Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

CHAPTER XXXV.
SOME OCCUPANTS OF MONTPARNASSE

The Boulevard Montparnasse – The Cemetery – Father Loriquet – Hégésippe Moreau – Sainte-Beuve

TO return to the Carmelite Monastery and the Rue de Rennes, which continues its course until it reaches the Boulevard Montparnasse. This boulevard is a section of the road round Paris, formed under Louis XV., together with all the southern boulevards, in virtue of letters patent. Until recently the Boulevard Montparnasse was full of restaurants and dancing-places, among the latter the most celebrated being La Grande Chaumière, much patronised by students in the time of Louis Philippe and of Gavarni. Since the construction of the great terminus of the Western Railway the boulevard in question has become transformed. It has been invaded by industry and commerce. The hovels, booths, and public gardens of former days have been replaced by well-built houses, many of which, with the studios attached to them, are occupied by painters and sculptors.

The name of this boulevard has a genuine literary origin. The land was given in the sixteenth century, with the high ground in the immediate neighbourhood, to the scholars of the different Paris colleges, who assembled on its slopes and summit to read poems, and to discuss matters of literature and art. The height of the so-called “mount” is on a level with that of the roof of the railway station; but the railway line is itself considerably above the level of the boulevard. The region of Mount Parnassus has its theatre and its cemetery. At the former many a dramatic author, afterwards to become celebrated, has brought out his first piece; in the latter numbers of writers and painters who, without perhaps failing in their art, failed in life, have found repose, with the poet Hégésippe Moreau among them. Here, too, lie Henri Regnault, the young painter who was killed in the sortie towards Buzenval on the 19th of January, 1871; the surgeon Lisfranc, self-declared rival of the illustrious Dupuytren, whom, in his lectures, he used freely to describe as “This brigand from over the water” (Lisfranc was attached to the Charité on the left bank, Dupuytren to the Hôtel Dieu on the island); Father Loriquet, author of the celebrated “History of France,” in which Napoleon Bonaparte is represented as one of the generals of Louis XVIII., in whose name he gains important victories; Sainte-Beuve, the famous critic; Baron Gérard, the painter; Rude, the sculptor; Orfila, the great chemist, who discovered arsenic in the body of M. Lafarge – whereupon Raspail, the chemist retained for the defence, declared that he would find as much arsenic in a pair of old window curtains; the four sergeants of Rochelle, whose unhappy fate has been told in connection with Bicêtre, where for a time they were confined; the philosopher Jouffroy, and the famous writer on political and religious subjects, Montalembert.

Hégésippe Moreau, just mentioned as one of the most interesting tenants of the Montparnasse cemetery, was the author of a terrible poem, “To Hunger,” – with which he was only too intimately acquainted. But his reputation rests on a collection of poems gracefully entitled “Le Myosotis.”

Father Loriquet was one of the most remarkable historians of ancient or modern times. Holding individually, perhaps, the doctrine ascribed to Jesuits collectively by their enemies, that the end justifies the means, and resolved in his “History of France” to work according to the motto of his Order, “Ad majorem Dei gloriam,” he rearranged the historical facts so as to make them accord, not with what did happen, but with what in his opinion ought to have happened – a mode of writing history not indeed peculiar to himself. The work was published immediately after the Restoration, and, according to the titlepage, was expressly designed “for the instruction of youth.” It is said to be still used in certain ultra-religious boarding schools, where no words are looked upon as so odious as those of “Revolution” and “Republic.”

Speaking of the American War of Independence, this strange historian writes: “Louis XVI. did not think it just or politic to take the part of rebels, who claimed rights for subjects against kings. But sacrificing inopportunely his own intelligence to that which he thought he recognised among his councillors, he acknowledged the independence of the United States of America” (vol. ii., p. 129).

Here are some more extracts from this curious work: —

“Louis XVI. committed the fault of tolerating an illegal meeting of factious persons in the Tennis Court. He should have known that a few drops of impure blood shed in time are the salvation of empires (page 130).

“In the midst of convulsive movements the assembly, after a splendid repast, held the midnight meeting so well known under the name of the sitting of the 4th of August. There, without discussion, without deliberation, inspired solely by the vapours of wine, it decreed a number of unjust things against landed proprietors and the owners of feudal rights (page 144).

