brought us suddenly to the brow of a steep hill, opposite another of
the same height, and with the same abrupt descent, at the distance of
a mile across. Between, lay Rouen. I hardly know how to describe, for
American eyes, the peculiar beauty of this view; one of the most
exquisite, I am told, in all France. A town at the foot of a hill is
common enough in our country, but of the hundreds that answer to this
description, I can not name one that would afford a correct
comparison. The nice and excessive cultivation of the grounds in so
old a country gives the landscape a complexion essentially different
from ours. If there were another Mount Holyoke, for instance, on the
other side of the Connecticut, the situation of Northampton would be
very similar to that of Rouen; but, instead of the rural village, with
its glimpses of white houses seen through rich and luxurious masses of
foliage, the mountain sides above broken with rocks, and studded with
the gigantic and untouched relics of the native forest, and the fields
below waving with heavy crops, irregularly fenced and divided, the
whole picture one of an overlavish and half-subdued Eden of
fertility--instead of this I say--the broad meadows, with the winding
Seine in their bosom, are as trim as a girl's flower-garden, the grass
closely cut, and of a uniform surface of green, the edges of the river
set regularly with willows, the little bright islands circled with
trees, and smooth as a lawn; and instead of green lanes lined with
bushes, single streets running right through the unfenced verdure,
from one hill to another, and built up with antique structures of
stone--the whole looking, in the _coup d'oeil_ of distance, like
some fantastic model of a town, with gothic houses of sand-paper, and
meadows of silk velvet.
You will find the size, population, etc., of Rouen in the guide-books.
As my object is to record impressions, not statistics, I leave you to
consult those laconic chronicles, or the books of a thousand
travellers, for all such information. The Maid of Orleans was burnt
here, as you know, in the fourteenth century. There is a statue
erected to her memory, which I did not see, for it rained; and after
the usual stop of two hours, as the barometer promised no change in
the weather, and as I was anxious to be in Paris, I took my place in
the night diligence and kept on.
I amused myself till dark, watching the streams that poured into the
broad mouth of the postillion's boots from every part of his dress,
and musing on the fate of the poor Maid of Orleans; and then, sinking
down into the comfortable corner of the _coupe_, I slept almost
without interruption till the next morning--the best comment in the
world on the only _comfortable_ thing I have yet seen in France, a
diligence.
It is a pleasant thing in a foreign land to see the familiar face of
the sun; and, as he rose over a distant hill on the left, I lifted the
window of the _coupe_ to let him in, as I would open the door to a
long-missed friend. He soon reached a heavy cloud, however, and my
hopes of bright weather, when we should enter the metropolis,
departed. It began to rain again; and the postilion, after his blue
cotton frock was soaked through, put on his greatcoat over it--an
economy which is peculiarly French, and which I observed in every
succeeding postilion on the route. The last twenty-five miles to Paris
are uninteresting to the eye; and with my own pleasant thoughts, tinct
as they were with the brightness of immediate anticipation, and an
occasional laugh at the grotesque figures and equipages on the road, I
made myself passably contented till I entered the suburb of St. Denis.
It is something to see the outside of a sepulchre for kings, and the
old abbey of St. Denis needs no association to make a sight of it
worth many a mile of weary travel. I could not stop within four miles
of Paris, however, and I contented myself with running to get a second
view of it in the rain while the postilion breathed his horses. The
strongest association about it, old and magnificent as it is, is the
fact that Napoleon repaired it after the revolution; and standing in
probably the finest point for its front view, my heart leaped to my
throat as I fancied that Napoleon, with his mighty thoughts, had stood
in that very spot, possibly, and contemplated the glorious old pile
before me as the place of his future repose.
After four miles more, over a broad straight avenue, paved in the
centre and edged with trees, we arrived at the port of St. Denis. I
was exceedingly struck with the grandeur of the gate as we passed
under, and, referring to the guide-book, I find it was a triumphal
arch erected to Louis XIV., and the one by which the kings of France
invariably enter. This also was restored by Napoleon, with his
infallible taste, without changing its design: and it is singular how
everything that great man touched became his own--for, who remembers
for whom it was raised while he is told who employed his great
intellect in its repairs?
