A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

The Rue St. Dominique, parallel with the Rue de Grenelle nearer the river, is equally old and august. At No. 13 lived Madame de Genlis, the monitress of French youth. Still nearer the river runs the long Rue de l'Université, which also has an illustrious past and a picturesque present, some great French noble having built nearly every house.

One of the first old streets to cross the Boulevard St. Germain is the Rue du Bac, a roadway made when the Palace of the Tuileries was building, to convey materials from Vaugiraud to the bac (or ferry boat) which crossed the Seine where the Pont Royal now stands. This street also is full of ancient palaces and convents. Chateaubriand died at 118-120. At 128 is the Séminaires des Missions Etrangères, with a terrible little museum called the Chambre des Martyrs, very French in character, displaying instruments of torture which have been used upon missionaries in China and other countries inimical (like poor Adrienne's priest) to Christianity. The Rue des Saints-Pères resembles the Rue du Bac, but is more attractive to the loiterer because it has perhaps the greatest number of old curiosity shops of any street in Paris. They touch each other: perhaps they take in each other's dusting. I never saw a customer enter; but that of course means nothing. One might be sure of finding a case made of peau de chagrin here and be equally sure that Balzac had trodden this pavement before you. You will see, however, nothing or very little that is beautiful, because Paris does not care much for sheer beauty.

The Rue des Saints-Pères runs upwards into the Rue de Sèvres, where old convents cluster and the Bon Marché raises its successful modern bulk. It was in the Abbaye-aux-Bois, once at the corner of the Rue de Sèvres and the Rue de la Chaise, but now buried beneath a gigantic block of new flats, that Madame Récamier lived from 1814 until her death in 1849, visited latterly every day by the faithful Chateaubriand. M. Georges Cain has a charming chapter on this friendship and its scene in his Promenades dans Paris, of which an English translation, entitled Walks in Paris, has recently been published.

Returning to the Boulevard St. Germain, which we leave as often as we touch it, I remember that, on the south side, between the Invalides end and the statue of the inventor of the semaphore, used to be a little shop devoted to the sale of trophies of Joan of Arc. And since it used to be there, it follows that it is there still, for nothing in Paris ever changes. One of the great charms of Paris is that it is always the same. I can think of hardly any shop that has changed in the last ten years. This means, I suppose, that the French rarely die. How can they, disliking as they do to leave Paris? It is the English and the Scotch, born to forsake their homes and live uncomfortably foreign lives, who die.

EIFFEL TOWER TROCADÉRO
THE PONT ALEXANDRE III
(FROM THE EAST)

If one is interested in seeing the Pasteur Institute, now is the time, for it is not far from the Rue de Sèvres, in the Rue Falguière, named after Falguière the sculptor of the memorial to Pasteur in the Place Breteuil: one of the best examples of recent Paris statuary, with a charming shepherd boy playing his pipe to his flock on one side of the pediment, and grimmer scenes of disease on the others. This monument, however, is some distance from the Institute, the Place Breteuil being the first carrefour in that vast and endless avenue which leads southwards from Napoleon's tomb. The Institute itself has a spirited statue of Jupille the shepherd, one of its first patients, in his struggle with the wolf that bit him. Pasteur's tomb is here, but I have not seen it, as I arrived on the wrong day.

One of the most attractive of the Boulevard St. Germain's byways is entered just round the corner of the Rue de Rennes. This is the Cour du Dragon, which is not only a relic of old Paris, but old Paris is still visible hard at work in it. The Cour du Dragon is a narrow court gained by an archway over which a red dragon perches, holding up the balcony with his vigorous pinions. It was the Hôtel Taranne in the reigns of Charles VI. and VII. and Louis XI.; later it became a famous riding and fencing school. It is now a cheerful nest of artisans—coppersmiths, locksmiths, coal merchants and the like, who fill it with brisk hammerings, while at the windows above, with their green shutters, the songs of caged birds mingle in the symphony.

As in all Parisian streets or courts where signs are hung, the golden key is prominent. (There is one in Mr. Dexter's picture of the Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville.) What the proportion of locksmiths is to the population of Paris I cannot say; but their pretty symbol is to be seen everywhere. The reason of their numbers is not very mysterious when we recollect that practically every one that one meets in this city, and certainly all the people of the middling and working classes, live in flats, and all want keys. The streets and streets of the small houses with which East London is covered are unknown in Paris, where every façade is but the mask which hides vast tenements packed with families. No wonder then that the serrurier is so busy.