A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

It is not until we enter the great Court of Honour that we catch sight of Napoleon, whose figure dominates the opposite wall. Thereafter one thinks of little else. Louis XIV. disappears.

Passing some dingy frescoes which the weather has treated vilely, we enter the Musée Historique on the left—unless one has an overwhelming passion for artillery, armour and the weapons of savages, in which case one turns to the right. I mention the alternative because there is far too much to see on one visit, and it is well to concentrate on the more interesting. For me guns and armour and the weapons of savages are without any magic while there are to be seen such human relics as have been brought together in the Musée Historique on the opposite side of the Court. The whole place, by the way, is a model for the Carnavalet, in that everything is precisely and clearly labelled. This, since it is a favourite resort of simple folk—soldiers and their parents and sweethearts—is a thoughtful provision.

The Musée Historique has at every turn something profoundly interesting, and incidentally it tells something of the men from whom numbers of Paris streets take their names; but the real and poignant interest is Napoleon. The Longwood room is to me too painful. The project of the admirable administrator has been to illustrate the whole pageant of French arms; but the Man of Destiny quickly becomes all-powerful, and one finds oneself looking only for signs and tokens of his personality. So it should be, under the shadow of the Dome which covers his ashes. I would personally go farther and collect at the Invalides all the Napoleonic relics that one now must visit so many places to see—the Carnavalet, Fontainebleau, the Musée Grévin, our own United Service Museum in Whitehall (as if we had the right to a single article from St. Helena!), Madame Tussaud's, and Versailles. There is even a room at the Arts Décoratifs devoted nominally to Napoleon, but it has few articles of personal interest and none of any intimacy—merely splendid costumes for occasions and ceremonials of State, with a few of Josephine's lace caps among them. Its purpose is to illustrate the Empire rather than the Emperor, but the Invalides should have what there is.

At the Invalides you may, I suppose, see in three or four rooms more Napoleonic relics of a personal character than anywhere else. In Whitehall is the chair he died in; but here is his garden-seat from St. Helena, one bar of which was removed to allow him as he sat to pass his arm through and be more at his ease as he looked out to the ocean that was to do nothing for him. At Whitehall is the skeleton of his horse Marengo; here is the saddle. Here are his grey redingote and more than one of his hats. Among the relics in the special Napoleonic rooms those of his triumph and his fall are mixed. Here is the bullet that wounded him at Ratisbon; here are his telescopes and his maps, his travelling desks and his pistols; here are the toys of the little Duke of Reichstadt; here is the walking stick on which Napoleon leaned at St. Helena, his dressing-gown, his bed, his armchair and his death-mask. Here are the railings of the tomb at St. Helena, and a case of leaves and stones and pieces of wood and other natural surroundings of the same spot. Here also is the pall that covered his coffin on the way to its final burial under the Dome close by.

It is a fitting end to the study of these storied corridors to pass to the tomb of the protagonist of the drama we have been contemplating. The Emperor's remains were brought to Paris in 1840, nineteen years after his death at St. Helena. Thackeray, in his Second Funeral of Napoleon, wrote a vivid, although to my mind hateful, description of the ceremonial: a piece of complacent flippancy, marked by the worst kind of French irreverence, which shows him in his least admirable mood, particularly when he is pleased to be amusing over the difference between the features of the Emperor dead and living. None the less it is an absorbing narrative.

One looks down upon the sarcophagus, which lies in a marble well. It is simple, solemn and severe, and to a few persons, not Titmarshes, inexpressibly melancholy. The Emperor's words from his will, "Je désire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords de la Seine, au milieu de ce peuple français que j'ai tant aimé," are placed at the entrance to the crypt. He had not the Invalides in mind when he wrote them; but one feels that the Invalides is as right a spot for him as any in this land of short memories and light mockeries.

CHAPTER X
THE BOULEVARD ST. GERMAIN AND ITS TRIBUTARIES

An Aristocratic Quarter—Adrienne Lecouvreur—A Grisly Museum—A Changeless City—The Pasteur Institute—The Golden Key—The Stoppeur—Sterne—The Beaux Arts—A Wilderness of Copies—Voltaire Clad and Naked—The Mint—An Inquisitive Visitor—Bad Money.

From the Invalides the Boulevard St. Germain, the west to east highway of the Surrey side of Paris, is easily gained; but it is not in itself very interesting. The interesting streets either cross it or run more or less parallel with it, such as the old and winding Rue de Grenelle, which we come to at once, the home of the Parisian aristocracy after its removal from the Marais. The houses are little changed: merely the tenants; and certain Embassies are now here. No. 18 was once the Hôtel de Beauharnais, the home of the fair Joséphine; at the Russian Embassy, No. 79, the Duchesse d'Estrées lived. In an outhouse at No. 115 was buried in unconsecrated ground Adrienne Lecouvreur, the tragedienne who made tragedy, the beloved of Maréchal Saxe. Scribe's drama has made her story known—how her heart was too much for her, and how Christian burial was refused her by a Christian priest.