In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

If he has seen you before he will know you. If he has seen you twice, you and he are old friends.

His face takes on more luminous cheer as he catches sight of you, and he bows profoundly, with a dramatic flourish of the napkin.

"Ah, bon soir, M'sieu. Tout va toujours bien? – et Madame? – et le petit?"

He leads you into the restaurant and finds a table for you. The important matter of the dinner is settled, and then, if you are of the favoured, Frederic will talk to you of his art, and you will hear of refinements and subtleties of cookery which will make you smile until Frederic has proved to you that they are not poetic fancy but substantial fact. Your quail, for example, must be cooked before a grape-vine fire. Nothing but grape-vine will do the trick. Frederic is very positive on that point, and if you are skeptic, he may perhaps take you out and show you the grape-vine fire. Afterward you eat the quail and skepticism melts away into unquestioning faith.

That is only one of the mysteries of Frederic's cuisine. The man loves his art, goes to all lengths to achieve the results he desires, would rather invent a successful sauce than inherit a million, is as proud of his canneton à la presse as is a painter or poet of his masterpiece. On the whole, a majority of the public would probably prefer the masterpiece of Frederic to that of the poet or the painter, and in the chef's own mind there would be no doubt as to the comparative excellence of poem, picture, and duck.

It takes three ducks to supply one duck to a patron at Frederic's. The two extra birds give up their juices for the sauce that is served with the bird – that wonderful sauce which Frederic makes himself in the double brazier or chafing-dish which he sets on a side table near the diner.

It is a treat to watch the making of that sauce, from the moment when, after touching a match to the first brazier burner, Monsieur daintily takes up some of the flame between his forefinger and thumb and deposits it upon the other burner, to the final moment when with an air of triumph the artist announces his complete success.

It is a treat too to see Frederic come and serve the duck. You are not getting your money's worth if he does not do it himself.

And it is a treat, beyond the telling, to eat the duck and the sauce which le Roi des Canards has prepared.

Small wonder that there are smart folk mingled with the marchands des vins at the Tour d'Argent nowadays, and that the birds of passage flitting through Paris go to Frederic's for a dinner or a luncheon.

Marguery is another of the chefs of the old French school, but he has become business man rather than chef, as have most of the restaurateurs of Paris. Only Frederic devotes himself passionately to his art, lives for his cuisine, burns his grape-vine fires, and makes a religious rite of preparing his sauces.

He is not only Roi des Canards, but the last of a royal line.

CHAPTER VII

ROUND THE NORMANDY CIRCUIT WITH MADAME

A slight hush falls upon the fashionable Parisian world after Grand Prix has rung down the curtain upon the Paris season. The élégantes pause to draw breath before plunging into the swirling tide of the summer circuit, but the breathing time is short. A few leisurely days, a few final visits to dressmakers and milliners, a closing of town houses, and then, ho for Trouville.

There are many popular resorts on the Normandy coast, but Trouville is queen of them all in so far as smart Parisian society is concerned. Madame follows the races and is in evidence at every fashionable racing event of the Normandy circuit, from the opening at Caen to the close at Ostend – or at least to the last of the French courses at Dieppe; but she is merely a bird of passage at the shifting rendezvous. Her summer nest is at Trouville-Deauville.

They are practically one resort, these two places of hyphenated association. Familiars even shorten the name to Trou-Deauville; but the little ferry that crosses the river Tuch between the two towns, and is heavily freighted with holiday-making folk from morning until night, traverses a gulf wider than the casual traveller would imagine. Trouville has the Casino, the promenade des planches, the Rue de Paris, the famous Hôtel de Paris; but Deauville has the race course, the hyperswell club, the villas of the ultra-chic. All the world is eligible to the pleasures of Trouville – or at least such share of the world as has the price at which Trouville pleasures are rated – but Deauville is for the favoured few, for the crowd of Puteaux and la Boulié, and the Polo Club of the Bois. The races draw the human potpourri of Trouville across the ferry; but after the races, the ferry carries the crowd back, while the social elect move on to the exclusive club grounds for polo or tennis or tea. A small distinction when put into mere words, but a mighty matter as viewed by the Parisienne, and there are many women whose whole ambition but compasses the crossing of that expressive hyphen in Trouville-Deauville.

