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Updated: May 26, 2025
It didn't seem to be a popular subject in that cafe. One big blue-black fellow said that Maritz was a dirty swine who would soon be hanged. Peter quickly caught his knife-wrist with one hand and his throat with the other, and demanded an apology. He got it. The Lisbon boulevardiers have not lost any lions. After that there was a bit of a squash in our corner.
He inwardly recalled the types with which his stage was embellished; the fellow puppets of that gilded and arrogant and idle world, the curled and perfumed princes, the waxed and watching boulevardiers side by side with virginal and unconscious American girls, pallid and impoverished grand dukes in the wake of painted but wary Parisians, stiff-mustached and mysterious Austrian counts lowering at doughty and indignant Englishwomen; bejeweled beys and pashas brushing elbows with unperturbed New England school-teachers astray from Cook's; monocled thieves and gamblers and princelings, jaded tourists and skulking parasites and always the disillusioned and waiting women.
Large numbers of voluble "Boulevardiers" in Paris have, during the last years of the nineteenth century, made it an article of their patriotic faith that the future success of the French navy depends upon the submarine boat.
With the exception of our Sunday afternoons of leave, when we joined the boulevardiers in town, we lived a life as remote and cloistered as that of some brotherhood of monks in an inaccessible monastery. That is how it appeared to me, although here again I am in danger of making it seem that my own impressions were those of all the others. This of course was not true.
To an American and especially to an American who was reared below Mason and Dixon's justly popular Line it is indeed edifying to behold a black heavyweight fourthrater from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his ease in a smart cafe, entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers, both male and female.
Further, the Official Journal had published a circular addressed by Bismarck to the German diplomatists abroad, in which he stated formally that if France desired peace she would have to give "material guarantees." That idea, however, was vigorously pooh-poohed by the Boulevardiers, particularly as rumours of sudden French successes, originating nobody knew how, were once more in the air.
Cardailhac was especially anxious to justify his title of "Manager of the Nouveautes," and, since the Nabob's millions had been at the back of the undertaking, had made a point of preparing for the boulevardiers the most dazzling surprises. That of this evening surpassed them all; the piece was in verse and moral. A moral play!
It was something to talk about. It was ten years more before the French got thoroughly used to the nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon the whole, a good thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade after Sedan, chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would commonly tell me that they wished they had the empire back again. Perhaps they will have it, some day.
And then the charming evenings spent at the theaters and ended at Tortoni's with this truest of "boulevardiers," who knew every one and everything, and whose inexhaustible fund of anecdote was enlivened by a spontaneous easy wit and verve that made his companionship a delight.*
A later attempt at Paris to "incarnadine" the neighborhood of the Champs de Mars, and "round up" a number of boulevardiers, met with a more disastrous result, the gleam of steel from mounted gendarmes, and a mandate to his employers.
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