Part 13

The annual number of persons who commit suicide in all France, I have seen stated at two thousand. Those who came to the _Morgue_ in 1822 were 260. Is it not strange that the French character, so flexible and fruitful of resources in all circumstances of fortune, should be subject to this excess? And that they should kill themselves, too, for the most absurd and frivolous causes. One, as I have read in the journals, from disgust at putting on his breeches in the cold winter mornings; and two lately (Ecousse and Lebrun) because a farce they had written did not succeed at the play-house. The authors chose to incur the same penalty in the other world that was inflicted on their vaudeville in this. And these Catos of Utica are brought here to the _Morgue_.

The greater part are caught in the Seine, by a net stretched across the river at St. Cloud. Formerly twenty-five francs were given for a man saved, and twenty if drowned; and the rogues cheated the government of its humanity by getting up a company, who saved each other. The sum is now reversed, so that they always allow one time, and even assist one a little sometimes, for the additional five francs.

The building, by the advance of civilization, has required, this season, to be repaired, and a new story is added. Multitudes, male and female, are seen going in and out at every hour of the day. You can step in on your way as you go to the flower market, which is just opposite. There is a lady at the bureau, who attends the sale and recognition of the corpses in her father’s absence, and who plays the piano, and excels in several of the ornamental branches.

She was crowned at the last distribution of prizes, and is the daughter of the keeper, M. Perrin. He has four other daughters, who also give the same promise of accomplishment. Their morals do not run the same risk as most other children’s, of being spoilt by a bad intercourse from without. Indeed, they are so little used to associate abroad, that, getting into a neighbour’s the other day, they asked their playmates, running about through the house, “Where does your papa keep his dead people?” Innocent little creatures! M. Perrin is a man of excellent instruction himself, and entertains his visitors with conversations literary and scientific, and he writes a fine round text hand.

When a new corpse arrives, he puts himself at his desk, and with a graceful flourish enters it on the book; and when not claimed at the end of three days he writes down in German text, “_inconnu_;” if known, “_connu_.” The exhibition room is, since its enlargement, sufficient for the ordinary wants of society; but on emergencies, as on the “three glorious days,” and the like, they are obliged to accommodate a part of the corpses elsewhere. They have been seen strewed, on these occasions, over the garden; and Miss Perrin has to take some in her room. Alas! that no state of life should be exempt from its miseries! You who think to have propitiated fortune by the humility of your condition, come hither and contemplate M. Perrin. Only a few years ago, when quietly engaged in his official duties, his own wife came in with the other customers. He was struck with horror; and he went to his bureau and wrote down “_connu_.”

The notorious _Hôtel de Ville_ is well placed in a group with these obscene images. It is the seat of the administration of justice for all Paris, a grey and grief-worn castle, with the _Place de Grêve_ by the side of it. There it stands by the great thermometer of Monsieur Chevalier, where the French people come twice a day to see if they ought to shiver or sweat. There is not a more abominable place in all Paris than this _Place de Grêve_. It holds about the same rank in the city that the hangman does in the community. There flowed the blood of the ferocious Republic, of the grim Empire, and the avenging Restoration. Lally’s ghost haunts the guilty place. Cartouche was burnt there, and the horrible Marchioness Brinvilliers; Damien and Ravaillac were tortured there. The beautiful Princess de Lamballe was assassinated there, and the martyrs of 1830 buried there. To complete your horror, there is yet the lamp post, the revolutionary gibbet, and the window through which Robespierre leaped out and broke--if I were not writing to a lady I would say--his d----d neck. No accusing spirit would fly to Heaven’s chancery with the oath.

I began to breathe as I stepped upon the _Pont Neuf_. The atmosphere brightened, the prospect suddenly opened, and the noble river exhibited its twenty bridges, and its banks, turretted, towered, and castellated, as far as the eye could pierce. There is a romantic interest in the very name of this bridge, as in the “Bridge of Sighs,” though not a great deal richer in architecture than yours of Fair Mount. And what is the reason? Why is the Rialto more noble than your Exchange of Dock-street? You see Pierre and Jaffier, and the Jew, standing on it. The _Pont Neuf_ has arched the Seine these two hundred years and more. It was once the centre of gaiety, and fashion, and business. Here were displayed the barbaric luxury of Marie de Medicis, and the pompous Richelieu; glittering equipages paraded here in their evening airings, and fair ladies in masks--better disguised in their own faces--crowded here to the midnight routes of the Carnival.

A company in 1709 had an exclusive privilege of a depôt of umbrellas at each end, that ladies and gentlemen paying a sou might cross without injury to their complexions. The fine arts, formerly natives of this place, have since emigrated to the _Palais Royal_--_ripæ ulterioris amantes_--and despair now comes hither at midnight--and the horrid suicide, by the silent statue of the great Henry, plunges into eternity.

