The American in Paris; vol. 1 of 2

The American

In

Paris.

In Two Volumes.

Vol. I.

London: Henry Colburn, Publisher, Great Marlborough Street. 1838.

T. C. Savill, Printer, St. Martin’s Lane, Charing Cross.

Preface.

* * * * * You have no sooner a guinea in London than you have none. In addition to the ways and means I pointed out in my last, gather together the letters I wrote you from Paris, and offer them to the booksellers. There are enough, if you have preserved them, for two volumes. I had partly the intention, in writing these letters, to dress them up one day into some kind of shape for the Public. I am not certain they are fit to be seen in their present dishabille--but leave that to the purchaser. A pretty woman slip-shod is a pretty woman still, and she is not so much improved as you think by her court dress. Tell the Public I do not mean them for _great things_: I am no critic, no politician, no political economist; but only, as Shakspeare would say, “a snapper up of inconsiderate trifles.” Under this title I have the honour to be, with the most perfect consideration, the Public’s very obedient, humble servant.

Contents.

Letter I.

Havre--Description of the Town--The Mapseller--Manners of the People--Law of Inheritance--State of Agriculture--Town and Country Poverty--Foreign Trade--The Custom House, a School for Perjury--System of Passports--The French Diligence--Rouen--The Cathedral--Joan of Arc p. 1-24

Letter II.

Paris--Street Cries--St. Roch--The Boulevards--Parisian Lodgings--Manner of Living--The Grand Opera--Taglioni--The Public Gardens--The Guinguettes--Dancing, the characteristic amusement of the French--Sunday Dances--Dancing defended, from classical authority p. 25-53

Letter III.

The Boulevards--Boulevard Madelaine--Boulevard des Capucines--Boulevard Italien--Monsieur Carème--Splendid Cafés--The Baths--Boulevard Montmartre--The Shoe-black--The Chiffonnier--The Gratteur--The Commissionnaire--Boulevard du Temple--Scene at the Ambigù Comique--Sir Sydney Smith--Monsieur de Paris--The Café Turc--The Fountains--Recollections of the Bastille--The Halle aux Blés--The Bicêtre--Boulevard du Mont Parnasse p. 54-92

Letter IV.

The Palais Royal--French courtesy--Rue Vivienne--Pleasures of walking in the streets--Cafés in the Palais Royal--Mille Colonnes--Véry’s--French dinners--Past History of the Palais Royal--Galerie d’Orleans--Gambling--The unhappy Colton--Hells of the Palais Royal--Prince Puckler Muskau--Lord Brougham--The King and Queen p. 93-125

Letter V.

The Tuileries--The Gardens--The Statues--The Cabinets de Lecture--The King’s Band--Regulations of the Gardens--Yankee modesty--The English Parks--Proper estimate of riches--Policy of cultivating a taste for innocent pleasures--Advantages of gardens--Should be made ornamental--Cause of the French Revolution--Mr. Burke’s notion of the English Parks--Climate of France p. 126-143

Letter VI.

The Three Glorious Days--The plump little Widow--Marriage of fifteen young Girls--Shrines of the Martyrs--Louis Philippe--Dukes of Orleans and Némours--The National Guards--Fieschi--The Infernal Machine--Marshal Mortier and twelve persons killed--Dismissal of the Troops--The Queen and her Daughters--Disturbed state of France--The Chamber of Deputies--Elements of support to the present Dynasty--Private character of the King--The Daily Journals--The Chamber of Peers--Bonaparte p. 144-165

Letter VII.

The Garden of Plants--The Omnibus--The Museum of Natural History--American Birds--The Naturalist--Study of Entomology--The Botanic Garden--Cabinet of Comparative Anatomy--The Menagerie--The Giraffe--Notions of America--The Cedar of Lebanon--Effects of French Cookery--French Gastronomy--Goose Liver Pie--Mode of Procuring the Repletion of the Liver p. 166-186

Letter VIII.

Burial of the victims--St. Cloud--The Chateau--The Cicerone--The Chevalier d’Industrie--Grave of Mrs. Jordan--The Bois de Boulogne--Amusements on Fête Days--Place Louis XV.--The King at the Tuileries--The American Address--His Majesty’s Reply--The Princess Amelia--The Queen and her Daughters--The Dukes of Orleans and Némours--Madame Adelaide--Splendour of Ancient Courts--Manner of governing the French--William the Fourth--Exhibition of the Students at the University p. 187-209

Letter IX.

Tour of Paris--The Seine--The Garden of Plants--The Animals--Island of St. Louis--The Halle aux Vins--The Police--Palais de Justice--The Morgue--Number of suicides--M. Perrin--The Hotel de Ville--Place de Grêve--The Pont Neuf--Quai des Augustins--The Institute--Isabelle de Bavière--The Bains Vigiers--The Pont des Arts--The Washerwomen’s Fête--Swimming-schools for both sexes--The Chamber of Deputies--Place de la Revolution--Obelisk of Luxor--Hospital of the Invalids--Ecole Militaire--The Champ de Mars--Talleyrand p. 210-250

Letter X.

Faubourg St. Germain--Quartier Latin--The Book-stalls--Phrenologists--Dupuytren’s Room--Medical Students--Lodgings--Bill at the Sorbonne--French Cookery--A Gentleman’s Boarding-house--The Locomotive Cook--Fruit--The Pension--The Landlady--Pleasures of being duped--Smile of a French Landlady--The Boarding-house--Amiable Ladies--The Luxembourg Gardens--The Grisettes--Their naïveté and simplicity--Americans sent to Paris--Parisian Morals--Advantages in visiting Old Countries--American Society in Paris p. 251-284

Letter XI.

The Observatory--The Astronomers--Val de Grace--Anne of Austria--Hospice des Enfans Trouvés--Rows of Cradles--Sisters of Charity--Vincent de Paul--Maisons d’Accouchement--Place St. Jaques--The Catacombs--Skull of Ninon de l’Enclos--The Poet Gilbert--Julian’s Bath--Hotel de Cluny--Ancient Furniture--Francis the First’s Bed--Charlotte Corday--Danton--Marat--Robespierre--Rue des Postes--Convents of former Times--Faubourg St. Marceau p. 285-302

The American In Paris.

Letter I.

Havre--Description of the Town--The Mapseller--Manners of the People--Law of Inheritance--State of Agriculture--Town and Country Poverty--Foreign Trade--The Custom House, a School for Perjury--System of Passports--The French Diligence--Rouen--The Cathedral--Joan of Arc.

_June 30th, 1835._

I have half a mind to describe this town to you. It has twenty thousand inhabitants, is at the mouth of the Seine, and twenty-four hours from Paris. The houses are high, and mostly of black slate, and patched often till nothing is seen but the patches, and mushrooms, and other vegetables, grow through the cracks. Villages in America have an air of youth and freshness harmonising with their dimensions. Small things should never look old. This town presents you with the ungracious image of a wrinkled and gray-headed baby. The streets, except one, have no side walks; they are paved with rough stone, and are without gutters and common sewers; the march of intellect not having arrived at these luxuries. The exception is the “_Rue de Paris_;” it has “_trottoirs_,” a theatre, a public square, a market-house, a library with six thousand volumes, and a church very richly furnished, the organ presented by Cardinal Richelieu. I have been to the church this morning, to pay the Virgin Mary the pound of candles I owed, for my preservation at sea. The prettiest improvement I have seen (and it is no miracle for a town of so much commercial importance) is a dock, cut in from the bay along the channel of an old creek, which contains three or four hundred ships, a goodly number of which wear the American flag; it runs through the midst of the town, and brings the vessels into a pleasant sociability with the houses. When the tide is high, these vessels ride in their own element; when low, you see a whole fleet wallowing in the mud; and passengers, to get to sea, have to wait the complaisance of both wind and tide often a whole week.

But step out through the _Rue de Paris_, a little to the north, and you will see a compensation for all this ugliness. It is a hill, running boldly up to the water’s edge, whose south side, several hundred feet high, is smothered with houses, which seem to be scrambling up the acclivity to get a look at the town; and the entire summit is covered with beautiful villas, and gardens rich with trees and shrubbery, and hedges, which at this season are a most luxurious ornament. Many American families, having grown rich here by commerce, are perched magnificently upon this hill. The view from the top is charming! The old town, in its motley livery of houses, ships, and fortifications, spreads itself out at your feet; on the west, there is an open view of the channel, and all the pretty images of a commercial port, such as vessels in the near and distant prospect, coming into harbour and going out upon their voyages; and on the south, and beyond the bay into which the Seine flows, is a fine romantic country of field and woodland, which runs gradually up, undulating like the sea, till it meets the blue sky. It is charming, too, in the night; for as soon as Mercury has hung out his lamps above, these Havrians light up theirs in the town, and set up a little opposition to the heavens; and there you are between two firmaments, which of a fine evening is a fantastic and gorgeous spectacle. This is the Havre. It is the first thing I ever described, and I am out of breath.

And now the customs and manners. I have had dealings with hackney-coachmen, porters, pedlars, and pickpockets, and have found them eminently qualified in their several departments. In strolling last evening through the streets, going only to frank a letter at the post office, I remarked a person crying maps by a wall side. He walked up and down with arms folded, and had a grave and respectable face:--“_A trente sous seulement! C’est incroyable! A trente sous!_” I wished to look after a place in Normandy called Helleville; the very place where Guiscard and, that other choicest of all ladies’ heroes, Tancred were born. Only think of Tancred being born in the department of Coutance, and being nothing but a Frenchman; and only think, too, of the possibility of taking a piece of gold out of a man’s waistcoat pocket at mid-day, the owner being wide awake, and in full enjoyment of his senses. I had no sooner made my wants known to this polite auctioneer than, with a _civilité toute Française_, he placed the map before my eyes--that is, between the eyes and the waistcoat pocket, and himself just behind the left shoulder, and assisted me in the search--“_Hell--Hell--Hell--Helleville!--le voilà, monsieur!_” He then resumed his walk and looked out for new customers; and I, with a return of his bow and smile, and a grateful sense of his politeness, took leave, and pursued my way contentedly, “not missing what was stolen,” to the post-office. Here I took out my letter, had it stamped, and put my hand complacently in my pocket, and then went home very much disgusted with the French nation. To be robbed at the Havre brings no excuse for one’s wit or understanding: in Paris, it is what one expects from the civilization of the capital.

