There lies before me as I write an amusing memorial of the innocent high spirits that can prevail on such a special all-night sitting as Réveillon: one of the tails of a dress coat, lined with white satin on which a skilful hand has traced with a fountain pen (my own) two very intimate scenes of French life. These drawings were made between five and six in the morning in the intervals of the dance, the artist, lacking paper, having without a word taken a table knife and shorn off his coat-tails for the purpose. His coat, I may say, was already being worn inside out, with one of the leather buckles of his braces as a button-hole. A tall burly man, with a long red Boulevard beard, he had thrown out signs of friendliness to me at once, and we became as brothers. He drew my portrait on the table-cloth; I affected to draw his. He showed me where I was wrong and drew it right. He then left me, in order to walk for a while on an imaginary tight-rope across the floor, and having safely made the journey and turned again, with infinite skill in his recoveries from falling and the most dexterous managing of a balancing-pole that did not exist, he leaped lightly to earth again, kissed his hand to the company, and again sat by me and resumed his work; finally, after other diversions, completing the chef d'œuvre that is now lying on my desk and lending abandon to what is otherwise a stronghold of British decorum. We parted at seven. I have never seen him since, but I find his name often in the French comic papers illustrating yet other phases of their favourite pleasantry for the entertainment of this simple and tireless people.

Another incident I recall that is equally characteristic of Montmartre. "Ça ne fait rien," said a head-waiter when we had expressed regret on hearing of the death of the maître d'hotel, for whom (an old acquaintance) we had been asking. "Ça ne fait rien: it is necessary to order supper just the same." True. True indeed everywhere, but particularly true on Montmartre.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE ELYSÉE TO THE HÔTEL DE VILLE

The Most Interesting Streets—Pet Aversions—The Rue de la Paix—The Vendôme Column—A Populous Church—The Whiff of Grapeshot—Alfred de Musset—The Molière Quarter—A Green and White Oasis—Camille Desmoulins at the Café de Foy—Charles Lamb in Paris—The Cloître de St. Honoré—The Massacre of St. Bartholomew—St. Germain of Auxerre—A Satisfied Corpse—Catherine de Médicis' Observatory—St. Eustache—A Wonderful Organ-The Halles—French Economy and English Want of It—The Goat-herd—The Assassination of Henri IV.—The Tour St. Jacques-Pascal, Theologian and Inventor of Omnibuses—A Sinister Spot—The Paris Town-hall—A Riot of Frescoes—Etienne Marcel—The Hôtel de Ville and Politesse—An Ancient Palace—Old Streets—Madame de Beauvais' Mansion—A Quiet Courtyard—The Church of St. Paul and St. Louis—Rabelais' Grave.

The Elysée, the official home of the French president—Paris's White House and Buckingham Palace—is situated in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which is one of the most entertaining streets in the whole city in which to loiter; that is, if you like, as I do, the windows of curiosity dealers and jewellers and print shops. Not that bargains are to be obtained here: far from it: it is not like the Rue des Saints Pères or the Rue Mazarine across the river; but merely as a series of windows it is fascinating. I like it as much as I dislike the Rue Lafayette, which has always been my aversion, not only because it is interminable and commercial and noisy, but because it leads back to England and work; yet since, however, when one arrives in Paris it leads from England and work, I must be a little lenient, and there is also a café in it where the diamond merchants compare gems quite openly.

Remembering these extenuating circumstances I unhesitatingly award the palm for undesirability in a Paris street to the Rue du Quatre-Septembre and the Rue Réaumur, which are sheer Shaftesbury Avenue, and, as in Shaftesbury Avenue, cause one to regret the older streets and houses whose place they have usurped. The Rue de Rivoli I dislike too: that strange mixture of very good hotels (the Meurice, for instance, is here) and rubbishy shops full of tawdry jewellery to catch the excursionist. How it happened that such a site should have been allowed to fall into such hands is a mystery. An additional objection to the Rue de Rivoli is that the one English acquaintance whom one least wishes to meet is always there.

The Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré becomes the Rue Saint-Honoré at the Rue Royale. The Rue Saint-Honoré is also a good street for shop windows, but not the equal of its more aristocratic half; just as that is surpassed here by the Rue de la Paix, to which we now come on the left, and which contains more things that I can do without, made to perfection, than any street I ever saw. At its foot is the Place Vendôme, with the beautiful column in the midst on which Napoleon's campaign of 1805 is illustrated in a bronze spiral that constitutes at once, I suppose, the most durable and the longest picture in the world. The bronze came very properly from the melted Russian and Austrian cannons. Napoleon stands at the top, imperially splendid; but as we saw in the chapter on the "Ile de la Cité," it was not always so: for his first statue was removed by Louis XVIII. to be used for the new Henri IV. In its stead a fleur-de-lys surmounted the column. Then came Louis-Philippe, who erected a new statue of the Emperor, not, however, imperially clad; and then Napoleon III., who substituted the present figure. But in 1870 the Communards succeeded in bringing the column down, and it has only been vertical again since 1875. Thus it is to be a Paris monument!

