THE ELYSEE TO THE HOTEL DE VILLE
The Most Interesting Streets--Pet Aversions--The Rue de la
Paix--The Vendome Column--A Populous Church--The Whiff of
Grapeshot--Alfred de Musset--The Moliere Quarter--A Green
and White Oasis--Camille Desmoulins at the Cafe de
Foy--Charles Lamb in Paris--The Cloitre de St. Honore--The
Massacre of St. Bartholomew--St. Germain of Auxerre--A
Satisfied Corpse--Catherine de Medicis' Observatory--St.
Eustache--A Wonderful Organ-The Halles--French Economy and
English Want of It--The Goat-herd--The Assassination of
Henri IV.--The Tour St. Jacques-Pascal, Theologian and
Inventor of Omnibuses--A Sinister Spot--The Paris
Town-hall--A Riot of Frescoes--Etienne Marcel--The Hotel de
Ville and Politesse--An Ancient Palace--Old Streets--Madame
de Beauvais' Mansion--A Quiet Courtyard--The Church of St.
Paul and St. Louis--Rabelais' Grave.
The Elysee, the official home of the French president--Paris's White
House and Buckingham Palace--is situated in the Rue du Faubourg
Saint-Honore, which is one of the most entertaining streets in the
whole city in which to loiter; that is, if you like, as I do, the
windows of curiosity dealers and jewellers and print shops. Not that
bargains are to be obtained here: far from it: it is not like the Rue
des Saints Peres or the Rue Mazarine across the river; but merely as a
series of windows it is fascinating. I like it as much as I dislike
the Rue Lafayette, which has always been my aversion, not only because
it is interminable and commercial and noisy, but because it leads back
to England and work; yet since, however, when one arrives in Paris it
leads from England and work, I must be a little lenient, and there is
also a cafe in it where the diamond merchants compare gems quite
openly.
Remembering these extenuating circumstances I unhesitatingly award the
palm for undesirability in a Paris street to the Rue du
Quatre-Septembre and the Rue Reaumur, which are sheer Shaftesbury
Avenue, and, as in Shaftesbury Avenue, cause one to regret the older
streets and houses whose place they have usurped. The Rue de Rivoli I
dislike too: that strange mixture of very good hotels (the Meurice,
for instance, is here) and rubbishy shops full of tawdry jewellery to
catch the excursionist. How it happened that such a site should have
been allowed to fall into such hands is a mystery. An additional
objection to the Rue de Rivoli is that the one English acquaintance
whom one least wishes to meet is always there.
The Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore becomes the Rue Saint-Honore at the
Rue Royale. The Rue Saint-Honore is also a good street for shop
windows, but not the equal of its more aristocratic half; just as that
is surpassed here by the Rue de la Paix, to which we now come on the
left, and which contains more things that I can do without, made to
perfection, than any street I ever saw. At its foot is the Place
Vendome, with the beautiful column in the midst on which Napoleon's
campaign of 1805 is illustrated in a bronze spiral that constitutes at
once, I suppose, the most durable and the longest picture in the
world. The bronze came very properly from the melted Russian and
Austrian cannons. Napoleon stands at the top, imperially splendid; but
as we saw in the chapter on the "Ile de la Cite," it was not always
so: for his first statue was removed by Louis XVIII. to be used for
the new Henri IV. In its stead a fleur-de-lys surmounted the column.
Then came Louis-Philippe, who erected a new statue of the Emperor,
not, however, imperially clad; and then Napoleon III., who substituted
the present figure. But in 1870 the Communards succeeded in bringing
the column down, and it has only been vertical again since 1875. Thus
it is to be a Paris monument!
Returning to the Rue Saint-Honore, in which, by the way, are several
old and interesting houses, such as No. 271, the Cabaret du
Saint-Esprit, a great resort in the Reign of Terror of spectators
wishing to see the tumbrils pass, and No. 398, where Robespierre
lodged, we come to St. Roch's church, on the left, interesting both in
itself and in history. It has been called the noisiest church in
Paris, and certainly it is difficult to find a time when feet are
silent there. The attraction is St. Roch's wealth of shrines, of a
rather theatrical character, such as the wise poor love: an
entombment, a calvary and a nativity, all very effective if not
beautiful. Beauty does not matter, for on Good Friday the entombment
holds thousands silent before it. The church, which is in the baroque
style that it is so easy to dislike, is too florid throughout. Among
the many monuments are memorials of Corneille and Diderot, both of
whom are buried here. The music of St. Roch is, I am told, second only
to that of the Madeleine.
