XX. THE PRISONS OF PARIS…

XX. THE PRISONS OF PARIS

La Santé--La Roquette--The Conciergerie--The Mazas--Sainte-Pélagie--Saint-Lazare--Prison Regulations.

The Luxemburg, though only from time to time (and usually at intervals of several years) transformed into a High Court of Justice, has a prison permanently attached to it. The apartments reserved for prisoners of state have, however, nothing in common with the ordinary prisons of Paris. These abound on both sides of the Seine. Not far from the end of the Luxemburg Gardens, and close to the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, is the prison of La Santé--built in 1865 at a cost of six millions of francs, for the reception of twelve thousand prisoners: about a ninth part of the total population of the Paris prisons. But before leaving the Boulevard Saint-Jacques and the Place Saint-Jacques, to which the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques directly leads, a word must be said about the open space formerly closed by the ancient Barrière Saint-Jacques. During twenty years, from 1832 to 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques was the scene of public executions. Here, while the scaffold was being erected, the innumerable taverns of the barrier were crowded with revellers, who, after supping all night, remained at the windows of the rooms they had hired at great cost, in order early the next morning to see the guillotine at work. Similar scenes took place in our own capital when murderers were publicly hanged outside Newgate; scenes which have been described in admirable prose and in perfect verse by Thackeray and by Ingoldsby.

The prisons of Paris have played an important part in history, though the most historical of them no longer exist. With the exception of Saint-Lazare and the Conciergerie, which still preserve some vestiges of the past, the prisons that figure so largely in the annals of France have vanished.

Paris has been described by a well-known French writer as a “city of destruction.” Edifices fraught with the memories of ages fall, he complains, under the hand of the municipal destroyer like castles built of cards. If there is a house which dates back even to the seventeenth century it has to be looked for at the end of some court or alley, which has escaped the pickaxe and hammer by sheer insignificance. Even as regards churches, there are few which are more than three or four generations old. When we have counted Notre Dame, the two churches of Saint-Germain, the Sainte-Chapelle, and one or two temples of lesser importance, we have to leap to Saint-Eustache and Saint-Sulpice, and thence take a big bound to the Madeleine. This eternal demolition by architects who wish to outdo their predecessors is a matter of keen lament to archæologists and to writers like M. Jules Simon, who declares that the only pickaxe he can forgive is the one that overthrew the Bastille, and that he forgives it because it, at the same time, “overthrew everything else.”

Of all the historical prisons of Paris one only can be said to exist to-day--the Conciergerie. It preserves an air of the past by virtue of a few antiquities which still belong to it: such as the two big towers on the quay, the large walls inside, the large table in the courtyard, at which Saint Louis is reported to have fed the poor, the room in which Damiens was confined, and the dungeon of Marie Antoinette.

In 1830 Paris could boast--or perhaps one should say blush for--twenty civil prisons. Not a few of these consisted of old convents or other buildings converted into state gaols; and it may well be imagined that such places were neither salubrious nor secure. The prisoners were not even divided into categories. In the present day eight or nine prisons suffice for a much larger number of convicts, and admit of a regular classification.

First, there is a lock-up, or maison de dépôt, at the prefecture of police. Then there are three “preventive” prisons--Mazas and La Santé for men and the Conciergerie for both sexes. One portion of Saint-Lazare is also set apart for the accommodation of the fair sex. Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare--the first for men and the second for women--are houses of correction for prisoners sentenced to one year or less. It is at Sainte-Pélagie that political prisoners are for the most part confined. In La Roquette are lodged prisoners under sentence of death and offenders condemned to more than one year. Clichy, once the debtors’ prison, has already in these pages been amply described.

Nor should we omit to mention the military prison of the Rue du Cherche-Midi; the prison of the National Guard; the dépôt of Saint-Denis where mendicants are locked up; and La Petite Roquette, where, until 1865, were imprisoned, and subjected to the rigorous régime of cell confinement, children and youths guilty for the most part, as M. Jules Simon well expresses it, of having had unnatural parents.

In taking a leisurely survey of the principal Paris prisons, we may begin with La Roquette as the most formidable in character. Situated in the street and place of the same name, it was built towards 1837, and on such a perfect plan that there has hitherto been no example of any prisoner’s escape or even attempted escape from it. This gaol, therefore, is to criminals one of the most redoubtable. The gloomy impressions, however, which it may well produce on a stranger are somewhat relieved by the fact that the courtyard by which it is approached is adorned with a fountain, and that the prison boasts a well composed library of some two thousand volumes; nor, since crime is so often the outcome of ignorance, could a wiser means of recreation for the convicts be devised. The librarian is usually a convict who has received a certain education, and who has earned this post of confidence by repentance and good behaviour. It has been found, indeed, that the inmates prefer reading to any other diversion, and statistics of the books lent out show that each prisoner gets through nearly one volume a week. The library is divided into various sections; and the books most eagerly read are said to be works of science.

The régime imposed at La Roquette is uniform, and applies without distinction to all classes of offenders. Everyone within the walls rises at 5.0 a.m., does ten hours’ work relieved by intervals for food and recreation, and goes to bed at half-past seven, passing the night in a strongly bolted cell, of which the sole furniture is an iron bedstead. An exception, however, as regards sleeping, is made in the case of prisoners liable to epileptic fits, or who have attempted to commit suicide. These sleep in special dormitories under the careful inspection of warders. One room, moreover, is set apart for fever patients. Another is reserved for those prisoners who have softened the rigour of their confinement by particularly good behaviour or--what some will think less admirable--by informing against their accomplices. It frequently happens that the accomplices so betrayed find their way to the same gaol, and if the informers were not isolated deeds of vengeance might sometimes be committed. The administration of La Roquette consists of a governor, a chaplain, a physician, two clerks (senior and junior), a brigadier, an under-brigadier, fourteen warders, a dispenser, a laundress, and a sutler. Nearly two dozen prisoners, moreover, are employed about the establishment as auxiliaries.

At certain periods gangs of convicts are transferred from La Roquette to provincial state prisons or houses of correction. Before their departure, however, they are most rigorously searched lest they should have upon them any sort of instrument which might assist them to escape from their future residence. One tool in particular, the invention of inveterate criminals, is always an object of apprehension with the authorities on such occasions. This consists of a kind of diminutive fret-saw, which by a miracle of patience can be made out of scraps of metal, and with which thick iron bars can sometimes be cut through. It was a saw of this family that Ainsworth’s prison-hero employed to sever the bar of his Newgate cell.

Since 1851 the Paris executioner has been accustomed to perform his grim functions in front of La Roquette. A number of massive stones which, forming a square, are let into the pavement outside, serve as basis for the temporary erection of the guillotine whenever a head is to fall. The surface of these stones is level with that of the pavement, and many a pedestrian walks over them without dreaming of their sinister utility. The guillotine is usually put up during the night; but despite the early hour at which, thanks to this precaution, executions take place, the spectacle of decapitation always draws a crowd of curious persons, consisting, it is sad to say, largely of women and youths, who will brave all the rigours of a winter’s night in order to witness from the front rank the death of some wretch, notorious or obscure. It was on the Place de la Roquette that Verger (assassin of the Archbishop of Paris), Orsini (the would-be destroyer of Napoleon III.), La Pommerais (the poisoning doctor), and many other criminal celebrities, were executed. “Perhaps,” says a fanciful French writer, “during the fatal night which preceded their last hour they heard the nailing-down of the guillotine planks; for La Roquette is the gaol where those under death-sentence are lodged in a special cell.” This cell is cold and gloomy: a bed and a table constitute its furniture. It is here that the condemned man gets his last snatch of sleep, if indeed he can sleep at all; it is hence that, after a last “toilette,” he steps forth to make his exit by that prison doorway which to him is the threshold of eternity.

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The Conciergerie is the gaol of the department of the Seine. It gained a sinister celebrity during some of the most sanguinary periods of French history. This sombre prison abounds in recollections of those strifes and miseries by which royal epochs were too often characterised, and of that vengeance and blind fury which distinguished the Revolution. Every political movement, every religious passion, has contributed to the horrors which mark the annals of this institution.

The Conciergerie is an appendage to the Palais de Justice; and when this palace, which was originally a fortress, became the residence of the French kings, it served as prison. It would appear to have been built about the same time as the palace, though it has undergone sundry alterations and enlargements during successive ages.

Reconstructed by Saint Louis, the Conciergerie, as its name indicates, included the residence of the prison-governor. The “concierge” of the palace was no unimportant personage. He was in a certain way the governor of the royal mansion, and all royal prisoners were under his charge. He could administer petty justice in the palace and its surroundings, and he appointed a bailiff to carry out the law in his name. His privileges were extensive enough. It was he whom merchants had to pay for the right of exposing their wares for sale at the Palais Royal. In 1348 the concierge took the official title of bailiff. More than one person of high distinction has held this office: Philippe de Savoisi, friend of Charles VI., for instance, and Juvenal des Ursins, the historiographer of that monarch’s reign. Louis XI.’s famous physician, Jacques Coictier, was the first who united the functions of bailiff with those of concierge.

The concierge-bailiff of the Palais had on many points a discretionary power over the prisoners of the Conciergerie. He himself taxed the food he supplied to them, and fixed the rate of hire for the furniture they used; and more than one prisoner, released by order of justice, found himself retained at the Conciergerie until he could pay his bill for board and lodging. The post of concierge-bailiff lasted until the Revolution. The cases which came beneath the jurisdiction of this functionary were tried in a large hall of the palace. These were cases of misdoing which had occurred within the palace walls.

One of the most ghastly scenes ever enacted within the walls of the Conciergerie was that in which, during the quarrels between the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons, those ruffian supporters of the latter party, known as the “cabochiens,” invaded the gaol and killed the crowd of prisoners within it, irrespective of age or sex. The court of the palace was inundated with blood and strewn with corpses. The Count d’Armagnac, Constable of France, six bishops, and numerous members of the Paris Parliament expired under the blades of the assassins.

The dungeons of the Conciergerie, built at the level of the Seine, were dark and unhealthy: the light of day could never penetrate to them. During the Middle Ages several pestilences, caused by the filthy condition of the prisoners combined with insufficiency of food, broke out at the Conciergerie and awakened the attention of the authorities. On the 31st June, 1543, beds were for the first time placed in the apartment known as the infirmary; and it was about this period that the gaolers were instructed not to ill-treat the wretches beneath their charge. They were to treat them “gently and humanely, to provide them with water and straw, to procure them the services of priests, etc.” In spite of these reforms, the Conciergerie long remained the most unhealthy prison in Paris.

In 1776, during the fire at the Palais de Justice, a great part of the Conciergerie fell a prey to the flames; nor was the mischief repaired until some years afterwards. The fire had already reached one of the towers occupied by the prisoners, when the officials were for the first time warned of their danger by their cries for help.

During the revolutionary period the number of prisoners shut up in the Conciergerie sometimes rose to 1,200. At the time of the September massacre this prison was the scene of a horrible slaughter. According to documents of indisputable exactness, close on three hundred persons fell, at the Conciergerie, beneath the weapons of the agents of popular vengeance. The “Septembrisseurs,” however, spared all the women, with one exception. A poor wretch, known as the “pretty flower-girl” of the Palais Royal, had, in a moment of furious jealousy, mutilated a French guard, her lover; and she was now put to death with unheard-of cruelty. According to Pelletier’s account she was attached to a stake, naked, her feet nailed to the ground, her breasts were cut off with blows from a sabre, and various other atrocious tortures inflicted upon her before she expired.

Whilst the Revolutionary tribunal was accomplishing its bloody work, the Conciergerie served, so to say, as the antechamber to the scaffold. Most of the proscribed were shut up in this prison, whence they issued only to mount the fatal cart which was to convey them to their slaughter. At this period, the chambers being too small, prisoners were huddled together, to the number of fifty, in a space of twenty feet square, without distinction of social position, age, or sex. Big dogs, let loose at night in the courtyards, completed the system of surveillance; these were the most dreaded gaolers of all. At a time when famine threatened the capital, the prisoners’ rations were reduced. Soon a regulation was made that all meals should be taken in common, at a cost of two francs a head, and that the rich and aristocratic prisoners should pay for the rest. “Drolly enough,” says Mercier, “the estimation in which these gentlemen were held depended on the number of ragged wretches they fed, just as it formerly did in the world on the number of their horses, their mistresses, their dogs, and their lackeys.” Despite the horror of their situation, the prisoners of the Conciergerie preserved the frivolous and licentious habits of the epicurean society of the eighteenth century. They threw away the last hours of their lives on games of all kinds, or on amorous intrigues; they laughed at everything--even the guillotine. Royalists, aristocrats, and popular leaders were carried to the Conciergerie by the flux or reflux of the Revolution, and they lived together in a fatal state of indifference, disdaining to dispute their head with the executioner. Few took the trouble even to curse their judges; many died singing a song. It was in the midst of this general intrepidity that Beauharnais, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Queen Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, her sister, and a host of other less distinguished victims, passed from the Conciergerie to the scaffold. In this same prison, at a later date, Robespierre and his partisans awaited the hour of their execution. Under the Restoration the chamber in which Marie Antoinette was confined was turned into a chapel; the pavement alone remaining as it was in 1794. Since the Reign of Terror the Conciergerie has received many prisoners who have become historical, with Louvel among them, the assassin of the Duke of Berri.

The torture which many of the wretched prisoners underwent was inflicted for the most part in the famous Bombec Tower, beneath which existed what were called oubliettes, or dungeons in which prisoners were subjected to diabolical cruelty. These dungeons bristled everywhere with sharp sword-blades; they were inhabited by rats and loathsome reptiles; and the wretch who was thrown into them found, amidst other horrors, that the waters of the Seine crept in upon him as the tide rose. One of the cells of this tower, into which no light could penetrate, had been occupied by Ravaillac.

In modern times the Conciergerie has been rendered habitable. The dark and humid cells constructed at the foot of the towers have been either filled up or suppressed. Already some years ago it was boasted that, with one exception, the Conciergerie contained no dungeon into which the light of day could not steal.

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The Mazas prison, situated on the boulevard of the same name, dates from 1850. The official name is “The house of cellular arrest.” The administration abandoned in 1858 the original designation of Mazas prison, on the petition of the family of Colonel Mazas, who was killed at Austerlitz. But custom is more powerful than any administration; and to the public this gaol is to-day still known solely by the name of Mazas.

Its construction, commenced in 1845, was not terminated till five years later. The cost of so vast a prison was naturally enormous. It was intended in the first instance to replace the prison of La Force, then situated in the Rue Pavée-aux-Marais and the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The ground on which the first constructions were raised had previously been occupied by market-gardeners and by a mill, which was demolished. The works progressed rapidly under the direction of the architects, Gilbert and Lecointe. Interrupted by the Revolution of 1848, they were resumed shortly afterwards, and on the 19th of May, 1850, took place the inauguration--if this word can be employed in so sinister a sense--of the new prison; the installation, that is to say, of the prisoners. Less than twelve hours sufficed to transfer eight hundred and forty-one convicts in cellular vans, to establish them in their new abode, and inscribe their names, and other particulars concerning them, in the books of the gaol.

At this period the grave inconveniences which have by degrees asserted themselves in France as the result of the cellular system were not yet clearly recognised. Thus it was that the first poor wretches who, after their transfer from La Force, found themselves suddenly immured in the cells of Mazas, were seized with fits of fury and despair which soon took the proportions of a panic and a riot. The whole building resounded with incessant cries and shouts: the condemned, isolated from one another, and exasperated by their solitude, trying to converse by shouts with their old acquaintances lodged in distant cells. Some requested as a favour to be taken back to La Force. At length the administration felt it discreet to order an inquiry into the state of things, and the Academy of Medicine was consulted. M. de Pietra-Santa, an eminent member of that body, wrote, in a report which he laid before his colleagues: “The cellular system employed in prisons plays deadly havoc with the intellectual faculties. It develops scrofulous diseases, and urges its victims to suicide.” Statistics were quoted to show what a formidable proportion of cell-confined prisoners either took or attempted their own lives. In the end the Academy of Medicine denounced the prison-cell in uncompromised terms; and, in consequence, the system of isolation ceased at the Mazas prison to be rigorously enforced. As, however, the edifice had been constructed on a particular plan which did not permit of its conversion into an ordinary prison, its original purposes were modified by the confinement within its walls only of prisoners under short sentences. “In these circumstances,” says a contemporary French writer, “solitary confinement, far from being an inconvenience, presents in general the advantage of not mixing prisoners arrested from very diverse causes, and the moral character of whose offences widely differs. Moreover, the individual who may perhaps be acquitted to-morrow has not to endure a regrettable contact, which is often dangerous.”

The Mazas prison is surrounded by a girdle wall which conceals it from the public gaze; though the curious can easily defeat this difficulty by mounting the viaduct of the railway of Vincennes, which traverses the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. From this elevation a bird’s-eye glance of the whole of the buildings may be obtained.

The sanitation of this prison leaves little to be desired. The cells are spacious, wholesome, and well ventilated. Their furniture consists of a hammock suspended from cramp-irons; of a wooden stool, a water-can, and one or two other articles the reverse of luxurious. The ventilation is managed on scientific principles by means of orifices at different altitudes; and so effectual is it that in an experiment which was once made, with three men smoking tobacco in them incessantly for three hours, it was found that the fumes disappeared as fast as they were produced, and that the atmosphere never once lost its transparency. This circumstance is a great consolation for the Mazas prisoners, who can beguile the time with their pipes.

As to the interior régime of the prison, the spacious courts which separate each gallery of cells are divided into promenades, in which the prisoners are free to exercise themselves for at least one hour a day. A part of these promenades is provided with a shelter in view of wet weather. The prisoners take exercise by turns, and always alone, the warders being able from certain points of observation to follow their movements incessantly. An infirmary is attached to the prison, as well as bath rooms, which are no less commodious than cleanly. Each prisoner is known at Mazas by the number of his cell, inscribed on a plate hung above the door, and which is turned over to indicate that the prisoner is away from his cell taking exercise or receiving instruction. Among the special punishments inflicted on the more serious offenders are: exclusion from outdoor exercise, a diet of bread and water, a bare plank bed, and a dark cell.

The administrative and subordinate staff of the Mazas consists of a director, four registration clerks, a brigadier, four sub-brigadiers, sixty-four warders, a laundress, three chaplains, a doctor, a chemist, a female searcher, two barbers, and four commissioners, not to mention some three dozen prisoners employed as assistants.

What chiefly strikes a visitor to the place is the regular and geometrical plan on which the whole prison is constructed. The arrangements are of the most perfect description, though it was complained some years since that the method of arranging divine service--the door of each cell being kept ajar, so that the prisoner can see the altar and the officiating priest--provided to a large part of the prisoners little more than a curious spectacle.

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The prison of Sainte-Pélagie, founded in 1665, owes its name to a holy penitent of the fifth century, who was a famous actress at Antioch, when, after hearing a sermon from the bishop of Heliopolis, she became a convert to Christianity, received baptism, liberated her slaves, and made over her property to the bishop that it might be given to the poor. Then, clothing herself in a rough garment, she made her way secretly to Jerusalem, and there built herself a cell on the Mount of Olives, where she led the most austere life. In memory of Sainte Pélagie, Madame Beauharnais de Miramion, who, according to the memoirs of the eighteenth century, had for years led a life of pleasure, built an immense house of refuge for young girls. As the rule of life laid down by the pious founder (though she herself submitted to it) seemed too strict to the young women of the establishment, as well as to their families, they were one by one withdrawn, until at last the mistress of the house found herself alone. Then Madame de Miramion--determined that someone should do penance--addressed herself to women and girls of loose life, when those who were really tired of their wild existence, with others who had lost all personal charms, accepted the hospitality offered to them at Sainte-Pélagie. Gradually the number of repentant Magdalens--thanks not only to goodwill on their part but to the intervention of the police--became so great that many of them had to be moved to the convent of Les Filles de la Mère-Dieu.

When in 1789 the Revolution broke out, the gates of Sainte-Pélagie were thrown open like those of the convents; and the repentant girls, equally with the nuns, were at liberty to leave their cells. Two years later the Commune of Paris converted the building into a prison, where men and women were confined for all sorts of offences, political as well as criminal. From 1797 until 1834 Sainte-Pélagie was a debtors’ prison, and it was then changed into a house of correction for juvenile offenders, vagabonds below the age of sixteen, and children found hopeless by their parents.

Under the Second Empire, as for a time under the First and during a portion of the Restoration, Sainte-Pélagie was exclusively a state prison. Here it was that the first Napoleon--in the words of an anti-Bonapartist writer--“shut up those citizens who displeased him and failed to manifest for his policy all the enthusiasm he desired.” To this despot is due the introduction at Sainte-Pélagie of special registers, called “registers of persons brought beneath the notice of the administration”--in other words, beneath the notice of the police. The Restoration continued this work--the imprisonment, that is to say, of suspected persons--as practised alike under the Empire, the Republic, and the ancient Monarchy. At the beginning of Louis XVIII.’s reign no less than 135 persons were arrested by the king’s private police, simply as having served under Napoleon in the Imperial Guard.

In the courtyard of Sainte-Pélagie stands a chapel, built under the Restoration by the Duchess of Berri, which among other curiosities contains an altar-cloth worked by the Duchess de Praslin, whose tragic death at the hands of her husband has already been related, and a Via Dolorosa, painted by a prisoner who had been condemned for immoral pictures. All the Catholic prisoners, with the exception of those sentenced for political and press offences, are obliged to be present on Sundays and holidays at mass and at vespers. A platoon of infantry also assists at these ceremonies.

