The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

by John Sanderson

In the mean time I saw a couple of ghosts (I supposed them to be Cuvier, and Dr. Gall) skulking away as soon as they caught a glimpse of our tapers, and I saw a great many other things, not interesting to people above ground. We began now to be apprehensive of taking cold, and being sent hither to enrich these cabinets; and so we deposited at the door our golden branch, and having mounted a straight stair-way one hundred feet, were purified in the open air.

The two doctors now left me their Eurydice, and she and I, being inspired alike with the spirit of sight-seeing, went a few hundred yards westward, and saw Julian’s Baths. Though he is said to have been little addicted to bathing, here are his baths, the only relic of his sojourn in Paris. This old building is an oblong, with very thick walls, which are crumbling to decay. One of them is entirely dilapidated. The vaults, rising forty-two feet above the soil, and furnaces under ground, and parts of the bathing rooms, are exposed to view, in all the naked majesty of a ruin; a ruin, too, of fifteen centuries.

This is but a single hall of an immense palace—the Palais des Thermes—which once covered the present site of the University. It was the scene of licentious revellings and crime, “latebra scelerum, Venerisque accommoda furtis,” afterwards of the theological disputes of the Sorbonne, and now of the quiet lectures of the University; and Virgin Mary’s are now made out of the old Venuses.

I am a goose of an antiquary; all I could see was Mrs. Julian, jumping into her bath, and coming dribbling out again; but my companion was very different. She had a taste for putting her nose into every musty corner, and cracking off pieces of a bath, and the Roman mortar, of which posterity has lost the secret, to put in her cabinet. She has over-run all Europe, and has now got, she says, near a ton of antiquities. She has a stone from Kenilworth, and a birch from Virgil’s tomb, plenty of mosaics from the Coliseum, and of “auld nick-nackets” from Stirling castle. She has promised me a leaf from Tasso’s lemon tree, and one from Rousseau’s rose bush, also a twig of William Tell’s tree of liberty, and Shakspeare’s mulberry, and a little chip of Dr. Johnson’s cedar at Streatham. And nearly all our travelling Yankee ladies are bringing over a similar collection; after a while the commonest thing in the world will be a curiosity.

Close in this neighbourhood is the Hôtel de Cluny, to which we also paid a visit—I having a ticket from Mr. Sommerand, the proprietor. In this hotel used to lodge Roman generals and emperors, and the first French kings. A suite of seven or eight rooms is crammed with furniture, the remains of the last age; some of it magnificently decayed; commodes, chests, boxes, second-hand tooth brushes, as good as new, and other national relics.

Nothing contemporary enters here; there was nothing, but the lady who accompanied me, under a hundred years old. First we entered the dining room, and saw a knight in full armour placed by a table; and the ghost of a mahogany sideboard at the opposite end—without date, and there is no knowing whether it was made before or since the flood—with its knives and spoons, and earthenware tea-cups, of the same antiquity; next, a bed chamber hung in gilt leather—whose do you think? Why Francis the First’s, with all the implements thereunto belonging.

An entire suit of steel armour, cap-a-pie, reposes upon the bed, with a visor of the knight’s, which had gained victories in jousts and tournaments; also an old coat out at the elbows, worn last, I presume, by his footman. Every little rag of his is preserved here. Here, too, are girdles and bracelets, caskets and other valuables, and a necklace with its pedigree labelled on a bit of parchment; the Belle Feronières’, I suppose. Here is the very glass he looked into, with a Venus holding a garland in front, and a cross and altar behind, by way of symmetry; and here are the very spurs (I held them in my hand) which he wore at Pavia; finally, the very bed, the very sheets, his Majesty slept in.

This bed was hawked about all Paris in the Revolution—at last it was sold by auction in the public streets, a dix francs seulement, and was knocked down to Monsieur Sommerand—Francis the First’s bed and comfortable, and his little pillow, about as big as a sausage. I was much gratified with this collection, which is certainly unique in the world; and you are not hurried through by a Cicerone, but by the complaisance of M. Sommerand you can rummage and ransack things at your leisure. In the other rooms are vases and caskets, and precious cabinets, a spinette of Marie de Medicis, and other furniture of noble dames; one gets tired of looking at their trinkets; and in other rooms are castings, and inlayings, and carvings, and so forth.

I now took Madame under my arm, and descending through one of the thousand and eighty streets of Paris into the Rue de l’Ecole Médecine, deposited her at her home. You should never pass into this street without stopping awhile to contemplate a very memorable dwelling in it—that in which Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat. One owes to this generous maid and disinterested martyr to humanity, a tribute in approaching its threshold. The house is also otherwise remarkable.

Danton used to call here of a morning from the bottom of the stairs upon Marat, and then they went arm in arm to the Convention; and Collot d’Herbois, the actor—what memorable names!—and Chabot the Capucin, Legendre the butcher, Chaumette the Atheist, and St. Just and Robespierre, used to hold here their nightly councils. It would puzzle Beelzebub to get up such another club. Under the outer door-way are remaining the letters * * or D * *, a part of the inscription effaced, “Liberty, Indivisibility, OR Death!”