“La petite reine bicyclette” has been fêted in light verse many times, but no one seems to have hit off its salient features as did Charles Monselet. Others have referred to riders of the “new means of locomotion” as “cads on casters,” and a writer in Le Gaulois stigmatized them as “imbéciles à roulettes,” which is much the same; while no less a personage than Francisque Sarcey demanded, in the journal La France, that the police should suppress forthwith this eccentricité.
Charles Monselet’s eight short lines are more appreciative:
“Instrument raide
En fer battu
Qui dépossède
Le char torlu;
Vélocipède
Rail impromptu,
Fils d’Archimède,
D’où nous viens-tu?”
Though it is apart from the era of Dumas, this discursion into a phase of present-day Paris is, perhaps, allowable in drawing a comparison between the city of to-day and that even of the Second Empire, which was, at its height, contemporary with Dumas’ prime.
If Paris was blooming suddenly forth into beauty and grace in the period which extended from the Revolution to the Franco-Prussian War, she has certainly, since that time, not ceased to shed her radiance; indeed, she flowers more abundantly than ever, though, truth to tell, it is all due to the patronage which the state has ever given, in France, to the fostering of the arts as well as industries.
And so Paris has grown,—beautiful and great,—and the stranger within her gates, whether he come by road or rail, by automobile or railway-coach, is sure to be duly impressed with the fact that Paris is for one and all alike a city founded of and for the people.