Old and New Paris Part 8

It was early on the morning of Friday, July 22, 1836, that Armand Carrel and M. de Girardin found themselves face to face in the Bois de Vincennes.

While the pistols were being loaded, Carrel said to M. de Girardin, "Should chance be against me and you should afterwards write my life, you will, in all honour, adhere strictly and simply to the facts?" "Rest a.s.sured," replied his adversary. The seconds had measured a distance of forty paces; the combatants were to advance within twenty of each other.

Armand Carrel immediately took his place and advanced, presenting, despite the urgent entreaties of M. Ambert that he would show less front, the whole breadth of his person to his adversary's aim. M. de Girardin having also advanced some paces, both parties fired nearly at the same instant, and both fell wounded, the one in the leg, the other in the groin.

"I saw him," wrote Louis Blanc some time afterwards, "as he lay; his pale features expressing pa.s.sion in repose. His att.i.tude was firm, inflexible, martial, like that of a soldier who slumbers on the eve of battle."

M. de Girardin was profoundly grieved at the result of the duel, and he made a vow never to fight again. Many years afterwards, under the Republic of 1848, he visited the grave of the man he had killed, to express his regret and ask for pardon in the name of the form of Government to which he had now become a convert, and which Carrel had always placed above every other.

The duelling chronicles of the Bois de Vincennes would lead us far away from the Paris of to-day. It may be mentioned, however, that in this wood Alexandre Dumas the elder fought his famous duel with a _collaborateur_, who claimed to have written the whole of the _Tour de Nesle_ and who, undoubtedly, supplied to the skilful dramatist the framework of the piece.

Dumas was in all truth a skilful dramatist, though one may hesitate to give him the t.i.tle of dramatic poet, which he loved to claim. "What are you?" said the judge of the Rouen Tribunal to the author of so many clever pieces, who had to give evidence in a certain case. "If I were not in the city of Corneille," answered Alexander the Great, "I should call myself a dramatic poet." "There are degrees in everything,"

replied the judge. Alexandre Dumas was, all the same, a great inventor, and he possessed an extraordinary talent for putting dramatic things into shape. When, therefore, the future editor of the _Courier des etats-Unis_ claimed to have written all that was important in the _Tour de Nesle_, he doubtless declared what from a literary point of view was false. Dumas not only rejected his contention, but declined to allow his own name to appear in the bill side by side with that of his _collaborateur_. Hence angry words and a duel: once more a serious one, and with pistols, not swords.

With a calm desire to kill his man, of which, were he not his own accuser, one would refuse to suspect him, Dumas tells us, in his _Memoirs_, how, when he appeared on the ground, he examined his adversary's costume, and, while thinking it excellent as a "make-up,"

was sorry to find that it offered no salient mark for a pistol-shot. M.

Gaillardet was dressed entirely in black; his trousers, his b.u.t.toned-up coat, his cravat were all as inky as Hamlet's cloak, and according to the Parisian fas.h.i.+on of the time, he wore no s.h.i.+rt-collar. "Impossible to see the man," said Dumas to himself; "there is no point about him to aim at." He at the same time made a mental note of the costume, which he afterwards reproduced in the duel scene of the "Corsican Brothers."

At last he noticed a little speck of white in his adversary's ear: simply a small piece of cotton-wool. "I will hit him in the ear," said Dumas to himself; and on his confiding the amiable intention to one of his seconds, the latter promised to watch carefully the effect of the shot, inasmuch as he was anxious to see whether a man hit with a bullet through the head turned round a little before falling or fell straight to the ground. Dumas's pistol, however, missed fire. The delightful experiment contemplated could not, therefore, be tried; and the encounter was bloodless.

