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

Let us hope, in conclusion, that the American girl does not “let herself go,” on her return from straitlaced Paris to the freedom of New York, at all events to such an extent as suggested by this writer, who assures us that, having once set foot again on native soil, she flirts furiously.

CHAPTER III.

MORE PARISIAN TYPES

The Spy – Under Sartines and Berryer – Fouché – Delavau – The Present System – The Écuyère – The Circus in Paris

TO return, however, to native Parisian types. Mention has already been made of the French spy, but he is such an important and historical character that it is impossible to dismiss him in a few words.

The police, already strongly organised under Louis XIV., resorted largely to espionage; but in Louis XV.’s reign the famous Lieutenant of Police, de Sartines, fashioned the spy system into a civil institution, and gave it a prodigious development. Spies were now employed to follow the Court or to watch the doings of distinguished foreigners who had recently arrived in the capital. Then there were domestic spies, the most terrible of all, to judge by the following observations extracted from a report attributed to Louis XV.’s lieutenant. “The ‘family,’ amongst us, lives under the protection of a reputation for virtue which cannot impose on the magistracy; the family is a repertory of crimes, an arsenal of infamies. The hypocrisy of the false caresses which are lavished in it must be apparent to all but fools. In a family of twenty persons the police ought to place forty spies.” After Sartines, Lieutenant Berryer by no means allowed the spy service to deteriorate. He employed convicts as spies, one of the conditions of their employment being that on the slightest failure in the vile duties they had to perform, they should be restored to prison. The services, too, of coachmen, landladies, lodgers, were called into requisition. Even domestic servants were sometimes Berryer’s agents, and many a mysterious lettre-de-cachet was issued on the strength of some word uttered carelessly within the hearing of a lady’s-maid or valet-de-chambre.

Stories are even told of men so innocent that they acted as spies without being aware of it. Such a one was Michel-Perrin, of Mme. de Bawr’s tale, which, in its dramatic form, gave Bouffé one of his best parts. The simple-minded man had in his youth, when he was a student of theology, known Fouché, afterwards to become Napoleon’s Minister of Police. In due time Michel-Perrin took orders, and was doing duty in a little village when, under the Revolution, public worship was abolished. Calling upon Fouché to ask his old friend for some suitable employment, he can obtain nothing until, moved by the urgency of his solicitations, the Police Minister suggests to him, with so much delicacy that his true meaning remains unperceived, that he shall walk about the public places, go into cafés and restaurants, and frequent all kinds of resorts where people congregate, and that he shall then return to Fouché with an account of anything remarkable he may have seen or heard. This seems to the delighted Michel-Perrin mere child’s play, and he regards it as little more than a pretext on the part of the generous minister for handing him every evening a gold piece. When, however, the unconscious spy finds one day that he has revealed a political conspiracy, and jeopardised the lives of many, perhaps innocent men, he suddenly awakens to a sense of what he has been doing, and in horror throws up his employment. Fouché, it seems, was pained to have humiliated the unoffending priest, and, public worship being just at that time restored, he used his influence with Napoleon to obtain the ingenuous man’s re-appointment as village curé.

Under the Revolution the spy was replaced by the official denunciator, an agent no less formidable. At length came the Empire, and then Fouché invested espionage with the importance of a science. In 1812 the “brigade of safety” appeared, which was first composed of four agents, but which, in 1823 and 1824, always under the direction of the famous Vidocq, numbered close upon thirty. Delavau, the prefect of police, had permitted him to establish, on the public road, a game known as “troll-madam”; and this game, an excellent trap for boobies and passers-by whose slightest words and actions were keenly watched by Vidocq’s hounds, produced, from the 20th of July to the 4th of August, 1823, a net profit of 4,364 francs. This sum was added to the subvention already granted to the spy department.

