Richard Harding Davis

“ On no one class of visitor does Paris lay her spell more heavily than on the American art student. For, no matter where he has studied at home, or under what master, he finds when he reaches Paris so much that is new and beautiful and full of inspiration that he becomes as intolerant as are all recent converts, and so happy in his chosen profession that he looks upon everything else than art with impatience and contempt. ”

“ It is difficult to feel gloomy in a city which is so genuinely illuminated that one can sit in the third-story window of a hotel and read a newspaper by the glare of the gas-lamps in the street below. This is a very wise generosity, for it helps to attract people to Paris, who spend money there, so that in the end the lighting of the city may be said to pay for itself. If we had as good government in New York as there is in Paris, Madison Square would not depend for its brilliancy at night on the illuminated advertising of two business firms. ”

“ It is a question whether or not one should be pleased that the would-be wicked American woman in Paris cannot adopt the point of view of the Parisian women as easily as she adopts their bonnets. She tries to do so, it is true; she tries to look on life from the same side, but she does not succeed very well, and you may be sure she is afraid and a fraud at heart, and in private a most excellent wife and mother. If it be reprehensible to be a hypocrite and to pretend to be better than one is, it should also be wrong to pretend to be worse than one dares to be, and so lend countenance to others. ”

“ Americans go to London for social triumph or to float railroad shares, to Rome for art's sake, and to Berlin to study music and to economize; but they go to Paris to enjoy themselves. And there are no young men of any nation who enter into the accomplishment of this so heartily and so completely as does the young American. It is hardly possible for the English youth to appreciate Paris perfectly, because he has been brought up to believe that "one Englishman can thrash three Frenchmen," and because he holds a nation that talks such an absurd language in some contempt ”

“ Paris is full of these poor hangers-on, who have allowed her to use them and pat them on the back, and who cannot see that her approbation is not the only reward worth the striving for, but who go on year after year tagging in her train, beseeching her to take some notice of them. They are like the little boys who run beside the coaches and turn somersaults to draw a copper from the passengers on top, and who are finally left far behind, unobserved and forgotten beside the dusty road. ”

“ It is the only spot in the city where many people are awake. Everybody is awake here, bustling and laughing and scolding—porters with brass badges on their sleeves carrying great piles of vegetables, and plump market-women in white sleeves and caps, and drivers in blue blouses smacking their lips over their hot coffee after their long ride through the night. It is like a great exposition building of food exhibits, with the difference that all of these exhibits are to be scattered and are to disappear on the [Pg 97] breakfast-tables of Paris that same morning. ”

“ This great, beautiful open place, even to one accustomed to city streets and their monuments, seems to change more rapidly and to form with greater life than any other spot in the world, and its great stupid obelisk in the centre appears to rise like a monster exclamation-point of wonder at what it sees about it, and with the surprise over all of finding itself in the centre of it. ”

“ PARIS is the only city in the world which the visitor from the outside positively refuses to take seriously. He may have come to Paris with an earnest purpose to study art, or to investigate the intricacies of French law, or the historical changes of the city; or, if it be a woman, she may have come to choose a trousseau; but no matter how serious his purpose may be, there is always some one part of each day when the visitor rests from his labors and smiles indulgently and does as the Parisians do. ”

“ You are, and feel that you are, a drone in this busy place, and salute with a sense of guilty companionship the groups of men and girls in dinner dress who have been up all night, and who come singing and chaffing in their open carriages in search of coffee and a box of strawberries, or a bunch of cold, crisp radishes with the dew still on them, which they buy from a virtuous matron of grim and disapproving countenance at a price which throws a lurid light on the profits of Bignon's and Laurent's. ”

“ The most notorious of these dance-halls is the Moulin Rouge. You must have noticed when journeying through France the great windmills that stand against the sky-line on so many hilltops. They are a picturesque and typical feature of the landscape, and seem to signify the honest industry and primitiveness of the French people of the provinces. And as the great arms turn in the wind you can imagine you can hear the sound of the mill-wheel clacking while the wheels inside grind out the flour that is to give life and health. ”

“ He will not believe that his time has come and gone, and that Paris has no memory, and no desire but to see and to hear some new thing. She has taken his money and eaten his dinners and hung his pictures once or twice in a good place; but, now that his money is gone, Paris has other dinners to eat, and other statues to admire, and no leisure time to spend at his dull receptions, which have taken the place of his rare dinners, or to climb to his garret when there is a more amusing and more modern painter on the first floor. ”

“ You feel that every one who passes by knows and approves of your idea of a holiday, and will quite understand when you ride out on the Champs Élysées at eleven o'clock in the morning with four other men packed in one fiacre, or when, for no apparent reason, you hurl your hat into the air. ”

“ The best of the boulevards is that the people sitting on their sidewalks, and the heavy green trees, and the bare heads of so many of the women, make one feel how much out-of-doors he is, as no other street or city does, and what a folly it is to waste time within walls. I do not think we appreciate how much we owe to the women in Paris who go without bonnets. ”

