To return to Marie. The stage is transformed into a sumptuously decorated saloon. Around a table sparkling with wax tapers and crystals the joyous companions of Henri Berville are performing the obsequies of his bachelorhood, for he is shortly to be married. Henri alone resists the general gaiety. He neither eats nor drinks, and the champagne bubbling in the glass or discharging its corks against the ceiling is powerless to relieve his melancholy. Suddenly the door opens and the band of laughing grisettes who have carried off Marie from her dreary room enter to the movement of a polka. Marie follows them, but feels ashamed and bewildered; so much so that she crosses her hands over her mask as though it did not sufficiently disguise her. Her companions, however, are ready enough to lift their masks to anyone who will admire their neat little noses or roguish eyes; and presently one of the guests fastens himself on to the bashful Marie, and carries his insolence so far as to unmask her. In trying to escape, moreover, from his violent hands she tears a part of that precious robe which a year’s toil would scarcely pay for. Henri Berville interposes and indignantly reproaches his friend with such behaviour. The friend replies with insolence, and a duel becomes inevitable. Marie, meanwhile, half mad with shame and {364} fear, has fled. During her absence a mysterious woman has penetrated into her chamber and deposited on the bed an infant. This woman had been paid to kill the innocent child, but shrinking at the last moment from so great a crime, has simply got rid of it as best she could. The fee she had received was ten thousand francs, and this was the sum, in bank-notes, which the rag-picker had discovered at the end of his crook. In her eagerness to escape she had lost the precious paper. Now Marie enters the room with her torn dress, still deeply vexed at the affront she has received. But if she has been grossly insulted, she has likewise found a noble defender; and for this young man, as brave and generous as his companion was cowardly, she begins to feel the flame of an impossible love, which simply mocks her, whilst a thousand regrets disturb her gentle breast. How can she replace this torn dress? In despair she determines to put an end to her life. But, on the point of doing so, she hears a plaintive cry in the room. She goes to the bed and discovers the child. The sight of it changes her resolution, and when Father John appears he finds his protégée nursing the little one whom she proposes to adopt. In a later scene Marie pays a visit to the mansion of Baron Hoffman in order to present her bill to Mademoiselle, the baron’s daughter. The little dressmaker is very ill received, and tries to excuse her importunity by explaining the circumstances in connection with the child she has to support—at which the daughter seems strangely disquieted and the father enraged. The truth is that Mlle. Hoffman herself has brought this child into the world, and has confessed her shame to the baron, who thereupon wished to get rid of the little creature for a very particular reason. Baron Hoffman is the rag-picker who assassinated Marie’s father twenty years before. For the whole world he would not have had an obstacle arise to the marriage of his daughter with Henri Berville; nor is his anxiety on this point unintelligible. Henri Berville is the son of the banker whose cashier the ex-rag-picker has killed, and with whom, subsequently, he has entered into partnership. Dreading every moment of his life that some traces of his crime may be discovered, he wishes, by marrying his daughter to the banker’s son, to identify the interests of Henri Berville with his own. From what is said during her visit {365} to Mlle. Hoffman by the unsuspecting Marie, who does not dream that she is addressing the mother of the foundling, the baron sees that his grandchild is not dead. The woman who has already received one fee of ten thousand francs is now presented with another of like amount, and this time she executes her mission to the letter. The infant is found murdered in Marie’s room. Marie is arrested on suspicion and imprisoned, and Father John swears to discover the true assassin. Fortune assists him. He discovers the owner of the bank-notes in his possession, visits her, perceives her guilt, and, working partly upon her cupidity, partly upon her fear, obtains from her a compromising letter. Then, armed with damnatory evidence, he calls upon Baron Hoffman, who, recognising him, gets his lackeys to make him drunk. An abstinence of twenty years has not destroyed his liking for wine, and he now in a weak moment sacrifices so unreservedly to Bacchus, that the baron has no difficulty in wresting from him as he lies inebriated the documentary evidence of his guilt. Instead of accuser he has now become the accused, and Baron Hoffman has him arrested for complicity with the murderer of the bank cashier. Having ridded himself of this dangerous witness, the baron goes to Saint-Lazare to see Marie, who is in detention there, and manages to make her believe that she will be the cause of Henri Berville’s ruin by preventing his marriage with Mlle. Clara Hoffman. Between Marie and Henri an undeclared passion already exists. Since their first meeting at the masked ball, Henri has sworn that he will marry her and no one else; for indeed he has never loved Clara, whose hand was forced upon him, and who already has another less chivalrous lover, as events have only too painfully proved.
