Four Years in France

The staircase is handsome, but not sufficiently so for that to which it leads. I shall not pretend to describe the suite of state apartments. One wonders that men of five feet and some inches high should build, for their own use, rooms so disproportionate to their stature. The chamber in which Louis XIV. died is amongst the largest of these rooms: from its windows are seen the three avenues, called la patte de corbeau, or of some other bird: the ends of these avenues are not near enough to the palace; a defect easily to be supplied. This chamber, the central one of the grande cour, remained unoccupied, in token of respect for the memory of that great monarch, who rendered null the efforts of a powerful coalition against him, put his grandson in quiet possession of Spain and the Indies, carried the frontier of France to the Rhine, made all Europe begin to learn French, and exemplified the truth of William of Wykeham's motto, – "manners maketh man."

When I saw the palace of Versailles, it was unfurnished; they were renewing the gilding, and repairing the damages of revolution and neglect. The celebrated gallery runs the whole length of the central part of the garden front. The side opposite the windows is panelled with mirrors in a manner exactly resembling the old wainscot which I remember in my youth, and which has now given place to stucco, silk, and paper. What splendid scenes have these mirrors reflected! and all that was then so glorious is now as unsubstantial as the shadowed form.

The chapel is such an one as may be expected in such a palace. The seat of the royal family is in what is called the tribune, which is entered from the state apartments, and is at the height of half the chapel from the pavement, looking down on the altar at the opposite end. In all the royal chapels, the place of the king is thus situated, thus elevated above the altar. Of this I cannot approve: let me quote a story which will explain my meaning. King George III. sent, as a present to the Emperor of China, a handsome town-built chariot. On board the vessel which conveyed it, (it was packed up in separate pieces) a mandarin attended, to see it mounted and put together, that he might inform himself of the uses of the several parts. – He readily understood all the rest; but the two seats, the one within, and the coachman's seat, covered, of course, with a superb hammer-cloth, perplexed him. "For whom is that seat?" said he, pointing to the inside of the carriage. He was told that it was for the Emperor. "And that?" pointing to the coach-box. "For the man who guides the horses." "Do you think," said he, with a sudden burst of indignation, "that our glorious sovereign, the son of the sun, &c. &c. will allow any one to be placed higher than himself?"

From the southern end of the terrace is seen the orangery below, sheltered from the north by the terrace, and the southern end of the central part of the palace; and from the east by that wing in which are the petits appartements. Oranges, in this climate, endure the open air during five months in the year: those of the Tuilleries had already taken their station in the garden when I arrived at Paris, in the end of April. It is said that Louis XIV. received a Turkish ambassador at a first audience in this orangery. This envoy having learned at Paris that Versailles was a most magnificent palace, and at the Sublime Porte that flattery was a most important part of his trade, began to offer to the king his prepared compliments. The king quietly allowed him to proceed and finish; and then taking him on the terrace, and into the state rooms, enjoyed his surprise, mingled, as may be supposed, with some confusion, at having repeated his lesson rather too soon.

The formal arrangement and straight lines of the garden have, of course, been blamed by those who, according to the present English taste, wish every thing in this kind to be tortured into irregularity. I do not desire that the trees should be clipt, but sympathize rather with the old duchess, who said it made her melancholy to see so many millions of leaves, not one of which was permitted to grow as it pleased. But a garden near a house ought to partake of the regularity of the building; and the house ought not to look, according to the ingenious expression of the author of Waverly, as if it had walked out of the town, and found its place in the fields by chance. The grand central walk leads down to the water-works, which are, doubtless, very fine, when the water spouts forth from the shells of tritons and the mouths of dolphins. On each side of this allée, are bowers and bosquets, statues and fountains, vases and beds of flowers. Turning to the right, through avenues of well-grown, unclipt trees, one arrives at the Grand and Petit Trianon, – two very pretty country-seats, at which grandeur was pleased to escape from itself. In the Jardin Anglois, the good taste of Marie Antoinette has shown itself superior to rules for avoiding rule, and planned all according to the advantages of the site.

