Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 1

The Bourbons were not without their familiar spectre, a very celebrated one, who appeared to announce the approaching death of a member of the royal family, and on the eve of his execution Louis XVI asked Monsieur de Malesherbes if the White Lady were not walking in the corridors of the Temple. This was the Dame Blanche of the popular saying, who takes an interest in you when all other things cease to be of any concern to you: La Dame Blanche vous regarde, et les affaires des autres ne vous regardent pas.

During the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate, and even the early days of the Empire, the fashions for both men and women were in many respects extravagant. The very elegant young men were known as muscadins and incroyables (incredibles) from their favorite expression,—all the r's being banished from their speech: "En véité, c'est incoyable!" But it was not always safe to laugh at them; in 1795, the black collar which the aristocrats substituted for the former green one, in sign of mourning, gave rise to many difficulties and altercations. In the midst of the Palais-Royal a republican received a bullet point-blank in his chest in return for an insult. Another, meeting one of these collets noirs, said to him: "B . . . of a Chouan, for whom dost thou wear mourning?" "For thee!" replied the other, and blew out his brains. When Napoleon came into power, there arose that misdirected imitation of the antique known as the style of the Empire, with a great display of jewelry on the costumes of both men and women; "the aristocracy of the French Empire presented a revival of the ostentatious patricians of Rome under the Cæsars. The toilettes displayed were rich and magnificent, but it must be said that they were in bad taste."

The contempt which the members of the somewhat effete aristocracy of the ancien régime manifested, even down to the period of the Second Empire, for the virile and fire-new nobility of Napoleon's family, generals and marshals, was generally as puerile as it was unpatriotic, but the latter only too frequently presented subject for sarcasm. In one of the most recent of the many Napoleonic memoirs, those of the Comtesse Potocka, this lively Polish lady describes the great personages who surrounded the Emperor in the winter of 1806-1807, at Warsaw: Murat, parading himself in the salons "with the majestic air of a comedian assuming the rôle of a king;" the young Prince Borghèse, "who, in the brief intervals when the conversation became a little serious, went off to get some chairs, arranged them in pairs in the middle of the salon, and amused himself by dancing contra-dances with these silent partners, humming to himself." Three years later, in Paris, Madame Potocka saw the new Empress, Marie-Louise, whose dull countenance and German accent sufficiently accounted for her personal unpopularity.

Napoleon, who did not hesitate to qualify contemptuously the public opinion of Paris when it was adverse to him, was not above the ancient "bread and circus" methods of the Roman emperors at times. On the occasion of the celebration of his coronation, there were distributed to the populace thirteen thousand poultry, bread, and wine ran freely in the public squares, so that the streets echoed to this cheerful refrain:

"Vive, vive Napoléon,Qui nous bâilleD' la volaille,Du pain et du vin à foison.Vive, vive Napoléon!"

(who gives us chickens, bread, and wine in abundance.)

As for Joséphine, her pretty legend has quite disappeared in the light of these recent memoirs, and the historians and commentators no longer attempt to defend her against even the abominable stories which Barras tells of her. "It would be Don-quixotism to deny them," says M. Gustave Larroumet, among others; "the Joséphines prefer the Barras to the Bonapartes."

The marriage with Joséphine was declared null, in virtue of an order of the Council of Trent on the 14th of January, 1810, and Napoleon was condemned by the municipality of Paris to a fine of six francs for the benefit of the poor. The curious engraving, reproduced on, illustrates the brilliant ceremony of the arrival of the new Empress at the Tuileries on the 2d of April following. A tremendous storm broke over the city the night before, but at one o'clock in the afternoon, when the Imperial couple arrived at the Arch of Triumph, then incomplete but represented by a temporary maquette, the sun was shining brightly. The cavalry of the Guard and the heralds-at-arms preceded the gorgeous coronation carriage in which they were seated; the procession descended the avenue of the Champs-Élysées, traversed the gardens of the Tuileries, and halted before the Pavillon de l'Horloge. Then the Empress assumed the coronation robe, the cortége ascended the grand stairway, traversed the grand gallery of the Louvre between a double row of invited guests, and entered the Salon Carré, which had been transformed into a chapel, and where the nuptial altar had been erected. After the mass, there was a Te Deum, and in the evening a grand banquet in the Tuileries. The musicians sang the chorus of the Iphigénie of Gluck: Que d'attraits, que de majesté! to the accompaniment of thousands of voices.

