Do not run away with the idea that such nonsense as this has no interest for the American public. It has.
American reporters have asked me, with the most serious face in the world, whether I worked in the morning, afternoon, or evening, and what color paper I used (_sic_). One actually asked me whether it was true that M. Jules Claretie used white paper to write his novels on, and blue paper for his newspaper articles. Not having the honor of a personal acquaintance with the director of the Comédie-Française, I had to confess my inability to gratify my amiable interlocutor.
Look at the advertisements in the newspapers. There you have the bootmaker, the hatter, the traveling quack, publishing their portraits at the head of their advertisements. Why are those portraits there, if it be not to satisfy the curiosity of customers?
The mass of personalities, each more trumpery than the other, those details of people's private life, and all the gossip daily served up in the newspapers, are they not proof enough that curiosity is a characteristic trait of the American?
This curiosity, which often shows itself in the most impossible questions, gives immense amusement to Europeans. Unhappily, it amuses them at the expense of well-bred Americans--people who are as innocent of it as the members of the stiffest aristocracy in the world could be. The English, especially, persist in not distinguishing Americans who are gentlemen from Americans who are not.
And even that easy-going American _bourgeois_, with his childish but good-humored nature, they often fail to do justice to. They too often look at his curiosity as impertinence and ill-breeding, and will not admit that, in nine cases out of ten, the freedom he uses with you is but a show of good feeling, an act of good-fellowship.
Take, for instance, the following little story:
An American is seated in a railway carriage, and opposite him is a lady in deep mourning, and looking a picture of sadness; a veritable _mater dolorosa_.
"Lost a father?" begins the worthy fellow.
"Your husband! Ah! Left you comfortable?"
The lady, rather offended, retires to the other end of the car, and cuts short the conversation.
"Rather stuck up, this woman," remarks the good Yankee to his neighbor.