strange profession have disappeared as Paris has been demolished and rebuilt. The spread of education among the lower classes was really his death-blow.

The public writer was usually an old man, sometimes one of erudition, who had been reduced by severe reverses or persistent misery to a very low position. He wrote a beautiful hand, and could on occasion compose a poem. He could execute a piece of penmanship in so many different handwritings (seventeen or eighteen), and his flourishes and ornamentations were so magnificent, that he would never have prostituted his pen to the service of shopgirls and domestics had not starvation stared him in the face. Moreover, the cultivation of an acquaintanceship with the Muses solaced him, and caused him to forget the day of his greatness when, holding the diploma of a “master-writer,” he inscribed the Ten Commandments or executed a dedication to the king on a bit of vellum smaller than a crown piece. He could dash off verses at a moment’s notice, and had always in reserve a varied assortment of festive songs, wedding-lines, epitaphs, and simple and double acrostics, to serve whatever occasion might arise.

Above the Public Writer’s door, which he threw open every morning to his clients, this legend was inscribed: – “The Tomb of Secrets.” The passer-by thus learned that there – in the words of a French chronicler – “behind those four coarsely-whitened windows of the entrance door, was an ear and a hand which held the key of human infirmities; that there, smiling and serviceable, Discretion resided in flesh and blood. Curious to see everything, you approached; a few specimens of petitions to the Chief of the State, drawn up on official paper and sealed with wafers, gave you a foretaste of the master’s dexterity. Moreover you could read, in a position well exposed to view, some piece of poetic inscription, deficient in neither rhyme nor even reason, and cleverly calculated to allure you forthwith. The running hand, the round hand, the English hand, and the Gothic hand alternated freely in the ingenious composition, not to mention the flourishings with which the lines ended, the page encased in ornamented spirals, the capitals complicated with arabesques, and so forth. One day we read one of the writings peculiar to this profession, and copied it with a haste which we do not regret to-day when the booth where we saw it has been removed. This booth, a mere plank box, three feet square, whence issued during forty years an incalculable number of letters, petitions, and other documents, was situated in the quarter of Saint-Victor, at the foot of the Rue des Fossés, Saint-Bernard. Its occupant was a man named Étienne Larroque, an old bailiff whom misfortune had reduced to this poor trade. Nearly eighty years of age, this Nestor of public writers was known to everybody.”

To the pedestrian his signboard proclaimed the particulars of his profession in a piece of poetry which might at all events have been much worse, and of which the metre was marred only by one fault – a certain line with a foot too much. Dressed in a frock coat maltreated by years, the writer, continues the before-mentioned chronicler, sat in his office, with his spectacles on his nose, and all his pens cut before him. He placed himself eagerly at the service of anyone who crossed the threshold. Sometimes the strangest revelations were confided to him. Installed in his cane arm-chair, furnished with a cushion which he had sat upon till it was crushed to a pancake, he lent a grave ear to the pretty little rosy mouths that came to tell him everything, as though he were a confessor or a physician, and took up his pen to write for them their letters of love or complaint. More than one unhappy girl came to him to sigh and weep and to accuse the monster who had sworn to wed her; more than one fireman came to confess to him the flame which was burning in his breast; more than one soldier to request him to pen a challenge.

As the depository of secrets innumerable, the Public Writer was a most important personage; or would have been had he been able to take full literary advantage of the confidences entrusted to him. Richardson’s knowledge of the female heart is said to have been due to the good faith with which he inspired a number of young ladies, who thereupon gave him, unconsciously, material for such characters as Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe. They consulted him now and then about their love letters. But the Public Writer had love letters, letters of reproach, letters of explanation, letters of farewell, to write every day, and by the dozen. It is not recorded, however, that any Public Writer was sufficiently inspired, or sufficiently interested in his habitual work to turn the dramatic materials which must often have come beneath him into novels or plays.

