No less than the old part of the City, the left bank of the river is
rich in souvenirs. There the Roman occupation left the deepest traces.
We find the arenas of Lutecia, and, above all, the Thermae of Julian,
saved from destruction by the taste and initiative of Du Sommerard at
the moment when these grandiose ruins, which were being used as coopers'
store-rooms, were about to be pulled down, involving in their fall that
jewel of the fifteenth century, the marvellous Hôtel de Cluny. Quite
recently, remains of Roman substructures have been discovered near the
College de France, in the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Saint-Michel
Boulevard; but the glory of the left bank of the river was, in
particular, the University and the Sorbonne.
Little to-day is left of these old walls; but, ten years ago, the hill
of Sainte-Geneviève still preserved much of its whilom picturesqueness.
[Illustration: THE COLLEGE OF LOUIS-LE-GRAND
_H. Saffrey, Sculpt._]
There was the Rue Saint-Jacques, with its old book-sellers and
seventeenth-century houses, and especially--what dread
reminiscences!--the heavy-leaved gate of the Louis-le-Grand Lycée, where
Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, and the future Marshal Brune had
studied under the mastership of the good Abbé Berardier. I confess that
the Louis-le-Grand of our boyhood was black, and gloomy enough also,
with its moss-grown playgrounds, its smoky rooms, its punishment
chambers up under the roof, where one was frozen in winter and stifled
in summer, its punishment chambers in which tradition relates that
Saint-Huruge was confined; quite near to the Saint-Jacques blind alley
where Auvergne dealers sold such fine trinkets, and to the little Rue
Cujas, noisy with the noise of rowdy students--but which rendered us
pensive.
There was the Sorbonne, with its paved courtyard, where we used to wait,
pale, feverish and anxious, for the posting of the small white notice
bearing the names of those candidates for the Baccalaureat that were
admitted to the _vivâ voce_; and we were half-dead with fear at the idea
of appearing before the terrible Monsieur Bernès, while we blessed the
gods to have given us as examiner the witty and indulgent Monsieur
Mézières, who, at least for his part, has not grown old.
[Illustration: THE INNER COURTYARD OF THE ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE
_Etching by Martial_]
Further on, in the rear of Sainte-Barbe, we come to the Rue de la
Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, alive and teeming with its old mansions
converted into dispensaries or business premises, its petty trades, its
popular dancing-rooms, and, last but not least, its celebrated École
Polytechnique, dear to all Parisians, which adds its note of
cheerfulness to this somewhat sombre quarter.
[Illustration: THE RUE CLOVIS IN 1867
_Drawn by A. Maignan_]
Quite near there is the Rue Clovis, where formerly stood the Abbey of
Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower still remains and makes us regret
the part that has disappeared. In this Rue Clovis may be seen, crumbling
to decay and half-buried under climbing plants--lichens, ivy, sage and
moss--a big side of a primitive-looking wall, a fragment of the
fortifications of Philippe-Auguste, the belt of stone and lofty strong
towers behind which for centuries were heaped houses, palaces, colleges,
churches and abbeys, huddling against one another. The church of
Saint-Etienne-du-Mont opens its elegant portal a few yards away from the
Rue Clovis. Illustrious dead were buried there: Pascal, Racine, Boileau.
A crime was also committed in it.
On the 3rd of January 1858, the first day of the novena of
Sainte-Geneviève, whose relics repose in one of the side-chapels of the
church, dreadful cries were heard: "They have just murdered
Monseigneur," and soon a man of haggard looks, clad in black, with
blood-red hands, was seen on the Square in the grasp of some policemen
who had just arrested him. It was Verger, a half-mad, interdicted
priest, who had stabbed to the heart Monseigneur Sibour, Archbishop of
Paris!
This charming church should be seen in the early days of January.
A sort of small religious fair is then held in front of the porch. A
veritable liturgical library is there for sale, under umbrellas
resembling those that used to shelter the orange-dealers: "Mary's
Rose-trees," "Miracles at Lourdes," "Synopses of Novenas," "Acts of
Faith," "Acts of Contrition," "Lives of the Saints," "Glorifications of
the Blessed." Chaplets are sold, holy images, devotional post-cards,
orthodox rituals, medals, scapularies--and unfortunately these objects
have less artistic value than sentiment about them. It is a
delightful Parisian tableau in one of the prettiest settings of the
great town.
At the end of the Rue Clovis, is the Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, where the
painter Lebrun possessed a lovely house, still standing at No. 49,
over-run with ivy and honeysuckle, two or three yards distant from the
Scotch college--at present the "Institution Chevallier,"--converted into
a prison during the Terror, like most educational institutions.
Saint-Just was conveyed thither, after being outlawed on the 9th of
Thermidor; and his friends came there to fetch him at eight o'clock in
the evening, as well as his colleague Couthon, who was confined in the
Port-Libre (the old religious house of Port-Royal). It is easy to
imagine the gendarmes, on the steep slopes of the Rue Saint-Jacques,
running round the mechanical seat which the impotent Couthon feverishly
worked and propelled with handles levered to the wheels, and which
travelled rapidly over the hard stones, amid shouts and frightened
"sectionnaires,"--easy to conjure up before one's senses the call to
arms, the sound of the tocsin, under the downpour of the storm that
dispersed the Robespierrian bands camped about the Town Hall, and
enabled the troops of the Convention to invade the "Maison Commune"
without resistance.
An hour later, Robespierre had his jaw smashed by Merda's bullet; his
brother sprang through the window; Le Bas committed suicide; Saint-Just,
haughty and impassible, allowed himself to be arrested in silence;
Couthon, with his paralysed legs, was flung on to a rubbish heap, and
then, bleeding and motionless, was dragged by the feet to the parapet of
the quay. He pretended to be dead. "Let us cast him into the water,"
howled a multitude of fierce voices. "Excuse me, citizens," murmured
Couthon, "but I am still alive." So he was reserved for the scaffold.
Behind Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, there is a nook almost unknown to
Parisians: a little cloister close to the apse of the church, and
containing some admirable painted glass windows by Pinaigrier, the great
artist, who, in 1568, charged for the "Parable of the Guests," a
three-compartment window painting, which masterpiece now adorns the
chapel of the Crucifix, "92 livres 10 sols, including the leading and
iron trellis."
[Illustration: THE RUE DE LA MONTAGNE-SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE IN 1866
_Drawn by A. Maignan_]
It is one of the retreats for poetry and devotion so common in Paris,
and yet ofttimes so unsuspected amid the city's noise; and one never
forgets the impression produced when leaving the Latin Quarter, with its
laughter and songs, and plunging suddenly into this deserted cloister
full of dream and melancholy, though so close to the sunny, busy square
of the Panthéon, where, on the 27th of July 1830, to the shouts of the
people and the army, an actor at the Odéon Theatre, Eric Besnard,
replaced once more the inscription: "_To her great men the grateful
mother country_" on the fine temple built by Soufflot, which the
Restoration had consecrated to the worship of Sainte-Geneviève.
[Illustration: THE PANTHÉON, IN BUILDING]
The Panthéon is certainly the one Parisian building which has been
most often baptized and re-baptized. Constructed in consequence of a vow
made by Louis XV. when ill at Metz, on the gardens belonging to the
original Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, the money that paid for it was
derived from a portion of the funds raised by three lotteries drawn
every month in Paris.
Soufflot, whose grandiose plans had been accepted, set to work in 1755.
Towards 1764, the edifice began to assume shape, and the Parisians in
enthusiasm admired the magnificent forms that modified the ancient
outlines of their city. But cracks and fissures and sinkings-in
occurred; a mad terror succeeded to the wonder: "The building will
tumble, and its fall will involve a part of the old quarter of the
Sorbonne," people said. Works of shoring up, embanking and strengthening
were carried out. Paris breathed again; but poor Soufflot, in despair,
could not survive so many tragic emotions. He died in 1781 without
finishing his undertaking.
