A loiterer in Paris

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Shifting Sands 21

II The Birth Place 31

Chapter I Shifting Sands

With its fundamental setting practically intact Paris is enormously changed. Of this there can be no shadow of doubt, " no possible, probable shadow of doubt, no possible doubt whatever." What will newcomers make of it? I often ask myself. How will those who never knew it before the Avar relate this hard, brilliant metropolis with the romantic, legendary city of Victor Hugo, of Balzac, of Du Maurier, of that host of writers of fact and fiction who have made it their theme?

The change is, of course, the result of the war; but just what makes it so different is hard to define, for the change is subtle and the face of things is the same. The boulevards are there, thronged as of yore; the cafes ply the same busy industry, despite the fabulous rise in the cost of consommations ; the theatres are a succes fou; the streets are full of taxis, gliding hither and thither with their restless fares, though chauffeurs are become as capricious as society belles; the Place de r Opera presents the same confusion of vehicles all tangled up together at tense crises, and all getting through somehow, in defiance of all the laws of traffic.

The decorative police preserve their same noble air of detachment from the vulgar exercise of law and order. Handsome and gentle, lithe of figure and slender of waist, they seem rather models of decorum than agents of discipline, walking in abstraction, the neatly folded cloak thrown over the left shoulder, or standing solitary and aloof from scenes of violence — calm, disinterested spectators. But it is they who are right, France understands their function differently.

The kiosks bloom with the same flowers and journals, presided over by the same brisk little women, as exquisitely coiffed as ever, with their own neat tresses, and guarded over hy the same little dogs, who run about in careless freedom, oblivious to social amenities, and with insouciance escape sudden death at every turn.

During this year of quasi-peace, Paris has thrown off its shabby aspect, due to five years'

SHIFTING SANDS 23

neglect of its toilette; activities long abandoned have been resumed, and the women are little by little relaxing the strict black of their bereavement and brightening up at each change of the season, like butterflies emerging from the chrysalis. Yet somehow the old charm is missing, the joie de vivre lacks, as though the people had looked stern reality too fully in the face to be really diverted by their pastimes, or to put love into their work.

Constantly shifting, like a kaleidoscope, nothing that one can say of this superficial Paris can have more than a fleeting truth. The clearing-house of the war, it has been also the theatre of all the phases of this new thing called peace. The population since before the armistice has been more than doubled, and one-half the dwellers in Paris at the moment are provincials, composed of those countless refugees from the devastated departements. It is this which has made the crise du logement more genuine and more acute here than in any other city.

The easy hospitality of Paris was also in a sense abused by the tremendous inundation of foreigners throughout the war. Accustomed always to a large floating population of strangers, the city had never before found itself the hostess of such armies of semi-hostile guests, guests brought here by military necessity, or commercial interests, or for mere considerations of personal safety, not at all attracted hither by a love of the city, or a predisposition in its favour, or because of its rich treasures of history and of art.

One hesitates to say that Paris had, up to the time of the war, been fed on flattery most of its life, but at least it is true that it had been accustomed to a wide and intelligent appreciation. The great bulk of tourists who came annually came to learn and to admire, and even when, amongst the more crass, they couldn't quite succeed, at least they bowed to the consensus of opinion, they felt the fault to be their own.

Suddenly all this is withheld. Paris is invaded by several millions of homeless persons, whose sole preoccupation is food and shelter; and by as many more foreign soldiers and " war workers," who look upon its streets, its river, its monmnents with cool indifference ; its institutions with uncomprehending intolerance; its business methods with amused indulgence. Paris, the beautiful, the mistress of poets, of painters, finds herself scrutinized by multitudes of young, crude, cruel, critical, practical, uncompromising eyes, which see in the great cathedrals only space takers, in the old palaces useless impedimenta, in the narrow, picturesque streets

SHIFTING SANDS 25

traffic obstructors; eyes which pierce the mystery of the Seine to the lost power of its waters, the romance of old neighbourhoods to defective drainage; eyes, in fine, of foreigners and aliens. Never had Paris been looked upon so strangely.

