François II died on December 5, 1560; Mary of Scots went back to her

native land, weeping bitterly, and the queen-mother assumed the regency,

as her second son, Charles IX, was then only ten years and six months of

age. He was not without good parts, he had an inclination for _les

belles lettres_, fostered in him by his preceptor, Amyot, who had

translated Plutarch, and one of his favorites was the poet, Pierre de

Ronsard. The mutual outrages and exasperations, the changing fortunes of

the incessant wars between Catholics and Huguenots, gradually led up to

the calamity of the Saint-Bartholomew; in 1567, five years before, the

young king was nearly captured by the chiefs of the Reformed religion,

escaping with difficulty to his capital and to his palace of the Louvre.

To cement the peace of Saint-Germain, signed in 1570, and which granted

such favorable terms to the Protestants that the Catholic party

protested fiercely, a marriage was arranged between the son of Jeanne

d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, Henri de Béarn, and the king's sister,

Marguerite, the Reine Margot of the chroniclers. The Queen of Navarre

and her son, followed by the Admiral Coligny and a host of the leaders

among the Huguenots, came to Paris; the protestations of friendship with

which they were received by the king inflamed still more the passions of

the partisans of the Guises, and the sudden death of Jeanne d'Albret,

attributed to poison, but probably caused by a pulmonary affection, only

served to increase the universal apprehension and suspicion.

The marriage was postponed, but celebrated a week later, on the 17th of

August, 1572, with great pomp; the bridegroom took up his lodgings in

the Louvre, but, five days later, Coligny, returning to his little hôtel

in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, was fired at by an

assassin named Maurevert in the pay of the Guises, receiving one ball in

the left arm and losing the index finger of his right hand by another.

The excessive grief and concern manifested by the king seems to have

disarmed his suspicions; but Catherine, aided by the leaders of the

Catholic party, was incessantly urging her son to seize the opportunity

thus within his grasp, and, by exterminating all the enemies of the true

religion, at once avert from France the horrors of a fourth civil war.

"The king resisted; his mother quoted to him the Italian proverb that

mildness is often cruelty, and cruelty mildness; then she threatened to

leave the court with her other son, the Duc d'Anjou, so as not to

witness the ruin of her house, so as to no longer have before her eyes

such cowardice and imbecility. She had well calculated the effect of

this last taunt upon a violent spirit. Charles, until then motionless

and sombre, suddenly exclaimed, that, if it were found advisable to kill

the admiral, he wished that all the Huguenots in France might be killed,

'so that not one should be left to reproach him.'" It was agreed to

exempt from the massacre the King of Navarre, the new brother-in-law of

Charles, and the young Prince de Condé, but on the condition that both

of them returned to the Catholic religion.

All the necessary measures had been taken by the Guises and by the

municipality of the city; the signal was to be given from the Palais de

Justice, by the first stroke of the tocsin after midnight, on the

morning of Sunday, the 24th of August, the day of Saint-Barthélemy, and

the Catholics were to be designated by white handkerchiefs on their arms

and white crosses in their hats. But the killing began under the walls

of the Louvre before the appointed hour, and Catherine sent hastily to

the neighboring church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois with orders to give

the signal. The Duc de Guise had reserved for himself the honor of

superintending the murder of Coligny, then helpless from his wounds, and

he immediately hastened to the Hôtel de Ponthieu, where the admiral was

lodged, burst in the doors, had the old man murdered and flung out of

the window and his head struck off.

There are various authorities, among them D'Aubigné, for the story that

the king fired with a long arquebus from one of the windows of the

Louvre upon the fleeing Huguenots. "He took great pleasure," says

Brantôme, "in seeing from his windows more than four thousand corpses,

killed or drowned, floating down the river." The same chronicler relates

that when, on the 27th, in company with his mother and a number of

seigneurs, he visited the gibbet of Montfaucon to inspect the corpse of

the admiral, there hanging in chains, he did not, like all the others,

stop his nose, but said: "I do not as you all do, for the smell of an

enemy is always pleasant." He had, perhaps, borrowed the phrase from

Aulus Vitellius, visiting the battle-field of Bedriac.

"Women who were enceinte were ripped open, that the little Huguenots

might be snatched from their wombs, to be thrown, to be devoured, to

pigs and dogs. In those houses in which none were left alive but

children, these infants were piled into large baskets, and then thrown

from the bridges into the river. There might be seen frightful little

boys, ten years of age, strangling the babies in the cradles, or

dragging them through the streets by a cord around their necks."

The number of slain in the city of Paris was variously estimated at from

two thousand to ten. The murders did not cease entirely until the 17th

of September, and, with the exception of some districts, in which the

officials refused to carry out their orders, extended throughout France.

The victims were by no means all Huguenots; the opportunities offered to

private vengeance were too great, and rivals, debtors, thieves, and a

horde of criminals covered their crimes with the cloak of religion. Two

years later, the king died, at the age of twenty-four, tormented in his

last moments by remorse, and cared for only by his old Huguenot nurse.

Even in this horrible business, there were not wanting reassuring

touches of human nature. The fine story which Dumas _père_ tells with so

much spirit in his _Reine Margot_, of the wounded gentleman, pursued by

the assassins, seeking refuge in the very bed-chamber of this queen, and

saved by her, is quite true, if we may believe the recital of the queen

herself (_Historic Memoirs: Margaret of Valois_). His name was Monsieur

de Nançay, and she was obliged to change her chemise, as he had bloodied

it in clinging to her! In the conspiracy to prevent the return of the

King of Poland, afterward Henri III, to France in the eventuality of the

death of Charles, of which conspiracy the youngest royal brother, the

Duc d'Alençon, was the head, there were two gentlemen, Joseph de

Boniface, Sieur de la Mole, who was Queen Marguerite's lover, and the

Comte de Coconas, an Italian, who was loved by the Duchesse de Nevers.

The story of the trial and execution of these two, and even the ghastly

incident of the preservation of the severed head of the lover, are also

founded on facts.

The massacre of Saint-Bartholomew has found apologists, even at this

late day,--an historical work issued by the house of Firmin-Didot, in

1898, purporting to give an impartial résumé of the acts of the League

during the reigns of Henri III and Henri IV, declares that the people

took part in this tragedy because "their zeal had been misled," and they

believed that they were going, not to massacre, but to battle "against

enemies who menaced their faith and their liberty." The League,

according to this champion of the Church, M. V. de Chalambert, "was at

once legitimate in its principles, energetic and sagacious in its acts,

in its faith;" ... "if the family of Lorraine had the signal honor of

personifying, during a space of nearly fifty years, the Catholic cause

in France, it owed this honor to the faith, to the sincere zeal, and to

the great qualities of its princes, not to the schemes of ambition." A

more important work, the _History of the Princes of Condé_, by the Duc

d'Aumale, in seven volumes, is much more impartial, though the

distinguished author's sympathies are naturally enlisted in this

subject. He quotes with just appreciation the answer of the young Prince

of Condé, Henri de Bourbon, to Charles IX after the massacre, when the

king summoned him before him and curtly gave him his choice: "_Messe,

mort, ou Bastille?_" (the mass, death, or the Bastile.) "God will not

permit, my king and my seigneur, that I should select the first. As for

the other two, they are at your discretion, which may God temper with

His Providence."

"The intellectual life of the people," says the author of the _Mémoires

du peuple français_, "had gained, rather than lost, amid the terrible

emotions of public affairs. In the interiors of the houses, everything

demonstrated that literature, the arts, the sciences, commerce, and

industry were far from having succumbed during the long crises of the

preceding reigns." It was during the reign of Charles IX that the

beginning of the year was fixed at the first of January, by an edict

issued in 1564. It had previously been considered as commencing at

Easter.

Henri de Navarre and the young Duc d'Alençon were retained as prisoners

in the Louvre, where they amused themselves by flying quails in their

rooms and making love to the ladies. The young prince escaped first, on

the evening of the 15th of September, 1575, but the king did not succeed

in evading the vigilance of his keepers till the following February,

when he took advantage of a hunt in the forest of Senlis, to ride to

rejoin _Monsieur_, his young brother-in-law, and the Prince de Condé,

thus abjuring the vows of the Church, which he had taken under

compulsion. The _Paix de Monsieur_ which followed, signed on the 17th of

April, 1576, granted the followers of Luther and Calvin the free

exercise of their religion everywhere, "as much as they would have

acquired by gaining two battles against the court of France." To the

zealous Catholics this peace seemed like a betrayal of their cause, and

the _Sainte Ligue_, for the maintenance of the privileges of the Church

and the king, was organized throughout the country under the auspices of

Henri de Guise, who placed himself at the head of the movement.

Henri III, who had fled from his throne of Poland to take that of

France as soon as he heard of the death of his brother, had not even the

few good qualities of the latter. Depraved, prodigal, effeminate,

capable only of the most puerile occupations, he excited the indignation

of the Parisians by his dissolute manners, by his travesty of feminine

apparel, his fine collars, his necklaces of pearls, his pourpoint opened

to show his throat. D'Aubigné declared that he could not decide whether

he saw "a woman-king or a man-queen." In his solemn entry into his

capital he scandalized the grave citizens by his appearance, "having

around him a great quantity of parakeets, monkeys, and little dogs." His

courtiers and favorites naturally followed his example, and shared the

popular disfavor; in 1576, the Parisians began to designate them as

_mignons du roi_. Their worthy master, whenever it arrived to one of

them to be killed in duel or ambuscade, contented himself with giving

him a fine tomb and a marble statue in the church of Saint-Paul, hence

called "the seraglio of the mignons," so that, says De Thou, "the usual

threat against one of these favorites was: 'I will have him carved in

marble like the others.'"

[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE RESIDENCE OF THE VICOMTESSE ALIX DE

JANZÉ, RUE MARIGNAN. ABOUT TO BE PRESENTED, WITH ITS COLLECTION, TO THE

CITY.]

To thwart the schemes of the Guises, who had begun to plot for the

succession to the throne, the king placed himself at the head of the

League, and created his Order of the Saint-Esprit in hopes of winning

partisans in both camps. His brother, now Duc d'Anjou, died in 1584,

after an unsuccessful expedition into the Low Countries; the Duc de

Guise concluded the treaty of Joinville with Philippe II of Spain, in

the same year, in which the high contracting parties agreed to extirpate

sects and heresies; to exclude from the throne of France heretic

princes, or those who promised public impunity to heretics, and to

assure the succession of the Valois to Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon. The

cardinal was put forward as a stalking-horse, to be discarded at the

right moment. And yet after the _eighth_ civil war, that "of the three

Henrys," the duke had the courage, or the assurance, to come to demand

an audience of the king at Blois, and was poniarded by the

Quarante-Cinq, the royal body-guard, in the antechamber. The next day,

his brother, the cardinal, was killed with halberds, and the two bodies

were burned that there might be no relics.

Catherine de Médicis, if we may believe the historians, had an undoubted

talent for epigrams. When it was announced to her erroneously, as it

afterward proved, that the battle of Dreux, in 1562, had been won by the

Huguenots, she remarked, placidly: "Well, we shall have to pray God in

French." When her son hastened to inform her after this notable

assassination: "I have become, again, King of France, madame, having had

killed the King of Paris," she replied: "It is not enough to cut out, my

son; you must sew up." Henri did not know how to sew up; the League was

far from being killed, the city of Paris, filled with fury and

resentment at this murder, publicly disowned him and closed its gates

against him. In one of the many nocturnal processions in its streets, a

hundred thousand persons, it is said, carrying lighted torches,

extinguished them all at once at a signal, crying, with one voice: "God

extinguish thus the race of Valois!" He was obliged to seek an alliance

with the Béarnais; the two kings laid siege to the capital, and a

fanatical Dominican monk, Jacques Clément, having gained access to the

tent of Henri III by forged letters, buried a knife in his bowels. He

died in the night, having previously made his attendants swear to

recognize the King of Navarre as King of France. His mother had died six

months before, "despair in her soul."

