Part 20
We shall never forget, nor ever want to, that wonderful sail back from Chioggia to Venice. Listening to the music on the Canal to-night the memory of it seems compact of dreams, or as the florid cloister-fancy of a Middle-Ages monk that we had read in some illuminated old volume bound in vellum and clasped with gold. There was all the vitalizing pageantry of sunset about us, all the immensity of sky and sea, and many a bright little island rising out of the rippling lagoon this side the marshy wastes. The yellow strips of Pellestrina and Malamocco topped the waves in two long lines, like half-submerged reefs of gold. Above was a vast dome of turquoise glinted with pinks and grays, and with here and there a little heap of snowy clouds. Every phase of the wonderful sky was reproduced in the water. The sun reflected a second sun of no less ruddy fire which burned across the sea in a broad highway of shaking light that rolled to our very feet. The piled and fleecy clouds were steeped in gold, and bands of purple mists across Shelley’s Euganean Hills were pierced by it through and through. Venice, a mirage of the azure sea, rose slowly as we drew nearer, a witchery of towers, campaniles, palaces, painted sails, and drifting gondolas. As the dimming beauty faded with the brief Eastern twilight and we were gazing in awe on the enchanting panorama, there suddenly loomed a fresh and added glory, for just above the topmost pinnacle of stately San Giorgio floated a young summer moon!
Beauty has here an abiding-place. Venice is doubtless a fairer vision now, with its myriad lights, than when the only illumination was from flickering tapers before the corner shrines of the Virgin. More comfortable it surely is than when St. Roche himself was baffled by more than seventy plagues. The jaunty boatman and his peerless gondola still charm us, and dustless and noiseless the city continues musical with the cheery hum of voices and the soft shuffle of feet. In the cool twilight of the churches marvels of sculpture and immortal canvases still inspire and enthrall. Time has added new charms to the marbles of bell tower, church, and palace, and nature still employs a witchery scarce equaled elsewhere in decking the Sea City with flowers. From the water-lilies of the Brenta, the flaming begonia trumpets of the Giudecca, the pale sea-lavender of the Dead Lagoon, the rose-pergolas and oleander-cloisters of San Lazzaro, the primroses and sea-holly of the Lido wooded with odorous acacias and white-flowered catalpas, and carpeted with crimson poppies and the snowy Star of Bethlehem, away out to the sand dunes and lush grasses of Triporti, there continually rises an inexhaustible incense of fragrance and beauty.
The serenade is nearly ended. Anticipating the coming rush at the San Marco Piazza, a word to Paolo starts us laboriously toward the outskirts of the flotilla. From the Royal Gardens to the _molo_ is a matter of only a dozen plunges or so of the stout oar, spurred by an offer of extra _lire_ for extra speed. Off flies our gondola, frowning as superbly as ever did swan in the eye of Keats. We dart alongside the wet quay beyond the Bridge of Sighs and one of those superannuated old gondoliers called _rampini_ earns a _pourboire_ by steadying the prow as we jump ashore at the base of the column of San Marco’s winged lion. St. Theodore looks down placidly from the vantage-point above his crocodile as we pass between these storied pillars—“fra Marco e Todaro,” as the Venetians say when they mean “between pillar and post.” The _piazzetta_ is already crowded and our hope of a table at Florian’s is dwindling. Never did the stately Sansovino Library or the airy colonnades and warm Moorish marbles of the Palace of the Doges look finer, but past them we speed with no time for the scantiest of glances at the famous quatrefoils and the thirty-six pillars with the renowned capitals, and in we hurry to the broad and glorious piazza and its flooding of light and life. Florian’s is in a state of siege. Every table seems taken and hungry people by hundreds are clamoring for places. The Quadri, across the square, would probably have had to content us had not the efficacy of frequent past tips saved the day, and my nightly waiter welcomes us with his dry and mirthless smile and slips us into a snug harbor under the very guns of the enemy. My companions are officers of the American squadron now lying at Triest and they pass their professional opinion that the strategy was capital. But though officers, they are _young_ officers, and Venice has captured them hand and foot. Scarcely have we completed our supper-order when the flowing strains of the Coronation March from “The Prophet” roll in from the _molo_ in the _barca’s_ good night, and, as if it were riding in on that splendid musical tide, the noisy, jubilant host of the _festa_ comes pouring upon us.