Marie, deceived by the baron’s representations, now resolves to sacrifice herself to Henri’s welfare, and signs a false confession which has been prepared for her, and by which she lays claim to a crime of which she is guiltless. Meanwhile Father John, brought before the commissary, is concerned with nothing but the demonstration of Marie’s innocence. He speaks with such eloquence and grief, his accents are so real and heartrending, that the hesitating magistrate consents to make experiment of a proof which the chiffonnier proposes. “Lend me thirty thousand francs!” he cries. At this demand everyone present thinks him insane, with the exception of Henri, who promptly furnishes the loan. With the aid of this sum the chiffonnier obtains from the murderess of Clara’s child conclusive evidence of Marie’s innocence and the baron’s guilt. Hoffman is brought to justice, and no obstacle remains to the union of Marie and Henri Berville. “But how can we reward devotion like yours?” ask Henri and his friends of Father John; who, a true chiffonnier to the last, replies, “Give me a new basket!”
Béranger’s Bohemians—Balzac’s Definition—Two Generations—Henri Mürger.
ANOTHER extremely interesting type of character in Paris—likewise of the vagrant nature—is the Bohemian. According to the definition of a French lexicographer the Bohemian is “a gay and careless man who laughingly endures the ills of life.” Béranger has written a charming poem upon the Bohemians of his day—describing the wandering and eccentric life of bronzed-faced, brilliant-eyed men of athletic stature, with their free amours and their romantic slumbers, during summer nights, beneath the canopy of heaven. But Béranger did not dream of any analogy between poets or artists in search of a supper and a cheap bed, and those simple mendicants whose existence he idealised. The comparison, however, soon began to assert itself. A new sense, peculiar and fascinating, was given to the word Bohemian; and George Sand, the first writer who seems to have applied it, finishes her novel entitled “La Dernière Aldini” with the exclamation, “Vive la Bohème!” Balzac, in his “Prince de la Bohème,” presents an admirable definition of the intellectual Bohemians. “They are young men,” he writes, “of any age over twenty, but not yet in their thirtieth year; men of genius in their respective walks of life, little known hitherto, but who will make themselves known and conquer fame. In this class {366} you may find diplomatists who could overthrow the projects of Russia if supported by the power of France. Authors, too, administrators, warriors, journalists, artists, belong to the order of Bohemians.” A less flattering notion, however, of the Bohemian is given by Xavier de Montépin, who in his “Confessions d’une Bohême” describes the adventurer thus: “A lost child of this great Paris, where all the vices have temples and all the bad passions altars and priests, the Bohemian cultivates, with dangerous skill, the worse side of human nature. Sometimes he is really clever and succeeds in deceiving the whole world, which for a moment accepts him. Then he is brilliant and proud, delicately gloved and fastidiously shod; he has horses, mistresses, gold. Of this lying edifice, so elaborately constructed, not one stone, perhaps, will to-morrow rest upon another.” It is to be hoped that Montépin was, in this case, generalising from a few very bad specimens.
Like his counterpart in London, the Bohemian of Paris has usually long to wait for his hour of triumph. He has to pass through years of struggles and privations, to hunger and to thirst. He does not surrender, however; for he has an ardent faith in himself, and never loses the sheet-anchor of hope. The life he leads has, moreover, its seductive side, without which the bravest soul could not support it—hours of delightful illusion, the pleasures of study, the buoyant companionship of others engaged in the same warfare, and a free vent for the explosive gaieties of youth. Then there are the periods of discouragement and anguish, the unkindnesses of friends, the physical frame yielding even whilst the spirit defiantly holds out; then, perhaps, despair or even death. Such things as these constitute the chequered life of the Bohemian. The Bohemia of Paris, according to Henri Mürger, is “the stage of artistic life; it is a preface to the Academy, to the hospital, or to the Morgue.” This inevitably reminds an Englishman of the old Grub Street Bohemian, the man of talent or genius who, in a few exceptional instances, struggled on, like Johnson, to greatness, but who, as a rule, thought Fortune had smiled when he could fill the vacuum in his stomach with four-pennyworth of shin of beef; who, after months of toil in his garret, would take his work to the bookseller’s and return with a pocketful of guineas, only to be penniless again on the morrow, to starve for another twelvemonth, and perhaps to end his career, heartbroken and forgotten, in a pauper’s grave.
The present century has produced two generations of Paris Bohemians who have left their mark upon the history of arts and letters. The first had its cradle in a now demolished house of the Rue du Doyenné. Nothing could have been more sombre or depressing than this street, which was one of the ugliest in Paris. Yet the indomitable spirits who made it their haunt lived within sight of all that the most artistic and delicate imagination could desire. There were the remains of the Hôtel Rambouillet, in which French literature had, in its infancy, been nursed; the façade of the Musée, resplendent with sculptures of the Renaissance; a cluster of trees, which might almost have been called a wood, in the branches of which feathered Bohemians trilled their songs of love and liberty. The walls of the house were old and bare; but the inhabitants soon covered them with decorations of a magnificence scarcely to be found in palaces. There Corot painted his Provence landscapes and Chausserian his bacchants; and there the earliest novels of Arsène Houssaye and the earliest poems of Théophile Gautier were penned. No troop of gipsies, encamped beneath foliage in the midst of a perfumed wood, ever led a more buoyant life. Comedy was played within those artistic walls; masked balls were given; the landlord and the scandalised citizens were defied. Years went by, and at last the Bohemians of the Rue du Doyenné had constrained the public to accept their ideals of art and literature. And now they were petted, fèted, adored by those who had previously taken them for fools. Yet even whilst Fortune was thus smiling, one famous member of the order—one who, in the eyes of posterity, personifies the Bohemians of this period—threw his fellows into mourning. The unhappy Gérard de Nerval—translator of Faust, friend and collaborator of Heine—was found one morning suspended from a street-lamp.
