Part 12

I was guilty (no easy matter in Paris), of an act of uncommon foolishness, in going to see this execution. The French way is so elegant and classic--it is none of your vulgar hangings on a gibbet, with a fellow creeping like a spider up the gallows, or the chopping off a head upon a block, as a butcher does a pig’s. The guillotine is itself a piece of ingenious mechanism, and the executioner a gentleman; he wears white gloves, and is called “Monsieur de Paris.” So, I went with other amateurs, and I have seen nothing but men without heads ever since.

For a change, I went this morning to the Chamber of Deputies. Don’t you want to know something of this great council of the nation? I shall be glad if you do, for I have nothing else of sufficient dignity to come after this paragraph.

This is the French House of Commons. It has been in session these two months, and holds its meetings in one of the great architectural monuments of the capital, the Palais Bourbon. At its entrance, you will see four colossal statues upon curule seats, Sully, Colbert, Hopital and d’Aguesseau. The chamber is lighted from above, and is semi-circular, having at the centre a tribune just in front of the President’s Chair, and over-head the reporters. The members are ranged according to their parties, on seats rising in amphitheatre. On the very left, or _extreme gauche_, are the Liberals; and on the right, or _extreme droit_, are the extreme Royalists; the hues of each party softening gradually, and blending as they recede from the extremes. On a gallery overhead are the spectators of both sexes.

The reading of speeches, which is common, and mounting the Tribune, even for a short remark, are precautions taken against eloquence. I have heard that attempts are often made by several persons to speak at once, or to preoccupy the tribune to the great disturbance of order. Persons are seen discoursing, generally with great animation, during the orator’s speech. When there is a little too much noise the president taps with his paper-knife on the desk, and when a little more, he rings a bell; when this fails, he puts on his hat. The constant assent or dissent expressed at nearly every sentence, seems to me to touch upon the ridiculous--it drives all one’s classic notions of a senate out of one’s head. It is, perhaps, a necessary safeguard against being talked to death by some stupid and loquacious member, as happens occasionally in other countries.

The great man of the chamber is, at present, Thiers, Minister of the Interior. He is seldom at a loss for sense, and never for words; but neither his face nor his manner has any thing of eloquence. He is merely a facetious talker, and is nearly as expert at a _bon mot_, as the old Prince Talleyrand himself--a kind of merit that makes its fortune more readily at Paris than elsewhere. He is said also to emulate the great diplomatist in the flexibility of his politics; having the same skill of being always of the strong party, without compromising his principles.

In society he is a good actor, and plays with grave diplomatists, or with little girls of fifteen, and pleases both. Not the least essential of his qualifications, is a revenue of two or three hundred thousand livres, which he has had the discretion to make, the gossiping world says, from his position of minister, by gambling in the stocks.

That censorial tribunal, which is called public opinion, and which forces a man in the United States sometimes to be honest against his will, is scarce known in this country. Indeed, I have not seen that any vice renders a man publicly infamous here, except it be giving bad dinners. On the other hand, they have one virtue, which I believe does not exist in the same degree amongst the statesmen of other countries--they are not so barefaced as to commend one another’s honesty. Every body cries up parts, and poor honesty has not a rag to her back. Guizot, who is also minister of something, made a speech ethical and pedagogical, about education. He is the opposite of Thiers, of a stern and inflexible nature, and has an air of solemnity in his face; you would think he had just arrived from the Holy Land. He decomposes and analyses till he is blinded in the smoke of his own furnace. He is the great type of the “Doctrinaires.” Though he does not throw his wisdom in every one’s face, he has few equals in facility. After translating Gibbon, and writing several volumes on the English Revolution, he may well claim some praise for this quality. He has been for several years a leader; but I have heard he is lately, for I know not which of his virtues, of less influence in the House. He and the Doctrinaires have the odium of the rigid censorships set up a few months since against the Press.

The other greatest men are De Broglie, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Barrot, Mauguin, and Dupin the President. The last is ranked amongst the most eloquent of the French speakers. I have not heard him in any thing but the ringing of the bell. But the great ornament of French eloquence, at the bar, and in the tribune, is Berryer. He has an exceedingly happy physiognomy; a broad and high brow, shaded with jet black hair; a bland and persuasive expression of the mouth, and his voice is grave and impressive. The French generally impair the strength and dignity of their oratory by too much action; Berryer in this is economical and prudent. Though leader _en chef_ of the Legitimists, he defended strenuously Cambron and Marshal Ney. He spoke also against the American Indemnity, and gave us very little reason to be satisfied with his eloquence.

