<h2> <SPAN name="ch12" id="ch12"></SPAN>CHAPTER XII. </h2>
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<p>We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France. What
a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of bright green
lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their grasses
trimmed by the barber. Surely the hedges are shaped and measured and their
symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners. Surely the long
straight rows of stately poplars that divide the beautiful landscape like
the squares of a checker-board are set with line and plummet, and their
uniform height determined with a spirit level. Surely the straight,
smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-planed and sandpapered every day.
How else are these marvels of symmetry, cleanliness, and order attained?
It is wonderful. There are no unsightly stone walls and never a fence of
any kind. There is no dirt, no decay, no rubbish anywhere—nothing
that even hints at untidiness—nothing that ever suggests neglect.
All is orderly and beautiful—every thing is charming to the eye.</p>
<p>We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between its grassy banks;
of cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrubbery; of quaint old red-tiled
villages with mossy medieval cathedrals looming out of their midst; of
wooded hills with ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles
projecting above the foliage; such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us,
such visions of fabled fairyland!</p>
<p>We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of: "—thy cornfields
green, and sunny vines, O pleasant land of France!"</p>
<p>And it is a pleasant land. No word describes it so felicitously as that
one. They say there is no word for "home" in the French language. Well,
considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive
aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word. Let us not
waste too much pity on "homeless" France. I have observed that Frenchmen
abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or
other. I am not surprised at it now.</p>
<p>We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, though. We took
first-class passage, not because we wished to attract attention by doing a
thing which is uncommon in Europe but because we could make our journey
quicker by so doing. It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any
country. It is too tedious. Stagecoaching is infinitely more delightful.
Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the West in a
stagecoach, from the Missouri line to California, and since then all my
pleasure trips must be measured to that rare holiday frolic. Two thousand
miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and by day, and
never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest! The first seven hundred
miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and softer and smoother
than any sea and figured with designs fitted to its magnitude—the
shadows of the clouds. Here were no scenes but summer scenes, and no
disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on the mail sacks
in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of peace—what
other, where all was repose and contentment? In cool mornings, before the
sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city toiling and moiling to
perch in the foretop with the driver and see the six mustangs scamper
under the sharp snapping of the whip that never touched them; to scan the
blue distances of a world that knew no lords but us; to cleave the wind
with uncovered head and feel the sluggish pulses rousing to the spirit of
a speed that pretended to the resistless rush of a typhoon! Then thirteen
hundred miles of desert solitudes; of limitless panoramas of bewildering
perspective; of mimic cities, of pinnacled cathedrals, of massive
fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal rocks and splendid with the
crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy altitudes among fog-wreathed
peaks and never-melting snows, where thunders and lightnings and tempests
warred magnificently at our feet and the storm clouds above swung their
shredded banners in our very faces! But I forgot. I am in elegant France
now, and not scurrying through the great South Pass and the Wind River
Mountains, among antelopes and buffaloes and painted Indians on the
warpath. It is not meet that I should make too disparaging comparisons
between humdrum travel on a railway and that royal summer flight across a
continent in a stagecoach. I meant in the beginning to say that railway
journeying is tedious and tiresome, and so it is—though at the time
I was thinking particularly of a dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New
York and St. Louis. Of course our trip through France was not really
tedious because all its scenes and experiences were new and strange; but
as Dan says, it had its "discrepancies."</p>
<p>The cars are built in compartments that hold eight persons each. Each
compartment is partially subdivided, and so there are two tolerably
distinct parties of four in it. Four face the other four. The seats and
backs are thickly padded and cushioned and are very comfortable; you can
smoke if you wish; there are no bothersome peddlers; you are saved the
infliction of a multitude of disagreeable fellow passengers. So far, so
well. But then the conductor locks you in when the train starts; there is
no water to drink in the car; there is no heating apparatus for night
travel; if a drunken rowdy should get in, you could not remove a matter of
twenty seats from him or enter another car; but above all, if you are worn
out and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with cramped legs
and in a torturing misery that leaves you withered and lifeless the next
day—for behold they have not that culmination of all charity and
human kindness, a sleeping car, in all France. I prefer the American
system. It has not so many grievous "discrepancies."</p>
<p>In France, all is clockwork, all is order. They make no mistakes. Every
third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a
brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions
with tireless politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and
ready to go and put you into it to make sure that you shall not go astray.
