Читать книгу Pencillings by the Way - Nathaniel Parker Willis - Страница 12

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JOACHIM LELEWEL—PALAIS ROYAL—PERE LA CHAISE—VERSAILLES, ETC.

I met, at a breakfast party, to-day, Joachim Lelewel, the celebrated scholar and patriot of Poland. Having fallen in with a great deal of revolutionary and emigrant society since I have been in Paris, I have often heard his name, and looked forward to meeting him with high pleasure and curiosity. His writings are passionately admired by his countrymen. He was the principal of the university, idolized by that effective part of the population, the students of Poland; and the fearless and lofty tone of his patriotic principles is said to have given the first and strongest momentum to the ill-fated struggle just over. Lelewel impressed me very strongly. Unlike most of the Poles, who are erect, athletic, and florid, he is thin, bent, and pale; and were it not for the fire and decision of his eye, his uncertain gait and sensitive address would convey an expression almost of timidity. His form, features, and manners, are very like those of Percival, the American poet, though their countenances are marked with the respective difference of their habits of mind. Lelewel looks like a naturally modest, shrinking man, worked up to the calm resolution of a martyr. The strong stamp of his face is devoted enthusiasm. His eye is excessively bright, but quiet and habitually downcast; his lips are set firmly, but without effort, together; and his voice is almost sepulchral, it is so low and calm. He never breaks through his melancholy, though his refugee countrymen, except when Poland is alluded to, have all the vivacity of French manners, and seem easily to forget their misfortunes. He was silent, except when particularly addressed, and had the air of a man who thought himself unobserved, and had shrunk into his own mind. I felt that he was winning upon my heart every moment. I never saw a man in my life whose whole air and character were so free from self-consciousness or pretension—never one who looked to me so capable of the calm, lofty, unconquerable heroism of a martyr.

"Paris is the centre of the world," if centripetal tendency is any proof of it. Everything struck off from the other parts of the universe flies straight to the Palais Royal. You may meet in its thronged galleries, in the course of an hour, representatives of every creed, rank, nation, and system, under heaven. Hussein Pacha and Don Pedro pace daily the same pavé—the one brooding on a kingdom lost, the other on the throne he hopes to win; the Polish general and the proscribed Spaniard, the exiled Italian conspirator, the contemptuous Turk, the well-dressed negro from Hayti, and the silk-robed Persian, revolve by the hour together around the same jet d'eau, and costumes of every cut and order, mustaches and beards of every degree of ferocity and oddity, press so fast and thick upon the eye that one forgets to be astonished. There are no such things as "lions" in Paris. The extraordinary persons outnumber the ordinary. Every other man you meet would keep a small town in a ferment for a month.

I spent yesterday at Pére la Chaise, and to day at Versailles. The two places are in opposite environs, and of very opposite characters—one certainly making you in love with life, the other almost as certainly with death. One could wander for ever in the wilderness of art at Versailles, and it must be a restless ghost that could not content itself with Pére la Chaise for its elysium.

This beautiful cemetery is built upon the broad ascent of a hill, commanding the whole of Paris at a glance. It is a wood of small trees, laid out in alleys, and crowded with tombs and monuments of every possible description. You will scarce get through without being surprised into a tear; but, if affectation and fantasticalness in such a place do not more grieve than amuse you, you will much oftener smile. The whole thing is a melancholy mock of life. Its distinctions are all kept up. There are the fashionable avenues, lined with costly chapels and monuments, with the names of the exclusive tenants in golden letters upon the doors, iron railings set forbiddingly about the shrubs, and the blessing-scrap writ ambitiously in Latin. The tablets record the long family titles, and the offices and honors, perhaps the numberless virtues of the dead. They read like chapters of heraldry more than like epitaphs. It is a relief to get into the outer alleys, and see how poverty and simple feeling express what should be the same thing. It is usually some brief sentence, common enough, but often exquisitely beautiful in this prettiest of languages, and expressing always the kind of sorrow felt by the mourner. You can tell, for instance, by the sentiment simply, without looking at the record below, whether the deceased was young, or much loved, or mourned by husband, or parent, or brother, or a circle of all. I noticed one, however, the humblest and simplest monument perhaps in the whole cemetery, which left the story beautifully untold; it was a slab of common marl, inscribed "Pauvre Marie!"—nothing more. I have thought of it, and speculated upon it, a great deal since. What was she? and who wrote her epitaph? why was she pauvre Marie?

