Chapter 12
We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart
of France. What a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of
bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their
grasses trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped and measured and
their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners. Surely the
long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the beautiful landscape like
the squares of a checkerboard are set with line and plummet, and their uniform
height determined with a spirit level. Surely the straight, smooth, pure white
turnpikes are jack-planed and sandpapered every day. How else are these
marvels of symmetry, cleanliness, and order attained? It is wonderful. There
are no unsightly stone walls and never a fence of any kind. There is no dirt,
no decay, no rubbish anywhere--nothing that even hints at untidiness--nothing
that ever suggests neglect. All is orderly and beautiful--everything is
charming to the eye.
We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between its grassy banks; of
cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrubbery; of quaint old red-tiled villages
with mossy medieval cathedrals looming out of their midst; of wooded hills with
ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles projecting above the foliage;
such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us, such visions of fabled fairyland!
We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of:
--thy cornfields green, and sunny vines,
O pleasant land of France!
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And it is a pleasant land. No word describes it so felicitously as that
one. They say there is no word for "home" in the French language. Well,
considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive aspect,
they ought to manage to get along without the word. Let us not waste too much
pity on "homeless" France. I have observed that Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly
give up the idea of going back to France some time or other. I am not
surprised at it now.
We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, though. We took
first-class passage, not because we wished to attract attention by doing a
thing which is uncommon in Europe but because we could make our journey quicker
by so doing. It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any country. It is
too tedious. Stagecoaching is infinitely more delightful. Once I crossed the
plains and deserts and mountains of the West in a stagecoach, from the Missouri
line to California, and since then all my pleasure trips must be measured to
that rare holiday frolic. Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and
clatter, by night and by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of
interest! The first seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet
greener and softer and smoother than any sea and figured with designs fitted to
its magnitude--the shadows of the clouds. Here were no scenes but summer
scenes, and no disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on the
mail sacks in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of peace--what
other, where all was repose and contentment? In cool mornings, before the sun
was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city toiling and moiling to perch in
the foretop with the driver and see the six mustangs scamper under the sharp
snapping of the whip that never touched them; to scan the blue distances of a
world that knew no lords but us; to cleave the wind with uncovered head and
feel the sluggish pulses rousing to the spirit of a speed that pretended to the
resistless rush of a typhoon! Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes;
of limitless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of
pinnacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the
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eternal rocks
and splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy altitudes
among fog-wreathed peaks and never-melting snows, where thunders and lightnings
and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and the storm clouds above swung
their shredded banners in our very faces! But I forgot. I am in elegant France
now, and not scurrying through the great South Pass and the Wind River
Mountains, among antelopes and buffaloes and painted Indians on the warpath.
It is not meet that I should make too disparaging comparisons between humdrum
travel on a railway and that royal summer flight across a continent in a
stagecoach. I meant in the beginning to say that railway journeying is tedious
and tiresome, and so it is--though at the time I was thinking particularly of a
dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New York and St. Louis. Of course our
trip through France was not really tedious because all its scenes and
experiences were new and strange; but as Dan says, it had its
"discrepancies."
The cars are built in compartments that hold eight persons each. Each
compartment is partially subdivided, and so there are two tolerably distinct
parties of four in it. Four face the other four. The seats and backs are
thickly padded and cushioned and are very comfortable; you can smoke if you
wish; there are no bothersome peddlers; you are saved the infliction of a
multitude of disagreeable fellow passengers. So far, so well. But then the
conductor locks you in when the train starts; there is no water to drink in the
car; there is no heating apparatus for night travel; if a drunken rowdy should
get in, you could not remove a matter of twenty seats from him or enter another
car; but above all, if you are worn out and must sleep, you must sit up and do
it in naps, with cramped legs and in a torturing misery that leaves you
withered and lifeless the next day--for behold they have not that culmination
of all charity and human kindness, a sleeping car, in all France. I prefer the
American system. It has not so many grievous "discrepancies."
In France, all is clockwork, all is order. They make no
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mistakes. Every third
man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a brakeman,
he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions with tireless
politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and ready to go and put
you into it to make sure that you shall not go astray. You cannot pass into
the waiting room of the depot till you have secured your ticket, and you cannot
pass from its only exit till the train is at its threshold to receive you.
Once on board, the train will not start till your ticket has been
examined--till every passenger's ticket has been inspected. This is chiefly
for your own good. If by any possibility you have managed to take the wrong
train, you will be handed over to a polite official who will take you whither
you belong and bestow you with many an affable bow. Your ticket will be
inspected every now and then along the route, and when it is time to change
cars you will know it. You are in the hands of officials who zealously study
your welfare and your interest, instead of turning their talents to the
invention of new methods of discommoding and snubbing you, as is very often the
main employment of that exceedingly self-satisfied monarch, the railroad
conductor of America.
