THE GRANDS BOULEVARDS: I. THE MADELEINE TO THE OPERA
From Temple to Church--Napoleon the Christian--The Chapelle
Expiatoire--More Irony of History--Mi-Careme--The Art of
Insolence--Spacious Streets--The Champions of
France--Marius--Letter-boxes and Stamps--The Facteur at the
Bed--Killing a Guide no Murder--The Largest Theatre in the
World--A Theatrical Museum.
The Madeleine has had a curious history. The great Napoleon built it,
on the site of a small eighteenth-century church, as a Temple of
Glory, a gift to his soldiers, where every year on the anniversaries
of Austerlitz and Jena a concert was to be held, odes read, and
orations delivered on the duties and privileges of the warrior, any
mention of the Emperor's own name being expressly forbidden. That was
in 1806. The building was still in progress when 1815 came, with
another and more momentous battle in it, and Napoleon and his proposal
disappeared. The building of the Temple of Glory was continued as a
church, and a church it still is; and the memory of Jena and
Austerlitz is kept alive in Paris by other means (they have, for
example, each a bridge), no official orations are delivered on the
soldier's calling, no official odes recited. It was a noble idea of
the Emperor's, and however perfunctorily carried out, could not have
left one with a less satisfied feeling than some of the present
ceremonials in the Madeleine, which has become the most fashionable
Paris church. Napoleon, however, is not wholly forgotten, for in the
apse, I understand, is a fresco representing Christ reviewing the
chief champions of Christianity and felicitating with them upon their
services, the great Emperor being by no means absent. Herr Baedeker
says that the fresco is there, but I have not succeeded in seeing it,
for the church is lit only by three small cupolas and is dark with
religious dusk.
Within, the Madeleine is a surprise, for it does not conform to its
fine outward design. One expects a classic severity and simplicity,
and instead it is paint and Italianate curves. The wisest course for
the visitor is to avoid the steps and the importunate mendicants at
the railings, and slip in by the little portal on the west side where
the discreet closed carriages wait.
Louis XVIII., with his passion--a very natural one--to obliterate
Napoleon and the revolutionaries and resume monarchical continuity,
wished to complete the Madeleine as a monument to Louis XVI. and Marie
Antoinette; but he did not persevere with the idea. He built instead,
on the site of the old cemetery of the Madeleine, where Louis XVI. and
the Queen had been buried, the Chapelle Expiatoire. It is their memory
only which is preserved here, for, after Waterloo, their bones were
carried to St. Denis, where the other French kings lie. Their
statues, however, are enshrined in the building (which is just off the
Boulevard Haussmann, isolated solemnly and impressively among chestnut
trees and playing children), the king being solaced by an angel who
remarks to him in the words used by Father Edgeworth on the scaffold,
"Fils de St. Louis, montez au ciel!" and the queen by religion,
personified by her sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth. The door-keeper,
who conducted me as guide, was in raptures over Louis XVI.'s lace and
the circumstance that he was hewn from a single block of marble. I
liked his enthusiasm: these unfortunate monarchs deserve the utmost
that sculptor and door-keeper can give them.
Paris has changed its mind more completely and frequently than any
city in the world--and no illustration of that foible is better than
this before us. Consider the sequence: first the king; then the
prisoner; then the execution--the body and head being carried to the
nearest cemetery, the Madeleine, where the guillotine's victims were
naturally flung, and carelessly buried. Ten months later the queen's
body and head follow. (It is said that the records of the Madeleine
contain an entry by a sexton, which runs in English, "Paid seven
francs for a coffin for the Widow Capet".) That was in 1793. Not until
1815 do they find sepulture befitting them, and then this chapel rises
in their honour and they become saints.
[Illustration: LA DENTELLIERE
JAN VERMEER OF DELFT
(_Louvre_)]
Among other bodies buried here was that of Charlotte Corday. Also the
Swiss Guards, whom we saw meeting death at the Tuileries. A strange
place, and to-day, in a Paris that cares nothing for Capets, a perfect
example of what might paradoxically be called well-kept neglect.
To me the Madeleine has always a spurious air: nothing in it seems
quite true. Externally, its Roman proportions carry no hint of the
Christian religion; within, there is a noticeable lack of reverence.
