“With many a foul and midnight murder fed,”
“With many a foul and midnight murder fed,”
“With many a foul and midnight murder fed,”
the “high altar and castle of Despotism,” theBastille! Where are now the damp and secret cells, the sombre corridors, and the grim countenances of the gaolers, and where the mob of 1789, and the mad passions that levelled its towers and battlements? Quiet as the Seine that sleeps upon its dungeons! The present substitutes for the Bastille are, the Depôt at the Prefecture of Police;St. Pelagiefor state crimes, andLa Forcefor civil; theConciergeriefor those awaiting trial, and theSalpetrièrefor those awaiting the execution of their sentence.
Bonaparte has built here an immense granary, containing always corn enough for the consumption of the capital for two months. This, with theHalle aux blésin the centre of the city, supplies the whole population. Paris has six hundred bakers, who are obliged to keep always in this granary one hundred thousand sacks of flour, worth thirty shillings sterling per sack; andtherefore it is called theGrenier de Reserve. Here lived the witty and profligate Beaumarchais; his castle is rased; all but Figaro are dead. You have in sight the Hospital of the Quinze-vingts, which contains three hundred blind, who have twenty-four sous a day each for a living, with the produce of their industry, which is wonderfully ingenious. Now we have passed the Garden of Plants, and the Bridge of Austerlitz. For this latter favour we owe something to the Russians, who saved this bridge from its bad name and Blucher’s gunpowder.
That upon the hill is theSalpetrière, the Insane Hospital for women. What a huge pile! One to put the sane ones in would not be half the size. This front on the boulevard is six hundred feet. The building in the rear is of similar dimensions, and theRotondebetween, with the octagon dome, is the chapel. It contains now four thousand five hundred poor, aged above seventy; one thousand five hundred crazy; all women. I went in on Sunday. What immense conversation! There is a similar institution for the other sex, called theBicêtre. Paris has twenty hospitals, affording thirty thousand beds, and classed by the several diseases and infirmities. It has no poor-houses,but each of its twelvearrondissements, or municipal divisions, has a “Bureau de Bienfaisance,” which distributes provisions to the indigent, and provides labour for the idle; and there is a plenty of benevolent societies, with specific objects. Nor do they want customers, for the number of paupers are near fifty thousand. I forgot to tell you there is a hospital here (the Hospice des Ménages) for widowers. What an object of charity is a man without a wife! They have made, however, the terms hard; one has to stay married twenty years to be admitted. The institution is under the care of the sisters of Charity.
This ofVal de Graceis for the military, and that of theRue d’Enferfor the foundlings; not an unnatural association, but emblematic of the two chief concerns of the capital—killing off the people by war, and making up the loss by adultery. And this is the Rue St. Jaques, one of the classical streets of the city. The great rogues pay their last visit to this end of it, and the great men to the other: if you kill ten thousand of your fellow creatures you go to the Pantheon at the west end, if one only, you come here to the Place St. Jaques, now the seat of the guillotine and the public executions. At lengthwe are on theBoulevard du Mont Parnasse, at the end of our journey. Yet could you not get a drop of helicon here, though perishing with thirst. All one can offer you is a little sour Burgundy, which is cheaper than inside the wall. This is the reason why you see all this rabble, five hundred at a view, carousing and dancing in their sabots, drinking and caressing, tour-à-tour, the necks of their bottles and their belles; it is the reason why thousands are crowding here to drink who are not dry, and Paris is losing daily her sober reputation, and learning to get drunk like her neighbours.
The bad system of the ports, is in France transferred to all the petty towns. A couple of sergeants, musketted and whiskered, walk with grim dignity at each side of the gates. They stop and examine all vehicles, public and private, and all such persons as carry in provisions to the market, forcing them to pay anoctroi, or duty, to the city of Paris, which prevents those rogues, the poor people, from getting a dinner untaxed. They even stop sometimes the foot passengers; especially those notorious smugglers, the women. If any one chance to be half gone, she is not allowed to go any farther, unless she produce a certificate from the parish priest, or some equallygood authority. Quantities of lace and silks have passed in under such pretexts. The best commentary I know upon the wisdom of this policy is the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse.
When Paris was surrounded by this wall, fifty years ago, the people murmured and made a riot, and hung up several of the ring-leaders, on the same principles of law recently laid down by our chief justice Lynch. They entered suits, too, against the city, to put her in the Bastille; but a compromise ended the strife, and the wall was built. Here is a line from an old book relating to these times—
“Les murs murant Paris rendent Paris murmurant.”
“Les murs murant Paris rendent Paris murmurant.”
“Les murs murant Paris rendent Paris murmurant.”
I could not think of descending from Parnassus without a line of poetry.
