AN ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS.*

THE writer of these volumes—who is said to be Sir R. Wallace =lived in Paris from his youth, and was thoroughly acquainted with all the sides of it throughout along career. He lived among

artists and authors in the Quartier Latin, frequented Courts and haunted theatres, and considered himself a great art- critic and fashionable authority. His admission that he much preferred judging pictures to judging books, because examining a manuscript cost so much more trouble than detecting genius from a dash of charcoal on the wall, will to many be an amusing clue to the mysteries of criticism. The main. purpose of the book, however, appears to be to provide the world of gossip with a dish of unlimited scandal and personal anecdote. In the first volume of the book, which deals with the personages and incidents of Louis Philippe's reign, we make ac- quaintance with the bourgeois King himself, and likewise with Dumas and with Balzac, with Dumas the elder, that ever-fertile source of story and of character, with Alfred de Mnsset, and with "Dr. Peron." The latter, less known by name to the present generation, will perhaps for that reason be a more interesting study. "No more original figure in any civilised community has existed before or since," the author writes, "with the exception, perhaps, of Phineas Barnum," of which famous master of the advertiser's art, the Doctor, who enriched letters with his own memoirs in six volumes, was clearly the precursor. He was at once the founder of the Revue de Paris, which preceded the Revue des Deux _Honda, and the most famous and flourishing of the managers of the Paris Opera, a rare combination of successful generalship.

232,500 a year was the subsidy on which he accepted office,— a terrible sound of mockery to the manager at home. After all, what is there that money cannot do ? Is there any reason

to suppose that £32,000 a year from Government would not settle a much-vexed question by making England a musical nation in no' time ? Dr. Veron began by producing Robert le Diable, and there are amusing stories for the reader about Meyerbeer's constant nervousness, and as constant extrava- gance, where his own works were concerned. At the last • An Englishman in Paris : Notes and Recollections. In 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1892.

rehearsal, he was so upset by the beauty of the cloister-scene "set," that he feared the manager looked only for a spectacular success,—whereupon the Doctor immediately provided Princess Isabella with such a shabby lodging in the next act, that the composer bitterly complained that he wasn't worthy the ex- pense of a new scene. Managers must certainly have a trying time of it sometimes. Meantime he filled the papers with little anecdotes and paragraphs, inserting absolutely the puff direct and indirect which has since become so widespread an institution, till we are at last led to believe that everything, from costume to American journalism, was in its origin derived from France. He produced Meyerbeer, and dis- covered Taglioni, and succeeded in realising in four years a fortune of 22,000 a year, which would have been more but for the outbreak of cholera in 1832, when he refused to close his theatre because of the numbers dependent on him, and made his savings into ten parcels, each to hold out a month. Five were gone when the cholera disappeared. This story is all the more to the manager's credit because he was very careful of money. He would never travel on a railway, like Queen Victoria at first ; and when she gave up the prejudice, he declined to follow suit, on the ground that she had a successor and he had none. And when he found thirteen guests at his table, he sent two or three of them to the Cafe de Paris, requesting them to send him the bill.

