Descending the labyrinth, behind the hot-houses, the visitor finds in front of him the door of the orangery, and to the left the entrance to the grand amphitheatre, where so many illustrious voices have instructed the world. Then, following the avenue which passes before the amphitheatre, he descends the length of the Rue Cuvier, and making on this side the tour of the menagerie, an enormous grampus, together with its skeleton, comes into view, guarding the entrance to the galleries of anatomy and anthropology. Farther on is the reptile menagerie, as well as a school of fruit trees, which French writers on the subject characteristically declare to be “without a rival in the world.”

At the angle formed by the Rue Cuvier and the quay, and following the latter, one comes to the aquarium of fresh-water plants. Willows hang their branches over the water, full of plants and sleepy fishes. All is shade, freshness, and tranquillity in this nook, which is the most picturesque and charming in the whole garden.

We have now returned to the principal entrance, facing the bridge of Austerlitz. In the immense flower-beds which ascend to the galleries, what chiefly strikes the eye is a square devoted to the cultivation of gaily ornamental flowers, where they seem to have more than their accustomed splendour. This particular effect is produced simply by means of skilful arrangement, based on those laws relating to the simultaneous contrast of colours which it was reserved for M. Chevreuil to discover. Each flower owes more to its neighbour than to itself. Isolated, it would lose that brilliant beauty which is lent to it by a clever juxtaposition.

Close at hand, in the great avenue to the left, is a modest café. The tables are ranged around the peeled trunk of an old tree, the first acacia planted in France, some hundred years ago, by Vespasian Robin, after whom it is named—even as a certain beetle was named after another famous naturalist, on whom his admirers thought thus to confer the highest conceivable degree of honour. A little farther on, in front of the building containing the collections of geology, stand other venerable trees. Finally one reaches, at the top of the garden and opposite the{152} entrance in the Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a large square house built as the residence of Buffon, who, lodged at first in the buildings of the galleries, had given up his apartments to the growing collections. The name of Intendancy is still borne by this edifice. It was here that Buffon died.

Along the street which bears his name the garden is to-day still enclosed by the spiked iron railings which he himself caused to be erected. They protected the garden on the side of the country; but the country since then has retreated far away.

To come, however, to the menagerie, a noisy concert of parrots and cockatoos forms a prelude to the show, as one advances from the side of the amphitheatre. The birds of prey are enclosed in large cages with iron bars. The monkeys have a “palace,” where they disport themselves in the sunshine, to the great delight of sight-seeing crowds. The Rotunda is devoted to animals from hot latitudes—the elephant, for instance; the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus. A striking peculiarity of the female hippopotamus in the Jardin des Plantes is that she has given birth several times to a tough-skinned baby, and always or nearly always killed it immediately with her terrible teeth.

The carnivorous animals are confined in a series of dens. The bear is the most beloved of all these formidable creatures. His pit is resorted to by masses of people who regard him quite as an old acquaintance, and call him by the name of one of his celebrated ancestors—“Martin.”

The reptile menagerie is contained in a low chamber, damp and narrow, where these cold, creeping animals pass their lives in comparative darkness. What to many forms the most curious spectacle in this menagerie is the remains of a strange repast in which, some years ago, one of the pythons indulged. This enterprising creature one fine night swallowed the blanket which had been placed over him to keep him warm; his digestion was excellent, but was not equal to blankets, and after a fortnight’s indisposition he threw it up in the condition in which it is now preserved.

In the long building which runs parallel to the Rue Cuvier are the galleries of anatomy and of anthropology. They occupy two large rooms on the ground floor, and the whole of the first storey round the courtyard, known as the Courtyard of the Whale. In its centre is a fine skeleton of an ordinary whale, and in one of the corners the skeleton of a spermaceti whale—in French “cachalot,” which, according to a fantastic etymologist, is derived from “cache à l’eau,” the animal being accustomed{153} when threatened with attack to hide in the water.