So much for St. Roch within. Historically it chances to be of immense
importance, for it was here, and in the streets around and about the
church, that the whiff of grapeshot blew which dispersed the French
Revolution into the air. That was on October 5th, 1795, and it was not
only the death of the Revolution but it was the birth of the
conquering Buonaparte. Carlyle is superb: "Some call for Barras to be
made Commandant; he conquered in Thermidor. Some, what is more to the
purpose, bethink them of the Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed
Artillery-Officer, who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of action:
Barras is named Commandant's-Cloak; this young Artillery-Officer is
named Commandant. He was in the Gallery at the moment, and heard it;
he withdrew, some half-hour, to consider with himself: after a
half-hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he
answers _Yea_.
"And now, a man of head being at the centre of it, the whole matter
gets vital. Swift, to Camp of Sablons; to secure the Artillery, there
are not twenty men guarding it! A swift Adjutant, Murat is the name of
him, gallops; gets thither some minutes within time, for Lepelletier
was also on march that way: the Cannon are ours. And now beset this
post, and beset that; rapid and firm: at Wicket of the Louvre, in
Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue Saint-Honore, from Pont-Neuf all along the
north Quays, southward to Pont _ci-devant_ Royal,--rank round the
Sanctuary of the Tuileries, a ring of steel discipline; let every
gunner have his match burning, and all men stand to their arms!
"Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint-Roch; has seized the
Pont-Neuf, our piquet there retreating without fire. Stray shots fall
from Lepelletier; rattle down on the very Tuileries Staircase. On the
other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking, Peace; Lepelletier
behind them waving his hat in sign that we shall fraternise. Steady!
The Artillery-Officer is steady as bronze; can, if need were, be quick
as lightning. He sends eight-hundred muskets with ball-cartridges to
the Convention itself; honourable Members shall act with these in case
of extremity: whereat they look grave enough. Four of the afternoon is
struck. Lepelletier, making nothing by messengers, by fraternity or
hat-waving, bursts out, along the Southern Quai Voltaire, along
streets and passages, treble-quick, in huge veritable onslaught!
Whereupon, thou bronze Artillery-Officer--? 'Fire!' say the bronze
lips. And roar and thunder, roar and again roar, continual,
volcano-like, goes his great gun, in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against
the Church of Saint-Roch; go his great guns on the Pont-Royal; go all
his great guns;--blow to air some two-hundred men, mainly about the
Church of Saint-Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such horse-play; no
Sectioner can stand it; the Forty-thousand yield on all sides, scour
towards covert. 'Some hundred or so of them gathered about the Theatre
de la Republique; but,' says he, 'a few shells dislodged them. It was
all finished at six.'
[Illustration: THE SACRE-COEUR DE MONTMARTRE, FROM THE
BUTTES-CHAUMONT]
"The Ship is _over_ the bar, then; free she bounds shoreward,--amid
shouting and vivats! Citoyen Buonaparte is 'named General of the
Interior, by acclamation'; quelled Sections have to disarm in such
humour as they may; sacred right of Insurrection is gone forever! The
Sieyes Constitution can disembark itself, and begin marching. The
miraculous Convention Ship has got to land;--and is there, shall we
figuratively say, changed, as Epic Ships are wont, into a kind of _Sea
Nymph_, never to sail more; to roam the waste Azure, a Miracle in
History!
"'It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge;
it had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false: the firing was
with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no
sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by
it to this hour.--Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this
Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then; could
not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the
man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call
_French Revolution_ is blown into space by it, and become a thing that
was!--"
Crossing the Place du Theatre-Francais we come to that historic home
of the best French drama, where Moliere is still played frequently,
and one has some respite from the theme of facile promiscuity which
dominates most of the other theatres of Paris. A new statue of Alfred
de Musset has lately been set up under the Comedie Francaise. I copy
from a writer very unlike him a passage of criticism to remember as
one stands by this monument: "Give a look, if you can, at a Memoir of
Alfred de Musset written by his Brother. Making allowance for French
morals, and Absinthe (which latter is not mentioned in the Book),
Alfred appears to me a fine Fellow, very un-French in some respects.
