Part 15

In the evening I rested from the day's fatigue by an hour in the garden of the Palais Royal. I sat by one of the little tables and called for an ice. There were hundreds of ladies and gentlemen eating ices, drinking wine, reading the papers, smoking, chatting; scores of pretty children were frolicking and enjoying the balmy evening. Here six or eight midgets were jumping the rope, while papa and mamma swung it for them. Pretty little things, with their flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, how they did seem to enjoy themselves! What parent was ever far from home that did not espy in every group of children his own little ones,--his Mary or his Nellie, his Henry or Charlie? So it was with me. There was a ring of twenty or thirty singing and dancing, with a smaller ring in the centre, while old folks and boys stood outside. But I heard not a single oath, nor saw a rough or rude action, during the whole time I was there. The boys standing by looked on quietly, like young gentlemen. The best finale of such a toilsome day of sight-seeing was a warm bath in the Rue de Bac, for the trifling sum of fifteen sous. The cheapness and convenience of bathing here is a great recommendation of Paris life. They will bring you a hot bath at your house for twenty-five cents, and that without bustle or disorder. And nothing so effectually as an evening bath, as my experience testifies, cures fatigue and propitiates to dreamless slumber....

After visiting the Luxembourg, I resorted to the gardens of the Tuileries. The thermometer was at about eighty degrees in the shade. From the number of people assembled, one would have thought, if it had been in the United States, that some great mass convention was coming off. Under the impenetrable screen of the trees, in the dark, cool, refreshing shade, are thousands of chairs, for which one pays two cents apiece. Whole families come, locking up their door, bringing the baby, work, dinner, or lunch, take a certain number of chairs, and spend the day. As far as eye can reach you see a multitude seated, as if in church, with other multitudes moving to and fro, while boys and girls without number are frolicking, racing, playing ball, driving hoop, etc., but contriving to do it without making a hideous racket.

How French children are taught to play and enjoy themselves without disturbing everybody else is a mystery. "_C'est gentil_" seems to be a talismanic spell; and "_Ce n'est pas gentil ca_" is sufficient to check every rising irregularity. Oh, that some _savant_ would write a book and tell us how it is done! I gazed for half an hour on the spectacle. A more charming sight my eyes never beheld. There were gray-headed old men, and women, and invalids; and there were beautiful demoiselles working worsted, embroidery, sewing; men reading papers; and, in fact, people doing everything they would do in their own parlors. And all were graceful, kind, and obliging; not a word or an act of impoliteness or indecency. No wonder the French adore Paris, thought I; in no other city in the world is a scene like this possible. No wonder that their hearts die within them at thoughts of exile in the fens of Cayenne!

But under all this there lie, as under the cultivated crust of this fair world, deep abysses of soul, where volcanic masses of molten lava surge and shake the tremulous earth. In the gay and bustling Boulevards, a friend, an old resident of Paris, pointed out to me, as we rode, the bullet-marks that scarred the houses,--significant tokens of what seems, but is not, forgotten.

At sunset a military band of about seventy performers began playing in front of the Tuileries. They formed an immense circle, the leader in the centre. He played the octave flute, which also served as a baton for marking time. The music was characterized by delicacy, precision, suppression, and subjugation of rebellious material.

I imagined a congress of horns, clarionets, trumpets, etc., conversing in low tones on some important theme; nay, rather a conspiracy of instruments, mourning between whiles their subjugation, and ever and anon breaking out in a fierce _emeute_, then repressed, hushed, dying away, as if they had heard of Baron Munchausen's frozen horn, and had conceived the idea of yielding their harmonies without touch of human lips, yet were sighing and sobbing at their impotence. Perhaps I detected the pulses of a nation's palpitating heart, throbbing for liberty, but trodden down, and sobbing in despair.

[A _salon_ experience is next described, followed by a visit to Versailles. Then our authoress plunges into the world of art at the Louvre.]

