Part 14

If you wish to have the finest view of all Paris--the finest perhaps of all Europe, of a similar kind--you must stand upon the centre of this Place; and you must hurry, as the Obelisk of Luxor has just arrived from Egypt, and will occupy it shortly. Towards the east, you have spread out before you the gardens of the Tuileries, bordered by the noble colonnade of the Rue Rivoli and the Seine;--towards the west, the Champs Elysées, and the broad walk leading gently up to Napoleon’s arch, which stands proudly on the summit, and “helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale.” On the north, you have in full view, through the Rue Royale, the superb Madelaine, on the side of its most brilliant sculpture; and in symmetry with it, the noble front of the Palais Bourbon on the south. On fine evenings, and days of parade, you will see from the Arch to the Palace, about two miles, a moving column of human beings upon the side walks; and innumerable equipages, with horses proud of their trappings, and lackeys of their feathers, meeting and crossing each other upon the intervening roads; and upon the area of the Tuileries, all that which animated life has most amiable and beautiful. You will see, amidst the parterres of flowers, and groups of oranges, and its marble divinities, swans swimming upon the silvery lakes; multitudes of children at their sports, and everywhere ladies and their cavaliers, in all the colours of the toilette, sitting or standing, or sauntering about, and appearing through the trees, upon the distant terraces, as if walking upon the air. All this will present you a rich and variegated tableau, of which prose like mine can give you no reasonable perception.

The great obelisk which is to stand here, is now lying upon the adjacent wharf. It is seventy-two feet high, and is to be raised higher, by a pedestal of twenty feet. It is a single block of granite, with four faces, and each face has almost an equal share of the magnificent prospect I have just tried to describe. It tapers towards the top, and its sides, older than the alphabet, are embossed with a variety of curious images. Birds are singing, rustics labouring, or playing on their pipes, sheep are bleating, and lambs skipping. A slave is on his knees, and a Theban gentleman recumbent in his fauteuil; and one is at his wine,--he who “hob-a-nobbed with Pharaoh, glass to glass, 3,000 years ago.”--The men are in caps, a third their size; and the women in low hoods, like a chancellor’s wig.

Little did the miner think who dug it from the quarry, little did the sculptor think, as he carved these images on it, and how little did Sesostris think, in reading over his history of Paris, that it would, one day, make the tour of Europe, and establish itself here in the Place de la Concorde. An expensive and wearisome journey it has had of it. It is nine years since it stepped from its pedestal at Luxor. It was a good notion of Charles X., but not original. The Emperor Constantius brought one, the largest ever known, (150 feet high,) to Rome. Two magnificent ones, set up by the Doge Ziana, adorn the Piazzetta of St. Mark’s, brought from some island of the Archipelago.

The French army at Alexandria, in 1801, had two young ones on their way to Paris, which fell, poor things! into the rapacious hands of the British Museum. And now the English, jealous of this Luxorique magnificence, are going to bring over Cleopatra’s needle, to be up with them; and we are going to put something in our Washington Square; and then the French, some of these days, will bring over the Pyramids.

At the corner of the Rue Royale you will see two palaces, one the depôt of fine furniture and jewels, the other of the armour of the crown. Here are shields that were burnished for Cressy and Agincourt. Here is the armour of Francis when made prisoner at Pavia, of Henry when mortally wounded by Montgomery; complete sets of armour of Godfrey de Bouillon and Joan of Arc, the sword of King Cassimer, and that of the holy father Paul V. Spiders are now weaving their webs in casques that went to Jerusalem. The diamonds of the crown deposited here before the Revolution in rubies, topaz, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, &c., were 7432 in number, amongst which were the famous jewels called the _Sanci_ and the _Regent_, so notorious in the history of jewels; the latter has figured about the world in the king’s hats, and Napoleon’s sword. An antiquarian would find extreme delight in this room; as for me I scarce know which is Mambrino’s helmet and which the barber’s basin.