The seashore season opens on the first of July, and from that time on to the first of September the villas and hotels of Trou-Deauville are filled with the most fashionable folk of Europe, though there is much skurrying about the coast in automobile, coach, or train, and constant interchange of social courtesies with the owners of villas in neighbouring resorts. The Normandy shore line is crowded with picturesque little villages of more or less ancient fame and more or less fashionable repute, and there are Parisians who deliberately choose villas at these smaller resorts, even when they might have the entrée at Deauville, did they elect to join the crowd there. Life at the little place is better for the children than life at Trouville, and it is possible for the elders to relax slightly in the quieter atmosphere, though they can easily find feverish gaiety within motoring distance when they care to go in search of it.

They are charming, these little Normandy towns, but it would be difficult for a town not to be charming on the Normandy coast. To be sure the average seashore villa of France is a blot on the landscape, but there are exceptions to the rule, – quaint modern houses of true Norman type, – and there are, too, old timbered farmhouses and picturesque châteaux which have been invaded by the tide of Parisian modernity. Even the ugliest of the villas is likely to have a delightful little garden, and over many of the architectural horrors charitable roses clamber riotously, softening the hideous outlines and bringing the dissonant notes into harmony with the melody round about. Green fields and fruitful orchards run down to meet the sea, and smooth white poplar-fringed roads that are the joy of the automobilist run away in every direction through the smiling fertile country. Broad shining beaches stretch along beside the sunlit waves and are dotted with gay striped tents under which children play in the sand and grown-ups idle away the hours. Perhaps a mediæval church and a quaint market-place form a background for the summer settlement, and sturdy Norman fisher folk come and go among the holiday aliens.

Yes, they are charming, these little places, and they are, too, more exclusively French than most of the larger resorts, – but not more French than Trouville. Nothing could be more French than Trouville. Dieppe has a tremendous American, English, Austrian, German, Russian contingent that elbows the French element; Boulogne is given over largely to bank-holiday crowds from England; Ostend is more cosmopolitan than French; but Trouville is of the French Frenchy, and to know Trouville is to know the Parisienne in her gayest summer rôle.

A popular French seashore resort must be seen to be appreciated, and no American whose theories of seaside customs is limited to an acquaintance with the shore resorts of Jersey, Long Island, Massachusetts, etc., can have the slightest conception of seaside life in a French translation. There is, in the latter, a spice, a colour, an audacity, lacking in the Anglo-Saxon version. An English or American imitation of Trouville would be hopelessly vulgar, but Trouville – well, it is Trouville. It is all bubble, sparkle, brilliancy, extravagance, folly. It is Paris with an added laissez aller, Paris set to a new tune. There is much to shock the sober-minded as there is in Paris, but the sober-minded should not go to Trouville. It is the refuge of the light-hearted, the buoyant, the volatile; and soberness has no place in its scheme. What would electrify Newport, Bar Harbor, even Narragansett Pier, will not create even a ripple of excitement at Trouville. Someone has said that the difference between smart society in New York and in Paris is the difference between the immoral and the unmoral. French seashore life in its most exaggerated phase is distinctly unmoral, but like Paris life, it is also distinctly picturesque. The most shocking thing about Gallic impropriety is the fact that it fails to shock.

But when one talks of morals, one is taking Trouville seriously, and to take Trouville seriously is altogether out of the question. It is all froth and effervescence, all laughter and irresponsibility. Beau monde, bourgeoisie, actresses, dressmakers, milliners, cocottes, titled folk and millionaires from all over the world, gamblers, racing touts, English polo players, American yacht owners – all jostle each other on the promenade, in the Casino, at the Hôtel de Paris; for the exclusive set of Deauville does not cling to its own select haunts but crosses the ferry often in search of diversion less monotonously comme il faut.

The Rue de Paris is the great meeting-place for this class during the morning hours, and on a bright August morning one may find the most noted social celebrities of Europe grouped before the doors of the little shops that line the crooked street.

