About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

So when I was convinced by the morning papers, after the first shock of unbelief, that the President of France was dead, I walked out into the streets to see what sign there would be of it in Paris. I argued that in a city given to demonstrations the feelings of the people would take some actual and visible form; that there would be meetings in the street, rioting perhaps in the Italian quarter, and extraordinary expressions of grief in the shape of crêpe and mourning. But the people were as undisturbed and tranquil as the sun; the same men were sitting at the same round tables; the same women were shopping in the Rue de la Paix, and but for an increased energy on the part of the newsboys there was no sign that a good man had died, that one who had harmed no one had himself been cruelly harmed, and that the highest office of the state was vacant.

When I complained of this to Parisians, or to those who were Parisians by choice and not by birth, they explained it by saying that the people were stunned. "They are too shocked to act. It is a horror without a precedent," they said; but it struck me that they were an inordinately long time in recovering from the blow. At one o'clock on Monday morning a workman crawled out upon the roof of the Invalides, and, gathering the tricolored flag in his arms, tied a wisp of crêpe about it. The flags in the Chamber of Deputies and in the War Office were draped in the same manner, and with these three exceptions I saw no other visible sign of mourning in all Paris. On Monday night those theatres subsidized by the government, and some others, but not all, were closed for that evening. At three o'clock on Tuesday, two days after the death of the President, I counted but three flags draped with crêpe on the boulevards; but on the day following all the shops on the Rue de la Paix and the hotels on the Rue de Rivoli put out flags covered with mourning, and so advertised themselves and their grief. It is interesting to remember that the most generous display of crêpe in Paris was made by an English firm of ladies' tailors. During this time the correspondents were cabling of the grief and rage of the Parisians to sympathetic peoples all over the world; and we, in our turn, were reading in Paris the telegrams of condolence and the resolutions of sympathy from as different sources as the Parliament of Cape Town and the Congress of the United States. What effect the reading of these sincere and honest words had upon the people of Paris I do not know, but I could not at the time conceive of their reading them without blushing. I looked up from the paper which gave Lord Rosebery's speech, and the brotherly words which came from little colonies in the Pacific, from barbarous monarchs, and from widows to Madame Carnot, and from corporations, Emperors, and Presidents to the city of Paris, and saw nothing in the countenances of the Parisians at the table next to mine but smiles of gratification at the importance that they had so suddenly attained in the eyes of the whole world.

AT THE JARDIN DE PARIS

It was also interesting to note by the Paris papers how the French valued the expressions of sympathy which poured in upon them. The fact that both Houses in the United States had adjourned to do honor to the memory of M. Carnot was not in their minds of as much importance as was the telegram from the Czar of Russia, which was given the most important place in every paper. It was followed almost invariably by the message from the German Emperor, whose telegram, it is also interesting to remember, was the second one to reach Paris after the death of the President was announced. When one reads a congratulatory telegram from the German Emperor on the result of the Cambridge-Oxford boat-race, and another of condolence to the King of Greece in reference to an earthquake, and then this one to the French people, it really seems as though the young ruler did not mean that any event of importance should take place anywhere without his having something to say concerning it. But this last telegram was well timed, and the line which said that M. Carnot had died like a soldier at his post was well chosen to please the French love of things military, and please them it did, as the Emperor knew that it would. But the condolence from the sister republic across the sea was printed at the end of the column, after those from Bulgaria and Switzerland. In the eyes of the Parisian news editor, the sympathy of the people of a great nation was not so important to his readers as the few words from an Emperor to whom they looked for help in time of war.