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

"Those officers of the general staff of the National Guard who have neglected their duties to banquet with filles de mauvaise vie, at the restaurant Peters, were arrested yesterday by order of the Committee of Public Safety. They have been sent to the Bicêtre, with spades and picks, to work in the trenches. The women have been sent to Saint-Lazare to make sacks for containing earth."

One of the strongest characteristics of the Commune was its hatred and persecution of the clergy, manifested in a hundred acts, and culminating in the murder of the archbishop and the hostages. On the morning after the arrest of all the clergy of Montmartre, the following notice was posted on the doors of the church of Saint-Pierre:

"Whereas, the priests are bandits, and the haunts in which they have morally assassinated the masses, by bowing France under the claws of the infamous Bonaparte, Favre, and Trochu, are the churches,

"The civil delegate of the Carrières of the ex-prefecture of police orders that the church of Saint-Pierre (Montmartre) shall be closed and decrees the arrest of the priests and the Ignorantins."

On the preceding day, the cathedral and the church of Saint-Laurent had been closed, and in the crypt of the latter were found a great number of human bones; some of these were arranged so as to constitute the skeletons of fourteen women which, it was asserted, had been sequestered by the priests of the church, outraged, and murdered. Great was the virtuous indignation, the bones were officially photographed by the photographer Carjat, all Paris went to see them, and the affair made such a noise that after the capture of the city by the Versailles troops and the restoration of order, it was officially investigated by a scientific commission, which reported through its chairman, M. Tardieu, that the bones were those of persons who had been buried for at least a hundred and fifty years.

Of the women of the Commune, M. Maxime du Camp draws the following unflattering picture: "They were wicked and cowardly. Utilized by the police of the Rigaults and the Ferrés, they were pitiless in the search for refractory citizens who hid themselves that they might not have the shame of serving the Commune.... From the heights of the pulpits of the churches, converted into clubs, they poured out all the corruption of which their ignorance was full; with their shrill and yelping voices, in the midst of the smoke of pipes, to the accompaniment of vinous hiccoughs, they demanded 'their place in the sun, their rights as citizens, the equality which was refused them,' and other vague claims which concealed, perhaps, the secret dream which they put into practice shamelessly,—the plurality of husbands.

"They disguised themselves as soldiers; … they 'manifested'; they assembled in bands, and, like the Tricoteuses, their grandmothers, they wished to go to Versailles 'chambarder la parlotte and hang Foutriquet the first.' They were all there, rushing about and squalling, the boarders of Saint-Lazare in vacation, the natives of the little Pologne and the great Bohemia, the sellers of tripe à la mode de Caen, the seamstresses for messieurs, the shirt-makers for men, the instructors for elder students, the maids of all work, the vestals of the temple of Mercury, and the virgins of Lourcine. That which was the most profoundly comic was that those escaped from the Dispensaire delighted in alluding to Joan of Arc and in comparing themselves to her.

"The Commune, without concerning itself about it, aided in this feminine uprising which emptied the houses with big street-numbers [houses of ill-fame] to the detriment of the public health and to the profit of the civil war. It knew how to resolve—this good Commune, composed of the sensible men that we know—it knew how to resolve, with one sole blow, the social problem which had troubled, for so many years, the administrators, the economists, the moralists, the philosophers, the doctors, and the legislators. It caused a paper to be pasted on the walls of Paris, and the great difficulty was solved forever. By a poster, well and duly stamped, it forbade prostitution. It was not any more difficult than that! The poor creatures liberated from all administrative regulation, from all sanitary control, did not wait to have it repeated; they spread themselves like a leprosy through the city, and when, reduced to poverty by the men who exploited them, they no longer had anything to eat, they donned the great-coat of the foot-soldier and went to the advance posts, where they were as formidable to their friends as to their adversaries.