But the happiest regulation in French railway government
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is--thirty minutes to
dinner! No five-minute boltings of flabby rolls, muddy coffee, questionable
eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception and execution are a dark and
bloody mystery to all save the cook that created them! No, we sat calmly
down--it was in old Dijon, which is so easy to spell and so impossible to
pronounce except when you civilize it and call it Demijohn--and poured out rich
Burgundian wines and munched calmly through a long table d'hôte bill of
fare, snail patties, delicious fruits and all, then paid the trifle it cost and
stepped happily aboard the train again, without once cursing the railroad
company. A rare experience and one to be treasured forever.
They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it must
be true. If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads or through
tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level. About every
quarter of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held up a club till the
train went by, to signify that everything was safe ahead. Switches were
changed a mile in advance by pulling a wire rope that passed along the ground
by the rail, from
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station to station. Signals for the day and signals for the
night gave constant and timely notice of the position of switches.
No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France. But why? Because
when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it!* Not hang, maybe, but be
punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make negligence a thing to
be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a day thereafter. "No blame
attached to the officers"--that lying and disaster-breeding verdict so common
to our softhearted juries is seldom rendered in France. If the trouble
occurred in the conductor's department, that officer must suffer if his
subordinate cannot be proven guilty; if in the engineer's department and the
case be similar, the engineer must answer.
The Old Travelers--those delightful parrots who have "been here before" and
know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will
know--tell us these things, and we believe them because they are pleasant
things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of the
*They go on the principle that it is better that one innocent man should suffer than five hundred.
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rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us everywhere.
But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.
We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers;
they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and
know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how
they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of
Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down,
make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan
glory! They will not let you know anything. They sneer at your most
inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of
foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as
the stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish
the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless
ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love
them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for
their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination,
for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!
By Lyons and the Saône (where we saw the lady of Lyons and thought little
of her comeliness), by Villa Franca, Tonnere, venerable Sens, Melun,
Fontainebleau, and scores of other beautiful cities, we swept, always noting
the absence of hog
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wallows, broken fences, cow lots, unpainted houses, and mud,
and always noting, as well, the presence of cleanliness, grace, taste in
adorning and beautifying, even to the disposition of a tree or the turning of a
hedge, the marvel of roads in perfect repair, void of ruts and guiltless of
even an inequality of surface--we bowled along, hour after hour, that brilliant
summer day, and as nightfall approached we entered a wilderness of odorous
flowers and shrubbery, sped through it, and then, excited, delighted, and half
persuaded that we were only the sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in
magnificent Paris!
What excellent order they kept about that vast depot! There was no frantic
crowding and jostling, no shouting and swearing, and no swaggering intrusion of
services by rowdy hackmen. These latter gentry stood outside--stood quietly by
their long line of vehicles and said never a word. A kind of hackman general
seemed to have the whole matter of transportation in his hands. He politely
received the passengers and ushered them to the kind of conveyance they wanted,
and told the driver where to deliver them. There was no "talking back," no
dissatisfaction about overcharging, no grumbling about anything. In a little
while we were speeding through the streets of Paris and delightfully
recognizing certain names and places with which books had long ago made us
familiar. It was like meeting an old friend when we read Rue de Rivoli on
the street corner; we knew the genuine vast palace of the Louvre as well as we
knew its picture; when we passed by the Column of July we needed no one to tell
us what it was or to remind us that on its site once stood the grim Bastille,
that grave of human hopes and happiness, that dismal prison house within whose
dungeons so many young faces put on the wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits
grew humble, so many brave hearts broke.
We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds put into one room,
so that we might be together, and then we went out to a restaurant, just after
lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering dinner. It was a
pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food so well cooked,
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the
waiters so polite, and the coming and departing company so moustached, so
frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonderfully Frenchy! All the surroundings
were gay and enlivening. Two hundred people sat at little tables on the
sidewalk, sipping wine and coffee; the streets were thronged with light
vehicles and with joyous pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and
action all about us, and a conflagration of gaslight everywhere!
After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might see
without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered through the brilliant streets
and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and jewelry shops.
Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending
Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of
their native language, and while they writhed we impaled them, we peppered
them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of the articles marked
"gold" and some labeled "imitation." We wondered at this extravagance of
honesty and inquired into the matter. We were informed that inasmuch as most
people are not able to tell false gold from the genuine article, the government
compels jewelers to have their gold work assayed and stamped officially
according to its fineness and their imitation work duly labeled with the sign
of its falsity. They told us the jewelers would not dare to violate this law,
and that whatever a stranger bought in one of their stores might be depended
upon as being strictly what it was represented to be. Verily, a wonderful land
is France!
Then we hunted for a barbershop. From earliest infancy it had been a cherished
ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial barbershop in Paris. I
wished to recline at full length in a cushioned invalid chair, with pictures
about me and sumptuous furniture; with frescoed walls and gilded arches above
me and vistas of Corinthian columns stretching far before me; with perfumes of
Araby to intoxicate my senses and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to
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sleep. At the end of an hour I would wake up regretfully and find
my face as smooth and as soft as an infant's. Departing, I would lift my hands
above that barber's head and say, "Heaven bless you, my son!"
So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but never a barbershop
could we see. We saw only wigmaking establishments, with shocks of dead and
repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen brigands who stared out
from glass boxes upon the passerby with their stony eyes and scared him with
the ghostly white of their countenances. We shunned these signs for a time,
but finally we concluded that the wigmakers must of necessity be the barbers as
well, since we could find no single legitimate representative of the
fraternity. We entered and asked, and found that it was even so.
I said I wanted to be shaved. The barber inquired where my room was. I said
never mind where my room was, I wanted to be shaved--there, on the spot. The
doctor said he would be shaved also. Then there was an excitement among those
two barbers! There was a wild consultation, and afterwards a hurrying to and
fro and a feverish gathering up of razors from obscure places and a ransacking
for soap. Next they took us into a little mean, shabby back room; they got two
ordinary sitting-room chairs and placed us in them with our coats on. My old,
old dream of bliss vanished into thin air!
I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn. One of the wigmaking villains
lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by plastering a mass of
suds into my mouth. I expelled the nasty stuff with a strong English expletive
and said, "Foreigner, beware!" Then this outlaw strapped his razor on his boot,
hovered over me ominously for six fearful seconds, and then swooped down upon
me like the genius of destruction. The first rake of his razor loosened the
very hide from my face and lifted me out of the chair. I stormed and raved,
and the other boys enjoyed it. Their beards are not strong and thick. Let us
draw the curtain over this harrowing scene.
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Suffice it that I submitted and
went through with the cruel infliction of a shave by a French barber; tears of
exquisite agony coursed down my cheeks now and then, but I survived. Then the
incipient assassin held a basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents
over my face, and into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean
pretense of washing away the soap and blood. He dried my features with a towel
and was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused. I said, with
withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned--I declined to be
scalped.
I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never, never,
never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barbershops anymore. The truth is,
as I believe I have since found out, that they have no barbershops worthy of
the name in Paris--and no barbers, either, for that matter. The impostor who
does duty as a barber brings his pans and
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napkins and implements of torture to
your residence and deliberately skins you in your private apartments. Ah, I
have suffered, suffered, suffered, here in Paris, but never mind--the time is
coming when I shall have a dark and bloody revenge. Someday a Parisian barber
will come to my room to skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never
be heard of more.
At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to
billiards. Joy! We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that were
not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than a brick
pavement--one of those wretched old things with dead cushions, and with patches
in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made the balls describe the
most astonishing and unsuspected angles and perform feats in the way of
unlooked-for and almost impossible "scratches" that were perfectly bewildering.
We had played at Gibraltar with balls the size of a walnut on a table like a
public square and in both instances we achieved far more aggravation than
amusement. We expected to fare better here, but we were mistaken. The
cushions were a good deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion
of always stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way
of caroms. The cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so crooked
that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly
put the "English" on the wrong side of the hall. Dan was to mark while the
doctor and I played. At the end of an hour neither of us had made a count, and
so Dan was tired of keeping tally with nothing to tally, and we were heated and
angry and disgusted. We paid the heavy bill--about six cents--and said we
would call around sometime when we had a week to spend, and finish the game.
We adjourned to one of those pretty cafés and took supper and tested the
wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do, and found them harmless
and unexciting. They might have been exciting, however, if we had chosen to
drink a sufficiency of them.
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To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought our
grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our sumptuous bed to
read and smoke--but alas!
It was pitiful,
In a whole city-full,
Gas we had none.
No gas to read by--nothing but dismal candles. It was a shame. We tried to
map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French "guides to Paris"; we
talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of the wild chaos
of the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to indolent smoking; we gaped
and yawned and stretched--then feebly wondered if we were really and truly in
renowned Paris, and drifted drowsily away into that vast mysterious void which
men call sleep.
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