It was this song, perhaps, which really fixed the name of the deadly weapon. So far, however, the Assembly, as we have seen, had come to no decision on the subject, having simply decreed the principle of equality in criminal punishments. The question of the mode of execution was entrusted for discussion to a special committee. On the 21st of September, 1791, after lengthy debate, the Assembly adopted the new penal code, of which one clause provided that every criminal sentenced to death should have his head cut off. The method of decapitation now remained to be decided. Hitherto the instrument employed had been the sword or the axe. This ghastly operation had been performed on a block, and clumsiness or emotion on the part of the executioner had sometimes caused the victim indescribably horrible tortures. Instances had occurred in which the criminal’s head had not been severed from his body till the sixth or seventh stroke.
This question greatly preoccupied the Assembly. Ministers openly expressed the horror with which decapitation by the sword inspired them; and the executioner himself published, in reference to the disadvantages of this method, a number of observations tinged with similar abhorrence. At length the Committee of Legislation called upon the celebrated surgeon Louis to draw up a report on the subject, indicating the fittest methods for cutting off a person’s head rapidly and according to the principles of science.
The witty Sophie Arnould, meeting once, as she walked through a wood, some physician of her acquaintance, with a gun under his arm, inquired of him: “Do you not find your prescriptions sufficient?” and it seems droll enough that, whilst the mission of doctors is, theoretically at least, to preserve life, a surgeon should have been selected by the Assembly to prescribe the fastest method of taking it. Yet, after all, the selection was prompted by humanity; for the infliction of death is a sufficiently sad necessity of State without the addition of needless torture. Dr. Louis in any case drew up his report, and presented it to the Assembly on the 20th of March, 1792. He set forth, in the first place, that cutting instruments are in reality nothing but saws of a more or less fine description, having very little effect when they strike perpendicularly, and that it was consequently necessary in executions to apply them in an oblique and gliding fashion. Adopting, {329} therefore, the idea propounded by Guillotin—whom he did not even name in the report—he maintained that decapitation, in order to be surely effected, must be the direct act, not of a man, but of a machine, the adoption of which he now recommended. He mentioned a machine then employed in England which was, in fact, a rude sort of guillotine, and suggested several improvements in connection with it. Nor, indeed, was the notion of such an instrument by any means new. Some very old German prints exist representing executions performed in a similar fashion. The Italians employed in the sixteenth century, for the beheading of noble criminals, a machine called the mannaja, consisting of two upright posts, between which was fixed a sliding knife or cleaver, of great weight, designed to descend with enormous force and velocity on the neck of the prisoner leaning over a block below.
Dr. Louis did not content himself with preparing this report. He hired a German mechanician, named Schmidt, to construct at his directions a machine which, after a succession of improvements, was definitely adopted. The first experiments were made at Bicêtre, on animals—which reminds one inevitably of Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s executioner, who resolved first to practise on inferior beasts, and then to work his way up through the whole of animate creation until he was artist enough to behead a king. Schmidt, by the way, charged the State 824 livres (francs) for constructing those earliest machines, undertaking, moreover, to superintend their installation in the various departments.
Originally the new instrument was sometimes called the Louisette, after the name of its actual creator. But guillotine was already the common title, and it soon became universal, as well as technical and official. Dr. Guillotin seems never to have protested against this appellation, though it is probable that during the troubles which were so close at hand he would fain have divested himself of the infamy which enshrouded him. As to Dr. Louis, he was fortunate enough not to witness a single political execution, for he died on the 20th of May, 1792.
The guillotine took its first human life on the 25th of April, 1792. The subject was a highwayman named Nicolas-Jacques-Pelletier. The Chronique de Paris said next day of this execution:—“The novelty of the execution had considerably enlarged that crowd of people whom a barbarous pity is wont to draw to these sad spectacles. The new machine has been justly preferred to the old methods of execution. It does not stain any man’s hand with the murder of his fellow, and the promptitude with which it strikes the criminal is in the spirit of law, which may often be severe, but ought never to be cruel.”
The first political execution took place on the night of 21st August, 1792, at ten o’clock, to the flare of torches. The victim was Louis David Collenot d’Agremont, put to death for having been seen amongst the enemies of the people on the eventful day of the 10th August. This execution marked the commencement of an era of relentless and bloody feuds; but it was not until the establishment of the revolutionary tribunal, on 7th April, 1793, that the guillotine began to ply its deadly blade in such fearful earnest. From that moment to the 28th July the total number of persons executed was 2,625.
The earliest political executions had for their scene the Place du Carrousel, whilst ordinary criminals continued to be decapitated on the Place de Grève. On the 10th May, 1793, the Convention, sitting then at the Tuileries, just opposite the ugly guillotine, called upon the Executive Council to choose another site. The Commune selected the Place de la Révolution (Concorde), where the guillotine was in operation until the 12th June, 1794. It was then erected in the Place du Trône. Some persons had suggested the Bastille; but in the eyes of the people this was a place which had acquired an almost sacred character. Under the Empire and the Restoration the guillotine stood on the Place de Grève, and under Louis Philippe at the Barrière St. Jacques, whilst to-day it is transferred to the Place de la Roquette.
During the Reign of Terror the French nation was so familiarised with the idea of violent death that executions did not produce the same feeling of horror as at ordinary times. And now the real character of the Frenchman began to assert itself. In the gaols it became a favourite diversion with the prisoners to “play at the guillotine.” People gave burlesque names to the horrible machine, such as “national razor,” etc. It is even said that ear-rings in the shape of miniature guillotines were now largely worn by fashionable ladies. Within their Paris mansions aristocrats were accustomed to kill the time by means of a toy guillotine, which was placed on the table during dessert. Beneath this instrument were passed in succession several puppets, {330} whose heads, representing those of leading Paris magistrates, liberated from the hollow trunk, as they rolled off the block, a red liquid like blood. All present, and especially the ladies, thereupon saturated their handkerchiefs with the fluid, which contained a highly agreeable scent.
Under the Government of the Commune of Paris, the mob seized the guillotine and burnt it in the open street. Of late years the Paris executioner has distinctly improved the instrument. The scaffold, which was once an adjunct to it, has quite disappeared, and the criminal has no longer to climb a rude staircase before placing himself beneath the knife.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE EXECUTIONER.
The Executioner—His Taxes and Privileges—Monsieur de Paris—Victor of Nîmes.
