Bohemian Paris of To-day Second Edition

WE were in wonderful Paris at last--Bishop and I--after a memorable passage full of interest from New York to Havre. Years of hard work were ahead of us, for Bishop would be an artist and I a sculptor.

For two weeks we had been lodging temporarily in the top of a comfortable little hotel, called the Grand something (most of the Parisian hotels are Grand), the window of which commanded a superb view of the great city, the vaudeville playhouse of the world.

Pour la première fois the dazzle and glitter had burst upon us, confusing first, but now assuming form and coherence. If we and incomprehensible at could have had each a dozen eyes instead of two, or less greed to see and more patience to learn!

Day by day we had put off the inevitable evil of finding a studio. Every night found us in the cheapest seats of some theatre, and often we lolled on the terraces of the Café de la Paix, watching the pretty girls as they passed, their silken skirts saucily pulled up, revealing dainty laces and ankles. From the slippery floor of the Louvre galleries we had studied the masterpieces of David, Rubens, Rembrandt, and the rest; had visited the Panthéon, the Musée Cluny; had climbed the Eiffel Tower, and traversed the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-Elysées. Then came the search for a studio and the settling to work. It would be famous to have a little home of our very own, where we could have little dinners of our very own cooking!

It is with a shudder that I recall those eleven days of ceaseless studio-hunting. We dragged ourselves through miles of Quartier Latin streets, and up hundreds of flights of polished waxed stairs, behind puffing concierges in carpet slippers, the puffing changing to grumbling, as, dissatisfied, the concierges followed us down the stairs. The Quartier abounds with placards reading, "_Atelier d'Artiste à Louer!_" The rentals ranged from two hundred to two thousand francs a year, and the sizes from cigar-boxes to barns. But there was always something lacking. On the eleventh day we found a suitable place on the sixth (top) floor of a quaint old house in a passage off the Rue St.- André-des-Arts. There were overhead and side lights, and from the window a noble view of Paris over the house-tops.

A room of fair size joined the studio, and from its vine-laced window we could look into the houses across the court, and down to the bottom of the court as well. The studio walls were delightfully dirty and low in tone, and were covered with sketches and cartoons in oil and charcoal. The price was eight hundred francs a year, and from the concierge's eloquent catalogue of its charms it seemed a great bargain. The walls settled our fate,--we took the studio.

It was one thing to agree on the price and another to settle the details. Our French was ailing, and the concierge's French was--concierges' French. Bishop found that his pet theory that French should be spoken with the hands, head, and shoulders carried weak spots which a concierge could discover; and then, being somewhat mercurial, he began floundering in a mixture of French and English words and French and American gestures, ending in despair with the observation that the concierge was a d------ fool. At the end of an hour we had learned that we must sign an iron-bound, government-stamped contract, agreeing to occupy the studio for not less than one year, to give six months' notice of our leaving, and to pay three months' rental in advance, besides the taxes for one year on all the doors and windows, and ten francs or more to the concierge. This was all finally settled.

As there was no running water in the rooms (such a luxury being unknown here), we had to supply our needs from a clumsy old iron pump in the court, and employ six flights of stairs in the process.

Then the studio had to be furnished, and there came endless battles with the furniture dealers in the neighborhood, who kept their stock replenished from the goods of bankrupt artists and suspended ménages.

These marchands de meubles are a wily race, but Bishop pursued a plan in dealing with them that worked admirably. He would enter a shop and price an article that we wanted, and then throw up his hands in horror and leave the place as though it were haunted with a plague. The dealer would always come tumbling after him and offer him the article for a half or a third of the former price. In this way Bishop bought chairs, tables, a large easel, beds, a studio stove, book-shelves, linen, drapings, water pitchers and buckets, dishes, cooking utensils, and many other things, the cost of the whole being less than one hundred and fifty francs,--and thus we were established. The studio became quite a snug and hospitable retreat, in spite of the alarming arrangement that Bishop adopted, "to help the composition of the room." His favorite cast, the Unknown Woman, occupied the place of honor over his couch, where he could see it the first thing in the morning, when the dawn, stealing through the skylight, brought out those strange and subtle features which he swore inspired him from day to day. My room was filled with brilliant posters by Chéret and Mucha and Steinlen,--they were too bold and showy for the low tone of Bishop's studio. It all made a pretty picture,--the dizzy posters, the solemn trunks, the books, the bed with its gaudy print coverings, and the little crooked-pane window hung with bright green vines that ran thither from a box in the window of an adjoining apartment. And it was all completed by the bright faces of three pretty seamstresses, who sat sewing every day at their window across the passage.

