A Wanderer in Paris

The Bois has two race-courses, but it is at Longchamp that the principal races are run—the Grand Prix and the Conseil Municipal. Racing men tell me that the defect of the pari-mutuel system is that one cannot arrange one's book, since the odds are always more or less of a surprise; but to one who does not bet on horses anywhere but in Paris, and who views an English bookmaker with alarm, if not positive terror, the pari-mutuel seems perfect in its easy and silent workings and the dramatic unfolding of its surprises. For first you have the fun of picking out your horse; then quietly putting your money on him, to win or for a place; and then, after the race is run and your horse is a winner, you have those five to ten delightfully anxious minutes while the actuaries are working out the odds.

An experience of my own will illustrate not only the method of the system but the haphazard principles on which a stranger's modest gambling can be done. On the morning of the races I had visited the Louvre with Mr. Dexter, the artist of this book. We had not much time, and were therefore proposing to look only at the Leonardos and the Rembrandts, which are separated by a considerable stretch of gallery hung with other pictures. On leaving the Leonardos we walked briskly towards the Dutch end; Mr. Dexter, however, loitered here and there, and I was some distance ahead when he called me back to see a Holbein. It was worth going back for. In the afternoon at Longchamp, when the time came before the race to pick out the horses who were to have the honour of carrying my money, I noticed that one of them was named Holbein. Having already that day been pleased with a Holbein, I accepted the circumstance as a line of guidance, and placed a five-franc piece on the brave animal. He came in first, and being an outsider his price was 185.50.

The Longchamp course is perfectly managed. There are three places where one may go—to the pesage, which costs twenty francs for a cavalier and ten francs for a dame; to the pavillon, which is half that price; or to the pelouse, where the people congregate, which costs a franc. Perfect order reigns everywhere.

For the wanderer who has no carriage awaiting him and no appointments to hurry him there are two entertaining things to do when the races are over on a fine Sunday afternoon. One is to cross the Seine to Suresnes by the adjacent bridge and sitting at the café that faces it, watch the crowd and the traffic, for this is on a main road from Paris to the country; or walking the other way, one may enjoy a similar spectacle at the Café du Sport outside the Porte Maillot and study at one's ease the happy French in holiday mood—the husbands with their wives and their two children, and the Sunday lovers arm in arm.

And now we return to the Champs-Elysées in order to look at some pictures and admire a beautiful bridge. For the Avenue Alexandre III., as for the Pont Alexandre III., Paris is indebted to the 1900 Exhibition. These are her permanent gains, and very valuable they are. Of the two white palaces on either side of this green and spacious Avenue, that on the right, as we face the golden dome of the Invalides, is the home of the Salon and of various exhibitions. I say Salon, but Paris now has many Salons, two of which, in more or less amicable rivalry, occupy this building at the same time. In one, the Salon proper, the Salon of the old guard, the Royal Academicians of France, there are miles of paint but few experiments; in the other, where the more independent spirits—the New Englishers, so to speak—hang their works in personal groups, there are fewer miles but more outrages. For outrages, however, pure and simple (or even impure and complex), I recommend the Salon that is now held in the early spring in some of the old Exhibition buildings on the banks of the river, close to the Pont d'Alexandre III. I have seen pictures there—nudities, in the manner of Aztec decorations, by the youngest French artists of the moment—which made one want to scream. It was said once that the French knew how to paint but not what to paint, and the English what to paint but not how to paint it. Since then there has been such a fusing of nationalities, such increased and humble appreciation on the part of the English painters of the best French methods, that one can no longer talk in that kind of cast-iron epigram; but it is impossible to see some of the crude innovating work now being done without the reflection that France is rapidly and successfully creating a school of artists who not only know not what to paint but how to paint too.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts, which was built for the collection of pictures at the Exhibition of 1900, is now a permanent gallery for the preservation of the various works of art acquired from time to time by the municipality of Paris, thus differing from the Luxembourg collections, which are national. The Palais has become a kind of brother of the Carnavalet, the one being the historical museum of Paris and the other—the Palais—the artistic museum of Paris. The Palais undoubtedly contains much that is not of the highest quality, but no one who is interested in modern French painting and drawing can afford to neglect it, while the recent acquisition of the Collection Dutuit, consisting chiefly of small but choice pictures of the Dutch masters, including a picture of Rembrandt with his dog, from his own hand, has added a rather necessary touch of antiquity.