I must tell you that the great staple of conversation here at present, is abuse of America, and that every thing looks warlike.--I heard a member of the Deputies say: “There are not ten men in the chamber who believe in the justice of your claims; we have been inveigled into the acknowledgment by our king, and bullied into it by your President.” If you know any nice computer of national honesty you had better get him to tell you the difference between the notorious rogue who robs his neighbours, and the four hundred and fifty-nine rogues who refuse to make restitution of the robbery.

This chamber is composed of men all above the middle age--none being eligible below thirty. They have a venerable and decent appearance, and for learning, I believe they do not suffer in comparison with any of the legislative assemblies of Europe. They are chosen from thirty millions of people, by two hundred and fifty thousand electors, while the English House of Commons is selected by near a million of electors, from twenty-five millions. Their hours of sitting are from one to five o’clock. Spectators are admitted on the written order of a member.

We had a little spurt to-day upon rail-roads, and steam-boats; in which M. Thiers said there was in the United States a reckless disregard of human life; (_a prolonged sensation!_) and George Lafayette, his American partialities getting the better of his judgment, got up and defended our humanity. He gave himself as an example of the possibility of descending the Mississippi without being blown up--but nobody believed him; (_grand mouvement dissentient!_)

Since on the subject of Chambers, why not pay a visit to the “Chamber of Peers.” For this you must ascend the Seine to the Pont Neuf, and half a mile thence towards the south will bring you to the Palace of Luxembourg, the place of its sittings.

I wished a few days ago to see the interior of Madelaine, into which there is no admission; “not for the queen,” said the door-keeper; but after a little fuss about honesty, and receiving thirty sous, he permitted me to go in. In traversing the Luxembourg the same day, as I went whistling along, innocent of thought, I fell upon the ice against the statue of a goddess. In returning to my senses, I found a pair of fair arms about my neck; it was not the Queen of Love, who had stepped from her pedestal, but a servant maid, who did me this service, she said, by order of her mistress; and the incorruptible little wench refused, either for love or money, to tell me her mistress’s name.

I attempted a few days after to enter the Chamber of Peers, and was refused by the door-keeper; but, on placing in his hands a few francs, he furnished me the necessary passport.--What is the reason we find in no country the same fidelity from the public servants as from those in private life?

This anecdote is to introduce you with proper ceremony to the Peers. The etiquette of great houses always requires the guests to be detained a reasonable time in the ante-chamber. But since I am on the subject of bribery and corruption--your agent here, Mr. R., told me in excuse for high commissions, he had to hire witnesses to prove the decease of heirs; this he mentioned as a common business transaction.--“And did you succeed?” “Oh, yes, we killed them all off,” was his reply. I have seen also in Philadelphia an Irish labourer, taken at random from the street, who swore before a magistrate, a false oath, for a bribe of five dollars.

Now if this bribery is so easy in all the worlds, old and new, ask your husband, if you please, who makes laws, whether it ought not to suggest to the statesman, the impropriety of exacting oaths at all; which do not make the honest man more faithful, and certainly make the dishonest more corrupt.

The Peers have their chamber in the second story of this Palace. It is a semicircle on a diameter of eighty feet. A beautiful row of Corinthian pillars of veined stucco sustains the vault, upon which Le Sueur has painted the usual number of Virtues, civil and military; and between these pillars are statues of the most famous ancient orators and statesmen; Solon, Aristides, Scipio, Demosthenes, Cicero, Camillus, Cincinnatus, Cato of Utica, Phocion, and Leonidas. The disposition of the chairs and benches is the same as in the Chamber of Deputies. It is tapestried with blue velvet, wainscotted with looking-glasses, and a beautiful lustre descending in the centre produces the light of five hundred tapers.

It is a rich and elegant chamber--a kind of boudoir of the French nobility. The staircase which leads to it is the most magnificent, they say, of all Europe.--The Peers are either dukes, marquises, counts, viscounts, or barons, and except the members of the royal family, and princes of the blood, are titled only for life. They sit at the same time as the Deputies, under the Presidency of the Chancellor of France. Their concurrence is necessary to all laws, and they try all cases of state crimes and high treasons. They have had a long time on hand Fieschi and the never ending “Procès Monstre.”

To set apart a few hundred individuals from the great herd, and give them the highest opportunities of improvement and polish, would furnish, one might suppose, at least a pretty ornament to a nation. However, it turns out that, in a high degree of fortune men do not submit to the labour necessary to intellectual improvement, and that they are exposed to more vicious temptations; that they have less dread of public opinion, and are spoilt in temper, by indulgences. In a word, we know that human nature does not bear a very high degree of refinement.