I entered Paris on Sunday at eleven o'clock. I never should have
recognized the day. The shops were all open, the artificers all at
work, the unintelligible criers vociferating their wares, and the
people in their working-day dresses. We wound through street after
street, narrow and dark and dirty, and with my mind full of the
splendid views of squares, and columns, and bridges, as I had seen
them in the prints, I could scarce believe I was in Paris. A turn
brought us into a large court, that of the Messagerie, the place at
which all travellers are set down on arrival. Here my baggage was once
more inspected, and, after a half-hour's delay, I was permitted to get
into a _fiacre_, and drive to a hotel. As one is a specimen of all, I
may as well describe the _Hotel d'Etrangers_, Rue Vivienne, which, by
the way, I take the liberty at the same time to recommend to my
friends. It is the precise centre for the convenience of sight-seeing,
admirably kept, and, being nearly opposite Galignani's, that bookstore
of Europe, is a very pleasant resort for the half hour before dinner,
or a rainy day. I went there at the instance of my friend the
_diplomat_.
The _fiacre_ stopped before an arched passage, and a fellow in
livery, who had followed me from the Messagerie (probably in the
double character of porter and police agent, as my passport was yet to
be demanded), took my trunk into a small office on the left, over
which was written "_Concierge_." This person, who is a kind of
respectable doorkeeper, addressed me in broken English, without
waiting for the evidence of my tongue, that I was a foreigner, and,
after inquiring at what price I would have a room, introduced me to
the landlady, who took me across a large court (the houses are built
_round_ the yard always in France), to the corresponding story of the
house. The room was quite pretty, with its looking-glasses and
curtains, but there was no carpet, and the fireplace was ten feet
deep. I asked to see another, and another, and another; they were all
curtains and looking-glasses, and stone-floors! There is no wearying a
French woman, and I pushed my modesty till I found a chamber to my
taste--a nutshell, to be sure, but carpeted--and bowing my polite
housekeeper out, I rang for breakfast and was at home in Paris.
There are few things bought with money that are more delightful than a
French breakfast. If you take it at your room, it appears in the shape
of two small vessels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of
bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter, and one or two of some
thirty dishes from which you choose, the latter flavored exquisitely
enough to make one wish to be always at breakfast, but cooked and
composed I know not how or of what. The coffee has an aroma peculiarly
exquisite, something quite different from any I ever tasted before;
and the _petit-pain_, a slender biscuit between bread and cake, is,
when crisp and warm, a delightful accompaniment. All this costs about
one third as much as the beefsteaks and coffee in America, and at the
same time that you are waited upon with a civility that is worth three
times the money.
It still rained at noon, and, finding that the usual dinner hour was
five, I took my umbrella for a walk. In a strange city I prefer always
to stroll about at hazard, coming unawares upon what is fine or
curious. The hackneyed descriptions in the guidebooks profane the
spirit of a place; I never look at them till after I have found the
object, and then only for dates. The Rue Vivienne was crowded with
people, as I emerged from the dark archway of the hotel to pursue my
wanderings.
A walk of this kind, by the way, shows one a great deal of novelty. In
France there are no shop-_men_. No matter what is the article of
trade--hats, boots, pictures, books, jewellery, anything or everything
that gentlemen buy--you are waited upon by girls, always handsome, and
always dressed in the height of the mode. They sit on damask-covered
settees, behind the counters; and, when you enter, bow and rise to
serve you, with a grace and a smile of courtesy that would become a
drawing-room. And this is universal.
