The lecturer is a man of about forty, whose cranium is getting visible through his hair. He wears a double eye-glass, with which he plays while talking to his audience. His handkerchief was black-bordered. He wore the regulation patent leather shoes, and his shirt front was fastened with a single stud. He spoke without effort or pretension, and often with his hands in his pockets, etc.
A few days ago, on reading the morning papers in a town where I had lectured the night before, I found, in one of them, about twenty lines consecrated to my lecture, and half a column to my hat.
I must tell you that this hat was brown, and all the hats in America are black. If you wear anything that is not exactly like what Americans wear, you are gazed at as if you were a curious animal. The Americans are as great badauds as the Parisians. In London, you may go down Regent Street or Piccadilly got up as a Swiss admiral, a Polish general, or even a Highlander, and nobody will take the trouble to look at you. But, in America, you have only to put on a brown hat or a pair of light trowsers, and you will become the object of a curiosity which will not fail very promptly to bore you, if you are fond of tranquility, and like to go about unremarked.
I was so fond of that poor brown hat, too! It was an incomparably obliging hat. It took any shape, and adapted itself to any circumstances. It even went into my pocket on occasions. I had bought it at Lincoln & Bennett’s, if you please. But I had to give it up. To my great regret, I saw that it was imperative: its popularity bid fair to make me jealous. Twenty lines about me, and half a column about that hat! It was time to come to some determination. It was not to be put up with any longer. So I took it up tenderly, smoothed it with care, and laid it in a neat box which was then posted to the chief editor of the paper with the following note:
Dear Sir:
I see by your estimable paper that my hat has attracted a good deal of public attention during its short sojourn in your city. I am even tempted to think that it has attracted more of it than my lecture. I send you the interesting headgear, and beg you will accept it as a souvenir of my visit, and with my respectful compliments.
A citizen of the Great Republic knows how to take a joke. The worthy editor inserted my letter in the next number of his paper, and informed his readers that my hat fitted him to a nicety, and that he was going to have it dyed and wear it. He further said, “Max O’Rell evidently thinks the song, ‘Where did you get that hat?’ was specially written to annoy him,” and went on to the effect that “Max O’Rell is not the only man who does not care to tell where he got his hat.”
Do not run away with the idea that such nonsense as this has no interest for the American public. It has.
American reporters have asked me, with the most serious face in the world, whether I worked in the morning, afternoon, or evening, and what color paper I used (sic). One actually asked me whether it was true that M. Jules Claretie used white paper to write his novels on, and blue paper for his newspaper articles. Not having the honor of a personal acquaintance with the director of the Comédie-Française, I had to confess my inability to gratify my amiable interlocutor.
Look at the advertisements in the newspapers. There you have the bootmaker, the hatter, the traveling quack, publishing their portraits at the head of their advertisements. Why are those portraits there, if it be not to satisfy the curiosity of customers?