Part 16
---- But he is a proud and insolent fellow, and I hate him because he always has an eye upon his sister, and unless you ruin yourself altogether, in expenses for new coats, he won’t speak to you. In fine, to keep you no longer in suspense about this elegant couple ---- they are called “The Fashions.” Enough of parables; to-morrow I will treat you to matters of fact.
To-morrow, May 8th.
This old fool, Paris, has turned out again upon the Boulevards, three days of this week, as thick as a _Mardi gras_; it is called the _fête de Longchamps_, and the object is to determine the fashions for the coming season. The most important decision of this year seems to be the entire suppression of “gigot sleeves.” Only think; they were last year as wide as the British Channel, and now they are to be all at once razed to the quick. The public, however, does not submit quietly to the curtailment. Nothing else indeed but mutton sleeves and the President’s message is thought fit for conversation, or discussion in the newspapers, this month past. It is found to be exceedingly difficult to legislate for the head and shoulders, and lower parts at the same time; what is a benefit to one section being a prejudice to the other. The waist especially is indignant; it has been straightened enough and squeezed enough in all conscience ever since it was first invented. It has remonstrated; and petition after petition has been sent in, signed by all the neighbouring states, threatening to nullify the union, unless these restrictions are taken off. However, by relieving a little the flatness and nakedness of the arm with a row or two of _point d’Angleterre_, it is supposed a compromise may be effected. Indeed I have already seen several pairs of these sleeves venturing abroad, and two yesterday amidst the _bravas_ of the Tuileries. But what a figure is a woman, shrunk into those narrow circumstances above, and so prominent beneath! she seems scarcely of the same species. She is Horace’s _mulier formosa superné_ reversed.
Another decree of the Longchamps is to lengthen the frock still more at the tail; though longer already than cleanliness or mercy to many a reluctant pair of ankles should have permitted. Ankles are said to be very beautiful in Paris, and they resisted with all their might this innovation the last season; they had enjoyed the privilege of being seen for years, and it was natural they should take some steps to maintain it; but did it avail? In this you see only another signal example of the despotism of Fashion. Not two years ago a frock was circumcised midleg--no one indeed looked at a lady’s legs, as a matter of curiosity, much below the knee--and now, unless in a whirlwind or stepping into a coach, not a “peeping ankle” is to be seen upon the whole pavé of Paris. Alas, all you can see now-a-days is
“The feet, that from each petticoat Like little mice creep in and out.”
Formerly, the cause of going to Longchamps was to say mass; now it is a mutton-sleeve. This Longchamps was once a Convent, and was founded by St. Louis’s sister, Isabelle de France, who after her death performed in this place (a pretty good number for a woman) forty miracles. The place therefore became very celebrated; pilgrims visited it by thousands, and the sick were carried there to be cured, and princesses shut themselves up in it from the temptations of the world. But these nuns were very pretty, and the rakes of Paris went thither on pilgrimage also; amongst the rest went Henry the Fourth to court Mademoiselle Catherine de Vérdun.
In the course of time every one heard certain holy concerts spoken of, that were given there on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays of the Holy week, (the days now celebrated.) On which occasions the church was illuminated, embalmed with incense, and the little nuns sang so sweetly, that many pious people thought their songs not of this earth, but hymns that came directly from the celestial choirs: and the crowds that frequented Longchamps was immense.
Not the inhabitants of Paris only came, but of London and other foreign cities, striving to rival each other in the richness of their dresses, and the magnificence of their equipages. Their emulation went so far at last, that the very wheels of the chariots were often gilt, and the shoes of the horses were also of the precious metals; and the coachmen and footmen more gold than gold (κρυσω κρυσοτερα.) But again libertinism broke into the sacred cloisters, and the concerts were suppressed; finally the Revolution came, and the convent was demolished; not a stone was left to testify the miracles of Isabelle de France. But the multitude still continues its annual pilgrimage to Longchamps.
