Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands Volume Ii Part 33

Well, he got enough of it at last. The fact is, that with, the French, destructiveness is as much developed as constructiveness, and they are as good at one as the other."

As we were pa.s.sing over one of the bridges, we saw a flower market, a gay show of flowers of all hues, and a very brisk trade going on about them. Madame told me that there was a flower market every day in the week, in different parts of the city. The flower trade was more than usually animated to-day, because it is a saint's _fete,_ the _fete_ of St. Louis, the patron of Paris.

The streets every where showed men, women, and children, carrying their pots of blooming flowers. Every person in Paris named Louis or Louise, after this saint, has received this day little tokens of affection from their friends, generally bouquets or flowers. Madame Belloc is named Louise, and her different friends and children called and brought flowers, and a beautiful India China vase.

The life of Paris, indeed of the continent, is floral, to an extent of which the people in the United States can form no conception. Flowers are a part of all their lives. The churches are dressed with flowers, and on _fete_ days are fragrant with them. A _jardiniere_ forms a part of the furniture of every parlor; a _jardiniere_ is a receptacle made in various fanciful forms for holding pots of flowers. These pots are bought at the daily flower market for a trifle, in full bloom and high condition; they are placed in the _jardiniere,_ the s.p.a.ces around them filled with sand and covered with moss.

Again, there are little hanging baskets suspended from the ceilings, and filled with flowers. These things give a graceful and festive air to apartments. When the plants are out of bloom, the porter of the house takes them, waters, prunes, and tends them, then sells them again: meanwhile the parlor is ornamented with fresh ones. Along the streets on saints' days are little booths, where small vases of artificial flowers are sold to dress the altars. I stopped to look at one of these stalls, all brilliant with cheaply-made, showy vases of flowers, that sell for one or two sous.

We went also to the National Academy of Fine Arts, a government school for the gratuitous instruction of artists, a Grecian building, with a row of all the distinguished painters in front.

In the doorway, as we came in, was an antique, headless statue of Minerva; literally it was Minerva's _gown_ standing up--a pillar of drapery, nothing more, and drapery soiled, tattered, and battered; but then it was an antique, and that is enough. Now, when antique things are ugly, I do not like them any better for being antique, and I should rather have a modern statue than Minerva's old gown. We went through all the galleries in this school, in one of which the prize pieces of scholars are placed. Whoever gets one of these prizes is sent to study in Rome at the expense of the government. We pa.s.sed through the hall where the judges sit to decide upon pictures, and through various others that I cannot remember. I was particularly interested in the apartment devoted to the casts from the statuary in the Louvre and in other palaces. These casts are taken with mathematical exactness, and subjected to the inspection of a committee, who order any that are defective to be broken. Proof casts of all the best works, ancient and modern, are thus furnished at a small price, and so brought within the reach of the most moderate means.

This morning M. and Madame Belloc took me with them to call on Beranger, the poet. He is a charming old man, very animated, with a face full of feeling and benevolence, and with that agreeable simplicity and vivacity of manner which is peculiarly French. It was eleven o'clock, but he had not yet breakfasted; we entreated him to waive ceremony, and so his maid brought in his chop and coffee, and we all plunged into an animated conversation. Beranger went on conversing with shrewdness mingled with childlike simplicity, a blending of the comic, the earnest, and the complimentary. Conversation in a French circle seems to me like the gambols of a thistle down, or the rainbow changes in soap bubbles. One laughs with tears in one's eyes. One moment confounded with the absolute childhood of the simplicity, in the next one is a little afraid of the keen edge of the shrewdness.

This call gave me an insight into a French circle which both amused and delighted me. Coming home, M. Belloc enlarged upon Beranger's benevolence and kindness of heart. "No man," he said, "is more universally popular with the common people. He has exerted himself much for the families of the unfortunate deportes to Cayenne." Then he added, laughing, "A mechanic, one of my model sitters, was dilating upon his goodness--'What a man! what sublime virtue! how is he beloved! Could I live to see his funeral! _Quelle spectacle! Quelle grande emotion!'"_

At tea, Madame M. commented on the manners of a certain English lady of our acquaintance.

"She's an actress; she's too affected!"

Madame Belloc and I defended her.

"Ah," said M. Belloc, "you cannot judge; the French are never natural in England, nor the English in France. Frenchmen in England are stupid and cross, trying to be dignified; and when the English come to France, it's all guitar playing and capering, in trying to have _esprit._"

But it is hard to give a conversation in which the salient points are made by a rapid pantomime, which effervesces like champagne.

