Chapter 13

The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock. We went to the
'commissionaire' of the hotel--I don't know what a 'commissionaire' is,
but that is the man we went to--and told him we wanted a guide. He said
the national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen and
Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to find a good
guide unemployed. He said he usually kept a dozen or two on hand, but he
only had three now. He called them. One looked so like a very pirate
that we let him go at once. The next one spoke with a simpering
precision of pronunciation that was irritating and said:

"If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in
hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look
upon in ze beautiful Parree. I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw."

He would have done well to have stopped there, because he had that much
by heart and said it right off without making a mistake. But his
self-complacency seduced him into attempting a flight into regions of
unexplored English, and the reckless experiment was his ruin. Within ten
seconds he was so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and
bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever have gotten
him out of it with credit. It was plain enough that he could not
"speaky" the English quite as "pairfaitemaw" as he had pretended he
could.

The third man captured us. He was plainly dressed, but he had a
noticeable air of neatness about him. He wore a high silk hat which was
a little old, but had been carefully brushed. He wore second-hand kid
gloves, in good repair, and carried a small rattan cane with a curved
handle--a female leg--of ivory. He stepped as gently and as daintily as
a cat crossing a muddy street; and oh, he was urbanity; he was quiet,
unobtrusive self-possession; he was deference itself! He spoke softly
and guardedly; and when he was about to make a statement on his sole
responsibility or offer a suggestion, he weighed it by drachms and
scruples first, with the crook of his little stick placed meditatively to
his teeth. His opening speech was perfect. It was perfect in
construction, in phraseology, in grammar, in emphasis, in pronunciation
--everything. He spoke little and guardedly after that. We were charmed.
We were more than charmed--we were overjoyed. We hired him at once. We
never even asked him his price. This man--our lackey, our servant, our
unquestioning slave though he was--was still a gentleman--we could see
that--while of the other two one was coarse and awkward and the other was
a born pirate. We asked our man Friday's name. He drew from his
pocketbook a snowy little card and passed it to us with a profound bow: