The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

On a range with the restaurants, and over them, you will see lodged many of the fine arts; painters, engravers, dentists, barbers, and beautiful sultanas, look out from the highest windows upon these fair dominions, to which the severity of French morals has forbidden them access. In the lower rooms, on a level with the area of the garden, and peeping through the colonnade, west and east, are riches almost immeasurable, in exquisite and fashionable apparel for both sexes, and in jewellery, trinkets, and perfumery. This trade, which in other cities is pedling and huckstering, assumes here the dignity of a great commercial interest, and its productions are reckoned at upwards of a hundred millions of francs. The stores themselves are so little, and yet so pretty, that I have thoughts of sending you one of them over by the packet. Their arrangements are changed every hour, so as to keep up a continuous emotion and a series of agreeable excitements, and so as to present you a new set of temptations twelve times a day.

Everything that human industry, sharpened by necessity or competition, can effect—everything which can excite an appetite, can heighten a beauty, or hide a deformity, is here. I begin to love art almost as well as nature: I begin to love mother Eve in her fig-leaves, as well as in her unaproned innocence. After all, what is nature to us without art? Education is art. Indeed, rightly considered, art itself is nature; she has but left a part of her work unfinished to urge the industry and whet the ingenuity of man. In these stores, everything is sacrificed to the shop; there is no accommodation for the household gods. Persons with their families are not allowed to inhabit here. A man hoards space as a miser hoards money. It is a qualification indispensable in a clerk to be of a slender capacity. You would think you were in Lilliput, served by the fairies. The shop-girls, especially, are of such exquisite exility of figure, you can almost take one of them between your thumb and finger, and set her on the counter.

In our country, we have nothing yet to shew in the way of great works of art. We have nature, indeed, wild and beautiful, but without historic associations; tradition is dumb, and the “memory of man” runs back to the Eden of our race. It is a mighty advantage these old countries have over us; their reminiscences, their traditions, and their antiquities. What would be the Tower but for humpback Richard and the babes; or, what Hounslow Heath but for the ghosts of those who have been murdered there? And in these countries, which have no beginning, they can supply the vacant space into which authentic history does not venture, by legends and romances; and no matter how obscure may be one of their mountains and lakes, they can lie it into a reputation. Some things are beautiful from their accessories alone; as lords are sometimes lords only from their equipages. What is there beautiful in a ruin? We have plains as desolate as Babylon, and no one looks at them.

The Palais Royal, however magnificent as a bazaar, has still higher and better merits. It is the history of some of the most remarkable personages and events of the last two ages. Some day, when we have a ticket from the “Intendant de sa Majesté,” I will shew you them all; and first, that very celebrated old fop the Cardinal de Richelieu, who used to strut, with his train of a monarch, through this very garden and these very halls. You shall see the very theatre upon which he represented his woeful tragedies; his flatterers crowding around with wonderful grimace, and Corneille’s muse cowering her timid wings in silence. As you are a lady, and love trinkets, I will shew you, if it yet exists, that great miracle of massive gold and diamonds, the Cardinal’s Chapel; the two candlesticks, valued at a hundred thousand livres; the cross, twenty-two inches high, and of pure gold; the Christ of the same metal, and the crown and drapery all glittering in diamonds. And you shall see the prayer-book, too, encased in lamina of gold; in the centre the cardinal holding up the globe, and from the four corners four angels placing a crown upon his head. If you like, I will shew you also that other smooth-faced rogue, scarcely his inferior in political ability, the Cardinal Mazarin, who put the king’s money in his pocket, and stinted his little majesty in shirts. And if you love more cardinals, I will shew you yet another, more witty, and not less profligate and debauched, than the other two, the Cardinal de Retz. When we read his memoirs together, little did we foresee that one day we should look into the very chambers in which he held his nightly councils, with his fellow conspirators, plotting his rabble Revolution of the Fronde.

You shall see also Turenne and the great Condé. That gentleman gathering maxims—maxims of life at the court of Mazarin!—that is M. le due de Rochefoucauld; and I will introduce you to Madame de Motteville, and other famous wits and beauties of those times. In the room just opposite, where one dines upon soup, three courses, and a dessert, at forty sous, I will shew you the little “Grand Monarque” in his cradle. The dear little thing! It was here the great man first began; it was here he crept, I presume very unwillingly, to school; here he began to seek the bubble reputation, and to sigh at the feet—worthy a better devotion—of the “humble violet,” Madame la Vallière.

