On Anything

by Hilaire Belloc

Then again, in Toulouse it was amazing to collect, as one wandered through, the memories of so many centuries. Here were the shrine where the body of Saturninus was found dead, dragged to death by a bull through the streets of the city; the quarter from which the populace saw advancing the Northern Army that was to defeat the Visigoths; the site of the wall whence the retreat of the Saracen was noted, a flood of men pouring back towards the wall of the Pyrenees; the flat heights beyond the city to the east, where the English Army came up from Spain in the defeats of Napoleon and drove back the resistance of the defence.

All these, and many more, a man notes in a travel of but few days, for all Europe—and no province more than this—is crammed with the story of its own past; but perhaps that which, in such reminiscences or resurrections, most moves one is to observe the obliteration of the last and most immediate of our efforts. The sites of the Revolution have disappeared.

One may walk about Paris—as I have walked to-day—and see stones and windows that are still alive with the long business of the city. There is the room where Madame de Sévigné wrote, there is the long gallery where Sully paced, recognising the new power of artillery and planning the greatness of his master. You may stand on the very floor where the priests stood when St. Louis held the Crown of Thorns above them, more than six hundred years ago; you may stand on the stone that covers Geoffrey Plantagenet before the altar of the Cathedral; you may touch the altar that the boatmen raised under Tiberius to their gods when our Lord was preaching in Galilee, and as you marvel at that stone you may note around you the little Roman bricks that stood in the same arches when Julian saw them, sitting at the Council that saved the Faith for the West.

All these old things remain in this moving, and yet unchanging, town—except the things of its principal and most memorable feat of will.

The Revolution is even now not old. Its effects are still in movement; they are not yet accomplished. Of the fundamental quarrels which it raised (some five or six) one at least, that of religion, is by no means resolved.

It is not even old in time. I who write this have known some who saw it; many who remembered its soldiers or its victims. I have but to-day visited a room where a daughter of the Montgolfiers would tell me in her extreme old age how the mob poured on the Bastille, and her companion, nearer to me in blood, had seen, and in my boyhood talked to me of, Napoleon. How many all round me, to-day or yesterday, were filled with the light or fire of that time, saying, "My father died in such and such a battle," in Spain, or in Italy, or beyond the Vistula—at the ends of the world. It is not so very long ago. It was much the chief business, for good or evil, that Europe has known since the Empire accepted the Faith. And what visible relics of it remain?

Where the National Assembly sat at Versailles, the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, there are a few houses or barracks, a place in building. Where they sat in Paris, they and the first days of the Convention, wrestling with and throwing Necessity, the Riding School, that vast oval cavern in which they forged the modern world, has utterly gone.

I never pass the place, even hurriedly and on business to some work or other, but I pause a moment to consider so great a change! It is where the Rue Castiglione comes now into the Rue de Rivoli—two streets whose very names are those of battles fought long after the atlantean work was done. Not a trace remains. A drinking shop for foreign jockeys, a cosmopolitan hotel, a milliner's where the rich of all nations (the women of the rich, that is) go in and buy; these hold the place. Here Mirabeau spoke his last words with effort and went home to die; here Verginaud thundered; here Louis and Mary Antoinette took refuge in the oven of the August days; here the long vote, a day and a night and yet another day, dragged on and ended with the end of the Capétians—after a thousand years.

The Tuileries saw more. They saw the outlawing of Thermidor, the quarrels that ended in the dictatorship, the hard scuffle that killed the monarchy. They have wholly disappeared. At the one end of them still stands the room where the committee made war on the whole world, and imposed upon the nation that leaden law of armies which we still call the Terror. But for that room all has gone.