In 1791, the constituent Assembly set apart for the "Honouring of Great
Men" the church primitively dedicated to Sainte-Geneviève; and
Mirabeau's body was conveyed thither in triumph "to the sounds of
trombone and gong, whose notes, by the intensity with which they were
produced, tore the bowels and harrowed the heart," says a chronicle of
the time.
[Illustration: PROCESSION IN FRONT OF SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE
_Meunier, fecit_ (Carnavalet Museum)]
The great tribune was destined to make but a short stay in the
Panthéon,--this was the name given to the secularised church--for on the
27th of November 1793, at the instigation of Joseph Chénier, and after
study of the documents found in the iron safe, documents that left no
doubt as to "the great treason of the Count de Mirabeau," the
Convention, "considering that a man cannot be great without virtue,
decreed that Mirabeau's ashes should be removed from the Panthéon, and
that those of Marat should be buried there." The sentence was carried
out by night, and the "virtuous" Marat took the place of Mirabeau; not
for long, however, since, some months later, Marat's body,
"depantheonised" in its turn, was cast into the common grave of the
small graveyard belonging to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. Voltaire and
Rousseau were, in their turn, triumphantly interred. Voltaire's body,
after remaining all night in the ruins of the Bastille, had been brought
to the Panthéon on a triumphal car, escorted by fifty girls dressed in
antique style through David's care, and by the actors and actresses of
the Théâtre Français in their stage dresses. The widow and daughters of
the unfortunate Calas walked behind, close to the torn flag of the
Bastille. In order to make this interment a never-to-be-forgotten fête,
its organisers had provided for everything except for the weather. A
dreadful storm descended on the heads of those composing the procession:
Mérope, Lusignan, the Virgins, Brutus, and the delegates sent in the
names of Politics, the Arts, and Agriculture, were wet to the skin; and,
covered with mud and in wretched plight, were compelled to huddle into
cabs or shelter themselves under umbrellas.
And thus it was that, on the 12th of July 1791, Voltaire made his entry
into the Panthéon.
[Illustration: THE APOTHEOSIS OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
His translation to the Panthéon on the 11th of October 1794
_Girardet, inv. et del._]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau followed him there on the 11th of October 1794;
his body brought back from Ermenonville, beneath a bower of flowering
shrubs, to the agreeable sounds of the "Village Seer," had passed the
preceding night on the basin of the Tuileries, transformed for the
occasion into an "Isle of Poplars." While yet not so popular as that of
Voltaire, his triumph was "one of sensitive souls," and "the man of
nature" was interred according to the rites he had himself prescribed.
Later, Napoleon peopled the Panthéon with the shades of obscure senators
and some few artists, admirals, and generals. Subsequently, the Second
Republic made a definitive assignment of the edifice to the cult of
great men; and there, on a sunny day, the 3rd of May 1885, Victor Hugo's
body was brought in the humble hearse of the poor, amid the acclamations
of an immense concourse of people, after spending a night of apotheosis
under the Arc de Triomphe, which he had so nobly sung. Since then,
Baudin, President Carnot, La Tour d'Auvergne have been buried there; and
an admirable decoration, the work of our best contemporary artists,
covers the vast walls of this necropolis. Puvis de Chavannes, Humbert,
Henri-Lévy, Cabanel, Jean-Paul Laurens are finely represented in it;
and, last of all, Edouard Detaille, surpassing himself, has, in an
admirable soaring of art, created on the canvas--in Homeric
proportions--a mad rush of horses and riders, the old cavaliers of the
Republic and the Empire, towards the radiant image of the Motherland,
with standards conquered from the enemy by their dauntless heroism.
Around the Panthéon, there used to be, and still is, a labyrinth of
little streets, poor and crowded together, once inhabited by those that
attended the schools, so numerous in that quarter of the Sorbonne.
The Rue des Carmes remains to us as a perfect specimen of the past, with
its houses whose shaking walls support each other, its crumbling
façades, its dilapidated staircases; and then, here and there, the
relics of a vanished splendour, the entrance to two important colleges,
to-day dwindled down into dens of misery, into lodgings of the poor.
Narrow and uneven, the Rue des Carmes ascends toilingly between shops
whose paint has been streaked by storms, faded by dust and wind; and yet
it continues to be full of charm and poetry, this sorry-looking street,
crowned at the top by the august proportions of the Panthéon, and
framing at the bottom, with its two lines of dingy houses, mean hotels,
and dancing-rooms, the delicate and elegant spire of Notre-Dame aloft on
the horizon of the clear sky.
It was at the corner of this Rue des Carmes and the Rue des Sept-Voies,
not far from Sainte-Geneviève's church, that, at seven o'clock in the
evening of the 9th of March 1804, George Cadoudal sprang into the cab
that was to take him to the fresh hiding-place which his friends had
prepared for him in the house of Caron, the royalist perfumer of the Rue
du Four-Saint-Germain. George was narrowly watched, all the Paris police
being on the alert. He was recognised, and pursued by the Inspectors of
the Prefecture, two of whom pounced on him at the corner of the Rue
Monsieur-le-Prince and the Rue de l'Observance. The one he killed with a
pistol bullet in his forehead, the second he wounded. Meanwhile, the
assembled crowd hindered his flight; and a hatter of the neighbourhood
seized the outlaw and dragged him to the Police Station. His calmness
and dignity and the wit of his replies disconcerted his adversaries.
Reproached with having killed a married detective, the father of a
family: "Next time have me arrested by bachelors," he retorted. After he
had owned to the dagger found upon him, he was asked if the engraving on
the handle were not the English hall-mark. "I cannot say," he replied,
"but I can assure you that I have not had it[1] hall-marked in France."
[Illustration: THE LUXEMBOURG, ABOUT 1790
_Maréchal, del._ (National Library)]
Quite near, is the Luxembourg, both palace and prison, the Luxembourg,
where Marie de Medici gave such magnificent fêtes, where Gaston
d'Orléans yawned so much, and where the Grande Mademoiselle sulked,
sighing for the handsome Lauzun; where also the Count de Provence so
cleverly prepared, with Monsieur d'Avaray, his escape from France, on
the same evening that Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette made such bad
arrangements for the lugubrious journey that was to lead them to
Varennes; the Luxembourg, whose courtyard was used as a promenade by
such prisoners as the Terror crowded there; the Luxembourg, whence
Camille Desmoulins wrote to his Lucile those heartrending letters that
still bear the traces of tears; the Luxembourg whither, a few weeks
later, Robespierre was brought as a prisoner, and where, "for want of
room," Hally, the porter, refused to receive him; the Luxembourg where,
after Thermidor, the artist David painted, from, his dungeon, the shady
walk in which he could see his children playing at ball; the
Luxembourg of Barras, of Bonaparte, of the Directory fêtes; the
Luxembourg, too, of Nodier, of Saint-Beuve, of Murger, of Michelet, of
the students, of the workers of Bohemia, of the songs of the worthy
Nadaud and Mimi Pinson, near to Bullier's and the Lilac Closerie and
also to the Observatory and the ill-omened wall "scored with bullets"
where Marshal Ney fell. Everywhere, the same mingling of mirth and
sorrow, of laughter and blood. The reason is that each street, each
cross-road, almost each house has seen some dark procession pass by or
some victorious fête celebrated.
[Illustration: FRATERNAL SUPPERS IN THE SECTIONS OF PARIS
On the 11th, 12th, and 13th of May 1793, or the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd of
Floreal, Anno II. of the Republic.
_Drawn by Swebach-Desfontaines_ (Carnavalet Museum)]
On all these dingy walls of Paris, hands of women or of artists have
contrived to put flowers or bird-cages; and no alley is so dismal that
it does not harbour a little poetry and dreaming, some gillyflowers and
songs.
