About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

"THE GIRL WHO REPRESENTED ALSACE"

But what best pleased the French people were two girls dressed in the native costumes of Alsace and Lorraine. They headed the deputation from those provinces. The girl who represented Alsace was particularly beautiful, with long black hair parted in the middle, and hanging down her back in long plaits. She wore the characteristic head-dress of the Alsacian women, and a short red skirt, black velvet bodice, and black stockings. She carried the French flag in front of her draped in crêpe, and as she stepped briskly forward the wind blew the black bow on her hair and the folds of the flag about her face, and gave her a living and spirited air that in no way suited the occasion, but which delighted the populace. They applauded her and her companion from one end of the march to the other, and the spectacle must have rendered the German ambassador somewhat uncomfortable, and made him wish for a billet among a people who could learn to forget. The only other feature of the procession which called forth applause, which no one tried to suppress, was the presence in it of an old general who was mistaken by the spectators for Marshal Canrobert. This last of the marshals of France was too ill to march in the funeral cortége; but the old soldier, who looked not unlike him, and whose limping gait and bent back and crutch-stick led him to be mistaken for the marshal, served the purpose quite as well. One wondered if it did not embarrass the veteran to find himself so suddenly elevated into the rôle of popular idol of the hour; but perhaps he persuaded himself that it was his white hair and crutch and many war-medals which called forth the ovation, and that he deserved it on his own account—as who can say he did not?

The unpleasant incident of the day was one which was unfortunately acted in full view of the balconies of the hotels Meurice and Continental. These were occupied by most of the foreigners visiting Paris, and were virtually the grandstands of the spectacle.

In the Rue Castiglione, which separated the two hotels, and in full sight of these critical onlookers, a horse was taken with the blind staggers, and upset a stand, throwing those who sat upon it out into the street. In an instant the crash of the falling timbers and the cries of the half-dozen men and women who had been precipitated into the street struck panic into the crowd of sight-seers on the pavement and among the firemen who were at that moment marching past. The terror of another dynamite outrage was in the minds of all, and without waiting to learn what had happened, or to even look, the thousands of people broke into a confused mass of screaming, terrified creatures, running madly in every direction, and changing the quiet solemnity of the moment into a scene of horror and panic. The firemen dropped the wreath they were carrying and fled with the crowd; and then the French soldiers who were lining the pavements, to the astonishment and disgust of the Americans and English on the balconies, who were looking down like spectators at a play, tucked their guns under their arms and joined in the mad rush for safety. It was a sight that made even the women on the balconies keep silence in shame for them. It was pathetic, ridiculous, and inexcusable, and the boy officers on duty would have gained the sympathy of the unwilling spectators had they cut their men down with their swords, and shown the others that he who runs away from a falling grandstand is not needed to live to fight a German army later. It is true that the men who ran away were only boys fresh from the provinces, with dull minds filled with the fear of what an anarchist might do; but it showed a lack of discipline that should have made the directors of the Salon turn the military pictures in that gallery to the wall, until the picture exhibited in the Rue Castiglione was effaced from the minds of the visiting strangers. Imagine a squad of New York policemen running away from a horse with the blind staggers, and not, on the contrary, seizing the chance to club every one within reach back to the sidewalk! Remember the London bobby who carried a dynamite bomb in his hand from the hall of the Houses of Parliament, and the Chicago police who walked into a real anarchist mob over the bodies of their comrades, and who answered the terrifying bombs with the popping of their revolvers! It is surprising that Napoleon, looking down upon the scene in the Rue Castiglione from the top of his column, did not turn on his pedestal.

After such an exhibition as this it was only natural that the people should turn from the soldiers to find the greater interest in the miles of wreaths that came from every corner of France. These were the expressions of the truer sympathy with the dead President, and there seemed to be more sentiment and real regret in the little black bead wreaths from the villages in the south and west of France than there were in all the great wreaths of orchids and violets purchased on the boulevards.

The procession had been two hours in passing a given point. It had moved at ten o'clock, and it was four in the afternoon before it dispersed at the Panthéon, and Deputies in evening dress and attachés in uniform and judges in scarlet robes could be seen hurrying over Paris in fiacres, faint and hot and cross, for the first taste of food and drink that had touched their lips since early morning. A few hours later there was not a soldier out of his barracks, the scaffoldings had been taken to pieces, the spectators had been distributed in trains to the environs, the bands played again in the gardens, and the theatres opened their doors. Paris had taken off her mourning, and fallen back into her interrupted routine of pleasure, and had left nothing in the streets to show that Carnot's body had passed over them save thousands of scraps of greasy newspapers in which the sympathetic spectators of the solemn function had wrapped their breakfasts.