The Champs Elysées: From a Sick-Room

IT was a new point of view, if that is in its favor. It was limited, undeniably, yet perhaps one saw and noticed things which would have been overlooked in a wider horizon. The prospect it commanded was an open space, formed by the convergence of five wide streets into the broad avenue of the Champs Elysées, divided at the junction by quincunxes of grass, bordered by trees and lampposts, each containing a fountain, and producing a pleasaunce-like effect of greensward, branches, and spurting, foaming water, very cheerful and agreeable to behold at all seasons. Opposite the sick-room windows, the Avenue d’Antin and Avenue Montaigne, both planted with trees, opened oblique, broken perspectives of tall, pale houses. One of them ends in a confusion of distant gables and dormer windows ; the other is closed by a long, low hill rising above intervening tree-tops, the heights of St. Cloud beyond the Seine. It is the Rond Point des Champs Elysées, the frontier of that extraordinary district, the paradise of Parisian cockneys.

The autumn of 1882 was hopelessly gloomy. For three months the sun must have been shining on other worlds. When a single ray peered through the clouds it was like Béranger’s Dieu des bonnes gens looking out of the window, and saying, —

The genial beam was instantly lost in rivers of rain falling into seas of mud. The Seine rose higher and higher, truncating the piers of the bridges, until the river navigation was stopped ; even the bateaux mouches, those tiny steamboats which dart about on the stream like water-flies, could not pass under the abased arches. The quays, which border the Seine on both sides for miles, through the heart of the town, were lined with river-crafts and bristled with a chevauxde-frise of smoke-stacks. Where the river leaves the streets and skirts the Bois de Boulogne, it swept past gray, leafless woods and inundated meadows, a swollen, livid mass of water, beneath a leaden sky, heaving as if its sullen rage would soon burst its barriers. In the country it had done so already, and the sufferings of the rural, populations were audible in groans of distress and growls of discontent, filling the political air with menacing echoes. Strangers, who had been talking of keeping their hotel rooms, or taking private apartments for the winter, suddenly packed up and traveled southward, and many residents of Paris hastily went off on a visit to Provence or Italy. Paris was visibly deserted. Riding, walking, driving, for pleasure were impossible. The streets were dirty and dismal; even the Champs Elysées were dreary ; nothing was to be seen except muddy carriages, draggled horses, and people in their worst clothes Splashing about under umbrellas.