Not far away is the Carmes prison, in the Rue de Vaugirard, at the
corner of the Rue d'Assas; and there all the externals are the same as
they were at the moment of the terrible massacre of 1792. At the foot of
the staircase one sees still the tiled floor of the small room where,
between two corridors, Maillard placed the chair and table that formed
the bloody tribunal of the September slaughter; the balcony covered with
climbing plants through which issued the unfortunates that were felled,
stabbed with pikes, or shot in the large garden; and, at the top of the
first story, on the wall bearing even now the red marks of the
blood-dripping sabres used by the slayers, may be read the signatures of
the fair prisoners who, day after day, in terrified anxiety, waited,
each evening, for the fatal order to appear before the Tribunal:
Mesdames d'Aiguillon, Terezia Cabarrus-Tallien, Joséphine de
Beauharnais. At this date, Tallien, himself suspected and followed by a
band of spies, prowled from eve till morn round the sinister prison in
which the woman he loved was confined. One day, on his table, 17 Rue de
la Perle, he found a poniard that he recognised, a gem of Spain with
which Terezia's hands were familiar. It was an imperative order; and on
the 7th of Thermidor this note was transmitted to him from "La Force."
"The head of the police has just gone from here. He came to tell me that
to-morrow I shall ascend to the Tribunal, that is, to the scaffold. It
is different from the dream I had in the night: Robespierre dead and the
prisons opened.... But, thanks to your signal cowardice, there will soon
be no one in France capable of realising it!"
As a matter of fact, the fair Terezia, being more especially aimed at by
the Committee, had been mysteriously transferred from the Carmes prison
to La Force; and it was from this latter place that she sent her will
and testament of vengeance and death. Then, Tallien swore to save his
country; the mother country for him was the woman he worshipped. Mad
with love and rage, rousing against Robespierre every rancour, terror,
and hatred, he spent the night and the day of the 8th in preparing the
dreadful and tragical sitting of the 9th of Thermidor, which was a
merciless duel between the two sides. He appealed to Fouché, to
Collot d'Herbois as to Durand-Maillane and Louchet, to Cambon as to
Vadier, to Thuriot as to Legendre, to the few remaining Dantonists as to
the eternal tremblers of the Marais; then, springing to the rostrum with
a dagger in his hand, he threatened Robespierre, who was nervous,
uneasy, distraught, from the presentiment that his power was escaping
him; and, at length, after a fearful five hours' struggle, obtained the
dread decree outlawing and condemning to the guillotine those who
themselves for two years had been mowing down the members of the
Convention.
[Illustration: FÊTE GIVEN AT THE LUXEMBOURG ON THE 20TH OF FRIMAIRE,
ANNO VII.
Bonaparte hands to the Directory the treaty of Campo-Formio]
Opposite the Luxembourg, is the Rue de Tournon, where Théroigne de
Méricourt and Mademoiselle Lenormand lived; the Countess d'Houdetot
dwelt at No. 12, the appearance of which has hardly changed since. If he
were to come back and wander about these parts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
would again find almost intact the home of her he chiefly loved, quite
near to the Rue Servandoni, a dark, damp lane lurking beneath the walls
of Saint-Sulpice, where Condorcet, during the Terror, succeeded in
safely hiding himself at the house of Madame Vernet, No. 15. There he
terminated--under what sorry conditions!--his _Tableau of the Progress
of the Human Mind_. His wife was living at Auteuil and there painted
pastels. No industry prospered under the Terror. "Every one," says
Michelet, "was in a hurry to fix on the canvas a shadow of this
uncertain life." On the 6th of April, his work being finished,
Condorcet dressed himself as a workman, with long beard and cap down
over his eyes, a "Horace" in his hand, and in his pocket some poison,
for a case of need, prepared him by Cabanis; and escaped from Madame
Vernet's. All day, he roamed about the country, in the vicinity of
Fontenay-aux-Roses, hoping to find with some friends, Monsieur and
Madame Suard, a shelter that they refused him. He spent the night in the
woods; then, on the morrow, haggard and starved, he entered a Clamart
public-house. There, he made a ravenous meal, while reading his dear
Horace. Being questioned and suspected, he was carried off to the
district, put on an old horse and thus conducted to the prison at
Bourg-la-Reine. At dawn, the gaolers, on going into his cell, stumbled
over his corpse. Poison had made an end of this noble life of work,
glory, and misery.
Aloft in the same quiet quarter, Saint-Sulpice rears its two unequal
towers, on which Chappe planted the great arms of his aërial telegraph.
It was in the fine vestry of this imposing church, which has preserved
its admirable wood-carvings, that Camille Desmoulins signed the marriage
register, when, on the 29th of December 1790, he married his adored
Lucile Duplessis. The marriage was a veritable romance; and all Paris
crowded to the gates of Saint-Sulpice to see the procession go by. The
bride and bridegroom were congratulated; and cheers were given for the
witnesses, whose names had already become popular; Sillery, Pétion,
Mercier, and Robespierre. Then, the wedding party ascended the Rue de
Condé to go and breakfast at Camille's home, No. 1 Rue du Théâtre
François (to-day, No. 38 Rue de l'Odéon), on the third floor. There, on
the 20th of March 1794, the day of his mother's death, he was arrested,
bound like a malefactor, and thence was taken to the Luxembourg hard by.
On the 5th of April, Camille was executed amid the shouts of the people
who had so flattered him. Lucile followed him to the scaffold a week
later! They had sworn to love each other in life and death.... The idyll
finished in blood.
Round about Saint-Sulpice, one comes across the Rue Férou, the Rue
Cassette, the Rue Garancière, the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, the Rue
Madame, with their ancient names and provincial aspect, devout and
silent quarters of monastic and semi-mysterious life, and, for this
reason, full of infinite charm.
There, on all sides, are heard convent bells and liturgic sounds. The
few shops that exist are austere in air and devoted to religious
purposes: chasuble makers', holy image dealers', church book and
jewellery sellers'. Behind long, sombre walls, shoots of verdure, the
plumes of a tree joyously bursting forth remind one of large, unkempt
gardens, where all grows wild, full of flowers and birds, inhabited by
pious persons and old people who pray as they walk and regretfully dream
of the times that are no more.
In the huge Paris, noisy and flippant, mad with sound and movement,
tramways and underground railways, it is the refuge of the past, the
quarter for prayer, silence, and oblivion; there still seem to live "a
few dolent voices of yearnings for the past, which ring the curfew,"
says Chateaubriand in his _Memoirs from beyond the Grave_.
Old mansions are numerous.
In the Rue de Varenne alone, each portal awakes a remembrance of the
most illustrious names of France's nobility: Broglie, Bourbon, Condé,
Villeroy, Castries, Rohan-Chabot, Tessé, Béthune-Sully, Montmorency,
Rougé, Ségur, Aubeterre, Narbonne-Pelet, &c., and some of the hosts of
these aristocratic dwellings were certainly found disguised, dressed up
as horse-dealers, drovers, peasants, workmen, in the _Golden Cup_
hostelry at the corner of the Rue de Varenne, which was celebrated in
the history of the Chouannerie: the heroes of _Tournebut_, my dear
friend Lenôtre's interesting work, put up there, says the author, who,
himself filled with enthusiasm, knows how to inspire his reader with the
same. It was one of the meeting-places used by the sworn companions of
George Cadoudal, who hid there several times; and there, too, the
royalist conspirators met to complete, for Vendémiaire, Anno IV., their
arrangements relative to the abduction of the Convention.
At some little distance, in the Rue Canettes, another rendezvous
existed, for emigrants and chouans, in the house of the perfumer, Caron,
where a famous hiding-place was used. Hyde de Neuville tells us, in his
picturesque memoirs, that one needed only to slip behind the picture,
serving as signboard to the perfumery--a picture overhanging the
street--then to draw over one the shutter of the neighbouring chamber,
for all the police Fouché employed to be tricked, in spite of searching,
as they frequently did, the house through and through.
Next, we come upon the Odéon--the old Odéon--still standing on its base,
in spite of the countless jests levelled at it, with its famous
galleries, where, for many a long year, saunterers have gone to have a
look at the last productions of contemporary literature. How often have
we lingered in front of the old books or new ones, turning over the
leaves, or reading between two pages yet uncut?
