Chapter 24

As, during my first stay in Paris, I had frequently visited Madame Victorine, the widow of my deceased uncle, and her children, very cordial relations had since existed between us, especially after my uncle's faithless friend had been compelled to disgorge the sums sent from Denmark for her support, which he had so high-handedly kept back. There were only faint traces left of the great beauty that had once been hers; life had dealt hardly with her. She was good and tender-hearted, an affectionate mother, but without other education than was usual in the Parisian small bourgeois class to which she belonged. All her opinions, her ideas of honour, of propriety, of comfort and happiness, were typical of her class.

Partly from economy, partly from a desire not to waste the precious time, I often, in those days, restricted my midday meal. I would buy myself, at a provision dealer's, a large veal or ham pie and eat it in my room, instead of going out to a restaurant. One day Victorine surprised me at a meal of this sort, and exclaimed horrified: _"Comment? vous vous nourrissez si mal!"_ To her, it was about the same as if I had not had any dinner at all. To sit at home without a cloth on the table, and cut a pie in pieces with a paper knife, was to sink one's dignity and drop to poor man's fare.

Her thoughts, like those of most poor people in France and elsewhere, centred mostly on money and money anxieties, on getting on well in the world, or meeting with adversity, and on how much this man or the other could earn, or not earn, in the year. Her eldest son was in St. Petersburg, and he was doing right well; he was good and kind and sent his mother help when he had a little to spare. He had promised, too, to take charge of his next brother. But she had much anxiety about the little ones. One of them was not turning out all that he should be, and there were the two youngest to educate.

There was a charming celebration in the poor home when little Emma went to her first communion, dressed all in white, from head to foot, with a long white veil and white shoes, and several other little girls and boys came just as smartly dressed, and presents were given and good wishes offered. Little Henri looked more innocent than any of the little girls.

Victorine had a friend whom she deemed most happy; this was Jules Clarétie's mother, for, young though her son was, he wrote in the papers, wrote books, too, and earned money, so that he was able to maintain his mother altogether. He was a young man who ought to be held in high estimation, an author who was all that he should be. There was another author whom she detested, and that was P.L. Möller, the Dane:

"Jacques, as you know, was always a faithful friend of Monsieur Möller; he copied out a whole book for him, [Footnote: _The Modern Drama in France and Denmark_, which won the University Gold Medal for Möller.] when he himself was very busy. But then when Jacques died--_pauvre homme!_--he came and paid visits much too often and always at more and more extraordinary times, so that I was obliged to forbid him the house."

X.

In a students' hotel near the Odéon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbés and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings such as these that Gambetta emerged.

The young abbés and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers, but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from _Tartufe_ at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.

Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their company. We went to St. Cloud and Sèvres, to Versailles and St. Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthléry, a village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbé Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that it rendered the resurrection impossible, since God himself could not collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the church--_on se demande encore pourquoi_. In the innocence of his heart this abbé regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible than as an inexplicable act.

XI.

The society of the Italian friends of my first visit gave me much pleasure. My first call at the Pagellas' was a blank; at the next, I was received like a son of the house and heaped with reproaches for not having left my address; they had tried to find me at my former hotel, and endeavoured in vain to learn where I was staying from Scandinavians whom they knew by name; now I was to spend all the time I could with them, as I used to do in the old days. They were delighted to see me again, and when I wished to leave, drove me home in their carriage. I resumed my former habit of spending the greater part of my spare time with Southerners; once more I was transported to Southern Europe and South America. The very first day I dined at their house I met a jovial old Spaniard, a young Italian, who was settled in Egypt, and a very coquettish young Brazilian girl. The Spaniard, who had been born in Venezuela, was an engineer who had studied conditions in Panama for eleven years, and had a plan for the cutting of the isthmus. He talked a great deal about the project, which Lesseps took up many years afterwards.

Pagella, too, was busy with practical plans, setting himself technical problems, and solving them. Thus he had discovered a new method of constructing railway carriages on springs, with a mechanism to prevent collisions. He christened this the _Virginie-ressort_, after his wife, and had had offers for it from the Russian government.

