The Paris Shave

 

Twain and a friend get a Parisian "skinning"

My husband's opposite experience

      After dinner at a cafe, Twain and his friends took in some window-shopping in what was then—and remains—a pretty tony part of Paris.  Bellies full and feet slow, in the state known to so many visitors after a meal here, they “felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might see without distressing exertion.”  So they “sauntered through the brilliant streets and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and jewelry shops.”
     You know the pattern by now, right? Twain begins with compliments but then his tone wriggles around like a worm on a hook.  It’s as if he's casting humorous lines to land a big joke that will make all his readers laugh. Even allowing for his persona, he fluctuates from praise to scorn. So the pleasures of Paris window-shopping lead to French-taunting:
Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and  participles.
      I don't want to subject you to another deconstruction of Twain's writing.  So let's just say he wants to have it both ways again, to make fun of themselves while also putting the French in their place.  But who's inferior here?  And in the very next paragraph comes another wriggle.  He walks by jewelry stores with items marked "gold" or "imitation" and is impressed to learn that a French law requires jewelers to distinguish the real from the fake. "Verily a wonderful land is France!" he concludes, mostly sincerely (although we could argue about that "verily").
     But enough language nit-picking! What comes next is unadulterated distaste.  Twain launches into a horrifying tale about getting a shave in Paris, and his words turn homicidal.  He confesses to a life-long desire to go to a Parisian barber in a passage that, to my mind, reveals that he--like other tourists--may be disappointed in Paris because he romanticized it too much in the first place:
From earliest infancy it had been a cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial barbershop in Paris.  I wished to recline in at full length in a cushioned invalid chair, with pictures about me and sumptuous furniture; with frescoed walls and gilded arches above me and vistas of Corinthian columns stretching before me; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate my senses and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to sooth me to sleep.  At the end of an hour I would wake up regretfully and find my face as smooth and as soft as an infant's.  Before departing, I would lift my hands above that barber's head and say, "Heaven bless you, my son!" 
     Setting aside all the hyperbole--surely as a baby he wasn't thinking about shaving--I found this "cherished amibition" baffling.  True, I'm a woman so I don't have to scrape the hair off my face every day with a sharp metal object, but even so I couldn't understand the great urge to waste time in Paris on something so mundane.  It was as if Twain said he just had to go to a Parisian dentist for a great teeth-cleaning.
     Then I started to consider the shaving conditions for men in 1867.  And if the word "conditions" seems to smack too much of a Victorian workhouse, just think for a moment about what a dreary, difficult, and even dangerous job shaving must have been in those days.  Men, I guess, had two choices: they could get up--often in a dark, cold house without electricity or central heating--and shave themselves with a soap brush, strop, and straight razor.  Or they could hire someone to do it for them.  Looked at in that light, the invention of the safety razor takes on the dimensions of a humanitarian act.  So it's not really much of a surprise that Twain would seek out a barber in a city known for la toilette.
     Unfortunately, Twain's experience of a Paris shave didn't live up to his romanticized expectation.  He and his friends spend two hours looking for a barber but find only wigmakers, so they decide that those men must be barbers too.  They go into a wig shop, ask for a shave, and are taken not into the sumptuous, scented shaving palace of his dreams but "into a mean, shabby back room" where the barbers "got two ordinary sitting-room chairs and placed us in them with our coats on."  Bad sign, I'd say, but Twain persists:
I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn.  One of the wigmaking villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by plastering a mass of suds into my mouth.  I expelled the nasty stuff with a strong English expletive and said, "Foreigner, beware!" Then this outlaw strapped his razor on  his boot, hovered over me ominously for six fearful seconds, and then swooped down on me like the genius of destruction.  The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my face and lifted me out of the chair.  I stormed and raved...Let us draw the curtain over this harrowing scene.  Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel affliction of a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my cheeks now and then, but I survived.  Then the incipient assassin held a basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face...I asked to be excused.  I said, with withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned--I declined to be scalped.
     Twain goes on to say he later found out there were "no barbershops worthy of their name" in Paris, and that "[T]he imposter who does duty as a barber brings his pans and napkins and implements of torture to your residence and deliberately skins you in your private apartments."  
      He ends this odd bit of travel writing with an ironic threat:  "The time is coming when I shall have a dark and bloody revenge.  Someday a Parisian barber will come to my room to skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never be heard of more."
     I have to admit there's something funny in this scene, something I think gets at the heart of why Twain still makes so many people laugh--and in a way that is so iconically American.  He sets up cultural expectations, then knocks them down like so many bowling pins, all the while playing the naive narrator.  First the French embody culture and luxury--indeed all of civilization itself--then they're perfectly primitive  barbarians--"scalpers" reminiscent of the worst fears and prejudices Americans held in those days toward "Injuns."  The scene is so ridiculous that it's hilarious.  If you look closely, Twain is hustling his reader with his rube routine as surely as any pool player with a cue (he loved to play billiards, by the way).   It's just that he's doing it with words.  
    Turns out his account even matches up with historical fact. Until the mid-nineteenth century, French barbers rolled a variety of jobs into one: wig-making, shaving, hair-cutting, bloodletting.  Twain's story comes at the end of that era but, even so, when such a barbershop could still have existed in Paris.  Think of them as the men's spas of their day.
     But in this, as in other things, Paris has changed yet stayed the same: la plus ca change... A man may not be able to get a good bloodletting while he waits for a wig anymore, but he can still get a haircut and a shave in the same place.  And, contrary to Twain's long search, it's easy to find a good barber, at least in our neighborhood.  
    To prove a point, since I myself don't need to shave, I recruited my husband.  He is, as you might guess, a patient, adventurous, and open-minded man, so similar and yet so opposite to the venturesome but irascible Twain.  All we had to do was walk up the street to a little place run by French-Tunisians.  My husband had been there before and gotten a good, cheap haircut, so when we asked them if they gave shaves and they nodded, he headed back for one a few days later.
    I was the only woman in the place but they nicely allowed me not only to sit and watch but even to take pictures.  Our young French-Tunisian barber worked with the skill of an artist, applying and lathering soap as if my husband's face were a canvas, then removing it as if he'd turned to sculpting.  All the while, he let me dance around him with my camera, not the least bit distracted, annoyed, or put out by what must have seemed to him a pretty strange, if nice, American couple.  When he finished, my husband sat up, and we all smiled and shook hands.  In Twain's words, his face was as smooth and as soft as an infant's.

