Part 15
I tell you this only for its pleasantry, and not to hint the frequency of such cases. I have, indeed, heard of one French husband, who was jealous a little while. He flew at his wife’s lover with a knife, and perhaps would have killed him, but she rushed between, and seizing his arm, exclaimed: “_Arrête, malheureux, tu vas tuer le père de tes enfans!_” and the knife fell from his paternal hands.
In conversation there is a language of prudery, and a language of grossness.--These are the extremes, and propriety is somewhere about the middle. Human nature, especially in large cities, does not bear exquisite refinement. To refine, is to be indelicate; to hide, is to discover. In America, we get, in some places, into the very wantonness of delicacy, and decency herself becomes absolutely indecent. There are two sorts of persons affected in this way; the modest woman just stepping into the world, and the woman, who has been in it too much. The latter “adds to the bloom of her cheek in exact proportion to the diminution of her modesty.”
You have acquitted me fully of this charge of prudery in several of your letters--much obliged. I wish I could be as easily absolved from the opposite offence. All I can say in mitigation, is, that living a whole year in Paris, and describing Parisian manners makes it very difficult not to incur such a blame from you Pottsvillians. I may observe, however, that freedoms are often permitted in one person, which may be very blameable in others, depending entirely upon the comparative innocency of their lives. Is Lafontaine ever taxed with indecency? Yet in words he is a libertine without a rival;--and your baby, too, may kick up its heels and do a good many things that would be very unbecoming in its mother.
When you come to Paris you may talk of the eloquent preacher and the music at St. Roch with raptures; but recollect you cannot do a more silly thing than to make any show of religion. Though you may know your Bible by heart, it will be well sometimes to ask, who Samuel was, or David, or Moses, by way of recommending your good breeding.
If a coach stops at your door and brings you an acquaintance up the stairs, you must say in a fret; “Here is that sickening thing again; now I shall be teazed with her insipid talk all the morning. Why did they let her in?”--“My dear Caroline I am so rejoiced to see you!” and then you must jump about her neck.--“I was so dull, and just wanted your sweet countenance and wit to enliven me.”--This is only a little fashionable air, and does not mean any thing. The French profess more violent affection before your face and employ more saucy ridicule behind your back, than any other people; but the mass of kindness and benevolence is about as great here as in other countries.--Complimentary phrases are in no country to be taken literally. In Paris, if a man swears he loves you, and will share his last crumb with you, he means of course that you are to pay for it.
In taking leave of a lady, see her to your chamber door, and then hold the door a little ajar, and wait until she has turned round and given you the valedictory smile; then it is an affair finished. You are not to follow to the street. You rub your lamp, that is, you ring a bell, and a genius appears to conduct her. This leaves her at liberty with respect to her equipage.
Nothing is so ill-bred as officious assiduities. Good breeding never makes a fuss; it takes good care of a lady when her safety and real comfort are concerned, with kindness, but not officiousness. Anticipate all her wants, gratify all her whims, and overload her with superfluous civilities, and you make her ungrateful, selfish, disagreeable. She will regard your neglects as offences, and your kindnesses as dues that enjoin no acknowledgment. You know what unhappy, disagreeable things spoiled children are, and in their infantine grace and innocence how amiable; their mammas may be spoiled in the same way, and when spoiled are equally detestable. _Nota bene_: the papas may be spoiled too.
When you pay a visit, go away rather too soon than too late; leave people always a little hungry of your company; unless you are of the class of ladies, who “make hungry where most they satisfy.”
I advise you in your dress not to follow too implicitly the fashions of Europe, and especially not to exaggerate, which is so common with imitators. In bowing with the reverence to French fashions, which is becoming in all womankind, have a decent respect to the human shapes and appearances. Why, I have seen bustles or bishops, or what do you call them, put up even in Chestnut-street by some of you, who, under the Rump Parliament, would have been taken up for a libel.
If you are well dressed, no one meeting you will ask who made your frock. One stares at the woman, and the frock is unseen. Do you believe that any one asks Madame la Hon who made her chapeau; or the pretty Countess de Vaudrueil, or the Duchess de Guiche, who plaited those diamonds, more beautiful than the starry firmament, upon their turbans; or the Duchess de Plaisance who made her shoe? No, no, the heart is full of the little foot, and there is no room there for the shoemakers and mantua-makers.
Don’t do things always the same way. If, for example, you hand a gentleman anything (a bit of anthracite of the “Peacock Vein,” or a joint of the railroad) do it with a graceful simplicity. I know an elegant of your village, polished, to be sure, only with coal-dust, who always brings his hand inconveniently to his heart as the starting-place, and then sets off in a beautiful hyperbola, and always with a velocity geometrically progressive. Do you be various; look sometimes beautiful; look sometimes well, and fore Haven’s sake, if you can, look sometimes ugly. She who wears a pretty cap every day, because it is a pretty cap, is “the cap of all the fools.”