In the present fêtes there is scarcely any thing which recals the sumptuousness of ancient times. Coaches indeed are varnished, stirrups are burnished, and lacqueys have a new livery; and here and there an English lord, or an American Colonel blazes out with chariots, postilions, and mounted gens d’armes. The French aristocracy has been so unvarnished by the Revolution, that twenty thousand a year has got very little chance of being exceedingly magnificent.
The procession is an uninterrupted train of vehicles of all sorts in motion the whole length of the Boulevards; and up through the Champs Elysées to the Bois de Boulogne, a distance of about four miles, and having arrived at a certain spot, the cavalcade wheels about and returns in the same manner; the one side of the way being used for going and the other for coming. The chief concern of the day is, the exhibition of pretty women in open barouches, clad in the splendours and novelties of the season. Mounted beaux, too, on steeds richly caparisoned are exceedingly in favour.
The decrees of Longchamps, like Cæsar’s, go forth upon the whole earth; and it is the only tribunal that can claim upon the earth this extensive jurisdiction. A revolution has passed, like a hurricane, over its very throne, and left its authority undisturbed; and there is no reason to believe that this supreme and universal power will ever pass away. Causes and effects both co-operate to perpetuate its existence. In other countries, men and women, follow fashion, and have consequently little exercise of taste or invention; but the Parisians are by general consent inventors; they are gay, vain and ostentatious, and from the nature of their commerce, and from the number of strangers who are induced to reside amongst them, they will give always to dress and fashion an importance they can have no where else. Let us then recognise our legitimate sovereigns, and bow graciously to their natural and indisputable authority. Let us recognise, too, the wisdom of Providence, which by giving a diversity of products to the earth, and of capacities to the civilised nations, who inhabit it, has bound them by ties of mutual necessity, to live together in peace and harmony. The savages of our country, who have no such ties, who have but the same pursuits and capacities, have also but one passion, the destruction of each other.
To compare the American and French modiste, is to compare the mere manual operation, to the imaginative and intelligent exercise of the mind. A French bonnet maker is not made, she is born; she meditates, she invents, she conceives a hat--as much as Pindar did a lyric poem. And when she has made you a hat, your only wonder is, whether the hat was made for you, or you were made for the hat.
Why, in Philadelphia a hat may be worn by two faces; here it is a constituent part of the woman it was invented for, and they cannot be separated from each other without injury to both. Do you believe that _Madame Palmyre_ ever makes two frocks alike? it would be the ruin of the woman’s reputation. What kind of feelings must a lady have, coming into an assembly, and finding another woman’s frock having the same physiognomy as her own! I have seen more than one in a fit of hysterics from this very occurrence. And do you believe that _Simon’s_ chapeaux are formed upon the cold precepts of the schools, or Herbault’s _bibis_? Do you think that _Michael’s_ shoes, or those exquisite bottines of _Gelot_, or those kid gloves of _Boivin_ are produced without enthusiasm? or _Batton’s_ flowers or _Cartier’s_ plumes, without inspiration?
A modiste in America indeed!--why the same woman cuts out a frock and makes it! The same woman who does the head-work of a bonnet, does the stitchings! In France there is an adaptation of labour to the abilities of the artist; and a modiste _en chef_ no more thinks of the manipulation of a frock, than Scribe of a vaudeville, or Carème of a dinner.
Nor does she suffer her genius to be dissipated and wasted upon varieties even the most important. Each branch has its professor, whose whole mind is concentrated upon this one object. Even the invention has its specialities. One adapts colours to complexions, and another studies the proportions of the human form, and its shapes, and the congruity of dresses with its various sizes; how to bring out an attraction more seductive by the sacrifice of one less potent; where to enhance a beauty by a defect; and how to discover a charm under pretext of concealing it; one is a kind of Minister of the Interior, another of Foreign Affairs.
In the manual operations, too, the same series is observed. One folds, another crimples, one bastes, another rips; one spends her days in “undoing,” another in “trying-on,” another again grows old in puckering, and so in crisping, pranking, curling, and flouncing--all have their several functions, and all their tasks assorted to their several abilities.
