To Americans, as M. André justly says, Paris must seem “a world upside down. American mothers complain greatly of the little security and respect shown to women in this capital, of the gallantry of the French and the indulgence of public opinion in flagrant cases. They are right;” and he thinks that it is because French girls are too severely disciplined, too much caged up, that there is less reverence between the two sexes in France than in America. “True chastity,” he maintains, “has liberty for her sister.”

American girls staying in Paris are astonished and indignant at the close surveillance to which unmarried young Frenchwomen are subjected, although they themselves frequently sacrifice to opinion in the matter of not appearing out of doors unaccompanied by a maid. M. André regrets this on account of the countenance it gives to a prudish system, which he is the last to admire in his own countrywomen. “O young ladies,” he exclaims, “born on a soil where monarchical influences have never flourished, why do you submit to this shameful spy system? Would it not be better if you openly showed your disdain for it, and taught our women the manners of liberty? Paris, after all, is not a forest, and a mere glance, a shrug of the shoulders, or silence itself, will suffice to shame away a leering lounger or an impertinent snob. Is it true, then, that in default of other forms of tyranny, respect for opinion, whatever that opinion be, is a yoke in America?”

Let us hope, in conclusion, that the American girl does not “let herself go,” on her return from straitlaced Paris to the freedom of New York, at all events to such an extent as suggested by this writer, who assures us that, having once set foot again on native soil, she flirts furiously.{17}

CHAPTER III.

MORE PARISIAN TYPES.

The police, already strongly organised under Louis XIV., resorted largely to espionage; but in Louis XV.’s reign the famous Lieutenant of Police, de Sartines, fashioned the spy system into a civil institution, and gave it a prodigious development. Spies were now employed to follow the Court or to watch the doings of distinguished foreigners who had recently arrived in the capital. Then there were domestic spies, the most terrible of all, to judge by the following observations extracted from a report attributed to Louis XV.’s lieutenant. “The ‘family,’ amongst us, lives under the protection of a reputation for virtue which cannot impose on the magistracy; the family is a repertory of crimes, an arsenal of infamies. The hypocrisy of the false caresses which are lavished in it must be apparent to all but fools. In a family of twenty persons the police ought to place forty spies.” After Sartines, Lieutenant Berryer by no means allowed the spy service to deteriorate. He employed convicts as spies, one of the conditions of their employment being that on the slightest failure in the vile duties they had to perform, they should be restored to prison. The services, too, of coachmen, landladies, lodgers, were called into requisition. Even domestic servants were sometimes Berryer’s agents, and many a mysterious lettre-de-cachet was issued on the strength of some{18} word uttered carelessly within the hearing of a lady’s-maid or valet-de-chambre.

Stories are even told of men so innocent that they acted as spies without being aware of it. Such a one was Michel-Perrin, of Mme. de Bawr’s tale, which, in its dramatic form, gave Bouffé one of his best parts. The simple-minded man had in his youth, when he was a student of theology, known Fouché, afterwards to become Napoleon’s Minister of Police. In due time Michel-Perrin took orders, and was doing duty in a little village when, under the Revolution, public worship was abolished. Calling upon Fouché to ask his old friend for some suitable employment, he can obtain nothing until, moved by the urgency of his solicitations, the Police Minister suggests to him, with so much delicacy that his true meaning remains unperceived, that he shall walk about the public places, go into cafés and restaurants, and frequent all kinds of resorts where people congregate, and that he shall then return to Fouché with an account of anything remarkable he may have seen or heard. This seems to the delighted Michel-Perrin mere child’s play, and he regards it as little more than a pretext on the part of the generous minister for handing him every evening a gold piece. When, however, the unconscious spy finds one day that he has revealed a political conspiracy, and jeopardised the lives of many, perhaps innocent men, he suddenly awakens to a sense of what he has been doing, and in horror throws up his employment. Fouché, it seems, was pained to have humiliated the unoffending priest, and, public worship being just at that time restored, he used his influence with Napoleon to obtain the ingenuous man’s re-appointment as village curé.

