“Belle comme Vénus,
Riche comme Crœsus,
Innocente comme Dreyfus.”
The raillery did not prevent “tout Paris” from being present at the splendid marriage ceremony, and inscribing its best names upon the wedding gifts. It could not do less, seeing that its king and master, Philip of Orleans, the digne (for alas! there is no English equivalent of that indescribable French word as applied to a man) representative of the House of France, is said to have accepted a million from the bride’s anti-Semitic Hebrew mother.
There is another side, less known, of aristocratic Paris. This is the quiet, exclusive, genuinely religious side, that of old-fashioned, rigid noblewomen, who live apart in their dull, old houses of the Faubourg, given up to prayer and good works. There is a charming distinction about them, a musty, conventual odour, as you enter the halls of their faded hotels. They preside over ouvroirs, where ladies of their like meet to make church articles and decorate altar pieces. Sometimes they carry piety and good-will to the poor to excess, for I know of one, a baroness, who neglected her children to make perfume and soap of her own invention, which she sold for the benefit of the poor. The instinct of trade so developed that she ended by opening a shop, on which she duly bestowed a saint’s name; and here, if you are willing to pay exorbitant prices, you may find wherewithal to wash and scent yourself with the labours of aristocratic hands, and tell yourself you are doing so for the good of mankind. Not that I would laugh at those ladies, who are the salt, the redemption of their class. I once lodged in the dismantled hotel of such a countess, and was edified by the stately, chill dignity of her austere existence. Her private rooms were furnished with a touching simplicity. Even in winter there was not a carpet anywhere, no sign of luxury or comfort; but in her private chapel, where Mass was celebrated every day, the vestments and ornaments were both beautiful and precious. She herself had nothing whatever to do with the frisky countesses of French fiction. She was in every sense of the word a great lady,—handsome, with aquiline features, and with hair worn high off a noble forehead, reserved, possibly too haughty in bearing and expression for her reputation of piety, but essentially one of the elect of this earth, the kind of woman that an aristocrat should be, and too rarely is, to justify her privileges and pretensions.
Here, far off from the roar of reaction and the rumble of revolt, such women dwell amidst the dim splendours of an impoverished house, unfamiliar to the frequenters of routs and races; whose names never appear in the society columns of the Figaro; who are chiefly known to the poor and the priests of their neighbourhood; and they it is who preserve some charm for the Faubourg, who help us to regard it with some indulgence and sympathy in its futile discontent. For what can be the benefit to itself or to France of this fine attitude of disdain? Every part of a nation should go with the times, and the Faubourg would have served its own cause as well as its country’s in abandoning its belated ambitions, and making the best of its existing circumstances. It feeds its pride on its absurd exclusiveness; and who is the better for this? It is largely due to this insane vanity, that Paris has become the centre of rowdy cosmopolitanism, the pleasure-ground of the entire world, for it is the titled malcontents who attract the class they are pleased, with signal ingratitude, to call, contemptuously, rastas, instead of looking after the affairs of their country. Since they will not earn their right to live, they must be amused, and amusement is the costliest thing in the world. Not having enough money for this profession, they needs must set themselves out for the capture of alien millions; and then when the foreign millions fall into their laps, by way of Frankfort, or New York, or South America, they mourn and lament because the foreigners take root, Parisianised by the sorceress Paris, and cry out that France no longer belongs to the French, and that Paris is sold to a band of cosmopolitan miscreants.