The Palais Royal—French courtesy—Rue Vivienne—Pleasures of walking in the streets—Cafés in the Palais Royal—Mille Colonnes—Véry’s—French dinners—Past History of the Palais Royal—Galerie d’Orleans—Gambling—The unhappy Colton—Hells of the Palais Royal—Prince Puckler Muskau—Lord Brougham—The King and Queen.
The Palais Royal—French courtesy—Rue Vivienne—Pleasures of walking in the streets—Cafés in the Palais Royal—Mille Colonnes—Véry’s—French dinners—Past History of the Palais Royal—Galerie d’Orleans—Gambling—The unhappy Colton—Hells of the Palais Royal—Prince Puckler Muskau—Lord Brougham—The King and Queen.
Paris, July, 1835.
Youwish to see thePalais Royal? Then you must step from the Boulevard Italien a quarter of a mile to the south-west. If you hate Philadelphia sameness and symmetry, you will be gratified here to your heart’s content. In Paris there are ten hundred and eighty streets, besides lanes and alleys, all recommending themselves by the most charming irregularities. That which you will now pass through, the “Rue Vivienne,” is among the most bustling; it is a leading avenue, is alive with business, and has pretensions far above its capacity. I must tell you aword about the etiquette of these streets before you set out.
If a lady meets a gentleman upon the little side walk, which French courtesy calls a “trottoir,” it is the lady always whotrotsinto the mud. The French women seem used to this submission, and yield to it instinctively; and, indeed, all who feel their weakness, as children and old men, being subject to the same necessity, shew the same resignation. Also, if a number of gentlemen are coteried, even across the broad walk of the Boulevards, the lady walks round, not to incommode them; and it is not expected of a French gentleman in a public place or vehicle that he should give his seat to any one, of whatever age, sex, or condition, or that he should deviate from his straight line on the street for anything less than an omnibus. The French have been a polite people, and they continue to trade on the credit of their ancestors. What is curious to observe, is the complaisance with which human nature follows a general example. A Russian wife, when the husband neglects to beat her for a month or two, is alarmed at his indifference, and I have remarked that the French women are the warmest defenders of this French incivility.
Recollect, that as soon as you put your little foot upon thisRue Vivienne, fifty waggons, a wedding coach, and three funerals, with I don’t know how manymalle-postes, cabs,coucous, and bell-eared diligences—all but thefiacres, with their gaunt and fleshless horses, which plead inability—will set themselves to run over you, without the smallest respect for your Greek nose, your inky brows, and black eyes. The danger is imminent, and it won’t do to have your two feet in one sock. I have written home to your mother, to have prayers performed in the churches for women’s husbands sojourning in Paris. And by escaping from one danger, you are sure to run full butt against another. Scylla and Charybdis, too, are so close together, that the “prudent middle” is precisely the course that no prudent lady will think of pursuing. To make it worse, the natives will have not the least sympathy in your dangers; they have been used to get run over themselves from time immemorial, and when we staring Yankees come over to see the “Tooleries and the Penny Royal,” they are not aware that any allowance is to be made for our ignorance. Besides, the driver knows a stranger as far as he can see him, and takes aim accordingly; he gets twenty-fivefrancs for his body at the Morgue. It is known, that secret companies for “running over people” exist all over Paris, and that the drivers are the principal stockholders. The truth is, that it is reckoned amongst the natural deaths of the place, and two hundred and fifty are marked upon the bills of the last year. Under the oldrégime, when the nobility put out a greater train of vehicles, and had a kind of monopoly of running over the common people, I have heard it was still worse. Then, if any one walked about the streets unmashed for twenty years, he was entitled to the cross of St. Louis. I have escaped till now, but I set it down entirely to the efficacy of your innocent prayers, which have reversed the fates in my favour.
Your best way is to watch and imitate the address of the native women. Here they are now, in front of my window, sprinkled over the whole street, in their white stockings and prunellas, and in the very filthiest of the French weather, without a spot to their garters. The little things just pull up all the petticoats in the world more than half leg, and then tip-toe they step from the convex surface of one paving stone to another, with a dexterity and grace that go to one’s heart.
A lady must expect, also, other embarrassments here, to which the delicate pusillanimity of the sex isyetbut slightly exposed in our country, besides the cat and nine kittens that she must jump over, and the defunct lap-dogs that lie putrid in the gutters. The truth is, that these streets are very often (I ask pardon of Madame de Rambouillet and other good authorities) so indeshabille, they are not fit to be seen. A Parisian lady, therefore (and she is to be imitated also in this), when she ventures out on foot, is sharp-sighted as a lynx, and blind as an owl; she has eyes to see and not to see, and she runs the gauntlet through the midst of all these slippery and perilous obstructions in as careless a good humour as you upon the smooth trottoirs of your Chestnut and Broadways. It is true, the ladies of thehaut tondo not much exercise their ambulatory functions—their “vertu caminante”—upon these unsavoury promenades.
