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The Paris Sketch Book

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"Here I pause, to call for my valet-de-chambre, and call for tea;
for my head is heavy, and I've no time for a headache. In serving
me, this rascal of a Frédéric has broken a cup, true Japan, upon my
honor--the rogue does nothing else. Yesterday, for instance, did
he not thump me prodigiously, by letting fall a goblet, after
Cellini, of which the carving alone cost me three hundred francs?
I must positively put the wretch out of doors, to ensure the safety
of my furniture; and in consequence of this, Eneas, an audacious
young negro, in whom wisdom hath not waited for years--Eneas, my
groom, I say, will probably be elevated to the post of valet-de-
chambre. But where was I? I think I was speaking to you of an
oyster breakfast, to which, on our return from the Park (du Bois), a
company of pleasant rakes are invited. After quitting Borel's, we
propose to adjourn to the Barrière du Combat, where Lord Cobham
proposes to try some bull-dogs, which he has brought over from
England--one of these, O'Connell (Lord Cobham is a Tory,) has a face
in which I place much confidence; I have a bet of ten louis with
Castijars on the strength of it. After the fight, we shall make our
accustomed appearance at the 'Cafe de Paris,' (the only place, by
the way, where a man who respects himself may be seen,)-- and then
away with frocks and spurs, and on with our dress-coats for the rest
of the evening. In the first place, I shall go doze for a couple of
hours at the Opera, where my presence is indispensable; for Coralie,
a charming creature, passes this evening from the rank of the RATS
to that of the TIGERS, in a pas-de-trois, and our box patronizes
her. After the Opera, I must show my face to two or three salons in
the Faubourg St. Honoré; and having thus performed my duties to the
world of fashion, I return to the exercise of my rights as a member
of the Carnival. At two o'clock all the world meets at the Théâtre
Ventadour: lions and tigers--the whole of our menagerie will be
present. Evoé! off we go! roaring and bounding Bacchanal and
Saturnal; 'tis agreed that we shall be everything that is low. To
conclude, we sup with Castijars, the most 'furiously dishevelled'
orgy that ever was known."


The rest of the letter is on matters of finance, equally curious
and instructive. But pause we for the present, to consider the
fashionable part: and caricature as it is, we have an accurate
picture of the actual French dandy. Bets, breakfasts, riding,
dinners at the "Café de Paris," and delirious Carnival balls: the
animal goes through all such frantic pleasures at the season that
precedes Lent. He has a wondrous respect for English "gentlemen-
sportsmen;" he imitates their clubs--their love of horse-flesh: he
calls his palefrenier a groom, wears blue birds's-eye neck-cloths,
sports his pink out hunting, rides steeple-chases, and has his
Jockey Club. The "tigers and lions" alluded to in the report have
been borrowed from our own country, and a great compliment is it to
Monsieur de Bernard, the writer of the above amusing sketch, that
he has such a knowledge of English names and things, as to give a
Tory lord the decent title of Lord Cobham, and to call his dog
O'Connell. Paul de Kock calls an English nobleman, in one of his
last novels, Lord Boulingrog, and appears vastly delighted at the
verisimilitude of the title.

For the "rugissements et bondissements, bacchanale et saturnale,
galop infernal, ronde du sabbat tout le tremblement," these words
give a most clear, untranslatable idea of the Carnival ball. A
sight more hideous can hardly strike a man's eye. I was present at
one where the four thousand guests whirled screaming, reeling,
roaring, out of the ball-room in the Rue St. Honoré, and tore down
to the column in the Place Vendôme, round which they went shrieking
their own music, twenty miles an hour, and so tore madly back
again. Let a man go alone to such a place of amusement, and the
sight for him is perfectly terrible: the horrid frantic gayety of
the place puts him in mind more of the merriment of demons than of
men: bang, bang, drums, trumpets, chairs, pistol-shots, pour out of
the orchestra, which seems as mad as the dancers; whiz, a whirlwind
of paint and patches, all the costumes under the sun, all the ranks
in the empire, all the he and she scoundrels of the capital,
writhed and twisted together, rush by you; if a man falls, woe be
to him: two thousand screaming menads go trampling over his
carcass: they have neither power nor will to stop.

