Kitabı oku: «In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity»

PREFACE

The Parisienne, in her subtler phases, is a theme for a feminist of genius; and this little book does not venture upon the psychological deep seas.

Grave issues are tangled in the game of fashion-making; but the world through which My Lady of the Chiffons dances lightly to gay music reeks of frivolity, and the story of the fashionable Parisienne and of the haunts in which she obtains and displays her incomparable frocks must needs be a story of folly and extravagance, best told, perhaps, by snap-shots of the inner courts of Vanity Fair.

The Author.

CHAPTER I
FROCKS AND FEMININITY

Clothes and the woman we sing! Given the themes, Paris is obviously the only appropriate setting. Nowhere else do the kindred cults of frocks and femininity kindle such ardent devotion. Nowhere else are women so enthusiastically decorative. There are women more beautiful than the Parisiennes, there are women who spend as much money upon their clothes. Pouf! What is beauty unadorned? What is beauty adorned – provided it is not chic.

That crisp little monosyllable is sadly abused by our Anglo-Saxon saleswomen, but it is a master word for all that, a great word holding in solution the quintessence of things Parisian. It means a subtle something before which mere beauty is humble, and mere luxury is banal. It means coquetry, audacity, charm. It means a thing evanescent, impalpable, unmistakable, absurd, adorable, a thing deliciously feminine, a thing essentially of the world worldly.

That the word should be a French word with no exact equivalent in another tongue is as it should be. The Parisienne is the true "femme chic." She has the secret and she realizes its value, makes a fetich of it, devotes herself to it with a zeal that could flourish nowhere outside of Paris. There are charming women all over the world, but nowhere is femininity so conscientiously occupied in being charming as it is in Paris.

Your true Parisienne begins her creed with, "I believe in coquetry"; and by coquetry she means not merely embryonic flirtation, but all that goes to make sophisticated charm. She is coquette from her cradle to her grave, from her first communion frock to her last cap and shawl. She does not depend upon her natural advantages, she is not unconscious, not simple. She is deliberately, insistently charming, and to gain that end she shows the infinite capacity for taking trouble which amounts to genius. The ill-natured call the result artificiality, and they are right; but the fine art of the artificiality is a thing to conjure with, and through its aid the Frenchwoman retains her charm long after youth and its bloom are fled. Wit wears better than complexion, and tact outlasts figure. Incidentally, much may be done to patch up complexion and figure if wit and tact are on hand to carry off the counterfeit.

To be sure there is something a trifle depressing about the faded ghosts of Parisian youth, the old ladies of Paris who refuse to admit defeat, and, painted, bejewelled, vivacious, defy the years.

Yes, there's a sadness in the struggle, a gentle melancholy such as serves poets for rondels and villanelles, but they are not sad, themselves, those old ladies of Paris. Bless your heart, no! They are gay, excessively gay. They flutter their fans and toss their curled heads and scatter wrinkled smiles and unwrinkled bon mots, and succeed, after a fashion, in their aim; for they are delightful, these faded, worldly belles. They keep their youthful hearts, their keen wits, their absorbing interest in men and things. They have not forgotten how to be amusing; and, under their cleverly applied rouge and powder and false hair and general artificiality, they are still sympathetic, still witty, still wise. Not one's ideal of placid old age, not, perhaps, the grandmothers one would choose for the family tree, but delightful companions still; coquettes who have outlived their youth but not their finesse.

Perhaps the cult of coquetry which is the pervasive spirit of French society would be impossible outside the atmosphere in which it flourishes. It is a part of Parisian tradition, it colours Parisian values, determines Parisian standards. Insensibly the woman who lives in Paris surrenders to this spirit though she may have come of Puritan stock or of Roundhead ancestry. It is in the air of Paris. If one cannot breathe the air and assimilate the germs, one departs. That is all. One returns to Boston or Kansas City or Glasgow or Tewkesbury. Doubtless those women who flee from the insidious assault lead lives more estimable than those who succumb, but they do not learn the gentle art of coquetry in its Parisian form. So much the better for the quietude of Boston and Kansas City and Glasgow and Tewkesbury.