On the left is the _Quai des Augustins_, where the patient bibliopolist sits over his odd volumes, and where the cheapest of all human commodities is human wit. A black and ancient building gives an imposing front to the _Quai Conti_; it is the _Hotel des Monnaies_. Commerce, Prudence, and several other allegorical grandmothers are looking down from the balustrade. Next to it, (for the Muses, too, love the mint,) with a horse-shoe kind of face, is the Royal “_Institut de France_.” This court has supreme jurisdiction in the French republic of letters; it regulates the public judgment in matters of science, fine arts, language, and literary composition; it proposes questions, and rewards the least stupid, if discovered, with a premium, and gives its approbation of ingenious inventors; who, like Fulton, do not die of hunger in waiting for it.

You may attend the sittings of the _Académie des Sciences_, which are public, on Mondays. You will meet Pascal and Molière in the ante-chamber--as far as they dared venture in their lives. The members you will see in front of broad tables in the interior, and the president eminent above the rest, who ever and anon will ring a little bell by way of keeping less noise; the spectators, with busts of Sully, Bossuet, Fenelon, and Descartes, sitting gravely, tier over tier, around the extremities of the room. The secretary will then run over a programme of the subjects, not without frequent tinklings of the admonitory bell; at the end of which, debates will probably arise on general subjects, or matters of form. For example, M. Arago will call in question the veracity of that eminent man, M. Herschel, of New York, and his selenelogical discoveries; which have a great credit here, because no one sees the moon for the fogs, and you may tell as many lies about her as you please.

Afterwards, a little man of solemn mien, being seated upon a chair, will read you, alas, one of his own compositions. He will talk of nothing but the _geognosie des couches atmospheriques_; the _isomorphism_ of the _mineralogical substances_, and the “_Asyntotes of the Parabola_,” for an hour. You will then have an episode from Baron Larrey (no one listening) upon a bag of dry bones, displayed, _à la Jehoshaphat_, upon a wide table; followed by another reader, and then by another, to the end of the sitting. You will think the empire of dulness has come upon the earth.

The Institute was once the _College des Quatre Nations_, and was founded by Mazarin upon the ruins of the famous _Tour de Nesle_. I need not tell you the history of this tower. Who does not know all about Queen _Isabeau de Bavière_?--of her window from the heights of the tower, from which she overlooked the Seine, before the baths of Count Vigier (what made him a count?) were invented. She was a great admirer of the fine forms of the human figure.

Her ill-treatment of her lovers--her sewing them up, to prevent their telling tales, in sacks, and then tossing them before day-light into the river, was, to say the least of it, very wrong! In crossing the _Pont des Arts_, towards midnight, I have often heard something very like the voices of lamentation and violence. Sometimes, I thought I could hear distinctly _Isabeau!_ in the murmuring of the waters.

All the world runs to the _Bains Vigiers_, which are anchored along this Quai, to bathe, at four sous; but the water is exceedingly foul. It is here the Seine,

“With disemboguing streams, Rolls the large tribute of its dead dogs.”

And what is worst, when done bathing here, you have no place to go to wash yourself.

The _Pont des Arts_ is a light and airy bridge, from the door of the Institute to the Quai du Louvre; upon which no equipages are admitted. The Arts use their legs--_cruribus non curribus utuntur_. Between this and the “Pont Royal,” (a bridge of solid iron,) the antiquarians have got together for sale all the curious remains of the last century, Chineseries, Sevreries, and chimney pieces of Madame Pompadour. Next is the _Quai Voltaire_, in the east corner of which is the last earthly habitation of the illustrious individual whose name it bears. The apartment in which he died has been kept shut for the last forty years, and has been lately thrown open.

On the opposite side you see stretched out, huge in length, the heavy and monotonous Louvre, which, with the Tuileries adjoining, is, they say, the most spacious and beautiful palace in the world. I have not experienced what the artists call a perception of its beauties. There is a little pet corner, the eastern colonnade raised by Louis XIV., which is called the great triumph of French architecture. It consists of a long series of apartments, decorated with superb columns, with sculpture and mosaics, and a profusion of gilding, and fanciful ornaments.[2] From the middle gallery it was that Charles IX., one summer’s evening, amused himself shooting Hugonots, flying the St. Bartholomew, with his arquebuss. Nero was a mere fiddler to this fellow. This is the gallery of Philip Augustus, so full of romance. It was from here that Charles X. “cut and ran,” and Louis Philippe quietly sat down on his stool. See how the Palais des Beaux Arts is peppered with the Swiss bullets!

