And here they lived as nearly as possible the life of the French home. Abandoning soon the hearty American breakfast, the student learned that the brain worked well during the morning hours on its cup of coffee and its share,—a yard if you like, for bread can be bought by the yard—of bread. And away out here in Passy they found their servant, the good old woman who owned the house, yet waited upon them with her own hands, had not yet learned the trick of the hotels and cafés frequented by foreigners, but still gave them coffee such as we read about as found in Paris in “ye olden time.” In common with nearly all French families, she frequented every morning the coffee-shops scattered at convenient distances throughout the whole city, and selected her coffee in just the quantity required for the day, from the freshly-roasted mass, and saw it ground and mixed before her eyes. The custom is to combine three kinds of coffee—one for strength, and two for flavor, for the morning use. Then it is neither smoked, drenched nor boiled until the result is an injurious decoction, but, placed in its perforated cup, just boiling water enough is poured upon it to swell every grain and force it to yield up its delicious first aroma; then again and again is the bath repeated, until a half a teacupful will be all the coffee prepared for a household. Now, to a tablespoonful or two of this beverage she adds a cup of milk, heated almost to a boiling point, and the liquid is fit for a king. Quite another affair is the café noir, made usually by boiling the residue of the breakfast coffee, and religiously let alone by the occupants of many French homes. Out of doors, after coffee, for two or three good hours of work in museums, and galleries, and palaces, and churches, and streets, wherever the city offered anything to be enjoyed or learned, and then back to breakfast at twelve o’clock in the day, a meal of meats and vegetables, salads and sweets,—a dinner really in all but soup and a name. Dinner at six, cooked by the owner of the rooms, served by her daughter, a black-eyed, tidy girl of seventeen, comprised the menu of the home. This was varied by an occasional raid upon the American gingerbread at the bakery of the Boulevard Malesherbes, or a visit to restaurants, where, at any price from thirty cents to a dollar and a half, according to location and appointments, one can be sure of a dinner, appetizing, clean, well-served, abundant, and so, whether one sits under the arches of the old historic Palais Royale, and takes history with his soup, and blends the gay kaleidoscopic throng before his eyes with the throngs that have filled the court in other days, or chooses his seat under the gilt and crystal of the glittering Boulevard des Italians, or boards at a pension at ten francs a day, and finds himself in a mitigated American boarding-house, where he puts a sou in the charity plate as a forfeit for every word of English spoken, or runs around in the Rue Neuve de Petit Champs, and consoles his patriotism by fish-balls and buckwheat cakes, or lets some kind, shrewd old woman buy and cook his chop, piously pilfering regularly her two sous a pound, there is no need to go hungry in Paris. Alas, that so much can not be said for the poorer classes of Parisians themselves, the laborers under whose lack of bread wrongs long suffered have so often ripened to revolutions. Let no one suppose the stimulating coffee, daintily prepared, is the drink of the laboring man of France. Happy is he who gets it once a week, and the common food on which the laborer works is soup, in which the meat is ordinarily scant enough, and the bread,—of which he can not always take as much as he would like and leave a portion of the loaf for the little ones at home;—a piece of bread with a bit of sausage, when he can afford it, makes the meal that marks the noonday pause in labor, and gives the more fortunate his dejeuner a la fourchette. In no city in the world is there more destitution than in Paris among the unfortunate and the deserving poor. The surface of its social life is kept so whitened that one forgets that it is like the sepulcher of Holy Writ. Only now and then, on some grand holiday, when misery may seem only a farce, only a fantastic spectacle in a pageant, is squalor’s want and beggary allowed to see the light. At all other times, the beggar’s hand must hold something to sell, and the reality of want be treated as if it were sham, and crime be made to feel ashamed of nothing but the day. With the slow-coming change in public opinion, on all questions of philanthropy and morals, with the slow-coming emancipation of education, with the slow-coming freedom from priestcraft and the growth of true religious sentiment in France, there must dawn a brighter day for the masses, those enormous majorities who make the under strata of the nation’s life. That it is volcanic strata, with a heart of fire that now and then heaves with its gigantic throbs the upper world, and sends forth the low rumble of suppressed lava-floods and the dull smoke of threatening revolution, is no marvel to any student of the past history and present social and moral and political conditions of France.