Every one walks about, and the Suisses are of the world peculiarly and
offensively worldly. Standing before the altar with its representation
of the Magdalen, who gives the church its name, being carried to
Heaven, it is difficult to realise that only thirty-eight years ago
this very spot was running red with the blood of massacred Communards.
I remember the Madeleine most naturally as I saw it once at Mi-Careme,
from an upper window at Durand's, after lunch. It was a dull day and
the Madeleine frowned on the human sea beneath it; for the Place
before it and the Rue Royale were black with people. The portico is
always impressive, but I had never before had so much time or such
excellent opportunity to study it and its relief of the Last Judgment,
an improbable contingency to which few of us were giving much thought
just then. Not only were the steps crowded, but two men had climbed to
the green roof and were sitting on the very apex of the building.
The Mi-Careme carnival in Paris, I may say at once, is not worth
crossing the Channel for. It is tawdry and stupid; the life of the
city is dislocated; the Grands Boulevards are quickly some inches deep
in confetti, all of which has been discharged into faces and even eyes
before reaching the ground; the air is full of dust; and the places of
amusement are uncomfortably crowded. The Lutetian humours of the Latin
Quarter students and of Montmartre are not without interest for a
short time, but they become tedious with extraordinary swiftness and
certainty as the morning grows grey.
Each side of the Madeleine has its flower markets, and they share the
week between them. Round and about Christmas a forest of fir-trees
springs up. At the back of the Madeleine omnibuses and trams converge
as at the Elephant.
For a walk along the Grands Boulevards this temple is the best
starting-point; but I do not suggest that the whole round shall be
made. By the Grands Boulevards the precisian would mean the half
circle from the Madeleine to the Place de la Republique and thence to
the Place de la Bastille; or even the whole circle, crossing the river
by the Pont Sully to the Boulevard St. Antoine, which cuts right
through the Surrey side and crosses the river by the Pont de la
Concorde and so comes to the Rue Royale and the Madeleine again. Those
are the Grands Boulevards; but when the term is conversationally used
it means nothing whatever but the stretch of broad road and pavement,
of vivid kiosques and green branches, between the Madeleine and the
Rue Richelieu: that is the Grands Boulevards for the flaneur and the
foreigner. All the best cafes to sit at, all the prettiest women to
stare at, all the most entertaining shop windows, are found between
these points.
The prettiest women to stare at! Here I touch on a weakness in the
life of Paris which there is no doubt the Boulevards have fostered.
Staring--more than staring, a cool cynical appraisement--is one of the
privileges which the Boulevardier most prizes. I have heard it said
that he carries staring to a fine art; but it is not an art at all,
and certainly not fine; it is just a coarse and disgusting liberty. It
is nothing to him that the object of his interest is accompanied by a
man; his code ignores that detail; he is out to see and to make an
impression and nothing will stop him. One must not, however, let this
ugly practice offend one's sensibility too much. Foreigners need not
necessarily do as the Romans do, but it is not their right to be too
critical of Rome; and liberty is the very air of the Boulevards. Live
and let live. If one is going to be annoyed by Paris, one had better
stay at home.
The Grands Boulevards might be called the show-rooms of Paris: it is
here that one sees the Parisians. In London one may live for years and
never see a Londoner; not because Londoners do not exist, but because
London has no show-rooms for their display. There is no Boulevard in
London; the only streets that have a pavement capable of accommodating
both spectators and a real procession of types are deserted, such as
Portland Place and Kingsway. The English, who conquer and administer
the world, dislike space; the French, a people at whose alleged want
of inches we used to mock, rejoice in space. Think of the
Champs-Elysees and the Bois, and then think of Constitution Hill and
Hyde Park, and you realise the difference. Take a mental drive by any
of the principal Boulevards--from the Madeleine eastward to the Place
de la Republique and back to the Madeleine again by way of the
Boulevards de Magenta and Clichy and down the Boulevard Malesherbes,
and then take a mental drive from Hyde Park Corner by way of
Piccadilly, the Strand, Fleet Street, Cannon Street, Lombard Street,
Cheapside, Holborn, Oxford Street and Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner
again and you realise the difference. In wet weather in Paris it is
possible to walk all day and not be splashed. Think of our most
fashionable thoroughfare, just by Long's Hotel, when it is
raining--our Rue de la Paix. The only street in London of which a
Frenchman would not be ashamed is the Mile End Road.
