CHAPTER XI
THE “LITTLE PEOPLE” OF PARIS
The “little people” of Paris are not confined to any particular quarter of the city. They are to be found everywhere, in spacious avenues, in streets of heraldic renown, in the sinister neighbourhood of La Roquette, through the noisy length of St. Denis. Opposite the palace of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld in the Rue de Varennes will you see an old curiosity shop, and close by work a mild-eyed cobbler and his wife, a little sempstress. Excellent types, both of these indefatigable little people of Paris, living in two tidy attics of this aristocratic street, with an air of quiet independence. The little people are of all sorts: beginning with the “little” bourgeoise and ending with the rag-picker and the marchand de quatre saisons. The little bourgeoise is a curious study, and to penetrate into the precincts where she breathes and thrives, the foreigner must be her boarder. Else will he obtain none but a superficial view of her; and as her aspect is generally cheerful, her manners pleasing, he will be disposed to think better of her than she altogether deserves. The thrift of the little bourgeoise must be given its real and ugly name, avarice, for it is nothing else. It has turned its back upon the virtue of economy, and has assumed the coarseness of a vice. And so when she furnishes a spare room, it is that she shall exploit mercilessly the stranger at her gates. The traveller in search of experience may drop in upon her, but those not supplied with patience, with fortitude in the endurance of cynical imposition and lucre to meet complacently exorbitant demands upon their purse, should avoid this interesting creature, and go to a hotel. In the first place, the opening of private doors to the traveller or over-seas student is so foreign to the habits and instincts of her race, that once she has allowed the brilliant idea of “taking in” a foreign boarder to enter her narrow mind, she starts immediately by magnifying her legitimate profits, and in her ardour to amass francs on ground where she is practically free from all commercial or professional restrictions, she is not beset by any paltry fear of overstepping the limits of honesty. Her sole conception of that homely virtue lies in its rigid application in her own regard, in an austere resolution to see that nobody on earth shall cheat her of the value of a single farthing. I know not which is the more astounding: her inflexible insistence on the honesty of her bonne, or the flexibility of her conscience when she comes in contact with alien claims upon her own honesty.
Her favourite boarder is the young American or English art student. Young women she naturally prefers, because it is easier to fleece them, and they are shyer of monetary disputes than men or experienced women. She will not scruple to demand for the poorest table imaginable and the perfunctory service of a single maid-of-all-work, the terms of a first-rate pension or a comfortable hotel, where there are servants in plenty and the table is varied and excellent. Her excuse is that, not being a boarding-house keeper or a hotel keeper (“Would that she were either!” dejectedly moan her victims), she is entitled to relatively higher prices for the privilege of a seat at a private table. In the region of bills she is altogether her own mistress, for she has no commercial reputation at stake to balance her notions on the subject of profits, which are colossal, and so she enters every extra she can think of with gaiety of heart, and a smiling conviction that all is fair that puts cash into the big pocket of the rapacious little bourgeoise. Not that she will risk frightening off a possible boarder by a revelation of this view beforehand, and no mention of those formidable trifles called “extras” will be made in the preliminary treaty. Then it will be all beguilement and blandishment, allurement and promise, with a hint of paradise through the open door of her modest establishment. Within there, seems to say this cheering creature, will you find the warmth of home, maternal care and tenderness when you are ill, and intelligent sympathy in all hours. Ten pounds a month seems a small sum to pay for this, and you enter gratefully, not disposed to criticise, on the contrary, eager to see everything through the rose hue of satisfaction, to find another fifty or seventy francs added to your bill at the end of the month for wine, light, coffee, service, linen, and baths. When fire comes to be included, you discover that you might have boarded, with comfort, independence, and good living, for the same price in one of the hotels of the Rue de Rivoli. For independence is the very last thing the little bourgeoise is disposed to allow her “paying guest.” It needs a quality of brain of which she is destitute, to recognise a single woman’s right to liberty.
