Part 4

The Ambassadeurs' is a roof-garden on the ground, except that there are comfortable benches instead of tables with chairs about them, and that there is gravel underfoot in place of wooden flooring. Lining the block of benches on either side are rows of boxes, and at the extreme rear is the restaurant, with a wide balcony, where people sit and dine, and listen to the music of the songs without running any risk of hearing the words. The stage is shut in with mirrors and set with artificial flowers, which make a bad background for the artists, and which at matinées, in the broad sunlight, look very ghastly indeed. But at night, when all the gas-jets are lit and the place is crowded, it is very gay, joyous, and pretty.

The Parisian may economize in household matters, in the question of another egg for his breakfast, and in the turning of an uneaten entrée into a soup, but in public he is most generous; and he is in nothing so generous as in his reckless use of gas. He raises ten lamp-posts to every one that is put up in London or New York, and he does not plant them only to light some thing or some person, but because they are pleasing to look at in themselves. It is difficult to feel gloomy in a city which is so genuinely illuminated that one can sit in the third-story window of a hotel and read a newspaper by the glare of the gas-lamps in the street below. This is a very wise generosity, for it helps to attract people to Paris, who spend money there, so that in the end the lighting of the city may be said to pay for itself. If we had as good government in New York as there is in Paris, Madison Square would not depend for its brilliancy at night on the illuminated advertising of two business firms.

Individuals follow the municipality of Paris in this extravagance, and the Ambassadeurs' is in consequence as brilliant as many rows of gas-jets can make it, and these globes of white light among the green branches of the trees are one of the prettiest effects on the Champs Élysées at night. They do not turn night into day, but they make the darkness itself more attractive by contrast. The performers at the Ambassadeurs' are the best in their line of work, and the audiences are composed of what in London would be called the middle class, mixed with cocottes and boulevardiers. You will also often see American men and women who are well known at home dining there on the balcony, but they do not bring young girls with them.

It is interesting to note what pleases French people of the class who gather at these open-air concerts. What is artistic they seem to appreciate much more fully than would an American or an English audience--at least, they are more demonstrative in their applause; but the contradictory feature of their appreciation lies in their delight and boisterous enthusiasm, not only over what is very good, but also over what is most childish horse-play. They enjoy with equal zest the quiet, inimitable character studies of Nicolle and the efforts of two trained dogs to play upon a fiddle, while a hideous, gaunt creature, six foot tall, in a woman's ballet costume, throws them off their chairs in convulsions of delight. They are like children with a mature sense of the artistic, and still with an infantile delight in what is merely noisy and absurd.

It is also interesting to note how much these audiences will permit from the stage in the direction of suggestiveness, and what would be called elsewhere "outraged propriety." This is furnished them to the highest degree by Yvette Guilbert. It seems that as this artist became less of a novelty, she recognized that it would be necessary for her to increase the audacity of her songs if she meant to hold her original place in the interest of her audiences, and she has now reached a point in daring which seems hardly possible for her or any one else to pass. No one can help delighting in her and in her line of work, in her subtlety, her grace, and the absolute knowledge she possesses of what she wants to do and how to do it. But her songs are beyond anything that one finds in the most impossible of French novels or among the legends of the Viennese illustrated papers. These latter may treat of certain subjects in a too realistic or in a scoffing but amusing manner, but Guilbert talks of things which are limited generally to the clinique of a hospital and the _blague_ of medical students; things which are neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly. At Pastor's Theatre last year a French girl sang a song which probably not one out of three hundred in the audience understood, but which she delivered with such appropriateness of gesture as to make her meaning plain. When she left the stage there was absolute silence in the house, and in the wings the horrified manager seized her by the arms, and in spite of her protests refused to allow her to reappear. So her performance in this country was limited to that one song. It was a very long trip to take for such a disappointment, and the management were, of course, to blame for not knowing what they wanted and what their audiences did not want, but the incident is interesting as showing how widely an American and a French audience differs in matters of this sort.

