The greatest beauty in the world becomes by pollution an odious and
repulsive creature. Health and charm flourish only in the practice of
virtue and in the abodes of innocence. The prostitute is shunned by
every woman of honour and reputation, and dens of vice are avoided by
every man to whom virtue is not an empty word.
I am now about to treat of the Palais Royale, that hot-bed of
revolution and crime, that nursery of every loathsome vice, that
abomination of all virtue and profanation of all religion.
This infernal sink of iniquity is situated in the very centre of Paris,
and by certain vicious inhabitants of the capital is considered its
brightest ornament, just as the Devils in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”
admired the Palace of the Pandemonium. In my last letter I mentioned
that Duke of Orleans, who styled himself Philippe Egalité, during the
Revolution. This wretch was the proprietor of the Palais Royale. His
great grandfather, who was nearly though not quite as great a scoundrel
as his great grandson, was the first who made this place the focus
for his illicit pleasures; it has ever since been dedicated to Cabal,
Bloodshed, Rapine and Debauchery.
During the first moments of the Revolution it was the rendezvous of the
desperate, the ambitious and the cut-throat. Political mountebanks,
mounted on tables, harangued the people on the Rights of Man. The
Palais Royale became the arsenal wherein were forged the instruments
of anarchy and murder. Here could an unsophisticated provincial, newly
arrived in Paris, listen to provocatives to civil discord and learn
those arts by which the repose of France has been disturbed for above
ten years. The orators had the words Liberty and Virtue continually in
their mouths, but their hearts were rank and rotten to the core, and
the real objects they courted were licentiousness and vice.
Their ignorance was only equalled by their effrontery; they talked of
subjects they did not understand; they encouraged their countrymen to
revolt, they passed their days in exciting the populace to murder, and
rioted away their nights in taverns and styes of prostitution. They
promoted confusion and civil strife; covetous without economy, and bold
without courage, they were deaf to the voice of honour and honesty.
The frequenters of this place are in the present day[1] no better than
their predecessors. The former march of the Parisian cannibals to
Versailles was arranged at and begun from this spot, it was also the
rendezvous of the apostles of Marat and the sbirri of Robespierre.
I remember the last interview had in this garden with the mad Colonel
Oswald, who asserted that a representation of the people was as
great a despotism as absolute monarchy. He asserted as a man could
not _eat_ by proxy, so he could not _think_ by proxy. He
proposed, therefore, that men and women should assemble in an open
plain and there make and repeal laws. I endeavoured to persuade him
that his plan was not sufficiently extensive, as he had excluded from
this grand assembly the most populous portion of his fellow creatures,
_i.e._, cats, dogs, horses, chickens, sheep, cattle, &c.
Oswald was originally a captain of a Highland regiment in the British
service, and when quartered in India lived some considerable time with
some Brahmins, who turned his head. From that period he never tasted
flesh meat. He did not, however, embrace the whole Brahmin theology,
for he was a professed atheist and denied the metempsychosis, and
drank plentifully of wine. Such a man, living in a fermented capital,
was capable of doing much mischief. He dined on his roots one day at
a party of some members of the Convention at which I was present, and
coolly proposed, as the most effectual way of averting civil war, to
put to death every suspected man in France. I was deeply shocked to
hear such a sentiment proceed from the mouth of an Englishman. The
expression was not suffered to pass unnoticed, and the famous Thomas
Paine remarked: “Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh
that you have now a most voracious appetite for blood.”
[Sidenote: GARDEN OF THE PALAIS ROYALE]
In consequence of my remarks upon this occasion, Oswald invited me to
meet him in the gardens of the Palais Royale. As soon as I arrived
I found him already there. He darted forward, drew his sword and
exclaimed: “You are not fit to live in civilised society!” Having
uttered these words he returned his sword into the scabbard and
disappeared in a moment. His regiment was ordered to La Vendée, when,
while bravely leading on his men at the battle of Pont-de-Cé, he was
killed by a cannon ball; and at the same instant a discharge of grape
shot laid both his sons, who served as drummer boys in the corps he
commanded, breathless on their father’s corpse. He had two wives,
who still reside in Paris. They were both singularly handsome, and,
strange to say, lived together in friendship and harmony.
