France in eighteen hundred and two

The greatest beauty in the world becomes by pollution an odious and repulsive creature. Health and charm flourish only in the practice of virtue and in the abodes of innocence. The prostitute is shunned by every woman of honour and reputation, and dens of vice are avoided by every man to whom virtue is not an empty word.

I am now about to treat of the Palais Royale, that hot-bed of revolution and crime, that nursery of every loathsome vice, that abomination of all virtue and profanation of all religion.

This infernal sink of iniquity is situated in the very centre of Paris, and by certain vicious inhabitants of the capital is considered its brightest ornament, just as the Devils in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” admired the Palace of the Pandemonium. In my last letter I mentioned that Duke of Orleans, who styled himself Philippe Egalité, during the Revolution. This wretch was the proprietor of the Palais Royale. His great grandfather, who was nearly though not quite as great a scoundrel as his great grandson, was the first who made this place the focus for his illicit pleasures; it has ever since been dedicated to Cabal, Bloodshed, Rapine and Debauchery.

During the first moments of the Revolution it was the rendezvous of the desperate, the ambitious and the cut-throat. Political mountebanks, mounted on tables, harangued the people on the Rights of Man. The Palais Royale became the arsenal wherein were forged the instruments of anarchy and murder. Here could an unsophisticated provincial, newly arrived in Paris, listen to provocatives to civil discord and learn those arts by which the repose of France has been disturbed for above ten years. The orators had the words Liberty and Virtue continually in their mouths, but their hearts were rank and rotten to the core, and the real objects they courted were licentiousness and vice.

Their ignorance was only equalled by their effrontery; they talked of subjects they did not understand; they encouraged their countrymen to revolt, they passed their days in exciting the populace to murder, and rioted away their nights in taverns and styes of prostitution. They promoted confusion and civil strife; covetous without economy, and bold without courage, they were deaf to the voice of honour and honesty. The frequenters of this place are in the present day[1] no better than their predecessors. The former march of the Parisian cannibals to Versailles was arranged at and begun from this spot, it was also the rendezvous of the apostles of Marat and the sbirri of Robespierre.

I remember the last interview had in this garden with the mad Colonel Oswald, who asserted that a representation of the people was as great a despotism as absolute monarchy. He asserted as a man could not eat by proxy, so he could not think by proxy. He proposed, therefore, that men and women should assemble in an open plain and there make and repeal laws. I endeavoured to persuade him that his plan was not sufficiently extensive, as he had excluded from this grand assembly the most populous portion of his fellow creatures, i.e., cats, dogs, horses, chickens, sheep, cattle, &c.

Oswald was originally a captain of a Highland regiment in the British service, and when quartered in India lived some considerable time with some Brahmins, who turned his head. From that period he never tasted flesh meat. He did not, however, embrace the whole Brahmin theology, for he was a professed atheist and denied the metempsychosis, and drank plentifully of wine. Such a man, living in a fermented capital, was capable of doing much mischief. He dined on his roots one day at a party of some members of the Convention at which I was present, and coolly proposed, as the most effectual way of averting civil war, to put to death every suspected man in France. I was deeply shocked to hear such a sentiment proceed from the mouth of an Englishman. The expression was not suffered to pass unnoticed, and the famous Thomas Paine remarked: “Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh that you have now a most voracious appetite for blood.”

In consequence of my remarks upon this occasion, Oswald invited me to meet him in the gardens of the Palais Royale. As soon as I arrived I found him already there. He darted forward, drew his sword and exclaimed: “You are not fit to live in civilised society!” Having uttered these words he returned his sword into the scabbard and disappeared in a moment. His regiment was ordered to La Vendée, when, while bravely leading on his men at the battle of Pont-de-Cé, he was killed by a cannon ball; and at the same instant a discharge of grape shot laid both his sons, who served as drummer boys in the corps he commanded, breathless on their father’s corpse. He had two wives, who still reside in Paris. They were both singularly handsome, and, strange to say, lived together in friendship and harmony.

The history of this warrior brings to my recollection a curious rencontre I had in this place with Anarcharsis Clootz, who called himself “Orator of the human race.” For four hours did this man expose his political dreams. In six months the tri-colour flag was to wave over the dome of S. Sophia at Constantinople. A month later it would be seen on Mount Caucasus, and then at St. Petersburg and Pekin.

Paris would be the capital of the world, mankind composed of one family, subordinate to one government, and French be the sole international language.

All this would be accomplished in the short space of three years. Before these wonders could come about Anarcharsis was publicly executed, together with many other fanatics. I have actually heard this man propose at the Jacobin Club that the moment the French army came in sight of the Austrian and Prussian soldiers, they should, instead of attacking the enemy, throw down their own arms and advance towards them, dancing in a friendly manner. Such a measure, he was persuaded, would strike the wretched victims of tyranny with a sentiment of affection, which would be announced by an equally sympathetic movement.

After such a proposition I suspected that the accusation by which he perished, namely that he was a pensioner of the King of Prussia, had some foundation.

Unquestionably Clootz, by his speeches and conduct, cast more ridicule than any man else upon the Revolution. His abominable deification and worship in the Cathedral Church of Notre Dame of an abandoned woman, whom he created Goddess of Reason, and the manœuvres he employed to induce Gobel, Archbishop of Paris, to renounce his character and belief at the bar of the Convention, are proofs either of madness or conspiracy.

The Palais Royale is an immense building, in the form of a parallelogram, within which is a garden distributed into separate gravelled walks. In the piazzas which run along the sides of the edifice are shops, coffee-houses, bagnios, money-changers, gambling-houses, and stockbrokers. The jewellers’ shops are as numerous and brilliant as if neither misery nor miserable human beings existed. You see nothing but chains, half pearl, half diamond. The woollen drapers unfurl from the top of their shops to the floor every kind of stuff. The stuffs are under your hand, no one watching you; and the master is careless and sorry when you ask him the price.

