In the very interior of the cavern are collections of water which have
classical names. Here is the Styx just under the Ecole Médecine, and the
River Lethe flows hard by the Institute. We came at length to a cabinet
of skulls, arranged upon shelves, some for phrenology, and some for
pathology, exhibiting in classes the several diseases, which our doctors
explained with circumstantiality to their sybil conductor; rows of toes,
of fingers, and jaws, and legs which used to cut pigeon-wings, and
pirouettes, alas! how gracefully.
In the mean time I saw a couple of ghosts (I supposed them to be Cuvier,
and Dr. Gall) skulking away as soon as they caught a glimpse of our
tapers, and I saw a great many other things, not interesting to people
above ground. We began now to be apprehensive of taking cold, and being
sent hither to enrich these cabinets; and so we deposited at the door
our golden branch, and having mounted a straight stair-way one hundred
feet, were purified in the open air.
The two doctors now left me their Eurydice, and she and I, being
inspired alike with the spirit of sight-seeing, went a few hundred yards
westward, and saw _Julian’s Baths_. Though he is said to have been
little addicted to bathing, here are his baths, the only relic of his
sojourn in Paris. This old building is an oblong, with very thick walls,
which are crumbling to decay. One of them is entirely dilapidated. The
vaults, rising forty-two feet above the soil, and furnaces under ground,
and parts of the bathing rooms, are exposed to view, in all the naked
majesty of a ruin; a ruin, too, of fifteen centuries.
This is but a single hall of an immense palace--the Palais des
Thermes--which once covered the present site of the University. It was
the scene of licentious revellings and crime, “_latebra scelerum,
Venerisque accommoda furtis_,” afterwards of the theological disputes of
the Sorbonne, and now of the quiet lectures of the University; and
Virgin Mary’s are now made out of the old Venuses.
I am a goose of an antiquary; all I could see was Mrs. Julian, jumping
into her bath, and coming dribbling out again; but my companion was very
different. She had a taste for putting her nose into every musty corner,
and cracking off pieces of a bath, and the Roman mortar, of which
posterity has lost the secret, to put in her cabinet. She has over-run
all Europe, and has now got, she says, near a ton of antiquities. She
has a stone from Kenilworth, and a birch from Virgil’s tomb, plenty of
mosaics from the Coliseum, and of “auld nick-nackets” from Stirling
castle. She has promised me a leaf from Tasso’s lemon tree, and one from
Rousseau’s rose bush, also a twig of William Tell’s tree of liberty, and
Shakspeare’s mulberry, and a little chip of Dr. Johnson’s cedar at
Streatham. And nearly all our travelling Yankee ladies are bringing over
a similar collection; after a while the commonest thing in the world
will be a curiosity.
Close in this neighbourhood is the _Hôtel de Cluny_, to which we also
paid a visit--I having a ticket from Mr. Sommerand, the proprietor. In
this hotel used to lodge Roman generals and emperors, and the first
French kings. A suite of seven or eight rooms is crammed with furniture,
the remains of the last age; some of it magnificently decayed; commodes,
chests, boxes, second-hand tooth brushes, as good as new, and other
national relics.
Nothing contemporary enters here; there was nothing, but the lady who
accompanied me, under a hundred years old. First we entered the dining
room, and saw a knight in full armour placed by a table; and the ghost
of a mahogany sideboard at the opposite end--without date, and there is
no knowing whether it was made before or since the flood--with its
knives and spoons, and earthenware tea-cups, of the same antiquity;
next, a bed chamber hung in gilt leather--whose do you think? Why
Francis the First’s, with all the implements thereunto belonging.
An entire suit of steel armour, cap-a-pie, reposes upon the bed, with a
visor of the knight’s, which had gained victories in jousts and
tournaments; also an old coat out at the elbows, worn last, I presume,
by his footman. Every little rag of his is preserved here. Here, too,
are girdles and bracelets, caskets and other valuables, and a necklace
with its pedigree labelled on a bit of parchment; the Belle Feronières’,
I suppose. Here is the very glass he looked into, with a Venus holding a
garland in front, and a cross and altar behind, by way of symmetry; and
here are the very spurs (I held them in my hand) which he wore at Pavia;
finally, the very bed, the very sheets, his Majesty slept in.