The personage known as the Public Writer was at least a more useful institution than the book entitled “The Complete Letter-Writer,” the function of which is to supply correspondence in regard to every possible incident in life. The Public Writer was, if up to his work, capable of suiting his language to peculiar cases, whereas the Complete Letter-Writer was an oracle whose utterances came forth hard and fast, in such a way that the ignorant devotees could not change them. Thus the illiterate persons who could not read at all had a clear advantage over those whose education enabled them to read the Complete Letter-Writer, but not to apply it. In an excellent farce by M. Varin, one of the best comic dramatists of the French stage, an amusing equivoque– or quiproquo as the French say – is caused by an ignorant young man in some house of business addressing a love letter to the dark-haired daughter of his employer, which expresses admiration for locks of gold such as belong in profusion, not to the girl, but to her buxom mother. When the husband’s jealousy is excited and a variety of comic incidents have resulted therefrom, it appears that the unlettered and moreover foolish young clerk has copied his epistle out of a letter-book, and, thinking apparently that one love letter would do as well as another, has addressed to a girl with dark hair a declaration intended by the author of the Complete Letter-Writer for a woman who is beautifully blonde. No such mistake as this could have occurred had the amorous young clerk told his case to a Public Writer, and ordered an appropriate letter for the occasion.

Another interesting type of street character in Paris is the bouquetière or flower-girl. She is more enterprising and engaging than her counterpart in London. She will approach a gentleman who happens to be walking past and stick a flower in his button-hole, leaving it to his own sense of chivalry whether he pays her anything or not. Nor does the device infrequently produce a piece of silver. There is generally one flower-girl in Paris who poses as a celebrity – either on account of her beauty or of other qualities of a more indefinable character. Fashionable Parisians resort to her stall and pay fantastic prices for whatever bloom she pins to their breast. The flower-girl of the Jockey Club, who used to attend the races and ply her trade in the enclosure of the grand stand, expected a louis as her ordinary fee.

The oyster-woman, too, is a highly important personage. Paris consumes three hundred million oysters a year, and the dispensing of these bivalves keeps the lady in question sufficiently active whilst the season lasts. At breakfast-time or dinner-time, with a white napkin thrust in her girdle, a knife in her hand, and a smile on her lips, she is to be seen stationed at the entrance to restaurants in anticipation of the waiter rushing out and shouting: “One dozen,” “Two dozen,” or “Ten dozen – open!” A police ordinance of September 25th, 1771, forbade oyster-women to exercise their trade between the last day of April and the 10th of September, under penalty of a fine of 200 francs and the confiscation of their stock. This ordinance was destined to fall into disuse; but inasmuch as the prohibited months are those in which oysters are at their worst, the écaillères of Paris do in fact to-day suspend their trade during May, June, July, and August – months which they devote to the sale of sugared barley-water and other cooling beverages.

In Paris a sempstress is supposed to be “gentille,” a lingère, or getter-up of linen, “aimable,” a flower-girl “pretty.” The oyster-woman, although not characterised by any one particular quality, is credited with a combination of qualities in a more or less modified degree. Without being in her first youth, she is young; without being in the bloom of beauty, she does not lack personal charm; and frequently she invests even the opening of oysters with a grace which may well excite admiration. La belle écaillère is indeed the name traditionally applied to her. With the origin of this name a tragic story is associated.

There was once a charmingly pretty oyster-girl named Louise Leroux, known as La belle écaillère. She had a lover named Montreuil, a fireman, who, in a moment of frantic jealousy, plunged his sword into her breast. This horrible crime at once rendered “the beautiful oyster-girl” famous, not only in Paris, but throughout Europe; and in due time the legend of her life and love took dramatic form, and found its way to the stage. The interest excited in her unhappy end was all the greater inasmuch as her murderer had eluded justice by flying to England, where, in London, he set up as a fencing master. The Gaieté Theatre achieved, in 1837, one of its greatest successes by putting on the boards, under the title of La Belle Écaillère, the tragic history of Louise Leroux.

Since then the name has been familiarly applied without discrimination to the female oyster-sellers of Paris, many of whom have well deserved it. But while bearing the name, they have abandoned the traditional fireman, as rather too dangerous a commodity. In lieu of firemen they have captivated notaries, financiers, and others in superior stations of life; whilst one is known to have turned the head of a state minister, who, even if he did not marry her, confessed the passion with which she inspired him by devouring thirty-two dozen of her oysters every morning before breakfast. The flame within him had first been excited by the siren’s ready wit. As he was entering a restaurant one day, a friend who accompanied him remarked: “To-day, my dear sir, more than ever, France dances on a volcano.” “What nonsense!” cried the écaillère; “she dances on a heap of oysters!” Next day the exclamation was reported in a Paris journal, which easily turned it to political account.