The jewellers and dressmakers of Paris have branch establishments here, and around their thresholds flutter the women who are the best patrons of those Paris tradesfolk, met to flirt and gossip and show in their frocks and jewels what may be achieved with the assistance of the firms whose names are written large above the open doors. It is called La Potinière, the gossip rendezvous, this little Rue de Paris, and there is gossip enough abroad there on any morning to justify the name. There is so much excuse for gossip at Trouville.

Eleven o'clock is the magic hour that really opens the ball at Trouville. Before that, there may possibly have been a private pigeon shoot, but that calls out only a small clique and takes in one of the most exclusive sets of Europe. No entrance here for the rank and file even of the fashionable world, and no open sesame for women whom the haughty dames of the French aristocracy do not put upon their visiting list. If Monsieur and Madame appear together anywhere at Trouville it is likely to be at the pigeon shoot.

But it is at eleven that the doors of the villas and hotels fly open. Out flock all of the somebodies and a choice assortment of nobodies, and every path to the beach is filled with the gay throng. Not that all of the Trouville world takes a dip in the surf. No indeed, – the truly smart folk scorn sea bathing, but they go to the beach to meet each other, to watch the throng, to promenade, to show their pretty morning frocks, to put in the time until déjeuner, and their decorative value in the bathing hour scene is tremendous.

Those women who do intend to go into the water, or to wear fetching bathing costumes at a safe distance from the waves, dress in their own rooms, if they live anywhere near the beach, and issue cloaked, hatted, and followed by maids. The maid is an essential feature of the scenic effect. She carries anything that may be needed, and she gives cachet to her mistress. There is a theory, too, that she represents the proprieties. It is quite improper to go to the beach without a maid, and so the Parisienne, no matter how lurid her reputation nor how startling her attire, goes beachward with her maid trotting demurely at her heels.

The bathing at Trouville is not particularly picturesque, though much imaginative description of its startling features has been written, and conditions at the resort seem favourable for a spectacular display of sea nymphs. Trouville is the summer paradise of Parisian cocottes, and the average Parisian cocotte is not as a rule strikingly averse to conspicuous rôles; but Narragansett Pier can show, during one fine summer day, more audacious bathing costumes than will be seen at Trouville in a week; and though little chorus girls up from Paris for a holiday may tumble about in the waves, among a crowd of bathers that but repeats the bathing types familiar the world over, the notorious "filles" do not go into the water any more than do the great ladies of Deauville.

There are some piquant and attractive bathing costumes worn on the sands by women who do not go in for serious bathing, but the Trouville show at the bathing hour is under the gay striped tents or on the promenade, where women in Paris frocks and hats chat lightly with men in informal summer attire, and where the grande dame of the Faubourg St. Germain touches elbows with the cocotte of the Boulevards.

After the bathing hour the crowd scatters again to the hotels and villas, and though in the afternoon there is an immense and amusing crowd on the promenade, the very smart set is not seen there again until the next morning.

It is so very busy, this smart set. The days are not long enough for the goings and comings that must be crowded into them. The fashionable women make elaborate toilettes for déjeuner at café or club or villa, and after the déjeuner they pour out upon the terraces, arrayed in their most ravishing costumes. Automobiles, coaches, smart traps of all kinds, are in waiting. Madame enters the one that is to have the honour of harbouring her mousseline and silk and lace, lifts her exquisite sunshade, scatters smiles and gay jests among her friends, and is off to the races.

Not even at Auteuil, Chantilly, or the Grand Prix can one see more superb and extravagant costuming than in the Tribune or the pesage at Trouville. The crowd is less mixed than at the Paris races and there is more uniform elegance of dress, while the beautiful pesage with its velvety turf, its masses of bloom, its shaded paths, offers the most delightful of settings in which to display the latest creation of Paquin, or a daring but successful innovation from Reboux.

The club of Deauville provides a scenic arrangement even more perfectly adapted to the great show of frocks and mondaines, than is the pesage, and here is the centre of that exclusive social life of which the outsider can form but a vague idea, though the other side of Trouville may afford him most enjoyable entertainment. The golf course of the club is said to be the finest on the continent, the tennis courts are always full, polo is played there by the crack players of all Europe, and there is never a time when there is not something amusing on the club tapis.

