Our Amusements.
Pair by pair, as you see them costumés in the fashions of the month; pinioned arm to arm, but looking different ways; leaning upon polished reeds as light and as expensive as themselves—behold the chivalry of the land! The hand of Barde is discernible in their paletots. The spirit of Staub hovers over those flowery waistcoats; who but Sahoski shall claim the curious felicity of those heels? and Hippolyte has come bodily from Paris on purpose to do their hair. "Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire," says Boileau, and here, in supply exactly equal to the demand, come forth, rustling and bustling to see them, bevies of long-tongued belles, who ever, as they walk and meet their acquaintance, are announcing themselves in swift alternation "charmées," with a blank face, and "toutes desolées," with the best good-will! Here you learn to value a red riband at its "juste prix," which is just what it will fetch per ell; specimens of it in button-holes being as frequent as poppies amidst the corn. Pretending to hide themselves from remark, which they intend but to provoke, here public characters do private theatricals a little à l'écart. Actors gesticulate as they rehearse their parts under the trees. Poets
"Rave and recite, and madden as they stand;"
and honourable members read aloud from the Débats that has just arrived, the speech which they spoke yesterday "en Deputés." Our promenade here lacks but a few more Saxon faces amidst the crowd, and a greater latitude of extravagance in some of its costumes, to complete the illusion, and to make you imagine that this public garden, flanked as it is on one side by a street of hotels, and on the opposite by the bank of the Allier, is the Tuilleries with its Sunday population sifted.
Twenty-five francs secures you admission to the "Cercle" or club-house, a large expensive building, which, like most buildings raised to answer a variety of ends, leaves the main one of architectural propriety wholly out of account. But when it is considered how many interests and caprices the architect had to consult, it may be fairly questioned, whether, so hampered, Vitruvius could have done it better; for the ground floor was to be cut up into corridors and bathing cells; while the ladies requested a ball and anteroom; and the gentlemen two "billiards" and a reading-room, with detached snuggeries for smoking—all on the first floor.
Public places, excepting the above-mentioned "Cercle," exist not at Vichy, and as nobody thinks of paying visits save only to the doctor and the springs, "on s'ennui très considerablement à Vichy." If it be true, that, in some of the lighter annoyances of life, fellowship is decidedly preferable to solitude, ennui comes not within the number—every attempt to divide it with one's neighbours only makes it worse; as Charles Lamb has described the concert of silence at a Quakers' meeting, the intensity increases with the number, and every new accession raises the public stock of distress, which again redounds with a surplus to each individual, "chacun en a son part, et tous l'ont tout entier."[4] What a chorus of yawns is there; and mutual yawns, you know, are the dialogue of ennui. No wonder; for the physicians don't permit their patients to read any books but novels. They seek to array the "Understanding" against him who wrote so well concerning its laws; Bacon, as intellectual food, they consider difficult of digestion; and even for their own La Place there is no place at Vichy! Every unlucky headache contracted here, is placed to the account of thinking in the bath. If Dr P—— suspects any of his patients of thinking, he asks them, like Mrs Malaprop, "what business they have to think?" "Vous êtes venu ici pour prendre les eaux, et pour vous desennuyer, non pas pour penser! Que le Diable emporte la Pensée!" And so he does accordingly!
How we got through the twenty-four hours of each day, is still a problem to us; after making due deductions for the time consumed in eating, drinking, and sleeping. Occasionally we tried to "beat time" by versifying our own and our neighbours' "experiences" of Vichy. But soon finding the "quicquid agunt homines" of those who in fact did nothing, was beyond our powers of description, gave up, as abortive, the attempt to maintain our "suspended animation" on means so artificial and precarious. When little is to be told, few words will suffice. If the word fisherman be derived from fishing, and not from fish, we had a great many such fishermen at Vichy; who, though they could neither scour a worm, nor splice the rod that their clumsiness had broken, nor dub a fly, nor land a fish of a pound weight, if any such had had the mind to try them, were vain enough to beset the banks of the Allier at a very early hour in the morning. As they all fished with "flying lines," in order to escape the fine imposed on those that are shotted, and seemed to prefer standing in their own light—a rare fault in Frenchmen—with their backs to the sun; the reader will readily understand, if he be an angler, what sport they might expect. Against them and their lines, we quote a few lines of our own spinning:—
Now full of hopes, they loose the lengthing twine,
Bait harmless hooks, and launch a leadless line!
Their shadows on the stream, the sun behind—
Egregious anglers! are the fishes blind?
Gull'd by the sportings of the frisking bleak,
That now assemble, now disperse, in freak;
They see not deeper, where the quick-eyed trout,
Has chang'd his route, and turned him quick about;
See not those scudding shoals, that mend their pace,
Of frighten'd bream, and silvery darting dace!
