_Versailles—Expiatory Chapel—Père Lachaise._
THE guide-books say that the visitor to the palace of Versailles is
admitted, should he desire it, to five different court-yards. We cared
for but one—the _cour d’honneur_ whose gates are crowned with groups
emblematical of the victories of _le grand Monarque_.
It is an immense quadrangle, paved with rough stones, and flanked
on three sides by the palace and wings. The central château, facing
the entrance, was built by Louis XIII., the wings by Louis XIV. The
prevailing color is a dull brick-red; the roofs are of different
heights and styles; the effect of the whole far less grand, or even
dignified, than we had anticipated. The pavilions to the right and
left are lettered, “_À toutes les gloires de la France_.” Gigantic
statues, beginning, on the right hand, with Bayard, “_sans peur et sans
reproche_,” guard both sides of the court. In the centre is a colossal
equestrian statue in bronze of Louis XIV., the be-wigged, be-curled,
and be-laced darling of himself and a succession of venal courtezans.
At the base of this statue we held converse, long and low, of certain
things this quadrangle had witnessed when, through it, lay the way
to the most luxurious and profligate court that has cursed earth and
insulted Heaven since similar follies and crimes wrought the downfall
of the Roman Empire. Of the throngs of base parasites that flocked
thither in the days when Pompadour and Du Barry held insolent misrule
over a weaker, yet more vicious sovereign than Louis XIV. Of the
payment exacted for generations of such amazing excesses, when Parisian
garrets and slums sent howling creditors by the thousand to settle
accounts with Louis XVI. Vast as is the space shut in by palace-walls
and folding gates, they filled it with ragged, bare-legged, red-capped
demons. Upon the balcony up there, the king, also wearing the red cap,
appeared at his good children’s call. Anything for peace and life! Upon
the same balcony stood, the same day, his braver wife, between her
babes, true royalty sustaining her to endure, without quailing, the
volleys of contumely hurled at “the Austrian woman.” Having secured
king, queen, and children as hostages for the payment of the national
debt of vengeance, the complainants sacked the palace, made an end
of its glory as a kingly residence, until Louis Philippe repaired
ravages to the extent of his ability, and converted such of the state
apartments as he adjudged unnecessary for court uses into an historical
picture-gallery.
The history of the French nation—of its monarchs, generals, marshals,
victories, coronations, and hundreds of lesser events—is there written
upon canvas. Eyes and feet give out and the brain wearies before it
is half read. The polished floors, inlaid with different-colored
woods, smooth as glass, are torture to the burning soles; the aching
in the back of the neck becomes agony. Yet one cannot leave the work
unfinished, where every step is a surprise and each glance discovers
fresh objects of interest.
“If only we had the moral courage not to look at the painted ceilings!”
said Dux, meditatively; “or if it were _en règle_ for a fellow to lie
upon his back in order to inspect them!”
We were in the Gallery of Mirrors, two hundred and forty feet long;
seventeen windows looking down upon gardens and park, upon fountains,
groves, and lakelets; seventeen mirrors opposite these repeating the
scenes framed by the casements.
“The ceiling by Lebrun represents scenes in the life of the Grand
Monarch,” uttered the guide.
Hence the plaint, echoed groaningly by us all.
The chamber in which Louis XIV. died is furnished very much as it was
when he lay breathing more and more faintly, hour after hour, within
the big bed lifted by the dais from the floor, that, sleeping or dying,
he might lie above the common walks of men. Communicating with the
king’s bed-room is the celebrated Salle de l’œil de Bœuf, the ox-eyed
window at one side giving the name. The courtiers awaited there each
day the announcement that the king was awake and visible, beguiling
the tedium of their long attendance by sharp trades in love, court,
and state honors. It is a shabby-genteel little room, the hardness,
glass and glare that distinguish palatial parlors from those in which
sensible, comfort-loving people live, rubbed and tarnished by time
and disuse. Filled with a moving throng in gala-apparel, this and
the expanse of the royal bed-chamber may have been goodly to behold;
untenanted, they are stiff and desolate.