THE executioner is one of the most curious, interesting, and important figures in the history of France in general and of Paris in particular. Going back to the thirteenth century, we find that there already existed an individual whose duty it was to whip, hang, behead, break on the wheel, and burn in the name of the law. He was then called the Executioner of High Justice, and every bailiwick possessed such a functionary. An ordinance of 1264 against blasphemers provides that “anyone who has offended by word or deed shall be beaten, naked, with rods; that is to say, men by a man, and women by a woman, without the presence of any man.” Hence some historians have inferred that the office of bourrelle, or female executioner, existed. This is an error; though it is quite true that the wife or the daughter of the bourreau was usually preferred for the duty of whipping female misdemeanants. As to the rest, an elaborate apprenticeship had to be gone through by the executioner before he was deemed fit for his work, the law stipulating that he must be competent to whip, quarter, break on the wheel, fork, clip off ears, gibbet, dismember, and so forth. For a long time the executioner wore a special costume—a cassock wrought in the colours peculiar to the town in which he operated, and bearing in front the representation of a gibbet, and, behind, that of the scaffold staircase—emblems somewhat too obvious of his infamous profession. So soon as the office of bourreau was permanently established, large taxes were enfeoffed to him, and the executioners of France now became so jealous of their prerogatives that one of them in 1560 sued a gentleman at law because, seizing a thief who tried to take his purse, he had drawn his sword and cut off the rascal’s ear. In thus acting the gentleman was accused of having infringed on the executioner’s rights and invaded his profession, the ear technically belonging to the executioner as one of his perquisites. No less curious than manifold were the taxes and privileges of all kinds enjoyed by this functionary. When he performed an execution on the domain of a monastery he was entitled, amongst other things, to the head of a pig; and the Abbé of Saint-Germain paid him an annual tax of this kind. The heads, moreover, of any pigs found straying in the streets or highways of Paris belonged to the executioner. During the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the Parisians had permitted their pigs to stroll about in the public thoroughfares; but when the son of Louis le Gros was killed by a fall from his horse, which had stumbled over one of these wandering animals, it was forbidden thenceforth to allow them outside their owners’ premises—though an exception was made in favour of the monks of Saint-Antoine, who were still at liberty to let out their pigs, which were distinguished by a peculiar mark on the ear. Any pig found walking abroad without this mark was now seized by the executioner, who could demand either its head, or, in lieu thereof, four sous. Another of his curious privileges was to levy a tax on young women leading objectionable lives. He received duty, moreover, on the goods vended by different classes of shopkeepers, and could walk into their shops and help himself to a certain fraction of their stock. Still more extraordinary than any hitherto mentioned was the tax he levied on all sick persons living in the suburbs of Paris, who were compelled {331} to pay him four sous apiece every quarter. Some of the tolls taken at bridges went into his pocket. He was permitted to despoil the criminals he put to death. At first he could only take possession of what they had upon them above the girdle; but ultimately he obtained everything. Besides the innumerable imposts and perquisites of all kinds belonging to his office, he received a fixed fee for each execution. This, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was 15 sous. In 1721 his taxes were for the most part abolished, and in lieu thereof an annual salary of 16,000 francs was assigned to him; though, out of this sum, he had to keep two assistants. In 1793 the National Convention entirely reformed the criminal legislation so far as concerned the executioner. By a decree of 13th June it decided that there should be an executioner to every department of the Republic. He was to be remunerated at the expense of the State. In towns with a population not exceeding 50,000 he was to receive a salary of 2,400 francs, besides another 1,600 francs for two assistants (in the departments), or 4,000 francs for four assistants (at Paris). In the French capital today the bourreau has a fixed salary of 5,000 francs, and 10,000 francs for the maintenance of his formidable machine.
The executioner is still regarded in France with much of the abhorrence which has always been felt for him; but although he is an outcast from the ordinary world, admission to churches, theatres, promenades, and public places generally is not to-day, as it once was, denied to him. Whenever his place becomes vacant there is a rush of candidates for it more multitudinous and more eager than for any other State office whatsoever. To be “Monsieur de Paris,” as the executioner is styled, seems the pinnacle of ambition with only too large a section of the public. Once, indeed, the post of bourreau, although not, as some have imagined, hereditary, remained long in the same family; and that of Sanson produced seven generations of executioners, from 1688 to 1847. The post has seldom been a sinecure, and it was particularly far from being so during the centuries which followed the thirteenth. Thence, until the eighteenth, the executioner was a terribly busy man, hanging, quartering, and otherwise judicially massacring with scarcely a cessation. Kings with many enemies would sometimes make a pet of him. Louis XI. took a particular fancy to Tristan, whom he called his colleague. This man, by the way, had a genius for his ghastly business, chopping off heads with a dexterity well calculated to excite the favour of a king who had determined that all heads should fall which were difficult to bend.
It was not only upon the persons of criminals that the executioner had to operate. He was sometimes required to burn or behead dummies representing offenders who had eluded capture. Peter the Cruel, King of Castile, having killed one of his subjects, was condemned to death. But as the person of the king was sacred, he was only executed in effigy, the bourreau beheading with his sword an image intended to represent him.
The public executioner has generally been more loathed in France than even in England. And justly so; for in the former country his work for many centuries has been peculiarly infamous, not to say diabolical. In the present day, it is true, “Monsieur de Paris” simply touches a button and his victim, without a struggle or a pang, is no more. But he was not always so humane. Once it was his own hand that dealt slow death and inflicted fiendish torture. It was he who quartered the condemned wretch—who attached horses, that is to say, to his legs and arms, and then drove them in four different directions. It was he who burned or broke on the wheel—the latter an indescribably ghastly operation, in which he used an iron bar to break almost every bone in the victim’s body. It is not surprising, therefore, that even to-day “Monsieur de Paris,” with such a history behind him, should be the object of a detestation which Ketch himself, or Marwood, failed to excite.
The Revolution of 1789, although it swept away his privileges, completely rehabilitated that bourreau whose services it was so frequently to require; and a decree of the Convention decided that thenceforth this functionary should be admitted to the rank of officer in the army. It was even proposed to confer upon him, as executioner, a new and finer title—that of “National Avenger”; and M. Matton de la Varenne was quite eloquent in his praise. “What would become of society?” he said; “of what use would be the judges, of what avail authority, if an active and legitimate force did not exist to avenge outrages committed upon citizens whom it is the care of the law to protect? If the punishment of the guilty is dishonourable to those who administer it, the magistrate who has pronounced the sentence, the {332} notary who has drawn it up, the protractor and the criminal lieutenant who cause it to be executed beneath their eyes should bear part of the dishonour. Why should he who puts the last hand to the work be reputed infamous for duties which are simply the complement of those of the magistrate?” The argument was specious enough; but the difference between the two functionaries named is, after all, precisely the difference existing between a civic corporation which decrees that its town shall be kept clean, and the scavenger whom it hires to scrape the streets.
However, the bourreau became for a time an influential and admired personage. He was sometimes invited to dine at distinguished tables, and embraced as a favourite guest. Ultimately he figured as an autobiographer. The last of the Sansons wrote his own memoirs, together with those of his ancestors, executioners like himself. By no means the least curious fact in the history of the bourreau is that, in former days, he killed with one hand and healed with the other. He was a physician, that is to say; and at his dispensary, in the intervals between his murderous operations, he dealt out medicines to poor people who flocked to him for advice. By far the most famous of these medical bourreaux was Victor of Nîmes. His scientific reputation spread even beyond the boundaries of France. One day an Englishman called upon him for a consultation. This patient had a twisted neck, and had come over to place himself under the treatment of the once-famous school of Montpelier. After having endured all sorts of experiments, he found that his head showed no sign of resuming its normal position, and therefore, wishing his tormentors good day, he went on to Victor. “Can you cure me?” he inquired. The executioner examined him, and then said: “It is a simple case of torticolis. Nothing is easier than to cure you if you will confide in me, and do whatever I command.” The Englishman consented; and after certain preliminaries both surgeon and patient passed from the consulting-room into a more retired apartment. That Victor, besides being a surgeon, was a humorist, seems beyond question. The room now entered was remarkable for nothing in particular—with one exception, namely, that from the ceiling hung a rope, at the end of which was a noose. The doctor ordered his patient to put his head in this noose. For a long time the Englishman hesitated and protested; ultimately he obeyed. Then Victor tightened the noose, hoisted his subject high up in the air, and, using the victim’s legs as a kind of trapeze, went through the most frightful gymnastic exercises. At the end of a quarter of an hour—a mauvais quart d’heure for our countryman—the performance concluded, and the patient was let down—cured.{333}
CHAPTER XXXI.
