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

It may be remembered that, in the celebrated affair of the diamond necklace, the young person who was persuaded by the adventuress, Madame de la Motte, to personify the queen, Marie Antoinette, and to meet the duped Cardinal Rohan in the park of Versailles at ten o'clock in the evening for the purpose of giving him the fictitious authority to purchase the necklace, was a fille du monde who lived in the Rue du Jour at Paris, and was known as "la d'Oliva." For playing this part, the young woman was promised fifteen thousand livres. The mémoire that was afterward drawn up by the avocat of Madame de la Motte "excited the interest of all sensitive souls by relating that the demoiselle, enceinte at the moment of her arrest, had been delivered in the Bastile, and was nursing her infant herself."

One of the most celebrated resorts of the ladies of the monde and the demi-monde, the cabaret of Ramponneau at Belleville, was closed a few years before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789. Its renown seems to have been established, in the early days of the Regency, by the fact that wine was there sold at three sous six deniers the pint, that is to say, at one sou less than the usual price. "It was so crowded that there were as many persons outside, waiting their turn to enter, as inside, although the accommodations were very considerable in size. This crowd excited the curiosity of persons of distinction, who wished to see for themselves this prodigy." It is described as a species of cellar, decorated on the exterior with a vine painted on the wall, and with a sign bearing the legend, "Au Tambour Royal," and a picture of the proprietor astride of a cask. It was furnished in the interior with wooden benches and crippled tables, around which crowded a multitude drawn from all classes of society, high and low.

The fame of the proprietor became so great that he was offered by the two managers, Gaudon and Nestre, of a theatrical establishment on the Boulevard du Temple, in 1758, ten livres a day if he would consent to show himself on their stage daily for the space of three months. The contracts were all signed, the songs prepared for him, when Ramponneau, worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures which the Church has pronounced upon these individuals, have determined him to renounce, as in these presents, through scruples of conscience and for the purpose of so contributing, on his part, to the purity of manners which it becomes a Christian to maintain, and in which he prays God always to maintain him, he renounces appearing, and promises to God never to appear, on any stage, nor to perform any function, profession, or act which is in the nature of those performed by those individuals who appear on the theatrical stage, whoever they may be," etc. The case was conducted on both sides by the most eminent avocats, and finally compromised by Ramponneau paying a large sum to have the agreement cancelled. He still had left one hundred thousand livres, with which he established himself at the Porcherons, and purchased from the Sieur Magny the cabaret de la Grande-Pinte, on which he expended sixty thousand livres more, and where he had the same success as at the Courtille. The court and the city thronged his establishment, which became the restaurant à la mode.

A very celebrated wine-shop, known as the Petit-Ramponneau, was established, in 1859, at Montmartre, and was the last in which wine was served in little crocks or jugs. The proprietors, MM. Lallemand, made a fortune in thus dispensing vin bleu and portions at six sous the plate.

"It had long been said that the third estate paid with its property, the nobility with its blood, the clergy with its prayers. Now, the clergy of the court and of the salon prayed but very little, the nobility no longer constituted in itself the royal army; but the third estate, remaining faithful to its functions in the State, still paid, and each year more. Since its purse was the common treasury, it was inevitable that the more the monarchy expended, the more would it place itself in a condition of dependency upon the bourgeoisie, and that a day would arrive when the latter, weary of paying, would demand its accounts. That day is called the Revolution of 1789."

The engraving on is a reproduction of one of the many that appear at this day of settlement, with the object of exciting the people against the clergy and the nobility, and of illustrating forcibly the two principal vices of society as then constituted,—the privileges and the inequality of taxation. To suppress these privileges, and to make this inequality disappear,—this was the task of the Revolution. In the engraving, from the collection of M. le Baron de Vinck d'Orp, of Brussels, we see a woman of the people bending under the double burden of a nun and a lady of the nobility; the title is "Le Grand Abus."

