The Chapel of the Invalides looked gloomy, and even neglected; the great Magician was gone. Some service was performing, as it is in the Romish chapels at most hours of the day: some poor people were kneeling in different parts of the area; and some strangers were, like myself, wandering along the nave, looking at the monuments to the fallen military names of France. On the pillars in the nave are inscriptions to the memory of Jourdan, Lobau, and Oudinot. There is a bronze tablet to the memory of Marshal Mortier, who was killed by Fieschi's infernal machine, beside Louis Philippe; and to Damremont, who fell in Algiers.
But the chapel is destined to exhibit a more superb instance of national recollection—the tomb of Napoleon, which is to be finished in 1852. A large circular crypt, dug in the centre of the second chapel (which is to be united with the first,) is the site of the sarcophagus in which the remains of Napoleon lie. Coryatides, columns, and bas-reliefs, commemorative of his battles, are to surround the sarcophagus. The coryatides are to represent War, Legislation, Art, and Science; and in front is to be raised an altar of black marble. The architect is Visconti, and the best statuaries in Paris are to contribute the decorations. The expense will be enormous. In the time of Louis Philippe it had already amounted to nearly four millions of francs. About three millions more are now demanded for the completion, including an equestrian statue. On the whole, the expense will be not much less than seven millions of francs!
The original folly of the nation, and of Napoleon, in plundering the Continent of statues and pictures, inevitably led to retribution, on the first reverse of fortune. The plunder of money, or of arms, or of anything consumable, would have been exempt from this mortification; but pictures and statues are permanent things, and always capable of being re-demanded. Their plunder was an extension of the law of spoil unknown in European hostilities, or in history, except perhaps in the old Roman ravage of Greece. Napoleon, in adopting the practice of heathenism for his model, and the French nation—in their assumed love of the arts violating the sanctities of art, by removing the noblest works from the edifices for which they were created, and from the lights and positions for which the great artists of Italy designed them—fully deserved the vexation of seeing them thus carried back to their original cities. The moral will, it is to be presumed, be learned from this signal example, that the works of genius are naturally exempt from the sweep of plunder; that even the violences of war must not be extended beyond the necessities of conquest; and that an act of injustice is sure to bring down its punishment in the most painful form of retribution.
The Artesian Well.—Near the Hôtel des Invalides is the celebrated well which has given the name to all the modern experiments of boring to great depths for water. The name of Artesian is said to be taken from the province of Artois, in which the practice has been long known. The want of water in Paris induced a M. Mulot to commence the work in 1834.
The history of the process is instructive. For six years there was no prospect of success; yet M. Mulot gallantly persevered. All was inexorable chalk; the boring instrument had broken several times, and the difficulty thus occasioned may be imagined from its requiring a length of thirteen hundred feet! even in an early period of the operation. However, early in 1841 the chalk gave signs of change, and a greenish sand was drawn up. On the 26th of February this was followed by a slight effusion of water, and before night the stream burst up to the mouth of the excavation, which was now eighteen hundred feet in depth. Yet the water rapidly rose to a height of one hundred and twelve feet above the mouth of the well by a pipe, which is now supported by scaffolding, giving about six hundred gallons of water a minute.
Even the memorable experiment confutes, so far as it goes, the geological notion of strata laid under each other in their proportions of gravity. The section of the boring shows chalk, sand, gravel, shells, &c., and this order sometimes reversed, in the most casual manner, down to a depth five times the height of the cupola of the Invalides.
The heat of the water was 83° of Fahrenheit. In the theories with which the philosophers of the Continent have to feed their imaginations is that of a central fire, which is felt through all the strata, and which warms everything in proportion to its nearness to the centre. Thus, it was proposed to dig an Artesian well of three thousand feet, for the supply of hot water to the Jardin des Plantes and the neighbouring hospitals. It was supposed that, at this depth, the heat would range to upwards of 100° of Fahrenheit. But nothing has been done. Even the Well of Grenelle has rather disappointed the public expectation; of late the supply has been less constant, and the boring is to be renewed to a depth of two thousand feet.
The Napoleon Column.—This is the grand feature of the Place de Vendôme, once the site of the Hôtel Vendôme, built by the son of Henry IV. and Gabrielle d'Estrées; afterwards pulled down by Louis XIV., afterwards abandoned to the citizens, and afterwards surrounded, as it is at this day, with the formal and heavy architecture of Mansard. The "Place" has, like everything in Paris, changed its name from time to time. It was once the "Place des Conquêtes;" then it changed to "Louis le Grand;" and then it returned to the name of its original proprietor. An old figure of the "Great King," in all the glories of wig and feathers, stood in the centre, till justice and the rabble of the Revolution broke it down, in the first "energies" of Republicanism. But the German campaign of 1805 put all the nation in good humour, and the Napoleon Column was raised on the site of the dilapidated monarch.
The design of the column is not original, for it is taken from the Trajan Column at Rome; but it is enlarged, and makes a very handsome object. When I first saw it, its decorations were in peril; for the Austrian soldiery were loud for its demolition, or at least for stripping off its bronze bas-reliefs, they representing their successive defeats in that ignominious campaign which, in three months from Boulogne, finished by the capture of Vienna. The Austrian troops, however, stoutly retrieved their disasters, and, as the proof, were then masters of Paris. It was possibly this effective feeling that prevailed at last to spare the column, which the practice of the French armies would have entitled them to strip without mercy.