XXIX. LUNATIC ASYLUMS AND MIXED INSTITUTIONS…

XXIX. LUNATIC ASYLUMS AND MIXED INSTITUTIONS

The Treatment of Lunacy in the Past--La Salpêtrière--Bicêtre--The Story of Latude--The Four Sergeants of La Rochelle--Pinel’s Reforms--Charenton.

Our description of the hospitals and asylums of Paris would be scarcely complete without some mention of the public madhouses. In pre-revolutionary Paris no special establishment for the treatment of the insane existed. Strange as it may seem, there were no lunatic asylums in France until the beginning of this century; nor until 1838 was any such institution formally recognised by law. We have not far to go back to find the demented treated as criminals, or exorcised as demoniacs, or put to death as magicians and sorcerers. Mr. H. C. Burdett, who has recently published a work on the hospitals and asylums of the world, divides the history of lunatics and their treatment into four periods.

I. An early period when, at the beginning of the Christian era, the insane were brought together and placed under intelligent control.--In this connection Mr. Burdett cites the rules given for the treatment of lunatics by Aretæus (A.D. 80) and Soranus (A.D. 95). The latter, in particular, gave directions of great minuteness as to the temperature and furniture of the rooms, the arrangements of the bed, the physical and mental exercises to which the patients afflicted with dementia were to be subjected. The superintendents, according to the rules of this period, were to have strict instructions to repress the errors of the patients in such a way as not to exasperate them by too much sharpness, and yet not permit them, by too much weakness, to increase their unreasonable demands. Subsequent writers deal with insanity in a like spirit of enlightenment down to Paulus Ægineta (A.D. 650).

II. The period of slaughter.--In the Middle Ages the treatment of lunatics was worthy only of the ages characterised as dark. A madman was worse treated than a mad dog. For twelve centuries lunatics were commonly put to death, and in most cases by burning at the stake. In France alone twenty thousand are said to have been burnt in a hundred years; and the same thing went on in every other country. Those who were not burnt wandered at large in a wretched condition, to die at last from exposure; or they were confined in dungeons, starved and cruelly maltreated. Ambrose Paré, the celebrated French surgeon, medical attendant of Francis I., fully believed that lunatics were possessed by the devil. “They may often be seen,” he says, “to change into goats, asses, dogs, wolves, crows, and frogs; they cause thunder and lightning, lift castles into the air, and fascinate the eye.” King Louis XIV. has been much reproached since his death as he was adulated during his lifetime. To him, in any case, is due the first movement against the cruel--the absolutely insane treatment of the insane. In 1670 a trial took place in Normandy which ended in the condemnation of seventeen people to the stake, either as lunatics or as sorcerers. A rat, it was sworn, had been seen talking to a child; and on the strength of this evidence everyone who could be brought into connection with the strange incident was sentenced to death. The king was indignant, and soon afterwards a decree was published forbidding trials of the kind in future.

III. The period of torture.--Though no longer subject to death punishment by fire, lunatics were almost as badly off in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century as at an earlier time. Such asylums as existed in France and other countries up to the present century were entirely of a monastic kind; and it was not, as before mentioned, until the reign of Louis Philippe that any regular secular institution for the treatment of the insane was founded. The unhappy lunatics were probably happiest in those countries where least notice was taken of them; for not a century ago they were liable, when “cared for,” to copious bleeding, shower-baths, sudden frights, and rigid coercion. In some places they were chained and flogged at the changes of the moon, or they were placed under the charge of criminals, who set dogs on them and tortured them to death. The doctors, instead of checking these barbarities, encouraged them; and from time to time invented new ones. They it was who introduced the “circular swing” and “bath of surprise.” One torture, diabolically devised, was to lower the patient into a well, chain him there, and allow the water to rise gradually to his mouth in order to give a shock to his nerves. An unhappy man named Norris was in England, at the so-called Hospital of Bethlem, fixed to the wall by the neck and waist so that he could not move a foot or raise his arms; and, thus attached, he remained for twelve years.

“At an epoch not far distant from our own,” says Dr. Linas in a paper on lunatic asylums in France, “demented persons were, with the exception of those who found an asylum in the monasteries, treated as vagabonds and even criminals.”

The first attempts to improve the condition of the unhappy lunatic were made by Dr. Tenon, and by a member of the Constituent Assembly, M. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, in 1791. A year later Pinel, equally estimable for his philanthropic and for his scientific spirit, introduced at Bicêtre the reforms which, in common with the two excellent men before named, he had long been meditating. For the First Revolution, then, with all its mad excesses, must be claimed the honour of having introduced in modern times the humane treatment of the insane. The Revolution, indeed, opened not only a “career to talent,” but a path to very useful reform. The mad patients were now taken from the Hôtel Dieu and other hospitals to be placed at Charenton, Bicêtre, and La Salpêtrière (1802-1807). From that time these asylums, placed under the direction of eminent medical men, changed their character. The employment of force or coercion with lunacy was at an end; and the new establishments, thanks to the intelligence and zeal of Esquirol, Ferrus, and their disciples, gained the highest reputation throughout Europe. The study of mental maladies was now for the first time followed.

It was not, however, until 1838 that Charenton became a lunatic asylum and nothing else. Bicêtre and La Salpêtrière remained hybrid institutions, half hospitals, half asylums; receptacles alike for madness and old age. The inmates of Charenton are treated with the greatest kindness. Cases of insubordination must of course be dealt with; and they are treated by the withdrawal of some favour or (less humanely, as it would seem to the lay reader) by the shower-bath. A strait-jacket, with long sewn-up sleeves, is the only means of coercion employed with violent and dangerous madmen, so as to preserve them against the excesses of their own fury and to render it impossible for them to injure their companions. The wards of the unruly patients--broad and lofty, well lighted, well ventilated, with waxed floors--present no resemblance whatever to the cages of former days.

All patients without exception, peaceful or unruly, are in the enjoyment of fresh air, sunlight, space, and as much liberty as can be prudently allowed them. They correspond with their relatives and receive visits from their family and their friends. Once a month they are officially visited by a magistrate, whose duty it is to question them and listen to their complaints. For the men there are workshops of all kinds, for the women workrooms. The dormitories are well kept, the dining rooms are exquisitely clean, and for the recreation of the patients there are billiard rooms, drawing rooms, and libraries. Music, too, and drawing may be cultivated. During the summer there are excursions to the country, during the winter evening parties, concerts, and dramatic representations. Among the inmates persons of every age, every rank, and every profession are to be found: some of them monomaniacs, harmless dreamers after an impossible chimera or vain hope; or it may be obstinately attached to some wild idea which they cannot refer to without expressions of violence. The liberal professions are largely represented at Charenton, and, due numerical proportion being observed, furnish more lunatics than any other class. “Paris,” says Dr. Linas, “the great rendezvous of every kind of ambition, every kind of vanity, every presumption, every passion, every pleasure, and every form of misery, furnishes a larger contingent than any other part of France.” While the proportion of lunatics for the other departments is one to from 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants, it is in the ratio of one to 500 for the department of the Seine. In 1801 this department had 946 lunatics to support, in 1845 2,595, in 1851 3,060, and in 1865 4,388. Happily, however, largely as the numbers will be seen to have swelled, a great many cures are yearly effected. In the year last-named 389 patients (154 men and 224 women) were discharged sane from Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière.

There are two modes of admission to these asylums. The Prefect of the Seine authorises the admission of harmless patients on the demand of those patients’ friends; but lunatics who are considered dangerous to the community--and these form by far the greater proportion--are shut up by order of the Prefect of Police.

Let us take a leisurely glance at the two great French lunatic asylums. To begin with La Salpêtrière. It is situated on the 13th arrondissement, almost at the entrance to the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, and not far from the Jardin des Plantes and the Bridge of Austerlitz. On the pediment of its portal is this inscription: “Hospital for old age--Women.” Such has been the official title of the institution since 1823, but the more ancient and popular name, that of La Salpêtrière, has prevailed in common use.

At the spot which is occupied by this madhouse there stood in the reign of Louis XIII. a little arsenal called La Salpêtrière, on account of the saltpetre which was made within its walls. In 1656 appeared an edict of Louis XIV. ordering the establishment at this point of a general hospital for the “poor mendicants of the town and suburbs of Paris.” Thanks to the royal munificence, to the liberality and generous co-operation of Cardinal Mazarin, of the Duchess d’Aiguillon, and several notable citizens, to the pious zeal of Vincent de Paul, and to the active direction of the architects Levau, Bruant, Duval, and Le Muet, the various buildings of the arsenal were happily converted into a retreat for the poor, two new blocks, those of Mazarin and St. Claire, being added to the original structures. From the 7th to the 13th of May, 1657, the hospital opened its doors to 628 poor women, blind, mad, and imbecile, infirm, invalid, deaf, or otherwise afflicted, as well as to 192 children of from two to seven years of age, who, born in many cases out of wedlock, had been exposed and abandoned.

In 1669 the church was built by the king’s orders. Towards 1684 was constructed in the centre of the hospital the prison of La Force, where women of irregular life were incarcerated. In 1756 the Marchioness de Lassay caused to be constructed at her own expense the superb building which bears her name, and which forms a pendant to that of Mazarin.

At the period last mentioned La Salpêtrière still contained, as at its origin, the most strangely mixed population that could be conceived. At the end of the last century, and more particularly at the beginning of the present, efforts were made to transform this “frightful sewer,” as Camus called it. From 1801 to 1804 La Force was evacuated. Its feminine inhabitants transferred to Lourcine, the children went to the Orphelins; the insane were separated from the infirm and placed in a special quarter. From 1815 to 1823, in virtue of a very strong report drawn up by M. de Pastoret, the dungeons of La Salpêtrière were destroyed, the sanitation improved, the dormitories enlarged and well ventilated, the furniture renewed, and the diet improved. Finally, as if to efface all memory of the past, the asylum received the name of Hospital for Old Age. Other subsequent ameliorations, notably those effected in 1836, 1845, 1848, and 1851, have contributed to render La Salpêtrière what it certainly is in the present day--the finest institution of the kind in France.

The total population of the establishment is no less than 5,000, comprising as it does some 800 employés, 1,500 lunatics, and nearly 3,600 patients, old or infirm. The annual expenses amount to nearly two million francs. Within the precincts of La Salpêtrière the visitor might fancy himself in a small town. There is a church, a letter box, a tobacco shop, a butcher’s shop, warehouses, wash-houses, and a market, or rather bazaar, where all sorts of goods are retailed, such as fruit, vegetables, sweetmeats, and pastry; there are streets named after the establishments to which they lead--Laundry Street, Kitchen Street, Church Street, and so on; there are large promenades and pretty gardens, together with courts, squares, and “places” bearing the illustrious name of a founder, a benefactress, a physician, or a saint immortalised by charity.

This vast community of indigence and madness is under the control of the general administration of Public Assistance. The local management is in the hands of a director, assisted by a steward and eleven clerks. The medical officers are seven in number, five for the insane and two for the infirm; not to mention a surgeon, a dispensing chemist, and other medical assistants. The religious services are conducted according both to the Catholic and the Protestant ritual. The staff of female attendants is divided up into superintendents, under-superintendents, household servants, etc. The superintendents and under-superintendents wear a black uniform, severe but in good taste. They are women carefully chosen, able, devoted, of tried zeal, benevolent character, and not infrequently of mental culture.

Before the principal entrance to La Salpêtrière, looking towards the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, is a more or less triangular open space, which, almost deserted during five days of the week, is animated and noisy like a fair every Thursday and Sunday between the hours of twelve and four; for the public is then admitted to see the inmates, and the wandering dealers have assembled in order to sell presents for the unfortunate patients. The two porters of the establishment have on these days enough to do, since the number of visitors averages from 1,200 to 3,000.

Before entering the hospital the church is worthy of observation. Louis XIV. ordered it to be built in December, 1669, and it was constructed by the celebrated architect, Levau. It is of octagonal form, and like the ancient basilicas, of which the model is preserved by the Greek Church in Russia and elsewhere, it is surmounted by five cupolas: a central one, beneath which stands the high altar, and four lateral ones covering an equal number of chapels.

Under the portico are two allegorical groups by the famous sculptor, Etex. The interior of the church is adorned with ancient organs, statues of Christ and of the twelve apostles, and a number of pictures belonging to the eighteenth century, some of which should not hastily be passed by. Every Sunday nearly three hundred demented women assist with the greatest devotion at the celebration of mass. On the buildings and wings to the right and left of the church are engraved the names of the most illustrious and most generous benefactors of the Salpêtrière: Mazarin, Bellièvre, Fouquet, and Lassay.

Administratively and medically the Salpêtrière is divided into five compartments, which are subdivided into quarters or sections. The old people, the incurables, the infirm, form three separate classes. The principal wards bear the names of Mazarin, Lassay, St. Jacques, St. Léon, and Ste. Claire. There are smaller wards which are dedicated to the Virgin, to St. Vincent de Paul, the guardian angel, and St. Magdalen.

The patients are allowed three meals a day: between seven and eight a breakfast of bread and milk; between eleven and twelve, soup and boiled beef; between four and five, a plate of vegetables and then dessert. Those who are well enough, to the number of 850, take their meals in the refectory; the others, upwards of 1,700, are served in the dormitories. The annual mortality among the indigent inmates averages 23 per cent. At the time Dr. Linas wrote his paper on La Salpêtrière there were several examples of longevity in the institution, including a certain Madame Mercier, who was well and lively at 104.

The department which occupies the southern extremity of La Salpêtrière is the one specially devoted to lunatics. Placed at the head of the establishment in 1795, Pinel introduced at this hospital the same beneficent reforms with which he had already endowed Bicêtre. He at once did away with the chains, fetters, and irons with which, until his time, the patients were loaded, and he filled up the subterranean dungeons in which unhappy women, half naked, had often had their feet gnawed by rats, or frozen by the cold of winter. From 1818 to 1836 Esquirol, pupil, disciple, and friend of Pinel, introduced new modifications to soften the lot of the deranged.

Connected with La Salpêtrière are many interesting traditions. During its earliest days St. Vincent de Paul ministered constantly to the patients. Here Bossuet, on the 29th of June, 1657, pronounced his panegyric on St. Paul, one of the masterpieces of Christian eloquence. Here was confined in 1788 the mysterious personage calling herself Madame de Donhault, whose identity has never been established, and who is known in judicial annals as the “WOMAN WITHOUT A NAME,” or “THE SHAM MARCHIONESS.” Here, too, was shut up the widow and accomplice of the famous poisoner, Desrues, massacred with thirty-five other prisoners on the 4th of September, 1792. Two other women who played in the world two very different parts died at La Salpêtrière: Théroigne de Méricourt, at the age of fifty-seven, after eighteen years of wild illusions, and Mdlle. Quino.

The Salpêtrière has been the cradle of important physical and psychological studies in connection with brain diseases. These have sometimes taken a slightly fantastic form, as when Esquirol and his nephew, Dr. Miture, endeavoured to cure madness by the most agreeable remedies--the former prescribing music, the latter champagne. Rostan and Georget in 1822 made at La Salpêtrière experiments in animal magnetism, which attracted much attention in the scientific world, especially as regards two subjects, now well known in the history of somnabulism: the young Petronilla, and the widow Brouillard, nicknamed Braquette, whose clairvoyance was some years later put to a delicate test by three mischievous house surgeons, MM. Dechambre, Diday, and Debrou. A number of interesting and very important experiments in the new science (or old science under a new name) of hypnotism have been made by Charcot and his pupils at this institution. Here, too, a close examination and analysis of the cerebral manifestations of the insane led some subtle anatomist to the conclusion that genius was but a form of insanity. There was one physician of La Salpêtrière, M. Lélut, member of the Chamber of Deputies, and of the Institute, who, in two remarkable works, endeavoured to prove that in the minds of Socrates and of Pascal there was, at least, a touch of madness. Another learned physician, attached during the Louis Philippe period to the Salpêtrière, M. Trélat--described by Dr. Linas as “an excellent man, ex-minister, and not a member of the Legion of Honour”--wrote a book, which may be classed with the one just named, on “Lucid Madness.”

Bicêtre, an asylum of the same character as La Salpêtrière, derives its name from the familiar Winchester. On the site of Bicêtre, in the year of grace 1284, Jean de Pontoise, Bishop of Winchester, built near Paris a manor house, which, after the name of his see, he called Winchester, soon corrupted into Wicester, which, by a further process of corruption, became successively Bicestre and Bicêtre. After going through various hands, and at last passing into the king’s possession, Bicêtre was given in 1656 by Louis XIV. to be turned into a hospital for old men above the age of seventy, lame and incurable children, the blind, the paralytic, the imbecile, and the epileptic, together with women of dissolute life, who were to be received only on condition of being corrected, whipped, and fed on bread and water.

At the period of the Revolution Bicêtre was at once a hospital, an asylum, a prison, and a house of correction, until, in 1791, it became at the same time a madhouse. The lunatics were at first mixed up with the criminals, or confined in horrible dungeons, but at length the intelligent and benevolent Pinel broke their chains. It was only in 1812, however, that the lunatics were placed in a special compartment, separate at once from the criminals and from the patients. Bicêtre continued to be a prison until 1836, when it became simply a hospital. At present the dungeons of former days are used as store-rooms for provisions and drugs.

Bicêtre is a little beyond the fortifications on the road to Fontainebleau. An avenue, lined with eating houses and taverns, so plentiful at all the Barriers, leads to the principal entrance, which is surmounted by a royal escutcheon with this inscription, “Hospice de la Vieillesse--Hommes.” It is inhabited by some 3,000 persons, comprising more than four hundred officials and servants, upwards of 1,500 indigent persons, between fifty and sixty convalescents, 1,830 adult lunatics, and 120 epileptic and idiotic children. The annual cost of the establishment amounts to one million and a half francs.

Bicêtre, like the Salpêtrière, is divided into departments: the Hospice on the north, where the aged and infirm of the city of Paris are gratuitously received; and the Asile, on the south, intended for the lunatics of the Department of the Seine. Like the Salpêtrière, it has more the character of a town than of a single building. Without any pretension to architecture, Bicêtre is composed of wings, outgrowths, and “annexes” of various kinds, added and super-added to the original and central structure. The shops attached to the establishment are now limited to a grocer’s and a tobacconist’s. There was formerly a shop for the sale of alcoholic drinks; but the intemperance of the customers caused the administration to banish for ever its estimable proprietor. For similar reasons the strictest regulations have been affixed to the door of the still-existing canteen.

The canteen occupies the superb cellar of the ancient manor house: an immense crypt, admirably constructed and supported by a double rank of robust pilasters. It was formerly the Eldorado of the inhabitants of Bicêtre. Officials, servants, visitors, were in the canteen from morning till night, giving themselves up to libations of Rabelaisian magnitude; so much so that this, pauper-tavern brought in, one year with another, a clear profit of 50,000 francs. To put a stop to these abuses, both in the interest of morality and of health, the administration of La Salpêtrière, instead of letting out the canteen to enterprising speculators, assumed the entire direction of it, and introduced stringent regulations, by which the canteen is only open for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. No one, moreover, must enter it more than once in twenty-four hours, when the order must be limited to thirty centilitres (about 1/3 of a quart) of wine, or five centilitres of brandy. Complaints, threats, and even partial revolt were the consequences of this severe edict; but it had to be observed.

For the rest, the inhabitants of Bicêtre, if they are really thirsty, have excellent water within reach. The great well, said to be the finest in the world, is one of the curiosities of the place. The depth of the well is equal to the height of the towers of Notre Dame. Its walls are faced with masonry to a depth of some 150 feet, and the bottom is reached by a staircase of 220 steps. The mouth is enclosed by an immense cage, intended to preserve the beholder from the vertiginous attractions of its depth. The three pumps connected with the well used formerly to be worked day and night by prisoners, and, when they were tired out, by lunatics. For the last thirty years, however, the pumping has been done by a steam engine. The water is discharged into an immense reservoir, which received the major part of its contents from the well, and the remainder from the Seine.

Close to the great well are the workshops, where, among other products, some seven thousand pairs of boots and shoes are turned out every year. All the able-bodied inmates must do work of some kind, for which they are remunerated at the rate of from ten to seventy centimes a day.

The library, founded in 1860, contains 2,500 volumes, and is open twice a day.

The inmates of Bicêtre come from all classes: workmen, soldiers, servants, artists, writers, professors, inventors, shopkeepers, government clerks--whom imprudence, misconduct, or misfortune has reduced to poverty. This mixed population is said to be difficult to rule, and in former days it frequently showed insubordination, and even rose in insurrection against the officials of the place. The rising of 1837 was caused by the limitations in connection with drink, already mentioned; that of 1841 by the suppression of the right to dine alone; that of 1848 by the abolition of liberty to go out every day at any hour without permission. To prevent the return of any such disturbances an administrative order was issued in 1850, instituting the following penalties against particular offences: stoppage of wine, withdrawal of leave to go out, imprisonment and expulsion from the asylum. It may be seen from the above that it is not alone in the mad division of the hospital that lunatics are to be found.

