Part 17
In strolling along a silent path through the woods, we came unexpectedly into a little retreat, which so lurked in a corner, that, after a week’s stay here, I had not observed it. They call it the ball-room. It is a circle, having an orchestra in the centre, and an area for dancing between it and the circumference; and here are two rows of columns of coloured marble, united by thirty arches, and beneath each, on the night of ceremony, is a jet-d’eau falling in _fleur de lis_, and seeming to sustain lighted lustres, which are suspended by an invisible thread from the arches. It is inclosed by a hedge, and overshaded by branches from the surrounding trees. It seems as if made for some king of the elves, or fairy queen, to play her midnight gambols in.
The great palace of Versailles is a long squat edifice, which inspires no great reverence. It has one magnificent room, two hundred feet by thirty, now converted into a National Museum of pictures. There are two smaller palaces half a mile distant, graceful and elegant, called the great and little _Trianon_. With the latter is connected, an English garden, in all the pretty disorder of nature, and in open contrast with the garden in general, which is tricked out in all the embellishments of art.
Nature has furnished the raw materials, and of a good quality; but a tree here is scarcely more like a tree in its natural shapes, than a _paté de foie gras_ is like a goose. The sums expended upon this royal residence are reckoned at near forty millions sterling. The population of the town is twenty-eight thousand. I remained here a week last August, and then wrote you a detailed account of its garden and its palaces; Maria Antoinette's room, Josephine's room, and all the rooms, and the pictures and the beautiful Cathedral; and though I may presume from your silence this letter is lost, like so many others, I have no mind to return to the subject.
Apropos. I sent you more than three months ago, written by an amiable Parisienne, "the Literary Ladies of Paris;" I hope they are not miscarried. I am tired of consuming whole days for Louis Philippe's Post-office establishment.
With great expectation of pleasure I went to the Races at Chantilly, which are among the events of this week. This town is at ten leagues distance and has an elegant view, over the Seine, and a fine turf, which was trodden on this occasion by the prettiest little feet that ever went to Chantilly. And here were the full blooded coursers, which champed the bit and pawed the earth, and devoured the road and made gallant show and promise of their mettle. What a pity you had not been there You would have seen Miss Annette outstrip Volante; you would have been glad the one gained and the other lost without caring a pin for either, and you would have paid for a mutton chop the price of the whole sheep, and as for a bed, you would have got none either for love or money.
A little slice of hard fare is not without its advantages to pampered citizens, it works off the bad humours engendered by an idle life; and fits of poverty now and then in the country are grateful and genteel recreations of the rich, and have been praised by the poets,--You would have dreamed of slumbering by the waving pines, and soft murmurs of your little Schuylkills, and then of wandering alone in a foreign land, and then sitting the live-long night upon a chair in the stables of the Great Condé; of having jockeys and grooms for your chamber-maids and race horses for your bed curtains.--These stables, if you please, cost thirty millions, and it is an old saying in France, _"que les cheveaux du Prince de Condé, sont mieux logés que les rois d'Angleterre."_ Famous knights used to mount here in full panoply, to carry terrors beyond the Duro and the Rhine. Alas, that stables should be sometimes the only memorials of one's earthly possessions! The castle of the Great Prince is demolished; the _"magnifique maison de Plaisance,"_ which opened its folding doors to a thousand guests of a night, is now with the house of Priam, and the grass has grown upon its altars:--
----“Where one seeks for Ilion’s walls, The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.”
Indeed, castles in general in France, may be written in the catalogue of its ruins. The French nobles and princes are no longer great feudal barons or idlers. The aristocracy of now-a-days has to attend to business--to the Chamber of Peers and Deputies--and to go to market. Even the retreats of monarchy are moss-grown with neglect. The nation murmurs at the expense, and lets its ruins go to wreck for want of repair. The number of royal palaces are a dozen, and their annual expense of keeping, 160,000 dollars. Fontainebleau is content with a yearly visit; and the magnificent Versailles has become a national museum. I looked all about here for the eloquent Bossuet, but he too is so broken up, you scarce find the fragments. His magnificent gardens, jets-d’eaux, and chestnut groves, are the commons of Chantilly--and
“Thriving plants, ignoble broomsticks made, Now sweep the alleys they were born to shade.”
Paris and the neighbouring country poured out upon the plains of Chantilly, this day, such multitudes as never went to Troy. To obtain a vehicle to return in was impossible, and to stay another night at Chantilly was impossible also; but I had to set my foot upon this latter impossibility. I was so lucky as to meet Mr. ---- of New York, and by a long search together we found lodgings for the night; and what we little thought of finding in a French village, a fat landlady; but so fat, she is silently taking leave of her knees; before this reaches you she will have seen them, perhaps, for the last time; and her husband, still more ill favoured, sat by, his lower lip hanging towards the waistband of his breeches. At the lady’s feet was a chubby baby, nearly naked, resembling an unfeathered owl.
