myself, Oh, if the carpet of the story in the Arabian Nights would only
take me up and carry me to London for one week,--just one short
week,--setting me down fresh from quiet, wholesome living, in my usual
good condition, and bringing me back at the end of it, what a different
account I could give of my experiences! But it is just as well as it is.
Younger eyes have studied and will study, more instructed travellers
have pictured and will picture, the great metropolis from a hundred
different points of view. No person can be said to know London. The most
that any one can claim is that he knows something of it. I am now just
going to leave it for another great capital, but in my concluding pages
I shall return to Great Britain, and give some of the general
impressions left by what I saw and heard in our mother country.
VII.
Straitened as we were for time, it was impossible to return home without
a glimpse, at least, of Paris. Two precious years of my early manhood
were spent there under the reign of Louis Philippe, king of the French,
_le Roi Citoyen_. I felt that I must look once more on the places I
knew so well,--once more before shutting myself up in the world of
recollections. It is hardly necessary to say that a lady can always find
a little shopping, and generally a good deal of it, to do in Paris. So
it was not difficult to persuade my daughter that a short visit to that
city was the next step to be taken.
We left London on the 5th of August to go _via_ Folkestone and
Boulogne. The passage across the Channel was a very smooth one, and
neither of us suffered any inconvenience. Boulogne as seen from the
landing did not show to great advantage. I fell to thinking of Brummel,
and what a satisfaction it would have been to treat him to a good
dinner, and set him talking about the days of the Regency. Boulogne was
all Brummel in my associations, just as Calais was all Sterne. I find
everywhere that it is a distinctive personality which makes me want to
linger round a spot, more than an important historical event. There is
not much worth remembering about Brummel; but his audacity, his starched
neckcloth, his assumptions and their success, make him a curious subject
for the student of human nature.
Leaving London at twenty minutes before ten in the forenoon, we arrived
in Paris at six in the afternoon. I could not say that the region of
France through which we passed was peculiarly attractive. I saw no fine
trees, no pretty cottages, like those so common in England. There was
little which an artist would be tempted to sketch, or a traveller by the
railroad would be likely to remember.
The place where we had engaged lodgings was Hôtel d'Orient, in the Rue
Daunou. The situation was convenient, very near the Place Vendome and
the Rue de la Paix. But the house was undergoing renovations which made
it as unpresentable as a moulting fowl. Scrubbing, painting of blinds,
and other perturbing processes did all they could to make it
uncomfortable. The courtyard was always sloppy, and the whole condition
of things reminded me forcibly of the state of Mr. Briggs's household
while the mason was carrying out the complex operations which began with
the application of "a little compo." (I hope all my readers remember Mr.
Briggs, whose adventures as told by the pencil of John Leech are not
unworthy of comparison with those of Mr. Pickwick as related by
Dickens.) Barring these unfortunate conditions, the hotel was
commendable, and when in order would be a desirable place of temporary
residence.
It was the dead season of Paris, and everything had the air of suspended
animation. The solitude of the Place Vendome was something oppressive; I
felt, as I trod its lonely sidewalk, as if I were wandering through
Tadmor in the Desert. We were indeed as remote, as unfriended,--I will
not say as melancholy or as slow,--as Goldsmith by the side of the lazy
Scheldt or the wandering Po. Not a soul did either of us know in that
great city. Our most intimate relations were with the people of the
hotel and with the drivers of the fiacres. These last were a singular
looking race of beings. Many of them had a dull red complexion, almost
brick color, which must have some general cause. I questioned whether
the red wine could have something to do with it. They wore glazed hats,
and drove shabby vehicles for the most part; their horses would not
compare with those of the London hansom drivers, and they themselves
were not generally inviting in aspect, though we met with no incivility
from any of them. One, I remember, was very voluble, and over-explained
everything, so that we became afraid to ask him a question. They were
fellow-creatures with whom one did not naturally enter into active
sympathy, and the principal point of interest about the fiacre and its
arrangements was whether the horse was fondest of trotting or of
walking. In one of our drives we made it a point to call upon our
Minister, Mr. McLane, but he was out of town. We did not bring a single
letter, but set off exactly as if we were on a picnic.