There was another Frenchwoman who appeared in New York last winter, named Duclerc. She is a very beautiful woman, and very popular in Paris, and I used to think her amusing at the Ambassadeurs', where she appealed to a sympathetic audience; but in a New York theatre she gave you a sense of personal responsibility that sent cold shivers down your back, and you lacked the courage to applaud, when even the gallery looked on with sullen disapproval. And when the Irish comedian who followed her said that he did not understand her song, but that she was quite right to sing it under an umbrella, there was a roar of relief from the audience which showed it wanted some one to express its sentiments, which it had been too polite to do except in silence. This tolerance impressed me very much, especially because I had seen the same woman suffer at the hands of her own people, whom she had chanced to offend. The incident is interesting, perhaps, as showing that the French have at times not only the child's quick delight, but also the cruelty of a child, than which there is nothing more unreasoning and nothing more savage.

One night at the Ambassadeurs', when Duclerc had finished the first verse of her song, a man rose suddenly in the front row of seats and insulted her. Had he used the same words in any American or English theatre, he would have been hit over the head by the member of the orchestra nearest him, and then thrown out of the theatre into the street. It appeared from this man's remarks that the actress had formerly cared for him, but that she had ceased to do so, and that he had come there that night to show her how well he could stand such treatment. He did this by bringing another woman with him, and by placing a dozen bullies from Montmartre among the audience to hiss the actress when she appeared. This they did with a rare good-will, while the rejected suitor in the front row continued to insult her, assisted at the same time by his feminine companion. No one in the audience seemed to heed this, or to look upon it as unfair to himself or to the actress, who was becoming visibly hysterical. There was a piece of wood lying on the stage that had been used in a previous act, and Duclerc, in a frenzy at a word which the man finally called to her, suddenly stooped, and, picking this up, hurled it at him. In an instant the entire audience was on its feet. This last was an insult to itself. As long as it was Duclerc who was being attacked, it did not feel nor show any responsibility, but when she dared to hurl sticks of wood at the face of a Parisian audience, it rose in its might and shouted its indignation. Under the cover of this confusion the hired bullies stooped, and, scooping up handfuls of the gravel with which the place is strewn, hurled them at Duclerc, until the stones rattled around her on the stage like a fall of hail. She showed herself a very plucky woman, and continued her song, even though you could see her face growing white beneath the rouge, and her legs twisting and sinking under her when she tried to dance. It was an awful scene, breaking so suddenly into the easy programme of the evening, and one of the most cowardly and unmanly exhibitions that I have ever witnessed. There did not seem to be a man in the place who was not standing up and yelling "À bas Duclerc!" and the groans and hisses and abuse were like the worst efforts of a mob. Of course the stones did not hurt the woman, but the insult of being stoned did. They put an end to her misery at last by ringing down the curtain, and they said at the stage door afterwards that she had been taken home in a fit.

When I saw her a few months later at Pastor's, I was thankful that, as a people, our self-respect is not so easily hurt as to make us revenge a slight upon it by throwing stones at a woman. Of course a Frenchman might say that it is not fair to judge the Parisians by the audience of a music-hall, but there were several ladies of title and gentlemen of both worlds in the audience, who a few months later assailed Jane Harding when she appeared as Phryne in the Opéra Comique with exactly the same violence and for as little cause. These outbursts are only temporary aberrations, however; as one of the attendants of the Ambassadeurs' said, "To-morrow they will applaud her the more to make up for it," which they probably did. It is in the same spirit that they change the names of streets, and pull down columns only to rebuild them again, until it would seem a wise plan for them, as one Englishman suggested, to put the Column of Vendôme on a hinge, so that it could be raised and lowered with less trouble.

Of the public gardens and dance-halls there are a great number, and the men who have visited Paris do not have to be told much concerning them, and the women obtain a sufficiently correct idea of what they are like from the photographs along the Rue de Rivoli to prevent their wishing to learn more. What these gardens were in the days of the Second Empire, when the Jardin Mabille and the Bal Bullier were celebrated through books and illustrations, and by word of mouth by every English and American traveller who had visited them, it is now difficult to say. It may be that they were the scenes of mad abandon and fascinating frenzy, of which the last generation wrote with mock horror and with suggestive smiles, and of which its members now speak with a sigh of regret. But we are always ready to doubt whether that which has passed away, and which in consequence we cannot see, was as remarkable as it is made to appear. We depreciate it in order to console ourselves. And if the Mabille and the Bullier were no more wickedly attractive in those days than is the Moulin Rouge which has taken their place under the Republic, we cannot but feel that the men of the last generation visited Paris when they were very young. Perhaps it is true that Paris was more careless and happy then. It can easily be argued so, for there was more money spent under the Empire, and more money given away in fêtes and in spectacles and in public pleasures, and the Parisian in those days had no responsibility. Now that he has a voice and a vote, and is the equal of his President, he devotes himself to those things which did not concern him at all in the earlier times. Then the Emperor and his ministers felt the responsibility, and asked of him only that he should enjoy himself.