The central balcony, opening from the great chamber—the balcony
on which, forty-four years later, Marie Antoinette stood with her
children—was, upon the death-night of the king, occupied by impatient
officials—impatient, but no longer anxious, for the decease of their
lord was certain and not far off. The hangings of the bed, cumbrous
with gold embroidery, had been twisted back to give air to the expiring
man. As the last sigh fluttered from his lips, the high chamberlain
upon the balcony broke his white wand of office, shouting to the crowds
in the court-yard, “_Le roi est mort!_” and, without taking breath,
“_Vive le roi!_”
No incident in French history is more widely known. In talking of it
in the bed-chamber and balcony, it was as if we heard it for the first
time.
The “little apartments of the queen” were refreshment to our jaded
senses and nerves. They are a succession of cozy nooks in a retired
wing. Boudoirs, where were the soft lounges and low chairs, excluded
by etiquette from the courtly _salons_; closets, fitted up with
writing-desk, chair, and footstool; others, lined on all sides with
books; still others, where the queen, whether it were Maria Lesczinski
or Marie Antoinette, might sit, with a favorite maid of honor or two,
at her embroidery. Through these apartments, all the “home” she had had
in the palace, a terrified woman fled to gain a secret door of escape,
while the marauders, the delegation from Paris, were yelling and raging
for her blood in the corridors and state apartments.
If this row of snug resting and working rooms were the “Innermost”
of her domestic life, the Petit Trianon was her play-ground. It is
a pretty villa, not more than half as large as the Grand Trianon
built for Madame de Maintenon by Louis XIV. Napoleon I. had a suite
of small apartments in the Petit Trianon—study, salon, bath and
dressing-rooms, and bed-chamber. They are furnished as he left them,
even to the hard bed and round, uncompromising pillows. All are hung
and upholstered with yellow satin brocade; the floors are polished
and waxed, uncarpeted, save for a rug laid here and there. A door
in the arras communicates with the Empress’ apartments. The villa
was built by Louis XV. for the Du Barry, but interests us chiefly
because of Marie Antoinette’s love for it. Her spinnet is in the
salon where she received only personal and intimate friends. It is a
common-looking affair, the case of inlaid woods ornamented with brass
handles and corners. The keys are discolored—some of them silent; the
others yielded discordant tinklings as we touched them with reverent
fingers. Her work-table is in another room. Her bed is spread with an
embroidered satin coverlet, once white. Her monogram and a crown were
worked near the bottom. The stitches were cut out by revolutionary
scissors, but their imprint remains, enabling one to trace clearly
the design. In this room hang her portrait and that of her son, the
lost Dauphin, a lovely little fellow, with large, dark-blue eyes like
his mother’s, and chestnut hair, falling upon a wide lace collar. His
coat is blue; a strap of livelier blue crosses his chest to meet a
sword-belt; a star shines upon his left breast, and he carries a rapier
jauntily under his arm. His countenance is sweet and ingenuous, but
there is a shading of pensiveness or thought in the expression which
is unchildlike. It was easy and pleasant to picture him running up and
down the marble stairs, and filling the now uninhabited rooms with
boyish talk and mirth. It was yet easier to reproduce in imagination
the figures of mother and children in the avenues leading to the Swiss
village, her favorite and latest toy.
This is quite out of sight of palace and villas. The intervening
park was verdant and bright as with June suns, although the season
was November, and the sere leaves were falling about us. A miniature
lake and the islet in the middle, a circular marble temple upon the
island, giving cover to a nude nymph or goddess, were there, when
the light steps of royal mother and children skimmed along the path,
she, in her shepherdess hat, laughing and jesting with attendants in
sylvan dress. The day was very still with the placid melancholy that
consists in our country with Indian summer. The smell of withering
leaves hung in the air, spiciest in the sunny reaches of the winding
road, almost too powerful in shaded glens, heaped with yellow and
brown masses. We met but two people in our walk—an old peasant bent
low under a bundle of faggots, and an older woman in a red cloak, who
may have been a gypsy. The woods are well kept, the brushwood cut
out, and the trees, the finest in the vicinity of Paris, carefully
pruned of decaying boughs. We saw the village between their boles long
before reaching the outermost building—a mill, with peakéd gables and
antique chimneys, the hoary stones overgrown with ivy. We mounted the
flight of steps leading, on the outside, to the second story; shook
the door, in the hope that it might, through inadvertence, have been
left unlocked. Hollow echoes from empty rooms answered. Bending over
the balustrade, we looked down at the little water-wheel, warped by
dryness; at the channel that once led supplies to it from the lake hard
by. A close body of woods formed the background of the deserted house.