It was in 1873 that, under three arcades of the Odéon galleries, the
most amiable of publishers, Ernest Flammarion, installed himself in
partnership with Ch. Marpon; both of them indefatigable workers,
benevolent and witty, they spent treasures of contrivance to get into
too narrow a space all the nice, fine books they loved so well, and
understood so well how to make others love.
But soon the three arcades were really inadequate; and, progressively,
the untiring Flammarion spread round two sides of the big building,
before starting out to conquer Paris, and to establish in the city so
many bookshops. He had his faithful readers: an old book-lover of narrow
purse owned to him that he had read the whole of Darwin's _Origin of
Species_ (450 pages) while standing in front of the stall!
Other customers less scrupulous have sometimes carried off the volume
they had begun; but the good Flammarion is infinitely indulgent to such
"absent-minded" individuals. "The desire to instruct themselves is too
strong for their feelings," he murmurs by way of excuse, and,
philosophically, he smiles and passes these petty larcenies to his
profit and loss account.
[Illustration: THE RUE DE L'ECOLE DE MÉDECINE IN 1866
House where Marat was assassinated
_Drawn by A. Maignan_]
Along the Rue de l'École-de-Médecine, passing by the Dupuytren Museum,
which was formerly the refectory of the Franciscan monastery, we reach
the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the cutting of which did away with so many
precious relics; among others, the abode where Marat was assassinated,
the Mignon College, and the Saint-Germain Abbey, the front of which
opened opposite the row of old, curiously gabled houses which so far
have been left alone by architects and builders. These latter heard the
cries of the victims that were massacred in the September slaughters.
They were lighted by the reflection of eighty-four fire-pots supplied by
a certain Bourgain, the candle-maker of the quarter, in order that the
families of the slaughterers and the amateurs of fine spectacles might
come and contemplate the work; the shopkeepers of the quarter, who were
complaisant witnesses, supplied details. These houses also saw
Billaud-Varennes congratulate the "workers" and distribute wine tickets
to them; and Maillard, surnamed Strike Hard, they saw leave, when his
work was done, with his hands crossed behind the skirts of his long grey
overcoat, and walk quietly back to his home, like a worthy clerk
quitting his office, coughing the while, for he had a delicate chest.
[Illustration: THE GALLERY OF THE ODÉON (RUE ROTROU)]
Together with the present presbytery, they form the sole extant
witnesses of that dreadful butchery.
Within a stone's throw, once there was the Passage du Commerce, where
resounded the butt-ends of the guns of the sectionaries who, on the 31st
of March 1794, came at daybreak to arrest Danton and conduct him to the
Luxembourg; and it is easy to fancy what must have been that hour of
fright and stupefaction. Arrest Danton! the Titan of the Revolution, him
whose formidable eloquence had raised fourteen armies from the soil! the
Danton of the 10th of August, Danton till then untouchable! It was only
a few days after the arrest of Camille with his cruel wit; the Camille
of the Palais-Royal, of the _Lanterne_, the _Revolutions of France and
Brabant_, the _Brissot unmasked_; the Camille of the "_Vieux
Cordelier_," that masterpiece of wit and courage, in which he dared to
speak of clemency to Robespierre and of respect for his fellows to the
ignoble Hébert! On the site of Danton's house, the tribune's statue
stands to-day; we regret the house.
[Illustration: THE ROHAN COURTYARD IN 1901
_Water-colour by D. Bourgoin_]
The Rohan courtyard (the word ought to be written _Rouen_, for, in the
fifteenth century, the yard depended on the old mansion possessed by the
Cardinal de Rouen) joins the Passage du Commerce, a few steps from the
bookshop where the philanthropic Doctor Guillotin tried on a sheep the
knife of his "beheading machine"; it is picturesque and curious, this
Rohan courtyard, where you can still see the well of the house once
inhabited by Coictier, the doctor of Louis XI.; where, too, the "mule's
step" may be found, that Sorbonne doctors, who frequented this quarter,
used in order to get off their steeds, and which preserved a very old
wall round a garden planted with lilac and turf--alas! destroyed last
year. The wall, like that of the Rue Clovis, was a fragment of
Philippe-Auguste's fortification, the base of one of whose towers is
still to be made out in the Passage du Commerce, No. 4, at the house of
a locksmith, who has set up his forge upon it!
[Illustration: THE ROHAN COURTYARD IN 1901
Second view]
The houses there are old, dilapidated, and sordid, but perfect in their
picturesqueness; the strangest industries flourish in them, and quite
recently one might read there this characteristically Parisian
advertisement, "Small hands required for flowers and feathers," beside a
plate pointing out the address of the newspaper, _Heaven_, on the fourth
floor, door to the left!
The Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie is on one side; it is the ancient Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Germain, where Marat set up his press and printing-machine
in a cellar. At No. 14, in the courtyard of an old mansion occupied by a
wall-paper merchant, once stood the premises of the Théâtre-Français.
The large entrance door, the staircases leading to the actors' private
rooms, the slanting pit of the hall, and even the friezes are still in
existence. The King's Comedians played there, on April 18th, 1689,
_Phèdre_ and the _Médecin malgré lui_, and performed in the same
building until 1770.
The encyclopædists, d'Alembert, Diderot and his friends, used to meet
opposite at the Procope coffee-house, the handsome iron balcony of which
is yet subsisting, from where it was so agreeable to hobnob with the
balcony of the Comedy. The Procope coffee-house, celebrated in the
eighteenth century, was even more so under the Second Empire. In 1867,
on the eve of the Baudin trial, Gambetta poured forth in it, to the
students of the various University schools, the thunder and lightning
bursts of his admirable eloquence. The great orator in 1859 lived at No.
7 Rue de Tournon, in the hotel of the Senate and the Nations, at present
to be found there. His small room afforded a fine view over the roofs of
Paris, and also remains as it was then.
Near the spot, at No. 1 Rue Bourbon-le-Château, on the 23rd of December
1850, two poor women were assassinated. One of them, Mademoiselle
Ribault, a designer on the staff of the _Petit Courrier des Dames_,
edited by Monsieur Thiéry, had the strength to write on a screen with a
finger dipped in her own blood: "The assassin is the clerk of M.
Thi...." This clerk, Laforcade, was arrested the next day.
How many delightful nooks besides, hardly known by Parisians, are to be
met with on the left bank of the river!
[Illustration: THE RUE VISCONTI
_Water-colour by F. Léon_]
Not all have disappeared for ever of those vast melancholy gardens,
those hoary mansions buried in streets where the grass grows, and whose
noble but gloomy façades would never cause one to suspect the riches
they contain. Many are in the vicinity of the Hôtel des Invalides.
Others are in the Rue Vanneau, the Rue Bellechasse, the Rue de Varenne,
the Rue Saint-Guillaume, the Rue Bonaparte; some also in the Rue
Visconti, which dark narrow lane possesses illustrious souvenirs. The
famous Champmeslé, Clairon, and Adrienne Lecouvreur lived in the Ranes
mansion, built on the site of the Petit-Pré-aux-Clercs, and J. Racine
died there in 1697. This house, which bears the number 21, is to-day a
girls' boarding-school! And last of all, at No. 17 the great Balzac
established the printing-press that ruined him, and that later became
the studio of Paul Delaroche. There, was played the sentimental and
commercial drama whose poignant phases have been related to us so
eloquently by Messieurs Hanoteaux and Vicaire.
All these houses, so pregnant with history, are still visible; yet how
few Parisians are acquainted with them!
[Illustration: ALFRED DE MUSSET AT 23 YEARS OF AGE
_Drawn by Lépaulle_ (Pigoreau Collection)]
On the Voltaire Quay lived Vivant, Denon, Ingres, Alfred de Musset,
Judge Perrault, Chamillard, Gluck, and Voltaire himself who died there,
and whose corpse, wrapped in a dressing-gown and held up by straps, like
a traveller asleep, started by night in a travelling-coach, on the 30th
of May 1778, from the courtyard of Monsieur de Villette's mansion, with
its entrance still in the Rue de Beaune, to be buried outside Paris at
the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne.