PÈRE-LACHAISE.
The Cemeteries of Clamart and Picpus—Père-Lachaise—La Villette and Chaumont—The Conservatoire—Rue Laffitte—The Rothschilds—Montmartre—Clichy.
BEFORE crossing the river to the left bank, we must say a few words about some of those districts of Paris which are reached naturally, and as a matter of course, by the great thoroughfares; the ancient estate, for instance, of Mont-Louis, where, for the last two centuries, has been established the cemetery known as Père-Lachaise.
The cemeteries of Paris may be distinguished locally, or by the special character belonging to several of them. Each important district has its own cemetery: that of Montmartre, for instance, on the north, that of Mont-Parnasse on the south of Paris. The cemetery of Clamart was reserved, until the Revolution, for the bodies, dissected or undissected, of those who had died in hospital. It is now the last resting-place of criminals who have passed beneath the guillotine. The Picpus cemetery, at present a more or less private cemetery in which only privileged persons are buried, was formerly a place of interment for those who had distinguished themselves in insurrections and civil wars. There reposes La Fayette in the earth of the locality mingled with earth sent from America, in memory of the important part played by La Fayette in the American War of Independence.
Père-Lachaise, the most celebrated and most interesting of all the cemeteries, owes its name to the famous confessor of Louis XIV., who proposed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—the edict which accorded a certain toleration to the Protestants of France—and who celebrated the secret marriage of Louis XIV. to Mme. de Maintenon. Father Lachaise was a Jesuit with whom the idea of toleration could find no favour. The Duke de Saint-Simon, in his famous memoirs, gives a very favourable account of him, and while describing him as a “strong Jesuit,” adds that he was “neither fanatical nor fawning.” Although he advised the king to revoke the Edict of Nantes, he was no party to the active persecution by which the revocation was followed.{334}
The burial-ground of Père-Lachaise occupies the ancient domain of Mont-Louis, a property given to Father Lachaise by the king, and which in time became known exclusively by the name of its owner. It is for the most part an aristocratic cemetery. Although it contains monuments characterised by a solemnity befitting the idea of eternity, it is by no means the depressing, melancholy, awe-inspiring place which one might expect so vast a necropolis to be. On the one side wealth lies buried, on the other indigence. In juxtaposition to magnificent monuments, shaded with shrubs and graced with flowers, is the common trench, formed by two immense dikes dug in a sterile soil, where the poor sleep their last. There nothing but cold and dreary solitude meets the eye; whilst a few paces off stand Gothic chapels, sarcophagi, pyramids, obelisks, and artistic emblems of every kind—objects expressive, for the most part, of posthumous pride. Here social distinctions are marked with an ostentation painful to see: titles, coats of arms, escutcheons appearing in the marble or the stone. As to the inscriptions, these, written in a variety of styles—now pompous, now epigrammatic, now melodramatic—are frequently fantastic and seldom appropriate. Common to all the epitaphs, however widely they differ in other respects, is the uniform virtue which they ascribe to their subjects. In this connection a few words from the caustic pen of M. Benjamin Gastineau deserve reproduction. “At Père-Lachaise,” he says, “you find nothing but good fathers, good mothers, good brothers, good husbands, faithful wives, true friends, noble hearts, angels flown to heaven, white flowers, chaste spouses, seraphim of perfection. Not a traitor, not a coward, not a hypocrite, not a knave, not an egotist!”
The tombs of Père-Lachaise are frequently remarkable, not merely as fine specimens—or even masterpieces—of sculptural art, but on account of the illustrious personages who slumber beneath them. The magnificent tomb of Héloise and Abailard would justify a page of description, whilst the story of their romantic love sufficed, as we know, to inspire even the frigid pen of Alexander Pope with passion. From this ancient tomb a few steps will take the visitor into the company of the illustrious dead of a later day. Here is the monument of Frederick Soulié, the vehement and impassioned novelist—a simple marble slab, surmounted by a cross, and eloquently inscribed with his mere name. The tomb of the composer Chopin is not far off. In the front appears a medallion portrait of this brilliant genius, whilst, on the tomb itself, Cleslinger has sculptured a poetic figure, breaking the lyre he bears, and in an attitude of profound despair. Hard by is the tomb of Vivant Denon. Upon it his statue, by Cartelier, stands, still smiling with that smile which, as a French historian has ingeniously said, “pleased, turn by turn, Louis XV., Mme. de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XVI., Robespierre, and Napoleon.”
The most sumptuous monument in the cemetery is that of the Russian Princess, Demidoff. Its height is prodigious. Its semi-Oriental architecture, at once severe and beautiful, is highly imposing. It consists of a rich temple adorned with ten columns of white Carrara marble, supporting a magnificent canopy. On the sarcophagus rests a crown. This monument is said to have cost 120,000 francs.
The stage is represented in this silent city. Here sleeps Mlle. Duchenois, once the rival of Mlle. Georges. At no great distance from where she lies a chapel stands over the remains of the last great Célimène, Mlle. Mars; whilst the name inscribed on a little sarcophagus in the Greek style shows us that even Talma had to die.
Among the host of illustrious names inscribed on the stones of Père-Lachaise must be mentioned those of Laharpe, Beaumarchais, Molière, and La Fontaine. The relics of the two last were transferred to this cemetery at the same time as those of Héloise. Nor, finally, can we forget the monument raised to the famous General Foy. In the inscription which it bears an ingenious and eloquent use is made of the General’s celebrated utterance in the Chamber of Representatives: “Yesterday I said I would not yield except to force. To-day I come to keep my word.”
The cemetery of Père-Lachaise has two special quarters: one reserved for Protestants, the other for Jews. The monuments of the former present, by their austere simplicity, a striking contrast to the elegant or sumptuous mausoleums in the Catholic burial-ground. Most of the tombs bear, as their sole emblem, a representation of the Bible, open at a page reflecting upon the ultimate way of all flesh. The Jewish cemetery is situated behind the monument of Héloise and Abailard. On entering it the visitor sees, to the right, a funeral chapel in the Greek style, which is the tomb of Rachel. Further on, to the left, is that of the Rothschild family.
Lastly, at the summit of the hill of Père-Lachaise, covering an area {335} newly annexed, is the Mussulman cemetery, provided with a mosque. The Princess of Oude and one of her relatives were its first occupants.
On the 27th of May, 1871, Père-Lachaise became the scene of a horrible slaughter. Five days previously the Army of Versailles had penetrated into Paris. The troops of the Commune, despite a desperate resistance, had had to withdraw to one or two points of retreat: among others to Père-Lachaise. On the 27th some battalions of Marines, forming part of the corps of General Vinoy, invaded the cemetery. There was a fearful hand-to-hand fight over the tombs. Into the very vaults the marines pursued the insurgents who had spiked their guns and fled. Two days afterwards the cemetery was a litter of broken weapons, empty bottles, and other profane rubbish.
During the last few years a corner of the cemetery of Père-Lachaise has been set apart for cremations. Paris, which claims to be first in so many things and which is so often justified in these pretensions, did not establish a crematorium until long after the city of Milan had done so.
