It is very much of a step from the Académie Française to the Fête of Flowers in the Bois de Boulogne, but the latter comes under the head of one of the shows of Paris, and is to me one of the prettiest and the most remarkable. I do not believe that it could be successfully carried out in any other city in the world. There would certainly be horse-play and roughness to spoil it, and it is only the Frenchman's idea of gallantry and the good-nature of both the French man and woman which render it possible. It would be an easy matter to hold a fête of flowers at Los Angeles or at Nice, or in any small city or watering-place where all the participants would know one another and the masses would be content to act as spectators; but to venture on such a spectacle, and to throw it open to any one who pays a few francs, in as great a city as Paris, requires, first of all, the highest executive ability before the artistic and pictorial side of the affair is considered at all, and the most hearty co-operation of the state or local government with the citizens who have it in hand.
On the day of the fête the Allée du Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois is reserved absolutely for the combatants in this annual battle of flowers, which begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and lasts uninterruptedly until dinner-time. Each of the cross-roads leading up to the Allée is barricaded, and carriages are allowed to enter or to depart only at either end. This leaves an open stretch of road several miles in extent, and wide enough for four rows of carriages to pass one another at the same moment. Thick woods line the Allée on either side, and the branches of the trees almost touch above it. Beneath them, and close to the roadway, sit thousands of men, women, and children in close rows, and back of them hundreds more move up and down the pathways. The carriages proceed in four unbroken lines, two going up and two going down; and as they pass, the occupants pelt each other and the spectators along the road-side with handfuls of flowers. For three miles this battle rages between the six rows of people, and the air is filled with the flying missiles and shrieks of laughter and the most graceful of compliments and good-natured blague. At every fifty yards stands a high arch, twined with festoons trailing from one arch to the next, and temporary flagpoles flying long banners of the tricolor, and holding shields which bear the monogram of the republic. The long festoons of flowers and the flags swinging and flying against the dark green of the trees form the Allée into one long tunnel of color and light; and at every thirty paces there is the gleaming cuirass of a trooper, with the sun shining on his helmet and breastplate, and on other steel breastplates, which extend, like the mirrors in "Richard III.," as far as the eye can reach, flashing and burning in the sun. Between these beacons of steel, and under the flags and flowers and green branches, move nearly eight miles of carriages, with varnished sides and polished leather flickering in the light, each smothered with broad colored ribbons and flowers, and gay with lace parasols.
It is a most cosmopolitan crowd, and it is interesting to see how seriously some of the occupants of the carriages take the matter in hand, and how others turn it into an ovation for themselves, and still others treat it as an excuse to give some one else pleasure. You will see two Parisian dandies in a fiacre, with their ammunition piled as high as their knees, saluting and chaffing and calling by name each pretty woman who passes, and following them in the line you will see a respectable family carriage containing papa, mamma, and the babies, and with the coachman on the box hidden by great breastworks of bouquets. To the proud parents on the back seat the affair is one which is to be met with dignified approval, and they bow politely to whoever hurls a rose or a bunch of wild flowers at one of their children. They, in their turn, will be followed by a magnificent victoria, glittering with varnish and emblazoned by strange coats-of-arms, and holding two coal-black negroes, with faces as shiny as their high silk hats. They have with them on the front seat a hired guide from one of the hotels, who is showing Paris to them, and who is probably telling them that every woman who laughs and hits them with a flower is a duchess at least, at which their broad faces beam with good-natured embarrassment and their teeth show, and they scramble up and empty a handful of rare roses over the lady's departing shoulders. There are frequent halts in the procession, which moves at a walk, and carriages are often left standing side by side facing opposite ways for the space of a minute, in which time there is ample opportunity to exhaust most of the ammunition at hand, or to express thanks for the flowers received. The good order of the day is very marked, and the good manners as well. The flowers are not accepted as missiles, but as tributes, and the women smile and nod demurely, and the men bow, and put aside a pretty nosegay for the next meeting; and when they draw near the same carriage again, they will smile their recognition, and wait until the wheels are just drawing away from one another, and then heap their offerings at the ladies' feet.
There are a great number of Americans who are only in Paris for the month, and whom you have seen on the steamer, or passing up the Rue de la Paix, or at the banker's on mail day, and they seize this chance to recognize their countrymen, and grow tremendously excited in hitting each other in the eyes and on the nose, and then pass each other the next day in the Champs Élysées without the movement of an eyelash. The hour excuses all. It has the freedom of carnival-time without its license, and it is pretty to see certain women posing as great ladies, in hired fiacres, and being treated with as much empressement and courtesy by every man as though he believed the fiacre was not hired, and the pearl necklace was real and not from the Palais Royal, and that he had not seen the woman the night before circling around the endless treadmill of the Jardin de Paris. Sometimes there will be a coach all red and green and brass, and sometimes a little wicker basket on low wheels, with a donkey in the shafts, and filled with children in the care of a groom, who holds them by their skirts to keep them from hurling themselves out after the flowers, and who looks immensely pleased whenever any one pelts them back and points them out as pretty children. But the greater number of the children stand along the road-side with their sisters and mothers. They are of the good bourgeois class and of the decently poor, who beg prettily for a flower instead of giving one, and who dash out under the wheels for those that fall by the wayside, and return with them to the safety of their mother's knee in a state of excited triumph.
When you see how much one of the broken flowers means to them, you wonder what they think of the cars that pass toppling over with flowers, with the harness and the spokes of the wheels picked out in carnations, and banked with shields of nodding roses at the sides and backs.
These are the carriages entered for prizes, and some of them are very wonderful and very beautiful. One holds a group of Rastaqouères, who have spent a clerk's yearly income in decorating their victoria, that they may send word back to South America that they have won a prize from a board of Parisian judges.
And another is a big billowy phaeton blooming within and without with white roses and carnations, and holding a beautiful lady with auburn hair and powdered face, and with the lace of her Empire bonnet just falling to the line of her black eyebrows. She is all in white too, with white gloves, and a parasol of nothing but white lace, and she reclines rather than sits in this triumphal car of pure white flowers, like a Cleopatra in her barge, or Venus lying on the white crest of the waves. All the men recognize her, and throw their choicest offerings into her lap; but whenever I saw her she seemed more interested in the crowds along the road-side, who announced her approach with an excited murmur of admiration, and the little children in blouses threw their nosegays at her, and then stood back, abashed at her loveliness, with their hands behind them. She was quite used to being pelted with flowers at one of the theatres, but she seemed to enjoy this tribute very much, and she tossed roses back at the children, and watched them as they carried her flowers to the nurse or the elder sister who was taking care of them, and who looked after the woman with frightened, admiring eyes.