One of the special rooms is devoted to pictures of the opulent Félix Ziem, painter of Venetian sunsets and the sky at its most golden, wherever it may be found, who is still (1909) living in honourable state on those slopes of the mountain of fame which are reserved for the few rare spirits that become old masters before they die, and who presented his pictures to Paris a few years ago; another room is filled with the works of the late Jean Jacques Henner, whose pallid nudities, emerging from voluptuous gloom, still look yearningly at one from the windows of so many Paris picture dealers. Henner, I must confess, is not a painter whom I greatly esteem; but few modern French artists were more popular in their day. He died in 1905, and this gift of his work was made by his son. Other French artists to have rooms of their own in the Palais are Jean Carriès the sculptor, who died in 1894 at the age of thirty-nine, after an active career in the modelling of quaint and grotesque and realistic figures, one of the best known and most charming of his many works being "La Fillette au Pantin" (No. 1338 in the collection); and Jules Dalou (1838-1902), also a sculptor, a man of more vigour although of less charm than his neighbour in the Palais. That strange gift of untiring abundant creativeness which the French have so notably, Dalou also shared, his busy fingers having added thousands of new figures to those that already congest life, while he modelled also many a well-known head. I think that I like best his "Esquisses de Travailleurs". Nothing here, however, is so fascinating as Dalou's own head by Rodin in the Luxembourg.

Of the picture collection proper I am saying but little, for it is in a fluid state, and even in the catalogue before me, the latest edition, there is no mention of several of its finest treasures: among them Manet's portrait of Théodore Duret, a sketch of an old peasant woman's hand by Madame David, a Rip Van Winkle by that modern master of the grotesque and Rabelaisian, Jean Véber, and one of Mr. Sargent's Venetian sketches—the racing gondoliers. For the most part it is like revisiting the past few Salons, except that the pictures are more choice and less numerous; but one sees many old friends, and all the expected painters are here. It is of course the surprises that one remembers—the three Daumiers, for example, particularly "L'Amateur d'Estampes," reproduced opposite page 286, and "Les Joueurs d'Echecs," and the fine collection of the drawings of Puvis de Chavannes and Daniel Vierge. I was also much taken with some topographical drawings by Adrian Karbowski—No. 494 in the catalogue. Other pictures and drawings which should be seen are those by Cazin (a sunset), Pointelin, Steinlen (some work-girls), Sisley, Lebourg, and Harpignies, who exhibits water-colours separated in time by fifty-nine years, 1849 to 1908. The drawings on a whole are far better than the paintings.

In the collection Dutuit look at Ruisdael's "Environs de Haarlem," Terburg's "La Fiancée," Hobbema's "Les Moulins" and a woodland scene, Pot's "Portrait of a Man," Van de Velde's landscape sketches, and the Rembrandt. The rooms downstairs are not worth visiting.

Among the statuary, some of which is very good, particularly a new unsigned and uncatalogued Joan of Arc, is a naked Victor Hugo holding a MS. in his hand; while Frémiet of course confronts the door, this time with a really fine George and the Dragon, George having a spear worthy of the occasion, and not the short and useless broadsword which he brandishes on the English sovereign.

On my last visit to this thinly populated gallery I was for some time one of three visitors, until suddenly the vast spaces were humanised by the gracious and winsome presence of a band of Isidora Duncan's gay little dancers, with a kindly companion to tell them about the pictures, and—what interested them more—the statues. These tiny lissome creatures flitting among the cold rigid marbles I shall not soon forget.

And so we come to the Pont Alexandre III., the bridge whose width and radiance are an ever fresh surprise and joy, and make our way to the Invalides, at the end of the prospect, across the great Esplanade des Invalides, so quiet to-day, but for a month of every year, so noisy and variegated with round-abouts and booths. It is, by the way, well worth while, whenever one is in Paris, to find out what fair is being held. For somewhere or other a fair is always being held. You can get the particulars from the invaluable Bottin or Bottin Mondain, which every restaurant keeps, and which is even exposed to public scrutiny on a table at the Gare du Nord, and for all I know to the contrary, at the other stations too. This is one of the lessons which might be learned from Paris by London, where you ask in vain for a Post Office Directory in all but the General Post Office. Bottin, who knows all, will give you the time and place of every fair. The best is the Fête de Neuilly, which is held in the summer, just outside the Porte Maillot, but all the arrondissements have their own. They are crowded scenes of noisy life; but they are amusing too, and their popularity shows you how juvenile is the Frenchman's heart.