The first room in the gallery of anatomy is filled with skeletons of the largest sea-animals. The adjoining room contains human skeletons, among which will be remarked that of Soliman-el-Halir, the assassin of General Kleber, put to death with frightful torture by the avenging French, who barbarously adopted the mode of punishment of the barbarous country they had invaded. Strange that the French, nearly a century after this offence against humanity, should still preserve a monument to revive its memory. To notice but one point, the finger-bones of the right hand are wanting. The hand was burnt off before the final punishment was applied—that of impalement, which the assassin endured for six hours without uttering a groan.

A narrow staircase leads to the first floor, in which the ante-chamber is full of animals’ heads. In the second room we are in the midst of monsters, most of which formed subjects of study to the two Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires, intent on finding immutable laws where science had previously seen nothing but the sport and caprices of chance. “Ritta Christina Parodi” was the name given to two heads on a single body born at Sassari in Sardinia, March 12, 1827. The two heads lived about eight months, one of them dying on the 20th of November, the other shortly afterwards, but not until there had been time to make, in regard to this strange being, some curious observations. Further on may be seen Philomèle and Hélène, two bodies on one pair of legs. They also lived. Finally, in the same order, are Olympe and Thérèse, joined together by the top of the head.

In the third room are the great anthropomorphous or man-shaped apes, arranged in an attitude not natural to them, since in nature they walk on hands and feet, but which brings out more vividly their resemblance to humanity. The broken teeth, the fractured limbs of these rangers of the forests—orang-outangs, chimpanzees, and gorillas—are evidence of their fights, their struggles, their adventurous life. The orang-outang is a war trophy. It belonged formerly to the collection of the Stadtholder of Holland, whence it was sent to Paris by the victorious French army, without being claimed and sent back by the allies in 1815, as undoubtedly would have been its fate had its history and its actual position been known.

In the waxwork collection (eighth room) many of the anatomical reproductions come from the château of the Duke of Orleans—known during the Revolution as Philippe Égalité—at Chantilly. Others, executed with rare perfection, are from Florence, always celebrated for this kind of work. At the entrance to the ninth room are two figures, considered marvels of ingenuity and of science in the last century, but now looked upon as, for purposes of study, next to useless: an “arterial” man and a “venous” man. Very curious, too,{154} are the children’s heads, in which skilful injections, even into the most delicate veins, have given to the complexion the appearance of life. They have been furnished, according to the taste of the period, with enamel eyes, and to render them presentable to the public, each little head is enveloped in a lace cap. In the eleventh room will be found the collection of Dr. Gall, including the very heads on whose developments he formed his theory of localised faculties and cerebral bumps. It may here be observed that the followers of Gall have rendered his system questionable by giving to it in detail a value which he attached to it only in a general way. The collection contains, moreover, the bust of Dr. Gall himself, a cast of his head taken after death, and his very cranium, on which may be sought the special bump of phrenologism. Here, too, may be seen the masks of Voltaire, Casimir Périer, François Arago, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. This last was taken by the sculptor Houdon, at Les Charmettes, July 4, 1778—the day after Rousseau’s death. A bust of Cuvier is to be seen on the ground floor, to which a staircase leads directly from the Gall collection. It is the work of David d’Angers, and stands in front of five skeletons of elephants, which seem to form for the great comparative anatomist a guard of honour.

In the anthropological gallery, on the first floor, the visitor finds himself on entering in front of a pleasing collection of human heads, all severed during lifetime from the bodies to which they belonged: those of Arabs and Kabyles, decapitated by the yataghan, and dried beneath the African sun. This at least marks a progress since the days when native malefactors were burnt and impaled. “Their narrow puckered lips,” says a French writer, “exhibit their white teeth in a grin which has been left significantly by a violent death.” Near these heads are the skulls of the ancestors of the modern French, the Franks and the Gauls, from whose tombs they have been taken. In this room is to be seen a curious and picturesque ethnographical collection: a number of Russian dolls, attired in the European, Asiatic, and American costumes of the various nationalities included in the vast empire of the Tsar. In the eighth room the ancient Peruvian mummies are well worth a glance. So, too, are the strange little human heads prepared by this now extinct race. From the head that was to be preserved the bones were first removed. Then the skin was dried, which in contracting kept its original shape. This, however much diminished, was still preserved. The head, indeed, may have shrunk to the size of one’s fist: the proportions are still the same, except that the hair is, by comparison, denser and in a greater mass. In the next room is a cast of a once well-known Hottentot woman who died in Paris, where she went under the name of the “Hottentot Venus.”

