The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

Paris, July, 1835.

You wish to see the Palais Royal? Then you must step from the Boulevard Italien a quarter of a mile to the south-west. If you hate Philadelphia sameness and symmetry, you will be gratified here to your heart’s content. In Paris there are ten hundred and eighty streets, besides lanes and alleys, all recommending themselves by the most charming irregularities. That which you will now pass through, the “Rue Vivienne,” is among the most bustling; it is a leading avenue, is alive with business, and has pretensions far above its capacity. I must tell you a word about the etiquette of these streets before you set out.

If a lady meets a gentleman upon the little side walk, which French courtesy calls a “trottoir,” it is the lady always who trots into the mud. The French women seem used to this submission, and yield to it instinctively; and, indeed, all who feel their weakness, as children and old men, being subject to the same necessity, shew the same resignation. Also, if a number of gentlemen are coteried, even across the broad walk of the Boulevards, the lady walks round, not to incommode them; and it is not expected of a French gentleman in a public place or vehicle that he should give his seat to any one, of whatever age, sex, or condition, or that he should deviate from his straight line on the street for anything less than an omnibus. The French have been a polite people, and they continue to trade on the credit of their ancestors. What is curious to observe, is the complaisance with which human nature follows a general example. A Russian wife, when the husband neglects to beat her for a month or two, is alarmed at his indifference, and I have remarked that the French women are the warmest defenders of this French incivility.

Recollect, that as soon as you put your little foot upon this Rue Vivienne, fifty waggons, a wedding coach, and three funerals, with I don’t know how many malle-postes, cabs, coucous, and bell-eared diligences—all but the fiacres, with their gaunt and fleshless horses, which plead inability—will set themselves to run over you, without the smallest respect for your Greek nose, your inky brows, and black eyes. The danger is imminent, and it won’t do to have your two feet in one sock. I have written home to your mother, to have prayers performed in the churches for women’s husbands sojourning in Paris. And by escaping from one danger, you are sure to run full butt against another. Scylla and Charybdis, too, are so close together, that the “prudent middle” is precisely the course that no prudent lady will think of pursuing. To make it worse, the natives will have not the least sympathy in your dangers; they have been used to get run over themselves from time immemorial, and when we staring Yankees come over to see the “Tooleries and the Penny Royal,” they are not aware that any allowance is to be made for our ignorance. Besides, the driver knows a stranger as far as he can see him, and takes aim accordingly; he gets twenty-five francs for his body at the Morgue. It is known, that secret companies for “running over people” exist all over Paris, and that the drivers are the principal stockholders. The truth is, that it is reckoned amongst the natural deaths of the place, and two hundred and fifty are marked upon the bills of the last year. Under the old régime, when the nobility put out a greater train of vehicles, and had a kind of monopoly of running over the common people, I have heard it was still worse. Then, if any one walked about the streets unmashed for twenty years, he was entitled to the cross of St. Louis. I have escaped till now, but I set it down entirely to the efficacy of your innocent prayers, which have reversed the fates in my favour.

Your best way is to watch and imitate the address of the native women. Here they are now, in front of my window, sprinkled over the whole street, in their white stockings and prunellas, and in the very filthiest of the French weather, without a spot to their garters. The little things just pull up all the petticoats in the world more than half leg, and then tip-toe they step from the convex surface of one paving stone to another, with a dexterity and grace that go to one’s heart.

A lady must expect, also, other embarrassments here, to which the delicate pusillanimity of the sex is yet but slightly exposed in our country, besides the cat and nine kittens that she must jump over, and the defunct lap-dogs that lie putrid in the gutters. The truth is, that these streets are very often (I ask pardon of Madame de Rambouillet and other good authorities) so in deshabille, they are not fit to be seen. A Parisian lady, therefore (and she is to be imitated also in this), when she ventures out on foot, is sharp-sighted as a lynx, and blind as an owl; she has eyes to see and not to see, and she runs the gauntlet through the midst of all these slippery and perilous obstructions in as careless a good humour as you upon the smooth trottoirs of your Chestnut and Broadways. It is true, the ladies of the haut ton do not much exercise their ambulatory functions—their “vertu caminante”—upon these unsavoury promenades.