The lunatic department at Bicêtre is divided into three sections; the first and second being assigned to adult lunatics, the third to epileptics and idiots. The study in which peaceable lunatics assemble to read, write, or draw is interesting, if only for the objects of art which adorn it: busts, statues, water-colours, engravings, sepias, and pen-and-ink drawings, some by unknown artists, others by artists of celebrity--many of them inmates, for a while, at least, of the asylum. In the time of Dr. Linas (some twenty years ago) there was a painter in the lunatic wards of Bicêtre, a former priest, known in the house as “Monsieur L’Abbé,” who, if he had not gone mad, would, in the opinion of Dr. Linas, have earned renown. “Nothing,” says the doctor, “is more curious than his symbolical picture of ‘Life’: a vast composition, in which are represented, with wonderful harmony of ensemble, and a prodigious fecundity of detail, all the splendour and all the misery, all the heights and all the depths, all the virtues and all the vices, all the grandeurs and all the infamies, all the beauty and all the turpitude, of human existence from the cradle to the grave.”

The ward for epileptic and idiotic children is the saddest of all, by its arrangement and general exterior, as well as by the condition of the patients. These are well cared for. Unhappy creatures, who were formerly regarded as the dregs of humanity, are now made the object of the most devoted solicitude. Two physicians, of heart as well as of talent, were the first to show that idiocy has its degrees, and is not absolutely refractory to intellectual culture. At their suggestion a school for idiots was instituted at Bicêtre in 1842, and since then untiring endeavour has been made to further their education. They are taught to speak, to read, to sing. Their irregular attitudes and gestures are corrected, and their muscular system is developed by marching, running, dancing, fencing, digging, and gymnastics of every kind. Their senses are directed, their bad instincts reformed, and in time, according to their aptitude, they are made cobblers, carpenters, and so on. Many children admitted as idiots leave the asylum every year to exercise these trades, and live by their work.

Criminal lunatics, condemned by a verdict, or dangerous ones, certified as such, are kept apart in a building called La Sureté. Within this sinister rotunda the patients are kept in cells, and subjected night and day to the strictest surveillance. The ordinary occupation of these dangerous lunatics is the harmless one of cutting out artificial flowers. Their occasional fits of violence are dealt with only by the application of the strait-jacket.

Many of the officials at Bicêtre look upon the place not only as a home, but as a native land. Born at Bicêtre of parents who were preceded at the same institution by their own parents, the functionaries form a sort of official dynasty. Bicêtre has had its celebrities, its dramas, its memorable events. In legendary times the hill-side of Gentilly was haunted by Wehr-wolves, and the wizards of the neighbourhood held sabbath there. Interesting anecdotes have been told about the captivity of Salomon de Caux in the dungeons of Bicêtre, and the visit of Marion Delorme to the inventor, supposed by many of his countrymen to have constructed the first steam engine. At the time, however, of Salomon de Caux (1580-1630) Bicêtre was a magnificent country house, and neither a prison nor an asylum. It is certain, on the other hand, that this establishment has reckoned among its prisoners or its patients Latude, the unhappy victim of the hatred of Mme. de Pompadour, who, after escaping three times from Vincennes and the Bastille, was three times re-arrested, and finally delivered, after thirty-five years of captivity, by the courageous perseverance of Mme. Legros.

The pathetic story of Latude might be told in connection with more than one of the Paris prisons, mixed establishments, and lunatic asylums; for he was confined successively in the Bastille, the Castle of Vincennes, at Charenton, and, finally, at Bicêtre. With a genius for escaping from imprisonment, and an equal aptitude for getting recaptured, this able, energetic, yet light-minded, and, in sum, most unhappy man, provoked his first incarceration by a too ingenious device which he adopted with the view of securing the favour of Mme. de Pompadour, the all-powerful favourite of Louis XV. He was a lieutenant in the army when the idea occurred to him of obtaining promotion by putting himself forward as saviour of Mme. de Pompadour’s life. Sending her a collection of explosive toys, combined so as to form a sham infernal machine, he at the same time warned her not to open any parcel that might be addressed to her, since it had come to his knowledge that a case was being forwarded, which, on removal of the lid, would violently explode. “The gentleman knows too much,” thought Mme. de Pompadour; and she communicated her reflection to the Lieutenant of Police, who, sending for Latude, questioned him, and after convicting him out of his own mouth of the imposition he had practised, sent him to the Bastille.

Transferred a few months later to the Castle of Vincennes, he succeeded on the 25th of June, 1750, in making his escape, and in this very original manner. Watching until he found one of the prison gates open, he ran out and, breathless as he was, asked every sentinel he passed whether he had seen the Abbé de Saint Sauveur, whose ministrations were needed for a dying prisoner. Taking him for one of the officials of the establishment, the sentinels allowed him to hurry on--allowed him, that is to say, to make his escape. Latude was unable to profit by his liberty. Convinced that Mme. de Pompadour would pardon him his thoughtless act, he wrote her a letter of regret and appeal, related to her his escape, and confided to her his place of concealment. But the selfish marchioness could not forget that he had caused her a moment’s fright. She sent his letter to the Lieutenant of Police, and the poor man was once more thrown into the Bastille, with orders that he was to be strictly watched. One day, however, the governor took pity on him, and to render his captivity less rigorous gave him a companion. This companion was another young man who, strangely enough, had himself given offence to the all-powerful marchioness by an epigram of which he had been proved to be the author. His name was D’Aligre; and the two prisoners, both indebted for their captivity to the same tyrannical woman, made common cause and became fast friends. Their first thought was naturally to escape from the Bastille; and the project having once been formed, it was easier for two persons to carry it out than for only one. The preparations for their escape occupied them not less than two years. From time to time they cut off faggots from the blocks of wood furnished to them as fuel, and at the same time tore strips from their shirts and their bed-linen. The linen was tied and twisted into a knotted rope, more than a hundred yards long. With the wood they made a ladder to aid them, when they had descended into the moat, in getting up the parapet on the other side. All the preparations having been finished, the two prisoners chose for their escape a dark wintry night, when there was but little chance of their movements being observed. They began by climbing the chimney, one after the other. Then having fastened the rope, they one after the other slid down, till, excited, exhausted, and with bleeding hands, they reached the moat in safety. The wooden ladder enabled them, as their next step, to get over the parapet, which brought them into the governor’s garden. The wall which surrounded it was too high to climb, and they had no second ladder with which to escalade it. Fortunately, in view of some difficulty of this kind, they had provided themselves with a strong wooden stick, and this they made use of for picking out the mortar, loosening the bricks, and ultimately making a hole sufficiently large for them to crawl through. During this laborious and dangerous work, when the very noise they were making might at any moment cause their discovery, day broke, and they had just time to force themselves through the aperture they had made, when there were already signs of movement within the fortress. Latude and his companion had just taken refuge in one of the narrow streets surrounding the Bastille when the alarm-bell sounded. Their flight had been discovered. D’Aligre, disguised as a peasant, had no difficulty in passing the frontier. He was arrested at Brussels. Latude, informed of the capture of his friend, changed his route, but was equally unfortunate. Just when he was on the point of taking ship for India the police seized him at Amsterdam. He was brought back to the Bastille.

This time he was cast into a dungeon which looked out on to the moat, whose fetid vapours had a very injurious effect upon his health. To occupy his time and divert his thoughts, the unhappy prisoner undertook the taming of rats, and having from the branch of a bulrush made a primitive flute or flageolet, he played tunes upon it, an attention to which the little animals are said to have been by no means insensible. With marvellous patience and ingenuity, Latude now made tablets with the crumb of his bread, and wrote upon them with his blood. He had conceived certain plans of financial reform and of much-needed amelioration in various departments of state, and these he noted down as best he could by the difficult and painful means just mentioned. Finding how he was occupied, the governor was seized with compassion, and in his sympathy supplied the patient, intelligent prisoner with pen, ink, and paper. Latude now wrote day and night on all kinds of political and financial subjects. His suggestions were transmitted to the different ministers, less in the hope that they would be adopted than that their exposure would draw attention to the writer’s wretched state. One day Latude succeeded in getting a letter into the hands of Madame de Pompadour. It was in these words:--“On the 25th of this month of September, 1760, I shall have had 100,000 hours of suffering.” He thought for a moment that this pathetic utterance might restore him to liberty. But he had still 200,000 hours to count.

Permission was now given to him to walk on the terrace of the tower. He succeeded in awakening the interest of two young laundresses whose garret-windows looked out upon the walls of the Bastille; and one fine day in April, 1764, these girls, by means of large letters traced on a strip of paper, informed him that the woman who had persecuted him was dead. In his usual impulsive way, Latude now wrote to the Lieutenant of Police, telling him that he had heard of Mme. de Pompadour’s death, and that he trusted there was now some chance, after such prolonged tortures, of his being set at liberty. By way of reply, the lieutenant wished to know how he (Latude), of all the prisoners, was the only one that the news had reached. Determined not to compromise his kind-hearted informants, Latude refused to explain, upon which the lieutenant ordered that he should be watched more closely than ever. He was now put back in the dungeon, but soon afterwards, without any reason being assigned, was transferred to Vincennes. There a certain liberty was allowed him. Among other privileges he was permitted to walk in the garden, by which he soon profited to make his escape. The young laundress gave him asylum, and he now, with his unvarying imprudence, wrote to the Lieutenant of Police to request an audience. M. de Sartines took no notice of the application, except to have his correspondent arrested and taken back to Vincennes.

Latude now passed ten continuous years in prison. He had long been utterly forgotten when the minister Malesherbes, making a scrupulous inspection of the state prisons, saw him, heard the tale of his woes, and promised to do him justice. Circumvented, however, by the Lieutenant of Police, who represented Latude as a dangerous lunatic, he, with the best intentions, ordered the poor wretch to be removed to Charenton. This was still further to aggravate the captive’s condition, for Charenton was by several degrees worse than Vincennes. Madmen were then treated in the cruellest fashion, confined in narrow cells, and fed on a disgusting diet. Allowed a little more freedom than the other inmates, he was shocked to find, in a fetid little dungeon, loaded with chains and mercilessly beaten by the warders, his old companion D’Aligre, whose reason had not been able to survive his misfortunes, who scarcely recognised his friend, and who died shortly afterwards.

The adventures of Latude, however, had now attracted the attention of the outside world. He had been able so far to elude the vigilance of the warders as to get a few letters delivered to influential personages. An order for his liberation, almost immediately revoked, was signed in 1777. The victim had hardly started out for Montagnac, his native place, when he was re-arrested--though here again he probably had his own folly to thank, for he might have got clean away had he not obstinately determined to make a stay at Paris, and delayed his departure with that object. This time he was shut up at Bicêtre with malefactors of the worst class.

The history of Latude is singularly touching when one reflects that it was for a mere piece of boyish stupidity that he suffered a weight of frightful misery, which grew not lighter but heavier as years dragged on. “Each year,” says Michelet, “his sad position was aggravated. At length the crevices of his windows were stopped up and additional bars fitted to his cell. In Latude,” continues this historian, “the imbecile old tyranny had incarcerated the very man who could best denounce it--an ardent and terrible man whom nothing could tame, whose voice shook the walls, and whose wit and audacity were invincible.... His body was made of indestructible iron; for he could live in the Bastille, at Vincennes, at Charenton, and even at the horrible Bicêtre, where anyone else would have perished.

“I am unfortunately obliged to say that in this effeminate and decayed society there were not wanting philanthropists, ministers, magistrates, and grand-seigneurs to weep over the affair; but none of them did anything. Malesherbes wept, and Lamoignon and Rohan: everyone wept hot tears.

“He was on his muck-heap at Bicêtre, literally eaten up with vermin, lodged underground, and often howling with hunger. He had again addressed a memoir to some philanthropist, entrusting it to a turnkey: a woman picked it up.

“This woman was a little milliner, Mme. Legros, whose name is now unalienably associated with that of Latude. A high official had come to visit Bicêtre by royal order. He heard the victim’s complaints, which moved his pity, and requested Latude to draw up a statement of his grievances. The document was promptly prepared, but a drunken messenger failed to deliver it, and it was picked up by the young woman in question, who, having read it with deep compassion, saw what others could not see, that Latude was no madman, but a victim of the frightful necessities of a government obliged to put out of the way a man who could expose its vices. That was the obstacle which had frustrated the benevolent desires of Malesherbes, Lemoignon, and Rohan. Latude was to remain in captivity simply because he had already been in captivity too long.”

Mme. Legros, however, courageously undertook the work of justice, and nobly persevered with it in spite of all. During three years she solicited everybody, notwithstanding the misery in which she was herself living--for the police tried to intimidate her, and threatened her with transportation or imprisonment. She persisted all the same; and having lost her little business, she sacrificed her last resources to the cause which she had made her own. By dint of interviewing the valets of ministers and the femmes-de-chambre of ladies of high rank, she at length managed to interest Marie Antoinette herself in the fate of Latude. Louis XVI. promised to look into the matter, and had the police documents brought to him--papers, that is to say, prepared by those who only desired that the prisoner might die on their hands. The decision, therefore, of the monarch was that Latude, as a very dangerous man, must never be released. Even this did not discourage Mme. Legros, who, indeed, had public opinion on her side. The popular wave was already mounting high; it submerged the inflexible Sartines, and, after him, Lenoir. The Academy gave it a further impulse by awarding to Mme. Legros, in 1783, the prize of virtue as recompense for her heroic perseverance in the cause she had espoused. All that the minister Breteuil could obtain from this independent body was that the grounds on which the prize was awarded should not be proclaimed. The blow directed against the police and the court was a heavy one, and early the next year Latude was finally set free. He was then on the verge of his sixtieth year; he had passed thirty-five years in prison. As sole indemnity after so much suffering, he was granted a pension of 400 francs “in consideration of his lost patrimony,” as the official order phrased it; and even this was conditional upon his quitting Paris to live in his native province. Mme. Legros, by dint of tact and of petitions, got this sentence of exile revoked, and Latude came to live in her house at Paris. When the Revolution broke out he ardently embraced its principles, and in 1793, attacking the heirs of Mme. de Pompadour, he obtained against them from the Commune a condemnation to pay him an indemnity of 60,000 francs, though he never touched more than a sixth of this sum. A public subscription had, moreover, placed him beyond the danger of want. He died in obscurity in 1805.

“Mme. Legros,” says Michelet, “did not see the destruction of the Bastille. She died a little before. But it was she, none the less, who had the glory of destroying it. It was she who filled the popular mind with hatred and horror of this arbitrary prison which had received so many martyrs of Faith and Thought. The weak hand of a poor woman pulled down, in reality, that high fortress, threw to the ground its massive stones, tore down its iron gratings, and razed its towers.”

So much, then, for the celebrated Latude and his heroic deliverer. Among other notable inmates of Bicêtre may be mentioned the accomplice and denouncer of Cartouche, who lived forty-three years in a dungeon; the author of “Justine”--the Marquis de Sade--a perfect example of erotic madness; and the four sergeants of La Rochelle, those heroic champions of liberty whom the devotion of two of the house-surgeons would have saved but for the treachery of the chaplain.

The story of the four sergeants of La Rochelle, so well known in France, and so often referred to by contemporary French writers, is so little known in England that it may here with propriety be told; for it was at La Salpêtrière that the last act, or last but one, of this tragedy was played.

In the year 1821, under the Restoration, John François Louis Leclerc Bories, sergeant-major in the 45th regiment of the line, was in garrison at Paris when he was initiated into the society of the Charbonniers, corresponding to that of the Carbonari in Italy. The association was a formidable conspiracy of Liberals and Bonapartists against the monarchy of the Bourbons, and it was largely recruited from the ranks. Bories undertook to gain adherents among his comrades, and he initiated successively a number of non-commissioned officers and soldiers. In January, 1822, the 45th regiment was moved from Paris to La Rochelle. Before quitting the capital Bories was placed in relations with La Fayette, and received from him the halves of several cards, the missing portions to be presented to him on the line of march by members of the secret society, who would at the same time communicate to him the orders of the directing committee. Movements were being prepared at Nantes and at Saumur, and the chiefs of the Charbonniers wished, if necessary, to utilise the passage of the regiment through the departments which were ready to rise. Bories had several interviews along the line of march, and some imprudent words were spoken. But no order to take up arms was transmitted, and the 45th arrived at La Rochelle on the 14th of February without any incident of importance having taken place. By a strange fatality Bories had been placed under escort at Orleans for having replied to the provocations of the Swiss soldiers stationed in this town; and on reaching La Rochelle he was confined in the guard-house, and afterwards, in consequence of some suspicious circumstances, transferred to the prison of Nantes. The post of Bories in connection with the secret society was now filled by a less capable man, Sergeant-Major Pomier; and at this very moment an unsuccessful attempt was made against Saumur, under the direction of General Berton. Pursued from all sides, Berton made his way stealthily to La Rochelle, determined to try his fortune once more from what he considered a more favourable point. He placed himself in communication with Pomier and other chiefs. But nothing was decided, except that they must all hold themselves in readiness for action. A few days afterwards all the members of the society serving in the 45th regiment were, one after another, arrested. The authorities had got wind of what was going on, and Goubin, Pomier, Goupillon, and a few others, interrogated and pressed by General Despinois, made complete revelations, Bories meanwhile remaining firm and impenetrable.

Five months afterwards the accused were brought before the tribunal of the Seine. There were twenty-five of them, some in the civil, some in the military service; and they were charged either with belonging to the conspiracy or with not revealing what they knew about it. No conspiracy, in the strict legal sense of the word, existed; though the undetermined aim of the association was sooner or later to take up arms. The only offence of which the prisoners could be justly accused was that of belonging to a secret society. The Government prosecutor demanded, however, sentence of death against twelve of the accused. Among the advocates for the defence were men, with Chaix-d’Est-Anges, Mocquart, and others of the same mark, who afterwards reached the highest positions, and who were all at this time Carbonari and sworn enemies of the Bourbons. At the end of a trial which had lasted a fortnight the president of the court asked each of the accused if he had anything to add to his defence. Bories, whose self-possession had never for one moment left him, rose and said with much dignity:

“Gentlemen of the jury, the Advocate-General, while declaring that the most eloquent oratory in the world would be powerless to save me from public vengeance, has pointed to me as the chief criminal. Well, I accept this position, and shall deem myself happy if by bringing my head to the scaffold I can obtain the acquittal of all my comrades.”

He was condemned to death, together with three other sergeants--Goubin, Raoulx, and Pomier. Goupillon was let off as informer. Seven others were condemned to imprisonment for different periods, while thirteen more were acquitted. There were groans and sobs in court when the capital sentence was pronounced, and public opinion pronounced itself in the strongest manner in favour of the unfortunate young men, against neither of whom any overt act was charged. But the Government of Louis XVIII. was implacable; and on the 21st of September, 1822, the scaffold was erected on the Place de Grève. The four sergeants submitted to their fate with heroic calmness, and bent their heads beneath the knife of the guillotine amid cries of “Vive la Liberté!”

The same evening, to the disgust of everyone, there was a grand party at the Tuileries.

Serious attempts had been made by the Carbonari to save the unhappy victims. Through the intermediary of two famous painters--Ary Scheffer and Horace Vernet, assisted by Colonel Fauvier and other leaders of the party, the director of Bicêtre had been gained over. He consented to aid the escape of the four sergeants who were confined in his establishment--at that time half prison, half asylum--on consideration of receiving 70,000 francs, estimated as the capitalised value of his appointment. Unfortunately, however, he confided the affair to the chaplain of the prison, whom he wished, through friendship and affection, to take with his own family to foreign parts. The priest rightly or wrongly felt it to be his duty to give notice to the Prefect of Police, and just as the projected escape was on the point of being effected a number of police agents appeared. They began by arresting M. Margue, one of the surgeons at Bicêtre, and they at the same time seized 10,000 francs in gold. But an energetic man, the house-surgeon, Guillié-Latouche, managed to get away with the rest of the sum--60,000 francs--in bank notes, and entering Paris at daybreak, placed the money in the hands of the members of the committee.

Other attempts were not more successful, and on the day fixed for the execution a number of Carbonari, with arms concealed beneath their clothes, stationed themselves at different points, ready to attack the prisoner’s escort. Meanwhile the central committee, doubting the success of the enterprise so boldly conceived, could not decide to order an attack on the forces drawn up by the military authorities. Nothing could be done. The execution was allowed to take place in the midst of general indignation.

One of the members of the central committee, Dr. Ulysse Trélat, afterwards minister and representative of the people, has traced the following portrait of Bories in his “Esquisse de la Charbonnerie”:--

“Bories was a young man of twenty-six, who, beneath an exterior full of softness and grace, concealed the noblest and firmest heart. He had nothing of the soldier but his frankness and his courage, without any of the faults generally produced by the idleness of barrack life. His morals were pure, his tastes simple, and his life retired. He gave up the greater part of his time to reading. Exempt from ambition, his most ardent wish was to die at the moment of the victory of the people; and one day he was quite annoyed at someone’s proposing to take him to General La Fayette. It seemed to him that this offer implied some doubt as to his sincerity, as well as an intention to stimulate his ardour by the authority of a great name.”

At Villefranche, Bories’s birthplace, there was a general understanding among the inhabitants to conceal his tragic end from his old parents. On their expressing astonishment at not receiving news from their son, they were informed that his regiment had gone to the colonies.

Another touching story, which has all the character of a legend, is told in connection with the unfortunate Bories. Until the year 1864 a broken-down old woman, supporting herself with a stick and carrying a bunch of faded flowers, was a familiar figure on the left bank of the Seine. For forty years she had been grieving for the loss of Bories, to whom in his youth she was engaged to be married. From the cart in which, with his three comrades, he was driven to the scaffold, he had sought to console the young girl in her despair by throwing her a bouquet, which she kept for ever afterwards. She was frequently seen at the tomb of the four sergeants in the cemetery of Montparnasse; and she was at last buried near the grave of her lover towards the end of 1864, when the legendary bouquet was placed with her in the coffin.