I strolled on until I entered a narrow passage, penetrating a long
line of buildings. It was thronged with people, and passing in with
the rest, I found myself unexpectedly in a scene that equally
surprised and delighted me. It was a spacious square enclosed by one
entire building. The area was laid out as a garden, planted with long
avenues of trees and beds of flowers, and in the centre a fountain was
playing in the shape of a _fleur-de-lis_, with a jet about forty feet
in height. A superb colonnade ran round the whole square, making a
covered gallery of the lower story, which was occupied by shops of the
most splendid appearance, and thronged through its long sheltered
_paves_ by thousands of gay promenaders. It was the far-famed _Palais
Royal_. I remembered the description I had heard of its gambling
houses, and facilities for every vice, and looked with a new surprise
on its Aladdin-like magnificence. The hundreds of beautiful pillars,
stretching away from the eye in long and distant perspective, the
crowd of citizens, and women, and officers in full uniform, passing
and re-passing with French liveliness and politeness, the long windows
of plated glass glittering with jewellery, and bright with everything
to tempt the fancy, the tall sentinels pacing between the columns, and
the fountain turning over its clear waters with a fall audible above
the tread and voices of the thousands who walked around it--who could
look upon such a scene and believe it what it is, the most corrupt
spot, probably, on the face of the civilized world?
LETTER V.
THE LOUVRE--AMERICANS IN PARIS--POLITICS, ETC.
The salient object in my idea of Paris has always been the Louvre. I
have spent some hours in its vast gallery to-day and I am sure it will
retain the same prominence in my recollections. The whole palace is
one of the oldest, and said to be one of the finest, in Europe; and,
if I may judge from its impressiveness, the vast inner court (the
_facades_ of which were restored to their original simplicity by
Napoleon), is a specimen of high architectural perfection. One could
hardly pass through it without being better fitted to see the
masterpieces of art within; and it requires this, and all the
expansiveness of which the mind is capable besides, to walk through
the _Musee Royale_ without the painful sense of a magnificence beyond
the grasp of the faculties.
I delivered my passport at the door of the palace, and, as is
customary, recorded my name, country, and profession in the book, and
proceeded to the gallery. The grand double staircase, one part leading
to the private apartments of the royal household, is described
voluminously in the authorities; and, truly, for one who has been
accustomed to convenient dimensions only, its breadth, its lofty
ceilings, its pillars and statuary, its mosaic pavements and splendid
windows, are enough to unsettle for ever the standards of size and
grandeur. The strongest feeling one has, as he stops half way up to
look about him, is the ludicrous disproportion between it and the size
of the inhabiting animals. I should smile to see any man ascend such a
staircase, except, perhaps, Napoleon.
Passing through a kind of entrance-hall, I came to a spacious _salle
ronde_, lighted from the ceiling, and hung principally with pictures
of a large size, one of the most conspicuous of which, "The Wreck,"
has been copied by an American artist, Mr. Cooke, and is now
exhibiting in New York. It is one of the best of the French school,
and very powerfully conceived. I regret, however, that he did not
prefer the wonderfully fine piece opposite, which is worth all the
pictures ever painted in France, "The Marriage Supper at Cana." The
left wing of the table, projected toward the spectator, with seven or
eight guests who occupy it, absolutely stands out into the hall. It
seems impossible that color and drawing upon a flat surface can so
cheat the eye.
From the _salle ronde_, on the right opens the grand gallery, which,
after the lesson I had just received in perspective, I took, at the
first glance, to be a painting. You will realize the facility of the
deception when you consider, that, with a breadth of but forty-two
feet, this gallery is one thousand three hundred and thirty-two feet
(more than a quarter of a mile) in length. The floor is of tesselated
woods, polished with wax like a table; and along its glassy surface
were scattered perhaps a hundred visiters, gazing at the pictures in
varied attitudes, and with sizes reduced in proportion to their
distance, the farthest off looking, in the long perspective, like
pigmies of the most diminutive description. It is like a matchless
painting to the eye, after all. The ceiling is divided by nine or ten
arches, standing each on four Corinthian columns, projecting into the
area; and the natural perspective of these, and the artists scattered
from one end to the other, copying silently at their easels, and a
soldier at every division, standing upon his guard, quite as silent
and motionless, would make it difficult to convince a spectator, who
was led blindfold and unprepared to the entrance, that it was not some
superb diorama, figures and all.
