The cuisine of these great hotels is unexceptionable, the rooms, which are either very grand or very small, well furnished, although comfort is too often sacrificed to display; but the attendance or attention, unless the servants are heavily feed, is nothing to speak of, while the charges during the travelling season are a third beyond those of other equally good, though not "grand" establishments.
The magnificent new opera house, near these hotels, is a huge building, rich on the exterior with splendid statues, marbles, medallions, carving, and gilding, upon an island as it were, with the great, broad avenues on every side of it; and as I sit at table in the salle à manger looking out at it, I am suddenly conscious that the English tongue appears to be predominant about me; and so indeed it is, as a large portion of the guests at these two hotels are Americans or English, which accounts in a measure for the high prices and bad service, the French considering Americans and English who travel to be moving money-bags, from which it is their duty to extract as much as possible by every means in their power.
The court-yard of the Grand Hotel, around which, in the evening, gentlemen sit to sip a cup of coffee and puff a cigar, is such a rendezvous for Americans, that during the Exposition it was proposed by some to post up the inscription, "French Spoken Here," for fear of mistakes.
The modes of living, besides that at hotels, have been frequently described, and in taking apartments, one must be very explicit with the landlord; indeed, it will be well to take a written memorandum from him, else, on the presentation of his first bill, one may ascertain the true value of a Frenchman's word, or rather how valueless he considers a verbal agreement.
We had the fortune, however, in hiring apartments, to deal with a Frenchman who understood how to bargain with foreigners, and had learned that there was something to be gained by dealing fairly, and having the reputation of being honest.
This man did a good business by taking new houses immediately after they were finished, hiring furniture, and letting apartments to foreigners. From him we learned that French people never like to live in an entirely new house, one that has been dwelt in by others for a year having the preference; perhaps this pre-occupation is supposed to take the chill off the premises; so our landlord made a good thing of it in taking these houses at a low rent of the owners for one year, and getting a reputation for fair prices, fair dealing, and an accommodating spirit: those who hired of him were so prompt to commend him as an exception among the crowd of grasping, cringing rascals in his business, that his houses in the pleasant quarter, near the Arc d'Etoile were constantly occupied by Americans and English.
In Paris do as the Parisians do; and really it is difficult to do otherwise in the matter of meals. Breakfast here is taken at twelve o'clock, the day being commenced with a cup of coffee and a French roll, so that between twelve and one business appears at its height in the cafés, and almost suspended everywhere else. To gastronomic Yankees, accustomed to begin the day with a good "square" meal, the French déjeûner is hardly sufficient to support the three hours' sight-seeing our countrymen calculate upon doing between that time and the real déjeûner à la fourchette.
The sights and scenes of Paris have been so thoroughly described within the past three years, in every style and every vein, by the army of correspondents who have visited the gay capital, that beyond personal experiences it seems now as though but little else could possibly be written. I therefore look at my closely-written note-book, the heap of little memoranda, and the well-pencilled fly-leaves of my guide-books, of facts, impressions, and experiences, with some feelings of doubt as to how much of this already, perhaps, too familiar matter shall be inflicted upon the intelligent reader; and yet, before I visited Paris, every letter of the descriptive tourist kind was of interest, and since then they are doubly so. Before visiting Europe, such letters were instruction for what I was to one day experience; and many a bit of useful information, read in the desultory letter of some newspaper correspondent which had been nearly forgotten, has come to mind in some foreign capital, and been of essential service, while, as before remarked in these pages, much of the important minutiæ of travel I have been surprised has not been alluded to. That surprise in a measure vanishes, when any one with a keen love of travel finds how much occupies his attention amid such an avalanche of the enjoyable things that he has read, studied, and dreamed of, as are encountered in the great European capitals.
In Paris my first experience at living was in lodgings in a fine new house on Avenue Friedland, third flight (au troisième). The apartments consisted of a salon, which served as parlor, breakfast and reception room, a sleeping-room, and a dressing-room with water fixtures and pegs for clothing. The grand Arc d'Etoile was in full view, and but a few rods from my lodgings, and consequently the very first sight that I "did."
This magnificent monument of the first Napoleon is almost as conspicuous a landmark in Paris as is the State House in Boston, and seems to form the terminus of many of the broad streets that radiate from it, and upon approaching the city from certain points overtops all else around. The arch is situated in a large, circular street, called the Place d'Etoile, which is filled with elegant houses, with gardens in front, and is one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris: from this Place radiate, as from a great star, or like the sticks of a lady's fan, twelve of the most magnificent avenues of the city, and from the top of the arch itself the spectator can look straight down these broad streets for miles. It is quite recently that several of them have been straightened and widened, under the direction of Baron Haussmann; and one cannot but see what a commanding position a battery of artillery would occupy stationed in this Place d'Etoile, and sweeping down twelve great avenues to the very centre of the city.