A Wanderer in Paris

No matter with what fervour is the entente fostered and nourished, the Parisian cabman will see to it that the hatchet is never too deeply interred, that the racial excrescences are not too smoothly planed. Polite hotel managers, obsequious restaurateurs, smiling sommeliers and irradiated shopkeepers may do their best to assure the Anglo-Saxon that he is among a people that exist merely to do him honour and adore his personality; but directly he hails a cab he knows better. The truth is then his. Not that the Parisian cocher hates a foreigner. Nothing so crude as that. He merely is possessed by a devil of contempt that prompts him to humiliate and confound us. To begin with he will not appear to want you as a fare; he will make it a favour to drive you at all. He will then begin his policy of humorous pin-pricks. Though you speak with the accent of Mounet-Sully himself he will force you to pronounce the name of your destination not once but many times, and then very likely he will drive you somewhere else first. You may step into his cab with a feeling that Paris is becoming a native city: you will emerge wishing it at the bottom of the sea. That is the cocher's special mission in life—subtly and insidiously to humiliate the tourist. He does it like an artist and as an artist—for his own pleasure. It is the only compensation that his dreary life carries.

The French, I fancy, are not less capable of stupidity than any other people. There is an idea current that they are the most intelligent of races, but I believe this to be a fallacy, proceeding from the fact that the French language lends itself to epigrammatic expression, and that every French child dips his cup into the common reservoir of engaging idioms and adroit phrases. This means that French conversation, even among the humblest, is better than English conversation under similar and far more favourable conditions; but it means no more. It gives no real intelligence. The incapacity of the ordinary Frenchman to get enough imagination into his ear (so fine that it can distinguish between the most delicate vowel sounds in his own language) to enable it to understand a foreign pronunciation is partly a proof of this. But take him at any time off his regular lines, present a new idea to him, and he can be as stupid as a Sussex farm labourer. It is the same with America. Just as the French language imposes wit on its user, so is every American, man or woman, fitted at birth with the mechanism of humour. Yet how few are humorous!

But the cocher is not the only cabman of Paris: there remains the driver of the auto. The motor cab has not elbowed out the horse cab in Paris as it has in London, nor probably will it, for the Parisians are not in a hurry; but for Longchamp and such excursions the auto is indispensable, and the motor cabman becomes more and more a characteristic of the streets. Our London chauffeurs are sufficiently implacable, blunt and churlish, but the Parisian chauffeur is like fate. There is no escape if you enter his car: he lights his cigarette, sinks his back into his seat, and his shoulders into his back, and his head into his shoulders, and drives like the devil. He seems to have no life of his own at all: he exists merely to urge his car wherever he is told. The foreigner has no hold whatever upon the chauffeur; he arranges the meter to whatever tariff he pleases, and before you can examine the dial at the end of the journey he has jerked up the flag. When you keep him waiting his meter devours your substance. Always terrible, he is worst in winter, when he is dressed entirely in hearth-rugs. The old cocher for me.

But it grows chilly and it is dinner time. Let us go. Yet first I would remind you that we chose the Café de la Paix for our reverie only because it is the centre, and we were intent upon the centre. But the pavement chairs of all the cafés of Paris are interesting, and it is equally good to sit in any populous bourgeois quarter where one can watch the daily indigenous life of this city, which the visitor who remains for the most part in the visitors' districts can so easily miss. The busy, capable girls and women shopping—their pretty uncovered heads all so neatly and deftly arranged, and their bags and baskets in their hands; the chair mender blowing his horn; the teams of white horses, six or eight in single file, with high collars and bells, drawing blocks of stone or barrels of wine; the tondeur de chiens, with his mournful pipe and box of scissors; the brisk errand boys; the neat little milliners with their band-boxes; now and then a slovenly soldier and a well-groomed erect agent. Paris as a spectacle is perpetually new and amusing.

CHAPTER XVI
THE GRANDS BOULEVARDS: II. THE OPERA TO THE PLACE DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE

The Christmas Baraques—The Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin—The Rue Laffitte—La Musée Grévin—The Bibliothèque Nationale—The Roar of Finance—Tailors as Cartoonists—A Bee-hive Street—Cities within the City—Pompes Funèbres—The Church as Advertiser—The Great Marguery—Gates which are not Gates—The Life of St. Denis—Highways from Paris—The First Theatre—St. Martin's Act of Charity—The Arts et Métiers; a Modern Cluny—Statues of the Republic.

From the Place de l'Opéra to the Place de la République is an interesting and instructive walk, but at no time of the day a very easy one; and between five o'clock and half-past six, and eight and ten, on the north pavement, it is always almost a struggle; but when the baraques are in full swing around Christmas and the New Year, it is a struggle in earnest, at any rate as far as the Rue Drouot. Indeed Christmas and New Year, but especially Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, are great times in France, and presents are exchanged as furiously as with us.

On Christmas Eve—Réveillon as it is called—no one would do anything so banal as to go to bed. The restaurants obtain a special permission to remain open, and tables are reserved months in advance. Montmartre, never very sleepy, takes on a double share of wakefulness.

