CHAPTER XXIX

THE PRESENT TONE OF PARIS SOCIETY

I have seen many changes take place in Paris during the twenty-five years of my sojourn in the gay city. I cannot say that all these changes have been congenial; the good manners for which Frenchmen were famous, certainly disappeared simultaneously with the crinoline. A _laisser aller_ has replaced the stiffness which at one time made the select Parisian houses so difficult of access to the foreigner. At present the American and Jewish elements have entirely invaded French society, and imported into it not only their easy ways but also an independence of speech and action which would have horrified dowagers of olden times. Sport also, which was formerly unknown, has absorbed the thoughts of people who would not have dreamed of it a few years ago. Life in hotels has done away with the intimacy of the home, and whereas formerly one only invited to dine at a restaurant people one would not have cared to entertain in one’s own house, now it is the reverse, and those whom it is desired to honour are asked to lunch or to supper at the Ritz or the Meurice, or some other fashionable place of the same kind. The refinement that was so essentially a French characteristic has entirely disappeared. Women have grown loud, and men have become coarse, girls have lost their modesty, and boys are impertinent. An altogether new world has superseded that of the Second Empire.

The advent of American millionaires has aroused the desire to be able to emulate their luxury, and the introduction of Jews into the best French society, in spite of all the efforts of Drumont and other anti-Semites, has done away with the prejudice which existed against them. Indeed, Jewish heiresses are sought as wives by bearers of some of the oldest and most aristocratic names in France; Mlle. Ephrussi has become Princess de Lucinge; the Marquise de la Ferté Meun was Mlle. Porgès; the Princess Murat, the wife of the head of that house, is the granddaughter of old Madame Heine, herself the only child of the banker Furtado; and the present Princesse de Monaco, whose first husband was the Duc de Richelieu, is the daughter of another Heine, also a banker, whose many millions she inherited.

These new elements entering society have necessarily transformed it. Paris is now a vast hotel where are met all kinds of people, and no one feels the necessity to observe etiquette or restraint. It is a place where the man who pays can obtain everything he wants. Excepting in a few houses, as of old was that of Madame Aimery de la Rochefoucauld, one can meet everywhere the representatives of Hebrew banking houses, or great tradesmen, whom Parisian hostesses are but too eager to invite to their balls or receptions, feeling sure that it will bring them some profit in one shape or another. Money is the only thing that counts nowadays. It is so everywhere unfortunately, but in France it seems to be more potent than anywhere else.

In consequence, society is perhaps smarter than it has ever been, but it is a great question whether it is so distinguished, and it is certain that it is no longer so good-mannered.

If one examines things carefully, one cannot wonder at it. When the first heiresses to great fortunes, but to nothing else, were admitted into the Faubourg St. Germain dowagers looked at them askance, and even their husbands seemed half ashamed to have been obliged to marry them. It was but natural that, repulsed as it were by the people who ought to have opened their arms to them, they should have turned towards those who belonged to their own sphere. The _nouveaux_ were invited to their parties, at which the old aristocratic representatives of monarchical France were at first rather shy about putting in an appearance. But very soon the _noblesse_ began to feel at home, and there met other heiresses whom in their turn they were to take to their bosoms.

The leading hostesses in Paris at that time were the Duchesse de Grammont, née Rothschild; the Duchesse de Doudeauville, whose grandmother was Madame Blanc of Monaco fame; the Comtesse Bernard de Gontaut Biron, whose father, M. Cabibel, had not been one of Lyons’ best citizens, though he had lived in that town all his life and made all his money there; the Comtesse de Trédern, who had been Mademoiselle Say, and so on.

Money did away with all the differences which formerly existed between the various classes of society, and newspapers which began to make or to mar social reputations mentioned, as the most fashionable women in fashionable Paris, Madame Schneider of Creusot fame, Madame Pierre Lebaudy, Madame Deutsch de la Meurthe, and the wives and daughters of every banker or industrial whose millions had opened the doors of the social Eden into which a hundred years ago no one who was not an aristocrat could ever have hoped to enter. Society became a haunt of millionaires, even Monsieur Chauchard, the owner of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, would have been admitted into it easily had he only lived long enough.

