UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE. LIBRARY 3 1210 01981 1668 PARIS OF TO-DAY AN INTIMATE ACCOUNT OF ITS PEOPLE, ITS HOME LIFE, AND ITS PLACES OF INTEREST BY KATHARINE DE FOREST THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris Jf* Frederick & Emmanuelle D'Hauthuille-Schwartz ri$tma$ PARIS OF TO-DAY PARIS OF TO-DAY AN INTIMATE ACCOUNT OF ITS PEOPLE, ITS HOME LIFE, AND ITS PLACES OF INTEREST BY KATHARINE DE FOREST Sllustratefc LONDON GAY & BIRD 22, Bedford Street, Strand 1900 All righis reserved Preface, The writer of this book is an American who exiled herself from her country, not by in- tention; for chance sent her to Paris and fetters of business kept her there. Her ex- patriation found comfort, however, in an un- usual privilege of contact with many phases of French life; which, beholding with two pairs of eyes, she has sought to translate into philosophy. For, indeed, the Old World is in many respects terra incognita to the New. The tourist knits his brows in passing like a pilgrim under the dull eyes of the Sphinx. Here, for instance, is a country which for some hundreds of years has kept a certain number of its citizens set apart, starred, medalled and uniformed as immortals—how shall that be interpreted at the beginning of the twentieth century? Old art and literature, old temples and monuments, old customs and traditions, have these a message to neolog- ists? Do they rest on eternal principles and vi PREFACE. speak of unchanging truths? This book is perhaps less a guide-book than a dream- book. Certainly it was written, not so much to give information, as to interpret the genius of Paris. Nevertheless its facts are from in- side, reliable and in large part inaccessible sources. Thanks are due in particular to M. Andre Saglio, of the Beaux Arts, for many suggestive facts, especially in regard to the French movement in art. Contents. PART I.—THE LIFE AND PEOPLE. The Charm of Paris 3 The Academie Franchise and the Other Academies 14 The Comedie Fraxcaise 35 French Homes 55 The Latin Quarter 72 The Men of Letters 83 The Restaurants 109 The Great Shops 128 PART II.—THE RULERS OF PARIS. The Chamber of Deputies 141 The Elysee 158 In the Ministries 173 PART III.—THE ART LIFE AND ITS INSTITUTIONS. The Museum of Cluny 191 The Little Museums 205 Les Invalides 214 The Mode 219 The Studios 229 Notre Dame 261 The Commerce of Art in Paris .... 267 . List of Illitstratio7ts. A General View of Paris from the „ . , FACING Louvre,T Frontispiece. page Sunday on the Bois du Boulogne ... 8 Jules Claretie in His Library 18 Ready for School 26 Foyer of the Theatre Francaise ... 38 The Theatre Francaise 38 mounet-sully in hls library 44 Sarah Bernhardt 48 The Elder Coquelin 52 Cozy Corner in a French Home .... 64 A French Home 64 A Family Breakfast 68 On the Street 68 The Moulin Rouge 76 Zola in His Study 86 "Gyp" 94 Edmond Rostand in His Library .... 98 Pierre Loti 104 Restaurant Ledoyen 114 Salon in the Cafe de Paris 114 A Tramping Party of Painters 120 The Magazin du Printemps 130 The Bon Marche 130 Hall of Chamber of Deputies 152 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. FACING PAGE Decoration Over the Door of the Elvsee 168 The President's Library at the Elysee . i68' Under the Eiffel Tower 178 Place du Chatelet, Victory Fountain . 178 First Communicants 184 Coming Out from Mass at St. Germain des Pres 184 Room of Francis I., Cluny Museum ... 198 The Garden of Cluny 198 In the Garden of the Tuileries .... 208 The Tuileries Gardens, Rue de Riyoli Side 208 Napoleon's Tomb at the Hotel des Inva- lides 216 The Flower Market 222 In a Fiacre 222 Massenet at Home 232 Bonnat's Studio 242 Besnard in His Studio 242 Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre ... 252 General View of the Louvre from the River 252 The Arc de Triomphe 260 Bridge of Notre Dame 260 One of the Gargoyles on Notre Dame . 