Before almost all the poorer monuments is a minature garden with a low wooden fence, and either the initials of the dead sown in flowers, or rose-trees, carefully cultivated, trained to hang over the stone. I was surprised to find, in a public cemetery, in December, roses in full bloom and valuable exotics at almost every grave. It speaks both for the sentiment and delicate principle of the people. Few of the more costly monuments were either interesting or pretty. One struck my fancy—a small open chapel, large enough to contain four chairs, with the slab facing the door, and a crucifix encircled with fresh flowers on a simple shrine above. It is a place where the survivors in a family might come and sit at any time, nowhere more pleasantly. From the chapel I speak of, you may look out and see all Paris; and I can imagine how it would lessen the feeling of desertion and forgetfulness that makes the anticipation of death so dreadful, to be certain that your friends would come, as they may here, and talk cheerfully and enjoy themselves near you, so to speak. The cemetery in summer must be one of the sweetest places in the world.

Versailles is a royal summer chateau, about twelve miles from Paris, with a demesne of twenty miles in circumference. Take that for the scale, and imagine a palace completed in proportion, in all its details of grounds, ornament, and architecture. It cost, says the guide book, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars; and, leaving your fancy to expend that trifle over a residence, which, remember, is but one out of some half dozen, occupied during the year by a single family, I commend the republican moral to your consideration, and proceed with the more particular description of my visit.

My friend, Dr. Howe, was my companion. We drove up the grand avenue on one of the loveliest mornings that ever surprised December with a bright sun and a warm south wind. Before us, at the distance of a mile, lay a vast mass of architecture, with the centre, falling back between the two projecting wings, the whole crowning a long and gradual ascent, of which the tri-colored flag waving against the sky from the central turrets was the highest point. As we approached, we noticed an occasional flash in the sun, and a stir of bright colors, through the broad deep court between the wings, which, as we advanced nearer, proved to be a body of about two or three thousand lancers and troops of the line under review. The effect was indescribably fine. The gay uniforms, the hundreds of tall lances, each with its red flag flying in the wind, the imposing crescent of architecture in which the array was embraced, the ringing echo of the grand military music from the towers—and all this intoxication for the positive senses fused with the historical atmosphere of the place, the recollection of the king and queen, whose favorite residence it had been (the unfortunate Louis and Marie Antoinette), or the celebrated women who had lived in their separate palaces within its grounds, of the genius and chivalry of Court after Court that had made it, in turn, the scene of their brilliant follies, and, over all, Napoleon, who must have rode through its gilded gates with the thought of pride that he was its imperial master by the royalty of his great nature alone—it was in truth, enough, the real and the ideal, to dazzle the eyes of a simple republican.

After gazing at the fascinating show for an hour, we took a guide and entered the palace. We were walked through suite after suite of cold apartments, desolately splendid with gold and marble, and crowded with costly pictures, till I was sick and weary of magnificence. The guide went before, saying over his rapid rigmarole of names and dates, giving us about three minutes to a room in which there were some twenty pictures, perhaps, of which he presumed he had told us all that was necessary to know. I fell behind, after a while; and, as a considerable English party had overtaken and joined us, I succeeded in keeping one room in the rear, and enjoying the remainder in my own way.

The little marble palace, called "Petit Trianon," built for Madame Pompadour in the garden grounds, is a beautiful affair, full of what somebody calls "affectionate-looking rooms;" and "Grand Trianon," built also on the grounds at the distance of half a mile, for Madame Maintenon, is a very lovely spot, made more interesting by the preference given to it over all other places by Marie Antoinette. Here she amused herself with her Swiss village. The cottages and artificial "mountains" (ten feet high, perhaps) are exceedingly pretty models in miniature, and probably illustrate very fairly the ideas of a palace-bred fancy upon natural scenery. There are glens and grottoes, and rocky beds for brooks that run at will ("les rivieres à volonté," the guide called them), and trees set out upon the crags at most uncomfortable angles, and every contrivance to make a lovely lawn as inconveniently like nature as possible. The Swiss families, however, must have been very amusing. Brought fresh from their wild country, and set down in these pretty mock cottages, with orders to live just as they did in their own mountains, they must have been charmingly puzzled. In the midst of the village stands an exquisite little Corinthian temple; and our guide informed us that the cottage which the Queen occupied at her Swiss tea-parties was furnished at an expense of sixty thousand francs—two not very Switzer-like circumstances.

