Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

CHAPTER XXXVII.
FENCING SCHOOLS

Fencing in France – A National Art – Some Extracts from the Writings of M. Legouvé, One of its Chief Exponents – The Old Style of Fencing and the New

FENCING is in England the pastime of a few amateurs; in France it is a national art. An ingenious reason has been adduced by M. Legouvé why proficiency with the rapier should be acquired by everyone. “The sword,” he writes, “possesses the finest of all advantages: it is the only weapon with which you can avenge yourself without an effusion of blood. What is nobler for a man of chivalry and skill when he finds himself confronting the man who has offended him, and whom he is privileged to kill, than at once to punish this adversary and to spare his life – to disarm him, that is to say.”

It is in his character of dramatic author, however, that M. Legouvé chiefly values duelling. “What would become of us wretched playwrights without the sword-duel?” he asks. “The pistol is a brutal contrivance, suitable only to dark melodramas and to dénouements… What do you think could be done in a comedy with a man who haply had received a bullet wound? He is no longer good for anything. But if he has been wounded with a sword, he returns two minutes afterwards with his hand thrust in the folds of his waistcoat and an attempted smile on his face. The young woman says to him, ‘How pale you are!’ ‘I, mademoiselle?’ Then the end of a bandage is somehow perceived. ‘Gracious heavens! you have been fighting a duel,’ she exclaims.” M. Legouvé must now be allowed to continue in his own language: “Ah! l’admirable verbe que le verbe se battre! Tous les temps en sont bons. Vous vous battez? battez-vous!.. Ne vous battez pas!.. Et comme il va bien avec les exclamations: ‘Mon ami! par grâce! Monsieur, vous êtes un lâche!.. Arthur! Arthur!.. Je me jette à tes pieds!’ Speak not to me of dramatic writing without those two indispensable collaborators: love and the sword.

“Fencing interests me, moreover, simply as an observer. A fencing-school is a theatre at which as many amusing characters may be seen as on any stage. First of all there is a class of fencers who do not fence and never will. Then there are the men who fence in order to reduce their bulk; who have been told by their doctor or their wife that they are too fat, and who, after sweating like oxen, blowing like seals, steaming like boiled puddings, for a couple of hours, tell you in the calmest manner that they have been fencing.

“Then there are the fencing-masters, or professors of fencing, as they prefer to be called. They are generally gay, good-natured, well-meaning fellows, devoted body and soul to their pupils, especially to those pupils who have done them the honour to kill someone in mortal combat. Their weak point is said to be veracity; not on all occasions, but whenever they have the foil in hand. “I have never,” says M. Legouvé, “met a single fencer who would not – say once every year – deny that he had been touched when the hit was palpable. It is so easy to say ‘I did not feel it,’ and a hit not recognised does not count. Ah, if we dramatists could only annul hisses by saying: ‘I did not hear them!’

“My first professor,” continues M. Legouvé, “was an old master known as Père Dularviez. He had a daughter of whom he was exceedingly proud. She was employed in a milliner’s shop, which caused her father some uneasiness as to her possible conduct. There was nothing to justify his uneasiness, but he was uneasy. At last, unable to rest, he wrapped himself up in a cloak and took up his position at the corner of the Rue Traversière, close to the Rue Saint-Honoré, where his daughter worked. ‘You may imagine,’ he said to us, ‘how my heart beat when I saw her appear. I approached her, and averting my face, whispered in her ear a graceful little compliment which I had invented for the occasion. O joy! she turned round and administered to me with all her might a box on the ear. I guarded myself en tierce and said: ‘My child, you are truly virtuous.’

“Fencing has, moreover, its utilitarian value. It teaches you to judge men. With the foil in hand no dissimulation is possible. After five minutes of foil-play the false varnish of mundane hypocrisy falls and trickles away with the perspiration: instead of the polished man of the world, with yellow gloves and conventional phrases, you have before you the actual man, a calculator or a blunderer, weak or firm, wily or ingenuous, sincere or treacherous… One day I derived a great advantage. I was crossing foils with a large broker in brandies, rums, and champagnes. Before the passage of arms he had offered me his services in regard to a supply of liquors, and I had almost accepted… The fencing at an end, I went to the proprietor and said: ‘I shall buy no champagne of that man.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘His wine must be adulterated – he denies every hit.’

