The Tuileries--The Gardens--The Statues--The Cabinets de
Lecture--The King’s Band--Regulations of the Gardens--Yankee
modesty--The English Parks--Proper estimate of riches--Policy of
cultivating a taste for innocent pleasures--Advantages of
gardens--Should be made ornamental--Cause of the French
Revolution--Mr. Burke’s notion of the English Parks--Climate of
France.
_Paris, July 24th, 1835._
I am going now to escort you to the Tuileries, for which you must
scramble through a few filthy lanes a quarter of a mile towards the
south-west. Who would live in this rank old Paris if it were not for its
gardens? This garden is in the midst of the city, and contains near a
hundred acres of ground. It has the Seine on the south side; the Palace
of the Tuileries on the east; and on the north, the beautiful houses of
the Rue Rivoli, the street intervening; and on the west, the Place Louis
XV. between it and the Champs Elysées. The whole is enclosed with an
iron railing tipped with gold near the Palace, and terraces, having a
double row of tile trees are raised along the north and south sides. A
beautiful parterre is spread out in front of the Palace, of oranges,
red-rosed laurels, and other shrubs, with a reservoir, _jets d’eaux_,
vases, and statues. The chief walks also have orange-trees on both
margins during the summer, and one of these, as wide as Chestnut-street,
runs from the centre pavilion of the palace through the middle of the
garden, and continuing up through the Champs Elysées to the _Barrière de
l’Etoile_, terminates in a full view of the great triumphal arch of
Napoleon. In the interior are plots of woodland, and chairs, upon which,
at two sous the sitting, you may repose or read in the shade, and little
cabinets, which offer you for a sou your choice of the newspapers. The
area is of hard earth and gravel, relieved here and there by enclosures
of verdure; and on the west end, an octagonal lake is inhabited by
swans, and fishes, and river gods, and a fountain is jetting its silvery
streams in the air. This is the garden of the Tuileries. The whole
surface is sprinkled with heathen mythology. Hercules strangles the
Hydra, Theseus deals blows to the Minotaur, Prometheus sits sullen on
his rock, and Antinous is mad to see his own gardens outdone, and the
Pius Æneas, little Jule by the hand, bears off his aged parent upon his
shoulders. Venus, too, looks beautiful on the back of a tortoise, and
Ceres is beautiful, her head coiffed in the latest fashion with sheaves
of wheat.
On the side next the palace, you will see a knife-grinder, whom
everybody admires, and statues of ancient heroes and statesmen majestic
on their pedestals,--Pericles, Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cæsar, and
Spartacus. You may imagine what life these images, set out alone and in
groups through the garden, give to the perspective. The whole scene is
as beautiful as my description of it is detestable. The French are
justly proud of this garden, and are every year increasing the quantity
of its statuary: it will become at length one of the splendid galleries
of the capital; its silent lessons improving the public taste in the
arts and elegances of life: how much better than the lessons of the
schools! I like to see, in spite of English authority, a good deal of
art in a city garden; a rude and uncivilized field seems to me no more
appropriate there than a savage and unpolished community.
In this garden, there is no drinking, no smoking, no long faces waiting
the preliminary soups, or turning up of noses over the relics of a
departed dinner. It is a spot sacred to the elegant and intellectual
enjoyments. The great walks are filled every fine evening with a full
stream of fashionable company, and that near the Rue Rivoli has always a
hedge of ladies extending along each margin, the third of a mile. In
another section, a thousand or two of children are engaged in their
infantine sports, and their army of nurses are gathering also a share of
the health and amusements. Here are the most graceful little mothers,
and children, and nurses, in the world; I will send you over one of
each, some of these days, for a pattern.
How delightful to walk of an early morning amidst this silent
congregation of statues of eminent men, of heroes, and mythological
deities. I often rise with the first dawn for the sole luxury of this
enjoyment. Very early, the _Cabinet de Lecture_ opens its treasures to
the anxious politicians, who sit retired here and there through the
shady elms. One, with a doctrinal air, spreads open the “Journal des
Débats;” reads, ruminates, ponders, and now and then writes down an idea
on his tablets; another pours out his whole spirit through his tangled
hair and grisly mustachios, devouring the “_National_;” he rises
sometimes, clenches his two fists, and sits down again; and a third, in
a neat and venerable garb, a snuff-coloured coat and tie-wig, his
handkerchief and snuff-box at his side (from the Faubourg St. Germain),
lays deliberately upon his lap the “_Quotidienne_.” And here and there
you will see a diligent school boy preparing his college recitations;
perusing his Ovid at the side of a Daphne and Apollo, or by a group of
Dryades skulking behind an oak, or of Naiades plunging into a fountain.