You cannot pass into the waiting room of the depot till you have secured
your ticket, and you cannot pass from its only exit till the train is at
its threshold to receive you. Once on board, the train will not start till
your ticket has been examined—till every passenger's ticket has been
inspected. This is chiefly for your own good. If by any possibility you
have managed to take the wrong train, you will be handed over to a polite
official who will take you whither you belong and bestow you with many an
affable bow. Your ticket will be inspected every now and then along the
route, and when it is time to change cars you will know it. You are in the
hands of officials who zealously study your welfare and your interest,
instead of turning their talents to the invention of new methods of
discommoding and snubbing you, as is very often the main employment of
that exceedingly self-satisfied monarch, the railroad conductor of
America.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>But the happiest regulation in French railway government is—thirty
minutes to dinner! No five-minute boltings of flabby rolls, muddy coffee,
questionable eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception and
execution are a dark and bloody mystery to all save the cook that created
them!<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>No, we sat calmly down—it was in old Dijon, which is so easy to
spell and so impossible to pronounce except when you civilize it and call
it Demijohn—and poured out rich Burgundian wines and munched calmly
through a long table d'hote bill of fare, snail patties, delicious fruits
and all, then paid the trifle it cost and stepped happily aboard the train
again, without once cursing the railroad company. A rare experience and
one to be treasured forever.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it
must be true. If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads or
through tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level.
About every quarter of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held up
a club till the train went by, to signify that everything was safe ahead.
Switches were changed a mile in advance by pulling a wire rope that passed
along the ground by the rail, from station to station. Signals for the day
and signals for the night gave constant and timely notice of the position
of switches.</p>
<p>No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France. But why?
Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it! Not hang, maybe, but
be punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make negligence a
thing to be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a day thereafter.
"No blame attached to the officers"—that lying and disaster-breeding
verdict so common to our softhearted juries is seldom rendered in France.
If the trouble occurred in the conductor's department, that officer must
suffer if his subordinate cannot be proven guilty; if in the engineer's
department and the case be similar, the engineer must answer.</p>
<p>The Old Travelers—those delightful parrots who have "been here
before" and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or
ever will know—tell us these things, and we believe them because
they are pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and
savor of the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us
everywhere.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and
lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few
feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every
individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their
throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and
blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim,
is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble
in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know
anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh
unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the
statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities;
they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they
have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the
fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for
their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for
their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of
imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming
mendacity!</p>
<p>By Lyons and the Saone (where we saw the lady of Lyons and thought little
of her comeliness), by Villa Franca, Tonnere, venerable Sens, Melun,
Fontainebleau, and scores of other beautiful cities, we swept, always
noting the absence of hog-wallows, broken fences, cow lots, unpainted
houses, and mud, and always noting, as well, the presence of cleanliness,
grace, taste in adorning and beautifying, even to the disposition of a
tree or the turning of a hedge, the marvel of roads in perfect repair,
void of ruts and guiltless of even an inequality of surface—we
bowled along, hour after hour, that brilliant summer day, and as nightfall
approached we entered a wilderness of odorous flowers and shrubbery, sped
through it, and then, excited, delighted, and half persuaded that we were
only the sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in magnificent Paris!</p>
<p>What excellent order they kept about that vast depot! There was no frantic
crowding and jostling, no shouting and swearing, and no swaggering
intrusion of services by rowdy hackmen. These latter gentry stood outside—stood
quietly by their long line of vehicles and said never a word. A kind of
hackman general seemed to have the whole matter of transportation in his
hands. He politely received the passengers and ushered them to the kind of
conveyance they wanted, and told the driver where to deliver them. There
was no "talking back," no dissatisfaction about overcharging, no grumbling