As to the origin of the famous phrase, the sans-culottes, the following statement is made by some historians. Two ladies of the nobility, but favorably inclined toward the new ideas, were one day present at a session of the Assembly, and were commenting very audibly and very critically upon a speech which the Abbé Maury was delivering. The orator, finally losing his patience, interrupted his discourse, and, indicating his unappreciative hearers with his forefinger, turned to the presiding officer:

"Monsieur le President," he said, "make these two sans-culottes—unbreeched, trouserless—keep quiet."

This appellation, applied to the two ladies, naturally turned the laugh against them, and the phrase, repeated from mouth to mouth, was adopted by the people of the faubourgs as a title glorifying their miserable condition and their aspirations.

Another of these Revolutionary prints, from the National Almanac for 1791, engraved by Debucourt, and preserved in the collection of M. Muhlbacher of Paris, gives an ingenious and picturesque presentation of one of the numberless sources of supply of that literature of journals and pamphlets on which the Revolution was so largely fed. This marchande de journaux, who adorns a page in the calendar, sits between two benches covered with papers and pamphlets, and set off with ribbons, flowers, and patriotic emblems mounted on rods; her costume and her attitude are also patriotic and a trifle dishevelled, and she is shrilly proclaiming the new decree concerning the value of the assignat which she holds out. Behind her, a couple of elderly aristocrats are about to come into collision with two younger citizens, representatives of the newer ideas, and absorbed in reading some catechism for patriots. On the sidewalk are two boys in the costumes of their elders, one of whom is supposed to be pointing to the date of July 14th in the calendar. This plate is referred to in the Art du 18e siècle, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.

It is worthy of remark that even this sacred date of the 14th of July, that of the national fête, is nowadays not exempt from that curious self-criticism which in every tone of mockery, semi-seriousness, and grave apprehension occupies so considerable a proportion of contemporary French literature, from the Siècle to the Bulletin de la Société d'Economie Sociale et des Unions de la Paix Sociale. So persistent had this criticism become that the national authorities this year (1898) in the capital thought it fit to tack on to the national and municipal celebration of a great political event, in order to give it greater weight and dignity, the commemoration of the birth of a not very important literary man! M. Gaston Deschamps, in the usually ribald Figaro, claimed much of the credit of this innovation for himself. In a long leading editorial on the Sanctification du 14 Juillet, he thus lays sacrilegious hands on the taking of the Bastile itself: "Last year, I demonstrated, very readily, that our fête of the 14th of July, already discredited by the desertion of the wealthy classes, by the scepticism of the public functionaries, and by the frivolousness of the populace, was destitute of that character, national, republican, and humanitarian, which should be in a democracy, the characteristic of every solemnity.

"This fête seems to have been instituted for the special aggravation of those Frenchmen who believe that the history of France did not begin with the 14th of July, 1789. It is no longer, to employ the energetic expression of Gambetta, anything but 'a rag of the civil war.' It glorifies an event which, according to the testimony of contemporaries the least suspected of moderation in politics (Marat, Saint-Just), had not the importance nor, above all, the beauty which our present system of primary instruction attributes to it. Historical research has verified the opinion of these witnesses. It is impossible to relate the taking of the Bastile Saint-Antoine without recognizing the silliness or the unworthiness of the citizens who were the principal actors in this enterprise. This old prison had just been put out of commission by a royal ordinance which decreed its demolition. Very many of the 'conquerors of the Bastile' cried 'Vive le Roi!' as they went down the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The number of prisoners at that time confined in this jail reduced itself to seven, to wit: four forgers, two lunatics, and a crapulous old gentleman. The Bastile was garrisoned by the French invalides and by the Swiss guards. The assailants swore to injure no one if they were permitted to enter. The gates were opened. The French invalides, who had trusted in the promise given, were massacred without being able to defend themselves. The Swiss guards were taken for 'captives' (because of their uniform). They were carried off in triumph. The brewer Santerre (at that time demagogue, and later monopolist in national property) proposed to set the edifice on fire with poppy oil. His friends preferred the demolition pure and simple, which had the effect of turning out in the street the poor devils whose shops were built against the walls of the 'monument of tyranny.'" And he cites the works of a number of modern historical writers to prove the truth of his statements.

