And as the ten-a-penny poet gazes, enraptured, upon this pleasing spectacle from a conveniently adjacent mountain summit, his bosom heaves with many a joy, he flings his pack upon the grassy sward, and he too dances a festal hornpipe upon his head.
If admirers of ten-a-penny poetry had anything to think with, they would resent this crude and humiliating imposition.
I protest that the scenes of earlier joys are always, and in the nature of things, a delusion and a snare. That vast and luscious orchard, so long and so fondly remembered, turns out to be no more than a scrubby clump of woebegone bearers of tasteless, sapless pears and wooden apples. The main street that we thought so wide and grand and gay, is a narrow, dirty, straggling collection of dingy, fly-blown marine stores and reach-me-down contraptions. The toffee-shop—the Star of the East, that glorious palace of delight—is a ramshackle, tumbledown hovel, with a stock of sloppy, sticky, sickly brandy-balls, and soiled peppermints. The confectioner's—ah, woe is me!
When I lived in Paris, as a boy, what a mad, merry, reckless place it was! How admirably Offenbach set it to music in the rippling airs of La Grande Duchesse, which tout Paris then whistled and sang!
I think the sun in those days shone all the time, and Paris, newly rebuilt by Baron Haussman, glittered in bran new white and gold under a canopy of silky blue.
Offenbach translated it all—sunshine, staring new white stone, gilt railings and eagles, joyous crowds, laughing women, madly merry mirlitons, dazzling uniforms, splendid horses and carriages, imperial tinsel, bright silk skies, universal carelessness, recklessness, and intoxication. It is all in the music of The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.
Then the Sunday picnics in the woods of Vincennes and St. Cloud! the al fresco dinner-parties at the suburban cafés! the jousting games upon the river, where we knocked each other into the Seine, to the joy of ourselves and all beholders! and the old dances—ah! who could forget the dances of the fête at St. Cloud? Men in shirt-sleeves, girls without hats, spinning like coupled tornadoes, heedless of time, heedless of all measure, heedless of conventions. If they desired to dance the waltz, and the band chose to play the polka, eh bien, "Zut," to the band.
THE CHAMPS ÉLYSÉES.