Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 1

At Longchamp there are about one hundred and fifty bureaux of the Pari Mutuel, and nearly twice as many on the day of the Grand-Prix. No bet is accepted under five francs, and there are special bureaux for ten, twenty, fifty, and even one hundred, and five hundred francs at the weighing-stand; the bets are of two kinds,—first, for the winning horse, and, second, for the horses "placed" one and two, when there are at least four horses running; one, two, and three, when there are at least eight. When two or more horses belong to the same proprietor and run in the same race, the Pari Mutuel gives the whole stable, that is to say, that if one of the horses of the stable wins the race the bets made upon the other horses of the stable, one or several, are paid as though laid upon the winning animal himself. This rule applies only to bets made upon one winner; for the places, it is not a question of the whole stable, and each horse is paid according to his order in arriving at the winning-post. When all the tickets are collected, the sum total of the bets is ascertained, the seven per cent. tax is deducted, and the sum remaining is divided among the winning tickets. For the placés, there are four operations to be performed after the deduction of the seven per cent.,—first, to subtract from the sum to be divided the sum total of the bets upon the places. This operation has for its object to save the stake of the bettor and to guarantee him against the risks of receiving a sum less than he wagered; second, to divide the new sum thus obtained by two or by three, according as there are two or three placés; third, to divide each half or each third proportionally to the number of bets on each placé; fourth, to add the amount of the bet previously subtracted. All the employés of the Pari Mutuel are strictly forbidden to bet, themselves, under penalty of losing their situations; and the whole is under the control of the Minister of Agriculture and the inspectors of finances.

The establishment of this official regulation was speedily followed by the opening of unauthorized "pool-rooms" all over Paris, in cheap cabarets, tobacco-shops, coiffeurs' salons, anywhere, in which the general public were invited to come in and bet on any horse they chose, without any further concern about attending the races, and with the deduction of the smallest possible commission for the bureau, in some cases fifty or twenty-five centimes. These improvised agencies, in a great majority of cases, hold no communication whatever with the Sociétés, thus depriving them of their commissions, and offer their clients only the slightest guarantees of good faith. This abuse became so flagrant that the law had to be invoked.

The popular cafés, cabarets, buvettes, brasseries, châteaux, moulins, etc., are so numerous as to be entitled to a special chapter. One of the most famous, the Moulin de la Galette, of the Montmartre quarter, is here illustrated, with a touch of the picturesque. It may be reached by the Rue Lepic, more circuitous and possibly more safe than the acrobatic ladders which lead directly to its door. Its usual customers vary from workmen's families through many varieties of painters, strangers, filles, and marlous. Its dances are not of a kind to recommend themselves to the conventional. It is even customary, before each one, for each couple to pay four sous, and it is usually the lady who pays for her cavalier. The beer-shops, or brasseries,—"more properly embrasseries,"—were invented in the Latin Quarter, but have since multiplied more on the lower boulevards. It is asserted that they were better at the beginning; M. Maurice Barres declared at one time: "The brasserie à femmes is quite truly a salon." He appreciated them for the severe discipline maintained in them by the proprietor, or, at least, for the restraint imposed upon the more enterprising clients and servitors by the example of the others. "There was coquetry and flirtage, without much more." He considered this institution necessary; its influence was, in his opinion, beneficent. These superficial endearments, this amiable tone, this care to please which was there displayed, "relaxed the mind and restored the neglected faculties of our sensitiveness." Since then, he has asked himself whether the brasseries have changed or whether he has grown older. Certainly, the qualities which he discovered in them no longer exist. The institution does not seem necessary; the salon is usually a hole; the attendants appear to be the refuse of those places of entertainment the character of which is revealed by the unusual size of the house number over the entrance. Even the Parisian gilding of vice sometimes wears off.

