A Wanderer in Paris

The menace of 397 spiral steps in a narrow, dark and almost airless turret, is no light matter, but it is essential to see Paris from the summit of Notre Dame. That view is the key to the city, and the traveller who means to study this city as it deserves, penetrating into the past as industriously and joyously as into the present, must begin here. He will see it all beneath him and around him in its varying ages, and he will be able to proceed methodically and intelligently. Immediately below is the Parvis, the scene of the interrupted execution of Esmeralda, and it was from one of the galleries below that Quasimodo slung himself down to her rescue. Here, where we are now standing, she must often have stood, looking for her faithless Phœbus. Only one of the bells that Quasimodo rang is still in the tower.

Hugo draws attention to the shape of the island, like that of a ship moored to the mainland by various bridges, and he suggests that the ship on the Paris scutcheon (the ship that is to be seen in the design of the lamps around the Opera) is derived from this resemblance. It may be so. On each side of us, north and south, are the oldest parts of Paris that still stand; in the north the Marais, behind the Tour Saint-Jacques, and in the south the district between the Rue de Bièvre and the Boulevard St. Michel. On the south side of the river lived the students, clerics and professors—Dante himself among them, in this very Rue de Bièvre, as we shall see; while in the Marais, as we shall also see, dwelt the nobility. West of St. Eustache in the Middle Ages was nothing but waste ground and woodland, a kind of Bois, at the edge of which, where the Louvre now spreads itself, was a royal hunting lodge, the germ of the present vast palace.

When the Marais passed out of favour, the aristocracy crossed the river to the St. Germain quarter, which clusters around the twin spires of St. Clotilde that now rise in the south-west. And then the Rue Saint-Honoré and the Grands Boulevards were built, and so the city grew and changed until the two culminating touches were put to it: by M. Eiffel, who built the tower, and M. Abadie, architect of the beautiful and unreal Basilique du Sacré-Coeur that crowns the heights of Montmartre.

The chief eminences that one sees are, near at hand, the needle-spire of Sainte Chapelle, in the north the grey mass of St. Eustache, the Châtelet Theatre (advertising at this moment "Les Pilules du Diable" in enormous letters), the long roofs of the Halles, and the outline of the medieval Tour Saint-Jacques. Farther west the bulky Opera; then, right in front, the Trocadéro's twin towers, with Mont Valérien looming up immediately between them; and so round to the south—to the Invalides and St. Clotilde, the Panthéon and the heights of Geneviève. A wonderful panorama.

Of all the views of Paris I think that from Notre Dame is the most interesting, because the point is most central; but the views from Montmartre, from the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Panthéon and the Arc de Triomphe should be studied too. The Eiffel Tower has dwarfed all those eminences; they lie far below it, mere ant-hills in the landscape, although they seem high enough when one essays their steps; yet, although it makes them so lowly, these older coigns of vantage should not for a moment be considered as superseded, for each does for its immediate vicinage what the Eiffel giant can never do. From the Arc de Triomphe, for example, you command all the luxurious activity of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and the wonderful prospect of the Champs Elysées, ending with the Louvre; and from the Panthéon you may examine the roofs of the Latin Quarter and see the children at play in the gardens of the Luxembourg.

The merit of the Eiffel Tower is that he shows you not only Paris to the ultimate edges in every direction save on the northern slopes of Montmartre, but he shows you (almost) France too. How long the Eiffel Tower is to stand I cannot say, but I for one shall feel sorry and bereft when he ceases to straddle over Paris. For though he is vulgar he is great, and he has come to be a symbol. When he goes, he will make a strange rent in the sky. This year (1909) is his twentieth: he and I first came to Paris at the same time; but his life is serene to-day compared with what it was in his infancy. At that time his platforms were congested from morn to dusk; but few visitors now ascend even to the first stage and hardly any to the top. No visitor, however, who wants to synthesise Paris should omit this adventure. Only in a balloon can one get a better view, but in no balloon adrift from this green earth would I, for one, ever trust myself, although I must confess that the procession of those aerial monsters that floated serenely past the Eiffel Tower on the last occasion that I climbed it, suggested nothing but content and security. They rose one by one from the bosky depths of the Bois, five miles away, gradually disentangled themselves from the surrounding verdure, assumed their independent buoyant rotundity and came straight to my waiting eye. In an hour I counted fifteen, and by the time the last was free of the earth the first was away over Vincennes, with the afternoon sun turning its mud-coloured silk to burnished gold. Paris has always one balloon floating above her, but fifteen is exceptional.

