Chapter XII: Letter XI

The Observatory--The Astronomers--Val de Grace--Anne of
Austria--Hospice des Enfans Trouvés--Rows of Cradles--Sisters of
Charity--Vincent de Paul--Maisons d’Accouchement--Place St.
Jaques--The Catacombs--Skull of Ninon de l’Enclos--The Poet
Gilbert--Julian’s Bath--Hôtel de Cluny--Ancient Furniture--Francis
the First’s Bed--Charlotte Corday--Danton--Marat--Robespierre--Rue
des Postes--Convents of former times--Faubourg St. Marceau.

_Paris, Oct. 25th._

I rose this morning, and refreshed myself from the repose of the night, by running boyishly up the broad and elegant walk which leads to the south end of the garden, to the Observatory, the place where they make almanacks; I went in and saw great piles of astronomical books and instruments, an _anemometer_ to measure the winds, and another affair baptised also in Greek, to measure the rain; also, a thing in the cellar, which, in this Latin quarter, they call an “_acoustic phenomenon_.” By this you can talk aloud all day to any individual standing in a particular place, and not another of the company will be anything the wiser for it.

There are a number of men here, whom they call astronomers, who, while we are asleep, look after the stars, and observe what is going on in the moon; and who go to bed with Venus and the heavenly bodies towards morning.

There is an old woman here in a little stall, upon the broad and paved place in front of the Observatory, who sells tobacco and butter, besides vaudevilles and epic poems, who shewed me, what do you think?--the very stone upon which Marshal Ney stood to be shot. “There stood the wretches that shot him. Yes, sir, I saw him murdered, and I never wish to see the like again.”

Just east, I visited another remarkable building, which young girls read about in their romances, called _Val de Grace_. This church, built by Anne of Austria, was called _Val de Grace_. If you wish to see the prettiest fresco paintings of all Paris, you must go in here and look up at the dome; the chapels, too, are full of virgins and dirty little angels. She came here in 1624, and laid the corner-stone with her own little hands. She bestowed some special privileges upon the monastery, amongst others the right of burying in this church the hearts of all the defunct princesses, beginning with herself; and at the Revolution, “one counted even to twenty-six royal hearts.” The convent of _Val de Grace_ is now turned into a military hospital, and greasy soldiers are stabled where once lived and breathed the pretty nuns you read of in your novels.

Just in the neighbourhood is the _Hospice des Enfans Trouvés_, to which I paid a hasty visit. If a child takes it into its head to be born out of lawful wedlock, which now and then occurs, it is carried to this hospital for nourishment and education. The average number admitted here, is 6,000 annually, 16½ per day. They are received day and night, and no questions asked. All you have to do is, to place the little human being in a box, communicating with an apartment in the interior, which, on ringing a bell, is taken in, and gets on afterwards well enough, often better than we who think ourselves legitimate. It sucks no diseases from its mother’s milk; and from its father’s example no vices; and it has a good many virtues incident to its condition. It has amongst these a great reverence for old age, not knowing but that every old gentleman it meets might be its papa.

On entering this hospital you will see two long rows of cradles running over with babies, and a group of sisters, in gowns of black serge, making and mending up the baby wardrobe, or extending to the little destitute creatures the offices of maternity; and indeed they take such care of them, as almost to discourage poor people from having legitimate children altogether. But what praise can be equal to the merits of these Sisters of Charity? You see them wherever suffering humanity needs their assistance; their devotion has no parallel in the history of the world. They are very often, too, of rich and distinguished families; women who leave all the enjoyments of gay society to pursue these humble and laborious duties, to practise, in these silent walls, prudence, patience, fortitude, and all those domestic virtues and peaceful moralities which, in this naughty world of ours, obtain neither admiration nor distinction. Think only of relinquishing fashion, and rank, and pleasure, to be granny to an almshouse!

This hospital was founded by one of the most respectable saints of all Paris, Vincent de Paul. His statue is placed in the vestibule. It would do your heart good to see the babies go down on their bits of knees every evening, and bless the memory of this saint. A cradle used to be hung up as a sign to draw customers here, but the reputation of the house is now made, and it is taken down. Formerly the ringing of a bell, too, or the wailings of the infant, the mother giving it a pinch, was enough to announce a new comer, but lately so many dead children have been put in the box to avoid the expense of burying them that they have been obliged to stop up the hole. I am sorry for this; it was so convenient. You just put in a baby as you put a letter in the post-office; now you are obliged to carry it into a room inside, where the names, dress, the words, and behaviour of those who bring it, as also its death, are entered in a register; this register is kept a profound secret; never revealed to any one, unless one pays twenty francs. I visited the school-rooms, where those of proper age are taught to read and write. They seem very merry and happy; and, having no communication with the world, are unconscious of any inferiority of birth. When very young or sickly they are put out to nurse in the country, and at twelve are apprenticed to a trade. The sisters will point you out a mother who has placed her infant here, and got herself employed as child’s nurse to the hospital to give it nourishment and care. I forgot to mention that mothers are not allowed to see their babies, or receive their bodies if they die; they are reserved for the improvement of anatomical science.