At the fête of the Longchamps the eye is dazzled by the splendour, and the attention is distracted by the variety. A fashion, to have vogue, must present itself in a more “questionable shape.” A pretty woman is therefore selected, who for a season may personate the many-coloured goddess; she is called during her reign the “Most fashionable”--not indeed as the king is called the “Most Christian,” for truly, she is the most fashionable--“_la plus à la mode de Paris_.”
The Parisians have a way of getting this fashionable woman up, pretty much as we get up a great man in the United States. A few of the leaders of fashion, young gentlemen in their first down, having made choice of a fit person, first direct upon her all the rays of their admiration. She is not required to be a duchess, or to have any more beauty or accomplishments than her neighbours, but she had better be the wife of a rich banker. If she rides out of an afternoon to the Bois de Boulogne, then will a dozen of these fashionables gather around her barouche; and hats in hand, they will canter alongside; they will be unable to contain their admiration, and they will set the multitude gaping. Thus in the crowd one stares at the heavens, and another, till at last the world is on the gaze; and as all see different wonders in the skies, one a whale, another a weasel, and many phantasms and idle visions; so in the heaven of this lady’s face, beauties are now struck out that had remained, but for this general regard, for ever undiscovered; beauties which herself, if possible, had never seen.
----“As learned critics view In Homer, beauties Homer never knew.”
The same gallants pursue her to the opera, and there gather into her box with noise and bustle and assiduities, till they have drawn the whole house upon her, and every glass is pointed; as in the chase, where the hare stands at bay, and the hunters have but a single aim; only that here the danger is reversed.
So at the concert, and so at the ball, where she is engaged for twenty sets a-head, before half up the stairs; so every where the same ardour, the same _empressement_, the same adoration. She is gazetted too in the newspapers, and all her particulars, jetty hair, inky eye-brows, turn-up nose, pouting lips; every thing circumstantially described. Every one knows her, every one loves her, and every one not wishing to pass for a clown, without taste, swears she is adorable. She is in every one’s mouth, she is in every one’s heart, she is ---- in a word, she is _la femme la plus à la mode de Paris_.
Thus our fashionable lady is turned about in the vortex of dissipation till Spring, and enjoys a flood of frothy adulation beyond the lot of all other monarchs. The spring arrives, and then the summer; and being fashionable, she leaves of course during the warm months for the Waterings, or her castle in a distant province, and returns in the Autumn: and in the Autumn she finds another “Fashionable Lady” in her place. It is scarce to be expected that such violent admiration should be bestowed on the same person for more than a season. She now abdicates and sinks into obscurity, or which is more common, being unable to endure the reverse of fortune, dies of mortification and spite.
I send you this by Mr. C----, of Philadelphia, with a single sheet of music, a delightful air from the Puritani--an air which is graven upon ten thousand hearts. Oh, if you had heard Rubini sing it over the coffin of Bellini at the Invalids! The sexton wept. It stole upon the ear as if from the spheres--mournful as the wood-pigeon’s moan:--
----“Soft as the mother’s lullaby When babies sleep.”
Learn to sing it in your most plaintive voice. I will love you the more for recalling one of the tenderest scenes of my absence. Good night.
LETTER XXIII.
Return of Spring.--A New Venus.--The Artesian Well.--Montmartre--Donjon of Vincennes.--St. Ouen.--St. Germain.--The Pretender.--Machine de Marli.--Versailles.--The Water-works.--The Swiss Garden.--Trianon.--Races at Chantilly.--Stables of the Great Condé--Lodgings in a French Village.--A Domestic Occurrence.--The Boots.--The Alarm.--The Bugs.--Extract from Pepys.--Delights of Chantilly.--Unlucky Days.--Solitude in a Crowd.--The Cure.--The King’s Birth-day.--The Concert.--The Fire-works.--The Illuminations.--The Buffoons.--Punch.--The Eating Department.--The Mat de Cocagne.