At last I have come into dream-land; into the lotos-eater's paradise; into the land where it is always afternoon. I am released from care; I am unknown, unknowing; I live in a house whose arrangements seem to me strange, old, and dreamy. In the heart of a great city I am as still as if in a convent; in the burning heats of summer our rooms are shadowy and cool as a cave. My time is all my own. I may at will lie on a sofa, and dreamily watch the play of the leaves and flowers in the little garden into which my room opens; or I may go into the parlor adjoining, whence I hear the quick voices of my beautiful and vivacious young friends.

You ought to see these girls. Emma might look like a Madonna, were it not for her wicked wit; and as to Anna and Lizzie, as they glance by me, now and then, I seem to think them a kind of sprite, or elf, made to inhabit shady old houses, just as twinkling harebells grow in old castles; and then the gracious mamma, who speaks French or English like a stream of silver, is she not, after all, the fairest of any of them? And there is Caroline, piquant, racy, full of conversation, sharp as a quartz crystal, how I like to hear her talk! These people know Paris, as we say in America, "like a book." They have studied it aesthetically, historically, socially. They have studied French people and French literature, and studied it with enthusiasm, as people ever should who would truly understand. They are all kindness to me. Whenever I wish to see anything, I have only to speak; or to know, I have only to ask. At breakfast every morning we compare notes and make up our lists of wants. My first, of course, was the Louvre. It is close by us. Think of it. To one who has starved all a life, in vain imaginings of what art might be, to know that you are within a stone's throw of a museum full of its miracles; Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, Roman sculptors and modern painting, all there!...

It was, then, with a thrill almost of awe that I approached the Louvre. Here, perhaps, said I to myself, I shall answer fully the question that has long wrought within my soul. What is art? and what can it do? Here, perhaps, these yearnings for the ideal will meet their satisfaction. The ascent to the picture-gallery tends to produce a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo, rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art, dazzle the eye of the neophyte, and prepare the mind for some grand enchantment. Then opens on one the grand hall of paintings arranged by schools, the works of each artist by themselves, a wilderness of gorgeous growths.

I first walked through the whole, offering my mind up aimlessly to see if there were any picture there great and glorious enough to seize and control my whole being, and answer at once the cravings of the poetic and artistic element. For any such I looked in vain. I saw a thousand beauties, as also a thousand enormities, but nothing of that overwhelming, subduing nature which I had conceived. Most of the men there had painted with dry eyes and cool hearts, thinking only of the mixing of their colors and the jugglery of their art, thinking little of heroism, love, faith, or immortality. Yet when I had resigned this longing, when I was sure I should not meet there what I sought, then I began to enjoy very heartily what there was.

In the first place, I now saw Claudes worthy of the reputation he bore. Three or four of these were studied with great delight,--the delight one feels who, conscientiously bound to be delighted, suddenly comes into a situation to be so. I saw, now, those atmospheric traits, those reproductions of the mysteries of air and of light, which are called so wonderful, and for which all admire Claude, but for which so few admire Him who made Claude, and who every day creates around us in the commonest scenes effects far more beautiful. How much, even now, my admiration of Claude was genuine, I cannot say. How can we ever be sure on this point, when we admire what has prestige and sanction, not to admire which is an argument against ourselves? Certainly, however, I did feel great delight in some of these works.

One of my favorites was Rembrandt. I always did admire the gorgeous and solemn mysteries of his coloring. Rembrandt is like Hawthorne. He chooses simple and every-day objects, and so arranges light and shadow as to give them a sombre richness and a mysterious gloom. The House of the Seven Gables is a succession of Rembrandt pictures, done in words instead of oils. Now, this pleases us, because our life really is a haunted one; the simplest thing in it is a mystery, the invisible world always lies around us like a shadow, and therefore this dreamy golden gleam of Rembrandt meets somewhat in our inner consciousness, to which it corresponds. There were no pictures in the gallery which I looked upon so long, and to which I returned so often and with such growing pleasure, as these. I found in them, if not a commanding, a drawing influence, a full satisfaction for one part of my nature.

There were Raphaels there which still disappointed me, because from Raphael I asked and expected more. I wished to feel his hand on my soul with a stronger grasp; these were too passionless in their serenity, and almost effeminate in their tenderness.

