CHAPTER II
AT SIXTEEN
THE family was abroad for the summer, one of those delightful May-first to October thirty-first summers when school is missed at both ends. The itinerary was supposed to be planned by letting each member drop into a hat slips of paper indicating preferences. Mother was astonishingly good about considering the wishes of all. But as the trip was undertaken for education as well as vacation, the head of the family did not intend to make it aimless rambling. Although, to get full benefit of the strawberry season, we took our cathedrals from south to north in England, none were omitted. By the time we reached Edinburg, Roman, Saxon, Early Norman and Gothic were as mixed up in the head of the sixteen-year-old member of the party as they were in the buildings inspected. "Inspected"—just the word for an educational tour! Later visits to East Coast cathedrals have not conquered the instinctive desire to avoid going inside. Impressions of places were vivid enough. But I fear Canterbury meant London the next stop; Ely a place near Cambridge; Peterborough the view from the top of the tower; Lincoln tea-cakes that crumbled in one's mouth; York a mean photographer who never sent me films I left to be developed; and Durham a batch of long-delayed letters from boys at home.
At sixteen strawberries do not satisfy hunger: cathedrals do not feed the soul.
No, cathedrals and history and the origin of the political institutions under which I lived interested me very mildly. At sixteen one is too young to have love affairs that interfere with the appetite, and too sophisticated to cling to the dream of a cloistered convent life that followed giving up the hope of being a chorus-girl. The mental effort of preparing for college (which the tour abroad was to stimulate) could not claim me to the exclusion of clothes and an engrossing interest in the doings of the group of boys and girls who formed my "crowd." The trip abroad was going to give me something to talk about at dinner-parties and the advantage of wearing clothes bought in Paris. One never looks forward to the coming winter with as keen anticipation as during the sixteen-year-old summer. Hair would be put up, and dances and dinners were a certainty for every Friday and Saturday evening.
If you believe in the value of first impressions and are in a mood to love Paris, plan your introduction to the queen of the world for an evening in June. Do not worry about your baggage. Send a porter from the hotel afterwards for your trunks. Find a fiacre if you can. An auto-taxi is second-best, but be sure that the top is off. Baisser la capote is a simple matter, done in the twinkling of an eye. Of course the chauffeur will scold. But handling cochers and chauffeurs in Paris requires the instinct of a lion-tamer. If you let the animal get the better of you, you are gone. You will never enjoy Paris. Mastery of Parisian drivers, hippomobile and automobile, does not require a knowledge of French. Your man will understand "put down the top" accompanied by the proper gesture. Whether he puts it down depends upon your iron will and not upon your French!
Best of all stations for the first entry to Paris is the Gare de Lyon. But that good fortune is yours only if you are coming from Italy or Spain or if you have landed at Marseilles. The Dover and Boulogne routes bring you to the Gare du Nord and the Dieppe and Havre and Cherbourg routes to the Gare Saint-Lazare. In any case, ask to be driven first to the Pont-Neuf, then along the quais of the Rive Gauche to the Pont-Alexandre Trois, then to the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Only when you have gone over this itinerary and have passed between the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais are you ready to be driven to your hotel. It is the difference between seeing a girl first at a dance or a garden-party or running into her by accident in her mother's kitchen when the cook is on a strike.
How often, in the decades that have passed since June, 1899, have I wished that the return to Paris had included this program, not only initially but for every June and July evening of our weeks there. But it did not. The passionate love of Paris, my home city, that was born in me as a child, that was re-awakened and deepened in maturity, did not manifest itself when I was a school-girl as it should have done. The change from regular lessons to the governess-controlled days of sightseeing was not as amusing at the time as it seems in retrospect. Madame Raymond and I were not made for each other. It wasn't incorrigibility on my part or severity in a nasty way on hers. We just pulled in different directions, and shocked each other. It began on the first day. She found that I spoke French well enough not to call for the usual effort she had to make with American girls and that I did not need to be told the names of monuments and jardins and avenues. The memories of infancy had been carefully kept alive by word and picture. Mother had seen to that. Paris meant to me my father. Consequently, I suppose Madame Raymond's conscience stimulated her to lay stress upon history and art. She wanted to earn her money.
Mutual lack of comprehension began immediately. My first reading under Madame Raymond's direction was a volume of Guy de Maupassant's stories, with markers to show which could be read and which were forbidden. Next day Madame was horrified to see the markers gone and to learn that I had sat up late reading without censorship. She told me that a well-bred jeune fille ought to be ashamed of reading certain things, and refused to argue about it when I asked her why a jeune fille should be ashamed of reading the stories she had indicated to be skipped.