Paris, May 6th, 1836.
Your letter, of March the 25th, has arrived. I am sorry to hear the north wind has given himself such airs. Here he has been quite reasonable. The lilacs of the Luxembourg are again in their pride. The gardener is stirring up the loose earth, while May recals the roses with refreshing showers. How delightful to see the Spring thus repairing the desolations of Winter! Your trees of Pine Hill, which persevere in being green the year round, do not please so much as those which strip off in November, and put on their green and flowery robes in April. Pines are called rightly, the dress of winter and the mourning of summer.
What has immutability to do with this earth? where one tires even with a uniformity of excellence. If I were to make, like Ovid, a golden age, I would say not a word of eternal Spring. How delightful is this morning! The sun has just poured out its first rays upon the dews, and every lilac has a pearl in its ear. They are setting out, in the Palais Royal, a new Venus of the whitest marble. Look at the jade, in the south-east corner, in her impudent attitude; she is stooping, and ungartering a snake from her leg. Pretty, to be sure, if one had a taste for a hieroglyphic woman; as for me, I like the little thing in its natural attributes of flesh and blood, in its straight nose; lips double dyed; and overlooking the humid eye of gray, or dark, or blue, and the “darling little foot.”
They are also setting out chairs for the Summer, and the gallery of Orleans already weeps its empty halls. These chairs are let at two sous the sitting, and bring money to the private purse of our “citizen king.” The “right of location” is 32,000 francs, and the lessee gets rich by the bargain. This sitting out upon chairs is an ancient custom; it is the way Frenchwomen take a walk. I have read in Scarron some verses in allusion to it.
Tous les jours une chaise Me coute un écu, Pour porter a l’aise Votre chien, &c. &c.
A poetic husband is out of humour with his wife, whose sedentary habits have become a serious item in the household expenses.
As I am about to leave Paris I have taken several flights to the country, to satisfy what yet remains of unsatiated curiosity; to Fontainbleau, where I walked upon the footsteps of the _Belle Gabrielle_, and stood upon the spot where the thunder of retributive justice fell upon the head of Napoleon. I stood this morning at nine by the _Barrière des Martyrs_ accompanied by Mr. ----, of Philadelphia. We went to see an Artesian well they are boring there towards the centre of the earth; and through which we are to have a short passage to the Indies; and to get a peep of the sun at midnight. It is already nine hundred feet; the temperature increasing; and they are going to make mother Earth keep us in hot water. She is to heat our baths, warm our houses, make the tea, and spoil your trade in Anthracite coal; so says M. Arago, secretary of the Institute, member of the Chamber of Deputies, &c. But I have little taste for wells, except in very hot weather--unless it be those
----“delicate _wells_ Which a sweet smile forms in a lovely cheek.”
These are agreeable in all weathers.
We breakfasted in coming along, on the Heights of Montmartre, where we surveyed the great village, and stood on a level with its steeples. This was Henry the Fourth’s Camp at his taking of Paris; and lately of the English on a similar errand. Here were a great many John Bullish looking children with jovial rubicund faces, running about the hill. They have profited, the little rogues, by the gallantry of their mothers. The French children of the poorer classes have generally a sallow and unhealthy look.
Next we walked around the “Donjon of Vincennes,” its ditches and its towers. It has great titles stuck on its scutcheon. It has imprisoned the great Condé, Retz, Fouquet, Vendome, and Conti; also in later times, Diderot and Mirabeau: and it contains in its chapel the remains of the Duc d’Enghein, who was shot here. It was formerly the residence of kings. Philip Augustus lived here, and St. Louis, and Francis I., and Henry IV., and Blanche of Castile, and Agnes, called the “Lady of Beauty.” Charles IX. died here, and Mazarin, and that wicked creature _Isabelle de Bavière_. I visited this village last summer in fête-time, and had a dance in the _Rotonde de Mars_, and excellent music in the _Grand salon des Chorybantes_.