Perhaps, instead of races or club events, a garden party at one of the Deauville villas claims the fashionables. Or perhaps the garden party is in some nearby resort such as Houlgate or Villers, and the clean white road leading to the rendezvous is crowded with automobiles and traps as the appointed hour approaches. The automobile has added much to the gaiety of the Normandy season. It has brought the resorts closer together, has made intimate social intercourse between them more possible. For great social events, the clans gather from every direction, coming even from far-away spas and châteaux. Wherever the races are in progress, there a host of automobiles makes its appearance, each machine laden with a jolly party from some one of the innumerable Normandy resorts. There is much motoring, too, in quest of luncheon or dinner. Madame and her friends forsake the Parisian cuisine of the Trouville hotel and motor merrily along the wonderful road to Caen, where in one of the quaint old restaurants that huddle near the market-place, one may have the best of Norman cooking and enjoy – or at least sample – one of the tripe dinners for which the restaurant is famed. A vulgar dish, tripe – but not tripe à la mode de Caen. The chef will tell you proudly that there are fifty Norman ways of cooking tripe, each more masterly than the other, and he will prove to you that the ordinary domestic tripe is to the tripe of Caen as the fried egg of the Bowery restaurant to the œufs sur le plat of the Café Foyot, – or to the omelette of Madame Poulard.

The omelette of Madame Poulard is another excuse for a motor pilgrimage from Trouville. One goes all the way to Mont St. Michel for it, but the run is a beautiful one and the omelette would be well worth even a journey over a corduroy road. Rural Normandy and Brittany still make pilgrimages to the shrine of the Archangel St. Michel, but even the pious pilgrims make their obeisance to the famous omelette as well as to the worthy saint, and the motor parties from Trouville know more about omelette than shrine. They are not profoundly pious, ces gens là, but they see the beauty of the sacred mountain where it towers between sea and sky, and they appreciate the omelette which Madame, with due ceremony, makes in a great casserole over the glowing logs in her cavernous fireplace.

And then there is Dives, with its ancient hostellerie Guillaume le Conquerant, whose praises have been sung so often and so eloquently that even a mere mention of its charms seems rank plagiarism. All the Trouville crowd motors over to Dives for luncheon or for dinner, and divides the tables with other motor parties from Paris and from all the country round; for it is famous, this inn of William the Conqueror, the most picturesque and popular of the provincial taverns of France.

The great William himself saw to the building of the inn when he chose Dives as the most convenient place in which to build the boats needed for his little excursion to England; and since that far day a multitude of famous personages has found shelter there, though the place has not always been used for an inn. Kings and queens of France have slept under the low roof, Madame de Sévigné and other great ladies of her day dined in the feudal dining-room and chatted in the Salle des Marmousets.

But the rooms were not, in Madame de Sévigné's time, what they are now. Monsieur Paul has made of his old Norman inn a treasure-house. He is artist, antiquary, and inn-keeper, this quiet M. Le Remois, and his inn is his hobby as collecting is his passion. He has ransacked the hidden places of Europe for rare and wonderful things that would add beauty and interest to the three low-raftered rooms in which he serves private dinners and luncheons and suppers, and his collection has overflowed into every corner of the inn. Fourteenth-century glass gleams like jewel mosaic in some of the windows; marvellous old tapestries, rare antique carvings, embroideries, brasses, ivories, laces, porcelains are everywhere, yet all are disposed with an eye to artistic effect and the result is a harmonious interior, not a museum jumble of curios. Even in the kitchen, antiquity holds sway; the carved cupboards and walls are rich in old Normandy brasses and in porcelains and pottery that would drive a collector wild with covetousness. Up in the sleeping-rooms that open from a vine-embowered gallery are old carved bedsteads and presses and dressing-tables, quaint chintzes, ewers and basins and bric-à-brac and candelabra of a far-away time. They are named for illustrious visitors who have slept in them, these chambers along the rambling galleries. One, with seventeenth-century coquetry, is sacred to Madame de Sévigné. Another bears the name of Dumas; for Dumas and all the other famous writers, artists, bohemians of France have at one time or another frequented the inn at Dives. From the galleries one looks down upon a courtyard surrounded by the timbered, gable-roofed, many-winged old building. It is all abloom with flowers, this court. Doves flutter and coo about the low eaves and the niches in which stand queer, stiff, archaic images. Flamingoes and herons and peacocks pick their way over the cobblestones. Cockatoos swing from mullioned windows.