Of Henri IV, "manly and humane by natural gifts, as well as by worldly

experience," there are innumerable anecdotes related to illustrate his

somewhat contradictory character. He is even found apologizing for

Catherine de Médicis. One day, in 1600, the Président de Groulard was

recalling to the king the memory of the many ills that she had brought

upon France. "But," said the Béarnais, "I should like to ask you, what

could a poor woman do who had, by the death of her husband, been left

with five small children on her hands and two families who were

endeavoring to wrest the crown from them, ours and that of the Guises?

Was she not obliged to make use of strange personages to outwit both of

them, and yet to preserve, as she did, her children, who reigned

successively, thanks to the discreet conduct of so sagacious a woman? I

wonder that she did not do even worse!" His perpetual pecuniary

difficulties, so common to kings of France, developed in him other

qualities. L'Estoile relates that his fine horses were returned to him

in Paris because there were no funds with which to provide for them. The

king turned to M. d'O, the Governor of Paris, and asked him how this

came to be. "Sire," replied the latter, "there is no money." "My

condition," said the king, "is, indeed, deplorable! I shall presently be

obliged to go naked and on foot." Then, turning to a _valet de chambre_,

he asked him how many shirts he possessed. "A dozen, sire; some of them

are torn." "And handkerchiefs, have I not eight?" "At present, there are

only five." "One night, when D'Aubigné and La Force were sleeping near

the King of Navarre, the former complained bitterly to the second of

their master's stinginess. La Force, overwhelmed with fatigue, was not

listening. 'Do you not hear what I am saying?' asked D'Aubigné. La

Force, rousing himself, demanded the subject of his discourse. 'Eh! he

is telling thee,' said the king, who had heard it all, 'that I am a

skinflint [_un ladre vert_], and the most ungrateful mortal on the face

of the earth.' 'He did not manifest any resentment toward me,' adds

D'Aubigné; 'but neither did he give me a quarter of an écu the more.'"

[Illustration: INVITATION TO THE FUNERAL OF A MAN. PERIOD OF CHARLES X.

Fac-simile of a lithograph, by Perrin, printed by Girod. A companion

form exhibits a young man seated, in lieu of the young woman.]

His second marriage, with Marie de Médicis, a niece of the Pope, was no

more happy than royal marriages usually were. The pontiff had granted

him a divorce from Marguerite de Valois, whose conduct was thought to be

too frivolous even for those times; and the royal nuptials were

solemnized at Florence in October, 1600, and greatly fêted in Paris the

following January. "A dull woman, who brought him neither heart nor

beauty nor wit, but the largest dot that could then be found (six

hundred thousand écus of gold, equivalent to eighteen or twenty millions

of francs to-day)." "His mistresses--less by their beauty than by

gaiety and good humor--held an influence over him which probably she

herself might have acquired, could she have curbed her violent temper.

But not only did she rave and rage, and assail him with angry words, it

was even necessary to restrain her from the too free use of her hands.

And her blows were far from being light ones, for, as Henri once

jestingly said, she was 'terribly robust.'" His conjugal inconstancy

was, indeed, flagrant. _La belle Gabrielle_, Madame de Liancourt,

afterward made Marquise de Mousseaux, the most celebrated of his

mistresses, was declared by him to be the only woman he ever really

loved, and, say the chronicles, "he used to caress her greatly and kiss

her before everybody," but she had plenty of successors. One of them,

the Marquise de Verneuil, was obliged to be present in the queen's train

on the day of her coronation, as was, also, the divorced Marguerite de

France; and on the very morning of his assassination, the king, now

grizzled and bent, went to pay a visit to a newer beauty to whom he was

paying court, Mlle. Angélique Paulet, daughter of the secretary of State

who originated the celebrated financial measure named, after him, _la

paulette_.

Nevertheless, it is related that on the day of her coronation, in 1610,

when Marie de Médicis passed up the nave of the cathedral of

Saint-Denis, flushed with pride and triumph, and wearing regally the

royal mantle and jewels, Henri, who was present only as a spectator,

turned to Sully, his minister and friend, and said, with animation:

"_Ventre-saint-gris! Qu'elle est belle!_" It may be remarked that the

king's favorite oath was said to have been invented for him by the

churchmen, that he might not be guilty of blasphemy,--neither Saint-Gris

nor his stomach being known to the calendar.

After having paid his visit to Mademoiselle Paulet, the king ordered his

carriage, to go and see how the preparations for the 16th of May--the

day of the public entrance into the capital of the newly-crowned Queen

of France--were progressing. It is said that he had a superstitious

presentiment concerning carriages, and but very seldom used them; there

were not wanting other warnings, one from the astrologers, and his heart

was unusually heavy. He had already escaped nineteen attempts at

assassination. The coaches of those days had no glass windows, and were

clumsy boxes, mounted on four immense wheels, and either set without

springs or suspended on broad leathern bands. The king, who was

accompanied by the ducs d'Épernon and de Montbazon and five other

gentlemen, ordered the leathern curtains at the sides to be rolled up;

at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré and the narrow Rue de la

Ferronnerie there was a temporary blockade caused by two wagons, one

laden with wine and the other with hay,--Ravaillac took advantage of the

halt to mount with one foot on one of the spokes of the hind wheel on

the side where the king was sitting and stabbed him three times, though

the second stroke was instantly mortal.

The consternation was general and overwhelming, and with reason. "There

might be seen men, as if struck by lightning, suddenly fall unconscious

in the middle of the streets; several persons died very suddenly."

Henri III was the first King of France who made use of a carriage, but

horses and mules long remained the favorite means of transportation for

those who did not go afoot. Sober personages, magistrates and burghers,

rode mules, and the ladies were loath to give up their hackneys for the

new machines. Sauval, in his _Antiquités de Paris_, relates that he had

been informed by a certain ancient dame--Madame Pilon--that there were

no coaches in Paris until after the time of the League, some sixteen

years before the death of Henri IV, and that the first person to appear

in one was a relative of her own, the daughter of a wealthy apothecary

of the Rue Saint-Antoine. Glass windows for them were not used till the

reign of Louis XIV, who sent a coach so furnished as a gift to Charles

II of England. The usage of tobacco began to be general under Henri IV,

and soon became so excessive that the strongest measures were taken

against those addicted to this habit. The beard of this monarch was also

considered an offensive innovation by his Catholic subjects, and is even

said to be responsible for more than one of the fanatical attempts on

his life. His Huguenot subjects, however, "drew a hope from his

continuance to wear it that their renegade chief might yet be of the

number of the predestined."

"A hundred virtues of a valet, and not one virtue of a master," said

Tallemant des Réaux of Henri's son, Louis XIII, as he grew to manhood.

In two very recent publications on this historical period, M. Berthold

Zeller, drawing his details from the contemporary reports of the

Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the court of France, presents a

striking picture of the feebleness and ineptitude of the young king,

even after the date of the official ending of his minority, October 2,

1614, and of the subtlety, quite Italian, with which the queen-mother

played her part amid the intrigues of her followers and her adversaries.

M. Louis Batiffol, in an article in the _Revue de Paris_, December,

1896, comments on a collection of manuscripts which he has found in the

Bibliothèque Nationale, communications furnished by Louis XIII to the

_Gazette_, published by Renaudot, on various military transactions. The

communications were all edited, and not printed from these originals,

because, although he was very fond of writing for the new art of

printing, the king was "absolutely destitute of orthography, and was

ignorant of the simplest rules of grammar. He wrote stiffly and with

great care, in letters thin and long, more than a centimètre in length,

he re-read, erased, and corrected in pencil the most awkward phrases,

but his style remained at the end that of a child." Before being sent to

the printer, these royal communications were corrected by one of his

secretaries, M. Lucas, and afterward went through the hands of

Richelieu. Nevertheless, M. Batiffol finds that these articles give "a

very favorable impression of a king who presents so unimportant a

figure in history and yet who did not lack for real qualities,"--an

impression of impassibility, of self-control under all circumstances,

and of a very serious application to the details of the affairs that

came before him. "He was a soldier devoted to his profession, a true

soldier, who loved the whistling of bullets, and would remain all night

on horseback under a beating rain if he expected an attack from the

enemy."

[Illustration: AFTER THE COTILLION.

After a water-color by Maurice Bonvoison; "Mars."]

He was also a superior market-gardener, and prided himself on having the

earliest and finest spring vegetables, superintending all the details of

their cultivation himself. None of these early crops, however, appeared

on his own table, but were furnished, at fancy prices, to such luxurious

consumers as the wealthy Pierre de Puget, Seigneur de Montauron,

Conseiller du roi. One day, in 1628, being, as usual, at a loss for

occupation, and having successfully concocted a _fricandeau_ for dinner,

he amused himself by shaving all his courtiers, leaving them only a

little tuft on the chin. This, naturally, set the fashion for beards for

some time.

It also became the custom for gentlemen to perfume themselves, to

disguise the odor of the pipe, which was now coming into general use. In

October, 1645, the King of Poland sent a magnificent embassy, with an

escort of four hundred cavaliers, to Paris to demand in marriage the

hand of Marie-Louise de Gonzague, daughter of Charles I, Duke of Mantua,

and Catherine de Lorraine; a formal entry into the city was arranged,

and the Parisians were much impressed with the grand costumes of the

Polish nobility,--"their stuffs were embossed with gold and silver, and

precious stones glittered from every portion of their adornment, whilst

the French nobility, which came out to meet them, displayed only plumes

and ribbons." Nevertheless, it appeared that the French nobles had

shaved themselves and washed their hands, which the Poles had forgotten

to do. This mediæval lack of cleanliness continued down to the time of

Louis XIV; Marguerite de Navarre, in a pretty, amorous dialogue of her

composition, makes the fair lady admit that she had not washed her hands

for a week.

[Illustration: IN THE RUE BLANCHE.]

The court of France was, at this period, the most depraved in morals,

the grossest and most unpolished in manners, of any in Europe. The women

of the bourgeoisie, envious of the great ladies, called them _dames à

gorge nue_; and the latter retaliated by designating the women of the

people as _grisettes_, because of their gray (_grises_) stockings,--a

name retained almost down to the present day. In the sittings of the

_États Généraux_, the President, Miron, complained bitterly of the

excesses of the nobility, the contempt for justice, the open violences,

the gambling, the extravagance, the constant duels, the "execrable oaths

with which they thought it proper to ornament their usual discourse." It

was from this general ignorance and corruption that the Marquise de

Rambouillet withdrew in disgust, and established in her own hôtel that

famous society of arts and letters and refinement--somewhat stilted and

artificial--which constituted it the true court of France. "Instituted

certainly before 1620," says M. Victor Cousin, "it sparkled with the

utmost brilliancy for thirty years."

In 1612, the queen-mother, Marie de Médicis, then regent, arranged a

double Spanish marriage for two of her children: the Princess Elisabeth,

a child of twelve, was sent to Spain to wed the Prince of the Asturias,

afterward Philip IV, and Louis brought back to Paris "a fine tall girl,

a Spanish blonde, wanting yet two or three summers for the full

development of her beauty," Anne d'Autriche. Though he was as faithful

to his marriage vows as Saint-Louis, it is said, he seems to have always

maintained for his wife a profound contempt, and, when the little Louis

XIV was born, refused to take the infant in his arms, or to kiss it,

which wounded the mother more than all his previous neglect. His

treatment of his own mother in her later days was even more

reprehensible; she was banished, and left in indigence and humiliation

till her death, at Cologne, July 3, 1642. Her sole piece of jewelry, a

cross surrounded with diamonds, and containing a piece of the true

cross, she bequeathed to her daughter Henrietta, wife of Charles I of

England. It was through Marie de Médicis, whom he afterward opposed so

consistently, that the Bishop of Luçon, afterward Cardinal Richelieu,

first was called to court, and during the king's minority and tutelage

the government was administered by "the three robes," the queen-mother,

the Bishop of Luçon, and the wife of the Italian favorite Concini, the

Maréchal d'Ancre, killed on the drawbridge of the Louvre when he became

too overbearing and obnoxious.