At Vincennes was confined for a few days, just before his expulsion from France, the Young Pretender, or "Charles Edward," as the French called him. The Duke de Biron had been ordered to see to his arrest; and one evening when it was known that he intended to visit the Opera, Biron surrounded the building with twelve hundred guards as soon as the prince had entered it. He was arrested, taken to Vincennes, and kept there four days; then to be liberated and expelled from France, in accordance with the treaty of 1748, so humiliating to the French arms. The servants of the Young Pretender, and with them one of the retinue of the Princess de Talmont, whose antiquated charms had detained him at Paris, were conveyed to the Bastille; upon which the princess wrote the following letter to M. de Maurepas, the minister: "The king, sir, has just covered himself with immortal glory by arresting Prince Edward. I have no doubt but that his Majesty will order a _Te Deum_ to be sung to thank G.o.d for so brilliant a victory. But as Placide, my lacquey, taken captive in this memorable expedition, can add nothing to his Majesty's laurels, I beg you to send him back to me." "The only Englishman the regiment of French guards has taken throughout the war!" exclaimed the Princess de Conti, when she heard of the arrest.

"Besides the Bastille and the Castle of Vincennes, which are the privileged places of confinement for State prisoners, there are others,"

says an old chronicler, "which may be called the last strongholds of tyranny. The minister by his private _lettre de cachet_ sends an objectionable individual to Bicetre or Charenton. The latter place, indeed, is for lunatics; but a minister who deprives a citizen of his liberty because he so wills it may make him pa.s.s for what he pleases; and if the person taken up is not at that time, he will in a few months be, entirely out of his senses, so that at worst it is only a kind of ministerial antic.i.p.ation. Upon any complaint laid by the parents or other relations, a young man is sent to St.-Lazare, where sometimes he will remain till the death of the complainants; and Heaven knows how fervently this is prayed for by the captive!"

Under the reign of Charles VII. there stood in the Wood of Vincennes a castle which the King named Chateau de Beaute, and presented to Agnes Sorel. Of this abode the royal favourite duly took possession. Charles was by no means popular with his subjects, whom he taxed severely; and they were scandalised by the way in which Agnes Sorel squandered money, by her undisguised relations with the king, and by the kindness with which she was apparently treated even by the queen. Far, then, from rendering honours to "the beautiful Agnes," the Parisians murmured at her prodigality and arrogance; and the favourite, indignant to find herself so ill received in Paris, departed, saying that the Parisians were churls, and that if she had suspected they would render her such insufficient honour she would never have set foot in their city: "which," says a contemporary writer, "would have been a pity, but not a great one."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DUEL IN THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE.]

After saying so much against Agnes Sorel, it is only fair to add that, according to many historians, it was she who roused Charles VII. from his habitual lethargy, and inspired him with the idea of driving the English out of France.

Vincennes is a military station, where a considerable body of troops is maintained. Hence, as already mentioned, the once famous Cha.s.seurs derived their name. Each division has now its own battalion of Cha.s.seurs. It may be added that special corps of infantry, such as Cha.s.seurs de Vincennes, Zouaves, Turcos, together with the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique and other kinds of ornamental cavalry, have been abolished: to the detriment of the picturesqueness, if not the practical efficiency, of the French army.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SEINE, FROM NOTRE-DAME.]

The infantry regiments are all armed and dressed absolutely alike, with the exception of the battalions of "cha.s.seurs" (corresponding to the "schutzen" battalions of the German Army), whose tunics are of a lighter blue than those of the line regiments. The Germans, by the way, have only one battalion of sharpshooters to each army corps, whereas the French have two, one to each division. As the French are adopting as much as possible the principle of uniformity in their army, it seems strange that they should have made any distinction between cha.s.seurs and infantry of the line; that, in short, they should have retained cha.s.seurs in their army at all. Formerly sharp-shooters carried rifles and were supposed to be particularly good shots; whereas infantry of the line were armed with smooth-bore muskets, and if they could pull the trigger, could certainly not aim straight. Now every infantry soldier is supposed, more or less correctly, to be a good marksman; and linesmen and cha.s.seurs are armed alike.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RECRUITS.]

