The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (12 page)

While the Paris Opera was second to none in all of Europe in its elaborate scenery and costuming, and the glitter of the audience was no less than at the Italian Opera, it was the dazzling Marie Taglioni, considered the greatest dancer in the world, that “
tout Paris
” turned out for, filling all 1,300 seats of the Salle Le Peletier performance after performance. “Have you seen Taglioni?” was often the first question a foreign visitor was asked on arriving in Paris.

Her Italian father, Philippe Taglioni, a famous
maître de ballet
, had started her dancing as a child, and by age twenty-three she had made her debut at the Paris Opera. She had dark hair and large, luminous dark eyes. Her skin was uncommonly pale, her arms and legs uncommonly long and thin. By the time someone like Nathaniel Willis saw her perform, she was in her late twenties but looked younger. She had been one of the first to dance on the tips of her toes, and was known for her floating leaps and for her costume, with its tight bodice and short gauzy skirt, the prototype of
the tutu. So lavish was the praise for her beauty and artistry that many went to see her for the first time wondering whether they might be disappointed.

“No language can describe her motion,” wrote Nathaniel Willis after seeing her in the role of the dancing girl in
Le Dieu et la Bayadère
, the part that had made her famous. “She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke, or a flake of down. Her difficulty seems to be to keep to the floor.”

Her figure is small, but rounded to the very last degree of perfection; not a muscle swelled beyond the exquisite outline; not an angle, not a fault. … Her face is most strangely interesting, not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half-retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of young girls just “out” in a circle of high fashion.

John Sanderson felt utter joy watching her. He had never seen anything to compare. “Mercy! How deficient we are in our country in these elegant accomplishments. In many things we are still in our infancy, in dancing we are not yet born.”

Nathaniel Willis wondered to what degree the response of an audience enhanced the quality of a performance on stage. Taglioni’s performance was a triumph of art, and she was applauded as an artist, but then the “overwhelming tumult of acclamation” she received for her most brilliant moments came from “the hearts of the audience, and as such must have been both a lesson and the highest compliment for Taglioni.” Here, he thought, was the great contrast with the theater at home. “We shall never have a high-toned drama in America, while, as at present, applause is won only by physical exertion, and the nice touches of genius and nature pass undetected and unfelt.”

What Willis appreciated most about the French theater was that the actors did not look like actors, or play their parts as if acting. He liked their naturalness, their “unstudied” facial expressions. “And when they come upon stage, it is singularly without affectation, and as the character they represent would appear.”

Wendell Holmes and his fellow medical students, for all the pressures on them in their studies, took time to attend both the opera and the theater. Even James Jackson, Jr., the most intense of students, went along. By “indulging” himself this way, he was better able to study and maintain his health, he assured his father, knowing his father’s own love of music.

Indeed, while at the opera, I long for your company almost as much as while at the hospital, as I feel in both places how strongly you would sympathize with me—for I did not know what music was in America and I assure you I will not allow myself to neglect it altogether here. …

Like others, Holmes and Jackson wrote dutifully to their parents every week, sometimes comparing notes with one another in the process. “James Jackson has just come up to my room to write home a letter, and reminded me that I must have one ready for the next packet,” Holmes began one letter. “Well, here we are, Jackson at my desk and I at my table, both of us in a little hurry, but not willing to let the day pass without our weekly tribute.”

Of the many theaters in Paris, the famous old Théâtre Français, adjacent to the Palais Royal, was foremost and immensely popular largely because of Mademoiselle Mars, who was to French drama of the time what Taglioni was to dance. Here were performed the great classical French works—the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Molière—and in the finest style and according to strict rules. For the Americans intent on learning French, it was common practice to bring along a copy of the play to follow what was being said. Such theater was indispensable to the intelligent foreigner, Holmes explained to his parents, both as a guide to French manners and as “the best standard” of the language. In consideration of his parents’ views on such matters, he added, “There is no need of cutting or tearing off this last page about theaters—where society is far advanced they must exist and are a blessing.”

Mademoiselle Mars, whose real name was Anne Françoise Boutet, had been an unrivaled favorite on the French stage for nearly thirty years and
had made Molière her
pièce de résistance
. Her pronunciation was considered the finest model of classic French.

“Molière could not have had a proper conception of his own genius, not having seen Mademoiselle Mars,” wrote Sanderson, who had waited in line for more than two hours to buy a ticket. Charles Sumner saw her in Molière’s
Les Femmes Savantes
. “Her voice is like a silver flute, her eye like a gem.” He knew he would remember the evening as long as he lived.

And following the theater, there was more. “Thousands in merry moods throng the walks,” wrote Thomas Appleton, who had no medical studies to cope with, and few if any worries about spending money. His wealthy father, a Boston merchant, banker, and textile manufacturer, had told him there was no reason to deny himself whatever was “comfortable.”

Appleton adored the restaurants and cafés of Paris, especially after dark when the light from their windows was like “the blaze of day.” He had made a point of dining at several of the finest, including the Rocher de Cancale, known for its oysters, and Tortoni’s, on the boulevard des Italiens, where in summer after the opera the
haut ton
flocked to “take ices.”

