Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Hire Billfinger

Would Bilfinger have stopped at this shop instead of the Louvre?

     Going anywhere with a guide has always been a tricky business.  If you doubt my word, take that of Dante, who had to follow the taskmaster Virgil through heaven, purgatory, and hell in The Divine Comedy.  Twain's guide in The Innocents Abroad, an "accomplished knave" named Billfinger, is no Greek poet, for sure.  Nor are his motives as honorable as Virgil's.  But he does lead his client on one hellish ride.

    Twain and friends hire him to take them around Paris because, as the commissionaire of the Grand Hotel du Louvre tells them, it was "next to impossible to find a good guide unemployed," what with the International Exposition--where they themselves stopped only briefly--"draw[ing] such multitudes of Englishmen and Americans to Paris."  So, just as at the start of any fairytale you know will soon head south, they have three choices.  They can hire the guy who looks like a pirate, the guy who can't speak English, or the guy in the silk hat and kid gloves.  Door number three, please.

     It turns out, of course, that this seeming gentleman is only after their money, which wouldn't even be so bad if he would just take them where they want to go.  Instead, he forces them to pay for his long, lingering meals and to stop at all the silk shops where he gets a percentage of the sales.   Although the card he presents them, with a deep, courtly bow, reads "A. Billfinger, Guide to Paris, France, Germany, Spain, &c., &c.,"  Twain's traveling party finds the name unacceptably un-Frenchy.  They think something along the lines of Henri de Montmorency, Armand de la Chartreuse, Alexis du Calaincourt, or Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville, would sound better in their letters home.  But they can't agreed on which one, of course, so they settle on calling him Ferguson. 

     Stop right there! Can it be that, before we readers even get into the open barouche (metaphorically, of course) to tour Paris with Twain's party, we're off on a digression through a neighborhood of  names?  Mais, quoi d'autre?  These names are French and, well, other. Which is exactly the point. You can't tell me that the man who went from Samuel Clemens to Mark Twain doesn't take the symbolism of names seriously, and with a clever grin.

     So, first let's take A. Billfinger aka Ferguson.  Oh, those American tourists on the Quaker City!  They may have been too naive to recognize a proper noun that approaches allegory, but I bet the readers back home saw through Twain's ruse .  Or is it just me who reads "A. Billfinger" to mean someone who gets his sticky fingers on other people's dollar bills and won't let go?  Monsieur Greedy Guy?

     Then there's the litany of fancy French names, real or parodied. "Morency" belonged to a true-life family in the Paris area.  If you'd like to buy your own framed copy of the family crest, or maybe some emblazoned mugs or a T-shirt, you can order up all your aristocratic items at: 
http://www.houseofnames.com/morency-family-crest.
And Caulaincourt was no less than a French marquis, the first Duc de Vicense, who died a few years before Twain was born, though his name was Armand, not Alexis.  A general and a statesman, he fought with Napoleon and wrote a first-hand account of being by his side at the Russian debacle; there's even a lovely avenue and square named after him in Paris at the foot of Montmartre. But Armand de la Chartreuse and Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville?  I don't think so. 
     But what of Billfinger/Ferguson himself?  He turns out to be a con man reminiscent of Twain's own Jim Smiley in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.  First, he tells Twain's party he's going to get his own breakfast and come back, figuring they'll invite him to share theirs out of fear of having to wait for him.  Which they do. From then on, they have to feed and water him. 
     ...he was always hungry; he was always thirsty.  He came early; he stayed late; he could not pass a resaurant; he looked with lecherous eye upon every wineshop.  Suggestions to stop, excuses to eat and drink, were forever on his lips. We tried all we could to fill him so full that he would have no room to spare for a fortnight, but it was a failure.  He did not hold enough to smother the cravings of his superhuman appetite.   
     But the worst thing about Billfinger/Ferguson is that he won't stop taking them to silk shops where he gets a cut of the sales. Try as they might to remain polite and patient, one of Twain's companions bursts out, "Confound the idiot!  I don't want to see any silks today, and I won't look at them." The other pleads, "We need no silks now, Ferguson.  Our hearts yearn for the Louvre.  Let us journey on--let us journey on."

