Читать книгу Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1 - Edwards Henry Sutherland - Страница 8

Hôtel Carnavalet. – Hôtel Lamoignon. – Place Royale. – Boulevard du Temple. – The Temple. – Louis XVII. – The Theatres. – Astley’s Circus. – Attempted Assassination of Louis Philippe. – Trial of Fieschi. – The Café Turc. – The Cafés. – The Folies Dramatiques. – Louis XVI. and the Opera. – Murder of the Duke of Berri.

LET us return now from Vincennes to the Place de la Bastille and the Boulevard Beaumarchais.

Perhaps the most interesting house on this boulevard is number twenty-three, which was built by Mansard, the famous architect, for his own occupation. One set of rooms in the house was occupied by the celebrated Ninon de Lenclos, who died there October 17, 1703, at the age of eighty-nine, preserving, according to tradition, her remarkable beauty to the very last. Here Voltaire, then in his twelfth year, was presented to her; nor did she forget to assign to him in her will 2,000 francs for the purchase of books.

Next door to the house of Mansard and Ninon de Lenclos is the little Beaumarchais theatre, which, constructed in forty-three days, was opened on the 3rd of December, 1835, under the style of Théâtre de la Porte St. – Antoine. In 1842 it was re-named Théâtre Beaumarchais. Then at different periods it bore the titles of Opéra Bouffe Français, and Fantaisies Parisiennes, until at length, in 1888, when it was entirely rebuilt, it became once more the Théâtre Beaumarchais.

The Government of 1830 did right in giving the name of Beaumarchais to the boulevard on which he at one time lived, and where he possessed a certain amount of property. During the stormy years that immediately preceded the Revolution of 1789 Beaumarchais was an important figure; and the effect of the “Marriage of Figaro” on the public mind was in a good measure to prepare it for the general overthrow then imminent. The King, the Queen, the Ministers, were all, in the first instance, afraid of the “Marriage of Figaro”; and we have seen that to get it produced Beaumarchais displayed as much diplomacy and energy as would suffice in the present day to upset a Cabinet.

While living at his mansion near the Porte St. – Antoine, Beaumarchais built close at hand the Théâtre du Marais, where, after letting it to a manager, he brought out, in 1792, his “Mère Coupable” – the third part of his Figaro Trilogy, in which the Count and Countess Almaviva, Figaro and Susannah, are shown in their old age. The “guilty mother” is the Countess herself; the charming and, as one had hoped, innocent Rosina of the “Barber of Seville.” The male offender is Chérubin, better known under his operatic name of Cherubino, who after saying in the French comedy, with a mixture of timidity and audacity, “Si j’osais oser!” ends by daring too much. “La Mère Coupable” obtained but little success, and deserved none. Closed by Imperial order in 1807, the Théâtre du Marais existed only for fifteen years. It must not be confounded with the ancient theatre of the same name where in 1636 Corneille produced his famous tragedy “Le Cid.”

The Marais or marsh, whose name recalls the early history of Paris, when Lutetia was defended by marshes as by a broad impassable moat, has long been known as the favourite abode of small pensioners and fundholders, who in this remote quarter found food and shelter at inexpensive rates.

The Marais, however, has had, like most other parts of Paris, its illustrious residents; and when about the middle of the eighteenth century the immortal actress Mlle. Clairon lived there she was the third famous inmate of the tenement in which she had taken up her abode. “I was told of a small house in the Rue du Marais,” she writes in her memoirs, “which I could have for two hundred francs, where Racine was said to have lived forty years with his family. I was informed that it was there he had composed his imperishable works and there that he died; and that afterwards it had been occupied by the tender Lecouvreur, who had ended her days in it. ‘The walls of the house,’ I reflected, ‘will be alone sufficient to make me feel the sublimity of the author and develop the talents of the actress. In this sanctuary then I will live and die!’”

Close to the Rue du Marais, in the Rue de Sévigné, stands the Musée Carnavalet, established in the former Hôtel Carnavalet, where Mme. de Sévigné, author of the famous Letters, lived from 1677 to 1698. It was restored in 1867 by Baron Haussmann, who converted it into a museum for preserving various monuments, statues, inscriptions, tombstones, ornaments, and objects of various kinds, proceeding from the wholesale demolition to which sundry streets and even whole quarters of Paris were at that time being subjected, under the orders of Baron Haussmann himself in his capacity of Prefect of the Seine.

Another remarkable mansion in the same street is the Hôtel Lamoignon, now occupied by different manufacturers, especially of chemical products, but which, in its earliest days, had highly aristocratic and even royal occupants. Begun by Diana of France, legitimatised daughter of Henri II., the Hôtel Lamoignon was bought and finished in 1581 for Charles de Valois, Duke of Angoulême, natural son of Charles IX., who, according to Tallemant des Réaux, would have been “the best fellow in the world if he could only have got rid of his swindling propensities.” When his servants asked him for money, he would reply to them: “My house has three outlets into the street; take whichever of them you like best.” The architecture of the Hôtel Lamoignon is that of an ancient fortress, though its walls and façades are ornamented with crescents, hunting horns, and the heads of stags and dogs; the whole in allusion to the Diana for whom the building was originally planned.

Having once left the upper boulevard to enter the adjacent Marais, we cannot but go on towards the Place des Vosges, better known as the Place Royale, where, in 1559, Henri II. took a fancy one day for trying his powers at tilting against Montgomery, captain in the Scotch Guard; when the shock was so violent that a splinter from Montgomery’s lance penetrated the king’s eye through the broken visor of his helmet. The king was carried to the Hôtel des Tournelles, where, without having regained consciousness, he died on the 15th of July, 1559. The hotel or palace where the king breathed his last was thenceforth abandoned as a fatal and accursed place. In the course of four years it fell into a ruinous condition, and Charles IX. ordered it to be pulled down. The park belonging to the old palace was turned into a horse market, which was the scene in 1578 of the famous encounter between the favourite courtiers of Henri III. known as the Mignons and the partisans of the Duke of Guise. Four combatants, Maugiron, Schomberg, Riberac, and Quélus, lost their lives in this affair. The horse market, or Place Royale as it afterwards became, witnessed many sanguinary duels, until at last Richelieu determined to put an end to a fashion which was depriving France of some of her bravest men. With this view he cut off the head of Montmorency-Bouteville and of Count des Chapelles, his second in the duel which cost Bussy d’Amboise his life. In 1613 the Cardinal erected in the centre of the Place Royale an equestrian statue of his royal master Louis XIII. The Place Royale was at that time the favourite quarter of the French nobility, and the rendezvous of all that was witty, gallant, and distinguished in France.

The house number six on the Place Royale is particularly interesting as having been inhabited in Richelieu’s time by the brilliant and too celebrated Marion de Lorme, and two centuries later by Victor Hugo, who, in the very room that Marion de Lorme had occupied, wrote, at the age of twenty-five, the splendid tragedy of which she is the heroine.

