A grisette never obtrudes her acquaintance,but question her and you will find her circumstantially communicative. Such information as she possesses, and a great deal more, she will retail to you with a naïveté and simplicity, you would swear she was brought up amongst your innocent lambs and turtle-doves of the Shamoken. She is the most ingenious imitation of an innocent woman in the world; and never was language employed more happily for the concealment of thought (I ask pardon of Prince Talleyrand) than in the mouth of a grisette. The Devil is called the father of lies (I ask pardon again of the Prince), but there is not one of these little imps but can outdo her papa in this particular.
When sent with goods from shopkeepers to their customers—the common practice of this place—she will lie and wrestle for her patron, and perjure herself like a Greek; when accused, she will listen to reproaches, insults, even abuse, as long as there is any point of defence, with the resignation of Saint Michael; and there is no trick of the stage, no artifice of rhetoric, recommended by Cicero, that she leaves out in her pleadings; if at last overcome—why, she surrenders.
She remains awhile mute, and then sets herself to look sorry with all her might; at last she bursts into tears, with sighs and sobs, until she disarms you. “Well, let me see what you have got.” She will now wipe away gracefully the briny drops with the corner of her apron, brighten up again, shew you her goods again, and cheat you once more by way of reparation for her former rogueries.
There is a modiste, lodged in the adjoining room, from New Orleans, who entertains about twenty of these every morning at her levee. I make sometimes one of the group, and from this opportunity, and from the lady’s information, I am thus learned about grisettes.
It is important for one’s mamma to know whether it is a good or bad fashion that, so common now-a-days, of sending a young gentleman, just stepping from youth into manhood, to Europe, especially to Paris. I will venture some remarks for your information, though I have no very settled opinion on the subject. I know several Americans engaged here, some in medical and scientific schools, and some in painting and other arts, who appear to me to be exceedingly diligent, and to make as profitable a use of their time as they would anywhere else. I know some who mix pleasure with business, and a little follywith their wisdom; and some (you will please to put me in this class) who do not taste dissipation with their “extremest lips.”
But I know some also, who, under pretext of law and medicine, study mischief only, and return home worse, if possible, than when they came out. I know one now, who, having too much health, overruns his revenues occasionally, and draws upon home for a doctor’s and apothecary’s bill; and another poor devil who has gone to Mont Pieté with his last trinket. There came one from the Mississippi lately, who being very young and rich, and unmarried, set up a kind of seraglio, and died of love yesterday; they are burying him to-day at Père la Chaise.
I know one also, who has lived here nine years, who reads Voltaire, keeps a French cook, and his principles are as French as his stomach; and another who entertains the French noblesse with fêtes and soirées, to the tune of a hundred thousand per annum; from his stable, thirty-six horses, full bred, better than many of his Majesty’s subjects, come prancing out on days of jubilee upon the Boulevards.
If a young man’s morals should get out of order at home, Paris is not exactly the place I would send him to be cured. It is true, if drunkenness be the complaint, it is not a vice of the place; and, if curable at all, which I do not believe, Paris, from its common use of light wines, and variety of amusements, is perhaps the best place to make the attempt. It is certainly not the most dangerous place for falling into this vice. If he be fond of gambling, here it is a genteel accomplishment, and brought out under the patronage of the government. And to keep a mistress is not only not disgraceful in French society, but is always mentioned to one’s credit. It is a part of a gentleman’s equipage, and adds to his gentility; for it implies that he possesses that most considerable merit that a gentleman can aspire to in this country, and most others—money. “Il a la plus jolie maitresse de Paris!” you cannot say anything more complimentary if it were of the prime minister, and it would scarce be an injurious imputation if said of one’s father confessor.
If you send, then, your son to Paris, am I uncharitable in surmising that he may sometimes use the privilege of the place? It is, indeed, a question for philosophy to determine (and not for me), which of the two may be the less injurious to his health and morals—the gross intercourse he is exposed to in some other towns, orthe more refined gallantries of the French capital. If you can preserve him, by religious and other influences, from either, as well as from the dangers of an ascetic and solitary abstinence—for solitude has its vices as well as dissipation—so much the better. He will be a better husband, a better citizen, and a better man.