In the barouche with Billfinger/Ferguson

     But "Ferguson" has fooled them--and the Quaker City crew won't make it to the Louvre that day.  In his French accent, he tells them:
     It is only one moment--one leetle moment.  And ze time will be save--entirely save! Because zere is nothing to see now--it is too late. It want ten minute to four and ze Louvre close at four--only one leetle moment...
     Twain goes on to castigate Billfinger:
    The trecherous miscreant!  After four breakfasts and a gallon of champagne, to serve us such a scurvy trick.  We got no sight of the countless treasures of art in the Louvre galleries that day, and our only poor little satisfaction was in the reflection that Ferguson sold not a solitary silk dress pattern.
        Well, we've all fallen victim to tourist-soakers, right?  The smiling guys who sell us fake Venetian glass that paint flakes off before we get it home.  The street vendors who take us for $40 hoodies when we can get them for $20 in a non-tourist shop across town.  So it's hard not to feel sympathy for Twain and his buddies at the mercy of Billfinger.  We're with them--right?
     The problem for me is that he ties so much of his rant to Billfinger/Ferguson being French.  The accent isn't satire but  sarcasm. With its "leetle"s and its "ze"s and "zere"s, it's bad stereotyped mimicry.  The references to champagne and endless eating don't help either  But Twain hits a low-point when he admits:
     I am writing this chapter partly for the satisfaction of abusing that accomplished knave Bullfinger, and partly to show whosoever shall read this how Americans fare at the hands of the Paris guides and what sort of people Paris guides are.  It need not be supposed that we were a stupider or easier prey than our countrymen generally, for we were not.  The guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the first time and sees it sights alone or in company with others as little experienced as himself.  I shall visit Paris again someday, and then let the guides beware!  I shall go in my war paint--I shall carry my tomahawk along!
     File in, American travellers, and saddle up for the culture wars!  The French are after our wallets and they'll stop at nothing to get their wine-stained hands on them!  Prepare to be as savage in your monetary self-defense as Native American "savages" were in their territorial one!  Let's all give a whoop and scalp the scalpers!
    What's strange to me is not Twain's anger or even his desire for revenge, but that he limits it to French guides.  After all, he gets swindled by all kinds of people on the Quaker City trip: the glove girl in Gibraltar, for example, or the fake "gifted linguist" guide in Genoa.  Yet it is the Frenchman who stands in for all of them.  I'd even say Billfinger may have been the model for Twain's con-artist characters, the Duke and Dauphin, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
      So what's a French guide to do?  Get an official license, of course. Over the decades of ever-increasing tourism since Twain came to Paris, the city has become--can you believe it?-- sensitive about how those who live and work here treat tourists.  The French authorities are now quite strict about regulating and licensing tour guides; if you want to work as one you have to study hard, then take a rigorous examen to be accredited by an organization called the Federation Nationale de Guides Interpretes et Conferenciers.  Meanwhile, the Paris Chamber of Commerce has launched a website to help all those who serve tourists do so with politesse; it's called Do You Speak Touriste?  Ironically, it too relies on national stereotypes. Evidently, you shouldn't treat a tourist from Japan the same way as someone from England.  Who knew? But who's the most demanding customer, according to the Paris COC?  The French themselves, of course.
     Le guide est mort, vive le guide! 
 
        
     
      

