A house-hunter in Europe

Contents

FIRST PERIOD

CHAPTER

I. — House-hunting and Housekeeping, from the Port of Cherbourg to Stately Versailles,

Chapter I

HOUSE-HUNTING AND HOUSEKEEPING FROM THE PORT OF CHERBOURG TO STATELY VERSAILLES

In the next place, then — for the prejudice against going back to the beginning of the world to tell how it all came about is really too well founded, — in the next place, then, we landed at Cherbourg, — in the last days of July.

It is no " editorial we " that is here employed : the pronoun refers to a family of two which had been married about a couple of years, to a day. We are by no means to hold up our modest housekeeping experiences here as a model, — indeed, I fear we shall too often prove only "the horrible example;" but we have thought they might have some small interest of novelty, and a value if only on this very ground of showing people what to avoid if not what to imitate.

When we had spoken, before leaving home, of being gone two years, our friends in America had called it a long time, and we ourselves hardly believed in so much. But, in the sequel, our experiment extended its proportions to nearly five years instead of two. And, what is more, from this warm, sunny, fragrant Riviera which became our harbor of refuge after many wanderings, we are scarce ready even yet to depart.

We had no set destination. We did not want a great many of the things that other people want ; we were not in search of good schools, musical advantages, improving society, in the usual sense, nor a climate to restore our shattered health. We wanted to gratify to the full that taste for antiquity and romantic tradition which is so very American, for all that it is the way of the world to represent us as so exclusively modern and practical. And we wanted to test personally the cheapness of foreign living, of which we hear so much. Our theory was that, a man of letters could write as well, or as ill, on one side of the water as the other; and the advice to reduce one's divisor, if he can't increase his dividend, could not be carried out so favorably in any other way. When we come to figures, it will be seen that the promise was justified, and notable economies were really possible. Indeed, I fear people looking for practical advice would do well to take our prices " and upward, " as the hotel-keepers say; for it would be rather difficult to depart much from them downward.

Other people simply travelled, we meant to keep house, in romantic places, and see the life through and through. That should be our form of originality. We had an idea we might even seek first some quiet French village, and find entertainment enough there. There would certainly be some good architecture, which is scattered everywhere, and plenty of history, — perhaps, for the American habit, used to making much of a little, there would be even too much. We would go one day to the local fete^ another to see the administration of justice, another to a marriage at the inairie^ and the like. We should probably get acquainted with the mayor, the doctor, the acre\ and other local dignitaries; — in short, we should be in a position to study the place in complete and satisfactory detail. What is the matter with such a programme ? And, then, if it be true, as our critics represent, that the best material for fiction is the vestiges of foreign life that linger about our shores, there must be infinitely more in plunging over head and ears into foreign life itself, — foreign life free from admixture with any Americanism. Remark that I say, skeptically, if it be true, for our plan had no need of this argument at least.

So now, I begin.

It almost seemed at first as if Cherbourg itself would do. There, all at once, were the traditional French atmosphere, the silvery-gray, warm tones, the uniforms, the peasants, men in Millet-blue blouses, and women in white caps fresh as snowflakes, and Napoleon prancing on horseback in a wide paved square, and promising to renew in the navy yard before him " the marvels of Egypt." A beach with a pretty Casino, too; but these were suffering, like all the bathing-beaches along the coast, from an exceptionally cold summer. Brittany and its neighborhood are a rainy country at best, and its drawback was unusually manifest that year. It did not rain all the time, it is true, and the broken gleams of sunshine gave charming effects of light. Still, no sooner was your umbrella down than you must put it up again, and no sooner was it up than you must put it down again — which finished by becoming embetanty as they say in the country.

Cherbourg was not even a very good place to rest in.

We connect with it an uncommon clatter of wooden shoes over the stones, a booming of heavy carts and cabs, a shrieking of whistles in the port, a piping of bugles and a trotting along of troops, very early in the morning, at that double-quick pace which has become the recognized gait of the modern French soldier.

We did not ask the price of any houses at Cherbourg, but we first became acquainted there with the " Saint Michel " whose name figures so prominently on the bills of all houses to let. I believe we had, for a moment, an idea that the places were billed "/<??/r le jour de Saint Michel prochain'' (Saint Michael's day next coming) in view of some possible fine street procession, of which their windows might afford an exceptional view. It stands simply for the beginning of the October term, — "the Michaelmas term," as the English would say.

From that day primarily or the ist of April secondarily, the renting of houses and apartments begins, and if you are not on hand at the time, to have the advantage of the general moving, you may expect to have to put up with rather poor leavings.