“ It is now a lodging-house for beggars and for those who collect the ends of castaway cigars and cigarettes on the boulevards, and possibly for those who thieve in a small way. By ten o'clock each night the place is filled with men and women sleeping heavily at the tables, with their heads on their arms, or gathered together for miserable company, whispering and gossiping, each sipping jealously of his glass of red wine. ”

“ Some of the houses had iron balconies, from which the women leaned and talked across the street to one another in purring nasal voices, with a great rolling of the r's and an occasional disdainful movement of the shoulders. When any other than a French woman shrugs her shoulders she moves the whole upper part of her body, from the hips up; but the French woman's shoulders and arms are all that change when she makes that ineffable gesture that we have settled upon as the characteristic one of her nation. ”

“ But there is nothing just like the boulevards. If you should wish to sit at the exact centre of the world and to watch it revolve around you, you have only to take your place at that corner table of the Café de la Paix which juts the farthest out into the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Boulevard Capucines. This table is the apex of all the other tables. It turns the tides of pedestrians on the broad sidewalks of both the great thoroughfares, and it is geographically situated exactly under the "de la" of the "Café de la Paix," painted in red letters on the awning over your head. ”

“ The American visitor is not only undaunted by the strange language, but unimpressed by the signs of years of vivid history about him. He sandwiches a glimpse at the tomb of Napoleon, and a trip on a penny steamer up the Seine, and back again to the Morgue, with a rush through the Cathedral of Notre Dame, between the hours of his breakfast and the race-meeting at Longchamps the same afternoon. Nothing of present interest escapes him, and nothing bores him. ”

“ At another corner there are smoothly-shaven men and plump, well-fed-looking women waiting to take service on some gentleman's box-seat or in front of some lady's cooking-stove—an intelligence office where there is no middleman to whom they must pay a fee, and where, while they wait for a possible employer, they hold an impromptu picnic, and pay such gallant compliments that one can see they have lived much in the fashionable world. ”

“ The house fronts would tell nothing to the outside world; they would frown upon each other like family tombs in a cemetery; but in this street of Paris the people lived in it, or on the balconies, or at the windows. We knew what they were going to have for dinner, because we could see them carrying the uncooked portions of it from the restaurant at the corner, with a long loaf of bread under one arm and a single egg in the other hand; and when some one gave a fête we knew of it by the rows of bottles on the ledge of the window and the jellies set out to cool on the balcony. ”

“ The American artist who has taken Paris properly has only kind words to speak of her. He is grateful for what she gave him, but he is not unmindful of his mother-country at home. He may complain when he returns of the mud in our streets, and the height of our seventeen-story buildings, and the ugliness of our elevated roads—and who does not? But if his own art is lasting and there is in his heart much constancy, his work will grow and continue in spite of these things, and will not droop from the lack of atmosphere about him. ”

“ Young men and women are fed into the blazing doors of the mill nightly, and the great arms, as they turn unceasingly and noisily in a fiery circle through the air, seem to tell of the wheels within that are grinding out the life and the health and souls of these young people of Montmartre. ”

“ There are a great number of Americans who are only in Paris for the month, and whom you have seen on the steamer, or passing up the Rue de la Paix, or at the banker's on mail day, and they seize this chance to recognize their countrymen, and grow tremendously excited in hitting each other in the eyes and on the nose, and then pass each other the next day in the Champs Élysées without the movement of an eyelash. ”

“ This is entertaining for a quarter of an hour, as you will find that every American or English man and woman you have ever met is sitting within talking distance of you, and as you weave your way in and out like a shuttle in a great loom you have a chance to bow to a great many friends, and to gaze for several minutes at a time at all of the celebrities of Paris. ”

“ People may neglect the horses for luncheon, or press over the rail to see them rush past, or gather to watch the President of the Republic enter to a solemn fanfare of trumpets between lines of soldiers, but there are always a few left to feed these little machines, and their clicking goes on through the whole of the hot, dusty day, like the clipping of the shears of Atropos. ”

“ It would be an easy matter to hold a fête of flowers at Los Angeles or at Nice, or in any small city or watering-place where all the participants would know one another and the masses would be content to act as spectators; but to venture on such a spectacle, and to throw it open to any one who pays a few francs, in as great a city as Paris, requires, first of all, the highest executive ability before the artistic and pictorial side of the affair is considered at all, and the most hearty co-operation of the state or local government with the citizens who have it in hand. ”

“ Or you will see ambassadors and men of title from the Jockey Club jostling cockney bookmakers and English lords to look at a little girl in a linen blouse and a flat straw hat, who is dancing in the same circle of shining shirt-fronts vis-à-vis to the most-talked-of young person in Paris, who wears diamonds in ropes, and who rode herself into notoriety by winning a steeplechase against a field of French officers. ”

“ They enjoy with equal zest the quiet, inimitable character studies of Nicolle and the efforts of two trained dogs to play upon a fiddle, while a hideous, gaunt creature, six foot tall, in a woman's ballet costume, throws them off their chairs in convulsions of delight. They are like children with a mature sense of the artistic, and still with an infantile delight in what is merely noisy and absurd. ”