But whatever may have been true of the spirit of Paris then, the man who visits it to-day expecting to see Leech's illustrations and Mark Twain's description of the Mabille reproduced in the Jardin de Paris and the Moulin Rouge will be disappointed. He will, on the contrary, find a great deal of light and some very good music, and a mixed crowd composed chiefly of young women and Frenchmen well advanced in years and English and American tourists. The young women have all the charm that only a Frenchwoman possesses, and parade quietly below the boxes, and before the rows of seats that stretch around the hall or the garden, as it happens to be, and are much better behaved and infinitely more self-respecting and attractive in appearance than the women of their class in London or New York. But there are no students nor grisettes to kick off high hats and to dance in an ecstasy of abandon. There are in their places from four to a dozen ugly women and shamefaced-looking men, who are hired to dance, and who go sadly through the figures of the quadrille, while one of the women after another shows how high she can kick, and from what a height she can fall on the asphalt, and do what in the language of acrobats is called a "split;" there is no other name for it. It is not an edifying nor thrilling spectacle.

The most notorious of these dance-halls is the Moulin Rouge. You must have noticed when journeying through France the great windmills that stand against the sky-line on so many hilltops. They are a picturesque and typical feature of the landscape, and seem to signify the honest industry and primitiveness of the French people of the provinces. And as the great arms turn in the wind you can imagine you can hear the sound of the mill-wheel clacking while the wheels inside grind out the flour that is to give life and health. And so when you see the great Red Mill turn high up where four streets meet on the side of Montmartre, and know its purpose, you are impressed with the grim contrast of its past uses and its present notoriety. An imaginative person could not fail to be impressed by the sight of the Moulin Rouge at night. It glows like a furnace, and the glare from its lamps reddens the sky and lights up the surrounding streets and cafés and the faces of the people passing like a conflagration. The mill is red, the thatched roof is red, the arms are picked out in electric lights in red globes, and arches of red lamp-shades rise on every side against the blackness of the night. Young men and women are fed into the blazing doors of the mill nightly, and the great arms, as they turn unceasingly and noisily in a fiery circle through the air, seem to tell of the wheels within that are grinding out the life and the health and souls of these young people of Montmartre.

If you have visited many of the places touched upon in this article in the same night, you will find yourself caught in the act by the early sunlight, and as it will then be too late to go to bed, you can do nothing better than turn your steps towards the Madeleine. There you may find the market-people taking the flowers out of the black canvas wagons and putting up the temporary booths, while the sidewalk is hidden with a mass of roses in their white paper cornucopiæ and the dark, damp green of palms and ferns.

It will be well worth your while to go on through the silent streets from this market of flowers to the market of food in the Halles Centrales, where there are strawberry patches stretching for a block, and bounded by acres of radishes or acres of mushrooms, and by queer fruits from as far south as Algiers and Tunis, just arrived from Marseilles on the train, and green pease and carrots from no greater a distance than just beyond the fortifications. It is the only spot in the city where many people are awake. Everybody is awake here, bustling and laughing and scolding--porters with brass badges on their sleeves carrying great piles of vegetables, and plump market-women in white sleeves and caps, and drivers in blue blouses smacking their lips over their hot coffee after their long ride through the night. It is like a great exposition building of food exhibits, with the difference that all of these exhibits are to be scattered and are to disappear on the breakfast-tables of Paris that same morning. Loud-voiced gentlemen are auctioneering off whole crops of potatoes, a sidewalk at a time, or a small riverful of fish with a single clap of the hands; live lobsters and great turtles crawl and squirm on marble slabs, and vistas of red meat stretch on iron hooks from one street corner to the next.

You are, and feel that you are, a drone in this busy place, and salute with a sense of guilty companionship the groups of men and girls in dinner dress who have been up all night, and who come singing and chaffing in their open carriages in search of coffee and a box of strawberries, or a bunch of cold, crisp radishes with the dew still on them, which they buy from a virtuous matron of grim and disapproving countenance at a price which throws a lurid light on the profits of Bignon's and Laurent's.

