Trains Encore

The Gare de Lyon today

     I can’t be absolutely certain, but my guess is that Twain debarked at the Gare de Lyon.  In those days, the train stations in Paris were different than they are today, just as they were in most major cities.  (As a former New Yorker, I'm among those who remain grateful to Jackie Kennedy Onasis for saving Grand Central Station and furious over the destruction of the old Penn Station.) Twain came up to Paris from Marseille and that was the station that served the south of France, as it does today.  But it's hard to say where he arrived because the Gare de Lyon that exists now--a classic art nouveau affair with a high clock tower--was built during Baron Haussman's renovation of Paris under Napoleon III.  To call the reconstruction that occurred during their political and architectural rule a "renovation," though, is like calling a hair cut and dye job just a shampoo.  Haussman's projects tore down the infamous Paris slums--where revolution had once festered and might have again--and built in their place the gracious boulevards that define Paris today.  He also redid the Gare de Lyon in time for all the tourists showing up for the 1900 World Fair to land at a grand new station.
     Thirty-three years earlier, though, Twain would have arrived at the second Gare de Lyon, the one built several feet above the Seine to protect it from raw river sewage.  That station was largely destroyed by fire during the days of the Paris Commune in 1871, five years after Twain's visit. Then an identical one was put up in its place until Haussman tore it down.
     Twain gave Gare de Lyon II an A, for order:
     What excellent order they kept about that vast depot!  There was no frantic crowding and jostling,  no shouting and swearing, and no swaggering intrusion of services by hackmen.  These latter gentry stood outside--stood quietly by their long line of vehicles and never said a word.  A kind of hackman general seemed to have the whole matter in hand.  He politely received the passengers and ushered them to the kind of conveyance they wanted, and told the driver where to deliver them.  There was no "talking back," no dissatisfaction about overcharging, no grumbling about anything.
     Well, okay.  I have to admit there's no France-bashing here.  But doesn't Twain sound a bit disappointed that everything's so neat and civilized?  After all, he describes the station largely by what isn't there, not what is.  No shoving or swearing, no rudeness or rip offs.  In fact, practically no talking at all.  I don't know about you, but I'd be more convinced of his sincerity if he threw in a smile or two, or a pretty word picture of a mother traveling with a child.  It sounds to me as if he would really have preferred a ruckus--a good push, shout, or haggle--the sort of thing one imagines he would have found in the American West.

Order still presides in the Gare de Lyon.

The TGF, or fast-speed "bullet train," that can take you pretty much anywhere you want to go in France.

     Not to engage in America-bashing, but today anyone who can tell time, see reasonably well, and sit with ordinary ease knows that the French train system now surpasses our own.  The SNCF or Société nationale des chemins des fer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF)--which stands, literally and quaintly, for National Society of French Iron Ways, is an extensive, impressive network of railroad lines that can take you anywhere in the country for about the same amount of money as our own less serviceable Amtrak system.  Want to go to Amiens to see the cathedral?  There's a train for that. To Dijon for the mustard?  There's a train for that.  To the beach at Biarritz?  There's a train...you get the point.

     In the U.S., on the other hand, if you want to go to Bar Harbor for the lobster, there's no train for that.  To Cooperstown for the Baseball Hall of Fame?  There's no train for that.  To Yellowstone for the bears?  There's no...again, you get the point.

     Our love of the automobile did away with all that.  In France, on the other hand, while there are plenty of cars, they haven't taken over the culture nearly as much.  Consider, for example, that at last count there were nearly 800 vehicles for every 1,000 people in the U.S. but only about 580 in France.  America ranks third in car-ownership, beyond San Marino and Monaco, where you pretty much must have a car just to get in and out of the county.  France, on the other hand, ranks 19th, behind such countries as Italy, New Zealand, Finland, Greece, Canada, Spain, and Japan.

     But enough about trains.  There are those who love railroad history, and then there are the rest of us, who find it as fascinating as waiting for toast to pop.  

     For the former, here's a site with some lovely images of old postcards of Haussman's Gare de Lyon:
http://www.cparama.com/forum/paris-gare-de-lyon-t3228.html
    Meanwhile, Twain is about to go speeding in his hack past the Bastille. 

