We are apt to fall into the error of assuming that only
American cities have displaced their centres and changed their
appearance during the last half-century.
The “oldest inhabitant,” with his twice-told tales
of transformations and changes, is to a certain extent
responsible for this; by contrast, we imagine that the capitals
of Europe have always been just as we see them. So strong
is this impression that it requires a serious effort of the
imagination to reconstruct the Paris that our grandparents knew
and admired, few as the years are that separate their day from
ours.
It is, for instance, difficult to conceive of a Paris that
ended at the rue Royale, with only waste land and market gardens
beyond the Madeleine, where to-day so many avenues open their
stately perspectives; yet such was the case! The few fine
residences that existed beyond that point faced the Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, with gardens running back to an unkempt open
country called the Champs Elysées, where an unfinished Arc
de Triomphe stood alone in a wilderness that no one ever dreamed
of traversing.
The fashionable ladies of that time drove in the afternoon
along the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Château
d’Eau, and stopped their ponderous yellow barouches at
Tortoni’s, where ices were served to them in their
carriages, while they chatted with immaculate dandies in
skin-tight nankeen unmentionables, blue swallow-tailed coats, and
furry ‘beaver” hats.
While looking over some books in the company of an old lady
who from time to time opens her store of treasures and recalls
her remote youth at my request, and whose spirituel and
graphic language gives to her souvenirs the air of being stray
chapters from some old-fashioned romance, I received a vivid
impression of how the French capital must have looked fifty years
ago.
Emptying in her company a chest of books that had not seen the
light for several decades, we came across a “Panorama of
the Boulevards,” dated 1845, which proved when unfolded to
be a colored lithograph, a couple of yards long by five or six
inches high, representing the line of boulevards from the
Madeleine to the Place de la Bastille. Each house, almost
each tree, was faithfully depicted, together with the crowds on
the sidewalks and the carriages in the street. The whole
scene was as different from the effect made by that thoroughfare
to-day as though five hundred and not fifty years had elapsed
since the little book was printed. The picture breathed an
atmosphere of calm and nameless quaintness that one finds now
only in old provincial cities which have escaped the ravages of
improvement.
My companion sat with the book unfolded before her, in a
smiling trance. Her mind had turned back to the far-away
days when she first trod those streets a bride, with all the
pleasures and few of the cares of life to think about.
I watched her in silence (it seemed a sacrilege to break in on
such a train of thought), until gradually her eyes lost their
far-away expression, and, turning to me with a smile, she
exclaimed: “How we ever had the courage to appear in the
street dressed as we were is a mystery! Do you see that
carriage?” pointing in the print to a high-swung family
vehicle with a powdered coachman on the box, and two sky-blue
lackeys standing behind. “I can remember, as if it
were yesterday, going to drive with Lady B-, the British
ambassadress, in just such a conveyance. She drove four
horses with feathers on their heads, when she used to come to
Meurice’s for me. I blush when I think that my frock
was so scant that I had to raise the skirt almost to my knees in
order to get into her carriage.
“Why we didn’t all die of pneumonia is another
marvel, for we wore low-necked dresses and the thinnest of
slippers in the street, our heads being about the only part that
was completely covered. I was particularly proud of a
turban surmounted with a bird of paradise, but Lady B--- affected
poke bonnets, then just coming into fashion, so large and so deep
that when one looked at her from the side nothing was visible
except two curls, ‘as damp and as black as
leeches.’ In other ways our toilets were absurdly
unsuited for every-day wear; we wore light scarves over our
necks, and rarely used furlined pelisses.”
Returning to an examination of the panorama, my companion
pointed out to me that there was no break in the boulevards,
where the opera-house, with its seven radiating avenues, now
stands, but a long line of Hôtels, dozing behind high
walls, and quaint two-storied buildings that undoubtedly dated
from the razing of the city wall and the opening of the new
thoroughfare under Louis XV.
A little farther on was the world-famous Maison Dorée,
where one almost expected to see Alfred de Musset and le docteur
Véron dining with Dumas and Eugene Sue.
“What in the name of goodness is that?” I
exclaimed, pointing to a couple of black and yellow monstrosities
on wheels, which looked like three carriages joined together with
a “buggy” added on in front.
