Part 2

The Champs Élysées is hardly a street, but as a thoroughfare it is the most remarkable in the world. It is a much better show than are the boulevards. The place for which you pay to enter is generally more interesting than the place to which admittance is free, and any one can walk along the boulevards, but to ride in the Champs Élysées you must pay something, even if you take your fiacre by the hour. Some Parisians regret that the Avenue des Champs Élysées should be so cheapened that it is not reserved for carriages hired by the month, and not by the course, and that omnibuses and hired cabs are not kept out of it, as they are kept out of Hyde Park. But should this rule obtain the Avenue des Champs Élysées would lose the most amusing of its features. It would shut out the young married couples and their families and friends in their gala clothes, which look strangely unfamiliar in the sunlight, and make you think that the wearers have been up all night; and the hundreds of girls in pairs from the Jardin de Paris, who have halved the expense of a fiacre, but who cannot yet afford a brougham; and the English tourists dressed in flannel shirts and hunting-caps and knickerbockers, exactly as though they were penetrating the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Syria, and as unashamed of their provincialism as the young marquis who passes on his dog-cart is unashamed of having placed the girl with him on his right hand instead of his left, though by so doing he tells every one who passes who and what she is. It would shut out the omnibuses, with the rows of spectators on their tops, who lean on their knees and look down into the carriages below, and point out the prettiest gowns and faces; and it would exclude the market-wagons laden with huge piles of yellow carrots and purple radishes, with a woman driving on the box-seat, and a dog chained beside her. There is no other place in the world, unless it be Piccadilly at five o'clock in the afternoon, where so many breeds of horses trot side by side, where the chains of the baron banker and the cracking whip of a drunken cabman and the horn of some American millionaire's four-in-hand all sound at the same time. To be known is easy in the boulevards, but it is a distinction in the Avenue des Champs Élysées--a distinction which costs much money and which lasts an hour. Sometimes it is gained by liveries and trappings and a large red rosette in the button-hole, or by driving the same coach at the same hour at the same rate of speed throughout the season, or by wearing a fez, or by sending two sais ahead of your cart to make a way for it, or by a beautiful face and a thoroughbred pug on a cushion at your side, although this last mode is not so easy, as there are many pretty faces and many softly cushioned victorias and innumerable pug-dogs, and when the prevailing color for the hair happens to be red--as it was last summer--the chance of gaining any individuality becomes exceedingly difficult. When all of these people meet in the afternoon on their way to and from the Bois, there is no better entertainment of the sort in the world, and the avenue grows much too short, and the hours before dinner even shorter. There are women in light billowy toilets, with elbows squared and whip in hand, fearlessly driving great English horses from the top of a mail-phaeton, while a frightened little English groom clutches at the rail and peers over their shoulder to grasp the reins if need be, or to jump if he must. And there are narrow-chested corseted and padded young Frenchmen in white kid gloves, who hold one rein in each hand as little girls hold a skipping-rope, and who imagine they are so like Englishmen that no one can distinguish them even by their accent. There are fat Hebrew bankers and their equally fat sons in open victorias, who, lacking the spirit of the Frenchmen, who at least attempt to drive themselves, recline consciously on cushions, like the poodles in the victorias of the ladies with the red hair. There are also visiting princes from India or pashas from Egypt; or diplomats of the last Spanish-American republic, as dark as the negroes of Sixth Avenue, but with magnificent liveries and clanking chains; the nabobs of Haiti, of Algiers and Tunis, and with these the beautiful Spanish-looking woman from South America, the wives of the _rastaqouères_; and mixed with these is the long string of bookmakers and sporting men coming back from the races at Longchamps or Auteuil, red-faced and hot and dusty, with glasses strapped around them, and the badges still flying from their button-holes. There are three rows of carriages down and three of carriages up, and if you look from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries you see a broken mass of glittering carriage-tops and lace parasols, and what looks like the flashing of thousands of mirrors as the setting sun strikes on the glass of the lamps and windows and on the lacquered harness and polished mountings. Whether you view this procession from the rows of green iron seats on either side or as a part of it, you must feel lifted up by its movement and color and the infinite variety of its changes. A man might live in the Champs Élysées for a week or a month, seeing no more of Paris than he finds under its beautiful trees or on its broad thoroughfare, and be so well content with that much of the city as to prefer it to all other cities.

