The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

Innumerable lights, in the meantime, shine out from the palace windows, and the Rue Rivoli, and glimmer through the tufted trees of the garden. The plantation of elms has also, at this hour, its little enchantments. Lovers, using the sweet opportunities of the night, and seated apart from the crowd, breathe their soft whisperings into each other’s ears, in a better music than the king’s; and you can see visions of men and women just flit by you now and then in the doubtful light, and fade away into the thin air. But I am venturing upon the poetical point of my description, which I had better leave to your fancy. Alas, I squandered away all my poetry last week upon the Palais Royal, and have left myself nothing but mere prose to describe to you the exquisite and incomparable Tuileries.

The regulations of this garden are simple. The world is admitted, if trim and dressed decently, with the morning dawn, and is dispersed about nine in the evening by the beating of a drum. One is not permitted to enter with anything of a large bundle. The Minister of Finance was stopped the other day; he was attempting to enter with the budget for this year! The rules are enforced by an individual accoutred in a beard, mustachios, red breeches and a carabine, who walks gravely up and down at the entrance of each gate.

The statues (Lucretia and all) are exposed in a state of the most unsophisticated nakedness. If mother Eve should come back, she would find things here just as she left them, with the exception of the aprons. This to us green Americans, at our arrival, is a subject of great scandal. I had with me a modest Yankee (please excuse the tautology) on my first visit here, and we stumbled first on a Diana, which was passable, for she apologized, manibus passis, for her deshabille as well as she could; then a Hercules; and at length we fell in with a Venus just leaving her bath. “Come,” said he, interrupting my curiosity, and drawing me aside, “let us go out, I don’t think this is a decent place.” You must not imagine, however, my dear, that you Americans are essentially more modest than we French * * * * * * Things of every day’s occurrence are never a subject of remark; and if our first mother had not begun these modesties of the toilette, the world might have gone on, as in her time, and no one would have taken notice of it. Americans (I presume I may mention it to their credit) are more easily reconciled to the customs of foreign nations than any other people; they are more plastic, and easily fitted to every condition of life. Talk to any one of your acquaintance, of a community of lodging in her mansion in Chestnut-street, and she will have a fit of hysterics at least, and six months after, you will find her climbing up a long Parisian staircase as long as Jacob’s ladder, in common with half a dozen of families, and delighted with her apartments. An English or Frenchman in foreign countries can no more change his habits than the Æthiop his skin.

I may as well go on gardening through the whole of this letter. Our little squares and squaroids of Philadelphia have their little advantages. I do not mean to disparage them, but from want of extent they are not susceptible of any elegant improvement, nor do they furnish a promiscuous multitude with the necessary accommodations; they lose, therefore, their rank in society, and become unfashionable. All your pretty squarets—and I believe those of New York too—could be put into the Tuileries alone.

I have not yet seen the English Parks, but report says they would swallow up our whole city. And I have known even these little spots of ours to be looked at with a suspicious eye. I have heard men calculate the value of the houses and other things which might be built upon them. The “Independence Square” is worth a thousand dollars a foot, every inch of it; why don’t the New Yorkquois sell their “Battery” alongside the sea, which is big enough without it? Oh, the magnificent wharves, and oh, the warehouses and hotels, that might grow upon it.

Besides, who but the caterpillars enter it, and even they will be starved out shortly. With all its breezes from the sea, its port more beautiful than Naples, its fleets laden with India, Persia, and Arabia, a fashionable woman will not look through the fence.

Railroads and spinning-jennies are, to be sure, excellent things; but they lead us too much to measure value by its capacity to supply some physical necessity, and to forget that the moral condition of man has also its wants. If riches only were necessary to the prosperity of a nation, I should to-day, perhaps, instead of the Boulevards, be strolling through the fashionable streets of Babylon. If a painting, or a statue, by perpetuating the memory of virtuous and religious men, and the glorious events of history, has the power of elevating the mind and inspiring it with emulous feelings, as Scipio Africanus and other great men used to testify; if it has the power of improving taste, which is improving virtue, or affording pleasure, which is a part of our natural wants, or even of employing time innocently, which might be otherwise employed wickedly—perhaps in getting drunk at the tavern—why then, a statue, or a painting, is not only more ornamental, but as useful as a steam-engine or a spinning-jenny.

The Scythian who preferred the neighing of a horse to a fine air of Timotheus, no doubt was a good Scythian; but we are not, in our present relations with the world, to remain long in a state of Scythian simplicity, and it is worth while to consider what is about to be the condition of a people, who have grown luxurious, consequently vicious, without the refinements and distractions of the fine arts and liberal amusements. Utility, with all her arithmetic, very often miscalculates. By keeping vacant spaces open in the midst of a town, an equivalent value is given to other localities. A garden would bring many, who now waste their time in travelling into airy situations, to the neighbourhood of the Exchange and other places of business, and it would drive many out from such places who may as well be anywhere else; whose time, at feast, is of less value.

Since human nature will have her diversion, the business of the statesman is to amuse her innocently; that is, to multiply pleasures which are cheap and accessible to all—pleasures which are healthy, and especially those which are public. Men never take bad habits under the eye of the world; but secret amusements are sedentary, unhealthy, and all lead to disreputable and dangerous excesses. Every one knows the social disposition of our race; it is a disposition founded upon both our good and bad passions—upon our love of kindred, and other loves, upon a sense of weakness and dependence,—and curiosity, vanity, and even malevolence, find their gratification in social intercourse. It is therefore the duty of statesmen to study that our crowds and meetings of pleasure, which they cannot prevent, should not be in gin-shops and taverns.

Let us have gardens, then, and other public places, where we may see our friends, and parade our vanities, if you will, before the eyes of the world. Did you ever know any one who was not delighted with a garden? What are the best descriptions of the best poets? Their gardens. It is the original taste, it is transmitted from Paradise, and is almost the only gratification of the rich that does not cloy in the possession. I know an English gentleman here who has worn out all the pleasures that money can buy at twenty-eight; he is peevish, ill-natured, and insupportable; we sometimes walk together into the Luxembourg, where he suddenly brightens up, and is agreeable, and as happy for a while as if he was no lord.