XLV. PARISIAN MENDICANCY: THE PARIS POOR…

XLV. PARISIAN MENDICANCY: THE PARIS POOR

Parisian Mendicancy in the Sixteenth Century--The General Hospital--Louis XV. and the Beggars--The Revolution--Mendicancy as a Regular Profession--The Organ-grinders and the Trade in Italian Children--The French Treatment of the Poor--Asylums, Alms-houses, and Retreats--The Droit des Pauvres--The Cost of the Poor.

In Paris, formerly, mendicancy was so grave and manifest a plague that it could escape the eyes of no one, and there is not a single Paris historian who has omitted to write upon the subject. The documents which subsist in reference to it--Parliamentary decrees, for instance, and royal edicts, would supply material for a complete history of mendicity, not only detailed but even anecdotal. There was a time when the beggars of Paris organised themselves into troops, which were under the command of a chief. The members of these troops understood their business. The orphans and other little scamps, in groups of three or four, would go out into the streets shivering and half-naked, weeping and begging for bread; ostensible husbands and wives, with their own or other people’s children, exhibited certificates to the effect that their property had been destroyed by lightning; the marchandiers were merchants whom some conflagration had reduced to misery; the piètres excelled in tying their calves up to their thighs and proceeding legless on crutches; while the sabouleux rolled on the ground, with leaps and contortions, foaming--thanks to a piece of soap which they kept in their mouths--as though they were epileptic.

In this connection a droll anecdote may be told. A veteran Parisian beggar had a very beautiful daughter, and many a suitor petitioned the father for her hand. One day a retired soldier, who had taken to mendicancy, came to him to implore the paternal consent. “What are your qualifications?” asked the old man. “I have only one leg,” replied the amorous warrior. “Bah!” cried the father, “you have no chance; only yesterday I refused a man without either legs or arms.”

In the middle ages, however, the humours of mendicancy, were frequently lost in the gravity of the perils to which a city infested by cunning and desperate beggars was exposed. An edict was issued in 1524 condemning mendicants to be whipped and banished. It apparently had little effect, for in the following year they were ordered to quit Paris under pain of being hanged. In 1532 the Parliament ordered that, chained in pairs, they should be employed to clean out the sewers, which at this period were, for the most part, open. In 1561 an ordinance of Charles IX. sentenced all beggars to the galleys during the remainder of their life; for in those days, the offender who once found himself chained to the oar never went on shore again. A Parliamentary decree of 1606 proclaimed that all beggars should be whipped in public by the assistants of the executioner; a particular mark, moreover, was to be placed on their shoulder; while, in virtue of an ordinance of 1602, their heads were shaved--a punishment which was at least beneficial to them from a hygienic point of view.

And now we reach the moment when severely punitive laws against mendicancy were about to give way to preventive measures characterised by humanity. The first person to occupy himself with the fate of the mendicants seems to have been a certain theoretical reformer named Jean Douet de Romp Croissant. He published, in pamphlet form, a series of memoirs addressed to the Queen Regent. Many of the schemes he put forward were wild in the extreme, but his writings contain the germs of one or two excellent institutions. He proposed the organisation of those State pawnshops which were ultimately to be opened in France, though not until 1778. In view of the filthy condition of the Paris streets, the dangers to which pedestrians were exposed from highwaymen, and the extraordinary number of beggars then in the capital, he proposed to employ these beggars in cleaning the town and protecting the citizens. His idea was to place a beggar at every fifty yards along the thoroughfares, armed with a brush and shovel, so as to remove the refuse and to be able to call his next neighbour to the rescue should any wayfarer fall into the hands of thieves. The scheme had its practical and reasonable side, but no attempt was ever made to execute it.

It is to Louis XIV., or more correctly, to M. de Belièvre, first president of the Parliament, that the honour is due of having first acted in this matter with deliberation, method, and success. An edict of the 4th of May, 1656, created the General Hospital, chiefly composed of three establishments: Notre Dame de la Pitié; the Maison de St. Denis or Petit Arsenal, familiarly known as Salpetrière; and Bicêtre. According to Sauval the number of beggars in Paris then exceeded forty thousand. They formed “an independent people, who knew neither law, nor religion, nor superior, nor police; impiety, sensuality, libertinage, were all that reigned amongst them.” De Belièvre’s measure was already accepted in principle, but grave doubts were entertained respecting its application.

The authorities feared that so vast a crowd of lawless people might be able to defy their power. Everything, however, was effected in an orderly manner, and with a facility by no means anticipated. It was announced in all the churches that, on the 7th of May, 1657, the General Hospital would be open to as many of the poor as deserved admission, and at the same time criers went about the streets proclaiming a warning to beggars against ever asking alms again. On the 14th of May every beggar who could be found in Paris was arrested and shut up. The city now found itself delivered from an ancient and formidable scourge.

How complete was the delivery may be seen from the account left of their visit to Paris by two young Dutchmen--De Villers by name--who went to inspect the “Little Arsenal designed for the confinement of paupers accustomed to be in the streets,” and who, expatiating on the admirable plan and general arrangements of the institution, declared it the finest one of the kind imaginable, and that not one beggar was then to be found in Paris.

In course of years, however, in spite of the General Hospital and of the Hôtel des Invalides, opened in 1670 to indigent soldiers, mendicants once more multiplied in the streets of Paris. The French metropolis was indeed an irresistible centre of attraction to malefactors, vagabonds, and beggars. Misery flowed thither not only from the provinces but from abroad. At the close of the seventeenth century a curious and ingenious ordinance was issued for preventing mendicancy, by which any person giving alms to a beggar was liable to a fine of fifty francs. Under regency, the famous Law put forth an emigration scheme for the clearance of vagabonds from Paris. Authority was obtained for the transportation of indigent young men and women from the various pauper institutions to America, and numbers were shipped. The result, however, was apparently unsatisfactory, for in 1725 the Duke of Bourbon ordered that every mendicant who had come from the provinces to Paris should be seized, branded on the arm, and deprived of his possessions.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, recourse was again had to the scheme of Law, and beggars, particularly young and strong ones, were kidnapped for transportation to the colonies by gangs of men in the pay of the authorities. Blunders, however, occurred. Gentlemen’s servants who chanced to be out at night, as well as the sons of artisans, were seized and carried off. And now Paris, so credulous, so ready to believe the most improbable tales, grew terrified. It was said--first in a whisper, then aloud--that Louis XV., devoured by leprosy, could not recover health except by taking each morning a bath of human blood, and that the pauper children who disappeared were bled to death for the benefit of the royal invalid. The rumour went so far as to produce riots, in which a number of the king’s archers were killed and at least one of the kidnappers torn to pieces. The Government now found it necessary to relinquish the emigration project, and every endeavour was made to provide mendicants with employment at home. In 1766 a severe law was passed by which every mendicant caught begging was to be branded on the left arm with the letter “M,” and sent to the galleys for nine years, or for life should the offence be repeated.

Such heavy threats and penalties, however, were useless. The king himself recognised the fact, and, in a wise and beneficent letter, wrote as follows: “I have felt keenly afflicted at the great number of mendicants that fill the streets of Paris and Versailles.... We must furnish work for the strong, a hospital for the invalids, and a house of detention for those who resist the benefits of the law.”

The Revolution, like every violent social or political movement, had a disturbing effect on the regular industries, and threw upon the streets of Paris vast numbers of workmen whom want of occupation plunged into a misery rendered still deeper by the prevailing scarcity of bread. The first decree on the subject of mendicancy was issued May 20th, 1790. Needlework in special workshops was to be provided for the women and children, the healthy men were to be put to manual labour; the sick and infirm were to be treated in the hospitals; foreign beggars were to be banished from the country, and provincial beggars conducted back to their native place with pecuniary assistance along the road at the rate of three sous a league, and with the obligation to follow a prescribed route--a clause in the mendicancy law which is to-day still in force.

It was easy, however, to decree the extinction of mendicancy. Unfortunately, mendicants continued to exist. A sharp law was passed whereby every citizen convicted of having given any description of alms to a beggar was condemned to a fine “equivalent to the value of two days’ work”; whilst every person convicted of having solicited money or bread in the streets or public ways was liable to arrest. Under the Directory mendicants were for a time allowed to beg as they chose. They abused their liberty, however, and became importunate and even menacing in their quest of alms. Then they were arrested on all hands by soldiers, who drove them outside the city with blows from the butt-end of their muskets. Once in the country, some of them got into mischief, stopped carriages and robbed pedestrians; so that it was found necessary to issue an edict whereby any beggar bearing firearms or any kind of weapon, even though he had not made use of it, was liable to imprisonment for a period varying from two to five years, with police surveillance to follow.

But rigour and leniency have proved alike powerless in Paris to relieve the city of its beggars. Mendicancy is a profession, and it is not exercised only by extending the hand and whining for alms. It tries to disguise itself under various forms. It opens carriage-doors, sells flowers and lucifers in the streets and on the boulevards, picks up cigar-ends which it vends to illicit tobacco manufacturers at one franc a pound, sings beneath the windows of the rich, turns the handle of the barrel-organ, and lets out, at so much a day, little children to be exhibited for the excitement of public sympathy. That the exhibition of articles for sale from the street gutter is frequently but a pretence everyone knows. The present writer once asked a woman, who sold matches in Paris, whether a good many pedestrians did not give her the sou without requiring anything in return. “Yes, sir,” she replied, in a tone of lament, “but sometimes they take the matches!”

Mendicancy is a profession, and in the exercise of it a good deal of ingenuity, and one might almost say talent, is frequently shown. Not a few Parisian beggars have become historical. Years ago there was a female beggar in Paris, without legs and with only one arm, who could, by a certain trick in her breathing, produce in her interior a sound like the tick of a pendulum. “Listen! ladies and gentlemen,” she used to exclaim, “I have a clock in my stomach!” Her gaping auditors used thereupon to apply their ear to her back. It was true! There was a clock inside her! They could hear the click of the pendulum!

Formerly, in the gardens of the Hôtel Gontaut was stationed an old blind man accompanied by a poodle. Every day he arrived and departed at the same hours. Seated on a camp-stool, with a woollen cap on his head, and enveloped in a large overcoat with seven plaits, he did nothing all day but keep a pair of expressionless eyes directed towards heaven, and shake his tin money-box from time to time. It was a tradition in Paris that he had given his daughter a dowry of three hundred thousand francs on the occasion of her marriage to a notary, and that in the evening, after rattling his money-box all day, the old man could often be seen in a box at the opera, to which he had driven in his carriage.

A blind beggar is always sure of a tolerable income, and, although he may not frequent the opera, he generally lives well. “One day,” says M. Ducamp in his work on Paris, “as I was crossing the Pont des Arts, I saw a woman taking one of the blind beggars his dinner. She put into his hand a metal porringer, which he rapidly uncovered. He smelt it and asked--‘What do you call this?’ ‘It is stewed mutton and peas,’ replied the woman with a certain expression of fear. ‘Devil take you and the mutton too! You know I only care for beef!’ I retained my alms and kept them for a better occasion.” How profitable a misfortune the loss of sight has long been to Paris beggars may be seen from a report drawn up in 1853 on the subject of mendicancy, which sets forth that “a number of blind beggars come to Paris just for the season, and return with enough money to live comfortably at home through the winter.”

Jugglers at one time abounded in the city of Paris, together with public exhibitors of all kinds; men, for instance, whose stock-in-trade consisted of a dromedary and an ape--which rode through the boulevards on the dromedary’s back. These adventurers so obstructed the traffic that a series of restrictive ordinances were passed on the subject. That of February 28th, 1865, which was based on all the preceding ordinances, provides that every individual wishing to take up the profession of juggler, organ-grinder, singer, or perambulating musician, must be provided with an authorisation from the Préfecture of Police. To obtain this, the applicant must be a Frenchman, must have resided for a year past in the jurisdiction of the Préfecture, and must bear a fair moral character. This authorisation has to be renewed every three months, and the holder must carry on him a numbered metal badge. It is expressly forbidden to mendicants of this class to take with them those of their children who are under sixteen years old, to lend their badge, to divine, prophesy, or interpret dreams, or to perform in public any operation which infringes on the profession of the manicure or the dentist.

