The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 12

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.

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!

We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of: "--thy cornfields

green, and sunny vines, O pleasant land of France!"

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.

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."

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."

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.

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! 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!"

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

It was pitiful,

In a whole city-full,

Gas we had none.

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.