Notre Dame remains, however, the most important height to scale, for Notre Dame is interesting in every particular, it is soaked in history and mystery. Notre Dame is alone in the possession of its devils—those strange stone fantasies that Méryon discovered. Although every effort is made to familiarise us with them—although they sit docilely as paper-weights on our tables—nothing can lessen the monstrous diablerie of these figures, which look down on Paris with such greed and cruelty, cunning and cynicism. The best known, the most saturnine, of all, who leans on the parapet exactly by the door at the head of the steps, fixes his inhuman gaze on the dome of the Invalides. Is it to be wondered at that he wears that expression?

A small family dwells in a room just behind this chimera, subsisting by the sale of picture-postcards. It is a strange abode, and an imaginative child would have a good start in life there. To him at any rate the demons no doubt would soon lose their terrors and become as friendly as the heavenly host that are posed so radiantly and confidently on the ascent to the flèche—perhaps even more so. But to the stranger they must remain cruel and horrible, creating a sense of disquietude and alarm that it is surely the business of a cathedral to allay. Curious anomaly! Let us descend.

Before leaving the Ile de la Cité, the Rue Chanoinesse, to the north of Notre Dame, leading out of the Rue d'Arcole (near a blackguard pottery shop), should be looked at. The cloisters of Notre Dame once extended to this street and covered the ground between it and the cathedral. The canons, or chanoines, lived here, and there are still a few attractive old houses; but the rebuilder is very busy just now. At No. 10, Fulbert, the uncle of Héloïse, is said to have lived; at No. 18 was the Tour Dagobert, a fifteenth-century building, by climbing which one had an excellent view of Notre Dame, but in the past year it has been demolished and business premises cover its site. At No. 26 are (or were) the ruins of the twelfth-century chapel of St. Aignan, where the faithful, evicted from Notre Dame by the Reign of Reason, celebrated Mass in secret. Saint Bernard has preached here. The adjacent streets—the Rue de Colombe, Rue Massillon, Rue des Ursins and Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame—have also very old houses.

CHAPTER IV
ST. LOUIS AND HIS ISLAND

The Morgue—The Ile St. Louis—Old Residents—St. Louis, the King—The Golden Legend—Religious Intolerance—Posthumous Miracles—Statue of Barye—The Quai des Célestins.

On the way from Notre Dame to the Ile St. Louis we pass a small official-looking building at the extreme east end of the Ile de la Cité. It is the Morgue.

But the Morgue is now closed to idle gazers, and you win your way to a sight of that melancholy slab with the weary bodies on it and the little jet of water playing on each, only by the extreme course of having missed a relation whom you suspected of designs upon his own life or whom you imagine has been the victim of foul play. No doubt the authorities were well advised (as French municipal authorities nearly always are) in closing the Morgue; but I think I regret it. The impulse to drift into that low and sinister building behind Notre Dame was partly morbid, no doubt; but the ordinary man sees not only too little death, but is too seldom in the presence of such failure as for the most part governs here: so that the opportunity it gave was good.

I still recall very vividly, in spite of all the millions of living faces that should, one feels, have blurred one's prosperous vision, several of the dead faces that lay behind the glass of this forlorn side-show of the great entertainment which we call Paris. An old man with a white imperial; more than one woman of that dreadful middle-age which the Seine has so often terminated; a young man who had been stabbed.... Well, the Morgue is closed to the public now, and very likely no one who reads this book will ever enter it.

The Ile St. Louis, to put it bluntly, is just as commonplace as the Ile de la Cité is imposing. It has a monotony very rare in the older parts of Paris: it is all white houses that have become dingy: houses that once were attractive and wealthy and are now squalid. One of the largest of the old palaces is to-day a garage; there is not a single house now occupied by the kind of tenant for which it was intended. Such declensions are always rather melancholy, even when—as, for example, at Villeneuve, near Avignon—there is the beauty of decay too. But on the Ile St. Louis there is no beauty: it belongs to a dull period of architecture and is now duller for its dirt. Standing on the Quai d'Orléans, however, one catches Notre Dame against the evening sky, across the river, as nowhere else, and it is necessary to seek the Ile if only to appreciate the fitness of the Morgue's position.

The island was first called L'Ile Notre Dame, and was uninhabited until 1614. It was then developed and joined to the Ile de la Cité and the mainland by bridges. The chief street is the Rue St. Louis, at No. 3 in which lived Fénélon. The church of St. Louis is interesting for a relic of the unfortunate Louise de la Vallière. At No. 17 on the Quai d'Anjou is the Hôtel Lauzun, which the city of Paris has now acquired, and in which once lived together for a while the authors of Mademoiselle de Maupin and Les Fleurs de Mal.