The profession of organ-grinder has declined in Paris. The street was his domain, and he was often accompanied by assistants in queer costumes, who grinned, gesticulated, and sang as he played beneath the windows of the well-to-do. Towards 1830 one of these wanderers was well known to Parisians as “the Marquis,” from the costume he wore. Although upwards of fifty years of age, he was extremely nimble, and he excelled in throwing into an open window, on the fourth or fifth floor, a two-sou piece wrapped up in a small book of songs. His customer would thereupon throw him down double the amount. It was asserted by some that he belonged to the secret police, and he, in any case, rendered it important services.

A new organ costs from four hundred to five hundred francs, a second-hand one, with an occasional flat note, one hundred or a hundred and fifty. This is a great expense, and necessitates beforehand a capital such as few of the mendicant class possess. Most organ-grinders, therefore, hire their instrument by the day, paying for a small organ between fifty centimes and a franc; or for a big Cremona organ, which imitates an entire orchestra, ten francs, with another two francs for the hire of the assistant in charge.

These better kind of organ-grinders generally earn a good deal of money; it is no uncommon thing for them to return to their squalid homes with a profit of fifty francs.

Some of the humbler kind of organ-grinders were at one time accustomed to supplement their income in an ingenious fashion. They quitted the city under pretext of playing in the suburban pleasure-gardens, and when they passed the barrier on their return they had replaced the pointed cylinder of their instrument with another cylinder similar in appearance and hollow, which was filled with brandy. Many of them thus evaded the octroi duty, though occasionally they were seized by the authorities and severely punished.

Among the Parisian street-musicians we must not forget the orchestra-man, with a cap of bells on his head, a flute of reeds beneath his lips, cymbals between his legs, a drum on his back, and a triangle one hardly knows where. His gymnastic musical exertions seem to keep him in a state of perpetual drought, for as soon as he has received a little money he adjourns to the nearest wine-shop.

In London we occasionally see disinherited viscounts turning barrel-organs in the street, or repudiated younger sons on the perch of the hansom cab. This may result either from sheer necessity or from a desire on the part of the discontented youth to make things a trifle awkward for his sire; and we distinctly remember an earl’s son who was a cab-driver taking a huge delight in plying for hire just outside the paternal mansion.

In Paris there have been a good many instances of well or highly connected persons becoming street-musicians either from want or in virtue of an instinct. Quite recently there was a lady vocalist, nearly related to an influential Parisian, who took to the streets and could not be persuaded by her friends to resume the comforts of private life which were freely offered to her. Two or three times she was induced to quit the streets for a day or two, but each time she found existence intolerable till she returned to the public pavement. For those in distress there is always a living, no matter what the age of the performer, to be got out of street-singing. A few years ago an old man of eighty went about Paris singing with a voice which was almost extinct and scarcely exceeded a whisper, but which, nevertheless, brought him in regularly forty-five francs a month. As to the rest, street-singing is to many paupers not merely a trade, but an hereditary tendency, handed down from father to son.

The largest section of the Paris street-musicians consists, probably, of the little Italian boys who overrun public places and who are to be found at night asleep under the seats of the boulevards, against the parapets of the quays, or upon some doorstep. They are as difficult to suppress and as persistent as ants: the very police get tired of trying to clear the streets of them.

Whence do they chiefly come? We will let M. Ducamp reply:--“One result,” he says, “of the expedition led by Garibaldi in 1860 was that the kingdom of the two Sicilies entered into the habits of civilised nations. Formerly, at the time of the Bourbons, as it was held that any individual demanding a passport for abroad could only be a Jacobin, permission to travel was never given. It is no longer so; everyone can go and come at pleasure. The inhabitants of the southern provinces have quickly profited by this new right in order to get rid of their children and disperse them over the whole earth. It is the Basilicate which to-day furnishes nine-tenths of these unhappy little creatures.

“This is a sort of commerce of which those who engage in it do not, in all probability, understand the immorality. Everything is arranged in a regular manner, and generally before a notary: it is white slavery. A speculator runs through the villages, collects the children, whom parents are quite willing to let him have, and takes them on lease, generally for three years. All that these children earn, no matter where, during that lapse of time, belongs to him, and, in exchange, he gives the family a lump sum or so much annually. Formal agreements are signed, which become invalid in case of non-execution of the clauses.

“I have inspected several of these contracts. There could not possibly be more naïveté or good faith than they exhibit. A father lets out his son as he lets out a field. The child is a capital, of which the produce belongs legitimately to the father. That is the principle, and it is very simple, as everyone can see. Highly immoral as it is amongst us, and contrary as it is to all our customs, there is nothing in it to shock the inhabitants of the Basilicate, for whom it becomes frequently a profitable resource. The speculators believe themselves so well within the law that often abroad, and particularly at Paris, they have recourse to their consuls in order to enforce the terms of the contract against their victims when these prove refractory.

“This industry has its agents and its travellers. Some go to Italy in search of the children and, bringing them to Paris, place them in the hands of the patron, who is expecting them and pays for them at so much a head. Others supply information as to the villages where children who are good musicians or who have agreeable physiognomies are to be found; while, again, others--nor are these the least dangerous--when they learn that a ‘patron’ has been expelled by some administrative measure, collect together the poor little creatures belonging to his band and work them on their own account.

“The trade is not a bad one. One patron was recently living in London with a fortune of 200,000 francs, gained by this frightful traffic. Formerly the patrons defended their pretended rights to the bitter end, but to-day, rendered more circumspect by adverse verdicts, they take flight as soon as they feel uneasy, and abandon the children to their fate. Some five-and-twenty years ago the constantly increasing number of little Italians caused the Government to adopt severe measures, and the patroni were all and separately informed that unless they abandoned their cruel trade they would, in virtue of a law passed in 1849, be conducted to the frontier. The effect of this notification was somewhat droll. Instead of making a complaint, either to their own Minister, to the Minister of the Interior, or the Prefect of Police, they drew up an address to the French nation, and, in a document full of sound and rhetoric and commonplace, took farewell of ‘that hospitable land, Italy’s own sister.’”

The patroni in charge of the children are far from irreproachable. Some of them possess musical talent; and these not only seek but know how to turn the abilities of their little slaves to the best account. Others are retired brigands, or loafers on a large scale, who wish to see the world and to make money during the process.

The courts have sometimes had to deal with great cruelties on the part of the patroni. On one occasion a man named Pellitieri was convicted for having kept a child for four days and nights fastened beneath his own bed with a harp-string, which could be tightened by means of a key. The culprit was sentenced, in default, to four months’ imprisonment. The life to which the poor little Italian children are condemned is of the most sordid, hateful, and demoralising kind. They suffer in health, and it has been calculated that out of a hundred children brought from Italy into France, twenty return home, thirty remain abroad, and fifty die of privation and hunger.

The streets in which they are chiefly to be found are the Rue Simon le Franc, the Rue de la Clef, the Rue des Boulangers, and the Place St. Victor. Here they live crowded together in such a manner that there are often five, six, and even seven beds in the same room, with three, four, five, and it may be six children in each bed. There is a bolster at each end of the bed, and the curious visitor is surprised on entering the room to see heads spring up in every direction.

Along the walls hang harps, which, in the hands of the unfortunate children, are less instruments of music than of mendicancy. On the floor lie the children’s clothes--their rags, that is to say--together with sacks of coarse cloth containing the macaroni and vermicelli that they have brought or had sent to them from Italy.

The children earn from a franc and a half to three francs a day, all of which goes into the pocket of the patron, who has, on his side, to feed, dress, and lodge the members of his band. The little musicians pick up food wherever they can get it: often from charitable persons, and in the kitchens of restaurants or of private houses; and this fare is doubtless preferable to that provided for them by their master, whose only invariable contribution towards their support is a basin of questionable soup, doled out to them in the morning before the beginning of the day’s work. The children’s rags have been tied or stitched together, their harps have been tuned and perhaps re-stringed, and at nine o’clock they go out into the street to carry out the instructions of the patron, who has told them to bring back as much money as possible, and not to allow themselves to be arrested. Some five or six hundred of these children are, in fact, arrested every year for begging. As a rule, they solicit alms only in the way of business, but at times they beg directly and exclusively for their own account, as when the patron abandons them and leaves them to shift for themselves. Then the unhappy ones take refuge in some half-built house, and, having nothing else to depend on, continue to beg until at last they fall inevitably into the hands of the police, who imprison them and announce the fact to the Italian consul. If the consul sends them back to Italy, they return to France under the care of some new patron, who, to keep out of difficulties, thinks it prudent to describe himself as their uncle or some other near relative. They may be sent back fifty times, but for the fifty-first they will return to Paris--a sign, it would seem, that, however miserable their life may be, they do not find it intolerable. It must be preferable, one would think, to their life in Italy, or they would remain at home. It is to be remembered, on the other hand, that their parents sell them or let them out at the rate of from a hundred to a hundred and twenty francs a year to the slave-drivers called patroni.

The beggar in Paris who falls into the hands of the police is imprisoned--not, however, as an offender, but as an unfortunate man. An article in the penal code sets forth, in fact, that “the beggar is sent to the station-house for mendicants not as a punishment but as a measure of police, to be exercised at the discretion of the administrative authority.” In the first place, the man who begs is presumably without resources. Nor is it in prison that he will be able to create new ones for himself. To throw him into prison, then, and afterwards set him free in the same condition as before, would be to expose him once more to the commission of the very act for which he had been incarcerated. Instead of doing this, the administration places the beggar, after a brief period of confinement, in a house where he is fed, clothed, and comfortably lodged, but is at the same time required to do a measure of work in proportion to his strength. For this work he is paid; not largely, but sufficiently to enable him to amass a little sum for his immediate needs on being liberated. He will now be able to seek for work, and may perhaps manage to obtain it. This system seems admirable, and would be so as a matter of fact, were not beggars as a rule so perverse as to prefer begging to all other means of gaining a subsistence. When a beggar is arrested in the streets of Paris, he is taken to a department of the Préfecture, where he is generally recognised as an old acquaintance.

Many of those who, at large, left to themselves, are intolerably idle, become, as soon as they are imprisoned, industrious, skilful, indefatigable workmen. Some of them will earn in confinement a hundred or two hundred francs--even more. They claim their liberty, and though everyone knows what use they will make of it, there would be no justification for keeping under lock and key a man provided with enough money to enable him to seek employment. Three days afterwards the newly liberated one is again taken up for begging; he is reminded of the sum of money he had about him when he was set free--enough to have enabled him to live quietly and respectably for at least a month or two. “Yes,” he replies, “but I have been amusing myself with my friends.” This sort of thing reproduces itself again and again. It is more easy to improve the moral tone of a thief than of a professional beggar. The chief occupation of the beggars kept in confinement is tearing up linen to make charpie, the French equivalent for lint. According to M. Maxime Ducamp, the incarcerated beggars work as they like and when they like. “They talk, read, and in the courtyards smoke. Once a week--every Tuesday for the men, every Wednesday for the women--they are taken out for a walk, and often come back intoxicated. They dress as they please, and are allowed to wear moustaches and beards.... Among the crowds of poor wretches more than one is in a desperate condition. I recognised a man of sixty whose history was known to me. It so happened that he wrote a five-act tragedy in verse, which was neither better nor worse than many others. The author presented his piece at the Odéon, where it was refused. He had it printed, and this was the beginning of his misfortunes. He offered a copy to the French Academy, which, according to custom, acknowledged its reception through the secretary. The letter set forth that the piece would be placed in the library of the Institute, and it was signed ‘Villemain.’ The unfortunate author thought, and persisted in thinking, that his work had appeared so remarkable that it had been found worthy of being preserved in the archives of the Academy. He now dreamed of other poetical works, abandoned his ordinary occupation, and allowed poverty to approach him without seeing that it was at hand. ‘How do you find yourself here?’ I said to him, as he ate his bread with some preparation of haricot beans. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I have not to trouble myself about my material existence, and can now go on writing.’”

