The Cockaynes in Paris Part 3

The bottles are trim in rows; there are no vats of liquid; there is no brawling; there are no beggars by the door--no drunkards within. It is so quiet, albeit on the Boulevard, not one in a hundred of the pa.s.sers-by notice it. The lordly Cafe du Cardinal opposite is not more orderly.

Past chocolate shops, where splendidly-attired ladies preside; wood-carving shops, printsellers, pastrycooks--where the savarins are tricked out, and where _pet.i.t fours_ lie in a hundred varieties--music-shops, bazaars, immense booksellers' windows; they who are bent on a look at the shops reach a corner of the Grand Opera Street, where the Emperor's tailor dwells. The attractions here are, as a rule, a few gorgeous official costumes, or the laurel-embellished tail coat of the academician. Still proceeding eastward, the shops are various, and are all remarkable for their decoration and contents. There is a shop where cots and flower-stands are the main articles for sale; but such cots and such flower-stands! The cots are for Princes and the flower-stands for Empresses. I saw the Empress Eugenie quietly issuing from this very shop, one winter afternoon.

Sophonisba's mother lingered a long time over the cots, and delighted her mother-eye with the models of babies that were lying in them. One, she remarked, was the very image of young Harry at home.

And so on to "Barbedienne's," close by the well-known Vachette.

Sophonisba, however, will not wait for our description of the renowned Felix's establishment, where are the lightest hands for pastry, it is said, in all France. When last we caught sight of the young lady, she was _chez_ Felix, demolis.h.i.+ng her second _baba!_ May it lie lightly on her--!

I humbly beg the pardon of Mademoiselle Sophonisba!

CHAPTER V.

THE c.o.c.kAYNE FAMILY.

The c.o.c.kaynes deserve a few words of formal introduction to the reader, since he is destined to make their better acquaintance. We have ventured hitherto only to take a few discreet and distant glimpses at them, as we found them loitering about the Boulevards on the morrow of their appearance in Paris. Mr. c.o.c.kayne--having been very successful for many years in the soap-boiling business, to the great discomfort and vexation of the noses of his neighbours, and having ama.s.sed fortune enough to keep himself and wife and his three blooming daughters among the _creme de la creme_ of Clapham, and in the list of the elect of society, known as carriage-people--he had given up the soap-boiling to his two sons, and had made up his mind to enjoy his money, or rather so much of it as Mrs. c.o.c.kayne might not require. It is true that every s.h.i.+lling of the money had been made by c.o.c.kayne, that every penny-piece represented a bit of soap which he had manufactured for the better cleansing of his generation. But this highly honourable fact, to the credit of poor c.o.c.kayne, albeit it was unpleasant to the nostrils of Mrs. C. when she had skimmed some of the richest of the Clapham _creme_ into her drawing-room, did not abate her resolve to put at least three farthings of the penny into her pocket, for her uses and those of her simple and innocent daughters. Mrs. c.o.c.kayne, being an economical woman, spent more money on herself, her house, and her children than any lady within a mile of c.o.c.kayne House. It is certain that she was an excellent mother to her three daughters, for she reminded c.o.c.kayne every night regularly--as regularly, he said, as he took his socks off--that if it were not for her, she did not know what would become of the children.

She was quite sure their father wouldn't trouble his head about them.

Perhaps Mrs. c.o.c.kayne was right. c.o.c.kayne had slaved in business only thirty-five years out of the fifty-two he had pa.s.sed in this vale of tears, and had only lodged her at last in a brougham and pair. He might have kept in harness another ten years, and set her up in a carriage and four. She was sure he didn't know what to do with himself, now he had retired. He was much better tempered when he went off to business by the nine o'clock omnibus every morning; and before he had given himself such ridiculous airs, and put himself on all kinds of committees he didn't understand anything about, and taken to make himself disagreeable to his neighbours in the vestry-hall, and moving what he called amendments and riders, for the mere pleasure, she verily believed, of opposing somebody, as he did everybody in his own house, and of hearing himself talk. Does the reader perceive by this time the kind of lady Mrs.

c.o.c.kayne was, and what a comfort she must have been to her husband in the autumn of his life?