He did not at all relish the new Romantic School, beginning with V.
Hugo, and now alive in ---- and Co.--(what I call the Gargoyle School
of Art, whether in Poetry, Painting, or Music)--he detested the modern
'feuilleton' Novel, and read Clarissa!... Many years before A. de M.
died he had a bad, long, illness, and was attended by a Sister of
Charity. When she left she gave him a Pen with 'Pensez a vos
promesses' worked about in coloured silks: as also a little worsted
'Amphore' she had knitted at his bedside. When he came to die, some
seventeen years after, he had these two little things put with him in
his Coffin." That, by Edward FitzGerald, no natural friend to the de
Mussets of the world, is very pretty.
The Rue de Richelieu runs up beside the Comedie Francaise. We have
already been in this street to see the Bibliotheque Nationale,
entering it from the Boulevard, but let us now walk up it, first to
see the Moliere monument, so appropriate just here, and also to glance
at No. 50, a house still unchanged, where once lived an insignificant
couple named Poisson, whose daughter Jeanne Antoinette Poisson lived
to become famous as Madame La Pompadour. In souvenirs of Moliere Paris
is still rich. We are coming soon to No. 92 Rue Saint-Honore, where he
was born; we are coming to the church of St. Eustache, where he was
christened on January 15th, 1622, and where his second son was
christened too. We are coming also to the church of St. Germain
l'Auxerrois, where he was married and where his first son was
baptised. In St. Roch he once stood as a godfather; and close to us
now, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honore and the Rue Valois, was one
of his theatres. And he died close to his monument, at No. 40 Rue de
Richelieu. This then is the Moliere quarter.
We now enter the Palais Royal, that strange white and green oasis into
which it is so simple never to stray. When I first knew Paris the
Palais Royal was filled with cheap restaurants and shops to allure the
excursionist and the connoisseur of those books which an inspired
catalogue once described as very curious and disgusting. It is now
practically deserted; the restaurants have gone and few shops remain;
but in the summer the band plays to happy crowds, and children frolic
here all day. I have, however, never succeeded in shaking off a
feeling of depression.
The original palace was built by Richelieu and was then the Palais
Cardinal. After his death it became the Palais Royal and was enlarged,
and was the scene of notorious orgies. Camille Desmoulins made it more
serious, for it was here that he enflamed the people by his words on
July 12th, 1789, and started them on their destroying career. That
was in the Cafe de Foy. Carlyle thus describes the scene: "But see
Camille Desmoulins, from the Cafe de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in
face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a
table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not
take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without
stammering:--Friends! shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep
hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where is no mercy, but
only a whetted knife? The hour is come; the supreme hour of Frenchman
and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and
the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be
_well_-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal
Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound
only: To arms--To arms! yell responsive the innumerable voices; like
one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces
wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter
words, does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this great
moment.--Friends, continues Camille, some rallying sign! Cockades;
green ones;--the colour of Hope!--As with the flight of locusts, these
green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring shops; all
green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille descends from
his table, 'stifled with embraces, wetted with tears'; has a bit of
green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius'
Image-shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds; and rest not
till France be on fire!"
Desmoulins in bronze now stands in the garden, near this spot. It is
an interesting statue by Boverie, who showed great courage in his use
of a common chair, dignified here into a worthy adjunct of liberation.
Under Napoleon the Tribunate sat in the Palais Royal, and after
Napoleon the Orleans family made it their home. The Communards, always
thorough, burned a good deal of it in 1871, and it is now a desert and
the seat of the Conseil d'Etat. Let us leave it by the gateway leading
to the Rue de Valois and be happier again.
The Rue de Valois is an interesting and picturesque street, but its
greatest attraction to me is its association with Charles Lamb. His
hotel--the Europe, just opposite the gateway--has recently been
rebuilt and is now called the Grand Hotel du Palais Royal et de
l'Europe, and the polished staircase on which his infinitesimal legs
slipped about so comically on his late and not too steady returnings
(and how could he be steady when Providence ordained that the waiter
of whom in his best stammering French he ordered an egg, on his first
visit to a restaurant, should have so misunderstood the order as to
bring in its place a glass of eau de vie--an error, we are told,
which gave Lamb much pleasure?) the polished staircase has now gone;
but the hotel stands exactly where it did, and every thing else is the
same--the Boeuf a la Mode is still close by and still one of the
best restaurants in Paris, and the Place de Valois is untouched, with
its most attractive archway leading to the Rue des Bons-Enfants and
giving on to the vista of the Rue Montesquieu, with its hundred signs
hanging out exactly as in 1823.
