The Cockaynes in Paris | Page 9

you can buy, an it please you, toys at forty guineas each--babies that cry, and call "mamma," and automata to whom the advancement of science and art has given all the obnoxious faculties of an unruly child), or east to the boulevards, which are known the wide world over, at least by name, the Boulevards de la Madeleine, des Capucines, des Italiens, Montmartre. These make up the heart and soul of Paris. Within the limits of these gorgeous lines of shops and cafés luxury has concentrated all her blandishments and wiles. This is the earthly heaven of the Parisians. Here all the celebrities air themselves. Here are the Opera stars, the lights of literature, the chiefs of art, the dandies of the Jockey Club, the prominent spendthrifts and eccentrics of the day. About four o'clock in the afternoon all the known Paris figures are lounging upon the asphaltum within this charmed space. Within this limit--where the Frenchman deploys all his seductive, and vain, and frivolous airs; where he wears his best clothes and his best manners; where he loves to be seen, and observed, and saluted--the tradesmen of the capital have installed establishments the costliness and elaborateness of which it is hardly possible to exaggerate. The gilding and the mirrors, the marbles and the bronze, the myriad lamps of every fantastic form, the quaint and daring designs for shop fronts, the infinite arts employed to "set off" goods, and the surprising, never-ceasing varieties of art-manufacture--whether in chocolate or the popular Algerian onyx--bewilder strangers. Does successful Mr. Brown, who, having doffed the apron of trade, considers it due to himself to become--so far as money can operate the strange transformation--a fine fleur; does he desire also to make of plain, homely Mrs. Brown a leader of fashion and a model of expensive elegance?--here are all the appliances and means in abundance. Within these enchanted lines Madame B. may be made "beautiful for ever!" Every appetite, every variety of whim, the cravings of the gourmet and the dreams of the sybarite, may be gratified to the utmost. A spendthrift might spend a handsome patrimony within these limits, nor, at the end of his time, would he call to mind a taste he had not been able to gratify.
Sophonisba enters this charmed region of perfect shopping from the west. Tahan's bronze shop, at the corner of the Rue de la Paix, marks (or did mark) its western boundary. There are costly trifles in that window--as, book cutters worth a library of books, and cigar-stands, ash-trays, pen-trays, toothpick-holders (our neighbours are great in these), and match, and glove, and lace, and jewel-boxes--of wicked price. Ladies are not, however, very fond of bronze, as a rule. The great Maison de Blanc--or White House--opposite, is more attractive, with its gigantic architectural front, and its acres of the most expensive linens, cambrics, &c. Ay, but close by Tahan is Boissier. Not to know Boissier is to argue yourself unknown in Paris. He is the shining light of the confectioner's art. Siraudin, of the Rue de la Paix, has set up a dangerous opposition to him, under the patronage of a great duke, whose duchess was one day treated like an ordinary mortal in Boissier's establishment, but Boissier's clients (nobody has customers in Paris) are, in the main, true to him; and his sweets pass the lips still of nearly all the élégantes of the "centre of civilization." Peep into his shop. Miss Sophonisba is within--la belle insulaire!--buying a bag of marrons glacés, for which Boissier is renowned throughout civilization. The shop is a miracle of taste. The white and gold are worthy of Marie Antoinette's bedroom at St. Cloud--occupied, by the way, by our English queen, when she was the guest of the French Emperor in 1855. The front of the shop is ornamented with rich and rare caskets. A white kitten lies upon a rosy satin cushion; lift the kitten, and you shall find that her bed is a bon-bon box!
"How very absurd!" exclaims Sophonisba's mamma, bon-bon boxes not being the particular direction which the extravagance of English ladies takes.
Close by the succulent establishment of M. Boissier, to whom every dentist should lift his hat, is the doorway of Madame Laure. Sophonisba sees a man in livery opening the door of what appears to be the entrance to some quiet learned institution. She touches her mamma upon the arm, and bids her pause. They had reached the threshold of a temple. Madame Laure makes for the Empress.
"Ah! to be sure, my child, so she does," Sophonisba's mamma replies. "I remember. Very quiet-looking kind of place, isn't it?" It is impossible to say what description of "loud" place had dwelt in the mind of Sophonisba's mamma as the locale where the Empress Eugénie's milliner "made" for her