You will see one individual upon the southern terrace, his hands
clasped, walking lonely, or standing still, his eyes stretched towards
the west, till a tear steals down his cheeks. He is a stranger, and a
thousand leagues of ocean yawn between him and his native country! I
love this terrace of all things; it has a look towards home. When I
receive your letters, I come here to read them; and when a pretty woman
honours me with her company, why we come hither together, and in this
shady bower, I tell her of our squaw wives and the little pappooses,
until the sun fades away in the west.
All day long, this elegant saloon has its society, and a lady can walk
in it, unaccompanied, when and whither she pleases. Every day is
fashionable, but some more than others, and from four till six are the
fashionable hours. The crowd by degrees thickens, the several groups are
formed, and towards four the panorama is complete. This is the time that
one stands gaping at the long file of ladies upon each side of the wide
walk, or that one strolls up and down eyeing them along the intervening
avenue, or airs or fans one’s idle minutes upon the terrace overlooking
this scene of enchantment. I never venture in here, without saying that
part of the Lord’s prayer about temptation, which I used to leave out in
the Coal Region.
At length, the day is subdued, and the long glimmering twilight,
peculiar to these northern climates, wanes away gently into night. Then
the king’s band strikes up its concert from the front of the palace, and
then you will see the gravelled walk leading to the steps of the royal
residence, and the transversal alley, filled with ten thousand
listeners, bound in the spell of Rossini and Mozart for an hour; an
hour, too, in which the air has a more balmy fragrance, and the music a
more delicious harmony.
Innumerable lights, in the meantime, shine out from the palace windows,
and the Rue Rivoli, and glimmer through the tufted trees of the garden.
The plantation of elms has also, at this hour, its little enchantments.
Lovers, using the sweet opportunities of the night, and seated apart
from the crowd, breathe their soft whisperings into each other’s ears,
in a better music than the king’s; and you can see visions of men and
women just flit by you now and then in the doubtful light, and fade away
into the thin air. But I am venturing upon the poetical point of my
description, which I had better leave to your fancy. Alas, I squandered
away all my poetry last week upon the Palais Royal, and have left myself
nothing but mere prose to describe to you the exquisite and incomparable
Tuileries.
The regulations of this garden are simple. The world is admitted, if
trim and dressed decently, with the morning dawn, and is dispersed about
nine in the evening by the beating of a drum. One is not permitted to
enter with anything of a large bundle. The Minister of Finance was
stopped the other day; he was attempting to enter with the budget for
this year! The rules are enforced by an individual accoutred in a
beard, mustachios, red breeches and a carabine, who walks gravely up and
down at the entrance of each gate.
The statues (Lucretia and all) are exposed in a state of the most
unsophisticated nakedness. If mother Eve should come back, she would
find things here just as she left them, with the exception of the
aprons. This to us green Americans, at our arrival, is a subject of
great scandal. I had with me a modest Yankee (please excuse the
tautology) on my first visit here, and we stumbled first on a Diana,
which was passable, for she apologized, _manibus passis_, for her
deshabille as well as she could; then a Hercules; and at length we fell
in with a Venus just leaving her bath. “Come,” said he, interrupting my
curiosity, and drawing me aside, “let us go out, I don’t think this is a
decent place.” You must not imagine, however, my dear, that you
Americans are essentially more modest than _we_ French * * * * * *
Things of every day’s occurrence are never a subject of remark; and if
our first mother had not begun these modesties of the toilette, the
world might have gone on, as in her time, and no one would have taken
notice of it. Americans (I presume I may mention it to their credit)
are more easily reconciled to the customs of foreign nations than any
other people; they are more plastic, and easily fitted to every
condition of life. Talk to any one of your acquaintance, of a community
of lodging in her mansion in Chestnut-street, and she will have a fit of
hysterics at least, and six months after, you will find her climbing up
a long Parisian staircase as long as Jacob’s ladder, in common with half
a dozen of families, and delighted with her apartments. An English or
Frenchman in foreign countries can no more change his habits than the
Æthiop his skin.