But it is not in these undercurrents that control national destiny that we can afford to drift our little tourist bark. What ought to be done, one can but vaguely feel; of what is being done, one may have a faint glimpse who will follow the history of the Protestant movement, and make himself acquainted with the missions in the city of Paris alone. I doubt if it would do to take our quartette too near the heart of this work, since some of them, at least, would never be willing to come away. And we can never let them leave Paris without a sight of the wonders that everybody sees. From Passy they make daily their entree into the city by the Avenue de la Grande Armee, and pass under the great Arc de Triomphe, that stands, the largest triumphal arch in the world, in the center of the beautiful Place de l’Etoile, from which branch like the points to a star the new beautiful avenues cut by Napoleon III in every direction, straight through miles of the most populous portions of the city. Climb the arch, a massive pile of stone larger than our largest churches, and let the eye run down the star-points. Here on the right is the most beautiful of all, the Avenue de l’Imperatrice, over three hundred feet wide, and extending to the Bois de Boulogne, the Central Park of Paris. Down this drive on any Saturday morning one may see many a cab containing a groom and bride of humble station, she in her white dress and orange wreath, going out to spend the wedding day walking and talking, and feasting at one of the many restaurants in the beautiful wood. A little earlier in the day, in the Madelaine, one might see the marriage ceremony performed. Our travelers chanced on one sunny morning to find a bride and groom before one altar, a coffin in the aisle, while at the font a priest was baptising a little child. Down this avenue to the Bois, all the finest equipages of the pleasure-lovers of Paris drift every day, and especially every Sunday. On Sunday occur the races and the military reviews. In the mornings the churches are thinly peopled with worshippers, principally women; in the afternoon the city is alive with pleasure seekers of every class. Yet let no one imagine Paris given to pleasure to be what New York or Chicago under the same conditions might be—noisy, uproarious, or rude. Everybody on the brilliant, crowded boulevards, in the Bois, all down the whole length of the Champs Elysees, is decorous, moderate, well dressed and well behaved. The whirligigs laden with little children whirl softly; even Punch and Judy, never-failing delight of childhood, are not too noisy in their quarrels. The cabmen drowse on their boxes, the horses go at a slow and steady jog. On the sidewalks the people sip their ices or their soda. There is animation, vivacity, but no rush or scramble or haste such as marks not only our work-a-day; but our holiday life. It is on the boulevards and the Champs Elysees that French leisure and pleasure may be seen at their best.
This wonderful Champs Elysees lies before one who stands at the Place de l’Etoile, in its whole length of more than two miles from the Arc de Triomphe to the beautiful Tuilleries gardens. In the daytime it is all foliage and sunshine and brightness; at night the gas-lights glitter in unbroken chains from tree to tree. From one end we can see the fountains play at the other, as they sparkle all day in the square by the old Egyptian obelisk, that marks the place of the guillotine, the memory of which changes all the brightness to gloom in the space of a single thought. Beyond, the half-ruined piles of the Tuilleries palace stand up gray and grim, as if they had not yet recovered from the astonishment and shock of their blows. Further still rise the palace and gallery of the Louvre, which some one has aptly called “the first and last fascination of Paris.” We would make the fascinations plural, and include the Luxembourg gallery, which, though smaller, holds no second place in the Parisian world of art. Let no one fancy our tourists saw the Louvre in a day, or can write of it in a paragraph. What one finds there depends on what one carries in of technical knowledge, in intelligent apprehension, in sympathetic insight and appreciation. Words are not the medium for the description of pictures, or for the transmission of the sense of beauty. One should go to the Louvre once, at least, thinking of the building only. Remember that if it and the adjoining Tuilleries palace were extended their full length along the Seine, we should walk a mile to pass them. Once within, and relieved of our umbrellas, lest we forget ourselves and inadvertently “poke” some antique marble warrior, or try the point upon some crumbling mummy, we climb innumerable stairs and walk over acres of slippery, polished floors, and through rooms heavy with gilded decoration, burdened with every adornment that wealth or taste could devise. The lower floors are devoted to libraries, to Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek museums, and the upper to room after room of paintings, where one wanders at first aimless and bewildered, like