Under the Revolution the spy was replaced by the official denunciator, an agent no less formidable. At length came the Empire, and then Fouché invested espionage with the importance of a science. In 1812 the “brigade of safety” appeared, which was first composed of four agents, but which, in 1823 and 1824, always under the direction of the famous Vidocq, numbered close upon thirty. Delavau, the prefect of police, had permitted him to establish, on the public road, a game known as “troll-madam”; and this game, an excellent trap for boobies and passers-by whose slightest words and actions were keenly watched by Vidocq’s hounds, produced, from the 20th of July to the 4th of August, 1823, a net profit of 4,364 francs. This sum was added to the subvention already granted to the spy department.

The Prefect Delavau returned to the method of Lieutenant Berryer in employing as spies convicts, whom he threw back into prison for the slightest fault. One of his predecessors, Baron Pasquier, had endeavoured, like Berryer, to enlist domestic servants into the secret police force; and, with this object, Delavau renewed an old ordinance, calling upon them to get their names noted in the books of the prefecture every time they entered a situation or left one. The domestics, however, perceived the motive of Delavau’s measure, and were so unanimous in withholding their names from the books in question, that all idea of family espionage, on which much value had been set, was soon to be abandoned. Delavau drew even more largely upon the criminal class for his myrmidons than Pasquier had done, and in his day no public gathering took place at which some felon, released for the purpose from gaol, was not lurking about for an ill-sounding word or a suspicious gesture. Such agents as these worked with the industry of bloodhounds. “Between the populace and the subalterns of the police,” says the historian Peuchet, “there is a continual war; the latter are ill-bred dogs who seize every opportunity for applying their fangs. The police will never inspire respect for order so long as part of its force consists of released gaol-birds who owe a grudge to the whole of the people. When these two elements are in contact there is inevitably a fermentation.” The justice of these remarks was recognised by M. Delavau’s successor, M. de Belleyme, whose first care was to dismiss and even restore to their respective prisons this army of felon-spies. To-day, although he has not risen much in public estimation, the spy of the police-force is a citizen in every sense of the word, enjoying all the rights of a Frenchman, and not obtaining his commission from the prefecture until after his past life and his moral character have stood the test of a keen investigation. Thus espionage has been purified as far as that is possible; but whether the system is not in itself essentially immoral, is a question which has exercised the minds even of such writers as Montesquieu. “Espionage,” he says, “is never tolerable; if it were so it would be practised by honest men; but the necessary infamy of the person indicates the infamy of the thing.” This is in effect another version of the famous utterance of Argenson, who, reproached with employing as spies none but rogues and villains, exclaimed: “Find me honest men who will do this work.” The present prefecture of police believes it has found such men, and the{19} discovery, if it has really been made, is a fortunate one indeed.

Another variety of police spy to be met with in Paris is the officious volunteer spy. He may belong to the lower or to the higher ranks of society. He takes upon himself to observe and to denounce, without instructions, and solely in the hope of a pecuniary recompense. This variety is probably the most contemptible and the vilest. It should be mentioned, too, that the French capital swarms with invisible and unrecognisable spies, disguised, as they sometimes are, beneath an appearance of luxury or magnificence. This or that personage passes for a member of the diplomatic service. He is an admired figure in fashionable drawing-rooms, and while affecting to converse on the European situation, exercises the ear of a fox terrier and the eye of a hawk. Then, of course, there is the military spy, who is superior to the civil variety inasmuch as whilst the latter, in case of recognition, only incurs a more or less disagreeable misadventure, the former is liable to be shot. The military spy, therefore, may have all the heroism of the professed soldier.

The civil spy system was naturally developed to an extraordinary degree by the subtle Richelieu. His secret agent took as many shapes as Proteus. Now it was a brave old seigneur, infirm and professedly deaf, in whose presence people would not hesitate to speak out and say everything, but who recovered his vigour and his legs in order to go and report to the cardinal a conversation of which he had not missed one detail. Now it was a woman, who, having insinuated herself into the intimate friendship of some young and brilliant courtier, wrested from him a dangerous and terrible secret. But it was not only throughout the length and breadth of France that Richelieu had spies; numbers of them were in his pay abroad, all over the Continent indeed, regularly reporting political intrigues, and furnishing clandestine copies of secret treaties.

