_Over the Channel._
I LAUGHED once on the route from Dover to Calais. The fact deserves to
be jotted down as an “Incident of Travel.” For the boat was crowded,
the wind brisk, and we had a “chopping sea” in the Channel. Words of
woe upon which we need not expatiate to those who have lost sight of
Shakspeare’s Cliff in like circumstances. The voyage was filled with
disgust as Longfellow’s Night with music, and with untold misery to all
of our party excepting Caput, to whom smooth and turbulent seas are as
one. If he has a preference, it is for the latter. He led off in the
laugh that extended even to the wretched creature I had known in calmer
hours, as Myself.
An elderly lord was on board. A very loud lord as to voice. A mighty
lord in rank and honors, if one might judge from the attentions of
deck-stewards and some of the initiated passengers. A very big lord as
to size. A very rich lord, if the evidence of furred mantles, and a
staff of obsequious servants be admitted. A very pompous lord, whose
stiffened cravat, beef-steak complexion and goggle-eyes reminded us of
“Joey Bagstock, Tough Jo, J. B., sir!”
If, having sunk to the depths of suffering and degradation, we could
have slid into a lower deep, it would have been by reason of that man’s
struttings and vaporings and bullyings in our sight. He tramped the
deck over and upon the feet of those who were too sick, or too much
crowded to get out of his path,—courier and valet at his heels, one
bearing a furled umbrella and a mackintosh in case it should rain, the
other a second furred surtout should “my lord” grow chilly.
“Ill, sir! what do you mean, sir! I am never ill at sea!” he
vociferated to the captain, who ventured a query and the offer of his
own cabin should his lordship require the refuge.
“Pinafore” had not then been written, and the assertion went
unchallenged.
“I have travelled thousands of miles by water, sir, and never known so
much as a qualm of sea-sickness—not a qualm, sir! Do you take me for a
woman, sir, or a fool?”
In his choler he was more like Bagstock than ever, as he continued his
promenade, gurgling and puffing, goggling and wagging his head like an
apoplectic china mandarin.
We were in mid-channel where there was a rush of master, servants,
and officious deck-hands to the guards, that made the saddest
sufferers raise their eyes. In a few minutes, the parting of the
group of attendants showed the elderly lord, upon his feet, indeed,
but staggering so wildly that the courier and a footman held him up
between them while the valet settled his wig and replaced his hat. His
complexion was ashes-of-violets, if there be such a tint,—his eyes were
as devoid of speculation as those of a boiled fish. The steward picked
up his gold-headed cane, but the flabby hands could not grasp it. The
captain hastened forward.
“Very sorry, me lud, I’m sure, for the little accident. But it’s a
nosty sea, this trip, me lud, as your ludship sees. An uncommon beastly
sea! I hope your ludship is not suffering much?”
The British lion awoke in the great man’s bosom. The crimson of rage
burned away the ashes. The eyes glared at the luckless official.
“Suffering, sir! Do you suppose I care for suffering? It is the _dommed
mortification_ of the thing!”
Then, as I have said, Caput laughed, and the sickest objects on board
joined in feeble chorus.
Prima lifted her head from her father’s shoulder. “I am glad I came!”
she said, faintly.
So was I—almost—for the scene lacked no element of grotesqueness nor of
poetical retribution.
The long room in the Paris station (_gare_), where newly-arrived
travellers await the examination of their luggage, is comfortless,
winter and summer. It was never drearier than on one March morning,
when, after a night-journey of fifteen hours, we stood, for the want
of seats, upon the stone floor, swept by drifts of mist from the
open doors, until our chattering teeth made very broken French of
our petition to the officers to clear our trunks at their earliest
convenience, and let us go somewhere to fire and breakfast. The
inspection was the merest form, as we found it everywhere. Perhaps
we looked honest (or poor), or our cheerful alacrity in surrendering
our keys and entreating prompt attendance, may have had some share in
purchasing immunity from the annoyances of search and confiscation
complained of by many. One trunk was unlocked; the tray lifted and put
back, without the disturbance of a single article; all the luggage
received the mystic chalking that pronounced it innocuous to the
French Republic; we entered a carriage and gave the order: “61 Avenue
Friedland!”