Madame Belloc and Madame M. agree that the old French _salon_ is no more; that none in the present iron age can give the faintest idea of the brilliancy of the inst.i.tution in its palmiest days. The horrors and reverses of successive revolutions, have thrown a pall over the French heart.

I have been now, in all, about a month in this gay and flowery city, seeing the French people, not in hotels and _cafes,_ but in the seclusion of domestic life; received, when introduced, not with ceremonious distance, as a stranger, but with confidence and affection, as a friend.

Though, according to the showing of my friends, Paris is empty of many of her most brilliant ornaments, yet I have been so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of many n.o.ble and justly celebrated people, and to feel as if I had gained a real insight into the French heart.

I liked the English and the Scotch as well as I could like any thing.

And now, I equally like the French. Exact opposites, you will say. For that reason all the more charming. The goodness and beauty of the divine mind is no less shown in the traits of different races than of different tribes of fruits and flowers. And because things are exact opposites, is no reason why we should not like both. The eye is not like the hand, nor the ear like the foot; yet who condemns any of them for the difference? So I regard nations as parts of a great common body, and national differences as necessary to a common humanity.

I thought, when in English society, that it was as perfect and delightful as it could be. There was worth of character, strength of principle, true sincerity, and friendship, charmingly expressed. I have found all these, too, among the French, and besides them, something which charms me the more, because it is peculiar to the French, and of a kind wholly different from any I have ever had an experience of before. There is an iris-like variety and versatility of nature, a quickness in catching and reflecting the various shades of emotion or fancy, a readiness in seizing upon one's own half-expressed thoughts, and running them out in a thousand graceful little tendrils, which is very captivating.

I know a general prejudice has gone forth, that the French are all mere outside, without any deep reflection or emotion. This may be true of many. No doubt that the strength of that outward life, that acuteness of the mere perceptive organization, and that tendency to social exhilaration, which prevail, will incline to such a fault in many cases. An English reserve inclines to moroseness, and Scotch perseverance to obstinacy; so this aerial French nature may become levity and insincerity; but then it is neither the sullen Englishman, the dogged Scotchman, nor the shallow Frenchman that we are to take as the national ideal. In each country we are to take the very best as the specimen.

Now, it is true that, here in France, one can find people as judicious, quiet, discreet, and religious, as any where in the world; with views of life as serious, and as earnest, not living for pretence or show, but for the most rational and religious ends. Now, when all this goodness is silvered over, as it were, reflecting like mother-of-pearl or opal, a thousand fanciful shades and changes, is not the result beautiful? Some families into which I have entered, some persons with whom I have talked, have left a most delightful impression upon my mind; and I have talked, by means of imperfect English, French, and interpretations, with a good many. They have made my heart bleed over the history of this most beautiful country. It is truly mournful that a people with so many fine impulses, so much genius, appreciation, and effective power, should, by the influence of historical events quite beyond the control of the ma.s.ses, so often have been thrown into a false position before the world, and been subjected to such a series of agonizing revulsions and revolutions.

"O, the French are half tiger, half monkey!" said a cultivated American to me the other day. Such remarks cut me to the heart, as if they had been spoken of a brother. And when they come from the mouth of an American, the very shade of Lafayette, it would seem, might rise and say, "_Et tu, Brute!_"

It is true, it is a sarcasm of Voltaire's; but Voltaire, though born a Frenchman, neither imbodied nor was capable of understanding the true French ideal. The French _head_ he had, but not the French heart.

And from his bitter judgment we might appeal to a thousand n.o.ble names. The generous Henri IV., the n.o.ble Sully, and Bayard the knight _sans peur et sans reproche_, were these half tiger and half monkey? Were John Calvin and Fenelon half tiger and half monkey?

Laplace, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Cuvier, Des Cartes, Malebranche, Arago--what were they? The tree of history is enriched with no n.o.bler and fairer boughs and blossoms than have grown from the French stock.

It seems a most mysterious providence that some nations, without being wickeder than others, should have a more unfortunate and disastrous history.

The woes of France have sprung from the fact that a Jezebel de Medici succeeded in exterminating from the nation that portion of the people corresponding to the Puritans of Scotland, England, and Germany. The series of persecutions which culminated in the ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew, and ended with the dragonades under Louis XIV., drained France of her lifeblood. Other nations have profited by the treasures then cast out of her, and she has remained poor for want of them. Some of the best blood in America is of the old Huguenot stock. Huguenots carried arts and manufactures into England. An expelled French refugee became the theological leader of Puritanism in England, Scotland, and America; and wherever John Calvin's system of theology has gone, civil liberty has gone with it; so that we might almost say of France, as the apostle said of Israel, "If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness!"