An Italian engineer, named Casellini, who had carried out the construction for him, was one of the many bold adventurers that one met with among the Southerners in Paris. He had been sent to Spain the year before by Napoleon III to direct the counter-revolution there. Being an engineer, he knew the whole country, and had been in constant communication with Queen Isabella and the Spanish Court in Paris. He gave illuminating accounts of Spanish corruptibility. He had bribed the telegraph officials in the South of Spain, where he was, and saw all political telegrams before the Governor of the place. In Malaga, where he was leading the movement against the Government, he very narrowly escaped being shot; he had been arrested, his despatches intercepted and 1,500 rifles seized, but he bribed the officials to allow him to make selection from the despatches and destroy those that committed him. In Madrid he had had an audience of Serrano, after this latter had forbidden the transmission from the town of any telegrams that were not government telegrams; he had taken with him a telegram drawn up by the French party, which sounded like an ordinary business letter, and secured its being sent off together with the government despatches. Casellini had wished to pay for the telegram, but Serrano had dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand, rung a bell and given the telegram to a servant. It was just as in Scribe's _Queen Marguerite's Novels_, the commission was executed by the enemy himself.

Such romantic adventures did not seem to be rare in Spain. Prim himself had told the Pagellas how at the time of the failure of the first insurrection he had always, in his flight, (in spite of his defective education, he was more magnanimous and noble-minded than any king), provided for the soldiers who were sent out after him, ordered food and drink for them in every inn he vacated, and paid for everything beforehand, whereas the Government let their poor soldiers starve as soon as they were eight or ten miles from Madrid.

I often met a very queer, distinguished looking old Spaniard named Don José Guell y Rente, who had been married to a sister of King Francis, the husband of King Isabella, but had been separated from her after, as he declared, she had tried to cut his throat. As witness to his connubial difficulties, he showed a large scar across his throat. He was well-read and, amongst other things, enthusiastically admired Scandinavian literature because it had produced the world's greatest poet, Ossian, with whom he had become acquainted in Cesarotti's Italian translation. It was useless to attempt to explain to him the difference between Scandinavia and Scotland. They are both in the North, he would reply.

XII.

A young American named Olcott, who visited Chasles and occasionally looked me up, brought with him a breath from the universities of the great North American Republic. A young German, Dr. Goldschmidt, a distinguished Sanscrit scholar, a man of more means than I, who had a pretty flat with a view over the Place du Châtelet, and dined at good restaurants, came, as it were, athwart the many impressions I had received of Romance nature and Romance intellectual life, with his violent German national feeling and his thorough knowledge. As early as the Spring, he believed there would be war between Germany and France and wished in that event to be a soldier, as all other German students, so he declared, passionately wished. He was a powerfully built, energetic, well-informed man of the world, with something of the rich man's habit of command. He seemed destined to long life and quite able to stand fatigue. Nevertheless, his life was short. He went through the whole of the war in France without a scratch, after the conclusion of peace was appointed professor of Sanscrit at the University of conquered Strasburg, but died of illness shortly afterwards.

A striking contrast to his reticent nature was afforded by the young Frenchmen of the same age whom I often met. A very rich and very enthusiastic young man, Marc de Rossiény, was a kind of leader to them; he had 200,000 francs a year, and with this money had founded a weekly publication called "_L'Impartial_," as a common organ for the students of Brussels and Paris. The paper's name, _L'Impartial_, must be understood in the sense that it admitted the expression of every opinion with the exception of defence of so-called revealed religion. The editorial staff was positivist, Michelet and Chasles were patrons of the paper, and behind the whole stood Victor Hugo as a kind of honorary director. The weekly preached hatred of the Empire and of theology, and seemed firmly established, yet was only one of the hundred ephemeral papers that are born and die every day in the Latin quarter. When it had been in existence a month, the war broke out and swept it away, like so many other and greater things.

XIII.

Of course I witnessed all that was accessible to me of Parisian public life. I fairly often found my way, as I had done in 1866, to the Palais de Justice to hear the great advocates plead. The man I enjoyed listening to most was Jules Favre, whose name was soon to be on every one's lips. The younger generation admired in him the high-principled and steadfast opponent of the Empire in the Chamber, and he was regarded as well-nigh the most eloquent man in France. As an advocate, he was incomparable. His unusual handsomeness,--his beautiful face under a helmet of grey hair, and his upright carriage,--were great points in his favour. His eloquence was real, penetrating, convincing, inasmuch as he piled up fact upon fact, and was at the same time, as the French manner is, dramatic, with large gesticulations that made his gown flutter restlessly about him like the wings of a bat. It was a depressing fact that afterwards, as the Minister opposed to Bismarck, he was so unequal to his position.