And what a fascinating spectacle does this grand, unrivaled old square then present! Were Byron here to-night he would still have to call it “the pleasant place of all festivity.” No chance now to study the designs in this vast flooring of marble or to coax a half-persuaded pigeon on to your shoulder. In every part of its two hundred yards of arcaded length, set with storied architecture so inspiring by beauty and association that it moved even the self-contained Mr. Howells to exclaim, “It makes you glad to be living in this world,” and under the blaze of its rimming of clustered lights and shops and thronged cafés, there storms and chatters a vigorous, cheery, light-hearted multitude fresh from the stimulus of the glittering water pageant. It comes in through the _piazzetta_ with such a rush that one looks for the band and band-stand, too, to be swept the full length of the square and out under the arches of the Royal Palace. Such laughing and uproar! Such a sirocco of gestures and hailstorm of crackling exclamations! This human tidal wave of the Adriatic pours down the middle, seethes along the edges, and swirls and eddies in the remotest corners. One sees in it happy, voluntary exiles from almost every part of the world, but to-night the _festa_-loving Venetians predominate. Every local type is here; from the languid patrician, come in from her country estate and now sipping anise-water here at Florian’s, and the vapid and scented fashionable youths with carnations in their buttonholes, to the flashing, black-eyed shop-girls with red roses in their crisp black hair and graceful mantilla shawls dropping back from their tossing heads, and the vigorous, smiling artisans, easy and jaunty of gait, with soft hats pushed back at every rakish angle on their curly heads. How happy and transported Maria is to-night, in her new black skirt and crimson bodice, and how the sultry red smoulders through the olive of her cheeks as her little hands whirl in a tempest of gestures and the lightnings of excitement play in her midnight eyes! And no less carried away is Giovanni, beside her,—proud as Colleoni on the big bronze horse,—though he lets her do most of the talking and contents himself with approving in quick, expressive shrugs. All classes of society are with us—“rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief”; and old Shylock himself, who was most of these, “dreaming of money-bags.” Scraps of gay, slurring song are continually bubbling over and flashes of wit and snappy repartees go flying to and fro. Flower-girls thread the press and insist upon pinning _boutonnières_ on the men, and street merchants move about offering everything from curios to caramel-on-a-stick. A crowd gathers about a blind old troubadour thrumming a dirty guitar and struggling to force his rusty voice along the melodious course of some popular _villotte_, and presently he will be led among the tables before the cafés and _centesimi_ and silver _lire_ will jingle into his ragged hat.
It is little enough to say that no scene ever had a more romantic setting. The quaint old Venetian quatrain does this famed spot scant justice:—
“In St. Mark’s Place three standards you descry, And chargers four that seem about to fly; There is a timepiece which appears a tower, And there are twelve black men who strike the hour.”
In the moonlight the sculptured and arcaded old buildings glow like mellow ivory around three sides of it, and it is warmed and vitalized by bustling cafés and brilliant shop windows set with tempting snares of artful jewelry and cunningly wrought glass. Strong and proud the great Campanile towers upward into the clear night, away above the tops of the three tall flag-staffs. The sumptuous Cathedral, in its wealth of glowing color and lavish adornment, makes one think of a vast heap of glittering treasure piled up by returning Venetian pirates in answer to the accustomed question, “What have you brought back for Marco?” One can scarcely take his eyes off its lofty, yawning portals, its gates of bronze, its forest of columns, its sweeping arches glowing in every color of brilliant mosaics, its profusion of creamy sculptures, its canopied saints and statued pinnacles and its great Byzantine domes billowing into the purple sky. On the ancient clock tower of the Merceria the fierce winged lion of St. Mark’s holds a resolute paw on the open Gospels, and the bronze bellringers swing twelve ponderous blows and hang up the hour of midnight on a dial of blue and gold. As they pause at the completion of their labors and look down on the sea of faces turned toward them from the Piazza they seem so nearly galvanized into life that it would scarcely surprise one to hear them shout, “What news of the argosies of Antonio?”