We took our few days of needed repose, instead, at Mont Saint Michel. From that island rock, one prodigious abbey, so curious and good after its kind that the government has made a national monument of it, we looked back across miles of wet shining sand to attractive-seeming Avranches, on its height. One would not exactly want to live at Mont Saint Michel, but it would be most charming to have its fascinations added to those of Saint Malo, Cancale, Concarneau, and all the rest, if he chanced to live in that district at all. A practical detail of the beds in the large old-fashioned room they gave us, up among the ramparts, was that they were in closets, with folding doors. We thought the plan quite worthy of American invention, at first, but finding it in our modern Paris apartment, later on, we fell quite out of conctit with it, for those perverse doors were forever open when they should be shut, or shut when they should be open.

We proposed to pass the hot weather at one of the little Brittany bathing-stations, before actively beginning our campaign; but the hot weather obstinately declined to appear. Dinard, the most considerable of these places, was much too modern to our eyes. The same reproach could not be made against fine old Saint Malo, walled in on its promontory, and with the genial clumsiness about its marine life that painters like.

To me, there had always been something about a battlemented town on a height that well-nigh dispensed with all need of further recommendation. But will you believe it that everybody does not share this taste ? St. Malo would not have been bad at all, but prepare for astonishment when I tell you that even a person quite

near to the expedition, that " Madame," that " S ,"

— ahem ! — in short, the other half of the expedition — whose opinion in the matter of home-making was naturally of high importance — did not like walled towns but felt that they gave you " a sort of shut-in feeling."

Need one dwell upon the inexactness of this view, their sole reason for existence having been to give other people a shut-out feeling? However, it is a taste that may be acquired, — ^as well, let me say, as abated — and we came in our time to live in a walled town that would have warmed the heart of a Sir Walter Scott or a Froissart.

Some English inhabit Saint Malo, and a dwelling there, though dear if taken only for the summer season, would be reasonable for all the year round. It was the recollection of Victor Hugo's grandiose fiction, " The Toilers of the Sea," and of the melancholy harmonies of Chateaubriand, who is buried there, that chiefly led us to Saint Malo. It was Feyen-Perrin's poetic picture, at the Luxembourg, of " A Return of Oyster-Fishers," that led us to Cancale — and disappointment. Oysters are a controverted point internationally, and I do not enter upon that; and the cliffs and limpid greenish-blue water are lovely, but the Cancalaise women, instead of being the dream-maidens of the picture, balancing their nets against the sky as in a rhythmic procession with banners, are plain, squalid, and awkward to a degree.

These earlier wanderings served but as a preliminary to the little city of Dinan, eight or ten miles in the country, south of Dinard. We knew of Dinan before leaving America; romancers have dealt with it, and we had heard pleasant things of it from a group of artists and friends who used to go there to sketch. The prettiest way is up a little sylvan river, the Ranee, which narrows soon into a still more sylvan canal. The steamboat, running you aground a few times incidentally as it works its way up the exiguous channel, lands you under a fine high stone viaduct. Climbing a moderate steep to the town you pass through the old portcullised gateway of Jersual, part of the mediaeval defences left behind them by the dukes of Brittany; the bastions, crenelations, and donjon-keeps that yet exist in imposing prominence. Only, — in the interest of such as may dread gloomy impressions — the greater part of the old fortifications has been turned into a charming green promenade, a plan frequently adopted as a happy compromise, where such stern vestiges of antiquity are not swept away altogether.

Dinan seems larger than its population, of but eight or nine thousand, would warrant. Perhaps the cobble-stones, all set thin edge upward, which make walking about in it a sort of penance, have something to do with the illusion. It is gray and ivy-grown, plentifully supplied with old arcaded houses, quaint shop-fronts, and the graver architectural monuments of a most interesting sort.

The considerable English colony has built a quarter of its own, spick-and-span-new, little in keeping with the rest. It has an English church, good tennis courts, a circulating library, and an English club. At the latter I found myself, though a stranger, heartily entertained by one who insisted that he must pay off to me an old favor he had received from some other American. The climate cannot be very severe in winter, as the character of the vegetation shows. I heard of a person who had kept a comparative record of temperatures here and at Cannes, and had found them to differ very little, though this is hard to believe except for some exceptional season.