The prisoners are divided into three categories. The first includes those who are exempted from work without being obliged to pay for the privilege; these are the political offenders and persons who have contravened the laws relating to the press. The second comprises those who, for a payment averaging from six or seven francs a fortnight, purchase the right not to labour. To the third belong all the prisoners who are obliged to work in the shops directed by the speculator who farms the prison. These last receive but a third part of the wages paid by the speculator. Of the two other thirds, one goes to the administration, the other to the prisoner the day he is set at liberty. A prison-workman gains on the average two francs twenty-five centimes a month, of which he receives, as his own particular share, five centimes or one sou per day, which he is allowed to spend in the prison canteen.

In France, as in England, different views are entertained on the subject of prison-labour. The prisoners must work; and it is both wasteful and cruel to employ them without advantage to themselves or anyone else--as, for instance, in drawing water and then throwing it away. If, however, they are employed, like the occupants of Sainte-Pélagie and other French prisons, with useful work they are brought into competition with the honest workman outside. The political prisoners, and the prisoners who are allowed to liberate themselves from work by small payments, are permitted to order from the outside, by the intermediary of commissionaires attached to the prison for that purpose, whatever food and drink they may require. “Luxuries,” it is true, are not permitted by the prison regulations, but it rests with the officials to determine what a “luxury” really means.

Prisoners at this, as at some of the other Paris prisons, are allowed to send out letters, but copies of them are made and kept in the governor’s office. By this system not only the prisoner but France and the whole world has, in some cases, profited. It was through copies being made of the eloquent and passionate, if not too edifying, epistles addressed by Mirabeau, during his confinement in the Bastille, to the young woman he was so desperately in love with that the now famous “Lettres à Sophie” were preserved.

The ordinary inhabitants of Sainte-Pélagie are, in addition to the political and newspaper offenders, juvenile thieves, tradesmen whose scales have not been found sufficiently impartial, with fraudulent bankrupts and debtors to the state--the only ones who, since the abolition of imprisonment for debt in civil and commercial matters, are still liable to confinement.

The official staff of Sainte-Pélagie consists of a governor, a physician in chief with two assistants, a dispenser, a Roman Catholic priest, a registrar, a clerk, a brigadier, twelve warders, three commissionaires, a female searcher, a barber (who recruits his auxiliaries from among the prisoners), a sutler, and a sempstress. The prison is guarded by a company of infantry stationed at different posts.

A list of the celebrated prisoners who have been confined at Sainte-Pélagie would be a formidable one. Sainte-Pélagie ceased to be a convent in 1790, and was transformed to a prison by order of the Convention. During this period many persons suspected of political intrigue were lodged in this prison previously to appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Some distinguished offenders quitted Sainte-Pélagie for the scaffold: Madame Roland, for instance, the Comte de Laval Montmorency, and the Marquis de Pons. On the 3rd of August, 1793, in virtue of an edict for the arrest of the actors of the Théâtre de la Nation (afterwards Théâtre Français), Fleury, Lange, Petit, Suin, Joly, Devienne, Lachassaigne, Rancourt, and Mézerai were all incarcerated at Sainte-Pélagie. After the 9th Thermidor it received the victims of the counter-revolution, but ere long the prison was quite empty, and no further political prisoners found their way into it until the Empire, when, although they were by no means few, their numbers cannot be certainly ascertained, as the prison books were not faithfully kept. In 1811, at a time when the Emperor of Russia was in Paris, sixty-eight prisoners were liberated at his request. The Restoration, from the 15th of April, 1814, to the 29th of January, 1815, incarcerated 135 prisoners, nearly all of them old officers of the Imperial Guard. When the allies entered Paris for the second time the Russian Emperor, who the year before had procured the liberation of political prisoners detained by Bonaparte, made use of Sainte-Pélagie for the imprisonment of Russian deserters to the number of 192. Among the latter were several Poles guilty of having fought for their country in the French armies. These so-called deserters found themselves in the same gaol with the victims of the royalist reaction. Under Charles X. Sainte-Pélagie continued to be a state prison, and began to afford accommodation to journalists or authors who had been indiscreet with their pen. Between 1820 and 1830 many a celebrity lodged there, such as Béranger, Paul Louis Courier, Eugène de Pradel, Dubois and Barthélemy--to name no others.

From 1830 to 1838 the constitutional monarchy made a sufficiently free use of Sainte-Pélagie. Then the Republic came and set the prisoners loose; though the insurrection of June repeopled Sainte-Pélagie, into which no less than a hundred offenders were summarily thrown.

On the 17th of December, 1851, the man who nineteen years afterwards was to finish his career at Sedan imprisoned thirty-four representatives of the people at Sainte-Pélagie. Nor did Napoleon III. stop here. In the space of a few days he lodged within the gaol some five hundred citizens whom he considered dangerous and capable of interfering with his projects.

It would be impossible within a limited space to adequately trace the subsequent history of Sainte-Pélagie. Before quitting this gaol, however, mention may be made of one or two of the most famous escapes which have been effected from it.

In July, 1835, a certain number of notorious prisoners conspired to dig, at the north-east angle of the building, a subterranean passage, which was at length carried into the garden of a house in the Rue Coupeau. This passage was eighteen metres long. Twenty-eight men thereby regained their liberty, this being the most daring escape which was ever planned and executed at Sainte-Pélagie. Two months afterwards the Comte de Richmond, calling himself the son of Louis XVI., contrived to get away with two of his fellow-prisoners, Duclerc and Rossignol. The count had somehow procured the key of the gridiron gate separating the ground floor of the east pavilion from a courtyard. Then with his hat on, with papers under his arm, and followed by his two companions, he was proceeding to one of the principal exits when a sentinel challenged him. Richmond declared himself the governor, and presented his two friends, one as the registrar, the other as his architect. The sentinel let them pass, and the three prisoners quietly proceeded on their way, ultimately escaping by a final gate, the key of which was in the count’s possession.

Of yet another ingenious escape an Englishman named Thomas Jackson, under a sentence of five years, was the hero. He hoisted himself up from the central pavilion by a false window and, by means of a cord provided with a stout hook at the end, gained the roofs, along which he stole to the exterior wall, where, still with the aid of his rope, he managed to let himself down to the ground uninjured and without exciting suspicion, favoured, as he had been, by a dark night and a deluge of rain.

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Saint-Lazare, a house of detention and correction for women, is situated in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Before arriving at its ultimate destination, this prison had to pass through sundry historical phases, some of them sufficiently curious. It was at first, as its name indicates, a leper hospital; and already at the beginning of the twelfth century it existed on the road from Paris to Saint-Denis, built, as it had been, upon the ruins of an old basilica dedicated to Saint-Lawrence. Louis le Gros established for its benefit the fair of Saint-Ladre, which was held annually in front of the hospital and lasted eight days. This fair was, under Philip Augustus, replaced by the fair of Saint-Lawrence.

Like most lazarettos, the hospital of Saint-Lazare was composed of an assemblage of little compartments, in which each leper lived isolated. It is recorded by a monk of Saint-Denis, Odéon de Deuil by name, that in 1147 Louis VII., carrying the royal standard to Saint-Denis previously to his departure for the Crusades, visited the lepers in their cells. The bakers of France, who, it appears, were more exposed to leprosy than any other body of men, owing to the action of the fire upon their skin, made it their particular concern to contribute towards the maintenance of Saint-Lazare, and sent large gifts of bread to it. In return, its doors were always open to any baker attacked with the malady.

From 1515 until the seventeenth century Saint-Lazare was managed, or mismanaged, by the canons of Saint-Victor, who established themselves there as in a great abbey, and consumed the rich revenues of the institution. The leprosy was turned out of doors, or at least the canons would only receive certain ecclesiastics afflicted with leprosy. In 1630 the reform of this degenerate establishment was confided to Saint-Vincent de Paul, who installed there, under the name of “congregation of Saint-Lazare,” a regular staff of priests to tend the sick. It was in the convent of Saint-Lazare that Vincent de Paul died. He was interred in the choir at the foot of the high altar. His tomb, bearing a commemorative inscription, was still visible in 1789.

Ten years after the Revolution a portion of Saint-Lazare was employed as a house of correction for men, as well as a depository for persons suddenly and arbitrarily arrested. It was there that, shortly after the famous first representation of the Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais was shut up, after having been brutally dragged from his home. This iniquitous arrest, which nothing could excuse or extenuate, caused such a stir in Paris that the brilliant dramatist was set free within three days.

On the 13th of July, 1789, the eve of the taking of the Bastille, the convent of Saint-Lazare was pillaged. Paris was suffering from famine, and the report got abroad that in the immense buildings of the cloister large quantities of wheat and flour were concealed. The popular suspicions proved to be well founded. Enormous supplies of cereals, wines, and victuals of every description were discovered, and the inmates, who had represented themselves as entirely destitute, were ignominiously chased out of doors. Unhappily the famished invaders, once in possession of the booty, abandoned themselves to all kinds of excesses. The barns were set on fire, and the flames for some time threatened the whole quarter with destruction.

Converted into a prison, Saint-Lazare received a great number of suspects. Some of its guests were now sufficiently illustrious: the great poet, André Chenier, for instance. Within its walls Chenier wrote, for a female prisoner, one of his most beautiful elegies, as well as some of his famous iambics. After, the Consulate Saint-Lazare became at once a civil prison, an administrative prison, and a house of correction. Amongst other classes of offenders detained there were women sentenced to less than a year’s imprisonment, or in debt to the State, or convicted of adultery, as well as girls under age whose parents had shut them up for correction.

This vast and sombre prison, with its decrepit walls and its sinister aspect, consists of five great blocks of buildings surrounding three courtyards planted with trees. A road encircles and isolates the whole. The buildings are four-storeyed, sufficiently well ventilated, and capable of accommodating twelve hundred offenders. The women immured at Saint-Lazare are divided into three categories. The first consists of women convicted of crimes or misdemeanours; the second of girls under age condemned for indiscreet conduct to remain till their majority in a house of correction, as also of girls whose parents have incarcerated them on a judge’s order, and girls below sixteen, detained for vagabondage or prostitution. The third category is composed of abandoned women administratively detained.

This last category, entirely isolated from the two others, is itself divided into three classes: the old, the mutinous, and the young. The old culprits are naturally the most resigned to their fate; some even prefer it to liberty. In 1830 a great many of them, forcibly ejected into a state of freedom, returned the same evening to Saint-Lazare. The mutinous ward is occupied by loose women who are refractory to all discipline. It is here that conspiracies are hatched against the prison regulations, and that language is used which no slang dictionary would dare to reproduce. The ward of the young contains those fallen women who are not yet hardened by a long course of vice. It is towards these that moralising influences are chiefly directed; though the attempts to reform them have not, on the whole, been highly successful. Against women of recognised immorality the state laws are notoriously severe. Slighter offences, such as appearing in the street at prohibited hours, venturing out of doors bareheaded, or with an air of solicitation, and drinking to excess, are punished with fifteen days’ to three months’ imprisonment. For graver offences, such as insulting the doctors attached to the administration, or making determined overtures to pedestrians, the minimum term of imprisonment is three months, the maximum close upon a year.

The female warders of the different sections are sisters of the order of Saint-Joseph. All the prisoners are employed at needlework, and receive weekly a slender remuneration for so much as they have done. They labour together in vast workshops. The women under correction sleep isolated, in cells; the others sleep, four by four, in rooms or in large dormitories, where, a few years since, it was complained that they were strewn about pell-mell, and so crowded together that their beds frequently touched.

A very able writer, who has made a special study of the régime of different prisons, M. Maxime Ducamp, furnishes statistics showing that in one average year Saint-Lazare gave accommodation to 2,859 ordinary criminals; 232 young girls, of less than sixteen, under correction; and 4,831 unfortunates “administratively” detained, not to mention some 200 women who were infirm.

It is complained that notwithstanding all the divisions and subdivisions which have been made to prevent communication between the different sections of prisoners, the greatest promiscuity reigns at Saint-Lazare. Philanthropists and journalists have constantly raised their voice in the matter, and demanded that a special house should be instituted for young girls in which they would not get corrupted. “Every young girl who enters under correction at Saint-Lazare,” says M. Maxime Ducamp, “issues thence vicious and polluted to the depths of her heart. I have been turning over the leaves of two prayer-books found on a child of hardly sixteen, detained for three months, on the application of her father, in this accursed house, where the walls reek with vice. On the margins the little prisoner has written her thoughts; frequently the dates are indicated, and one can thus follow the progress of her ideas. The study is appalling.” The moral atmosphere of the place, that is to say, was one which the girl could scarcely breathe; though by degrees she became acclimatised, until her last reflections were an outrage against not only virtue, but nature itself.

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We will conclude this chapter on the prisons of Paris with a few general observations.

On the question of hygiene most of the governors of Paris prisons state, in their reports, that little on this head remains to be desired. Certain exceptions, however, must be made, as in the case of ancient convents whose age renders a perfect adaptation impossible. Now it is the dormitories which are defective, because the cubic quantity of air required by the regulations cannot be obtained; now it is the courts, which, as the sun can never penetrate to them, become damp and unwholesome; now it is the workshops, which are ill-suited to the industries exercised within them. On the whole, however, the central prisons are healthy enough.

On the subject of food--one of the most important of hygienic considerations--the authorities have had this problem to solve: to avoid imposing such rigorous deprivations as would border upon inhumanity, whilst equally avoiding such a dietary system as would lend an attraction to the prisons, and cause destitute wretches to prefer confinement to their ordinary life of liberty. The regulation diet is at present as follows:--a daily ration of bread weighing 750 grammes for men and 650 for women; in the morning, on ordinary days, a bowl of vegetable soup with bread in it, and on Sundays, Thursdays, and fête days, a bowl of meat soup; in the evening similar soup, accompanied, on ordinary days, by a small quantity of dry vegetables, such as potatoes, peas, and lentils, and on Sundays and fête days by a portion of meat, without bone, weighing at least 75 grammes, as well as at least 3 decilitres of potatoes.

The ordinary beverage is pure water. During the months of June, July, and August, however, the administration requires that a refreshing drink be supplied to the prisoners. This is made from gentian, hops, leaves of the walnut-tree, molasses, and lemon.

The régime of prisoners in the infirmaries is chiefly determined by the medical officers, though there are state regulations even on this subject. The régime of the infirmary is very indulgent, and invalids confined there are practically, for the time being, not treated as prisoners at all.

As to the sleeping arrangements, the bedstead now generally employed is of iron, with a base of trellis work or wire gauze. It is furnished with a mattress, a pair of sheets, one blanket in summer and two in winter.

Of cleanliness a great point, of course, is made. The prisoner, on his first introduction into prison, is stripped and bathed, and has his hair and beard cut off. The tresses of the women, however, remain unshorn; though formerly female prisoners, to their own furious indignation, were deprived of this their chief adornment. According to one article of the prison regulations, a footbath must be furnished to each prisoner at least once in two months, and a large bath at least twice a year. It is to be hoped that the officials of the different prisons do not really limit those under their charge to such an atrociously infrequent application of necessary water.

The infirmaries are very competently organised. To each metropolitan prison at least one doctor is attached. The prisoners may have a medical consultation whenever they apply for it; though they are not admitted to the infirmary without a doctor’s certificate, except in urgent cases. The temperature of the infirmary is regulated according to the season or, more precisely, the weather. The rest of the prison is only heated when the weather is very rigorous. The total number of patients admitted to the infirmary in 1869 was 12,982 men and 2,489 women. These figures may at first appear somewhat formidable; but two facts must be borne in mind: first, that a stay in the infirmary is much coveted by prisoners, who get themselves entered on the sick list under the slightest pretext; secondly, that the population of the Paris prisons is generally an unhealthy one, already degenerated through excesses or anterior maladies. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that long isolation, insufficient exercise, and perhaps also inadequate food, produce a grievous effect on the health of the inmates. It is found, indeed, that prisoners who have been long confined are peculiarly liable to become invalided; and this is in particular the case with women. In 1869, out of a given number of convicts, nearly three times as many were in the infirmary during the fourth year of confinement as during the first. That most patients, however, enter the infirmary in consequence of anterior conditions, is shown by the statistics for 1869, considerably more than half having been afflicted with previous maladies or bad constitutions.

The hours of compulsory prison labour are regulated by the State. The organisation of the labour system leaves, on one point at least, something to be desired. A double object ought to be held in view by the authorities, namely, to ensure for the prisoner sufficient resources to exempt him, on his liberation, from temptation to mendicancy or theft, and to develop in him such habits of industry as will procure him an honest livelihood out in the world. The institution of the “peculium,” or private fund, is of the first necessity for this purpose. At present each prisoner has a peculium, or at all events it is within his power to create one. The slender proceeds of his labour form an accumulation for this fund. The longer his imprisonment and the greater the difficulty experienced in obtaining work on his discharge, the larger should be the stock of money intended to keep his hands out of other people’s pockets. As a matter of fact, however, in the case of ill-regulated prisoners, nine-tenths of the fund is sometimes deducted before they are liberated. Involuntary thieves are thus let loose upon society.

The central prisons of Paris inspire the criminal classes with a wholesome dread, due, in a very large measure, to the exasperating monotony of the life led within their walls. Many medical authorities hold that more diversion and variety should be afforded. Continued year after year upon long-sentence prisoners, the monotony is sure to prey, more or less, upon the mind; and the cases of atony and other mental diseases attributable to this cause are unfortunately by no means few.

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XXI. THE PARIS ZOO

The Jardin des Plantes--Its Origin and History--Under Buffon--The Museum of Natural History--The Tobacco Factory.

From caged men to caged beasts the transition is easy and natural. The Jardin des Plantes is probably the most popular institution in Paris, and, according to certain French writers whose eye by no means diminishes the magnitude of native objects, the most popular in the world. At all events, the names associated with this Parisian equivalent of our Zoological Gardens are glorious enough, including as they do those of Buffon, Cuvier, and other writers whose lustre is dimmed only by juxtaposition with those of the two greatest naturalists who ever lived. It is more to the names in question, whose reputation cannot decline, than to the collections which the establishment contains, that the Jardin des Plantes owes its fame.

The creation of this garden dates back to Louis XIII. It was two of this monarch’s physicians, Hérouard and Guy de la Brosse, who conceived the first idea of it. Having submitted their plans to the king, the two naturalists soon obtained letters patent for the acquisition, in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, of a suitable piece of ground. At its origin, however, the institution which was one day to earn a European fame was of very limited extent, and its collections were entirely botanical. Royal Garden of Medicinal Herbs it was called; and the first design of its founders had in fact been nothing more than the cultivation of plants possessing curative properties. In this character the garden was a mere supplement to the Faculty of Medicine. It served as a theatre of study for students in pharmacy; and the royal letters patent, signed “Louis,” provided that “no instruction in pharmacy shall be given at the School of Medicine.” “In the said garden,” runs another clause, “a specimen shall be preserved of every drug, whether simple or compound.”

Of the two founders of the Jardin des Plantes, one can only be said to have taken part in the work; for Hérouard died prematurely. It was Guy de la Brosse who did the planning and the classifying; and to him the credit of establishing the garden almost exclusively belongs.

One of the first botanists of his time, Guy de la Brosse himself furnished the garden with nearly every species of plant which was to be cultivated there. At the same time it must be owned that Louis XIII. showed himself, for the period, very munificent towards de la Brosse, who received an annual allowance of 6,000 francs for his professional services in connection with the institution.

During the first years of its existence the garden met with much opposition, and sometimes fell into a state of neglect. The Faculty of Medicine was jealous of this rival, and rebelled against the royal edict because de la Brosse did not seek to enlist the sympathies of its professors. For this exhibition of disrespect the Faculty suffered no punishment but that of having its remonstrances quite ignored; and Guy de la Brosse devoted all his energies to the enrichment of the botanical collection. His death, however, occurred three years after the inauguration, and his successors, as indolent as he had been indefatigable, let the garden run almost to weed. At length one of the professors of the Faculty imparted to it a new life. This was Fagon, one of Louis XIV.’s physicians, who seemed fitted for the task no less by his birth than by his studies; for he was a grandnephew of Guy de la Brosse, and had first seen the light within the precincts of the Jardin des Plantes.

Devoted to study, which he preferred to the distractions of a court where he was nevertheless an oracle, Fagon, already celebrated by the ability with which he had supported the theory of the circulation of the blood--at that time rejected by the Faculty--proved himself, with his natural passion for botany, an admirable director for the Jardin. In 1693 Louis XIV. conferred upon him the title of Superintendent.

Fagon’s period of service was indeed a prosperous one for the royal garden. With a generous nature, and gifted with that savoir-faire which is only acquired by contact with men, he was happy in the choice of his professors, and contrived, by his influence and liberality, to give a great impulse to the whole establishment. Besides grouping around him an illustrious body of specialists, he despatched agents to various foreign countries to discover specimens for his collection.

After the reign of Louis XIII. the superintendence of the Jardin des Plantes had been considered as essentially the business of one or other of the royal physicians. In consequence a succession of men filled the post who were total strangers to natural science, and quite unfitted to manage such an institution. Afterwards, incompetent directors removed from the staff of specialists all those who were worth retaining, and showed so little respect for the purposes of the garden that they cultivated part of it as a vineyard for their own private use. Colbert, when he visited the garden, was so indignant at this outrageous abuse, that he called for a pickaxe and himself commenced a work of destruction which he took care to have carried out forthwith.

