THE FIVE FLOORS.
The Boulevards may be said to perform for Paris the functions fulfilled by the cestus of Venus towards that amphibious goddess, by surrounding it with a magic girdle of fascinations. Every sort and variety of entertainment is to be found comprised in their cincture of the city,—from the stately Académie de Musique and Italian Opera (full of dandies and dowagers), to the trestles of rope-dancers, amphitheatres of dancing-dogs, and galleries of wax-work, (full of ploughboys and pickpockets,)—and every species of domicile, from the gorgeous hôtel to the humble stalls of the vendors of liquorice-water and galette. At one extremity we have the costly menu of the Café de Paris, with its ortolans and poudings à la Nessebrode; at the other, the greasy fricots of La Courtille. The Café Turc brays forth with Tolbecque, and an orchestra of trumpets and bassoons; the guinguettes of the Faubourg St. Antoine scrape away with their solitary fiddle. Every species of shop and merchandize, from the sumptuous magazin of Le Revenant to the boutique à vingt-cinq sous; every species of temple, from the Parthenonic Madeleine, to that aërial shrine of liberty, the site of the Bastille. Every gradation of display between splendour and misery is epitomized in the circuit of the Boulevards.
Play, opera, farce, feats of equestrianism, funambulism, somnambulism, and humbugism of every colour, industrious fleas, and idle vendors of magic eye-salve, successively arrest the attention; while in the vicinity of the Café Tortoni, famous for the coldness of its ices and heat of its quarrels, the courtier marron plies his trade of trickery; stock-jobbing has full possession of the pavé; and almost within hearing of the knowing ears of the Jockey-Club, and the ears polite of the Club Anglais, bulls and bears outbellow the fashionable jabber of the Boulevards.
On emerging from the head-quarters of English Paris,—the Rue de la Paix,—to the Boulevards des Capucines and des Italiens, the eye is dazzled by gilding, gas-light, plate-glass, scagliola, or moulu, varnished counters, and panelling in grotesque and arabesque, interspersed with glittering mirrors, as appliances and means of getting off the lowest goods at the highest rate. A little further, and by an imperceptible gradation, vice succeeds to frivolity. Instead of milliners and jewellers, we find billiard-tables and gambling-houses, deepening at length, into the more tremendous hazards of the Stock Exchange. After passing the vicinity of the Bourse, we come, naturally enough, to the quarter of the Jews; passing through the speculative neighbourhood of Le Passage des Panoramas, which is but a splendid game of chance materialised into stone and marble.
Next to this gaudy section of the modern Babylon dwells solid trade,—the streets of St. Denis and St. Martin,—accompanied by such theatres and such coffee-houses as might be expected to minister to the sensual and intellectual delights of the marchand en gros; melo-drama, and the Porte St. Martin,—the Cadran Bleu, and its unctuous cuisine. The vicinage of Rag Fair (the marché aux vieux linges) succeeds; then the Boulevard still bearing the name of Beaumarchais (the mansion formerly inhabited by the creator of Figaro being appropriately occupied by a refinery of salt); and lastly, in the wake of rags and wits, the site of the Bastille,—the rallying-point of the most seditious parish of Paris, the republican quarter of the manufacturers, the tremendous Faubourg St. Antoine.
It was precisely at the boundary limit between the pleasure and business sections of the Boulevards, at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, on an airy second-floor with a projecting balcony, commanding a view of the sporting world to the right, and the trading world to the left,—the idle west, and active east,—that there lived a certain Monsieur Georges,—a little wizened man, of doubtful age, doubtful fortune, doubtful reputation. Everything about him was equivocal. In Paris people occupy themselves far less than in London with the affairs of their neighbours: the great have something better to do, the little something worse; the rich being too busy with play, the poor too busy with work, to have leisure for the dirty scandals which spring up like fungi in that region of lords and lackeys, Grosvenor Square. Nevertheless, the porter's lodge of every Parisian house is a chartered temple of echo, having a gossipry and a jargon of its own. The porter's lodge knits stockings, reads novels, and composes romances; peeps into letters, interrogates chambermaids, and confederates with duns. A man loose in his habits had need be very close in his domestics, in order to escape the detection of his porter's lodge.
Yet, in spite of fifteen years' domiciliation in that polished corner of the Boulevards, Monsieur Georges, though far from a beauty, was still a mystery. Madame la portière had never been able to discover whether "Georges" was a surname given by father to son, or a Christian name given by godfather to godson. She sometimes thought him a single man, sometimes a double, nay, sometimes a treble. Curious varieties of the fair sex occasionally visited the balconied saloon,—young, old, and middle-aged,—shabby-genteels who passed for poor relations, and glaring tawdry who passed for worse. There was no roost in his abode, however, either for the birds with fine feathers, or the birds without. Monsieur Georges's foible was not that of hospitality. His interests were too intimately cared for by a ferocious femme de confiance, who set himself and his house in order, and caused his establishment to be designated in the neighbourhood as that of Georges and the Dragon.
If not generous, however, the little man was strictly just; he gave nothing, but he kept nothing back. He paid his way with the praiseworthy punctuality remarkable in those who never pay an inch of the way for other people.
It is a hard thing, by-the-bye, that while male designations leave the facts of the man's bachelorhood uncertain, a spinster is specially pointed out by the malice of conventional phraseology. Mr. or Monsieur may be married or single, as he pleases; but Mrs. and Madame assume, even on the direction of a letter, their airs of matronly superiority over Miss or Mademoiselle. While her master rejoiced in his ambiguity as Monsieur Georges, Mademoiselle Berthe was designated to mankind and womankind in all the odium of spinsterhood; and exclamations of "old maid" and "chissie" followed her daily passage past the porter's lodge, the moment the "grim white woman" reached the first floor.