A Voyage of Consolation by Sara Jeannette Duncan (top 10 most read books in the world .txt) 📖

Malt had assured her that it was nothing to what we would experience in Italy. "That's where you _get_ romance," said Mr. Malt, and his cigar end dropped like a falling star as he removed the ash. "Italy's been romantic ever since B.C. All through the time the rest of the world was inventing Magna Chartas and Doomsday Books, and Parliaments, and printing presses, and steam engines, Italy's gone right on turning out romance. Result is, a better quality of that article to be had in Italy to-day than anywhere else. Further result, twenty million pounds spent there annually by tourists from all parts of the civilised world. Romance, like anything else, can be made to pay."

"Are we likely to find the beds----" began Mrs. Malt plaintively.

"Oh dear yes, Mrs. Malt!" interrupted momma, who thought everything entomological extremely indelicate. "Perfectly. You have only to go to the hotels the guide-books recommend, and everything will be quite _propre_."

"Well," said Emmeline, "they may be _propre_ in Italy, but they're not _propre_ in Paris. We had to speak to the housemaid yesterday morning, didn't we, mother? Don't you remember the back of my neck?"

"We all suffered!" declared Mrs. Malt.

"And I _showed_ one to her, mother, and all she would say was, '_Jamais ici, mademoiselle, ici, jamais!_' And there it _was_ you know."

"Emmeline," said her father, "isn't it about time for you to want to go to bed?"

"Not by about three hours. I'm going to get up a little music first. Do you play, Mis' Wick?"

Momma said she didn't, and Miss Malt disappeared in search of other performers. "Don't you go asking strangers to play, Emmeline," her mother called after her. "They'll think it forward of you."

"When Emmeline leaves us," said her father, "I always have a kind of abandoned feeling, like a top that's got to the end of its spin."

There was silence for a moment, and then the Senator said he thought he could understand that.

"Well," continued Mr. Malt, "you've had three whole days now. I presume you're beginning to know your way around."

"I think we may say we've made pretty good use of our time," responded the Senator. "This morning we had a look in at the Luxembourg picture gallery, and the Madeleine, and Napoleon's Tomb, and the site of the Bastile. This afternoon we took a run down to Notre Dame Cathedral. That's a very fine building, sir."

"You saw the Morgue, of course, when you were in that direction," remarked Mr. Malt.

"Why no," poppa confessed, "we haven't taken much of liking for live Frenchmen, up to the present, and I don't suppose dead ones would be any more attractive."

"Oh, there's nothing unpleasant," said Mrs. Malt, "nothing that you can _notice_."

"Nothing at all," said Mr. Malt. "They refrigerate them, you know. We send our beef to England by the same process----"

"There are people," the Senator interrupted, "who never can see anything amusing in a corpse."

"They don't let you in as a matter of course," Mr. Malt went on. "You have to pretend that you're looking for a relation."

"We had to mention Uncle Sammy," said Mrs. Malt.

"An uncle of Mis' Malt's who went to California in '49 and was never heard of afterward," Mr. Malt explained. "First use he's ever been to his family. Well, there they were, seven of 'em, lying there looking at you yesterday. All in good condition. I was told they have a place downstairs for the older ones."

"Alexander," said momma faintly, "I think I _should_ like a little brandy in my coffee. Were there--were there any ladies among them, Mr. Malt?"

"Three," Mr. Malt responded briskly, "and one of them had her hair----"

"Then _please_ don't tell us about them," momma exclaimed, and the silence that ensued was one of slight indignation on the part of the Malt family.

"You been seeing the town at all, evenings?" Mr. Malt inquired of the Senator.

"I can't say I have. We've been seeing so much of it in the daytime, we haven't felt able to enjoy anything at night except our beds," poppa returned with his accustomed candour.

"Just so. All the same there's a good deal going on in Paris after supper."

"So I've always been told," said the Senator, lighting another cigar.

"They've got what you might call characteristic shows here. You see a lot of life."

"Can you take your ladies?" asked the Senator.

"Well of course you _can_, but I don't believe they would find it interesting."

"Too much life," said the Senator. "I guess that settles it for me too. I daresay I'm lacking in originality and enterprise, but I generally ask myself about an entertainment, 'Are Mrs. and Miss Wick likely to enjoy it?' If so, well and good. If not, I don't as a rule take it in."

"He's a great comfort that way," remarked momma to Mrs. Malt.

"Oh, I don't _frequent_ them myself," said Mr. Malt defensively.

"Talking of improprieties," remarked Miss Callis, "have you seen the New Salon?"

There was something very unexpected about Miss Callis; momma complained of it. Her remarks were never polished by reflection. She called herself a child of nature, but she really resided in Brooklyn.

The Senator said we had not.

