Chapter VII: Part 7

Max Nordau, in his _Paradoxes psychologiques_, thus disposes of the Parisian woman: "The _Parisienne_ is entirely the work of the French romancers and journalists. They make of her, literally, whatever they wish, physically and intellectually. She speaks, she thinks, she feels, she acts, she dresses herself even, assumes attitudes, walks and stands upright, according to rules which the writers _à la mode_ impose upon her. She is in their hands a doll furnished with springs and obeys with docility all their suggestions," etc. On the contrary, it is probably safe to say, speaking generally, that the French romancers systematically defame their compatriots, and that even Parisian society is not the institution it is represented to be in novels, on the stage, and by many of the essayists. It has been reserved, for example, for a very recent writer, M. Jules Bois, to portray, _for the first time in France_, the indignation of the fiancée at the fact, almost constant, that her future husband comes to her without that freshness of soul and body which is required in her case. It would not have required very accurate social observers, it would seem, to have discovered earlier this phenomenon. M. Bois counsels the wives not to compromise themselves by weak forgiveness of the egotistical and adulterous spouses.

The frightful conflagration of the Bazar de la Charité, in the Rue Jean-Goujon, on the 4th of May, 1897,--the most terrible catastrophe of this nature that had been seen in Paris since the fire at the ball given by the Austrian ambassador on the 1st of July, 1810, in honor of the marriage of Napoleon I and Marie-Louise, and the burning of the Opéra-Comique in 1887,--offered, in the long list of its victims, a most tragic demonstration of the fact that the women of Paris of the highest society knew how to occupy themselves in works of practical benevolence. Of the hundred and seventeen victims, all but six were ladies and young girls; and the roll of illustrious names was headed by that of the Duchesse d'Alençon. This philanthropic institution was founded in 1885 by M. Henri Blount, its honorary president; its annual bazaars, for the benefit of the poor, were held at first in the Salle Albert-le-Grand, then in the hôtel of the Comtesse Branicka in 1888, in the following year in that of M. Henry Say, and from 1890 to 1896 in two houses in the Rue de la Boëtie. In 1897, M. Michel Heine placed at the disposition of the managers, gratuitously, a large open space in the Rue Jean-Goujon. The new bazaar was here inaugurated on the 3d of May, and the receipts exceeded forty-five thousand francs. On the day after the catastrophe, some charitable person donated, anonymously, to the OEuvre de la Charité the sum of nine hundred and thirty-seven thousand francs, representing the amount of the sales of the preceding year, that the poor, also, might not suffer by this catastrophe. A subscription opened by the _Figaro_ for the same charitable purpose, and for those who had distinguished themselves, at the risk of their lives, in saving victims from the flames, realized the sum of one million two hundred and eighteen thousand and fifteen francs, and another, by the _Rappel_, more than fifteen thousand francs. And, finally, the Comtesse de Castellane, who had been the American Miss Gould, gave a million of francs for the purchase of another site and the construction of another edifice for the work of the organized charity of Paris.

Among the lighter details of information concerning this illustrious society may be mentioned an article by the Vicomte A. de Royer in a recent number of the _Revue des Revues_ (October, 1898), which undertakes to demonstrate, by means of documents, that, of the forty-five thousand "noble" families in France, only four hundred and fifty are in a position to substantiate a claim to ancient lineage, and that, of the three hundred and forty-six princely families of France, which are all that are left, not one has the right to wear the closed coronet. All the titles of the latter are usurped, and are purely fanciful. No fewer than twenty-five thousand families put the particle _de_ in front of their names without a shadow of right; and it appears that the Republic manufactures another forty of such families every year. When official permission to thus distinguish the family name is refused, it is simply dispensed with. In addition, the Pope gives or sells, on an average, sixty titles of "count" or "prince" every year, and though these are not current, the possessors wear them, just the same. The Paris _Journal_ demanded, indignantly, if M. de Royer thought he was doing a patriotic work in thus closing the French market to American heiresses.

To conclude: we quote what M. Henri Lavedan, in his recent work: _Les Jeunes, ou L'Espoir de la France_, gives as a typical conversation between three young men of the highest society in Paris, "the hope of France." The scene is laid in the apartments of D'Allarège, about five o'clock in the afternoon. All three are smoking. The day is declining; they comprehend each other in silence. At intervals, they alternately allow a monosyllable to fall, which is as the affirmation of their absence of thought:

BRIOUZE.--"Yes...." (_Puff of smoke._)

MONTOIS.--"Yes...."

(_Then a black hole of silence. Puffs. Spirals. Sound of carriages. Paris continues its murmur._)

MONTOIS.--"Ah! la, la!"

D'ALLARÈGE.--"Is it not?"

BRIOUZE.--"To whom do you say it?"

(_Blue smoke through the nose. Ashes fall from the cigar. And time passes._)

D'ALLARÈGE (to Montois).--"And besides that?"

MONTOIS.--"Not much."