When the English and Americans sneer at the instability, turbulence, and convulsions of the French nation for the last century, let us ask ourselves what our history would have been had the "Gunpowder Plot"

succeeded, and the whole element of the reformation been exterminated.

It is true, vitality and reactive energy might have survived such a process; but that vitality would have shown itself just as it has in France--in struggles and convulsions. The frequent revolutions of France are not a thing to be sneered at; they are not evidences of fickleness, but of constancy; they are, in fact, a prolonged struggle for liberty, in which there occur periods of defeat, but in which, after every interval of repose, the strife is renewed. Their great difficulty has been, that the destruction of the reformed church in France took out of the country entirely that element of religious rationalism which is at once conservative and progressive.

There are three forces which operate in society: that of blind faith, of reverent religious freedom, and of irreverent scepticism. Now, since the human mind is so made that it must have religion, when this middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superst.i.tion; the extreme of superst.i.tion reacting to scepticism, and then the barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superst.i.tion. When the persecutions in France had succeeded in extinguishing this middle element, then commenced a series of oscillations between religious despotism and atheistic license, which have continued ever since. The suppression of all reasonable religious inquiry, and the consequent corruption of the church, produced the school of Voltaire and his followers. The excesses of that school have made devout Catholics afraid of the very beginning of religious rationalism; and these causes act against each other to this day.

The revolution in England, under Cromwell, succeeded, because it had an open Bible and liberty of conscience for its foundation, and united both the elements of faith and of reason. The French revolution had, as Lamartine says, Plutarch's Lives for its Bible, and the great unchaining of human pa.s.sion had no element of religious control. Plad France, in the time of her revolution, had leaders like Admiral Coligny, her revolution might have prospered as did England's under Cromwell. But these revolutions, needlessly terrible as they have been, still have accomplished something; without them France might have died away into what Spain is. As it is, progress has been made, though at a fearful sacrifice. No country has been swept cleaner of aristocratic inst.i.tutions, and the old bastiles and prisons of a past tyranny. The aspiration for democratic freedom has been so thoroughly sown in France, that it never will be rooted up again. How to get it, and how to _keep_ it when it is got, they do not yet clearly see; but they will never rest till they learn. There is a liberty of thought and of speech in France which the tongue-tied state of the press cannot indicate. Could France receive the Bible--could it be put into the hands of all the common people--_that_ might help her. And France is receiving the Bible. Spite of all efforts to the contrary, the curiosity of the popular mind has been awakened; the yearnings of the popular heart are turning towards it; and therein lie my best hopes for France.

One thing more I would say. Since I have been here, I have made the French and continental mode of keeping Sunday a matter of calm, dispa.s.sionate inquiry and observation. I have tried to divest myself of the prejudices--if you so please to call them--of my New England education--to look at the matter sympathetically, in the French or continental point of view, and see whether I have any occasion to revise the opinions in which I had been educated. I fully appreciate all the agreeableness, the joyousness, and vivacity of a day of recreation and social freedom, spent in visiting picture galleries and public grounds, in social _reunions_ and rural excursions. I am far from judging harshly of the piety of those who have been educated in these views and practices. But, viewing the subject merely in relation to things of this life, I am met by one very striking fact: there is not a single nation, possessed of a popular form of government, which has not our Puritan theory of the Sabbath.

Protestant Switzerland, England, Scotland, and America cover the whole ground of popular freedom; and in all these this idea of the Sabbath prevails with a distinctness about equal to the degree of liberty. Nor do I think this result an accidental one. If we notice that the Lutheran branch of the reformation did not have this element, and the Calvinistic branch, which spread over England and America, did have it, and compare the influence of these two in sustaining popular rights, we shall be struck with the obvious inference.

Now, there are things in our mode of keeping the Sabbath which have a direct tendency to sustain popular government; for the very element of a popular government must be self-control in the individual. There must be enough intensity of individual self-control to make up for the lack of an extraneous pressure from government. The idea of the Sabbath, as observed by the Puritans, is the voluntary dissevering of the thoughts and a.s.sociations from the things of earth for one day in seen, and the concentrating of the mind on purely spiritual subjects.

In all this there is a weekly recurring necessity for the greatest self-control. No way could be devised to educate a community to be thoughtful and reflective better than the weekly recurrence of a day when all stimulus, both of business and diversion, shall be withdrawn, and the mind turned in upon itself. The weekly necessity of bringing all business to a close tends to give habits of system and exactness.

