But we should have the cool vistas of the inner forest, and the stately satisfaction of historic stone stairs and mellow creamy-grey urns and statues through the trees; or we can go down the river instead to old Vincennes, and have a look at the grim prison-castle that has sheltered many a noble in disgrace. Which shall it be? To use Madame La France’s borrowed Spanish expression: I am “tout à votre disposition.”
III
AND ITS SEQUEL
Whichever it is, we must be back in time for tea at one of the fashionable “fiv’ o’clocks”; for, though many ladies who buy their clothes in Paris do not know it, looking at grandes dames is vastly different from looking at mannequins or the demi-monde; and the French grande dame is at her best at the tea hour. Someone has said, with truth, that the American woman is the best-dressed in the morning, the Englishwoman the best-dressed at night; but that the Parisienne triumphs over both in the gracious, clinging gown of afternoon.
Let us turn into this exclusive little establishment in the Place Vendôme, and from the vantage of a window-table in the mezzanine observe the lovely ladies as they enter. The first to come is in the simplest frock of leaf-green—the average American woman would declare it “positively plain”; there is not a sign of lace or hand embroidery about it, only at the open throat a soft fall of finest net, snowy as few American women would take pains to have it. And the lady’s hair is warm copper, and her hat a mere ingenious twist of leaf-green tulle; but a master hand has draped it and the simple frock of green; and the whole is a beautiful blend of line and colour, as unstudied as a bit of autumn woodland.
Here is a combination more striking. The lady just stepping from the pansy limousine has chosen yellow for her costume of shimmering crêpe; a rich dull ochre, with a hint of red in its flowing folds. At the neck and wrists are bits of fragile old embroidery, yellow too with age, and that melt into the flesh-tones of the wearer till they seem part of her living self; while at the slim waist-line is a narrow band of dusky rose—the kind of rose that looks faintly coated with silver—and daringly caught up high at the right side, a single mauve petunia. The hat of course is black—a mere nothing of a tiny toque, with one spray of filmy feather low against the lady’s blond hair.
“But she is not pretty at all,” you realize suddenly; “she’s really almost ugly, and yet—”
Exactly. A Frenchwoman can be as ugly as it pleases perverse Heaven to make her; there is always the “and yet” of her overwhelming charm. You may call it artificial if you like—the mere material allurements of stuffs and bits of thread; but to arrange those stuffs there must be a fine discrimination, to know how to use those bits of thread, a subtle science no other woman has—or ever quite acquires. Look about you in the tea-room—now fast filling with women of all ages and all tastes—what is it that forms their great general attraction? White hands, shown to perfection by a fall of delicate lace, or the gleam of a single big emerald or sapphire; hands moving daintily among fragile china, the sheen of silver, the transparency of glass. And above the hands, vif faces, set in the soft coquetry of snowy ruches, graceful fichus, piquant Medici collars, but all open upon the alluring V of creamy throat.
What is it these women have? You can set down what they have on, but what is it you cannot set down, yet that you know they possess? It is the art of supreme femininity, carried out in the emphasis of every charm femininity has; by means of contrast, colour, above all by the subtlest means in everything: simplicity. And there is added to their conscious art a pervading delicate voluptuousness, that underlies the every expression of themselves as women; and that completes the havoc of the male they subjugate.
Look at him now. Do you know any man but an Englishman who likes tea? Yet here they are, these absinthe-ridden Frenchmen drinking it with a fervour; but their eyes are not within their cups! For again the highly proper little dogs are present—“dogs for the afternoon,” of course; and the management has been thoughtful in providing discreet corners and deep window-seats, where a tête-a-tête may be enjoyed without too many interruptions on the part of the chic waitress with a windward eye to tips.
Another precaution these abandoned couples take is a third person—usually a young girl—to be with them. Madame starts out with the young girl, by chance they meet Monsieur X at the five-o’clock, and have tea with him; of course he escorts the ladies home, and equally of course the young girl is “dropped” first. If between her house and that of Madame’s, the better part of an hour is employed in threading the tangled traffic of that time of evening, who can say a word except the chauffeur—who is given no reason to regret his long-suffering silence on such subjects. Thus during the hour after tea, the hour between six and seven, when kindly dusk lends her cloak to the game, husbands and wives play at their eternal trick of outwitting one another.