We now return to the Rue Saint-Honore. The three old houses, 180, 182
and 184, opposite the Magasins du Louvre, belonged before the
Revolution to the Canons of Saint-Honore. The courtyard here--the
Cloitre du Saint-Honore--is one of the most characteristic examples of
dirty Paris that remain, but very picturesque too. To peep in here is
almost certainly to be rewarded by some Hogarthian touch, and to walk
up the Rue des Bons-Enfants yields similar experiences and some very
pleasant glimpses of old Paris.
Still going east we turn down past the Oratoire on the right, with
Coligny's monument on its south side, into the Rue de Rivoli, and
across the Rue du Louvre obliquely to the old church we see there,
opposite the east end of the Louvre and Napoleon's iron gates. This
church is that of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, not to be confounded with
the St. Germain of St. Germain des Pres across the river. St. Germain
l'Auxerrois is historically one of the most interesting of the Paris
churches, for it was St. Germain's bell that gave the signal for
the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. Charles IX. is said to have
fired at the Huguenots (doubtless with Catherine de Medicis at his
shoulder, anxious for the success of his aim) from one of the windows
in the Louvre overlooking this space.
[Illustration: L'AMATEUR D'ESTAMPES
DAUMIER
(_Palais des Beaux Arts_)]
St. Germain of Auxerre began as a layman--the ruler of Burgundy.
Divine revelation, however, indicated that the Church was his true
calling, and he therefore succeeded Saint Amadour as Bishop, "gave,"
in Caxton's words, "all his riches to poor people, and changed his
wife into his sister". He took to the new life very thoroughly. He
fasted every day till evening and then ate coarse bread and drank
water and used no pottage and no salt. "In winter ne summer he had but
one clothing, and that was the hair next his body, a coat and a gown,
and if it happed so that he gave not his vesture to some poor body, he
would wear it till it were broken and torn. His bed was environed with
ashes, hair, and sackcloth, and his head lay no higher than his
shoulders, but all day wept, and bare about his neck divers relics of
saints. He ware none other clothing, and he went oft barefoot and
seldom ware any girdle. The life that he led was above man's power.
His life was so straight and hard that it was marvel and pity to see
his flesh, and was like a thing not credible, and he did so many
miracles that, if his merits had not gone before, they should have
been trowed phantasms."
St. Germain's miracles were more interesting than those of, say, his
convert Sainte Genevieve. He conjured devils; he forbade fire to burn
him; having fed his companions on the only calf of a friendly
cow-herd, he put the bones and the skins together and life returned to
it; he also raised one of his own disciples from the dead and
conversed with him through the walls of his tomb, but on the disciple
saying that in his late condition "he was well and all things were to
him soft and sweet," he permitted him to remain dead. He also found
his miraculous gifts very useful in the war; but his principal
interest to us is that he is supposed to have visited England and
organised the Establishment here. St. Germain's church has a little
old glass that is charming and much bad new. The south transept
window, although sheer kaleidoscope, is gay and attractive.
At the back of the church runs the narrow and medieval Rue de
l'Arbre-Sec, extending to the Rue Saint-Honore. At No. 4 is, or was,
the Hotel des Mousquetaires, where, when it was the Belle Etoile,
d'Artagnan drank and swaggered. Let us take this street and come to
St. Eustache by way of another and less terrible souvenir of Catherine
de Medicis. The Rue de l'Arbre-Sec leads to the Rue Sauval and to the
circular Rue de Viarmes surrounding the Bourse de Commerce. Here we
see a remarkable Doric column, all that remains of the palace which
Catherine built in order to avoid the fate predicted for her by a
soothsayer--that she would perish in the ruins of a house near St.
Germain's. The Tuileries, which she was then building, being far too
near St. Germain's to be comfortable after such a remark, she erected
the Hotel de la Reine, the tower being designed for astrological study
in the company of her Italian familiar, Ruggieri. All else has gone:
the tower and the stars remain.