The first street on our left, the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, is one of the busiest in Paris, with excellent shops and many interesting associations. Madame Récamier lived at No. 7, the site of the Hôtel d'Antin. So also did Madame Necker and Madame Roland, and for a while Edward Gibbon. Chopin lived at No. 5. This street, by the way, has suffered almost more than any other from the Parisian fickleness in nomenclature. It began as the Rue de la Chaussée Gaillon, then Rue de l'Hôtel Dieu, then Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, from Richelieu's Hôtel d'Antin, then the Rue Mirabeau, from the revolutionary who lodged and died at No. 42, then, when Mirabeau's body was removed ignominiously from the Panthéon, the Rue Mont Blanc, and in 1815 it became once again the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin.

At the foot of the Rue Laffitte one should stop, because one gets there a glimpse of Montmartre's white and oriental cathedral, hanging in mid-air, high above Paris and the church of Notre Dame de Lorette. This street is, to me, one of the most entertaining in the city, for almost every other shop is a picture-dealer's, and to loaf along it, on either side, is practically to visit a gallery. Two or three of these shops keep as a continual sign the words "Bronzes de Barye". The Rue Laffitte was named after the banker Jacques Laffitte, whose bank was in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin. Cerutti, who delivered Mirabeau's funeral oration, set up his revolutionary journal La Feuille Villageoise here. At the Hôtel Thelusson at the end of the street the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses assembled. Among the guests was General Buonaparte, and it was here that he first met Joséphine Beauharnais.

The Musée Grévin, to which we soon come on the left, is the Parisian Tussaud's; and it is as much better than Tussaud's as one would expect it to be. Tussaud's is vast and brilliant; the Musée Grévin is small and mysterious. There is so little light that every one seems wax, and one has to look very narrowly and anxiously at all motionless figures. The particular boast of the Grévin is its groups: not so much the Pope and his pontifical cortège, the coulisses of the Opera (a scene of coryphées and men about town), and the Fête d'Artistes, as the admirable tableaux of the Revolution. To the untutored eye of one who, like myself, avoids waxworks, the Grévin figures and grouping are good and, what is perhaps more important, intelligent. Pains have been taken to make costumes and accessories historically accurate, and in many cases the actual articles have been employed, notably in the largest tableau of all—"Une Soirée à Malmaison"—which was arranged under the supervision of Frédéric Masson, the historian, an effigy of whom stands near by. Among these scenes the historical sense of the French child can be really quickened. There are also tableaux of Rome in the time of the early Christians—very clever and painful.

At the Rue Drouot, at the conjunction of the Boulevards des Italiens and de Montmartre, there is an angle. Hitherto we have been walking west by north; we now shall walk west by south. From this point we shall also observe a difference in the character of the street, which will become steadily more bourgeois. At this corner, where the traffic is always so congested, owing largely to the omnibuses with the three white horses abreast that cross to and from the Rue Richelieu, all the best cafés are behind us.

If that £32,000,000 reconstruction scheme of which I have already spoken comes to pass, this point will be unrecognisable, for among the items in that programme is the uniting of the Boulevard Haussmann, which now comes to an abrupt end at the Rue Taitbout, with the Boulevard de Montmartre, which, as a glance at the map will show, is in a line with it. But my hope is that the improvement will be long deferred.

It is in the Rue Richelieu that the Bibliothèque Nationale stands, where the foreign resident in Paris may read every day, precisely as at the British Museum, provided always that he is certified by his Consul to be worthy of a ticket, and the visitor may on certain days examine priceless books and autographs, prints and maps and cameos and wonderful antiquities. Here once lived Cardinal Mazarin, and it is in the galerie that bears his name that the rarest bindings are to be seen—some from Grolier's own shelves. Among the MSS. is that of Pascal's Pensées. The library, which is now perhaps the finest in existence, has been built up steadily by the kings of France, even from Charlemagne, but Louis XII. was the first of them who may really be called a bibliophile, to be worthily followed by François I. It was not until 1724, in the reign of Louis XV., that the royal collection was removed to this building. The Revolution greatly added to its wealth by transferring hither the libraries of the destroyed convents and monasteries. The treasures in the Cabinet de Médailles I cannot describe; all I can say is that they ought not to be missed. They may be called an extension of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre.

Before leaving the Bibliothèque I should add that in certain of its rooms, with an entrance in the Rue Vivienne, exhibitions are periodically held, and it is worth while to ascertain if one is in progress. In the spring of 1908 I saw there a most satisfying display of Rembrandt's etchings.

It was in one of the old book-shops in the neighbourhood of the Bibliothèque that I received my first impression of the Paris Bourse. I was turning over little pocket editions of Voltaire's Pucelle and naughty Crébillons and such ancient boudoir fare, when I began to be conscious of a sound as of a thousand boys' schools in deadly rivalry. On hurrying out to learn the cause I found Paris in its usual condition of self-containment and intent progress; no one showed any sign of inquisitiveness or excitement; but on the steps of the Bourse I observed a shouting, gesticulating mob of men who must, I thought, be planning a new Reign of Terror. But no; they were merely financiers engaged in the ordinary work of life. The Bourse is free, and I climbed the steps, pushed through the money-makers, and entered. Never again. I have seen men engaged in the unlovely task of acquiring lucre by more or less improper means in various countries, but I never saw anything so horrible as the rapacity expressed upon the faces of this heated Bourse populace.