My companion, a man of address, nursed this brat, and called it tender names to please the mother. One grows so polite in this country; besides what does not one do for a lodging at Chantilly? Also in the back ground was a female, acting in the double capacity of chambermaid and _bonne_, who had her share in the general effect. She had been frightened, when young, till her eyes had started out of her head, and had stayed there, staring ever since; and her lips being too short for her teeth, gave her a look of affability without the trouble of smiling. To complete the interest of her physiognomy, she had a long beaky nose with the tip red. She was so ugly, the child would not cry after her. These were the protections, which it pleased Providence to put around our honesty at the races of Chantilly.
I describe this family only to introduce with more interest, a domestic occurrence, which I am going to relate, in order to relieve a little the serious details of this letter.--Night already held its middle course in the heavens, and a lady, our fellow-lodger, tired of waiting the untimely hours of her husband, had retired for the evening to her chamber; and there, being relieved from the apparel of the day, she took a look under the bed; a prudent caution, which she always observed, and which she says, her mother had observed before her;--and what do you think she discovered under the bed? The legs of a man! She fled, and forgetting the nakedness of her condition, rushed into the hall, where we, in the midst of the family circle, sat over a mug of French beer, with long pipes, smoking and watching the curling smoke as it ascended gracefully towards the ceiling. In the precipitation of her flight she fell over a stool, at full length, upon the floor--exhibiting the incomprehensible mechanism of the human figure in all its proportions. It fell to my lot, being nearest, to bring her to, which I did, wrapping her in a cloak, placing her on a couch, and encouraging her to speak. As soon as she had explained, the alarm became general; pipes were extinguished, and candles lighted, and we proceeded into the suspicious bed-chamber; the “bonne,” with her eyes farther out, smiling nevertheless, and the fat madame, and her husband walking on his lip; one carried the poker, one the boot-jack, and one the flat-iron, and we moved on in close file to the bed-side; and here we made a halt. I felt, (I will confess it,) my respiration stop; I stood in the van, being unwillingly placed there by the pride of sustaining American bravery in a foreign country. I thought of my little children, and then moved aside the curtain, respectfully. You have, perhaps, seen a man kill a rattle-snake with a short stick.--And after all, what do you think it was? A pair of boots;--the lady’s husband having gone out in his shoes.
We retired now to our chambers, where Dr. B. and I were eaten up by bugs; and there was a Frenchman in the adjoining room, who passed also a melancholy night; we presumed from the same cause, for we heard him every now and then say----, which is the French for bug. So you see that not Americans alone are subject to these unsavoury afflictions--_non soli dant sanguine pœnas_. Get thee to Chantilly, Mrs. Butler. Indeed, I have learned from inquiry, and personal experience, too, that this kind of vermin and some others, creep higher up into good society here, than in the United States.
Our better houses, I mean, which keep servants, and pique themselves on their gentility, do not suffer such inmates at all. It is true, that the poorer sort of folks, and even the better sort of country taverns, do not care a straw for all the bugs of Christendom. They look upon them as the natural bleeders, provided for the poor, providentially, and a saving of expense, in cupping, leeching, and other kinds of phlebotomy.
But these English people, when did they all at once become so clean, that they should turn up their noses so fastidiously at others? Why, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, in Shakspeare’s time, in my Lord Bacon’s time, in my Lord Coke’s time, courtiers used to offend the very nose of majesty by coming with dirty feet into the presence. Oh, here is a quotation apropos, in Pepys’s Journal, which I have just been reading. “February 12th; Up, finding the beds good, but _lousy_.” Now, this is in London, and this Pepys, who found the beds so “good,” was secretary of the admiralty, only one hundred and fifty years ago. Besides our judges, I guess, don’t carry posies in their button holes--(though, it is not because they have not frequent need of them.)
These are the delights of Chantilly. If any one should go thither twice, he must be a much greater fool than I am, which I deem impossible. Yet here was the whole habitable earth; all the peasantry with their baked faces, and caps like your winnowed snows, and all the trim rabble of the towns, the _beau monde_ of the Halles, and all that is richest in beauty, education, and blood, too, was here--not forgetting my Lord S----, who keeps horses for the turf, and liveries for Longchamps, nor him, so enviable for his skin and bones, so recommendable by his thinness, and who makes himself lighter on a pinch, by holding his breath, who rode Miss Annette, though Volante came up like a storm from the south, victoriously to the stake--Mr. Robinson. Now all these were at the races, and the newspapers have done nothing else for a week than describe their inexpressible enjoyments.
