Parisian high society

“ Men and women, each is a selection; they all are of the accomplished class, gifted with every grace which good blood, education, fortune, leisure and custom can bestow; they are perfect of their kind. There is no toilet, no carriage of the head, no tone of the voice, no expression in language which is not a masterpiece of worldly culture, the distilled quintessence of all that is exquisitely elaborated by social art. Polished as the high society of Paris may be, it does not approach this;2136 compared with the court, it seems provincial. ”

“ An Englishman, thus circumstanced, finding that he gains no ground, and is treated with a sort of ceremony, will probably seek other company, dine at the restaurateurs', frequent the spectacles, and visit the impures: for such was the life our countrymen, in general, led in Paris before the revolution. Public amusements may, perhaps, make him amends for the want of private society. ”

“ The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities, Lyons, Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society of the Rights of Man, the Charbonnière, and The Free Men. All had a revolutionary society which was called the Cougourde. We have already mentioned this word.
In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than the faubourgs. A café in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop of the Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served as rallying points for the students. ”

“ Parisian society has degenerated, it is impossible to deny it, degenerated on account of{354} the many foreign elements that have invaded it, and also on account of the importance which money has acquired, an importance that has taken the place occupied formerly by intelligence, beauty, virtue—all the things which ought to be respected, but which we are apt, now, to forget when we find them associated with that money which is the only god whose supremacy is acknowledged in that Paris which thinks itself the capital of the world, but which is only the purveyor of most of its evil pleasures. ”

“ France loves genius, but for social success, in Paris, genius is not enough.
One must have money, wit, and tact to succeed in smart French society without the prestige of aristocratic birth. If one has the birth in addition, so much the better.
There are salons to which only those to the nobility born are eligible, but they are few, and modern French society is prone to go where it will be most skilfully amused, where it will find the most luxury, the greatest originality, the most volatile gaiety. ”

“ We have thus rapidly seen what Paris does for her poor youth. The city has often been called the focus of light and the centre of intelligence. Without going quite so far as this, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that with her public schools, her splendid libraries, her museums, her natural history and art collections, and her very numerous and valuable institutions open free to all, Paris affords unusual facilities for boys, taken even from the lowest strata of society, to rise by dint of hard study, a firm will and exemplary conduct to the very highest positions. ”

“ Taking her life and her works together, their action and re-action upon each other, it may be observed that such a writer could be produced and fostered only in such a state of society as that of Paris. With all her genius she would perish in London. The moral atmosphere of France is necessary alike to its culture and reception—the volcanic soil—the perpetual excitement—the instability of the people and the government—the eternal turmoil, caprice, and transition—a society agitated and polluted to its core. ”

“ The close of the civil wars made Paris the centre of a distinguished and brilliant society, in which poets and men of letters began for the first time to move, not in the feudal position of dependants on some great noble, as even Ronsard had done, but on a footing of equality. ”

“ Parisian society is very exclusive, and is divided into small coteries, into which a stranger finds it difficult to become initiated. Large routes are rare, and not at all suited to the tastes of the French people ”

“ I have certainly endeavoured to employ my time better, and have had the good fortune to be admitted into the best private societies in Paris. These were composed of the remains of the French nobility, of men of letters and science, and of families, who, without interfering in politics, devote themselves to domestic duties, to literary and social pleasures. The happy hours I have passed in this society can never be forgotten, and the kindness I have received has made its full impression upon an honest English heart. ”

“ XXIII. The concentration of the energies of France in the one great city of Paris is again a potent agency in the impoverishment of the blood of the rural districts. All great cities are destroyers of life. Scarcely one would hold its own in population or power were it not for the young men of the farms. In such destruction Paris has ever taken the lead. The education of the middle classes in France is almost exclusively a preparation for public life. To be an official in a great city is an almost universal ideal. ”

“ If he refuses to lend on this article or that, some merchant will be unable to redeem his honour and his promissory note, some lover will be unable to keep his appointment with the girl of his heart, some comedian will not make his début, some lady of fashion will not give her soirée, and some needy mother will have to send her family supperless to bed. Here behind this partition there is no distinction of class. The highest and the lowest ranks of Parisian society are brought together—a duchess by the side of a flower-girl, an artist by the side of an artisan. ”

“ As is always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality. ”

“ He has undertaken to win one part of society to our cause; but you must know that in Paris there is a complete class of men, distinct and separate from all the rest of the people, whom it concerns me much to gain, for the purpose of securing the metropolis. You will be curious to know what class I speak of:--I mean," he added with a smile, "the honourable body of bravoes, swash-bucklers, swindlers, and, in short, the whole company of those who, having no property of their own, live at the expense of others. ”

“ They risked their lives and happiness for its benefit! Had there been more of those men, France would not now be a beacon to warn us of the hazard and horror of Revolutions, but a pattern of society rapidly advancing to a state of perfection, and holding out an example for the gradual and peaceful regeneration of the world. I consider it to be one of the effects of a Philanthropic Association to assist in the production of such men as these, in an extensive development of those germs of excellence whose favourite soil is the cultured garden of the human mind. ”

“ The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, the Government would have to stamp out the despotism of capital over labor—the condition of their own parasitical existence.
Workingmen's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. ”

