William Walton

“ The body is that of a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that are simple and elementary, is lit up by eyes grey or blue, eyes limpid and tranquil, which regard without vivacity, without appearing and disappearing lights, without surprise, the eyes of an animal under the yoke and resigned to it, eyes only too well acquainted with the eternal landscape which they have been reflecting ever since they were first opened. ”

“ The historians quote from the Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris for the years 1419-1421: "You would have heard through all Paris pitiable lamentations, little children crying: 'I am dying with hunger!' There were to be seen on a dunghill twenty, thirty children, boys and girls, who yielded up their souls through famine and cold. Death cut down so many and so fast that it was necessary to excavate in the cemeteries great ditches in which were put thirty or forty, packed close together, and scarcely powdered over with earth. ”

“ Everything is renewed, art, science, philosophy; and the world, arrested for two centuries in the lower levels which it had found at the end of its passage through the Middle Ages, resumed its progress that it might mount into the light and the purer air. 'Oh! age!' exclaims Ulrich von Hutten, 'letters flourish, minds awaken;—it is a joy to live!' Even the least philosophical experience the sentiment of this renaissance of the mind. ”

“ Well, the heights and depths which we are called upon to contemplate are not unendurable, but they are certainly in many respects unexcelled. "France," says one of her most eloquent and dignified historians, "has justly been termed the soldier of God;" "Other continents have monkeys," says a learned German philosopher; "Europe has the French." Any community or locality which offers, or is considered by intelligent observers to offer, such a range as this, is certainly worthy of high renown and deep research, and it is not too much to say that Paris justifies her fame. ”

“ The people forced to provide, by paying a great many imposts, for the necessities of the government which they did not as yet comprehend, the bourgeoisie wounded in its particular interests, which it did not know how to sacrifice to the general interests, the clergy menaced in its property, the lesser nobility in its rights and in its dearest habits, the higher aristocracy in its pretensions to sovereignty,—all these classes, so widely diverse, so often hostile one to another, found themselves for the moment quite in accord upon one point,—the necessity of limiting the royal authority. ”

“ Under all this fever of fashion and customs, under all these dissipations of the imagination and the life, there remains something unappeased, unsatisfied, and empty in the heart of the woman of the eighteenth century. Her vivacity, her affectation, her eagerness to run after fancies, seem to be a disquietude; and a sickly impatience appears in this continual search for attraction, in this furious thirst for pleasure. She searches in every direction, as if she wished to expand herself outside of herself. ”

“ Within her walls the human mind has displayed its loftiest development, and the human passions their most insane excesses; her art and her literature have erected beacon-lights for all the ages to come, and have but too frequently fallen into the depths of more than swinish filth; her science of government has ranged from the Code Napoléon to the statutes of Belial himself; her civilization has attained an elegance of refinement unknown to the Greeks, and her cigars and lucifer-matches are a disgrace to Christendom! ”

“ And, during this time, the grass grew in the streets, say the historians of the period, the wolves entered the city at night by the river; the imagination of the people, exalted, saw already in Paris a new Babylon, the ruins of which would presently become the repair of the beasts of prey."
When the remains of what might well seem to be the last of the kings of France were interred at Saint-Denis, a herald-at-arms recommended the soul of the defunct to the prayers of the assembled multitude; then he cried: "Vive Henri de Lancastre, Roi de France et d'Angleterre!" ”

“ One day, this Stanislas Leczinski entered the chamber in which his wife and daughter were sitting, and said to them in great excitement: "Let us get down on our knees and thank God!" "Are you recalled to the throne of Poland?" asked his daughter. "Much better; you are Queen of France." She was seven years older than the king, very poor, without beauty, but gentle and pious. The insult offered to the court of Spain was but one of the many blunders and failures of the foreign diplomacy, while the extravagance and debauchery at home kept pace with the growing disorder in the national finances. ”

“ In 1867 the Municipal Council of Paris set up a monument "to the sources of the river which has given its name to the department of the Seine, and to which Paris owes its ancient prosperity."
The overrunning of Gaul by the barbarians, the latest historians tell us, did not present the imposing spectacle of a great invasion in which armed hosts of valiant and robust warriors trod down the effeminate and corrupted civilization of the Romans, pillaged and ravaged the seats of refinement and luxury in city and country, slew and carried into captivity without respect for age or sex. ”

“ During the long reign of Philippe-Auguste, which even the modern historians call "glorious," the power of the nobles was seriously impaired. The Cour du Roi retained the organization it had received, but its importance increased with that of the royal authority, and the most powerful vassal of the king of France saw himself dispossessed of his fiefs by its decree. The feudal power was attacked in one of its most cherished rights, that of private warfare, by a royal ordinance compelling the observance of a truce of forty days after any injury, so that no one might be assailed without warning. ”

“ Polite society—the only one to be considered—believes itself to be in possession of absolute rules, and, in the court as in the city, the heart abdicates in favor of reason." "When one speaks of the seventeenth century in France," says M. Louis Farges, "it appears, to those who are neither historians nor professional scholars, as one of those rare epochs in which all the forces of the nation concentrate and develop in a serene and majestic unity. ”

“ Every country well governed develops from an economical, industrial, commercial, financial, and political point of view. All those projects necessary to the grandeur and the prosperity of the nation are conceived, decided upon, carried out. At this time, France, so munificently endowed, enriched by all the favors of nature, inhabited by the race the most intelligent, the richest in resources of the mind and the imagination, is delivered over to hazards the most unforeseen and the most dangerous. ”

“ Art is invented! The three superior social classes, the king, the clergy, and the nobles, which were definitely established in France at the outbreak of the Revolution, were the legitimate development of the feudal system, and had, apparently, legitimately conquered their position. They had been the protectors of the people even before the Carlovingian epoch, and when the people finally arose and overturned them, it was only because they had completely forgotten their high mission through a long course of years. ”