[Illustration: AFTER A MORNING MEETING IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE. From the

painting by Nicolas Sicard.]

"The distinguishing characteristic of the _Siècle de Louis XIV_," says

M. Maxime Petit, in his review of the important work by Émile Bourgeois,

_Le Grand Siècle_, "that which Voltaire selected as the most important,

is not the history of the negotiations and the battles, but that of

the manners and customs, the ideas, the beliefs, the letters, and the

arts.... Never, perhaps, more than in the time of Louis XIV was there a

more complete harmony between the ideas and the life. The political

forces are thoroughly disciplined, and the principle of authority, which

Richelieu had developed to its fullest extent, reigns uncontested.

Polite society--the only one to be considered--believes itself to be in

possession of absolute rules, and, in the court as in the city, the

heart abdicates in favor of reason." "When one speaks of the seventeenth

century in France," says M. Louis Farges, "it appears, to those who are

neither historians nor professional scholars, as one of those rare

epochs in which all the forces of the nation concentrate and develop in

a serene and majestic unity. France seems, then, to be at the summit of

her political power, of her intellectual and artistic development, of

her religious and philosophical unity. Taken altogether, and in a very

general manner, this is a very just idea; ... it must be admitted that

at no other epoch has the genius of France manifested itself in the

divers branches of human activity in a manner so complete, so abundant,

and so united." "France was really," says M. Duruy, "at the head of

modern civilization, and, by the recognized superiority of her genius

and of her taste, she caused to be accepted by the whole of Europe the

pacific empire of her artists and of her writers."

[Illustration: PARISIENNE. From a drawing by L. Marold.]

Apparently, at least, the visible instrument that accomplished this

great result was the dogma of absolute power, the monarchical régime;

the king was the earthly image of God, divine, inviolable: _loyalisme_

was a veritable religion, it had its symbols, its mysteries, and its

rites. "If the king were not afraid of the devil," said Saint-Simon, "he

would cause himself to be worshipped." This faith and this worship were

already manifested "in their incomparable splendor by the ceremonies

attending the opening of the _États Généraux_ in 1614, dominated, not,

as in 1789, by the august and abstract idea of the nation, but by the

pale and melancholy figure of a boy of thirteen." For the tremendous

and elaborate pomp of his court, the ceremonial ostentation which hedged

around his own redoubtable figure, the tedious and suffocating etiquette

which attended all approach to his person, Louis XIV himself had very

definite reasons, which he expressed with an appreciable logic in his

_Mémoires_. "Those who deem that these are only matters of ceremony

deceive themselves greatly. The people over whom we reign, not being

able to penetrate to the depths of things, form their judgments usually

on that which they see on the surface, and most frequently measure their

respect and their obedience by precedence and rank. As it is important

to the public to be governed by one only, it is also of importance to it

that he who fills this function should be elevated in such a manner

above the others that there should be no person who can be either

confounded or compared with him, and it is not possible, without injury

to the whole body of the State, to deprive its chief of the slightest

marks of superiority which distinguish him from all the other members."

Hence, three conditions were imposed absolutely upon all those who

sought in any way to find favor with the head of the State,--to ask and

to obtain a residence at Versailles; to follow the court everywhere,

even when sick, even when dying, and to approve of everything. Of the

universal abasement of spirit which this régime brought about, the

memoirs of the time are full. La Bruyère said: "Whoever considers how

the happiness of the courtier lies wholly in the face of the prince,

that he makes it the one occupation of his life to look on it, and to be

seen by it, may, in some degree, comprehend how, in looking on the face

of God, consists all the glory and happiness of the saint." The Duc de

Richelieu wrote: "I pray the king on my knees that he will permit me to

come sometimes to pay my court to him, for I had rather die than be two

months without seeing him." A court-preacher, preaching one day before

the king on the familiar topic, dwelt upon it: "We shall all die, all,

all!" A sudden and involuntary movement of the monarch reminded him that

he had touched upon a theme displeasing to royalty. In his dismay and

confusion he hastened to qualify his assertion: "Yes, sire, almost all."

Louis XIV, it is said, looked forward to continuing his _rôle_ of Grand

Monarque, even in the next world.

[Illustration: "AUX COURSES." By F. Fournery.]

His education had been much neglected in his youth,--it was said,

designedly, by Mazarin, who wished to perpetuate his own powder. One of

the first of the royal preceptors, M. Le Vayer, discovered that Louis

was less intelligent than his younger brother, Philippe, and proposed to

devote himself to developing the character of the latter, but was

speedily checked by the astute cardinal. Like his mother, Anne of

Austria, the king had but little taste for literature. "Of what use is

reading?" he said one day to the Maréchal de Vivonne. His appetites,

however, were fully developed. The Duchesse d'Orléans relates that she

had very frequently seen him eat, at one sitting, four platefuls of

different soups, an entire pheasant, a partridge, a great dish of salad,

a dish of mutton with its gravy, garnished with garlic, two good pieces

of ham, a large plateful of pastry, and end with fruit and preserves.

However, he drank only water reddened with a little wine. The _état de

maîtresse en titre du roi_ was as formally recognized in his court as

that of confessor or chamberlain. Frequently there were two at once. The

"three queens" were legitimate objects of curiosity to all those who

were permitted to bask in the royal sunshine. Madame de la Vallière,

perceiving herself to be gradually superseded by Madame de Montespan,

fled to a convent three times, and was finally permitted to remain

there; M. de Montespan, having vainly attempted to remove his wife from

court, was sent to the Bastile, and on his release was ordered to his

estate. There he put on mourning, as though she were dead, which the

king considered a great affront. His wife graciously made use of her

influence at court to procure a renewal of the pension of the widow

Scarron, only to see her ultimately appointed guardian of the king's

children and succeed her in her position, as Madame de Maintenon.

"Violating all laws, civil and religious," says Duruy, "the king placed

on a level with the princes of the blood the princes _legitimized_. He

forced the court to respect the one as equal to the other; and the

public morality received a blow from which it was very slow to recover."

These lessons were not lost, and the annals of the nobility are full of

scandalous examples. The ducs d'Orléans and Vendôme were addicted to

infamous debauchery; the Duc d'Antin was caught, _flagrante delicto_, in

theft; drunkenness and gambling were prevalent at court, the Grand

Prieur de Vendôme boasted that he had not gone to bed sober one night

in forty years. Pascal, discussing the privileges of the nobles and the

kings, said to them boldly: "You are kings only of concupiscence." This

great court, the most brilliant in Europe, "sweated hypocrisy," said

Saint-Simon. It may be remarked, that, in addition to the very frequent

disfigurement by small-pox, from which even the king was not entirely

free, there was a remarkable prevalence of deformity among the families

of the aristocracy. "There was scarcely one of which some member, male

or female, had not a curved spine, a distorted limb, or other

malformation; owing, most likely, to the common practice of closely

swathing the limbs of infants, and of confiding young children to the

charge of careless and ignorant nurses, for the first three or four

years of their lives."

Two of the mysteries of this reign which have long furnished themes for

discussion have lately been solved by the ingenuity of modern research.

The "Man in the Iron Mask," guarded in the Bastile "for forty-two

years," treated with the utmost consideration and buried under a false

name, it now appears was confined there only five years, from September,

1698, to his death in November, 1703, shared his cell at different

periods with other prisoners, a police spy and a lackey, and was buried

without any attempt at mystery! The original register of his death,

reproduced before its destruction among other archives of the city of

Paris in 1871, gives his name as _Marchioly_, though it had been read

_Marchialy_ by all the commentators (the tail of the o being really a

trifle too high for an a), and it is now considered settled that this

signified Mattioli, in the uncertain orthography of the times, Count

Hercule-Antoine Mattioli, secretary of the Duke of Mantua, whom Louis

XIV had caused to be arrested on Italian soil, in defiance of

international law, for having betrayed the secrets of the negotiations

relative to the acquisition of Casal.

The sudden and tragic death of _Madame_, Henriette d'Angleterre, wife of

the king's brother, Monsieur, le Duc d'Orléans, made famous by Bossuet's

funeral oration, long ascribed to poison, has been elucidated by Littré

in what has been designated as the finest example known of "a

retrospective medical demonstration." She had just returned from

England, bearing with her the treaty of Dover, signed by her brother,

Charles II, in which that monarch agreed to abandon the alliance with

Holland, and died suddenly in great agony after taking her usual glass

of chicory-water in the evening. The autopsy, which was performed by the

most celebrated surgeons of France, aided by two or three English

physicians, revealed a small perforation in the walls of the stomach,

which the doctors, knowing no other way of accounting for, agreed must

have been made accidentally by the point of their scissors. Littré

demonstrates that this accident was very improbable, and that the

perforation was evidently caused by an ulcer of the stomach,--a disease

unknown to the medical science of the time.

[Illustration: END-OF-CENTURY TYPE.

By F. Fournery.]

Louis XIV was preceded to the tomb by his only son, the dauphin, in

April, 1711; by the Duc de Bourgogne, become dauphin in February, 1712,

his wife having died six days before; by the Duc de Bretagne, eldest of

the sons of the Duc de Bourgogne, three weeks after his parents; by the

Duc de Berry, grandson of the king, on the 4th of May, 1714. Such a

succession of calamities roused the gravest suspicions, and the Duc

d'Orléans, afterward regent, openly accused of the use of poison,

seriously contemplated demanding permission of the king to constitute

himself prisoner till these calumnies should be silenced. There remained

only a young prince, the Duc d'Anjou, son of the Duc de Bourgogne and

Marie-Adélaide de Savoie, five years old at this date, and so delicate

that his life was despaired of. He, however, lived to become Louis XV.

Louis XIV, after having declared his sons by the Marquise de Montespan,

the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, heirs to the crown in

default of princes of the blood, and making them members of the Council

of the Regency, died September 1, 1715, at the age of seventy-seven.

His testament, as he had foreseen, was set aside, much as his father's

had been. Philippe d'Orléans summoned the Parlement, which granted him

full power as regent, with freedom to compose the council as he liked,

and the government of the royal household was taken from the Duc du

Maine after a most unseemly altercation. All the solemn and pompous

traditions of the court were likewise abandoned. "What does it matter to

the State," said the regent, "whether it is I or my lackey who rides in

a carriage." He took for his minister and councillor the Abbé Dubois, "a

little, thin man, like a weasel," said Saint-Simon, "in whom _all_ the

vices, perfidiousness, avarice, debauchery, ambition, and base flattery,

struggled for the mastery." The general demoralization caused by the

collapse of the great financial schemes of John Law was only a feature

in the general abandonment of all restraint in the pursuit of

pleasure. In the midst of this luxury of effrontery, there suddenly

appeared the imposing and barbaric figure of Peter the Great of Russia,

who visited Paris in the spring of 1717, and dismayed the court and the

Parisians by the simplicity and directness of his character, his

disregard for their voluptuous frivolity, and his appreciation of the

things only that make for greatness in a State. He did not hesitate to

prophesy, from what he saw and learned, the approaching decadence and

ruin of the French monarchy and the French people.

[Illustration: BEFORE THE ATTACK. After a water-color by J. Koppay.]

At the age of thirteen, in February, 1723, Louis XV was declared to have

attained his majority and assumed the reins of government, nominally at

least, for the regent had taken care to give him Dubois for prime

minister. Both these illustrious personages, however, died in the course

of the year, and were succeeded by the Duc de Bourbon, "ugly and

one-eyed, low, mediocre, hypocritical, a man of little led by a woman of

nothing, Madame de Prie," and who renewed the persecution of the

Protestants and the Jansenists. The young king contented himself with

"showing at the council table his handsome and impassible countenance,

which nothing ever animated. When not thus engaged, when he was neither

gambling nor hunting, he occupied himself with tapestry-making, turning

snuff-boxes in wood, or reading either the secret correspondence with

his ambassadors, which he maintained unknown to his ministers, or the

scandalous recitals which the lieutenant of police sent him regularly

every day." In the latter part of his reign, these habits were succeeded

by even more ignoble ones, drunkenness and nameless vices.