One should enter the Invalides from the great Place and round off the inspection of the Musée de l'Armée by a visit to Napoleon's tomb; that, at least, is the symmetrical order. The Hôtel des Invalides proper, which set the fashion in military hospitals, was built by Louis XIV., who may be seen on his horse in bas-relief on the principal façade. The building once sheltered and tended 7,000 wounded soldiers; but there are now only fifty. From its original function as a military hospital for any kind of disablement it has dwindled to a home for a few incurables; while the greater portion of the building is now given up to collections and to civic offices. There could be no greater contrast than that between the imposing architecture of the main structure and the charming domestic façade in the Boulevard des Invalides, which is one of the pleasantest of the old Paris buildings and has some of the simplicity of an English almshouse.

The Musée Historique has at every turn something profoundly interesting, and incidentally it tells something of the men from whom numbers of Paris streets take their names; but the real and poignant interest is Napoleon. The Longwood room is to me too painful. The project of the admirable administrator has been to illustrate the whole pageant of French arms; but the Man of Destiny quickly becomes all-powerful, and one finds oneself looking only for signs and tokens of his personality. So it should be, under the shadow of the Dome which covers his ashes. I would personally go farther and collect at the Invalides all the Napoleonic relics that one now must visit so many places to see—the Carnavalet, Fontainebleau, the Musée Grévin, our own United Service Museum in Whitehall (as if we had the right to a single article from St. Helena!), Madame Tussaud's, and Versailles. There is even a room at the Arts Décoratifs devoted nominally to Napoleon, but it has few articles of personal interest and none of any intimacy—merely splendid costumes for occasions and ceremonials of State, with a few of Josephine's lace caps among them. Its purpose is to illustrate the Empire rather than the Emperor, but the Invalides should have what there is.

At the Invalides you may, I suppose, see in three or four rooms more Napoleonic relics of a personal character than anywhere else. In Whitehall is the chair he died in; but here is his garden-seat from St. Helena, one bar of which was removed to allow him as he sat to pass his arm through and be more at his ease as he looked out to the ocean that was to do nothing for him. At Whitehall is the skeleton of his horse Marengo; here is the saddle. Here are his grey redingote and more than one of his hats. Among the relics in the special Napoleonic rooms those of his triumph and his fall are mixed. Here is the bullet that wounded him at Ratisbon; here are his telescopes and his maps, his travelling desks and his pistols; here are the toys of the little Duke of Reichstadt; here is the walking stick on which Napoleon leaned at St. Helena, his dressing-gown, his bed, his armchair and his death-mask. Here are the railings of the tomb at St. Helena, and a case of leaves and stones and pieces of wood and other natural surroundings of the same spot. Here also is the pall that covered his coffin on the way to its final burial under the Dome close by.

It is a fitting end to the study of these storied corridors to pass to the tomb of the protagonist of the drama we have been contemplating. The Emperor's remains were brought to Paris in 1840, nineteen years after his death at St. Helena. Thackeray, in his Second Funeral of Napoleon, wrote a vivid, although to my mind hateful, description of the ceremonial: a piece of complacent flippancy, marked by the worst kind of French irreverence, which shows him in his least admirable mood, particularly when he is pleased to be amusing over the difference between the features of the Emperor dead and living. None the less it is an absorbing narrative.

One looks down upon the sarcophagus, which lies in a marble well. It is simple, solemn and severe, and to a few persons, not Titmarshes, inexpressibly melancholy. The Emperor's words from his will, "Je désire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords de la Seine, au milieu de ce peuple français que j'ai tant aimé," are placed at the entrance to the crypt. He had not the Invalides in mind when he wrote them; but one feels that the Invalides is as right a spot for him as any in this land of short memories and light mockeries.

CHAPTER X
THE BOULEVARD ST. GERMAIN AND ITS TRIBUTARIES

An Aristocratic Quarter—Adrienne Lecouvreur—A Grisly Museum—A Changeless City—The Pasteur Institute—The Golden Key—The Stoppeur—Sterne—The Beaux Arts—A Wilderness of Copies—Voltaire Clad and Naked—The Mint—An Inquisitive Visitor—Bad Money.

From the Invalides the Boulevard St. Germain, the west to east highway of the Surrey side of Paris, is easily gained; but it is not in itself very interesting. The interesting streets either cross it or run more or less parallel with it, such as the old and winding Rue de Grenelle, which we come to at once, the home of the Parisian aristocracy after its removal from the Marais. The houses are little changed: merely the tenants; and certain Embassies are now here. No. 18 was once the Hôtel de Beauharnais, the home of the fair Joséphine; at the Russian Embassy, No. 79, the Duchesse d'Estrées lived. In an outhouse at No. 115 was buried in unconsecrated ground Adrienne Lecouvreur, the tragedienne who made tragedy, the beloved of Maréchal Saxe. Scribe's drama has made her story known—how her heart was too much for her, and how Christian burial was refused her by a Christian priest.

