Palace of Luxembourg

“ South of these is the Luxembourg Palace, whose charming Renaissance gardens, unhappily, owing to the erection of the Observatory in 1672, reduced by more than one-third of their former extent, are the delight of the Parisians of the south bank of the Seine. The old Orangery, restored and enlarged, is used as a public museum of contemporary French art, chiefly painting and sculpture. Here are exhibited the works of modern artists which have been deemed worthy of acquisition by the State. ”

“ The Jardin du Luxembourg is all that a great city garden should be, ample, commodious, [Pg 158] decorative and as thoroughly typical of Paris as the Pont Neuf. Innumerable, but rather mediocre, statues are posed here and there between the palace and the observatory at the end of the long, tree-lined avenue which stretches off to the south, the only really historical monument of this nature being the celebrated Fontaine de Médicis by Debrosse, the architect of the palace. ”

“ The palace of the Luxembourg, one of the largest and finest edifices of Paris, stands quite near the spot where the tree fell through, and yet there is not the smallest danger of the structure's disappearing some dark night, the piers below always affording sufficient support. ”

“ The shops in the Palais Royal are very dear and disagreeable: the people seem to make quite a favour of selling you anything. [26] Near this we got some strawberries and cream in a café (Véfours) . After that we drove to the Luxembourg. We walked in the gardens, which are very formal, but pretty in their way; there are a great [Pg 110] many flowers and roses growing out of the banks of grass. There are a few basins of water, and a great number of statues. We did not see the inside of the palace. ”

“ Even to those soldiers who come from the older sections of the United States the sight is thrilling. In the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, in Paris, built by Henry of Navarre for his second wife, Marie de Medici, stands a stately marble fountain, moss-grown and mellow with time. ”

“ Quite near, is the Luxembourg, both palace and prison, the Luxembourg, where Marie de Medici gave such magnificent fêtes, where Gaston d'Orléans yawned so much, and where the Grande Mademoiselle sulked, sighing for the handsome Lauzun; where also the Count de Provence so cleverly prepared, with Monsieur d'Avaray, his escape from France, on the same evening that Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette made such bad arrangements for the lugubrious journey that was to lead them to Varennes; the Luxembourg, whose courtyard was used as a promenade by such prisoners as the Terror crowded there ”

“ During the Renaissance period, while many of the nobility fixed their seats in the eastern and north-eastern part of Paris-within-the-Boulevards on the Right Bank, not a few erected houses for themselves in the open spaces of the Faubourg St. Germain. The most magnificent of these later buildings is the Palais du Luxembourg, erected for Marie de Médicis, after the death of Henri IV, by Jacques Debrosse, one of the best French architects of the generation which succeeded that of Jean Goujon and Philibert Delorme. ”

“ Of all the minor French palaces the Luxembourg and the Elysée are the most often heard of in connection with the life of modern times. The first is something a good deal more than an art museum, and the latter more than the residence for the Republican president, though the guide-book makers hardly think it worth while to write down the facts. ”

“ And every castle ruin is haunted to heart’s desire, crowded with attested ghosts whose consistent habits and dependable visitations are a peculiar joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could not believe in the impossible and promptly discounted the improbable. Any peasant in Luxembourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the whole duchy is honeycombed by the midnight prowlings of an entire population of delectable phantoms, while the stories and legends of their commerce in the past with lords and ladies and{307} knights and monks and bishops form a literature in themselves. ”

“ The Luxembourg is only shown when the Senate is not sitting. The apartments best worth seeing are the Chapel of 1844, decorated with modern paintings; and the Ancienne Salle du Livre d’or, where the titles and arms of peers were preserved under the Restoration and Louis Philippe, adorned with the decorations of the apartment of Marie de’ Medici. The ceiling of the gallery, which forms part of the hall, represents the Apotheosis of Marie. ”

“ We saw the little balcony where the doomed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette showed themselves to the mob—the "deluge" which the greater Louis had once predicted.
The palace at Versailles is like other royal palaces of France—a fine show place, an excellent museum, but never in its day of purest domesticity could it have been called "a happy little home." Everything [Pg 245] is on too extended a scale. Its garden was a tract of marshy land sixty miles in circumference until Louis XIV set thirty-six thousand men at it, turning it into fairyland. ”

“ There are men too who have trifles to sell, and they talk loudly of the glories of modern art, and the necessity of a British Luxembourg.
That France should have a Luxembourg is natural enough; that we should have one would be anomalous. We are a free-trading country. I pass over the failure of the Luxembourg to recognise genius, to save the artist of genius a struggle with insolent ignorance. What did the Luxembourg do for Corot, Millet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro? ”

“ The existence and status of Luxembourg in Europe before the war are not universally understood in America, and it may be useful to say a few words about it. The grand duchy is a tiny independent country, about 1,000 square miles of lovely hills and dales and table-lands, clothed with noble woods, watered by clear streams, and inhabited by about 250,000 people of undoubted German-Keltic stock and of equally undoubted French sympathies. The land lies in the form of a northward-pointing triangle between Germany, Belgium, and France. ”

“ Architects busied themselves with innumerable plans for re-making the shabby pile. Some would have torn down the Council Hall, the bed-chamber of Louis XIV, the antechamber of the Bull's Eye, and all the rest of the palace except the apartments of the King and Queen, the Gallery with the salons at either end, the Chapel and the Opera House. Napoleon was willing to spend 6,000 francs on the construction of suites for himself and his family "and fifty others." "Then," said he, "we could perhaps come to Versailles to pass a summer." ”

“ The Luxembourg Garden is principally remarkable for its statues without fingers, almond trees without almonds, and grisettes without number. Its groves of horse-chestnuts would be very beautiful if, in their cropped condition, they did not remind the unprejudiced observer—who is of course English—of the poodle dogs, who in their turn are cropped, it would seem, to imitate the trees. The queens of France, too, who look down upon you from pedestals at every turn, were evidently the work of some secret republican ”