Returning to the Rue Saint-Honoré, in which, by the way, are several old and interesting houses, such as No. 271, the Cabaret du Saint-Esprit, a great resort in the Reign of Terror of spectators wishing to see the tumbrils pass, and No. 398, where Robespierre lodged, we come to St. Roch's church, on the left, interesting both in itself and in history. It has been called the noisiest church in Paris, and certainly it is difficult to find a time when feet are silent there. The attraction is St. Roch's wealth of shrines, of a rather theatrical character, such as the wise poor love: an entombment, a calvary and a nativity, all very effective if not beautiful. Beauty does not matter, for on Good Friday the entombment holds thousands silent before it. The church, which is in the baroque style that it is so easy to dislike, is too florid throughout. Among the many monuments are memorials of Corneille and Diderot, both of whom are buried here. The music of St. Roch is, I am told, second only to that of the Madeleine.

So much for St. Roch within. Historically it chances to be of immense importance, for it was here, and in the streets around and about the church, that the whiff of grapeshot blew which dispersed the French Revolution into the air. That was on October 5th, 1795, and it was not only the death of the Revolution but it was the birth of the conquering Buonaparte. Carlyle is superb: "Some call for Barras to be made Commandant; he conquered in Thermidor. Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed Artillery-Officer, who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of action: Barras is named Commandant's-Cloak; this young Artillery-Officer is named Commandant. He was in the Gallery at the moment, and heard it; he withdrew, some half-hour, to consider with himself: after a half-hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he answers Yea.

"And now, a man of head being at the centre of it, the whole matter gets vital. Swift, to Camp of Sablons; to secure the Artillery, there are not twenty men guarding it! A swift Adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops; gets thither some minutes within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that way: the Cannon are ours. And now beset this post, and beset that; rapid and firm: at Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue Saint-Honoré, from Pont-Neuf all along the north Quays, southward to Pont ci-devant Royal,—rank round the Sanctuary of the Tuileries, a ring of steel discipline; let every gunner have his match burning, and all men stand to their arms!

"Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint-Roch; has seized the Pont-Neuf, our piquet there retreating without fire. Stray shots fall from Lepelletier; rattle down on the very Tuileries Staircase. On the other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking, Peace; Lepelletier behind them waving his hat in sign that we shall fraternise. Steady! The Artillery-Officer is steady as bronze; can, if need were, be quick as lightning. He sends eight-hundred muskets with ball-cartridges to the Convention itself; honourable Members shall act with these in case of extremity: whereat they look grave enough. Four of the afternoon is struck. Lepelletier, making nothing by messengers, by fraternity or hat-waving, bursts out, along the Southern Quai Voltaire, along streets and passages, treble-quick, in huge veritable onslaught! Whereupon, thou bronze Artillery-Officer—? 'Fire!' say the bronze lips. And roar and thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his great gun, in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against the Church of Saint-Roch; go his great guns on the Pont-Royal; go all his great guns;—blow to air some two-hundred men, mainly about the Church of Saint-Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such horse-play; no Sectioner can stand it; the Forty-thousand yield on all sides, scour towards covert. 'Some hundred or so of them gathered about the Théâtre de la République; but,' says he, 'a few shells dislodged them. It was all finished at six.'

"'It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it to this hour.—Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!—"

Crossing the Place du Théâtre-Français we come to that historic home of the best French drama, where Molière is still played frequently, and one has some respite from the theme of facile promiscuity which dominates most of the other theatres of Paris. A new statue of Alfred de Musset has lately been set up under the Comédie Française. I copy from a writer very unlike him a passage of criticism to remember as one stands by this monument: "Give a look, if you can, at a Memoir of Alfred de Musset written by his Brother. Making allowance for French morals, and Absinthe (which latter is not mentioned in the Book), Alfred appears to me a fine Fellow, very un-French in some respects. He did not at all relish the new Romantic School, beginning with V. Hugo, and now alive in —— and Co.—(what I call the Gargoyle School of Art, whether in Poetry, Painting, or Music)—he detested the modern 'feuilleton' Novel, and read Clarissa!... Many years before A. de M. died he had a bad, long, illness, and was attended by a Sister of Charity. When she left she gave him a Pen with 'Pensez à vos promesses' worked about in coloured silks: as also a little worsted 'Amphore' she had knitted at his bedside. When he came to die, some seventeen years after, he had these two little things put with him in his Coffin." That, by Edward FitzGerald, no natural friend to the de Mussets of the world, is very pretty.