The porters, coachmen, draymen, boatmen, and such like, about the Havre, are wrangling and noisy to excess. They burst out into a fury every few minutes, but it always terminates innocently. It reminds one of our militia musketry; there is a preliminary, and then a general explosion, and then a few scattering cartridges, and all ends in smoke. They seldom resort to duelling, and boxing is considered vulgar; and as for oaths, they make no sort of figure in French. In the article of swearing, we are ahead, I believe, of all other nations. In their common intercourse, however, these people are much more respectful than we are to their betters and to one another. Mr. Boots, for no other reason than bringing your shoes in well polished, insists on your “pardon for having deranged you;” and the beggar takes leave of his fellow-beggar with his “respects to madam.” But these respects, I have heard, do not bear the test of any twopenny interest. There is no civility that stands against sixpence.

This common world is more social, and in appearance more joyous, than with us. It huddles together in public places, with wonderful conversation and merriment, till a late hour of the night; and what a quantity of green old age! grandmothers of sixty with their hair _en papillote_, are playing hide and go-seek with twenty-five. After all, what signifies the degree of poverty or age, if one is happy? Another remarkable thing is, the respect paid to property. Benches on the public squares are handed down to posterity with no other marks than the natural wear and tear of sitting on them; vegetables grow by the way-side untrodden, and gardens and fields offer their fruits without hedge or fence, or any visible protection. I have talked these matters over with a Frenchman, who says, that it is the last generation only that lives at this rate, and that the present one dies off at a very reasonable age. The truth I believe is, that we, in our country, keep old persons inside the house; we wrap them up and lay them on the shelf, and ennui and neglect, no doubt, abridge a little their duration.

As for the security of property, he ascribes it entirely to a certain shepherdly swain, very common here, who wears red breeches, and is coiffed in a cocked hat, with one of the cocks exactly over his nose, called a _Garde Champêtre_, who watches day and night over the safety of the fields. A curiosity of the place is the peasant women, whom you will see mixed fantastically with the citizens in the market, and flocking in and out in great numbers at the town gate. Labour and the sun have worn all the feminine charms out of their faces, and they have mounted up over these ugly faces starched and white caps two stories high, in which they encounter all sorts of weather; they are seated on little asses, a large basket at each side, in which they carry vegetables to market, and carry back manure for the crops of the next year. The American intercourse is so quickened by railroads and steamboats, that the characteristics of town and country are almost effaced; here they wear yet their distinct liveries.

And now the antiquities. I visited, this morning, a trumpery old palace of Charles V.; also a round tower, built, they say, by that great tower builder, Julius Cæsar; and returning through a solitary alley, I stumbled accidentally upon a monument of more precious memory, the birthplace of the author of Paul and Virginia. It is a scrubby old hut, with a bit of marble in front containing his name and day of nativity. Genius seems to have but mean notions of the dignity of birth; Pindar was born in the slough and vapours of Bœotia, and St. Pierre in this filthy alley of the Havre.

And now the politics. The children here are apportioned equally, and cannot be disinherited. All the father can dispose of by will, is a half, third, or fourth, of the estate, according as he has one, two, or more heirs. This kind of succession cuts up the land into small patches, and thus brings poverty on both town and country. Families being without capital to improve their agricultural resources, have but little to spare to the town, and can, therefore, buy but little of its stores and manufactures; and, from inability to supply the raw materials and provisions cheap, buy this little at an enhanced price. In this way the two parties mutually beggar each other. Besides, under this system of minute divisions, the farming population increases enormously, poverty increasing in the same ratio.

Two-thirds of the French are already farmers; and in England, where farming is in so much greater perfection, the ratio is one-third. This law, too, in rendering the children independent of the father, destroys his authority and his check upon their conduct; it weakens the motives to exertion, which arise from fear of want or prospects of future good, and is consequently unfavourable to intellect and morals. The English system makes one son only a fool, the French besots the whole family. A redundant population is the great curse of all these old countries, and under this system of subdivision, a nation, unless the blessings of war or the plague intervene, becomes as multitudinous as the Chinese, eating dogs, and cats, and potatoes, and hutting with cows and pigs; a plough, as in Ireland, becoming a joint stock possession, and a horse belonging to a whole neighbourhood.

The French, in spite of the Moscows and Waterloos, have added between five and six millions to their population of 1789. Agriculture, to be sure, was improved by the Revolution, by the divisions amongst the peasantry of the national domains and confiscated property of the nobles, by the abolition of tithes and game laws, and by bringing the waste lands into cultivation; but this condition is, or must soon be, on the reverse. In America, the abundance of idle and cheap land prevents this calamity for the present. I have travelled a few miles in the country, and have squeezed what sense I could out of the peasants. I find that, in all branches of husbandry, a labourer here performs a fourth less work daily than in America; and in ploughing and reaping, nearly a third. The French implements, too, are clumsy and bungling; oxen are yoked by the horns, harrows have wooden teeth, and the plough, mostly of wood, scratches up the earth instead of turning a furrow.

Another great evil in French politics is, the centralization of every thing in the metropolis. In our country, each borough or township is an independent community, and manages its concerns with scarce a sense of any foreign superintendence. An individual recommends himself to favour first in his village, then in his county, next in his state, and finally in the United States; and none glimmer in the last sphere who have not shone in the first. Here this condition is reversed--there is a converging of all the rays into one general focus. Paris is the centre, and there is none but delegated authority any where else. So the French provinces are out at the heels and elbows, and Paris wears its elegant and fashionable wardrobe. Your Pottsville has a hundred miles of railroad, whilst the Havre transports the whole trade of the capital by a two-wheeled operation she calls the “_roulage_,” and her boats upon the channel carrying on the intercourse between the two greatest cities of the world, are about equal to yours, in which you cross over into Jersey to eat creams with mother Heyle.

A third reason of village and country poverty is, the neglect of machinery, by which production may be increased with a diminution of labour. Not a railroad has yet shewn its nose in this place, though it is the outlet to the foreign trade of one third of the French territory, including the capital, with its almost a million of inhabitants. They are cleaning their great dock to-day with a hundred or two of men armed with spades, whilst a machine is doing the same work upon the Delaware with three or four negroes. The economists of the French school reason thus: If this clumsy apparatus is superseded, our workmen will be out of employ; besides, it is known that the increase of consumers always keeps pace with the increase of production, and you end where you began.--But you increase also your strength. Yes, and the difficulties of government.--You give life to a greater number of human beings. And little obligations have they for the gift, if they are to run the risk of being corrupted in this world and punished in the next; and the means of corruption are greater in a crowded than a thin population; greater amongst an idle and luxurious, than a simple and laborious people.

The American public was more happy and virtuous with its three millions than with its ten millions and its railroads. If this is all true, then the country which has least fertility of soil, and least skill in the arts of agriculture, is the most favoured by Providence; and the best system of economy is that which teaches us to procure the least possible produce with the greatest possible labour. The best employment, too, for the labourers, would be to plant cucumbers in summer, and extract the sunbeams out of them, to keep themselves warm in winter. I like the system which teaches us to increase the sum of human comforts. I think it is better to live in an improved country, with clean streets and neat dwellings, than to have the same means of living with a destitution of such conveniences. I like even to starve with decent accommodations.

A fourth great cause of poverty is, the restriction which these nations have imposed upon their mutual intercourse, and the produce of each other’s industry. There is a total disagreement between natural reason and the custom of all countries on this subject. Nature, by giving us a diversity of soils, climates, and products, has pointed out the right objects of industry, and laid all nations under obligations of dependence and intimacy upon each other; and there is a general struggle amongst all to counteract this benevolent design. France, for example, has a natural fitness for wines, and the land producing this wine is unsuited to any other culture; yet she has so managed as to keep her wine trade stationary for the last fifty years. England buys her wine, of inferior quality, from Portugal and Spain, and carries on a greater trade with the Chinese, her Antipodes, than with France, her next-door neighbour. All proclaim the benefits of foreign trade, and all legislate directly to get rid of their foreign customers. In what more direct way could France prevent the sale of her wines to Russia, Sweden, and England, than by refusing their coal, iron, woollen manufactures, and other products, for which they have a natural advantage in return?

But the great struggle of all is to become independent; and yet the very word implies the extinction of all foreign commerce. The greatest of all national blessings is assuredly that very dependence we are so eager to avoid. We cannot become dependent upon a foreign nation without laying it, at the same time, under a similar dependence. But in case of a war? This is the very way to make a war impossible. Men do not war against their own interests. We are dependent upon Lyons for her silks, and her petitions are now pouring in daily against the impending war with America; and many think they will go nigh to prevent it. Would not this war be more remote if the dependence were increased? If I wished to prevent all future wars with France and England, I would begin by building a railroad from Paris to London, and removing their commercial restrictions. Each country would then improve to the uttermost that industry to which it is most fitted. Intimacies, too, would be improved, prejudices effaced, and they would become, at length, so dependent upon each other, that even should a mad or silly government involve them in a war, their mutual interests would force them to discontinue it.

Of all methods of gathering taxes, that of the Custom-house seems to me the worst. What an expensive apparatus of buildings! what a fleet of vessels! what an army of spies! what courts of admiralty! and what an array of new crimes upon the statute book! A custom-house is a school for perjury and other vices, and where the first lessons are made easy for beginners. There is nothing one robs with so little compunction as one’s country. It is, at the worst, only robbing thirty millions of people. A sin loses its criminality by diffusion, and may be so expanded as to be no sin at all.