Capel Court is not indifferent to the advantages of a successful coup, but Capel Court differs from the Bourse not only in a comparative retention of its head, but also in a certain superficial appearance of careless aristocracy. Capel Court dresses well and keeps time for a practical joke now and then. The Bourse is shabby and in the grip of avarice. Wall Street and the Chicago pit, I am told, are worse: I have not seen them; but no race-course scramble for odds could exceed the horrors of that day in the Bourse. The home, by the way, of this daily vociferous service of Mammon, was built on the site of the old convent of the Filles de St. Thomas. During the Revolution the connection between the Bourse and Heaven was even closer, for the church of the Petits Pères was then set apart for Exchange purposes.

Returning to the point where we left the Boulevard—at the Rue Richelieu—I am moved to ask what would happen in London if Messrs. Baker in the Tottenham Court Road or Messrs. Gardiner in Knightsbridge were suddenly to break out into caricature and embellish their windows with scarifying cartoons of Kings, Kaisers, Presidents and Premiers? The question may sound odd, but it is simple enough if you visit the High Life tailor at the corner of the Rue Richelieu, or, farther east, a similar establishment at the corner of the Rue de Rougemont, for it then becomes obvious that it is quite part of the duties of the large Parisian clothier to do his part in forming public opinion. These cartoons are always bold and clever, although often too municipal for the foreigner's apprehension.

I have said somewhere that one of my favourite streets in Paris is the Rue Montorgeuil. That is largely, as I have explained, because it is old and narrow, and the people swarm in it, and the stalls are so many, and the houses are high and white and take the sun so bravely, and it smells of Paris; and also, of course, because the Compas d'Or is here, bringing the middle ages so nigh. Another favourite is the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre (which is now the next on the left eastward) for its busy happy shops and its moving multitudes. In its own narrow way it is almost as crowded as the Grands Boulevards.

A little way up this street, on the right, is a gateway leading into a very curious backwater, as noticeably quiet as the highways are noisy and restless: the Cité Bergère, the largest of those cités within a cité of which Paris has several, to be compared in London only with St. Helen's Place in Bishopsgate or Park Row at Knightsbridge. The Cité Bergère is practically nothing but hotels—high and narrow, with dirty white walls and dirty green shutters—very cheap, and very incurious as to the occupations of their guests, whether male or female. It has a gate at each end which is closed at night and penetrated thereafter only at the goodwill of the concierge, whom it is well to placate. The Cité Bergère leads into the Cité Rougemont (hence offering an opportunity to an innkeeper between the two to hang out the imposing sign of the Hôtel des Deux Cités), and from the Cité Rougemont you gain that district of Paris where the woollen merchants congregate.

Returning to the Grands Boulevards, the next street on the left is the Rue Rougemont, and if we take this we come in a few moments to the Conservatoire, where so many famous musicians have been taught, and where Coquelin and Sarah Bernhardt learned the art of elocution. There is a little museum at the Conservatoire in which every variety of musical instrument is preserved, together with a few personal relics, such as a cast of Paganini's nervous magical hand, with its long sharply pointed fingers, and the death-mask of Chopin.

Close to the Conservatoire is the darkest church in Paris—Saint Eugène, a favourite spot for funeral services. I chanced once to stay in a room overlooking this church, until the smell of mortality became too constant. There was a funeral every day: every morning the undertakers' men were busy in the preparations for the ceremony—draping the façade with heavy curtains of a blackness that seemed to darken the circumambient air: every afternoon removing it, together with the other trappings of the ritual—the candlesticks and furniture. It is not without reason that the French undertaker ambushes beneath the imposing style of Pompes Funèbres.

It was, by the way, on the walls of Saint Eugène, each side of the door, that I first saw any of those curious affiches, made, I suppose, necessary, or at any rate prudent, by recent events in France, directing notice to—advertising, I almost wrote, and indeed why not?—the advantages of religion. Religion (this is what the notice came to in essence), religion has its points after all. When President Fallières' daughter was married, it remarked, where was the ceremony performed? In a church. (Ha, Ha!) Who, it asked, is called to visit a man on his death-bed, no matter how wicked he has been? A priest. (Touché!) And so forth. Surely a strange document.

In the same street is an old book-stall whose shelves are fastened to the wall, giving the appearance of an open-air library for all—the Carnegie idea at its best. There used to be one on the side of the Hôtel Chatham in the Rue Volney (opposite Henry's excellent American Bar) but it has now gone.

We may regain the Boulevards by turning down the long Rue du Faubourg Poissonière, which leads direct, through the Rue Montorgeuil, to the Halles and the Pont Neuf—a very good walk. Passing Marguery's great restaurant on the left, famous for its filet de sole in a special sauce, which every one should eat once if only to see the great Marguery on his triumphant progress through the rooms, bending his white mane over honoured guests, we come to a strange thing—a massive archway in the road, parallel with the pavements, which I think needs a little explanation. It will take us far from the Grands Boulevards: as far, in fact, as The Golden Legend; for the arch is the Porte St. Denis, and St. Denis is the patron saint of Paris.

