France, 16th July.—Home once more. Paris has buried her dead. The paving-stones, torn up for barricades, are replaced; but for how long?
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is one mass of desolation and ruin; even the Goddess of Liberty on the Bastille column has a bullet through her. Trees, maimed and uprooted; houses tottering to a fall; squares, streets, quays, still palpitating from the riot—all bear witness to the horrors they have suffered.
Who could think of Art at such a time! Theatres are closed, artists undone, professors idle, pupils fled, pianists become street musicians, painters sweep the gutters, and architects mix mortar in the national work-sheds.
Although the National Assembly has voted a subsidy to the theatres, and some help to the poorest of the artists, what is that among so many?
Take a first violin of the opera, for instance; his pay is nine hundred francs a year, which is eked out by private lessons. What chance has he of saving? Transportation would be a boon to him and his colleagues, for they might earn a living in America, Sydney, or the Indies. But even this is denied them. They fought for the Government and against the insurgents, and being only deserving poor instead of malefactors, they cannot even claim this last favour—it is reserved for criminals.
Surely this way—in this awful, hideous confusion of just and unjust, of good and evil, of truth and untruth—this way doth madness lie!
I must write on and try to forget.
IV
PARIS
When Robert and I got to Paris in 1822, I loyally kept my promise to my father by studying nothing but medicine. My first trial came when my cousin, telling me that he had bought a subject, took me to the hospital dissecting room.
But the foul air, the grinning heads, the scattered limbs, the bloody cloaca in which we waded, the swarms of ravenous rats and sparrows fighting for the debris of poor humanity, overwhelmed me with such a paroxysm of wild terror that, at one bound, I was through the nearest window, and tearing home as if Death and the Devil were at my heels.