It has been said that Bicêtre has, during the present century, been the scene of several disturbances, In the last century it witnessed serious insurrections. In 1756 the prisoners rose against the soldiers of the guard, when two archers and fourteen insurgents were killed. In 1774 a spy found among the prisoners was crucified. In September, 1792, Bicêtre made a determined resistance to the bands of slaughterers who arrived to massacre the inmates. Officials, prisoners, lunatics, all defended themselves with wonderful courage. Each building was made the object of a separate siege. Once masters of the place the assassins spared no one. There was for three nights and three days a frightful carnage, which even the intervention of Péthion could not stop.

The apologists--not merely of the Revolution, which, as a whole, brought immeasurable benefit to the French people, but even of the crimes which accompanied it--have tried to justify the massacres committed in the prisons of Paris by bands of fanatical ruffians, who had somehow persuaded themselves that the persons confined were all aristocrats or priests, and that in slaughtering these enemies of society it mattered but little if a few inoffensive persons were also put to death. The allied German powers who were marching upon Paris, and whose outposts were gradually approaching the capital, had already taken the fortress of Verdun, and were prepared, if they continued their successful campaign, to inflict terrible vengeance on the Revolutionists and on the French nation generally. A counter-revolutionary movement had suddenly set in among the Royalist proprietors and the loyal, if superstitious, peasants of Brittany and La Vendée. With the exaggeration sure to manifest itself at moments of great popular excitement, it was declared that the enemy was at the gates of Paris; and it was proclaimed among the fanatics of the Revolution that in a few hours the nobles and ecclesiastics thrown into prison, in some cases with a view to trial, in others only as a precautionary measure, would soon be at liberty and ready to take part, in the slaughter of the Republicans. The people had been summoned by Danton to the Champ de Mars in order to be enrolled for service against the enemy. Alarm-bells were sounded, cannons were fired, and a general war-cry resounded through Paris. “The tocsin,” says a journal of the period, “was heard on all sides. Everyone ran to take up arms. Everyone cried out, ‘To the enemy!’ But the enemy is not in the field alone. The enemy is at Paris, as well as around Verdun. Our foes are in the Paris prisons. Shall we leave our women, our children, our aged persons, to the mercy of these wretches? Let us hurry to the prisons. Let us exterminate these monsters, who will profit by our absence with the army to murder our wives and our children, to liberate Louis XVI. from his tower, and to rally the Royalist battalions.” This terrible cry was at once taken up in a unanimous, universal manner throughout the streets and public places, at all public meetings, and finally in the National Assembly itself.

Apart from the purely spontaneous, impulsive movement, meetings were held after formal deliberations, and it was decided by a resolution that the aristocrats and priests confined in the prisons must be put to death.

To return, however, to Bicêtre, which is associated in more than one way with the Revolution and with the Reign of Terror. In a little courtyard adjoining the amphitheatre of Bicêtre, on the 15th of April, 1792, was tried for the first time on a corpse (previous experiments had been made with live animals) the “decapitating machine,” whose invention, wrongly attributed to Dr. Guillotin, belongs really to Dr. Louis, perpetual secretary of the Royal Society of Surgery: whence the name of “Louisette” given in the first instance to the guillotine.

Some time afterwards, towards the end of 1792, Bicêtre, which had just been the theatre of such tragic scenes, had the glory of seeing accomplished within its walls the reforms in the treatment of lunacy introduced by Pinel. This excellent man, chief physician at Bicêtre, had begged the Commune of Paris for authority to unchain the violent lunatics. The next day the fanatical Couthon went to Bicêtre to make sure that Pinel was “not concealing the enemies of the people among his madmen.” Astounded and somewhat frightened by the confused shrieking and howling of the maniacs, and by the rattling of their chains, the surly Jacobin turned to Pinel and said to him “Why, you must be mad yourself, citizen, to think of unchaining such animals.”

“I am convinced,” replied Pinel, “that these lunatics are only so intractable because they are deprived of air and liberty.”

“Well, do what you like,” cried Couthon, as he went away; “do what you like: I abandon them to you.”

Pinel at once entered the cage of the most terrible of his madmen: an English captain who had been shut up for forty years, and who, a few days previously, had killed one of the keepers with a blow from his fetters. Full of faith, the physician unlocked his irons; and the madman becoming at once gentle and calm, was, during the two years he had still to live, Pinel’s most useful assistant. Pinel restored successively to liberty an old officer who, in a moment of frenzy, had stabbed one of his own children; a young poet mad from love, who, after leaving Bicêtre, perished on the scaffold; a soldier formerly in the Royal Guard; Chevingé, an athlete, the terror of his keepers, who soon afterwards gave his liberator a striking proof of gratitude by snatching him from a band of fanatics at the very moment when they were about to hang him; and fifty others, of all conditions and all countries, who, as soon as they were treated with humanity, gave up their habits of violence.

Finally, it may be mentioned that in the old dungeons of Bicêtre Victor Hugo lays the scene of his “Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.”

It has been seen that neither at Bicêtre nor at La Salpêtrière are lunatics alone confined. The one recognised madhouse in or near Paris, to which those whose ideas or actions excite the disapproval of their friends are told familiarly to go--as, in England, they would be sent to Hanwell--is Charenton. The Maison de Charenton, situated at about four miles south-east of Paris, on the road to Lyons, close to the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, dates from the year 1641, when Sebastien Leblanc, counsellor of the king and minister of war, presented it ready furnished to the brothers of La Charité, or of St. Jean de Dieu. A few years after their installation in the house presented to them, the brothers of La Charité arranged to receive madmen and epileptic patients; when, like all the madhouses of the time, Charenton became a house of detention, where were confined by lettres de cachet prisoners of state, prodigals, libertines, and others who were thought worthy of a milder treatment than they would receive in the Bastille or at Vincennes. In the eighteenth century, and up to the time of the Revolution, Charenton had accommodation for nearly 100 lunatics, each of whom had his separate room. The attendance was in the hands of ten religious persons and fifty-two servants. A few years after the Revolution, both monastery and hospital were suppressed, and the monks, together with the lunatics under their charge, dispersed. Soon afterwards, however, the Directory issued a decree, which forms the legal basis of the hospital of Charenton as it now exists. “Refuge for the Mad” was the title given to it; and it was now placed under the immediate direction of the Minister of the Interior. Insane persons of both sexes were to be admitted; the indigent ones gratuitously, and others at a fixed rate of payment. The Abbé de Coulmier, a former member of the Constituent Assembly, was named director of the establishment; and, as if in compensation for the injury done to the establishment by its sudden dispersion, it had additional land assigned to it. The building could now be enlarged, and a special division was erected for the women.

M. de Coulmier conducted the house in the most despotic manner; and on the death of the principal surgeon, M. Gastaldi, in 1805, he assumed such powers in the medical department that the School of Medicine was obliged to intervene, when the medical direction was placed in the hands of Dr. Royer-Collard, brother of the celebrated orator of the same name. With all his tyranny, M. de Coulmier had many agreeable ways. Remembering the fury of Saul, calmed by the harp of the youthful David, and the quieting of savage animals by the lyre of Orpheus, the director, carried away by his artistic feeling, determined to apply a similar treatment to the demented ones of Charenton. To carry out his idea he introduced dancing, dramatic performances, fireworks, and even ballets, with the assistance of some of the choregraphic celebrities of the epoch. The imprisoned Marquis de Sade, known by books that no decent person can read, was the organiser of these entertainments, which were attended by all Paris.

To the joyous reign of M. de Coulmier succeeded, in 1814, the severe administration of Roulhac du Maupas. No more singing and dancing now! Comedies and ballets gave place to useful reforms, and the substitution of a new medical organisation for the former choregraphic system. Royer-Collard had suppressed the iron girdles, the fetters, the handcuffs, and the collars, by which the ungovernable madmen used to be restrained, and the melancholy ones driven to suicide. Esquirol did away with the human figures in wicker-work, in which violent maniacs used sometimes to be enclosed. The new programme met with the full approbation of the Government. A credit of 2,720,000 francs was voted by the Chamber of Deputies in July, 1838; and soon afterwards M. de Montalivet, then Minister of the Interior, laid with due solemnity the first stone of the new edifice. The memory of this important ceremony is consecrated by an inscription placed beneath the vestibule of the principal building.

At the back of the building is the wood of Vincennes, from which it is separated only by a wall, with a gate for the inmates of the asylum. In front the landscape comprises the immense and fertile plain of Maisons Alfort, Ivry, and Choisy-le-Roi. The panorama is one of the finest offered by the environs of Paris. The capricious meanderings of the Marne, with its green banks and its flower-clad islands, the picturesque hill of Alfort, the interesting domain of Charentonneau; villages sparkling beneath the sun in the midst of fields and meadows: on the horizon the smiling slopes of Saint-Maur, Créteil, Champigny, Chenevières, and Boissy-Saint-Lèger; the forest of Sénart, Villeneuve-St.-Georges--which, deserted by its inhabitants, was occupied, during the last war, in every house and every room by German troops, who left behind them sad proofs of their destructiveness; and, finally, the majestic course of the Seine, and its union with the Marne. The new establishment has been so built that from nearly every room the patients can gladden their eyes and refresh their minds by contemplating the enchanting scenery.

The patients are grouped together, not with reference to their social rank, but according to the medical peculiarities of each particular case. In the first division are patients who have reached the convalescent stage, and who are quiet. In the second are the lunatics who know how to behave themselves, but are still subject to fits of insanity. The third class consists of incurable lunatics, who are nevertheless capable of obeying orders. The fourth is reserved for incurable lunatics, difficult to govern; the fifth for paralytic lunatics; the sixth for lunatics who have been attacked by some ordinary malady; the seventh for epileptic patients; and the eighth for violent uncontrolable maniacs.

During the last twenty or thirty years a hydropathic establishment has been added to the asylum, together with workshops for the occupation and amusement of the convalescent.

On the 2nd of February, 1866, the Empress paid a visit to Charenton, and took the institution under her special patronage. She began by proposing the construction of a department for women on the same system and the same scale as the well-organised department for men; and, adopting the Empress’s idea, the legislative body voted an important sum towards carrying it out.

Charenton receives about 600 patients, 300 men and 300 women; but the number would be much larger were there sufficient accommodation. The terms for the paying patients are 1,500 francs for the first class, 1,200 for the second, and 900 for the third, while for those who have a separate room 900 francs extra, as the wages of a servant, are charged. Needless to add that the patients, paying or non-paying, are all on an equality as regards medical treatment. The quality and variety of the cooking vary with the different classes. The chief elements of the population of Charenton are furnished by officials and clerks, artists and men of letters, merchants, dealers in wine and spirits, officers and soldiers. Every type of madness may there be studied, from dementia and melancholia to mania. Many of the patients owe their malady to hereditary predisposition, alcoholic excesses, and other abuses, domestic calamities, reverses of fortune, and intellectual labour unduly prolonged.

Nothing is spared to provide the patients with salutary occupations, agreeable pastimes, and innocent amusements. They are encouraged to study music, singing, and drawing, and for those who have no artistic tastes, cards, draughts, dominoes, billiards, and bowls are provided. Among the outdoor recreations walks in the most beautiful parts of the wood of Vincennes, carriage excursions and picnics may be mentioned. The Thursday and Sunday concerts form, however, the great delight of the place. These are not given by the director simply as entertainments. They are prescribed by the regulations, and have formed part of the institutions of the House since 1811. In the spacious hall, which serves at once as ball-room and concert-room, assemble upwards of a hundred convalescents of both sexes. In the dress and demeanour of those present there is nothing remarkable, except that they are more quietly attired, and generally better behaved than in fashionable society. The billiard-room is much frequented, and the general aspect of the card-room reminds Dr. Linas of one of the aristocratic Paris clubs.

It should have been mentioned that at the periodical concerts the music is contributed by the patients, some of whom are singers, others violinists or pianists. The officials of the establishment join the inmates either as performers or among the audience. In like manner the patients and attendants act together in the comedies and dramas which are sometimes represented.

Charenton, though placed under the direction of the Ministry of the Interior, has its own particular administration, in which a clerk may in due time, after successive promotions, rise to be a functionary of almost the first rank. No one voluntarily quits the establishment; and the servants, like the officials, remain there until they are compelled by old age to resign. Charenton, like other madhouses, has had celebrities among its inmates, including the Marquis de Sade, who, after sending one of his infamous books to Napoleon, was at once ordered to be arrested and placed in a lunatic asylum; the same punishment which, at a later date, was inflicted by the Emperor Nicholas on a writer, blameless in his morality, who had attacked the existing order of things in Russia.

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XXX. THE RIVER BIÈVRE AND THE MANUFACTORY OF THE GOBELINS

The Brothers Gobelin--Lebrun--The Gobelins under Louis XIV.--At the Time of the Revolution--The Manufactory of Sèvres.

The Bièvre is a stream which, many years ago, behaved so badly in the matter of inundations that it was put under ground. Canalised subterraneously, it runs beneath or by the side of the Horse Market, passes near the Salpêtrière, and enters the Seine close to the Orleans Railway terminus. It is between the Bièvre and the Rue Mouffetard that the buildings of the Gobelins manufactory, so famed for its tapestry and dyes, are situated.

The superiority of the products of this factory is by some attributed to peculiar saline properties in the stream. Of these Rabelais speaks in thoroughly Rabelaisian style; and it was doubtless in consequence of the tinctorial qualities of the river that the brothers Gobelin established on its banks their famous manufactory.

It is to these brothers that the name of the establishment is due. They were famous dyers in Normandy, or, as is also said, at Rheims, in Champagne; and, whatever their origin, they came to Paris in the middle of the fifteenth century, and took up their position on the banks of the river above mentioned.

The water of the Bièvre, while helping the development of Gobelin dyes, is injured by them. Like all the streams which flow past dye works, the Bièvre is perpetually stained; and in the present day there are many scientific men who venture to affirm that the brilliant colours of the Gobelin tapestry are in no way due to water of any kind, but to artistic secrets belonging to the Gobelin brothers, and handed down by them to their descendants or successors.

Under the reign of Louis XIV. the Gobelins was a sort of school of furniture, in which not only tapestry but cabinet work of every kind was cultivated. “Here,” writes a chronicler of the time, “two hundred and fifty master weavers produced the richest tapestries, after the works of our best painters. The school was extended in order to include sculptors in metal and goldsmiths.”

A passion for ornamentation now took possession at once of the Court and of Paris society generally; and the candelabra and the lamps produced at the Gobelins were worthy of any palace. Most of the works produced at the Gobelins, to whatever category they belonged, were intended as presents to members of royal families and other persons of the very first distinction. Among the painters attached to the Gobelins manufactory may, in the first place, be mentioned the celebrated Lebrun in the reign of Louis XIV., and under the government of Colbert. “And as a matter of fact,” says an historian, “Lebrun gave to the Gobelins a splendour which was steadily maintained.”

He painted for the manufactory, simply that they might be reproduced in wool, some of his greatest pictures, including “The Battles of Alexander,” “The History of Louis XIV.,” “The Twelve Months of the Year,” “The Story of Moses,” etc. etc. Van der Meulen, Yvart, Boëls, and others may be mentioned among the painters attached permanently to the establishment.

When, on the death of Lebrun, Mignard succeeded him as Director of the Gobelins, an architect, La Chapelle-Bessé, was appointed architect and builder. Under the joint direction of painter and architect a school of drawing was created at the Gobelins with Toby, Coysevox, and Sebastien Leclerc as professors.

Unfortunately the reverses sustained by Louis XIV. during the last year of his reign led to the discharge of the best workmen at the Gobelins, whom it was thought impossible any longer to pay; and from this time the establishment has occupied itself only with the production of tapestry, to the neglect of medals, cameos, cabinet work, and artistic furniture generally.

Specimens of the Gobelin tapestry were often given away as presents either to crowned heads or to celebrities of less eminence whom the king wished to honour with some mark of distinction. Thus there may still be seen at Windsor Castle the tapestries of “Esther” and of “Jason and Medea,” given to the King of England by Louis XIV. The King of Siam, the Emperor of Russia, the Duke of Lorraine, and the King of Prussia received similar presents. Occasionally, too, the Gobelins executed orders for men of wealth and of high position; and in every country in Europe so rare a work of art as a Gobelin tapestry gave a character to the furniture of a room, indeed of a whole house.

The Revolution was but little favourable to the Gobelin manufactory. Writing on the subject in 1790, Marat said: “No one has any idea abroad of establishments maintained at the expense of the State in connection with fine arts or rather manufactures: the honour of this invention was reserved for France. Such are, among others, the manufactories of Sèvres and of the Gobelins. The latter costs annually 100,000 francs; it is difficult to say why, unless it be to enrich intriguers and rogues.”

In spite of Marat’s report the Gobelin manufactory was not interfered with; not at least in theory. The Government subvention was not formally withdrawn, but it ceased to be paid. The Consulate, seeing how entirely the place was neglected, appointed a director at a fixed salary, and took the place generally under its charge. The Empire regarded the Gobelins as a state institution, and paid largely towards its support. It enjoyed also the full patronage of the Bourbons after the Restoration. The government of Louis Philippe ordered, at great cost, a whole series of tapestries representing the royal palaces and residences of France, which were intended for the decoration of these very mansions. At the same time, continuing ancient traditions, the king ordered a number of tapestries for presentation to foreign potentates. “Peter the Great in the Tempest,” after Steuben’s picture, admirably rendered in wool, was presented to the Tsar; the “Massacre of the Mamelukes,” after Horace Vernet, to the Queen of England.

The different revolutions which have taken place in France have never for any length of time affected the position of the Gobelins, which successive governments have learnt to regard as one of the glories of France. For the beautiful, brilliant colours in use during the present century the establishment has been indebted to the famous chemist and centenarian, M. Chevreuil.

Among the masterpieces executed at the Gobelins may be mentioned the portrait of Louis XIV., after Rigaud, of which the original may be seen in the Louvre; “The Assumption” of Titian, an immense composition, some thirty feet high; and the reproduction in wool of a number of delicate, graceful pictures by Boucher, etc. etc. Since 1848 a school has been established at the Gobelins, where the art of tapestry is systematically studied by pupils and apprentices.

* * * * *

Although not connected in any direct manner with the Gobelins, the manufactory of Sèvres is associated with it as an establishment for art work. It enjoys a similar reputation for the excellence of its products, and is supported, like the Gobelins, by grants from the State, and by state patronage of every kind. At St. Cloud in 1695 a manufactory of pottery was started by the brothers Chicanneau, who took for their trade-mark a sun, doubtless by way of flattery to Louis XIV., the Sun King--“Le Roi Soleil.” The factory was visited in 1700 by the Duchess of Burgundy, on whose recommendation it obtained special privileges in 1702. Twenty years later Henri Trou, Chicanneau’s son-in-law, and his brother Gabriel, took the direction of the establishment, which at this time prided itself on its imitations of China porcelain. In 1735 the brothers Dubois, one a painter, the other a sculptor, quitted the establishment of St. Cloud, where they had hitherto been employed, and founded a rival establishment at Chantilly, under the patronage of the Prince de Condé. The Dubois brothers afterwards moved to Vincennes; and it was not until 1756 that general headquarters for the porcelain work of Paris were fixed at Sèvres. The establishment belonged to a body of shareholders. But four years after the company was started the king bought up all the shares, thus becoming not only the patron but the proprietor of the Sèvres manufactory. At once managing director and monarch, Louis XIV. was able to forbid competition of every kind, and under the severest penalties. To attempt to make porcelain elsewhere than at Sèvres was not only a criminal offence, but almost an offence of State.

Admirable as were the results obtained, the pieces of porcelain turned out at Sèvres were seldom, if ever, quite perfect; and it was only the cups, vases, plates and dishes in which there was some perhaps almost imperceptible flaw that were offered for sale to the general public. When perfection had been attained the fortunate work was reserved for the royal palaces or for presentation to some foreign potentate. In 1761 a native of Strasburg, which for about a century had belonged to France, sold to the Sèvres manufactory the secret of a so-called “hard paste” porcelain which he had obtained from a relative, director of some porcelain works in the neighbouring Palatinate.

Like the Gobelins, the manufactory of Sèvres was not interfered with by the Revolution. From 1800 to 1847 it remained continuously under the direction of Brongniart, who introduced many improvements in the manufacture of porcelain, though he is thought to have paid more attention scientifically to the matter than artistically to the form of his products. Perfectly-made paste, but bad designs.

The Sèvres porcelain of the period of the First Empire was remarkable for the stiffness and sham-academical style of the figures. From this epoch dates the custom of reproducing on cups and saucers, vases and plates, copies of great historical pictures and other unsuitable works. The landscapes, the pastoral pieces of Watteau and of Boucher, were far more appropriate.

Under the Second Empire the Sèvres manufactory cost the State 480,000 francs a year, and sold porcelain to the general public to the amount of 80,000 francs. There was a clear loss, then, to the establishment of 400,000 francs, or £16,000 a year. After the fall of the Empire an attempt was made by M. Charles Garnier, the architect of the new opera, and M. Jules Simon, at that time Minister of Public Instruction, to place the Sèvres manufactory on a more satisfactory footing. A commission was appointed with well-known artists, art-critics, and manufacturers among its members, to consider what was to be done; and in the first place M. Duc, the celebrated architect, was requested to draw up a report on the subject.

