While we were there the Emperor drove by and spoke to our cabman, saying, “How is business?” Seeing how much pleasure it gave the poor fellow to repeat it, we kept asking him to tell vis what the Kaiser said to him.

First my companion would say: 

“When was it and what happened?”

And when he had quite finished, I would say: 

“It wasn’t the Emperor himself, was it?  It must have been the coachman who spoke to you.”

“No, not so, ladies.  It was the great Kaiser himself.  He said to me—­” And then we would get the whole thing over again.  It was charming to see his pleasure.

When we returned home we entered the hotel between rows of palms, and we dropped money into each of them.  It seemed to me that fifty servants were between me and the elevators.  However, it was New Year’s, and we tried not to be bored by it.

People talk so much of the expense of foreign travel, but to my mind the greatest expenditures are in paying for extra luggage and in fees.  Otherwise, I fancy that travel is much the same if one travels luxuriously, and that in the long run things would be about equal.  The great difference is that in America all travel luxuries are given to you for the price of your ticket, and here you pay for each separate necessity, to say nothing of luxury, and your ticket only permits you to breathe.  But the annoyance of this continuous habit of feeing makes life a burden.  One pays for everything.  It is the custom of the country, and no matter if you arrange to have “service included,” it is in the air, in the eyes of the servants, in the whole mental atmosphere, and you fee, you fee, you fee until you are nearly dead from the bother of it.  In Germany they raise their hats and rise to their feet every time you pass, even if you pass every seven minutes, and when the time comes for you to go, you have to pay for the wear and tear of these hats.

In Paris, at the theatre, you fee the woman who shows you to your seat, you fee the woman who opens the door and the woman who takes your wraps.  One night in midsummer we stepped across from the Grand Hotel to the opera without even a scarf for a wrap, and the woman was so disappointed that we were handed from one attendant to another some half dozen times as “three ladies without wraps.”  And the next one would look us over from head to foot and repeat the words, “Three ladies without wraps,” until we laughed in their faces.

French servants are the cleverest in the world if you want versatility, but they are absolutely shameless in their greed, and look at the size of your coin before they thank you.  In fact, the words in which they thank you indicate whether your fee was not enough, only modest, or handsome.

“It is not too much, madam,” or “thanks, madam,” or “I thank you a thousand times” show your status in their estimation.

If you are an American they reserve the right to rob you by the impudence of their demands, until rather than have a scene, you give them all they ask.  I have followed in the footsteps of a French woman and given exactly what she did, and had my money flung in derision upon the pavement.