The inspired ugliness of Taglioni is the subject of much dis- course to the author, who disliked her cordially, though she tried to be amiable with the Saxon races, while keeping the Latins at arm's-length,—an odd characteristic. She had to dance at Perth in answer to a deputation, without a corps de ballet or a male dancer ; and when she had to make love to a dummy, she made her servant play the part, which the manager only allowed him to do when he had been held down and shaved by a Scotch barber. At another time, when leaving St. Petersburg, she was stopped by a famous highwayman in a dark forest at midnight, and made to dance on her rugs in a muddy road for a quarter of an hour to the most appreciative audience she ever had, her two violinists playing the accompaniment. " Trischka " then sent her on her way, jewels and possessions and all, and only kept the rugs for his pains. It was a companion- incident to Claude Duval. It is almost impossible, as well as a pity, to quote at length from a book of anecdotes without spoiling the flavour, especially as they are all told with a view to character-drawing and character-contrast. In this respect, the author deserves much credit for the plan of his book, which strikes us as new. He contrasts for us Dumas with Sue, Balzac with Alfred de Musset, in a way which certainly brings the men vividly enough before us. Eugene Sue's affectations, and Congreve-like attempts to ignore the literary man altogether, while posing as a club-man and man of the world, are in delightful opposition to the fashions of "Dumas the ignorant," as it amused the novelist to call him- self, after he had learned that a philosopher of his name was known as "Dumas le Savant." The anecdotes of this delight- ful personality are all in the old vein ; and it amuses 1LS again to hear of a visitor, hearing roars of laughter in the study and wishing to leave, till informed that the novelist was engaged only with his own characters, and revelling in his own sallies. The joie de vivre, of which he was perhaps the joyousest of all possessors, was chronic with him till almost the end; and of his extraordinary fertility in invention and in cookery, we have examples here enough and to spare. When informed that Queen Victoria bad specially requested a per- formance of one of his comedies at St. Cloud, because she had been so charmed with it in London,—" Just like the author," he said ; "the more you see of him, the more you like him !" As for his powers of work and play, let this suffice. He had been out shooting all day since 6, and killed twenty-nine birds. He would not go back till he had shot his thirtieth, then went to rest at his farm. But as the farm-yard pre- vented him from sleeping, he sat before the fire, and was found by his son twirling his thumbs. "I'm resting," he said. He had invented and written in his head a one-act piece, afterwards acted at the Francais as Romulus. It was sent in anonymously, and accepted without a voice in opposition. As a politician, Dumas was not too favourably known in later years, but it is curious that daring Louis Philippe's reign, during a brief candidature, he should thus have spoken of the political state of Europe :—" Geographically, Prussia has the form of a serpent, and, like it, she seems to be asleep, and to gather her strength in order to swallow everything round her, —Denmark, Holland, Belgium ; and when she shall have swallowed all that, you will find that Austria will be swallowed in its turn, and perhaps, alas ! France also." No wonder that he was hissed; and he was an odd kind of candidate ; for when some brawlers taunted him for his "aristocratic grip," le threw two of them into the river to prove its force. Dumas and Musset, the writer says, forgetting what he had just said of Sue, were more than men of genius. They were men of the world, and pleasant companions, both strikingly handsome, though Musset's delicate appearance—" Miss Byron," Preault called him—was the marked opposite of Dumas' burly form. Balzac was a man of another kind altogether, and for a few months at a stretch would go to bed at 7 in the evening, be called at 4 a.m., write till 8, bed again till 9.30; after a light meal, write till 4 p.m., see a few friends, and take a bath or go out; then dine, and then bed. It is a strange summary enough. Rachel and the Brohans and Regnier among the actors (the anecdotes of the former, of her unscrupulous love of money, and of her talent for acquisition at any price, being both painful and surprising, much as the world has heard of them before), Auber and David among the composere, Delaoroix and Vernet among the painters, are the heroes and heroines of many of the author's tales : Eugene Delazroix being apparently an especial favourite with him, and an amusing anecdote being told of his calm in- difference to the advances of Georges Sand. The author, moreover, credits him with exceptional literary talent, though he could only read his English in translations. "ça ne pent pas etre cela," was his pithy comment on Shakespeare seen through the medium. His rules of life were simple,—the studio from 8 to 6. His experiences of Czar Nicholas, whom he believed decidedly insane, are among the most interesting of the reminiscences of Vernet.

To the student, perhaps the most interesting part of the volume is the chapter which deals with the Citizen-King, Louis Philippe himself, and his family, as they appeared to the author and to those who, like him, and to use his own words, refused to look at them through the spectacles supplied in turns by the Legitimists, the Imperialists, and Republicans. The King was by no means, we are told, the ardent ad- mirer of the bourgeoisie he professed to be. He resented the admiration which he felt to be patronage, and pined to conciliate his own caste, the old nobility, who ostracised him. "There is more difficulty," he said, "in getting people to my Court entertainments from across the Seine than from across the Channel." The English, and not always the best, were the principal guests of those days at the Tuileries. "When

