'You would hardly believe,' said Madame de Maintenon, 'how much a talent for combing hair contributed to my elevation:' tact in the minor economies, the ability to minister to approbativeness and epicurism, no where finds such scope as in Paris. 'Be more amiable,' said an experienced mother to her daughter, an employé of the opera, 'be more tender and empresse to your admirers, if not for your child's sake, or for your mother's, then for your voiture!' The triumph of material niceties here reaches its acme: from what an infinite variety of petty resources is French subsistence and enjoyment derived! A journal of our day announces the death of a distinguished claquer, at his country-seat, and the event is signalized by an obituary notice, declaring him 'master of the art of expressing feeling according to the subject!' A eulogy nowhere else applicable to any but an author, composer or artist, thus celebrates one whose vocation it was to testify approbation and blame at the theatre! Liquorice-water, the caricature of an abbe, an omelette scientifically fried, a fancy clock; a woman in front of Tortoni's letting off swallows from a basket, at two sous a flight; a bird-cage, a flower-stand, a plaster bust, a lap-dog, a fan, a little glass of Otard, a cake of scented soap, an opera-glass, a pan of charcoal, a wax candle, or a parrot, an elegant coiffure, a geranium leaf, or a bit of sugar—where on earth, but in Paris, do such things weigh so much in the scale of diurnal experience, felicity, and even fate?
How many 'gentle stoics' exhibit frugality and contentment; how many complacent epicureans ingenuity in pleasure-seeking; how many devotees of science isolated self-devotion, in that mart of humanity! We are told of a famous surgeon who questioned the credited idea that a vital gun-shot wound is followed by an involuntary leap, or sudden turning of the body: called to the field, and mortally wounded, he exclaimed, 'It is true; I could not help that movement,' and so died. In no other meridian do the frivolous and the solemn, the fantastic and the philosophic associations of life thus incongruously blend.
An historian quotes a royal letter, the possession of which he accounts for by the statement that he purchased it of a rogue who stole it at the sack of the Tuileries; a philosopher cannot study in peace without a group of tropical plants and two gazelles in sight; the Amazonian market-women, whose savage air would frighten a novice, keep a plaster bust of the Emperor on their stalls, and throw nosegays into Eugenie's carriage; the identical transparency which represented the Goddess of Reason in the bloodiest days of the Revolution, was subsequently used as the festal effigy of Liberty, Josephine, Faith, Hortense, and the present Empress; a painter's model impiously engraves on his card: Nature de Christ; an amateur takes down a new dance in short-hand; a female novelist assumes male attire, in order to observe life in Paris with more facility; the best poet of the South is a barber; at the same shop-window the flaneur gazes on a print of Napoleon at St. Helena, contemplating, with folded arms, the declining sun—and a national guard lacing the stays of a grisette; the municipal authorities imprison a refractory opera-singer, and, without their permission, not a bucket of water can be dipped from the Gulf of Lyons; our dinner-companion says good-by, after coffee, and goes deliberately to blow his brains out. The fireman makes loves to the femme de chambre, while in the act of extinguishing a conflagration; the people read their fate in placards; Galignani's column of foreign news is arbitrarily cut down, and the suppressed items come to light in Charivari; a deposed king's effects are sold at auction, and Sevres ware bearing his crest thenceforth adorn American tables; the streets swarm with police and spies, and the child of a Dutch admiral and Hortense Beauharnais, having turned the cannon upon the populace, issues a religious bulletin after the massacre: no flower-market in the world is patronized so well as the Parisian, and no urban gardens more frequented than the Tuileries and Luxembourg, while rural life is irksome to the citizen, and only sought as a pretext for love-making, a dance, or dinner al fresco. Catch a few phrases from the leaf of a courtier's memoirs, the mouth of a neighbor at restaurant or theater, or the bourgeois in a crowd, and an epitome of this mingled levity and talent, this comedy of life, and quickness of apprehension, without seriousness of conviction, is hinted at once. 'They are like me, they regret their mud,' said Madame de Maintenon, watching the restless carp in their pellucid vase; 'il y quelqu'un qui fait encore plus d'ennemis qu'un cheval anglais—ce'st la femme de theatre,' was the observation of a Parisian sage; 'my confessor has ordered me to be dull in company,' said Madame Scarron, 'to mortify the passion, he detects in me, of wishing to please by my understanding.' 'Un femme d'esprit ne doit rien à personne,' bluntly remarks an obese traveler, as he shifts his feet to avoid the provision-basket of his vis-a-vis. Opera-girls, we are told by Veron, have a passion to appear in mourning for some distant relative whom they have never seen.
In 1740, Montesquieu, in a letter to a friend, wrote: 'France is nothing but Paris and a few distant provinces.' 'Here,' says a traveller of the last century, 'things are estimated by their air; a watch may be a master-piece without exactness, and a woman rule the whole town without beauty, if they have an air. Here life's a dance, and awkwardness of step its greatest disgrace. Character, here, is dissolved into the public, and 'an original' a name of mirth. Cela se fait, et cela ne se fait pas, are here the supreme umpires of conduct. Their religion is superstition, fashion, sophism. Tyranny may grind the face, but not the countenance of a Frenchman; his feet are made to dance in wooden shoes. The parliament resembles an old toothless mastiff. France was the country of Le Sœur and Racine, and is that of Voltaire.'