On the first floor to the left are two large rooms full of reptiles and fish. In these historic rooms Louis XV. placed the fine statue of Buffon which is still there, and beneath which may be read the famous inscription, which time has not falsified: “Majestati naturæ par ingenium.” The majesty of Buffon’s genius shows itself, it has been said, in his very style: an idea which may have been suggested by his famous saying: “Le style est l’homme même”—and not “Le style c’est l’homme,” as the phrase is generally quoted. All that Buffon meant, and all that Buffon said, was that a writer’s facts, and even his arguments and thoughts, are or may be made common property, whereas his manner of expressing himself is exclusively his own. The idea that an author’s personality necessarily reveals itself in his writings is contrary to experience, few authors, indeed, exhibiting the same character on paper as in ordinary life.

To return for one moment to the garden, and to those exotics which are cultivated with so much success in the Parisian climate. The most important of these—at least, in a commercial sense—is the tobacco-plant, now naturalised over nearly the whole of France.

The tobacco-factory of Paris, where so much of the native as well as foreign tobacco-leaf is prepared, consists of large buildings, five storeys high, situated between the Quai d’Orsay, the Rue de l’Université, the Rue Saint-Jean, and the Rue de la Boucherie des Invalides. The large gate in the Rue Saint-Jean affords entrance to tobaccos coming from all parts of the globe, of which the qualities have been ascertained beforehand by experts buying on samples which are preserved for comparison with each consignment as it arrives. The great national factory receives from the United States—Virginia, for instance, Kentucky, and Maryland—large shipments of tobacco packed in casks; from South America vast quantities in bales composed of skins. Java, too, and Manilla in the Pacific Ocean, Macedonia, Egypt, Greece, Algeria, Hungary, Holland, and finally France itself, contribute their share.

The anti-smokers of France naturally look{155} with horror on the huge tobacco factory of their metropolis; and more than a century ago Valmont Bomare wrote the following lament: “I wish I had never known that in 1750 they estimated that Maryland and Virginia consigned each year more than a hundred million casks of tobacco to the English, who only consumed about half of it, exporting the rest to France, and thereby enriching themselves annually to the amount of nine million two hundred thousand francs.”

At present nineteen departments of France produce some fifty million pounds of tobacco, worth twenty million francs. The native tobacco growths are restricted by the often beneficial interference of the administration, which has to be consulted by growers in choosing the land for cultivation, and which even prescribes the varieties of tobacco to be grown.

The sale of tobacco is a monopoly in France, the shop-keeping tobacconists being really nothing more than Government agents for the distribution of cigars, cigarettes, tobacco, and snuff. The tenancy of a tobacconist’s shop is a privilege conferred by the Government sometimes on widows and orphans whose husbands or fathers have deserved well of the state, sometimes on less meritorious persons who have rendered services at elections, or have in some other way earned the goodwill of the Government or of Government agents.

All tobacco manufactories are Government property; and it was as such that the tobacco manufactory of Dieppe was seized in 1870 by the Prussians when they occupied that town. They declared their intention of burning it—but only as a menace; and they obligingly allowed it to be ransomed on payment of 75,000 francs.{156}

CHAPTER XXII.

SOME HISTORICAL BUILDINGS.

