THE BOURGEOIS AND THE LOWER CLASSES
INTRODUCTION
[Illustration: THE MARTYR; MEROVINGIAN PERIOD. By F. Bac, from a
tapestry.]
If the capital of the French nation, situated on the river Seine, were
simply the most beautiful, the wittiest, wickedest, and most artistic of
towns, if--as has been so often asserted (and not exclusively by the
citizens thereof)--the most commonplace and the most brilliant of human
manifestations alike take on new qualities, texture, and interest the
moment they become Parisien, then, indeed, would this city be entitled
to be considered only with that mild offence which is the proper
intellectual attitude before all so-claimed earthly superlatives. But
Paris is by no means to be so disposed of. The very peccability of her
wit is demonstrated by the extravagant claims which it permits itself.
No God-given institution proclaims itself as such,--at least, noisily.
It is the shadings to this brilliant picture, the exceeding width and
depth and blackness of the sun-spots on this luminary of civilization,
which relieve us from any easy toleration and compel us to the liveliest
attention. One of her many qualities is that of representing and, too
often, of acting for the whole country,--indeed, _la centralisation_ is
one of the four great evils (the others being the abuse of _alcool_, _la
pornographic_, and the stationary birth-rate) which are recognized by
its own citizens as menacing the nation. So that, in a general way, for
both good and bad, Paris reads France.
Well, the heights and depths which we are called upon to contemplate are
not unendurable, but they are certainly in many respects unexcelled.
"France," says one of her most eloquent and dignified historians, "has
justly been termed the soldier of God;" "Other continents have monkeys,"
says a learned German philosopher; "Europe has the French." Any
community or locality which offers, or is considered by intelligent
observers to offer, such a range as this, is certainly worthy of high
renown and deep research, and it is not too much to say that Paris
justifies her fame. Within her walls the human mind has displayed its
loftiest development, and the human passions their most insane excesses;
her art and her literature have erected beacon-lights for all the ages
to come, and have but too frequently fallen into the depths of more than
swinish filth; her science of government has ranged from the Code
Napoléon to the statutes of Belial himself; her civilization has
attained an elegance of refinement unknown to the Greeks, and her cigars
and lucifer-matches are a disgrace to Christendom!
Happily, as in several other human institutions, there is more of good
than of bad. The so-called "seamy side" of cities is not like that of
flour-bags,--equal in extent and importance to the fair outer surface
that meets the eye. Much as has been published of the depravity of
Paris, it is not that, but the splendid activity of her material and
intellectual civilization, the serious confronting of the heavy problems
of humanity, the intelligent accumulation of the treasures of the mind
and the hand, legislation, literature, art, science, that impress the
intelligent visitor. Moreover, it is the annals of unhappy nations only
that are said to be interesting, and it is impossible that a quick human
interest should not attach to the contemplation of this capital which
has attacked so many problems, maintained so many struggles, and endured
such crushing reverses. In the light of her most troubled history the
import becomes clear of the galley on her shield, and her motto:
"_Floats, but sinks not._" But few capitals have been more frequently,
apparently, on the point of being submerged. Even as these lines are
being written, it is agitated by the protracted and cumulating effects
of a military and social agitation which, in the language of the
President of the Cabinet of Ministers, "is deplorable, which paralyzes
all commerce and creates a situation intolerable to all."
[Illustration]
Indeed, it may be said that the present moment is the most critical, the
most dramatic, in the long history of the city and the nation, and that
an entirely new interest will henceforth attach itself to this crowned
capital which sees herself in the inevitable future forever uncrowned.
Never before has the pitiless march of events, the pitiless accumulation
of irrefutable evidence, the testimony of so many observers, at home and
abroad, so seemed to demonstrate that all the methods of government had
been exhausted, and that the nation had attained her summit of power and
was doomed to steady decline. Down to Louis XIV, her hope was thought to
lie in the consolidation of the royal authority and the suppression of
the feudal power of the nobles; down to 1789, in the _tiers état_ and
the States-General; after the Commune of 1871, in the maintenance of a
Republic supported by universal suffrage. The ideals of 1830 and of 1848
have been practically attained; there are, finally, no new and more
liberal political expedients to hope for,--and never has France seen
herself so distanced by her neighbors. Her contemporary literature
groans with the accumulation of these facts--from the ineptitude of her
rulers, national and colonial, down to the dependence upon the
foreigner for wood for her street pavements and the canned provisions
for her army. Behind that "gap in the Vosges" upon which, as one of her
statesmen remarks, she cannot forever fix her gaze, she sees her great
and hated rival doubling in power. In 1860, Germany had the same
population as France; to-day, she has that of France and Spain combined.
"Never has such a displacement of power been so quickly produced between
two rival peoples. And no one among us seems to regard it, though not
one of the problems which torment us is as grave as this one. Our
agriculture, our industry, our commerce decline; we seem to be in
decadence! How could it be otherwise? There are, in the neighboring
hive, beyond the Rhine, sixteen millions of workers who were not there
forty years ago,--that is the explanation of the progress of our
neighbors as well as of the stagnation of our own activity. All the more
that the quality of the French tends to diminish with their quantity;
... we can foresee the day when there will be two Germans against one
Frenchman, and this prospect fills us with fear for the future of our
country, for we cannot comfort ourselves with illusions, we cannot
believe in the perpetual peace, we know that history is a _Vie Victis_
continual."
Therefore, let us hasten to contemplate this great and most admirable
Babylon before Cyrus comes.
_Paris, Rue Boissonade._
INTRODUCTION
GALLO-ROMAN AND PRE-MEDIÆVAL PERIODS
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTING BREAD, TWELFTH CENTURY.
Water-color by George Rochegrosse.]
Lucotocia, says that somewhat inexact geographer, Strabo, "is the city
of the _Parisii_, who dwell along the river Seine, and inhabit an island
formed by the river." Ptolemy, who has been thought to have been
somewhat better informed concerning the Parisii than with regard to any
of the other small tribes of Gaul, calls their capital LUCOTECIA; but
both they and their town appear for the first time in history
fifty-three years before the birth of Christ, when Cæsar, in his
_Commentaries_, relates, himself, that he summoned a general assembly of
the Gauls at LUTETIA, the capital of the Parisii. At this date, he was
already master of the greater part of the country now called France.
More than four hundred years later, Julian, surnamed the Apostate,
nephew of Constantine the Great, after having passed more than two years
in this city, which he called "his dear LEUCETIA," was proclaimed
emperor here by his soldiers, who refused to obey the orders of
Constantius and return to the East. It is surmised by the scholars that
the imperial author of the _Misopogon_ adopted this form of the name of
the town on the Seine through an affectation of deriving it from the
Greek, in which language he wrote, and, as is still evident in those of
his works which have survived, in a style remarkably pure.
Lutetia, of which the modern French make Lutèce, is supposed to have
been derived from the Celtic _louk-teih_, which signified the place of
morasses; and the name of the Parisii from the Celtic _par_, a species
of boat, and _gwys_, in composition _ys_, man, whence _parys_,
boatmen,--these islanders being supposed to have been skilful
navigators. But they are said to have called themselves
_Loutouchezi_,--that is to say, a residence in the midst of the waters.
Other etymologists cast doubts upon all these deductions, and the matter
is not very important. The early Parisians were one of the smallest of
the Gaulish tribes, and preferred the islands to the mainland as a safer
place of residence; they were surrounded by the Carnutes, Senones, and
other, stronger people whose names have not been perpetuated. Of their
ten islands and sand-banks, which were preserved until late in the
Middle Ages, there are now only two remaining, the Ile Saint-Louis and
Ile de la Cité. The ancient town, like the modern one, lay in the centre
of a "tertiary" basin, about sixty-five mètres, or two hundred and ten
feet, above the level of the sea, broken here and there by low hills.
The modern historian, Duruy, quotes Strabo as finding a proof of divine
providence in the fortunate configuration of the soil of Gaul; and that
writer testifies that the whole country was inhabited, even in the
marshes and woods. "The cause of this is, however, rather a dense
population than the industry of the inhabitants. For the women there are
both very prolific and excellent nurses, while the men devote themselves
rather to war than to husbandry."
The antiquity of the inhabitants of Gaul is now pushed back by the
learned far beyond the days of Cæsar. M. A. Thieullen, in two
communications addressed to the _Société d'anthropologie_ at Paris
(January and February, 1898), maintained that the chipped flint
arrow-heads found at Chelles and Saint-Acheul, which have been
considered as the earliest works of prehistoric man, are, in reality, in
common with the polished stone hatchets of the Neolithic age, the
products of an industry in a high state of development, the result of
successive essays by numberless generations. In this theory he is
supported by other scientists, among them the English geologist,
Prestwich; and in this insistence upon the artistic quality of the
chipped and polished flints and the prodigious number of rudimentary
utensils which have preceded and accompanied them is found another
argument in favor of the great antiquity of man and his existence in the
tertiary period. The soil of Paris has furnished many of these superior
flints, and the comparative state of civilization to which the locality
early attained is further testified to by the discovery, in the early
months of this year, 1898, by an enterprising proprietor on the edge of
the forest of Fontainebleau, of the site of a prehistoric pottery on his
grounds. This locality, opposite the village of Ecuelle, was already
noted for the menhir, or prehistoric upright stone, standing on the
right bank of the canal. The ancient potteries seem to have occupied a
space about five hundred mètres in length and two hundred in width; at
the depth of sixty-five or seventy centimètres below the surface there
is found "a black sand, burned, beaten down, trodden, which gives forth
a resonant sound when attacked by the pick-axe; this arises from the
fact that it has been, through a long series of centuries, tormented by
the incessant passage of men and the innumerable fires of the furnaces."
From the specimens of pottery extracted from this sand, it is concluded
that this manufactory had been maintained from the Neolithic age down to
the Gallo-Roman period. In the little village of La Mouthe, in the
department of the Dordogne, farther south, have been discovered within
the last few years, in a cavern, very curious and not unskilful outline
drawings on the rock, sometimes touched up with color, of now extinct
animals,--the extreme age of these works of art being demonstrated by
the fact that they are in many cases partially covered with stalactites.
The learned scientists who have uncovered and photographed these incised
drawings conclude, from their appearance and from the fragments of
animals' bones found in the cavern, that they are the work of men of the
Neolithic age and the Palæolithic, which preceded it. In short, there is
every reason to believe, on the strength of all the testimony which
modern science has wrested from the unwilling records of the past, that
the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary
with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with
cleft nostrils.
[Illustration: FRAGMENT OF ROMAN AQUEDUCT, STILL IN EXISTENCE, ON THE
PROPERTY OF M. RASPAIL, AT ARCUEIL.]
It is not to be supposed, however, that these very ancient texts are
read without the necessary stumbling over obscure passages and much
upsetting of cherished historical truth. The finest presentations of
ancient records that we find in grave historians are now set aside by
learned archæologists in communications to the _Académie des Sciences à
Paris_ or the _Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres_. Even the
original number of islands in the Seine and Cæsar's statements
concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed.