The Rue de Richelieu runs up beside the Comédie Française. We have already been in this street to see the Bibliothèque Nationale, entering it from the Boulevard, but let us now walk up it, first to see the Molière monument, so appropriate just here, and also to glance at No. 50, a house still unchanged, where once lived an insignificant couple named Poisson, whose daughter Jeanne Antoinette Poisson lived to become famous as Madame La Pompadour. In souvenirs of Molière Paris is still rich. We are coming soon to No. 92 Rue Saint-Honoré, where he was born; we are coming to the church of St. Eustache, where he was christened on January 15th, 1622, and where his second son was christened too. We are coming also to the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, where he was married and where his first son was baptised. In St. Roch he once stood as a godfather; and close to us now, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré and the Rue Valois, was one of his theatres. And he died close to his monument, at No. 40 Rue de Richelieu. This then is the Molière quarter.

We now enter the Palais Royal, that strange white and green oasis into which it is so simple never to stray. When I first knew Paris the Palais Royal was filled with cheap restaurants and shops to allure the excursionist and the connoisseur of those books which an inspired catalogue once described as very curious and disgusting. It is now practically deserted; the restaurants have gone and few shops remain; but in the summer the band plays to happy crowds, and children frolic here all day. I have, however, never succeeded in shaking off a feeling of depression.

The original palace was built by Richelieu and was then the Palais Cardinal. After his death it became the Palais Royal and was enlarged, and was the scene of notorious orgies. Camille Desmoulins made it more serious, for it was here that he enflamed the people by his words on July 12th, 1789, and started them on their destroying career. That was in the Café de Foy. Carlyle thus describes the scene: "But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:—Friends! shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come; the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be well-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To arms—To arms! yell responsive the innumerable voices; like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter words, does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this great moment.—Friends, continues Camille, some rallying sign! Cockades; green ones;—the colour of Hope!—As with the flight of locusts, these green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring shops; all green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille descends from his table, 'stifled with embraces, wetted with tears'; has a bit of green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius' Image-shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds; and rest not till France be on fire!"

Desmoulins in bronze now stands in the garden, near this spot. It is an interesting statue by Boverie, who showed great courage in his use of a common chair, dignified here into a worthy adjunct of liberation.

Under Napoleon the Tribunate sat in the Palais Royal, and after Napoleon the Orleans family made it their home. The Communards, always thorough, burned a good deal of it in 1871, and it is now a desert and the seat of the Conseil d'Etat. Let us leave it by the gateway leading to the Rue de Valois and be happier again.

The Rue de Valois is an interesting and picturesque street, but its greatest attraction to me is its association with Charles Lamb. His hotel—the Europe, just opposite the gateway—has recently been rebuilt and is now called the Grand Hôtel du Palais Royal et de l'Europe, and the polished staircase on which his infinitesimal legs slipped about so comically on his late and not too steady returnings (and how could he be steady when Providence ordained that the waiter of whom in his best stammering French he ordered an egg, on his first visit to a restaurant, should have so misunderstood the order as to bring in its place a glass of eau de vie—an error, we are told, which gave Lamb much pleasure?) the polished staircase has now gone; but the hotel stands exactly where it did, and every thing else is the same—the Bœuf à la Mode is still close by and still one of the best restaurants in Paris, and the Place de Valois is untouched, with its most attractive archway leading to the Rue des Bons-Enfants and giving on to the vista of the Rue Montesquieu, with its hundred signs hanging out exactly as in 1823.

We now return to the Rue Saint-Honoré. The three old houses, 180, 182 and 184, opposite the Magasins du Louvre, belonged before the Revolution to the Canons of Saint-Honoré. The courtyard here—the Cloître du Saint-Honoré—is one of the most characteristic examples of dirty Paris that remain, but very picturesque too. To peep in here is almost certainly to be rewarded by some Hogarthian touch, and to walk up the Rue des Bons-Enfants yields similar experiences and some very pleasant glimpses of old Paris.

Still going east we turn down past the Oratoire on the right, with Coligny's monument on its south side, into the Rue de Rivoli, and across the Rue du Louvre obliquely to the old church we see there, opposite the east end of the Louvre and Napoleon's iron gates. This church is that of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, not to be confounded with the St. Germain of St. Germain des Prés across the river. St. Germain l'Auxerrois is historically one of the most interesting of the Paris churches, for it was St. Germain's bell that gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. Charles IX. is said to have fired at the Huguenots (doubtless with Catherine de Médicis at his shoulder, anxious for the success of his aim) from one of the windows in the Louvre overlooking this space.

