03.13. Paris
Chapter 13 Paris.
Napoleon -- His Tomb -- Pantheon -- The Morgue -- The Place De La Concorde -- Names That Are Misnomers -- Pere La Chaise -- The Bastile -- The Eiffel Tower -- An Evening Scene This entire land speaks of Bonaparte, at least to the traveler. Whether one hurries through France on the flying train, or tarries in Paris, the most prominent figure of the past is felt to be that of the Corsican. He has projected himself into the present and impressed his personality on this country in a most remarkable way. As you glance down the long broad thoroughfares seaming the land, you see him in fancy leading a group of horsemen, himself far in the front, with head slightly bent, with knit brow and compressed lip, while the hand jerks impatiently at the rein as he sweeps along. Again on yonder eminence we behold another group of stalwart-looking men in uniform standing near and about one of small figure clad in gray cloak and three-cornered hat. The white clouds drifting on the horizon answer in the mental picture for the smoke of the distant battlefield. But oftenest do we see him in Paris, not only in painting and statue, not only in the letter "N" that we find in many places, but through the magical power of association. The very names of streets and buildings are able to bring him up. The banks of the Seine recall the time when he, in a fit of despondency, meditated taking his life by plunging in its waves. The sight of the libraries bring to mind the pale young student, who for long months sought their quiet shadows, and filled his capacious mind with knowledge of every kind, so that when his country called for such a man, he was able to stand forth and say, I am ready.
Within one block of my room is the street where he directed and discharged his cannon upon the mob, and France for the first time heard the voice and tread of her future master. Works of art by thousands in galleries, and playing fountains, and stately columns, and majestic arches, and radiating boulevards all alike speak of the great first Napoleon. The Hotel des Invalides is now his last resting-place. At 12 o’clock every day a cannon is fired close by in the barrack yards. So that the sleeping body of the Emperor still feels the vibration of the sounds of war. The roar of cannon was to him in life a well-beloved voice, so that the daily regular boom of the great piece of artillery is a fitting and appropriate sound, although now it is a requiem. The magnificent sarcophagus that contains his body, rests in the center of a circular crypt of polished granite, that is twenty feet in depth, and nearly forty in width. As I leaned on the encircling balustrade and looked down at the sleeping dust, I recalled a line of a song composed in his honor many years ago, a song, by the way, of great pathos and beauty-- "No sound can awake him to glory again." The cannon sends forth its heavy boom every day, the building trembles under the discharge, the body of the dead man quivers, but the eyes refuse to open and the sleeper slumbers on, awaiting the voice of the Son of God, who alone can awake the dead.
I observed that Josephine was not by his side. As the divorced wife she could not be, nor did he deserve to have her there. She rests, I think, at Malmaison.
Very wide apart, I notice, are the tombs of people who were very close to each other in life. This separation of the graves of loved ones is one of the sad features of this world of ours.
Mary of Scotland is in London, while her husband sleeps in Edinburgh. Queen Elizabeth rests in Westminster Abbey, and the man she loved is entombed in Warwick. The graves of almost every household offer a study here, and a most pathetic study at that. The tombs of three of Napoleon’ s brothers, Jerome, Joseph and Louis, are to be seen in room-like recesses close by. He lifted them into prominence in life, and continued to do the same in death. How often we see a large family upheld and held together by a single member. It was so in the far distant days of Joseph in Egypt, and will continue to be so, I suppose, until the end of time. The fickleness of the Parisian populace is proverbial. Perhaps no one sight so forcibly brings the thought back to mind as the contemplation of the statue of Marshal Key. At one time he was a demi-god, and fairly worshiped by the people, then he was shot, and then after that his statue was erected upon the spot where he was executed.
I have been much struck with the street statues of this city. As I looked into the history of the men who were accorded this honor I made this discovery, that the method of Paris is, either to kill a man and then make a statue of him, or make a statue and then kill the man. If choice had to be made here some people might feel a little puzzled and reasonably ask for time.
I visited the Pantheon. This is built in imitation of the structure in Rome that bears the same name. It is used as a burial-place of the mighty dead of France. Victor Hugo has thus been honored. A feeling of a conglomerate character swept over me as I overheard a young traveler of undoubted country air say very earnestly to another person, standing near, "that Victor Hugo was a very fine old man!"