Successive failures at length proved to the authorities that the superintendence of the Jardin was no suitable perquisite for a royal physician; and it was now that the illustrious Buffon was appointed “intendant.” From this moment the aspect of everything changed; and the institution rapidly earned a world-wide renown. Under Buffon it was completely transformed. From a simple apothecary’s plantation it became a depôt for all the riches of creation. He erased the inscription, “Jardin royal des herbes médicinales,” from over the door of entrance, and substituted for it the plain title of “Jardin du Roi.” Endowed with immense energy, the great naturalist employed all his influence towards enriching the establishment over which he reigned with the superiority of genius. When he first set foot in it the chief treasures of the museum were displayed in two little rooms of the edifice erected on the grounds, whilst in a third room, carefully removed from the gaze of the curious, were collected a number of inferior skeletons of men and animals. It was during Buffon’s administration that the great amphitheatre was constructed, which remains one of the most admired in Paris, as well as the chemical laboratories which surround it. The natural history galleries were, as might have been expected, by no means overlooked. He even extended them at the expense of his own allowance for lodging, which he reduced time after time, and ended by abandoning altogether. Although his main passion was for animals, Buffon gave earnest attention to the cultivation of plants. It was he who traced the plan of the garden very nearly as it exists in the present day.

The intendant of the Jardin des Plantes, who rendered such incalculable services to natural science, has been reproached with having written his immortal pages in foppish attire, with a sword at his side and his hand adorned with ruffles. This reproach, which has been so widely reiterated, deserves refutation. When Comte de Buffon appeared in society it was with the exterior of a gay cavalier; but in his study, when he was at work, his costume was so plain that it shocked a Franciscan friar of his acquaintance who saw a great deal of him at his château. If he was extravagant at all, it was in the exercise of his natural benevolence, which assumed quite a princely character.

The name of Buffon attracted from all parts magnificent presents to the museum. The King of Poland sent him a splendid collection of minerals, and the Empress of Russia, who had failed to entice him to her court, nevertheless presented him with some of the richest products of her country. Nor was this all. Pirates, who seized every cargo which came within their reach, are said to have spared the cases which they found addressed to so great a naturalist.

More fortunate than the human beings outside, the animals in the royal garden were in no way affected by the Revolution. The hateful title of their abode, however, was naturally changed; and the former Garden of the King became the Museum of Natural History. In 1792 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the author of Paul and Virginia, was made director of the establishment; and the Convention, which with all its destructiveness showed constructive tendencies in regard to all matters of science, literature, and art, founded at the museum twelve chairs, which were filled by professors of human anatomy, zoology, animal anatomy, botany, mineralogy, geology, general chemistry, chemistry in its application to the arts, agriculture, and iconography.

The number of some of the chairs has since been increased, and a few new ones have been established; but, fundamentally, the organisation of the establishment remains what it was at the time of the radical transformation under the Convention. The professors appointed by the Convention went to work with the greatest enthusiasm, and all the invaders and explorers of the time were begged to supply the museum with whatever specimens of natural history they could offer. The collection, moreover, was increased by the activity and success of the French troops, with a view to the greater glory of France, and especially of Paris. The commanders of the French armies brought back with them, in the form of booty, the most interesting objects from the museums of the conquered cities. Holland having been overrun in 1798, a number of the curiosities belonging to the Stadtholder’s Museum were forwarded to Paris; and the celebrated naturalist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, was sent to Lisbon, occupied at the time by a French army, to choose from the local collections whatever he might find suitable for the natural history museum at Paris. After a time the collection became too rich for the professors and officials who had to arrange it. Money and space were alike wanting; and at last the established authorities formally complained that the treasures forwarded to them by the victorious troops were too abundant.

Among the most celebrated professors attached to the museum of natural history may be mentioned Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, already named, Lamarck, Lacépède, and Cuvier.

The garden of the museum forms a spacious quadrilateral, bounded on the east by the Quai Saint-Bernard, on the north by the Rue Cuvier, on the south by the Rue Buffon, and on the west by the Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Entering by the principal gate, the visitor finds himself opposite an immense flower-bed enclosed between two long avenues which were planted by Buffon himself. The avenue on the left leads to the school of stone-fruit trees, the collections of botany, mineralogy, and geology, the library, and the house inhabited by Buffon when he was superintendent of the place. The avenue on the right is bounded by the school of botany and the hothouses. Behind the botanical school a long avenue of chestnut trees leads by the side of the bears’ den from the hothouses to the quay. Between this avenue and the Rue Cuvier are the menagerie, the school of fruit trees, the galleries of anatomy and anthropology, the amphitheatre, the Administration, and, at the top of the garden, behind the hothouses, the labyrinth and the Belvedere. A number of exotic trees have been planted and cultivated in the Jardin des Plantes, thence to be transplanted and naturalised in France. One of the popular celebrities of the garden is the Cedar of Lebanon, which Bernard de Jussieu was bringing from the East with other specimens, when, made prisoner by the English, he was deprived of the whole of his collection, with the exception only of the young cedar tree, which he had sworn at all hazards to preserve. Keeping it in a hat, planted in suitable mould, he succeeded, after many vicissitudes, in bringing it to the haven where it has since so wonderfully thrived. The tree, cultivated with only too much care, wears an aspect which is not precisely that of its natural freedom, but which is not wanting in grandeur. “The old Titan,” writes a French naturalist, “several times decapitated by our icy climate, spreads more and more every year.”

Higher up, in an almost forgotten corner, in the midst of foliage, stands a column supported by a pedestal of minerals. This simple monument is in memory of a simple man. Beneath it rests the body of Daubenton, the friend and collaborator of Buffon, the “learned shepherd” to whom France owes its fine breeds of merino sheep, and the author of the new plan of organisation adopted by the Convention in 1793. Narrow, winding paths, overshadowed by yew trees, lead to the Belvedere, constructed during the reign of Louis XV. The bronze cupola of doubtful style, surmounted by a celestial globe, with a sundial and a motto, tells plainly the period to which this fantastic conceit belongs. The motto, however, is ingenious and charming: “Horas non numero nisi serenas”; in English, “I note only the hours of sunshine.” Buffon had here placed an apparatus which has disappeared. At twelve o’clock exactly the lens of the dial burned a thread, causing a ball of metal to fall with a sonorous clang.

Arrived at this point the visitor sees the garden stretching out at his feet. It is in the spring that the full beauty of flower and foliage reveals itself. On Sundays and fête days, when the weather is fine, the garden teems with people. Masses of promenaders come to find, beneath the shade of the avenues, verdure and fresh air; for not only is the Jardin des Plantes a great scientific school, it is the joy and the life of a populous quarter of the metropolis. It affords repose to fatigued workmen, the families of local residences resort to it, and generations of lighthearted children grow up in the midst of its charms.

Descending the labyrinth, behind the hot-houses, the visitor finds in front of him the door of the orangery, and to the left the entrance to the grand amphitheatre, where so many illustrious voices have instructed the world. Then, following the avenue which passes before the amphitheatre, he descends the length of the Rue Cuvier, and making on this side the tour of the menagerie, an enormous grampus, together with its skeleton, comes into view, guarding the entrance to the galleries of anatomy and anthropology. Farther on is the reptile menagerie, as well as a school of fruit trees, which French writers on the subject characteristically declare to be “without a rival in the world.”

At the angle formed by the Rue Cuvier and the quay, and following the latter, one comes to the aquarium of fresh-water plants. Willows hang their branches over the water, full of plants and sleepy fishes. All is shade, freshness, and tranquillity in this nook, which is the most picturesque and charming in the whole garden.

We have now returned to the principal entrance, facing the bridge of Austerlitz. In the immense flower-beds which ascend to the galleries, what chiefly strikes the eye is a square devoted to the cultivation of gaily ornamental flowers, where they seem to have more than their accustomed splendour. This particular effect is produced simply by means of skilful arrangement, based on those laws relating to the simultaneous contrast of colours which it was reserved for M. Chevreuil to discover. Each flower owes more to its neighbour than to itself. Isolated, it would lose that brilliant beauty which is lent to it by a clever juxtaposition.

Close at hand, in the great avenue to the left, is a modest café. The tables are ranged around the peeled trunk of an old tree, the first acacia planted in France, some hundred years ago, by Vespasian Robin, after whom it is named--even as a certain beetle was named after another famous naturalist, on whom his admirers thought thus to confer the highest conceivable degree of honour. A little farther on, in front of the building containing the collections of geology, stand other venerable trees. Finally one reaches, at the top of the garden and opposite the entrance in the Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a large square house built as the residence of Buffon, who, lodged at first in the buildings of the galleries, had given up his apartments to the growing collections. The name of Intendancy is still borne by this edifice. It was here that Buffon died.

Along the street which bears his name the garden is to-day still enclosed by the spiked iron railings which he himself caused to be erected. They protected the garden on the side of the country; but the country since then has retreated far away.

To come, however, to the menagerie, a noisy concert of parrots and cockatoos forms a prelude to the show, as one advances from the side of the amphitheatre. The birds of prey are enclosed in large cages with iron bars. The monkeys have a “palace,” where they disport themselves in the sunshine, to the great delight of sight-seeing crowds. The Rotunda is devoted to animals from hot latitudes--the elephant, for instance; the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus. A striking peculiarity of the female hippopotamus in the Jardin des Plantes is that she has given birth several times to a tough-skinned baby, and always or nearly always killed it immediately with her terrible teeth.

The carnivorous animals are confined in a series of dens. The bear is the most beloved of all these formidable creatures. His pit is resorted to by masses of people who regard him quite as an old acquaintance, and call him by the name of one of his celebrated ancestors--“Martin.”

The reptile menagerie is contained in a low chamber, damp and narrow, where these cold, creeping animals pass their lives in comparative darkness. What to many forms the most curious spectacle in this menagerie is the remains of a strange repast in which, some years ago, one of the pythons indulged. This enterprising creature one fine night swallowed the blanket which had been placed over him to keep him warm; his digestion was excellent, but was not equal to blankets, and after a fortnight’s indisposition he threw it up in the condition in which it is now preserved.

In the long building which runs parallel to the Rue Cuvier are the galleries of anatomy and of anthropology. They occupy two large rooms on the ground floor, and the whole of the first storey round the courtyard, known as the Courtyard of the Whale. In its centre is a fine skeleton of an ordinary whale, and in one of the corners the skeleton of a spermaceti whale--in French “cachalot,” which, according to a fantastic etymologist, is derived from “cache à l’eau,” the animal being accustomed when threatened with attack to hide in the water.

The first room in the gallery of anatomy is filled with skeletons of the largest sea-animals. The adjoining room contains human skeletons, among which will be remarked that of Soliman-el-Halir, the assassin of General Kleber, put to death with frightful torture by the avenging French, who barbarously adopted the mode of punishment of the barbarous country they had invaded. Strange that the French, nearly a century after this offence against humanity, should still preserve a monument to revive its memory. To notice but one point, the finger-bones of the right hand are wanting. The hand was burnt off before the final punishment was applied--that of impalement, which the assassin endured for six hours without uttering a groan.

A narrow staircase leads to the first floor, in which the ante-chamber is full of animals’ heads. In the second room we are in the midst of monsters, most of which formed subjects of study to the two Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires, intent on finding immutable laws where science had previously seen nothing but the sport and caprices of chance. “Ritta Christina Parodi” was the name given to two heads on a single body born at Sassari in Sardinia, March 12, 1827. The two heads lived about eight months, one of them dying on the 20th of November, the other shortly afterwards, but not until there had been time to make, in regard to this strange being, some curious observations. Further on may be seen Philomèle and Hélène, two bodies on one pair of legs. They also lived. Finally, in the same order, are Olympe and Thérèse, joined together by the top of the head.

In the third room are the great anthropomorphous or man-shaped apes, arranged in an attitude not natural to them, since in nature they walk on hands and feet, but which brings out more vividly their resemblance to humanity. The broken teeth, the fractured limbs of these rangers of the forests--orang-outangs, chimpanzees, and gorillas--are evidence of their fights, their struggles, their adventurous life. The orang-outang is a war trophy. It belonged formerly to the collection of the Stadtholder of Holland, whence it was sent to Paris by the victorious French army, without being claimed and sent back by the allies in 1815, as undoubtedly would have been its fate had its history and its actual position been known.

In the waxwork collection (eighth room) many of the anatomical reproductions come from the château of the Duke of Orleans--known during the Revolution as Philippe Égalité--at Chantilly. Others, executed with rare perfection, are from Florence, always celebrated for this kind of work. At the entrance to the ninth room are two figures, considered marvels of ingenuity and of science in the last century, but now looked upon as, for purposes of study, next to useless: an “arterial” man and a “venous” man. Very curious, too, are the children’s heads, in which skilful injections, even into the most delicate veins, have given to the complexion the appearance of life. They have been furnished, according to the taste of the period, with enamel eyes, and to render them presentable to the public, each little head is enveloped in a lace cap. In the eleventh room will be found the collection of Dr. Gall, including the very heads on whose developments he formed his theory of localised faculties and cerebral bumps. It may here be observed that the followers of Gall have rendered his system questionable by giving to it in detail a value which he attached to it only in a general way. The collection contains, moreover, the bust of Dr. Gall himself, a cast of his head taken after death, and his very cranium, on which may be sought the special bump of phrenologism. Here, too, may be seen the masks of Voltaire, Casimir Périer, François Arago, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. This last was taken by the sculptor Houdon, at Les Charmettes, July 4, 1778--the day after Rousseau’s death. A bust of Cuvier is to be seen on the ground floor, to which a staircase leads directly from the Gall collection. It is the work of David d’Angers, and stands in front of five skeletons of elephants, which seem to form for the great comparative anatomist a guard of honour.

In the anthropological gallery, on the first floor, the visitor finds himself on entering in front of a pleasing collection of human heads, all severed during lifetime from the bodies to which they belonged: those of Arabs and Kabyles, decapitated by the yataghan, and dried beneath the African sun. This at least marks a progress since the days when native malefactors were burnt and impaled. “Their narrow puckered lips,” says a French writer, “exhibit their white teeth in a grin which has been left significantly by a violent death.” Near these heads are the skulls of the ancestors of the modern French, the Franks and the Gauls, from whose tombs they have been taken. In this room is to be seen a curious and picturesque ethnographical collection: a number of Russian dolls, attired in the European, Asiatic, and American costumes of the various nationalities included in the vast empire of the Tsar. In the eighth room the ancient Peruvian mummies are well worth a glance. So, too, are the strange little human heads prepared by this now extinct race. From the head that was to be preserved the bones were first removed. Then the skin was dried, which in contracting kept its original shape. This, however much diminished, was still preserved. The head, indeed, may have shrunk to the size of one’s fist: the proportions are still the same, except that the hair is, by comparison, denser and in a greater mass. In the next room is a cast of a once well-known Hottentot woman who died in Paris, where she went under the name of the “Hottentot Venus.”

On the first floor to the left are two large rooms full of reptiles and fish. In these historic rooms Louis XV. placed the fine statue of Buffon which is still there, and beneath which may be read the famous inscription, which time has not falsified: “Majestati naturæ par ingenium.” The majesty of Buffon’s genius shows itself, it has been said, in his very style: an idea which may have been suggested by his famous saying: “Le style est l’homme même”--and not “Le style c’est l’homme,” as the phrase is generally quoted. All that Buffon meant, and all that Buffon said, was that a writer’s facts, and even his arguments and thoughts, are or may be made common property, whereas his manner of expressing himself is exclusively his own. The idea that an author’s personality necessarily reveals itself in his writings is contrary to experience, few authors, indeed, exhibiting the same character on paper as in ordinary life.

To return for one moment to the garden, and to those exotics which are cultivated with so much success in the Parisian climate. The most important of these--at least, in a commercial sense--is the tobacco-plant, now naturalised over nearly the whole of France.

The tobacco-factory of Paris, where so much of the native as well as foreign tobacco-leaf is prepared, consists of large buildings, five storeys high, situated between the Quai d’Orsay, the Rue de l’Université, the Rue Saint-Jean, and the Rue de la Boucherie des Invalides. The large gate in the Rue Saint-Jean affords entrance to tobaccos coming from all parts of the globe, of which the qualities have been ascertained beforehand by experts buying on samples which are preserved for comparison with each consignment as it arrives. The great national factory receives from the United States--Virginia, for instance, Kentucky, and Maryland--large shipments of tobacco packed in casks; from South America vast quantities in bales composed of skins. Java, too, and Manilla in the Pacific Ocean, Macedonia, Egypt, Greece, Algeria, Hungary, Holland, and finally France itself, contribute their share.

The anti-smokers of France naturally look with horror on the huge tobacco factory of their metropolis; and more than a century ago Valmont Bomare wrote the following lament: “I wish I had never known that in 1750 they estimated that Maryland and Virginia consigned each year more than a hundred million casks of tobacco to the English, who only consumed about half of it, exporting the rest to France, and thereby enriching themselves annually to the amount of nine million two hundred thousand francs.”

At present nineteen departments of France produce some fifty million pounds of tobacco, worth twenty million francs. The native tobacco growths are restricted by the often beneficial interference of the administration, which has to be consulted by growers in choosing the land for cultivation, and which even prescribes the varieties of tobacco to be grown.

The sale of tobacco is a monopoly in France, the shop-keeping tobacconists being really nothing more than Government agents for the distribution of cigars, cigarettes, tobacco, and snuff. The tenancy of a tobacconist’s shop is a privilege conferred by the Government sometimes on widows and orphans whose husbands or fathers have deserved well of the state, sometimes on less meritorious persons who have rendered services at elections, or have in some other way earned the goodwill of the Government or of Government agents.

All tobacco manufactories are Government property; and it was as such that the tobacco manufactory of Dieppe was seized in 1870 by the Prussians when they occupied that town. They declared their intention of burning it--but only as a menace; and they obligingly allowed it to be ransomed on payment of 75,000 francs.

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XXII. SOME HISTORICAL BUILDINGS

Abailard and Héloise--Fulbert’s House in the Rue des Chantres--The Philip Augustus Towers--The Hôtel Barbette--The Hôtel de Sens.

“To look for history in the streets of Paris,” said M. Edouard Fournier, some twenty-five years ago, “when so much of the city has been destroyed, especially during the last ten years, is to arrive rather late in the field; it is like harvesting after the gleaners, picking up blades of grass instead of ears of corn.” And this, from the author of “L’Esprit dans l’Histoire” and of “Le Vieux-Neuf,” concerning whom Jules Janin once wrote: “Cet homme sait tout; il ne sait que cela; mais il le sait bien.” Where Edouard Fournier despaired of finding anything it would be vain to seek for much. Something, however, may, even by following in his footsteps, yet be gleaned in the very field which he regards as bare. In the socalled “city”--the germ of that capital to which the name of Paris is now given--may still be seen the house in the Rue des Chantres which passes for that of the odious Fulbert, villain of the love story of Abailard and Héloise. That of Abailard, which was on the other side of the street, was pulled down early in 1849. Its final association was with a law-suit, brought by lodgers in the house against the proprietor, who, as they alleged, had dispossessed them without due notice. The former abode of Fulbert, the terrible uncle of Héloise, must itself be on the point of disappearing, even if it has not been already demolished. The house of Abailard was at one time connected by a narrow bridge with the house where the unnatural Fulbert dwelt with his charming niece. But after the separation of the lovers their respective houses were no longer to remain united, and the stone bridge which joined them together--like the Bridge of Sighs of the Venetian Palace and Prison--soon fell into ruins. Two medallions, in which their features were said to be reproduced, formed the last record of their loves. These have been reproduced above the ground-floor of the new house on the Quai Napoleon, with the famous distich: “Abailard, Héloise, habitèrent ces lieux,” etc. Those who love history for its romance, those who have been touched by the tale of the lovers, will gaze with interest on these two faces; and if they are not satisfied they may go to Père Lachaise to continue their devotions in presence of the monument to their memory. If, however, they should have consulted M. Edouard Fournier beforehand, they will have been warned that the medallions of the Quai Napoleon and the statues of the tomb are anything but authentic. “The medallions,” says this unerring critic, “in costumes of the time of Henry IV. represent lovers of the twelfth century. As to the statues, M. de Guilhermy has already shown that the one of Héloise was seen until the time of the Revolution on the tomb of the Dorman family in the chapel of the Beauvais College, Rue Jean de Beauvais. The statue of Abailard is probably of equal authenticity.”

If, to pursue the subject historically, we were to look for remains of the great wall with innumerable towers which Philip Augustus built before his departure for the Crusades, in order not to leave his dear city of Paris without defence, we should find it difficult to discover even traces; though the most imposing of the towers were destroyed not more than twenty or thirty years ago. They were brought to light by preceding demolitions, themselves in turn to be laid in ruins. At the foot of one of these towers a treasure, dating from Gallo-Roman times, was dug up. It was valued, according to the weight of the gold, at 30,000 francs, though its artistic and historical worth was a hundred times greater. Most of the medals found their way to England. In the Cour de Rouen, close to the Passage du Commerce, is, or was until lately, to be seen a well-preserved fragment of a Philip Augustus tower, standing, half-smothered with ivy, on a piece of wall, broad enough to serve as terrace to the adjoining house, where a girls’ school had been established. “It is a joyful sight,” says M. Edouard Fournier, “to see children of the present day leaping and bounding on this remnant of antiquity.” Further on, in the Rue Clovis--which the reader may remember as figuring in Eugène Sue’s “Wandering Jew”--is another relic of this same wall. In the Rue Dauphine, at the back of the house numbered 34, is a tower almost in its original form; and close by, in the Rue Guénégaud, the body of another, which stood on the edge of the wall that from this point went on in a straight line to the celebrated Tour de Nesle. The ruined tower of the Rue Guénégaud served some years ago as background to a blacksmith’s forge, whose flames cast a lurid light on this obscure reminder of a past age.