about anything. In a little while we were speeding through the streets of
Paris and delightfully recognizing certain names and places with which
books had long ago made us familiar. It was like meeting an old friend
when we read Rue de Rivoli on the street corner; we knew the genuine vast
palace of the Louvre as well as we knew its picture; when we passed by the
Column of July we needed no one to tell us what it was or to remind us
that on its site once stood the grim Bastille, that grave of human hopes
and happiness, that dismal prison house within whose dungeons so many
young faces put on the wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits grew humble,
so many brave hearts broke.</p>
<p>We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds put into one
room, so that we might be together, and then we went out to a restaurant,
just after lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering
dinner. It was a pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food so
well cooked, the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing company
so moustached, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonderfully
Frenchy! All the surroundings were gay and enlivening. Two hundred people
sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and coffee; the streets
were thronged with light vehicles and with joyous pleasure-seekers; there
was music in the air, life and action all about us, and a conflagration of
gaslight everywhere!</p>
<p>After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might see
without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered through the brilliant
streets and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and jewelry
shops. Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put
unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the
incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed
we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile
verbs and participles.</p>
<p>We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of the articles marked
"gold" and some labeled "imitation." We wondered at this extravagance of
honesty and inquired into the matter. We were informed that inasmuch as
most people are not able to tell false gold from the genuine article, the
government compels jewelers to have their gold work assayed and stamped
officially according to its fineness and their imitation work duly labeled
with the sign of its falsity. They told us the jewelers would not dare to
violate this law, and that whatever a stranger bought in one of their
stores might be depended upon as being strictly what it was represented to
be. Verily, a wonderful land is France!</p>
<p>Then we hunted for a barber-shop. From earliest infancy it had been a
cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial barber-shop
in Paris. I wished to recline at full length in a cushioned invalid chair,
with pictures about me and sumptuous furniture; with frescoed walls and
gilded arches above me and vistas of Corinthian columns stretching far
before me; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate my senses and the
slumbrous drone of distant noises to soothe me to sleep. At the end of an
hour I would wake up regretfully and find my face as smooth and as soft as
an infant's. Departing, I would lift my hands above that barber's head and
say, "Heaven bless you, my son!"</p>
<p>So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but never a
barber-shop could we see. We saw only wig-making establishments, with
shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen
brigands who stared out from glass boxes upon the passer-by with their
stony eyes and scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances. We
shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that the
wig-makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, since we could find
no single legitimate representative of the fraternity. We entered and
asked, and found that it was even so.</p>
<p>I said I wanted to be shaved. The barber inquired where my room was. I
said never mind where my room was, I wanted to be shaved—there, on
the spot. The doctor said he would be shaved also. Then there was an
excitement among those two barbers! There was a wild consultation, and
afterwards a hurrying to and fro and a feverish gathering up of razors
from obscure places and a ransacking for soap. Next they took us into a
little mean, shabby back room; they got two ordinary sitting-room chairs
and placed us in them with our coats on. My old, old dream of bliss
vanished into thin air!<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn. One of the wig-making
villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by
plastering a mass of suds into my mouth. I expelled the nasty stuff with a
strong English expletive and said, "Foreigner, beware!" Then this outlaw
strapped his razor on his boot, hovered over me ominously for six fearful
seconds, and then swooped down upon me like the genius of destruction. The
first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my face and lifted me
out of the chair. I stormed and raved, and the other boys enjoyed it.
Their beards are not strong and thick. Let us draw the curtain over this
harrowing scene.</p>
<p>Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel infliction of
a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my
cheeks now and then, but I survived. Then the incipient assassin held a
basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face, and
into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense of
washing away the soap and blood. He dried my features with a towel and was
going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused. I said, with withering
irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned—I declined to be
scalped.</p>
<p>I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never,
never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.
