The Story of Paris Part 1

The Story of Paris.

by Thomas Okey.

PREFACE

In recasting _Paris and its Story_ for issue in the "Mediaeval Towns Series," opportunity has been taken of revising the whole and of adding a Second Part, wherein we have essayed the office of cicerone.

Obviously in so vast a range of study as that afforded by the city of Paris, compression and selection have been imperative: we have therefore limited our guidance to such routes and edifices as seemed to offer the more important objects of historic and artistic interest, excluding from our purview, with much regret, the works of contemporary artists. On the Louvre, as the richest Thesaurus of beautiful things in Europe, we have dwelt at some length and even so it has been possible only to deal broadly with its contents. A book has, however, this advantage over a corporeal guide; it can be curtly dismissed without fear of offence, when antipathy may impel the traveller to pa.s.s by, or sympathy invite him to linger over, the various objects indicated to his gaze. In a city where change is so constant and the housebreaker's pick so active, any work dealing with monuments of the past must needs soon become imperfect. Since the publication of _Paris and its Story_ in the autumn of 1904, a picturesque group of old houses in the Rue de l'Arbre Sec, including the Hotel des Mousquetaires, the traditional lodging of Dumas'

d'Artagnan, has been swept away and a monstrous ma.s.s of engineering is now reared on its site: even as we write other demolitions of historic buildings are in progress. Care has, however, been taken to bring this little work up to date and our constant desire has been to render it useful to the inexperienced visitor to Paris. Success in so complicated and difficult a task can be but partial, and in this as in so many of life's aims "our wills," as good Sir Thomas Browne says, "must be our performances, and our intents make out our actions; otherwise our pious labours shall find anxiety in our graves and our best endeavours not hope, but fear, a resurrection."

It now remains to acknowledge our indebtedness to the following, among other authorities, which are here set down to obviate the necessity for repeated footnotes, and to indicate to readers who may desire to pursue the study of the history and art of Paris in more detail, some works among the enormous ma.s.s of literature on the subject that will repay perusal.

For the general history of France, the monumental _Histoire de France_ now in course of publication, edited by E. Lavisse; Michelet's _Histoire de France_, _Recits de l'Histoire de France_, and _Proces des Templiers_; Victor Duruy, _Histoire de France_; the cheap and admirable selection of authorities in the seventeen volumes of the _Histoire de France racontee par les Contemporains_, edited by B.

Zeller; _Carl Faulmann, Ill.u.s.trirte Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst_; the Chronicles of Gregory of Tours, Richer, Abbo, Joinville, Villani, Froissart, De Comines; _Geographie Historique_, by A. Guerard; Froude's essay on the Templars; _Jeanne d'Arc, Maid of Orleans_, by T.

Douglas Murray; _Paris sous Philip le Bel_, edited by H. Geraud.

For the later Monarchy, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the Histories of Carlyle, Mignet, Michelet and Louis Blanc; the _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, by Taine; the _Cambridge Modern History_, Vol. VIII.; the Memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon, of Madame Campan, Madame Vigee-Lebrun, Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland and Paul Louis Courier; the _Journal de Perlet_; _Histoire de la Societe Francaise pendant la Revolution_, by J. de Goncourt; Goethe's _Die Campagne in Frankreich_, 1792; _Legendes et Archives de la Bastille_, by F. Funck Brentano; Life of Napoleon I., by J. Holland Rose; _L'Europe et la Revolution Francaise_, by Albert Sorel; the periodical, _La Revolution Francaise_; _Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution_, by C.D. Hazen.

For the particular history of Paris, the exhaustive and comprehensive _Histoire de la Ville de Paris_, by Michel Felibien and Guy Alexis Lobineau; the so-called _Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris_, edited by L. Lalanne; _Paris Pendant la Domination Anglaise_, by A. Longnon; the more modern _Paris a Travers les Ages_, by M.F. Hoffbauer, E. Fournier and others; the _Topographie Historique du Vieux Paris_, by A. Berty and H. Legrand, and other works now issued or in course of publication by the Ville de Paris. Howell's _Familiar Letters_, Coryat's _Crudities_, Evelyn's _Diary_, and Sir Samuel Romilly's _Letters_, contain useful matter. For the chapters on Historical Paris, E.

