To Englishmen, who are already acquainted with their Transatlantic brethren, a French view of the American in Paris would be more instructive than an English one. What particularly strikes Parisians is the freedom of American girls as contrasted with the restraint of unmarried young women in France, whose training is notoriously very much that of a convent. “American manners,” the French observe, “grant to girls entire liberty. They are the guardians of their own virtue and their own interests, and they preserve these things right well. Instructed in the dangers of life, they are capable of braving them; though it must be owned that their task is easy on account of the respect which, throughout their country, is shown to them by men. A girl can travel the length and breadth of the territory of the Union without having to fear dishonourable pursuits or the slightest unpleasantness. Therefore the American girl utterly differs from ours by her aspect alone.” Her costume is more unstudied, and the mouse-like timidity of the young Frenchwoman is replaced in her by a graceful carelessness.
To Americans, as M. André justly says, Paris must seem “a world upside down. American mothers complain greatly of the little security and respect shown to women in this capital, of the gallantry of the French and the indulgence of public opinion in flagrant cases. They are right;” and he thinks that it is because French girls are too severely disciplined, too much caged up, that there is less reverence between the two sexes in France than in America. “True chastity,” he maintains, “has liberty for her sister.”
American girls staying in Paris are astonished and indignant at the close surveillance to which unmarried young Frenchwomen are subjected, although they themselves frequently sacrifice to opinion in the matter of not appearing out of doors unaccompanied by a maid. M. André regrets this on account of the countenance it gives to a prudish system, which he is the last to admire in his own countrywomen. “O young ladies,” he exclaims, “born on a soil where monarchical influences have never flourished, why do you submit to this shameful spy system? Would it not be better if you openly showed your disdain for it, and taught our women the manners of liberty? Paris, after all, is not a forest, and a mere glance, a shrug of the shoulders, or silence itself, will suffice to shame away a leering lounger or an impertinent snob. Is it true, then, that in default of other forms of tyranny, respect for opinion, whatever that opinion be, is a yoke in America?”
Let us hope, in conclusion, that the American girl does not “let herself go,” on her return from straitlaced Paris to the freedom of New York, at all events to such an extent as suggested by this writer, who assures us that, having once set foot again on native soil, she flirts furiously.
CHAPTER III.
MORE PARISIAN TYPES
TO return, however, to native Parisian types. Mention has already been made of the French spy, but he is such an important and historical character that it is impossible to dismiss him in a few words.
The police, already strongly organised under Louis XIV., resorted largely to espionage; but in Louis XV.’s reign the famous Lieutenant of Police, de Sartines, fashioned the spy system into a civil institution, and gave it a prodigious development. Spies were now employed to follow the Court or to watch the doings of distinguished foreigners who had recently arrived in the capital. Then there were domestic spies, the most terrible of all, to judge by the following observations extracted from a report attributed to Louis XV.’s lieutenant. “The ‘family,’ amongst us, lives under the protection of a reputation for virtue which cannot impose on the magistracy; the family is a repertory of crimes, an arsenal of infamies. The hypocrisy of the false caresses which are lavished in it must be apparent to all but fools. In a family of twenty persons the police ought to place forty spies.” After Sartines, Lieutenant Berryer by no means allowed the spy service to deteriorate. He employed convicts as spies, one of the conditions of their employment being that on the slightest failure in the vile duties they had to perform, they should be restored to prison. The services, too, of coachmen, landladies, lodgers, were called into requisition. Even domestic servants were sometimes Berryer’s agents, and many a mysterious lettre-de-cachet was issued on the strength of some word uttered carelessly within the hearing of a lady’s-maid or valet-de-chambre.
Stories are even told of men so innocent that they acted as spies without being aware of it. Such a one was Michel-Perrin, of Mme. de Bawr’s tale, which, in its dramatic form, gave Bouffé one of his best parts. The simple-minded man had in his youth, when he was a student of theology, known Fouché, afterwards to become Napoleon’s Minister of Police. In due time Michel-Perrin took orders, and was doing duty in a little village when, under the Revolution, public worship was abolished. Calling upon Fouché to ask his old friend for some suitable employment, he can obtain nothing until, moved by the urgency of his solicitations, the Police Minister suggests to him, with so much delicacy that his true meaning remains unperceived, that he shall walk about the public places, go into cafés and restaurants, and frequent all kinds of resorts where people congregate, and that he shall then return to Fouché with an account of anything remarkable he may have seen or heard. This seems to the delighted Michel-Perrin mere child’s play, and he regards it as little more than a pretext on the part of the generous minister for handing him every evening a gold piece. When, however, the unconscious spy finds one day that he has revealed a political conspiracy, and jeopardised the lives of many, perhaps innocent men, he suddenly awakens to a sense of what he has been doing, and in horror throws up his employment. Fouché, it seems, was pained to have humiliated the unoffending priest, and, public worship being just at that time restored, he used his influence with Napoleon to obtain the ingenuous man’s re-appointment as village curé.
Under the Revolution the spy was replaced by the official denunciator, an agent no less formidable. At length came the Empire, and then Fouché invested espionage with the importance of a science. In 1812 the “brigade of safety” appeared, which was first composed of four agents, but which, in 1823 and 1824, always under the direction of the famous Vidocq, numbered close upon thirty. Delavau, the prefect of police, had permitted him to establish, on the public road, a game known as “troll-madam”; and this game, an excellent trap for boobies and passers-by whose slightest words and actions were keenly watched by Vidocq’s hounds, produced, from the 20th of July to the 4th of August, 1823, a net profit of 4,364 francs. This sum was added to the subvention already granted to the spy department.
The Prefect Delavau returned to the method of Lieutenant Berryer in employing as spies convicts, whom he threw back into prison for the slightest fault. One of his predecessors, Baron Pasquier, had endeavoured, like Berryer, to enlist domestic servants into the secret police force; and, with this object, Delavau renewed an old ordinance, calling upon them to get their names noted in the books of the prefecture every time they entered a situation or left one. The domestics, however, perceived the motive of Delavau’s measure, and were so unanimous in withholding their names from the books in question, that all idea of family espionage, on which much value had been set, was soon to be abandoned. Delavau drew even more largely upon the criminal class for his myrmidons than Pasquier had done, and in his day no public gathering took place at which some felon, released for the purpose from gaol, was not lurking about for an ill-sounding word or a suspicious gesture. Such agents as these worked with the industry of bloodhounds. “Between the populace and the subalterns