In the water of the lake were reflected the gray and moss-green stones;
barred windows; the clinging cloak of ivy; our own forms—the only
moving objects in the picture. Louis XVI., amateur locksmith for his
own pleasure, played miller here to gratify his wife’s whim, grinding
tiny sacks of real corn, and taking pains to become more floury in an
hour than a genuine miller would have made himself in six weeks, in
order to give vraisemblance to the play enacted by the queen and her
coterie. Around the bend of the pond lay the larger cottages which
served as kitchen, dining, and ball-rooms. All are built of stone, with
benches at the doors where peasants might rest at noon or evening; all
are clothed with ivy; all closed and locked. We skirted the lake to
get to the _laiterie_, or dairy. It is a one-storied cottage, with
windows in the tiled roof. Long French casements and glazed doors
allowed us to get a tolerable view of the interior. The floor, and the
ledges running around the room, are marble or smooth stone. Within this
building court-gallants churned the milk of the Swiss cows that grazed
in the lakeside glades; maids of honor made curds and whey for the
noonday dinner, and the leader of the frolic moulded rolls of butter
with her beautiful hands, attired like a dairy-maid, and training her
facile tongue to speak peasant patois. The industrious ivy climbs to
the low-hanging eaves, and, drooping in long sprays that did not sway
in the sleeping air, touched the busts of king and queen set upon tall
pedestals, the one between the two windows in the side of the house,
the other between the glass doors of the front gable. An observatory
tower, with railed galleries encircling the first and third stories, is
close to the _laiterie_.
Many sovereigns in France and elsewhere have had expensive playthings.
Few have cost the possessors more dearly than did this Swiss hamlet.
Innocent as the pastimes of miller and dairymaid appear to us, the
serious student of those times sees plainly that the comedy of happy
lowly life was a burning, cankering insult to the apprehension of the
starving people to whom the reality of peace and plenty in humble
homes, was a tradition antedating the reign of the Great Louis. While
their children died of famine, and men prayed vainly for work, the
profligate court, to maintain whose pomp the poor man’s earnings were
taxed, demeaned their queen and themselves in such senseless mummeries
as beguiled Time of weight in the pleasure-grounds of the Petit Trianon.
The Place de la Concorde, from which Marie Antoinette waved farewell
to the Tuileries—dearer to her in death than it had been in life—is
the connecting link between the toy-village in the Versailles Park
and the Expiatory Chapel, in what was formerly the Cemetery of the
Madeleine in Paris. Leaving the bustling street, one enters through a
lodge, a garden, cheerful in November, with roses and pansies. A broad
walk connects the lodge and the tomb-like façade of the chapel. On
the right and left of paved way and turf-borders are buried the Swiss
Guard, over whose dead bodies the insurgents rushed to seize the queen
in the Tuileries, when compromise and the mockery of royalty were at
an end. The chapel is small, but handsome. On the right, half-way up
its length, is a marble group, life-size, of the kneeling king, looking
heavenward from the scaffold, in obedience to the gesture of an angel
who addresses him in the last words of his confessor—“Son of St. Louis,
ascend to Heaven!”
Opposite is an exquisite portrait-statue of the queen, her sinking
figure supported by Religion. Anguish and resignation are blended in
the beautiful face. Her regards, like those of the king, are directed
upward. The features of Religion are Madame Elizabeth’s, the faithful
sister of Louis, who perished by the guillotine May 12, 1794. Both
groups are admirably wrought, and seen in the dim light of the stained
windows, impressively life-like.