La Femme has always played a most important role in France; nowhere is she so much discussed, nowhere is she so much respected as Mother, and nowhere, it may be said, is she so little respected as Woman. The women of the eighteenth century enjoy a species of popular renown as somewhat more piquant, brilliant, and peculiarly feminine, as it were,—thanks largely to the chroniclers and the romancers in literature and art; there is a very general idea that they were all, more or less, of the type of Madame de Pompadour, we will say, as set forth by one of her most recent biographers: "It would seem that the grace and the good taste of all the things of her time appertained to Madame de Pompadour. She marked with her cachet, it might almost be said with her arms, all that world of matter which seems to be animated from one end to the other by the ideal of the habits of a people, and the needs of a society. The whole century is like a great relic of the royal favorite.... She presides over that variety and that wide range of objects, so diverse in the universality of their type, that the eighteenth century created in her image to surround her existence, to serve her and to adorn her." This graceful and pleasing picture, however, was largely superficial in the case of her less favored sisters. The inevitable limitations of the life and of the times, the ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant social life, and there was a general consciousness of its hollowness.

"Under all this fever of fashion and customs, under all these dissipations of the imagination and the life, there remains something unappeased, unsatisfied, and empty in the heart of the woman of the eighteenth century. Her vivacity, her affectation, her eagerness to run after fancies, seem to be a disquietude; and a sickly impatience appears in this continual search for attraction, in this furious thirst for pleasure. She searches in every direction, as if she wished to expand herself outside of herself. But it is vainly that she displays her activity, that she seeks all around her a species of deliverance;—she may plunge herself, drown herself, in that which the fashion of the times designates as an 'ocean of worlds,' run after distractions, new faces, those passing liaisons, those accidental friends, for whom the century invents the word connaissances; dinners, suppers, fêtes, voyages of pleasure, tables always filled, salons always crowded, a continual passage of personages, variety of news, visages, masks, toilettes, absurdities, all this spectacle ceaselessly changing cannot entirely satisfy her with its distractions. Though all her nights are brilliant with candles, though she summon—as she grows older—more movement still around her, she ends always by falling back upon herself; she finds herself again in wishing to flee from herself, and she admits to herself secretly the suffering which devours her. She recognizes in herself the secret evil, the incurable evil which this century carries in itself and which it drags with it everywhere smiling,—ennui." (La Femme au XVIIIe siècle.)

The very original methods employed by one of these clever ladies at the very beginning of the century to avoid this all-pervading weariness of the spirit furnished Théophile Gautier with the title and the theme of one of his best romances. Mademoiselle de Maupin lived in the flesh of Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, offspring of a good family, who ran away from the paternal mansion at the age of fourteen and fell in love with a fencing-master who made of her a fighter of the very first order. Nothing that the most successful romancer could desire was wanting in her life,—abductions, disguises, duels, convents forced and set on fire: "Don Juan was only a commonplace fop in comparison with the incredible good fortunes of this terrible virago who changed her costume as she did her visage, courted, indifferently and always with the same success, one sex or the other, according as she was in an impulsive or a sentimental vein." She had a fine voice, became a member of the Opéra troupe under the name of la Maupin, and sang with success in the Psyche, the Armide, and the Atys of Lully. One of her most famous duels ensued from her too assiduous attentions to a young lady one night at a ball at the Palais-Royal, in the last days of the reign of Louis XIV. The husband, the brother, and the lover all took up the quarrel, and were all three neatly run through the body, one after the other, in the snowy court-yard below. Then the victor, calm and smiling, returned to offer his arm to the beauty.