St. Germain's miracles were more interesting than those of, say, his convert Sainte Geneviève. He conjured devils; he forbade fire to burn him; having fed his companions on the only calf of a friendly cow-herd, he put the bones and the skins together and life returned to it; he also raised one of his own disciples from the dead and conversed with him through the walls of his tomb, but on the disciple saying that in his late condition "he was well and all things were to him soft and sweet," he permitted him to remain dead. He also found his miraculous gifts very useful in the war; but his principal interest to us is that he is supposed to have visited England and organised the Establishment here. St. Germain's church has a little old glass that is charming and much bad new. The south transept window, although sheer kaleidoscope, is gay and attractive.

At the back of the church runs the narrow and medieval Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, extending to the Rue Saint-Honoré. At No. 4 is, or was, the Hôtel des Mousquetaires, where, when it was the Belle Etoile, d'Artagnan drank and swaggered. Let us take this street and come to St. Eustache by way of another and less terrible souvenir of Catherine de Médicis. The Rue de l'Arbre-Sec leads to the Rue Sauval and to the circular Rue de Viarmes surrounding the Bourse de Commerce. Here we see a remarkable Doric column, all that remains of the palace which Catherine built in order to avoid the fate predicted for her by a soothsayer—that she would perish in the ruins of a house near St. Germain's. The Tuileries, which she was then building, being far too near St. Germain's to be comfortable after such a remark, she erected the Hôtel de la Reine, the tower being designed for astrological study in the company of her Italian familiar, Ruggieri. All else has gone: the tower and the stars remain.

A few steps down the Rue Oblin and we are at St. Eustache, which has to my eyes the most fascinating roof of any church in Paris and a very attractive nave. The interior, however, is marred by the presence of what might be called a church within a church, destroying all vistas, and it is only with great difficulty that one can see the exquisite rose window over the organ. It is a church much used by the poor—who even call it Notre Dame des Halles—but its music on festival days brings the rich too. Like most other Paris churches of any importance, St. Eustache had its secular period. The Feast of Reason was held here in 1793; in 1795 it was the Temple of Agriculture. In 1791 Mirabeau, the first of the illustrious, as we saw, to be buried in the Panthéon, was carried here in his coffin for a funeral service, at which guns were fired that brought down some of the plaster. Voiture the poet was buried here. The church has always been famous for the splendour of its festivals and for its music, its present organ, once much injured by Communard bombs, being one of the finest in the world. No reader of this book who cares for solemn music should fail to ascertain the St. Eustache festivals. On St. Cecilia's day entrance is very difficult, but an effort should be made.

Eustache, or Eustace, the Saint, had no direct association with Paris, as had our friends St Germain and St. Geneviève and St. Denis and St. Martin and St. Merry; but he had an indirect one, having been a Roman soldier under the Emperor Trajan, whose column was the model for the Vendôme column. In the Sacristy, however, are preserved some of the bones not only of himself but of his wife and family, brought hither from St. Denis. One of his teeth is here too, and one special bone, the gift of Pope Alexander VII. to an influential Catholic.

Why our London markets should be so dull and unattractive and the Halles so entertaining is a problem which would perhaps require an ethnological essay of many pages to elucidate. But so it is. Smithfield, Billingsgate, Leadenhall, Covent Garden—one has little temptation or encouragement to loiter in any of them; but the Halles spread welcoming arms. I have spent hours there, and would spend more. In the very early morning it is not too agreeable a neighbourhood for the idle spectator, nor is he desired, although if he is prepared to endure a little rough usage with tongue and elbow he will be vastly amused by what he sees; but later, when all the world is up, the Halles entreat his company. Their phases are three: the first is the arrival of the market carts with their merchandise, very much as in our own Covent Garden, but multiplied many times and infinitely more vocal and shattering to the nerves. (I once occupied a bedroom within range of this pandemonium.) The second phase, a few hours later, sees the descent upon the market of the large caterers—buyers for the restaurants, great and small, the hotels and pensions. That is between half-past five and half-past seven. And then come the small buyers, the neat servants, the stout housewives, all with their baskets or string bags. This is our time; we may now loiter at our ease secure from the swift and scorching sarcasms of the crowded dawn.

The Halles furnish another proof of the quiet efficiency of Frenchwomen. At every fruit and vegetable stall—and to me they are the most interesting of all—sits one or more of these watchful creatures, cheerful, capable and always busy either with the affairs of the stall or with knitting or sewing. The Halles afford also very practical proof of the place that economy is permitted to hold in the French cuisine: as much being done for the small purse as for the large one.

