John Burroughs : A Glimpse of France

John Burroughs

Winter Sunshine

(1875)

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE

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The fitness and good taste everywhere displayed in the French capital .. cannot fail to be refreshing to a traveller of any other land; in the dress and manners of the people, in the shops, and bazaars, and show-windows, in the markets, the equipages, the furniture, the hotels. It is entirely a new sensation to an American to look into a Parisian theatre, and see the acting and hear the music. ‘The chances are that, for the first time, he sees the interior of a theatre that _ does not have a hard, business-like, matter-of-fact air. The auditors look comfortable and cosey, and quite at home, and do not, shoulder to shoulder, and in solid lines, make a dead set at the play and the music. The theatre has warm hangings, warm colors, cosey boxes and stalls, and is in no sense the public, away-from-home place we are so familiar with in this country. Again, one might know it was Paris by the character of the prints and pictures in the shop-windows ; they are so clever, as art, one becomes reprehensibly indifferent to their license. Whatever sins the French may be guilty of, they never sin against art and good taste (except when in the frenzy of revolution), and, if Propriety is sometimes obliged to cry out ‘For shame!” in the French capital, she must do so with ill-concealed admiration, like a fond mother chiding with word and gesture, while she approves with tone and look. It is a foolish charge, often made, that the French make vice attractive ; they make it provocative of laughter ; the spark of wit is always evolved, and what is a better antidote to this kind of poison than mirth?

They carry their wit even into their cuisine. Every dish set before you at the table is a picture, and tickles your eye before it does your palate. When I ordered fried eggs, they were brought on a snow-white napkin, which was artistically folded upon a piece of ornamented tissue-paper, that covered a china plate; if I asked for cold ham, it came in flakes, arrayed like great rose-leaves, with a green sprig or two of parsley dropped upon it, and surrounded by a border of calvesfoot jelly, like a setting of crystals. The bread revealed new qualities in the wheat, it was so sweet and nutty ; and the fried potatoes, with which your beefsteak comes snowed under, are the very flower of the culinary art, and I believe impossible in any other country.

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The French give a touch of art to whatever they do. Even the drivers of drays, and carts, and trucks, about the streets, are not content with a plain, matter-of-fact whip, as an English or American laborer would be, but it must be a finely-modeled stalk, with a long, tapering lash tipped with the best silk snapper. Always the inevitable snapper. I doubt if there is a whip in

Paris without a snapper. Here is where the fine art, the rhetoric of driving, comes in. This converts a vulgar, prosy “gad” into a delicate instrument, to be wielded with pride and skill, and never to be literally applied to the backs of the animals, but to be launched to the right and left into the air with a professional flourish, and a sharp, ringing report. Crack! crack! crack! all day long go these ten thousand whips, like the boys’ Fourth of July fusillade.

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In the shops, and windows, and public halls, etc., this passion takes the form of mirrors, mirrors everywhere, on the walls, in the panels, in the cases, on the pillars, extending, multiplying, opening up vistas this way and that, and converting the smallest shop, with a solitary girl and a solitary customer, into an immense enchanted bazaar, across whose endless counters customers lean and pretty girls display goods. The French are always before the looking-glass, even when they eat and drink. I never went into a restaurant without seeing four or five fac-similes of myself approaching from as many different directions, giving the order to the waiter, and sitting down at the table. Hence, I always had plenty of company at dinner, though we were none of us very social, and I was the only one who entered or passed out at the door. The show-windows are the greatest cheat. What an expanse, how crowded, and how brilliant! You see, for instance, an immense array of jewelry, and pause to have a look. You begin at the end nearest you, and, after gazing a moment, take a step to run your eye along the dazzling display, when, presto! the trays of watches and diamonds vanish in a twinkling, and you find yourself looking into the door, or your delighted eyes suddenly bring up against a brick wall, disenchanted so quickly that you almost stagger.

I went into a popular music and dean hall one night, and found myself in a perfect enchantment of mirrors. Not an inch of wall was anywhere visible. I was suddenly caught up into the seventh heaven of looking-glasses, from which I came down with a shock the moment I emerged into the street again. I observed that this mirror contagion had broken out in spots in London, and, in the narrow and crowded condition of the shops there, even this illusory enlargement would be a relief. It might not improve the air, or add to the available storage capacity of the establishment, but it would certainly give a wider range to the eye.

The American no sooner sets foot on the soil of France than he perceives he has entered a nation of drinkers as he has left a nation of eaters. Men do not live by bread here, but by wine. Drink, drink, drink everywhere along all the boulevards, and streets, and quays, and by-ways ; in the restaurants and under awnings, and seated on the open sidewalk, social and convivial wine-bibbing — not hastily and in large quantities, but leisurely and reposingly, and with much conversation and enjoyment.

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One of the loveliest features of Paris is the Seine. I was never tired of walking along its course. Its granite embankments ; its numberless, superb bridges, throwing their graceful spans across it; its clear, limpid water ; its paved bed; the women washing ; the lively little boats ; and the many noble buildings that look down upon it — make it the most charming citizen-river I ever beheld. Rivers generally get badly soiled when they come to the city, like some other rural travellers ; but the Seine is as pure as a meadowbrook wherever I saw it, though I dare say it does not escape without some contamination. I believe it receives the sewerage discharges farther down, and is, no doubt, turbid and pitchy enough there, like its brother, the Thames, which comes into London with the sky and the clouds in its bosom, and leaves it reeking with filth and slime.

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