ST. LOUIS AND HIS ISLAND
The Morgue--The Ile St. Louis--Old Residents--St. Louis, the
King--The Golden Legend--Religious Intolerance--Posthumous
Miracles--Statue of Barye--The Quai des Celestins.
On the way from Notre Dame to the Ile St. Louis we pass a small
official-looking building at the extreme east end of the Ile de la
Cite. It is the Morgue.
But the Morgue is now closed to idle gazers, and you win your way to a
sight of that melancholy slab with the weary bodies on it and the
little jet of water playing on each, only by the extreme course of
having missed a relation whom you suspected of designs upon his own
life or whom you imagine has been the victim of foul play. No doubt
the authorities were well advised (as French municipal authorities
nearly always are) in closing the Morgue; but I think I regret it. The
impulse to drift into that low and sinister building behind Notre Dame
was partly morbid, no doubt; but the ordinary man sees not only too
little death, but is too seldom in the presence of such failure as for
the most part governs here: so that the opportunity it gave was good.
I still recall very vividly, in spite of all the millions of living
faces that should, one feels, have blurred one's prosperous vision,
several of the dead faces that lay behind the glass of this forlorn
side-show of the great entertainment which we call Paris. An old man
with a white imperial; more than one woman of that dreadful middle-age
which the Seine has so often terminated; a young man who had been
stabbed.... Well, the Morgue is closed to the public now, and very
likely no one who reads this book will ever enter it.
The Ile St. Louis, to put it bluntly, is just as commonplace as the
Ile de la Cite is imposing. It has a monotony very rare in the older
parts of Paris: it is all white houses that have become dingy: houses
that once were attractive and wealthy and are now squalid. One of the
largest of the old palaces is to-day a garage; there is not a single
house now occupied by the kind of tenant for which it was intended.
Such declensions are always rather melancholy, even when--as, for
example, at Villeneuve, near Avignon--there is the beauty of decay
too. But on the Ile St. Louis there is no beauty: it belongs to a dull
period of architecture and is now duller for its dirt. Standing on the
Quai d'Orleans, however, one catches Notre Dame against the evening
sky, across the river, as nowhere else, and it is necessary to seek
the Ile if only to appreciate the fitness of the Morgue's position.
The island was first called L'Ile Notre Dame, and was uninhabited
until 1614. It was then developed and joined to the Ile de la Cite and
the mainland by bridges. The chief street is the Rue St. Louis, at
No. 3 in which lived Fenelon. The church of St. Louis is interesting
for a relic of the unfortunate Louise de la Valliere. At No. 17 on the
Quai d'Anjou is the Hotel Lauzun, which the city of Paris has now
acquired, and in which once lived together for a while the authors of
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ and _Les Fleurs de Mal_.
Of Saint Louis, or Louis IX., who gives his name to this island, and
whose hand is so visible in the Ile de la Cite, it is right to know
something, for he was the father of Paris. Louis was born in 1215, the
year of Magna Charta, and succeeded to the throne while still a boy.
The early years of his reign were restless by reason of civil strife
and war with England, in which he was victor (at Tailleburg, at
Saintes and at Blaize), and then came his departure for the Holy Land,
with 40,000 men, in fulfilment of a vow made rashly on a sick-bed. The
King was blessed at Notre Dame, as we have seen, and departed in 1248,
leaving his mother Blanche de Castile as regent. But the Crusade was a
failure, and he was glad to return (with only the ghost of his army)
and to settle down for the first time seriously to the cares of his
throne.
He was a good if prejudiced king: he built wisely and well, not only
Sainte Chapelle, as we have seen, but the Sorbonne; he devised useful
statutes; he established police in Paris; and, more perhaps than all,
he made Frenchmen very proud of France. So much for his administrative
virtues. When we come to his saintliness I would stand aside, for is
he not in _The Golden Legend_? Listen to William Caxton: "He forced
himself to serve his spirit by diverse castigation or chastising, he
used the hair many times next his flesh, and when he left it for cause
of over feebleness of his body, at the instance of his own confessor,
he ordained the said confessor to give to the poor folk, as for
recompensation of every day that he failed of it, forty shillings. He
fasted always the Friday, and namely in time of lent and advent he
abstained him in those days from all manner of fish and from fruits,
and continually travailed and pained his body by watchings, orisons,
and other secret abstinences and disciplines. Humility, beauty of all
virtues, replenished so strong in him, that the more better he waxed,
so, as David, the more he showed himself meek and humble, and more
foul he reputed him before God.