The edge of the river, for half a mile, is embroidered with washerwomen; and baths, and boats of charcoal, cover its whole surface. One cannot drown oneself here, but at the risk of knocking out one’s brains. One of the curiosities of this place, is the _fête des Blanchisseuses_, celebrated a few days ago. The whole surface of the river was covered with dances; floors being strewed upon the boats, and the boats, adorned with flags and streamers, rowing about, and filled with elegant washerwomen, just from the froth, like so many Venuses--now dissolving in a waltz, now fluttering in a quadrille. You ought to have seen how they chose out, the most beautiful of these washerwomen--the queen of the suds--and rowed her in a triumphal gondola through the stream, with music that untwisted all the chains of harmony.

“Not Cleopatra, on her galley’s deck, Display’d so much of leg, or more of neck.”

This array of washing-boats relieves the French from that confusion and misery of the American kitchen, the “washing-day;” but to give us the water to drink, after all this scouring of foul linen, is not so polite. I have bought a filter of charcoal, which, they say, will intercept, at least, the petticoats and other such articles as I might have swallowed. The Seine here suffers the same want as one of his brother rivers, sung by the poets:--

“The River Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash the city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine, Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine.”

Just opposite this Quai, I observed “Schools of Natation,” for both sexes, kept entirely separate. An admonition is placed over the ladies’ school to this effect, in large letters; besides, it is hermetically secured against any impertinent intrusion, by a piece of linen. The ladies, however, were put to their last shifts, last summer, in maintaining this establishment. Such rigid notions do some persons here entertain of female decorum! But opposition has now died away; and the reports about gentlemen of the “other house” becoming love-sick, from swimming in the waters from the ladies’ bath, have been proved malicious: for the gentlemen’s house is farther up the stream, “_et par consequence_.”

The truth is, that a lady has as much right, and, unfortunately, in these ship-wrecking times, as much necessity often, to swim as a gentleman; and it is ascertained that, with the same chance, the woman is the better swimmer of the two. (I have this from the lady who keeps the bureau.) Her head is always above the water. All of them, and especially those who have the vapours, can swim without cork. The process of instruction is easy. All that the swimming master has to do, is just to thrust the little creatures into a pair of gum-elastic trousers, and a cravat inflated, and then pitch them in, one after another--only taking care not to put on the trousers without the cravat.

I will finish this paragraph, already too long, by an anecdote. It will shew you that ladies who swim cannot use too much circumspection,--I mean, by circumspection, looking up, as well as round about them. The ever-vigilant police about the Tuileries had observed a young gentleman very busy with tools, at an opposite garret window, for whole weeks together. Sometimes till the latest hour of the night his lamp was seen glimmering at the said window. At length, by the dint of looking, and looking, they discovered something like an “Infernal Machine,” placed directly towards the apartment of the king and queen, and the bed-chamber of the dear little princesses and Madame Adelaide. It was just after the July review, and General Mortier’s disaster; and suspicion lay all night wide awake. What needs many words? They burst into the room--the “_Garde Municipale_,” and the “_police centrale_,” the “_pompiers_,” and the “_sapeurs_,” and the serjeants clad in blue, with buttons to their arms, and swords to their sides, and coifed in chapeaux, three feet in diameter--breaking down all opposition of doors, and dragged forth the terrified young man.

The tongues of all Paris were now set loose, as usual, and proclamations were read through the streets _de l’horrible assassinat tenté contre la vie du roi, et de la famille royale_, &c. &c., and all that for four sous! It was even said, that he had made important revelations to the Minister of the Interior; and that some of the most distinguished Carlists were implicated in his guilt. At length, he was brought up before the Chamber of Peers, with his machine; where it was examined, and discovered to be--what do you think?--a telescope! The young man alleged that he was getting it up for astronomical purposes; but the president, a shrewd man about machines, observed that its obliquity was in an opposite direction to the stars.

The Seine flows gently by the side of the Tuileries, both from the pleasure it has had in bathing the royal family, and the delight of listening to the king’s band, which plays here every evening; and from this onwards, the right bank is occupied by the gardens of the Tuileries and the Champs Elysées. If you wish to know how much more beautiful than the gardens of Armida is this garden of the Tuileries, I refer you to my former letters; especially to that one which I wrote you when I had just fallen from the clouds. I admired, then, everything with sensibility, and a good many things with ecstacy. Somebody has said, that every one who is born, is as much a first man as Adam; which I do not quite believe. He came into the midst of a creation, which rushed, with the freshness of novelty, upon his senses, and was not introduced to him by gradual acquaintance.