So much for the first generation of Paris Bohemians. The second comprised, among others, Privat d’Anglemont, Auguste Vitu, Schanne, Alfred Delvan, Champfleury, and, above all, Henri Mürger. Their haunt was the Café Momus, in the Rue Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. This café has, within the last few years, disappeared, and its site is now occupied by a colour-merchant’s warehouse and a pawnbroking establishment. The place no longer resounds with the laughter, the reckless gaiety, the folly of Bohemians such as those just named. At {367} the door of the little temple Death or Glory sometimes came and knocked, to summon one or other of its inhabitants away. Privat d’Anglemont entered the Municipal Maison-de-Santé and died there; Mürger, a few months afterwards, breathed his last in the same retreat. He left behind him a literary monument in the pictures, at once charming and grotesque, of that strange life in which he played so important a part. Every writer of distinction in Paris followed his bier to the grave; and the tomb erected to his memory is worthy of the man who slumbers beneath it. His companion, Privat d’Anglemont, lies near him; but without even a stone to tell his admirers where to cast their wreaths. Of the survivors, one—Schanne—became a toy-merchant in the Rue Saint-Denis and is suspected of having, to the delight of children, invented certain mechanical rabbits which beat a drum at every movement of the car to which they were harnessed.
The first Bohemians of France must be looked for among her earliest poets. François Villon, for instance, who was publicly whipped, and the vagabond minstrels, one of whom in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame so narrowly escapes hanging. But these lively, luckless bards were in the position of the warriors who lived before the time of Homer, and whose deeds were destined to remain unsung. The great student and chronicler of Bohemian life (whose “Vie de Bohême,” as translated into German, was classed by a Leipzic bookseller under the head of ethnography) was Henri Mürger, with his four literary and artistic personages and their servant, himself a Bohemian, who lends small sums of money to his masters out of the wages he does not receive, and who, in his love of the picturesque, finds himself unable to interfere with the beau désordre in which they leave their rooms. Highly ingenious are these four typical Bohemians in getting rid of their money when there are funds in hand, and in making both ends meet when their purses are nearly empty. Thus, one of them having obtained a certain sum from a confiding relative, purchases for a young woman to whom he is attached a monkey and a parrot; only to find, a few days afterwards, that the monkey has eaten the parrot and died of indigestion. They have not even a suit of dress-clothes among them; and on one occasion, when the musician wishes to go to a ball, the painter induces a gentleman whose portrait he is taking to divest himself of his evening coat that he may secretly lend it to his pleasure-seeking friend. Varied and original are the devices by which the attention of the puzzled sitter is diverted from his missing garment. The Bohemian who has gone to the ball, and who puts on a pair of white gloves with the view of disguising himself from possible creditors, passes most of his time in the refreshment room; returning to it, when for a moment he has been taken out by one of the dancers, on the plea that if he were to stop away too long his absence would be “remarked.”
There are some Bohemians who seem to have a particular fancy for white kids. In M. Ponsard’s drama of Honneur et Argent the romantic but impecunious hero rushes forward at one critical moment to the front of the stage, exclaiming: Je porte des gants blancs, et je n’ai pas dîné! Hégésippe Moreau, Bohemian and true poet, who for want of a bed slept at times in one of the trees of the Champs Elysées, went one evening to a ministerial party, where, expecting to get something to eat, he was driven to despair at finding nothing to relieve his hunger except jellies and ices. It was probably in view of famished Bohemians that an old French book on etiquette warned persons invited out to dinner not, if the meal was long delayed, to exclaim: On ne aîne jamais dans cette maison. A well-known Bohemian, on being asked by a wealthy friend to take pot-luck with him at a certain hour, is said to have replied: “With pleasure; and you will excuse me if I am rather punctual.”
The Bohemian consoles himself by the thought that the greatest writers have often in their youth been in almost as dire straits as himself. How indeed, without such a reflection, could he from day to day exist? He remembers that when, during the first performance of Hernani, Victor Hugo was called out of the theatre by a bookseller and requested to accept 6,000 francs for the right of publishing the play, he had not more than forty francs in his actual possession. He may even, if he has studied the literary history of a neighbouring country, recall the case of Samuel Johnson, who for years had to live on fourpence a day.
