The town-hall has gone. It was the focus of the revolt, it led the fever of the war against the kings. From it came the massacres of September—by order, I believe,—into it retreated and was defeated the last effort of extreme equality. This building at least (one might have hoped) might have been spared for history. It had sprung from the Renaissance, whole and beautiful. It had seen all the growths of the Bourbons and of their power, all the growing consciousness of Paris. It held half the documents of the city and more than half its destiny. It was the head, and its Italian front was the face, of Paris. It has gone altogether. It was burned when the Tuileries was burned.
The room where Danton pleaded so that his voice was heard beyond the river; the room where the Queen, in a voice low and firm, replied to the questions of her judges; the room where Marat was acquitted, and where the Girondins sang—all that has gone in fire. The house where Desmoulins first conspired is pulled down. The house where Danton sat in his last hours watching the fire and caring little for life or death has also gone. The Jacobins are a market-place. The temple was pulled down by the order of Napoleon. That furious business seems to have burnt out the very stones of its origin or to have burst the confines wherein it was conceived.
Perhaps a fate rested upon them all.
I went to-day through woods that were quite lonely twenty years ago. They stood near my home. Here, in the midst of the trees, and in a deserted place reached by a dismantled and neglected road, rose a country-house, regular in outline, monotonous, and faded. The windows were open to the night, the floors rotten; green moss grew on the plaster of the walls; the roof was ruinous. It was the house to which the daughter of Marie Antoinette had come, reserved, and perhaps with terrors in her mind, to find silence while the restoration still endured. It was her refuge. Years after it stood as I have recalled it. I saw it (I say) again to-day—or rather, I saw it no longer.
The woods are felled in regular great roads. There are villas built and new inns, and pleasure-places. A new Paris has spread out towards it and killed it. Here also the memory of the Revolution, the physical memory, has disappeared.
I know of no wave like it in Europe or in the history of Europe: of no such attempt, so great, so full of men and of creation, whose outward garment in building has been so thrust away by the irony of Time.
A SECRET LETTER
I had promised Your Excellency in my last dispatch to let him know with the least delay both the consequences of my appeal to the King in this country and the events that might flow from his attitude.