In the sub-chapel, gained by a winding stair, is an altar of black
marble in a recess, marking the spot where the unfortunate pair were
interred after their execution. The Madeleine was then unfinished,
and in the orchard back of it the dishonored corpse of Louis, and,
later, of his widow, were thrust into the ground with no show of
respect or decency. The coffins were of plain boards; the severed
heads were placed between the feet; quicklime was thrown in to hasten
decomposition; the grave or pit was ten feet deep, and the soil
carefully leveled. No pains were spared to efface from the face of
the earth all traces of the victims of popular fury. But loving eyes
noted the sacred place; kept watch above the mouldering remains until
the nation turned to mourn over the slaughter wrought by their rage.
Husband and wife were removed to the vaults of the Kings of France,
at St. Denis, in 1817, by Louis Philippe. The consciences of himself
and people fermented actively about that time, touching the erection
of a _monument expiatoire_. The Place de la Concorde was re-christened
“Place de Louis XVI.,” with the ulterior design of raising upon the
site of his scaffold, obelisk or church, which should bear his name
and be a token of his subjects’ contrition. To the like end, the king
of the French proposed to change the Temple de la Gloire of Napoleon
I.—otherwise the Madeleine—into an expiatory church, dedicated to
the _manes_ of Louis XVI., Louis XVII. (the little Dauphin), Marie
Antoinette, and Madame Elizabeth, a hapless quartette whose memory
needed rehabilitation at the hands of the reigning monarch and his
loving subjects, if ever human remorse could atone for human suffering.
The Chapelle Expiatoire is the precipitate and settlement into
crystallization of this mental and moral inquietude.
“No, madame!” said the custodian, in a burst of confidence. “We have
_not_ here the corpses of Louis XVI. and his queen. Their skeletons
repose at St. Denis. But only their bones! For there are here”—touching
the black marble altar—“the earth, the lime, the clothing that enclosed
their bodies. And upon this spot was their deep, deep grave. People of
true sensibility prefer to weep here rather than in the crypt of St.
Denis!”
On the same day we saw St. Roch. Bonaparte planted his cannon upon the
broad steps, October 3, 1795, and fired into the solid ranks of the
advancing Royalists—insurgents now in their turn. The front of the
church is scarred by the balls that returned the salute. The chief
ornament of the interior is the three celebrated groups of statuary in
the Chapelle du Calvaire. These—the Crucifixion, Christ on the Cross,
and the Entombment—are marvelous in inception and execution. The small
chapel enshrining them becomes holy ground even to the Protestant
gazer. They moved us as statuary had never done before. Returning to
them, once and again, from other parts of the church, to look silently
upon the three stages in the Story that is above all others, we left
them finally with lagging tread and many backward glances. At the same
end of the church is the altar at which Marie Antoinette received her
last communion, on the day of her death.
“Were _they_ here, then?” we asked of the sacristan, pointing to the
figures in the Chapelle du Calvaire.
“But certainly, Madame! They are the work, the most famous, of Michel
Anguier, who died in 1686. The queen saw them, without doubt.”
While the bland weather lasted, we drove out to Père Lachaise, passing
_en route_, the Prison de la Roquette, in which condemned prisoners are
held until executed. The public place of execution is at its gates.
This was a slaughter-pen during the Commune. The murdered citizens,—the
Archbishop of Paris, and the curé of the Madeleine among them,—were
thrown into the _fosses communes_ of Père Lachaise. These common
ditches, each capable of containing fifty coffins, are the last homes
donated by the city of Paris to the poor who cannot buy graves for
themselves. One is thankful to learn that the venerable Archbishop and
his companions were soon granted worthier burial. Our _cocher_ told us
what may, or may not be true, that the last victim of the guillotine
suffered here; likewise that one of the fatal machines is still kept
within the walls ready for use.