“Apply my principle, and you will find it profitable. Some of you are already married. One day you will have daughters to marry. Well, if a suitor presents himself, do not waste time in collecting particulars which are too often false. Say simply to your future son-in-law: ‘Will you have a turn with the foils?’ At the end of a quarter of an hour you will know more about his character than after six weeks of investigations.

“Finally, I like fencing because you cannot learn it. It does, indeed, demand practice, and long practice; but that is not sufficient, it must be your vocation: you must be born a fencer, just as you must be born an artist. And then, when the apprenticeship has been served, what pleasure is enjoyed! I doubt whether there is in external life a single act in which a man feels himself to live more fully than in a vigorous assault.

“Look at the fencer in action. Each member, each muscle is stretched, and each for a different purpose. Whilst the hand glances rapidly and lightly, always tending forwards, the body holds itself back, and the legs, vigorously contracted like a spring, await, for their extension, the signal to be given by the arm as it prepares to make its sudden thrust. The whole of the members are like so many obedient soldiers to whom the general says: ‘March’ – ‘Halt’ – ‘Double.’ The general is the head, that head which, at once inspired and calculating as though on a real field of battle, detects at a glance the faults of the enemy, lays traps for him and compels him to fall into them, simulates a retreat in order to give him confidence, and returns suddenly upon him with a frightful assault…

“And to think that this art, complex as it is, in which the whole of the body is engaged, should really be concentrated between the end of the forefinger and the thumb. For there it all is: there resides the delicate and masterly faculty which alone constitutes the superior fencer – tact. Is it not wonderful to see how much sensibility and life flows between these two digits? They tremble, they palpitate beneath the pressure of the foil in contact with their own, as if an electric current communicated to them all its movements. For them the aid of sight is not necessary, for they do more than see the hostile sword; they feel it, they could follow it with their eyes bandaged; and if you add to these magnificent delights of the sense of touch the powerful circulation of the blood which runs in great waves through the veins, the beating heart, the boiling head, the throbbing arteries, the heaving breast, the opening pores; if you join, moreover, to this the delight of feeling your power and your suppleness increase tenfold; if you think, above all, of the ardent joy and bitter grief of self-love, of the pleasure of beating and the vexation of being beaten, and of the thousand vicissitudes of a struggle which terminates and begins again at each fresh thrust – you will understand that there is in the exercise of this art a veritable intoxication, of which the passion for gambling can alone give an idea. It is play without vice and with health superadded.”

M. Legouvé, who, besides being an admirable writer, possesses no superficial knowledge of fencing, next proceeds to a few detailed observations on the art of the foil and its professors. We can hardly do better than preserve his own words. “Fencing,” he says, “has undergone during the last half-century the same revolution as poetry, music, and painting. It has had its romantic period and its contending schools.

“The distinguishing characteristics of the old school were rigidity, grace, and a certain academic elegance. The words themselves express the thing. To practise fencing was to ‘go to the Academy.’ A fencer of the old school could not run to the attack, nor suddenly break off. He neither bent down nor sprang forward, but under all circumstances maintained, more or less, the same attitude. Fencing was in those days, above all things, an art; which, like every art, had the beautiful for aim.

“Very different was the system of the new school. To make hits was its one object. The means were of no importance, provided the result could be obtained. Fencing was now more a combat than an art; its programme included everything, even the ugly. Fencers would now lie on the ground, would avoid a thrust by ducking their head, aim below the belt, and reduce all the qualities of the fencer to one only: rapidity.