The truth is, I set out upon this excursion on one of my unlucky days. I have read of a giant somewhere, who one day swallowed down windmills without choking, and who was suffocated by a piece of fresh butter the next. Unlucky days are an old woman’s superstition. But there is scarce a wise man, who does not tell you some of his days that were nothing but a series of mishaps.
In the same manner, good fortune appears to attend some persons in all their enterprises, while others again seem marked for special persecution; adversity keeps barking at their heels through the whole course of their lives.
My grandmother, who brought me up, besides being a Presbyterian, was a Scotchwoman; she believed she was compelled to snuff out the candle by predestination; and it is not so easy a matter as you think, to get rid of one’s grandmother. My silly jaunt to Chantilly occurred on one of these days. It was not enough that I should be run against by a diligence, and almost irretrievably smashed; that I should be crammed into a stable; be destroyed by bugs, and frightened to death by a pair of boots; the same fortune pursued me on my return home. I hung up my watch by a nail, which had sustained it for six months; but it was my unlucky day; it fell, to its entire destruction, upon the brick floor. I gathered up the fragments, and to close my window curtains, mounted upon a chair, which tilted; I fell against an opposite table, which also upset, breaking the marble cover into several pieces; and there I was, with a broken head, amidst the ruins. I then crawled into bed, where I remained the next day with a fever, and sent for the doctor.
Now I will conclude this very absurd doctrine, with a sensible advice; namely, that you never set out to the Races, on any such abominable, horse-play, excursions of pleasure, in a melancholy, or ill-natured mood; it is the sure precursor of ill-luck; both because you will extract evil out of every occurrence, and, in your froward temper, you will be continually running into difficulties, which, in good humour, you would either have escaped, or turned to a merry account.
If you come to Paris without a soul with you, having been spoiled a little at home with your domestic affections, you will every now and then fall into a fit of melancholy, which the doctors will call a “_nostalgia_;” and you will wish the very devil had Paris; and you will detest all French people, whatever be their merits; and, to be revenged of them, you will write home to your friends, and you will call the men all rogues, and the women all something else, and then you will feel a little better. I have been in the midst of this wilderness of men, as solitary as Robinson Crusoe, in his island. And I know of no kind of solitude half so distressful, as the aspect of a large city, especially to tender-hearted gentlemen, who have been brought up in villages.
To walk in the midst of multitudes of one’s own species, without a sign, or a look, or a smile of recognition, impresses one with a very humiliating sense of one’s own insignificance; besides, one feels the necessity of loving somebody, and of being loved. These feelings will be exceedingly bitter on your first arrival, and your fits of “blue devils” more frequent. My advice is, that you seek the distractions of gentlemanly amusements. For this, you must make the acquaintance of some French gentleman, (a French lady is much better,) who is well versed in the genteel world, and she will lead you into such consolations and mischiefs, as your unfortunate situation may require. She must be sufficiently attached to you, to take the trouble to instruct you, and you must take the trouble, by your amiability and assiduities, to win this attachment. How much better is this than sitting alone, and killing the minutes one by one, in your bachelor’s chamber; it is better, though you should gain nothing else from her acquaintance than hanging yourself in her garters.
Depend upon it, nature did not intend the whole of this life as a preparation for the next; else had she not opened to us so many means of enjoyment of the senses here. And, depend upon it, there is a world of delightful and genteel pleasures in Paris, if one has but the address to hunt for them. My special advice is, that you do not seek a cure for home-sickness, in excesses; if in wine, be assured that your spirits will soon pass from the vinous to the acetous fermentation; if in gambling in Paris, your ruin is accomplished. I repeat, there is but one effectual cure, it is the acquaintance of an amiable and sensible woman. This was the first remedy for solitude prescribed by Him, who knew best the heart and dispositions of man. Adam, I doubt not, while Eve slept, yet a rib in his bosom, was afflicted often with home-sickness; and I dare say he was never troubled with it afterwards.
Recollect, when I speak of women, I claim the right of being interpreted on the side of mercy. I speak of them with an entire sense of the respect due to the sex; as a gentleman should, who does not forget that his mother is a woman, his sisters, wife, and daughters are women. When I recommend woman’s society, you will please to think of the intercourse of the bee with the flowers; it gathers its honied treasures, where most rich and succulent, but meditates no injury to the plant by which they are supplied. But I am relapsing into morality; good night. I will fill the rest of this blank to-morrow.
May 7th.
