I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde
Park—as a well-known local section—yet how few Americans who have gone
to Paris have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the
town. One finds it a curious circumstance that so many if not most of
the great cities somehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate
toward the setting sun.
When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of
Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant
villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic
opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval
and his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days
there was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote
pointed out as the very “rustic dwelling” so pathetically sung in
Verdi’s tuneful score and tenderly described in the original Dumas
text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago plowed the shrines of romance
out of the knowledge of the living, and a part of the Longchamps
racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious poets and
adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of cruel
bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.
Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray’s Paris Sketches with a kind of
awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his
glowing spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures
in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the
street “for which no rhyme our language yields,” next door to a pastry
shop that claimed to have furnished the mise en scène for the “Ballad
of Bouillabaisse,” and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic
Cartouche “down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from
a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves.” Ah,
well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew
his Paris, and my Paris has been as interesting as his Paris, for it
includes the Empire, the Siege and the Republic.
I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the
bastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a
person in his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself
agree. I knew them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make
every Frenchman rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the
Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the
Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was
not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the
Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place Vendôme, when I got
there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House
and of the venerable Notre Dame they told me had been but yesterday
running streams of blood. At the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the
Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men,
women, and boys were one forenoon stood against the wall and shot,
volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the Cathedral over
against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the gore-stained
vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as many
decades.