Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call
existence had so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a
succession of performances; has so concentrated human attention upon
mundane affairs; has called such a muster roll of stage favorites; has
contributed to romance so many heroes and heroines, to history so many
signal episodes and personal exploits, to philosophy so much to kindle
the craving for vital knowledge, to stir sympathy and to awaken
reflection.
Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us as
pictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about statues—
that they all look alike to me? There are too many of them. They bring
the ancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood.
We do not really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with Æschylus
and Homer. The very nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on a
collection of curios in an auction room, droning the dull iteration of
a catalogue. There is as little to awaken and inspire in the system of
religion and ethics of the pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of
the stone effigies that stare blankly upon us in the British Museum,
the Uffizi and the Louvre.
We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity,
the human side quite lost in the archaic. What is Cæsar to us, or we to
Cæsar? Jove’s thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than
the Medici Venus for the lights o’ love.
Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundred
years—semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly
ascribe to Athens or Rome—beginning with the exit of this our own world
from the dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and
continuing thence through the struggle of man toward achievement—tells
us a tale more consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive,
than may be found in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of
the civilizations which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber,
to yield at last to triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag
and Alpine height, from the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to
swallow luxury and culture. Refinement had done its perfect work. It
had emasculated man and unsexed woman and brought her to the front as a
political force, even as it is trying to do now.
The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo—even of
Thackeray—could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age
is as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it
does not contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet
it is hard to separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the
true and the false; to pluck from the haze with which time has
enveloped them, and to distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and
blood who lived and moved and had their being, and the phantoms of
imagination called into life and given each its local habitation and
its name by the poet’s pen working its immemorial spell upon the
reader’s credulity.
To me D’Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo’s imps and
Balzac’s bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the
tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the
field marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in
Cæsar de Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin,
in the Regent and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can
shut my eyes and see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were
coming out of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into her automobile,
while the Grande Mademoiselle is merely a cloud of clothes and words
that for me mean nothing at all.
I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.
Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly
twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers—a
gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us—a poor, insane creature she must
have been—disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond
the Place des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her
doll-rags and did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no
longer to slide down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a
death-mask, colored and exceeding life-like, taken the day after
Ravaillac delivered the finishing knife-thrust in the Rue de
Ferronnerie, which represents the Bèarnais as anything but a tamer of
hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say Dumas’
narrative is quite as authentic as any.
One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarter
of the town to live in—and Rachael, too!—it having given such frequent
shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real
abode of a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the
days of Diane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of
statesmen and prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to
Turgot.