Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

“A Parisian may for years walk round English society as he would walk round the wall of China, without being able to find either a door or a window. He understands absolutely nothing about it.

“In France, on the contrary, Englishmen find a greater social liberty. French society is an open society; French manners are cosmopolitan manners. The most diverse peoples can in France find their place without losing their national character. In our country everyone is at home, and the Englishman gets on comfortably enough. In the Englishman, however, it is necessary to distinguish between the citizen and the individual; for he is both. When the national interests or passions are in question he does not scruple to intrigue and conspire; when he is unconcerned with the politics of the country where he happens to find himself, he practises the greatest reserve and mixes in nothing. See the English at Paris. They assist at all our revolutions as mere spectators; their sole care is to get a good seat. They always come to their ambassador to request a presentation at the Tuileries and tickets for the court ball.”

So far we have presented the observations of M. Lemoinne for what they may be worth. That his skilful pen, however, penetrates sometimes into the regions of truth is shown by the fact that his remarks not infrequently recall those of foreign writers so famous as to be regarded more or less as oracular. Heine, after visiting London, complained that at an English dinner party the gentlemen, after the ladies had retired from the dining-room, remained at table for an hour or two to saturate themselves with port. Heine, it must be remembered, took a perverse delight in satirising everything English. But that we, in England, do leave the ladies to drink their after-dinner coffee in the desolation of the drawing-room must be handsomely admitted. M. Lemoinne notices this peculiarity.

“The time has passed,” he says – with burlesque drollery – “when the true Englishman remained at table for several hours after dinner and ended by slumbering beneath it. Now, when the ladies have quitted the dining-room, the gentlemen content themselves with circulating the Bordeaux for twenty minutes. In France we are beginning to divest ourselves of certain prejudices concerning the English. For a long time we regarded the English character as synonymous with ‘spleen.’ It was an old French author who said of the English: ‘They amuse themselves sadly, after the custom of their country.’

“The fact is the English are gay in their own fashion, and sometimes even expansive and noisy; but they are not gay with everybody, nor on a first acquaintance. They must unfreeze; they are like the wine of Bordeaux, which, to give forth its fragrance, has to be warmed.”

After this, however, a very dubious compliment is paid to our compatriots. “It is certain that this race is robuster than others, the women as well as the men. It spends more, consumes more, and absorbs more. See how well these pretty white and red-complexioned Englishwomen can take their sherry and their champagne! Observe them in the middle of the day going to exercise their palate at the pastry-cook’s with coffee, chocolate, ices, all kinds of cakes and sandwiches; you are staggered at the quantity of these delicacies they can put out of sight. See them at the buffets of all those official fêtes of which they form the finest ornament. It is a pleasure to see them, especially when you know that their appetite is not destructive of sentiment.” Now, however, for a compliment which is absolutely sincere. “We venture to say that English society in Paris has exercised a salutary influence on French society, and that it has introduced cordiality into intimate relationships. The handshake of the English lady, for instance, has long shocked, and still shocks our purists. Their fault is that they believe an amiable woman must be too accessible, and that a certain liberty of manners implies an equal liberty of conduct. With such ideas as these they bring up daughters who, having given the tips of their fingers, imagine that they have given everything and have no longer anything to protect; whereas a pretty little English girl who gives her hand gives nothing else, and knows how to defend the rest.”

Another trait of the English character is, we are assured, an “interest in religious questions.” English ladies are “all more or less theologians – veritable doctors in petticoats. English girls will hold forth to you on the subject of grace and free will. You will meet them at church, listening to sermons and going through services, and even taking notes. But what does that matter, since it does not prevent them from serving out the tea admirably, from rearing their children later on, and from being model housewives and model mothers? If our Frenchwomen cry ‘Fie’ upon the blue-stocking, that is perhaps because it is too green; a little theology would not hurt them. It is at church that you get the most comprehensive view of English society in Paris. On Sunday you have only to visit the Faubourg St. – Honoré towards two o’clock; you will encounter quite a procession of English men and women coming from the Rue d’Agnesseau, with their prayer-books and their Sunday demeanour. I say the church, but I ought to say the churches; for the English have nowadays in Paris almost as many chapels as religions. There is the Embassy chapel for Anglicans of the established religion, an English episcopal chapel in the Rue Bayard, another English chapel in the Rue Royale, a Scotch Presbyterian chapel and two English Methodist places of worship in the Rue Roquepine, independently of American chapels. This is not to say that the English observe Sunday in Paris as strictly as they are obliged to do in their own country. Respect for the Sabbath is an observance which they know very well how to dispense with amongst foreigners. On Sunday, from time to time, you see some individual in black attire, and invariably adorned with an umbrella, who, seated on one of the seats in a public garden, pretends to ignore a little pamphlet which is intended to be picked up by the first pedestrian who passes, and which turns out to be a dissertation on the observance of the Sabbath. There are still, perhaps, a few hotels specially designed for English people, where the Bible Society causes to be placed in every bedroom a copy of the Scriptures bearing its own stamp. This ardour of propagandism has begun, however, to abate, and the English in general are by no means the last to take advantage of the Paris Sunday. Anyone who has seen the Sabbath of London must feel the difference. Every Frenchman who has just missed dying, not only of ennui, but of hunger and thirst, during the hours of service in England – hearing his footsteps resound in the desolate streets – will understand the solace experienced by an Englishman on finding that the coast is clear for him at Paris and Versailles. There are, it is true, a certain number of English families who do not receive on Saturday evening because the festivity or the dancing might encroach upon the Sabbath; but what is a sin on English territory is not so on French territory, and the English do not scruple to pass midnight in a Parisian drawing-room.”