Similar English settlements are scattered numerously over the Continent. Each has its peculiar reason for existence. Those throughout northern France have the advantage of the greater nearness to England; if you have occasion to run over to London, it is a very slight matter, and you do not impair your economies by the cost of long journeys. Although such settlements have been begun, as a rule, by artists or literary men, who have discovered something that especially pleased them in the spot, this modest class of people involuntarily create a publicity, and find themselves followed, and, in course of time, elbowed out, by not merely the well-to-do, but the great of the earth, who want to see for themselves localities that have become famous. There were major-generals, bishops, and hereditary titles of note among the frequenters -of Dinan ; and going, one day, on foot, to see the Renaissance chateau of La Conninais, down in the valley by the mineral spring, I found it occupied by a great parliamentary leader. The seeming check proved to be only an occasion for one more experience of English kindliness; though the occupants of an historic monument are by no means held to be agreeable to the clients of an over-zealous guidebook, they deferred to the disappointed look with which I was turning away, and the family themselves showed me, there, all that it was important to see.

1 went further on, in this same jaunt, to the ruins of La Garaye, a chateau of the elegant Francis L period, looking like an abandoned fairy palace in its lonesome wood. I should not otherwise have acquired that intimate idea it is desirable to have of the country surrounding one's immediate abode. I should not have known, for instance, about that system of sunken roads which cross the land without ever being visible from its surface. They are often ten or twelve feet deep, — deep enough to hide not only a pedestrian, but a whole farm-wagon with its load; and in their sunless depths linger clayey mire and standing pools. There is a mystic solemnity on the face of the land as if the spirit of its old Druids hovered over it still ; it would require plenty of sunshine to brighten it, but sunshine, unfortunately, it does not get. The peasants are silent and solemn, too, in keeping with the prevailing tone. The Brittany school of painters have shown us much of this, but somehow there is such a decorative quality in the pottery, embroideries, and furniture they depict, and even in the costumes of sombre blue or black, relieved by the sparkling white of the women's caps, that you do not believe in so much gravity till you have seen it for yourself.

The very first house we looked at, at Dinan, was charming. It seemed to have been a large farm grange now made over into a villa. The approach was through a farm garden, and thence by a green door in a wall, and through a flower garden. It had pleasant nooks, blue and white wall-papers and chintzes, and many of the old oak Breton wardrobes, with rich brass mountings, which the English proprietor had picked up in peasant interiors of the district. But it was much too large for us; and besides it was furnished, and we had already begun to talk of buying our own furniture, to have artistic " finds " and bargains for ourselves. The rent, too, was something like a thousand dollars a year, whereas we were carrying in mind, as a basis, an old manor-house, half-way between Trouville and Honfleur, for which, meagrely furnished, it is true, an American family we had known had paid but four hundred dollars a year.

Of z^^zfurnished habitations there was a dearth, as there is apt to be. The foreign colony would not be likely to offer them, and the truth was forced upon us that if you want something attractive and hygienic in the older part of such small places where there is little moving, it must be a matter of long previous search and negotiation. Perhaps you might pay somebody handsomely lO A HOUSE-HUNTER IN EUROPE

to turn out for you, but I am not sure that even that could be done. A small apartment, not bad after you once got there, could have been had in a sculptured old hotel, near the Place des Cordeliers, for three hundred francs, but the entrance was vilely impossible. In the Place Saint Sauveur, facing close up to the buttresses of the gray old church, with a view of the sylvan valley, over the parapet, there was vacant a small stone house, for five hundred francs. Here we could have drunk deep our draught of mediaevalism ; but the house faced due north ; it was in a condition to need cleaning with shovels rather than brooms, and water trickled in rivulets down the natural rock of its foundations.

An uneasy feeling that it was necessary to wait for the rain to stop, and to see how the places would appear by settled daylight, impeded all this house-hunting. But the rain did not stop; it increased. The destiny of men is dependent, after all, upon small circumstances. Brittany was not on the cards for us. We left damp, gray, dripping Dinan behind us, and set out for Paris. In a great capital, we said, distractions can be found even in the rain.

On the way, the weather perversely turned hot and dusty, and our sudden resolution was shaken. We looked with a certain longing at Chartres, then at Rambouillet, but did not really yield to temptation till we reached Versailles, which had been on our vague mental list.

Captivated by the great park of Le Notre and the traditions of the court of Louis XIV., we left the train at Versailles, and tried housekeeping in lodgings for a month. Our lodging was on the Rue de la Paroisse, — I need not indicate more closely, as nothing is to be said

HOUSE-HUNTING AND HOUSEKEEPING IT

in praise of it. We used to go through the Gate of the Dragon, opening just at the end of our street, past the Basin of Apollo, and so up to the esplanade in front of the palace. The Basin of Apollo is where the best of the fountains play, in the grand monthly exhibition of spouting waters; but in our day it was torn up for wholesale repairs, and we used to hurry by it as rapidly as possible. We tired ourselves — an agreeable, wellpaid fatigue, — in the endless galleries of the palace, but there were few days when the weather allowed us to enjoy the yet more enchanting delights of the park.

