What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

CHAPTER XIII.

I observe that I left Calais in the banquette of the diligence at 6 P.M. on the Friday night, May 8th, 1835, and reached Paris at 3 A.M. on Sunday morning—thirty-three hours. I remember my great surprise at finding the entire way paved after the fashion that I had been accustomed to consider proper only for the streets of towns. We used for by far the greatest part of the way the unpaved spaces left on either side of the paved causeway. But the conductor told me that in winter they were generally obliged to keep on the latter the whole way. The horses, two wheelers and three leaders abreast, were almost—indeed I think quite—without exception grey. They were also all, or almost all, stallions. The style of driving struck me as very rough, awkward, violent, and inelegant, but masterful and efficacious. The driver was changed with every relay; and it seemed to me very probable that it was expedient that each man should know such cattle, not only on the road but in the stable.

We breakfasted at Abbeville, and dined at Beauvais. And I find it recorded that I contrived at both places to find time for a flying visit to the cathedral, and was highly delighted with the noble fragment of a church at the latter city.

I went to bed on arriving at the Hôtel de Lille et d’Albion, which was in those days a very different place from its noisy, pretentious, and vulgar successor of the same name in the Rue St. Honoré. The old house in the Rue des Filles de St. Thomas has long since disappeared, together with the quiet little street in which it was situated. Like its successor it was almost exclusively used by English, but they were the English of the days when personally conducted herds were not. The service was performed by handmaidens in neat caps and white bodices over their coloured skirts. There were no swallow-tail-coated waiters, and the coffee was exquisite! Tempi passati, perchè non tornate più?

At ten the next morning I went to No. 6, Rue de Provence, where I found my parents and my sisters at breakfast.

The object of this Paris journey was twofold—the writing a book in accordance with an agreement which my mother had entered into with Mr. Richard Bentley, the father of the publisher of these volumes, and the consultation of a physician to whom she had been especially recommended respecting my father’s health, which was rapidly and too evidently declining. They had been in Paris some time already, and had formed a large circle of acquaintance, both English and French. I was told by my mother that the physician, who had seen my father several times, had made no pleasant report of his condition. He did not apprehend any immediately alarming phase of illness, but said that had he been left to guess my father’s age after visiting him, he should have supposed him to be more than four score, the truth being that he was very little more than sixty.

This, my first visit to Paris, lasted one month only, from the 9th of May to the 9th of June, and many of the recollections which seem to me now to be connected with it very probably belong to subsequent visits, for my diary, re-opened now for the first time after the interval of more than half a century, was kept, I find, in a very intermittent and slovenly manner. No doubt I found very few minutes for journalising in the four-and-twenty hours of each day.

I well remember that my first impression of Lutetia Parisiorum—“Mudtown of the Parisians,” as Carlyle translates it—was that of having stepped back a couple of centuries or so in the history of European civilisation and progress. We are much impressed at home, and talk much of the vastness of the changes which the last fifty years have made in our own city, but I think that which the same time has operated in Paris is much greater. Putting aside the mere extension of streets and dwellings, which, great as it has been in Paris, has been much greater in London, the changes in the former city have been far more radical. Certainly there are many quarters of London where the eye now rests on that which is magnificent, and which at the time when I knew the town well, presented nothing but what was, if not sordid, at least ugly. But to those who remember the streets of Louis Philippe’s city, the change in the whole conception of city life, and the manière d’être of the population, is far greater. With the exception of the principal boulevards in the neighbourhood of the recently completed “Madeleine,” and its then recently established flower market, the streets were still traversed by filthy and malodorous open ditches, which did more or less imperfectly the duty of sewers, and Paris still deserved its name of “Mudtown”. Wretched little oil lamps, suspended on ropes stretched across the streets, barely served to make darkness visible. Water was still carried at so much the bucket up the interminable staircases of the Parisian houses by stalwart Auvergnats, who came from their mountains to do a work more severe than the Parisians could do for themselves.

But another specialty, which very forcibly struck me, and which cannot be said to have been any survival of ways and habits obsolete on the other side of the Channel, was the remarkable manner in which the political life of the hour, with its emotions, opinions, and passions, was enacted, so to speak, on the stage of the streets, as a drama is presented on the boards of a theatre. Truly he who ran through the streets of Paris in those days might read, and indeed could not help reading, the reflection and the manifestation of the political divisions and passions which animated the reign of the bourgeois king, and ended by destroying it.

And in this respect the time of my first visit to Paris was a very interesting one. The Parisian world was, of course, divided into Monarchists and Republicans, the latter of whom laboured under the imputation, in some cases probably unjust, but in more entirely merited (as in certain other more modern instances), of being willing and ready to bring their theories into practice by perpetrating or conniving at any odious monstrosity of crime, violence and bloodshed. The Fieschi incident had recently enlightened the world on the justice of such accusations.