A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

The Rue de Richelieu runs up beside the Comédie Française. We have already been in this street to see the Bibliothèque Nationale, entering it from the Boulevard, but let us now walk up it, first to see the Molière monument, so appropriate just here, and also to glance at No. 50, a house still unchanged, where once lived an insignificant couple named Poisson, whose daughter Jeanne Antoinette Poisson lived to become famous as Madame La Pompadour. In souvenirs of Molière Paris is still rich. We are coming soon to No. 92 Rue Saint-Honoré, where he was born; we are coming to the church of St. Eustache, where he was christened on January 15th, 1622, and where his second son was christened too. We are coming also to the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, where he was married and where his first son was baptised. In St. Roch he once stood as a godfather; and close to us now, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré and the Rue Valois, was one of his theatres. And he died close to his monument, at No. 40 Rue de Richelieu. This then is the Molière quarter.

We now enter the Palais Royal, that strange white and green oasis into which it is so simple never to stray. When I first knew Paris the Palais Royal was filled with cheap restaurants and shops to allure the excursionist and the connoisseur of those books which an inspired catalogue once described as very curious and disgusting. It is now practically deserted; the restaurants have gone and few shops remain; but in the summer the band plays to happy crowds, and children frolic here all day. I have, however, never succeeded in shaking off a feeling of depression.

The original palace was built by Richelieu and was then the Palais Cardinal. After his death it became the Palais Royal and was enlarged, and was the scene of notorious orgies. Camille Desmoulins made it more serious, for it was here that he enflamed the people by his words on July 12th, 1789, and started them on their destroying career. That was in the Café de Foy. Carlyle thus describes the scene: "But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:—Friends! shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come; the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be well-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To arms—To arms! yell responsive the innumerable voices; like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter words, does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this great moment.—Friends, continues Camille, some rallying sign! Cockades; green ones;—the colour of Hope!—As with the flight of locusts, these green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring shops; all green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille descends from his table, 'stifled with embraces, wetted with tears'; has a bit of green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius' Image-shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds; and rest not till France be on fire!"

Desmoulins in bronze now stands in the garden, near this spot. It is an interesting statue by Boverie, who showed great courage in his use of a common chair, dignified here into a worthy adjunct of liberation.

Under Napoleon the Tribunate sat in the Palais Royal, and after Napoleon the Orleans family made it their home. The Communards, always thorough, burned a good deal of it in 1871, and it is now a desert and the seat of the Conseil d'Etat. Let us leave it by the gateway leading to the Rue de Valois and be happier again.

The Rue de Valois is an interesting and picturesque street, but its greatest attraction to me is its association with Charles Lamb. His hotel—the Europe, just opposite the gateway—has recently been rebuilt and is now called the Grand Hôtel du Palais Royal et de l'Europe, and the polished staircase on which his infinitesimal legs slipped about so comically on his late and not too steady returnings (and how could he be steady when Providence ordained that the waiter of whom in his best stammering French he ordered an egg, on his first visit to a restaurant, should have so misunderstood the order as to bring in its place a glass of eau de vie—an error, we are told, which gave Lamb much pleasure?) the polished staircase has now gone; but the hotel stands exactly where it did, and every thing else is the same—the Bœuf à la Mode is still close by and still one of the best restaurants in Paris, and the Place de Valois is untouched, with its most attractive archway leading to the Rue des Bons-Enfants and giving on to the vista of the Rue Montesquieu, with its hundred signs hanging out exactly as in 1823.

We now return to the Rue Saint-Honoré. The three old houses, 180, 182 and 184, opposite the Magasins du Louvre, belonged before the Revolution to the Canons of Saint-Honoré. The courtyard here—the Cloître du Saint-Honoré—is one of the most characteristic examples of dirty Paris that remain, but very picturesque too. To peep in here is almost certainly to be rewarded by some Hogarthian touch, and to walk up the Rue des Bons-Enfants yields similar experiences and some very pleasant glimpses of old Paris.

Still going east we turn down past the Oratoire on the right, with Coligny's monument on its south side, into the Rue de Rivoli, and across the Rue du Louvre obliquely to the old church we see there, opposite the east end of the Louvre and Napoleon's iron gates. This church is that of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, not to be confounded with the St. Germain of St. Germain des Prés across the river. St. Germain l'Auxerrois is historically one of the most interesting of the Paris churches, for it was St. Germain's bell that gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. Charles IX. is said to have fired at the Huguenots (doubtless with Catherine de Médicis at his shoulder, anxious for the success of his aim) from one of the windows in the Louvre overlooking this space.