The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (9 page)

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— you 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.

The French seemed to take every meal in public, even breakfast, and whenever dining, showed not the slightest sign of hurry or impatience. It was as if they had nothing else to do but sit and chatter and savor what seemed to the Americans absurdly small portions. Or sip their wine ever so slowly.

“The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.”

The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was “in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce … the lightest and most agreeable food.” The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the “effect.”

A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from
Château Margaux
,
côtelettes
,
consommés
and
soufflés
. The very name
vol-au-vent
is enough to make one walk on air!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of Wendell Holmes’s Boston friends, turned up in Paris in 1833, the same year as Holmes, but a little later that summer and by way of Italy. Having concluded he no longer wished to be a minister of the gospel, Emerson was trying to decide at age thirty what to make of his life. Far from charmed by Paris, he found it, after the antiquity of Italy, a “loud modern New York of a place.” Yet repent he did. In a matter of days he was calling it “the most hospitable of cities.” Walking
the boulevards in ideal weather, he was captivated by the human scenery and the multitude of ingenious ways some men made a living.

One vendor had live snakes crawling about him as he sold soaps. Another had an offering of books spread across the ground. Half a dozen more strutted up and down selling walking sticks and canes. Here a boot-black “brandished” his brush at every passing shoe; there a man sat cleaning old silver spoons.

Then a person who cut profiles with scissors. “Shall be happy to take yours, sir.” Then a table of card puppets. … Then a hand organ. … Then a flower merchant. Then a bird shop with 20 parrots, four swans, hawks, and nightingales. …

In stark contrast were the beggars—pitiful men without arms or legs, ancient, hunched women who pleaded mainly with their eyes, and ragged street boys singing mournfully in Italian. Nathaniel Willis kept seeing a woman who sat playing a violin while holding in her lap a sleeping child so still and pale that Willis wondered if it might be made of wax.

Henry Longfellow, who made a return visit to Paris in 1836, loved the crowds as much as anything about the city. When a friend from home, accompanying him on a walk, showed no interest in the passing parade, but insisted on talking about predestination and the depravity of human nature, it was more than Longfellow could bear.

Sundays brought out the greatest crowds, and for many Americans this took getting used to, in that no one seemed the least inclined to keep the Sabbath. The Bostonians found it especially difficult to accept. As said, Boston on Sunday remained “impatient of all levity.” In Paris it was not only meant to be a day of enjoyment for everyone, but remarkably everyone seemed entirely at ease with enjoyment.
“Vivez joyeux”
was the old saying. “Live joyfully.”

Church bells rang, but hardly more than on other mornings—the bells of the great cathedrals were as characteristic of the city as any sound—and most churches were filled through a succession of services that began at an early hour. But shops, cafés, and restaurants all did business as usual. The opera and theaters were open. The great public gardens were filled with
tens of thousands of people, more people than some of the Americans had ever seen all in one place. It was on Sunday only that the Musée du Louvre was open to the public, and to the astonishment of the Americans, the enormous Sunday crowds at the museum included people from all walks of life, as though everyone cared about art.

On Sundays nearly every public garden had its elegant rotundas for dancing. (Happy the nation that once a week could forget its cares, the English author Laurence Sterne had once written of life in Paris.) There were public ballrooms in all parts of the city. John Sanderson hired a cabriolet and escorted a lady from New Orleans to half a dozen different public dances where they found everyone having a perfectly grand time. These Parisians had the right idea, he thought.