The a.s.sembling together for divine worship, and for instruction in the duties of Christianity, is a training of the highest and n.o.blest energies of the soul. Even that style of abstract theologizing prevailing in New England and Scotland, which has grown out of Sabbath sermonizing, has been an incalculable addition to the strength and self-controlling power of the people.

Ride through France, you see the laborer in his wooden shoes, with scarce a thought beyond his daily toil. His Sunday is a _fete_ for dancing and recreation. Go through New England, and you will find the laborer, as he lays his stone fence, discussing the consistency of foreordination with free will, or perchance settling some more practical mooted point in politics. On Sunday this laborer gets up his wagon, and takes his wife and family to church, to hear two or three sermons, in each of which there are more elements of mental discipline than a French peasant gets in a whole lifetime. It is a shallow view of theological training to ask of what practical use are its metaphysical problems. Of what practical value to most students is geometry? On the whole, I think it is the Puritan idea of the Sabbath, as it prevails in New England, that is one great source of that individual strength and self-control which have supported so far our democratic inst.i.tutions.

In regard to the present state of affairs here, it has been my lot to converse unreservedly with some of all parties sufficiently to find the key note of their thoughts. There are, first, the Bourbonists--mediaeval people--believers in the divine right of kings in general, and of the Bourbons in particular. There are many of them exceedingly interesting.

There is something rather poetic and graceful about the antique cast of their ideas; their chivalrous loyalty to an exiled family, and their devout belief of the Catholic religion. These, for the most part, keep out of Paris, entirely ignore the present court, and remain in their chateaus in the country. A gentleman of this cla.s.s, with whom I talked, thought the present emperor did very well in keeping other parties out till the time should come to strike a blow for the true king.

Then there are the partisans and friends of the Orleans family. I heard those who spoke, even with tears, of Louis Philippe and his dynasty. They were patrons of letters and of arts, they say, of virtue and of religion; and these good, faithful souls cling lovingly to their memory.

And then there are the republicans--men of the real olden time, capable of sacrificing every thing that heart holds dear for a principle; such republicans as were our fathers in all, save their religion, and because lacking that, losing the chief element of popular control. Nevertheless, grander men have never been than some of these modern republicans of France; Americans might learn many lessons from them.

Besides all these there is another cla.s.s, comparatively small, having neither the prestige of fashion, rank, or wealth, but true, humble, evangelical Christians, in whom the simplicity and spirituality of the old Huguenot church seems revived. These men are laboring at the very foundation of things; laboring to bring back the forgotten Bible; beginning where Christ began, with preaching the gospel to the poor.

If any would wish to see Christianity in its loveliest form, they would find it in some of these humble laborers. One, with whom I conversed, devotes his time to the _chiffoniers,_ (rag pickers.) He gave me an account of his labors, speaking with such tenderness and compa.s.sion, that it was quite touching. "My poor people," he said, "they are very ignorant, but they are not so very bad." And when I asked him, "Who supports you in your labors?" he looked upward, with one of those quick, involuntary glances by which the French express themselves without words. There was the same earnestness in him as in one of our city missionaries, but a touching grace peculiarly national. It was the piety of Fenelon and St. John. And I cannot believe that G.o.d, who loves all nations alike, and who knows how beautifully the French mind is capable of reflecting the image of Jesus, will not yet shine forth upon France, to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Christ.

It was the testimony of all with whom I conversed, that the national mind had become more and more serious for many years past. Said a French gentleman to me one evening, "The old idea of _l'homme d'esprit_ of Louis XIV.'s time, the man of _bon-mots_, bows, and _salons_, is almost pa.s.sed away; there is only now and then a specimen of it left. The French are becoming more earnest and more religious." In the Roman Catholic churches which I attended, I saw very full audiences, and great earnestness and solemnity. I have talked intimately, also, with Roman Catholics, in whom I felt that religion was a real and vital thing. One of them, a most lovely lady, presented me with the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, as a ground on which we could both unite.

I have also been interested to see in these French Catholics, in its most fervent form, the exhibition of that antislavery spirit which, in other ages, was the boast of that church. One charming friend took me to the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, pointing out with great interest the statues and pictures of saints who had been distinguished for their antislavery efforts in France. In a note expressing her warm interest in the cause of the African slave, she says, "It is a tradition of our church, that of the three kings which came to worship Jesus in Bethlehem, one was black; and if Christians would kneel oftener before the manger of Bethlehem they would think less of distinctions of caste and color."

