[PREFACE]
Grandson and son of two rare and justly-renowned artists, P. J. Mène and Auguste Cain, my excellent friend, Georges Cain, has abundantly shown that he is the worthy inheritor of their talent. To-day, he wishes to prove that he knows how "to handle the pen as well as the pencil" as our Ancients used to say, and that the Carnavalet Museum has in him, not only the active and enthusiastic Curator that we constantly see at his task, but also the most enlightened guide possible in matters of Parisian lore; and so he has written this bewitching book which conjures up before me the Paris of my childhood and youth—the Paris of times gone by, which, in the course of centuries, has undergone many transformations, but not one so rapid and so complete as that which I have witnessed. The change, indeed, is such that, in certain quarters, I have difficulty in recognising, in the city of Napoleon III., that of Louis-Philippe. The latter would have been uninhabitable now, owing to the requirements of modern life, but it answered to the needs and customs of its time. People put up then with difficulties and defects that were judged unavoidable, no Capital being without them. And, in fact, in spite of its drawbacks and blemishes, the Paris of that period had its own charms.
THE PLACE DE LA BASTILLE, AND THE ELEPHANT
Lithographed by Ph. Benoist
Most of its streets were very narrow and had no sidewalks. Pedestrians were obliged to take refuge, from passing carriages, on shop thresholds, under entrance gates, or else beside posts erected here and there for that purpose. Still, even in the densest traffic, one ran fewer risks walking along the road than one runs at present crossing the boulevards.... On these boulevards, where a single omnibus plied between the Madeleine and the Bastille every quarter of an hour, and where there was practically no danger of being knocked down by a horse, I have seen a crowd watching a fencing-bout on the spot to-day occupied by a refuge-pavement; and, on the Bastille Square, I used to play quietly, trundling my hoop round the Elephant and the July Pillar. There was little else to dread, throughout Paris, save splashes from the gutters, whose waters flowed in the middle of the streets ... when they flowed at all; for, during the hot summer days, there was nothing but stagnant household slops, which lay in the gutters until the next storm of rain. In winter, as the snow was never swept away, and the employment of salt for melting it was unknown, the thaws were something terrible! Every corner—and the houses being hardly ever in line, there were many—was used as a rubbish-heap, or for the committing of nuisances excusable only through lack of modern conveniences. Moreover, the streets, by very reason of their narrowness, were more noisy than ours. The rolling of heavy waggons over big, round paving-stones badly set, with jolts that shook both windows and houses; the constant cries of men and women selling fruit, vegetables, fish and flowers, &c. ... and pushing their handcarts, not to speak of dealers in clothes, umbrellas, and hand-brushes, of glaziers and of chimney-sweeps; the din of watermen blowing into their taps; the calls of water-bearers as they loudly clinked their bucket-handles; the clarionets and tambourines of strolling singers that went from one courtyard to another; all this composed the gaiety of the street. What was less tolerable was the incessant noise of barrel-organs beneath your windows from morning till evenings and inflicting on you a torture that it makes me angry to think of even now.
To crown all, the lighting of the streets was wretched. In most, it was the ancient lamp whose illumination was an affair that stopped traffic while the operation lasted. On the other hand, however, the city was better guarded at night than it is at present, owing to the rounds of the "grey patrols" which, with their Indian files of cloak-muffled, slow-walking figures, crept along the walls and crossed one another's beats so as to be within helping distance, at the least alarm. Happy time, when, at one o'clock in the morning, in my lonely quarter, I was sure to come across one of them, and when one could stay out late without a revolver in one's pocket. This, it will be said, was because Paris was smaller, less populus, and the task of the police easier. But it is the duty of the police to proportion the protection to the danger, and the numbers of its officers to those of the evil-doers that infest our streets, for whom, formerly, little of the regard was felt that is lavished on them to-day.
As a set-off to its narrow, badly-paved, badly-kept, and badly-lighted streets, Paris then had an attraction which it no longer possesses—its gardens.
The idea formed of the old city is, generally, that of a heap of ancient houses with neither light, fresh air, nor verdure. In reality, the houses of the time, whether recent or old, existed only as a border to the street. Behind them, in the whole of the space that extended from one road to another, there were vast enclosures affording the sun, silence and verdure that did not exist in front. Many dwellings had fashioned, out of the grounds of mansions and convents parcelled up during the last century or two, large courtyards and private gardens which, separated merely by low fences, mingled their foliage and shade. This was so everywhere throughout the city, except in the part of it properly so called, and in the central portion near the Town Hall and the markets. A glance at the old plans of Paris will suffice to show that these unbuilt-on spaces comprised, under Louis XVI., the half, and, under Louis-Philippe, a third of the city's present area. In the Marais and Arsenal quarters, in the Saint-Antoine, Temple, and Popincourt faubourgs, in the Courtille, the Chaussée d'Antin, the Porcherons, the Roule quarters, in the Saint-Honoré faubourg, and along all the left bank of the river, which last was privileged in this respect, there were only scattered dwellings amidst orchards, kitchen-gardens, trellis-vineyards, farmyards, groves, and parks planted with century-old trees. The little that remains of this past is being rapidly destroyed; and, from the health and pleasure point of view, it is a great pity.
From my window in the Rue d'Enfer, Estrapade Square, close to the blind alley of the Feuillantines, I used to cast my eyes, as far as I could see in every direction, over a wealth of foliage. In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, from the place where Bernardin de Saint-Pierre once lived, I beheld the towers of Notre Dame, beyond avenues of trimmed trees; and I could say, like the good Monsieur Rollin, in the distich engraved on his door a few yards away: Ruris et urbis incola, that I was "an inhabitant both of the town and of the country." Through these gardens, through these silent streets so propitious to quiet labour, and scenting of lilacs and blossoming with pink and white chestnuts, new roads have been cut; the Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel Boulevards, the Rues de Rennes and Gay-Lussac, the Rue Monge which caused the demolition of the rustic cottage where Pascal died in the Rue Saint-Étienne itself; and the Rue Claude-Bernard which did away with the Feuillantines, where Victor Hugo, as a child, used to chase butterflies. Soon, the last of the monastic enclosures of the Saint-Jacques quarter, that of the Ursulines, will disappear to make room for three new streets!