Fournier's _Promenade Historique dans Paris_, _Chronique des Rues de Paris_, _enigmes des Rues de Paris_; the Marquis de Rochegude's _Guide Pratique a Travers le Vieux Paris_; the _Dictionnaire Historique de Paris_, by G. Pessard, and the excellent _Nouvel Itineraire Guide Artistique et Archeologique de Paris_, by C. Normand, published by the _Societe des Amis des Monuments Parisiens_.

For French art, Felibien's _Entretiens_; the writings of Lady Dilke; _French Painting in the Sixteenth Century_, by L. Dimier; _Histoire de l'Art, Peinture, ecole Francaise_, by Cazes d'Aix and J. Berard; the compendious _History of Modern Painting_, by R. m.u.t.h.e.r; _The Great French Painters_, by C. Mauclair; _La Sculpture Francaise_, by L.

Gonse; _Mediaeval Art_, by W.R. Lethaby; the Catalogue of the _Exposition des Primitifs Francais_ (1904); _Le Peinture en Europe, Le Louvre_, by Lafenestre and Richtenberger, and the official catalogues of the Louvre collections. All these have been largely drawn upon and supplemented by affectionate memories of an acquaintance with Paris and many of its citizens dating back for more than thirty years.

May we add a last word of practical counsel. Distances in Paris are great, and the traveller who would economise time and reduce fatigue will do well to bargain with his host to be free to take the mid-day meal wherever his journeyings may lead him.

_April, 1906._

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The demolition of Old Paris has proceeded apace since the publication of the _Story of Paris_ in 1906. The Tower of Dagobert; the old Academy of Medicine; the Annexe of the Hotel Dieu and a whole street, the Rue du Pet.i.t Pont; the Hotel of the Provost of Paris--all have fallen under the housebreakers' picks. As we write the curious vaulted entrance to the old charnel houses of St Paul is being swept away and the revision of this little book has been a melancholy task to a lover of historic Paris. Part II. of the work has been brought up to date and the changes in the Louvre noted: it is much to be regretted that the new edition of the official Catalogue of the Foreign Schools of Painting promised by the authorities in 1909 has not yet seen the light.

_May, 1911._

INTRODUCTION

The History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French monarchy: "Paris, France and the Dukes and Kings of the French, are three ideas," says Freeman, "which can never be kept asunder." The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus indicated. Moreover, men are ever touched by "sad stories of the death of kings," the pomp and majesty and the fate of princes. By a pathetic fallacy their capacity to suffer is measured by their apparent power to enjoy, and those are moved to tears by the spectacle of a Dauphin surrendered to the coa.r.s.e and brutal tutelage of a sans-culotte, who read without emotion of thousands of Huguenot children torn from their mothers' arms and flung to the novercal cruelties of strangers in blood and creed. In the earlier chapters the legendary aspect of the story has been drawn upon rather more perhaps than an austere historical conscience would approve, but it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and in painting, on the decoration of her architecture, both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways.

The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced.

Paris is yet in the stage of l.u.s.ty growth. Time after time, like a young giantess, she has burst her cincture of walls, cast off her outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no gra.s.s-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities once the mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a great historic tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death.

Paris has more than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation; Norseman and Briton, Russian and German have bruised her fair body; the dire distress of civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she has always emerged from her trials with marvellous recuperation, more flourishing than before.

Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a twofold calamity of foreign invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in 1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic tribe to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the most delightful and seductive of continental cities has been prodigious, yet withal she has maintained her essential unity, her corporate sense and peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circ.u.mference, and over her gates to-day one may read, _Entree de Paris_. The Parisian is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. The essentials of Parisian life remain unchanged since mediaeval times. Busy mult.i.tudes of alert, eager burgesses crowd her streets; ten thousand students stream from the provinces, from Europe, and even from the uttermost parts of the earth, to eat of the bread of knowledge at her University. The old collegiate life is gone, but the arts and sciences are freely taught as of old to all comers; and a lowly peasant lad may carry in his satchel the portfolio of a prime minister or the insignia of a president of the republic, even as his mediaeval prototype bore a bishop's mitre or a cardinal's hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a Francois Villon find their a.n.a.logue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery pa.s.sions which, from the days of the Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crises of her history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death.

