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Stranger as I was in the capital, to me the acquaintance was a boon of great price. He knew it thoroughly: in the gorgeous and stately salons of the Faubourg; in the guingettes of the Rue St. Honoré, he was equally at home, and by some strange charm had the entrée too. The same "sesame" opened to him the coulisse of the Opera and the penetralia of the Français.
Jewellers' apprentices, ladies' hair-dressers, journeymen tailors and upholsterers dance, at twenty sous a head, with sempstresses and ladies' maids. Journeymen shoemakers, cabinet-makers, and workmen of other trades, not very laborious, assemble in guingettes, where they dance French country-dances at three sous a ticket, with grisettes of an inferior order.
Masons, paviours in wooden shoes, tipped with iron, and other hard-working men, in short, repair to guingettes, and make the very earth tremble with their heavy, but picturesque capers, forming groups worthy of the pencil of Teniers. Lastly, one more link completes the chain of this nomenclature of caperers.
"The ragoûts of the Temple the arlequins of the Cité the fried fish of the Odéon arcades the unknown hashes of the guingettes, and the 'funeral baked meats' of the Palais Royal, are all familiar to my pocket and my palate. I do not scruple to confess that in cases of desperate emergency, I have even availed myself of the advantages of Le hasard." "Le hasard." said I. "What is that?"
"We shall amuse ourselves famously at Courbevoie," he said, as we rattled over the stones. "We'll dine at the Toison d'Or an excellent little restaurant overlooking the river; and if you're fond of angling, we can hire a punt and catch our own fish for dinner. Then there will be plenty of fiddling and dancing at the guingettes and gardens in the evening. By the way, though, I've no money! That is to say, none worth speaking of voil
The fine paved road to this town has many inconveniencies, and jars the nerves terribly with its perpetual rattle; the approach however always strikes one as very fine, I think, and the boulevards and guingettes look always pretty too: as wine, beer, and spirits are not permitted to be sold there, one sees what England does not even pretend to exhibit, which is gaiety without noise, and a crowd without a riot.
I am putting here, however, my cart before my horse, for the hour just glanced at was but a final tag to a day of much brighter curiosity, and which seemed to take its baptism, as we passed through prodigious perched and huddled, adorably scattered and animated and even crowded Tivoli, from the universal happy spray of the drumming Anio waterfalls, all set in their permanent rainbows and Sibylline temples and classic allusions and Byronic quotations; a wondrous romantic jumble of such things and quite others heterogeneous inns and clamorous <i>guingettes</i> and factories grabbing at the torrent, to say nothing of innumerable guides and donkeys and white-tied, swallow-tailed waiters dashing out of grottos and from under cataracts, and of the air, on the part of the whole population, of standing about, in the most characteristic <i>contadino</i> manner, to pounce on you and take you somewhere, snatch you from somebody else, shout something at you, the aqueous and other uproar permitting, and then charge you for it, your innocence aiding.
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