The Frenchman has fewer illusions about himself than most people. In the first shock of a victory which seemed to have all the disadvantages of a defeat, these cold, clear-sighted criticisms struck home, and he felt himself in need of some readjustment to a world so different from that of his ancestors, from that of yesterday. Meanwhile everybody claimed attention at once. The piper was there with his amazing compte — there were debts to pay off, pensions to be granted, workmen to be satisfied, strikes to be settled, the public to be pacified. A certain system of adjustment to the state of war had been worked out and was in successful operation, but this peace business upset everything again and the work of reconstruction was crushing.

To those of us who have weathered, eye to eye, the Incredible conditions of life during the period immediately succeeding the cessation of hostilities, the old Paris that we knew and loved in time of peace and plenty seemed at times to have fairly sunk out of sight. It has only been by a strong grip on essential values and enduring fundamentals that one has been able to hold at all to the old and true idea of the Gallic city — that one has not been swept off one's feet by the tide of material considerations that have from time to time threatened to engulf us.

At first, though the riding was uncommonly rough and the most that one could do was to hold hard while things in general went by the board, one had faith that a little patience and courage would see one through what was merely a temporary and provisional state of things in France, not at all surprising after so great a calamity. The American press invented a phrase in which one took much comfort — that Europe would " come back," as a delirious patient might return to consciousness or a madman regain his senses.

One thought in one's finite way of a transition period, or a period of reconstruction, as a matter of months merely — one was frantically occupied with the hand-to-hand struggle for daily existence, personal existence — and in a larger way one saw Paris in the throes of a superhuman effort to right itself after release from years devoted exclusively to the absorbing passion of war. All courses had been turned to swell the one great torrent of resistance. What one now saw was the

SHIFTING SANDS 27

bending back of those currents into normal channels, the enormous travail multiplied by the fatigue of the nation — the vague de paresse of which we heard so much.

Of the international politics one cannot pretend either a close observation or a profound understanding; but it is certain that the country stood more than once upon the brink of revolution and that its leaders dreaded a repetition of the horrors which succeeded the war of '70, and pursued a yielding policy of mingled tact and propitiation, preferring to avert by excessive concession, rather than to attempt to crush by force, and perhaps thereby precipitate, an all too menacing disaster.

To each country its difficulties. And besides the debt of gratitude which the nation owed to the army, to a man, there was also the knowledge (as who indeed does not know?) of the limits to which the Gallic temperament will go when it has reached the point of rupture, when the last straw has been laid upon its exceedingly patient back. Certainly the wise old Communard knew how far to go in his dealings with a people already ereinte, to use their own forceful adjective describing their moral and physical state as the result of the five years' tension.

The indefinite extension of the moratorium with its attendant complications between landlord and tenant, the fabulous rise of workmen's wages, with its reaction ui3on prices in general, and the crowning disaster, the adoption of the eight-hour day, upsetting the routine of work at the verymoment when work was to have been the salvation of the country, these have been the outstanding factors in the great metamorphosis that has taken place in France. I doubt if even the great Revolution itself made more drastic changes in a people.

In the enveloping thick of a mighty battle against the insistence of every minor annoyance, Paris has never been more uncomfortable, it has never been more thrillingly interesting. Deprived as we have been daily of each elementary commodity in turn, obliged to scheme and plot for the strictest necessities, forced to give up, one after another, when it is not all at the same time, the comforts and luxuries of a normal existence, the essential charm and beauty, the poetic depths of the loved city, seem to hold aloof, to be for us of this hand-to-hand conflict with the hard facts of mere physical life, forever separated by those centuries which have rolled between us and the builders of Paris the beautiful, by that vast gulf

SHIFTING SANDS 29

of emptiness which represents for us now the interminable period of the war.

Crossing the Pont du Carrousel frequently during days sacrificed to dealings with material obstacles, the vision of Notre-Dame, rising there in serene majesty, in all the glow of its Gothic beauty against the eastern sky, usually piled with soft, gray, cumulus clouds, into which the towers melt, seems so remote from actuality, from strife and struggle, as to detach itself from the present, to represent a phase of belief and an ideality of vision so long ignored as to have been completely forgotten.