 

At a Parisian barbershop today

So Frenchy! (At the Cafe)

 How many cafes are there in Paris? 
(views from the top of L'Arc de Triomphe and along Canal St. Martin)

     So what did Mark Twain do his first night in Paris?  Shall we all say it tous ensemble?  He went to a cafe.  And there, doing what people in Paris do best, he almost sounds as if he too fell in love with the city.  In The Innocents Abroad, he writes nearly convincingly about how much he enjoyed his sortie with other American tourists from the Quaker City.  But could Twain be laying it on too thick?  Is he serious or poking fun?  And if so, who's his target?  The French?  Himself?  All concerned?  You can judge for yourself in this passage:
...then we went out to a restaurant, just after lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering dinner.  It was a pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food so well cooked, the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing company so mustached, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonderfully Frenchy.  All the surroundings were gay and enlivening.  Two hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and coffee; the streets were thronged with light vehicles and with joyous pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and action all about us, and a conflagration of gaslight everywhere!
     Now, whenever I read something, I look for the places where there's some sort of change: in point of view, time frame, tone.  And I tell my students to do the same, because that's where readers find the best clues about what's really going on with the writing and, often, with the author's attitude. 

The cafe inside the Musee d'Orsay

      So, as a small experiment,  I read the passage above to my 24- and 21-year-old nephews, who happened to be visiting us in Paris.  I asked them, along with my husband and two teenaged sons, to raise their hands whenever they heard the tone change.  When I came to the word "mustached," hands started to go up into the air. By the time I got to "so frisky," everyone's hand was up, and by "so Frenchy," they were all waving wildly like excited first-graders who know the answer to the teacher's question.  
     Why?  My nephew nailed one reason: hyperbole.  Twain may start out convincingly with the "comfortable, satisfactory, lingering dinner" but he piles too much description on as he goes along--and that, I think, results in his readers detecting a change in his attitude about the French, toward irony. What's more, Twain's language moves so fast, from one exaggerated phrase to another, that it's hard to stop from following along with him.  His audience has no time to react, to think about what he might be burying in his language.   "Tidy...well-cooked...polite"? That's complimentary.  But "frisky"? That starts to sound as if he's taking about a small animal.  And "wonderfully Frenchy?": like some cute but strange small animal.  Then, after another convincing stretch with people "sitting at little tables on the sidewalk sipping wine and coffee," he reverts to an oddly alarmed note with "conflagration."
     There's also the matter of repetition.  One, two, even three uses of  "so" might work for emphasis.  But seven--which is what Twain has here?  Surely he's shifted into parody, taking us along with him.  When it comes to words, the same rule generally applies as with commodities: the value goes down as the quantity goes up, and vice versa. 