While A---- and her attendant went about making their purchases, I
devoted myself to the sacred and pleasing task of reviving old memories.
One of the first places I visited was the house I lived in as a student,
which in my English friend's French was designated as "Noomero sankont
sank Roo Monshure ler Pranse." I had been told that the whole region
thereabout had been transformed by the creation of a new boulevard. I
did not find it so. There was the house, the lower part turned into a
shop, but there were the windows out of which I used to look along the
Rue Vaugirard,--_au troisième_ the first year, _au second_ the
second year. Why should I go mousing about the place? What would the
shopkeeper know about M. Bertrand, my landlord of half a century ago; or
his first wife, to whose funeral I went; or his second, to whose bridal
I was bidden?
I ought next to have gone to the hospital La Pitié, where I passed much
of my time during those two years. But the people there would not know
me, and my old master's name, Louis, is but a dim legend in the wards
where he used to teach his faithful band of almost worshipping students.
Besides, I have not been among hospital beds for many a year, and my
sensibilities are almost as impressible as they were before daily habit
had rendered them comparatively callous.
How strange it is to look down on one's venerated teachers, after
climbing with the world's progress half a century above the level where
we left them! The stethoscope was almost a novelty in those days. The
microscope was never mentioned by any clinical instructor I listened to
while a medical student. _Nous avons changé tout cela_ is true of
every generation in medicine,--changed oftentimes by improvement,
sometimes by fashion or the pendulum-swing from one extreme to another.
On my way back from the hospital I used to stop at the beautiful little
church St. Etienne du Mont, and that was one of the first places to
which I drove after looking at my student-quarters. All was just as of
old. The tapers were burning about the tomb of St. Genevieve. Samson,
with the jawbone of the ass, still crouched and sweated, or looked as if
he did, under the weight of the pulpit. One might question how well the
preacher in the pulpit liked the suggestion of the figure beneath it.
The sculptured screen and gallery, the exquisite spiral stairways, the
carved figures about the organ, the tablets on the walls,--one in
particular relating the fall of two young girls from the gallery, and
their miraculous protection from injury,--all these images found their
counterpart in my memory. I did not remember how very beautiful is the
stained glass in the _charniers_, which must not be overlooked by
visitors.
It is not far from St. Etienne du Mont to the Pantheon. I cannot say
that there is any odor of sanctity about this great temple, which has
been consecrated, if I remember correctly, and, I will not say
desecrated, but secularized from time to time, according to the party
which happened to be uppermost. I confess that I did not think of it
chiefly as a sacred edifice, or as the resting-place, more or less
secure, of the "_grands hommes_" to whom it is dedicated. I was
thinking much more of Foucault's grand experiment, one of the most
sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records
of science. The reader may not happen to remember it, and will like,
perhaps, to be reminded of it. Foucault took advantage of the height of
the dome, nearly three hundred feet, and had a heavy weight suspended by
a wire from its loftiest point, forming an immense pendulum,--the
longest, I suppose, ever constructed. Now a moving body tends to keep
its original plane of movement, and so the great pendulum, being set
swinging north and south, tended to keep on in the same direction. But
the earth was moving under it, and as it rolled from west to east the
plane running through the north and south poles was every instant
changing. Thus the pendulum appeared to change its direction, and its
deviation was shown on a graduated arc, or by the marks it left in a
little heap of sand which it touched as it swung. This experiment on the
great scale has since been repeated on the small scale by the aid of
other contrivances.
My thoughts wandered back, naturally enough, to Galileo in the Cathedral
at Pisa. It was the swinging of the suspended lamp in that edifice which
set his mind working on the laws which govern the action of the
pendulum. While he was meditating on this physical problem, the priest
may have been holding forth on the dangers of meddling with matters
settled by Holy Church, who stood ready to enforce her edicts by the
logic of the rack and the fagot. An inference from the above remarks is
that what one brings from a church depends very much on what he carries
into it.