The flat in which Voltaire passed away has not been altered, and its
decoration has remained almost intact, with its wall mirrors, its
painted ceilings, and its small mirrored salons contrived in the thick
walls.
[Illustration: THE FAÇADE OF THE INSTITUTE
_From an original drawing of the Revolutionary period_ (Carnavalet
Museum)]
The Institute is not far, but for the ancient College of the Four
Nations to produce its best impression, it needs a special day--an
extraordinary sitting, a sensational reception, when the prettiest
costumes of the most elegant Parisian dames contrast with the
Academicians' green uniforms. On one side, are beauty, charm, and grace;
on the other, some of the noblest intelligences, the most illustrious
names in Literature, Art, and Science. It is the great intellectual
banquet of France in one of the fairest sights of the Capital.
If, however, we wish for something to amuse us, something original, we
must mount the endless staircases of the Institute and seek it in the
attic portion of the palace, visiting the tiny chambers where formerly
it was the custom to put candidates for the Prix de Rome in the
competitive music examination.
Inside these closets, at which the sumptuously lodged prisoners of
Fresnes-les-Rungis would grumble, on these decrepit walls, the finest
talents of our modern school have left traces of their whilom
presence--bars of music, verses, drawings, writings of varied nature. I
confess I should not dare to reproduce, even expurgated, the
inscriptions which confinement and absence from Paris streets and
acquaintance have suggested to many an admirable composer of to-day.
Saint-Saëns would certainly blush, Bizet's great shade would be
troubled, our great and witty Massenet would surely refuse to accept the
paternity of his vigorous apostrophes, and--I will be discreet; never
mind--it's something very enjoyable, very funny, and quite in the
character of the language.
Between the Mint and the lion-poodle of the Institute (from the shelter
of which, if we are to believe his delightful Memoirs, Alexandre Dumas
contributed so valiantly to the triumph of the 1830 Revolution) nestles
a small, provincial-looking Square; Madame Permon, mother of the future
Madame Junot, Duchess of Abrantès, lived there until the Revolution. In
a small garret of the same house, at the left corner, on the third
floor, Bonaparte used to lodge during his rare holidays from the École
Militaire. The fine, carved wainscotings are still round the walls of
the drawing-room on the ground floor, overlooking the Seine, which the
Cæsar that-was-to-be used to enter and there speak of his hopes, and the
marble chimney-piece is in its old place; at it he would come and dry
his big patched boots that "smoked again," the talkative Madame
d'Abrantès tells us. So, while dreaming, the little sub-lieutenant
might, from the window, see opposite him the palace whence, for a number
of years, he was to conqueringly dispose of the destinies of the dazzled
world.
In front of the Institute is the Pont des Arts. There the sight is an
enchanting one; the Seine--the gayest, most lively of rivers--crowded
with passenger-boats, tugs, barges, and barques. The grey or blue sky is
reflected in the water, and the river flows majestically between two
verdure-clad quays, surmounted by book-sellers' cases, and inhabited by
the most picturesque of populations.
What strange trades there are on the river sides!--watermen's barbers,
dog shearers, dockmen, and sand-carters, tollmen and mattress-carders,
anglers, bathmen, washerwomen; it is a separate population with its own
customs, habits, and peculiar language. And what a splendid frame is
round this odd little world seen from the Pont des Arts!
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE LOUVRE QUAY
_Noël, pinxit_]
On the one bank, the Louvre, the green foliage of the Tuileries, and the
Champs-Elysées, with the minarets of the Trocadero and the heights of
Chaillot on the horizon; on the other, all old Paris, a series of
monuments haloed with souvenirs--the Palais de Justice, the
Conciergerie, the Sainte-Chapelle, Notre-Dame; the churches of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, Saint-Gervais, Saint-Paul; the Pointe de la
Cité.
[Illustration: PARIS FROM THE POINTE DE LA CITÉ
_Photographed by Richebourg_]
At night, these noble, suggestive silhouettes assume a still more
imposing majesty--modern blemishes, glaring colourings, shameless
advertisements are blotted out.
The moon spreads its delicate white light over the old walls, and a
silvern Paris rears itself in the darkness. At times, too, underneath a
storm-red sky, an entirely sombre town arises, made known only as a
tragic vision in successive flashes of lightning.
Either we have a Paris of sunny mirth or a Paris bathed in night's
gloom.
Descending once again towards the Seine, through the picturesque streets
that surround the Institute--the Rue Dauphine, the Rue de Nesles, the
Rue Mazarine--we discover in the Rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine--at present
the Rue Mazet--the remains of the old White Horse Inn. The stables, with
their ancient mangers and quaint eaves, still exist. They date back to
Louis XIV. In that time, every week the huge inn-yard was filled with
travellers going to Orléans and Blois; and the unwieldy coach started in
a cloud of dust, amidst crackings of whip, trumpetings, adieus, and
shakings of handkerchiefs; horses pranced, women wept, dogs barked,
postilions swore. To-day the animation has disappeared, but the scene
has remained, age-stricken, impressive, still charming, so much so that
Massenet, moved by it, murmured one morning: "It must be here that
Manon[2] alighted from the diligence!"
The neighbouring house was once the Magny restaurant, at which those
celebrated dinners were given that Goncourt speaks of so often in his
Memoirs, dinners shared by Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Georges Sand, Flaubert,
Théophile Gautier, Gavarni, and many others.
Not far away, and connecting the Rue Mazarine--where Molière and his
company played--with the Rue de Seine, let us go through the Passage du
Pont-Neuf, occupying the site of the ancient entrance to the theatre,
and being the scene of Zola's terrible novel _Thérèse Raquin_.
It is a typical nook--sordid, dingy, and malodorous, but strangely
attractive, with its fried-potato sellers and Italian modellers. The
shops in it seem to belong to another century; some months back, one
only was frequented by customers, that of a drawing-paper dealer. The
artist, Bonnat, told us he had bought his "Ingres paper" there, when he
was a pupil at the School of Fine Arts, of which to-day he is the
eminent head. The shop had not altered for sixty years, and the
saleswoman asserted that the "stomping-rags she sold were exactly
similar to those used by Monsieur Flandrin." In front of us is the
Institute, and it is impossible to walk along the interminable
black-looking wall enclosing it, on the side of the Rue Mazarine,
without thinking of the painful paragraph in the preface of the _Fils
Naturel_, wherein the younger Dumas, speaking of his childhood, recalls
the souvenir of the return from the first performance, at the Odéon, of
_Charles VI. chez ses grands vassaux_, on the 20th of October 1831.
The evening had been a stormy one, and the success of the play was
doubtful. Consequently, a continuation of their poverty was to be
expected. Alexandre Dumas had heavy burdens to support--his mother, a
household, a child. He had to live himself and to keep his family on the
meagre salary his situation under the Duke d'Orléans procured him. It
was not of his talents but of his star that he doubted; and the younger
Dumas always remembered his father's broad shadow cast by the moon on
the dark, gloomy wall of the Institute, and himself timidly guessing at
his father's anxieties and endeavouring, with his little eight-year-old
legs, to follow and keep up with the studies of the good-natured giant.
[Illustration: THE RUE DES PRÊTRES-SAINT-SÉVERIN IN 1866
_Drawn by A. Maignan_]
It was in the Rue Guénégaud, in the Hôtel Britannique, that Madame
Roland took up her quarters in 1791. There, joyous and confident in the
future, she opened her political _salon_. What a pleasure for the little
Manon to show to all the Pont-Neuf neighbourhood, where her childhood
had been spent, that she had become a lady and received people of mark.
Brissot, Buzot, Pétion, Robespierre, Danton himself, were pleased to
come, between two sittings, and talk at this amiable woman's house; and
I fancy what attracted them was far more the pretty Parisian's qualities
than the virtues of the austere husband, who must have been a great
bore! On the 26th of March 1792, Dumouriez came to Roland's door and
rang to tell him that he was appointed Minister. On the morrow, the
little Manon of the Quai des Lunettes settled in triumph at the Calonne
mansion. It was the way to the scaffold.
