Towards the end of June we went to Paris to see the World’s Fair. We put up as usual at the Hôtel de Calais, a pleasant, quiet house. After having washed off the dust of our journey we started to visit the Exhibition. The passage of carriages was forbidden on the Pont d’Terra, and only foot-passengers provided with entrance tickets could cross that bridge. On entering the enclosure of the “Grand Fair,” we took the Decauville, a toy-train, which carried us round the whole place. Every now and then our eyes were arrested by vivid printed notices on the walls, advertisements about cocoa and soap, and placards put everywhere, warning the passengers not to thrust out their hands or heads out of the window, written in all the European languages except in German. The Parisians, as it seems, have nothing to say against the Teutonic visitors of the Exhibition being deprived of heads or hands! In all directions small two-wheeled waggonettes called “puss-puss,” circulated, pushed by yellow-faced Tonqinoise aborigines.
There was much to see at the Exhibition; it just made my head swim. We unweariedly enjoyed all the sights of the Champ de Mars, the gayest part of the Exhibition, crowded with visitors from all the parts of the earth and moved with the throng, being pushed to-and-fro. The Eiffel Tower was the chief attraction of the Exhibition. It is by far the highest structure in the world, being 984 feet high, and took two years to build. There were five big restaurants on the first platform, where the charges were perfectly monstrous. We had lunch at the Restaurant de Russe, and paid ten francs for a roasted chicken. We waited more than half-an-hour our turn to enter the lift, which raised us to the third platform. Whilst we were mounting gently to the very sky, we saw through the barred windows the landscape gradually diminishing; the whole horizon was disclosed and the people down below, walking about the Exhibition, appeared not bigger than flies. On each platform commemorative medals made of brass, bronze and silver were sold. The Tower had its own printing office where a newspaper, named “Le Figaro de la Tour,” was printed every day.
Night festivals were given three times a week at the Trocadero, when the Eiffel Tower was illuminated with thousands of electric lights of all the brightest colours of the rainbow, as well as the beautiful “Fontaines Lumineuses,” lighted up in a wonderful way.
We went almost every day to the Exhibition and sacrificed a whole afternoon to the French colonies: Tunis, Algiers, Dahomey and other transmarine countries, all clustered together near the Trocadero. In front of them were the cafés belonging to them. Here you could listen to the different national airs, see the different national types and costumes, and eat the different national foods.
The section named “Habillement des deux Sexes” is marvellous, with Paquin’s and Worth’s most divine combinations. I did not know how our purses were going to hold out. There was a dress I had been dying for, and Sergy, dear man, made me a present of it immediately.
The “Palais des Machines,” a monstrous gallery full of machines, with glass walls and roof, was very fatiguing to go through. Sergy took great interest in all sorts of engines, and our guide bothered me with his technical explanations of which I understood nothing. On the top galleries a moving electric bridge, full of people, advanced towards us from the opposite side of the gallery, moving very slowly in order to permit the visitors to see all the machines at work. We were dying of thirst, and entered the English Dairy to drink a glass of milk, after which we visited the Cow-House, exhibiting superb animals, who stood in comfortable stalls with new clean straw under their feet. Whilst I petted a beautiful fat cow named “Every Inch a Queen,” a milkmaid appeared with a stool and a pail and began to extract what the cow chose to give her.
Directly opposite the “Palais des Machines” is the “Vieux Paris.” To visit it is to step back into the past. In the street La Huchette, the houses, the shops, the citizens, everything, transports you to the seventeenth century; the anachronism was ourselves in our modern clothes, which did not harmonise with the picture. Soldiers with their bands at the head, wearing white wigs, marched in the streets. On a raised platform the Mandolinists of the Duc de Guise played pretty gavottes and minuets. A few steps further the so-called “Sans-Chagrins” (street singers), standing on a table, sang popular airs. Through an open window we saw a dainty “Marquise” singing old-time love-ditties, to the accompaniment of a smart “Marquis” wearing a white wig and buckled shoes, who played a harpsichord. The illusion was complete, we had gone back a hundred years to Louis XVI. time. In the Rue Sainte Antoine we saw the exact copy of the church Sainte Marie, with a museum inside, where you could see the atrocities of the French Revolution, represented with horrid realism, and calculated to give even a strong man the creeps. Soldiers wearing pig-tailed wigs bellowed: “Come and see the execution of the Royal Family!” In dark alcoves different scenes of the French Revolution were represented. We saw the wax figure of Robespierre presiding at the Jacobin Club; of Charlotte Corday in the act of murdering Marat, etc., etc.
