Paris has other cemeteries, as we know, for we have walked through that of Montmartre; but there is also the Cimetière de Montparnasse, where lie Sainte-Beuve and Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, master of vers de société, and Fantin-Latour, Baudelaire (lying beneath a figure of the Genius of Evil), and Barbey d'Aurevilly, the dandy-novelist. There are also the cemeteries of Passy and Picpus, but into these I have never wandered. Lafayette lies at Picpus, which is behind a convent in the Rue de Picpus, and costs fifty centimes to see, and there also were buried many victims of the guillotine besides those whose bodies were flung into the earth behind the Madeleine.

All the space at my disposal has been required by Paris itself; and such is the human interest that at any rate in the older parts clings to every stone and saturates the soil, that I do not know that I have had any temptation to rove beyond the fortifications. But that of course is not right. No one really knows the Parisians until he sees them in happy summer mood in one of the pleasure resorts on the Seine, or winning money at Enghien, or lunching in one of the tree-top restaurants at Robinson. We have indeed been curiously unenterprising, and it is all owing to the fascination of Paris herself and the narrow dimensions of this book. We have not even been to St. Denis, to stand among the ashes of the French kings; we have not descended the formal slopes of St. Cloud; we have not peeped into Corot's little chapel at Ville d'Avray; we have not seen the home of Sèvres porcelain; we have not scaled Mont-Valérien; we have not taken boat for Marly-le-Roi; we have not wandered marvelling but weary amid the battle scenes of Versailles, or smiled at the pretty fopperies of the hamlet of the Petit Trianon. We have not known the groves either of the Bois de Vincennes or the Bois de Meudon.

Much less have we fed those guzzling gourmands, the carp of Chantilly, or lost ourselves before the little Raphael there, or the curious Leonardo sketch for La Joconde, or the sweet simplicities of the pretty Jean Fouquet illuminations, particularly the domestic solicitude of the ladies attending upon the birth of John the Baptist; less still have we forgotten the restlessness and urgency of Paris amid the allées and rochers of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and the still white streets of Barbizon, or even on the steps of the château where the Great Emperor, thoughts of whom are never very distant—are indeed too near—bade farewell to his Old Guard in 1814.

Greater Paris, it will be gathered, is hardly less interesting than Paris herself; and indeed how pleasant it would be to write about it! But not here.

Of Paris within the fortifications have I, I wonder, conveyed any of the fascination, the variety, the colour, the self-containment. I hope so. I hope too that at any rate these pages have implanted in a few readers the desire to see this beautiful and efficient city for themselves, and even more should I value the knowledge that they had excited in others who are not strangers to Paris the wish to be there again. To do justice to such a city, with such a history, is of course an impossibility. What, however, should not be impossible is to create a goût.

INDEX