And why not? You should appreciate the compliment to your good taste. It is when he begins to make love behind one’s back that one must beware of one’s French friend; for he is a finished artist at the performance, and women know it, and are prepared in advance to be subdued. He is by no means a degenerate, however, the average Frenchman; he has to work too hard, and besides he has not the money degeneracy costs. He may have his “petite amie,” generally he has; but quite as generally she is a wholesome, well-behaved little person,—a dressmaker in a small way, or vendeuse in a shop—content to drink a bock with him in the evening, at their favourite café, and on Sundays to hang on his arm during their excursion to St. Germain or Meudon. Just as a very small percentage of New Yorkers are those who dwell in Wall Street and corner stocks, so a very small percentage of Parisians are those who feed louis to night restaurants and carouse till morning with riotous demi-mondaines.
It is a platitude that foreigners are the ones who support the immoral resorts of Paris; yet no foreigner seems to care to remember the platitude. The best way to convince oneself of it forever is to visit a series of these places, and take honest note of their personnel. The employés will be found to be French; but ninety-eight per cent. of the patrons are English, German, Italian, Spanish, and North and South American. The retort is made that nevertheless the Parisians started such establishments in the first place. They did; but only after the stranger had brought his crude sensuality to their variety theatres and night cafés, stripping the first of their racy wit, the second of their rollicking bonhomie, taking note only of the license underlying both—and blatantly revelling in it. Then it was that the ever-alert commercial sense of the Frenchman awoke to a new method of making money out of foreigners; and the vulgar night-restaurant of today had its beginning.
But not only in the matter of degeneracy is the common analysis of the Parisian open to refutation; his inveterate cynicism also comes up for doubt. The attitude that calls forth this mistaken conclusion on the part of those not well acquainted with French character is more or less the attitude of every instinctively dramatic nature: a kind of impersonal detachment, which causes the individual to appreciate situations and events first as bits of drama, seen in their relation to himself. Thus, during the recent scandal of the motor bandits, I have heard policemen laugh heartily at some clever trick of evasion on the part of the criminals; only to see them turn purple with rage the next minute, on realizing the insult to their own intelligence.
A better example is the story of the little midinette who, though starving, would not yield to her former patron (desirous also of being her lover), and whom the latter shot through the heart as she was hurrying along the Quai Passy late at night. “Quel phenomène!” she exclaimed, with a faint shrug, as her life ebbed away in the corner brasserie; “to be shot, while on the way to drown oneself—c’est inoui!” The next moment she was dead. And all she had to say was, “what a phenomenon—it’s unheard of!”
Is this cynicism? Or is it not rather the characteristic impersonality of the histrionic temper, which causes the artist, even in death, to gaze at herself and at the scene, as it were, from the critical vantage of the wings? And the light shrug—which so often grounds the idea of heartlessness, or simply of shallow frivolity, in the judgment of the stranger—look closer, and you will see it hiding a brave stoicism that this race of born actors makes every effort to conceal. The French throughout embody so complex a combination of Latin ardour, Spartan endurance, and Greek ideality as to render them extremely difficult of any but the most superficial comprehension. They laugh at things that make other people shudder; they take fire at things that leave other people cold; they burn with a white flame for beauties other people never see. As a great English writer has said, “below your level, they’re above it:—and a paradox is at home with them!”
But I do not think that they are always ridiculing the foreigner, when the latter is uncomfortably conscious of their smiling glance upon him. There are travelling types at whom everyone laughs, and these delight the Frenchman’s keen humour; but the ordinary stranger has become so commonplace to Paris that, unless he or she is especially distinguished, no one takes any notice. Here, however, we have in a nutshell the reason for that smile that sometimes irritates the foreigner: it is often a smile of pure admiration. The great artist’s eye knows no distinction of nationality or an iota of provincial prejudice. When it lights upon ugliness, it is disgusted—or amused, if the ugliness has a touch of the comic; when, on the other hand, it lights upon beauty—and how instant it is to spy out the most obscure trait of this—enthusiasm is kindled, regardless of kind or race, and the vif French features break into a smile of pleased appreciation. Here, he would say, is someone who contributes to the scene; someone who helps to make, not mar, the radiant ensemble we are striving for.
Paris, as no other city in the world, offers a playhouse of brilliant and charming mise-en-scène; and gives the visitor subtly to understand that she expects him to live up to it. Otherwise she has no interest in him. For the well-tailored Englishman, the striking Américaine, for anyone and everyone who can claim title to that supreme quality, chic, Paris is ready to open her arms and cry kinship. Those whom she favours, however, are held strictly to the mark of her fine standard of the exquisite; and if they falter—oblivion.
“I am never in Paris two hours,” said an American friend of mine, “before I begin to perk and prink, and furbish up everything I have. One feels that each man and woman in the street knows the very buttons of one’s gloves, and quality of one’s stockings; and that every detail of one’s costume must be right.” Many people have voiced the same impression: as of being consciously and constantly “on view”—before spectators keenly critical. The curtain seems to rise on oneself alone in the centre of the stage, and never to go down until the last pair of those appraising eyes has passed on.
It is a very different appraisement, however, from the “inventory stare” of Fifth Avenue. Here, not money value but beauty of line—blend of colour, grace, verve—is the criterion. And the modestly gowned little midinette receives as many admiring glances as the gorgeous demi-mondaine, if only she has contrived an original cut to her frock, or tied a clever, new kind of bow to her hat. Novelty, novelty, is the cry of the exacting artiste; and who obeys wins approval—who has exhausted imagination is laid upon the shelf.
But, again, this is not the shifting, impermanent temper of Madame New York; it is the fickle variability of the great artist, exercising her eternal prerogative: caprice. She accepts a fashion one week, discards it the next for one newer; throws that aside two days later, and demands to know where everyone’s ideas have gone. It is not that she is pettish, but simply that she is used to being slaved for, and to being pleased—by something different, something more charming every hour. Infinite pains are taken to produce the merest trifle she may fancy. Look from your window into the rows of windows up and down the street, or that line your court: everywhere people are sewing, fitting minute bits of delicate stuffs into a pattern, threading tiny pearls to make a border, straining their eyes in dark work-rooms,—toiling indefatigably—to create some fragile, lovely thing that will be snatched up, worn once or twice, and tossed aside, forgotten for the rest of time.