On the 1st of January, 1883, this reign of Saturn came to an end. The sun broke forth from the clouds to welcome the new year ; the sky was soon blue and fleckless, while the industrious street-cleaners made quick work with the mud, which looked deep and thick enough to form the stratum of a new geological era. The Parisian mud exhibits curious nhenomena. On a fine day the asphalt is as dry and bare as a ten-pin alley ; on a rainy morrow it is as deep in slime as if acres of alluvion had been carted in during the night. It is delightful to watch the light-footed French go through it and hardly spatter themselves. The maid-servants and shop-girls, especially, trip along, keeping their white petticoats and long white aprons spotless. Frenchwomen have always been famous for their dexterity in holding their skirts clear of the ground with one hand. The present fashion of dresses tied back makes this more difficult than when the robe flowed free. They manage it by a little kick with what an American lady once called the hind-leg (by analogy, no doubt, with the fore-arm), adroitly catching the skirt in one hand at the same moment. This manœuvre is practiced with great skill by the ladies who get out of their carriages at the Rond Point to take a little exercise on the wide sidewalk of the Champs Elysées. They are sometimes followed by a footman leading a poodle, sometimes they lead the pet themselves, sometimes they leave him to tread in their footsteps ; any one of which experiments gives a looker-on good opportunities of studying the dispositions of dogs and of ladies who own them. There are a great many fine dogs to be seen in the Champs Elysees during the day, from the Italian greyhound shivering under its blanket to the bloodhound or Danish mastiff with a spiked collar. When there is nobody else to take them walking, they are sent out with a maidservant ; and there is often a total want of sympathy between the girl, in her neat frilled cap, and the small, scuffling Skye terrier, racing before her at a pace with which she cannot keep up, or the huge quadruped, nearly as big as a horse, pulling and tugging her contrariwise to her intentions by the chain with which she is supposed to be holding him. Fortunately, the large dogs are generally amenable to authority or reason ; and if the situation becomes too tense between the bonne and the lap-dog she puts an end to it by picking him up in her arms, whence he yelps and squeaks in a way to justity the interference of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Society,— if such an association exist in Paris, which the treatment of the horses discredits. The majority of cab-drivers, and even of private coachmen, do not know how to drive, and lash their beasts unmercifully, besides jerking the curb to make them turn, back, halt, or go on. They also strike them when they wish them to stop or stand still. The lash may not be more abused in Paris than in London, and loading animals to the top of their strength and driving them at the top of their speed is as bad in one country as in the other. But in London, at least at the West End, there are fewer underfed horses and donkeys than in Paris, where they are often mere skeletons, scarcely able to stand; then the whip falls at every step, to stimulate the flagging beast, in a way that makes human nerves wince. It is disgraceful to Paris that, except in private carriages and the wagons of certain establishments, such as the great dry-goods shops, it is uncommon to see a fresh, well-fed horse. The overloading is distressing and disgraceful, too, when the solitary poor nag of an open cab, or, still worse, of a smart, showy private equipage, has three grown people on the back seat, two on the front, and a huge coachman on the box. The size of public coachmen in Paris is noteworthy: many of them must weigh between two and three hundred pounds, or, as the English say, over fifteen stone, and are as red and surly-faced as London ’bus-drivers. Can this be a result of Anglomania on the French turf ? If there is cruelty in some forms, however, there is little brutality, in proof of which it is unusual to see a French horse or donkey afraid to let its head be touched, or shrinking from the approach of a hand. The beasts and their drivers are on good terms, and it is more common to hear a Frenchman address them as “ my heart ” or “ my cabbage ” than with oaths. The charge of overloading cannot be brought against omnibuses or tramway cars. The rule of showing a sign marked “ Full” when the vehicle contains its complement, protects both horses and passengers from the injustice which is hourly inflicted upon them in this country. There is sense and humanity, moreover, in the general practice of driving horses without blinkers and in the disuse of the check-rein, which is almost obsolete.

The foreigner, looking down upon the Champs Elysées from December until July, discovers that the Parisians with pretensions to elegance takes most pride in his stable. It is too often a misplaced pride, what the French call an unhappy passion. It is not rare to see them with a light hand for a horse’s mouth, and managing the curb nicely ; but in the saddle few of them attain more than a bad eminence, having neither by nature nor acquirement the firm, easy seat of the true horseman. Their best riders are the cavalry officers. There are women to be seen in the Champs Elysées and Bois who are better equestrians than any of the civilians ; but it is doubtful whether these are English or French women, and their social status is still more doubtful than their nationality. The Frenchman is more at home on the coach-box than in the saddle; some of those who make a pursuit of driving do it very well, and with a great deal of style. Every fine morning dozens of breaks, with pairs or four-in-hands, pass the Rond Point, driven by a trainer or coachman, sometimes by the master; exercising the horses in that peculiar gait which is the great desideratum of the amateur whip. It is a prancing, plunging action of the fore feet, like a canter, contrary to American notions of the square trot, and different from English high-stepping. But on getting over one’s first contempt at the circus-chariot advance of these curveting spans, one learns to admit that it is a dashing, showy gait, well suited to the dog-cart or mail phaeton of a lord of the turf, or to the barouche of a pretty woman. Races are among the favorite and most frequent amusements during the gay season. From New Year until midsummer, steeple - chases and every other form of the diversion are given at Pussy, Auteuil, Longchamps, which are on the outskirts of the town, and at Vincennes, Chantilly, Fontainebleau, and other places, an hour away by rail, announced by placards among the opera and play bills and similar advertisements of the week’s pleasures. Several clubs have annual races in the rotunda of the Palais de l’Industrie; the military ones are in high favor with the world of fashion. At Easter huge advertisements and flags floating across the Avenue Montaigne proclaim that horses and riders are scattering the tan and clearing the hurdles under the eyes of fair Parisians in spring toilets, on ground which a month later will be transformed into a garden, where heterogeneous thousands of Salon-goers will be staring at the statuary of the great art exhibition.

But these are the observations of springtime, for the racing season does not fairly begin until after Lent, and I was in my midwinter recollections.