To the north of Père-Lachaise extend the hillsides of Ménilmontant and Belleville, commanding, from innumerable points, a magnificent view, and memorable for the defence of Paris conducted from these heights in 1814. Belleville is the scene of more than one remarkable incident in the novels of Paul de Kock, the Maid of Belleville being as much associated with this suburban eminence as the Maid of Orleans with that of Montmartre. The vast region of Belleville and Ménilmontant is chiefly inhabited by the workpeople of Paris, who have here their headquarters. Close at hand is the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, communicating in a direct line with the Rue Saint-Antoine—street and faubourg both celebrated in the annals of popular insurrection. The streets and faubourgs of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin belong equally to the workmen’s quarter, which includes, moreover, La Villette and Chaumont, with its quarries. Here all the vagabonds and malefactors of Paris used at one time to seek refuge. Napoleon III., who systematically made war upon this class of the population, cleared the Buttes Chaumont and caused the slopes to be covered with picturesque gardens. In the valley is an artificial lake fed by one of the tributaries of the Saint-Martin canal. The gardens of the Buttes Chaumont belong to what used to be known as the District of the Fights, or Quartier des Combats, so called from the fights between dogs and bulls or other animals which here took place until the time of the Revolution. These, with some modifications, were continued up to the first years of Louis Philippe’s reign. Here Jules Janin found the subject of his famous novel, “L’âne mort et la femme guillotinée”—a story written, according to some, in order to turn into ridicule the sensational novelists of the day; according to others, with the view of attracting and forcing attention by means of exaggerated and monstrous sensationalism.
Returning from the heights which bound Paris on the north, by the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, we find at the corner of this street and of the Rue Bergère the building in which has existed, since the Revolution, the National Conservatory of Music and Declamation. The great musical academy had its origin in a school of singing and declamation established in 1784 in order to prepare singers for the Opéra. To this institution was added in 1786 a school of dramatic declamation, which had the honour of producing Talma. But the Conservatory of Music, as it now exists, owes its organisation to the Revolution. Founded in virtue of a decree dated August 3rd, 1795, it had for its first director the illustrious Cherubini, who was replaced by Auber, to whom has succeeded M. Ambroise Thomas, the composer of Mignon and of Hamlet. The students are admitted by competition, and the teaching is gratuitous. Prizes are adjudged every year, and of these the most important is the so-called Prix de Rome, which enables its holder to study for a certain number of years in the great Italian city. The concerts of the Conservatoire are famous throughout Europe; and fortunate indeed is the visitor to Paris who can succeed in obtaining a place at concerts which are supported and attended exclusively (except, of course, in case of forced absence) by permanent subscribers. The orchestra which takes part in these concerts is of the finest quality, the principal instruments being all in the hands of the professors of the establishment—the first instrumentalists, that is to say, of France.
The Rue Laffitte, formerly known as the Rue d’Artois, by which, in the neighbourhood of the Conservatoire, one reaches the best part of the Boulevard, has, since the Revolution of 1830, borne the name of the celebrated banker and politician whose mansion was the rendezvous of the Opposition Deputies during the so-called “days of July.” {336} Laffitte is, in some sense, the hero of a charming tale published by the so-called Saint-Germain under the title of “Story of a Pin.” At the office of a Paris banker, a young man in search of employment has been refused by reason of there being no vacancy. As, however, he goes away in a dejected mood, he is seen to pick up a pin; and this indication of order and economy has such an effect upon the banker that he is called back and at once appointed to a supplementary chair. It is said that a friend of Laffitte’s, also out of employment, hearing of the success of this “pin trick,” as he termed it, resolved to try it himself. At the next office where he applied for a situation his conversation and general demeanour so pleased the principal that he was all but engaged, when, in order to determine the matter, he went through the gesture of picking up a pin—which he had held all the time between his fingers. “What was that?” asked the head of the firm. “A pin,” was the reply. “A pin?” repeated the principal. “A man who would take a pin out of my office would take a cheque. Good morning, sir.”
Laffitte was the most generous of millionaires. One of the Rothschilds assured the famous actress Rachel that if he had lent money to everyone who asked him he should at last have had to borrow five francs of her. This was in all probability the mere plea of Dives, unwilling to be too much put upon by Lazarus. Laffitte seems to have been ready to lend to anyone who really deserved assistance; and a strange story is told of his advancing a sum of money to an officer of whom he knew nothing. The officer had been gambling and had lost 5,000 francs which did not belong to him. It was necessary to restore this amount to the regimental chest or be for ever disgraced. Laffitte listened to the officer’s story, counted out to him the 5,000 francs, and took a receipt, together with a promise that the money should be repaid at the rate of 250 francs a year. “It will take you a long time to pay it off at that rate,” said Laffitte, “and who knows whether you will ever bring {337} me the first instalment?” The officer, however, swore that he would keep his word—and, exactly to the day when the first payment became due, brought to the banker his first 250 francs. Laffitte, however, while complimenting him on his punctuality, declared himself unable to receive such a contemptibly small sum, and told his debtor to keep it for another year, when he must bring him 500. On the officer’s return, at the expiration of another twelvemonth, with the increased amount, Laffitte exclaimed: “Yes; I see you are a man of honour. Keep the money and take back your note of hand.” It is to be hoped that Heine, living in Paris at the time, heard this story, though he did not profit by its teaching; for it was one of his amusing if cynical maxims, that a man had more chance of getting a loan from a poor friend, anxious to appear better off than he really was, than from a rich one whose pecuniary position was above question.
After the Revolution of 1830 Laffitte was appointed Minister of Finance and President of the Council. This just man could not, however, succeed in pleasing either of the sections into which the Chamber was divided. His own party thought him too lukewarm, too unprogressive, while the Legitimists could not forget his alliance with the party of Revolution.
The Rue Laffitte may well be regarded as the headquarters of finance, for, in addition to the banking-house of Laffitte, the French branch of the Rothschilds has here for more than half a century been domiciled. The Rothschilds of Paris, like those of London, Frankfort, Vienna, and Naples, are descendants of the Mayer-Rothschilds who founded the first of the Rothschild banking-houses at Frankfort a century ago. Born at Frankfort-on-the-Maine in 1743, Mayer Anselm Rothschild belonged to a Jewish family of small means. He received, nevertheless, a good education and studied for some time with the view of becoming a Rabbi. Commerce and finance had, however, greater attractions for him than the Law and the Prophets, and, thanks to his industry and intelligence, he soon found himself the possessor of a small amount of capital. He had established himself in the Juden-gasse; and here, faithfully assisted by his young wife, he occupied himself with dealings of the most varied kinds. He had familiarised himself with financial operations at a bank where he had been engaged as clerk; and after his marriage he quickly became known by his enterprise, honesty, and tact to the great financial houses of Frankfort, Mayence, and Darmstadt, who often entrusted him with important commissions. Mayer Rothschild was forty-six years of age when the French Revolution broke out; and it was in the midst of the troubles caused by this great convulsion that he found his first great opportunity of enriching himself. Immediately after the Reign of Terror, when, in 1794, the French armies were replying to the German invasion by themselves invading Germany, the smaller German princes became panic-stricken, and fled with such haste towards the Elbe that some of them had not time to carry away all their gold. Among the illustrious fugitives was the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, who possessed more ready money than all his brethren of the German Federation united. Finding it imprudent, if not impossible, to take with him in his travelling-carriage heaps of silver and gold, he resolved to place a portion of his treasure in the hands of trustworthy persons, and one of those selected was Mayer Rothschild of Frankfort. Two millions of florins were confided to him on the simple understanding that he should restore the money at the conclusion of peace. The war, however, lasted for years; and during this period the talents confided to the Hebrew banker were not allowed to lie buried in a napkin. He put them out at interest, made loans to the Governments and to the military commanders and commissaries on all sides; speculated, in short, with the money carefully and judiciously, without permitting himself to be influenced by any of the prejudices of patriotism. Ubi bene, ibi patria, was the motto of the Hebrew at the beginning of the century, and naturally enough; for in a privileged society he was without privileges and almost without rights. Every career was closed to him except those of medicine and money-making; and in making money it was enough for the Hebrew to make it lawfully. There is no record of Mayer Rothschild’s having lent anything to the French Republic, which had liberated the Jews from every burden, every disability, weighing upon them in other countries. But he made advances to Napoleon and also, with fine impartiality, to England, Napoleon’s most consistent foe. Any prince, moreover, reigning or deposed, could, if he possessed the requisite security, count upon the Frankfort financier for pecuniary aid.{338}
When peace was established, the Elector of Hesse-Cassel received back the whole of his capital with a fair amount of interest, and Mayer Rothschild was able to congratulate himself on having benefited alike the Elector and himself.