Even in the depths of poverty Bohemians, if there is anything in them, are sure (so Henri Mürger testifies) to make from time to time an impression upon some rich man, who will invite them to dinner, partly from sympathy and admiration, partly in order to have the opportunity of reading to them some poem or drama that vanity has impelled him to compose. On these occasions the Bohemian is said to revenge himself {368} for having been condemned to play the part of listener only—auditor tantùm—by staying late and drinking profusely. Macaulay had such a Bohemian in view when he described a member of this interesting class—a guest at the time in the house of his patron—as “roaring for fresh punch” at four in the morning.
THE BOULEVARD POISSONIÈRE.
THE BOULEVARD POISSONIÈRE.
To be suspected, however, of a Bohemianism of which they are innocent is sometimes the fate of eminent and well-conducted authors; and Macaulay’s roarer for punch reminds one of a certain fashionable Parisian novelist who, as Grenville Murray relates, went once to stay at a country house where the host and hostess had very romantic notions of the life usually led by the knights of the pen. Towards twelve o’clock the eminent littérateur, slightly fatigued by his journey, retired to his room, and before long was in bed and fast asleep. In about a quarter of an hour he was awakened by a continued tapping at the door, and, raising his head, wondered for a moment whether the house could be on fire. Then, recovering his presence of mind, he called out “Entrez”; on which two sturdy footmen appeared, bearing between them an ice-pail with a bottle of champagne in it. The novelist had some difficulty in prevailing upon the wine bearers to retire with their well-intended burden. His host and hostess had been under the impression that authors wrote habitually at night, and were unable to get through their work unless well primed with alcoholic liqueur.{369}
The Garçon—The Development of the Type—The Garçon’s Daily Routine—His Ambitions and Reverses.
SELLING GOATS.
SELLING GOATS.
THE waiter of Paris, whose manners are of velvet, whose flittings are bird-like, and whose smile is eternal, is another pronounced type of character. The garçon may be said to have originated at a Paris refreshment-room established in or before the time of Scarron (who celebrates it in verse), by a certain Señor Lopes in association with a certain Señor Rodrigues. This restaurant, in the Portuguese style, was celebrated for a beverage then much in vogue, known as “citrate,” and composed of lemon-juice, cedrat, and sugar in fresh or iced water. It was dispensed to the frequenters of the place by extremely polite servants, who were the first in France to exercise the suave and delicate functions of the waiter. Gradually other restaurants were opened in the capital for the sale, first of lemonade and orgeat, and subsequently of coffee, tea, chocolate, and wines. The waiter, as these houses of refreshment improved and developed, became more and more polished and indispensable, so that to-day, according to a French writer, “He is a personage. He wears shirts of the finest Holland, glazed shoes, white stockings, and a tie which would move the envy of a sub-prefect. But for his vest, which indemnifies itself for not being quite a vest by the fineness of its tissue, he would be mistaken for an ambassador or a tenor. His hair, cut in the latest fashion, exhales {370} sweet odours, and his lips express a perpetual smile of complaisance. The lady at the counter, it should be added, shows him delicate attentions.”
The true Paris waiter, like the true poet, is born, not made. He has hereditary waiter’s blood coursing through his veins. His father was a garçon before him, and from childhood he has been instructed in the family art, learning celerity and grace of movement, with that patience, politeness, and amiability by which he is distinguished. There are exceptions to this rule, all the same; and good waiters have sometimes been made out of men who have failed in the higher walks of life; of bankrupt merchants or ruined gentlemen. A spendthrift who, having run through his fortune, prefers to wait rather than work is already in some degree qualified for the post of garçon. His experience will constitute him an authoritative arbiter in disputes over a game of billiards, or a pretty girl, or dominoes, or cards; he knows how to please men who love to dine or sup as sumptuously as he once did, and the winebibbers excite within him no repulsion, but on the contrary strike a chord of sympathy in his soul.