THE BOURGEOIS AND THE LOWER CLASSES

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT DAY

If the history of a city were written with anything like a due exactness of proportion, much of it would be but a weary record of human misery, and through even the most decorous and conventional of chronicles there appear constantly unpleasant glimpses of the terrible under-strata that sometimes upheave and make ruin. So long as this apparently inevitable and irremediable discord does not appear to affect the general march of events, it is glozed over. 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. The Seine--quite regardless of the praise the Emperor Julian had bestowed upon its moderation and uniform flow--was constantly bursting its bonds and devastating with inundation the Cité and the adjoining shores; the excessive cold of the winters is a constant source of complaint in the local annals. That of 1433-1434 was heralded by a "formidable wind" which, on the 7th of October, raged for nine consecutive hours, demolishing many houses and uprooting many trees,--three hundred of the latter in the wood of Vincennes alone. The frost commenced on the 31st of December and continued uninterruptedly for eighty days; for forty days the snow fell continuously, night and day; toward the end of March, freezing weather returned, and lasted till Easter, the 17th of April. In one tree alone there were found a hundred and forty birds dead with cold. In 1437 and 1438 the wolves penetrated into the city, by way of the river, and devoured women and children, in the last week of September, 1437, while the king was in the city, "fourteen persons, big and little, between Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Antoine." There was one most monstrous beast, called Courtaud, because he had no tail, that was an object of special terror. "But the wolves, for the Parisians, were less to be feared than the seigneurs and the brigands called _escorcheurs_, which followed in their train."

In 1348, the Black Plague, coming from Egypt and Syria, reached Paris and destroyed eighty thousand inhabitants. At the Hôtel-Dieu, the dead numbered five hundred a day, and the nuns who served as nurses perished so rapidly that they had to be constantly renewed. Charles V, _le Sage_, died on the 16th of September, 1380, "after a reign of sixteen years, during which the people, although they had been crushed by such taxation that 'many were forced to sell their beds in order to pay,' had yet had much less to complain of than during the preceding reign, and, still more, than they would have during that which was to follow,--the most wretched of all!"

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. Those who dug the graves asserted that they had buried more than a hundred thousand persons. The shoe-makers counted up, on the day of their trade reunion, those that had died among them, and found that they numbered some eighteen hundred, masters and apprentices, in these two months. Troops of wolves traversed the country and entered Paris during the night to carry off the dead bodies.... The working people said to each other: 'Let us fly to the woods with the wild beasts.... Farewell to wives and children.... Let us do the worst we can.... Let us place ourselves again in the hands of the devil.'"

To multiply these historical incidents would be but dreary iteration,--we will rather give one or two presentations in full of some details of what may be called the subterranean aspect of the great city, sombre and rather unpleasant presentations that are not to be found in the dignified histories or in the guide-books, and that remain unknown to the usual decorous tourist and reader. That the first one may not be too sombre, we will select it, not in the gloom of the Dark Ages, but in full French Renaissance, under François I. Readers of Victor Hugo's _Notre-Dame de Paris_ will doubtless remember his very picturesque description of the famous Cour des Miracles as it existed in the reign of Louis XI,--more sober historians do not hesitate to corroborate these fantastic details in many particulars. M. Gourdon de Genouillac, Officier d'Académie, in his learned work, _Paris à travers les siècles_, gives a description which we condense. "Everything had been done in order to oppose an effective defence to the attacks of enemies outside the walls; but it was much more difficult to guard against the enterprises of those within; the assemblings of the malcontents which were held nightly, and those of the gentry of sack and cord who, as soon as the gates were opened, set off eagerly to ravage the suburbs of Paris, returning in the evening to conceal themselves in the quarters where no one scarcely ventured to go in search of them. 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.

"The Cour des Miracles extended between the Impasse de la Corderie (on the site of which a part of the Rue Thévenot was opened) and the Rues de Damiette and des Forges; its entrance was in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. It had been in existence since the thirteenth century....

"Several other haunts of the same kind existed in Paris, and Dulaure asserts that under Louis XIV there were still to be seen, the Cour des Miracles, of which we have just spoken; the Cour du Roi-François, situated in the Rue Saint-Denis; the Cour Sainte-Catherine, in the same street; the Cour Brisset, Rue de la Mortellerie; the Cour Gentien, Rue des Coquilles; the Cour de la Jussienne, in the street of the same name; the Cour Saint-Honoré, between the Rues Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Honoré, and de l'Echelle; the Cour des Miracles, Rue du Bac; the Cour des Miracles, Rue de Reuilly, and still another Cour des Miracles, Rue Jean Beausire.

"But that which, in the sixteenth century, formed a veritable quarter of the city, was the Cour des Miracles of the Rue Saint-Sauveur, which served as a refuge for beggars and vagabonds.

"'It consisted,' as we read in Sauval's _Antiquités_, 'of an open place of very considerable size and of a very large _cul-de-sac_, evil-smelling, miry, and irregular, which had no pavement whatever. Formerly, it was confined to one of the farthest extremities of Paris. At present, it is situated in that one of the quarters of the city which is the worst built, the most filthy, and the most out of the way, between the Rue Montorgueil, the convent of the Filles-Dieu, and the Rue Neuve-Saint-Sauveur, as if it were in another world. To get to it, it is necessary to go astray in little streets, villainous, stinking, crooked; to enter it, it is necessary to descend a sufficiently long slope, tortuous, rugged, uneven. I have seen there a house of dirt, half buried, tumbling to pieces with old age and rottenness, which did not cover a space of four square fathoms, and in which were lodged, nevertheless, more than fifty households, having in charge an infinite number of little children, legitimate, natural, or stolen. I was assured that in this little dwelling and in the others dwelt more than five hundred large families, piled one upon the other. Large as is this court, it was formerly much more so. On every side it has been encroached upon by lodgings, low, sunken, dark, and deformed, constructed of earth and of mud, and all of them crowded with the evil poor.'