The view of the country from Versailles is pleasing: but how was it possible for him, who had the choice of this spot or of St. Germains for his purpose, to choose the former? I will not believe the reason that from the latter are seen the towers of St. Denis: his piety, or, if not his piety, that force by which most men are unhappily but too well enabled to shut their eyes on death, and all that may remind them of it, would have surmounted this objection. A superbly-elevated natural terrace, with a wide and varied prospect; the Seine, here a lordly stream; an extensive forest abounding with game; a proud height, from which his palace would have shown majestically to the country around; – all these advantages, not one of which is possessed by Versailles, ought to have induced Louis XIV. to prefer St. Germains. The only unpleasing feature in the view from the terrace is the aqueduct, made to carry to Versailles the water of the Seine raised by the machine of Marly. Certainly he who can command money can command labour; and labour can erect a series of arches on the side of a high hill. Let this fault be redeemed by the canal of Languedoc.

The handsome tower-like château of St. Germains, when I saw it, was used as a caserne: the chapel was filled with military stores. We entered the apartment in which our James II. lived and died an exile, chased from his house and home by his son-in-law. History records many deeds more atrocious, but none more disgraceful, than this violation of family confidence, – of the pledge of good faith given and received. But, what is more disgraceful still, the English nation, besotted by prejudices, sees nothing disgraceful in the transaction.

The palace of St. Cloud is an agreeable, and, according to the favourite English phrase, a comfortable habitation, splendidly, but not too richly furnished. The salle-à-manger particularly attracted my notice, being the first good specimen I had seen of a French dining-room. It is a room large enough for about forty persons to dine in it conveniently. A round table of mahogany, or coloured like mahogany, one fauteuil, and half a dozen chairs, seemingly not belonging to this room, but brought from another, standing round the table on a mat which went underneath it; a chandelier, or lustre, hanging over the tables; – such, with a few articles for the use of the attendants, was the furniture of the room. Instead of a sideboard, a painted shelf went round the room at about four feet from the floor. On one of the panes of the window, a thermometer, with the scale marked on glass, was fixed on the outside: thus the temperature of the outer air might be known without opening the casement.

An English family of moderate fortune lives very much in the dining-room: a French family would as soon think of sitting in the kitchen as in the salle-à-manger at any other than eating hours. The English think it marvellous that a French lady should receive visits in her bed-room; but to this bed-room is annexed a cabinet; which conceals all objects that ought to be put out of sight: the bed is either hidden by the drapery, or covered by a handsome counterpane, with a traversin or bolster at each end, which, as it is placed lengthways against the wall, the two ends resembling each other in the woodwork also, gives it, during the day-time, the appearance of a couch.

The park of St. Cloud is not a park in the English sense of the word; it is a pretty pleasure-ground, with great variety of surface. If King George III. had been as much accustomed to the continental notion of a park as the king his grandfather probably was, he would not have expressed so much surprise, when, on his visit to Magdalen College, Oxford, he was asked if he would be pleased to see the park. "Park! what, have you got a park?" – "We call it a park, sir, because there are deer in it." – "Deer! How big is it?" – "Nine acres, an it please your Majesty." – "Well, well, I must go and see a park of nine acres: let us go and see a park of nine acres."

From the elevated ground of the park of St. Cloud, where the lantern rears its head, Paris is seen over an extent of flat and marshy ground, over which the Seine winds with as many evolutions and curvatures as a serpent. The fable of the sun and the wind contending which of them could first induce a traveller to quit his cloak, might be paralleled by one invented on the sinuosity of rivers in plain countries. Let nature oppose rocks and mountains, the river holds on its way by torrent and by cataract: arrived at a level country, it seems to amuse itself by delay. If it were told, at an English gaming club, that the mountain and the plain had engaged in a contest, which of them should most effectually divert the course of a river from its direct line to the ocean, the odds would, most likely, be in favour of the mountain. But the result is otherwise.

