The weather was very cold at Rheims, and one morning (2nd May) even frosty; the last day of my residence there was wet. The diligence to Soissons, on Sunday, being full, I hired a carriole, which is something much like a taxed cart, but lined with tapestry. We were seated on a bundle of straw; there were two horses, one between the shafts, and one outrigger. The first part of our road lay through an open common field, as usual, but on looking back, the appearance of the cathedral was very fine. The two towers, rising at the end of the long range of building, put me in mind of Westminster Abbey, though nothing can be more different when the parts are considered separately. The latter part of our journey seemed somewhat more pleasant, but a mizzling rain would not permit us to enjoy it.
Before reaching Soissons, our outrigger, which carried the postillion, became very restive, and we dismounted. As soon as he seemed a little more quiet we got in again, but were hardly seated, before the horse began again to kick and twist himself about: in a few moments the postillion was on the ground. I jumped out, and ran to him, but he had already disengaged himself. He was entangled in the traces, and seemed to be among the horses’ feet, so that I expected to have found him with half his bones broken, but he was not materially hurt. The vicious animal did not cease kicking till he had thrown himself down and broken the traces. He was afterwards quiet enough, and we reached Soissons without farther difficulty at about half-past three. After dinner I walked out, in spite of the bad weather. The first object was the ruin of the church of St. John the Baptist. The two western towers only remain, each crowned with a spire; the rest was destroyed at the revolution, and some huge masses of masonry lie scattered about, the remains of the ancient edifice, but no vegetation yet softens the crudeness of the ruin; no mosses or lichens break the harshness of the lines, and give richness and variety of colour; no venerable trees spread their majestic branches around, and by their deep and solemn shade give spirit and relief to the building. The inhabitants of Soissons obtained permission for these towers to remain as ornaments to their city, and even as they are, they are very beautiful, and time will render them more so. They are of a late Gothic, with the characteristic compound arch in the details, and enriched points to the trefoils. Each tower terminates in a small spire, but it preserves, quite to the bottom, a pyramidal form. I took my course along the rampart, where there has been a broad walk, but it was cut up by the garrison in order to raise defences against the Prussians in the last war. The effort was of little use, and the town suffered much; the greatest scene of ruin was where a powder magazine blew up; it divided the fortifications quite to the foundation, destroyed all the houses near it, injured a great many more, and shattered the windows throughout the place. Repairs are commenced, but the town in general looks very melancholy and forlorn, and the windows of the cathedral are still patched with straw. I continued my walk along the rampart, but the thick weather did not permit me to see much of the prospect. It looks, in one part, over the public promenade, but the old trees were destroyed by the Prussians, and the present are only about six feet high. What a long time it will take to repair the injury of a few weeks! The rampart here making a sudden bend, I left it, and passed by what once was a church dedicated to St. Leger. The southern front is of early Gothic, but I shall leave that for a comparison with some other Gothic buildings: I could not obtain admittance. Thence I proceeded through the principal square, where the town-hall once stood. My next object was the cathedral, which, in character, is something like that at Rheims, but far inferior in scale and execution: the south transept finishes in a semicircle, having been the choir of a more ancient church of the early French Gothic. During my absence Mr. Le Blanc found out a vault in the convent of St. Medard which had served as a prison to Louis le Debonnaire, in 833. This day was observed as the anniversary of the return of Louis XVIII., and two candles were placed, in the evening, on the outside of one of the windows of our room, by way of illumination, and a few drunken soldiers rambled about the streets, crying vive le roi! White flags, or handkerchiefs, were very generally hung out at the windows during the day, but I saw nothing which indicated any popular enthusiasm in favour of the Bourbons. Next day the weather became yet worse, and in the afternoon, we took our places in the diligence and returned to Paris; my post, as usual, was in the cabriolet. The conducteur was the son of a man who had a little property of his own of about thirty acres, but he had followed the prince of Condé, to whom he was attached, out of the country, and had lost it all. This story contains nothing improbable, but it is amusing to hear how constantly those in the lower stations of life, had been reduced by the revolution. My blanchisseuse, who is the most graceful woman in the world, and speaks the best French, was obliged to have recourse to washing dirty linen, as the means of gaining a subsistence, in consequence of that event, and there is scarcely a cabriolet driver who has not been a man of some importance.