A French gentleman, who has resided a week and a half at New York (just long enough to know the manners and customs of a country), told me this very morning, that you American ladies stare in the streets at the gentlemen, he ventured to say, “even to immodesty;” and Ihave heard other foreigners make similar remarks, I presume without a proper attention to the peculiar circumstances of the different countries. In a Philadelphia street, a lady can give herself up to her thoughts, and her soul has the free use of its wings. She can get into a romance, or a reverie; she can study her lesson, or read a love-letter, and she can stare at a French gentleman, without the least apprehension of danger. Our streets are clean and decent, and are excellent places of parade; and gentlemen and ladies go out expressly on fine evenings to stare at one another. Indeed, Chestnut-street is so trim and neat that sometimes one is almost obliged, like Diogenes, to spit in somebody’s face not to soil its prettiness. Not so in Paris; you are here quite at your ease in all such matters. A French lady, therefore,—and very properly,—sees no one in the street, not even her husband. To get her to look at you, you are obliged to take hold of her, shake her, and turn her about three or four times. But when once upon the Boulevard Italien of an evening, or upon the broad walk of the elegant Tuileries, when she has no longer need of the faculties of her eyes, and ears, and nose too, to anticipate and obviate danger—ah, ma foi!her diamond eyes are no more chary of their amorous glances than the hazle and bugle eyes of Chestnut or Broadway of theirs. I tried to persuade this French gentleman,—who is a baron, has abel air, and large mustachios,—that this happened only to him. I told him (and it is true, too,) of others, who could not get the dear little girls of New York to look at them sufficiently. But I must shew you the Palais Royal.
It is a third less than your Washington Square. Its trees are in two regular rows along each margin. In the centre is an inclosure, containing a shrubbery and flowers; and also an Apollo and a Diana in bronze, and ajet d’eauthat separates in the air, and falls in a “fleur de lis”—the only emblem of royalty that deceived the Revolution and the Jacobins; and a lake, where the little fishes “wave their wings of gold.” There is no access to vehicles, or street noise, to disturb the quiet of this fairy retreat. It is in the centre, too, of the city, in the vicinity of all the other chief places of diversion; and here all the world meets after dinner to take coffee, to smoke, and concert measures for the rest of the evening. You will see them creeping in from the neighbouringstreets, as you have seen the ants into a sugarhouse.
If you wish to know where is the centre of the earth, it is the Palais Royal. Ask a stranger, when he arrives, “whither will you go first?” he will answer, “to the Palais Royal;” or ask a Frenchman, on the top of Caucasus, “where shall I meet you again?” he will give yourendez-vousat the Palais Royal; and no spot, they say, on the earth, has witnessed so many tender recognitions. Just do you ask Mademoiselle Celeste, at New York, “where did you get that superbrobe de chambre?” and, I will lay you six to one, she will say, “at the Palais Royal.”
Let us sit down beneath these pretty elms. Those upper rooms, which you see so adorned with Ionic columns, with galleries, and vases, and little Virtues, and other ornaments in sculpture—those are not his majesty’s apartments; not thesalles des marechaux, nor thesalle du trône, nor thechambre à coucher de la reine; they are thecafés and restaurantsof the Palais Royal. And those multitudes you see circulating about the galleries, and looking down from the windows—those are not the royal family, nor thegarde du corps, nor the“hundred Swiss,” nor thechambellans, theécuyers, theaumoniers, themaitres de cérémonies, theintroducteurs des ambassadeurs, nor the historiographers, nor even thechauf-cire, nor thecapitaines des levrettes—they are the cooks, and the garçons, in their white aprons, of the cafés and restaurants; the only order that has suffered no loss of dignity or corruption of blood by the Revolution; the veritable noblesse of these times, the “cordons bleus” of the order of the gridiron.
Louis Philippe, our citizen king, and proprietor of this garden, gets thirty-two thousand francs annually from letting out these chairs. Sit you down. It being after dinner, I will treat you to aregale; which is, a cup of pure coffee, with a small glass of liqueur,eau de vie, or rum, or quirsh. You can take them separate or together; in the latter case, it is called “gloria;” or you may put your cognac into a cup, with a large lump of sugar in the middle, and set it on fire, to destroy the effects of the alcohol upon your nerves. See how the area of the garden is already covered with its smoking, drinking, and promenading community; and how the smoke, as if loth to quit us, still lingers, until the whole atmosphere is narcotic with itsincense. At a later hour, we shall find in the Rotunda, at the north end, and upon tables under these trees, ices in pyramids, and orgeat, andeau sucrée, and all the other luxurious refreshments. Those two oriental pavilions, with the gilded roofs, in front of the Rotonde, will distribute newspapers to the studious, and the whole garden will buzz with conversation and merriment, until the long twilight has faded into night.