Whatever his antecedents may be, the Paris waiter invariably becomes fashioned after a certain recognised type. This type is well described by a French writer in the following words: “Vigour of constitution and honesty of soul are two qualities without which the café garçon would not exist. The master’s eye cannot always be hovering over the bottles, the decanters, the cups, and the coffee-pots of the laboratory. Nothing is easier than to divert, in the midst of the gigantic consumption which distinguishes certain establishments, an occasional drop from the ocean of refreshments and liqueurs; a fraction of that total which the proprietor counts every evening, to the great annoyance of the late-staying customer exchanging his last ten-sou piece at midnight for a final petit verre. The garçon is therefore, of necessity, an honest man. From the rising of the sun to the extinction of the gas he is handling the money of others; he is a confidential servant, a cashier on a small scale. As to vigour of constitution, you will soon see how indispensable that is to the garçon. Day dawns, and late as he went to bed the night before, he has to rise betimes. At that hour there is hardly anyone awake in Paris but fruiterers, scavengers, and water-carriers; nevertheless he, the man of eloquence, who passes his time amongst epicures and who forms an indisputable part of the fashionable world, must tear himself from the luxury of repose. Every day the luxury of life surrounds him with its seductions, its perfumes, and its joys, and yet he is condemned to live the hard life of an artizan. His master wishes him to have at once the complaisant elegance of a spaniel and the vigilance of a fox. Well, he wakes up, and stretches his arms; striking, perhaps, with his extended fingers the table-legs between which he has thrown his mattress the night before. For you must quite understand that he is obliged to take his food and to sleep within that space which is the scene of his duties; like the soldier in action, he sleeps on the field of battle. When, thus early, he rises, he is breathing a heavy air, impregnated with the too-familiar emanations from gas, not to mention the odours (hermetically closed in by the café shutters) of that punch, wine, and haricot mutton which the proprietor has shared at midnight with his companions, at table No. 1, the table, that is to say, nearest the counter. The only glimpse of light which cheers the garçon as he opens his eyes proceeds from the inextinguishable lamp which burns in the laboratory with the obstinacy of the vestal fire. As to those matutinal sounds which herald the approach of day, the garçon is quite free to regard as such the mewing of the cat, or the shrill whistlings of Madame’s canaries, which are anticipating a near visit from the chickweed merchant. But suddenly the tread of the master, who, in a room overhead, is searching for his braces and his cravat, shakes the ceiling. In an instant the mattresses of all the waiters are snatched up and bundled behind an old partition, side by side with spoilt billiard cues, watering cans, broken chess-boards, and the antique counter which the proprietor purchased with the original stock. The shutters are taken down, the milkmaid arrives, the principal comes downstairs with a bag of money under his arm, Madame thinks about her toilette, butter pats are distributed on the plates, the stove-tender lights the fire, and all the bees in this hive are in motion. The hour of work has struck.”
After this first tug at his collar, it is a relief to find that the garçon enjoys a brief period of repose, and, whilst awaiting custom, tears the wrappers off the newspapers and studies the European situation. In the morning he is occupied entirely with dispensing café-au-lait. This first service is productive of very few “tips,” as the customers who breakfast at the cafés are usually employées, or old bachelors, or provincial visitors lodging in the small hotels of the {371} neighbourhood; people more or less pledged to a discreet economy. From noon, however, till two o’clock black coffee and alcoholic liqueur absorb the waiter’s energies. It is between those hours that gay consumers, with hearts already warmed by a visit to the neighbouring restaurant, arrive in troops and pay without counting their change. This, however, is not a wise proceeding if we are to be guided by a certain M. Vidocq, who, in his “Arch Thief (Paravoleur); or, The Art of conducting oneself prudently in all countries and especially at Paris,” a book at once curious and rare, does not, like a beforementioned writer, rely on the universal integrity of the garçon, and whose advice to his readers is as follows:—“At the café you must not, from a sense of false shame or from misplaced confidence, put in your pocket without counting it the change which the garçon gives you when the piece of money you have tendered in payment exceeds the charge you have incurred. This is particularly to be avoided in the cafés-jardins, where the crowd presses on all sides, and where twenty panting waiters seem hardly sufficient to serve the customers. You have come with some friends, and have taken ices, punch, liqueurs, etc. When you are about to depart you tell the waiter that you wish to settle. You call in vain for him five or six times, getting no reply but—‘Coming, sir; coming.’ At length he arrives, scared, bewildered, and staring right and left as though anxious to despatch you and rush off to someone else. You tell him to reckon what you owe. He gabbles certain words about ices, punch, liqueurs, which you cannot understand, and then distinctly mentions a certain sum-total. If you pay on the spot, without any explanation, you are pretty sure to have been charged fifteen or twenty sous too much. If you have calculated your debt beforehand, with the aid of the tariffs posted up at these places, you will easily perceive, before parting with your money, what errors have been committed. If, however, you have failed to take this precaution, do not be imposed upon by the distracted air of the garçon, but make him enumerate each separate item of your account, and it will be a wonder indeed if you do not gain by this recapitulation.” Yet another ingenious device on the part of the garçon is made by M. Vidocq a subject of admonition to his readers. “When a party of friends,” he writes, “have run up rather a heavy bill, it often happens that the gentleman who is doing the honours finds amongst the change he receives a piece of ten or twenty sous from which the image and superscription have been almost entirely effaced; and he ultimately throws it to the waiter, saying that it is for him. This coin has not been introduced without intention. It has already been frequently presented to customers and frequently thrown back to the waiter. You would give the garçon two or three sous if you received good money, and you give him ten or twenty because he tenders a piece of money which you are afraid you cannot pass.”