The truth is, as I believe I have since found out, that they have no
barber shops worthy of the name in Paris—and no barbers, either, for
that matter. The impostor who does duty as a barber brings his pans and
napkins and implements of torture to your residence and deliberately skins
you in your private apartments. Ah, I have suffered, suffered, suffered,
here in Paris, but never mind—the time is coming when I shall have a
dark and bloody revenge. Someday a Parisian barber will come to my room to
skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never be heard of more.</p>
<p>At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to
billiards. Joy! We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that were
not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than a
brick pavement—one of those wretched old things with dead cushions,
and with patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made
the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles and perform
feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impossible "scratches" that
were perfectly bewildering. We had played at Gibraltar with balls the size
of a walnut, on a table like a public square—and in both instances
we achieved far more aggravation than amusement. We expected to fare
better here, but we were mistaken. The cushions were a good deal higher
than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of always stopping under
the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way of caroms. The
cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so crooked that in
making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly put
the "English" on the wrong side of the hall. Dan was to mark while the
doctor and I played. At the end of an hour neither of us had made a count,
and so Dan was tired of keeping tally with nothing to tally, and we were
heated and angry and disgusted. We paid the heavy bill—about six
cents—and said we would call around sometime when we had a week to
spend, and finish the game.</p>
<p>We adjourned to one of those pretty cafes and took supper and tested the
wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do, and found them
harmless and unexciting. They might have been exciting, however, if we had
chosen to drink a sufficiency of them.</p>
<p>To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought
our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our sumptuous
bed to read and smoke—but alas!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was pitiful,<br/> In a whole city-full,<br/> Gas we had none.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p><br/> *(Joke by the Doctor) <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<p>No gas to read by—nothing but dismal candles. It was a shame. We
tried to map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French "guides
to Paris"; we talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail
of the wild chaos of the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to
indolent smoking; we gaped and yawned and stretched—then feebly
wondered if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and drifted
drowsily away into that vast mysterious void which men call sleep.<br/>
<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
<h2> <SPAN name="ch13" id="ch13"></SPAN>CHAPTER XIII. </h2>
<p>The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock. We went to the
'commissionaire' of the hotel—I don't know what a 'commissionaire'
is, but that is the man we went to—and told him we wanted a guide.
He said the national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen
and Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to find a good
guide unemployed. He said he usually kept a dozen or two on hand, but he
only had three now.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>He called them. One looked so like a very pirate that we let him go at
once. The next one spoke with a simpering precision of pronunciation that
was irritating and said:</p>
<p>"If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in hees
serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look upon in
ze beautiful Parree. I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw."</p>
<p>He would have done well to have stopped there, because he had that much by
heart and said it right off without making a mistake. But his
self-complacency seduced him into attempting a flight into regions of
unexplored English, and the reckless experiment was his ruin. Within ten
seconds he was so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and
bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever have gotten
him out of it with credit. It was plain enough that he could not "speaky"
the English quite as "pairfaitemaw" as he had pretended he could.</p>
<p>The third man captured us. He was plainly dressed, but he had a noticeable
air of neatness about him. He wore a high silk hat which was a little old,
but had been carefully brushed. He wore second-hand kid gloves, in good
repair, and carried a small rattan cane with a curved handle—a
female leg—of ivory. He stepped as gently and as daintily as a cat
crossing a muddy street; and oh, he was urbanity; he was quiet,
unobtrusive self-possession; he was deference itself! He spoke softly and
guardedly; and when he was about to make a statement on his sole
responsibility or offer a suggestion, he weighed it by drachms and
scruples first, with the crook of his little stick placed meditatively to
his teeth. His opening speech was perfect. It was perfect in construction,
in phraseology, in grammar, in emphasis, in pronunciation—everything.
He spoke little and guardedly after that. We were charmed. We were more
than charmed—we were overjoyed. We hired him at once. We never even
asked him his price. This man—our lackey, our servant, our
unquestioning slave though he was—was still a gentleman—we
could see that—while of the other two one was coarse and awkward and
the other was a born pirate. We asked our man Friday's name. He drew from
his pocketbook a snowy little card and passed it to us with a profound
bow:</p>
<p>A. BILLFINGER,</p>
<p>Guide to Paris, France, Germany,</p>
<p>Spain, etc., etc.</p>
<p>Grande Hotel du Louvre.</p>
<p>"Billfinger! Oh, carry me home to die!"</p>
<p>That was an "aside" from Dan. The atrocious name grated harshly on my ear,
too. The most of us can learn to forgive, and even to like, a countenance
that strikes us unpleasantly at first, but few of us, I fancy, become
reconciled to a jarring name so easily. I was almost sorry we had hired
this man, his name was so unbearable. However, no matter. We were
impatient to start. Billfinger stepped to the door to call a carriage, and
then the doctor said:</p>
<p>"Well, the guide goes with the barbershop, with the billiard-table, with
the gasless room, and may be with many another pretty romance of Paris. I
expected to have a guide named Henri de Montmorency, or Armand de la
Chartreuse, or something that would sound grand in letters to the
villagers at home, but to think of a Frenchman by the name of Billfinger!