Of Saint Louis, or Louis IX., who gives his name to this island, and whose hand is so visible in the Ile de la Cité, it is right to know something, for he was the father of Paris. Louis was born in 1215, the year of Magna Charta, and succeeded to the throne while still a boy. The early years of his reign were restless by reason of civil strife and war with England, in which he was victor (at Tailleburg, at Saintes and at Blaize), and then came his departure for the Holy Land, with 40,000 men, in fulfilment of a vow made rashly on a sick-bed. The King was blessed at Notre Dame, as we have seen, and departed in 1248, leaving his mother Blanche de Castile as regent. But the Crusade was a failure, and he was glad to return (with only the ghost of his army) and to settle down for the first time seriously to the cares of his throne.

He was a good if prejudiced king: he built wisely and well, not only Sainte Chapelle, as we have seen, but the Sorbonne; he devised useful statutes; he established police in Paris; and, more perhaps than all, he made Frenchmen very proud of France. So much for his administrative virtues. When we come to his saintliness I would stand aside, for is he not in The Golden Legend? Listen to William Caxton: "He forced himself to serve his spirit by diverse castigation or chastising, he used the hair many times next his flesh, and when he left it for cause of over feebleness of his body, at the instance of his own confessor, he ordained the said confessor to give to the poor folk, as for recompensation of every day that he failed of it, forty shillings. He fasted always the Friday, and namely in time of lent and advent he abstained him in those days from all manner of fish and from fruits, and continually travailed and pained his body by watchings, orisons, and other secret abstinences and disciplines. Humility, beauty of all virtues, replenished so strong in him, that the more better he waxed, so, as David, the more he showed himself meek and humble, and more foul he reputed him before God.

"For he was accustomed on every Saturday to wash with his own hands, in a secret place, the feet of some poor folk, and after dried them with a fair towel, and kissed much humbly and semblably their hands, distributing or dealing to every one of them a certain sum of silver, also to seven score poor men which daily came to his court, he administered meat and drink with his own hands, and were fed abundantly on the vigils solemn. And on some certain days in the year to two hundred poor, before that he ate or drank, he with his own hands administered and served them both of meat and drink. He ever had, both at his dinner and supper, three ancient poor, which ate nigh to him, to whom he charitably sent of such meats as were brought before him, and sometimes the dishes and meats that the poor of our Lord had touched with their hands, and special the sops of which he fain ate, made their remnant or relief to be brought before him, to the end that he should eat it; and yet again to honour and worship the name of our Lord on the poor folk, he was not ashamed to eat their relief."

Qualities have their defects, and such a frame of mind as that can lead, for all the good motive, to injustice and even cruelty. Christ's lesson of the Roman coin is forgotten as quickly as any. Louis' passion for holiness, which became a kind of self-indulgence, led him into a hard and ugly intolerance and acts of severe oppression against those whom he styled heretics. His short way with the Jews recalled indeed those of our own King John, who was very nearly his contemporary. I know not if he pulled out their teeth, but he once did what must have been as bad, if not worse, for he published an ordinance "for the good of his soul," remitting to his Christian subjects the third of their debts to the Jews; and he also expressed it as his opinion that "a layman ought not to dispute with an unbeliever, but strike him with a good sword across the body," the most practical expression of muscular sectarianism that I know. Louis' religious fanaticism was, however, his end; for he was so ill-advised as to undertake a new Crusade against the unbelievers of Morocco, and there, while laying siege to Tunis, he died of the plague. That was in 1270, when he was only fifty-five.

"In the year that S. Louis was put or written in the catalogue of the holy confessors, many miracles worthy to be prized befell in divers parts of the world at the invocation of him, by his merits and by his prayers. Another time at Evreux a child fell under the wheel of a water-mill. Great multitude of people came thither, and supposing to have kept him from drowning, invoked God, our Lady and his saints to help the said child, but our Lord willing his saint to be enhanced among so great multitude of people, was there heard a voice saying that the said child, named John, should be vowed unto S. Louis. He then, taken out of the water, was by his mother borne to the grave of the saint, and after her prayer done to S. Louis, her son began to sigh and was raised on life."

We leave the island by the Pont Sully, first looking at the statue of Barye, the sculptor of Barbizon, many of whose best small bronzes are in the Louvre (to say nothing of the shops of the dealers in the Rue Laffitte) and several of his large groups in the public gardens of Paris, one, for example, being near the Orangery in the Tuileries. Barye's monument standing here at the east end of the Ile St. Louis balances Henri IV. at the west end of the Ile de la Cité.

Crossing to the mainland we ought to look at the old houses on the Quai des Célestins, particularly the old Hôtel de la Valette, now the Collège Massillon, into whose courtyard one should boldly peep. At No. 32 we touch very interesting history, for here stood, two and a half centuries ago, Molière's Illustre Théâtre, the stage entrance to which may be seen at 15 Rue de l'Ave Marie.

And now for the Marais.

CHAPTER V
THE MARAIS

A £32,000,000 Rebuilding Scheme—Romance and Intrigue—The Temple—The Archives—Illustrious Handwriting—The "Uncle" of Paris—The Wall of Philip Augustus—Old Palaces now Rookeries—The Carnavalet—The Perfect Museum—Latude—Napoleon—Madame de Sévigné—Chained Streets—John Law—The Rue St. Martin.