The foreign boarder’s days under her roof constitute a march through surprises. Here no gleaming glass and shining damask at table; no flowers, no silver, no tasteful arrangement of desert; for tablecloth a coarse sheet and cloths to match for napkins, sometimes patched, and invariably sewn down the middle. There is nothing to please the eye or the palate, but the disappointed boarder must stoically hold her tongue if she would maintain agreeable relations. The hostess is an arbitrary as well as a parsimonious and dishonest housekeeper. The exactions, the arrogance, must be allowed to remain all on her side and the malcontent has nothing to do but pay a month’s board and lodging in advance and pack up her things. If she stays, a hushed civility is expected from her, and all payments rigidly in advance. Why, the little bourgeoise should have instituted this singular law, that a month’s food should be paid for before it has been consumed, I have never been able to understand: but I confess I have never been able to master the complicated ethics of this interesting woman. She is a fervent Catholic, attends church regularly morning and evening, confesses, teaches Catholicism and morality to the outcast infant, and never seems to suspect that honesty is one of the virtues incorporated in the Christian doctrine. When she orders anything for you she will pay one price in the shop and charge you another; yet, good, consistent creature, she goes to market on market days after Mass to take note of the prices, in order to calculate to a farthing what the day’s purchases will cost, so that the bonne shall not cheat her of the value of a sou. This is hard on the bonne, whom she pays as little as she can, and underfeeds, and overworks, and who is thus defrauded of one of the acknowledged perquisites of the servant in France,—le sou du franc. When a Parisian servant makes a purchase over a franc, each tradesman returns her a sou on every franc paid in cash. The avid “little bourgeoise” usually insists on having this sou back, and if the bonne is meek and afraid she gives up the sou, for her mistress understands the question of perquisites only in her own right. She watches her servant closely, though there is nothing of a shrew or a Sally Brass about her. She victimises her through the attendant vice of avaricious, unsleeping suspicion. And so she visits the kitchen when the girl has left, to see if a lump of sugar or a piece of bread, or anything else, should be secreted anywhere. Perhaps once a week she will give the domestic martyr a half-dozen rotten strawberries or cherries when these can be had for next to nothing, or the last spoonful of rice or stewed prunes when the enraged boarders have turned their eyes from nauseous remains of these choice dishes three or four days old.
Her cuisine is a thing to gape at. You forget you are in France, the land of good, inexpensive living, and pronounce it frankly execrable. The dinner usually consists of vegetable water or greasy water with pieces of bread floating about, of ragged bouilli (the meat used in the boiling of this insipid liquid), a tasteless dish of sorrel and of stewed prunes that will be served no less than four or five times successively until the very last of the dish has been consumed, or a dish of rice which will also in its half-finished condition make its successive appearance until the last grain has vanished, and the dish, presumably on the score of economy, on which these luxuries are served will not even be changed. In the same quaint spirit the remains of cold vegetables are reheated and served again, with such result for eye and palate as no pen can describe. Whatever you find at her table you may know beforehand will be of the worst and cheapest of its kind, and there will be as little as possible of it. When fruit outside, in the markets, along the streets in barrows, in the shops, is plentiful, excellent, and absurdly cheap, she will assure you it is far too expensive for her table, and treat three art students, each paying, exclusive of extras, ten pounds a month, to musty biscuits and dried figs that taste like caked sawdust. As for sweet dishes, creams, sauces, varieties of well-cooked vegetables, all the thousand little kickshaws we associate with the dainty French term cuisine, these you are as likely to find at her table as ice-cream or champagne.
The home life of the little bourgeoise is a strange and a dull one. She possesses a house, one wonders why, when a bedroom seems to be all that she requires. She lives in her bedroom as Englishwomen of the same class live in their parlours. That a salon was made for use, to be sat in and worked in and talked in, never enters her head. She uses her dining-room only for meals, and thus never has any fire in it during the winter, does not dream of lighting the stove which every French salle à manger has, however small. She puts on a shawl to go into lunch and dinner. The salon is hermetically sealed all the week, and opened gingerly should she have an at-home day; if not, it is opened only when some very important visitors call. I have known a little bourgeoise, whose “paying guest” I, for my misfortune, happened to be, who allowed the inmates of her establishment to pass into the salon after dinner for exactly an hour. At nine o’clock she rose and graciously dismissed us from the sacred precincts, bidding us disperse to our chambers, while she locked up the holy of holies. Here, as elsewhere, I discovered that such a thing as a comfortable chair or sofa is unknown, undreamed of by the little bourgeoise. To do her justice, she never lounges herself, and consequently does not understand the need. This is the admirable side of her character,—the complete absence of self-indulgence. She swindles you, not for her comfort, but for the security of her old age. She is circumspect and formal in all her attitudes, absolutely self-respecting, of a cordial coldness, and there is something impersonal, something claustral in her selfishness. I have remarked that nuns resemble her astonishingly in all their material relations with the world: the same implacable hardness, the same smiling austerity, the same lack of honesty or of consideration for others, the same resolute determination to get the best of outsiders in the matter of labour or bargains, to give as little and obtain as much as possible in all transactions, to underfeed, underpay, and overwork,—and all with the same high air of self-approval and righteousness.
