What do they care for any mode, or any proprieties of the Faubourg St. Honoré, as they leer at the dancers of the Bal Mabil, or roar once and again at the clown who figures at the Estaminet-Café of the Champs Elyssées?
In short, says our aggrieved friend, the letter-writer, they press us, and torture us every where; they eat our bread, and drink our wine, and tread on our toes, and crowd us from our seats, as if the gay capital were made for them alone! Nor is the story unreal: whoever has happened upon that mad French metropolis, in the days of its fête madness, can recall the long procession of burly and gross provincials who swarm the streets and gardens, like the lice in the Egypt of Pharaoh.
In the old kingly times, when fêtes were regal, and every Frenchman gloated at the velvet panoply, worked over with golden fleurs-de-lis, as they now gloat at the columns of their Republican journals, their love for festal-days was well hit off in an old comedy. The shopkeeper (in the play) says to his wife, "Take care of the shop; I am going to see the king." And the wife presently says to the chief clerk, "Take care of the shop; I am going to see the king." And the clerk, so soon as the good woman is fairly out of sight, says to the garçon, "Take care of the shop; I am going to see the king." And the garçon enjoins upon the dog to "take care of the shop, as he is going to see the king." And the dog, stealing his nose out at the door, leaves all in charge of the parroquet, and goes to see the king!
The joke made a good laugh in those laughing days: nor is the material for as good a joke wanting now. The prefect leaves business with the sub-prefect, that he may go up to the Paris fête. The sub-prefect leaves his care with some commissioner, that he may go up to the Paris fête. And the commissioner, watching his chance, steals away in his turn, and chalks upon the door of the prefecture, "Gone to the fêtes of May."
All this, to be sure, is two months old, and belonged to that festive season of the Paris year, which goes before the summer. Now, if report speaks true, with provincials gone home, and the booths along the Champs Elyssées struck, and the theatric stars escaped to Belgium, or the Springs, the Parisian is himself again. He takes his evening drive in the Bois de Boulogne; he fishes for invitations to Meudon, or St. Cloud; he plots a descent upon Boulogne, or Aix la Chapelle; he studies the summer fashions from his apartments on the Boulevard de la Madeleine; he takes his river-bath by the bridge of the Institute; he smokes his evening cigar under the trees by the National Circus; and he speculates vaguely upon the imperial prospects of his President, the Prince Louis.
Meantime, fresh English and Americans come thronging in by the Northern road, and the Havre road, and the road from Strasbourg. They cover every floor of every hotel and maison garnie in the Rue Rivoli. They buy up all the couriers and valets-de-place; they swarm in the jewelry and the bronze shops of the Rue de la Paix; and they call, in bad French, for every dish that graces the carte du jour in the restaurants of the Palais Royal. They branch off toward the Apennines and the Alps, in flocks; and, if report speak true, the Americans will this year outnumber upon the mountains of Switzerland both French and German travelers. Indeed, Geneva, and Zurich, and Lucerne, are now discussed and brought into the map of tourists, as thoughtlessly as, ten years since, they compared the charms of the Blue Lick and the Sharon waters.
Look at it a moment: Ten days, under the Collins guidance, will land a man in Liverpool. Three days more will give him a look at the Tower, the Parks, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and Paternoster Row; and on the fourth he may find himself swimming in a first-class French car, on damask cushions, at forty miles the hour from Boulogne to Paris. Five days in the capital will show him (specially if he is free of service-money) the palaces of Versailles, the Louvre, the park at St. Cloud, the church of Notre Dame, the Madeleine, the Bourse, the Dead House, a score of balls, half as many theatres, the pick of the shops, and the great Louis himself.
Three other summer days, allowing a ten hours' tramp over the galleries and sombre grounds of Fontainebleau, will set him down, at the door of "mine host" of the Hotel de l'Ecu, in the city of Geneva, and he will brush the dews from his eyes in the morning, within sight of the "blue, arrowy Rhone," and "placid Leman, and the bald white peak of Mont Blanc." A Sunday in the Genevese church, will rest his aching limbs, and give him hearing of such high doctrine as comes from the lips of Merle d'Aubigné, and Monday will drift him on char-a-banc straight down through wooded Sardinia—reading Coleridge's Hymn—into the marvelous valley of Chamouny.
There, he may take breath before he goes up upon the Sea of Ice; and afterward he may idle, on donkeys or his own stout feet, over such mountain passes as will make Franconia memories tame, and boat it upon the Lake of Lucerne; and dine at the White Swan of Frankfort, and linger at Bingen, and drink Hock at Heidelberg; and chaffer with Jean Maria Farina at Cologne, and measure the stairs of the belfry at Antwerp, and toss in a cockle shell of a steamer across the straits, and lay him down in his Collins berth one month from his landing, a fresher and fuller man—with only six weeks cloven from his summer, and a short "five hundred" lifted from his purse.