The Marais is that district of old streets and palaces which is bounded on the south by the Rue St. Antoine, on the east by the Rue du Turenne, on the west by the Rue du Temple, and fades away in the north somewhere below the Rue de Bretagne. The Rue des Francs Bourgeois is its central highway east and west.

It was my original intention to devote a large proportion of this book to this fascinating area—to describe it minutely street by street—and I have notes for that purpose which would fill half the volume alone. But the publication of the £32,000,000 scheme for renovating this and other of the older parts of Paris (one of the principal points in which is the isolation of the Musée Carnavalet, which is the heart of the Marais), coming just at that time, acted like a douche of iced water, and I abandoned the project. Instead therefore I merely say enough (I hope) to impress on every reader the desirability, the necessity, of hastening to the Rue des Francs Bourgeois and its dependencies, and refer them to the two French writers whom I have found most useful in my own researches—the Marquis de Rochegude, author of a Guide Pratique à travers le Vieux Paris (Hachette) and the Vicomte de Villebresme, author of Ce que reste du Vieux Paris (Flammarion). To these I would add M. Georges Cain, the director of the Carnavalet, to whom I refer later.

No matter where one enters the Marais, it offers the same alluring prospect of narrow streets and high and ancient houses, once the abode of the nobility and aristocracy, but now rookeries and factories—and, over all, that sense of thorough insanitation which so often accompanies architectural charm in France and Italy, and which seems to matter so little to Latin people. Hence the additional wickedness of destroying this district. The Municipality, however, having acquired superfine foreign notions as to public health, will doubtless have its way.

Wherever one enters the Marais one finds the traces of splendour, intrigue and romance; howsoever modern conditions may have robbed them of their glory, to walk in these streets is, for any one with any imagination, to recreate Dumas. For the most part one must make one's own researches, but here and there a tablet may be found, such as that over the entrance to a narrow and sinister passage at No. 38 Rue des Francs Bourgeois, which reads thus: "Dans ce passage en sortant de l'hôtel Barbette le Duc Louis d'Orléans frère du Roi Charles VI. fut assassiné par Jean Sans Peur, Duc de Bourgogne, dans la nuit du 23 ou 24 Novembre, 1407". Five hundred years ago! That gives an idea of the antiseptic properties of the air of Paris. The Duke of Orléans, I might remark here, was symmetrically avenged, for his son assassinated Jean Sans Peur on the bridge of Montereau all in due course.

The Marais was at its prime from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth; at which period the Faubourg St. Antoine was abandoned by fashion for the Faubourg St. Germain, as we shall see when the time comes to wander in the Rue de Varenne and the Rue de Grenelle on the other side of the river.

Let us enter the Marais by the Rue du Temple at the Square du Temple, a little south of the Place de la République. One must make a beginning somewhere. The Temple, which has now disappeared, was the head-quarters of the Knight Templars of France before their suppression in 1307: it then became the property of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, who held it until the Revolution, when all property seems to have changed hands. Rousseau found sanctuary here in 1765; and here Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were imprisoned for a while in 1792. More tragic by far, it was here that the little Dauphin died. Napoleon pulled down the Tower: Louis XVIII. on his accession awarded the property to the Princesse de Condé, and Louis-Philippe, on his, took it back again.

The Rue du Temple has many interesting old houses and associations. Just north of the Square is the church of Elizabeth of Hungary, the first stone of which was laid in 1628 by a less sainted monarch, Marie de Médicis. It is worth entering to see its carved wood scenes from Scripture history. At 193 once lived Madame du Barry; at 153 was, in the reign of Louis XV., the barreau des vinaigrettes—the vinaigrette being the forerunner of the cab, a kind of sedan chair and jinrickshaw; at 62 died Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, in the Hôtel de Montmorency.

From the Square du Temple we may also walk down the Rue des Archives, parallel with the Rue du Temple on the east. This street now extends to the Rue de Rivoli. It is rich in old palaces, some with very beautiful relics of their grandeur still in existence, such as the staircase at No. 78. The fountain at the corner of the Rue des Haudriettes dates only from 1705. At No. 58 is the gateway, restored, of the old palace of the Constable de Clisson, built in 1371. Later it belonged to the Guise family and then to the Soubise. The Revolution made it the property of the State, and Napoleon directed that the Archives should be preserved here. The entrance is in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, across the green court; but do not go on a cold day, because there is no heating process, owing to the age of the building and the extraordinary value of the collections. The rooms in themselves are of some interest for their Louis XV. decoration and mural paintings, but one goes of course primarily to see the handwriting of the great. Here is the Edict of Nantes signed by Henri IV.; a quittance signed by Diana de Poictiers, very boldly; a letter to Parliament from Louis XI., in his atrocious hand; a codicil added by Saint Louis to his will on board a vessel on the coast of Sardinia, exquisitely written. The scriveners have rather gone off than improved since those days; look at the "Registre des enquêteurs royaux en Normandie," 1248, for a work of delicate minuteness. Marie Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV., wrote an attractive hand, but Louis XIV.'s own signature is dull. Voltaire is discovered to have written very like Swinburne.