Of the inside of the cafés and restaurants I must give you a few particulars. In each, there is a woman of choice beauty, mounted on a kind of throne. She is present always, and may be considered as one of the fixtures of the shop. When you enter any of these cafés, you will see, standing here and there through the room, an individual in a white apron; he has mustachios; he holds a coffee-pot in his left hand, and leaning gracefully over the right, reads his favourite journal—this is the waiter! When you have cried three times “Garçon!” the lady at the bureau will vibrate a little bell, and bring you instantly this waiter from his studies. If you are a very decent-looking man, she will let you cry only twice; and if you have an embroidered waistcoat, and look like a lord, and havewhiskers, she will not let you cry at all. The chair occupied by this she-secretary, at theMille Colonnes, cost ten thousand francs; and she who sat, some years ago, upon that of the “café des Aveugles,” the “belle Limonadière,” charmed all who had eyes, and amongst the rest, a brother of the greatest emperor in the world.
There are above a thousand of these cafés in Paris, and several of the most sumptuous overlook the gardens of the Palais Royal. Ceres has unlocked her richest treasures here, and has poured them out with a prodigality that is unknown elsewhere. Fish, of fresh and salt water; rare wines, of home and foreign production; and as for the confectionaries, sucreries, fruiteries, and charcuiteries—the senses are bewildered by the infinite variety. And the artists here have a higher niche in the temple of Fame than even those of the Boulevard Italien. Monsieur Véry supplied the allied monarchs at three thousand francs per day. The “Purveyor of Fish” to his Majesty, who is of this school, is salaried a thousand dollars above our chief justice of the Union; and Monsieur Dodat, who is immortal for making sausages and the “Passage Vero-Dodat,” has atPère la Chaisea monument towering like that of Cheops.
This is the true “Kitchen Cabinet” to which ours is no more to be compared than the dish water to the dinner. Véry is in the kitchen what the Emperor was in the camp; he is the Napoleon of gastronomy. All flesh is nothing in his sight. Why, he will transform you a rabbit to a hare, or an eel to a lamprey, as easily as you a Jackson-man to a Whig; and he turns cocks into capons, andvice versa, by the simple artifice of a sauce. You indeed condense the sense of a whole community into the single head of a senator, or a President; and he just as easily a whole flock of geese into a single goose. You, it is true, possess the wonderful art, all know in what excellence, of puffing a man up beyond the natural measure of his merits, and just so Monsieur Véry will puff you a goose’s liver, however unmathematical it may seem, beyond the size of the whole animal.
Now, in the midst of all this skill and profusion, “the devil’s in it if you cannot dine;” yet have I perished myself several times of hunger in the very midst of this Palais Royal. It is not enough that a table be loaded with itsdishes, there must be science, to call them by their names, and taste, to discriminate their uses. What can you do with an Iroquois from the “Sharp Mountain,” who does not know that sauce for a gander is not sauce for a goose. Unless you have studied the nomenclature, which is about equal to a first course of anatomy, you are no more fit to enjoy a dinner at Véry’s than Tantalus in his lake. For example, the garçon will present you a bill of fare as big as your prayer-book; you open it; the first page presents you thirty soups, (classically,potages,) and there you are to choose between a “puré,” a “consommé,” “à la Julien,à la Beauvais,à la Bonne Femme,” &c. &c. I prefer the “consommé,” and I will tell you how it is made. It is a piece of choice beef and capon boiled many hours over a slow fire to a jelly, and the juices concentrated, and served without any extraneous mixture. The “Julien,” is apot pourriof all that is edible or potable in the list of human aliments. It is a soup, for which, if rightly made, an epicure would give away his birth-right; it was invented, not by Julian the Apostate, but by Monsieur Julien, of the Palais Royal.
The fluids being settled, you will turn then tothe following page for the solids: “Papillottes de Levreaud,” “filet à la Napolitaine,” “vol-au-vent,” “scolope de saumon,” “œuf au miroir,” “riz sauté à la gláce,” “piqué aux truffles,” &c. &c. Alas, my poor roasting and frying countrymen! There is not a day but I see some poor Yankee scratching his head in despair over this crabbed vocabulary of French dishes. Your best way in this emergency is to call the garçon, and leave all to him, and sit still like a good child, and take what is given to you. I have known many a one to run all over Paris for a beef-steak, and when he has got it, it was a horse’s rump. My advice is, that no one come to Paris to dine in mean houses on cheap dinners, where you will eat cats for hares, and have snails and chalk for your cream, and the jelly of the “consommé,” from the barber’s. You are no more sure of the ingredients of a dish under the disguises of a French cookery, than of men’s sentiments from their faces or professions. You can get, to begin with, olives, and eggs, boiled and poached, all that remains of old simplicity, if you know how to ask for them; if not, carry the shells about with you in your pocket.