“Gomard and Charlemagne were the two last representatives of the old school: Roussel and Lozes the two first of the new one. I have had the honour, in my youth, of fencing with all four; and I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, while fully recognising the incomparable quickness of Lozes, the superiority rested altogether with the representatives of the old school. Fencing ran the risk not of being renewed, like poetry, in another form, but of being lost altogether, at least as an art. Then came forward a young man who combined in himself the opposite qualities of the two schools. Every lover of fencing will understand that I am referring to Bertrand. As rapid as Lozes and as regular as Gomard, he borrowed from romanticism its audacity, its inspiration, its occasional rashness, and preserved at the same time the elegance of bearing, the severity of attitude, the caution and the science of the classical school. He may fairly be said, in company with Cordelois and Pons the elder, to have saved the art of fencing. He is an exceptional fencer among exceptional fencers. If I may be allowed to use the expression, there is genius in his art. The fencing-masters who came next were the products, somewhat mixed, of the three schools; the four professors who figure in the first rank being MM. Robert the elder, Gâtechair, Mimiague, and Pons the younger. Robert has a quickness of hand, an accuracy of attitude, and a rapidity of reply which recalls Bertrand. Gâtechair is the most academic of the masters of the present day. There is, however, something a little theatrical in his elegance and in his imposing carriage.

“Mimiague is supple, insinuating, adroit, sure to profit by every opportunity. There is a sort of cajolery in his play. If you ask who is the best of these four professors, I shall recommend you to apply the test of Themistocles. Bring together the principal fencing-masters of Paris, and ask them to write on a slip of paper the names of the two best fencers in Paris. Each of them will give the first vote to himself; but Robert will have all the second votes: from which I conclude that he deserves the first.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
PETTY TRADES

Petty Trades – Their Origins – The Day-Banker – The Guardian Angel – The Old-Clothesman – The Claque – Its First Beginning and Development

THE police of Paris are very strict in suppressing those trades bordering upon mendicancy, which in London are somewhat freely allowed. Many of the former hawkers of inexpensive trifles have been permanently swept away from the streets of Paris.

The Galileo of the Place Vendôme, however, is still permitted to carry on his business. As soon as the gas is alight, this personage, somewhat fantastically dressed, levels his telescope, after having traced in chalk on the pavement a picture of the moon, with its mountains, ravines, and so forth. In consideration of a slight recognition, varying from 25 to 50 centimes, he shows his clients all the astronomical phenomena, including some which have escaped the notice of the Observatory.

“Nearly all the petty industries not classed in the Dictionary of Commerce are,” says a French writer, “the product of an imagination over-excited by the gnawings of the stomach. The first person who picked up, on the highway, a cigar-end, and then another and another, and who, after chopping them all up, sold the results as smoking-tobacco, did not deliberately adopt this profession in the same way that a person becomes an administrator or a lawyer. It was the necessity of eating that launched him into this career. Presently he held this argument, based upon statistics: – Every day in Paris at least three hundred thousand cigars are smoked. There must, therefore, be somewhere, and particularly beneath the outdoor tables of the boulevard cafés, three hundred thousand fag-ends. Thus the horizon opens to him. He perceives a magnificent commercial enterprise and takes partners. A new kind of manufacturer has now come into being: a manufacturer of unlicensed tobacco.”

Apparently the commodity sells well; and in the retort of a pipe the eclectic composition is as agreeable to the taste as the privileged product of the imperial factories. Some of the contraband dealers in cigar-ends have made a small fortune.

It was simply chance which created the “day-banker” or “banquier à la journée.” Thirty or forty years ago an individual named Poildeloup, living in the quarter of the markets, lent five francs one day to a woman dealing in old clothes, on condition that she should return him the same evening five francs ten centimes. She kept her word, and again borrowed from him. Then other tradeswomen, also out of funds, applied to Poildeloup, who at once saw what a profit he might derive from this daily lending organised on a big scale. The two sous brought to him each evening in excess of the five francs lent in the morning looked less than nothing at first sight; but in fifty days the banker doubled his capital, and in a few years had amassed wealth. Later on, rival banks were established, which reduced the interest by half, charging only five centimes a day on a hundred sous borrowed in the morning and returned at night. These day-banks, content with half the interest charged by the inventor of the business, still do an excellent trade.