Relics of the Revolution abound. Here is Marie Antoinette's last letter to the Princess Elizabeth, written the night before she was executed; a letter of Pétion, bidding his wife farewell, and of Barbaroux to his mother, both stained with tears. Here also is the journal of Louis XVI., 1766-1792, and the order for his inhumation (as Louis Capet), 21st January, 1793. His will is here too; and so is Napoleon's. I say no more because the collection is so vast, and also because a franc buys a most admirable catalogue, with facsimiles, beginning with the monogram of Charlemagne himself.

On leaving the Archives we may take an easterly course along the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, with the idea of making eventually for the Carnavalet; but it is well to loiter, for this is the very heart of the Marais. One's feet will always be straying down byways that call for closer notice, and it is very likely that the Carnavalet will not be reached till to-morrow after all. Indeed, let "Hasta mañana" be your Marais motto.

One of the first buildings that one notices is the Mont de Piété, the chief of the Paris pawnbroking establishments. I am told that the system is an admirable one; but my own experience is against this opinion, for I was unable on a day of unexpected stress at the end of 1907 to effect an entrance at the very reasonable hour of a quarter past five. The closing of the English pawnbrokers at seven—the very moment at which the ordinary man's financial troubles begin—is sufficiently uncivilised; but to cease to lend money on excellent gold watches at five o'clock in the afternoon (with the bank closed on the morrow, too, being New Year's Day) is a scandal. My adventures in search of relief among French tradesmen who had been at my feet as recently as yesterday, before supplies had broken down, I shall never forget, nor shall I relate them here. This aims at being an agreeable book.

It is interesting to note that one of the entrances to the Mont de Piété is reserved for clients who wish to raise money on deeds, and I have seen cabmen very busy in bringing to it people who quite shamelessly hold their papers in their hands. And why on earth not? And yet your English pawner seldom reaches the Three Brass Balls with such publicity or by any other medium than his poor feet. Our Mont de Piété for the respectable is the solicitor's office. A trace of the wall, and one of its towers, built around Paris by Philip Augustus in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, may be seen in the courtyard of the Mont de Piété; but the wall is better observed in the Rue des Guillemites, at No. 14.

All about here once stood a large convent of the Blancs-Manteaux, or Servants of the Virgin Mary, an order which came into being in Florence in the thirteenth century and of whom the doctor Benazzi was the general. After the Blancs-Manteaux came the Hermits of St. Guillaume, or Guillemites, and later the Benedictines took it over. Next the Mont de Piété at the back is the church of the Blancs-Manteaux in its modern form. It is plain and unattractive, but it wears an air of some purpose, and one feels that it is much used in this very popular and not too happy quarter. Just opposite, in a doorway, I watched an old chiffonnière playing with a grey rabbit. Every inch of this neighbourhood offers priceless material to the hand of Mr. Muirhead Bone.

One of the old tavern signs of Paris is to be seen close by, at the corner of the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux and the Rue des Archives: a soldier standing by a cannon, representing l'homme armé. It is a comfortable little retreat and should be encouraged for such antiquarian piety.

The pretty turret at the corner of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois and the Rue Vieille du Temple marks the site of the hôtel of Jean de la Balue. Turning to the left up the Rue Vieille du Temple we come at No. 87 to a very beautiful ancient mansion, with a spacious courtyard, built in 1712 for the Cardinal de Rohan. It is now the national printing works: hence the statue of Gutenberg in the midst. Visitors are allowed to see the house itself once a week, but I have not done so. You will probably not be interfered with if you just step to the inside of the second courtyard to see the bas-relief of the steeds of Apollo. Nos. 102 to 108 in the same street mark the remains of another fine eighteenth-century hôtel. There is also a house which one should see in the lower part of the street, on the south side of the Francs Bourgeois—No. 47, where by penetrating boldly one comes to a perfect little courtyard with some beautiful carvings in it, and, above, a green garden, tended, when I was there, by a Little Sister of the Poor. The principal courtyard has a very interesting bas-relief of Romulus and Remus at their usual meal, and also an old sundial. This palace was built in 1638.