"In fact, under François I the Cour des Miracles had a physiognomy much more strongly marked than under Louis XIV. The narrow and miry streets, insinuating themselves between the hovels in wood, halting and crippled, turned and returned upon themselves, to end finally in a repulsive sewer. Neither air nor sunshine ever penetrated into these infamous alleys, from which escaped, at all seasons of the year, nauseating odors, and too often, also, pestilential miasmas. There vegetated in the most sordid uncleanliness the subjects of the kingdom of beggary. All that Paris illegally received in the way of mendicants, false cripples, false blind, false lepers horrible to see, covered with ulcers, there wallowed in orgies, in frantic feasting, in gambling....

". . . All these _truands_ recognized a veritable hierarchy; there were to be distinguished among them three distinct classes,--the _capons_, or _voleurs_ (thieves); the _francs-mitous_, or _mendiants_ (beggars), and the _rifodes_, or _vagabonds_. All together formed a kingdom, the chief of which was called the grand Coësre; he carried a banner on which was depicted a dead dog, and, quite like his colleague, the King of France, he had a court and courtiers.

"It was the kingdom of _Argot_ (cant, slang), the code or the formula of which prescribed theft and plunder.

"Its enclosure, restricted to the Cour des Miracles, was place of refuge [legal asylum]; all the historians have repeated it, but we do not think that this right had ever been officially recognized, and it existed rather through force of circumstances; in this sense, that when a thief or an assassin had taken refuge in one of the dens of which we have spoken, it was found more convenient to leave him there in peace than to run the risk of taking him out of it. However this may be, the _argotiers_ were quite masters in their own house, and enjoyed in complete liberty the right of living as seemed good to them. In order that it might not be permitted that they should be accused of wanting for religion, they had stolen a statue of the Father Eternal from the church of Saint Pierre aux Boeufs and had placed it in a niche, before which they willingly made the sign of the cross.

"Moreover, it should be remarked that the monks and the gentry of the Cour des Miracles lived on sufficiently good terms with each other, and it would not be impossible that the name given to this enclosure came from the zeal with which the argotiers cried 'Miracle!' every time that one was manifested in the streets of Paris, and we may say, _en passant_, that the miracles were frequently performed in their favor. Whenever the monks made some solemn procession, promenading through the streets the relics of some saint, it was not uncommon to see a franc-mitou, paralyzed, crippled or epileptic, endeavoring to touch the sacred casket; in vain would the attempt be made to keep him at a distance; he redoubled his efforts, and scarcely had he succeeded in gluing his lips to the sacred coffer when immediately the cripple threw away his crutch, the epileptic ceased to foam at the mouth, and the astonished people cried: 'Miracle!'

"It was even said that the monks had been seen on several occasions to penetrate at night into the famous court, and come out again without having received the slightest ill treatment.

"During very many years, this society of begging thieves existed and its importance constantly augmented. Under Louis XIV, its numerous members were divided into _cagoux_, _orphelins_, _marcandiers_, _rifodes_, _malingreux_ and _capons_, _piètres_, _polissons_, _francs-mitous_, _callots_, _saboleux_, _hubains_, _coquillards_, _courtaux de boutange_, and _drilles_.

"The _cagoux_, who occupied the highest rank in this singular association of malefactors, were, it might be said, the professors of the newly-admitted; they gave instructions in the art of cutting purses, the proper recipes for procuring factitious wounds, in a word, all the methods necessary for appealing to the charity of the public, and, if need be, of obliging individuals to exercise it unknown to themselves.

"The _orphelins_ (orphans) were young boys who assumed the rôle of abandoned children, and who slipped into houses for the purpose of carrying off whatever fell into their hands.

"The _marcandiers_ gave themselves out for merchants ruined by the wars and asked for alms, which they exacted when, after nightfall, some good bourgeois fell into their hands.

"The _rifodes_ begged by means of forged certificates.

"The _malingreux_ counterfeited maladies, simulating the most disgusting afflictions; they frequented the churches by preference, and implored aid that they might go on pilgrimages.

"The _capons_ begged in the streets and the cabarets.

"The _piètres_ were counterfeit cripples, walking with the aid of crutches, or pretending to be deprived of their legs.

"The _polissons_ were a variety of capons, and effected their purposes through intimidation.

"The _francs-mitous_ gave themselves out as dying of hunger, they fell fainting with weakness in the middle of the streets, and succeeded by this means in gathering in abundant receipts.

"The _callots_ pretended to be recently cured of the scurf, and to have just arrived from Sainte-Reine, where they had been miraculously delivered of their ailment.

"The _hubains_ exhibited a certificate setting forth that, having been bitten by a mad dog, they had been cured by the intercession of Saint-Hubert.

"The _saboleux_ were false epileptics who were enabled to simulate convulsions by means of a piece of soap placed between their lips, which made a froth.

