Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

To know the Paris of half a century ago it is only, indeed, necessary to study the “Lutèce” of Heinrich Heine, in which the Paris of the best part of Louis Philippe’s reign is portrayed in the most life-like, the most brilliant style. The sketches, the anecdotes, the criticism—all full of the Heinean verve and irony—form the best portion of the book, which is deficient, perhaps, in the description (if we except personal description) on which Heine, without adequate reason, was inclined to pride himself. His poems, his travels, and his miniature dramas are crowded with fantastic thoughts, which are of course presented in fantastic forms; but he will always be remembered by his ideas rather than by his images; and when he states, in his “Reisebilder,” that, owing to the prodigality of German writers in the matter of thoughts, he finds it more profitable to cultivate the production of pictures, one would think, were it not for the very title of the work, that he was indulging in irony at the expense of his readers.

ENTRANCE TO THE HÔTEL DE CHATEAUBRIAND, IN THE FAUBOURG ST. GERMAIN.

As a satirist Heine is first of all remarkable for his irony, which is always masterly and which sometimes reaches the diabolical. He admits that even in his most amiable moments the “caresses of his Teutonic paws sometimes inflicted a wound”; and if he scratches like a cat in play, it is certain that he tears in earnest like a tiger. He seizes his victim by the neck, and either skins him with his delicate observation or scalps him with his unerring sarcasm. On great occasions he resorts to deliberate analysis, or rather anatomy; when, after a very few pages,[{294}] the patient finds himself lying dissected at the end of a chapter, with the merciless satirist grinning at his remains.

In the last chapter of the Reisebilder, speaking of the misfortunes of the German emigrants, Heine gives an anecdote of an artist who, on being requested to paint a golden angel on a signboard, replied that he would rather paint a red lion; that he was accustomed to them, and that even if he painted a golden angel it would look like a red lion all the same. “The words of this painter,” said Heine, “reply beforehand to the objections which may be made to my book.... It was not any vain caprice which made me quit all that was dear to me, all that charmed me and smiled upon me in my native land. There more than one being loved me—my mother, for instance. And yet I left it without knowing why—I left it because I was obliged to do so. It is only in the winter that we become fully penetrated with the beauties of the spring; the love of liberty is a flower which grows in prison; and in the same way the love of the German fatherland commences at the German frontier—above all, at sight of German misery on a foreign soil.... I have now before me the letter of a friend who is dead, and in which the following passage occurs: ‘I never was aware that I loved my country so much. I was in the position of a man who had never been taught by physiology the value of his blood. The blood is taken from him, and the man falls. That was indeed the case. Germany is ours, and that is why I felt suddenly broken down and ill at the sight of those emigrants, of those great rivers of blood which flow from the wounds of our country and lose themselves in the deserts of Africa.’ ... The golden colours of the angel have since that time entirely dried up on my palette, and all that remains upon it in a liquid state is a raw red colour, which looks like blood, and with which nothing but red lions can be painted. Accordingly, my next book will be purely and simply a red lion; for which I beg the kind public to pardon me by reason of the confession now made.”

Heine, during his prolonged stay in Paris, where he was adopted and became naturalised, saw all the new operas and most of the new pictures; attended the meetings of the Institute; abused the polka, then just invented; discussed the Eastern Question, and tried to decide whether it was more probable that England and Russia would declare war against France, or that France and Russia would declare war against England; calculated Philippe’s chances of remaining on the throne, considered the rival merits of Thiers and Guizot, and generally criticised everyone and everything with which he was brought in contact. He was on friendly terms with George Sand, Meyerbeer, Rothschild, Balzac, Victor Cousin, Spontini, and Alfred de Musset; and he has given elaborate portraits of some of these celebrities, while he has written something characteristic of each. If he was at any time personally acquainted with Victor Hugo, all intimacy between the two must certainly have ceased after Heine’s murderous attack upon the great French poet:—“As all the French writers possess taste, the total absence of this quality in Victor Hugo struck his compatriots as a sign of originality and genius. He is essentially cold, as is the devil, according to the assertions of witches—cold and icy even in his most passionate effusions; his enthusiasm is only a phantasmagoria, a piece of calculation devoid of love; for he loves nothing but himself—he is an egoist, or, worse still, a Hugoist. In spite of his imagination and his wit, he has the awkwardness of a parvenu or a savage.” In another place we are told that Hugo’s studied passion and artificial warmth suggest “fried ice”—an edible antithesis prepared by the Chinese, which consists of little balls of ice dipped into a particular kind of batter, and forthwith fried and swallowed.