It was in the little palace of Trianon that Napoleon signed his divorce from Josephine. The guide showed us the room, and the table on which he wrote. I have seen nothing that brought me so near Napoleon. There is no place in France that could have for me a greater interest. It is a little boudoir, adjoining the state sleeping-room, simply furnished, and made for familiar retirement, not for show. The single sofa—the small round table—the enclosing, tent-like curtains—the modest, unobtrusive elegance of ornaments, and furniture, give it rather the look of a retreat, fashioned by the tenderness and taste of private life, than any apartment in a royal palace. I felt unwilling to leave it. My thoughts were too busy. What was the strongest motive of that great man in this most affecting and disputed action of his life?

After having been thridded through the palaces, we had a few moments left for the grounds. They are magnificent beyond description. We know very little of this thing in America, as an art; but it is one, I have come to think, that, in its requisition of genius, is scarce inferior to architecture. Certainly the three palaces of Versailles together did not impress me so much as the single view from the upper terrace of the gardens. It stretches clear over the horizon. You stand on a natural eminence that commands the whole country, and the plan seems to you like some work of the Titans. The long sweep of the avenue, with a breadth of descent that at the first glance takes away your breath, stretching its two lines of gigantic statues and vases to the water level; the wide, slumbering canal at its foot, carrying on the eye to the horizon, like a river of an even flood lying straight through the bosom of the landscape; the side avenues almost as extensive; the palaces in the distant grounds, and the strange union altogether, to an American, of as much extent as the eye can reach, cultivated equally with the trim elegance of a garden—all these, combining together, form a spectacle which nothing but nature's royalty of genius could design, and (to descend ungracefully from the climax) which only the exactions of an unnatural royalty could pay for.

I think the most forcible lesson one learns at Paris is the value of time and money. I have always been told, erroneously, that it was a place to waste both. You could do so much with another hour, if you had it, and buy so much with another dollar, if you could afford it, that the reflected economy upon what you can command, is inevitable. As to the worth of time, for instance, there are some twelve or fourteen gratuitous lectures every day at the Sorbonne, the School of Medicine and the College of France, by men like Cuvier, Say, Spurzheim, and others, each, in his professed pursuit, the most eminent perhaps in the world; and there are the Louvre, and the Royal Library, and the Mazarin Library, and similar public institutions, all open to gratuitous use, with obsequious attendants, warm rooms, materials for writing, and perfect seclusion; to say nothing of the thousand interesting but less useful resorts with which Paris abounds, such as exhibitions of flowers, porcelains, mosaics, and curious handiwork of every description, and (more amusing and time-killing still) the never-ending changes of sights in the public places, from distinguished foreigners down to miracles of educated monkeys. Life seems most provokingly short as you look at it. Then, for money, you are more puzzled how to spend a poor pitiful franc in Paris (it will buy so many things you want) than you would be in America with the outlay of a month's income. Be as idle and extravagant as you will, your idle hours look you in the face as they pass, to know whether, in spite of the increase of their value, you really mean to waste them; and the money that slipped through your pocket you know not how at home, sticks embarrassed to your fingers, from the mere multiplicity of demands made for it. There are shops all over Paris called the "Vingt-cinq-sous," where every article is fixed at that price—twenty five cents! They contain everything you want, except a wife and fire-wood—the only two things difficult to be got in France. (The latter, with or without a pun, is much the dearer of the two.) I wonder that they are not bought out, and sent over to America on speculation. There is scarce an article in them that would not be held cheap with us at five times its purchase. There are bronze standishes for ink, sand, and wafers, pearl paper-cutters, spice-lamps, decanters, essence-bottles, sets of china, table-bells of all devices, mantel ornaments, vases of artificial flowers, kitchen utensils, dog-collars, canes, guard-chains, chessmen whips, hammers, brushes, and everything that is either convenient or pretty. You might freight a ship with them, and all good and well finished, at twenty-five cents the set or article! You would think the man were joking, to walk through his shop.