"The taking of the Bastile was an act of anarchy, which, if it were repeated to-day, would be immediately suppressed by our Minister of the Interior, Monsieur Brisson. The Republican police no longer permits, God be thanked, this particular form of diversion. This was very evident the other day when several hundred gentry, intoxicated, perhaps, by the approach of this untoward anniversary, wished to sack Mazas prison.

"No, I cannot bring myself to consider this killing of Frenchmen as the most glorious event of the French Revolution. There is too much of fratricidal murder in this affair. I cannot rejoice to thus see the blood of our nation flow. Every time that it is wished to make an apology for this excess of contagious folly, we find ourselves reduced to invoking the approbation of foreigners. It appears that Kant was so well satisfied with this outbreak that he forgot, for the first time in his life, the hour of his luncheon. The English ambassador wrote to his Gracious Majesty that he was very well pleased. The Venetian ambassador judged it to be a 'noble revolt.' So be it. But neither the Prussian Kant, nor this Englishman, nor that Venetian, had the same reasons that we have for grieving over an incident that divided France against herself....

"Last year I succeeded in stirring up a very sufficient number of protestations for having ventured to deduce, from a collection of self-evident facts, a judgment which I still maintain. It may well be believed, moreover, that I was not wrong, since the Government and the Municipal Council have, this year, taken the initiative of adding to the ceremonies and to the diversions usual on the 14th of July, the celebration of an illustrious memory, which will heighten the dignity of the official fête, and which should give to the French people the opportunity to reunite in the unanimity truly national of a common admiration.

"On the white posters which the administration has just placarded I read as follows:

"'Fête Nationale,'

and underneath:

"'Fêtes du centenaire de Michelet.'

"This coincidence is intentional. It is significative.

"Michelet was born on the 21st of August, 1798; the date of his centennial therefore falls regularly in the coming month. It has been decided to celebrate to-morrow the commemoration of his birth. It has been desired, by means of this addition, to purify, to sanctify the 14th of July by a sort of pious eve.... If these fêtes contribute toward fixing in the souvenirs of the populace an idea of the life and of the work of Michelet, this 14th of July, ennobled, embellished, will not have been misplaced. A hateful date will justly have been transformed into a fête of union and of fraternity."

Lamartine says of the murder of M. de Launey, Governor of the Bastile, hacked to pieces by the crowd in the street after he had surrendered: "A victim of duty, he yielded only with his last breath the sword which had been confided to him by his master. The court, the army, the royalists, the people, basely endeavored to throw upon him the responsibility for their want of forethought, their cowardice, their blood shedding."

The vainqueurs de la Bastille took upon themselves such airs of superiority and claimed so many privileges over their fellow-citizens that the municipal authorities finally, wearied with their arrogance, issued a proclamation in the latter part of December, forbidding them to assemble and to deliberate, and directing the procureur of the commune to prosecute any author, printer, or distributor of decrees which the aforesaid "conquerors" issued without any legal authority.

Michelet gives some details of one of the most celebrated of the innumerable murders of the Terror, that of the pretty Princesse de Lamballe, which may serve to illustrate the quality of the populace. She was confined in the prison de la Force, where during the night of the 2d of September, 1792, a Revolutionary tribunal condemned the prisoners to death after a mock trial. In the morning, two of the National Guards came to tell her that she was to be transferred to the Abbaye, to which she replied that she would as soon stay where she was. Taken before the tribunal, she was ordered to take the oath of liberty and equality, of hatred of the king, the queen, and royalty. "I will willingly take the first two oaths," she said; "I cannot take the last, it is not in my heart." A voice cried to her: "Swear; if you do not swear, you are dead." "Cry 'Vive la Nation!'" said several others, "and no harm will be done thee." "At that moment, she perceived at the corner of the little Rue Saint-Antoine something frightful, a soft and bloody mass upon which one of the participants in the massacres was trampling with his iron-pegged shoes. It was a heap of corpses, stripped, quite white, quite naked, which they had piled up there. It was upon this pile that she was required to lay her hand and take the oath;—this trial was too much. She turned around and uttered a cry: 'Fi! l'horreur!'"