In England we are ashamed of economy; by avoiding it we hope to give the impression that we are not mean. The wise French either care less for their neighbour's opinions or have agreed together to dispense with such insincerities; and the result is that if a pennyworth of carrots is all that your soup requires you need not buy two pennyworth, and so forth. Little portions of vegetables for one, two or more persons, all ready for the pot, can be bought, involving no waste whatever, and with no faltering or excuse on the part of the purchaser to explain so small an order. In France a customer is a customer. There are no distinctions; although I do not deny that in the West End of Paris, where the Americans and English spend their money, subtle shades of courtesy (or want of it) have crept in. I have been treated like a prince in a small comestible shop where I wanted only a pennyworth of butter, a pennyworth of cheese and a pennyworth of milk. It is pennies that make the French rich; no one can be in any doubt of that who has taken notice of the thousands of small shops not only in Paris but in the provinces.

Any one making an early morning visit to the Halles should complete it by seeing my goat-herd, who leads his flocks thereabouts and eastward. He is the prettiest sight I ever saw in Paris. There are several goat-herds—even Passy knows them—but my goat-herd is here. By eight o'clock he has done; his flock is dry. He wears a blue cloth tam-o'-shanter (if there can be such a thing: it is really the cap of the romantic mountaineer of comic opera) and he saunters carelessly along, piping melancholy notes on a shepherd's pipe—not unlike the lovely wailing that desolates the soul in the last act of Tristan und Isolde. When a customer arrives he calls one of his goats, sits down on the nearest doorstep—it may be a seventeenth-century palace—and milks a cupful; and then he is off again, with his scrannel to his lips, the very type of the urban Strephon.

We may leave les Halles (pronounced lay al, and not, as one would think, lays all: one of the pitfalls for the English in Paris) by the Rue Berger, and enter the Square des Innocents to look at its decorative fountain. The next street below the Rue des Innocents is the Rue de la Ferronnerie, where, on May 14th, 1610, Henri IV. was assassinated by Ravaillac before the door of No. 3. And so by the Rue St. Denis, which one is always glad to enter again, and the Rue de Rivoli, we come to Saint-Jacques, that grey aged isolated tower which we have seen so often from the heights and in the distance. It is a beautiful Gothic building, at the summit of which is the figure of St. James with his emblems, the originals of which are at the Cluny. The tower belonged to the church of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie, but that being in the way when Napoleon planned the Rue de Rivoli, it had to go.

The tower has not lately been open to the climbers, and I have never seen Paris from St. James's side, but I hope to. Blaise Pascal experimented here in the density of air; hence the presence of his statue below. It was also to Pascal, of whom we now think only as an ironist and wistful theologian, that Paris owes her omnibuses, for it was he that devised the first, which began to run on March 18th, 1662, from the Luxembourg to the Bastille. Pascal owed his conversion to his escape from a carriage accident on the Pont Neuf. His grave we saw at St. Etienne-du-Mont.

In crossing the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville one must not forget that this was once the terrible Place de Grève, the site of public executions for five centuries. Here we meet Catherine de Médicis again, for it was by her order that after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew the Huguenots Briquemont and Cavagnes were hanged here, and here also was executed Captain Montgomery, whom we are to meet in the next chapter. The foster-sister of Marie de Médicis was burned alive in the Place de Grève as a sorcerer; and Ravaillac, after assassinating Henri IV., here met his end. Among later victims was the famous Cartouche, of whom Thackeray wrote so entertainingly.

The Hôtel de Ville is not a building that I for one should choose to revisit, nor do I indeed advise others to bother about it at all; but externally at any rate it is fine, with its golden sentinels on high. Its chief merit is bulk; but there is a certain interest in observing a Republican palace of our own time, if only to see how near it can come to the real thing. A saturnine guide displays a series of spacious apartments, the principal attraction of which is their mural painting. All the best French Royal Academicians (so to speak) of twenty years ago had a finger in this pie, and their fantasies sprawl over ceilings and walls. With the exception of one room, the history of Paris is practically ignored, allegory being the master vogue. Poetry, Song, Inspiration, Fame, Ambition, Despair—all these undraped ladies may be seen, and many others. Also Electricity and Steam, Science and Art, distinguishable from their sisters only by the happy chance that although they forgot their clothes they did not forget their symbols.

One beautiful thing only did I see, and that was a large design, perhaps the largest there, of Winter, by Puvis de Chavannes. But to say that I saw it is an exaggeration: rather, I was conscious of it. For the architect of the salon in which Puvis was permitted to work forgot to light it.

In the historical room there are crowded scenes by Laurens of the past of Paris—the hero of which is Etienne Marcel, whose equestrian statue may be seen from the windows, under the river façade of the building. Etienne Marcel, Merchant Provost, controlled Paris after the disastrous battle of Poictiers, where the King and the Dauphin were both taken prisoners. Power, however, made him headstrong, and he was killed by an assassin.