The Prefect Delavau returned to the method of Lieutenant Berryer in employing as spies convicts, whom he threw back into prison for the slightest fault. One of his predecessors, Baron Pasquier, had endeavoured, like Berryer, to enlist domestic servants into the secret police force; and, with this object, Delavau renewed an old ordinance, calling upon them to get their names noted in the books of the prefecture every time they entered a situation or left one. The domestics, however, perceived the motive of Delavau’s measure, and were so unanimous in withholding their names from the books in question, that all idea of family espionage, on which much value had been set, was soon to be abandoned. Delavau drew even more largely upon the criminal class for his myrmidons than Pasquier had done, and in his day no public gathering took place at which some felon, released for the purpose from gaol, was not lurking about for an ill-sounding word or a suspicious gesture. Such agents as these worked with the industry of bloodhounds. “Between the populace and the subalterns of the police,” says the historian Peuchet, “there is a continual war; the latter are ill-bred dogs who seize every opportunity for applying their fangs. The police will never inspire respect for order so long as part of its force consists of released gaol-birds who owe a grudge to the whole of the people. When these two elements are in contact there is inevitably a fermentation.” The justice of these remarks was recognised by M. Delavau’s successor, M. de Belleyme, whose first care was to dismiss and even restore to their respective prisons this army of felon-spies. To-day, although he has not risen much in public estimation, the spy of the police-force is a citizen in every sense of the word, enjoying all the rights of a Frenchman, and not obtaining his commission from the prefecture until after his past life and his moral character have stood the test of a keen investigation. Thus espionage has been purified as far as that is possible; but whether the system is not in itself essentially immoral, is a question which has exercised the minds even of such writers as Montesquieu. “Espionage,” he says, “is never tolerable; if it were so it would be practised by honest men; but the necessary infamy of the person indicates the infamy of the thing.” This is in effect another version of the famous utterance of Argenson, who, reproached with employing as spies none but rogues and villains, exclaimed: “Find me honest men who will do this work.” The present prefecture of police believes it has found such men, and the discovery, if it has really been made, is a fortunate one indeed.

Another variety of police spy to be met with in Paris is the officious volunteer spy. He may belong to the lower or to the higher ranks of society. He takes upon himself to observe and to denounce, without instructions, and solely in the hope of a pecuniary recompense. This variety is probably the most contemptible and the vilest. It should be mentioned, too, that the French capital swarms with invisible and unrecognisable spies, disguised, as they sometimes are, beneath an appearance of luxury or magnificence. This or that personage passes for a member of the diplomatic service. He is an admired figure in fashionable drawing-rooms, and while affecting to converse on the European situation, exercises the ear of a fox terrier and the eye of a hawk. Then, of course, there is the military spy, who is superior to the civil variety inasmuch as whilst the latter, in case of recognition, only incurs a more or less disagreeable misadventure, the former is liable to be shot. The military spy, therefore, may have all the heroism of the professed soldier.

The civil spy system was naturally developed to an extraordinary degree by the subtle Richelieu. His secret agent took as many shapes as Proteus. Now it was a brave old seigneur, infirm and professedly deaf, in whose presence people would not hesitate to speak out and say everything, but who recovered his vigour and his legs in order to go and report to the cardinal a conversation of which he had not missed one detail. Now it was a woman, who, having insinuated herself into the intimate friendship of some young and brilliant courtier, wrested from him a dangerous and terrible secret. But it was not only throughout the length and breadth of France that Richelieu had spies; numbers of them were in his pay abroad, all over the Continent indeed, regularly reporting political intrigues, and furnishing clandestine copies of secret treaties.

Enough, however, of the spy; let it simply be added that he has been introduced into two novels by Balzac, into one by Hugo, and into two by Alexandre Dumas, who has likewise made him figure in a couple of plays.

Let us pass from the most slinking and distasteful Paris character to the most open and, as many consider, the most charming one – from the “espion,” that is to say, to the “écuyère.”