Caput, to whom every quarter of the city and every incident of the
Commune Reign of Terror were familiar, pointed out streets and squares,
as we rode along, that gained a terrible notoriety through the
events of that bloody and fiery era. I recollect leaning forward to
look at one street—not a wide one—in which ten thousand dead had lain
at one time behind the barricades. For the rest, I was ungratefully
inattentive. Paris, in the gray of early morning, looked sleepy,
respectable, and dismal. The mist soaked us to the bone; the drive was
long; we had void stomachs and aching heads. Some day we might listen
to and believe in the tale of her revolutions, her horrors and her
glories. Now this was a physical, and therefore, a mental impossibility.
“At last!”
Almost in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, looming gigantic through
the fog, the carriage stopped at a handsome house. A porter came out
for our luggage, the concierge gave us into the care of a waiter.
“But yes, monsieur, the rooms were ready. Perfectly. And the fires.
Perfectly—perfectly! Monsieur would find all as had been ordered.”
Up we went, two flights of polished stairs,—where never an atom of
dust was allowed to settle—along one hall, across an ante-chamber, and
the waiter threw back a door. A large chamber stood revealed, made
lightsome by two windows; heartsome by a glowing fire of sea-coal. And
set in front of the grate was a round table draped whitely, and bearing
that ever-blessed sight to a fagged-out woman—a tea equipage. By the
time I, as the family invalid, was divested of bonnet and mufflers, and
laid in state upon the sofa at one side of the hearth, a tap at the
door heralded the entrance of a smiling English housekeeper in a black
dress and muslin cap with flowing lappets. She carried a tray; upon it
were hissing tea-urn, bread and butter, and light biscuits.
“Miss Campbell hopes the ladies are not very much fatigued after their
long journey, and that they will find themselves quite comfortable
here.”
How comfortable we were then, and during all the weeks of our stay in
Hôtel Campbell; how we learned to know and esteem, as she deserved,
the true gentlewoman who presides with gracious dignity at her table,
and makes of her house a genuine home for guests from foreign lands,
I can only state here in brief. Neither heart nor conscience will let
me pass over in silence the debt of gratitude and personal regard we
owe her. I shall be only too happy should these lines be the means of
directing other travelers to a house that combines, in a remarkable
degree, elegance and comfort in a city whose hotels, boarding-houses,
and “appartements” seldom possess both.
The March weather of Paris is execrable. Some portion of our
disappointment at this may have been due to popular fictions respecting
sunny France, and a city so fair that the nations come bending with awe
and delight before her magnificence; where good Americans—of the upper
tendom—wish to go when they die; the home of summer, butterflies, and
WORTH! To one who has heard, and, in a measure, credited all this, the
fog that hides from him the grand houses across the particular Rue or
Avenue in which he lodges, are more penetrating, the winds more bitter,
the flint-dust they hurl into his eyes is sharper, the rain, sleet, and
snow-flurries that pelt him to shelter more disagreeable—than London
fog or Berlin gloom and dampness. There were whole days during which
I sat, perforce, by my fire, or, if I ventured to the window to enjoy
the prospect of sheets of rain, dropping a wavering curtain between
me and the Rothschild mansion opposite, I must wrap my shawl about my
shoulders, so “nipping and eager” was the air forcing its way between
the joints of the casements.
But there were other days in which out-door existence was tolerable
in a _fiacre_, jealously closed against the whirling dust. Where it
all came from we could not tell. The streets of Paris are a miracle of
cleanliness. Twice a day they are swept and washed, and the gutters run
continually with clear, living water.
The wind was keen, the dust pervasive, the sky a bright, hard blue when
we went, for the first time, to the tomb of Napoleon in the Hôtel des
Invalides. The blasts held revel in the courtyard we traversed in order
to gain the entrance. The sentinels at the gate halted in the lee of
the lodges before turning in their rounds to face the dust-laden gusts.
Once within the church a great peace fell upon us—sunshine and silence.
It was high noon, and the light flowed through the cupola crowning the
dome directly into the great circular crypt in the centre of the floor,
filling—overflowing it with glory. We leaned upon the railing and
looked down. Twenty feet below was the sarcophagus. It is a monolith
of porphyry, twelve feet in length, six in breadth, with a projecting
base of green granite. Around it, wrought into the tesselated marble
pavement, is a mosaic wreath of laurel—glossy green. Between this and
the sarcophagus one reads—“_Austerlitz_, _Marengo_, _Jena_, _Rivoli_,”
and a long list of other battle-fields, also in brilliant mosaic.