Although everywhere very much on the same pattern, the Paris garçon varies somewhat in his manners, customs, and general bearing according to the establishment in which he exercises his functions. There are cafés on the Boulevard des Italiens where he deviates somewhat from his traditional amiability, and, when a customer complains of the café-au-lait with which he has been served, raises his eyes to the ceiling, sighs, places a fresh cup on the table, and filling it from the self-same coffee-pot, exclaims, “I know you will like that, sir.” The waiter of the Boulevard Saint-Martin is a man of letters, particularly conversant with dramatic literature. He picks up his education from the eminent actors and dramatists who frequent the establishment, and knows everything that is going on behind the scenes. At one time the garçon of the Café Desmares was an eminent authority on military matters. He knew all the superior officers of the Royal Guard, and everything that was whispered in the barracks. In course of time—after 1830 that is to say—he lost his martial tint, and became highly aristocratic; speaking in measured tones and looking exceedingly bored. Now, however, like the café itself, he is no more. The body-guards were accustomed under the Restoration to assemble at the Café Valois; whilst the Bonapartists had their headquarters at the Café Lemblin. Challenges were sent from one café to the other, swords were drawn and duels were fought by the dim light of some street lamp. The weapons, it is said, were confided to the waiters of the belligerent cafés, together with the pipes of the frequenters. The intending duellist called for them as he would have called for a newspaper, and the waiter sometimes replied:—“They are all in use, sir.”
The garçon aspires to wealth and greatness. Sometimes, in his vaulting ambition, he o’erleaps himself. Says a French student of his manners and customs: “He takes a wife and a new house, puts frills on his shirt, and inscribes his name in the National Guard. Become, in his turn, a master, he puts a hundred thousand francs’ worth of gilding, pictures, {372} and mirrors (obtained on credit) into the establishment which he opens with unusual éclat. The public rush to his doors, and all goes well until some neighbouring café, more sumptuous still, draws the crowd away again. Then the time has arrived for him to make up his balance-sheet and pay two and a half per cent. to his creditors. What becomes of him after that? If he has protected his wife’s dowry he takes refuge in his native country, between two cabbage beds with a pond for his ducks. One day the malady of dethroned kings seizes him, and he dies of ennui in the midst of an inconsolable family. Heaven take pity on his soul! Many café waiters die without having fulfilled their dream of having an establishment of their own. The life of fatigue which they lead kills them, as a rule, towards their thirtieth year. It is thus that we have seen the greatest of them all vanish from our midst—that waiter of the Café de la Rotonde, whose ‘baoum!’ uttered in a far-resounding voice, has found so many imitators. We see him still, coffee-pot in hand, saying in a voice profound, ‘Pas de Crême?’ Alas, alas, he is dead. He died of consumption, and when he was about to expire the nurse still offered him a mixture of cod-liver oil and milk, which his doctor had prescribed. He exclaimed with his last gasp, ‘Pas de Crême?’”
Brillat-Savarin on the Art of Cooking—The Cook and the Roaster—Cooking in the Seventeenth Century—Louis XV.—Mme de Maintenon.
FROM the Paris waiter to the Paris cook the transition is, in literary phrase, “easy and natural.” There is probably no prouder personage in the world than this artist, who knows that mankind cannot dispense with him, and who, if one were to ask him whether the revolution of his spit or of the earth on its axis were the more important, might hesitate to decide.
In that excellent comedy from the combined pens of Émile Augier and Jules Sandeau, entitled Le Gendre de M. Poirier, we see an illustration of the solemn importance which is attached by the French cook to a well-ordered menu. M. Poirier, an aspirant for social position, has married his daughter to a ruined marquis, Gaston de Nesle, whom he soon finds to be a magnificently expensive son-in-law. One day, determined to retrench, he sends for his chef and asks what he intends to prepare for dinner that day. The chef enumerates a list of some twenty costly and exquisite dishes; to which M. Poirier replies: “You will replace all that by soup, roast meat, salad, and a fruit tart.” The cook feels like a soldier required to chop wood with the sword with which he has been accustomed to cut his way to glory, and who prefers to snap that sword in two. “I resign!” exclaims the cuisinier. “No man will cook for you!” “Then I will engage a woman,” is the economist’s base rejoinder.
To pass from fiction to fact we find a very much stronger instance of the spirit of the French cook in the famous Vatel, who was so delicate on the “point of honour” that he ran a sword through his own body because the fish which should have arrived for an important dinner he was cooking did not turn up in time. This artist was first attached to the intendant Foquet, afterwards to the Prince de Condé; and he could not endure the shame of letting the king go short of one particular course in the dinner which the prince offered him at the Castle of Chantilly.
Some of the loftiest functions of the Parisian chef can be performed by no one who is not endowed with absolute genius. Training, experience, industry, will go some distance in the French culinary art; but, according to Brillat-Savarin, in his Physiologie du Goût, they would apparently never qualify a man for the sublimer functions of roasting a joint or a fowl.
“On devient cuisinier mais on naît rotisseur,” exclaims this excellent writer, who raised the art of the kitchen to the dignity of a science, and who propounds the maxims of cooking with the same gravity, the same sincerity, the same ardour as if he were laying the bases of a grand moral philosophy. “A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with but one eye,” he declared in a neat sentence which admits of only a lumbering translation.