War had broken out again, and Napoleon had undertaken that campaign against Russia which was to bring him to ruin, when Mayer Rothschild died, like a patriarch, surrounded by his ten children. He had never quitted his house in the Juden-gasse, and, millionaire as he now was, had never abandoned the long, characteristic frock-coat of the Frankfort Jews.
Of the ten children surrounding the bed of the dying financier, five were sons—Anselm, Solomon, Nathan, Charles, and James. In giving them his last blessing he exhorted them to live together in the most perfect harmony: a command which was to be religiously obeyed. The five brothers formed in common an immense banking house, with the central establishment at Frankfort, and four branches at Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris. To undertake no important operation without the consent of all the partners, to be content with a relatively small profit, to leave nothing to chance, to be always punctual and exact—such were the principles by which they were to be guided; and in formally adopting them they took this motto: Concordia, Industria, Integritas.
The events of 1813 and 1814 offered to this fraternal association admirable opportunities. It was applied to for loans, first by the coalition of Powers marching against France, and, after Napoleon’s final defeat, by the new monarchical Government of France, in view of the war indemnity. From this moment the house of Rothschild assumed colossal proportions. It seemed to hold Europe at every point, and no important financial operation could be undertaken without its consent and aid. The Emperor of Austria ennobled the brothers Rothschild in 1815, at the time of the Vienna Conferences, and in 1822 created them barons and appointed them consuls-general for Austria in the different cities where they were established.
Of Mayer Rothschild’s five sons, Baron Anselm, the eldest, born at Frankfort in 1773, assumed, after the death of his father, the direction of the Frankfort bank, and while remaining at its head took an active part in founding the four branch houses at Paris, London, Vienna, and Naples. He died at Frankfort in 1855. Baron Solomon de Rothschild, Mayer Rothschild’s second son, born at Frankfort in 1774, died at Paris in 1855. After founding the branch bank of Vienna, he directed, in concert with his brother Anselm, most of the great financial operations undertaken in Germany. He was an intimate friend of Prince Metternich’s, and his son, Baron Anselm Solomon, became, less from political tastes than in virtue of his rank, a member of the Austrian Reichsrath.
After quitting Vienna, Baron Solomon, the father, went to Paris, where, in association with his brother James, he undertook the management of the French bank. His son, the before-mentioned Baron Anselm Solomon, died at Vienna in 1874, leaving behind him one of the finest art galleries in the world. He had three sons, Nathaniel, Ferdinand, and Albert, the last-named of whom took the direction of the Vienna bank.
Baron Nathan de Rothschild, brother of the preceding, was born at Frankfort in 1777, and died there in 1836. His father, the founder of the family, had sent him as early as 1798 to England, where, after passing some years at Manchester, he established himself in London in 1806. After the death of his father he remained at the head of the London house, and played a considerable part in the great financial operations undertaken by the five brothers in common. In 1813 he lent large sums to the English Government, as well as to England’s allies, and, after the peace, was, like his four brothers, appointed consul-general for Austria, and created baron. Nathan, who, by the way, never made use of his title, died at Frankfort in 1836, and was succeeded in the direction of the London house by Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Baron Charles de Rothschild, the fourth of the five brothers, was born at Frankfort in 1788, and died at Naples in 1855. He directed the Naples bank from its first establishment until his death. He reconstructed the finances of Piedmont and Tuscany, and, in association with his brothers, borrowed for the Roman Government between 1831 and 1856 some 200,000,000 francs.
Baron James de Rothschild, the last of the brothers, born at Frankfort-on-the-Maine in 1792, died at Paris in 1868. It is with him we have chiefly to do, since it was he who in the year 1812, immediately after the death of his father, established at Paris the great banking house which now forms one of the most striking features of the Rue Laffitte. The post of consul-general for Austria was given to him in 1822. Under the Restoration, in December, 1823, Baron James subscribed for a loan of nearly five hundred millions, and, in association with {339} his brothers, he undertook nearly all the important loans issued in Portugal, Prussia, Austria, France, Italy, and Belgium. He rendered important financial aid to the French Government under the reign of Louis Philippe, and during the Second Empire. It was Baron James de Rothschild, moreover, who furnished the brothers Pereire with the sums necessary for the construction of the first railways in France.
Falsely accused of having speculated in corn during the dearth of 1847, he had reason to fear, at least for a time, after the Revolution of 1848, that he could no longer live safely at Paris. His house was pillaged and burnt, and he was indeed on the point of quitting France, when the Prefect of Police, Caussidière, persuaded him to stay, and placed at his disposal a picket of the Republican Guard, which was stationed in the courtyard of his mansion night and day. The baron gave 50,000 francs towards the relief of the wounded of February, illuminated his house to show that he was not hostile to Republican institutions, and tranquilly continued his operations at the bank. When Caussidière, obliged to leave France, decided to set up as a wine merchant in London, Baron James, mindful of the service he had rendered him, did not, it is true, offer him a present of money, which might have been refused, but in the handsomest manner ordered such large annual consignments of wine from him, that Caussidière could thenceforth have lived comfortably without selling a drop of his stuff to any other customer. The baron never boasted of this action, but the wine merchant took delight in telling the story of his patron’s delicate gratitude. Thanks to his state loans, to his banking and exchange transactions, and to the great commercial enterprises which he had created or protected, the financier had amassed enormous wealth. He richly endowed or founded all kinds of Jewish institutions, notably a vast hospital in the Rue Picpus, and the synagogue of the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth. Every year he sent to Judæa large sums of money, which the Rabbis distributed to the poor; and the Jews of the East attributed to him the project of redeeming Jerusalem from the government of the Turks.
His château at Ferrières, in the department of Seine-et-Marne, is a sumptuous palace; and besides this and his two other residences in the Rue Laffitte and the Bois de Boulogne, he possessed innumerable houses in Paris. In nearly all the great cities and towns of Europe, moreover, he owned valuable properties—at Rome, for instance, Naples, and Turin, where some of the finest palaces and mansions were his. To the end of his life the great financier displayed a most prodigious activity. He was quick, hot-tempered, peevish, and surly to approach. But if he has been often reproached with brutality to underlings, he, on the other hand, treated the great with none too much ceremony. One day the Count de Morny entered the baron’s office at a moment when he was busily engaged. “Take a chair,” said the financier, without looking at him. “Pardon me,” said the injured visitor; “you cannot have heard my name. I am the Count de Morny.” “Take two chairs,” replied Baron James, without lifting his eyes off the papers before him. This prince of millionaires never carried more than fifty francs in his pocket; and he himself declared that by means of this aid to economy he had saved half a million francs in the course of his life. At the club of the Rue Royale, where he was accustomed to play whist after dinner, much amusement was caused by the extraordinary purse he always carried. It was fitted with a lock, and the key to this lock hung as a pendant to the baron’s watchchain. To pay a debt of ten sous he had first to get hold of the key and then open the lock; nor even when he had done so was there always enough in the purse to discharge his liability. At his club he was called simply “The Baron”—his compeers were all barons of something or other; and for this title he had always a punctilious regard. He was a great lover of art, and had formed a magnificent collection in the château at Ferrières. By his marriage with his niece, daughter of Baron Solomon de Rothschild, he left four sons—Edmond, Gustave, Alphonse, and Nathaniel, of whom the first-named became naturalised in France, and assumed on his father’s death the direction of the Paris house. During the siege of the capital in January, 1871, he, in association with his brothers, expended 300,000 francs on the relief of the necessitous; and in 1872 subscribed for a sum of 2,750,000,000 francs towards the loan required to buy the foe out of the country.