Under our housekeeping agreement Bishop was made cook, and I chambermaid and water-carrier. It was Bishop's duty to obey the alarm clock at six every morning and light the fire, while I went down for water at the pump, and for milk at the stand beside the court entrance, where fat Madame Gioté sold café-au-lait and lait froid ou chaud, from a sou's worth up. Then, after breakfast, I did the chamber work while Bishop washed the dishes. Bishop could make for breakfast the most delicious coffee and flapjacks and omelette in the whole of Paris. By eight o'clock all was in order; Bishop was smoking his pipe and singing "Down on the Farm" while working on his life study, and I was off to my modelling in clay.

Bishop soon had the hearts of all the shop-keepers in the neighborhood. The baker's dimple-cheeked daughter never worried if the scales hung a little in his favor, at the boucherie he was served with the choicest cuts of meat, and the fried-potato women called him "_mon fils_" and fried a fresh lot of potatoes for him. Even Madame Tonneau, the marchande de tabac, saw that he had the freshest packages in the shop. Often, when I was returning home at night, I encountered him making cheerily for the studio, bearing bread by the yard, his pockets bulging with other material for dinner. Ah, he was a wonderful cook, and we had marvellous appetites! So famous did he soon become that the models (the lady ones, of course) were eager to dine avec nous; and when they did they helped to set the table, they sewed buttons on our clothes, and they made themselves agreeable and perfectly at home with that charming grace which is so peculiarly French. Ah, those were jolly times!

The court, or, more properly, le passage, on which our window looked was a narrow little thoroughfare leading from the Rue St.-André-des-Arts to the Boulevard St.-Germain. It bore little traffic, but was a busy way withal. It had iron-workers' shops, where hot iron was beaten into artistic lamps, grills, and bed-frames; a tinsmith's shop; a blanchisserie, where our shirts were made white and smooth by the pretty blanchisseuses singing all day over their work; a wine-cellar, whose barrels were eternally blocking one end of the passage; an embossed picture-card factory, where twoscore women, with little hammers and steel dies, beat pictures into cards; a furniture shop, where everything old and artistic was sold, the Hôtel du Passage, and a bookbinder's shop.

Each of the eight buildings facing the passage was ruled by a formidable concierge, who had her dark little living apartments near the entrances. These are the despots of the court, and their function is to make life miserable for their lodgers. When they are not doing that they are eternally scrubbing and polishing. They are all married. M. Mayé, le mari de notre concierge, is a tailor. He sits at the window and mends and sews all day long, or acts as concierge when his wife is away. The husband of the concierge next door is a sergeant de ville at night, but in the early mornings as, in a soiled blouse, he empties ash-cans, he looks very unlike the personage dressed at night in a neat blue uniform and wearing a short sword Another concierge's husband _fait des courses_--runs errands--for sufficient pay.

Should you fail to clean your boots on the mat, and thus soil the glossy stairs, have a care!--a concierge's tongue has inherited the warlike characteristics of the Caesars. Rugs and carpets must not be shaken out of the windows after nine o'clock. Ashes and other refuse must be thrown into the big bin of the house not later than seven. Sharp at eleven in the evening the lights are extinguished and the doors locked for the night; and then all revelry must immediately cease. Should you arrive en retard,--that is, after eleven,--you must ring the bell violently until the despot, generally after listening for an hour to the bell, unlocks the catch from her couch. Then when you close the door and pass her lodge you must call out your name. If you are out often or till very late, be prepared for a lecture on the crime of breaking the rest of hard-working concierges. After the day's work the concierges draw their chairs out into the court and gossip about their tenants. The nearer the roof the lodger the less the respect he commands. Would he not live on a lower floor if he were able? And then, the top floor gives small tips!

It is noticeable that the entresol and premiers étages are clean and highly polished, and that the cleanliness and polish diminish steadily toward the top, where they almost disappear. Ah, les concierges! But what would Paris be without them?

Directly beneath us an elderly couple have apartments. Every morning at five the old gentleman starts French oaths rattling through the court by beating his rugs out of his window. At six he rouses the ire of a widow below him by watering his plants and incidentally drenching her bird- cages. Not long ago she rose in violent rebellion, and he hurled a flower pot at her protruding head. It smashed on her window-sill; she screamed "Murder!" and the whole court was in an uproar. The concierges and the old gentleman's pacific wife finally restored order--till the next morning.

Next, to my room are an elderly lady and her sweet, sad-faced daughter. They are very quiet and dignified, and rarely fraternize with their neighbors. It is their vine that creeps over to my window, and it is carefully tended by the daughter. And all the doves and sparrows of the court come regularly to eat out of her hand, and a lively chatter they have over it. The ladies are the widow and daughter of a once prosperous stock-broker on the Bourse, whom an unlucky turn of the wheel drove to poverty and suicide.