The Rue St. Dominique, parallel with the Rue de Grenelle nearer the river, is equally old and august. At No. 13 lived Madame de Genlis, the monitress of French youth. Still nearer the river runs the long Rue de l'Université, which also has an illustrious past and a picturesque present, some great French noble having built nearly every house.

One of the first old streets to cross the Boulevard St. Germain is the Rue du Bac, a roadway made when the Palace of the Tuileries was building, to convey materials from Vaugiraud to the bac (or ferry boat) which crossed the Seine where the Pont Royal now stands. This street also is full of ancient palaces and convents. Chateaubriand died at 118-120. At 128 is the Séminaires des Missions Etrangères, with a terrible little museum called the Chambre des Martyrs, very French in character, displaying instruments of torture which have been used upon missionaries in China and other countries inimical (like poor Adrienne's priest) to Christianity. The Rue des Saints-Pères resembles the Rue du Bac, but is more attractive to the loiterer because it has perhaps the greatest number of old curiosity shops of any street in Paris. They touch each other: perhaps they take in each other's dusting. I never saw a customer enter; but that of course means nothing. One might be sure of finding a case made of peau de chagrin here and be equally sure that Balzac had trodden this pavement before you. You will see, however, nothing or very little that is beautiful, because Paris does not care much for sheer beauty.

The Rue des Saints-Pères runs upwards into the Rue de Sèvres, where old convents cluster and the Bon Marché raises its successful modern bulk. It was in the Abbaye-aux-Bois, once at the corner of the Rue de Sèvres and the Rue de la Chaise, but now buried beneath a gigantic block of new flats, that Madame Récamier lived from 1814 until her death in 1849, visited latterly every day by the faithful Chateaubriand. M. Georges Cain has a charming chapter on this friendship and its scene in his Promenades dans Paris, of which an English translation, entitled Walks in Paris, has recently been published.

Returning to the Boulevard St. Germain, which we leave as often as we touch it, I remember that, on the south side, between the Invalides end and the statue of the inventor of the semaphore, used to be a little shop devoted to the sale of trophies of Joan of Arc. And since it used to be there, it follows that it is there still, for nothing in Paris ever changes. One of the great charms of Paris is that it is always the same. I can think of hardly any shop that has changed in the last ten years. This means, I suppose, that the French rarely die. How can they, disliking as they do to leave Paris? It is the English and the Scotch, born to forsake their homes and live uncomfortably foreign lives, who die.

If one is interested in seeing the Pasteur Institute, now is the time, for it is not far from the Rue de Sèvres, in the Rue Falguière, named after Falguière the sculptor of the memorial to Pasteur in the Place Breteuil: one of the best examples of recent Paris statuary, with a charming shepherd boy playing his pipe to his flock on one side of the pediment, and grimmer scenes of disease on the others. This monument, however, is some distance from the Institute, the Place Breteuil being the first carrefour in that vast and endless avenue which leads southwards from Napoleon's tomb. The Institute itself has a spirited statue of Jupille the shepherd, one of its first patients, in his struggle with the wolf that bit him. Pasteur's tomb is here, but I have not seen it, as I arrived on the wrong day.

One of the most attractive of the Boulevard St. Germain's byways is entered just round the corner of the Rue de Rennes. This is the Cour du Dragon, which is not only a relic of old Paris, but old Paris is still visible hard at work in it. The Cour du Dragon is a narrow court gained by an archway over which a red dragon perches, holding up the balcony with his vigorous pinions. It was the Hôtel Taranne in the reigns of Charles VI. and VII. and Louis XI.; later it became a famous riding and fencing school. It is now a cheerful nest of artisans—coppersmiths, locksmiths, coal merchants and the like, who fill it with brisk hammerings, while at the windows above, with their green shutters, the songs of caged birds mingle in the symphony.

As in all Parisian streets or courts where signs are hung, the golden key is prominent. (There is one in Mr. Dexter's picture of the Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville.) What the proportion of locksmiths is to the population of Paris I cannot say; but their pretty symbol is to be seen everywhere. The reason of their numbers is not very mysterious when we recollect that practically every one that one meets in this city, and certainly all the people of the middling and working classes, live in flats, and all want keys. The streets and streets of the small houses with which East London is covered are unknown in Paris, where every façade is but the mask which hides vast tenements packed with families. No wonder then that the serrurier is so busy.

