There can be no doubt that the sight of the Swiss uniforms—scarlet, like that of the Household troops of most sovereigns—irritated greatly the people of Paris, who looked upon the revolution now taking place as a national movement under the tricolour flag against the monarchy, restored by foreign power after the defeat of Napoleon, with the white flag as its emblem. “The sight of those red uniforms,” wrote an eye-witness of many of the scenes that took place during the three days of July, “redoubled the fury of the insurgents; fresh combatants rushed forth from every alley, and a barricade was manned and seized by the people. The Swiss sustained this attack with vigour; the guards advanced to support them, and the Parisians were beginning to give way, when a young man advanced to rally and cheer them on, waving a tricolour flag at the end of a lance, and shouting, ‘I will show you how to die!’ He fell, pierced with balls, within ten paces of the guards. This engagement was terrible; the Swiss left many of their numbers stretched on the pavement.”
The fighting, all over Paris, abounded in scenes which were either fantastic, heroic, or lamentable. The Marquis d’Antichamp had taken up his post, seated on a chair under the colonnade of the Louvre, opposite Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Bent under the burden of his years, and hardly able to sustain his tottering frame, he encouraged the Swiss to the fight by his presence, and sat with folded arms gazing on the terrible spectacle before him with stoical insensibility. A band of insurgents attacked the powder magazine at Ivry on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, broke the gate in with hatchets and pole-axes, rushed into the courtyard, and obliged the people of the place to throw them packages of powder out of the windows. The insurgents, with all the hot-headed recklessness of the moment, continued with their pipes in their mouths to catch the packages as they fell, and carried them off in their arms. The debtors confined in Sainte-Pélagie, using a beam for a battering-ram, burst the gates, and then went and joined the guards on duty outside to prevent the escape of the criminal prisoners. A {171} sanguinary encounter took place in the Rue de Prouvaires, and exhibited the spectacle, common enough in civil wars, of brothers fighting in opposite ranks. Throughout the whole city a sort of moral intoxication beyond all description had seized upon the inhabitants. Amidst the noise of musketry, the rolling of the drums, the cries and groans of the combatants, a thousand strange reports prevailed and added to the universal bewilderment. A hat and feathers were carried about in some parts of the town, said to be those of the Duke of Ragusa, whose death was reported. The audacity of some of the combatants was incredible. A workman, seeing a company of the 5th regiment of the line advancing upon the Place de la Bourse, ran straight up to the captain and struck him a blow on the head with an iron bar. He reeled, and his face was bathed in blood; but he had still strength enough left to throw up his soldiers’ bayonets with his sword as they were about to fire on the aggressor. The leaders of the people added the most perfect self-denial to their intrepidity; and they ranged themselves by preference under the orders of those combatants whose dress proclaimed that they belonged to the more favoured classes of society. Furthermore, the young men found at every step guides for their inexperience in the persons of old soldiers who had survived the battles of the Empire—a warlike generation whom the Bourbons had for ever incensed in 1815.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE.
Its History—The Roman Comique—Under Louis XV.—During the Revolution—Hernani.
LET us now return to the Palais Royal, and to the theatre which adjoins it. The Comédie Française, or Théâtre Français, as it is also called, was never, as the first of these names might suggest, devoted exclusively to comedy. The word “comedy” was used in France in the early days of its stage to denote any kind of theatrical entertainment. The famous “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” produced towards the end of the 16th century, was, in fact, a dramatic entertainment with singing and dancing, strongly resembling what would now be called an opera; and the author of the work explains, in his preface, that he calls it “ballet comique,” instead of “ballet” alone, because it possesses a dramatic character. Volumes innumerable have been written on the origin of the French theatre, which had as humble a beginning as the theatre in all other European countries; with the exception, however, of opera, which in the earliest days of the musical drama enjoyed the special patronage of kings, princes, cardinals, and great noblemen.
In Italy, during the Renaissance period, the musical drama was invented by popes, cardinals, and other illustrious personages bent on restoring in modern form the ancient drama of the Greeks. The spoken drama of France, as of other European countries, had humbler beginnings, and the first regular troop of the Comédie Française had its origin in a combination of wandering companies.
At the end of the sixteenth, and during the early part of the seventeenth century, the English stage, with Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other dramatic poets of the Elizabethan period, was far superior to the stage of France, which scarcely indeed existed at the time. But towards the end of the seventeenth century the French theatre enjoyed the supreme advantage of possessing simultaneously the three greatest dramatists that France even to this day has produced: Corneille, Molière, and Racine.