Читать книгу From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn - Field Henry Martyn - Страница 8

I have written of the startling contrasts of London; what shall I say of those of Paris? It is the gayest city in the world, yet the one in which there are more suicides than in any other. It is the city of pleasure, yet where pleasure often turns to pain, and the dance of dissipation, whirling faster and faster, becomes the dance of death. It is a city which seems devoted to amusement, to which the rich and the idle flock from all countries to spend life in an endless round of enjoyment; with which some of our countrymen have become so infatuated that their real feeling is pretty well expressed in the familiar saying – half witty and half wicked – that "all good Americans go to Paris when they die." Certainly many of them do not dream of any higher Paradise.

And yet it is a city in which there are many sad and mournful scenes, and in which he who observes closely, who looks a little under the surface, will often walk the streets in profound melancholy. In short, it is a city of such infinite variety, so many-colored, that the laughing and the weeping philosopher may find abundant material for his peculiar vein. Eugene Sue, in his "Mysteries of Paris," has made us familiar with certain tragic aspects of Parisian life hidden from the common eye. With all its gayety, there is a great deal of concealed misery which keeps certain quarters in a chronic state of discontent, which often breaks out in bloody insurrections; so that the city which boasts that it is "the centre of civilization," is at the same time the focus of revolution, of most of the plots and conspiracies which trouble the peace of Europe. As the capital of a great nation, the centre of its intellectual, its literary, and its artistic life, it has a peculiar fascination for those who delight in the most elevated social intercourse. Its salons are the most brilliant in the world, so that we can understand the feeling of Madame de Staël, the woman of society, who considered her banishment from Paris by the first Napoleon as the greatest punishment, and who "would rather see the stones of the Rue du Bac than all the mountains of Switzerland"; and yet this very brilliancy sometimes wearies to satiety, so that we can understand equally the feeling of poor, morbid Jean Jacques Rousseau, who more than a hundred years ago turned his back upon it with disgust, saying, "Farewell, Paris! city of noise, and dust, and strife! He who values peace of mind can never be far enough from thee!"

If we are quite just, we shall not go to either of these extremes. We shall see the good and the evil, and frankly acknowledge both. Paris is generally supposed to be a sinner above all other cities; to have a kind of bad eminence for its immorality. It is thought to be a centre of vice and demoralization, and some innocent young preachers who have never crossed the sea, would no doubt feel justified in denouncing it as the wickedest city in the world. As to the extent to which immorality of any kind prevails, I have no means of judging, except such as every stranger has; but certainly as to intemperance, there is nothing here to compare with that in London, or Glasgow, or Edinburgh; and as to the other form of vice we can only judge by its public display, and there is nothing half so gross, which so outrages all decency, as that which shocks and disgusts every foreigner in the streets of London. No doubt here, as in every great capital which draws to itself the life of a whole nation, there is a concentration of the bad as well as the good elements of society, and we must expect to find much that is depraved and vicious; but that in these respects Paris is worse than London, or Berlin, or Vienna, or even New York, I see no reason to believe.

Without taking, therefore, a lofty attitude of denunciation on the one hand, or going into sudden raptures on the other, there are certain aspects of Paris which lie on the surface, and which any one may observe without claiming to be either wiser or better than his neighbors.

I have tried to see the city both in its brighter lights and its darker shadows. I have lived in Paris, first and last, a good deal. I was here six months in 1847-8, and saw the Revolution which overthrew Louis Philippe, and have been here often since. I confess I am fond of it, and always return with pleasure. That which strikes the stranger at once is its bright, sunny aspect; there is something inspiring in the very look of the people; one feels a change in the very air. Since we came here now, we have been riding about from morning to night. Our favorite drive is along the Boulevards just at evening, when the lamps are lighted, and all Paris seems to be sitting out of doors. The work of the day is over, and the people have nothing to do but to enjoy themselves. By hundreds and thousands they are sitting on the wide pavements, sipping their coffee, and talking with indescribable animation. Then we extend our ride to the Champs Elysées, where the broad avenue is one blaze of light, and places of amusement are open on every side, from which comes the sound of music. It is all a fairy scene, such as one reads of in the Arabian Nights. Thousands are sitting under the trees, enjoying the cool evening air, or coming in from a ride to the Bois de Boulogne.