Enough, however, of the spy; let it simply be added that he has been introduced into two novels by Balzac, into one by Hugo, and into two by Alexandre Dumas, who has likewise made him figure in a couple of plays.

Let us pass from the most slinking and distasteful Paris character to the most open and, as many consider, the most charming one—from the “espion,” that is to say, to the “écuyère.”

At Paris the circus-woman is the object of a much higher admiration than in London. Théophile Gautier, in his dramatic feuilletons, has frequently shown that he preferred the equestrian fairy of the circus to the sylph who dances at the opera. He goes into ecstasies over her agility, vigour, and courage, and is displeased with nothing but the drapery in which her lower limbs are enveloped, holding that, just as the most virtuous fashionable woman or actress takes care to exhibit her bare arms if they are beautiful, so the “écuyère” of the circus should be allowed to display the full symmetry and grace of her legs. The “écuyère” whom Balzac brings on the scene in his Fausse Maîtresse, Malaga by name, is an excellent type of the French circus-woman, who is nearly always without relatives, sometimes a foundling, sometimes a stolen child, and who, coming one knows not whence, goes, the idol of a day, one knows not where. “At the fair,” says the greatest of French novelists—or rather, one of his characters—“this delicious Columbine used to carry chairs on the tip of her nose—the prettiest little Greek nose I ever saw. Malaga, madame, is skill personified. Of Herculean strength, she only requires her tiny fist or diminutive foot to rid herself of three or four men. She is, in fact, the goddess of gymnastics. Careless as a gipsy, she says everything that enters her head; she thinks as much of the future as you do of the halfpence you throw to beggars, and sometimes sublime things escape from her. No one could ever persuade her that an old diplomatist is a beautiful youth; a million could not change her opinion. Her love is, for whoever inspires it, a perpetual flattery. Endowed as she is with really insolent health, her teeth are thirty-two exquisite pearls encased in coral.”

The performances of the Paris circus-woman too closely resemble those of her sister in London to need description. The characters, however, of the two equestrians are not identical, and that of the écuyère can scarcely be represented better than in the words of a vivacious French writer, who says: “You can easily imagine what must be, not the future (alas! has she one?), but the present of this poor, intrepid, careless creature. After being exposed twenty times a day to the risk of breaking her jaw, she has hardly earned her food; and every morning she has to wash, stretch, and otherwise renovate the costume in which she is to dazzle her spectators at night.... Some of these circus-women marry a Hercules or a professional fool; at the third or fourth child Mme. Hercules or Mme. Fool takes her{20} mare by the head, kisses her on the nose, and bids a weeping adieu to the brave, affectionate beast, the only friend who has never beaten her. It is done: the whole family—husband, wife and children, go forth to try their luck as strolling players. Their theatre is the fair in summer and the street in winter. Hercules will lift, at arm’s length, enormous weights, and the children will form the living column, or dance on the rope, while the mother, as short-skirted as ever, but now plump enough to burst her vestments, will contribute some kind of music or exhort the outside public to enter the show.” She frequently fills up her intervals with fortune-telling; informs young women whether they will be married the same year, and whether the visionary swain is fair or dark; lets married men know if their wives are faithful, and wives if their husbands are engaged in amours. Nurse-maids learn from her that in the mounted gendarmerie or the cuirassiers there is a hero of six-feet-six, only awaiting an opportunity of declaring his passion.

This, however, is a sketch of the more fortunate of the strolling circus artists. Occasionally the husband breaks a limb, or kills himself in attempting some daring feat; in that case his family is often reduced to beggary or something worse.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOMESTIC.