Returning to the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, we find at No. 38 the little impasse already referred to, where the Duc d'Orléans was assassinated. At No. 30 is a very impressive red-brick palace with a courtyard, now a nest of offices and factories, once the hôtel of Jean de Fourcy. A bust of Henri IV. has a place there. At No. 25 on the other side (seen better from the Rue Pavée) is an even more splendid abode—now also cut up into a rookery—the Hôtel de Lamoignon, once Hôtel d'Angoulême, built for Diane, Duchess of Angoulême, daughter of Henri II.: hence the symbols of the chase in the ornamentation. The hotel passed to President de Lamoignon in 1655.

And here is the Carnavalet—the spacious building, with a garden and modern additions, on the left—once the Hôtel des Ligneries, afterwards the Hôtel de Kernevenoy, afterwards the Hôtel de Sévigné, and now the museum of the city of Paris. The only way to understand Paris is to make repeated visits to this treasure-house. You will find new entertainment and instruction every time, because every time you will carry thither impressions of new objects of interest whose past you will want to explore. For in the Carnavalet every phase of the life of the city, from the days of the Romans and the Merovingians to our own, is illustrated in one way or another. The pictures of streets alone are inexhaustible: the streets that one knows to-day as they were yesterday and the day before yesterday and hundreds of years ago; the streets one has just walked through on the way here, in their stages of evolution: such, for example, as the picture of the wooden Pont des Meuniers in 1380 with the Tour Saint-Jacques behind it; the streets with dramas of the Revolution in progress, such as the picture of the emblems of Royalty being burned before the statue of Liberty (where the Luxor column now stands) in the Place de la Concorde on August 10th, 1793; such as the picture of the famous "serment" being taken in the court of the Jeu de Paume on June 20th, 1789; such as the picture of the funeral of Marat. For the perfection of topographical drawing look at the series by F. Hoffbauer. But it is impossible and needless to particularise. The visitor with a topographical or historical bent will find himself in a paradise and will return and return. One visit is ridiculous.

The catalogue, I may say, is not good, therein falling into line with the sculpture catalogue at the Louvre. Everything may be in it, but the arrangement is poor. In such a museum every article and every picture should of course have a description attached, if only for the benefit of the poor visitor, the humblest citizen of Paris whose museum it is.

There are a few works of art here too, as well as topographical drawings. Georges Michel, for example, who looked on landscape much as Méryon looked on architecture and preferred a threatening sky to a sunny one, has a prospect from the Plaine St. Denis. Vollon paints the Moulin de la Galette on Montmartre as it was in 1865; Troyon spreads out St. Cloud. Here also are a charming portrait by Chardin of his second wife; the well-known picture of David's Life School; drawings by Watteau; an adorable unsigned "Marchand de Lingerie"; an enchanting leg on a blue pillow by Boucher; a portrait by Prud'hon of an unknown man, very striking; and some exquisite work by Louis Boilly.

Latude is, however, the popular figure—Latude the prisoner of the Bastille who escaped by means of implements which he made secretly and which are now preserved here, near a portrait of the enfranchised gentleman, robust, portly and triumphant, pointing with one hand to his late prison while the other grasps the rope ladder. Latude's history is an odd one. He was born in 1725, the natural son of a poor girl: after accompanying the army in Languedoc as a surgeon, or surgeon's assistant, he reached Paris in 1748 and proceeded to starve. In despair he hit upon an ingenious trick, which wanted nothing but success to have made him. He prepared an infernal machine of infinitesimal aptitude—a contrivance of practically harmless but perhaps somewhat alarming explosives—and this he sent anonymously to the Marquise de Pompadour, and then immediately after waited upon her in person at Versailles to say that he had overheard some men plotting to destroy her by means of this kind of a bomb, and he had come post-haste to warn her and save her life. It was a good story, but Latude seems to have lacked some necessary gifts as an impostor, for his own share was detected and he was thrown into the Bastille on the 1st of May, 1749. A few weeks later he was transferred to the prison at Vincennes, from which he escaped in 1750. A month later he was retaken and again placed in the Bastille, from which he escaped six years later. He got away to Holland, but was quickly recaptured; and then again he escaped, after nine more years. He was then treated as a lunatic and put into confinement at Charenton, but was discharged in 1777. His liberty, however, seems to have been of little use to him, and he rapidly qualified for gaol again by breaking into a house and threatening its owner, a woman, with a pistol, and he was imprisoned once more. Altogether he was under lock and key for the greater part of thirty-five years; but once he was free in 1784 he kept his head, and not only remained free but became a popular hero, and did not a little, by reason of a heightened account of his sufferings under despotic prison rule, to inflame the revolutionaries. These memoirs, by the way, in the preparation of which he was assisted by an advocate named Thiery, were for the most part untruthful, and not least so in those passages in which Latude described his own innocence and ideals. Our own canonised prison-breaker, Jack Sheppard, was a better hero than this man.

