A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

I should not have minded, Monsieur, said he, if you had had twenty girls—’Tis a score more, replied I, interrupting him, than I ever reckon’d upon—Provided, added he, it had been but in a morning.—And does the difference of the time of the day at Paris make a difference in the sin?—It made a difference, he said, in the scandal.—I like a good distinction in my heart; and cannot say I was intolerably out of temper with the man.—I own it is necessary, resumed the master of the hotel, that a stranger at Paris should have the opportunities presented to him of buying lace and silk stockings and ruffles, et tout cela;—and ’tis nothing if a woman comes with a band-box.—O, my conscience! said I, she had one but I never look’d into it.—Then Monsieur, said he, has bought nothing?—Not one earthly thing, replied I.—Because, said he, I could recommend one to you who would use you en conscience.—But I must see her this night, said I.—He made me a low bow, and walk’d down.

Now shall I triumph over this maître d’hôtel, cried I,—and what then?  Then I shall let him see I know he is a dirty fellow.—And what then?  What then?—I was too near myself to say it was for the sake of others.—I had no good answer left;—there was more of spleen than principle in my project, and I was sick of it before the execution.

In a few minutes the grisette came in with her box of lace.—I’ll buy nothing, however, said I, within myself.

The grisette would show me everything.—I was hard to please: she would not seem to see it; she opened her little magazine, and laid all her laces one after another before me;—unfolded and folded them up again one by one with the most patient sweetness.—I might buy,—or not;—she would let me have everything at my own price:—the poor creature seem’d anxious to get a penny; and laid herself out to win me, and not so much in a manner which seem’d artful, as in one I felt simple and caressing.

If there is not a fund of honest gullibility in man, so much the worse;—my heart relented, and I gave up my second resolution as quietly as the first.—Why should I chastise one for the trespass of another?  If thou art tributary to this tyrant of an host, thought I, looking up in her face, so much harder is thy bread.

If I had not had more than four louis d’ors in my purse, there was no such thing as rising up and showing her the door, till I had first laid three of them out in a pair of ruffles.

–The master of the hotel will share the profit with her;—no matter,—then I have only paid as many a poor soul has paid before me, for an act he could not do, or think of.

THE RIDDLE

PARIS

When La Fleur came up to wait upon me at supper, he told me how sorry the master of the hotel was for his affront to me in bidding me change my lodgings.

A man who values a good night’s rest will not lie down with enmity in his heart, if he can help it.—So I bid La Fleur tell the master of the hotel, that I was sorry on my side for the occasion I had given him;—and you may tell him, if you will, La Fleur, added I, that if the young woman should call again, I shall not see her.

This was a sacrifice not to him, but myself, having resolved, after so narrow an escape, to run no more risks, but to leave Paris, if it was possible, with all the virtue I enter’d it.

C’est déroger à noblesse, Monsieur, said La Fleur, making me a bow down to the ground as he said it.—Et encore, Monsieur, said he, may change his sentiments;—and if (par hazard) he should like to amuse himself,—I find no amusement in it, said I, interrupting him.—

Mon Dieu! said La Fleur,—and took away.

In an hour’s time he came to put me to bed, and was more than commonly officious:—something hung upon his lips to say to me, or ask me, which he could not get off: I could not conceive what it was, and indeed gave myself little trouble to find it out, as I had another riddle so much more interesting upon my mind, which was that of the man’s asking charity before the door of the hotel.—I would have given anything to have got to the bottom of it; and that, not out of curiosity,—’tis so low a principle of enquiry, in general, I would not purchase the gratification of it with a two-sous piece;—but a secret, I thought, which so soon and so certainly soften’d the heart of every woman you came near, was a secret at least equal to the philosopher’s stone; had I both the Indies, I would have given up one to have been master of it.

I toss’d and turn’d it almost all night long in my brains to no manner of purpose; and when I awoke in the morning, I found my spirits as much troubled with my dreams, as ever the King of Babylon had been with his; and I will not hesitate to affirm, it would have puzzled all the wise men of Paris as much as those of Chaldea to have given its interpretation.

LE DIMANCHE

PARIS

It was Sunday; and when La Fleur came in, in the morning, with my coffee and roll and butter, he had got himself so gallantly array’d, I scarce knew him.

I had covenanted at Montreuil to give him a new hat with a silver button and loop, and four louis d’ors, pour s’adoniser, when we got to Paris; and the poor fellow, to do him justice, had done wonders with it.

He had bought a bright, clean, good scarlet coat, and a pair of breeches of the same.—They were not a crown worse, he said, for the wearing.—I wish’d him hang’d for telling me.—They look’d so fresh, that though I knew the thing could not be done, yet I would rather have imposed upon my fancy with thinking I had bought them new for the fellow, than that they had come out of the Rue de Friperie.

This is a nicety which makes not the heart sore at Paris.

He had purchased, moreover, a handsome blue satin waistcoat, fancifully enough embroidered:—this was indeed something the worse for the service it had done, but ’twas clean scour’d;—the gold had been touch’d up, and upon the whole was rather showy than otherwise;—and as the blue was not violent, it suited with the coat and breeches very well: he had squeez’d out of the money, moreover, a new bag and a solitaire; and had insisted with the fripier upon a gold pair of garters to his breeches knees.—He had purchased muslin ruffles, bien brodées, with four livres of his own money;—and a pair of white silk stockings for five more;—and to top all, nature had given him a handsome figure, without costing him a sous.

He entered the room thus set off, with his hair dressed in the first style, and with a handsome bouquet in his breast.—In a word, there was that look of festivity in everything about him, which at once put me in mind it was Sunday;—and, by combining both together, it instantly struck me, that the favour he wish’d to ask of me the night before, was to spend the day as every body in Paris spent it besides.  I had scarce made the conjecture, when La Fleur, with infinite humility, but with a look of trust, as if I should not refuse him, begg’d I would grant him the day, pour faire le galant vis-à-vis de sa maîtresse.