The next place to visit could be no other than the Café Procope. This
famous resort is the most ancient and the most celebrated of all the
Parisian cafés. Voltaire, the poet J. B. Rousseau, Marmontel, Sainte
Foix, Saurin, were among its frequenters in the eighteenth century. It
stands in the Rue des Fossés-Saint Germain, now Rue de l'Ancienne
Comédie. Several American students, Bostonians and Philadelphians,
myself among the number, used to breakfast at this café every morning. I
have no doubt that I met various celebrities there, but I recall only
one name which is likely to be known to most or many of my readers. A
delicate-looking man, seated at one of the tables, was pointed out to me
as Jouffroy. If I had known as much about him as I learned afterwards, I
should have looked at him with more interest. He had one of those
imaginative natures, tinged by constitutional melancholy and saddened by
ill health, which belong to a certain class of poets and sentimental
writers, of which Pascal is a good example, and Cowper another. The
world must have seemed very cruel to him. I remember that when he was a
candidate for the Assembly, one of the popular cries, as reported by the
newspapers of the time, was _A bas le poitrinaire!_ His malady soon
laid him low enough, for he died in 1842, at the age of forty-six. I
must have been very much taken up with my medical studies to have
neglected my opportunity of seeing the great statesmen, authors,
artists, orators, and men of science outside of the medical profession.
Poisson, Arago, and Jouffroy are all I can distinctly recall, among the
Frenchmen of eminence whom I had all around me.
The Café Procope has been much altered and improved, and bears an
inscription telling the date of its establishment, which was in the year
1689. I entered the cafe, which was nearly or quite empty, the usual
breakfast hour being past.
_Garçon! Une tasse de café._
If there is a river of _mneme_ as a counterpart of the river
_lethe_, my cup of coffee must have got its water from that stream
of memory. If I could borrow that eloquence of Jouffroy which made his
hearers turn pale, I might bring up before my readers a long array of
pallid ghosts, whom these walls knew well in their earthly habiliments.
Only a single one of those I met here still survives. The rest are
mostly well-nigh forgotten by all but a few friends, or remembered
chiefly in their children and grandchildren.
"How much?" I said to the garçon in his native tongue, or what I
supposed to be that language. "_Cinq sous_," was his answer. By the
laws of sentiment, I ought to have made the ignoble sum five francs, at
least. But if I had done so, the waiter would undoubtedly have thought
that I had just come from Charenton. Besides, why should I violate the
simple habits and traditions of the place, where generation after
generation of poor students and threadbare Bohemians had taken their
morning coffee and pocketed their two lumps of sugar? It was with a
feeling of virile sanity and Roman self-conquest that I paid my five
sous, with the small additional fraction which I supposed the waiter to
expect, and no more.
So I passed for the last time over the threshold of the Café Procope,
where Voltaire had matured his plays and Piron sharpened his epigrams;
where Jouffroy had battled with his doubts and fears; where, since their
time,--since my days of Parisian life,--the terrible storming youth,
afterwards renowned as Léon Michel Gambetta, had startled the quiet
guests with his noisy eloquence, till the old _habitués_ spilled
their coffee, and the red-capped students said to each other, _"Il ira
loin, ce gaillard-là!"_
But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my
early friends and companions, that came up before me in all the
freshness of their young manhood? The memory of them recalls my own
youthful days, and I need not go to Florida to bathe in the fountain of
Ponce de Leon.
I have sometimes thought that I love so well the accidents of this
temporary terrestrial residence, its endeared localities, its precious
affections, its pleasing variety of occupation, its alternations of
excited and gratified curiosity, and whatever else comes nearest to the
longings of the natural man, that I might be wickedly homesick in a
far-off spiritual realm where such toys are done with. But there is a
pretty lesson which I have often meditated, taught, not this time by the
lilies of the field, but by the fruits of the garden. When, in the June
honeymoon of the seasons, the strawberry shows itself among the bridal
gifts, many of us exclaim for the hundredth time with Dr. Boteler,
"Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never
did." Nature, who is God's handmaid, does not attempt a rival berry. But
by and by a little woolly knob, which looked and saw with wonder the
strawberry reddening, and perceived the fragrance it diffused all
around, begins to fill out, and grow soft and pulpy and sweet; and at
last a glow comes to its cheek, and we say the peach is ripening. When
Nature has done with it, and delivers it to us in its perfection, we
forget all the lesser fruits which have gone before it. If the flavor of
the peach and the fragrance of the rose are not found in some fruit and
flower which grow by the side of the river of life, an earth-born spirit
might be forgiven for missing them. The strawberry and the pink are very
delightful, but we could be happy without them.