The odour of exquisite ragouts ascends in vapours to the air, the side tables are loaded with fruit, confectionery and pastry, and you may dine to the sound of musical instruments and French horns played by girls who are not nymphs of Diana. Petty gaming-houses support the shops of women who sell garters, lavender water, toothbrushes and sealing-wax. Booksellers’ shops allure the libertine and entrap innocent youth. Pictures from curious collection books, licentious engravings, libidinous novels serve as signs to a crowd of loose women, lodging in the wooden shops. Their nets are ten feet distant from the sauntering youth, idle and already emaciated in the flower of his age. Above the wooden shops are gambling-rooms, where all the passions and torments of hell are assembled.

As soon as the day closes all the arcades are suddenly illuminated, the shops become resplendent and the crowd more numerous. This is the moment when the gaming-houses open under the sanction of the Government and afford it a productive revenue. While the great sharpers are employed in the drawing-rooms above, the lesser ones are at work in the through passages, which communicate with the adjacent street and serve as gliding holes to swarms of pickpockets and money jobbers. Your steps under the arcades are arrested by smoke, which pricks your eyes, it is the kitchen flame of the restaurateurs. Close to them are the balls beginning in subterraneous grottoes. Across the air-holes you see circles of girls, leaping, giggling, rushing on their gallants like Bacchantes. In the auction rooms the brokers, dealers, retailers are all seated. Women’s wigs, chimney pendulums, shawls, handkerchiefs, shirts, beds â la Duchesse were sold to the highest bidder. Spies of the police prowl in every coffee house, but no one dares now talk politics in them. Under the arcades are holes of shops, where young girls attract the passengers by their glances. These places are the assiduous rendezvous of every man fattened by rapine, army contractors, agents, administrators of tontines and lotteries, professors of nocturnal robberies, and stock-jobbers.

These places are to the seraglio what the cookshops are to the restaurateurs. At these latter places you are served by a nod. The dish is placed on the table the moment it is ordered. Private rooms offer you everything to satiate gluttony and sensuality. The glasses which decorate them offer to the libidinous eye of an old satyr the charms of his mistress, and all the seats are elastic. There is a private saloon in which you drink the coolest liquors, and where burnt incense escapes from boxes in light cloudy streams. There you dine à l’Orientale! and find on certain days all the pomp and singularity of a repast of Trimalcion. On a signal given the ceiling opens, and from above descended heathen goddesses in classical attire. The amateurs choose, and the divinities, not of Olympus, but the ceiling, join the mortals.

Such is the infected lazar house, placed in the middle of a great city, which has reduced the whole of society to degradation and corruption. Independently of the fatal contagion of gaming, the excuses of cupidity under all its forms, and the licentiousness of morals, blasphemy and infidelity in every mouth, and at every moment, brutal and depraved language has pervaded every condition and made a sport of sacred words heretofore never pronounced without respect. Everywhere you meet troops of children, without order or modesty, who swear, blaspheme, and scandalise chaste and pious ears. At Sodom and Gomorra they would not have allowed such books to circulate as are printed and sold in the Palais Royale. The infamous work of De Sade,[1] “Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue,” is exposed on every stall, and a hundred other productions, equally distinguished for turpitude and vice, are there to finish the decomposition of what instinctive morality remains in the hearts of young people.

I cannot help expressing the utmost indignation against the compiler of a publication just issued, entitled, “A Practical Guide, during a journey from London to Paris,” in which the writer asserts “that no station, no age, no temper could leave the Palais Royale without an ardent desire to return.” It is proper the English public should not be thus abused by perversions and falsehoods, and on this account I have entered more fully into a detail of the wanton and disgusting scenes at the Palais Royale than their monstrous enormities would otherwise deserve.

Accompanied by an English gentleman, like myself a married man, we visited every part of this Temple of Sin, and we agreed in opinion that as long as it existed it will be vain to look in Paris for any sincere demonstrations of either moral probity, decency in private or honesty in public life. The Government appears sensible of the evil, though they have taken no steps to prevent it. It is believed, and from what I have seen I do not entertain the least doubt upon the subject, that they protect these scenes of voluptuousness for the purpose of enervating the minds and diverting the attentions of the Parisians from the consideration of public affairs.

If this is not the case why should the legislators and the Government be continually preaching up the advantage of morality, and the necessity of establishing a national education system for the encouragement of virtue and the suppression of vice, when they receive at the same time a considerable revenue from the wages of harlots and the profits of gambling-houses? Why is a soldier stationed at the door of every one of these dens of impurity but to demonstrate that they are tolerated? There is another circumstance which is noticeable in the Palais Royale, this is the domineering aspect and conduct of the military, the airs and consequence assumed by the soldiers, and the manifest superiority they affect and maintain over their fellow citizens. Every one makes room for them to pass, the officers strut or saunter along arm in arm, the clinking of their sabres along the pavement announcing their approach warns the servile citizen to make way. The very prostitute, leaning on the arm of the large whiskered regimental pantaloon, feels an importance far above her sisters. She laughs and talks loud, and as she moves exacts from the spectators the ecstatic apostrophe: “Eh! regardez-là, comme elle est belle!”

These things are better ordered in our country, which is at once a land of liberty and of paramount laws. The soldier, with us, comprehends the obligation he owes the laws, and while he displays the utmost loyalty to his sovereign he associates under the idea of duty a regard for his fellow subjects. I cannot conclude this subject without noticing a remark made to me by one of the founders of the French Revolution, an ex-Bishop and now a member of the Senate.