At the Taverne Olympia--just past the old houses standing back from
the pavement, on the left, which are built on the wall of the old
moat, when this Boulevard really was a bulwark or fortification--at
the Taverne Olympia, upstairs, is one of the few billiard saloons in
Paris in which exhibition games are continually in progress, and in
which one can fill many amusing half-hours and perhaps win a few
louis. Years ago I used to frequent the saloon in a basement under the
Grand Cafe, a few doors east of the Olympia, but it has lost some of
its prestige. The best play now is at Olympia and at Cure's place in
the Rue Vivienne. Every day of the year, for ever and ever, a billiard
match is in progress. So you may say is, in the winter, the case in
London at Burroughs and Watts', or Thurston's, but these are very
different. In London the match is for a large number of points and it
may last a week or a fortnight. Here there are scores of matches every
afternoon and evening and the price of admission is a consommation. By
virtue of one glass of coffee you may sit for hours and watch champion
of France after champion of France lose and win, win and lose.
The usual game is played by three champions of France and is for ten
cannons off the red. The names of the players, on cards, are first
flung on the table, and the amateur of sport advances from his seat
and stakes five francs on that champion of France whom he favours.
Five francs is the unit. On my first visit, years ago, the champion
whom I, very unsoundly but not perhaps unnaturally, supported, was one
Lucas. Poor fellow, on that afternoon he did his best, but he never
got home. The great Marius was too much for him. Marius in those days
was a very fine player and the hero of the saloon at the Grand Cafe. A
Southerner I should guess; for I have seen his doubles by the score in
the cafes of Avignon and Nimes. He was short and thick, with a bald
head and a large sagacious nose and a saturnine smile and a heavy
moustache. Winning and losing were all one to him, although it is
understood that fifty centimes are contributed by each of his backers
to a champion of France when he brings it off. Marius looked down his
nose in the same way whatever happened. He was no Roberts; he had none
of the Caesarian masterfulness, none of the Napoleonic decision, of
that king of men. The modern French game does not lend itself to such
commanding excellence, such Alpine distinction. The cannon is all:
there is no longer any of the quiet and magical disappearance of the
ball into a pocket which makes the English game so fascinating.
Such was Marius when I first saw him, and quite lately I descended to
his cellar again and found him unaltered, except that he was no longer
a master except very occasionally, and that he had grown more
sardonic. I do not wonder at it. It may not be, in Paris, "a lonely
thing to be champion," as Cashel Byron says, but it must be a
melancholy thing to be no longer the champion that you were. A home of
rest for ex-champions would draw my guinea at once.
The ten or eight cannons off the red, I might add, are varied now and
then. Sometimes there is a match between two players for a hundred
points. Sometimes three players will see which can first make eight
cannons, each involving three cushions (trois bandes). This is a very
interesting game to watch, although it may be a concession to
decadence.
[Illustration: THE RUE DE BIEVRE
(FROM THE QUAI DE MONTEBELLO)
PANTHEON]
We come next to the Rue Scribe, and crossing it, are at "Old England,"
a shop where the homesick may buy such a peculiarly English delicacy
as marmalade, beneath the shadow of the gigantic Grand Hotel,
notable not only for its million bedrooms but for marking the position
of one of the few post offices of Paris, and also the only shop in the
centre of the city which keeps a large and civilised stock of Havana
cigars. One can live without Havana cigars, but post offices are a
necessity, and in Paris they conceal themselves with great success;
while, as for letter-boxes, it has been described as a city without
one. To a Londoner accustomed to the frequent and vivid occurrence at
street corners of our scarlet obelisks, it is so. Quite recently I
heard of a young Englishman, shy and incorrigibly one-languaged, who,
during a week in Paris, entrusted all his correspondence to a
fire-alarm. But, as a matter of fact, Paris has letter-boxes in great
number, only for the most part they are so concealed as to be solely
for the initiated. Directly one learns that every tobacconist also
sells stamps and either secretes a letter-box somewhere beneath his
window, or marks the propinquity of one, life becomes simple.