Finally there came one such, a perfect summer day, so delightful among those vast alleys and vagaries of clipped foliage, with the quaint population of statues, as to wipe out a multitude of disappointments. We took our lunch and spent a long day at the further end of the park, a point so remote that it used to seem as if nobody had ever been there before. The hasty tourists from Paris scurry about the palace and near alleys, and rarely go beyond the Trianons. We rested in the shade, by the high railing that cuts off the royal domain from the farming-country of Saint Cyr. There all around were vast carpet-like stretches of greensward, and the roads, between the noble straight avenues, are greensward, too, hardly marked by a single wheel-track. You see only an ancient woman gathering fagots, like a witch, or a solitary officer trying the paces of a new charger, preparatory to going down to command his men, who are throwing pontoons back there, over the neglected southern arm of the great fish-pond.

The palace is much better from that great distance than near by ; its slope of ground serves it as a pedestal ; and, what with the play of light and shade upon it, and the delicious long vista, you do not mind so much its monotonous drab tone and total lack of sky-line. The formal park has here relapsed into nature again, like some fine old gentleman of the old regime who has abandoned the artificial court-life and taken to philosophy and simple rural tastes. There is something extremely grateful, restful, and pensive about these noble alleys of green, going on and on and on in unbroken directness. I should think one might be very happy who had the chance to walk in them often. We still think the choice of Versailles was a good one, and look back to it as the pleasantest of all the suburbs of Paris, though the exceptional season pursued us, and ended by driving us away.

The town itself used to be silent, without gayety, sunk in slumber, soon after nightfall. Even the tramway seemed to steal away to Paris, on its wide shaded avenue, with a discreet, hushed air.

A certain Hortense, a nice-looking young person, reticent, and sad in expression, as if she had some history to conceal, did our cooking for us, and gave us our first acquaintance with the useful femme de me'nage system. The femme de menage comes to do your day's work, or any part of it you like, for about six cents an hour, and returns to her home to sleep. It is a recognized thing, like going to a trade or other occupation. By this system, you do not have to provide a chamber for her, and if she comes only a part of the day you do not even have to feed her. I mention, for the moment, only the advantageous side of the system.

At Versailles, S , flanked by Hortense as chief of

staff, after an attempt alone, did her earliest marketing. It is a veritable ordeal, as she represented to me, and the worst of it is, it has to be renewed in each new foreign country, and, to some extent, al-ways continues. Insidious or crabbed old women stare hard at you, to put you out of countenance if possible by their appreciation of the fact that you are a novice and a stranger. They practise extortion on all hands, and return impudence, or affect to toss back their lettuce or plums into the heap in disdain, if you attempt to bargain. I think no masculine mind, in superior pride of intellect, need smile at the difficulty of mastering all the new qualities and quantities of the received kinds of provisions, and keeping out a proper eye for taking novelties. To estimate in kilogrammes and litres instead of in pounds and quarts, and in francs and centimes instead of dollars and cents, is simple in cold blood, I grant you ; but to do it under fire, and still know where you are in your economies, is a matter of long and serious practice. Suppose it is suddenly sprung upon you, for instance, that you have eggs to the amount of soixante-dix centimes, mushrooms to quatre-vingtquinze^ and four hektos of butter at trente-huit the hekto, will you remember instantly that these are simple fourteen, nineteen, and seven and three-fifths cents respectively, and that four hektos is four-tenths of a kilo, which is two and one-tenth pounds? I should very much doubt it.

Then, too, the language comes in. However glib you may be at it, this will not always serve; for the lower orders of people, the world over, mouth and chop their words, and change them into a patois^ which is quite unintelligible and has to be a-cquired separately.

" Even if they send in a written account, it isn't much better," S , complained, in those days. "They make their figures all alike, and nothing is distinct but the sum total."

However, this is one of the conditions of the problem; it is an ordeal to be met, — the earlier and more bravely, the better. A personal acquaintance with the prices is indispensable as a check upon others, even if the marketing is afterward to be committed to assistants. Surel}^ some of the hardships should be offset, too, by the never-failing supply of humorous episodes, the novelty of the wares, and the bright, bustling character of these market scenes, in which indeed a good part of foreign picturesqueness resides.