So, too, we may hope that when the fruits of our brief early season of
three or four score years have given us all they can impart for our
happiness; when "the love of little maids and berries," and all other
earthly prettinesses, shall "soar and sing," as Mr. Emerson sweetly
reminds us that they all must, we may hope that the abiding felicities
of our later life-season may far more than compensate us for all that
have taken their flight.
I looked forward with the greatest interest to revisiting the Gallery of
the Louvre, accompanied by my long-treasured recollections. I retained a
vivid remembrance of many pictures, which had been kept bright by seeing
great numbers of reproductions of them in photographs and engravings.
The first thing which struck me was that the pictures had been
rearranged in such a way that I could find nothing in the place where I
looked for it. But when I found them, they greeted me, so I fancied,
like old acquaintances. The meek-looking "Belle Jardinière" was as
lamb-like as ever; the pearly nymph of Correggio invited the stranger's
eye as frankly as of old; Titian's young man with the glove was the
calm, self-contained gentleman I used to admire; the splashy Rubenses,
the pallid Guidos, the sunlit Claudes, the shadowy Poussins, the moonlit
Girardets, Géricault's terrible shipwreck of the Medusa, the exquisite
home pictures of Gerard Douw and Terburg,--all these and many more have
always been on exhibition in my ideal gallery, and I only mention them
as the first that happen to suggest themselves. The Museum of the Hôtel
Cluny is a curious receptacle of antiquities, many of which I looked at
with interest; but they made no lasting impression, and have gone into
the lumber-room of memory, from which accident may, from time to time,
drag out some few of them.
After the poor unsatisfactory towers of Westminster Abbey, the two
massive, noble, truly majestic towers of Notre Dame strike the traveller
as a crushing contrast. It is not hard to see that one of these grand
towers is somewhat larger than the other, but the difference does not
interfere with the effect of the imposing front of the cathedral.
I was much pleased to find that I could have entrance to the Sainte
Chapelle, which was used, at the time of my earlier visit, as a
storehouse of judicial archives, of which there was a vast accumulation.
With the exception of my call at the office of the American Legation, I
made but a single visit to any person in Paris. That person was M.
Pasteur. I might have carried a letter to him, for my friend Mrs.
Priestley is well acquainted with him, but I had not thought of asking
for one. So I presented myself at his headquarters, and was admitted
into a courtyard, where a multitude of his patients were gathered. They
were of various ages and of many different nationalities, every one of
them with the vague terror hanging over him or her. Yet the young people
seemed to be cheerful enough, and very much like scholars out of school.
I sent my card in to M. Pasteur, who was busily engaged in writing, with
his clerks or students about him, and presently he came out and greeted
me. I told him I was an American physician, who wished to look in his
face and take his hand,--nothing more. I looked in his face, which was
that of a thoughtful, hard-worked student, a little past the grand
climacteric,--he was born in 1822. I took his hand, which has performed
some of the most delicate and daring experiments ever ventured upon,
with results of almost incalculable benefit to human industries, and the
promise of triumph in the treatment of human disease which prophecy
would not have dared to anticipate. I will not say that I have a full
belief that hydrophobia--in some respects the most terrible of all
diseases--is to be extirpated or rendered tractable by his method of
treatment. But of his inventive originality, his unconquerable
perseverance, his devotion to the good of mankind, there can be no
question. I look upon him as one of the greatest experimenters that ever
lived, one of the truest benefactors of his race; and if I made my due
obeisance before princes, I felt far more humble in the presence of this
great explorer, to whom the God of Nature has entrusted some of her most
precious secrets.