Another of these epicene sworders, diplomat, publicist, and captain of dragoons, reader for the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, in the suite of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, preserved the secret of his sex until his death. This was the adventurer D'Éon de Beaumont, whose career excited such a lively interest in both England and France, and who signed himself, in a letter addressed to Madame de Staël during the Revolution, citoyenne de la nouvelle République française, citoyenne de l'ancienne République des lettres.

On the 3d of May, 1814, a Bourbon king was again in the Tuileries. All the tremendous work of the Revolution and the Empire seemed undone. "Brusquely, without any transitions," says M. Henri Noël, "the standard of men and things was lowered many degrees. To the epopee succeeds the bourgeois drama, not to say the comedy. It would have been thought that France, satiated with glory and misfortunes, France, which, on the whole, seemed to have accepted without enthusiasm, but with a sort of resigned indifference, the new régime, was about to breathe again, to relax herself, to repose. She is wearied with herself. She is nervous, discontented. It might be said that she endured with less patience the blunders, the littleness, the errors of the royalty, than she had the tragic massacres, and the ruins, and the invasions, and the bloodshed, and the tears. Everywhere, anxiety and disquietude, the royalists not completely satisfied, the generals humiliated, the army without glory and its best officers retired on half-pay, the liberal bourgeoisie suspicious and disposed to join the opposition, the small land-owners anxious for their property which they had received from the Revolution...."

Louis XVIII, with all his inherent faults, was a prudent and moderate ruler in comparison with his brother, the Comte d'Artois, who succeeded him as Charles X in September, 1824, and in six years brought the Bourbon dynasty to an end. M. Ernest Daudet, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, has recently been publishing some letters in connection with the ministry of the Duc Decazes, in one of which we find the king remonstrating with his brother, already the chief of the ultras: … "You have notified me that, if you do not succeed in persuading me, you will make your opinions known publicly, and, which unfortunately will inevitably follow, that you will no longer see me.... There is no doubt that this resolution will seriously embarrass the government. But, with consistency and firmness, this obstacle may be overcome, and I hope that, during my lifetime, there will be no troubles. But I cannot, without a shudder, look forward to the moment when my eyes will be closed. You will then find yourself between two parties, one of which believes itself to be already oppressed by me, and the second of which will apprehend being so treated by you. (Conclusion: there will be civil war, and a whole future of divisions, of troubles, and of calamities.)"

This prophecy was but too well realized. The liberal ideas, which were made responsible, though without any proof, for the assassination of the Duc de Berri, at the door of the Opéra-house on the evening of the 13th of February, 1820, attained a great development in the ensuing reign. Paris was unanimous in its opposition. Decamps's absurd cartoon of Charles X hunting, which we have reproduced, is a not unfaithful presentation of the state of public opinion concerning this purblind monarch.

All these revolutions in the political world were, of course, followed in the, perhaps, minor world of fashion. Souvent femme varie, and Toute passe, tout casse, tout lasse. "Paris, in its revulsion from the severity of the earlier Revolution," says an unsympathetic English writer, "took refuge in the primitive license of the Greeks. 'It was a beautiful dress,' says a lady in a popular modern comedietta; 'I used to keep it in a glove-box.' The costume of a belle of the Directoire was equally portable.... With the triumph of the Empire, a more martial and masculine tone prevailed. So the Parisienne cast off her Grecian robes—a comparatively easy process—and put on the whole armor of the tailor-made. She wore cloth instead of diaphanous gauze, and her gowns were cut with a more austere simplicity. Then came the Restoration and the Romantic movement, and the great days of 1830. Woman read her Chateaubriand and her Victor Hugo and her Byron, and became sentimental. It was bon-ton to languish a good deal, and the dressmakers were required to find a suitable costume for the occupation. They proved equal to the demand.... In England, these vestments are called Early Victorian, and are scoffed at, together with the horse-hair sofas and glass lustres of the period.