With the sparkling beauty of Venice so irresistible it is a terrible temptation to my companions to hurry straight back to Triest and come over with their battleship and, like dashing naval Lochinvars, force an espousal of this incomparable Bride of the Sea. Vain thought! It is Venice herself who has always done the espousing; fully to possess her it must be on her own conditions of complete surrender.
How inevitable it seems at night that you must take the step; must cry out, once and for all, to fellow voyagers on the Dead Lagoons of Life: “Ho, brothers! No more of the drab and wretched wastes for me! I am for beauty and romance—‘in Venice, all golden, to dream!’ I shall dwell in this enchanted realm of _dolce far niente_ and float with my gondola into the final Sunset. Companions on Life’s waters, ‘Ah, Stalì’!”
PARIS
MIDNIGHT TO 1 A.M.
Like a practiced coquette, Paris, the world’s _enchanteresse_, reserves for the supreme moments of midnight her rarest resources of gayety and charm. Her last laughs are her best. And decidedly, she is dangerous when laughing. Beyond question, her glowing eyes at midnight are wonderfully sweet and beguiling; and hers is the skill to touch the bright hours with the most delectable _couleur de rose_. There is satisfaction for each desire. “Would monsieur sup?” The most amazing cuisine in the world awaits your pleasure. “Would monsieur stroll?” The sparkling lights and rustling trees of the fairest of boulevards fairly drag you their way. “Would he drive?” You raise your hand; a _fiacre_ dashes up; and soon the Bois and the Champs-Élysées, cool, scented, dewy, receive you gladly to their enchanting retreats. “Would he join a revel—just a little one?” _Cabarets_, _cafés-chantants_, _bals publics_ were designed for no other purpose. “Would he look on at life?” “_Garçon vite! Une demi-tasse—une; sur la terrasse!_”—and heart could not ask for a madder, merrier, more absorbing spectacle than that which will whirl and surge by the very edge of your little round table. “Eh? Monsieur has a fancy for nature and solitude? _Mon Dieu! C’est un original, celui-là! Mais_”—and you will find nowhere gardens lovelier than those of the Tuileries, elegant with statues and carpeted with flowers. Thus at every point the charmer wins. What is left but surrender? She seems the very Queen of Heart’s Desire.
Of course, the night side of Paris is her most trivial side. But then visitors have always refused to take her seriously at any time. No matter how many wonderful achievements have been crying out to them all day that this is one of the most extraordinary and advanced communities to be found anywhere on the face of the earth, still they stubbornly cling to the conviction that all is frivolity here and that night is Paris’s supreme period and pleasure seeking her most conspicuous and characteristic rôle. Accustomed to the droll ideas of foreigners, and bothering little about them except to find occasional amusement, Paris shrugs her shoulders in indifference and turns on more lights. Brilliant, charming, and ingenious she creates what she prefers—an atmosphere of gayety and beauty. And the visiting world purrs about her in joy of a fascination it cannot find elsewhere and salves its own patriotism with the conclusion that this is her principal _raison d’être_.
As a matter of fact, the Parisians are masters of the art of living. As their kitchen is the best, so is their drawing-room and study. All the affairs of every day are handled with ease and grace, with imagination and a kind of poetic skill that adorns even the ugly and commonplace and invests them with attractiveness and charm. The cheery light-heartedness that is a fundamental trait of Parisians converts the life of their streets and parks into scenes delightful either to contemplate or share. Indeed, they often seem to be only grown-up children, so gracefully have they retained the fresh and stimulating enthusiasm of youth—so rueful and pouting over a rainy day; so exuberant over a bright one. And the best of it is that there is an infection to their high spirits that passes into the observer and clears his perception of the folly of worry and depression, and shows him the value and availableness of optimism and good cheer. Such is the glorious influence of a people whose attitude toward life is essentially one of hope and zest.
