Our hospitals and asylums for suffering poverty, are too well known, and stand on too high a basis to require any eulogium from me. I am happy to add, that those of Paris have not been neglected during the united horrors of war and revolution. A respectable physician (not a frenchman) assures me, that even during the most barbarous moments of the sanguinary Robespierre, these useful establishments were not abandoned. By a strange contradiction, while virtue and innocence were daily dragged to the scaffold, misery here found a refuge from the agonies of pain, and the menaces of disease. These institutions are now kept up with liberality, and every possible attention. Besides several others the medical gentleman in question particularly praises “l’Hôtel Dieu, rue du Marché Palu,” where from fifteen hundred to two thousand sick persons receive the advice of the ablest physicians, and are treated with the most delicate care. The government, and the persons particularly entrusted with the management of this establishment, show the most laudable zeal in its support. “L’Hospice St. Louis” is an excellent appendage to this, to which those whose complaints are contagious are immediately removed. He next commends “l’Hospice de la Pitié, rue Fossés St. Victor,” behind “le Jardin des Plantes,” the refuge of distressed innocence, in which two thousand children of soldiers, who died in the service of their country, are rescued from misery, and comfortably supported. “L’Hospice de St. Sulpice, rue de Sèvres,” originally built by madame Necker, in which one hundred and twenty sick, and eighteen wounded persons are relieved. “L’Hospice des Incurables,” where the doom of these unhappy wretches is softened by an extensive garden; and “l’Hospice de la Salpétrière,” built by Louis XIII, and maintained at present in all its original grandeur. The building is fine, presenting a majestic façade, and its boundaries are so extensive that it is almost a little city. Here sixteen hundred girls are employed in making linen and in working lace. Old married men, young women affected with madness, and female ideots here receive those little comforts, of which their respective situations still allow them to partake.
Requesting you to pardon this digression I shall conclude my subject with a few short observations drawn from my former remarks.
To those who are fond of the arts, and who devote their time to the pursuit, Paris offers objects of great interest and unequalled beauty. Persons who pass their lives in a career of dissipation, who are satisfied with public amusements, bought pleasures, and high play, will find here, decked in all the joys of variety, the means of gratifying their favourite wishes. To such as come to view the curiosities of the place, Paris will appear delightful during a residence of two or three months, as that time will be fully and agreeably occupied in examining its various institutions, and in visiting its different theatres, particularly if the traveller arrives in the beginning of spring, when the charms of nature are added to those of art. But to him whose attachments are centred within the circle of his own family, who is fond of the investigation of truth, and whose early days have been passed in the polished societies of London, Paris, after its great and striking beauties have once been sufficiently viewed, will appear comparatively tame, dull, and uninteresting. He will daily miss the freedom of conversation, which is so generally prevalent in England; he will look in vain for that manly sense, with which great national questions are discussed by men of education in London, he will be irritated by the flippancy of french politicians, and by the pedantic terms and laboured sentences, which take the place of sound argument and solid reasoning. He will find the amusements rather various than splendid. He will find society difficult when it is good, and dangerous when it is easy[97]. He will admire the grace and elegance of the ladies, and will look with an eye of pity, it not of contempt, on the indelicacy of their dress. He will hear “la bonne compagnie” talked of in every set, and never defined. He will perhaps at last discover that it only exists, where it does not assume the name, or as Voltaire says,
“Qui ne s’appelle pas la bonne compagnie, mais qui l’est.”
He will view with wonder and admiration the works of art, and see with no little pleasure and curiosity the extraordinary man now at the head of government. Such will be his principal sources of satisfaction at Paris. He will soon discover that every thing else, however blazoned out in the trappings of grandeur, or vamped up in the colouring of hyperbole, is only “air and empty nothing.”
Adieu, my dear sir, I propose setting out to-morrow morning for Lyons, Switzerland, and Italy. You will, therefore, not hear from me again till I am far distant from this capital. I came here big with hope, and eager in expectation. I rejoice at having undertaken the journey, as it has afforded me much useful information, but I leave Paris without regret, and with but little desire of a speedy return.
I am, &c.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Three horses and a post boy cost six livres, or five shillings per post. The post is two leagues, or five miles english.