M. Duc set forth that the fabrication of the material left nothing to be desired, and that the artists who furnished designs for the porcelain were unequalled. But there were not enough of them, and M. Duc’s main proposal was that a school should be established in connection with the Sèvres manufactory, precisely what had been proposed and adopted under Louis Philippe’s reign in connection with the Gobelins. The school of Sèvres was established in conformity with M. Duc’s recommendation, and at the same time a “Sèvres prize” of the value of 2,000 francs was instituted as an annual recompense to the author of the most artistic design for pottery work.

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XXXI. THE PALAIS BOURBON

The Palais Bourbon--Its History--The National Convention--Philippe Egalité.

The Palais Bourbon, situated between the Quai d’Orsay on the north and the Place de Bourgogne on the south, bears a name which is singularly inappropriate to the edifice in its modern character; for neither under the ancient monarchy nor under the restored Bourbons has the great monarchical family of France shown the least favour towards the parliamentary discussions of which in modern times the Palais Bourbon has been the scene. The building was constructed in 1772 by the Italian architect, Gardini, at the orders of the Dowager-Duchess of Bourbon. After passing through various hands, the Palais Bourbon was made national property at the time of the Revolution, when “Maison de la Revolution” was the name given to it. In 1795 its principal reception-rooms were transformed into a hall for the Council of the Five Hundred, and it was at the same time enlarged. The present façade was added in 1804 under Napoleon I.

Among the other remarkable halls contained in the Palais Bourbon as it at present exists, the most important is the one in which, under the name now of Chamber of Deputies, now of Legislative Body, the French Parliament has held its sittings.

The hall arranged in 1795 for the Council of the Five Hundred was afterwards occupied by the Legislative Body of the Empire, and again, under the Restoration, by the Chamber of Deputies. In 1814 the Palais Bourbon was, as property, restored to the Prince de Condé, who left the use of it to the State for the benefit of the Chamber. The Government bought from the prince in 1827 a portion of the palace, and purchased the rest from the Duke of Aumale in 1830, the full price paid amounting to 10,500,000 francs. In 1829 the Hall of the Five Hundred was replaced provisionally by a building of wood, in lieu of which the hall as it now exists was soon afterwards constructed. After the Revolution of 1848 a wooden hall was built in the courtyard of the palace to receive the nine hundred deputies of the Constituent Assembly. This hall was invaded by the mob on the 15th of May, 1848, and demolished after the coup d’état of the 2nd of December, 1851.

The Legislative Body of the Empire was now installed in the former Chamber of Deputies until the 4th of September, 1870, when the palace of the Legislative Body was once more invaded by the mob.

The most famous parliamentary debates, however, of the French, and the most important parliamentary trials, have taken place not in the Palais Bourbon but at the Tuileries and at the Luxemburg. Under the reign of Louis Philippe, in the best days of Guizot and Thiers, debates of the greatest interest took place at the Palais Bourbon in the “Chamber of Deputies,” as the French representative body was at that time called; for with each new government the name of the assembly, as of almost every other institution in France, is changed. All public establishments are from time to time Royal, National, or Imperial; and the body which corresponds in France to the House of Commons in England is called, turn by turn, Chamber of Representatives, Chamber of Deputies, or Legislative Body. No country, indeed, has had so many legislative and governing assemblies as France, which until the Revolution was as nearly as possible an absolute monarchy. The States-General, under the ancient régime, were convoked from time to time by the king, but had no real power. The most that can be said in their favour is that they at least preserved among the people the idea of popular representation. In 1788, the year before the Revolution, there was a general demand for a convocation of the States-General, to which an unexpected reply was made by the calling together of Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. These bodies both admitted the royal veto as a bar upon their decisions. But the Convention, the Revolution having now been accomplished, recognised no counterbalancing power, no control of any kind. It governed the country through its commissaries and its committees.

The constitution of the year 3 of the Republic (1792) divided the legislative power into two assemblies, the Council of the Five Hundred and the Council of the Elders. To the former belonged the initiative, to the latter the final decision.

Dissatisfied with the working of these two bodies, Bonaparte introduced a parliamentary reform of the most remarkable kind. According to his constitution of the year 1797, the Legislative Body was to be divided into two assemblies, one of which was to discuss the laws submitted to it by the Government, the other to accept the decisions in the upper chamber without debate and simply by way of registration. After the fall of Napoleon the restored monarchy, obliged by the circumstances of the time to tolerate the existence of a parliament, formed the Chamber of Representatives, which, under the government of Louis Philippe, was succeeded by the Chamber of Deputies, destined to play an important part in the political history of the country. Under the Second Empire the governmental forms of the First Empire were as much as possible introduced. The Legislative Body and the Senate came now once more into existence, the former being empowered to discuss the laws proposed by the Government, the latter to prevent their promulgation should they, under the influence of the debates, have taken a form which the Government might consider objectionable. Under the Third Republic the French chambers have resumed something of the importance they possessed under Louis Philippe. Their powers, indeed, have been increased, though they contain no such distinguished men as those which gave character and brilliancy to the Chamber of Deputies between the years 1830 and 1848.

The assembly of the States-General held at Versailles in May, 1789, preceded by three months the taking of the Bastille; and it was in this assembly that the task-work of the peasants--their serfdom, that is to say--was abolished; that obnoxious feudal rights of various kinds were suppressed; and that religious liberty, individual liberty, liberty of the press, and general equality before the law were proclaimed.

The Bastille was taken while the assembly was in full deliberation, and this event gave to its discussions and decisions a more liberal, more revolutionary turn than ever.

The assembly of the States-General followed the king to Paris, and soon afterwards installed itself in the riding-school of the Tuileries. After the flight of Louis XVI. (June 21, 1791) it took possession of the executive power, and held it with a firm hand until the acceptance of the constitution by the king on the 14th of September. On the 30th of the same month it dispersed, to be replaced by the Legislative Assembly, to which, in virtue of a resolution proposed by Robespierre, no member of the previous assembly could belong. The number of laws, acts, and decrees passed by the assembly afterwards to be known as the Constituent amounted to not less than 3,250.

The Legislative Assembly of 1791, in which, as just mentioned, no member of the famous Constituent Assembly could sit, began by swearing allegiance to the constitution just proclaimed. A number of émigrés having assembled on the frontier, it confiscated their property, and took proceedings against the king’s brothers, the chiefs of the fugitive royalists now threatening return. It replied to the coalition against France by a declaration of war, called the country to arms, and decreed the formation of a camp of 20,000 men beneath the walls of Paris. The king making objection to these vigorous measures, the Assembly declared the monarchy at an end, and on the 10th of August it was abolished, or rather “suspended,” by law.

On the 10th of August, 1792, the Legislative Assembly, in presence of Louis XVI., decreed the “provisional suspension of the chief of the executive power,” and the convocation of a national convention--that is to say an extraordinary assembly invested by the people with full powers for reconstituting the government of the country. The members of the new legislative body were to be chosen by double election. Every Frenchman who was of age, and possessed not a house but a “domicile,” had a right to vote for an elector; and the electors thus chosen elected in their turn the members of the new assembly. There was one elector to every hundred citizens; and at the primary elections the merits of the candidates for electoral honours were freely discussed.

The procedure of the Convention was almost identical with that of the Constituent and Legislative Assembly. Many readers will be surprised to hear that among the 749 deputies forming the National Convention there were sixteen bishops, eight episcopal grand vicars, eighteen priests, and seven Protestant ministers; besides one prince of the blood (the Duke of Orleans, nicknamed Philippe Égalité), and a number of barristers and lawyers, officers of the king’s army, now disbanded; former members of the Paris Parliament, nobles, landed proprietors, doctors, men of science, men of letters, several poets, painters, and actors; a few merchants and manufacturers, and only one workman, a wool-carder named Armonville. The Convention, though a Revolutionary assembly, can scarcely be said to have been a democratic one. On the 20th of September the new representatives of the people held a preparatory sitting in the Hall of the Hundred Swiss at the Tuileries. On the 21st the Convention reassembled at the Tuileries, and notified its official existence to the Legislative Assembly, which at once deposited its powers in the hands of the new representatives of the people, who thereupon established themselves in the Riding School. The Convention did not take possession of the Tuileries until eight months afterwards, May 10th, 1793, the unfortunate king having meanwhile, been sentenced to death and (Jan. 21) executed.

When the Convention began its sittings the enemy’s outposts were only seventy-five miles from Paris, and the German powers, who had invaded France, were preparing to take a terrible vengeance on the country which, if it had not actually dethroned, had formally “suspended” the power of its king.

“Kings” exclaimed the Bishop of Blois in an excited debate, “are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical”; and in the midst of general acclamation the Assembly adopted unanimously this declaration:

“ROYALTY IS ABOLISHED IN FRANCE.”

The Girondists, who for some time had the upper hand in the Convention, wished to spare the king, and some of them proposed to leave the decision of his fate to the people at large; confident, no doubt, that the verdict of the nation would be, if not altogether favourable, at least not fatal to the unhappy monarch. The Girondists, however, could not get their views adopted by the Assembly generally; and in the end many of them voted for the king’s death.

The king having been tried and found guilty by the Assembly, each member was called upon to declare in writing what sentence the convicted monarch deserved. Some were for keeping him in prison until peace was made with the invading powers, and then sending him into exile on condition of his never attempting to return. The greater number, however, of the deputies were in favour of death. One, more brutal than the others, is said to have recorded his view as to the sentence that should be passed in these cynical words: “La mort sans phrase.” M. Edouard Fournier has, however, well explained, in his admirable little volume, “Les Mots Historiques,” that whereas in most cases the deputy signing the register explained, in one or more phrases, why he was in favour of a particular sentence, the sentence in this particular case was given without one word of explanation, “sans phrase” in short, as the registrar put it.

The day of the king’s sentence, one of the deputies, Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, who had voted for death, was assassinated just after he had left the Assembly, by a former member of the Body-guard named Pàris. The Convention ordered that he should receive the honours of the Pantheon, and assisted in a body at his funeral. This incident caused a deep sensation, deeper, it is said, even than the execution of the king, which took place on the 21st of January, 1793. The deepest indignation, too, was excited by the news that among those who had voted for the king’s death was his cousin, the Duke of Orleans, the so-called Philippe Égalité, whose son, Louis Philippe, was thirty-seven years afterwards to ascend the French throne. Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes a few years after the latter event, Châteaubriand reproached the reigning king in plain terms with being the son of a regicide. Arguing that since the execution of Louis XVI., and as a punishment for that crime, it had become impossible to establish monarchy in France, he added:--

“Napoleon saw the diadem fall from his brow in spite of his victories; Charles X., in spite of his piety. To discredit the Crown finally in the eyes of the nations, it has been permitted to the son of the regicide to lie for one moment in the bloodstained bed of the murdered man.” That Louis Philippe suffered this outburst to be published unchallenged has been regarded as a proof of his extreme tolerance in press matters. Probably, however, he thought it prudent not to invite general attention to words which, by a large portion of his subjects, would have been accepted as justifiable.

It has been said by the defenders of the “regicide” that Philippe Égalité did his best not to be present at the sitting of the Convention when sentence had to be passed on the unfortunate king; but that he was threatened by his friends of the Left with assassination unless he voted with them for the “death of the tyrant.” However that may be, he took his seat among the judges by whom the fate of his royal kinsman was to be decided, and, when it became his turn to deliver his opinion, did so in the following words: “Occupied solely with my duty, convinced that all those who have attacked, or might afterwards attack, the sovereignty of the people deserve death, I pronounce the death of Louis.”

Philippe Égalité had looked for general approval, and had voted in fear of death--which awaited him all the same, and came to him in the very form in which a few months before it had been inflicted on the unhappy Louis. When his vote was made known cries of indignation from all sides warned him that he had transgressed one of the great moral laws which are observed even by men who violate all others. Then it was that a former soldier of the King’s Body-guard, hearing of Philippe Égalité’s unnatural offence, resolved to kill him, but not being able to find him, killed another less guilty “regicide” in his place.

Very different was the feeling excited by the conduct of Philippe Égalité in the breast of the king himself. “I don’t know by what chance,” says the Abbé Edgeworth in his “Relation sur les Derniers Momens du Roi,” “the conversation fell upon Philippe. The king seemed to be well acquainted with his intrigues and with the horrid part he had taken at the Convention. But he spoke of him without any bitterness, and with pity rather than with anger. ‘What have I done to my cousin,’ he exclaimed, ‘that he should so persecute me? What object could he have? Oh, he is more to be pitied than I am. My lot is melancholy, no doubt, but his is much more so.’”

Meanwhile the faction of the Assembly which in the beginning of September, 1792, had, by its excited declamation and denunciation, brought about the massacre of the prisoners, was constantly attempting, in combination with other factions, to arrest some of the most influential members of the majority, accuse them of treason, and bring them before the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the 2nd of June, 1793, they struck their first blow; and on the 3rd of October in the same year they denounced forty-four deputies, ordered the arrest of seventy-one, and compelled many more to take to flight and seek safety in concealment. The majority was thus diminished by 150 members: the minority in fact became the majority.

Then one of the authors of these measures, Robespierre, hoping to monopolise whatever fruits they might bear, and finding no further obstacle to his ambition, became dictator in fact, bent everything beneath his will, and reigned by terror. During fourteen months he subjected the French to a ferocious tyranny. At Paris alone thirty, forty, sixty heads fell daily. At length, on the 27th of July, 1794, this monster, together with his chief accomplices, paid his reckoning, and France was delivered from an intolerable yoke. To the general desolation, grief, and alarm now succeeded the liveliest joy. The doors of many prisons were thrown open; the instrument of death ceased to ply its blade.

The Convention, free and tranquil, despite the difficulties it experienced from foreign factions, was now to pursue its way and to give France a constitution. On the 26th of October, 1795, it terminated its session.

The Conventional Assembly, at war with all the States of Europe, at war even with the French inhabitants of some of the western provinces, surrounded by distractions and dangers to which some of its own members fell victims, did not omit to encourage the arts and sciences, particularly those of practical utility, nor to found public institutions of the highest importance. The development it gave to the national schools and hospitals, to mention these alone, has already been touched upon in previous chapters. A report drawn up in the third year of the Republic by the savant Foucroy, in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, on the “Arts which had served for the defence of the Republic,” contains some interesting details. Within nine months, it was boasted, 12,000,000 pounds of saltpetre had been manufactured and stored in the magazines of the Republic, whereas, previously, the merest fraction of that quantity had been yearly produced.

A method had been introduced, moreover, for manufacturing gunpowder in a few hours with machines of the greatest simplicity. Hitherto France had been dependent on the neighbouring nations for the manufacture of steel. England and Germany had been accustomed to furnish her with this metal at a charge of about 4,000,000 francs a year. Now several factories rose in places where the production of steel had been hitherto unknown.

During the same period many improvements were introduced in the manufacture of muskets; the number of cannon foundries was greatly increased, a species of balloon was used as a war vehicle; and, to pass from war to peace, weights and measures were rendered uniform.

The system of national education with nominal charges (averaging ten francs a month), at the gymnasiums, with free lectures by the best professors at the Sorbonne and the College of France, is due to the Convention. So, too, is the famous Conservatoire de Musique, with its gratuitous teaching, which has had the effect of turning France from an unmusical into an eminently musical nation. For an interesting and valuable account of the constructive measures adopted by the French Republic, which is usually credited with measures of destruction alone, the reader is referred to Mr. Morse Stephens’s excellent “History of the French Revolution.”

Having been endowed by the Republic with a legislative body, France was never afterwards without one, though its importance varied according to the form and character of the Government. From the Riding School of the Tuileries the Assembly moved to the Tuileries itself, and governing the country as the Convention really did, it had the right, perhaps, to establish itself in the palace of the French kings. Napoleon, however, wanted the Tuileries for himself; and his Legislative Body now held its unimportant discussions in the Palais Bourbon; which remained the home of the French Parliament, under various names, until in 1871 the seat of government was changed from Paris to Versailles.

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XXXII. SOME HISTORICAL RESIDENCES

The Palace of the Legion of Honour--The Ministry of War--The Rue de Grenelle--Talleyrand.

An interesting walk on the left bank of the Seine is from the end of the Rue du Bac along the quay to the Pont des Invalides. To many persons the most remarkable house on the Quai d’Orsay is the café of the same name, which, by reason, no doubt, of its proximity to the Ministry of War, is largely frequented by superior officers. At No. 5 is a cavalry barrack occupied under the Restoration by the King’s Body-guard. Here, up to the time of the Revolution, was the office of the Court carriages which conveyed the public of Paris to the different royal residences, but went nowhere else. In 1788, the year before the Revolution, the prices were three livres ten sols (three francs ten sous, that is to say) for Versailles and St.-Germain, nine livres ten sols for Fontainebleau, and thirteen livres ten sols for Compiègne.

Close to the Café d’Orsay stood the Palace of the Council of State, laid in ruins by the Communists on the 24th of May, 1871.

The Palace of the Legion of Honour, one of the most beautiful buildings on the quay, was erected in 1786 by the architect Rousseau for Prince Frederic John Otho von Salm Kirburg, husband of Jeanne Françoise Fidèle Antoinette de Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The prince was well connected, for, husband of a Hohenzollern, he was brother-in-law of the Duc de Thouars and of the Prince de Croy. He sat as deputy for Lorraine in the Constituent Assembly, commanded a battalion of the National Guard of Paris, was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and guillotined on the 23rd of July, 1794, four days before Robespierre, and in the same batch with the Prince de Montbazon-Rohan, M. de Beauharnais, and M. Gouy d’Arcy. He was brought to the scaffold under the name, negligently given to him by the Moniteur, of “H. Desalm-Kirbourg, Prince of Germany.”

The former palace of the princes of Salm has had almost as eventful a history as its first owners. It was put into a lottery, and won by a hairdresser’s assistant, who sold it to a man named Liertaud, who used to call himself the Marquis de Boisregard, until he was arrested for forgery, and passed from the Hôtel de Salm to the galleys of Toulon. The house was inhabited for a time, under the Directory, by Mme. de Stael, who made it the scene of those political assemblies which were destined to get her into trouble, and which, under the Empire, made it necessary for her to leave Paris and live abroad.

At last the Government bought the Hôtel de Salm, in 1803, and caused it to be arranged as the Palace of the Legion of Honour. Burnt and pillaged by the Commune, it was rebuilt on the original plan by a voluntary subscription, to which, on the invitation of the Grand Chancellor, General Vinoy, the members of the Legion of Honour contributed.

At the corner of the Quai d’Orsay, just where the Boulevard St.-Germain terminates, is the Cercle Agricole, or Agricultural Club, composed almost exclusively of landed proprietors, and one of the best clubs in every respect that Paris possesses. The “Potato Club” it is humorously called by those who have no sympathy with agricultural pursuits, and who hold with a cert writer that “cultivators of wit have generally no land, and cultivators of land generally no wit.”

There are several Government offices in this neighbourhood: the Ministries of Agriculture, of Public Works, and of War.

The Ministry of War occupies a sort of island comprised between the Rue St.-Dominic, the Rue de Solferino, and the Rue de Bourgogne, with its principal entrance on the Boulevard St.-Germain, No. 231. The Dowager Princess of Conti inhabited the mansion until 1775, the year of her death. The next occupant was the Duc de Richelieu, who was succeeded by Loménic de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, and at the same time Minister of War in the year 1786, and by his brother, the Comte de Brienne, in 1789. Without being designated “Ministry of War,” the house seemed destined to be occupied by a succession of War Ministers. At last, however, it became national property, and from 1802 to 1804 it was inhabited by Lucien Bonaparte. After the proclamation of the Empire, Napoleon gave it to Mme. Laetitia Bonaparte; and it was not until the Restoration that the Hôtel de Brienne became finally the official residence of the Minister of War.

Close by, on the Boulevard St.-Germain, formerly Rue St.-Dominic, is installed the Central Depôt of Artillery. It occupies the whole of the ancient cloister of the monastery of the Reformed Dominicans, whose church is dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas. To the right of the church portal, the little Rue St.-Thomas Aquinas conducts the visitor to a space surrounded by symmetrical buildings. He is now in the heart of the ancient convent. The large door to the right is that of the historical cloister, where the Museum of Artillery found a home until it was transferred to the Hotel des Invalides. The religious establishment, of which nothing but the church survives, was the convent of the general noviciate of the reformed Dominicans or Jacobins, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1631. The construction of the church did not commence till 1638. The architect was Pierre Bullet, and the foundation stone was laid by the Duchess de Luynes. It was not until nearly the middle of the next century--1740--that the edifice was completed. The interior is richly adorned with paintings from the brush of Blondel, Picot, Guillemot, Lemoyne, Lagrenée, Michel Vanloo, and Ary Scheffer. The church of St.-Thomas Aquinas is the most aristocratic in Paris, and a wedding within its walls possesses enormous fascination for the curious sightseer.

The Rue de Grenelle, which runs parallel to the old Rue St.-Dominique, is remarkable for a sculptural masterpiece--the fountain designed by Edmé Bouchardon, who himself executed the whole of the figures and bas-reliefs. The central figure, representing the town of Paris, and the two figures to right and left of it, symbolising the Seine and the Marne, are exquisite. Between the columns and beneath the pediment is a long Latin inscription, addressed by the Provost of the merchants of Paris to the glory of Louis XV., “the father and delight of his people, who, without shedding blood, has extended the frontiers of France.”