Without this circle, upon the balustrade fencing in the tomb, are
twelve statues, representatives of as many victories. A cluster of
fresh flowers lay upon the sarcophagus. And upon all, the sunshine,
that seemed to strike into the polished red marble and bring out the
reflection of hidden flame. It was a strange optical illusion, so
powerful one had to struggle to banish the idea that the porphyry was
translucent and the glow reddening the sides of the crypt such gleams
as one sees in the heart of an opal—“the pearl with a soul in it.” It
was easier to give the rein to fancy and think of a Rosicrucian lamp
burning above the stilled heart of the entombed Emperor. The quiet of
the magnificent burial-place is benignant, not oppressive. In noting
the absence of the sentimental fripperies with which the French delight
to adorn the tombs of the loved and illustrious dead we could not but
hope that the grandeur of the subject wrought within the architect this
pure and sublime conception of more than imperial state.
We followed the winding staircase from the right of the high
altar,—above which flashes a wonderful golden crucifix—to the door
of the crypt. Bertrand on one side, Duroc on the other, guard their
sleeping master. “The bivouac of the dead!” The trite words are
pregnant with dignity and with power when quoted upon that threshold.
Over the doorway is a sentence in French, from Napoleon’s will:
“I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the
midst of the French people, whom I have so much loved.”[A]
The Communists tore down the bronze column in the Place Vendôme. The
bas-reliefs, winding from bottom to top, were cast from cannon captured
by Napoleon, and his statue surmounted the shaft. They battered the
Tuileries, where he had lived, to a yawning ruin, and outraged the
artistic sensibilities of the world by setting fire to the Louvre. But,
neither paving-stone, nor bomb, nor torch, was flung into the awful
circle where rests the hero, with his faithful generals at his feet.
Jerome Bonaparte, his brother’s inferior and puppet, is buried in a
chapel at the left of the entrance of the Dôme. A bronze statue of him
rests upon his sarcophagus. His eldest son—by his second marriage—is
near him. A smaller tomb holds the heart of Jerome’s Queen. Joseph
Bonaparte is interred in a chapel opposite, the great door being
between the brothers.
We took the Place de la Concorde in our ride uptown. We did this
whenever we could without making too long a _détour_. The Luxor
obelisk, three thousand years old, is in the middle of the Square. A
beautiful fountain plays upon each side of this, and the winds, having
free course in the unsheltered Place, flung the waters madly about.
Twelve hundred people were trampled to death here once. A discharge
of fireworks in celebration of the marriage of Louis XVI. and Marie
Antoinette caused a panic and a stampede among the horses attached to
the vehicles blocking up the great square. They dashed into the dense
mass of the populace, and in half-an-hour the disaster was complete.
Sixteen years later there was another panic,—another rush of maddened
brutes, that lasted eighteen months. Twenty-eight hundred souls were
driven to bliss or woe in the hurly-burly—the devil’s dance of the
eighteenth century. The bride and groom, whose nuptial festivities
had caused the minor catastrophe, duly answered to their names at the
calling of the death-roll. The most precious blood of the kingdom was
flung to right and left as ruthlessly as the March winds now tore the
spray of the fountains.
Nobody knows, they say, exactly where the guillotine stood;—only that
it was near the obelisk and the bronze basins, where Tritons and
nymphs bathe all day long. We were in the Place one evening when an
angry sunset tinged the waters to a fearful red. Passers-by stopped to
look at the phenomenon, until quite a crowd collected. A very quiet
crowd for Parisians, but eyes sought other eyes meaningly, some in
superstitious dread. While we reviewed, mentally, the list of the
condemned brought hither in those two years, it would not have seemed
strange had the dolphins vomited human blood into the vast pools.
“Monsieur will see the Colonne de Juillet?” said our coachman, who, as
we gazed at the fountains on this day, had exchanged some words with
a compatriot. “There has been an accident to” (or _at_) “the Colonne.
Monsieur and mesdames will find it interesting, without doubt.” The
wind was too sharp for bandying words. We jumped at the conclusion that
the colossal Statue of Liberty, poised gingerly upon the gilt globe on
the summit of the monument, had been blown down; bade him drive to the
spot, and closed the window.