When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is
profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch _quaternaire_ or
_pléistocène_ four successive divisions,--in their order of antiquity,
the _Chelléen_, the _Moustérien_, the _Solutréen_, and the
_Magdalénien_; M. Perrier du Carne thinks that the traces of the Solutré
and of the Madeleine show them to have been derived from two races long
contemporary on the same soil, of which the former were autochthonous
and the latter, immigrants, who came in with the reindeer and followed
him when he retreated northward. M. Piette objects to the word
_Magdalénien_, and proposes to replace it by _glyptique_, for, during
this period, man learned to carve bones with flint instruments; after
the _Solutré_ he places the epoch _Eburnéenne_, and after that, the
_Tarandienne_, characterized by instruments in reindeer's horns. After
the quaternary period, Professor Alexandre Bertrand, of the École du
Louvre, places the _Mégalithiques_, whom he thinks belonged to the great
ethnological family of the Touranians which preceded the Aryans in
Europe, and who erected the great stone monuments, dolmens, menhirs,
cromlechs, etc., formerly called druidical, found in various parts of
Europe. Several of these _monuments mégalithiques_ have been discovered
in Paris and its environs,--a street of the Faubourg du Temple owes its
name of Pierre-Levée (raised stone) to the fact that at its opening, in
1782, an enormous ancient rock was found artificially supported on two
others, the funerary tumulus, or mound, which formerly covered it having
disappeared.
As it is impossible to attribute any longer these prehistoric monuments
to the "Celts," or to "their priests, the Druids," so do others of our
historical illusions vanish. M. Duruy, in his learned _Histoire de
France_, states that at the dawn of history the country known as Gaul
was "divided between three or four hundred tribes (_peuplades_)
belonging to the three great families,--the Celts, the Iberians, and the
Belgians." M. Guizot says that "in the south were Iberians or
Aquitanians, Phoenicians and Greeks; in the north and northwest,
Kymrians or Belgians; everywhere else, Gauls or Celts, the most numerous
settlers, who had the honor of giving their name to the country." M.
Salomon Reinach, in his detailed description of the monuments in the
Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under the general title of _Antiquités
nationales_, declines to recognize the _race celtique_; in accord with
the science of anthropology he distinguishes various Gaulish types and
is aware that they nowhere present themselves in a pure state. Professor
Bertrand "superposes" upon his _Mégalithiques_, whose distinguishing
trait in Europe is their use of polished stone, another race,
numerically inferior and much less ancient; these are the "_tribus
celtiques_ or _celtisées_ of the Aryan race." When they arrived in Gaul,
they were already familiar with the use of metals, especially bronze,
beginning to be acquainted with iron; they were pastoral and
agricultural, and burned their dead. About the sixth century B.C.
appeared a third group, the _tribus galatiques_, Helvetians, Kymrians,
Belgians; they were wandering bands of warriors, who used iron
implements only and buried their dead. "From the superposition, rather
than from the fusion, of these divers elements has resulted that which
is called _la nation gauloise_ or _celtique_."
Naturally, the religions of these varied nations were as diversified as
their origins. The Druids, according to Professor Bertrand, so far from
forming the priesthood of a practically homogeneous race, can be said to
have had no influence upon the religion of the people, who were alien to
them and who remained faithful to their own worship of the spirits or
powers in nature and to their superstitious practices. "Druidism was,
then, neither a dogma, nor a religion, nor a particular theogony, but a
social institution with an organization analogous to that of the great
abbeys of Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, or to the Lamaism of
Thibet. The Druids lived in communism, like the Lamas." Moreover, M.
Bertrand refuses the Druids all their fine old qualities,--human
sacrifices; worship of stones; solstitial ceremonies, such as the
Yule-log and fires on the eve of Saint John; the herbs of Saint John;
the worship of fountains; the worship of trees, and medical
prescriptions. Even more, what Guizot calls their "noblest
characteristic, a general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief
in the immortality of the soul," was less a particular doctrine of their
own than a sentiment innate in the race; "they had only to develop ideas
the germ of which had not been imported by them." Nevertheless, so well
organized was their communal order that they were, before the Roman
epoch, the only central, definite power capable of consecutiveness in
its conceptions and of unity in its views, and their influence over a
gross and ignorant people was proportionally great.
To the _chamanisme_, or belief in the spirits that pervade nature, and
in the power of man over them by magic arts, of the original Touranians,
the Celtic tribes brought the worship of natural forces,--the sun, fire,
torrents, tempests, mountains, etc.; but neither they nor the Druids had
any human figures or symbols in their pantheon. The invasions
_galatiques_ or _kimrobelge_, on the contrary, brought in from the
Orient a cult already strongly anthropomorphous, and with these symbols,
traditions, and divinities those of the Greeks and Romans became mingled
to a greater or lesser degree that it is impossible to determine,
because, as it appears, all that we really know of the Gaulish religion
before the Roman conquest is reduced to a few lines in Polybius, in
which can be found the name of _Perkunas_, the Perkun of the Slavs.
Cæsar identifies the gods of the Gauls with the Roman ones, Mercury,
Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva; and M. André Lefèvre, in the _Revue
mensuelle de l'École d'anthropologie_, asks, without being able to
answer: "How is it possible that such men as Cæsar and Tacitus were able
to confound with Mercury the supreme gods of the Gauls and the Germans;
but, still more, how is it that the Gaul should have adopted with
enthusiasm the Latin name and forgotten the Gaulish name of his supreme
god?" M. Reinach is considered to have proved beyond a doubt that the
god with the mallet, the Dispater of the Gallo-Roman period, was a sort
of copy, in Gaulish attire, of the Egyptian Serapis; and the
inscriptions of the imperial epoch testify to the diffusion of the
worship of the divinities of Alexandria from Arles and Nîmes, in the
extreme south, to Besançon, almost on the borders of Switzerland, and
Soissons, northeast of Paris. Nevertheless, those archæologists who have
thought they found traces of the art of Egypt and Babylon in that of the
original cave-dwellers are now considered to have been deceiving
themselves; and M. Reinach has modified the opinions he held a few years
ago on the early religious art of Gaul. "In short, what we know of
Gaulish mythology amounts to nothing, or practically nothing."
Various rude images and fragments of altars found under the modern
pavements of Paris at different dates and localities--among others,
under the choir of Notre-Dame in 1710--have revealed the names, if not
the characters, of some of the ancient divinities of the soil, _Esus_,
_Jovis_, _Volcanus_, _Tarvos trigaramos_, _Cernunnos_.
But if the scientists grope doubtingly in these twilights of history,
the romancers relate boldly. One of them, M. Henri Lavedan, has been
calling up the Parisienne of the Lacustrine age, "_gran' maman
archi-centennaire_" of her of the present day. This is how she was.
"Large, thick, and short, with a vigorous figure, shaking out coarse and
matted hair, the feet bare, the arms bare, the breast half bare and
unrestrained under her species of primitive corset. The body is that of
a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat
hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting
nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that
are simple and elementary, is lit up by eyes grey or blue, eyes limpid
and tranquil, which regard without vivacity, without appearing and
disappearing lights, without surprise, the eyes of an animal under the
yoke and resigned to it, eyes only too well acquainted with the eternal
landscape which they have been reflecting ever since they were first
opened. The step is slow, sure, heavy, and majestic. Under her petticoat
of sombre color may be divined two great legs, the legs, almost, of a
man, two legs of labor and of endurance. She sings naturally, this
woman, when she is alone, vague songs, sort of fugues of savages, very
simple, which seem to have neither beginning nor end, but in the company
of others she is almost taciturn, replying by gestures, by signs,
accomplishing her task with a passive regularity. She scarcely knows the
lighter shades of sentiments and expressions. She laughs or she weeps.
No smiling. When she laughs, it is with a large display of the solid
white teeth of a carnivorous animal; when she weeps, it is with the deep
sobs of a beaten child. She is strong and patient like the ox, she runs
like the horse, she resists cold, heat, and fatigue; her sleep is
profound and without dreams. She is more mother than wife, in the animal
sense of the word; she is capable of courage, of rude goodness and of
devotion, but all of these naturally and by instinct. Her life may be
hard and long, she may retain until a very advanced age the plenitude of
her vigor, and die splitting wood or turning the mill.
"Should the wife cease to please her husband, he sells her again; should
she commit a fault, he strips her (the garments will serve for the new
spouse); then he takes her by the hair and smothers her in the marsh.
Nevertheless, however miserable may be her condition of a domestic
animal, this creature has passions. Tacitus informs us that adultery was
not unknown to the purchased wife. The male children belonged to the
father, and always remained with him; as to the aged, the old relatives,
useless and cumbering, they were put 'in a place apart,' a sort of
hollow in the neighborhood of the hole for the hogs or the enclosure for
the cattle, and there was thrown to them the remnants of the meals. The
family sentiment, the voice of kindred blood, did not, as yet, make
itself heard very distinctly."
[Illustration: THE BATHS OF THE EMPEROR JULIAN, CORNER BOULEVARDS ST.
MICHEL AND ST. GERMAIN. Restoration.]
This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the
ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the
barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue
of courage. Cæsar says that when a man of importance died, his wives
were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being
instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it
was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite
clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their
choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an
equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were
offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one
of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845,
indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.
Of the many attempts that have been made to restore the primitive man in
his environments, one of the most learned and interesting is that shown
by M. Cormon, the painter, in his series of large decorations for the
_plafond_ and walls of some ethnological museum, exhibited in the Salon
of 1898. But an artist is an impossible archæologist; the more of an
artist he is, the more will he be unwilling to represent the merely
bestial, as the scientist finds it; and though the original inhabitant
of the valley of the Seine and other favored spots may have circulated
in some such early landscape, and have garbed himself and tattooed
himself somewhat as the painter here paints him, it is probable that
there was far less of the picturesque and presentable about him, of
grace of attitude and whiteness of skin in his women-folk, than in any
artist's presentation on a self-respecting canvas.
The habitations of the early Parisian were equally unlike those familiar
to the Cook's tourist. On the pedestal of an antique statue of Melpomene
of heroic size in the Louvre is a relief representing the head of a
supposed Gaul defending his house against a Roman soldier, and this
sculpture, confirmed by others on the column of Antoninus at Rome of
those of the German barbarians, gives this dwelling as a species of
circular, upright hut, covered with a conical-shaped roof constructed of
branches and reeds, or thatch, or perhaps of a half-spherical piece of
wood.
In the soil of the tertiary, or quaternary, basin in which Paris lies
are found traces of marine plants, oyster-shells, skeletons of fish,
etc., which indicate that it has risen from the bottom of the sea. As
every one knows, the Seine, flowing in a general direction from east to
west, curves toward the north to traverse the heart of the city, the
former Palais de l'Industrie, but just demolished, having occupied
nearly the centre of the upward curve of this bow. On the south, the
river receives the waters of the Bièvre, a feeble stream which flows
through a narrow valley, and, farther eastward, those of the river
Marne. Under the Roman domination and that of the first Merovingian
kings, that part of the city lying immediately south of the river seems
to have become the most populous and important almost as soon as the
narrow limits of the original islands became too confining. The pride of
the Faubourg Saint-Germain may date itself back for some fifteen
centuries. A central, principal street traversed the city from south to
north, entering it in the general direction of the Rue Saint-Jacques,
passing on the east side of the imperial palace whose ruins may still be
seen in the Musée des Thermes, at the corner of the Boulevard
Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel. Under the Rue Saint-Jacques
remains of the ancient pavement have been found at a great depth, and a
fragment of it is preserved in the Musée de Cluny. The Roman street
crossed the small arm of the Seine on a wooden bridge, near where is now
the Petit-Pont, traversed the Ile de la Cité, at the western end of
what is to-day the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, and crossed the larger
branch of the river near the site of the present Pont Notre-Dame. On the
northern shore, it followed for some distance nearly the course of the
present Rue Saint-Denis, and then forked,--one branch continuing in a
general northerly direction toward Senlis, and the other turning off to
the northwest, in the direction of the Bourse, toward Clichy,
Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, and, finally, Rouen by the valley of the
Montmorency.