There was another oyster-girl who solved a question of lexicographic definition which had hopelessly baffled the Academicians. A new edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie was being prepared, and it became necessary to establish the distinction of meaning between the two expressions de suite and tout de suite. The forty Academicians were all at variance about it, and were about to tear their hair, when one of them, Népomucène Lemercier, exclaimed: “Let us go and dine at Ramponneau’s. That’s better than disputing. We can discuss the matter during dessert.” “Agreed,” replied another member – Nodier. The Academicians forthwith set out, and when they had arrived at their destination one of them, Parseval-Grandmaison, who ordered the dinner, said to the écaillère: “Open forty dozen oysters for us de suite, and serve them tout de suite.” “But, sir,” replied the oyster-woman, “if I open them de suite, I cannot serve them tout de suite.” The Academicians looked at each other in astonishment. The problem had been solved. They had now discovered that of the two expressions tout de suite indicated the greater celerity.

CHAPTER II.

THE ENGLISH AND AMERICANS IN PARIS

The Englishman Abroad – M. Lemoinne’s Analysis – The Englishwoman – Sunday in London and in Paris – Americans in Par – The American Girl

HITHERTO the types of character which we have noticed have been native. Let us vary them by a glance at the typical foreigner or rather foreigners residing or sojourning in Paris.

To begin with the Englishman. In Paris, although there are a great number of Englishmen, it can hardly be said that an English Society exists. Samuel Johnson once complained that Englishmen did not fraternise with one another; that if two visitors called upon a lady about the same time and were shown into her drawing-room, they would, until the lady made her appearance – say for five minutes – simply glare at one other in silence, whereas a couple of foreigners would, although they had never met before, have entered into a conversation.

Without, perhaps, being aware of Johnson’s stricture on the social frigidity of his own countrymen, an excellent French writer, John Lemoinne, has noticed the same insular peculiarity in English visitors to Paris. “The English,” he says, “do not seek one another’s acquaintance; they do not come into other lands to find themselves. If they easily form acquaintanceship with foreigners, they are more fastidious in approaching each other. An Englishman will make friends with a Frenchman without the ceremony of presentation, I mean of introduction, but never with another Englishman. A couple of Englishmen stare at each other very hard before saying, ‘How do you do?’”

Punch many years ago noticed this national characteristic in a picture which represented two English visitors to Paris breakfasting at the same table in the Hôtel Meurice, and, although the only guests in the room, solemnly ignoring each other’s existence.

But M. Lemoinne goes further than Punch. “If the English leave their native land,” he says, “it is not to find their own compatriots; it is to see new men and new things. Even when you understand their language, they prefer to talk to you in their bad French. The thing is intelligible enough: they wish to learn, and have no desire to teach. You are regarded simply as a book and a grammar. The foreigner must be turned to some account.”

So far excellent. But let us return to Samuel Johnson. When he visited Paris did he air his “bad French”? No, he absolutely refused to speak a word of anything but English. This by no means confirms M. Lemoinne’s proposition. Yet in fairness, let it be said, Johnson’s chief objection to talking French in Paris was a fear lest he should “put his foot in it,” and, lexicographer as he was, excite by some grammatical blunder the ridicule of irreverent Parisians.

Let us see, however, to what lengths M. Lemoinne is prepared to go. “If there was ever a people who have the sentiment of nationality, it is,” he says, “the English. They are impregnated, petrified with it; the thing is fatiguing and offensive. But in order to affirm and manifest this sentiment the English have no need to group themselves, to form themselves into a society. An Englishman is to himself England alone; he carries his nation in him, with him, on him; he does not require to be several. Everywhere he is at home: the atmosphere is his kingdom and the ambient air his property. Religion enters largely into this temperament. The Englishman carries not only his nation, but his religion with him; he scours the whole earth with his Bible for companion; the Frenchman, habitually catholic, requires a bell and a priest – he does not know how to converse directly with Heaven. From a social point of view, moreover, the English find France freer, more liberal, more open than their own country. English society, at home, is regulated like music-paper; it has a severe hierarchy, in which the most idiotic little lord stands before a man of genius without a title. Geographically, it is a very narrow space which separates England from France; but this space is a gulf. The two countries are in constant relationship; but they never arrive at any resemblance to each other. We have not the political liberty of the English, and they have not our social equality. An Englishman could not live with laws like those which, in France, regulate the right of speaking, the right of writing, the right of petitioning, the right of assembling, the right of going and coming; but a Frenchman would be stifled amidst those thousand conventional bonds which form English society. The influence of convention in England is such that it equals and even surpasses the tyranny of the political and administrative laws of the Continent. That is why the Englishman, after a stay of some time, and when the ice of his nature is a little melted, moves amongst foreigners as freely as he moves at home. No possible comparison can be made between the Frenchman in London and the Englishman in Paris; or at all events the comparison can only be an antithesis. The Frenchman who pays a visit to England will, so soon as presented, be welcomed with a boundless hospitality, provided his visit is only a flying one; but if he apparently wishes to take root, the soil refuses, and society shuts itself up and retires as though a descent were being made upon its territory. It must be confessed, moreover, that France is not usually represented in England by the cream or flower of her population; and for a simple reason, namely, that a Frenchman does not go to England for pleasure or from choice, and that he has no idea but that of returning as quickly as possible. But apart, even, from these particular circumstances, the mere pressure of the English social atmosphere suffices to asphyxiate a Frenchman. It is a world, an order of ideas, an assemblage of laws and customs entirely different from all others.

