Читать книгу A Wanderer in Paris - E. V. Lucas - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Paris Old and New—The Heart of France—Saint Louis—Old Palaces—Henri IV.'s Statue—Ironical Changes—The Seine and the Thames—The Quais and their Old Books—Diderot and the Lady—Police and Red Tape—The Conciergerie—Marie Antoinette—Paris and its Clocks—Méryon's Etchings—French Advocates—A Hall of Babel—Sainte Chapelle—French Newspapers Serious and Comic—The Only Joke—The English and the French.

Where to begin? That is a problem in the writing of every book, but peculiarly so with Paris; because, however one may try to be chronological, the city is such a blend of old and new that that design is frustrated at every turn. Nearly every building of importance stands on the site of some other which instantly jerks us back hundreds of years, while if we deal first with the original structure, such as the remains of the Roman Thermes at the Cluny, built about 300, straightway the Cluny itself intrudes, and we leap from the third century to the nineteenth; or if we trace the line of the wall of Philip Augustus we come swiftly to so modern an institution as the Mont-de-Piété; or if we climb to such a recent thoroughfare as the Boulevard de Clichy, with its palpitatingly novel cabarets and allurements, we must in order to do so ascend a mountain which takes its name from the martyrdom of St. Denis and his companions in the third century. It is therefore well, since Paris is such a tangle of past and present, to disregard order altogether and to let these pages reflect her character. Expect then, dear reader, to be twitched about the ages without mercy.

Let us begin in earnest by leaving the mainland and adventuring upon an island. For the heart of Paris is enisled: Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel Dieu, the Préfecture de Police, the Morgue—all are entirely surrounded by water. The history of the Cité is the history of Paris, almost the history of France.

Paris, the home of the Parisii, consisted of nothing but this island when Julius Cæsar arrived there with his conquering host. The Romans built their palace here, and here Julian the Apostate loved to sojourn. It was in Julian's reign that the name was changed from Lutetia (which it is still called by picturesque writers) to Parisea Civitas, from which Paris is an easy derivative. The Cité remained the home of government when the Merovingians under Clovis expelled the Romans, and again under the Carlovingians. The second Royal Palace was begun by the first of the Capets, Hugh, in the tenth century, and it was completed by Robert the Pious in the eleventh. Louis VII. decreed Notre Dame; but it was Saint Louis, reigning from 1226 to 1270, who was the father of the Cité as we now know it. He it was who built Sainte Chapelle, and it was he who surrendered part of the Palace to the Law.

While it was the home of the Court and the Church the island naturally had little enough room for ordinary residents, who therefore had to live, whether aristocrats or tradespeople, on the mainland, either on the north or south side of the river. The north side was for the most part given to merchants, the south to scholars, for Saint Louis was the builder not only of Sainte Chapelle but also of the Sorbonne. Very few of the smaller buildings of that time now remain: the oldest Paris that one now wanders in so delightedly, whether on the north bank or the south, whether near the Sorbonne or the Hôtel de Sens, dates, with a few fortunate exceptions, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Nowhere may the growth of Paris be better observed and better understood than on the highest point on this Island of the City—on the summit of Notre Dame. Standing there you quickly comprehend the Paris of the ages: from Cæsar's Lutetia, occupying the island only and surrounded by fields and wastes, to the Paris of this year of our Lord, spreading over the neighbouring hills, such a hive of human activity and energy as will hardly bear thinking of—a Paris which has thrown off the yoke not only of the kings that once were all-powerful but of the Church too.

By the twelfth century the kings of France had begun to live in smaller palaces more to their personal taste, such as the Hôtel Barbette, the Hôtel de Sens (much of which still stands, as a glass factory, at the corner of the Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville and the Rue de Figuier, one of the oldest of the Paris mansions), the Hôtel de Bourgogne (in the Rue Etienne Marcel: you may still see its tower of Jean Sans Peur), the Hôtel de Nevers (what remains of which is at the corner of the Rue Colbert and Rue Richelieu), and, of course, the Louvre. Charles VII. (1422-1461) was the first king to settle at the Louvre permanently.

To gain the Ile de la Cité we leave the mainland of Paris at the Quai du Louvre, and make our crossing by the Pont Neuf. Neuf no longer, for as a matter of historical fact it is now the oldest of all the Paris bridges: that is, in its foundations, for the visible part of it has been renovated quite recently. The first stone of it was laid by Henri III. in 1578: it was not ready for many years, but in 1603 Henri IV. (of Navarre) ventured across a plank of it on his way to the Louvre, after several previous adventurers had broken their necks in the attempt. "So much the less kings they," was his comment. He lived to see the bridge finished.

Behind the statue of this monarch, whom the French still adore, is the garden that finishes off the west end of the Ile very prettily, sending its branches up above the parapet. Here we may stop; for we are now on the Island itself, midway between the two halves of the bridge, and the statue has such a curious history, so typical of the French character, that I should like to tell it. The original bronze figure, erected by Louis XIII. in 1614, was taken down in 1792, a time of stress, and melted into a commodity that was then of vastly greater importance than the effigies of kings—namely cannon. (As we shall see in the course of this book, Paris left the hands of the Revolutionaries a totally different city from the Paris of 1791.) Then came peace again, and then came Napoleon, and in the collection at the Archives is to be seen a letter written by the Emperor from Schönbrunn, on August 15th, 1809, stating that he wishes an obelisk to be erected on the site of the Henri IV. statue—an obelisk of Cherbourg granite, 180 pieds d'élévation, with the inscription "l'Empereur Napoléon au Peuple Français". That, however, was not done.