How he must have listened for what the novelists call "her every footstep," and treasured her every syllable! It was mercifully ordained that Mr. c.o.c.kayne should be a good-tempered, non-resisting man. When Mrs. c.o.c.kayne was, as her sons pleasantly and respectfully phrased it, "down upon the governor," the good man, like the flowers in the poem, "dipped and rose, and turned to look at her." He sparkled while she stormed. He smiled when the shafts of her sarcasm were thrown point-blank at him. He was good-tempered before the storm began, while it lasted, and when it was over. Mrs. c.o.c.kayne had the ingenuity to pretend that c.o.c.kayne was the veriest tyrant behind people's backs; he who, as a neighbour of his very expressively put the case, dared not help himself to the fresh b.u.t.ter without having previously asked the permission of his wife. Fate, in order to try the good-nature of Timothy c.o.c.kayne to the utmost, had given him two daughters closely resembling, in patient endurance and self-abnegation, their irreproachable mamma. Sophonisba--at whom the reader has already had a glimpse, and whom we last saw demolis.h.i.+ng her second _baba_ at Felix's, was the eldest daughter--and the second was Theodosia. There was a third, Carrie; she was the blue, and was gentle and contented with everything, like her father.

The reader may now be prepared to learn that it was not Mr. Timothy c.o.c.kayne, late of Lambeth, who had planned the family's journey to Paris. Mrs. c.o.c.kayne had projected the expedition. Everybody went to Paris now-a-days, and you looked so very stupid if you had to confess in a drawing-room that you had never been. She was sure there was not another family on Clapham Common, of their station, who had not been.

Besides, it would exercise the girls' French. If Mr. c.o.c.kayne could only consent to tear himself away from board-meetings, and devote a little time to his own flesh and blood. They would go alone, and not trouble him, only what would their neighbours say to see them start off alone, as though they'd n.o.body in the world to care a fig about them. At any rate, they didn't want people to know they were neglected. Now Mr.

c.o.c.kayne had never had the most distant idea of leaving the ladies of his family to go alone to Paris. But it pleased his wife to put the case in this pleasant way, and he never interfered with her pleasures. He wanted very much to see Paris again, for he had never been on the banks of the Seine since 1840, when he made a flying visit to examine some new patent soap-boiling apparatus. He was ordered about by both mother and daughters, by boat and railway. He was reproached fifty times for his manners in insisting on going the Dieppe route. He was loaded with parcels and baskets and rugs, and was soundly rated all the way from the railway station to the Grand Hotel, on the Boulevard des Capucines, for having permitted the Custom House officers to turn over Mrs. c.o.c.kayne's boxes, as she said, "in the most impudent manner; but they saw she was without protection."

I have always been at a loss to discover why certain cla.s.ses of English travellers, who make their appearance in Paris during the excursion season, persist in regarding the capital of France, or, as the Parisian has it, "the centre of civilization," as a Margate without the sea. I wonder what was floating in the head of Mr. c.o.c.kayne, when he bought a flat cloth grey cap, and ordered a plaid sporting-suit from his tailor's, and in this disguise proceeded to "do" Paris. In London Mr.

c.o.c.kayne was in the habit of dressing like any other respectable elderly gentleman. He was going to the capital of a great nation, where people's thoughts are not unfrequently given to the cares of the _toilette;_ where, in short, gentlemen are every bit as severe in their dress as they are in Pall Mall, or in a banking-house in Lombard Street. Now Mr.

c.o.c.kayne would as soon have thought of wearing that plaid shooting-suit and that grey flat cap down Cheapside or Cornhill, as he would have attempted to play at leap-frog in the underwriters' room at Lloyd's. He had a notion, however, that he had done the "correct thing"

for foreign parts, and that he had made himself look as much a traveller as Livingstone or Burton. Some strange dreams in the matter of dress had possessed the mind of Mrs. c.o.c.kayne, and her daughters also. They were in varieties of drab coloured dresses and cloaks; and the mother and the three daughters, deeming bonnets, we suppose, to be eccentric head-gears in Paris, wore dark brown hats all of one pattern, all ornamented with voluminous blue veils, and all ready to Dantan's hand. The young ladies had, moreover, velvet strings, that hung down from under their hats behind, almost to their heels. It was thus arrayed that the party took up their quarters at the Grand Hotel, and opened their Continental experiences. I have already accompanied Mrs. c.o.c.kayne, Sophonisba, and Theodosia, on their first stroll along the Boulevards, and peeped into a few shops with them. Mr. c.o.c.kayne was in the n.o.ble courtyard of the Hotel, waiting to receive them on their return, with Carrie sitting close by him, intently reading a voluminous catalogue of the Louvre, on which, according to Mrs. c.o.c.kayne, her liege lord had "wasted five francs." Mr. c.o.c.kayne was all smiles. Mrs. c.o.c.kayne and her two elder daughters were exhausted, and threw themselves into seats, and vowed that Paris was the most tiring place on the face of the earth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEAUTY & THE B----. _Normally a severe Excursionist_.]