The road from Paris to St. Germains en Laye is the most varied and agreeable of any in the environs. From the avenue and bridge of Neuilly it passes by Mont Valerien, a finely-wooded hill; through Nanterre, the birth-place of Ste. Geneviève, patroness of Paris; near Malmaison, the last abode of Napoleon in France; by Marly, where all is beautiful except the aqueduct. There is a steam-engine to raise the water, and pipes to conduct it, which workmen were repairing. We clambered up by the side of the pipes, at every step induced to mount higher by the beauties of the prospect, the same as that from the terrace of St. Germains. It reminded me of the view from Richmond Hill, but it is bolder and more romantic; and the Seine, being nearer to the hill than the Thames at Richmond, appears an equally important feature in the landscape.

One of the roads to St. Cloud passes through the Bois de Boulogne: this wood was much injured while the allied armies remained in the neighbourhood of Paris: young trees had been planted, and appeared thriving. Let us hope that a long, a very long peace, may obliterate all traces of a war which desolated all Europe, and more than Europe, for a quarter of a century. Indeed, I cannot help agreeing in the wish expressed by one of the common people, in answer to another who congratulated him on the good news of the peace of Amiens: – "Ay," said the first, "I wish we may never have such good news again." A third cried out, "D – n your jacobin eyes, what do you mean by that?" The congratulator explained, "Why, doesn't see, that, for us to have good news of peace again, we must first have war again? and he wishes we may never have another war." The wish, it seems, was then a symptom of jacobinism; but in the present day, it must be considered as laudable to join in it, as I do most cordially, since it is the end proposed by the Holy Alliance.

At Meudon, is a very pretty palace, from the terrace of which the eye looks down on a beautiful ravine, and then traverses the plain which is seen from the park of St. Cloud. While my sons and I were loitering on the bridge of this latter place, the daughter of Louis XVI. passed by on horseback. She returned our salute by an inclination of the body, while the principal person in attendance (a general officer he seemed to be,) took off his hat, as Dr. – said, determinately. Three years only after the restoration, to see this princess for the first time was an interesting occurrence; and I certainly regarded her with a very different feeling from that of the Parisian, who, on her entrance into the capital, after five and twenty years of suffering and exile, showed what he was not thinking of, by exclaiming, "Comme son chapeau est petit!"17

We returned to the restaurateur's to dine; and, passing the bridge in the evening, saw the water works play in honour of the arrival of the king; a sheet of water thrown down artificial rocks; a pretty play-thing enough.

We saw at Sévre a most splendid collection of china, for the greatest part ornamental. Every one has seen some of this china, but it is well worth while to see it en masse in a great quantity at this repository. The working part of the manufacture was not opened to us; as I had not been aware that, for this purpose, it was necessary to be fortified, muni, with a permission of the director. If I translate muni by fortified, it is in the sense of the Englishman, who being invited to be present at a mass, "assister à une messe," – asked what it was expected of him to do there.

We went to St. Ouen, celebrated by Madame de Stäel as the birth-place of the revolution and of the charte; and thence, along the bank of the Seine, to the port of St. Denis, – the point, that is on the river, towards which one of the streets of the town extends itself. It is a small bourg; but the seat of a sous-prefecture. On the abolition of royalty, the ashes of the kings of France, who for many ages had been interred in the church of St. Denis, were dug up and thrown to the winds: they were punished for the crime of having been kings, as Cromwell was punished for having been an usurper. Royalty was called an usurpation on the sovereign people. The roof of the church was stripped of its lead to be melted into bullets for the use of the armies, and the windows were broken for no use at all. The building was thus left exposed to all the injuries of the seasons, till that great counter-revolutionist Napoleon undertook to repair it as a burial-place for the monarchs of "the fourth dynasty," – a phrase by which he ingeniously reminded the French that, as the race of Capet was not the first, it had no imprescriptible right to be the last race of their sovereigns. The force of this argument prevailed, while maintained by the argument of force. The audacious roturier who had seized on the sceptre of royalty, like the daring mortal who stole fire from heaven, was chained on a barren rock, with vultures, – their prey a fallen great man, – to gnaw his entrails: on this rock he found his grave. The reparations of the church of St. Denis, continued by order of the king, were, at this time, nearly completed. Some remains of the bodies of Louis XVI. and his queen, rescued from the unseemly sepulture to which infuriated republicanism had consigned them, had been here honourably deposited. We had seen the mortal spoil of the brave Prince de Condé lying in state at the Palais Bourbon; it had here also found its place. The church resembles that of Notre Dame; it is not so large, but proportionably loftier; and the pillars, with the whole of the architecture, are lighter.