A set of Malays drunk with bhang and running amuck, a company of
howling dervishes, may possibly, in our own day, go through similar
frantic vagaries; but I doubt if any civilized European people but
the French would permit and enjoy such scenes. Yet our neighbors
see little shame in them; and it is very true that men of all
classes, high and low, here congregate and give themselves up to
the disgusting worship of the genius of the place.--From the dandy
of the Boulevard and the "Café Anglais," let us turn to the dandy
of "Flicoteau's" and the Pays Latin--the Paris student, whose
exploits among the grisettes are so celebrated, and whose fierce
republicanism keeps gendarmes for ever on the alert. The following
is M. de Bernard's description of him:--


"I became acquainted with Dambergeac when we were students at the
Ecole de Droit; we lived in the same Hotel on the Place du
Panthéon. No doubt, madam, you have occasionally met little
children dedicated to the Virgin, and, to this end, clothed in
white raiment from head to foot: my friend, Dambergeac, had
received a different consecration. His father, a great patriot of
the Revolution, had determined that his son should bear into the
world a sign of indelible republicanism; so, to the great
displeasure of his godmother and the parish curate, Dambergeac was
christened by the pagan name of Harmodius. It was a kind of moral
tricolor-cockade, which the child was to bear through the
vicissitudes of all the revolutions to come. Under such
influences, my friend's character began to develop itself, and,
fired by the example of his father, and by the warm atmosphere of
his native place, Marseilles, he grew up to have an independent
spirit, and a grand liberality of politics, which were at their
height when first I made his acquaintance.

"He was then a young man of eighteen, with a tall, slim figure, a
broad chest, and a flaming black eye, out of all which personal
charms he knew how to draw the most advantage; and though his
costume was such as Staub might probably have criticised, he had,
nevertheless, a style peculiar to himself--to himself and the
students, among whom he was the leader of the fashion. A tight
black coat, buttoned up to the chin, across the chest, set off that
part of his person; a low-crowned hat, with a voluminous rim, cast
solemn shadows over a countenance bronzed by a southern sun: he
wore, at one time, enormous flowing black locks, which he sacrificed
pitilessly, however, and adopted a Brutus, as being more
revolutionary: finally, he carried an enormous club, that was his
code and digest: in like manner, De Retz used to carry a stiletto in
his pocket by way of a breviary.

"Although of different ways of thinking in politics, certain
sympathies of character and conduct united Dambergeac and myself,
and we speedily became close friends. I don't think, in the whole
course of his three years' residence, Dambergeac ever went through
a single course of lectures. For the examinations, he trusted to
luck, and to his own facility, which was prodigious: as for honors,
he never aimed at them, but was content to do exactly as little as
was necessary for him to gain his degree. In like manner he
sedulously avoided those horrible circulating libraries, where
daily are seen to congregate the 'reading men' of our schools.
But, in revenge, there was not a milliner's shop, or a lingère's,
in all our quartier Latin, which he did not industriously frequent,
and of which he was not the oracle. Nay, it was said that his
victories were not confined to the left bank of the Seine; reports
did occasionally come to us of fabulous adventures by him
accomplished in the far regions of the Rue de la Paix and the
Boulevard Poissonnière. Such recitals were, for us less favored
mortals, like tales of Bacchus conquering in the East; they excited
our ambition, but not our jealousy; for the superiority of
Harmodius was acknowledged by us all, and we never thought of a
rivalry with him. No man ever cantered a hack through the Champs
Elysées with such elegant assurance; no man ever made such a
massacre of dolls at the shooting-gallery; or won you a rubber at
billiards with more easy grace; or thundered out a couplet out of
Béranger with such a roaring melodious bass. He was the monarch of
the Prado in winter: in summer of the Chaumière and Mont Parnasse.
Not a frequenter of those fashionable places of entertainment
showed a more amiable laisser-aller in the dance--that peculiar
dance at which gendarmes think proper to blush, and which squeamish
society has banished from her salons. In a word, Harmodius was the
prince of mauvais sujets, a youth with all the accomplishments of
Göttingen and Jena, and all the eminent graces of his own country.

"Besides dissipation and gallantry, our friend had one other vast
and absorbing occupation--politics, namely; in which he was as
turbulent and enthusiastic as in pleasure. La Patrie was his idol,
his heaven, his nightmare; by day he spouted, by night he dreamed,
of his country. I have spoken to you of his coiffure à la Sylla;
need I mention his pipe, his meerschaum pipe, of which General
Foy's head was the bowl; his handkerchief with the Charte printed
thereon; and his celebrated tricolor braces, which kept the
rallying sign of his country ever close to his heart? Besides
these outward and visible signs of sedition, he had inward and
secret plans of revolution: he belonged to clubs, frequented
associations, read the Constitutionnel (Liberals, in those days,
swore by the Constitutionnel), harangued peers and deputies who had
deserved well of their country; and if death happened to fall on
such, and the Constitutionnel declared their merit, Harmodius was
the very first to attend their obsequies, or to set his shoulder to
their coffins.