It is from the Hôtel de Ville that the city of Paris is administered, with the assistance of the Préfecture de Police on the island opposite. The Hôtel de Ville contains, so to speak, the Paris County Council, and I have been told that no building is so absurdly over-staffed. That may or may not be true. The high officials do not at any rate allow business to exclude the finer graces of life, for in the great hall in which I waited for the cicerone were long tables on which were some twenty or thirty baskets containing visiting cards, and open books containing signatures, and before each basket was a card bearing the name of an important functionary of the Hôtel de Ville—such as the Préfet de la Seine, and the Sous-Préfet, and their principal secretaries, and so forth. Every minute or so some one came in, found the basket to which he wished to contribute, and dropped a card in it. I wondered to what extent the social machinery of Paris bureaucracy would be disorganised if I were to change a few baskets, but I did not embark upon an experiment the results of which I should have had no means of contemplating and enjoying.

After leaving the Hôtel de Ville and its modern splendours, we may walk eastward along the Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, one of the narrowest and dirtiest relics of old Paris, and so come to the Hôtel de Sens. But first notice, at the corner of the Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères, at the point at which Mr. Dexter made his drawing, the very ancient stone sign of the knife-grinder. The Hôtel de Sens, in the Place de l'Ave Maria, at the end of the Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, is almost if not quite the most attractive of the old palaces. Although it has been allowed to fall into neglect, it is still a wonderfully preserved specimen of fifteenth-century building. The turrets are absolutely beautiful. The Archbishop of Sens built it, and for nearly three centuries it remained the home of power and wealth, among its tenants being Marguerite of Valois. Then came the Revolution and its decline into a coach office, from which it is said the Lyons mail, made familiar to us by the Irvings, started. During a later revolution, 1830, a cannon ball found a billet in the wall, and it may still be seen there, I am told, although these eyes missed it. The Hôtel is now a glass factory. The city of Paris ought to acquire it before it sinks any lower.

It is at the foot of the Rue de l'Ave Maria, hard by, that Molière's theatre, which we saw from the Quai des Célestins in an earlier chapter, is found. Here Molière was arrested at the instance of the unpaid tallow chandler. Our way now is by the Rue Figuier, of which the Hôtel de Sens is No. 1, to the Rue François-Miron, all among the most fascinating old architecture and association. At No. 8 Rue Figuier, for instance, Rabelais is said to have lived, and what could be better than that? At No. 17, we have what the Vicomte de Villebresme calls a "jolie niche du XV^e siècle". This street leads into the Rue de Jouy, also exceedingly old, with notable buildings, such as No. 7, the work of Mansard père, and No. 9, and on the left of the Impasse Guépine, which existed in the reign of Saint Louis.

In the Rue François-Miron, if you do not mind exhibiting a little inquisitiveness, enter the doorway of No. 68, and look at the courtyard and the staircase. Here you get an excellent idea of past glories, while the outer doors or gates give an excellent idea of past danger too. For life in Paris in the days in which this street was built must have been very cheap after dark. It is not dear even now in certain parts. This was an historic mansion. It was built for Madame de Beaumaris, femme de chambre of Anne of Austria, and on its balcony, now removed, on August 20th, 1660, Anne stood with Mazarin and others when Louis XIV. entered Paris. No. 82 still retains a balcony of great charm.

We now enter the very busy Rue St. Antoine at its junction with the Rue de Rivoli. Almost immediately on our right is a gateway leading into a very charming courtyard, which is not open to the public, but into which one may gently trespass; it is the school of the Frères Chrétiens, founded by Frère Joseph, the good priest with the sweet and sad old face whose bust is on the wall. A few steps farther bring us to the church of St. Paul and St. Louis, a florid and imposing fane, to which Victor Hugo (to whose house we are now making our way) carried his first child to be christened, and presented to the church two holy water stoops in commemoration. Here also Richelieu celebrated his first mass. One of Delacroix's best early works (we saw the picture called "Hommage à Delacroix," you will remember, in the Moreau collection at the Louvre) is in the left transept, "Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane". On no account miss the Passage Charlemagne (close to the St. Paul Station on the Métro) for it is a curious, busy and very French by-way, and it possesses the remains of a palace of the fourteenth century. In the Passage de St. Pierre is the site of the old cemetery of St. Paul's in which Rabelais was buried.

CHAPTER XIX
THE PLACE DES VOSGES AND HUGO'S HOUSE

A Beautiful Square—The Palais des Tournelles—Revolutionary Changes—Madame de Sévigné and Rachel—Hugo's Crowded Life—A Riot of Relics—Victorious Versatility—Dumas' Pen—The Age of Giants—Dickens—"Les Trois Dumas".

Were we to walk a little farther along the busy Rue St. Antoine towards the Place de la Bastille, we should come, on the left, a few yards past the church of St. Louis, to the Rue de Birague, at the head of which is the beautiful red gateway of which Mr. Dexter has made such a charming picture. This is the southern gateway of the Place des Vosges, a spacious green square enclosed by massive red and white houses of brick and stone which once were the abode, when the Place des Vosges was the Place Royale, of the aristocracy of France.