"In the last days, all these belligerent viragoes fired from behind the barricades longer than did the men; very many of them were arrested, their hands black with powder, their shoulders bruised by the recoil of the musket, all excited still with the fever of battle. A thousand and fifty-one of them were conducted to Versailles, among whom were to be counted, according to the euphemism of the statistics, 'two hundred and forty-six celibataires under police surveillance.' As in the case of children, no undue severity was exercised, and eight hundred and fifty decisions of non-lieu were rendered in their favor; among the female prisoners, four were sent to insane asylums,—that was very little! For any student of possession, there is scarcely any room for doubt; nearly all the unfortunates who combatted for the Commune were that which science calls 'patients.'"

The last stand of the insurgents before the constantly advancing forces of Marshal MacMahon was made in the last days of May in the quarters Ménilmontant and Popincourt and in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. The Buttes Chaumont were taken on the evening of the 27th; through the cemetery, around the tombstones, in the rain, the combat was waged with the bayonet, and without quarter. The marine infantry pursued the Communards into the vaults and killed every one they found. On the gray stones of the tombs could be seen for days afterwards the imprint of hands blackened with gunpowder and red with blood. In the quarries of Amérique, many of the last survivors killed themselves in despair. "The Seine for many days was filled with corpses, and the streets of Paris were only a slaughter-house." Two hundred and thirty-four buildings were destroyed, and the losses in property were estimated at a hundred and fourteen million francs.

The hideous virgins of the Commune are no longer in evidence, but they have been succeeded by a variety of their sex, in the idle and fashionable society of the present day, which, if we may believe a modern romancer, is sufficiently numerous to constitute a still more formidable menace. His story is put forth as a serious psychological study of Parisian manners and customs in certain walks of life; the interest, if not the approval, with which it has been received has been very marked, and the volume from which we quote is of the hundred and sixty-first edition. It is in much such a salon as M. Montzaigle has endeavored to paint that the explanation of these demi-vierges is furnished to his friend from the provinces by the critical Parisian man of the world:—"There have happened in Paris, within the last fifteen years, two grave events,—two kracks, as my brother the banker would say.... Firstly, the krack of modesty. Our epoch may be compared to the Latin decadence or to the Renaissance, in the matter of love. Our young girls (I refer to those of the idle world of pleasure) no longer serve naked at the table of the Médicis; they do not wear necklaces of representations of the generative organs; but they are as knowing in matters of love as those Florentines and those Roman women. Who troubles himself to refrain from speaking before them of the last scandal? To what theatrical representations are they not taken? What romances have they not read? And yet conversation, books, the theatre, these are only words.... There are at Paris, in the world of society, professors of defloration, men on the hunt for innocence: … the first lesson is given to young girls on the evening of their first ball; the course is continued through the season; when the summer comes, the promiscuousness of the watering-places or the sea-beach will permit the professional deflorator to put the finishing touch to his work....

"The second krack is that of the dot, as pernicious for the modern virgin as that of modesty. There are no longer any innocent young girls, but there are, also, no more rich young girls. The millionaire gives two hundred thousand francs of dot to his daughter, that is to say, six thousand francs of income, that is to say, nothing, not even enough to hire a coupé by the month. Hence, in this respect, the young girl has never been dependent upon the man, and as she has but one weapon with which to conquer him—love—the mothers allow them to learn love as soon as possible, through maternal devotion.... Yes, through maternal devotion. In my opinion, the universal alteration in the type of the young girl of former times may be imputed, first of all, to the mothers of the present generation." …M. Marcel Prevost justifies his unpleasant discourse on the plea that modern education tends more and more to develop the type "demi-vierge," and that, if the education of the young girl be not greatly modified, "Christian marriage will perish."