Why a roasting-cook should require greater talent than one of his kitchen colleagues, who, for instance, like the chef spoken of by Macaulay, could make ten different dishes out of a poppy-head, is not {373} at first sight apparent. One might imagine that the roaster required nothing but care and patience; but after the dictum of so high an authority as Brillat-Savarin, it must by the uninitiated be supposed that for the seemingly simple operation of roasting a bird or joint as it ought to be roasted, a combination of subtle qualities are requisite, just as the mere two hands of a watch need, for their due regulation, a complex system of machinery.
THE BIRD MARKET.
THE BIRD MARKET.
As roaster, or in no matter what capacity, the Paris cook had his poetic eulogist. One gastronomic versifier was wont, whilst sitting at dinner, to regard the genius who was furnishing his stomach as a divinity—
Another regarded his cook as a present from the sky—
The science of cooking in France was in a languid condition when Francis I. ascended the throne. The presence of ladies at his court, and the {374} fêtes and banquets which were given, reanimated the cuisinier. It was the renaissance of the kitchen as well as of the arts; and Francis I. imported from Italy cooks as well as painters and sculptors. The Italian cooks viewed their art in a very serious light. Montaigne well portrays a typical member of their order.
“Just now,” he writes, “I was mentioning an Italian I have recently entertained, who acted as maître d’hôtel to the late Cardinal Caraffe until his death. I made him describe his duties, and he gave me a discourse on this science of the jaws with a gravity and countenance quite magisterial, precisely as if he had been engaged on some subject in theology. He indicated the different stages of appetite: that which exists after fasting, and that which remains when the first or second course has been served; the methods employed, now simply to gratify it, now to awaken and spur it; the policy with which he prepares his dishes, adorning and embellishing them so as to fascinate the eye. After that he entered upon the order of the service, full of fine and important considerations; the whole inflated with a magnificence of words such as characterises a treatise on the government of an empire.”
The luxury of gastronomy was carried to such a point in France that edicts were issued by several French kings for the purpose of restraining it; but the Italian cooks whom Catherine de Medici brought to the court of Henri II. easily contrived to vanquish the law. They formed a school and produced pupils who were destined to surpass their preceptors. Until the Revolution the profession of cook was regulated by a succession of statutes. So far back as 1260 the corporation of “goose-cooks” (geese being their most important commodity) received statutes from the provost of the merchants. Later on the name of “roasters” was given to them; and anyone not of their order who ventured to cook for the public was termed a traitor. The cooks of Paris had already been made the subject of many enactments when Louis XIV., in 1663, gave them new statutes which were registered in parliament the following year; nor was it until the Revolution that their profession became free.
In the seventeenth century the culinary art had reached a high pitch of perfection, and epicures abounded in high life, amongst princes, seigneurs, and even bishops—indeed bishops in particular. One day when a certain archbishop famed for good living, in a sense otherwise than ecclesiastical, had dined at the palace of his episcopal brother in the capital, he called his servants around him and said: “I have been dining with the archbishop of Paris; there was this and that dish, and such and such defects. Now I tell you, so that you may fall into the danger, that if you were to treat me in that fashion, you would be wishing to throw away your lives.” At the end of dinner he was accustomed to send for Maître Nicholas, his cook, and say: “Maître Nicholas, what shall we have for supper?” After supper his inquiry was: “Maître Nicholas, what shall we have for to-morrow’s dinner?” Another bishop having returned home very hungry and demanded his dinner, the episcopal cook made his appearance empty-handed. “As a bishop,” he said, “I forgive you; but if you fail to produce my supper, I shall talk to you like a man, and flatten your nose for you.”
Louis XIV. was a great gastronomist, but in the refinements of the culinary art Louis XV. eclipsed his predecessor. The artists of the kitchen were not yet in his reign paid twenty thousand francs a year, as they have since been paid in Paris; but they were petted, yielded to, and stroked down when out of temper. The cooks from Languedoc were chiefly in demand at Paris; they received very large salaries and exercised domestic despotism, the other servants of the household having to bow to their authority.
Expense was nothing when it became a question of stimulating the jaded appetite of a count or a wealthy merchant. Mercie in his “Picture of Paris” shows us a maître d’hôtel presenting the bill of fare to his aristocratic master, who throws it down disdainfully, exclaiming: “Always the same dishes! You have no imagination. These are nothing but nauseating repetitions.” “But, monseigneur, the sauces are varied.” “I tell you the whole thing is detestable, and I can no longer eat it.” “Well, monseigneur, I will prepare you a grilled boar.” “When?” “To-morrow. I will make him drink sixty bottles of champagne first. And after that I want you to eat a Jamaica turtle.” “Bravo! And when? Where is the turtle?” “In London.” “Send a courier at once: let him fetch it post-haste.” The courier is despatched, and returns with the turtle. There is a solemn conference as to the most effective way of preparing the animal; and after all kinds of processes, it appears on the table. That dish has cost a thousand crowns. Seven or eight gourmands devour it, and while they are drinking costly wines discuss the question as to how much a peasant can live on. They decide that three sous a day are enough for him, and that the inhabitants of the towns are well off if they have seventeen. Beyond these figures all is superfluity, according {375} to the turtle-devouring economists.