the French," said Lord "sit round the table, it is not like a King dining with his subjects, but like half-a-hundred Kings dining with one subject." Like the bourgeoisie, the King loved his money for the sake of hoarding it, though he could be kind in cases of real distress. But he was always thinking of the misery of his early life, and haunted by the fear of poverty. "My dear Minister," he said to Guizot, " am telling you that my children will be wanting for bread." Once in 1843, when Queen Victoria paid him a visit at Ea, he offered her a peach in the garden. The Queen seemed rather embarrassed how to skin it, when Louis Philippe took a large clasp-knife from his pocket. "When a man has been a poor devil like' myself, obliged to live upon forty sous a day, he always carries a knife. I might have dispensed with it for the last few years ; still, I do not wish to lose the habit ; one does not know what may happen." Of course the tears stood in the Queen's eyes. But the King's chief sin in the eyes of his subjects, according to the narrator, was his neglect of the Parisian craving for pomp and display. That is the old theme. In the light of the later Republican history, however, one begins to doubt if the pampering of this supposed passion was not the mistake all through. His daughter Princess Clementine, mother of the ruler of Bulgaria, thought Louis Philippe trop Fere. And of her and of her brothers we hear some interesting details. The Duo de Nemours seems to have been remarkable for information and memory, and essentially grand seigneur ; while the Duo d'Aumale appears in these pages as the preux chevalier. His influence on the outside world the writer considers unaccounted for by his own merits, which lay mainly in wit and fascination. The palm is given to the Duo d'Orleans for knowledge of the French people as well as for personal charms, the author

ranking him as one of the three whom he holds as the "best company" he has known, the other two being the elder Dumas and Benjamin Disraeli. It is curious how continually the latter name crops up in this connection,—curious, too, that the Duke, unlike his witty brother, "never said anything worth remembering." It opens up a field of speculation as to what "the best company" may really mean.

As for the famous Revolution of 1848, we have read and re-read the chapter which recounts it without being able to gather the author's idea, or to grow any clearer-headed than before about the most puzzling of all the many puzzling reverses of French crowns and dynasties. Never after witnessing it, says the author, has he cared to read any history of modern France professing to deal with it. It was all a. question of money, he says, and quotes an authority who always refused to enter public life. "Lea convictions politiques en France," he said, " sont basees sur le fait que le louis d'or vaut sept fois plus que l'ecti de trois francs." If each of the men who led the revolutions of this century had been born with five thousand a year, their names would have been absent. If the Orleans family had been less rich, there would have been no settled Third Republic. If Louis Napoleon had been less poor, there would have been no Second Empire. If the latter had lasted another year, Gambetta would have been a Minister. Much virtue in an "if," indeed. We cannot say that our eye-witness's own acoount tells us very much, or holds us either. In his happy familiarity with all ranks and places, he escaped the deafening mob and the " Marseillaise " in the streets, having a strong objection to its brutalities, by turning into the green-room of the Varietes for a chat with Bouffe and D6jazet, a resource which might have attracted many, and was ready the neat morning to form his opinion on the "sovereign people" of France as a set whom "for cold-blooded, apish, monkeyish, tigerish cruelty, there is nothing on the face of God's earth to match," whom "no concession wrung from society will ever make anything but fiends in human shape." A dreary theory and dreary reading. The anecdotage is a welcome relief enough. At the sacking of the Tuileries, the divinity which hedges a King vindicated its existence by keeping all the riff- raff gazing superstitiously at the objects which "belonged to the Royal family" for some time before they touched them. The scene in the " Galerie de Diane" the writer describes as incredibly revolting, with the mob feasting on the King's interrupted breakfast; but the account reads to us more like a dreary farce than anything else. The whole thing leaves a melancholy and unintelligible impression upon the mind ; and we are not surprised that Dumas should have been "ashamed of lending his countenance to such a Republic as that."

