The Greater Journey Page 4

  What idea can ears, used only to the ordinary and human noises, conceive of this unceasing racket—this rattling of cabs and other vehicles over the rough stones, this rumbling of the omnibuses. For the street cries—one might have relief from them by file and handsaw.

  Even as the famous bridges on the Seine, the splendors of gardens and palaces and the gilded dome of the Invalides came into view, the close proximity of such appalling poverty and immeasurable riches was both startling and unsettling. After years of living in Paris, James Fenimore Cooper said he still struggled to adjust to a country comprised of “dirt and gilding … bedbugs and laces.”

  Many, like Emma Willard, arrived so utterly exhausted that under the circumstances little if anything could have pleased them. Gone was any trace of the “sublimity” she had felt at the cathedral in Rouen. “We were amidst dirt and disorder, fatigued … and strange eyes seemed to glare upon us.”

  But the famous allure and vitality of the great city won them over soon enough. Never in their lives had the Americans seen such parks and palaces, or such beautiful bridges or so many bridges. Or so many people of every kind. For those staying at the best hotels, such comforts and attentions as awaited them almost immediately, magically alleviated whatever initial disappointment they had felt.

  To Nathaniel Willis the Hôtel des Étrangers on the rue Vivienne was everything the weary traveler longed for. Arriving in the rain at mid-morning after a long night on the road, he was shown every courtesy, including his choice of several “quite pretty” rooms. The beds were surely the best in the world, he thought. “Five mattresses are successively piled on an elegant mahogany bedstead” to a thickness of eighteen inches. The pillow was “a masterpiece.” There was simply no “opiate” like a French pillow. Then followed a breakfast that carried the day:

  There are few things bought with money that are more delightful than a French breakfast. If you take it at your room, it appears in the shape of two small vessels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter, and one or two of some thirty dishes from which you can choose, the latter flavored exquisitely enough to make one wish to be always at breakfast, but cooked and composed I know not how or of what. The coffee has an aroma peculiarly exquisite, something quite different than any I have ever tasted before; and the petit pain, a slender biscuit between bread and cake, is, when crisp and warm, a delightful accompaniment.

  And the cost was a third that of steak and coffee at home and the civility of the service worth three times the money.

  The location on the bustling rue Vivienne was ideal. The Palais Royal, with all its famous enticements, the Louvre, and the Garden of the Tuileries were only a little way down the street, southward toward the Seine. Up the street in the other direction was the Bourse, which with its grandiose Doric columns looked more like a palace or temple than what it was, a stock exchange.

  Best of all, Galignani’s, the English bookstore and reading room, a favorite gathering place, stood across the street from the hotel. There one could pass long, comfortable hours with a great array of English and even American newspapers. Parisians were as avid readers of newspapers as any people on earth. Some thirty-four daily papers were published in Paris, and many of these, too, were to be found spread across several large tables. The favorite English-language paper was Galignani’s own Messenger, with morning and evening editions Monday through Friday. For the newly arrived Americans, after more than a month with no news of any kind, these and the American papers were pure gold.

  Of the several circulating libraries in Paris, only Galignani’s carried books in English, and indispensable was Galignani’s New Paris Guide in English. Few Americans went without this thick little leather-bound volume, fully 839 pages of invaluable insights and information, plus maps.

  Like Nathaniel Willis, schoolmistress Emma Willard delighted in her first breakfast at the fashionable Hôtel de l’Europe on the rue de Richelieu, and in the café au lait in particular. Nothing could exceed it, she wrote, adding, “the bread is fine and the butter exquisite.” She was also much the better after a restorative night’s sleep.

  Breakfast concluded and accompanied by a young lady from New York traveling with her father, whom she had met on board ship and identified in her letters only as “Miss D,” Mrs. Willard set forth full of expectations for a first walk in Paris, down the rue de Richelieu in the direction of the Seine and into the luxurious garden and arcades of the Palais Royal. The spectacle of the immense garden with its fountain playing was “brilliant and beautiful,” and, enclosed as it was by the Palais, blessedly removed from the clamor of the streets. It was also, much to her approval, “promenaded by multitudes of the elegant and fashionable.”

  We took the rounds under the arcades, upon the finely paved marble walk. … And surely we had never seen anything with which to compare the splendor of the shops. … You have not the least idea of the elegance of some of the painted porcelain; and then there are such quantities. … Jewelry, too, abounds in all its dazzling sheen … and hats of many fashions, with snowy plumes. …

  Having purchased a few “wearable things,” she and her companion returned to the hotel to announce they had found the Paris they had expected to see.

  Samuel Morse had hardly unpacked at his hotel when he was handed an invitation to a soirée at the home of Lafayette. On his arrival, the warmth of his welcome from the general took Morse’s breath away. “When I went in he instantly recognized me, took me by both hands, said he was expecting to see me in France, having read in the American papers that I had embarked.”