And a more generalized and recent portrait is given by our countryman, Henry James: 'Your true Frenchman will sit for any number of consecutive hours glued to the benches of the Champs Elysees in order to see the monde pass by—to see it merely with his eyes, remember—never speaking to a soul, never knowing a soul in all the moving mass, yet perfectly content to see the monotonous waves roll on and repeat their tiresome glare, till darkness comes at last to snatch them from sight, and the beholder (let us hope) from imbecility. To frequent from childhood to manhood, and from manhood to old age, the same unchanging scenes; to sit year in and year out on the same dusty sidewalks, in front of the same crowded and noisy cafés, playing the same eternal dominoes, seeing pass the same throng of similar people, each as like the other in his diversity as a big pea is like a little pea, as a double clover is like a single clover, or a wilted cabbage is like a fresh one; everlastingly sipping the same eau sucre; everlastingly hearing and repeating the same stupid gossip of Mrs. B. to-day, which was heard and repeated of Mrs. A. yesterday; everlastingly resorting to the same play-house to applaud the same actors; running to the same opera to go into ecstasies over the same fiddle; strolling along the same streets to gaze at the same or similar prints in the same windows at the end of the year which he gazed upon at the beginning; such is your true Frenchman's conception of variety, such is his ideal of life; and he cannot but heartily despise a state of things like that at home, which drops all this imbecile routine out as an infinite dreariness and ennui; a full stomach, a faithful wife or mistress, and an honored name, and he will agree to live forever in immortal joy. Life to him is not the commerce or play of an infinite inward ideal, with a responsive outward organization; it is rather the commerce or play of a finite outward organization with what is still more finite and outward than itself, namely, the universe of sense. God forbid that I should undervalue a mental constitution so pronounced, and, in its way, so admirable; I only allege it to show that the Frenchman commits suicide only when some tangible possession takes its departure from him; only when poverty, or some other palpable calamity, comes to shake him out of his easy-going routine, and that he can't imagine any profounder source of disgust.'
Garvani's illustrations of Paris life contain a domestic interior which might serve an artist, a political economist, or a dramatic author, so entirely does it suggest the ways and means of the domiciliated Parisian. Like his frugal Caledonian brother, he prefers the nook of a vast and substantial edifice to a small isolated tenement; and is content to occupy a floor, and adjust the height thereof to the length of his purse: both space and cash are saved by the arrangement; while a far more uniform, permanent, and effective architecture is secured. Thus each huge dwelling is a world in itself; the ground-floor may be a shop, but ascend the steps and you find the guardian genius of the place, whom if you are a resident or an habitué of the premises, it is well to propitiate. All the conveniences of a family are found in each of these suites, which vary in extent and costliness as you ascend; survey the neat glass case, wherein sits the porter's wife in her spotless cap, knitting, with an alcove containing a bed, perhaps in the back-ground, and a dainty pendulum or flower near by, and a sleepy cat purring at her side; accept her courteous directions, mount the polished oaken staircase, note the different colored cords hanging at each door, look in upon the prosperous family who hold a salon once a week on the premiere etage, or the smaller domestic establishment above; the economical traveller's winter-apartment, full of knick-knacks and sunshine, au troisieme; or mount, if you will, to the highest region of all to find the provident musician practising in his cheerful attic; or the light-hearted and hard-working grisette, his neighbor, with her box of mignonette at her side, embroidering a kerchief, or making artificial flowers: while she muses of the next holiday, when her beau is to escort her to a dance at Montmorenci. These, and a thousand similar scenes, have been so graphically described in novels, plays, and memoirs, that such a casual inspection seems like a process of memory rather than observation, so exactly does the still-life and local arrangement correspond with vague images of apartments in the French capital to which biographers, novelists, and playwrights have conducted us. This way of living in colonies, the diversities of condition thus brought under one roof, is another of those special phases of life in Paris, which render it eminently dramatic and scenical. Yet the convenience thus secured is often modified to Anglo-Saxon appreciation, by miserable provision for a fire, scraps of rug instead of an entire carpet, and a want of comfort scarcely atoned for by sundry cheap expedients for elegance; so that we can well believe the assertion of an American envoy, fresh from his snug country-seat, that the charms of the French capital were dispelled for him by a habit his chimney had of smoking, and his waiter of bringing him punch in a tea-pot. The requirements of warmth and ease are secondary in the estimation of the fair Parisian; she says: 'Le salon sera rouge et or, la chambre á coucher en brocatelle jaune et le boudoir en satin de chine blue; ce sera ravissant.' And yet there is not a city in the world where a comfortable retreat, in our sense of the word, is more requisite. Cold humidity is the normal trait of the winter climate; catarrh is almost permanently epidemic; many of the inhabitants can echo the declaration of one their frank fellow-citizens, who says: 'Depuis que je me connais, je suis enrhumée. J'aurai en froid en venant au monde.' Moccasins, snuff, and eau sucre, are the usual remedies; and their universal use confirms and suggests atmospheric causes.
[A MEMORY.]
Oh! many, many years ago,
By hill-sides where the violets grow;
Loving the sun in the new spring,
And where the robins came to sing;
A long, sunshiny, quiet way,
To school I led our little May.
Day after day, and hand in hand,
We pattered o'er the path of sand;
I plucking violets here and there,
To wreathe in sister's sunny hair;
She singing with the birds a song
That cheered me all the summer long.