Let us, however, turning from drollery and from Léon Gozlan—who can hardly have been quite serious—glance at the household servant of Paris as a factor in the Parisian community. The French domestic, whether valet, lackey, or lady’s-maid, is more important and influential than the domestic of England. It is true that occasionally in an English house some servant practically rules the family, and that the relationship between employer and employed becomes so reversed that the mistress is afraid to ring her drawing-room bell. As a rule, however, in England the domestic is a nonentity. The man-servant or maid-servant who waits at an English table is absolutely ignored, and is not even supposed to understand the conversation which accompanies dinner, nor to laugh at jokes indulged in by the host or his guests. An English servant nowadays who shook with laughter at what he overheard in the dining-room, like black Sambo at Mr. Sedley’s, would be cautioned if not cashiered. The French domestic is a personage and a power. The “trade of lackey,” according to Fabrice, in “Gil Blas,” requires a man of superior intellect. The true lackey “does not go through his duties like a ninny; he enters a house to command rather than to serve. He begins by studying his master: he notes his defects, gains his confidence, and ultimately leads him by the nose.... If a master has vices, the superior genius who waits upon him flatters them, and often indeed turns them to his own advantage.” Awaiting the day when he shall himself be great, the liveried aspirant takes the name of his master when he is with other lackeys, adopts his manners and apes his gestures; he carries a gold watch and wears lace; he is impertinent and foppish. “Bon chien se forme sur maître,” says the French proverb, and the Parisian domestic religiously takes after his master, even though, as far as intrinsic resemblance{21} goes, he might simply be an ape in his master’s clothes.

That vanity characterises French servants is undeniable. Against the charge of cupidity, however, which is brought against them, even by French writers, must be set off one or two famous instances in which valets have supported their ruined masters for ten or twenty years out of their own savings. Mercier, all the same, represents the Paris domestic as hardly less a rogue than does Léon Gozlan. “Out of ten servants,” he assures us, “four are thieves.” Another native writer, while not undertaking to combat this proposition, finds a defence for the accused domestics. “If they are thus, who,” he asks, “has perverted them? Who, either by example or complicity, has made them thieves and spies? Every year is committed, to the prejudice of the country and of agriculture, an abominable crime, namely, the stealing of individuals, strong and useful, snatched at once from the sunlight and from simplicity of manners, to be degraded, and sullied with a livery; to have imposed upon them their master’s vices and follies, and to be turned into idlers and good-for-nothings, flatterers and procurers.”

Paul Louis Courier looked forward to the time when domestic servitude would be replaced by household service rendered freely, as if in virtue of a contract between man and man; and in Paris, as in other capitals, this state of things seems to be fast approaching, not as the result of any benignant feeling on the part of the rich towards the poor, but because, with the spread of education and of democratic ideas, a disinclination to remain constantly at the orders of another person is gradually extending. Already servants demand a greater number of holidays than in ancient times; and there are many who, like the London charwoman and the “laundress” of the Inns of Court, are ready to give their services during the day-time, and even until a late hour in the evening, while reserving to themselves the right of returning, after their labours, to their own domicile.

There is much to be said, no doubt, on the other side. If there are masters and mistresses without consideration for their servants, there are servants who, having kind masters and mistresses, show themselves without gratitude. But we are dealing specially with French servants, who, apart from all question of good conduct or bad, enjoy certain privileges not formally recognised as lawfully belonging to servants in England. The bonne, for instance, or the cook, who goes to market to purchase provisions considers herself entitled to “make the handle of the basket dance”—“fair danser l’anse du panier”—to appropriate, that is to say, a portion of the things she has bought, or of the money she has nominally spent, to her own uses. In like manner the house-porter, or “concierge,” takes for himself, as a matter of course, so many logs out of every basket of wood ordered by the different tenants, of whom there are often some half-dozen in the same house. In France, as in other countries, a valet will sometimes wear his master’s clothes, and the Parisian lady’s-maid asserts and enforces, more perhaps than in any other capital, her claims to her mistress’s cast-off apparel.

The cook—both the “cuisinier” and the “cuisiniêre”—has already been dealt with in a special chapter. It may here, however, be remarked, that though the best cooks, and certainly the most expensive ones, are in France, as in other countries, men, the female cook is far indeed from being held in disesteem. The “cordon bleu,” or blue ribbon, was a distinction conferred upon the female, not upon the male cook; and a woman who cooks particularly well is called to this day a “cordon bleu.” Such a woman was in the service for many years of the well-known “bourgeois de Paris,” as Dr. Véron loved to describe himself.