At Paris the circus-woman is the object of a much higher admiration than in London. Théophile Gautier, in his dramatic feuilletons, has frequently shown that he preferred the equestrian fairy of the circus to the sylph who dances at the opera. He goes into ecstasies over her agility, vigour, and courage, and is displeased with nothing but the drapery in which her lower limbs are enveloped, holding that, just as the most virtuous fashionable woman or actress takes care to exhibit her bare arms if they are beautiful, so the “écuyère” of the circus should be allowed to display the full symmetry and grace of her legs. The “écuyère” whom Balzac brings on the scene in his Fausse Maîtresse, Malaga by name, is an excellent type of the French circus-woman, who is nearly always without relatives, sometimes a foundling, sometimes a stolen child, and who, coming one knows not whence, goes, the idol of a day, one knows not where. “At the fair,” says the greatest of French novelists – or rather, one of his characters – “this delicious Columbine used to carry chairs on the tip of her nose – the prettiest little Greek nose I ever saw. Malaga, madame, is skill personified. Of Herculean strength, she only requires her tiny fist or diminutive foot to rid herself of three or four men. She is, in fact, the goddess of gymnastics. Careless as a gipsy, she says everything that enters her head; she thinks as much of the future as you do of the halfpence you throw to beggars, and sometimes sublime things escape from her. No one could ever persuade her that an old diplomatist is a beautiful youth; a million could not change her opinion. Her love is, for whoever inspires it, a perpetual flattery. Endowed as she is with really insolent health, her teeth are thirty-two exquisite pearls encased in coral.”

The performances of the Paris circus-woman too closely resemble those of her sister in London to need description. The characters, however, of the two equestrians are not identical, and that of the écuyère can scarcely be represented better than in the words of a vivacious French writer, who says: “You can easily imagine what must be, not the future (alas! has she one?), but the present of this poor, intrepid, careless creature. After being exposed twenty times a day to the risk of breaking her jaw, she has hardly earned her food; and every morning she has to wash, stretch, and otherwise renovate the costume in which she is to dazzle her spectators at night… Some of these circus-women marry a Hercules or a professional fool; at the third or fourth child Mme. Hercules or Mme. Fool takes her mare by the head, kisses her on the nose, and bids a weeping adieu to the brave, affectionate beast, the only friend who has never beaten her. It is done: the whole family – husband, wife and children, go forth to try their luck as strolling players. Their theatre is the fair in summer and the street in winter. Hercules will lift, at arm’s length, enormous weights, and the children will form the living column, or dance on the rope, while the mother, as short-skirted as ever, but now plump enough to burst her vestments, will contribute some kind of music or exhort the outside public to enter the show.” She frequently fills up her intervals with fortune-telling; informs young women whether they will be married the same year, and whether the visionary swain is fair or dark; lets married men know if their wives are faithful, and wives if their husbands are engaged in amours. Nurse-maids learn from her that in the mounted gendarmerie or the cuirassiers there is a hero of six-feet-six, only awaiting an opportunity of declaring his passion.

This, however, is a sketch of the more fortunate of the strolling circus artists. Occasionally the husband breaks a limb, or kills himself in attempting some daring feat; in that case his family is often reduced to beggary or something worse.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOMESTIC

The French Servant, as described by Léon Gozlan and by Mercier – The Cook and the Cordon Bleu – The Valet

IT has already been seen that domestics have at different periods been employed in Paris as spies. – According to Léon Gozlan, writing of his own period, “the police of Paris is almost entirely occupied with the misdeeds of domestics. Nearly all domestics are thieves or spies, and they get more so as they grow older. The most honest amongst them steals at least ten sous a day from his master.” It is to be hoped that if they steal in this amusingly regular fashion, they at least observe the kind of morality which has been noticed in some of the inferior state officials of Russia. One of these complained that a colleague of his was dishonest and helped himself to things which belonged to the State. “But you do the same thing yourself,” suggested a friend. “True,” was the reply; “but this fellow steals too much for his place.”