There has been no successful street revolution in Paris since the days of the Commune, but the terrible under-strata ever and anon break through the thin upper crust of society with some such outburst as that of the dynamite explosions of 1892 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in the caserne Lobau, and in the Rue de Clichy. On this occasion, the Paris Matin published the result of the official researches as to the locality of the various groups of anarchists in the city, from which it appeared that they were to be found in associations of greater or lesser numbers in the quartiers of the Bourse, of the Temple, of the Panthéon, of the fashionable Champs-Élysées, among the valets de chambre, the cooks, and the coachmen, and in the fourth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth arrondissements. In the quartiers of the Louvre, of the Luxembourg, and in the seventh, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements, no organized groups existed. Their titles varied: L'Avant-garde cosmopolite, Le Réveil du quinzième (arrondissement), La Bibliothèque socialiste, La Jeunesse anarchiste du vingtième (arrondissement), La Jeunesse révolutionnaire and La Ligue des antipatriotes; their publications ranged from Le drapeau rouge [the red flag] to La Révolte and Henri Rocheforte's Intransigeant. The arrest of the chief dynamiter, Ravachol, was effected through the intelligence of a waiter named Lhérot in the restaurant Véry, on the Boulevard Magenta, of which we give a view, on Victor Hugo's authority that it is always interesting to look at a wall behind which we think something is happening.

Their haunts, or those of the desperate poverty and misery which tend to swell their ranks, may be represented by the Cabaret or Buvette du Père Lunette or the Château Rouge, both of them threatened with demolishment for the last nine years, but still standing. The first, situated in one of the worst streets of old Paris, the Rue des Anglais, in the quartier of the Place Maubert, has been famous for forty years, having succeeded, as it were, to the evil renown of the Lapin blanc, in the Rue aux Fèves, celebrated by Eugène Sue and believed to have dated from the reign of Pepin le Bref, and the cabaret of Paul Niquet, in the Rue aux Fers. The founder of the Père Lunette, a Sieur Lefebvre, is said to have made a fortune by it. Its name is derived from a gigantic pair of spectacles (lunettes) hanging over the entrance-door, and another painted on the small window beside it. The whole small front of the establishment is of a deep red. Our illustration represents the inner sanctuary, to which the visitor attained by passing through an antechamber only slightly less characteristic. The walls are decorated by ignoble frescoes; on the disbursal of a franc for several litres of a species of wine, the stranger is admitted to the honors of the establishment, and there are duly unrolled for him six canvases hanging on the wall on which are figured various personages, Gambetta, Cassagnac, Prince Napoleon, and even the Pope, in various situations. The Rue des Anglais, at the present day, very short and narrow and irregular, is very clean and proper.

A large porte-cochère, surrounded by a red border, near the middle of the Rue Galande, opens under an arched passage-way into a small court, badly paved, at the bottom of which a few steps lead up to an entrance in a wall also painted red, and a glass door opens into the first apartment of the Château Rouge. This visit should be made between midnight and two o'clock in the morning, the hours at which the establishment is in its fullest activity. The first two rooms on the ground-floor are merely low drinking-places, crowded with both men and women; the second floor, reached by a narrow staircase, was formerly known familiarly to the inmates as the Salle des Morts or the Bataille de Champigny; at these hours it is strewn with motionless bodies, in various attitudes of uneasy slumber, and in various stages of squalid undress. As the visitor turns to descend, he will find the stairway blocked by the recumbent forms of late arrivals for whom no space has been left in this wretched dormitory. At two o'clock in the morning the establishment closes, and all the sleepers are aroused and turned out into the street. For this transient hospitality each of them pays two sous.

Curiously enough, the building seen at the left of the Château Rouge, with its balustraded stairway under the arch and its arched windows filled with innumerable little panes, was the residence of Gabrielle d'Estrées, the belle amie of Henri IV. It may still be seen, but the railing of the stairway at the present day is a simple iron one.

