Orientals who visit Paris for the first time are at a loss to conceive anything more magnificent than its streets and its palaces and gardens. After having been in England, however, their opinion is materially altered, though I must still admit that there are some striking features in Paris; amongst these, the Boulevards, Champs Elysées, Tuileries, the Louvre and Luxembourg, are the most attractive. Of the greater part of the streets of Paris I can say but little; and there are some so filthy, narrow, and almost impassable, as to outstrip the meanest town in Turkey. Nothing but the uncouth wooden sabots of the French could at any season traverse them. Though I must acknowledge that nothing can surpass the easy elegance and refinement of the higher classes of society, it would appear, from what a poor countryman of mine told me, that the second-rate lodging houses are miserable in the extreme. One would imagine, from his description, that they went to the opposite extreme to luxury. Complaining bitterly of his fate, for he had all his life before been accustomed to opulent independence in Lebanon, he wrote to me the other day as follows, viz.:—
“The disagreeable first-impression made upon my mind on first taking possession of my lodgings here (Paris), was the melancholy resemblance existing between my chimney-place and a Syrian church-yard, for I can assure you that its shape resembles exactly one of our ordinary tombstones. For the first few nights I hardly dared look at it before going to bed, lest I should have my rest broken by dreams of spectres and other horrid sprites of the imagination. In addition to its disagreeable appearance, it smokes so terribly that I dare not light a fire, though shivering with cold, lest I should lose my eyesight from the effects of the smoke; but this is not all; the door will not shut well, the floorings are of damp bricks, and the rooms are built without respect to proportion, elegance, or comfort. The house I am living in is eight stories high, and heigho! poor me, I live on the fourth floor, so that I have a hundred steps to mount up and down a dozen times a-day. The greatest nuisance of all is, that the street door is continually being left open, so that any one given to pilfering is at perfect liberty to walk up and down stairs and help himself to whatever the fates may throw in his way. There certainly is nominally a concierge. This old worthy, however, is either so engrossed with an old newspaper or so comfortably napping, that he is perfectly unconscious of all passing around him.
“I have vainly complained to him of this negligence, and pointed out the inconvenience and interruption I was perpetually being exposed to by people rapping at my door, under the pretext of inquiring if M. So-and-so lodged there, but evidently with the intention of finding out if there was any one within to hinder their forcing an entrance. His invariable reply used to be, ‘Eh bien! que voulez vous que je fasse.’ There are no bells, so that I may die in a fit, or be burnt to death before any assistance could be obtained.”
Such is the deplorable picture drawn by my poor friend, who, on the other hand, lauds up to the skies lodgings of a similar class in London, and as he is a sharp, acute man, I have little doubt but that he is correct in his ideas.
What surprised me very much in Paris was the apparent ignorance of the French with regard to the
cities and towns of the Holy Land. I forgot at that period that they were restricted from reading their Bibles, and that consequently very few of them were likely to have the names of places, and people familiar to the English and ourselves, so firmly impressed upon their minds. My appearance and costume never excited curiosity. When they asked me whence I came from, and I answered Syria, the word made no impression on them.
“Where is that?” said one man to another in my hearing.
“Ma foi, je ne saurais vous dire—unless it be some obscure village in Algeria which our colonists have not yet explored.”
Of course the higher classes are not guilty of such ignorance, for who could have thrown a better light on the beauties and localities of Syria than the learned and amiable Lamartine, whose accurate work, Souvenirs de l’Orient, is deservedly popular over Europe.
I have many pleasant souvenirs of the friends I met in Paris. The hospitable reunions of their Excellencies the Turkish and the English ambassadors—the kindness of the American representative, Mr. Rives—the brilliant balls I was invited to by various families of fashion—and an adventure at the hotel V....—never to be forgotten, and which it is my intention at some future period to publish, which I have no doubt will interest many of my English readers—all these I recall with pleasure, and I avail myself of this opportunity with gladness to thank my many friends in Paris for the courtesy and kindness I have ever met with at their hands. But putting these aside as elegant exceptions, I prefer on the whole England, and the friendship of
an Englishman to that of a Frenchman,—the private character of the former has a sounder foundation, and they know how to appreciate real moral, domestic comfort and happiness, such as our countrymen seek for and find amongst the citron groves and gardens of Syria.