On the left, from No. 73 to No. 85, there is a whole series of remarkable houses, each associated with some person of distinction. At No. 73 died, in 1856, Viscount d’Arlincourt, once a popular novelist, now absolutely forgotten. His family was of ancient origin, and his father, a Farmer General, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. Young D’Arlincourt became one of Napoleon’s chamberlains, and afterwards held some post in connection with the Council of State. At the Restoration he wished to attach himself to the service of the Court, but he was not successful, and returning to his castle in Normandy, gave himself up entirely to literature, in which, under the Empire, he gained some reputation. In the year 1825 he gave an entertainment in honour of the Duchess of Berry, which became celebrated, and was made the subject of elaborate descriptions in the newspapers. Running through the viscount’s estate was a winding stream, on which a bark had been prepared for the reception of the duchess, which was attended by the ladies of the neighbourhood costumed as shepherdesses. The young people of the surrounding villages, in arcadian attire, towed the boat with chains of flowers towards a Greek temple, where ballads of a chivalric kind were sung in praise of the honoured guests. White flags embroidered with fleurs de lys were waved in the air; and in the evening, after a sumptuous banquet, there were illuminations and a grand ballet. More than a thousand persons took part in these operatic scenes, which were marked by the same theatrical taste that distinguishes the viscount’s romances. He had begun, under the Empire, an epic poem, called “The Caroleid,” on the subject of Charlemagne, in which, beneath the features of Carolus Magnus, the physiognomy of Napoleon could be recognised. These passages were, however, marked out when, under the Restoration, the viscount published the complete work. The most successful of all M. d’Arlincourt’s books was “Le Solitaire,” which when it first appeared went through a number of editions, and was translated into many languages. It may be added that Bellini’s last opera, I Puritani, was based on a novel by M. d’Arlincourt, called “Cavaliers and Roundheads.”

At No. 75 Talleyrand resided as Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Directory. Before entering political life, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord studied theology and took holy orders. His family would have placed him in the army, but for an accident of rather a frightful kind, which happened to him in his childhood. His nurse had put him down in a field, while she walked away in conversation with her lover, and during her absence the child under her care was attacked by a pig, which bit away part of one of the calves and of one of the feet of the future diplomatist. At the age of twenty-one young Talleyrand was named Abbé of St.-Denis in the diocese of Rheims. He led the dissipated life common among the young abbés of his day; but he cultivated the society of intellectual men, and was on friendly terms with Mirabeau, Buffon, and Voltaire. In 1780 he was appointed Agent-General of the French clergy: a lucrative post which placed him in relations with the Minister, M. de Calonne, from whom he acquired ideas on the subject of finance which enabled him to repair his shattered fortune. Leading at the same time a life of pleasure and of affairs, Talleyrand did not remain insensible to the changes that were taking place around him; and in a letter addressed to his friend, Choiseul Gouffier, ambassador at Constantinople, he showed himself an intelligent advocate of political reform. A separate administration for the provinces--provincial self-government, in fact--was one of the remedies he proposed. He declared war against all privileges, and ended his letter by observing that “at last the people must count for something.” In 1788, the year before the Revolution, Talleyrand was made Bishop of Autun, with an income of 80,000 francs. A member of the Assembly of Notables in the month of November in this year, he showed himself one of the warmest advocates of the new ideas, and became at this time the friend of Necker. The clergy of his diocese sent Talleyrand as deputy to the States-General of 1789. Here he ranged himself on the popular side, and voted for the union of the two privileged orders (nobility and clergy) with the Tiers États. He voted, too, for the suppression of tithes, and for the constitution of an executive with responsible ministers.

At the great Federation Festival in the Champs de Mars, it was Talleyrand who celebrated mass on the altar of the country, and a few months afterwards he gave up the bishopric of Autun. For supporting the civil constitution of the clergy he drew upon himself a decree of excommunication. In 1791 Talleyrand undertook his first diplomatic mission, being sent to London in order, if possible, to obtain a declaration of neutrality from England. In this he was unsuccessful. The atmosphere of London, however, suited him better than that of Paris, and Talleyrand kept away from France until after the Reign of Terror. From England he had passed to the United States. But on the formation of the Directory he thought the time had come for him to go back to France; and though his name had been placed on the list of émigrés, he had no trouble in obtaining permission to return. He now established friendly relations with Barras, with Chénier, and with Mme. de Stael, and, in spite of some opposition from the austere Carnot, who disliked Talleyrand’s levity, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, or “director of external relations.” He at once recognised the genius of the young chief who, as General Bonaparte, had already made himself a great name; and Talleyrand’s appointment as Foreign Minister was renewed when Napoleon became First Consul. He foresaw the establishment of the Empire, and encouraged Napoleon in that direction. He had a serious misunderstanding with the emperor in regard to the execution of the Duke d’Enghien, which Talleyrand strongly condemned, though, according to Napoleon, it was he who first suggested it.

Talleyrand had more than one difference of opinion with Napoleon, and on a certain occasion the emperor, half familiarly, half contemptuously, pulled him by the ear. “What a pity,” exclaimed Talleyrand, “that so great a man should be so ill-bred!” More than once Talleyrand was dismissed from Napoleon’s service; but in moments of difficulty it was found necessary to recall him. Finally, however, on Napoleon’s fall, he got the Emperor of Russia to declare that he would treat neither with Napoleon nor with any member of his family. Talleyrand used all his influence, moreover, with the Senate to procure its acceptance of the Bourbons, sure by this means to secure the favour of Louis XVIII. “Il n’y a rien de changé: il n’y a qu’un Français de plus”--was the phrase which Talleyrand at this time put into the mouth of the king’s brother, Count d’Artois, who, after a time, believed that he had really uttered it. The restored monarchy, however, gave the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Duc de Richelieu, Talleyrand receiving an office he had before held under Napoleon, that of Grand Chamberlain, with a salary of 100,000 francs.

When the Revolution of 1830 broke out, the Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis Philippe, consulted Talleyrand as to whether, should he accept the throne, the European powers would be likely to recognise him. Talleyrand wrote to the Duke of Wellington, at that time Prime Minister, and, finding that England would make no objection, took it for granted that there would be no trouble with Russia, while it was comparatively unimportant what views the other governments might take. A month afterwards he started for London, where he had been appointed ambassador, and where he laid the foundation of that entente cordiale (the expression was Guizot’s) which has secured to both countries a long period of peace.

In 1834 Talleyrand, now in his eighty-first year, resigned his embassy and returned to Paris, where, no longer taking part in public affairs, he died four years afterwards. “Talleyrand spoke little,” says Capefigue, “but with exquisite delicacy said all that it was necessary to say with precision and politeness. He defined a situation by a word; terminated a discussion by a phrase. He had seen so many events, so many men, and so many passions, that no small thing could excite him. He could meet anger, bursts of temper, with the most impassible countenance. To a reproach he would reply by some charming mot. Thus, when Napoleon said to him abruptly one day: “They say you are very rich, M. de Talleyrand; you have made lucky speculations on the stock exchange.” “Yes,” was his answer, “I bought into the funds on the eve of the 18th Brumaire”--the day on which Napoleon made his celebrated coup d’état.

Many witticisms have of course been attributed to Talleyrand which he never uttered, and many more, which he did utter, but which were not absolutely original. According to M. Edouard Fournier he was a constant student of a collection of jests entitled, with curious irony, “L’Improvisateur Français.” All necessary deductions, however, having been made, the fact remains that this statesman was very witty, and with a wit characteristically his own. “Language was given to man in order to conceal his thoughts” is, perhaps, the most famous of his sallies. When someone said in his presence that M. Thiers was a “parvenu,” “not parvenu, but arrivé,” he remarked.

Besides being witty himself, he was according to M. Louis Blanc, the cause at least on one occasion of wit in another. When Talleyrand was dying, says the author of “The History of Ten Years,” King Louis Philippe went to see him. “Je souffre les tourments d’enfer,” complained Talleyrand. “Déjà?” the king is reported to have muttered. This story, however, was at the time of M. Louis Blanc’s writing at least two or three centuries old, and there is no reason for supposing that either Talleyrand or the king uttered the words attributed to them by this always interesting but generally inaccurate historian.

As a rule Talleyrand’s witticisms were marked by politeness. But he could say severe things; and once when a lady, who suffered from defective vision, seemed by her mode of inquiry after his health to be hinting at his lameness, he replied to her “Comment allez vous?” “Comme vous voyez, Madame.” His “Surtout pas de zèle” is well known; also his amusing if cynical caution on the subject of spontaneity: “Beware of first impulses: they are nearly always generous.”

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XXXIII. THE RUE TARANNE AND DIDEROT

Diderot’s Early Life in Paris--His Love Affairs--Imprisonment in the Château de Vincennes--Diderot and Catherine II. of Russia--His Death.

An interesting book has been published, under the title of “Paris Démoli,” on the churches, houses, and buildings of various kinds which were pulled down during the work of reconstruction pursued so vigorously during recent years, and especially under the Second Empire. To build the Rue de Rennés, which joins the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the terminus of the Left-Bank Western Railway on the Boulevard Montparnasse, it was necessary to pull down the two first houses in the Rue Taranne, numbered 1 and 2. No. 2, whose side windows look out upon the Rue Saint-Benoit, afforded for many years an abode, on the fifth floor, just beneath the roof, to Diderot, who, however, died, not here, but in the Rue Richelieu immediately after his return from a visit to the Empress Catherine.

Fitted neither by birth nor breeding for the atmosphere of courts, Diderot received, nevertheless, from the Russian empress the greatest marks of favour. In Russia Catherine could scarcely govern otherwise than despotically, though she once summoned a parliament whose members were entrusted with legislative functions; and it was perhaps not altogether her fault that nothing came of their labours. Personally, however, she had not the despotic manners by which the intercourse of Frederick the Great with his inferiors was so often marked. Of a more accommodating disposition than Diderot, Voltaire was able for a considerable time to live peacefully with the Prussian king, though when at last the inevitable quarrel came, he did not scruple to criticise and satirise the sovereign whom, through a long course of years, he had persistently flattered.

Son of a blacksmith and cutler at Langres, Diderot entered at an early age the college of Harcourt, directed by the Jesuits. But showing no aptitude for the theological career, he was placed with a lawyer, at whose office he occupied himself exclusively with the study of literature, philosophy, and mathematics. After a time the chief of the office remonstrated with him, and asked him how he expected to live. “I am fond of study,” he replied, “I can exist on very little, I am perfectly happy; why, then, should I trouble myself about a regular profession?” On being informed of these views Diderot’s father began by stopping his son’s allowance. Then Diderot gave lessons, but not, it would seem, on very remunerative principles; for if the pupil pleased him he was ready to go on teaching him all day, whereas, in the contrary case, he did not give a second lesson. He accepted payment in the form of books, clothes, or anything else which, in the absence of money, the pupil could offer. After a time he was engaged in a private family, where for three months he taught incessantly, walking out with his pupils, taking all his meals with them, and not leaving them for a moment. He disliked, however, living in another person’s house, and retired after three months to his own garret. He was now in the direst poverty. He was often without food, and one Shrove Tuesday, in 1741 (he was then twenty-eight years of age), he returned home in a fainting condition from having eaten nothing all day. His landlady, seeing his enfeebled state, gave him some toast steeped in wine; “and I then swore,” said Diderot afterwards to his daughter, “that, if ever I possessed anything, I would not, so long as I lived, refuse help to a fellow creature who might find himself in a similar position.” On the whole, however, apart from occasional bad days, Diderot led a lively existence. He could write in any style, and was ready to execute any kind of literary work. He even composed sermons. He wrote six for a missionary, who paid him 300 crowns (about £36) for the half-dozen. This he afterwards declared to be one of the best strokes of business he had ever done. From time to time he wrote to his father, who did not answer him. His mother, however, sent him, from time to time, a portion of her savings by a faithful servant who, without saying anything about it, added to the amount some savings of her own. On these occasions the poor woman had to make a journey on foot of some 300 miles, 150 each way. In spite of this assistance Diderot was often in distress. It may be, as Heine somewhere suggests, that writers and artists, like medlars, ripen best on straw. It is certain, in any case, that the talent and courage of Diderot developed in spite, if not in consequence, of his poverty. His energy grew in proportion as he exercised his power of resistance.

Unable to be much poorer than he actually was, Diderot now resolved to get married. He heard one morning that two ladies had come to live in the same house as himself. One was Mme. Champion, widow of a man who had ruined himself and his family by his mania for speculation; the other her daughter, Mlle. Annette Champion, a tall, handsome, well-mannered girl. They had their own furniture, had saved a little money, and were trying to support themselves by needlework. Diderot wished to be introduced to them. “They will decline to make your acquaintance,” was his landlady’s reply. He determined to order some shirts; by one means or another he had resolved to make their acquaintance. On seeing the daughter he fell in love with her, and soon afterwards proposed to marry her. “You wish to get married?” said Mme. Champion; “and upon what? You have no profession, no property, nothing whatever except a tongue of gold, with which you have managed to turn my daughter’s head.” The girl’s mother, however, gave her consent, and Diderot had next to obtain the consent of his own father. Old Diderot, however, treated his son as a madman, and not only would not hear of the marriage, but threatened to curse him if he persisted in his intentions. Troubled on all sides, Diderot now fell ill, and the illness sealed his fate. He was waited upon and nursed by his two kind-hearted neighbours. On his recovery he was profuse in his expressions of gratitude towards the mother; nor did this prevent him from marrying the daughter in secret.

The young woman whom he now made his wife was more remarkable for good nature than for intelligence. The strangest stories are told about her want of brains. Thus, on one occasion, when a publisher had in her presence purchased a manuscript from Diderot for 100 crowns, she expressed her astonishment at his taking so much money for a few scraps of paper, and urged him to return the sum. About a year later Diderot, finding that injurious stories had been told to his family concerning his wife, sent her without invitation on a visit to his father, who received her with kindness, and kept her in his house for three months. Meanwhile Diderot made the acquaintance of a Mme. de Pinsieux, who, unlike the wife, was more remarkable for intellectual than for moral qualities. She was extravagant in her tastes, and to gratify them Diderot plied his pen with ceaseless activity.

To furnish her with money, literary spendthrift that he was, he wrote books of the most varied kinds, from “Pensées Philosophiques,” one of his most admirable works, to “Les Bijoux Indiscrets,” one of the most objectionable. No one complained of the licentious tale. But the philosophical work, a pamphlet of some sixty pages, full of profound truths, expressed with vivacity and originality, was first attributed to Voltaire, and next burnt by the common hangman. In his “Letter on the Blind,” Diderot gave further offence, and this time he was imprisoned in the castle of Vincennes. Everyone thought that the materialism professed by Diderot in his essay was the cause of his arrest; which, however, was due to something quite different. His “Lettre sur les Aveugles” had been written on the occasion of an operation for cataract performed by Réaumur on a patient who had been blind from birth. Diderot had wished to study the first sensations produced upon the blind man by the effect of light; but the famous operator would admit no one except a lady of fashion, Mme. Dupré de Saint-Maur; and at the beginning of his letter Diderot complained of the man of science who had preferred to have his experiment witnessed by two beautiful eyes rather than by men capable of appreciating it. Mme. Dupré de Saint-Maur is said to have had considerable influence with M. d’Argençon, the Minister of Police; and without judgment or accusation Diderot was arrested on the 24th of July, 1749, and taken to the Château of Vincennes. Thus religion was avenged, and Mme. Dupré de Saint-Maur also.

That Diderot’s arrest was due in a great measure to the general contents of his book, and not merely to his by no means uncomplimentary mention of Mme. Dupré de Saint-Maur, seems proved by the fact that after imprisoning him the police visited Diderot’s house and made a search for his manuscripts. The unhappy author remained for twenty-eight days in secret confinement. At the end of that time he wrote to D’Argençon begging the minister to liberate him from a captivity “in which he might make him die but could not make him live.” He was now transferred from the castle-dungeon to the castle itself, where his wife and several of his friends were allowed to visit him, among others Jean Jacques Rousseau, with whom for some time past he had been on intimate terms.

In the eighth book of his “Confessions” Rousseau relates how a visit he made to the prisoner of Vincennes marked an epoch in his life. The Academy of Dijon had just proposed the following subject for a prize essay:--“Has the revival of Arts and Letters contributed to the purification of manners?” It was during his visits to Diderot in the Château that Rousseau claims not only to have conceived the idea of treating the question proposed, but also to have written the greatest part of the essay which was to cause such a sensation in the world. Diderot, however, gave a very different account of the matter to his friend Marmontel. “I was prisoner at Vincennes,” he said, “where Rousseau came to see me. He had made me his Aristarchus, as he himself declared. One day, when we were walking together, he told me that the Academy of Dijon had just proposed an interesting question, and that he wished to treat it. The question was ‘Has the revival of arts and letters contributed to the perfection of morals?’ ‘Which side shall you take?’ I said to him. ‘The affirmative,’ he replied. ‘That is the pons asinorum,’ I said. ‘All the mediocre people will take that view, and you can only support it by commonplace ideas; whereas the contrary side offers to philosophy and eloquence a new and fertile field.’ ‘You are right,’ he answered, after a moment’s reflection. ‘I will follow your advice.’” Diderot himself wrote on this very subject: “When the programme of the Academy of Dijon appeared he came to consult me as to which side he should take. ‘Take the side,’ I said to him, ‘that no one else will take.’”

It was, in any case, Rousseau who wrote the essay, author though Diderot may have been of its paradoxical character. As an example of the laxity, as well as the severity of the period, it may be mentioned that when Diderot had once been set free from the dungeon, he was allowed, in his more commodious place of residence, to receive not only his wife and friends, but also Mme. de Pinsieux, to whom he was still attached. One day, when she was visiting him, he was struck by the brilliancy of her attire. She accounted for the elaborateness of her toilette by saying that she was going to an entertainment at Champigny. “Was she going alone?” he asked. “Quite alone.” “Your word of honour?” “I give it you.” Diderot did not quite believe in the lady’s assurances, and soon after her departure he climbed over the wall of the park, hurried to Champigny, and there saw Mme. de Pinsieux with some admirer. He went back, scaled the wall a second time, and became once more a captive, but with a heart set free. “He broke for ever,” says an indignant moralist, “with his unworthy mistress.”

Diderot remained three years at Vincennes. He quitted his prison in 1734, and now conceived the plan of the “Encyclopædia,” a magnificent literary and scientific monument, which alone would justify the reputation he enjoys. It occupied him, without absorbing the whole of his time, for more than thirty years; and there was certainly no other man who could have brought to the work such wide knowledge, such energy of style, and such prodigious application. He had undertaken the articles on historical, philosophical, and scientific subjects, while he was, at the same time, in association with D’Alembert, to go over the work of all the contributors. As regards many of the subjects Diderot had to study them as he went on; which his marvellous intuition enabled him to do with the best effect. “Diderot,” said Grimm, “has naturally the most encyclopædic head that ever existed.” “His genius, in its sphere of activity, includes everything,” said Voltaire. “He passes from the heights of metaphysics to the frame of a weaver, and thence to the drama.” “Centuries after the time of his existence,” wrote Rousseau, in his “Confessions,” when he had quarrelled with him, “this universal head will be looked upon as we now look upon the head of Plato or Aristotle.”

Apart from his legitimate work Diderot had to cope with opposition and persecution of all kinds. The Jesuits had proposed their co-operation for the theological articles of the “Encyclopædia,” and Diderot had refused their offer equally with a similar one made by the Jansenists. The work was forthwith denounced as irreligious; and with such contributors as Diderot and Voltaire it could scarcely, indeed, have been otherwise, though it was not the direct object of the writers to make war upon Faith. Among the many celebrated authors who furnished articles to the “Encyclopædia” Rousseau may in particular be mentioned. But like most of the contributors he wrote only for a time, and chiefly on musical subjects. D’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, all fell off; Rousseau because something had offended him, Voltaire to write his own philosophical dictionary, D’Alembert because he had grown tired of the work. “I am worn out with the vexations of all kinds brought upon us by this work,” wrote D’Alembert to Voltaire in 1758. At one time its publication was forbidden, when Catherine II. offered to continue it in Russia. The volumes were, curiously enough, thrown into the Bastille; which, since they could be taken out again, was at least better than burning them at the hands of the common hangman.

Catherine II. granted Diderot a handsome pension, and she at the same time purchased his library for a large sum. The empress went so far, indeed, as to send him the sum of 50,000 francs, being the annual pension paid in advance for fifty years. Touched by the bounty of Catherine, Diderot wished to thank the empress in person, and in the year 1773 he started for Russia. At the Hague he was met by the High Chamberlain, Narischkin, who, accompanying him to St. Petersburg, put him up at his own house. Diderot’s friend Grimm was already at St. Petersburg. He presented Diderot to the Empress Catherine, who received him in the most cordial manner. She would be glad to see him, she said, in her own apartments every day from three to five or six, and she took the greatest pleasure in his conversation. “I see him very often,” she wrote to Voltaire. “Our conversations are incessant. What an extraordinary head he has! As for his heart, would that all other men had one like it. I do not know whether they (Grimm and Diderot) are getting tired of St. Petersburg, but I know that I could talk to them all my life without fatigue.”

Catherine did her best to keep Diderot at St. Petersburg; but he wished to return to Paris, and though he had been invited to stay at Berlin by Frederick the Great, he passed through Prussia without visiting the capital. It has been before said that he had no sympathy for Frederick.

