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

CHAPTER V.

PARISIAN CHARACTERISTICS

Parisian Characteristics – Gaiety, Flippancy, Wit – A String of Favourite Anecdotes

IN our last few chapters we have been glancing about Paris for different types of character. These are sufficiently varied even where they are not absolutely dissimilar from each other. But there is one characteristic which runs through the whole of them; the Parisian, be he great or small, rich or poor, never loses his national gaiety. He laughs through his tears and sometimes jests with his last breath.

This gaiety finds expression in manifold ways, and shows itself above all in innumerable anecdotes. If, as Dr. Johnson maintained, the dullest book is worth wading through if only it contains a couple of good anecdotes, no apology need be made for presenting in this chapter a few of those “bonnes histoires” in which Parisians delight, and which so often illustrate their character.

Let us begin with one which is very French and particularly Parisian. A poverty-stricken author, awaking suddenly at midnight, discerned in his garret a burglar feeling in his empty cash-box. The author burst into a laugh. The burglar, annoyed to find himself an object of ridicule, inquired what the author could find so particularly amusing. “A thousand pardons,” was the polite reply, “but I could not help smiling to see you searching in the dark for what I shall be unable to find in the daylight.”

A Parisian had been accustomed for twenty years to pass his evenings at the house of a certain Mme. R – . He lost his wife, and everyone expected he would marry the lady whom he had so assiduously visited. When however, his friends urged him to do so, he refused, saying, “I should no longer know where to pass my evenings.”

A general who had been beaten in Germany and in Italy perceived one day, hanging over his door, a drum inscribed with this device: “I am beaten on both sides.”

The Regent of Orleans wished to go to a masked ball without being recognised. “I know how to manage it,” said the Abbé Dubois. During the ball he set the Regent on his guard against disclosing his identity, by dint of sundry admonitory kicks. The victim, finding the clerical foot by no means a light one, whispered, “My dear Abbé, you disguise me too much.”

A French soldier, not knowing how otherwise to pass his time, entered the fashionable church of Saint-Roch. When the woman who receives money for the use of chairs approached him and asked for five sous, “Five sous?” he exclaimed. “If I had five sous I should not be here.”

A lady had a spoilt child, whose praises she was never tired of sounding. “Your child is delightful,” said a visitor. “At what time does he go to bed?”

Someone, in presence of the Abbé Trublet, was praising one day the soft seductive manners of Mme. de Tencin, who was fascinating but without principle. “Yes,” said the abbé, “if she wished to poison you she would use the sweetest poison she could find.”

A Paris cabdriver, much vexed by the success of the omnibus, then just introduced, determined to start an opposition. He proposed to take passengers at four sous a head, and put this inscription outside his vehicle: “Fiacribus at four sous.”

A Parisian boy was receiving a long lecture from his father on the subject of his inattention, no matter what good advice might be given to him. The boy lowered his head and seemed to be earnestly engaged in listening to his parent’s observations. Suddenly, however, he exclaimed, “Ninety-nine – one hundred! That is the hundredth ant, father, that has gone into that little hole since you have been talking to me.”

A Parisian, who could not brook contradiction, fought fourteen duels by way of maintaining his opinion that Dante was a greater poet than Petrarch. When dying from the effects of a wound received in his last encounter, he admitted to a friend that he had never read a line of either poet.

A Parisian candidate for the degree of bachelor in letters was being examined in history. He gave satisfactory answers to every question until at last he was asked when Charlemagne lived. “Eight centuries before Christ,” he replied. “You mean after Christ?” said the questioner with a smile. “I am sorry to disagree with the board of examiners,” answered the young man with some modesty, “but I maintain my opinion that Charlemagne must have lived eight centuries before Christ.” This determined student had, as a matter of course, to be plucked.

Two daughters of Paris, at the bedside of their dying father, who had gained millions by usury, were shocked to hear the priest, who had just received his confession, enjoin restitution as the only condition on which he could possibly be saved. “For pity’s sake, father,” said the girls, when the priest had left the room, “do nothing of the kind. You will suffer for a short time, but after the first quarter of an hour you will be like a fish in water.”