Of the stately buildings erected by the Roman officers sent to govern
the city on the Seine and the province of which it was the capital, the
only remains now above ground are those preserved in the Musée des
Thermes, in somewhat curious juxtaposition with the late
fifteenth-century Hôtel de Cluny. These ruins represent the great Roman
baths of the palace, the _frigidarium_, the _piscine_, the _tepidarium_,
and, somewhat deeper, the _hypocaustum_, or furnace for heating. By
their size and importance, these ancient walls testify to the dignity of
the imperial palace which rose on this site, and, surrounded by its
gardens, extended along the southern bank of the Seine. Of the date of
the erection of this _Palatium Thermarum seu Thermæ Parisiaci_ nothing
definite is known; it is generally ascribed to Constantius, surnamed
Chlorus, "the pale," father of Constantine the Great, who died in 306
A.D. It is considered certain that it was occupied by Julian, and by
Valentinian I, and Valens; after the expulsion of the Romans by the
Franks, it served as a residence for the kings of the first and second
race, and was still an important edifice in 1180 when Philippe-Auguste
presented it to his chamberlain, Henri. About 1340 it passed into the
possession of the Abbé of Cluny, Pierre de Chaslus.
These very antique walls are preserved by the national authorities in a
manner that might be considered as more satisfactory to the lovers of
the picturesque than to the archæologists. They are exposed to all the
disintegrating influences of the sun and rain, much blackened by the
Parisian climate, which darkens everything exposed to it, and largely
overgrown with creeping vines. They are constructed of squared stones
interspersed with layers of brick, with rectangular and arched niches,
filled-up arches at the base of which may be seen still the remnants of
the prows of ships, and in the niches are still the remains of the
earthenware pipes that conveyed the water to the baths. The student of
architecture is interested to observe here that the Roman bricks were
much longer than ours, and only about an inch and a half thick. Their
original, cheerful red still shows occasionally through the Parisian
blackness. He will, however, probably be somewhat disturbed by the fine
indifference of the authorities to styles and chronologies. In the place
of the missing wall of the _piscine_ is set the arched porch of the
cloister of the Benedictines of Argenteuil; inside the enclosures are
tumulary stones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, found on the site of the
publishing house of Hachette. In the pleasant green garden in front of
these ruins, and in which the bare-legged Parisian children play at
soldiers or at digging gravel in the paths, are more incongruous
mediæval bits of architecture and sculpture,--placid Madonnas and
Annunciations, much defaced by time; gargoyles from the church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in what may be called the size of life,
agonizing and tormented by queer little beasts like weasels under their
throats or bellies, and, guarding the gateway at the angle of the
boulevards, three great, deformed figures of the animals of the
Evangelists, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Ox, from the tower of
Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, where they have been replaced by copies.
For a number of centuries these ruins were forgotten, and were even
concealed until 1810 under hanging-gardens constructed above them. In
1819 it was proposed to establish in the Thermes a museum for the
Gaulish and Roman antiquities discovered in the soil of Paris; but this
project was not carried out until 1836, when, through the action of the
Prefect of the Seine and the Conseil Municipal, the remains of the Roman
palace became the property of the city. Seven years later, the State
having acquired the Hôtel de Cluny and the collection Sommerard, the
city offered the Palais des Thermes to the national government, and the
two museums were united in one national one. The project of M. E. du
Sommerard, of clearing away all the surrounding modern buildings,
opening the new streets and planting the garden, was finally put in the
way of being realized in 1856.
The site of this palace, the ruins of which are among the most important
in France, was on the lower slopes of Mount Lucotitius, afterward the
mount of Sainte-Geneviève, overlooking both the city and the Roman road
to Genabum (Orléans). Its dependent buildings and enclosures seem to
have extended as far south as the Rue Soufflot, in front of the
Panthéon, ruins of foundation-walls having been located at various
periods in this quarter. Its magnificent baths were probably preserved
during the earlier Christian centuries, when the civilization of the
Romans had not entirely disappeared, until the siege of Paris by the
Normans in the ninth century. On this (southern) side of the river have
also been discovered the ruins of an amphitheatre, traces of a quarter
or barracks for soldiers, another establishment of baths, the aqueduct
of Arcueil, a great cemetery on the southern slopes of Mount Lucotitius,
secondary roads, and a port on the smaller arm of the Seine. In the
Luxembourg garden have been unearthed at various periods numerous
fragments of painted walls; seven hundred large Roman medals in bronze
and two hundred in silver, all enclosed in a species of chest of tiles,
and covered with a silver plate, and supposed to have been the treasury
of a rich Gallo-Roman country-house; a statuette of Mercury; a bust of
Cybele; pits to preserve grain, etc.
Another of these important palaces or suburban villas was seated on the
northern slopes of the Butte Montmartre, which rises some hundred mètres
above the level of the Seine, on the other side of the river,--a site
which gave it an admirable extended view over the city and the
surrounding plains. The most important ruins which have been discovered
north of the river are the remnants of the aqueduct to convey water from
Passy, large basins on the site of the Palais-Royal, various highways
branching off to the north and east and extensive cemeteries near these
roads, and numerous Roman medals and coins in various
localities,--sufficient to demonstrate the existence of an extensive and
important population. Montmartre is supposed to have derived its name
from having been the site of a temple of Mars (_Mons Martis_); or from
having been the scene of the martyrdom of Saint Denis, the first bishop
of Paris, and his companions, A.D. 270 (_Mons Martyrum_).
Buried under the modern pavement of the Ile de la Cité, the Gaulish
_Oppidum_, are many vestiges of the Roman occupation. In 1847 numerous
remains of the construction of houses during this period and of what
was considered to be a church dedicated to the Virgin were discovered
under the open place in front of Notre-Dame; of these, careful drawings
were made, engraved, and published in the _Statistique monumentale de
Paris_ and the structures then covered up again; in the following year,
excavations made in the course of enlarging the Palais de Justice
brought to light in the court of the Sainte-Chapelle and under the
houses to the south of it remains of walls of the ancient Roman palace.
The old historians of Paris, indeed, relying upon the testimony of
Ammianus Marcellinus, state that one of the two Roman palaces was
situated in the western end of the island which formed the ancient
Lutetia. In 1844 the laying out of a new street between the Palais de
Justice and the Hôtel-Dieu revealed two portions of edifices the use of
which was unknown, but which, by the thickness of their walls and the
nature of their construction, were supposed to have formed some part of
the public structures. It has been considered that these various
vestiges of important buildings situated in the centre of Lutetia
indicate that they surrounded an open market-place or commercial
exchange.
But the discovery of one of the most important and interesting vestiges
of the Gallo-Roman city was reserved for the latter part of the year
1869, when, in laying out the Rue Monge, on the eastern slopes of Mont
Sainte-Geneviève, there was revealed the ancient amphitheatre, with
which no Roman city of importance could dispense. Although these
important vestiges lay only some twelve mètres below the surface, and
though at least two passages in mediæval chronicles were known which
alluded to the locality, this contribution to the history of the city
was delayed to this late date. Alexandre Neckham, a professor in Paris,
writing in 1180, mentions, in the course of four verses, the vast ruins
of a Roman amphitheatre, dedicated to Venus, which was situated near the
Abbey of Saint-Victor. Adrien de Valois cites a _cartulary_, or registry
of a monastery, dated in 1310, in which mention is made of three
sections of vineyards situated in the district known as _les Areinnes_.
A date for the construction of this amphitheatre was conjectured by M.
Adrien de Longpérier, from the bringing together of three of the broken
stones of the edifice--selected from the sixteen bearing inscriptions
now in the Musée Carnavelet and from twelve others bearing similar
inscriptions and evidently from the same source, but which were found in
1847 in the Parvis-Notre-Dame, having been taken in later days to
construct the wall of fortification of the city. By placing three of
these fragments in order, M. de Longpérier was enabled to decipher the
names of two of the Gaulish emperors who lived in the second half of the
third century of our era, from which he concluded that it was a portion
of the imperial inscription, and that the construction of the
amphitheatre accordingly dated from this period. The pride of the
Parisians, however, took offence at this interpretation, and it was
considered as highly improbable that the Romans "should have delayed for
more than two centuries and a half to construct, for the use of the
population of a city as important as Lutèce had become, a monument
similar to those the ruins of which have been enumerated in more than
fifty Gallo-Roman cities,--a figure which shows how much the diversions
of the amphitheatre and the theatre were relished by the Gauls." M.
Gourdon de Genouillac, in his history of Paris, decides that the
structure dates from the second century.
[Illustration: REMAINS OF ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE, RUE MONGE, DISCOVERED IN
1869.]
It may be observed that, in the third century, Roman Gaul became a
practically independent State,--from A.D. 258 to 273, from Posthumus to
Tetricus, its connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own
emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising
spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus
Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic
influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille
Jullian before the _Académie des Inscriptions_ in 1896, "as we would
willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third
century, it was entirely superficial, and doubtless slightly factitious;
it resembled that reaction in the life, the language, the traditions of
the provinces which the French Romanticism brought about in 1815. Like
that, it in no way changed the ideas of the nation, it had no influence
upon the political and social destinies of Gaul." With regard to the
fondness of the ancient Gauls for histrionic and spectacular
performances, we may quote M. Reinach again: "The qualities and the
defects of the present inhabitants of France may all be found again
among the Gaulish contemporaries of Cato and Cæsar. The warlike humor,
the facility of elocution, the curiosity--often turbulent, have
remained, throughout the centuries, the portion, more or less enviable,
of the inhabitants of Gaul."
An important publication in folio by Firmin-Didot, _Paris à travers les
Ages_, gives the following description of the amphitheatre of Lutetia.
"But few constructions are visible around the arena, elliptic in shape
and measuring fifty-four mètres on its long axis and forty-seven on the
short one. This was the space reserved for the combats of animals, for
the hunts and other spectacles. A podium, or enclosing wall, surrounded
this arena in its entire circuit, and the thickness of this wall was
such that it resisted the thrust of the sides of the Mount Lucotitius,
on the eastern slopes of which the edifice was constructed. The places
arranged for the spectators of the games, around the arena, were
evidently placed, on the west, on the slope of Mount Lucotitius, where
have been found walls converging toward the centre of the structure to
support the tiers of seats running in the contrary direction. The
benches may have been supported by constructions which have now
disappeared; the various fragments of architecture discovered in the
excavations must have formed part of the decoration of the edifice, as
well as the stones that were employed in the military wall of
fortification of Lutetia during the later period of decline."
The discovery of these ruins caused much excitement among the savants of
Paris at the time. The Société de Numismatique visited the excavations
in a body, several archæological and antiquarian associations united in
drawing up a paper, which was presented to the Emperor, advocating the
preservation of this "antique theatre of the popular festivals of the
Gauls, the arena in which had perished for liberty of conscience the
ancestors of the French nation, the field in which sleep the martyrs of
Lutèce." A petition was likewise addressed to the Chamber of Deputies;
Napoleon III visited the locality in person; but the Municipal Council
hesitated before the expenditure of 300,000 francs for this purpose, and
the ground was actually purchased by the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus.