“It was the evening of the 5th of October. The most alarming news was being circulated in Versailles. The days of the royal family, above all those of the queen, were seriously menaced. The aim of the conspirators was, by intimidating Louis XVI., to compel him to fly and quit the throne, which the Duke of Orleans proposed to seize. But the king having declared that he would not take flight, the duke and his accomplices resolved to get rid of him by assassination. It was in a church dedicated to St. Louis that the horrible plot was prepared. At daybreak the signal was given. Thirty thousand assassins, intoxicated with wine and debauchery, threw themselves into the palace, calling out, ‘Long live our Orleans King!’ (page 146).

“Bonaparte, having by his crimes reached the summit of power, was proclaimed emperor.” In his narrative of the retreat from Moscow Father Loriquet compares the French to Pharaoh’s Egyptians lost in the snow instead of being drowned in the Red Sea. At Fontainebleau, in 1814, when the allies were approaching Paris, Napoleon, according to the historian in question, was suddenly informed by his generals that he was no longer emperor, and that France had a king. “This information made him shed many tears, and he only seemed to be consoled when the allies ceded to him the little island of Elba with an income of 6,000,000 francs.”

The poet Hégésippe Moreau had but little in common with the Jesuit father whose last resting-place he shares. As a writer he is remembered solely by the volume of poems previously referred to, called “Le Myosotis.” As a man, little is known of him except that he was miserably poor – obliged, during one period of his life, to sleep in the trees of the Champs Élysées and of the Bois de Boulogne. In a touching letter of his, preserved by one of his biographers, he tells his correspondent how, being invited to a fashionable evening party, he found nothing there to eat but a little fruit jelly, when he had hoped to have the opportunity of dining. He was, in fact, in the position of that unfortunate young man in M. Ponsard’s Honneur et Argent who exclaims pathetically: “Je porte des gants blancs, et je n’ai pas dîné!” – “I have white gloves on and I’ve had no dinner!” One terrible incident is related of Hégésippe Moreau. During the cholera year of 1832 he was carried in a state of exhaustion, caused solely by hunger, to the hospital of La Charité, where, in the hope of catching the epidemic and dying of it, he rolled himself up in the sheets of a cholera patient who had but lately expired. Contagion, however, spared him, and wanting nothing but food and rest he was soon restored to health. On leaving the hospital he walked on foot to his native town of Provins, where, such was the unpractical character of his mind, he not only started a journal, but a journal in verse. Diogenes it was called, and his only reason for starting it in the little town of Provins, where it could not possibly find a sufficient number of readers, seems to have been that he had influence and credit at a local printing-office, where he had at one time been employed as proof-reader. Diogenes had doubtless been suggested by the Nemesis of Barthélémy, which, however, was published not in a little provincial town, but at Paris. Only a few numbers of Diogenes appeared; and in his rage at not being appreciated the satirist filled his dying number with the bitterest attacks on leading inhabitants of the town. This led to a duel, and obliged him once more to quit Provins for Paris.

It is related of Hégésippe Moreau that in the revolutionary days of 1830, fighting at the barricades, he wounded a Swiss soldier, and then, taking pity on the man, gave him his own coat, to enable him to get away in disguise.

Let us pass, however, to a writer enjoying far more celebrity than either the graceful poet Hégésippe Moreau or the grotesque historiographer, Father Loriquet. It was probably from his English mother that Sainte-Beuve derived that taste for certain English poets, with Cowper, Wordsworth, and Shelley among them, whom he attempted to imitate in his earliest flights. His mother, having been left a widow, sent him for preliminary study to the College of Boulogne, his native town; afterwards transferring him, for the completion of his general education, to Paris. At length he commenced the study of medicine, urged by his mother, who is said to have distrusted the literary aspirations which her son had already manifested. But after waiting for a year as assistant-physician at the hospital of Saint-Louis, he felt that he had missed his true vocation, and, without completely abandoning medicine, wrote a series of historical, philosophical, and critical articles for the Globe, directed at that time by M. Dubois, formerly one of his professors. Sainte-Beuve was then living in the Rue de Vaugirard, a few doors from the house inhabited by Victor Hugo; and when the latter changed his abode and installed himself in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, accident once more threw Sainte-Beuve within easy distance of the poet. Community of literary taste produced an intimate acquaintance between the neighbours, and Sainte-Beuve took part in the new intellectual movement of which Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas were the originators and chiefs. The New School, breaking from classical traditions, turned back its attention to the sixteenth century, and to a group of writers greatly obscured by the literary lustre of the two centuries which followed. Sainte-Beuve set himself to study Ronsard and Du Bellay; and in due time he had an opportunity of showing that he had not studied them in vain. The Academy having, in 1827, proposed as the subject of its Prize for Eloquence a “Picture of French Poetry in the Sixteenth Century,” Daunou persuaded the critic of the Globe to compete, and placed at the young man’s disposition his own rich library. Sainte-Beuve’s essay did not gain the prize. But it was published by its author, who printed with it an edition of the “Selected Works” of Ronsard; and the work, which the Academy had rejected, took rank ultimately as the first authority on the period of French literature with which it deals.