The statue of Louis XIII. which Richelieu had raised was overturned and broken to pieces in 1792, when the most critical period of the Revolution was at hand. It was replaced after the Restoration, under the reign of Charles X., by the present statue.

The Boulevard du Temple owes its name to a building which was first occupied by the Order of Templars, and which, towards the close of the last century, enjoyed a sad celebrity as the prison where Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and the young Dauphin were confined.

No less than forty-eight works are said to have been written on the imprisonment of Louis XVII., and matters connected with it, including the histories of some dozen “claimants,” asserting, in his name, their right to the French throne. Most of these pretenders, with Naundorff – who had been the Dauphin’s valet in the Temple – prominent among them, had no difficulty in finding enthusiasts and dupes to further their designs; and even in France one of them caused himself to be described on his tombstone as “Louis de France.” The Emperor Napoleon III. took, however, the liberty of ordering the inscription to be effaced.

Soon after the death of the Count de Chambord, M. de Chantelauze published in the Illustration an account of Louis XVII.’s life in the Temple, and of his last illness, death, and post-mortem examination, together with certificates which leave no doubt as to the young prince having really died in his prison. Simon, the gaoler, according to M. de Chantelauze’s view, was, like so many other bad men, not wholly bad; while his wife was for the most part good, the appearance of badness or roughness which she manifested when the child confided to her care was visited by members of the Commune being assumed in order to inspire her employers with confidence. The task assigned to Simon was not, as has often been supposed, to reduce the young prince, by ill-treatment, to such a point that he would at last be attacked by illness and carried off, but simply to get from him evidence against his mother, the Queen, with respect to her complicity in the Varennes plot, and the various plans formed for effecting the escape of the child. The evidence having been obtained by the simple process of first putting it into the child’s mouth, and afterwards taking it out, the special work assigned to the Simons was at an end, and the young prince experienced from them nothing but kindness. If he ultimately fell ill and died, his confinement and the bad air he breathed may well have been the cause.

The life of Louis XVII., from the departure of the Simons until his death, can be made out continuously; and the evidence of his having died in the Temple is quite conclusive. Nevertheless, Louis XVIII., in view of the pretension constantly springing up, instituted for his own satisfaction an inquiry into the whole matter; and the proofs adduced in the course of it as to the identity of the “child in the Temple” with the son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette seem decisive.

M. Nauroy, however, author of “Les Secrets des Bourbons,” is convinced that the true Louis XVII. was carried out of the Temple in a bundle of linen, and that by like means the child who ultimately died there was substituted for him. M. Nauroy finds in support of his belief abundant evidence, positive and negative, which he derives from a variety of sources, and sometimes discovers in the most unexpected places.

The appearance of a long succession of impostors claiming to be Louis XVII. proves nothing, and will pass for what it is worth in the native land of Arthur Orton. It is remarkable, however, that Royalists and Republicans, including eminent personages on both sides, have agreed in maintaining that the child who died in the Temple was not Louis XVII. Louis Blanc favours this view in his “History of the Revolution.” Nor does he do so without taking a calm, judicial survey of all the evidence in the case. He may consciously or unconsciously have been influenced by party spirit; and the moral he draws from the whole matter is that there is danger in the principle of “divine right” when, through a variety of accidents, it may be impossible to show on whom this questionable right has devolved.

Those Royalists who deny that Louis XVII. died in the Temple, explain the announcement of his death and the proclamation of Louis XVIII. in the Royalist camp, first, by the inconvenience of bringing forward as King of France a child of tender years; secondly, by the difficulty of producing this child; and, thirdly, by the danger, when Louis XVIII. had once gained acceptance with the party, of dividing it by a revelation of the fact that his nephew, son of Louis XVI., was still alive.

M. Nauroy, as already hinted, sees proofs of his favourite theory where no one else would perceive them. When, for instance, the Duke of Berri, dying from the stroke of an assassin, had some final words to whisper to his brother, the Duke of Angoulême – “What,” asks M. Nauroy, “could this have been but the truth in regard to Louis XVII.?” When, again, one of the doctors who made the post-mortem examination of the supposed Louis XVII. offered to Louis XVIII. the heart which he had concealed and preserved, and the king declined the present – “Why,” asks M. Nauroy, “should he have accepted the heart which he knew was not that of Louis XVII., but that of the child by whom the young prince was replaced in his prison?”

Meanwhile, that some of the great Royalist families believed Louis XVII. to have been replaced in the Temple by another child and himself carried to La Vendée is beyond doubt; and a letter on the subject, addressed, December 4, 1838, to the Times, shows that this view of the matter was held by at least a section (probably a very small one) of the Royalist party.

On January 19th the cobbler Simon ceased to do duty as gaoler. At that time there were, as M. Nauroy sets forth, only four persons in the Temple – the Dauphin, Simon, his wife, and the Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Duchess of Angoulême. Simon died on the scaffold six months afterwards, on the 28th of July. The Princess Elizabeth, confined in a room apart from her brother, never saw him again, and consequently knew nothing of him except by hearsay. From January 19th to July 28th there was no warder at the Temple. The child was watched by Commissaries, who were relieved from day to day, and of whom not one could establish his identity. When regular gaolers were appointed, not one of them had ever seen the Dauphin. If, then, after the departure of Simon, another child could have been substituted for Louis XVII., there was no one to notice the change when it had once been accomplished. The Dauphin was in perfect health at the time when Simon and his wife left him. But the child in the Temple fell ill immediately afterwards; and on the 6th of May, 1795, Dr. Desault, summoned to attend the “Dauphin,” declared his little patient to be some other child. He had visited the Dauphin’s brother in 1789, and on that occasion had seen the Dauphin himself at the Tuileries. If, as M. Nauroy asserts, Dr. Desault drew up a report on the subject, that report has disappeared. Indirect evidence, however, as to Dr. Desault’s conviction that the child he attended in the Temple could not be the Dauphin, was given fifty years afterwards in a letter written and signed by the widow of P. A. Thouvenin, Dr. Desault’s nephew, who claimed to remember what his uncle had frequently said on the subject.

Whether or not Louis XVII. escaped to La Vendée to be cherished by the Vendean chiefs even when, in the Royalist army which was invading France from Germany, Louis XVIII. had been proclaimed, he is now in any case no more. The eighteenth Louis was ten years old when the child of the Temple is supposed to have died in prison; and according to the most convinced, not to say credulous, of those writers who maintain that Louis XVII. escaped, to live for years afterwards, he breathed his last in 1872 at Saveney (Loire Inférieure), under the name of Laroche, at the age of eighty-seven. The numerous impostors who with more or less success personated the unhappy prince had died much earlier. But the descendants of Naundorff, his valet, the most famous of all these pretenders, claim still to be of the blood royal, and on the occasion of the Count de Chambord’s death they displayed a proud consciousness of their rights by publishing somewhere in Holland a manifesto asserting gravely the title of the chief of the family to the throne of France.