All the functions of a custom-house are in their nature odious and vexatious. The first injunction is, to refuse the traveller, wearied of the sea, the common rites of hospitality on setting his foot upon the land, to ransack even honest women by impudent police officers, and subject honourable men to a scrutiny practised elsewhere only upon thieves. I piqued a Frenchman on board our ship on the venality, which I had heard of, of the French ports. He replied, that he had been in the American trade for ten years, and accompanied each of his cargoes to our ports, for the express purpose of not paying the duties. Why, nothing is more easy. “There is an officer who examines; we know each other; he knocks off the top of the boxes, rummages the calico with great fuss and ceremony, and the silks and jewellery sleep quiet at the bottom. Whoever,” he says, “pays more than ten per cent. of his duties in any country, is unacquainted with his business.”

There is another item in European policy--the requirement of passports--the cost, the delays and vexatious ceremony attending it. This has incurred abundant reprehension, especially from American travellers; and there certainly is no other use in such a regulation than that a set of the most despicable creatures that creep upon the earth may get a living by it. But when one is used, for a long time, to see things done in a certain way, one does not conceive the possibility of their being done in any other way. When I informed an intelligent Frenchman, of forty years, that even a stranger did not carry a passport about with him in America, and that we dispensed with all this array of police officers, and spies, and other such impediments to travelling and the intercourse of nations, he inferred that there could be no personal security. That alone, he said, would deter him from residing in the United States. When I cited against him the example of England, he remained incredulous, and required the confirmation of a better authority.

Don’t you imagine that I am going to treat you hereafter to so vulgar a thing as politics. Events have not yet thickened upon my observation, and I am obliged to make use of all my resources. If I could afford to send you blank paper all the way across the Atlantic, I would have omitted these last pages--hand them over to your husband. The living here is about equal in the quality of food and price to your best houses of Philadelphia. The hotels are shabby in comparison with ours; the one I lodge in has not been washed since the year of the world 1656; but the cookery and service are altogether in favour of the French. A breakfast is two francs, a dinner three, and a chamber two. You may count your daily expenses at a dollar and a half in the best houses. The Havre is our first acquaintance on the continent, and its history cannot be without some interest, especially to ladies who are just sighing to go to Paris. Adieu.

_Rouen, July 3rd, 1835._

What a curiosity of ugliness is a French diligence. It exceeds in this quality even our American stages. But beauty is sacrificed to convenience: it carries three tons of passengers and luggage, with a speed of seven miles an hour. The _coupé_, in front, has three seats, the _intérieur_, six, and the _rotonde_ as many in the rear, the price decreasing in the same direction--from the whole, to about the half of our American prices. There are also three seats aloft. These divisions are invisible to each other, and represent the world outside--the rich, the middling, and the poor. If you feel very aristocratic, you take the whole _coupé_ to yourself, or yourself and lady, and you can be as private as you please. Each seat is numbered, and the traveller has his number on the way-bill and in his pocket. A _conducteur_ superintends luggage, &c., and is paid extra. The team has three horses abreast in front, and two in the rear, and upon one of the latter is mounted a postillion. This personage deserves a particular notice. He is immersed to his middle in a huge pair of boots, making each leg the diameter of his body; and his body, too, is squeezed into a narrow coat, which being buttoned to the chin, props his woeful countenance towards the firmament, so that he corresponds exactly with Ovid’s description of a man, or rather, he looks like the letter Y upside down. Cracking a whip he does not regard as an acquirement, but a virtue. He can crack several tunes; and, in a calm night, serenades a whole village.

The road to Rouen, in the diligence, has nothing in it agreeable. The land has the ordinary crops, but it is a wide waste of cultivation, without hedges, or barns, or cottages. The only relief is now and then a comfortless village, or a solitary and neglected chateau. You swallow a mouthful of dust at each breath, and you are disgusted at all the stopping-places by the wailing voices of beggars, old men and women recommending themselves by decrepitude, and children by rags and nakedness. The children often run before the diligence for a quarter of a mile in quest of the charitable _sous_. I soon got out of change, and then reasoned myself into a fit of uncharitableness. They may be unworthy, and I shall encourage vice; besides, charity only increases the breed. What I give to these vagabonds I take from somebody else. I should otherwise lay it out in some article of trade, and if all do so, we shall only make a new set of beggars by relieving the old--reduce the industrious to mendicity by encouraging the idlers. Moreover, I can’t help all, and I won’t help any, or, if I do help any, I will give to my own countrymen, and not to these ragamuffin Frenchmen. In this way, you get along without much affecting the tranquillity of your conscience. My advice is, that you come by the Seine and the steamboat. It is a passage of only eight hours, and every one says it will delight you with its beautiful and romantic scenery.

I suppose you know this is the birth-place of Racine and Fontenelle. It deserves a passing notice on their account, as also on its own. The residence of those truculent old Norman dukes who made the world shake with fear, and gave sovereigns to some of the best nations of Europe, cannot be an indifferent spot upon the globe. Indeed, we may trace to it many of our own institutions, as well as a good part of our language. Our terms of law, the very cries of our courts in Schuylkill county, are imported from this Old Normandy, of which Rouen is the capital. It is a fantastic old town, with earthenware tiles, and enclosed between two mountains, having a mixture of art and nature, which bring each other out finely into relief. One is delighted to see town in the country, and country in the town. Here is a large factory, or hotel, and there a set of gray and tawny-looking hovels, like a village of the Puttawattemies.

The peasants are seen amongst the tops and chimneys of the houses, cultivating their fields on the sides, and upon the summits, of the hills, which are arrayed in tufts of woodland, hedges, and pasturage; and all the avenues leading to the town are beautifully overshaded with chestnuts and elms. The Seine, too, has its fairy islands and weeping willows on its banks, and winds along through the middle of the town; and now and then a steamboat comes up the valley, with a puffing and fuss that would have made stare even the iron features of old Rollo. One can see such a town but once, and no one can see it so well as he who has been used to the fresh and glaring villages of our country. Rouen has ninety thousand inhabitants, a library of four thousand volumes, a gallery of paintings, and manufactures of all sorts of calico and other cotton stuffs; also of velvets, shawls, linen, and bombasins. More than half the population is engaged directly in these manufactures. My advice is, that you sleep here one night instead of in the diligence, in running post to Paris; and in your evening’s walk, I invite you to step out and see Napoleon’s bridge, which has, in the centre of it, a fine statue of Corneille.

I went to see that famous piece of venerable antiquity, the Cathedral. You have its picture in all the “Penny Magazines.” Our guide, who knows it by heart, told us his tale as follows:--“Gentlemen, this is the tomb of Rollo, first duke of Normandy; no horse could carry him; had to walk on foot; died 917. Gentlemen, this is William Longsword, his son and successor; was on the point of taking the frock to be a monk, but was basely assassinated by Arnaud, Count of Flanders.” (And the devil a monk was he.) “Gentlemen, this is Pierre de Breze, Grand Seneschal of Anjou and Normandy; fell in the battle of Montilherry, 1467; and this is John, Duke of Bedford, Viceroy of Normandy, who died in 1438. In this tomb, gentlemen (come a little nearer)--in this tomb is deposited the heart of Richard Cœur de Lion! (a tremor ran through our bones.) His heart is in this tomb, his brains are in Poictiers, and the other parts of him in Kent, in Great Britain. The man who took out his brains died of it. This is the last man Richard killed, and he had killed more than one.” Here our Cicerone ran down, and his features, just now so animated, were suddenly collapsed, the natural effect of inspiration.

We looked then at the great bell, and the organs, and the statues of saints, most of them mutilated in the Revolution. One, without a nose, they told us was St. Dunstan; the Devil and the Jacobins having retaliated. There is a headless trunk, too, they might very well pass for St. Denis. One of the remarkable features of this church is the painting on glass, representing scriptural scenes, of which the colours seem to have grown more vivid by time, though time has destroyed the secret of their composition. The architecture is Gothic, and the grandest specimen of this order in France. Its immense fluted columns, near a hundred feet high and ten or twelve in diameter--its images of Christ and the Virgin, and the pictures of the apostles and saints, are both sublime and beautiful. The lightning has thought it worthy of a visit, and has overturned one of its huge towers.

Poor Joan of Arc! Here is her monument in the midst of the market square, where she was burnt. It is a pedestal of twenty feet, surmounted by her statue. Alongside of this trophy of French and English barbarism, instead of blushing for shame, they shew you, for sixpence, the room in which she was imprisoned. It is damp, and has only glimmerings of light, and is altogether a horrid remnant of antiquity. Farewell to Rouen.

Letter II.

Paris--Street Cries--St. Roch--The Boulevards--Parisian Lodgings--Manner of Living--The Grand Opera--Taglioni--The Public Gardens--The Guinguettes--Dancing, the characteristic amusement of the French--Sunday Dances--Dancing defended, from classical authority.

_Paris, July 4th, 1835._

When one has travelled all night in a French diligence in the dog-days, and is set down next morning in the “_Place Notre Dame des Victoires_,” three thousand miles from one’s home--oh dear! one has much less pleasure in the aspect of the great city than one expected. _Voilà Paris!_ said the “conducteur,” announcing our approach; each one half opening his eyes, and then closing them suddenly. Four gentlemen and two ladies in a diligence, bobbing their heads at each other about six of the morning; the hour in which sleep creeps so agreeably upon one’s senses, is an interesting spectacle. It was cruel to be interrupted in so tender an interview. _Voilà Paris!_ was echoed a second time, so we awoke and looked out, except a lady, who reposed gently upon my left shoulder, who had seen Paris a thousand times, and had never slept with four gentlemen perhaps in her life. She lay still, I attentive not to awake her, until the ill-omened raven croaked a third time, _Paris!_ A French gentleman now did the honours of the city to us strangers. “That, sir, is the ‘Invalids;’ see how the morning rays glitter from its gilded dome. And this, which peers so proudly over the Barrière de l’Etoile, is the grand Triumphal Arch of Napoleon;” and he read over the trophies--Marengo! Jena! Austerlitz! praised the sculpture and bas reliefs, and burst out into a great many tropes about French victories. We now passed down through the _Champs Elysees_, rolled along the beautiful _Rue Rivoli_, and arrived fast asleep upon the _Place Notre Dame des Victoires_. I advise you to sleep at St. Germains, where the steamboat will leave you, and come to Paris next morning with the imagination fresh for the enjoyment. To be wide awake improves wonderfully one’s capacity for admiration.