"The _coquillards_ represented pilgrims returning from Saint-Jacques or some other pilgrim shrine.

"The _courtaux de boutange_, beggars in winter, shivered with cold under their rags.

"The _drilles_, or _narquois_, begged in military uniform, and said that they had received wounds which prevented them from working.

"The total number of these wretches had become so great, and their depredations in the city were so frequent, that it was resolved to use vigorous measures; in 1656, a veritable army of archers and of officers invaded the Cour des Miracles under the lead of several commissioners. The beggars and the truands endeavored to make their escape, but the quarter was surrounded.

"Thieves, beggars, and vagabonds were all arrested; then a selection was made; some were released, and the others remained in prison or were sent to the hospitals....

"But under François I, and especially at the period when the chevalier king was expiating at Madrid the loss of the battle of Pavia, the Cour des Miracles was in all its splendor, and those who inhabited it were a sufficiently lively cause of anxiety to the _prévôt_ of the merchants and to the bishop-governor.

"On the 22d of May, 1525, the Assemblée des Vingt adopted a resolution to arrest a certain number of fraudulent beggars who were strongly suspected of being marauders of the worst kind, but, having been notified in time, they decamped.... The enterprises of the vagabonds, the thieves, and the _mauvais garçons_ became more and more audacious; they had for chiefs three bandits, Esclaireau, Barbiton, and Jean de Mets, who spread such terror that the archers who were sent against them preferred to advise them to fly, through fear of being killed by them; however, the salt barges having been robbed on the 7th of June, near the Célestins, the _prévôt_ of the merchants sent the night-watch against them; they defended themselves with arquebuses, drove the watch back as far as the Port Saint-Landry, and all but killed the _prévôt_.

"On the 14th, a troop of these rogues traversed the city, crying: '_Vive Bourgogne! À sac! à sac!_'

"Immediately the watch turned out, there was a fight, and some thirty men were killed or wounded on both sides. Presently, the disbanded soldiers and the _routiers_, coming from no one knew where, joined forces with the truands and spread terror among the inhabitants. One of the officers of the quarters, charged to take proceedings against them, asserted that there were eighty of them who frequented the hostelry de la Coquille, situated in the Rue Saint-Martin, and that there was a still greater number in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. Every one was quite convinced that these were soldiers who had not been paid their hire, and it was resolved that some sixty persons, honorable and of divers conditions (one of them was a president of the court), with twenty sergeants, should be sent against them, to seize all these adventurers and bring them to justice.

After a contemporary engraving by Duplessis-Bertaux.]

"This was a mission sufficiently disagreeable to fulfil, and one which was not exempt from danger; the vagabonds, forewarned, joined the Italian and Corsican bands commanded by the Comte de Belle Joyeuse, who had been authorized by the regent 'to live upon the people,' and who gave themselves up to all the excesses which were compatible with such an authorization, quite in consonance with the manners of the times; when it was desired to raise soldiers for a campaign and there was no money with which to pay them, they were permitted to live upon the people, that is to say, to exact from the unhappy inhabitants of the town or the country whatever they pleased, to ransom them, to rob them, to pillage them, free to beat them unmercifully or to spit them like chickens, if they took it into their heads to complain. This was what was called the necessities of the troops.

"Presently, these adventurers, French or foreign, formed an effective force of four thousand men.

"If one imagine these four thousand armed bandits falling unexpectedly upon the inhabitants of Saint-Cloud, of Sèvres, of Montreuil, ravaging, destroying, robbing all, ransoming the nuns of Longchamps, threatening to pillage Le Landit, it can readily be believed that the merchants were so uneasy that they hastened to place their goods upon carts and to flee with them.

"There was certainly sufficient here to frighten the Parisians...."

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 Coeur 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. After a long and rude winter, now behold the earth reanimating under the sunshine of the new birth! A generous sap circulates in her bosom; she adorns herself with a vegetation capricious, yet fruitful, which re-covers and conceals the old soil, while sustaining itself by it, like those vigorous plants which, born at the foot of an antique oak, embrace it and kill it in the clasp of their younger tendrils. 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. 'The world laughs at the world,' said Marot;--'therefore is it in its youth!'"

The question of the social evil had been taken up in this city as early as the time of Charlemagne. That great lawmaker had endeavored to banish from his capital all public women, but they defied even his imperial authority. He ordained that they should be punished with the lash, and that all those who had lodged them, or had been found in their company, should carry them around their necks to the place of execution. But the number of these whippings, and of these singular processions, was so great that a policy of toleration was, perforce, substituted. Philippe-Auguste also undertook to regulate this disorder, as the number was constantly increasing of these _femmes amoureuses_, or _filles folles_, as they were called; they were grouped in a corporation, honored with a special tax, and with special judges to consider their delinquencies; they were given the liberty of certain streets, the names of which have been preserved, in each of which they were furnished with a building (_clapier_, a sort of hutch, or retreat), which they were to keep clean and "render agreeable and comfortable." Here they were to confine themselves from ten o'clock in the morning till curfew--six o'clock in the evening in winter, and between eight and nine in summer, and nowhere else whatever. Every year they walked in solemn procession on the day of Saint Mary Magdalen. "Those of them who followed the Court were obliged during the month of May to furnish the bed of the _roi des ribauds_."