To maintain his own power, the Duc de Bourbon sent back to Spain the

Infanta, who had been brought to Paris, at the age of four, to fit her

for her future position as Queen of France, and married the king to

Marie Leczinska, daughter of the dethroned King of Poland, then living

at Wissembourg on the charity of the French government. One day, this

Stanislas Leczinski entered the chamber in which his wife and daughter

were sitting, and said to them in great excitement: "Let us get down on

our knees and thank God!" "Are you recalled to the throne of Poland?"

asked his daughter. "Much better; you are Queen of France." She was

seven years older than the king, very poor, without beauty, but gentle

and pious. The insult offered to the court of Spain was but one of the

many blunders and failures of the foreign diplomacy, while the

extravagance and debauchery at home kept pace with the growing disorder

in the national finances. The sum total of the funds disbursed during

"the nineteen years of the _reign_ of Madame de Pompadour, drawn up by

her orders, exceeds thirty-six millions of livres, equivalent to more

than sixty millions at the present day." In 1780, under Louis XVI, the

amount of pensions paid by the government reached the sum of

twenty-eight millions, and soon after rose to thirty-two. "I doubt,"

said Necker, in his _Compte rendu_, "if all the sovereigns of Europe pay

in pensions the half of this sum." At the same time, the officers of the

household of Louis XV were frequently unpaid, and it was more than once

necessary, as it had been in the reign of his illustrious predecessor,

to appeal to bourgeois and nobles to bring their silverware to the

treasury to be melted down, that the national administration might not

be utterly bankrupt. "Never," said the Comte de Maistres, during the

Terror, "did a great crime have so many accomplices: there are doubtless

some innocent sufferers among the victims, but they are very much fewer

than is generally supposed."

The marriage of the dauphin, afterward Louis XVI, with the Austrian

archduchess, Marie-Antoinette, in May, 1770, was attended with a

frightful catastrophe during the celebration of the event, on the

evening of the 30th, on the Place Louis XV, now Place de la

Concorde,--hundreds of persons being crushed to death, trampled under

foot, killed with swords, or with the fireworks which burst in their

midst. It was an ill omen for the future. The accession to the throne of

this youthful pair, in 1774, was hailed with pleasing anticipations by

the nation, wearied with the excesses of the late reign. "What joy,"

said Michelet, "to see seated at last on the purified throne of Louis XV

this virtuous, this excellent young king and this charming queen! Who

would not have hoped for everything? A grand movement of art adorned

this coronation, illuminated the scene. And the queen was the centre of

all. One woman only seemed to exist." The graceful, youthful figure of

Marie-Antoinette, dauphine, has recently been made the subject of

special research by M. Pierre de Molhac, and the intimate relations

between court intrigues and the gravest measures of foreign diplomacy

are exemplified in the pressure put upon her by her mother,

Marie-Thérèse, to treat with more consideration the king's mistress,

Madame du Barry, who, the dauphine wrote to her mother, "is the silliest

and most impertinent creature imaginable." The consent of Louis XV to

the partition of Poland was purchased by the promise of his

daughter-in-law to assume the same attitude toward Madame du Barry that

her mother had formerly condescended to with respect to Madame du

Pompadour. "Louis XV was touched in the most sensitive part of his heart

by the tact of his old friend; his silence concerning Poland was paid

for in advance."

Amid the general extravagance and corruption of the upper classes of

society some attempts were made to preserve the traditions of the famous

Hôtel de Rambouillet, _le berceau de la société polie_, where talent,

learning, and wit were the qualities that secured distinction, and not

pride of birth. Under Louis XIV, this _salon_ was renewed in the fine

hôtel of the Marquise de Lambert, in the Ile Saint-Louis,--in modern

times restored by Prince Czartoriski,--and in the "Saturdays" of

Mademoiselle de Scudéry, one of the greatest literary celebrities that

had frequented the receptions of the Marquise de Rambouillet. The

Saturdays were a great success, and the example thus set of "having a

day" was generally followed; the literary coteries of the

_précieuses_--later satirized by Molière--became numerous, and

Mademoiselle de Scudéry's receptions were maintained till 1695. Under

Louis XVI, in 1780, appeared no less than three social organizations

having widely different aims,--the _Société Philanthropique_, the

_Société Apollonienne_, which soon changed its title to that of the

_Musée_, and the more practical _Société des Mercredis_, which existed

for the purpose of encouraging good cooking. But the most distinguished

of these reunions, frequented by the higher classes of society, was the

_Société Dramatique_ de Madame de Montesson, the mistress of the Duc

d'Orléans, who had ended by marrying her with his left hand. In her

hôtel in the Rue Chaussée d'Antin, this lady had mounted a theatre, on

which she appeared with the prince, and which, from 1770 to 1780, quite

maintained the lead in the social diversions of the capital.

[Illustration: FAINT-HEARTED. After a water-color by J. Koppay.]

With the approach of the Revolution, about the commencement of the year

1785, there was a new movement, in the direction of the organization of

a great number of "clubs," a word then new to the Parisian ears, but

which was received with great favor. There was already in existence a

_Club Politique_, which the government tolerated on the express

condition that no discussions of politics or religion were to be

permitted,--a condition which was quite disregarded. The Duc d'Orléans,

who was very proud of being a member of the _Club Anglais_, founded the

_Club de Boston_ or _des Américains_; then there was the _Club des

Arcades_, the _Club des Étrangers_, the _Club de la Société Olympique_,

the _Club des Artistes_, and several others. The important part played

in the bloody drama of the Revolution by the various political clubs, is

matter of history. The earliest of these associations, of course, bore a

general resemblance to the social institutions which the Parisians now

know as _Cercles_; and it may be remarked that one of the most

celebrated of the many recent pessimistic publications of the day, the

_Grandeur et Décadence des Français_, by M. Gaston Routier, finds one of

the many signs of the social demoralization of his countrymen in the

number and importance of the cercles in the cities, and especially in

the high play that so many of them favor.

To the extravagances and pretended miracles of the sect of the

_convulsionnaires_ and those wrought on the tomb of the deacon Paris in

the cemetery Saint-Médard in 1730 and 1731, succeeded the extraordinary

alleged cures of the German doctor Mesmer, who came to Paris in 1778

with his theory of "animal magnetism,"--theory treated with more respect

by many of the _savants_ of the present day than by those of the

eighteenth century. The invention of the brothers Montgolfier,

practically tested in 1783, awakened an extraordinary interest both in

the scientific world and among the populace; and it is related that the

American, Benjamin Franklin, being asked what he thought of these new

aërial machines, replied: "It is the coming child."

The times were ripe for change: Mademoiselle de Romans, walking in the

Tuileries gardens with a little son whom she had born to Louis XV, and

pressed by the crowd, exclaimed: "Eh! messieurs and mesdames, do not

crush so, and let your king's child breathe!" The Comte d'Artois, who

was devoted to the game of tennis, being one day in an ill humor,

ordered the court to be cleared of all the spectators, using epithets

which were habitual with him: "Drive them all out," he said, "_tous ces

b . . . et ces j . . . f . . . !_" No one was left but one officer.

"Well, did you not hear what I said?" demanded his Royal Highness. "Yes,

monseigneur, but as I am neither a b . . . , nor a j . . . f... , I

remained." "The respect for _la noblesse_ was singularly diminished, and

the whole audience, even the nobles themselves, applauded at the

theatre, in 1784, the bold epigrams of the 'Figaro' of Beaumarchais:

'Because you are a great seigneur, you think yourself a great genius!

You have given yourself the trouble to be born; that is all you have

done!'"

On the 19th of June, 1789, the Assemblée Nationale, in a session which

Marat qualified as "glorious," decreed "that hereditary nobility is

forever abolished in France; that, consequently, the titles of marquis,

chevalier, écuyer, comte, vicomte, messire, prince, baron, vidame,

noble, duc, and all other similar titles cannot be borne by any person

whatsoever, nor given to any one; that no citizen shall bear other than

his true family name; that no one shall cause his domestics to wear a

livery nor have any coats-of-arms, and that incense shall be burned in

the temples only in honor of the Divinity." The Assemblée Legislative

held its first sitting on the 1st of October, 1792; on the 4th, the

deputation of sixty members sent to announce to the king that the body

was ready to begin its deliberations hesitated as to what phrases to

employ, and finally decided upon _Votre Majesté_. When the deputation

returned to give an account of its mission, much dissatisfaction was

expressed: "Let there be no more use of this title of 'Majesty,'"

exclaimed one member.

"Let us repudiate the title of 'Sire,'" said another.

"There is no longer any majesty here but that of the law and the

people," cried Couthon.

It was accordingly decreed that the deputies should seat themselves and

cover themselves before the king, that there should be provided but two

similar arm-chairs, one for the king and one for the president, and,

finally, that the king should receive no other title but that of _Roi

des Français_. Louis XVI complained bitterly of this indignity, but it

was one of the least he was called upon to endure.

When the royal family were brought into Paris from Versailles by the

armed mob, they arrived at the Tuileries at half-past ten in the morning

of the 6th of October, 1789. No attempt had been made to prepare for

their use this long uninhabited palace, and the little dauphin said to

his mother: "Mamma, everything here is very ugly." "My son," she

replied, "Louis XIV lived here, and found himself comfortable; we should

not be more difficult to please than he was." On the 20th of June, 1791,

they made an unsuccessful attempt to escape by flight, in disguise, from

the constantly increasing perils that menaced them, but were recognized

at Varennes and brought back in captivity. Nevertheless, the king was

restored to his executive functions on the 14th of the following

September, and it was not until after the attack on the Tuileries, on

the 10th of August, 1792, brought about largely by the intrigues of the

_émigré_ nobles who had fled over the frontier and by the manifesto of

the Duke of Brunswick, the general in command of the Prussian army,

announcing that he was coming, in the name of the allied kings, to

restore to Louis XVI his authority, that that hapless monarch finally

lost it. While his faithful Swiss guards were being massacred in the

hopeless defence of his palace, he was sitting, surrounded by his

family, in the _loge_ called that of the _logographe_, where he had

taken refuge with the Assemblée, watching through the open _grille_, or

iron railing, the tumultuous deliberations of that body while it enacted

that the chief of the executive power was temporarily suspended from the

exercise of his functions. Two days later, they were all conducted to

the Temple as prisoners, where the king was lodged on one floor of the

grand tower, while the queen, Madame Elisabeth, his sister, the young

dauphin and his sister, occupied that above him.

On the 26th of October, the _Journal de Paris_ announced that the ladies

had taken possession of their new apartment on the third floor, which

consisted "of four rooms very well furnished, two of which had chimneys

and the other two, stoves. The son of Capet sleeps in his father's

chamber. On a clock in the chamber of Louis there was the inscription:

'Le Pautre, clockmaker to the king.' The name of the king has been

effaced and that of the Republic substituted." The "_ci-devant_ royal

family" were allowed to promenade in the garden, and the king sometimes

walked on the leads of the tower, all the openings of which had been

carefully closed so that he could not see below, nor be seen. During

five months this captivity was maintained under a constant and

frequently outrageous surveillance.

The Bourbons were not without their familiar spectre, a very celebrated

one, who appeared to announce the approaching death of a member of the

royal family, and on the eve of his execution Louis XVI asked Monsieur

de Malesherbes if the White Lady were not walking in the corridors of

the Temple. This was the Dame Blanche of the popular saying, who takes

an interest in you when all other things cease to be of any concern to

you: _La Dame Blanche vous regarde, et les affaires des autres ne vous

regardent pas_.

[Illustration: VANQUISHED! After a water-color by J. Koppay.]