“
Cafés
abound in Paris, particularly in the principal streets and the boulevards,” the newcomers read in their
Galignani’s
guidebook.

It is impossible to conceive either their number, variety, or elegance, without having seen them. In no other city is there anything to resemble them; and they are not only unique, but in every way adapted for convenience and amusement.

The most celebrated concentration was at the Palais Royal, where the modern restaurant had originated in the eighteenth century. The Café de Foy, the oldest and still one of the finest in Paris, Périgord, Café Corazza, and Véry were all in the Palais Royal. For the cost of a dinner at Véry, it was said, one could live comfortably in the provinces for a month. “Alas, my poor roasting and frying countrymen!” wrote Sanderson after dining at Véry and observing other Americans trying with equal difficulty to fathom the choices offered on the menu. “Your best way in this emergency,”
he advised, “is to call the garçon and leave all to him, and sit still like a good child and take what is given to you.”

The gaslit Café des Mille Colonnes outdid them all in mirrors, and the elegant Trois Frères Provençaux was where Holmes, Jackson, Warren, and others of the medical students convened regularly on Sundays. As much as the food and the wine, they relished the talk that went with such evenings in such an atmosphere. Talk helped one shape one’s thoughts, said Holmes, the greatest talker of the lot.

At Véfour, which many considered the most beautiful, rows of tables were covered with snow-white cloths, and the
garçons
[waiters] dressed to match. Each had one jacket pocket filled with silver spoons, another with silver forks, a corkscrew in a vest pocket and a snow-white napkin, or
serviette
, on the left arm. The menu was the size of a newspaper.

At the Café des Aveugles, below ground level, a small band of blind musicians played. The Café de la Paix was described in
Galignani’s Guide
as richly decorated and much frequented by “ladies of easy virtue and Parisian dandies of the second order.”

The Palais Royal, Holmes liked to say, was to Paris what Paris was to Europe. If enjoyment was the object of life, as some philosophers held, no one spot in the world offered such a variety of choices. The principal restaurants and the shops shimmering with jewelry and Sèvres china were on the garden level, as well as shoemakers, linen drapers, waistcoat makers, and tailors. On the level above were still more restaurants and a number of gambling houses. Some of the gambling houses were “
très élégantes
,” and to the surprise of newly arrived Americans one saw “beautiful
women
engaged in various games of hazard.” Other establishments catered to a rougher trade. As
Galignani’s Guide
warned, in the Palais Royal were “haunts where the stranger, if he ventures to enter, should be upon his guard against the designs of the courtesan and the pickpocket.”

(It was not that gambling went on at the Palais Royal only. It was everywhere and an unfamiliar spectacle for many Americans. In many states at home, gambling was a criminal offense. “Billiards, cards, faro, and other games of hazard, are to be found at every … street and alley of Paris,” wrote John Sanderson. “The shuffling of cards or rattling of dice is a part of the music of every Parisian saloon. …”)

Prostitutes of varying degrees of sophistication, allure, and price maintained a conspicuous presence throughout much of the city wherever crowds congregated. But the young Americans said little or nothing on the subject in their letters or even in the privacy of their diaries. Dire warnings by parents and teachers weighed heavily, as did the dread of syphilis, and few wished to acknowledge succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh or even suggest that when in Paris one might do as the Parisians did.

But then they were on their own as never before. “Young men are very fond of Paris no doubt,” wrote Emerson, “because of the perfect freedom—freedom from observation as well as interference—in which each one walks. …” There were, it seemed, some advantages after all to being a “stranger.”

While making no case for prostitution, John Sanderson could not bring himself to disapprove of, let alone scorn, the young working women of Paris who, because of pitifully meager wages as shop clerks and the like, chose to make “arrangements.” These were the
grisettes
, so called because of the grey (
grises
) skirts and blouses they often wore.

“They are very pretty, and have the laudable little custom of falling deeply in love with one for five or six francs a piece,” John Sanderson wrote. To many a student in the Latin Quarter, a
grisette
was “a branch of education.”

If a student is ill, his faithful
grisette
nurses him and cures him; if he is destitute, she works for him. … Thus a mutual dependence endears them to each other; he defends her with his life, and sure of his protection, she feels her consequence and struts in her new starched cap. … She is the most ingenious imitation of an innocent woman that is in the world.

If a young man’s morals were “out of order” at home, Paris was not exactly the place to send him, Sanderson conceded. To keep a mistress was not only acceptable in Paris society, but was nearly always mentioned to one’s credit.

If you can preserve him by religious and other influences from either, as well as from the dangers of an ascetic and solitary abstinence—for solitude has its vices as well as dissipation— so much the better. He will be a better husband, a better citizen, and a better man. But let me tell you that to educate a young man of fortune and leisure to live through a youth of honesty, has become excessively difficult even in any country; and to expect that with money and address he will live entirely honest in Paris, where women of good quality are thrown in his face—women of art, of beauty, and refined education—it is to attribute virtues to human nature she is no way entitled to.