This bed was hawked about all Paris in the Revolution--at last it was
sold by auction in the public streets, _a dix francs seulement_, and was
knocked down to Monsieur Sommerand--Francis the First’s bed and
comfortable, and his little pillow, about as big as a sausage. I was
much gratified with this collection, which is certainly unique in the
world; and you are not hurried through by a Cicerone, but by the
complaisance of M. Sommerand you can rummage and ransack things at your
leisure. In the other rooms are vases and caskets, and precious
cabinets, a spinette of Marie de Medicis, and other furniture of noble
dames; one gets tired of looking at their trinkets; and in other rooms
are castings, and inlayings, and carvings, and so forth.
I now took Madame under my arm, and descending through one of the
thousand and eighty streets of Paris into the _Rue de l’Ecole Médecine_,
deposited her at her home. You should never pass into this street
without stopping awhile to contemplate a very memorable dwelling in
it--that in which Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat. One owes to this
generous maid and disinterested martyr to humanity, a tribute in
approaching its threshold. The house is also otherwise remarkable.
Danton used to call here of a morning from the bottom of the stairs upon
Marat, and then they went arm in arm to the Convention; and Collot
d’Herbois, the actor--what memorable names!--and Chabot the Capucin,
Legendre the butcher, Chaumette the Atheist, and St. Just and
Robespierre, used to hold here their nightly councils. It would puzzle
Beelzebub to get up such another club. Under the outer door-way are
remaining the letters * * or D * *, a part of the inscription effaced,
“Liberty, Indivisibility, OR Death!”
I now dined and traversed leisurely the _Place du Panthéon_ homewards,
passing through the _Rue de l’Estrapade_ into the _Rue des Postes_,
once famous for its convents. This is to a pious man, and one who lives
a little back into the past, a holy region; it is consecrated by
religious recollections beyond all the other spots of Paris. Here in
this single “_Rue des Postes_,” was the old “_Couvent des Dames de St.
Augustin_,”--“_des Dames St. Thomas_,”--“_des Dames Ursulines_,”--“_des
Dames de la Visitation!_”--“_de l’Adoration Perpetuelle_,”--“_du St.
Sacrement_.”
Alas, how many pretty women, born to fulfil a better destiny, are mewed
up in perpetual youth, within those dismal cloisters! Here, too, were
the convents of the “_Filles de l’Immaculée Conception_,”--“_de la St.
Providence_,” and finally “_les Filles de Bonne Volonté_.” It is the
very region of repentant lovers, of heart-sick maids, and all the friars
and holy nuns of the romances.
Towards the close of a summer’s evening, one’s fancy sees nothing here
but visions and spectres. You will descend, in spite of your reason,
with Madame Radcliffe, into the subterranean chambers of the convent,
and into the solitary prisons, where you will see poor Elena and her
iron table, her dead lantern, her black bread, her cruche of water, and
her crucifix; and you will see the wretch Schedoni bare the bosom of
the sleeping maid, hanging over the dagger. It is his own
miniature!--his own daughter! And then you will walk through the long
row of silent monks and smoky tapers, in the funeral of a broken-hearted
sister, the sullen bell of the chapel giving news that a soul has fled.
The evening was still and solemn; and the sun just descending on your
side of the globe; and lured by the novelty of the place, I travelled
slowly onwards through a narrow lane to the Faubourg St. Marceau.
This street is different from all that I have seen in Paris; it is
perhaps different from anything that is to be seen upon the earth. The
houses are so immensely high that not a ray even in the brightest
mid-day reaches the pavement, which is covered with a slimy mud. The
darkened and grated windows give to the houses, the look of so many
prisons. A chilling damp and horrid gloom invest you around; you feel
stifled for want of air. Now and then, the whine of a dog, or the
wailing of a beggar, interrupts the silence, and sometimes a sister of
charity, wrapped in her hood and mantle, passes quick from one house to
another. I went out of this street willingly, as it was growing more
horrible by the coming night, into the purer atmosphere of the Seine.
And thus ended my adventures for the day.