Parisian habits.—The Chaussée d’Antin.—Season of Bon-bons.—Jour de l’An.—Commencement of the Season.—The Carnival.—Reception at the Tuileries.—Lady Granville.—The Royal Family.—Court Ceremonies.—Ball at the Hotel de Ville.—French Beauty.—A Bal de Charité.—Lord Canterbury.—Bulwer.—Sir Sydney Smith.—The Court Balls.—Splendid Scene.—The Princess Amelia.—Comparison between Country and City Life.
Paris, January 25th, 1836.
As your husband has gallantly allowed me the exclusive pleasure of writing to you this week, I am going to use the privilege in giving you his biography for the year 1836. For a wife to judge of her husband’s conduct from her husband’s letters, is absolute folly.—He rises at day-break, which occurs in this country, at this season, about nine; he makes his toilet with Parisian nicety, breakfasts at eleven, and then attends his consultations, till three. After this hour he runs upon errands. Paris covers eight thousand five hundred square acres, and he has business at both ends of it; I have to run after him, just as a man’s shadow would, if people in this country had shadows, a league to the east, and then a league to the west, only because he don’t know a Frenchman calls his mother a mare, and a horse a shovel. As he and his partner do not comprehend each other, and he cannot communicate with the world out of doors, you may imagine I have got myself into a business.
And here are all nations of the earth to be interpreted, and all sexes; French, Spaniards, Italians, Poles, and modern Greeks. “God’s life, my lords, I have had to rub up my Latin.” One might as well have been interpreter at Babel. We dine at six, and have all the rest of the day to ourselves.—Then comes smoking of Turkish tobacco in a long pipe, then a cup of good coffee and the little glass of quirsh; and then conversations—conversations, not about burning Moscara, and the Bedouin brothers; or whether beet sugar should be taxed; but that which it imports more our happiness to know, what vintage is the wine, and whether we are to pass the evening at the Italien, or Grand Opera. Our host, who is a French gentleman, a man of the world, and refined in learning, adds the perfume of his wit to the little minutes as they go fluttering by.
A propos of good coffee, I will tell you how to make it. Make it very strong, and then pour out with your right hand half a cup, and with your left the milk, foaming and smoking like Vesuvius upon it; it is reduced thus to a proper consistency and complexion, retaining its heat. Strange! that so simple a process should not have superseded the premeditated dishwater of our American cities. This is the café au lait of the breakfast; the coffee of the dinner is without milk.
At length conversation flags, and we sit each in a “Fauteuil,” recumbent, and looking silently upon the Turkish vapour as it ascends to the upper region of the room, till it has obscured the atmosphere in clouds as dark as science metaphysic; and then we sweeten ourselves with open air and evening recreations—
“Vive Henri Quatre! vive ce roi vaillant!”
And so we stroll, arm in arm, through the Boulevards to the “Rue Favart,” and there drink down Grisi until the unwelcome midnight sends us to our pillows. This repairs us from the cares of the day, and raises us up fresh and vegetated to the duties of to-morrow. I must not forget to tell you, we live now in the Rue Neuve des Maturins, a little east of the Boulevards. I was quite disdainful of this unclassic ground after so long an abode among the Muses; but this street is more than classic, it runs right-angled into the aristocratic Chaussée d’Antin; is full of honour and high fare, and ennobled by some of the best Parisian blood.
Your husband—I suppose by living here, has got into the bel air of the French. (I forgot to put a dash under his name.) He has his share of Favoris, and mustachios, and a coat from Barde’s that would win the ear of a countess. Barde makes coats for “crowned heads,” and takes measures at Moscow;—and he never ties his cravat—(I mean your husband)—just in front, but always a quarter of an inch or so to the left; nor sends a lady a red rose, when white roses are in the fashion; and though he speaks nothing yet of the French jargon, he makes Paris agreeable to every one. Folks, to be liked in this country, are obliged to be amiable—a violent effort sometimes for me. In this respect we have an advantage at home, where poor people only are required to have wit, and twenty thousand a-year may be as big a fool as it pleases.
This is the season of bon-bons. I think I see you, and little Jack and Sall, parading your littleness upon the Boulevards—which I presume you will do this time next year. Here is the whole animal creation in paste, and all the fine arts in sucre d’orge. You can buy an epigram in dough, and a pun in soda-biscuit; a “Constitutional Charter” all in jumbles; and a “Revolution of July” just out of the frying-pan. Or, if you love American history, here is a United States’ frigate, two inches long, and a belly-gut commodore bombarding Paris—(with “shin-plasters”)—and the French women and children stretching out their little arms, three quarters of an inch long, towards heaven, and supplicating the mercy of the victors, in molasses candy.