Oh! This is absurd, you know. This will never do. We can't say Billfinger;
it is nauseating. Name him over again; what had we better call him? Alexis
du Caulaincourt?"</p>
<p>"Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville," I suggested.</p>
<p>"Call him Ferguson," said Dan.</p>
<p>That was practical, unromantic good sense. Without debate, we expunged
Billfinger as Billfinger, and called him Ferguson.</p>
<p>The carriage—an open barouche—was ready. Ferguson mounted
beside the driver, and we whirled away to breakfast. As was proper, Mr.
Ferguson stood by to transmit our orders and answer questions. By and by,
he mentioned casually—the artful adventurer—that he would go
and get his breakfast as soon as we had finished ours. He knew we could
not get along without him and that we would not want to loiter about and
wait for him. We asked him to sit down and eat with us. He begged, with
many a bow, to be excused. It was not proper, he said; he would sit at
another table. We ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us.</p>
<p>Here endeth the first lesson. It was a mistake.</p>
<p>As long as we had that fellow after that, he was always hungry; he was
always thirsty. He came early; he stayed late; he could not pass a
restaurant; he looked with a lecherous eye upon every wine shop.
Suggestions to stop, excuses to eat and to drink, were forever on his
lips. We tried all we could to fill him so full that he would have no room
to spare for a fortnight, but it was a failure. He did not hold enough to
smother the cravings of his superhuman appetite.</p>
<p>He had another "discrepancy" about him. He was always wanting us to buy
things. On the shallowest pretenses he would inveigle us into shirt
stores, boot stores, tailor shops, glove shops—anywhere under the
broad sweep of the heavens that there seemed a chance of our buying
anything. Anyone could have guessed that the shopkeepers paid him a
percentage on the sales, but in our blessed innocence we didn't until this
feature of his conduct grew unbearably prominent. One day Dan happened to
mention that he thought of buying three or four silk dress patterns for
presents. Ferguson's hungry eye was upon him in an instant. In the course
of twenty minutes the carriage stopped.</p>
<p>"What's this?"</p>
<p>"Zis is ze finest silk magazin in Paris—ze most celebrate."</p>
<p>"What did you come here for? We told you to take us to the palace of the
Louvre."</p>
<p>"I suppose ze gentleman say he wish to buy some silk."</p>
<p>"You are not required to 'suppose' things for the party, Ferguson. We do
not wish to tax your energies too much. We will bear some of the burden
and heat of the day ourselves. We will endeavor to do such 'supposing' as
is really necessary to be done. Drive on." So spake the doctor.</p>
<p>Within fifteen minutes the carriage halted again, and before another silk
store. The doctor said:</p>
<p>"Ah, the palace of the Louvre—beautiful, beautiful edifice! Does the
Emperor Napoleon live here now, Ferguson?"</p>
<p>"Ah, Doctor! You do jest; zis is not ze palace; we come there directly.
But since we pass right by zis store, where is such beautiful silk—"</p>
<p>"Ah! I see, I see. I meant to have told you that we did not wish to
purchase any silks to-day, but in my absent-mindedness I forgot it. I also
meant to tell you we wished to go directly to the Louvre, but I forgot
that also. However, we will go there now. Pardon my seeming carelessness,
Ferguson. Drive on."</p>
<p>Within the half hour we stopped again—in front of another silk
store. We were angry; but the doctor was always serene, always
smooth-voiced. He said:</p>
<p>"At last! How imposing the Louvre is, and yet how small! How exquisitely
fashioned! How charmingly situated!—Venerable, venerable pile—"</p>
<p>"Pairdon, Doctor, zis is not ze Louvre—it is—"</p>
<p>"What is it?"</p>
<p>"I have ze idea—it come to me in a moment—zat ze silk in zis
magazin—"<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>that we did not wish to buy any silks to-day, and I also intended to tell
you that we yearned to go immediately to the palace of the Louvre, but
enjoying the happiness of seeing you devour four breakfasts this morning
has so filled me with pleasurable emotions that I neglect the commonest
interests of the time. However, we will proceed now to the Louvre,
Ferguson."</p>
<p>"But, doctor," (excitedly,) "it will take not a minute—not but one
small minute! Ze gentleman need not to buy if he not wish to—but
only look at ze silk—look at ze beautiful fabric. [Then pleadingly.]