    By now you're probably thinking, Thank god I never had to take a class with that woman.  But I bet if I gave you the same experiment, your hands would go up--and stay down--in all the same places.  Which brings me to the question of persona, or the character a writer creates to tell a story.  I'm hardly the first person to notice that he's a master of it, especially in his early travel writing when he's still establishing himself as a new and original voice on the nineenth-century literary scene.  Twain carefully constructs a guy from somewhere out west who marvels at the things he sees, but can also be baffled and even repulsed by them--just as the readers of his day might be.  So naive, so unpretentious, so Americany!  
     Almost forty years ago, another Twainiac named Mark K. Wilson pointed out that much of Twain's humor lies in how he sets up this character only to poke fun at him in a deadpan way.  "[T]he joke appears to be on the teller himself, or rather on the naive persona whom the artist creates to tell the story; and to mistake this persona for the artist behind him is to miss both the artistry and the humor," Wilson writes ("Mr. Clemens and Madame Blanc: Mark Twain's First French Critic," American Literature, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Jan., 1974), pp. 537-556).
      And I agree, but only to a point.  Another literary critic--yes, a  French one--famously argued that, as much they might try, authors can never completely suppress the contradictions and values in what they write. Jacques Derrida was the father of deconstruction, an elaborate and analytical approach to writing that comes close to creating an entire philosophy of meaning, although the term is now also used popularly just to mean analyzing or looking closely at something.  For Derrida, all writing was unstable: it couldn't be controlled by any writer, even one with a persona as brilliant as Twain's.
     So, yes, Twain really does like some things about cafes, and therefore about France in general, his first night out there.  And, yes, he's deliberately creating a persona of an American abroad to build an audience that identifies with him. But, yes too, behind that persona he's already starting to find the French alien and odd, and to head toward a full-blown bias against them. 
     If you're counting, that's three "yeses"--four fewer than the number of Twain's "so's."  

The Man Without a Plaque

    

     All over Paris, as anyone who's walked around the city and looked up even occasionally knows, there are plaques that commemorate where historic, literary, and artistic events occurred.  Not far from my apartment, for example, is one that marks one of the most shameful moments in modern Parisian history: a plaque outside the Charonne metro station at the spot where police killed nine people demonstrating against the Algerian war. (BBC broadcast on the 50-year anniversary of this event)

The plaque marking the spot where demonstrators against the Algerian war died

     Most of the plaques, though, celebrate writers, artists, and philosophers who have lived, worked, or died at particular addresses.  The one above, for instance, honors Thomas Paine and the one below both James Joyce and Sylvia Beach.

     It will probably come as no surprise to those of you who've been reading this blog, however, that nowhere in Paris is there a plaque marking Twain's time or what he wrote here.  So it occurred to me to try to get one put up--and what better place, I thought, that at the  Grande Hotel du Louvre.  As many things do in France, this is proving to be a process with many steps.
     My first was simply to walk into the hotel and approach the desk clerk.  I explained my mission to him, and he seemed interested if astonished to learn that Twain had stayed there with the other Quaker City tourists--and, what's more, that he'd actually written about it.  He put me on to the manager, giving me a card with her name and number and instructing me to call during the week when she would be in. 
     Some days later, that's what I did.  This time, I was given another name and told that there had been a change in managers.  Did I want to leave a voice mail?  Yes, I said, and did so, but given my unsolicited and rather unusual message, I wasn't surprised that no one called me back.
     A while later, I tried again.  This time, I spoke to someone who explained that the hotel had recently been bought by the Hyatt chain.  He listened patiently and politely to my somewhat rambling explanation ("I'm an American professor here in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar--connaissez-vous Fulbright?  Et est-ce que vous connaissez the American writer Mark Twain?  Ah, bon.  Well, in 1867...").
     This man was also kind enough to transfer me to a woman named Delphine in the public relations department.  She spoke excellent English, so our conversation went along more quickly.
     "I've looked at the hotel's website," I told her, "and I see you mention that Arthur Conan Doyle set Sherlock Holmes stories there.  Did you know that the American writer Mark Twain also stayed at your hotel and wrote about it?"
     I could hear her gasp of excitement on the other end of the line.
     "No, I did not know that.  Mark Twain!"
     "Would you be interested in some information about his trip that you could use on your website to promote the hotel?"
     "Yes, I would love that!"
      "Maybe we could even work together on getting a plaque put up," I ventured and heard sounds of agreement as I imagined her enthusiastically nodding her head.
     That's when I got so excited myself that j'ai fait une gaffe.
     "You know, Mark Twain didn't like Paris or the French, but that could make the plaque and the website history more interesting--more ironic and funny..."
     At that, I heard only silence on the phone.
     "I'll be here for several more weeks. Would you like me to come in to talk about it?
     Pause.  "Yes, but you know my only problem is that Mark Twain did not like it here."
     "Could I email you some information and maybe some suggestions about what you might say?"
     "Yes, yes, of course..."
     So that's what I'm going to do.  To Delphine's credit, she seems willing to work with me on some sort of way for the hotel to mark Twain's stay there--to capitalize on it, that is.  She's a corporate employee, after all, and in that way her response is no different from what that of an American in her position would be.
     I'm just going to have to be careful with my wording and hope that I can put the facts delicately enough.  I can't help but wonder what Twain would make of such politesse--but I'm pretty sure I already know.