Baffled at last, they quit the ungrateful shore,
Curse what they fail to catch—and fish no more!
Yet fish there be, though these unsporting wights
Affect to doubt what Rondolitier[5] writes;
Who tells, "how, moved by soft Cremona's string,
Along these banks he saw the Allice spring;
Whilst active hands, t' anticipate their fall,
Spread wide their nets, and draw an ample haul."
Our sportsmen do not confine themselves to the gentle art of angling—they shoot also; and some of them even acquire a sort of celebrity for the precision of their aim. This class of sportsmen may be divided into the in, and the out-door marksmen. These, innocuous, and confining their operations principally to small birds in trees; those, to the knocking the heads off small plaster figures from a stand. The following brief notice of them we transcribe from our Vichy note-book:—
Those of bad blood, and mischievously gay,
Haunt "tirs au pistolets," and kill—the day!
There, where the rafters tell the frequent crack,
To fire with steady hand, acquire the knack,
From rifle barrels, twenty feet apart,
On gypsum warriors exercise their art,
Till ripe proficients, and with skill elate,
Their aimless mischief turns to deadly hate.
Perverted spirits; reckless, and unblest;
Ye slaves to lust; ye duellists profess'd;
Vainer than woman; more unclean than hogs;
Your life the felon's; and your death the dog's!
Fight on! while honour disavow your brawl,
And outraged courage disapprove the call—
Till, steep'd in guilt, the devil sees his time,
And sudden death shall close a life of crime.
In front of some of the hotels you always observe a number of persons engaged successively in throwing a ring, with which each endeavours to encircle a knife handle, on a board, stuck all over with blades. If he succeeds, he may pocket the knife; if not he pays half a franc, and is free to throw again. It is amusing to observe how many half franc pieces a Frenchman's vanity will thus permit him to part with, before he gives over, consigning the ring to its owner, and the blades to his electrical anathema of "mille tonnerres!" A little farther on, just beyond the enclosure, is another knot of people. What are they about? They are congregated to see what passengers embark or disembark (their voyage accomplished) from the gay vessels, the whirligigs or merry-go-rounds (which is the classical expression, let purists decide for themselves) which, gaily painted as a Dutch humming-top, sail overhead, and go round with the rapidity of windmills.
In hopes to cheat their nation's fiend, "Ennui,"
These cheat themselves, and seem to go to sea!
Their galley launch'd, its rate of sailing fast,
Th' Equator soon, and soon the Poles they've past,
And here they come to anchorage at last!
These, tightly stirrupt on a wooden horse,
Ride at a ring—and spike it, as they course.
Thus with the aid that ships and horses give,
Life passes on; 'tis labour, but they live.—
And some lead "bouledogues" to the water's edge,
There hunt, à l'Anglais, rats amidst the sedge;
And some to "pedicures" present—their corns,
And some at open windows practise—horns!
In noisy trictrac, or in quiet whist,
These pass their time—and, to complete our list,
There are who flirt with milliners or books,
Or else with nature 'mid her meads and brooks.
But Gauthier's was our lounge, and therefore, in common gratitude, are we bound particularly to describe it. Had we been Dr Darwin we had done it better. As it is, the reader must content himself with Scuola di Darwin—
In Gauthier's shop, arranged in storied box
Of triple epoch, we survey the rocks,
A learned nomenclature! Behold in time
Strange forms imprison'd, forms of every clime!
The Sauras quaint, daguerrotyped on slate,
Obsolete birds and mammoths out of date;
Colossal bones, that, once before our flood,
Were clothed in flesh, and warm'd with living blood;
And tiny creatures, crumbling into dust,
All mix'd and kneaded in one common crust!
Here tempting shells exhibit mineral stores,
Of crystals bright and scintillating ores!
Of milky mesotypes, the various sorts,
The blister'd silex and the smoke-stain'd quartz;
Thy phosphates lead! bedeck'd with needles green,
Of Elbas speculum the steely sheen,
Of copper ores, the poison'd "greens" and "blues,"
Dark Bismuth's cubes, and Chromium's changing hues.
Here, too, (emblematical of our own position with respect to Ireland,) we see silver alloyed with lead. In the "repeal of such union," where the silver has every thing to gain and the lead every thing to lose, it is remarkable at what a very dull heat ('tis scarcely superior to that by which O'Connell manages to inflame Ireland) the baser metal melts, and would forsake the other, by its incorporation with which it derives so large a portion of its intrinsic value, whatever that may be!