Another sign which probably puzzles many English people is that of the stoppeur. Bellows' dictionary does not recognise the word. What is a stoppeur and what does he stop? I discovered the answer in the most practical way possible; for a Frenchman, in a crowd, helped me to it by pushing his lighted cigar into my back and burning a hole in it, right in the middle of the coat, where a patch would necessarily show. I was in despair until the femme de chambre reassured me. It was nothing, she said: all that was needed was a stoppeur. She would take the coat herself. It seems that the stoppeur's craft is that of mending holes so deftly that you would not know there had been any. He ascertains the pattern by means of a magnifying glass, and then extracts threads from some part of the garment that does not show and weaves them in. I paid three francs and have been looking for the injured spot ever since, but cannot find it. It is a modern miracle.

Diagonally opposite the Court of the Dragon is the Church of St. Germain—not the St. Germain who owns the church at the east end of the Louvre, but St. Germain des Prés, a lesser luminary. It has no particular beauty, but a number of frescoes by Flandrin, the pupil of Ingres, give it a cachet. Flandrin's bust is to be observed on the north wall. The frescoes cannot be seen except under very favourable conditions, and therefore for me the greatness of Flandrin has to be sought in his drawings at the Luxembourg and the Louvre—sufficient proof of his exquisite hand.

Before descending the Rue Bonaparte to the river, let us ascend it to see the great church of St. Sulpice and its paintings by Delacroix in the Chapel of the Holy Angels. Under the Convention St. Sulpice was the Temple of Victory, and here General Bonaparte was feasted in 1799. The church is famous for its music and an organ second only to that of St. Eustache. And now let us descend the Rue Bonaparte to the quais, where several buildings await us, beginning with the Beaux-Arts at the foot of the street; but first the Rue Jacob, which bisects the Rue Bonaparte, should be looked at, for it has had many illustrious inhabitants, including our own Laurence Sterne, who lodged here, at No. 46, in the Hôtel of his friend Madame Rambouillet (of the easy manners) when he was studying the French for A Sentimental Journey. It was here perhaps that he penned the famous opening sentence: "'They order,' said I, 'these things better in France'"—which no other writer on Paris has succeeded in forgetting. At No. 20 lived Adrienne Lecouvreur, and hither Voltaire must often have come, for he greatly admired her. At No. 7 is a fine old staircase and an old well in the court.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts, where the Royal Academy Schools of Paris are situated, is an unexhilarating building containing a great number of unexciting paintings. Indeed, I think that no public edifice of Paris is so dreary: within and without one has a sense not exactly of decay but certainly of neglect. This is not the less odd when one thinks of the purpose of the institution, which is to foster the arts, and when one thinks also of the spotless perfection in which the Petit Palais, the latest of the Parisian picture galleries, is maintained. The spirit, however, is willing, if the flesh is weak, for in the first and second courts are examples of the best French architecture, and a bust of Jean Goujon is let into the wall of the Musée des Antiques. The building contains a number of casts of the best sculptures and an amphitheatre with Delaroche's pageant of painters on the hemicycle and Ingres' Victory of Romulus over the Sabines opposite it; but there is not always enough light to see either well. For the best view of Delaroche's great work one must go upstairs to the Gallery. The library also is upstairs, with many thousand of valuable works on art and a collection of drawings by the masters, access to which is made easy to genuine students.

By returning to the first court we come to the Musée de la Renaissance, which now occupies an old chapel of the Couvent des Petits-Augustins, on the site of which the Palais de Beaux-Arts was built. Here are more casts and copies, and there are still more in the adjoining Cour du Mûrier, where stands the memorial of Henri Regnault, the painter, and the students who died with him during the defence of Paris in 1870-71.

We then enter the Salle de Melpomène, so called from the dominating cast of the Melpomene at the Louvre, and are straightway among what seem at the first glance to be old friends from all the best galleries of the world but too quickly are revealed as counterfeits. Rembrandt's School of Anatomy and the Syndics, our own National Gallery Correggio, the Dresden Raphael, the Wallace Collection Velasquez (the Lady with a Fan), one of Hals' groups of arquebusiers, and Paul Potter's Bull: all are here, together with countless others, all the work of Beaux-Arts students, and some exceedingly good, but also (like most copies) exceedingly depressing.

In other rooms almost pitch dark are modelled studies of expression and paintings which have won the Grand Prix of Rome during the past two hundred years. It is odd to notice how few names one recognises: it is as though, like the Newdigate, this prize were an end in itself.