Soon after his return to Paris he was taken ill, and after a short malady died. The curé of Saint-Roch had come to see him, and Diderot received him in a very friendly manner. They talked on various moral and religious subjects, and as they agreed on many theological points, especially as to the efficacy of charity and good works, the curé ventured to suggest that if he would authorise the publication of these opinions, together with a retractation of his works, the effect would be excellent. But Diderot would do nothing of the kind. Neither would he confess. Nevertheless there was but little difficulty in connection with his funeral, which took place at Saint-Roch, where he was buried (July, 1784) in the Chapel of the Virgin. There his remains still lie.

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XXXIV. MONSEIGNEUR AFFRE AND THE INSURRECTION OF JUNE

The Courtyard of the Dragon--The National Workshops--The Insurrection of June--Monseigneur Affre Shot at the Barricade of the Faubourg St.-Antoine.

Close to the Rue de Turenne is the Courtyard of the Dragon, inhabited for the last two centuries, even until now, by dealers in every kind of ironwork. It was here, in July, 1830, that the first insurgents of this particular district armed themselves more or less effectively for the fray. The Courtyard of the Dragon owes its name to the dragon in bronze placed at the entrance, just opposite the Rue Sainte-Marguerite, in allusion to the monster on which painters and sculptors make Sainte Marguerite trample. Passing in front of the Courtyard of the Dragon the Rue de Rennes runs from north to south. The Rue du Four, the Rue du Vieux-Colombier, and the Rue d’Assas, are at the back of the Monastery of the Carmes Déchaussés--or Shoeless Carmelites--which occupies the interior of the angle formed by the Rue de Rennes and the Rue d’Assas. The Shoeless Carmelites, as formed or reformed under the auspices of St. Theresa, were authorised to establish themselves in France by letters patent, dated June, 1610; and they soon enriched themselves by the sale of two manufactured articles which they alone were able to make: a kind of stucco, known as Blanc des Carmes, which took the polish of marble, and treacle water; both of which became very popular in Paris. The Carmelite Monastery is now the seat of the Catholic University of Paris, founded by thirty French archbishops or bishops, and comprising three faculties: Law, Letters, and Sciences. In 1791 the priests, who had refused to swear fidelity to the Constitution, were imprisoned in the Carmelite Monastery, and the massacring band of Maillard, and the wretches under his orders, slaughtered them on the 2nd and 3rd of September, 1792, together with all the prisoners, irrespectively of age or sex, who were confined with them. Close to the altar of the left transept is a monument enclosing the heart of Monseigneur Affre, who fell during the terrible days of June, in 1848, at the formidable barricade of the Faubourg St.-Antoine, as he was making a last effort to stop the further effusion of blood. In the midst of his exhortations he was struck in the loins by a stray bullet, and fell into the arms of the insurgents, who were in despair at the terrible incident, which was not the result of a crime, as the direction of the shot, the evidence of the vicars in attendance upon him, and the grief of the revolutionists sufficiently testified. The venerable prelate expired on the 27th, two days after he had been struck. “May my blood be the last shed” were his dying words.

The successful insurrection of June, which, after much slaughter, was suppressed, was partly the consequence of the successful insurrection of February, after which, Louis Philippe having taken flight, the Second Republic was proclaimed. In February the provisional Government had guaranteed in a formal manner the “right to labour.” Accordingly, numbers of workmen being without employment, and capitalists being unwilling to embark in new enterprises, or even in many cases to continue those which were already on foot, national workshops were opened, in which upwards of 100,000 workmen found occupation and bread. Apart from the drain upon the exchequer caused by the employment of these hundred thousand men, the inevitable moment at which it would be necessary to close the workshops was regarded by everyone with alarm. Each workman was employed one day out of four in useless labour; and the more prudent hoped that the national workshops would be closed gradually, and the men induced gradually to seek service with private employers. Among other measures it was proposed to colonise Algeria with the men out of work; and it was calculated that two hundred millions of francs would be necessary for this purpose. According to the calculations of many wise economists and politicians, an expenditure of two hundred millions in order to get rid of a menacing army of 100,000 men was not excessive. Others, including, it may be, some secret enemies of the Republic, who did not object to a violent collision, in which the republican form of government might disappear, thought the workshops ought to be closed, and the men left to shift for themselves. The national workshops were at the same time declared to be nests of idlers, thieves, and incendiaries.

On the 17th of June, after long and passionate debates in the Assembly, the immediate dissolution of the national workshops was proposed. The next day the workmen, by way of reply, exhibited on all the walls of Paris placards in these terms: “There is no unwillingness on our part to work; but useful and appropriate work according to our trades is just what we cannot obtain. We call for it, we ask for it with all our force. The immediate suppression of the national workshops is demanded; but what is to become of the 100,000 workmen who find in their modest pay the sole means of existence for themselves and their families? Are they to be delivered over to the evil counsels of famine, to the suggestions of despair? Are they to be placed at the mercy of factions?” A proclamation was at the same time issued to the workmen, calling upon them to be calm, and warning them against the emissaries of different political parties. “Nothing is any longer possible in France,” concluded the proclamation, “but the democratic and social republic. We will have neither emperor nor king; nothing except liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

It was decided in the first place to expel from the national workshops, and, with the consent of the expelled, enroll in the army all workmen of from seventeen to twenty-five years of age. Other detachments were to be sent to the marshes of Sologne in order to drain them, or to be employed on earthworks in distant departments. Others, again, could be sent to Algeria. The workmen, however, showed no disposition to adopt any of the courses recommended; and, according to the expression of one of them, they were called upon to choose between famine, expatriation, and military servitude. They were threatened, indeed, by famine, but more than one means of escape was offered to them. After a stormy day an immense meeting was held in the Place St.-Sulpice, at which, after many impassioned speeches, it was decided to meet the next morning at six o’clock in the Place du Panthéon. The executive commission appointed by the Government to watch over the peace of Paris, and prevent, if possible, its being broken, ordered General Cavaignac, Minister of War, to occupy the Place du Panthéon the next morning, June 23rd, at five. But at six not a soldier was to be seen, and the square was taken possession of by the people. The absence of troops at important points was observed elsewhere. Two plans had been discussed. The executive commissioners wished the troops to be disseminated in such a manner that no barricade could be erected without being at once destroyed, so that the hostile popular movement would be crushed from the beginning. Cavaignac, however, wished to be allowed to mass the entire army beneath his orders, and then to send columns of attack wherever necessary. It was represented to him that by such a system Paris would be covered with barricades, and the final victory of the troops cause torrents of blood. The stern soldier cared nothing for that. “As for the National Guard, let it take care of its own shops,” he haughtily added; “I do not wish to run the risk of a single one of my companies being disarmed.” Cavaignac was afterwards accused of having purposely allowed the insurrection to grow, in order that he might play the part of a saviour. But the question being purely a military one, the executive commission found itself bound to give in.

The insurrection had neither chief nor settled plan. Enjoying full liberty of extension during the first few hours, it had spread rapidly over half the city, extending in a semicircle from the Clos St. Lazare on the right bank to the Pantheon on the left. Its centre seemed to be the Place de la Bastille, and its strategic object to converge upon the Hôtel de Ville. In spite of Cavaignac’s sarcasm about the shopkeepers and their shops, the National Guard played a very active part in the suppression of the insurrection. Cavaignac entrusted the command on the right bank and the boulevards to Lamoricière, on the left bank to Daumesuil, and around the Hôtel de Ville to Bedeau. He himself took charge of a few battalions in the Faubourg du Temple, not far from the Place de la Bastille.

It was on the evening of the first day that Monseigneur Affre, accompanied by his two Grand Vicars, went to the Place de la Bastille to address some conciliatory words to the insurgents, in the hope of prevailing upon them to abandon the contest; and it was here, as before set forth, that, received with every mark of sympathy by the insurgents, he fell while he was addressing them. It was not till nine on the day following that the formidable insurrection of June was, after terrible slaughter, brought to an end.

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XXXV. SOME OCCUPANTS OF MONTPARNASSE

The Boulevard Montparnasse--The Cemetery--Father Loriquet--Hégésippe Moreau--Sainte-Beuve.

To return to the Carmelite Monastery and the Rue de Rennes, which continues its course until it reaches the Boulevard Montparnasse. This boulevard is a section of the road round Paris, formed under Louis XV., together with all the southern boulevards, in virtue of letters patent. Until recently the Boulevard Montparnasse was full of restaurants and dancing-places, among the latter the most celebrated being La Grande Chaumière, much patronised by students in the time of Louis Philippe and of Gavarni. Since the construction of the great terminus of the Western Railway the boulevard in question has become transformed. It has been invaded by industry and commerce. The hovels, booths, and public gardens of former days have been replaced by well-built houses, many of which, with the studios attached to them, are occupied by painters and sculptors.

The name of this boulevard has a genuine literary origin. The land was given in the sixteenth century, with the high ground in the immediate neighbourhood, to the scholars of the different Paris colleges, who assembled on its slopes and summit to read poems, and to discuss matters of literature and art. The height of the so-called “mount” is on a level with that of the roof of the railway station; but the railway line is itself considerably above the level of the boulevard. The region of Mount Parnassus has its theatre and its cemetery. At the former many a dramatic author, afterwards to become celebrated, has brought out his first piece; in the latter numbers of writers and painters who, without perhaps failing in their art, failed in life, have found repose, with the poet Hégésippe Moreau among them. Here, too, lie Henri Regnault, the young painter who was killed in the sortie towards Buzenval on the 19th of January, 1871; the surgeon Lisfranc, self-declared rival of the illustrious Dupuytren, whom, in his lectures, he used freely to describe as “This brigand from over the water” (Lisfranc was attached to the Charité on the left bank, Dupuytren to the Hôtel Dieu on the island); Father Loriquet, author of the celebrated “History of France,” in which Napoleon Bonaparte is represented as one of the generals of Louis XVIII., in whose name he gains important victories; Sainte-Beuve, the famous critic; Baron Gérard, the painter; Rude, the sculptor; Orfila, the great chemist, who discovered arsenic in the body of M. Lafarge--whereupon Raspail, the chemist retained for the defence, declared that he would find as much arsenic in a pair of old window curtains; the four sergeants of Rochelle, whose unhappy fate has been told in connection with Bicêtre, where for a time they were confined; the philosopher Jouffroy, and the famous writer on political and religious subjects, Montalembert.

Hégésippe Moreau, just mentioned as one of the most interesting tenants of the Montparnasse cemetery, was the author of a terrible poem, “To Hunger,”--with which he was only too intimately acquainted. But his reputation rests on a collection of poems gracefully entitled “Le Myosotis.”

Father Loriquet was one of the most remarkable historians of ancient or modern times. Holding individually, perhaps, the doctrine ascribed to Jesuits collectively by their enemies, that the end justifies the means, and resolved in his “History of France” to work according to the motto of his Order, “Ad majorem Dei gloriam,” he rearranged the historical facts so as to make them accord, not with what did happen, but with what in his opinion ought to have happened--a mode of writing history not indeed peculiar to himself. The work was published immediately after the Restoration, and, according to the titlepage, was expressly designed “for the instruction of youth.” It is said to be still used in certain ultra-religious boarding schools, where no words are looked upon as so odious as those of “Revolution” and “Republic.”

Speaking of the American War of Independence, this strange historian writes: “Louis XVI. did not think it just or politic to take the part of rebels, who claimed rights for subjects against kings. But sacrificing inopportunely his own intelligence to that which he thought he recognised among his councillors, he acknowledged the independence of the United States of America” (vol. ii., p. 129).

Here are some more extracts from this curious work:--

“Louis XVI. committed the fault of tolerating an illegal meeting of factious persons in the Tennis Court. He should have known that a few drops of impure blood shed in time are the salvation of empires (page 130).

“In the midst of convulsive movements the assembly, after a splendid repast, held the midnight meeting so well known under the name of the sitting of the 4th of August. There, without discussion, without deliberation, inspired solely by the vapours of wine, it decreed a number of unjust things against landed proprietors and the owners of feudal rights (page 144).

“It was the evening of the 5th of October. The most alarming news was being circulated in Versailles. The days of the royal family, above all those of the queen, were seriously menaced. The aim of the conspirators was, by intimidating Louis XVI., to compel him to fly and quit the throne, which the Duke of Orleans proposed to seize. But the king having declared that he would not take flight, the duke and his accomplices resolved to get rid of him by assassination. It was in a church dedicated to St. Louis that the horrible plot was prepared. At daybreak the signal was given. Thirty thousand assassins, intoxicated with wine and debauchery, threw themselves into the palace, calling out, ‘Long live our Orleans King!’ (page 146).

“Bonaparte, having by his crimes reached the summit of power, was proclaimed emperor.” In his narrative of the retreat from Moscow Father Loriquet compares the French to Pharaoh’s Egyptians lost in the snow instead of being drowned in the Red Sea. At Fontainebleau, in 1814, when the allies were approaching Paris, Napoleon, according to the historian in question, was suddenly informed by his generals that he was no longer emperor, and that France had a king. “This information made him shed many tears, and he only seemed to be consoled when the allies ceded to him the little island of Elba with an income of 6,000,000 francs.”

The poet Hégésippe Moreau had but little in common with the Jesuit father whose last resting-place he shares. As a writer he is remembered solely by the volume of poems previously referred to, called “Le Myosotis.” As a man, little is known of him except that he was miserably poor--obliged, during one period of his life, to sleep in the trees of the Champs Élysées and of the Bois de Boulogne. In a touching letter of his, preserved by one of his biographers, he tells his correspondent how, being invited to a fashionable evening party, he found nothing there to eat but a little fruit jelly, when he had hoped to have the opportunity of dining. He was, in fact, in the position of that unfortunate young man in M. Ponsard’s Honneur et Argent who exclaims pathetically: “Je porte des gants blancs, et je n’ai pas dîné!”--“I have white gloves on and I’ve had no dinner!” One terrible incident is related of Hégésippe Moreau. During the cholera year of 1832 he was carried in a state of exhaustion, caused solely by hunger, to the hospital of La Charité, where, in the hope of catching the epidemic and dying of it, he rolled himself up in the sheets of a cholera patient who had but lately expired. Contagion, however, spared him, and wanting nothing but food and rest he was soon restored to health. On leaving the hospital he walked on foot to his native town of Provins, where, such was the unpractical character of his mind, he not only started a journal, but a journal in verse. Diogenes it was called, and his only reason for starting it in the little town of Provins, where it could not possibly find a sufficient number of readers, seems to have been that he had influence and credit at a local printing-office, where he had at one time been employed as proof-reader. Diogenes had doubtless been suggested by the Nemesis of Barthélémy, which, however, was published not in a little provincial town, but at Paris. Only a few numbers of Diogenes appeared; and in his rage at not being appreciated the satirist filled his dying number with the bitterest attacks on leading inhabitants of the town. This led to a duel, and obliged him once more to quit Provins for Paris.

It is related of Hégésippe Moreau that in the revolutionary days of 1830, fighting at the barricades, he wounded a Swiss soldier, and then, taking pity on the man, gave him his own coat, to enable him to get away in disguise.

Let us pass, however, to a writer enjoying far more celebrity than either the graceful poet Hégésippe Moreau or the grotesque historiographer, Father Loriquet. It was probably from his English mother that Sainte-Beuve derived that taste for certain English poets, with Cowper, Wordsworth, and Shelley among them, whom he attempted to imitate in his earliest flights. His mother, having been left a widow, sent him for preliminary study to the College of Boulogne, his native town; afterwards transferring him, for the completion of his general education, to Paris. At length he commenced the study of medicine, urged by his mother, who is said to have distrusted the literary aspirations which her son had already manifested. But after waiting for a year as assistant-physician at the hospital of Saint-Louis, he felt that he had missed his true vocation, and, without completely abandoning medicine, wrote a series of historical, philosophical, and critical articles for the Globe, directed at that time by M. Dubois, formerly one of his professors. Sainte-Beuve was then living in the Rue de Vaugirard, a few doors from the house inhabited by Victor Hugo; and when the latter changed his abode and installed himself in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, accident once more threw Sainte-Beuve within easy distance of the poet. Community of literary taste produced an intimate acquaintance between the neighbours, and Sainte-Beuve took part in the new intellectual movement of which Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas were the originators and chiefs. The New School, breaking from classical traditions, turned back its attention to the sixteenth century, and to a group of writers greatly obscured by the literary lustre of the two centuries which followed. Sainte-Beuve set himself to study Ronsard and Du Bellay; and in due time he had an opportunity of showing that he had not studied them in vain. The Academy having, in 1827, proposed as the subject of its Prize for Eloquence a “Picture of French Poetry in the Sixteenth Century,” Daunou persuaded the critic of the Globe to compete, and placed at the young man’s disposition his own rich library. Sainte-Beuve’s essay did not gain the prize. But it was published by its author, who printed with it an edition of the “Selected Works” of Ronsard; and the work, which the Academy had rejected, took rank ultimately as the first authority on the period of French literature with which it deals.

Whilst throwing himself into romanticism Sainte-Beuve was not blind to the defects of the New School, though he could not himself, as poet, avoid the very faults against which he had warned others. In reference to Victor Hugo’s “Odes and Ballads” he wrote as follows: “M. Hugo’s first inspiration is invariably true and profound; the whole mischief arises from extravagant similes, frequent digressions, and over-refinement of analysis.... There are forced metaphors, moreover, improprieties of language, ellipses in the series of ideas, and prosaic passages in the midst of the most dazzling poetry.” Victor Hugo was naturally not delighted with this criticism. But he encouraged the critic, and persuaded him to publish his “Poésiés de Joseph Delorme,” of which Sainte-Beuve had read him some specimens. Having once taken up with romanticism, Sainte-Beuve went at least as far as his master, and committed precisely those faults which he had censured; for eccentric lines, prosaic phrases, and outrageous metaphors abound in his collection, although these eccentricities, far from injuring the volume, seem to have caused its success. People who liked everything that was odd or audacious read the book, and praised it for faults at which scholars would knit their brows.

The Revolution of 1830 opened a new sphere of activity to Sainte-Beuve. Hitherto he had occupied himself little with politics; but now he plied his pen freely in the Globe as a supporter of those principles of humanitarianism so strongly championed by Pierre Leroux, who had become director of the journal in question. Subsequently he undertook a political campaign in the National with Armand Carrel. In his various writings, both in and out of the newspapers, he showed himself inconstant to any fixed principles. His whole life, in fact, was composed of intellectual changes and variations. These, however, were simply the outcome of a mind curious to fathom all kinds of ideas, to penetrate within them, in order to extract from them their sap or their honey. Approaching the teachers in order to appreciate them as well as their doctrines, he made himself their pupil, sat at their feet, and quitted them as soon as he had completed his analysis. He himself was quite conscious of this tendency, and confessed that even when he entered Victor Hugo’s school of romanticism he only assumed as much of that enthusiasm as might be expected to characterise a devotee. If, however, he was on this, and on other similar occasions, consciously insincere, his fault is largely redeemed by the genuine ardour with which he played the neophyte at each fresh initiation; by the respect which he always entertained for his masters, even after he had changed them; and by the universality of the knowledge which he derived from these studies, pursued, as they were, in a spirit of adventure or of intellectual speculation. He sketches his own character admirably in some advice which he gave to a young man in 1864; nor is it difficult to see that he was consciously proposing himself as an example: “Seek the most noble friendships,” he wrote, “and bring to them the benevolence and sincerity of an open soul, desirous, above all things, of admiring; pour into criticism--emulous sister of your poetry--your ardour, sympathy, and all that is purest in your nature; eulogise, lay your eloquence at the service of new talents, usually so much contested and combated, and do not forsake them until the day when they withdraw themselves from the right path and falsify their promises: after that treat them with reserve. Incessantly vary your studies, cultivate your mind in every direction; do not narrow yourself to one party, one school, or one idea; let it see the dawn break on every horizon; maintain your independence and your dignity; lend yourself for a time, if necessary, but do not give yourself away. Remain judicious and clear-sighted even in your weaker moments; and even if you do not say the whole truth, never utter what is false. Never allow fatigue to lay a hold upon you; never feel that you have attained your goal. At the age when others are reposing or relaxing themselves, redouble your courage and ardour; recommence like a novice, run your career a second time, renew yourself.” Such was precisely the course which Sainte-Beuve himself followed. When he wrote the above lines he was reviewing his own life.

Votary of romanticism as he had been, Sainte-Beuve adopted on one occasion a course which many would have considered the reverse of romantic. Challenged to a duel by M. Lecaze for words which he had uttered in the Senate, he replied that he would fight his adversary with no other weapon than that with which they were both familiar--the pen.

The death of Sainte-Beuve was preceded by cruel bodily tortures, and, as he saw his end approaching, he took precautions to keep the priests away from his bedside, and to divest his interment of all solemnity. By his testamentary wishes none of the associations to which he belonged, neither the Academy nor the Senate, was to be represented at his funeral; and no oration was to be pronounced over his tomb. “Finally,” he added, “I wish to be carried straight from my home to the cemetery of Montparnasse, and to be placed in the vault where my mother lies, without passing through the church, which I could not do without violating my sentiments.” His dying directions were obeyed to the letter.

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XXXVI. SPORTS AND DIVERSIONS

Le “Sport”--Longchamps--Versailles Races--Fontainebleau--The Seine--Swimming Baths--The Art of Book-collecting.

The Seine at Paris is the scene not of much boating, but of a good deal of swimming. Baths on the Thames have never been successful: they abound on the Seine, and the Parisians, whatever they may be as boatmen--“canotiers,” to use their own word--excel as swimmers.

