At another dinner, to which Samson and Vidocq were invited, Balzac and Dumas were present, and the talk was most amusing. For romance writers, the conversation of such men must possess especial interest and value. Of Vidocq, M. Appert speaks very highly, with respect both to his head and heart. He began life as a soldier under Dumouriez, and was sent to prison for forging a passport. Endowed with great intelligence and physical strength, and with a restless activity of mind and body, he made his escape, and opened a negotiation for a free pardon, on which condition he promised to render great services to the police. His offer was accepted and he kept his word. M. Appert considers his skill as a police agent unsurpassable. It is perhaps in gratitude for that gentleman’s good opinion that Vidocq has bequeathed him his head, should he die first, for the purpose of phrenological investigations. We find two or three interesting traits and anecdotes of the thief-catcher. A report once got abroad that he had an only daughter to marry, and as he was supposed to be rich, he immediately received a host of offers for her hand, many of them from young men of excellent family, but in needy circumstances. Vidocq, who had no children, was vastly amused at this sudden eagerness for the honour of his alliance. Samson has two pretty daughters, who are well brought up and even accomplished, and who will probably marry the sons of the executioners of large towns. Hangmen, like kings, can only wed in their own sphere. “Samson, who was grateful for the politeness shown him by Lord Durham, thought it might please that nobleman to possess the clothes worn by remarkable criminals, and offered to send them to me. Thus I had for some time in my possession the coats worn at their execution by Fieschi, Lacenaire, and Alibaud. It was one of Samson’s assistants who brought them, and each time I gave him fifteen francs as compensation, the clothes being his perquisites.” M. Appert relates many other curious particulars concerning French executioners, and gives a remarkable letter from Samson himself, relating to the guillotine, to the punishment of branding, and to the old tax called navage, which was formerly levied, to the profit of the headsman, on all grain and fruits entering Paris. This tax gave rise to many disputes and discussions between the country people and the men appointed to collect it, who received from the peasants the title of valets de bourreau. From that time dates the French proverb, “Insolent as a hangman’s lacquey.”
Of the four sons of Louis Philippe, M. Appert speaks in terms of very high praise. Doubtless they are well-informed and accomplished princes, although, as yet, none of them have given indications of striking talents or high qualities; possibly because they have lacked opportunities for their display. Not one of them enjoys the prestige and popularity of the late Duke of Orleans. The Prince de Joinville, by his handsome person, and frank, off-hand manners, also by his antipathy, real or supposed, to the English, and by his occasional indulgence in a bit of harmless clap-trap and rhodomontade, has acquired the favour and good opinion of certain classes of the French people, who behold in him the man destined, at some future day, to humble the maritime power of England, and to take the British fleet into Brest or Cherbourg, as Gulliver towed the hostile men-of-war into the port of Liliput. We trust it will be long before he has an opportunity of displaying his prowess, or of disappointing the expectations of his admirers. The Duke of Nemours, against whom nothing can be alleged, who has distinguished himself in Algeria, and who is represented, by those who best know him, as a man of sense and moderate views, zealous for the welfare of his country, has been far less successful than his nautical brother, in captivating the sympathies of the bulk of the nation. This can only be attributed to his manners, which are reserved, and thought to indicate pride; but this seeming haughtiness is said to disappear upon nearer acquaintance. Of the two younger brothers, the characters have yet to be developed. It has been affirmed that the natural abilities of the Duke of Aumale are superior to those of either of his seniors. As far as can be judged by the scanty opportunities they have hitherto had of displaying them, the military talents of the French princes are respectable. Their personal courage is undoubted. But for the opposition of the king and of their anxious mother, they would, according to M. Appert, be continually in Africa, heading and serving as examples to the troops. Bravery, however, whose absence is accounted a crime in the private soldier, can hardly be made a merit of in men whose royal blood raises them, when scarcely beyond boyhood, to the highest ranks in the service. And the best wish that can be formed on behalf of the princes of France, of their country, and of Europe, is that their military experience may ever be limited, as, with some slight exceptions, it has hitherto been, to the superintendence of field-days, and the harmless manœuvres of Mediterranean squadrons.
MILDRED;
A Tale.
Chap. IV.
A few days afterwards the Bloomfields also and Miss Willoughby left Brussels for Paris.
It is far from our purpose to follow them step by step upon their route. The little love-affair we have undertaken to relate, leads us a dance upon the Continent; but we have no disposition to play the tourist one moment more than is necessary; and as no incidents connected with our story occurred in Paris, we shall not loiter long even in that gayest and most seductive of capitals. He who knows Paris—and who does not?—and at all understands what sort of traveller Mildred was, will easily conceive the delight she felt in visiting the public monuments, ancient and modern; in observing its populace, so diversified and mobile in their expression, so sombre and so gay; in traversing the different quarters of a city which still retains in parts whatever is most picturesque in the structures of the middle ages, whilst it certainly displays whatever is most tasteful in modern architecture, and which, in fact, in every sense of the word, is the most complete summary of human life that exists upon the face of the earth.