The history of this warrior brings to my recollection a curious
rencontre I had in this place with Anarcharsis Clootz, who called
himself “Orator of the human race.” For four hours did this man expose
his political dreams. In six months the tri-colour flag was to wave
over the dome of S. Sophia at Constantinople. A month later it would be
seen on Mount Caucasus, and then at St. Petersburg and Pekin.
Paris would be the capital of the world, mankind composed of one
family, subordinate to one government, and French be the sole
international language.
All this would be accomplished in the short space of three years.
Before these wonders could come about Anarcharsis was publicly
executed, together with many other fanatics. I have actually heard this
man propose at the Jacobin Club that the moment the French army came
in sight of the Austrian and Prussian soldiers, they should, instead
of attacking the enemy, throw down their own arms and advance towards
them, dancing in a friendly manner. Such a measure, he was persuaded,
would strike the wretched victims of tyranny with a sentiment of
affection, which would be announced by an equally sympathetic movement.
After such a proposition I suspected that the accusation by which he
perished, namely that he was a pensioner of the King of Prussia, had
some foundation.
Unquestionably Clootz, by his speeches and conduct, cast more ridicule
than any man else upon the Revolution. His abominable deification and
worship in the Cathedral Church of Notre Dame of an abandoned woman,
whom he created Goddess of Reason, and the manœuvres he employed to
induce Gobel, Archbishop of Paris, to renounce his character and
belief at the bar of the Convention, are proofs either of madness or
conspiracy.
[Sidenote: GARDEN OF THE PALAIS ROYALE]
The Palais Royale is an immense building, in the form of a
parallelogram, within which is a garden distributed into separate
gravelled walks. In the piazzas which run along the sides of
the edifice are shops, coffee-houses, bagnios, money-changers,
gambling-houses, and stockbrokers. The jewellers’ shops are as numerous
and brilliant as if neither misery nor miserable human beings existed.
You see nothing but chains, half pearl, half diamond. The woollen
drapers unfurl from the top of their shops to the floor every kind of
stuff. The stuffs are under your hand, no one watching you; and the
master is careless and sorry when you ask him the price.
The odour of exquisite ragouts ascends in vapours to the air, the side
tables are loaded with fruit, confectionery and pastry, and you may
dine to the sound of musical instruments and French horns played by
girls who are _not_ nymphs of Diana. Petty gaming-houses support
the shops of women who sell garters, lavender water, toothbrushes
and sealing-wax. Booksellers’ shops allure the libertine and entrap
innocent youth. Pictures from curious collection books, licentious
engravings, libidinous novels serve as signs to a crowd of loose women,
lodging in the wooden shops. Their nets are ten feet distant from the
sauntering youth, idle and already emaciated in the flower of his age.
Above the wooden shops are gambling-rooms, where all the passions and
torments of hell are assembled.
As soon as the day closes all the arcades are suddenly illuminated,
the shops become resplendent and the crowd more numerous. This is the
moment when the gaming-houses open under the sanction of the Government
and afford it a productive revenue. While the great sharpers are
employed in the drawing-rooms above, the lesser ones are at work in
the through passages, which communicate with the adjacent street and
serve as gliding holes to swarms of pickpockets and money jobbers.
Your steps under the arcades are arrested by smoke, which pricks your
eyes, it is the kitchen flame of the restaurateurs. Close to them are
the balls beginning in subterraneous grottoes. Across the air-holes
you see circles of girls, leaping, giggling, rushing on their gallants
like Bacchantes. In the auction rooms the brokers, dealers, retailers
are all seated. Women’s wigs, chimney pendulums, shawls, handkerchiefs,
shirts, beds _â la Duchesse_ were sold to the highest bidder.
Spies of the police prowl in every coffee house, but no one dares
now talk politics in them. Under the arcades are holes of shops,
where young girls attract the passengers by their glances. These
places are the assiduous rendezvous of every man fattened by rapine,
army contractors, agents, administrators of tontines and lotteries,
professors of nocturnal robberies, and stock-jobbers.
