H. Sutherland Edwards

“ The church soon became a temple of Renown—a place where the People gather to pronounce their judgment on the dead. This is why that colonnade bears its splendours so high aloft; why the cupola lifts itself up as though it were a crown on the head of Paris. Here occurs the apotheosis, not of a shepherdess—Sainte-Geneviève, that is to say—but of France, of the country, in the form of illustrious men who have gone to breathe the air of another shore. What had been blamed as superfluous luxury for the prophetess of Nanterre was assuredly necessary for the glorification of glorious men. ”

“ Everyone ran to take up arms. Everyone cried out, ‘To the enemy!’ But the enemy is not in the field alone. The enemy is at Paris, as well as around Verdun. Our foes are in the Paris prisons. Shall we leave our women, our children, our aged persons, to the mercy of these wretches? Let us hurry to the prisons. Let us exterminate these monsters, who will profit by our absence with the army to murder our wives and our children, to liberate Louis XVI. from his tower, and to rally the Royalist battalions. ”

“ This ardour of propagandism has begun, however, to abate, and the English in general are by no means the last to take advantage of the Paris Sunday. Anyone who has seen the Sabbath of London must feel the difference. Every Frenchman who has just missed dying, not only of ennui, but of hunger and thirst, during the hours of service in England—hearing his footsteps resound in the desolate streets—will understand the solace experienced by an Englishman on finding that the coast is clear for him at Paris and Versailles. ”

“ Once arrived in the Bois de Boulogne, the visitor has not to travel far in order to see the Marne, that most capricious of French rivers. There is scarcely a Parisian who has not taken an exploring stroll along the banks of this stream, which conducts the oarsman to the very point whence he started. Artists and dreamers in search of leafy shade, of trees overhanging a limpid stream, of mills beating the clear water with their black wheels, know the Marne well. On summer days many a peal of laughter may be heard to proceed from behind some shrubbery. ”

“ We have not the political liberty of the English, and they have not our social equality. An Englishman could not live with laws like those which, in France, regulate the right of speaking, the right of writing, the right of petitioning, the right of assembling, the right of going and coming; but a Frenchman would be stifled amidst those thousand conventional bonds which form English society. The influence of convention in England is such that it equals and even surpasses the tyranny of the political and administrative laws of the Continent. ”

“ To have a genuine passion for books is to care neither for cards, nor for good living, nor for useless luxury, nor for racehorses, nor for political intrigues, nor for ruinous love affairs. The bibliophile is never troubled by the storms of political life. Pixéricourt, the author of thirty amusing or terrible novels, would be forgotten in France but for the rare editions that he collected in his library, and which after his death did more for his reputation, at the sale of his books, than all his works of fiction had done. Few writers of the day grudged him his talent or his success ”

“ The Englishman carries not only his nation, but his religion with him; he scours the whole earth with his Bible for companion; the Frenchman, habitually catholic, requires a bell and a priest—he does not know how to converse directly with Heaven. From a social point of view, moreover, the English find France freer, more liberal, more open than their own country. English society, at home, is regulated like music-paper; it has a severe hierarchy, in which the most idiotic little lord stands before a man of genius without a title. ”

“ If one of the actors makes a mistake, he seems grieved and shocked; if on the other hand the actor plays well, he gives him, by gestures and by word of mouth, the liveliest marks of approbation. He enters into the spirit of both situations with all the signs of genuine emotion, and even sheds tears with the effusiveness of a young girl assisting for the first time at the performance of a tragedy. ”

“ The Conciergerie is the gaol of the department of the Seine. It gained a sinister celebrity during some of the most sanguinary periods of French history. This sombre prison abounds in recollections of those strifes and miseries by which royal epochs were too often characterised, and of that vengeance and blind fury which distinguished the Revolution. Every political movement, every religious passion, has contributed to the horrors which mark the annals of this institution. ”

“ The word “étrenne” is at once a terror and a joy to Parisians, according as they belong to the class who give or the class who receive. In London no gentleman would venture to omit at Christmas-time to “tip” any one of the underlings who had ever cleaned his boots, lifted his portmanteau, or twisted the ends of his moustache. But in Paris, if a gentleman failed at the new year to present “étrennes” to his boot-black, his messenger, or his valet, derision and infamy would, according to a French writer, pursue him, not merely throughout this life, but even beyond the tomb. ”

“ It is in the spring that the full beauty of flower and foliage reveals itself. On Sundays and fête days, when the weather is fine, the garden teems with people.{151} Masses of promenaders come to find, beneath the shade of the avenues, verdure and fresh air; for not only is the Jardin des Plantes a great scientific school, it is the joy and the life of a populous quarter of the metropolis. ”

“ During the reign of Louis XIV., an English traveller remarked that no people were more industrious than the Parisians, nor gave less money, because he said they hastened to spend all they earned in food, drink and clothes. The vanity of dress, the love of ornaments, and, above all, of decorations in the official sense of the word, has always tormented the Parisians. The passion for equality still shows itself in France by everyone wishing to wear a gold stripe on his trousers or a feather in his cap. No such brilliant display of fantastic uniforms was ever seen as during the Commune. ”

