THE PARDON OF SAINT ANNE (BRITTANY)
Guillou
Another source of pleasure are the markets of Paris. The great Halles Centrales one generally visits once, and no more, as a truly wonderful sight; but the flower-markets of the quays, of the Madeleine, and St. Sulpice are scenes of perpetual delight. There are many markets in the different quarters of Paris, where your servant may go in search of vegetables, fruit, eggs, and fowls for the national pot-au-feu. It is a small luxury, however, which I do not recommend, though widely practised by the bourgeois, who has a positive genius for the slow and ingenious saving of sous.
It is for all these reasons, and thousands more that creep into the blood and the brain beyond the range of analysis, that Paris takes such a grip of the foreigner, and becomes the birth-town of his maturity. In other towns you sojourn as a stranger or a contemplator. You live apart, either in your own world of dreams, among old stones, ruins, and faded pictures, amid the dim aisles of Gothic poems, or else you form part of a foreign coterie, and give and go to afternoon teas, living like invaders, in insolent indifference to the natives around you, except in your appreciation of them should they be courteous enough to lend themselves to your notion of the picturesque, or treat you with the consideration and kindness you naturally deem yourself entitled to expect along the highways of Europe. But Paris will have none of this patronage. If you settle there it is inevitable that you will become Parisianised. I do not say anything so flattering as that your taste in dress, if you happen to be a woman, will, of necessity, become that of your adopted sister, but there will be a chance that her eye for colour will modify your barbaric indifference to it, and the cut of her gown and shape of her hat will insensibly beguile you into altering yours. Nor, in the case of the young gentlemen of Great Britain, would I imply that long residence in Paris will affect their excellent tailoring, or turn them into the overdressed popinjays of the boulevards. The Englishman and the Parisian woman will always remain the best-dressed of their kind wherever they may live; and, while the Frenchman, in morals and manners, can descend to odious depths unsuspected by the blunt and open-minded Saxon, he can also, when the race shows him at his best, reveal virtues of subtler and more captivating quality. I know no form of young man more charming than a good young Frenchman, and can never understand why he figures so little in French fiction. There is nothing of the prig about him. He does not spend his days in being shocked at his neighbour; he is under no compulsion to be narrow and dull; he does not quote the Bible, nor does he desire, like the British virtuous youth, to mould all humanity upon his own stiff and starched effigy. His wisdom is woven with a great deal of gaiety; and when he happens to be dull, he carries off his dulness with an imperturbable amiability. This type of Frenchman a woman will never find offensive. He can oblige her with simplicity, and courtesy and gentleness are the most distinctive features of his character.
Foreigners in Paris seem to be very much swayed in their judgments and adoption of French politics by the mental and moral atmosphere they breathe, as well as by their own natural tendencies. The average Briton far too rarely stoops to consider the question of Republicanism, but condemns it beforehand on aristocratic principles. Mr. Bodley, who wrote a singularly pretentious work on France, frequented Bonapartist circles, and sat at the feet of the Comte de Mun, and sundry other political noblemen of the same mind; and the consequence is two tomes to prove that what France wants is another Napoleon—the very thing that nearly ruined her. The daughter of a sister Republic carries her millions into France by marriage with some needy nobleman, who has already figured in no estimable light in the pages of contemporary history written by fashionable romancers, under the guise of fiction, and she perhaps brandishes her parasol at the head of a band of miscreants, called La Jeunesse Royaliste, in enthusiastic admiration of its mission to batter the hat of a guest, an old man, the Head of the State, the Representative of France before the world. Mr. Bodley’s ideal appears to be not the good of France, but the triumph of the ideal of the archbishops and owners of castles. The Republic is bad form, and he would fain see it overthrown for the pleasure of his good friend, the Comte de Mun. What the Parisianised, ennobled American subject wants is to see her admirable and chivalrous husband Court Chamberlain, or something of the sort;—she, too, yearns for the life which every other countess in Paris wants, a Court to confer a forgotten dignity upon herself, and if she longs for the