Old and New Paris Part 7

"I have already observed," he writes, "that the Parisians in general are totally indifferent as to their political interest; nor is this to be wondered at in a place where a man is hardly allowed to think for himself. A coercive silence, imposed upon every Frenchman from the hour of his birth on whatever regards the affairs of government, grows with him into a habit which the fear of the Bastille and his natural indolence daily strengthen, till the man is totally lost in the slave.

Kingly prerogative knows no bounds, because no one ever dared to resist the monarch's despotic commands. It is true that at times, in the words of the proverb, the galled horse has winced. The Parisians have at times attempted to withstand tyranny; but popular commotions amongst them have had very much the air of a boyish mutiny at school; a rod with the latter, the b.u.t.t end of a firelock with the former, quiets all, because neither act with the spirit and resolution of _men_ who a.s.sert their natural rights. What would cost the minister his life in those unhappy countries where self-denial and pa.s.sive obedience are unknown is done off in Paris by a witty epigram, a smart song, etc.; the authors of which, however, take the greatest care to remain concealed, having continually the fear of ministerial runners before their eyes; nor has a _bon mot_ unfrequently occasioned the captivity of its author."

Mercier at the same time points out that never since the days of Henri IV. had France been so mildly governed as under Louis XVI. One of the last acts of Louis XV. had been to cast into the Bastille all the volumes of the Encyclopaedia. One of the first acts of Louis XVI. was to liberate from the Bastille all prisoners who had not been guilty of serious, recognisable offences.

"At the accession of his present Majesty," writes Mercier, "his new ministers, actuated by humanity, signalised the beginning of their administration with an act of justice and mercy, ordering the registers of the Bastille to be laid before them, when a great number of prisoners were set at large." Among those liberated was a man of whom Mercier tells the same story that was afterwards to be told of one of the seven prisoners who were freed at the taking of the Bastille.

"Their number included a venerable old man, who for forty-seven years had remained shut up between four walls. Hardened by adversity, which steels the heart when it does not break it, he had supported his long and tedious captivity with unexampled constancy and fort.i.tude; and he thought no more of liberty. The day is come. The door of his tomb turns upon its rusty hinges, it opens not ajar, as usual, but wide, for liberty, and an unknown voice acquaints him that he may now depart.

He thinks himself in a dream; he hesitates, and at last ventures out with trembling steps; wonders at everything; thinks to have travelled a great way before he reaches the outward gate. Here he stops a while; his feeble eyes, long deprived of the sun's cheering beams, can hardly support its first light. A coach waits for him in the streets; he gets into it, desires to be carried to a certain street, but unable to support the motion of the coach, he is set down, and by the a.s.sistance of two men at length he reaches the quarter where he formerly dwelt; but the spot is altered, and his house is no more. His wandering eye seems to interrogate every pa.s.senger, saying with heartrending accents of despondency: 'Where shall I find my wife? Where are my children?' All in vain; the oldest man hardly remembers to have heard his name. At last a poor old decrepit porter is brought to him. This man had served in his family, but knew him not. Questioned by the late prisoner, he replied, with all the indifference which accompanies the recollection of events long pa.s.sed, that his wife had died above thirty years before in the utmost misery, and that his children were gone into foreign countries, nothing having been heard of them for many years. Struck with grief and astonishment, the old gentleman, his eyes riveted to the ground, remains for some time motionless; a few tears would have eased his deeply wounded heart, but he could not weep. At last, recovering from his trance, he hastens to the minister to whose humanity he was indebted for a liberty now grown burdensome. 'Sir,' he says to him, 'send me back to my dungeon! Who is it that can survive his friends, his relations, nay, a whole generation? Who can hear of the death of all he held dear and precious, and not wish to die? All these losses, which happen to other men by gradation, and one by one, have fallen upon me in an instant.

Ah, sir! it is not dreadful to die; but it is to be last survivor.' The minister sympathised with this truly unfortunate man. Care was taken of him, and the old porter a.s.signed to him for his servant, as he could speak with this man of his wife and children: the only comfort now left for the aged son of sorrow, who lived some time retired, though in the midst of the noise and confusion of the capital. Nothing, however, could reconcile him to a world quite new for him, and to which he resolved to remain a perfect stranger; and friendly death at last came to his relief and closed his eyes in peace."