Whilst throwing himself into romanticism Sainte-Beuve was not blind to the defects of the New School, though he could not himself, as poet, avoid the very faults against which he had warned others. In reference to Victor Hugo’s “Odes and Ballads” he wrote as follows: “M. Hugo’s first inspiration is invariably true and profound; the whole mischief arises from extravagant similes, frequent digressions, and over-refinement of analysis… There are forced metaphors, moreover, improprieties of language, ellipses in the series of ideas, and prosaic passages in the midst of the most dazzling poetry.” Victor Hugo was naturally not delighted with this criticism. But he encouraged the critic, and persuaded him to publish his “Poésiés de Joseph Delorme,” of which Sainte-Beuve had read him some specimens. Having once taken up with romanticism, Sainte-Beuve went at least as far as his master, and committed precisely those faults which he had censured; for eccentric lines, prosaic phrases, and outrageous metaphors abound in his collection, although these eccentricities, far from injuring the volume, seem to have caused its success. People who liked everything that was odd or audacious read the book, and praised it for faults at which scholars would knit their brows.

The Revolution of 1830 opened a new sphere of activity to Sainte-Beuve. Hitherto he had occupied himself little with politics; but now he plied his pen freely in the Globe as a supporter of those principles of humanitarianism so strongly championed by Pierre Leroux, who had become director of the journal in question. Subsequently he undertook a political campaign in the National with Armand Carrel. In his various writings, both in and out of the newspapers, he showed himself inconstant to any fixed principles. His whole life, in fact, was composed of intellectual changes and variations. These, however, were simply the outcome of a mind curious to fathom all kinds of ideas, to penetrate within them, in order to extract from them their sap or their honey. Approaching the teachers in order to appreciate them as well as their doctrines, he made himself their pupil, sat at their feet, and quitted them as soon as he had completed his analysis. He himself was quite conscious of this tendency, and confessed that even when he entered Victor Hugo’s school of romanticism he only assumed as much of that enthusiasm as might be expected to characterise a devotee. If, however, he was on this, and on other similar occasions, consciously insincere, his fault is largely redeemed by the genuine ardour with which he played the neophyte at each fresh initiation; by the respect which he always entertained for his masters, even after he had changed them; and by the universality of the knowledge which he derived from these studies, pursued, as they were, in a spirit of adventure or of intellectual speculation. He sketches his own character admirably in some advice which he gave to a young man in 1864; nor is it difficult to see that he was consciously proposing himself as an example: “Seek the most noble friendships,” he wrote, “and bring to them the benevolence and sincerity of an open soul, desirous, above all things, of admiring; pour into criticism – emulous sister of your poetry – your ardour, sympathy, and all that is purest in your nature; eulogise, lay your eloquence at the service of new talents, usually so much contested and combated, and do not forsake them until the day when they withdraw themselves from the right path and falsify their promises: after that treat them with reserve. Incessantly vary your studies, cultivate your mind in every direction; do not narrow yourself to one party, one school, or one idea; let it see the dawn break on every horizon; maintain your independence and your dignity; lend yourself for a time, if necessary, but do not give yourself away. Remain judicious and clear-sighted even in your weaker moments; and even if you do not say the whole truth, never utter what is false. Never allow fatigue to lay a hold upon you; never feel that you have attained your goal. At the age when others are reposing or relaxing themselves, redouble your courage and ardour; recommence like a novice, run your career a second time, renew yourself.” Such was precisely the course which Sainte-Beuve himself followed. When he wrote the above lines he was reviewing his own life.

Votary of romanticism as he had been, Sainte-Beuve adopted on one occasion a course which many would have considered the reverse of romantic. Challenged to a duel by M. Lecaze for words which he had uttered in the Senate, he replied that he would fight his adversary with no other weapon than that with which they were both familiar – the pen.