I stood and looked about, and I felt the spirit of manhood die away within me; and every other spirit, even curiosity. I would rather have seen one of your haycocks than the queen. But, fortunately, here is no time for reflection. You are immediately surrounded by a score of individuals, who greet you with hats in their hands and with great officiousness, offering you all at once their services. Some are exceedingly anxious you should lodge in their hotels: _La plus jolie location de tout Paris--des chambres de toute beauté!_ and others are dying to carry your luggage; others again are eager to sell you their wares, and thrust a bit of soap, or a cane, or a pair of spectacles, in your face suddenly. I mistook this for an attempt at assassination. Next, I had to bow to my toes for a lodging. With the address of three hotels, a mile apart, I had to pick one out of the street. I advise you not to run about town till your porter’s charges are of greater amount than the value of your luggage, but to put yourself and your trunks in a hack, and you will have at least a ride for your money; besides, the driver is limited in his charges, and the porter is _à discretion_, and discretion is one of the dearest of the French virtues.

Who do you think I had for a fellow traveller? Your old acquaintance ---- ----, who has lost his wife, and travels to dissipate his grief. He has not left off saying good things. He remarked that it was a bad day to go into Paris--the 4th of July; there would be such a crowd. Recollecting with what jubilee we celebrate this day at New York, he imagined how much greater must be the confusion at Paris. He feared we should have our brains knocked out by the mob. You can’t think what an advantage it is for one having but little of this commodity of brains, to travel into foreign countries; one grows into the reputation of a wit by not being understood. I do not mean to be arrogant in saying I am better versed, at least in our foreign relations, than my companion, and yet I was noticed on the way only as being of his suite, which I ascribe entirely to my capacity to express myself in a known tongue. As he did not speak French, I was mistaken for the interpreter to some foreign ambassador.

Paris is a wilderness of tall, scraggy, and dingy houses, of irregular heights and sizes, starting out impudently into the street, or retiring modestly, and without symmetry, a palace often the counterpart of a pig-sty, and a cathedral next neighbour to a hen-roost. The streets run zig-zag, and abut against each other as if they did not know which way to run. They are paved with cubical stones of eight and ten inches, convex on the upper surface like the shell of a terrapin; few have room for side-walks, and where not bounded by stores, they are dark as they were under king Pepin. Some of them seem to be water-tight. St. Anne, my first acquaintance, is yet clammy with mud after a week’s drought, and early in the morning when she gets up, she is filthy to a degree that is indecent. The etymology of Paris is mud; the etymology of the Bourbons is mud, and mud to the last note of time will be, Paris and the Bourbons.

As for the noise of the streets, I need not attempt to describe it. What idea can ears, used only to the ordinary and human noises, conceive of this unceasing racket--this rattling of the cabs and other vehicles over the rough stones, this rumbling of the omnibusses. For the street cries--one might have relief from them by a file and hand-saw. First the _prima donna_ of the fish-market opens the morning: _Carpes toutes fraiches; voilà des carpes!_ And then stand out of the way for the glazier: _Au vitrière!_ quavering down the chromatic to the lowest flat upon the scale. Next the ironmonger, with his rasps, and files, and augers, which no human ears could withstand, but that his notes are happily mellowed by the seller of old clothes, _Marchand de drap!_ in a monotone so low and spondaic, and so loud, as to make Lablache die of envy. About nine is full chorus, headed by the old women and their proclamations: _Horrible attentat contre la vie du roi Louis Philippe--et la petite chienne de Madame la Marquise--égarée à dix heures--L’Archevèque de Paris--Le Sieur Lacenaire--Louis Philippe, le Procès monstre--et tout cela pour quatre sous!_ being set loose all at the same time, tuned to different keys. All things of this earth seek, at one time or another, repose--all but the noise of Paris. The waves of the sea are sometimes still, but the chaos of these streets is perpetual from generation to generation; it is the noise that never dies. Many new comers have been its victims. In time, however--such is the complaisance of human nature--we become reconciled even to this never-ending hubbub. It becomes even necessary, it is said, to one’s comforts. There are persons here who get a night-mare in a place of tranquillity, and can sleep only upon the Boulevards.

Paris and I, are yet on ceremonious terms. I venture upon her acquaintance as one who walks upon ice; it is the boy’s first lesson of skating. I am not much versed in towns any way; and this one is ahead of my experience. In my case, one is ignorant and afraid to ask information. I did venture this morning to ask what General that was--a fat, decent-looking gentleman, in silk stockings, and accoutred in regimentals? That General, sir, is Prince Talleyrand’s lacquey. Soon after, I inquired what house was that barn of a place? That house, sir, is the Louvre. So I must feel the ground under me. Yesterday, being Sunday, (which I found out by the almanac,) I went to St. Roch’s. I had the luck to hit upon the fashionable church; but the preacher was the god of dulness. The world, he says, is growing worse and worse; our roguish ancestors begot us bigger rogues, about to produce a worse set of rogues than ourselves. “The antichrist is already come.” If he had said the antichrist of wit, anybody would have believed him; and yet this is the very pulpit from which the Bossuets and Bourdaloues used to preach. The church was filled almost entirely with women. One might think that none go to heaven in this country but the fair sex. The worshippers seem intent enough upon their devotions; but the wide avenues at the sides are filled with a crowd of idle, curious, and disorderly spectators. Give me a French church: one walks in here booted and spurred, looks at the pretty women and the pictures, whistles a tune if one chooses, and then walks out again. They have not spoilt the architectural beauty of St. Roch’s by pews and galleries. The walls are adorned splendidly with paintings; and here and there are groups of statuary; and the altar, being finely gilt and illuminated, looks magnificently. When I build a church I will decorate it somewhat in this manner. It is good to imitate nature as much as one can, in all things; and she has set us the example in this. She has adorned her great temple, the world, with green fields and fragrant flowers, and its superb dome, the firmament, with stars. I walked into the Tuileries after church, where I saw a great number of naked statues and pretty women. The pretty women were not naked. I sat down awhile by the goddess of wisdom. And this is the sum of my adventures.

Oh, no! I ventured also a walk last night upon the Boulevards, about twilight. How adorable is the Madelaine! While staring at this church, (for staring is the only expression of countenance one pretends to, the first week in Paris,) a little girl--but not a little graceful and pretty--presented me a bouquet. But, my dear, I have no change. “_Mais, qu’est ce que cela fait?_” and she turned it about with her taper fingers, and fixed it and unfixed it, though there were but two leaves and a rosebud, and then arranged it in a buttonhole, shewing all the while her pearly teeth and laughing black eyes. She had the finesse to gain admiration for her charms without seeming to court it. We now walked on a few steps, when we met other women, of a richer attire, and of very easy, unembarrassed manners, who also said very obliging things to us, walking along side.

There is a kind of men in New England who cannot be beaten out of the dignity of a walk, who would rather die than be seen running, which is perhaps the reason they won the battle of Bunker’s Hill. Now, if you would represent to yourself something very comical, you must imagine my companion, straight-laced in his gravity, escorted by one of these sultanas of the Boulevards, all betawdried, and rustling in her silks--_Mon petit cœur!--Mon petit ami!--Venez donc!_ At last, turning suddenly upon her with a look and air of menace and expostulation, he invoked her in a most solemn manner to depart; though she understood not a word of the exorcism, she obeyed instantly, the gesture and tone being significant enough, and she went off as evil spirits do usually in such cases, murmuring, “_Pourquoi me tenir donc à causer, ce diable d’homme? il m’a fait perdre au moins deux messieurs._”

We now descended by the _Rue St. Anne_ towards our lodgings, talking as we went to prevent thinking; for we are both very tender-hearted so far from home--he of his Yankee wife, how industrious, how economical, and how she has resigned all the intercourse and pleasures of the world to teach the little children their catechism and their astronomy; and I, of our dear little wives of Schuylkill, so amiable, so cheerful, tempering their duties with amusements, and not forgetting the claims of society--when suddenly we observed, in a dark corner, reached only by a few rays of a distant lamp, a queer old woman, seated, her knees and chin together, and rocking herself on a chair. She rose up in the face of my companion, who knows not a word of French, with an immense gabble: “_Des demoiselles très distinguées!--jolies comme des anges!_” and instantly we were hemmed round with a fluttering troop of the angels; but we escaped into the _Hotel des Ambassadeurs_, and locked our doors for the night. Please direct your letters to this house, No. 64, _Rue St. Anne_.