Rothschild is said to be the best possible political thermometer; and he is praised for the genial if slightly patronising manner in which he famillionairement addresses his friends. “Indeed, it might be affirmed,” says Heine, still full of the thermometrical idea, “that he possesses the talent of the frog for indicating fair and foul weather, were it not that this comparison might be considered somewhat disrespectful; and certainly he is a man who must be respected, if only on account of the respect he inspires in the greater number of those who approach him. I love to visit him at his bank, where I have the opportunity of observing men of all classes and all religions. Gentiles as well as Jews bow, incline, and prostrate themselves before him. They turn, and stoop, and bend their backs nearly double, in a manner which the most talented acrobat might envy. I have seen some persons tremble on approaching him as if they had touched a voltaic battery. Even when standing outside the door many of them are seized with a [{295}]quivering veneration, such as Moses felt on Mount Horeb.... His private room is, indeed, a most remarkable place, and awakes sublime thoughts and feelings—like the aspect of the ocean, of the starry heavens, of mountains or of boundless forests. It teaches me the littleness of man and the greatness of God. For money is the god of our age, and Rothschild is his prophet.”

As the Louvre is associated with the monarchy and Notre Dame with the Episcopacy, so the Faubourg St. Germain is associated with the ancient French nobility. It is interesting to know that St. Germain, the holy man to whom the nobiliary quarter (there are “aristocratic” quarters elsewhere in Paris) owes its name, was himself of noble birth. Little is recorded of him except that he performed miracles, which the inhabitants of the district bearing his name have failed to do, and that, like the ancient nobility of France at the period of the Revolution, he visited England and stayed there some time. The church of St. Germain des Prés was one of the principal landmarks on the left bank of the Seine in the latter part of the seventeenth century, when the Institute and the church just named formed two important centres on the left bank of the Seine. The Faubourg St. Germain, or simply “the Faubourg,” as its exclusive inhabitants love to call it, was scarcely known, however, by any such name until the time of the Revolution or even later, when it emigrated in a mass to England, or in some cases to Russia. The German courts, too, offered for a time a favourite place of retirement until Germany was invaded by the Republican armies of France.

“The emigration” is usually attributed to the excesses of the Revolutionists, especially during the Reign of Terror; but as a matter of fact it began in 1789, the first examples being given by members of the royal family. The emigration of the French nobility may indeed be said not to have been caused by the Reign of Terror, but in a measure to have produced it. This now seems to be supported in a certain measure by dates. After the 14th of July the Count of Artois, the Condés, the Contis, the Polignacs, the Broglies, the Vaudreuils, the Lambescs, and others, hurried abroad in order to band together the enemies of France, and to prepare the invasion of the country. While the Count of Artois was intriguing on all sides, Condé, installed at Worms, surrounded himself with a body of fatuous noblemen, the nucleus of his future army, adopted a rebellious attitude, replied with contempt to the invitations of the National Assembly, and organised plots in the eastern provinces. In 1792 the king himself would have emigrated and thrown himself into the arms of foreigners, in the hope that they would subdue France and restore the ancient régime. He was, as everyone knows, arrested at Varennes. But his brother, the Count of Provence, succeeded in quitting France, and at Brussels prepared the celebrated declaration of Pilnitz. At the same time a crowd of nobles left France to furnish recruits to the Prince de Condé. Coblenz was full to overflowing with emigrants, whose manœuvres were in no way affected by the fact that the king had himself accepted the constitution. The army of the emigrating princes was being openly organised. It was to be composed of three army corps: one commanded by Condé, which was to operate in Alsace; another commanded by the princes of the blood, who were to enter France through Lorraine, in company with the Prussians, and march upon Paris; and a third commanded by the Prince de Bourbon, which was to act in the provinces of the north. Later on special regiments of émigrés were formed, to which the names of Rohan, Damas, Salm, “Loyal Emigrants,” etc., were given. The Viscount de Mirabeau, brother to the orator, formed a legion of his own, whose soldiers wore a black uniform adorned with death’s-heads, and whose disorderly conduct is said to have been such that the corps was not allowed to form part of the Austrian army, to which it had originally been attached.