"My dear," said Mr. c.o.c.kayne, addressing his wife, "people find Paris fatiguing because they walk about the streets all day, and give themselves no rest. If we did the same thing at Clapham----"

"There, that will do, c.o.c.kayne," the lady sharply answered. "I'm sure I'm a great deal too tired to hear speeches. Order me some iced water.

You talk about French politeness, c.o.c.kayne. I think I never saw people stare so much in the whole coa.r.s.e of my life. And some boys in blue pinafores actually laughed in our very faces. I know what _I_ should have done to them, had _I_ been their mother. What was it they said, Sophy, my dear?"

"I didn't quite catch, mamma; these people talk so fast."

"They seem to me," Mrs. c.o.c.kayne continued, "to jumble all their words one into another."

"That is because----" Mr. c.o.c.kayne was about to explain.

"Now, pray, Mr. c.o.c.kayne, do leave your Mutual Improvement Society behind, and give us a little relief while we are away. I say the people jumble one word into another in the most ridiculous manner, and I suppose I have ears, and Sophy has ears, and we are not quite lunatics because we have not been staring our eyes out all the morning at things we don't understand."

Here Carrie, lifting her eyes from her book, said to her father--

"Papa dear, you remember that first Sculpture Hall, where the colossal figures were; that was the Salle des Caryatides, and those gigantic figures you admired so much were by Jean Goujon. Just think! It was in this hall that Henry IV. celebrated his wedding with Marguerite de Valois. Yes, and in this very room Moliere used to act before the Court."

"Yes," Mrs. c.o.c.kayne interjected, pointing to Carrie's hands, "and in that very room, I suppose, Miss Caroline c.o.c.kayne appeared with her fingers out of her glove."

"And where have you been all day, my dear?" Mr. c.o.c.kayne said, in his blandest manner, to his wife.

"We poor benighted creatures," responded Mrs. c.o.c.kayne, "have been--pray don't laugh. Mr. c.o.c.kayne--looking at the shops, and very much amused we have been, I can a.s.sure you, and we are going to look at them to-morrow, and the day after, and the day after that."

"With all my heart, my dear," said Mr. c.o.c.kayne, who was determined to remain in the very best of tempers. "I hope you have been amused, that is all."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PALAIS DU LOUVRE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROAD TO THE BOIS]

"We have had a delightful day," said Sophonisba.

"I am sure we have been into twenty shops," said Theodosia.

"And I am sure," Mrs. c.o.c.kayne continued, "it is quite refres.h.i.+ng, after the boorish manners of your London shopkeepers, to be waited upon by these polite Frenchmen. They behave like n.o.blemen."

"Mamma has had fifty compliments paid to her in the course of the day, I am certain," said Sophonisba.

"I am very glad to hear it," said Sophonisba's papa.

"Glad to hear it, and surprised also, I suppose, Mr. c.o.c.kayne! In London twenty compliments have to last a lady her lifetime."

"I don't know how it is," Theodosia observed, "but the tradespeople here have a way of doing things that is enchanting. We went into an imition jeweller's in the Rue Vivienne--and such imitations! I'll defy Mrs.

Sandhurst--and you know how ill-natured she is--to tell some earrings and brooches we saw from real gold and jewels. Well, what do you think was the sign of the shop, which was arranged more like a drawing-room than a tradesman's place of business; why, it was called L'Ombre du Vrai (the Shadow of Truth). Isn't it quite poetical?"

Mr. c.o.c.kayne thought he saw his opportunity for an oratorical flourish.

"It has been observed, my dear Theo," said he, dipping the fingers of his right hand into the palm of his left, "by more than one acute observer, that the mind of the race whose country we are now----"

Here Mrs. c.o.c.kayne rapped sharply the marble table before her with the end of her parasol, and said--

"Mr. c.o.c.kayne, have you ordered any dinner for us?"

Mr. c.o.c.kayne meekly gave it up, and replied that he had secured places for the party at the _table d'hote_.

Satisfied on this score, the matron proceeded to inform that person whom in pleasant irony she called her lord and master, that she had set her heart on a brooch of the loveliest design it had ever been her good fortune to behold.

"At the _L'Ombre_--what do you call it, my dear?" said the husband, blandly.

Mrs. c.o.c.kayne went through that stiffening process which ladies of dignity call drawing themselves up.

"You really surprise me, Mr. c.o.c.kayne. If you mean it as a joke, I would have you know that people don't joke with their wives; and I should think you ought to know by this time that I am not in the habit of wearing imitation jewellery."