Passing to the other side of the water (where our subject inevitably leads us, though it is on the left bank that Paris antiquities are chiefly to be sought), we find several houses ancient themselves, or at least closely connected with ancient associations. In the former Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul--now Rue Charlemagne--where Rabelais died, and where Molière passed the first years of his dramatic apprenticeship, may be seen, in the courtyard of the neighbouring barracks, remains of one of the two towers which Charles X. gave in 1485 to the nuns of the Ave Maria convent, whose cloister the barracks have now replaced. At No. 20 of the Rue Rambuteau some twenty metres of the old wall, here in the form of a terrace, are to be found; and finally, in the very heart of Paris, in the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, where the General Post Office is established, is preserved at the back of No. 12 a tower which has still two-thirds of its original height. It stands twenty-four feet above the soil. In its entirety it was, like all the other towers, thirty-nine feet high.

These remains of the old girdle-wall, whose existence by many persons is scarcely suspected, are all that survives of the constructions of the sixteenth century. The thirteenth is still more imperfectly represented; though some forty years ago might be seen in the quarter of Saint-Marcel, at some paces from the river Bièvre, substantial remains of one of the lodges of St. Louis.

In the Rue des Gobelins and the Rue des Marmousets are still extant relics, in the shape of a façade and the fragment of a wall, of the royal lodge where Queen Blanche listened beneath the willows of the Bièvre to the verses of Thibault de Champagne; where Charles VI. went mad one terrible night, which, beginning with a masquerade, ended with a conflagration; where Francis I. had secret rendezvous, to which playful reference is sometimes made in the pages of Rabelais.

In the Rue Vieille du Temple, at the corner of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, stands a graceful turret--bright relic of that sombre Hôtel Barbette which the Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI., was just leaving when he was killed at the very door by the followers of John the Fearless. A lamp, whose light was never to be extinguished, was placed there by one of the assassins, in expiation of the crime. Tradition says that “la belle Ferronnière” lived close by, and that it was by the light of the lamp, fixed beneath the turret, that the husband saw Francis I. escape one night from his wife’s house.

After adorning a feudal mansion, subsequently to be transformed into the rich abode of a financier of the time of Louis XIV., what has this turret now become? Without losing anything of its graceful exterior, not even the grating, so finely worked, of its little window, it marks the corner of the bedroom occupied by the grocer who has his shop below!

John the Fearless was not troubled by the remorse experienced by his accomplice, whose repentance was for ever to be proclaimed by his votive lamp. The blow having been struck, his only thought was to guard against the consequences. Withdrawing to the Hôtel d’Artois, which afterwards took from him the name of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, he there constructed a stone room, or what was then called a donjon--not to be confounded with the English word obviously derived from it. The little fortress of John the Fearless was solidly built, for it exists even to this day. The square tower, at least eighty feet high, is indeed in perfect condition. Its walls are still crenellated, and it has lost nothing of its original physiognomy, except as regards the roof with which it has been covered in.

An old building of very different character is the house of Nicholas Flamel, at No. 50, Rue Montmorency, near the Rue Saint-Martin. Just above the ground floor a touching inscription in Gothic characters may still be read, from which it appears that “poor labouring men and women dwelling beneath the porch of this house,” said the Paternoster and the Ave Maria for the dead. This was the sole condition of the hospitality extended to them by Flamel. He had ideas on the subject of property which can never have been widely spread in any age, and which are certainly not entertained in the present day. He let out his numerous houses in such a way, that with the money gained from lodgers on the lower floors he supported lodgers without means on the upper ones. “Gens de mestier,” says Guillebert de Metz, “demouroient en bas, et du loyer qu’ils payoient estoient soutenus povres laboureurs en hault.”

Another historic house, in the very centre of what may still be looked upon as mediæval Paris, the Hôtel de Sens, stands in an open space enclosed by the Rues Figuier, de la Mortellerie, du Fauconnier, and des Barrés; in an admirable position, that is to say, and at two paces from the ancient Hôtel Saint-Paul. John the Good, after his imprisonment in London, lived there for some time as the guest of the Archbishop of Sens. Charles V. attached more value to it, for in 1369 he purchased it, and for some time it was only an adjunct to the Hôtel Saint-Paul. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century it reverted to the Archbishop of Sens, Tristan de Salazar, who had it rebuilt in the form it still preserves, with the exception of the embellishments added by the famous Duprat, one of his successors.

Under Henri IV. it was the abode of La Reine Margot, as Marguerite de Valois, the king’s divorced wife, was popularly called. “Queen Venus,” as will afterwards be seen, was another of her familiar names. This legendary heroine of the Tour de Nesle had scarcely taken possession of her new mansion, in August, 1605, when a placard was affixed to her door, inscribed with a quatrain in which her licentious life was satirised. The evil reputation brought to the house by Queen Margot remained attached to it as long as she lived there. In a previous sketch of the locality the story has already been told of the tragic event which caused Queen Margot to abandon the Hôtel de Sens for ever. She had been there scarcely a year when one of her pages, whose professions of love she had accepted, finding another page preferred to him, shot his rival almost beneath the queen’s eyes. Marguerite’s cry for vengeance, her offer of her own garter to anyone who would use it to strangle the assassin, his arrest, and her vow neither to eat nor drink until he had been executed, have already been told. Two days after (or, as some authorities have it, only one) the page Vermond, who had fled but was duly captured, lost his head beneath the axe of the executioner, when Queen Margot fainted away, and, on recovering herself, left the place for ever.

She had scarcely quitted Paris when this murder of her lover before her door and the speedy gratification of her desire for vengeance on the assassin were thus set forth in verses sung freely in the public streets:--

La Royne Vénus demi-morte De voir mourir devant sa porte Son Adonis, son cher Amour, Pour vengeance a devants a face Fait défaire en la mesme place L’assassin presque au mesme jour.

The Hôtel de Torpane, in the Rue de Bernardins, was the mansion of the Bignon family, which has produced so many illustrious men in literature and in law. It was demolished in 1830, but remains of it still subsist. Some years ago a stone, bearing the motto of the Bignon family--“Multa renascentur”--was found (what irony!) in the midst of the ruins. Nothing of a fallen house lives again except, perhaps, certain ornaments which, like the sculpture of the Hôtel de Tortonne, are carried elsewhere--in this particular case, to a back room in the École des Beaux-Arts. The statues which once adorned the Hôtel de Torpane are said--but probably without foundation--to be from the hand of Jean Goujon.

Mention has already been made of the Hôtel Carnavalet, where the genius of Jean Goujon may really be studied. It owes its name to the widow of M. Kernevenoy, whose Breton name had become softened into that of Carnavalet, and who in his lifetime had been the worthy friend of Ronsard and of Brantôme. Madame “Carnavalet” bought the house for herself and her son. She maintained it in its original beauty, which it was impossible to increase. She did, however, add some ornaments, especially the sculptured masks which figure here and there on the façade, and which, according to the ingenious idea of M. Fournier, may have been intended to suggest, through the “Carnival,” her husband’s family name.

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XXIII. THE MONT-DE-PIÉTÉ

“Uncle” and “Aunt”--Organisation of the Mont-de-Piété--Its Various Branches--Its Warehouses and Sale-rooms.

French idioms, and particularly slang ones, are seldom translatable into English. The cant Parisian word, however, for a pawnbroker bears quite a comic resemblance to the word employed in London. The medical student of our metropolis, when he is at low water, takes his watch to his “uncle.” The medical student of Paris resorts, under like circumstances, to his “aunt.” Neither would think of employing the dignified historical word used by the student of Brussels, who, as if mindful of the pawnbroker’s origin, calls him “the Lombard.”

The English student speaks of the unfortunate watch in question as being “up the spout”; the Parisian declares that his is “on the nail”--the idea apparently being that the chronometer is “hung up” until more prosperous days.

The great pawnbroking establishment, or Mont-de-Piété, of Paris, is situated in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, with a principal branch office in the Rue Bonaparte; but it may be interesting meanwhile to glance at those minor establishments which are scattered over the whole of the French capital. Like their counterparts in London, they excite in the philosophic beholder a melancholy curiosity, above all in the poorer quarters, where dire necessity compels the levying of those loans which, in more fashionable parts, are the result of an extravagant life.

The Paris pawnshop has the aspect of quite an ordinary house, and nothing would particularly attract to it the attention of an observer--not even the incessant stream of its visitors in and out--were it not that these wear a suspiciously stealthy air as they enter or quit the place; a sort of shame on their arrival and an uneasy haste at their departure.

It is not, as a rule, necessary for the student of human life, who wishes to see what occurs within a Paris pawnshop, to pledge or redeem anything himself; the crowd is so large that the absence of his parcel will be unperceived, and everyone is so intent on his or her own errand that not a glance, probably, will be bestowed upon him. “How much will you lend me on this?”--such is the absorbing thought, the sole preoccupation, which deprives the visitors of all curiosity concerning what is around them.

Entering one of these loan offices, a peculiar odour--which a French writer with a delicate nose has described as something between the smell of a barrack and that of a hospital--gives the visitor his first impression of the place. Scrupulously clean as the depôt is kept, the air is to some extent affected by the malodorous parcels brought in by the customers. Even the frequent opening of the doors scarcely relieves the atmosphere, which is characterised by that most unbearable of all atmospheric qualities--stuffiness. But the heroic student of life, bent on observation, fortifies his nose by the aid of philosophy; and instead of betaking himself to flight, sits down on one of the benches ranged round the room and affects to await his turn. This room is divided into two by a partition fitted with doors, one part accommodating the public, the other being reserved for the employés. The public compartment is generally very sombre, with no other light than that which steals through chance apertures: the shopmen’s compartment is thoroughly illuminated. The sun has been accused by a French writer of flinging his beams into these pawnshops in order to reveal some of the most lamentable scenes and acts of human life. But, on the other hand, the assistants require a good light to examine the miscellaneous articles submitted to their appraisement.

One curious feature is the silence which reigns in these establishments. The customers seem to have no tongues, and the money-lenders, by no means prodigal of words, communicate with their clients chiefly by looks and gestures. After all, there is little need for conversation, the business of every visitor being ostensible, and the employés having simply to say that they will lend such and such a sum on the article proposed, or--what sickens the heart of some poor wretches who wish to raise the price of a loaf of bread or a bundle of firewood--that they will lend nothing on a worthless rag.

To some extent the pawnbroking assistant may be said to control the destinies of the impecunious public. If he refuses to lend on this article or that, some merchant will be unable to redeem his honour and his promissory note, some lover will be unable to keep his appointment with the girl of his heart, some comedian will not make his début, some lady of fashion will not give her soirée, and some needy mother will have to send her family supperless to bed. Here behind this partition there is no distinction of class. The highest and the lowest ranks of Parisian society are brought together--a duchess by the side of a flower-girl, an artist by the side of an artisan. Pride and humility are here united. Aristocrats, whose souls revolt at the thought of borrowing, are dragged to the place by necessity, and have to wait, like the rest, till the assistant is at leisure to inspect their rings and their diamonds, their silks and their satins.

“For anyone who knows how to observe and divine,” says M. Alfred Delvau, “the public of a loan office is very interesting. You enter mentally into the existences of all those widely different characters, dragged here by such opposite causes, and you leave the place smiling sometimes, but sad nearly always. Misery--even smiling misery--has nothing of gaiety; and it is Misery, or her shame-faced sister Want, who drives hither that crowd of people differing so greatly from one another by their costume, age, sex, and position.

“First of all, with his elbows resting on the counter, facing the commissionaire--sworn appraiser of all those rubbish heaps which the owners wish to turn into gold--lounges a fellow who turns his back on us and lets us see, beneath his frayed trouser-ends, a pair of naked feet enclosed in down-at-heel shoes. He comes to pledge his mattress--the last, the supreme resource!--that mattress which seems to have lost half its stuffing; or some workman’s tools, which do not look sorry to rest a little. By his side, and by way of contrast, stands, with brazen air, a big red-faced woman, red-haired, red-shawled, with a mauve silk dress and ruffles of white lace, whom I sometimes meet on the footway of the Rue des Martyrs, and who personifies a certain category of women--the last category. What does she come to pledge?--her heart? That has long since wandered away. Her virtue? That has followed her heart. Her wit? She never had any. What then? Some jewel, without doubt--the last witness of a last liaison. Her ear is at this moment bereft of the twenty-five francs’ worth of gold which hung in it just now.

“On the wooden bench let into the wall are other persons: two women of the lower orders, who are estimating beforehand the borrowing value of the linen they are going to pledge, while the little daughter of one of them is heedlessly gnawing an apple; a young girl in black, her head bare, like that of the red woman who has just gone, but more decently and poorly clad; an Arthur of the Reine Blanche--his hat tilted over his ear, his hands in his pockets, and looking at the small dog playing at his feet, rather than look at nothing; then men and women of the inferior classes with their children, talking about the hard times and the high rents; then placid citizens; then careworn flower-girls; then other people more or less interesting--but always interested. The man who pledges his mattress, the woman who pledges her linen, the sempstress who pledges her dress, feel no doubt a sharp pang in taking leave of objects so indispensable; but that is as nothing compared with the poignant anguish of the man who, for food, or the woman who, to feed her child, is obliged to part with love tokens or family jewels, as sacred as the vases of a church: the ancestral watch which has marked so many hours of joy and pain; the locket enclosing that lock of hair; the bracelet of that dead mistress who will never die in the heart of him she has left for ever; the ring given by that lover who still lives but who is for ever dead to the woman he has deserted.

“It is the physiognomy of the borrowers that I have just been sketching, of those wretches of all ranks, who are forced by some dire necessity, whether accidental or normal, to come and pledge their clothes or their jewels; to exhaust--in order not to die of hunger or to meet an overdue debt--the resources which are still at their disposal. Yet, by the side of these careworn, despairing faces, inscribed with poignant melancholy, or, in some cases, resignation, are the radiant faces of those who have come to redeem their jewels and their clothes. These are not silent like the rest. They do not glide in, like furtive shadows amongst other shadows. You hear them coming before you see them: they ascend the steps with tremendous haste. It is a question of arriving before the shop is closed, for it is Saturday, the morrow is Sunday, and they have come up panting like a pair of forge-bellows.

“There is a run of business on Saturday night, and the assistants behind the counter, although they, too, love Sunday with the repose it brings, almost dread it as being preceded by such a rush of work. And these people who come to redeem are not so easy to manage as the poor wretches who pledge, the latter being mild and patient, full of anguish though they are; the former noisy, exacting, and sometimes insolent. The relationship is changed, in fact. One set come to demand something, almost an act of charity--for that is the nature of the request, although the pledge is worth more than the loan granted. The other set come to make what is almost a gift; for the pledge they withdraw is not always worth the price that has been estimated, and if they did not withdraw it the commissionaire would perhaps lose something on it, instead of gaining. You see the difference. And then, again, it is usually men who pledge and women who redeem. In pledging, a signature is required; a certificate alone suffices for the redemption. I leave you to imagine the behaviour of those gossips, proud of “unhooking” from the accursed “nail” the dress or the jacket which has hung there six months, and which is now as indispensable for going to the dance or the promenade as it was useless six months since, when it was a question of procuring a dinner or paying for a bed.”

The Parisian pawnbroker, being simply a Government official, differs necessarily from the pawnbroker of London. The latter is the most independent and insolent of all shopkeepers. He makes very little distinction between those who come to pledge and those who come to redeem. If his Saturday-night customers who come to take their things out of pawn were to give themselves such airs as the Parisian pledge-redeemers already described, he would insult them to their face, and keep them waiting till they had learnt better manners. He feels indebted to no one. He does not seek regular customers, for he knows that the stream of the impecunious will never cease to flow into his shop, that if one does not come another will, and that the people who come to redeem are seriously in want of their property, and must pay him the amount of the loan and interest no matter whether he is bearish or polite.

The branch establishments, with their commissionaires, having been spoken of, let us now glance at the great Mont-de-Piété of Paris, situated in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux. This central establishment dates from the reign of Louis XVI., who founded it by letters patent in 1777. The work of money-lending was at once commenced, but not in the buildings specially constructed in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, beside the convent of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, since these buildings were not completed until 1786. It is interesting to follow the different phases through which this vast establishment of public utility, designed to “put an end to the abuses of usury,” has passed, until now it receives upwards of twenty-five million pledges annually. That these pledges present an inconceivably great variety of objects may well be supposed. On this subject M. Blaize, author of the “Traité des Monts-de-Piété,” has written descriptively enough as follows:--“Let us stop at the first floor. This is the quarter of the aristocracy; the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Chaussée d’Antin of our borrowers. Here are the first and second divisions--those of the “jewels”--where the most precious objects are deposited. I open the ‘four-figure cupboards’--such is the name we give to those cupboards of iron which contain pledges on which a thousand francs or more have been advanced. Great Heaven! what riches! Sparkling sprays, strings of diamonds, trinkets calculated to turn the heads of duchesses! Silver services fit to adorn the table of a king! In these regions of want--opulent want and necessitous want--one’s eyes must not see everything nor one’s ears listen to everything: let us pass on. We take our way through the passages which are bordered on each side with wealth-laden shelves. Look at those thousands of watches, chains, bracelets, jewels of every kind; that countless mass of objects of art, of luxury, of utility, of vanity, or of coquetry.

“We are now on the second floor. Here commences the ordinary goods department. The floor bends beneath the weight of the million pledges which are taken in every year. Here are ranged, in admirable order, dresses, coats, shirts, table-cloths, blankets, and indeed every object of household use or of the toilet; vestments of silks or of rags; books; tools. Let us explore the next two storeys. The same arrangements, the same symmetry: cases filled with boxes, bandboxes, and parcels. The walls of the staircases are covered with pictures, mirrors, metronomes, which have not found a place in the interior of the divisions. Let us go higher still. We are now in the doleful city, in the region of sorrow and want. Look at those piles of mattresses so highly packed. They are the very last tribute of misery, which, after being despoiled of its vestments, has given us its last pledge, and which sleeps on a heap of straw, where shiver, in a fetid attic, around an emaciated mother, children blue with cold, with wasted cheeks, hollow eyes, and a smile sad and sweet. Poor dear little creatures! In order to live, they ask for nothing but a little air and bread! Let us descend to the ground floor.

“The warehouses are used for new merchandise, such as linen, cloth, muslins, mirrors of large dimensions, bronze and copper articles, etc. Things which are too heavy to be carried above, such as vices, anvils, and cauldrons, occupy a considerable space below. Do not let us forget the fountain warehouse. At the end of the autumn the cocoa-hawkers bring us their fountains and exchange them for a sum which, small as it is, enables them to follow the little industries by which they are able to live on through the winter.... At the first sunshine of the spring they come to redeem the pledge they have left with us, and, with their little bell in their hand, gaily betake themselves once more to the Champs Élysées and the boulevards.

“Each article bears a ticket, each ticket an even number if it is a pledge, an uneven number if it is a renewal. As often as an article is renewed, a fresh ticket is sewn over that of the preceding year (you can count ten on this particular pledge--nine renewals, that is to say). The loan is only six francs--six francs! But it is a fortune to those whose work does not even suffice for the wants of the day. Listen to a simple and touching story. Some years ago one of our predecessors noticed a little packet which had upon it a whole series of renewal-tickets, and on which but three francs had been lent. He wrote to the borrower: a woman presented herself in reply. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘do you not redeem this pledge?’ ‘I am too poor,’ was the answer. ‘You attach a great value, then, to this article?’ ‘Ah, sir, it is all that remains to me of my mother.’ The director gave her back the packet, which contained an old-fashioned petticoat. The poor woman bore away this treasure of filial piety with tears of joy. Instances of this kind are by no means rare, and they prove that if indiscretion and misconduct bring some borrowers to the Mont-de-Piété, the greater number are impelled thither by causes which are highly honourable. The history of many a pledge is a lamentable page in the drama of human life, so full of nameless miseries and unknown misfortunes. The whole of the property does not return to its owners; at least six per cent. does not. What efforts are made to prevent this or that article from falling into the hands of the brokers, who will sell it for a mere trifle at the sale-rooms! On the 26th of June, 1849, a gold watch was sold which had been pledged on the 8th of January, 1817, for eighty francs. It had been renewed for the last time on the 8th of December, 1847. The borrower, who had not been able to redeem it, had successively paid 20 francs 50 centimes for the right of renewal. We made inquiries for him. He was dead. What a mystery of tenderness was implied in so long a constancy!”

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XXIV. PARIS MARKETS

The Halles-Centrales--The Cattle Markets--Agriculture in France--The French Peasant.

The Panthéon, standing on the summit of the mountain of Sainte-Geneviève, and the Luxemburg Palace, surrounded by the galleries and the garden of the same name, dominate the rest of the left bank, which has still, however, one salient point in the Hôtel des Invalides. To the left of the Luxemburg Garden, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, stands the National School of Mines, established in the house which formerly belonged to a religious order. Here, as in so many other of the public establishments of France, the instruction is gratuitous, under the direction of an inspector-general and thirteen professors. The museum contains all kinds of interesting geological and mineralogical specimens, together with a library of 30,000 volumes, which, like the museum, is open to the public.

The Rue de Tournon--to pass from the garden to the front of the palace--has already been mentioned in connection with that Hôtel de l’Empereur Joseph at which Joseph II., visiting his sister Marie Antoinette, elected to stay in preference to putting up at one of the royal palaces. The street owes its name to François de Tournon, cardinal-ambassador under Francis I. At that time the land through which the street was afterwards to run was the site of a large horse market, a sort of annex to the Marché Saint-Germain, and familiarly known as the Muddy Meadow--“le Pré crotté.” Very different were the Paris markets of those days from the system of markets now so perfectly organised. At present, when Paris has expanded so far beyond its ancient “barriers” that it has become one of the greatest cities in the world, the provisioning of its population is a question of the first importance. For breakfast, as for subsequent meals, the French metropolis requires a stupendous quantity of food, which must arrive regularly at a fixed hour, and be delivered promptly at the doors of the numberless beings whose mouths are to be filled.

