Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

To some extent the pawnbroking assistant may be said to control the destinies of the impecunious public. If he refuses to lend on this article or that, some merchant will be unable to redeem his honour and his promissory note, some lover will be unable to keep his appointment with the girl of his heart, some comedian will not make his début, some lady of fashion will not give her soirée, and some needy mother will have to send her family supperless to bed. Here behind this partition there is no distinction of class. The highest and the lowest ranks of Parisian society are brought together—a duchess by the side of a flower-girl, an artist by the side of an artisan. Pride and humility are here united. Aristocrats, whose souls revolt at the thought of[{162}] borrowing, are dragged to the place by necessity, and have to wait, like the rest, till the assistant is at leisure to inspect their rings and their diamonds, their silks and their satins.

“For anyone who knows how to observe and divine,” says M. Alfred Delvau, “the public of a loan office is very interesting. You enter mentally into the existences of all those widely different characters, dragged here by such opposite causes, and you leave the place smiling sometimes, but sad nearly always. Misery—even smiling misery—has nothing of gaiety; and it is Misery, or her shame-faced sister Want, who drives hither that crowd of people differing so greatly from one another by their costume, age, sex, and position.

“First of all, with his elbows resting on the counter, facing the commissionaire—sworn appraiser of all those rubbish heaps which the owners wish to turn into gold—lounges a fellow who turns his back on us and lets us see, beneath his frayed trouser-ends, a pair of naked feet enclosed in down-at-heel shoes. He comes to pledge his mattress—the last, the supreme resource!—that mattress which seems to have lost half its stuffing; or some workman’s tools, which do not look sorry to rest a little. By his side, and by way of contrast, stands, with brazen air, a big red-faced woman, red-haired, red-shawled, with a mauve silk dress and ruffles of white lace, whom I sometimes meet on the footway of the Rue des Martyrs, and who personifies a certain category of women—the last category. What does she come to pledge?—her heart? That has long since wandered away. Her virtue? That has followed her heart. Her wit? She never had any. What then? Some jewel, without doubt—the last witness of a last liaison. Her ear is at this moment bereft of the twenty-five francs’ worth of gold which hung in it just now.

“On the wooden bench let into the wall are other persons: two women of the lower orders, who are estimating beforehand the borrowing value of the linen they are going to pledge, while the little daughter of one of them is heedlessly gnawing an apple; a young girl in black, her head bare, like that of the red woman who has just gone, but more decently and poorly clad; an Arthur of the Reine Blanche—his hat tilted over his ear, his hands in his pockets, and looking at the small dog playing at his feet, rather than look at nothing; then men and women of the inferior classes with their children, talking about the hard times and the high rents; then placid citizens; then careworn flower-girls; then other people more or less interesting—but always interested. The man who pledges his mattress, the woman who pledges her linen, the sempstress who pledges her dress, feel no doubt a sharp pang in taking leave of objects so indispensable; but that is as nothing compared with the poignant anguish of the man who, for food, or the woman who, to feed her child, is obliged to part with love tokens or family jewels, as sacred as the vases of a church: the ancestral watch which has marked so many hours of joy and pain; the locket enclosing that lock of hair; the bracelet of that dead mistress who will never die in the heart of him she has left for ever; the ring given by that lover who still lives but who is for ever dead to the woman he has deserted.

“It is the physiognomy of the borrowers that I have just been sketching, of those wretches of all ranks, who are forced by some dire necessity, whether accidental or normal, to come and pledge their clothes or their jewels; to exhaust—in order not to die of hunger or to meet an overdue debt—the resources which are still at their disposal. Yet, by the side of these careworn, despairing faces, inscribed with poignant melancholy, or, in some cases, resignation, are the radiant faces of those who have come to redeem their jewels and their clothes. These are not silent like the rest. They do not glide in, like furtive shadows amongst other shadows. You hear them coming before you see them: they ascend the steps with tremendous haste. It is a question of arriving before the shop is closed, for it is Saturday, the morrow is Sunday, and they have come up panting like a pair of forge-bellows.

“There is a run of business on Saturday night, and the assistants behind the counter, although they, too, love Sunday with the repose it brings, almost dread it as being preceded by such a rush of work. And these people who come to redeem are not so easy to manage as the poor wretches who pledge, the latter being mild and patient, full of anguish though they are; the former noisy, exacting, and sometimes insolent. The relationship is changed, in fact. One set come to demand something, almost an act of charity—for that is the nature of the request, although the pledge is worth more than the loan granted. The other set come to make what is almost a gift; for the pledge they withdraw is not always worth the price that has been estimated, and if they did not[{163}] withdraw it the commissionaire would perhaps lose something on it, instead of gaining. You see the difference. And then, again, it is usually men who pledge and women who redeem. In pledging, a signature is required; a certificate alone suffices for the redemption. I leave you to imagine the behaviour of those gossips, proud of “unhooking” from the accursed “nail” the dress or the jacket which has hung there six months, and which is now as indispensable for going to the dance or the promenade as it was useless six months since, when it was a question of procuring a dinner or paying for a bed.”

THE JEWELLERY STORES, RUE DES BLANCS MANTEAUX.

The Parisian pawnbroker, being simply a Government official, differs necessarily from the pawnbroker of London. The latter is the most independent and insolent of all shopkeepers. He makes very little distinction between those who come to pledge and those who come to redeem. If his Saturday-night customers who come to take their things out of pawn were to give themselves such airs as the Parisian pledge-redeemers already described, he would insult them to their face, and keep them waiting till they had learnt better manners. He feels indebted to no one. He does not seek regular customers, for he knows that the stream of the impecunious will never cease to flow into his shop, that if one does not come another will, and that the people who come to redeem are seriously in want of their property, and must pay him the amount of the loan and interest no matter whether he is bearish or polite.