Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

In the evening I rested from the day's fatigue by an hour in the garden of the Palais Royal. I sat by one of the little tables, and called for an ice. There were hundreds of ladies and gentlemen eating ices, drinking wine, reading the papers, smoking, chatting; scores of pretty children were frolicking and enjoying the balmy evening. Here six or eight midgets were jumping the rope, while papa and mamma swung it for them. Pretty little things, with their flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, how they did seem to enjoy themselves! What parent was ever far from home that did not espy in every group of children his own little ones—his Mary or his Nelly, his Henry or Charlie? So it was with me. There was a ring of twenty or thirty singing and dancing, with a smaller ring in the centre, while old folks and boys stood outside. But I heard not a single oath, nor saw a rough or rude action, during the whole time I was there. The boys standing by looked on quietly, like young gentlemen. The best finale of such a toilsome day of sightseeing was a warm bath in the Rue du Bac, for the trifling sum of fifteen sous. The cheapness and convenience of bathing here is a great recommendation of Paris life. They will bring you a hot bath at your house for twenty-five cents, and that without bustle or disorder. And nothing so effectually as an evening bath, as my experience testifies, cures fatigue and propitiates to dreamless slumber.

Thursday, June 9. At the Louvre. Studied three statues half an hour each—the Venus Victrix, Polyhymnia, and Gladiateur Combattant. The first is mutilated; but if disarmed she conquers all hearts, what would she achieve in full panoply? As to the Gladiator, I noted as follows on my catalogue: A pugilist; antique, brown with age; attitude, leaning forward; left hand raised on guard, right hand thrown out back, ready to strike a side blow; right leg bent; straight line from the head to the toe of left foot; muscles and veins most vividly revealed in intense development; a wonderful petrifaction, as if he had been smitten to stone at the instant of striking.

Here are antique mosaics, in which colored stones seem liquefied, realizing the most beautiful effects of painting—quadrigae, warriors, arms, armor, vases, streams, all lifelike. Ascending to the hall of French paintings I spent an hour in studying one picture—La Méduse, by Géricault. It is a shipwrecked crew upon a raft in mid ocean. I gazed until all surrounding objects disappeared, and I was alone upon the wide Atlantic. Those transparent emerald waves are no fiction; they leap madly, hungering for their prey. That distended sail is filled with the lurid air. That dead man's foot hangs off in the seething brine a stark reality. What a fixed gaze of despair in that father's stony eye! What a group of deathly living ones around that frail mast, while one with intense eagerness flutters a signal to some far-descried bark! Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has no colors more fearfully faithful to his theme. Heaven pities them not. Ocean is all in uproar against them. And there is no voice that can summon the distant, flying sail! So France appeared to that prophet painter's eye, in the subsiding tempests of the revolution. So men's hearts failed them for fear, and the dead lay stark and stiff among the living, amid the sea and the waves roaring; and so mute signals of distress were hung out in the lurid sky to nations afar.

For my part, I remain a heretic. Give to these French pictures the mellowing effects of age, impregnating not merely the picture, but the eye that gazes on it, with its subtle quality; let them be gazed at through the haze of two hundred years, and they will—or I cannot see why they will not—rival the productions of any past age. I do not believe that a more powerful piece ever was painted than yon raft by Gericault, nor any more beautiful than several in the Luxembourg; the "Décadence de Rome," for example, exhibiting the revels of the Romans during the decline of the empire. Let this Décadence unroll before the eyes of men the cause, that wreck by Géricault symbolize the effect, in the great career of nations, and the two are sublimely matched.

After visiting the Luxembourg, I resorted to the gardens of the Tuileries. The thermometer was at about eighty degrees in the shade. From the number of people assembled one would have thought, if it had been in the United States, that some great mass convention was coming off. Under the impenetrable screen of the trees, in the dark, cool, refreshing shade, are thousands of chairs, for which one pays two cents apiece. Whole families come, locking up their door, bringing the baby, work, dinner, or lunch, take a certain number of chairs, and spend the day. As far as eye can reach you see a multitude seated, as if in church, with other multitudes moving to and fro, while boys and girls without number are frolicking, racing, playing ball, driving hoop, &c., but contriving to do it without making a hideous racket. How French children are taught to play and enjoy themselves without disturbing every body else, is a mystery. "C'est gentil" seems to be a talismanic spell; and "Ce n'est pas gentil ça" is sufficient to check every rising irregularity. O that some savant would write a book and tell us how it is done! I gazed for half an hour on the spectacle. A more charming sight my eyes never beheld. There were grayheaded old men, and women, and invalids; and there were beautiful demoiselles working worsted, embroidery, sewing; men reading papers; and, in fact, people doing every thing they would do in their own parlors. And all were graceful, kind, and obliging; not a word nor an act of impoliteness or indecency. No wonder the French adore Paris, thought I; in no other city in the world is a scene like this possible! No wonder that their hearts die within them at thoughts of exile in the fens of Cayenne!

But under all this there lie, as under the cultivated crust of this fair world, deep abysses of soul, where volcanic masses of molten lava surge and shake the tremulous earth. In the gay and bustling Boulevards, a friend, an old resident of Paris, poised out to me, as we rode, the bullet marks that scarred the houses—significant tokens of what seems, but is not, forgotten.

At sunset a military band of about seventy performers began playing in front of the Tuileries. They formed an immense circle, the leader in the centre. He played the octave flute, which also served as a baton for marking time. The music was characterized by delicacy, precision, suppression, and subjugation of rebellious material.

I imagined a congress of horns, clarinets, trumpets, &c., conversing in low tones on some important theme; nay, rather a conspiracy of instruments, mourning between whiles their subjugation, and ever and anon breaking out in a fierce émeute, then repressed, hushed, dying away; as if they had heard of Baron Munchausen's frozen horn, and had conceived the idea of yielding their harmonies without touch of human lips, yet were sighing and sobbing at their impotence. Perhaps I detected the pulses of a nation's palpitating heart, throbbing for liberty, but trodden down, and sobbing in despair.

In the evening Mrs. C. had her salon, a fashion of receiving one's friends on a particular night, that one wishes could be transplanted to American soil.

No invitations are given. It is simply understood that on such an evening, the season through, a lady receives her friends. All come that please, without ceremony. A little table is set out with tea and a plate of cake. Behind it presides some fairy Emma or Elizabeth, dispensing tea and talk, bonbons and bon-mots, with equal grace. The guests enter, chat, walk about, spend as much time, or as little, as they choose, and retire. They come when they please, and go when they please, and there is no notice taken of entree or exit, no time wasted in formal greetings and leave takings.