re-establishment of the old privilege, it is in order to patronise and protect those she fondly deems her inferiors. Other rich or needy foreigners in Paris wish for a Court to shine at, a monarchy or an empire, to be able to boast of their powerful relations. And what none of them will see is that France, in her several experimental moods, is seriously labouring to discover the form of government best suited to her needs, and that the elect of the people still hope, through trial and blunder, to reach the ideal of a progressive liberality. But the passion, the earnestness, of all these Parisianised foreigners in their adoption of the several prejudices and aspirations of Paris prove the truth of my assertion, that Paris absorbs us in her furnace of ardent sentiments and theories as no other place does. We can not stand by and view the spectacle of her follies and furies like a philosopher. Needs must we go down into the fray, which in reality does not concern us, and brandish the stick or parasol of revolt, whatever our nationality. Needs must we adopt a party in the land which regards us mistrustfully as foreigners, and rewards our generous enthusiasm for its multiple causes by calling us “Sans-patrie,” “Jews,” and “Traitors from Frankfort,” subsidised by a mythical syndicate, like the Czar, the Emperor of Germany, the King of Italy, and the Pope of Rome. Needs must we fret and fume, grow irritable and ill, perhaps long to hear the tocsin ring for another St. Bartholomew’s, if we are on one side,—that of the large, unenlightened, and foolish majority; yearn to people the Devil’s hole with sundry scoundrels we have come to hate if on the other side, that of the elect and liberal minority, with a passion of hatred no public men in our own country have ever inspired. What is the meaning of it? Is there some subtle magnetism in the air of Paris which makes us see French rascals as so different from other rascals, French tragedy as more poignant and intense than any other? I know I could cheerfully get through the remainder of my days in Spain or Italy without giving a thought to either government or caring a straw whether Sagasta or Crispi were in or out of office. I never see much difference between the gentlemen who in turn manage the affairs of England; in fact, I never have the ghost of an idea who is at the head of each department, and could not for the life of me distinguish between Mr. Codlin and Mr. Short. Not so in this brilliant, variable, light-headed, light-hearted, graceless, and bewitching Paris. I am burningly anxious to know all there is to be known about each minister of war, and take their repeated defections almost as a personal grievance. I eagerly examine the interpellations and their consequences, count majorities and minorities in the turbulent Chamber, follow the fortunes of the Senate, applaud, disapprove of all that happens with the ferocity of a citizen who pays to keep the machine going. I know well that I am a fool for my pains, and that I would be far better employed in minding my own business. But it is all the fault of Paris for being so abominably, so mischievously interesting. She it is who will not let you let her alone. She is like a vain woman; she must have all attention concentrated upon herself. She clamours for your notice, and despises you for giving it. If you stand aside with folded arms and look elsewhere, she will get into a passion, create a frightful scene to attract your attention, and when you obey her and give it in unstinted fashion, she turns on you and sneers and rails at you for a foreign spy and busybody. Poor Mr. Bodley, all ignorant of the fretful indignation he often roused in France by his thirst for information, was for long regarded by many an honest Frenchman as a spy.
Oddly enough, I hold that the pleasure side of Paris, its fashionable world, is the least of all to be envied. If I were a millionaire, I think I should prefer London, with its larger public life, its more varied hospitalities, for the investing of my millions in the thing called experience. Even a British ass, with time on his hands, and millions to squander, can discover an original method of going to the dogs and casting his millions into the bottomless pit. But what can the French idiot do after he has sent his shirts to London to be washed, and invested in an automobile? He is such a superlative dandy and humbug—I would fain use a hideous word, which describes him still better in three letters, if it were not for its inexcusable offensiveness—that he cannot bring sincerity to bear upon his imaginary passion for sport, and looks ten times more absurd when he is playing the athlete than when he is contentedly playing the fool. He is “the sedulous ape,” not to literature, like Stevenson in his young days, but to the Anglo-Saxon; and the folly lasts on to the brink of age.