An impressionable Paris banker, the owner of immense riches, died of grief on hearing that he had lost everything in the world except 100,000 francs. His pauper brother, on inheriting the sum, died of joy.

A Parisian husband, to whom his wife rendered but scant obedience, asked her one day, when she was leaving the house, where she was going. “Wherever I like,” she answered. “And when do you propose to come back?” “Whenever I think fit,” she replied. “If you return one moment later,” said the husband, with an air of menace, “I shall have a word with you.”

A Parisian schoolboy, meeting a little beggar in the street who declared himself to be the most miserable boy alive, said to him, with an accent of deep sympathy, “What! are you learning the Latin grammar?”

The Prince de Condé was one of the wittiest of Parisians. He had been criticising severely a tedious tragedy called Zenobia, the work of the Abbé d’Aubignac. “It is written strictly in accordance,” said one of the Abbe’s defenders, “with the rules of Aristotle” “I don’t blame the abbé,” replied Condé, “for having followed Aristotle, but I shall never forgive Aristotle for having caused him to write so tedious a piece.”

A Parisian grande dame, before whom a gentleman had just taken out a cigar, was asked whether she disliked the smell of tobacco. “I cannot say,” she replied. “No one has ever smoked in my presence.”

The French are perhaps less celebrated than of old for their politeness. It was a French preacher, however, who, in a sermon delivered before Louis XIV., observed deferentially “we are nearly all mortal”; and it was a French professor who, when Louis XVIII. had requested from him some lessons in chemistry, began his explanations by saying, “These two bodies, of opposite properties, will now have the honour of combining in presence of your Majesty.”

A Parisian, in the midst of a dissipated life, was prevailed upon to enter a monastery. Ere long he confessed to the Superior that in his moments of solitude he was constantly assailed by a desire to return to his former mode of existence. The Superior recommended him on these occasions to ring the great bell of the monastery, which would at once give him bodily exercise, distract him from evil thoughts, and be a signal to the other monks to pray for him. He rang, however, so frequently that the bell went on tolling all night, until at last representations on the subject were made from the entire neighbourhood.

A cuirassier, who had seen and admired Horace Vernet’s military pictures, called upon the great painter and asked how much he would charge him for his portrait. “How much are you prepared to pay?” asked Vernet. “I could go as high – as high as a franc and a half,” replied the soldier. “Done,” said Vernet, and in a few minutes he had made a rapid sketch of the warrior. As the cuirassier left the room he said to a comrade who had been waiting for him at the door, “I got it done for a franc and a half. But I am sorry, now, I did not bargain. He might have taken a franc.”

Sophie Arnould’s dog having fallen ill, the celebrated actress sent him for treatment to her friend Mesmer, inventor of the pretended science which bears his name. In a few days the German physician returned the dog with a letter certifying that it was quite well. The dog, however, died on the way home. “What a comfort it is,” said Sophie, on seeing the letter and the dead body, “to know that the poor animal died in good health.”

On seeing the dancer, Madeleine Guimard, who was thin even to scragginess, perform in a “pas de trois” with a robust male dancer leaping about on each side of her, Sophie Arnould said that it was like two dogs fighting for a bone.

A Parisian lady observed one day, in the presence of a man six feet high who greatly admired her, that she did not like tall men. He redoubled his attentions until, seeing her one day in rather a dreamy condition, he asked her what she was thinking about. “I am wondering how it is,” she replied, “that you seem to get smaller and smaller every day.”

The Abbé Fouquet was Mazarin’s spy, and he threw numberless Parisians into the Bastille. One man, whom he sent there one day, saw a large dog in the court-yard of the fortress-prison. “What has that dog done?” he asked, “to get in a place like this?” “He has probably bitten the Abbé Fouquet’s dog,” replied a veteran prisoner.

An amorous youth wished to send to the object of his affections a passionate, but at the same time witty, epistle. After cudgelling his brains for some hours to no purpose he went to a bookseller’s, bought a “complete letter-writer,” and copied out what seemed to him the most suitable missive, which he duly despatched. The young lady replied to him next day as follows: “Turn to the next page and you will find my answer.”