And then you become conscious of your evening dress and generally dissolute and out-of-place air, and hurry home through the bright sunlight to put out your sputtering candle and to creep shamefacedly to bed.

III

PARIS IN MOURNING

The news of the assassination of President Carnot at Lyons reached Paris and the Café de la Paix at ten o'clock on Sunday night. What is told at the Café de la Paix is not long in traversing the length of the boulevards, and in crossing the Place de la Concorde to the cafés chantants and the public gardens in the Champs Élysées, so that by eleven o'clock on the night of the 24th of June "all Paris" was acquainted with the fact that the President of the Republic had been cruelly murdered.

There are many people in America who remember the night when President Garfield died, and how, when his death was announced from the stage of the different theatres, the audience in each theatre rose silently as one man and walked quietly out. To them the President's death was not unexpected; it did not stun them, it came with no sudden shock, but it was not necessary to announce to them that the performance for that evening was at an end. They did not leave because the manager had rung down the curtain, but because at such a time they felt more at ease with themselves outside of a place of amusement than in one.

This was not the feeling of the Parisians when President Carnot died. On that night no lights were put out in the cafés; no leader's bâton rapped for a sudden silence in the Jardin de Paris, and the Parisians continued to drink their bock and to dance, or to watch others dance, even though they knew that at that same moment Madame Carnot in a special train was hurrying through the night to reach the death-bed of her husband. It is never possible to tell which way the French people will jump, or how they will act at a crisis. They have no precedents of conduct; they are as likely to do the characteristic thing, which in itself is different from what people of any other nation would do under like circumstances, as the uncharacteristic thing, which is even more unexpected. They complicate history by behaving with perfect tranquillity when other people would become excited, and by losing their heads when there is no occasion for it. As the Yale captain said of the Princeton team, "They keep you guessing."

So when I was convinced by the morning papers, after the first shock of unbelief, that the President of France was dead, I walked out into the streets to see what sign there would be of it in Paris. I argued that in a city given to demonstrations the feelings of the people would take some actual and visible form; that there would be meetings in the street, rioting perhaps in the Italian quarter, and extraordinary expressions of grief in the shape of crêpe and mourning. But the people were as undisturbed and tranquil as the sun; the same men were sitting at the same round tables; the same women were shopping in the Rue de la Paix, and but for an increased energy on the part of the newsboys there was no sign that a good man had died, that one who had harmed no one had himself been cruelly harmed, and that the highest office of the state was vacant.

When I complained of this to Parisians, or to those who were Parisians by choice and not by birth, they explained it by saying that the people were stunned. "They are too shocked to act. It is a horror without a precedent," they said; but it struck me that they were an inordinately long time in recovering from the blow. At one o'clock on Monday morning a workman crawled out upon the roof of the Invalides, and, gathering the tricolored flag in his arms, tied a wisp of crêpe about it. The flags in the Chamber of Deputies and in the War Office were draped in the same manner, and with these three exceptions I saw no other visible sign of mourning in all Paris. On Monday night those theatres subsidized by the government, and some others, but not all, were closed for that evening. At three o'clock on Tuesday, two days after the death of the President, I counted but three flags draped with crêpe on the boulevards; but on the day following all the shops on the Rue de la Paix and the hotels on the Rue de Rivoli put out flags covered with mourning, and so advertised themselves and their grief. It is interesting to remember that the most generous display of crêpe in Paris was made by an English firm of ladies' tailors. During this time the correspondents were cabling of the grief and rage of the Parisians to sympathetic peoples all over the world; and we, in our turn, were reading in Paris the telegrams of condolence and the resolutions of sympathy from as different sources as the Parliament of Cape Town and the Congress of the United States. What effect the reading of these sincere and honest words had upon the people of Paris I do not know, but I could not at the time conceive of their reading them without blushing. I looked up from the paper which gave Lord Rosebery's speech, and the brotherly words which came from little colonies in the Pacific, from barbarous monarchs, and from widows to Madame Carnot, and from corporations, Emperors, and Presidents to the city of Paris, and saw nothing in the countenances of the Parisians at the table next to mine but smiles of gratification at the importance that they had so suddenly attained in the eyes of the whole world.