These places are to the seraglio what the cookshops are to the
restaurateurs. At these latter places you are served by a nod. The
dish is placed on the table the moment it is ordered. Private rooms
offer you everything to satiate gluttony and sensuality. The glasses
which decorate them offer to the libidinous eye of an old satyr the
charms of his mistress, and all the seats are elastic. There is a
private saloon in which you drink the coolest liquors, and where burnt
incense escapes from boxes in light cloudy streams. There you dine _à
l’Orientale_! and find on certain days all the pomp and singularity
of a repast of Trimalcion. On a signal given the ceiling opens, and
from above descended heathen goddesses in classical attire. The
amateurs choose, and the divinities, not of Olympus, but the ceiling,
join the mortals.
[Sidenote: GARDEN OF THE PALAIS ROYALE]
Such is the infected lazar house, placed in the middle of a great city,
which has reduced the whole of society to degradation and corruption.
Independently of the fatal contagion of gaming, the excuses of cupidity
under all its forms, and the licentiousness of morals, blasphemy and
infidelity in every mouth, and at every moment, brutal and depraved
language has pervaded every condition and made a sport of sacred words
heretofore never pronounced without respect. Everywhere you meet
troops of children, without order or modesty, who swear, blaspheme,
and scandalise chaste and pious ears. At Sodom and Gomorra they would
not have allowed such books to circulate as are printed and sold in
the Palais Royale. The infamous work of De Sade,[1] “Justine, or the
Misfortunes of Virtue,” is exposed on every stall, and a hundred other
productions, equally distinguished for turpitude and vice, are there to
finish the decomposition of what instinctive morality remains in the
hearts of young people.
I cannot help expressing the utmost indignation against the compiler
of a publication just issued, entitled, “A Practical Guide, during a
journey from London to Paris,” in which the writer asserts “that no
station, no age, no temper could leave the Palais Royale without an
ardent desire to return.” It is proper the English public should not be
thus abused by perversions and falsehoods, and on this account I have
entered more fully into a detail of the wanton and disgusting scenes
at the Palais Royale than their monstrous enormities would otherwise
deserve.
Accompanied by an English gentleman, like myself a married man, we
visited every part of this Temple of Sin, and we agreed in opinion that
as long as it existed it will be vain to look in Paris for any sincere
demonstrations of either moral probity, decency in private or honesty
in public life. The Government appears sensible of the evil, though
they have taken no steps to prevent it. It is believed, and from what
I have seen I do not entertain the least doubt upon the subject, that
they _protect_ these scenes of voluptuousness for the purpose of
enervating the minds and diverting the attentions of the Parisians from
the consideration of public affairs.
If this is not the case why should the legislators and the Government
be continually preaching up the advantage of morality, and the
necessity of establishing a national education system for the
encouragement of virtue and the suppression of vice, when they receive
at the same time a considerable revenue from the wages of harlots and
the profits of gambling-houses? Why is a soldier stationed at the door
of every one of these dens of impurity but to demonstrate that they
are tolerated? There is another circumstance which is noticeable
in the Palais Royale, this is the domineering aspect and conduct of
the military, the airs and consequence assumed by the soldiers, and
the manifest superiority they affect and maintain over their fellow
citizens. Every one makes room for them to pass, the officers strut
or saunter along arm in arm, the clinking of their sabres along the
pavement announcing their approach warns the servile citizen to make
way. The very prostitute, leaning on the arm of the large whiskered
regimental pantaloon, feels an importance far above her sisters. She
laughs and talks loud, and as she moves exacts from the spectators the
ecstatic apostrophe: “_Eh! regardez-là, comme elle est belle!_”
These things are better ordered in our country, which is at once a land
of liberty and of paramount laws. The soldier, with us, comprehends the
obligation he owes the laws, and while he displays the utmost loyalty
to his sovereign he associates under the idea of duty a regard for his
fellow subjects. I cannot conclude this subject without noticing a
remark made to me by one of the founders of the French Revolution, an
ex-Bishop and now a member of the Senate.
The thing [said he] which gives me most pleasure in your English
institutions is the general appearance of moral conduct that
everywhere prevails, the astonishing observance of Sunday
and holy days, the respect for religion, and the orderly and
unaffected manners of your soldiers, who are neither insolent
nor consequential, but who seem to feel they are neither masters
nor slaves.