Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-03-09
A TEXAS GIRL ABROAD.
She and Her Ma Experience Many Diff
culties in Crowded Paris.
An Interesting Sketch of the Great City and Its
P~eople-The Exposition and Comment
on the sights.
For the Gazette,

ouppOSeu " PAOhSSb W WV
classes of individuals known as fools and
drunkards also extends itself over those who
come into a foreign land without a foreign
tongue. How we ever dared to do it 1 do not
quite ~know-but we did. We hurried through
with Scotland's ruined abbeys; peeped into the
English cathedrals on our way down the west
coast and skurried through London without see
ing the dozen things left over from our first visit
in order to be in at the death of the exposition.
So behold the Texas girl and her ma, st half
past eight O'Clock of a warm October evening,
n a French cab being driven DIV q choIerlc
French cabman through the glittering Paris
boulevards in search of a hotel. English was
in our mouths and English was in our pockets,
for we had not yet had our money changed and
were relying on the hotel to pay our cab fare.
Il say ''our pockets because the plural fits in
the sentence better, but the truth is there has
been practically but one pocket in this family
since the time l sent a bank bill to the wash IN:
der the impression that 1t was filthy lucre.)
One hotel interpreter after another came out to
explain that there was no room for US and to
send US off somewhere else; and each time the
choleric coachman mounted his box he was
more choleric. Finally we bethcught us OF q
certain pension near the Arc-de-Triumphe and
gave the slip of paper containing the address to
our jehu.
THE EFFECT WAS DYNAMIC!
For fifteen minutes he stood at the door of the
eau duu pOuIGu IN upon Us u OOliluES Nd-hOOu
of excited, staccato French, which we received
with submission and meekly responded to by
''Oui." Inwardly 1 quaked with fear and felt
as if we had arrived in the middle of the French
revolution without passports. What was there
in the slip of paper, and what would the fren-
zied Celt do with us? We were utterly in his
power since we had no French money with which
TO dismiss him. At last he turned away, inter-
viewed somebody on the sidewalk, savagelly
mounted tho hnv md laChn6 his hnrcpC nnnhrq
still narrowed my. soul as to whether we were be-
ing driven to a police station or the address, but
1t proved TO be the pension, wherein we found a
resting place on the sixth story. The landlady
was English; | would willingly have mounted
to the fifteenth story to find somebody who spoke
English.
We had thought of life in Paris as having all
the advantages and more Of luxuries than board
ing house life in England; we had dreamed Of
some pretty apartments on the first or second
floor in a quiet, tree-Shaded street; of dainty
meals of our own selection served In our own
rooms; we had yainly hoped that, as a shilling
IN England goes as far as a quarter IN America,
that a franc on the continent would equal a shil-
ling-but we did not know Paris. 1t takes two
or three francs to make a shilling, and there is
no such delightful sy stem of living in rooms and
having the cooking and the service Furnished;
you must board at a pension, take your meals at
q restaurant or else
LET a WHOLE SUITE OF ROOMS
and keep house altogether. There is nothing
honey or interesting about living in a fat,
ana to live on the first or second floor of a good
house in a nice street is to deposit a small for
tune weekly at the feet of your landlord. or-be-
come a concierge. One has to mount two flights
to reach the premiere etage," in France. 1t
makes me ache to climb again, even in memory,
the stairs that we essayed those first days in our
search for an abiding place. Everybody that
has a pension lives on the fourth story and never
has an elevator. We found it no easy matter to
discover our addresses, for one number covers a
multitude of folks. You dismiss your cab-man
with the franc and a half. plus ''pourboire,' -
which is the fare for all distances within the
city; you enter the gate or the door bearing the
number and find yourself within a square court
of six or seven story houses; which of these
houses and which floor and which suite of apart
ments do you want? To be sure, the concierge
gives you the needed information; you reply,
''Oui,M Monsieur, - with an air of perfect under
standing, and then trust yourself absolutely to
the special providence to which l alluded a
while ago.
What frantic times we had with men selling
exhibition tickets those days when we did not
know four from forty! How boys with views to
sell chung to our skirts and cried ''bete'' after
us; how we were quietly showed off the plat
forms of omnibuses, to our great indignation,
in order that people with little numbered tickets
might get on first; how ridiculous it seemed
that nobody understood plain English: how my
Twill you please let me know when we reach
such and such a placer and how she would
sink, b%lushing, into her seat under the conduc-
ter's flank ''Madame?" Everybody poured floods
of incomprehensibIe talk over us wherever we
went. which We received with a subdued, submits
sive feeling that one takes a cold shower bath.
Il am getting used to being deaf and dumb
sighed my ma, plaintively: 1T would really
seem queer to be able to understand what people
say, and there is one advantage in being deaf
no matter how angry or excited other people are
with US, we are always SERENE
Soon. however, we took refuge from French as
parlor boarders in an English home for students
and governesses. 1t was on the fourth floor, to
be sure, but q sunny room on the Avenue du
Bots de Boulogne, the finest avenue for resi-
dences in the city,
IS WORTH CLIMBING FOR, |
and, the gods be thanked, there are no smeIlsl
We have found that even in this newest and
finest part OF Paris, that is, the Arc de Triumphe
region, the narrower streets have an atmosphere
unpleasantly strong. We are within twenty
minutes walk of the exposition and there is a
resident French governess. but the chief at
traction is the bliss of having a count live be- |
meath you and the atmosphere of a departed
duke inhabiting the next house. We make our
first observations on French nobility; we listen
for the counts footstep on the stair; we try to |
imagine how the house looked next door when
the duke was in it! There are beautiful resi-
dences here on the avenue, with their grounds,
their elegant stables, and their entrances shaded
by very fancy arrangements of glass, like the
top OF a portlco which is not there. l only know
our side Of the avenue for the other is away off.
across four rows of trees. two strips of park and
three wide roadways and l have never explored
over there. Part of the great middle road is
p%loughed up for equestrians and in the morning
it is full of dancing thoroughbreds taking OFF,
GERS and ladies and gentlemen for their morning
exercise; in the afternoon there is q sIeady roll |
carriages going out to the Bots, but it is in the
carry evening tQdI the avenue Is most DeauJlfQI. 1
then four long rows of lights among the foliage.
twinkle the way out to the two high e~lectreo
marking the gate of the Bots, beyond which
the one great, confused twinkle of the Bots it
self extends to the rosy glow on the horizon just
left behind by the sun.
All Paris is enchanted ground at night, as you
have already heard many times. The boule-
wards blaze with gas and electricity, and there is
a never-ceasing stream of people promenading
back and forth and
EvERLAsTINGLY DRINKING WINE
at the little tables on the sidewalk. NV chief
delight is to come home in the evening, Town
the Champs Elysees, on the top of an omnibus.
Especially of a Sunday the great avenue, bor-
dered with parks and trees and fountains, is one
moving mass of light which seems to flow ike q
fiery river from'the high blaze of electric lights
in the Place de Ia Concorde as its source. Look
ing the other way, the Arc de la Triumphe rises
in whiteLess and grandeur far above the trees
and gas jets of the great round Place de IEtoile,
which is indeed a ''place of the starr at night,
when the ten or twelve wide avenues radiating
from it are. so many long beams of light. But
the most enchanted of all enchanted places is
the Seine; fringed with light, spanned with
light, bearing burdens Of light, yet ever flowing
darkly, silently; drawing its many serpentine
curves through tie brilliant city like one bent