On this excursion we strolled also into the village of St. Ouen, four and a half miles from Paris. Here is a royal chateau, where Louis XVIII. reposed the second of May 1814, before his solemn entrance into the city. It is a delightful situation, overlooking the Seine, and the old kings as far back as Dagobert had a place here, which Louis XI. gave to the monks of St. Denis, “_Afin qu’ils priassent Dieu pour la conservation de sa personne_.” The Pavilion of Queen Blanche is yet remaining. On the site of the old palace is the elegant mansion of M. Terneaux, whose predecessors were M. and Madame Necker.
One of the curiosities of the place is the cradle, which rocked Madame de Staël. M. Terneaux is a member of the Deputies; he makes laws and Cashmere shawls--the shawls equal in tissue and beauty to those of Indus. Every body comes hither to see his Thibet goats and merinoes, and his _silos_, which are immense excavations in which grain is preserved fresh for many years.
We now went two leagues and a half further to St. Germain, and walked upon its elegant Terrace. The Pretender is buried here, and several of the little Pretenders; and in going along we looked at the _Machine de Marli_, which desires to be remembered to the Falls of Niagara. The water is climbing up an immense hill by dribbles to supply the little squirting Cupids at Versailles.
St. Germain was once the seat of the pleasures and magnificence of the Grand Monarch. He left it, because St. Denis, standing upon a high eastern eminence, overtopped his palace, a _memento mori_ amidst the royal cups. Kings do not choose that these telltales of mortality shall look in at their windows.
We then walked in the chestnut groves and deep solitudes of Montmorency, till we grew sentimental--till we could almost hear Heloise wail her unhappy lover. We saw a tree that had fallen to the earth, and the vine which had entwined it in its prosperity still clinging to it in its fall; it had refused to climb any other tree, but died with the trunk that had supported it. We thought of the perfidy and ingratitude of men, and we had serious thoughts of quitting their society and living altogether among trees. We visited the Hermitage and plucked each a leaf from the rose-bush, and sat upon Jean Jacques’s chair. We intended to visit Meudon on our return, to laugh at Rabelais, and to fly to the rocks of Vitry to kiss the footsteps of Madame de Sevigné, but did not. I have now given you my journey of a day.
I announced to you pompously, by the last boat, my departure for London, and you will be surprised to receive yet a letter from Paris. I stayed chiefly to see the waters “play” at Versailles. It is an amazing spectacle, and every body stays to see it. You must imagine a hundred little Cupids squirting away with all their might, and Diana, Amphitrite, and several other grown-up goddesses doing the same; and Apollo’s horses, which breathe the surge from their nostrils, and Neptune, astride of a whale, which vomits the ocean from its gills; with jets-d’eaux innumerable, spouting water, with fantastic figures along the main walks and vistas of the garden.
For the grand scene of all, you must imagine a wide avenue the fourth of a mile, and a row of watery trees at each side, and at the closed end a circular lake, with a liquid pillar rising from the centre, and several concentric circles jetting around at different heights, and scattering the drizzly vapour which makes rainbows as it descends. If you have imagined all this, with a temple, and Thetis and her nymphs seated in it, and plenty of cascades, waterspouts, and cataracts pouring down upon them--this is the “Play of the waters at Versailles.”
The multitude of the spectators was like a forest of the Mahonoy. The women were as thick as Catullus’s kisses. With one of them, whom I knew, I walked awhile, in the “Swiss Garden,” with its air of gentility and modesty. Here the Royal Family used to abdicate their greatness and play one week of the year a peasant’s life; and the royal girls romped about the garden in their linsey frocks, and check aprons, and coarse petticoats, and had bonny-clabber for supper. Louis XVI. was a miller, and Maria Antoinette was a dear little dairy-maid; but--
“More water glides by the mill Than wots the miller of.”
The mill, and the dairy, and the cottages, and other monuments of these royal Saturnalia, are yet remaining. These were anciently the pastimes of monarchs, who had thirty millions of subjects; and they complain that the judgments of Heaven have overtaken them!