Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

The two Palaces of Fine Arts are fine enough; and finer still, on beyond them, is the great Pont Alexandre III; but, to my untutored instincts, all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards and their grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching-white to the eye in the sunlight, seemed overly suggestive of a World's Fair as we know such things in America. Seeing them I knew where the architects who designed the main approaches and the courts of honor for all our big expositions got their notions for color schemes and statuary effects. I liked better those two ancient triumphal arches of St.-Martin and St.-Denis on the Boulevard St.-Denis, and much better even than these the tremendous sweep of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares in the world, and the one with the grimmest, bloodiest history, I reckon.

The Paris to which these things properly appertain is at its very best and brightest on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the parks where well-to-do people drive or ride, and their children play among the trees under the eyes of nursemaids in the quaint costumes of Normandy, though, for all I know, it may be Picardy. Elsewhere in these parks the not-so-well-to-do gather in great numbers; some drinking harmless sirupy drinks at the gay little refreshment kiosks; some packing themselves about the man who has tamed the tree sparrows until they come at his call and hive in chattering, fluttering swarms on his head and his arms and shoulders; some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name—could not find anybody who seemed to know its name—but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, and a tremendous amount of speed and skill. If the ball gets lost in anybody's whiskers I think it counts ten for the opposing side; but I do not know the other rules.

A certain indefinable, unmistakably Gallic flavor or piquancy savors the life of the people; it disappears only when they cease to be their own natural selves. A woman novelist, American by birth, but a resident of several years in Paris, told me a story illustrative of this. The incident she narrated was so typical that it could never have happened except in Paris, I thought. She said she was one of a party who went one night to dine at a little cafe much frequented by artists and art students. The host was himself an artist of reputation. As they dined there entered a tall, gloomy figure of a man with a long, ugly face full of flexible wrinkles; such a figure and such a face as instantly commanded their attention. This man slid into a seat at a table near their table and had a frugal meal. He had reached the stage of demitasse and cigarette when he laid down cup and cigarette and, fetching a bit of cardboard and a crayon out of his pocket, began putting down lines and shadings; between strokes he covertly studied the profile of the man who was giving the dinner party. Not to be outdone the artist hauled out his drawing pad and pencil and made a quick sketch of the long-faced man. Both finished their jobs practically at the same moment; and, rising together with low bows, they exchanged pictures—each had done a rattling good caricature of the other—and then, without a word having been spoken or a move made toward striking up an acquaintance, each man sat him down again and finished his dinner.

The lone diner departed first. When the party at the other table had had their coffee they went round the corner to a little circus—one of the common type of French circuses, which are housed in permanent wooden buildings instead of under tents. Just as they entered, the premier clown, in spangles and peak cap, bounded into the ring. Through the coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face: it was the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an hour before.

Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown. His ears were painted bright red—the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown—and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the drollest master of pantomime I ever saw. On leaving the circus, very naturally we went to the cafe—where the first part of the little dinner comedy had been enacted. We encountered both artists, professional or amateur, of blacklead and bristol board, but we met a waiter there who was an artist—in his line. I ordered a cigar of him, specifying that the cigar should be of a brand made in Havana and popular in the States. He brought one cigar on a tray. In size and shape and general aspect it seemed to answer the required specifications. The little belly band about its dark-brown abdomen was certainly orthodox and regular; but no sooner had I lit it and taken a couple of puffs than I was seized with the conviction that something had crawled up that cigar and died. So I examined it more closely and I saw then that it was a bad French cigar, artfully adorned about its middle with a second-hand band, which the waiter had picked up after somebody else had plucked it off one of the genuine articles and had treasured it, no doubt, against the coming of some unsophisticated patron such as I. And I doubt whether that could have happened anywhere except in Paris either. That is just it, you see. Try as hard as you please to see the real Paris, the Paris of petty larceny and small, mean graft intrudes on you and takes a peck at your purse.

Go where you will, you cannot escape it. You journey, let us assume, to the Tomb of Napoleon, under the great dome that rises behind the wide-armed Hotel des Invalides. From a splendid rotunda you look down to where, craftily touched by the softened lights streaming in from high above, that great sarcophagus stands housing the bones of Bonaparte; and above the entrance to the crypt you read the words from the last will and testament of him who sleeps here: "I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have so well loved." And you reflect that he so well loved them that, to glut his lusting after power and yet more power, he led sundry hundreds of thousands of them to massacre and mutilation and starvation; but that is the way of world—conquerors the world over—and has absolutely nothing to do with this tale. The point I am trying to get at is, if you can gaze unmoved at this sepulcher you are a clod. And if you can get away from its vicinity without being held up and gouged by small grafters you are a wonder.

Not tombs nor temples nor sanctuaries are safe from the profane and polluting feet of the buzzing plague of them. You journey miles away from this spot to the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise. You trudge past seemingly unending, constantly unfolding miles of monuments and mausoleums; you view the storied urns and animated busts that mark the final resting-places of France's illustrious dead. And as you marvel that France should have had so many illustrious dead, and that so many of them at this writing should be so dead, out from behind De Musset's vault or Marshal Ney's comes a snoopy, smirky wretch to pester you to the desperation that is red-eyed and homicidal with his picture post cards and his execrable wooden carvings.

You fight the persistent vermin off and flee for refuge to that shrine of every American who knows his Mark Twain—the joint grave [Footnote: Being French, and therefore economical, those two are, as it were, splitting one tomb between them.] of Hell Loisy and Abie Lard [Footnote: Popular tourist pronunciation.] and lo, in the very shadow of it there lurks a blood brother to the first pest! I defy you to get out of that cemetery without buying something of no value from one or the other, or both of them. The Communists made their last stand in Pere Lachaise. So did I. They went down fighting. Same here. They were licked to a frazzle. Ditto, ditto.

Next, we will say, Notre Dame draws you. Within, you walk the clattering flags of its dim, long aisles; without, you peer aloft to view its gargoyled waterspouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the very act of leering and congealed into stone. The spirit of the place possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above; and at the precise moment a foul vagabond pounces on you and, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth, he draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs—things which no decent man could look at without gagging and would not carry about with him on his person for a million dollars in cash. By threats and hard words you drive him off; but seeing others of his kind drawing nigh you run away, with no particular destination in mind except to discover some spot, however obscure and remote, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary may be at rest for a few minutes. You cross a bridge to the farther bank of the river and presently you find yourself—at least I found myself there—in one of the very few remaining quarters of old Paris, as yet untouched by the scheme of improvement that is wiping out whatever is medieval and therefore unsanitary, and making it all over, modern and slick and shiny.

Losing yourself—and with yourself your sense of the reality of things—you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses with tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids like hostile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers and coops where caged larks and linnets pipe cheery snatches of song; and on beyond, between the eaves, which bend toward one another like gossips who would swap whispered confidences, is a strip of sky. Below are smells of age and dampness. And there is a rich, nutritious garlicky smell too; and against a jog in the wall a frowsy but picturesque rag-picker is asleep on a pile of sacks, with a big sleek cat asleep on his breast. I do not guarantee the rag-picker. He and his cat may have moved since I was there and saw them, although they had the look about them both of being permanent fixtures.