In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

The Fête des Fleurs belongs to the spring season, but it does not belong to the smart Parisian set, though every one turns out to see the show. The fête is given in the name of charity, and doubtless charity covers its sin, but there is more than a little vulgarity and horse-play mixed with the picturesque beauty of the scene. A part of the Bois is roped off, and an entrance fee is charged for all sight-seers and equipages passing the barriers. So much for charity. The rest is merry-making of a somewhat promiscuous sort. Every seat along the avenues is taken, masses of flowers are banked high along the curb, to be sold as ammunition for the battle of flowers. Bands are playing, flags are fluttering, garlands are swinging from decorated poles, and past the judges' stand by the pigeon-shooting club files an endless line of carriages, carts, automobiles, fiacres, conveyances of all types, from the butcher's cart, bearing the honest butcher and his wife and children, to the electric victoria of the most famous dancer of Paris. Only the chic society woman is conspicuous by her absence. One seldom sees, in the Fête des Fleurs procession, faces familiar in the exclusive salons.

But the sight is an interesting one, for all that. A Parisian fête does not need the indorsement of the Faubourg St. Germain in order to be gay, and the public celebrities and demi-mondaines turn out in all their glory for the Fête des Fleurs.

Pretty women look out from the riot of flowers that covers hansom, victoria, dog-cart, phaeton, automobile, and money has been spent like water to furnish some of the beauties with their setting. One phaeton is literally hidden under purple orchids, and holds two blondes elaborately arrayed in white and violet. Behind comes a victoria trimmed in thousands of yellow and red roses and bearing a noted Spanish dancer. A popular opera singer has made her motor car a moving bank of pink roses and violets.

Bunches of forget-me-nots and daisies and pinks are hurtling through the air. A popular lionne of the day is so pelted with fragrant ammunition that she springs up in her carriage bower and stands, a slender mousseline-draped beauty, laughing under the rain of nosegays, and with gay abandon returning her assailants' fire.

In the carriage just behind hers are two gorgeously gowned women, old and haggard and hideous under their cosmetics, derelicts, favourites who have outlived their day, and are fighting the hopeless fight against defeat and misery and oblivion; but the beauty of the flower battle does not look behind her and read the memento mori. She is having her day now. What has yesterday or to-morrow to do with a Fête des Fleurs?

There are other public fêtes on the floodtide of the Paris spring,—plebeian, many of them, and the Fête de Neuilly is one of the most plebeian; yet it is chic to go to Neuilly at least once while the van dwellers from all the highways and byways of France are in camp along the Avenue de Neuilly. From every direction the vagabonds have gathered,—a motley crew of gipsy wanderers, strolling entertainers who, after a winter in the provinces, have found their way back to the borders of the Paris they love.

Ramshackle booths, tents, shooting-galleries, carousels, acrobats, fortune-tellers, snake-charmers, lion tamers, ventriloquists, fat ladies, magicians, vendors of every imaginable cheap and tawdry thing—the old Coney Island multiplied by ten and invested with a Gallic lightness and sparkle in place of its own dull vulgarity. That is the Neuilly Fair.

Smart folk give jolly little dinners and, after, take their guests out to Neuilly for a lark. They visit the side shows, and shoot at the balls, and buy ridiculous souvenirs, and ride on the carousel, and throw confetti, and give themselves up to vulgar amusements with the infantile joyousness that is a characteristic Parisian mood.

Madame is very charming in all her elegant perfection against the tawdry background of Neuilly, and she knows that she is charming—all of which helps to make the "Neuilly evening" a popular item on the June programme.

There was once a crown prince who went to the Neuilly Fête, and who saw a gipsy girl there. He was bon garçon, this crown prince, and he was doing the fête incognito and with a thoroughness that included making friends with many of the van folk. The gipsy girl was beautiful. She killed herself afterward, far from Paris, in the country of the Prince, but one expects comedy, not tragedy, of the fête de Neuilly.