Having contemplated the statue of Voltaire in his robes outside the Institut, the next building of importance after the Beaux Arts, you may, if you so desire, gaze upon the same philosopher in a state of nature by entering the Institut itself, and ascending to its Bibliothèque. There he sits, the skinny cynic, among the books which he wrote and the books which he read and the books which would not have been written but for him. I was glad to see him thus, for it showed me where our own Arouet, Mr. Bernard Shaw, found his inspiration when he too subjected recently his economical frame to the maker of portraits. Mr. Shaw sat, however, only to a photographer (although a very good one, Mr. Coburn); when he visited Rodin it was for the head, a replica of which may be seen at the Luxembourg. Speaking of heads, the Institut is a wilderness of them: heads line the stairs; heads line the walls not only of its own Bibliothèque but of the Bibliothèque de Mazarin, which also is here, a haven for every student that cares to seek it: heads of the great Frenchmen of all time and of the Cæsars too.

The Pont des Arts, which leads direct from the old Louvre to the Institut (a connection, if ever, no longer of any importance), is for foot passengers only. One is therefore more at ease there in observing the river than on the noisy bridge of stone. But it is inexcusably ugly and leaves one continually wondering what Napoleon was about to allow it to be built—and of iron too—in his day of good taste. Looking up stream, the Pont Neuf is close by with the thin green end of the Cité's wedge protruding under it and, in winter, Henri IV. riding proudly above. In summer, as Mr. Dexter's drawing shows, he is hidden by leaves. A basin has been constructed at this point from which the tide is excluded, and here are washing houses and swimming baths; for Parisians, having a river, use it.

I was shown round by a very charming attendant, who handled the new coins as though he loved them and took precisely that pride in the place that the Government seems to lack. The design on the French franc, although it ought to be cut, I think, a little deeper, a little more boldly, is very attractive, both obverse and reverse, and it is a pleasant sight to see the bright creatures tumbling out of the machine as fast as one can count. Pleasanter still is it to the frail human eye when the same process is repeated with golden Louis'—baskets full of which stand negligently about as though it were the cave of the Forty Thieves.

An Englishman's perhaps indiscreet questions as to what precautions were taken to prevent leakage amused the guide beyond all reason. "It is impossible," he said; "the coins are weighed. They must correspond to the prescribed weight." "But who," my countryman went on, in the relentless English way, "checks the weigher?" "Another," said the guide. "But a time must come," continued the Briton, who probably had a business of his own and had suffered, "when there is no one left to check—when the last man of all is officiating: how then?" Our guide laughed very happily, and repeated that there were no thieves there; and I daresay he is right. "Perhaps," I said, to the English inquisitor, "perhaps, like assistants in sweet shops, they are allowed at first to help themselves so much that they acquire a disgust for money." He looked at me with eyes of stone. I think he had Scotch blood. "Perhaps," he said at last.

My own contribution to the guide's entertainment was the production, before a machine that was shooting five-franc pieces into a bowl at the rate of one a second, of the four bad (démonétisé) coins of the same value which had been forced upon me during the few days I had then been in Paris. They gave immense delight. Several mintners (or whatever they are called) stopped working in order to join in the inspection. It was the general opinion that I had been badly treated: although, of course, I ought to have known. Three of the coins were simply those of other nations no longer current in France, and for them I could get from two to three francs each at an exchange. Unless, of course, a man of the world put in, I liked to sell them to a waiter, and then I should get perhaps a slightly better price. "Be careful, however," said he, "that he does not give them back to you in the next change." The fourth coin was frankly base metal and ought not to have taken in a child. That, by the way, was given to me at a Post Office, the one under the Bourse, and I find that Post Offices are notorious for this habit with foreigners. The mintners generally agreed that it was a scandal, but they did so without heat—bearing indeed this misfortune (not their own) very much as their countryman La Rochefoucauld had observed men to do.

After the coins we saw the medal-stampers at work, each seated in a little hole in the ground before his press. The French have a natural gift for the designing of medals, and they are interested in them as souvenirs not only of public but of private events—such as silver weddings, birthdays and other anniversaries. Upstairs there is a collection of medals by the best designers—such as Roty, Patey, Carial, Chaplain, Dupuis, Dupré—many of them charming. Here also are collections of the world's coinage and of historical French medals.