It will be seen that France, though in a less degree than England, suffers from the plague of mendicancy. It has been proposed that agricultural colonies be established (as they are in Holland) where mendicants may be kept permanently at work. France, it is said, possesses 5,147,862 hectares of uncultivated land to which, by the railways and canals, manure might easily be brought. Artesian wells, too, may be sunk everywhere, even beneath the most sterile soil. In exchange for the labour required from the mendicants employed in tilling the land, bread would be given to them, a certain remuneration, and, it might be, a portion of the field cultivated by them. Such a system would be beneficial in more than one way. The agricultural resources of the country would be increased, and the towns would be freed from a parasitic race which often lends to crime its most redoubtable auxiliaries.

There is no poor-law in Paris. Yet the French, like other nations, have the poor always with them; and means have had to be found for preventing the most unfortunate class of the population from dying of hunger. Now, as in the time of Chamfort, society consists of two great classes--those who have more appetite than dinner, and those who have more dinner than appetite; and prudence, as well as charity, imposes the necessity of preventing the unsatisfied appetites from becoming too acute. It is only just to add that at Paris the most ancient of the asylums for the indigent owe their establishment to charity alone. Take, for example, the Hospice des Petits Ménages, founded in 1557 on the site of a leper hospital, closed for want of funds in 1544. Certain conditions, however, were required for admission into the almshouses, known first as Les Petits Ménages, and afterwards as Les Petites Maisons. Admission to the establishment, by an order from the Préfecture, issued in 1801, was limited exclusively to widowers and widows of sixty whose married life had extended over at least ten years; and to married couples whose united ages amounted to 130, of which fifteen had been passed in common. This asylum, however, is not, under present conditions, open to the indigent, but only to those whose poverty is relative. Each inmate, besides supplying furniture of a certain specified kind, must pay 200 francs a year for a bedroom, or 300 for a bedroom and sitting-room. There were in this asylum, according to the latest returns, some 1,300 persons, from sixty to ninety-five years of age. Another asylum of the same kind is the La Rochefoucauld Retreat, installed at Montrouge, on the road to Orleans, founded by the noble and generous woman whose name it bears. Here, also, there is no admission to anyone beneath the age of sixty, except only in the case of persons suffering from incurable illnesses which are neither epilepsy, nor insanity, nor cancer. The annual payment is fixed at 250 francs for old people in good health, and 312·50 francs for incurable patients. A charge, moreover, is made in either case of 100 francs, as representing the value of the furniture supplied.

The Hospice de la Reconnaissance, opened at Garches in 1833, was founded, 1829, by Michael Brezin, a blacksmith and mechanical engineer, who had made his fortune under the Republic and the Empire. Here there is nothing to pay. Admission is given, by preference, to men of sixty who have been employed in some kind of metal-work. The establishment contains 300 beds. At another asylum, close to Auteuil, in the Bois de Boulogne, there is a charge of 400 francs for single persons and 250 francs for married couples. A moderate sum has to be paid for the use of furniture, and no one is admitted below the age of sixty.

At the Maison de Villas, founded some sixty years ago in the Rue du Regard by a retired merchant, old people of seventy, or indigent invalids of any age, are received to the number of fifty. In 1825, the house known as St. Michel, close to the wood of Vincennes, was founded by a retired carpet-maker named Boular, who reserved its gratuitous privileges for twelve old men of the age of at least seventy.

Among the various asylums there is one which is almost celebrated, and which is luxurious compared with the others. It is more like a very comfortable boarding-house than an establishment reserved for the disinherited of this world. Everything has been done to deprive it of the sad aspect that belongs to most institutions of the kind. It was founded by Chamousset, whose name is associated with nearly all the charitable works as with all the most useful inventions of the 18th century, including, in the latter category, the Paris letter-post. The benevolent establishment founded by Chamousset was called neither hospice nor asile, but simply l’Institution Sainte-Périne. No advantage was at first taken of it until the beginning of the present century, when it was turned to a purpose little dreamed of by its benevolent author. Two speculators, Gloux and Duchaylar, discovered in a charitable enterprise a means of making their fortune. They interested the Emperor and the Empress Josephine in their project, and organised the Institution Sainte-Périne (established in the former convent of Sainte-Périne at Chaillot) as a place of retreat for a number of unfortunate persons who had been ruined by the Revolution but had still preserved sufficient resources to be able to pay an annual charge, out of which the enterprising Gloux and Duchaylar contrived to make a handsome profit. Such was the carelessness of, or more probably the rapacity of, the administrators, that in 1807 the Emperor found it necessary to send the inmates provisions prepared specially for them in the kitchen of the Tuileries. The direction of Sainte-Périne was at the same time taken from the two shameless speculators and entrusted to the Prefect of the Seine.

The old convent has since been pulled down; and it was replaced in 1862 by a spacious house constructed at Auteuil in the midst of a large and picturesque park. The privileges of the establishment are reserved for state functionaries or their widows, who are admissible from the age of sixty. The charges are 850 francs for board and lodging, and 100 for the use of furniture. There is accommodation for 268 inmates.

But the almshouses, asylums, and “retreats” founded by a few benevolent persons could have but little effect in mitigating the distress of the Paris poor as a class. Up to the time of the Revolution, poverty was relieved by the Church, and especially by the religious houses. Private charity, moreover, was largely practised--somewhat on the principle of the benevolent St. Vincent de Paul, whose maxim it was that charity should “open its arms and shut its eyes.” In less than two years after the taking of the Bastille, on the 25th of May, 1791, a law was passed confiding the duty of relieving the wants of the poor to the municipality of Paris; which, after long deliberations, appointed “bureaux of beneficence” in each of the twenty arrondissements into which Paris had been divided. In each arrondissement a council of twelve administrators was named; and each of the twelve administrators had entrusted to him one of twelve “zones,” into which each arrondissement was divided. To each of the “zone” bureaux, doctors and midwives, chosen by the Prefect of the Seine, were attached.

Then, if an indigent person sought relief, he was visited by the administrator, by a commissary, or lady of charity, and by a doctor; and a detailed report as to his position was presented at one of the sittings held by the Council of Administration twice a month. Temporary and immediate assistance is of course given; but only, as a rule, to the sick and wounded, to women in labour, to women who are nursing and who have no means of subsistence, to deserted children, to orphans who have not yet reached the age of sixteen, to heads of families who have at least three children below the age of fourteen under their care, and to widows and widowers who have two children of tender years to support.

After a certain age the assistance given by the bureaux is permanent, but not excessive. Thus, from seventy to seventy-nine, indigent old men receive 5 francs a month; from seventy-nine to eighty-two, 8 francs, from eighty-two to eighty-four, 10 francs, and 12 francs from eighty-four to the end of their lives. This small allowance does not exclude orders from the bureau for bread, meat, and clothes.

The “bureaux of beneficence” are not maintained by the Government nor by local taxation; they are supported by private gifts and legacies, and by sums which the commissioners and ladies of charity periodically collect on the pressing invitation of the mayor of the arrondissement. The sum placed annually at the disposal of the charitable offices scarcely exceeds one million francs--£40,000, that is to say. Under this system it necessarily follows that the sums contributed in the richer districts or arrondissements are proportionately larger than those contributed in the smaller ones; so that the bureaux have plenty of money to distribute where there is but little poverty, and scarcely any where the pain of poverty is severely felt. Thus, in the opulent quarters of the Louvre, the Bourse, the Opéra, and Faubourg Poissonnière, the annual revenue of each charitable office ranges from ninety to a hundred thousand francs, whereas, in the arrondissements of Belleville, Vaugirard, La Glacière, and La Villette, the average sum collected varies from 16,000 to 18,000 francs. To remedy these inequalities, the municipality draws upon its own resources; so that, although there is no poor-law in France, the poor are relieved partially, at least, through local taxation. It would be impossible for the charitable offices to do their work without assistance from the authorities, and the Administration of Public Aid helps the offices with contributions which may be put down at 500,000 francs in money and 700,000 francs in bread, besides another 500,000 francs, called the subvention extraordinaire, which enables the central administration to establish something like a balance between the resources of the different bureaux. Every year the average is fixed of the amount of succour to be given to each indigent household--generally something over fifty francs, and to each charitable office a complementary sum is given, so as to enable it to distribute the minimum amount of relief fixed upon.

In spite of endeavours made by the central administration to equalise the resources of the different arrondissements, the position of the indigent person is much better in a rich than in a poor arrondissement. Instead of the regulation fifty francs fixed as the minimum of relief to be granted to a family in distress, there are quarters where the value of the relief granted amounts to 130 francs per household.

An allowance at the rate of 130 francs a year is little enough, it will be said, for a starving family. But the object of the charitable offices is not to grant annuities for the poor. They only propose to help persons in temporary difficulties, such as workmen thrown out of employment by sickness, or some other external cause. As it is, the kindly intentions of the administrators are often abused. Orders for bread, begged for in the most importunate manner, are in many cases surrendered to the baker for a smaller value in money, which is promptly spent in drink.

Each charitable office has under its immediate direction several houses of relief, the number of which varies according to the richness of each particular quarter. There are altogether fifty-seven of these houses in which immediate relief may be obtained. Of such asylums, one of the poorest arrondissements, the thirteenth, possesses four, while the ninth, that of the Opéra, has only one. Each house of refuge is indicated by a flag hanging out from one of the windows. As first instituted, they were all directed by those devoted sisters of charity who, by an unjust law passed a few years ago, and which may, from one year to another, be repealed, were excluded from hospital services. The argument on the other side must, in fairness, however, be stated. Some of the doctors complained that their patients were troubled, and at times thrown into great excitement, by religious exhortations, when it was necessary to keep them in a state of absolute calm. The houses of refuge are amply supplied with linen, bed-linen, as well as shirts, which are lent to the necessitous, and returned for exchange (unless, meanwhile, they happen to be carried to the pawnbroker’s) once a month in the case of the bed-linen, once a week in that of the shirts. Flannel waistcoats and drawers, woollen stockings and warm under-clothes generally, are kept in the houses of relief, where, if absolutely necessary, the indigent are also supplied with shoes. The principal room in the house is furnished with benches, and in winter warmed by a stove, which is protected by a grating. Here the patients and the paupers assemble two or three times a week, when the divisional physician visits them and gives them consultations. The doctors arrive very punctually, making it a point of honour not to keep waiting unhappy men and women who have often quitted their work to seek relief. One by one they exhibit their certificates of indigence, to show that they are entitled to gratuitous drugs. Even if they possess no such certificate, they receive advice; and as medical advice without medicine would in most cases be useless, the drugs follow, even without formal authorisation.

There are but few pathological cases. Wounds (the result of accident), rheumatism and anæmia, are what the unfortunate applicants generally suffer from. Occasionally some old hand will present himself whose complaint is easily found by the experienced physician. He complains of a general feeling of lassitude, and by reason of previous excesses, followed by the inevitable reaction, is really, perhaps, in want of a stimulant. All he can do is to suggest a tonic, and, in case the doctor should make no sympathetic response, ask boldly for quinine. Bitter as all preparations of quinine must be, the drunkard below par prefers every one of them to cold water. The quinine of the relief houses is composed of some alcoholate of quinine mixed with a strong southern wine, which gives it strength without depriving it of its intolerable bitterness. This preparation is so much in demand that in one particular year 4,000 litres of it were distributed among the applicants for relief.