* * * * *

_Hotel des Ambassadeurs, July 6th, 1835._

I must tell you how one lodges in Paris. A hotel is a huge edifice, mostly in the form of a parallelogram, and built around a paved courtyard, which serves as a landing for carriages as well as for persons on foot, and leads up to the apartments by one or more staircases. In the centre of the front wall, is a wide door (a _porte cochère_) opening from the street, and just inside a lodge (a _concièrge_) and a porter, who watches night and day over the concerns of the establishment. This porter is an important individual, and holds about the same place in a Paris hotel, that Cerberus holds--(I leave you a place for the rhyme.) He is usually a great rogue, a spy of the government, and a shoemaker; he cobbles the holes he makes in your boots, while his wife darns those she makes in your stockings. He is always a bad enemy and a useful friend, and you purchase his good will by money and condescensions, as a first minister’s. He lets you rooms, he attends them, receives parcels, letters, messages, runs errands, answers your visits, and fines you a shilling if you stay out after twelve; and his relation with many lodgers enables him to give you these services, I am ashamed to tell you how cheap. By proper attentions also to his wife, there will come to your bed every morning, at the hour you appoint, a cup of coffee or tea, and the entertainment of the lady’s conversation while you sip it. Each story of a hotel is divided into apartments and rooms--that is, accommodations for whole families or individuals; distinction, and, of course, price, decreasing upwards; for example, he who lives a story lower down thinks himself above you, and you in return consider him overhead below you. A third story in the Rue Castiglione or Rivoli, is equal in rank to a second story anywhere else.

The porter’s lodge is a little niche, about eight feet square. It pays no rent, but receives a salary, usually of sixty dollars a year, from the proprietor. Our porter is a man of several talents. He tunes pianos for ten sous, and plays at the “Petit Lazare” of a night for two francs. Indeed, his whole family plays; his grandmother plays the “Mother of the Gracchi.” He takes care, too, of his wife’s father; but he dresses him up as a Pair de France, or a Doge, and makes a good deal out of him also. Besides, he has a dog which he expects soon to play the “_Chien de Montargis_,” he is studying; and a magpie, which plays already in the “_Pie Voleuse_.” It is by these several industries that he is enabled to clean my boots once a day, take care of my room, and do all the domestic services required by a bachelor, at six francs a month; and he has grown into good circumstances. But, alas! impartial fate knocks at the Porter’s Lodge, as at the gates of the Louvre. He had an only son, who, in playing Collin last winter--a shepherd’s part in a vaudeville--had to wear a pair of white muslin breeches in the middle of the inclement season, and he took cold, and died of a _fluxion de poitrine_! The mother wept in telling this story; and then some one coming in, she smiled.

One is usually a little shy of these hotels at first sight, especially if one comes from the Broad Mountain. You take hold of an unwieldy knocker, you lift it up cautiously, and open flies the door six inches; you then push yourself through, and look about with a kind of a suspicious and sheepish look, and you see no one. At length you discover an individual, who will not seem to take the least notice of you till you intrude rather far;--then he will accost you: _Que demandez-vous, Monsieur?_--I wish to see Mr. Smith? _Monsieur?--Monsieur, il ne demeure pas ici.--Que tu es bête!_ exclaims the wife, _c’est Monsieur_ Smit. _Oui, oui, oui--au quatrième, Monsieur, au dessus de l’entresol_; and with this information, of which you understand not a syllable, you proceed up stairs, and there you ring all the bells to the garret; but no one knows Mr. Smith. Why don’t you say _Mr. Smit_?

The houses here are by no means simple and uniform, as with us. The American houses are built, as ladies are dressed, all one way. First there is a pair of rival saloons, which give themselves the air of parlours: and then there is a dining room, and corresponding chambers above to the third or fourth story; and an entry runs through the middle or alongside a mile or two without stopping, at the farthest end of which is the kitchen; so that one always stands upon the marble of the front door in December, until Kitty has travelled this distance to let one in. How many dinners have I seen frozen in their own sauces, how many lovers chilled, by this refrigeratory process? Here, if you just look at the knocker, the door, as if by some invisible hand, flies open; and when you descend, if you say “Cordon,” just as Ali Baba said “Sesame,” the door opens, and delivers you to the street. The houses, too, have private rooms, and secret doors, and intricate passages; and one can never be said to be at home in one’s own house. I should like to see any one find the way to a lady’s boudoir. A thief designing to rob, has to study beforehand the topography of each house, without which, he can no more unravel it than the Apocalypse. There are closets, too, and doors, in many of the rooms, unseen by the naked eye. If a gentleman is likely to be intruded on by the bailiff, he sinks into the earth; and a lady, if surprised in her dishabille, or any such emergency, just disappears into the wall.

No private dwellings are known in Paris. A style, which gives entire families and individuals, at a price that would procure them very mean separate lodgings, the air of living in a great castle; and they escape by it all that emulation about houses, and door servants, and street display, which brings so much fuss and expense in our cities. I have seen houses a little straitened that were obliged to give Cæsar a coat to go to the door, another to bring in dinner, and another to curry the horses. To climb up to the second or third story is, to be sure, inconvenient; but once there, your climbing ends. Parlours, bedrooms, kitchen, and all the rest, are on the same level. In America, you have the dinner in the cellar, and the cook in the garret; and nothing but ups and downs the whole day. Moreover, climbing is a disposition of our nature. “In our proper motion we ascend.” See with what avidity we climb when we are boys; and we climb when we are old, because it reminds us of our boyhood. I have no doubt that the daily habit of climbing, too, has a good moral influence; it gives one dispositions to rise in the world. I ought to remark here, that persons in honest circumstances do not have kitchens in their own houses.

It is in favour of the French style not a little, that it improves the quality at least of one class of lodgers. Mean houses degrade men’s habits, and lower their opinions of living. As for me, I like this Paris way, but I don’t know why. I like to see myself under the same roof with my neighbours. One of them is a pretty woman, with the prettiest little foot imaginable; and only think of meeting this little foot, with which one has no personal acquaintance, three or four times a-day on the staircase! Indeed, the solitude of a private dwelling begins to seem quite distressing. To be always with people one knows! it paralyzes activity, breeds selfishness, and other disagreeable qualities. Solitary life has its vices, too, as well as any other.

On the other hand, a community of living expands one’s benevolent affections, begets hospitality, mutual forbearance, politeness, respect for public opinion, and keeps cross husbands from beating their wives, and _vice versa_. If Xantippe had lived in a French hotel, she would not have kept throwing things out of the window upon her husband’s head. The domestic virtues are, to be sure, well enough in their way; but they are dull, and unless kept in countenance by good company, they go too soon to bed. Indeed, that word “home,” so sacred in the mouths of Englishmen, often means little else than dozing in an arm-chair, listening to the squeaking of children, or dying of the vapours; at all events, the English are the people of the world most inclined to leave these sanctities of home. Here they are by hundreds, running in quest of happiness all about Europe.

But to return. My object, in setting out, was to shew you, as nearly as possible, my manner of living in the street of St. Anne. I have a _chambre de garçon au second_; this means, a bachelor’s room in the third story. As companions, I have General Kellerman, and a naked Mars over the chimney (not Mademoiselle), and a little Bonaparte about three inches long; and on a round table, with a marble cover, there is an old Rabelais and a Seneca’s Maxims, with manuscript notes on the margin, and a Bible open at Jeremiah. The floor is a kind of brick pavement, upon which a servant performs a series of rubbings, every morning, with a brush attached to his right foot, which gives it a slippery and mahogany surface. We have a livery stable also in the yard, and several persons lodge here for the benefit of the smell, it being good against consumption. Of the staircase I say nothing now, as I intend some day to write a treatise upon French Staircases. This one has not been washed ever, unless by some accident, such as Noah’s flood. Indeed, the less one says of French cleanliness in the way of houses the better. Our landlady appears no more delighted with a clean floor than an antiquary would be with a scoured shield; and there is none of the middling hotels of Paris that presumes to be better than this. I ought to remark here, that servants do not run about from one garret to another as they do in America. A French servant is transmitted to posterity. Our coachman says he has been in this family several hundred years.

When one cannot travel in the highway of life with a fashionable equipage, it is pleasant to steal along its secret path unnoticed. A great man is so jostled by the throng that either he cannot think at all, or, in gathering its silly admiration, so occupied with intrigues and mere personal vanities that the good qualities of his understanding are perverted, and he loses at length his taste for innocent enjoyments. But, travelling in this sober, unambitious way, one may gather flowers by the road side; one has leisure for the contemplation of useful and agreeable things; and is not obliged to follow absurd fashion, or keep up troublesome appearances; and one can get into low company when one pleases, without being suspected. Now I can wander “on my short-tailed nag” all over the country; I can get sometimes into a _coucou_ and ride out to St. Germains, or stroll unconcerned through the markets, and ask the price of fruits; of cassolettes, muscats, and jargonelles, and of grapes; and I can eat a bunch or two upon the pavement, just fresh from Fontainbleau; and do a great many innocent things which persons of distinction dare not do. This is the life of those who lodge at the _Hotel des Ambassadeurs_.

Here are two sheets filled, with what meagre events! and how much below the dignity of history! I console myself that trifles, like domestic anecdotes, are often the most characteristic. I will be your Boswell to the city of Paris. But Boswell had to retail the sense of an individual, and I the nonsense of the multitude, and my own. However, I wish these letters to be preserved from the flames, if you can, frivolous as they are; I have partly a design to manufacture some sort of a book out of them on my return home. I intend them as notes upon the field of battle--like Cæsar’s Commentaries, with the exception of the wit.

_July 7th._

I went with my Yankee companion last night to the Grand Opera; and, at the risk of being enormously long, I am going to add a postscript; for it is a wet day, and I have no better way to beguile the lazy twenty-four hours. They admit the spectators to a French theatre in files of two between high railings, and under the grim and bearded authority of the police, which prevents crowding and disorder; and whoever wishes to go in, not having a seat provided, “makes tail,” as they call it, by entering the file in the rear. A number of speculators also stand in the ranks at an early hour, and sell out their places at an advance to the more tardy, so that you have always this resort to obtain a good enough seat. In approaching the house, persons will offer you tickets, with great importunity, in the streets. With one of these, which, by cheapening a little, I got at double price, I procured admission to the pit.

_L’analyse de la Pièce; voilà le programme!_ These are two phrases--meaning only the analysis and bill of the play, at two sous--which you will hear croaked with the most obstreperous discord through the house, in the intervals of the performance, to bring out Monsieur Auber, and Scribe, and the Donnas. It is probably for the same reason the owls are permitted to sing in the night, to bring out the nightingales. The opera last night was “_Robert le Diable_,”--_voici l’analyse de la pièce_.