“ In municipal affairs, the unshakable conviction that Paris is, simply, the only capital in the world does not in the least interfere with frank admissions concerning its limitations, which the least public-spirited villager in other climes would neither believe nor admit. Here, the journalist, the romancer, the historian, find in the most simple human demonstration, if it take place in the capital, something peculiarly and most admirably Parisien. ”

“ Under the new Empire, Paris saw itself almost transformed by the opening of wide and direct avenues of communication, the suppression of gloomy and insalubrious quarters, the completion of the Louvre, the construction of the Halles, the erection of churches, schools, mairies, and the laying out of public gardens and promenades. Six hundred kilomètres of sewers were provided for the drainage of the capital, and the Bois de Boulogne and de Vincennes greatly embellished. The working-classes were still disturbed by vague discussions over social questions, and by souvenirs of the Republic ”

“ The cloister offered a refuge to those who fled aghast from the world and sought meditation and solitude; the abbey was not only an asylum, but a haunt of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to precipitate itself." ”

“ There has been no successful street revolution in Paris since the days of the Commune, but the terrible under-strata ever and anon break through the thin upper crust of society with some such outburst as that of the dynamite explosions of 1892 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in the caserne Lobau, and in the Rue de Clichy. ”

“ All this took place in a period of general prosperity, of unexampled ease and comfort compared with what had gone before. "Bodin assures us," says Duruy, "that, from 1516 to 1560, there was more gold in France than had ever been collected there before in two hundred years. 'The bourgeois,' as the Venetian ambassador so well said, 'have become the masters of wealth.' Ango had amassed, like Jacques Cœur in another century, the fortune of a prince," And this was in full Renaissance. "It is the radiant awakening of human reason, the spring-time of the mind. ”

“ Paris has become a veritable city of war. At seven o'clock in the morning, before all the gates of the city, the guard is under arms, the drum beats aux champs, the portcullis is lowered. It is the opening of the gates. At eight o'clock, in all the quarters of the city, the rappel is beaten, all the citizen soldiers who are to relieve the guard on the ramparts and on the minor posts are called to arms. Others are called out for the drill; there are, however, some quarters in which there is no drill in the mornings. ”

“ You will see at the Halles a multitude of rascals who amuse themselves only by pillaging and robbing each other, sellers as well as buyers, by cutting their purses, searching in their hottes and baskets; others, in order to better secure their prey, will sing dishonest songs and dirty ones, sometimes one and sometimes the other, without any regard for either Sundays or fête days,—things deplorable in a city of Paris! In the Halles and other usual markets, you may see women who sell provisions ”

“ Nevertheless, this capital of all possible civilizations does not hesitate to admit that it must by all means do all in its power to attract the wealthy tourist of other nations, on whom its prosperity is so largely dependent, especially since it has no longer the attractions of a royal or imperial court to offer. No presentation of the city of Paris at the present day would be complete without documents giving the opinions of its own cultured and intelligent classes on its general characteristics and its most urgent needs. ”

“ The Cour des Miracles was the usual refuge of all those wretches who came to conceal in this corner of Paris, sombre, dirty, muddy, and tortuous, their pretended infirmities and their criminal pollution. ”

“ By the 18th of September, 1870, the siege of Paris by the Germans was formally opened, and yet, on that date, the author of the Journal du Siège declares the capital to be "the most strange and the most marvellous city. On the eve of combat she still preserves her unalterable gaiety, still sings, and strews flowers in front of the soldiers. It is because her resolution is firmly taken, and that she awaits the attack with a firm stand and a valiant heart. To-day, it is a festival Sunday indeed;—on every side is animation, enthusiasm, life. We have made the tour of the boulevards ”

“ His entry into Paris after his coronation at Reims is described enthusiastically by the chroniclers of the times. "The whole city turned out before him; the poets chanted odes in his praise, the musicians filled the air with the sound of the vielle [hurdy-gurdy!] , of fifes, of tambours, of the psalterion and of the harp." Another admires the richness of the garments: "It is a pleasure to see the embroideries of gold and the coats of jewelled silk sparkle on all the public places, in the streets, in the squares. ”

“ That curious custom of the Middle Ages, which testifies so strongly to the impotence and unjustness of the laws and the universal prevalence of sudden outbreaks of passion and crime, the right of asylum, was greatly modified in Paris by Louis XII. In the porches of the churches, or, if they had none, within the space of thirty feet of their walls on all sides, and in the cemeteries adjoining them, the hunted criminal was safe. ”

“ All this is done with such frank simplicity and good nature, such a characteristically cheerful French appropriation of the public street for domestic purposes, that the foreigner, sitting looking on somewhat scornfully at first, gradually veers round to their point of view, and, if he be young enough, probably ends by being quite willing to get up and dance, himself, with some of these slim-waisted, pretty French maids. ”

“ The Municipal Council in no way goes outside of its proper sphere; on the contrary, it is well within it, when it concerns itself with the general interests of the city of Paris, when it seeks for means of retaining in it and attracting to it the largest possible number of foreigners and of very wealthy individuals whose presence and whose habits have for result the circulation of a great deal of money and the constant vivifying of the Parisian industries, which are, for the greater part, the industries of luxury. ”

“ The condition of the middle and lower classes in Paris through the Middle Ages was that common to all mediæval cities, and would seem to modern ideas all but unendurable. To the absence of law, municipal, protective, or sanitary, the disregard of life and property, the pestiferous condition of houses and streets, to famine, war, pestilence, and constant internal discords, were added the intemperances of the seasons—apparently much more severe than at present—and the ravages of wild beasts. ”