A useful appendage to this establishment are the numerous _Maisons d’Accouchement_, distributed everywhere over the city, in which persons find accommodations, as secretly as they please, and at all prices, to suit their circumstances. The evils of all these establishments are manifest: the good is, the prevention of infanticide, often of suicide, and of the perjuries innumerable, and impositions practised in some other countries. I doubt whether a city like Paris could safely adopt any other system. The tables of the last year’s births stand thus:--seventeen thousand one hundred and twenty-nine legitimate; nine thousand seven hundred and twenty-one illegitimate. So you see that every second man you meet in Paris wants but a trifle of being no bastard. Expense, above a million and a half of francs.

Here is the _Place St. Jaques_; the place of public execution. It is the present station of the guillotine, which has already made several spots of the city classical. And here is appropriately the _Barrière d’Enfer_. These barriers are found at all the great issues from the city through the walls. They are amongst the curiosities of Paris; often beautiful with sculpture, and other ornaments.

Whilst I was surveying this district, in my usual solitary way, I met two gentlemen and a lady, acquaintances, who were descending into the catacombs, whose opening is just here, and I went down with them.

This nether world bears upon its vaults three fourths of the Quartier St. Germain, with its superincumbent mass of churches and palaces. The light of Heaven is shut out, and so deep a silence reigns in its recesses, that one hears his own footsteps walking after him, and is so vast that several visitors, straying away a few years ago, have not yet returned. The bones of fifty generations are emptied here from ancient grave yards of Paris, now only known to history. What a hideous deformity of skulls! After entering half a mile we saw various constructions, all made out of these remnants of mortality; sepulchral monuments, an entire church, with its pulpit, confessional, altars, tombs, and coffins; and the victims of several Revolutionary massacres, are laid out here chronologically. How unjacobinical they look!

On entering, you are confronted with the following inscription; “_Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Mort!_” and various other inscriptions are put up in the dead languages, and names often written upon skulls, to designate their owners. “Fix your eyes here,” said the lady; “this is the skull of Ninon de l’Enclos,” with verses.

“L’indulgente et sage Nature
A formé l’âme de Ninon
De la Volupté d’Epicure,
Et de la vertu de Caton.”

And this is her skull! Every one knows her history, but I will tell you a little of it over again. I will give you a list of her court. Molière, to begin with, and Corneille; Scarron, St. Evermond, Chapelle, Desmarets, Mignard, Chateauneuf, Chaulieu, Condé, Vendome, Villeroi, Villars, D’Etrée, La Rochefoucauld, Choiseul, Sevigné and Fontenelle. She was honoured with the confidence of Madame Scarron, and the homage, through her ambassadors, of the Queen of Sweden. She made conquests at sixty, one at seventy, and died at ninety. Her own son, the Chevalier de Villars, fell in love with her at fifty, and fell upon his sword when she revealed to him the secret of his birth. The Chevalier de Gourville confided to her twenty thousand crowns, when driven to exile, and a like sum to the Grand Penetencier; the priest denied the deposit, and the courtezan restored it, unasked.

I visited, a month ago, her chateau, and saw the rooms in which she used to give her famous suppers “_à tous les Despreaux, et tous les Racines_.” And this is her skull! While my doctor companions were turning it about, and explaining the bumps--how big was her ideality, how developed her amativeness, I turned her about in my mind, until I had turned her into shapes again--into that incomparable beauty and grace, which no rival was able to equal, and which sensuality itself was not able to degrade. I hung back the lips upon those grinning teeth, I gave her her smile again, her wit, and her eloquence. I assisted at her little court of Cyprus, in the Rue de Tournelle, where philosophers came to gather wisdom, and courtiers grace, from her conversation; I assisted at her toilette, and witnessed the hopes, the jealousies, the agonies, and ecstacies of her lovers. And so we took leave of the exquisite Ninon’s skull--if it was her’s.

The poet Gilbert, who died of want, has here an apartment to himself, which he had not above ground. It is inscribed with his own mournful epitaph,

“Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J’apparus un jour, et je meurs.
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j’arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs!”

I could not help contradicting him, for the life of me.