There was the representation of a grave-yard and a resurrection; and the ghosts, at least two hundred, flocked out of the ground in white frocks and silk stockings, and they squeaked and gibbered all over the stage. Then they asked one another out to dance, and performed the most fashionable ballets of their country, certainly in a manner very creditable to the other world. And while these waltzed and quadrilled, another set were entertaining themselves with elegant and fashionable amusements, some were turning summersets upon a new grave; others playing at whist upon a tombstone, and others again were jumping the rope over a winding-sheet; when suddenly, they all gave a screech and skulked into their graves; there was a flutter through the house, the music announcing some great event, and at length, amidst a burst of acclamations, Mademoiselle Taglioni stood upon the margin of the scene. She seemed to have alighted there from some other sphere.

I expected to be little pleased with this lady, I had heard such frequent praises of her accomplishments; but was disappointed. Her exceeding beauty surpasses the most excessive eulogy. Her dance is the whole rhetoric of pantomime; its movements, pauses, and attitudes, in their purest Attic simplicity, chastity, and urbanity. She has a power over the feelings which you will be unwilling to concede to her art. She will make your heart beat with joy; she will make you weep by the sole eloquence of her limbs. What inimitable grace! In all she attempts, you will love her, and best in that which she attempts last. If she stands still, you will wish her a statue that she may stand still always; or if she moves, you will wish her a wave of the sea that she may do nothing but--“move still, still so, and own no other function.” To me, she appeared last night to have filled up entirely the illusion of the play--to have shuffled off this gross and clumsy humanity, and to belong to some more airy and spiritual world.

But my companion, who is a professor, and a little ecclesiastical, and bred in that most undancing country, New England, was scandalized at the whole performance. He is of the old school, and has ancient notions of the stage, and does not approve this modern way of “holding the mirror up to nature.” He was displeased especially at the scantiness of the lady’s wardrobe. I was born farther south, and could better bear it.

The art of dressing, as I have read in the history of Holland and other places, has been carried often by the ladies to a blameable excess of quantity; so much so, that a great wit said in his day, a woman was “the least part of herself.” Taglioni’s sins, it is true, do not lie on this side of the category; she produced last evening nothing but herself--Mademoiselle Taglioni in the abstract. Ovid would not have complained of her. Her lower limbs wore a light silk, imitating nature with undistinguishable nicety; and her bosom a thin guaze, which just relieved the eye, as you have seen a fine fleecy cloud hang upon the dazzling sun. But there is no gentleman out of New England who would not have grieved to see her spoilt by villainous mantua-makers. She did not, moreover, exceed what the courtesy of nations has permitted, and what is necessary to the proper exhibition of her art.

They call this French opera, the “_Académie Royale de Musique_,” also, the “Français,” in contradistinction with the “Italien,” finally, the “Grand Opera;” this latter name because it has a greater quantity of thunder and lightning, of pasteboard seas, of paper snow-storms, and dragons that spit fire; also a gorgeousness of wardrobe and scenery not equalled upon any theatre in Europe. It is certain, its “_corps de ballet_” can outdance all the world put together.

Mercy! how deficient we are in our country in these elegant accomplishments. In many things we are still in our infancy,--in dancing we are not yet born. We have, it is true, our “_balancés_,” and “_chassés_,” and _back-to-backs_, and our women do throw a great deal of soul into their little feet--as on a “birth-night,” or an “Eighth of January,” or the like;--but the Grand Opera, the Opera Français, the Académie Royale de Musique! _ah, ma foi, c’est là une autre affaire!_--You have read, and so has everybody, of the “dancing Greeks;” of Thespis, so described by Herodotus, who used to dance on his head, his feet all the while dangling in the air; of the “Gaditanian girls,” so sung by Anacreon; of Hylas, who danced before Augustus; of the “dancing Dervishes,” who danced their religion like our Shakers; of the pantomimic dances, described by Raynal; and the Turkish Ulemas, by the “sweet Lady Mary Montague,” (quere “sweet?”) and finally, every one has heard of the “Age of Voltaire, the King of Prussia, and Vestris,”--well, all this is out-danced by Taglioni and the Grand Opera.

This opera has seats for two thousand spectators, besides an immense saloon (two hundred feet by fifty) where a great number of fashionables, to relieve their ears from the noise of the singing, promenade themselves magnificently during the whole evening, under the light of brilliant lustres; and where the walls, wainscotted with mirrors, multiply their numbers and charms to infinity.--May I not as well continue dancing through the rest of this page?

Dancing, you know, is a characteristic amusement of the French; and you may suppose they have accommodations to gratify their taste to its fullest extent. There are elegant rotundas for dancing in nearly all the public gardens, as at “Tivoli,” “Waxhal d’Eté,” and the “Chaumière de Mont Parnasse.” Besides, there are “Guinguettes” at every Barrière; and in the “Village Fêtes,” which endure the whole summer, dancing is the chief amusement; and public ball-rooms are distributed through every quarter of Paris, suited to every one’s rank and fortune. The best society of Paris go to the balls of Ranelagh, Auteuil, and St. Cloud. The theatres, too, are converted into ball-rooms, especially for the masquerades, from the beginning to the end of the Carnival.

I hired a cabriolet and driver the other night, and went with a lady from New Orleans to see the most famous of the “Guinguettes.” Here all the little world seemed to me completely and reasonably happy, behaving with all the decency, and dancing with almost the grace, of high life. We visited half a dozen, paying only ten sous at each for admission. I must not tell you it was Sunday night: it is so difficult to keep Sunday all alone, and without any one to help you. The clergy find a great deal of trouble to keep it themselves here, there is so little encouragement. On Sunday only, these places are seen to advantage. I am very far from approving of dancing on this day, if one can help it; but I have no doubt that in a city like Paris the dancers are more taken from the tavern and gin-shops than from the churches. I do not approve, either, of the absolute denunciation this elegant amusement incurs from many of our religious classes in America. If human virtues are put up at too high a price, no one will bid for them. Not a word is said against dancing in the Old or New Testament, and a great deal in favour. Miriam danced, you know how prettily; and David danced. To be sure, the manner of his dancing was not quite so commendable, according to the fashion of our climates. In the New Testament, to give enjoyment to the dance, the water was changed into wine. If you will accept classical authority I will give you pedantry _par dessus la tête_. The Greeks ascribed to dancing a celestial origin, and they admitted it even amongst the accomplishments and amusements of their divinities. The Graces are represented almost always in the attitude of dancing; and Apollo, the most amiable of the gods, and the god of wisdom, too, is called by Pindar the “dancer.” Indeed, I could shew you, if I pleased, that Jupiter himself sometimes took part in a cotillon, and on one occasion danced a gavot.

Mεστοισιν δ’ωρχειτο πατηρ ανδρωντε Θεωντε.

There, it is proved to you from an ancient Greek poet. I could shew you, too, that Epaminondas, amongst his rare qualities, is praised by Cornelius Nepos for his skill in dancing; and that Themistocles, in an evening party at Athens, passed for a clown, for refusing to take a share in a dance. But it is so foppish to quote Greek, and to be talking to women about the ancients. Don’t you say that dancing is not a natural inclination, or I will set all the savages on you of the Rocky Mountains, and I don’t know how many of the dumb animals--especially the bears, who, even on the South-Sea Islands, where they could not have any relations with the _Académie Royale de Musique_, yet always express their extreme joy (Captain Cook says) by this agreeable agitation of limbs. And if you won’t believe all this, I will take you to see a Negro holiday on the Mississippi. Now, this is enough about dancing; it is very late, and I must dance off to bed.

It is necessary to be as much in love with dancing as I am to preach so pedantically about it as I have in this postscript. Its enormous length, when you have seen Mademoiselle Taglioni, needs no apology. When you do see her, take care her legs don’t get into your head; they kept capering in mine all last night.

Letter III.

The Boulevards--Boulevard Madelaine--Boulevard des Capucines--Boulevard Italien--Monsieur Carème--Splendid Cafés--The Baths--Boulevard Montmartre--The Shoe-black--The Chiffonnier--The Gratteur--The Commissionnaire--Boulevard du Temple--Scene at the Ambigù Comique--Sir Sydney Smith--Monsieur de Paris--The Café Turc--The Fountains--Recollections of the Bastille--The Halle aux Blés--The Bicêtre--Boulevard du Mont Parnasse.

_Paris, July, 1835._

The main street of Paris, and one of the most remarkable streets in the whole world, is the _Boulevard_. It runs from near the centre towards the east, and coils around the circumference of the city. Its adjacent houses are large, black, and irregular in height, resembling at a distance, battlements, or turretted castles. Its course is zig-zag, and each section has a different name, and different pursuits; so that it presents you a new face and character, a new and picturesque scene, at every quarter of a mile. This does not please, at first sight, an eye formed upon our Quaker simplicity of Philadelphia, but is approved by the general taste. Our Broadways, and Chestnut streets, and Regent-streets, are exhausted at a single view; the Boulevard entertains all day. Its side-walks are delightfully wide, and overshadowed with elms.

Before the visit of the allies, it had eight miles of trees,--a kind of ornament that is held in better esteem in European than in American cities. Our ancestors took a dislike to trees, from having so much grubbing at their original forests, and their enmity has been infused into the blood. To cut down a tree is now a passion become hereditary, and I have often spent whole days in its gratuitous indulgence. A squatter of the back woods begins by felling the trees indiscriminately; and he is most honoured, as those first Germans we read of in Cæsar, who has made the widest devastation around his dwelling. Your Pottsville, which ten years ago was a forest, has to-day not a fig-leaf to cover its nakedness.

Here is a gentleman just going to Philadelphia, who will hand you this letter; I send also a map of Paris, that I may have your company on such rambles as I may chance to take through the capital. To day I invite you to a walk upon the Boulevards.