Let us, however, turning from drollery and from Léon Gozlan – who can hardly have been quite serious – glance at the household servant of Paris as a factor in the Parisian community. The French domestic, whether valet, lackey, or lady’s-maid, is more important and influential than the domestic of England. It is true that occasionally in an English house some servant practically rules the family, and that the relationship between employer and employed becomes so reversed that the mistress is afraid to ring her drawing-room bell. As a rule, however, in England the domestic is a nonentity. The man-servant or maid-servant who waits at an English table is absolutely ignored, and is not even supposed to understand the conversation which accompanies dinner, nor to laugh at jokes indulged in by the host or his guests. An English servant nowadays who shook with laughter at what he overheard in the dining-room, like black Sambo at Mr. Sedley’s, would be cautioned if not cashiered. The French domestic is a personage and a power. The “trade of lackey,” according to Fabrice, in “Gil Blas,” requires a man of superior intellect. The true lackey “does not go through his duties like a ninny; he enters a house to command rather than to serve. He begins by studying his master: he notes his defects, gains his confidence, and ultimately leads him by the nose… If a master has vices, the superior genius who waits upon him flatters them, and often indeed turns them to his own advantage.” Awaiting the day when he shall himself be great, the liveried aspirant takes the name of his master when he is with other lackeys, adopts his manners and apes his gestures; he carries a gold watch and wears lace; he is impertinent and foppish. “Bon chien se forme sur maître,” says the French proverb, and the Parisian domestic religiously takes after his master, even though, as far as intrinsic resemblance goes, he might simply be an ape in his master’s clothes.

That vanity characterises French servants is undeniable. Against the charge of cupidity, however, which is brought against them, even by French writers, must be set off one or two famous instances in which valets have supported their ruined masters for ten or twenty years out of their own savings. Mercier, all the same, represents the Paris domestic as hardly less a rogue than does Léon Gozlan. “Out of ten servants,” he assures us, “four are thieves.” Another native writer, while not undertaking to combat this proposition, finds a defence for the accused domestics. “If they are thus, who,” he asks, “has perverted them? Who, either by example or complicity, has made them thieves and spies? Every year is committed, to the prejudice of the country and of agriculture, an abominable crime, namely, the stealing of individuals, strong and useful, snatched at once from the sunlight and from simplicity of manners, to be degraded, and sullied with a livery; to have imposed upon them their master’s vices and follies, and to be turned into idlers and good-for-nothings, flatterers and procurers.”

Paul Louis Courier looked forward to the time when domestic servitude would be replaced by household service rendered freely, as if in virtue of a contract between man and man; and in Paris, as in other capitals, this state of things seems to be fast approaching, not as the result of any benignant feeling on the part of the rich towards the poor, but because, with the spread of education and of democratic ideas, a disinclination to remain constantly at the orders of another person is gradually extending. Already servants demand a greater number of holidays than in ancient times; and there are many who, like the London charwoman and the “laundress” of the Inns of Court, are ready to give their services during the day-time, and even until a late hour in the evening, while reserving to themselves the right of returning, after their labours, to their own domicile.

There is much to be said, no doubt, on the other side. If there are masters and mistresses without consideration for their servants, there are servants who, having kind masters and mistresses, show themselves without gratitude. But we are dealing specially with French servants, who, apart from all question of good conduct or bad, enjoy certain privileges not formally recognised as lawfully belonging to servants in England. The bonne, for instance, or the cook, who goes to market to purchase provisions considers herself entitled to “make the handle of the basket dance” – “fair danser l’anse du panier” – to appropriate, that is to say, a portion of the things she has bought, or of the money she has nominally spent, to her own uses. In like manner the house-porter, or “concierge,” takes for himself, as a matter of course, so many logs out of every basket of wood ordered by the different tenants, of whom there are often some half-dozen in the same house. In France, as in other countries, a valet will sometimes wear his master’s clothes, and the Parisian lady’s-maid asserts and enforces, more perhaps than in any other capital, her claims to her mistress’s cast-off apparel.

The cook – both the “cuisinier” and the “cuisiniêre” – has already been dealt with in a special chapter. It may here, however, be remarked, that though the best cooks, and certainly the most expensive ones, are in France, as in other countries, men, the female cook is far indeed from being held in disesteem. The “cordon bleu,” or blue ribbon, was a distinction conferred upon the female, not upon the male cook; and a woman who cooks particularly well is called to this day a “cordon bleu.” Such a woman was in the service for many years of the well-known “bourgeois de Paris,” as Dr. Véron loved to describe himself.