There was a little fat man in his shirt sleeves one morning in front of the Theatre of the Republic, which, as everybody knows, stands under the trees in the Champs Élysées, on the Rue Matignon, hanging a new curtain, and the fat man, as the proprietor and manager, was naturally anxious. Two small boys with their bare legs, and leather belts about their smocks, and a nurse with broad blue ribbons down her back, and myself looked our admiration from the outside of the roped enclosure. The orchestra had laid down its fiddle, and was helping the man who takes the twenty centimes to adjust the square yard of canvas. The proprietor placed his fat fingers on the small of his back and threw his head to one side and shut one eye. We waited breathlessly for his opinion. He took two steps backward from the ten-centime seats, and studied the effect of the curtain from that distance, with his chin thrown up and his arms folded severely. We suggested that it was an improvement on the old curtain, and one that would be sure to catch the passer's eye.

"Possibly," the proprietor said, indulgently, and then wiped his brow and shook his head. He told us we had little idea how great were the trials of an _impresario_ of an open-air theatre in the Champs Élysées. What with the rent and the cost of the costumes and the employment of three assistants--one to work the marionettes, and one to take up the money, and one to play in the orchestra--expenses did run up. Of course there was madame, his wife, who made costumes herself better than those that could be bought at the regular costumers', and that was a saving; and then she also helped in working the figures when there were more than two on the scene at once, but this was hard upon her, as she was stout, and the heat at the top of the tin-roofed theatre up among the dusty flies was trying. And then, I suggested, there was much competition. The proprietor waved a contemptuous dismissal of the claims of the four little theatres about him. It was not their rivalry that he cared for. It is true the seats were filled, but with whom? Ah, yes, with whom? He placed his finger at the side of his nose, and winked and nodded his head mysteriously. With the friends of the proprietor, of course. Poor non-paying acquaintances to make a show, and attract others less knowing to a very inferior performance. Now here with him everybody paid, and received the worth of his money many times. Perhaps I had not seen the performance; in that case I should surely do so. The clown and the donkey-cart were very amusing, and the dancing skeleton, which came to pieces before the audience and frightened the gendarme, was worthy of my approval. So the two small boys and the nurse and the baby and I dodged under the rope and waited for the performance.

The idle man, who knows that "they also serve who only stand and wait," must find the Champs Élysées the most acceptable of all places for such easy service. There are at one corner the stamp-collectors to entertain him, with their scrap-books and market-baskets full of their precious bits of colored paper, gathered from all over the known world, comparing and examining their treasures, bargaining with easy good-nature and with the zeal of enthusiasts. Three times a week he will find this open market or exchange under the trees, where old men and little boys and pretty young girls meet together and chatter over their common hobby, and swap Columbian stamps for those of some French protectorate, and of many other places of which they know nothing save that it has a post-office of its own. At another corner there are smoothly-shaven men and plump, well-fed-looking women waiting to take service on some gentleman's box-seat or in front of some lady's cooking-stove--an intelligence office where there is no middleman to whom they must pay a fee, and where, while they wait for a possible employer, they hold an impromptu picnic, and pay such gallant compliments that one can see they have lived much in the fashionable world.

Or the idler can drop into a chair in one of the cafés chantants on an off day, when there is no regular performance, but a rehearsal, to which the public is neither invited nor forbidden. It is an entertaining place in which to spend an hour or two, with something to drink in front of you, and a cigar, and the sun shining through the trees upon the mirrors and artificial flowers and the gaudy hangings of the stage. Here you will see Mlle. Nicolle as she is in her moments of leisure. The night before she wore a greasy gingham gown, with her hair plastered over her forehead in oily flat curls, as a laundress or charwoman of Montmartre might wear them. Now she is fashionably dressed in black, with white lace over it, and with a lace parasol, which she swings from her finger in time to the music, while the other artists of the Ambassadeurs' stand farther up the stage waiting their turn, or politely watch her from the front. The girl who chalked her face as Pierrot the evening before follows her in a blue boating-dress and a kick at the end of it, which she means to introduce later in the same day; and the others comment audibly on it from their seats, calling her by her first name, and disagreeing with the leader of the orchestra as to the particular note upon which the kick should come, while he turns in his seat with his violin on his knee and argues it out with them, shrugging his shoulders, and making passes in the air with his lighted cigarette as though it were a baton.