This drolly severe but, from a literary point of view, admirable writer seems to think that an Englishman is a sort of fox-terrier, or mastiff, which having been chained up for a length of time becomes, when you let him loose, extremely rampant and ill-conducted. “There are so many things the English would not do at home, that they do without scruple amongst foreigners. Once abroad they indemnify themselves for their national reserve; it is on the foreigner that they revenge themselves for the shackles of their own etiquette and social laws. In crossing the Channel they pitch their solemn vestments into the sea. In London they will not go to the opera dressed in anything but black; here they go in a tweed coat and a slouch hat.” After this Monsieur Lemoinne seems very much upset by the moustaches which Englishmen display as they promenade in the Boulevards. There was a time, he assures us, when a Frenchman crossing the Channel and wishing to have a fashionable air was obliged to sacrifice his moustache – a time when English caricaturists never represented a Frenchman without a pair of long, ill-combed moustaches. To-day the thing is reversed. It is the Englishman who wears this grotesque appendage which proclaims his nationality from afar. Thus moustached, the Englishman goes to Paris – so M. Lemoinne evidently thinks – to have his full fling. “Amongst us,” he says, “a grave man may occasionally dress up to go to a ball, wear fancy costume, or take part in a quadrille, and next morning resume his function as state councillor or referendary. So the Englishman precipitates himself into the French world as into a great masked ball, puts on a false nose, dances at Paris extravagant steps which he calls French dances, cuts capers, sups and gets maudlin, and when he has finished his French tour, tranquilly resumes his duties as member of parliament or no matter what.”

To English ladies M. Lemoinne is a good deal more gallant. He is obliged to point out that they over-dress and stride along the Boulevards like dismounted dragoons. “Yet, make no mistake,” he adds. “In that still crude block there are all the elements of a superb work of art. What fine construction, what solid layers, what grand architecture! Wait till art has put her hand to these materials; wait till the Englishwoman has learned how to walk, carry herself, and dress, and until, to her native beauty, she has added acquired grace – then you will have the finest type of creation and of civilisation. The native Englishwoman who has become a naturalised Parisian is perfection.”

In spite of the modified tribute which this writer pays to Englishwomen, it may be said that he has handled our nation very roughly. In the present day England and France would no longer, in a European war, fight side by side as they did in the Crimea; and a little unconscious Anglophobia tinctures the writings even of such a skilful and impartial essayist as M. Lemoinne. The Americans in Paris are regarded, by French writers generally, from a much more favourable point of view. Let us, in the first place, hear what M. André Léo has to say on this subject. “If you walk through the Champs Élysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de l’Étoile, or through the avenues which converge there, from the direction of the Madeleine, in the Quartier St. – Honoré towards the Parc Monceaux, you will frequently meet women richly adorned, men with light-coloured beards, tranquil and placid; young women of lively and decided mien, pretty children with curly hair, whose physiognomy is at once full of candour and of assurance. All these individuals, isolated or grouped, offer you pretty nearly the same type; a countenance which is strong in comparison with the small, piercing grey eyes, and flexible features, often agreeable, and sometimes beautiful… All nationalities, indeed, meet and knock against each other in this new quarter with its fine avenues and its sylvan groves. But there is an evident predominance of English and American language and customs, as appears from the signs over the chemists’ shops, the stores, the boarding-houses, and the special pastry-cooks, where cakes, pies, and puddings are displayed in the window. Yet although in this region a unity of language and conformity of habits unite the English and the Americans, the two societies intermix very little. Anglophobia, as a national and popular sentiment, is perhaps more ardent in the United States than amongst us.”

In a general way the resident American population of Paris consists of the Diplomatic body, bankers, families who have come for the education of their children, and artists eager to study the masterpieces of the Parisian galleries. The American nation is accused of being devoid of artistic sentiment; but M. André Léo stoutly protests that “such a criticism passed upon a new people, who have been obliged to occupy themselves before everything with work and industry, is too hasty. American artists already exist; and already their efforts and their ambitions foretell the development of that noble and precious human faculty the germ of which exists in every people and every man, but which necessitates a certain leisure and a certain mental education.”

