A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

The French may have abolished bookmakers from their race-courses and may give even a cabman a clean napkin to his meals, but their tobacco is a monopoly. The English may fill their streets with newspaper posters advertising horrors and scandals, but they are permitted now and then to forget their vile bodies. The French may piously and prettily erect statues of every illustrious child of the State, but their billiard tables are now without pockets. London may have a cleaner Tube railway system than Paris, but Paris has the advantage of no lifts and a correspondence ticket at a trifling cost which will take you everywhere, whereas London's Tubes belonging to different companies the correspondence is expensive. Again with omnibuses, London may have more and better, but here again the useful correspondence system is to be found only in Paris.

London may be in darkness for most of the winter and be rained upon by soot all the year round; but at any rate the Londoner is master in his own house or flat and not the cringing victim of a concierge, as every Parisian is. That is something to remember and be thankful for. Paris has an atmosphere, and a climate, and good food, and attentive waiters, and a cab to every six yards of the kerb, and no petty licensing tyrannies, and the Champs-Elysées, and immunity from lurid newspaper posters, and good coffee, and the Winged Victory, and Monna Lisa; but it also has the concierge. At the entrance to every house is this inquisitive censorious janitor—a blend in human shape of Cerberus and the Recording Angel. The concierge knows the time you go out and (more serious) the time you come in; what letters and parcels you receive; what visitors, and how long they stay. The concierge knows how much rent you pay and what you eat and drink. And the worst of it is that since the concierge keeps the door and dominates the house you must put a good face on it or you will lose very heavily. Scowl at the concierge and your life will become a harassment: letters will be lost; parcels will be delayed; visitors will be told you are at home; a thousand little vexations will occur. The concierge in short is a rod which, you will observe, it is well to kiss. The wise Parisian therefore is always amiable, and generous too, although in his heart he wishes the whole system at the devil.

And here I ought to say that although one is thus conscious of certain of the defects and virtues of each nation, I have no belief whatever in any large interchange of characteristics being possible. Nations I think can borrow very little from each other. What is sauce for the goose is by no means necessarily sauce for the oie, and the meat of an homme can easily be the poison of a man.

The French and the English base life on such different premises. To put the case in a nutshell, we may say that the French welcome facts and the English avoid them. The French make the most of facts; the English persuade themselves that facts are not there. The French write books and plays about facts, and read and go to the theatre to see facts; the English write books and plays about sentimental unreality, and read and go to the theatre in order to be diverted from facts. The French live quietly and resignedly at home among facts; the English exhaust themselves in games and travel and frivolity and social inquisitiveness, in order to forget that they have facts in their midst.

One always used to think that the English were the most willing endurers of impositions and monopolies; but I have come to the conclusion that a people that can continue to burn French matches and use French ink and blotting-paper, bend before the concierge and suffer the claque and the French theatre attendant, must be even weaker. Only a people in love with slavery would continue to endure the black bombazined harpies who turn the French theatres into infernos, first by their very presence and secondly by their clamour for a bénéfice. They do nothing and they levy a tax on it. So far from exterminating them, this absurd lenient French people has even allowed them to dominate the cinematoscope halls which are now so numerous all over Paris. I sit and watch them and wonder what they do all day: in what dark corner of the city they hang like bats till the evening arrives and they are free to poison the air of the theatres and exact their iniquitous secret commission. The habit of London managers to charge sixpence for a programme—an advertisement of his wares such as every decent and courteous tradesman is proud to give away—is sufficiently monstrous; but I can never enough honour them for excluding these bénéfice hunters.

Whatever may be said of French acting and French plays there is no doubt that our theatres are more comfortable and better managed. A Frenchman visiting a theatre in London has no difficulties: he buys his seat at the office, is shown to it and the matter ends. An Englishman visiting a theatre in Paris has no such ease. He must first buy his ticket (and let him scrutinise the change with some care and despatch); this ticket, however, does not, as in London, carry the number of his seat: it is merely a card of introduction to the three gentlemen in evening dress and tall hats who sit side by side in a kind of pulpit in the lobby. One of them takes his ticket, another consults a plan and writes a number on it, and the third hands it back. Another difficulty has yet to come, for now begins the turn of the harpies. Why the English custom is not followed, and a clean sweep made of both the men in the pulpit and the women inside, one has no notion; for in addition to being a nuisance they must reduce the profits.

I mentioned the claque just now. That is another of the Frenchman's darling bugbears which the English would never stand. Every Frenchman to whom I have spoken about it shares my view that it is an abomination, but when I ask why it is not abolished he merely shrugs his shoulders: "Why should it be?—one can endure it," is the attitude; and that indeed is the Frenchman's attitude to most of the things that he finds objectionable. They are, after all, only trimmings; the real fabric of his life is not injured by them; therefore let them go on. Yet while one can understand the persistence of certain Parisian defects, the long life of the claque remains a mystery. Upon me the periodical and mechanical explosions of this body of hirelings have an effect little short of infuriation. One is told that the actors are responsible rather than the managers, and this makes its continuance the more unreasonable, for the result has been that in their efforts to acquire the illusion of applause, they have lost the real thing. French audiences rarely clap any more.

When it comes to the consideration of the French stage, there is again no point in making comparisons. It is again a conflict of fact and sentiment. The French are intensely interested in the manifestations of the sexual emotion, and they have no objection to see the calamities and embarrassments and humours to which it may lead worked out frankly on the boards or in literature: hence a certain sameness in their plays and novels. The majority of the English still think that physical matters should be hidden: hence our dramatists and novelists having had to find other themes, adventure, eccentricity and character have won their predominant place. That is all there is to it. The French stage is the best—to a Frenchman or a gallicised Englishman; the English stage is the best—to the English. The English go rather to see; the French to hear. In other words a blind Frenchman would be better pleased with his national stage than a blind Englishman with his. The blind Frenchman would at any rate not miss the jokes, which, though he knew them all before, he could not resist; whereas the Englishman would be deprived of the visible touches of which the personæ of our drama are largely built up. In a drama of passion, whether treated seriously or lightly, words necessarily are more than idiosyncrasies.