And into this place of mediæval memories come the worldly moderns of Trouville and Paris. They flutter about the courtyard scattering the doves, and rivalling the peacocks and flamingoes in brilliance of plumage. They make their toilettes in the low-ceilinged rooms off the vine-draped galleries, they lunch and dine in the Salle des Marmousets, or the Chambre de la Pucelle, among the marvellous carvings and tapestries and bibelots.

An American millionaire once offered M. Paul five hundred thousand dollars for the feudal dining-room just as it stood, woodwork, fireplace, glass, furnishings and all. Doubtless he had visions of sensational New York dinners framed in such setting, but the dream was a vain one. Sell a part of the inn? M. Paul would sell as readily his head or heart, but millionaires do not always understand the artist temperament.

The meals served in the treasure rooms are worthy of their setting, for the artist is a prince of inn-keepers as well as a connoisseur of parts; and some of his dishes have long been the joy of Parisian epicures and the despair of Parisian chefs. There, for example, is his poulet vallée d'Auge. One sees the name upon Parisian menus now, but one tastes the real thing only in the dining-rooms of the old inn at Dives. Here is a luncheon menu prepared for a motor party from Trouville, a menu not too long, but calculated to call up to the gourmet who has lunched in the Salle des Marmousets memories of past delights.

Potage Dives.

Melon.

Sole à la Normande.

Poulets à la vallée d'Auge.

Aloyau Hastings.

Pêches flambées à la Guillaume le Conquerant.

Gallette.

Fruits.

Oh, that fish sauce, those little chickens cooked in fresh cream, those peaches flavoured with other fruits and dropped in raspberry syrup and brandy – all eaten from a genuine fifteenth-century carved table in a room that might serve for a curio collector's dream of heaven! Verily the epicureans of Trouville and Paris should mention M. Le Remois in their prayers.

A sound all modern comes in through the Gothic doorway and wakens the group around the fifteenth-century tables from their dream of bliss. The car is waiting in the courtyard and driving the cockatoos to hysteria. There is a hasty donning of dust-coats, a climbing into the huge touring-car, an exchange of compliments with M. Paul, a waving of hands, and then the long white road through a green, green land, and Trouville in time for polo and dinner and the Casino.

Such excursions are now essential features of the seashore life. Trouville is motor-mad as is Paris, and last season there was not half enough garage room to accommodate the crowd. At every hour of the day great machines dash up to the hotels and unload well-known men and women from Hamburg, from Carlsbad, from Vichy, from Vienna, from Berlin, from Brittany, from Paris, from anywhere and everywhere. The King of Greece arrives at the Hôtel Paris in a Mercedes, the Shah of Persia spins blithely up to the Casino in a Panhard, a Russian Princess steers her motor into the narrow winding way of the Rue de Paris and brings it up with quick turn before Doucet's popular corner or in front of the fashionable pâtisserie. An English Duke has run up from Boulogne in his Daimler, the American Millionaire has made sixty miles an hour from Paris in his Packard, in order to meet his yacht in the bay of Deauville. It is an automobile show of the finest, the grande semaine at Trouville, and, later, automobile week at Ostend brings together a host of cars even more cosmopolitan, just as it brings together a crowd of folk still more cosmopolitan, than that of Trouville.

Yachting, too, is an important feature of Trouville life, and the bay is always well filled with sleek sea-going craft during grand semaine. Few of the very large yachts are French, but a fleet of beautiful small yachts has sailed up the Seine from Melun which is the anchorage for the Yacht Club of France, and there are a few imposing yachts flying the French colours. Trim English and American yachts by the dozen anchor off the Trouville shore for the great week, and there is a constant going and coming between boats and shore, a perpetual interchange of courtesies between the smart folk of villas and hotels, and the yachting visitors. Sometimes it is not the villa set that lunches and dines aboard the yacht. There are hilarious doings out there on the sea, when certain parties from the Hôtel de Paris are entertained, but those who hear tales of these doings when they stroll through la Potinière only shrug their shoulders, What can one expect when the season at Trou-Deauville, according to the traditional phrase, "bat son plein"?