St. Denis was not a Frenchman but an Athenian, who was converted by St. Paul in person, after considerable discussion. Indeed, discussion was not enough: it needed a miracle to win him wholly. "And as," wrote Caxton, "S. Denis disputed yet with S. Paul, there passed by adventure by that way a blind man tofore them, and anon Denis said to Paul: If thou say to this blind man in the name of thy God: See, and then he seeth, I shall anon believe in him, but thou shalt use no words of enchantment, for thou mayst haply know some words that have such might and virtue. And S. Paul said: I shall write tofore the form of the words, which be these: In the name of Jesu Christ, born of the virgin, crucified and dead, which arose again and ascended into heaven, and from thence shall come for to judge the world: See. And because that all suspicion be taken away, Paul said to Denis that he himself should pronounce the words. And when Denis had said those words in the same manner to the blind man, anon the blind man recovered his sight. And then Denis was baptized and Damaris his wife and all his meiny, and was a true Christian man and was instructed and taught by S. Paul three years, and was ordained bishop of Athens, and there was in predication, and converted that city, and great part of the region, to christian faith."

Denis was sent to France by Pope Clement, and he converted many Parisians and built many churches, until the hostile strategy of the Emperor Domitian prevailed and he was tortured, the scene of the tragedy being Montmartre. "The day following," says Caxton, "Denis was laid upon a gridiron, and stretched all naked upon the coals of fire, and there he sang to our Lord saying: Lord thy word is vehemently fiery, and thy servant is embraced in the love thereof. And after that he was put among cruel beasts, which were excited by great hunger and famine by long fasting, and as soon as they came running upon him he made the sign of the cross against them, and anon they were made most meek and tame. And after that he was cast into a furnace of fire, and the fire anon quenched, and he had neither pain ne harm. And after that he was put on the cross, and thereon he was long tormented, and after, he was taken down and put into a dark prison with his fellows and many other Christian men.

"And as he sang there the mass and communed the people, our Lord appeared to him with great light, and delivered to him bread, saying: Take this, my dear friend, for thy reward is most great with me. After this they were presented to the judge and were put again to new torments, and then he did do smite off the heads of the three fellows, that is to say, Denis, Rusticus, and Eleutherius, in confessing the name of the holy Trinity. And this was done by the temple of Mercury, and they were beheaded with three axes. And anon the body of S. Denis raised himself up, and bare his head between his arms, as the angel led him two leagues from the place, which is said the hill of the martyrs, unto the place where he now resteth, by his election, and by the purveyance of God. And there was heard so great and sweet a melody of angels that many of them that heard it believed in our Lord."

Any one making the pilgrimage from, say, Notre Dame to the town of St. Denis to-day, can follow the saint's footsteps, for the Rue St. Denis at the foot of Montmartre leads out into the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, and that street right over Montmartre, Caxton's hill of the martyrs, to St. Denis itself. I do not pretend that the legend as it is thus given has not been subjected to severe criticism; but when one has no certain knowledge, the best story can be considered the best evidence, and I like Caxton better than the others, even though it conflicts a little with the legend of St. Geneviève. It is she, I might add, who is credited with having inaugurated the pilgrimage to St. Denis's bones.

The Rue St. Denis was more than the road to the saint's remains: it was the great north road out of Paris to the sea. Just as the old Londoners bound for the north left by the City Road and passed through the village of Highgate, so did the French traveller leave by the Rue St. Denis and pass through the village of St. Denis. Similarly the Rue St. Martin was the high-road to Germany. In the old days, when this street was a highway, the Porte St. Denis had some meaning, for it stood as a gateway between the city and the country; but to-day, when the course of traffic is east and west, it stands (like the Porte St. Martin) merely as an obstruction in the Grand Boulevard—not quite so foolish as our own revised Marble Arch, but nearly so. The Porte St. Denis dates from 1673 and celebrates, as the bas-reliefs indicate, the triumphs of Louis XIV. in Germany and Holland; the Porte St. Martin (to which we are just coming) belongs to the same period and commemorates other successes of the same monarch.

The Rue St. Denis is one of the most entertaining of the old streets of Paris, although adulterated a little by omnibuses and a sense of commerce. But to have boundless time before one, and no cares, and no fatigue, and starting at the Porte St. Denis to loiter along it prepared to penetrate every inviting court and alluring by-street—that is a great luxury. The first theatre in Paris, and indeed in France, was in the Hospital of the Trinity in the Rue St. Denis. That was early in the fifteenth century, and it was designed for the performance of Mystery plays in which the protagonist was, of course, Jesus Christ. Paris has now many theatres, with other ideals; but whatever their programmes may be, they proceed from that early and pious spring.

We come next to the Boulevard de Strasbourg, running north to the Gare de l'Est, and the Boulevard de Sébastopol, running south to the Ile de la Cité; and then to the second archway, the Porte St. Martin. St. Martin (who was Bishop of Tours) lived in Paris for a while, and it was here that he performed the miracle of healing a leper by embracing him—an act commemorated by Henri I. in the founding of the Priory of St. Martin, which stood a little way down the Rue St. Martin on the left, on a site on which the Musée des Arts et Métiers now stands. But it was at Amiens that the saint's most beautiful act—the gift of his cloak to a beggar—was performed, and perhaps I may be allowed to quote here, from another book of mine, the translation of a poem by M. Haraucourt, the curator of the Cluny museum, celebrating that deed:—

CHARITY

Because so bitter was the rain,
Saint Martin cut his cloak in twain,
And gave the beggar half of it
To cover him and ease his pain.