No one is going to deny that the Parisian is vain. Indeed, his attitude toward the rest of the earth, while patient and polite, is at bottom patronizing and even a little supercilious. And sometimes, it must be confessed, this gets on the visitor’s nerves. One cannot give out admiration forever and rest content with getting none back. It is easy to understand the mood of bitter derision into which even so enthusiastic an admirer as Edmondo de Amicis fell when he wrathfully wrote: “Three hundred ‘citizens’ hang over the side of a bridge to see a dog washed; if a drum passes, a crowd collects; and a thousand people, in one railway station, make a tremendous uproar by clapping their hands, shouting, and laughing because one of the guards of the train has lost his hat!” Yet De Amicis came shortly to see that this is only the Parisian temperament, which he admired in so many other of its manifestations, and that under it lie solid qualities of the highest and rarest order. So he forgave Paris, as everyone does, and took her again to his heart—albeit, I mistrust, with reservation and a lingering grain of suspicion and perhaps something of the foreign conviction that she is not always to be taken quite seriously.
To the vast majority of visitors Paris by night means the boulevards. The beauty of these famed thoroughfares, the cosmopolitan and fascinating sea of humanity that flows through them, the means of amusement that abound, and all the many little refinements of comfort and elegance to be seen on every hand place them in a class by themselves among the city streets of the world. In the matter of virility the life of the boulevards is amazing. Every one seems to be at his keenest when he walks there. Anticipation is fairly skipping on tiptoe. The old _boulevardier_, the traditional _flâneur_, has not been disappointed of his evening’s diverting on-look these forty years or more, and he can, therefore, clothed and gloved and caned _à la mode_, proceed with his stroll in unhasting dignity, confident that the usual amusing spectacle will unfold itself in good time. But the new arrivals and the visitors of a few weeks show in their eager faces that nothing is going to escape them and that a thorough debauch of pleasure is the least they propose to make out of all the bewildering light and life about them. From the Place de la Concorde to the Place de la République a laughing, brilliant, light-hearted multitude pours along all night with infinite bustle and chatter. Between twelve and one o’clock it is at its gayest. The theatres and _cafés-concerts_ have emptied their audiences into the stream, which is swollen to the very curb, and the driveways are whirling with an enormous outpouring of busses, motors, and cabs. The size of the loads the hired victorias and _fiacres_ will accommodate is determined solely by the inclination and interest of the impertinent fat _cocher_ in the varnished plug hat; and it is nothing to see a conveyance, that ordinarily carries but two people, trundling merrily along behind a sprung-kneed nag, with a man and several girls piled inside and all waving hands to the crowd with the vastest _camaraderie_ imaginable. This is of a piece with the universal high spirits and good humor that prevail along the boulevards. It is all fun and frolic, and everybody is in it. The rows of chairs and tables on the sidewalks before the cafés really make the spectators a part of the show; and the groups before the artistic little newspaper kiosks and the comfortable sitters on the green benches along the curb are, in spite of themselves, part and parcel of the big family, with something of the intimacy and allied interest of a village street at fair-time. And it always seems fair-time in Paris by night. The profusion of lights that have won it the title of “La Ville Lumière” gives it an appearance of being perpetually _en fête_, and the ebullient crowds complete the illusion.
But the Grand Boulevards have no monopoly of the night attractiveness of the city. All over town stretch broad, clean streets with shade trees and double lines of lights and rows of stone and stucco houses. In the main these houses resemble each other rather closely; slate-colored, Mansard-roofed, and with shallow iron balconies running full length of the second, fourth, and fifth stories. By night they fairly exhale an atmosphere of tranquillity and peace. There are, besides, hundreds of beautiful roomy squares, flooded with light and set with comfortable benches that are seldom without contented occupants. Such a notable one as the Place de la Concorde is without its equal in any city. It costs the three and a quarter millions of people who live in and about Paris more than $70,000,000 a year to maintain their city’s reputation for beauty; and not a sou of it is begrudged. For Paris is the whole world to most of them, and many a Parisian politician had rather be Prefect of the Seine and rule this town than president of the whole Republic. And with what reason! “It is a world-city,” said Goethe, “where the crossing of every bridge or every square recalls a great past, and where at every street corner a piece of history has been unfolded.”