What modern city can boast a point of view comparable to that which bursts upon the stranger as he enters the Place de la Concorde! What beautiful architecture to his right and to his left!—the Palais Bourbon, the distant Madeleine, the Chamber of Deputies—whilst before him runs the long avenue of the Champs Elysées, terminated by its triumphal arch. No crowding in of buildings. No darkening of the air. Here is open space and open sky, trees and fountains, and a river flowing through the scene. There is room to quarrel, no doubt, with some of its details. Those two beautiful fountains in the centre are beautiful only at a certain respectful distance; you must not approach those discoloured nymphs who are each squeezing water out of the body of the fish she holds in her arms. Nor can we ever reconcile ourselves to that Egyptian obelisk which stands between them; in itself admirable enough, but as much out of place as a sarcophagus in a drawing-room. But these and other criticisms of the like kind, are to be made, if worth while, on after reflection and a leisure examination; the first view which the scene, as a whole, presents to the eye, is like enchantment. So at least Mildred thought, when, the morning after their arrival, (while the breakfast was waiting for her uncle, who was compensating himself for the fatigues of the journey,) she coaxed her aunt to put her arm in hers, and just turn round the corner—she knew from the map where she was—and take one look at it whilst the sun was shining so brightly above them.
Nor are there many cities, however boastful of their antiquities, which present more picturesque views than meet the eye as, leaving the garden of the Tuileries, you proceed up the river; and the round towers, with their conical roofs, of the Palais de Justice, rise on the opposite banks, and you catch glimpses of Notre Dame. In London, the houses have crowded down to the edge of the water, and are standing up to their ankles in it, so that the inhabitants may walk about its streets all their lives, and never know that a river is flowing through their city. From the centre of one of its bridges they may indeed assure themselves of the fact, and confirm, by their own observations, what they had learned in the geographical studies of their youth, that London is built on the river Thames; but, even from this position, it is more wood than water they will see. The shipping, and the boats of all kinds, blot out the river, and so crush and overcharge it that it is matter of wonder how it continues to exist and move under such a burden. It is otherwise in Paris. There one walks along the quay, and sees the river flowing through the city.
In spite of its revolutions, of its innovations, of its impatient progress, there is much still in Paris to carry back the thoughts of a visitor to antiquated times. If the Madeleine is a Grecian temple, if he finds that religious ceremonies are performed there with an elegance and propriety which propitiate the taste of the profane, if they fail to satisfy the fervour of the devout—a short walk will bring him to the venerable church of St. Germain, hard by the Louvre, where he will encounter as much solemnity and antiquity as he can desire; an antiquity, however, that is still alive, that is still worshipping as it used to worship. He will see at the further extremity of the church a dark, arched recess, imitative of a cavern or sepulchre, at the end of which lies the Christ, pale and bleeding, visible only by the light of tapers; and, if he goes to matins there, he will probably find himself surrounded by a crowd of kneeling devotees, kneeling on the stone pavement before this mediæval exhibition. Two distant ages seem to be brought together and made contemporaries.
But we will not be tempted to loiter on our way even at Paris; we take post horses and proceed with our party to Lyons.
A long ride, what an exceptional state it is!—what a chapter apart—what a parenthesis in life! The days we pass rolling along the road are always dropped out of the almanack; we have lost them, not in the sublime sense of the Roman emperor, but fairly out of the calendar; we cannot make up the tale of days and weeks. We start—especially if it is in a foreign country that we are travelling—with how much exhilaration! Every thing is new, and this charm of novelty lends an interest to the most trivial things we encounter. Not one of the least amusements of travel is this passing, in easy and rapid review, the wayside novelties which the road, the village, and the street that we scamper through, present to us. The changing costume of the peasant—the whimsical, traditionary head-dress of the women, which, whimsical as it is, retains its geographical boundaries with a constancy rarely found in any flora of the botanist—the oddly constructed vehicles, carts fashioned upon all conceivable plans, and drawn by horses, or mules, or oxen harnessed and decorated in what seems quite a masquerading attire—these, and a thousand other things, in their nature the most common and familiar, claim for once the power to surprise us. All the common-place of daily life comes before us, “Trick’d in this momentary wonderment.”
Here in the south of France, for instance, a cart-horse approaches you with a collar surmounted by a large upright horn, and furnished, moreover, with two long curving antennæ branching from either side, which, with the gay trappings that he wears, give to an old friend the appearance of some monstrous specimen of entomology; you might expect him to unfold a pair of enormous wings, and take flight as you advance, and not pass you quietly by, as he soon will, nodding his head in his old familiar style, and jingling his bells. While the mind is fresh, there is nothing which does not excite some transitory pleasure. But when the journey is felt to be growing long—very long—what a singular apathy steals over us! We struggle against this encroaching torpor—we are ashamed of it—we rouse the mind to thought, we wake the eye to observation—all in vain. Those incessant wheels of the carriage roll round and round, and we are rolling on as mechanically as they. The watch, which we refrain from consulting too often, lest the interest of its announcements should be abated, is our only friend; we look at it with a secret hope that it may have travelled farther than we venture to prognosticate; we proclaim that it is just two o’clock, and in reality expect that it is three, and try to cheat ourselves into an agreeable surprise. We look, and the hands point precisely at half-past one!