  In her turn, Mrs. Willard sent off a note to “apprise” General Lafayette that she had arrived, expecting to receive no answer for days, given his importance in the new government as commander of the army. But the following morning the general himself appeared to greet her with open affection. For nearly an hour they reminisced about his visit to her school, talked of their families, and discussed politics and the new government. “His heart seemed to expand as to a confidential sister,” she wrote with boundless pride. No welcome to Paris could have pleased her more, and it was not to be her only time with him, as he had graciously assured her.

  The Palais Royal, the Louvre, the Palace and Garden of the Tuileries, were all in the first of the twelve arrondissements, or districts, of Paris. It was the royal arrondissement par excellence. As Wendell Holmes wrote, in an effort to explain to his parents how things were arranged, the Palais Royal was the great center of the luxury and splendor of Paris.

  He, however, had “fairly settled” in the quite different Sixth Arrondissement, across the Seine in the Pays Latin, the Latin Quarter, on the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank. The ancient College of the Sorbonne and the School of Law were there. So, too, were the École de Médecine and several major hospitals, and hence it was where the medical students lived in high, dingy old houses closely packed along narrow, unpaved streets with gutters down the middle and rarely a sidewalk. (Describing the choices this left to the pedestrian, Holmes wrote, “If he keeps near the wall his feet probably become victims of some animal or vegetable abomination. If on the other hand he keeps to the middle he is almost inevitably splashed by the horses with mud of an intensity that defies competition.”) In this same crowded, compact neighborhood lived and worked the medical-book sellers, instrument makers, medical artists, preparers of natural and artificial skeletons, in addition to professors and lecturers of highest renown who were advancing the art and science of medicine as nowhere else in the world.

  Holmes, like his fellow Bostonians James Jackson, Jr., and Mason Warren, found lodgings on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a street barely wide enough for two carts to pass. Consistent with his nature, Holmes had no complaints.

  Those who, like Holmes or John Sanderson, arrived in late June or early July were delighted from the outset by the long summer days of northern Europe. In Paris, as they had to remind themselves, they were as far north as Newfoundland. And what p
leasure to be out and about in daylight at ten at night! In December, as they would discover, it would still be pitch dark at eight in the morning, and night again by four in the afternoon. Winter, too, brought endless rain, mud, snow, and fog, often heavy fog. The penetrating cold of a Paris winter was commonly said to be worse even than in London.

  Charles Sumner, who arrived in late December, took a room near the Sorbonne, intending to devote his time first to learning French, but was so distressed by the dank, bone-chilling weather he could hardly concentrate on anything. A blazing fire had little effect.

  The cold continues intolerable [he wrote in his journal], and my chamber, notwithstanding all my exertions, frigid beyond endurance. I go to bed tonight earlier than usual—the clock this moment striking midnight—in the hope of escaping the cold. My French grammar will be my companion.

  In the morning he studied as close by the fire as he dared sit, bundled to the neck in an overcoat. “I freeze behind, and my hair is so cold that I hesitate to touch it with my hand.”

  Yet life had never been so exhilarating. To a friend at home Sumner wrote, “My voyage has already been compensated for—seasickness, time, money, and all—many times over.”

  They were in Paris! It was no longer something to read about at home, or talk about at sea. They were there—this was nearly always the first thought on awakening each morning. Paris was right there out the window, out the door, and the common impulse was to get out and walk, to get one’s bearings, certainly, but also, as they discovered, Paris was a place where one wanted to walk, where to walk—flâner, as the French said—was practically a way of life. (“Ah! To wander over Paris!” wrote Honoré de Balzac. “What an adorable and delectable existence is that! Flânerie is a form of science, it is the gastronomy of the eye.”)

  In spirited letters and diary entries, the Americans described walking the uncommonly broad sidewalks of grand avenues and boulevards under “noble” chestnut trees, or venturing off into the “charming irregularities” of the endless side streets. A mile was nothing. Without realizing it, one could walk the whole day in an effort to see everything. Or to ward off homesickness, which often hit with surprising force. Interestingly, “Home, Sweet Home,” a favorite song then throughout the English-speaking world, was written by an American in Paris. “Mid pleasures and palaces / Though we may roam,” wrote John Howard Payne, “Be it ever so humble, / There’s no place like home.”

  The French had a different idea about distances. A destination described as only “two steps away” could turn out to be a walk of several miles. Aching legs were common by day’s end. The soles of good Boston (or New York or Philadelphia) shoes wore thin sooner than expected.

  When the walking became too much, there were the famous Paris omnibuses, giant, horse-drawn public conveyances that went to all parts of the city and were available from eight in the morning until eleven at night, and that some of the Americans found an even better way to relieve spells of homesickness or melancholy. “If you get into melancholy,” wrote John Sanderson, “an omnibus is the best remedy you can imagine.

  Whether it is the queer shaking over the rough pavement, I cannot say, but you have always an irresistible inclination to laugh. … I often give six sous just for the comic effect of an omnibus. Precipitate jolts against a neighbor one never saw, as the ponderous vehicle rolls over the stones, gives agitation to the blood and brains and sets one thinking.

  But walk they did more often than not, and were amazed by the thousands of Parisians doing the same, and how friendly they were. Galignani’s Guide made a point of the “uniform politeness which pervades all classes,” and it seemed true. “Indeed,” wrote Holmes, “the only very disagreeable people one meets are generally Englishmen.”