Whoever turns from the boulevards for a space will learn of other kinds of life that are in full cry at midnight. What of the studio revelries of the Quartier Latin? There abound jollity and earnestness and strong friendships with few of the gilded accessories of the _Rive Droite_. The brightest of these scenes are often the most meagre in setting. A group of jovial, smoking, singing companions—and about them an easel and sketching-board, a dingy divan, a few battered chairs, a stove in the corner with the remains of the last meal, a huddle of draperies and hangings, fragments of casts and uncompleted sketches on the walls, and a corner table piled with a dusty litter of squeezed-out paint-tubes, broken brushes, magazine illustrations, a dog-eared book or two, and a generous strewing of cigarette butts. The cleanest things in sight are a freshly scraped palette and a sheaf of brushes stuck in a half-filled jar of water. With so much of equipment your merry, care-free artist squeezes the orange of life to its smallest drop, and cares not a sou how the whole world wags, provided all is well between the Place de l’Observatoire and the Seine.
Then, again, were you to pass some pleasant house on a quiet avenue where an evening’s party is ending, you could not help but linger under the windows in delight to hear some tender song of Massenet’s, some soothing _berceuse_ of Ropartz’s, a haunting plaint of Saint-Saëns or a vitalizing torrent of Chaminade’s.
And perhaps where you might most expect just such a scene as this, behind the closely-drawn window draperies of some handsome apartment, there is gathered around a broad green table a group of flushed, excited men to whom a hard-eyed _croupier_ is singing the abominable siren song of “Faites vos jeux,” “Les jeux sont faits,” “Rien ne va plus.” It seems quiet and peaceful enough. You could scarcely believe that there hangs above it the shadow of the little gray Morgue down behind Notre-Dame!
Before returning to the giddy boulevards for a final _petit-verre_ and an exchange of pleasantries with café acquaintances, one likes to finish a cigar in an aimless ramble through such placid scenes as these. Not only may he so indulge the pleasing diversion of speculating over the kinds of home life that go on within these houses, but incidentally he escapes the tumult of the maelstrom for a few calm moments, and eventually sees for himself what a pity it is that so many night fascinations should abound in Paris and be enjoyed by so few. He may like to draw moral conclusions from the peace-loving pigeons nesting in the war-glorifying reliefs of the gigantic and towering Arc de Triomphe, or take satisfied note of the monuments of the victories of peace that dot the broad avenues that radiate from it. One such monument is always under the eyes of the _boulevardiers_ in the form of that most glorious of all temples to music, the Paris Opera House. It is especially impressive by night, with the shadows blending columns and statues in bewildering beauty, and high-lights from the street lamps glinting on sculptured balustrades and cornices, chalking the edges of half-hidden arches and penciling the delicate detail of medallions and reliefs. Nor, it must be allowed, are devotees often wanting for that fair Greek temple of La Madeleine—so chaste and of such imposing dignity, rimmed with giant columns and embowered in verdure.
After like fashion does night enhance the beauty of the great, rambling Louvre—though this may only be Diana’s way of paying tribute to the Arts and of venerating the sacred shrine of a sister divinity, that serenest and sublimest of goddesses, the Venus de Milo. There is certainly something of almost ethereal comeliness by night to those long vistas of columns and arcades, to the shadowy sculptures of the pavilions, the lines of graceful caryatids and the blustering triumphal groups of the pediments. One might fancy the Louvre wearing a look of grave disapproval over the hubbub that drifts in from the boulevards were he not aware how carefully it treasures so many pictorial skeletons in its own closets. Boucher and Watteau are on record with infinitely worse scenes than these. But now it has the appearance of some palace capitol of Shadowland; and before it in perfect sympathy lies its beautiful dream-kingdom, the hushed and fragrant gardens of the Tuileries,—fair as the golden Hesperides,—fresh with fountains, silvered in patches with little shining lakes, marquetried in flowers, and peopled with shadowy forms of pallid marble.