The three houses in the Rue Laffitte occupied by the Rothschilds are numbered 17, 19, and 21. At 21 is the banking establishment, now presided over by Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, third son of the late Baron James. Baron Alphonse is a painter of the highest distinction, in token of which he has been elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. No. 19 is the residence of the Dowager Baroness James de Rothschild; {340} while No 17 is occupied by various administrative offices. Close by is the mansion which, under the First Empire, was inhabited by the Queen of Holland. In one of the rooms overlooking the garden was born, April 20th, 1808, Napoleon Louis, the future Emperor of the French.
THE MUFFIN MILL.—THE OBELISK OF THE PARIS MERIDIAN.—THE
OBSERVATORY.
MONTMARTRE.
In the middle of the Rue de la Victoire stands the finest of the three synagogues of Paris, built by the architect Aldrophe in the Roman style.
The perspective of the Rue Laffitte terminates at the frontispiece of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. The plan of this edifice is that of an ancient Roman basilica, and its aspect that of an Italian church. The interior is very richly adorned with works from the chisels of half a dozen famous sculptors, and from the brushes of a still greater number of distinguished painters. This church, situated in the midst of those quarters where literature, art, and the drama have made their home, is marked by an elegance which approaches the mundane.
Passing northwards through the Rue Laffitte, the visitor sees, rising before him, the hill of Montmartre, which overlooks the church. The windmills which five-and-twenty years ago waved their arms on the summit of this eminence have given way to the imposing church of the Sacred Heart, a massive structure suggestive of a fortress.
The Butte Montmartre, to give the hill its French name, figures on almost every page of the annals of Paris. It is supposed, with a certain degree of probability, that temples to Mars and Mercury were raised there in the Roman era. Three different etymologies have been given to the Butte Montmartre, namely, Mons Martis, or Mount of Mars; Mons Mercurii, or Mount of Mercury; and finally Mons Martyrum, or Mount of the Martyrs. The last-named derivation is justified by the martyrdom of St. Denis, first Archbishop of Paris, who in the third century perished upon this spot. The hill bears a reservoir of water, artistically decorated; and close to it an obelisk erected in 1736 to serve as a point of view by which, from the opposite or southern side of Paris, {342} the city could be surveyed and measured. Our illustration shows, to the right of this edifice, the Observatory of Montmartre, and to the left the Moulin de la Galette, or Muffin Mill.
THE SYNAGOGUE IN THE RUE DE LA VICTOIRE.
Close by is the church of St. Peter, which presents a miserable front, but which archæologists prize as a monument of extraordinary interest. It dates back to the earliest ages of Christianity. Destroyed by the Romans, it was completely rebuilt in 1137. Partly burnt in 1559, it was half demolished in 1792, and restored without any regard to regularity or unity of design. It thus presents, at first sight, the aspect of a ruin held together by means of shaky scaffoldings.
The Butte Montmartre is an enormous mass of gypsum, about 125 metres high, and it has furnished century after century the finest kind of plaster, required for the construction of buildings in Paris. As a consequence it has been dangerously hollowed out, and in recent times a part of the hill gave way and precipitated itself upon the district below. The massive church of the Sacred Heart was built with a special eye to the insecurity of the hill; for it rests on an artificial foundation, in the shape of huge masses of cement, reaching deep down into the lower strata.
In the last generation the Butte Montmartre was, to Parisians, simply a fresh-air resort, picturesque with the before-mentioned windmills, to which rustic taverns were usually attached. From the summit, where city-pent children used on Sundays joyously to romp on the future site of the church of the Sacred Heart, a magnificent view is obtained of the Plain of Saint-Denis, the course of the Seine, and beyond that the fringe of the Montmorency Forest. Then, turning suddenly towards the south, the astonished visitor sees the whole city of Paris lying at his feet.
At the bottom of the Rue Lepic a vast enclosure is visible full of trees of various kinds, with the cypress prominent amongst them. This is the cemetery of Montmartre, or, by its official designation, Cemetery of the North. It contains many a monument as remarkable for its artistic beauty as for the character or celebrity of the sleeper beneath it; that of Godefroi Cavaignac, for instance, brother of the general of the same name, and one of the hopes of the Republican party under the monarchy of Louis Philippe; of Henri Beyle (otherwise “Stendhal”), author of “The Life of Rossini,” the treatise on “Love,” and of several admirable novels, including “La Chartreuse de Parme,” described as a masterpiece by so competent a judge as Balzac. Here, too, repose Paul Delaroche the painter, Marshal Lannes, Halévy, composer of La Juive, and Henri Murger, observer, if not inventor, of the literary and artistic Bohemian, described with so much gaiety, vivacity, and picturesqueness in the “Scènes de la Vie de Bohême.”
Until a few years ago the Montmartre Cemetery barred the way from Paris to the Butte Montmartre. But since 1888 a bridge or viaduct has connected the Boulevard Clichy with the Rue Caulaincourt. The Barrière Clichy has given its name to one of the most characteristic of Horace Vernet’s works—the picture of this barrier as seen in 1814 during the advance upon Paris of the allied armies.
The prison of Clichy, familiarly known as “Clichy,” in the street of the same name, was the Paris prison for debt. Here, until the Second Empire, debtors were confined under conditions peculiar to France, or at least never known in England. The duration of the imprisonment was determined by the magnitude of the debt, up to a period of five years; the maximum term, whatever amount might be owed. The debtor was maintained at the cost of the creditor, who had to deposit a sum of forty-five francs with the prison officials before his victim could be admitted within the prison walls. From early morning until ten o’clock at night the prisoners were free to walk about the grounds and occupy themselves as they thought fit. There were two hundred rooms for men, and sixteen for women; and, contrary to the general opinion on the subject, largely due to humorous writers and caricaturists, the prisoners belonged, for the most part, not to the aristocratic class, but to the class of small tradesmen. As the enforced allowance from the creditor was only sufficient to provide the necessaries of life, a fund was maintained among the prisoners for supplementing the ordinary bill of fare. There was a restaurant for prisoners of means, and light wines were on sale, to the exclusion of dessert wines and liqueurs. If, as often happened, the creditor omitted to pay for the support of the debtor, the latter was set free.
It is recorded in the chronicles of Clichy that among the wines forbidden, as savouring specially of a luxury unbecoming on the part of a man unable to pay his debts, was champagne. The heart of the creditor, says one writer on this subject, would have been too much vexed by the {343} thought of bursting corks and foaming wine. The prisoners at Clichy became, according to the French caricaturists, inordinately fat; and in one of Gavarni’s pictures of Clichy a prisoner is represented saying to a friend who has called to see him: “If they don’t let me out soon I shall be unable to get through the door.” Thus, the mouse of the fable, having crept through a small hole into a basket of provisions, feasted till he was too big to squeeze his way out again.