“TO look for history in the streets of Paris,” said M. Edouard Fournier, some twenty-five years ago, “when so much of the city has been destroyed, especially during the last ten years, is to arrive rather late in the field; it is like harvesting after the gleaners, picking up blades of grass instead of ears of corn.” And this, from the author of “L’Esprit dans l’Histoire” and of “Le Vieux-Neuf,” concerning whom Jules Janin once wrote: “Cet homme sait tout; il ne sait que cela; mais il le sait bien.” Where Edouard Fournier despaired of finding anything it would be vain to seek for much. Something, however, may, even by following in his footsteps, yet be gleaned in the very field which he regards as bare. In the socalled “city”—the germ of that capital to which the name of Paris is now given—may still be seen the house in the Rue des Chantres which passes for that of the odious Fulbert, villain of the love story of Abailard and Héloise. That of Abailard, which was on the other side of the street, was pulled down early in 1849. Its final association was with a law-suit, brought by lodgers in the house against the proprietor, who, as they alleged, had dispossessed them without due notice. The former abode of Fulbert, the terrible uncle of Héloise, must itself be on the point of disappearing, even if it has not been already demolished. The house of Abailard was at one time connected by a narrow bridge with the house where the unnatural Fulbert dwelt with his charming niece. But after the separation of the lovers their respective houses were no longer to remain united, and the stone bridge which joined them together—like the Bridge of Sighs of the Venetian Palace and Prison—soon fell into ruins. Two medallions, in which their features were said to be reproduced, formed the last record of their loves. These have been reproduced above the ground-floor of the new house on the Quai Napoleon, with the famous distich: “Abailard, Héloise, habitèrent ces lieux,” etc. Those who love history for its romance, those who have been touched by the tale of the lovers, will gaze with interest on these two faces; and if they are not satisfied they may go to Père Lachaise to continue their devotions in presence of the monument to their memory. If, however, they should have consulted M. Edouard Fournier beforehand, they will have been warned that the medallions of the Quai Napoleon and the statues of the tomb are anything but authentic. “The medallions,” says this unerring critic, “in costumes of the time of Henry IV. represent lovers of the{157} twelfth century. As to the statues, M. de Guilhermy has already shown that the one of Héloise was seen until the time of the Revolution on the tomb of the Dorman family in the chapel of the Beauvais College, Rue Jean de Beauvais. The statue of Abailard is probably of equal authenticity.”

If, to pursue the subject historically, we were to look for remains of the great wall with innumerable towers which Philip Augustus built before his departure for the Crusades, in order not to leave his dear city of Paris without defence, we should find it difficult to discover even traces; though the most imposing of the towers were destroyed not more than twenty or thirty years ago. They were brought to light by preceding demolitions, themselves in turn to be laid in ruins. At the foot of one of these towers a treasure, dating from Gallo-Roman times, was dug up. It was valued, according to the weight of the gold, at 30,000 francs, though its artistic and historical worth was a hundred times greater. Most of the medals found their way to England. In the Cour de Rouen, close to the Passage du Commerce, is, or was until lately, to be seen a well-preserved fragment of a Philip Augustus tower, standing, half-smothered with ivy, on a piece of wall, broad enough to serve as terrace to the adjoining house, where a girls’ school had been established. “It is a joyful sight,” says M. Edouard Fournier, “to see children of the present day leaping and bounding on this remnant of antiquity.” Further on, in the Rue Clovis—which the reader may remember as figuring in Eugène Sue’s “Wandering Jew”—is another relic of this same wall. In the Rue Dauphine, at the back of the house numbered 34, is a tower almost in its original form; and close by, in the Rue Guénégaud, the body of another, which stood on the edge of the wall that from this point went on in a straight line to the celebrated Tour de Nesle. The ruined tower of the Rue Guénégaud served some years ago as background to a blacksmith’s forge, whose flames cast a lurid light on this obscure reminder of a past age.

Passing to the other side of the water (where our subject inevitably leads us, though it is on the left bank that Paris antiquities are chiefly to be sought), we find several houses ancient themselves, or at least closely connected with ancient associations. In the former Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul—now Rue Charlemagne—where Rabelais died, and where Molière passed the first years of his dramatic apprenticeship, may be seen, in the courtyard of the neighbouring barracks, remains of one of the two towers which Charles X. gave in 1485 to the nuns of the Ave Maria convent, whose cloister the barracks have now replaced. At No. 20 of the Rue Rambuteau some twenty metres of the old wall, here in the form of a terrace, are to be found; and finally, in the very heart of Paris, in the Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, where the General Post Office is established, is preserved at the back of No. 12 a tower which has still two-thirds of its original height. It stands twenty-four feet above the soil. In its entirety it was, like all the other towers, thirty-nine feet high.