A few steps down the Rue Oblin and we are at St. Eustache, which has
to my eyes the most fascinating roof of any church in Paris and a very
attractive nave. The interior, however, is marred by the presence of
what might be called a church within a church, destroying all vistas,
and it is only with great difficulty that one can see the exquisite
rose window over the organ. It is a church much used by the poor--who
even call it Notre Dame des Halles--but its music on festival days
brings the rich too. Like most other Paris churches of any importance,
St. Eustache had its secular period. The Feast of Reason was held here
in 1793; in 1795 it was the Temple of Agriculture. In 1791 Mirabeau,
the first of the illustrious, as we saw, to be buried in the Pantheon,
was carried here in his coffin for a funeral service, at which guns
were fired that brought down some of the plaster. Voiture the poet was
buried here. The church has always been famous for the splendour of
its festivals and for its music, its present organ, once much injured
by Communard bombs, being one of the finest in the world. No reader of
this book who cares for solemn music should fail to ascertain the St.
Eustache festivals. On St. Cecilia's day entrance is very difficult,
but an effort should be made.
Eustache, or Eustace, the Saint, had no direct association with Paris,
as had our friends St Germain and St. Genevieve and St. Denis and St.
Martin and St. Merry; but he had an indirect one, having been a Roman
soldier under the Emperor Trajan, whose column was the model for the
Vendome column. In the Sacristy, however, are preserved some of the
bones not only of himself but of his wife and family, brought hither
from St. Denis. One of his teeth is here too, and one special bone,
the gift of Pope Alexander VII. to an influential Catholic.
Why our London markets should be so dull and unattractive and the
Halles so entertaining is a problem which would perhaps require an
ethnological essay of many pages to elucidate. But so it is.
Smithfield, Billingsgate, Leadenhall, Covent Garden--one has little
temptation or encouragement to loiter in any of them; but the Halles
spread welcoming arms. I have spent hours there, and would spend more.
In the very early morning it is not too agreeable a neighbourhood for
the idle spectator, nor is he desired, although if he is prepared to
endure a little rough usage with tongue and elbow he will be vastly
amused by what he sees; but later, when all the world is up, the
Halles entreat his company. Their phases are three: the first is the
arrival of the market carts with their merchandise, very much as in
our own Covent Garden, but multiplied many times and infinitely more
vocal and shattering to the nerves. (I once occupied a bedroom within
range of this pandemonium.) The second phase, a few hours later, sees
the descent upon the market of the large caterers--buyers for the
restaurants, great and small, the hotels and pensions. That is between
half-past five and half-past seven. And then come the small buyers,
the neat servants, the stout housewives, all with their baskets or
string bags. This is our time; we may now loiter at our ease secure
from the swift and scorching sarcasms of the crowded dawn.
The Halles furnish another proof of the quiet efficiency of
Frenchwomen. At every fruit and vegetable stall--and to me they are
the most interesting of all--sits one or more of these watchful
creatures, cheerful, capable and always busy either with the affairs
of the stall or with knitting or sewing. The Halles afford also very
practical proof of the place that economy is permitted to hold in the
French cuisine: as much being done for the small purse as for the
large one.
In England we are ashamed of economy; by avoiding it we hope to give
the impression that we are not mean. The wise French either care less
for their neighbour's opinions or have agreed together to dispense
with such insincerities; and the result is that if a pennyworth of
carrots is all that your soup requires you need not buy two
pennyworth, and so forth. Little portions of vegetables for one, two
or more persons, all ready for the pot, can be bought, involving no
waste whatever, and with no faltering or excuse on the part of the
purchaser to explain so small an order. In France a customer is a
customer. There are no distinctions; although I do not deny that in
the West End of Paris, where the Americans and English spend their
money, subtle shades of courtesy (or want of it) have crept in. I have
been treated like a prince in a small comestible shop where I wanted
only a pennyworth of butter, a pennyworth of cheese and a pennyworth
of milk. It is pennies that make the French rich; no one can be in any
doubt of that who has taken notice of the thousands of small shops not
only in Paris but in the provinces.
Any one making an early morning visit to the Halles should complete it
by seeing my goat-herd, who leads his flocks thereabouts and eastward.
