Of the out-door gay life by gas-light, we saw less than we had hoped to see in the French capital. The season was unusually cold and wet, and most of the time it would have required the spirit of a martyr to sip coffee upon the sidewalk. One garden concert we did attend, and found it very bright and fairy-like, and all the other adjectives used in this connection. We sat wrapped in shawls, our feet upon the rounds of the chair before us, and shivered a little, and enjoyed a great deal. We went one night—in most orthodox company—to the Cirque de l'Impératrice, a royal amphitheatre with handsome horses, pretty equestriennes, and a child balanced and tossed about on horseback, showing a frightened, painful smile, which made of the man who held her a Herod in our eyes. A girl very rich in paint and powder, but somewhat destitute in other particulars, skipped and danced upon a slack rope in a most joyous and airy manner. When we came out, a haggard woman, with an old, worn face, was crouching in a little weary heap by the door that led into the stables, wrapped in an old cloak; and that was our dancing girl!
We went to the opera, too; it was Les Huguenots. To this day I cannot tell who were the singers. I never knew, or thought, or cared. And the bare shoulders flashing with jewels in the boxes around us, the claqueurs in the centre, hired to applaud, clapping their hands with the regularity of clock-work, the empty imperial box, were nothing to the sight of Paris portrayed within itself. You know the familiar opera; do think how strange it was to see it in Paris; to look upon the stage and behold the Seine and the towers of Notre Dame; the excited populace rising up to slay and to be slain, with all the while this same fickle French people serenely smiling, and chatting, and looking upon it—the people who were even then ready at a word to reënact the same scenes for a different cause. Just outside, only a day or two before, something of the same spirit, portrayed here for our amusement, had broken out again in the election riots. And we remembered that, as we drove around the corner to the opera house, mounted soldiers stood upon either side, while every other man upon the street was the eye, and ear, and arm of the emperor, who knew that the very ground beneath his fair, white city tottered and reeled.
We saw the emperor and empress one day, after having looked for them long and in vain upon the Champs Elysées, and in the Bois de Boulogne where gay Paris disports itself. It was the morning after the riot, when they drove unattended, you will remember, through the streets where the rioters had gathered. We were in one of the shops upon the Rue de Rivoli. Just across the way rose the Tuileries from the sidewalk. A crowd began to collect about the open archway through the palace, which affords entrance and egress to the great square around which the palace is built. "What is it?" we asked of the voluble Frenchman who was gradually persuading us that brass was gold. "L'Empereur," he replied; which sent us to the sidewalk, and put from our minds all thoughts of oxidized silver and copper-colored gold. Just within the arch paced a lackey in livery of scarlet and gold, wearing a powdered wig and general air of importance. On either side, the sentries froze into position. The gendarmes shouted and gesticulated, clearing the streets. A mounted attendant emerged from the archway; there followed four bay horses attached to a plain, dark, open carriage; upon the front seat were two gentlemen, upon the back, a gentleman with a lady by his side. His hair was iron gray, almost silvery. He turned his face from us as he raised his hat gravely to the crowd, displaying a very perceptible bald spot upon the back of his head as he was whizzed around the corner and down the street. And that was Napoleon III. We saw no American lady in Paris dressed so simply as the empress. Something of black lace draped her shoulders; a white straw bonnet, trimmed with black, with a few pink roses resting upon her hair, crowned her head. She bowed low to the right and left, with a peculiar, graceful motion, and a smile upon the face a little worn and pale, a little faded,—but yet the face we all know so well. Beautiful Spanish woman, whose face was your fortune, though you smiled that day upon the people, your cheeks were pale, your eyes were full of tears.