We will dine to-morrow at the “Mille Colonnes.” Ladies often step into thiscaféto be reflected; you can see here all your faces, and behind and before you, as conveniently as Janus. One always enters this threshold with reverence: it has dined the Holy Alliance. Besides the usual officers and attendants, you will sometimes see here a little man, grave,distrait, and meditative; do not disturb him; he is, perhaps, busy about theprojétof some new sauce. He will start off abruptly sometimes, and leave you in the middle of a phrase; it is not incivility, he has just conceived a dish, and is going out to execute it, or write it upon his tablets. Never ask for him in the mornings beforeone—“il compose.” The French are not copyists in cookery, any more than in fashions. They are inventors, and this keeps the imagination on the rack. You will remark, that people always excel in those things in which they invent, and are always mediocre in those things in which they imitate.
After your potage, which you must eat sparingly, and without bread, (for bread will satiate, and spoil the rest of your dinner,) you will take a little “vin ordinaire,” or pure Burgundy, waiting for your first course; and you will just cast a look over the official part of theMoniteur, for there is no knowing when one may be made a Peer of France; and on receiving one dish, always command the next. After the dessert you will read the news all round; theMessager,Gazette,Constitutionnel,Debats,Quotidienne,National, and theCharivari; and after coffee, you may amuse yourself at checkers, domino, or improve your morals by a game of chess. In looking about the room, you will see a great number of guests, perhaps a hundred, not in stalls, as in our eating-houses and the stables, but seated at white marble tables, in an open and elegant saloon; the walls tapestried with mirrors.
If it be a serious gentleman, reading deliberately the newspaper over his dessert, careless or contemptuous of what is going on around him, and drinking his bottle of champagne alone—that is an Englishman. If apartie carré, that is, a couple of ladies and their cavaliers, dining with much noise and claret, observing a succession and analogy of dishes, swallowing their wine drop by drop, as I read your letters, fearing lest it should come too soon to an end, and prolonging expressly the enjoyments of the repast—these are French people; or if you see a couple of lads, hurried and impatient, andrating the waiters in no gentle terms, “D—n your eyes, why don’t you bring in the dinner? and take away that broth, and your black bottle; who the devil wants your vinegar, and your dishwater, and your bibs too? And bring us, if you can, a whole chicken’s leg at once, and not at seven different times,”—these are from the “Far West,” and a week old in Paris.
How should these little snacks of a French table not seem egregiously mean to an American, who is used to dine in fifteen minutes, even on a holiday, and to see a whole hog barbacued? The French dine to gratify, we to appease, appetite; we demolish a dinner, and they eat it. The guests who frequent these cafés are regular or flying visiters; some are accidental, others occasional, dining by agreement to enjoy each other’s company; others again are families, who dine out for a change, or to give a respite to their servants; and others live here, a kind of stereotype customers altogether: and these houses serve, in addition to their province of eating and drinking, as places of conference, or clubs; it is here that men communicate on political subjects, that news is circulated, and public opinion formed; and that kings are expelled, and others are set up on their thrones.
On a range with the restaurants, and over them, you will see lodged many of the fine arts; painters, engravers, dentists, barbers, and beautiful sultanas, look out from the highest windows upon these fair dominions, to which the severity of French morals has forbidden them access. In the lower rooms, on a level with the area of the garden, and peeping through the colonnade, west and east, are riches almost immeasurable, in exquisite and fashionable apparel for both sexes, and in jewellery, trinkets, and perfumery. This trade, which in other cities is pedling and huckstering, assumes here the dignity of a great commercial interest, and its productions are reckoned at upwards of a hundred millions of francs. The stores themselves are so little, and yet so pretty, that I have thoughts of sending you one of them over by the packet. Their arrangements are changed every hour, so as to keep up a continuous emotion and a series of agreeable excitements, and so as to present you a new set of temptations twelve times a day.
Everything that human industry, sharpened by necessity or competition, can effect—everything which can excite an appetite, can heighten a beauty, or hide a deformity, is here. I begin to love art almost as well as nature: I begin tolove mother Eve in her fig-leaves, as well as in her unaproned innocence. After all, what is nature to us without art? Education is art. Indeed, rightly considered, art itself is nature; she has but left a part of her work unfinished to urge the industry and whet the ingenuity of man. In these stores, everything is sacrificed to the shop; there is no accommodation for the household gods. Persons with their families are not allowed to inhabit here. A man hoards space as a miser hoards money. It is a qualification indispensable in a clerk to be of a slender capacity. You would think you were in Lilliput, served by the fairies. The shop-girls, especially, are of such exquisite exility of figure, you can almost take one of them between your thumb and finger, and set her on the counter.