Skirting the quays, we reach the Saint-Michel Square, then the Rue
Galande. In spite of recent demolitions, this old street still contains
some ancient abodes; but it has lost the singular house called the _Red
Castle_, or more prosaically, "the Guillotine."
In what was, during the seventeenth century, a sumptuous dwelling--the
mansion, 'tis said, of Gabrielle d'Estrées--behind the huge, tall front
steps at the back of the courtyard, was the dingy, smoky habitation,
stinking of wine, dirt, debauch, and vice.
One had to step over the bodies of male and female drunkards to get
inside the dens where such poor wretches came seeking some sort of
lodging and an hour of forgetfulness. It was at once hideous and
lugubrious. Amateurs of ugly sights might continue their studies hard
by, on the premises of "Gaffer" Lunette, in the Rue des Anglais. The
inhabitants were similar; a prison population--"bestiality in all its
horror," as Mephistopheles sings in the _Damnation of Faust_. Recent
building and sanitary improvements have done away with the "Red Castle."
The Rue Saint-Séverin is a picturesque medley of old houses round the
ancient Gothic church--"that flora of stone"--one of the most curious
perhaps in Paris; one of those that best preserve the traces of a past
of art, devotion, and prayer.
The sublime artists who, in several centuries, knew how to create the
forest of fine carvings with which the apse is adorned, have, alas! left
but sorry successors. By the side of old painted glass windows, brought
from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, other cold, modern stained
windows of loud colour have taken from Saint-Séverin's the religious,
poetical mysteriousness, the inviting half-obscurity that appeal to the
soul of the believer; and their crude light renders only too visible
the marks of successive mutilations inflicted on this fine church. In
the next street, the present clergy-house is built on the old graveyard,
where, in 1641--as the erudite Monsieur de Rochegude informs us--the
first operation for gravel was publicly performed on a criminal
condemned to death, who, happy man, was cured, and pardoned by Louis XI.
The whole of the quarter is one of the busiest in Paris. It would seem
as if the vagabonds, the lewd and their lemans, the tatterdemalions of
bygone centuries, had left there a direct line of descendants. People
live in the street, eat scraps in low drink-shops; a smell of spirits
floats in the air at the corners of the various cross-roads; bars and
petty restaurants are thronged with customers. Part of the money begged
or stolen in Paris is spent there.
[Illustration: THE PASSAGE DES PATRIARCHES
_Etching by Martial_]
Saint-Médard's church is quite close, with its small, dusty, quaint
Square, and its round tower at the end of the Rue Monge and the corner
of the Rue Mouffetard. It is a gloomy, rat-gnawed, poverty-stricken
church, looking as if worn-out with age; and is blocked in by old houses
covered with gaudy-coloured advertisements. It has left, far behind in
the past, the days when the tomb of the Deacon Pâris in it performed its
miracles, when the townsfolk and courtfolk crowded in the small
graveyard, a door of which still exists, the one perhaps whereon was
written the famous couplet:--
"In the King's name, forbid is God
To work a wonder on this sod."
[Illustration: THE RUE MOUFFETARD
_Charcoal Drawing by P. L. Moreau_]
The Rue Mouffetard passes in front of the church porch, overflowing with
life and activity. A hundred petty trades are exercised in it; the house
doors themselves--old eighteenth-century doors--shelter women-sellers of
flowers, milk, fried potatoes, cooked mussels; children play about the
middle of the road; carriage traffic is rare. Housewives gossip on their
doorsteps, people live together--and in the street. The Passage des
Patriarches, which opens at No. 99, was famous in days of yore. The
Calvinists, who used to preach there, had bloody quarrels with the
Catholics of Saint-Médard's. To-day, it is nothing but a dank, dirty,
melancholy alley, inhabited by bric-à-brac dealers, old-iron sellers,
and petty hucksters; and smells of rags, old lead, and cauliflower!
[Illustration: THE RUE GALANDE
_Lansyer, pinxit_ (Carnavalet Museum)]
Maubert Square is the converging centre of these strange streets. At
present, modernised and rearranged--adorned, if I may say so, with a
wretched statue of Etienne Dolet, who was burnt there in 1546--the
Square only vaguely resembles the "Plac' Maub'," still visible six or
seven years ago, ill-famed, narrow, bordered with old steep-roofed
houses, a den of vagabonds, full of suspicious lurking-corners where the
police might be sure of making good hauls. Near at hand, in the Maubert
Blind Alley, Sainte-Croix used to dwell; and it was in the same
mysterious retreat that Madame de Brinvilliers, the sorry heroine of the
Poisons drama so well told by our witty friend, F. Funck-Brentano, used
to meet her accomplice and with him prepare the terrible "succession
powder," composed, according to her avowal, of "vitriol, toad's venom,
and rarefied arsenic," which she made use of to poison her father, her
two brothers, and to try to make away with her sisters and husband.
[Illustration: THE PLACE MAUBERT
_Lansyer, pinxit_]
In 1304, Dante attended, hard by, one of the numerous schools of the Rue
du Fouarre; and, at the corner of the Colbert-Mansion Street, the
Faculty of Medicine had its amphitheatre. This curious building is still
almost intact with its ancient cupola, and would supply an admirable
piece of decoration to some retrospective museum of surgery.
[Illustration: THE OLD AMPHITHEATRE OF SURGERY
At the corner of the Colbert Mansion
_Etching by Martial_]
Not far from this spot, the Rue Maître-Albert--which up to 1844 was
called the Rue Perdue--owes its present name to the Dominican Maître
Albert who, in the thirteenth century, taught in the open air in Maubert
Square. It contains curious houses, to-day dens for tramps, who
spend the night in them. In 1819, an old negro of miserable appearance
and strange manners used to go down this dark street every evening,
trying his best to escape observation, and used to seek food and shelter
in one of its sorry eating-houses. People pointed him out as he went,
whispering that he was formerly Dubarry's black servant, Zamore, whom
Louis XV. had played with; Zamore who became a power, petted and courted
by noble lords, fine ladies, and princes of the Church that emulously
strove to gain the favourite's good graces. Later, having been appointed
a municipal officer under the Terror, he vilely, ungratefully, and in a
cowardly way, betrayed his benefactress, gave her up, and cast her
beneath the knife of the guillotine. At length, sinking lower and lower,
Zamore came and hid himself at No. 13, on the second courtyard floor of
this gloomy Rue Perdue, and died there on the 7th of February 1820.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF SAINT-NICOLAS-DU-CHARDONNERET, AND THE RUE
SAINT-VICTOR
_Drawn by Heidbrendk_ (Carnavalet Museum)]
The two churches nearest the spot are those of
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Connected with
the former is a dismal little seminary, in which, under the guidance of
the Abbé Dupanloup, the eminent philosopher Ernest Renan went through
part of his theological studies. Every one should read in the _Souvenirs
of my Childhood and Youth_ the admirable pages this marvellous writer
has devoted to his stay in this studious home. "The parish, which
derived its name from the field of thistles well known of the students
at the Paris University in the Middle Ages, was then the centre of a
rich quarter inhabited chiefly by the legal profession. The
boarding-school _régime_ weighed heavily upon me. My best friend, a
young man from Coutances, I think, like myself, full of enthusiasm, and
of excellent heart, held himself aloof, refused to reconcile himself,
and died. The Savoy students showed themselves still less
acclimatisable. One of them, older than I, owned to me that, each
evening, he measured with his eye the height of the three-storey
dormitory above the pavement of the Rue Saint-Victor. I fell ill;
apparently I was doomed. My Breton soul lost itself in an infinite
melancholy. The last angelus of evening I had heard resound over our
dear hills, and the last sunset I had watched over the tranquil
landscape came back to my memory like sharp arrows. In the ordinary
course of things I ought to have died. Perhaps it would have been better
if I had...."
[Illustration: THE RUE SAINT-JULIEN-LE-PAUVRE
_Etching by Martial_]
The artist Le Brun's mother is buried in the Saint-Charles chapel of the
church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret, and also Pierre de Chamousset,
the inventor of the petty Postal service. Parisian ladies, bless his
memory!