The Colonne de Juillet stands in the Place de la Bastille. No need
to tell the story of the prison-fastness. The useless key hangs in
the peaceful halls of Mount Vernon. The leveled stones are built into
the Bridge de la Concorde. These “French” titles of squares, bridges,
and streets, are sometimes apt, oftener fantastic, not infrequently
horribly incongruous. The good Archbishop of Paris was shot upon the
site of the old Bastille, in the revolution of 1848, pleading with both
parties for the cessation of the fratricidal strife, and dying, like
his Lord, with a prayer for his murderers upon his lips. Under the
Column of July lie buried the victims of still another revolution—that
of 1830,—with some who fell at the neighboring barricade, in 1848. One
must carry a pocket record of wars and tumults, if he would keep the
run of Parisian _émeutes_.
Our _cocher’s_ information was correct. A throng gathered about the
railed-in base of the column. But Liberty still tip-toed upon the
gilded world, and the bronze shaft was intact.
“If Monsieur would like to get out”—said the driver at the door—“he
can learn all about the accident. _Le pauvre diable_ leaped—it is now
less than an hour since.”
“Leaped!” Then the interesting accident was described. A man had jumped
down from the top of the monument. They often did it.
We ought to have been shocked. But the absurdity of the
misunderstanding, the man’s dramatic enjoyment of the situation, and
his manner of communicating the news, rather tempted us to amusement.
“Was he killed?”
“Ah! without doubt, Madame! The colonne has one hundred and fifty-two
feet of height. Perfectly killed, Monsieur!”
Impelled by a wicked spirit of perversity, or a more complex caprice, I
offered another query:
“What do you suppose he thought of while falling?”
The fellow scanned my impassive face.
“Ah, Madame! of nothing! One never thinks at such a moment. _Ma foi!_
why should he? He will be out of being—_rien_—in ten seconds. He has no
more use for thought. Why think?”
We declined to inspect the stone on which the suicide’s head had
struck. Indeed, assented our _cocher_, where was the use? The body
had been removed immediately, and the pavement washed. The police
would look to that. Monsieur would see only a wet spot. The wind would
soon dry it. Ah! they were skilful (_habile_) in such accident at the
monument. If a man were weary of life, there was no better place for
him—and no noise made about it afterward.
“Somehow,” said Prima, presently, “I cannot feel that a Frenchman’s
soul is as valuable as ours. They make so light of life and death, and
as for Eternity, they resolve it into, as that man said—‘nothing.’”
“‘He giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made of one
blood all nations of men,’” I quoted, gravely.
I would not admit, unless to myself, that the coachman’s talk of
the wet spot upon the pavement and the significant gesture of
blowing away a gas, or scent, that had accompanied his “Nothing,”
brought to my imagination the figure of a broken phial of spirits of
hartshorn—pungent, volatile—_rien_!
On another windy morning we made one of our favorite “Variety
Excursions.” We had spent the previous day at the Louvre, and eyes and
minds needed rest. I have seen people who could visit this mine of
richest art for seven and eight consecutive days, without suffering
from exhaustion or plethora. Three hours at a time insured for me a
sleepless night, or dreams thronged with travesties of the beauty in
which I had reveled in my waking hours. Instead then, of entering the
Louvre on the second day, we checked the carriage on the opposite side
of the street before the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois.
Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill,
went on a mission to Paris, suffered death for his faith upon
Montmartre—probably a corruption of _Mons Martyrum_,—and was interred
upon the site of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. His tomb and chapel are
there, in support of the legend. Another chapel is dedicated to “Notre
Dame de la Compassion.” The name reads like a sorrowful satire. For
we had not come thither out of respect for St Dionysius—alias St.
Denis—nor to gaze upon frescoes and paintings—all fine of their
kind,—nor to talk of the battle between Bourbons and populace in 1831,
when upon the eleventh anniversary of the Duc de Berry’s assassination,
as a memorial mass was in progress, the church was stormed by a
mob—that _canaille_-deep that was ever boiling like a pot—the priests
violently ejected, the friends of the deceased Duc forced to fly for
their lives, and the old church itself closed against priests and
worshippers for seven years. It was the royal parish church, for a
long time. Catherine de Medicis must have attended it, being a good
daughter of the Church. Hence there was especial propriety in her order
that from the belfry of this sanctuary should be given the signal for
the massacre of her dear son’s heretic subjects on St. Bartholomew’s
Night, 1572. From a window in his palace of the Louvre, Charles fired
as fast as his guards could load carbines, upon the flying crowds in
the streets. In obedience to tradition, a certain window was, up to the
beginning of this century, designated as that in which he was stationed
on that occasion, and an inscription to this effect was engraved
beneath it:
“_C’est de cette fenêtre que l’infâme Charles 9 d’exécrable mémoire a
tiré sur le peuple avec une carabine._”
“Upon the people!” It was not safe even in 1796 to write that the
murdered were Huguenots and that they perished for that cause and none
other. The cautious inscription was removed upon the belated discovery
that the part of the palace containing this window was not built
until the execrable Charles was in his grave. The balcony from which
he “drew” upon all who did not wear the white badge of Romanism, was
in the front of the palace where the deep boom of the bell must have
jarred him to his feet, pealing from midnight to dawn. The government
suffered no other knell to sound for the untimely taking-off of nearly
one hundred thousand of the best citizens of France.