For a mile—perhaps more—before reaching Père Lachaise, the streets are
lined with shops for the exhibition and sale of flowers,—a few natural,
many artificial,—wreaths of immortelles, yellow, white and black, and
an incredible quantity of bugle and bead garlands, crosses, anchors,
stars and other emblematic devices. Windows, open doors, shelves and
pavement are piled with them. Plaster lambs and doves and cherubs,
porcelain ditto; small glazed pictures of deceased saints, angels and
other creatures; sorrowing women weeping over husbands’ death-beds,
empty cradles and little graves,—all framed in gilt or black wood,—are
among the merchandise offered to the grief-stricken. A few of the
mottoes wrought into the immortelle and bead decorations will give a
faint idea of the “Frenchiness” of the display.
“_Hélas!_” “_À ma chère femme_,” “_Chère petite_,” “_Ah! mon amie_,”
“_Bien-aimée_,” “_Chérie_,” and every given Christian name known in the
Gallic tongue.
The famous Cemetery, which contains nearly 20,000 monuments, great and
small, is a curious spectacle to those who have hitherto seen only
American and English burial-grounds. Père Lachaise is a city of the
dead; not “GOD’S Acre,” or the garden in which precious seed have been
committed to the dark, warm, sweet earth in hope of Spring-time and
deathless bloom. The streets are badly paved and were so muddy when
we were there, that we had to pick our steps warily in climbing the
steep avenue beginning at the gates. Odd little constructions, like
stone sentry-boxes, rise on both sides of the way. Most of these
are surrounded by railings. All have grated doors, through which
one can survey the closets within. Flagging floors, plain stone, or
plastered walls and ceilings; low shelves or seats at the back, where
the meditative mourner may sit to weep her loss, or kneel to pray for
the belovéd soul,—these are the same in each. The monotony of the row
is broken occasionally by a chapel, an enlarged and ornate edition of
the sentry-box, or a monument resembling in form those we were used
to see in other cemeteries. The avenues are rather shady in summer.
At our November visit, the boughs were nearly bare, and rotting
leaves, trampled in the mud of the thoroughfares, made the place more
lugubrious. Really cheerful or beautiful it can never be. The flowers
set in the narrow beds between tombs and curbings, scarcely alleviate
the severely business-like aspect. Still less is this softened by
the multitudinous bugled and beaded ornaments depending from the
spikes of iron railings, cast upon sarcophagi, and the marble ledges
within the gates. All Soul’s Day was not long past and we supposed
this accounted for the superabundance of these offerings. We were
informed subsequently that there are seldom fewer than we saw at this
date. About and within one burial-closet—a family-tomb—we counted
_fifty-seven_ bugle wreaths of divers patterns, in all the hues of
the rainbow, besides the conventional black-and-white. The parade of
mortuary millinery, for a while absurd, became presently sickening,
horribly tawdry and glistening. It was a relief to laugh heartily and
naturally when we saw a child pick up a garland of shiny purple beads,
and set it rakishly upon the bust of Joseph Fourier, the inclination of
the decoration over the left eyebrow making him seem to wink waggishly
at us, in thorough enjoyment of the situation.
We wanted to be thoughtful and respectful in presence of the dead, but
the achievement required an effort which was but lamely successful.
Dispirited we did become, by and by, and fatigued with trampling up
steep lanes and cross-alleys. Carriages cannot enter the grounds, and
even a partial exploration of them is a weariness. We drooped like the
weeping-willow set beside Alfred de Musset’s tomb, before we reached
it. An attenuated and obstinately disconsolate weeper is the tree
planted in obedience to his request:—
“Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai,
Plantez un saule au cimetière;
J’aime son feuillage éploré,
La pâleur m’en est douce et chère;
Et son ombre sera légère,
À la terre où je dormirai.”
The conditions of the sylvan sentinel whose sprays caressed his bust,
were, when we beheld it, comically “according to order.” There were
not more than six branches upon the tree, a few sickly leaves hanging
to each. At its best the foliage must have been “pale” and the shade
exceedingly “light.”