Although, as frigid historians have pointed out, the Bastille never did any harm to the common people, it was sometimes made use of to punish actresses who were much admired by the populace. Mlle. Clairon, a distinguished actress and excellent woman, on quitting the stage from religious scruples--or rather because, contrary to her own views on the subject, she found the profession of actress condemned absolutely by the Church--was sent to the Bastille on the ground that, being a paid servant of the king, she refused to do her duty. "The case of this lady," said a writer of the time, "is indeed hard. The king sends her to prison if she does not act, and the Church sends her to perdition if she does." Mlle. Clairon was much troubled at the view taken of her profession by the clergy; and after consulting her confessor, she came to the conclusion that so long as she remained on the stage she could have no hope of salvation. It was then that she refused any longer to act, and determined to retire altogether from the stage. So indignant had Mlle. Clairon become on learning for the first time under what severe condemnation the stage lay, that she raised a strong party with the view of removing so great a scandal. Much was written and said in favour of the comedians, but all to no purpose. The priests stood firm to their text, and, in the words of a French writer, would by no means give up "their ancient and pious privilege of consigning to eternal punishment everyone who had anything to do with the stage."

[Ill.u.s.tration: a LA ROBESPIERRE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A LADY OF 1793.]

Mlle. Clairon's retirement threw her manager into the greatest confusion. She was by far the best actress of the day, and such a favourite that it was almost impossible to do without her. The theatre was soon deserted by the public, and still Mlle. Clairon refused to act. Then it was that by royal mandate she was imprisoned. She had not, however, been long in the Bastille, when an order came from the Court for the players to go to Versailles to perform before the king. Mlle.

Clairon was released, and commanded to make her appearance with the rest of the company. Being already very tired of the Bastille, she decided to obey, and performing at Court with immense success, and finding that all attempts to gain even the toleration of the Church were in vain, she resigned herself to her fate and went on acting as usual. Some years previously, Mlle. Clairon, accused of organising a cabal against a rival, had been sent to another State prison, Fort l'eveque, where, instead of pining, as at the Bastille, she held high court, receiving visits from all kinds of ill.u.s.trious people, whose carriages are said to have made the approach to the prison impa.s.sable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A TRICOTEUSE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP SHOWING THE EXTENSION OF PARIS.]

Besides the Bastille and Fort l'eveque, there was yet another prison, La Force, to which recalcitrant actresses used to be sent in the strange days of the ancient _regime_. Thus Mlle. Gavaudin, a singer at the Opera, having refused the part a.s.signed to her in a piece called the "Golden Fleece," was sent to La Force, where she enjoyed herself so much, that she was warned as to the possibility of her being punished by solitary confinement in a genuine dungeon. On this, she agreed to appear in the character which she had at first rejected. When, however, an official came to the prison to set her at liberty, in order that she might play her part that very evening, she told him that for the present she would remain where she was, that she had ordered an excellent dinner, and meant to eat it. The official charged with her liberation insisted, however, on setting her free, telling her that after he had once got her into the street she might go wherever she chose. She simply returned to the prison, where she dined copiously, with a due allowance of wine. "Then," says a narrator of these incidents, "she went to the Opera, had a furious scene with the stage-manager, who, during her imprisonment, had given her dressing-room to another singer, and after a quarter of an hour of violent language calmed down, dressed herself for the part of Calliope, and sang very charmingly." It may be mentioned that before she was consigned to the Bastille, Mlle. Clairon's case interested greatly some of the best writers of the day, including Voltaire, who published an eloquent defence of the stage against the overbearing pretensions of the Church.

It seems strange that in France, where the drama is cultivated with more interest and with more success than in any other country, actors and actresses should so long have been regarded as beyond the pale of Christianity. Happily, this is no longer the case. But the traditional view of the French Church in regard to actors and actresses was, until within a comparatively recent time, that they were, by the mere fact of exercising their profession, in the position of excommunicated persons.

This is sufficiently shown not only by the case of Mlle. Clairon in connection with the Bastille, but also by the circ.u.mstances attending the burial of Moliere in the seventeenth, of Adrienne Lecouvreur in the eighteenth, and of Mlle. Raucourt in the nineteenth century.

