The notorious Hôtel de Ville is well placed in a group with these obscene images. It is the seat of the administration of justice for all Paris, a grey and grief-worn castle, with the Place de Grêve by the side of it. There it stands by the great thermometer of Monsieur Chevalier, where the French people come twice a day to see if they ought to shiver or sweat. There is not a more abominable place in all Paris than this Place de Grêve. It holds about the same rank in the city that the hangman does in the community. There flowed the blood of the ferocious Republic, of the grim Empire, and the avenging Restoration. Lally’s ghost haunts the guilty place. Cartouche was burnt there, and the horrible Marchioness Brinvilliers; Damien and Ravaillac were tortured there. The beautiful Princess de Lamballe was assassinated there, and the martyrs of 1830 buried there. To complete your horror, there is yet the lamp post, the revolutionary gibbet, and the window through which Robespierre leaped out and broke—if I were not writing to a lady I would say—his d——d neck. No accusing spirit would fly to Heaven’s chancery with the oath.
I began to breathe as I stepped upon the Pont Neuf. The atmosphere brightened, the prospect suddenly opened, and the noble river exhibited its twenty bridges, and its banks, turretted, towered, and castellated, as far as the eye could pierce. There is a romantic interest in the very name of this bridge, as in the “Bridge of Sighs,” though not a great deal richer in architecture than yours of Fair Mount. And what is the reason? Why is the Rialto more noble than your Exchange of Dock-street? You see Pierre and Jaffier, and the Jew, standing on it. The Pont Neuf has arched the Seine these two hundred years and more. It was once the centre of gaiety, and fashion, and business. Here were displayed the barbaric luxury of Marie de Medicis, and the pompous Richelieu; glittering equipages paraded here in their evening airings, and fair ladies in masks—better disguised in their own faces—crowded here to the midnight routes of the Carnival.
A company in 1709 had an exclusive privilege of a depôt of umbrellas at each end, that ladies and gentlemen paying a sou might cross without injury to their complexions. The fine arts, formerly natives of this place, have since emigrated to the Palais Royal—ripæ ulterioris amantes—and despair now comes hither at midnight—and the horrid suicide, by the silent statue of the great Henry, plunges into eternity.
On the left is the Quai des Augustins, where the patient bibliopolist sits over his odd volumes, and where the cheapest of all human commodities is human wit. A black and ancient building gives an imposing front to the Quai Conti; it is the Hotel des Monnaies. Commerce, Prudence, and several other allegorical grandmothers are looking down from the balustrade. Next to it, (for the Muses, too, love the mint,) with a horse-shoe kind of face, is the Royal “Institut de France.” This court has supreme jurisdiction in the French republic of letters; it regulates the public judgment in matters of science, fine arts, language, and literary composition; it proposes questions, and rewards the least stupid, if discovered, with a premium, and gives its approbation of ingenious inventors; who, like Fulton, do not die of hunger in waiting for it.
You may attend the sittings of the Académie des Sciences, which are public, on Mondays. You will meet Pascal and Molière in the ante-chamber—as far as they dared venture in their lives. The members you will see in front of broad tables in the interior, and the president eminent above the rest, who ever and anon will ring a little bell by way of keeping less noise; the spectators, with busts of Sully, Bossuet, Fenelon, and Descartes, sitting gravely, tier over tier, around the extremities of the room. The secretary will then run over a programme of the subjects, not without frequent tinklings of the admonitory bell; at the end of which, debates will probably arise on general subjects, or matters of form. For example, M. Arago will call in question the veracity of that eminent man, M. Herschel, of New York, and his selenelogical discoveries; which have a great credit here, because no one sees the moon for the fogs, and you may tell as many lies about her as you please.
Afterwards, a little man of solemn mien, being seated upon a chair, will read you, alas, one of his own compositions. He will talk of nothing but the geognosie des couches atmospheriques; the isomorphism of the mineralogical substances, and the “Asyntotes of the Parabola,” for an hour. You will then have an episode from Baron Larrey (no one listening) upon a bag of dry bones, displayed, à la Jehoshaphat, upon a wide table; followed by another reader, and then by another, to the end of the sitting. You will think the empire of dulness has come upon the earth.
The Institute was once the College des Quatre Nations, and was founded by Mazarin upon the ruins of the famous Tour de Nesle. I need not tell you the history of this tower. Who does not know all about Queen Isabeau de Bavière?—of her window from the heights of the tower, from which she overlooked the Seine, before the baths of Count Vigier (what made him a count?) were invented. She was a great admirer of the fine forms of the human figure.
Her ill-treatment of her lovers—her sewing them up, to prevent their telling tales, in sacks, and then tossing them before day-light into the river, was, to say the least of it, very wrong! In crossing the Pont des Arts, towards midnight, I have often heard something very like the voices of lamentation and violence. Sometimes, I thought I could hear distinctly Isabeau! in the murmuring of the waters.
All the world runs to the Bains Vigiers, which are anchored along this Quai, to bathe, at four sous; but the water is exceedingly foul. It is here the Seine,
“With disemboguing streams,
Rolls the large tribute of its dead dogs.”