And there have been two weddings,—one at the blanchisserie, where the master's daughter was married to a young mechanic from the iron shop. There were glorious times at the laundry that night, for the whole court was present. It was four in the morning when the party broke up, and then our shirts were two days late.
Thus ran the first months of the four years of our student life in Paris; in its domestic aspects it was typical of all that followed. We soon became members of the American Art Association, and gradually made friends in charming French homes. Then there was the strange Bohemian life lying outside as well as within the students' pale, and into the spirit of it all we found our way. It is to the Bohemian, not the social, life of Paris that these papers are devoted—a life both picturesque and pathetic, filled with the oddest contrasts and incongruities, with much suffering but more content, and spectacular and fascinating in all its phases. No one can have seen and known Paris without a study of this its living, struggling artistic side, so strange, so remote from the commonplace world surging and roaring unheeded about it.
On New Year's Day we had an overwhelming number of callers. First came the concierge, who cleaned our door-knob and wished us a prosperous and bonne année. She got ten francs,—we did not know what was coming. The chic little blanchisseuse called next with our linen. That meant two francs. Then came in succession two telegraph boys, the facteur, or postman, who presented us with a cheap calendar, and another postman, who delivers only second-class mail. They got a franc each. Then the marchand de charbon's boy called with a clean face and received fifty centimes, and everybody else with whom we had had dealings; and our offerings had a steadily diminishing value.
We could well bear all this, however, in view of the great day, but a week old, when we had celebrated Christmas. Bishop prepared a dinner fit for a king, giving the greater part of his time for a week to preparations for the great event. Besides a great many French dishes, we had turkey and goose, cooked for us at the rôtisserie near by, and soup, oysters, American pastries, and a big, blazing plum-pudding. We and our guests (there were eight in all) donned full dress for the occasion, and a bonne, hired for the evening, brought on the surprises one after another. But why should not it have been a glorious evening high up among the chimney-pots of old Paris? for did we not drink to the loved ones in a distant land, and were not our guests the prettiest among the pretty toilers of our court?