This interesting excavation, but little known even to the Parisians, has
now been transformed into a public garden, in the quarter between the
Panthéon and the Jardin des Plantes, and is well worth visiting. The
ancient Mont Lucotitius still heaves itself under the modern Parisian
pavement, and the grades frequently become so steep that they have to
be abandoned, and terraces and retaining-walls substituted. Although
much less than a half of the oval of the original arena has been
uncovered, the explorations have reduced the houses on the Rue Monge to
but little more than tall façades. From under their rear walls emerge
the amphitheatre and some of the curving rows of seats in stone, the
latter much restored. In the walls of the arena are two rectangular,
barred entrances, and one lower, arched one, from which we may imagine
the gladiators or the wild beasts emerging. The floor of the arena is
left in a roughly gravelled condition; at present, nothing more
formidable is to be encountered there than three very little French boys
making mud-pies in the puddle formed by last night's rain. A fourth,
still smaller, is at some distance, absorbed in some dry engineering of
his own at the foot of the old wall. Seated in the steep little green
park which rises above the terraced seats, crowned with trees and
shrubberies, and vocal with a prodigious twittering of birds, are three
or four idle, bare-headed young women in "shirt-waists," one with a
lover, and an old gentleman with a red ribbon reading his morning
newspaper. The traveller can place himself on one of the benches in this
pleasant little greenery, look down on the infantile engineers below,
and make appropriate reflections.
A still more important architectural feature of the ancient city was the
great aqueduct which supplied the baths of the palace on the river, its
fountains and those of the populous quarter around it. The waters of
three or four small streams to the south of the capital were united and
conveyed in a channel, lined with cement, 19,100 mètres in length, which
traversed the slopes of the hills on the eastern side of the Bièvre, and
remains of which have been found at various points. To cross the valley
and the stream, an aqueduct was constructed on arches at the locality
which took the name of Arcueil, and where some of the masonry is still
preserved in modern construction, "this aqueduct being some four hundred
mètres long and fifty (?) high." It is computed that a supply of
twenty-four cubic mètres of water was furnished every twenty-four hours.
Remains of other and smaller aqueducts have been discovered at various
points in the city. At Passy, surrounding the present Trocadéro, there
were springs of mineral waters, which were conveyed to the city by
terra-cotta pipes, passing along the banks of the Seine. In 1781, in the
gardens of the Palais-Royal, were discovered the remains of great basins
which are supposed to have been the piscines of the hygienic baths.
Remains of Roman aqueducts have been found at various other localities
in France, at Nîmes, at Lyons, at Metz, etc., and that over the Gard is
still standing in part.
Among the bridges constructed by the Gauls, Cæsar mentions that of Melun
on the Seine; one on the Allier, near Vichy; that of Genabum (Orléans),
and that of Lutetia, over the larger arm of the Seine, on the site of
the present Pont Notre-Dame. Of that over the Allier and of the Parisian
one, some of the ancient piles have been found in the bed of the rivers.
Remains of the ancient wall of fortification of the capital have also
been brought to light, at various localities and at different dates. The
excavations in the Parvis-Notre-Dame in 1847 discovered a section of the
Roman wall twenty-six mètres in length, as well as the substructure of
the porch and the front portion of the nave of the original basilica,
constructed by Childebert and dedicated to the Virgin. These latter
foundations, some thirty-two mètres in front of the present cathedral,
demonstrate by their position, and by the probable width of the
primitive edifice in proportion to its length, that they were
constructed to the west and inside of the enclosing wall of the city, a
portion of which had been found under the choir of the cathedral. The
basilica constructed by the son of Clovis probably rose on the site of
the altars consecrated to the Roman or Gaulish gods, Jupiter, Vulcan,
Esus, and others, and which, before the construction of the city wall,
were visible from all sides. The enclosing wall, on the contrary, fenced
in the basilica, since it was necessary to protect this part of the
city, as well as all others. The somewhat unimposing aspect of
Notre-Dame, which was founded in 1163, may be ascribed in part to the
raising of the level of all the surrounding soil, for, as the histories
tell us, so late as 1748, it was reached only by ascending a flight of
thirteen steps, whereas now it is on the ordinary street-level.
This wall of defence was not commenced till about 406, when the
barbarians began to invade Gaul, and was apparently constructed in great
haste, if we may judge by the manner in which materials were borrowed
from surrounding buildings of all kinds. It is described as being
something over three and a half mètres in thickness at its base, which
was constructed in rough stone, frequently of small size, and sloping to
a height of two mètres. On this was erected a wall of dressed stones,
each successive layer set back, like a step, so that at the top it was
only some two mètres in width. It might be thought that this manner of
building offered considerable facilities to an escalading enemy.
On the largest stone of those discovered in 1711 under the choir of
Notre-Dame was deciphered an inscription which recorded the erection of
this altar to Jupiter, "very great, very beneficent," in the reign of
Tiberius Cæsar, by the corporation of _nautæ_, or mariners, apparently
the most powerful in the city, and the prows of the ships at the foot of
the arches in the ancient palace of Thermes are supposed to have been
connected with the same guild, though this architectural ornament is by
no means uncommon in ancient art. It is from these _Nautæ Parisiaci_
that the modern city derives its arms,--a vessel with distended sails.
(If any doubting tourist inquire concerning the maritime commerce of
Paris, he will be proudly referred to the barges which may be seen at
all the quais, and, even more, to the little steamers from London which
contrive to get under the bridges.) In some of the modern records this
ancient corporation is given great importance--with many _sans doutes_
and _il paraîts_--in the history of the city, both before and during the
sway of the Romans. Cæsar found it "fully organized," though it was
founded on the Roman corporation of the _Nautæ Tyberis_, navigators of
the Tiber, composed of senators, magistrates, and knights, which
transported grain and other merchandise from the port of Ostia to the
capital; and it was the original of the later _maison de la marchandise
de l'eau, de l'hôtel de Ville et du conseil municipal_ of Paris. The
activity of the Lutetian shippers and navigators covered the territory
bathed by the Seine, the Marne, and the Oise, all of them quite
navigable. The ruins of the Gallo-Roman buildings discovered in the Cité
in 1844, at the opening of the Rue de Constantine, were the remains of a
market or forum for the sale of provisions; and the corporation had,
near the port, an office or bureau for the regulation of this river
commerce. Opposite the port, on the northern side of the Seine, they
controlled also another point of landing, at the Grève, where, later,
was established the _prévôté de l'eau_, which developed into the
Parisian municipality. The port on the Cité, on the larger arm of the
Seine, received in the Middle Ages the name of Saint Landri, this bishop
having had an oratory, and perhaps his residence, in the neighborhood.
Under the Later Empire, in the reign of Posthumus, the northern suburb
having increased in size and importance, a market was placed at the
Champeaux, on the site of the present Halles Centrales, and the port of
the Grève became, as it has remained ever since, a point of landing for
merchandise coming from the upper Seine. The port on the southern side
of the river, near the great road from Genabum, was established on the
site of the mediæval _Quai de la Tournelle_, the great tower which
replaced that of the southern wall of fortification of the city built by
Philippe-Auguste. This quai still serves at the present day as a
landing-place for the barges.
[Illustration: FLIGHT OF LEUDASTE, A MEROVINGIAN. From a drawing by Jean
Paul Laurens]
In the reigns of Louis the Fat and Louis VII, the successors of the
_Nautæ Parisiaci_ were known as _mercatores aquæ parisiaci_, and they
were the origin of the municipal body charged with the policing of the
river navigation and commerce. Later in the Middle Ages, this small
species of Hanseatic League had a commercial station at
Marsons-sur-Seine, and its maritime jurisdiction extended as far as the
city of Mantes, situated on the western limits of the territory of the
Parisii. The sources of the Seine, near the farm of the Vergerots in the
commune of Saint-Germain-la-Feuille, were held in great veneration in
Gallo-Roman times, and a temple, the remains of which have been found,
was erected in their honor. In 1867 the Municipal Council of Paris set
up a monument "to the sources of the river which has given its name to
the department of the Seine, and to which Paris owes its ancient
prosperity."
The overrunning of Gaul by the barbarians, the latest historians tell
us, did not present the imposing spectacle of a great invasion in which
armed hosts of valiant and robust warriors trod down the effeminate and
corrupted civilization of the Romans, pillaged and ravaged the seats of
refinement and luxury in city and country, slew and carried into
captivity without respect for age or sex.
Long before the invasions of the fifth century the Germans had been
established in the empire, both as colonists and as soldiers. The
legions composed of Germans are said to have been even more amenable to
discipline than the Roman ones. The first who established themselves in
Gaul were the Visigoths and the Burgundians; the former, flying before
the Huns, appeared as suppliants on the frontiers of the empire in the
closing years of the fourth century. Ataulf (Ataulphus), the successor
of the imperial puppet Attalus, set up by the conquering Alaric, came
into Gaul early in the fifth century, became the ally of the Emperor
Honorius, married his sister Placida, and marched to the conquest of
Spain. The Visigoths, being thus installed in Gaul, admitted the
Burgondes (Burgundii) in a neighborly manner; we are even told that they
considered themselves as honored by the friendship of the Romans, and
pretended that they had a common origin. Their kings proclaimed
themselves lieutenants of the emperors, and fed their vanity by the
Roman titles with which they invested themselves. The historian Orosius
says the Burgundii were a quiet people, with gentle manners, respecting
the civil authorities, and living in friendly relations with the Gauls.
Both Visigoths and Burgundii promptly abandoned their national religions
and traditions and adopted Christianity, but they followed the Aryan
sect,--"unfortunately," says Duruy. Some modern French historians, on
the contrary, attribute the greatness of France to this circumstance.
The Gallo-Romans were orthodox.
When the Huns, driving the Germans before them or passing over their
bodies, appeared on the frontiers of Gaul in the year 451, they were met
by an army commanded by a Roman, Aëtius, but composed of Romans,
Burgundii, Visigoths, Franks, and Saxons, which defeated them at the
famous battle of the _champs catalauniques_, over the locality of which
the historians are still disputing. When the Franks appeared, at the end
of the fifth century, the army of Clovis contained a large number of
Romans, and from the time of the sons of Clotaire, the entire
population, without distinction of race, was called upon to do military
duty. It is even said that it was only the Gallo-Roman chiefs of the
armies who acquired military renown. Notwithstanding all this, there are
still historians of the present day who speak of "the catastrophe of 406
breaking abruptly the bond which attached the barbarians to the Empire
of the West." Some of these latter are disposed to see in Clovis, after
his conversion, the founder of modern political society, a creator of a
nationality, a maker of civilization,--titles which are freely denied
him by others. His success was owing, it is said, not to his victories,
but to his conversion. He was baptized by the Bishop of Reims, Remi, on
Christmas Day, 496. "From that date, he had the alliance of the bishops
throughout all Gaul against the Visigoths and the Burgondes, and his
reign was assured."
This conversion, it is said, had been earnestly desired by his wife
Clotilde, a niece of Gondebaud, King of the Burgondes, who had
stipulated with her royal spouse that her first-born should be
"consecrated to Christ by baptism." It also contributed greatly to his
final establishment in Paris, a capital which he had long coveted and
from which his predatory attacks had been constantly turned aside by the
efforts of a virgin, Sainte-Geneviève, whom the Parisians still honor as
their patron saint. The central position of this city, between the Rhine
and the Loire, enabled him to keep a watchful eye upon Brittany,
Aquitaine, the Burgondes, and the Frankish tribes of Belgium.
At his death, his kingdom was divided among his four sons, Paris, with
Poitiers, Périgueux, Saintes, and Bordeaux, falling to the lot of
Childebert. From the confused records of these barbaric times the names
of two women issue, and have remained permanently engraven upon the
tablets of history,--one of them as that of a personification of
Christian and feminine virtues rare at any age and doubly so in these
dark ages, and the other that of a monstrous queen whose crimes have
made her immortal. Radegonde was a daughter of Bertaire, King of
Thuringe, killed by his brother Hermanfried at the instigation of the
wife of the latter; the murderer invited Thierry, King of Metz, and
Clotaire, King of Soissons, sons of Clovis, to invade the kingdom, and
in the partition of the booty, Radegonde fell to the share of Clotaire.
