Although the petits soupers have disappeared, the dinners are very sufficient substitutes: they are given at a better hour; and the service of a French entertainment, so quiet, so entirely free from effort, or chatter about food, is admirably adapted to rendering them agreeable. I am clearly of opinion that no one ought to give any entertainment that has not the means of making it pass off as a matter-of-course thing, and without effort. I have certainly seen a few fussy dinners here, but they are surprisingly rare. At home, we have plenty of people who know that a party that has a laboured air is inherently vulgar, but how few are there that know how to treat a brilliant entertainment as a mere matter of course! Paris is full of those desirable houses in which the thing is understood.
The forms of the table vary a little, according to the set one is in. In truly French houses, until quite lately, I believe, it was not the custom to change the knife,—the duty of which, by the way, is not great, the cookery requiring little more than the fork. In families that mingle more with strangers, both are changed, as with us. A great dinner is served very much as at home, so far as the mere courses are concerned, though I have seen the melons follow the soup. This I believe to be in good taste, though it is not common; and it struck me at first as being as much out of season as the old New England custom of eating the pudding before the meat. But the French give small dinners (small in name, though certainly very great in execution), in which the dishes are served singly or nearly so, the entertainment resembling those given by the Turks, and being liable to the same objection; for when there is but a single dish before one, and it is not known whether there is to be any more, it is an awkward thing to decline eating. Such dinners are generally of the best quality, but I think they should never be given, except where there is sufficient intimacy to embolden the guest to say jam satis.
The old devotion to the sex is not so exclusively the occupation of a French salon as it was probably half a century since. I have been in several, where the men were grouped in a corner talking politics, while the women amused each other as best they could, in cold, formal lines, looking like so many figures placed there to show off the latest modes of the toilette. I do not say this is absolutely common, but it is less rare than you might be apt to suppose.
I can tell you little of the habit of reading manuscripts in society. Such things are certainly done, for I have been invited to be present on one or two occasions; but having a horror of such exhibitions, I make it a point to be indisposed, the choice lying between the megrims before or after them. Once, and once only, I have heard a poet recite his verses in a well-filled drawing-room; and though I have every reason to think him clever, my ear was so little accustomed to the language, that, in the mouthing of French recitation, I lost nearly all of it.
I have had an odd pleasure in driving from one house to another, on particular evenings, in order to produce as strong contrasts as my limited visiting-list will procure. Having a fair opportunity a few nights since, in consequence of two or three invitations coming in for the evening on which several houses where I occasionally called were opened, I determined to make a night of it, in order to note the effect. As A—— did not know several of the people, I went alone, and you may possibly be amused with an account of my adventures: they shall be told.
In the first place, I had to dress, in order to go to dinner at a house that I had never entered, and with a family of which I had never seen a soul. These are incidents which frequently come over a stranger, and at first were not a little awkward; but use hardens us to much greater misfortunes. At six, then, I stepped punctually into my coupé, and gave Charles the necessary number and street. I ought to tell you that the invitation had come a few days before, and in a fit of curiosity I had accepted it, and sent a card, without having the least idea who my host and hostess were, beyond their names. There was something piquant in this ignorance, and I had almost made up my mind to go in the same mysterious manner, leaving all to events, when happening, in an idle moment, to ask a lady of my acquaintance, and for whom I have a great respect, if she knew a Madame de ——, to my surprise, her answer was, "Most certainly; she is my cousin, and you are to dine there to-morrow." I said no more, though this satisfied me that my hosts were people of some standing. While driving to their hotel, it struck me, under all the circumstances, it might be well to know more of them, and I stopped at the gate of a female friend, who knows everybody, and who, I was certain, would receive me even at that unseasonable hour. I was admitted, explained my errand, and inquired if she knew a M. de ——. "Quelle question!" she exclaimed—"M. de —— est Chancelier de France!" Absurd and even awkward as it might have proved, but for this lucky thought, I should have dined with the French Lord High Chancellor, without having the smallest suspicion of who he was!
The hotel was a fine one, though the apartment was merely good, and the reception, service, and general style of the house were so simple that neither would have awakened the least suspicion of the importance of my hosts. The party was small and the dinner modest. I found the chancelier a grave dignified man, a little curious on the subject of America, and his wife apparently a woman of great good sense, and I should think, of a good deal of attainment. Everything went off in the quietest manner possible, and I was sorry when it was time to go.
From this dinner, I drove to the hotel of the Marquis de Marbois, to pay a visit of digestion. M. de Marbois retires so early, on account of his great age, that one is obliged to be punctual, or he will find the gate locked at nine. The company had got back into the drawing-room, and as the last week's guests were mostly there, as well as those who had just left the table, there might have been thirty people present, all of whom were men but two. One of the ladies was Madame de Souza, known in French literature as the writer of several clever novels of society. In the drawing-room were grouped, in clusters, the Grand Referendary, M. Cuvier, M. Daru, M. Villemain, M. de Plaisance, Mr. Brown, and many others of note. There seemed to be something in the wind, as the conversation was in low confidential whispers, attended by divers ominous shrugs. This could only be politics, and watching an opportunity, I questioned an acquaintance. The fact was really so. The appointed hour had come and the ministry of M. de Villèle was in the agony. The elections had not been favourable, and it was expedient to make an attempt to reach the old end, by what is called a new combination. It is necessary to understand the general influence of political intrigues on certain côteries of Paris, to appreciate the effect of this intelligence, on a drawing-room filled, like this, with men who had been actors in the principal events of France for forty years. The name of M. Cuvier was even mentioned as one of the new ministers. Comte Roy was also named as likely to be the new premier. I was told that this gentleman was one of the greatest landed proprietors of France, his estates being valued at four millions of dollars. The fact is curious, as showing, not on vulgar rumour, but from a respectable source, what is deemed a first-rate landed property in this country. It is certainly no merit, nor do I believe it is any very great advantage; but I think we might materially beat this, even in America. The company soon separated, and I retired.
From the Place de la Madeleine, I drove to a house near the Carrousel, where I had been invited to step in, in the course of the evening. All the buildings that remain within the intended parallelogram, which will some day make this spot one of the finest squares in the world, have been bought by the government, or nearly so, with the intent to have them pulled down, at a proper time; and the court bestows lodgings, ad interim, among them, on its favourites. Madame de —— was one of these favoured persons, and she occupies a small apartment in the third story of one of these houses. The rooms were neat and well-arranged, but small. Probably the largest does not exceed fifteen feet square. The approach to a Paris lodging is usually either very good, or very bad. In the new buildings may be found some of the mediocrity of the new order of things; but in all those which were erected previously to the revolution, there is nothing but extremes in this, as in most other things: great luxury and elegance, or great meanness and discomfort. The house of Madame de —— happens to be of the latter class, and although all the disagreeables have disappeared from her own rooms, one is compelled to climb up to them, through a dark well of a staircase, by flights of steps not much better than those we use in our stables. You have no notion of such staircases as those I had just descended in the hotels of the chancelier and the président premier;[25] nor have we any just idea, as connected with respectable dwellings, of these I had now to clamber up. M. de —— is a man of talents and great respectability, and his wife is exceedingly clever, but they are not rich. He is a professor, and she is an artist. After having passed so much of my youth on top-gallant yards, and in becketting royals, you are not to suppose, however, I had any great difficulty in getting up these stairs, narrow, steep, and winding as they were.
[Footnote 25: M. de Marbois was the first president of the Court of
Accounts.]