This journey presented some very pleasant scenes; always, I believe, in valleys among the strata lying above the chalk. The forest of Villars Coterie, containing sixty thousand arpents, belonging to the duke of Orleans, makes an agreeable variety, though it is too uniformly a covert of small trees to be beautiful. Several straight avenues are cut through it; and when we passed any which looked quite clear and even, and exhibited the sky at the termination; the conducteur, and a third person in the cabriolet, never failed to pronounce them superbes, magnifiques, or to apply some other epithet equally sounding, and wondered much I did not join in their admiration. We arrived at Paris about seven o’clock, on a fine but cold morning.
On the 11th of May, at seven in the morning, I attended M. de Fontaine’s lecture on botany at the Jardin du Roi. The room is larger than the lecture room at the Royal Institution in London, but without galleries; and the entrances are at the top, above the ranges of seats. It had the appearance of being pretty nearly full, but this could not be the case, as it is said to hold one thousand two hundred persons, and the number then present was only estimated at six hundred; this, however, is a good class. The ascent of the steps is very steep, which gives every possible advantage of seeing, but the room is too large; and those on the back can neither hear nor see very distinctly; besides M. de Fontaine’s manner is not calculated for so large a place. He speaks at times very rapidly, and seemed rather to pitch his voice to some ladies near him, than to the remoter part of his audience. The subject was quite elementary, explaining the different parts of plants, and their uses; without any thing of the principles of classification and of natural affinity, the part in which the French school is supposed to excel. The garden used to be called des plantes, but now du roi. I do not know the reason of the change. It is very large, but only a small portion is appropriated to the science of botany; it is divided into large squares, by straight and wide walks, which are always open, and form an agreeable promenade, but you cannot enter into the squares without permission. One of these is intended to contain a collection of plants arranged according to the system of Jussieu, but it is very defective, especially in the plants of France, a sensible proportion of which are under wrong names. Many parts are much too crowded, as you may easily comprehend, when I tell you that they allot for each forest tree, a space of about four feet square; other squares are dedicated to experiments in horticulture and agriculture. There is one square appropriated entirely to experiments in standard fruit trees; some of these have a whimsical appearance, especially those where new roots have been given to old trees. Two, three, four, or even five young slips are planted near the tree intended to be so treated, and the heads being cut off at a proper season, the top of the remaining part is inserted into the old trunk and grows to it. The slips continue to increase in size, and in two or three years the old trunk may be cut away. In some instances the reports are very favourable to this process, and in one case in particular, where the original wood was sound, the addition of these extra roots had made the tree increase very much faster than a neighbouring tree, apparently of equal strength, which had been chosen as an object of comparison. The department of grafts contains also a number of curious particulars, and M. Thouin, the professor, was so good as to accompany me, and to explain the various experiments. Virgil has said, that if you pass a vine through a walnut-tree, it will bear the most large and beautiful fruit, but bitter and uneatable. To use M. Thouin’s expression, “le fait est faux,” he made several attempts to conduct a vine through the trunk of a walnut-tree, but as soon as it began to enlarge sufficiently to feel the confinement, it uniformly died, and he was never able to procure any fruit from it. He then passed a vine through a pear-tree, whose wood being softer, did not compress it so much as entirely to stop its growth; but the grapes produced above this insertion did not differ in size or flavour from those below. If then, he reasoned, the grapes are altered in size or flavour by passing through a walnut-tree, the converse of the proposition ought to hold good, and we shall alter the walnuts by passing a branch through a vine; the experiment was tried, but both grapes and walnuts remained as they were before.
Another graft is called ‘des charlatans;’ Pliny says that Lucullus shewed him a tree producing grapes, apples, pears, cherries, and other fruit, belonging to trees having no relation to each other, from the same root; and this, he tells us, was effected by grafting. It has been a problem ever since, among gardeners, to produce this tree of Lucullus; M. Thouin has succeeded, not by grafting, but by planting the several stocks in a hollow trunk.