Acting in _Le Malade Imaginaire_, Moliere broke a blood-vessel, and was carried home to die. He was attended in his last moments by a priest of his acquaintance; he expired in presence of two nuns whom he frequently entertained, and who had come to visit him on that very day. Funeral rites were denied him, all the same, by the Archbishop of Paris; and when Mme. Moliere appealed in person to Louis XIV., the king took offence at her audacious mode of address, and threw the whole responsibility on the Archbishop of Paris--to whom, nevertheless, he sent a private message. As a result of the king's interference--not a very authoritative one--a priest was allowed to accompany Moliere's body to its otherwise unhonoured grave. The great comedy-writer was buried at midnight in unconsecrated ground; and of course, therefore, without any religious service.

Adrienne Lecouvreur, who, more than a century after her death, was to be made the heroine of Scribe and Legouve's famous drama, is known to all playgoers as the life-long friend of Marshal Saxe, whom she furnished with money for his famous expedition to Courland. Voltaire entertained the greatest regard for her, and was never so happy as when he had persuaded her to undertake a part in one of his plays. Adrienne died in Voltaire's arms, and no sooner was she dead than public opinion accused her rival, the d.u.c.h.ess de Bouillon, of having poisoned her from jealousy and hatred; for the d.u.c.h.ess had conceived a pa.s.sion for Marshal Saxe to which that gallant warrior could not bring himself to respond. The clergy refused to bury Adrienne, as in the previous century they had refused to bury Moliere. Her body was taken possession of by the police, who buried it at midnight, without witnesses, on the banks of the Seine. "In France," said Voltaire, "actresses are adored when they are beautiful, and thrown into the gutter when they are dead."

Nearly a hundred years after the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur died another great actress, Mlle. Raucourt, who, like Adrienne Lecouvreur and like Moliere, was refused Christian burial. This was in 1815, just after the Restoration, at a time when the clergy, so long deprived of power, were beginning once more to exercise it in earnest. The Cure of St.-Roch refused to admit the body of the actress into his church. An indignant crowd a.s.sembled, and became so riotous that the troops had to be called out. At last King Louis XVIII. ordered the church doors to be opened, and with the tact which distinguished him, commissioned his private chaplain to perform the service. In such horror was the stage held by the French clergy (if not by the Catholic clergy throughout Europe) so late as the beginning of the present century, that money offered to the Church by actors and actresses for charitable purposes, although accepted, was at the same time looked upon as contaminating. Thus, when Mlle. Contat gave performances for the starving poor of Paris, and handed the proceeds to the clergy of her parish for distribution, they refused to touch the money until it had been "purified" by pa.s.sing through the hands of the police, to whom it was paid in by the stage, and by whom it was afterwards paid out to the Church.

The Place de la Bastille was formed in virtue of a decree of the First Consul, but it was not completed until after the establishment of the Empire. The princ.i.p.al ornament of the square was to be a triumphal arch to the glory of the Grand Army. But after taking the opinion of the Academy of Fine Arts, the emperor altered his views; and the triumphal arch was reserved for the place it now occupies at the top of the Champs elysees. Oddly enough, too, a ma.s.sive object, intended originally for the spot now occupied by the Arc de l'etoile, was carried to the Bastille in the form of an elephant, whose trunk, according to the fantastic design, was to give forth a column of water large enough to feed a triumphal fountain, which was inaugurated December 2nd, 1808.

The wooden model of the elephant, covered with plaster, was seventeen metres long and fifteen metres high, counting the tower which the animal bore on its back. Set up for a time on the western bank of the Ca.n.a.l de l'Ourcq, the plastered elephant was afterwards abandoned, like the project in which it played a preliminary part, and its wooden carcase became a refuge for innumerable rats. The remains of the elephant were not removed until just before the completion of the bronze column which now stands in the centre of the Place de la Bastille, in memory of the victims of the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830.

The first stone of this monument was laid by King Louis Philippe on the 27th of July, 1831. It was finished at the beginning of 1843; and on the 28th of July of that year were placed, in the vaults constructed beneath the column for their reception, the remains of the insurgents of 1830, which for ten years had been lying buried in all parts of Paris, but particularly in the neighbourhood of the markets and at the foot of the Colonnade of the Louvre, where the relics reposed side by side with those of the Swiss soldiers who had died in protecting the palace. The figure lightly poised on the ball at the top of the column represents the Genius of Liberty.