"Such were his tastes and passions: his antipathies were not less
lively. He detested three things: a Jesuit, a gendarme, and a
claqueur at a theatre. At this period, missionaries were rife
about Paris, and endeavored to re-illume the zeal of the faithful
by public preachings in the churches. 'Infâmes jesuites!' would
Harmodius exclaim, who, in the excess of his toleration, tolerated
nothing; and, at the head of a band of philosophers like himself,
would attend with scrupulous exactitude the meetings of the
reverend gentlemen. But, instead of a contrite heart, Harmodius
only brought the abomination of desolation into their sanctuary. A
perpetual fire of fulminating balls would bang from under the feet
of the faithful; odors of impure assafoetida would mingle with the
fumes of the incense; and wicked drinking choruses would rise up
along with the holy canticles, in hideous dissonance, reminding one
of the old orgies under the reign of the Abbot of Unreason.

"His hatred of the gendarmes was equally ferocious: and as for the
claqueurs, woe be to them when Harmodius was in the pit! They knew
him, and trembled before him, like the earth before Alexander; and
his famous war-cry, 'La Carte au chapeau!' was so much dreaded,
that the 'entrepreneurs de succès dramatiques' demanded twice as
much to do the Odeon Theatre (which we students and Harmodius
frequented), as to applaud at any other place of amusement: and,
indeed, their double pay was hardly gained; Harmodius taking care
that they should earn the most of it under the benches."


This passage, with which we have taken some liberties, will give
the reader a more lively idea of the reckless, jovial, turbulent
Paris student, than any with which a foreigner could furnish him:
the grisette is his heroine; and dear old Béranger, the cynic-
epicurean, has celebrated him and her in the most delightful verses
in the world. Of these we may have occasion to say a word or two
anon. Meanwhile let us follow Monsieur de Bernard in his amusing
descriptions of his countrymen somewhat farther; and, having seen
how Dambergeac was a ferocious republican, being a bachelor, let us
see how age, sense, and a little government pay--the great agent of
conversions in France--nay, in England--has reduced him to be a
pompous, quiet, loyal supporter of the juste milieu: his former
portrait was that of the student, the present will stand for an
admirable lively likeness of


THE SOUS-PRÉFET.


"Saying that I would wait for Dambergeac in his own study, I was
introduced into that apartment, and saw around me the usual
furniture of a man in his station. There was, in the middle of the
room, a large bureau, surrounded by orthodox arm-chairs; and there
were many shelves with boxes duly ticketed; there were a number of
maps, and among them a great one of the department over which
Dambergeac ruled; and facing the windows, on a wooden pedestal,
stood a plaster-cast of the 'Roi des Français.' Recollecting my
friend's former republicanism, I smiled at this piece of furniture;
but before I had time to carry my observations any farther, a heavy
rolling sound of carriage-wheels, that caused the windows to rattle
and seemed to shake the whole edifice of the sub-prefecture, called
my attention to the court without. Its iron gates were flung open,
and in rolled, with a great deal of din, a chariot escorted by a
brace of gendarmes, sword in hand. A tall gentleman, with a
cocked-hat and feathers, wearing a blue and silver uniform coat,
descended from the vehicle; and having, with much grave
condescension, saluted his escort, mounted the stair. A moment
afterwards the door of the study was opened, and I embraced my
friend.

"After the first warmth and salutations, we began to examine each
other with an equal curiosity, for eight years had elapsed since we
had last met.

"'You are grown very thin and pale,' said Harmodius, after a
moment.

"'In revenge I find you fat and rosy: if I am a walking satire on
celibacy,--you, at least, are a living panegyric on marriage.'

"In fact a great change, and such an one as many people would call
a change for the better, had taken place in my friend: he had grown
fat, and announced a decided disposition to become what French
people call a bel homme: that is, a very fat one. His complexion,
bronzed before, was now clear white and red: there were no more
political allusions in his hair, which was, on the contrary, neatly
frizzed, and brushed over the forehead, shell-shape. This head-
dress, joined to a thin pair of whiskers, cut crescent-wise from
the ear to the nose, gave my friend a regular bourgeois
physiognomy, wax-doll-like: he looked a great deal too well; and,
added to this, the solemnity of his prefectural costume, gave his
whole appearance a pompous well-fed look that by no means pleased.