Two gendarmes, with their capes folded and thrown over their shoulders, come in and stand with the waiters, surveying the rehearsal with critical disapproval, and the woman who collects the pennies for the iron seats in the avenue takes a few moments' recess, and brings with her two nurse-maids, with their neglected charges swinging by the silken straps around their silken bodies. And so they all stand at one side and gaze with large eyes at the breathless, laughing young woman on the stage above them, who runs and kicks and runs back and kicks again, reflected many times in the background of mirrors around her; and then the two American song-and-dance men, and the English acrobats, and the Italian who owns the performing dogs, and the smooth-faced French comédiennes, and all the idle gentlemen with glasses of bock before them, sit up as though some one had touched their shoulders with a whip, and all the actresses smile politely, and look with pressed lips and half-closed eyes at a very tall woman with red hair, who walks erectly down the stage with a roll of music in her gloved hands. This is Yvette Guilbert, the most artistic and the most improper of all the women of the cafés chantants. She is also the most graceful. You can see that even now when she is off her guard. She could not make an ungraceful gesture even after long practice, and when she shudders and jumps at a false note from the orchestra she is still graceful.

When the rehearsal is finished you can cross the Place de la Concorde and hang over the stone parapet, and watch the Deputies coming over the bridge, or the men washing the dogs in the Seine, and shaving and trimming their tufts of curly hair, and twisting their mustaches into military jauntiness; or you can turn your back to this and watch the thousands of carriages and cabs and omnibuses crossing the great square before you from the eight streets opening into it, with the water of the fountains in the middle blown into spray by the wind, and turned into the colors of the rainbow by the sun. This great, beautiful open place, even to one accustomed to city streets and their monuments, seems to change more rapidly and to form with greater life than any other spot in the world, and its great stupid obelisk in the centre appears to rise like a monster exclamation-point of wonder at what it sees about it, and with the surprise over all of finding itself in the centre of it.

You cannot say you have seen the streets of Paris until you have walked them at sunrise; every one has seen them at night, but he must watch them change from night to day before he can claim to have seen them at their best. I walked under the arches of the Rue de Rivoli one morning when it was so dark that they looked like the cloisters of some great monastery, and it was impossible to believe that the empty length of the Rue Cambon had but an hour before been blocked by the blazing front of the Olympia, and before that with rows of carriages in front of the two Columbins. There were a few belated cabs hugging the sidewalk, with their drivers asleep on the boxes, and a couple of gendarmes slouching together across the Place de la Concorde made the only sound of life in the whole city. The Seine lay as motionless as water in a bath-tub, and the towers of Notre Dame rising out of the mist at one end, and the round bulk of the Trocadéro bounding it at the other, seemed to limit the river to what one could see of its silent surface from the Bridge of the Deputies. The Eiffel Tower, the great skeleton of the departed exposition, disappeared and reformed itself again as drifting clouds of mist swept through it and cut its great ugly length into fragments hung in mid-air. As the light grew in strength the façades of the government buildings grew in outline, as though one were focussing them through an opera-glass, and the pillars of the Madeleine took form and substance; then the whole great square showed itself, empty and deserted. The darkness had hidden nothing more terrible than the clean asphalt and the motionless statues of the cities of France.

