Читать книгу Paris Vistas - Helen Davenport Gibbons - Страница 14

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WE started our search for a temporary home at the Observatoire, and good fortune took our footsteps down the Rue d'Assas rather than down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Had we turned to the right instead of to the left, we should probably have found a pension that satisfied our requirements on the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Rue Claude Bernard, the Rue Soufflot, or behind the Panthéon. But a short distance down the Rue d'Assas, we turned into the Rue Madame, which held two possibilities on our list. The first place advertised proved to be a private apartment, whose mistress was looking for boarders for one room who would not only pay her rent but her food and her old father's as well. We got out quickly, and kept our hopes up for the second place. It was a small private hotel just below the Rue de Vaugirard, with a modest sign: Pension de Famille.

A beaming young woman, who told us that she was Mademoiselle Guyénot, propriétaire et directrice de la maison, answered our first question in a way that won our hearts forever. "Do I mind a baby!" she exclaimed. "I love them. No trouble in the world. Wish the bon dieu would allow me to have one myself. If any boarder complains about babies crying in my house, I ask them how they expect the world to keep on going. Parfait! Bring the little rabbit right along. Of course there is no charge. Is it I who will feed her? Think of it, then!" And Mademoiselle Guyénot opened wide her arms and lifted them Heavenward. Her eyes shone, and she laughed.

We engaged a room on the court, two flights up, for seventy francs a week tout compris, lodging, food, boots, wine. Lights would not amount to more than a franc a week. We could give what we wanted for attendance. The arrangement with Marie was perfect. She would stay at home and come for the days we wanted her. That meant only her noonday meal on our pension bill—one franc-fifty.

We got out of the Boulevard Diderot hotel none too soon. The charges were fully as much as at a first-class hotel (I have frequently since found this to be the case in trying to economize in travel) and made a serious dent in our nest-egg. When we reached the pension with our baby and baggage, we felt that it was only the square thing to acquaint the new friend who loved babies with our financial situation.

"Oh! la, la," cried Mademoiselle Guyénot, "you may pay me when you like!"

"You must understand," said my husband, "that we have just come out of Turkey and have very little money. Of course, as soon as we get settled, things will be all right again."

Mademoiselle received us in the bureau of her pension with open arms and lightning French. I could not get it all, but we knew she was glad to see us. She turned around on her chair and faced us as we sat on an old stuffed sofa surrounded by our suitcases.

"You must not worry," she exclaimed, "you must not worry du tout, du tout, du tout, du tout.... If you don't pay me I'll keep the baby, pauvre chou."

Mademoiselle's voice went up the scale and down again, dying away only when she opened her mouth wider to laugh.

Mademoiselle ran the pension single-handed in those days. Now she is Madame and the mother of two little girls. Monsieur is a mechanical genius and has himself installed many conveniences. He can paper a room, rig up a table lamp at the head of a bed, carry in the coal, forage for provisions with a hand-cart and a cheerful jusqu'au boutisme that stops at nothing. He is also able to make a quick change in clothes and bobs up serenely within fifteen minutes after unloading the potatoes, quite ready to make you a cocktail.

Mademoiselle handled her clients with cheerful firmness. She used to marshal the forces of her house with a strong and capable hand. You could not put one over on her then any more than you can now, as some transients discovered to their confusion. The regulars knew better than to try. On the other hand if your case was good and your complaint justified, she defended you with energy. Liberté, égalité, fraternité were realities in the Rue Madame.

The clientele was French for the most part: elderly people who had got tired of keeping house. Folks from the provinces who had come to town to spend the winter after Monsieur retired from business. Young people, mostly men, some of them long haired who were studying at the Sorbonne or elsewhere. And a sprinkling of transients whose chief effect upon the regulars was allowing them to shift about until they had possession of the rooms they wanted to keep at a monthly rate. When we went to the pension we were the only Americans. We paid five francs a day for room and board like everybody else excepting the old lady who had come to the house years ago when the rate was four francs fifty. German Hausfraus may be marvels in management, but I defy any lady Boche to beat Mademoiselle's efficiency. She got all the work of kitchen and dining-room done, and well done too, by Victorine the tireless, Louis the juggler and François the obsequious. Guillaume and Yvonne, a working menage, looked after the rooms until they got a swell job at the Ritz Hotel, where tips would count. The other three were fixtures.