Time passed on, Napoleon fell, and Louis XVIII. returned from his English home to the throne of France, and was not long in perpetrating one of those symmetrical ironical jests which were then in vogue. Taking from the Vendôme column the bronze statue of Napoleon (who was safely under the thumb of Sir Hudson Lowe at St. Helena, well out of mischief), and to this adding a second bronze statue of the same usurper intended for some other site, the monarch directed that they should be melted into liquid from which a new statue of Henri IV.—the very one at which we are at this moment gazing—should be cast. It was done, and though to the Röntgen-rayed vision of the cynic it may appear to be nothing more or less than a double Napoleon, it is to the world at large Henri IV., the hero of Ivry.

I have seen comparisons between the Seine and the Thames; but they are pointless. You cannot compare them: one is a London river, and the other is a Paris river. The Seine is a river of light; the Thames is a river of twilight. The Seine is gay; the Thames is sombre. When dusk falls in Paris the Seine is just a river in the evening; when dusk falls in London the Thames becomes a wonderful mystery, an enchanted stream in a land of old romance. The Thames is, I think, vastly more beautiful; but on the other hand, the Thames has no merry passenger steamers and no storied quais. The Seine has all the advantage when we come to the consideration of what can be done with a river's banks in a great city. For the Seine has a mile of old book and curiosity stalls, whereas the Thames has nothing.

And yet the coping of the Thames embankment is as suitable for such a purpose as that of the Seine, and as many Londoners are fond of books. How is it? Why should all the bookstalls and curiosity stalls of London be in Whitechapel and Farringdon Street and the Cattle Market? That is a mystery which I have never solved and never shall. Why are the West Central and the West districts wholly debarred—save in Charing Cross Road, and that I believe is suspect—from loitering at such alluring street banquets? It is beyond understanding.

The history of the stall-holders of the quais has been told very engagingly by M. Octave Uzanne, whom one might describe as the Austin Dobson and the Augustine Birrell of France, in his work Bouquinistes et Bouquineurs. They established themselves first on the Pont Neuf, but in 1650 were evicted. (The Paris bridges, I might say here, become at the present time the resort of every kind of pedlar directly anything occurs to suspend their traffic.)

The parapets of the quais then took the place of those of the bridge, and there the booksellers' cases have been ever since. But no longer are they the gay resort that once they were. It was considered, says M. Uzanne, writing of the eighteenth century, "quite the correct thing for the promenaders to gossip round the bookstalls and discuss the wit and fashionable writings of the day. At all hours of the day these quarters were much frequented, above all by literary men, lawyers clerks and foreigners. One historical fact, not generally known, merits our attention, for it shows that not only the libraries and the stall-keepers assisted in drawing men of letters to the vicinity of the Hôtel Mazarin, but there also existed a 'rendez-vous' for the sale of English and French journals. It was, in fact, at the corner of the Rue Dauphine and the Quai Conti that the first establishment known as the Café Anglais was started. One read in big letters on the signboard: Café Anglais—Becket, propriétaire. This was the meeting place of the greater part of English writers visiting Paris who wished to become acquainted with the literary men of the period, the encyclopædists and poets of the Court of Louis XV. This Café offered to its habitués the best-known English papers of the day, the Westminster Gazette, the London Evening Post, the Daily Advertiser, and the various pamphlets published on the other side of the Channel....

"You must know that the Quai Conti up to the year 1769 was only a narrow passage leading down to a place for watering horses. Between the Pont Neuf and the building known as the Château-Gaillard at the opening of the Rue Guénégaud, were several small shops, and a small fair continually going on.

"This Château-Gaillard, which was a dependency of the old Porte de Nesle, had been granted by Francis I. to Benvenuto Cellini. The famous Florentine goldsmith received visits from the Sovereign protector of arts and here executed the work he had been ordered to do, under his Majesty's very eyes....

"One calls to mind that Sterne, in his delightful Sentimental Journey, was set down in 1767 at the Hôtel de Modène, in the Rue Jacob, opposite the Rue des Deux-Anges, and one has not forgotten his love for the quais and the adventure which befell him while chatting to a bookseller on the Quai Conti, of whom he wished to buy a copy of Shakespeare so that he might read once more Polonius' advice to his son before starting on his travels.

"Diderot, in his Salon of 1761, relates his flirtation with the pretty girl who served in one of these shops and afterwards became the wife of Menze. 'She called herself Miss Babuti and kept a small book shop on the Quai des Augustins, spruce and upright, white as a lily and red as a rose. I would enter her shop, in my own brisk way: "Mademoiselle, the 'Contes de la Fontaine' ... a 'Petronius' if you please."—"Here you are, Sir. Do you want any other books?"—"Forgive me, yes"—"What is it?"—"La 'Religieuse en Chemise.'"—"For shame, Sir! Do you read such trash?"—"Trash, is it, Mademoiselle? I did not know...."'"