Just in leaving the Garden, the Seine has lent some of its water to St. Martin, to make an island—saints not being able to make islands without this accommodation. This island of St. Martin is covered, during summer, with huge piles of wood, ingeniously arranged into pyramids and conic sections. Some of the piles are built into dwellings, and let out for the warm season; so you can procure here a very snug little summer retreat, and burn your house to warm your toes in the winter. I ought to tell you (for acute travellers never let anything of this kind slip), that wood is here two sous a pound. That old woman, the government, is very expensive in her way of living, and the moment she finds any article of first necessity, as salt or fuel, &c., she claps a tax upon it. Besides, all that money which your railroad fanatics about Schuylkill lay out in contrivances to carry your coal to market, she lays out in new frocks—and this is the reason wood is two cents a pound.
A little onward, I stepped upon the quiet and peaceful island of St. Louis—quiet! and yet it is inhabited by nearly all the lawyers of Paris. St. Louis is the only saint that has not left off doing miracles. The noisy arts will not venture on it, though four bridges have been made for their accommodation. It reminds one of that world of Ovid’s, where everything went off to Heaven except justice.—Astræa ultima. Like all other places of Paris, this island has its curiosities and monuments. You will find here the ancient Hotel de Mimes, its ceilings painted by Lebrun and Le Sueur, now a lumber-house for soldiers and their iron beds; and if you give a franc to the cicerone (the porter and his wife) you can get him to tell you that Bonaparte was hid here for two days after the battle of Waterloo. He will shew you, if you seem to doubt, the very paillasse upon which the Emperor, whilst the Allies were marching into Paris, slept. You will find here, also, some imperishable ruins of Lebrun and Le Sueur, in the once famous Hotel de Bretonvilliers, now venerable for its dirt, as well as its antiquity.
I admired awhile the Halle aux Vins, one of the curiosities of the left bank, enclosed on three sides by a wall, and on the side of the Seine, by an iron railing 889 yards. It contains 800,000 casks of wine and spirits, from which are drawn annually, for the use of Paris, twenty millions of gallons. France, by a cunning legislation, prevents this natural produce of her soil escaping from the country, by laying a prohibitory duty upon the industry of other nations, which would enable them to purchase it; so we have the whole drinking of it to ourselves, and we oblige John Bull to stick to his inflammatory Port and Madeira.
L’isle de la Cité comes next; the last, but not the least, remarkable of the three sister islands, called the Island of the Cité, because once all Paris was here, and there was no Paris anywhere else. Antony used to quaff old Falernian on this island with Cæsar, and run after the grisette girls and milliners, whilst they sent Labienus to look after Dumnorix; and here in a later age came the gay and gartered earls; knights in full panoply; fashionable belles in rustling silks, and the winds brought delicate perfumes on their wings. At present no Arabic incense is wasted upon the air of this island. Filth has set up her tavern here, and keeps the dirtiest house of all Paris. But in the midst of this beggary of comfort and decency, are glorious monuments which the rust of ages has not yet consumed; the Hôtel Dieu, Palais de Justice, and Præfecturate of Police; and I had like to have forgotten that majestic old pile, with fretted roofs and towers pinnacled in the clouds, with Gothic windows, and grizly saints painted on them,
“So old, as if she had for ever stood,
So strong as if she would for ever stand,”
whose bells at this moment are tolling over the dead, the venerable, the time-honoured Notre Dame de Paris.
This old lady is the queen of the cité. Her corner-stone was laid by Pope Alexander III. upon the ruins of an old Roman temple of Jupiter, in 1163. So you see she is a very reverend old lady. Her bell is eight feet in diameter, and requires sixteen men to set its clapper in motion. On entering the church, the work of so many generations, in contemplating its size, the immense height of its dome and roofs, and the huge pillars which sustain them, with the happy disposition and harmony of all these masses, one is seized with a very sudden reverence and a very modest sense of one’s own littleness; and yet a minute before one looked upon the glorious sun, and walked under “this most excellent canopy” almost without astonishment.
You will see here, at all hours of the day, persons devoutly at their beads, intent on their prayer books, or kneeling at the cross. Except on days of parade, you will see almost six women to one man; and these rather old. Women must love something. When the day of their terrestrial affections has faded, their loves become celestial. When they can’t love anything else, why they love God. “Aime Dieu, Sainte Thérése, c’est toujours aimer.” The Emperor Julian stayed a winter on this island, at which time the river washed (not the Emperor[1]) but the base of the walls of the city; and Paris was accessible only by two wooden bridges. He called it his Lutetia την φιλην Αευχετιαν, his beloved city of mud.
The Palais de Justice, or Lit de Justice, as the French appropriately call it, (for the old lady does sometimes take a nap) is a next door neighbour. This palace lodged, long ago, the old Roman Præfects; the kings of the first race, the counts of Paris under the second; and twelve kings of the third.
The great Hôtel Dieu, or Hospital, counts all the years between us and king Pepin, about twelve hundred. It is a manly, solid, and majestic building; its façade is adorned with Doric columns, and beneath the entablature are Force, Prudence, and Justice, and several other virtues “stupified in stone.” But I will give you a more particular account of it, as well as of the right worshipful Notre Dame, and the Palace, when I write my book about Churches, Hospitals, and the courts of Justice. I will only remark now, that I visited this great Hospital a few days ago, and that I saw in it a thousand beds, and a poor devil stretched out on each bed, waiting his turn to be despatched; that the doctor came along about six, and prescribed a bouillon et un lavement to them all round; a hundred or two of students following after, of whom about a dozen could approach the beds, and when symptoms were examined, and legs cut off, or some such surgical operation performed, the others listened.