Bad Pool and Dull Wine

Loves cats and pool: Twain at the billiard table with a cute kitten

       Twain is well-known not only as a great writer but also as a great lover of pool.   He had a whole room set up just to play it on the third floor of the mansion he and Livy built in the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford--a man-attic if not a man-cave.  There he and his friends would hang out till the wee hours smoking tobacco, drinking scotch, and shooting pool.  According to Paine, Twain could play all night, until everybody else fell asleep.  He also liked to write and edit there, spreading pages of his manuscripts out on the pool table. 
     So I guess it's not surprising that the other thing Twain did his first night in Paris was to play billiards--or at least try to.  But here too what he found in France disappointed him.  When he and his friends came upon a place with billiards, they headed right in but found nothing but frustration:
     At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to billiards. Joy!...We expected to fare better here [than when they had played in Gilbraltar], but we were mistaken.  The cushions were a good deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of always stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way of caroms.  The cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly put the "English" on the wrong side of the ball.  Dan was to mark while the doctor and I played.  At the end of an hour neither of us had made a count, and Dan was tired of keeping a tally with nothing to tally, and we were heated and angry and disgusted.  We paid the heavy bill--about six cents--and said we would call around sometime when we had a week to spend, and finish the game.
     Now, I know nothing about playing pool.  So his description of cushions and caroms means about as much to me as the Egyptian hieroglyphs I saw last week at the Louvre.  As far as I can remember, I've only tried to play twice, twenty years apart.  When I was in college, my brother tried to teach me in a friend's basement near Boston.  He's a patient soul, but after several attempts he got that look on his face that says, Can I really be related to this woman? So I let him off the hook, or should it be pool stick?  The second time, a friend from London gave it a go at an English pub in Bordeaux.  I performed equally badly if not worse.  Luckily, we soon got distracted by the good, cheap wine and she too was free to give up on me. 
     But even though I'm an ignoramus about pool, I hope I've learned something about Twain's tricky use of tone, especially when it comes to himself and the French .  The pattern I see is that he sets up an expectation--"Joy!"--only to have it dashed, quickly and quirkily, in a way that manages to make likeable fun of himself even while he's putting down the French.  The trains are wonderful but free of accidents because of the Draconian consequences for conductors.  The hotel is lovely but lacks soap and gaslight.  The cafes are frisky and Frenchy but somehow sound too cutesy.  And the shave, well, that's just an unmitigated desastre, based on a foolish fantasy.
     Yet, through it all, Twain, or should I say his persona, makes us like him, even when he admits to taunting the French with their own language, just "for the pleasure of being cruel."  How does he pull it off?  Well, for starters, he presents himself and his sidekicks from The Quaker City, as just regular folks, people his readers can relate to.  He doesn't pretend to know much about Paris or France (in fact, he knew quite a bit more French language and history than he let on).  He admits to arriving in Paris with the typical romanticized notions about the city of Americans of his day (many of which still persist).  As a result, his readers like him because we can follow him around Paris with eyes that seem to have a similar gaze as our own.  In that way, he's the definitive reporter and travel writer.  Because the character of "Twain" that he creates, starting with The Innocents Abroad, and continuing throughout his long career as a writer, speech-maker, and public figure, is neither better nor worse than ourselves.  "Twain" is the average American let loose in the world, like some kind of cultural scout, with no airs or pretensions.  Even by the Quaker City trip, though, what with the fame of his "Jumping Frog" story, Twain himself is no longer that guy. And he'll become even less so as time goes on.  But it is that "Twain" persona--and his careful cultivation of it--that allows him, ironically, to take a superior attitude toward the French.  Hey, he's just sayin'.  Can he help it if France and the French aren't all they were cracked up to be?
      But there's a bigger force starting to come into play, too.  Through "Twain," Twain is creating a new American identity, one different from earlier extremes of either the Brahmin or the frontiersman: from Emerson on the one hand or Wild Bill Hickok on the other.  He's forging an American character who, yes, is still rough around the edges, but who is also competent to comment on the most refined capital of the world, the place that symbolizes culture itself.  And who is willing to do so.  It takes quite a bit of cultural self-confidence to do that.  When I say Twain builds an American identity in contradistinction to the French, that's what I'm talking about.
     So, back to pool as an example.  According to histories of the game, it was a French (and English) pursuit long before it was an American one.  In fact, it's generally agreed that it started in medieval times in France or England as an indoor version of a lawn game like croquet.  As far back as 1470, French kings were playing it, as evidenced by the fact that Louis XI bought a billiard table that year.  Many pool terms even come from the French: billiards itself, for example, and cue, which derives from the French queue, or line.  And what was one of Marie Antoinette's and Louis XVI's favorite ways to pass the time in the waning days of the monarchy before the French Revolution?  Shooting pool.  You can still see a pool table at Versailles today.

The pool table in Versailles today

     What's more, there are evidently many places to shoot pool in Paris these days, though I personally haven't tried any of them out, of course. But for those of you who may be so inclined, here's a list. Maybe one of you will go and have a better experience than Twain--then write an updated review and post it as a comment on this blog.
     But I'm not quite done with Twain's first night in Paris.  Between the bad pool and dark, soapless hotel, he stops by "one of those pretty cafes," where they ate and "tested the wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do."  And how does he--and I mean "Twain"--find them?"  Harmless and unexciting." 
Mais, bien sur!