Charmed by her original beauty, the king had her educated with unusual
care, and, later, married her, but the queen sought only to forget her
earthly dignities in ministering to the poor, in pious meditation, and
in long conversations upon the Scriptures with some learned prelate.
"She is a nun," said Clotaire, "and not a queen;" and he ended by
killing her last surviving brother. Whereupon she fled to Noyon and
implored Saint Médard at the altar to give her the protection of the
Church; Clotaire threatened and protested, but finally permitted her to
found a church and a convent at Poitiers, in which she immured herself
till her death, in 587,--thirty-seven years. "During this long seclusion
she constantly mingled with good works and with the austerity of
religious exercises the culture of letters; constantly also did she
guard her cherished traditions of the domestic hearth, and we find her
living again in the awkward verses of the greatest poet of that time,
Fortunatus, who had himself ordained priest that he might never be
constrained to leave her."
At the death of Clotaire, the monarchy was again divided into four
kingdoms, those of Paris, Soissons, Metz, and Burgundy,--soon reduced to
three by the death of Charibert, King of Paris. The Burgondes were under
the sway of Gontran, the Austrasien and Eastern Franks under Sigebert,
and the mingled population of Franks and Gallo-Romans which were called
Neustriens, or the Westerners, under Chilpéric. Aquitaine was divided
between the three, and Paris was already of so much importance that none
of them was willing to yield her to the others, and it was agreed that
no one should enter the city without the consent of the other two. The
royal authority was weaker in Austrasie, now Belgium and Lorraine, the
petty chiefs stronger, and the manners and customs more Germanic and
barbaric; in Neustrie, now Ile-de-France, Normandy, etc., there were
more ancient cities, mere remnants of the Roman civilization and
vestiges of imperial administration. To the political rivalry to which
this disparity gave rise was added the personal animosity of the two
queens, Frédégonde and Brunehaut.
While Sigebert was fighting the Avars, barbarians from Asia, on the
eastern frontier, his two brothers amused themselves by pillaging his
western provinces. Chilpéric had taken, for a most unwilling bride, a
younger sister of Brunehaut, Galswinthe, daughter of a king of the
Visigoths, notwithstanding the fierce jealousy of his mistress, or his
first wife, Frédégonde; her empire was, however, soon regained, and
Galswinthe was strangled in her sleep. Brunehaut incited her husband,
Sigebert, to a war of vengeance; Paris was taken, and Chilpéric only
saved from ruin by his wife, who despatched two assassins against the
King of the Neustriens. The rights of inheritance of her son, Clotaire,
were impaired by the existence of two sons of Chilpéric by a former
marriage. One of them, Mérovée, imprudently married the widowed
Brunehaut, and his step-mother sent him to rejoin Sigebert. The Bishop
of Rouen, Prétextat, who had already narrowly escaped with his life, in
Paris, from the terrible queen, had blessed this marriage; he was killed
on the steps of the altar while celebrating mass. Clovis, the brother of
Mérovée, followed; then one of his sisters, and Audovère, the mother.
The king left Paris for Chelles one afternoon, for the chase; he had
previously entered his wife's apartment while she was occupied with her
toilette and struck her playfully on the shoulder with a light
wand,--the queen mistook him for another, and answered, without turning
round: "_Tout beau!_ Landry," and other words of great familiarity. Then
she perceived her error, and the king went out without a word; as he
dismounted, on his return, some one slipped a knife into his heart, "and
no one thought it worth while to run after the murderer."
Charibert, the short-lived king of Paris, had in his royal palace a serf
named Leudaste, who, when a fellow-servant, Markowefe, attracted the
monarch's favor and was made queen, contrived to ingratiate himself with
her to such an extent that he was made grand equerry and, later, Comte
de Tours. In his administration he proved himself capable of every
outrage; but the death of Charibert compelled him to seek refuge with
Chilpéric, and he endeavored to win Frédégonde's favor as he had
Markowefe's. When Tours fell into the hands of Chilpéric, in 574,
Leudaste was re-established in his office and resumed his old practices;
two years later, upon a petition addressed to the king by the bishop,
Saint Grégoire de Tours, he was dismissed. Thereupon he hatched a plot
against the bishop and against the queen who had not interposed to save
him; he declared to the king that the former had conspired to deliver
Tours to the King of Austrasie, and that the queen had done him an even
greater wrong, and he offered to produce witnesses. But his case fell to
the ground; the king, threatened with excommunication by the clergy for
bringing false charges against the revered prelate, threw all the
responsibility upon Leudaste, and that individual, diligently sought
for, had prudently disappeared.
He was accordingly solemnly excommunicated and declared anathema "from
the crown of his head to the sole of his feet." After some two years
passed in pillage and debauchery at the head of an organized band of
brigands in the domains of Gontran, he obtained permission to return to
Tours, and had the audacity to come and seek his pardon at the court of
Neustrie. Chilpéric tolerated his presence, but advised him to avoid the
queen. As the sovereigns were one day attending mass in the basilica of
Paris, Leudaste entered boldly, traversed the crowd, and knelt at the
feet of Frédégonde, imploring her forgiveness. The king had him expelled
from the church, but, instead of taking warning, he lingered in the
shops around the market-place in the Cité, selecting jewels and rich
stuffs with which to propitiate the queen; when she issued from the
church and saw him, she despatched her guards to arrest him; one of them
was wounded, and another gave him a sword-cut over the head; as he fled
across the Petit-Pont, he fell and broke his leg. The manner and quality
of a torture that should be appropriate for him were carefully discussed
by the royal pair; he was tended by eminent physicians that he might be
duly strengthened for it; but when Frédégonde learned that gangrene had
appeared in his wounds, she had him dragged from his bed, stretched on
the pavement with his neck on a great iron bar, and his head crushed by
another heavy bar in the hands of the executioner.
After the murder of Chilpéric, the people began to murmur, and the
gentle King Gontran, according to Saint Grégoire of Tours, "in order to
put an end to the evil custom of killing kings, went one day to a church
where all the people were assembled for the mass, commanded silence
through a deacon, and said: 'I conjure you, men and women who are here
present, keep for me an assured fidelity, and do not kill me as you have
lately killed my brothers. Allow me to live at least two or three years,
that I may educate my young nephews, for fear that, after my death, it
should happen that you should perish with these children, since there
will remain of all my family no man strong enough to defend you.'"
Nevertheless, he had the courage to raise doubts as to the legitimacy of
Frédégonde's son, Clotaire, and to postpone his baptism till she
produced three bishops and three hundred other witnesses in his favor.
Brunehaut's son, Childebert, was threatening the queen with an armed
force; he and Gontran agreed to be each the other's heir in case they
died without children, and on Gontran's death Childebert endeavored to
take possession of Clotaire's domains also. Frédégonde had him poisoned:
the dreary series of civil war and family murders began again; Clotaire
II became in the end sole king of the Franks, and his mother died in her
bed, "full of years." Her rival, Brunehaut, less fortunate, betrayed by
her own followers, was, by Clotaire's orders, tied naked to the tail of
a wild horse and dragged to death.
Such were the manners and customs of the Mérovingians.
[Illustration: DEATH OF SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE. After the mural painting, in
the Panthéon, by J.-P. Laurens.]
There are various accounts of the two patron saints of France and Paris.
It is to Grégoire de Tours that we owe our first knowledge of Saint
Denis, who, according to his statement, came to preach Christianity in
Lutetia in the year 245, with the friar Rustique and the deacon
Eleuthère. Dionysius, bishop of the Parisians, he says, full of zeal for
the name of Christ, suffered many persecutions, and finally martyrdom.
Other historians assign to Saint Martin, rather than to Saint Denis, the
glory of having converted the Gauls to Christianity; some place his
mission even before the year 100, and the Abbé Hilduin confounds him
with Saint Denis the Areopagite. But, according to Grégoire, Denis,
Rustique, and Eleuthère were beheaded in the year 272, by order of the
préfet Percennius, on a mountain situated near Paris, which accordingly
took the name of the Mont des Martyrs (Montmartre). The préfet had given
orders to have the bodies thrown into the Seine, but a Roman lady, named
Catulla, although not a Christian herself, caused them to be sought for
in the night and piously buried in a locality known as Catolocus. Grain
was sown over the graves, and when the fury of persecution was passed,
they were disinterred and deposited in a tomb.
According to the popular legend (to which the municipal and national
authority has given a sort of official sanction by M. Bonnat's very
vigorous and realistic presentation on the walls of the Panthéon), after
having had his head struck off, the saint arose on his feet, picked it
up and walked away, carrying the severed organ in his hands, to the
great surprise of the spectators. In this manner he traversed the space
of a league, till he came to the spot where his church now stands, the
angels meanwhile chanting around him _Gloria tibi Domine_, and others
repeating three times the _Alleluia_. It was this unusual promenade that
gave rise to the well-known proverb that it is only the first step that
costs.
In 286 the weight of the Roman yoke and the persecutions of the
Christians had become so cruel that there was a rebellion, headed by
Salvianus Amandus and Lucius Pomponius Ælianus, who put themselves at
the head of the slaves and the _colons_ of Paris and Meaux, were
elevated on bucklers, and proclaimed emperors near the site of the
present Hôtel de la Ville. To them were speedily joined the _bagaudes_
(insurgents) of the surrounding country, and it required a very serious
effort on the part of the Roman troops, under the command of Maximien
Hercule, associated with Diocletian in the government of the empire, to
restore order.
Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of the Parisians, also perpetuated
with her legend on the walls of the Panthéon, originally her church but
now dedicated to the _Grands Hommes_ of the nation, was born at
Nanterre, near Paris, in 422, and guarded in the fields the flocks of
her parents, Sévère and Gérontia. She is said to have known Saint
Germain d'Auxerre, and to have promised him to devote herself to the
service of God; her reputation for sanctity, confirmed by several
miracles accomplished, was such that when the city was thrown into a
panic by the approach of Attila and his terrible Huns (begotten, it was
asserted, in the deserts of Scythia by the union of sorceresses and
infernal spirits) her voice was listened to as that of one qualified
from on high. Nevertheless, there were certain obstinate ones who
doubted her assurances of safety; there was even question of stoning her
for false counsel; but she, mounting a little eminence, assured her
fellow-citizens that, though Attila was indeed advancing, he would not
attack their city; this she stated in the name of God. That was
convincing, and, indeed, the dreaded conqueror turned his march toward
Orléans, and was preparing to pillage it when he was vanquished by
Aëtius and Théodoric.
A second time she came to the rescue of the capital when it was suddenly
attacked, in 476, by Childéric at the head of his Franks. His first
efforts were directed toward cutting off all supplies by the river, and
in this he was so successful that the Parisians speedily found
themselves reduced to a diet of fish and roots, with no bread at all.
Geneviève was touched by their sufferings, she embarked on a little
flotilla of fishermen's boats, and succeeded in escaping through the
enemy's lines in the most marvellous manner. Her return was anxiously
awaited; for nine days there was no news of her, and the famine grew
more cruel; finally, the lookouts on the towers perceived something in
the distance on the bosom of the river; it approached; it was she, with
eleven vessels filled with provisions of all kinds, of which she herself
superintended the distribution. Each one of the nine days had been
marked by some miracle, in the pursuance of her object. Monsieur Puvis
de Chavannes has recently devoted a large mural painting to this pious
legend. Nevertheless, Childéric took the city, in which he dwelt but
very little.