During the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate, and even the early

days of the Empire, the fashions for both men and women were in many

respects extravagant. The very elegant young men were known as

_muscadins_ and _incroyables_ (incredibles) from their favorite

expression,--all the _r_'s being banished from their speech: "_En véité,

c'est incoyable!_" But it was not always safe to laugh at them; in 1795,

the black collar which the aristocrats substituted for the former green

one, in sign of mourning, gave rise to many difficulties and

altercations. In the midst of the Palais-Royal a republican received a

bullet point-blank in his chest in return for an insult. Another,

meeting one of these _collets noirs_, said to him: "B . . . of a Chouan,

for whom dost thou wear mourning?" "For thee!" replied the other, and

blew out his brains. When Napoleon came into power, there arose that

misdirected imitation of the antique known as the style of the Empire,

with a great display of jewelry on the costumes of both men and women;

"the aristocracy of the French Empire presented a revival of the

ostentatious patricians of Rome under the Cæsars. The toilettes

displayed were rich and magnificent, but it must be said that they were

in bad taste."

The contempt which the members of the somewhat effete aristocracy of the

_ancien régime_ manifested, even down to the period of the Second

Empire, for the virile and fire-new nobility of Napoleon's family,

generals and marshals, was generally as puerile as it was unpatriotic,

but the latter only too frequently presented subject for sarcasm. In one

of the most recent of the many Napoleonic memoirs, those of the Comtesse

Potocka, this lively Polish lady describes the great personages who

surrounded the Emperor in the winter of 1806-1807, at Warsaw: Murat,

parading himself in the salons "with the majestic air of a comedian

assuming the rôle of a king;" the young Prince Borghèse, "who, in the

brief intervals when the conversation became _a little_ serious, went

off to get some chairs, arranged them in pairs in the middle of the

salon, and amused himself by dancing contra-dances with these silent

partners, humming to himself." Three years later, in Paris, Madame

Potocka saw the new Empress, Marie-Louise, whose dull countenance and

German accent sufficiently accounted for her personal unpopularity.

Napoleon, who did not hesitate to qualify contemptuously the public

opinion of Paris when it was adverse to him, was not above the ancient

"bread and circus" methods of the Roman emperors at times. On the

occasion of the celebration of his coronation, there were distributed to

the populace thirteen thousand poultry, bread, and wine ran freely in

the public squares, so that the streets echoed to this cheerful refrain:

"_Vive, vive Napoléon,

Qui nous bâille

D' la volaille,

Du pain et du vin à foison.

Vive, vive Napoléon!_"

(who gives us chickens, bread, and wine in abundance.)

As for Joséphine, her pretty legend has quite disappeared in the light

of these recent memoirs, and the historians and commentators no longer

attempt to defend her against even the abominable stories which Barras

tells of her. "It would be Don-quixotism to deny them," says M. Gustave

Larroumet, among others; "the Joséphines prefer the Barras to the

Bonapartes."

The marriage with Joséphine was declared null, in virtue of an order of

the Council of Trent on the 14th of January, 1810, and Napoleon was

condemned by the municipality of Paris to a fine of six francs for the

benefit of the poor. The curious engraving, reproduced on page 123,

illustrates the brilliant ceremony of the arrival of the new Empress at

the Tuileries on the 2d of April following. A tremendous storm broke

over the city the night before, but at one o'clock in the afternoon,

when the Imperial couple arrived at the Arch of Triumph, then incomplete

but represented by a temporary _maquette_, the sun was shining brightly.

The cavalry of the Guard and the heralds-at-arms preceded the gorgeous

coronation carriage in which they were seated; the procession descended

the avenue of the Champs-Élysées, traversed the gardens of the

Tuileries, and halted before the Pavillon de l'Horloge. Then the Empress

assumed the coronation robe, the cortége ascended the grand stairway,

traversed the grand gallery of the Louvre between a double row of

invited guests, and entered the Salon Carré, which had been transformed

into a chapel, and where the nuptial altar had been erected. After the

mass, there was a _Te Deum_, and in the evening a grand banquet in the

Tuileries. The musicians sang the chorus of the _Iphigénie_ of Gluck:

_Que d'attraits, que de majesté!_ to the accompaniment of thousands of

voices.

_La Femme_ has always played a most important role in France; nowhere is

she so much discussed, nowhere is she so much respected as Mother, and

nowhere, it may be said, is she so little respected as Woman. The women

of the eighteenth century enjoy a species of popular renown as somewhat

more _piquant_, brilliant, and peculiarly feminine, as it were,--thanks

largely to the chroniclers and the romancers in literature and art;

there is a very general idea that they were all, more or less, of the

type of Madame de Pompadour, we will say, as set forth by one of her

most recent biographers: "It would seem that the grace and the good

taste of all the things of her time appertained to Madame de Pompadour.

She marked with her _cachet_, it might almost be said with her arms, all

that world of matter which seems to be animated from one end to the

other by the ideal of the habits of a people, and the needs of a

society. The whole century is like a great relic of the royal

favorite.... She presides over that variety and that wide range of

objects, so diverse in the universality of their type, that the

eighteenth century created in her image to surround her existence, to

serve her and to adorn her." This graceful and pleasing picture,

however, was largely superficial in the case of her less favored

sisters. The inevitable limitations of the life and of the times, the

ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which

really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant

social life, and there was a general consciousness of its hollowness.

"Under all this fever of fashion and customs, under all these

dissipations of the imagination and the life, there remains something

unappeased, unsatisfied, and empty in the heart of the woman of the

eighteenth century. Her vivacity, her affectation, her eagerness to run

after fancies, seem to be a disquietude; and a sickly impatience appears

in this continual search for attraction, in this furious thirst for

pleasure. She searches in every direction, as if she wished to expand

herself outside of herself. But it is vainly that she displays her

activity, that she seeks all around her a species of deliverance;--she

may plunge herself, drown herself, in that which the fashion of the

times designates as an 'ocean of worlds,' run after distractions, new

faces, those passing liaisons, those accidental friends, for whom the

century invents the word _connaissances_; dinners, suppers, fêtes,

voyages of pleasure, tables always filled, salons always crowded, a

continual passage of personages, variety of news, visages, masks,

toilettes, absurdities, all this spectacle ceaselessly changing cannot

entirely satisfy her with its distractions. Though all her nights are

brilliant with candles, though she summon--as she grows older--more

movement still around her, she ends always by falling back upon herself;

she finds herself again in wishing to flee from herself, and she admits

to herself secretly the suffering which devours her. She recognizes in

herself the secret evil, the incurable evil which this century carries

in itself and which it drags with it everywhere smiling,--_ennui_." (_La

Femme au XVIIIe siècle._)

The very original methods employed by one of these clever ladies at the

very beginning of the century to avoid this all-pervading weariness of

the spirit furnished Théophile Gautier with the title and the theme of

one of his best romances. _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ lived in the flesh of

Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, offspring of a good family, who ran away from

the paternal mansion at the age of fourteen and fell in love with a

fencing-master who made of her a fighter of the very first order.

Nothing that the most successful romancer could desire was wanting in

her life,--abductions, disguises, duels, convents forced and set on

fire: "Don Juan was only a commonplace fop in comparison with the

incredible good fortunes of this terrible virago who changed her costume

as she did her visage, courted, indifferently and always with the same

success, one sex or the other, according as she was in an impulsive or a

sentimental vein." She had a fine voice, became a member of the Opéra

troupe under the name of _la Maupin_, and sang with success in the

_Psyche_, the _Armide_, and the _Atys_ of Lully. One of her most famous

duels ensued from her too assiduous attentions to a young lady one night

at a ball at the Palais-Royal, in the last days of the reign of Louis

XIV. The husband, the brother, and the lover all took up the quarrel,

and were all three neatly run through the body, one after the other, in

the snowy court-yard below. Then the victor, calm and smiling, returned

to offer _his_ arm to the beauty.

Another of these epicene sworders, diplomat, publicist, and captain of

dragoons, reader for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, in the suite of

Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, preserved the secret of his sex until

his death. This was the adventurer D'Éon de Beaumont, whose career

excited such a lively interest in both England and France, and who

signed himself, in a letter addressed to Madame de Staël during the

Revolution, _citoyenne de la nouvelle République française, citoyenne de

l'ancienne République des lettres_.

On the 3d of May, 1814, a Bourbon king was again in the Tuileries. All

the tremendous work of the Revolution and the Empire seemed undone.

"Brusquely, without any transitions," says M. Henri Noël, "the standard

of men and things was lowered many degrees. To the epopee succeeds the

bourgeois drama, not to say the comedy. It would have been thought that

France, satiated with glory and misfortunes, France, which, on the

whole, seemed to have accepted without enthusiasm, but with a sort of

resigned indifference, the new régime, was about to breathe again, to

relax herself, to repose. She is wearied with herself. She is nervous,

discontented. It might be said that she endured with less patience the

blunders, the littleness, the errors of the royalty, than she had the

tragic massacres, and the ruins, and the invasions, and the bloodshed,

and the tears. Everywhere, anxiety and disquietude, the royalists not

completely satisfied, the generals humiliated, the army without glory

and its best officers retired on half-pay, the liberal bourgeoisie

suspicious and disposed to join the opposition, the small land-owners

anxious for their property which they had received from the

Revolution...."

Louis XVIII, with all his inherent faults, was a prudent and moderate

ruler in comparison with his brother, the Comte d'Artois, who succeeded

him as Charles X in September, 1824, and in six years brought the

Bourbon dynasty to an end. M. Ernest Daudet, in the _Revue des Deux

Mondes_, has recently been publishing some letters in connection with

the ministry of the Duc Decazes, in one of which we find the king

remonstrating with his brother, already the chief of the _ultras_: ...

"You have notified me that, if you do not succeed in persuading me, you

will make your opinions known publicly, and, which unfortunately will

inevitably follow, that you will no longer see me.... There is no doubt

that this resolution will seriously embarrass the government. But, with

consistency and firmness, this obstacle may be overcome, and I hope

that, during my lifetime, there will be no troubles. But I cannot,

without a shudder, look forward to the moment when my eyes will be

closed. You will then find yourself between two parties, one of which

believes itself to be already oppressed by me, and the second of which

will apprehend being so treated by you. (Conclusion: there will be civil

war, and a whole future of divisions, of troubles, and of calamities.)"

This prophecy was but too well realized. The liberal ideas, which were

made responsible, though without any proof, for the assassination of

the Duc de Berri, at the door of the Opéra-house on the evening of the

13th of February, 1820, attained a great development in the ensuing

reign. Paris was unanimous in its opposition. Decamps's absurd cartoon

of Charles X hunting, which we have reproduced, is a not unfaithful

presentation of the state of public opinion concerning this purblind

monarch.

All these revolutions in the political world were, of course, followed

in the, perhaps, minor world of fashion. _Souvent femme varie_, and

_Toute passe, tout casse, tout lasse._ "Paris, in its revulsion from the

severity of the earlier Revolution," says an unsympathetic English

writer, "took refuge in the primitive license of the Greeks. 'It was a

beautiful dress,' says a lady in a popular modern comedietta; 'I used to

keep it in a glove-box.' The costume of a _belle_ of the _Directoire_

was equally portable.... With the triumph of the Empire, a more martial

and masculine tone prevailed. So the _Parisienne_ cast off her Grecian

robes--a comparatively easy process--and put on the whole armor of the

tailor-made. She wore cloth instead of diaphanous gauze, and her gowns

were cut with a more austere simplicity. Then came the Restoration and

the Romantic movement, and the great days of 1830. Woman read her

Chateaubriand and her Victor Hugo and her Byron, and became sentimental.

It was _bon-ton_ to languish a good deal, and the dressmakers were

required to find a suitable costume for the occupation. They proved

equal to the demand.... In England, these vestments are called Early

Victorian, and are scoffed at, together with the horse-hair sofas and

glass lustres of the period.

"At any rate, it did not last. Nothing lasts in feminine fashions....