A fortune-teller, standing at the door of her dwelling, invited the passers-by to come in to hear their fortunes told. On the threshold of a house just opposite, a quarrelsome female, arms akimbo, was shouting and shaking her fist at her bourgeois; the discussion waxed hot, and a constable, dressed in the costume of the period, came running to separate them; the scene was only a sham. We entered a theatre on the Place du Guesclin, where we saw the escape of a prisoner from the dungeon of La Bastille. There was a great push at the entrance, and we got to our places with difficulty. The curtain rose showing the prisoner preparing to clamber out of the window, and falling down whilst he was dropping a cord exclaiming: “How dark the night is!” And, indeed, night came on when the spectators emerged into the square where stood the reproduction of the Bastille with its towers and raised bridges, to see the man, who appeared to be a skilful acrobat, making his escape from the prison. His flight was noticed by a group of soldiers, dressed in red uniforms, and wearing white wigs, who fired at him and began to climb over the walls in hurried pursuit, and seized the escaping prisoner, who was hissed by the crowd on the square. After that the taking of the Bastille, was reproduced. We could imagine all this taking place. A throng of 500 men, wearing Jacobin caps with tri-coloured cockades and armed with muskets and swords, began to climb up the Bastille by the aid of ropes and ladders, making a terrible noise. Suddenly a detachment of soldiers, dressed in the costume of the period, appeared, and a white-wigged colonel began to read instructions to the men, under a smoking lamp-post, urging them to serve their King faithfully and defeat the Sans-Culottes. Then began the charge of cannons and muskets, which soon made the huge building flame on all sides.
After the taking of La Bastille, we went to seek for something to eat and drink at the hostelry of the Lion d’Or, and ended our evening at the Palais des Enfants, a rather badly named theatre at the Exhibition, where we saw the La Belle Fatima, the renowned Eastern beauty, encircled by unattractive houris who set her off still more. La Belle Fatima looked amongst them, like some vivid brilliant flower surrounded by faded leaves.
We assisted one day at the representation of the Fakirs, a Hindustan religious sect given over to the mortification of the flesh. It was an impressive spectacle. The Fakirs, arrayed in white flowing garments of doubtful cleanness, were sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, holding banners and singing religious chants. Their “mollah,” wearing an enormous turban, sat in the centre. Suddenly the tom-toms rolled like thunder and the experiments began. The Fakirs did amazing things. One of them, clad in a sort of white sack with five openings through which passed his head, legs and arms, began to light the sacred fire to the accompaniment of a flute and tambourine, bending over the burning coals into which he threw some essence in order to get dizzy. The barbaric music, struck up faster and a long convulsive shudder shook the Fakir’s limbs. Then he took a heated spade and applied it to his arms and face and put his fingers into the brazier, making disorderly jumps, after which he fell on the floor with foam in the corners of his mouth. But it was only a prelude to more horrors. The Fakir who came next terrified me still more by his shouts and wild gestures. He pricked his tongue, lips, cheeks and ears with a long iron spear, and stepped barefooted on the sharp sides of a sword, after which, in a state of wild excitement, he stabbed himself with a poniard, and the blood ran down in abundance. The third Fakir twisted a large serpent round his body and ate a part of it, and then swallowed a scorpion, which the manager had previously shown to the audience. Now came the turn of the last Fakir, who grilled his skin with red hot irons, and made his eyes bulge out of its sockets with the end of a dagger and slowly rolled the eye back into its ordinary position again. Professor Charcot, the celebrated psychologist, who had controlled the experiment, was convinced that it was not a fraud.