Pagan though he was, he partook of the general veneration for the
saintly virgin, and could refuse nothing to her earnest entreaties. It
was during his reign that she conceived the idea of building a church to
Saint Denis on the site of his tomb; by her prayers and entreaties she
succeeded in inducing the clergy and the people of Paris to raise the
necessary funds, and she commissioned a priest by the name of Genès to
construct the edifice. Clovis, son and successor of Childéric, had no
less consideration for her, but the basilica which he erected, in
connection with his wife Clotilde, and in consequence of his vow made
during the war with the Visigoths, was originally dedicated to Saint
Peter and Saint Paul, and did not take the name of Sainte-Geneviève
until later. It was completed after his death by Clotilde, who caused to
be interred in it the bodies of her spouse and the saint.
The famous _châsse_ (shrine or casket) of Sainte-Geneviève, preserved in
the abbey bearing her name which was completed in the reign of
Philippe-Auguste, and enriched by successive gifts of various
sovereigns, was constantly appealed to during many centuries, taken
down, solemnly carried in procession through the streets escorted by
barefooted clergy, whenever any of the innumerable evils from the hand
of God or man afflicted her good city of Paris.
[Illustration: A MEROVINGIAN QUEEN. From water-color by F. Bac.]
THE COURT AND THE UPPER CLASSES
FROM THE OPENING OF THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT DAY
[Illustration]
Any one traversing the handsome, formal garden which now occupies the
site of the ancient palace of the Tuileries, official residence of the
rulers of France after the red days of the Revolution, may perceive in
the midmost of the central alley, directly in the axis of the long vista
between Napoleon's two arches of triumph, that of the Carrousel and that
of the Place de l'Étoile, an important marble group by the sculptor
Mercié, set up on a high pedestal. This monument represents a vanquished
and wounded French infantry soldier, with bandaged feet, sinking and
clutching for support at the skirts of a robust peasant woman wearing
the typical head-dress of Alsace-Lorraine, who snatches the real
Chassepot, whitened to imitate marble (furnished by the courtesy of the
Minister of War), from his failing grasp. The whiting is wearing away
from the real Chassepot, the grime of the Parisian weather is settling
into corners of eyes, under noses, etc.; the pathos and sentiment of the
work suffer accordingly, and it may be doubted whether any pathetic, or
would-be pathetic, work of sculpture is ever really effective, even if
wrought by a very clever contemporary French artist. But it is to be
noticed that on this national and historic site, in what might be called
the physical centre of the nation, the most prominent monument
commemorates, not the national glories and triumphs, but a humiliating
and overwhelming national disaster. Facing the square of the Carrousel,
between the arch and the Louvre, is the much vaster monument of Gambetta
in marble and bronze, with long extracts from his orations in the evil
days of '71 engraved on the tall shaft which rises behind him,--a most
ostentatious commemoration of defeat. Farther west, the great Place de
la Concorde is surrounded by handsome pavilions and balustrades, with
eight stately, seated female figures of heroic size typifying the
principal cities of France. To one of these the traveller's attention is
at once directed by the funerary contributions in which she is half
smothered,--draped flags, great wreaths and disks of immortelles and
black bead-work, similar to those seen on the tombs in the cemeteries,
with commemorative inscriptions: "From the Societies of the Inhabitants
of Alsace-Lorraine;" "14th July, 1898" (the day of the national _fête_,
commemorative of the fall of the Bastile); "_France! Souviens toi!_" on
a huge yellow circle like a life-preserver, and, on a circular disk at
the feet of the statue:
[Illustration QUI VIVE! FRANCE! L. D. P. QUAND MÊME]
This curiously-garnished statue is that representing the city of
Strasbourg, which is no longer a French city; and of all the others,
which illustrate nothing particularly mortifying or mournful in the
national history, no proclamation whatever is made. In the centre of the
handsome court-yard of the new and imposing Hôtel de Ville, the statue
selected as the central jewel of this _écrin_, as it were, is Mercié's
_Gloria Victis_, the vanquished here being, again, France. (It should be
stated, however, that if any work of contemporary sculpture is worthy of
honor and of proud municipal recognition, it is this admirable bronze.)
Many of the great public places in the city of Paris, moreover,
commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains
on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the
Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than
twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hôtel
de Ville was formerly the Place de Grève, famous in all hangmen's
annals,--burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the
wheel, decapitations, hangings,--from Catherine de Médicis' Huguenot
chiefs and the unlucky Comte de Montgomery; Lally-Tollendal, Governor of
the Indies; Foulon, _contrôleur-général_ of the finances and his
son-in-law, hanged to the street lanterns by the mob, down to the famous
regicides and the obscure and ignoble multitude of criminals of all
ages. The Place de la Bastile commemorates the fortress-jail of that
name,--one of the worst of all jails and one to be discreetly forgotten;
the column of July, in the centre of this place, was erected in memory
of the victims of the Revolution of 1830. The statue of Henri IV on the
Pont-Neuf marks the spot where the Grand Master of the Templars and one
of his officers were burned at the stake; on the _carrefour_ of the
Observatory, that of Marshal Ney, the locality where that brave soldier
was shot by order of the Chamber of Peers; from the little bell-tower at
the side of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, back of the Louvre,
the signal was sounded for the Saint Bartholomew. The Châtelet and the
Conciergerie were famous prisons; the ruins of the palace on the Quai
d'Orsay have been but just removed, to make room for the new depot of
the Orléans railway, after having stood since 1871 a most eloquent
monument of the excesses of the Commune. It was even proposed to leave
the shattered walls of the Tuileries as a permanent record of the
follies of an unbridled democracy!
[Illustration: ARMED PARISIANS MEETING THE KING, 1383.
From an illuminated manuscript in the National Library, Paris.]
This expansiveness, this frank parading of unseemly things, is
supplemented by other public demonstrations of the passion of the hour.
For some years after the fall of the Commune the national emotions found
solace in stencilling in big letters on every possible wall or _fronton_
or pediment, public or private,--_Liberté._ _Egalité._ _Fraternité._ The
harassed citizen of the new republic looked up, or down, or sideways, at
this official assurance of the sentiments breathed by all, high or low,
and found comfort. Only, the wits of the agitated capital--who perceive
some, but by no means all, of the opportunities which their
fellow-citizens afford them--took occasion to read this text with the
punctuation-mark--(.) _point_--after each noble word. _Point_ is also
the strongest of negations, so that the official declaration of faith
was reduced to nullity,--"Liberty, none; Equality, none: Fraternity, not
the slightest!"
All this seems to constitute a curious national trait, and in
literature, in the daily journals, the observing traveller is again
impressed with this unbosoming, which the Parisian himself would
probably brand as _naïveté_ if he could perceive it. It flourishes
perfectly side by side with his vanity; in fact, it probably has its
origin in his vanity. "The Causes of Our Defeat in 1870," under various
titles, have furnished and are still furnishing matter for interminable
publication. In municipal affairs, the unshakable conviction that Paris
is, simply, the only capital in the world does not in the least
interfere with frank admissions concerning its limitations, which the
least public-spirited villager in other climes would neither believe nor
admit. Here, the journalist, the romancer, the historian, find in the
most simple human demonstration, if it take place in the capital,
something peculiarly and most admirably _Parisien_. Balzac, _e.g._, in
the _Double Famille_, if we remember aright, brings two of his
characters together late at night in a dusky street; the younger man
thinks he recognizes the elder, but is not certain; he therefore
approaches him doubtfully "as a Parisian does when he is undecided."
This endless and childish delight in everything appertaining to his
town, and the accompanying frank indifference to everything, pretty
much, outside of it, is, in fact, so well known abroad that it has even
brought down upon the Parisian's unconscious head the epithet that he
would consider the uttermost of insults--"provincial!" He provincial! he
who has invented those two withering words, "the provinces" and
"bourgeois."
Nevertheless, this capital of all possible civilizations does not
hesitate to admit that it must by all means do all in its power to
attract the wealthy tourist of other nations, on whom its prosperity is
so largely dependent, especially since it has no longer the attractions
of a royal or imperial court to offer. No presentation of the city of
Paris at the present day would be complete without documents giving the
opinions of its own cultured and intelligent classes on its general
characteristics and its most urgent needs. With regard to this question
of dependence upon strangers, endless quotations might be cited, and two
or three may well be printed here as more valuable contributions to this
contemporary history than any speculations by mere foreigners. The
_Revue Encyclopédique_, published weekly by the great house of Larousse,
has a column which it devotes to _ideas of general interest_,
underscored, and in this column appeared, in the issue of January 23,
1897, the following communication: "For some time past the Avenue de
L'Opéra, at Paris, has been lighted by electricity by means of
incandescent lamps placed along the central axis of this great
thoroughfare. This very handsome illumination serves only to accentuate
more strongly the monotonous melancholy of the double row of commercial
establishments the fronts of which are invariably closed at eight
o'clock in the evening.... And sorrowful reflections are awakened of the
brilliant evenings of thirty years ago, the movement of foreigners along
the boulevards, the crowd of promenaders constantly changing before the
dazzling show-windows of the end of the Second Empire. Why is not some
effort made to revive this brilliant past by creating attractions
capable of arousing the curiosity of the Parisians and, above all, of
the foreigners? Could not some arrangement be made among all the
shop-keepers of the grand boulevards and of the principal adjacent
streets (Rue de la Paix, Rue Royale, Avenue de l'Opéra, etc.), that one
evening a week be devoted to the exceptional adornment of their
establishments?" And the writer goes on to suggest, with Parisian
ingenuity, that a jury of artists might even be constituted to decide
which display was the most brilliant and the most worthy, and to award
suitable recompense. "By this means it is probable that the street and
the boulevard would resume their former animation, to the great profit
of the trade in articles of luxury, so profoundly affected by the
desertion of the foreigners."
In the year of grace, 1898, the Parisian world was greatly agitated by
the fact that the Grand Prix de Paris was run at Longchamps on the 5th
of June, and that, consequently, the Parisian season was brought to an
ending most unreasonably early. These complaints were so insistent that
they found voice in the Municipal Council and were brought before the
Prefect of the Seine. It was contended that the treaty between the city
and the _Société d'encouragement_ of improvement of the equine breed,
its lessee at Longchamps, had been violated, inasmuch as the great event
had taken place before the middle of June. But the _Société
d'encouragement_ proved conclusively, by the terms of its lease from the
city, that the date and the regulations of the race were left to its own
judgment, and that, in point of fact, it had always taken place before
the 15th of June. "But that which it is above all important to observe
is, that the date of the Grand Prix is determined, not according to the
whim of the _Société d'encouragement_, but indeed by that of the English
Derby, which regulates also that of the French Derby. It is necessary,
in fact, that the same horses should take part in the three trials. The
English, having set the date of their Derby this year on the 26th of
May, the French Derby, which precedes it, had to be run on the 22d of
May, and the Grand Prix de Paris, which occurs regularly ten days after
the English Derby, could only be run on Sunday, the 5th of June. It is
impossible, moreover, in any way to postpone this date, for the reason
that the horses cannot be maintained in racing condition for any longer
period of time."
Notwithstanding this conclusive reasoning, _Le Temps_, one of the most
eminent and dignified journals of the capital, devoted a long article in
its largest type, two days afterward, to the duty of the _Conseil
municipal_ in the matter. "This date is not, in fact, a matter of
indifference to the interests of the city. It is, or it is considered to
be, the moment selected for a general exodus of foreigners and even of
Parisians in comfortable circumstances toward the seaside and other
rural resorts. The shop-keepers therefore consider that they have cause
for complaint if this moment arrive too early. The municipal councillors
who have constituted themselves the spokesmen of their griefs have
demanded and obtained a vote on a resolution having for its object the
designation of the third Sunday in June, at the earliest, as the date of
this equine solemnity.