The whole court of Louis XV. consisted of gourmands, loyal imitators of their sovereign. Marshal de Richelieu attached his name to various dishes, prepared for the purpose of making an epicure’s mouth water. The gay and ingenious Mme. de Pompadour invented three or four recipes which have become famous. Gastronomy, however, did not flourish at the court of Louis XVI., who was by no means fastidious in the choice of his food, and for whose robust appetite rude joints of meat amply sufficed. Coming to the Revolution, we find the culinary art injured a good deal by the arbitrary closing of the mansions of the great nobility.
Those thousand and one ruinous inventions without which courtiers, financiers, and ecclesiastics found existence impossible, were seductions for the severe Republicans. A celebrated gastronomist, Grimod de la Reynière, paints, in what he doubtless intended for very black tints, the calamity which marked the revolutionary period. “It is an unquestionable fact,” he writes, “that during the disastrous years of the Revolution not one fine turbot entered the market”; and he has thus exposed himself to Republican reproaches as to the seat of his patriotism and political sentiment being his stomach.
All the celebrities of the eighteenth century sat at the table of the la Reynières, which was more sumptuously kept than Scarron’s. There was first the grandfather, la Reynière, who died in 1754 with a napkin under his chin, suffocated by a pâté-de-foie-gras; then the father, whose dinners were better than his society, if we are to judge from the remark passed upon him by one of his guests, namely: “You can eat him; but digest him you cannot”; and finally the son, who has exercised by his pen and his stomach a considerable influence on gastronomy, and rescued French cookery from the indifference of the Revolution.
We have just mentioned the exquisite table which was kept by the inimitable Scarron. The time came, however, when his resources dwindled and the dishes laid before his distinguished guests were less numerous and less varied. The conversation of Scarron’s vivacious wife, however, the future Mme. de Maintenon, did much to atone for a poor menu. On one occasion, whilst dinner was proceeding, Scarron received a secret message from his cook—who had to prepare the meal with very spare materials—to the effect that a certain dish, usually regarded as essential, was wanting. Turning his head aside from the guests, Scarron {376} whispered to his wife: “My dear, give them another of those charming little stories. There is no roast.”
So much for the ingenuity of a French host. The ingenuity of a French cook was perhaps never better exemplified than under the following circumstances. A rich financier was once dining at an aristocratic table where one of the courses consisted of some preparation of veal, highly gratifying to the palate. Whilst this course was being eaten one of the guests happened to say to the host: “Your epigrams, you know, are excellent.” When the financier got home he summoned his cook, told him he had just dined at a house where a ravishing dish of veal, mysteriously prepared, had been served, and directed the cuisinier to manufacture something like it, adding that he could not describe the precise nature of the dish, but that he knew it was called an “epigram.” For a moment the cook was staggered. Then a sudden inspiration came upon him, and he declared that he clearly perceived how epigrams should be prepared. Next day he invented an exquisite dish, which was destined to become famous—to his own and his master’s glory—as the “Epigramme de veau á la financière.”
It was a maxim of Brillat-Savarin’s that “the discovery of a new dish is more precious for the universe than the discovery of a new star”; and there have been plenty of illustrious diners and cooks in Paris who lived up to this lofty idea. The greatest chef who ever turned a spit was doubtless the immortal Carême, who commenced his career as maître d’hôtel to the Prince de Talleyrand. Having broken with his first master on some question of politics, he was successively employed by the Prince Regent of England, whom he quitted because George IV. did not sufficently understand the refinements of the culinary art; by the Emperor Alexander I. of Russia, whose dominions he found too cold; by Prince Bagration, who was a fine connoisseur but whose stomach was out of order; by the Prince of Wurtemberg, who had vulgar culinary tastes; and finally by an English lord, said to have been a glutton, and who was in any case choked to death with a bone. Carême was a friend of the illustrious Villeroux, famed partly as Mirabeau’s cook, but chiefly for his courage and adventures. Having sailed to the Indies, he fell into the midst of a savage race with strong gastronomic instincts, and prepared for them such delicious sauces and ragouts that they enthusiastically proclaimed him king. For several years, with a frying pan in his hand and the crown on his head, he played the dual part of cook and king. When he died he left his subjects a very precious legacy, a recipe, that is to say, for a bacon-omelette.
| Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: |
|---|
| boulevard Saint-Denis=> Boulevard Saint-Denis {pg 95} |
| It vain will despotism dread=> In vain will despotism dread {pg 188} |
| THE PALMIER FOUNTAIN, PLACE DU CHÀTELET=> THE PALMIER FOUNTAIN, PLACE DU CHÂTELET {pg 298} |
| The Boheman consoles himself=> The Bohemian consoles himself {pg 367} |