On the west end is the Madelaine, in full view of the street. While the other monuments of Paris are “dim with the mist of years,” this stands, like a new-dressed bride, in white and glowing marble; its architecture fresh from the age of Pericles. This church became pagan in the Revolution; it was for a while the “Temple of Glory,” and has returned to the true catholic faith. Three mornings of the week, you will find at its feet half an acre in urns, baskets, and hedges, of all that nature has prettiest in her magazine of flowers; delighting the eye by their tasteful combination of colours, and embalming the air with their fragrance. I am sorry you are not a gentleman, I could describe to you so feelingly the flower-girl--her fichu too narrow by an inch; her frock rumpled and disordered, which seems hung upon her by the graces. Her laughing eyes emulate the diamond; and love has pressed his two fingers upon her brunette cheeks. This is the _Boulevard Madelaine_. On the south side, a sad looking garden occupies its whole length. I asked of a Frenchman whose it was; he says “it is the Minister of Strange Affairs.” It is the hotel of Monsieur Thiers, who wrote a book about the Revolution and a “Treatise upon Wigs,” and is now minister _des affaires étrangères_. I do not like him, this Mr. Thiers, and I don’t care to tell you the reason. I experienced yesterday some impudence and pertness from one of the clerks of his office; and these underlings you know represent usually the qualifications of their masters in such particulars.

To leave Paris for London requires your passport to be signed at the police office, at the American and English ambassadors’, and at the French minister’s. At the first office you are set down with a motley crew upon a bench, and there you sit, like one of those virtues in front of the “Palais Bourbon,” often an hour or two, until your name is called; and when it is called you don’t recognise it, and you keep sitting on, unless you take some one along with you to translate it for you. There is not anything in nature so unlike itself as one’s name Frenchified--even a monosyllable. As for “John,” it changes genders altogether, and becomes “_Jean_.” To the last three offices you pay the valedictory compliment of thirty francs, and get their impudence into the bargain. You will always find persons about your lodgings, called “_facteurs_,” (they should be called _benefactors_,) who will do all this for you, for a small consideration, much better than you can do it yourself.

You are now on the _Boulevard des Capucines_. It is raised about thirty feet, and the houses for a quarter of a mile are left in the valley. The garret and Miss Annette are alone above ground; all the high life here is below stairs. On the right side, you see apparently one of the happiest of human beings, the “_marchand des chiens_,” who sells little dogs and parrots. “_A six francs ma caniche!_”--“_Margot à dix francs!_” he cries, with a gentle voice, half afraid some one might hear him; he has become attached to his animals, and feels a sorrow to part with them. He feels as you for your chickens you have fed every day, when you must kill them for dinner. Poor little Azor, and Zémire! Only think of seeing them no more! He sells them a few francs cheaper, when the purchaser is rich and likely to treat them well. The French, especially the women, dote upon dogs beyond the example of all other nations, and yet have the nastiest race of curs upon the earth. A dog, they say, loves his master the more he is a vagabond, and the French in return love their dogs the more they are shabby. What would I give for a few of those eloquent _bow wows_ which resound in the night from an American barn-yard, and which protect so securely one’s little wife from the thieves and the lovers, while the husband is wandering in foreign lands.

Take off your hat; this is one of the choice and pre-eminent spots of the French capital; the very seat almost of the pleasures and amusements of Europe; it is the _Boulevard Italien_. It is here that gentlemen and ladies assemble of an evening to discuss the immense importance of a good dinner, when the labours of the day have closed, and not a care intrudes to distract the mind from the great business of deglutition and digestion. Men make splendid reputations here which live after them by the invention of a single soup. It is here they make the sauces in which one might eat his own grandfather. This place was respected by the Holy Alliance; and Lord Wellington, in 1815, pitched his marquee upon the Boulevard Italien.

It is in vain to expect perfection in an art unless we honour those who exercise its functions. Monsieur Carème, (whom I mention for the sake of honour, and who lives close by here in the Rue Lafitte,) now cook to the Baron Rothschild and ex-cook to the Prince of Wales, is one of the most considerable persons of this age; holding a high gentlemanly rank, and living in an enviable condition of opulence and splendour. He keeps his carriage, takes his airings of an evening, has his country seat, and his box at the opera; and has, indeed, every attribute requisite to make a gentleman in any country. The number of officers attached to his staff is greater than that of any general of the present _régime_; his assistant roaster has a salary above our President of the United States. It is by this honourable recompence of merit that, through all the vicissitudes of her various fortunes, France has still maintained unimpaired her great prerogative of teaching the nations how to cook.

Monsieur de Carème is worthy a particular notice. He had an ancestor who was “chef de cuisine,” of the Vatican, and invented a _soupe maigre_ for his Holiness; and another who was cook to the Autocratrix of all the Russias. How talents do run in some families! Himself, having served his apprenticeship under an eminent artist of the Boulevard Italien, he invented a _sauce piquante_, when quite a young man; and by a regular cultivation of his fine natural powers, he has reached a degree of perfection in his art which has long since set envy and rivalship at defiance. The truth is, that a great cook is as rare a miracle as a great poet. It is well known that Claude Lorraine could not succeed in pastry with all his genius.

“Et Balzac et Malherbe si fameux en bon mots, En cuisine peut-être n’aurait été que des sots.”

To whom, think you, does the British nation owe those Attic suppers, those feasts of the gods, which so surprised the Allied Monarchs, and brought so much glory upon his late majesty? To Monsieur de Carème. And to whom do you think the Baron Rothschild owes those clear and unclouded faculties with which he out-financiers all Europe and America? Certes, to Monsieur de Carème. All the Baron has to do is to dine; digestion is done by his cook. Carème has refused invitations to nearly every European court; and it was only upon the most urgent solicitations that he consented to reside eight months at Carlton House,--a portion of his life upon which he looks back with much displeasure and repentance, and the remnant of his days he designs to consecrate, with the greater zeal on this account, to the honour and interests of his native country. He is now preparing a digest of his art, after the manner of the Code Napoleon; and eminent critics, to whom he has communicated his work, pronounce it excellent, both for its literary and culinary merits.

To this Boulevard also the sweetmeat part of the creation resort about twilight to their creams and lemonades and _eau sucrée_. They seat themselves upon both margins of the _trottoir_ upon chairs, leaving an interval between, for the successive waves of pedestrians, who are also attracted hither by the fashion and elegance of the place. How charming, of a summer evening, to sit you down here upon one chair and put your feet upon another, and look whole hours away upon this little world; or to walk up and down and eye the double row of belles seated amidst the splendour of the gas-lamps. In this group are examples of nearly all that is extant of the human species. I have seen a Bedouin of the _Mer Rouge_ stumble upon a great ambassador from the Neva; and a Mandarin of the Loo-koo run foul of an ex-school-master of the Mohontongo. If any one is missing from your mines of Shamoken, come hither, and you will find him seated on a straw-bottomed chair on the Boulevard Italien.

These splendid cafés are multiplied by mirrors, and being open, or separated only by panels of glass, appear to form but a single tableau with the street, and those outside and in seem parts of the same company. I recommend you the _Café de Paris_, the _Café Hardi_, the _Café Veron_, if you wish to mix with the fashionable and merry world; if with the business world, with the great bankers, the millionaires, the _noblesse de la Bourse_, who smooth their cares with fat dinners and good wines, where else in the world should you go but to _Tortoni’s_? There are not two Tortonis upon the earth. A dinner you may get at the _Rocher Cancale_,--but a breakfast!--it is to be had no where in all Europe out of Tortoni’s. The ladies of high and fashionable life stop here before the door, and are served by liveried waiters elegantly in their barouches; they cannot think of venturing in, there are so many more gentlemen outside. You will see here, both in and out, the most egregious cockneys of Europe, the beau Brummels and the beau Nashes, the “Flashes,” and “Full-Swells” of London town, and, in elegant apposition, the Parisian exquisites.

Was there ever anything so beautiful!--No, _d’honneur_! His boots are of Evrat, his coat Staub, vest Moreau, gloves and cravat Walker, and hat Bandoni; and Mrs. Frederic is his washerwoman! You will please give the superiority to the French. To make an elegant fop is more than the barber’s business; nature herself must have a finger in the composition. Besides, if a man is born a fool, he is a greater fool in Paris than elsewhere, there are such opportunities for acquirement.

These are the French people. Don’t you hate to see so many ninnies in mustachios? If I had not the great Marlborough, and Bonaparte, and Apollo, on my side, all three unwhiskered, I would go home in the next packet. The moment one has made one’s debut here in the world of beards, one is a man, and there is no manhood, founded on any other pretensions, that can dispense with this main qualification. It is the one eminent criterion of all merit; it is a diploma; a bill of credit as current as in the days Albuquerque; it is promotion in the army, in the diplomacy, even in the church; you cannot be a saint without this grisly recommendation. One loves the women, just because they have no beards on their faces.

Otherwise--_à la barbe près_--the French are well enough. It is the same kind of population, nearly, that one meets by the gross in New York, and everywhere else. I looked about for Monsieur Dablancour, but could see nothing of him. In a foreign country a man is always a caricature of himself. The French are here in their own element, and swim in it naturally. One is always awkward from the very sense of not knowing foreign customs; and always ridiculous abroad because everything is ridiculous which departs from common and inveterate habit, and nothing is ridiculous which conforms with it. In a nation of apes, it is becoming to be an ape. If you place a man of sense in a company of fools, it is the man of sense who is embarrassed and looks foolish. If one travelled into Timbuctoo, I presume one would feel very foolish for being white.

