There are two other influences at work upon the artisans of France; one exclusively masculine, and the other an influence equally strong with each sex—the wineshop and the public ball. Statistics assure us that France leads the list for the consumption of alcohol—and statistics are weighty and respectable matter. But can it be true? one asks one’s self in amazement, remembering the evil sights of London and the astonishing absence here of drunken men in the streets. Now and then you will meet such a thing as a drunken man, but the sight is unusual enough to attract notice. Tippling is the general form of drinking to excess here. The men go into the wineshop to have a drink, and to talk things over. There is always something to be talked about, and the public bar is the best place to have it out with your neighbour, and the marchand de vin, sly rogue, is accused of supplying queer, unwholesome drinks that provoke thirst, so that one drink follows another.
The marchand de vin sells more than liquors. He is the local post-office keeper, sells stamps, postcards, tobacco, and usually has a rude little dining-saloon where workmen and coachmen gather. So it stands to reason that there is a great deal of coming and going, of movement and life; there is always something to be learnt in the way of rumour, and someone to listen to you in the hour of revolt. Thus many private and personal revolutions are planned here and it is decided here whether, on the occasion of public functions, the cry shall be, Vive l’Armée or Vive la République. As a different decision will probably be taken at the next wineshop, when these valiant heroes meet in the streets we are threatened with a renewal of the barricades. After the first or second shudder at these menaces, the citizens come to take them very quietly. I remember the afternoon the Chamber of Deputies met under the protection of the troops, when the whole large Place de la Concorde was laid out in bivouacs, mounted police and cavalry gathered in knots around groups of resting horses, both sides of the bridges guarded by lines of sergeants de ville through which a needle could not pass, except by wily and clever entreaties; egress to the avenues, Rue de Rivoli, Rue Royale, all severely barred. You rubbed your eyes, and wondered if the city were besieged. Well, not a soul sought to cross the Place de la Concorde, except some curious, inoffensive spectator like myself. So quiet, so still and silent, was everything that it was impossible to account for all these regiments and this look of a besieged city. Visiting a friend who lives near the Pont des Invalides, she informed me that two young English girls had just left her in a state of acute disappointment. “We came to Paris to see the great French Revolution, and there was nothing.” That has been the true state of affairs in Paris for the past two or three years. We were constantly sallying forth into the streets, and there never was anything much to be seen. What little there was in the way of civic uproar was centred round the reactionary and anti-semitic beershop Maxeville on the Boulevard. It rarely led to anything but a few arrests of a few hours’ duration, and then we quieted down to await with fortitude and patience the next explosion.
The public ball is, if less revolutionary in its consequences, more morally disastrous. The French love dancing; when they dance together in the open or in big kitchens, as the peasants dance, there is nothing for us to do but cheer and envy them. Here we recognise in the dancing of tired workers a legitimate outlet for compressed activities, the eternal measure of joy which children of nature must ever tread. If it lead to love and marriage, or, maybe, only through the dalliance of flirtation, that, too, is in the fitness of things, since men and women must flirt, make love, marry or jilt; and the only thing we have to ask of humanity is that it shall do these things with decorum and taste. It is just this sense of decorum, of taste, which is so conspicuous in the French of all classes, and so absent in the British Isles. And the only place where this decorum and taste fail them is at the public ball. Here they literally go off their heads, and become vulgar, gross, and indecent. Modest little grisettes come to these vile rendezvous for the first time, well-mannered, timid, perhaps with some of the bloom of youth about them still, a reserve which might be interpreted as a kind of virtue,—such a pretty, engaging dignity does it give them,—and this they leave behind in the empty bowl of hot blue wine, with the slices of lemon or orange floating in it. They breathe the air of obscenity, and grow vain and audacious, believing this is life, and that they have learnt it. Inept and stupid rascals think it a grand thing to dye their souls in purple-black, and make a foolish mockery of all things sacred. Tenth-rate, vulgar-minded scribblers haunt these halls of horror, and pretend to prefer the popularity earned by their brutish impurities, couched in coarse verse, in such abodes of vice to that of the reading public. And when, by chance, you see printed, or hear one of those hymns of Montmartre of the glories of Bullier or the Moulin Rouge, it seems to you a proof of infallible justice on the part of contemporary judgment that these mediocre scoundrels should have failed.