Religious communities will cheerfully, singing, as it were, hymns of thanks, do for the glory of God things modest pagans would shrink from in honour of the devil, and the little French bourgeoise has much of this inexplicable complacency in dishonesty. Like the nuns, she is active and virtuous, and she is most pleasant as long as you are pliant and uncomplaining,—the ideal art student! But she is essentially a despot, the unyielding mistress of her own house; and she is cynically indifferent to your dissatisfaction should you think fit to make it visible. She has no hesitation whatever in letting you understand, with a sincerity that does her honour, that she did not take you as a boarder with the naïve intention of rendering you comfortable or giving you an adequate return for your money, but with the simpler design of making a considerable profit on you. She will say to you, with that French independence I ever admire, that it is not your purse but hers that is in question; and I judge her to regard as idiots such saints as Martin of Tours and Francis of Assisi. Truth is no more conspicuous than charity and honesty among her virtues, for she will lie with a courage befitting a nobler cause in the interests of her pocket. The minute and persevering genius of Balzac alone could follow her through the maze of economical twists she has devised wherewith to save or make a sou. She is impaled in my memory over her sugar-bowl like the king of nursery legend counting out his money. If avarice be an impediment to reception within the gates of Paradise I fear my arrogant, self-approving little friend has small chance in the next world. Yet far be it from me to deny her good qualities and her charm. She is so well-mannered, so pleasant, so intelligent, such a plausible villain when off the field of her illegitimate profits, that fain would I see her flourish and triumph. After all, money matters are not the sole test of virtue. I have known persons of the most unimpeachable honesty and delicacy on this ground, utterly insupportable in all things else, with horrid tempers and tongues, an utter lack of heart, which is not the little bourgeoise’s failing, for if you are ill she will overwhelm you with kindness and attentions, accompanied ever with her equable, smiling cordiality; and if your bill is the heavier, well, at least you have had the pleasure of the attentions; and her presence, when you are not considering its consequences in your bill, is more often than not a tonic and a ray of sympathy and gaiety. Of so priceless a quality is gaiety, that good-humoured roguery is better any day than sour, ill-natured honesty.