I found our distinguished countryman, Morse, copying a beautiful
Murillo at the end of the gallery. He is also engaged upon a Raffaelle
for Cooper, the novelist. Among the French artists, I noticed several
soldiers, and some twenty or thirty females, the latter with every
mark in their countenances of absorbed and extreme application. There
was a striking difference in this respect between them and the artists
of the other sex. With the single exception of a lovely girl, drawing
from a Madonna, by Guido, and protected by the presence of an elderly
companion, these lady painters were anything but interesting in their
appearance.
Greenough, the sculptor, is in Paris, and engaged just now in taking
the bust of an Italian lady. His reputation is now very enviable; and
his passion for his art, together with his untiring industry and his
fine natural powers, will work him up to something that will, before
long, be an honor to our country. If the wealthy men of taste in
America would give Greenough liberal orders for his time and talents,
and send out Augur, of New Haven, to Italy, they would do more to
advance this glorious art in our country, than by expending ten times
the sum in any other way. They are both men of rare genius, and both
ardent and diligent, and they are both cramped by the universal curse
of genius--necessity. The Americans in Paris are deliberating at
present on some means for expressing unitedly to our government their
interest in Greenough, and their appreciation of his merit of public
and private patronage. For the love of true taste, do everything in
your power to second such an appeal when it comes.
* * * * *
It is a queer feeling to find oneself a _foreigner_. One cannot
realize, long at a time, how his face or his manners should have
become peculiar; and, after looking at a print for five minutes in a
shop window, or dipping into an English book, or in any manner
throwing off the mental habit of the instant, the curious gaze of the
passer by, or the accent of a strange language, strikes one very
singularly. Paris is full of foreigners of all nations, and of course,
physiognomies of all characters may be met everywhere, but, differing
as the European nations do decidedly from each other, they differ
still more from the American. Our countrymen, as a class, are
distinguishable wherever they are met; not as Americans however, for,
of the habits and manners of our country, people know nothing this
side the water. But there is something in an American face, of which I
never was aware till I met them in Europe, that is altogether
peculiar. The French take the Americans to be English: but an
Englishman, while he presumes him his countryman, shows a curiosity to
know who he is, which is very foreign to his usual indifference. As
far as I can analyze it, it is the independent self-possessed bearing
of a man unused to look up to any one as his superior in rank, united
to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression which is the
index to our national character. The first is seldom possessed in
England but by a man of decided rank, and the latter is never
possessed by an Englishman at all. The two are united in no other
nation. Nothing is easier than to tell the rank of an Englishman, and
nothing puzzles a European more than to know how to rate the
pretensions of an American.
* * * * *
On my way home from the Boulevards this evening, I was fortunate
enough to pass through the grand court of the Louvre, at the moment
when the moon broke through the clouds that have concealed her own
light and the sun's ever since I have been in France. I had often
stopped, in passing the sentinels at the entrance, to admire the
grandeur of the interior to this oldest of the royal palaces; but
to-night, my dead halt within the shadow of the arch, as the view
broke upon my eye, and my sudden exclamation in English, startled the
grenadier, and he had half presented his musket, when I apologized and
passed on. It was magically beautiful indeed! and, with the moonlight
pouring obliquely into the sombre area, lying full upon the taller of
the three _facades_, and drawing its soft line across the rich windows
and massive pilasters and arches of the eastern and western, while the
remaining front lay in the heavy black shadow of relief, it seemed to
me more like an accidental regularity in some rocky glen of America,
than a pile of human design and proportion. It is strange how such
high walls shut out the world. The court of the Louvre is in the very
centre of the busiest quarter of Paris, thousands of persons passing
and repassing constantly at the extremity of the long arched
entrances, and yet, standing on the pavement of that lonely court, no
living creature in sight but the motionless grenadiers at either gate,
the noises without coming to your ear in a subdued murmur, like the
wind on the sea, and nothing visible above but the sky, resting like a
ceiling on the lofty walls, the impression of utter solitude is
irresistible. I passed out by the archway for which Napoleon
constructed his bronze gates, said to be the most magnificent of
modern times, and which are now lying in some obscure corner unused,
no succeeding power having had the spirit or the will to complete,
even by the slight labor that remained, his imperial design. All over
Paris you may see similar instances; they meet you at every step:
glorious plans defeated; works, that with a mere moiety of what has
been already expended in their progress, might be finished with an
effect that none but a mind like Napoleon's could have originally
projected.