Romanticism and sentiment died out or became _bourgeois_. Gay Paris grew

alert, lively, animated, dashing. The lady who used to be called a

_lionne_ when people were reading Murger and De Musset, displaced the

_femme incomprise_. The 'lioness' was not unlike the vigorous young

person of a later epoch. She was distinctly loud in her manners and free

and easy in her conversation.... At any rate, she was a healthier type

than the pleasure-loving matron of the Second Empire, whose life was one

whirl of unwholesome excitement. The vulgarity of thought and conduct,

the destruction of all standards of dignity, which characterized the

régime of Louis Napoleon's stock-jobbing adventurers, were reflected in

the dress of the women. Never was female attire more extravagantly

absurd.... Man, with all his tolerance, could not really like the Paris

fashions of the Second Empire, and he might have found consolation for

the tragedies of 1870, if he had known, as has been asserted, that they

portended deliverance from the thraldom. France, so we are told, purged

and purified by the baptism of fire, shook off its tasteless frippery,

and sought a chaster and purer mode.... Thus elevated and touched to

higher issues, the _modistes_ of France, when once the Third Republic

had settled down, made quite nice and simple dresses for a few years,

and were imitated by the slavish islanders across the Channel, who had

no such lofty motives to inspire them. The latest developments of this

philosophy of clothes are not yet worked out in detail...."

A multitude of the _emigré_ nobles returned with Louis XVIII, bringing

with them the manners and customs of the _ancien régime_, which the

Parisians found singularly antiquated and absurd, and gave these

reactionaries the title of _Voltigeurs de Louis XVI_. The science of

good cooking, however, which had been somewhat neglected by society

during the Empire, suddenly took on a much greater importance--as was

its due. The lady of the higher aristocracy, taking her déjeuner so

comfortably with her lapdog, in the plate which we have reproduced from

the _Bon Genre_, is supposed to be the Princesse de Vaudémont. A curious

detail of the social life of the Romantic period of the Restoration was

the fashion of _keepsakes_ and _annuaires illustrés_, which came from

England, and which flourished from 1825 to 1845. These costly little

books intended for presentation, richly bound, and illustrated with

small steel engravings, generally taken from the English "keepsakes,"

bore various titles: _L'Album brittanique_, _L'Amaranthe, Annales

romantiques_, _Le Camée_, _La Corbeille d'or_, _L'Eglantine_, _L'Élite_,

_Livre des salons_, etc. The greatest names among the writers of the

_Romantisme_ may be found among the contributors to these

publications,--Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset,

A. de Vigny, Méry, Gozlan, and others.

The _bourgeois_ monarchy of Louis-Philippe was made the object of a

storm of ridicule on the part of the Parisian wits and caricaturists

from which it has never entirely recovered. The "umbrella" of the

Orléans family, which the ribald press of that day made the emblem of

their royalty, still figures in the lampoons addressed to the present

pretender. The caricature of the royal physiognomy as a pear is one of

the most famous in history. Louis-Philippe wore his hair piled in a

species of pyramid over his forehead, which lent plausibility to this

defamation; this pyramid was known as the _toupet_, and was naturally

largely imitated; those whose locks were not sufficient in quantity for

the purpose, purchased false ones. Whiskers were also in fashion, but

not moustaches, and no official functionary was permitted to wear hair

under his nose. The _Saint-Simoniens_ and those who entitled themselves

_Jeune France_ alone wore the hair long and pendant, and the toupet

gradually lowered its altitude and finally disappeared, to give place to

hair smoothed down and parted strongly on one side, generally the left.

After the Revolution of 1830, the Tuileries gardens were thrown open to

all decently-dressed people, but not to those in blouses; it required

another revolution, that of 1848, to bring about sufficient toleration

to recognize the privilege of smoking under these ci-devant royal

horse-chestnuts. A Legitimist journal, regretting the good old days,

before the populace were accorded the privilege of entry, "which gives

to this locality much the appearance of Noah's ark, in which both the

clean and the unclean beasts were admitted," related the following

anecdote of the days of the monarchy. A young man of the _suprême bon

ton_, carefully arrayed in the very latest modes, a _petit-maître_

[dandy, fop, exquisite], presented himself at one of the entrances of

the garden and was much surprised to see the sentry on duty lower his

bayonet and forbid his passing. "How! no admittance?" exclaimed the

beau. "I have precise orders," replied the soldier. "Precise orders ...

to refuse me?" "Precise orders to refuse any one whom I consider to be

badly dressed [_mal mis_]; ... now, I consider you to be _bien mal

mis_." And the young man was compelled to retire before this new censor

of manners armed with authority.

In 1845, the _prestidigitateur_, Robert-Houdin, appeared at the

Palais-Royal with his new species of entertainment, and for a number of

years continued to delight numerous audiences with his mystifying skill

in sleight of hand, his example being followed by minor practitioners

who gave performances in private salons. The theatre bearing his name on

the Boulevard des Italiens still maintains this class of popular

amusement.

On the 13th of July, 1842, the Duc d'Orléans, the heir to the throne,

and a prince deservedly popular, was thrown from his carriage on the Rue

de la Révolte, while on his way to Neuilly, and so badly injured that he

died five hours later, universally lamented. The right of succession

passed to his son, the Comte de Paris, then a child of four; and both

Legitimists and Republicans began to look forward to the inevitable

feebleness and uncertainty of a regency as favorable to the triumph of

their ideas. The opposition of the king's minister, Guizot, the

historian, to the electoral reforms is generally considered as having

brought about the Revolution of 1848, though it is somewhat doubtful if

the monarchy could have successfully weathered the storms of this year

of liberal ideas and universal unrest.

Nevertheless, the Republic came too soon, as the French historians now

seem disposed to admit. The political education of the nation was not

yet sufficiently advanced, and "it returned to the Empire as to a

solution that best conformed with its condition of _esprit simpliste_.

This movement was accelerated by the combinations of men of all shades

of political beliefs,--Berryer, Montalembert, Molé, Thiers, Odilon

Barrot, and others, who counted on 'the pretended incapacity' of the

future emperor for sliding into power themselves. But their hopes were

disappointed by the taciturn pretender." One of the latest apologists

for the Emperor, M. Thirria, in his _Napoléon III avant l'Empire_,

claims, and no intelligent commentator can disprove the claim: "If he

reigned, it was because France was willing, and very willing, and his

fatal politics of nationalities, she approved of it, sanctioned it, the

republican party first of all." M. Thirria is willing to admit, however,

that "he was not made to be the chief of a State, and his reign was a

great misfortune for France."

[Illustration: THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE BIRTH OF A GIRL. From a drawing

by Adolphe Willette.]

Having the courage of his convictions, M. Thirria does not hesitate to

take up all the charges against the Emperor, beginning with the first of

all, chronologically, that he was not the son of his alleged father. By

a number of letters which he quotes from Louis-Napoleon, King of

Holland, he endeavors to demonstrate that the latter considered himself

to be, without doubt, the parent of Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.

The story of the Dutch Admiral Verhuel is, however, corroborated by

other documents of equal authenticity. The future emperor, it appears,

did at one time officiate as an English police officer, but it was only

for the space of two months, and then as special constable at some

Chartist meetings. After the affair at Strasbourg, he did accept fifteen

thousand francs from the government of Louis-Philippe, which he had just

attempted to overthrow, on condition that he should go to America.

A franker chronicler gives us further details. Under the title, _Madame

Cornu et Napoléon III_, M. Eugène d'Eichthal published, in 1897, a

number of fragments translated from a posthumous work, _Conservation_,

by the English economist, Nassau Senior, who had been brought into

contact with a large number of distinguished men of different countries.

In 1854, he first met in a salon the wife of the French painter

Sébastien Cornu, who was a goddaughter of Queen Hortense and had been a

friend from childhood of Louis-Napoleon. She had been able to render him

many services when he was a prisoner at Ham, and they had maintained a

confidential correspondence even after the _Coup d'État_, which almost

interrupted their friendship, Madame Cornu being a good republican. In

the course of her acquaintance with the English gentleman, she gave him

much information concerning the then ruler of the French nation, which

he carefully set down, and which M. d'Eichthal translated for the

benefit of his countrymen. On one occasion she said: "The mental

faculties of Louis-Napoleon present many great superiorities and great

deficiencies. He has neither originality nor invention. He neither knows

how to reason nor to discuss. He has very few fixed or general

principles, but he is a very keen observer, noting quickly the

weaknesses and the stupidities of those around him. In the company of

some persons with whom he feels at ease, his wit and his gaiety are

delicious.

"There is an equal want of accord in his moral qualities. He is

extremely mild and amiable; his friendships are durable, but his

passions are not so. He has, in a high degree, decision, obstinacy,

dissimulation, patience, and confidence in himself. He is not arrested

by any scruples. That which we call a sense of good and evil, he calls

prejudices...."

Installed in the Élysée as Prince-President in 1849, he began to prepare

the way for the _Coup d'État_ and the zealous republicans saw with alarm

the species of informal court which he was already gathering around him.

To attract the members of the higher society, he instituted a series of

weekly receptions; all the ground-floor of the palace, including three

salons and a gallery, was thrown open, and there was added a light

edifice connecting the main façade with the wall of the garden, facing

on the Avenue de Marigny. A decree of the 4th of January, 1850, elevated

the ex-king Jérôme, then governor of the Invalides, to the rank of

marshal of France, by a mere exercise of the presidential authority. His

term of office and that of the Assemblée both expired in 1852, with an

interval of three months between them, but the violent measures of the

2d of December, 1851, made him president for a term of three years, and

the constitution which he had proposed was ratified by the nation by a

tremendous majority.

In the Tuileries, he re-established the etiquette of the First Empire,

but the ceremonial of his court did not equal the state maintained under

the Bourbons. The palace itself, at first, was a very uncomfortable

residence. All the modern conveniences of a dwelling were wanting;

Louis-Philippe, who had a numerous family, had divided several galleries

into apartments, separated by corridors without windows, lit only by

lamps which vitiated the air. The various floors of the building were

connected by narrow, winding stairways, also lit only by lamps; one

story had been made into two, each with low ceilings and with very

little day-light, and in the garrets, where the domestics were lodged,

the air was pestilential. There was no running-water in the various

apartments, and it was necessary to carry it in every day in pitchers.

In the Musée Carnavelet may be seen an interesting collection of

water-colors by Baron, portraits of ladies and important personages of

the Imperial court in costumes of fancy-dress balls and tableaux

vivants. There may be seen the Emperor in black coat and trousers, the

Empress _en bohémienne_, the Princesse de Metternich _en diable noir_,

Madame de Gortschakoff as Salammbô, the Marquise de Galliffet as an

angel, the Comtesse Walewska as Diana, the Comtesse de Pourtales as a

bayadère, the Marquis de Galliffet as a cock, the Baron de Heeckeren as

a doge, etc.

A retrospective exhibition, a _Salon de la Mode_, was opened in Paris,

in the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, in the spring and early summer of 1896,

and furnished a very good compendium in little, not only of the changing

manners and customs of the last century or two, the vicissitudes of the

artistic spirit of the nation, but also of the varying fortunes with

which the capital ruled in matters of taste, of fashion, and of luxury.

Subject-matter for grave historians might be found in the various

indications, direct and suggested, of the points of contact between the

daily life of the eighteenth century and our own, as well as of the many

divergences. Long before 1789, the Parisians of the _ancien régime_ were

in the enjoyment of many of the modes, the whims, and the absurdities

which constitute so large a part of the existence of their successors.

They were even, almost, supplied with fashion magazines, the first of

these very important publications to appear, the _Courrier de la Mode_,

under Louis XV, in 1768, not being appreciated, and coming to an early

end. In 1785, however, appeared the _Cabinet des Modes_, transformed in

the following year into _Magasin des modes nouvelles françaises et

anglaises_, for English fashions disputed the sovereignty with Parisian

ones, and journals published on the banks of the Thames spoke with equal

authority. Among these latter was the _Gallery of Fashion_, founded in

1794. The Germans, on the other hand, originated nothing, and the _Moden

Zeitung_ of Berlin reproduced slavishly only that which had already been

approved in Paris and London.

[Illustration: CARD. Design by Guillaume.]

