A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

L'AMATEUR D'ESTAMPES
DAUMIER
(Palais des Beaux Arts)

St. Germain of Auxerre began as a layman—the ruler of Burgundy. Divine revelation, however, indicated that the Church was his true calling, and he therefore succeeded Saint Amadour as Bishop, "gave," in Caxton's words, "all his riches to poor people, and changed his wife into his sister". He took to the new life very thoroughly. He fasted every day till evening and then ate coarse bread and drank water and used no pottage and no salt. "In winter ne summer he had but one clothing, and that was the hair next his body, a coat and a gown, and if it happed so that he gave not his vesture to some poor body, he would wear it till it were broken and torn. His bed was environed with ashes, hair, and sackcloth, and his head lay no higher than his shoulders, but all day wept, and bare about his neck divers relics of saints. He ware none other clothing, and he went oft barefoot and seldom ware any girdle. The life that he led was above man's power. His life was so straight and hard that it was marvel and pity to see his flesh, and was like a thing not credible, and he did so many miracles that, if his merits had not gone before, they should have been trowed phantasms."

St. Germain's miracles were more interesting than those of, say, his convert Sainte Geneviève. He conjured devils; he forbade fire to burn him; having fed his companions on the only calf of a friendly cow-herd, he put the bones and the skins together and life returned to it; he also raised one of his own disciples from the dead and conversed with him through the walls of his tomb, but on the disciple saying that in his late condition "he was well and all things were to him soft and sweet," he permitted him to remain dead. He also found his miraculous gifts very useful in the war; but his principal interest to us is that he is supposed to have visited England and organised the Establishment here. St. Germain's church has a little old glass that is charming and much bad new. The south transept window, although sheer kaleidoscope, is gay and attractive.

At the back of the church runs the narrow and medieval Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, extending to the Rue Saint-Honoré. At No. 4 is, or was, the Hôtel des Mousquetaires, where, when it was the Belle Etoile, d'Artagnan drank and swaggered. Let us take this street and come to St. Eustache by way of another and less terrible souvenir of Catherine de Médicis. The Rue de l'Arbre-Sec leads to the Rue Sauval and to the circular Rue de Viarmes surrounding the Bourse de Commerce. Here we see a remarkable Doric column, all that remains of the palace which Catherine built in order to avoid the fate predicted for her by a soothsayer—that she would perish in the ruins of a house near St. Germain's. The Tuileries, which she was then building, being far too near St. Germain's to be comfortable after such a remark, she erected the Hôtel de la Reine, the tower being designed for astrological study in the company of her Italian familiar, Ruggieri. All else has gone: the tower and the stars remain.

A few steps down the Rue Oblin and we are at St. Eustache, which has to my eyes the most fascinating roof of any church in Paris and a very attractive nave. The interior, however, is marred by the presence of what might be called a church within a church, destroying all vistas, and it is only with great difficulty that one can see the exquisite rose window over the organ. It is a church much used by the poor—who even call it Notre Dame des Halles—but its music on festival days brings the rich too. Like most other Paris churches of any importance, St. Eustache had its secular period. The Feast of Reason was held here in 1793; in 1795 it was the Temple of Agriculture. In 1791 Mirabeau, the first of the illustrious, as we saw, to be buried in the Panthéon, was carried here in his coffin for a funeral service, at which guns were fired that brought down some of the plaster. Voiture the poet was buried here. The church has always been famous for the splendour of its festivals and for its music, its present organ, once much injured by Communard bombs, being one of the finest in the world. No reader of this book who cares for solemn music should fail to ascertain the St. Eustache festivals. On St. Cecilia's day entrance is very difficult, but an effort should be made.

Eustache, or Eustace, the Saint, had no direct association with Paris, as had our friends St Germain and St. Geneviève and St. Denis and St. Martin and St. Merry; but he had an indirect one, having been a Roman soldier under the Emperor Trajan, whose column was the model for the Vendôme column. In the Sacristy, however, are preserved some of the bones not only of himself but of his wife and family, brought hither from St. Denis. One of his teeth is here too, and one special bone, the gift of Pope Alexander VII. to an influential Catholic.

Why our London markets should be so dull and unattractive and the Halles so entertaining is a problem which would perhaps require an ethnological essay of many pages to elucidate. But so it is. Smithfield, Billingsgate, Leadenhall, Covent Garden—one has little temptation or encouragement to loiter in any of them; but the Halles spread welcoming arms. I have spent hours there, and would spend more. In the very early morning it is not too agreeable a neighbourhood for the idle spectator, nor is he desired, although if he is prepared to endure a little rough usage with tongue and elbow he will be vastly amused by what he sees; but later, when all the world is up, the Halles entreat his company. Their phases are three: the first is the arrival of the market carts with their merchandise, very much as in our own Covent Garden, but multiplied many times and infinitely more vocal and shattering to the nerves. (I once occupied a bedroom within range of this pandemonium.) The second phase, a few hours later, sees the descent upon the market of the large caterers—buyers for the restaurants, great and small, the hotels and pensions. That is between half-past five and half-past seven. And then come the small buyers, the neat servants, the stout housewives, all with their baskets or string bags. This is our time; we may now loiter at our ease secure from the swift and scorching sarcasms of the crowded dawn.

The Halles furnish another proof of the quiet efficiency of Frenchwomen. At every fruit and vegetable stall—and to me they are the most interesting of all—sits one or more of these watchful creatures, cheerful, capable and always busy either with the affairs of the stall or with knitting or sewing. The Halles afford also very practical proof of the place that economy is permitted to hold in the French cuisine: as much being done for the small purse as for the large one.

In England we are ashamed of economy; by avoiding it we hope to give the impression that we are not mean. The wise French either care less for their neighbour's opinions or have agreed together to dispense with such insincerities; and the result is that if a pennyworth of carrots is all that your soup requires you need not buy two pennyworth, and so forth. Little portions of vegetables for one, two or more persons, all ready for the pot, can be bought, involving no waste whatever, and with no faltering or excuse on the part of the purchaser to explain so small an order. In France a customer is a customer. There are no distinctions; although I do not deny that in the West End of Paris, where the Americans and English spend their money, subtle shades of courtesy (or want of it) have crept in. I have been treated like a prince in a small comestible shop where I wanted only a pennyworth of butter, a pennyworth of cheese and a pennyworth of milk. It is pennies that make the French rich; no one can be in any doubt of that who has taken notice of the thousands of small shops not only in Paris but in the provinces.

Any one making an early morning visit to the Halles should complete it by seeing my goat-herd, who leads his flocks thereabouts and eastward. He is the prettiest sight I ever saw in Paris. There are several goat-herds—even Passy knows them—but my goat-herd is here. By eight o'clock he has done; his flock is dry. He wears a blue cloth tam-o'-shanter (if there can be such a thing: it is really the cap of the romantic mountaineer of comic opera) and he saunters carelessly along, piping melancholy notes on a shepherd's pipe—not unlike the lovely wailing that desolates the soul in the last act of Tristan und Isolde. When a customer arrives he calls one of his goats, sits down on the nearest doorstep—it may be a seventeenth-century palace—and milks a cupful; and then he is off again, with his scrannel to his lips, the very type of the urban Strephon.