At a short distance from the Place de la Bastille, and easily accessible by train, is Vincennes: known by its wood, at one time the favourite resort of duellists; by its military establishment, to which the famous Cha.s.seurs de Vincennes owed their name when, after the downfall of Louis Philippe, it was thought desirable to get rid of their former designation--that of Cha.s.seurs d'Orleans; and for its castle, in whose ditch the ill-fated Duke d'Enghien was shot, after a mock trial, on an all but groundless accusation.

The Duke d'Enghien, who, according to one of his biographers, had no fault but the one common to all the Bourbons--that of being "too easily influenced by beautiful eyes"--was living on the German side of the Rhine, nearly opposite Strasburg, with his wife, a Princess de Rohan-Rochefort, to whom he had been secretly married. As a royalist and a member of the royal family, he was naturally the enemy of Napoleon and the Napoleonic _regime_. But he had taken no part in any conspiracy, unless the League of Sovereigns and States formed against Napoleon could be so considered. The duke frequently crossed over from the right or German bank, especially at Binfelden, where the Prince de Rohan-Rochefort, his wife's father, had taken apartments at the local inn. It became known, moreover, to the French authorities that the Prefect of Strasburg had for some time past been sending various agents to the German side. The princess received at this time from an officer of the Strasburg garrison, who had been formerly attached to the Rohan family, secret intelligence that inquiries were being made in regard to the Duke d'Enghien. Soon afterwards a small body of troops crossed the Rhine, surrounded the little castle or Gothic villa where the duke was living at Ettenheim, seized him, and brought him over to Strasburg.

He was permitted to write, and lost no time in sending a note to the princess, who, from the windows of the house, had followed in painful anxiety all the events of the alarming drama acted before her eyes.

"They have promised me," wrote the duke from the citadel of Strasburg, "that this letter shall be delivered to you intact. This is the first opportunity I have had of rea.s.suring you as to my present condition, and I do so now without losing a moment. Will you, in your turn, rea.s.sure those who are attached to me in your neighbourhood? My own fear is that this letter may find you no longer at Ettenheim, but on the way to this place. The pleasure of seeing you, however, would not be nearly so great as the fear I should have of your sharing my fate.... You know, from the number of men employed, that all resistance would have been useless.

There was nothing to be done against such overpowering forces.

"I am treated with attention and politeness. I may say, except as regards my liberty (for I am not allowed to leave my room), that I am as well off as could be. If some of the officers sleep in my chamber, that is because I desired it. We occupy one of the commandant's apartments, but another room is being prepared for me, which I am to take possession of to-morrow, and where I shall be better off still. The papers found on me, and which were sealed at once with my seal, are to be examined this morning in my presence."

The first letters written by the young man from Strasburg to his wife (they are still preserved in the French Archives) showed no apprehension of danger; nothing could be proved against him except what was known beforehand, that he was a Bourbon and an enemy of Napoleon. "As far as I remember," wrote the duke to his wife, "they will find letters from my relations and from the king, together with copies of some of mine.

In all these, as you know, there is nothing that can compromise me, any more than my name and mode of thinking would have done during the whole course of the Revolution. All the papers will, I believe, be sent to Paris, and it is thought, according to what I hear, that in a short time I shall be free; G.o.d grant it! They were looking for Dumouriez, who was thought to be in our neighbourhood. It seems to have been supposed that we had had conferences together, and apparently he is implicated in the conspiracy against the life of the First Consul. My ignorance of this makes me hope that I shall obtain my liberty, but we must not flatter ourselves too soon. The attachment of my people draws tears from my eyes at every moment. They might have escaped; no one forced them to follow me. They came of their own accord.... I have seen n.o.body this morning except the commandant, who seems to me an honest, kind-hearted man, but at the same time strict in the fulfilment of his duty. I am expecting the colonel of gendarmes who arrested me, and who is to open my papers before me."

Transferred to Vincennes, the duke was tried summarily by court-martial, sentenced to death, and shot in the moat of the fortress on the 21st of March, 1804. Immediately before the execution he asked for a pair of scissors, cut off a lock of his hair, wrapped it up in a piece of paper, with a gold ring and a letter, and gave the packet to Lieut. Noirot, begging him to send it to the Princess Charlotte de Rohan-Rochefort.