Another prisoner in the Temple of whom mention must be made is Sir Sidney Smith, whose friends were making every effort for his liberation, when a Royalist officer in the French army, named Boisgerard (who under the Revolution had quitted military life to become ballet-master at the Opera), effected his escape. With this view he had obtained an impression of the seal of the Directorial Government, which he affixed to an order, forged by his own hand, for the delivery of Sir Sidney Smith into his care. Accompanied by a friend, disguised, like himself, in the uniform of an officer of the revolutionary army, he did not scruple personally to present the fictitious document to the keeper of the Temple, who, opening a small closet, took thence some original document, with the writing and seal of which he carefully compared the forged order. Desiring the adventurers to wait a few minutes, he then withdrew and locked the door after him. Giving themselves up for lost, the confederates determined to resist, sword in hand, any attempt made to secure them. Highly interesting is Boisgerard’s own description of the period of horrible suspense he now passed through. Under the dread that each successive moment might be attended by a discovery involving the safety of his life, the acuteness of his organs of sense was heightened to painfulness; the least noise thrilled through his brain, and the gloomy apartment in which he sat seemed filled with strange images. Both he and his companion, however, retained self-possession, and after the lapse of a few minutes their anxiety was terminated by the re-appearance of the gaoler, with his captive, who was delivered to Boisgerard. But here a new and unexpected difficulty occurred. Sir Sidney Smith, not knowing Boisgerard, refused for some time to quit the prison; and considerable address was required on the part of his deliverers to overcome his scruples. At last the precincts of the Temple were cleared. The fugitives rode a short distance in a fiacre, then walked, then entered another carriage, and in this way so successfully baffled pursuit that they ultimately got to Havre, where Sir Sidney was put on board an English vessel. Boisgerard, on his return to Paris, was a thousand times in dread of detection and had a succession of narrow escapes until his visit to England, which took place after the peace of Amiens. A pension had been granted to Sir Sidney Smith by the English Government for his meritorious services; and on Boisgerard’s arrival here a reward of a similar nature was bestowed on him through the influence of Sir Sidney, who took every opportunity of testifying his gratitude.

If the prison of the unfortunate king and queen who were to suffer for the sins of their predecessors was at the eastern end of the line of boulevards, as marked by the Boulevard du Temple, their place of execution on the Place Louis XV., now known as Place de la Concorde, was at the western extremity, which in due time we shall explore.

Meanwhile from one end of the boulevards to the other, from the tiny Théâtre Beaumarchais to the magnificent Opéra, there is a long series of playhouses. Close to the Beaumarchais Theatre stands the Cirque d’Hiver, opened in 1852 under the title of Cirque Napoléon, which seats 3,800 persons. It occupies the site of the first circus that was ever established in Paris. In 1785 the Astleys, father and son, came to Paris and there opened a circus exactly like the one they had just founded in London. Under their direction this theatre, situated at number twenty-four Rue du Faubourg du Temple, and measuring twenty metres in diameter, was lighted by 2,000 lamps and furnished with two rows of boxes. The price of the seats varied from twelve sous to three francs. Astley junior is said to have possessed a remarkably fine figure; and, in the words of a contemporary writer, “his beauty was sculptural.” Bachaumont, in his memoirs of the time, speaks of the numerous passions inspired by the young equestrian in too susceptible feminine hearts. The tricks of the circus, now so familiar, that in England, at least, no one cares to see them, were at that time new, and the sight of a man attitudinising on the back of a horse at full gallop excited the greatest wonder.

Astley’s Circus in Paris possessed, as so many operatic theatres have done, a sort of international character. Engagements were made for it by diplomatists abroad. It can be shown, indeed, that diplomatists have long and almost from time immemorial been in the habit of doing agency work for artists and managers of good position. Operatic celebrities have been particularly favoured in this respect. A great Minister of State, Cardinal Mazarin, introduced, or aided powerfully in introducing, opera into France. The engagement of Cambert as director of music at the Court of Charles II. was effected by diplomatic means. Gluck, more than a century later, was induced to visit Paris through the representations of a secretary of the French Embassy at Vienna – that M. du Rollet who arranged for Gluck, on the basis of Racine’s Iphigénie, the libretto of Iphigénie en Aulide; and Piccini, at the instigation of Madame du Barry, was secured at Paris as opposition composer through the instrumentality of Baron de Breteuil, French Ambassador at Rome, working in co-operation with the Marquis Carraccioli, Neapolitan Ambassador at Paris.

The great Montesquieu, moreover, when he was in England, had not thought it unbecoming to interest himself in the welfare of the French artists who occasionally arrived in England with recommendations addressed to him. Nor did the illustrious Locke occupy himself so exclusively with the “human understanding” as to have no time to bestow on the material interests of foreign danseuses. Locke was not indeed one of those practically Epicurean philosophers of whom M. Arsène Houssaye discourses so agreeably in his “Philosophes et Comédiennes.” He had no general taste either for the public performances or for the private society of ballerines; but a certain Mlle. Subligny having come to him with a letter of introduction from the Abbé Dubois, he is known to have made himself useful, and therefore, no doubt, agreeable, to her during her stay in England.

Locke, it is true, was a metaphysician, and had nothing whatever to do with diplomacy. But his friend Montesquieu was a personage of political importance, and in his anxiety to assist French artists in London he even went so far as to bring to their performances as many of the English nobility as were willing to attend. About the same time, at the suggestion of the Regent of Orleans, a Minister of State, M. de Maurepas, made overtures to Handel concerning a series of representations which it was proposed that his celebrated company should give at the Académie Royale of Paris. M. de Maurepas wished, like Mr. Washburne at a later day, to secure for Paris the best available talent; and he looked to Handel’s opera-house for singers, as Mr. Washburne looked to the circuses of the United States for “bare-back riders.”

On this subject Ebers’s “Seven Years of the King’s Theatre” shows that immediately after the peace of 1815 all the offers of engagements to artists of the Paris opera were made through the medium of the English Embassy to the Court of France, or by special missions with which diplomatists of distinction were glad to be entrusted. The committee of noblemen who aided Ebers in his management treated, through the English Ambassador at Paris, with the Director of the Academy, or with the Minister of Fine Arts; though, as a matter of fact, they failed to secure by these elaborate means the services of artists who, in the present day, would be engaged through an exchange of telegrams.