"Then don't you go, Mr. Wick. There's a picture there----"

"We never look at such pictures, Miss Callis," momma interrupted.

"It's _so_ French," said Miss Callis.

Momma drew her shawl round her preparatory to withdrawing, but it was too late.

"Too French for words," continued Miss Callis. "The poet Lamartine, with a note-book and pencil in his hand, seated in a triumphal chariot, drawn through the clouds by beautiful Muses."

"Oh," said momma, in a relieved voice, "there's nothing so dreadfully French about that."

"You should have seen it," said Miss Callis. "It was simply immoral. Lamartine was in a frock coat!"

"There could have been nothing objectionable in that," momma repeated. "I suppose the Muses----"

"The Muses were not in frock coats. They were dressed in their traditions," replied Miss Callis, "but they couldn't save the situation, poor dears."

Momma looked as if she wished she had the courage to ask Miss Callis to explain.

"In picture galleries," remarked poppa, "we've seen only the Luxembourg and the Louvre. The Louvre, I acknowledge, is worthy of a second visit. But I don't believe we'll have time to get round again."

"We've got to get a hustle on ourselves in a day or two," said Mr. Malt, as we separated for the night. "There's all Italy and Switzerland waiting for us, and they're bound to be done, because we've got circular tickets. But there's something about this town that I hate to leave."

"He doesn't know whether it's the Arc de Triomphe on the Bois de Boulogne or the Opera Comique, or what," said Mrs. Malt in affectionate criticism. "But we've been here a week over our time now, and he doesn't seem able to tear himself away."

"I'll tell you what it is," exclaimed Mr. Malt, producing a newspaper, "it's this little old _New York Herald_. There's no use comparing it with any American newspaper, and it wouldn't be fair to do so; but I wonder these French rags, in a foreign tongue, aren't ashamed to be published in the same capital with it. It doesn't take above a quarter of an hour to read in the mornings, but it's a quarter of an hour of solid comfort that you don't expect somehow abroad. If the _New York Herald_ were only published in Rome I wouldn't mind going there."

"There's something," said poppa, thoughtfully, as we ascended to the third floor, "in what Malt says."

Next day we spent an hour buying trunks for the accommodation of the unattainable elsewhere. Then poppa reminded us that we had an important satisfaction yet to experience. "Business before pleasure," he said, "certainly. But we've been improving our minds pretty hard for the last few days, and I feel the need of a little relaxation. D.V. and W.P., I propose this afternoon to make the ascent of the Eiffel Tower. Are you on?"

"I will accompany you, Alexander, if it is safe," said momma, "and, if it is unsafe, I couldn't possibly let you go without me."

Momma is naturally a person of some timidity, but when the Senator proposes to incur any danger, she always suggests that he shall do it over her dead body.

I forget where we were at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower. We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding through Paris, brown in the open sun, dark under the shadowing arches of the bridges, full of hastening comers and goers from landing-place to landing-place, up and down. It gave us quite a new familiarity with the river, which had been before only a part of the landscape, and one of the things that made Paris imposing. We saw that it was a highway of traffic, and that the little, brisk, business-like steamers were full of people, who went about in them because it was the cheapest and most convenient way, and not at all for the pleasure of a trip by water. We noticed, too, a difference in these river-going people. Some of them carried baskets, and some of them read the _Petit Journal_, and they all comfortably submitted to the good-natured bullying of the mariner in charge. There were elderly women in black, with a button or two off their tight bodices, and children with patched shoes carrying an assortment of vegetables, and middle-aged men in slouch hats, smoking tobacco that would have been forbidden by public statute anywhere else. They all treated us with a respect and consideration which we had not observed in the Avenue de l'Opera, and I noticed the Senator visibly expanding in it. There was also a man and a little boy, and a dog, all lunching out of the same basket. Afterward, on being requested to do so, the dog performed tricks--French ones--to the enjoyment and satisfaction of all three. There was a great deal of politeness and good feeling, and if they were not Capi and Remi and Vitalis in "_Sans Famille_," it was merely because their circumstances were different.

As we stood looking at the Eiffel Tower, poppa said he thought if he were in my place he wouldn't describe it. "It's old news," he said, "and there's nothing the general public dislike so much as that. Every hotel-porter in Chicago knows that it's three hundred metres high, and that you can see through it all the way up. There it is, and I feel as if I'd passed my boyhood in its shadow. That way I must say it's a disappointment. I was expecting it to be more unexpected, if you understand."

Momma and I quite agreed. It had the familiarity of a demonstration of Euclid, and to the non-engineering mind was about as interesting. The Senator felt so well acquainted with it that he hesitated about buying a descriptive pamphlet. "They want to sell a stranger too much information in this country," he said. "The meanest American intelligence is equal to stepping into an elevator and stepping out again." But he bought one nevertheless, and was particularly