A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

I remember the Madeleine most naturally as I saw it once at Mi-Carême, from an upper window at Durand's, after lunch. It was a dull day and the Madeleine frowned on the human sea beneath it; for the Place before it and the Rue Royale were black with people. The portico is always impressive, but I had never before had so much time or such excellent opportunity to study it and its relief of the Last Judgment, an improbable contingency to which few of us were giving much thought just then. Not only were the steps crowded, but two men had climbed to the green roof and were sitting on the very apex of the building.

The Mi-Carême carnival in Paris, I may say at once, is not worth crossing the Channel for. It is tawdry and stupid; the life of the city is dislocated; the Grands Boulevards are quickly some inches deep in confetti, all of which has been discharged into faces and even eyes before reaching the ground; the air is full of dust; and the places of amusement are uncomfortably crowded. The Lutetian humours of the Latin Quarter students and of Montmartre are not without interest for a short time, but they become tedious with extraordinary swiftness and certainty as the morning grows grey.

Each side of the Madeleine has its flower markets, and they share the week between them. Round and about Christmas a forest of fir-trees springs up. At the back of the Madeleine omnibuses and trams converge as at the Elephant.

For a walk along the Grands Boulevards this temple is the best starting-point; but I do not suggest that the whole round shall be made. By the Grands Boulevards the precisian would mean the half circle from the Madeleine to the Place de la République and thence to the Place de la Bastille; or even the whole circle, crossing the river by the Pont Sully to the Boulevard St. Antoine, which cuts right through the Surrey side and crosses the river by the Pont de la Concorde and so comes to the Rue Royale and the Madeleine again. Those are the Grands Boulevards; but when the term is conversationally used it means nothing whatever but the stretch of broad road and pavement, of vivid kiosques and green branches, between the Madeleine and the Rue Richelieu: that is the Grands Boulevards for the flâneur and the foreigner. All the best cafés to sit at, all the prettiest women to stare at, all the most entertaining shop windows, are found between these points.

The prettiest women to stare at! Here I touch on a weakness in the life of Paris which there is no doubt the Boulevards have fostered. Staring—more than staring, a cool cynical appraisement—is one of the privileges which the Boulevardier most prizes. I have heard it said that he carries staring to a fine art; but it is not an art at all, and certainly not fine; it is just a coarse and disgusting liberty. It is nothing to him that the object of his interest is accompanied by a man; his code ignores that detail; he is out to see and to make an impression and nothing will stop him. One must not, however, let this ugly practice offend one's sensibility too much. Foreigners need not necessarily do as the Romans do, but it is not their right to be too critical of Rome; and liberty is the very air of the Boulevards. Live and let live. If one is going to be annoyed by Paris, one had better stay at home.

The Grands Boulevards might be called the show-rooms of Paris: it is here that one sees the Parisians. In London one may live for years and never see a Londoner; not because Londoners do not exist, but because London has no show-rooms for their display. There is no Boulevard in London; the only streets that have a pavement capable of accommodating both spectators and a real procession of types are deserted, such as Portland Place and Kingsway. The English, who conquer and administer the world, dislike space; the French, a people at whose alleged want of inches we used to mock, rejoice in space. Think of the Champs-Elysées and the Bois, and then think of Constitution Hill and Hyde Park, and you realise the difference. Take a mental drive by any of the principal Boulevards—from the Madeleine eastward to the Place de la République and back to the Madeleine again by way of the Boulevards de Magenta and Clichy and down the Boulevard Malesherbes, and then take a mental drive from Hyde Park Corner by way of Piccadilly, the Strand, Fleet Street, Cannon Street, Lombard Street, Cheapside, Holborn, Oxford Street and Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner again and you realise the difference. In wet weather in Paris it is possible to walk all day and not be splashed. Think of our most fashionable thoroughfare, just by Long's Hotel, when it is raining—our Rue de la Paix. The only street in London of which a Frenchman would not be ashamed is the Mile End Road.

At the Taverne Olympia—just past the old houses standing back from the pavement, on the left, which are built on the wall of the old moat, when this Boulevard really was a bulwark or fortification—at the Taverne Olympia, upstairs, is one of the few billiard saloons in Paris in which exhibition games are continually in progress, and in which one can fill many amusing half-hours and perhaps win a few louis. Years ago I used to frequent the saloon in a basement under the Grand Café, a few doors east of the Olympia, but it has lost some of its prestige. The best play now is at Olympia and at Cure's place in the Rue Vivienne. Every day of the year, for ever and ever, a billiard match is in progress. So you may say is, in the winter, the case in London at Burroughs and Watts', or Thurston's, but these are very different. In London the match is for a large number of points and it may last a week or a fortnight. Here there are scores of matches every afternoon and evening and the price of admission is a consommation. By virtue of one glass of coffee you may sit for hours and watch champion of France after champion of France lose and win, win and lose.

The usual game is played by three champions of France and is for ten cannons off the red. The names of the players, on cards, are first flung on the table, and the amateur of sport advances from his seat and stakes five francs on that champion of France whom he favours. Five francs is the unit. On my first visit, years ago, the champion whom I, very unsoundly but not perhaps unnaturally, supported, was one Lucas. Poor fellow, on that afternoon he did his best, but he never got home. The great Marius was too much for him. Marius in those days was a very fine player and the hero of the saloon at the Grand Café. A Southerner I should guess; for I have seen his doubles by the score in the cafés of Avignon and Nîmes. He was short and thick, with a bald head and a large sagacious nose and a saturnine smile and a heavy moustache. Winning and losing were all one to him, although it is understood that fifty centimes are contributed by each of his backers to a champion of France when he brings it off. Marius looked down his nose in the same way whatever happened. He was no Roberts; he had none of the Cæsarian masterfulness, none of the Napoleonic decision, of that king of men. The modern French game does not lend itself to such commanding excellence, such Alpine distinction. The cannon is all: there is no longer any of the quiet and magical disappearance of the ball into a pocket which makes the English game so fascinating.

Such was Marius when I first saw him, and quite lately I descended to his cellar again and found him unaltered, except that he was no longer a master except very occasionally, and that he had grown more sardonic. I do not wonder at it. It may not be, in Paris, "a lonely thing to be champion," as Cashel Byron says, but it must be a melancholy thing to be no longer the champion that you were. A home of rest for ex-champions would draw my guinea at once.

The ten or eight cannons off the red, I might add, are varied now and then. Sometimes there is a match between two players for a hundred points. Sometimes three players will see which can first make eight cannons, each involving three cushions (trois bandes). This is a very interesting game to watch, although it may be a concession to decadence.