One of the most interesting of the small professions is that of the “guardian angel.” This ethereal personage conducts drunkards home to their dwellings. Attached to every large Paris tavern is a guardian angel, whose duty it is to escort any late-staying customer whose legs decline their office, and who needs a guide. He must not quit the person entrusted to his charge until the latter is out of the reach of thieves and safely installed in his own house. The chief quality requisite in this angel is sobriety.

We were speaking just now of the man who collects cigar-ends. Another curious picker-up of unconsidered trifles is the man who is always on the look-out for crusts of bread. A crust of bread is found in all sorts of places: in the street, at the corners of lanes and alleys, on heaps of rubbish. Do not imagine that this man, on the hunt for hard, dirty, disgusting pieces of bread, has fallen so low as to be obliged to live on the fruits of his discoveries. He is the sort of person who believes firmly that nothing in this world is lost, and that one morsel of dry bread, added to another, may be the beginning of a sack of fragments which he will be able to sell for some twenty sous to breeders of rabbits. The rabbit, beloved by the frequenters of barrier-taverns, does not feed on grain and cabbage alone. It also eats a good quantity of bread. It is in order to procure it this article of diet that the trade of crust-collector was invented.

Of the ragpicker mention has been made elsewhere. He is essentially eclectic in his tastes: rags, paper, gloves, glass, broken toys, the necks of bottles, nothing comes amiss to him. He puts into the basket he carries on his shoulder whatever he can find. It is the trieur or sorter whom the classification of the different objects concerns.

Another petty trade which should not be forgotten is that of the old-clothesman, who is seen everywhere early in the morning uttering his piercing and well-known cry. He is above all to be met with in the districts where young men abound: in the environs, that is to say, of the School of Law and of the School of Medicine. The old-clothesman is of all the gutter-merchants the most cunning and the most merciless. He wanders around the abodes of the students, knowing well the time when they will probably find it necessary to ease themselves of a portion of their wardrobe. It is, above all, when the Carnival is going on that he does good business. The allowance from home being insufficient for the cost of the masked ball, with its concomitant expenses, he realises money by the sale, now of a light overcoat, now of some other summer garment which can be dispensed with in the depths of winter. If the old-clothesman is waiting for the student, the student is on the look-out for the old-clothesman. The latter enters and the bargaining is at once begun. Whatever the dealer may offer, it is sure, after some haggling as if for form’s sake, to be accepted. Having made his purchase, the old-clothesman hastens with the clothes he has bought for a mere nothing from an improvident student in order to sell them at a moderate rate to a provident one. A story is told of two students, of about the same height and figure, who after a time found that their clothes passed from one to the other, the middleman in the shape of the old-clothesman taking on each transaction his own particular profit. It struck them that the middleman might as well be suppressed; and from that time forward Jules, when he was hard up, sold his clothes to Anatole, while Anatole, when he in his turn fell into an impecunious position, sold them back again to Jules.

In the Temple, which gives its name to one of the lower boulevards, there was formerly a market for all kinds of antiquities, including old clothes; while buying and selling of a like character was carried on until a later period in the Marché des Patriarches. Here, even now, the lovers of the economical may provide themselves with shoes at a franc, and boots at three francs and a half.

There are other petty trades at Paris, such as that of the bird-catcher and the pigeon-fancier.

Nor must the sellers of violets at one sou the bunch be forgotten; though they are not to be confounded with the bouquetière in a far more fashionable walk of life. The dealers in groundsel, too, have a trade of their own.

There are many institutions, professions, and classes which, after being originated on the left bank, have crossed the water to flourish on the right. Among these must be included the claque; though, from whatever quarter it may have sprung, there is now no theatrical district in Paris where it does not thrive.