In spirit the Rue Madame pension has not changed. The atmosphere to-day is as it was in nineteen hundred and nine. The table is good, plentiful, appetizing—and, oh, what a variety of meats and vegetables! The potatoes are never served in the same way twice in a week, and Madame Primel, as Mademoiselle is now called, cooks as many different plats de jour as her number in the street, which is forty-four. There the reader has my secret! But five francs a day no longer holds. In nineteen hundred and nineteen five francs will barely pay for a single meal. Not only has the price of food more than doubled, but the traveler is beginning to demand comforts that cost. We used to have buckets of coal brought up, and make a cheerful fire. We used to grope in the dark when we came home, strike a match, and look for our candle on the hall table. We used to have a lamp—the best light in the world—in our room. But now the pension in the Rue Madame has yielded to the demands of a discontented world. Steam heat, electric lights—these have had their part in making five francs a day disappear forever. The five franc pension exists only in the memory of Paris lovers, or in story books like mine.

At our table were Mrs. Reilly, a sprightly Irish woman called by the pensionnaires Madame Reely; Monsieur Mazeron, a law student with an ascetic blond face and hair like a duckling; an elderly couple from Normandy who had adopted Madame Reely, swallowed her at one gulp of perfection, only to discover afterwards that they did not understand her; a Polish doctor and his wife from Warsaw; and others. Madame Reely made a pretty speech the first night at dinner, proposing that our table volunteer to help us take care of the baby.

"To-morrow is the Fête Dieu," said she. "I'll go to the early mass so that I can come back and stay with the baby while you two go to the later mass. You will see the priests in their robes of ceremony, the Holy Relics, and a thousand children in the procession. It is too lovely,—all those little things with their baskets of flowers, throwing petals in the path of the priests. Who can tell," she went on in a whispered aside to her neighbor, "it may impress them. One never knows when new converts are to be added to the blessed Church!"

"And I shall look at the baby," said the Doctor from Warsaw. "Children are my specialty. That is why I am here, observing in the clinics of Paris, you see. I shall come to your room to-morrow after breakfast. Being an American mother, I suppose you give your baby orange juice?"

"Certainly I give her orange juice," said I; "it is good for her."

"Au contraire! au contraire!" cried the Doctor, waving his hands. The Doctor was always "au contraire" no matter what was said and who said it. Polish character.

In a corner was a tiny table for one. It was for the starboarder, a young Roumanian, who wore a purple tie held together by a large amethyst ring. Possibly he wore it because he believed in the ancient legend about amethysts being good to prevent intoxication. When we entered upon the scene he was still in high favor. His downfall came later and had to do with a wide-awake concierge and a luckless kiss at the front door.

The food we had was the kind we used to have in Paris when many visitors came here with no better excuse than to enjoy the cuisine. Mademoiselle gave us two meat dishes for each meal. If you did not like calves' liver, Louis would do a trick that landed a steaming plate of crisp fried eggs (fried in butter, you remember) before you. And that without being told. Behind the scenes was Victorine.

Victorine invited me into her kitchen to learn how to make sauce piquante.

"Are you married, Victorine?" I queried.

"My cookstove is my husband," she laughed; "his heart is good and warm and he never leaves me."

During meals Mademoiselle was to be found in the kitchen. She did the carving herself and tasted everything before it was passed through a window to Louis.

There was no felt covering under the table-cloth. The serving of the meal competed with piping, high-pitched, excited voices. Perhaps I oughtn't to say excited, but the Frenchman in his most ordinary matter of fact conversation sounds excited to the Anglo-Saxon. He asks you to pass the bread in the same tone you would use in announcing an event of moment. At each place was a glass knife-and-fork rest. In France, unless the first dish happens to be fish, you keep the same knife and fork. This is the custom in the best of homes. We are prodigal of cutlery where the French are prodigal of plates. The same knife and fork didn't matter, because the food was so good. Nor does it matter to-day, because now there is only one meat dish. Times have changed.

If fruit or pudding ran out, Mademoiselle opened a section of the wall, finding the key on a bunch that was suspended from her belt on a piece of faded black tape. From the cupboard she took tiny glasses filled with confiture or perhaps a paste made of mashed chestnuts and flour slightly sweetened. The glasses, to the touch, were cylindrical, but when you had broken the paper pasted across the top and had eaten half way down, the space was no wider than the fat part of your tea spoon. If your glass was a cylinder outside, on the inside it was an inverted cone.