Sceaux is a small town, six miles to the south of Paris, situated on a ridge commanding a fine view to the south and north. It is, as well as St. Denis, the seat of a sous-prefecture. Hither the Parisians resort during summer on Sundays to dance under arbours in gardens, and enjoy other sports, with the zest of those who have been "long in populous cities pent."

James I. issued an ordinance in favour of Sunday sports: Charles I. renewed it: the spirit of those who observe no festival but Sunday, and who keep Sunday like a fast, prevails in England. Such persons will hardly think it a sufficient set-off against the enormities of the amusements of Sceaux, that, during four months residence at Paris, I did not see one drunken man, not even on a Sunday.

The château of Vincennes is an ancient feudal castle with modern additions: it has a chace before it, an extensive open space left for military exercises and sports of chivalry, and to prevent surprise from an enemy, who might, under the shadow of a wood, have approached too near without being discovered. In the moat, surrounding the castle, the Duc d'Enghién was put to death. Every one must lament the early fate of this prince, and the extinction of an illustrious house. The duke perished for having done or attempted to do what he thought to be his duty, and Bonaparte, in causing him to suffer death, regarded himself as acting according to his own. He is said to have declared at St. Helena that, were the deed to be done again, he would do it. The "greenest usurpation," to use a phrase of Burke's, has never scrupled to inflict capital punishment on those who endeavoured its overthrow. In the beginning of the reign of William III. a man was guilty of intending the death of the king; and having nothing to plead in his defence except the defect, according to his reasoning, of the king's title, and that "murderare" was bad Latin, – both which pleas were considered as equally valid by the court, – received the sentence of a traitor. But some time must elapse ere the conduct of Bonaparte be judged by principles applied to that of other men.

Seventeen years ago, I entertained the design of writing the history of the French revolution, which then appeared to be terminated by the assumption of the imperial title by Bonaparte: a counter-revolution was in reality effected; all was reversed that had been done during the revolution; republican principles, – the very name of republic, – was extinguished, and, as a Frenchman well expressed himself, "à la chute de Bonaparte les Bourbons n'avoient qu' à monter le trône tout dressé."18 I was told it was too soon to write the history of so stormy a period. Yet Thucydides, Tacitus, Davila, Clarendon, were contemporary with the times of which they wrote. It was not too soon, at the time of Bonaparte's elevation, to write with impartiality, as I was disposed to do, the history of the preceding events, but it was too soon for readers to judge without passion.

In the château is a small room, hung with black, with an altar, on which, by the care of the family of Condé, masses are said for the repose of the soul of their unfortunate relative; and some military accoutrements, said to have been his, are shown to strangers whom sympathy may render credulous. He desired to have the assistance of a priest before the execution of the sentence of the commission. "Veux-tu mourir en capucin?"19 is said to have been the answer. I pass over all other obvious reflections on this circumstance, to remark that it implied an eulogy on the Capucins, which, from all that I have seen and know of them, they well deserve. Brutus and Cassius were called the last of Romans; the Capucins may perhaps be the last of Christians.

The bottom of the fosse is flat, about twelve feet broad: a wall, of the height of a man, supports the earth of the outer side: the spot, where the execution took place, was pointed out to us. The sign of the cross fortified him in the absence of that other spiritual succour which had been refused to him.

