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I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley. The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; her entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable.
There is no provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy we must not forget Quincy well.
But the most irritating of girl men is assuredly the Parisian and the boulevardier, in whom the appearance of intelligence is more marked and who combines in himself all the attractions and all the faults of those charming creatures in an exaggerated degree in virtue of his masculine temperament. Our Chamber of Deputies is full of girl-men.
In possessing Schopenhauer the world possesses a personality the richer; a somewhat garrulous personality it may be; a curiously whimsical and sensitive personality, full of quite ordinary superstitions, of extravagant vanities, selfish, at times violent, rarely generous; a man whom during his lifetime nobody quite knew, an isolated creature, self-absorbed, solely concerned in his elaboration of the explanation of the world, and possessing subtleties which for the most part escaped the perception of his fellows; at once a hermit and a boulevardier.
In short, what with all this mental disturbance added to the more purely physical anguish in the billowy portions and the calves and ankles, the Bertram Wooster who eventually toppled off at the door of Kingham Manor was a very different Bertram from the gay and insouciant boulevardier of Bond Street and Piccadilly.
"Voulez-vous danser, mademoiselle?" whispered the Chevalier in the perfect accent of the boulevardier. "Merci, beaucoup," she replied in the diplomatic courtesies of the Ambassadeurs. They danced together, not once, but many times, to the admiration, the wonder and envy of all; to the scandalized reprobation of a proper few. Who was she? Who was he?
By nature you're a boulevardier, or what the newspapers call a 'clubman. I admire you more than I can say everybody admires you for making such a success of a work that must always have been uncongenial at the least." The opening was obvious. Nothing could have been more opportune.
Like all Southerners, Zola helps out his voice with frequent gestures; but he has none of the exuberant eloquence of his race. In society he is still, to a certain degree, and must always remain the victim of bashfulness; and his one attempt at public speaking was a complete failure. He has in him nothing of the boulevardier, and he is happy only when at work.
Barbara was on her knees by his chair before he realized that she was in the room. "When do you start? You never said a word about it in your letters." He stood up and pulled her gently to her feet. Invitingly she craned her head forward, offering him her lips. "About what?" "Your American tour. The Vieux boulevardier said you were going to deliver a course of lectures in America."
He generalized, he particularized about the blacks; he told anecdotes. I was interested, a little incredulous, and considerably surprised. What could this man with such a boulevardier exterior that he looked positively like, an exile in a provincial town, and with his drawing-room manner—what could he know of negroes?
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