The Gothic chapel roofing in the sarcophagus of Abelard and Heloïse,
was built of stones from the convent of Paraclet, of which Heloïse
was, for nearly half a century, Lady Superior. From this retreat she
addressed to her monkish lover letters that might have drawn tears
of blood from the heart of a flint; which impelled Abelard to the
composition of quires of homilies upon the proper management of the
nuns in her charge, including by-laws for conventual housewifery.
Under the pointed arches the mediæval lovers rest, side by side,
although they were divided in death by the lapse of twenty-two years.
Sarcophagus and effigies are very old, having been long kept among the
choice antiquities of a Parisian museum and placed in Père Lachaise by
the order of Louis Philippe. The monument was originally set up in the
Abbey of Heloïse near the provincial town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where
the rifled vault is still shown. Prior and abbess slumbered there for
almost seven centuries. Their statues are of an old man and old woman,
vestiges of former beauty in the chiseled features; more strongly drawn
lines of thought and character in brow, lip, and chin. They wear their
conventual robes.
Peripatetic skeletons and ashes are _à la mode_ in this polite country.
The “manes,” poets and epitaphs are so fond of apostrophizing, should
have lively wits and faithful memories if they would keep the run of
their mortal parts.
Marshal Ney has neither sentry-box, nor chapel, nor memorial-tablet.
His grave is within a square plat, railed in by an iron fence. The
turf is fresh above him, and late autumn roses, lush and sweet, were
blooming around. The ivy, which grows as freely in France as brambles
and bind-weed with us, made a close, green wall of the railing. We
plucked a leaf, as a souvenir. It is twice as large as our ivy-leaves,
shaded richly with bronze and purple, and whitely veined, and there
were hundreds as fine upon the vine.
One path is known as that of the “artistes,” and is much frequented.
Upon Talma’s head-stone is carved a tragic mask. Music weeps over
the bust of Bellini and beside Chopin’s grave, and, in bas-relief,
crowns the sculptured head of Cherubini. Bernardin de St. Pierre lies
near Boïeldieu, the operatic composer. Denon, Napoleon’s companion
in Egypt, and general director of museums under the Empire, sits in
bronze, dark and calm as a dead Pharaoh, in the neighborhood of Madame
Blanchard, the aëronaut, who perished in her last ascent. There was
a picture of the disaster in Parley’s Magazine, forty years ago. I
remembered it—line for line, the bursting flame and smoke, the falling
figure—at sight of the inscription setting forth her title to artistic
distinction. Upon another avenue lie La Fontaine, Molière,—(another
itinerant, re-interred here in 1817,) Laplace, the astronomer, and
Manuel Garcia, the gifted father of a more gifted daughter,—Malibran.
“Around the corner,” we stumbled, as it were, upon the tomb of Madame
de Genlis.
Rachel sleeps apart from Gentile dust in the Jewish quarter of Père
Lachaise. Beside the bare stone closet above her vault is a bush of
laurestinus, with glossy green leaves. The floor inside was literally
heaped with visiting-cards, usually folded down at one corner to
signify that he or she, paying the compliment of a post-mortem
morning-call, deposited the bit of pasteboard in person. There was
at least a half bushel of these touching tributes to dead-and-gone
genius. No flowers, natural or false, no immortelles—_no bugle
wreaths_! Only visiting-cards, many engraved with coronets and other
heraldic signs, tremendously imposing to simple Republicans. We
examined fifty or sixty, returning them to the closet, with scrupulous
care, after inspection. Some admirers had added to name and address,
a complimentary or regretful phrase that would have titillated the
insatiate vanity of the deceased, could she have read it,—wounded to
her death as she had been by the success of her rival Ristori. Her
votaries may have had this reminiscence of her last days in mind, and
a shadowy idea that her “manes,” in hovering about her grave, would be
cognizant of their compassionate courtesies.
Most of the offerings were from what we never got out of the habit
of styling “foreigners.” There were a few snobbish-looking English
cards,—one with a sentence, considerately scribbled in French—“_Mille
et mille compliments_.” So far as our inspection went, there was not
one that bore an American address. Nor did we leave ours as exceptions
to this deficiency in National appreciation of genius and artistic
power—or National paucity of sentimentality.