The French are not naturally a sporting nation. In the first place they have found it necessary to borrow our English word for their pastimes; and their spelling of sportsman as “sportman” is somewhat indicative of their generally unsuccessful imitation of English sports.

The French are themselves conscious of the failure of this imitation. “Sport,” says a French writer, “is an English word which signifies literally relaxation, distraction, and which the English employ, by extension, to designate the pleasures to which powerful aristocrats or opulent citizens abandon themselves as a relaxation from the serious labours of political life or the absorbing occupations of commerce. In “sport” they include large hunts and shooting expeditions such as can be practised on vast estates, together with betting, which involves millions of pounds sterling, riding and driving, fencing, boxing, swimming, skating; everything which calls into play the forces and energy of the body, to the too frequent neglect of mental activity.

“We have adopted the word and attempted the thing. But independently of the fact that our French society lacks some of the fundamental conditions which, in this respect, English society possesses, we have done what imitators generally do: we have diminished, sometimes even travestied the model. Large aristocratic hunts have become impossible on our democratic and parcelled-out soil. Well-bred horses cost a great deal of money, and the instability of fortunes is an obstacle to fine stables. The most reckless of our millionaires only hazard a few thousand francs in the way of bets, and it is now generally understood that when a “louis” is spoken of on the turf, the ambitious word must be translated into the more modest expression, “twenty sous.” ... Even fencing is abandoned to fiction and the stage. Duellists who are at all serious must go beyond the frontier to find a ground which will place combatants and seconds beyond the reach of the French law. The police-court of the nineteenth century is perhaps more dreaded than was the scaffold of Richelieu.”

Parisian summers, this same writer goes on to observe, are on the whole too cold for bathing, and Parisian winters too hot for skating.

Unquestionably horse-racing has taken a certain hold on the French, though it is true that the crowds who frequent the most popular races do not confine their attention, or their conversation, to the horses or the stakes, but regard the event principally as a fête.

It is at the hippodrome of the Bois de Boulogne (or Longchamps, as it is also called) that the most largely attended races occur. A minimum charge of a franc is made for admission, to stand or walk about outside the ropes which mark off the course. For the reserved places higher prices are charged: five francs to the pavilions, twenty francs to the weighing enclosure, fifteen francs for a one-horse carriage, twenty francs for a carriage with more than one horse, and so on. The races of La Marche are in the form of steeple-chases. The Château de La Marche stands in a park at a short distance from Ville d’Avray and Saint-Cloud; and it is in the park that the races take place.

The races of the Bois de Vincennes are less fashionable than those of Longchamps and of La Marche, perhaps because the approach to Vincennes through crowded streets is less attractive than the drive through the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne.

The races of Chantilly, founded in 1834 under the patronage of the Dukes of Orleans and of Nemours, are run twice a year on the spacious meadows which extend right and left of the magnificent stables of the château of the Condés. The first races are fixed for the second fortnight of May. The later series, those of the autumn meeting, are held in September and October. The last race of the season is for the grand prize of the Jockey Club. The racecourse of Chantilly describes an ellipsis measuring some 2,000 metres. Several stands have been erected opposite the stables: prices of admission to the various places as at Paris. At Chantilly are the principal training establishments.

The Versailles races are run on the plain of Satory, where Napoleon III. held some of his most brilliant reviews. They take place in May and June.

At Fontainebleau the races are run on a course cut through the part of the forest known as the Valley of the Solle. From various woody heights the spectator, well protected from the sun, can obtain an excellent view of the running. Shooting is practised at a club in the little town of Argenteuil, close to Paris, where the society of Parisian Riflemen is established. Candidates duly proposed and seconded are put up for election, and, if admitted, pay ten francs entrance money and an annual subscription of fifty francs. The organ of the society is the well-known sporting paper, the Journal des Chasseurs.

The canotiers and canotières of the Seine are counted by thousands. They all seem to row more for amusement than for exercise and pace. The principal ports of the Parisian navy are Charenton above bridge, and Asnières below. Charenton may be reached by the Lyons Railway: the charming Asnières (famous for its balls) by the Saint-Germain and Versailles line. The water-side restaurants are organised in view of the canotiers, and appeal specially to this floating population.

If the Seine is remarkable for its swimming baths and, at some little distance on each side of Paris, for its innumerable boats with rowers and rowed in gay fantastic costumes, one bank of the Seine, the left, is celebrated for its stalls of second-hand books. It was at a curiosity shop on one of the quays of the left bank that Balzac’s “Peau de Chagrin” or “Chagreen Skin” was offered for sale. It was at a neighbouring bookstall that the poor student in the “Vie de Bohème” sold his Greek books for little more than the price of waste paper in order to buy medicine for the dying mistress of his friend. It is not at the bookstalls of the Quai d’Orsay that one would look for the rarest editions, though rare editions may here be found. There are connoisseurs who seem to spend every day and all day long at the bookstalls of the quay; resembling the celebrated English bibliophile, Lord Spencer, who remained an entire year at Rome, visiting neither St. Peter’s, nor the Coliseum, nor the Vatican, but only the old bookshops. When he had once found the Martial of Sweynheym and Pannartz dated 1473 he went straight back to London. Such a passion looks like insanity; but it is at least a respectable, innocent kind of madness. To have a genuine passion for books is to care neither for cards, nor for good living, nor for useless luxury, nor for racehorses, nor for political intrigues, nor for ruinous love affairs. The bibliophile is never troubled by the storms of political life. Pixéricourt, the author of thirty amusing or terrible novels, would be forgotten in France but for the rare editions that he collected in his library, and which after his death did more for his reputation, at the sale of his books, than all his works of fiction had done. Few writers of the day grudged him his talent or his success; but many envied him his “Imitation of Jesus Christ,” given to the monk Laurence “by his very humble servant, Pierre Corneille.” His Elzevirs and Baskervilles, for which Holland and China had furnished their rarest paper, England and France their best engravers, Russia and Morocco their incomparable leather, filled amateurs with enthusiasm. A great French book-collector, Grolier, had adopted this motto, “For myself and my friends.” Charles Nodier wrote for Pixéricourt an epigraph to be inscribed inside his books which, if somewhat selfish, was at least true:

Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prêté, Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gâté.[D]

[D] This is the sad lot of every book that is lent: often it is lost, always spoilt.

The bookstall-keeper acquires gradually a knowledge of the finest or, if not the finest, the most curious editions; and he would be but a poor dealer were he unable to judge of their value. At one time the Pont-Neuf was full of bookshops; and the second-hand dealers in books had their stalls in the Cité, close to Notre Dame and to the Palace of Justice, as well as on the Place de Grèves. But they are now nearly all to be found on the parapets of the left bank.

The picture-dealers, at one time numerous on the quays of the left bank of the Seine, have for years past been gradually disappearing. It was in the curiosity shop already mentioned in connection with Balzac’s “Peau de Chagrin” that a certain Christ, by Raphael, was supposed to be kept hidden away like a treasure. That, however, was more than sixty years ago; and no masterpieces by Raphael are now to be found in the curiosity shops of the left bank. The one place for buying and selling pictures is the Hôtel Drouot, on the other side of the river. Here pictures are sold by auction at the hands of official auctioneers and authorised brokers. In addition to the purchase-money five per cent. must be paid in the way of fees and for the cost of the sale. This charge is thought exorbitant, and it has not been forgotten that at the sale of Marshal Soult’s pictures, when Murillo’s “Conception” was purchased by the Government for the Square Room of the Louvre, nearly 30,000 francs commission had to be paid independently of the 586,000 francs, which was the adjudicated price. The sales about to take place are announced on the walls of the Hôtel Drouot; also in the columns of certain journals, such as the Moniteur des Ventes or the Chronique des Arts.

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XXXVII. FENCING SCHOOLS

Fencing in France--A National Art--Some Extracts from the Writings of M. Legouvé, One of its Chief Exponents--The Old Style of Fencing and the New.

Fencing is in England the pastime of a few amateurs; in France it is a national art. An ingenious reason has been adduced by M. Legouvé why proficiency with the rapier should be acquired by everyone. “The sword,” he writes, “possesses the finest of all advantages: it is the only weapon with which you can avenge yourself without an effusion of blood. What is nobler for a man of chivalry and skill when he finds himself confronting the man who has offended him, and whom he is privileged to kill, than at once to punish this adversary and to spare his life--to disarm him, that is to say.”

It is in his character of dramatic author, however, that M. Legouvé chiefly values duelling. “What would become of us wretched playwrights without the sword-duel?” he asks. “The pistol is a brutal contrivance, suitable only to dark melodramas and to dénouements.... What do you think could be done in a comedy with a man who haply had received a bullet wound? He is no longer good for anything. But if he has been wounded with a sword, he returns two minutes afterwards with his hand thrust in the folds of his waistcoat and an attempted smile on his face. The young woman says to him, ‘How pale you are!’ ‘I, mademoiselle?’ Then the end of a bandage is somehow perceived. ‘Gracious heavens! you have been fighting a duel,’ she exclaims.” M. Legouvé must now be allowed to continue in his own language: “Ah! l’admirable verbe que le verbe se battre! Tous les temps en sont bons. Vous vous battez? battez-vous!... Ne vous battez pas!... Et comme il va bien avec les exclamations: ‘Mon ami! par grâce! Monsieur, vous êtes un lâche!... Arthur! Arthur!... Je me jette à tes pieds!’ Speak not to me of dramatic writing without those two indispensable collaborators: love and the sword.

“Fencing interests me, moreover, simply as an observer. A fencing-school is a theatre at which as many amusing characters may be seen as on any stage. First of all there is a class of fencers who do not fence and never will. Then there are the men who fence in order to reduce their bulk; who have been told by their doctor or their wife that they are too fat, and who, after sweating like oxen, blowing like seals, steaming like boiled puddings, for a couple of hours, tell you in the calmest manner that they have been fencing.

“Then there are the fencing-masters, or professors of fencing, as they prefer to be called. They are generally gay, good-natured, well-meaning fellows, devoted body and soul to their pupils, especially to those pupils who have done them the honour to kill someone in mortal combat. Their weak point is said to be veracity; not on all occasions, but whenever they have the foil in hand. “I have never,” says M. Legouvé, “met a single fencer who would not--say once every year--deny that he had been touched when the hit was palpable. It is so easy to say ‘I did not feel it,’ and a hit not recognised does not count. Ah, if we dramatists could only annul hisses by saying: ‘I did not hear them!’

“My first professor,” continues M. Legouvé, “was an old master known as Père Dularviez. He had a daughter of whom he was exceedingly proud. She was employed in a milliner’s shop, which caused her father some uneasiness as to her possible conduct. There was nothing to justify his uneasiness, but he was uneasy. At last, unable to rest, he wrapped himself up in a cloak and took up his position at the corner of the Rue Traversière, close to the Rue Saint-Honoré, where his daughter worked. ‘You may imagine,’ he said to us, ‘how my heart beat when I saw her appear. I approached her, and averting my face, whispered in her ear a graceful little compliment which I had invented for the occasion. O joy! she turned round and administered to me with all her might a box on the ear. I guarded myself en tierce and said: ‘My child, you are truly virtuous.’

“Fencing has, moreover, its utilitarian value. It teaches you to judge men. With the foil in hand no dissimulation is possible. After five minutes of foil-play the false varnish of mundane hypocrisy falls and trickles away with the perspiration: instead of the polished man of the world, with yellow gloves and conventional phrases, you have before you the actual man, a calculator or a blunderer, weak or firm, wily or ingenuous, sincere or treacherous.... One day I derived a great advantage. I was crossing foils with a large broker in brandies, rums, and champagnes. Before the passage of arms he had offered me his services in regard to a supply of liquors, and I had almost accepted.... The fencing at an end, I went to the proprietor and said: ‘I shall buy no champagne of that man.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘His wine must be adulterated--he denies every hit.’

“Apply my principle, and you will find it profitable. Some of you are already married. One day you will have daughters to marry. Well, if a suitor presents himself, do not waste time in collecting particulars which are too often false. Say simply to your future son-in-law: ‘Will you have a turn with the foils?’ At the end of a quarter of an hour you will know more about his character than after six weeks of investigations.

“Finally, I like fencing because you cannot learn it. It does, indeed, demand practice, and long practice; but that is not sufficient, it must be your vocation: you must be born a fencer, just as you must be born an artist. And then, when the apprenticeship has been served, what pleasure is enjoyed! I doubt whether there is in external life a single act in which a man feels himself to live more fully than in a vigorous assault.

“Look at the fencer in action. Each member, each muscle is stretched, and each for a different purpose. Whilst the hand glances rapidly and lightly, always tending forwards, the body holds itself back, and the legs, vigorously contracted like a spring, await, for their extension, the signal to be given by the arm as it prepares to make its sudden thrust. The whole of the members are like so many obedient soldiers to whom the general says: ‘March’--‘Halt’--‘Double.’ The general is the head, that head which, at once inspired and calculating as though on a real field of battle, detects at a glance the faults of the enemy, lays traps for him and compels him to fall into them, simulates a retreat in order to give him confidence, and returns suddenly upon him with a frightful assault....

“And to think that this art, complex as it is, in which the whole of the body is engaged, should really be concentrated between the end of the forefinger and the thumb. For there it all is: there resides the delicate and masterly faculty which alone constitutes the superior fencer--tact. Is it not wonderful to see how much sensibility and life flows between these two digits? They tremble, they palpitate beneath the pressure of the foil in contact with their own, as if an electric current communicated to them all its movements. For them the aid of sight is not necessary, for they do more than see the hostile sword; they feel it, they could follow it with their eyes bandaged; and if you add to these magnificent delights of the sense of touch the powerful circulation of the blood which runs in great waves through the veins, the beating heart, the boiling head, the throbbing arteries, the heaving breast, the opening pores; if you join, moreover, to this the delight of feeling your power and your suppleness increase tenfold; if you think, above all, of the ardent joy and bitter grief of self-love, of the pleasure of beating and the vexation of being beaten, and of the thousand vicissitudes of a struggle which terminates and begins again at each fresh thrust--you will understand that there is in the exercise of this art a veritable intoxication, of which the passion for gambling can alone give an idea. It is play without vice and with health superadded.”

M. Legouvé, who, besides being an admirable writer, possesses no superficial knowledge of fencing, next proceeds to a few detailed observations on the art of the foil and its professors. We can hardly do better than preserve his own words. “Fencing,” he says, “has undergone during the last half-century the same revolution as poetry, music, and painting. It has had its romantic period and its contending schools.

“The distinguishing characteristics of the old school were rigidity, grace, and a certain academic elegance. The words themselves express the thing. To practise fencing was to ‘go to the Academy.’ A fencer of the old school could not run to the attack, nor suddenly break off. He neither bent down nor sprang forward, but under all circumstances maintained, more or less, the same attitude. Fencing was in those days, above all things, an art; which, like every art, had the beautiful for aim.

“Very different was the system of the new school. To make hits was its one object. The means were of no importance, provided the result could be obtained. Fencing was now more a combat than an art; its programme included everything, even the ugly. Fencers would now lie on the ground, would avoid a thrust by ducking their head, aim below the belt, and reduce all the qualities of the fencer to one only: rapidity.

“Gomard and Charlemagne were the two last representatives of the old school: Roussel and Lozes the two first of the new one. I have had the honour, in my youth, of fencing with all four; and I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, while fully recognising the incomparable quickness of Lozes, the superiority rested altogether with the representatives of the old school. Fencing ran the risk not of being renewed, like poetry, in another form, but of being lost altogether, at least as an art. Then came forward a young man who combined in himself the opposite qualities of the two schools. Every lover of fencing will understand that I am referring to Bertrand. As rapid as Lozes and as regular as Gomard, he borrowed from romanticism its audacity, its inspiration, its occasional rashness, and preserved at the same time the elegance of bearing, the severity of attitude, the caution and the science of the classical school. He may fairly be said, in company with Cordelois and Pons the elder, to have saved the art of fencing. He is an exceptional fencer among exceptional fencers. If I may be allowed to use the expression, there is genius in his art. The fencing-masters who came next were the products, somewhat mixed, of the three schools; the four professors who figure in the first rank being MM. Robert the elder, Gâtechair, Mimiague, and Pons the younger. Robert has a quickness of hand, an accuracy of attitude, and a rapidity of reply which recalls Bertrand. Gâtechair is the most academic of the masters of the present day. There is, however, something a little theatrical in his elegance and in his imposing carriage.

“Mimiague is supple, insinuating, adroit, sure to profit by every opportunity. There is a sort of cajolery in his play. If you ask who is the best of these four professors, I shall recommend you to apply the test of Themistocles. Bring together the principal fencing-masters of Paris, and ask them to write on a slip of paper the names of the two best fencers in Paris. Each of them will give the first vote to himself; but Robert will have all the second votes: from which I conclude that he deserves the first.”

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XXXVIII. PETTY TRADES

Petty Trades--Their Origins--The Day-Banker--The Guardian Angel--The Old-Clothesman--The Claque--Its First Beginning and Development.

The police of Paris are very strict in suppressing those trades bordering upon mendicancy, which in London are somewhat freely allowed. Many of the former hawkers of inexpensive trifles have been permanently swept away from the streets of Paris.

The Galileo of the Place Vendôme, however, is still permitted to carry on his business. As soon as the gas is alight, this personage, somewhat fantastically dressed, levels his telescope, after having traced in chalk on the pavement a picture of the moon, with its mountains, ravines, and so forth. In consideration of a slight recognition, varying from 25 to 50 centimes, he shows his clients all the astronomical phenomena, including some which have escaped the notice of the Observatory.

“Nearly all the petty industries not classed in the Dictionary of Commerce are,” says a French writer, “the product of an imagination over-excited by the gnawings of the stomach. The first person who picked up, on the highway, a cigar-end, and then another and another, and who, after chopping them all up, sold the results as smoking-tobacco, did not deliberately adopt this profession in the same way that a person becomes an administrator or a lawyer. It was the necessity of eating that launched him into this career. Presently he held this argument, based upon statistics:--Every day in Paris at least three hundred thousand cigars are smoked. There must, therefore, be somewhere, and particularly beneath the outdoor tables of the boulevard cafés, three hundred thousand fag-ends. Thus the horizon opens to him. He perceives a magnificent commercial enterprise and takes partners. A new kind of manufacturer has now come into being: a manufacturer of unlicensed tobacco.”

Apparently the commodity sells well; and in the retort of a pipe the eclectic composition is as agreeable to the taste as the privileged product of the imperial factories. Some of the contraband dealers in cigar-ends have made a small fortune.

It was simply chance which created the “day-banker” or “banquier à la journée.” Thirty or forty years ago an individual named Poildeloup, living in the quarter of the markets, lent five francs one day to a woman dealing in old clothes, on condition that she should return him the same evening five francs ten centimes. She kept her word, and again borrowed from him. Then other tradeswomen, also out of funds, applied to Poildeloup, who at once saw what a profit he might derive from this daily lending organised on a big scale. The two sous brought to him each evening in excess of the five francs lent in the morning looked less than nothing at first sight; but in fifty days the banker doubled his capital, and in a few years had amassed wealth. Later on, rival banks were established, which reduced the interest by half, charging only five centimes a day on a hundred sous borrowed in the morning and returned at night. These day-banks, content with half the interest charged by the inventor of the business, still do an excellent trade.

One of the most interesting of the small professions is that of the “guardian angel.” This ethereal personage conducts drunkards home to their dwellings. Attached to every large Paris tavern is a guardian angel, whose duty it is to escort any late-staying customer whose legs decline their office, and who needs a guide. He must not quit the person entrusted to his charge until the latter is out of the reach of thieves and safely installed in his own house. The chief quality requisite in this angel is sobriety.

We were speaking just now of the man who collects cigar-ends. Another curious picker-up of unconsidered trifles is the man who is always on the look-out for crusts of bread. A crust of bread is found in all sorts of places: in the street, at the corners of lanes and alleys, on heaps of rubbish. Do not imagine that this man, on the hunt for hard, dirty, disgusting pieces of bread, has fallen so low as to be obliged to live on the fruits of his discoveries. He is the sort of person who believes firmly that nothing in this world is lost, and that one morsel of dry bread, added to another, may be the beginning of a sack of fragments which he will be able to sell for some twenty sous to breeders of rabbits. The rabbit, beloved by the frequenters of barrier-taverns, does not feed on grain and cabbage alone. It also eats a good quantity of bread. It is in order to procure it this article of diet that the trade of crust-collector was invented.

Of the ragpicker mention has been made elsewhere. He is essentially eclectic in his tastes: rags, paper, gloves, glass, broken toys, the necks of bottles, nothing comes amiss to him. He puts into the basket he carries on his shoulder whatever he can find. It is the trieur or sorter whom the classification of the different objects concerns.

Another petty trade which should not be forgotten is that of the old-clothesman, who is seen everywhere early in the morning uttering his piercing and well-known cry. He is above all to be met with in the districts where young men abound: in the environs, that is to say, of the School of Law and of the School of Medicine. The old-clothesman is of all the gutter-merchants the most cunning and the most merciless. He wanders around the abodes of the students, knowing well the time when they will probably find it necessary to ease themselves of a portion of their wardrobe. It is, above all, when the Carnival is going on that he does good business. The allowance from home being insufficient for the cost of the masked ball, with its concomitant expenses, he realises money by the sale, now of a light overcoat, now of some other summer garment which can be dispensed with in the depths of winter. If the old-clothesman is waiting for the student, the student is on the look-out for the old-clothesman. The latter enters and the bargaining is at once begun. Whatever the dealer may offer, it is sure, after some haggling as if for form’s sake, to be accepted. Having made his purchase, the old-clothesman hastens with the clothes he has bought for a mere nothing from an improvident student in order to sell them at a moderate rate to a provident one. A story is told of two students, of about the same height and figure, who after a time found that their clothes passed from one to the other, the middleman in the shape of the old-clothesman taking on each transaction his own particular profit. It struck them that the middleman might as well be suppressed; and from that time forward Jules, when he was hard up, sold his clothes to Anatole, while Anatole, when he in his turn fell into an impecunious position, sold them back again to Jules.