“A Parisian may for years walk round English society as he would walk round the wall of China, without being able to find either a door or a window. He understands absolutely nothing about it.

“In France, on the contrary, Englishmen find a greater social liberty. French society is an open society; French manners are cosmopolitan manners. The most diverse peoples can in France find their place without losing their national character. In our country everyone is at home, and the Englishman gets on comfortably enough. In the Englishman, however, it is necessary to distinguish between the citizen and the individual; for he is both. When the national interests or passions are in question he does not scruple to intrigue and conspire; when he is unconcerned with the politics of the country where he happens to find himself, he practises the greatest reserve and mixes in nothing. See the English at Paris. They assist at all our revolutions as mere spectators; their sole care is to get a good seat. They always come to their ambassador to request a presentation at the Tuileries and tickets for the court ball.”

So far we have presented the observations of M. Lemoinne for what they may be worth. That his skilful pen, however, penetrates sometimes into the regions of truth is shown by the fact that his remarks not infrequently recall those of foreign writers so famous as to be regarded more or less as oracular. Heine, after visiting London, complained that at an English dinner party the gentlemen, after the ladies had retired from the dining-room, remained at table for an hour or two to saturate themselves with port. Heine, it must be remembered, took a perverse delight in satirising everything English. But that we, in England, do leave the ladies to drink their after-dinner coffee in the desolation of the drawing-room must be handsomely admitted. M. Lemoinne notices this peculiarity.

“The time has passed,” he says – with burlesque drollery – “when the true Englishman remained at table for several hours after dinner and ended by slumbering beneath it. Now, when the ladies have quitted the dining-room, the gentlemen content themselves with circulating the Bordeaux for twenty minutes. In France we are beginning to divest ourselves of certain prejudices concerning the English. For a long time we regarded the English character as synonymous with ‘spleen.’ It was an old French author who said of the English: ‘They amuse themselves sadly, after the custom of their country.’

“The fact is the English are gay in their own fashion, and sometimes even expansive and noisy; but they are not gay with everybody, nor on a first acquaintance. They must unfreeze; they are like the wine of Bordeaux, which, to give forth its fragrance, has to be warmed.”

After this, however, a very dubious compliment is paid to our compatriots. “It is certain that this race is robuster than others, the women as well as the men. It spends more, consumes more, and absorbs more. See how well these pretty white and red-complexioned Englishwomen can take their sherry and their champagne! Observe them in the middle of the day going to exercise their palate at the pastry-cook’s with coffee, chocolate, ices, all kinds of cakes and sandwiches; you are staggered at the quantity of these delicacies they can put out of sight. See them at the buffets of all those official fêtes of which they form the finest ornament. It is a pleasure to see them, especially when you know that their appetite is not destructive of sentiment.” Now, however, for a compliment which is absolutely sincere. “We venture to say that English society in Paris has exercised a salutary influence on French society, and that it has introduced cordiality into intimate relationships. The handshake of the English lady, for instance, has long shocked, and still shocks our purists. Their fault is that they believe an amiable woman must be too accessible, and that a certain liberty of manners implies an equal liberty of conduct. With such ideas as these they bring up daughters who, having given the tips of their fingers, imagine that they have given everything and have no longer anything to protect; whereas a pretty little English girl who gives her hand gives nothing else, and knows how to defend the rest.”