Sergy essayed a trip in the “Ballon Captif,” which lifted ten persons at a time a hundred metres higher than the Eiffel Tower. From below I breathlessly watched the ascent. Sergy was presented with a medal bearing the inscription: “Souvenir de mon ascension.”
Another day we went to see “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” where a troup of “Red Skins” attacked a caravan of travellers, after which they scalped them and showed dramatically all the horrors described by Mayne Reid. Suddenly the Cowboys, with pistols bulging from their belts, came galloping on and drove away the Red Indians.
On July 14th, the day of the Fête Nationale, the usual review of the troops took place at Longchamps. I was ill in bed that day and could not accompany my husband to the review. Military bands played in the streets which were full of noise, and from everywhere shouts of “Vive Boulanger!” were heard. Tables were set in the streets and squares, laid out with dishes for the populace. I saw from my window an Alsacian procession pass by. All the members, dressed in black, were directing their steps towards the Statue of “Strasbourg,” in order to adorn it with mourning wreaths. We witnessed on the Place de la Concorde the arrival of the Shah of Persia. Soldiers formed a long line on his way. The Shah drove in a victoria with President Carnot sitting by his side, and was escorted by a squadron of cuirassiers. The General Saussier followed galloping alongside the victoria, and twelve carriages with the suite of the Shah and newspaper correspondents followed. That night there was a great rush to the Exhibition to see the Shah, who was to make his appearance on the balcony of the “Dome Central.” We were carried ahead with the rush, with more than one escape of being crushed to atoms. We raced for chairs, and Sergy got one for me to stand on. A row of red velvet fautueils were placed for the Shah and his suite on the balcony, upon which the Shah appeared arrayed in a beautiful costume all worked with gold and bedecked with diamonds, accompanied by President Carnot with his spouse and a numerous suite. From the exhibition the Shah was driven to the Eiffel Tower. He had gone up only as far as the first floor, and there was no persuading him to ascend higher up. We have been braver than the Shah, as it appears!
M. Prévost-Rousseau and Melle. Camille, having heard of our arrival at Paris, came to see us at the hotel and invited us to come and spend a whole day at Champigny, where they have some property. The very next morning they came up again in their brougham to take us to their Château. It was a two hours’ drive, and a very pleasant one, going through Joinville and the Bois de Vincennes. Mme. Prévost came forward to greet us, holding out both hands, and led us to the salon, where we found a group of guests assembled. Our host proposed to all the company to make a tour in the park, which descended in an easy slope to the banks of the Marne. M. Prévost took us for a pull on the river, and showed us afterwards his well kept grounds. The weather had changed for the worse by this time, and M. Prévost thought we ought to be starting home. I lifted up my nose to the clouds from which big drops of rain began to fall. Suddenly a storm burst out, and a shower came down upon us in torrents, accompanied by lightning and peals of thunder, which necessitated a hasty retreat, and we started running back to the Château. Mme. Camille carried me up to her own room to remove my hat and arrange my hair, dishevelled by the wind. After dinner there was to be a little entertainment in the salon, music and recitation, and towards midnight M. Prévost drove us to the railway station in his dog-cart.
Baroness Rothvillers had left Paris when we arrived, nevertheless we went to see her husband, who gave us a warm and kindly welcome. He invited us to dinner on the following day and took us afterwards to the “Cirque d’Eté.”
We met at the Exhibition Mme. Diane Bibikoff, a French lady, married to a Russian dignitary, living in Moscow, a very pretty young woman, full of spirits, and Parisienne to her finger tips. One day whilst visiting the Exhibition together, I suggested entering a barrack on the Champs de Mars bearing the inscription, “On the waves of the sea.” It appeared to be a carousal with boats rolling over cardboard waves. Mme. Diane stepped into one of these boats, but as I did not like to be sea-sick at shore, I could in no way be persuaded to follow her example, and left poor Mme. Diane to her fate. After the first going round she began to beg for mercy and entreated them to stop the machine, but she had to make the regulation circuits, and stepped out of the boat more dead than alive. The situation was too much for my gravity, and I was seized with a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Mme. Diane will not want to repeat the experience.