“Where, then, is the body?”
A shrug. “Ah! monsieur, who knows?”
Another wooden structure, with a statue on top, is dedicated, “Aux manes de Voltaire.”
“Poet, historian, philosopher, he exalted the man of intellect and taught him that he should be free. He defended Calas, Sirven, De la Barre, and Montbailly; combated atheists and fanatics; he inspired toleration; he reclaimed the rights of man from servitude and feudalism.” Thus runs the epitaph.
“Empty, also!” said the guide, tapping the sarcophagus. “The body was removed by stealth and buried—who can say where?”
“Was anybody left here?”
“But yes, certainly, monsieur!” and we were showed the tombs—as yet unrifled—of Marshal Lannes, Lagrange, the mathematician, and Soufflot, the architect of the Panthéon; likewise, the vaults in which the Communists stored gunpowder for the purpose of blowing up the edifice. It was a military stronghold in 1848, and again in 1871, and but for the opportune dislodgment of the insurgents at the latter date the splendid pile would have followed the example of the noted dead who slumbered, for a time, beneath her dome—then departed—“who can tell where?”
The Hôtel and Museum de Cluny engaged our time for the rest of the forenoon. A visit to it is a “Variety Excursion” in itself. The hall, fifty feet high, and more than sixty in length, and paved with stone—headless trunks, unlidded sarcophagi, like dry and mouldy bath-tubs; broken marbles carved with pagan devices, and heaps of nameless débris lying about in what is, to the unlearned, meaningless disorder—was the frigidarium, or cold-water baths, belonging to the palace of the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus, built between A.D. 290 and 306. It was bleak with the piercing chilliness the rambler in Roman ruins and churches never forgets—which has its acme in the more than deathly cold of that ancient and stupendous refrigerator, St. John of Lateran, and never departs in the hottest noon-tide of burning summer from the frigidaria of Diocletian and Caracalla. But we lingered, shivering, to hear that the Apostate Julian was here proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in 360, and to see his statue, gray and grim, near an altar of Jupiter, found under the church of Nôtre Dame. Wherever Rome set her foot in her day of power, she stamped hard. Centuries, nor French revolutions can sweep away the traces.
In less than three minutes the guide was pointing out part of Molière’s jaw-bone affixed to a corridor-wall in the Musée. This, directly adjoining the Roman palace, was a “branch establishment” of the celebrated Abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy; next, a royal palace, first occupied by the English widow of Louis XII., sister of Bluff King Hal. “La chambre de la Reine Blanche,” so called because the queens of France wore white for mourning—is now the receptacle of a great collection of musical instruments, numbered and dated. James V. of Scotland married Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., in this place. After the first Revolution, when kings’ houses were as if they had not been, Cluny became state property, and was bought by an archæologist, who converted it into a museum. There are now upward of nine thousand articles on the catalogue. The reader will thankfully excuse me from attempting a summary, but heed the remark that the collection is valuable and varied, and better worth visit and study than any other assortment of relics and ancient works of art we saw in France. The fascination it exerted upon us and others is doubtless, in part, referable to the character of the building in which the collection is stored. Palissy faïence, ivory carvings, rich with the slow, mellow dyes of centuries; enamels in copper, executed for Francis I.; Venetian glasses; old weapons; quaint and ornate tilings; tapestries, more costly than if woof and broidery were pure gold—are tenfold more ravishing when seen in the light from mullioned windows of the fifteenth century, and set in recesses whose carvings vie in beauty and antiquity with the objects enclosed by their walls. Gardens, deep with shade, mossy statues and broken fountains dimly visible in the alleys, great trees tangled and woven into a thick roof over walks and green sward—all curiously quiet in the heart of the restless city, seclude Thermæ and Hôtel in hushed and dusky grandeur.
The Rue St. Jacques, skirting the garden-wall on one side, was an old Roman road. By it we were transported, without too violent transition from the Past, into the Paris of To-Day.