a child whose Christmas riches leave it unknowing what first to enjoy. One or two sauntering visits like this, and the great pictures begin to come out from the mass, and we know which are those which belong to us by some subtle power of entering into their significance which we feel, but can not define. Then one by one they begin to lay a touch upon us, and draw us back again and again, for just one other look. How, after a little, our eyes let go, as our souls do also, of nine-tenths of the pictures, those with which we have been able to establish no line of communication, which may be, and are, doubtless, fine, only they are not for us. Then how we yield ourselves to the touch of those that have reached us through their greatness, that could not be resisted. Then we feel the pathos of Triosa’s “Burial,” and the passion of despair in the writhing forms and agonized faces of his “Deluge.” Then we feel the strength in the masterpieces of David, and the exquisite delicacy and suffering and resolve in the “Ecce Homo” of Guido. Here Raphael’s genius shines upon us in the seraphic sweetness of the “Holy Family,” and Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” with its beauty of form and richness of color, and marvelous vigor of conception. And here is the mysterious, half-triumphant, half-timid, grace and beauty of “The Conception,” by Murillo. The longer one lingers, the more one dreads to hear the voice of the guard who calls out the time to close, and when the spell is fairly on one who loves art, he will pass from Louvre to Luxembourg, and back again from Luxembourg to Louvre, unheeding the great, gay, bustling world that is surging up and down between. At the smaller gallery, modern art and living artists are better represented than at the Louvre. Look here for De la Roche and Rosa Bonheur, and if the horrors of the French Revolution are not already coming up too often, as you pass about the city, dwell upon the anguished faces of the prisoners in the picture called “The Night Before Execution,” and I can promise you an afternight of troubled sleep. How gladly one turns from its horrors to the calm, sad strength in the face of the Christ in Ary Scheffer’s “Temptation,” rejoicing in the grand expression the artist has given to the power before which ultimately shall shrink back all the pain of the world, all the horrors and shames of sin. Between the thick walls of her silent galleries, and in the hushed air of her churches, one who had time could find a wealth of association, historical and other, that would enrich weeks spent in their examination alone.
But we cannot see all, and we can linger in but very few. We must go to the Hotel des Invalides, under whose dome lie in solemn splendor the remains of Napoleon I. We must stand for a moment, at least, in the spots made interesting by associations with history that can never be forgotten. Who would not go out of his way, for example, to hear for a few strokes the bell of St. Germain L’Auxerrois, when he remembers that it gave the midnight signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew? Who would not seek his opportunities to sit for a while under the towers of Notre Dame, or behind the porches of the Madelaine, or to rest in the rustic chapel behind the high altar of St. Roche? Here, as they should be everywhere, the churches are open all day long. The busy mother of a family on her way to market, may come in and, dropping her basket on the floor, kneel and pray for patience and strength for her round of common care. The world-weary soul may creep into the shadow of some high column, or kneel at some dim altar, and find the rest he craves. It is, at least, a spot to escape for a while into blessed stillness from the wearing turmoil of the world, and forgetting the papal altars, and the tinsel, and the gaudy images of the Virgin, and caricatures of angels, and remembering the great sea of human sin and sorrow surging forever beyond, the stranger can but be glad that the gates stand open wide.
Little time have we to linger in the most interesting, but we must surely go out to the church of St. Denis and see where, for thirteen hundred years, France has laid her royal dead. It is a drive of only five miles, and that is only a fair walk for some of our number, who would enjoy walking it every step alone, and calling up out of the past a procession of priests and courtiers bearing a dead king to his rest. Alas, that so many of them blessed France on the day they were borne to St. Denis more than in all their long, luxurious lives.
And to St. Denis is not the only little excursion that must be made from Paris. We cannot turn our faces southward without having visited Fontainebleau, and having had at least a long bright day in the palace of Versailles.
For the former excursion, only thirty-five miles from Paris, a day may be taken, though a charming little hotel outside the wood will tempt one to linger for a night, and thus secure an uninterrupted day for visiting the palace, strolling about the grounds, or driving in the charming roads through the forest.