CHAPTER XI
THE LATIN QUARTER

Old Prints—Procope, Tortoni, and Le Père Lunette—The Luxembourg Palace—Rodin—Modern Paintings—A Sinister Crypt—A Garden of Sculpture—The Students of the Latin Quarter—The Sorbonne—A Beautiful Museum—The Cluny's Treasures—Marat and Danton—Old Streets and Dirty—The River Bièvre—Inspired Topography—Dante in Paris.

The high road from the centre of Paris to the Latin Quarter is across the Pont du Carrousel and up the narrow Rue Mazarine, which skirts the Institut. We have seen on the Quai des Célestins the site of one of Molière's theatres: here, at Nos. 12-14, is the house in which he established his first theatre, on the last day of 1643. The Rue Mazarin runs into the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie Française, at No. 14 in which was that theatre, whose successor stands at the foot of the Rue Richelieu. Parallel with the Rue Mazarin is the Rue de Seine, interesting for its old print shops, not the least interesting department of which is the portfolios containing students' sketches, some of them very good. (I might equally have said some of them very bad.)

Crossing the Boulevard St. Germain we climb what is now the Rue de l'Odéon to the Place and theatre of that name, with the statue of Augier the dramatist before it. The Place de l'Odéon demands some attention, for at No. 1, now the Café Voltaire, was once the famous Café Procope, very significant in the eighteenth century, the resort of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists, and later of the Revolutionaries. Camille Desmoulins indeed made it his home. You may see within portraits of these old famous habitués. Procopio, a Sicilian who founded his establishment for the shelter of poor actors and students (whom Paris then loathed in private life), was the father of all the Paris cafés.

The Café Procope was to men of intellect what some few years later Tortoni's was to men of fashion. The Café Tortoni was in the Boulevard des Italiens. Let Captain Gronow tell its history: "About the commencement of the present [nineteenth] century, Tortoni's, the centre of pleasure, gallantry, and entertainment, was opened by a Neapolitan, who came to Paris to supply the Parisians with good ice. The founder of this celebrated café was by name Veloni, an Italian, whose father lived with Napoleon from the period he invaded Italy, when First Consul, down to his fall. Young Veloni brought with him his friend Tortoni, an industrious and intelligent man. Veloni died of an affection of the lungs, shortly after the café was opened, and left the business to Tortoni; who, by dint of care, economy, and perseverance, made his café renowned all over Europe. Towards the end of the first Empire, and during the return of the Bourbons, and Louis Philippe's reign, this establishment was so much in vogue that it was difficult to get an ice there; after the opera and theatres were over, the Boulevards were literally choked up by the carriages of the great people of the court and the Faubourg St. Germain bringing guests to Tortoni's.

"In those days clubs did not exist in Paris, consequently the gay world met there. The Duchess of Berri, with her suite, came nearly every night incognito; the most beautiful women Paris could boast of, old maids, dowagers, and old and young men, pouring out their sentimental twaddle, and holding up to scorn their betters, congregated here. In fact, Tortoni's became a sort of club for fashionable people; the saloons were completely monopolised by them, and became the rendez-vous of all that was gay, and I regret to add, immoral.

"Gunter, the eldest son of the founder of the house in Berkeley Square, arrived in Paris about this period, to learn the art of making ice; for prior to the peace, our London ices and creams were acknowledged, by the English as well as foreigners, to be detestable. In the early part of the day, Tortoni's became the rendez-vous of duellists and retired officers, who congregated in great numbers to breakfast; which consisted of cold pâtés, game, fowl, fish, eggs, broiled kidneys, iced champagne, and liqueurs from every part of the globe.

"Though Tortoni succeeded in amassing a large fortune, he suddenly became morose, and showed evident signs of insanity: in fact, he was the most unhappy man on earth. On going to bed one night, he said to the lady who superintended the management of his café, 'It is time for me to have done with the world'. The lady thought lightly of what he said, but upon quitting her apartment on the following morning, she was told by one of the waiters that Tortoni had hanged himself."

Some one should write a book—but perhaps it has been done—on the great restaurateurs. Paris would, of course, provide the lion's share; but there would be plenty of material to collect in other capitals. The life of our own Nicol of the Café Royal, for example, would not be without interest; and what of Sherry and Delmonico?

While on the subject of meeting-places of remarkable persons, I might say that a latter-day resort of intellectuals who have allowed the world and its temptations to be too much for them is not so very far away from us at this point—the cabaret of Le Père Lunette at No. 4 Rue des Anglais. I do not say that this is a modern Procope, but it has some of the same characteristics: men of genius have met here and illustrious portraits are on the wall; but they are not frescoes such as could be included in this book, for old Father Spectacles puts satire before propriety.