Much as in the present day, English tastes were followed in many things,

not all of them feminine. The _Tableau de Paris_, published by Sébastien

Mercier, lamented that "it is to-day the fashion among the youth to copy

the English in their clothes." The large stores, the _magasins_, called

themselves _anglais_; and the sport of horse-racing, which was beginning

to be popular, and which was largely a matter of importation, naturally

brought in alien words to shock the purists. The _jockei_ was sweated

down to his proper weight to mount the _bête de sang_ [blooded animal];

_cheval de race_ was antiquated, and bad form. In the present day,

there is a _Ligue d'honnêtes gens préoccupés de maintenir le bon

français_, and who quote Béranger:

"_Redoutons l'Anglomanie,

Elle a déjà gâté tout._"

[Beware of Anglomania, it has already spoiled everything.] These "worthy

people" admit that for such words as "jockey," "lawn-tennis," and

"sport," for which there are no equivalents in the French language,

there is some excuse, but why, they ask, is "turf" better than

_pelouse_; "flirter," meaning "to flirt," than _fleureter_ (_conter

fleurette_, to say pretty, gallant things); "garden-party" than _une

partie de jardin_; "five o'clock" than _cinq heures_? Is

"boarding-house" any more euphonious than _hôtel meublé_, or "tub" than

_bassin_? Scarcely! Nevertheless, the English fashions, especially in

men's garments, continue to enjoy great favor in Paris; and it may be

noted, for the gratification of our national pride, that in some minor

matters, such as shoes and ladies' stockings, the American articles are

to be preferred to the Parisian ones.

All these futile and minor things, _toilettes_, _brimborions_, take on,

a hundred years later, the importance of historic documents. "One would

not go so far as to say," observes M. Bouchot, "that Napoleon was

dethroned because it was found that the _fleur-de-lis_ made an adorable

ornament for a _parure_ of crape, but is it such an absurd idea?" Under

the reign of Louis XVI, it was proposed, more than once, to establish an

_Académie de la Mode_, and an _Académie de la Coiffure_. A certain

_citoyen amateur de sexe_, Lucas Rochemont, invented a concours, or

competition, of new modes among the real _élégantes_ of France. It was

the custom then to put forth small jokes against the Académie, just as

it is now; it was declared that men of letters should renounce it and

all its works, and that it preserved no better the purity of the

language than it did that of taste. Nevertheless, it retained a certain

respect, and the title, _Académie de Coiffure_, with which certain

hair-dressers and wig-makers provided themselves, was forbidden.

The capital had long enjoyed the reputation, says the _Tableau de

Paris_, of being "the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, the

inferno of horses." The purgatory seems to have changed in two respects

at least;--one could live in it then "comfortably enough at small

expense," and the city was "highly indifferent concerning its political

position." The horses were treated cruelly, even more so than at

present, and the familiar jests concerning the fiacres were already

invented. By this name was designated both the driver and his vehicle

drawn "by an expiring horse." The _cochers_ enjoyed the same bad

reputation they do at present--probably somewhat more justly, and they

even went on strike, as in the nineteenth century. On one occasion,

eighteen hundred of them drove out to Choisy, where the king was

residing, to set their griefs before him. The streets were narrow and

without sidewalks; the driver was held responsible only for the

fore-wheels of his vehicle; and he naturally scattered terror as he

went. The bicyclist and the automobile were not then invented to torment

him in his turn. These two modern innovations have added very greatly to

the danger and inconvenience of the streets of Paris of to-day; there

are already complaints from the owners of private carriages that the

Bois and the principal drives are becoming impossible because of the

latter, and that the city will have to take measures to preserve its

attractions for this class of inhabitants and for the wealthy stranger

whose presence is so much desired within its walls.

Also, as at present, the washwomen were the despair of careful

housekeepers. "There is no city where so much linen is used as at Paris,

and none where it is so badly washed," says our authority. There was a

legend of some _gommeux_ [dandies] from Bordeaux who sent theirs to

Saint-Domingo, naturally, by sailing vessel, to have it whitened. _Homme

à bonne fortune_ and _petit-maître_ were no longer in favor, _élégant_

was the proper appellation. The Seine water was drunk freely, but it had

already begun to be analyzed and doubted; cremation was advocated and

vivisection denounced; the classic education and Latin were derided,

just as by M. Jules Lemaître; the evolution of the species was

discussed, and the sorrowfulness of the Carnival lamented,--the police

were even obliged to hire the maskers; the _claque_ was offensively in

evidence at the theatres. The _grippe_ arrived periodically in the month

of November, to the great surprise of every one,--but it was then called

_la coquette_ and not _l'influenza_. The ladies pommaded their faces,

and drank vinegar to preserve their figures; marriages were effected

only in hopes of pecuniary advantages. The honest bourgeoisie complained

bitterly of the display of licentious prints on the walls and the fronts

of the bookstalls; "the young men in the cafés discussed matters which

were beyond their comprehension and which they had never studied." There

was a surprising number of points of resemblance.

Among the minor observances of social life which have come down to the

present day with only some modification of details are the _billets de

décès_ and the _invitations aux funérailles_. It is only since 1760 that

the names of members of the mourning families have appeared on these

invitations. In the matter of _avis de naissance_, in which the birth of

a baby is announced, the moderns have made great improvements, some of

the designs by the cleverest Parisian artists--as that by Willette

reproduced on page 211--being quite charming. In the much more important

matter of _Menus_, the prodigal display of invention is worthy of the

most artistic of capitals. The luxury of the toilette is maintained with

somewhat more discretion and less ostentation; many of the modern

refinements, as that of the manicure, are but intelligent developments

or modifications of the arts of the last century. Some of the social

vices, as gambling and intoxication, have greatly decreased,

notwithstanding the lamentations of such prophets of evil as M. Gaston

Routier, and many of the more graceful forms of exercise, such as

fencing--consult M. Koppay's spirited sketches--have grown greatly in

favor.

The Second Empire contributed a very commendable example of luxury

lending itself to the interests of history in the case of the

restoration of a Pompeian house, erected by Prince Jérôme Napoleon in

the Rue Montaigne, and formally opened with a reception at which the

Emperor and Empress were present, February 14, 1860.

Max Nordau, in his _Paradoxes psychologiques_, thus disposes of the

Parisian woman: "The _Parisienne_ is entirely the work of the French

romancers and journalists. They make of her, literally, whatever they

wish, physically and intellectually. She speaks, she thinks, she feels,

she acts, she dresses herself even, assumes attitudes, walks and stands

upright, according to rules which the writers _à la mode_ impose upon

her. She is in their hands a doll furnished with springs and obeys with

docility all their suggestions," etc. On the contrary, it is probably

safe to say, speaking generally, that the French romancers

systematically defame their compatriots, and that even Parisian society

is not the institution it is represented to be in novels, on the stage,

and by many of the essayists. It has been reserved, for example, for a

very recent writer, M. Jules Bois, to portray, _for the first time in

France_, the indignation of the fiancée at the fact, almost constant,

that her future husband comes to her without that freshness of soul and

body which is required in her case. It would not have required very

accurate social observers, it would seem, to have discovered earlier

this phenomenon. M. Bois counsels the wives not to compromise themselves

by weak forgiveness of the egotistical and adulterous spouses.

The frightful conflagration of the Bazar de la Charité, in the Rue

Jean-Goujon, on the 4th of May, 1897,--the most terrible catastrophe of

this nature that had been seen in Paris since the fire at the ball given

by the Austrian ambassador on the 1st of July, 1810, in honor of the

marriage of Napoleon I and Marie-Louise, and the burning of the

Opéra-Comique in 1887,--offered, in the long list of its victims, a most

tragic demonstration of the fact that the women of Paris of the highest

society knew how to occupy themselves in works of practical benevolence.

Of the hundred and seventeen victims, all but six were ladies and young

girls; and the roll of illustrious names was headed by that of the

Duchesse d'Alençon. This philanthropic institution was founded in 1885

by M. Henri Blount, its honorary president; its annual bazaars, for the

benefit of the poor, were held at first in the Salle Albert-le-Grand,

then in the hôtel of the Comtesse Branicka in 1888, in the following

year in that of M. Henry Say, and from 1890 to 1896 in two houses in the

Rue de la Boëtie. In 1897, M. Michel Heine placed at the disposition of

the managers, gratuitously, a large open space in the Rue Jean-Goujon.

The new bazaar was here inaugurated on the 3d of May, and the receipts

exceeded forty-five thousand francs. On the day after the catastrophe,

some charitable person donated, anonymously, to the OEuvre de la

Charité the sum of nine hundred and thirty-seven thousand francs,

representing the amount of the sales of the preceding year, that the

poor, also, might not suffer by this catastrophe. A subscription opened

by the _Figaro_ for the same charitable purpose, and for those who had

distinguished themselves, at the risk of their lives, in saving victims

from the flames, realized the sum of one million two hundred and

eighteen thousand and fifteen francs, and another, by the _Rappel_, more

than fifteen thousand francs. And, finally, the Comtesse de Castellane,

who had been the American Miss Gould, gave a million of francs for the

purchase of another site and the construction of another edifice for the

work of the organized charity of Paris.

Among the lighter details of information concerning this illustrious

society may be mentioned an article by the Vicomte A. de Royer in a

recent number of the _Revue des Revues_ (October, 1898), which

undertakes to demonstrate, by means of documents, that, of the

forty-five thousand "noble" families in France, only four hundred and

fifty are in a position to substantiate a claim to ancient lineage, and

that, of the three hundred and forty-six princely families of France,

which are all that are left, not one has the right to wear the closed

coronet. All the titles of the latter are usurped, and are purely

fanciful. No fewer than twenty-five thousand families put the particle

_de_ in front of their names without a shadow of right; and it appears

that the Republic manufactures another forty of such families every

year. When official permission to thus distinguish the family name is

refused, it is simply dispensed with. In addition, the Pope gives or

sells, on an average, sixty titles of "count" or "prince" every year,

and though these are not current, the possessors wear them, just the

same. The Paris _Journal_ demanded, indignantly, if M. de Royer thought

he was doing a patriotic work in thus closing the French market to

American heiresses.

To conclude: we quote what M. Henri Lavedan, in his recent work: _Les

Jeunes, ou L'Espoir de la France_, gives as a typical conversation

between three young men of the highest society in Paris, "the hope of

France." The scene is laid in the apartments of D'Allarège, about five

o'clock in the afternoon. All three are smoking. The day is declining;

they comprehend each other in silence. At intervals, they alternately

allow a monosyllable to fall, which is as the affirmation of their

absence of thought:

BRIOUZE.--"Yes...." (_Puff of smoke._)

MONTOIS.--"Yes...."

(_Then a black hole of silence. Puffs. Spirals. Sound of carriages.

Paris continues its murmur._)

MONTOIS.--"Ah! la, la!"

D'ALLARÈGE.--"Is it not?"

BRIOUZE.--"To whom do you say it?"

(_Blue smoke through the nose. Ashes fall from the cigar. And time

passes._)

D'ALLARÈGE (to Montois).--"And besides that?"

MONTOIS.--"Not much."

THE BOURGEOIS AND THE LOWER CLASSES

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT DAY

[Illustration: TWO SANS-CULOTTES. PERIOD, 1792.]