[Illustration: TWO DAYS BEFORE SAINT BARTHOLOMEW'S.
Facsimile of a German copperplate engraving of the period.
LITERAL TRANSLATION OF THE LEGEND.
_Here is to be seen what is set forth_
_To lose their lives, young and old,_
_At a wedding in Paris._
_So that to judgment shall be sure,_
_There were killed the Admiral_
_With his nobles altogether._
_So, together with the servants, it is thought_
_That three thousand were destroyed._
_The King of Navarre, also Conde,_
_Is taken likewise of nobles more._
_The Huguenots, man, woman, child,_
_Were rapidly disposed of._
_Of whom the total number was found to be five thousand._
_On the 22d day of August, in the year 1572._
]
"Whether this date may or may not be adopted, it seems to us that the
interest which it awakens is entitled to unqualified commendation. The
Municipal Council in no way goes outside of its proper sphere; on the
contrary, it is well within it, when it concerns itself with the general
interests of the city of Paris, when it seeks for means of retaining in
it and attracting to it the largest possible number of foreigners and of
very wealthy individuals whose presence and whose habits have for result
the circulation of a great deal of money and the constant vivifying of
the Parisian industries, which are, for the greater part, the
industries of luxury. The Municipal Council understands perfectly that
this question of the sojourn of strangers amongst us is in the highest
degree an economical question which concerns the labor and the wages of
the Parisian workmen, as it does also the general prosperity of the
finances of the city. Therefore, far from criticising it for
deliberating upon this question and others of a similar nature, we
should rather regret that it has not turned its attention upon them with
more constancy and consecutiveness.
"It is not, in fact, a simple matter of detail like that which has
occupied the Municipal Council, which can ameliorate or even guarantee
the situation of Paris in so far as it is a rendezvous or a residence
for foreigners. These will not continue to come here and to remain here
unless their sojourn is made agreeable and peaceful for them. This is
something which should be considered, and it is a question which is
closely connected with the general functions of our ædiles. It is not to
be imagined that with a few indirect measures this foreign colony, so
essentially susceptible and flitting by nature, can be constrained to
remain among us and expend its money against its own will. These are not
birds that can be put in a cage, and, above all, retained there. Even
those whose passion for the races is well developed will easily find a
method of being present at the Grand Prix without domiciling themselves
among us. They will only pass through; we shall see them no more. The
essential point is, therefore, to watch with the utmost care, every day,
that Paris shall never lose in their eyes its prestige and its
attractions. From this will ensue, if we wish to deduce from it,
practical regulations for the administration of the great city."
And the editor goes on to regret that the municipal authorities, so far
from occupying themselves exclusively with these details of public
hygiene, street lighting, facility of transport, etc., should so
frequently expend themselves upon "violent discussions of _politique
pure_." "Is it not true that in what concerns the general progress of
urban life, whether it be the question of transportation, or that of
gas, or that of electricity, we are behind, and very greatly behind,
the condition which has been attained in London, in New York, in Berlin,
and even in Geneva and in some of our cities of the provinces?" These
reflections appeared to be especially opportune on the evening of the
election which was to replace in the Municipal Council those members who
were about to leave it for the Chamber of Deputies. "The electors who
are interested in the aspect under which the city will present itself to
foreigners in 1900, at the moment of the Exposition Universelle, will
not allow to escape this opportunity of manifesting their sentiments
upon this subject.... All those who labor to augment its prosperity
accomplish much more--be it known--for the amelioration of the condition
of the work-people than the dreamers of national confiscations and of
obligatory collectivism, and their efforts, if they are in the majority,
will be otherwise efficacious in retaining the foreigners than by the
moving forward some fifteen days of the date of the Grand Prix. Although
it is not to be despised, a season of fifteen days' duration is, taking
it altogether, but a slight gain. The foreigners flock hither the whole
year round, and it is the whole year round that it is necessary to make
them find it safe and agreeable to visit here, visits to which they are
inclined and from which the entire city derives such great benefits."
[Illustration: CHATELAINE; END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
From a drawing by Adrien Moreau.]
This exposition may be considered as an authentic, contemporary
document, and, as has been premised, these opinions are coeval and
coterminous with an admirable civic self-satisfaction. It is perhaps
scarcely necessary to stipulate that in these general observations it is
the frame of mind and the mode of speech of what are known everywhere as
the upper classes, the more intelligent and refined, which are taken
into account,--the Parisian workman, day-laborer, and semi-criminal,
though they figure very largely in the results of the general elections
(worse luck!), do not necessarily appear in the discussion of these
questions of high importance. It may be remembered that, at the period
of this much-discussed Grand Prix, there was much contradictory
testimony as to the existence of a general feeling of hostility toward
America and the Americans among the French because of the Spanish war.
Many depositions were made on both sides, but there was a general
consensus of opinion among the heads of the larger Parisian commercial
and manufacturing establishments as to that of their work-people. "Their
political views and manner of looking at things have no other horizon
than that of the newspaper they are in the habit of reading," said one
chief of an important house, "they take no notice of the effect which
such crises may have upon their work." "We believe them to be absolutely
indifferent," said another; "I can assure you that the workmen take not
the slightest interest in this question, and they probably would not
understand it if it were put to them," testified a third. "As to the
working-class," said a merchant in the Rue de Rivoli, "they occupy
themselves with their own affairs, and nothing beyond. Apart from the
social question, all they want is to earn as much money as possible, and
do the least work possible for it." One of these sons of toil
corroborated these statements very frankly. "I can assure you," said he,
"that neither my comrades nor myself side with one or the other. I
assure you that it matters nothing to us. We have something better to do
than to gossip about the war."
Much the same conditions have obtained in the formation and development
of this superior intellectual and aristocratic Parisian society as in
that of other civilized nations. We are all more or less familiar with
the general demonstrations by which the historians demonstrate the
development of the wealthy classes, by the aid and support of which
alone the letters and the arts arise and flourish. In the earliest
stages of society, the struggle for life absorbs all possible energy; a
little comfort and security, and consequent leisure, bring in the arts.
The half-starved hunting-dog follows the game steadily, stealthily,
without a superfluous sign or motion; _after_ the chase, and the
subsequent feast and the subsequent luxurious slumber, he awakes to
indulge in unpractical gambols and barkings around his master,--it is
the dance; Art is invented! The three superior social classes, the king,
the clergy, and the nobles, which were definitely established in France
at the outbreak of the Revolution, were the legitimate development of
the feudal system, and had, apparently, legitimately conquered their
position. They had been the protectors of the people even before the
Carlovingian epoch, and when the people finally arose and overturned
them, it was only because they had completely forgotten their high
mission through a long course of years.
To Stendhal's observation, that, in the tenth century, a man considered
himself lucky if he were not killed, and had a good leathern jacket for
winter, Taine adds, and a woman, if she were not violated by a whole
band of ruffians. In those truly Dark Ages the peasant accepted quite
willingly the hardest feudal obligations as a harbor of refuge from the
ills that menaced him on every side. The sixth and seventh centuries of
our era are considered to have been among the worst that the world has
seen; it was declared that it was not with water, but with His tears,
that God moistened the earth out of which He made man. After the fall of
the Romans, it was the Church alone that saved human society from "a
Mongol anarchy;" in the last years of the Empire, the cities, illy
defended by their natural protectors, gave to their bishops, with the
title of _defensor civitatis_, the principal municipal authority. The
Church alone retained any influence over the conquering barbarian;
before the shaven monk or the mitred abbot, the wolfish and ignorant
chief, long-haired, filthy, and half-clad in furs, hesitated, listened
to his words in the council, stooped before his altars,--"like Saint
Lupicin before the Burgonde king Chilpéric, Saint Karileff before the
king Childebert." In his moments of repose, after the chase, or the
battle, or the feast, the menaces of the prelate began to stir in his
guilty soul,--aided, perhaps, by the reproaches or the advice of his
wife or his concubine; he hesitated to violate the sanctuary lest he
should fall dead with a broken neck on the threshold; if he had been
carried away by his passions, and committed murder or robbery, he
repented and made reparation, sometimes a hundred-fold. The cloister
offered a refuge to those who fled aghast from the world and sought
meditation and solitude; the abbey was not only an asylum, but a haunt
of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the
farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the
Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the
finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls
of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was
arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to
precipitate itself."
Nevertheless, this historian admits that Christianity, which had not
modified the manners of Roman society, was itself an element in the
dissolution of the Empire, and that the Church itself acquired some of
the rudeness of the barbarians with which it came into such intimate
contact. "Germans and Franks aspired to the honor of the episcopate, and
carried into the basilicas customs and manners which were strange there.
The great intellectual movement which had formerly animated religious
society slackened, then ceased; the shadows descended upon the Church
itself."
[Illustration: CAROCHE, COVERED WITH LEATHER, STUDDED WITH GOLD-HEADED
NAILS, PERCHERONS; PERIOD, END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
From a drawing by Adrien Moreau.]
After Charlemagne's short-lived empire, the universal dissolution set in
again. Against the bands of brigands, four or five hundred strong each,
that traversed the country, any defender was welcome, and a second
upholder of society arose,--the stout warrior, skilled in arms, who
gathered retainers around him, secured a hold or a castle, and offered
protection in return for service rendered. His title or his lineage
mattered but little in the tenth century, his defence was much too
welcome for any carping about his arms or his ancestry,--he was an
ancestor himself. The original source of many noble houses is more than
doubtful,--Tertulle, the founder of the Plantagenets; Rollo, Duke of
Normandy; the ancestors of Robert le Fort; the Capétiens were said to
have been descended from a butcher of Paris. "'In these times,'" says
Taine, quoting the Spanish chronicle, "'the kings, counts, nobles, and
all the knights, in order to be ready at any moment, kept their horses
in the hall in which they slept with their wives.' The viscount in the
tower which defends the entrance to the valley, or the passage of the
ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the devastated frontier,
sleeps on his arms, like the American lieutenant in a blockhouse in the
far West, among the Sioux. His house is only a camp and a refuge; some
straw and a pile of leaves are thrown on the pavement of the great hall;
it is there that he sleeps with his horsemen, unbuckling a spur when he
has a chance for repose; the loopholes scarcely allow the day-light to
enter,--it is important, above all, that the arrows do not. All
inclinations, all sentiments, are subordinated to the service; there are
posts on the European frontier where the boy of fourteen is called upon
to march, and where the widow, up to sixty years of age, is compelled to
marry again. Men in the ranks, to fill up the vacancies, men at the
posts, to mount guard,--this is the cry that issues at this moment from
all human institutions, like the call of a voice of bronze." Thanks to
these stout defenders, some form of society is again made possible.
A later historian, M. Flach, in his _Origines de l'ancienne France_,
finds the germ from which sprang the whole feudal system in this
_patronage_, the system of defence of the serf and vassal by the landed
proprietor. In the great disorganization of the Roman Empire, a portion
of the public authority passed into the hands of individuals; when the
Frankish kings invaded Gaul, they found there a system of patronage
similar to their own. These great proprietors were maintained under the
first Merovingian kings, who kept them in due subjection; but as this
regulation gradually weakened under the growing power of the land-owner,
the private individual found himself ground between these two
millstones. A private patron then became his only defence, and thus was
hastened the strictly feudal system. With regard to the royal function,
which crowned this feudal system, the historian cites two quotations in
support of his thesis: "Under Louis d'Outre-mer, the legate of the Pope,
Marin, defined the royal authority,--he called it patronage
[_patrocinium_]. Forty years later the decisive argument of the
Archbishop of Reims, Adalbéron, in sustaining the claims of Hugues Capet
to the throne, was: 'You will have in him a father. No one, up to the
present time, has invoked in vain his patronage [_patrocinium_].'"