“ He has found vent thus for that very dangerous class in Paris society to which the subdivision of property gave birth; namely the crowd of well-born, daring young men without fortune and without profession. He has opened the ‘Bourse’ and said, ‘There, I give you employment, resource, an ‘avenir.‘’ He has cleared the byways into commerce and trade, and opened new avenues of wealth to the noblesse, whom the great Revolution so unwisely beggared. What other way to rebuild a ‘noblesse’ in France, and give it a chance of power be side an access to fortune? ”

“ They afford a study which excites no small degree of combined interest and regret. The number is large in Paris of those who, having repudiated all restraint and banished the last vestige of self-respect, live aloof from society and never touch it except for purposes of injury. Despite the incessant surveillance of which they are the object, despite the laws which hedge them about, accuse and punish them, they remain in the great capital, like an unsubdued tribe, always in revolt, bent upon evil, and often accomplishing it with audacity. ”

“ Mere nonsense. In a society so profoundly democratic as ours, in which waiters have become kings, the sons of innkeepers prime ministers, and foundlings illustrious men of science, there is a place for everyone.{324}”
CHAPTER XLV.
PARISIAN MENDICANCY: THE PARIS POOR. Parisian Mendicancy in the Sixteenth Century—The General Hospital—Louis XV. and the Beggars—The Revolution—Mendicancy as a Regular Profession—The Organ-grinders and the Trade in Italian Children—The French Treatment of the Poor—Asylums, Alms-houses, and Retreats—The Droit des Pauvres—The Cost of the Poor. ”

“ It is to be regretted that Paris should have these disadvantages, for in other respects I take it to be a most eligible residence for such as prefer a great city. The society for a man of letters or one who has any scientific pursuit cannot be exceeded. The intercourse between such men and the great, which, if it is not upon an equal footing, ought never to exist at all, is respectable. Persons of the highest rank pay {283} an attention to science and literature, and emulate the character they confer. ”

“ What is called 'le high-life' of Paris is neither Royalist nor Republican. It is merely shallow and vulgar, like the 'high-life' of sundry other places ruled by governments of divers forms. But when young men born to names which in the popular mind represent the history of France show themselves as athletes in a Parisian circus, or appear as grooms on the carriages of cocottes in the Bois de Boulogne, their folly naturally damages more or less in the public estimation the principles with which the names they bear are associated. ”

“ That they, the people, had made the revolution in Paris, that they were the masters of Paris, that Paris was theirs, to work in it their work; that, as masters of Paris, they were not to be bid leave it; that leave it they would not; that if labour failed, money must be found them at all events, or they would find means of taking it; in short, that they would not be degraded by being sent into the provinces. The workmen of Paris claim, then, to be the masters of the capital, and still more, in their esteem, the masters of all France. The people of Paris, then, is the people; it owns no other. ”

“ Such a Parisian centre must be aristocratic, yet liberal and intelligent; it must lay down rules of conduct, and contrive to get them obeyed; it must be recognized and haunted by the first men and women of the century; it must be actuated in equal proportions by the genius of discipline, and by that of easy grace and accomplished gallantry. ”

“ In France such matters are far better managed, and the love of art is a thousand times more keen; and (from this feeling, surely) how much superiority is there in French SOCIETY over our own; how much better is social happiness understood; how much more manly equality is there between Frenchman and Frenchman, than between rich and poor in our own country, with all our superior wealth, instruction, and political freedom! ”

“ Indeed I have been informed that, at the period alluded to, a spirit of indifference, prodigality, and dissipation, seemed to pervade every class of society. Whether placed at the bottom or the top of Fortune's wheel, a thirst of gain and want of economy were alike conspicuous among all ranks of people. Those who strained every nerve to obtain riches, squandered them with equal profusion.
No human beings on earth can be more fond of diversion than the Parisians. ”

“ But, granted all this, he nevertheless, with his dreams, his weaknesses, his vanities and his refinements, belonged to the Legitimist Monarchy, for which, moreover, the fact that his youth had been spent under it gave him a warmer feeling. In the days of gilded state-coaches and old French ceremonial, under the shelter of ecclesiasticism and frivolity, it had been possible for liberal ideas and humane morals to thrive in the higher classes of society; they disappeared when money ascended the throne. The social life of Paris lost that refined charm for which it had been so famous. ”

“ There have been those who would make philosophy responsible for these extravagances and excesses, because it had been assiduously cultivated in Paris, just before the Revolution, and some of its maxims were appealed to in justification of the excesses. But nothing can be more unjust. There was mingled with the enlightened part of the Paris population, a far larger portion which was immersed in the grossest ignorance. ”

“ It is not France, but Paris, the great centre of population, the seat of all that is luxurious and refined, of science and of art, of everything in short which can serve to adorn and embellish social life; it is this Paris alone that makes and unmakes kings and emperors, that overthrows one dynasty during the night and sets up another the next morning, and then gives the law to the nation which stands looking on. ”

“ All this, in France, has been formed under the guardianship of society, and, in its progressive development, has uniformly been guided and determined by it—the guardianship of a society which zealously imitated the tone of the capital, which again took its direction from the reigning modes of a brilliant court. ”