If the history of a city were written with anything like a due exactness

of proportion, much of it would be but a weary record of human misery,

and through even the most decorous and conventional of chronicles there

appear constantly unpleasant glimpses of the terrible under-strata that

sometimes upheave and make ruin. So long as this apparently inevitable

and irremediable discord does not appear to affect the general march of

events, it is glozed over. The condition of the middle and lower classes

in Paris through the Middle Ages was that common to all mediæval cities,

and would seem to modern ideas all but unendurable. To the absence of

law, municipal, protective, or sanitary, the disregard of life and

property, the pestiferous condition of houses and streets, to famine,

war, pestilence, and constant internal discords, were added the

intemperances of the seasons--apparently much more severe than at

present--and the ravages of wild beasts. The Seine--quite regardless of

the praise the Emperor Julian had bestowed upon its moderation and

uniform flow--was constantly bursting its bonds and devastating with

inundation the Cité and the adjoining shores; the excessive cold of the

winters is a constant source of complaint in the local annals. That of

1433-1434 was heralded by a "formidable wind" which, on the 7th of

October, raged for nine consecutive hours, demolishing many houses and

uprooting many trees,--three hundred of the latter in the wood of

Vincennes alone. The frost commenced on the 31st of December and

continued uninterruptedly for eighty days; for forty days the snow fell

continuously, night and day; toward the end of March, freezing weather

returned, and lasted till Easter, the 17th of April. In one tree alone

there were found a hundred and forty birds dead with cold. In 1437 and

1438 the wolves penetrated into the city, by way of the river, and

devoured women and children, in the last week of September, 1437, while

the king was in the city, "fourteen persons, big and little, between

Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Antoine." There was one most monstrous

beast, called Courtaud, because he had no tail, that was an object of

special terror. "But the wolves, for the Parisians, were less to be

feared than the seigneurs and the brigands called _escorcheurs_, which

followed in their train."

In 1348, the Black Plague, coming from Egypt and Syria, reached Paris

and destroyed eighty thousand inhabitants. At the Hôtel-Dieu, the dead

numbered five hundred a day, and the nuns who served as nurses perished

so rapidly that they had to be constantly renewed. Charles V, _le

Sage_, died on the 16th of September, 1380, "after a reign of sixteen

years, during which the people, although they had been crushed by such

taxation that 'many were forced to sell their beds in order to pay,' had

yet had much less to complain of than during the preceding reign, and,

still more, than they would have during that which was to follow,--the

most wretched of all!"

The historians quote from the _Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris_ for the

years 1419-1421: "You would have heard through all Paris pitiable

lamentations, little children crying: 'I am dying with hunger!' There

were to be seen on a dunghill twenty, thirty children, boys and girls,

who yielded up their souls through famine and cold. Death cut down so

many and so fast that it was necessary to excavate in the cemeteries

great ditches in which were put thirty or forty, packed close together,

and scarcely powdered over with earth. Those who dug the graves asserted

that they had buried more than a hundred thousand persons. The

shoe-makers counted up, on the day of their trade reunion, those that

had died among them, and found that they numbered some eighteen hundred,

masters and apprentices, in these two months. Troops of wolves traversed

the country and entered Paris during the night to carry off the dead

bodies.... The working people said to each other: 'Let us fly to the

woods with the wild beasts.... Farewell to wives and children.... Let us

do the worst we can.... Let us place ourselves again in the hands of the

devil.'"

To multiply these historical incidents would be but dreary

iteration,--we will rather give one or two presentations in full of some

details of what may be called the subterranean aspect of the great city,

sombre and rather unpleasant presentations that are not to be found in

the dignified histories or in the guide-books, and that remain unknown

to the usual decorous tourist and reader. That the first one may not be

too sombre, we will select it, not in the gloom of the Dark Ages, but in

full French Renaissance, under François I. Readers of Victor Hugo's

_Notre-Dame de Paris_ will doubtless remember his very picturesque

description of the famous Cour des Miracles as it existed in the reign

of Louis XI,--more sober historians do not hesitate to corroborate these

fantastic details in many particulars. M. Gourdon de Genouillac,

Officier d'Académie, in his learned work, _Paris à travers les siècles_,

gives a description which we condense. "Everything had been done in

order to oppose an effective defence to the attacks of enemies outside

the walls; but it was much more difficult to guard against the

enterprises of those within; the assemblings of the malcontents which

were held nightly, and those of the gentry of sack and cord who, as soon

as the gates were opened, set off eagerly to ravage the suburbs of

Paris, returning in the evening to conceal themselves in the quarters

where no one scarcely ventured to go in search of them. The Cour des

Miracles was the usual refuge of all those wretches who came to conceal

in this corner of Paris, sombre, dirty, muddy, and tortuous, their

pretended infirmities and their criminal pollution.

"The Cour des Miracles extended between the Impasse de la Corderie (on

the site of which a part of the Rue Thévenot was opened) and the Rues de

Damiette and des Forges; its entrance was in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. It

had been in existence since the thirteenth century....

"Several other haunts of the same kind existed in Paris, and Dulaure

asserts that under Louis XIV there were still to be seen, the Cour des

Miracles, of which we have just spoken; the Cour du Roi-François,

situated in the Rue Saint-Denis; the Cour Sainte-Catherine, in the same

street; the Cour Brisset, Rue de la Mortellerie; the Cour Gentien, Rue

des Coquilles; the Cour de la Jussienne, in the street of the same name;

the Cour Saint-Honoré, between the Rues Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Honoré, and

de l'Echelle; the Cour des Miracles, Rue du Bac; the Cour des Miracles,

Rue de Reuilly, and still another Cour des Miracles, Rue Jean Beausire.

"But that which, in the sixteenth century, formed a veritable quarter of

the city, was the Cour des Miracles of the Rue Saint-Sauveur, which

served as a refuge for beggars and vagabonds.

"'It consisted,' as we read in Sauval's _Antiquités_, 'of an open place

of very considerable size and of a very large _cul-de-sac_,

evil-smelling, miry, and irregular, which had no pavement whatever.

Formerly, it was confined to one of the farthest extremities of Paris.

At present, it is situated in that one of the quarters of the city which

is the worst built, the most filthy, and the most out of the way,

between the Rue Montorgueil, the convent of the Filles-Dieu, and the Rue

Neuve-Saint-Sauveur, as if it were in another world. To get to it, it is

necessary to go astray in little streets, villainous, stinking, crooked;

to enter it, it is necessary to descend a sufficiently long slope,

tortuous, rugged, uneven. I have seen there a house of dirt, half

buried, tumbling to pieces with old age and rottenness, which did not

cover a space of four square fathoms, and in which were lodged,

nevertheless, more than fifty households, having in charge an infinite

number of little children, legitimate, natural, or stolen. I was assured

that in this little dwelling and in the others dwelt more than five

hundred large families, piled one upon the other. Large as is this

court, it was formerly much more so. On every side it has been

encroached upon by lodgings, low, sunken, dark, and deformed,

constructed of earth and of mud, and all of them crowded with the evil

poor.'

"In fact, under François I the Cour des Miracles had a physiognomy much

more strongly marked than under Louis XIV. The narrow and miry streets,

insinuating themselves between the hovels in wood, halting and crippled,

turned and returned upon themselves, to end finally in a repulsive

sewer. Neither air nor sunshine ever penetrated into these infamous

alleys, from which escaped, at all seasons of the year, nauseating

odors, and too often, also, pestilential miasmas. There vegetated in the

most sordid uncleanliness the subjects of the kingdom of beggary. All

that Paris illegally received in the way of mendicants, false cripples,

false blind, false lepers horrible to see, covered with ulcers, there

wallowed in orgies, in frantic feasting, in gambling....

". . . All these _truands_ recognized a veritable hierarchy; there were to

be distinguished among them three distinct classes,--the _capons_, or

_voleurs_ (thieves); the _francs-mitous_, or _mendiants_ (beggars), and

the _rifodes_, or _vagabonds_. All together formed a kingdom, the chief

of which was called the grand Coësre; he carried a banner on which was

depicted a dead dog, and, quite like his colleague, the King of France,

he had a court and courtiers.

"It was the kingdom of _Argot_ (cant, slang), the code or the formula of

which prescribed theft and plunder.

"Its enclosure, restricted to the Cour des Miracles, was place of refuge

[legal asylum]; all the historians have repeated it, but we do not think

that this right had ever been officially recognized, and it existed

rather through force of circumstances; in this sense, that when a thief

or an assassin had taken refuge in one of the dens of which we have

spoken, it was found more convenient to leave him there in peace than

to run the risk of taking him out of it. However this may be, the

_argotiers_ were quite masters in their own house, and enjoyed in

complete liberty the right of living as seemed good to them. In order

that it might not be permitted that they should be accused of wanting

for religion, they had stolen a statue of the Father Eternal from the

church of Saint Pierre aux Boeufs and had placed it in a niche, before

which they willingly made the sign of the cross.

"Moreover, it should be remarked that the monks and the gentry of the

Cour des Miracles lived on sufficiently good terms with each other, and

it would not be impossible that the name given to this enclosure came

from the zeal with which the argotiers cried 'Miracle!' every time that

one was manifested in the streets of Paris, and we may say, _en

passant_, that the miracles were frequently performed in their favor.

Whenever the monks made some solemn procession, promenading through the

streets the relics of some saint, it was not uncommon to see a

franc-mitou, paralyzed, crippled or epileptic, endeavoring to touch the

sacred casket; in vain would the attempt be made to keep him at a

distance; he redoubled his efforts, and scarcely had he succeeded in

gluing his lips to the sacred coffer when immediately the cripple threw

away his crutch, the epileptic ceased to foam at the mouth, and the

astonished people cried: 'Miracle!'

"It was even said that the monks had been seen on several occasions to

penetrate at night into the famous court, and come out again without

having received the slightest ill treatment.

"During very many years, this society of begging thieves existed and its

importance constantly augmented. Under Louis XIV, its numerous members

were divided into _cagoux_, _orphelins_, _marcandiers_, _rifodes_,

_malingreux_ and _capons_, _piètres_, _polissons_, _francs-mitous_,

_callots_, _saboleux_, _hubains_, _coquillards_, _courtaux de boutange_,

and _drilles_.

"The _cagoux_, who occupied the highest rank in this singular

association of malefactors, were, it might be said, the professors of

the newly-admitted; they gave instructions in the art of cutting purses,

the proper recipes for procuring factitious wounds, in a word, all the

methods necessary for appealing to the charity of the public, and, if

need be, of obliging individuals to exercise it unknown to themselves.

"The _orphelins_ (orphans) were young boys who assumed the rôle of

abandoned children, and who slipped into houses for the purpose of

carrying off whatever fell into their hands.

"The _marcandiers_ gave themselves out for merchants ruined by the wars

and asked for alms, which they exacted when, after nightfall, some good

bourgeois fell into their hands.

"The _rifodes_ begged by means of forged certificates.

"The _malingreux_ counterfeited maladies, simulating the most disgusting

afflictions; they frequented the churches by preference, and implored

aid that they might go on pilgrimages.

"The _capons_ begged in the streets and the cabarets.

"The _piètres_ were counterfeit cripples, walking with the aid of

crutches, or pretending to be deprived of their legs.

"The _polissons_ were a variety of capons, and effected their purposes

through intimidation.

"The _francs-mitous_ gave themselves out as dying of hunger, they fell

fainting with weakness in the middle of the streets, and succeeded by

this means in gathering in abundant receipts.

"The _callots_ pretended to be recently cured of the scurf, and to have

just arrived from Sainte-Reine, where they had been miraculously

delivered of their ailment.

[Illustration: NEWSDEALER. PORTION OF THE "L'ALMANACH NATIONAL" OF 1791.

Re-engraved by Pannemaker, after the original by Debucourt.]

"The _hubains_ exhibited a certificate setting forth that, having been

bitten by a mad dog, they had been cured by the intercession of

Saint-Hubert.

"The _saboleux_ were false epileptics who were enabled to simulate

convulsions by means of a piece of soap placed between their lips, which

made a froth.

"The _coquillards_ represented pilgrims returning from Saint-Jacques or

some other pilgrim shrine.

"The _courtaux de boutange_, beggars in winter, shivered with cold under

their rags.

"The _drilles_, or _narquois_, begged in military uniform, and said that

they had received wounds which prevented them from working.

"The total number of these wretches had become so great, and their

depredations in the city were so frequent, that it was resolved to use

vigorous measures; in 1656, a veritable army of archers and of officers

invaded the Cour des Miracles under the lead of several commissioners.

The beggars and the truands endeavored to make their escape, but the

quarter was surrounded.

"Thieves, beggars, and vagabonds were all arrested; then a selection was

made; some were released, and the others remained in prison or were sent

to the hospitals....