But Rubens, the great, joyous, full-souled, all-powerful Rubens! there he was, full as ever of triumphant, abounding life; disgusting and pleasing; making me laugh and making me angry; defying me to dislike him; dragging me at his chariot-wheels; in despite of my protests forcing me to confess that there was no other but he....

I should compare Rubens to Shakespeare for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly resembles. Like Shakespeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellences. Some of Shakespeare's finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like sky-rockets,--the thought blows the language to shivers....

The halls devoted to painting of which I have spoken give you very little idea of the treasures of the institution. Gallery after gallery is filled with Greek, Roman, Assyrian, and Egyptian sculpture, coins, vases, and antique remains of every description. There is also an apartment in which I took a deep interest, containing the original sketches of ancient masters. Here one may see the pen-and-ink drawings of Claude, divided into squares to prepare them for the copyist. One compares here with interest the manners of the different artists in jotting down their ideas as they rose, some by chalk, some by crayon, some by pencil, some by water-colors, and some by a heterogeneous mixture of all. Mozart's scrap-bag of musical jottings could not have been more amusing.

On the whole, cravings of mere ideality have come nearer to meeting satisfaction by some of these old mutilated remains of Greek sculpture than anything I have met yet. In the paintings, even of the most celebrated masters, there are often things which are excessively annoying to me. I scarcely remember a master in whose works I have not found a hand, or foot, or face, or feature so distorted, or coloring at times so unnatural, or something so out of place and proportion in the picture as very seriously to mar the pleasure that I derived from it. In this statuary less is attempted and all is more harmonious, and one's ideas of proportion are never violated.

My favorite among all these remains is a mutilated statue which they call the Venus de Milo. This is a statue which is so called from having been dug up some years ago, piecemeal, in the island of Milos. There was a struggle for her between a French naval officer, the English, and the Turks. The French officer carried her off like another Helen, and she was given to Paris, old Louis Philippe being bridegroom by proxy. _Savans_ refer the statue to the time of Phidias, and as this is a pleasant idea to me, I go a little further, and ascribe her to Phidias himself.

The statue is mutilated, both arms being gone, and part of the foot. But there is a majesty and grace in the head and face, a union of loveliness with intellectual and moral strength, beyond anything which I have ever seen. To me she might represent Milton's glorious picture of unfallen, perfect womanhood, in his Eve.

Compared with this matchless Venus that of Medici seems as inane and trifling as mere physical beauty always must by the side of beauty baptized and made sacramental, as the symbol of that which alone is truly fair.

TRAVEL IN FRANCE FIFTY YEARS AGO.

CHARLES DICKENS.

[It hardly seems to us, to whom the works of Dickens are household words, that his fame as a writer began more than half a century ago. Yet such is the case. The "Pictures from Italy," from which we make the following selection, was published in 1846, while his first book saw the light ten years earlier. We give here his story of how France and French life appeared to him on a journey southward from Paris.]

On a fine Sunday morning in the midsummer time and weather of eighteen hundred and forty-four it was, my good friend, when--don't be alarmed; not when two travellers might have been observed slowly making their way over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first chapter of a Middle Age novel is usually attained--but when an English travelling carriage of considerable proportions, fresh from the shady halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave Square, London, was observed (by a very small French soldier, for I saw him look at it) to issue from the gate of the Hotel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.

I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday morning, of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a reason for all the little men in France being soldiers and all the big men postilions, which is the invariable rule. But they had some sort of reason for what they did, I have no doubt, and their reason for being there at all was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair Genoa for a year; and that the head of the family purposed in that space of time to stroll about wherever his restless humor carried him.

And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the population of Paris generally that I was that Head and Chief, and not the radiant embodiment of good-humor who sat beside me in the person of a French courier,--best of servants and most beaming of men. Truth to say, he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in the shadow of his portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all.

There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris--as we rattled near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf--to reproach us for our Sunday travelling. The wine-shops (every second house) were driving a roaring trade; awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging, outside the cafes, preparatory to the eating of ices and drinking of cool liquids later in the day; shoeblacks were busy on the bridges; shops were open; carts and wagons clattered to and fro; the narrow, uphill, funnel-like streets across the river were so many dense perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-colored nightcaps, tobacco pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy heads of hair; nothing at that hour denoted a day of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and there, of a family pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab, or of some contemplative holiday-maker in the freest and easiest dishabille, leaning out of a low garret window, watching the drying of his newly-polished shoes on the little parapet outside (if a gentleman), or the airing of her stockings in the sun (if a lady), with calm anticipation.

Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough. To Sens. To Avallon. To Chalons. A sketch of one day's proceedings is a sketch of all three, and here it is.

We have four horses and one postilion, who has a very long whip, and drives his team something like the courier of St. Petersburg in the circle at Astley's or Franconi's, only he sits his own horse instead of standing on him. The immense jack-boots worn by these postilions are sometimes a century or two old, and are so ludicrously disproportionate to the wearer's foot that the spur, which is put where his own heel comes, is generally half-way up the leg of the boots. The man often comes out of the stable-yard with his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out, in both hands, one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by the side of his horse with great gravity, until everything is ready. When it is--and oh, Heaven! the noise they make about it!--he gets into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a couple of friends; adjusts the rope harness, embossed by the labors of innumerable pigeons in the stables; makes all the horses kick and plunge; cracks his whip like a madman; shouts "En route--hi!" and away we go. He is sure to have a contest with his horse before we have gone very far; and then he calls him a thief, and a brigand, and a pig, and what not, and beats him about the head as if he were made of wood.

There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the country for the first two days,--from a dreary plain to an interminable avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a dreary plain again. Plenty of vines there are, in the open fields, but of a short, low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about straight sticks. Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere, but an extraordinarily scanty population and fewer children than I ever encountered. I don't believe we saw a hundred children between Paris and Chalons. Queer old towns, drawbridged and walled, with odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into the moat; other strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes and in farm-yards; all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof, and never used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all sorts; sometimes an hotel de ville, sometimes a guard-house, sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a chateau with a rank garden, prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped turrets and blink-eyed little casements, are the standard objects, repeated over and over again.

Sometimes we pass a village inn, with a crumbling wall belonging to it, and a perfect town of out-houses; and painted over the gate-way, "Stabling for sixty horses," as indeed there might be stabling for sixty score, were there any horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or anything stirring about the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the wine inside, which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with everything else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though always so old as to be dropping to pieces. And all day long strange little narrow wagons, in strings of six or eight, bringing cheese from Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line, of one man, or even boy,--and he very often asleep in the foremost cart,--come jingling past; the horses drowsily ringing the bells upon their harness, and looking as if they thought (no doubt they do) their great blue woolly furniture, of immense weight and thickness, with a pair of grotesque horns growing out of the collar, very much too warm for the midsummer weather.

Then there is the diligence, twice or thrice a day, with the dusty outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking like an idiot's head; and its Young-France passengers staring out of window, with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clinched in their national grasp. Also the malle-poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at a real good daredevil pace, and out of sight in no time. Steady old cures come jolting past, in such ramshackle, musty, rusty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or digging and hoeing, or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, or representing real shepherdesses with their flocks,--to obtain an adequate idea of which pursuit and its followers, in any country, it is only necessary to take any pastoral poem, or picture, and imagine to yourself whatever is most exquisitely and widely unlike the descriptions therein contained.

You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the horses--twenty-four apiece--have been ringing sleepily in your ears for half an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot, monotonous, tiresome sort of business; and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner you will have at the next stage; when down at the end of the long avenue of trees through which you are travelling the first indication of a town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages; and the carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement, ... and here we are in the yard of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or....

The landlady of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is here; and the landlord of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is here; and the femme de chambre of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is here; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, with a red beard like a bosom friend, who is staying at the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or, is here; and Monsieur le Cure is walking up and down in a corner of the yard by himself, with a shovel-hat upon his head, and a black gown on his back, and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other; and everybody, except Monsieur le Cure, is open-mouthed and open-eyed for the opening of the carriage-door. The landlord of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or dotes to that extent upon the courier that he can hardly wait for his coming down from the box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends. "My courier! My brave courier! My friend! My brother!" The landlady loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the garcon worships him.