The outbreak of the Revolution was the signal for the Astleys and their company to recross the Channel, and the Astley Circus remained unoccupied until 1791. Then a company calling themselves “The Comedians without a Title” (Les Comédiens sans titre) opened it as a theatre on Thursday, March 20th, and closed it on the 23rd. Finally Franconi took it over, and achieved a triumphal success, his management being destined to last many years. In 1801 he moved his enterprise to the Garden of the Capucines, which had become a public promenade in the heart of Paris, subsequently transferring it to the theatre in the Rue du Mont-Thabor. In 1819 he returned with his company to the circus of the Faubourg du Temple, reconstructed by the architect Dubois, but doomed, on the night of March 15th, 1826, to be burnt to the ground. The destruction of the circus by fire excited much sympathy. Public subscriptions were opened, and public representations given for the benefit of the sufferers, the result being so satisfactory that the theatre was at once reconstructed, this time on the Boulevard du Temple, with a magnificent façade, and Franconi once more threw open his doors, about a year after the fire, on the 31st of March, 1827. The stage, which in the old building was an accessory, became in the new one of the first importance. It was now possible to perform military manœuvres on a large scale. At the restored circus was represented during the last years of the reign of Charles X. the Siege of Saragossa; and under Louis Philippe a number of military pieces founded on incidents in the history of the Republic and the Empire.

Every Government in France since the first Napoleon has had victories of its own, important or unimportant, to celebrate. The martial triumphs of Louis XIV. seem, by common consent, to have been forgotten, either because French history dates for the immense majority of the population from the time of the Revolution, or because the battles won under the old Monarchy are now too remote to stir the national pride. The reign of Napoleon I., however, was a series of brilliant victories. Under the Restoration a campaign was undertaken in Spain, the incidents of which so lent themselves to dramatic treatment that playwrights reproduced them on the stage and in the arena of the circus. The reign of Louis Philippe, too, had its military glories; first in Belgium, in connection with the War of Independence undertaken in 1830 by the Belgians, with the assistance of France and England, against the Dutch. It was in Africa, however, and in the neighbourhood of Algiers, that Louis Philippe’s army played for many years so active a part. The war against the Dey of Algiers was begun by Charles X., whose consul had been insulted by that potentate; Louis Philippe continued it, chiefly, it was thought, in order to keep open for discontented spirits a field of activity at a safe distance from France. Many restless adventurers sought distinction and found it in the Algerian campaigns; and Algeria was the principal training-ground for those generals who were afterwards to aid Prince Louis Napoleon in executing his coup d’État. It was under Louis Philippe that those picturesque troops, the Chasseurs d’Orléans and Chasseurs d’Afrique, were created, not to mention the Zouaves and the Spahis.

According to the criticisms of German officers, the laxity of discipline in the Algerian campaigns had a considerable effect in producing, or at least hastening, the long series of military defeats to which France was subjected in the war of 1870. The news of victories gained in Africa was, all the same, constantly reaching France; and each successive triumph was made the subject of a new dramatic spectacle at the circus or hippodrome. Abd-el-Kader became a familiar theatrical figure, and his famous interview with General Bugeaud was represented in more than one equestrian piece.

Abd-el-Kader had by the most violent means been prevailed upon to make peace; and an interview was arranged at which the Arab chief and Bugeaud, the French commander, were to ratify it by a personal interchange of promises. Abd-el-Kader did not, however, keep his appointment, and seems, indeed, to have studiously missed it. The French general, in a fit of impatience, left his room, and went forward with a small escort, military and civil, towards the quarters of the unpunctual Arab chief, in order to stir him up. On reaching the advanced posts, the French general called a chieftain of one of the tribes, who pointed out to him the hill-side where the emir lay encamped. “It is unbecoming of your chief,” said Bugeaud to this Arab, “to bring me so far, and then make me wait so long;” whereupon he continued resolutely to advance. The emir’s escort now appeared. The Arab chieftains, most of them young and handsome, were magnificently mounted, and made a gallant display of their finery. Presently from their ranks a horseman advanced dressed in a coarse burnoose, with a camel-hair cord, and without any outward sign of distinction, except that his black horse, which he sat most elegantly, was surrounded by Arabs holding the bridle and the stirrups. This was Abd-el-Kader. The French general held out his hand; the other grasped it twice, then threw himself quickly from his horse, and sat down. General Bugeaud took his place beside him, and the conversation began. The emir was of small stature; his face serious and pale, with delicate features slightly marked by time, and a keen sparkling eye. His hands, which were beautifully formed, played with a chaplet that hung round his neck. He spoke gently, but there was on his lips and in the expression of countenance a certain affectation of disdain. The conversation turned, of course, upon the peace which had just been concluded, and Abd-el-Kader spoke of the cessation of hostilities with elaborate and feigned indifference. When the French general, after pointing out to him that the treaty could not be put into force until it was ratified, observed that the truce, meanwhile, was favourable to the Arabs, since it would save their crops from destruction so long as it lasted, the chief replied: “You may destroy the crops this moment, and I will give you a written authority to do so, if you like. The Arabs are not in want of corn.”

The conversation at an end, General Bugeaud stood up, and the emir remained seated; whereupon the former, stung to the quick, seized the emir’s hand and jerked it, saying “Come, get up.” The French were delighted at this characteristic act of an imperious and intrepid nature, and the Arabs could not conceal their astonishment. As for the emir, seized with an involuntary confusion, he turned round without uttering a word, sprang on his horse and rode back to his own people; his return being a signal for enthusiastic cries of “God preserve the Sultan!” which echoed from hill to hill. A violent thunder-burst added to the effect of this strange scene, and the Arabs vanished among the mountain gorges.

Until 1860 the Boulevard du Temple was noted for a number of little theatres, where marionettes might be seen dancing on the tight-rope, or where pantomimes in the Italian style were performed. Then there was the cabinet of wax figures, together with other little shows, difficult to class: all destined in that year to disappear. The reconstruction of this portion of Paris caused the removal of many theatres, which were built again at other points. The site of the former circus was now occupied by the Imperial Theatre of the Châtelet. The circus reappeared, for winter performances, in the Boulevard des Filles de Calvaire, for the summer season in the Champs Élysées. In connection with the winter circus the Popular Concerts started by the late Pasdeloup must not be forgotten. Here the finest symphonic music of the French and other composers, chiefly modern, was performed in admirable style. Here the French public were familiarised with the works of Berlioz, and, in spite of a certain opposition at the outset, with selections from some of the operas of Wagner. Pasdeloup, who after thirty years’ unremitting work died in poverty, used to find worthy imitators and successors in M. Colonne and M. Lamoureux, both renowned among the musical conductors of the period.

Number forty-two of the Boulevard du Temple marks the house, formerly number fifty, whence the notorious Fieschi, on the 28th of July, 1835, exploded his infernal machine which was intended to kill Louis Philippe and his sons, and which, in fact, struck down by their side one of the veterans of the Empire, Marshal Mortier, Duc de Trévise, and several other superior officers.