The entire nine hundred apartments of the palace are not open for inspection, but at twelve o’clock daily a guide gathers up the waiting visitors and drives them like a flock of sheep through the apartments, many of them beautiful and sumptuous in adornment, and some neglected and forlorn. We entered by the Court of the White Horse, or the Court of Adieux, as it has been called since the time when Napoleon I there bade farewell to the remnant of his old guard before his departure for Elba. His bed-room, said to be in the same state as when he left it, and the table on which he signed his abdication, naturally claim the attention of all strollers through these halls. Within there is the jargon of the chattering people, who feel of the draperies as they pass warily over the slippery floors, the autocratic twang of the guide who means to hold us to his story until he gets us safely through and out at the door with our francs snugly stored away in his pocket. Outside there are lovely gardens and grounds, but cabmen beset us to drive in the forest, and once there, produce a new waterfall, or a high rock, or a rustic bridge, anything, everything, that a sixty-mile forest can afford for which a pour boire can be extracted. On the whole, we are ready on the second afternoon to return to Paris, and equally ready on the very next day to take the train for Versailles. It is only a little journey; we are there almost before we seem started, and in company with many other strangers, a few French families out for a day’s holiday, and many earnest talking deputies en route to the Assembly, we go up in the omnibus through the town, which now fairly hugs the palace gates, to the entrance of the great court, and before us lies the enormous but not imposing pile of the Palace of Versailles. Everybody who has never seen it knows it through pictures. We need not even quote the guide-books, and say that the great palace is over a quarter of a mile long, and cost France in money two hundred millions of dollars, to say nothing of what it cost in after-suffering to the nation and to the descendants of the king who built it as a magnificent monument to his vanity and ambition. We all know what part the Revolution played in it, and also that no government since the Revolution could take the enormous expense of using it as a royal residence. Hence, in the time of Louis Phillipe it became a grand museum, and to-day the visitor, after exhausting himself in the effort to traverse some of the miles of walks to see the grounds, traverses miles of corridors and apartments lined with pictures, principally of French battles, and dedicated to all the glories of France. To Marie Antoinette the place of most tragic interest, to Louis Phillipe and Louis Napoleon it was simply a museum, and to France it has come to be, after the humiliation of seeing the German emperor encamped here, the seat of her new government and the stronghold of the power of the Republic.
The place of meeting of the National Assembly is in the former theater of the palace, and if one is so fortunate as to have a friend among the deputies, there is no difficulty in securing admission to any session. Ordinarily, guests are shown to boxes, from which they can look down upon the seven hundred representative men of France. The President’s seat is at one end of the hall, with before him a tribune, or platform, from which the deputies speak. On the right of the speaker are the Royalists, including Legitimists, Orleanists, and Imperialists, and on the left the Republicans. Besides these two grand divisions, there are the minor divisions of the Right and Left Center, the former wishing a constitutional monarchy, and the latter a conservative republic. One should visit the Assembly more than once to bring away anything beyond a confused sense of much animated gesticulation, violent discussion, often rising into a frenzy of speech and movement only equalled by the excitement of the Bourse. Calm talk grows to an apparent tempest of speech, for which there is no control, until it subsides of itself. Those familiar with emotional French manner will tell us that it all means nothing serious; that, notwithstanding this turmoil, all important questions are calmly discussed in party councils before they are submitted to public debate, and that the excitement is only the natural outlet of irrepressible human nature as it exists in sunny France. And it matters little with what petty bluster or serious throes she does it, if, out of her agitations, the nation comes, as she seems to be slowly doing, into larger light and truer liberty, into the grand freedom of self-control. Once there, revolutions will cease to be chronic, and regeneration, begun in the governmental center, may permeate the spiritual and intellectual, and ultimately reach even the corruption of the social life. Any influence that tends toward this, however convulsive in its action, must be welcomed by the thinking world. In her transformed palaces and half deserted churches one can but think on these things, forgetting that our business is for the present to observe and not to think. There is small time now for processes of thought, and none for opinions or conclusions. Three-quarters of the globe is before us, and even bewildering, bewitching France must be left behind.
[To be continued.]