[Footnote 1: "_Faudra recommencer_" ("We must begin again"), said, to the present writer in 1871, a Communist refugee bearing a great scar on his face from a wound received fighting at the barricades.]

Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on pa.s.sages in ancient authors who describe the Gauls as quick to champion the cause of the oppressed, p.r.o.ne to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat, easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediaeval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute.

Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, "Now, was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far."[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and their avidity for new things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. Sir Henry Maine has shown in his _Ancient Law_ that the idea of kingship created by the accession of the Capetian dynasty revolutionised the whole fabric of society, and that "when the feudal prince of a limited territory surrounding Paris began ... to call himself _King of France_, he became king in quite a new sense." The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours, a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her walls, until in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] "Alone of the capitals of Modern Europe," said Freeman, "Paris can claim to have been the creator of the state of which it is now the head." The same authority bears witness to the unique position held by France in her generous and liberal treatment of new subjects, and the late historian, Mr. C.A. Fyffe, told the writer that when travelling in Alsace in 1871 the inhabitants of that province, so essentially German in race, were pa.s.sionately attached to France, and more than once he heard a peasant exclaim, unable even to express himself in French: "_Nimmer will ich Deutsch sein._"

[Footnote 2: _Inf._ XXIX. 121-123. A French commentator consoles himself by reflecting that the author of the _Divina Commedia_ is far more vituperative when dealing with certain Italian peoples, whom he designates as hogs, curs, wolves and foxes.]

[Footnote 3: Cobbett, comparing the relative intellectual culture of the British Isles and of France between the years 1600 and 1787, found that of the writers on the arts and sciences who were distinguished by a place in the _Universal, Historical, Critical and Bibliographical Dictionary_, one hundred and thirty belonged to England, Scotland and Ireland, and six hundred and seventy-six to France.]

During the first Empire and the Restoration, after the tempest was stilled and the great heritage of the Revolution taken possession of, an amazing outburst of scientific, artistic and literary activity made Paris the _Ville Lumiere_ of Europe. She is still the city where the things of the mind and of taste have most place, where the wheels of life run most smoothly and pleasantly, where the graces and refinements and amenities of social existence, _l'art des plaisirs fins_, are most highly developed and most widely diffused. There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates the spirit.

The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and material phases, is less gross and coa.r.s.e,[4] its pleasures more refined than in London. It is impossible to conceive the pit of a London theatre stirred to fury by an innovation in diction in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the att.i.tude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Francais or the Odeon, where the severe cla.s.sic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Moliere or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a _premiere_ at the Francais is an intellectual feast. The brilliant house; the pit and stalls filled with black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the whole a.s.sembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured "overture"--three knocks on the boards--dating back to Roman times when the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor's approach to the front of the stage after the play is ended to announce to Mesdames and Messieurs what in these days they have known for weeks before from the press, that "the piece we have had the honour of playing" is by such a one--all combine to make an indelible impression on the mind of the foreign spectator.

[Footnote 4: "Nous cuisinons meme l'amour."--TAINE.]

The Parisian is the most orderly and well-behaved of citizens. The custom of the _queue_ is a spontaneous expression of his love of fairness and order. Even the applause in theatres is organised. A spectacle such as that witnessed at the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, the most solemn and impressive of modern times, is inconceivable in London. The whole population (except the Faubourg St. Germain and the clergy) from the poorest labourer to the heads of the State issued forth to file past the coffin of their darling poet, lifted up under the Arc de Triomphe, and by their mult.i.tudinous presence honoured his remains borne on a poor bare hea.r.s.e to their last resting-place in the Pantheon. Amid this vast crowd, mainly composed of labourers, mechanics and the _pet.i.te bourgeoisie_, a.s.sembled to do homage to the memory of the poet of democracy, scarcely an _agent_ was seen; the people were their own police, and not a rough gesture, not a trace of disorder marred the sublime scene. The Parisian democracy is the most enlightened and the most advanced in Europe, and as of old the Netherlanders, in their immortal fight for freedom against the monstrous and appalling tyranny of Spain, were stirred to heroic deeds by the psalms of Clement Marot, even so to-day, where a few desperate and devoted men are moved to wrestle with a brutal despotism, the Ma.r.s.eillaise is their battle hymn. It is to Paris that the dearest hopes and deepest sympathies of generous spirits will ever go forth in

"The struggle, and the daring rage divine for liberty, Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast dreams of brotherhood."

