Of the further journey to Paris there is happily little to record. ‘Das höchste Glück hat reine Lieder,’ and the most satisfactory travelling is that which lends itself least to description. The Calais boat made its journey in the most brilliant of sunshine and the most refreshing of breezes, trampling its way along the water at a pace that made the tall merchantmen look more old-world and stately than usual as they moved serenely down the Channel. The male part of the passengers walked the deck as if their lives depended on it, after the custom of men; the ladies sat in sheltered places and tried to keep their hair tidy; and all alike exhibited the hypnotic consciousness of the presence of a sketch-book, that makes the most cautious sketcher the object of instant remark and suspicion.
We sat that night in the warm, airless courtyard of a Paris hotel; tall dusty shrubs in pots hung their lank leaves limply over our heads; waiters flitted like bats to and fro between the kitchen on one side and the salle-à-manger on the other. A French family, consisting of a papa, a mamma, a beautifully behaved daughter with her hair in a queue, a humorous old friend of a godfatherly type, and a little boy with tasselled boots, partook of various liquids at a table near enough to us to permit of our hearing their effortless, endless babble, and also to observe with ever-growing hatred the self-conscious gambols of the little boy. Later on, they adjourned to the salon, and the daughter performed a selection of music. She began with a confident rendering of ‘La Prière d’une Vierge’ one of those pieces which once was the strength and glory of every budding pianiste, but now in its old age is only heard limping and faltering over the greasy keys of hotel pianos; and she finished with an operatic gallop in which the treble fled about in lonely frenzy, and the bass retired on to the lowest octave of the piano and there had a fit of St. Vitus’s dance. The little boy pirouetted about the room, the papa, mamma, and godfather clapped their hands and laughed indulgently, and a good many of the windows that gave on to the courtyard were suddenly and violently shut.
We went to bed after that; that is to say, we retired into a good-sized opera-box, with windows opening on to lamps and palms, and a general interior effect of red curtains and mirrors. It is one of the strangest features of French hotels that dressing-tables are not included in any suite of bedroom furniture; there are looking-glasses by the score, there are handsome marble slabs bearing ornate clocks that do not go, there are gorgeous armoires à glace, but never a good, commonplace, useful dressing-table. French people seem to do without them in the same simple, uncomplaining way that they do without baths.
We cannot pretend to say we slept well in our opera-box. Everything in the hotel seemed to stay up
HE BROKE INTO A DEFIANT POLKA.
all night, including a small but devoted party of fleas; and the atmosphere, even when diluted with as much courtyard air as the windows would let in, was heavy and hot. We came down next morning feeling unrefreshed, and not at all disposed to bestow of our substance on the street musician who, since eight o’clock, had been playing national airs on an accordion in the courtyard. Having seen us pass by on our way to breakfast, he immediately played ‘God save the Queen,’ gliding subsequently into the ‘Marseillaise’ as a kind of corrective, and then finding that we still drank our coffee unmoved, he broke into a defiant polka, which, did he but know it, has ‘sung in our sleeping ear and hummed in our waking head’ in elusive, half-remembered snatches, revenging a thousandfold the callousness of the two Anglaises.
We had not much time to spare after breakfast, as the Bordeaux train by which we were going started at 11.20. A mosquito net was, however, one of the things we had forgotten, and one of the things which we were assured was indispensable, and it was not until we had entered a likely-looking shop that we realised that we did not know the French for mosquito. My second cousin and the shopwoman regarded each other for a few seconds in polite silence, and then the latter said interrogatively,—
‘Madame désire—?’