Another trait of the English character is, we are assured, an “interest in religious questions.” English ladies are “all more or less theologians – veritable doctors in petticoats. English girls will hold forth to you on the subject of grace and free will. You will meet them at church, listening to sermons and going through services, and even taking notes. But what does that matter, since it does not prevent them from serving out the tea admirably, from rearing their children later on, and from being model housewives and model mothers? If our Frenchwomen cry ‘Fie’ upon the blue-stocking, that is perhaps because it is too green; a little theology would not hurt them. It is at church that you get the most comprehensive view of English society in Paris. On Sunday you have only to visit the Faubourg St. – Honoré towards two o’clock; you will encounter quite a procession of English men and women coming from the Rue d’Agnesseau, with their prayer-books and their Sunday demeanour. I say the church, but I ought to say the churches; for the English have nowadays in Paris almost as many chapels as religions. There is the Embassy chapel for Anglicans of the established religion, an English episcopal chapel in the Rue Bayard, another English chapel in the Rue Royale, a Scotch Presbyterian chapel and two English Methodist places of worship in the Rue Roquepine, independently of American chapels. This is not to say that the English observe Sunday in Paris as strictly as they are obliged to do in their own country. Respect for the Sabbath is an observance which they know very well how to dispense with amongst foreigners. On Sunday, from time to time, you see some individual in black attire, and invariably adorned with an umbrella, who, seated on one of the seats in a public garden, pretends to ignore a little pamphlet which is intended to be picked up by the first pedestrian who passes, and which turns out to be a dissertation on the observance of the Sabbath. There are still, perhaps, a few hotels specially designed for English people, where the Bible Society causes to be placed in every bedroom a copy of the Scriptures bearing its own stamp. This ardour of propagandism has begun, however, to abate, and the English in general are by no means the last to take advantage of the Paris Sunday. Anyone who has seen the Sabbath of London must feel the difference. Every Frenchman who has just missed dying, not only of ennui, but of hunger and thirst, during the hours of service in England – hearing his footsteps resound in the desolate streets – will understand the solace experienced by an Englishman on finding that the coast is clear for him at Paris and Versailles. There are, it is true, a certain number of English families who do not receive on Saturday evening because the festivity or the dancing might encroach upon the Sabbath; but what is a sin on English territory is not so on French territory, and the English do not scruple to pass midnight in a Parisian drawing-room.”

This drolly severe but, from a literary point of view, admirable writer seems to think that an Englishman is a sort of fox-terrier, or mastiff, which having been chained up for a length of time becomes, when you let him loose, extremely rampant and ill-conducted. “There are so many things the English would not do at home, that they do without scruple amongst foreigners. Once abroad they indemnify themselves for their national reserve; it is on the foreigner that they revenge themselves for the shackles of their own etiquette and social laws. In crossing the Channel they pitch their solemn vestments into the sea. In London they will not go to the opera dressed in anything but black; here they go in a tweed coat and a slouch hat.” After this Monsieur Lemoinne seems very much upset by the moustaches which Englishmen display as they promenade in the Boulevards. There was a time, he assures us, when a Frenchman crossing the Channel and wishing to have a fashionable air was obliged to sacrifice his moustache – a time when English caricaturists never represented a Frenchman without a pair of long, ill-combed moustaches. To-day the thing is reversed. It is the Englishman who wears this grotesque appendage which proclaims his nationality from afar. Thus moustached, the Englishman goes to Paris – so M. Lemoinne evidently thinks – to have his full fling. “Amongst us,” he says, “a grave man may occasionally dress up to go to a ball, wear fancy costume, or take part in a quadrille, and next morning resume his function as state councillor or referendary. So the Englishman precipitates himself into the French world as into a great masked ball, puts on a false nose, dances at Paris extravagant steps which he calls French dances, cuts capers, sups and gets maudlin, and when he has finished his French tour, tranquilly resumes his duties as member of parliament or no matter what.”

To English ladies M. Lemoinne is a good deal more gallant. He is obliged to point out that they over-dress and stride along the Boulevards like dismounted dragoons. “Yet, make no mistake,” he adds. “In that still crude block there are all the elements of a superb work of art. What fine construction, what solid layers, what grand architecture! Wait till art has put her hand to these materials; wait till the Englishwoman has learned how to walk, carry herself, and dress, and until, to her native beauty, she has added acquired grace – then you will have the finest type of creation and of civilisation. The native Englishwoman who has become a naturalised Parisian is perfection.”