If every French servant looks for some particular perquisite, they all expect a gratuity at the New Year. One of the greatest curses and greatest blessings which rest upon Paris is the custom of presenting New Year’s gifts. The word “étrenne” is at once a terror and a joy to Parisians, according as they belong to the class who give or the class who receive. In London no gentleman would venture to omit at Christmas-time to “tip” any one of the underlings who had ever cleaned his boots, lifted his portmanteau, or twisted the ends of his moustache. But in Paris, if a gentleman failed at the new year to present “étrennes” to his boot-black, his messenger, or his valet, derision and infamy would, according to a French writer, pursue him, not merely throughout this life, but even beyond the tomb.

Cardinal Dubois, who had a reputation for niggardliness, used to give his servants their “étrennes” in a manner which they could hardly have relished. His major-domo came to him one New Year’s Day to demand the annual gratuity. “Étrennes!” exclaimed the cardinal; “yes, I will give you your étrennes. You may keep everything you have stolen from me during the last twelvemonth.”

Let us, before quitting the subject of the Parisian domestic, relate an anecdote or two. “When I come home,” said a master to his servant, “I often find you asleep.” “That, sir,” replied the man, “is because I don’t like to remain doing nothing.”

A nobleman paid a visit to Fontenelle one day, and found him in a very bad humour. “What is the matter with you?” he asked. “The matter?” replied Fontenelle; “I have a valet who serves me as badly as if I had twenty.”

The Abbé de Voisenon preserved his gay humour to his very last gasp. Just before his death he caused the leaden coffin which he had ordered beforehand to be brought to his bedside. “There,” said he, “is my last overcoat.” Then, turning towards one of his servants of whom he had had reason to complain, he added, “I hope you will not wish to steal that too.”

A certain high official of Paris lived in the country, and, thanks to railway facilities, went home every evening to dine. On one occasion he arrived earlier than usual, and going into his kitchen found the cook in a decidedly unequivocal position, with a bottle in his hand, three-fourths of whose contents had already found their way into his stomach. “Ah, my fine fellow,” exclaimed the master, “I have caught you drinking my wine.” “It is your own fault, sir,” was the reply. “You were not due till four o’clock, and it is now hardly three.”

Our gallery of Paris types would scarcely be complete without a sketch of a very familiar personage who, though not peculiar to Paris, abounds there more than in other capitals. This is the “rentier,” the man of “small, independent means.” According to the etymology of the word, anyone should be called a rentier who lives on his “rentes” – the income, that is to say, derived from the letting of houses or farms; or the interest of money invested in the Funds. In practice, however, the name is given exclusively to the man who lives on the interest of money which he has invested in government securities. He has been described as the corresponding type, in English society, to the man retired from business. He lives modestly in the quarter of the Marais or of the Batignolles, as in England he might live at Clapham or Brixton, at Holloway, or Camden Town; and he passes a considerable portion of his time in some favourite café, reading a newspaper of moderate-liberal politics, or playing at dominoes. Condemned to economy, sometimes of the most parsimonious kind, he counts every lump of sugar brought to him by the waiter, and shows a great predilection for halfpenny rolls. In politics, without being an aristocrat, he is something of a conservative; and, while stickling for his rights, hates revolutions as sure to cause perturbations in the securities of the state.

It was doubtless a rentier from whose pocket the thief in Lord Lytton’s “Pelham” extracted, in a Paris café, a tiny packet which he had seen the owner put carefully away in his coat-tail pocket, and which, on being adroitly stolen and curiously examined, was found to contain, not a precious stone, but a lump of sugar. In the rentier’s defence it may be mentioned that during the great Napoleonic war, when a universal blockade had been declared against English exports, and when colonial produce was everywhere excluded from the ports of France, the price of sugar rose to such a height as to render this luxury difficult for persons of straitened means to indulge in.

The existence of such a number of rentiers in Paris goes far to demonstrate the prudence of the ordinary Frenchman. An Englishman with a few thousand pounds in his possession would, as a rule, speculate with it, instead of burying it in the Funds. The speculation would furnish him with active employment, whereas the permanent investment preferred by the average Frenchman involves an idle and somewhat ignoble life.