Reproduction of one of many contemporary engravings issued to excite the people against the clergy and nobility.]

This functionary had been established by Philippe-Auguste for the double purpose of policing these offenders, and of forming a body-guard of resolute men for the monarch himself. "The ribauds were armed with maces, and watched night and day over the person of the king, who feared the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain and the bravoes of Richard of England. The _roi des ribauds_ was an important personage, in the enjoyment of very considerable prerogatives and privileges. He mounted guard at the sovereign's door, and saw that no one entered without authority. He was the judge for crimes committed within the enclosure of the royal residence, and carried out himself the sentences which he pronounced; he was thus at once judge and executioner. We find him in the exercise of his office as late as the fifteenth century."

Under Saint Louis, there was further legislation against these women, _les ribaudes_, and renewal of the edicts forbidding any citizen to let his house to them under penalty of confiscation. Thus early do we find in use one of the least ineffective of modern measures for correcting this evil. This king, who had a weakness for cruel and excessive punishments, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) his sanctity, also commanded that these disturbers of public morals should be stripped of all their property, wherever found, and imprisoned at hard labor. This being found impracticable, he modified his ordinance, and directed that they should be restricted to certain streets, that they should not be allowed to wear embroideries, or silver or other ornaments appertaining to honest women. Three of these streets being in turn denied them under Charles VI, in 1387, the proprietors appealed to Parliament, which by a decree restored to them the Rue de Baillehoé. In 1367, in 1379, in 1386, and in 1395, there were further ordinances forbidding them numerous other streets; in 1446, the week before Ascension, proclamation was made by the public crier of the furs, silver girdles, reversed collars, and other articles of feminine adornment which were forbidden them. There were at this date between five and six thousand of them in Paris, and all classes of society, ecclesiastics, monks, magistrates, openly paraded their immoral mode of life. The very churches and bath-houses were used as rendezvous. Henry VI, King of England and France, had, in 1424, forbidden the sergeants and the archers of the municipality to confiscate to their own use the girdles, jewelry, or vestments of the _fillettes et femmes amoureuses ou dissolues_, but this regulation seems to have been no better enforced than all the others.

Under Louis XI, we find the same bold Cordelier, Olivier Maillard, who had not hesitated to preach against the king himself, denouncing all the sins of the Parisians at once from his pulpit. He reproached them with their games of chance, their playing cards, their taking the name of God in vain in their oaths, their turning their houses into dens of prostitution, their selling their daughters to the seigneurs; he accused their wives of deceiving their husbands for the sake of fine gowns, embroidered and furred. "Is it not true, mesdemoiselles," he cried, "that there are to be found among you, here in Paris, more debauched women than honest women? Is it not fine to see the wife of an advocate who has bought his office, and who has not ten francs of income, dress herself like a princess, display the gold on her neck, on her head, on her girdle? She is dressed according to her station in life, she says. Let her go to all the devils, she and her station! And you, Monsieur Jacques, you give her absolution? Doubtless she will say: 'It is not my husband who has given me such fine clothes, but I have earned them with the labor of my body!' To thirty thousand devils with such labor!"

In the following reign, the Court and Parliament took extraordinary measures to prevent the spread of the contagious disease which was called _le mal de Naples_, because it was said to have been first brought into France by the soldiers of Charles VIII on their return from the Italian campaigns. This statement, however, is very doubtful. An ordinance was drawn up, with the approval of the _prévôts_ of Paris, the merchants and the _échevins_, by which all those affected with this malady, and having no regular residence in the city, were directed to leave it within twenty-four hours under penalty of the halter, and in order to facilitate their return to their own homes, they were directed to rendezvous at the Portes Saint-Denis or Saint-Jacques, where they would give their names in writing to an official stationed there for that purpose and receive each four sous parisis. Those who possessed houses in the city were requested to immediately shut themselves up in them and remain in them; the curés and churchwardens of their parishes were to see that they were furnished with food. The homeless poor were to congregate in the Faubourg Saint-Germain-des-Près, where they would be lodged, fed, and cared for; they were expressly forbidden to leave until they were cured. The _prévôt_ of Paris gave orders that those affected with disease were not to be suffered to go about the city, but were to be driven from it, or put in prison; the _prévôt_ of the merchants and the _échevins_ put guards at the city gates to prevent any of these persons entering the capital.

In 1560, during the short reign of François II, the States-General issued a positive prohibition of all prostitution,--which was as ineffective as all the preceding regulations had been. Under Charles IX and Henri III, the evil constantly increased,--the example offered by the corrupt court not being conducive to the growth of a sound public opinion. Those persons who were convicted of bigamy were condemned to be publicly flogged, and, sometimes, to be afterward hanged,--in the latter case, they were executed between two distaffs. Those convicted of the crime of bestiality were usually burned at the stake, the animal undergoing the same penalty. The _filles de mauvaise vie_ were more numerous than ever, and all the streets formerly assigned to them were still occupied by them. In 1619, a new decree of the Parliament against them forbade all persons to let them houses or lodgings, under penalty of confiscation of their property for the benefit of the poor, and directed all _vagabonds_ and _filles débauchées_ to quit _la ville et faulxbourgs de Paris_ within twenty-four hours, under pain of imprisonment. Every bourgeois and citizen of Paris was required to aid the first huissier, or sergeant of the Châtelet, or any other officer of justice, who called upon him to do so, in enforcing this regulation, under penalty of a fine of a hundred livres parisis.

