About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

"You are quite like a breeze from the piny woods at home. I suppose we do talk rather thoughtlessly over here, but then none of us take what we say of each other as absolute truth."

The other men all agreed to this, and protested that no one took them or what they said seriously. They were quite right, and, as a matter of fact, it would be unjust to them to do so, except to pity them. The Man without a Country was no more unfortunate than they. It is true they have Henry's bar, where they can get real American cocktails, and the Travellers', where they can play real American poker; but that is as near as they ever get to anything that savors of our country, and they do not get as near as that towards anything that savors of the Frenchman's country. They have their own social successes, and their own salons and dinner-parties, but the Faubourg St.-Germain is as strange a territory to many of them as though it were situated in the heart of the Congo Basin.

Of course there are many fine, charming, whole-souled, and clean-minded American women in Paris. They are the wives of bankers or merchants or the representatives of the firms which have their branches in Paris and London as well as New York. And there are hundreds more of Americans who are in Paris because of its art, the cheapness of its living, and its beauty. I am not speaking of them, and should they read this they will understand.

The American in Paris of whom one longest hesitates to speak is the girl or woman who has married a title. She has been so much misrepresented in the press, and so misunderstood, and she suffers in some cases so acutely without letting it be known how much she suffers, that the kindest word that could be said of her is not half so kind as silence. No one can tell her more distinctly than she herself knows what her lot is, or how few of her illusions have been realized. It is not a case where one can point out grandiloquently that uneasy lies the head that wears a coronet; it is not magnificent sorrow; it is just pathetic, sordid, and occasionally ridiculous. To treat it too seriously would be as absurd as to weep over a man who had allowed himself to be fooled by a thimblerigger; only in this case it is a woman who has been imposed upon, and who asks for your sympathy.

There is a very excellent comic song which points out how certain things are only English when you see them on Broadway; and a title, or the satisfaction of being a countess or princess, when viewed from a Broadway or Fifth Avenue point of view, is a very pretty and desirable object. But as the title has to be worn in Paris and not in New York, its importance lies in the way in which it is considered there, not here. As far as appears on the surface, the American woman of title in Paris fails to win what she sought, from either her own people or those among whom she has married. To her friends from New York or San Francisco she is still Sallie This or Eleanor That. Her friends are not deceived or impressed or overcome—at least, not in Paris. When they return to New York they speak casually of how they have been spending the summer with the Princess So-and-So, and they do not add that she used to be Sallie Sprigs of San Francisco. But in Paris, when they are with her, they call her Sallie, just as of yore, and they let her understand that they do not consider her in any way changed since she has become ennobled, or that the glamour of her rank in any way dazzles them. And she in her turn is so anxious that they shall have nothing to say of her to her disadvantage when they return that she shows them little of her altered state, and is careful not to refer to any of the interesting names on her new visiting-list.

Her husband's relations in France are more disappointing: they certainly cannot be expected to see her in any different light from that of an outsider and a nobody; they will not even admit that she is pretty; and they say among themselves that, so long as Cousin Charles had to marry a great fortune, it is a pity he did not marry a French woman, and that they always had preferred the daughter of the chocolate-maker, or the champagne-grower, or the Hebrew banker—all of whom were offered to him. The American princess cannot expect people who have had title and ancestors so long as to have forgotten them to look upon Sallie Sprigs of California as anything better than an Indian squaw. And the result is, that all which the American woman makes by her marriage is the privilege of putting her coronet on her handkerchief and the humble deference of the women at Paquin's or Virot's, who say "Madame the Baroness" and "Madame the Princess" at every second word. It really seems a very heavy price to pay for very little.

We are attributing very trivial and vulgar motives to the woman, and it may be, after all, that she married for love in spite of the title, and not on account of it. But if these are love-matches, it would surely sometimes happen that the American men, in their turn, would fall in love with foreign women of title, and that we would hear of impecunious princesses and countesses hunting through the States for rich brokers and wheat-dealers. Of course the obvious answer to this is that the American women are so much more attractive than the men that they appeal to people of all nations and of every rank, and that American men are content to take them without the title.

The rich fathers of the young girls who are sacrificed should go into the business with a more accurate knowledge of what they are buying. Even the shrewdest of them—men who could not be misled into buying a worthless railroad or an empty mine—are frequently imposed upon in these speculations. The reason is that while they have made a study of the relative values and the soundness of railroads and mines, they have not taken the pains to study this question of titles, and as long as a man is a count or a prince, they inquire no further, and one of them buys him for his daughter on his face value. There should be a sort of Bradstreet for these rich parents, which they could consult before investing so much money plus a young girl's happiness. There are, as a matter of fact, only a very few titles worth buying, and in selecting the choice should always lie between one of England and one of Germany. An English earl is the best the American heiress can reasonably hope for, and after him a husband with a German title is very desirable. These might be rated as "sure" and "safe" investments.