Automobilism, which gave to so many representatives of the oldest names in France the opportunity to make money by fostering its popularity, and lending the support of their family connections to the numerous shareholders’ companies which sprang into existence at a minute’s notice, contributed considerably also to what I would call the demoralisation of good manners. Many people, in order to make money through this new kind of sport, associated with persons of a very low social and moral standard, or even simple mechanicians were admitted at first to the Automobile Club, and at last into the drawing-rooms of its members. Much had to be forgiven these parvenus of sport, many errors of etiquette overlooked, but very soon all were forgetting themselves, and instead of raising these people to its own level, society came down to theirs. Ladies, who could more easily dispose of the tickets of the many charitable lotteries, or theatre performances, which they patronised among these _nouveaux venus_ than in their own circle of acquaintances, and who, in case of necessity, could also apply to them for a small loan or the settlement of an angry dressmaker’s bill, were but too glad to invite them to their receptions. So, little by little, the salons of the noble ladies of the Faubourg St. Germain became a kind of succursale of the “haute banque and haute finance” not only of Paris, but also of France and of New York.

There were some exceptions to this rule, but these were not frequent. I must mention as one of these exceptions the Comtesse Jean de Montebello, one of the loveliest, most charming, and most intelligent women that Paris could boast. She was the daughter-in-law of that amiable Comtesse Gustave de Montebello, who had been one of the favourite ladies in waiting of the Empress Eugénie. She lived in the private hotel, which the former had built for herself in the Rue Barbet de Jouiy, preserving all the old traditions that were associated with it, and maintaining the grave, serious tone for which it had been famous during the Second Empire.

Madame Jean de Montebello is a true type of the great lady; her affable manners, the perfect distinction which she shows in conversation, the inimitable grace and ease that accompanies every one of her movements, makes her a delightful creature. Beautiful as a dream in her youth, in her old age she has kept the straight, classic features, the soft eyes, and the kind, joyous expression for which she has always been famous. Her wit is bright, without the least shade of ill-nature, and she is one of the very few Frenchwomen of the higher classes whose conversation and culture constitute an attraction strong enough to make one forget even her beauty and her other charms. She is learned without being a pedant, and no one meeting her for the first time would guess that under her pleasant way of greeting you is hidden a knowledge and a love of art and literature such as unfortunately is but seldom found among the many fair women who throng the drawing-rooms of brilliant Paris.

Madame Jean de Montebello had a cousin, the Marquise de Montebello, whose husband occupied for something like ten years the post of French Ambassador in St. Petersburg, and who was the subject of many discussions in the world in which she had literally been thrust, but to which she did not belong either by birth or by education. The Marquise de Montebello was the granddaughter of Madame Chevreux Aubertot, the proprietress of the big shop, called the Gagne-Petit, in the Avenue de l’Opéra, in Paris. She was a bright, intelligent, dashing, intriguing woman, full of ambition, and of desire to play a part in European politics. Amusing, and utterly regardless of what people might say or think about her, she was enormously rich, and knew how to spend her money.

When she arrived in St. Petersburg she threw wide open the doors of the Embassy, and entertained all who expressed the desire to enjoy her hospitality. She soon made friends with the Grand Dukes, the brothers of Alexander III., who always gave their affections and their preferences to the people who amused them, and, indeed, it was impossible not to be amused in the company of Madame de Montebello. She was essentially a person who liked to see the utmost liberty both of language and of manners reign around her, and who did not hesitate to put her feet on the table, or do anything _outré_, provided she could in that way attract to her house the company she sought. Under her rule the French Embassy became a sort of Liberty Hall, where one could do anything one liked. She gave to her friends and acquaintances the run of her house, of her kitchen and of her cellar, and she would have given them the run of her bedroom had they only dared to ask for it.

When she left Russia she was extremely regretted there, even by those who did not care for her, because with her disappeared a bright element that always brought along with it some gaiety, even in the dullest circles. Whilst she was Ambassadress, the French alliance was extremely popular, it became less so after she was gone.

The Marquis de Montebello was a diplomat of the old school, pompous, solemn, not esteemed clever, but with a ripened experience. He had traditions, knowledge of the world, and understood perfectly well that his enormous wealth would help his country to win for herself the friendship of Russia. He fulfilled all his duties with tact, and his manners were essentially those of a gentleman--quiet, reserved, and with a shade of self-sufficiency which became him. He made himself just as popular as his brilliant wife, and cared immensely for his position as an Ambassador. It broke his heart when he had to abandon it; he never could get reconciled to the fact, the more so that he was not the favourite in Paris he had been in St. Petersburg, and though the Marquise tried to give receptions and dinners to all those who cared to come to them, she did not succeed in making either herself or her husband popular in Paris society, though they contrived to be admitted in several select houses, such as the one of the Comtesse Mélanie de Pourtalès.

