Doing the Double Take: Twain's Split Itinerary

The Hotel du Louvre today, formerly the Grande Hotel du Louve, where the Quaker City passengers stayed.  The Louvre itself is just to the right and down the street in this photo.

     Twain had two itineraries on that first trip to Paris: the official versus the unofficial, the famous places versus the personal experiences, the sites versus the stories. In that way, of course, he was no different from the rest of us when we travel, nor from other travel writers past and present, come to think of it.  We all like to bring home stories of what happened to us elsewhere.
     What's remarkable about Twain's particular split itinerary, however, is its imbalance.  He spends much less time describing the famous places he visited and much more telling strange if entertaining tales.  No doubt that was to be expected from the man who, only a few years earlier, had become famous with a story about a jumping frog contest--and a rigged one gone wrong, to boot.  But his double take also tells some unflattering tales about Paris and Parisians.  And since those stories make up the greater part of his travelogue, most of what he has to say is, well, bad, if only by implication.
     Without further ado, then, here is his split Paris itinerary from his Quaker City trip.  Itinerary A is the official, touristique one; itinerary B is the narrative, negatif one.

Itinerary A 
Sidewalk cafe
International Exposition
Arc d'Etoile (now Arc de Triomphe)   

Military review of Napoleon III         

Notre Dame                                          
Paris Morgue (then a tourist site)         
Louvre                                                   
Bois de Boulogne                                  

Pere Lachaise cemetery
Versailles

Itinerary B
Bad barber
Lousy pool
Crooked guide
Dirty cancan
Perverted Abelard
Strange Signs
Incomprehensible language 
Ugly Grisettes
Dangerous Slums   
 
     In Itinerary A, we're more likely to find the good things Twain has to say about Paris, though that's not always the case.  At the Louvre, for example, he mostly bemoans the "cringing spirit"of artists forced to suck up to their "princely patrons" through "nauseous adulation."  His visit to the Bois de Boulogne quickly devolves into his observation that "it was in this park that that fellow with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian czar's life last spring with a pistol."

     Still, Twain finds the park "a wonderful wilderness...an enchanting place."  And he's impressed by Notre Dame's "lofty square towers and its rich front," moved by the "mute witness" of the dead in the Morgue, thrilled by the military pomp at the Arc de Triomphe, and struck by Pere Lachaise: "so exquisite in design, so rich in art, so costly in material, so graceful, so beautiful."
     That's all well and good--and much of it is still true today--but let's look at the numbers, folks.  My edition of The Innocents Abroad has 510 pages, 450 of which Twain devotes to the Quaker City trip itself.  Of them, some 55 pages--or seven chapters out of 58 that describe the cruise--take place in France, counting the sections on both Marseille and Paris. That's well over 10 percent, for just one of about 15 countries he visits. 
     Here's the kicker, though.  Itinerary B--the one with the unflattering stories--takes up about 32 pages, depending on how you score it.  Just by the numbers, that's almost 60 percent.  Put another way, if Twain's France-bashing in The Innocents Abroad were rolled up into a piece of legislation before Congress today, it would probably pass without much lobbying, even with the filibuster.
     Voila! Mais, lamentable!

What's so bad about this place?   From the top:  The cafe in the Hotel du Louvre, aptly called the Cafe de la Comedie (because of its location across from La Comedie Francaise ; the hotel's grand lobby today; a mysterious stranger (yours truly) caught in a startled pose at the foot of  the posh staircase; a current-day cruise ship model displayed in the window of a nearby  travel agent.         

  

A La Bastille!

    

A 1789 French etching of the storming heard 'round the world

     On his way from--I assume--the Gare de Lyon to the Grand Hotel du Louvre, Twain passed by the Place de la Bastille.  He writes a brief but stirring passage, full of high-blown sentiment and descriptive flair, a heady mix of history and heartstrings:
...when we passed by the Column of July we needed no one to tell us what it was or to remind us that on its site once stood the grim Bastile [sic], that grave of human hopes and happiness, that dismal prison house within whose dungeons so many young faces put on the wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits grew humble, so many brave hearts broke. 
      Anyone want to try counting the rhetorical devices in that long half-sentence?  There's metaphor, of course, as well as allusion, alliteration, assonance, hyperbole, parallelism, point-of-view.  And what about authorial intrusion in that turn of phrase, "we needed no one to tell us...or remind us"?  Maybe metonymy in the "brave hearts" that broke?  Pathetic fallacy in those faces putting on those wrinkles? And surely the whole thing is a textbook example of periphrasis or circumlocution?  But all to good effect.  Twain the tourist successfully creates a cathartic moment of tragic lyricism for his audience back home.
     I was thinking of this passage recently when my husband, our two sons, and I walked down to the Place de la Bastille from our apartment not far away.  It was a nice evening, the first after weeks of battleship-gray skies, cold rain, and even rare snow.  We were like a group of giddy kids on a field trip as we wound our way down the rue de Charonne through the 11th arrondissement.  We hadn't been here long and, what with all the bad weather, we hadn't much explored our own--never mind nearby--quartiers.  So we were delighted to see all the cafes and shops that we could get to-- a pied, without a car!  

The view from our apartment window this winter.

     And I was especially excited to see how many people were out on the streets.  "How great is this!" I cried to my family.  "People coming out on the streets!  Just wait till the weather warms up.  Le monde [them again] will be out enjoying life. We can sit in cafes with our cafes gourmands.  Now this is Paris--you'll love it."
     (This last was aimed at our teenage sons, who would usually  rather be back home with their friends.)
      My husband was getting into the swing of things, though, smiling and taking my hand.  Even the boys were not complaining.  Then we started to notice all the people wearing face paint and bright costumes.  There were stripes in many colors, creative hats, and masses of balloons.  Some people were singing and chanting, but I couldn't figure out exactly what.   The sidewalks and the narrow streets kept getting more and more crowded as we approached the Place de la Bastille.  

My favorite placard: "Better a gay marriage than an unhappy marriage"

     Then we came around the corner and saw the large crowd that had gathered around the Column of July.  Someone was standing on a makeshift platform with a bullhorn.  People were cheering and hooting.  I looked around and put the picture together: we'd found ourselves in the middle of a large gay marriage demonstration held in response to an anti-marriage demonstration a few days earlier. Mariage pour tous, they call it here; under Francois Hollande's socialist leadership, the government is considering--and likely to adopt--a law that provides gay French citizens equal rights to marriage and adoption. 
     For a moment, I was ashamed by our resemblance to the family in the National Lampoon's Vacation movies, in which Chevy Chase and Beverly DiAngelo, as Clark and Ellen Griswold, bring their kids to famous places, only to reveal themselves as American cultural ignoramuses.  In particular, I was mortified at the memory of a scene in European Vacation.  Clark tosses his son Rusty's monogrammed beret off the Eiffel Tower, whereupon a Parisian lap dog jumps off after it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=MedHanoUnoY 
     But then, as the sun set over the Column of July and French demonstrators chanted and sang around me, I felt a thrill coming on.  What had been a feeling of bourgeois complacency turned into a frisson of revolutionary promise.  
     Aux placards, citoyens!  I starting humming La Marseillaise to myself.  Have a listen; it might get you too in the storming mood:
     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K1q9Ntcr5g
     Now this, I thought, revising my earlier assessment, this is France.  You go out for an evening stroll and you wind up in the middle of a revolutionary movement.  

 
     












byhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MedHanoUnoY