Apart from the American residing in Paris, and the American who, binding himself to the nation by more than lengthened residence, has married into some French family – an occurrence by no means rare – there is the flying American visitor to Paris, whose headquarters are the Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Italiens. This establishment, by its central position, its interior arrangements, its luxury and its comfort, enjoys an enormous reputation on the other side of the Atlantic. The Yankee leaves New York for the Grand Hotel. It is not till he passes its threshold that he feels himself on terra firma again; it is here that he finds out where he is and gets his information. If his means or his projects permit it, he installs himself at this hotel for three or four months; if not, he goes on to some other hotel or boarding-house, or else rents an apartment to live by himself. If you enter the courtyard of the Grand Hotel, ascend the portico steps, and, making your way into the stately readingroom, look out of the window for five minutes, you will see that the innumerable vehicles which every few seconds stop at the hotel deposit ten Americans to one Englishman.

From this centre the tourist easily gets to all those points of the city to which necessity or curiosity impels him. The first visit he pays is probably to his banker – to Bowles and Devritt, perhaps, in the Rue de la Paix, or to Norton’s in the Rue Auber. Once he banked with the firm of Rothschild, but now no longer. During the American war M. de Rothschild’s attitude in reference to the planters was by no means neutral, and this political indiscretion has cost him his American clients.

When the New York party has cashed its cheque at the American bank – which is quite a rendezvous for trans-Atlantics and at which all the American newspapers can be seen – the feminine element hastens to visit all the most fashionable shops. The ladies are eager to purchase, at comparatively low prices, those Parisian costumes which their own native custom-house raises to prices so exorbitant. Dressed ere long in the richest and newest fashions, they step with their male companions into a carriage and drive to the Bois de Boulogne; then they go to the opera, to spectacles of every kind, and to the Legation. If there happens to be a sovereign on the throne, they put their names down for presentation at the Tuileries and order a court costume. For it must be confessed that the Americans are fond of the pomps of this world, and that, Republicans as they profess to be, they have no prejudice against kings and princes outside their own country. The monarchs of other nations neither shock nor terrify them. And the American tourist, apart from the question of political sentiment, likes to see everything and do everything before he recrosses the Atlantic. If an American family visits a land where it is the fashion to be presented at court, they will feel humiliated and ashamed should they have to confess afterwards to their compatriots that they missed the presentation.

Under the last Empire the American visitors to Paris showed an eagerness for court-presentations which would have entitled them to a place in Thackeray’s Book of Snobs – which, nevertheless, directly or indirectly, embraces pretty nearly the whole human species. But there were a certain number of Americans then in France who got acclimatised to the splendours of the court and became habitual guests at imperial residences. The drawing-room of the United States minister is naturally the centre of meeting for American society in Paris. “The aspect and tone of these assemblies,” says a French writer, “is at once less solemn and colder than our French social gatherings. The necessity of being previously presented exists in this democratic society just as it does in England, though on the other hand American conversation and behaviour bear a natural impress of indifference and freedom, not even to the exclusion, perhaps, of a little coarseness.”

Curiously enough, the Americans, although they despise or affect to despise social and genealogical distinctions in their own country, turn to some extent into aristocrats during the voyage across the Atlantic to Europe. Frenchmen have noticed that if you wish to be presented to their minister or at one of their drawing-rooms in Paris, you must never forget your ancestry. “A certain author of my acquaintance,” says André Léo, “a man of genuine fame, was sufficiently astonished, on reading his American letter of introduction, to find that it recommended him much less on his own account than on that of his grandfather. This is not an isolated case; it results from a law much more human than national, which consists in particularly prizing what one does not possess. The Americans, a people without ancestors, naturally hold race distinctions in high esteem. They boast, one against the other, of belonging to the first founders of the colonies, and even in their own country these pretensions sometimes provoke laughter… As to nobilary titles, if you possess any, be particularly careful to let them be known, and rest assured that when once they have been declared the Americans will not fail to apply them to you. These titles will win for you sweet glances, and should you be contemplating marriage will turn the scale in your favour with those blonde beauties who, for the most part, have Californian dowries; for these Republican young women think that a ducal coronet sits marvellously well on blonde hair, and that the title of Countess is the finishing ornament required by an elegant lady. Hence it is that at Paris numerous alliances are contracted between the France of other days and the America of to-day.”