As the taste may be rude and uncultivated, so it may be excessively delicate; and fastidiousness is almost as disagreeable as grossness. But inequalities are an ordinance of nature in society, as much as in the structure of the globe we inhabit; nor can we level the hills, or so raise the valleys that the hills will lose their eminence. The three great classes, besides the other reasons for their existence, may, for aught I know, be necessary to the improvement, and well-being of each other; the upper communicating emulation and refinement to that immediately below, and the lower furnishing nerve and industry to that immediately above.

“Wholesome berries thrive and ripen best, Neighboured by fruits of baser quality.”

However this may be, it is certain that the middle class is the most sound and respectable of every community; and this is the class which is now ascendant in France. The Chamber of Peers is hardly noticed in the machinery of the government. This is partly owing to the democratic spirit transmitted from the Revolution, but chiefly to the want of hereditary titles and estates. A lordship, without money, is a weight about the neck of its owner. Shabby peasants look well enough, but one has no patience with ordinary people of quality. Nobility holds the same relation to society, as poetry to prose; it does not suffer mediocrity. The too indiscriminate and common use of the French titles, has done much, also, to their discredit.

“On ne porte plus qu’étoiles; On les prodigue par boisseaux, Au pekins comme aux genereaux, Jusqu’aux marchands de toiles.”

M. Decaze made, during his ministry, as many as sixty nobles in a week. These gentlemen do not, themselves, seem to entertain a very high sense of their rank. I have heard of more than one hiding his decoration, to cheapen a piece of goods: as the Italian landlord, who passes himself for the waiter, to have the _quelque chose à boire_. I do not mean you to infer from this, that to be a nobleman it is necessary to be born so.

Nothing is so easy as to make any man think himself better than others; the facility even increases in proportion as he is ignorant. The footman advances his pretensions with a simple change of his livery--by stepping only from an earl’s coach to a duke’s. A girl will change her opinions of herself, from neat’s leather to prunella, and become prouder and nobler from cotton to silk stockings; but nothing can make any one noble who lacks the sense of superiority; in other words, who lacks money.

I must gossip a little to fill the rest of this blank paper. I dined with an American, this evening, at the Palais Royal, where he and a young Englishman, whom we met there, talked of the merits and demerits of their several countries, until their patriotism grew outrageous.

My rule is, to waive all discussions in which passion and prejudice have the mastery of reason. As far as Paris is concerned, and the travelling English whom I know here, America is yet undiscovered, and this ignorance, to us who think we have strutted into great historical importance, is sometimes quite offensive. To make it worse, they suppose that we cannot possibly know much of Europe, or indeed of any thing--how should we, being born so far from Paris?--and they began by teaching us the elements.

A very complaisant man of the university told me over, the other day, the Rape of the Sabines, with all its circumstances; and a French lady, of good literary pretensions and wealth, has paraded me more than once to amuse her company, by “talking _American_”--“_Quel accent extraordinaire! cela ne ressemble à rien en Europe._”--“Ah! you are from Boston,” said another; “I am glad, perhaps you know my brother; he lives in Peru.”

---- The common people have a kind of indistinct notion, that all Americans are negroes--and as negro sympathies are now uppermost in Europe, we gain nothing by their disappointment.--The English know more; but their information, as far as I have yet observed, is altogether strained through Madame Trollope and Basil Hall, and the other caricaturists. In what manner have the English travelled in our country? An author, intent on making a book, comes over, and tells a lie; and the next who comes over steals it, and passes it for his own; and, at last, it is holy writ.

I read, twenty years ago, in English travels, that we gentlemen, at the taverns, clean our teeth with the same brush. This has been repeated, I presume, by Captains Hall and Hamilton, (for I have met it in all their predecessors,) and is now told positively for the last time, by Miss Fanny Kemble.--A propos, I saw Captain Hall, the other night, at the Geographical Society; he is a big man, and I did not flog him.

As for Miss Kemble, she has such a pretty face, and so much genius, she may just tell as many lies as she pleases. One prefers to go wrong with her, than right with many a one else. I read her book aboard ship, and was pleased and entertained with it. Indeed, I would go any time, ten miles barefooted only to see a book that speaks what it thinks;--above all, to see a woman of genius, who writes after her own impressions, and sends her thoughts uncorrected by dunces to press.

But is it not a spite that we, who have been so lied upon by the English, should have amongst them a most extensive reputation for lying? It will be a worse spite if we deserve it. We certainly use more licentiously than they do that pretty figure of rhetoric, they call amplification. But from the little knowledge they possess of our country I suspect one may acquire amongst them a notorious reputation for lying by only telling the truth.