Madame Belloc received, a day or two since, a letter from a lady in the old town of Orleans, which gave name to Joan of Arc, expressing the most earnest enthusiasm in the antislavery cause. Her prayers, she says, will ascend night and day for those brave souls in America who are conflicting with this mighty injustice.

A lady a few days since called on me, all whose property was lost in the insurrection at Hayti, but who is, nevertheless, a most earnest advocate of emanc.i.p.ation.

A Catholic lady, in a letter, inquired earnestly, why in my Key I had not included the Romish clergy of the United States among the friends of emanc.i.p.ation, as that, she said, had been always the boast of their church. I am sorry to be obliged to make the reply, that in America the Catholic clergy have never identified themselves with the antislavery cause, but in their influence have gone with the mult.i.tude.

I have received numerous calls from members of the Old French Abolition Society, which existed here for many years. Among these I met, with great interest, M. Dutrone, its president; also M. ----, who presented me with his very able ethnological work on the distinctive type of the negro race. One gentleman, greatly distressed in view of the sufferings of the negro race in America, said, naively enough, to Mrs. C., that he had heard that the negroes had great capability for music, dancing, and the fine arts, and inquired whether something could not be done to move sympathy in their behalf by training them to exhibit characteristic dances and pantomimes. Mrs. C. quoted to him the action of one of the great ecclesiastical bodies in America, in the same breath declining to condemn slavery, but denouncing dancing as so wholly of the world lying in wickedness as to require condign ecclesiastical censure. The poor man was wholly lost in amazement.

In this connection, I cannot but notice, to the credit of the French republican provisional government, how much more consistent they were in their attachment to the principles of liberty than ever our own has been. What do we see in our own history? Our northern free states denouncing slavery as a crime, confessedly inconsistent with their civil and religious principles, yet, for commercial and pecuniary considerations, deliberately entering into a compact with slaveholders tolerating a twenty years' perpetuation of the African slave trade, the rendition of fugitives, the suppression of servile insurrections, and allowing to the slaveholders a virtual property basis of representation. It should qualify the contempt which some Americans express of the French republic, that when the subject of the slave colonies was brought up, and it was seen that consistency demanded immediate emanc.i.p.ation, they immediately emanc.i.p.ated; and not only so, but conferred at once on the slaves the elective franchise.

This point strongly ill.u.s.trates the difference, in one respect, between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. As a race the French are less commercial, more ideal, more capable of devotion to abstract principles, and of following them out consistently, irrespective of expediency.

There is one thing which cannot but make one indignant here in Paris, and which, I think, is keenly felt by some of the best among the French; and that is, the indifference of many Americans, while here, to their own national principles of liberty. They seem to come to Paris merely to be hangers on and applauders in the train of that tyrant who has overthrown the hopes of France. To all that cruelty and injustice by which thousands of hearts are now bleeding, they appear entirely insensible. They speak with heartless levity of the revolutions of France, as of a pantomime got up for their diversion.

Their time and thoughts seem to be divided between defences of American slavery and efforts to attach themselves to the skirts of French tyranny. They are the parasites of parasites--delighted if they can but get to an imperial ball, and beside themselves if they can secure an introduction to the man who figured as a _roue_, in the streets of New York. n.o.ble-minded men of all parties here, who have sacrificed all for principle, listen with suppressed indignation, while young America, fresh from the theatres and gambling saloons, declares, between the whiffs of his cigar, that the French are not capable of free inst.i.tutions, and that the government of Louis Napoleon is the best thing France could have. Thus from the plague- spot at her heart has America become the propagandist of despotism in Europe. Nothing weighs so fearfully against the cause of the people of Europe as this kind of American influence. Through almost every city of Europe are men whose great glory it appears to be to proclaim that they worship the beast, and wear his name in their foreheads. I have seen sometimes, in the forests, a vigorous young sapling which had sprung up from the roots of an old, decaying tree. So, unless the course of things alters much in America, a purer civil liberty will spring up from her roots in Europe, while her national tree is blasted with despotism. It is most affecting, in moving through French circles, to see what sadness, what anguish of heart, lies under that surface which seems to a stranger so gay. Each revolution has cut its way through thousands of families, ruining fortunes, severing domestic ties, inflicting wounds that bleed, and will bleed for years. I once alluded rather gayly to the numerous upsets of the French government, in conversation with a lady, and she laughed at first, but in a moment her eyes filled with tears, and she said, "Ah, you have no idea what these things are among us." In conversation nothing was more common than the remark, "I shall do so and so, provided things hold out; but then there is no telling what will come next."

On the minds of some there lie deep dejection and discouragement.