At some hours before dawn a large number of market-gardeners and other cultivators from the vicinity of Paris enter the city and converge towards the same point. Enormous and noisy drays at the same time bring in to this common centre the consignments of edible produce which arrive by rail daily from the provinces or abroad.

The great market which receives all these goods, known as the Halles-Centrales, is situated opposite the beautiful church of Saint-Eustache, at the end of the Rues Coquillière, Montmartre, Montorgeuil, and Rambuteau. This immense and elegant building, constructed entirely of bricks and iron, consists of twelve pavilions, which shelter the sale of the various descriptions of goods. Each pavilion has its speciality. One is a wholesale, another a retail meat-market, a third is devoted to fish, a fourth to eggs and butter, and so on.

Markets are held in various parts of the city; but most of them are fed by the Central Market. Many of them recall the Central Market by the light character of the architecture in brick and iron. Two great cattle-markets are established at Sceaux and at Poissy, and a smaller one at La Chapelle Saint-Denis, connected with the Marché de la Villette, built with the view of absorbing all the smaller meat-markets.

Unlike England, France, in the matter of agricultural products, is self-sufficing. Two-thirds of the population are occupied, as proprietors, farmers, or labourers, with the cultivation of the soil. In England the agricultural classes represent only one-third of the population. In France there are nine millions of small landowners with a slight proportion of large ones; in England the land is in the possession of comparatively few persons. Up to the time of the Revolution the number of proprietors in France did not go beyond 30,000, and the peasantry at that period were in a state of utter poverty, the actual cultivators receiving, according to Alison, only a twelfth part of the produce for their share. “The people’s habitations,” wrote Arthur Young, “are miserable heaps of dirt--no glass, no air; the women and children are in rags--no shoes, no stockings. The proprietors of these badly cultivated lands, all absentees, were worshipping the king at Versailles in the most abject and servile manner, spending their scanty income and getting into scandalous debt.” “The agricultural population,” he says elsewhere, “are 76 per cent. worse fed and worse clad than in England. Impossible to have an idea of the animals who served us at table, called women by courtesy. In reality they are walking dunghills, without stockings, shoes, or sabots.”

All this was changed by the Revolution, when immense numbers of tenants became proprietors of the land they had previously cultivated, as serfs, for their masters. The progress from destitution to comfort was effected in less than twenty years, and since then the condition of the peasantry has been constantly improving. Under the system of small ownerships agriculture, as an art, may not be brought to the highest possible pitch of perfection, but the agriculturists thrive and are happy. France is not a corn-exporting country; and it is quite possible that under a system of large estates the sum of her agricultural produce might be greater than it really is. The peasants, however, under the system of “la petite culture” produce more butter and their fowls more eggs than they need for their own consumption or for sale in France. Accordingly great quantities of eggs and butter are sent to England, France’s best customer for produce of this kind.

The small proprietors, too, keep rabbits and pigeons, many of which find their way not only to the Paris markets but to England. A century ago, until the time of the Revolution, the landholding aristocracy had alone the right of shooting rabbits and keeping pigeons. “The birds,” says M. Nottelle, writing on this subject, “ate the seed of the poor peasants in the neighbourhood and the rabbits ate the corn when it was green. These exclusive privileges were abolished on the celebrated night of the 4th of August, 1789.” Yet it should always be remembered that the noble proprietors gave up their exclusive privileges--doubtless under the influence of the Revolution, but, nevertheless, as a matter of fact--of their own accord. Now everyone can keep pigeons; but the owners are ordered by the mayor to keep them in the pigeon-house during seed-time. If they are allowed to fly at this period they are considered as game, and may be shot. The owner, moreover, is fined. Occasionally in the French market frogs are to be seen, and it is quite possible that in the days before the Revolution the epithet “frog-eating” could be more fitly applied to the generality of Frenchmen than it can now, when the thighs of frogs are only to be met with at certain restaurants, where they are served, equally with snails, as a rare delicacy.

It has been seen that before 1789 the French peasants were poor and miserable. Arthur Young’s descriptions of them have been quoted often enough. A century earlier than Arthur Young, La Bruyère, author of “Les Caractères,” spoke of them as looking like ferocious animals. “The men and women,” he continued, “are meagre, dark-looking objects, their dirty rags scarcely covering them, and retiring at night into filthy dens or hovels.” It is possible, then, as M. Nottelle, in his unpretentious but interesting and instructive little book on the French peasantry since the Revolution, declares, that several millions of peasants were obliged to live on roots. “No doubt,” he adds, “they ate frogs, though it took much time to get a decent dish of them. But time was not a great object to these poor famished slaves. From this, most likely, Shakespeare called the French ‘frog-eaters,’ and foreigners have come to the conclusion that many of the French feed mostly on frogs. It is not easy, however, to exist on frogs, which are too dear to be eaten by the generality of people.”

It is said, too, that frogs are in favour with the devout, for they may be eaten as fish on fast days. Not only frogs but also snails are to be seen exhibited for sale in some of the Paris markets. It may be that in the days when the unhappy French peasantry were on the verge of starvation they found themselves reduced to a disgusting diet of snails and even slugs. However that may have been, the only snail eaten by the French at the present day, and the only kind of snail to be seen in the Paris markets, is the “escargot,” in its streaked whity-brown shell. The escargot is found chiefly in the wine countries, especially Burgundy, where it feeds on the leaves of the vine. One of the few places in Paris where snails and frogs used to be sold, cooked, no doubt in perfection, is or was the famous restaurant in the “New Street of the Little Fields”--otherwise Rue Neuve des Petits Champs--which Thackeray celebrated in his ballad on the subject of Bouillabaisse.

Many interesting anecdotes of the French peasants are told by a writer from whom I have recently quoted. Living in the midst of their property, with their domestic animals around them, they become very much attached to their cattle, not sentimentally but by reason of the beasts’ market value. A story is told of a farmer who sent to the cattle-show a fat pig, that obtained a medal which he afterwards wore with great pride as though he himself had carried it off. The peasant’s love of his cow surpasses even his affection for his pig. A peasant proprietor lamented the loss of one of his cows to such an extent that a friend at last said to him: “If you had lost your wife your grief could scarcely be greater.” “Maybe,” he replied; “for many of the farmers about here would gladly give me their daughter in marriage, while none of them would give me a cow.” In one of Pierre Dupont’s songs this preference on the part of the peasant of the cow to the wife finds full expression. The cow, it is true, becomes in the poet’s lines an ox; but cows, like oxen, are used in France for the plough. “I love Jeanne, my wife,” exclaims the peasant of Pierre Dupont’s song; “well, I would rather see her die than see the death of my oxen”; or, in the French--

Eh bien, j’aimerais mieux La voir mourir que voir mourir mes bœufs.

So great is the cow-passion by which the French peasantry are animated, that when one of them had stolen the cow of his neighbour, the exhortations of the priest were powerless to enforce restitution.

“You must return it to the owner,” said the priest.

“But, father, I have confessed my fault.”

“Yes, yes; but you must do as I tell you. Send back the cow to its owner.”

The man hesitated; he did not wish to restore the cow.

“Then no absolution; no sacrament.”

The peasant still demurred.

“Think,” the priest then said, “of the day of judgment, when all the village will be assembled on the green, and you will be there holding the cow by the tail, and everybody will know you stole it. How ashamed you will be!”

“Really! but will the owner of the cow be there too?”

“Of course he will.”

“Well, if I see him, I will then give him back his cow.”

One more anecdote may be permitted in reference not indeed to the Paris markets, but to those by whom the Paris markets are supplied. Not only is the French peasant prudent and economical: he is also, as is shown by the story just told, very cunning. Equally so is the peasant woman. One day at a market in Normandy people were much surprised at seeing a woman offer an excellent horse for sale at the price of five francs, and still more astonished at her asking 500 francs for a dog she wished to dispose of. The two animals were to be sold together. They were ultimately got rid of on the terms demanded. The explanation of the mystery was this. The peasant woman was the widow of a man who in his will had directed that the horse was to be sold for the benefit of his own family and the dog for the benefit of his wife. She had so arranged matters that out of the joint sale 500 francs, the price of the dog, came to her, while five francs went to her husband’s relations.

It seems strange and somewhat absurd to English Conservatives that so many peasants in France should have a vote; but inasmuch as of these peasants nine millions are proprietors, the establishment of universal suffrage in France was not a revolutionary but a Conservative measure. The peasantry, moreover, are in some degree trained to public affairs by the part they play in the communal councils. There are about 40,000 communes in France, and each commune has its mayor and its municipal councillors elected by universal suffrage for the management of local affairs. Every peasant may become a municipal councillor and, if duly elected by the municipal council, a mayor. The municipal council meets periodically for the discussion of local affairs; so that its members accustom themselves to public speaking and the interchange of ideas. France has now about 10,000,000 electors, of whom two-thirds are peasants, but, as before explained, peasants in the possession of landed property.

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XXV. SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS

Its Origin and History--Its Library--Its Organ--Saint-Sulpice.

If the Pantheon and the Luxemburg are by their size, their appurtenances, and their dominant position, the most important buildings on the left bank of the Seine, the most interesting, by its antiquity, is the church, with the monastery attached to it, of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; which, like the cathedral-church of Notre Dame in the city, and the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois on the right bank, belong to the most ancient period of the Merovingian monarchy, to that, in other words, of Childebert I. and Ultrogothe his wife, who reigned at Paris from 511 to 538. Childebert, returning from an expedition against the Visgoths, brought back from Spain as trophies of his victory the tunic of Saint Vincent, a gold cross and precious stones, together with some vases which were said to have belonged to King Solomon. By the advice of Saint Germain, Bishop of Paris, he constructed for the reception of the holy relics a church and a monastery at the western end of the gardens belonging to the Palace of the Hot Baths, or Palais des Thermes. On the very day of Childebert’s death, in 558, Saint Germain consecrated the new church as “Church of the Holy Cross and of St. Vincent”; and he was himself buried in it when he died in 596. After the death of the good bishop the church which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross and to St. Vincent got to be known under no other name than that of Saint-Germain; and it now became the burial-place of the kings, queens, and princes of the Merovingian dynasty.

The abbey remained for a long time an isolated building, which the high walls, erected around the church and convent in 1239 by Simon, abbé of Saint-Germain, made into a veritable fortress, which was strengthened in 1368 by Charles V., who, at war with the English, feared a sudden attack on their part against the suburbs of Paris. A narrow canal was at the same time dug, which placed the ditches of the fortified abbey in communication with the Seine. This canal, called at the time “the little Seine,” was filled up towards the middle of the sixteenth century, when the line of land thus formed became the Rue des Petits Augustins, now Rue Bonaparte.

Of this ancient church, three times burned by the Normans and three times rebuilt, but little now remains. Thirty years ago fragments of the walls and two of the gates were still to be seen. But the last traces of the old abbey disappeared when through the Place Saint Germain-des-Prés the Rue de Rennes was made to run. The church, however, was destined to survive, in a sadly mutilated condition, the convent and the walls. It suffered greatly, like so many other sacred buildings, at the time of the Revolution, when the tombs of the Merovingian kings were broken into and their contents dispersed. These or portions of them are now to be found in the abbey of Saint-Denis.

Again and again the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés has been restored: as in 1644, in 1820, at the time of the Restoration, and finally under Napoleon III. The choir preserves intact the style of the twelfth century. Among the tombs may be seen the tomb of King Casimir of Poland, who, after becoming a monk, was made abbé of Saint-Germain, and died holding that office in 1672. In a chapel on the opposite side of the church is the tomb of Olivier and Louis de Castellan, who fell in the service of Louis XIV., and a little further on the chapel of the Douglases, many of whom served in the Scottish Guard. Here too are the remains of Boileau and Descartes. The sacred pictures around the choir and the nave are the work of Hippolyte Flandrin, the most celebrated among the pupils of Ingrès, who died before completing his work, and to whom, in the church he loved to decorate, a monument in white marble has been erected, surmounted by his bust.

It must not be forgotten that during the greater part of its history the ancient church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was outside Paris, which gradually grew towards it and at last surrounded it. On the 2nd of November, 1589, Henry IV., besieging Paris, went up the convent tower, accompanied by a single monk, to examine the situation of the town. He is said to have afterwards gone round the walls of the cloister. But he did not enter the church, and he withdrew without uttering one single word.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés was at one time known as the Church of the Three Steeples. These were destroyed in 1822 under Louis XVIII. as a measure of economy, since it would otherwise have been necessary to restore them.

The monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés used to contain a library, which was at that time the largest in Paris, and the only one that was open to the public. Begun by Father du Breul, author of the “Antiquities of Paris,” it was augmented through legacies from the physician Noel Vaillant, the Abbé Baudran, the Abbé Jean d’Estrées, the Abbé Renaudot, the Chancellor Séguier, the Cardinal Gesvres, the Councillor of State De Harlay, and others, who, dying, left their libraries to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The collection included 100,000 printed volumes, and 20,000 manuscripts, all of which found their way to the National Library, where they are now preserved. Close to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and between this church and that of Saint-Sulpice, was held the famous market or fair of Saint-Germain. In the fifteenth century the Saint-Germain fair used indeed to be held in the garden of the presbytery of Saint-Sulpice. Antiquaries are not quite agreed as to the antiquity of Saint-Sulpice; not, that is to say, as to the precise date, undoubtedly a remote one, of its origin. A tombstone of the tenth century, found in 1724, when, during the restoration of the church, the foundations had to be examined, showed that the cemetery, attached to which there would naturally be a chapel, had existed from the earliest period. A new chapel or church is supposed to have been built in place of the more ancient one during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. A nave was added to it under Francis I., and three chapels in 1614. In 1643 a council was held under the presidency of the Prince de Condé, at which it was determined to rebuild the church, which was too small for the requirements of the neighbourhood and, above all, was falling into ruins. The first stone of the new church was laid by Anne of Austria in 1646. The building operations were, however, discontinued in 1678; and it was not until 1721 that--thanks to a lottery for which permission was given by Louis XV.--enough money was found to enable the architect, Servandoni, to complete the work. The architecture of Saint-Sulpice has been severely criticised, especially by Victor Hugo, who compared the lofty towers (one, by the way, much loftier than the other) to clarinets. The church of Saint-Sulpice is remarkable, among its various treasures, for a magnificent balustrade enclosing the choir, and the statues of the twelve apostles by Bouchardon which surround it. The pulpit given in 1788 by the Duc de Richelieu is surmounted by an admirable group sculptured in wood: “Charity surrounded by her children.” Very curious is the obelisk in white marble, more than eight metres high, constructed in the most scientific manner by Sully and Lemonnier, in 1773, to determine the occurrence of the spring equinox and of Easter Day. The two enormous shells which hold at the entrance to the church the holy water were gifts from the Republic of Venice to Francis I.

The chapels of the nave and of the choir, decorated by the most celebrated artists of this century, present admirable specimens of religious painting. Eugène Delacroix is represented in the chapel of the Holy Angels by two mural pictures and a painted ceiling, all instinct with his fiery genius. The Triumph of Saint Michael, Heliodorus Beaten with Rods, and Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, are the subjects. The artists who have painted the various chapels are too numerous to mention. The organ-loft rests on composite columns of a grandiose character, the work of Servandoni, and the organ is worthy of the loft built for its reception. Reconstructed in 1861 by Cavaillé-Coll, this majestic instrument with its ten octaves possesses 5 complete key-boards, 118 registers, 20 pedals, and about 7,000 pipes. The organ of Saint-Sulpice is said to be the largest in Europe, and on Sundays and holidays the congregation is never without a certain number of dilettanti who have come to hear the gigantic instrument speak beneath the eloquent fingers of M. Widor, whose duties as organist have not prevented him from writing the music of a ballet, “La Korrigane,” for the Opéra, and of a lyric work, “Maître Ambros,” for the Opéra Comique. Widor, the organist of Saint-Sulpice, composing ballet-music reminds one of the still more violent relief sought by Hervé, who passed from the organ-loft to the stage of the Folies Dramatiques with his burlesque operettas of “L’Œil Crevé” and “Le Petit Faust.” The hero of M. Hervé’s operatic vaudeville “Nitouche” is perhaps a typical personage in the musical world of Paris. He also is an organist by profession, a composer of light opera by aspiration; and he gets into sad trouble by teaching frivolous airs to the pupils of the convent school where he is employed to play psalms and hymns.

Strangely enough, by what hazard can scarcely be said, in the organ-loft of Saint-Sulpice is to be found the harpsichord of Marie Antoinette. What a contrast between the delicate sounds of this feeble instrument and the thunder of its colossal neighbour!

The church of Saint-Sulpice, renamed in 1793, at the height of the Revolution, Temple of Victory, was the scene on the 9th of November, 1799, of a banquet, at which General Bonaparte presided. In 1802 it was restored to public worship. The existing church rests on an immense crypt, in which the architects have respected the pillars of the original church. In this subterranean church, which is adorned with statues of Saint Paul and Saint John the Evangelist by Pradier, the catechism is taught and conferences are held. The plan of Servandoni comprised a space in front of the church, enclosed by symmetrical façades, the model of which may be seen in the south-east corner of the square, between the Rue des Canettes and the Rue Saint-Sulpice. This part of the architect’s project was, however, abandoned.

Completed in virtue of a decree of the year 1811, and planted with trees in 1838, the Place Saint-Sulpice has been adorned since 1847 with a monumental fountain constructed by Visconti in place of an older one removed to the Marché Saint-Germain. The four statues which form part of the design, in the midst of three concentric basins, represent Bossuet, Fénélon, Massillon, and Fléchier. Beneath the eyes of the four preachers in bronze a flower-market is held twice a week.

Quitting the Place Saint-Sulpice by the Rue Bonaparte, passing before Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and crossing the Rue Jacob, we reach the section of the Rue Bonaparte which was originally called Rue des Petits Augustins, and which stands on what, until it was filled up, was the bed of the Little Seine.

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XXVI. PRINTING IN PARIS--THE CENSORSHIP

Rue Visconti--Historical Buildings--The National School of Roads and Bridges--The Introduction of Printing into Paris--The First Printing Establishments--The Censorship.

Starting once more from the Place Saint-Sulpice, and proceeding by the Rue Bonaparte across the Rue Jacob to the Rue des Petits Augustins, we come to the ancient Rue des Marais, a narrow street opened in 1540 between the Rue des Petits Augustins and the Rue de Seine. It is now called the Rue Visconti, and contains at least one house which is worth a moment’s attention--the Hôtel de Ranes, No. 21. Here Nicholas d’Argouges, Marquis de Ranes, who built the house, was killed in 1678. Jean Racine came to live in the building as lodger in 1692; and here was born in that same year the last of his children, Louis Racine, author of that much-esteemed poem, “La Réligion.” It was here, too, that the immortal author of “Phèdre” expired on the 21st of April, 1699. Other theatrical associations are connected with this house.

Here, moreover, Adrienne Lecouvreur, the celebrated actress, died on the 20th of March, 1730, and, the last rites of the Church being refused, was carried away the same night in a hackney-coach by Voltaire and a friend of Marshal Saxe who had always been devoted to her. She was buried on the banks of the Seine at a point beyond the Palais Bourbon, which it is no longer possible to discover. The place was marked at the time by a simple memorial, which from malice or through neglect and the natural ravages of time, was destined soon to disappear.

Later on this same house was inhabited by Mdlle. Clairon, who only quitted it when she resigned her engagement at the Comédie Française.

At No. 17 in this interesting Rue Visconti existed in 1825 the printing-office founded by Honoré de Balzac. But the greatest novelist of France met with no greater success as a printer than the greatest novelist of England obtained as a publisher. Balzac, like Scott, contracted debts in his business enterprise which weighed heavily upon him and, compelling him to the severest literary labour, shortened his existence. It was to pay his debts that Balzac condemned himself to that perpetual work, those prolonged night-watches, which developed in him, robust as he was in his early days, the germs of that hypertrophy of the heart from which he died. In the street of Les Petits Augustins stood a convent, founded in the midst of a garden to fulfil a vow made by Queen Margaret at the Château d’Usson.

The convent was turned by the Constituent Assembly in 1790 into a depòt for monuments and ruins of monuments whose preservation was desirable in the interest of history or of art. Alexandre Lenoir, who had proposed the formation of this museum, was appointed its superintendent. In carrying out his seemingly peaceful work he found himself on one occasion in danger of his life, for some madman wounded him with a bayonet as he was protecting by main force the monument of Cardinal de Richelieu which a number of fanatics wished to destroy. The precious collection brought together by Lenoir was inaugurated in 1795 under the title of the National Museum of French Monuments.

An imperial decree of the 24th of February, 1811, ordered the creation of a School of Fine Arts, which was to contain common rooms for the lectures and separate studios for the different professors with their pupils. By order of the restored Louis XVIII., in April, 1816, the School of Fine Arts, with which no progress had been made under Napoleon, was to be completed. Then, however, it occurred to the king that it would be unbecoming to turn out from what had been considered their last resting-place so many statues, busts, tombs, and other monuments. Churches were now requested to claim the ornaments of which, under the Revolution, they had been despoiled, the different communes to take back the arms and other insignia which had been torn by fanatical revolutionists from their walls, while the great historic families were assured that they were now at liberty to resume possession of their ancestral sepulchres. But these permissions and appeals were for the most part in vain. Meanwhile the mausoleums of the kings and princes of France were removed to Saint-Denis, while many other monuments were placed in the museums of Paris and Versailles.