The 1st of January brought not only sunshine, but excitement. Gambetta’s disappearance from before the footlights with the expiring year was startling, yet so consistent with the part he had acted upon the world’s stage that the poor player might have been well content with his exit, if he had not died in torture. His death, like most public shocks, sobered the populace, and produced a momentary calm. The distressing suicide of the Austrian ambassador, two days before, was forgotten; the sudden death of General Chanzy, a gallant and prominent man, a few days later, was overlooked in the engrossing interest which lasted until the funeral procession of the demagogue had passed out of Paris. Soldiers, bands of citizens, and hecatombs of flowers have become unmeaning in the convoy of a dead politician, but it was a new thing to see almost the whole population of a great capital following the body of one man. The people of Paris accompanied the train in a concourse which filled the streets solidly from wall to wall, flowing like a river, impossible to stem. The multitude was innumerable ; large portions of the city must have been deserted ; it seemed as if all the inhabitants were out-of-doors. It was an extraordinary spectacle. They were quiet and orderly, making no violent demonstrations of any sort, but passing, passing, passing, as if there were no end to them. As the day wore on they surged in great waves of humanity over the Faubourg St. Honoré, submerging the quarter ; then they gradually spread and subsided, like the ebbing tide.

The next day the nurses and children were back on their usual beat. The Champs Elysées is one of the public playgrounds of the well-to-do Parisian children, and is almost given up to them at certain hours of the day. The nursery-maids are the most conspicuous figures in the show, with their white caps wreathed with bows of ribbon ending in two broad streamers hanging almost to their heels, and a long round cloak, often an entire costume, of the same color as the cap ribbons. The children are beautifully dressed, like so many little princes and princesses by Vandyke and Velasquez, or small aristocrats of the later times of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence. There is as much regard paid to adapting their dress to their age as if they were men and women. The excess of fancy and finery is for the youngest; the dress grows simpler as the child grows older, until boys about to escape from knickerbockers (which are worn much later here than in England, or with us) are as soberly clad as little sportsmen, save for their bright stockings and cravats, while the costume of young girls who are not yet young ladies is picturesquely severe. The majority of the children under seven years old wear white, often in fulfillment of a vow to the Virgin on the mother’s part. It cannot be convenient to clothe suitably a sturdy boy, who has cast off petticoats, under this restriction, but blue, the color dedicated to the Madonna, can be used. There is a children’s clothing establishment, called “ A l’enfant voué au bleu et au blanc,” after the enticing French custom of giving names to shops, — the resort of Roman Catholic mothers in this difficulty. French children have been reproached with a lack of bloom and spirits, but I suspect that this originated with those systematic detractors of the French and all other foreign nations, the Fnglish. After watching the endless “ march past ” of the children on the Champs Elysées, day after day, for half a year, I am convinced that no civilized country can muster a liner host. Their forms are as chubby, their cheeks as rosy, their eyes as bright, their teeth as pearly, their locks as thick and glossy, as those of any children I have ever seen ; in this last respect they excel their little island neighbors. The calves of their legs may not always be so robust as the little Britons’, but they frisk and caper upon them to such a degree that they must wear off the superfluous flesh. Their spirits are inexhaustible; they seem filled with quicksilver to the tips of their fingers and toes. They never look tired, or cross, or dirty; never quarrelsome, never naughty. They are captivating little creatures, neither shy nor bold, caressing and vivacious, restrained in their romps only by obedience and precocious politeness, —the only precocity I can detect in them. They are graceful and gesticulating ; their play is like a perpetual liliputian pantomime or ballet.