The little room devoted to Napoleon is filled with an intimate melancholy. Many personal relics are here—even to a toothbrush dipped in a red powder. His nécessaires de campagne so compactly arranged illustrate the minute orderliness of his mind, and the workmanship of the travelling cases that hold them proves once again his thoroughness and taste. Everything had to be right. One of his maps of la campagne de Prusse is here; others we shall see at the Invalides.

The relics of Madame de Sévigné, who once lived in this beautiful house, are not very numerous; but they exercise their spell. Her salon is very much as she left it, except that the private staircase has disappeared and a china closet takes its place. Within these walls have La Rochefoucauld and Bossuet conversed; here she sat, pen in hand, writing her immortal letters. "Lisons tout Madame de Sévigné" was the advice of Sainte-Beuve, while her most illustrious English admirer, Edward FitzGerald, often quotes her. He came to her late, not till 1875, but she never loosened her hold. "I have this Summer," he wrote to Mrs. W. H. Thompson, "made the Acquaintance of a great Lady, with whom I have become perfectly intimate, through her Letters, Madame de Sévigné. I had hitherto kept aloof from her, because of that eternal Daughter of hers; but 'it's all Truth and Daylight,' as Kitty Clive said of Mrs. Siddons. Her Letters from Brittany are best of all, not those from Paris, for she loved the Country, dear Creature; and now I want to go and visit her 'Rochers,' but never shall." "I sometimes lament," he says (to Mrs. Cowell), "I did not know her before; but perhaps such an acquaintance comes in best to cheer one toward the end." With these pleasant praises in our ears let us leave the Carnavalet.

The Rue de Sévigné itself has many interesting houses, notably on the south side of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois; No. 11, for example, was once a theatre, built by Beaumarchais in 1790. That is nothing; the interesting thing is that he built it of material from the destroyed Bastille and the destroyed church of St. Paul. The fire station close by was once the Hôtel de Perron de Quincy. It was in this street, on the day of the Fête Dieu in 1392, that the Constable de Clisson, whose house we saw in the Rue des Archives, was attacked by Pierre de Craon.

The Rue des Francs Bourgeois is the highway of the Marais, and the Carnavalet is its greatest possession; but, as I have said, the Marais is inexhaustible in architectural and historical riches. We may work our way through it, back to the Rue du Temple by any of these ancient streets; all will repay. The Rue du Temple extends to the Rue de Rivoli, striking it just by the Hôtel de Ville, but the lower portion, south of the Rue Rambuteau, is not so interesting as the upper. There is, however, to the west of it, just north of the Rue de Rivoli, a system of old streets hardly less picturesque (and sometimes even more so) than the Marais proper, in the centre of which is the church of St. Merry, with one of the most wonderful west fronts anywhere—a mass of rich and eccentric decoration. The Saint himself was Abbot of Autun. He came to Paris in the seventh century to visit the shrines of St. Denis and St. Germain. At that time the district which we are now traversing was chiefly forest, in which the kings of France would hunt, leaving their palace in the Ile de la Cité and crossing the river to this wild district—wild though so near. St. Merry established himself in his simple way near a little chapel in the woods, dedicated to St. Peter, that stood on this spot, and there he died. After his death his tomb in the chapel performed such miracles that St. Peter was forgotten and St. Merry was exalted, and when the time came to rebuild, St. Merry ousted St. Peter altogether.

St. Merry's florid west front is in the Rue St. Martin, once the Roman road from Paris to the north and to England, and by the Rue St. Martin we may leave this district; but between it and the Rue du Temple there is much to see—such as, for example, the Rue Verrerie, south of St. Merry's, the head-quarters of the ancient glassworkers; the Rue Brisemiche, quite one of the best of the old narrow Paris streets, with iron staples and hooks still in the walls at Nos. 20, 23, 26 and 29, to which chains could be fastened so as to turn a street into an impasse during times of stress and thus be sure of your man; the Rue Taillepin, also leading out of the Rue du Cloître St. Merry into the Rue St. Merri, which has some fine old houses of its own, notably No. 36 and the quaint Impasse du Bœuf at No. 10.

Parallel with the Rue St. Merry farther north is the Rue de Venise, which the Vicomte de Villebresme boldly calls the most picturesque in old Paris. Now a very low quarter, it was once literally the Lombard Street of Paris, the chief abode of Lombardy moneylenders, while the long and beautiful Rue Quincampoix, into which it runs on the west, was also a financial centre, containing no less an establishment than the famous Banque of John Law, the Scotchman who for a while early in the eighteenth century controlled French finance. When Law had matured his Mississippi scheme, he made the Rue Quincampoix his head-quarters, and houses in it, we read, that had been let for £40 a year now yielded £800 a month. In the winter of 1719-20 Paris was filled with speculators besieging Law's offices for shares. But by May the crash had come and Law had to fly. Many a house in the Rue Quincampoix, which is now sufficiently innocent of high finance, dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There is a fine doorway at No. 34.