The death of Sainte-Beuve was preceded by cruel bodily tortures, and, as he saw his end approaching, he took precautions to keep the priests away from his bedside, and to divest his interment of all solemnity. By his testamentary wishes none of the associations to which he belonged, neither the Academy nor the Senate, was to be represented at his funeral; and no oration was to be pronounced over his tomb. “Finally,” he added, “I wish to be carried straight from my home to the cemetery of Montparnasse, and to be placed in the vault where my mother lies, without passing through the church, which I could not do without violating my sentiments.” His dying directions were obeyed to the letter.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
SPORTS AND DIVERSIONS

Le “Sport”– Longchamps – Versailles Races – Fontainebleau – The Seine – Swimming Baths – The Art of Book-collecting

THE Seine at Paris is the scene not of much boating, but of a good deal of swimming. Baths on the Thames have never been successful: they abound on the Seine, and the Parisians, whatever they may be as boatmen – “canotiers,” to use their own word – excel as swimmers.

The French are not naturally a sporting nation. In the first place they have found it necessary to borrow our English word for their pastimes; and their spelling of sportsman as “sportman” is somewhat indicative of their generally unsuccessful imitation of English sports.

The French are themselves conscious of the failure of this imitation. “Sport,” says a French writer, “is an English word which signifies literally relaxation, distraction, and which the English employ, by extension, to designate the pleasures to which powerful aristocrats or opulent citizens abandon themselves as a relaxation from the serious labours of political life or the absorbing occupations of commerce. In “sport” they include large hunts and shooting expeditions such as can be practised on vast estates, together with betting, which involves millions of pounds sterling, riding and driving, fencing, boxing, swimming, skating; everything which calls into play the forces and energy of the body, to the too frequent neglect of mental activity.

“We have adopted the word and attempted the thing. But independently of the fact that our French society lacks some of the fundamental conditions which, in this respect, English society possesses, we have done what imitators generally do: we have diminished, sometimes even travestied the model. Large aristocratic hunts have become impossible on our democratic and parcelled-out soil. Well-bred horses cost a great deal of money, and the instability of fortunes is an obstacle to fine stables. The most reckless of our millionaires only hazard a few thousand francs in the way of bets, and it is now generally understood that when a “louis” is spoken of on the turf, the ambitious word must be translated into the more modest expression, “twenty sous.” … Even fencing is abandoned to fiction and the stage. Duellists who are at all serious must go beyond the frontier to find a ground which will place combatants and seconds beyond the reach of the French law. The police-court of the nineteenth century is perhaps more dreaded than was the scaffold of Richelieu.”

Parisian summers, this same writer goes on to observe, are on the whole too cold for bathing, and Parisian winters too hot for skating.

Unquestionably horse-racing has taken a certain hold on the French, though it is true that the crowds who frequent the most popular races do not confine their attention, or their conversation, to the horses or the stakes, but regard the event principally as a fête.

It is at the hippodrome of the Bois de Boulogne (or Longchamps, as it is also called) that the most largely attended races occur. A minimum charge of a franc is made for admission, to stand or walk about outside the ropes which mark off the course. For the reserved places higher prices are charged: five francs to the pavilions, twenty francs to the weighing enclosure, fifteen francs for a one-horse carriage, twenty francs for a carriage with more than one horse, and so on. The races of La Marche are in the form of steeple-chases. The Château de La Marche stands in a park at a short distance from Ville d’Avray and Saint-Cloud; and it is in the park that the races take place.

The races of the Bois de Vincennes are less fashionable than those of Longchamps and of La Marche, perhaps because the approach to Vincennes through crowded streets is less attractive than the drive through the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne.

The races of Chantilly, founded in 1834 under the patronage of the Dukes of Orleans and of Nemours, are run twice a year on the spacious meadows which extend right and left of the magnificent stables of the château of the Condés. The first races are fixed for the second fortnight of May. The later series, those of the autumn meeting, are held in September and October. The last race of the season is for the grand prize of the Jockey Club. The racecourse of Chantilly describes an ellipsis measuring some 2,000 metres. Several stands have been erected opposite the stables: prices of admission to the various places as at Paris. At Chantilly are the principal training establishments.

The Versailles races are run on the plain of Satory, where Napoleon III. held some of his most brilliant reviews. They take place in May and June.

