How comfortable we were then, and during all the weeks of our stay in Hôtel Campbell; how we learned to know and esteem, as she deserved, the true gentlewoman who presides with gracious dignity at her table, and makes of her house a genuine home for guests from foreign lands, I can only state here in brief. Neither heart nor conscience will let me pass over in silence the debt of gratitude and personal regard we owe her. I shall be only too happy should these lines be the means of directing other travelers to a house that combines, in a remarkable degree, elegance and comfort in a city whose hotels, boarding-houses, and “appartements” seldom possess both.
The March weather of Paris is execrable. Some portion of our disappointment at this may have been due to popular fictions respecting sunny France, and a city so fair that the nations come bending with awe and delight before her magnificence; where good Americans—of the upper tendom—wish to go when they die; the home of summer, butterflies, and Worth! To one who has heard, and, in a measure, credited all this, the fog that hides from him the grand houses across the particular Rue or Avenue in which he lodges, are more penetrating, the winds more bitter, the flint-dust they hurl into his eyes is sharper, the rain, sleet, and snow-flurries that pelt him to shelter more disagreeable—than London fog or Berlin gloom and dampness. There were whole days during which I sat, perforce, by my fire, or, if I ventured to the window to enjoy the prospect of sheets of rain, dropping a wavering curtain between me and the Rothschild mansion opposite, I must wrap my shawl about my shoulders, so “nipping and eager” was the air forcing its way between the joints of the casements.
But there were other days in which out-door existence was tolerable in a fiacre, jealously closed against the whirling dust. Where it all came from we could not tell. The streets of Paris are a miracle of cleanliness. Twice a day they are swept and washed, and the gutters run continually with clear, living water.
The wind was keen, the dust pervasive, the sky a bright, hard blue when we went, for the first time, to the tomb of Napoleon in the Hôtel des Invalides. The blasts held revel in the courtyard we traversed in order to gain the entrance. The sentinels at the gate halted in the lee of the lodges before turning in their rounds to face the dust-laden gusts. Once within the church a great peace fell upon us—sunshine and silence. It was high noon, and the light flowed through the cupola crowning the dome directly into the great circular crypt in the centre of the floor, filling—overflowing it with glory. We leaned upon the railing and looked down. Twenty feet below was the sarcophagus. It is a monolith of porphyry, twelve feet in length, six in breadth, with a projecting base of green granite. Around it, wrought into the tesselated marble pavement, is a mosaic wreath of laurel—glossy green. Between this and the sarcophagus one reads—“Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena, Rivoli,” and a long list of other battle-fields, also in brilliant mosaic. Without this circle, upon the balustrade fencing in the tomb, are twelve statues, representatives of as many victories. A cluster of fresh flowers lay upon the sarcophagus. And upon all, the sunshine, that seemed to strike into the polished red marble and bring out the reflection of hidden flame. It was a strange optical illusion, so powerful one had to struggle to banish the idea that the porphyry was translucent and the glow reddening the sides of the crypt such gleams as one sees in the heart of an opal—“the pearl with a soul in it.” It was easier to give the rein to fancy and think of a Rosicrucian lamp burning above the stilled heart of the entombed Emperor. The quiet of the magnificent burial-place is benignant, not oppressive. In noting the absence of the sentimental fripperies with which the French delight to adorn the tombs of the loved and illustrious dead we could not but hope that the grandeur of the subject wrought within the architect this pure and sublime conception of more than imperial state.
We followed the winding staircase from the right of the high altar,—above which flashes a wonderful golden crucifix—to the door of the crypt. Bertrand on one side, Duroc on the other, guard their sleeping master. “The bivouac of the dead!” The trite words are pregnant with dignity and with power when quoted upon that threshold. Over the doorway is a sentence in French, from Napoleon’s will:
“I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have so much loved.”[A]
The Communists tore down the bronze column in the Place Vendôme. The bas-reliefs, winding from bottom to top, were cast from cannon captured by Napoleon, and his statue surmounted the shaft. They battered the Tuileries, where he had lived, to a yawning ruin, and outraged the artistic sensibilities of the world by setting fire to the Louvre. But, neither paving-stone, nor bomb, nor torch, was flung into the awful circle where rests the hero, with his faithful generals at his feet.
Jerome Bonaparte, his brother’s inferior and puppet, is buried in a chapel at the left of the entrance of the Dôme. A bronze statue of him rests upon his sarcophagus. His eldest son—by his second marriage—is near him. A smaller tomb holds the heart of Jerome’s Queen. Joseph Bonaparte is interred in a chapel opposite, the great door being between the brothers.
We took the Place de la Concorde in our ride uptown. We did this whenever we could without making too long a détour. The Luxor obelisk, three thousand years old, is in the middle of the Square. A beautiful fountain plays upon each side of this, and the winds, having free course in the unsheltered Place, flung the waters madly about. Twelve hundred people were trampled to death here once. A discharge of fireworks in celebration of the marriage of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette caused a panic and a stampede among the horses attached to the vehicles blocking up the great square. They dashed into the dense mass of the populace, and in half-an-hour the disaster was complete. Sixteen years later there was another panic,—another rush of maddened brutes, that lasted eighteen months. Twenty-eight hundred souls were driven to bliss or woe in the hurly-burly—the devil’s dance of the eighteenth century. The bride and groom, whose nuptial festivities had caused the minor catastrophe, duly answered to their names at the calling of the death-roll. The most precious blood of the kingdom was flung to right and left as ruthlessly as the March winds now tore the spray of the fountains.
Nobody knows, they say, exactly where the guillotine stood;—only that it was near the obelisk and the bronze basins, where Tritons and nymphs bathe all day long. We were in the Place one evening when an angry sunset tinged the waters to a fearful red. Passers-by stopped to look at the phenomenon, until quite a crowd collected. A very quiet crowd for Parisians, but eyes sought other eyes meaningly, some in superstitious dread. While we reviewed, mentally, the list of the condemned brought hither in those two years, it would not have seemed strange had the dolphins vomited human blood into the vast pools.