Secure on its tiny island, the birth-place of the city of the Romans, its massive architecture dominates the compactness of that old, romantic section, gives the note of remoter antiquity to that boat-like isle, freighted with the treasures of an only less ancient epoch. Pointing its prow towards the mouth of the Seine, the ile de la Cite seems to float upon the bosom of the silver river. Its forward part is green at most seasons with the verdure of the graceful trees which screen the heavy masonry of the Pont-Neuf. To the left, the composition is held together by the heavy mass of the Conciergerie, its conical towers relievingthe level of the roofs, while to the right the flat fa9ade of that handsome row of XVIIth century dwellings stands out clear, and from the middle rises high and fine the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, silhouetted against the gray sky, its line repeated in the slender fleche of Notre-Dame, above the cross. From the left-hand tower the fateful siren, whose four great mouths announced the approach of the enemy's air raids, has lately been removed, the ancient glass of the three roses has been restored, and the cathedral stands firm and splendid as the symbol of the faith of its builders, of the great and serious Paris, the Paris that must come back in time.

Chapter II The Birth-place

Enchanting as it is from all points of view, it is, perhaps, from the Pont des Arts, that simple footbridge which, thrown like a mere log across a stream, spans the Seine before the Institut, that the story of the island breathes deepest its note of inexhaustible promise.

Of the shell of Henri IV houses, which encloses the Place Dauphine, the two at the point of the island preserve, through restoration, their original character. As they are now, so was once the whole prow of the ile de la Cite. Between them one looks, as into the heart of a fire, upon an enclosed greenery, once part of the garden to the palace of the Ca?sars established in Roman times, where now is ponderously planted the Palais de Justice.

The simile of the heart of the fire, a fire rich and glowing with the embers of remoter antiquity, never fails to strike me, as I pass now almost daily in my peregrinations back and forth between the Louvre and the delightful Bibliotheque

Mazarine, lodged in a wing of the Institut de France. One seems here to have that older Paris completely within the hollow of the hand.

The vista thus glimpsed of a ground so rich in layers of history that one seems never to reach the first deposit, is one of the most inviting of a city that goes in largely for vistas. Henri IV himself, so proud upon his mount there at the head of the island, looks in between Madame Roland's house and its cheerful twin, upon the place which he preserved and embellished.

The Place Dauphine remains just as Henri IV made it, a cool retreat from the gaiety of the Pont-Neuf, completed in his reign. I could wish, upon closer inspection, that there were less asphalt, and I am sure, as Henri designed it, whatever, if any, carriages entered between the two openings in the belt of houses came by a modest driveway in keeping with the discretion of the enclosure. The king named it in commemoration of the birth of Louis XIII, the then dauphin of France. The place, accommodating itself to the form of the island, is triangular, and the houses in their original state were of red brick with wide markings of white stone and steep renaissance roofs of blue slate, all of the same structure and symmetry. There were never more than the two entrances, one in the middle of the base of the triangle and the other opposite in the angle upon the Pont-Neuf. The houses are shallow and have two fa9ades of equal importance, and the two large ones upon the Rue de Harlay form acute angles with the quays. The whole scheme is amusing and original. There is nothing here to suggest the lugubrious Louis XIII, but the whole disposition of affairs exhales that charm and vivacity inseparable from the memory of Henri IV.

Now the oldest bridge in Paris, the Pont-Neuf, finished in 1608, was then the newest — all Paris adopted it as the fashionable promenade and made it the scene of their rendezvous. As the XVIIth century advanced it became the official passage of the royal processions going to parliament.

Old maps show two little islets preceding the present ile de la Cite; they remained until the end of the XVIth century and were accredited to the abbot of Saint-Germain. The largest lay towards the left bank of the Seine and in various deeds and titles is called I'isle des Juifs, I'isle aux Treilles, I'isle aux Vaches, and isle de Seine. The vineyards of this island, whence the name tie auoc Treilles (trellis), must have been considerable, for an old act records six hogsheads of wine from the trellises behind the Palais, given by the king to the chaplain of Saint-Nicholas-du-Palais in the year 1160. The abbot and monks of Saint-Germain profited from the pasturage of cows there.

The other island, much smaller, was called sometimes I'isle. de Bussy and again I'isle du Passeur aux Vaches.