From the garden I went into the museum of natural history, which is open to persons with tickets, from eleven to two, three times a week. The first floor contains a large, but ill-disposed room, for fishes and reptiles, a library which I did not see, and an extensive suite of rooms for the collection of minerals. There is an interesting collection of extraneous fossils, and especially of those of the plaster beds at Paris, but, altogether, it rather fell short of my expectation, not in the substances, but in their arrangement. We are told also of a geological collection, but the specimens are not geologically disposed. The upper floor is thrown into a single room, divided into several parts, but the divisions are left open at the middle, so that the whole is exposed at one view; it is very long, of a moderate width, but low in proportion; and it is either partially, or entirely in the roof; in short, it is by no means handsome, and has completely the look of an enormous garret. I shall give you what I suppose to be the dimensions of each part; they are wholly from guess, but may help you at least in the comparative sizes. First part 28 × 24, principally monkeys. Second part 60 × 28, contains an elephant, a rhinoceros, and an hippopotamus, all in glass cases; it looks rather ridiculous to see these enormous things taken so much care of, but they are fine animals and well preserved. An Arabian and Russian horse, the quagga of Vaillant, a zebra, and the young of each of these stand exposed in the room. Other quadrupeds are placed in glass cases around it. Third division, 86 × 28, also quadrupeds. After this is a little space forming the segment of a circle, which seems awkward, ugly, and useless. Fourth part 108 × 28, birds all round; the cases are extremely deep, and the birds, except a few very large ones, are placed on little stands side by side, all facing the spectator and nearly close together, so that little is seen either of the side or back of the bird. This might be the more easily obviated as there are frequently several specimens of the same species. The plate glass of the cases is magnificent. The subjects are well preserved and scientifically arranged. Another segment of a circle follows. Fifth part, 36 × 28, also birds; along the middle of the three divisions, three, four, and five, runs a stand of two tables united,
and a part rising above them in the middle; containing a superb collection of insects, shells, zoophytes, podophthalmata, and eggs of birds; and, since the light is introduced on both sides of the apartment, they are very well seen. Sixth, 60 × 28, quadrupeds, mostly deer and antelopes; in the middle is a great basking shark, a camel, oxen, and the giraffe killed by Vaillant.
On the 12th of May I walked up Mont Martre. It is a curious looking place, having apparently been, in its original state, a hill neither so high nor so steep as Hampstead Heath, but all the sides have been dug away to procure gypsum, and only the top remains, with the roads leading up to it, presenting all round either steep banks or perpendicular faces. The gypsum is dug out of two beds, of which the upper is, I suppose, twenty-five feet thick; of the lower I did not see the bottom. It has very much the colour and fracture of coarse lump sugar, but the grain is rather finer. Between the two courses, and above the upper, are beds of white clay, at least when dry it appeared quite white; but there are some intermediate beds of clay and sand of a darker colour, and the whole is crowned by a thick bed of yellow sand, which forms the soil of the summit of the hill. This is a very narrow strip, with a row of windmills, from whence I enjoyed an excellent view. Paris was covered with a little whitish smoke, at least that was the case over the most thickly inhabited part, but nothing like the dense yellow fumes of London. By the appearance of the horizon, I judged my elevation to be about equal to that of the summit of the Pantheon, and a little above that of the dome of the Invalides. The cross at the top of the former is about 280 feet above the pavement, and as this building stands on an elevated spot, Mont Martre must be more than 300 feet above the Seine. Below the quarries, and sometimes between them, are vineyards as open as the corn-fields in England, and mixed with the vines are currant and gooseberry bushes, and a few larger fruit trees. The vine stumps were about three feet a part, and the leaves, which had just begun to appear, were dark and shining. About Chartres the young vine leaf is almost always covered with thick down. Here and there was a bush of hawthorn not yet in flower, whence I conclude the Parisian spring is not a great deal more forward than that of the south of England.
I leave you to conclude that I have seen the elephant, the catacombs, the observatory, and a hundred other curiosities of this city; they are too familiar for any novelty of description, yet I ought not entirely to omit a visit to the Ecole des Mines. Here is a superb collection of minerals; the objects are very numerous, and the specimens frequently very beautiful. The arrangement is by provinces, distinguishing those which are lost to France, from those which still constitute part of the country. It occupies a range of rooms of about 130 feet in length towards the garden, and one or two besides, in which the specimens are arranged mineralogically. There is also on the ground floor a library, and a further collection of minerals. I was likewise conducted to the collection of M. de Dré, which, for the beauty of the specimens, is said to be the finest in Europe. In all these museums, I have been struck with the arrangement which displays every thing at once; a great deal of room is necessarily given up to this purpose, but it is well applied, for the ease which it offers of reference and comparison, as well as for communicating an air of magnificence which is suitable for public institutions. Two large paintings of David are at present exhibited, and I did not fail to visit them. The subject of one is Leonidas about to attack the Persians, after he found that they had discovered a passage over the mountains. That of the other, the interposition of the Sabine women who had been carried away by the Romans, to prevent the battle between the two people. The drawing is said to be, and I dare say is, perfectly true to nature, but not to beautiful nature. The stories are not very well told, nor the figures well disposed or well lighted. The relief is excellent, and in spite of the harsh colouring, some of the figures seem quite to stand from the canvass.