Chapter II

When the rain still came down and soaked the gayeties of a gingerbread fair, and put out its strings of paper lanterns, it dampened anew our fancy for rural life, and again we turned our attention toward Paris.

I went in first to see what could be done in the way of permanent quarters there, and we soon found something to our liking and took possession. Among other vague plans we had contemplated was one that it would be pleasant, if feasible, to live a year in each of the great capitals of Europe in turn. Paris proper had entered no more into our scheme than any other, but nothing could be better to begin with than Paris.

In Paris of course we must expect to live rather high, as the houses are six and seven stories in the air. Except in the most expensive, there are no "lifts," or "elevators." But how often you hear it said by people at home, enthusiasts for foreign life, that abroad you do not mind all that, stairs and the rest, as you would here! — they are the custom, and then there are so many distractions and charms, and then and then, and so forth. We came to have a different opinion later; you do mind them. But we had no great prejudice, for the moment, against a quatri^me or even a cinquihne story.

We ruled out the quarter about the Arc de Triomphe, the colony of the wealthy strangers, and plunged into more thoroughly French surroundings. That exception apart, we were governed by no narrow exclusiveness, for we searched sites so far apart as the hill of Montmartre ; the Place des Vosges, in the Marais, with the house of Madame Sevigne; the Luxembourg; and the Invalides.

Montmartre is the most picturesque thing in Paris; and, as it is a landmark from every side, it repays its prominence by returning you a wide view over the city and country. I recollect there, years before, a young American literary man and painter, known to fame, who w^ith the aid of a Greek servant brought back from the Russo-Turkish war led a charming life in a small house of his own. It was entered through a green door in a garden wall, and what the standing fascination is of a green door in a garden wall, I shall leave to others to explain.

Well, the old studios were all there, along the boulevards below ; the view was as fine as ever from the windmills; the great votive church, building ever since the war, was finished; but, whether I had forgotten its address or the small house itself had disappeared, I could not find it, high nor low. The quarter itself had grown more shabby and disreputable than of old, and we were told afterward that it was not pleasant, at all times, for ladies to pass along through its teeming noisy life.

On the whole, the staider portion of the Latin Quarter, under the shade of the university and schools, seemed the most promising for our case. Away from the dazzle of the great shops and the mighty rush of the central boulevards, it would naturally, we said, have the habit of dealing with frugal-minded people, and looking with content upon moderate prices. There are some houses along the Rue Madame and the Rue du Luxembourg giving, either front or rear, upon the Luxembourg garden. That seemed a particularly attractive point. * We had not been satiated with clipped vegetation and statuary at Versailles, only tantalized, and if we could have the ancient plaisance of Catherine de Medicis under our eyes, it would be well worth while.

The sign " To Let " was out on a fresh-looking house in the Rue du Luxembourg. It had only a cinquieme, a fifth story, however. It was large enough, consisting of a salon^ dining-room, three principal bedrooms, and the appurtenances.

"And the price?" to the beaming concierge.

A concierge, on first or brief acquaintance, is always beaming.

"Two thousand francs, M'seu et 'Dame."

" That is the lowest ? "

" Mon Dieu! one can always see the proprietor; there is no harm in that. "

Generally there is a small diminution on seeing the proprietor in person; you cannot count on much. We thought a fifth story at two thousand francs too high in several senses, though I dare say, considering the accommodation, it was not excessive.

Accident led us into the pleasant quarter of the Invalides, which I doubt if we should ever have thought of looking up expressly. It remained then a sort of slackwater point, tranquil, roomy, .healthy, and reasonable in price, with all Paris about it, the rich, fashionable districts one way, and overcrowded, grimy Faubourgs the other. I didn't quite understand it, but fancy that another tramway line or two would finish it, and set it swirling in the general movement. In that precinct people would tell you, as in America, they recollected well when there was nothing but gardens where you now saw great blocks of houses.

The gilded dome of the Invalides presides over it, like a fine local planet, to take the place of the sun when that is missing — which is often. Numerous wide avenues, planted in quadruple or octuple rows of shadetrees, cross at obtuse angles and make a sort of continuous garden. They take the names of notables of the old regime, the stout admirals Duquesne and De Suffren, and marshals De Villars and De Saxe, and they keep the Invalides in view as their general objective point. It is a part of the stately Faubourg Saint Germain, and there still remain a number of fine old residences of the great families standing free in their own grounds. We were fortunate enough to have those of the Prince de Leon and the Count de Chambrun under our own eyes — both real chateaux.