A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

Another sign which probably puzzles many English people is that of the stoppeur. Bellows' dictionary does not recognise the word. What is a stoppeur and what does he stop? I discovered the answer in the most practical way possible; for a Frenchman, in a crowd, helped me to it by pushing his lighted cigar into my back and burning a hole in it, right in the middle of the coat, where a patch would necessarily show. I was in despair until the femme de chambre reassured me. It was nothing, she said: all that was needed was a stoppeur. She would take the coat herself. It seems that the stoppeur's craft is that of mending holes so deftly that you would not know there had been any. He ascertains the pattern by means of a magnifying glass, and then extracts threads from some part of the garment that does not show and weaves them in. I paid three francs and have been looking for the injured spot ever since, but cannot find it. It is a modern miracle.

Diagonally opposite the Court of the Dragon is the Church of St. Germain—not the St. Germain who owns the church at the east end of the Louvre, but St. Germain des Prés, a lesser luminary. It has no particular beauty, but a number of frescoes by Flandrin, the pupil of Ingres, give it a cachet. Flandrin's bust is to be observed on the north wall. The frescoes cannot be seen except under very favourable conditions, and therefore for me the greatness of Flandrin has to be sought in his drawings at the Luxembourg and the Louvre—sufficient proof of his exquisite hand.

Before descending the Rue Bonaparte to the river, let us ascend it to see the great church of St. Sulpice and its paintings by Delacroix in the Chapel of the Holy Angels. Under the Convention St. Sulpice was the Temple of Victory, and here General Bonaparte was feasted in 1799. The church is famous for its music and an organ second only to that of St. Eustache. And now let us descend the Rue Bonaparte to the quais, where several buildings await us, beginning with the Beaux-Arts at the foot of the street; but first the Rue Jacob, which bisects the Rue Bonaparte, should be looked at, for it has had many illustrious inhabitants, including our own Laurence Sterne, who lodged here, at No. 46, in the Hôtel of his friend Madame Rambouillet (of the easy manners) when he was studying the French for A Sentimental Journey. It was here perhaps that he penned the famous opening sentence: "'They order,' said I, 'these things better in France'"—which no other writer on Paris has succeeded in forgetting. At No. 20 lived Adrienne Lecouvreur, and hither Voltaire must often have come, for he greatly admired her. At No. 7 is a fine old staircase and an old well in the court.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts, where the Royal Academy Schools of Paris are situated, is an unexhilarating building containing a great number of unexciting paintings. Indeed, I think that no public edifice of Paris is so dreary: within and without one has a sense not exactly of decay but certainly of neglect. This is not the less odd when one thinks of the purpose of the institution, which is to foster the arts, and when one thinks also of the spotless perfection in which the Petit Palais, the latest of the Parisian picture galleries, is maintained. The spirit, however, is willing, if the flesh is weak, for in the first and second courts are examples of the best French architecture, and a bust of Jean Goujon is let into the wall of the Musée des Antiques. The building contains a number of casts of the best sculptures and an amphitheatre with Delaroche's pageant of painters on the hemicycle and Ingres' Victory of Romulus over the Sabines opposite it; but there is not always enough light to see either well. For the best view of Delaroche's great work one must go upstairs to the Gallery. The library also is upstairs, with many thousand of valuable works on art and a collection of drawings by the masters, access to which is made easy to genuine students.

By returning to the first court we come to the Musée de la Renaissance, which now occupies an old chapel of the Couvent des Petits-Augustins, on the site of which the Palais de Beaux-Arts was built. Here are more casts and copies, and there are still more in the adjoining Cour du Mûrier, where stands the memorial of Henri Regnault, the painter, and the students who died with him during the defence of Paris in 1870-71.

We then enter the Salle de Melpomène, so called from the dominating cast of the Melpomene at the Louvre, and are straightway among what seem at the first glance to be old friends from all the best galleries of the world but too quickly are revealed as counterfeits. Rembrandt's School of Anatomy and the Syndics, our own National Gallery Correggio, the Dresden Raphael, the Wallace Collection Velasquez (the Lady with a Fan), one of Hals' groups of arquebusiers, and Paul Potter's Bull: all are here, together with countless others, all the work of Beaux-Arts students, and some exceedingly good, but also (like most copies) exceedingly depressing.

In other rooms almost pitch dark are modelled studies of expression and paintings which have won the Grand Prix of Rome during the past two hundred years. It is odd to notice how few names one recognises: it is as though, like the Newdigate, this prize were an end in itself.

Having contemplated the statue of Voltaire in his robes outside the Institut, the next building of importance after the Beaux Arts, you may, if you so desire, gaze upon the same philosopher in a state of nature by entering the Institut itself, and ascending to its Bibliothèque. There he sits, the skinny cynic, among the books which he wrote and the books which he read and the books which would not have been written but for him. I was glad to see him thus, for it showed me where our own Arouet, Mr. Bernard Shaw, found his inspiration when he too subjected recently his economical frame to the maker of portraits. Mr. Shaw sat, however, only to a photographer (although a very good one, Mr. Coburn); when he visited Rodin it was for the head, a replica of which may be seen at the Luxembourg. Speaking of heads, the Institut is a wilderness of them: heads line the stairs; heads line the walls not only of its own Bibliothèque but of the Bibliothèque de Mazarin, which also is here, a haven for every student that cares to seek it: heads of the great Frenchmen of all time and of the Cæsars too.

The Pont des Arts, which leads direct from the old Louvre to the Institut (a connection, if ever, no longer of any importance), is for foot passengers only. One is therefore more at ease there in observing the river than on the noisy bridge of stone. But it is inexcusably ugly and leaves one continually wondering what Napoleon was about to allow it to be built—and of iron too—in his day of good taste. Looking up stream, the Pont Neuf is close by with the thin green end of the Cité's wedge protruding under it and, in winter, Henri IV. riding proudly above. In summer, as Mr. Dexter's drawing shows, he is hidden by leaves. A basin has been constructed at this point from which the tide is excluded, and here are washing houses and swimming baths; for Parisians, having a river, use it.