264 Entrance to Notre Dame 264 The Invalides 276 PART I. THE LIFE AND PEOPLE. The Charm of Paris. What is the secret of this enigmatic charm of Paris which, sooner or later, takes posses- sion of everyone? What is it about Paris which seizes people, envelops them, holds them, and often keeps them forever, even those who pro- fess to have the greatest lack of sympathy for the French? "Every man has two countries," said an old writer of the last century, "his own, and then France." And this seems to hold true even now of the capital. What is the key to this mysterious seduction? This is something which has intrigued and fascinated me from the time I first began to know the French capital. And now I have discovered that when you have solved this enigma you have got at one of the best means for under- standing the French people. For a long time it was instinctive to look to the natural beauty of Paris as one of the princi- pal sources of her charm, for she is singularly happy in her site; as Montaigne put it so pic- turesquely, "Elk est grande en felicite dc son assicttc." All her natural features combine to give varied artistic effects, especially the Seine, which traverses the city with the curve 3 4 PARIS AS IT IS. of a bow, so that with each quay and each bridge the landscape becomes of an entirely different character. At the little Pont de la Tournelle, for in- stance, what could be of more impressive grandeur than the view of the old Isle de la Cite rising in gray walls from the very water's edge to meet the massive and delicate silhou- ette of Notre Dame? But from the Pont des Arts, at the foot of the town, the Island of the City is entirely different. It is a fan- tastic vessel, with the spire of Ste. Chapelle for a golden mast, which cleaves the Seine with its elongated point, green with plants and flowers, like a prow. At the Pont des Invalides the scene changes again. At the turn of the stream the horizon is bounded by the Trocadero, rising with its two minarets from the side of a hill, and you would say the river stopped there to lose itself in some mysterious gulf hidden in the gardens of that Palace of the Thousand and One Nights. Be- yond the Pont de Passy, near the Isle des Cygnes, you are in Holland. The river is a melancholy basin whose low, green shores are bordered by dark, smoking factories. Then, as you look off and your eyes fall on the hills of Sevres and of Meudon outlined in soft, un- dulating lines against the sky, and you seem to be sailing in some old French print. Paris is like a fruit divided into two halves THE CHARM OF PARIS. 5 by the gleaming steel of the river, and over each half on either side rises a height which augments the impression of immensity. On the left bank it is the Mountain of Sainte Gene- vieve crowned by the Pantheon, with its belt of columns on which rests its enormous dome. On the right is the white church of the Sacre Cceur, gleaming on the hill of Mont Martre like some celestial vision. It is at its threshold, rather than from the Eiffel Tower or any- where else, I think, that you get the most poignant impressions of Paris as a whole. It lies spread out before you, with its setting of distant hills, its swarming expanse of houses dominated here and there by palaces, and broken by the green of gardens ; and from that distance the sounds of the city come to you only as one great suppressed murmur, a mur- mur palpitating with the life of this great heart of the old world. All this natural beauty it is easy to recognize as one of the great advan- ages of Paris, but beauty counts for very little in its charm. And, indeed, my expe- rience is that Paris is not one of the cities whose beauty is spoken of as one of its con- spicuous features, as with Edinburgh, for in- stance. Most people who go there in the sum- mer when it is deserted are disappointed, and if you ask the average stranger what the attrac- tion of Paris is, he rarely answers its beauty, but always its movement, its life; by which 6 PARIS AS IT IS. he generally means some such thing as sitting at a little table on the boulevard, or going about to the Bohemian resorts of Montmartre, most of which are entirely arrayed, he discov- ers later, to meet his preconceived ideals, and have nothing to do with the real life of Paris at all. For that matter, what can you fix upon as the life of this great city, where each quarter is, as it were, a city within a city, having its own particular character and its own esprit? It is as hard to define it as it is to analyze the heart of a man tossed by a thousand conflict- ing emotions. And yet in the heart of a town, as in the heart of a human being, you can al- ways find dominant characteristics which ex- plain each. Many years ago a sentence spoken by a lit- tle Paris hairdresser first gave me a key to Paris.