Besides these well dressed and tended little mortals there are the children of the middle and poorer classes, of whom an irruption occurs every day before noon. The sidewalk is suddenly invaded by scores of urchins between eight and twelve years old, fresh, clean, and tidy, most of them wearing black alpaca blouses, with broad white linen collars and leather belts, which give them a clerical aspect, and carrying their books, not in satchels, but in black portfolios called serviettes, such as lawyers use for their papers. More than half these children have no head-covering, — a French custom not confined to children nor to the male sex ; economical in a way, of course, but which must surely cost most people dear, at some time or other, in earache, toothache, and neuralgia of the head with its myriad tortures. The little fellows are not troubled by them yet, and come bounding and babbling along the streets, hand in hand, or with arms thrown round each other’s shoulders ; for French children are demonstrative, and not self-conscious. They are very kind to their juniors. I never saw the hapless and hated “tag-tail,” panting and blubbering after his stronger, fleeter elders, kicked and cuffed out of the way when they cannot dodge him; there was always a bigger boy to take the small boy by the hand, and run with him in the wake of the party. I saw squabbles occasionally, but seldom blows ; only once or twice a real fight. Their altercations are very dramatic. I remember two little fellows in blouses, in great wrath, to judge by their gestures. At the climax one of them raised his hand, but not to strike; he waved it with ineffable scorn, ejaculating, “ R-r-republicain !” to which the other retorted, with a motion of utter defiance, “ Aristoc-r-r-rat ! ” and each turned on his heel. They are twitted with this absence of pugnacity by our little Anglo-Saxon bullies, who set it down to want of pluck ; but people who settle the slightest difficulty with sword or pistol cannot be supposed to lack personal courage. Mere love of danger, however, has not the same attraction for French children as for our own : they are not to be seen indulging in pranks which make older people’s hearts stand still, such as hanging by their hands to the edge of a roof, or trying how near they can come to being run over in the street. But besides love of danger, love of disobedience has a great deal to do with children’s enjoyment of perilous sport, and the French child is obviously more submissive and better trained than ours.

By three o’clock in the afternoon, the small fry have given place to grownup loungers of every class, who repair to the Champs Elysées every day, from the middle of the afternoon until sunset, to look at each other and the world that drives to and from the Bois de Boulogne. It is a curious contrast to the similar daily parade in Hyde Park. To begin with the side scenes, instead of fine English trees and stretches of turf and flower-beds, here, on each side the paved street, there are young plantations in a nondescript region of asphalt, grass-plats, cake stalls, parterres, gravel-walks, shrubbery, puppet-shows, fountains, merry - go - rounds, eatinghouses. The procession is not less multifarious. The exclusion of drays, carts, cabs, and other public conveyances from Hyde Park results in an assemblage of handsome, or at any rate presentable, equipages, with that stamp of private so characteristic of England. Here there are huge omnibuses, with an imposing front of three horses abreast, constructed on the model of an excursion steamboat, fog-horn and all, minus the smokestack ; there are little yellow cabs, and the black, shiny parcels-delivery wagons of the Bon Marché, Louvre, and other great shops, built like prison-vans, but driven by men in smart livery, and drawn by pairs of magnificent horses, perfectly groomed. Here are curious vehicles like small omnibuses without a knife-board, which carry schoolboys to and from the different lycées and colléges, which correspond to our public schools; each apparently has its own, which passes twice a day with its freight of youngsters in cap and uniform, carrying serviettes, like a company of cadets turned lawyers all at once. In Hyde Park people on horseback keep to Rotten Row ; here riders mix with the throng on wheels, and as this is the highroad to the Bois de Boulogne horse men and women go by in squads, and groups of children on smaller steeds. The Hippodrome, by way of advertisement, sends out half a dozen pairs of diminutive ponies, — cream-colored, black, chestnut, gray, white, and piebald, — ridden by tiny boys, with tricolor streamers to their hats, and otherwise bedizened, who thread their way in and out among the thundering rush of heavy vehicles and horses, which could swallow them at a gulp, chatting as coolly as if they had the street to themselves. Bicycles skim by, and every sort of handcart adds to the confusion. There are quantities of the latter, pushed or pulled by the human beast of burden, who is cheaper, even, than the donkey; some of them contain the apparatus of industries which do not exist with us, or exist in a form which cannot be carted about the street. Among the most peculiar of these are the copper bath-tub and heating arrangements for taking un grand bain à domicile, brightly burnished, and looking like a machine-room in miniature. These are seen so often as to impugn the accuracy of the classification which sets down the French among non-washing nations. Bathing establishments for people of all classes are to be found in every neighborhood, almost in every street, of Paris, and swimming baths, cheap or costly, along the quays, in refutation of the charge. It is to be doubted whether such English people as cannot count a bath-tub among their household necessaries ever indulge in the luxury of hiring one.