I may as well go on _gardening_ through the whole of this letter. Our
little squares and squaroids of Philadelphia have their little
advantages. I do not mean to disparage them, but from want of extent
they are not susceptible of any elegant improvement, nor do they furnish
a promiscuous multitude with the necessary accommodations; they lose,
therefore, their rank in society, and become unfashionable. All your
pretty squarets--and I believe those of New York too--could be put into
the Tuileries alone.
I have not yet seen the English Parks, but report says they would
swallow up our whole city. And I have known even these little spots of
ours to be looked at with a suspicious eye. I have heard men calculate
the value of the houses and other things which might be built upon them.
The “Independence Square” is worth a thousand dollars a foot, every inch
of it; why don’t the New Yorkquois sell their “Battery” alongside the
sea, which is big enough without it? Oh, the magnificent wharves, and
oh, the warehouses and hotels, that might grow upon it.
Besides, who but the caterpillars enter it, and even they will be
starved out shortly. With all its breezes from the sea, its port more
beautiful than Naples, its fleets laden with India, Persia, and Arabia,
a fashionable woman will not look through the fence.
Railroads and spinning-jennies are, to be sure, excellent things; but
they lead us too much to measure value by its capacity to supply some
physical necessity, and to forget that the moral condition of man has
also its wants. If riches only were necessary to the prosperity of a
nation, I should to-day, perhaps, instead of the Boulevards, be
strolling through the fashionable streets of Babylon. If a painting, or
a statue, by perpetuating the memory of virtuous and religious men, and
the glorious events of history, has the power of elevating the mind and
inspiring it with emulous feelings, as Scipio Africanus and other great
men used to testify; if it has the power of improving taste, which is
improving virtue, or affording pleasure, which is a part of our natural
wants, or even of employing time innocently, which might be otherwise
employed wickedly--perhaps in getting drunk at the tavern--why then, a
statue, or a painting, is not only more ornamental, but as useful as a
steam-engine or a spinning-jenny.
The Scythian who preferred the neighing of a horse to a fine air of
Timotheus, no doubt was a good Scythian; but we are not, in our present
relations with the world, to remain long in a state of Scythian
simplicity, and it is worth while to consider what is about to be the
condition of a people, who have grown luxurious, consequently vicious,
without the refinements and distractions of the fine arts and liberal
amusements. Utility, with all her arithmetic, very often miscalculates.
By keeping vacant spaces open in the midst of a town, an equivalent
value is given to other localities. A garden would bring many, who now
waste their time in travelling into airy situations, to the
neighbourhood of the Exchange and other places of business, and it
would drive many out from such places who may as well be anywhere else;
whose time, at feast, is of less value.
Since human nature will have her diversion, the business of the
statesman is to amuse her innocently; that is, to multiply pleasures
which are cheap and accessible to all--pleasures which are healthy, and
especially those which are public. Men never take bad habits under the
eye of the world; but secret amusements are sedentary, unhealthy, and
all lead to disreputable and dangerous excesses. Every one knows the
social disposition of our race; it is a disposition founded upon both
our good and bad passions--upon our love of kindred, and other loves,
upon a sense of weakness and dependence,--and curiosity, vanity, and
even malevolence, find their gratification in social intercourse. It is
therefore the duty of statesmen to study that our crowds and meetings of
pleasure, which they cannot prevent, should not be in gin-shops and
taverns.
Let us have gardens, then, and other public places, where we may see our
friends, and parade our vanities, if you will, before the eyes of the
world. Did you ever know any one who was not delighted with a garden?
What are the best descriptions of the best poets? Their gardens. It is
the original taste, it is transmitted from Paradise, and is almost the
only gratification of the rich that does not cloy in the possession. I
know an English gentleman here who has worn out all the pleasures that
money can buy at twenty-eight; he is peevish, ill-natured, and
insupportable; we sometimes walk together into the Luxembourg, where he
suddenly brightens up, and is agreeable, and as happy for a while as if
he was no lord.
To know the advantages of these places to the poor, one must visit the
close alleys, crowded courts, and over-peopled habitations, of an
over-grown city; where vices and diseases are festering in secret in the
heart of the community. Why send missionaries to the South Seas, while
their infected districts are unreclaimed? or why talk of popular
religion, and morals, and education? The people who would employ about
half the care and expense in preventing a disposition to vice, that they
now employ in correcting it, would be the people the most happy and
innocent of the earth. The best specifics I can conceive against the
vagabond population of a city, are gardens, airy streets, and neat
houses. Men’s habits of life are degraded always to the meanness of
their lodgings; if we build “beggar’s nests,” we must expect beggars to
breed in them.