The small dressmaker is another pleasing picture of the humbler walks of Paris. The grisette I deem to be as extinct as the dodo, while the class of work-girl I have in view may be supposed to step out of her rank. But the novelist who would try to turn her into copy for Musset or Mürger would be all abroad. She earns her bread honestly and diligently in the skilful exercise of her art, with a band of juvenile needle-women round her who ought to be playing in the fields, but who, instead, are content to sit in a tiny workroom and sew and snip all day. Nothing more dignified, more modest, more self-respecting than all this young world, seemingly unaware of any reasons for dissatisfaction. The youthful mistress exercises her authority with good-humour and gentleness, and her willing little workers appear really fond of her. It is in Paris that I have become converted to Tolstoi’s belief that the humble class is the vrai grand monde, a thousand times more interesting and instructive, worthier of our admiration, than the wealthy and educated classes. The deeper you penetrate into these obscure lives, the deeper you feel a sense of humiliation by confrontation with the futility of education, breeding, blood,—the accepted adjuncts of superiority. The poor and humble of the world are inarticulate, and they live and die unconscious of the heroism of their existence. But the average woman of the people gathers more virtue into a single day than the educated woman, who enjoys the priceless benefits of leisure, space, and ease, spreads over a week. Mark the gaiety and content with which she will toil for inadequate pay, rising early, resting late, with few pleasures, fewer distractions, maintaining through all her never-ending trials a dignity of bearing, an ideal of honesty, an incomparable altitude of disinterestedness that should shame us for the idle price we put upon birth and education. Let us pick out of the crowd one figure of the small dressmaker Dickens or Daudet might have made a charming study of. I have been observing her life now for some years with friendly interest, and have not found a flaw in it. She is good to look upon, a supple French figure, clear skin, pretty features, reddish soft eyes, and red hair a painter would delight to paint. Young, too, with winning manners, she would not have far to look for assistance in her difficulties with term-day, work-girls, and other expenses. Her father, an invalid, and her mother live in a suburb, and she dwells alone all the week in a somewhat squalid flat near the Bon Marché, her own protector, and needing none other; such is her indestructible purity. No well-born girl could show a more delicate reserve towards men than this pretty French dressmaker, no nun could reveal herself less of a flirt. Her sole desire is to please her customers and extend her connexion, to work early and late, sometimes into the small hours of the morning; and her sole distraction, after a week’s hard labour, is to go out to her parents in a dusty suburb beyond Sant-Ouen, from Saturday evening to Monday morning. She never grumbles, she is never unhappy; and though I give her books and encourage her to talk to me about them, I have never detected in her remarks a particle of envy or discontent with her humble lot. Her mind is clear and fresh, essentially a lady’s mind, and her notions on the score of honesty are as primitive as those of the poet who taught us in our infancy that it was a sin to steal a pin. Quite as good and graceful pictures may be drawn from the lower class of sempstresses who come to the house and work by the day. These, too, have their ideal of conduct, which owes nothing to education, and which a lady need not disown.
The concierge belongs to a more complex order of being. These often run down to desperate depths of degradation, and, in the wealthy quarters especially, constitute one of the curses of Parisian life. I suspect it is the tips and the endless sources of gossip that demoralise them. And yet I can remember a delightful old lady, who looked as if she had stepped out of a perfumed page of the last century, with her lovely white hair fluffy and soft under a black mantilla; tiny, elegant, wrinkled hands; gentle glance and exquisite smile, with the manners as well as the appearance of a French marquise. She was my concierge, and a sweeter, more disinterested little creature I have never known. I lived on the fifth floor, and had no servant, contenting myself with the services of a femme de ménage in the morning. I was seriously ill for months; and had this dear, gentle old lady been a relative or a friend she could not have nursed me more devotedly, and never a farthing in coin would she accept. She overwhelmed me with thousands of charming attentions, and the only payment she would take gratefully was the assurance that they gave me pleasure.
So, though I constantly hear terrible tales of the wicked doings of the Paris concierge, I have to pass them over lightly for the sake of my white-haired little marquise. Whenever I want to show an English friend what an enchanting creature a Frenchwoman of the people can be, I make a point of passing through her street, for the pleasure of looking in on her, and saying, “Good-day” to my old friend. The concierge, should he or she happen to be disagreeable, can do a singular lot of mischief, and make the lodger’s life a burden to him. If you are out, friends who call can be sent up several flights of stairs for nothing; if you are in, your callers will be assured you are out. Letters can be held over, mislaid, or forgotten; your servants can be set by the ears in the concierge’s parlour; evil reports can be spread of you in the neighbourhood; hints given to trades-people against your solvency. All these things I have known to happen to persons in discordant relations with their concierge; so that it is recognised in Paris that if the concierge does not like you, the best thing you can do is to pack up your things, pay a term in advance, and go.
The rag-picker of Paris is a familiar figure. To him belongs, I know not why, some of the glory of romance. Everybody feels a sneaking tenderness for the rag-picker. When, some years ago, M. Poubelle, the Prefect of Police, decided that the rubbish of Paris was no longer to be left outside along the pavements, but that each house should have its big refuse-box, called ever since by his name, there was a general uproar in the Press. What! disturb the amiable customs of the interesting rag-picker! Diminish the income of these delicious Parisians!