It originated at the Comédie Française, when that institution had its abode at the theatre now known as the Odéon, where, among other masterpieces, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro was produced in 1784. Mercier pointed out, about this time, that the masterpiece in question had no need of organised applause. This preconcerted clapping of hands, varied by the stamping of feet and by walking-sticks, had a very bad effect on the taste and temper of the public, and even, at times, on the fortune of a piece. “They clap when the actor appears on the stage; they clap for the author at the end of the play; they clap for the composer, and make more noise than all the instruments of Gluck’s orchestra, which can no longer be heard. This perpetual noise, this artificial excitement, degrades the public taste. An author who was constantly hissed was once advised to construct a machine which would imitate the sound of three or four hundred persons clapping their hands, and to place it in a corner of the theatre under the guidance of some intelligent and devoted friend.”

Another writer on the same subject, M. Prudhomme, tells us in his “Historical and Critical Mirror of Old and New Paris” (1807) that he had once been acquainted with a man who had no means of living but by assisting at first representations. Placed in the middle of the pit, he called attention to the beauties of the piece and led the applause. The name of “Monsieur Claque” had been given to him, and he had hands as hard as the piece of wood with which washerwomen beat their linen. His terms were thirty-six francs if the piece succeeded, and twelve francs if it failed.

The claque, however, did not acquire its greatest importance until the time of the Restoration. At an earlier period Dorat, a popular drawing-room poet, or writer of vers de société, was in the habit of sending persons to the theatre with a free-admission on the understanding that they were to applaud his piece. By this stratagem he managed to secure a run of several nights for more than one of his works; but at each success he might have applied to himself the exclamation of Pyrrhus after the Battle of Asculum: “One more such victory and I am ruined.”

Dorat did, indeed, ruin himself at the game he is said to have invented; but his invention was not lost to posterity. The claque, however, did not work, in these comparatively primitive days, as an organised body. There was a certain Chevalier de la Morlière, a retired musketeer, who undertook the criticism of all new pieces, and offered to dramatic authors his support or his condemnation. His terms were moderate. A few dinners, a few louis, lent without any fixed term of repayment, a little commission on the pit tickets that passed through his hands: that was all he asked. He had volunteers and paid agents equally at his disposal, the former acting under his advice, the latter at his command. The Chevalier de la Morlière placed himself, moreover, at the service of débutants and débutantes, or rather he imposed his services upon them. One day he took it into his head to become a dramatic author, arguing with himself that after ensuring the success of so many works by others he could do the same for a work of his own. But though he now surpassed himself in the ingenuity of his manœuvres, the work he produced did not succeed. Thereupon he lost all credit. The authors and actors resolved to do without him. His sceptre fell, but only to be taken from time to time by others. Up to this time the claque, as before said, was the work of enterprising individuals who organised it on certain occasions, but not continuously as a permanent institution. Figaro, in Beaumarchais’s comedy, speaks of the play he had written, and goes on to say: “I really cannot understand how it was that I did not obtain the greatest success; for I had filled the pit with excellent workmen, whose hands were like wood.”

The organisation of the claque, as a permanent institution, dates from the time of Napoleon I., and seems to have had for its starting-point the famous rivalry between Mlle. Duchénois and Mlle. Georges. When the struggle between the two tragic actresses came to an end, the forces organised in their service declined to be disbanded. They elected their chiefs, and the leaders treated with managers and authors for regular support. People were still found who would applaud a favourite actor or actress from enthusiasm, duly stimulated by a gratuitous ticket. Thus at one time the whole atelier of David served as claque to an actress much admired by the painter and his pupils, who without support and encouragement might have been crushed, it was thought, by the growing talent and popularity of Mlle. Mars. The claque of David’s atelier was a formidable one, for the great artist had from sixty to eighty students attached to him. This was in 1810, a year or two after the publication of the “Historical and Critical Mirror of Old and New Paris” previously referred to.

Under the Restoration the claque was a regular institution. The quarrels of the Romanticists and Classicists lent it a considerable importance. Impartial in its tastes, it served, turn by turn, and with the same zeal, the “Antony” of the modern drama and the Greek heroines of ancient tragedy. Since 1830 its authority has been universally accepted. Several directors, after trying to dispense with it, have been obliged to conciliate it and accept its conditions – for when the directors have driven it from their house, it has always been brought back by the vanity of the comedians. One alone of the Paris theatres preserved itself from the claque. This was the now defunct Théâtre Italien; though people say of this house that if it had not a claque it had a clique.