Although spring and autumn are the times of year when the daily procession to the Bois is at its height, every fine Sunday brings forth an interminable parade, defiling past the Rond Point from early in the afternoon until dark. Thousands of carriages, of every shape and size, drive by : some very handsome, others very shabby, with handsome or shabby horses and occupants. The most remarkable thing about the latter is the way in which the women are painted : some of them look as if they were standing over a fire, some as if their eyes were lolling out of their head ; some of them have painted out the semblance of humanity, and are mere monsters. The crowd never reaches that hopeless climax of cross-purposes which constantly occurs at Hyde Park Corner during the London season; but on every fair afternoon there is such an agglomeration of vehicles and animals going at full speed in all directions that it is alarming to see anybody attempt to cross the street on foot. Yet the feat is safely performed every minute, and another, which I could no more understand than a conjuring trick,— that of piloting four frisky goats harnessed to a child’s barouche through the vortex. It was done without blows or tugs, — a lesson to cab-drivers and draymen, if they would profit by it.

It was long a subject of speculation to me why an ordinary Parisian crowd should be so much more picturesque and spectacular than an English or American one. There is, it is true, much greater variety of attire; for although a French peasant’s costume is as seldom seen in the Champs Elysées as a Greek’s, there are the white caps and aprons of the maid-servants and men-cooks, the red trousers of the soldiers, the black cassocks of the priests, the veils and wimples of nuns, the uniform frocks of girls’ charity-schools, — light blue, dark blue, lilac, violet, gray, brown, — the white suits of some artisans, the blue smocks of others; the long, dark, rough cloak, with a pointed hood of mediæval pattern, worn by men of all classes in wet weather ; the frequency of bare heads, the general independence in dress of a community where nobody feels obliged to appear like anybody else except the members of an organization. I once saw a group of workmen fit to be painted by Rembrandt: three of them were habited in brown velveteen, with gray slouch hats; the other wore a crimson jacket, dull blue trousers, and a brown cap. But the Parisians’ briskness of movement, their gestures, changes of countenance, their lively bearing and expressive physiognomies, add as much to the animation and interest of their street scenes as dissimilarity of dress. There is a perpetual ripple, sparkle, eddy, on the surface of their crowd.

Yet this was not the laughter-loving multitude, the gay, thoughtless throng, of half a century or even twenty years ago. These people have felt the blows of war, grinding want, the burden of political responsibility. Their city has lost much of the brilliancy and elegance of which it boasted under the Second Empire, and has a shabby, second-hand air; even in the showiest streets, the equipages, shops, and purchasers look cheap, wholesale, made for the million. The men and women of the workingclasses are careworn and toilworn ; there are constant strikes among tradesmen and workmen, and rumors of communistic disturbance.

Notwithstanding the driving to the Bois and a general impression that all the world was brought abroad on Sunday, it was not until February, the jours gras, the three days before Ash Wednesday, that I saw anything like the old gayety. A Parisian carnival is a spiritless, commonplace affair to any one who is familiar with Italy. A few noisy fellows in false noses, a woman in a grotesque mask and a man’s fancy dress, or a man in woman’s clothes, are all that represent the picturesque travesties and disguises, the merry antics, of the Roman Corso. But putting those out of mind, the Champs Elysées at Shrovetide was a popular holiday, such as Americans must go to Europe to witness. The weather was beautiful; and winter weather in Paris, when it is fine, is particularly charming, with the cheerful, tender loveliness of our sweetest early April days. There were such myriads of people abroad that it seemed as if the town had turned itself inside out. The cafés which line the Rue Montaigne and Avenue Matignon, where they meet in an apex on the Rond Point, were crowded from morning till night, and the pavement before the doors filled with little tables, at which sat family parties or friends, eating, drinking, smoking, laughing, and chatting, bundled in furs and warm wraps. Numbers of very young children were in costume: small Harlequins, Columbines, officers and courtiers of Louis XIV.’s time, ran in and out among men and women in every-day dress.

I saw one little fellow, in his ordinary clothes and the black half mask which the French call a loup, his rosy mouth and chin peeping out below the satin frill like a Cupid on a dinner card, strut along, holding his mother’s hand, evidently persuaded that he was entirely disguised. There was a pervading lightheartedness, the atmosphere or which penetrated even the sick-room.

