A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

(Odd work for Marquises!)

THE MUSÉE CLUNY (COURTYARD)

On the way to the Jardin des Plantes from this restaurant it is not unamusing to turn aside to the Halles des Vins and loiter a while in these genial catacombs. Here you may see barrels as the sands of the sea-shore for multitude, and raw wine of a colour that never yet astonished in a bottle, and I hope, so far as I am concerned, never will: unearthly aniline juices that are to pass through many dark processes before they emerge smilingly as vins, to lend cheerfulness to the windows of the épicier and gaiety to the French heart.

Even with the most elementary knowledge of French one would take the Jardin des Plantes to be the Parisian Kew, and so to some small extent it is; but ninety-nine per cent. of its visitors go not to see the flora but the fauna. It is in reality the Zoo of the Paris proletariat. Paris, unlike London, has two Zoos, both of which hide beneath names that easily conceal their zoological character from the foreigner—the Jardin des Plantes, where we now find ourselves, which is free to all, and the Jardin d'Acclimatation, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, near the Porte Maillot, which costs money—a franc to enter and a ridiculous supplément to your cabman for the privilege of passing the fortifications in his vehicle: one of Paris's little mistakes. To the Jardin d'Acclimatation we shall come anon: just now let us loiter among the wild animals of the Jardin des Plantes, which is as a matter of fact a far more thorough Zoo than that selecter other, where frivolity ranks before zoology. Our own Zoo contains a finer collection than either, and our animals are better housed and ordered, but this Parisian people's Zoo has a great advantage over ours in that it is free. All zoological gardens should of course be free.

The Jardin des Plantes has another and a dazzling superiority in the matter of peacocks. I never saw so many. They occur wonderfully in the most unexpected places, not only in the enclosures of all the other open-air animals, but in trees and on roofs and amid the bushes—burning with their deep and lustrous blue. But on the warm day of spring on which I saw them first they were not so quiescent. Regardless of the proprieties they were most of them engaged in recommending themselves to the notice of their ladies. On all sides were spreading tails bearing down upon the beloved with the steady determination of a three-masted schooner, and now and then caught like that vessel in a shattering breeze (of emotion) which stirred every sail. In England one might feel uncomfortable in the midst of so naked a display of the old Adam, but in Paris one becomes more reconciled to facts, and (like the new cat in the adage) ceases to allow "I am ashamed" to wait upon "I would". The peahens, however, behaved with a stolid circumspection that was beyond praise. These vestals never lifted their heads from the ground, but pecked on and on, mistresses of the scene and incidentally the best friends of the crowds of ouvriers and ouvrières ("V'là le paon! Vite! Vite!") at every railing. But the Parisian peacock is not easily daunted. In spite of these rebuffs the batteries of glorious eyes continued firing, and wider and wider the tails spread, with a corresponding increase of disreputable déshabillé behind; and so I left them, recalling as I walked away a comic occurrence at school too many years ago, when a travelling elocutionist, who had induced our headmaster to allow him to recite to the boys, was noticed to be discharging all his guns of tragedy and humour (some of which I remember distinctly at the moment) with a broadside effect that, while it assisted the ear, had a limiting influence on gesture and by-play, and completely eliminated many of the nuances of conversational give and take. Never throughout the evening did we lose sight of the full expanse of his shirt front; never did he turn round. Never, do I say? But I am wrong. Better for him had it been never: for the poor fellow, his task over and his badly needed guinea earned, forgot under our salvoes of applause the need of caution, and turning from one side of the platform to the other in stooping acknowledgment, disclosed a rent precisely where no man would have a rent to be.

My advice to the visitor to the Jardin des Plantes is to be satisfied with the living animals—with the seals and sea-lions, the bears and peacocks, the storks and tigers; and, in fair weather, with the flowers, although the conditions under which these are to be observed are not ideal, so formally arranged on the flat as they are, with traffic so visibly adjacent. But to the glutton for museums such advice is idle. Here, however, even he is like to have his fill.

Let him then ask at the Administration for a ticket, which will be handed to him with the most charming smile by an official who is probably of all the bureaucrats of Paris the least deserving of a tip, since zoological and botanical gardens exist for the people, and these tickets (the need for which is, by the way, non-existent) are free and are never withheld—but who is also of all the bureaucrats of Paris the most determined to get one, even, as I observed, from his own countrymen. Thus supplied you must walk some quarter of a mile to a huge building in which are collected all the creatures of the earth in their skins as God made them, but lifeless and staring from the hands of taxidermic man. It is as though the ark had been overwhelmed by some such fine dust as fell from Vesuvius, and was now exhumed. One does not get the same effect from the Natural History Museum in the Cromwell Road; it is, I suppose, the massing that does it here.

Having walked several furlongs amid this travesty of wild and dangerous life, one passes to the next museum, which is devoted to mineralogy and botany, and here again are endless avenues of joy for the muséephile and tedium for others. Lastly, after another quarter of a mile's walk, the palatial museum of anatomy is reached, the ingenious art of the late M. Frémiet once more providing a hors d'œuvre. At the Arts Décoratifs we find on the threshold a man dragging a bear cub into captivity; at the Petit Palais, St. George is killing the dragon just inside the turnstile; and here, near the umbrella-stand, is a man being strangled by an orang-outang. Thus cheered, we enter, and are at once amid a very grove of babies in bottles: babies unready for the world, babies with two heads, babies with no heads at all, babies, in short, without any merit save for the biologist, the distiller, and the sightseer with strong nerves. From the babies we pass to cases containing examples of every organ of the human form divine, and such approximations as have been accomplished by elephants and mice and monkeys—all either genuine, in spirits, or counterfeited with horrible minuteness in wax. Also there are skeletons of every known creature, from whales to frogs, and I noticed a case illustrating the daily progress of the chicken in the egg.