With the exception of the last-named, all the theatres of Paris have for years past had organised claques, that of the Opéra being the best disciplined. The chiefs of the claques give themselves the title of “undertakers of dramatic successes.” They do not receive a subvention from the “directors,” but a certain number of places each night, which they sell for their own benefit. It is not from the tickets, however, that they derive the bulk of their gains. Some of them make twenty or thirty thousand francs a year; but they derive this from the vanity of the actors, who pay them proportionately to the degree of applause required.

The claque consists of the chief and a number of assistants, generally poor wretches with a passion for the theatre, some of whom are admitted free on condition of contributing as much applause as necessary, while others are admitted simply at a reduced price. The chief attends the rehearsals, and notes the scenes, passages, or phrases which seem most effective. Then he revises his notes by watching the effect of the first performance on the public. After that he knows each precise point at which to come in with his applause; and if the piece is played for a year, the laughter and tears occur at the same given moments. He employs great tact in choosing men, and even women, for his purpose, the fair sex being the best counterfeiters of convulsive emotion. When, therefore, a drama is produced at Paris, a number of lady weepers are distributed amongst the audience, many of them being the devoted wives of male members of the claque. So soon as the old man of the piece recovers his unfortunate daughter, and exclaims, “My darling! Saved!” the lady weepers plunge their faces into their handkerchiefs and sob like children. The thing becomes contagious. The whole female portion of the audience are now, perhaps, like Niobe, all tears, and the newspapers next day declare that the performance was a succès de larmes.

Doubtless this charlatanism has its comic side. But it is repulsive at the same time; for falsehood is the foundation of the system, and, as M. Eugène Despois says: “It is sad to see men almost exclusively occupied in lying reciprocally. People say that it is only life, that you must conform to it, and that it imposes on no one. ‘Who is deceived? Everyone agrees to the system,’ they argue. That is true. No one is duped; but of what use is all this comedy? After all, of the two parts, that played by the claqueurs, often with spirit, to dupe the public, and that played by the public who submit to this impudent mystification and daily pretend to be duped, the most shameful is that of the public.”

Of recent years the claque has been made the object of some very lively attacks by writers who understand the dignity of their profession. A certain number of dramatic authors, Émile Augier and Dumas the younger amongst others, have frequently endeavoured to dispense with its mercenary plaudits; but it must be owned that the vanity of a large proportion of the actors, and in particular of the actresses, has frustrated the reform. In the meantime, ere the theatre world has awakened to the dishonourable character of the claque system, the claqueurs grow fat, and in some cases possess their town and country residences. It is true that not everyone can be a chief of the claque; to conquer, or rather to purchase, that important post, a great deal of money is required. Auguste, formerly chief of the claque at the Opéra, paid 80,000 francs for his position, but in a few years he had made his fortune. “More than one well-established dancer paid him a pension,” says Dr. Véron. “The début of each artist brought him a gratuity proportionate to the artist’s pretensions. Towards the end of an engagement and the moment of its renewal more than one singer or actor, in order to deceive at once the public and the director, goes to the Auguste of his theatre and offers him a bag of gold to produce such a paroxysm of applause as shall result in a large increase of salary. Such are the traps laid for the director; and into these traps, shrewd as he may be, he sometimes inevitably falls.”

Dr. Véron, an experienced impresario, is far from denouncing the claque, which, according to him, has a mission. “All who expose themselves to be judged by the public, need,” he says, “for the animation of their courage, that fever of joy which applause produces in them.” That was also the opinion of Talma, who found the public too slow to take the initiative. “The claque,” says Elleviou, “is as necessary in the centre of the pit as the chandelier in the centre of a drawing-room.”

The question has often been raised as to whether not only the claque but even spontaneous applause should not be suppressed. The spectator, abandoned to the power of the illusion, is displeased to find himself disturbed by unexpected noise, which, tearing him from Athens or from Rome, reminds him that he is on the benches of a Paris playhouse.