A Parisian publisher, extremely annoyed at having printed a big book of which he could only sell four copies, bitterly reproached the author, telling him that his works would not even give him bread. A vigorous blow with the fist, which knocked out several of the publisher’s teeth, was the only reply made by the haughty writer. Arrested by the police, the latter, called upon to explain his conduct, extricated himself by the following ingenious defence, at which the judge, the audience, and even the plaintiff could not restrain their laughter. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I confess that I acted with rather too much warmth. I knocked out his teeth; but after all, what mischief is done? He told me my works would not give him bread, and teeth are useless when there is nothing to eat.”

The Marquis de Favières, a great borrower and notorious for never returning his loans, went one day to the financier Samuel Bernard, and said to him: “I am going to astonish you, sir. I am the Marquis de Favières. I do not know you, and I have come to borrow five hundred louis.” “Sir,” said Bernard, “I shall astonish you still more. I know you, and I am going to lend you the money.”

The Parisian “badaud,” an intensification of the London Cockney, has a reputation, moreover, for making blunders and bulls of the Irish kind. One of them, hazarding some speculations on the subject of astronomy, is said to have observed that the moon was a much more important orb than the sun, because the sun “comes out only in the day-time, when everyone can see perfectly well. The moon, on the other hand, shines in the darkness, when a light to guide us is really wanted.”

Another Parisian of the dull species once wrote to a friend as follows: “A man has just called me a villain, and threatened, if I ever speak to him again, to kick me. What do you usually do in such a case?”

A Parisian who, without knowing much about horse-flesh, had just bought a horse, was asked whether the animal was timid. “Not at all,” he replied. “He has slept three nights running in the stable by himself.” Another Parisian “sportsman” was reproached by a connoisseur with having clipped his horse’s ears. He explained that the animal was in the habit, whenever alarmed, of pricking up his ears, and that he had cut them in order to cure him of his timidity.

A literary specimen of the Parisian Cockney is said to have written, in an historical novel, the following remarkable sentence. “Before the year 1667 Paris at night was plunged in total darkness, which was made darker than ever by the absence of gas-lights, not yet invented.”

In a Russian history of Poland, the Poles were seriously reminded that it was not until after the partition of Poland that the streets of Warsaw were lighted with gas.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STREETS

The Arrangement of the Streets – System of Numbering the Houses – Street Nomenclature – Street Lamps – The Various Kinds of Vehicles in Use

WE have already searched the streets of Paris for types of character. Let us proceed to look at one or two characteristic street objects, after first taking a general view of the streets themselves.

The streets of Paris divide themselves into two categories: those parallel to the Seine and those at right angles to it. In the first the numbers follow the course of the stream, in the second they begin from that end of the street which is nearest to the river. The traveller, however, finding himself in any particular street, cannot in the present day tell at once to which category it belongs, inasmuch as the old distinction of colour is no longer preserved, by which the parallel streets used to be numbered in red, and those at right angles in black.

All the Paris streets are lit up throughout the night. Early in the morning, before daylight, companies of scavengers collect the city refuse in heaps which, some hours afterwards, are carted away into the neighbouring country to fertilise the soil. During the day other scavengers clear the highways of whatever dust or mud they may have accumulated.

Every day in summer water-carts sprinkle the principal thoroughfares. These carts carry behind them an apparatus which flings the water over the whole width of the street. In streets which are rather narrow, or when the cart cannot keep exactly to the middle, the pedestrians come in for a part of the municipal spray, as also do vehicles which are low or open. It is prudent, therefore, to keep one’s eye on the water-cart, unless a gratuitous shower-bath is absolutely desired.

Every public way bears a distinctive name. Extended thoroughfares are not infrequently divided up into portions, each named separately; this is due sometimes to local circumstances, sometimes to the fact that in the olden days it was a caprice of the citizens frequently to change the title of the street in which they resided. It was not until the seventeenth century that the municipal administration officially intervened in this matter. Then, however, the titles were less often derived from local circumstances, adulation lavishing on the highways and byways the names of princes and other personages of wealth or power. Under Louis XIV. a certain proportion of street names were also drawn from royal victories or from those officers who had achieved them. The Revolution inscribed with the names of its heroes, its martyrs, its triumphs, its principles, not only the new streets which it opened, but even the old ones from which it wished to efface monarchical titles. The Empire followed the same system. The Restoration returned to the Royalist traditions; and the monarchy of July united those of the Revolution and the Empire, mingling the ancient glories of France with the modern, and illustrious foreigners with natives of renown.

