A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

There are a few works of art here too, as well as topographical drawings. Georges Michel, for example, who looked on landscape much as Méryon looked on architecture and preferred a threatening sky to a sunny one, has a prospect from the Plaine St. Denis. Vollon paints the Moulin de la Galette on Montmartre as it was in 1865; Troyon spreads out St. Cloud. Here also are a charming portrait by Chardin of his second wife; the well-known picture of David's Life School; drawings by Watteau; an adorable unsigned "Marchand de Lingerie"; an enchanting leg on a blue pillow by Boucher; a portrait by Prud'hon of an unknown man, very striking; and some exquisite work by Louis Boilly.

PORTRAIT DE JEUNE HOMME
ATTRIBUTED TO BIGIO
(Louvre)

The Musée is strong in Henri IV. and the later Louis, but it is of course in relics of the Revolution and Napoleon that the interest centres. A casquette of Liberty; the handle of Marat's bathroom; a portrait of "La Veuve Capet" in the Conciergerie, in the room that we have seen; a painted life-mask of Voltaire, very horrible, and the armchair in which he died; a copy of the constitution of 1793 bound in the skin of a man; Marat's snuff-box; Madame Roland as a sweet and happy child,—these I remember in particular.

Latude is, however, the popular figure—Latude the prisoner of the Bastille who escaped by means of implements which he made secretly and which are now preserved here, near a portrait of the enfranchised gentleman, robust, portly and triumphant, pointing with one hand to his late prison while the other grasps the rope ladder. Latude's history is an odd one. He was born in 1725, the natural son of a poor girl: after accompanying the army in Languedoc as a surgeon, or surgeon's assistant, he reached Paris in 1748 and proceeded to starve. In despair he hit upon an ingenious trick, which wanted nothing but success to have made him. He prepared an infernal machine of infinitesimal aptitude—a contrivance of practically harmless but perhaps somewhat alarming explosives—and this he sent anonymously to the Marquise de Pompadour, and then immediately after waited upon her in person at Versailles to say that he had overheard some men plotting to destroy her by means of this kind of a bomb, and he had come post-haste to warn her and save her life. It was a good story, but Latude seems to have lacked some necessary gifts as an impostor, for his own share was detected and he was thrown into the Bastille on the 1st of May, 1749. A few weeks later he was transferred to the prison at Vincennes, from which he escaped in 1750. A month later he was retaken and again placed in the Bastille, from which he escaped six years later. He got away to Holland, but was quickly recaptured; and then again he escaped, after nine more years. He was then treated as a lunatic and put into confinement at Charenton, but was discharged in 1777. His liberty, however, seems to have been of little use to him, and he rapidly qualified for gaol again by breaking into a house and threatening its owner, a woman, with a pistol, and he was imprisoned once more. Altogether he was under lock and key for the greater part of thirty-five years; but once he was free in 1784 he kept his head, and not only remained free but became a popular hero, and did not a little, by reason of a heightened account of his sufferings under despotic prison rule, to inflame the revolutionaries. These memoirs, by the way, in the preparation of which he was assisted by an advocate named Thiery, were for the most part untruthful, and not least so in those passages in which Latude described his own innocence and ideals. Our own canonised prison-breaker, Jack Sheppard, was a better hero than this man.

The little room devoted to Napoleon is filled with an intimate melancholy. Many personal relics are here—even to a toothbrush dipped in a red powder. His nécessaires de campagne so compactly arranged illustrate the minute orderliness of his mind, and the workmanship of the travelling cases that hold them proves once again his thoroughness and taste. Everything had to be right. One of his maps of la campagne de Prusse is here; others we shall see at the Invalides.

The relics of Madame de Sévigné, who once lived in this beautiful house, are not very numerous; but they exercise their spell. Her salon is very much as she left it, except that the private staircase has disappeared and a china closet takes its place. Within these walls have La Rochefoucauld and Bossuet conversed; here she sat, pen in hand, writing her immortal letters. "Lisons tout Madame de Sévigné" was the advice of Sainte-Beuve, while her most illustrious English admirer, Edward FitzGerald, often quotes her. He came to her late, not till 1875, but she never loosened her hold. "I have this Summer," he wrote to Mrs. W. H. Thompson, "made the Acquaintance of a great Lady, with whom I have become perfectly intimate, through her Letters, Madame de Sévigné. I had hitherto kept aloof from her, because of that eternal Daughter of hers; but 'it's all Truth and Daylight,' as Kitty Clive said of Mrs. Siddons. Her Letters from Brittany are best of all, not those from Paris, for she loved the Country, dear Creature; and now I want to go and visit her 'Rochers,' but never shall." "I sometimes lament," he says (to Mrs. Cowell), "I did not know her before; but perhaps such an acquaintance comes in best to cheer one toward the end." With these pleasant praises in our ears let us leave the Carnavalet.

The Rue de Sévigné itself has many interesting houses, notably on the south side of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois; No. 11, for example, was once a theatre, built by Beaumarchais in 1790. That is nothing; the interesting thing is that he built it of material from the destroyed Bastille and the destroyed church of St. Paul. The fire station close by was once the Hôtel de Perron de Quincy. It was in this street, on the day of the Fête Dieu in 1392, that the Constable de Clisson, whose house we saw in the Rue des Archives, was attacked by Pierre de Craon.

The Rue des Francs Bourgeois is the highway of the Marais, and the Carnavalet is its greatest possession; but, as I have said, the Marais is inexhaustible in architectural and historical riches. We may work our way through it, back to the Rue du Temple by any of these ancient streets; all will repay. The Rue du Temple extends to the Rue de Rivoli, striking it just by the Hôtel de Ville, but the lower portion, south of the Rue Rambuteau, is not so interesting as the upper. There is, however, to the west of it, just north of the Rue de Rivoli, a system of old streets hardly less picturesque (and sometimes even more so) than the Marais proper, in the centre of which is the church of St. Merry, with one of the most wonderful west fronts anywhere—a mass of rich and eccentric decoration. The Saint himself was Abbot of Autun. He came to Paris in the seventh century to visit the shrines of St. Denis and St. Germain. At that time the district which we are now traversing was chiefly forest, in which the kings of France would hunt, leaving their palace in the Ile de la Cité and crossing the river to this wild district—wild though so near. St. Merry established himself in his simple way near a little chapel in the woods, dedicated to St. Peter, that stood on this spot, and there he died. After his death his tomb in the chapel performed such miracles that St. Peter was forgotten and St. Merry was exalted, and when the time came to rebuild, St. Merry ousted St. Peter altogether.