These were joined to the larger island when the Pont-Neuf was projected, in the reign of Henri III, and the bridge rests upon them. When the first pier emerged from the water, at the side of the Quai des Grands-Augustins, the king accompanied by his wife, Louise de Vaudemont, and his mother, Catherine de Medicis, rode from the Louvre in a magnificent barge, to lay the corner-stone. It bore the arms of the king, the dowager, and the city of Paris, and the date, May 30, 1578. That day Henri had seen pass, on its way to the church of Saint-Paul in the Marais, the funeral procession of Quelus and de Maugiron, his dearest minions, and out of respect for his grief the bridge bore for a time the name, Pont des Pleurs.

All the history of Paris is mingled with this old and admirable Pont-Neuf. Jacques- Androuet Du Cerceau, distinguished under both Henri III and Henri IV, was the architect, and the bridge is spoken of as his chef-d'oeuvre. One of its attractions, a tremendous innovation, was an hydraulic pump, constructed by Lintlaer, a Flemish engineer, upon one of the piers of the bridge — the second from the right bank. Its mission was to distribute water to the Louvre and the Tuileries, hitherto unprovided, and it was one of the mechanical wonders of the age. " L'eau de la pompe du Pont-Neuf est auoc Tuileries," wrote Malherbe triumphantly, on October 3, 1608, as though the impossible had been accomplished.

The Musee Carnavalet preserves the model of the little chateau d'eau in which the machine was housed. The charming little renaissance building gave piquancy to the river views; its fa9ade towards the promenade was ornamented with a group of sculpture representing Jesus receiving water from the woman of Samaria at Jacob's Well, from which the familiar name of the building, La Samaritaine. A chiming clock with, says John Evelyn, " a very rare dyall of several motions," filled the rounded space above the group, and a little wooden campanile contained the carillon of bells, which, playing every hour, charmed and diverted the people. Falling into decay, the Samaritaine was rebuilt in 1712, only to be again mutilated, by the Revolution, when the statues were destroyed as too reminiscent of the evangel.

The Roman fortress or palace, which formed the western buttress of the antique city of Julian the Apostate, became in later centuries the palace of the kings of France, culminating in importance and grandeur under Saint-Louis; and who is not familiar with the oft-repeated story of that sublimely simple monarch, seated under the trees in the garden of his palace, administering a merciful justice to his beloved and loving subjects?

Let Joinville tell it again in his archaic tongue:

" Je le vis aucunefois en ete, que pour delivrer sa gent il venoit ou jardin de Paris, une cote de camelot vestue, un surcot de t3a'eteinne sans manche, un mantel de ceudal noir entour son col, moult bien pigne, et sans coife, et un ch'ipel de paon blanc sur la teste, et faisoit estendre tapis pour nous seoir entour li, et tout le peuple qui avoit a faire par devant li, estoit entour, et lors il faisoit delivrer en la maniere, que je vous ai dit devant, du bois de Vincennes."

In still earlier times a mill for minting moneys stood in this field belonging to the Palais. A street. Rue de la Monnaie, behind Saint-Germain- I'Auxerrois, recalls this obscure fact, and from a similar association comes the name of the second of the three pepper-pot towers which, standing along the Quai de I'Horloge, mark the northern boundary of the ancient palace. The first mint must have been this Tour d'Argeot and the famous mill, indicated upon the oklest maps of Paris, was probably a modern contrivance for striking coins built as an improvement upon the mint of the Tour d'Argent.

The tall, square tower, the Tour de I'Horloge, rising almost to the height of the Tour Saint- Jacques, that isolated Gothic fragment, upon the right bank of the Seine, places the northeast corner of the Palais. From its summit was echoed the fateful signal for the Massacre of Saint-Bartholomew, first sounded from Saint-Germain- I'Auxerrois.

The first of the pointed towers, coupled to the Tour d'Argent, long bore the name Tour de Montgomery, in memory of the captain of the Scotch guards imprisoned therein after fatally wounding Henri II in a tournament near Place des Vosges. Place des Vosges was then a royal park attached to the palace of the Tournelles, built by Charles V as a country house. There, on July 1, 1559, Henri II, fighting under the colours of Diane de Poitiers, broke his lance against the Earl of Montgomery, and Montgomery's lance raising the visor of the king's helmet penetrated his adversary's eye. The king died of the wound ten days later at the Tournelles.

Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV, and Damiens, who attempted the life of Louis XV, spent also their last days in this tower. The Tour Bonbec, the last aiid smallest, is the most perfect of the towers, since it has preserved its battlements. With the modern restoration of the Palais, these names, which had both point and flavour, have been changed. Montgomery becomes the Tour de Cesar; Bonbec, the Tour Saint-Louis.

These four towers then, with the Sainte-Chapelle, determine accurately the perimeter of the Palais from the Merovingien monarchs to the first of the House of Valois. The Palais, thus simply designated from time immemorial, meant the kings' residence upon the ile de la Cite, whereas one specified Palais des Thermes, chateau du Louvre, chateau de Vincennes. The occasional residence, merely, of the Merovingiens, who affected the Thermes, it was in this palace that the sovereigns of France held court from the Capetiens to Charles V. The Roman building appears to have lasted until the time of the Norman invasions, when Count Eudes rebuilt the palace as a square fortress, defended by high towers, its facade characterized by four great round-headed arches, flanked by bastions, of which

HENRI rV ON THE PONT-XEUF.

the remains were discovered when the Cour de Harlay was pulled down.

Louis le Gros and Louis le Jeune both died within the walls of this palace, and here Philippe Auguste was married to a Danish princess. Blanche de Castille, mother of Saint-Louis, is said to have inhabited the right-hand tower.

At the beginning of the XlVth century the Palais presented a reunion of buildings of which the oldest went back to the epoch of Louis IX and the most recent dated from the time of Philippe le Bel, or about 1313.

The beautiful early XVIth century Gothic buildings erected by Louis XII, which surrounded the Cour du Mai, totally perished in the three fires of 1618, 1737, and 1776. These fires also destroyed the Hotel Isabeau, once occupied by the unfaithful wife of Charles VI; the rooms in which the Burgundians seized the Comte d'Armagnac. Constable of France, and Chancellor Henri de Masle, and others; the Grand' Salle, in which was held the coronation banquet of Henry IV of England, when he was crowned king of France; the halls of Saint-Louis, and the room in which that king spent his bridal night, and in which thereafter the kings of France slept upon the night of their arrival in Paris.

The triumphal entry of the sovereigns upon their accession to the throne was feted with many curious and beautiful customs. As the cortege advanced towards the Palais by the Grand Pont " two hundred dozens of birds " were set free by the bird market to add to the festivity of the scene. In consideration of this the bird dealers were allowed the privilege of selling their stock upon the Grand Pont on Sundays and fete days, so that the bridge in olden times came to be known as le Pont aux Oiseaux. By the rue de Lutece and across from the Prefecture of Police is still a market where birds of all sorts are for sale on fete days and Sundays, a survival of the ancient custom.

Saint-Louis gave certain rights of the Palais to a court of justice, but Charles V was the first to abandon it to the newly created parliament, removing his court to the famous Hotel Saint-Pol, under the protection of the Bastille, from which later developed the Palais des Tournelles. Meanwhile the Louvre was slowly advancing from the fortress of Philippe Auguste into a residence for the last monarchs of the House of Valois.

The palace of antiquity lies buried beneath the crushing mass of the modern Palais de Justice, rebuilt after the furies of the Commune had destroyed most of the buildings erected after the fire of 1776 (about 1874). The domain of the CcTsars forms in effect the foundations, the cellars, of the contemporary pile. The Quai de I'Horloge covers about twenty feet of those antique constructions, its road-bed lies well above the beginnings of the three round towers, whose elevation, even yet of an imposing height, bespeaks a primitive structure of impressive elegance. Judged by them alone this palace of antiquity over which you walk in treading the floor of the immense Salle des Pas Perdus, of the present palace, was a marvel of architecture.

Such fragments as remain poets have woven into a fantastic fabric, which the cool judgment of archaeologists has in turn destroyed. It is all so indefinite that one may choose for belief between the rich legends of the romanticists and the alleged facts of the materialists. It is true that very little of the ancient palace remains, that the towers show remorseless reconstruction, but it is equally true that the foundations have yielded from time to time some thrilling evidence of prehistoric times.