But let me tell you that to educate a young man of fortune and leisure, to live through a youth of honesty, has become excessively difficult, even in the chaste nunnery of your “Two Hills;” and to expect that, with money and address, he will live entirely honest in Paris, where women of good quality are thrown in his face—women of art, beauty, and refined education—is to attribute virtues to human nature she is in no way entitled to in any country. He may have some trouble with his conscience, perhaps, the first month or two, but by degrees, he will become reconciled, and get along well enough. If he comes over with some refinement of taste, and moral inclinations and habits, or only on a transient visit, he will be secure from all the dangers (except, perhaps, gambling) to which I have alluded; he will live only in American society, which is quite as good and pure here as at home; he will have noacquaintance with the natives, but of that class in which a gentleman’s morals run less risk of temptation than even from the vulgar intercourse of American towns.
All that part of a city like Paris, that comes into relation with strangers, and lives by deceiving and plundering them, is of course gross and corrupt; yet I do not know any community in which the honesty of a gentleman is so safe from contamination.
It is certainly of much value in the life of an American gentleman to visit these old countries, if it were only to form a just estimate of his own, which he is continually liable to mistake, and always to overrate without objects of comparison; “nimium se æstimet necesse est, qui se nemini comparat.” He will always think himself wise who sees nobody wiser; and to know the customs and institutions of foreign countries, which one cannot know well without residing there, is certainly the complement of a good education.
The American society at Paris, taken altogether, is of a good composition. It consists of several hundred persons, of families of fortune, and young men of liberal instruction. Here are lords of cotton from Carolina, and of sugarcane from the Mississippi, millionaires from all the Canadas, and pursers from all the navies; and their social qualities, from a sense of mutual dependence or partnership in absence, or some such causes, are more active abroad than at home. The benevolent affections act in a contrary way from gravitation; they increase as the square of the distance from the centre.
The plain fact is, that Americans in Paris are hospitable in a very high degree; they have no fear of being dogged with company, and have leisure here, which they have nowhere else, to be amiable; the new comer, too, is more tender and thankful, and has a higher relish of hospitality and kindness; and the general example of the place has its effect on their animal spirits.
They form a little republic apart, and when a stranger arrives, he finds himself at home; he finds himself also under the censorial inspection of a public opinion, a salutary restraint, not always the luck of those who travel into foreign countries. One thing only is to be blamed: it becomes every day more the fashion for theéliteof our cities to settle themselves here permanently. We cannot but deplore this exportation of the precious metals, since our country is drained of what the supply is not too abundant.They who have resided here a few years, having fortune and leisure, do not choose, as I perceive, to reside anywhere else.
It is now midnight, and more. I have said so much in this letter about grisettes, that I shall have a night-mare of them before morning. This “Latin Quarter,” is one of the most instructing volumes of Paris, but all I can do is just to open you here and there some of its pages, and shew you the pictures. Pictures in this country, recollect, are moreà decouvertthan in America. Please to make the allowance. Good night!
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.
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 rosethis 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, ananemometerto 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, theycall 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, calledVal de Grace. This church, built by Anne of Austria, was calledVal 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-stonewith 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 ofVal de Graceis 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 theHospice 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 itscondition. 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 numerousMaisons 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 thePlace St. Jaques; the place ofpublic execution. It is the present station of the guillotine, which has already made several spots of the city classical. And here is appropriately theBarrière 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 NatureA formé l’âme de NinonDe la Volupté d’Epicure,Et de la vertu de Caton.”
“L’indulgente et sage NatureA formé l’âme de NinonDe la Volupté d’Epicure,Et de la vertu de Caton.”
“L’indulgente et sage NatureA formé l’âme de NinonDe 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. Herown 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. Andso 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!”
“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!”
“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 glimpseof 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 sawJulian’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 theHôtel 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, aregirdles 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 theRue 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,ORDeath!”
I now dined and traversed leisurely thePlace du Panthéonhomewards, passing through theRue de l’Estrapadeinto theRue 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, passesquick 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 ofnon 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.
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 ofnon lavando.
[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 ofnon 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.
[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.
[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}
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}