Lancers exist no more; and the French cavalry, but for differences of uniform, would all be of the same medium pattern, neither "light"

nor "heavy," but presumably fit for duties of all kinds. Some cavalry regiments are uniformed as dragoons, some as cha.s.seurs, some as hussars; and every army corps has attached to it, or rather included in its integral force, four cavalry regiments of one of these three descriptions.

The Recruitment Bill of 1872 and the Organisation Bill of 1873 form a net which, with the additions since made to them, takes at one sweep everybody whom the military authorities can possibly want. Even seminarists and students of theology are no longer exempted.

Postmen, policemen of all kinds, workmen in Government factories, students of a certain age in Government schools and in all educational establishments private or public, members of the custom house and octroi service, firemen, Government engineers, clerks and workmen in the Department of Woods, Bridges, and Mines, scavengers, lighthouse-keepers, coast-guardsmen, engine-drivers, stokers, guards, pointsmen, station-masters, signalmen and clerks of the railway service, all persons employed in the telegraph service, all seamen not already on the lists of the navy, and generally all members of bodies having some recognised const.i.tution in time of peace, may in time of war be formed into special corps in order to serve either with the active army or with the "territorial army"--as the French equivalent to the German Landwehr is called. "The formation of these special corps," says the text of the Law on the General Organisation of the French Army, "is authorised by decree. They are subject to all the obligations of military service, enjoy all the rights of belligerents, and are bound by the rules of the law of nations."

For private gentlemen going out in plain clothes to shoot at invaders from behind hedges no provision is made; and such persons, whether called "francs-tireurs" or by any other name, would, if caught by the enemy, evidently be left to their fate. The franc-tireur, in fact, though still popular with the sort of people who delight in stories of brigands and highwaymen, is not looked back to with admiration even by his own Government. "These articles," says the report on the Law of Military Organisation in reference to the clause above cited, "are introduced in order to prevent the return of such unhappy misunderstandings as occurred in the last war, during which it is said that National Guards and francs-tireurs were shot by the enemy because our military laws had not given them the rights of belligerents." The rules under which these bodies of armed civilians, temporarily endowed with the military character, may be organised are strictly defined, so that the country may at no future time be troubled by "the formation of bands of foreign adventurers who have during all the worst epochs of our history fallen upon France, and, under pretext of defending her, have often subjected her to devastation and pillage." This is, of course, meant for the bands of Garibaldians. They were, nevertheless, regularly organised under officers bearing commissions from the Minister of War, and, apart from the question of "devastation and pillage," were the only bodies of partisans who showed any apt.i.tude for guerilla warfare.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BOULEVARDS (_continued_).

Hotel Carnavalet.--Hotel Lamoignon.--Place Royale.--Boulevard du Temple.--The Temple.--Louis XVII.--The Theatres.--Astley's Circus.--Attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Louis Philippe.--Trial of Fieschi.--The Cafe Turc.--The Cafes.-The Folies Dramatiques.--Louis XVI.

and the Opera.--Murder of the Duke of Berri.

Let us return now from Vincennes to the Place de la Bastille and the Boulevard Beaumarchais.

Perhaps the most interesting house on this boulevard is number twenty-three, which was built by Mansard, the famous architect, for his own occupation. One set of rooms in the house was occupied by the celebrated Ninon de Lenclos, who died there October 17, 1703, at the age of eighty-nine, preserving, according to tradition, her remarkable beauty to the very last. Here Voltaire, then in his twelfth year, was presented to her; nor did she forget to a.s.sign to him in her will 2,000 francs for the purchase of books.

Next door to the house of Mansard and Ninon de Lenclos is the little Beaumarchais theatre, which, constructed in forty-three days, was opened on the 3rd of December, 1835, under the style of Theatre de la Porte St.-Antoine. In 1842 it was re-named Theatre Beaumarchais. Then at different periods it bore the t.i.tles of Opera Bouffe Francais, and Fantaisies Parisiennes, until at length, in 1888, when it was entirely rebuilt, it became once more the Theatre Beaumarchais.