But being now himself ill clad,
The Saint's own case was no less sad.
So piteously cold the night;
Though glad at heart he was, right glad.

Thus, singing, on his way he passed,
While Satan, grim and overcast,
Vowing the Saint should rue his deed,
Released the cruel Northern blast.

Away it sprang with shriek and roar,
And buffeted the Saint full sore,
Yet never wished he for his cloak;
So Satan bade the deluge pour.

Huge hail-stones joined in the attack,
And dealt Saint Martin many a thwack,
"My poor old head!" he smiling said,
Yet never wished his cape were back.

"He must, he shall," cried Satan, "know
Regret for such an act," and lo,
E'en as he spoke the world was dark
With fog and frost and whirling snow.

Saint Martin, struggling toward his goal,
Mused thoughtfully, "Poor soul! poor soul!
What use to him was half a cloak?
I should have given him the whole."

The cold grew terrible to bear,
The birds fell frozen in the air:
"Fall thou," said Satan, "on the ice
Fall thou asleep, and perish there."

He fell, and slept, despite the storm,
And dreamed he saw the Christ Child's form
Wrapped in the half the beggar took,
And seeing Him, was warm, so warm.

The Arts et Métiers is a museum devoted to the progress of mechanics and the useful crafts: a kind of industrial exhibition, a modern utilitarian Cluny. It is a memorial of the world's ingenuity and the ingenuity of France in particular, and one cannot have a much better reminder that the frivolity of the Grands Boulevards is not all. Apropos, however, of the frivolity of the Grands Boulevards, I may say that the case that was attracting most interest on the Sunday that I was here contained a collection of all the best mechanical toys of the past dozen years, with their dates affixed. The only article in the vast building which seemed to serve no useful purpose was a mirror cracked during the Commune by a bullet, with the bullet still in it. In the square opposite the Musée is the statue of Béranger, who for many years made the ballads of the French nation.

Returning to the Grands Boulevards once more, we pass first the Porte St. Martin theatre, where the great Coquelin played Cyrano, and where he was rehearsing Chantecler when he died, and then the Ambigu, home of sensational melodrama, and come very shortly to the Place de la République, with its great central monument. The Republic thus celebrated is not merely the Third and present Republic, but all the efforts in that direction which the French have made, as the twelve reliefs round the base will show, for they begin with the scene in the Jeu de Paume in 1789, and end with the National Fête on July 14th, 1880. Paris would still have statues of the République if this were to go, for there is one by Dalou, the sculptor of these bas-reliefs, in the Place de la Nation, and another by Soitoux at the Institut. Dalou (whose work we saw in such profusion at the Little Palace in the Champs-Elysées) made a very spirited and characteristic group, with the Republic standing high on a chariot being drawn by lions and urged forward by an ouvrier and an ouvrière.

There is another and hardly less direct walk eastward to the Place de la République, which, taken slowly and amusedly, instructs one as fully in the manners of the busy small Parisian as the Boulevards in those of the flâneur. This route is by the Rue de Provence, the Rue Richer, the Rue des Petites-Ecuries and the Rue Château-d'Eau—practically a straight line, and in the old days a highway. You see the small Parisian at his busiest—at her busiest—this way.

CHAPTER XVII
MONTMARTRE

Steep Streets—The Musée Moreau—The Sacré-Cœur—Françoise-Marguerite—Paris and Her Beggars—A Ferocious Cripple—The Communard Insurrection—The Maison Dufayel—Heinrich Heine—The Cimetière de Montmartre—The Boulevard de Clichy—Cabarets Good and Bad—An Aged Statesman is Entertained—Three Bals—Paris and Late Hours—The Night Cafés—The Tireless Dancers—A Coat-tail—The Dead Maître d'Hôtel.

One may gain Montmartre by every street that runs off the Grands Boulevards on the left, between the Opéra and the Place de la République; but when the night falls and the tide begins to turn that way, it is the Rue Blanche and the Rue Pigalle that do most of the work. All are very steep. To the wayfarer climbing the hill in no hurry, I recommend for its interest the Rue des Martyrs (Balzac once lived at No. 47), leading out of the Rue Laffitte; or, starting from the Boulevards at a more easterly point, one may gain it by the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, which runs into the Rue des Martyrs at Notre Dame de Lorette and is full of activity and variety.

By taking the Rue de la Rochefoucauld one may spend a few minutes in a little white building there which was once the home and studio of the painter Gustave Moreau and is now left to the nation as a permanent memorial of his labours. In industry the man must have approached Rubens and Rembrandt, for this, though a large house, is literally filled with paintings and drawings and studies, which not only cover the walls but cover screens built into the walls, and screens within screens, and screens within those. The menuisier and Moreau together have contrived to make No. 14 Rue de la Rochefoucauld the most tiring house in Paris—at least to me, who do not admire the work of this painter, or at any rate do not want to see more of it than is in the Luxembourg, where may be seen several of his pictures, including the most famous of all, the Salome. Herr Baedeker considers that Moreau's works have a charm of their own, but I do not find it. I find a striving after the grandiose and startling, with only occasional lapses into sincerity and good colour. It is better than Wiertz, no doubt; but less entertaining, because less shocking.

