But there are some callings, indeed, wholly untouched by a crisis. The manufacture of street gas goes on, for example, without any change. There are others that are even benefited by a revolution. After the last revolution, while other trades were turning away men to whom there was no longer work to give, the trades concerned in providing military equipment were taking on fresh hands. To that class in Paris, and to that only, there was an increase of business in eighteen hundred and forty-eight to the extent of twenty-nine per cent. The decrease of business among the printers, although few books were printed, did not amount to more than twenty-seven per cent., in consequence of the increased demand for proclamations, handbills, and manifestoes.
Without any extra crisis, men working in all trades have trouble
enough to get over the mere natural checks upon industry, which come to most tradesmen twice a year in the shape of the dead seasons. Every month is a dead season to some trade; but the dead seasons which prevail over the largest number of workmen in Paris are the two months, July and August, in summer, and the two months, January and February, in winter. The dead season of summer is the more decided of the two. The periods of greatest activity, on the other hand, are the two months, April and May, and next to those the months, October and November. Printers are busiest in winter, builders are busiest in summer—so there are exceptions to the rule; but, except those who provide certain requisites for eating and drinking which are in continual demand, there are few workmen in Paris or elsewhere in France, who have not every year quite enough slack time to perplex them. They can ill afford the interference of any small crisis in the shape of a strike, or large crisis in the shape of a national tumult.
Finally, let me say that the French workman, take him all in all, is certainly a clever fellow. He is fond of Saint Monday, “solidarity,” and shows; but is quickwitted at his work, and furiously energetic when there is any strong call made upon his industry. In the most debased form he has much more vigour and vivacity than the most debased of English operatives. He may be more immoral; but he is less brutish. If we are a little vain, and very fond of gaiety; and if we are improvident, we are not idle; and, with all our street fighting, we are not a discontented race. Except an Arab, who can be so happy as we know how to make ourselves, upon the smallest possible resources?
CHAPTER XXV.
licensed to juggle.
Some years ago a short iron-built man used to balance a scaffold pole upon his chin; to whizz a slop-basin round upon the end of it; and to imitate fire-works with golden balls and gleaming knives, in the public streets of London. I am afraid his genius was
not rewarded in his own country; for not long ago I saw him starring it in Paris. As I stood by to watch his evolutions, in the Champs Elysées, I felt a patriotic glow when they were rewarded with the enthusiastic applause of a very wide and thick ring of French spectators.
There was one peculiarity in his performance which distinguished him from French open-air artistes—he never spoke. Possibly he was diffident of his French accent. He simply uttered a grunt when he wished to call attention to any extraordinary perfection in his performance; in imitation, perhaps, of the “La!—la!” of the prince of French acrobats, Auriol. Whatever he attempted he did well; that is to say, in a solid, deliberate, thorough manner. His style of chin-balancing, knife-catching, ball-throwing, and ground and lofty tumbling, was not so agile or flippant as that of his French competitors, but he never failed. On the circulation of his hat, the French halfpence were dropped in with great liberality.
As the fall of the curtain denotes the close of a play, so the raising of the square of carpet signifies the end of a juggler’s performance; and, when my old acquaintance had rolled up his little bit of tapestry, and had pocketed his sous, I accosted him—“You are,” I said, “an Englishman?”