The Government of 1830 did right in giving the name of Beaumarchais to the boulevard on which he at one time lived, and where he possessed a certain amount of property. During the stormy years that immediately preceded the Revolution of 1789 Beaumarchais was an important figure; and the effect of the "Marriage of Figaro" on the public mind was in a good measure to prepare it for the general overthrow then imminent. The King, the Queen, the Ministers, were all, in the first instance, afraid of the "Marriage of Figaro"; and we have seen that to get it produced Beaumarchais displayed as much diplomacy and energy as would suffice in the present day to upset a Cabinet.

While living at his mansion near the Porte St.-Antoine, Beaumarchais built close at hand the Theatre du Marais, where, after letting it to a manager, he brought out, in 1792, his "Mere Coupable"--the third part of his Figaro Trilogy, in which the Count and Countess Almaviva, Figaro and Susannah, are shown in their old age. The "guilty mother" is the Countess herself; the charming and, as one had hoped, innocent Rosina of the "Barber of Seville." The male offender is Cherubin, better known under his operatic name of Cherubino, who after saying in the French comedy, with a mixture of timidity and audacity, "Si j'osais oser!" ends by daring too much. "La Mere Coupable" obtained but little success, and deserved none. Closed by Imperial order in 1807, the Theatre du Marais existed only for fifteen years. It must not be confounded with the ancient theatre of the same name where in 1636 Corneille produced his famous tragedy "Le Cid."

The Marais or marsh, whose name recalls the early history of Paris, when Lutetia was defended by marshes as by a broad impa.s.sable moat, has long been known as the favourite abode of small pensioners and fundholders, who in this remote quarter found food and shelter at inexpensive rates.

The Marais, however, has had, like most other parts of Paris, its ill.u.s.trious residents; and when about the middle of the eighteenth century the immortal actress Mlle. Clairon lived there she was the third famous inmate of the tenement in which she had taken up her abode. "I was told of a small house in the Rue du Marais," she writes in her memoirs, "which I could have for two hundred francs, where Racine was said to have lived forty years with his family. I was informed that it was there he had composed his imperishable works and there that he died; and that afterwards it had been occupied by the tender Lecouvreur, who had ended her days in it. 'The walls of the house,' I reflected, 'will be alone sufficient to make me feel the sublimity of the author and develop the talents of the actress. In this sanctuary then I will live and die!'"

Close to the Rue du Marais, in the Rue de Sevigne, stands the Musee Carnavalet, established in the former Hotel Carnavalet, where Mme. de Sevigne, author of the famous Letters, lived from 1677 to 1698. It was restored in 1867 by Baron Haussmann, who converted it into a museum for preserving various monuments, statues, inscriptions, tombstones, ornaments, and objects of various kinds, proceeding from the wholesale demolition to which sundry streets and even whole quarters of Paris were at that time being subjected, under the orders of Baron Haussmann himself in his capacity of Prefect of the Seine.

Another remarkable mansion in the same street is the Hotel Lamoignon, now occupied by different manufacturers, especially of chemical products, but which, in its earliest days, had highly aristocratic and even royal occupants. Begun by Diana of France, legitimatised daughter of Henri II., the Hotel Lamoignon was bought and finished in 1581 for Charles de Valois, Duke of Angouleme, natural son of Charles IX., who, according to Tallemant des Reaux, would have been "the best fellow in the world if he could only have got rid of his swindling propensities."

When his servants asked him for money, he would reply to them: "My house has three outlets into the street; take whichever of them you like best." The architecture of the Hotel Lamoignon is that of an ancient fortress, though its walls and facades are ornamented with crescents, hunting horns, and the heads of stags and dogs; the whole in allusion to the Diana for whom the building was originally planned.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HoTEL CARNAVALET.]