* * * * *
Paris, of course, is rife with politics. There is but one opinion on
the subject of another pending revolution. The "people's king" is
about as unpopular as he need be for the purposes of his enemies; and
he has aggravated the feeling against him very unnecessarily by his
late project in the Tuileries. The whole thing is very characteristic
of the French people. He might have deprived them of half their civil
rights without immediate resistance; but to cut off a strip of the
public garden to make a play ground for his children--to encroach a
hundred feet on the pride of Paris, the daily promenade of the idlers,
who do all the discussion of his measures, it was a little too
venturesome. Unfortunately, too, the offence is in the very eye of
curiosity, and the workmen are surrounded, from morning till night, by
thousands of people, of all classes, gesticulating, and looking at the
palace windows and winding themselves gradually up to the
revolutionary pitch.
In the event of an explosion, the liberal party will not want
partizans, for France is crowded with refugees from tyranny, of every
nation. The Poles are flocking hither every day, and the streets are
full of their melancholy faces! Poor fellows! they suffer dreadfully
from want. The public charity for refugees has been wrung dry long
ago, and the most heroic hearts of Poland, after having lost
everything but life, in their unavailing struggle, are starving
absolutely in the streets. Accident has thrown me into the confidence
of a well-known liberal--one of those men of whom the proud may ask
assistance without humiliation, and circumstances have thus come to my
knowledge, which would move a heart of stone. The fictitious
sufferings of "Thaddeus of Warsaw," are transcended in real-life
misery every day, and by natures quite as noble. Lafayette, I am
credibly assured, has anticipated several years of his income in
relieving them; and no possible charity could be so well bestowed as
contributions for the Poles, starving in these heartless cities.
I have just heard that Chodsko, a Pole, of distinguished talent and
learning, who threw his whole fortune and energy into the late
attempted revolution, was arrested here last night, with eight others
of his countrymen, under suspicion by the government. The late serious
insurrection at Lyons has alarmed the king, and the police is
exceedingly strict. The Spanish and Italian refugees, who receive
pensions from France, have been ordered off to the provincial towns,
by the minister of the interior, and there is every indication of
extreme and apprehensive caution. The papers, meantime, are raving
against the ministry in the most violent terms, and the king is abused
without qualification, everywhere.
I went, a night or two since, to one of the minor theatres to see the
representation of a play, which has been performed for the _hundred
and second time_!--"Napoleon at Schoenbrun and St. Helena." My object
was to study the feelings of the people toward Napoleon II., as the
exile's love for his son is one of the leading features of the piece.
It was beautifully played--most beautifully! and I never saw more
enthusiasm manifested by an audience. Every allusion of Napoleon to
his child, was received with that undertoned, gutteral acclamation,
that expresses such deep feeling in a crowd; and the piece is so
written that its natural pathos alone is irresistible. No one could
doubt for an instant, it seems to me, that the entrance of young
Napoleon into France, at any critical moment, would be universally and
completely triumphant. The great cry at Lyons was "_Vive Napoleon
II.!_"
I have altered my arrangements a little, in consequence of the state
of feeling here. My design was to go to Italy immediately, but affairs
promise such an interesting and early change, that I shall pass the
winter in Paris.
LETTER VI.
TAGLIONI--FRENCH STAGE, ETC.