"Siede Parigi in una gran pianura, Nell' ombilico a Francia, anzi nel core.

Gli pa.s.sa la riviera entro le mura, E corre, ed esce in altra parte fuore; Ma fa un' isola prima, e v'a.s.sicura Della citta una parte, e la migliore: L'altre due (ch' in tre parti e la gran terra) Di fuor la fossa, e dentro il fiume serra."

_Orlando Furioso_, Canto xiv.

Part I.: The Story

CHAPTER I

_Gallo-Roman Paris_

The mediaeval scribe in the fulness of a divinely-revealed cosmogony is wont to begin his story at the creation of the world or at the confusion of tongues, to trace the building of Troy by the descendants of j.a.pheth, and the foundation of his own native city by one of the Trojan princes made a fugitive in Europe by proud Ilion's fall. Such, he was very sure, was the origin of Padua, founded by Antenor and by Priam, son of King Priam, whose grandson, yet another Priam, by his great valour and wisdom became the monarch of a mighty people, called from their fair hair, Galli or Gallici. And of the strong city built on the little island in the Seine who could have been its founder but the ravisher of fair Helen--Sir Paris himself? The nave etymology of the time was evidence enough.

But the modern writer, as he compares the geographical position of the capitals of Europe, is tempted to exclaim, _Cherchez le marchand!_ for he perceives that their unknown founders were dominated by two considerations--facilities for commerce and protection from enemies: and before the era of the Roman road-makers, commerce meant facilities for water carriage. As the early settlers in Britain sailed up the Thames, they must have observed, where the river's bed begins somewhat to narrow, a hill rising from the continuous expanse of marshes from its mouth, easily defended on the east and west by those fortified posts which, in subsequent times, became the Tower of London and Barnard's Castle, and if we scan a map of France, we shall see that the group of islands on and around which Paris now stands, lies in the fruitful basin of the Seine, known as the Isle de France, near the convergence of three rivers; for on the east the Marne, on the west the Oise, and on the south the Yonne, discharge their waters into the main stream on its way to the sea. In ancient times the great line of Phoenician, Greek and Roman commerce followed northwards the valleys of the Rhone and of the Saone, whose upper waters are divided from those of the Yonne only by the plateau of Dijon and the calcareous slopes of Burgundy. The Parisii were thus admirably placed for tapping the profitable commerce of north-west Europe, and by the waters of the Eure, lower down the Seine, were able to touch the fertile valley of the Loire. The northern rivers of Gaul were all navigable by the small boats of the early traders, and, in contrast with the impetuous sweep of the Rhone and the Loire in the south and west, flowed with slow and measured stream:[5] they were rarely flooded, and owing to the normally mild winters, still more rarely blocked by ice. Moreover, the Parisian settlement stood near the rich cornland of La Beauce, and to the north-east, over the open plain of La Valois, lay the way to Flanders. It was one of the river stations on the line of the Phoenician traders in tin, that most precious and rare of ancient metals, between Ma.r.s.eilles and Britain, and in the early Middle Ages became, with Lyons and Beaucaire, one of the chief fairs of that historic trade route which the main lines of railway traffic still follow to-day. The island now known as the Cite, which the founders of Paris chose for their stronghold, was the largest of the group which lay involved in the many windings of the Seine, and was embraced by a natural moat of deep waters. To north and south lay hills, marshes and forests, and all combined to give it a position equally adapted for defence and for commerce.

[Footnote 5: The Seine takes five hours to flow through the seven miles of modern Paris.]