"Release madame," said the president of the improvised tribunal. This was the signal for her execution. A little peruke-maker, Charlat, a drummer of the volunteers, struck off her cap with a blow of his pike, but in doing so he wounded her in the forehead; the sight of the flowing blood produced its usual effect upon the mob; they precipitated themselves upon her, "her breasts were cut off with a knife, she was stripped quite naked, Charlat opened her chest and took out her heart, then he mutilated her in the most secret part of her body." A certain Sieur Grison cut off her head; then the two wretches, taking on the ends of their pikes, one her head and the other her heart, set off down the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Temple, followed by an immense crowd, "dumb with astonishment." They carried the head into the shop of a coiffeur, who washed, combed, and powdered the blond hair. "Now," he said, "Antoinette will be able to recognize her." Then the procession proceeded in the direction of the Temple again; but by this time it began to be feared that, carried away by their excitement, the cut-throats might inflict the same fate upon the royal family confined there, and the Commune sent hastily some commissioners, girded with large tricolored sashes. When Grison and Charlat arrived, they demanded permission to promenade under the windows of the apartments occupied by the king and queen, which was immediately granted them, and the king was even requested to go to the window at the moment when the livid head of the princess was elevated in front of him. "The march was continued throughout Paris, without any one interposing any obstacle. The head was carried to the Palais-Royal, and the Duc d'Orléans, who was then at table, was obliged to rise, to go to the balcony, and to salute the assassins."

The only relief to be found in the perusal of these chronicles is in some incident in which the executioners turn on each other. Among the most vociferous of the "citizenesses" was the belle Liégeoise, called also la belle Théroigne de Méricourt, and the première amazone de la Liberté. From the garden of the Tuileries, the usual scene of her orations, she one day ascended to the terrace of the Feuillants, where she fell into the hands of the women of the party of the Montagne, who surrounded her, trussed up her petticoats, and gave her a public whipping. The "first amazon of Liberty" screamed, shrieked, but no one came to her rescue, and when her persecutors finally released her, it was found that she had lost her reason, and it was necessary to conduct her to an insane asylum in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.

All the chronicles of the times devote a paragraph to the "Furies of the Guillotine," the terrible women who habitually occupied the front places among the spectators at all the executions, and who interrupted their knitting only to hurl insults at the victims who mounted the scaffold. These tricoteuses affected an exalted Revolutionary sentiment, they wore the red cap of liberty, and one day presented themselves at the Convention with an address in which they offered to mount guard while the men went off to combat in the armies on the frontier.

At the great gate of the Tuileries, between the two marble horses of Coustou, was a café-restaurant, painted a lively red, and which bore the sign: "À la Guillotine." "Needless to say, that the establishment was always full of customers." During the two years in which the instrument of public executions stood permanently on the Place de la Revolution, on the site of the present obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, so much blood was shed there that, it is said, a herd of cattle refused to cross the Seine on the bridge, terrified at the stale odor of slaughter. By the side of the scaffold was a hole destined to receive the blood of the victims, but this diffused such an infection through the air that "the citizen Coffinet thought it would be advantageous to establish, on a little two-wheeled barrow, a casket lined with lead to receive the blood, which might then be transported to the fosse commune."

On the 16th of September, 1797, the Central Bureau, "justly indignant at the debauchery and at the offences constantly committed against the public morality, whether by the impudent exhibition of books and pictures the most obscene, or by the prodigious multiplicity of women and girl prostitutes, or by the indecent masquerading of a great number of women in men's garments," issued a rigorous decree against all women who were found disguised as men, and very many arrests were made in consequence.