It is probable, highly probable, that the foreigner who recklessly remains in Paris and invites the spirit of the place will show her inevitable lapse from Puritanical grace first in her underwear. French lingerie is the sign and symbol of French femininity. It is the refinement of luxury, the quintessence of coquetry.

To wear a fortune in a gown is something, but to wear a fortune in lace and handwork and cobweb linen hidden away under a frock demurely simple is more, and the Parisienne adores "le dessous." Jewels she may lack – though not for want of conscientious effort to obtain them – but dainty petticoats she will have, and, having them, she will wear them, and wearing them, she will show them. Why not contribute to the sum of humanity's simple joys?

An old lady from a little Missouri town strayed from a Cook's party one day, at the entrance to the Louvre; and, some hours later, a young countrywoman of hers found her occupying one of the Champs Elysées chairs and watching with fearful joy the stream of French womanhood picking its way along walks still wet from an all-night rain.

The old lady clutched the arm of her fellow American and turned a puzzled face away from the passing show.

"My dear, just look at those petticoats and stockings!" she gasped. "The creatures haven't any idea of hiding them. I've been watching for two mortal hours and there hasn't been a let-up yet. Some are finer than others, that's all. But they're all showy, and every single woman has her dress tucked up so you can't miss them. When I saw the first ones I thought I'd struck the French women you read about, – the ones who aren't proper, you know, and I was so interested; but then they kept coming so steadily that I got all mixed up. Hundreds have gone by, all holding their skirts like that and every one of them swishing silk or lace ruffles and showing silk stockings, – and it isn't humanly possible, even in Paris, that they're all bad, now is it?"

Bad? Not the least in the world. They were merely French. The petticoat of Pleasantville, Missouri, and the petticoat of Paris are two separate and distinct things, and the old lady had vaguely grasped an important fact not down upon the Cook's party schedule of information. The Parisienne is Paris. Incidentally there are picture galleries and museums.

The amount of money spent on the "dessous" by a Parisian woman of fashion is madly extravagant and entirely characteristic. It is but a detail of that religion of luxury whose high priests centre in the Rue de la Paix. The average Frenchwoman has a thrifty and frugal side, but the extravagant Frenchwoman spends her money with a light-hearted gaiety and a maximum of picturesque effect. The most prodigal patrons of the great dressmakers and jewellers in the Rue de la Paix are Americans, but the most brilliant figures in the fashionable Parisian world are French. The born Parisienne is the supreme coquette. She wears her clothes with an incomparable air. There is a touch of the actress in her, and in the matter of feminine fashion art can give points to nature, so the Frenchwoman wears with artfully artless grace and naturalness creations whose audacity would reduce a woman of any other nationality to an awkward self-consciousness that would ruin the effectiveness of the costume.

Even could one conceive of all the great French dressmakers transplanted to another land, only in Paris could the modes be successfully launched, for only there can monsieur find the women who are ready and able to carry off triumphantly even the most revolutionary of creations, who have the courage and confidence to exploit models strikingly novel – always provided those models have beauty and cachet to commend them. It is the Parisienne, too, who is willing to buy the most extravagantly fragile and perishable of frocks and who will wear them regardless of consequences; who will, moreover, smile most cheerfully when, having fulfilled its mission, the costly frock is crushed, drabbled, ruined.

"It had un succès fou, M'sieu!" she says blithely to the maker when she sees him next. That is quite enough. A great success on one occasion justifies any extravagance, and why allow a spoiled frock to obscure an agreeable memory?

King Alfonso attended one of the famous race meetings near Paris one day last summer, and all the smart Parisian world turned out to do him honour. The display of frocks and millinery was a notable one. The pesage was crowded with women in the airiest and most elaborate of summer toilettes and, suddenly, the heavens opened and a torrent of rain poured down. Such a scurrying and twittering; such little moans and shrieks; such laughter and jesting! Bad temper? Not a bit of it. Things were quite bad enough without losing one's temper. So they chatted and joked and achieved bon mots that almost reconciled them to the facts that their rouge was streaked and their plumes were drabbled and their curls were straggling and their frocks were limp. The sun came out and the demoralized toilettes emerged from under cover, mere wrecks of their former beauty; but the wearers carried the situation off with a good-natured vivacity to which no other women would have been equal. The afternoon was a particularly gay one, and the prevailing philosophy was voiced by one little countess who was heard to say to a friend as they stood waiting for their automobiles:

"The frocks are spoiled, absolutely spoiled. C'est dommage, – but, ma chère, what an opportunity for the petticoats and the feet, n'est-ce pas? Me, – I found much consolation in the real lace in my white stockings and in my new shoe buckles, – Va! One sees, every day, the frocks. To-day, for the first time, I know intimately the ankles of all my friends."