Montmartre's life may for our purpose be divided into three distinct periods: day, evening, and the small hours. By day one may roam its streets of living and of dead and study Paris from its summit; in the evening its cabarets are in full swing; and then comes midnight when its supper cafés open, not to close or cease their melodies until the shops are doing business again.

Montmartre (so called because it was here that St. Denis and his associates were put to death) really is a mountain, as any one who has climbed to the Sacré-Cœur can tell. The last two hundred yards are indeed nearly as steep as the Brecon Beacons; but the climb is worth it if only for the view of Paris. (There is, however, a funicular railway.) As for the cathedral, that seems to me to be better seen and appreciated from the distance: from the train as one enters Paris in the late afternoon, with the level sun lighting its pure walls; from the heights on the south side of the river; from the Boulevard des Italiens up the Rue Laffitte; and from the Buttes-Chaumont, as in Mr. Dexter's exquisite drawing. For the cathedral itself is not particularly attractive near at hand, and within it is cold and dull and still awaiting its glass. It was, however, one of the happiest thoughts that has come to Rome in our time to set this fascinating bizarre Oriental building here. It gave Paris a new note that it will now never lose.

Before leaving, one ought perhaps to have a peep at Françoise-Marguerite, for one is not likely to see her equal again. Françoise-Marguerite, otherwise known as La Savoyarde de Montmartre, is the great bell given to the cathedral by the province of Savoy. She weighs nineteen tons, is nine feet tall, and her voice has remarkable timbre.

Behind the new cathedral lies the old church of St. Pierre-de-Montmartre, on the side of which, it is said, once stood a temple of Mars. (Hence, for some lexicographers, Mont-Mars and Montmartre; but I prefer to think of St. Denis wandering here without his head.) It was in the crypt of this church, I have somewhere read, that Ignatius Loyola, with Xavier and Laine, founded the order of Jesuits.

I attended early mass at the Sacré-Cœur church on January 1st, 1908. It was snowing lightly and very cold, and as I came away, at about eight, and descended the hill towards Paris, I was struck by the spectacle of the lame and blind and miserable men and women who were appearing mysteriously from nowhere to descend the hill too, groping and hobbling down the slippery steepnesses. Such folk are an uncommon sight in Paris, where every one seems to be, if not robust, at any rate active and capable, and where, although it eminently belongs to the poor as much as to the rich, extreme poverty is rarely seen. In London, where the poor convey no possessive impression, but, except in their own quarters, suggest that they are here on sufferance, one sees much distress. In Paris none, except on this day, the first of the year—and on one or two others, such as July 14th—when beggars are allowed to ask alms in the streets. For the rest of the year they must hide their misery and their want, although I still tremble a little as I remember the importunities of the Montmartre cripple of ferocious aspect and no legs at all, fixed into a packing-case on wheels, who, having demanded alms in vain, hurls himself night after night along the pavement after the hard-hearted, urging his torso's chariot by powerful strokes of his huge hands on the pavement, as though he rowed against Leander, with such menacing fury that I for one have literally taken to my heels. He is the only beggar I recollect meeting except on the permitted days, and then Paris swarms with them.

Standing on the dome of the cathedral one has the city at one's feet, not as wonderfully as on the Eiffel Tower, but nearly so. From the Buttes-Chaumont we see Montmartre: here we see the Buttes-Chaumont, which, before it was a park, shared with Montmartre the gypsum quarries from which plaster of Paris is made. Beyond the Buttes-Chaumont is Père Lachaise, a hill strangely mottled by its grave-stones, while immediately below us is the Cimetière du Nord, which we are about to visit for the sake of certain very interesting tombs.

One realises quickly the strategical value of this mountain. Paris has indeed been bombarded from it twice—by Henri IV., and again, only thirty-eight years ago. It was indeed on Montmartre that the Communard insurrection began, for it was the cannon on these heights that the rebel soldiers at once made for after the assassination of their officers. They held them for a while, but were then overpowered and forced to take up their quarters in the Buttes-Chaumont and Père Lachaise, which were shelled by the National Guard from Montmartre until the brief but terrible mutiny was over.

The great dome, close by us on the left, which might be another Panthéon, crowns the Maison Dufayel. Who is Dufayel? you ask. Well, who is Wanamaker, who was Whiteley? M. Dufayel is the head of the gigantic business in the Boulevard Barbès, a northern continuation of the Boulevard de Magenta. His advertisements are on every hoarding. I think the Maison Dufayel is well worth a visit, especially as there is no need to buy anything: you may instead sip an apéritif, listen to the band or watch the cinematoscope. One also need have none of that fear of what would happen were there to be a sudden panic which always keeps me nervous if ever I am lured into the Magasins du Louvre or the Galeries Lafayette; for at Dufayel's there is space, whereas at those vast shopping centres there is a congestion that, in a time of stress would lead to perfectly awful results. The Maison Dufayel is not so varied a repository as Wanamaker's or Whiteley's: but in its way it is hardly less remarkable. Its principal line is furniture, and I never saw so many beds in my life. It was M. Dufayel who brought to perfection the deposit system of payment, and his agents continually range the otherwise pleasant land of France, collecting instalments.