Little by little their favourite and most famous citadels have been demolished, their oddly named groups dispersed. There used to be the Cité des Singes and the Cité des Mousquetaires, now no longer in existence. The rag-pickers are everywhere, and live just like other citizens. I visited the rag-pickers of my quarter the other day. I found them in an airy quarter of Grenelle, like a quiet little town of the provinces on the edge of a wide river. Who would dream it was Paris, and that broad splash of dull grey, the lively brilliant Seine that flows past the Louvre? When I reached the rag-picker’s dwelling, she was out, and two neighbours from different doors appeared to assist me. If they had known me all their lives they could not have given me a more friendly greeting. One went off in search of the rag-picker, the other pressed me to take a seat in her room. The rag-picker came, one of the jolliest and pleasantest-looking women I ever saw. She spoke admirably, with perfect gesticulation, with inflection of voice, management of eyebrows that would have won her distinction in a salon. Her expressive face was clean, but her hands were the hue of soot, and her hair was the grey of dust. Her little room, kitchen and sleeping-chamber, was freshly washed and in perfect order. Outside the window clothes hung drying, and below in the courtyard a pile of rubbish lay for sorting. It would be impossible to find anywhere a healthier-looking or a happier creature. Yet this has been her life from the age of twelve: she gets up at four A.M. winter and summer, hail or snow; she heats some milk for her dog, boils coffee for herself and her husband, leaves coffee simmering for her three children, who, when she and her husband, with their cart and dog, have gone off on their rag-gathering mission, get up, dress, and go off to school. She paid fifty francs to her fellow-rag-pickers for the whole of the Avenue de Breteuil, which was then only half built upon, and to-day her practice is worth three hundred francs. I imagined the tax was paid to the town; but no, it is paid to a sort of guild of rag-pickers, who thereby assure her and her husband that they only have the right to the refuse of the avenue. When they have picked up all the refuse, they return and sort it out in the yard. She told me the prices of each thing, and hair is the most valuable,—above all, white hair. The honesty of the Parisian rag-picker is proverbial, and I know something of it, for once a silver spoon of mine was accidentally flung out, and the next day the rag-picker brought it back to the concierge.
Her visage shone with a positive radiance of soul. Her cheerfulness was so contagious that it set me wishing to be a rag-picker too. Her devotion to her husband and her children, of whom she spoke in rapturous terms, was hardly more touching than her devotion to a saintly priest, who seems to do an immense deal of good in the neighbourhood.
This man is quite remarkable; and a friend, speaking of him to me, and of his well-known enthusiasm for rag-pickers and their like, told me he once said to her: “See you, when once you get into the heart of that class, you can’t endure any other. It becomes a passion.” And I can well understand it, from all I have seen of the humbler classes of Paris. There is a fulness of life, of vitality, of inarticulate, unconscious goodness about them that puts you in sympathy with Tolstoiïsm. But instead of the mysticism, the intensity of the Russian character, you have here that irresistible French gaiety, which is not by any means so light as it is said to be. Action is its virtue. Its mental horizon is brightened by a personal charm of character, as a twilight sky is enriched by an arch of radiant colour. In spite of the false romancers, morality is in the air, everywhere about us.
In these humbler walks I refer to, pure girls, faithful husbands, devoted wives, hard-working, honest sons and daughters abound, and the force, as well as the weakness of all may be found in the love of home and family. The temple of self-respect is lit with the unquenchable flames of independence. All these admirable “little people” work so hard and so contentedly that they may enjoy the delights of freedom and a hearth, and they work the more contentedly, without embittered or soured temper, because they have the inestimable art of living and enjoying themselves when they leave aside work. The lower down you go among the people, the greater the readiness to open the purse, and a workman bent on a holiday will not hesitate to pay twenty or thirty francs for a picnic carriage for the day, and fill the hamper with an abundance of good fare and drink. I remember once hearing a well-to-do woman violently complain because her coachman’s brother-in-law had paid such a price for a vehicle to take a marriage party out into the country. I could not share her indignation, to her disgust. The French people work so hard, and so gallantly, and so well, that I think they earn their right to an outbreak now and then. They at least pay for their pleasures and dissipations with the sweat of their brow, and we who profit by their labour owe them all thanks and indulgence.