III
I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde Park—as a well-known local section—yet how few Americans who have gone to Paris have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the town. One finds it a curious circumstance that so many if not most of the great cities somehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate toward the setting sun.
When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very “rustic dwelling” so pathetically sung in Verdi’s tuneful score and tenderly described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and a part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.
Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray’s Paris Sketches with a kind of awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street “for which no rhyme our language yields,” next door to a pastry shop that claimed to have furnished the mise en scène for the “Ballad of Bouillabaisse,” and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche “down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves.” Ah, well-a-day! I have known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, and my Paris has been as interesting as his Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siege and the Republic.
I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the bastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person in his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself agree. I knew them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every Frenchman rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place Vendôme, when I got there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they told me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood against the wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the Cathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as many decades.
IV
Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters. It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary history.
His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her saying, as they drove away, “Never, never forget, my child, as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin play.” It was in one of the lubberly houses of the Place Vendôme that the poet of the keyboard died a few days later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. A brass plate marks the house.
May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous “Ballad of Bouillabaisse,” which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and part of which I may at length take to myself:
“Ah me, how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a time that’s gone,
When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting
In this same place—but not alone—
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me,
There’s no one now to share my cup.”