More of these unfortunates, of various shades, may be seen displaying themselves in the open streets, in the public fiacres as in their salons, during the Carnival, and especially on the day of Mardi Gras,—arrayed as Pierrettes, clownesses, rosières [winners of the prize of virtue], and avocats with very open robes, their bared arms and shoulders defying the weather. Their proper establishments are known by a great variety of appellations, the old word bordel being now considered gross. More commonly they are designated discreetly as Tolérances or Gros Numéros; in the popular slang they are claques or boxons. Many of them have special designations, as the celebrated Botte de paille mentioned by Edmond de Goncourt in his Fille Elisa; one of the noisiest was known as the Perroquet gris; and another, from its specialty, Au Télescope. "But at Paris all these maisons chaudes," says an expert in these matters, Rodolphe Darzens, "have a special physiognomy,—they are not, as in the provinces, discreet localities, with an atmosphere of familiar conventionality, in which the father brings his eldest son to pass the evening with the notary of the quarter and the pharmacien of the public square, in an interminable game of billiards or of piquet voleur. Houses very comme il faut, in which no incongruity would be tolerated, from which a Parisian was even chased one day for having pronounced a gross word. Neither do they resemble those vast establishments in the seaports or in the commercial cities, in which the rutting assumes a character of savage eagerness and of primitive fury.

"Excepting in the houses of the exterior quarters of the city which are frequented by soldiers and by coarse peasants, who quickly recover from their first bedazzlement at the fine salons ornamented with mirrors and gilding, illuminated by gas or by electricity, and in which the usual visitors are composed almost exclusively of workmen, which constitutes them rather a species of brasserie, the prostitution in Paris has been refined by luxury. The viveurs enter them, no longer to finish the night in them, but to pass a few minutes, to yawn and to drink champagne in the company of some young women lightly clad, indifferent and passive, pretty sometimes, bestial almost always. You can rarely avoid hearing confidentially from one of them her story, the eternal story of love betrayed. There are sometimes to be found among them some who have received a real education,—these speedily acquire an influence over their comrades, who listen to them, admire them, ask their advice. They are the queens of the household, and Madame treats with them on a footing of equality.

"Frequently an inmate of one of these convents of the Devil will seat herself at the piano, and then some revery of Chopin will rise, melancholy, through the air, while the tears will appear in the eyes of her hearers.

"When, 'finally alone,' to fill up their long leisure of waiting, they play never-ending games of écarté, or, indeed, tell each other's fortunes by the cards, in the hope that the promises they read in them may be speedily realized, promises of a better life, outside of the cursed house, of meeting a monsieur very rich, of country parties, carriages, a little hôtel, who knows? To see, perhaps,—a marriage.

"But a voice, interrupting these dreams, that of the imperious matron, orders curtly: 'To the salon, ladies!'"

The Parisian winter is an institution of which no good can be said. The tremendous, arctic cold of the United States is almost unknown, as is also the beautiful, clear, frosty weather; in their stead come an almost endless succession of gray, misty, unutterably damp days, with a searching, raw cold that penetrates even to the dividing asunder of bone and marrow. The dearness of fuel, and the totally inadequate heating arrangements in most houses, add to the cruel discomfort of this season, in which the poor always suffer greatly. The number of unemployed is always large, and among them are frequently to be found those accustomed to the comforts and refinements of life. A recent article in a Parisian journal describing the charitable distribution of hot soups by the organization of the Bouchée de pain [mouthful of bread] cites the instance of a lady among these applicants, so well dressed that the attendant thought it right to say to her: "Have you come through simple curiosity, madame? In that case, you should not diminish the portion of those who are hungry." The lady answered simply: "I am hungry." It appeared that she was an artist, had exhibited twice in the Salon, and yet was reduced to this necessity. This charitable organization is distinguished from most others by the fact that it asks no questions and imposes no conditions on those who come to it for aid. Consequently, its various points of distribution are crowded with long lines of the shivering and famished, and the smallest offering from the charitable is thankfully received.

On the suppression of the recent general strike among the workmen of Paris, in the month of October, 1898, there appeared, in a number of the Matin, a serious article giving some important details concerning the wages and the manner of spending them, and presented from the point of view of a friend of the laboring classes. The writer, M. Manini, had interviewed one of his friends, an important contractor, whose six hundred workmen had followed the example of their comrades, gone on strike, and been compelled to abandon it by the prudent action of the civil and military authorities in protecting all those who were willing to labor. "I expressed to my friend my surprise that workmen earning, at a minimum, six francs, and some of them, masons and rough-casters, eight and ten francs a day, should have ceased work under pretence of insufficient pay. I showed him the instructive table published by an evening journal, and according to which the rough-casters earned from eleven to twelve francs a day; the stone-cutters, eight francs; the journeymen masons, eight francs; the apprentice masons, five and a half francs; the bricklayers, eight francs; the stone-sawyers, nine to eleven francs,—in a word, as much as a lieutenant in garrison in Paris, and more than a lieutenant in garrison in the provinces.

