Paris, August 14th, 1835.
Here is an Englishman, who has interrupted me at the very outset of this letter, and says I must dine with him at the “Garden of Plants.” He is a kind of public informer, and does the honours of Paris to us raw Yankees, just come over. He has on his left arm, a basket of provisions, a couple of claret-bottles exhibiting their slender necks over the margin of the basket, and on his right a lady, his sister, who is to accompany us. She is exceedingly pretty, with a complexion of drifted snow, and a rosiness of cheeks. I have no comparison, only strawberries and cream. She is not slow, neither, as English women generally, to shew her parts of speech. “Sir, it is as delightful and romantic a little spot as there is in the whole city. Only two centuries ago it was an open field, and the physician of Louis XIII. laid it out as a botanical garden; it now covers eighty-four acres, partly with wood. Wood is so delightful at this hot season. And there is now a botanic garden, besides immense conservatories; also, a splendid gallery of anatomy, of botany, and a menagerie; a library, too, of natural history, and laboratories, and an amphitheatre, in which there are annually thirteen courses of lectures. And then there is the School of Drawing and Painting, of Natural History, all gratuitous. We will just step into an omnibus on the Boulevards, and for six sous we shall be set down at the very gate. Oh, it is quite near, only two steps.” I resign myself to the lady. The excursion will perhaps furnish me, what I have great need of, a subject for this letter. Parisian civility never allows one place to be far from another. The French women, if the place should be at any considerable distance, cannot for their little souls tell you. It is always “two steps,” and under this temptation of “two steps” you are often seduced into a walk of several miles. If there is any one virtue in Paris more developed than another, it is that of shewing strangers the way. A French lady asked me the way to-day, in the street, and though I did not know it, I ran all about shewing her, out of gratitude. The strangers who reside here soon fall, by imitation, into the same kind of civility. The Garden of Plants is distant from my lodging about three miles. Adieu till to-morrow.
August 15th.
The driver of a cab takes his seat at the side of his customer, and is therefore very civil, amiable, talkative, and a great rogue. The coachman, on the contrary, is a straight-up, selfish, and sulky brute, who has no complaisance for any one born of a woman; he is not even a rogue, for being seated outside, he has no communication with the passengers. He gives you back your purse if you drop it in his coach; he is the type of the omnibus-driver. You have your choice of the “Citadine,” which does not stop for way-passengers, but at its stations at half a mile; or the omnibus, which picks you up anywhere on the way. It sets off always at the minute, not waiting for a load; and then you have a “correspondence;” that is, you have a ticket from the conducteur at the end of one course, which gives you a passage, without additional charge, for the next. You go all round the world for six sous. You change your omnibus three times from the Barrière du Trone to the Barrière de l’Etoile, which are at the east and west extremities of the city.
In Paris, everybody rides in an omnibus. The Chamber of Peers rides in an omnibus. I often go out in the one the king used to ride in before he got up in the world. I rode this morning between a grisette with a bandbox and a knight with a decoration. Some of the pleasantest evenings I have spent here were in an omnibus, wedged in between the easy embonpoint of a healthy pair of Frenchwomen. If you get into melancholy, an omnibus is the best remedy you can imagine. Whether it is the queer shaking over the rough pavement I cannot say, but you have always an irresistible inclination to laugh. It is so laughable to see your face bobbing into the face of somebody else; it is so interesting, too, to know what one’s neighbours may be thinking about one; and then the strange people, and the strange rencontres. I often give six sous just for the comic effect of an omnibus. Precipitate jolts against a neighbour one never saw, as the ponderous vehicle rolls over the stones, gives agitation to the blood and brains, and sets one a thinking. And not the least part of the amusement is the getting in, especially if all the places but the back seat are filled. This back seat is always the last to have a tenant. It is a circular board of about six inches in diameter at the very farthest end, and to reach it you have to run the gauntlet between two rows of knees almost in contact; you set out, the omnibus setting out at the same time, and you get along sitting on a lady’s lap, now on this side, and now on that, until you arrive at your destination; and there you are set up on a kind of pivot to be stared at by seventeen pair of black eyes, ranged along the two sides of the omnibus.
The only evil I know of these vehicles is, that the seat being occupied by seven fat gentlemen, it may leave only six inches of space to a lady of two feet in diameter, so that she comes out compressed to such a degree as to require a whole day of the enlarging and tightening capacities of Madame Palmyre to get her back to her shapes; a worse evil is, that you often take an interest in a fellow-traveller, from whom you are in a few minutes to be separated, perhaps for ever.
We arrived at the garden just time enough before our repast to expatiate lightly upon its beauties. We visited first the Museum of Natural History, which occupies two stories of a building three hundred feet long. On the first floor are six rooms of geological and mineralogical collections; on the second, are quadrupeds, birds, insects, and all the family of the apes—two hundred specimens—and groups of crystals, porphyry, native gold and silver, rough and cut diamonds. Overlooking this whole animal creation is a beautiful statue of Venus Urania—hominum divumque voluptas! In one apartment is a group of six thousand birds, in all their gay and glittering plumage; and there are busts about the room, in bronze, of Linnæus, Fourcroy, Petit, Winslow, Tournefort, and Daubenton.
Our American birds here have all got to be members of the Academy. You can know them only by their feathers. There would be no objection to call our noisy and stupid whip-poor-will, “caprimulgus vociferus,” but what do you think of calling our plain and simple Carolina wren, “troglodytus ludovicianus!”
The insects have a room also to themselves, very snug and beautiful, in cases, and sparkling like gems in all their variety of vivid and fantastic colours. We met here a naturalist, an acquaintance, who has lived the chief part of his life among spiders’ legs, and he explained to us the properties of the insects. He conversed upon their tenacity of life. He shewed us a mite that had lived three months glazed to a bit of glass, and a beetle which had been above three years without eating, and seemed not particular how long it lived; a spider, also, which had been kept one year on the same abstemious regimen, and yet was going on living as usual. Are you not ashamed, you miserable mortals, to be outlived by a beetle? He shewed us, also, flies and spiders sepulchred in amber, perhaps since the days of Ninus—how much better preserved than the mummied ladies and gentlemen who have been handed down to us from the same antiquity.