Thomas Okey

“ There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates the spirit. The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and material phases, is less gross and coarse, [4] its pleasures more refined than in London. ”

“ Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the germs of an unquenchable hatred of their oppressors were sown in his breast. Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons he was one day diverted from his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about, seeking in vain to discover his way. ”

“ The social revolution known as the enfranchisement of the commons and the growth of towns begins in the reign of Louis VI. The king would have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with that of the monarchy. ”

“ His statue on the Pont Neuf was spared for a while by the revolutionists, who made every passer-by in a carriage alight and bow to it. Born among the mountains, Henry was patient of fatigue and hardships. In good or evil fortune his gaiety of heart never failed him. Brave and generous, courteous and witty, he endeared himself to all his subjects, save a few fanatics, and won a desperate cause by sheer personal magic and capacity. Like all his race, Henry was susceptible to the charms of the daughters of Eve, but, unlike his descendants, he never sacrificed France to their tears and wiles. ”

“ For a time the regent, Marie de’ Medici, was content to suffer the great Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of princes, to the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from Paris into the retirement of his château of Villebon, and a feeble and venal Florentine, Concini, took his place. The Prince of Condé, now a Catholic, the Duke of Mayenne, and a pack of nobles who professed solicitude for the wrongs of the pauvre peuple, fell upon the royal treasury like hounds on their quarry. ”

“ The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a François Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, from the days of the Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crisis of her history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens. ”

“ The chief architectural creations of the Third Republic are the Hôtel de Ville, the new Sorbonne, the Trocadero, and the completion of the magnificent and colossal temple, rich with precious marble and stone of every kind, which, at a cost of £10,000,000 sterling, has been raised to the Muses at the end of the Avenue de l’Opéra. The Church, too, has lavished her millions on the mighty basilica of the Sacré Cœur, which dominates Paris from the heights of Montmartre. But some of the glory of past ages remains hidden away in corners of the city ”

“ The new ideas were none the less revolutionary of social life. The salon, that eminently French institution, soon felt their power. The charming irresponsible gaiety and frivolity of the old régime gave place to more serious preoccupation with political movements. The fusing power of Rousseau’s genius had melted all hearts; the solvent wit of Voltaire and the precise science of the Encyclopedists were a potent force even among the courtiers themselves. The centre of social life shifted from Versailles to Paris and the salons gained what the court lost. ”

“ Not until a quarter of a century had passed were her ashes laid beside those of her husband in the rich Renaissance tomb, which still exists, in the royal church of St. Denis. When the news of the king’s death reached Paris, the Duchess of Montpensier, whom he had threatened to burn alive when he entered, leapt into her carriage and drove through the streets crying, “Good news, friends! Good news! The tyrant is dead!” Jacques Clement, who had been cut to pieces by the king’s Guards, was worshipped as a martyr, and his mother rewarded for having given birth to the saviour of France. ”

“ The little band rush forth, place themselves against the ruins of the bridge, and prepare to sell their lives dearly—terrible against terrible foes. The walls of the city are lined with their kinsmen and friends impotent to help. The enemies of God, doomed one day to dine at Pluto’s cauldron, press upon them. They fight till Phœbus sinks to the depths of the sea, so great is the courage of despair. They are promised their lives if they will yield, are disarmed, then treacherously slain, and their souls fly to heaven. ”

“ Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circumference, and over her gates to-day one may read, Entrée de Paris. The Parisian is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. ”

“ It is now time to ask what had been done with the magnificent inheritance which the fourteenth Louis had entered upon at the opening of his reign: he left to his successor a France crushed by an appalling debt of 2,400,000,000 livres; a noblesse and an army in bondage to money-lenders; public officials and fund-holders unpaid, trade paralysed, and the peasants in some provinces so poor that even straw was lacking for them to lie upon, many crossing the frontiers in search of a less miserable lot. ”

“ The university, the parlement, the queen-mother, the whole of North France, from Brittany and Normandy to Flanders, from the Channel to the line of the Loire, accepted the situation, and the Duke of Burgundy, most powerful of the royal princes, was a friend of the English. Yet a few French hearts beat true. While the regent Duke of Bedford was entering Paris, a handful of knights unfurled the royal banner at Melun, crying—“Long live King Charles, seventh of the name, by the grace of God king of France!” ”

“ At the annual review in the Champ de Mars near Paris, the king strode along the line inspecting the weapons of his warriors. He stopped in front of the uncourtly soldier, took his axe from him, complained of its foul state, and flung it angrily on the ground. As the man stooped to pick it up Clovis, with his own axe, cleft his skull in twain, exclaiming: “Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.” “Even so,” says Gregory quaintly, “did he inspire all with great fear.”
At this point of our story we meet the first of those noble women, heroic and wise, for whom French history is pre-eminent. ”

“ Louis, however, hated Paris, for his forced exile during the troubles of the Fronde rankled in his memory. Nor were the associations of St. Germain any more pleasant. A lover of the chase and all too prone to fall into the snares of “fair, fallacious looks and venerial trains,” the retirement of his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles, away from the prying eyes and mocking tongues of the Parisians, early attracted him. There he was wont to meet his mistress, Madame de la Vallière, and there he determined to erect a vast pleasure-palace and gardens. ”