Fortunately the great author was dead. For some minutes I walked on through the building with a feeling in my heart that found expression in the mental whisper -- O fame! The walls of the Pantheon are being covered with paintings of colossal size. The history of Joan of Arc is thus powerfully and felicitously represented in four scenes: The Call to the Life Work, the Warrior, the Crowning of the King, and the Death of the Martyr. They all hold the visitor with a deep fascination. Not far from this spot is a picture representing the beheading of St. Dennis. The saint is portrayed with bent body and on his knees, in the act of picking up the decapitated head with his hands.
Although the painting was intended to be very solemn and awe-inspiring, it really requires an effort to keep from smiling! for as the saint holds his head before him in his hands it looks for all the world like he was gazing at and examining it microscopically and analytically for his own amusement or information, through his shoulders.
Near by St. Dennis, and on the ground lies a man who has suffered decapitation likewise, and whose head rests several feet away from his body. A gentleman near me of an inquiring turn of mind turned suddenly to the guide and cried out: "I say, how is this? Here is St. Dennis beheaded and yet picking up his head, and here is another man who has lost his head, and yet he is lying still with his head by him -- how do you explain that?"
"Oh," replied the guide, "St. Dennis was a saint and could pick up his head; but this other man is a poor devil of a fellow and had to leave his head on the ground!" The laugh went up from the crowd. I looked at the guide, and he had turned, and with his shoulders shrugged to his very ears, was walking away with his arms extended like the wings of a bird.
"Bravo!" I mentally ejaculated; here is a stab at Roman Catholic folly in the heart of Catholic France, and by one of her sons. A few more blows like that, a little more blood-letting like that, and the victory of common sense and truth is bound to come." The Morgue is a ghastly place to visit. With no feeling of vain curiosity, but actually with a shrinking, reluctant spirit I entered the building. You pass in from the street through a door into a passage that runs parallel with the sidewalk. The inner wall of the passage is made of glass, and on the other side of the glass, ranged in a row, stare at you the suicides of the week. These were not all the self-inflicted murders, but were simply those who have not been recognized. On a placard on the wall I read the names of twenty. Eighteen of the twenty were men. Women with all of their physical weakness, and in face of the fact that they are constantly called the "weaker vessel," can endure much more suffering than the strong sex. With all of the bitterness of poverty and consequent hard work, and with all the unkind treatment, in addition, coming from the hands of brutal men, it is a rare thing for a woman to commit suicide. The bodies are placed here for identification. And I could not but reflect, as I tarried for a moment in the sad place, upon the agonizing scenes that had there transpired, as wife or mother recognized suddenly and, it may be, unexpectedly the face, cold in death, of husband or son. Poor, giddy, wine-drinking, pleasure-loving, Sabbath-breaking Paris continues to lead all the other cities in the matter of suicides. The Place de la Concorde is a large stone-paved square at the head of the avenue called Champs Elysees, and near the river Seine. It was in this square that the guillotine was erected and employed so busily in the time of the Revolution. Here Louis X VI and Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland and a host of others met untimely deaths. The blood of the best and noblest in France poured here in torrents. Here women knitted as they watched the flash of the descending blade of the guillotine, while the mob raged and roared like wild animals, as head after head was lifted up, and one victim after another stepped from the cart to the platform of death. And yet they call this spot the Place de la Concorde!
What a way men have of misnaming things! What is in a name after all? Certainly some of them sound like a sarcasm -- a ghastly piece of irony. Take the word gentleman; is he always a gentle man? And the word nobleman; O how noble are some of the nobility! Dwell a moment on the term "Good Queen Bess." As the reader recalls her paroxysms of anger, her inordinate vanity, her imprisonment of people, and the deaths she had inflicted, the words Good Queen Bess become a fine piece of satire! May we all be saved from such goodness! Henry the Eighth was called the Defender of the Faith. What faith? Doubtless the faith he had in himself for if he ever had any other, it does not so appear in his life. And here right before me is a place that will be forever remembered for its scenes of discord, strife, and bloodshed; and, behold, it is called the Place de la Concorde!
Pere-la-Chaise is the famous cemetery of Paris. The Prince of Wales remarked after his visit to America, that almost the first thing said to him on reaching one of our great cities would be, "Have you visited our cemetery?" In absence of historic places, this was the next best thing that a young nation could offer. In Pere-la-Chaise there is history as well as tombstones. I was told that here was one of the last stands made by the Communists, and that they fought desperately to the very end in the midst of these graves, and even in the tombs themselves. In the southern part of the cemetery is the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. I was informed that two hundred thousand people visit it annually, and that the younger class keep it supplied with flowers. As I was looking at the recumbent figures carved in stone I saw a lady connected with a traveling party stoop and pick a sprig of grass that grew beside the monument. The little occurrence, done quickly and with evident embarrassment, showed an amount of morbid sentimentality and a certain lack of moral fiber that was surprising, at least, to one individual. The Bastille as the reader knows, is no more. The spot is now marked by a large square, from the center of which shoots up a monumental shaft one hundred and fifty-four feet in height.