Camphorated spirits of wine shares with quinine its disastrous popularity. There are men and women among the indigent poor who give themselves bumps and contusions simply that they may be able to obtain camphorated spirits of wine at the local relief-house. Having obtained the desired stimulant, they dilute it with water, sweeten it with sugar, and drink it as a liqueur. Of some 2,000 litres given away in one particular year, not more than one half is said to have been employed for external use.

Women, many of them accompanied by children, are much more numerous in the waiting-rooms of the relief-houses than the men. They are for the most part, especially the aged ones, insatiable in their demands. Something they must have to make them sleep; camomile for their poor stomachs; barley-water for their poor throats; but, above all, quinine to make them strong.

The unfortunate applicants are treated with much generosity. The doctors supply them with spectacles, knee-caps, elastic stockings, crutches: all kinds of things rendered necessary for our working population by the difficult labours they have to undertake. Often, alas! the spectacles, the elastic stockings, the crutches, are sold and the proceeds spent in drink.

In connection with the charitable offices, two very ingenious and beneficial measures were introduced at the time of the Restoration: one to promote the bodily, the other the mental, health of the Paris population. It was enacted that no father or mother should be held entitled to relief unless the children had been vaccinated and sent to school. This legislation was in every way beneficial to the working classes; for the teaching was gratuitous, while the vaccination was profitable. An indigent person who causes his child to be efficaciously vaccinated receives a present of three francs from the authorities.

Systematic inquiries into the matter have proved beyond doubt that most applicants for relief have brought poverty upon themselves by intemperance and debauchery, and, moreover, that whatever be given to them will at the earliest opportunity be converted into drink. In one official report on the subject the following passage occurs: “However much may be given, nothing will be remedied; it will at once be spent in dissipation.”

The Public Aid Department, deriving nothing from taxation, owes a portion of its revenue to the payments made by well-to-do patients in the different hospitals; to the public Burial Office, to the Mont de Piété, or Government pawnbroking office; and to the theatres, which contribute to the support of the poor a certain percentage on their receipts. The poor-tax, levied on the money received by the proprietors of theatres, concert and public halls, yields nearly two million francs a year.

The droit des pauvres, as the impost in question is called, has often been protested against by the Paris managers, though in taking a theatre they know perfectly well what liabilities they incur. It is not the manager who is taxed for the support of the poor, but the people who go to his theatre, and who, paying money for their own amusement, are presumably able to spare a trifle towards the maintenance of the starving poor. The droit des pauvres dates from 1699, in which year Louis XIV. declared that a sixth part of all theatrical receipts should be made over to the general hospitals. The managers did not fail to protest; on which it was explained to them that the poor-tax was an impost levied on the spectator, not on the manager. The manager might, of course, have replied that to increase the price of theatre tickets was to diminish his chances of having a full house. The tax was all the same, maintained. At the time of the Revolution, when, on the 14th of August, 1789, all privileges were abolished, the right of the poor to a portion of all theatrical receipts was suppressed. It was re-established, however, the year afterwards, when it was laid down by law that one décime (two sous) in every franc should for the benefit of the poor be charged on each theatre ticket; and this regulation was renewed from year to year until, by an imperial decree of the year 1809, the proportion to be levied was fixed permanently at one-tenth. This harmless, beneficial tithe continued to be paid until the year 1864, when the Paris theatres were, for the first time, empowered to play whatever suited them, without any of the ancient restrictions which accorded to one theatre the exclusive right of playing grand opera, to another that of playing comic opera or opera with spoken dialogue, to a third tragedy of the classical pattern, and so on. In the vestibule of the theatres there were formerly two pay-places--one for seats in the theatre, the other for the poor-tax. In the early part of the century, the tariff at the entrance to the Comédie Française set forth the prices of admission in the following terms: “First boxes, 6 francs 60 centimes: 6 francs for the theatre, 60 centimes for the poor; pit, 2 francs 20 centimes: 2 francs for the theatre, 20 centimes for the poor.” No one at that time thought of protesting against this sumptuary impost. Then, to facilitate matters and to save theatre-goers the trouble of making payments first at one window, then at another, the two payments were combined in one. Before many years had passed, managers easily persuaded themselves that it was they who, out of their own pockets, paid the theatrical poor-tax. Some of them demanded that the impost should be levied not on receipts, but on profits; and one director, on becoming bankrupt, said to his creditors as he submitted to them his accounts of profit and loss: “I owe you 300,000 francs. If I had not been forced to give 400,000 francs to the poor, you would have been paid in full, and I should have had 100,000 to the good.”

Putting together the receipts from all sources which come into the hands of the Public Aid Department, the entire sum amounts to some fourteen or fifteen million francs. This is far from sufficient, since the expenditure in aiding and relieving the indigent and the sick is reckoned at some twenty-five millions of francs. The deficit is made up by the city of Paris, which contributes some eleven million or twelve million francs a year from its own resources.

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XLVI. VERSAILLES

Derivation of the Name--Saint-Simon’s Description--Louis XIV.--The Grand Fête of July, 1668--Peter the Great and the Regent--Louis XV.--Marie Antoinette and the “Affair of the Necklace”--The Events of October, 1789.

A description of the suburbs of Paris does not enter into the scope of the present work. Versailles, however, imperatively claims the attention of any writer on Paris, for Versailles is more than a suburb; it has, during the last two centuries, played almost as important a part in the annals of France as the capital itself.

The history of the town of Versailles is practically inseparable from that of its palace. Originally, indeed, the town was simply a dependency of the palace. In spite of its numerous historical associations, Versailles is comparatively modern. It sprang up suddenly, like the palace itself, by the will of Louis XIV. Its streets were opened and laid out so as to be in harmony with the façades of the palace, while the style and form of each building were regulated beforehand by police edicts. Hence the grand but monotonous aspect of the town.

The name of Versailles is derived, by some authorities, from that of an Italian nobleman, Hugo de Bersaglio, who at the end of one of the earliest of the Italian civil wars took refuge in France. By a familiar etymological change, the B became converted into V, and the name was further transformed from Versaglio into Versailis. Towards the year 1100, the proprietor of the land, Philippe de Versailis, retired to a monastery, and the district of Versailles then passed beneath the authority of the Abbey of Saint-Magloire at Paris.

A purely fantastic and not too ingenious derivation traces the name to “Blés versés,” the land at Versailles being, according to these enterprising etymologists, so high that the wind blew down the corn.

Henry IV. had a small hunting-box at Versailles, and Louis XIII. had another on a far more magnificent scale, which Saint-Simon in his “Memoirs” describes as a castle. It was a square building with a courtyard in the middle, and, according to the fashion of the time, was built of brick. The king’s horses and carriages were kept at a neighbouring farm. It was at Versailles, on the 11th of November, 1630, that the memorable day known in French history as the “Day of Dupes” took place on which, after a long struggle between Cardinal Richelieu and the queen-mother, Louis XIII. took part with his powerful minister. The “red Eminence,” as the much-feared cardinal was called, gave his name to one of the most ancient streets in Versailles, the Rue du Plessis.

After the death of Louis XIII., Versailles and the little castle of brick were abandoned by the court, and it was not until some twenty years afterwards that the Versailles of modern times was to arise. Strictly speaking, Versailles may be said to date from the reign of Louis XIII., but it owed its first importance to Louis XIV. This king, says an historian, “began by building a palace for himself; he then built a town for his palace.” To mark the distinction between the king and his subjects, the Great Monarch, while employing stone for his own royal residences, ordered that the houses of Versailles should be constructed exclusively of brick, or, if by exception stone were used, that the walls should be painted red, with dividing lines of white, so as to give them the appearance of bricks and mortar. The roof of each house was to be of slate, and the uniformity of the architecture, relieved by the verdure of the old trees, gave to the town a character and beauty of its own. Land was ceded to the principal members of the Court that they might build houses for themselves, and the new town grew up, as if by enchantment, on a general plan designed or approved by the king himself.

To study the history of Versailles one should turn to the pages of Saint-Simon, who, in vigorous terms, condemns the reckless extravagance with which Louis XIV. wasted on a pleasure-residence money urgently wanted for the maintenance of his troops.

“When all had been finished,” says the duke, “it appeared that water was everywhere wanting; and this in spite of the millions which had been spent in establishing seas of reservoirs on mud and moving sand. Who would have thought it? This lack of water proved the ruin of the king’s infantry. Madame de Maintenon was in power. The minister, De Louvois, was on the best terms with her, and we were at peace. It occurred to him under these circumstances to turn the course of the river Eure between Chartres and Maintenon, and to conduct it to Versailles. Who can say what gold and what suffering this experiment cost us? It was forbidden under the severest penalties to speak, among the troops employed to turn the stream, about the sickness, the deaths caused by the exhalations from the ancient bed of the river. How many took years to recover from the contagion! How many never regained health at all! The officers, colonels, brigadiers, and others employed were not allowed, whoever they might be, to absent themselves for a quarter of an hour, nor to rest for a quarter of an hour at their work.

“At length the king, tired of glitter and of the crowd, persuaded himself that he wanted occasional solitude: he accordingly set out for the environs. People pressed him to stay at Lucienne; he replied that this happy situation would ruin him, and that, as he wished for absolute rest, he must seek a situation which would permit him to do nothing.

“He found behind Lucienne a deep and narrow valley, with steep sides, inaccessible by its marshes, commanding no view, shut in by hills, and with a wretched village built on its sides. It was called Marly. This enclosure had its advantages; its narrowness kept a resident within bounds. It was an enormous task to dry up the sewers into which the surrounding parts poured their refuse; but at length the hermitage was prepared. Yet the king only slept there for three nights, from Wednesday to Saturday, two or three times a year, with a dozen courtiers at the most. By degrees the hermitage was enlarged. The hills were levelled to afford space for building-sites, and a large portion of the one at the extremity carried away to produce at least the glimpse of a landscape-view.

“Finally, what with buildings, gardens, lakes, aqueducts, parks, forests, statues, etc., Marly became what one sees it to-day, despoiled as it has been since the death of the king. Its vast woods and obscure avenues suddenly changed into immense stretches of water on whose surface people glided about in gondolas; I am speaking of what I have seen, within six weeks; basins changed a hundred times--cascades of ever-varying form.

“It is little to say that Versailles has not cost so much as Marly: and if one adds the expense of continual journeys, particularly towards the end of the king’s life, Marly cost billions. Such was the fortune of a repository of snakes and carrion, spiders and frogs, only chosen because the expense would be nothing!

“Such was the bad taste of the king in everything and his keen passion for forcing nature, which neither the most pressing war nor his devotion could blunt!

“The establishment of the Court at Versailles was another instance of the king’s policy. We all know how he derided, humiliated, confounded the very first grandees, gave pre-eminence to ministers, whom he promoted to equal authority and power with princes of the blood and to an importance exceeding that of the foremost noblemen in the land. It is necessary to show the progress in every direction of such policy on the part of the king. Several causes contributed to draw the court out of Paris, and to keep it incessantly in the country.

“The troubles of the minority, of which this city was the great theatre, had inspired the king with an aversion for it: and people had persuaded him that his stay there was dangerous, and that the residence of the court elsewhere would render cabals at Paris less easy through sheer distance, and more difficult to hide through the ease with which absences could be remarked.

“The number of his mistresses, and the danger of creating great scandals in the heart of a capital so populous and full of such turbulent spirits, now induced the king to remove farther away. At Paris he found himself importuned by the crowd every time he went out, came in, or showed himself in the streets.... A passion for exercise and the chase, much more easy to gratify in the country than at Paris, remote as it was from forests and sterile in places of promenade, and the love of buildings which came next and constantly grew, forbade to him the amusements of a town where he could not avoid being continually on view. The idea, moreover, of rendering himself more venerable by abstracting himself from the eyes of the multitude and from daily appearance in public, was one of the considerations which decided the king to fix upon Saint-Germain, soon after the death of the queen, his mother.