When Louis XVIII made his solemn entry into Paris on the 3d of May, 1814, it was in the midst of the popular acclamations; a numerous and very enthusiastic crowd swarmed in the Carrousel, the court of the château, the garden and the terraces, "this same crowd which, on the 10th of August, 1792, filled the air with its imprecations against Capet, which, on the 2d of December, 1804, acclaimed the Emperor and the Empress, and which, on this occasion, welcomed with cries of joy the orphan of the Temple after having applauded the decapitation of his father and his mother." When this same populace, turned Republican again, thronged along the boulevards and into the Place Vendôme in 1831, singing the Marseillaise, Maréchal Lobau, unwilling to fire on them, contented himself by ordering the hose of the fire-pumps turned on them, and deluging indiscriminately conspirators, orators on the public place, and spectators. "The Republicans had demonstrated on many occasions that they did not fear fire. But, like all Parisians, they detested water. Surprised at these unexpected douches, they fled in every direction, and the Place Vendôme was immediately cleared."

Well might Napoleon declare, repeating Rabelais's word, on one of the many occasions of popular manifestation: "This is not the first time that I have had occasion to remark that the population of Paris is only a ramas de badauds."

The poissardes, or fish-women of the Halles, those "commères fortes en gueule" (shrill-voiced gossips), appear almost as frequently in these police and scandalous chronicles as the courtesans. They are frequently mentioned in the mediæval records; under Louis XIII, they and their resort were considered worthy of the following description: "You will see at the Halles a multitude of rascals who amuse themselves only by pillaging and robbing each other, sellers as well as buyers, by cutting their purses, searching in their hottes and baskets; others, in order to better secure their prey, will sing dishonest songs and dirty ones, sometimes one and sometimes the other, without any regard for either Sundays or fête days,—things deplorable in a city of Paris! In the Halles and other usual markets, you may see women who sell provisions; if you offer them less than they want, were you the most renowned person in France, there you will be immediately blazoned with every possible insult, imprecation, malediction, dishonor, and the whole with an accompaniment of oaths and blasphemies."

(The same author, speaking of the shop-keepers of Paris at this epoch, says: "They will damn themselves for a liard, gaining on their merchandise the double of what it has cost them, selling bad goods, and blaspheming and swearing by God and the Devil that they are excellent.")

In 1716, Jean-François Gruet, inspector of police and mounted huissier of the Châtelet, was condemned to the pillory of the Halles for malversation of funds, and the poissardes manifested themselves on this occasion in front of him in great shape: "Huissier du diable! Gueule de chien! jardin à poux, grenier à puces, sac à vin, mousquetaire de Piquepuce, aumônier du cheval de bronze, poulet dinde de la Râpée," etc., until they were too hoarse to continue. In 1784, the winter began by heavy frosts, which were followed by a sudden thaw which flooded the city. "Paris has become a sewer; communication has been absolutely interrupted between the inhabitants, and for several days past there have been on foot only those who were compelled to it by necessity, by their occupation, or by their duty. Arms and legs broken, and many other accidents, have been the results of this intemperance of the season. In the midst of this species of public calamity, there are those who find entertainment in it, occasion for mirth, and much laughter. In the first place, there have been unlimited opportunities for sled races, and, also, there has been offered to the amateurs a more novel and more piquant spectacle. You went to the Halles to see the poissardes in boots, in breeches, their under-petticoats trussed up to their navels, and exercising their trade in this species of masquerade while redoubling their quirks and their scandalous jests."

Nevertheless, so important was their corporation, that, on the birth of the dauphin, in 1781, they were admitted in a body to compliment the king, to whom they were formally presented by the Duc de Cossé, Governor of Paris. The spokeswoman had her discourse written out on her fan, and read it to his Majesty. They were all dressed in black, and they were all, to the number of a hundred and fifty, invited by him to dinner and to present their compliments also to the queen. They had at first manifested some reluctance to accepting these royal hospitalities; the last time they had been to Versailles on a similar mission, some evilly-disposed person had inserted in the tarts and pâtés some indigestible substances "and dishonest things." The lieutenant of police, however, assured them that this time nothing of the kind would occur, and they were, in fact, treated sumptuously.