Quite apart from these valid, historical reasons, the British "love of a
lord" is by no means confined to Great Britain. The Parisians, also,
have a certain fondness for titles and distinctions of all sorts. For
the English aristocracy they profess a genuine admiration, as affording
the best example of the success of a certain _élite_ in affecting the
social conscience. They quote approvingly John Bright when he admits
that his folk--trades-people and commoners--are quite willing to have
their public affairs managed by a superior class, specially trained,
enjoying an independent and commanding social station. Their titles and
their pride of ancestry give them robes and plumes, and a troop follows
its officers more readily when they are gorgeously uniformed. Only, it
is required that this privilege shall not be abused; no favor to
mediocrities, no nepotism. Victor Hugo was more proud of his title of
_vicomte Hugo_ than of his greatest work, and Balzac's obstinacy in
clinging to his particle of _de_ has lately been shown to have been
completely unfounded. To Sainte-Beuve, who infuriated him by constantly
speaking of him as _M. Honoré Balzac_, he wrote: "My name is on my
register of birth, as M. Fitz-James's is on his." So it is, but without
any _de_. In 1836, at the period of the legal process to which one of
his works, _Le Lys dans la vallée_, gave rise, he wrote: "If my name is
that of an _old Gaulish family_, it is not my fault; but my name, De
Balzac, is my name patronymic, an advantage which is not enjoyed by many
aristocratic families who called themselves Odet before they called
themselves Châtillon, Riquet before Caraman, Duplessis before Richelieu,
and which are none the less great families.... If my name resounds well
in some ears, if it is envied by some who are not content with their
own, I cannot therefore renounce it.... My father ... found in the
_Trésor des Chartres_ the concession of land made in the fifth century
by the De Balzacs to establish a monastery in the environs of the little
town of Balzac (department of La Charente), a copy of which, he told me,
was, by their action, enregistered by the Parliament of Paris." It
appears that there are existing no Merovingian records of any kind
dating earlier than the seventh century; and a keeper of archives, M.
Ch. Portal, in the department of Tarn, in which the death of the great
novelist's father, "Bernard-François Balzac, born at Nougaïris," is
recorded, having looked the matter up, discovered that his ancestors
were simple country-people, laborers, who had never dreamed of a _de_
before their name, which, in fact, was really Balssa or Balsa!
The French have no word in their language which exactly translates
"snob," so they adopt with enthusiasm the English syllable
(mispronouncing it fearfully); and this curious weakness in so great a
writer and so keen a student of humanity would be even more remarkable
if it were not so very common among other civilized people. M. Jules
Lemaître, a couple of years ago, read before the five Academies of the
Institute a careful study of this particular social class; there were
said to be a crowd of amateur playwrights besieging the managers with
plays with this title, and the pretentious claimer of things that are
not his in the great world, "the great nephew of Mascarille in the
_Précieuses ridicules_," was honored with more analysis, comment, and
reconstruction than he was probably entitled to.
[Illustration: ASSASSINATION OF HENRY IV, RUE DE LA FERRONNERIE, MAY 14,
1610. From a drawing by L. Marold.]
In addition to the three great classes that have ruled over France, and
which, with the commons or serfs, have been known to almost every
European nation, a third class, the _tiers état_, still in process of
formation elsewhere on the Continent, but which arose in Paris and other
great cities in the thirteenth century, is claimed by the historians of
this nation as peculiarly French.
Previous to Pepin and Charlemagne, Paris was generally recognized as the
capital, though the wandering and barbaric Frankish kings much preferred
as places of residence their great country-houses or _villas_, when they
were neither hunting nor fighting. The court of Charlemagne, in the
later years of his reign, was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, his favorite
abode. In 775 he was present at the dedication of the new church of
Saint-Denis, and the Parisians are said to have made a _fête_ of the
occasion. Louis le Débonnaire, his son, more monk than king, also
neglected the city, excepting in the matter of founding churches and
increasing the privileges of the clergy. But under the last of the
Carlovingian emperors, Charles le Gros, the capital redeemed its right
to that title by its gallant defence against the Northmen, or Normans,
and its valiant count, Eudes, having brought the sluggish emperor to the
heights of Montmartre only to see him conclude an unworthy peace with
the invaders, founded himself the first national dynasty when his fat
suzerain was deposed in the following year. "One of the greatest figures
of the Carlovingian decadence," says M. Faure, in a recent monograph,
"he continued the monarchy of Charlemagne without changing anything in
the institutions, and he gave a precise form to a power that before him
was still undecided, that of duke of the Franks."
The royal authority waxed and waned, the turbulent nobles exhausted
themselves in war, in struggles amongst themselves and against the king,
but the wealth and power of the Church steadily increased. Occasionally
only, when its interference was too flagrantly unjust, its authority was
defied. The first Capétiens, like the first Carlovingians, whether from
motives of self-interest or sincere faith, were its faithful allies.
Hugues Capet liked better to wear his cope as Abbot of Saint-Martin de
Tours than his crown, and he restored to the Church several abbeys which
he possessed. His son, Robert the Pious, was almost a saint, and the
princes of this dynasty, on the whole, merited the title which Rome gave
them, of "eldest sons of the Church." Their piety was not altogether
without reward: the bishops of the Ile-de-France and the abbots, chiefs
of the abbeys founded by royal grace, brought more than once not only
earthly weapons but a spiritual one, that of excommunication, to the
defence of the sovereign.
Robert's first care, after his accession to the throne in 996, was to
rebuild the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois and the monastery of
Saint-Germain-des-Près, which had been destroyed by the Northmen. He
also erected in his palace a chapel dedicated to Saint Nicolas, which,
in 1154, entirely restored, became the Sainte-Chapelle. He washed the
feet of the poor, he fed, it is said, sometimes a thousand of them a
day; nothing was too sacred for them, neither the silver ornaments of
his lance nor the gold fringe of his robe. He was constant in his
attendance on the church services, he composed hymns, himself, which
were long retained. Nevertheless, having espoused his cousin Berthe, he
found himself excommunicated by the Pope, Gregory V. Among the earliest
works of the painter Jean-Paul Laurens, long in the Luxembourg, is a
graphic presentation of this unhappy couple, clinging to each other in
the poor, bare splendor of the very early mediæval throne-room, the
overturned great tapers of the excommunication service on the floor
before them, the smoke rising like anathema, and the last of the
implacable ministers of the Church departing through the open doorway.
Every one deserted them, as though plague-stricken; only two poor
domestics remained to serve them, and they purified by fire every vessel
from which the unhappy monarch had taken food or drink. But Berthe was
_enceinte_, and the king loved her, and so clung to her and would not
obey. One morning as he went to pray, according to his custom, at the
door of the church of Saint-Barthélemy, into which he was forbidden to
enter, Abbon, Abbé de Fleury, followed by two women of the palace,
carrying a great silver-gilt plate covered with a linen cloth,
approached him, and announced that Berthe had been delivered. Then he
uncovered the plate:
"See!" he exclaimed, "the effects of your disobedience to the decrees of
the Church, and the seal of anathema on the fruit of your guilty love!"
And Robert recoiled in horror before a little monster with the head and
neck of a duck! (_Canard_, it may be noted, in French, signifies both a
duck and a highly improbable story.)
So the poor queen was repudiated, and Robert married Constance, daughter
of the Comte de Toulouse, who made his life a burden to him. He hid
himself from her to say his prayers, and feared her so much that he did
not hesitate to deny his charities and good deeds to her,--though he had
such a horror of falsehood, that he had made a casket of crystal,
mounted with gold, but in which he was careful not to put any holy
relic, so that those who took their oaths on it before him might not
perjure themselves.
His son Henri I, who succeeded him, married a daughter of the Grand Duke
of Russia, in order that he might be certain of not taking a wife within
the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church. This princess,
Anne, claimed to descend through her mother, daughter of the Emperor
Romanus II, from Philip of Macedon.
The queen Constance brought with her from the Midi some of those
troubadours whose romantic airs and graceful verses were so appreciated
in the little courts of the south of France and, later, in the gloomy
castles of the nobles of the north. Great was the prevalence of ennui in
these fortresses, in which there was but little sunshine and a great
dearth of all other refining and civilizing influences. It was
impossible to be engaged in warfare or the chase all the time, and the
wandering pilgrim, with his tales from afar, or, still more, the
wandering minstrel, _trouvère_, as he was called in the north of France,
was a welcome relief to the deadly monotony of the days of peace.
"Seated at the hearth of the seigneur, he sang, during long evenings,
the tragic adventures of the Dame de Fayel and of the Sire de Coucy, or
the marvellous exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, of Renaud,
and of Roland, of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers; unless, indeed, his
audience, in a livelier mood, demanded of him some sarcastic _fabliau_,
or the fine tricks played upon Master Isengrin by his shrewd gossip,
Master Renard."
[Illustration: Louis XIV, FOR THE FIRST TIME, RECEIVING HIS MINISTERS.
From a drawing by L. Marold.]
But these Aquitains in the train of Queen Constance, when they first
appeared in the court of the good Robert, were singularly offensive to
the Parisians by their elegance, their luxurious habits, and their
light manners. "As soon as Constance appeared at the court," says Raoul
Glaber, "you could have seen France inundated by a species of folk the
most vain and the most frivolous of all possible men. Their fashion of
living, their garments, their armor, the harness of their horses, were
all equally fantastic. Their hair descended scarcely as low as the
middle of the head [the northern French still retained the long flowing
locks in the German fashion]: true theatricals, in whom the shaved chin,
the small-clothes, the ridiculous boots, ending in a curved beak, and
the whole outward appearance badly arranged, betrayed the disorder of
their minds. Men without faith, without law, without shame, whose
contagious example will corrupt the French nation, formerly so decent,
and precipitate it into all kinds of debauchery and wickedness."
Notwithstanding Robert's piety, his reign was signalized by a cruel
persecution of the Jews, in revenge for the destruction of the church of
the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem by the Fatimite caliph of Egypt, and by
the first execution of heretics in France. Throughout the whole of the
Middle Ages, the Jews, forbidden to hold any landed property, were
constantly persecuted, plundered, and outraged, banished only to be
called back again at the price of further exactions. The first thirteen
heretics were burned at Orléans in 1022; one of them had been the
confessor of Queen Constance, and as he passed her on his way to the
stake, she put out one of his eyes with a long rod she held in her hand.
Nevertheless, the historian Duruy considers that this certain mental
movement, these deviations of the human intelligence from the beaten
track, demonstrated that the period in which all thought seemed dead had
passed, and that the first Renaissance began in this (eleventh)
century.
A more recent writer distinguishes this century also by "that revolution
in feudal France," the development of the commune. The great social fact
was the disappearance of the three classes, serfs, semi-freemen, and
free men (_libres_), which had existed since the ninth century, and
their unity under subjection to the seigneur. This domination of the
seigneur, at first justified by the protection afforded, lost its
authority when it began to consult only its self-interest, and, toward
the close of the century, stirred up revolts which led to the
establishment of all kinds of popular associations, guilds,
confraternities, charities, communities, etc.