Sair—just only one leetle moment!"</p>
<p>Dan said, "Confound the idiot! I don't want to see any silks today, and I
won't look at them. Drive on."</p>
<p>And the doctor: "We need no silks now, Ferguson. Our hearts yearn for the
Louvre. Let us journey on—let us journey on."</p>
<p>"But doctor! It is only one moment—one leetle moment. And ze time
will be save—entirely save! Because zere is nothing to see now—it
is too late. It want ten minute to four and ze Louvre close at four—only
one leetle moment, Doctor!"</p>
<p>The treacherous miscreant! After four breakfasts and a gallon of
champagne, to serve us such a scurvy trick. We got no sight of the
countless treasures of art in the Louvre galleries that day, and our only
poor little satisfaction was in the reflection that Ferguson sold not a
solitary silk dress pattern.</p>
<p>I am writing this chapter partly for the satisfaction of abusing that
accomplished knave Billfinger, and partly to show whosoever shall read
this how Americans fare at the hands of the Paris guides and what sort of
people Paris guides are. It need not be supposed that we were a stupider
or an easier prey than our countrymen generally are, for we were not. The
guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the first
time and sees its sights alone or in company with others as little
experienced as himself. I shall visit Paris again someday, and then let
the guides beware! I shall go in my war paint—I shall carry my
tomahawk along.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>I think we have lost but little time in Paris. We have gone to bed every
night tired out. Of course we visited the renowned International
Exposition. All the world did that. We went there on our third day in
Paris—and we stayed there nearly two hours. That was our first and
last visit. To tell the truth, we saw at a glance that one would have to
spend weeks—yea, even months—in that monstrous establishment
to get an intelligible idea of it. It was a wonderful show, but the moving
masses of people of all nations we saw there were a still more wonderful
show. I discovered that if I were to stay there a month, I should still
find myself looking at the people instead of the inanimate objects on
exhibition. I got a little interested in some curious old tapestries of
the thirteenth century, but a party of Arabs came by, and their dusky
faces and quaint costumes called my attention away at once. I watched a
silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements and a living
intelligence in his eyes—watched him swimming about as comfortably
and as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a
jeweler's shop—watched him seize a silver fish from under the water
and hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate
motions of swallowing it—but the moment it disappeared down his
throat some tattooed South Sea Islanders approached and I yielded to their
attractions.</p>
<p>Presently I found a revolving pistol several hundred years old which
looked strangely like a modern Colt, but just then I heard that the
Empress of the French was in another part of the building, and hastened
away to see what she might look like. We heard martial music—we saw
an unusual number of soldiers walking hurriedly about—there was a
general movement among the people. We inquired what it was all about and
learned that the Emperor of the French and the Sultan of Turkey were about
to review twenty-five thousand troops at the Arc de l'Etoile. We
immediately departed. I had a greater anxiety to see these men than I
could have had to see twenty expositions.</p>
<p>We drove away and took up a position in an open space opposite the
American minister's house. A speculator bridged a couple of barrels with a
board and we hired standing places on it. Presently there was a sound of
distant music; in another minute a pillar of dust came moving slowly
toward us; a moment more and then, with colors flying and a grand crash of
military music, a gallant array of cavalrymen emerged from the dust and
came down the street on a gentle trot. After them came a long line of
artillery; then more cavalry, in splendid uniforms; and then their
imperial majesties Napoleon III and Abdul Aziz. The vast concourse of
people swung their hats and shouted—the windows and housetops in the
wide vicinity burst into a snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs, and the
wavers of the same mingled their cheers with those of the masses below. It
was a stirring spectacle.</p>
<p>But the two central figures claimed all my attention. Was ever such a
contrast set up before a multitude till then?<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>Napoleon in military uniform—a long-bodied, short-legged man,
fiercely moustached, old, wrinkled, with eyes half closed, and such a
deep, crafty, scheming expression about them!—Napoleon, bowing ever
so gently to the loud plaudits, and watching everything and everybody with
his cat eyes from under his depressed hat brim, as if to discover any sign
that those cheers were not heartfelt and cordial.</p>
<p>Abdul Aziz, absolute lord of the Ottoman empire—clad in dark green
European clothes, almost without ornament or insignia of rank; a red
Turkish fez on his head; a short, stout, dark man, black-bearded,
black-eyed, stupid, unprepossessing—a man whose whole appearance