In the Temple, which gives its name to one of the lower boulevards, there was formerly a market for all kinds of antiquities, including old clothes; while buying and selling of a like character was carried on until a later period in the Marché des Patriarches. Here, even now, the lovers of the economical may provide themselves with shoes at a franc, and boots at three francs and a half.

There are other petty trades at Paris, such as that of the bird-catcher and the pigeon-fancier.

Nor must the sellers of violets at one sou the bunch be forgotten; though they are not to be confounded with the bouquetière in a far more fashionable walk of life. The dealers in groundsel, too, have a trade of their own.

* * * * *

There are many institutions, professions, and classes which, after being originated on the left bank, have crossed the water to flourish on the right. Among these must be included the claque; though, from whatever quarter it may have sprung, there is now no theatrical district in Paris where it does not thrive.

It originated at the Comédie Française, when that institution had its abode at the theatre now known as the Odéon, where, among other masterpieces, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro was produced in 1784. Mercier pointed out, about this time, that the masterpiece in question had no need of organised applause. This preconcerted clapping of hands, varied by the stamping of feet and by walking-sticks, had a very bad effect on the taste and temper of the public, and even, at times, on the fortune of a piece. “They clap when the actor appears on the stage; they clap for the author at the end of the play; they clap for the composer, and make more noise than all the instruments of Gluck’s orchestra, which can no longer be heard. This perpetual noise, this artificial excitement, degrades the public taste. An author who was constantly hissed was once advised to construct a machine which would imitate the sound of three or four hundred persons clapping their hands, and to place it in a corner of the theatre under the guidance of some intelligent and devoted friend.”

Another writer on the same subject, M. Prudhomme, tells us in his “Historical and Critical Mirror of Old and New Paris” (1807) that he had once been acquainted with a man who had no means of living but by assisting at first representations. Placed in the middle of the pit, he called attention to the beauties of the piece and led the applause. The name of “Monsieur Claque” had been given to him, and he had hands as hard as the piece of wood with which washerwomen beat their linen. His terms were thirty-six francs if the piece succeeded, and twelve francs if it failed.

The claque, however, did not acquire its greatest importance until the time of the Restoration. At an earlier period Dorat, a popular drawing-room poet, or writer of vers de société, was in the habit of sending persons to the theatre with a free-admission on the understanding that they were to applaud his piece. By this stratagem he managed to secure a run of several nights for more than one of his works; but at each success he might have applied to himself the exclamation of Pyrrhus after the Battle of Asculum: “One more such victory and I am ruined.”

Dorat did, indeed, ruin himself at the game he is said to have invented; but his invention was not lost to posterity. The claque, however, did not work, in these comparatively primitive days, as an organised body. There was a certain Chevalier de la Morlière, a retired musketeer, who undertook the criticism of all new pieces, and offered to dramatic authors his support or his condemnation. His terms were moderate. A few dinners, a few louis, lent without any fixed term of repayment, a little commission on the pit tickets that passed through his hands: that was all he asked. He had volunteers and paid agents equally at his disposal, the former acting under his advice, the latter at his command. The Chevalier de la Morlière placed himself, moreover, at the service of débutants and débutantes, or rather he imposed his services upon them. One day he took it into his head to become a dramatic author, arguing with himself that after ensuring the success of so many works by others he could do the same for a work of his own. But though he now surpassed himself in the ingenuity of his manœuvres, the work he produced did not succeed. Thereupon he lost all credit. The authors and actors resolved to do without him. His sceptre fell, but only to be taken from time to time by others. Up to this time the claque, as before said, was the work of enterprising individuals who organised it on certain occasions, but not continuously as a permanent institution. Figaro, in Beaumarchais’s comedy, speaks of the play he had written, and goes on to say: “I really cannot understand how it was that I did not obtain the greatest success; for I had filled the pit with excellent workmen, whose hands were like wood.”

The organisation of the claque, as a permanent institution, dates from the time of Napoleon I., and seems to have had for its starting-point the famous rivalry between Mlle. Duchénois and Mlle. Georges. When the struggle between the two tragic actresses came to an end, the forces organised in their service declined to be disbanded. They elected their chiefs, and the leaders treated with managers and authors for regular support. People were still found who would applaud a favourite actor or actress from enthusiasm, duly stimulated by a gratuitous ticket. Thus at one time the whole atelier of David served as claque to an actress much admired by the painter and his pupils, who without support and encouragement might have been crushed, it was thought, by the growing talent and popularity of Mlle. Mars. The claque of David’s atelier was a formidable one, for the great artist had from sixty to eighty students attached to him. This was in 1810, a year or two after the publication of the “Historical and Critical Mirror of Old and New Paris” previously referred to.

Under the Restoration the claque was a regular institution. The quarrels of the Romanticists and Classicists lent it a considerable importance. Impartial in its tastes, it served, turn by turn, and with the same zeal, the “Antony” of the modern drama and the Greek heroines of ancient tragedy. Since 1830 its authority has been universally accepted. Several directors, after trying to dispense with it, have been obliged to conciliate it and accept its conditions--for when the directors have driven it from their house, it has always been brought back by the vanity of the comedians. One alone of the Paris theatres preserved itself from the claque. This was the now defunct Théâtre Italien; though people say of this house that if it had not a claque it had a clique.

With the exception of the last-named, all the theatres of Paris have for years past had organised claques, that of the Opéra being the best disciplined. The chiefs of the claques give themselves the title of “undertakers of dramatic successes.” They do not receive a subvention from the “directors,” but a certain number of places each night, which they sell for their own benefit. It is not from the tickets, however, that they derive the bulk of their gains. Some of them make twenty or thirty thousand francs a year; but they derive this from the vanity of the actors, who pay them proportionately to the degree of applause required.

The claque consists of the chief and a number of assistants, generally poor wretches with a passion for the theatre, some of whom are admitted free on condition of contributing as much applause as necessary, while others are admitted simply at a reduced price. The chief attends the rehearsals, and notes the scenes, passages, or phrases which seem most effective. Then he revises his notes by watching the effect of the first performance on the public. After that he knows each precise point at which to come in with his applause; and if the piece is played for a year, the laughter and tears occur at the same given moments. He employs great tact in choosing men, and even women, for his purpose, the fair sex being the best counterfeiters of convulsive emotion. When, therefore, a drama is produced at Paris, a number of lady weepers are distributed amongst the audience, many of them being the devoted wives of male members of the claque. So soon as the old man of the piece recovers his unfortunate daughter, and exclaims, “My darling! Saved!” the lady weepers plunge their faces into their handkerchiefs and sob like children. The thing becomes contagious. The whole female portion of the audience are now, perhaps, like Niobe, all tears, and the newspapers next day declare that the performance was a succès de larmes.

Doubtless this charlatanism has its comic side. But it is repulsive at the same time; for falsehood is the foundation of the system, and, as M. Eugène Despois says: “It is sad to see men almost exclusively occupied in lying reciprocally. People say that it is only life, that you must conform to it, and that it imposes on no one. ‘Who is deceived? Everyone agrees to the system,’ they argue. That is true. No one is duped; but of what use is all this comedy? After all, of the two parts, that played by the claqueurs, often with spirit, to dupe the public, and that played by the public who submit to this impudent mystification and daily pretend to be duped, the most shameful is that of the public.”

Of recent years the claque has been made the object of some very lively attacks by writers who understand the dignity of their profession. A certain number of dramatic authors, Émile Augier and Dumas the younger amongst others, have frequently endeavoured to dispense with its mercenary plaudits; but it must be owned that the vanity of a large proportion of the actors, and in particular of the actresses, has frustrated the reform. In the meantime, ere the theatre world has awakened to the dishonourable character of the claque system, the claqueurs grow fat, and in some cases possess their town and country residences. It is true that not everyone can be a chief of the claque; to conquer, or rather to purchase, that important post, a great deal of money is required. Auguste, formerly chief of the claque at the Opéra, paid 80,000 francs for his position, but in a few years he had made his fortune. “More than one well-established dancer paid him a pension,” says Dr. Véron. “The début of each artist brought him a gratuity proportionate to the artist’s pretensions. Towards the end of an engagement and the moment of its renewal more than one singer or actor, in order to deceive at once the public and the director, goes to the Auguste of his theatre and offers him a bag of gold to produce such a paroxysm of applause as shall result in a large increase of salary. Such are the traps laid for the director; and into these traps, shrewd as he may be, he sometimes inevitably falls.”

Dr. Véron, an experienced impresario, is far from denouncing the claque, which, according to him, has a mission. “All who expose themselves to be judged by the public, need,” he says, “for the animation of their courage, that fever of joy which applause produces in them.” That was also the opinion of Talma, who found the public too slow to take the initiative. “The claque,” says Elleviou, “is as necessary in the centre of the pit as the chandelier in the centre of a drawing-room.”

The question has often been raised as to whether not only the claque but even spontaneous applause should not be suppressed. The spectator, abandoned to the power of the illusion, is displeased to find himself disturbed by unexpected noise, which, tearing him from Athens or from Rome, reminds him that he is on the benches of a Paris playhouse.

Several chiefs of claques have become celebrities, or at least notorieties; with two gentlemen named Santon and Porcher among the number. One of these “knights of the chandelier,” as they are familiarly called, has published his reminiscences, entitled, “Memoirs of a Claqueur, containing the theory and practice of the art of obtaining success, by Robert (Castel), formerly chief of the Dramatic Insurance Company, Paris, 1829.”

Different opinions are entertained in theatrical circles as to the utility of the claque, some contending that it is indispensable, while others take a higher view, and hold that the work represented and the actors representing it may advantageously be allowed to stand upon their own merits. Meanwhile, apart from the claque maintained at all the Paris theatres by the management, there are often special claques which are paid by leading members of the company, jealous of one another’s reputation. This is looked upon by the company generally as unfair, and the practice is never avowed. Even in London, especially (if not exclusively) at the opera, a number of energetic men may sometimes be seen--and, above all, heard--working together with a view to the success of some particular “artist.” The claqueurs--at least, at the opera--are usually Italians, from the shops of the Italian wine merchants and dealers in macaroni, vermicelli, truffles, and olives in the neighbourhood of Soho. Wagner is known to have been absolutely opposed not only to the claque but to the most legitimate bursts of applause. The frame of mind in which to enjoy beautiful music should not, indeed, be broken in upon by disturbances from the outside. Not only in Germany, but wherever Wagner is played, the claque is, for the occasion, dispensed with. Even at the Grand Opéra of Paris there was no claque when Lohengrin was performed; and it may be that if a representation is witnessed in absolute silence from the beginning to the end of each act, the applause is more enthusiastic when at last the moment for plaudits arrives.

In opposition to what takes place at Wagnerian performances wherever given, it may be mentioned that at the dramatic theatres of Paris, as at the lyrical theatres of Italy (when Wagner is not being played), the leading performers are not only applauded, but walk forward and bow their acknowledgment of the applause at the end of any effective scene in which they may have pleased the public, or perhaps only the claque. This destroys all verisimilitude. The singer is applauded as Violetta or as Adrienne Lecouvreur, and acknowledges the applause in the character of Mme. Adelina Patti or of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt.

But whatever may be said against it, the claque is great and, in France at least, will prevail. Nor can it be denied that in some instances and on some individuals it imposes opinions which but for its authority would not be accepted. There is an old fable of a man who, standing in a market-place, was approached by a man leading a pig. “Do you want to buy this sheep?” asked the proprietor of the animal. “It is a pig,” was the reply. “Nothing of the kind; I can assure you your eyes deceive you,” returned the salesman. At that moment a third person came up, and, looking at the quadruped, said to its owner, “How much do you want for that sheep?” The man to whom it had first been offered stared with surprise, and supposed that the third person was out of his mind; but when a fourth, fifth, and sixth person had come up and likewise demanded the price of that “sheep,” he came to the conclusion that his own eyes must be at fault, and bought the animal as mutton.

The business of the claque is to pass off a theatrical pig as a theatrical sheep--and it sometimes succeeds.

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XXXIX. OBSOLETE PARIS SHOPS

The Old Wooden Stalls of Forty Years Ago--The “Lucky Fork”--The Cobblers’ Shops--The Old Cafés.

The quays on the left bank of the Seine were at one time remarkable for their shops; and the book-stalls of the Quai Voltaire are still celebrated. It was on one of the quays of the left bank that the old curiosity shop stood, so picturesquely described by Balzac, in which the hero of the “Peau de Chagrin,” who had entered the shop merely to pass the time until it should be dark enough for him to throw himself from the Pont Neuf without attracting too much attention, purchased his fatal talisman.

Thirty or forty years ago Paris contained thousands of antique little shops or covered stalls, of which now very few specimens remain. They were painted wooden structures, six feet high by three feet broad, picturesquely situated at the corners of squares or public monuments, by the side of churches or city houses, with plank roofs through which a stove-chimney protruded, and with the street pavement for their floor.

The extermination of these quaint establishments necessarily accompanied the general improvement of the city; they were an eyesore when the thoroughfares had become elegant. By degrees the keepers of these huts, who were once the gaiety and life of the streets, disappeared. They took refuge for the most part in overcrowded houses which had escaped the pickaxe of the architectural improver, though this removal was only a prelude to their final departure. These petty shopkeepers were often intellectually superior to the proprietors of the finest shops on the boulevard, for many a scholar who found that the art or science to which he had sacrificed his life proved ungrateful, would for the sake of his daily bread set up in one of these street huts as a “public writer,” there, as set forth in a previous chapter, writing love-letters for domestic servants or grooms who could not express the sentiments of their bosom with a pen. Schoolmasters without pupils, students who had been plucked at their examinations, and professors without chairs, formed a large proportion of this hut-inhabiting population.

Amongst these primitive establishments were a number of fried-potato shops, which were besieged by street urchins in quest of the traditional halfpennyworth of tritters. In the Rue de la Vieille-Estrapade flourished a shop well known under the sign or title of the “Lucky Fork.” Here might be beheld an enormous metal cauldron, in which constantly simmered a dark-coloured broth of somewhat too odoriferous a character. Floating in this gigantic vessel, tossed hither and thither by the bubbling of the hot liquid, were pieces of tripe, pork, and other even less inviting viands, which the customer had to make a stab at with a sharp fork of huge dimensions. Yet although the aspect of these establishments was not altogether appetising, cleanliness was by no means a quality in which they were deficient. For a halfpenny the consumers had the privilege of a stab with the fork. The patrons of these shops were numerous and varied: porters, workmen, students, tinkers, artists. The poet Berthauld, author of the “Fille du Peuple,” was famed for his skill with the weapon in question; Chartelet the painter and Fourier the philosopher frequently tried their hand with it, not to mention other votaries of the arts and sciences who, unknown at that time, were destined to become celebrated. It used to be a source of great amusement to watch the customers, whatever their trade or profession might be, as, with keen gaze, they awaited some unusually big morsel which was floating towards them, and then suddenly made a thrust at it like eel-spearers. The piece of meat, incessantly dancing and revolving as it was, frequently eluded the prongs of the fork, whereupon cries of irony would escape from the attentive crowd; but when, at the first stab--for a halfpenny, that is to say--one of the combatants had secured a bulky morsel, this victor paraded through the ranks of the spectators, who, as they made way for him, applauded vociferously. Many, however, of the vanquished went to bed on nothing but water and a crust of bread.

There were fruit-stalls, where apples, pears, and even peaches, were sold at prices which have quintupled since then; and huts kept by knife-grinders, who, at a later period, resumed their daily pilgrimage through those quarters of Paris where blunt instruments were most likely to be requiring a cheap edge. There was a bird-shop on the island of Saint Louis where the feathered stock was confided to the care of two enormous white cats, besides other like establishments, unprovided with cats, which were numerous enough in that space which is to-day occupied by the square of the Louvre. Then there were cobblers who, within their little pavement cabins, had no bills to deliver, no rent to pay, no reproaches to bear, no masters whose caprices must be humoured, since their toil from one hour to another produced immediate payment. The spirit of independence which was a characteristic of these artists in leather dated back, indeed, to ancient times. Simon of Athens, the friend of Socrates and the author of the thirty-three dialogues, in which a system of philosophy is set forth with great lucidity, received from Pericles an invitation to quit his shop and go to live with that magnate. “I would not sell my liberty for all the treasures in Greece,” was the reply.

The street cobblers of Paris have frequently given heroic instances of devotion and patriotism. During the massacre of St. Bartholomew they saved many Protestants from the edge of the sword. Their little shops were divided into two compartments, of which the upper one, approached by a small ladder, served as lumber-room for a mass of leather scraps and old shoes. It was here that more than one of the companions of Admiral Coligny found safety.

Some time afterwards, defying the terrible edicts of Richelieu, a Paris cobbler transmitted some vitally important correspondence to the prisoners in the Bastille, by cleverly sewing the letters between the soles of shoes. Later on his shop became a sort of literary rendezvous. Politics were indeed talked there; but it was the latest prose and the latest verse which chiefly occupied the frequenters. The cobbler was at that period accustomed to combine with his leathern functions those of “public-writer.”

French authors and poets have always had a kindness for the cobbler. François Villon wrote what is considered the best of his odes in honour of the “Povres Housseurs,” makers, that is to say, of a species of boots worn in the fifteenth century. It is known that the great Corneille did not think it beneath his dignity to make an intimate friend of the cobbler of the Rue d’Argenteuil.

The free atmosphere which surrounded his wooden shop apparently inspired the artist in leather with a passion for joyous rhymes and a love of literary works, together with a certain fund of satire which attracted men of letters towards him.

The most celebrated Paris cobbler of the eighteenth century was Henry Sellier, whose shop stood in the Rue Quoquereau, to-day the Rue Coq-Héron. This shop was a vile hut of rotten planks, the roof of which, a piece of oil-cloth held up by a couple of broom-handles, was riddled like a sieve. Nevertheless, the proprietor wrote spirited verse, and the success of his poems was such that Louis XIV. received a copy of them, together with their author, in his château at Fontainebleau. The effusions of Sellier, moreover, gained the approbation of Fontenelle, whose good opinion brought them greatly into fashion, and even excited the jealousy of contemporary poetasters. One of Sellier’s critics published a couplet charging him with being assisted by famous collaborators; to which the cobbler, who, whether poet or not, was always ready with a repartee, penned in reply another couplet to the effect that the absence of wit and every other quality from the verses of his accuser sufficiently proved that he, at least, wrote everything himself.

In 1789 the cobbler’s shop promptly and proudly bore aloft the tricolour cockade; it became a rendezvous for patriots, and a political cabinet in which more than one great popular resolution was passed. When the legislative assembly had declared that the country was “in danger,” all the young shoemakers hastened to enlist; the paternal artists in leather offered their children to France. In those battalions of volunteers which were sometimes disdainfully described as an army of “vagabonds, tailors and cobblers,” the last-named contingent, a numerous one, fought heroically enough.

Under the Restoration the hut of the cobbler was a political and secret rendezvous for the Bonapartists and the Republicans. Much whispering and much writing went on there; many a song, penned by a literary cobbler, issued thence in manuscript, to travel rapidly from workshop to workshop and inflame the political sentiments of partisans. After 1830 the cobbler openly showed his disapprobation of the citizen royalty. The interior of his shop was completely papered with political caricatures; one manuscript satire or cartoon, torn down by the police to-day, was succeeded by another to-morrow. The police, however, were so vigilant that the cobbler at length found it advantageous not to meddle too much with politics, and developed a tendency for frequenting cheap taverns, in which his songs and conversation procured him a satisfactory measure of admiration. He did not become a drunkard, but he sought inspiration in moderate potations. A celebrated advocate had lived for sixteen years in the Rue Coq-Héron, and just beneath the walls of his mansion a cobbler had long been accustomed to hammer at the soles of shoes. A provincial visitor one day asked this cobbler whether he knew the advocate in question. “No, sir,” was the imperturbable reply. The advocate overhead was told of it, and, mystified at such an instance of ignorance, came down to reproach his humble neighbour. “You do not know me?” he said, “and yet we have lived sixteen years side by side!” “Just so,” answered the cobbler, without the least embarrassment; “you have been next door to me for sixteen years, and have not once asked me to drink with you.”

Among the shops and other establishments that have disappeared from Paris may be mentioned the ancient “café,” properly so-called, where coffee was served but smoking forbidden, and the “café estaminet,” where smoking was permitted. Every café is now a café estaminet; though it is the latter term, not the former, which has gone out of use. The serving of beer at cafés was of course an innovation; but the drinking of beer has become so general in Paris that there are now numbers of so-called “brasseries” (literally “breweries,” which these places are not), where beer is the principal if not the only beverage served. In a history of cafés the introduction of music and the development of the café concert--the French music-hall--would have to be noted. Of late years, too, music of a certain kind--especially the music of the Hungarian gipsies--executed by members of the gipsy race more or less authentic, has been introduced into restaurants.

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