“ The wood of Vincennes is to-day, of course, very different from what it was at the period when Philip Augustus, enamoured of the chase, had it surrounded by solid walls, in order to preserve the fallow deer and roebucks which he had imported from England. But if it has lost a great deal of its ancient character, together with some of its noblest old trees, it has gained in lakes, lawns, and avenues, where the laborious population of Paris love to lounge or stroll in a clear and recreative air. ”

“ The great pawnbroking establishment, or Mont-de-Piété, of Paris, is situated in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, with a principal branch office in the Rue Bonaparte; but it may be interesting meanwhile to glance at those minor establishments which are scattered over the whole of the French capital. Like their counterparts in London, they excite in the philosophic beholder a melancholy curiosity, above all in the poorer quarters, where dire necessity compels the levying of those loans which, in more fashionable parts, are the result of an extravagant life. ”

“ Whilst people were eagerly revelling in these visions, they were suddenly aroused by claps of thunder, often redoubled, accompanied by an infinitude of lightning flashes and fires which, darting towards the heavens like rockets or hovering in the air like stars, burst to pieces or fell into some lake where they rekindled themselves instead of being extinguished, or, finally, creeping along the ground like serpents, augmented the horrors of darkness by dissipating it, and seemed to threaten the universe with its last conflagration. ”

“ There was a general competition as to who should undertake the most distant journeys, the most perilous enterprises. Every unknown land seemed to be an El Dorado. People whispered to one another in the evening, beside the hearth without a fire, of countries beyond the seas where the mountains were of pure gold, where the rivers were of milk, where the animals answered to the voice of man. A search was instituted for these enchanted islands, where there was neither hunger, nor poverty, nor oppression. ”

“ A passion for exercise and the chase, much more easy to gratify in the country than at Paris, remote as it was from forests and sterile in places of promenade, and the love of buildings which came next and constantly grew, forbade to him the amusements of a town where he could not avoid being continually on view. The idea, moreover, of rendering himself more venerable by abstracting himself from the eyes of the multitude and from daily appearance in public, was one of the considerations which decided the king to fix upon Saint-Germain, soon after the death of the queen, his mother. ”

“ The frame of mind in which to enjoy beautiful music should not, indeed, be broken in upon by disturbances from the outside. Not only in Germany, but wherever Wagner is played, the claque is, for the occasion, dispensed with. Even at the Grand Opéra of Paris there was no claque when Lohengrin was performed; and it may be that if a representation is witnessed in absolute silence from the beginning to the end of each act, the applause is more enthusiastic when at last the moment for plaudits arrives. ”

“ The liberal spirit in which the schools of the University of Paris were thrown open to foreigners could not fail to bear fruit. The students of all countries, hastening in those distant days to Paris, made it the intellectual capital, and at the same time the most popular city of continental Europe. In the course of less than a century were seen on the benches, or, to be literal, standing on the straw, of the schools of Paris, Albertus Magnus from Germany, Duns Scotus from Scotland, Raymond Lulli from Spain, Roger Bacon from England, Brunetto Latini and his pupil, Dante Alighieri, from Italy. ”

“ They afford a study which excites no small degree of combined interest and regret. The number is large in Paris of those who, having repudiated all restraint and banished the last vestige of self-respect, live aloof from society and never touch it except for purposes of injury. Despite the incessant surveillance of which they are the object, despite the laws which hedge them about, accuse and punish them, they remain in the great capital, like an unsubdued tribe, always in revolt, bent upon evil, and often accomplishing it with audacity. ”

“ Heine was a poet and satirist by nature. Endowed with great analytical power, and educated in Germany, he of course took a pleasure in studying the operations of the human mind; but he was not a philosopher by temperament, which is sufficiently proved by the fact that he not only refrained from attaching himself to any particular system of philosophy in a country where he had so many to select from, but that he did not even take the trouble to invent a system for himself. He comprehended philosophy, liked painting, loved music, and spoke of all science and art in the spirit of a poet. ”

“ The Normans, the English, even the Cossacks have made incursions here. There is, according to the expression of one French writer, not a tuft of grass which has not been stained with human blood. Through the villages in sight princes and kings have passed. Torch-lit cortèges, conducting prisoners to the dungeon and to death, have alternated with triumphal processions, escorting sovereigns to their capital to the flourish of trumpets. On that hill yonder Charles VII. raised a castle—the Castle of Beauty—which preserves the memory of Agnes Sorel. ”

“ Yet when the English troops had evacuated a good portion of the country in 1437, the year in which Charles VII. made his solemn entry into the capital he had reconquered, hunger and misery killed more than twenty thousand persons in Paris alone.
France was not alone in her suffering; all Europe was in the same plight. The fifteenth century was a century of misery. In his “Public Alimentation under the Ancient Monarchy,” M. Charles Louandre remarks, with reason, that the impossibility of living, of bringing up a family, of paying taxes and dues, inspired a passion for discovery. ”

“ The fifth act takes place at Paris, like the first; but the man who at the beginning of the drama was a prisoner and a proscript has come back as a conqueror. All Paris rises to salute him. The Academy believes that Homer, Socrates, and Aristophanes are to be found again in Voltaire; the Théâtre Français crowns him with immortal laurels. But the poet has reached the last point of greatness; Paris smothers in its embraces this ruler of opinions, who with his last breath proclaims the rights of man. ”