In the United States, so soon as a merchant has done some great stroke of business, or has pierced a big vein of ore in his mine, or has seen the petroleum spouting up on his land too fast for an adequate supply of barrels, his daughters are consumed with a desire to visit Europe. They sail thither, accompanied by the father, who pretends to despise the Continent, but who, inwardly, is scarcely less curious to explore it than his fair-haired children. And as a matter of fact the Americans may well be desirous to see that region of the world whence they derive everything but their liberty and their wealth. For their religion, their language, their literature, their arts and sciences, their memories, and the very blood which courses in their veins, they are indebted to Europe. In America, although an enormous number of books and newspapers are published, the English and French classics, not to mention the best English and French modern authors, form the foundation of every good library, and even the native writers fashion themselves after European models.

As regards the American families residing in Paris for the education of their children, it is music and the French language which they have chiefly in view. Some years ago M. André Léo observed that young American girls in Paris received a much severer education than their brothers. The instruction of the daughters “is, or appears, very complex; that of the sons much less so, for as a rule, having their own fortune to make, they early precipitate themselves into commercial life. But the young girl, whether intended for an instructress or working merely for the development and adornment of her person, devotes herself to studies which amongst us would pass for pedantic. Some of them learn Latin, algebra, geometry, and even attack without alarm more special sciences. Yet look at them and be reassured. The care of their toilette has not suffered from all this, and the accusations of ungracefulness cast against learned women fall before the display of their luxurious frivolity. See if the waves of silk, of muslin, of lace, which surround them are less abundant on that account; if the details of their exterior show a lesser degree of feminine art, if the whole has a lesser freshness.” This writer proceeds to insist on the superiority of the American woman over her male compatriot. The explanation is, according to him, that at fourteen years of age the American boy shuts up his books to enter the office of his father or some other merchant, and consecrates his whole intelligence to commercial speculations; whereas the young girl pursues her studies, strengthens them sometimes by teaching, and, spinster or wife, has always abundant leisure for mental exercise. The one point on which, in M. André’s view, the studious American woman exposes herself to reproach, is that hitherto she has not used her intellectual superiority for the furtherance of her own dignity and independence.

That she is nevertheless a powerful social factor, M. André himself admits, though he attributes this less to her activity than to her fascinations as a beauty in repose. “The first duty and the first pride of an American husband is” he says, “to ensure the idleness of his wife and provide for the expenses of her toilette.” There are in the United States many women-workers, whether as preceptresses or clerks in the postal, telegraphic, or even ministerial offices. These are nearly all spinsters – the single state being frequent in New England, which vies with the Mother Country for the supremacy of the feminine population – and they give in their resignation when they get married. “I will not let my wife work,” such is the husband’s proud determination. Here, however, one imperative reason why women must resign their employment on marriage is overlooked. In London the numberless women engaged in the post and telegraph offices are required by the authorities to abdicate their posts on becoming wives, simply because they would obviously be unable to work their nine hours a day at a desk or counter if they had absorbing domestic duties to attend to and children to rear.

To Englishmen, who are already acquainted with their Transatlantic brethren, a French view of the American in Paris would be more instructive than an English one. What particularly strikes Parisians is the freedom of American girls as contrasted with the restraint of unmarried young women in France, whose training is notoriously very much that of a convent. “American manners,” the French observe, “grant to girls entire liberty. They are the guardians of their own virtue and their own interests, and they preserve these things right well. Instructed in the dangers of life, they are capable of braving them; though it must be owned that their task is easy on account of the respect which, throughout their country, is shown to them by men. A girl can travel the length and breadth of the territory of the Union without having to fear dishonourable pursuits or the slightest unpleasantness. Therefore the American girl utterly differs from ours by her aspect alone.” Her costume is more unstudied, and the mouse-like timidity of the young Frenchwoman is replaced in her by a graceful carelessness.

To Americans, as M. André justly says, Paris must seem “a world upside down. American mothers complain greatly of the little security and respect shown to women in this capital, of the gallantry of the French and the indulgence of public opinion in flagrant cases. They are right;” and he thinks that it is because French girls are too severely disciplined, too much caged up, that there is less reverence between the two sexes in France than in America. “True chastity,” he maintains, “has liberty for her sister.”

American girls staying in Paris are astonished and indignant at the close surveillance to which unmarried young Frenchwomen are subjected, although they themselves frequently sacrifice to opinion in the matter of not appearing out of doors unaccompanied by a maid. M. André regrets this on account of the countenance it gives to a prudish system, which he is the last to admire in his own countrywomen. “O young ladies,” he exclaims, “born on a soil where monarchical influences have never flourished, why do you submit to this shameful spy system? Would it not be better if you openly showed your disdain for it, and taught our women the manners of liberty? Paris, after all, is not a forest, and a mere glance, a shrug of the shoulders, or silence itself, will suffice to shame away a leering lounger or an impertinent snob. Is it true, then, that in default of other forms of tyranny, respect for opinion, whatever that opinion be, is a yoke in America?”