Before that time the courtyard of the old Palais des Tournelles was here, where Henri II. was killed in a tournament in 1559, through an accident for which Captain Montgomery of the Scotch Guard, whose fault Catherine de Médicis deemed it to be, was executed, as we have just seen, in the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville. Catherine de Médicis, not content with thus avenging her husband's death, demolished the Palais des Tournelles, and a few years later Henri IV., to whom old Paris owes so much, built the Place Royale, just as it is now. His own pavilion was the centre building on the south side, comprising the gateway which Mr. Dexter has drawn; the Queen's was the corresponding building on the north side.

Around dwelt the nobles of the Court—such at any rate as were not living in the adjoining Marais. Richelieu's hotel embraced Nos. 21-23 as they now are. It was in front of that mansion that the famous duel between Montmorency-Bouteville and Des Chapelles against Bussy and Beuvron was fought. The spirit of the great Dumas, one feels, must haunt this Place: for it is peopled with ghosts from his brave romances.

The decay of the Place des Vosges began, of course, when the aristocracy moved over to the Faubourg St. Germain, although it never sank low. The Revolution then took it in hand, and naturally began by destroying the statue of Louis XIII. in the centre, which Richelieu had set up, while its name was changed from Place Royale to its present style in honour of the Department of the Vosges, the first to contribute funds to the new order. In 1825, under Charles X., Louis XIII. in a new stone dress returned to his honoured position in the midst of the square, and all was as it should be once more, save that no longer did lords and ladies ruffle it here or in the Marais.

There is nothing in England like the Hugo museum. I have been to Carlyle's house in Cheyne Row; to Johnson's house at Lichfield; to Wordsworth's house at Grasmere; to Milton's house at Chalfont St. Giles; to Leighton's House at Kensington; and the impression left by all is that their owners lived very thin lives. The rooms convey a sense of bareness: one is struck not by the wealth of relics but by the poverty of them; while for any suggestion that these men were pulsating creatures of friendship one seeks in vain. But Hugo—Hugo's house throbs with life and energy and warm prosperous amities. Every inch is crowded with mementoes of his vigour and his triumphs, yes, and his failures too.

Here are portraits of him by the hundred, at all ages, caricatures, lampoons, play bills, first editions, popular editions, furniture by Hugo, decorations by Hugo, drawings by Hugo, scenes in Hugo's life in exile, wreaths, busts, portraits of his grandchildren (who taught him the exquisite art of being a grandfather), his death-bed, his death-mask, the cast of his hands. Hugo, Hugo, everywhere, always tremendous and splendid and passionate and French.

Among the more valuable possessions of this museum are Bastien-Lepage's charcoal drawing of the master; Besnard's picture of the first night of Hernani with the young romantic on the stage taking his call and hurling defiance at the gods; Steinlen's oil painting (there are not many oil paintings by this great draughtsman and great Parisian) "Les Pauvres Gens"; Daumier's cartoon "Les Châtiments"; Henner's "Sarah la Baigneuse" from Les Orientales; allegories by Chifflart; beautiful canvases by Carrière and Fantin-Latour; and Devambez's "Jean Valjean before the tribunal of Arras," in which Jean is curiously like Gladstone in a bad coat; Vierge's drawing of the funeral of Georges Hugo, during the siege; and Yama Motto's curious scene of Hugo's own funeral, of which there are many photographs, including one of the coffin as it lay in state for two days under the Arc de Triomphe. There are also a number of Hugo relics which the camelots of that day were selling to the crowds.

Hugo, it is well known, nursed a private ambition to be a great artist, and in my opinion he was a great artist. There are on these walls drawings from his hand which are magnificent—mysterious and sombre fortresses on impregnable cliffs, scenes in enchanted lands with more imagination than ever Doré compassed, and some of the sinister cruelty and power of Méryon. Hugo was ingenious too: he decorated a room with coloured carvings in the Chinese manner and he made the neatest folding table I ever saw—hinged into the wall so that when not in use it takes up no floor-space whatever.

It is amusing to follow Hugo's physiognomy through the ages, at first beardless, looking when young rather like Bruant, the chansonnier of to-day; then the coming of the beard, and the progress of it until the final stage in which the mental eye now always sees the old poet—white and strong and benevolent—the Hugo, in short, of Bonnat's famous portrait.