It was now possible to proceed with the School of Fine Arts, and the first stone of the building was laid on the 3rd of May, 1820. The original plan, drawn up by the architect Debret, was much amplified, under the reign of Louis Philippe, by M. Dauban, who finished it in 1838--at least in its essential parts. New buildings were added under the Second Empire between the years 1860 and 1862. The National Special School of Fine Arts (such is its official title) furnishes instruction in drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and every kind of engraving to French students aged not less than fifteen nor more than thirty, and even to foreigners who have obtained due authorisation from the Ministry of Fine Arts.

The School of Fine Arts occupies a palace worthy of the institution. Its general plan is simple in the extreme. Through the gate of its entrance, adorned with two colossal busts of Puget and of Poussin, may be seen a square courtyard whose walls are covered with admirable monuments, for the most part from the above-mentioned Musée des Monuments Français. This courtyard is separated from the principal one into which it leads by a sort of triumphal arch, dating from the year 1500. It was brought from the Château de Gaillon and reconstructed stone by stone. At the end of the principal courtyard is the grand façade due to M. Dauban, composed of two storeys of arcades separated by Corinthian pilasters. The vestibule of the ground floor contains fragments of ancient marbles, casts from the temple of Egina and of the Parthenon, clever, curious copies of paintings discovered at Pompeii, etc. The vestibule leads to a magnificent collection of plaster casts from the most celebrated ancient works of antiquity, including two columns from the temple of Jupiter Stator, and one of the corner-pieces of the Parthenon. In the floor above are to be seen the fifty-two copies of the Loggie of Raphael, executed in 1836 by the brothers Balze, under the direction of the illustrious Ingrès, who had made Raphael the study of his life. The same storey contains, among other celebrated works, the hemicycle, painted by Paul Delaroche, representing the principal masters of every age and of every school, grouped around Ictinus and Phidias, the painter and sculptor of the Parthenon. This masterpiece has been popularised, in engraving, by Henriquel Dupont, one of the most regretted professors of the School of Fine Arts. It is impossible to leave the School of Fine Arts without casting a glance on the mansions which either surround or adjoin it, from the beginning of the Quai Malaquais, at the corner of the Rue de Seine, to the Rue des Saint-Pères, all of which enjoy magnificent views of the Seine, the Louvre, and the Tuileries. They have all the same origin, having been built during the first years of the seventeenth century on the property of Queen Margaret. No. 1 on the Quai Malaquais, with its two meagre wings on each side of a feeble body, was the mansion of Aubespine; and it was there that the celebrated archæologist, Visconti, died in 1818. No. 5 was at one time occupied by Marshal Saxe.

The noble house, with its façade of red bricks and white stone--No. 9, at the other corner of the Rue Bonaparte--was the Hôtel Loménie de Brienne et Loutrec. Nos. 11 and 13, now replaced by the exhibition-rooms of the School of Fine Arts, were built by Cardinal Mazarin for his niece Marianne Martinozzi, left a widow in 1666 by the death of Prince de Conti, younger brother of the great Condé. Originally Hôtel Conti, it passed from Conti’s widow, who received the Hôtel Guénégaud in exchange, into the hands successively of the Créquis, the Tremvilles, the Lauzuns, and three or four other aristocratic families, to become subsequently the office of the general police.

The right corner of the Rue des Saints-Pères and of the Rue de Lille is occupied by a new building with windows few and far between, and gates which might be those of a fortress. This is the special school of living Oriental languages founded by Louis XIV., reorganised in 1795 and again in 1869 and 1871. For many years it was an annex of the National Library, where it occupied an old building in the New Street of the Little Fields. For some few years past it has been established at No. 2 in the Rue de Lille. The languages taught in this institution comprise literary Arabic, the Arabic of ordinary conversation, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, Annamite, Chinese, modern Greek, Japanese, Malay, Russian, Roumanian, Hindostanee, and the Tamul languages. Attached to the professors are teachers born in the different and distant lands whose languages are studied in this school.

At the opposite corner (Rue de Lille, No. 1) is a magnificent mansion which now belongs to the publishing house of Garnier Brothers. During the period immediately before the French Revolution the stables of the Countess of Artois were here established. Throughout the First Empire it was occupied by Count Réal, entrusted with the first department of the Ministry of General Police, in which there were altogether fifty-one departments. From 1821 to 1849 it was the office of the first military division.

On the right side of the Rue des Saints-Pères, opposite the former entrance to the hospital of La Charité, is the National School of Roads and Bridges--until 1788 the Hôtel Fleury; from 1824 to 1830 the Ministry of Worship; and throughout the reign of Louis Philippe the Ministry of Public Works.

The National School of Roads and Bridges, created by Louis XV. in 1741, and developed by different decrees of the two empires, has for its special object the education of young men quitting the Polytechnic School after good examinations as civil engineers. It is placed beneath the authority of the Minister of Public Works, and directed by an Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges. It comprises twenty chairs devoted to different branches of the engineer’s art, without counting drawing--scientific and artistic--and the English and German languages. It contains a laboratory, a library, and a gallery of models to which the public is not admitted.

Returning towards the east as far as the Rue Saint-Benoît, we find, on the eastern side of the street, the printing department of the firm of Quantin, in a line with the publishing and administrative departments. At this printing and publishing office, which has given to the world so many fine editions, especially of illustrated books, Revue des Deux Mondes has been printed ever since it first appeared.

The art of printing has had a chequered history in Paris, being sometimes protected, sometimes oppressed by the crown, and too frequently crippled by two bodies who, in particular, should have nursed it--the University and the Parliament. It was introduced into the French capital by Allemand La Pierre, prior of the Sorbonne, one of the greatest scholars of his time, and Guillaume Fichet, doctor in theology, who, in 1470, invited Ulrich Gering of Constance, Michel Friburger of Colmar, and Martin Krantz, to come and establish a printing-office within the Sorbonne walls.

The three associates acceded to the request, and with the machines they fitted up printed a succession of interesting volumes during their stay at the Sorbonne, which lasted till 1473. Then their establishment was transferred to the Rue Saint-Jacques, under the sign of the “Golden Sun,” beside the church of Saint-Benoît. Here a number of elegant works were produced. In 1484 Friburger and Krantz retired from the concern, in order probably to return to Germany, the name of Gering alone being appended to publications posterior to the month of October in that year. Ultimately the printing-offices were again moved to a house belonging to the Sorbonne, though the sign of the “Golden Sun” was still preserved.

Printers now began to multiply rapidly in Paris. One of the most celebrated was Antoine Vérard, who from 1485 published a large number of works, chiefly in French, and remarkable for the beauty of their Gothic characters. Towards the end of 1499, at the period when the Bridge of Notre Dame, on which his house stood, gave way, he removed to a spot near the crossway of Saint-Séverin, afterwards shifting twice more--first to the Rue Saint-Jacques, and then to the Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame, where he remained till his death.

In 1513 Louis XII. testified his sympathy for the art of printing by liberating it from a heavy tax and from certain tolls to which it had previously been subject. Two years later his successor, Francis I., exempted the printers of Paris from all military service except in case of imminent peril.

In 1521--when already Claude Garamond had replaced the old Gothic and semi-Gothic characters by Roman letters and italics--Francis I., hitherto favourable to printing, issued an edict to the effect that no book should be printed or sold unless it had previously been examined and approved by the University and the Theological Faculty. Every book, moreover, had now to pass beneath the inspection of the Provost of Paris. This edict sorely fettered the two dozen printers who were then at work in the capital.

In 1522 the famous Robert Étienne, whom we call Stephens, published a beautiful edition of the New Testament in Latin; but the Sorbonne, displeased at the production of an edition which tended to popularise the Scriptures, attacked the text of Étienne, though without any apparent desire to engage in direct controversy on the point. It does not appear that the work was suppressed; but ten years later the Sorbonne showed itself much more potent in dealing with a new edition of the Latin Bible published by Robert Étienne, son and successor of the before-mentioned, with annotations--borrowed from the most learned authorities--on the original Hebrew. The younger Étienne had published this edition by special privilege obtained from the king. To secure it against criticism he had not printed it till after a careful comparison of the ancient manuscripts of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the abbey of Saint-Denis; he had not even omitted to call in the most famous theologians to assist him. Yet, despite all his precautions, he could not avert the wrath of the Sorbonne; and he was obliged to humiliate himself before that body and promise to print nothing henceforth “nisi cum bonâ eorum gratiâ.” These submissions saved Étienne, but could not obviate the danger which threatened the art of printing. The era of persecution had begun. The Sorbonne, which had at first patronised the art of Gutenberg, was so terrified now at the rapid propagation of Luther’s doctrines that it addressed to Francis I. an urgent request on the subject of heretical books, representing strongly to the king that if he wished to save religion, attacked and shaken on all sides, he must, by a stern edict, permanently abolish in France the art of printing, which daily produced so many pernicious books. The project of the Sorbonne was on the point of being realised, when it was cleverly thwarted by Jean de Bellay, Bishop of Paris, who explained to the zealous monarch that in preserving so precious an art he could effectually remedy the abuses of which such violent complaints were made.

Meanwhile the University exercised its right of supervision. In 1534 Christian Wechel was censured and threatened with a fine for having sold one of the works of Erasmus. The same year, on the 13th of January, Francis I. issued letters patent which prohibited all printing and exposed printers to rigorous punishment. These letters were not registered by the Parliament, which remonstrated to the king concerning so arbitrary a proceeding. A month afterwards the king’s advocate, Jacques Cappel, communicated to the Parliament new letters patent, by which Francis I. annulled the previous ones, but ordered that the Parliament should elect twenty-four persons, well qualified and cautioned, from whom he might select twelve who alone should print at Paris, and not elsewhere, “books which were approved and essential to the public welfare.” The printing of any other books was to be visited with formidable punishments.

The art of Gutenberg, however, resisted all these measures, and apparently the king did not persevere in his hostile projects, for in 1543 he exempted the printers from service in the City Guard. Two years later, nevertheless, Robert Étienne, having published an edition of the Bible which excited the wrath of the Sorbonne, found himself so persecuted that he had to retire to Lyons, whence he could not venture to return to Paris till he had obtained the protection of Henri II. A worse fate befell a Lyons printer, named Étienne Dolet, who had taken refuge in Paris. He was arrested, imprisoned in the Conciergerie, and at the end of eighteen months strangled and burned in the Place Maubert on the 3rd of August, 1546.

In 1551 Robert Étienne, seriously menaced, was forced to seek refuge at Geneva, leaving at Paris his wife and children, who might have starved had not Henri II., on the prayer of Charles Étienne, Robert’s brother, restored to them the goods of the proscribed printer. This same monarch gave a further proof of his goodwill in exempting printers, by an edict of the 23rd of September, 1553, from the taxes to which books were then liable.

In 1556 Henri decreed that a copy, printed on vellum, of every book whose publication was authorised, should be contributed to the Royal Library; and that every such copy should be magnificently bound. It is supposed to have been to Diana of Poitiers, a great bibliophile, that this decree was due.

Charles IX. showed no little favour to printing. By letters patent, dated March, 1560, he confirmed and continued to the printers all those favours, rights, privileges, liberties, exemptions, and so forth, which had been ceded by his royal predecessors. One printer, however, Martin Lhomme by name, derived small benefit from these letters patent, for in the same year, on a decree of the Parliament, he was hanged.

This printer, a native of Rouen, living at Paris in the Rue du Mûrier, was accused of having sold a book entitled “The Royal Tiger,” which was a satire directed against the Guises. He was condemned, according to the Parliamentary decree, “to be hanged and strangled on a scaffold erected in the Place Maubert, a suitable and convenient spot.” The goods of the prisoner were to be confiscated to the king, and the objectionable book was to be burned in the printer’s presence previously to his execution.

Not long afterwards, in September, 1563, an ordinance appeared which proclaimed that all printers, binders, and sellers of libellous placards and other publications should be punished, for the first offence with the whip, for the second with death. A further ordinance, issued the same month, forbade printers to put any unauthorised volume in type “under pain of being hanged and strangled.”

In spite of all these fetters the art of printing lived on and even prospered. Henri Étienne, having returned into possession of the paternal establishment, published in 1572 the four first volumes, in folio, of the Thesaurus linguæ Græcæ, a work which his father had planned, and which it took Henri eleven years to execute. This monument of literary learning was published under the auspices of several sovereigns, with Charles IX. amongst them.

In July, 1575, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine complained, in the general assembly, that the books of Ambroise Paré, first surgeon to the king, were being printed, although they contained a doctrine pernicious to the public welfare and to good morals. The dean, therefore, prayed the University to lay a petition before Parliament to the effect that the writings of this author might be examined by medical professors. Attempts were at the same time made to subject the printers of these works to a fine.

The sixteenth century had been a time of conflict for the art of printing, just as it had been for the Reformation. The subsidence of the civil wars benefited both. Hardly established on the throne, Henri IV., by letters patent, dated 20th February, 1595, confirmed to the printers their privileges, and liberated them from the taxes which, the year before, had been newly imposed upon them. At the moment of his accession he had exempted them from the duties payable for the confirmation of their ancient rights.

In 1624 a regular censorship was started by Louis XIII., who by an edict appointed four censors, chosen from the Faculty of Theology, to each of whom was accorded a salary of 500 livres, with honours, immunities, etc. The University protested against this edict, which encroached upon its secular rights. The dispute lasted long, and the four theologians resigned their office. But in 1626 the king entrusted the Guard of the Seals with the choice of censors, and the University lost this part of its privileges. Three years later Louis XIII. issued an ordinance which forbade the printing or selling of any book not inscribed with the names of the author and the printer.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were lands of refuge in which writers who feared the political laws and the despotism of their own country could always find free presses: Holland, that is to say, and Switzerland. It was in Holland that Bayle published his famous Dictionary.

The Constitution of 1791 “guaranteed” to every man “the liberty of writing, printing, and publishing his thoughts without his works being liable to any censure or inspection before their publication.” The Convention passed no law against the press. The pamphlets of the enemies of the Revolution still exist, and testify to the plenitude of the liberty enjoyed by writers at this period. Some of these, it is true, were accused of connivance with the foes of their country, and punished for that crime; but there was no question of process against the press.

The Consulate, with its strict régime, had less respect for the liberty of the pen. By a decree of 17th February, 1800, the consuls granted power to suppress those journals which published articles contrary to the welfare of society, the sovereignty of the people, or the glory of the national arms. Under the Empire new fetters were placed upon the press. In 1810 the number of printers in Paris was limited to sixty. In the following year another twenty were authorised; but, on the other hand, the censorship which had been suspended was re-established. The Restoration accorded to printers full liberty for producing works of more than twenty sheets, but maintained the censorship for smaller publications, and subjected the newspapers to royal authority.

The press had taken too great a part in the Revolution of July not to derive from it, at first, in any case, some advantage. The new Charter, in proclaiming the liberty of the press, within the limits of the law, declared that the censorship could never be re-established. Some years later, however, heavy fetters were once more placed upon the newspapers of France, though book-publishers retained their former measure of liberty.

At the period of 1835, under the monarchy of July, numerous prosecutions were instituted against the press; and the jury who tried these cases, though it often acquitted, sometimes condemned with rigour. The Republican journal, the Tribune, succumbed beneath the weight of the fines imposed on it.

The Republic of 1848 accorded to the press a liberty quite as unlimited as it now enjoys, though the free use it made of this liberty produced a reaction and new fetters in the following year.

* * * * *

The invention of printing was made the subject of a play by the unfortunate Gérard de Nerval, author of the Voyage en Orient, and of a translation of Faust which Goethe himself admired. In Gérard de Nerval’s drama figure a good angel and a demon; and when the good angel, always anxious to benefit humanity, invents printing, the demon comes forward and says: “I invent the censorship.” Of the censorship in connection with printed works some account has been given, and a few words may be added in reference to the censorship as bearing upon works written for the stage.

The dramatic censorship was established in France in the middle of the fifteenth century--that is to say, in the earliest days, of the French stage. The clerks and students classed together as “La Basoche” were forbidden to act any play or “satire” until after it had received the approval of the censor. It must be supposed that the corrections and commands of the censor were set at naught; for, thirty-four years later, an order was published forbidding the members of the Basoche to play at all, or even to ask permission to play. This was under the reign of Louis XI. Under Charles VIII. theatrical representations were again authorised, but only under rigid supervision. Louis XII. gave absolute liberty to the comedians. All kinds of personalities were permitted to dramatic writers, who, with impunity, could even attack the throne. On one point alone was Louis XII. fastidious, he objected to attacks on the honour of the queen; and for her protection in the midst of the general licence now exhibited on the stage, authors were required to “respect ladies under penalty of being hanged.” The threat was a severe one; and by reason, perhaps, of its very severity, it was never found necessary to carry it out. Under Francis I. the censorship was re-established in full force, and an order was published calling upon the players to be careful in their representations not to speak the passages which had been marked out. In 1548 the priests, who hated all theatrical performances, and looked upon stage-players as beyond the pale or the Church, procured the formal interdiction, by the Parliament, of the mediæval mysteries, into which much profanity had been introduced.

According to M. Poirson, one of the latest and best historians of Henri IV., the theatre, under his happy reign, enjoyed absolute liberty. Louis XIII., or rather his powerful minister, again introduced the censorship; and, later on, every reader of Molière knows what trouble the great comic dramatist met with at the hands of the censorship in connection with one of his masterpieces, Tartufe. Authorised by the king, the piece was interdicted by the Parliament, after its first representation, besides being condemned by a mandamus from the Archbishop of Paris; and it was not until three years after its original production that Molière obtained full permission to perform it. Louis XIV., despot as he was, hesitated, in the midst of the disputes between the Gallican Church and the Court of Rome, to interfere in a matter which his clergy had taken so deeply to heart. Molière had fresh difficulties to contend with in connection with Don Juan, which he was obliged to modify in many passages before he could obtain permission to perform it. The cynicism of the hero’s reflections was declared to be in opposition (as Molière intended it to be) to religious feeling; and the Parliament thought it impious that Sganarelle (afterwards the Leporello of Mozart) should, on seeing his master carried down to eternal torments, think of nothing but his wages and ask pathetically from whom he was to get them.

Under Louis XIV. the political side of the censorship first shows itself. In a farce played at the Théâtre Italien under the title of La Fausse Prude, Mme. de Maintenon was recognised; and when Racine, at Mme. de Maintenon’s request, composed Esther for the pupils of St. Cyr, the piece seemed full of political allusions, and everyone at Court was so convinced that Esther was Mme. de Maintenon, and Vashti Mme. de Montespan, that the performance was at last forbidden. Haman, in the proscribed piece, was thought to be the minister, Louvois, and in the persecution of the Jews a reference was seen to the cruel edicts against the Protestants. The Athalie of the same dramatic poet shared the fate of Esther, and for like reasons.

On the death of Louis XIV. Esther and Athalie were freed from the interdict which had weighed upon them, and now the picture of Judæa under its tyrannical rulers was looked upon as that of France, while in the character of Joas was seen the young king Louis XV. The censorship now became, above all, political. No allusion was to be made to a minister or to any state official, these rules being applicable to all state functionaries, whether belonging to France or not. A phrase in a comedy of this time, “From his rotundity one might take him for a president,” was condemned by the Parliament of Paris, whose president at the time was somewhat stout.

Voltaire had to take infinite trouble in order to get permission to produce his Mahomet. The official censor, Crébillon, having objected to Mahomet--in a spirit of jealousy, as Voltaire maintained--its author obtained from the Duke de Richelieu permission to entrust the censorship of the work to his friend, d’Alembert; though Crébillon, from one point of view, seems to have been not far wrong, since Mahomet, on its production as authorised by d’Alembert, excited on the part of the religious world general disapprobation, so that Voltaire, after a time, had to withdraw the piece.

The ingenious and daring measures by which Beaumarchais at last succeeded in getting removed from his Marriage of Figaro the veto pronounced upon it by King Louis XVI. have been told in another place. This brings us to the time of the Revolution, when all restrictions on personal liberty were, for a time at least, abolished. Theatrical representations were now given inside Notre Dame. On the first anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI., January 21st, 1794, was performed at the National Opera, “on behalf of, and for the people, gratis, in joyful commemoration of the death of the tyrant,” Miltiades at Marathon, the Siege of Thionville, and the Offering to Liberty. The censorship, abolished for a moment, was soon re-established under the Republic; and now stage kings and stage queens were absolutely suppressed. “Not only were they forbidden to appear on the stage,” says a writer on this subject, “but even their names were not to be pronounced behind the scenes, and the expressions ‘côté du roi,’ ‘côté de la reine,’ were changed into ‘côté jardin,’ ‘côté cour,’ which, at the theatre of the Tuileries, indicated respectively the left and right of the stage from the stage point of view. At first all pieces in which kings and queens appeared were prohibited, but the dramas of sans culottes origin were so stupid that the Republic was absolutely obliged to return to the old monarchical repertory. Kings, however, were turned into chiefs; princes and dukes became representatives of the people; seigneurs subsided into mayors, and substitutes more or less synonymous were found for such offensive words as crown, throne, sceptre, etc. The scenes of most of the new operas were laid in Italy, Prussia, Portugal--everywhere except France, where it would have been indispensable from a political, and impossible from a poetical point of view, to make the lovers address one another as ‘citoyen, and ‘citoyenne.’”

One of the reasons put forward for reintroducing the censorship under the Republic was that for a long time past the aristocracy had “taken refuge in the administration of various theatres”; whereupon it was resolved that the opera “should be encouraged and defended against its enemies.” At the same time the managers were arrested as suspicious persons, and replaced by republicans whose republicanism was beyond question.