In spite of the modified tribute which this writer pays to Englishwomen, it may be said that he has handled our nation very roughly. In the present day England and France would no longer, in a European war, fight side by side as they did in the Crimea; and a little unconscious Anglophobia tinctures the writings even of such a skilful and impartial essayist as M. Lemoinne. The Americans in Paris are regarded, by French writers generally, from a much more favourable point of view. Let us, in the first place, hear what M. André Léo has to say on this subject. “If you walk through the Champs Élysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de l’Étoile, or through the avenues which converge there, from the direction of the Madeleine, in the Quartier St. – Honoré towards the Parc Monceaux, you will frequently meet women richly adorned, men with light-coloured beards, tranquil and placid; young women of lively and decided mien, pretty children with curly hair, whose physiognomy is at once full of candour and of assurance. All these individuals, isolated or grouped, offer you pretty nearly the same type; a countenance which is strong in comparison with the small, piercing grey eyes, and flexible features, often agreeable, and sometimes beautiful… All nationalities, indeed, meet and knock against each other in this new quarter with its fine avenues and its sylvan groves. But there is an evident predominance of English and American language and customs, as appears from the signs over the chemists’ shops, the stores, the boarding-houses, and the special pastry-cooks, where cakes, pies, and puddings are displayed in the window. Yet although in this region a unity of language and conformity of habits unite the English and the Americans, the two societies intermix very little. Anglophobia, as a national and popular sentiment, is perhaps more ardent in the United States than amongst us.”

In a general way the resident American population of Paris consists of the Diplomatic body, bankers, families who have come for the education of their children, and artists eager to study the masterpieces of the Parisian galleries. The American nation is accused of being devoid of artistic sentiment; but M. André Léo stoutly protests that “such a criticism passed upon a new people, who have been obliged to occupy themselves before everything with work and industry, is too hasty. American artists already exist; and already their efforts and their ambitions foretell the development of that noble and precious human faculty the germ of which exists in every people and every man, but which necessitates a certain leisure and a certain mental education.”

Apart from the American residing in Paris, and the American who, binding himself to the nation by more than lengthened residence, has married into some French family – an occurrence by no means rare – there is the flying American visitor to Paris, whose headquarters are the Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Italiens. This establishment, by its central position, its interior arrangements, its luxury and its comfort, enjoys an enormous reputation on the other side of the Atlantic. The Yankee leaves New York for the Grand Hotel. It is not till he passes its threshold that he feels himself on terra firma again; it is here that he finds out where he is and gets his information. If his means or his projects permit it, he installs himself at this hotel for three or four months; if not, he goes on to some other hotel or boarding-house, or else rents an apartment to live by himself. If you enter the courtyard of the Grand Hotel, ascend the portico steps, and, making your way into the stately readingroom, look out of the window for five minutes, you will see that the innumerable vehicles which every few seconds stop at the hotel deposit ten Americans to one Englishman.

From this centre the tourist easily gets to all those points of the city to which necessity or curiosity impels him. The first visit he pays is probably to his banker – to Bowles and Devritt, perhaps, in the Rue de la Paix, or to Norton’s in the Rue Auber. Once he banked with the firm of Rothschild, but now no longer. During the American war M. de Rothschild’s attitude in reference to the planters was by no means neutral, and this political indiscretion has cost him his American clients.

When the New York party has cashed its cheque at the American bank – which is quite a rendezvous for trans-Atlantics and at which all the American newspapers can be seen – the feminine element hastens to visit all the most fashionable shops. The ladies are eager to purchase, at comparatively low prices, those Parisian costumes which their own native custom-house raises to prices so exorbitant. Dressed ere long in the richest and newest fashions, they step with their male companions into a carriage and drive to the Bois de Boulogne; then they go to the opera, to spectacles of every kind, and to the Legation. If there happens to be a sovereign on the throne, they put their names down for presentation at the Tuileries and order a court costume. For it must be confessed that the Americans are fond of the pomps of this world, and that, Republicans as they profess to be, they have no prejudice against kings and princes outside their own country. The monarchs of other nations neither shock nor terrify them. And the American tourist, apart from the question of political sentiment, likes to see everything and do everything before he recrosses the Atlantic. If an American family visits a land where it is the fashion to be presented at court, they will feel humiliated and ashamed should they have to confess afterwards to their compatriots that they missed the presentation.