I was present at the _Théâtre Français_ on the occasion of the unveiling of Ponsard's bust. To the Romanticists, Ponsard was nothing less than the ass's jawbone with which the Philistines attempted to slay Hugo. But Émile Chasles, a son of my old friend, gave a lecture upon him, and afterwards _Le lion amoureux_ was played, a very tolerable little piece from the Revolutionary period, in which, for one thing, Napoleon appears as a young man. There are some very fine revolutionary tirades in it, of which Princess Mathilde, after its first representation, said that they made her _Republican_ heart palpitate. The ceremony in honor of this little anti-pope to Victor Hugo was quite a pretty one.

Once, too, I received a ticket for a reception at the French Academy. The poet Auguste Barbier was being inaugurated and Silvestre de Sacy welcomed him, in academic fashion, in a fairly indiscreet speech. Barbier's _Jamber_ was one of the books of poems that I had loved for years, and I knew many of the strophes by heart, for instance, the celebrated ones on Freedom and on Napoleon; I had also noticed how Barbier's vigour had subsided in subsequent collections of poems; in reality, he was still living on his reputation from the year 1831, and without a doubt most people believed him to be dead. And now there he stood, a shrivelled old man in his Palm uniform, his speech revealing neither satiric power nor lofty intellect. It was undoubtedly owing to his detestation of Napoleon (_vide_ his poem _L'Idole_) that the Academy, who were always agitating against the Empire, had now, so late in the day, cast their eyes upon him. Bald little Silvestre de Sacy, the tiny son of an important father, reproached him for his verses on Freedom, as the bold woman of the people who was not afraid to shed blood.

"That is not Freedom as I understand it," piped the little man,--and one believed him,--but could not refrain from murmuring with the poet:

C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesse Du noble Faubourg St. Germain, Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse, Qui met du blanc et du carmin; C'est une forte femme.

XIV.

A very instructive resort, even for a layman, was the Record Office, for there one could run through the whole history of France in the most entertaining manner with the help of the manuscripts placed on view, from the most ancient papyrus rolls to the days of parchment and paper. You saw the documents of the Feudal Lords' and Priests' Conspiracies under the Merovingians and the Capets, the decree of divorce between Philip Augustus and Ingeborg, and letters from the most notable personages of the Middle Ages and the autocracy. The period of the Revolution and the First Empire came before one with especial vividness. There was Charlemagne's monogram stencilled in tin, and that of Robert of Paris, reproduced in the same manner, those of Louis XIV. and Molière, of Francis the Catholic and Mary Stuart. There were letters from Robespierre and Danton, requests for money and death-warrants from the Reign of Terror, Charlotte Corday's last letters from prison and the original letters of Napoleon from St. Helena.

In June I saw the annual races at Longchamps for the first time. Great was the splendour. From two o'clock in the afternoon to six there was an uninterrupted stream of carriages, five or six abreast, along the Champs Elysées; there were thousands of _lorettes_ (as they were called at that time) in light silk gowns, covered with diamonds and precious stones, in carriages decorated with flowers. Coachmen and footmen wore powdered wigs, white or grey, silk stockings and knee-breeches and a flower in the buttonhole matching the colour of their livery and the flowers which hung about the horses' ears. Some of the carriages had no coachman's box or driver, but were harnessed to four horses ridden by postillions in green satin or scarlet velvet, with white feathers in their caps.

The only great _demi-mondaine_ of whom I had hitherto caught a glimpse was the renowned Madame de Païva, who had a little palace by the side of the house in which Frölich the painter lived, in the Champs Elysées. Her connection with Count Henckel v. Donnersmark permitted her to surround herself with regal magnificence, and, to the indignation of Princess Mathilde, men like Gautier and Renan, Sainte-Beuve and Goncourt, Saint-Victor and Taine, sat at her table. The ladies here were younger and prettier, but socially of lower rank. The gentlemen went about among the carriages, said _tu_ without any preamble to the women, and squeezed their hands, while their men-servants sat stolid, like wood, seeming neither to hear nor see.

This race-day was the last under the Empire. It is the one described in Zola's _Nana_. The prize for the third race was 100,000 francs. After English horses had been victorious for several years in succession, the prize was carried off in 1870--as in _Nana_--by a native-born horse, and the jubilation was great; it was a serious satisfaction to national vanity.