All these legal penalties, necessarily inefficient in themselves, were rendered doubly so by the dissolute code of morals, _les moeurs Italiennes_, as they were called under Mazarin, that obtained in all classes of society. Under Louis XIV, an ordinance of 1684, drawn up by Colbert, was especially directed against those unfortunate women who were afflicted with disease: on entering the hospital they were first whipped, and then subjected to hard labor and the most rigorous confinement. Under the Regency, in 1720, Paris was greatly outraged by the tragic death of the Comtesse de Roncy, a very pretty young wife, who, justly suspicious of her husband, courageously went to seek him one day at the house of a certain charmer whom he was in the habit of visiting. On this occasion, he was not there, but the unhappy wife recognized his portrait on the bracelet which her rival was wearing; the controversy soon became heated, the neighbors of this Rue Gît-le-Coeur flocked in and took sides against the intruder, who, in the end, was thrown out the window and died on the following day. The murderesses were all sent to the Châtelet. Under Louis XV, the prodigal luxury displayed by the actresses and opera-dancers, the _femmes à la mode_, who were called _des impures_, and the effrontery of the grand seigneurs and rich bankers who maintained them in this state, became, if possible, more scandalous than ever; it was said, for example, that the minister Bertin, who had lived for fifteen years with Mlle. Hus, of the Comédie Française, had given her a set of furniture that was valued at five hundred thousand livres.

"Mlle. Grandi, of the Opéra, a dancer of mediocre talent and with a very commonplace face, was complaining one evening at the theatre of having lost the good graces of a protector who had given her a thousand louis in five weeks; one of those present said to her that she would readily find some one to take his place. Mlle. Grandi replied that it was not so easy as might be supposed, but that, in any case, she was firmly decided not to accept any new liaison excepting on the condition that she received a carriage and two good horses, with at least a hundred louis of income assured to maintain this equipage. The conversation then ended, but the next day there arrived at Mlle. Grandi's lodging a magnificent carriage drawn by two horses and followed by three others led behind it, and in the carriage was found one hundred and thirty thousand livres in specie."

Sometimes these scandalous chronicles took another turn. Mlle. Guimard, also of the Opéra, "a celebrated dancer, who was openly protected by the Maréchal de Soubise, did not shine by any excessive faithfulness to her protector; she accepted a rendezvous in one of the faubourgs of Paris, and saw that there was so much misery in this quarter that she distributed a portion of the two thousand écus which she had received as the price of her complaisance among the poor people whom she encountered and carried the rest to the curé of Saint-Roch, requesting him to have the goodness to distribute it among the poor."

The gardens of the Palais-Royal figure largely in the history of Paris as the scene of many of the more important incidents of the constantly changing social life of the capital. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this locality was so much the favorite resort of the _femmes galantes_ that the honest bourgeois and their wives were finally compelled to abandon it altogether; in the latter part of 1771, the former were accordingly all expelled, but by the summer of 1772 they had all returned. It is related that the Duc de Chartres, walking here one day, passed one of these ladies and was so much struck by her appearance that he turned to the gentlemen accompanying him and said: "Ah! how ugly she is!" To which the offended fair promptly replied: "You have much uglier ones in your seraglio." The prince did not judge it expedient to discuss the subject, but he related the incident to the lieutenant of police, and the next day these promenaders were more rigorously expelled than ever. In consequence, "to-day," relates a chronicler of the period, "excepting on days of the opera, the Palais-Royal is nothing but a vast solitude." In 1784, the streets back of it, inhabited by a dissolute and degraded population of both sexes, had become "veritable cloacæ." On the evening of the 31st of October, 1785, at a moment when the evening promenade was more crowded even than usual, a dragoon, having one of these _filles_ on his arm, pushed by the throng, happened to step on the foot of the Abbé de Lubersac, walking near him; the latter made use of a strong expression, to which the soldier replied in kind; the young woman endeavored to make peace by saying: "After all, it is only an abbé, who is not worth stopping for." The churchman, still further forgetting himself, permitted himself to kick the young woman quite as if she were a man; the dragoon took him by the collar; the _Suisses_ of the palace hastened to quell the riot, but their numbers were quite insufficient; the Duc de Chartres, seeing the tumult, but not daring to show himself because of his great unpopularity, summoned the city guard to what by this time had become a "regular field of battle," and the disturbance was finally quelled. Among the wounded who were carried off was a Chevalier de Saint-Louis, "disemboweled;" and thereafter the Suisses prohibited the entrance of the gardens to all women of doubtful virtue.

It may be remembered that, in the celebrated affair of the diamond necklace, the young person who was persuaded by the adventuress, Madame de la Motte, to personify the queen, Marie Antoinette, and to meet the duped Cardinal Rohan in the park of Versailles at ten o'clock in the evening for the purpose of giving him the fictitious authority to purchase the necklace, was a _fille du monde_ who lived in the Rue du Jour at Paris, and was known as "la d'Oliva." For playing this part, the young woman was promised fifteen thousand livres. The _mémoire_ that was afterward drawn up by the avocat of Madame de la Motte "excited the interest of all sensitive souls by relating that the demoiselle, enceinte at the moment of her arrest, had been delivered in the Bastile, and was nursing her infant herself."