A Tale of Two Trains

     The Quaker City left New York harbor on June 10.   It stopped in the Azores, where Twain rode around on a donkey; on Gibraltar, where he bought gloves that didn't fit from a pretty salesgirl; and in Tangier, where he sneaked a glimpse inside a mosque.  The Fourth of July found the passengers celebrating in the middle of the Mediterranean with a make-shift rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," an uninspiring reading of the Declaration of Independence, and a series of boring speeches made better by champagne toasts.  Then everyone danced at a ball on the promenade deck.  It was, Twain said, "a bright, cheerful, pleasant Fourth."
     And good thing, too, because they crossed into France the next night.  On this first trip, which marked the beginning of the end for Twain's goodwill toward the French, he apparently stayed for just over a week.  I say "apparently" because he doesn't give dates. After a couple of nights in Marseille, he and some other passengers headed to Paris by train. And here the trouble begins.  He starts to see, as he puts it, "discrepancies" between his idealized image of France and his actual experience of the country and the people who live in it. 
     Before he stepped on board,  Paris took top billing in his mind. "Everybody was going to Europe--I too was going to Europe. Everybody was going to the famous Paris Exhibition--I too was going to the Paris Exhibition," he enthuses.  Then he describes a scene with a man who becomes a fellow passenger, Mr. Blucher:
    We stepped into a store on Broadway one day, where he bought a handkerchief, and when the man
      could not make change, Mr. B. said, "Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris."
     "But I am not going to Paris."
     "How is--what did I understand you to say?"
     "I said I am not going to Paris."
     "Not going to Paris!  Not g--well, then, where in the nation are you going to?"
     As the French would say, le monde was headed to Paris.  And if there was anything Twain wanted, it was to be part of le monde--yet write about it a way that made light of himself and everyone else.
     So there he finally was, on his way to Paris.  He has a brief reverie looking out the train window--"What a bewitching land it is!  What a garden!...It is wonderful...There is no dirt, no decay, no rubbish...All is orderly and beautiful--everything is charming to the eye."  But then what he does do?  He announces that they are "not infatuated with these French railway cars" and launches into a nostalgic riff about a stagecoach ride he took across the American West.  Only then does he turn his attention to the French train;  if he were posting a review on TripAdvisor today, he'd probably give it a 7 out of 10.  He likes the comfortable seats and he loves the food--"a rare experience and one to be treasured forever"--but he doesn't care for the compartments where you can be locked in without heat or water and trapped with a drunk.

The inside of a French TGV, or fast speed, train today: no compartments to trap you in with drunks

     But it's when he comments on the safety record of French trains that we get a taste of the distaste to come: "They have no railroad accidents to speak of in France.  But why?  Because when one occurs, somebody has to pay for it.  Not hang maybe, but be punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make negligence a thing to be shuddered at."  In America, he says, "softhearted juries" don't blame the conductors, but in France "they go on the principle that it is better that one innocent man should suffer than five hundred."
     What's going on here?  Suddenly the French are vengeful meanies and we're the forgiving nice guys?  True, Twain seems to be joking about the French justice system, where a suspect is presumed guilty not innocent.  Still, his judgment is so harsh and sudden--hardly an example of the American softheartedness he describes.  And where does his information come from, anyway?  To me, it has the ring of a gripe heard from another passenger. 
     Wherever he got it, a pattern starts to form, in which Twain compares France to America and finds it lacking.  In the wake of the Civil War, as the U.S. is stepping onto the world stage with new power, he starts using the French to create an American identity by comparison.
    The French are becoming Twain's foil.
    

A Second Act in American Life--For a Ship

Before it became America's first cruise ship, the Quaker City was a Civil War ship doing duty in blockades and anti-Confederate raids.

      Twain sat out virtually all of the Civil War, but the ship that first took him to France had an illustrious military career.  The U.S.S. Quaker City--later just Quaker City of The Innocents Abroad fame--was a Union Navy ship throughout the war.  It played an important part in the blockade of the Confederate coastline when it was stationed off Chesapeake Bay.  Then it helped hunt down Confederate raider ships that were disrupting Union merchant shipping as a tactic to draw the North's ships away from the Confederate coast.
     After the Civil War,  U.S.S. Quaker City was decommissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Yard and sold at auction--after which it became, according to the ad Twain saw that lured him on board, "a first-class steamer...provided with every necessary comfort, including library and musical instruments" and "an experienced physican."
    It turned out, of course, that one particular passenger--the roving reporter known as Mark Twain--would lend Quaker City its final and greatest cachet.
     For more on the history of the U.S.S. Quaker City, see the official Navy site at http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-q/quakr-cy.htm.