Long ago there travelled to the south, an ass, who talked to the king of the beasts, of the length of days and nights, of the congelation of rains into snows, of the Aurora Borealis, and skating on the ice, until he destroyed entirely all credit for veracity, and was at last whipped out of the country for an impostor. It is our business to profit by this long-eared experience.

When you come to Paris, don’t forgot to tell them the Mississippi sends its compliments to the Seine, and if you find in London that the horses trot twelve miles an hour, don’t you say that ours trot fifteen. It is laid down by several of the casuists that a man is not to tell truth merely, but to consider what may be acceptable as such to his audience.

To make the current value of words in England the absolute test of good breeding in America, appears to me scarce reasonable. Something indeed is due to age, prescription, and to establish fame in letters; but I do not see why we should not begin to use modestly our own weights and measures; to pass our gold and silver even in an English market--if the currency there happens to be brass; and I do not see why one may not have a _bon-ton_ at Philadelphia, or New York, without speaking the fashionable jargon of St. James’s.

Language is variable from year to year, and we are too far distant to take the hue and air of an English court. Herodotus spoke in Ionic, Xenophon in Attic, (and Ionia was a colony of Attica) and Plutarch in Æolic, and were all three good Greeks. They did not despise one another because the one said τοισι, and the other τωσι.

“I have known several of your countrymen,” said Mr. John Bull, “very clever men, but not one who had the language of the best society.”

“Our misfortune is, sir, not to have a language of our own. The Henriade and the Messiah are, in France and Germany, titles of distinction. To be something in America, one must out-write Shakspeare and Milton. And how are we to have original views and tastes, if our habits of thought, and proprieties of language, are to be settled in a foreign country? It is to be hoped the time will come when in the United States one may be _sick_ without going to sea, and _raised_ in Kentucky without being a horse or a head of cabbage.--And pray, sir, what is there in the language of a well-educated American so distinguishable?”

“I should know you by your first six words. For example, you say _sir_ too often, and you use it to your equals, where an Englishman would omit it. And I should know you by your many cant phrases, and by your singularity of habits--by your easy familiarity with strangers, &c.”

“As I know you by your drinking your champagne alone, of which you find no example in America.”

“And by your boasting of the future instead of the past.--‘The time will come.’--An Englishman says--‘The time has come.’”

“And which is the more honourable boast, for one who is nothing himself?”

“There is this difference; we are sure of our ancestors, and we are not sure of our posterity.”

“There is another; our ancestors send us down many a rogue to dishonour us, and we are never disgraced by our posterity. Besides, sir, it is quite natural the old should boast of what they have done, and the young of what they will do. Nestor was a more prolix and disagreeable boaster than Achilles. Moreover, sir, there is no great arrogance in predicting the strength of manhood from the vigour of youth.”

“But why should not we claim in posterity at least an equal chance?”

“Why not? It is certainly not your modesty that prevents it.”

“But without speaking of Shakspeare or Milton, what apology?”

“Whoever heard of a child apologising for not being as big as a man? We have, sir, our Franklins and Washingtons for the past; our Clays, Calhouns, and Websters for the present. And now, set our fifty years against your five hundred; and our ten millions, and a rude continent, against your twenty-five millions, and your cultivated island, and what reason, sir, have we to be humbled by the comparison?”

“What could you do more grateful to a parent, than prove to her the worthiness of her children? We should rejoice that their merits were still greater.”

“We have imparted as much honour, sir, as we have received from the connection--or relationship, if you please.”

“Oh, if you wish to disown the kindred, agreed with all my heart.”

“Yes, sir, there is nearly as much Dutch and Irish in the breed at present, as English.”

“A kind of hybrid breed of Irish filth and Dutch stupidity.”

“It is known, sir, that the race is improved of all animals, by crossing the breed.”

“Your remark is too general. It is known that a horse and an ass produce nothing better than a mule.--In your crossing system, too, I remark you have left out the negroes.--A propos of negroes--we have given liberty to ours, and you hold yours in bondage.”

“Your slave proprietors have not given this liberty; the inhabitants of Great Britain have not given liberty to slaves, of which they were individually the proprietors; nor has the Parliament set loose three millions of negroes in the midst of her white population--so the case is not apposite.”

“Well, shall we end the argument, or shall I tell you of your riots and your Lynch law--and all this vice in your republic of fifty years, where we ought yet to expect the innocence of youth.”