In the very interior of the cavern are collections of water which have classical names. Here is the Styx just under the Ecole Médecine, and the River Lethe flows hard by the Institute. We came at length to a cabinet of skulls, arranged upon shelves, some for phrenology, and some for pathology, exhibiting in classes the several diseases, which our doctors explained with circumstantiality to their sybil conductor; rows of toes, of fingers, and jaws, and legs which used to cut pigeon-wings, and pirouettes, alas! how gracefully.

In the mean time I saw a couple of ghosts (I supposed them to be Cuvier, and Dr. Gall) skulking away as soon as they caught a glimpse of our tapers, and I saw a great many other things, not interesting to people above ground. We began now to be apprehensive of taking cold, and being sent hither to enrich these cabinets; and so we deposited at the door our golden branch, and having mounted a straight stair-way one hundred feet, were purified in the open air.

The two doctors now left me their Eurydice, and she and I, being inspired alike with the spirit of sight-seeing, went a few hundred yards westward, and saw _Julian’s Baths_. Though he is said to have been little addicted to bathing, here are his baths, the only relic of his sojourn in Paris. This old building is an oblong, with very thick walls, which are crumbling to decay. One of them is entirely dilapidated. The vaults, rising forty-two feet above the soil, and furnaces under ground, and parts of the bathing rooms, are exposed to view, in all the naked majesty of a ruin; a ruin, too, of fifteen centuries.

This is but a single hall of an immense palace--the Palais des Thermes--which once covered the present site of the University. It was the scene of licentious revellings and crime, “_latebra scelerum, Venerisque accommoda furtis_,” afterwards of the theological disputes of the Sorbonne, and now of the quiet lectures of the University; and Virgin Mary’s are now made out of the old Venuses.

I am a goose of an antiquary; all I could see was Mrs. Julian, jumping into her bath, and coming dribbling out again; but my companion was very different. She had a taste for putting her nose into every musty corner, and cracking off pieces of a bath, and the Roman mortar, of which posterity has lost the secret, to put in her cabinet. She has over-run all Europe, and has now got, she says, near a ton of antiquities. She has a stone from Kenilworth, and a birch from Virgil’s tomb, plenty of mosaics from the Coliseum, and of “auld nick-nackets” from Stirling castle. She has promised me a leaf from Tasso’s lemon tree, and one from Rousseau’s rose bush, also a twig of William Tell’s tree of liberty, and Shakspeare’s mulberry, and a little chip of Dr. Johnson’s cedar at Streatham. And nearly all our travelling Yankee ladies are bringing over a similar collection; after a while the commonest thing in the world will be a curiosity.

Close in this neighbourhood is the _Hôtel de Cluny_, to which we also paid a visit--I having a ticket from Mr. Sommerand, the proprietor. In this hotel used to lodge Roman generals and emperors, and the first French kings. A suite of seven or eight rooms is crammed with furniture, the remains of the last age; some of it magnificently decayed; commodes, chests, boxes, second-hand tooth brushes, as good as new, and other national relics.

Nothing contemporary enters here; there was nothing, but the lady who accompanied me, under a hundred years old. First we entered the dining room, and saw a knight in full armour placed by a table; and the ghost of a mahogany sideboard at the opposite end--without date, and there is no knowing whether it was made before or since the flood--with its knives and spoons, and earthenware tea-cups, of the same antiquity; next, a bed chamber hung in gilt leather--whose do you think? Why Francis the First’s, with all the implements thereunto belonging.

An entire suit of steel armour, cap-a-pie, reposes upon the bed, with a visor of the knight’s, which had gained victories in jousts and tournaments; also an old coat out at the elbows, worn last, I presume, by his footman. Every little rag of his is preserved here. Here, too, are girdles and bracelets, caskets and other valuables, and a necklace with its pedigree labelled on a bit of parchment; the Belle Feronières’, I suppose. Here is the very glass he looked into, with a Venus holding a garland in front, and a cross and altar behind, by way of symmetry; and here are the very spurs (I held them in my hand) which he wore at Pavia; finally, the very bed, the very sheets, his Majesty slept in.

This bed was hawked about all Paris in the Revolution--at last it was sold by auction in the public streets, _a dix francs seulement_, and was knocked down to Monsieur Sommerand--Francis the First’s bed and comfortable, and his little pillow, about as big as a sausage. I was much gratified with this collection, which is certainly unique in the world; and you are not hurried through by a Cicerone, but by the complaisance of M. Sommerand you can rummage and ransack things at your leisure. In the other rooms are vases and caskets, and precious cabinets, a spinette of Marie de Medicis, and other furniture of noble dames; one gets tired of looking at their trinkets; and in other rooms are castings, and inlayings, and carvings, and so forth.