Not even in Russia have so many sovereigns been assailed by their subjects as in France. Since, indeed, the murder of Henri III. by Jacques Clément, it has been the rule, rather than the exception, with royal personages in France to be struck by the assassin or the executioner; or, if spared in body, to be brought all the same to some tragic end. Henri IV. fell by the hand of Ravaillac. No such fate awaited Louis XIII., Henri IV.’s immediate successor; but Louis XV. was stabbed by Damiens, Louis XVI. was guillotined, Louis XVII., imprisoned in the Temple, died one scarcely knows how or where. The Duke of Enghien was shot by order of Napoleon. Louis XVIII. had to fly from Paris at the approach of Napoleon returning from Elba; the Duke of Berri was assassinated by Louvel; Charles X. lost his crown by the Revolution which brought Louis Philippe to the throne; and Louis Philippe, who was ultimately to disappear in a hackney cab before the popular rising which led to the establishment of the Second Republic, and soon afterwards of the Second Empire, was meanwhile made the object of some half-dozen murderous attacks, the most formidable being the one planned and executed by Fieschi, otherwise Gérard. What, it may be asked, had a quiet, peaceful, and eminently respectable monarch like Louis Philippe done to provoke repeated attempts upon his life? The explanation is simple. Charles X. had been driven away in 1830 by the Republicans, not that another king might be appointed in his stead, but that the Republic might be established. Louis Philippe was, from their point of view, an interloper who must, at all hazards, be removed.

Fieschi’s experiment with his infernal machine created a sensation all over Europe; and the papers for some time afterwards were full of particulars, more or less authentic, of the diabolical attempt upon King Louis Philippe’s life. The Revolutionists, whose action against Charles X. had led to the establishment, not of a Republic, but of a Monarchy – hateful to them in whatever form – had evidently sworn that he should die. It was ascertained by M. Thiers, the First Minister, that on the occasion of a journey which the King intended to make from Neuilly to Paris certain conspirators had arranged to throw a lighted projectile into the royal carriage; and His Majesty, therefore, was requested to let the royal carriage proceed on its way, at the appointed time, without him, and occupied simply by his aides-de-camp, no previous announcement being made as to the absence of the King. Louis Philippe having protested against this suggestion as unfair to the aides-de-camp: “Sire,” replied M. Thiers, “it is their duty to expose themselves for the safety of your person, and they surely will not complain when they find the Minister of the Interior by their side in the threatened carriage.” The King, however, rejected this proposition, declaring that he had resolved on the journey, and, hazardous as it might be, would undertake it. His resolution having been combated in vain by M. Thiers, the preparations for departure were ordered. Just as the King was about to get into the carriage, the Queen and the princesses suddenly presented themselves in an agony of terror and of tears. “It is impossible,” says M. Louis Blanc, “to say whether a skilful indiscretion on the part of the Minister had initiated them into the secret of what had taken place, or whether they had received no other intimation than that supplied by the instincts of the heart.” However this may have been, the Queen, finding that Louis Philippe would not abandon his intention, insisted on accompanying him, and it was quite impossible to prevent her from doing so. M. Thiers then begged the honour of a seat in the threatened carriage, and the journey was risked. The attack apprehended was not, however, on this occasion to be made; and it was as long afterwards as the 28th of July, 1835, on the occasion when Louis Philippe drove through Paris in memory of the “Three Days” of July, 1830, that Fieschi put his murderous project into execution. “On the 28th of July,” says M. Louis Blanc, “the sun rose upon the city, already perplexed with fears and doubts. The drum which summoned the National Guards early in the morning beat for some time in vain: a heavy apathy, in which there mingled a sort of morbid distrust, weighed upon everyone. At ten o’clock, however, the legions of the Garde Nationale stretched in an immense line along the boulevards, facing 40,000 of the regular troops, horse and foot. The Boulevard du Temple having been pointed out by rumour as the scene of the contemplated crime, the police had orders to parade it with particular watchfulness, and to keep a close eye upon the windows.” On the previous evening M. Thiers had a number of houses in this quarter searched. But the remonstrances of the inhabitants became so violent, that his original intention of examining every building on the boulevard had to be abandoned.

The clock of the château was striking ten when the King issued from the Tuileries on horseback. He was accompanied by his sons, the Dukes of Orleans, Nemours, and Joinville; by Marshals Mortier and Lobau; by his ministers; and by a numerous body of generals and other superior officers and high functionaries. Along the whole line which he traversed there prevailed a dead silence, broken only at intervals by the ex officio acclamations of the soldiers. At a few minutes past twelve the royal cortège arrived in front of the Eighth Legion, which was stationed along the Boulevard du Temple. Here, near the end of the Jardin Turc, as the King was leaning forward to receive a petition from the hands of a National Guardsman, a sound was heard like the fire of a well-sustained platoon. In an instant the ground was strewn with the dead and dying. Marshal Mortier and General Lachasse de Verigny, wounded in the head, fell bathed in their blood. A young captain of Artillery, M. de Villaté, slid from his horse, his arms extended at full length, as though they had been nailed to a cross; he had been shot in the head, and expired ere he touched the ground. Among the other victims were the colonel of gendarmerie, Raffé; M. Rieussec, lieutenant-colonel of the Eighth Legion; the National Guardsmen Prudhomme, Benetter, Ricard, and Léger; an old man upwards of seventy years of age, M. Lebrouste; a poor fringe-maker named Langeray; and a girl of scarcely fourteen, Sophie Remy. The king was not wounded, but in the confusion his horse reared and he sustained a violent shock in the left arm. The Duke of Orleans had a slight contusion on the thigh. A ball grazed the croup of the Duke of Joinville’s horse.

Thus the odious attempt failed in its object; the royal family was saved. No language can express the utter horror which this frightful and cowardly attack created in the minds of the assembled multitudes. An aide-de-camp immediately galloped off to reassure the Queen, and the King continued his progress amidst manifestations of the deepest sympathy and the most enthusiastic loyalty.

As a striking exemplification of the sang-froid of Louis Philippe it has been gravely related, on the alleged authority of Marshal Maison, that immediately after the fatal occurrence, and while all around were overwhelmed with dismay and grief, the King’s mind rapidly glanced over all the possible advantages which might be drawn from the event, and that he exclaimed, “Ah, now we are sure to get the appanages!” But this anecdote, in itself improbable, must be received with more than the usual grain of salt.

Meantime, at the moment of the explosion, clouds of smoke were seen to issue from a window on the third floor of the house number fifty. A man got out of this window, and seizing a double rope which was fastened inside, slid down it on to the roof of a lower building. He was but half-dressed, and his face streamed with blood. A flower-pot which was caught in the movement of the rope after he quitted hold of it fell to the pavement, and the noise attracted the attention of an agent of police who had been posted in the courtyard of the house. “There is the assassin escaping on the roof!” he exclaimed; and one of the National Guards at once called upon the fugitive to surrender, threatening to fire if he refused. But the man, wiping away with his hand the veil of blood which obscured his sight, dashed on and made his way through an open window into an adjoining house. A track of blood indicated his route, as though his own crime pursued him. He reached the courtyard too late to escape unobserved, and was at once taken into custody.