The Place Maubert, now forming part of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and ornamented by a statue of Étienne Dolet, was at the period shown in our illustration, in 1889, a rendezvous for the professionals of that peculiar street industry who are known as ramasseux de mégots,—those highly unpleasant individuals who slouch about the cafés on the boulevards and pick up the butts of cigars and cigarettes. They claim to be several thousand in number, and they have definite hours for the exercise of their profession, hours in which their harvest is the greatest and just before the street-sweepers come along, at two o'clock in the morning, when the establishments close, at noon, and at nine o'clock in the evening. An industrious man, who has pretty good eyesight, may pick up a hundred to a hundred and fifty grammes of tobacco on each round. A good day's work will bring in as much as fifty sous; a rainy day, not more than twelve or fifteen. The best localities, which it is, of course, very important to know, are the surroundings of the Halle aux blés, the Bourse, the Louvre, the cafés on the boulevards, and in summer the public gardens and the crowds around the military bands. This tobacco which is thus saved from the street sweepings is—it is painful to relate—dried, assorted, made over again, and sold to other smokers. When one reflects on the quality of ordinary French tobacco at its best, this consideration tends to add another ease to death. And yet an ingenious chronicler, who extracted these details from a professional, declares that upon examining, with his eyes and his nose, a package of the best of this resuscitated weed, a package of "théâtre," these faithful organs gave him no reason to suspect its origin. The théâtre is made from londrès exclusively, no cigarettes and no tabac de chique are allowed to enter in its composition; the two cheaper brands manufactured are le petit and le gros. There are special clients for this merchandise, ranging from the inmates of asylums for old men and the insane patients at Charenton to military men on insufficient pensions who make their purchases hurriedly and with anxious glances around. When the fine season opens, the ramasseur de mégots who has collected a good winter harvest will issue from the city to sell his merchandise in the suburbs. In this irregular commerce he runs the risks of denunciation by the authorized bureaux de tabac, and of six months in prison, although his tobacco has once paid the régie, or tax.

All this world of the people, which ranges from M. Brispot's comfortable and respectable Bon Bourgeois, taking his summer ease in his court-yard, down to almost unknown depths, has its moments of leisure and takes its relaxation as well as its betters. Two of M. Vierge's characteristic sketches may serve to illustrate two of the more popular and more innocent methods,—the informal manner in which the frequenters of the Parc de Montsouris, on the line of the southern fortifications, dispose themselves on the grass, around the kiosque of the military band, to listen to the music, and a very characteristic feature of the popular observance of the fête of the 14th of July, the balls in the open street. At almost every important crossing or open space, not only in the so-called quartiers excentriques, but in such official neighborhoods as those of the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville, temporary bandstands are set up, and around them the people dance cheerfully, mostly in ungraceful waltzes, all the evening, and frequently all night. In front of the cafés in the popular quarters, the music of a violin or a hurdy-gurdy, or even of the dreadful organ of the "merry-go-rounds," or chevaux de bois, will furnish inspiration enough to perspiring couples who will repeatedly leave their beer or their sirop to revolve giddily on the pavement till, quite breathless, they return to their seats. All this is done with such frank simplicity and good nature, such a characteristically cheerful French appropriation of the public street for domestic purposes, that the foreigner, sitting looking on somewhat scornfully at first, gradually veers round to their point of view, and, if he be young enough, probably ends by being quite willing to get up and dance, himself, with some of these slim-waisted, pretty French maids.

As the official fête of 1898 had a new feature added to it, the celebration of the centennial of Michelet, it naturally took on still another diversion, that of the election of a Muse of Paris, selected from among the most beautiful young working-girls of the capital. Her official functions consisted in being crowned, in presiding at the ceremony before Michelet's bust, set up in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and in strewing flowers before it. Then there was chanted before her: "Good people, Rich and poor, Hasten hither! Come all to admire, The Muse of Paris! She is a nice little working-girl, Whom the poet-kings of poverty, Have anointed queen of their chimeras," etc. The election of a queen of the washerwomen, or, rather, of a reine des blanchisseuses, has long been one of the important ceremonials of the Mi-carême festivities, and grotesque accounts are given of the intrigues, the rivalries, the heart-burnings, which this choice entails, of the adventures of the sovereign and her attendant ladies in assuming their somewhat unwonted toilettes for this great occasion, and of the still greater efforts of the garçons of the lavoirs to accoutre themselves as d'Artagnans and Henri III's. However, everything passes off for the best; and it is a dull lane that has no turning.