Possibly the countess gave her maid a bad quarter hour after she reached home; but for the benefit of the public she stood there, insouciant, smiling, debonair, with her chiffon frock clinging forlornly to her shapely little figure, with her tulle hat gummed to a disarranged coiffure and its plumes drooping like funeral emblems over her left ear, but with her spirits intact. Not for nothing did she have some of the best blood of France in her veins. It is sporting blood, – that best blood of France.

Concerning the morals of French womankind, the serious may write, – and the less they know about Paris – provided they are Anglo-Saxon – the more fluently they will write; for intimate acquaintance with Parisian life and sentiment is sadly prejudicial to orthodox Anglo-Saxon standards, and it is difficult to be severe with the Parisienne if one knows her. One disapproves of her, in certain of her phases, perhaps, but one learns the tolerant shoulder shrug of her nation. She is so very amusing, and Paris is, first of all, "le monde où l'on s'amuse."

One may like Paris or not. One may choose to live in Paris or to live elsewhere, but one thing the fair-minded will all admit. This capital city of the kingdom of Vanity Fair is gay. The Parisians have reduced gaiety to a science, luxury to an art. There may be tragedy behind the curtain; but, before the public, life goes to a merry tune. It is quite possible that smart society, the world over, is as rotten as our novelists, dramatists, and preachers would have us believe; but, at least, in Paris it is not dull. Where American smart society is spectacular, French smart society is chic. Even in the half world the distinction holds. The demi-mondaine of New York – or the nearest approach to the demi-mondaine which New York furnishes, for our standards are uncompromising and we recognize no "half world" – is vulgar. The demi-mondaine of Paris is – one can but have recourse once more to that untranslatable comprehensive word "chic."

Immorality, we are solemnly assured, is none the less immoral because it is not banal. Probably it is more deplorable in proportion as it takes on attractiveness; but we are not moralizing, merely stating facts, and the fascination of the great Parisian demi-mondaine is a well-established fact.

To begin with, she is the best dressed woman in the world. Any of the famous dressmakers of Paris, who are the world's arbiters of fashion, will tell you that. She has the money and the taste, and with her, even more than with the Parisienne of the beau monde, being charming is a metier. She supplements natural attractions with every resource of art. She is, as a rule, clever, tactful, witty. Often she is brilliant, and the nearest approach to the famous salons of old France are to be found to-day in the homes of certain Parisiennes who are frankly demi-mondaine or dwell in that middle world twixt "beau" and "demi" where, sometimes, the name "artiste" casts a broad mantle of charity over irregularity of life. There are countesses and princesses of the blood who play at salon making in Paris, and who would be in the seventh heaven could they once call under their roofs the famous men who flock to certain salons where mesdames of the beau monde may not follow. Great litterateurs, painters, sculptors, musicians, scientists gather at certain informal evenings, certain famous little dinners. And mark you, everything here is comme il faut – yes, indeed. Let the student of morals who associates the phrase demi-mondaine only with Tenderloin orgies revise his vocabulary. Orgies of the familiar kind he can find in Paris. They are easily found; but he will have considerable difficulty in gaining admittance to the salon of the great artiste whose life history has been, to put it mildly, unconventional, or to the salon of the famous demi-mondaine. Once admitted, he will need wit and worldly wisdom to hold his own. One hears of little dinners where the quantity of liquor drunk falls far below Tenderloin standards, but where the poet of the moment composes sonnets to his hostess's eyebrow; where the famous composer replies to Madame's "A new song, mon chèr. I must have a song all my own," by sitting down at the piano and working out a chanson which all Paris will be whistling a few months later; where the petted tenor from the Opera sings street ballads, and the great diplomat chats international scandal, and the successful artist and feminist sketches portraits of his hostess upon the fly-leaf of the autograph copy of the academician's book which the author has just presented to her.