In our country, we have nothing yet to shew in the way of great works of art. We have nature, indeed, wild and beautiful, but without historic associations; tradition is dumb, and the “memory of man” runs back to the Eden of our race. It is a mighty advantage these old countries have over us; their reminiscences, their traditions, and their antiquities. What would be the Tower but for humpback Richard andthe babes; or, what Hounslow Heath but for the ghosts of those who have been murdered there? And in these countries, which have no beginning, they can supply the vacant space into which authentic history does not venture, by legends and romances; and no matter how obscure may be one of their mountains and lakes, they can lie it into a reputation. Some things are beautiful from their accessories alone; as lords are sometimes lords only from their equipages. What is there beautiful in a ruin? We have plains as desolate as Babylon, and no one looks at them.
The Palais Royal, however magnificent as a bazaar, has still higher and better merits. It is the history of some of the most remarkable personages and events of the last two ages. Some day, when we have a ticket from the “Intendant de sa Majesté,” I will shew you them all; and first, that very celebrated old fop the Cardinal de Richelieu, who used to strut, with his train of a monarch, through this very garden and these very halls. You shall see the very theatre upon which he represented his woeful tragedies; his flatterers crowding around with wonderful grimace, and Corneille’s muse cowering her timid wings in silence. As you are a lady, and lovetrinkets, I will shew you, if it yet exists, that great miracle of massive gold and diamonds, the Cardinal’s Chapel; the two candlesticks, valued at a hundred thousand livres; the cross, twenty-two inches high, and of pure gold; the Christ of the same metal, and the crown and drapery all glittering in diamonds. And you shall see the prayer-book, too, encased in lamina of gold; in the centre the cardinal holding up the globe, and from the four corners four angels placing a crown upon his head. If you like, I will shew you also that other smooth-faced rogue, scarcely his inferior in political ability, the Cardinal Mazarin, who put the king’s money in his pocket, and stinted his little majesty in shirts. And if you love more cardinals, I will shew you yet another, more witty, and not less profligate and debauched, than the other two, the Cardinal de Retz. When we read his memoirs together, little did we foresee that one day we should look into the very chambers in which he held his nightly councils, with his fellow conspirators, plotting his rabble Revolution of the Fronde.
You shall see also Turenne and the great Condé. That gentleman gathering maxims—maxims of life at the court of Mazarin!—that is M. le due de Rochefoucauld; and I will introduce you to Madame de Motteville, and other famous wits and beauties of those times. In the room just opposite, where one dines upon soup, three courses, and a dessert, at forty sous, I will shew you the little “Grand Monarque” in his cradle. The dear little thing! It was here the great man first began; it was here he crept, I presume very unwillingly, to school; here he began to seek the bubble reputation, and to sigh at the feet—worthy a better devotion—of the “humble violet,” Madame la Vallière.
Just over head, Doctor Franklin used to sup with the Duke of Orleans and his family; and here Madame de Genlis gave lessons to the little Louis Philippe, causing his most Christian Majesty to walk fifteen miles a day in shoes with leaden soles. The Spartans did better, who, to make their kings hardy and robust, had them flogged daily at the shrine of some pagan goddess. In one of these rooms, the mob Republic held for awhile its meetings; and in this very garden, the tri-coloured cockade was adopted, at a great meeting in 1789, as the revolutionary emblem. On the south end is a gallery of paintings, they say very splendid. It was plundered in the Revolution, and since restored by the present proprietor, the King. Ifany one steals a picture or a book in Paris, and can prove quiet possession for a certain time, it is a vested right, and the owner is obliged to buy back his goods from the thief.
I sometimes walk in this garden with the scholars and thebonnes, of a morning, but it is disagreeable; it is not yet aired, and has a stale stupefactive smell from the preceding night’s banquet. It is by degrees ventilated, and life begins to flow into it about ten. Then the readers of news begin to gravitate around Monsieur Perussault’s pavilion. There is a dial here which announces, with a loud detonation, twelve; and as the important hour approaches, every one having a watch takes it out, and looks up with compressed lips, and waits inuno obtutuuntil Apollo has fired off his cannon; then quick he twirls about the hands, and replaces it complacently in his fob, and walks away very happy to have the official hour in his pocket. You will see also a fewbadauds, who always arrive just afterwards, and stand the same way, looking up for half an hour or so, till informed that the time has already gone off.