Among the less praiseworthy diversions, neither rat-baiting nor cock-fighting have much favor in Paris. A pair of game-cocks were imported from England in 1772, but the "sport" was not appreciated. In the country parts of France it is more practised; and one of the most important of the establishments, affected by the Parisians, devoted to the murderous combats of dogs and rodents, is the Ratier Club of Roubaix, whose modest wooden façade, rising at the back of a court which is entered through a sufficiently common-place cabaret, is shown in the illustration. On the left is a great lantern to light the dingy approach, and on the right, full of noise and tumult, the office and the weighing-stand. In the interior, the arrangements are those usually adopted,—the wooden benches are ranged around the parc, or pit, a large wire cage nearly five mètres long and two and a quarter high, elevated on a platform about a mètre from the floor. It has no top, but the upper portions of the walls present a smooth band of metal up which the rats cannot climb. The dog is introduced through a sliding door on the floor, and his antagonists are emptied from a box over the top. They are of three kinds, water-rats, sewer-rats, and granary-rats; the first are of a placid disposition and are rarely used; the last, in black, are the fiercest, and consequently the most desirable. The dogs are usually bull-dogs, fox-terriers, or a species with a scanty hair, called griffons; they are usually pitted against four rats at a time, and their prowess is according to the brevity of the time in which they dispose of them. There is a legend that one champion despatched a hundred rats in seventeen minutes, thirty seconds. A good dog will finish the four rats in ten or twelve seconds, notwithstanding their doublings and turnings, the speed with which they climb the wire trellis, and the fierceness with which they turn on him and fasten on his jaw. There are various methods of conducting these contests; the chasse à excitations, in which the proprietor of the dog is permitted to run around the cage and excite his animal by voice and gesture; that à la muette, in which he is strictly forbidden to make a sound or a sign; that à obstacles, in which the rodents are concealed under every second or third of a number of flower-pots reversed on the floor, or in which they are furnished with bundles of straw in which to seek refuge, or favored by an arrangement of partitions about a foot high, arranged in the manner of a Saint Andrew's cross, and over which the dog has to leap while they traverse them through small semicircular openings on a level with the floor. The dogs are classified by weight; the price of entry varies according to the variety of the chasse, and the sum of the prizes distributed sometimes amounts to as much as fifteen hundred francs.

As to the more aristocratic sport of horse-racing, we have already seen that the annually-recurring Grand Prix de Paris has been elevated to the dignity of a capital municipal institution. But it was early recognized that this diversion, which has attained such extraordinary development in the capital within the last twenty years, owed a very considerable proportion of its popularity to the facilities which it offered for gambling. The true sportsman's interest in the improvement of the equine race was by no means sufficiently widely diffused to maintain the hippodromes of the Sociétés de Course. This was abundantly demonstrated when, in the spring of 1887, the government forbade all betting on the race-course; the indifference of the public was promptly manifested by the great falling off in the attendance. At the end of a few weeks, it was found necessary to remove the restriction, but it was wished at the same time not to encourage the spirit of gambling, which threatened to affect all classes of society. The Pari Mutuel [mutual betting], which was accordingly authorized, offers to-day the only legal method of betting on the race-courses. It consists of a series of offices established on the tracks, where the public makes its bets on the horses running. It registers the bets, receives the money, and divides the winnings among those entitled to them. "A bettor wishes to stake fifty francs upon a horse which, we will say, is number six on the list; he goes to one of the five-franc bureaux, and asks for ten tickets on number six winning, or ten on number six 'placed.' He pays his fifty francs, receives ten tickets bearing the required number, and with the stipulation 'winning' or 'placed,' and he has no more to do but to wait the result of the race. If he win, as soon as the division is made he has only to present himself at the treasurer's office of the bureau where he made his bet, and he receives his winnings in exchange for his ten tickets." On all the operations there is deducted a tax of seven per cent. in the Parisian Sociétés de Courses,—one per cent. for breeding purposes, two for local charities, and four for the Sociétés themselves. The latter portion, which is six, eight, or ten per cent. in the provinces, is added to the sums gained from the entrance fees, and employed for the expenses, and to increase the prizes offered the following year.