To pass, however, from streets to street-illumination. Parisians of to-day, accustomed to the brilliancy of gas, which turns night almost into day, can scarcely believe that two centuries ago their town knew no other light than that of the moon and stars. It was the case, nevertheless; previously to 1667 not a public lamp existed. The necessity of street illumination had already, however, been recognised by a civic regulation which required householders, in those localities where garrotting had become too frequent, to place beneath their first-floor window, at 9 p.m., a lantern which might cast its beams into the street. It was M. de la Reynie, lieutenant of police for Paris, who first, in 1667, instituted public lamps. At the outset a lamp was placed at the end of each street, with a third in the middle. Then, after a time, the number of lamps was increased in streets of exceptional length. Each containing a candle, these “lanternes” were suspended by a rope from a crooked iron bar in the form of the gallows.

The lamps introduced by La Reynie marked a certain progress in civilisation. They at least diminished in a remarkable manner the number of night attacks. La Reynie’s lanterns lasted until 1776, when they were replaced by so-called reverbères, or reflecting lamps. In a few months more than half the streets in Paris were illuminated by the new lamps, which, with some modifications, remained in use until the introduction of gas.

The most celebrated of all the lamps in Paris was the lamp or “lanterne” of the Place de la Grève, which on the outbreak of the Revolution was made the instrument of several summary executions, the first victims being two retired soldiers and Major de Losme, accused of firing on the people at the capture of the Bastille. The cry of “À la lanterne!” was now constantly raised; and when the emigration began a number of aristocrats were dragged to the fatal lamp, but saved at the last moment by the intervention of Bailly and La Fayette. The notorious Foulon, detested by everyone, was really hanged from the fatal lamp. His son-in-law, Bertier, was also dragged beneath the lamp, but he defended himself, snatched a musket from one of his guards, and fought until he was shot down. On the 5th of October the brave Abbé Lefèvre d’Ormesson, a member of the Commune, was half hanged by a number of wild women. Fortunately for him, the rope was cut before it had done its work. About the same time the mob, perishing from hunger, hung to the lamp a baker named François, accused of hoarding up his bread. François is said to have been the “last man tied up to the illuminated gallows” of the Place de la Grève. Camille Desmoulins published, some eighty years before Henri Rochefort made use of the title, a pamphlet called “La Lanterne,” or, to quote the title in full, “Discours de la Lanterne aux Parisiens.” It bore this epigraph: “Qui male agit odit lucem,” which he translated thus: “Only rogues fear the light.”

If, however, the public lamps of Paris are the most conspicuous street objects by night, those which first strike the eye by day are unquestionably the vehicles.

In France, as in other countries, carriages are comparatively of modern invention; and when they were first introduced they were generally condemned as calculated to do away with a taste for equitation and to produce habits of effeminacy. The condition of the streets and public thoroughfares would, in ancient times, have rendered the employment of vehicles impossible, and thus persons who did not go on foot went on horseback until the sixteenth century, when the use of the so-called “Sedan-chairs” became general. Wheeled carriages were not absolutely unknown, but in Francis I.’s reign there were but two, one belonging to the king, the other to the queen. The privilege of constructing and letting out Sedan-chairs, or “chaises à bras,” was granted by Louis XIII. at the beginning of the seventeenth century to one of the officers of his body-guard; and towards the end of the reign, after many other inventions in the way of vehicles had been tried, two-wheeled chaises, called “brouettes,” or “wheelbarrows,” were introduced by a Monsieur Dupin, who received the king’s support in the shape of a formal authorisation. There was now a great dispute between the privileged makers of Sedan-chairs and the privileged makers of “wheelbarrows,” which ended in this compromise – that the new wheelbarrows were not to be allowed unless drawn exclusively by men. In the reign of Henry IV. the carriage, or “carrosse,” was introduced: a heavy, lumbering vehicle, whose windows were hung with leather curtains. The use of glass in carriage windows had not yet been adopted. Henry IV. was himself driving in one of these carriages when Ravaillac thrust his hand through the window and struck the fatal blow.