"'I surprise you,' said I, 'in the midst of your splendor: do you
know that this costume and yonder attendants have a look
excessively awful and splendid? You entered your palace just now
with the air of a pasha.'

"'You see me in uniform in honor of Monseigneur the Bishop, who has
just made his diocesan visit, and whom I have just conducted to the
limit of the arrondissement.'

"'What!' said I, 'you have gendarmes for guards, and dance
attendance on bishops? There are no more janissaries and Jesuits,
I suppose?' The sub-prefect smiled.

"'I assure you that my gendarmes are very worthy fellows; and that
among the gentlemen who compose our clergy there are some of the
very best rank and talent: besides, my wife is niece to one of the
vicars-general.'

"'What have you done with that great Tasso beard that poor
Armandine used to love so?'

"'My wife does not like a beard; and you know that what is
permitted to a student is not very becoming to a magistrate.'

"I began to laugh. 'Harmodius and a magistrate!--how shall I ever
couple the two words together? But tell me, in your correspondences,
your audiences, your sittings with village mayors and petty councils,
how do you manage to remain awake?'

"'In the commencement,' said Harmodius, gravely, 'it WAS very
difficult; and, in order to keep my eyes open, I used to stick pins
into my legs: now, however, I am used to it; and I'm sure I don't
take more than fifty pinches of snuff at a sitting.'

"'Ah! apropos of snuff: you are near Spain here, and were always a
famous smoker. Give me a cigar,--it will take away the musty odor
of these piles of papers.'

"'Impossible, my dear; I don't smoke; my wife cannot bear a cigar.'

"His wife! thought I; always his wife: and I remember Juliette, who
really grew sick at the smell of a pipe, and Harmodius would smoke,
until, at last, the poor thing grew to smoke herself, like a
trooper. To compensate, however, as much as possible for the loss
of my cigar, Dambergeac drew from his pocket an enormous gold
snuff-box, on which figured the self-same head that I had before
remarked in plaster, but this time surrounded with a ring of pretty
princes and princesses, all nicely painted in miniature. As for
the statue of Louis Philippe, that, in the cabinet of an official,
is a thing of course; but the snuff-box seemed to indicate a degree
of sentimental and personal devotion, such as the old Royalists
were only supposed to be guilty of.

"'What! you are turned decided juste milieu?' said I.

"'I am a sous-préfet,' answered Harmodius.

"I had nothing to say, but held my tongue, wondering, not at the
change which had taken place in the habits, manners, and opinions
of my friend, but at my own folly, which led me to fancy that I
should find the student of '26 in the functionary of '34. At this
moment a domestic appeared.

"'Madame is waiting for Monsieur,' said he: 'the last bell has
gone, and mass beginning.'

"'Mass!' said I, bounding up from my chair. 'You at mass like a
decent serious Christian, without crackers in your pocket, and
bored keys to whistle through?'--The sous-préfet rose, his
countenance was calm, and an indulgent smile played upon his lips,
as he said, 'My arrondissement is very devout; and not to interfere
with the belief of the population is the maxim of every wise
politician: I have precise orders from Government on the point,
too, and go to eleven o'clock mass every Sunday."'


There is a great deal of curious matter for speculation in the
accounts here so wittily given by M. de Bernard: but, perhaps, it
is still more curious to think of what he has NOT written, and to
judge of his characters, not so much by the words in which he
describes them, as by the unconscious testimony that the words all
together convey. In the first place, our author describes a
swindler imitating the manners of a dandy; and many swindlers and
dandies be there, doubtless, in London as well as in Paris. But
there is about the present swindler, and about Monsieur Dambergeac
the student, and Monsieur Dambergeac the sous-préfet, and his
friend, a rich store of calm internal debauch, which does not, let
us hope and pray, exist in England. Hearken to M. de Gustan, and
his smirking whispers, about the Duchess of San Severino, who pour
son bonheur particulier, &c. &c. Listen to Monsieur Dambergeac's
friend's remonstrances concerning pauvre Juliette who grew sick at
the smell of a pipe; to his naïve admiration at the fact that the
sous-préfet goes to church: and we may set down, as axioms, that
religion is so uncommon among the Parisians, as to awaken the
surprise of all candid observers; that gallantry is so common as to
create no remark, and to be considered as a matter of course. With
us, at least, the converse of the proposition prevails: it is the
man professing irreligion who would be remarked and reprehended in
England; and, if the second-named vice exists, at any rate, it
adopts the decency of secrecy and is not made patent and notorious
to all the world. A French gentleman thinks no more of proclaiming
that he has a mistress than that he has a tailor; and one lives the
time of Boccaccio over again, in the thousand and one French novels
which depict society in that country.