Madame de Montebello had a great friend who tried hard to launch her into the society of the Faubourg St. Germain. It was the Comte Joseph de Gontaut Biron, the son of the former French Ambassador in Berlin, the Vicomte de Gontaut Biron, and one of the most popular men in the whole of Paris, who usually did the honours of the city when Russian Grand Dukes visited it. The Comte de Gontaut was the only handsome member of a very ugly family which had redeemed its want of beauty by unusual cleverness. He had been married to a Princesse de Polignac, whose heart he had very soon broken, and whose fortune he had quite as soon squandered. The Gontauts occupied a privileged position in the Faubourg St. Germain, thanks to their numerous alliances and to their many relatives. The elder members of the family, such as the Comtesse Armand, or the Princesse de Beauvau, tried to maintain the traditions of their race, and could be classified among the _hautes et puissantes dames_ of their generation, but the younger members had mixed freely with the other elements of Paris society, and had assimilated their characteristics as well as those of their own circle.

I have spoken of the Comte Boni de Castellane, the former husband of Miss Anna Gould. His father, the Marquis de Castellane, had at one time played a part in French politics, when he had been a member of the first Assemblée Nationale, which had elected M. Thiers as President of the Republic, or rather the Executive power as it was called at that time. Unpleasant incidents of a private nature had obliged him to leave public life, and also to retire from several clubs of which he had been a member. But he had contrived to keep afloat in the Faubourg, and was rather feared there on account of the sharpness of his tongue and the ill-nature with which he repeated all the gossip which he spent his time in collecting. He was extremely intelligent, and had none of the foppery which made his son so thoroughly disagreeable; he would certainly have been a man who could have made his way in the world had he only tried to conform to the tenets of society.

His second son married the widow of Prince Furstenberg, who was a cousin of his, being the daughter of the old Duc de Sagan and of his second wife, Mademoiselle Pauline de Castellane, and considerably older than himself. The Comtesse Jean de Castellane is at the present moment one of the leading hostesses in Paris. She is clever, with excellent manners, with tendencies to pose as a woman of culture, and not disdaining to write now and then little articles in the daily papers, which are always accepted with pleasure on account of the signature which accompanies them. She could never be taken for anything else but a lady, but I doubt whether one would at once call her a _grande dame_ in the sense in which this word was understood formerly.

I think I have mentioned the name of the Comtesse de Trédern. That lady certainly deserves more than a passing mention. She was a Mlle. Say, the sister of the Princesse Amedée de Broglie, and she had married when quite young the Marquis de Brissac, the eldest son of the Duc de Brissac, who was killed during the Franco-German War. Left a widow with two children, she began first to restore the castle of Brissac in Anjou, which is considered one of the finest private residences in France, and which she bought from her father-in-law. Then she married the Comte de Trédern, from whom she parted after a few years of troublous union. Since then she has queened it at Brissac, or in her beautiful house of the Place Vendôme, where she regularly gives sumptuous entertainments.

Among other hostesses I must say a word concerning the Duchesse de Gramont, a Jewess and the daughter of Baron Amschel de Rothschild of Frankfurt. She was one of the few really _grandes dames_ of Paris. Clever, full of tact, and kind and good, as few women have been kind and good, she was essentially a great lady, and made for herself friends wherever she went. Her husband is now married to an Italian Princess, whom he took to his heart a few months after the death of the Duchesse Marguerite, but the latter is not forgotten by the world which she graced and adorned, and where her early death caused more sincere sorrow than is generally expressed in the circle to which she belonged.

Madame de Gramont had a sister who became the Princesse de Wagram, and who was also a favourite in Parisian society, where she won for herself a great position. Unfortunately she also died young, and with her disappeared one of the last great ladies in France.