In front of the castle is shown an oak under which Saint Louis was wont to sit. The title of saint was given to this king honoris causâ: in his time it was honourable; at the present day, the recollection of his valour, probity, piety, disinterestedness, and great talents is necessary to rescue Louis IX. from the ridicule of having been a saint and a crusader. The fashion of this world passeth away: religion would have passed away with it, had it depended on the fashion of this world. Veritas Domini manet in æternum. Let those, who now wish to maintain it, remember that it is not truth because useful, but useful because truth.

Forty years ago, who could return into the country, after having made the visit of a countryman to London, without having seen Bedlam? I was contented with the view of the two admirable statues of furious and melancholy madness at the entrance of the court. I went to Charenton without seeing the Maison des Fous. Such an asylum ought not to be an object of passing curiosity: there may be among the patients some who are amused by visits, but there are others who are very much afflicted by them. Besides, my sons were with me: it requires long experience and observation of the miseries of human life to harden the mind to the endurance of such a scene as a mad-house presents. Terror and pity have sometimes too strong an influence on young imaginations, when excited by theatric exhibition of fictitious woe; how much more when called forth by the sight of real misery such as this, – of man in his lowest state of degradation and wretchedness!

We made our remarks on the confluence of the Seine and Marne: the latter is by far the more rapid river of the two, and, though not quite so broad, seems to bear along a greater quantity of water. It flows, for some distance, in the same bed with the river in which its independent existence is merged, and its name lost, without mingling with it, as if resenting the injustice of its own lot. This appearance I afterwards looked for in vain at the junction of the Rhone and Saöne, though it is recorded, if I mistake not, by classical authority. The Saöne has no pretension to an equality with the Rhone, and ought quietly to submit to its fate.

On the day of my departure from Paris, I attended mass in the chapel of the Palace of the Tuilleries. This is one of the sights that the English go to gaze at, it being new to them not only in deed, but in thought; and even "Augusto mense," there was great resort of them. To me it appeared nothing wonderful that the Most Christian King should assist at mass; that, supported by his attendants on account of his great bulk, he should place himself on his knees, and his guards present arms, at the moment of the elevation of the host. Monsieur, now Charles X. and other members of the royal family, passed through the room in which we were, in their way to the tribune of the king.

Before I leave Paris, I must indulge in a few remarks on the spirit of the times, and the state of the public mind at this epoch.

CHAP. V

O Fortunatos nimium! O too fortunate those who visited Paris in the year 1814! They knew not however their own advantage, as they foresaw not the events of the following year, and all the changes consequent on those events. The pictures and statues of the Louvre were sent back in 1815 to the countries which had produced them, where, says an enthusiast for Italy, it is more natural to see them: just as a whig chancellor of the exchequer said that ten per cent was the natural limit of the income tax. Venus and the Graces fled to climes resembling those of Paphos and Cythera; Apollo and Laocöon went to be shut up in dark closets at Rome; the horses of St. Mark galloped off to Venice, leaving the beautiful arch, constructed by Napoleon as a pedestal for this trophy of his victories, to be a misplaced entrance to an iron palisade.

But this was not all, nor the worst: it even served the English as an excuse, though a superfluous one, for travelling further from home: the spirit of the French people was changed, both in regard to foreigners, and towards each other.

In 1818, I found it to be pretty generally believed in France, that the English government contrived and connived at the return of Napoleon from Elba, as an expedient for dividing, weakening, humbling, and despoiling a rival nation. It was in vain that I argued, that the experiment was too hazardous a one to have been ventured upon; that the imperial government was implacably hostile to England, while the royal government was, for the present at least, friendly, and likely to continue so; that the English people were overwhelmed by a load of debt and taxation, and needed repose after so long a war; that, had the battle of Waterloo been lost, they were very ill disposed for the struggle that must have ensued.

I was answered point by point; that, happen what might as to the success or discomfiture of Napoleon, England was secure, fearing no invasion so long as France had no marine; that it was the rival of France under whatever government; that, spite of its debt, it would find means to hire the troops of the continent; that, had the Prussians not come up in time to gain the battle of Mont St. Jean, the Austrians and Russians would have arrived shortly after, and the whole force of Europe would have been set in array.