“It was there that he began to attract the world by his fêtes and his gallantries, and to make people feel that he wished to be often seen. The flirtation with Mme. de Vallière, which was at first a mystery, resulted in frequent walks to Versailles--a little cardboard castle at that time, built by Louis XIII., himself disgusted, and his suite still more so, at having had to sleep in a vile inn frequented by waggoners, or in a windmill, after long, fatiguing hunts in the forest of Saint-Léger, or even beyond that, and reserved for his son at a period far distant, when roadways, the fleetness of trained dogs, and the skill of a large staff of keepers and huntsmen had rendered the chase easy and short. This monarch never slept at Versailles, or at least, very rarely, passing a night there only from necessity.

“The king, his son, in order to be more in private with his mistress, was there more often. Then its unknown pleasures, its little parties, caused the immense edifices to spring up which have been built there, with their accommodation for a numerous court, so different from the residences at Saint-Germain. Finally he transported his entire household to it, previously to the death of the queen, and built an infinitude of abodes there in compliance with the petitions made to him on the subject; whereas at Saint-Germain almost everyone was put to the inconvenience of staying in the town; those few who were lodged at the castle being terribly cramped for room there.

“Frequent fêtes, select promenades at Versailles, and journeys were the means seized upon by the king for distinguishing or mortifying, according to the part he assigned to those participating in such ceremonies; though he took care that everyone without the slightest difference should be assiduous and attentive to please him.”

Marly was afterwards much used by him as well as Trianon, where absolutely everyone could come and pay court to him, but where ladies alone had the honour to eat at his table. The wax candle which every evening he caused to be held by some courtier whom he wished to distinguish, and the brevet-doublet, were two more of his inventions. This garment was lined with red, and embroidered with a magnificent and unique design in gold with a little silver. Only a limited number could wear it, including the king, his family, and the princes of the blood; and the latter, like the rest of the courtiers, could only obtain possession of such doublets as they were vacated by their previous holders. The most distinguished members of the court, either directly or by favour, demanded them of the king, and it was a great honour to receive one.

“Not only (says Saint-Simon) was the king sensible of the continual presence of whatever was distinguished--he was likewise so of the inferior classes. He turned his gaze to right and left on rising and going to rest, at his meals, on passing through chambers, in the gardens of Versailles, or where courtiers, alone were privileged to follow him. He saw and noticed everybody: no one escaped him--not even those who would never have hoped to attract his eye. He carefully observed the absence of those belonging to the court, and of the visitors who came more or less frequently; noted the general or particular causes of such absence, and, recording these in his memory, never missed the slightest opportunity of acting in consequence of them.

“It was a demerit in some, and in all whom he had favoured, not to make the court their ordinary residence; in others a demerit to visit it rarely; and it was a sure disgrace never to visit it at all. When it became a question of doing something for such persons, he would say, of this last class, in a lofty tone, ‘I do not know them;’ and of a rare visitor, ‘He is a man I never see.’ These words were irrevocable. It was another crime not to go to Fontainebleau, which he regarded like Versailles. He could not endure people who were fond of Paris. He could easily put up with those who loved the country places to which they belonged, though they had to take care to moderate their expressions of this local affection, and, moreover, before going to stay in the country, to make a longer sojourn at the court. This was not confined to office-bearers or favourites, nor to those whom their age or their capacity marked out from others; anyone frequenting the court was liable to be called to account for his destination. To such a point did the thing go that during a journey I made to Rouen about a law-suit, the king caused a letter to be written to me, young as I was, by Pontchartrain, to demand the reason.”

Of the magnificence of Versailles under Louis XIV. many records remain. A vivid description of one of the most gorgeous fetes ever held is contained in a letter which was addressed at the time by an eye-witness to the Marquis de la Fuente. Nothing grander than this fête could have been devised even by Louis XIV., who offered it to his courtiers and subjects in 1668.

“The day appointed was the 18th of this month,” says the correspondent, who in July of the year named was writing to the marquis by orders of the queen, “and it is impossible to conceive the vast concourse which flocked to the place. The whole aristocratic world, Parisian and provincial, together with many persons who had crossed the sea in the suite of the Duke of Monmouth, had assembled there; never was a gathering so numerous, so select, so sumptuously adorned. The king, wishing that on this occasion all the expense might be his, and that others might have nothing but pleasure, had severely forbidden anything in the nature of tinsel or ornamentation. But what can laws do against fashion?...

“Of the numerous ladies present there were only three hundred who were to have the honour of eating at the royal tables. On their arrival they found all the apartments of the château open to them, perfumed and ready for their reception. In order not to cause them constraint, the royal family had retired into one of the further pavilions. Leisure was allowed these guests for refreshment, after which, towards evening, when the sweetness of the air invited people out of doors, they followed the queen into the garden, where carriages were in waiting to convey them towards one of the woods which lie to the right as you enter, and which has about it something more solitary and more mysterious than the others. The beauty of the evening and of the place compelled them to alight; they had reached a kind of labyrinth intersected by several avenues, many of which compose a circumference round five others, these latter starting out in different directions from one common centre and forming a very agreeable star. A thousand dwarf trees, laden with excellent fruits, fringed these avenues, which were embellished in the five angles with so many niches full of flowers, haunted by some rustic deity or other. In the middle of the star played a fountain whose basin was surrounded by five tables without cloths or covers, and which were made so ingeniously to imitate the natural that, however splendid the collation might be, it appeared to have been created on the spot rather than served.

“The first table was bounded, at that end of it which rested against the basin, by a mossy bank covered with truffles and mushrooms, six different entrées garnishing the table, of which the remainder, like a fertile valley, was strewn with salads and green stuff.

“The second table had at one end of it, as though in perspective, an architectural fabric of pastry, the rest of the table being furnished with pies and other produce from the oven.

“The third was terminated by pyramids of dried preserves, the rest of the table looking like a flower-bed through a skilful arrangement of almond cakes and stewed fruits.

“The fourth seemed to spring out of a rock where nature had commenced to form divers crystals, the remainder of the table being laden with crystal vases full of all sorts of iced waters.

“The fifth was bordered by a heap of caramels similar to that shapeless mass of amber which the sea sometimes throws up on shore, and the table was covered with porcelain vessels full of cream.

“All this was due more to the magic of fairies than to human industry. As a matter of fact, no one could be seen in the place when the company entered; and even during the repast you only got half a glimpse of the hands which through the foliage presented, on handsome salvers, beverages to all who wished to drink. For some time the feast was simply contemplated with wonder; but at length temptation overcame scruple, and the assembly set themselves to eat all these things as though they had never believed them enchanted.

“The repast at an end, the company promptly re-entered their carriages, which, after a few turns here and there, stopped at an edifice of rustic appearance, which, rising nearly to the height of the trees and having for external decoration nothing but what had come from the forests or gardens, effaced the pomp of the palace and gave brilliancy to things simple and rustic. At the time of the Druids one would have taken this structure for the palace where they delivered their judgments, or for the temple of the gods presiding over the forests. You could see, on entering, that it was a temple designed for spectacles: contained within it was a theatre, superb no less by its dimensions than by its ornaments. Two twisted columns dazzling with gold and azure, between which marble statues were ranged, supported on each side a very rich ceiling, greatly elevated to facilitate the working of the machines.... Who would have thought, sir, that a work which displayed so much order, industry, and invention could have been completed in fifteen days for the purpose of lasting only twenty-four hours! Who would have imagined that so much expense and profusion had no other object than the glory of a day and the representation of a comedy! To a vast audience the troop of Molière played one in his style, new and comic, and agreeably varied with ballet music.

“Darkness had now crept upon us; but although night arrests the operations of nature, she is no enemy to pleasure, and on this occasion spoiled nothing by her arrival. People almost wished she had come sooner; the shadows were blessed, partly for the freshness of the air which they brought, partly for the obscurity which enhanced the brilliancy of the jewels, partly because they announced the hour of supper, to which hunger had already looked forward. Everyone began to think seriously of this meal, though no one fancied that Her Majesty was preoccupied with it when she invited the company to go to the other side of the garden and visit a kind of enchanted palace, so rare and so singular that writers of fiction have imagined nothing like it.”

An elaborate description of this structure follows, and then the supper is described. To avoid confusion, the invited guests were divided up into nine bands, and the respective tables at which they sat were each presided over by some lady of rank.

The first was graced by the presence of the queen. To this table only the princesses of the blood were admitted. Other tables were beneath the charge of the Countess de Soissons, the Princess of Baden, the Duchesse de Créquy, and a number of other distinguished ladies. Besides this accommodation, which was only for invited lady guests, there were, continues the correspondent, “a great number of tables laid in the different avenues where anyone who wished could eat; and in the grotto which, as you know, is the most charming spot at Versailles, three tables of thirty covers each had been laid for the ambassadors. It was noticed that you, sir, were absent, and your absence was to be regretted in view both of the king’s glory and of your own satisfaction. Friend of magnificence as you are, you would have been more affected by the scene than another. But do not regard your absence from the scene as one of your misfortunes; if you knew who it was that wished you present, you would have been amply consoled for the pleasure you lost; and the honour of being remembered by their Majesties should more than recompense you for all the fêtes in the world.

“Good cheer does not usually inspire melancholy thoughts; gaiety shone upon all faces, and still more of it was concealed in each heart. The evening was cool, and the company were longing for a dance. In this disposition the king directed the company to a superb saloon where everything was ordered so regularly, where the ornaments were so natural and so gorgeous, and the place so vast and new, that it was easy to see that this must be the work of the architect of the Louvre--of a man, that is to say, accustomed to great designs and to the most noble ideas.”

After a description of the magnificent saloon in question, the correspondent adds: “I will not speak of the pomp of the ball, or the grace of the Majesties, nor of the beauty and personal ornament of those who danced; I will leave you to imagine the scene.

“You know, sir, that it is useless for pleasures to be natural unless art is employed to conduct them. Then instinct must not always be their rule; they would destroy themselves if one gave them full liberty--in a word, their votaries exhaust them far too rapidly. They should be quitted with regret and not with satiety. The king was aware of this when he closed the ball sooner than the assembly would have wished. People rose with His Majesty, and no one now thought of anything but departure and repose.

“But scarcely had the company emerged from the thick of the wood and arrived at the first flower-bed, where a moment before we had seen nothing but fountains and flowers, when our eyes were startled with the strangest and most prodigious illumination that could possibly be conceived. The order of nature seemed confounded; darkness seemed to have fallen from the heavens and daylight to have sprung out of the earth. A lurid, dazzling light illuminated the whole of the surrounding country, though there was not a trace of smoke in the air, and not a sound of flickering flames or of crackling sparks disturbed the silence of the night. Along the principal avenue of the garden motionless giants could be seen glowing internally with fire: at all the windows of the château great luminous phantoms appeared which, without consuming themselves, seemed penetrated with a fire more lively and more ardent than is the element of fire itself.... This terrible and surprising spectacle troubled and fascinated the sightseers. There are horrors which please, and the soul athirst for novelty feeds on what astonishes it. Whilst people were eagerly revelling in these visions, they were suddenly aroused by claps of thunder, often redoubled, accompanied by an infinitude of lightning flashes and fires which, darting towards the heavens like rockets or hovering in the air like stars, burst to pieces or fell into some lake where they rekindled themselves instead of being extinguished, or, finally, creeping along the ground like serpents, augmented the horrors of darkness by dissipating it, and seemed to threaten the universe with its last conflagration. Nevertheless, we soon recognised the ingenious imposture of these phantoms of light which had dazzled us, of this artificial thunder by which we had been so astonished.