A modern steeple lifts a stately spire between the church-porch and
the adjoining Mayor’s Court. The little old belfry is thrown into
background and shadow, as if it sought to slink out of sight and
history. We paused beneath it, within the church upon the very spot
pressed by the ringer’s feet that awful night. The sacristan stared
when we asked what had become of the bell, and why it had not been
preserved as a historical relic.
“There is a _carillon_ (chime) in the new steeple. Fine bells, large
and musical. Unfortunately, they do not at present play.”
The ceiling of the church is disproportionately low; the windows,
splendid with painted glass, light the interior inadequately, even in
fine weather. As we paced the aisles the settling of the clouds without
was marked by denser shades in the chapels and chancel, blotting out
figures and colors in frescoes and paintings, and making ghostly the
trio of sculptured angels about the cross rising above the holy-water
basin—or _bénitier_. Fountains of holy-water at each corner of the
Place would not be amiss.
The Parisian Panthéon has had a hard struggle for a name. First, it
was the Church of Ste. Géneviève, the patron saint of Paris, erected
soon after her martyrdom, A.D. 500. The present building, finished in
1790, bore the same title until in 1791, the Convention, in abolishing
Religion at large, called it “the Panthéon” and dedicated it to “the
great men of a grateful country.” This dedication, erased thirty years
afterward, was in 1830, again set upon the façade, and remains there,
_malgré_ the decree of Church and State, giving back to it the original
name.
Under the impression that Ste. Géneviève was buried in the chapel named
for her and the church decorated with scenes from her life, I accosted
a gentlemanly priest and asked permission on behalf of a namesake of
the girl-saint to lay a rosary entrusted to me, upon her tomb. He
heard me kindly, took the chaplet and proceeded to inform me that Ste.
Géneviève was burned (_brûlée_), but that “we have here in her shrine,
her hand, miraculously preserved, and her ashes.”
“That must do, I suppose,” said I, as deputy for American Géneviève.
The chaplet was laid within the shrine, blessed, crossed and returned
to me. I had no misgivings until our third visit to Paris, when, going
into St. Étienne du Mont, situated also in the Place du Panthéon, I
discovered that Ste. Géneviève had not been burned; had been buried,
primarily, in the Panthéon, then removed to St. Étienne du Mont, and
had now rested for a thousand years or so, in a tomb grated over to
preserve it from being destroyed by the kisses and touches of the
faithful. I bought another rosary; the priest undid a little door
on the top of the grating, passed the beads through and rubbed them
upon the sacred sarcophagus. Novices are liable to such errors and
consequent discomfiture.
The Panthéon, imposing in architecture and gorgeous in adornment,
assumed to us, through a series of disappointments, the character of
a vast receiving-vault. The crypt is massive and spacious, supported
by enormous pillars of masonry, and remarkable for a tremendous echo,
whereby the clapping of the guide’s hands is magnified and multiplied
into a prolonged and deafening cannonade, rolling and bursting through
the dark vaults, as if all the sons of thunder once interred (but not
staying) here were comparing experiences above their vacated tombs, and
suiting actions to words in fighting their battles over again.
Mirabeau’s remains were taken from this crypt for re-interment in Père
Lachaise. Marat—the Abimelech of the Jacobin fraternity—was torn from
his tomb, tied up in a sack like offal, and thrown into a sewer. There
is here a _wooden_ sarcophagus, cheap and pretentious, inscribed with
the name of Rousseau and the epitaph—“Here rests the man of Nature and
of Truth.” The door is ajar—a hand and wrist thrust forth, upbear a
flaming torch—an audacious conception, that startled us when we came
unexpectedly upon it.