The Bibliotheque Nationale preserves in its cabinet of antiquities a quadrangular cipjje, or truncated funeral column, found very deep amongst the debris of an ancient edifice under-

U A LOITERER IN PARIS

lying a part of the Palais ruined by the fire of 1776. This cippe is thought to date from the Ilird century. It is five feet ten inches in height and bears no inscription, and each side is ornamented by the standing figure of a divinity in high relief. There is Mercury with all his attributes; a woman holding a caduceus, possibly Maia, the mother of Mercury; Apollo with the bow and quiver; and a winged figure difficult to identify.

Again in the middle of the last century excavations under the Palais discovered the remains of certain Gallo-Roman constructions.

Beside the Tour de I'Horloge, along the quay, is a vaulted hall, built upon a quincunx of columns (arranged like a five-si)ot) with four large chimneys in the corners. This room is known as the cuisines de Saint-Louis, though Viollet-le- Duc, who studied the question, attributes it to the period of Philippe le Bel. What remains is thought to be the lower floor of a kitchen built in two stories, the lower serving for the domestics' table and the upper for the service of the king.

Situated between the twin towers of the Conciergerie, and opening from the Salle des Pas Perdus, is the Premiere Chamhre of the court. This was once the Grand' Cliavibre of the parlia-

.E CHRIST DL- PARLEMEXT. ■ROM THE GRAND CTIA.MBRE ;0\V IN THE LOliVRE.

OP THE PAI.AIS DU JUSTICE.

ment of Paris. Saint-Louis built it, together with the Sainte-Chapelle and the Grand' Salle, and Louis XII restored and ornamented it with a ceiling of golden caissons, walls hung with blue velvet and fleurs-de-lys in raised gold, high stained windows whose semi-translucency bathed the room in a rich, colourful twilight, and at the end of the room a large jDicture with sentences from the sacred writings under a crucifix.

The history of France was enacted here. In this room Francois I held his seat of justice; here the marechal de Biron was condemned to death; here, in 1614, parliament proclaimed the majority of Louis XIII; and here it was, on August 16, 1655, that Louis XIV, arriving post-haste from Vincennes, in hunting costume, booted and spurred, sprang to the dais and ordered the edicts recorded without discussion in fulfilment of his glorious assumption: " L'Etat, c'est moi."

In this same room, by a reversal of fortunes, the great-grandson of the autocrat presided at the seance (Sei3tember 12, 1715) which broke the will of the Roi-Soleil in favour of the legitimized princes. Little Louis XV, aged five years, but described as dcja dccoratif, sat upon cushions embroidered with the fleur-de-lys under the surveillance of his governess, Madame de Ventadour, while at his feet were the regent and the dukes and peers of parliament.

Parliament perished with the advent of the Revolution. Suspended by a law of November 3, 1789, it was suppressed in August of the following year, and in 1793 the Chamhre Dorce was transformed into a Salle cVEgalite. At the end of the room, his back to the Seine, the president of the Revolutionary tribunal was enthroned beneath a bust of Socrates flanked by those of Murat and Lepeletier. The vaulted roof of Louis XII covered them, but its grandeur was masked and the escutcheons of royalty had been scraped from the walls. Dukes, marshals, bishops, princes, the king, the queen — all the ancient nobility of France, the Orleanistes, Brissot, with the Girondistes, Saint-Just and the comitc du salut puhlique, all the condemned of all the parties — Marie-Antoinette and Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday and the Abbesse de Montmorency, the Dubarry and Madame Elisabeth, Hebert and his partisans, Danton and his party, Malesherbes, the marechal de Noailles, Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre — all, by hundreds, passed this fantastic mockery of judgment.

Here was heard, on October 14, 1793, the pitiful affaire de la veuve Capet. The trial of the queen of France occupied twenty consecutive hours, while, her destiny prejudged, she was subjected to every insult, accused of every infamy, compared to Catherine de Medicis, Messaline, Fredegonde! The seance broke up at four o'clock in the morning of the second day and Marie- Antoinette left the salle du tribunal, to regain her cell in the Conciergerie, by the little door to the left — it still exists — and descended the tiny spiral stairway built in the Tour Montgomery.