The quantities of bread consumed in that house would be appalling to anybody but a Frenchman. A Turk can live on bread and olives. But a Frenchman can live on bread alone. If he had to choose between bread and wine he would forget the wine. When the basket was passed around, the pensionnaires, with a delightful absence of self-consciousness, would cast their eye over it in order to select the biggest piece. There was always one person who would look around the room furtively, take the biggest piece on the plate, slip the second biggest piece into the lap under the serviette, and then, gazing far away in ostrich fashion, glide the bread into pocket or reticule. If the dessert happened to be fruit, an orange or an apple would follow the bread for private consumption later in the day. Perhaps these people came in for luncheon only and the bread and fruit was devoured at twilight at some little café where it is permitted to customers to bring their own supplies, if they buy a drink. This stretching of luncheon procured the evening meal. If necessity is the mother of invention, the students of Paris are necessity's grandmother.

Louis, the arch-juggler, was forced by public opinion to alternate day by day his point of departure when passing the steaming plat du jour. Egalité, you remember, is one-third of French philosophy. It would never do for the same end of the dining-room to enjoy for two days running the little privilege of having the first pick at the best piece of meat in the plate.

François helped in the dining-room. But he was everywhere else too. He was useful for Louis to swear at and to blame. He was bell-hop, scullery-boy, errand-man, who needed all of his amazing reserves of cheerfulness. I wondered when François slept. He was on hand with his grin and his oui, madame, early and late. Once when we slid out of the house at five in the morning to go on an excursion, we found him in the lower hall surrounded by the boots of the house. Back of his ear was a piece of chalk used for marking the number of the room on the soles of the boots. He was polishing away, moving his arm back and forth with a diminutive imitation of the swing his legs had to accomplish when his brush-clad feet were polishing the waxed floors. As a concession to the early hour, he was whistling softly instead of singing. The whistling of François fascinated everyone because it came through a tongue folded funnel-wise and placed in the aperture where a front tooth was missing. And we would often find him up and about when we came home late at night. It was a pleasant surprise, when, after calling out your name, you made ready to walk back to the candlestick table, hands stretched out before you, to have François suddenly appear with a light. He would hold out over the table his little hand lamp with the flourish a Gascon alone can make. You picked out your candlestick by the number of your room cut in its shining surface. The number had an old-fashioned swing to its curve, suggesting that the solid bit of brass might have been dug up from the garden of some moss-grown hostelry after a passage of the Huns.

Mademoiselle Guyénot insisted that the flagged pavement be washed every day. François used to fill with water a tin can in the bottom of which he had punched half a dozen holes. He swung it about the court until figure eight shaped sprinkle-tracks lay all over the twelve-by-twenty garden. Afterwards he would take a short-handled broom, bend himself over like a hairpin, and sweep up the flag-stones. The dirt he accumulated was made into a neat newspaper package and set aside to wait until early to-morrow morning when it was put out on the street in the garbage-pail. François' thin high voice sang incessantly and sounded for all the world like the piping of a Kurdish shepherd above the timber line in the Taurus Mountains. In those days woe betide you if you put trash or garbage on a Paris street later than 8 A. M. It was as unseemly an act as shaking carpets out of your window after the regulation hour. Now, even if you are a late and leisurely bank clerk or fashionable milliner and you don't have to show up at work before 10 o'clock, you will see garbage-pails along curb-stones and likely as not get a dust shower furious enough to make you wish you hadn't left your umbrella at home. The old days—will they come back?

When the band plays soft Eliza-crossing-the-ice music, my mind flies to several Home-Sweet-Homes. I think of Tarsus, Constantinople, Oxford and Princeton. But there is no twinge of homesickness. Paris and my present home there satisfy every want and longing. Among the homes of the past, however, I think of others in Paris as well as of those of other places. I never forget the pension in the Rue Madame. Thankfully it is still a reality. During the past decade it has housed our mothers and sisters and cousins and friends. We have gone there to see them. And we go there to see our first warm friend in Paris and her husband and children. From time to time we have a meal in the old dining-room. We hope the pension will not disappear or will not be converted into too grand a hotel. For us it is a Paris landmark.