He is the prettiest sight I ever saw in Paris. There are several
goat-herds--even Passy knows them--but my goat-herd is here. By eight
o'clock he has done; his flock is dry. He wears a blue cloth
tam-o'-shanter (if there can be such a thing: it is really the cap of
the romantic mountaineer of comic opera) and he saunters carelessly
along, piping melancholy notes on a shepherd's pipe--not unlike the
lovely wailing that desolates the soul in the last act of _Tristan und
Isolde_. When a customer arrives he calls one of his goats, sits down
on the nearest doorstep--it may be a seventeenth-century palace--and
milks a cupful; and then he is off again, with his scrannel to his
lips, the very type of the urban Strephon.
We may leave les Halles (pronounced lay al, and not, as one would
think, lays all: one of the pitfalls for the English in Paris) by the
Rue Berger, and enter the Square des Innocents to look at its
decorative fountain. The next street below the Rue des Innocents is
the Rue de la Ferronnerie, where, on May 14th, 1610, Henri IV. was
assassinated by Ravaillac before the door of No. 3. And so by the Rue
St. Denis, which one is always glad to enter again, and the Rue de
Rivoli, we come to Saint-Jacques, that grey aged isolated tower which
we have seen so often from the heights and in the distance. It is a
beautiful Gothic building, at the summit of which is the figure of St.
James with his emblems, the originals of which are at the Cluny. The
tower belonged to the church of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie, but that
being in the way when Napoleon planned the Rue de Rivoli, it had to
go.
The tower has not lately been open to the climbers, and I have never
seen Paris from St. James's side, but I hope to. Blaise Pascal
experimented here in the density of air; hence the presence of his
statue below. It was also to Pascal, of whom we now think only as an
ironist and wistful theologian, that Paris owes her omnibuses, for it
was he that devised the first, which began to run on March 18th, 1662,
from the Luxembourg to the Bastille. Pascal owed his conversion to his
escape from a carriage accident on the Pont Neuf. His grave we saw at
St. Etienne-du-Mont.
In crossing the Place de l'Hotel de Ville one must not forget that
this was once the terrible Place de Greve, the site of public
executions for five centuries. Here we meet Catherine de Medicis
again, for it was by her order that after the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew the Huguenots Briquemont and Cavagnes were hanged here,
and here also was executed Captain Montgomery, whom we are to meet in
the next chapter. The foster-sister of Marie de Medicis was burned
alive in the Place de Greve as a sorcerer; and Ravaillac, after
assassinating Henri IV., here met his end. Among later victims was the
famous Cartouche, of whom Thackeray wrote so entertainingly.
The Hotel de Ville is not a building that I for one should choose to
revisit, nor do I indeed advise others to bother about it at all; but
externally at any rate it is fine, with its golden sentinels on high.
Its chief merit is bulk; but there is a certain interest in observing
a Republican palace of our own time, if only to see how near it can
come to the real thing. A saturnine guide displays a series of
spacious apartments, the principal attraction of which is their mural
painting. All the best French Royal Academicians (so to speak) of
twenty years ago had a finger in this pie, and their fantasies sprawl
over ceilings and walls. With the exception of one room, the history
of Paris is practically ignored, allegory being the master vogue.
Poetry, Song, Inspiration, Fame, Ambition, Despair--all these undraped
ladies may be seen, and many others. Also Electricity and Steam,
Science and Art, distinguishable from their sisters only by the happy
chance that although they forgot their clothes they did not forget
their symbols.
[Illustration: LE BAISER
RODIN
(_Luxembourg_)]
One beautiful thing only did I see, and that was a large design,
perhaps the largest there, of Winter, by Puvis de Chavannes. But to
say that I saw it is an exaggeration: rather, I was conscious of it.
For the architect of the salon in which Puvis was permitted to work
forgot to light it.
In the historical room there are crowded scenes by Laurens of the past
of Paris--the hero of which is Etienne Marcel, whose equestrian statue
may be seen from the windows, under the river facade of the building.
Etienne Marcel, Merchant Provost, controlled Paris after the
disastrous battle of Poictiers, where the King and the Dauphin were
both taken prisoners. Power, however, made him headstrong, and he was
killed by an assassin.