These remains of the old girdle-wall, whose existence by many persons is scarcely suspected, are all that survives of the constructions of the sixteenth century. The thirteenth is still more imperfectly represented; though some forty years ago might be seen in the quarter of Saint-Marcel, at some paces from the river Bièvre, substantial remains of one of the lodges of St. Louis.

In the Rue des Gobelins and the Rue des Marmousets are still extant relics, in the shape of a façade and the fragment of a wall, of the royal lodge where Queen Blanche listened beneath the willows of the Bièvre to the verses of Thibault de Champagne; where Charles VI. went mad one terrible night, which, beginning{158} with a masquerade, ended with a conflagration; where Francis I. had secret rendezvous, to which playful reference is sometimes made in the pages of Rabelais.

In the Rue Vieille du Temple, at the corner of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, stands a graceful turret—bright relic of that sombre Hôtel Barbette which the Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI., was just leaving when he was killed at the very door by the followers of John the Fearless. A lamp, whose light was never to be extinguished, was placed there by one of the assassins, in expiation of the crime. Tradition says that “la belle Ferronnière” lived close by, and that it was by the light of the lamp, fixed beneath the turret, that the husband saw Francis I. escape one night from his wife’s house.

After adorning a feudal mansion, subsequently to be transformed into the rich abode of a financier of the time of Louis XIV., what has this turret now become? Without losing anything of its graceful exterior, not even the grating, so finely worked, of its little window, it marks the corner of the bedroom occupied by the grocer who has his shop below!

John the Fearless was not troubled by the remorse experienced by his accomplice, whose repentance was for ever to be proclaimed by his votive lamp. The blow having been struck, his only thought was to guard against the consequences. Withdrawing to the Hôtel d’Artois, which afterwards took from him the name of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, he there constructed a stone room, or what was then called a donjon—not to be confounded with the English word obviously derived from it. The little fortress of John the Fearless was solidly built, for it exists even to this day. The square tower, at least eighty feet high, is indeed in perfect condition. Its walls are still crenellated, and it has lost nothing of its original physiognomy, except as regards the roof with which it has been covered in.

An old building of very different character is the house of Nicholas Flamel, at No. 50, Rue Montmorency, near the Rue Saint-Martin. Just above the ground floor a touching inscription in Gothic characters may still be read, from which it appears that “poor labouring men and women dwelling beneath the porch of this house,” said the Paternoster and the Ave Maria for the dead. This was the sole condition of the hospitality extended to them by Flamel. He had ideas on the subject of property which can never have been widely spread in any age, and which are certainly not entertained in the present day. He let out his numerous houses in such a way, that with the money gained from lodgers on the lower floors he supported lodgers without means on the upper ones. “Gens de mestier,” says Guillebert de Metz, “demouroient en bas, et du loyer qu’ils payoient estoient soutenus povres laboureurs en hault.”

Another historic house, in the very centre of what may still be looked upon as mediæval Paris, the Hôtel de Sens, stands in an open space enclosed by the Rues Figuier, de la Mortellerie, du Fauconnier, and des Barrés; in an admirable position, that is to say, and at two paces from the ancient Hôtel Saint-Paul. John the Good, after his imprisonment in London, lived there for some time as the guest of the Archbishop of Sens. Charles V. attached more{159} value to it, for in 1369 he purchased it, and for some time it was only an adjunct to the Hôtel Saint-Paul. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century it reverted to the Archbishop of Sens, Tristan de Salazar, who had it rebuilt in the form it still preserves, with the exception of the embellishments added by the famous Duprat, one of his successors.

