(…) But pause we for the present, to consider the fashionable part: and caricature as it is, we have an accurate picture of the actual French dandy. Bets, breakfasts, riding, dinners at the “Café de Paris,” and delirious Carnival balls : the animal goes through all such frantic pleasures at the season that precedes Lent. He has a wondrous respect for English “gentlemen-sportsmen ;” he imitates their clubs , their love of horse-flesh : he calls his palefrenier a groom, wears blue bird’seye neckcloths, sports his pink out hunting, rides steeple-chases, and has his Jockey Club. The “tigers and lions ” alluded to in the report have been borrowed from our own country, and a great compliment is it to Monsieur de Bernard, the writer of the above amusing sketch, that he has such a knowledge of English names and things, as to give a Tory lord the decent title of Lord Cobbapi, and to call his dog O’Connell. Paul de Kock calls an English nobleman, in one of his last novels, Lord Boulingrog, and appears vastly delighted at the verisimilitude of the title.
For the “rugissements et bondissemerits, bucchanale et saturnale, galop infernal, rond; du sabbat tout le tremblement,” these words give a most clear, untranslatable idea of the Carnival ball. A sight more hideous can hardly strike a man’s eye. I was present at one where the four thousand guests whirled screaming, reeling, roaring, out of the ball-room in the Rue St. Honoré, and tore down to the column in the Place Vendome, round which they went shrieking
their own music, twenty miles an hour, and so tore madly back again. Let a man go alone to such a place of amusement, and the sight for him is perfectly terrible: the horrid frantic gayety of the place puts him in mind more of the merriment of demons than of men: bang, bang, drums, trumpets, chairs, pistol-shots, pour out of the orchestra, which seems as mad as the dancers; whiz, a whirlwind of paint and patches, all the costumes under the sun, all the ranks in the empire, all the he and she scoundrels of the capital, writhed and twisted together, rush by you ; if a man falls, woe be to him: two thousand screaming menads go trampling over his carcass; they have neither power nor will to stop.
A set of Malays drunk with bhang and running amuck, a company of howling dervishes, may possibly, at our own day, go through similar frantic vagaries; but I doubt if any civilized European people but the French would permit and enjoy such scenes. Yet our neighbors see little shame in them ; and it is very true that men of all classes, high and low, here congregate and give themselves up to the disgusting worship of the genius of the place. From the dandy of the Boulevard and the “Café Anglais,” let us turn to the dandy of “Flicoteau’s” and the Pays Latin , the Paris student, whose exploits among the grisettes are so celebrated, and whose fierce republicanism keeps gendarmes for ever on the alert. The following is M. de Bernard’s description of him: ,
” I became acquainted with Dambergeac when we were students at the Ecole de Droit; we lived in the same Hotel on the Place du Pantheon. No doubt, madam, you have occasionally met little children dedicated to the Virgin, and, to this end, clothed in white raiment from head to foot: my friend, Dambergeac, had received a different consecration. His father, a great patriot of the Revolution, had determined that his son should bear into the world a sign of indelible republicanism ; so, to the great displeasure of his godmother and the parish curate, Dambergeac was christened by the pagan name of Harmodius. It was a kind of moral tricolorcockade, which the child was to bear through the vicissitudes of all the revolutions to come. Under such influences, my friend’s character began to develop itself, and, fired by the example of his father, and by the warm atmosphere of his native place, Marseilles, he grew up to have an independent spirit, and a grand liberality of polities, which were at their height when first I made his acquaintance.
” He was then a young man of eighteen, with a tall, slim figure, a broad chest, and a flaming black eye, out of all which personal charms he knew how to draw the most advantage ; and though his costume was such as Staub might probably have criticised, he had, nevertheless, a style peculiar to himself, to himself and the students, among whom he was the leader of the fashion. A tight black coat, buttoned up to the chin, across the chest, set off that part of his person; a low-crowned hat, with a voluminous rim, cast solemn shadows over a countenance bronzed by a southern sun : he wore, at one time, enormous flowing black locks, which he sacrificed pitilessly, however, and adopted a Brutus, as being more revolutionary : finally, he carried an enormous club, that was his code and digest: in like manner, De Retz used to carry a stiletto in his pocket, by way of a breviary.