In the room whence he had fled were found the smoking remains of his death-dealing machine. It was raised upon a sort of scaffolding on four square legs connected together by strong oak cross-pieces. Twenty-five musket barrels were fastened by the breech upon the cross-piece at the back, which was higher than the front traverse by about eight inches. The ends of the barrels rested in notches cut in the lower traverse. The touch-holes were exactly in a line, so as to take fire simultaneously by means of a long train of gunpowder. The guns had been placed so as to receive the procession slantingly, embracing a large range, and rising from the legs of the horses to the heads of the riders. The charge in each barrel was a quadruple one. Fortunately, the calculations of the assassin were frustrated. Two of the barrels did not go off, four of them burst; and to these chances the King doubtless owed his life.

Fieschi was found, on inquiry, to have lodged in the house for several months. He stated himself to be a machinist. The porter had never been inside Fieschi’s room since he had occupied it. There had been but one man to see Fieschi, whom he represented as his uncle, and three women, who, he said, were his mistresses. On the morning of the 28th he had been noticed to go in and out, up and down, in a visible state of agitation, and once, though habitually abstemious, he went into a neighbouring cafe to drink a glass of brandy. At the military post where he was taken upon his arrest, a National Guard having asked him who he was, “What’s that to you?” he replied, “I shall answer such questions when they are put by the proper people.” Some gunpowder having been found upon his person, he was asked what it was for. “For glory!” he exclaimed.

The trial of Fieschi and his accomplices took place on the 30th of January, 1836, before the Court of Peers assembled in the palace of the Luxembourg. In the body of the court, in front of the clerk’s table, were displayed, among other proofs against the prisoners, a machine supporting a number of guns in an inclined position, an extinguished firebrand, a dagger, a shot belt with a quantity of bullets in it, an iron gauntlet, and a bloodstained rope.

Fieschi, the chief conspirator, is described by Louis Blanc as “endowed with an energy and shrewdness which merely served to promote the aims of an inveterate and grovelling turpitude. Vain to a degree which almost approached insanity, this man had stained his life with every infamy. A Corsican by birth, he had fought bravely in the service of Napoleon. After the peace, however, he had launched upon a career of vice and crime. He had invented the so-called infernal machine (which was simply a battery of guns so arranged that they could be discharged from a window), not from any political or personal hatred of Louis Philippe, but simply as the hireling of a band of Republican and Revolutionary conspirators.”

Fieschi and his accomplices were duly guillotined. Other attempts had been made and were still to be made on the life of Louis Philippe. The ferocious exploit, however, of Fieschi remains the most notorious one of this reign. At last the Citizen King lost his nerve; and in February, 1848, disappeared in face of a danger not more formidable, if firmly met at the outset, than the one which he had despised thirteen years previously, in 1835.

Fieschi was simply guillotined; and he was the first regicide or would-be regicide in France who escaped torture. The horrible cruelties inflicted on the assassins of French kings may make many persons less sensitive than they otherwise would be to the misfortunes reserved for the successors of these princes. The only possible excuse for the diabolical punishments devised for regicides under the old French Monarchy is that such barbarity was of the age. The torture of Damiens was imitated in every detail from the torture of Ravaillac, which had for precedent the torture of Gérard, the assassin of the Prince of Orange. An ingenious French writer attempted to decide whether Ravaillac’s torments were greater than those of Gérard. It is certain in any case that the latter suffered with much greater constancy. Ravaillac shrieked out in a terrible manner, whereas Balthasar Gérard never uttered a groan.

In this connection it is curious that, from the middle of the eighteenth century until the time of the French Revolution, the name of Damiens, or Damian, at present venerated throughout the civilised world, was in France, its country of origin, one of such opprobrium that nobody ventured to bear it. No Frenchman, indeed, would have dared to do so; for after the attempt upon the life of Louis XV. the name of Damiens, or D’Amiens, his would-be murderer, with all names of similar sound or spelling were, by a special edict, absolutely proscribed. To go by the name of D’Amiens, Damiens, or Damian, was to proclaim oneself affiliated nearly or remotely to the unspeakable being – the regicide, the parricide – who had lifted his hand against the Lord’s anointed. Time has its revenges. The name associated a century and a half ago with villainy and crime is now suggestive only of heroism and virtue. Everyone knows by what glorious acts of self-sacrifice Damien, enthusiast and martyr, has brought honour to a once unutterable name.

The French Revolution, which was separated from the torture of Damiens by only thirty-eight years, is associated with a number of sanguinary deeds. But it at least put an end to torture. No such horrors as had been perpetrated under the French Monarchy were ever to take place under the French Republic. Even in the case of ordinary criminals not specially condemned to torture, death, under the old Monarchy, was inflicted in the cruellest fashion. “After a prisoner has seen death under so many forms,” says a writer of the time of Louis XVI., “when his soul is in a manner withered, his spirit exhausted, and life is grown a burthen, the sentence that ends his sufferings should be welcome to him – and it would be so were not our laws more calculated to torture the body than simply to punish the criminal. A man who pays the forfeit of his life to the injured laws of his country has, in the eyes of reason, more than sufficiently atoned for his crime; but here industrious cruelty has devised the most barbarous means of avenging the wrongs done to society; and the breaking the bones of a wretch on a cross, twisting his mangled body round the circumference of a wheel, are inventions worthy of the fertile brains of a Phalaris, and show to the utmost that such inhuman laws were more levelled against the man than the crime for which he is doomed to suffer.”

Opposite the house on the Boulevard du Temple associated with the outrage of Fieschi stood formerly the Café Turc, which offered to the generation of its day a shady retreat and varied amusements. Here the celebrated Jullien, better known in London than even in Paris, gave in the early years of Louis Philippe’s reign orchestral pieces of his own composition adorned with fireworks and emphasized by the booming of cannon. Little by little the Café Turc was to disappear; and now repeated alterations have reduced it to a beer-house, or brasserie.

The Café Turc was the first of the French cafés-concerts or music halls; for, like so many of our dramatic entertainments, the music hall is an adaptation from the French. The English music hall differs, however, from the French café-concert about as much as an English farce differs from a French vaudeville. The café-concert may be looked upon either as a café at which there is singing, or as a concert where refreshments are served between the pieces and “consumed” during the performance. But whether you enter the place for the sake of art or with the view of sustaining nature, it is equally necessary that you should “consume”; and that there may be no mistake on this point, a curtain is at some establishments let down from time to time with “On est prié de renouveler sa consommation,” and, at the side, in English, “One is prayed to renew his consumption,” inscribed on it. The renewal of one’s consumption is often a very costly proceeding.