It is from the Hotel de Ville that the city of Paris is administered,
with the assistance of the Prefecture de Police on the island
opposite. The Hotel de Ville contains, so to speak, the Paris County
Council, and I have been told that no building is so absurdly
over-staffed. That may or may not be true. The high officials do not
at any rate allow business to exclude the finer graces of life, for in
the great hall in which I waited for the cicerone were long tables on
which were some twenty or thirty baskets containing visiting cards,
and open books containing signatures, and before each basket was a
card bearing the name of an important functionary of the Hotel de
Ville--such as the Prefet de la Seine, and the Sous-Prefet, and their
principal secretaries, and so forth. Every minute or so some one came
in, found the basket to which he wished to contribute, and dropped a
card in it. I wondered to what extent the social machinery of Paris
bureaucracy would be disorganised if I were to change a few baskets,
but I did not embark upon an experiment the results of which I should
have had no means of contemplating and enjoying.
After leaving the Hotel de Ville and its modern splendours, we may
walk eastward along the Rue de l'Hotel de Ville, one of the narrowest
and dirtiest relics of old Paris, and so come to the Hotel de Sens.
But first notice, at the corner of the Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyeres, at
the point at which Mr. Dexter made his drawing, the very ancient stone
sign of the knife-grinder. The Hotel de Sens, in the Place de l'Ave
Maria, at the end of the Rue de l'Hotel de Ville, is almost if not
quite the most attractive of the old palaces. Although it has been
allowed to fall into neglect, it is still a wonderfully preserved
specimen of fifteenth-century building. The turrets are absolutely
beautiful. The Archbishop of Sens built it, and for nearly three
centuries it remained the home of power and wealth, among its tenants
being Marguerite of Valois. Then came the Revolution and its decline
into a coach office, from which it is said the Lyons mail, made
familiar to us by the Irvings, started. During a later revolution,
1830, a cannon ball found a billet in the wall, and it may still be
seen there, I am told, although these eyes missed it. The Hotel is now
a glass factory. The city of Paris ought to acquire it before it sinks
any lower.
It is at the foot of the Rue de l'Ave Maria, hard by, that Moliere's
theatre, which we saw from the Quai des Celestins in an earlier
chapter, is found. Here Moliere was arrested at the instance of the
unpaid tallow chandler. Our way now is by the Rue Figuier, of which
the Hotel de Sens is No. 1, to the Rue Francois-Miron, all among the
most fascinating old architecture and association. At No. 8 Rue
Figuier, for instance, Rabelais is said to have lived, and what could
be better than that? At No. 17, we have what the Vicomte de
Villebresme calls a "jolie niche du XVe siecle". This street leads
into the Rue de Jouy, also exceedingly old, with notable buildings,
such as No. 7, the work of Mansard pere, and No. 9, and on the left of
the Impasse Guepine, which existed in the reign of Saint Louis.
In the Rue Francois-Miron, if you do not mind exhibiting a little
inquisitiveness, enter the doorway of No. 68, and look at the
courtyard and the staircase. Here you get an excellent idea of past
glories, while the outer doors or gates give an excellent idea of past
danger too. For life in Paris in the days in which this street was
built must have been very cheap after dark. It is not dear even now in
certain parts. This was an historic mansion. It was built for Madame
de Beaumaris, femme de chambre of Anne of Austria, and on its balcony,
now removed, on August 20th, 1660, Anne stood with Mazarin and others
when Louis XIV. entered Paris. No. 82 still retains a balcony of great
charm.
We now enter the very busy Rue St. Antoine at its junction with the
Rue de Rivoli. Almost immediately on our right is a gateway leading
into a very charming courtyard, which is not open to the public, but
into which one may gently trespass; it is the school of the Freres
Chretiens, founded by Frere Joseph, the good priest with the sweet and
sad old face whose bust is on the wall. A few steps farther bring us
to the church of St. Paul and St. Louis, a florid and imposing fane,
to which Victor Hugo (to whose house we are now making our way)
carried his first child to be christened, and presented to the church
two holy water stoops in commemoration. Here also Richelieu celebrated
his first mass. One of Delacroix's best early works (we saw the
picture called "Hommage a Delacroix," you will remember, in the Moreau
collection at the Louvre) is in the left transept, "Christ in the
Garden of Gethsemane". On no account miss the Passage Charlemagne
(close to the St. Paul Station on the Metro) for it is a curious, busy
and very French by-way, and it possesses the remains of a palace of
the fourteenth century. In the Passage de St. Pierre is the site of
the old cemetery of St. Paul's in which Rabelais was buried.