At that time, the Tuileries were still standing, and I was fond of walking about the gardens near closing time, when the guard beat the drums to turn the people out. It was pleasant to hear the rolling of the drums, which were beaten by two of the Grenadier Guard drummers and a Turco. Goldschmidt had already written his clever and linguistically very fine piece of prose about this rolling of the drums and what it possibly presaged: Napoleon's own expulsion from the Tuileries and the humiliation of French grandeur before the Prussians, who might one day come and drum this grandeur out. But Goldschmidt had disfigured the pretty little piece somewhat by relating that one day when, for an experiment, he had tried to make his way into the gardens after the signal for closing had sounded, the Zouave had carelessly levelled his bayonet at him with the words: _"Ne faites pas des bêtises!"_ This levelling of the bayonet on such trivial provocation was too tremendous, so I made up my mind one evening to try myself. The soldier on guard merely remarked politely: "_Fermé, monsieur, on va sortir._"

I little dreamed that only a few months later the Empress would steal secretly out of the palace, having lost her crown, and still less that only six months afterwards, during the civil war, the Tuileries would be reduced to ashes, never to rise again.

XV.

At that time the eyes of the Danes were fixed upon France in hope and expectation that their national resuscitation would come from that quarter, and they made no distinction between France and the Empire. Although the shortest visit to Paris was sufficient to convince a foreigner not only that the personal popularity of the Emperor was long since at an end, but that the whole government was despised, in Denmark people did not, and would not, know it. In the Danish paper with the widest circulation, the Daily Paper, foreign affairs were dealt with by a man of the name of Prahl, a wildly enthusiastic admirer of the Empire, a pleasant man and a brainy, but who, on this vital point, seemed to have blinkers on. From all his numerous foreign papers, he deduced only the opinions that he held before, and his opinions were solely influenced by his wishes. He had never had any opportunity of procuring information at first hand. He said to me one day:

"I am accused of allowing my views to be influenced by the foreign diplomatists here, I, who have never spoken to one of them. I can honestly boast of being unacquainted with even the youngest attaché of the Portuguese Ministry." His remarks, which sufficiently revealed this fact, unfortunately struck the keynote of the talk of the political wiseacres in Denmark.

Though the Danes were so full of the French, it would be a pity to say that the latter returned the compliment. It struck me then, as it must have struck many others, how difficult it was to make people in France understand that Danes and Norsemen were not Germans. From the roughest to the most highly educated, they all looked upon it as an understood thing, and you could not persuade them of anything else. As soon as they had heard Northerners exchange a few words with each other and had picked up the frequently recurring _Ja_, they were sufficiently edified. Even many years after, I caught the most highly cultured Frenchmen (such as Edmond de Concourt), believing that, at any rate on the stage, people spoke German in Copenhagen.

One day in June I began chatting on an omnibus with a corporal of Grenadiers. When he heard that I was Danish, he remarked: "German, then." I said: "No." He persisted in his assertion, and asked, cunningly, what _oui_ was in Danish. When I told him he merely replied, philosophically, "Ah! then German is the mother tongue." It is true that when Danes, Norwegians and Swedes met abroad they felt each other to be compatriots; but this did not prevent them all being classed together as Germans; that they were not Englishmen, you saw at a glance. Even when there were several of them together, they had difficulty in asserting themselves as different and independent; they were a Germanic race all the same, and people often added, "of second-class importance," since the race had other more pronounced representatives.

The only strong expression of political opinion that was engineered in France then was the so-called plebiscite of May, 1870; the government challenged the verdict of the entire male population of France upon the policy of Napoleon III. during the past eighteen years, and did so with the intention, strangely enough not perceived by Prime Minister Ollivier, of re-converting the so-called constitutional Empire which had been in existence since January 1, 1870, into an autocracy. Sensible people saw that the plebiscite was only an objectionable comedy; a favourable reply would be obtained all over the country by means of pressure on the voters and falsification of votes; the oppositionist papers showed this up boldly in articles that were sheer gems of wit. Disturbances were expected in Paris on the 9th of May, and here and there troops were collected. But the Parisians, who saw through the farce, remained perfectly indifferent.

The decision turned out as had been expected; the huge majority in Paris was _against_, the provincial population voted _for_, the Emperor.

XVI.

On July 5th I saw John Stuart Mill for the first time. He had arrived in Paris the night before, passing through from Avignon, and paid a visit to me, unannounced, in my room in the Rue Mazarine; he stayed two hours and won my affections completely. I was a little ashamed to receive so great a man in so poor a place, but more proud of his thinking it worth his while to make my acquaintance. None of the French savants had ever had an opportunity of conversing with him; a few days before, Renan had lamented to me that he had never seen him. As Mill had no personal acquaintances in Paris, I was the only person he called upon.