A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

GIOVANNA TORNABUONI AND THE CARDINAL VIRTUES
BOTTICELLI. FRESCO FROM THE VILLA LEMMI
(Louvre)

The Conciergerie had many other prisoners, but none so illustrious. Robespierre occupied for twenty-four hours the little cell adjoining that of the Queen, now the vestry of the chapel. Madame Du Barry and Madame Récamier had cells adjacent to that of Madame Roland. Later Maréchal Ney was imprisoned here. The oldest part of all—the kitchens of Saint Louis—are not shown.

The Pont au Change, the bridge which connects the Place du Châtelet with the Boulevard du Palais, the main street of the Ile de la Cité, was once (as the Ponte Vecchio at Florence still is) the headquarters of goldsmiths and small bankers. Not the least of the losses that civilisation and rebuilders have brought upon us is the disappearance of the shops and houses from the bridges. Old London Bridge—how one regrets that!

At the corner of the Conciergerie is the Horloge that gives the Quai its name—a floridly decorated clock which by no means conveys the impression that it has kept time for over five hundred years and is the oldest exposed time-piece in France. Paris, by the way, is very poor in public clocks, and those that she has are not too trustworthy. The one over the Gare St. Lazare has perhaps the best reputation; but time in Paris is not of any great importance. For most Parisians there is an inner clock which strikes with perfect regularity at about twelve and seven, and no other hours really matter. And yet a certain show of marking time is made in the hotels, where every room has an elaborate ormolu clock, usually under a glass case and rarely going. And in one hotel I remember a large clock on every landing, of which I passed three on my way upstairs; and their testimony was so various that it was two hours later by each, so that by the time I had reached my room it was nearly time to get up. On asking the waiter the reason he said it was because they were synchronised by electricity.

There has been a Tour de l'Horloge at this corner of the Conciergerie ever since it was ordained by Philippe le Bel in 1299; the present clock, or at least its scheme of decoration, dates, however, from Henri III.'s reign, about 1585. The last elaborate restoration was in 1852. In the tower above was a bell that was rung only on rare occasions. The usual accounts of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew say that the signal for that outrage was sounded by the bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois; but others give it to the bell of the Tour de l'Horloge. As they are some distance from each other, perhaps both were concerned; but since St. Germain l'Auxerrois is close to the Louvre, where the King was waiting for the carnage to begin, it is probable that it rang the first notes.

One of Méryon's most impressive and powerful etchings represents the Tour de l'Horloge and the façade of the Conciergerie. It is a typical example of his strange and gloomy genius, for while it is nothing else in the world but what it purports to be, it is also quite unlike the Tour de l'Horloge and the façade of the Conciergerie as any ordinary eyes have seen them. They are made terrible and sinister: they have been passed through the dark crucible of Méryon's mind. To see Paris as Méryon saw it needs a great effort of imagination, so swiftly and instinctively do these people remove the traces of unhappiness or disaster. It is the nature of Paris to smile and to forget; from any lapse into woe she recovers with extraordinary rapidity.

Méryon's Paris glowers and shudders; there is blood on her hands and guilt in her heart. I will not say that his concept is untrue, because I believe that the concept formed by a man of genius is always true, although it may not contain all the truth, and indeed one has to recall very little history to fall easily into Méryon's mood; but for the visitor who has chosen Paris for his holiday—the typical reader, for example, of this book—Mr. Dexter's concept of Paris is a more natural one. (I wish, by the way, before it is too late, that Mr. Muirhead Bone would devote some time to the older parts of the city—particularly to the Marais. How it lies to his hand!)

Since we are at the gates of the Palais de Justice let us spend a little time among the advocates and their clients in the great hall—the Salle des Pas Perdus. (In an interesting work, by the way, on this building, with a preface by the younger Dumas, the amendment, "La Salle du temps perdu" is recommended.) The French law courts, as a whole, are little different from our own: they have the same stuffiness, they give the same impression of being divided between the initiated and the uninitiated, the little secret society of the Bar and the great innocent world. But the Salle des Pas Perdus is another thing altogether. There is nothing like that in the Strand. Our Strand counsel are a dignified, clean-shaven, be-wigged race, striving to appear old and inscrutable and important. They are careful of appearances; they receive instructions only through solicitors; they affect to weigh their words; sagacious reserve is their fetish. Hence our law courts, although there are many consultations and incessant passings to and fro, are yet subdued in tone and overawing to the talkative.

But the Palais de Justice!—Babel was inaudible beside it. In the Palais de Justice everyone talks at once; no one cares a sou for appearances or reticence; there are no wigs, no shorn lips, no affectation of a superhuman knowledge of the world. The French advocate comes into direct communication with his client—for the most part here. The movement as well as the vociferation is incessant, for out of this great hall open as many doors as there are in a French farce, and every door is continually swinging. Indeed that is the chief effect conveyed: that one is watching a farce, since there has never been a farce yet without a legal gentleman in his robes and black velvet cap. The chief difference is that here there are hundreds of them. As a final touch of humour, or lack of gravity, I may add that notices forbidding smoking are numerous, and every advocate and every client is puffing hard at his cigarette.

Victor Hugo's Notre Dame begins, it will be remembered, in the great Hall of the Palais de Justice, where Gringoire's neglected mystery play was performed and Quasimodo won the prize for ugliness. The Hall, as Hugo says, was burned in 1618: by a fire which, he tells us, was made necessary by the presence in the archives of the Palais of the documents in the case of the assassination of Henri IV. by Ravaillac. Certain of Ravaillac's accomplices and instigators wishing these papers to disappear, the fire followed as a matter of course, as naturally as in China a house had to be burned down before there could be roast pig.