The church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre is set apart for the Greek ritual.
Enclosed on its sides and rear by the ancient buildings of the
Hôtel-Dieu, this melancholy-looking chapel is falling to ruin; a
stopped-up well with meagre weeds growing from its border-stones seems
to guard the door, which opens on a dirty, rubbish-strewn courtyard
where a few half-starved fowls peck their scanty meal. It is a nook of
poverty and suffering. The walls are damp and dingy; in these sombre
yards, where a few sickly trees barely exist, all is solitude and
abandon. Only three years ago, stretchers or ambulance carriages still
stopped from time to time in it, and from them were taken victims of
crime, disease, or accident, that had fallen in the street. Through the
vast Paris, busy and indifferent, monopolised by its pleasures or its
cares, one or another human wreck was brought to the Assistance Publique
in this dismal Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre with its suggestive name.
[Illustration: THE JARDIN DES PLANTES--THE CEDAR OF LEBANON AND THE
LABYRINTH
_Water-colour by Hilaire_ (National Library)]
To refresh ourselves after so painful a spectacle, let us come back to
the lovely Parisian quays, and walk along the fair river, quivering in
the daylight or in the moon's nightly rays; let us pass by the beautiful
mansions of the Miramionnes, of Nesmond, of Judge Rolland, in front of
the wine market--"catacombs of thirst," and pause at the old Jardin des
Plantes, dear to Buffon. A touch of the charm of things past, but not
entirely vanished, lingers yet!
The trees are centuries old, the ornamental hornbeams have not been
altered; there are aviaries and goat-pens which are the same as when
Daubigny and Charles Jacques sketched them in 1843, to illustrate the
handsome work published by Curmer.
[Illustration: THE JARDIN DES PLANTES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
_Water-colour by Hilaire_ (National Library)]
The reptiles are better housed than in our childhood; but the
hippopotamus wallows in the same basin; the giraffe stretches his neck
over the same enclosures, and the elephant holds through the same
railings his gluttonous trunk in search of rolls.
The bear-pit has not changed; and the crowd of idlers continue to tempt
the eternal "Martin" to climb up the same tree. Still to the noisy
children the delightful labyrinth offers its capricious meandering; and
the cedar of Lebanon (_Cedrus Libani_) [Linnæus], which tradition tells
us Monsieur Jussieu brought back in his hat, has not ceased to wave its
ample branches over dreamers, loungers, workers, or grisette--the
grisette that comes and sits beneath its venerable shade to read the
exciting magazine story which fills with sweet emotion her heart athirst
for the ideal!
And, in fine, is there anything nattier than the tiny rooms of the Louis
XVI. buildings? which once formed Buffon's natural history cabinet, and
whose delicate grey wood carvings made such a suitable framework for the
admirable butterfly collections brought from every country.
Within these finely decorated and cosy rooms there was, so to speak, an
ideal assemblage of blossoms, a fairy scene of exquisite colours, an
enchantment wrought by a brilliant palette.
There they were, all of them, beautiful butterflies, with their metallic
lustres from India and Brazil, French butterflies of a thousand tints,
both the great death's-head sphynx and the little blue creature of the
meadows.
Perhaps time had powdered and somewhat dimmed the marvellous brightness
of their first colouring; but it was better so. Their pristine lustre
would have been too great a contrast in the quaint surroundings, and it
was an extra charm to see such gems of the air thus lightly decked with
the dust of the past! To-day, alas! these rooms, flowering with
sculpture, are closed and forsaken; a part of their wainscoting has
disappeared.... Where have decorations so pleasing gone?... Why these
everlasting, culpable mutilations, which I know are a grief to Monsieur
Périer, the eminent Director of the Museum? The collections of
butterflies are now transferred to the vast and sumptuous central hall
of the new pavilion devoted to natural history. I liked them better in
the charming rooms which once contained them and suited them so well!
The water-flowers bloom, as of yore, in the same low, stifling
hot-houses, near the bizarre-shaped orchids; and it was in the old
amphitheatre, where so many illustrious scholars taught, that the noble
artist Madame Madeleine Lemaire,--the only "woman professor" that has
ever held a post at the Museum,--initiated her attentive, spell-bound
audience into the divine beauty of flowers!
In all periods, artists have come and installed their light easel or
their modelling-stands in front of the lions' cages, or in the Garden
itself, on the grass, opposite the antelopes, hinds, walla-birds, or the
goats of Thibet.
We remember, my brother and I, having, as little boys, accompanied our
father, who was modelling from life the tigers and lions in the wild
beasts' corridor. The odour was pungently alkaline, the heat sultry; we
heard the hissing of polecats in the entrance and exit rotundas;
sometimes a terrible roar, a complaint of anger, pain, or ennui, arose
and shook the panes.
Most of these unfortunate animals, deprived of air and light, shut up in
the horrible, narrow, stinking cages, died a lingering death of
consumption. Indeed, they quickly grew familiar with those who spent
whole weeks studying them; and their huge heads rubbed caressingly
against the thick cage-bars, while their eyes became soft and almost
tender.
Often we went, inquisitive, ferreting school-boys, to the reptiles'
menagerie, an old building crumbling with age, and passed long hours
peeping at the chameleons, gazing at the boa-constrictors, trying to
rouse the sleepy crocodiles, which seemed to be already stuffed! What
reminiscences and souvenirs in the dear old Jardin des Plantes, one of
the few "Nooks and Corners of Paris" that have remained almost
untouched!
[Illustration: THE JARDIN DES PLANTES--CUVIER'S HOUSE
_Water-colour by Bourgoin_ (Carnavalet Museum)]
On the side, the ancient house Cuvier lived in does not look very
stable, and perhaps would go to pieces but for the network of plants
round it: ivy, birthwort honeysuckle, lianes of all kinds caparisoned it
with verdure. They are carpets, cascades of glossy green, shining
together: a nosegay of leaves in a garden.
Behind the Jardin des Plantes is Salpêtrière with its walls of evil
memory, the Salpêtrière of the September massacres, the Salpêtrière
whence Madame de Lamotte so easily escaped after her condemnation; with
its broad gardens and its ugly covered-yards surrounded by railings,
where, as De Goncourt said, "Women madder than their fellows" are
confined. The dome, visible from everywhere, commands, like a lighthouse
of misery, all this quarter infected by the Bièvre, the poor, sacrificed
river, which is now in part walled over; the oily Bièvre, streaked with
tannery acids, reddened by skins of sheep recently flayed that steep in
it; the Bièvre which flows miserably and sordidly, but yet so
picturesquely, amidst starch factories, fellmongers' stores and other
works, after traversing the tiny gardens of Gentilly and creating the
illusion of a landscape in the quarter of the Fontaine-à-Mulard.
Gone is the time when this ill-starred river washed the banks of smiling
meadows and reflected the willows in its clear waters. Tamed,
domesticated, adapted to tasks of every sort, unceasingly used by
tanners, curriers, tawers, dyers, it flows dirty and putrid! To follow
it in its windings, the Rue du Moulin-des-Prés must be ascended, and
entrance made into the Rue de Tolbiac. There, through a gate, it enters
a dark, dismal passage, whence it will issue only to glide in a kind of
sinister-looking canal between black, repulsive manufactories. Here and
there, along the scanty banks, a few washerwomen have fixed their tubs
on a level with the water, and sing as they dolly their linen;
elsewhere, wretched urchins endeavour to catch a stray fish that might
have lost its way in the mephitic stream. Then the Bièvre disappears
once again and this time underground, coming to view afresh in the Rue
des Gobelins. At this spot, some rare traces of a glorious past are
discovered. The ancient houses have many of them remained. But how often
transformed! The owners of works and of shops, after enslaving the
river, have taken possession of the houses bordering it.
