A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

But the Morgue is now closed to idle gazers, and you win your way to a sight of that melancholy slab with the weary bodies on it and the little jet of water playing on each, only by the extreme course of having missed a relation whom you suspected of designs upon his own life or whom you imagine has been the victim of foul play. No doubt the authorities were well advised (as French municipal authorities nearly always are) in closing the Morgue; but I think I regret it. The impulse to drift into that low and sinister building behind Notre Dame was partly morbid, no doubt; but the ordinary man sees not only too little death, but is too seldom in the presence of such failure as for the most part governs here: so that the opportunity it gave was good.

I still recall very vividly, in spite of all the millions of living faces that should, one feels, have blurred one's prosperous vision, several of the dead faces that lay behind the glass of this forlorn side-show of the great entertainment which we call Paris. An old man with a white imperial; more than one woman of that dreadful middle-age which the Seine has so often terminated; a young man who had been stabbed.... Well, the Morgue is closed to the public now, and very likely no one who reads this book will ever enter it.

The Ile St. Louis, to put it bluntly, is just as commonplace as the Ile de la Cité is imposing. It has a monotony very rare in the older parts of Paris: it is all white houses that have become dingy: houses that once were attractive and wealthy and are now squalid. One of the largest of the old palaces is to-day a garage; there is not a single house now occupied by the kind of tenant for which it was intended. Such declensions are always rather melancholy, even when—as, for example, at Villeneuve, near Avignon—there is the beauty of decay too. But on the Ile St. Louis there is no beauty: it belongs to a dull period of architecture and is now duller for its dirt. Standing on the Quai d'Orléans, however, one catches Notre Dame against the evening sky, across the river, as nowhere else, and it is necessary to seek the Ile if only to appreciate the fitness of the Morgue's position.

The island was first called L'Ile Notre Dame, and was uninhabited until 1614. It was then developed and joined to the Ile de la Cité and the mainland by bridges. The chief street is the Rue St. Louis, at No. 3 in which lived Fénélon. The church of St. Louis is interesting for a relic of the unfortunate Louise de la Vallière. At No. 17 on the Quai d'Anjou is the Hôtel Lauzun, which the city of Paris has now acquired, and in which once lived together for a while the authors of Mademoiselle de Maupin and Les Fleurs de Mal.

Of Saint Louis, or Louis IX., who gives his name to this island, and whose hand is so visible in the Ile de la Cité, it is right to know something, for he was the father of Paris. Louis was born in 1215, the year of Magna Charta, and succeeded to the throne while still a boy. The early years of his reign were restless by reason of civil strife and war with England, in which he was victor (at Tailleburg, at Saintes and at Blaize), and then came his departure for the Holy Land, with 40,000 men, in fulfilment of a vow made rashly on a sick-bed. The King was blessed at Notre Dame, as we have seen, and departed in 1248, leaving his mother Blanche de Castile as regent. But the Crusade was a failure, and he was glad to return (with only the ghost of his army) and to settle down for the first time seriously to the cares of his throne.

He was a good if prejudiced king: he built wisely and well, not only Sainte Chapelle, as we have seen, but the Sorbonne; he devised useful statutes; he established police in Paris; and, more perhaps than all, he made Frenchmen very proud of France. So much for his administrative virtues. When we come to his saintliness I would stand aside, for is he not in The Golden Legend? Listen to William Caxton: "He forced himself to serve his spirit by diverse castigation or chastising, he used the hair many times next his flesh, and when he left it for cause of over feebleness of his body, at the instance of his own confessor, he ordained the said confessor to give to the poor folk, as for recompensation of every day that he failed of it, forty shillings. He fasted always the Friday, and namely in time of lent and advent he abstained him in those days from all manner of fish and from fruits, and continually travailed and pained his body by watchings, orisons, and other secret abstinences and disciplines. Humility, beauty of all virtues, replenished so strong in him, that the more better he waxed, so, as David, the more he showed himself meek and humble, and more foul he reputed him before God.

"For he was accustomed on every Saturday to wash with his own hands, in a secret place, the feet of some poor folk, and after dried them with a fair towel, and kissed much humbly and semblably their hands, distributing or dealing to every one of them a certain sum of silver, also to seven score poor men which daily came to his court, he administered meat and drink with his own hands, and were fed abundantly on the vigils solemn. And on some certain days in the year to two hundred poor, before that he ate or drank, he with his own hands administered and served them both of meat and drink. He ever had, both at his dinner and supper, three ancient poor, which ate nigh to him, to whom he charitably sent of such meats as were brought before him, and sometimes the dishes and meats that the poor of our Lord had touched with their hands, and special the sops of which he fain ate, made their remnant or relief to be brought before him, to the end that he should eat it; and yet again to honour and worship the name of our Lord on the poor folk, he was not ashamed to eat their relief."

Qualities have their defects, and such a frame of mind as that can lead, for all the good motive, to injustice and even cruelty. Christ's lesson of the Roman coin is forgotten as quickly as any. Louis' passion for holiness, which became a kind of self-indulgence, led him into a hard and ugly intolerance and acts of severe oppression against those whom he styled heretics. His short way with the Jews recalled indeed those of our own King John, who was very nearly his contemporary. I know not if he pulled out their teeth, but he once did what must have been as bad, if not worse, for he published an ordinance "for the good of his soul," remitting to his Christian subjects the third of their debts to the Jews; and he also expressed it as his opinion that "a layman ought not to dispute with an unbeliever, but strike him with a good sword across the body," the most practical expression of muscular sectarianism that I know. Louis' religious fanaticism was, however, his end; for he was so ill-advised as to undertake a new Crusade against the unbelievers of Morocco, and there, while laying siege to Tunis, he died of the plague. That was in 1270, when he was only fifty-five.