"At any rate, it did not last. Nothing lasts in feminine fashions.... Romanticism and sentiment died out or became bourgeois. Gay Paris grew alert, lively, animated, dashing. The lady who used to be called a lionne when people were reading Murger and De Musset, displaced the femme incomprise. The 'lioness' was not unlike the vigorous young person of a later epoch. She was distinctly loud in her manners and free and easy in her conversation.... At any rate, she was a healthier type than the pleasure-loving matron of the Second Empire, whose life was one whirl of unwholesome excitement. The vulgarity of thought and conduct, the destruction of all standards of dignity, which characterized the régime of Louis Napoleon's stock-jobbing adventurers, were reflected in the dress of the women. Never was female attire more extravagantly absurd.... Man, with all his tolerance, could not really like the Paris fashions of the Second Empire, and he might have found consolation for the tragedies of 1870, if he had known, as has been asserted, that they portended deliverance from the thraldom. France, so we are told, purged and purified by the baptism of fire, shook off its tasteless frippery, and sought a chaster and purer mode.... Thus elevated and touched to higher issues, the modistes of France, when once the Third Republic had settled down, made quite nice and simple dresses for a few years, and were imitated by the slavish islanders across the Channel, who had no such lofty motives to inspire them. The latest developments of this philosophy of clothes are not yet worked out in detail...."

A multitude of the emigré nobles returned with Louis XVIII, bringing with them the manners and customs of the ancien régime, which the Parisians found singularly antiquated and absurd, and gave these reactionaries the title of Voltigeurs de Louis XVI. The science of good cooking, however, which had been somewhat neglected by society during the Empire, suddenly took on a much greater importance—as was its due. The lady of the higher aristocracy, taking her déjeuner so comfortably with her lapdog, in the plate which we have reproduced from the Bon Genre, is supposed to be the Princesse de Vaudémont. A curious detail of the social life of the Romantic period of the Restoration was the fashion of keepsakes and annuaires illustrés, which came from England, and which flourished from 1825 to 1845. These costly little books intended for presentation, richly bound, and illustrated with small steel engravings, generally taken from the English "keepsakes," bore various titles: L'Album brittanique, L'Amaranthe, Annales romantiques, Le Camée, La Corbeille d'or, L'Eglantine, L'Élite, Livre des salons, etc. The greatest names among the writers of the Romantisme may be found among the contributors to these publications,—Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, A. de Vigny, Méry, Gozlan, and others.

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe was made the object of a storm of ridicule on the part of the Parisian wits and caricaturists from which it has never entirely recovered. The "umbrella" of the Orléans family, which the ribald press of that day made the emblem of their royalty, still figures in the lampoons addressed to the present pretender. The caricature of the royal physiognomy as a pear is one of the most famous in history. Louis-Philippe wore his hair piled in a species of pyramid over his forehead, which lent plausibility to this defamation; this pyramid was known as the toupet, and was naturally largely imitated; those whose locks were not sufficient in quantity for the purpose, purchased false ones. Whiskers were also in fashion, but not moustaches, and no official functionary was permitted to wear hair under his nose. The Saint-Simoniens and those who entitled themselves Jeune France alone wore the hair long and pendant, and the toupet gradually lowered its altitude and finally disappeared, to give place to hair smoothed down and parted strongly on one side, generally the left.

After the Revolution of 1830, the Tuileries gardens were thrown open to all decently-dressed people, but not to those in blouses; it required another revolution, that of 1848, to bring about sufficient toleration to recognize the privilege of smoking under these ci-devant royal horse-chestnuts. A Legitimist journal, regretting the good old days, before the populace were accorded the privilege of entry, "which gives to this locality much the appearance of Noah's ark, in which both the clean and the unclean beasts were admitted," related the following anecdote of the days of the monarchy. A young man of the suprême bon ton, carefully arrayed in the very latest modes, a petit-maître [dandy, fop, exquisite], presented himself at one of the entrances of the garden and was much surprised to see the sentry on duty lower his bayonet and forbid his passing. "How! no admittance?" exclaimed the beau. "I have precise orders," replied the soldier. "Precise orders … to refuse me?" "Precise orders to refuse any one whom I consider to be badly dressed [mal mis]; … now, I consider you to be bien mal mis." And the young man was compelled to retire before this new censor of manners armed with authority.

