About Paris - Richard Harding Davis

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With one exception. This was the great distinction of our street, and one of which we were very proud. A poet had lived in his way, and loved in his way, in one of the houses, and had died there. You could read the simple, unromantic record of this in big black letters on a tablet placed evenly between the two windows of the entresol. It gave a distinguished air to that house, and rendered it different from all of the others, as a Legion of Honor on the breast of a French soldier makes him conspicuous amongst his fellows.

      ALFRED DE MUSSET

       né à Paris

       Le 11 Décembre 1810

       est mort

       dans cette maison

       Le 2 Mai 1857

      "THE CONCIERGE OF EACH HOUSE STOOD CONTINUALLY AT THE FRONT DOOR"

      We were all pleased when people stopped and read this inscription. We took it as a tribute to the importance of our street, and we felt a proprietary interest in that tablet and in that house, as though this neighborly association with genius was something to our individual credit.

      We had other distinguished people in our street, but they were very much alive, and their tablets were colored ones drawn by Chéret, and pasted up all over Paris in endless repetition; and though their celebrity may not live as long as has the poet's, while they are living they seem to enjoy life as fully as he did, and to get out of the present all that the present has to give.

      The one in which we all took the most interest lived just across the street from me, and by looking up a little you could see her looking out of her window, with her thick, heavy black hair bound in bandeaux across her forehead, and a great diamond horseshoe pinned at her throat, and with just a touch of white powder showing on her nose and cheeks. She looked as though she should have lived by rights in the Faubourg St.-Germain, and she used to smile down rather kindly upon the street with a haughty, tolerant look, as if it amused her by its simplicity and idleness, and by the quietness, which only the cries of the children or of the hucksters, or the cracking at times of a coachman's whip, ever broke. She looked very well then, but it was in the morning that the street saw her at her best. For it was then that she went out to ride in the Bois in her Whitechapel cart, and as she never awoke in time, apparently, we had the satisfaction of watching the pony and the tiger and cart for an hour or two until she came. It was a brown basket-cart, and the tiger used to walk around it many times to see that it had not changed in any particular since he had examined it three minutes before, and the air with which he did this gave us an excellent idea of the responsibility of his position. So that people passing stopped and looked too—bakers' boys in white linen caps and with baskets on their arms, and commissionnaires in cocked hats and portfolios chained to their persons, and gentlemen freshly made up for the morning, with waxed mustaches and flat-brimmed high hats, and little girls with plaits, and little boys with bare legs; and all of us in-doors, as soon as we heard the pony stamp his sharp hoofs on the asphalt, would drop books or razors or brooms or mops and wait patiently at the window until she came.

      When she came she wore a black habit with fresh white gloves, holding her skirt and crop in one hand, and the crowd would separate on either side of her. She did not see the crowd. She was used to crowds, and she would pat the pony's head or rub his ears with the fresh kid gloves, and tighten the buckle or shift a strap with an air quite as knowing as the tiger's, but not quite so serious. Then she would wrap the lap-robe about her, and her maid would take her place at her side with the spaniel in her arms, and she would give the pony the full length of the lash, and he would go off like a hound out of the leash. They always reached the corner before the tiger was able to overtake them, and I believe it was the hope of seeing him some morning left behind forever which led to the general interest in their departure. And when they had gone, the crowd would look at the empty place in the street, and at each other, and up at us in the windows, and then separate, and the street would grow quiet again. One could see her again later, if one wished, in the evening, riding a great horse around the ring, in another habit, but with the same haughty smile; and as the horse reared on his hind-legs, and kicked and plunged as though he would fall back on her, she would smile at him as she did on the children in our street, with the same unconcerned, amused look that she would have given to a kitten playing with its tail.

      The houses on our street had tall yellow fronts with gray slate roofs, and roof-gardens of flowers and palms in pots. Some of the houses had iron balconies, from which the women leaned and talked across the street to one another in purring nasal voices, with a great rolling of the r's and an occasional disdainful movement of the shoulders. When any other than a French woman shrugs her shoulders she moves the whole upper part of her body, from the hips up; but the French woman's shoulders and arms are all that change when she makes that ineffable gesture that we have settled upon as the characteristic one of her nation.

      "SHE LOOKED DOWN UPON OUR STREET"

      In a street of like respectability to ours in London or New York those who lived on it would know as little of their next-door neighbor as of a citizen at another end of the town. The house fronts would tell nothing to the outside world; they would frown upon each other like family tombs in a cemetery; but in this street of Paris the people lived in it, or on the balconies, or at the windows. We knew what they were going to have for dinner, because we could see them carrying the uncooked portions of it from the restaurant at the corner, with a long loaf of bread under one arm and a single egg in the other hand; and when some one gave a fête we knew of it by the rows of bottles on the ledge of the window and the jellies set out to cool on the balcony. We were all interested in the efforts of the stout gentleman in the short blue smoking-jacket who taught his parrot to call to the coachman of each passing fiacre; he did this every night after dinner, with his cigarette in his mouth, and with great patience and good-nature. We took a common pride also in the flower-garden of the young people on the seventh floor, and in their arrangement of strings upon which the vines were to grow, and in the lines of roses, which dropped their petals whenever the wind blew, upon the head of the concierge, so that she would look up and shake her head at them, and then go inside and get a broom and sweep the leaves carefully away. When any one in our street went off in his best clothes in a fiacre we looked after him with envy, and yet with a certain pride that we lived with such fortunate people, who were evidently much sought after in the fashionable world; and when a musician or a blind man broke the silence of our street with his music or his calls, we vied with one another in throwing him coppers—not on his account at all, but because we wished to stand well in the opinion of our neighbors. It was like camping out on two sides of a valley where every one could look over into the other's tent.

      There was a young couple near the corner, who, I think, had but lately married, and every evening she used to watch for him in a fresh gown for a half-hour or so before he came. During the day she wore a very plain gown, and her eyes wandered everywhere; but during that half-hour before he came she never changed her position nor relaxed her vigil. And it made us all quite uncomfortable, and we could not give our attention to anything else until he had turned the corner and waved his hand, and she had answered him with a start and a little shrug of content. After dinner they appeared together, and he would put his arm around her waist, with that refreshing disregard for the world that French lovers have, and they would smile down upon us in a very happy and superior manner, or up at the sun as it sank a brilliant red at the end of our street, with the hundreds of chimney-pots looking like black musical notes against it. There was also a very interesting old lady in the house that blocked the end of our street, a very fat and masculine old lady in a loose white wrapper, who spent all of her time rearranging her plants and flowers, and kept up an amiable rivalry with the people in the balconies above and below her in the abundance and verdure of her garden. It was a very pleasant competition for the rest of us, as it hung that end of the street with a curtain of living green.

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