Just over head, Doctor Franklin used to sup with the Duke of Orleans and his family; and here Madame de Genlis gave lessons to the little Louis Philippe, causing his most Christian Majesty to walk fifteen miles a day in shoes with leaden soles. The Spartans did better, who, to make their kings hardy and robust, had them flogged daily at the shrine of some pagan goddess. In one of these rooms, the mob Republic held for awhile its meetings; and in this very garden, the tri-coloured cockade was adopted, at a great meeting in 1789, as the revolutionary emblem. On the south end is a gallery of paintings, they say very splendid. It was plundered in the Revolution, and since restored by the present proprietor, the King. If any one steals a picture or a book in Paris, and can prove quiet possession for a certain time, it is a vested right, and the owner is obliged to buy back his goods from the thief.

I sometimes walk in this garden with the scholars and the bonnes, of a morning, but it is disagreeable; it is not yet aired, and has a stale stupefactive smell from the preceding night’s banquet. It is by degrees ventilated, and life begins to flow into it about ten. Then the readers of news begin to gravitate around Monsieur Perussault’s pavilion. There is a dial here which announces, with a loud detonation, twelve; and as the important hour approaches, every one having a watch takes it out, and looks up with compressed lips, and waits in uno obtutu until Apollo has fired off his cannon; then quick he twirls about the hands, and replaces it complacently in his fob, and walks away very happy to have the official hour in his pocket. You will see also a few badauds, who always arrive just afterwards, and stand the same way, looking up for half an hour or so, till informed that the time has already gone off.

It is of a hot summer evening, that this garden is unrivalled in beauty. You swim in a glare of light; the gas flashes from under the arcades; lamps innumerable shine through the interior and look down from five hundred windows above. It is not night, it is “but the daylight sick.” It is haunted by its company, and is full of life to the latest hours, and revelry holds her gambols here, when Paris everywhere over the immense city is lulled into its midnight slumbers. When summer has turned round upon its axis, and the first chills of autumn frighten joy from her court, she retires then to her last hold, the “Galerie d’Orleans.” This delightful promenade extends across the south end of the garden; it is three hundred feet long by thirty wide; its roof is of glass and its pavement of tesselated marble; it is bounded on both sides by stores, and cafés, and reading rooms, eighteen feet square, renting annually at four thousand francs each. It is kept warm enough for its company in winter, and is a fashionable resort during that season. It is a pleasant walk also in the twilight of a summer evening.

I know an ex-professor, by dining with him at the same ordinary, and we walk often under the crystal vaults of this gallery, and reason whole evenings away—now we stop, and then walk on, and then take snuff, and then make a whole round arm in arm, in great gravity and silence; at other times, being seated at a marble table, we calmly unfold the intricate mazes of the human mind and systems of human policy; and then we take coffee, with a little glass of quirsh. Last night we reasoned warmly upon the nature of slavery till I got mad, and whilst I sipped and read the newspaper, he amused himself with a drawing (for he is skilled in this art), which he presented me. It was a Liberty, of a healthy and robust complexion, her foot upon a negro slave. The negro sympathies have waxed very warm in this country.

Four of the houses just over us are consecrated to gambling. They are frequented, however, by rather the lower class and rabble of the profession. They who have some regard to reputation go to Frascati’s, to the Rue Richelieu; the more select to the “Cercle,” or to the “Club Anglais” upon the Boulevard, and the Rue de Grammont; and the “Jockey Club” receives the dandies and flash gentlemen of the turf. The three last are of English origin, and the “Club Anglais” is in the best English style. It receives only the high functionaries of the state, princes of the blood, ambassadors, and other eminent persons, and even these are not admitted to pick one another’s pockets here, unless known to be of good moral character. Games of hazard are prohibited, and the bets correspondent to the dignity of the company. The “Cercle,” also, is frequented by the upper sort of folk; it is très distingué; and the eating and service are of no common rate.