Foreigners form an important contingent in Paris society. The gay town has always attracted wandering souls eager to find in strange places what they cannot get at home, and who have succumbed so well to its charms that they lack the courage to leave it. A numerous company of Americans and Russians met in society live in the new district about the Arc de Triomphe, and they visit all the houses where entertainments are going on. Polish emigrants and Polish aristocracy have found their headquarters in the Ile St. Louis at the Hotel Lambert, where Prince Ladislas Tsartoryski, the husband of Princess Marguerite of Orleans, opened the doors of his magnificent residence to them with unbounded hospitality.

Several members of the Radziwill family also settled by the Seine, after the marriage of one of them with the daughter of M. Blanc, the owner of the Monaco gambling house. He was the father of the present Duchesse de Doudeauville. The Counts Branicki and their connections bought themselves houses in the neighbourhood of the Rue de Penthièvre, where the chief of the race had settled. There hostility to the Russian Government was fanned by every possible device, and there hatred against Russia was preached with an energy worthy of a better cause.

The Russian colony was also an important one. It lacked, however, a rendezvous, and it had to submit to constant rebuffs on the part of its own Embassy and Consulate, where it is the fashion to repulse all the compatriots who call there unless they belong to the ultra-smart set which is in possession of influence in St. Petersburg official circles. Several Russian Grand Dukes, who had become constant inhabitants of the French capital, gave their colony an appearance of splendour which other foreign quarters lacked. Foremost among these scions of the Russian Imperial house was the Grand Duke Paul, who, after his marriage with the divorced wife of one of the officers of his own regiment, had left his fatherland and settled in Paris permanently. He goes about a great deal in society, where his wife, who has been created Countess of Hohenfelsen by the Prince Regent of Bavaria, is treated like a Grand Duchess, and in society given the precedence of one.

Life in smart Paris to-day is totally different from life as it was in the time of the Second Empire. Sport has entered into it, and is now one of its principal functions. Everyone who can, or who cannot, afford it possesses an automobile, and thinks himself obliged to make a show of it in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, which is also invaded before lunch by a bevy of fair ladies who pretend they come there to do some walking, but who in reality want only to show themselves and to see others. It is there that all the gossip, which later on in the afternoon is spread at many tables, finds its origin, and where reputations are marred and lost. It is there that “accidental” meetings take place either at polo or at some exhibition, or at one of the numerous tea-houses that have sprung up on all sides lately, where the Parisienne comes to eat cakes, and not to drink tea, with which she is not yet sufficiently familiar. From ten to twelve o’clock everybody worth knowing is to be met in the Bois, where it is fashionable to be seen at that hour, and where no one would care to go later or earlier.

The afternoon offers other kinds of pleasures, and fashionable society, after a pause at the aforementioned tea-houses, repairs either to the races or to some exhibition, or more often in summer time to the polo ground at Bagatelle, where it likes to watch the game. The players belong to the most elegant men about town, and think that the fact of taking part in polo confers on them the reputation of being real sportsmen. The evenings are spent either at a ball or at a reception, but late hours are not now the custom in Paris, and midnight generally sees the fashionable birds in their beds.

There is no serious interest in that kind of existence, no conversations worthy of being so called, except now and then by the greatest of chances. The witty, clever French society, the salons which had such a universal reputation in olden times, have all disappeared with the snows of the many winters that have elapsed since the days when they ruled public opinion, and when their influence was felt everywhere, often in politics and always in literature, which had to conform more or less to their rules, and which would not have cared to offend their good taste. Parisian society has degenerated, it is impossible to deny it, degenerated on account of the many foreign elements that have invaded it, and also on account of the importance which money has acquired, an importance that has taken the place occupied formerly by intelligence, beauty, virtue--all the things which ought to be respected, but which we are apt, now, to forget when we find them associated with that money which is the only god whose supremacy is acknowledged in that Paris which thinks itself the capital of the world, but which is only the purveyor of most of its evil pleasures.

Not only in society as a whole is this laxity of demeanour and conduct discernible, but there is a perceptible loosening of the laws which used to govern legislators and officials. What men would formerly consider as impinging upon their honour is no longer looked at askance, and so things happen which leave an unpleasant memory. This has been observed in certain activities in the financial world.

In an earlier part of these reflections I have spoken of the Panama affair, and in the present chapter I have made some reference to the money-fever that pervades Paris to-day. It is therefore only necessary here to be very brief.