One of the most celebrated resorts of the ladies of the monde and the demi-monde, the cabaret of Ramponneau at Belleville, was closed a few years before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789. Its renown seems to have been established, in the early days of the Regency, by the fact that wine was there sold at three sous six deniers the pint, that is to say, at one sou less than the usual price. "It was so crowded that there were as many persons outside, waiting their turn to enter, as inside, although the accommodations were very considerable in size. This crowd excited the curiosity of persons of distinction, who wished to see for themselves this prodigy." It is described as a species of cellar, decorated on the exterior with a vine painted on the wall, and with a sign bearing the legend, "_Au Tambour Royal_," and a picture of the proprietor astride of a cask. It was furnished in the interior with wooden benches and crippled tables, around which crowded a multitude drawn from all classes of society, high and low.

The fame of the proprietor became so great that he was offered by the two managers, Gaudon and Nestre, of a theatrical establishment on the Boulevard du Temple, in 1758, ten livres a day if he would consent to show himself on their stage daily for the space of three months. The contracts were all signed, the songs prepared for him, when Ramponneau, worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures which the Church has pronounced upon these individuals, have determined him to renounce, as in these presents, through scruples of conscience and for the purpose of so contributing, on his part, to the purity of manners which it becomes a Christian to maintain, and in which he prays God always to maintain him, he renounces appearing, and promises to God never to appear, on any stage, nor to perform any function, profession, or act which is in the nature of those performed by those individuals who appear on the theatrical stage, whoever they may be," etc. The case was conducted on both sides by the most eminent avocats, and finally compromised by Ramponneau paying a large sum to have the agreement cancelled. He still had left one hundred thousand livres, with which he established himself at the Porcherons, and purchased from the Sieur Magny the cabaret de la Grande-Pinte, on which he expended sixty thousand livres more, and where he had the same success as at the Courtille. The court and the city thronged his establishment, which became the restaurant _à la mode_.

A very celebrated wine-shop, known as the Petit-Ramponneau, was established, in 1859, at Montmartre, and was the last in which wine was served in little crocks or jugs. The proprietors, MM. Lallemand, made a fortune in thus dispensing _vin bleu_ and portions at six sous the plate.

"It had long been said that the third estate paid with its property, the nobility with its blood, the clergy with its prayers. Now, the clergy of the court and of the salon prayed but very little, the nobility no longer constituted in itself the royal army; but the third estate, remaining faithful to its functions in the State, still paid, and each year more. Since its purse was the common treasury, it was inevitable that the more the monarchy expended, the more would it place itself in a condition of dependency upon the bourgeoisie, and that a day would arrive when the latter, weary of paying, would demand its accounts. That day is called the Revolution of 1789."

The engraving on page 245 is a reproduction of one of the many that appear at this day of settlement, with the object of exciting the people against the clergy and the nobility, and of illustrating forcibly the two principal vices of society as then constituted,--the privileges and the inequality of taxation. To suppress these privileges, and to make this inequality disappear,--this was the task of the Revolution. In the engraving, from the collection of M. le Baron de Vinck d'Orp, of Brussels, we see a woman of the people bending under the double burden of a nun and a lady of the nobility; the title is "_Le Grand Abus_."

As to the origin of the famous phrase, the sans-culottes, the following statement is made by some historians. Two ladies of the nobility, but favorably inclined toward the new ideas, were one day present at a session of the Assembly, and were commenting very audibly and very critically upon a speech which the Abbé Maury was delivering. The orator, finally losing his patience, interrupted his discourse, and, indicating his unappreciative hearers with his forefinger, turned to the presiding officer:

"Monsieur le President," he said, "make these two _sans-culottes_--unbreeched, trouserless--keep quiet."

This appellation, applied to the two ladies, naturally turned the laugh against them, and the phrase, repeated from mouth to mouth, was adopted by the people of the faubourgs as a title glorifying their miserable condition and their aspirations.

Another of these Revolutionary prints, from the _National Almanac_ for 1791, engraved by Debucourt, and preserved in the collection of M. Muhlbacher of Paris, gives an ingenious and picturesque presentation of one of the numberless sources of supply of that literature of journals and pamphlets on which the Revolution was so largely fed. This _marchande de journaux_, who adorns a page in the calendar, sits between two benches covered with papers and pamphlets, and set off with ribbons, flowers, and patriotic emblems mounted on rods; her costume and her attitude are also patriotic and a trifle dishevelled, and she is shrilly proclaiming the new decree concerning the value of the assignat which she holds out. Behind her, a couple of elderly aristocrats are about to come into collision with two younger citizens, representatives of the newer ideas, and absorbed in reading some catechism for patriots. On the sidewalk are two boys in the costumes of their elders, one of whom is supposed to be pointing to the date of July 14th in the calendar. This plate is referred to in the _Art du 18e siècle_, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.

Caricature from _La Journée du Poëte Décadent_.]