Now it was the very thing I intended to do myself vis-à-vis Madame de R—.—I had retained the remise on purpose for it, and it would not have mortified my vanity to have had a servant so well dress’d as La Fleur was, to have got up behind it: I never could have worse spared him.

But we must feel, not argue in these embarrassments.—The sons and daughters of Service part with liberty, but not with nature, in their contracts; they are flesh and blood, and have their little vanities and wishes in the midst of the house of bondage, as well as their task-masters;—no doubt, they have set their self-denials at a price,—and their expectations are so unreasonable, that I would often disappoint them, but that their condition puts it so much in my power to do it.

Behold,—Behold, I am thy servant—disarms me at once of the powers of a master.—

Thou shalt go, La Fleur! said I.

–And what mistress, La Fleur, said I, canst thou have picked up in so little a time at Paris?  La Fleur laid his hand upon his breast, and said ’twas a petite demoiselle, at Monsieur le Count de B—’s.—La Fleur had a heart made for society; and, to speak the truth of him, let as few occasions slip him as his master;—so that somehow or other,—but how,—heaven knows,—he had connected himself with the demoiselle upon the landing of the staircase, during the time I was taken up with my passport; and as there was time enough for me to win the Count to my interest, La Fleur had contrived to make it do to win the maid to his.  The family, it seems, was to be at Paris that day, and he had made a party with her, and two or three more of the Count’s household, upon the boulevards.

Happy people! that once a week at least are sure to lay down all your cares together, and dance and sing and sport away the weights of grievance, which bow down the spirit of other nations to the earth.

THE FRAGMENT

PARIS

La Fleur had left me something to amuse myself with for the day more than I had bargain’d for, or could have enter’d either into his head or mine.

He had brought the little print of butter upon a currant leaf: and as the morning was warm, and he had a good step to bring it, he had begg’d a sheet of waste paper to put betwixt the currant leaf and his hand.—As that was plate sufficient, I bade him lay it upon the table as it was; and as I resolved to stay within all day, I ordered him to call upon the traîteur, to bespeak my dinner, and leave me to breakfast by myself.

When I had finished the butter, I threw the currant-leaf out of the window, and was going to do the same by the waste paper;—but stopping to read a line first, and that drawing me on to a second and third,—I thought it better worth; so I shut the window, and drawing a chair up to it, I sat down to read it.

It was in the old French of Rabelais’s time, and for aught I know might have been wrote by him:—it was moreover in a Gothic letter, and that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it cost me infinite trouble to make anything of it.—I threw it down; and then wrote a letter to Eugenius;—then I took it up again, and embroiled my patience with it afresh;—and then to cure that, I wrote a letter to Eliza.—Still it kept hold of me; and the difficulty of understanding it increased but the desire.

I got my dinner; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy; I at it again,—and, after two or three hours poring upon it, with almost as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription, I thought I made sense of it; but to make sure of it, the best way, I imagined, was to turn it into English, and see how it would look then;—so I went on leisurely, as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence,—then taking a turn or two,—and then looking how the world went, out of the window; so that it was nine o’clock at night before I had done it.—I then began and read it as follows.

THE FRAGMENT

PARIS

—Now, as the notary’s wife disputed the point with the notary with too much heat,—I wish, said the notary, (throwing down the parchment) that there was another notary here only to set down and attest all this.—

–And what would you do then, Monsieur? said she, rising hastily up.—The notary’s wife was a little fume of a woman, and the notary thought it well to avoid a hurricane by a mild reply.—I would go, answered he, to bed.—You may go to the devil, answer’d the notary’s wife.

Now there happening to be but one bed in the house, the other two rooms being unfurnished, as is the custom at Paris, and the notary not caring to lie in the same bed with a woman who had but that moment sent him pell mell to the devil, went forth with his hat and cane and short cloak, the night being very windy, and walk’d out, ill at ease, towards the Pont Neuf.

Of all the bridges which ever were built, the whole world who have pass’d over the Pont Neuf must own, that it is the noblest,—the finest,—the grandest,—the lightest,—the longest,—the broadest, that ever conjoin’d land and land together upon the face of the terraqueous globe.

[By this it seems as if the author of the fragment had not been a Frenchman.]

The worst fault which divines and the doctors of the Sorbonne can allege against it is, that if there is but a capfull of wind in or about Paris, ’tis more blasphemously sacre Dieu’d there than in any other aperture of the whole city,—and with reason good and cogent, Messieurs; for it comes against you without crying garde d’eau, and with such unpremeditable puffs, that of the few who cross it with their hats on, not one in fifty but hazards two livres and a half, which is its full worth.

The poor notary, just as he was passing by the sentry, instinctively clapp’d his cane to the side of it, but in raising it up, the point of his cane catching hold of the loop of the sentinel’s hat, hoisted it over the spikes of the ballustrade clear into the Seine.—

–’Tis an ill wind, said a boatman, who catched it, which blows nobody any good.

The sentry, being a Gascon, incontinently twirled up his whiskers, and levell’d his arquebuss.

Arquebusses in those days went off with matches; and an old woman’s paper lantern at the end of the bridge happening to be blown out, she had borrow’d the sentry’s match to light it:—it gave a moment’s time for the Gascon’s blood to run cool, and turn the accident better to his advantage.—’Tis an ill wind, said he, catching off the notary’s castor, and legitimating the capture with the boatman’s adage.

The poor notary crossed the bridge, and passing along the Rue de Dauphine into the fauxbourgs of St. Germain, lamented himself as he walked along in this manner:—