A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

Having taken the Daily Mail's advice and visited the abattoirs (which I have not done), one cannot do better than return to Paris by way of the canal, sauntering beside it all the way to the Rue Faubourg du Temple, where one passes into the Place de la République and the stir of the city once more. The canal descends from the heights of La Villette in a series of long steps, as it were (or, to take the most dissonant simile possible to devise, like the lakes at Wootton), built up by locks. Idling by this canal one sees many agreeable phases of human toil. Many commodities and materials reach Paris by barge, and it is on these quais and in the Villette basin that the unloading is done; while the barges themselves are pleasant spectacles—so long and clean and broad—very Mauretanias beside the barges of Holland—with spacious deck-houses that are often perfect villas, the wife and children watering the flowers at the door.

One quai is given up wholly to lime. This arrives in thousands of little solid sacks which stevedores whiter than millers transfer to the carts, that, in their turn, creak off to disorganise the traffic of a hundred streets and provoke the contempt of a thousand drivers before they reach their destined building, on which the workmen have already been engaged for two years and will be engaged for two years more. There is no hurry in constructional work in Paris—except of course on Exhibitions, which spring up in a night. The same piece of road that was up in the Rue Lafayette for some surface trouble in a recent April, I found still up in October. But they have the grace, when rebuilding a house in the city, to hide their deliberate processes behind a wooden screen—such a screen as was opposite the Café de la Paix, at the south-east corner of the Boulevard des Capucines, for, it seems to me, years.

If, however, one is walking beside the canal in the other direction, up the hill instead of down, one will soon be nearer the Victoria Park of Paris, the park of the east end, than at any other time, and this should be visited as surely as the abattoirs should be avoided: unless, of course, one is a well-informed or thoughtful butcher. We have seen the Parc Monceau; well, the antithesis of the Parc Monceau, which has no counter-part in London, is the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Both are children's paradises, the only difference in the children being social position. The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is sixty acres of trees and walks and perpendicular rocks and water, the special charm of which is its diversified character, rising in the midst to an immense height made easy for carriages and perambulators by a winding road. It has a deep gorge crossed by a suspension bridge, a lake for boats, a cascade, and thousands of chairs side by side, touching, lining the roads, on which the maids and matrons of La Villette and Belleville sew and gossip, while the children play around. The parc was made in the sixties: before then it had been a waste ground and gypsum quarry—hence its attractive irregularities. How wonderful the heights and cathedral of Montmartre can appear from one of the peaks of the Buttes-Chaumont, Mr. Dexter's drawing shows.

The Buttes-Chaumont is the most easterly point we have yet reached; but there is another parc more easterly still awaiting us, not unlike the Buttes-Chaumont in its acclivities, but unlike it in this particular, that it is a parc not of the living but the dead. I mean Père Lachaise. Père Lachaise! What kind of an old man do you think gave his name to this cemetery? Most persons, I imagine, see him as white-haired and venerable: not twinkling, like Papa Gontier, but serene and noble and sad. As a matter of fact he was a père only by profession and courtesy. Père Lachaise was Louis XIV.'s fashionable confessor (Landor has a diverting imaginary conversation between these two), and the cemetery took its name from his house, which chanced to occupy the site of the present chapel. The ground was enclosed as a burial ground as recently as 1804, which means of course that the famous tomb of Abélard and Héloise, to which all travellers find their way, is a modern reconstruction. The remains of La Fontaine and Molière and other illustrious men who died before 1804 were transferred here, just as Zola's were recently transferred from the cemetery of Montmartre to the Panthéon, but with less excitement.

Père Lachaise cannot be taken lightly. The French live very thoroughly, but when they die they die thoroughly too, and their cemeteries confess the scythe. There may be, to our thinking, too much architecture; but it is serious. There is no mountebanking (as at Genoa), nor is there any whining, as in some of our own churchyards. Death to a Frenchman is a fact and a mystery, to be faced when the time comes, if not before, and to be honoured. On certain festivals of the year there are a thousand mourners to every acre of Père Lachaise.

The natural entrance is by the Rue de la Roquette, but it is less fatiguing to enter at the top, at the new gate in the Avenue du Père Lachaise, and walk downhill; for the paths are steep and the cemetery covers a hundred acres and more. The objection to this course is that one loses some of the sublimity of Bartholomé's Monument aux Morts at the foot of the mountain on which the chapel stands. This monument faces the principal entrance with the careful design of impressing the visitor, and its impact can be tremendous. We approach it by the Avenue Principale, in which lies Alfred de Musset, with the willow waving over his tomb and his own lines upon it.

And then one enters seriously upon this strange pilgrimage among names and memories. Chopin lies here, his music stilled, and Talma the tragedian; Beaumarchais and Maréchal Ney; Cherubini and Alphonse Daudet; Balzac, his pen for ever idle, and Delacroix; Béranger, who made the nation's ballads, and Brillat-Savarin, all his dinners eaten; Michelet, the historian, and Planquette, the composer of Les Cloches de Corneville; Daumier, the great artist who saw to the heart of things, and Corot, who befriended Daumier's last years; Daubigny and Rosa Bonheur, Thiers and Scribe; Rachel, once so very living, and many Rothschilds now poorer than I.

LE MONUMENT AUX MORTS
A. BARTHOLOMÉ
(Père la Chaise)