Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2Edwards, H. Sutherland (Henry Sutherland)
History
Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2
Edwards, H. Sutherland (Henry Sutherland)
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
drawing-room.”
This drolly severe but, from a literary point of view, admirable writer
seems to think that an Englishman is a sort of fox-terrier, or mastiff,
which having been chained up for a length of time becomes, when you let
him loose, extremely rampant and ill-conducted. “There are so many
things the English would not do at home, that they do without scruple
amongst foreigners. Once abroad they indemnify themselves for their
national reserve; it is on the foreigner that they revenge themselves
for the shackles of their own etiquette and social laws. In crossing the
Channel they pitch their solemn vestments into the sea. In London they
will not go to the opera dressed in anything but black; here they go in
a tweed coat and a slouch hat.” After this Monsieur Lemoinne seems very
much upset by the moustaches which Englishmen display as they promenade
in the Boulevards. There was a time, he assures us, when a Frenchman
crossing the Channel and wishing to have a fashionable air was obliged
to sacrifice his moustache--a time when English caricaturists never
represented a Frenchman without a pair of long, ill-combed moustaches.
To-day the thing is reversed. It is the Englishman who wears this
grotesque appendage which proclaims his nationality from afar. Thus
moustached, the Englishman goes to Paris--so M. Lemoinne evidently
thinks--to have his full fling. “Amongst us,” he says, “a grave man may
occasionally dress up to go to a ball, wear fancy costume, or take part
in a quadrille, and next morning resume his function as state councillor
or referendary. So the Englishman precipitates himself into the French
world as into a great masked ball, puts on a false nose, dances at Paris
extravagant steps which he calls French dances, cuts capers, sups and
gets maudlin, and when he has finished his French tour, tranquilly
resumes his duties as member of parliament or no matter what.”
To English ladies M. Lemoinne is a good deal more gallant. He is obliged
to point out that they over-dress and stride along the Boulevards like
dismounted dragoons. “Yet, make no mistake,” he adds. “In that still
crude block there are all the elements of a superb work of art. What
fine construction, what solid layers, what grand architecture! Wait till
art has put her hand to these materials; wait till the Englishwoman has
learned how to walk, carry herself, and dress, and until, to her native
beauty, she has added acquired grace--then you will have the finest type
of creation and of civilisation. The native Englishwoman who has become
a naturalised Parisian is perfection.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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