” Although of different ways of thinking in politics, certain sympathies of character and conduct united Dambergeac and myself, and we speedily became close friends. I don’t think, in the whole course of his three years’ residence, Dambergeac ever went through a single course of lectures. For the examinations, he trusted to luck, and to his ewn facility, which was prodigious: as for honors, he never aimed at them, but was content to do exactly as little as was necessary for him to gain his degree. In like manner he sedulously avoided those horrible circulating libraries, where daily are seen to congregate the ‘reading men’ of our schools. But, in revenge, there was not a milliner’s shop, or a lingere’s, in all our quartier Latin, which he did not industriously frequent, and of which he was not the oracle. Nay, it was said that his victories were not confined to the left bank of the Seine; reports did occasionally come to us of fabulous adventures by him accomplished in the far regions of the Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard Poissonniere. Such recitals were, for us less favored mortals, like tales of Bacchus conquering in the East; they excited our ambition, but not our jealousy; for the superiority of Harmodius was acknowledged by us all, and we never thought of a rivalry with him. No man ever cantered a hack through the Champs Elysees with such elegant assurance; no man ever made such a massacre of dolls at the shooting-gallery; or won you a rubber at billiards with more easy grace ; or thundered out a couplet out of Béranger with such a roaring melodious bass. He was the monarch of the Prado in winter: in summer of the Chaumiere and Mont Parnasse. Not a frequenter of those fashionable places of entertainment showed a more amiable laisser-aller in the dance , that peculiar dance at which gendarmes think proper to blush, and which squeamish society has banished from her salons. In a word, Harmodius was the prince of mauvais sujets, a youth with all the accomplishments of Gottingen and Jena, and all the eminent graces of his own country.
” Besides dissipation and gallantry, our friend had one other vast and absorbing occupation , politics, namely; in which he was as turbulent and enthusiastic as in pleasure. La Patrie was his idol, his heaven, his nightmare; by day he spouted, by night he dreamed, of his country. I have spoken to you of his coiffure a la Sylla; need I mention his pipe, his meerschaum pipe, of which General Foy’s head was the bowl; his handkerchief with the Charte printed thereon; and his celebrated tricolor braces, which kept the rallying sign of his country ever close to his heart? Besides these outward and visible signs of sedition, he had inward and secret plans of revolution: he belonged to clubs, frequented associations, read the ‘Constitutionnel’ (Liberals, in those days, swore by the ‘ Constitutionnel’), harangued peers and deputies who had deserved well of their country; and if death happened to fall on such, and the ‘ Constitutionnel’ declared their merit, Harmodius was the very first to attend their obsequies, or to set his shoulder to their coffins.
” Such were his tastes and passions : his antipathies were not less lively. He detested three things : a Jesuit, a gendarme, and a claqueur at a theatre. At this period, missionaries were rife about Paris, and endeavored to re-illume the zeal ot the faithful by public preachings in the churches. ‘ Infames jesuites!’ would Harmodius exclaim, who, in the excess of his toleration, tolerated nothing ; and, at the head of a band of philosophers like himself, would attend with scrupulous exactitude the meetings of the reverend gentlemen. But, instead of a contrite heart, Harmodius only brought the abomination of desolation into their sanctuary. A perpetual fire of fulminating balls would bang from under the feet of the faithful ; odors of impure assafoetida would mingle with the fumes of the incense; and wicked drinking choruses would rise up along with the holy canticles, in hideous dissonance, reminding one of the old orgies under the reign of the Abbot of Unreason.
” His hatred of the gendarmes was equally ferocious: and as for the claqueurs, woe be to them when Harmodius was in the pit! They knew him, and trembled before him, like the earth before Alexander; and his famous war-cry, ‘ La Carte an chapeau !’ was so much dreaded, that the ‘ entrepreneurs de succes dramatiques’ demanded twice as much to do the Odeon Theatre (which we students and Harmodius frequented), as to applaud at any other place of amusement: and, indeed, their double pay was hardly gained ; Harmodius taking care that they should earn the most of it under the benches.”
This passage, with which we have taken some liberties, will give the reader a more lively idea of the reckless, jovial, turbulent Paris student, than any with which a foreigner could furnish him: the grisette is his heroine ; and dear old Beranger, the cynic epicurean, has celebrated him and her in the most delightful verses in the world.
From: William Makepeace Thackeray: The Paris Sketch Book. (1869)