THE
COCKAYNES IN PARIS.
CHAPTER I.
MRS. ROWE'S.
The story I have to tell is disjointed. I throw it out as I picked it up. My duties, the nature of which is neither here nor there, have borne me to various parts of Europe. I am a man, not with an establishment—but with two portmanteaus. I have two hats in Paris and two in London always. I have seen everything in both cities, and like Paris, on the whole, best. There are many reasons, it seems to me, why an Englishman who has the tastes of a duke and the means of a half-pay major, should prefer the banks of the Seine to those of the Thames—even with the new Embankment. Everybody affects a distinct and deep knowledge of Paris in these times; and most people do know how to get the dearest dinner Bignon can supply for their money; and to secure the apartments which are let by the people of the West whom nature has provided with an infinitesimal quantity of conscience. But there are now crowds of English men and women who know their Paris well; men who never dine in the restaurant of the stranger, and women who are equal to a controversy with a French cook. These sons and daughters of Albion who have transplanted themselves to French soil, can show good and true reasons why they prefer the French to the English life. The wearying comparative estimates of household expenses in Westbournia, and household expenses in the Faubourg St. Honoré! One of the disadvantages of living in Paris is the constant contact with the odious atmosphere of comparisons.
"Pray, sir—you have been in London lately—what did you pay for veal cutlet?"
The new arrivals are the keenest torments. "In London, where I have kept house for over twenty years, and have had to endure every conceivable development of servants' extortion, no cook ever demanded a supply of white aprons yet." You explain for the hundredth time that it is the custom in Paris. There are people who believe Kensington is the domestic model of the civilized world, and travel only to prove at every stage how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad, and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honoré—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the prints in the windows under the Rivoli colonnade; the monsters with fangs, red hair, and Glengarry caps, of Cham, and Doré, and Bertall, and the female sticks with ringlets who pass in the terra-cotta show of the Palais Royal for our countrywomen, have long ago ceased to warm my indignation. All I can say now is, that the artists and modellers have not travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn, their knowledge of our race is limited to the unfortunate selection of specimens who strut about their streets, and—according to their light—they are not guilty of outrageous exaggeration. I venture to assert that an Englishman will meet more unpleasant samples of his countrymen and countrywomen in an August day's walk in Paris, than he will come across during a month in London. To begin with, we English treat Paris as though it were a back garden, in which a person may lounge in his old clothes, or indulge his fancy for the ugly and slovenly. Why, on broiling days, men and women should sally forth from their hotel with a travelling-bag and an opera-glass slung about their shoulders, passes my comprehension. Conceive the condition of mind of that man who imagines that he is an impressive presence when he is patrolling the Rue de la Paix with an alpenstock in his hand! At home we are a plain, well-dressed, well-behaved people, fully up in Art and Letters—that is, among our educated classes, to any other nation—in most elegant studies before all; but our travellers in France and Switzerland slander us, and the "Paris in 10 hours" system has lowered Frenchmen's estimate of the national character. The Exhibition of 1867, far from promoting the brotherhood of the peoples, and hinting to the soldier that his vocation was coming to an end, spread a dislike of Englishmen through Paris. It attracted rough men from the North, and ill-bred men from the South, whose swagger, and noise, and unceremonious manners in cafés and restaurants chafed the polite Frenchman. They could not bring themselves to salute the dame de comptoir, they were loud at the table d'hôte and commanding in their airs to the waiter. In brief, the English mass jarred upon their neighbours; and Frenchmen went the length of saying that the two peoples—like relatives—would remain better friends apart. The disadvantage is, beyond doubt, with us; since the froissement was produced by the British lack of that suavity which the French cultivate—and which may be hollow, but is pleasant, and oils the wheels of life.
Mrs. Rowe's was in the Rue—say the Rue Millevoye, so that we may not interfere with possible vested interests. Was it respectable?