Since I had wandered into this monstrous establishment, which may not be as large as Harrod's Stores but feels infinitely vaster, I determined to buy something, and decided at last upon a French picture-book for an English child. Buying it was a simple operation, but I then made the mistake of asking that it might be sent to England direct. One should never do that in a bureaucratic country. The lady led me for what seemed several miles through various departments until we came late in the day to rows and rows of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen each in a little glass box. These boxes were numbered and ran to hundreds. We stopped at last before, say, 157, where my guide left me. The Frenchman in the box denied at once that the book could go by post. It was too large. It must go by rail. For myself, I did not then care how it went or if it went at all: I was tired out. But feeling that such an act as to abandon the parcel and run would be misconstrued and resented in a home of such perfect mechanical order, I waited until he had written for a quarter of an hour in a fine flowing hand with a pen sharper than a serpent's tooth, and then I paid the required number of francs and set out on the desperate errand of finding the street again. The book was a week on its journey. Go to Dufayel's, I say, most certainly, for it is quite amusing; but go when you are young and strong.

To me the most interesting thing on Montmartre is the grave of Heinrich Heine in the Cimetière du Nord, a strange irregular city of dead Parisians all tidily laid away in their homes in its many streets, over which a busy rumbling thoroughfare has been carried on a viaduct. I had Heine's Salon with me when I was last in Paris, and I sought his grave again one afternoon with an increased sense of intimacy. A medallion portrait of the mournful face is cut in the marble, and on the grave itself are wistful echoes of the Buch der Lieder. A little tin receptacle is fixed to the stone, and I looked at the cards which in the pretty German way visitors had left upon the poet and his wife; for Frau Heine lies too here. All were German and all rain-soaked (or was it tears?)

Ah! not little, when pain
Is most quelling, and man
Easily quell'd, and the fine
Temper of genius so soon
Thrills at each smart, is the praise,
Not to have yielded to pain
No small boast, for a weak
Son of mankind, to the earth
Pinn'd by the thunder, to rear
His bolt-scathed front to the stars;
And, undaunted, retort
'Gainst thick-crashing, insane,
Tyrannous tempests of bale,
Arrowy lightnings of soul

Ah! as of old, from the pomp
Of Italian Milan, the fair
Flower of marble of white
Southern palaces—steps
Border'd by statues, and walks
Terraced, and orange-bowers
Heavy with fragrance—the blond
German Kaiser full oft
Long'd himself back to the fields,
Rivers, and high-roof'd towns
Of his native Germany; so,
So, how often! from hot
Paris drawing-rooms, and lamps
Blazing, and brilliant crowds,
Starr'd and jewell'd, of men
Famous, of women the queens
Of dazzling converse—from fumes
Of praise, hot, heady fumes, to the poor brain
That mount, that madden—how oft
Heine's spirit outworn
Long'd itself out of the din,
Back to the tranquil, the cool
Far German home of his youth

See! in the May-afternoon,
O'er the fresh, short turf of the Hartz,
A youth, with the foot of youth,
Heine! thou climbest again.

But something prompts me: Not thus
Take leave of Heine! not thus
Speak the last word at his grave!
Not in pity, and not
With half censure—with awe
Hail, as it passes from earth
Scattering lightnings, that soul!

The Spirit of the world,
Beholding the absurdity of men—
Their vaunts, their feats—let a sardonic smile,
For one short moment wander o'er his lips.
That smile was Heine!—for its earthly hour
The strange guest sparkled; now 'tis passed away.

That was Heine! and we,
Myriads who live, who have lived,
What are we all, but a mood,
A single mood, of the life
Of the Spirit in whom we exist,
Who alone is all things in one?
Spirit, who fillest us all!
Spirit, who utterest in each
New-coming son of mankind
Such of thy thoughts as thou wilt!
O thou, one of whose moods,
Bitter and strange, was the life
Of Heine—his strange, alas,
His bitter life!—may a life
Other and milder be mine!
May'st thou a mood more serene,
Happier, have utter'd in mine!
May'st thou the rapture of peace
Deep have embreathed at its core;
Made it a ray of thy thought,
Made it a beat of thy joy!

Heine has many illustrious companions. If you would stand by the grave of Berlioz and Ambroise Thomas, of Offenbach, who set all Europe humming, of Delibes the composer of Genée's "Coppélia," of the brothers Goncourt, of Renan, who wrote the Life of Christ, or of Henri Murger, who discovered Bohemia, of De Neuville, painter of battles, of Halévy and Meilhac the playwrights, or of Théophile Gautier the poet, you must seek the Cimetière du Nord.

Montmartre in the evening centres in the Boulevard de Clichy—a high-spirited thoroughfare. Many foreigners visit it only then, and the Boulevard spreads its wares accordingly, and very tawdry some of them are. Here, for example, is a garish façade labelled "Ciel," in which a number of grubby blackguards dressed as saints and angels first bring refreshments at a franc a glass, and then offer the visitor a "prêche humoristique" followed by variations of Pepper's ghost in what are called "scènes paradisiaques," the whole performance being cold, tawdry and very stupid. Next door is "Enfer," where similar delights are offered, save that here the suggestion is not of heaven but hell. Instead therefore of grubby blackguards as saints we have grubby blackguards as devils. On the opposite side of the road is the Cabaret du Néant, where you are received with a mass for the dead sung by the staff, and sit at tables made of coffins.