[Illustration: THE RUE DE BIÈVRE
_Drawn by Heidbrendk_]
Offices, warehouses, leather stores have invaded the noble mansions of
the sixteenth century, and the Bièvre winds, as if ashamed, through poor
gardens, like it, fallen from their antique splendour.
[Illustration: THE BIÈVRE TANNERIES
_Etching by Martial_]
Further on, there are more works and tanneries, black corners mean and
malodorous, where thousands of rabbit-skins, hanging in mid-air, hard
and dry, clash together with a noise of wood. To the very end, the
unlucky river, harassed and exploited, cleans blood-stained skins, moves
heavy wheels, or washes ghastly offal, amidst a smell as of barege.
Finally, it runs to earth once more beneath the Hospital Boulevard,
within evil-smelling, dark holes.
But before the last fall, the Bièvre passes through an astonishingly
strange lane, one of the oddest in this odd quarter: the Ruelle des
Gobelins. It flows as a stream of red, green, and yellow tints, between
patched-up, mouldy, tumble-down houses, in an odour of ammonia. And yet,
near these hovels, among the heaps of tan, beside pits in which are
macerating skins of flayed animals, a gem of carving rises as it were an
appeal of beauty, a vestige of past splendour. It is the sculptured
remains of an adorable Louis XV. pavilion of which Monsieur de Julienne
had made a hunting-box; and this lovely paradox, this blossom of stone
cast among such a mass of ugliness, is not one of the least surprises of
the quarter so fertile in matters for astonishment. Moreover, a few
yards from this sewer, the artists of the Gobelins Manufactory have laid
out their work-and-study-gardens, in which shine the purple, gold and
azure of the prettiest flowers in France. These, cleverly distributed,
arrange a carpet of exquisite and radiant colours athwart the
surrounding district of sombre sadness.
On the confines of the town, is the Butte-aux-Cailles, a vast piece of
waste land, cheerless and without charm, which, until 1863, was a sort
of fresh country spot, with mills and farms on it. To-day, it is a
quarter of hard labour, where numbers of rag-pickers classify the refuse
of Paris. At the corner of the Ruelle des Peupliers, faggot-dealers have
set up their huts; and hovels line strange streets made with the
clearings of other streets.
[Illustration: THE BIÈVRE ABOUT 1900--THE VALENCE MILL-RACE
_Schaan, pinxit_ (Carnavalet Museum)]
Once, these spacious grounds were one stretch of flower gardens and
market gardens watered by the Bièvre.
In a most interesting book, somewhat forgotten now, Alfred Delvau tells
us much of the former history, under Louis-Philippe, of the
Saint-Marceau faubourg, the Butte-aux-Cailles, the Rue Croulebarde, and
also the Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, in which last street the
"Shepherdess of Ivry" was murdered, the crime by its bizarre character
producing a deep impression in the Capital in 1827. It was a
public-house waiter, Honoré Ulbach, who had stabbed a girl, Aimée Millot
by name; she, as a keeper of goats, was popular at Ivry. Every day, she
was to be seen, with a large straw hat on her head and a book in her
hand, tending her mistress's goats. The "Shepherdess of Ivry" she was
called in the neighbourhood; in 1827, there were still shepherdesses in
Paris!
The trial that followed excited the whole town; the crime was one of
love and jealousy; the victim was nineteen; she was virtuous and a
shepherdess; women "cursed the murderer, even while pitying him
perhaps," wrote the newspapers of the time; and even the giraffe but
recently arrived at the King's Garden was neglected for the Ivry drama.
On the 27th of July, Ulbach, who seems to have been half-mad, was
condemned to death; and, at four o'clock in the evening on the 10th of
September, he was executed on the Grève Square.
A Municipal Crèche, in the Rue des Gobelins, occupies, at No. 3, a
fine Louis XIII. mansion, once inhabited by the Marquis of Saint-Mesme,
a lieutenant-general and the husband of Elizabeth Gobelin, close to a
handsome lordly-looking building which in the quarter bears the name of
Queen Blanche's Mansion.
The legend attaching to the latter is false, affirms Monsieur
Beaurepaire, the learned and amiable librarian of the City of Paris. "It
was," he says, "simply Catherine d'Hausserville's home, where Charles
VI. was nearly burnt alive during the performance of a ballet, his fancy
dress having caught fire." The edifice, with its noble appearance, forms
a strange contrast in this poor yet picturesque district.
Another fine mansion, in the Rue Scipio, is the one built by Scipio
Sardini, in the reign of Henri III., with terra-cotta medallions, rare
Parisian specimens of the exceedingly pretty decoration that pleases us
so much at Florence, Pisa, and Verona. This Scipio Sardini was a
peculiar man, and his story deserves to be told. Of Tuscan origin, he
came to France after the death of Henri II., just when Catherine de
Medici seized the reins of power. Amiable, witty, ingratiating, a great
financier, clever in his enterprises, and unscrupulous, he quickly
gained a preponderant position in the frivolous, dissolute, mirth-loving
Court. He excelled in combining business and pleasure. An illustrious
marriage seemed to him essential to people's forgetting his low origin
and the rapid rise of his fortunes. He married the "fair Limeuil," one
of the most seductive beauties of the Queen's flying squadron--"All of
them capable of setting the whole world on fire," said Brantôme. This
attractive person had been successively courted by the most noble lords
of the Court before effecting the conquest of Condé, by whom she had a
child. At Dijon, during one of the Queen's receptions, Mademoiselle de
Limeuil was taken ill and was delivered of a boy. "It is inexplicable,"
writes Mézeray, "that such a prudent woman should have so
miscalculated." There was a scandal; the Queen Mother was indignant; the
fair Isabella was imprisoned; but Condé who was still amorous, succeeded
in effecting her escape. The Protestants, however, were on the watch,
and induced their leader to give up his too compromising mistress. Then
it was that Scipio Sardini came forward, the richest man of the period,
the King's banker, as also the nobles' and clergy's. He managed to get
himself accepted; the marriage took place; and he settled in this pretty
mansion that we still admire, and that is mentioned by Sauval as one of
the most beautiful in Paris, amidst vineyards, orchards, and fields
bordering on the Bièvre. There he lived, surrounded by luxury, works of
art, books and flowers, and died there about 1609. As early as 1636, the
mansion was converted into a hospital, which in 1742 was once more
transformed, this time into a bakery. To-day, it is the Bakery of the
City of Paris Hospitals.
Let us keep along by the Wine Market, and, before crossing to the right
bank of the river, respectfully pause on the Stockade Bridge, close to
the small monument erected to the famous sculptor Barye by his
admirers,--to the great Barye who, misunderstood and mocked, sold up by
his creditors, often came in the evening, after leaving his modest
studio on the Célestins Quay, to forget his sufferings and muse in this
same place before the splendid panorama of Paris crowned by the grand
silhouette of the Panthéon. Here, too, is one of the City's best views.
* * * * *
Nothing is more relative than an impression felt. To certain minds in
love with the Past, this or that ruin is much more affecting than the
most modern palace; it is the same with streets, houses, and pavements.
An exquisite hour to call up the soul of old Paris is at twilight.
The colour peculiar to each object has melted into the general shades
and tints spread by the day which is departing and the night which
comes.
Delicate lace-work outlines stand out against the sky, while huge
violet, black, and blue masses of atmosphere bathe whole streets in
fathomless mystery. Then thought awakens, souvenirs revive and grow
clear; scenes are lived through again of which these streets and houses
were the silent witnesses. One hears cries of fury or of joy; drums
beat, bells ring, groups pass singing 'mid these dream visions that rise
again!
In order to enjoy such an experience no better spot could be chosen than
the Stockade Bridge, which, with its barrier of black beams, as it were
shuts off to the east Paris of the olden days.
The City slumbers in the calm of evening, the smoke curls lazily up.
Afar sound bells; swallows sweep crying in the air embalmed by falling
night; noises ascend vague and weird, interpreted according to the fancy
of one's musings. All life seems to sleep; the soul of the past awakes.
It is the hour desired.
[Illustration: THE CONSTANTINE BRIDGE AND STOCKADE
_Etching by Martial_]