“All present continued to enjoy the spectacle until the peep of dawn seemed to give the signal for the assembly to retreat. Such, sir, was the display that happily crowned the gallant and magnificent fête with which His Majesty regaled his subjects in order that they might have a taste of the peace which he had just established for them, and in order that they might see that he limited his ambition thenceforth to ensuring repose and spreading joy throughout the length and breadth of the land.”

The splendour of Versailles came to an end with the Great Monarch, the Roi Soleil as he was also called.

The Regent cared only for Paris, and neither lived at Versailles himself nor allowed the heir to the throne to live there. Occasionally he visited the place; and Peter the Great, on visiting Paris, was put up for a time at Trianon in the Versailles park. The Tsar of Muscovy arrived in Paris from Holland (he had not yet been recognised by Europe as Emperor of Russia) on the 8th of May, 1717, and remained partly in the capital, partly at Versailles, for upwards of six weeks.

Saint-Simon describes him as tall, well-made, rather thin, his face somewhat round, with a broad forehead, fine eyebrows, short nose, thick lips, reddish-brown complexion, and fine black eyes, large, bright, piercing, open. His look was majestic and graceful when he was on his guard; but, at other times, severe and fierce, with a nervous twitching which did not often show itself, but at times quite changed the expression of his eyes and his physiognomy. For a moment his look was wild and terrible, but he at once recovered his habitual expression. His general air gave evidence of wit, reflection, greatness of mind, all marked by grace. He wore a round brown wig almost without powder; he was generally dressed in a brown suit with gold buttons, and with stockings of the same colour, without gloves or cuffs. When this prince visited St. Cyr, he was received like the king. He wished to see Madame de Maintenon, who, suspecting that his chief desire was to see how old she looked, determined to receive him in bed. Her conjecture proved correct. On entering the room, the Tsar drew aside the window-curtains, and then the curtains of the bed, which Madame de Maintenon had closed, with the exception of one which remained half-drawn, looked at her attentively without saying a word or going through any form of civility, and then went away just as he had come.

Peter, at Versailles, Marly, and St. Cyr, as in Paris itself, visited everything which piqued his curiosity and enabled him to satisfy his passion for information. “This passion,” says Saint-Simon, “made him adopt all possible means for getting away from the importunate crowd which constantly surrounded him, and he frequently escaped the vigilance of the noblemen whom the king had attached to his person to accompany him wherever he went. The first carriage he found at hand--any hackney carriage was quite good enough for him--he got into it with no matter what member of his suite, and drove wherever he wanted to go. The king paid the first visit to his royal guest, who went down to receive him as he got out of his carriage, and then accompanied the young monarch, keeping on his left until they reached the apartment, when the two princes sat down side by side and quite on an equality. The Tsar, however, insisted on giving the place of honour to the king. The same ceremonial was followed in the visit which Peter afterwards returned. On this occasion the Tsar, after taking the young king beneath the arms, raised him to his own height, kissed him several times, flattered him and caressed him in the most tender and affectionate way. Those present were much surprised at the way the young prince received these attentions, without being in the least disconcerted and without showing any emotion.

“The Regent, having taken the Tsar to his grand box, and Peter, in the middle of the piece, having asked for some beer, the Duke of Orleans, standing up, presented to him a glass on a saucer. The Russian prince received it with a graceful gesture, drinking the contents and putting back the glass on the saucer, which the Duke of Orleans, always standing, held in his hand, afterwards offering the Tsar a napkin in the same manner.”

Louis XV. lived for a time at Versailles, and it was there that his Parc-aux-Cerfs--with the young girls dressed in virginal blue, whom, with strange inappropriateness and shocking irreverence, he had dedicated to Our Lady--was established. But he formed an aversion for the place after the attack made upon him by Damiens, who struck at him and slightly wounded him with a penknife in the marble court just as he was getting into his carriage.

The royal suburb which Louis XIV. had created, which the Paris-loving Regent disdained, and which Louis XV. feared as associated with an attempt on his life, was destined to become the favourite residence of the homely, kindhearted Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, his charming wife; and Versailles has since been as closely associated with revolutions and with the disasters of France as formerly with the splendour and luxury of the monarchy at its supreme point of development. Versailles was the scene of the strange intrigues known collectively as “the affair of the necklace,” and it was at Versailles that the king and queen were openly threatened by the revolutionary mob.

The affair of the diamond necklace was turned to the disadvantage and grave injury of the queen by all her enemies, though it is certain that Marie Antoinette had nothing whatever to do with the matter. A certain Countess de Lamotte-Valois was the prime mover in the affair, and she acted throughout with an ingenuity which surprised the good faith of many. Born in a comparatively humble position, she became the wife of a dissipated and ruined count; when, determined to turn her newly acquired position to account, she went to Paris, where she succeeded in getting presented to Marie Antoinette and also to Cardinal de Rohan, the king’s grand almoner. She persuaded the cardinal, that to secure the eternal gratitude of the queen it was only necessary to obtain for her a necklace worth a million and a half francs which was in the possession of the court jewellers. De Rohan, moreover, was assured that the queen entertained for him the most tender affection, and, in order to carry conviction to the cardinal’s mind, a Mlle. d’Olivia, who much resembled Marie Antoinette, was induced to personate her at a midnight interview with His Eminence in the gardens of Versailles. Armed with the real signature of Cardinal de Rohan and a forged signature of the queen, the countess got possession of the necklace (February 2, 1786), which she forthwith carried to London and there sold it in fragments. Meanwhile, she pretended that she had delivered the necklace to Marie Antoinette, and she succeeded in concealing her robbery for several months by producing fictitious notes in handwriting imitated from that of Marie Antoinette. At last a direct application was made by the jewellers to the queen herself, which resulted in a public trial before the Parliament of Paris. The affair caused the greatest excitement throughout France. There was no evidence which really told against the queen, and all that could be urged against the cardinal was that his folly and fatuity had enabled the Countess de Lamotte to make him an easy dupe. De Rohan, then, was acquitted, while the countess was sentenced to be whipped, branded on the shoulder, and imprisoned for life. After two years confinement at the Salpêtrière, she escaped in June, 1787, and fled to London, where she published scandalous libels against the queen. In spite of her innocence, Marie Antoinette was suspected by the common people of having played the part attributed to her by the infamous Lamotte, and even when, five years later, she was being carried to the guillotine, sarcasms in reference to the affair of the necklace were hurled at the unfortunate woman by the mob.

That a queen should, in her wanton extravagance, have ordered a necklace worth some £60,000, and afterwards have neglected to pay for it, and thrown the odium of the transaction upon other persons, seemed natural enough to the embittered populace, driven wild by oppression and hunger, and the feeling caused by the Countess de Lamotte’s shameful calumnies against Marie Antoinette (the Revolution having meanwhile begun) had doubtless much to do with the menacing attitude of the crowd, who soon afterwards threatened both king and queen in their palace at Versailles.

The people of Paris entertained the gravest distrust of the king and queen. As the crisis was drawing near the queen entreated her husband to leave Versailles for Compiègne or Fontainebleau. She counted, above all things, on the Marquis de Bouillé, who commanded the troops on the eastern frontier, with headquarters at Metz. The Comte d’Estaing, commanding the National Guards at Versailles, was ready not only to aid the escape of the royal family, but, if necessary, to protect their flight; and the municipality of Versailles had empowered him to act freely against any movement made from Paris upon Versailles. It was essential to secure the co-operation of the king’s body-guard and of the Versailles garrison; and with this view the king, queen, and royal family assisted at a grand banquet given on the 1st of October by the king’s body-guard to the Regiment of Flanders in the theatre of the Palace. The population of Paris saw in these marks of goodwill towards the troops proofs of treachery. The excitement led to insurrection, and Versailles was invaded by the Parisian mob. On the 15th of October, at six in the morning, the tocsin was sounded in Paris. The National Guards quickly assembled, and a market-woman collected other market-women around her by beating a big drum. The women were animated less by political ideas than by a determination, by all possible means, to save their children from starvation. They had been told that there would be bread enough in Paris if the king and queen were there. Several volunteers belonging to the band which had played a leading part in taking the Bastille placed themselves at the head of the infuriated women and of the rabble who accompanied them. In the rear marched the conquerors of the Bastille in a body; not, it was said, to co-operate with the women, but, if necessary, to protect them. The municipality of Paris ordered General Lafayette to take measures in view of the threatened conflict; and, calling out the force distinctively known as the “paid battalion”--the former Gardes Françaises--he at the same time concentrated various volunteer battalions at different points. He delayed, however, ordering an advance until four o’clock in the afternoon. He wished, as Mr. Morse Stephens puts it, “to be the saviour of the king, and it would not be sufficiently glorious to forestall the danger.”

The news that a mob was marching on Versailles reached the king while he was hunting. Receiving the intelligence with his usual indifference, he nevertheless went back to the palace, where he found the body-guard, six hundred strong, and the Regiment of Flanders drawn up in order of battle. About two hundred of the National Guards at Versailles had taken up their position at some distance from the troops, but with no intention of assisting them. The women of Paris arrived between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. Some went at once to the palace and demanded food, which was readily given to them. Versailles had been made the meeting-place of the National Assembly, and the first French Parliament (not, of course, to be confounded with the judicial Parliament of Paris) was engaged in a debate when Maillard, representing the conquerors of the Bastille, entered the hall and demanded, on behalf of the women, that the price of bread should be lowered by a formal decree. The Assembly appointed a deputation of its own members to accompany a deputation of the women to the king. The deputations were most graciously received. But this only increased the difficulty; and on returning to their sisters, the women who had waited upon the king were furiously attacked for having condescended to such a step. Towards evening the royal travelling-carriages were seen issuing from the stables; and the cry at once arose that the king must not be allowed to escape. Several of the Versailles National Guards rushed forward and insisted on the carriages being driven back. An hour afterwards the body-guard, which was to have accompanied the king in his flight, retired to their barracks. As they did so they were fired upon by the National Guards of Versailles, and one of their horses was killed. It was immediately roasted and eaten by the Parisian mob.

At last, towards eleven o’clock, Lafayette arrived with the greater part of the National Guards of Paris, the paid battalion, and several guns. He at once sought an interview with the king, and after assuring him of his power and willingness to protect him, called upon him to accept the “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” The king complied, and Lafayette, thinking, or pretending to think, that peace had been secured at least for the night, retired to his hotel. About five o’clock the next morning a portion of the mob, after supping on horseflesh and washing down the unaccustomed food with plentiful libations, had got into the gardens of the palace, and, finding a back-door unguarded, forced their way towards the queen’s apartments, killing, as they did so, two of the body-guards who defended the ante-chamber and staircase. Two other body-guards, however, defended her bed-chamber until she had time to escape by a private staircase to the king’s own room. The noise of the fighting brought up the paid battalion of the Paris National Guard, who in a few minutes cleared the palace of its invaders; and at about seven o’clock Lafayette came upon the scene. He persuaded the king, queen, and royal family to appear on the balcony, where they were greeted with shouts, “Le roi à Paris!” and after a brief parley with the king, the popular general announced that the king had accepted unconditionally the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and that he would start that afternoon for the capital. “Maillard,” says Mr. Morse Stephens, “with a body of followers, including men carrying the heads of slaughtered body-guards, started off at once to take the good news to Paris, where he was warmly received by the municipality. At a little past one the royal carriages left Versailles, and late in the evening, escorted by Lafayette on his white horse, the Parisian National Guards and the mob, reached the capital. The royal family first went to the Hôtel de Ville, where they had to listen to an harangue from Bailly, and then went to the Tuileries, which had been so long unoccupied that there were not even sufficient beds to sleep in. Thus ended the memorable days of October 5 and 6, 1789, to the great glory of General Morpheus, as the royalists called him, and to the real destruction of monarchical power in France.”

