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.