A French gentleman, who has resided a week and a half at New York (just long enough to know the manners and customs of a country), told me this very morning, that you American ladies stare in the streets at the gentlemen, he ventured to say, “even to immodesty;” and I have heard other foreigners make similar remarks, I presume without a proper attention to the peculiar circumstances of the different countries. In a Philadelphia street, a lady can give herself up to her thoughts, and her soul has the free use of its wings. She can get into a romance, or a reverie; she can study her lesson, or read a love-letter, and she can stare at a French gentleman, without the least apprehension of danger. Our streets are clean and decent, and are excellent places of parade; and gentlemen and ladies go out expressly on fine evenings to stare at one another. Indeed, Chestnut-street is so trim and neat that sometimes one is almost obliged, like Diogenes, to spit in somebody’s face not to soil its prettiness. Not so in Paris; you are here quite at your ease in all such matters. A French lady, therefore,—and very properly,—sees no one in the street, not even her husband. To get her to look at you, you are obliged to take hold of her, shake her, and turn her about three or four times. But when once upon the Boulevard Italien of an evening, or upon the broad walk of the elegant Tuileries, when she has no longer need of the faculties of her eyes, and ears, and nose too, to anticipate and obviate danger—ah, ma foi! her diamond eyes are no more chary of their amorous glances than the hazle and bugle eyes of Chestnut or Broadway of theirs. I tried to persuade this French gentleman,—who is a baron, has a bel air, and large mustachios,—that this happened only to him. I told him (and it is true, too,) of others, who could not get the dear little girls of New York to look at them sufficiently. But I must shew you the Palais Royal.

It is a third less than your Washington Square. Its trees are in two regular rows along each margin. In the centre is an inclosure, containing a shrubbery and flowers; and also an Apollo and a Diana in bronze, and a jet d’eau that separates in the air, and falls in a “fleur de lis”—the only emblem of royalty that deceived the Revolution and the Jacobins; and a lake, where the little fishes “wave their wings of gold.” There is no access to vehicles, or street noise, to disturb the quiet of this fairy retreat. It is in the centre, too, of the city, in the vicinity of all the other chief places of diversion; and here all the world meets after dinner to take coffee, to smoke, and concert measures for the rest of the evening. You will see them creeping in from the neighbouring streets, as you have seen the ants into a sugarhouse.

If you wish to know where is the centre of the earth, it is the Palais Royal. Ask a stranger, when he arrives, “whither will you go first?” he will answer, “to the Palais Royal;” or ask a Frenchman, on the top of Caucasus, “where shall I meet you again?” he will give you rendez-vous at the Palais Royal; and no spot, they say, on the earth, has witnessed so many tender recognitions. Just do you ask Mademoiselle Celeste, at New York, “where did you get that superb robe de chambre?” and, I will lay you six to one, she will say, “at the Palais Royal.”

Let us sit down beneath these pretty elms. Those upper rooms, which you see so adorned with Ionic columns, with galleries, and vases, and little Virtues, and other ornaments in sculpture—those are not his majesty’s apartments; not the salles des marechaux, nor the salle du trône, nor the chambre à coucher de la reine; they are the cafés and restaurants of the Palais Royal. And those multitudes you see circulating about the galleries, and looking down from the windows—those are not the royal family, nor the garde du corps, nor the “hundred Swiss,” nor the chambellans, the écuyers, the aumoniers, the maitres de cérémonies, the introducteurs des ambassadeurs, nor the historiographers, nor even the chauf-cire, nor the capitaines des levrettes—they are the cooks, and the garçons, in their white aprons, of the cafés and restaurants; the only order that has suffered no loss of dignity or corruption of blood by the Revolution; the veritable noblesse of these times, the “cordons bleus” of the order of the gridiron.