Over in the spacious rooms of the Ritz, at the tea hour, one will find more English and Americans than French, though the French go there too, and there is a sprinkling of many nations. The crowd is more mixed than that of the Rue Cambon, in features other than that of nationality. Few demi-mondaines go to Columbin's. Why?—It is hard to tell,—but they do not go. Occasionally, demi-mondaines of the highest class drift in, but they are out of their element. There are hardly enough of them to give each other confidence.
At the Ritz things are different. There one is likely to see the most famous half-world beauties of Paris drinking tea, and at the Elysées the percentage of notoriety is still greater than at the Ritz.
They love dearly to range themselves alongside of the haut monde, these cocottes of Paris, but they like a large and varied scene, a certain amount of moral—or immoral—support. The restricted intimacy of a rendezvous like Columbin's is not to their taste.
At the Palais de Glace the demi-mondaine shines. Here is a setting to which she lends herself readily, a setting, moreover, in which she may pose beside Madame of the beau monde and measure charms with her.
Only the social elect may skate at the Cercle des Patineurs in the Bois, and there one finds the society women of Paris gliding over the ice or chatting around the braziers on the banks of the horseshoe lake. It is the most chic of social rendezvous, this skating club in the Bois, but the weather clerk is no respecter of high society, and there are comparatively few weeks during the winter when open-air skating is practicable in Paris.
Down at the Palais de Glace on the Champs Elysées, the management deals out artificial ice to the just and the unjust every day during the season. Even in October there is skating at the Palais, and it is chic to skate then, just as it is chic to eat fresh strawberries in January, while, during midwinter, this skating-rink is one of the most popular afternoon resorts in Paris. The Parisian skating costume is a triumph, and the Parisiennes skate well, conscious of their own grace and revelling in that consciousness. Some of the great ladies of the French world are famous skaters; especially certain members of the Russian colony; and there are demi-mondaines too who skate marvellously well,—particularly two or three Danish beauties, who have taken on a Parisian lacquer. After all, it is hardly fair that the demi-mondaine of Paris should be credited entirely to the essential immorality of French society, and constitute a reproach against French womanhood, for the class is cosmopolitan to an extraordinary degree, recruited from Spain, from Italy, from Austria, from Russia, from Germany, from Sweden, from Denmark, from all countries of Europe, and centred in Paris because there are concentrated the wealth and prodigality of a material and luxurious civilization, because there the cocotte can live her short day so brilliantly, so dizzily, that during it she can quite forget the inevitable hideousness of the long days to come.
The little grisettes of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre are largely French, and bear the homely French names,—Suzanne, Rose, Marie,—but they are, on the whole, the most honest, the least degraded and corrupt, as they are the humblest of the class to which, broadly speaking, they belong. A grade higher—or lower—according to the view-point of the one who classifies, is the little cocotte of the cafés and dance halls, the Cri-Cri of the Casino, the Fol-Fol of the Elysées Montmartre. When the boulevards and the better theatres and cafés are reached, the name is prone to take on dignity. Antoinette, Diane, Heloise appear. And further still up the cocotte's ladder comes an insistent "Mademoiselle" or "Madame." When the cocotte has become truly demi-mondaine, when she buys her clothes on the Place Vendôme, and acquires a villa at Trouville, an hôtel in Paris, she adds Madame to a high sounding, mouth-filling name, such as Montmorency or Beauregard. Perhaps she even preempts a title. There, for instance, was the Princesse d'Araignée. She was very quiet, this Princess, very retiring, but Paris knew her as it knew the king who was for many years her lover, and to whom she was loyal, though he came but seldom to Paris. He is dead now, that royal lover—a tragic death—and the Princess—but this was to be a story of her title.
The title was, on its face, self-explanatory. "The Spider Princess" had a fine appropriateness in the half-world of Paris. One day some one spoke jestingly of the name. The Princess shook her head.
"It is really mine," she said gravely, "mine since I was a baby."
The jester looked incredulous.