Napoleon, determined not to tolerate opposition or even criticism in any form, was very severe in regard to the theatrical censorship. In a letter on this subject to the Minister of the Interior, he says: “You must not depend on your officials to know what the theatrical pieces submitted to you for your examination are really like. You must read them yourself, and then decide whether it would be better to permit or to forbid their representation.” Under the Restoration the censorship was not less severe than under Napoleon. The performance of Arnault’s Germanicus in 1815 had results which almost seemed to justify the censorship’s existence. So excited did the audience become, that many of them rose from their seats and fought with walking-sticks. It is from this moment that the order dates by which no walking-sticks or umbrellas must be brought into the theatre.

Towards the end of the Restoration, when the romantic school had just arisen in France, with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas as its principal champions on the stage, the censorship, without ceasing to be political and moral, gave itself literary airs, and, inspired by the calmness and moderation of the old classical school, forbade violent scenes and scenes in which ideas of death and, above all, suicide were presented. Thus, in a translation of Hamlet, the graveyard scene had to be considerably abridged.

Out of consideration for Victor Hugo, who in these early days was a royalist, and who, throughout his long life, was the foremost poet of France, the Minister of Fine Arts, M. de Martignac, consented to read all his pieces and decide upon them himself. He began with “Marion Delorme,” and authorised the representation of that fine work, when suddenly there was a change of Cabinet, and the new minister, M. de la Bourdonnaye, forbade it. Through the intervention, however, of M. Trouvé, Director of Fine Arts, permission was obtained to bring out Hernani, to which all kinds of objections had previously been made.

After the overthrow of Charles X.’s Government, in July, 1830, the censorship was absolutely abolished; but, as equally happened after the previous revolution of 1789 and the subsequent one of 1848, it was very soon re-established. In the month of August M. Guizot, Minister of the Interior, named a commission for the examination of questions connected with the liberty of the stage. “I proposed,” he says in his Memoirs, “to re-establish a serious dramatic censorship, which would defend public decency against the cynicism and greed of speculators in corruption.” It was objected to M. Guizot’s proposition that the proper course to pursue would be to allow managers full liberty of production, and to punish them by ordinary police measures if they produced anything contrary to public morals. This proposition was combated by the vain argument that to stop the representation of a piece by reason of its alleged immorality would involve managers in serious loss; as though the loss inflicted ought not to be regarded as a just penalty. Ultimately, as has already been said, the censorship was re-established, and there is no reason to suppose that for some time to come it will not still be maintained. It has been said that in France the censorship is done away with only to be introduced anew. The Belgians have shown themselves on this head more logical and more consistent. When at the time of the revolution which separated Belgium from Holland, the Chamber of Deputies of the new constitutional monarchy declared that the censorship was abolished, it added that it could “never be re-established”; and this is one of the fundamental laws of the Belgian Constitution. It cannot, that is to say, be repealed or modified unless the constitution be revised.

As always happens in France, the withdrawal of restrictions is at once followed by an abuse of the new liberty gained. All the arguments on both sides are now thoroughly known. The simplest way, however, of testing the necessity of a dramatic censorship is by examining the condition of the stage in those countries where nothing of the kind exists: Belgium, for instance, and the United States. Licentious pieces are no more represented in Brussels than in Paris; nor is any liking for them exhibited in America. Occasionally in Brussels a piece founded on some recent sensational case has been produced. Some years ago, for example, the incidents of what was known as the “Pecq murder” were represented in dramatic form. Here there was no question of morality but only of good taste; and the taste of the public being more delicate than that of the manager the performance came to an end after the second night.

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XXVII. THE HÔTEL DES INVALIDES

A Glance at its History--Louis XIV. and Mme. de Maintenon--The Pensioners--Their Characteristics and Mode of Life.

Another of the most notable buildings on the left bank of the Seine is the Hôtel des Invalides. “There is no institution more worthy of respect,” said Montesquieu, “than the Hôtel des Invalides. If I were a prince I would rather have founded this establishment than have won three battles.”

Before its institution Paris was full of old soldiers, mutilated, miserable, and begging their bread. Nevertheless, they inspired a natural and just interest as long ago as the time of Charlemagne, who assigned them to the care of the priories and abbeys. “His successors,” says M. de Chamberet in his “Histoire des Invalides,” “continued the work of charity. When all the places in the religious houses were full, assistance was given to the old soldiers, and in some cases fixed pensions. But they were for the most part in deplorable circumstances. Philip Augustus, the first of our kings who maintained a standing army, conceived the idea of creating special establishments for his old soldiers, and his grandson Saint Louis, on his return from the Crusades, carried out to a certain degree the project formed by Philip Augustus. The institution he founded was intended, however, for the reception only of men of birth who had been blinded by the burning sands of Palestine. The asylum, named Les Quinze-Vingts, was intended in fact for the blind, and in connection with its original object the name has been preserved.”

Charles VI. did nothing; nor, during the English invasion and occupation, would it have been possible to do much. Charles VII. did very little, and Louis XI. followed the example of his predecessor. Louis XII., the “father of his people,” Francis I., the “father of letters,” and Henri II., the noble husband of Catherine de Médicis, occupied themselves more or less with the fate of old and wounded soldiers. Finally, on the 28th of October, 1568, Charles IX. published a decree regulating the admission of wounded veterans to the priories and abbeys. Under various pretexts old soldiers, it would seem, had been admitted into religious houses without sufficient authority. The ecclesiastical bodies complained of having these warriors quartered upon them, and the warriors on their side complained that no provision was made for their declining years. At length the matter received the serious attention of Henri IV. Wishing to appease the ecclesiastics, but at the same time not to neglect the old soldiers with whose aid he had conquered his kingdom, he conceived the idea--which had already occurred to more than one of his predecessors--of creating a special asylum for both officers and men. In confirmation of his project, he issued an edict in April, 1600, and letters patent in January, 1605, though his death in 1610 prevented the founding of the establishment.

Far from prosecuting his idea, Marie de Médicis, now declared regent, suppressed, by an order of the Council of State, the Military Houses of Christian Charity and the House of Lourcine; and she afterwards commanded that the mutilated officers and soldiers should go, as in the past, to find shelter as recluses in the abbeys and priories liable for their maintenance.

This unsatisfactory system led to all kinds of abuses, and the complaints of the monastic brotherhoods at length assumed an absolutely violent character. Louis XIII., to put an end to such a condition of things, established, by an edict of November, 1633, under the title of “Commanderie de St. Louis,” a community in which wounded military veterans could be housed and fed for the rest of their lives. The want of funds, however, and preoccupations of one kind and another, prevented the prosecution of this scheme, which made no progress until Richelieu took it in hand and on the 7th of August, 1834, continued the work at his own expense. Unfortunately, however, just when the new institution was on the point of being inaugurated (the public sheets had pompously announced it, and a procession of the Commanderie of Saint Louis, with flag and banner, had proclaimed it in the streets) the whole thing was suddenly and unaccountably abandoned.

The old soldiers were still lamentably unprovided for when this ancient grievance forced itself upon the notice of Louis XIV. Paris was just then inundated with soldiers reduced to the last extremity, although an ordinance of the 7th of January, 1644, required them to be sent out of the town as quickly as possible, and despatched to the frontiers, where, it was said, a subsistence was assured to them. Another decree strictly forbade them to solicit alms. Both edicts, however, were in practice ignored. Some of the invalids continued to stay in Paris; others went into the provinces to carry with them disorder and scandal. In 1670 a royal edict was issued ordering the immediate construction of the Hôtel des Invalides; and, pending its completion, part of the funds set apart for it were employed for renting in the Rue du Cherche-Midi an immense house, which served as refuge for the future pensioners. It is true that the religious chapters, who had to bear a share in the expense, showed a great disinclination to pay; but Louvois, who had the matter in hand, would by no means allow them to hang back, and in 1674 the veterans were transferred to their new abode. One fine day in October the king drove up to the institution in a magnificent carriage drawn by eight white horses, and followed by numerous equipages. At two o’clock a parade of the veterans began on the esplanade, where they marched three abreast. Two soldiers, well-nigh centenarians, who had served at the battles of Arques and of Ivry, headed the procession. On a subsequent occasion Louis XIV. paid a second visit to the Invalides, accompanied by Madame de Maintenon. As soon as his carriage entered the gate, several of the veterans got in front of the body-guard forming the escort and kept them back, saying that from the moment His Majesty entered the place he should have no other guard than his old servants. Those who had defended him on the battle-field could, they declared, look after him quite well whenever he was pleased to come and visit them. A lively altercation took place on this point, and attracted the attention of the king, who, informed of what had occurred, ordered the captain of his guards to withdraw outside the building, adding that in future whenever he visited the place he would confide his person to his dear old disabled soldiers.

Just as the illustrious visitors were going away, one pensioner who was minus a limb or two approached Madame de Maintenon and presented to her a plate bearing a piece of the regulation bread surrounded with flowers. “Permit me, madam,” he said, “to beg you to taste the bread we are fed with.” The court ladies present took a bite at it and complained of it to the king, who severely reprimanded the chief official of the establishment, and ordered him to supply bread of better quality.

The building, meanwhile, was not large enough to accommodate all the pensioners who had found refuge in the different religious retreats. The least infirm, therefore, had to yield precedence to their comrades, and Louvois ordered that forty companies should be despatched to Montreuil-sur-Mer, others being sent to Havre, Abbeville, and other fortified towns. Louvois died in 1691, much lamented by the pensioners.

In 1714 the king made a last and lengthy visit to the Invalides. In his will he commended the establishment to the particular care of his successors. “The foundation of the Invalides,” says M. Monnier, “is perhaps the one act of Louis XIV. which has remained popular.” In 1716 Peter the Great visited the Hôtel des Invalides, made a detailed inspection of it, and tasted the water drunk within its walls. On his return to Russia he founded an Hôtel des Invalides at St. Petersburg.

To skip over a somewhat uneventful period to the Revolution, the home of the pensioners was on the 14th of July, 1789, seized, without resistance, by the mob, who took possession of all the guns and carried them off.

The Constituent Assembly, despite the opposition of its military committee, maintained the Hôtel des Invalides. The Convention placed it under the special surveillance of the Legislative Body and, in some particulars, ameliorated the lot of the pensioners and their families. As for Napoleon, whether as First Consul or as Emperor, he took a great interest in the Invalides, whose population he did not allow to diminish; and the same solicitude has been displayed by the more pacific governments which have succeeded him.

Ever since the building was first inhabited, the pensioners--old, indeed, but still gay of heart--have from time to time amused themselves at the expense of their sometimes too curious visitors. Chief amongst the jokes played upon such persons must be mentioned the popularly-reported one of the “invalid with the wooden head.” This traditional joke dates from almost the foundation of the institution, and a manuscript in the library of the arsenal speaks of it in these terms:--

“As people of all kinds come to visit the house, certain playful soldiers have invented a method of mystification for those whom it is easy to take in, and to whom they give information as to whatever sights of curiosity or interest the place contains. They recommend them above all not to quit the place without having seen the invalid with the wooden head. When the proposition is assented to, they indicate his corridor and his room, and, as their comrades are in the conspiracy, they make their victims perform sundry journeys through different parts of the establishment in quest of a wooden head, which they might really behold if they looked at themselves in the glass. They are sent from floor to floor and from room to room by their tormentors, who invent all kinds of explanations for his absence, such as:--‘He was here a moment ago; he has gone no doubt to get shaved, and will be back directly. Pray take a seat.’”

Unprovided, however, as the pensioners are with wooden heads, many of them, by their various forms of mutilation, afford a sufficiently curious spectacle to the crowd. Those veterans who have lost the use of both hands are termed “Manicros.” They have to be specially waited upon by their comrades, and as it is necessary to remunerate the latter for their services, a fund for the purpose has been established. There is a special table for those who, having been wounded in the jaw, cannot masticate their food. Easily digestible hashes, soups, etc., are prepared for them by the “sisters”; and their table is furnished with no niggardly regard for expense.

The death of Louis XIV. was keenly regretted by the pensioners, who sent representatives to his funeral clad in deepest mourning. The death of Louis XV., who was more beloved by his people generally, caused little sorrow at the Invalides, the pensioners viewing the funeral cortège, as it passed along, with frigid eye.

Coming to Napoleon, we find him conferring honour upon the Invalides by celebrating there the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. He wished, moreover, on this solemn occasion, to consolidate the growing institution of the Legion of Honour. A salute of several cannons from within the precincts announced the emperor’s arrival. He took his seat upon a throne. Behind him were ranged the colonels-general of the guard, the governor, and the great officers of the crown. Meanwhile the empress, accompanied by the princesses, her sisters, and her maids of honour, had been received by the grand master of the ceremonies, who had led her to his tribune.

The cardinal legate, who was to officiate, took up his position beneath a daïs to the right of the altar, the cardinal archbishop of Paris and his clergy placing themselves on the left. Behind the high altar, on an immense amphitheatre, seven hundred invalids and two hundred pupils of the Polytechnic School were already stationed, while the nave contained the great officers and the members of the Legion of Honour.

When the cardinal legate had celebrated divine service the grand chancellor was conducted to the foot of the throne, proclaimed the object of the institution of the Legion of Honour, and enumerated the duties which were incumbent upon its members. This discourse at an end, Napoleon received the oaths of each member. The decorations were borne in basins of gold, and the first one was conferred upon the emperor himself, by the hand of his brother, Prince Louis, future king of Holland.

The most remarkable member of the Legion of Honour who ever dwelt in the Hôtel des Invalides was a widow named Brulon, who, in times past, disguised in male uniform, had seen no end of military service, fighting, sometimes by her husband’s side, with distinguished valour. She had been through seven campaigns, and bore the marks of three very decided wounds. Entering the ranks in 1811, she became a corporal the following year, a sub-lieutenant by royal mandate in 1822, and a member of the Legion of Honour in 1847. She died in 1848, deeply lamented by all who knew her, none of whom had ever seen her in feminine attire.

The Invalides pensioner, although, as we have seen, he will sometimes have his joke, is, as a rule, a morose old grumbler. His tendencies are those of a recluse. Although by the rules of the hotel he has to live, eat, drink, and sleep in common with his fellow pensioners, he keeps himself aloof, seldom seeks society, and is the reverse of communicative, “garrulous old age” being a phrase hardly applicable to one who, placed amongst men with the same experiences as himself, does not find them such appreciative and inspiring auditors as persons from the world outside. His friendships, in fact, are nearly always formed with civilians, though the decree which forbade the excursion of pensioners beyond the precincts of the hotel has reduced the number and intimacy of these friendships very considerably. A second decree, issued by the Minister of War, prohibited pensioners from performing any work in public places. Previously they had been employed to guard civic monuments, and to assist at constructions and demolitions; but it was found that the money they so earned was too often spent in a manner which neither morality nor good taste could sanction.

The grounds in front of the hotel contain a large flower-bed, beyond which are a number of small gardens belonging to the pensioners, who take a great pride in them, and adorn them with a beautiful display of flowers. It is noticeable, however, that all the gardens are alike, a grotto of shells, among other characteristic objects, belonging to each. These little plots of ground, so gay with bloom in the summer, are the delight of the children who come with their parents to visit some old grandfather who has lost a limb or two in the defence of his country.

The uncommunicativeness of the pensioner is attributed by M. Monnier to his having nothing to communicate. “If you ask him for his reminiscences,” says this admirable writer, “you will be astonished to find that, much as he has seen, he has learned little and retained little.” If, for instance, he is spoken to about Egypt, he declares that he has found Egypt just like any other country. “What about the inhabitants?” says the inquirer. “The same as any other inhabitants,” is the reply. “But the costumes?” “What costumes?” “Their different costumes. How are they dressed?” “Like us--they do not go naked.” “And the pyramids--those monuments of another age--which rise heavenwards and lose themselves in the clouds?” “Same thing as occurs here--at Boulogne and Calais, by the sea shore.” The visitor gives this gentleman up and passes to another, who has been to China, and who declares that the habits of the Chinese are identical with those of the French. “But how about their temples, their pagodas?” suggests the visitor. “Do you mean their houses?” “Yes, the places where they live, and those where they pray.” “Just like our own, with doors and windows--everything the same as here.” It is fair to suppose that M. Monnier, who is nothing if not a humourist, was so amused at the manner in which some few of the old soldiers had gone through the world with their eyes shut that he found the temptation to generalise this individual characteristic a trifle too strong for him.

The first stone of the Hôtel des Invalides was laid on the 30th November, 1670. Four years afterwards the place was ready for the reception both of officers and men. The plans of the whole building, with the exception of the dome, were drawn up by Libéral Bruant, who directed the works until his death. His duties were then taken up by Mansard, who made no change in his predecessor’s design, though he proposed the addition of a dome for which he submitted plans, and which was in due time constructed.

The Hôtel des Invalides stands in view of the Seine, at the extremity of a large esplanade planted with trees. In the middle of this esplanade there used to be a fountain which, under the First Empire, surmounted the lion of St. Mark, transported from Venice. Retaken in 1814 by the Austrians, the lion was replaced by an enormous fleur-de-lis, for which the Revolution of July substituted a bust of La Fayette. Bust and fountain have both disappeared.

On the Esplanade side of the Invalides are ranged a number of cannons, forming what is called the “triumphal battery,” which sends forth a peal of thunder on the occasion of some victory or state ceremony. The pieces are served by the pensioned artillerymen. The “triumphal battery” is particularly interesting from being largely composed of all kinds of foreign guns--Austrian, Prussian, Russian, Dutch, Venetian, Algerian, and Chinese, many of them taken in action.

Behind the “triumphal battery,” screened off by a sort of stone bastion, are the little gardens cultivated by the pensioners. Farther back is the principal façade of the hotel, three storeys high, and more than 200 metres wide, surmounted by a row of attics, and pierced with 133 windows. Projecting from the façade is a forepart enclosing a large arcade, of which the tympan represents Louis XIV. on horseback, accompanied by Justice and Prudence, two divinities to whom he did not always lend an ear. This group, the work of Couston, was maltreated by the Revolution, but restored by Cartellier. On the two sides of the entrance are the statues of Mars and Minerva, likewise by Couston. At the angles formed by the forepart and the façade are pedestals supporting four figures, in bronze, of chained nations, humbling themselves at the feet of the statue raised to Louis XIV. by Marshal de la Feuillade on the Place des Victoires and overthrown in 1792. These figures are executed by Desjardins.

An adequate description of the interior of the Invalides would fill a small volume. Remarkable by its architecture, it is interesting by the military relics and trophies preserved in it. A subterranean crypt, beneath the celebrated “dome,” contains the tomb of Napoleon, whose remains were conveyed thither from St. Helena.

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XXVIII. SOME MORE PARIS HOSPITALS

The French Hospital System--The Laënnec Hospital--The Houses of Assistance--The Quinze-Vingts--Deaf and Dumb Institutions--The Abbé de l’Épée--La Charité.

The Hôtel des Invalides suggests the hospitals of Paris in general; and to the briefest possible glance at these--inasmuch as we have already given much space to the famous Hôtel Dieu--the present chapter may be devoted.

“England” says Dr. Le Fort, “opens to the poor wretch without an asylum and without bread the doors of a workhouse; France those of a prison. To be without shelter is a misfortune in England; in France it is a crime. Unable to suppress poverty, our law will tolerate no manifestation of it. ‘Mendicity,’ as many a printed notice proclaims, is forbidden in the department of the Seine.”

Dr. Le Fort maintains that the Paris poor are treated with too little sympathy by the Legislature, and seems to think that if their wants were more readily relieved, many an indigent invalid, whose health has gradually given way beneath hunger and destitution, would not have found his way into hospital.

The Paris hospitals differ from those of London on one important point. In our metropolis all such institutions are supported by private charity, enjoying nothing, or next to nothing, in the way of state subventions. They are open either to the subscribers themselves or to those whom they choose to recommend. The hospitals of Paris, on the other hand, are practically state property, entirely independent of the control of the public. They are beneath the domination of the Prefect of the Seine and the Minister of the Interior; both represented by a director fully invested with their power. Side by side with the director exists a council of superintendence, which investigates and approves, or disapproves, the acts of that director, without being legally able to prevent them; for the whole of the executive is in the hands of the chief official, who is alone responsible. The director, it should be added, is seldom or never a physician, but a member of the administrative body.

The council of superintendence consists, amongst its other members, of the Prefect of the Seine, the Prefect of Police, a Councillor of State, a member of the Court of Appeal, a Professor of the Faculty of Medicine, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and two members of the Municipal Council, with a doctor and a surgeon attached to the hospital.

The medical service of the hospitals is effected by doctors and surgeons, aided by resident and non-resident assistants, sisters of charity, etc. The doctors and surgeons are appointed by competition, and they can practise, in the case of the former, till sixty-five, in that of the latter, till sixty years of age.

As regards the conditions under which patients are admitted to the hospitals, the first of these is not, as one might suppose, that the applicant be ill, but that he or she have been resident six months in the department of the Seine. This condition, which excluded poor patients coming to Paris from the provinces for special treatment, caused some years ago a good deal of lively criticism. Complaints, too, have frequently been made of the alleged extravagance of the administration and of the architectural embellishment of Paris hospitals, to the detriment of the patients upon whom in a direct manner the funds should, it was held, have been spent. Another defect which has been much commented upon is the inability of the surgeons to assign beds, on their own authority, to sick applicants whom they have pronounced to be in need of clinical treatment. Every morning, it should be explained, gratuitous advice is given at each hospital. Those applicants whose case is serious cannot, without further preliminaries, have beds assigned to them. The physician has first to represent their condition to the administrative director, and it is within the power of this latter functionary to grant or to refuse the admission. In practice, no doubt, the recommendation of the physician is acceded to; but the formality might well become, in some instances, a mischievous one.

During the day urgent cases can be received at the hospitals on the advice of the deputy medical officers. There exists, moreover, on the Parvis of Notre Dame, under the name of “central bureau of admission,” an establishment in which, from ten a.m. to four p.m., advice may be had from able physicians. Every morning the directors of the different hospitals send to this bureau a list of their vacant beds; and the consulting physician assigns them to applicants at his discretion.