A revival of this jollity occurred at the mi-carême, or mid-Lent holiday, which seemed to be more of a frolic and in the spirit of the Italian festival. The streets were again thronged, and the pavement before the cafes blocked with the little tables and their feasters ; but the feature of the day was the masquerading of the lower orders, which was not to be seen at its height in the Champs Elysées. Stragglers from other quarters appeared occasionally among the sober citizens, and large vans, with streamers and garlands, filled with young men and girls in fancy dress, dashed recklessly into the Rond Point from time to time. Some of the trades’ guilds had wains decorated with flags and flowers, and drawn by four and six horses, filled with revelers ; now and then the inborn French taste was shown in an arrangement which made these vulgar triumphal cars strikingly artistic objects, worthy of a Florentine procession in the sixteenth century. The fête belongs to the boulevards and their population. The bourgeoisie apparently took no part in it beyond sipping ices and coffee on the sidewalks; the world of fashion kept in-doors all day, but celebrated the evening by an explosion of balls.

With all the variety, life, and interest of the Champs Elysées during the day, after dark it becomes a very scene of enchantment. At nightfall a gauzy vapor gradually overspreads the earth and fills the air, veiling every outline, until nothing remains but a sense of space; through this flash innumerable triple jets of gas, in rows, in circles, in long double and quadruple lines, leading far away through miles of illuminated mist, until they meet in the indefinite distance, reflected on the wet asphalt by linear dashes of light, like a palisade of fire. Through these glimmering avenues, and through intervals of dimness, glide countless lights : some swift as meteors, some slow as glowworms, white, yellow, red, — were there other colors ? — higher or lower, but always in the air, flitting, following, darting, chasing, like thousands of will-o’-the-wisps. The imagination ranges with delight among the beautiful, mysterious suggestions of the phantasmagoria. “ A firefly meadow,” said Mr. J. R. Lowell, looking down from the window. Yes and no, for the lights do not twinkle; it is more like New York bay at night from the heights of Staten Island; nor yet that, altogether, because the spectator is so much nearer this scene. It is most like some of Martin’s illustrations of Milton, without the terror: they are theatrical, and so is this fantastic, fairy transformation of the Champs Elysées on a rainy day to an unpeopled world of wonder on a rainy night.

There are few places susceptible of so many beautiful transformations. The first snowstorm of 1883 was during the night of the 7th of March. The inhabitants of the Champs Elysées woke to find their lively quarter a silent expanse of untrodden snow, under a sky like oxidized silver ; long, broad streets of fleecy white without a footprint, between trees delicately penciled against the whiteness, and blossoming with feathery sprays and powdery tufts. It was a lovely but dreary sight; everybody kept in-doors. Towards evening an exquisite pink line faintly irradiated the atmosphere, throwing pale lilac shadows here and there on the blank surfaces ; it was so faint and evanescent that each person might imagine his the only eyes to see it.

The cold was the last pinch needed to rouse the ire of the malcontents, who had been nursing their wrath all winter, fomented by Bonapartists, the clerical party, communist leaders, and all enemies of the government. Ever since I saw the police tearing down Prince Napoleon’s foolish manifesto, six or seven weeks earlier, there had been a perceptible growth of murmuring and grumbling among the working classes. My French visitors if of the Legitimist party, and my American ones who were converts to Roman Catholicism (whose sympathies are more anti-republican than a French monarchist’s), were full of forebodings ; to listen to them, one would have supposed that the government could not last another half hour. I have no doubt that with those in whom the wish was father to the thought originated the reports of imminent anarchy which filled French, English, and American newspapers at that time. On the evening of the 8th of March, the snowy lay, President Grévy gave a ball at the little palace of the Elysée, which has changed names so often that I forget its present official appellation. Some of the beauties signalized themselves by appearing in the fashions of the Directory, and the public coachmen, taking advantage of another slight snowfall, refused to take home the guests they had brought without such an extortionate augmentation of fare that many ladies indignantly walked home in satin slippers, by the light of dawn. A few hours later the émeute broke out on the other side of the river. A large body, said to be workmen out of employment, marched to the Elysée with a petition for work. Being ordered to depart, they straggled up the Champs Elysées to the Rond Point, shouting a little, and I saw the police disperse them without difficulty, the crowd breaking into groups and scattering in different directions. On the other side of the river there was more disturbance, and two or three persons imprudently driving through that quarter in private carriages had the windows broken. The mob there was dispersed by a body of cavalry, who rode through them at a trot, and the only blood shed was from the noses of a few pugnacious blackguards of opposite political opinions. There was some stir about the Elysée that afternoon, a strong police force protecting the precinct, and knots of common men hanging on their skirts, a cavalry guard patrolling the street, and an officer trotting round and round a flagstaff in the Champs Elysées, as if he were at riding-school.