In the colonnade round the Odéon theatre are bookstalls, chiefly offering new books at very low rates. We emerge on the south side in the Rue Vaugiraud, with the Médicis fountain of the Luxembourg just across the road. The Luxembourg Palace was built by Marie de Médicis, the widow of Henri IV., and it fulfilled the functions of a palace until the Revolution, when, prisons being more important than palaces, it became a prison. Among those conveyed hither were the Vicomte de Beauharnais and his wife Joséphine, who was destined one day to be anything but a prisoner. After the Revolution the Luxembourg became the Palace of the Directoire and then the Palace of the First Consul. In 1800 Napoleon moved to the Tuileries, and a little while afterwards he established the Senate here, and here it is still. I cannot describe the Palace, for I have never been in it, but the Musée I know well.

The Luxembourg galleries are dedicated to modern art. They have nothing earlier than the nineteenth century, and may be said to carry on the history of French painting from the point where it is left in Room VIII. at the Louvre, while little is quite so modern as the permanent portion of the Petit Palais. One plunges from the street directly into a hall of very white sculpture, which for the moment affects the sight almost like the beating wings of gulls. The difference between French and English sculpture, which is largely the difference between nakedness and nudity, literally assaults the eye for the moment; and then the more beautiful work quietly begins to assert itself—Rodin's "Pensée," on the left, holding the attention first and gently soothing the bewildered vision. Rodin indeed dominates this room, for here are not only his "Pensée" (the "Penseur" is not so very far away, two hundred yards or so, at the Panthéon), but his "John the Baptist," gaunt and urgent in the wilderness (with Dubois' "John the Baptist as a boy" near by, to show from what material prophets are evolved) and the exquisite "Danaïdes" and the "Age d'Airain," and the giant heads of Hugo and Rochefort, and the little delicate sensitive Don Quixotic head of Dalou the sculptor, which has just been added, and the George Wyndham and the G.B.S. and other recent portraits; while through the doorway to the next room one sees the "Baiser," immense and passionate. I reproduce both the "Baiser," opposite page 294, and the "Pensée," opposite page 46.

Other work here that one recalls is the charming group by Frémiet, "Pan and the Bear Cubs," Dubois' fascinating "Florentine Singing-boy of the Fifteenth Century," a peasant by Dalou, a Great Dane and puppies by Le Courtier, and the very beautiful head in the doorway to Room I.—"Femme de Marin," by Cazin the painter. But other visitors, other tastes, of course.

Before entering Room I. there are two small rooms on the right of the sculpture gallery which should be entered, one given up to the more famous Impressionists and one to foreign work. The chief Impressionists are Degas, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and their companions, almost all of whom seem to me to have painted better elsewhere than here. Monet's "Yachts in the River" rise before me, as I write, with the warm sun upon them, and I still see in the mind's eye the torso of a young woman by Legros: but this room always depresses me, the effect largely I believe of the antipathetic Renoir. The other room has a floating population. Recently the painters have been Belgian: but at another time they may be German or English, when the Belgians will recede to the cellars or be lent to provincial galleries.

The pictures in the Luxembourg are many, but the arresting hand is too seldom extended. Cleverness, the bane of French art, dominates. In the first room Rodin's "Baiser" is greater than any painting; but Harpignies' "Lever de Lune" is here, and here also is one of Pointelin's sombre desolate moorlands. In a glass case some delicate bowls by Dammouse are worth attention; but I think his work at the Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre is better. The second room is notable for the Fantin-Latour drawings in the middle, with others by Flandrin and Meissonier; the third for Carolus-Duran's "Vieux Lithographe" and a case of drawings by modern black and white masters, including Legros and Steinlen; here also is another Pointelin. In Room IV. is a coast scene—"Les Falaises de Sotteville," in a lovely evening light, by Bouland, which falls short of perfection but is very grateful to the eyes. In Room V. is a portrait group by Fantin-Latour recalling the "Hommage à Delacroix," which we saw in the Collection Moreau, but less interesting. The studio is that of Manet at Batignolles. Here also is a beautiful snow scene by Cazin—an oasis indeed. In Room VI. we find Cazin again with "Ishmael," and two sweet and misty Carrières, a powerful if hard Legros, Carolus-Duran's portrait of the ruddy Papa Français the painter, Blanche's vivid group of the Thaulow family, with the gigantic Fritz bringing the strength of a bull-fighter to the execution of one of his tender landscapes, and finally Whistler's portrait of his mother, which I reproduce on the opposite page—one of the most restful and gentlest deeds of his restless, irritable life.