A strange and dramatic contrast to the Citizen-King and his Court is the brilliant fantasy of the Empire, which is the text of the second volume. We are loth to say much of parts of it, feeling that, about the Empress at all events, Sc e vero e mal trawl°. We have too great a weakness for the gracious figure which has been so much amongst us, to wish to credit the scandalous tales which the chronicler connects with her in language which is more than hinting, and not to share our own Queen's partiality. But there is no closing the eyes to the license, if not the libertinism, which pervaded the Imperial Court and the revels of Compiegne, or affecting to suppose that its theatrical element did not lead it into very dan- gerous caprices. "The gracefulness of awkwardness" is the chronicler's description of Napoleon's gait, with the "some- thing indescribable" which arrested the attention. To the present writer it is new to be told that he spoke both English and French with the accent of an educated German, and to read this characteristic anecdote of Bismarck. "M. de Bismarck, I have never heard a German speak French as you do," the Emperor said to him. " Will you allow me to return the compliment, Sire ? " "Certainly." "I have never heard a Frenchman speak French as you do." "Blunt enough" to be genuine, says the author. "Rude enough," woald run as well. But it is interesting to note that, after the first impression on the author's mind, that Napoleon was an opium-eater, came the second, that he was the opium Which affected everybody. " Cavaignac, Thiers, Lamartine, Hugo, and the rest," is the instructive summary of the men of varying greatness who all meant to use him, but whom he used. As for his impeennio and all that came of it, we have the twice-told tale all over again, embellished with new anecdotes, but still the same; though we are entertained by the old beggar who one day offered to help him with a loan of three thousand francs, which she had saved out of many contri- butions, including his own. He declined ; but as he never forgot kindness, offered her a small annuity when he became Emperor. She declined that, only because he had refused. By Napoleon's side, of course, stand De Morny, and De Persigny, and Walewski, all the makers of the Second Empire, with their moneyless- ness, and their extravagance, and their intrigues,—a weary picture of a kind of baseness which palls on the heart and imagination. Was it all really true, this pale page of a fruit- less chronicle ? and is it not enough to make a despairing Democrat out of every man, till the unreasonable cravings, the unsatisfied lawlessness, the monotonous abuse, make a more despairing Naughtocmt of him again ? E par si muove. Whither, and to what end ? The Empress, Madame de Persigny, Madame Rouher, all come in for their share of anecdote of more or less uncomplimentary kind, though of the last name it is pleasant to read that Rouher was both in public and private life essentially honour- able and honest. We think that we have said enough to refer curious readers to the book itself for the files of Com- piegne, and all that went therewith, from the momentous ele- vation of Mademoiselle de Montijo. To ourselves, as to many others—obviously, we think, to the author—the pleasantest figure in the book is "Queen Victoria," with the wonderful festivities that attended her Parisian visit in 1855. One seems to understand all the loveableness at once, and the deference and honour with which the French nation then, as now, treated her apart from England. The Emperor's impassive face, as he received her at Boulogne, with all the thoughts that must have been behind it, has been a picture to us all before this, and inspired the late Tom Taylor with some wonderful lines in Punch. The following story is worth quoting, as characteristic of all :—

"I returned to the Rue Beaujou, and ran up against Bkanger, who was living there. The old man seemed in a great hurry, which was rather surprising, because he was essentially phleg- matic, and rarely put himself out for anything. 'I want to see your Queen,' he said. A year or two before he had refused to go to the Tuileries to see the Empress, who had sent for him. But in this case—`Je vais voir in femme. S'il y avait beaucoup de femmes comme elle, je leur pardonnerai d'etre reines.' "

And here is another picture, at the Municipal Ball :—

" I remember one little incident which caused a flutter of sur- prise among the Court la iies, who, even at that time, had already left off dancing in the pretty old-fashioned way, and merely walked through their quadrilles. Th3 royal matron of 35 executed every step as her dancing-master had taught her. Canrobert, who was watching, turned round to the lady on his arm, ` Pardi !

she dances as her soldiers f You want it—there it is.' Correct all through."

And we shall continue to think well, in spite of scandal, of the Mademoislle de Montijo who so fairly won this single- minded heart, and has so fairly kept it.

We shall close our extracts with a story of a heroine of another kind. Brusca ' wai Marshal Vaillant's much-devoted dog. The Marshal is an interesting figure in these pages. She was of no recognised breed. Her old master was an Austrian General who died at Solferino, and Valliant found her licking his wounds as he died, and took her home. She adored him, sat at his feet or lay at his side, and occasionally strolled gently through his dried plants and beetles. Only once did her sedate behaviour change,—at one of his re- ceptions years later, when Francis Joseph came to Paris. She caught sight of the once-familiar Austrian uniform from the landing, and everybody thought she was going mad. They locked her up in the bedroom, but she barked so that she had to be let out. With a bound she was in the drawing-room, and would not leave the side of the Austrian officers for three hours. When they left, she had to be forcibly prevented from abandoning home and master and everything for their sake, till the Marshal did not know whether to laugh or to cry. But from that day she rose in his esteem, as we hope she will in that of our readers.