Although normally one never has, in France, even in the official
receptacle of one of the chief of the Bureaux des Postes, any of that
confidence that one reposes in the smallest wall-box in England; yet
one must perforce overcome this distrust or use only pneumatiques. The
French do not carry ordinary letters very well, but if you register
them nothing can keep the postman from you. A knock like thunder
crashes into your dreams, and behold he is at your bedside, alert and
important, be-ribboned with red tape, tendering for your signature a
pen dipped in an inkstand concealed about his person. Every one who
goes to France for amusement should arrange to receive one registered
letter.
Its letter-boxes may be a trifle farcical, but in its facilities given
to purchasers of stamps France makes England look an uncivilised
country. Why it should be illegal for any one but a postal official to
supply stamps in my own land, I have never been informed, nor have any
of the objections to the system ever been explained away. In France
you may get your stamps anywhere--from tobacconists for certain; from
waiters for certain; from the newspaper kiosques for certain; and from
all tradespeople almost for certain: hence one is relieved of the
tiresome delays in post offices that are incident to English life. But
I am inclined to think that when it comes to the post office proper,
England has the advantage. The French post office (when you have found
it) is always crowded and always overheated; and you remember what I
told the men in the Mint.
To return to the Grand Hotel, I am minded to express the wish that
something could be done to rid its pavement of the sly leering
detrimental with an umbrella who comes up to the foreigner and offers
his services as a guide to the night side of Paris. Not until an
Englishman has killed one of these pests will this part of Paris be
endurable. But from what I have observed I should say that few murders
are less likely to occur....
And so we come to the Cafe de la Paix, and turning to the left, the
Opera is before us. The Opera is one of the buildings of Paris that
are taken for granted. We do not look at it much: we think of it as
occupying the central position, adjacent to Cook's, useful as a place
of meeting; we buy a seat there occasionally, and that is all. And yet
it is the largest theatre in the world (the work of that Charles
Garnier whose statue is just outside), and although it is not exactly
beautiful, its proportions are agreeable; it does not obtrude its size
(and yet it covers three acres); it sits very comfortably on the
ground, and an incredible amount of patient labour and thought went to
its achievement, as any one may see by walking round it and studying
the ornamentation and the statuary, among which is Carpeaux's famous
lively group "La Danse". One very pleasant characteristic of the Opera
is the modesty with which it announces its performances: nothing but a
minute poster in a frame, three or four times repeated, giving the
information to the passer-by. Larger posters would impair its superb
reserve.
The Opera has a little museum, the entrance to which is in the Rue
Auber corner, by the statue of the architect (with his plan of the
building traced in bronze below his bust). This museum is a model of
its kind--small but very pertinent and personal in character. Here are
one of Paganini's bows and his rosin box; souvenirs of Malibran
presented to her by some Venetian admirers in 1835; Berlioz' season
ticket for the Opera in 1838, and a page of one of his scores; Rossini
in a marble statuette, asleep on his sofa, wearing that variety of
whisker which we call a Newgate fringe; Rossini on his death-bed,
drawn by L. Roux, and a page of a score and a cup and saucer used by
him; a match box of Gounod's, a page of a score, and his marble bust;
Meyerbeer on his death-bed, drawn by Mousseaux, a decoration worn by
that composer, and a page of his score; two of Cherubini's tobacco
boxes and a page of his score; Danton's clay caricature of Liszt--all
hair and legs--at the piano, and a caricature of Liszt playing the
piano while Lablache sings and Habeneck conducts; a bust of Fanny
Cerrito, danseuse, in 1821--with a mischievous pretty face--that
Cerrito of whom Thomas Ingoldsby rhymed; and a bust of Emma Livry, a
danseuse of a later day, who died aged twenty-three from injuries
received from fire during the repetition generale of the "Muette de
Portici" on November 15th, 1862. In a little coffer near by are the
remains of the clothes the poor creature was wearing at the time. What
else is there? Many busts, among them Delibes the composer of
"Coppelia," whose grave we shall see in the Cimetiere de Montmartre:
here bearded and immortal; autograph scores by Verdi, Donizetti,
Victor Masse, Auber, Spontini (whose very early piano also is here),
and Herold; a caricature by Isabey of young Vestris bounding in
mid-air, models of scenes of famous operas, and a host of other things
all displayed easily in a small but sufficient room. If all museums
were as compact and single-minded!