If, under the French system, the creditor was bound to maintain the debtor, the debtor, on his side, was denied the liberties accorded to him in England. Here a man who refused to pay his debts might be detained as long as the creditor wished without any charge to the latter; but here, also, the debtor might lead a luxurious life, and even leave the prison day after day on condition only of returning by a certain hour at night. To live “within the rules” of the Queen’s Bench was simply to inhabit an unfashionable and remote part of London, with the additional obligation of getting home early every night. A former manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre—King’s Theatre, as it was then called—passed several years in the Queen’s Bench Prison. This gentleman, Taylor by name, maintained, indeed, that it was the only place where an operatic manager could live so as to be quite beyond the reach of tenors dissatisfied with their parts, and prime donne clamouring for new dresses and increased salaries. In fact, he once declared, it was the only place where a man so rash as to undertake an {344} operatic speculation ought to be allowed to live, since no such person was fit to be at large.
Close to the Clichy district is the more important one of Les Batignolles, a growth of the present century and, one may almost say, of the last half-century. The village of Les Batignolles has developed into a town, inhabited for the most part by retired tradesmen and small annuitants. Close, again, to the Batignolles is the beautiful Parc Monceau, with its Avenue de Villiers, favourite abode of so many painters of the modern school.
We are now once more in the neighbourhood of the Champs Élysées, with its picturesque avenues, its children, its popular theatres, and its cafés without number. Once more, too, we are in the vicinity of that Bois de Boulogne, with its beautiful drives, its luxurious restaurants, its enchanting lake, and its forest renowned for duels.{345}
CHAPTER XXXII.
PARIS DUELS.
The Legal Institution of the Duel—The Congé de la Bataille—in the Sixteenth Century—Jarnac—Famous Duels.
PARISIAN duels are no longer to the death. As a rule, one of the combatants receives a scratch, and the farce is at an end. The story is well known of a Paris journalist’s wife, who, alarmed by the sudden disappearance of her husband, continued for a long time to fret and worry about him, until a friend of his told her that he had gone into the country to fight a duel, whereupon she exclaimed: “Thank Heaven! Then he is safe.”
From antiquity, however, until very recent times duels in Paris and in France generally have been only too sanguinary. The French first learned duelling from a ferocious nation. The ancient Franks, in invading Gaul, established there what was known as the “judicial combat.” Previously, in their own country, it had been a custom amongst the Franks for an individual who had suffered any private wrong, serious or trivial, to wreak a personal vengeance on the offender, inflicting death, or no matter what bodily injury, in the most barbarous fashion. At length the law intervened and instituted formal combat between the parties at {346} strife—a custom which, in due course, was introduced by the Franks into conquered Gaul. In the regulations of Philippe le Bel, 1306, it is set forth:—
“That the lists shall be forty feet in width and eighty feet in length.
“That the duel shall only be permitted when there is presumptive evidence against the accused, but without clear proof.
“That on the day appointed the two combatants shall leave their houses on horseback, with visor raised; their sabre, sword, axe, and other reasonable arms for attack and defence being carried before them; when they shall advance slowly, making from step to step the sign of the cross, or bearing an image of the saint to whom they are chiefly devoted and in whom they have most confidence.
“That having reached the enclosure, the appellant, with his hand on his crucifix, shall swear on his baptismal faith, on his life, his soul, and his honour, that he believes himself to have got a just subject of contention, and moreover that he has not upon him, nor upon his horse, nor among his arms, any herbs, charms, words, stones, conjurations, pacts, or incantations that he proposes to employ; and that the respondent shall take the same oaths.
“That the body of the vanquished man, if he is killed, shall be delivered to the marshal, until the king has declared if he wishes to pardon him or to do justice upon him; that is to say, hang him up to a gibbet by one of his feet.
“That if the vanquished man still lives, his aiguillettes shall be cut off; that he shall be disarmed and stripped; that all his harness shall be cast here and there about the field; and that he shall remain lying on the ground until the king, in like manner, has declared if he wishes to pardon him or to do justice upon him.
“That, moreover, all his property shall be confiscated for the benefit of the king, after the victor has been duly paid his costs and damages.”
In regard to capital crimes, the issue of a combat authorised by law and consecrated by religious ceremonies was looked upon as a formal judgment by which God made known the truth or falsehood of the accusation. The defeated combatant was dragged on a hurdle in his shirt to the gallows, where, dead or alive, he was hanged. The church itself adopted and sanctioned the superstitious idea that the vanquished in the judicial duel must necessarily be guilty. The one who had been killed in such a duel or combat was, says Brantôme, “in no case received by the church for Christian burial; and the ecclesiastics alleged as a reason for this that his defeat was a judgment from Heaven, and that he had succumbed by the will of God because his quarrel was unjust.”
The judicial duel was fully recognised by the Church of Paris. Louis VI. declared that the serfs and ecclesiastics of the Church of Paris might “testify,” that is to say maintain their word by a duel. In the reign of Louis the Young the monks of the Abbey of Saint-Geneviève, whose domains covered all the high ground which now overlooks the Panthéon, offered to prove by duel that the inhabitants of the little village in the neighbourhood were the serfs of their abbey. In the same reign (1144) the monks of Saint-Germain-des-Prés having demanded a duel in order to prove that Étienne de Maci had wrongly imprisoned one of their serfs, the two champions fought for a long time with equal advantage; but at last, “by the help of God,” says a chronicler, “the champion of the abbey took out the eye of his adversary, and obliged him to confess that he was conquered.”
Among the most remarkable judicial duels may be mentioned one that took place between two Norman knights behind the church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields in presence of Charles VI. and the whole court. Jacques Legris had been accused by the wife of Jean Carrouge of having entered his castle, masked, in the middle of the night, under pretence of being her husband, who was on his way from the Holy Land and whose return she was daily expecting. He protested his innocence, and on the demand of Carrouge the Parliament ordered the matter to be decided by duel. The judgment of God was unfavourable to Legris, and on being vanquished he was hung up at the gallows attached to the lists. Some time afterwards a malefactor, on the point of being executed for other crimes, confessed to having committed the infamous action for which Legris had suffered. This cruel mistake led to the abolition of the judicial duel. All demands on the subject addressed to the Parliament were from this time rejected—the judicial duel was at an end.
Appeals for a decision by single combat could still be made to the king, who sometimes granted what was known as the Congé de la Bataille. But simple crimes were no longer the cause of duels; and the personal conflicts that now take place turn upon the modern “point of honour.” Assemblies, however, were still held for the purpose of enacting that {347} duels should not be fought without the recognition of the superior authorities and without fair play. Two French officers having quarrelled on a campaign, one of whom had suffered from the other a personal affront, the case was brought before a tribunal of honour, with the highest personages of the court, the Chancellor, the Pope’s legate, two cardinals, and a certain number of prelates as judges; when, without any appeal to the sword, it was decided that one of the antagonists should go down on his knees before the other and declare that “madly and rashly, irreverentially, badly advised and badly counselled, he had given a box on the ear or blow with the fist to the other, in the tent and presence of the Duke de Longueville.”