Lieut. Noirot forwarded the packet to General Hulin, who transmitted it to an official named Real, together with the following letter:--

"Paris, 30th Ventose, Year 12 of the French Republic.--P.

Hulin, General of Brigade commanding the Grenadiers on Foot of the Consular Guard, to Citizen Real, Councillor of State charged with the conduct of affairs relating to the internal tranquillity and security of the Republic. I have the honour, Councillor of State, to address you a packet found on the former Duke d'Enghien. I have the honour to salute you. (Signed) P. HULIN."

The receipt of the package was thus acknowledged by Citizen Real:--

"Paris, 2 Germinal, Year 12 of the Republic.--The Councillor of State, especially charged with the conduct of all affairs relating to the internal tranquillity and security of the Republic, has received from the General of Brigade, Hulin, commanding the Grenadiers on Foot of the Guard, a small packet, containing hair, a gold ring, and a letter; this small packet bearing the following inscription: 'To be forwarded to the Princess de Rohan from the former Duke d'Enghien.'

"(Signed) ReAL."

The last wishes of the unfortunate duke were not carried out. The packet was never forwarded to his wife. She may have received the letter, but the ring, the lock of hair, and some fifteen epistles, written in German, from the princess to the duke, and found upon him after his death, remained, without the duke's letter, in the Archives of the Prefecture of Police. A fortnight after the duke's execution, his widow addressed from Ettenheim, on the 16th of July, 1804, the following letter to the Countess d'Ecquevilly:--

"Since I still exist, dear Countess, it is certain that grief does not kill. Great G.o.d! for what frightful calamity was I reserved? In the most cruel torments, the most painful anxiety, never once did the horrible fear present itself to my mind that they might take his life. But, alas! it is only too true that the unhappy man has been made their victim: that this unjust sentence, this atrocious sentence, to which my whole being refused to lend credence, was p.r.o.nounced and thereupon executed. I have not the courage to enter into details of this frightful event; but there is not one of them which is not heartrending, not one that would not paralyze with terror--I do not say every kind-hearted person, but anyone who has not lost all feeling of humanity. Alone, without support, without succour, without defence, oppressed with anxiety, worn out with fatigue, denied one moment of the repose demanded by Nature after his painful journey, he heard his death-sentence hurriedly p.r.o.nounced, during which the unhappy man sank four times into unconsciousness. What barbarity! Great G.o.d! And when the end came he was abandoned on all sides, without sympathy or consolation, without one affectionate hand to wipe away his tears or close his eyelids.

"Ah! I have not the cruel reproach to make to myself of not having done everything to follow him. Heaven knows that I would have risked my life with joy, I do not say to save him, but to soften the last moments of his life. Alas! they envied me this sad delight. Prayers, entreaties, were all in vain; I could not share his fate. They preferred to leave me to this wretched existence, condemned to eternal regret, eternal sorrow."

Princess Charlotte died at Paris in 1841; and quite recently a note on the subject of her last wishes appeared in the Paris _Intermediaire_, the French equivalent of our _Notes and Queries_. It was as follows:--"After the death of the Princess Charlotte, there was found among her papers a sealed packet, of which the superscription directed that it should be opened by the President of the Tribunal--at that time M. de Balli. This magistrate opened the packet and examined its contents. He found the whole correspondence of Bonaparte's victim with 'his friend,' as the worthy magistrate put it: _avec son amie_. The president gave the packet to the family notary after re-closing it, saying that the letters were very touching, very interesting, but that they must be burnt; which was in fact done."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR.

(_From the Bust by Courtet in the Comedie Francaise._)]

The marriage of the Duke d'Enghien to the Princess de Rohan had been informal; the informality consisting solely in its having been celebrated without some necessary sanction: probably that of the king, Louis XVI. The ceremony was performed by Cardinal de Rohan, the bride's uncle; and it is evident from her first letters that she was regarded by her nearest friends and relatives as the duke's lawful wife.

Let us now, pa.s.sing from political to private executions, say a few words about some of the famous duels of which Vincennes, or rather the wood of Vincennes, has from time to time been the scene.