The Assembly had originally taken up its quarters at Versailles in order to be free from all pressure on the part of the Paris population. It now debated under the eyes of the Parisians, who were able to influence its deliberations in more ways than one. The hall set apart for it at Versailles had presented some material inconveniences. It was so large that the speeches of members were sometimes inaudible; and another disadvantage (which surely might have been prevented) is said to have been that the immense size of the hall allowed strangers to enter, interrupt the debates, and occasionally even vote.

It was only by express order of the king, after he had taken up his residence at the Tuileries, that the National Assembly forsook Versailles for Paris; and it now established itself in the Manège, or Riding School, an oblong building some 240 feet in length by 60 feet in width, situated on the north side of the Tuileries Gardens, just where the Rue de Rivoli now joins the Rue Castiglione. When the necessary alterations had been completed, it was found that the new building was much better adapted for the debates than the immense hall at Versailles. Even at the Manège there was plenty of room; and the Assembly having magnanimously invited “the whole nation” to be present at the debates, the galleries were crowded all day by the people of Paris, and especially by women of all classes, who took the keenest delight in the proceedings, applauding or hissing as they thought fit. Fruit-sellers and newspaper-girls wandered about with discordant cries, so that the galleries resembled in many respects the gallery of a theatre.

The French deputies were not to assemble again at Versailles until after the disasters of 1870 and 1871, when, as during the first months of the Revolution, it was thought desirable to avoid immediate contact with the too-excitable Parisians.

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XLVII. VERSAILLES AND THE SIEGE OF PARIS

The Advance on Paris--Preparations for the Siege--General Trochu--The Francs-Tireurs--The Siege.

Versailles, originally a pleasure abode for the most powerful of the French monarchs, had at last become a place of entertainment and of public displays for the French people when, in 1870, after the defeat of Sedan, it acquired new importance from its occupation by the enemies of France.

After Sedan, the enemy hastened to Paris, well knowing that the occupation of this town, at once the head and the heart of France, would put an end to all resistance throughout the country. From the moment that intelligence was received of the German advance upon the capital, the new Government gave a fresh impulse to the works of defence commenced under the Regency; and gigantic efforts were necessary to arm the fortifications at such short notice. To defend the whole of the works around Paris a hundred thousand men were necessary.

But Paris could muster three or four hundred thousand National Guards, animated by the most ardent patriotism, invincible behind their ramparts, and of which a select portion could face the enemy’s fire with the intrepidity of old troops. It was they who went to guard the ninety-four bastions forming a continuous girdle round the city. Paris was in a bubbling ferment of patriotism; everyone, young or old, rich or poor, hastened to have his name inscribed and to ask for a rifle. Agitation reigned everywhere, yet without producing the least disorder. Already, on the 19th of August, a committee of defence for the fortifications had been formed, composed of distinguished military officers and statesmen; and under the direction of this committee between sixty and seventy thousand men were employed to organise the resistance on the ramparts, where everything was deficient. All the gates of Paris were isolated from their approaches by the prolongation of the moat, drawbridges being now utilised. Beyond the moat, obstacles of all kinds were heaped up to arrest the assailants--branches of trees, broken glass, planks bristling with nails, and so forth: useless and almost infantine precautions, considering the formidable means employed by the Germans to reduce Paris from a distance.

Within the city boundary all was movement, animation, fever. Gun-carriages were passing to and fro freighted with enormous cannon; other pieces of ordnance were lying in the interior of the bastions, awaiting their frames. On the parapets guns already mounted were established in hollows dug out for the purpose. Two million bags of earth were piled up, from behind which the defenders could fire in safety upon the foe.

In the forts the same activity, the same preparations might be observed. Six were occupied by the marines. As the French fleet could play only a very insignificant part in this war, these men, with their guns of long range, were summoned from the sea-ports; and they were destined to render their country splendid services in the capital. With marvellous rapidity they fitted their own forts with cannon and earthworks.

At the beginning of the war the artillery were terribly short of arms. By the regulations each bastion should have been provided with eleven pieces. At that time there were only three to reply to the Krupp guns of the foe. By way of reserve, Paris was habitually furnished with two parks of artillery, each consisting of 250 pieces: but not one piece remained, the whole supply having been sent eastward. The ammunition for the cannon was terribly limited, being only sufficient to afford the guns ten shots apiece. The lack of artillerymen was even more lamentable; in some forts the entire force consisted of a man in charge of the battery. Towards the middle of October, however, the numbers of the artillery were rapidly raised to 13,000 officers, under-officers, and soldiers, thanks to the patriotism of retired officers of the marines and of the Gardes Mobiles of the Seine, the Seine-et-Oise, the Drôme, the Rhone, the Loire Inférieure, and the Pas-de-Calais.

By this time, too, 2,140 cannon had been mounted at the city boundaries, and the inadequate supply of powder had been increased six-fold. The director of all this prodigious activity was the indefatigable Minister of Public Works, M. Dorian, whose services, moreover, in ensuring the water supply were altogether invaluable.

Whilst such enormous progress was being made with the works of defence, the enemy was the reverse of idle. Its columns, meeting no obstacle on their way, were rapidly marching towards Paris. The news of their approach redoubled the activity of the Parisians. Everywhere in the capital warehouses were improvised in which were heaped up waggon-loads of hay and straw, sacks of corn, and provisions of all kinds. The church of Notre Dame des Champs was turned into a forage-depot: in front of the École Militaire a large supply of mill-stones was placed, in view of grinding the corn. The streets were constantly traversed by immense herds of oxen and flocks of sheep, which were about to be stalled and penned on the exterior boulevards, in the open spaces, and even in the avenues of the Luxemburg. Everyone laid in as large a stock of provisions as his resources would allow: rice, vermicelli, macaroni, potatoes, hams, sugar, coffee, vanished in a twinkling from the grocers’ shops. Yet the purchasers knew better than to eat freely of their provisions. They could not tell how long the siege would last.

Meanwhile the Prussians advanced, the more rapidly from feeling confident that no force could bar their passage and from being familiarly acquainted with the country. High-roads, country lanes, the veriest footpaths, were known to them, for in their ranks, to quote the words of a French historian, “was that crowd of Germans who had so long eaten the bread of France, and who were now guiding the invaders. We had thought them our guests, when they were simply our spies.” On the 11th of September the Prussians were reported to have arrived at La Ferté, on their way to Meaux; at Rebais, Coulommères, Crécy, and even beneath the walls of Soissons. On the 12th they entered Nogent-sur-Seine and Provins, where the railway-stations were abandoned in all haste. On the 14th the telegraph wires were cut between Melun and Mormant; and Prussian lancers, the so-called Uhlans--the name being borrowed from the lancers of Poland--showed themselves in the last-named town.

On the 15th a train fell into the hands of the Prussians as it arrived at Senlis; and on that same day the stationmaster at Joinville telegraphed to the Minister of the Interior--“Enemy to the number of about 10,000 marching upon Joinville. Our troops are concentrating on the forts. In an hour the enemy will be here.” Almost at the same time the Governor of Paris received the following despatch from Vincennes: “The Uhlans are between Créteil and Neuilly-sur-Marne. At this last point what seems to be the advanced-guard of the column reported this morning. Are informing and summoning everyone.”

Paris now clearly understood that the enemy was marching upon it, and in proportion as the Prussians narrowed the circle of iron with which they were surrounding Paris, the inhabitants hurried from all sides to the capital, accompanied by carriages laden with furniture hastily got together, with such articles of value as they had had time to bring away. “It was a sad procession,” says a writer who witnessed the scene. “The unhappy fugitives were abandoning their peaceful homes to an enemy who would destroy them. In what condition will they find on their return the house and the little garden, the grass plot and the beds of flowers in which they took so much delight?” As a matter of fact, the deserted houses were the very ones, and probably the only ones, that were plundered and devastated. Where a proprietor or his representative, even if it were only a servant, had been left, so that the foreign visitors could be accommodated and their needs attended to, things went on in a sufficiently regular manner. But where no responsible person had been left in charge, the soldiers, all of them young men of from twenty to twenty-seven years of age, used, in their rough play, the legs of chairs as missiles, and fragments of furniture of all kinds as firewood. In some suburban towns, Villeneuve, Saint-Georges, for instance, the houses occupied by successive detachments were before long a terrible scene of destruction--chairs, tables, and looking-glasses all smashed to pieces. In houses, on the other hand, where the owner or his substitute remained, no damage was done. In some cases the work of demolition was due not to recklessness and wantonness alone, but also to anger, the German invaders feeling indignant, they said, at being regarded in the light of barbarians. Then, as if to prove that they were not savages, they behaved with a certain savagery. It was on the 17th of September that Villeneuve, Saint-Georges, and Choisy-le-Roy were for the first time occupied, the object of the occupation being to get possession of the lines to Lyons and Orleans and dominate the course of the Seine so as to establish communications with Versailles, which was to be the headquarters of the invading army. The Prussians advanced without fear, knowing well that with the exception of a strong division commanded by General Vinoy, which had advanced from Mézières to Paris the day after the battle of Sedan, there were no regular troops to oppose them. The line of investment was, in the first instance, very thin, and it is said that some observation on the subject was made to Moltke by a member of his staff. “General Trochu could break through it, no doubt,” Moltke replied, “but he will not try.” On the 18th of September, it was reported that the Germans were approaching the walls of the capital in three large bodies, and the public was informed, through the columns of the official journal, that it must not be surprised if no further telegraphic communications reached it from outside. The same evening a number of dull, distant detonations were heard. The bridges of St. Cloud, Sèvres, and Vallancourt had been blown up. Paris was being gradually cut off from the rest of France, from the rest of the world. No more communications, no more despatches, no more news of any kind. The only means of correspondence left to the great city was by way of the air.

General Trochu, Governor of Paris, had plenty of troops, or at least of armed men, under his command. The number of regulars, scarcely more than thirteen thousand, which General Vinoy had brought from Mézières, was small indeed; but these, with National Guards, Gardes Mobiles, and volunteers of various kinds, made up an entire force of 400,000, nearly twice the number of the besiegers.

It may not be generally known, but it is nevertheless the fact, that just after the battle of Sedan, when the Prussians were already advancing upon Paris, the command of the Paris forts was offered to General Ripley, who had distinguished himself during the American Civil War by his energetic defence of Charlestown. The general visited Paris, was perfectly satisfied with all the material preparations, but had no confidence in the National Guards, whose slovenly appearance, absence of discipline, and, above all, want of respect for their officers, impressed him very unfavourably. It must be remembered, however, that Paris had but few regular troops in its garrison, only, in fact, the division which, the day after Sedan, General Vinoy had conducted from Mézières, in the immediate neighbourhood of Sedan, to the capital. Plenty of brave men, moreover, had joined the army as volunteers at the beginning of the campaign; and Paris had furnished a large proportion of the Francs-Tireurs who rendered such questionable service to the national cause. “What a villain,” says a writer on this subject, “was the Franc-Tireur in the eyes of the Prussians, who regarded him as a poacher of the worst kind, shooting men without a licence; and what a hero in the eyes of his own countrymen, and, above all, countrywomen, who saw in him the ideal of a patriot!” “Who are these Francs-Tireurs?” a Frenchman was one day asked by the present writer, at that period one of the war correspondents of the Times. “Young men of good education who wish to defend their country,” he replied. “Who are the Francs-Tireurs?” the same correspondent inquired of a young French lady. “Charming young men, and as brave as lions,” she replied; “I have the portrait of one of them in my brooch.”

Almost as much nonsense has been written about the Francs-Tireurs in the German papers as about the Uhlans in the French. They were not necessarily savages nor assassins, nor anything of the kind. In the occupied provinces they were simply insurgents, and they led everywhere the life of insurgents, belonged to the same class or classes of society from which insurgents usually come, and, like insurgents, were adored by their own people and shot as felons if they fell into the hands of the enemy.