The court of honour might or might not be the preliminary to the Congé de la Bataille. When the latter was granted the fact was announced by the king’s herald. The duel might on certain grounds be declined, and an example of this is cited, in which Count William of Furstenberg refused to meet a certain Sieur de Vassé on account of his inferior birth. Victor Hugo has well reproduced this spirit of aristocratic punctilio, which did not spring from personal haughtiness alone, in his drama of Marion Delorme. Didier, the hero, of obscure birth, challenges a distinguished nobleman, who asks for his adversary’s name. “Didier,” is the reply. “Didier de quoi?” inquires the nobleman. “Didier de rien!” answers the bearer of the homely name, who declares that he never knew his father; whereupon the aristocrat, giving him the benefit of the doubt, observes that he may possibly be of the highest lineage, and at once consents to cut throats with him. This idea of disqualification on account of inferior birth disappeared with the Revolution. But it was maintained, with only the rarest exceptions, until the great outbreak of 1789. Voltaire challenged a duke who had caused him to be waylaid and beaten by hired ruffians, but with no result, except to get himself sent to the Bastille. The incident of the water-carrier, in one of Paul de Kock’s novels, challenging and fighting a gentleman by whom he has been aggrieved, would, before the Revolution, have been not merely an improbable, but an impossible one.
While tolerating duels up to the time of Louis XIII., the French kings sometimes intervened in person to put a stop to them. Charles VIII. separated two gentlemen who had “come furiously to blows,” and Francis I. brought to an end a combat that was taking place between two gentlemen of Berry, named Veniers and Harzai.
In the sixteenth century the duel was accompanied by great ceremony. Take, for example, the one fought between La Chateigneraie and Guychabot, better known under the name of Jarnac. Guychabot, a distinguished member of the court of Francis I., and afterwards of Henry II., had taken an important part in the war of Italy. But he is chiefly remembered by his duel with La Chateigneraie, arising from the rival influences at court of the Duchess of Étampes and Diana of Poitiers. An offensive statement about him having been made, or rather repeated, by the Dauphin, he replied by charging its author, whoever he might be, with mendacity. La Chateigneraie, as Jarnac may or may not have known, was the originator of the calumny, for which, indeed, he accepted full responsibility. Francis I., now in his old age, would not permit the adversaries to fight; and it was not until Henry II. came to the throne that the duel took place, on the plain of Saint-Germain, with all the pomp and ceremony of the ancient judicial duels, and in presence of the whole court. Jarnac, weaker and less skilful than his enemy, who was one of the first duellists of the age, had taken lessons of an Italian bravo; and he dealt La Chateigneraie a violent and unexpected thrust in the leg (afterwards to be known as le coup de Jarnac). La Chateigneraie perished in the duel, and Henry II. swore on his corpse never to permit another. He endeavoured to keep his word; but his authorisation was dispensed with, and duelling became one of the fashions of the day. In 1560 the States-General of the Kingdom, assembled at Orleans, begged Charles IX. to punish without remission all duellists; and the Tiers État having formulated the same request, a royal order was published, which served as basis to the edicts on this subject published by Henry IV. and Louis XIV. In these documents duelling was placed in the category of capital offences; which had no effect but to increase the number of duels. Among the remarkable duels of this period must be mentioned one which was fought in the island of the City, between two gentlemen, who, finding themselves pursued by the police in an approaching boat, fought with such a determination to get the affair quickly to an end, that four sabre strokes sufficed to lay both dead.
To this epoch, too, belongs the duel of the Seigneur de Jensac, who insisted on fighting two adversaries at the same time. The duel was about to begin, when a friend of Jensac’s rushed on the scene, and {348} protested against so unequal a combat. “Did you never before hear of a man fighting two antagonists?” asked the seigneur. “Yes, but you must be mad to place yourself in such a position deliberately and beforehand.” “Not at all,” replied de Jensac; “I wish to be spoken of in the papers.”
DIANA OF POITIERS.
(From the Portrait by Belliard.)
In contrast with this reckless but fundamentally good-natured gentleman, who was ready to perish for a paragraph, may be placed the virtually licensed assassin, Baron de Vitaux, called by Brantòme the “brave baron,” who began his murderous career by killing at Toulouse, with a surprise stroke, the young Baron de Soupez. He afterwards, and always with the same stroke, killed a gentleman named Gonnelion; next, the Baron de Millau; and finally the chief favourite of Henry II., Louis Béranger de Guast. The son of Millau, who had resolved to avenge his father, killed, in a duel, this assassin who never appeared in public unless accompanied by the two brothers Boucicault, known as “Baron de Vitaux’s lions.” Nor must we forget Bussy d’Amboise, who fought on the most trivial pretexts. A gentleman named Saint-Phal having said something about the letter “x” on a piece of embroidery, Bussy, in order to bring about a quarrel and a duel, declared that the letter was a “y.” On this important point a first combat was fought, with six combatants {349} on each side. Bussy having been wounded, Saint-Phal retired, but only to be summoned soon afterwards to a new combat. The Captain of the King’s Guard, sent to interdict the fight, made no impression upon Bussy, who tried to pick a quarrel with him, and declared that he would appeal to the King and ask permission to meet his foe in the lists.
From 1598 to 1608 duels caused more victims than the civil wars. It has been calculated that during this period nearly eight thousand gentlemen perished in single combat. Henry IV. himself followed the fashion; but unable from his regal position to fight in person, he fought by procuration. In presence of the Duke de Guise he had shown some jealousy in regard to Bassompierre, who had been much struck by Mlle. d’Antraigues. The duke offered to avenge the aggrieved monarch, and his proposition being accepted, a duel took place. Bassompierre received a lance wound from which he with difficulty recovered. But soon afterwards Henry IV. was himself obliged to issue an order against duelling, which was little more than a reproduction of the one put forth by his predecessor. He charged the constable, the marshals of France, and the governors of provinces to see that his commands were obeyed. The offenders were innumerable, but the king at the last moment mitigated in almost every case the severity of his edict. Thus, in the course of nineteen years seven thousand “letters of grace” were issued.
Thanks to the clemency of Henry IV., the number of duels fought in France increased to such a point that in the reign of Louis XIII. the tragic custom seemed to have reached its height.
Two gentlemen, the Vicomte d’Allemagne and the Sieur de la Roque, fought, on some mere question of precedence, a duel in which, holding each other by the left hand, they exchanged poniard stabs with the right. Another pair of combatants, inspired with deadly and ferocious hatred, shut themselves up together in an empty barrel, and cut each other’s throats with knives. In process of time, however, a series of edicts were issued against judicial duelling. The practice received its severest blow in 1626 from Richelieu, who inspired an edict regulating the penalties according to the gravity of the offences. Praslin, who was the first to infringe this edict, was exiled and despoiled of his possessions. But the most remarkable infraction was that which cost the Count de Bouteville his head. He was a notorious bully, and had been known in this character since 1621. He had already crossed swords with the Count de Pont-Gibaut, the Marquis de Portes, and the Count de Thorigny, to mention no other names; and in 1627 he took upon himself, in defiance of the law, to fight the Baron de la Frette and the Marquis de Beuvron. This last duel was fatal to him. He had been foolhardy enough to draw swords with the marquis on the Place Royale and in broad daylight. The marquis fled to England, but Bouteville found his way to the scaffold. Before his execution, Richelieu had said to Louis XIII.:
“It is a question of cutting the throat, either of these duels or of your Majesty’s edicts.” The exemplary punishment inflicted upon Bouteville did not, however, by any means exterminate duelling. Even ecclesiastics at this period went through a course of training at the fencing academies. Men of letters frequently laid down the pen for the sword. To know how to administer cold steel became the height of ambition with fashionable Parisians. The most desperate duellist of the time was Cyrano de Bergerac, who would challenge on the spot anyone who looked at him, or anyone who did not look at him.