somehow suggested that if he only had a cleaver in his hand and a white
apron on, one would not be at all surprised to hear him say: "A mutton
roast today, or will you have a nice porterhouse steak?"</p>
<p>Napoleon III, the representative of the highest modern civilization,
progress, and refinement; Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by
nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive,
superstitious—and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny,
Rapacity, Blood. Here in brilliant Paris, under this majestic Arch of
Triumph, the First Century greets the Nineteenth!</p>
<p>NAPOLEON III., Emperor of France! Surrounded by shouting thousands, by
military pomp, by the splendors of his capital city, and companioned by
kings and princes—this is the man who was sneered at and reviled and
called Bastard—yet who was dreaming of a crown and an empire all the
while; who was driven into exile—but carried his dreams with him;
who associated with the common herd in America and ran foot races for a
wager—but still sat upon a throne in fancy; who braved every danger
to go to his dying mother—and grieved that she could not be spared
to see him cast aside his plebeian vestments for the purple of royalty;
who kept his faithful watch and walked his weary beat a common policeman
of London—but dreamed the while of a coming night when he should
tread the long-drawn corridors of the Tuileries; who made the miserable
fiasco of Strasbourg; saw his poor, shabby eagle, forgetful of its lesson,
refuse to perch upon his shoulder; delivered his carefully prepared,
sententious burst of eloquence upon unsympathetic ears; found himself a
prisoner, the butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless ridicule of all
the world—yet went on dreaming of coronations and splendid pageants
as before; who lay a forgotten captive in the dungeons of Ham—and
still schemed and planned and pondered over future glory and future power;
President of France at last! a coup d'etat, and surrounded by applauding
armies, welcomed by the thunders of cannon, he mounts a throne and waves
before an astounded world the sceptre of a mighty empire! Who talks of the
marvels of fiction? Who speaks of the wonders of romance? Who prates of
the tame achievements of Aladdin and the Magii of Arabia?</p>
<p>ABDUL-AZIZ, Sultan of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Empire! Born to a
throne; weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; chief of a
vast royalty, yet the puppet of his Premier and the obedient child of a
tyrannical mother; a man who sits upon a throne—the beck of whose
finger moves navies and armies—who holds in his hands the power of
life and death over millions—yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats,
idles with his eight hundred concubines, and when he is surfeited with
eating and sleeping and idling, and would rouse up and take the reins of
government and threaten to be a sultan, is charmed from his purpose by
wary Fuad Pacha with a pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship—charmed
away with a new toy, like any other restless child; a man who sees his
people robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word
to save them; who believes in gnomes and genii and the wild fables of The
Arabian Nights, but has small regard for the mighty magicians of to-day,
and is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and
steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great
Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him;
a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth—a degraded,
poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime,
and brutality—and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial
life and then pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so!</p>
<p>Napoleon has augmented the commercial prosperity of France in ten years to
such a degree that figures can hardly compute it. He has rebuilt Paris and
has partly rebuilt every city in the state. He condemns a whole street at
a time, assesses the damages, pays them, and rebuilds superbly. Then
speculators buy up the ground and sell, but the original owner is given
the first choice by the government at a stated price before the speculator
is permitted to purchase. But above all things, he has taken the sole
control of the empire of France into his hands and made it a tolerably
free land—for people who will not attempt to go too far in meddling
with government affairs. No country offers greater security to life and
property than France, and one has all the freedom he wants, but no license—no
license to interfere with anybody or make anyone uncomfortable.</p>
<p>As for the Sultan, one could set a trap any where and catch a dozen abler
men in a night.</p>
<p>The bands struck up, and the brilliant adventurer, Napoleon III., the
genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise; and the feeble Abdul-Aziz, the
genius of Ignorance, Bigotry, and Indolence, prepared for the Forward—March!</p>
<p>We saw the splendid review, we saw the white-moustached old Crimean
soldier, Canrobert, Marshal of France, we saw—well, we saw every
thing, and then we went home satisfied.<br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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