     

When Is a Turning Point Not a Turning Point?

     The next few years marked the real turning point in Twain's life, Paine's charming claim about Joan of Arc aside.  Actually, they marked two turning points, first from a steamboat pilot to a gold miner and then from a gold miner to a journalist.  I don't know much about marching orders but I'd say that's two 90-degree turns for a complete about face.
    Twain himself disagreed with the whole idea of turning points.  We know that because he said so in his essay,  "The Turning Point in My Life." True to form, he used the term to dispute the term--an approach so appealing that I'm stealing it here.  "We have a fashion of saying 'such and such an event was the turning-point in my life,' but we shouldn't say it," he wrote. "We should merely grant that its place as the LAST link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link."
     He was also honest about the role of dumb luck: "A man may PLAN as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes the matter off his hands."  The way Twain saw it, circumstance combined with temperament--a person's "natural disposition"--determines the course of a life.
      Call it a link in a chain or call it a turning point, one important circumstance that surely helped Sam Clemens morph into Mark Twain was the Civil War.  It closed the Mississippi River to steamboat traffic and left him unable to earn his livelihood as a pilot.  As a result, he followed his older brother Orion out west, where--through a political connection that itself seems a magical circumstance--Orion had become Secretary of what was then the Territory of Nevada.  After failing as a miner, Sam turned to writing for newspapers, something he'd done briefly before when Orion bought The Hannibal Journal to help support the family after their father died.  It was as a western journalist that Sam took what may still be the world's best-known pen name, Mark Twain.  I think it's still just the best, too. 
     But I'm going to skip quickly over those days.  Together with his childhood and his steamboating, they've left Twain stuck like a bug in amber for too many people. These people think of him as an iconic Westerner when the truth is he moved to New York and lived in the Northeast or traveled abroad for the rest of his life.  Twain became an Easterner whose best material was his past in the West and on the Mississippi.  But an Easterner nonetheless.
     Before he left the West, though, he wrote a story about it-- "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--that got his name known even in the East where he would soon be heading. If you've never read it, it's short, funny, and a sign of the irreverance to come [click bookcover]: 

       The story was published in The Saturday Press in New York on November 18, 1865, as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." It was a hit in a way that magazine stories could be then; think of it as a meme today.  Across the country, and even in other countries where "Jumping Frog" was translated, people apparently took to repeating its catch phrase, "I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog." It's hard to imagine now how that line struck a chord in so many folks then.  On the other hand, what are people going to make of "gangnam style" in 150 years?  
     It was less than two years from the publication of "Jumping Frog" until Twain first set foot in France.  He used that time to parlay the story's success into work as a travel correspondent to the Sandwich Islands--now Hawaii--for The Sacramento Union.  Then he parlayed that job into his first lecture tour.  Twain was a great parlayer.
    Spring of 1867 found him visiting his family in Missouri, where he saw an ad in St. Louis for passengers to join the world's first tourist cruise.  The Quaker City, a side-wheel steamship, would leave New York with about 75 passengers aboard, most well-heeled, crossing the Atlantic to Morocco, then going across the Mediterranean to France, Italy, Greece, the Middle East, and Egypt, and coming back again by way of Bermuda.     
     "For months, the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at countless firesides," Twain writes in the opening sentence of The Innocents Abroad. "Its like had not been thought of before...It was to be a picnic on a gigantic scale." Or, as Paine's purple prose put it, "No such argossy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of happiness." 
     It turned out that Twain himself, with his budding fame, was about the only celebrity on board; the rest had backed out for one reason or another.  But no matter.  Twain, still on a lecture tour, made his way back to New York.  One more parlay, and he'd persuaded the Alta California back West to spring for his fare as a travel correspondent. He was already almost 32.
     So there you have it: a perfect moment when circumstance met temperament.  A turning point, if you'll excuse the term.