Duels in France are generally fought with swords; and as it depends upon the combatants to strike or not to strike at a mortal part, a hostile meeting is by no means always attended with serious consequences. It is a mistake, however, to a.s.sume, as Englishmen frequently do, that a duel in France fought for grave reasons is not itself a grave affair.

Plenty of sword duels have placed the worsted combatant in imminent danger of his life; though it is undeniable that the pistol, being a more hazardous weapon, proves, as a rule, deadlier than the sword. When M. Paolo Fiorentino, blackballed at the Society of Men of Letters, on the ground that he had accepted bribes, undertook to fight every member of the a.s.sociation, beginning with M. Amedee Achard, whose name, thanks to its two A's, headed the alphabetical list, the Italian critic and bravo ran his first opponent through the body, and all but killed him.

M. Henri de Pene received like treatment at the hands of an officer by reason of his having described the unseemly conduct of officers generally, as shown at a ball of which the ecole Militaire was the scene. Both Achard and Pene, however, recovered. Not so the unfortunate Armand Carrel, one of the boldest and most brilliant writers that the Republican Press of France possessed. Armand Carrel and his antagonist, emile de Girardin, another famous journalist of Louis Philippe's reign, fought with pistols in that Bois de Vincennes whose name at once suggests crossed rapiers or whizzing bullets.

M. de Girardin was the inventor of the cheap press, not only in France, but in Europe. To reduce the price of the newspaper, and thus increase the number of subscribers, while covering any possible loss on the sale by the enlarged revenue from advertis.e.m.e.nts, which would flow in more and more rapidly as the circulation widened: such was Girardin's plan.

According, however, to his enemies, he proposed to "enlarge the portion hitherto allotted in newspapers to mendacious announcements to the self-commendations of quackery and imposture, at the sacrifice of s.p.a.ce which should be devoted to philosophy, history, literature, the arts, and whatever else elevates or delights the mind of man."

The proposed change was really one which Democrats and Republicans should have hailed with delight; for it promised to extend a knowledge of public affairs to readers who had hitherto been prevented from becoming acquainted with them by the high price of the newspapers, which, apart from their own articles on political affairs, published long accounts of the debates in the Chamber.

M. de Girardin, however, found his innovation attacked as the device of a charlatan. He was accused of converting journalism into the most sordid of trades: of making it "a speaking-trumpet of the money-grabber and the speculator." Some of M. de Girardin's opponents went so far as to hint that he was not working in good faith, and that the losses to which the diminution of price must expose his journal were to be made good by a secret subsidy. Armand Carrel, as editor of the _National_, entered into the quarrel, and took part against Girardin, who, on his side, wrote a bitter attack upon Carrel. No sooner had Carrel read the scathing article than he called upon its author, demanding either retractation or personal satisfaction. He entered Girardin's room, accompanied by M. Adolphe Thibaudeau, holding open in his hand the journal which contained the offensive lines. Girardin asked Carrel to wait until he also could have a friend present. M. Lautour-Mezeray was sent for; but pending that gentleman's arrival some sharp words were interchanged.

Armand Carrel conceived that he was justified in regarding the course adopted by M. de Girardin as indicating an intention to bring the matter to a duel, and on his suggesting as much, M. de Girardin replied, "A duel with such a man as you, sir, would be quite a _bonne fortune_."

"Sir," replied Carrel, "I can never regard a duel as a _bonne fortune_."

A few moments afterwards M. Lautour-Mezeray arrived. His presence served to give the discussion a more conciliatory tone, and it was ultimately agreed that a few words of explanation should be published in both journals. On M. de Girardin's proposing to draw up the note at once, "You may rely upon me, sir," said Armand Carrel, with dignity.

The quarrel seemed almost at an end; but an incident reanimated it.

M. de Girardin required that the publication of the note should take place simultaneously in the two journals. Carrel, on the contrary, held that it ought to appear first in the _Presse_, Girardin's paper; but he experienced on this point the most determined resistance. It was then that, carried away with indignation, wounded to the quick, utterly unable to adhere any longer to the moderation which, by a determined effort, he had hitherto enforced upon himself, Carrel rose and exclaimed, "I am the offended person; I choose the pistol!"