I had no sooner quitted the deputies than I found myself under the great _Hospital of the Invalids_, whose lofty and gilded dome was blazing in the setting sun. Napoleon put up this gilding to amuse gossiping Paris in his Russian defeats; as Alcibiades, to divert Athens from his worse tricks, cut off his dog’s tail; and as Miss Kitty, to withdraw a more dangerous weapon from the baby’s hand, gives it a rattle. 3800 soldiers are now lodged in this Hospital, or rather, pieces of soldiers; for one has an arm at Moscow, another a leg at Algiers, needing no nourishment from the state. Here is one whose lower limbs were both lost at the taking of Paris. He seems very happy. He saves the shoemaker’s, hosier’s, and half the tailor’s bill. He is fat, too, and healthy, for he has the same rations as if he were all there. If I were expert at logic, I would prove to you that this piece of an individual might partly eat himself up, his legs being buried in the suburbs, and he dining on the potatoes which grow there; and I could prove, if I was put to it, that with a proper assistance from cork, he might be running about town with his legs in his cheeks. There are two sorts of historians,--one, of those who confine themselves to a simple narrative of facts and descriptions; the other, searching after causes and effects, and accompanying the narrative with moral reflections. I belong to the latter class.

This Hospital was planned by the great Henry; the great Louis built it; and it was furnished with lodgers by the great Napoleon. It has all the air of a hospital; long ranges of rooms and chilling corridors; and this _réunion_ of mutilated beings is a horrid spectacle! They lead a kind of inactive, lounging, alms-house existence. How much better had the munificence of government given to each his allowance, with the privilege of remaining with his friends and relations, than to be thus cut off from all the charities and consolations of domestic life, and without the last, best consolation of afflicted humanity--a woman.

The dome is magnificent with paintings, gildings, carvings, and such like decorations. The chapel, the most splendid part, is tapestried with flags taken in war from the enemy. What an emblem in a Christian church! There are several hundreds yet remaining, notwithstanding the great numbers burnt, to save them from their owners, the allies. “There are some here from all countries,” said my guide, growing a foot taller. “Those are from Africa; those from Belgium; and those three from England.” When I asked him to shew me those from America, he replied, with a shrug--“_Cela viendra, monsieur_.”

The immense plain to the west of the Invalids and in front of the _Ecole Militaire_, is the _Champ de Mars_, the rendezvous of horses fleet in the race, and cavalry to be trained for the battle. I am quite vexed that I have not space to tell you of the great Revolutionary fête which was once celebrated in this very place; how the ladies of the first rank volunteered and worked with their own dear little hands to put up the scaffolding; and how the king was brought out here with his white and venerable locks and air of a martyr, and the queen, her eyes swollen with weeping; their last appearance but one! before the people. And it would be very gratifying to take a look at that good old revolutionary patriarch, Talleyrand. How he officiated at the immense ceremony, at the head of two hundred priests, all habited in immaculate white surplices, and all adorned with tri-coloured scarfs, and then how the holy man blessed the new standards of France, and consecrated the eighty-three banners of the Departments.

I wish to write all this, but winged time will not wait upon my desires; besides, this letter is already the longest that was ever written; it has as many curiosities, too, as the shield of Achilles. The bridge just opposite is the _Pont de Jena_. The allies were about to destroy it on account of its name, and put gunpowder under it, but Louis the Eighteenth would not allow it. _Le jour où vous ferez sauter le Pont de Jena, je me mette dessus!_ and Blucher was moved. This bridge is the end of my letter and journey; _finis chartæque viæque_.

The cholera, the deuce take it, has got into Italy, and I shall perhaps lose altogether the opportunity of a visit to that country. I shall not kiss the feet of his Holiness, nor see the Rialto, nor the Bridge of Sighs; nor Venice and her gondolas, nor look upon the venerable palace of her Doges. Alas, I shall not linger at Virgil’s tomb! nor swim in the Tiber, nor taste one drop of thy pure fountain, Egeria! nor thine, _Fons Blandusiæ splendidior vitreo_.

