These are the Americans who go to Paris for the spring and summer only, who live in hotels, and see little of the city beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue of the Champs Élysées and their bankers'. They get a great deal of pleasure out of their visit, however, and they learn how important a thing it is to speak French correctly. If they derive no other benefit from their visit they are sufficiently justified, and when we contrast them with other Americans who have made Paris their chosen home, they almost shine as public benefactors in comparison.
For they, at least, bring something back to their own country: themselves, and pretty frocks and bonnets, and a certain wider knowledge of the world. That is not much, but it is more than the American Colony does.
"STANDING ON THEIR FEET FOR HOURS AT A TIME"
There is something fine in the idea of a colony, of a body of men and women who strike out for themselves in a new country, who cut out their homes in primeval forests, and who make their peace with the native barbarians. The Pilgrim Fathers and the early settlers in Australia and South Africa and amidst the snows of Canada were colonists of whom any mother-nation might be proud; but the emigrants who shrink at the crudeness of our present American civilization, who shirk the responsibilities of our government, who must have a leisure class with which to play, and who are shocked by the familiarity of our press, are colonists who leave their country for their country's good. The American Colony in Paris is in a strange position. Its members are neither the one thing nor the other. They cannot stand in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe and feel that any part of its glory falls on them, nor can they pretend an interest in the defeat of Tammany Hall, nor claim any portion in the magnificent triumph of the Chicago Fair. Their attitude must always be one of explanation; they are continually on the defensive; they apologize to the American visitor and to the native Frenchman; they have declined their birthright and are voluntary exiles from their home. The only way by which they can justify their action is either to belittle what they have given up, or to emphasize the benefits which they have received in exchange, and these benefits are hardly perceptible. They remain what they are, and no matter how long it may have been since they ceased to be Americans, they do not become Frenchmen. They are a race all to themselves; they are the American Colony.
On regular occasions this Colony asserts itself, but only on those occasions when there is a chance of its advertising itself at the expense of the country it has renounced. When this chance comes the Colonists suddenly remember their former home; they rush into print, or they make speeches in public places, or buy wreaths for some dead celebrity. Or when it so happens that no one of prominence has died for some time, and there seems to be no other way of getting themselves noticed, the American Colony rises in its strength and remembers Lafayette, and decorates his grave. Once every month or so they march out into the country and lay a wreath on his tomb, and so for the moment gain a certain vogue with the Parisians, which is all that they ask. They do not perform this ceremony because Lafayette fought in America, but because he was a Frenchman fighting in America, and they are playing now to the French galleries and not to the American bleaching-boards. There are a few descendants of Lafayette who are deserving of our sincere sympathy. For these gentlemen are brought into the suburbs many times a year in the rain and storm to watch different American Colonists place a wreath on the tomb of their distinguished ancestor, and make speeches about a man who left his country only to fight for the independence of another country, and not to live in it after it was free. Some day the descendants of Lafayette and the secretaries of the American embassy will rise up and rebel, and refuse to lend themselves longer to the uses of these gentlemen.
They will suggest that there are other graves in Paris. There is, for instance, the grave of Paul Jones, who possibly did as much for America on the sea as Lafayette did on shore. If he had only been a Frenchman, with a few descendants of title still living who would consent to act as chief mourners on occasion, his spirit might hope to be occasionally remembered with a wreath or two; but as it is, he is not to be considered with the French marquis, who must, we can well imagine, turn uneasily beneath the wreaths these self-advertising patriots lay upon his grave.