The Faubourg holds itself more aloof than ever. It is now not even on saluting terms with the Republic. Still its life must be lived after a fashion, and it must give balls, if for no other reason than the ignoring of ministers and their wives. It cannot be said that the country at large is much affected by its doings; and if we are to judge the inhabitants by the fiction of the day,—the dialogue novels of Gyp, of Lavedan, of Abel Hermant, the psychological studies of MM. Bourget, Hervieu, Prévost,—the sane and intelligent person may thank his stars that he is still free to choose his society, and is not condemned by an accident of birth to tread such a mill of vaporous frivolity and futility, of intellectual blankness and arrogance, and of senseless corruption. I do not presume to say that these clever writers are invariably accurate in their delineation of fashionable Paris, nor do I deny that there may be a good deal of exaggeration in their sombre and revolting pictures,—for what lies under the sparkling effervescence of the brightest and wittiest of Gyp’s earlier work if it is not a dead-level of inanity and perversity? But their singularity consists in the fact that all are unanimous in their conclusions, in the general tenor of the life they portray. Pride of birth is the only sort of pride this class seems to possess, and for a nod the heroines of all those heraldic pages fall into the arms of the first comer and the last alike. When you make the acquaintance of a viscount, you may be sure he has an entresol somewhere for varied clandestine loves, and passes his time between encounters here, le boxe, and his “circle.” One solid, useful action never seems to be entered to his account. His days and nights are devoted to accomplished idleness and seduction, and his busiest hours are those spent on his toilet. And the women of this dreary and monotonous fiction,—how shall we qualify them? They have all the frailty of the wicked, red-heeled, minuetting eighteenth century without any of its charm, its wit, and real intellect. For if the marquise of the old school, passed into perfumed memory, were a rake, she was not a fool, she was not a rowdy, and she had a feeling for great deeds and great thoughts. She stands on a picturesque eminence in the history of her land. We cannot say the same for the titled rake of to-day. It is the fashion to treat her as a détraquée, because she subsists mainly upon excitement. But what needs altering is her standard; what should be overthrown is the altar upon which she sacrifices her futile existence. Not that she is the only example of her class, but somehow the novelists have not thought fit to present us with any other. The strange thing about it is, that she and her mate in the game of battledore and shuttlecock with reputation and morality, the incorrigible viscount, have been brought up under a supervision and care exceeding northern conception. Neither was permitted a moment of licensed childhood. Priest and nun were at the side of each, in constant attendance upon their minds and manners and morals. The male cherub lost his wings when the abbé made his last bow and retired, leaving his charge alone on the brink of temptation, a youth with a budding moustache. The maid ceased to be an angel before the honeymoon had well begun; and, if we are to believe polite fiction, was already one of the pursued of snaring sinners before she was a week a bride.
The Paris of this class is not the Paris that charms and holds you in its spell. The fast, luxurious, and expensive Paris belongs to it; the cosmopolitan Paris, kept going by the millions of the foreigners who come here to amuse themselves. Theirs is the Rue de la Paix, the Concours Hyppique, the Arménonville Restaurant, the Bois, the avenues of the Champs Elysées and the Parc Monceau, the race-courses, the Théâtre Français “Tuesdays,” the charity bazaars, the flower feasts and exhibitions, the automobile competitions, the “five-o’clocks,” and M. Brunetière’s lectures on Bossuet. This is the rowdy, reactionary Paris, ever on view, which disapproves of the Pope, and would assuredly array itself in garments of gaiety if M. Loubet were assassinated. This is the Paris which sneers at rasta-quouères, and is ever on the lookout for American heiresses for its needy titled sons, which is rabidly anti-Semitic, and supports its prestige upon Jewish millions. Quite recently, when anti-Semitism was raging in France, and we were informed in every tone of fury and contempt that no self-respecting Catholic could possibly regard a Jew as an honest man or a French subject, an authentic French marquis married the daughter of a Hebrew millionaire, and to console themselves for the obligation of profiting by their noble comrade’s good fortune, his friends summed up the young lady’s qualities in three amusing lines:—