"'All that is perfectly true,' replied my friend. 'Never have the workmen on buildings had such a fête. Since Paris has become a vast ant-hill in which the work of preparation for 1900 goes on without ceasing, the workmen make magnificent working-days and have no fear of being "laid off." They have before them three magnificent years. But you are not aware of the conditions of a workman's life in Paris. They bear no resemblance to those of the life in the provinces, where similar wages would insure a comfortable living. In Paris, you see, the workman lives at a great disadvantage, and, in reality, it may be said that he is obliged to meet the expenses of two establishments.... Paris is an immense city, in which the distances are very great. The laborers, the diggers, and shovellers live, nearly all of them, on the heights of Clignancourt and of Belleville; the masons, for I know not what reason, prefer the quarter of the Gobelins. Well, work is carried on in all parts of Paris, is it not? The laborer from Belleville, the workman hired by me or by my overseer, arrives at his field of labor at six o'clock in the morning. This spot is at Auteuil, at the Trocadéro, at Passy, anywhere. It will be absolutely impossible for him to return to Belleville for his meals. He will have to eat on the spot, there where he works.

"'Well, arrived at the chantier at half-past six, and hard at work at seven, the workmen go at nine o'clock to get some soup and a piece of cheese. It is to some little eating-house in the neighborhood that they betake themselves. The cost of this casse-croûte [bread-crust], as they call it, fifty centimes at the least. At eleven o'clock, the déjeuner, always at the wine-shop or the little restaurant. When one works in the open air, and when one propels, by the strength of his arms, shovelfuls of earth weighing five kilos each a height of two mètres into the cart, one is hungry. Notwithstanding the utmost frugality, the déjeuner amounts to thirty sous, thirty-five sous at the least. We have now expended two francs, twenty-five centimes. About four o'clock, another mouthful and a glass of wine,—say ten sous, about. We have now reached fifty-five sous, have we not? In case the workman should be fatigued, or that the distance home should be too great,—observe that from Auteuil to Clignancourt there are nine good kilomètres, that is more than two leagues,—he dines on the spot, say twenty-five sous more.

"'If the workman earns eight francs, here are his wages reduced more than one-half. And you will remember that the wife and the brats eat at home; also, that it is necessary to clothe yourself and to clothe the little ones, that it is necessary to pay the rent, that, sometimes, there is an old infirm mother at home, that an illness is readily contracted.... In fact, the workman, at Paris, who labors at a distance is obliged to eat away from his own house, and he expends for himself alone as much as would be required to support the whole family. It may therefore be said, that he has to provide for two households,—the outside establishment, himself, and the inside establishment, the wife and the children.'"

It does not seem to have occurred to the author of this interesting exposé, or to his interlocutor, that there was a very simple and well-known remedy for this idiotic and extravagant mode of living,—the dinner-pail. The contractor cited to his friend the case of the masons from the provinces, the Creusois and the Limousins, who are enabled to save money by leaving their families in the country, and that of the London workman who commences his day's labor at nine o'clock in the morning and who ends it at five,—but without any interruption. "At one o'clock in the afternoon he breaks a piece of bread, which he generally brings in his work-bag; and at six o'clock, thanks to the 'Metropolitan,' he is again with his family, comfortably seated at table." The workman's dinner-pail, or its equivalent, is not altogether unknown to the Parisian ouvrier, and picturesque groups may sometimes be seen, sometimes with the wife's presence to cheer and adorn, eating and drinking comfortably al fresco, on the sidewalks, or on the steps of some monument. To the sojourner in the land, the facts appear to be that the workmen frequent the gargotes much more to drink than to eat, that they spend a very important fraction of the day congregated around, or in, the cheap wine-shops of the neighborhood, and that they consume a highly unnecessary quantity of variously and fearfully colored cheap combinations of alcool.

In the strike referred to, the terrassiers, or diggers, who commenced it, had enough influence in the Conseil Municipal of Paris to get the increased wages for which they quit work, awarded them; but the other workmen, who struck for the cause of solidarité, were unsuccessful, and the great strike of all the railway employés throughout the nation, ostentatiously ordered by the Syndicat Guérard, and promptly met by the military occupation of all the stations and points of danger, was a complete failure.