The few I came across were certainly not the kind of persons likely to commit the acts of violence and rapine with which the Francs-Tireurs were generally credited. The Francs-Tireurs I met were loungers from the Parisian boulevards, who had put on the semblance of a uniform and gone out to see whether they could be of any use in stopping the advance of the Prussians, and they would no more have committed an act of highway robbery than General Garibaldi would have picked a pocket. But side by side with the Francs-Tireurs of good education--the Francs-Tireurs whose photographs were found worthy of being enclosed in lockets--there were Francs-Tireurs of a lower type: there were escaped prisoners, deserters, and fugitives, the last remnants of the great armies that had from time to time been cut in pieces, and the amalgam formed by these different elements was doubtless not a nice one. Even the gentlemanly Franc-Tireur, if fallen into bad circumstances, might be a dangerous person to meet; he would be ashamed to show himself in the character of a robber, and from sheer self-respect might begin by killing his victim.

The Prussians, however, could not, like the young ladies of France, distinguish between the noble-minded Franc-Tireur and the Franc-Tireur who was a mere cut-throat. What they required was that he should carry papers showing that he belonged to some regularly organised corps, that he should wear a uniform recognisable at gun-shot distance, and that the distinctive marks of the uniform should be “inseparable from the person.” Let him comply with these conditions, and the Franc-Tireur, if he fell into the hands of the enemy, instead of being shot or condemned to ten years’ imprisonment, was treated as a prisoner of war.

It seems hard to insist that William Tell shall put on a uniform “recognisable at gun-shot distance,” and that the distinctive signs of the uniform worn by Masaniello shall be “inseparable from the person”; but if William Tell dresses like a civilian he places his enemy at a notable disadvantage, and the same may be said of Masaniello, if Masaniello has nothing military about him but his cap, which he can get rid of at a moment’s notice and replace by a wide-awake or a cotton nightcap.

There were, I believe, some bodies of Francs-Tireurs regularly incorporated in the French army, and they, to the Prussians, were of course like any other French soldiers. Such were “Les partisans de Gers,” who had account-books showing that they were in Government service, whose officers carried commissions, and whose military character was admitted, though their only “distinctive marks” were a red sash worn over a black coat and a Calabrian hat. Neither, then, of the “distinctive marks” was inseparable from the person. It was evident, all the same, that the partisans of Gers were men who had assumed the character of soldiers in good faith, with the intention of supporting it to the end.

But the original, typical Franc-Tireur carried no papers, wore no recognisable uniform; nor were the chiefs of bands responsible to any superior officer.

As for the individual members of such bands, how were the Prussians to distinguish between them and men shooting at other men from unpolitical motives? And, apart from the customs of war, would not the common law, strictly administered, condemn them everywhere as brigands?

Why, then, did not the Francs-Tireurs, for their own sake, form themselves into regular bodies and never show except in uniform? The reason was simple enough. They did not wish to be always soldiers. They desired now and then to retire into private life, and to profit by the privileges of the civilian. As troops, moreover, in the service of the Government they would have had to drill, to do regular military duty, to subject themselves, in short, to discipline, for which, as a rule, they had no taste. Otherwise, why, instead of becoming Francs-Tireurs, did they not join the Garde Mobile or the regular army, from which they could, in the most legitimate manner, have been detached for partisan warfare?

In less than a fortnight after the battle of Sedan, the King of Prussia, advancing towards Versailles, had established his headquarters at Férrières. It was here on the 18th and 19th of September, 1870, in the château belonging to Baron Rothschild, that Jules Favre, Vice-President of the Government of National Defence and Minister of Foreign Affairs, conferred with Count Bismarck; when the latter declared his readiness to sign an armistice on condition that three fortresses, Strasburg, Phalsburg, and Toul, were placed in the hands of the Germans. To the minister who (borrowing a phrase from the oath of the Templars) had declared that “not one inch of our territory, not one stone of our fortresses should ever be ceded,” these conditions were for the moment obviously unacceptable. On the 20th of September the Germans took possession of Versailles, which was unable to offer the least resistance, and soon afterwards the town became the headquarters of the Great General Staff, with General von Moltke at its head; also of the King of Prussia and Count Bismarck.

Versailles now became the headquarters of correspondents from all parts of the world, and a grave question--that of the maintenance of war-vessels in the Black Sea--having arisen between England and Russia, it was to Versailles that Mr. Odo Russell was sent, on the part of the English Foreign Office, to make representations to Count Bismarck, who had undertaken, in his own language, the part of “honest broker” between the Powers at variance.

An interesting account of the occupation of Versailles by the Germans was published three years after the conclusion of peace. It would be useful for the future historian, whose possible wants have been so much studied of late years, if the municipal authorities of other French towns which during the war of 1870 fell into the power of the Germans would put together and publish the official documents relating to the occupation, as the authors of this volume have done in regard to the occupation of Versailles. Strictly speaking, the authors of the work in question are the Prussians themselves. But the materials, in the form of requisitions, summonses to appear, condemnations to pay, proclamations, menaces and occasional remissions of punishment, were collected by M. Rameau, Mayor of Versailles, and by him entrusted for publication to M. Delerot, who, considering the hatred he felt and was bound to feel for the conquerors and oppressors of his country, showed commendable moderation in his manner of presenting the papers. Invasion must always be intolerable to the invaded. No Brussels conferences or Geneva conventions, however much they may alleviate the miseries of the battle-fields, can soften the hard lines of a foreign occupation in its general features; and M. Delerot would not be more--he would be something less--than human were he able to take a perfectly just view of the conduct of the Prussians in France. The truth is that they behaved badly if we judge them by a high ideal standard; admirably if we judge them by the standard of what has been done by former invaders engaged in invasions on the same vast scale and of the same momentous character as that of 1870.

The book in question is too full of matter for one to give an idea of its contents, either by means of notes or by a connected series of extracts. But some notion of its general character may be conveyed by the reproduction of a few stories from it.

The king, to begin with the most important of all the personages assembled at Versailles, was in the habit of receiving anonymous letters from all parts of the occupied country, and it would appear that he was quite ready to answer them. Not, however, knowing the authors of the epistles, he was obliged to content himself with writing notes for replies on the margin of these curious documents. To one correspondent, who charges him (on the strength of an accusation originally made by M. Jules Favre) with having declared, on entering France, that he made war “not on the French people, but on the Emperor Napoleon,” he justly answers, “Je n’ai jamais dit cela.” To a correspondent who insults and curses him, and who signs himself “Un Français qui ne t’aime pas,” he quietly remarks, “Il me semble!” One writer addresses him, in allusion to the siege of Strasburg, as “Sire Bombardeur!” Another, after exhausting all the terms of abuse he can think of in the French language, calls him, in plain English, “old rascal.”

Mention must not be omitted of the part played, in connection with the invasion, by the money-lender attached to the Prussian forces. He was no miserable camp-follower bent on securing much plunder by small advances of ready money, nor private bill-discounter prepared to “oblige” officers with loans on notes of hand. He was an officially recognised financial agent, representing a syndicate of foreign bankers, who, to enable the municipalities and the occupied towns to execute the requisitions and pay the contributions imposed on them, offered, with a generosity rare in time of war, to lend the necessary funds in return for promises to pay, secured on the local taxes. The arrival of Herr Betzold was announced in the Moniteur de Versailles, the official journal published by the Germans throughout the occupation; and a few days afterwards his benevolent project for enabling destitute French municipalities to satisfy the most exorbitant Prussian demands was made known through the columns of the little sheet, which thus found itself transformed for a time into a financial newspaper. A second time attention was called to the advantages to be derived from the scheme; but neither the eloquent articles of the Moniteur de Versailles nor the friendly personal representations of Herr Betzold himself had any effect upon the municipality. The mayor refused to pledge the future resources of the town, or rather, refused to pledge them to the Prussians. A loan was found indispensable, but the bonds were offered to and taken by the inhabitants. The interest was fixed at five per cent., principal and interest both to be paid off within three months of signing the peace.

While on the subject of contributions and the means taken to enable the conquered populations to pay them, I may point out--what some professors of international law are perhaps unaware of--that the Prussians no longer recognise the right of maritime Powers in time of war to seize merchant vessels belonging to the enemy. The contribution of 1,000,000 francs per occupied department, to which M. Delerot devotes some pages, was ordered by way of reprisal, and as an indemnity for the losses inflicted upon German commerce by French men-of-war.

The most serious charge brought by M. Delerot against the Prussians is that at Bougival they attacked and wounded a certain number of the inhabitants, on the ground, and apparently under the distinct impression, that they had been fired at with an air-gun: an instrument which, as M. Delerot assures us, is found only in scientific laboratories. The Prussians to whom the outrage in question is attributed were temporarily retreating in face of a sortie from Paris; and according to M. Delerot, they simply deluded themselves into a belief that the inhabitants of Bougival had assumed towards them an attitude which, under the circumstances, inhabitants are likely enough to adopt.

The fact that a formal trial was instituted, and that it resulted in two of the inhabitants being found guilty and shot, would seem to show that there must have been some sort of evidence against them, though M. Delerot will have it that the Prussians were under a delusion on the subject. It is clear, however, from the facts, adduced as such by M. Delerot himself, that the Prussians wished, not so much to act with severity as to be thought severe. The object, indeed, of most punishments in civilised warfare is, not to punish offenders retributively and in a spirit of vengeance for what they have done, but to deter other possible offenders from imitating their example. No one imagines that there is anything morally wrong in a civilian’s wishing to defend his country. But if troops do not molest the civil population, they consider that they have a right to require in return that civilians shall not molest them. One day, then, when a number of peasants taken in arms were brought to Versailles, the Prussians announced loudly their intention to shoot them. But M. Delerot and his friends observed that, instead of being taken to the place of execution, the peasants were imprisoned. On leaving Versailles, the Prussian authorities gave up to the mayor a list of the persons thrown into gaol during their occupation; and M. Delerot republishes it, with the names of the prisoners, the offences charged against them, and so on. The list certainly shows that many persons were incarcerated on trivial accusations: among others a servant-girl for having returned a box on the ears to an officer; someone else for having been found “in possession of a diary containing insulting expressions addressed to the King of Prussia”; a third for having recognised a Prussian spy; a fourth for having “followed Count Bismarck.” M. Delerot would, perhaps, have preferred that this last victim of precautionary measures should have been allowed to pursue Count Bismarck, who, walking out alone, was sometimes completely mobbed; so that on one occasion he reproached his pursuers with their ignorance of the “usages of war,” adding that if some impetuous young officer found himself surrounded in such a manner, he would probably make use of his sword. Thus, if Count Bismarck ended by objecting altogether to followers, he did not do so until they had become a serious nuisance.

The arrest of a man who had “recognised” a Prussian spy is interesting as an example of an action perfectly innocent, and, indeed, praiseworthy in itself, but which of necessity entailed upon its author a period of forced seclusion. A spy recognised, even by one individual, is a spy lost unless the individual who has recognised him be at once removed from public life.

To a large extent, M. Delerot’s work, independently of the fact that it is well put together and contains a mass of valuable and interesting information, is impartial. “Impartiality!” exclaims Victor Hugo in his “Napoleon le Petit.” “Strange virtue for an historian, which Tacitus never possessed!” Thereupon Victor Hugo proceeds to “déchirer” his victim “en style de Juvenal.” M. Delerot claims to have seen things, and to state them precisely as they took place. But, with the best intentions, such an attitude would be impossible for a citizen and official of Versailles writing the moment after the occupation had come to an end, with the wound constantly and inevitably inflicted on his patriotism still fresh. He has nothing extenuated, and he has set down much, if not in malice, at least in anger. But he has striven, though not always with success, to render justice to the Prussians, especially to the Crown Prince, Count Moltke, and even Prince Bismarck.

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