But it may be thought that these are the pleasures of the rich. On the contrary, they are the pleasures of all classes; and that is the charming thing about it. That which pleases me most in Paris is the general cheerfulness. I do not observe such wide extremes of condition as in London, such painful contrasts between the rich and the poor. Indeed, I do not find here such abject poverty, nor see such dark, sullen, scowling faces, which indicate such brutal degradation, as I saw in the low quarters of London. Here everybody seems to be, at least in a small way, comfortable and contented. I have spoken once before of the industry of the people (no city in the world is such a hive of busy bees) and of their economy, which shows itself even in their pleasures, of which they are fond, but which they get very cheap. No people will get so much out of so little. What an English workman would spend in a single drunken debauch, a Frenchman will spread over a week, and get a little enjoyment out of it every day. It delights me to see how they take their pleasures. Everybody seems to be happy in his own way, and not to be envious of his neighbor. If a man cannot ride with two horses, he will go with one, and even if that one be a sorry hack, with ribs sticking out of his sides, and that seems just ready for the crows, no matter, he will pile his wife and children into the little, low carriage, and off they go, not at great speed, to be sure, but as gay and merry as if they were the Emperor and his court, with outriders going before, and a body of cavalry clattering at their heels. When I have seen a whole family at Versailles or St. Cloud dining on five francs (oh no, that is too magnificent; they carry their dinner with them, and it probably does not cost them two francs), I admire the simple tastes which are so easily satisfied, and the miracle-working art which extracts honey from every daisy by the roadside.

Such simple and universal enjoyment would not be possible, but for one trait which is peculiar to the French – an entire absence of mauvaise honte, or false shame; the foolish pride, which is so common in England and America, of wishing to be thought as rich or as great as others. In London no one would dare, even if he were allowed, to show himself in Hyde Park in such unpretentious turnouts as those in which half Paris will go to the Bois de Boulogne. But here everybody jogs along at his own gait, not troubling himself about his neighbor. "Live and let live" seems to be, if not the law of the country, at least the universal habit of the people. Whatever other faults the French have, I believe they are freer than most nations from "envy, malice, and all uncharitableness."

With this there is a feeling of self-respect, even among the common people, that is very pleasing. If you speak to a French servant, or to a workman in a blouse, he does not sink into the earth as if he were an inferior being, or take a tone of servility, but answers politely, yet self-respectingly, as one conscious that he too is a man. The most painful thing that I found in England was the way in which the distinctions of rank, which seem to be as rigid as the castes of India, have eaten into the manhood and self-respect of our great Anglo-Saxon race. But here "a man's a man," and especially if he is a Frenchman, he is as good as anybody.

From this absence of false pride and false shame comes the readiness of the people to talk about their private affairs. How quickly they take you into their confidence, and tell you all their little personal histories! The other day we went to the Salpêtrière, the great hospital for aged women, which Mrs. Field describes in her "Home Sketches in France," where are five thousand poor creatures cared for by the charity of Paris. Hundreds of these were seated under the trees, or walking about the grounds. As I went to find one of the officials, I left C – standing under an arch. Seeing her there, one of the old women, with that politeness which is instinctive with the French, invited her into her little room. When I came back, I found they had struck up a friendship. The good mother – poor, dear, old soul! – had told all her little story: who she was, and how she came there, and how she lived. She made her own soup, she said, and had put up some pretty muslin curtains, and had a tiny bit of a stove, and so got along very nicely. This communicativeness is not confined to the inmates of hospitals. It is a national trait, which makes us love a people that give us their confidence so freely.

I might add many other amiable traits, which give a great charm to the social life of the French, and fill their homes with brightness and sunshine.

But of course there is another side to the picture. There is lightning in the beautiful cloud, and sometimes the thunder breaks fearfully over this devoted city. I do not refer to great public calamities, such as war and siege, bringing "battle, and murder, and sudden death," but to those daily tragedies, which are enacted in a great city, which the world never hears of, where men and women drop out of existence, as one and disappear from view, and the ocean rolls over them, burying the story of their unhappy lives and their wretched end. Something of this darker shading to bright and gay Paris, one may discover who is curious in such matters. There is a kind of fascination which sometimes lures me to search out that which is sombre and tragic in human life and in history. So I have been to the Prison de la Roquette, over which is an inscription which might be written over the gates of hell: Depôt des Condamnés. Here the condemned are placed before they are led to death, and in the open space in front take place all the executions in Paris. Look you at those five stones deep set in the pavement, on which are planted the posts of the Guillotine! Over that in the centre hangs the fatal knife, which descends on the neck of the victim, whose head rolls into the basket below.