Every invalid entering a hospital loses his or her individuality to take a number. Monsieur 6 and Madame 8 are the kind of appellations by which the patients are known. After having given in his or her name, age, address, and occupation at the registration office, the patient is taken up into the ward and undressed, receiving a grey cloak in exchange for the vestments put off. It used to be complained that these cloaks were passed from one patient to another without being in any way purified, whatever diseases they might be infected with. It may be hoped that this is no longer the case.

Soon after the new patient’s arrival he is visited by the house-physician, who prescribes for him a treatment which the physician-in-chief will confirm or rectify on his daily round next morning. At five a.m. the ward-servants come on duty, and then a clatter begins, the brush and the broom being freely plied. “So much the worse,” says Dr. Le Fort, a severe critic of the Paris hospital system, “for the patient who, having passed a sleepless night, is beginning to get a little repose.” In English hospitals, however, the same turmoil reigns at the same hour, and the sufferer from insomnia is as badly off as his Parisian fellow.

From eight to nine a.m. the physician goes his round of visits, accompanied by his assistants. He passes from bed to bed, feels pulses, looks at tongues, prescribes medicines, and so forth. At ten o’clock the breakfast-hour is sounded. Large cans, containing soup and vegetables, are brought into the ward. The ward-servants, or infirmiers present to the sister a succession of tin basins, into which she serves out the precise quantity of food ordered for the patients by the doctor. The quality of the food leaves nothing to be desired. The meat supplied is the best procurable, the fish is fresh, the vegetables irreproachable; but the cooking is the reverse of satisfactory. A mutton cutlet, cooked half an hour before dinner, and put in the oven to keep hot, comes sometimes to the patient’s bedside rather like a cinder; the joints are admirable, but as it is found convenient to carve them up some time before the meal, and keep them likewise in the oven, a cut off the joint occasionally means a slice of leather. Attempts have been made from time to time by the administration to reform this style of cooking, but the reformation has not yet, in practice, been effected.

After breakfast the patient reads or walks about. From one till three o’clock on Sundays and Thursdays he may receive visits from his family. At four o’clock the evening repast is served, and at eight the night commences, all conversation, as in English hospitals, abruptly ceasing. Thenceforth the repose of the vast wards is disturbed by nothing but the snoring of sleepers, and the sighs or groans of those to whose eyelids sleep will not come. The wards would now be in total darkness but for the faint glimmer of a little lamp suspended from the ceiling.

At No. 42 in the Rue de Sèvres stood the hospital or asylum (hospice) for incurable women, founded by the charity of Marguerite Roulié, assisted by Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, Grand Almoner of France. But the institution has now been transferred to Ivry in a large building, where incurable men are also received. The house in which the original hospital for incurables was established is now occupied by the Laennec Asylum, containing upwards of 300 beds, of which nearly fifty are for surgical cases. Then there are charitable houses for sick and for convalescent children. In the Rue de Sèvres (Nos. 93 to 95) is the monastery of the priests of the mission of St. Lazare, which, since 1816, has occupied the mansion of the Duc de l’Orges.

The chapel dedicated to St. Vincent de Paul, founder of the Lazarists, contains the relics of the saint, which were transferred to their present abode on the 29th of April, 1830. Seventeen bishops, with all the clergy of Paris and of the diocese, took part in the ceremony. The brothers of the Christian schools, also the sisters of Charity and of the Foundlings, assisted; in all upwards of 10,000 persons. This was for the Parisians the great event of the spring of the year 1830, which, however, in the month of July was to witness a manifestation of a very different character: the Revolution that brought Louis Philippe to the throne.

At the right corner of the Avenue of the Invalides stood, up to the time of the Revolution of 1789, a country house belonging to the sculptor Pigalle. The congregation of Notre Dame des Chanoinesses Régulières de Ste. Augustine, founded there towards 1820 a house of education, which has remained celebrated under the name of the Convent of the Birds. Beyond the Boulevard Montparnasse, which branches off at this point towards the Boulevard des Invalides, is the House of the Infant Jesus, founded in 1751 by the zeal of the Abbé Languet, Curé of St. Sulpice, by the liberality of the Marquise de Lassay, and under the patronage of Queen Marie Lesczinska, in favour of thirty poor and noble young ladies; to become in 1802 a hospital for sick children. Here the mortality is at the rate of two out of eleven, which is almost twice the average mortality in the hospitals for adults. “The idea of creating a special hospital for children,” said Professor Bouchardat, “excellent at first sight, is fatal for the unhappy ones who are admitted.” Contagious diseases spread, as a matter of fact, with particular rapidity among children. To counteract this evil the Hospice des Enfants Malades has been provided with a garden, 31,000 square metres in extent, so as to permit as much as possible the isolation of the little patients.

Besides the inmates of the Paris hospitals a great number of out-patients receive treatment within their walls.

An important institution in Paris, to which we have practically no counterpart in England, is one for the nursing of the indigent poor at their homes. It is admirably organised, and has done a great deal of inestimable work; and Dr. Le Fort is as proud of it as he seems ashamed of the Paris hospitals.

On the 25th of May, 1791, the municipality of Paris was charged by the administration with the distribution amongst the different parishes of the funds raised for the poor. On the 5th of August a municipal “Commission of Benevolence” was formed to consider the best method of administering aid to the indigent; and it is to this commission that the creation of the “offices of benevolence” is due. At the present time these offices relieve some twenty Paris mayoralties, besides freeing the hands of the hospital administration. Each office consists of the mayor of the arrondissement, as president; two assistants, twelve administrators, an unlimited number of commissionaires and sisters of charity, and a secretarial treasurer. Attached to each office are physicians and surgeons, midwives, etc. The scheme comprises, in each arrondissement, two or three “houses of assistance” where the poor come to seek aid for their sick friends, and where patients inscribed on the list of the indigent may have gratuitous consultations, medicine, and so forth. Fifty-three such houses are distributed over the capital.

Any poor or necessitous person wishing to be nursed at home through this organisation applies in person or by deputy to the office in his particular arrondissement, and if his case proves to be one requiring medical aid, the doctor attached to his section is instructed to visit him.

Dr. Le Fort draws a very strong contrast indeed between the Paris hospitals and the “houses of assistance.” The former institutions he declares to be, as a whole, the “most defective and murderous in Europe”; the latter, a “title to glory” for the city of Paris. He attributes the difference to the fact that the medical element is eliminated from the direct administration of the hospitals, but allowed its proper sway in the “benevolence” system. Certainly, one advantage of this system is that it strengthens those family ties which a long residence in hospital relaxes and too often breaks.

In connection with the hospitals and relief institutions of Paris must be mentioned the National Institution for Blind Children, founded just after the Revolution by Louis XVI., before the Republican form of government had been definitely adopted. Its initiator was Valentine Hauy, the mineralogist, to whom a statue has been erected in the principal courtyard. The Institution for Blind Children is one of the ten general establishments of benevolence conducted under the immediate authority of the Minister of the Interior by a responsible director, assisted by a consultative commission. The instruction given is (according to a writer on the subject who evidently does not set too high a value on music) “technological, musical, and intellectual.” Employment is found for the children on the completion of their studies.

The house of the strangely named Quinze Vingts is designed for the reception of 300 blind persons of both sexes, each with his own private apartments for himself, or himself and family, together with many other advantages as well in money as in kind. Attached, moreover, to this institution are 1,300 outside pensioners in all parts of the country, receiving assistance in money according to the class to which they have been assigned: 200 francs, 150 francs, and 100 francs.

The origin of the Quinze-Vingts, or Fifteen-Twenties, is lost in obscurity. Hence all sorts of contradictory stories and conjectures without foundation, substituted for positive documents. According to some authors St. Louis, on his return from Palestine, founded the establishment of the Fifteen-Twenties for 300 knights--the sad remains of his army.

But the writers of the time make no mention of this alleged fact, and the ordinances of St. Louis contain no sort of reference to it. The legend of the 300 knights must therefore be regarded as a fable. It is certain meanwhile that the blind asylum dates from an epoch anterior to the reign of St. Louis, though it is quite true that this pious monarch, by his patronage and his liberality, became the real founder of the house.

The Fifteen-Twenties forming a mendicant corporation, subsisting by alms, and belonging body and soul to their own Order, were first established in the Rue St. Honoré, not far from the Tuileries. They remained there under the constant patronage of numerous and powerful protectors until 1779, in which year Louis XVI. transferred the asylum to the ancient residence of the Black Musketeers in the Rue de Charenton. Its revenues already amounted to more than 370,000 livres (i.e. francs). The constitution of the hospital was then modified, collections in the churches were forbidden, and mendicancy in the streets likewise. At the same time regular pensions were introduced.

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Towards the gate of a modest edifice situated in the Rue St. Jacques, near the Luxemburg Garden, may daily be seen visitors attracted to this point from all quarters of France and even of the globe. The building they wish to enter was, until 1794, the seat of the minor seminary of St. Magloire, belonging to the Archbishop of Paris. In this year he ceded the house to the deaf and dumb institution, which, founded in 1760 by the Abbé de l’Épée in his own domicile, Rue des Moulins, was, just after the Revolution, raised to the dignity of a national establishment and transferred to the ancient monastery of the Célestins near the Arsenal. The national institution of the Rue St. Jacques, which still exists and which is under the direction of the Minister of the Interior, contains some 210 pupils of from seven to fourteen years. The school comprised, until lately, two divisions entirely separate and distinct, one for boys, the other for girls, when suddenly the girls of the Paris institution were sent to the institution of Bordeaux, and the boys of the Bordeaux school to that of Paris, so that at present, wherever they may have been born, the deaf and dumb boys are all at Paris, while the deaf and dumb girls are all at Bordeaux. Professor Ferdinand Berthier, of the Paris deaf and dumb school, himself deaf and dumb, maintained, in an article published some five-and-twenty years ago, that this pretended reform was no amelioration whatever; the deaf and dumb children studying perfectly well when the boys and girls were educated together under the same professors. At that time the Paris institution was administered by a director with the use of speech, assisted by an examiner of studies, similarly gifted, and a body of professors, some of whom spoke, while others were deaf and dumb.

One of the best private deaf and dumb institutions in France is at Lyons. It contains a good number of pupils of both sexes, and its director is, or was until recently, M. Claudius Forestier, a very distinguished deaf-mute; his wife, a highly educated person--the speech-endowed daughter of the deaf-mute founder of the school--acting as directress.

The number of deaf-mutes in France has been approximately estimated at 25,000; and here, as in nearly all countries where statistics are published, it is found that the male sufferers are decidedly more numerous than the female.

To each establishment, public or private, workrooms are attached, conducted by competent instructors, and in which all the pupils, poor or rich, serve an apprenticeship to some profession, art, or trade which will one day enable them to earn a subsistence. No longer, therefore, is the community encumbered by deaf and dumb idlers; the men and women thus afflicted leading active lives as shoemakers, dressmakers, tailors, sempstresses, locksmiths, compositors and even painters and sculptors.

It has been complained that the deaf and dumb institutions of France--about fifty in number--are insufficient for the instruction of 25,000 deaf-mutes, many of whom must consequently be deprived of instruction in those employments for which they are generally as apt as their neighbours who can speak and hear.

The question of the hereditary nature of muteness has been a good deal discussed by French experts. “Dumbness,” says Ferdinand Berthier, “far from being a necessary result of deafness, simply follows the latter by reason of a natural sequence. Whether deaf-muteness dates from birth or from some accident, it has been proved in the present day that the vocal apparatus of the deaf-mute and that of a speaking person are with rare exceptions equally well organised. A prejudice still too widely spread in the world, and worthy of every effort towards its destruction, is that deaf-muteness is infallibly transmitted from father or mother to child; when on all sides we see deaf-mutes, married between themselves or to speaking spouses, constantly producing children who both hear and speak, and in no way share the parental infirmity. Those arts which have enabled the sublimest efforts of genius to dazzle the world do not, in our opinion, merit greater attention from scholars and philosophers than the method which shall open to the deaf-mutes a road leading to intellectual labour and to the full enjoyment of civil and political rights.”

Looking back to antiquity, this excellent writer points out that the ancients regarded the education of deaf-mutes as an impossibility both physical and moral.

It was the custom at Sparta to allow children suffering from this double infirmity to die of hunger and thirst in the desert, where they were for that purpose exposed; and the laws of Solon were on this point no less severe. Aristotle, if he did not precisely justify the rigour of such laws, at least endorsed the moral prescription. In the fourth book of his History of Animals he unhesitatingly relegates deaf-mutes to the rank of idiots, declaring them hopelessly beyond all tuition. The Republic of Rome did not show itself more humane. It was in vain that intelligence beamed in the face of these unhappy victims: if their tongue could produce no sound they were condemned to be flung into the Tiber.

One of the earliest agents in the removal of this weight of infamy from the fraternity of deaf-mutes was, curiously enough, the stage. Lucian eulogises the pantomime of the dumb-show actors of his epoch, and the admirable influence they exercised in raising the deaf and speechless above general contempt. The Egyptians and Persians, more civilised and enlightened in this respect than Sparta, Athens, or Rome, showed for their deaf-mutes a solicitude which approached devotion.

In centuries less remote many efforts have from time to time been made by philosophers and philanthropists to invent an effectual method of instructing deaf-mutes. The sign method of the Abbé de l’Épée was one of the first great steps in this direction. The abbé held that the old-fashioned dactylology was insufficient, and that signs were essential to those who could neither hear nor speak. Starting from the incontestable principle that the bond existing between ideas and sounds which strike the ear is not more intimate, more natural, than the bond between ideas and traced characters which strike the eye, he found it by no means difficult to demonstrate the possibility of fully replacing speech, in the case of a deaf-mute, by mimicry.

As regards this mimicry, M. Berthier cautions people against the common mistake of confounding it with dactylology, or the language of the fingers. Dactylology is confined to the servile reproduction of the letters of the alphabet of any particular language, one by one, syllable by syllable, word by word, or in no matter what other conventional manner. Mimicry, a faithful picture of human thought, paints ideas and sentiments in a living language--the innate language of all nations--the language of humanity. By means of it thoughts are exchanged more quickly than by speech or writing--not to mention dactylology, which lags so far behind.

In the midst of his brilliant triumphs the Abbé de l’Épée had frequently to engage in conflict with two classes of powerful adversaries: the philosophers and the theologians; the former regarding words as the only vehicle for imparting metaphysical ideas, the latter regarding them as the sole means of inculcating supernatural religious truths.

Louis XVI. had granted the abbé out of his own privy purse an annual pension of 6,000 francs, in addition to his official appointment at the Célestins. Hitherto the school had, for twelve years, been maintained entirely at the cost of the founder, aided by such occasional alms as he received for the purpose. It was at the Célestins in 1789 that he expired, amid the weeping of his pupils and with the delightful thought that his work would not perish with him.

Amongst the disciples of the Abbé de l’Épée must be mentioned the Abbé Sicard, canon of Bordeaux, whom the archbishop of that town sent to Paris, where he had founded a deaf-mute institution, in order that he might study under de l’Épée that method of which there was so much talk. The high talents of this young priest soon enabled him to divine, comprehend, and complete the thought of his master in exciting the warm sympathies of the public towards those unfortunate persons whose tongue was tied and whose ear was stopped.

On the death of de l’Épée, Sicard competed for and was unanimously awarded the management of the abbé’s institution. Having already written not a little on the subject of deaf-muteness, he now published other works, “A Deaf-mute’s Course of Instruction,” among others, which only served to increase his renown; though in this treatise there was indeed one highly objectionable assertion concerning the condition of a deaf-mute which the author found it necessary to retract in his “Theory of Signs.”

During the Revolution of 1793 the Abbé Sicard did not escape persecution. Flung into prison after the eventful 10th of August, he was lucky enough to keep his head on his shoulders during the massacres of September. He had scarcely been set at liberty when, as editor of the Catholic Annals, he was condemned to transportation to Cayenne; and he passed the next two years of his life in flight far from his beloved institution, of which he did not resume the direction till after the Revolution of the 18th “Brumaire.” He died in 1822.

Among the professors whom he formed must be mentioned a speech-endowed one named Bébian, who in his turn trained several deaf-mute professors. His works are still consulted with advantage both in France and abroad by those who wish to devote themselves to this arduous method of instruction. The object he kept before him in writing was, as he himself expressed it at the commencement of one of his books, “to simplify the method and render it so easy that the mother of a family can teach her deaf-mute child to read just as she teaches the others to speak.”

Oblivion had already seemed too long to have overspread the remains of the Abbé de l’Épée when, in 1837, on the initiative of M. Berthier, a numerous and distinguished committee was formed for the purpose of raising to the clerical philanthropist a monument worthy of him in that chapel of the church of St. Roch which belonged to his family, and in which he was accustomed to celebrate mass, assisted by deaf-mutes. It was here indeed that his ashes lay. An admirable sculptor, M. August Préault, was unanimously chosen to interpret the homage which so many famous deaf-mutes and others wished to pay to the abbé’s memory, and he worthily carried out the intentions both of committee and subscribers. Eight years afterwards, in 1845, a crown of laurels in bronze was placed beside the monument with this simple inscription: “To the Abbé de l’Épée, from the Swedish deaf-mutes.” This crown, beautifully executed, was likewise the work of Préault. The year previously the same sculptor had testified his own admiration of the abbé by contributing to the Hôtel de Ville a fine statue of him. The town of Versailles, which was proud of being the birthplace of the great founder of the deaf-mute institution, could not do less than follow the example set by Paris in voting to his memory a statue, which was confided to the chisel of M. Michant. The same artist was subsequently commissioned by the Count de Montalivet, then intendant-general of the civil list, to execute a bust of the abbé for the historic gallery of Versailles.

The Paris hospitals are not, like ours, supported by voluntary contributions. Many of them have from the beginning been richly endowed. Others depend on grants from the State or from the Municipality; while a few are maintained from mixed sources. None of them, however, depend, as in England, on subscriptions and donations received periodically from charitable persons. Consequently, applicants for relief or advice need neither letters of recommendation nor introductions of any kind. Medical succour is given at certain hours to all who choose to ask for it. Patients seeking admission and regular attendance have sometimes to wait for their turn. But there are, in proportion to the population, quite as many beds at the service of the sick in Paris as in London.

Of the most ancient and most famous of all the French hospitals--the Hôtel Dieu--mention has already been made. Scarcely less celebrated, in view of the important services they have rendered and of the many physicians and surgeons of eminence who have lectured, operated, and prescribed within their walls, are the two hospitals named after those divine qualities Charity and Pity.

The Hospital of La Charité is the principal one on the left bank of the Seine; nor is its position likely to be forgotten by those who have heard of the famous professor of surgery--Lisfranc--and his attacks upon the illustrious Dupuytren, head of the Hôtel Dieu, whom Lisfranc, in his highly polemical lectures, used habitually to describe as “ce brigand de l’autre côté de l’eau.” Lisfranc had doubtless differed with his eminent rival on some slight theoretical point, for which reason he accused him, with a vehemence which Molière’s own doctors might have envied, of mental perturbations and moral offences in no way attributable to him.

No less than three benevolent institutions have been founded in Paris under the name of Charity--the Hôpital de la Charité Chrétienne, endowed and opened by Marguerite de Provence, widow of Louis IX., but destined in the course of ages to disappear; the Maison de la Charité, founded by the town of Paris at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the aid of Francis I., against epidemics, afterwards to become known as the Maison de la Santé; and finally, the Hôpital de la Charité, already referred to, which remains one of the first medical and surgical institutions in Paris.

The origin of La Charité and its history up to the time of the Revolution are sufficiently curious. A hospital was founded at Grenada in 1540 by St. John of God, who became the chief of a religious order which occupied itself specially with the care of the sick. This congregation of hospitallers spread rapidly throughout Europe, and a certain number of its members being, in 1602, at Paris, Marguerite de Valois, the divorced wife of Henry the Fourth, who in her old age, when her passions had somewhat subsided, became religious, enabled them to establish a hospital, to which the name of La Charité was given. The brothers of the Order of St. John of God had already a place of their own, which they gave up in order to take possession of the larger premises placed at their disposal by Queen Marguerite. A capacious house, surrounded by vast gardens, was the first home of La Charité. Here patients were received and treated by the brethren, who, besides religion, had studied medicine, surgery, and pharmacy. Their vows did not allow them to admit women, and their utility seems to have been further limited by insufficient knowledge of the art of healing; and this notwithstanding the fact that several of the brethren made themselves a great name as surgeons and physicians. In the early part of the eighteenth century they joined to their staff medical men from the ranks of the laity; compelled to this step by an edict from the Parliament of Paris which ordered them to admit, without salary, a surgeon-apprentice to help them in dressing wounds, and a master-surgeon to share their labours generally. Throughout the eighteenth century they found themselves constantly exposed to attacks from the members of the various medical and surgical guilds, who claimed the sole right of attending the sick and wounded.

In 1792, three years after the outbreak of the Revolution, the different religious congregations were broken up, and the Hospital of La Charité was placed under the direction of the Municipality of Paris. The very title was abolished, and instead of Hôpital de la Charité--beautiful and suggestive name!--it was now called, without the least significance, Hôpital de l’Unité. Under the Restoration, however, its old name was given back to it; and since then, under many changes of government, it has retained its original appellation.

Among the other hospitals of Paris the most important are those of La Pitié and of St. Louis, to which may be added L’Hôpital du Midi, and a number of special hospitals, such as the one known as La Maternité, founded in 1795, which is at once a school for the instruction of wet-nurses, and a maison d’accouchement, or lying-in hospital.

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