This was the beginning and end of the new reign of terror, which had been predicted for months. For some weeks each succeeding Sunday was regularly announced in advance as the date of the real revolution ; but March went by, and took winter away with it, and the faint symptoms of uprising melted with the icicles and vanished before the April sun.

Easter Monday was another popular holiday. As to the day before, there was no more sign of observance of it, outside the churches, than of any other Sunday in the calendar; that is, there was none beyond the shops being shut in the afternoon, as they are in London on Saturday. The Sabbathlessness of Paris strikes a stranger oddly and painfully ; the ear and brain wait for the recurring seventh-day lull in the noises of the week, but it does not come. The rattle of business-carts and rumble of drays, the cries and calls of itinerant venders, the hammering and pounding of masons and carpenters, go on without intermission ; the one voice which is unheard is the sound of church-bells. I tried to get a notion of the system and statistics of attendance on public worship and cessation of labor on Sunday in Paris, but could come to no conclusion as to whether there is a general custom in either, or not. There are so many services between six in the morning and one o’clock, with vespers and the benediction later in the afternoon, that the whole working population might attend them by detachments without causing any apparent pause in its toil. There was one tribute to the day which could be noticed even from an upper window, — a greater display of clean blouses ; but whether this was in recognition of its sacred or its festive character I cannot say.

With spring weather the wedding processions, which had been rare through the winter, began again — those funereal lines of hired carriages, only to be distinguished from the pomp of obsequies by driving at a better pace, and showing glimpses of white instead of black through the windows. I never saw a funeral in the Champs Elysées ; the great cemeteries lie in other directions, so the gay avenue is seldom sobered for a moment by the sight of a hearse and mourners. As the favorite goal of a bridal drive is the Bois, where the party breakfasts at a restaurant and then takes the traditional walk, two by two following the happy pair, bridal parties, on the contrary, were constantly passing the Rond Point on Wednesday and Saturday, the days consecrated to marriage in Paris ; whether by civil or religious authority, or only by custom, I do not know. Of course these promenades are a middle-class fashion : in what is called “society” it is not usual even to make wedding journeys. I had an amusing glimpse of the manners of the average citizen on these occasions. One day, on going into the little dining-room of my hotel for luncheon, I found a wedding-party at the central table, — a huge bunch of orange flowers in the middle, champagne corks popping, live men, of different ages, in dress-coats and white cravats, two ladies in bonnets and one in white satin and a veil, — beginning an elaborate breakfast. The bride was pale, but rather pretty and attractive, poor girl; the bridegroom plain and insignificant looking. They scarcely glanced at each other, and to all appearance were hardly acquaintances. The other guests were the parents of this couple, an old family friend, and a younger brother of the bride’s. The elderly men very soon had taken too much champagne ; they all became talkative, and one of them, the friend, very noisy and declamatory. Nothing had been settled beforehand, and they loudly debated whether they should take the regulation drive in the Bois or to the Jardin des Plantes, and whether they should go in carriages or in a small omnibus, which would hold them all; also, what direction to choose for the wedding journey. The unhappy pair wished to go to Nice or Cannes ; but they were very silent, and the dictatorial friend opposed it vehemently.

“ As to wedding trips, I know all about them, for I have made two. Don’t set out on a long journey, to arrive at an out-of-the-way place, where you will find a wretched hotel and nothing to see but the fields, which are wet at this season. Go to R——. You need not start until half past nine P. M. ; you will be sure to get a railway carriage to yourselves ; you have a short trip ; you find an excellent hotel, — especially not too dear, — charming promenades, a superb theatre ; and you come back the day after to-morrow and dine with me.”

“ But ” — began one of the fathers.