Having once left the upper boulevard to enter the adjacent Marais, we cannot but go on towards the Place des Vosges, better known as the Place Royale, where, in 1559, Henri II. took a fancy one day for trying his powers at tilting against Montgomery, captain in the Scotch Guard; when the shock was so violent that a splinter from Montgomery's lance penetrated the king's eye through the broken visor of his helmet. The king was carried to the Hotel des Tournelles, where, without having regained consciousness, he died on the 15th of July, 1559. The hotel or palace where the king breathed his last was thenceforth abandoned as a fatal and accursed place. In the course of four years it fell into a ruinous condition, and Charles IX. ordered it to be pulled down. The park belonging to the old palace was turned into a horse market, which was the scene in 1578 of the famous encounter between the favourite courtiers of Henri III. known as the Mignons and the partisans of the Duke of Guise. Four combatants, Maugiron, Schomberg, Riberac, and Quelus, lost their lives in this affair. The horse market, or Place Royale as it afterwards became, witnessed many sanguinary duels, until at last Richelieu determined to put an end to a fas.h.i.+on which was depriving France of some of her bravest men. With this view he cut off the head of Montmorency-Bouteville and of Count des Chapelles, his second in the duel which cost Bussy d'Amboise his life. In 1613 the Cardinal erected in the centre of the Place Royale an equestrian statue of his royal master Louis XIII. The Place Royale was at that time the favourite quarter of the French n.o.bility, and the rendezvous of all that was witty, gallant, and distinguished in France.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HoTEL LAMOIGNON.]

The house number six on the Place Royale is particularly interesting as having been inhabited in Richelieu's time by the brilliant and too celebrated Marion de Lorme, and two centuries later by Victor Hugo, who, in the very room that Marion de Lorme had occupied, wrote, at the age of twenty-five, the splendid tragedy of which she is the heroine.

The statue of Louis XIII. which Richelieu had raised was overturned and broken to pieces in 1792, when the most critical period of the Revolution was at hand. It was replaced after the Restoration, under the reign of Charles X., by the present statue.

The Boulevard du Temple owes its name to a building which was first occupied by the Order of Templars, and which, towards the close of the last century, enjoyed a sad celebrity as the prison where Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and the young Dauphin were confined.

No less than forty-eight works are said to have been written on the imprisonment of Louis XVII., and matters connected with it, including the histories of some dozen "claimants," a.s.serting, in his name, their right to the French throne. Most of these pretenders, with Naundorff--who had been the Dauphin's valet in the Temple--prominent among them, had no difficulty in finding enthusiasts and dupes to further their designs; and even in France one of them caused himself to be described on his tombstone as "Louis de France." The Emperor Napoleon III. took, however, the liberty of ordering the inscription to be effaced.

Soon after the death of the Count de Chambord, M. de Chantelauze published in the _Ill.u.s.tration_ an account of Louis XVII.'s life in the Temple, and of his last illness, death, and post-mortem examination, together with certificates which leave no doubt as to the young prince having really died in his prison. Simon, the gaoler, according to M. de Chantelauze's view, was, like so many other bad men, not wholly bad; while his wife was for the most part good, the appearance of badness or roughness which she manifested when the child confided to her care was visited by members of the Commune being a.s.sumed in order to inspire her employers with confidence. The task a.s.signed to Simon was not, as has often been supposed, to reduce the young prince, by ill-treatment, to such a point that he would at last be attacked by illness and carried off, but simply to get from him evidence against his mother, the Queen, with respect to her complicity in the Varennes plot, and the various plans formed for effecting the escape of the child. The evidence having been obtained by the simple process of first putting it into the child's mouth, and afterwards taking it out, the special work a.s.signed to the Simons was at an end, and the young prince experienced from them nothing but kindness. If he ultimately fell ill and died, his confinement and the bad air he breathed may well have been the cause.

The life of Louis XVII., from the departure of the Simons until his death, can be made out continuously; and the evidence of his having died in the Temple is quite conclusive. Nevertheless, Louis XVIII., in view of the pretension constantly springing up, inst.i.tuted for his own satisfaction an inquiry into the whole matter; and the proofs adduced in the course of it as to the ident.i.ty of the "child in the Temple" with the son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette seem decisive.