In Paris scandal is reduced to a minimum, for two reasons; first, from the variety of events;--a large city swallows at a meal, what would feed your towns for a whole month: and secondly, because what we call breaking three or four of the commandments is here no sin. As for elopements there are none; no occasion to run away.
News and coffee are taken usually together, and both must be hot. It is low breeding to talk of anything which happened three days ago; the news of the last week is the last year’s almanack. A Parisian gentleman never speaks but of great events, and those which are just born; nor does he rashly speak of Racine or Corneille, or such like antiquated authors; it smacks of the Provinces.
To be an exquisite, the qualifications are to talk of the opera and the races, and play at whist, dine at the _Cercle des Etrangers_, make a leg, walk in a quadrille, and _avoir la plus jolie maitresse de Paris_. It also recommends one greatly to have a pale face, and emaciated shanks; implying a long course of high living; besides it gives a modish languor to one’s air; it is exceedingly genteel. It is understood of course, that one must be a useful man about a woman, and have one’s pocket stuffed with her little conveniences. If she wants a pin, his pincushion is at her service; or a needle, he must have all the numbers from six to a dozen.
To be a gentleman of the _bon ton_, it is necessary not to be suspected of any useful employment, or of regulating life by any rule of order or economy; above all, not to be without some intrigue. Three or four persons should always be jealous of one at the same time.
With a moderate pair of whiskers and mustachios, with a little tuft on the inferior lip, and all trimmed like the garden of Versailles, he is a classic; but if you see a grisly monster, with the beard of a Scotch boar, and his hair flowing in all its St. Simonian shagginess about his shoulders, and with the sallow complexion of a quateroon, seated by the side of a smooth and elegant female, of an afternoon in the Tuileries, he is of the romantic school--I wonder you women don’t set your faces against these beards!
Gentlemen smoke now in Europe every where, but chew and spit nowhere. I have observed that the French Exchange, where several thousand persons daily congregate upon a white marble floor, is always pure from the contamination of spitting. The French are, however, often disagreeable, by spitting in their handkerchiefs. The best model, they say, in such matters, is an English gentleman. The ancient Persians were a still better. An Englishman often gets into good, sometimes bad customs, from a pure antigallic opposition, as Lord Burleigh turned out his toes, because Sir Christopher Hatton turned his in.
The Frenchman is hyperbolical, and the Englishman not even emphatic; the one makes loud expressions, the other none; the one spits in his pocket, and the other refuses to spit at all. However, there is no need of national antipathies to dissuade mankind from chewing tobacco, which is certainly one of the most aggravated indecencies that human nature has been guilty of. How it should exist where there are ladies, I do not conceive, and, least of all, do I conceive how it should exist in Philadelphia, the most gynocratic of all cities.
But I smell the dinner, and since I am in the way of aphorisms, I will give you a few to eat as a dessert, and to fill the rest of this page. In your cookery, avoid all high seasonings, and coarse flavours, they are vulgar. Cayenne, curry, allspice, and walnut pickles, and all such inflammatory dishes, are banished from the French kitchen entirely. If even the butter has a little crumb of salt in it, it is obliged, like the President’s Message, to make an apology for its sauciness. Every thing is served, as far as possible, in its own juices.
Even the ladies have left off aromatics and Eau de Cologne only keeps its place upon the toilet. High seasonings for meat are used only as antiseptics. If you ask a company to dinner, either dine out yourself, or conceal your authority, by mixing, as they do in Paris, undistinguishably with your guests. The guest must feel at his ease. And, take care to observe antipathies and affinities in the distribution of the seats. How many sin against this rule. I have known a lawyer put alongside of a judge!
The French used to place a gentleman by a lady, and both drank from the same cup, and ate from the same plate; sometimes the gentleman would put the bite into the lady’s mouth. I am sorry--sometimes I am glad--that this turtledove way of eating has gone out of fashion.
The table in America presents you the entire meal at a single view--in some houses including the dessert; and while the dishes are lugged fifty yards from the kitchen, and await then the ladies, fixing themselves, what do you think has happened? Why, the jellies are coddled, the drawn-butter has gone into _blanc-mange_, the beef gravy to tallow, and the chickens to goose-flesh--in a word, nothing is hot but the butter.
It may be laid down as a rule, that no man can dine who sees his dinner. Pray you observe a succession and analogy of dishes. I entreat you at least that the fish may be hot, and that it may not wait an hour for its sauce. And take care that your waiters have a proper acquaintance with human nature and its wants, and that they be penetrated with a sense of their duties. They must understand congruities, and know the desires and appetites of a guest from his countenance.
