A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

But the best thing in the Tuileries is M. Pol. Who is M. Pol? Well, he may not be the most famous man in Paris, but he is certainly the most engaging. M. Pol is the charmer of birds—"Le Charmeur d'oiseaux au Jardin des Tuileries," to give him his full title. There may be other charmers too at their pretty labours; but M. Pol comes easily first: his personality is so attractive, his terms of intercourse with the birds so intimate. His oiseaux are chiefly sparrows, whom he knows by name—La Princesse, Le Loustic, Garibaldi, La Baronne, l'Anglais, and so forth. They come one by one at his call, and he pets them and praises them; talks pretty ironical talk; uses them (particularly the little brown l'Anglais) for sly satirical purposes, for there are usually a few English spectators; affects to admonish and even chastise them, shuffling minatory feet with all the noise but none of the illusion of seriousness; and never ceases the while to scatter his crumbs or seeds of comfort. It is a very charming little drama, and although carried on every day, and for some hours every day, it has no suggestion of routine; one feels that the springs of it are sweetness and benevolence.

He is a typical elderly Latin, this M. Pol, a little unmindful as to his dress, a little inclined to shamble: humorous, careless, gentle. When I first saw him, years ago, he fed his birds and went his way: but he now makes a little money by it too, now and then offering, very reluctantly, postcards bearing pictures of himself with all his birds about him and a distich or so from his pen. For M. Pol is a poet in words as well as deeds: "De nos petits oiseaux," he writes on one card:—

"De nos petits oiseaux, je suis le bienfaiteur,
Et je vais tous les jours leur donner la pâture,
Mais suivant un contrat dicté par la nature
Quand je donne mon pain, ils me donnent leur cœur."

I think this true. It is a little more than cupboard love that inspires these tiny creatures, or they would never settle on M. Pol's hands and shoulders as they do. He has charmed the pigeons also; but here he admits to a lower motive:—

"Ils savent, les malins, que leur couvert est mis,
C'est en faisant du bien qu'on se fait des amis."

It amused me one day at the Louvre to fix one of these photographs in the frame of Giotto's picture of St. Francis (in Salle VII.), one of the scenes of which shows him preaching to the birds, thus bridging the gulf between the centuries and making for the moment the Assisi of the Saint and the Paris of M. Briand one.

London has its noticeable lovers of animals too—you may see in St. Paul's churchyard in the dinner hour isolated figures surrounded and covered by pigeons: the British Museum courtyard also knows one or two, and the Guildhall: quite like Venice, both of them, save that no one is excited about it; while in St. James's Square may be seen at all hours of every day the mysterious cat woman with her pensioners all about her on their little mats. Every city has these humorists—shall I say? using the word as it was wont to be used long ago. But M. Pol—M. Pol stands alone. It is not merely that he charms the birds but that he is so charming with them. The pigeon feeders of London whom I have watched bring their maize, distribute it and go. M. Pol is more of a St. Francis than that: as I have shown, he converses, jokes and exchanges moods with his friends.

Although he is acquainted with pigeons, his real friends are the gamins of the air, the sparrows, true Parisians, who have the best news. Pigeons, one can conceive, pick up a fact here and there, but it would have a foreign or provincial flavour. Now if there is one thing which bores a true Parisian it is talk of what is happening outside Paris. The Parisian's horizons do not extend beyond his city. The sun for him rises out of the Bois de Vincennes, and evening comes because it has sunk into the Bois de Boulogne. Hence M. Pol's wisdom in choosing the sparrow for his companion, his oiseau intime.

So far had I written when I chanced to walk into London by way of Hyde Park, and there, just by the Achilles statue, was a charming gentleman in a tall white hat whistling a low whistle to a little band of sparrows who followed him and surrounded him and fluttered up, one by one, to his hand. We talked a little together, and he told me that the birds never forget him, though he is absent for eight months each year. His whistle brings them at once. So London is all right after all. And I have been told delightful things about the friends of the grey squirrels in Central Park; so New York perhaps is all right too.

The Round Pond of Paris is at the Tuileries—not so vast as the mare clausum of Kensington Gardens, but capable of accommodating many argosies. Leaving this Pond behind us and making for the Place de la Concorde, we have on the right the remains of a monastery of the Cistercians, one of the many religious houses which stood all about the north of the Gardens at the time of the Revolution and were first discredited and emptied by the votaries of Reason and then swept away by Napoleon when he made the Rue de Rivoli. The building on the left is the Orangery. It is in this part that the temporary pavilions are erected for the banquets to provincial mayors and such pleasant ceremonies, while in the summer some little exhibition is usually in progress.