It was in this old building that Louis XVI. and his queen were imprisoned in 1792. The king was taken out from here the 20th of January, 1793, to the scaffold; the queen about eleven months after; and Madame Elizabeth, his sister, in the following year; leaving his daughter here alone at thirteen years of age. Sir Sydney Smith was confined in the same room in 1798. Bonaparte, in 1811, demolished the old edifice to the last stone—from what motive?—and in 1812 it was fenced round, and the grass grew upon the guilty place. The religious ladies who now reside here, are purifying it by prayers and other acts of devotion. A propos of Sydney Smith; I met him at an evening party lately. He looks like the history of the last half century. He is a venerable old man, and very sociable with the young girls, who were climbing his knees, and hanging about his neck, and getting his name albummed in their little books to carry to America.
I will now shew you a house in this street, (Rue des Marais du Temple, No. 31,) a house that, once seen, will never depart from your memory. Its closed doors and windows, as if no one lived there; its iron railing, without entrance, and the interstices condemned with wood, in front; and the slit in the centre of the door to receive the correspondence of its horrible master, who sits within as a spider in its web, you will see all the rest of your life. It is the house of Monsieur de Paris. Oh, dear! and who is Monsieur de Paris? He is a civil magistrate, and belongs to the executive department. No one living, is perhaps, so great a terror to evil doers as this Monsieur de Paris. “Monsieur,” you must recollect, has its particular and its general meanings. Monsieur means any body; un monsieur is a gentleman of some breeding and education; La maison de monsieur is the family of the king’s eldest son; Monsieur de Meaux means the Archbishop; and Monsieur de Paris means the Hangman! He is also called the “Executeur de la haute justice,” or “Executeur des hautes œuvres,” and vulgarly, the Bourreau. This is his Hotel. The name of the present incumbent is Mr. Henry Sanson. His family consists of a son, a person of mild and gentle manners, who is now serving his apprenticeship to the business under his eminent parent; and two daughters. The elder, about fifteen, is remarkable for beauty and accomplishments. The father is rich, his salary being above that of the President of the Royal Court, and he has spared no expense in the education of the girls. They will be sumptuously endowed.
The two ends of society are affected sometimes in nearly the same way. A princess, being obliged to select her husband from her own rank and religion, runs the hazard of a perpetual virginity; and Mademoiselle de Paris experiences exactly the same inconvenience; she can marry but a hangman. There is no one of all Europe who has performed the same eminent functions as Mr. Henry Sanson, or to whom, without loss of dignity, he can offer the hand of his fair daughter. Ye lords and gentlemen, if you think you have all the pride to yourselves, you are mistaken, the hangman has his share, like another man.
Mr. Sanson has appropriated one or two rooms of this building to a museum of ancient instruments used in judicial torture—Luke’s iron bed, Ravaillac’s boots, and such like relics; and is quite a dilettanti in this department of science. We expect a course of gratuitous lectures, as at the “Musée des Arts et Metiers,” when the season begins. Amongst other objects, you will see the sword with which was beheaded the Marquis de Laly. I am going to tell you an anecdote I have read of this too famous execution, which is curious.
About the year 1750, in the middle of the night, three young men of the high class of nobility, after breaking windows, and the heads of street passengers, and beating the guard, (which was the privilege of the higher classes in those times,) strolling down the Faubourg St. Martin, laughing and talking, and well fuddled with champagne, arrived at the door of this house. They heard the sound of instruments, and music so lively, seemed to indicate a hearty bourgeois dance. How fortunate! they could now pass the night pleasantly. One of them knocked, and a polite well-dressed person opened. A young lord explained the motive of their visit, and was refused. “You are wrong,” said the nobleman; “we are of the court, and do you honour in sharing your amusements.” “I am obliged, nevertheless, to refuse,” replied the stranger; “neither of you know the person you are addressing, or you would be as anxious to withdraw, as now to be admitted.” “Excellent, upon honour! and who the devil are you?” “The executioner of Paris.” “Ha, ha! what you? you the gentleman who breaks limbs, cuts off heads, and tortures poor devils so agreeably?” “Such indeed are the duties of my office; I leave, however, the details you speak of to my deputies, and it is only when a lord like either of you is subject to the penalties of the law, that I do execution on him with my own hands.” The individual who held this dialogue with the executioner was the Marquis de Laly. Twenty years after, he died by the hands of this man, upon whose office he was now exercising his raillery.
One of the ornaments of this Boulevard is the Café Turc, fitted up with a furniture of two hundred thousand francs. It would do honour to the Italien. What a display of belles and beaux, about seven of an evening, through its spacious rooms, and gardens, and galleries!—one lends his ear to the concert; another, retired in a grotto at the side of his bonne amie, drinks large draughts of love; and another drinks eau sucrée. And here is the largest elephant upon the earth, which bears the same relation to all other elephants that the Trojan horse did to all other horses. This monster was to be cast in bronze, and surmounted by a tower, forming a figure of about eighty feet in height. That which you see here is only the model, in plaster of Paris. The stair-way leads up through one of the legs, six and a quarter feet in the ancle. There were to be twenty-four bas reliefs in marble, representing the arts and sciences; and the bronze was to be obtained from the fusion of the cannon captured by the imperial army in Spain. Louis Philippe, who is charged with the public works begun by Bonaparte, will be puzzled to finish this elephant.
Paris contains one hundred and eighty-nine great fountains, of which, about twenty are of beautiful architecture, adorned with sculpture and statuary, and enlivened by jets d’eaux, and form a principal ornament of the city. This elephant was intended to add one to the number. That, so imposing and picturesque, which we just now passed, on the Boulevard du Temple, is called the Chateau. The building with the jet on the top forms a cone. The water falls from its summit into vases, which overflow in cascades that tumble down from story to story into a large basin at the base, where eight lions of bronze spout torrents in jets d’eaux from their mouths. Its cost was one hundred thousand francs.
It would be too long to particularise the others. On one, you will see Leda caressing her swan, Cupid lurking on the watch; on another, Tantalus gaping in vain for the liquid, which passes by his lips into the pail of the waterman; on another, Hygeia giving drink to a fatigued soldier; and, on another, Charity suckling one of her children, wrapping another from the cold in the folds of her frock, and quenching the parched lips of a third with the pure stream. I have just bought you a clock representing the “Fountain of the Innocents,” with all its waters in motion. It was the Duchess de Berri’s, and is of delicate workmanship. Please to have the proper respect for its dignity, and indulgence for its frailty. I will send it by the next Packet.
The turning of wickets, the gingling of keys, and grating of bolts, were the sounds heard here forty-six years ago. What recollections rise out of the ground to meet you at every step as you tread upon this unhallowed spot. One hears almost the chains clank, and the prisoner groan in his cell! It was here, where the charcoal now floats so peacefully on the lake, and where the boatman sings his absent mistress so joyously, that stood, in horrid majesty—
“With many a foul and midnight murder fed,”