To avoid being classed with theatres, and, as a legal consequence, taxed for the benefit of the poor, no charge for admission is made at the doors of the café-concert. But at those where such stars as the once celebrated Thérèse are engaged, the proprietor finds it necessary to attach extravagant prices to refreshments of the most ordinary kind, so that a bottle of lemonade may be quoted in the tariff at three francs, a cup of coffee at a franc and a half, and even the humble glass of water at fifty centimes. In England the music hall proprietor would be often glad to obtain a dramatic licence. He has no fear of the poor before his eyes, and would be only too happy to combine with the profits of musical publican those of the regular theatrical manager. Why he should or should not be so favoured has been argued at length before the magistrates and duly reported in the columns of the newspapers. The result has been that, as a rule, the London music hall proprietor does not give theatrical performances, though he often ventures upon duologues and sometimes risks a dramatic trio. The argument of London managers against music hall proprietors may thus concisely be stated: the manager cannot by the terms of his licence allow the audience to smoke and drink in presence of a dramatic performance; and, correlatively, the music hall proprietor ought not to be allowed to give dramatic performances while smoking and drinking are going on.

Paris is celebrated above all the capitals of Europe for its cafés; and the beverage which gives its name to these establishments seems to have been known earlier in France than in any other European country. Coffee was introduced into central Europe in 1683, the year of the battle of Vienna; and from the Austrian capital the use of coffee spread rapidly to all parts of Germany. The circumstances under which the Austrians first became acquainted with it were somewhat curious.

The Turks had brought with them to Vienna an imposing siege train. No European power possessed such formidable artillery; and their stone balls of sixty pounds each were not only the largest projectiles ever fired, but were regarded as the largest which by any possible means could be fired. According to the ingenious, but incorrect, view of one of Sobieski’s biographers (the Abbé Coyer), the amount of powder requisite for the discharge of a missile of greater weight would be so enormous as not to give time for the whole of it to become ignited before the ball left the cannon.

Kara Mustapha, the Turkish general, had also brought with him a number of archers; and when a letter from Sobieski to the Duke of Lorraine was intercepted by a Turkish patrol, the document was attached to an arrow and shot into the town, accompanied by a note in the Latin language to the effect that all further resistance was out of the question, and that the Vienna garrison had now nothing to do but accept its fate. The Turks, moreover, brought to Vienna an immense number of women, whose throats, when the Turkish army was forced to retire in headlong flight, they unscrupulously cut. The stone cannon balls of prodigious weight, the arrows, and the women could all be accounted for. But the Turks left behind them a large number of bags containing white berries, of which nothing could be made. Of these berries, however, after duly roasting and pounding them, an Austrian soldier, who had been a prisoner in Turkey, made coffee; and as he had distinguished himself during the battle, the Emperor granted him permission to open a shop in Vienna for the sale of the Turkish beverage which he had learned under such interesting circumstances to prepare.

According to another less authentic anecdote, the use of the mysterious white berries found among the stores of the defeated Turks was first pointed out by a Turkish soldier who had been working in the trenches before the besieged city, and had so fatigued himself by his ceaseless toil, that he fell asleep and slumbered on throughout the whole of the battle, undisturbed by the cavalry charges, the musketry fire, and the explosions of the artillery with its terrible sixty-pounders. When at last, after sleep had done its restorative work, the exhausted soldier woke up to find himself in the hands of the Christians, he was terribly alarmed. But his life was spared, and in return for this clemency on the part of his enemies he taught them how to make coffee.

Parisians, however, pride themselves on having known coffee fourteen years earlier than the Viennese. It is said, indeed, that an enterprising Levantine started a coffee-house at Paris in the very middle of the seventeenth century, and not later than the year 1650. The name of the stimulating beverage that he offered for sale was, as he wrote it, cahoue. But the unhappy man had not taken the necessary steps for getting his new importation spoken of beforehand in good society; and, no one knowing what to make of the strange liquor he wished to dispense – hot, black, and bitter – the founder of the first coffee-house or café became bankrupt.

The French, however, during, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sworn friends of the Turks, whose power they played off on every occasion against that of the hated Empire. Vienna might, indeed, on two occasions have been captured, plundered, and burnt by the infidels for all France cared to do towards saving it. France, on her side, was viewed with favour by the Turks; and in 1669 an ambassador, Soliman Aga by name, was sent by the Porte on a mission to Louis XIV., at whose court he made known the virtues of the berry which long previously the Arabs had introduced throughout the East.

Properly presented, coffee met in Paris with a success which elsewhere it had failed to attain, and before long it became the rage in fashionable society. When it was at the height of its first popularity, however, Madame de Sévigné condemned it, saying that the taste for coffee, like the taste for Racine, would pass away. Racine, in spite of the beauty of his at once tender and epigrammatic lines, is not much read in the present day, and is scarcely ever acted. Coffee, on the other hand, is as popular now as in the days when Pope wrote his couplet on

“There are in this capital,” wrote the author of the “Tableau de Paris” more than a hundred years ago, “between six and seven hundred coffee-houses, the common refuge of idleness and poverty, where the latter is warmed without any expense for fuel, and the former entertained by a view of the crowds who make their entrance and exit by turns. In other countries, where liberty is more than an empty name, a coffee-house is the rendez-vous of politicians who freely canvass the conduct of the Minister, or debate on matters of State. Not so here! I have already given a very good reason why the Parisians are sparing of their political reflections. If they speak at all on State matters it is to extol the power of their sovereign, and the wisdom of his counsellors. A half-starved author, with all his wardrobe and movables on his back, dining at these restaurants on a dish of coffee and a halfpenny roll, talks big of the immense resources of France, and the abundance she offers of every necessary of life; whilst his only supper is the steam arising from the rich man’s kitchen, as he returns to his empty garret.”

The writer goes on to show that the coffee-houses were haunted by cliques of critics, literary and artistic, and his description sometimes reminds one of Button’s, in the days of Addison and Steele. “Those,” he says, “who have just entered the lists of literature stand in dread of this awful tribunal, where a dozen of grim-looking judges, whilst they sip and sip, deal out reputation by wholesale. Woe to the young poet, to the new actor or actress! They are often sentenced here without trial. Catcalls, destined to grate their affrighted ears, are here manufactured over a dish of coffee.”

The writer then proceeds to lament the absence of sociability at the coffee-house, and the gloomy countenances of its frequenters, as contrasted with the convivial faces of those “brave ancestors” of his generation who used to pass their leisure, not at coffee-houses, but at taverns. One cause of the difference he finds in the change of beverage. “Our forefathers,” he explains, “drank that mirth-inspiring liquor with which Burgundy and Champaign supplied them. This gave life to their meetings. Ours are more sober, no doubt, but is this sobriety the companion of health? By no means. For generous wine we have substituted a black beverage, bad in itself, but worse by the manner in which it is made in all the coffee-houses of this fashionable metropolis. The good Parisians, however, are very careless in the matter; they drink off whatever is put before them, and swallow this baneful wash, which in its turn is driven down by more deadly poisons, mistakenly called cordials.”