Under Henri IV. it was the abode of La Reine Margot, as Marguerite de Valois, the king’s divorced wife, was popularly called. “Queen Venus,” as will afterwards be seen, was another of her familiar names. This legendary heroine of the Tour de Nesle had scarcely taken possession of her new mansion, in August, 1605, when a placard was affixed to her door, inscribed with a quatrain in which her licentious life was satirised. The evil reputation brought to the house by Queen Margot remained attached to it as long as she lived there. In a previous sketch of the locality the story has already been told of the tragic event which caused Queen Margot to abandon the Hôtel de Sens for ever. She had been there scarcely a year when one of her pages, whose professions of love she had accepted, finding another page preferred to him, shot his rival almost beneath the queen’s eyes. Marguerite’s cry for vengeance, her offer of her own garter to anyone who would use it to strangle the assassin, his arrest, and her vow neither to eat nor drink until he had been executed, have already been told. Two days after (or, as some authorities have it, only one) the page Vermond, who had fled but was duly captured, lost his head beneath the axe of the executioner, when Queen Margot fainted away, and, on recovering herself, left the place for ever.

She had scarcely quitted Paris when this murder of her lover before her door and the speedy gratification of her desire for vengeance on the assassin were thus set forth in verses sung freely in the public streets:—

{160}

The Hôtel de Torpane, in the Rue de Bernardins, was the mansion of the Bignon family, which has produced so many illustrious men in literature and in law. It was demolished in 1830, but remains of it still subsist. Some years ago a stone, bearing the motto of the Bignon family—“Multa renascentur”—was found (what irony!) in the midst of the ruins. Nothing of a fallen house lives again except, perhaps, certain ornaments which, like the sculpture of the Hôtel de Tortonne, are carried elsewhere—in this particular case, to a back room in the École des Beaux-Arts. The statues which once adorned the Hôtel de Torpane are said—but probably without foundation—to be from the hand of Jean Goujon.

Mention has already been made of the Hôtel Carnavalet, where the genius of Jean Goujon may really be studied. It owes its name to the widow of M. Kernevenoy, whose Breton name had become softened into that of Carnavalet, and who in his lifetime had been the worthy friend of Ronsard and of Brantôme. Madame “Carnavalet” bought the house for herself and her son. She maintained it in its original beauty, which it was impossible to increase. She did, however, add some ornaments, especially the sculptured masks which figure here and there on the façade, and which, according to the ingenious idea of M. Fournier, may have been intended to suggest, through the “Carnival,” her husband’s family name.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE MONT-DE-PIÉTÉ.

Entering one of these loan offices, a peculiar odour—which a French writer with a delicate nose has described as something between the smell of a barrack and that of a hospital—gives the visitor his first impression of the place. Scrupulously clean as the depôt is kept, the air is to some extent affected by the malodorous parcels brought in by the customers. Even the frequent opening of the doors scarcely relieves the atmosphere, which is characterised by that most unbearable of all atmospheric qualities—{161}stuffiness. But the heroic student of life, bent on observation, fortifies his nose by the aid of philosophy; and instead of betaking himself to flight, sits down on one of the benches ranged round the room and affects to await his turn. This room is divided into two by a partition fitted with doors, one part accommodating the public, the other being reserved for the employés. The public compartment is generally very sombre, with no other light than that which steals through chance apertures: the shopmen’s compartment is thoroughly illuminated. The sun has been accused by a French writer of flinging his beams into these pawnshops in order to reveal some of the most lamentable scenes and acts of human life. But, on the other hand, the assistants require a good light to examine the miscellaneous articles submitted to their appraisement.

One curious feature is the silence which reigns in these establishments. The customers seem to have no tongues, and the money-lenders, by no means prodigal of words, communicate with their clients chiefly by looks and gestures. After all, there is little need for conversation, the business of every visitor being ostensible, and the employés having simply to say that they will lend such and such a sum on the article proposed, or—what sickens the heart of some poor wretches who wish to raise the price of a loaf of bread or a bundle of firewood—that they will lend nothing on a worthless rag.