“ Of the museums, see the Luxembourg first, because, while the gardens are beautiful, they are not so well kept nor to be compared with those of the Louvre or Versailles. The works of art are placed in the Luxembourg gallery during the lifetime of an artist, if his works merit that honor; if his fame lives for ten years after his death, they are transferred to the Louvre. Hence it is in the Luxembourg one will find the best works of living artists. ”

“ The Château de Versailles, that marvellous chef-d'œuvre of the splendid taste and unbounded extravagance of Louis le Grand, is shut up, and has been so for the last eighteen months. This is a great disappointment to such of our party as have never seen its interminable chambers and their gorgeous decorations. The reason assigned for this unwonted exclusion of the public is, that the whole of this enormous pile is filled with workmen; not, however, for the purpose of restoring it as a palace for the king, but of preparing it as a sort of universal museum for the nation. ”

“ He lived with his wife on apparently good terms and as though he had not the slightest mistrust of her. On this occasion, because of the want of dancers, the King made older people dance than was customary, and among others M. de Luxembourg. Everybody was compelled to be masked. M. de Luxembourg spoke on this subject to M. le Prince, who, malicious as any monkey, determined to divert all the Court and himself at the Duke's expense. He invited M. de Luxembourg to supper, and after that meal was over, masked him according to his fancy. ”

“ Throughout the greater part of the country the people relapsed into ignorance and brutality, and the higher classes assumed the stiff, formal, artificial manners which nearly all Europe borrowed from the court of Louis XIV. Public buildings, churches and schools were allowed to stand as ruins, while the petty sovereign built his stately palace, laid out his park in the style of Versailles, and held his splendid and ridiculous festivals. ”

“ The English traveller will, however, be envious of a collection whose catholicity embraces examples of the work of two great modern masters, Londoners by option—Legros and Whistler. Any impression of modern French painting that may be left on the mind of the visitor by an{291} inspection of the examples hung in the Luxembourg should however be supplemented and corrected by a visit to the decorative works in the great public edifices, such as the Hôtel de Ville, the Sorbonne, the Panthéon, and the churches of Paris. ”

“ Therefore the Duke went back to Noyon on the Oise, some eight leagues north and east of Compiègne, while his captain, Jean de Luxembourg, led half his army west, towards Beauvais. There he took the castle of Provenlieu, an old castle, and ruinous, that the English had repaired and held. And there he hanged certain English, who were used to pillage all the country about Montdidier. Thence Jean de Luxembourg came back to the Duke, at Noyon, and took and razed Choisy, which was held for France. ”

“ At midnight the King and his family led a procession through the galleries of the palace, lighted by footmen carrying torches. At two o'clock in the morning the festivities were at an end and the royal party left for Trianon.
Says a French author, writing two years after the opening of the museum. "When Louis Philippe first cast his eye upon Versailles, he saw at once the impiety of allowing such a monument to sink into utter ruin. . . . He determined that the palace of Louis XIV, without losing its individuality, should become a palace of the entire people ”

“ The prodigality of littleness, the excess of ornament, the superficial gloss, the studied neatness, are carried to a pitch of the romantic. The Luxembourg gardens are more extensive, and command a finer view; but are not kept in the same order, are dilapidated and desultory. This is an enclosure of all sweet sights and smells, a concentration of elegance. The rest of the world is barbarous to this ‘paradise of dainty devices,’ where the imagination is spell-bound. It is a perfectly-finished miniature set in brilliants. It is a toilette for nature to dress itself ”

“ While I was speaking what was my astonishment at seeing the King, the Queen, and the Dauphin enter the chamber! It was M. de Luxembourg who had effected this change in the Queen's determination.
The enthusiasm became general; the moment their Majesties arrived the orchestra repeated the air I have just mentioned, and afterwards played a song in the "Deserter," "Can we grieve those whom we love?" ”

“ The Luxembourg Gardens have always retained their hold over my imagination. I never visit Paris without spending several hours there, sometimes in the bright morning light, sometimes in the late afternoon, when the military band plays dolent tunes, usually by Massenet, sometimes a spectator at one of the guignols and, very often in the autumn, when the leaves are falling, I sit silently on a bench before the Medici fountain, entirely unconscious of the passing of time. The Luxembourg Gardens always envelop me in a sentimental mood. ”

“ Of all the monuments in Versailles, that old, plain, unfurnished Tennis Court is the most interesting. The Englishman visiting Versailles should not forget that the immense palace is but a monument of despotism;—that its grandeur, such as it is, cries aloud of a pride and selfishness so alarming, that Louis XIV burnt the bills for its erection, not venturing to allow them to be seen, whilst France was starving and sinking under a load of debt ”

“ There were, however, Revolutionaries that so despised the relics of royalty that they continued to urge from time to time the complete demolition of the palace and park--chief works of Louis XIV's reign. The most diligent defenders of the chateau were the inhabitants of the town of Versailles, who were keenly aware that the continued existence of the palace would insure a measure of prosperity to the community. They protested, that, just object of the people's venom as the edifice was, it nevertheless stood as a monument to the arts and crafts of France during two centuries. ”

“ That is nothing at all but a tiresome, old-forgotten pleasure palace of the king."
"It is lively enough there now, depend upon it," replied Marat, with his sardonic laugh. "King Louis the well beloved has given this palace to his wife, in order that she may establish there a larger harem than Trianon; that miserable, worthless little mouse-nest, where virtue, honor, and worth get hectored to death, is not large enough for her. Yes, yes, that fine, great palace of the French kings, the noble St. Cloud, is now the heritage and possession of this fine Austrian. ”