A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

And now for the other Zoo, the Zoo of the classes. Perhaps the best description is to call it a playground with animals in it. For there are children everywhere, and everything is done for their amusement—as is only natural in a land where children persist through life and no one ever tires. In the centre of the gardens is an enclosure in which in the summer of 1908 were encamped a colony of Gallas, an intelligent and attractive black people from the border of Abyssinia, who flung spears at a target, and fought duels, and danced dances of joy and sorrow, and rounded up zebras, and in the intervals sold curiosities and photographs of themselves with ingratiating tenacity. It was a strange bizarre entertainment, with greedy ostriches darting their beaks among the spectators, and these shock-headed savages screaming through their diversions, and now and again a refined slip of a black girl imploring one mutely to give a franc for a five centimes picture postcard, or murmuring incoherent rhapsodies over the texture of a European dress.

All around the enclosure the Parisian children were playing, some riding elephants, others camels, some driving an ostrich cart, and all happy. But the gem of the Jardin is the Ecurie, on one side for ponies—scores of little ponies, all named—the other for horses; on one side a riding school for children, on the other side a riding school for grown-up pupils, perhaps the cavalry officers of the future. The ponies are charming: Bibiche, landaise, Volubilité, cheval landais, Céramon, cheval finlandais, Farceur, from the same country, Columbine, née de Ratibor, and so forth. There they wait, alert and patient too, in the manner of small ponies, and by-and-by one is led off to the Petit manège for a little Monsieur Paul or Etienne to bestride. The Ecurie is a model of its kind, with its central courtyard and offices for the various servants, sellier, piqueur and so forth.

LA LEÇON DE LECTURE
TERBURG
(Louvre)

Near by is a castellated fortress which might belong to a dwarf of blood but is really a rabbit house. Every kind of rabbit is here, with this difference from the rabbit house in our Zoo, that the animals are for sale; and there is a fragrant vacherie where you may learn to milk; and in another part is a collection of dogs—tou-tous and lou-lous and all the rest of it—and these are for sale too. This is as popular a department as any in the Jardin. The expressions of delight and even ecstasy which were being uttered before some of the cages I seem still to hear.

The Parisians may be kind fathers and devoted mothers: I am sure that they are; but to the observer in the streets and restaurants their finest shades of protective affection would seem to be reserved for dogs. One sees their children with bonnes; their dogs are their own care. The ibis of Egypt is hardly more sacred. An English friend who has lived in the heart of Paris for some time in the company of a fox terrier tells me that on their walks abroad in the evening the number of strangers who stop him to pass friendly remarks upon his pet or ask to be allowed to pat it—or who make overtures to it without permission—is beyond belief. No pink baby in Kensington Gardens is more admired. Dogs in English restaurants are a rarity: but in Paris they are so much a matter of course that a little pâtée is always ready for them.

It was of course a French tongue that first gave utterance to the sentiment, "The more I see of men the more I like dogs"; but I cannot pretend to have observed that the Frenchman suffers any loss in prestige or power from this attention to the tou-tou and the lou-lou. Nothing, I believe, will ever diminish the confidence or success of that lord of creation. He may to the insular eye be too conscious of his charms; he may suggest the boudoir rather than the field of battle or the field of sport; he may amuse by his hat, astonish by his beard, and perplex by his boots; but the fact remains that he is master of Paris, and Paris is the centre of civilisation.

The Parisians not only adore their dogs in life: they give them very honourable burial. We have in London, by Lancaster Gate, a tiny cemetery for these friendly creatures; but that is nothing as compared with the cemetery at St. Ouen, on an island in the Seine. Here are monuments of the most elaborate description, and fresh wreaths everywhere. The most striking tomb is that of a Saint Bernard who saved forty persons but was killed by the forty-first—a hero of whose history one would like to know more, but the gate-keeper is curiously uninstructed.[2]