The first coach with glass windows – “glass-coach,” as the new vehicle was called when, many years later, it was introduced into England – was seen in Paris in 1630, brought there from Brussels by the Prince de Condé. Up to the middle of the seventeenth century no wheeled vehicles were seen in the streets of Paris except those belonging to private persons. In 1650, however, it occurred to a man named Sauvage, living in an hotel in the Rue Saint-Martin, which bore the sign of “Saint-Fiacre,” to let out horses and carriages to anyone who wanted them; and in time the name of fiacre was given to all hired carriages. Soon afterwards, about the middle of the seventeenth century, so-called “diligences” were established for conveying “with diligence” passengers in common from one part of France to another; and from the idea of conveying a number of passengers in the same vehicle from town to town was derived that of the omnibus, doing a like service within the walls of the capital. The invention of the omnibus is attributed to Pascal, the author of so many “Pensées” of a finer type. The original Parisian omnibus was called the “five sous carriage” – “carrosse au cinq sous” – five sous being required from each passenger. It held six persons, and carried as a distinctive sign a lantern at the end of an iron pole, which was fixed on the top, to the left of the driver.

Until the time of the Revolution the right of letting out carriages was always made the subject of a privilege or concession, accorded to some court favourite, male or female. After the Revolution, however, when all privileges were abolished, those connected with the letting out of public vehicles came to an end. A few years afterwards, in 1800, a tariff regulating the prices payable to the drivers of hackney carriages was drawn up, when, as now, the cost of a drive, or “course,” inside Paris, was fixed at something above a franc, two francs being chargeable per hour if the vehicle were hired by time. Originally private carriages had now become public, so that at last a demand arose for carriages which might be taken by the month, the week, the day, or the half-day.

Hitherto all the hackney vehicles of Paris had been of one pattern and furnished with four wheels. They seated either two or four passengers, and were drawn by one or two horses. In the year 1800 the two-wheeled “cabriolet” was introduced, containing seats for two, one of which was occupied by the driver, to whose intimate society the unfortunate passenger was thus condemned. From this period until 1830 the public vehicles of Paris were, according to a French writer, “a disgrace to the capital.” They were drawn by ruined beasts which looked unlikely to reach any given destination, and they were many of them good for nothing but firewood.

The Paris hackney vehicle largely excited at this time the ridicule of wits and song-writers, although, irrespectively of its condition, it has always figured almost exclusively in literature. In a great city like Paris the cab is the witness, the auxiliary, or the accomplice in nearly every event which takes place – it is a mute confidant in most of the scenes of human life. The song-writer, Desaugiers, has left in verse a curious history of a cab, supposed to be written by itself, and in which it relates how one day it conveyed a widow to the altar, another day a husband to Chantilly without his wife, and a third day the wife to Gros-Bois without her husband.

Coming to modern times, we find the driver of the fiacre as interesting a personage as he must frequently find his fare to be. The question whether, as is asserted, ruined aristocrats are at present earning their bread as cab-drivers has already been discussed. But it is unquestionable that many members of what are called the “better” classes turn to the cab as their last resource, even as Dr. Johnson’s “scoundrel” was said to turn to politics. Priests, devoid in two senses of a living, bachelors of arts and sciences, old professors and worn-out notaries, may be seen plying the whip of the “cocher” in the Paris streets.

That the London cab – of which the name, as probably everyone knows, is simply a contraction of “cabriolet” – surpasses the cab of Paris is admitted even by patriotic Frenchmen. One able writer on the subject of the French capital says that “the London cabs, which we have vainly tried to acclimatise in Paris, are, if not comfortable, at least rapid and well-managed. Our neighbours can boast two elements of incontestable superiority. These are the drivers and the horses. Despite these causes, it is probable that the English ‘cab’ would be found less attractive if, instead of being paid by the mile, it were taken by the journey or by the hour.” This writer, it should be explained, complains bitterly that the Parisian cabman, engaged by the hour, proceeds at a crawl, knowing that he will be paid just as much as if he drove with the celerity of his London brother, who simply wants to get to his journey’s end and receive his fare – or as much beyond it as he possibly can.