To some extent the pawnbroking assistant may be said to control the destinies of the impecunious public. If he refuses to lend on this article or that, some merchant will be unable to redeem his honour and his promissory note, some lover will be unable to keep his appointment with the girl of his heart, some comedian will not make his début, some lady of fashion will not give her soirée, and some needy mother will have to send her family supperless to bed. Here behind this partition there is no distinction of class. The highest and the lowest ranks of Parisian society are brought together—a duchess by the side of a flower-girl, an artist by the side of an artisan. Pride and humility are here united. Aristocrats, whose souls revolt at the thought of{162} borrowing, are dragged to the place by necessity, and have to wait, like the rest, till the assistant is at leisure to inspect their rings and their diamonds, their silks and their satins.

“For anyone who knows how to observe and divine,” says M. Alfred Delvau, “the public of a loan office is very interesting. You enter mentally into the existences of all those widely different characters, dragged here by such opposite causes, and you leave the place smiling sometimes, but sad nearly always. Misery—even smiling misery—has nothing of gaiety; and it is Misery, or her shame-faced sister Want, who drives hither that crowd of people differing so greatly from one another by their costume, age, sex, and position.

“First of all, with his elbows resting on the counter, facing the commissionaire—sworn appraiser of all those rubbish heaps which the owners wish to turn into gold—lounges a fellow who turns his back on us and lets us see, beneath his frayed trouser-ends, a pair of naked feet enclosed in down-at-heel shoes. He comes to pledge his mattress—the last, the supreme resource!—that mattress which seems to have lost half its stuffing; or some workman’s tools, which do not look sorry to rest a little. By his side, and by way of contrast, stands, with brazen air, a big red-faced woman, red-haired, red-shawled, with a mauve silk dress and ruffles of white lace, whom I sometimes meet on the footway of the Rue des Martyrs, and who personifies a certain category of women—the last category. What does she come to pledge?—her heart? That has long since wandered away. Her virtue? That has followed her heart. Her wit? She never had any. What then? Some jewel, without doubt—the last witness of a last liaison. Her ear is at this moment bereft of the twenty-five francs’ worth of gold which hung in it just now.

“On the wooden bench let into the wall are other persons: two women of the lower orders, who are estimating beforehand the borrowing value of the linen they are going to pledge, while the little daughter of one of them is heedlessly gnawing an apple; a young girl in black, her head bare, like that of the red woman who has just gone, but more decently and poorly clad; an Arthur of the Reine Blanche—his hat tilted over his ear, his hands in his pockets, and looking at the small dog playing at his feet, rather than look at nothing; then men and women of the inferior classes with their children, talking about the hard times and the high rents; then placid citizens; then careworn flower-girls; then other people more or less interesting—but always interested. The man who pledges his mattress, the woman who pledges her linen, the sempstress who pledges her dress, feel no doubt a sharp pang in taking leave of objects so indispensable; but that is as nothing compared with the poignant anguish of the man who, for food, or the woman who, to feed her child, is obliged to part with love tokens or family jewels, as sacred as the vases of a church: the ancestral watch which has marked so many hours of joy and pain; the locket enclosing that lock of hair; the bracelet of that dead mistress who will never die in the heart of him she has left for ever; the ring given by that lover who still lives but who is for ever dead to the woman he has deserted.

“It is the physiognomy of the borrowers that I have just been sketching, of those wretches of all ranks, who are forced by some dire necessity, whether accidental or normal, to come and pledge their clothes or their jewels; to exhaust—in order not to die of hunger or to meet an overdue debt—the resources which are still at their disposal. Yet, by the side of these careworn, despairing faces, inscribed with poignant melancholy, or, in some cases, resignation, are the radiant faces of those who have come to redeem their jewels and their clothes. These are not silent like the rest. They do not glide in, like furtive shadows amongst other shadows. You hear them coming before you see them: they ascend the steps with tremendous haste. It is a question of arriving before the shop is closed, for it is Saturday, the morrow is Sunday, and they have come up panting like a pair of forge-bellows.

