About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

He will not believe that his time has come and gone, and that Paris has no memory, and no desire but to see and to hear some new thing. She has taken his money and eaten his dinners and hung his pictures once or twice in a good place; but, now that his money is gone, Paris has other dinners to eat, and other statues to admire, and no leisure time to spend at his dull receptions, which have taken the place of his rare dinners, or to climb to his garret when there is a more amusing and more modern painter on the first floor.

Paris is full of these poor hangers-on, who have allowed her to use them and pat them on the back, and who cannot see that her approbation is not the only reward worth the striving for, but who go on year after year tagging in her train, beseeching her to take some notice of them. They are like the little boys who run beside the coaches and turn somersaults to draw a copper from the passengers on top, and who are finally left far behind, unobserved and forgotten beside the dusty road. The wise man and the sensible man takes the button or the medal or the place on a jury that Paris gives him, and is glad to get it, and proud of the recognition and of the source from which it comes, and then continues on his way unobserved, working for the work's sake. He knows that Paris has taught him much, but that she has given him all she can, and that he must now work out his own salvation for himself.

Or, if he be merely an idler visiting Paris for the summer, he takes Paris as an idler should, and she receives him with open arms. He does not go there to spend four hours a day, or even four hours a week, in the serious occupation of leaving visiting-cards. He does not invite the same people with whom he dined two weeks before in New York to dine and breakfast with him again in Paris, nor does he spend every afternoon in a frock-coat watching polo, or in flannels playing lawn-tennis on the Île de Puteaux. He has tennis and polo at home. Nor did he go all the way to Paris to dance in little hot apartments, or to spend the greater part of each day at the race-tracks of Longchamps or Auteuil. The Americans who do these things in Paris are a strange and incomprehensible class. Fortunately they do not form a large class, but they do form a conspicuous one, and while it really does not concern any one but themselves as to how they spend their time, it is a little aggravating to have them spoiling the local color of a city for which they have no real appreciation, and from which they get no more benefit than they would have received had they remained at home in Newport.

They treat Paris as they would treat Narragansett Pier, only they act with a little less restraint, and are very much more in evidence. They are in their own environment and in the picture at the Pier or at the Horse Show, and if you do not like it you are at perfect liberty to keep out of it, and you will not be missed; but you do object to have your view of the Arc de Triomphe cut in two by a coach-load of them, or to have them swoop down upon D'Armenonville or Maxim's on the boulevards, calling each other by their first names, and running from table to table, and ordering the Hungarians to play "Daisy Bell," until you begin to think you are in the hall of the Hotel Waldorf, and go out into the night to hear French spoken, if only by a cabman.

I was on the back seat of a coach one morning in the Bois de Boulogne, watching Howlett give a man a lesson in driving four horses at once.

It was very early, and the dew was still on the trees, and the great, broad avenues were empty and sweet-smelling and green, and I exclaimed on the beauty of Paris. "Beautiful?" echoed Howlett. "I should say it was, sir. Now in London, sir, all the roads lie so straight there's no practice driving there. But in Paris it's all turns and short corners. It's the most beautiful city in the world." I thought it was interesting to find a man so wrapped up in his chosen work that he could see nothing in the French capital but the angles which made the driving of four horses a matter of some skill. But what interest can you take in those Americans who have been taught something else besides driving, and who yet see only those things in Paris that are of quite as little worth as the sharp turns of the street corners?

You wonder if it never occurs to them to walk along the banks of the Seine and look over the side at the people unloading canal-boats, or clipping poodles, or watering cavalry horses, or patiently fishing; if they never pull over the books in the stalls that line the quays, or just loiter in abject laziness, with their arms on the parapet of a bridge, with the sun on their backs, and the steamboats darting to and fro beneath them, and with the towers of Notre Dame before and the grim prison of the Conciergerie on one side. Surely this is a better employment than taking tea to the music of a Hungarian band while your young friends from Beverly Farms and Rockaway knock a polo-ball around a ten-acre lot. I met two American women hurrying along the Rue de Rivoli one morning last summer who told me that they had just arrived in Paris that moment, and were about to leave two hours later for Havre to take the steamer home.

"So," explained the elder, "as we have so much time, we are just running down to the Louvre to take a farewell look at 'Mona Lisa' and the 'Winged Victory;' we won't see them again for a year, perhaps." Their conduct struck me as interesting when compared with that of about four hundred other American girls, who never see anything of Paris during their four weeks' stay there each summer, because so much of their time is taken up at the dress-makers'. It is pathetic to see them come back to the hotel at five, tired out and cross, with having had to stand on their feet four hours at a time while some mysterious ceremony was going forward. It is hard on them when the sun is shining out-of-doors and there are beautiful drives and great art galleries and quaint old chapels and curious museums and ancient gardens lying free and open all around them, that they should be compelled to spend four weeks in this fashion.

There was a young woman of this class of American visitors to Paris who had just arrived there on her way from Rome, and who was telling us how much she had delighted in the galleries there. She was complaining that she had no more pictures to enjoy. Some one asked her what objection she had to the Louvre or the Luxembourg.

"Oh, none at all," she said; "but I saw those pictures last year."