LETTER X.

Faubourg St. Germain--Quartier Latin--The Book-stalls--Phrenologists--Dupuytren’s Room--Medical Students--Lodgings--Bill at the Sorbonne--French Cookery--A Gentleman’s Boarding-house--The Locomotive Cook--Fruit--The Pension--The Landlady--Pleasure in being duped--Smile of a French Landlady--The Boarding-house--Amiable Ladies--The Luxembourg Gardens--The Grisettes--Their naïveté and simplicity--Americans sent to Paris--Parisian Morals--Advantages in visiting Old Countries--American Society in Paris.

_Paris, November 24th, 1835._

Nearly all who love to woo the silent muses are assembled in this region, the _Faubourg St. Germain_. Here are the libraries bending under their ponderous loads, and here are the schools and colleges, and all the establishments devoted to science and letters; for which reason, no doubt, it is dignified by the name of the _Quartier Latin_. When the west of the river was yet overspread with its forests, this quarter was covered with houses, and adorned with a palace and amphitheatre, baths, an aqueduct, and a “Field of Mars” for the parade of the Roman troops, where Julius Cæsar used to make them shoulder their firelocks.

But now, though it contains a fourth of the population of the town, and retains its literary character, so far has luxury got ahead of philosophy, that it has no greater dignity of name than the “_Faubourgs_.” It stands apart as if the city of some other people. Some few, indeed, from the fashionable districts, in a desperate Captain Ross kind of expedition, do sometimes come over here, and have got back safe, but having found nothing but books and such things of little interest, it remains unexplored.

The population has become new by retaining its old customs. By standing still it shews the “march of intellect” through the rest of the city. Here you see yet that venerable old man who wears a cue and powder, and buckles his shoes, and calls his shop a _boutique_; who garters up his stockings over the knees, goes to bed at eight, and snuffs the candle with his fingers; and you see everywhere the innumerable people, clattering through the muddy and narrow lanes in their _sabots_. Poverty not being able to get lodgings in the Rue Rivoli, the Palais Royal, and, though she tried hard, in the Boulevards, has been obliged, on account of the cheap rents, to come over here and to strike up a sort of partnership with science, and they now carry on various kinds of industry, under the firm of _Misère et Compagnie_.

In the central section of this Latin country, the staple is the bookshop. Everywhere you will see the little store embossed with its innumerable volumes inside and out, on the ceilings, on the floor, and on screens throughout the room, leaving just a little space for a little bookseller; and stalls are covered with the same article in the open air, in all those positions where, in other towns, you find mutton and fat beef. When you see a long file of Institutes and Bartholos wrapped in their yellow parchment, you are near the Temple of Themis--the _Ecole des Lois_.

When you see in descending St. Jaques, a morose, surly, bibliomaniacal little man, entrenched behind a Homer, a Horace, and a Euclid’s Elements, that is the _Collège de France_; and when you stumble over a pile of the Martyrs, it is the _Sorbonne_; and as you approach the _Ecole Médecine_, five hundred Bichats and Richerands beckon you to its threshold. Besides, you will see ladies and gentlemen looking out from the neighbouring windows, and recommending themselves in their various anatomical appearances; _en squellette_, or half dissected, or turned wrong side out. There is a shop, too, of phrenological skulls, and a lady who will explain you the bumps; and if you like, you can get yourself felt for a franc or two, and she will tell you where is your _Philo-pro_--what do you call it? She told me our intellectual qualities were placed in front, and the sensual in the back part of the skull, very happily, because the former could look out ahead, and keep the latter in order. And next door is a shop of all the wax preparations of human forms and diseases, and here is another lady who will point you out their resemblances with originals, who will analyse you a man into all his component parts, and put him up again; and she puts up, also, “magnificent skeletons” and mannikins for foreign countries.