Many of the stones of the ancient prison have been built into the bridges that cross the river Seine; the dungeons have been filled up, the chains are gone; the key, a thing of most enormous size, I saw at Mt. Vernon on the banks of the Potomac; so that the prison is pretty effectually scattered. But all the razing and removing of this building of horror can never obliterate from the minds of men the memory of the scenes of suffering and torture occurring on this spot for centuries. Much as we know of these dark transactions of the past, how little really of the full history do we know. The unwritten and unknown records of the Bastille transcend conception. The Eiffel Tower was of course ascended. Think of standing on the top of a slender spire nearly one thousand feet high, which an excited fancy would have you believe is bending and swaying in the wind. The traveler may leave his hotel with the full intention of mounting to the dizzy summit, but when he reaches the base of the tower and looks up, he has to go through sundry additional process of mental bracing and determinations of will. Some, I doubt not, turn back at this point, and many have to be encouraged. One lady after considerable delay took a hesitating and woe begone seat in the elevator with the solemn words: "Well, if I must, I must!" Later on she ejaculated to her son, a lad of fourteen: "Come here, my son, and sit close to me." The husband, a patient-looking man was not invited to a like proximity.
There are three stops or platforms connected with the tower. From the third and last is obtained the lofty and wide-spread view for which the structure is famous. It is said that it commands a prospect of fifty miles. Paris lies like a map at your feet, while the Seine unrolls like a silver ribbon in the midst of an emerald landscape and finally disappears in the far distance.
Such, however, is the great height of the tower, that the inequalities of land in and about Paris, and that gives it much of its charm, are literally flattened out and lost to the vision. A view of the city from a lesser altitude is more correct, satisfying, and beautiful. This outlook can be had from the Trocadero Palace.
I have often heard people say that whenever they stood upon very lofty places they felt a strange and almost irresistible inclination to cast themselves down. So far from this being the case with the writer he was distinctly conscious of both a desire and determination not to do any such foolish thing, but to remain on the platform and when he returned, to come down by way of the elevator. A man seen on the ground from this height is a small sized spectacle never to be forgotten. As I looked down and saw a black dot moving about on the earth’s surface with two little specks alternately appearing and disappearing under the dot, I said, as I recognized the dot to be a man and the specks to be legs, is it possible that such a tiny creature as that could ever inspire fear in the breast of anything! A great courage seemed to arise within me, as I contemplated the human ants rushing around one thousand feet below me. Perhaps it was the distance that inspired the courage, but the wonder, nevertheless, arose that I should ever have dreaded those insects in the dust. Then came pity for them in their low estate, and so by and by I came down and stood with them and was like them once more. On the whole I prefer the horizontal view of my fellow-man. It is best every way. You can see into his eyes, and all but hear the beating of his heart. The lofty observation of men has been the trouble of the world, and will be, I fear, for generations to come.
It is very difficult to recognize a man, and what is in a man from altitudes of any kind. May we all come down from Eiffel Tower, especially those of us who are called to the work of the pulpit. The people will be very glad to see us; and all of us who come down will be glad, now and forevermore, for the descent. I have remembered very clearly for years the description given of a certain minister, that he "was invisible six days and incomprehensible the seventh." He certainly must have been on Eiffel Tower. Let us all descend, even though we have to jump the distance. If we will not come down, may a kind Providence knock us down, and keep us among the people where we belong. An evening walk by the banks of the Seine and a meditative pause in the square at the head of the Champs Elysees marked the close of my last day in Paris. The Arch of Triumph loomed up in the distance against the sunset; the roar of the city came with subdued sound through the Tulleries Gardens in one direction, and from over the river in another; the avenues were alive with equipages that flashed along; pedestrians were thronging the beautiful walks of the park; children were sailing their boats in the miniature lake, or strolling with their nurses under the trees. It was a scene of life and gayety; and yet the feeling left in the heart as I turned homeward was one of melancholy. Several causes conspired to produce this, but the one that predominated, was the thought that this busy, beautiful, populous city was without God.
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