It is of a hot summer evening, that this garden is unrivalled in beauty. You swim in a glare of light; the gas flashes from under the arcades;lamps innumerable shine through the interior and look down from five hundred windows above. It is not night, it is “but the daylight sick.” It is haunted by its company, and is full of life to the latest hours, and revelry holds her gambols here, when Paris everywhere over the immense city is lulled into its midnight slumbers. When summer has turned round upon its axis, and the first chills of autumn frighten joy from her court, she retires then to her last hold, the “Galerie d’Orleans.” This delightful promenade extends across the south end of the garden; it is three hundred feet long by thirty wide; its roof is of glass and its pavement of tesselated marble; it is bounded on both sides by stores, and cafés, and reading rooms, eighteen feet square, renting annually at four thousand francs each. It is kept warm enough for its company in winter, and is a fashionable resort during that season. It is a pleasant walk also in the twilight of a summer evening.
I know an ex-professor, by dining with him at the same ordinary, and we walk often under the crystal vaults of this gallery, and reason whole evenings away—now we stop, and then walk on, and then take snuff, and then make a whole round arm in arm, in great gravity andsilence; at other times, being seated at a marble table, we calmly unfold the intricate mazes of the human mind and systems of human policy; and then we take coffee, with a little glass of quirsh. Last night we reasoned warmly upon the nature of slavery till I got mad, and whilst I sipped and read the newspaper, he amused himself with a drawing (for he is skilled in this art), which he presented me. It was a Liberty, of a healthy and robust complexion, her foot upon a negro slave. The negro sympathies have waxed very warm in this country.
Four of the houses just over us are consecrated to gambling. They are frequented, however, by rather the lower class and rabble of the profession. They who have some regard to reputation go to Frascati’s, to the Rue Richelieu; the more select to the “Cercle,” or to the “Club Anglais” upon the Boulevard, and theRue de Grammont; and the “Jockey Club” receives the dandies and flash gentlemen of the turf. The three last are of English origin, and the “Club Anglais” is in the best English style. It receives only the high functionaries of the state, princes of the blood, ambassadors, and other eminent persons, and even these are not admitted to pick one another’s pockets here,unless known to be of good moral character. Games of hazard are prohibited, and the bets correspondent to the dignity of the company. The “Cercle,” also, is frequented by the upper sort of folk; it istrès distingué; and the eating and service are of no common rate.
The public gambling houses here are authorized by government, and pay for their charter annually six and a half millions of francs. The government has not thought it fit that the black-legs and courtezans should worship in the same temple. The ladies have therefore been turned out, poor things! to get a living as they can on the Boulevards and elsewhere, and the gamblers have the Palais Royal all to themselves. But why do not “the Chambers,” extend this system of financial economy to other moral offences, as stealing, drunkenness, and adultery? I would charter them every one, and enrich the state. If we can succeed in making a vice respectable, it is no vice at all; and why should not a proper protection of government and general custom render gambling or any vice as respectable as thieving or infanticide was at Sparta; or as duelling and privateering are amongst the modern civilized nations? The matter is now under discussion, but thereare members of both houses who oppose these doctrines; they say that the government by such licences becomes accessory to the crimes of its subjects, and that bad passions, already rank enough in human nature, should not be made a direct object of education; moreover, they find it awkward that legislators, after having given the whole community a public licence to pick one another’s pockets, should stand up in the national tribune and talk about honesty. There are persons who have absurd prejudices.
But to be serious; indeed, I am very well disposed to such a feeling; I have just fallen accidentally upon the story, which every one knows, of the unhappy Colton. He wrote books in recommendation of virtue, andcritiquesin reprobation of vice, with admirable talent. He was a clergyman by profession, and yet became a victim to this detestable passion. He subsisted by play several years amongst these dens of the Palais Royal, and at length falling into irretrievable misery, ended his life here by suicide. One feels a sadness of heart in looking upon the scene of so horrible an occurrence; one owes a tear to the errors of genius, to the weakness of our common humanity.
Gambling seems to be the universal passion; the two extremes of human society are equally subject to it. The savage of the Columbia River gambles his rifle and his squaw, and like any gentleman of the “Cercle,” commits suicide in his despair. Billiards, cards, Faro, and other games of hazard, are to be found at every hundred steps, in every street and alley of Paris; haunted by black-legs in waiting for your purse; and there is scarce a private ball orsoirée, even to those of the court, in which immense sums are not lost and won by gambling. The shuffling of cards or rattling of dice is a part of the music of every Parisian saloon, and many fathers of families of the first rank get a living by it. To know how much better it is in London, one has only to read the London books. And how much better is it in America? To know this, you have only to visit our Virginia Springs and other places of fashionable resort. You will hear there the instruments of gambling at every hour of the night; and you will see tables, covered with the infamous gold, set out in the shade during the day; and you will see seated around these tables those who make the laws for “the only Republic upon the earth,” the members of the American Congress—with the samesolemn gravity as if holding counsel upon the destinies of the nation. I have seen the highest officer of the House of Representatives step from the loo-table to the Speaker’s chair! The vices of the higher orders have this to aggravate their enormity, that the lower world is formed and encouraged by their example. Gambling in Virginia is a penitentiary offence.