If every French servant looks for some particular perquisite, they all expect a gratuity at the New Year. One of the greatest curses and greatest blessings which rest upon Paris is the custom of presenting New Year’s gifts. The word “étrenne” is at once a terror and a joy to Parisians, according as they belong to the class who give or the class who receive. In London no gentleman would venture to omit at Christmas-time to “tip” any one of the underlings who had ever cleaned his boots, lifted his portmanteau, or twisted the ends of his moustache. But in Paris, if a gentleman failed at the new year to present “étrennes” to his boot-black, his messenger, or his valet, derision and infamy would, according to a French writer, pursue him, not merely throughout this life, but even beyond the tomb.

Cardinal Dubois, who had a reputation for niggardliness, used to give his servants their “étrennes” in a manner which they could hardly have relished. His major-domo came to him one New Year’s Day to demand the annual gratuity. “Étrennes!” exclaimed the cardinal; “yes, I will give you your étrennes. You may keep everything you have stolen from me during the last twelvemonth.{23}”

Let us, before quitting the subject of the Parisian domestic, relate an anecdote or two. “When I come home,” said a master to his servant, “I often find you asleep.” “That, sir,” replied the man, “is because I don’t like to remain doing nothing.”

A nobleman paid a visit to Fontenelle one day, and found him in a very bad humour. “What is the matter with you?” he asked. “The matter?” replied Fontenelle; “I have a valet who serves me as badly as if I had twenty.”

The Abbé de Voisenon preserved his gay humour to his very last gasp. Just before his death he caused the leaden coffin which he had ordered beforehand to be brought to his bedside. “There,” said he, “is my last overcoat.” Then, turning towards one of his servants of whom he had had reason to complain, he added, “I hope you will not wish to steal that too.”

A certain high official of Paris lived in the country, and, thanks to railway facilities, went home every evening to dine. On one occasion he arrived earlier than usual, and going into his kitchen found the cook in a decidedly unequivocal position, with a bottle in his hand, three-fourths of whose contents had already found their way into his stomach. “Ah, my fine fellow,” exclaimed the master, “I have caught you drinking my wine.” “It is your own fault, sir,” was the reply. “You were not due till four o’clock, and it is now hardly three.”

Our gallery of Paris types would scarcely be complete without a sketch of a very familiar personage who, though not peculiar to Paris, abounds there more than in other capitals. This is the “rentier,” the man of “small, independent means.” According to the etymology of the word, anyone should be called a rentier who lives on his “rentes”—the income, that is to say, derived from the letting of houses or farms; or the interest of money invested in the Funds. In practice, however, the name is given exclusively to the man who lives on the interest of money which he has invested in government securities. He has been described as the corresponding type, in English society, to the man retired from business. He lives modestly in the quarter of the Marais or of the Batignolles, as in England he might live at Clapham or Brixton, at Holloway, or Camden Town; and he passes a considerable portion of his time in some favourite café, reading a newspaper of moderate-liberal politics, or playing at dominoes. Condemned to economy, sometimes of the most parsimonious kind, he counts every lump of sugar brought to him by the waiter, and shows a great predilection for halfpenny rolls. In politics, without being an aristocrat, he is something of a conservative; and, while stickling for his rights, hates revolutions as sure to cause perturbations in the securities of the state.

It was doubtless a rentier from whose pocket the thief in Lord Lytton’s “Pelham” extracted, in a Paris café, a tiny packet which he had seen the owner put carefully away in his coat-tail pocket, and which, on being adroitly stolen and curiously examined, was found to contain, not a precious stone, but a lump of sugar. In the rentier’s defence it may be mentioned that during the great Napoleonic war, when a universal blockade had been declared against English exports, and when colonial produce was everywhere excluded from the ports of France, the price of sugar rose to such a height as to render this luxury difficult for persons of straitened means to indulge in.

The existence of such a number of rentiers in Paris goes far to demonstrate the prudence of the ordinary Frenchman. An Englishman with a few thousand pounds in his possession would, as a rule, speculate with it, instead of burying it in the Funds. The speculation would furnish him with active employment, whereas the permanent investment preferred by the average Frenchman involves an idle and somewhat ignoble life.{24}

CHAPTER V.

PARISIAN CHARACTERISTICS.

Someone, in presence of the Abbé Trublet,{25} 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,{26} 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{27} 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.

{28}

CHAPTER VI.

THE STREETS.

The most celebrated of all the lamps in Paris{29} 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{30} 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{31} 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.