“There is a run of business on Saturday night, and the assistants behind the counter, although they, too, love Sunday with the repose it brings, almost dread it as being preceded by such a rush of work. And these people who come to redeem are not so easy to manage as the poor wretches who pledge, the latter being mild and patient, full of anguish though they are; the former noisy, exacting, and sometimes insolent. The relationship is changed, in fact. One set come to demand something, almost an act of charity—for that is the nature of the request, although the pledge is worth more than the loan granted. The other set come to make what is almost a gift; for the pledge they withdraw is not always worth the price that has been estimated, and if they did not{163} withdraw it the commissionaire would perhaps lose something on it, instead of gaining. You see the difference. And then, again, it is usually men who pledge and women who redeem. In pledging, a signature is required; a certificate alone suffices for the redemption. I leave you to imagine the behaviour of those gossips, proud of “unhooking” from the accursed “nail” the dress or the jacket which has hung there six months, and which is now as indispensable for going to the dance or the promenade as it was useless six months since, when it was a question of procuring a dinner or paying for a bed.”

The Parisian pawnbroker, being simply a Government official, differs necessarily from the pawnbroker of London. The latter is the most independent and insolent of all shopkeepers. He makes very little distinction between those who come to pledge and those who come to redeem. If his Saturday-night customers who come to take their things out of pawn were to give themselves such airs as the Parisian pledge-redeemers already described, he would insult them to their face, and keep them waiting till they had learnt better manners. He feels indebted to no one. He does not seek regular customers, for he knows that the stream of the impecunious will never cease to flow into his shop, that if one does not come another will, and that the people who come to redeem are seriously in want of their property, and must pay him the amount of the loan and interest no matter whether he is bearish or polite.

The branch establishments, with their commissionaires, having been spoken of, let us now glance at the great Mont-de-Piété of Paris, situated in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux. This central establishment dates from the reign of Louis XVI., who founded it by letters patent in 1777. The work of money-lending was at once commenced, but not in the buildings specially constructed in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, beside the convent of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, since these buildings were not completed until 1786. It is interesting to follow the different phases through which this vast establishment of public utility, designed to “put an end to the abuses of usury,” has passed, until now it receives upwards of twenty-five million pledges annually. That these pledges present an inconceivably great variety of objects may well be supposed. On this subject M. Blaize, author of the “Traité des Monts-de-Piété,” has written descriptively enough as follows:—“Let us stop at the first floor. This is the quarter of the aristocracy; the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Chaussée d’Antin of our borrowers. Here are the first and second divisions—those of the “jewels”—where the most precious objects are deposited. I open the ‘four-figure cupboards’—such is the name we give to those cupboards of iron which contain pledges on which a thousand francs or more have been advanced. Great{164} Heaven! what riches! Sparkling sprays, strings of diamonds, trinkets calculated to turn the heads of duchesses! Silver services fit to adorn the table of a king! In these regions of want—opulent want and necessitous want—one’s eyes must not see everything nor one’s ears listen to everything: let us pass on. We take our way through the passages which are bordered on each side with wealth-laden shelves. Look at those thousands of watches, chains, bracelets, jewels of every kind; that countless mass of objects of art, of luxury, of utility, of vanity, or of coquetry.

“We are now on the second floor. Here commences the ordinary goods department. The floor bends beneath the weight of the million pledges which are taken in every year. Here are ranged, in admirable order, dresses, coats, shirts, table-cloths, blankets, and indeed every object of household use or of the toilet; vestments of silks or of rags; books; tools. Let us explore the next two storeys. The same arrangements, the same symmetry: cases filled with boxes, bandboxes, and parcels. The walls of the staircases are covered with pictures, mirrors, metronomes, which have not found a place in the interior of the divisions. Let us go higher still. We are now in the doleful city, in the region of sorrow and want. Look at those piles of mattresses so highly packed. They are the very last tribute of misery, which, after being despoiled of its vestments, has given us its last pledge, and which sleeps on a heap of straw, where shiver, in a fetid attic, around{165} an emaciated mother, children blue with cold, with wasted cheeks, hollow eyes, and a smile sad and sweet. Poor dear little creatures! In order to live, they ask for nothing but a little air and bread! Let us descend to the ground floor.