I have visited these “Hells” of the Palais Royal. Their numbers are 113, 129, and 154 on the eastern gallery, and number 36 on the western; and from the look of the company, I presume one could get here very soon all the acquirements by which a man may be put in the way of being hanged. Bars are placed before the windows, by the humanity of the government, to prevent his Majesty’s subjects and others from throwing away their precious lives in their fits of despair.
That tall and robust, and stern-looking man, between fifty and sixty, in an old tattered great coat, and walking in the gait of a conspirator, is Chodruc Duclos. He was once the friend of Count Peyronnet, as they say; he lavished his fortune on him, and fought his duels. The Count became minister and Duclos poor; he claimed his protection, and was rejected by theungrateful minister. He now walks here daily at the same hour, like some mysterious, unearthly being. He never speaks; and the last smile has died upon his lips.
I have a mind to tell you a queer anecdote of myself, which will fill the rest of this page without much changing the subject. In a walk through the Rue Richelieu, a few evenings ago, with a wag of an Englishman, a fellow-lodger, he proposed to gratify me with a peep into one of the eveningrendez-vous, as he said, of the nobility. I entered with becoming reverence through a hall, where servants in livery attended, taking our hats and canes, with a princely ceremony, and bringing us refreshments. Tables in the several rooms were covered with gold, at which gentlemen and ladies were playing, and others were looking on intently and silently. Around, some were coteried in corners, others were strolling in groups, or pairs, through the rooms; and others again were rambling carelessly through the walks of an adjacent garden of flowers and shrubbery, illuminated, or were seated in secret conversation amongst its arbours.
“That gentleman,” said my companion, “on the right, with the Adonis neck, with myrrhedand glossy ringlets, is the Prince Puckler Muskau.” And when I had looked at him sufficiently—“That gentleman on the left in conversation with Don—Don—Don—I forget his name—that is Prince Carrimanico, of Rome; and that just in front is the Baron Blowminossoff, from Petersburgh.” I stared, particularly at my Lord Brougham, who had just come over to make a tour upon the continent for his health. He was attenuated by sickness and the cares of business, but I could discern distinctly the great traits of his character—the lowering indignation on his brow, the bitter curl and sarcasm on his lip, and the impetuous and overwhelming energy which distinguishes this great statesman, upon his strongly-marked features; and if I had not been informed his name, I should have marked him out at once as some eminent personage; and from a certain abrupt and fidgety manner, a hasty scratch at the back of his head, accompanied with two or three twitches of the nose, I should have suspected him for nobody else than the greatest statesman and orator of Europe—my Lord Brougham.
Among the ladies, also, several were highly distinguished. There were Madame la Contesse de Trotteville, and her beautiful cousin Mademoiselle Trottini, from Naples, with several of the French nobility; and there was the Countess of Crumple, and a fat lady, Madame Von Swellemburg, and others of the Dutch and English gentry. I fancied that a Duchess on my left (I forget her name) had a haughty and supercilious air, as if she felt the dignity of her blood, and the length of her genealogy. She seemed as if not pleased that everybody should be introduced, and wished someplace more exclusive. But there was one young and beautiful creature—but so beautiful that I could not with all my efforts keep my eyes off her—whom I observed more than once reciprocated my inquisitive looks. I felt flattered at being the object of her attention. The elegant creature! thought I; what a simplicity and sweetness of expression! and how strange, that, brought up amidst the art and refinement of a court, she should retain all the innocence of the dove upon her countenance.
In the midst of this admiration, and when I had just got myself almost bowed to by another countess, my companion let in the light upon the magic lantern. “These,” said he, “are women of the town, and these are gamblers and pickpockets, who come hither to Monsieur Frascati’s to rob and ruin one another.” I give you thisfor your private ear; if you tell it, mercy on me, I shall never hear the last of it. I shall be sung all over the village. There are persons there of half my years who would have detected such company at once. As I was going away, Miss Emmeline, Miss Adelaide, and Madame Rosalie, gave me their cards.
I saw this morning the Queen and the King’s most excellent Majesty. They passed through the Champs Elysées to their country habitation at Neuilly. The equipage was a plain carriage with six horses, a postillion on a front and rear horse; two other carriages and four, and guards. To see a king for the first time is an event. Ai’nt you mad?—you who never saw anything over there bigger than his most unchristian Majesty Black Hawk, and Higglewiggin his squaw.—I have now come to the interesting part of thisletter. I am, yours.