There was a great outcry and a wealth of righteous indignation at the Panama disclosures, but it is difficult to perceive any improvement. There have been scandals of recent date, the echoes of which reverberate even in 1914, and in which just as many people were implicated whose names and social position ought to have put them above sordid intrigues. Paris has always offered an excellent ground for financiers of doubtful moral standing. Every paper has advertisements offering to the innocent public every kind of facility to enable it to lose its money. With the help of a press willing to print anything provided it is paid for at a sufficiently high rate, shares not worth the paper they are printed upon are thrown upon the market, and are eagerly bought by credulous creatures who believe blindly in what their papers tell them, and who look forward to large benefits out of the promised rise of the said shares. That rise never comes, and then sometimes an angry dupe inquires of the police, generally without success, as to the reason why no redress can be obtained. The man in the street holds and expresses emphatic opinions, which if people believed were true would mean that the corruption of Republican government surpasses everything of the kind that ever flourished at the time of the Second Empire, about the venality of which so much has been written and spoken.

Whatever may be said of present-day finance, it is enough to remind the reader of the gigantic frauds which Madame Humbert was able to perpetrate for so many years, of the ease with which Cornelius Herz and Arton were able to escape from the grip of the law, and of the facility which the famous Rochette, the hero of the last financial scandal that France can boast, found in avoiding being imprisoned or obliged to give up any portion of his ill-gotten gains. Rochette succeeded in avoiding every pursuit for a long time, though numerous complaints had been made against him. It was said that the complaints had always been left unexamined under the pretence that they proceeded from people who simply wanted blackmail. It is no secret that several deputies were great friends with that successful financier, during whose reign their stock exchange operations were always profitable.

Rochette is a curious example of the ease with which any man gifted with sufficient impudence can become an important personage. He began his career by being a waiter in a small hotel at Melun, soon tired of it, and went to Paris, where he obtained a situation as office assistant in one of those financial establishments which flourish for a few months and disappear together with their directors into the unknown after a brief and brilliant existence. His experience there helped him considerably in his future life. He learned to avoid mistakes into which a novice in finance would be apt to fall. It is said that he profited by the whispered advice that “in order to be a lucky financier, one must before everything have a deputy in one’s pocket.”

When he became a banker and a director of several large concerns, he frequented the Chamber of Deputies, and even honoured with his attention the Senate. He affected great modesty, but took care to be kept well informed as to the private means of several important personages whose protection he thought might be of use to him in the future, and he managed in an unobtrusive way to make himself indispensable to them.

When the end came it was rumoured in Paris that most scandalous facts were about to come to light, and that the Panama affair would be eclipsed by them. Names were mentioned, at first secretly then quite loudly, until at last they found their way into the newspapers. But, somehow, the inquiry which had been begun dragged on until the public got tired of hearing nothing about it, and made up its mind not to think any more about the affair. In the meantime in prison Rochette was leading the best kind of life possible under the circumstances, had all the comforts which money allowed him to procure for himself, received visits from his numerous friends, and when at last he was released on bail pending his trial, he declared to all those who cared to hear it, that he would not only prove his innocence, but find people willing to trust him with their money again, in spite of his recent misadventures.

And when he was sentenced to several years’ imprisonment, Rochette quietly took a railway ticket and disappeared into an unknown land, which probably is not very far from the scene of his former exploits; sure that no one is going to discover him in the refuge which he had chosen, he is awaiting with the greatest confidence and calm the expiration of the time when proscription will allow him to reappear in Paris, and to begin again the financial career which he was obliged to interrupt for a short period.

How was it possible for Rochette to escape whilst Charles de Lesseps and his father were obliged to drink to the dregs the cup of their humiliation? The reply is very simple, perhaps obvious, and I hesitate to doubt the reader’s perception by uttering it.

When the great Lesseps was accused of having tried to buy the support of some members of the Parliament, everyone cried out that it was a scandal which ought to be punished as severely as possible; but when it was proved that Rochette had succeeded in buying or winning over to his side some of the most influential political people in France, that he had even secured the indulgence of judges who ought to have been at least impartial, the public only shrugged its shoulders, and some persons were even found to say that after all he had been _un homme très fort_, and that it was better to be his friend than his enemy. When Rochette was arrested, excuses without number were found for him, and he was represented to be the victim of private vengeances and private blackmail. Times are changed indeed, and not only the opinions of men, but also their ideas as to right and wrong.