Now and then you will see arrive a cart, which pours out a dozen, or so, of naked men and women, as you do a cord of wood, upon the pavement, which are distributed into the dissecting rooms, after the ladies and gentlemen standing about have sufficiently entertained themselves with the spectacle. And just step into “Dupuytren’s Room,” and you will see all the human diseases, arranged beautifully in families; here is the plague, and there is the cholera morbus; here is the gout, and there is the palsy staring you in the face; and there are whole cabinets of sprained ankles, broken legs, dislocated shoulders, and cracked skulls. In a word, every thing is literary in this quarter. One evening you are invited to a party for squaring the circle, another for finding out the longitude; and another:--“My dear sir, come this evening, we have just got in a subject. The autopsis will begin at six.”

The medical students are about four thousand; those of law and theology about the same number; and many a one lodges, eats, and clothes himself, and keeps his sweetheart, all for twelve dollars per month. With the exception of the last, I am living a kind of student’s life. I have a room twenty feet square, overlooking, from the second story, the beautiful garden of the Luxembourg, and the great gate opening from the _Rue d’Enfer_. This is my parlour during the day, and a cabinet having a bed, and opening into it, converts the two into a bed-chamber for the night; and the price, including services, is eight dollars per month.

I find at ten, a small table covered with white porcelain, and a very neat little Frenchwoman comes smiling in with a coffee-pot in one hand, and a pitcher of boiling milk in the other, and pours me out with her rosy fingers a large cup of the best _café au lait_ in the world, and sits down herself, and descants fluently on the manners and customs of the capital, and improves my facilities in French.

If you wish bad coffee, it is not to be had in this country. The accompaniments are two eggs, or some equivalent relish, a piece of fresh butter, and a small loaf of bread--all this for eighteen sous, (a sou is a twentieth less than our cent.) I dine out wherever I may chance to be, and according to the voracity or temperance of my appetite, from one and a half to five francs, at six o’clock. A French dinner comes at the most sociable hour, when the cares and labours of the day are past, and the mind can give itself up entirely to its enjoyments, or its repose.

I have dined sometimes at the illustrious Flicoteau’s on the Place Sorbonne, with the medical students, and have looked upon the rooms once occupied by J. Jaques Rousseau, and upon the very dial on which he could not teach Thérése, his grisette wife, to count the hours. I have dined, too, at Viot’s, with the law students, and have taken coffee with Molière, and Fontenelle, and Voltaire, at the Procope. The following is a bill at the Sorbonne.

A service of Soup, 3 Sous. Vegetables, 3 “ Meat, 6 “ Fish, 6 “ Bread, 2 “ -- 20

You have also, which serves at once for vinegar and wine, a half bottle of claret, at six sous; and a dessert, a bunch of grapes or three cherries, for two; or of sweetmeats, a most delicate portion--one of those infinitesimals of a dose, such as the Homœopathists administer in desperate cases. Yet this--if a dish were only what it professes to be on its face, the soup, not the rinsings of the dishcloth, the fricassee not poached upon the swill-tub,--this would still be supportable--if a macaroni were only a macaroni; which in a cheap Paris fare, I understand, is not to be presumed. In sober sadness, this is very bad.

We have a right to expect that a thing which calls itself a hare, should not be a cat. But, alas! it is the end of all human refinement, that hypocrisy should take the place of truth. You can discern no better the component parts of a French dish in a French cookery, than you can a virtue in a condiment of French affability. But ----. It is an homage which a horse’s rump renders to a beefsteak. At my last dinner here, I had two little ribs held together in indissoluble matrimony of mutton. I tried to divorce them, but to no purpose, till the perspiration began to flow abundantly. I called the “garçon,” and exhibited to him their toughness.--“_Cependant, Monsieur, le mouton était magnifique!_” I offered him five francs if he would sit down and eat it; he refused. He had perhaps a mother or some poor relation depending on him; I did not insist.