On a table is a collection of literary souvenirs of intense interest: Hugo's pen and inkstand, and the great Dumas' pen presented to Hugo in 1860 after writing with it his last "15 or 20" volumes (fifteen or twenty—how like him!); Lamartine's inkstand, offered "to the master of the pen"; George Sand's match-box for those endless cigarettes, and with it her travelling inkstand. In another room upstairs are the six pens used by Hugo in writing Les Humbles. Dumas' pen is not by any means the only Dumas relic here; portraits of him are to be seen, one of them astonishingly negroid. Had he too worked for liberty and carried in his breast or even on his sleeve a great heart that, like Hugo's, responded to every call and beat furiously at the very whisper of the word injustice, he too would have his museum to-day not less remarkable than this. But to write romances was not enough: there must be toil and suffering too.

Dumas and Hugo were born in the same year, 1802: Balzac was then three. In 1809 came Tennyson and Gladstone; in 1811 Thackeray and in 1812 Browning and Dickens. What was the secret of that astounding period? Why did the first twelve years of the last century know such energy and abundance? To walk through the rooms of this Hugo museum, however casually, is to be amazed before the vitality and exuberance not only of this man but of the French genius. It is truly only the busy who have time. I wish none the less that there was a museum for Alexandre the Great. I would love to visit it: I would love to see his kitchen utensils alone. The generous glorious creature, "the seven and seventy times to be forgiven"! As it was, no one being about, I kissed the pen with which he had written his last "15 or 20" novels (the splendid liar!).

I wish too that we had a permanent Dickens' museum in London—say at his house in Devonshire Terrace, which is now a lawyer's office. What a fascinating memorial of Merry England it might become, and what a reminder to this attenuated specialising day of the vigour and versatility and variety and inconquerable vivacity of that giant! Just as no one can leave Hugo's house without a quickening of imagination and ambition, so no one could leave that of Charles Dickens.

In addition to this museum Hugo has his monument in the Place Victor Hugo, far away in a residential desert in the north-west of Paris, a bronze figure of the poet as a young man seated on a rock, with Satire, Lyric Poetry and Fame attending him; while on the façade of the house where he died, No. 124 Avenue Victor Hugo, is a medallion portrait. He figures also in a fresco in the Hôtel de Ville. Dumas' monument is in the garden of the Place Malesherbes in the Avenue de Villiers. Doré designed it, as was perhaps fitting. The sturdy Alexandre sits, pen in hand, on the summit, his West Indian hair curling vigorously into the sky, with d'Artagnan and three engrossed readers at the base. It is not quite what one would have wished; but it is good to visit. His son, the dramatist, the author of that adorable joke against his father's vanity—that he was capable of riding behind his own carriage to persuade people that he kept a black servant—has a monument close by; and the gallant general of whom one reads such brave stories in the first volume of the Mémoires is to be set there too, and then the Place, I am told, will be re-named the Place des Trois Dumas.

CHAPTER XX
THE BASTILLE, PÈRE LACHAISE AND THE END

A Thoughtful Municipality—The Fall of the Bastille—Revolt and Revolution—The Column of July—A Paris Canal—Deliberate Building—The Buttes-Chaumont—A City of the Dead—Père la Chaise—Bartholomé's Monument—The Cimetière de Mont Parnasse—The Country round Paris—What we have Missed—Conclusion.

The Place des Vosges is close to the Place de la Bastille, which lies to the east of it along the Rue St. Antoine. The prison has gone for ever, but one is assisted by a thoughtful municipality to reconstruct it, a task of no difficulty at all if one remembers with any vividness the models in the Carnavalet or the Archives, or buys a pictorial postcard at any neighbouring shop. The contribution of the pious city fathers is a map on the façade of No. 36 Place de la Bastille, and a permanent outline of the walls of the dreadful building inlaid in the road and pavement, which one may follow step by step to the satisfaction of one's imagination and the derangement of the traffic until it disappears into cafés and shops. One has to remember, however, that the surface of the ground was much lower, the prison being surrounded by a moat and gained only by bridges. For the actual stones one must go to the Pont de la Concorde, the upper part of which was built of them in 1790.

The Bastille's end came in 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution, on the day after the National Guard was established, when the people of Paris rose under Camille Desmoulins and captured it, thus not only displaying but discovering their strength. Carlyle was never more scornful, never more cruelly vivid, than in his description of this event. I must quote a little, it is so horribly splendid: "To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade, at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts, Cour Avanceé, Cour de l'Orme, arched Gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new drawbridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and twenty;—beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his own engineer: seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of regimentals; no one would heed him in coloured clothes: half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in the Place de Grève. Frantic Patriots pick up the grapeshots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly so), to the Hôtel-de-Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is 'pale to the very lips'; for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering a minor whirlpool,—strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Maelstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.

"And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has become an impromptu cannoneer. See Georget, of the Marine Service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to the like): Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of him, for a hundred years. Yet now, at the right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent music. For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Françaises also will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so thick!—Upwards from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes show the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!