Yet the Parisian grisette, even when she is far from being a model of virtue, if she has not been vitiated by the bal public is a very well-behaved and gracious little creature. Her standard of life is not high, but such as it is, it is attained with surprising dignity, and it is thanks to the lover who leads her to the public ball, that she becomes acquainted with the ignoble, the profane, and the outrageous. Left to herself, she would ask for nothing better than a quiet and refined interior, a little money to spend capriciously, as many pretty, inoffensive fineries to wear as are necessary to make her always pleasant to be looked at, an occasional cheerful outing, with a picnic at Robinson or in the woods of Vincennes, or safe water-excursions at Bougival, with the certainty of replacing the present lover on the same discreet and advantageous lines. She takes no heed of the morrow, and it is this improvidence and the public ball that inevitably accomplish her ruin when she does not find—and it must be admitted she more frequently than not does find—an honest workman willing to overlook her past and to start married life with her. Made for the stability of home, neat and competent, she soon settles down, and proves herself a good housewife.
CHAPTER X
THE PARISIAN LECTURE AND SALON
In no city in the world is the public lecturer so popular as in Paris. The Conférence is almost a national institution, like the salon and the foyer. I will frankly confess that I find the average Parisian lecturer overrated, and the whole thing sadly overdone. In the winter and spring there are a great deal too many lectures, on too many subjects, but that is the way the Parisian, above all, Parisian woman, likes to take a dose of culture. When the season opens in January, you will generally find that your friends have subscribed somewhere or other for a course of lectures—six or twelve. Sometimes they take place in the lecture-hall of the Rue Caumartin, or in a lecture-hall in the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, or at the Société Géographique on the Boulevard St. Germain. Then there are the lectures of the Sorbonne, or the Collége de France, where the salaried professors of the State lecture, and a host of stray lectures on every subject under the sun, in various private dwellings or hired rooms. In spite of the competition between the well-known French lecturers, professors, men of letters and of science, foreigners are given courteous hearing, and if they have anything novel and interesting to say, are heartily thanked as well as generously paid for saying it. This I know, for I have had the honour of giving several lectures in Paris on modern English literature, and had reason to congratulate myself on my sympathetic and appreciative audience of intelligent and cultivated Frenchwomen. They dress so well, these pleasant-looking Frenchwomen, and listen with such speaking, sparkling visages, that no wonder there is so much competition between the male lecturers. Even a morose man of science, when he casts his eye over his audience, must be gladdened and freshened by their presence. He may prefer communion with the masculine intellect; but he must find his countrywoman’s alert and agreeable face, under its ever-becoming bonnet, a welcome vision.
Distinguished foreign writers, if they know enough French, are generally invited to lecture by some society. Fogazzarro was asked to lecture here on his recent visit, and a very pleasant little lecture it was, delivered in the best and easiest manner possible; and after him came Madame Pardo Bazán, the Spanish writer, with a few commonplaces about Spain. The fashionable resort for the lecture fanatic has been, for some years past, the Bodinière, in the Rue St. Lazare. This is an old theatre, a concert hall, a kind of fast musical chamber, where ballets, songs, and lectures all mingle strangely, and the lecturer, when the curtain rises, is revealed seated before a table, with ballet-girls heel-and-toe-tipped on the walls around him. The first time I attended a fashionable lecture at the Bodinière, it was to hear the Abbé Charbonnel talk to us on Lamennais. I am not easily shocked, but I found both incongruous and indecorous the picture made by an abbé in his uniform of religion, between two ballet-girls, with images everywhere of public dance and light morals. The lecture was an impressive one, far above the average Parisian lecture, eloquent, original, solemnly grave, polished as only a Frenchman’s prose is polished, with a note of burning revolt running through it. This, too, surprised me. When all London gathered to hear why an eminent clergyman of the Church of England left the faith of his fathers, they congregated in a church, and listened with a sense of solemnity to a solemn avowal. Here was a French abbé talking to us with a just indignation of the tyranny of Rome; talking with passion and admiration of Lamennais’s revolt and the injustice of Rome, talking as only a man who felt and shared the moral sufferings of his hero could talk. It was undoubtedly beautiful and thrilling. It was like hearing a heart beat, like watching a brain throb, feeling one’s self face to face with a naked soul in one of its great crises. But was a fashionable lecture-hall the place for such a public confession? Were frivolous, fluttering women of society a fitting audience in such an hour? Were these ladies of the ballet painted on the walls, this theatrical curtain, seemly environment? And was it in his abbé’s robe that Victor Charbonnel should have denounced the tyranny of Rome in public? Shortly afterwards the Abbé Charbonnel was excommunicated, which was no more than everybody expected; and though there was not a word he uttered in that remarkable lecture on a remarkable subject with which I did not sympathise, I should have preferred to hear it delivered elsewhere,—in other and more solemn surroundings.