  Of the foreigners in the city, the Americans were but a tiny minority, probably less than a thousand during the 1830s, a mere fraction compared to the English in Paris, or the Germans and Italians.

  It was also disconcerting for the Americans to find how little Parisians knew about America, though over time this was to be remedied in good measure by Baron Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique, or Democracy in America, as it would be titled in English. After a nine-month visit to the United States, and more than a year at work in an attic room in Paris, de Tocqueville had produced as clear-eyed and valuable a study of America as any yet published, in which he wrote about the nature of American politics, the evils of slavery, the American love of money, and of how, from the beginning, “the originality of American civilization was most clearly apparent in the provisions made for public education.” Volume I appeared in 1835. A second volume followed in 1840.

  Increasingly, with every passing day, the Americans were struck by how entirely, unequivocally French Paris was. Every sign was in French, the money was French, every overheard conversation was in French. Hardly a soul spoke a word of English. All this they had been forewarned about, but the difference between what one had been told and what one came to understand firsthand was enormous.

  Facing necessity, they began to learn a few words—that left was gauche; right, droite; that a waiter was a garçon; a baker, a boulanger; and that some words, like “façade” and “rat,” were the same in both languages. Even the more hesitant were surprised to find themselves saying bonjour, très bien, and merci quite naturally, even venturing a whole sentence— “Excusez-moi, je ne comprends pas.”

  To find that every noun had a gender—that a hand was feminine, while a foot was masculine—and that one was expected to know which was which, seemed to some of the newcomers too much to cope with, and often illogical or even unfair. Why were all four seasons—hiver, printemps, été, and automne—masculine, for instance. Could not spring perhaps be feminine? And how a word looked on a printed page or menu and how it was pronounced could be worlds apart.

  But then if one were clearly making an effort to learn the language, the French were nearly always ready to help. Indeed, so appealing was the attitude of nearly everyone the Americans encountered that there was seldom cause to complain. “You ask a man the way,” wrote Holmes’s friend Thomas Appleton, “and he will go to the end of the street to show you.” The Americans soon found themselves adopting the same kind of civility.

  The fashion for mustaches and beards among the French dandies, the Parisian “exquisites,” had little or no appeal, however. “Don’t you hate to see so many ninnies in mustaches?” wrote John Sanderson. Beards annoyed him still more. “One loves the women just because they have no beards on their faces.” If a man was born a fool, Sanderson concluded, he could be a greater fool in Paris than anywhere on earth, such were the opportunities.

  By the 1830s trousers had replaced britches as the fashion. Light tan trousers, a dark tight-fitting frock coat, a bright-colored vest coat, top hat, fine straw-colored or white kid gloves, laceless shoes or boots always highly polished, and a malacca cane or furled umbrella under the arm comprised the à la mode wardrobe of the gentleman flâneur. For women who dressed à la dernière mode it was the full, flounced skirt, puffed and banded sleeves, and large flowered hats that tied with a large ribbon beneath the chin.

  Some years earlier, in 1826, nineteen-year-old Henry Longfellow had reported happily from Paris to his brother in New England how he had “decorated” himself with a claret-colored coat and linen pantaloons, and how on Sundays he added “the glory of a little French hat—glossy and brushed.” Learning of this, his father wrote, “You should remember that you are an American, and as you are a visitor for a short time only in a place, you should retain your own national costume.” But for Longfellow, Paris instilled what was to be a lifelong love of fine clothes, as it would, too, for young Mason Warren and Thomas Appleton.

  Nathaniel Willis was delighted to find that in men’s apparel shops only attractive young women greeted the prospective customer.

  No matter what is the article of trade—hats, boots, pictures, books, jewelry, anything or everything that gentlemen buy— yo
u are waited upon by girls always handsome and always dressed in the height of the mode. They sit on damask-covered settees behind the counter; and when you enter, bow and rise to serve you with a grace and a smile of courtesy that would become a drawing room.

  John Sanderson claimed to have been nearly “ruined” financially by one pretty sales clerk with a way of “caressing and caressing each of one’s fingers, as she tries on a pair of gloves one doesn’t want.”

  Though it seemed hard to believe, there were no drunks reeling about in the streets, as in cities at home. Nor did men chew tobacco and spit, and no one abused public property. Park benches showed no other marks than the natural wear of people sitting on them. White marble statues in public gardens remained as pristine as if inside a museum.

  Surprising, too, was the presence of dogs everywhere and the way the French doted on them. No woman of fashion, it seemed, made an appearance except in the company of her dog, a très petit chien most often and with a step as stylish as her own. Amazingly also, the women of Paris could walk quite as fast as a man.

  Especially appealing was the great quantity of glass everywhere—glass doors, huge plate-glass windows fronting shops and cafés. And mirrors, mirrors everywhere, mirrors large and small, great gilt-framed mirrors in hotel lobbies, entire walls of mirrors in cafés and restaurants that multiplied the size of rooms, multiplied the light of day no less than the glow of gaslight and candles after dark, and doubled or tripled the human presence.