An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

by Albert D. Vandam

"I dare say you will find me very provoking, but let me beg of you not to fling so many commas at my head. You are absolutely pelting me with them, as the Romans pelted that poor Tarpeia with their bucklers."

It reminds one of Marguerite Thuillier, who "created Mimi" in Mürger and Barrière's "Vie de Bohème," when Mürger fell in love with her. "I can't do with him," she said to his collaborateur, who pleaded for him,—"I can't do with him; he is too badly dressed, he looks like a scarecrow." Barrière advised his friend to go to a good tailor and have himself rigged out in the latest fashion. The advice was acted upon; Barrière waited anxiously for the effect of the transformation upon the lady's heart. A fortnight elapsed, and poor Mürger was snubbed as usual. Barrière interceded once more. "I can do less with him than before," was the answer; "he is too well dressed, he looks like a tailor's dummy."

To return to M. Guizot, whom, in the course of the whole of our acquaintance, I have only seen once "put out." It was when the fiat went forth that his house was to come down to make room for the new Boulevard Malesherbes. The authorities had been as considerate as possible; they had made no attempt to treat the eminent historian as a simple owner of house-property fighting to get the utmost value; they offered him three hundred thousand francs, and M. Guizot himself acknowledged that the sum was a handsome one. "But I have got thirty thousand volumes to remove, besides my notes and manuscripts," he wailed. Then his good temper got the better of him, and he had a "sly dig" at his former adversary, Adolphe Thiers. "Serves me right for having so many books; happy the historian who prefers to trust to his imagination."

M. Guizot made up his mind to have his library removed to Val-Richer and never to live in Paris again; but his children and friends prevailed upon him not to forsake society altogether, and to take a modest apartment near his old domicile, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, opposite the English embassy, which, however, in those days had not the monumental aspect it has at present.

"It is doubtful," said M. Guizot afterwards to me, "whether the idea of living in the country would have ever entered my mind ten or fifteen years ago. At that time, I would not have gone a couple of miles to see the most magnificent bit of natural scenery: I should have gone a thousand to see a man of talent."

And, in fact, up till 1830, when he was nearly forty-four, he had never seen the sea, "And if it had not been for an electoral journey to Normandy, I might not have seen it then." I pointed out to him that M. Thiers had never had a country house; that he did not seem to care for nature, for birds, or for flowers.

"Ah, that's different," he smiled. "I did not care much about the country, because I had never seen any of it. Thiers does not like it, because the birds, the flowers, the trees, live and grow without his interference, and he does not care that anything on earth should happen without his having a hand in it."

Thiers was the only man at whom M. Guizot tilted in that way. Though brought up in strict Protestant, one might almost say Calvinistic principles, he was an ardent admirer of Roman Catholicism, which he called "the most admirable school of respect in the world." No man had suffered more from the excesses of the first Revolution, seeing that his father perished on the scaffold, yet I should not like to say that he was not somewhat of a republican at heart, but not of a republic "which begins with Plato and necessarily ends with a gendarme." "The republic of '48," he used to say, "it had not even a Monk, let alone a Washington or a Cromwell; and Louis-Napoléon had to help himself to the throne. And depend upon it, if there had been a Cromwell, he would have crushed it as the English one crushed the monarchy. As for Washington, he would not have meddled with it at all."

"Yes," he said on another occasion, "I am proud of one thing—of the authorship of the law on elementary education; but, proud as I am of it, if I could have foreseen the uses to which it has been put, to which it is likely to be put when I am gone, I would sooner have seen half of the nation unable to distinguish an 'A from a bull's foot,' as your countrymen say."

With Guizot died almost the last French statesman, "who not only thought that he had the privilege to be poor, but who carried the privilege too far;" as some one remarked when he heard the news of his demise. Towards the latter years of his life, he occupied a modest apartment, on the fourth floor, in the Rue Billaut (now the Rue Washington). Well might M. de Falloux exclaim, as he toiled up that staircase, "My respect for him increases with every step I take."