How many things did this first man see in Eden which you and I could never have seen in it; and which he himself had never seen in it if he had been put out to nurse, or had been brought up at the “College Rolin.” How often have I since wandered through this garden without even glancing at the white and snowy bosom of the Queen of Love; how often walked upon this goodly terrace, strolling all the while, the pretty Miss Smith at one arm, and thy incomparable self at the other, by the wizard Schuylkill, or the silent woods of the Mohontongo.

Opposite this garden, on the _Quai d’Orsay_, is the Hotel, not finished, of the Minister of the Interior, the most enormous building of all Paris. It has turned all the houses near it into huts. _That_, just under its huge flanks, with a meek and prostrate aspect, as if making an apology for intruding into the presence of its prodigious neighbour--that is the Hotel of the Legion of Honour. Alas, what signifies it to have bullied all Europe for half a century!

Close by is a little chateau, formerly of the _Marquis de Milraye_, which I notice only to tell you an anecdote of his wife. The prince Philip came to Paris and died very suddenly, under Louis XIV. He was a great roué and libertine, and some one moralizing, expressed, before the Marchioness, doubts about his salvation. “_Je vous assure_,” said she, very seriously, “_qu’à des gens de cette qualité-là, Dieu y regarde bien à deux fois pour les autres._” Which proves that ladies bred in high life don’t think that kings may be condemned like you and I.

The next object of importance, and the object of most importance in all Paris, is the _Chamber of Deputies_. I wished to go in, but four churlish and bearded men disputed me this privilege. I sat down, therefore, upon the steps, having Justice, Temperance, and Prudence, and another elderly lady, on each side of me; and I consoled myself, and said--

“In this House the Virtues are shut out of doors.” I had also in the same group, Sully, Hôpital, Daguesseau, and Colbert. What superhuman figures! And I had in front the Bridge of Concord, upon which are placed twelve statues in marble, also of the colossal breed. A deputy, as he waddles through the midst of them, seems no bigger than Lemuel Gulliver, just arrived at Brobdignag. Four, are of men distinguished in war--Condé, who looks ridiculously grim, and Turenne, Duguesclin, and Bayard; and four eminent statesmen--Suger, Richelieu, Sully, Colbert; and four men famous on the sea--Tourville, Suffren, Duquesne, and who was the other? He whose name would shame an epic poem, or the Paris Directory, Duguay-Trouin. I took off my hat to Suffren, for he helped us with our Independence.

On the back ground of this Palace is a delightful woodland, where the members often seek refreshment from the fatigues of business in the open air. Here you will see a Lycurgus seated apart, and ruminating upon the fate of empires; and there a pair of Solons, unfolding the mazes of human policy, straying arm in arm through its solitary gravel walks. M. Q----, a member of this Chamber, and sometimes minister, was seen walking here assiduously during the last summer evenings; and often, when the twilight had just faded into night, a beautiful female figure was seen walking with him. It did not seem to be of mortal race, but a spirit rather of some brighter sphere which had consented awhile to walk upon this earth with Monsieur Q----. It was, however, the wife of Monsieur O----, another member of this Chamber.

One essential difference you may remark between Numa Pompilius and Deputy Q----, is, that the one met ladies in the woods for the making of laws, and the other for the breaking of them. Monsieur O----, informed of the fact, took a signal revenge upon the seducer of his wife. And what do you think it was? He called him out, to be sure, and blew out his brains. Not a bit of it. He waylaid him, then, and despatched him secretly? Much less. I will tell you what he did. He took Monsieur Q----’s wife in exchange. In telling this tale, which I had on pretty good authority, I do not mean to say--Heaven preserve me!--that there are not honest wives in Paris.

“Il en est jusqu’à trois que je pourrais nommer.”

I have now before me one of the most execrable spots upon this earth--which all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten--the “Place de la Revolution”[3]--where the Queen of France suffered death with her husband, to propitiate the horrible Republic. I saw once my mother in agitation, upon reading a newspaper--sobbing and even weeping aloud;--she read (and set me to weeping too) the account of this execution of the Queen. It is the farthest remembrance of my life, and I am now standing on the spot--on the very spot on which this deed was perpetrated--which made women weep in their huts beyond the Alleghany!

With the manifold faults of this Queen, one cannot, at the age of sober reason, look upon the place of her execution, and think over her hapless fate, without feeling all that one has of human nature melting into compassion. She was a woman whom anything of a gentleman would love, with all her faults. Moreover, no one expects queens, in the intoxication of their fortune, to behave like sober people. Not even the sound and temperate head of Cæsar preserved its prudence in this kind of prosperity. The guillotine was erected permanently in the centre of this Place, and was fed with cart-loads at a time. The most illustrious of its victims were, the Queen, Louis XVI., his sister Mademoiselle Elizabeth, and the father of the present king. The grass does not grow upon the guilty Place, and the Seine flows quickly by it.