About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

"SHE LOOKED DOWN UPON OUR STREET"

In a street of like respectability to ours in London or New York those who lived on it would know as little of their next-door neighbor as of a citizen at another end of the town. The house fronts would tell nothing to the outside world; they would frown upon each other like family tombs in a cemetery; but in this street of Paris the people lived in it, or on the balconies, or at the windows. We knew what they were going to have for dinner, because we could see them carrying the uncooked portions of it from the restaurant at the corner, with a long loaf of bread under one arm and a single egg in the other hand; and when some one gave a fête we knew of it by the rows of bottles on the ledge of the window and the jellies set out to cool on the balcony. We were all interested in the efforts of the stout gentleman in the short blue smoking-jacket who taught his parrot to call to the coachman of each passing fiacre; he did this every night after dinner, with his cigarette in his mouth, and with great patience and good-nature. We took a common pride also in the flower-garden of the young people on the seventh floor, and in their arrangement of strings upon which the vines were to grow, and in the lines of roses, which dropped their petals whenever the wind blew, upon the head of the concierge, so that she would look up and shake her head at them, and then go inside and get a broom and sweep the leaves carefully away. When any one in our street went off in his best clothes in a fiacre we looked after him with envy, and yet with a certain pride that we lived with such fortunate people, who were evidently much sought after in the fashionable world; and when a musician or a blind man broke the silence of our street with his music or his calls, we vied with one another in throwing him coppers—not on his account at all, but because we wished to stand well in the opinion of our neighbors. It was like camping out on two sides of a valley where every one could look over into the other's tent.

There was a young couple near the corner, who, I think, had but lately married, and every evening she used to watch for him in a fresh gown for a half-hour or so before he came. During the day she wore a very plain gown, and her eyes wandered everywhere; but during that half-hour before he came she never changed her position nor relaxed her vigil. And it made us all quite uncomfortable, and we could not give our attention to anything else until he had turned the corner and waved his hand, and she had answered him with a start and a little shrug of content. After dinner they appeared together, and he would put his arm around her waist, with that refreshing disregard for the world that French lovers have, and they would smile down upon us in a very happy and superior manner, or up at the sun as it sank a brilliant red at the end of our street, with the hundreds of chimney-pots looking like black musical notes against it. There was also a very interesting old lady in the house that blocked the end of our street, a very fat and masculine old lady in a loose white wrapper, who spent all of her time rearranging her plants and flowers, and kept up an amiable rivalry with the people in the balconies above and below her in the abundance and verdure of her garden. It was a very pleasant competition for the rest of us, as it hung that end of the street with a curtain of living green.

"WITH A LONG LOAF OF BREAD"

For a little time there was a young girl who used to sit upon the balcony whenever the sun was brightest and the air not too chill; but she took no interest in the street, for she knew nothing of it except its noises. She lay always in an invalid's chair, looking up at the sky and the roof-line above, and with her profile against the gray wall. During the day a nurse in a white cap sat with her; but after dinner a stout, jaunty man of middle age came back from his club or his bureau, and took the place beside her until it grew dark, when he and the nurse would lift her in-doors again, and he would take his hat and go off to the boulevards, I suppose, to cheer himself a bit. It did not last long, for one day I came home to find them taking down a black-and-silver curtain from the front of the house, and the concierge said that the girl had been buried, and that her father was now quite alone. For the first week after that he did not go to the boulevards, but used to sit out on the balcony until late into the evening, with the night about him, so that we would not have known he was there save for the light of his cigar burning in the darkness.

The step from our street to the boulevards is a much longer one in the imagination than in actual distance. Our street, after all, was only typical of thousands of other Parisian streets, and when you have explained it you have described miles after miles of other streets like it. But there is nothing just like the boulevards. If you should wish to sit at the exact centre of the world and to watch it revolve around you, you have only to take your place at that corner table of the Café de la Paix which juts the farthest out into the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Boulevard Capucines. This table is the apex of all the other tables. It turns the tides of pedestrians on the broad sidewalks of both the great thoroughfares, and it is geographically situated exactly under the "de la" of the "Café de la Paix," painted in red letters on the awning over your head. From this admirable position you can sweep the square in front of the Opera-house, the boulevard itself, and the three great streets running into it from the river. People move obligingly around and up and down and across these, and if you sit there long enough you will see every one worth seeing in the known world.

There is a large class of Parisians whose knowledge of that city is limited to the boulevards. They neither know nor care to know of any other part; we read about them a great deal, of them and their witticisms and café politics; and what "the boulevards" think of this or that is as seriously quoted as what "a gentleman very near the President," or "a diplomat whose name I am requested not to give, but who is in a position to know whereof he speaks," cares to say of public matters at home. For my part, I should think an existence limited to two sidewalks would be somewhat sad, especially if it were continued into the middle age, which all boulevardiers seem to have already attained. It does not strike one as a difficult school to enter, or as one for which there is any long apprenticeship. You have only to sit for an hour every evening under the "de la," and you will find that you know by sight half the faces of the men who pass you, who come up suddenly out of the night and disappear again, like slides in a stereopticon, or whom you find next you when you take your place, and whom you leave behind, still sipping from the half-empty glasses ordered three hours before you came.