About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

It did not seem possible that the Parisians would feel so little interest as to who their new President might be that they would remain quietly in Paris while he was being elected on its outskirts. I expected to see them trooping out along the seven-mile road to Versailles in as great numbers as when they went there once before to bring a Queen back to Paris. But when we drove into Versailles the coach rattled through empty streets. There were no processions of cheering men in white hats tramping to the music of "Marching through Georgia." No red, white, and blue umbrellas, no sky-rocket yells, no dangling badges with gold fringe, nothing that makes a Presidential convention in Chicago the sight of a lifetime. No one was shouting the name of his political club or his political favorite; no one had his handkerchief tucked inside his collar and a palm leaf in his hand; there were no brass-bands, no banners, and not even beer. Nor was there any of the excitement which surrounds the election of even a Parliamentary candidate in England. I saw no long line of sandwich-men tramping in each gutter, no violent Radicals hustling equally elated Conservatives, and crying, "Good old Smith!" or "Good old Brown!" no women with primrose badges stuck to their persons making speeches or soliciting votes from the back of dog-carts. And nobody was engaged in throwing kippered herring or blacking the eyes of anybody else. Versailles was as unmoved as the statues in her public squares. Her broad, hospitable streets lay cool and quiet in the reflection of her yellow house-fronts, and under the heavy shadows of the double rows of elms the round, flat cobble-stones, unsoiled by hurrying footsteps, were as clean and regular as a pan of biscuit ready for the oven.

There were about six hundred Deputies in the town, who had not been there the day before, and who would leave it before the sun set that evening, but they bore themselves so modestly that their presence could not disturb the sleepy, sunny beauty of the grand old gardens and of the silent thoroughfares, and when we rattled up to the Hôtel des Réservoirs at one o'clock we made more of a disturbance with the coach-horn than had the arrival of both Chambers of Deputies. These gentlemen were at déjeuner when we arrived, and eating and drinking as leisurely and good-naturedly as though they had nothing in hand of more importance than a few calls to make or a game of cards at the club. Indeed, it looked much more as though Versailles had been invaded by a huge wedding-party than by a convention of Presidential electors. Some of the Deputies had brought their wives with them, and few as they were, they leavened and enlivened the group of black coats as the same number of women of no other nation could have done, and the men came from different tables to speak to them, to drink their health, and to pay them pretty compliments; and the good fellows of the two Chambers hustled about like so many maîtres d'hôtel seeing that such a one had a place at the crowded tables, that the salad of this one was being properly dressed, and that another had a match for his cigarette.

Besides the Deputies, there were a half-dozen young and old Parisians—those who make it a point to see everything and to be seen everywhere. They would have attended quite as willingly a fête of flowers, or a prize-fight between two English jockeys at Longchamps, and at either place they would have been as completely at home. They were typical Parisians of the highest world, to whom even the selection of a President for all France was not without its interest. With them were the diplomats, who were pretending to take the change of executive seriously, as representatives of the powers, but who were really whispering that it would probably bring back the leadership of the fashionable world to the Élysée, where it should be, and that it meant the reappearance of many royalist families in society, and the inauguration of magnificent functions, and the reopening of ballrooms long unused.

It was throughout a pretty, lazy, well-bred scene. Outside the entrance to the hotel, coachmen with the cockades of the different embassies in their hats were standing at ease in their shirtsleeves, and with their pipes between their teeth; and the gentlemen, having finished their breakfast, strolled out into the court-yard and watched the hostlers rubbing down the coach-horses, or walked up the hill to the palace, where the boy sentries were hugging their guns, and waving back the few surprised tourists who had come to look at the pictures in the historical gallery, and who did not know that the palace on that day was being used for the prologue of a new historical play.

"TO BRING A QUEEN BACK TO PARIS"

At the gates leading to the great Court of Honor there were possibly two hundred people in all. They came from the neighboring streets, and not from Paris. None of these people spoke in tones louder than those of ordinary converse, and they speculated with indolent interest as to the outcome of the afternoon's voting. A young man in a brown straw hat found an objection to Casimir-Perier as a candidate because he was so rich, but he withdrew his objection when an older man in a blouse pointed out that Casimir-Perier would make an excellent appearance on horseback.