A solitary fiacre passed me slowly with no one on the box, but with the coachman sitting back in his cab. He was returning to the stables, evidently, and had on his way given a seat to a girl from the street, whom he was now entertaining with genial courtesy. He had one leg thrown over the other, and one arm passed back along the top of the seat, and with the other he waved to the great buildings as they sprang up into life as the day grew. The girl beside him was smiling at his pleasantries, while the rising sun showed how tired and pale she was, and mocked at the paint around her sleepy eyes. The horse stumbled at every sixth step, and then woke again, while the whip rocked and rolled fantastically in its socket like a drunken man. From up the avenue of the Champs Élysées came the first of the heavy market-wagons, with the driver asleep on the bench, and his lantern burning dully in the early light. Back of him lay the deserted stretch of the avenue, strange and unfamiliar in its emptiness--save for the great arch that rose against the dawn, and seemed, from its elevation on the very top of the horizon, to serve as a gateway into the skies beyond. The air in the Champs Élysées was heavy with a perfume of flowers and of green plants, and the leaves dripped damp and cool with the dew. Hundreds of birds sang and chattered as though they knew the solitude was theirs but for only one more brief hour, and that they then must give way to the little children, and later to crowds of idle men and women. It seemed impossible that but a few hours before Duclerc had filled these silent, cool woods with her voice--Duclerc, with her shoulder-straps slipping to her elbows and her white powdered arms tossing in the colored lights of the serpentine dance. The long, gaudy lithographs on the bill-boards and the arches of colored lamps stood out of the silence and fresh beauty of the hour like the relics of some feast which should have been cleared away before the dawn, and the theatres themselves looked like temples to a heathen idol in some primeval wood. And as I passed out from under the cool trees to the silent avenues I felt as though I had caught Paris napping, and when she was off her guard, and good and fresh and sweet, and had discovered a hidden trait in her many-sided character, a moment of which she would be ashamed an hour or two later, as cynics are ashamed of their secret acts of charity.

II

THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS

NIGHT

Paris is the only city in the world which the visitor from the outside positively refuses to take seriously. He may have come to Paris with an earnest purpose to study art, or to investigate the intricacies of French law, or the historical changes of the city; or, if it be a woman, she may have come to choose a trousseau; but no matter how serious his purpose may be, there is always some one part of each day when the visitor rests from his labors and smiles indulgently and does as the Parisians do. Whether the city or the visitor is responsible for this, whether Paris adopts the visitor, or the visitor adapts himself to his surroundings, it is impossible to say. But there is certainly no other capital of the world in which the stranger so soon takes on the local color, in which he becomes so soon acclimated, and which brings to light in him so many new and unsuspected capacities for enjoyment and adventure.

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

But the American goes to Paris as though returning to his inheritance and to his own people. He approaches it with the friendly confidence of a child. Its language holds no terrors for him; and he feels himself fully equipped if he can ask for his "edition," and say, "Cocher, allez Henry's tout sweet." There is nothing so joyous and confiding as the American during his first visit to the French metropolis. He has been told by older men of the gay, glad days of the Second Empire, and by his college chum of the summer of the last exposition, and he enters Paris determined to see all that any one else has ever seen, and to outdo all that any one else has ever done, and to stir that city to its suburbs. He saves his time, his money, and his superfluous energy for this visit, and the most amusing part of it is that he always leaves Paris fully assured that he has enjoyed himself while there more thoroughly than any one else has ever done, and that the city will require two or three months' rest before it can readjust itself after the shock and wonder due to his meteoric flight through its limits. London he dismisses in a week as a place in which you can get good clothes at moderate prices, and which supports some very entertaining music-halls; but Paris, he tells you, ecstatically, when he meets you on the boulevards or at the banker's, where he is drawing grandly on his letter of credit, is "the greatest place on earth," and he adds, as evidence of the truth of this, that he has not slept in three weeks. He is unsurpassed in his omnivorous capacity for sight-seeing, and in his ability to make himself immediately and contentedly at home. There is a story which illustrates this that is told by a young American banker who has been living in Paris for the last six years. He met one day on the boulevards an old college friend of his, and welcomed him with pleasure.

"You must let me be your guide," the banker said. "I have been here so long now that I know just what you ought to see, and I shall enjoy seeing it with you as much as though it were for the first time. When did you come?" The new arrival had reached Paris only three days before, and said that he was ready to see all that it had to show. "You have nothing to do to-night, then?" asked the banker. "Well, we will drop in at the gardens and the cafés chantants. There is nothing like them anywhere." His friend said he had made the tour of the gardens on the night of his arrival, but that he would be glad to revisit them. But that being the case, the banker would rather take him to the cafés--"The Black Cat," and Bruant's, and "The Dead Rat." These his friend had visited on his second evening.

"Oh, well, we can cross the river, then, and I will show you some slumming," said the banker. "You should see the places where the thieves go--the Château Rouge and Père Lunette."

"I went there last night," said the new-comer.

The man who had lived six years in Paris took the stranger by the arm and asked him if he was sure he was not engaged for that evening. "For if you are not," he said, "you might take me with you and show me some of the sights!"