I now took Madame under my arm, and descending through one of the thousand and eighty streets of Paris into the _Rue de l’Ecole Médecine_, deposited her at her home. You should never pass into this street without stopping awhile to contemplate a very memorable dwelling in it--that in which Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat. One owes to this generous maid and disinterested martyr to humanity, a tribute in approaching its threshold. The house is also otherwise remarkable.

Danton used to call here of a morning from the bottom of the stairs upon Marat, and then they went arm in arm to the Convention; and Collot d’Herbois, the actor--what memorable names!--and Chabot the Capucin, Legendre the butcher, Chaumette the Atheist, and St. Just and Robespierre, used to hold here their nightly councils. It would puzzle Beelzebub to get up such another club. Under the outer door-way are remaining the letters * * or D * *, a part of the inscription effaced, “Liberty, Indivisibility, OR Death!”

I now dined and traversed leisurely the _Place du Panthéon_ homewards, passing through the _Rue de l’Estrapade_ into the _Rue des Postes_, once famous for its convents. This is to a pious man, and one who lives a little back into the past, a holy region; it is consecrated by religious recollections beyond all the other spots of Paris. Here in this single “_Rue des Postes_,” was the old “_Couvent des Dames de St. Augustin_,”--“_des Dames St. Thomas_,”--“_des Dames Ursulines_,”--“_des Dames de la Visitation!_”--“_de l’Adoration Perpetuelle_,”--“_du St. Sacrement_.”

Alas, how many pretty women, born to fulfil a better destiny, are mewed up in perpetual youth, within those dismal cloisters! Here, too, were the convents of the “_Filles de l’Immaculée Conception_,”--“_de la St. Providence_,” and finally “_les Filles de Bonne Volonté_.” It is the very region of repentant lovers, of heart-sick maids, and all the friars and holy nuns of the romances.

Towards the close of a summer’s evening, one’s fancy sees nothing here but visions and spectres. You will descend, in spite of your reason, with Madame Radcliffe, into the subterranean chambers of the convent, and into the solitary prisons, where you will see poor Elena and her iron table, her dead lantern, her black bread, her cruche of water, and her crucifix; and you will see the wretch Schedoni bare the bosom of the sleeping maid, hanging over the dagger. It is his own miniature!--his own daughter! And then you will walk through the long row of silent monks and smoky tapers, in the funeral of a broken-hearted sister, the sullen bell of the chapel giving news that a soul has fled.

The evening was still and solemn; and the sun just descending on your side of the globe; and lured by the novelty of the place, I travelled slowly onwards through a narrow lane to the Faubourg St. Marceau.

This street is different from all that I have seen in Paris; it is perhaps different from anything that is to be seen upon the earth. The houses are so immensely high that not a ray even in the brightest mid-day reaches the pavement, which is covered with a slimy mud. The darkened and grated windows give to the houses, the look of so many prisons. A chilling damp and horrid gloom invest you around; you feel stifled for want of air. Now and then, the whine of a dog, or the wailing of a beggar, interrupts the silence, and sometimes a sister of charity, wrapped in her hood and mantle, passes quick from one house to another. I went out of this street willingly, as it was growing more horrible by the coming night, into the purer atmosphere of the Seine. And thus ended my adventures for the day.

END OF VOL. I.

T. C. Savill, Printer, 107, St. Martin’s Lane.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We learn from tradition that Julian never washed hands or face, or suffered any kind of ablution, unless, perhaps, at his christening. In a word, he was a very dirty emperor. Is it not strange that his “Baths” should be the only monument remaining of him in Paris? I presume they are named ironically, or from the old rule of _non lavando_.

[2] Louis, by a royal edict, ordered that no other building should be constructed in Paris until this work was completed, under a penalty of imprisonment and ten thousand francs fine. It was something in those days to be a king. One has now to ask the Deputies everything, even to gilding the ceilings of the Madelaine.

[3] It is called also the Place de la Concord, and the Place Louis XV.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

Swiming-schools=> Swimming-schools {pg vii}

Your old acqaintance=> Your old acquaintance {pg 28}

These splended cafés=> These splendid cafés {pg 63}

and it wont do to have=> and it won’t do to have {pg 95}

Sparticus who had stepped=> Spartacus who had stepped {pg 143}

je sais que le rôti à manqué a deux tables!=> je sais que le rôti a manqué à deux tables! {pg 184}

retain our demoracy=> retain our democracy {pg 208}

with Pharoah=> with Pharaoh {pg 244}