For instance, here are before us a few specimens (do not, madam, be
alarmed, you can skip the sentence if you like,) to be found in as
many admirable witty tales, by the before-lauded Monsieur de
Bernard. He is more remarkable than any other French author, to
our notion, for writing like a gentleman: there is ease, grace and
ton, in his style, which, if we judge aright, cannot be discovered
in Balzac, or Soulié, or Dumas. We have then--"Gerfaut," a novel:
a lovely creature is married to a brave, haughty, Alsacian
nobleman, who allows her to spend her winters at Paris, he
remaining on his terres, cultivating, carousing, and hunting the
boar. The lovely-creature meets the fascinating Gerfaut at Paris;
instantly the latter makes love to her; a duel takes place: baron
killed; wife throws herself out of window; Gerfaut plunges into
dissipation; and so the tale ends.

Next: "La Femme de Quarante Ans," a capital tale, full of exquisite
fun and sparkling satire: La femme de quarante ans has a husband
and THREE lovers; all of whom find out their mutual connection one
starry night; for the lady of forty is of a romantic poetical turn,
and has given her three admirers A STAR APIECE; saying to one and
the other, "Alphonse, when yon pale orb rises in heaven, think of
me;" "Isadore, when that bright planet sparkles in the sky,
remember your Caroline," &c.

"Un Acte de Vertu," from which we have taken Dambergeac's history,
contains him, the husband--a wife--and a brace of lovers; and a
great deal of fun takes place in the manner in which one lover
supplants the other.--Pretty morals truly!

If we examine an author who rejoices in the aristocratic name of le
Comte Horace de Viel-Castel, we find, though with infinitely less
wit, exactly the same intrigues going on. A noble Count lives in
the Faubourg St. Honoré, and has a noble Duchess for a mistress: he
introduces her Grace to the Countess his wife. The Countess his
wife, in order to ramener her lord to his conjugal duties, is
counselled, by a friend, TO PRETEND TO TAKE A LOVER: one is found,
who, poor fellow! takes the affair in earnest: climax--duel, death,
despair, and what not? In the "Faubourg St. Germain," another
novel by the same writer, which professes to describe the very pink
of that society which Napoleon dreaded more than Russia, Prussia,
and Austria, there is an old husband, of course; a sentimental
young German nobleman, who falls in love with his wife; and the
moral of the piece lies in the showing up of the conduct of the
lady, who is reprehended--not for deceiving her husband (poor
devil!)--but for being a flirt, AND TAKING A SECOND LOVER, to the
utter despair, confusion, and annihilation of the first.

Why, ye gods, do Frenchmen marry at all? Had Père Enfantin (who,
it is said, has shaved his ambrosial beard, and is now a clerk in a
banking-house) been allowed to carry out his chaste, just,
dignified social scheme, what a deal of marital discomfort might
have been avoided:--would it not be advisable that a great reformer
and lawgiver of our own, Mr. Robert Owen, should be presented at
the Tuileries, and there propound his scheme for the regeneration
of France?

He might, perhaps, be spared, for our country is not yet sufficiently
advanced to give such a philosopher fair play. In London, as yet,
there are no blessed Bureaux de Mariage, where an old bachelor may
have a charming young maiden--for his money; or a widow of seventy
may buy a gay young fellow of twenty, for a certain number of
bank-billets. If mariages de convenance take place here (as they
will wherever avarice, and poverty, and desire, and yearning after
riches are to be found), at least, thank God, such unions are not
arranged upon a regular organized SYSTEM: there is a fiction of
attachment with us, and there is a consolation in the deceit ("the
homage," according to the old mot of Rochefoucauld) "which vice pays
to virtue"; for the very falsehood shows that the virtue exists
somewhere. We once heard a furious old French colonel inveighing
against the chastity of English demoiselles: "Figurez-vous, sir,"
said he (he had been a prisoner in England), "that these women come
down to dinner in low dresses, and walk out alone with the men!"--
and, pray heaven, so may they walk, fancy-free in all sorts of
maiden meditations, and suffer no more molestation than that young
lady of whom Moore sings, and who (there must have been a famous
lord-lieutenant in those days) walked through all Ireland, with rich
and rare gems, beauty, and a gold ring on her stick, without meeting
or thinking of harm.

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