A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

On a table is a collection of literary souvenirs of intense interest: Hugo's pen and inkstand, and the great Dumas' pen presented to Hugo in 1860 after writing with it his last "15 or 20" volumes (fifteen or twenty—how like him!); Lamartine's inkstand, offered "to the master of the pen"; George Sand's match-box for those endless cigarettes, and with it her travelling inkstand. In another room upstairs are the six pens used by Hugo in writing Les Humbles. Dumas' pen is not by any means the only Dumas relic here; portraits of him are to be seen, one of them astonishingly negroid. Had he too worked for liberty and carried in his breast or even on his sleeve a great heart that, like Hugo's, responded to every call and beat furiously at the very whisper of the word injustice, he too would have his museum to-day not less remarkable than this. But to write romances was not enough: there must be toil and suffering too.

Dumas and Hugo were born in the same year, 1802: Balzac was then three. In 1809 came Tennyson and Gladstone; in 1811 Thackeray and in 1812 Browning and Dickens. What was the secret of that astounding period? Why did the first twelve years of the last century know such energy and abundance? To walk through the rooms of this Hugo museum, however casually, is to be amazed before the vitality and exuberance not only of this man but of the French genius. It is truly only the busy who have time. I wish none the less that there was a museum for Alexandre the Great. I would love to visit it: I would love to see his kitchen utensils alone. The generous glorious creature, "the seven and seventy times to be forgiven"! As it was, no one being about, I kissed the pen with which he had written his last "15 or 20" novels (the splendid liar!).

I wish too that we had a permanent Dickens' museum in London—say at his house in Devonshire Terrace, which is now a lawyer's office. What a fascinating memorial of Merry England it might become, and what a reminder to this attenuated specialising day of the vigour and versatility and variety and inconquerable vivacity of that giant! Just as no one can leave Hugo's house without a quickening of imagination and ambition, so no one could leave that of Charles Dickens.

In addition to this museum Hugo has his monument in the Place Victor Hugo, far away in a residential desert in the north-west of Paris, a bronze figure of the poet as a young man seated on a rock, with Satire, Lyric Poetry and Fame attending him; while on the façade of the house where he died, No. 124 Avenue Victor Hugo, is a medallion portrait. He figures also in a fresco in the Hôtel de Ville. Dumas' monument is in the garden of the Place Malesherbes in the Avenue de Villiers. Doré designed it, as was perhaps fitting. The sturdy Alexandre sits, pen in hand, on the summit, his West Indian hair curling vigorously into the sky, with d'Artagnan and three engrossed readers at the base. It is not quite what one would have wished; but it is good to visit. His son, the dramatist, the author of that adorable joke against his father's vanity—that he was capable of riding behind his own carriage to persuade people that he kept a black servant—has a monument close by; and the gallant general of whom one reads such brave stories in the first volume of the Mémoires is to be set there too, and then the Place, I am told, will be re-named the Place des Trois Dumas.

CHAPTER XX
THE BASTILLE, PÈRE LACHAISE AND THE END

A Thoughtful Municipality—The Fall of the Bastille—Revolt and Revolution—The Column of July—A Paris Canal—Deliberate Building—The Buttes-Chaumont—A City of the Dead—Père la Chaise—Bartholomé's Monument—The Cimetière de Mont Parnasse—The Country round Paris—What we have Missed—Conclusion.

The Place des Vosges is close to the Place de la Bastille, which lies to the east of it along the Rue St. Antoine. The prison has gone for ever, but one is assisted by a thoughtful municipality to reconstruct it, a task of no difficulty at all if one remembers with any vividness the models in the Carnavalet or the Archives, or buys a pictorial postcard at any neighbouring shop. The contribution of the pious city fathers is a map on the façade of No. 36 Place de la Bastille, and a permanent outline of the walls of the dreadful building inlaid in the road and pavement, which one may follow step by step to the satisfaction of one's imagination and the derangement of the traffic until it disappears into cafés and shops. One has to remember, however, that the surface of the ground was much lower, the prison being surrounded by a moat and gained only by bridges. For the actual stones one must go to the Pont de la Concorde, the upper part of which was built of them in 1790.

The Bastille's end came in 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution, on the day after the National Guard was established, when the people of Paris rose under Camille Desmoulins and captured it, thus not only displaying but discovering their strength. Carlyle was never more scornful, never more cruelly vivid, than in his description of this event. I must quote a little, it is so horribly splendid: "To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade, at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts, Cour Avanceé, Cour de l'Orme, arched Gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new drawbridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and twenty;—beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his own engineer: seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of regimentals; no one would heed him in coloured clothes: half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in the Place de Grève. Frantic Patriots pick up the grapeshots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly so), to the Hôtel-de-Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is 'pale to the very lips'; for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering a minor whirlpool,—strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Maelstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.

"And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has become an impromptu cannoneer. See Georget, of the Marine Service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to the like): Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of him, for a hundred years. Yet now, at the right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent music. For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Françaises also will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so thick!—Upwards from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes show the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!