In 1845, the prestidigitateur, Robert-Houdin, appeared at the Palais-Royal with his new species of entertainment, and for a number of years continued to delight numerous audiences with his mystifying skill in sleight of hand, his example being followed by minor practitioners who gave performances in private salons. The theatre bearing his name on the Boulevard des Italiens still maintains this class of popular amusement.

On the 13th of July, 1842, the Duc d'Orléans, the heir to the throne, and a prince deservedly popular, was thrown from his carriage on the Rue de la Révolte, while on his way to Neuilly, and so badly injured that he died five hours later, universally lamented. The right of succession passed to his son, the Comte de Paris, then a child of four; and both Legitimists and Republicans began to look forward to the inevitable feebleness and uncertainty of a regency as favorable to the triumph of their ideas. The opposition of the king's minister, Guizot, the historian, to the electoral reforms is generally considered as having brought about the Revolution of 1848, though it is somewhat doubtful if the monarchy could have successfully weathered the storms of this year of liberal ideas and universal unrest.

Nevertheless, the Republic came too soon, as the French historians now seem disposed to admit. The political education of the nation was not yet sufficiently advanced, and "it returned to the Empire as to a solution that best conformed with its condition of esprit simpliste. This movement was accelerated by the combinations of men of all shades of political beliefs,—Berryer, Montalembert, Molé, Thiers, Odilon Barrot, and others, who counted on 'the pretended incapacity' of the future emperor for sliding into power themselves. But their hopes were disappointed by the taciturn pretender." One of the latest apologists for the Emperor, M. Thirria, in his Napoléon III avant l'Empire, claims, and no intelligent commentator can disprove the claim: "If he reigned, it was because France was willing, and very willing, and his fatal politics of nationalities, she approved of it, sanctioned it, the republican party first of all." M. Thirria is willing to admit, however, that "he was not made to be the chief of a State, and his reign was a great misfortune for France."

Having the courage of his convictions, M. Thirria does not hesitate to take up all the charges against the Emperor, beginning with the first of all, chronologically, that he was not the son of his alleged father. By a number of letters which he quotes from Louis-Napoleon, King of Holland, he endeavors to demonstrate that the latter considered himself to be, without doubt, the parent of Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The story of the Dutch Admiral Verhuel is, however, corroborated by other documents of equal authenticity. The future emperor, it appears, did at one time officiate as an English police officer, but it was only for the space of two months, and then as special constable at some Chartist meetings. After the affair at Strasbourg, he did accept fifteen thousand francs from the government of Louis-Philippe, which he had just attempted to overthrow, on condition that he should go to America.

A franker chronicler gives us further details. Under the title, Madame Cornu et Napoléon III, M. Eugène d'Eichthal published, in 1897, a number of fragments translated from a posthumous work, Conservation, by the English economist, Nassau Senior, who had been brought into contact with a large number of distinguished men of different countries. In 1854, he first met in a salon the wife of the French painter Sébastien Cornu, who was a goddaughter of Queen Hortense and had been a friend from childhood of Louis-Napoleon. She had been able to render him many services when he was a prisoner at Ham, and they had maintained a confidential correspondence even after the Coup d'État, which almost interrupted their friendship, Madame Cornu being a good republican. In the course of her acquaintance with the English gentleman, she gave him much information concerning the then ruler of the French nation, which he carefully set down, and which M. d'Eichthal translated for the benefit of his countrymen. On one occasion she said: "The mental faculties of Louis-Napoleon present many great superiorities and great deficiencies. He has neither originality nor invention. He neither knows how to reason nor to discuss. He has very few fixed or general principles, but he is a very keen observer, noting quickly the weaknesses and the stupidities of those around him. In the company of some persons with whom he feels at ease, his wit and his gaiety are delicious.