Here, too, we pass in frequent review a vast series of casts from the antique; they come from Clermont, and are produced by the dripping of water, strongly impregnated with the carbonate of lime, on moulds placed under it with this view. Some of these impressions were coarse and rusty, owing to the presence of iron in the water; but where the necessary precautions had been taken to precipitate this, the casts came out with a highly polished surface, together with a sharpness of outline and a precision of detail, that left no room for competition to Odellis, else unrivalled Roman casts, which, confronted with these, look like impressions of impressions derived through a hundred successive stages; add, too, that these have the solid advantage over the others of being in marble in place of washed sulphur.
Thus much concerning us and our pastimes, from which it will have appeared that the gentlemen at Vichy pass half the day in nothings, the other half in nothing. As to the ladies, who lead the same kind of out doors life with us, and only don't smoke or play billiards, we see and note as much of their occupations or listlessness as we list.
In unzoned robes, and loosest dishabille,
They show the world they've nothing to conceal!
But sit abstracted in their own George Sand,
And dote on Vice in sentiment so bland!
To necklaced Pug appropriate a chair,
Or sit alone, knit, shepherdise, and stare!
These seek for fashion in a mourning dress,
(Becoming mourning makes affliction less.)
With mincing manner, both of ton and town,
Some lead their Brigand children up and down;
Invite attention to small girls and boys,
Dress'd up like dolls, a silly mother's toys;
Or follow'd by their Bonne, in Norman cap,
Affect to take their first-born to their lap—
To gaze enraptured, think you, on a face,
In which a husband's lineaments they trace?
Smiling, to win the notice of their elf?
No! but to draw the gaze of crowds on Self.
Sunday, which is always in France a jour de fête, and a jour de bal into the bargain, is kept at Vichy, and in its neighbourhood, with great apparent gaiety and enjoyment by the lower orders, who unite their several arrondissements, and congregate here together.
Comes Sunday, long'd for by each smart coquette,
Of Randan, Moulins, Ganat, and Cusset.
In Janus hats,[6] with beaks that point both ways,
Then lively rustics dance their gay Bourrées;[7]
With painted sabots strike the noisy ground,
While bagpipes squeal, and hurdy-gurdies sound.
Till sinks the sun—then stop—the poor man's fête
Begins not early, and must end not late.
Whilst Paris belle in costliest silk array'd,
Runs up, and walks in stateliest parade;
Each comely damsel insolently kens;
(So silver pheasants strut 'midst modest hens!)
And marvels much what men can find t' admire,
In such coarse hoydens, clad in such attire!
And now 'tis night; beneath the bright saloon,
All eyes are raised to see the fire balloon,
Till swells the silk 'midst acclamations loud,
And the light lanthorn shoots above the crowd!
Here, 'neath the lines, Hygeia's fount that shade,
Smart booths allure the lounger on parade.
Bohemia's glass, and Nevers' beaded wares,
Millecour's fine lace, and Moulins' polish'd shears;
And crates of painted wicker without flaw,
And fine mesh'd products of Germania's straw,
Books of dull trifling, misnamed "reading light,"
And foxy maps, and prints in damaged plight,
Whilst up and down to rattling castanettes,
The active hawker sells his "oubliettes!"
We have our shows at Vichy, and many an itinerant tent incloses something worth giving half a franc to see; most of them we had already seen over and over again. What then? one can't invent new monsters every year, nor perform new feats; and so we pay our respects to the walrus woman, and to the "anatomie vivante." We look up to the Swiss giantess, and down upon the French dwarf; we inspect the feats of the village Milos, and of those equestrians, familiar to "every circus" at home and abroad, who
Ride four horses galloping; then stoop,
Vault from their backs, and spring thro' narrow hoop;
Once more alight upon their coursers' backs,
Then follow, scampering round the oft trod tracks.
And that far travell'd pig—that pig of parts,
Whose eye aye glistens on that Queen of hearts;
While wondering visitors the feat regard,
And tell by looks that that's the very card!
Behold, too, another curiosity in natural history, well deserving of "notice" and of "note," which we append accordingly—
From Auvergne's heights, their mother lately slain,
Six surly wolf cubs by their owner ta'en;
Her own pups drown'd, a foster bitch supplies,
And licks the churlish brood with fond maternal eyes![8]
Finally, and to wind up—
Who dance on ropes, who rouged and roaring stand,
Who cheat the eyes by wondrous sleight of hand,
From whose wide mouth the ready riband falls,
Who swallow swords, or urge the flying balls,
Here with French poodles vie, and harness'd fleas,
Nor strive in vain our easy tastes to please.
Whilst rival pupils of the great Daguerre,
In rival shops, display their rivals fair!