M. Flicoteau belongs to the romantic school. I prefer the classical. I need hardly say that the French students, who dine here, have an unhealthy and shrivelled appearance--you recollect the last run of the shad on the Juniatta. It is the very spot on which the Sorbonne used to starve its monks, and M. Flicoteau, for his own sake, keeps starving people here ever since? Sixteen sous is a student’s ordinary dinner. His common allowance for clothing, and other expenses by the year, is three hundred dollars.

He eats for a hundred, lodges for fifty, and has the remainder for his wardrobe and amusements. The students of medicine are mostly poor and laborious, and being obliged to follow their filthy occupation of dissecting, are negligent of dress and manners. The disciples of the law are more from the richer classes, have idle time, keep better company, and have an air _plus distingué_.

The doctors of law in all countries take rank above medicine. The question of precedence, I recollect, was determined by the Duke of Mantua’s fool, who observed that the “rogue always walks ahead of the executioner.” Theology, alas! hides her head in a peaceful corner of the Sorbonne, where once she domineered, and begs to be unnoticed in her humble and abject fortunes. A student of Divinity eats a _soup maigre_, a _riz-au-lait_, flanked by a dessert of sour grapes. His meals would take him to Heaven, if he had no other merits.

The other resorts of eating, besides the restaurants, are as follow: the _Gargotte_, the _Cuisine Bourgeoise_, and, of a higher grade, the _Pension Bourgeoise_. In the Gargotte you don’t get partridges. Your dinner costs seven sous. You have a little meat, dry and somewhat stringy, veal or mutton, whichever Monsieur pleases. Whether it died the natural way, or a violent death by the hands of the butcher, it is impossible to know. You have, besides, a thick soup, a loaf of bread three feet long, standing in the corner by the broom, and fried potatoes; also, water and the servant girl _à discretion_. At seventeen sous, you have all the aforesaid delicacies, with a table cloth into the bargain; and at twenty, the luxurious addition of a napkin, and a fork of Algiers metal. This is the Gargotte.

When you have got to twenty-five sous, you are in the Cuisine Bourgeoise. Here your “couvert,” consists of a spoon, a fork, a knife, a napkin, a glass, and a small bottle, called a caraffon; your plate is changed--already a step towards civilization; and you have a cucumber a foot long, radishes a little withered, asparagus just getting to seed, and salt and pepper, artistly arranged; and a horse’s rump cooked into a beefsteak, and washed down with “_veritable macon_”--that is, the best sort of logwood alcoholised. You have, also, a little dessert here of sour grapes, wrinkled apricots, or green figs, which are exhibited for sale, at the window, between meals.

The flaps of mutton and the drumsticks of turkeys, which you get so tender, have been served up, once or twice, at the Hotel Ordinary; but they are preferred much to the original dishes. One likes sometimes better Ephraim’s gleanings, than Abiezer’s vintage. The French have a knack of letting nothing go to loss. Why they make more of a dead horse or cow than others of the living ones. They do not even waste the putrid offals of the butcheries; they sell the maggots to feed chickens.

But when you pay forty sous, that’s quite another affair. You are now in the _monde gourmande_. Spinage has butter in it; custards have sugar in them; soup is called _potage_;--everything now has an honest name; bouilli is _bœuf à la mode_; fried potatoes _pomme de terre à la maitre d’hotel_; and a baked cat is, _lapin sauté a l’estragon_. This is the gentleman’s boarding-house.

I mean by gentleman, a youth, who has just come over from England or America, to the lectures, or a French clerk of the _corps bureaucratique_, or an apprentice philosopher, who calls himself a “man of letters.” It is one of the advantages of this place, that you are not often oppressed by the intelligence and gravity of your convives, and have a chance of shining. It is in the power of any man to have wit, if he but knows how to select his company. In this _pension_, the dishes succeed one another, and are not crammed, as on our tables, _roti fricandeau_, _salade_, _vol au vent_--all into the same service, to distract and pall the appetite, or get cold waiting on each other.