He has, we say, seen an immense number of wax candles, cups of tea, glasses of orgeat, and French people, in best clothes, enjoying the same; but intimacy there is none; we see but the outsides of the people.Year by year we live in France, and grow gray, and see no more.We play ecarte with Monsieur de Trefle every night; but what know we of the heart of the man--of the inward ways, thoughts, and customs of Trefle? If we have good legs, and love the amusement, we dance with Countess Flicflac, Tuesday's and Thursdays, ever since the Peace; and how far are we advanced in acquaintance with her since we first twirled her round a room? We know her velvet gown, and her diamonds (about three-fourths of them are sham, by the way); we know her smiles, and her simpers, and her rouge--but no more: she may turn into a kitchen wench at twelve on Thursday night, for aught we know; her voiture, a pumpkin; and her gens, so many rats: but the real, rougeless, intime Flicflac, we know not.
This privilege is granted to no Englishman: we may understand the French language as well as Monsieur de Levizac, but never can penetrate into Flicflac's confidence: our ways are not her ways;our manners of thinking, not hers: when we say a good thing, in the course of the night, we are wondrous lucky and pleased; Flicflac will trill you off fifty in ten minutes, and wonder at the betise of the Briton, who has never a word to say.We are married, and have fourteen children, and would just as soon make love to the Pope of Rome as to any one but our own wife.If you do not make love to Flicflac, from the day after her marriage to the day she reaches sixty, she thinks you a fool.We won't play at ecarte with Trefle on Sunday nights; and are seen walking, about one o'clock (accompanied by fourteen red-haired children, with fourteen gleaming prayer-books), away from the church."Grand Dieu!" cries Trefle, "is that man mad? He won't play at cards on a Sunday; he goes to church on a Sunday: he has fourteen children!"Was ever Frenchman known to do likewise? Pass we on to our argument, which is, that with our English notions and moral and physical constitution, it is quite impossible that we should become intimate with our brisk neighbors; and when such authors as Lady Morgan and Mrs.Trollope, having frequented a certain number of tea-parties in the French capital, begin to prattle about French manners and men,--with all respect for the talents of those ladies, we do believe their information not to be worth a sixpence; they speak to us not of men but of tea-parties.Tea-parties are the same all the world over; with the exception that, with the French, there are more lights and prettier dresses; and with us, a mighty deal more tea in the pot.
There is, however, a cheap and delightful way of travelling, that a man may perform in his easy-chair, without expense of passports or post-boys.On the wings of a novel, from the next circulating library, he sends his imagination a-gadding, and gains acquaintance with people and manners whom he could not hope otherwise to know.
Twopence a volume bears us whithersoever we will;--back to Ivanhoe and Coeur de Lion, or to Waverley and the Young Pretender, along with Walter Scott; up the heights of fashion with the charming enchanters of the silver-fork school; or, better still, to the snug inn-parlor, or the jovial tap-room, with Mr.Pickwick and his faithful Sancho Weller.I am sure that a man who, a hundred years hence should sit down to write the history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary history of "Pickwick" aside as a frivolous work.It contains true character under false names;and, like "Roderick Random," an inferior work, and "Tom Jones" (one that is immeasurably superior), gives us a better idea of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any more pompous or authentic histories.
We have, therefore, introduced into these volumes one or two short reviews of French fiction writers, of particular classes, whose Paris sketches may give the reader some notion of manners in that capital.If not original, at least the drawings are accurate; for, as a Frenchman might have lived a thousand years in England, and never could have written "Pickwick," an Englishman cannot hope to give a good description of the inward thoughts and ways of his neighbors.
To a person inclined to study these, in that light and amusing fashion in which the novelist treats them, let us recommend the works of a new writer, Monsieur de Bernard, who has painted actual manners, without those monstrous and terrible exaggerations in which late French writers have indulged; and who, if he occasionally wounds the English sense of propriety (as what French man or woman alive will not?) does so more by slighting than by outraging it, as, with their labored descriptions of all sorts of imaginable wickedness, some of his brethren of the press have done.
M.de Bernard's characters are men and women of genteel society--rascals enough, but living in no state of convulsive crimes; and we follow him in his lively, malicious account of their manners, without risk of lighting upon any such horrors as Balzac or Dumas has provided for us.
Let us give an instance:--it is from the amusing novel called "Les Ailes d'Icare," and contains what is to us quite a new picture of a French fashionable rogue.The fashions will change in a few years, and the rogue, of course, with them.Let us catch this delightful fellow ere he flies.It is impossible to sketch the character in a more sparkling, gentlemanlike way than M.de Bernard's; but such light things are very difficult of translation, and the sparkle sadly evaporates during the process of DECANTING.
A FRENCH FASHIONABLE LETTER.