“ With the accession of Charles VIII. and the beginning of the Italian wars a new era is inaugurated. Gothic architecture had reached its final development and structural perfection, in the flowing lines of the flamboyant style. [97] Painting and sculpture, both in subject, matter and style, assume a new aspect. The diffusion of ancient literature and the discovery of a new world, open wider horizons to men’s minds, and human thought and human activity are directed towards other, and not always nobler, ideals. Mediævalism passes away and Paris begins to clothe herself in a new vesture of stone. ”

“ Montaigne, in the second half of the sixteenth century, complains that the acrid smell of the mud of Paris weakened the affection he bore to that fair city, and Howell writes in 1620, “the city is always dirty, and by perpetual motion the mud is beaten into a thick, black and unctuous oil that sticks so that no art can wash it off, and besides the indelible stain it leaves, gives so strong a scent that it may be smelt many miles off, if the wind be in one’s face as one comes from the fresh air of the country.” ”

“ For a thousand years her people were loyal and faithful subjects of a monarchy, and endured for a century and a half an infliction of misgovernment, oppression and grinding taxation such as probably no other European people would have tolerated. With touching fidelity and indomitable steadfastness the French people have cherished the principles of the Great Revolution, in whose name they swept the shams and wrongs of the ancien régime away. ”

“ Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean and Persian antiquities (including the unique and magnificent frieze of the archers from the palace of Darius I.) , all are crowded with objects of interest and beauty, even to the inexpert visitor.
Of the gorgeous palace of the Tuileries, with its inharmonious but picturesque façade, stretching across the western limit of the Louvre from the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. ”

“ How vain is the wisdom of the great! Burke thought that the Revolution had expunged France in a political sense out of the system of Europe, and his opinion was shared by every statesman in Europe, but before the year closed the proud and magnificently accoutred armies of kings were scattered over the borders, civil war was crushed at home, the Revolution triumphant. ”

“ The despicable Gaston, who twice betrayed his friends to save his own skin, was watched, and when the queen, Anne of Austria, gave birth to a son after twenty years of marriage, he was deprived of his dignities and possessions and interned at Blois. The Marquis of Cinq-Mars, and the last Duke of Montmorency, son and grandson of two High Constables of France, felt the stroke of the headsman’s axe.
In 1642, when the mighty cardinal had attained the highest pinnacle of success and fame, a mortal disease declared itself. ”

“ Benvenuto da Imola says that Dante, when in Paris, diligently sought out the truth and convinced himself of the great minister’s innocence.
A prince of far different calibre was the Fourth Philip, surnamed the Fair, who grappled with and humiliated the great pontiff, Boniface VIII.—the most resolute upholder of the papacy in her claim to universal secular supremacy—and thus achieved a task which had baffled the mighty emperors themselves; a prince who, in Dante’s grim metaphor, scourged the shameless harlot of Rome from head to foot, and dragged her to do his will in France. ”

“ Every political upheaval of the nineteenth century in Paris has been at bottom an effort to realise the revolutionary ideals of political freedom and social equality in the face of external violence or internal corruption and treachery. Twice the hated Bourbons were re-imposed on the people of Paris by the bayonets of the foreigner; twice they rose and chased them away. A compromise followed—that of a citizen king, Louis Philippe of Orleans, once a Jacobin doorkeeper and a soldier of the Revolution, who had fought valiantly at Valmy and Jemappes. ”

“ Never since the days of Charlemagne had the French Monarchy been so powerful as when the Valois came to the throne: in less than a generation Crecy and Poitiers had made the English name a terror in France, and a French king, John the Good, was led captive to England. Once again, as in the dark Norman times, Paris rose and determined to save herself. Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants, whose statue now stands near the site of the Maison aux Piliers, the old Hostel de Ville which he bought for the citizens of Paris, became the leader of the movement. ”

“ The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced. Paris is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a young giantess, she has burst her{vi} cincture of walls, cast off her outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no grass-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride abased and glory departed ”

“ Dynastic and ecclesiastical ambition die hard, and the new Republic has had to weather many a storm in her career of a third of a century. Carducci in a fine poem has imagined Letizia, mother of the Bonapartes, a wandering shade haunting the desolate house at Ajaccio and recalling the tragic fate of her children:—a Corsican Niobe standing on her threshold and fiercely stretching forth her arms to the savage Ocean, calling, calling, that from America, from Britain, from burning Africa, some one of her tragic progeny may come to find a haven in her breast. ”

“ Louis sat on a carpet judging his people, and whence Philip the Fair watched the flames that were consuming the Grand Master and his companion of the Knights Templars. To the left are the picturesque mediæval towers of the Conciergerie and the tall roof of the belfry of the Palais. Around all are the embracing waters of the Seine breaking the light with their thousand facets. ”

“ It is easy enough to pour scorn on the Contrat Social as a political philosophy, but an ideal, a faith, a dogma are necessary to evoke enthusiasm, the contempt of material things and of death itself. These the Contrat Social gave. Its consuming passion for social justice, its ideal of a state founded on the sovereignty of the people became the gospel of the time. ”

“ Monk Abbo wearies not of singing, but the deeds of noble Eudes are wanting. All the poet craves is another victory to rejoice Heaven; another defeat of the black host of the enemy.
But the noble Eudes was now a king with rebellious vassals. Paris was never captured again, but the acephali were devouring the land. The grim spectres of Famine and Plague made a charnel-house of whole regions of France, while Eudes was fighting the Count of Flanders, a rival king, and the ineffectual emperor, Charles the Simple. ”