When I was just ready to go to London, what should have occurred but the king’s birth-day; it fell out exactly on the first of May, and I had to stay to see it; and I am going now to give you a brief abstract of its entertainments, to finish this letter; it is already long, but remember it is the last. At half-past five, P.M., the king made a bow, and the queen made one of the prettiest curtsies imaginable, from a gallery of the Tuileries; for we had all assembled there to listen to a concert served up, _al fresco_, in a hail storm. A platform was erected in front of the palace, and several hundred musicians were mounted on it; but a wintery rain from the north-east, mixed occasionally with snow, poured down the whole afternoon; and it rained, and rained, as if heaven had no ears for music. A howling storm, now and then, raved through an _adagio_ of Mozart, and Jove descended on the fiddle-strings.
At the end of each piece there was a pause--not of the rain, but the music--and then came criticisms on all sides.--“Oh! that air of Bellini! said the lady; and then her eyes trotted about the garden. “Exquisite! said her cavalier, and took a pinch of snuff.--“_Lafond? c’est un talent superbe.--Inférieur à Beriot? du tout, du tout, il n’y a que Pagga_--(Une prise s’il vous plait.) _Le Message du President est donc arrivé._ What are they going to determine?--Determine?--To pay. (Dieu, quelle jolie femme!) _On ne fait que payer dans ce pays-ci._” “As for the concerts of the Conservatory, I find them stupid beyond sufferance;”--the poor musician, in the mean time, turning up his eyes towards heaven, and, with supplicating looks, imploring mercy from the clouds.
I did not take off my hat and shout with the rest, when his majesty bowed. I was not quite sure whether the law of nations would justify me in making a bow, until he has paid the “twenty-five millions.” However, I said, quietly to myself, “_Vive le roi!_” He is, _sans compliment_, the most sensible head of a king that is in Europe; and I wish him, from the good will I bear the French nation, to live out his time.--But I did not let the paltry sum of “twenty-five millions” interfere with the respect I owed her majesty’s curtsey.
They have fire-works always ready made here for such occasions; and keep them by them in a closet. On this birth-day they were more sublime and beautiful, than is common, even in Paris. To look down from the terrace of the Tuileries, upon the immense crowd covered with its umbrellas, moving and whirling about in the twilight, all over the Place Louis XI., and its environs, was a fantastic spectacle, and worth seeing. Have you ever looked at a million of crabs in vinegar, through a microscope?--We remained, a long time, in expectation, and the mud. What a delightful thing a public _fête_ is, especially when one is expressly ordered to be diverted ten days a-head, by ordinance of the Police.
Suddenly, ten thousand sky-rockets hissed through the air, and exploded in constellations of stars, pale, pink, and vermilion, which dropped down slowly towards the earth. This was the note of preparation. Then went off Mount Ætna, and Vesuvius, and Hecla; and a Niagara of liquid fire poured down in a cataract, covering up a little Herculaneum and Pompeii; and the whole _Pyrotechnie_ was by degrees unfolded of Sieur Ruggieri, Ingénieur of Paris.
There were bouquets of all the flowers in the field, in their most brilliant and harmonious tints; and there was a fierce encounter of knights in the air, and lions ready to spring on you; and there was the devil on a pale horse; and, all at once, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, as large as life, stood blazing before us; its huge pillars, its pulpit, its sacristy, and a little fiery congregation, who exploded one after another; a lady went off, and then a gentleman; and, last of all, the priest went out at the altar, and suddenly all was night.--The atmosphere was sick with saltpetre, and the heavens wept tricoloured stars.--This was forty million times prettier than anything you ever saw in your life.
In the meantime, the illuminations blazed out through the town. The Madelaine stood in a basin of glimmering fire, and wore a garland of flaming beads upon her brows; and a belt of gas-lights, like sparkling diamonds, encircled the queen of streets, the Rue Rivoli; it was a mile long. The Pantheon too, and the Invalids, and the Arch of Neuilly, afar off, poured their ineffectual fires upon the thick night; and all the orchards of the Luxembourg, the Tuileries, and Champs Elysées, were bending under the load of their golden fruits.--How jealous the moon and stars would have been, if they could have looked out upon the French capital this night.--If we don’t get up such _fêtes_ in America, it is not because we can’t, it is because we don’t feel in the humour, it is because ---- in fine, it is because we don’t want to----
I had intended to pass over the recreations of the morning for want of room; but here is, unfortunately, room enough.--I generally walk out here, as in America, alone; for if one takes a companion one is obliged to walk his way; besides you can’t imagine what an effort it is to be always agreeable. I like sometimes, in a solitary walk, to think you all over; to stray with you by the Mill Creek and Tumbling Run, or to sit down on your piny eminence and overlook the village, and enjoy your nonsense, which is enjoyed nowhere else in such perfection. In a word, if alone, I can get into a reverie; alone, I can fight duels, rout armies, save ladies from ruin, and do things that are impracticable.