Gardens give a taste for out-door exercises, and thereby promote health
and physical developement; and they aid in keeping up the energy of a
nation, which city life, in depriving the women and children of air and
exercise, tends perpetually to destroy. To the children, they give not
only habits of health, cheerfulness, and gracefulness, but an emulation
of neatness and good manners, which they would surely not acquire under
the sober stimulus of home and the nursery; to the nurses, too, they
impart a valuable share of the same benefits. Finally, by gardens and
other embellishments of a city, we induce strangers to reside there.
About fifty thousand English are now residents in France, and their
necessary expenditure is rated at half a million of pounds sterling
annually. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say, that no property pays so
abundant a revenue to a city as its gardens. What is it that produces to
a city the same reputation? Who speaks of Madrid without its Prado, of
London without its Parks? And why should Paris be the choice residence
of Europe, but for its galleries and public gardens, its Tuileries, its
Palais Royal, its Luxembourg, its Tivoli, its Champs Elysées, and Bois
de Boulogne?
But to make gardens is not enough; you must cultivate the public taste
for them. For this, it is necessary that they be made ornamental, kept
by a vigilant police, and that fashionable women should frequent them.
The French women have a better sense of their advantages than to suffer
their fine gardens to become vulgar. They have, to be sure, days and
hours that are more genteel than others; but they are to be seen there
every day, and there is room for all classes without incommoding each
other. Even the poorer classes will not frequent a garden that only poor
devils visit. They are flattered to be seen within the sphere of good
company, and are encouraged to appear there with becoming decency. It is
not to be denied that the poorer people of Paris are decent in their
manners and dress, and graceful beyond the example of all other nations.
In what more serviceable manner can a lady of fortune benefit her
country and humanity, than by improving the manners and elevating the
character of the lower classes? She is taking care of her own interests
in taking care of the poor. It was the pride of the French nobility,
and not the Jacobins, that set loose the many-headed tyranny of their
revolution: it was not Robespierre, but Louis XIV. and Louis XV., who
put the axe to the throat of their unhappy successors.
Much intercourse of mind or society is not, indeed, to be expected
between two classes of a different education and fortune; nor can it be
desired by either; but there is nothing in our code of morals or
religion which can justify the one in treating the other with unkindness
or incivility. True dignity has no need to stand on the defensive. A
lady, who has little of this quality, will always be most afraid to
compromise it by vulgar associations; it is right to be economical of
what one has but little. The contempt of the rabble, of which we hear so
much, is three-fourths of it parade and affectation. She who abroad
hangs the common world with so much scorn upon her nose, lives at home,
under the same roof, almost at the same table, with the veriest rabble
of the whole community, her own servants and slaves. Why should we
abandon the Tuileries more than the Boulevards, and why the
Washington-square more than Chestnut-street, because the common people
walk in it? I have written upon this subject more at length, and more
earnestly, than perhaps I ought, from the mortification, the almost
indignation, I feel, after witnessing the utility and ornament of
gardens in other countries, at the immense defect occasioned by their
stupid omission, in the face of European experience, in the beauty and
comfort of our American cities.
But, without more scolding, let us see how far the evil may admit of a
remedy. Mr. Burke, in pleading for the English Parks, which the
Utilitarians of the day proposed to sacrifice to some temporary
convenience or miserly policy, called them the “lungs of the city,” and
supplicated the government not to obstruct the public health in one of
its most vital and necessary functions. The question here is with our
Philadelphia, which never had any other lungs than the grave-yards to
supply these respiratory organs. I propose that some one of your old
bachelors, as rich as Girard, shall die, as soon as he can be
conveniently be spared, and leave us a second legacy, to be appropriated
as follows: to buy two lots of fifty acres each upon the west bank of
the Schuylkill; (they ought to be in the centre of the city, but time
will place them there;) the one for the parade of equipages, display of
horsemanship, and military training, and for the games and ceremonies of
our public festivals; the other to be sacred to the arts, and to refined
and intellectual pleasures.
I know of no benefaction by which he could impose upon his posterity so
sacred a debt of gratitude; there is none, surely, which should confer
upon its author so lasting and glorious a reputation.
I have not a word of news, only that my health has improved, very much
to the credit of this French climate; you would think it was Spartacus
who had stepped from his pedestal in the Tuileries. The French summer is
delightful; only think of reading at three in the morning without a
candle, and stepping about in the daylight till ten o’clock at night.
Adieu.