CHAPTER XV.
PARIS.
Paris the Beautiful.—Notre Dame.—Tuileries and Louvre.—Garden of the Tuileries.—Bois de Boulogne.—Church of the Invalides.—Napoleon’s Tomb.—Place de la Concorde.—Story of the Man of the Iron Mask.—Versailles and the Trianons.—Story of the Dauphin.—Fontainebleau.—The Seine.—Water-Omnibuses.—A Wonderful Boat.—Tommy’s French.—A Surprise.—St. Eustache.—Molière.—Young French Heroes.—Wyllys Wynn’s Poem.
PARIS the beautiful!
City of light hearts, smiling faces, charming courtesies, and gay scenes everywhere!
City of dark tragedies of history that have hardly left behind a scar! The tropical forest gives no warning of poison lurking under the flowers; the bright Southern sky wears no trace of the tempest. Paris says to the stranger, “I am beautiful: I have ever been beautiful, and I wear loveliness like a crown.”
The streets are as gay as the summer sunshine in them; the boulevards, as the wide streets and avenues for pleasure walks are called, seem channels of happiness, through which the tides of life run as brightly as they glimmer along the Seine. “La belle Paris!” says the stranger as he comes, and “La belle Paris!” he utters respectfully as he goes.
We do not wonder that the French love it; that Napoleon gloried in it, and that Mary Queen of Scots left it with a heavy heart. Here human nature has light, warmth, and glow; and love, sympathy, and patriotism are everywhere to be seen.
“Where are the ruins caused by the siege and the Commune?” asked Frank Gray, after the Class had been driven through a number of streets. “I do not see the first sign of there having been a recent war and revolution.”
“In the fall of 1870,” said Master Lewis, “shot and shell for a long period fell around the city and into it like rain. In the following spring the Commune was declared the government of Paris, and it seemed bent on destroying the city’s beauty, and overturning its monuments of art. The Vendôme Column, which celebrated the victories of Napoleon the Great, was pulled down as a monument of tyranny; the Palace of the Tuileries and the Hotel de Ville were set on fire; and the wealthy citizens who had endured the siege by a foreign foe fled from their own countrymen. To-day most of the houses destroyed by the war and the Commune are rebuilt, and the streets are as splendid as in the gay days of the Empire.”
The Class took rooms in the Grand Hotel, one of the largest and finest houses for public entertainment in Europe. Its first visit was to the ancient Cathedral of Notre Dame, whose history is as old as Christianity in France, and which even before that period was a Pagan temple. Here Te Deums for all of the nation’s victories have been sung; funeral orations of kings have been pronounced, confessions of sin for a thousand years have been made, and masses innumerable celebrated. Here Napoleon the Great was crowned, and Napoleon III. was married. Here the Goddess of Reason, after being borne through the streets in state, was enthroned during the Revolution of 1793. It has thirty-seven chapels.