They have another very sensible and dramatic amusement there, which they call the “Mat de Cocagne.” This is a long pole, of about eighteen inches diameter at the base, well polished and greased from top to bottom, with soft soap, tallow, and other slippery ingredients. To climb up this pole to the top is an eminent exploit, which crowns the victorious adventurer with a rich prize, and gains him the acclamations of ten thousand spectators. The “pretenders” strip off their upper gear altogether, and roll up their trowsers mid-thigh, and thus accoutred, present themselves at the bottom of the mast. Now just listen to a description of the operation, and reflections thereupon, and tell us whether you ever read any thing more “perfectly French.”
“The first who attempt the ascent look for no honor; their office is to prepare the way, and put things in train for their successors: they rub off the grease from the bottom, the least practicable part of the pole. In every thing the first steps are the most difficult, although seldom the most glorious; and scarcely ever does the same person commence an enterprise, and reap the fruit of its accomplishment. They ascend higher by degrees, and the expert climbers now come forth, the heroes of the list: they who have been accustomed to gain prizes, whose prowess is known, and whose fame is established since many seasons. They do not expend their strength in the beginning; they climb up gently, and patiently, and modestly, and repose from time to time; and they carry, as is permitted, a little sack at their girdle, filled with ashes to neutralize the grease and render it less slippery.
“All efforts, however, for a long time prove ineffectual. There seems to be an ultimate point, which no one can scan, the measure and term of human strength; and to overreach it is at last deemed impossible. Now and then a pretender essays his awkward limbs, and reaching scarce half way even to this point, falls back clumsily amidst the hisses and laughter of the spectators; so in the world empirical pretension comes out into notoriety for a moment only to return with ridicule and scorn to its original obscurity.
“But the charm is at length broken: a victorious climber has transcended the point at which his predecessors were arrested. Every one now does the same: such are men: they want but a precedent: as soon as it is proved that a thing is possible, it is no longer difficult. Our climber continues his success: farther and farther still; he is a few feet only from the summit, but he is wearied, he relents. Alas! is the prize, almost in his grasp, to escape from him! He makes another effort, but it is of no avail. He does not, however, lose ground: he reposes. In the mean time, exclamations are heard, of doubt, of success, of encouragement.
“After a lapse of two or three minutes, which is itself a fatigue, he essays again. It is in vain! He begins even to shrink: he has slipped downward a few inches, and recovers his loss by an obstinate struggle (‘applause!’—‘sensation!’), but it is a supernatural effort, and—his last. Soon after a murmur is heard from the crowd below, half raillery and half compassion, and the poor adventurer slides down, mortified and exhausted, upon the earth!
“So a courtier, having planned from his youth his career of ambition, struggles up the ladder, lubric and precipitous, to the top—to the very consummation of his hopes, and then falls back into the rubbish from which he has issued; and they who envied his fortune, now rejoice in his fall. What lessons of philosophy in a greasy pole! What moral reflections in a spectacle so empty to the common world! What wholesome sermons are here upon the vanity of human hopes, the disappointments of ambition, and the difficulties of success in the slippery paths of fortune and human greatness! But the very defeat of the last adventurer has shown the possibility of success, and prepared the way for his successor, who mounts up and perches on the summit of the mast, bears off the crown, and descends amidst the shouts and applause of the multitude. It is Americus Vespucius who bears away from Columbus the recompense of his toils!”
So much for climbing a greased pole in reflective, philosophical Paris!
Inquisitiveness has been well described as “an itch for prying into other people's affairs, to the neglect of our own; an ignorant hankering after all such knowledge as is not worth knowing; a curiosity to learn things that are not at all curious.” People of this stamp would rather be “put to the question” than not to ask questions. Silence is torture to them. A genuine quidnunc prefers even false news to no news; he prides himself upon having the first information of things that never happened. Yankees are supposed to have attained the greatest art in parrying inquisitiveness, but there is a story extant of a “Londoner” on his travels in the provinces, who rather eclipses the cunning “Yankee Peddler.” In traveling post, says the narrator, he was obliged to stop at a village to replace a shoe which his horse had lost; when the “Paul Pry” of the place bustled up to the carriage-window, and without waiting for the ceremony of an introduction, said:
“Good-morning, sir. Horse cast a shoe I see. I suppose, sir, you are going to—?”