"For he was accustomed on every Saturday to wash with his own hands,
in a secret place, the feet of some poor folk, and after dried them
with a fair towel, and kissed much humbly and semblably their hands,
distributing or dealing to every one of them a certain sum of silver,
also to seven score poor men which daily came to his court, he
administered meat and drink with his own hands, and were fed
abundantly on the vigils solemn. And on some certain days in the year
to two hundred poor, before that he ate or drank, he with his own
hands administered and served them both of meat and drink. He ever
had, both at his dinner and supper, three ancient poor, which ate nigh
to him, to whom he charitably sent of such meats as were brought
before him, and sometimes the dishes and meats that the poor of our
Lord had touched with their hands, and special the sops of which he
fain ate, made their remnant or relief to be brought before him, to
the end that he should eat it; and yet again to honour and worship the
name of our Lord on the poor folk, he was not ashamed to eat their
relief."
Qualities have their defects, and such a frame of mind as that can
lead, for all the good motive, to injustice and even cruelty. Christ's
lesson of the Roman coin is forgotten as quickly as any. Louis'
passion for holiness, which became a kind of self-indulgence, led him
into a hard and ugly intolerance and acts of severe oppression against
those whom he styled heretics. His short way with the Jews recalled
indeed those of our own King John, who was very nearly his
contemporary. I know not if he pulled out their teeth, but he once did
what must have been as bad, if not worse, for he published an
ordinance "for the good of his soul," remitting to his Christian
subjects the third of their debts to the Jews; and he also expressed
it as his opinion that "a layman ought not to dispute with an
unbeliever, but strike him with a good sword across the body," the
most practical expression of muscular sectarianism that I know. Louis'
religious fanaticism was, however, his end; for he was so ill-advised
as to undertake a new Crusade against the unbelievers of Morocco, and
there, while laying siege to Tunis, he died of the plague. That was
in 1270, when he was only fifty-five.
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME: SOUTH FACADE
(FROM THE QUAI DE MONTEBELLO)
STE. CHAPELLE]
Twenty-seven years later Pope Boniface the Eighth raised him to the
Calendar of Saints, his day being August 25th. But according to _The
Golden Legend_, which I for one implicitly believe (how can one help
it, written as it is?), the posthumous miracles of Louis did not wait
for Rome. They began at once. "On that day that S. Louis was buried,"
we there read, "a woman of the diocese of Sens recovered her sight,
which she had lost and saw nothing, by the merits and prayers of the
said debonair and meedful king. Not long after, a young child of
Burgundy both dumb and deaf of kind, coming with others to the
sepulchre or grave of the saint, beseeching him of help, kneeling as
he saw that the others did, and after a little while that he thus
kneeled were his ears opened and heard, and his tongue redressed and
spake well. In the same year a woman blind was led to the said
sepulchre, and by the merits of the saint recovered her sight. Also
that same year two men and five women, beseeching S. Louis of help,
recovered the use of going, which they had lost by divers sickness and
languors.
"In the year that S. Louis was put or written in the catalogue of the
holy confessors, many miracles worthy to be prized befell in divers
parts of the world at the invocation of him, by his merits and by his
prayers. Another time at Evreux a child fell under the wheel of a
water-mill. Great multitude of people came thither, and supposing to
have kept him from drowning, invoked God, our Lady and his saints to
help the said child, but our Lord willing his saint to be enhanced
among so great multitude of people, was there heard a voice saying
that the said child, named John, should be vowed unto S. Louis. He
then, taken out of the water, was by his mother borne to the grave of
the saint, and after her prayer done to S. Louis, her son began to
sigh and was raised on life."
We leave the island by the Pont Sully, first looking at the statue of
Barye, the sculptor of Barbizon, many of whose best small bronzes are
in the Louvre (to say nothing of the shops of the dealers in the Rue
Laffitte) and several of his large groups in the public gardens of
Paris, one, for example, being near the Orangery in the Tuileries.
Barye's monument standing here at the east end of the Ile St. Louis
balances Henri IV. at the west end of the Ile de la Cite.
Crossing to the mainland we ought to look at the old houses on the
Quai des Celestins, particularly the old Hotel de la Valette, now the
College Massillon, into whose courtyard one should boldly peep. At No.
32 we touch very interesting history, for here stood, two and a half
centuries ago, Moliere's Illustre Theatre, the stage entrance to which
may be seen at 15 Rue de l'Ave Marie.
And now for the Marais.