About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

The man who had lived six years in Paris took the stranger by the arm and asked him if he was sure he was not engaged for that evening. "For if you are not," he said, "you might take me with you and show me some of the sights!"

The American visitor is not only undaunted by the strange language, but unimpressed by the signs of years of vivid history about him. He sandwiches a glimpse at the tomb of Napoleon, and a trip on a penny steamer up the Seine, and back again to the Morgue, with a rush through the Cathedral of Notre Dame, between the hours of his breakfast and the race-meeting at Longchamps the same afternoon. Nothing of present interest escapes him, and nothing bores him. He assimilates and grasps the method of Parisian existence with a rapidity that leaves you wondering in the rear, and at the end of a week can tell you that you should go to one side of the Grand Hôtel for cigars, and to the other to have your hat blocked. He knows at what hour Yvette Guilbert comes on at the Ambassadeurs', and on which mornings of the week the flower-market is held around the Madeleine. While you are still hunting for apartments he has visited the sewers under the earth, and the Eiffel Tower over the earth, and eaten his dinner in a tree at Robinson's, and driven a coach to Versailles over the same road upon which the mob tramped to bring Marie Antoinette back to Paris, without being the least impressed by the contrast which this offers to his own progress. He develops also a daring and reckless spirit of adventure, which would never have found vent in his native city or town, or in any other foreign city or town. It is in the air, and he enters into the childish good-nature of the place and of the people after the same manner that the head of a family grows young again at his class reunion.

One Harvard graduate arrived in Paris summer before last during those riots which originated with the students, and were carried on by the working-people, and which were cynically spoken of on the boulevards as the Revolution of Sarah Brown. In any other city he would have watched these ebullitions from the outskirts of the mob, or remained a passive spectator of what did not concern him, but being in Paris, and for the first time, he mounted a barricade, and made a stirring address to the students behind it in his best Harvard French, and was promptly cut over the head by a gendarme and conveyed to a hospital, where he remained during his stay in the gay metropolis. But he still holds that Paris is the finest place that he has ever seen. There was another American youth who stood up suddenly in the first row of seats at the Nouveau Cirque and wagered the men with him that he would jump into the water with which the circus ring is flooded nightly, and swim, "accoutred as he was," to the other side. They promptly took him at his word, and the audience of French bourgeois were charmed by the spectacle of a young gentleman in evening dress swimming calmly across the tank, and clambering leisurely out on the other side. He was loudly applauded for this, and the management sent the "American original" home in a fiacre. In any other city he would have been hustled by the ushers and handed over to the police.

Those show-places of Paris which are seen only at night, and of which one hears the most frequently, are curiously few in number. It is their quality and not their quantity which has made them talked about. It is quite as possible to tell off on the fingers of two hands the names and the places to which the visitor to Paris will be taken as it is quite impossible to count the number of times he will revisit them.

In London there are so many licensed places of amusement that a man might visit one every night for a year and never enter the same place twice, and those of unofficial entertainment are so numerous that men spend years in London and never hear of nooks and corners in it as odd and strange as Stevenson's Suicide Club or Fagan's School for Thieves—public-houses where blind beggars regain their sight and the halt and lame walk and dance, music-halls where the line is strictly drawn between the gentleman who smokes a clay pipe and the one who smokes a brier, and arenas like the Lambeth School of Arms, from which boy pugilists and coal-heavers graduate to the prize-ring, and such thoroughfares as Ship's Alley, where in the space of fifty yards twenty murders have occurred in three years.

In Paris there are virtually no slums at all. The dangerous classes are there, and there is an army of beggars and wretches as poor and brutal as are to be found at large in any part of the world, but the Parisian criminal has no environment, no setting. He plays the part quite as effectively as does the London or New York criminal, but he has no appropriate scenery or mechanical effects.

If he wishes to commit murder, he is forced to make the best of the well-paved, well-lighted, and cleanly swept avenue. He cannot choose a labyrinth of alleyways and covered passages, as he could were he in Whitechapel, or a net-work of tenements and narrow side streets, as he could were he in the city of New York.

Young men who have spent a couple of weeks in Paris, and who have been taken slumming by paid guides, may possibly question the accuracy of this. They saw some very awful places indeed—one place they remember in particular, called the Château Rouge, and another called Père Lunette. The reason they so particularly remember these two places is that these are the only two places any one ever sees, and they do not recall the fact that the neighboring houses were of hopeless respectability, and that they were able to pick up a cab within a hundred yards of these houses. Young Frenchmen who know all the worlds of Paris tell you mysteriously of these places, and of how they visited them disguised in blue smocks and guarded by detectives; detectives themselves speak to you of them as a fisherman speaks to you of a favorite rock or a deep hole where you can always count on finding fish, and every newspaper correspondent who visits Paris for the first time writes home of them as typical of Parisian low life. They are as typical of Parisian low life as the animals in the Zoo in Central Park are typical of the other animals we see drawing stages and horse-cars and broughams on the city streets, and you require the guardianship of a detective when you visit them as much as you would need a policeman in Mulberry Bend or at an organ recital in Carnegie Hall. They are show-places, or at least they have become so, and though they would no doubt exist without the aid of the tourist or the man about town of intrepid spirit, they count upon him, and are prepared for him with set speeches, and are as ready to show him all that there is to see as are the guides around the Capitol at Washington.

I should not wish to be misunderstood as saying that these are the only abodes of poverty and the only meeting-places for criminals in Paris, which would of course be absurd, but they are the only places of such interest that the visitor sees. There are other places, chiefly wine-shops in cellars in the districts of la Glacière, Montrouge, or la Villette, but unless an inspector of police leads you to them, and points out such and such men as thieves, you would not be able to distinguish any difference between them and the wine-shops and their habitués north of the bridges and within sound of the boulevards. The paternal municipality of Paris, and the thought it has spent in laying out the streets, and the generous manner in which it has lighted them, are responsible for the lack of slums. Houses of white stucco, and broad, cleanly swept boulevards with double lines of gas lamps and shade trees, extend, without consideration for the criminal, to the fortifications and beyond, and the thief and bully whose interests are so little regarded is forced in consequence to hide himself underground in cellars or in the dark shadows of the Bois de Boulogne at night. This used to appeal to me as one of the most peculiar characteristics of Paris—that the most desperate poverty and the most heartless of crimes continued in neighborhoods notorious chiefly for their wickedness, and yet which were in appearance as well-ordered and commonplace-looking as the new model tenements in Harlem or the trim working-men's homes in the factory districts of Philadelphia.

The Château Rouge was originally the house of some stately family in the time of Louis XIV. They will tell you there that it was one of the mistresses of this monarch who occupied it, and will point to the frescos of one room to show how magnificent her abode then was. This tradition may or may not be true, but it adds an interest to the house, and furnishes the dramatic contrast to its present wretchedness. It is a tall building painted red, and set back from the street in a court. There are four rooms filled with deal tables on the first floor, and a long counter with the usual leaden top. "Whoever buys a glass of wine here may sleep with his or her head on the table, or lie at length up-stairs on the floor of that room where one still sees the stucco cupids of the fine lady's boudoir. It is now a lodging-house for beggars and for those who collect the ends of castaway cigars and cigarettes on the boulevards, and possibly for those who thieve in a small way. By ten o'clock each night the place is filled with men and women sleeping heavily at the tables, with their heads on their arms, or gathered together for miserable company, whispering and gossiping, each sipping jealously of his glass of red wine."