“A sputtering flambeau in this day and generation,” said Caput.
The guide, not understanding one English word, hastened to inform us
that the tomb was empty.
“Where, then, is the body?”
A shrug. “Ah! monsieur, who knows?”
Another wooden structure, with a statue on top, is dedicated, “_Aux
manes de Voltaire_.”
“Poet, historian, philosopher, he exalted the man of intellect and
taught him that he should be free. He defended Calas, Sirven, De la
Barre, and Montbailly; combated atheists and fanatics; he inspired
toleration; he reclaimed the rights of man from servitude and
feudalism.” Thus runs the epitaph.
“Empty, also!” said the guide, tapping the sarcophagus. “The body was
removed by stealth and buried—who can say where?”
“Was _anybody_ left here?”
“But yes, certainly, monsieur!” and we were showed the tombs—as yet
unrifled—of Marshal Lannes, Lagrange, the mathematician, and Soufflot,
the architect of the Panthéon; likewise, the vaults in which the
Communists stored gunpowder for the purpose of blowing up the edifice.
It was a military stronghold in 1848, and again in 1871, and but for
the opportune dislodgment of the insurgents at the latter date the
splendid pile would have followed the example of the noted dead who
slumbered, for a time, beneath her dome—then departed—“who can tell
where?”
The Hôtel and Museum de Cluny engaged our time for the rest of the
forenoon. A visit to it is a “Variety Excursion” in itself. The
hall, fifty feet high, and more than sixty in length, and paved
with stone—headless trunks, unlidded sarcophagi, like dry and mouldy
bath-tubs; broken marbles carved with pagan devices, and heaps of
nameless _débris_ lying about in what is, to the unlearned, meaningless
disorder—was the _frigidarium_, or cold-water baths, belonging to the
palace of the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus, built between A.D. 290
and 306. It was bleak with the piercing chilliness the rambler in Roman
ruins and churches never forgets—which has its acme in the more than
deathly cold of that ancient and stupendous refrigerator, St. John of
Lateran, and never departs in the hottest noon-tide of burning summer
from the frigidaria of Diocletian and Caracalla. But we lingered,
shivering, to hear that the Apostate Julian was here proclaimed Emperor
by his soldiers in 360, and to see his statue, gray and grim, near an
altar of Jupiter, found under the church of Nôtre Dame. Wherever Rome
set her foot in her day of power, she stamped hard. Centuries, nor
French revolutions can sweep away the traces.
In less than three minutes the guide was pointing out part of Molière’s
jaw-bone affixed to a corridor-wall in the Musée. This, directly
adjoining the Roman palace, was a “branch establishment” of the
celebrated Abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy; next, a royal palace, first
occupied by the English widow of Louis XII., sister of Bluff King
Hal. “_La chambre de la Reine Blanche_,” so called because the queens
of France wore white for mourning—is now the receptacle of a great
collection of musical instruments, numbered and dated. James V. of
Scotland married Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., in this place.
After the first Revolution, when kings’ houses were as if they had not
been, Cluny became state property, and was bought by an archæologist,
who converted it into a museum. There are now upward of nine thousand
articles on the catalogue. The reader will thankfully excuse me
from attempting a summary, but heed the remark that the collection
is valuable and varied, and better worth visit and study than any
other assortment of relics and ancient works of art we saw in France.
The fascination it exerted upon us and others is doubtless, in part,
referable to the character of the building in which the collection
is stored. Palissy faïence, ivory carvings, rich with the slow,
mellow dyes of centuries; enamels in copper, executed for Francis I.;
Venetian glasses; old weapons; quaint and ornate tilings; tapestries,
more costly than if woof and broidery were pure gold—are tenfold
more ravishing when seen in the light from mullioned windows of the
fifteenth century, and set in recesses whose carvings vie in beauty and
antiquity with the objects enclosed by their walls. Gardens, deep with
shade, mossy statues and broken fountains dimly visible in the alleys,
great trees tangled and woven into a thick roof over walks and green
sward—all curiously quiet in the heart of the restless city, seclude
Thermæ and Hôtel in hushed and dusky grandeur.
The Rue St. Jacques, skirting the garden-wall on one side, was an old
Roman road. By it we were transported, without too violent transition
from the Past, into the Paris of To-Day.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] “_Je désire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords de la Seine, au
milieu de ce peuple François que j’ai tant aimé._”