But prisons are not peculiar to Paris, and probably quite as many executions have been witnessed in front of Newgate, in London. But that which gives a peculiar and sadder interest to this spot, is that here took place one of the most terrible tragedies even in French history – the massacre of the hostages in the days of the Commune. In that prison yard the venerable Archbishop of Paris was shot, with others who bore honored names. No greater atrocity was enacted even in the Reign of Terror. There fiends in human shape, with hearts as hard as the stones of the street, butchered old age. In another quarter of Paris, on the heights of Montmartre, the enraged populace shot down two brave generals – Lecompte and Clement-Thomas. I put my hand into the very holes made in the wall of a house by the murderous balls. Such cowardly assassinations, occurring more than once in French history, reveal a trait of character not quite so amiable as some that I have noticed. They show that the polite and polished Frenchman may be so aroused as to be turned into a wild beast, and give a color of reason to the savage remark of Voltaire – himself one of the race – that "a Frenchman was half monkey and half tiger."

I will present but one other dark picture. I went one day, to the horror of my companion, to visit the Morgue, the receptacle of all the suicides in Paris, where their bodies are exposed that they may be recognized by friends. Of course some are brought here who die suddenly in the streets, and whose names are unknown. But the number of suicides is fearfully great. Bodies are constantly fished out of the Seine, of those who throw themselves from the numerous bridges. Others climb to the top of the Column in the Place Vendôme, or of that on the Place of the Bastille, or to the towers of Nôtre Dame, and throw themselves over the parapet, and their mangled bodies are picked up on the pavement below. Others find the fumes of charcoal an easier way to fall into "an eternal sleep." But thus, by one means or other, by pistol or by poison, by the tower or the river, almost every day has its victim. I think the exact statistics show more than one suicide a day throughout the year. When I was at the Morgue there were two bodies stretched out stark and cold – a man and a woman, both young. I looked at them with very sad reflections. If those poor lips could but speak, what tragedies they might tell! Who knows what hard battle of life they had to fight – what struggles wrung that manly breast, or what sorrow broke that woman's heart? Who was she?

Perhaps she had led a life of shame, but all trace of passion was gone now:

And as I marked the rich tresses which hung down over her shoulders, I thought Jesus would not have disdained her if she had come to him as a penitent Magdalen, and with that flowing hair had wiped His sacred feet.

I do not draw these sad pictures to point a moral against the French, as if they were sinners above all others, but I think this great number of suicides may be ascribed, in part at least, to the mercurial and excitable character of the people. They are easily elated and easily depressed; now rising to the height of joyous excitement, and now sinking to the depths of despair. And when these darker moods come on, what so natural as that those who have not a strong religious feeling to restrain them, or to give them patience to bear their trials, should seek a quick relief in that calm rest which no rude waking shall ever disturb? If they had that faith in God, and a life to come, which is the only true consolation in all time of our trouble, in all time of our adversity, they would not so often rush to the grave, thinking to bury their sorrows in the silence of the tomb.

Thus musing on the lights and shadows of Paris, I turn away half in admiration and half in pity, but all in love. With all its shadows, it is a wonderful city, by far the greatest, except London, in the modern world, and the French are a wonderful people; and while I am not blind to their weaknesses, their vanity, their childish passion for military glory, yet "with all their faults I love them still." And I have written thus, not only from a feeling of love for Paris from personal associations, but from a sense of justice, believing that the harsh judgment often pronounced upon it is hasty and mistaken. All such sweeping declarations are sure to be wrong. No doubt the elements of good and evil are mingled here in large proportions, and act with great intensity, and sometimes with terrific results. But Frenchmen are not worse than other men, nor Paris worse than other cities. If it has some dark spots, it has many bright ones, in its ancient seats of learning and its noble institutions of charity. Taking them all together, they form a basis for a very kindly judgment. And I believe that He who from His throne in Heaven looks down upon all the dwellers upon earth, seeing that in the judgment of truth and of history this city is not utterly condemned, would say "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more."