“ Allow me to speak, monsieur,” resumed the friend authoritatively. “The next day you are back at your business. Let us send for an omnibus, which will take the luggage, too, and drive to the Jardin des Plantes : there you have delightful walks, the animals to visit” —

“ If ” —interposed the bride’s mother.

“ Allow me to speak, madame,” said the friend, with deference, but decision, — “ and you are close to the railway station. You take the half past nine P. M. train for R——. You will be sure to get a carriage to yourselves ; you have a short trip ; you find an excellent hotel, — especially not too dear ” —

“Still” —demurred the other father.

“ Allow me to speak, monsieur ” — this very imperiously — “ charming promenades, a superb theatre ” — and da capo al fine.

Everybody now thought his turn had come, and tried to put in a word ; the friend stopped them short with, “ Allow me to speak; I know all about wedding journeys,” etc. I stayed as long as decency would permit, pretending to eat my breakfast at a side-table; as I left the room, he was repeating “ Surtout pas trop cher ” for the third time, and the others were passing the railroad guide round the table.

The want of consideration for women’s feelings and wishes on occasions like this, when with us they would be paramount, is singularly at variance with the importance given to the demands and opinions of their sex in so many circumstances and conditions of life in France. There is no classifying the contradictions and inconsistencies which an American observes among the French on this head. Not to go further than I could see from my window, there is an irreconcilable variance between the universal interest which Frenchmen show for the other sex by their impartial staring and their indifference to opportunities, which we should consider obligations, of rendering slight services even to the young, pretty, and elegant. A true Frenchman would no more pass a woman without looking at her than certain superstitious housekeepers would “ see a pin and let it lay.” Yet apparently it is not according to his code of etiquette to help a woman out of an omnibus, to hail a cab which she is signaling in vain, or to pick up her handkerchief if she drops it. The absence of these minor gallantries is sometimes explained by Americans and English as a result of masculine selfishness, which they profess to find more largely developed in the Gallic race than in themselves; but even admitting the imputation, I cannot believe that it accounts for this want of alacrity in a nation of men whose first preoccupation is women. I am inclined to think that it arises from the greater quickness of Frenchwomen, who are more alert to help themselves than their Anglo-Saxon sisters, and possibly from a well-founded prejudice on the former’s part against being accosted by knights-errant of the sidewalk. The boulevards are the scene of adventures of this sort; the mixed throng in the Champs Elysées amuse themselves as respectably as the select fewer who frequent Beacon Street, Fifth Avenue, or the upper end of Walnut Street in Philadelphia.

As spring advances the number of loungers increases. Not a seat is empty among the chairs which border the pavements and the benches on the inner edge for two miles, and the hours of lounging lengthen with the lengthening afternoon ; people sit at the tables before the cafés all day and late into the night. Through the open windows come the sounds of the street: the Arcadian piping of Basque peasants, who pass in the morning with a little drove of she asses or goats, to be milked before the houses where invalids are waiting for the warm beverage ; the melancholy, plangent, rebellious braying of the donkey, who brings green stuff to the Cirque d’Eté every morning; the constant, conversational neighing of the omnibus-horses, which recalls the words of the prophet Jeremiah (v. 8) ; at quieter instants, the plash of the fountains ; the incessant roll of wheels and thud of hoofs, so deadened by the smooth asphalt that they lull and soothe the nerves ; that subdued reverberation composed of multitudinous voices and footsteps; the would-be gay song of the poor young fellows who have just been drawn for military service, and go about for a day or two with their numbers and tricolor cockades in their hats; the lively bugle-notes of the amateur guards of the four-in-hands, which are constantly driving to and from the races. A few afternoons before the great day of the Grand Prix they parade in force along the Champs Elysées and through the Bois, —a pretty show, the horses in shining condition, the coachtops covered with fine ladies and gentlemen in holiday humor; the proudest and happiest woman of them all she who is perched on the post of honor, dressed to perfection, beside the impassive gentleman who wields the longlashed whip. Whiffs of fragrance stir the air from flower - stalls and handcarts of plants in bloom. The birds sing as if they were in the woods, among the branches of the horse-chestnuts in the five converging avenues, which have come into the densest leaf and flower, and look from above like broad rivers of dark green foliage foaming with blossoms. The tenant of the sick-room sees health beckoning from without, and goes down to take part in the life and movement and enjoyment of the Rond Point.