Yes; one hears of those happenings in the little house at Neuilly or in the mansion on the Boulevard Malesherbes, or wherever the rendezvous may be, and one struggles vainly to adjust one's vision to the Parisian perspective to understand the Parisian attitude toward life. It is disturbing to find impropriety so devoid of the lurid light in which melodrama pictures it. One's moral vertebra softens in Paris.

But there are Parisiennes and Parisiennes. There is the aristocrat of the St. Germain – and even aristocratic virtue is not dull in Paris. There is the wife of the millionaire tradesman. There are the women folk of the great banking house. There are the ladies of the diplomatic circle, there are exiled queens and resident grand duchesses. There are the Americans. There are the artistes. There are the demi-mondaines, the cocottes. And there is Mimi. She is not the worst of the group, this unimportant little Mimi, not the worst, and by no means the least coquette; but she is not a bird of fine feathers and does not belong in our story.

The great lady of Paris is grande dame to her finger-tips, whether she nurses the traditions of the old régime in her exclusive salon in the Faubourg St. Germain or follows after such new gods as "le sport" and broadens her visiting list to include the trades and arts, – provided always that the trade and the art have paid well enough to lift tradesman and artist above their metiers. France loves genius, but for social success, in Paris, genius is not enough.

One must have money, wit, and tact to succeed in smart French society without the prestige of aristocratic birth. If one has the birth in addition, so much the better.

There are salons to which only those to the nobility born are eligible, but they are few, and modern French society is prone to go where it will be most skilfully amused, where it will find the most luxury, the greatest originality, the most volatile gaiety. The receptions of the Duchesse de Rohan are impressive, her invitations are in the nature of patents of nobility, but the Comtesse Pillet-Will's extravagantly original fêtes are more popular, and the average Parisian élégante would rather go ballooning with the exceedingly modern young Duchesse d'Uzes than talk politics in the salon of the Comtesse Jean de Castellane or listen to the excellent music which the Comtesse de Bearn provides for her guests. Not that one objects to politics and music. Music is "très chic" as furnished in the salons of the Comtesse de Bearn, the Marquise de Castrone, the Vicomtesse de Tredern, and the other society leaders who are noted for this especial variety of entertainment; and, though the great political salon is a thing of yesteryear, the Parisienne always takes an interest in politics. It is a game, and she adores games, especially games in which men are the counters. She is a born intrigante, and here is a field for legitimate intrigue. Moreover, many men are devoted to politics, and is not sympathy the corner-stone of the foundation of that power over men which is the breath of the Frenchwoman's nostrils?

So, many of the fair Parisiennes play at politics, but few play so charmingly as does the Comtesse Jean. Comtesse Boni de Castellane, too, has political pretensions, and shows a devotion to the royalist cause all the more vehement because grafted upon democratic birth and training; but it is when they pay forty thousand dollars for a week-end house party that the Boni de Castellanes loom large upon the Parisian horizon. Their salon is not epoch-making.

Parisian society dabbles in politics, music, art, spiritualism, amateur theatricals, and a host of other things, but it plunges bodily into racing. The Jockey Club of France, which controls the turf in France, is a gentleman's club, and its members are, with the exception of a few rich bourgeois, representatives of the most aristocratic houses of France. The Duc de Noailles, the Duc de Dondeauville, Prince d'Arenberg, Duc de Fezensac, Comte Pillet-Will, Vicomte d'Harcourt and a host of other men as well known are on the list of membership, and it is natural enough that the great racing events near Paris should bring out the flower of Parisian society as well as the heterogeneous crowds common to race tracks.

"Le sport," too, imported from England and conscientiously fostered for a long time before it showed signs of taking firm root in French soil, is now a conspicuous feature of Parisian social life; and golf clubs, tennis clubs, polo clubs, etc., are the chic rendezvous even for that large percentage of Parisian society which, for all its vivacity, would not, under any suasion, lend itself to active exercise. One does not look well when one exercises too violently, and costumes suitable for golf and tennis are not nearly as fascinating as those that may be worn by lookers-on. Therefore, since looking one's best is a sacred duty, and since attractive frock wearing is the Parisienne's religion, Madame, as a rule, prefers to look on. She has sporting blood, but, as we have already said, she is, before all else, "coquette."