It is hardly necessary to say that very few Parisians enter these places. The singing cabarets, however, are different: they are genuine, and one needs to be not only a Parisian but a very well-informed Parisian to appreciate them, for the songs are palpitatingly topical and political. The Quatz'-Arts, the Lune-Rousse and the Chat-Noir (once so famous, but now lacking in the genius either of Salis, its founder, or of Caran d'Ache, Steinlen or Willette, who helped to make it renowned) are all in the Boulevard de Clichy. So also is Aristide Bruant's cabaret, where an organised shout of welcome awaits every visitor, and Aristide—in costume a cross between a poet and a cowboy—sings his realistic ballads of Parisian street life. Here also is the Moulin-Rouge, which in the old days of the elephant was in its spurious way amusing, but is now rebuilt and redecorated out of knowledge, and for all the words you hear might be on Broadway.

Here also, at the extreme western end of the Boulevard, is the Hippodrome, now a hippodrome only in name and given up to the popular cinematoscope. I regret the loss of the real Paris Hippodrome. Paris still has her permanent circuses, but the Hippodrome is gone. It was there that, one night, in 1889, I chanced to sit very near the royal box, into which, with much bowing and scraping of managers, a white-haired old gentleman with the features of a lion and an eagle harmoniously blended was ushered. He was only seventy-nine, this old gentleman, and he was in the thick of such duties as fall to the Leader of the Opposition and promoter of Home Rule for Ireland; but he followed every step of the performance like a schoolboy, and now and then he sent for an official to have something explained to him, such as, on one occasion, the workings of the artificial snow-storm which overwhelmed Skobeleff's army. That ill-fated Russian general was the hero of the spectacle, a remarkable one in its way; but to me the restless animation and whole-hearted enjoyment of Mr. Gladstone was the finer entertainment.

Montmartre has also three dancing halls, two of which are genuine and one a show-place. The genuine halls are the Moulin-de-la-Galette, high on the hill on the steepest part of it above the Moulin-Rouge, and the Elysée in the Boulevard de Rochechouart, which are open only two or three times a week and which are thronged by the shop-assistants and young people of the neighbourhood. The spurious hall is the Bal Tabarin, which is open every evening and is a spectacle. It is, however, by no means unamusing, and I have spent many pleasant idle hours there. Willette's famous fresco of the apotheosis of the Parisian leg decorates a wall-space over the bar with peculiar fitness. At all the bals the men who dance retain their hats and often their overcoats, and for the most part leave their partners with amazing abruptness at the last step. Some of the measures are conspicuous for a lack of restraint that would decimate an English ballroom; but one must not take such displays "at the foot of the letter": they do not mean among these Latin romps and frolics what they would mean with us, whose emotions are less facile and sense of fun less physical.

And so we come to midnight, when Montmartre enters its third, and, to a Londoner exasperated by the grandmotherly legislation of his own city, its most entertaining phase. The idea that Paris is a late city is an illusion. Paris is not a late city: it is a city with a few late streets. Paris as a whole goes to bed as early as London, if not earlier, as a walk in the residential quarters will prove. Montmartre is late, and the Boulevards des Capucines and des Italiens are late, although less so; and that is about all. When it is remembered that Paris rises and opens its shops some hours earlier than London, and that the Parisians value their health, it will be recognised that Paris could not be a late city. One must remember also that the number of all-night cafés is very small, so small that by frequenting them with any diligence one may soon come to know by sight most of the late fringe of this city, both amateurs and professionals. One is indeed quickly struck by their numerical weakness.

There is a fashion in night cafés as in hats; change is made as suddenly and as inexplicably. One month every one is crowding into, let us say, the Chat Vivant, and the next the Chat Vivant kindles its lamps and tweaks its mandolins in vain: all the world passes its doors on the way to the Nid de Nuit. What is the reason? No one knows exactly; but we must probably once again seek the woman. A new dancer (or shall I say attachée?) has appeared, or an old dancer or attachée transferred her allegiance. And so for a while the Nid has not a free table after one o'clock, and on a special night—such as Mi-Carême, or Réveillon, or New Year's Eve—it is the head-waiter and the door-keeper of the Nid into whose hands are pressed the gold coins and bank notes to influence them to admit the bloods and their parties and find them a table. A year ago the douceur (often fruitless) would have gone to the officials of the Chat Vivant.

They remain, when all has been said against them, simple and well-mannered places, these half-dozen famous cafés on which the sun always rises. To think so one must perhaps graduate on the Boulevards, but once they are accepted they can become an agreeable habit. Sleepiness is as unknown there as the writings of Thomas à Kempis. Not only the dancers de la maison but the visitors too are tireless. There may be ways of getting ennui into a Parisian girl, but certainly it is not by dancing. Nor does the band tire either, one excellent rule at all of them being that there should be no pause whatever between the tunes, from the hour of opening until day.