I have seen countries, where if one asks for mutton, he has to ask for turnips also! I have seen servants in our country, who, all the while you are in agony for a dish, are standing and gaping at the ceiling--fellows whom Heliogabalus would have crucified immediately after dinner. A French garçon told me he knew a man’s wants--if a gentlemanly eater--by the back of his neck. “I was puzzled,” said he, “the other day by an American--he wanted a glass of milk just after his soup.”
To remove a plate too soon by officiousness, is a monstrous fault; and to make a clatter among the dishes is excessively annoying. What a hurly-burly at an American dinner!--At the Rocher Cancale you would think the servants were bearing along the sacred things of Mother Vesta--their feet are muffled, the dishes are of velvet. In barbarous times, a monstrous baron used to bring the dinner into his hall, by servants on horseback. A good housekeeper now, by placing his dining-room and kitchen in contiguity, and all accessories at the side of their principals, studies that their services may be almost invisible.--A host of a delicate taste never introduces one, but as they do a ghost at a play, where the occasion is indispensable--_nodus nisi vindice dignus_. These four words of Latin just saved their distance, and I have only room to add--good night.
LETTER XXII.
The Lap-dog.--The Dame Blanche.--The Beauty in a Gallery.--The Lingère.--Madame Frederic.--Fête de Longchamps.--Parisian Fashions.--Holy Concerts.--Pretty Women.--Empire of Fashion.--Reign of Beauty.--The Fashionable Lady.
May, 1836.
I have just had yours of the 4th of April, and have seen two of Miss Kitty’s, very acid. Doctor ---- let one of them fall in the Seine from the Pont Neuf, and it made lemonade to St. Cloud. Poor Miss Kitty! I wish she had such a husband as her mother, who, instead of going to carnivals, and masquerades, and receptions, and such places, and giving uneasiness to his wife, stays at home and looks cross all the evening, by the fire-side.--I walked out this morning in one of these domestic fits, and kicked a lady’s lap-dog in the Tuileries, and was called to account for it by a pair of mustachios like the horns of a centipede, and I got off only by making an apology to the lady and the puppy--(smiling to her and patting the dog a little) which I would not have done under the administration of James Madison.
This happened just by the statue of Lucretia, who used to stay at home also in the same way of an evening in spinning; it would have been, perhaps, better for both of us to have mixed a little more in the amusements of the town. The fact is, it puzzles the best of us to know how to behave ourselves. One may fall, like the Roman lady into difficulties at home, and another into temptations abroad. But alas, poor Kitty!--Beware of telling her what I am going to relate to you. You know what a thing jealousy is. Doctor ---- has fallen in love with a French woman. To be sure, she is one of the most glorious beauties of Paris, admired by the very first nobility--by the Duke of Orleans, by the Duke of Nemours, and by the Duke of I don’t know what else; and if the truth was known, I believe the king himself is fond of her. If you had only seen her last night at her harp!--a fine woman is dangerous in any shape whatever; but when she adds music to her charms--one surrenders at discretion.
If you had heard her wild notes, as they thrilled upon the wires, and as her fluttering voice softened and expired upon the listening ear, you would not yourself have blamed a little infidelity towards one’s wife, especially all the way to Paris. I hate to keep you in pain, so I will tell you at once her name.--What makes it a little more unhappy perhaps is, that she is a lady of rather a doubtful reputation; and belongs at present to the “Opera Comique:” In fine, if you will absolutely know, it was the “_Dame Blanche_.”
And now that I am in the chapter of accidents, I may as well tell you that your old acquaintance, D. D--, on Saturday night, was found dead--(say nothing of this to his sister, she will be so afflicted)--he was found dead drunk in the _Place du Carrousel_; and on Monday he got up at six in the morning, and went deliberately into a tippling-shop in the neighbourhood, and ran himself through the body--(being mad at his father for not sending him money)--with a pint of rum.
I have now prepared you for a story of a much more serious import--a story which concerns myself. I would not tell it to you but in obedience to my invariable rule of concealing nothing from you. What a place this Paris is! No virtue is under shelter from its temptations. Solomon had a great deal more wisdom than I can pretend to, and he was seduced away by foreigners, who, I dare say, were not half so tempting as these French.
I was looking out a few days ago to see what kind of weather it was;--there was not a cloud in the firmament; but there was a very beautiful woman standing in a gallery almost opposite; so I left off looking at the heavens just to look at this woman a little, never supposing any harm would come of it. But nothing is so dangerous as this cross-the-street kind of acquaintance. The silent conversation of looks, so much more expressive than words; the mysterious conjectures about what each other’s thoughts may be, and above all, the obstacle of the intervening space--you know what amorous things obstacles are.