There is nothing more wonderful in Paris than the tomb prepared to receive the remains of the first Napoleon, in the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides; fitting, it would seem to be, that he should rest here among his old soldiers. We left the carriage at the gateway, and crossed the open court, mounted the wide steps, followed the half dozen other parties through the open doors, and this was what we saw. At the farther end of the great chapel or church, an altar, approached by wide, marble steps; gilt and candles embellished it, and a large, gilt cross upon it bore an image of the crucified Lord. All this was not unlike what we had seen many times. But four immense twisted columns rose from its four corners—columns of Egyptian marble, writhing like spotted serpents. They supported a canopy of gold, and the play of lights upon this, through the stained windows above and on either side, was indescribable. As we entered the door, darkness enveloped it, save where an invisible sun seemed to touch the roof of gold and rest lightly upon the pillars; an invisible sun, indeed, for, without, the sky was heavy with clouds. As we advanced, this unearthly light touched new points—the gilded candlesticks, the dying Saviour, but above all the writhings of these monster serpents, until the whole seemed a thing of life, a something which grew and expanded every moment, and was almost fearful to look upon. Filling the centre of the chapel was a circular marble wall breast-high. Do you remember, in going to the old Senate chamber at Washington, after passing through the rotunda, the great marble well-curb down which you could look into the room below? This was like that, only more vast. Over it leaned a hundred people, at least, gazing down upon what? A circular, roofless room, a crypt to hold a tomb; each pillar around its circumference was the colossal figure of a woman; between these hung the tattered tri-colors borne in many a fierce conflict, beneath the burning suns of Egypt and over the dreary snows of Russia, with seventy colors captured from the enemies of France. A wreath of laurel in the mosaic floor surrounded the names Austerlitz, Marengo, Friedland, Jena, Wagram, Moscow, and Pyramids, and in the centre rose the sarcophagus of Finland granite, prepared to hold the body of him whose ambition knew no bounds. The letter N upon one polished side was the only inscription it bore. He who wrote his name in blood needed no epitaph. The entrance to this crypt is through bronze doors, behind the altar, and gained by passing under it. On either side stood a colossal figure in bronze; kings they seemed to be, giant kings, in long black robes and with crowns of black upon their heads. One held, upon the black cushion in his hands, a crown of gold and a golden sword; the other, a globe crowned with a cross and a golden sceptre. They were so grand, and dark, and still, they gazed upon us so fixedly from out their great, grave eyes, that I felt a chill in all my bones. They guard his tomb. They hold his sword and sceptre while he sleeps. I almost expected the great doors to swing open at the touch of his hand, and to see him come forth. Over these doors were his own words: "I desire that my ashes may repose upon the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people I have loved so well." On either side, as we came out, we read upon the tombs the names of Bertrand and Duroc,—faithful in death! We wondered idly whose remains were guarded in the simple tomb near the door. It was surrounded by an iron railing, and bore no inscription. Who can it be, we said, that is nameless here among the brave? Little did we imagine at the time that here rested the body of the great Napoleon, as it was brought from St. Helena; but his spirit seemed to pervade the very atmosphere, and we came out into the gloom of the day as though we had, indeed, come from the presence of the dead.
CHAPTER VII.
SIGHTS IN THE BEAUTIFUL CITY.
The Gobelin tapestry.—How and where it is made.—Père la-Chaise.—Poor Rachel!—The baby establishment.—"Now I lay me."—The little mother.—The old woman who lived in a shoe.—The American chapel.—Beautiful women and children.—The last conference-meeting.—"I'm a proof-reader, I am."
BY no means least among the places of interest in Paris is the manufactory of the Gobelin tapestry which serves to adorn the walls of the palace salons. O, these long, tiresome salons, which must be visited, though your head is ready to burst with seeing, your feet to drop off with sliding and slipping over the polished floors. The wicked stand upon slippery places, and nothing so convinced us of the demoralizing effect of foreign travel as our growing ability to do the same. When you have seen one or two, you have seen all. There may be degrees in gorgeous splendor, but we were filled with all the appropriate and now-forgotten emotions at sight of the first, and one cannot be more than full. Many of the old palace apartments are dull and dingy beyond belief, by no means the marble halls of our dreams; but of the others let me say something once for all. Under your feet is the treacherous, bare floor of dark wood, laid in diamonds, squares, &c.; over your head, exquisite frescoes of gods and goddesses, and all manner of unearthly and impossible beings enveloped in clouds by the bale,—usually an apotheosis of some king or queen, or both, and, as a rule, of the most wicked known at that time. The Medici were especially glorified and raised above the flesh,—and they had need to be. On every side pictures in Gobelin tapestry, framed into the walls, often so large as to cover the entire space from corner to corner, from cornice to within a few feet of the floor, and in this latter space doors, formed of a panel sometimes, for the entrance and egress of servants. Imagine, with all this, the gilt, and stucco, and wood-carving; the flowers, and arabesques, and entwined initials; the massive chandeliers, with glittering pendants; the mantels of rare marbles, of porphyry, and malachite; the cabinets, and tables, and escritoires of marqueterie and mosaic; the gilded chairs, stiff and stark, richly covered; the bronzes, vases, and curious clocks: and over all the air of having never been used from all time, and of continuing to be a bare show to all eternity,—and you have a faint conception of the salons of half the palaces.