“That’s the diligence just arrived from Calais; it
has been two days en route, the passengers sleeping as
best they could, side by side, and escaping from their
confinement only when horses were changed or while stopping for
meals. That high two-wheeled trap with the little
‘tiger’ standing up behind is a tilbury. We
used to see the Count d’Orsay driving one like that almost
every day. He wore butter-colored gloves, and the skirts of
his coat were pleated full all around, and stood out like a
ballet girl’s. It is a pity they have not included
Louis Philippe and his family jogging off to Neuilly in the court
‘carryall,’—the ‘Citizen King,’
with his blue umbrella between his knees, trying to look like an
honest bourgeois, and failing even in that attempt to please the
Parisians.
“We were in Paris in ’48; from my window at
Meurice’s I saw poor old Juste Milieu read his
abdication from the historic middle balcony of the Tuileries, and
half an hour later we perceived the Duchesse
d’Orléans leave the Tuileries on foot, leading her
two sons by the hand, and walk through the gardens and across the
Place de la Concorde to the Corps Législatif, in a last
attempt to save the crown for her son. Futile effort!
That evening the ‘Citizen King’ was hurried through
those same gardens and into a passing cab, en route for a
life exile.
“Our balcony at Meurice’s was a fine point of
observation from which to watch a revolution. With an
opera-glass we could see the mob surging to the sack of the
palace, the priceless furniture and bric-à-brac flung into
the street, court dresses waved on pikes from the tall windows,
and finally the throne brought out, and carried off to be
burned. There was no keeping the men of our party in after
that. They rushed off to have a nearer glimpse of the
fighting, and we saw no more of them until daybreak the following
morning when, just as we were preparing to send for the police,
two dilapidated, ragged, black-faced mortals appeared, in whom we
barely recognized our husbands. They had been impressed
into service and passed their night building barricades. My
better half, however, had succeeded in snatching a handful of the
gold fringe from the throne as it was carried by, an act of
prowess that repaid him for all his troubles and fatigue.
“I passed the greater part of forty-eight hours on our
balcony, watching the mob marching by, singing La
Marseillaise, and camping at night in the streets. It
was all I could do to tear myself away from the window long
enough to eat and write in my journal.
“There was no Avenue de l’Opéra then.
The trip from the boulevards to the Palais-Royal had to be made
by a long detour across the Place Vendôme (where, by the
bye, a cattle market was held) or through a labyrinth of narrow,
bad-smelling little streets, where strangers easily lost their
way. Next to the boulevards, the Palais-Royal was the
centre of the elegant and dissipated life in the capital.
It was there we met of an afternoon to drink chocolate at the
‘Rotonde,’ or to dine at ‘Les Trois
Frères Provençaux,’ and let our husbands have
a try at the gambling tables in the Passage
d’Orléans.
“No one thought of buying jewelry anywhere else.
It was from the windows of its shops that the fashions started on
their way around the world. When Victoria as a bride was
visiting Louis Philippe, she was so fascinated by the aspect of
the place that the gallant French king ordered a miniature copy
of the scene, made in papier-mâché, as a
present for his guest, a sort of gigantic dolls’ house in
which not only the palace and its long colonnades were
reproduced, but every tiny shop and the myriad articles for sale
were copied with Chinese fidelity. Unfortunately the
pear-headed old king became England’s uninvited guest
before this clumsy toy was finished, so it never crossed the
Channel, but can be seen to-day by any one curious enough to
examine it, in the Musée Carnavalet.
“Few of us realize that the Paris of Charles X. and
Louis Philippe would seem to us now a small, ill-paved, and
worse-lighted provincial town, with few theatres or hotels,
communicating with the outer world only by means of a horse-drawn
‘post,’ and practically farther from London than
Constantinople is to-day. One feels this isolation in the
literature of the time; brilliant as the epoch was, the horizon
of its writers was bounded by the boulevards and the Faubourg
Saint-Germain.”
Dumas says laughingly, in a letter to a friend: “I have
never ventured into the unexplored country beyond the Bastille,
but am convinced that it shelters wild animals and
savages.” The wit and brains of the period were
concentrated into a small space. Money-making had no more
part in the programme of a writer then than an introduction into
“society.” Catering to a foreign market and
snobbishness were undreamed-of degradations. Paris had not
yet been turned into the Foire du Monde that she has since
become, with whole quarters given over to the use of
foreigners,—theatres, restaurants, and hotels created only
for the use of a polyglot population that could give lessons to
the people around Babel’s famous “tower.”