If it had not been the wall with the crack in it at Babylon, I dare say Pyramus and Thisbe would not have cared for each other a French sou.--She kept looking and looking (I mean the woman in the gallery) and now and then I looked back at her. And if I have been looking into the looking-glass, more than usual, and if the tailor has just brought me home an entire new suit, which I could not well afford, it is all owing to her. I wish you could have seen the elegant creature this morning, as I did, at her toilette; as she stood like our first mother combing down to her ankles (the prettiest pair but one you ever saw) her long hair, which hung around her as a misty cloud about the full moon.
The little shoe soon embraced her foot and the garter her knee; the maid laced up her corsets, giving graceful folds to her _jupe_, gracility to her waist, and relief to her tournure; and incased her fair form in a frock, “soft as the dove’s down and as white;”--her glossy tresses having already received their fittest harmony from her nimble and tapering fingers.
And now she sat at her mirror, and perused her elegant features; she looked joyful, then sad, then cruel, then tender, and brought out each sentiment into its most eloquent and dangerous expression; she studied a frown and then put on the magic of a smile.--The fine rhetoric of the bosom came next--the rock upon which taste so often is wrecked. Here she meditated and pondered much and inquired of the Graces, how far she might adventure--“how much to the curious eye disclose, how much to fancy leave.”
I walked with her yesterday, amidst the elegant life of the Tuileries, at her return from an airing in the Bois de Boulogne. Unless you see a woman at all her fashionable hours, as well as in all her attitudes and passions, you know nothing of her beauty. She wore a little airy hat, _à la Duchesse de la Vallière_, the bird of Paradise waving over her stately brow;
“Suave a guisa va di un bel pavone, Diritta sopra se, come una grua;”
with cock-feathers in weeping willow upon the crown.--I went in the evening to the ball with her--_parole d’honneur_; in her dress of satin, citron colour, trimmed in _gauze volant_, and a tunique of the same, with wreaths of roses; and in her hair a garland of forget-me-not, with gems assorted by Beaudran, and beautiful as the stars upon the azure firmament. In her morning walk, if she condescends ever to walk in the mornings, her mantle is of deep colours. She wears in half dress, a _chapeau bibi_; in negligé, her tresses are parted under a _capote_, and her thin gauze handkerchief zig-zag, is narrow by an inch;
---- “’neath which you see Two crisp young ivory apples come and go, Like waves that on the shore beat tenderly, When a sweet air is ruffling to and fro.”
I send you a copy of her washerwoman’s list for the last week. I have seen one of the Queen Elizabeth’s somewhere, which began thus: Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, Ireland and France, Defender of the Faith. _Two petticoats, &c._ This Frenchwoman’s is without preface as follows: One frock, _à l’abri galant_; one ditto, _souris effrayé_; two ditto, _rassurées_; one jupon _inexorable_; two ditto, _implacables_; with other articles too tedious to enumerate.
Apropos. The department of the wash-tub is important, and I may as well give you here its statistics. There is the _Bourgeoise_, who superintends, and under her in order, the _savoneuse_, the _empeseuse_ and _refineuse_. A plain washerwoman has forty-two sous per day, and a starcher, clear starcher and ironer, three francs. There is scarcely any thing in Paris more neat and elegant than a _Lingère_. Each branch is brought, by a division of labour, to a nice perfection, which you will see in no other country; but, to find a single person, who can put a shirt through all its varieties, is nearly impossible. A gentleman’s account stands thus: Une chemise, _trois sous_; une veste, _trois sous_; une pantalon de drap, _six sous_; un collet, _un sou_; pair de bas, _deux sous_. And the washerwoman, when she brings you in your linen, will come in her court dress, and counting your shirts, she will inquire after your health, and as she retires she will have the “honour to salute you.” Madame Frederic is one of the notabilities of Paris, and no one who has a proper respect for clean linen ever speaks to her but with his hat in his hand; she has a _reputation Européenne_, but she refuses to wash any thing under a ministerial shirt--and not even that, if it be worn twice.
And now I will proceed to tell you who this elegant woman is, in whom, by this time, you must have taken some interest. She is a Parisian by birth and education, a married woman, and the greatest coquette and most capricious creature of all Paris; and yet all Paris--alas, more than all Paris, does nothing but run after her. As for me, I declare with Cicero, “_malle me errare cum illa, quam aliis recte sapere_.”
She has a brother too, as much admired by the ladies as she by the gentlemen, and is so exquisite in taste and dress, that many doubt whether he himself may not be of the softer gender. I wish I had time to describe to you his wardrobe also. His _petite redingote_ of blue, and his white _pantalons_ in contrast with his black vest and azure cravat, for the morning promenade; his graceful _Polonaise_ trousers black, and vest white, for the field sports, and his----