Since the above was written, coffee, far from dying out, has become more and more popular, and musical cafés, theatrical cafés, and literary cafés have been everywhere established in Paris. There are financial cafés, too, chiefly, of course, in the region of the Bourse; and among the cafés by which the Bourse is partly surrounded used to be one which owed its notoriety to the fact that Fieschi’s mistress – in the character of “dame du comptoir” – was exhibited there to the public.

Two days after the execution of the would-be regicide and actual maker of the famous infernal machine, a crowd of people might have been seen struggling towards the doors of a café on the Place de la Bourse, which was already as full as it could hold. “Those,” says an eye-witness, “who performed the feat of gaining admission, saw, gravely seated at a counter, adorned with costly draperies, an ordinary-looking woman, blind of one eye, and possessing in fact no external merit but that of youth: It was Nina Sassave. There she was, her forehead radiant, her lip quivering with delight, her whole expression that of unmingled pride and pleasure at the eager homage thus offered to her celebrity. A circumstance eminently characteristic of the epoch! Here had a creature, only known to the world as a base and treacherous informer, as the mistress of an assassin, been caught up for a show by a shrewd speculator. And what is more remarkably characteristic still, the public took it all as a perfect matter of course, and amply justified the speculator in his calculations.”

On the same side as the Café Turc, but further on towards the Rue du Temple, stood the tennis ground of the Count d’Artois (afterwards Charles X.), built by the architect Belanger, one of the most intimate and faithful friends of the famous Sophie Arnould.

On the site of the Count d’Artois’ tennis ground was erected, at the beginning of the Second Empire, a theatre, called in the first instance Folies-Meyer, but which, after various changes of title, became at last the Théâtre Déjazet, under the direction of the celebrated actress of that name, already seventy years of age, or nearly so, but still lively and graceful. For this theatre in 1860 Victorien Sardou wrote his first successful piece, “M. Garat,” in which Déjazet herself played the principal part, supported by Dupuis, who was afterwards to become famous in opera-bouffe as the associate of Mademoiselle Schneider.

The line of boulevards here presents an enormous gap, in the centre of which, between two fountains, stands a monument to the glory of the Republic. The rest of the open space serves twice a week as a flower market, the largest in Paris. At the beginning of the century La Place du Château d’Eau, as the open space in question is called, did not exist. The fountain which gave its name to the Place was constructed under the First Napoleon in the year 1811, but this fountain was replaced in 1869 by a finer one inaugurated by Napoleon III. The later fountain was itself, however, to disappear, soon afterwards to be replaced by the aforesaid monument to the Republic. Behind one of the large depots on the north side of the Place du Château d’Eau, looking out upon the Rue de Malte, was constructed in 1866 the Circus of the Prince Imperial, afterwards called the Theatre of the Château d’Eau, where at one time dramas, at another operas, have been given, never with success. Ill-luck seems to hang over the establishment, which, with its 2,400 seats, must be reckoned among the largest theatres in Paris. In Paris, however, as in London, theatres have often the reputation of being unlucky when, to succeed, all they require is a good piece with good actors to play in it.

The Boulevard du Temple had at one time its famous restaurants, like other boulevards in the present day. Here stood the celebrated Cadran Bleu and the equally celebrated Banquet d’Anacréon. The last of the great restaurants on this boulevard was the one kept by Bonvalet, who, during the siege of Paris, was generous enough to supply additional provisions to unfortunate actors and actresses who found themselves reduced to the limited rations distributed by the Municipal Council.

The Rue de Bondi, running out of the Boulevard Saint-Martin, brings us once more to a group of theatres. The Folies Dramatiques stands at number forty. This theatre was started in 1830 by M. Alaux, previously manager of the Dramatic Parnassus on the Boulevard du Temple. It was opened on January 22nd, 1831, under the direction of M. Léopold, who produced at this house a long series of successful pieces. Among these may be mentioned “Robert Macaire” with Frédéric Lemaître in the leading part. When, amidst demolitions and reconstructions, the original Folies Dramatiques came down, the company was transferred to the new building which now stands in the Rue de Bondi. Here were brought out Hervé’s “Œil Crevé” and “Petit Faust,” Lecoq’s “Fille de Madame Angot,” Planquette’s “Cloches de Corneville,” and other works which were soon to become known all over Europe. Vaudevilles are now played at this theatre alternately with operettas. The house contains 1,600 seats. The Ambigu-Comique, built on a sort of promontory which dominates the Boulevard Saint-Martin and the Rue de Bondi, was opened in 1829, in place of the original Ambigu, burnt to the ground two years previously. The new house, which contains 1,600 seats, was inaugurated in presence of the Duchess of Berri, widow of the unhappy nobleman who a few years before was stabbed by Louvois on the steps of the Opera House. In 1837 this theatre was entirely rebuilt under the direction of M. Rochart. Untrue, like so many theatres, to its original name, the Ambigu-Comique was to become associated with nothing in the way of ambiguity, nothing in the way of comedy, but with melodramas, often of a most blood-curdling kind. Here, it is true, was produced the “Auberge des Adrêts,” which, in the hands of Frédéric Lemaître, was to be transformed from a serious drama into a wild piece of buffoonery; so that the author of the work, too nervous to attend the performance himself, was almost driven mad when his trusted servant returned home and reported to him the bursts of laughter with which the work had been received. At the Ambigu were brought out some of the best pieces of Alexandre Dumas the elder, Frédéric Soulié, Adolphe Dennery, and Paul Feval.

Immediately adjacent to the Ambigu stand the Porte Saint-Martin and Renaissance Theatres, covering the triangle formed by the Boulevard Saint-Martin, the Rue de Bondi, and the Place de la Porte Saint-Martin. The Porte Saint-Martin Theatre has a long and interesting history, dating from June 8, 1781, when it was opened as an Opera House after the destruction by fire of the one in the Rue Saint-Honoré. A performance was going on at the time, and the singers had to fly in their operatic dresses from the stage to the street. In the midst of the general consternation, the musical director, Rey by name, whose “Coronis” was the opera of the night, startled those around him, already sufficiently terrified, by exclaiming, “Save my child! Oh, Heaven, save my child!” As Rey was not known in the character of a family man, his friends thought he had gone mad. But it was the creature of his brain that was troubling him; and after heroic struggles, the score of “Coronis” was rescued from the flames. The fascinating Madeleine Guiniard had on this occasion a narrow escape of her life. She was in her dressing-room, and had just divested herself of her costume when inquiries were made for her, and it was found that, like Brunhilda in the legend, she was enveloped on all sides by flames. A Siegfried, however, was found in the person of a stage carpenter, who, making his way through the ring of fire, reached the unhappy valkyrie, wrapped her up in a blanket, and brought her out in safety, though he himself, in his second passage through the flames, was somewhat scorched.