At Fontainebleau the races are run on a course cut through the part of the forest known as the Valley of the Solle. From various woody heights the spectator, well protected from the sun, can obtain an excellent view of the running. Shooting is practised at a club in the little town of Argenteuil, close to Paris, where the society of Parisian Riflemen is established. Candidates duly proposed and seconded are put up for election, and, if admitted, pay ten francs entrance money and an annual subscription of fifty francs. The organ of the society is the well-known sporting paper, the Journal des Chasseurs.

The canotiers and canotières of the Seine are counted by thousands. They all seem to row more for amusement than for exercise and pace. The principal ports of the Parisian navy are Charenton above bridge, and Asnières below. Charenton may be reached by the Lyons Railway: the charming Asnières (famous for its balls) by the Saint-Germain and Versailles line. The water-side restaurants are organised in view of the canotiers, and appeal specially to this floating population.

If the Seine is remarkable for its swimming baths and, at some little distance on each side of Paris, for its innumerable boats with rowers and rowed in gay fantastic costumes, one bank of the Seine, the left, is celebrated for its stalls of second-hand books. It was at a curiosity shop on one of the quays of the left bank that Balzac’s “Peau de Chagrin” or “Chagreen Skin” was offered for sale. It was at a neighbouring bookstall that the poor student in the “Vie de Bohème” sold his Greek books for little more than the price of waste paper in order to buy medicine for the dying mistress of his friend. It is not at the bookstalls of the Quai d’Orsay that one would look for the rarest editions, though rare editions may here be found. There are connoisseurs who seem to spend every day and all day long at the bookstalls of the quay; resembling the celebrated English bibliophile, Lord Spencer, who remained an entire year at Rome, visiting neither St. Peter’s, nor the Coliseum, nor the Vatican, but only the old bookshops. When he had once found the Martial of Sweynheym and Pannartz dated 1473 he went straight back to London. Such a passion looks like insanity; but it is at least a respectable, innocent kind of madness. To have a genuine passion for books is to care neither for cards, nor for good living, nor for useless luxury, nor for racehorses, nor for political intrigues, nor for ruinous love affairs. The bibliophile is never troubled by the storms of political life. Pixéricourt, the author of thirty amusing or terrible novels, would be forgotten in France but for the rare editions that he collected in his library, and which after his death did more for his reputation, at the sale of his books, than all his works of fiction had done. Few writers of the day grudged him his talent or his success; but many envied him his “Imitation of Jesus Christ,” given to the monk Laurence “by his very humble servant, Pierre Corneille.” His Elzevirs and Baskervilles, for which Holland and China had furnished their rarest paper, England and France their best engravers, Russia and Morocco their incomparable leather, filled amateurs with enthusiasm. A great French book-collector, Grolier, had adopted this motto, “For myself and my friends.” Charles Nodier wrote for Pixéricourt an epigraph to be inscribed inside his books which, if somewhat selfish, was at least true:

 
Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prêté,
Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gâté.⁴
 

The bookstall-keeper acquires gradually a knowledge of the finest or, if not the finest, the most curious editions; and he would be but a poor dealer were he unable to judge of their value. At one time the Pont-Neuf was full of bookshops; and the second-hand dealers in books had their stalls in the Cité, close to Notre Dame and to the Palace of Justice, as well as on the Place de Grèves. But they are now nearly all to be found on the parapets of the left bank.

The picture-dealers, at one time numerous on the quays of the left bank of the Seine, have for years past been gradually disappearing. It was in the curiosity shop already mentioned in connection with Balzac’s “Peau de Chagrin” that a certain Christ, by Raphael, was supposed to be kept hidden away like a treasure. That, however, was more than sixty years ago; and no masterpieces by Raphael are now to be found in the curiosity shops of the left bank. The one place for buying and selling pictures is the Hôtel Drouot, on the other side of the river. Here pictures are sold by auction at the hands of official auctioneers and authorised brokers. In addition to the purchase-money five per cent. must be paid in the way of fees and for the cost of the sale. This charge is thought exorbitant, and it has not been forgotten that at the sale of Marshal Soult’s pictures, when Murillo’s “Conception” was purchased by the Government for the Square Room of the Louvre, nearly 30,000 francs commission had to be paid independently of the 586,000 francs, which was the adjudicated price. The sales about to take place are announced on the walls of the Hôtel Drouot; also in the columns of certain journals, such as the Moniteur des Ventes or the Chronique des Arts.