It is worthy of remark that even this sacred date of the 14th of July, that of the national fête, is nowadays not exempt from that curious self-criticism which in every tone of mockery, semi-seriousness, and grave apprehension occupies so considerable a proportion of contemporary French literature, from the _Siècle_ to the _Bulletin de la Société d'Economie Sociale et des Unions de la Paix Sociale_. So persistent had this criticism become that the national authorities this year (1898) in the capital thought it fit to tack on to the national and municipal celebration of a great political event, in order to give it greater weight and dignity, the commemoration of the birth of a not very important literary man! M. Gaston Deschamps, in the usually ribald _Figaro_, claimed much of the credit of this innovation for himself. In a long leading editorial on the _Sanctification du 14 Juillet_, he thus lays sacrilegious hands on the taking of the Bastile itself: "Last year, I demonstrated, very readily, that our fête of the 14th of July, already discredited by the desertion of the wealthy classes, by the scepticism of the public functionaries, and by the frivolousness of the populace, was destitute of that character, national, republican, and humanitarian, which should be in a democracy, the characteristic of every solemnity.

"This fête seems to have been instituted for the special aggravation of those Frenchmen who believe that the history of France did not begin with the 14th of July, 1789. It is no longer, to employ the energetic expression of Gambetta, anything but 'a rag of the civil war.' It glorifies an event which, according to the testimony of contemporaries the least suspected of moderation in politics (Marat, Saint-Just), had not the importance nor, above all, the beauty which our present system of primary instruction attributes to it. Historical research has verified the opinion of these witnesses. It is impossible to relate the taking of the Bastile Saint-Antoine without recognizing the silliness or the unworthiness of the citizens who were the principal actors in this enterprise. This old prison had just been put out of commission by a royal ordinance which decreed its demolition. Very many of the 'conquerors of the Bastile' cried '_Vive le Roi!_' as they went down the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The number of prisoners at that time confined in this jail reduced itself to seven, to wit: four forgers, two lunatics, and a crapulous old gentleman. The Bastile was garrisoned by the French _invalides_ and by the Swiss guards. The assailants swore to injure no one if they were permitted to enter. The gates were opened. The French _invalides_, who had trusted in the promise given, were massacred without being able to defend themselves. The Swiss guards were taken for 'captives' (because of their uniform). They were carried off in triumph. The brewer Santerre (at that time demagogue, and later monopolist in national property) proposed to set the edifice on fire with poppy oil. His friends preferred the demolition pure and simple, which had the effect of turning out in the street the poor devils whose shops were built against the walls of the 'monument of tyranny.'" And he cites the works of a number of modern historical writers to prove the truth of his statements.

"The taking of the Bastile was an act of anarchy, which, if it were repeated to-day, would be immediately suppressed by our Minister of the Interior, Monsieur Brisson. The Republican police no longer permits, God be thanked, this particular form of diversion. This was very evident the other day when several hundred gentry, intoxicated, perhaps, by the approach of this untoward anniversary, wished to sack Mazas prison.

"No, I cannot bring myself to consider this killing of Frenchmen as the most glorious event of the French Revolution. There is too much of fratricidal murder in this affair. I cannot rejoice to thus see the blood of our nation flow. Every time that it is wished to make an apology for this excess of contagious folly, we find ourselves reduced to invoking the approbation of foreigners. It appears that Kant was so well satisfied with this outbreak that he forgot, for the first time in his life, the hour of his luncheon. The English ambassador wrote to his Gracious Majesty that he was very well pleased. The Venetian ambassador judged it to be a 'noble revolt.' So be it. But neither the Prussian Kant, nor this Englishman, nor that Venetian, had the same reasons that we have for grieving over an incident that divided France against herself....

"Last year I succeeded in stirring up a very sufficient number of protestations for having ventured to deduce, from a collection of self-evident facts, a judgment which I still maintain. It may well be believed, moreover, that I was not wrong, since the Government and the Municipal Council have, this year, taken the initiative of adding to the ceremonies and to the diversions usual on the 14th of July, the celebration of an illustrious memory, which will heighten the dignity of the official fête, and which should give to the French people the opportunity to reunite in the unanimity truly national of a common admiration.

"On the white posters which the administration has just placarded I read as follows:

"'FÊTE NATIONALE,'

and underneath:

"'_Fêtes du centenaire de Michelet._'

"This coincidence is intentional. It is significative.

"Michelet was born on the 21st of August, 1798; the date of his centennial therefore falls regularly in the coming month. It has been decided to celebrate to-morrow the commemoration of his birth. It has been desired, by means of this addition, to purify, to sanctify the 14th of July by a sort of pious eve.... If these fêtes contribute toward fixing in the souvenirs of the populace an idea of the life and of the work of Michelet, this 14th of July, ennobled, embellished, will not have been misplaced. A hateful date will justly have been transformed into a fête of union and of fraternity."

Lamartine says of the murder of M. de Launey, Governor of the Bastile, hacked to pieces by the crowd in the street after he had surrendered: "A victim of duty, he yielded only with his last breath the sword which had been confided to him by his master. The court, the army, the royalists, the people, basely endeavored to throw upon him the responsibility for their want of forethought, their cowardice, their blood shedding."