There used to be--I can hardly think it still exists--a class of
persons who prided themselves on their disbelief in the reality of any
such distinct disease as hydrophobia. I never thought it worth while to
argue with them, for I have noticed that this disbelief is only a
special manifestation of a particular habit of mind. Its advocates will
be found, I think, most frequently among "the long-haired men and the
short-haired women." Many of them dispute the efficacy of vaccination.
Some are disciples of Hahnemann, some have full faith in the mind-cure,
some attend the séances where flowers (bought from the nearest florist)
are materialized, and some invest their money in Mrs. Howe's Bank of
Benevolence. Their tendency is to reject the truth which is generally
accepted, and to accept the improbable; if the impossible offers itself,
they deny the existence of the impossible. Argument with this class of
minds is a lever without a fulcrum.
I was glad to leave that company of--patients, still uncertain of their
fate,--hoping, yet pursued by their terror: peasants bitten by mad
wolves in Siberia; women snapped at by their sulking lap-dogs in London;
children from over the water who had been turned upon by the irritable
Skye terrier; innocent victims torn by ill-conditioned curs at the doors
of the friends they were meaning to visit,--all haunted by the same
ghastly fear, all starting from sleep in the same nightmare.
If canine rabies is a fearful subject to contemplate, there is a sadder
and deeper significance in _rabies humana_; in that awful madness
of the human race which is marked by a thirst for blood and a rage for
destruction. The remembrance of such a distemper which has attacked
mankind, especially mankind of the Parisian sub-species, came over me
very strongly when I first revisited the Place Vendôme. I should have
supposed that the last object upon which Parisians would, in their
wildest frenzy, have laid violent hands would have been the column with
the figure of Napoleon at its summit. We all know what happened in 1871.
An artist, we should have thought, would be the last person to lead the
iconoclasts in such an outrage. But M. Courbet has attained an
immortality like that of Erostratus by the part he took in pulling down
the column. It was restored in 1874. I do not question that the work of
restoration was well done, but my eyes insisted on finding a fault in
some of its lines which was probably in their own refracting media.
Fifty years before an artist helped to overthrow the monument to the
Emperor, a poet had apostrophized him in the bitterest satire since the
days of Juvenal:--
"Encor Napoléon! encor sa grande image!
Ah! que ce rude et dur guerrier
Nous a couté de sang et de pleurs et d'outrage
Pour quelques rameaux de laurier!
* * * * *
"Eh bien! dans tous ces jours d'abaissement, de peine,
Pour tous ces outrages sans nom,
Je n'ai jamais chargé qu'un être de ma haine,...
Sois maudit, O Napoléon!"
After looking at the column of the Place Vendôme and recalling these
lines of Barbier, I was ready for a visit to the tomb of Napoleon. The
poet's curse had helped me to explain the painter's frenzy against the
bronze record of his achievements and the image at its summit. But I
forgot them both as I stood under the dome of the Invalides, and looked
upon the massive receptacle which holds the dust of the imperial exile.
Two things, at least, Napoleon accomplished: he opened the way for
ability of all kinds, and he dealt the death-blow to the divine right of
kings and all the abuses which clung to that superstition. If I brought
nothing else away from my visit to his mausoleum, I left it impressed
with what a man can be when fully equipped by nature, and placed in
circumstances where his forces can have full play. "How infinite in
faculty! ... in apprehension how like a god!" Such were my reflections;
very much, I suppose, like those of the average visitor, and too
obviously having nothing to require contradiction or comment.
Paris as seen by the morning sun of three or four and twenty and Paris
in the twilight of the superfluous decade cannot be expected to look
exactly alike. I well remember my first breakfast at a Parisian café in
the spring of 1833. It was in the Place de la Bourse, on a beautiful
sunshiny morning. The coffee was nectar, the _flute_ was ambrosia,
the _brioche_ was more than good enough for the Olympians. Such an
experience could not repeat itself fifty years later. The first
restaurant at which we dined was in the Palais Royal. The place was hot
enough to cook an egg. Nothing was very excellent nor very bad; the wine
was not so good as they gave us at our hotel in London; the enchanter
had not waved his wand over our repast, as he did over my earlier one in
the Place de la Bourse, and I had not the slightest desire to pay the
garçon thrice his fee on the score of cherished associations.