A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

CHAPTER XVI
THE GRANDS BOULEVARDS: II. THE OPERA TO THE PLACE DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE

The Christmas Baraques—The Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin—The Rue Laffitte—La Musée Grévin—The Bibliothèque Nationale—The Roar of Finance—Tailors as Cartoonists—A Bee-hive Street—Cities within the City—Pompes Funèbres—The Church as Advertiser—The Great Marguery—Gates which are not Gates—The Life of St. Denis—Highways from Paris—The First Theatre—St. Martin's Act of Charity—The Arts et Métiers; a Modern Cluny—Statues of the Republic.

From the Place de l'Opéra to the Place de la République is an interesting and instructive walk, but at no time of the day a very easy one; and between five o'clock and half-past six, and eight and ten, on the north pavement, it is always almost a struggle; but when the baraques are in full swing around Christmas and the New Year, it is a struggle in earnest, at any rate as far as the Rue Drouot. Indeed Christmas and New Year, but especially Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, are great times in France, and presents are exchanged as furiously as with us.

On Christmas Eve—Réveillon as it is called—no one would do anything so banal as to go to bed. The restaurants obtain a special permission to remain open, and tables are reserved months in advance. Montmartre, never very sleepy, takes on a double share of wakefulness.

The first street on our left, the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, is one of the busiest in Paris, with excellent shops and many interesting associations. Madame Récamier lived at No. 7, the site of the Hôtel d'Antin. So also did Madame Necker and Madame Roland, and for a while Edward Gibbon. Chopin lived at No. 5. This street, by the way, has suffered almost more than any other from the Parisian fickleness in nomenclature. It began as the Rue de la Chaussée Gaillon, then Rue de l'Hôtel Dieu, then Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, from Richelieu's Hôtel d'Antin, then the Rue Mirabeau, from the revolutionary who lodged and died at No. 42, then, when Mirabeau's body was removed ignominiously from the Panthéon, the Rue Mont Blanc, and in 1815 it became once again the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin.

At the foot of the Rue Laffitte one should stop, because one gets there a glimpse of Montmartre's white and oriental cathedral, hanging in mid-air, high above Paris and the church of Notre Dame de Lorette. This street is, to me, one of the most entertaining in the city, for almost every other shop is a picture-dealer's, and to loaf along it, on either side, is practically to visit a gallery. Two or three of these shops keep as a continual sign the words "Bronzes de Barye". The Rue Laffitte was named after the banker Jacques Laffitte, whose bank was in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin. Cerutti, who delivered Mirabeau's funeral oration, set up his revolutionary journal La Feuille Villageoise here. At the Hôtel Thelusson at the end of the street the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses assembled. Among the guests was General Buonaparte, and it was here that he first met Joséphine Beauharnais.

The Musée Grévin, to which we soon come on the left, is the Parisian Tussaud's; and it is as much better than Tussaud's as one would expect it to be. Tussaud's is vast and brilliant; the Musée Grévin is small and mysterious. There is so little light that every one seems wax, and one has to look very narrowly and anxiously at all motionless figures. The particular boast of the Grévin is its groups: not so much the Pope and his pontifical cortège, the coulisses of the Opera (a scene of coryphées and men about town), and the Fête d'Artistes, as the admirable tableaux of the Revolution. To the untutored eye of one who, like myself, avoids waxworks, the Grévin figures and grouping are good and, what is perhaps more important, intelligent. Pains have been taken to make costumes and accessories historically accurate, and in many cases the actual articles have been employed, notably in the largest tableau of all—"Une Soirée à Malmaison"—which was arranged under the supervision of Frédéric Masson, the historian, an effigy of whom stands near by. Among these scenes the historical sense of the French child can be really quickened. There are also tableaux of Rome in the time of the early Christians—very clever and painful.