We may regain the Rue St. Martin, just to the east, by the Rue des Lombards, which brings us to the flamboyant front of St. Merry's once more. The Rue St. Martin, which confesses its Roman origin in its straightness, is still busy with traffic, but neither itself nor the Rue St. Denis, two or three hundred yards to the west, is one-tenth as busy as it was before the Boulevard Sebastopol was cut between them to do all the real work. It is a fine thoroughfare and no doubt of the highest use, but what beautiful narrow streets of old houses it must have destroyed! We may note in the Rue St. Martin the pretty fountain at No. 122, and the curious old house at No. 164, and leave it at the church of St. Nicholas-des-Champs, no longer in the fields any more than London's St. Martin's is.

And now after so many houses let us see some pictures!

CHAPTER VI
THE LOUVRE: I. THE OLD MASTERS

The Winged Victory of Samothrace—Botticelli's Fresco—Luini—Ingres—The Salon Carré—La Joconde—Leonardo da Vinci—Pater, Lowell and Vasari—Early Collectors—Paul Veronese—Copyists—The Salle des Primitifs—The Grande Galerie—Landor's Pictorial Creed—The Great Schools—Rembrandt—Van Dyck and Rubens—Amazing Abundance—The Dutch Masters—The Drawings.

It is on the first landing of the Escalier Daru, at the end of the Galerie Denon, that one of the most priceless treasures of the Louvre—one of the most splendid things in the world—is to be found: it has been before us all the way along the Galerie Denon, that avenue of noble bronzes, the first thing that caught the eye: I mean the "Winged Victory of Samothrace". Every one has seen photographs or models of this majestic and exquisite figure, but it must be studied here if one is to form a true estimate of the magical mastery of the sculptor. The Victory is headless and armless and much mutilated; but that matters little. She stands on the prow of a trireme, and for every one who sees her with any imagination must for all time be the symbol of triumphant and splendid onset. The figure no doubt weighs more than a ton—and is as light as air. The "Meteor" in a strong breeze with all her sails set and her prow foaming through the waves does not convey a more exciting idea of commanding and buoyant progress. But that comparison wholly omits the element of conquest—for this is essential Victory as well.

The statue dates from the fourth century b.c. It was not discovered until 1863, in Samothrace. Paris is fortunate indeed to possess not only the Venus of Milo but this wonder of art—both in the same building.

Before entering the picture galleries proper, let us look at two other exceedingly beautiful things also on this staircase—the two frescoes from the Villa Lemmi, but particularly No. 1297 on the left of the entrance to Gallery XVI., which represents Giovanna Tornabuoni and the Cardinal Virtues, and is by Sandro Filipepi, whom we call Botticelli. For this exquisite work alone would I willingly cross the Channel even in a gale, such is its charm. A reproduction of it will be found opposite page 20, but it gives no impression of the soft delicacy of colouring: its gentle pinks and greens and purples, its kindly reds and chestnut browns. One should make a point of looking at these frescoes whenever one is on the staircase, which will be often.

The ordinary entrance to the picture galleries of the Louvre is through the photographic vestibule on the right of the Winged Victory as you face it, leading to the Salle Duchâtel, notable for such differing works as frescoes by Luini and two pictures by Ingres—representing the beginning and end of his long and austere career. The Luinis are delightful—very gay and, as always with this tender master, sweet—especially "The Nativity," which is reproduced opposite page 16. The Ingres' (which were bequeathed by the Comtesse Duchâtel after whom the room is named) are the "Œdipus solving the riddle of the Sphinx," dated 1808, when the painter was twenty-eight, and the "Spring," which some consider his masterpiece, painted in 1856. He lived to be eighty-six. English people have so few opportunities of seeing the work of this master (we have in oils only a little doubtful portrait of Malibran, very recently acquired, which hangs in the National Gallery) that he comes as a totally new craftsman to most of us; and his severity may not always please. But as a draughtsman he almost takes the breath away, and no one should miss the pencil heads, particularly a little saucy lady, from his hand in the His de la Salle collection of drawings in another part of the Louvre.

In the Salle Duchâtel is also a screen of drawings with a very beautiful head by Botticelli in it—No. 48. From the rooms we then pass to the Salon Carré (so called because it is square, and not, as I heard one American explaining to another, after the celebrated collector Carré who had left these pictures to the nation), and this is, I suppose, for its size, the most valuable gallery in the world. It is doubtful if any other combination of collections, each contributing of its choicest, could compile as remarkable a room, for the "Monna Lisa," or "La Joconde," Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the wife of his friend Francesco del Giocondo, which is its greatest glory and perhaps the greatest glory of all Paris too, would necessarily be missing.