In the vast dormitory of the high school here we see thirty neat compartments with partitions between, containing bed and toilet requisites, and at the extreme end of the room, commanding a view of the rest, is the bed of the under-mistress in charge, surveillante as she is called. Sleeping or waking, the students are watched. This massing together of numbers and perpetual supervision no longer find universal favour.
But I am here writing of fifteen years ago. Doubtless were I to repeat my visit I should find progressive changes too numerous for detail. Happy little middle-class Parisians now run to and from their Lycées unattended. Young ladies in society imitate their Anglo-Saxon sisters and have shaken off that incubus, la promeneuse or walking chaperon.
Works on social France, as is the case with almanacs, encyclopædias and the rest, require yearly revision. Manners and customs change no less quickly than headgear and skirts.
Charles Lamb would have lived ecstatically at the Languedocian capital. It is a metropolis of beggardom, a mendicant's Mecca, a citadel of Jules Richepin's cherished Gueux. Here, indeed, Elia need not have lamented over the decay of beggars, "the all sweeping besom of societarian reformation—your only modern Alcides' club to rid time of its abuses—is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity. Scrips, wallets, bags, staves, dogs and crutches, the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast hasting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution."
No, here is what the best beloved of English humorists calls "the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism," here his vision would have feasted on "Rags, the Beggars' robes and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public." "He is never out of fashion," adds Lamb, "or limpeth outwardly behind it. He is not required to wear court mourning. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances."
Here, too, would the unmatchable writer have gazed upon more than one "grand fragment, as good as an Elgin marble." And alas! many deformities more terrible still, and which, perhaps, would have damped even Lamb's ardour. For in the Toulouse of 1894, as in the London of sixty years before, its mendicants "were so many of its sights, its Lions." The city literally swarmed with beggars. At every turn we came upon some living torso, distorted limb and hideous sore. Begging seemed to be the accepted livelihood of cripples, blind folk and the infirm. Let us hope that by this time something better has been devised for them all. Was it here that Richepin partly studied the mendicant fraternity, giving us in poetry his astounding appreciation, psychological and linguistic? And perhaps the bard of the beggars, like the English humorist, would wish his pauvres Gueux to be left unmolested.
The sights of Toulouse would occupy a conscientious traveller many days. The least leisurely should find time to visit the tiny square called place du Salin. Here took place the innumerable autos-da-fé of the Toulousain Inquisition, and here, so late as 1618, the celebrated physician and scientist Vanini was atrociously done to death by that truly infernal tribunal, and for what? For simply differing from the obscurantism of his age, and having opinions of his own.
The atrocious sentence passed on Vanini was in part remitted, evidently public opinion already making itself felt. His tongue was cut out, but strangulation preceded the burning alive. Here one cannot help noting the illogical, the puerile—if such words are applicable to devilish wickedness—aspect of such Inquisitorial sentences. If these hounders-down of common-sense and the reasoning faculty really believed, as they affected to believe, that men who possessed and exercised both qualities were thereby doomed to eternal torments, why set up the horrible and costly paraphernalia of the Inquisition? After all, no matter how ingeniously inventive might be their persecutors, they could only be made to endure terminable and comparatively insignificant torments, not a millionth millionth fraction of eternity!
Refreshing it is to turn to the Toulouse of minstrelsy. The proud seat of the troubadours, the Academy of the Gay Science and of the poetic tourneys revived in our own day! Mistral's name has long been European, and other English writers have charmingly described the Feux Floraux of the olden time and the society of Lou Felibrige with its revival of Provençal literature. But forty years ago, and twenty years before his masterpiece had found a translator here, he was known and highly esteemed by a great Englishman.
In Mill's Correspondence (1910) we find a beautiful letter, and written in fine stately French, from the philosopher to the poet, dated Avignon, October 1869.