A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

LE BÉNÉDICITÉ
CHARDIN
(Louvre)

In the Paris music halls the comic singers merely sing—they have little but words to give. London music hall audiences may have an undue affection for red noses and sordid domestic details; but they do expect a little character, even if it is coarse character, during the evening, and they get it. There is little in the French hall. Personality is discouraged here; richness, quaintness, unction, irresponsibility, eccentricity—such gifts as once pleased us in Dan Leno and now are to be found in a lesser degree but very agreeably in Wilkie Bard—these are superfluities to a French comic singer. All that is asked of him is that he shall be active, shall have a resonant voice, and shall commit to memory a sufficient number of cynical reflections on life. A gramophone producing any rapid indecent song would please the French more than a hundred Harry Lauders. (And yet when all is said it must be far easier to live in a country where decency, as we understand and painfully cultivate it, has not everywhere to be considered. The life at any rate of the French author, publisher, editor and magistrate, to name no others, is immensely simplified.)

But from my point of view the worst characteristic of the French music hall and variety stage is the revue. The revue is indeed a standing proof of the incontrovertible fact that however the hotel proprietors may feel about it, the Parisian does not want English people in his midst. (Why should he?) The revue in its quiddity is a device for excluding foreigners from theatres; for it is not only dull and monotonous, but being for the most part a satire on Parisian politics is incomprehensible too. I am not here to defend the English pantomime, but not all its agonies (as Ruskin called them) reach such a height of tedium as a revue can achieve. A Frenchman ignorant of English at Drury Lane on Boxing Night might be bewildered and even stunned; but he would at any rate know something of what was happening and his eyes would be kept busy. An Englishman at a revue knows nothing, for there is no story, and very little money is spent on the stage picture: it is just a steady cataract of topical talk. I have endured many revues, always hoping against hope that some one would be witty or funny, that some ingenious satirical device would occur. But I have never been rewarded. No matter what the nominal subject, the jokes have been the same: the old old mots à double entente, the old old outspoken indecency....

The stream of people continues to be incessant and of incredible density—all walking at the same pace, all talking as only the French can talk, rich and poor equally owners of the pavement. Now and then a camelot offers a toy or a picture postcard; boys bring La Patrie or La Presse; a performer bends and twists a piece of felt into every shape of hat, culminating in Napoleon's famous chapeau à cornes....

One thing that one notices is the absence of laughter. The French laugh aloud very seldom. Even in their theatres, at the richest French jokes, their approval is expressed rather in a rippling murmur counterfeiting surprise than a laugh. Animation one sees, but on these Boulevards behind that is often a suggestion of anxiety. The dominant type of face seen from a chair at the Café de la Paix is not a happy one....

It is when one watches this restless moving crowd, or the complacent audiences at the farces, or the diners in restaurants eating as if it were the last meal, and when one looks week after week at the comic papers of Paris, with their deadly insistence on the one and apparently only concern of Parisian life, that one has most of all to remind oneself that these people are not the French, and that one is a superficial tourist in danger of acquiring very wrong impressions. This is the fringe, the froth. One has only to remember a very few of the things we have seen in Paris to realise the truth of this. Never was a harder working people. Look at the early hours that Paris keeps: contrast them with London's slovenly awakening. Look at the amazing productivity of a notoriously idle and careless set—the artists: the old Salon with its miles of pictures twice a year, and the other Salons, hardly less crowded, and the minor exhibitions too. Look at the industry of the Paris stage: the new plays that are produced every week, involving endless rehearsals day and night. Look at the energy of the French authors, dramatic as well as narrative, of the journalists and printers. Think of the engineers, the motor-car manufacturers, the gardeners and the vintners. Think of the bottle-makers. (But one cannot: such a thought causes the head to reel in this city of bottles.) No, we are not seeing France, we foreign visitors to "the gay capital". Don't let us labour under any such mistake. The industrious, level-headed, cheerful French people do not exhibit themselves to the scrutinising eyes of the Café de la Paix, do not spend all their time as Le Rire would have us believe, do not over eat and over drink.

Around and about one all the time, as one watches this panorama, the swift and capable waiters are busy. Every one carries away from Paris one mastering impression upon the inward eye: I am not sure that mine is not a blur of waiters in their long white aprons. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900, over the principal entrance at the south-west corner of the Place de la Concorde, was the gigantic figure of a young and fashionable woman in the very heyday of her vivacity, allurement and smartness. She personified Paris. But not so would I symbolise that city. In any coat of arms of Paris that I designed would certainly be a capable young woman, but also a waiter, sleek, attentive and sympathetic.

Paris may be a city of feminine charm and domination; but to the ordinary foreigner, and especially the Englishman, it is far more a city of waiters. Women we have in England too: but waiters we have not. There are waiters in London, no doubt, but that is the end of them: there are, to all intents and purposes, no waiters in the provinces, where we eat exclusively in our own houses. And even in London we must brace ourselves to find such waiters as there are: we must indulge in heroic feats of patience, and, once the waiter comes into view, exercise most of the vocal organs to attract his notice and obtain his suffrages. In other words, there is in London perhaps one waiter to every five thousand persons; whereas in Paris there are five thousand waiters, more or less, to every one person. Or so it seems. It is a city of waiters; it is the city of waiters.

Still the people stream by, and one wonders whence the idea comes that the French are a particularly small race. It is not true. Look at that tall boulevardier with some one else's hat (why do so many Frenchmen seem to be wearing other men's hats?) and the immense beard. Look at those two long-haired artists from the Latin Quarter, in velvet clothes and black sombreros. In England they would be stared at and laughed at; but here no one is laughed at at all, and only the women are stared at. It is interesting to note how little street ridicule there is in France. The Frenchman mocks, but he does not, as I think so many of the English do, search for the ridiculous; or at any rate it is not the same kind of ridiculousness that we pillory. In England we bring such sandpaper of prejudice and public opinion to bear upon eccentricity that every one becomes smooth and ordinary—like every one else. But in France—to the superficial observer, at any rate—individuality is encouraged and nourished; in France either no one is ridiculous or every one is.

Some one once remarked to me that never in Paris do you see a woman with any touch of the woods. It is true. The Parisian women suggest the boudoir, the theatre, the salon, the sewing-room, the kitchen, and now and then even the fields; but never the woods....