But this is not all that is worth your attention on the Boulevard Italien. If you love baths of oriental luxury, here are the _Bains Chinoises_ just opposite. Personal cleanliness is the French virtue _par excellence_. Bathing in other countries is a luxury, in France a necessity. Hot baths as good as yours at Swaim’s are at fifteen sous. The _Bains Vigiers_ at twenty sous a bath made their proprietor a count. You can have baths here simple and compound, inodorous and aromatic, with cold or warm, or clarified or Seine water; and you have them with naked floors and ungarnished walls, and with all the luxury of tapestry and lounges; baths double and single, with and without attendance, with a whole skin, or flayed alive with friction. And besides these baths ordinary and extraordinary--Russian, Turkish, and Chinese--you have baths specific against all human infirmities; baths alkalic, sulphurous, fumigatory, oleaginous, and antiphlogistic. All the mineral waters of Europe pour themselves at your feet in the middle of Paris. Spa, Seltzer, Barege, Aix-la-chapelle, and Ginsnack; manufactured, every one of them, in the street of the University, _Gros Caillou_, No. 21. And this is not all; there is the “ambulatory bath,” which walks to your bedside, and, embracing you, walks out again, at thirty sous. “_C’est un vrai pays de Cocagne que ce Paris._”

And if you love gew-gaws, gingumbobs, and pretty shop-girls, why here they are at the Bazaar. The French take care, as no other people, to furnish such places with pretty women, and they turn their influence, as women, to the account of the shop. The English, I have heard, put all their deformities into their bazaars, that customers, they say, may attend to the other merchandise. The French way is the more sensible. I have been ruined already several times by the same shop-girl, caressing and caressing each of one’s fingers, as she tries on a pair of gloves one does not want.

Or if you love the fine arts, where are all the print-shops of Paris? Why here. You can buy here Calypsos and Cleopatras all naked, with little French faces; and Scipios and Cæsars, and other marshals of the empire, from any price down to three sous a piece. Finally, if you love the best _patés_ in this world, we will just step over into the Passage Panorama to Madame Felix’s. Sweet Passage Panorama! How often have I walked up and down beneath thy crystal roof as the dusky evening came on, with arms folded, and in the narcotic influence of a choice Havannah, forgotten all, all but that a yawning gulf lies between me and my friends and native country!

Give a sou to this little Savoyard with the smiling face, who sweeps the crossings. “_Ah, Madame, regardez dans votre petite poche si vous n’avez pas un petit sou à me donner!_” How can you refuse him! If you do, he will make you just the same thankful bow, in the best forms of French courtesy.

We are now on the _Boulevard Montmartre_. Here are cashmeres and silks from Arabia; merinos _veritable barbe de Pacha_, chalys, _mousseline Thibet_, Pondicherry, _unis et broché_, and pocket handkerchiefs at two sous. Ah, come along! And here are six pairs of ladies’ legs, shewing at the window the silk stockings. How gracefully gartered! And from above, how the white curtain falls down modestly in front almost to the knee. Don’t be in such a hurry! they are twice as natural as living legs! And here are dolls brevetted by the king, and milliners _à prix fixe_, at a fixed price; and here is M. Dutosq, _fabricant de sac en papier_, manufacturer of little paper-bags-to-put-sugar-in to his majesty; and Madame Raggi, who lets out Venuses and other goddesses to the drawing-schools, at two sous an hour. And look at this shop of women’s ready-made articles. Here one can be dressed cap-à-pie for four francs and eleven centimes (three quarters of a dollar), frock, petticoat, fichu, bonnet, stockings and chemise! A student, also, can buy here a library in the street from a quarter of a mile of books, at six sous a volume. I have just bought Rousseau in calf, octavo, at ten sous!

Since the last Revolution, commerce has taken a new spirit; the _bourgeois_ blood has got uppermost. The greatest barons now are the Rothschilds, and the greatest ministers the Lafittes. The style, too, has risen to the level of the new bureau-cratic nobility. The shopkeeper of these times is at your service, a _commerçant_, his “boutique” is a _magazin_, his “contoir” his _bureau_, and his “pratique” his _clientelle_. Even the signs, as you see, speak a magnificent language. It is the “_Magazin du Doge de Venise_,” or “_Magazin du Zodiaque--des Vépres Siciliennes_,” or “_Grand Magazin de Nouveauté_.” And if the Doge of Venice is “selling out cheap,” the language is of course worthy of a Doge--it is “_au rabais par cessation de commerce_.” The Bourse is now a monument of the capital, and disputes rank with the Louvre. The “_petit Marquis_” is the banker’s son, and the marshals of the empire are sold “second hand” in the frippery market. I intended to write you in English, but the French creeps on in spite of me.

This is one of the prettiest of the Boulevards, and you will see here a great many fine women _en promenade_ of a morning about twelve. When a French lady walks out, she always takes on one side her _caniche_ by a string, and at the other, sometimes, her beau without a string. In either way she monopolizes the whole street, and you are continually getting between her and the puppy, very much to your inconvenience; for if you offend the dog the mistress is, of course, implacable, and you will very likely have to meet her gallant in the Forest of Bondy the next morning. But you can turn this evil sometimes to advantage. If you see, for instance, a pretty woman alone, with her curly companion, you can just walk on, “commercing with the skies” till the lady gets one side of you and the dog the other; this will give you the opportunity of begging her pardon, of patting and stroking the dog a little,--it may break the ice towards an acquaintance, or, if the place be convenient to fall, you had better let her trip you up, and then she will be very sorry. If you think it is a little thing to get a pretty woman’s pity on your side, you are very much mistaken.

Let me introduce you to this shoe-black. He has, as you see, a little box, a brush or two in it, and blacking, and a fixture on the top for a foot; this is his _fond de boutique_, his stock in trade. He brushes off the mud to the soles of your feet, and shews you your own features in your boots for three sous. This one has just dissolved an ancient firm; and his advertisement, which he calls a “prospectus,” standing here so prim upon a board, announces the event. The partnership is dissolved, but the whole “_personnel_,” he says, of the establishment remains with the present proprietor; and M. Badaraque, ex-partner, has also the honour to inform us, that he has transported the “_appareil de son établissement_” to the “_Place de la Bourse, une des plus jolies locations de la ville_.” The “_Decrotteur en chef_” at the Palais Royal, and other places of fashion, has his assistants, and serves a dozen or two of customers at a time. He has a shop furnished with cloth-covered benches in amphitheatre, as at the Chamber of Deputies, with a long horizontal iron support for the foot, and pictures are hung around the walls. “_On dit, monsieur, que c’est d’après Teniers--celui, monsieur? c’est d’après Vandyke._” And there are newspapers and reviews; so that to polish a gentleman’s boots and his understanding are parts of the same process.

There is a variety of other little trades and industries, which derive their chief means of life from the wants and luxuries of this street, which I may as well call to your notice _en passant_: I mean trades that are “_tout Parisiennies_”; that is to say, unknown in any other country than Paris. You will see an individual moving about, at all hours of the night, silent and active, and seeing the smallest bit of paper in the dark where you can see nothing, and, with a hook in the end of a stick, picking it up, and pitching it with amazing dexterity into a basket tied to his left shoulder; with a cat-like walk, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time, stirring up the rubbish of every nook and gutter of the street, under your very nose--this is the _chiffonnier_. He is a very important individual. He is in matter what Pythogoras was in mind; and his transformations are scarcely less curious than those of the Samian sage.

The beau, by his pains, peruses once again his dicky, or cravat, of a morning, in the “_Magazin des Modes_,” whilst the politician has his breeches reproduced in the “_Journal des Debats_;” and many a fine lady pours out her soul upon a _billet-doux_ that once was the dishclout. The _chiffonnier_ stands at the head of the little trades, and is looked up to with envy by the others. He has two coats, and wears on holidays a chain and quizzing-glass, and washes his hands with _pâte d’amand_. He rises, too, like the Paris gentry, when the chickens roost; and when the lark cheers the morning, goes to bed. All the city is divided into districts, and let out to these _chiffonniers_ by the hour; to one, from ten to eleven, and from eleven to twelve to another, and so on through the night; so that several get a living and consideration from the same district. This individual does justice to the literary compositions of the day; he crams into his _chiffonnerie_ indiscriminately the last Vaudeville, the last sermon of the Archbishop, and the last _éloge_ of the Academy.

Just below him is the _Gratteur_. This artist scratches the live-long day between the stones of the pavement for old nails from horses’ shoes, and other bits of iron--always in hopes of a bit of silver, and even, perhaps, a bit of gold; more happy in his hope than a hundred others in the possession. He has a store in the Faubourgs, where he deposits his ferruginous treasure. His wife keeps this store, and is a “_Marchande de Fer_.” He maintains a family, like another man; one or two of his sons he brings up to scratch for a living, and the other he sends to college; and he has a lot “in perpetuity” in Père la Chaise. His rank is, however, inferior to the _Chiffonnier_, who will not give him his daughter in marriage, and he don’t ask him to his _soirées_.

In all places of much resort you will see an individual, broad-shouldered and whiskered, looking very affable and officious, especially upon strangers, mostly about grocer-stores and street corners. Let me introduce you to him, also. He wants to carry your letters, and run errands for you from one end of Paris to the other. He will carry, also, your wood to your room, a _billet-doux_ to your mistress, and your boots to the cobbler’s, and, for a modest compensation, perform any service that one person may require of another; also, as you see, a very important individual. Indeed, he holds amongst men nearly the same place that Mercury holds amongst the gods. About his neck he wears a brass medal, polished bright as honour--at once his badge of office and pledge of fidelity. If you seem to doubt his honesty, he points to his medal, and holds up his head; that’s enough. If only the Peers could point to their decorations with the same confidence! For instance, if you walk out in the bright day, not being a Parisian, you are of course overtaken by the rain; for a Paris sunshine and shower are as close together as a babe’s smiles and tears; and then you just step into a “_Cabinet de lecture_,” and you have not read half the worth of your sou, when your coat has embraced you, and your umbrella is between you and the merciless heavens. This is the _commissionnaire_. I should have noticed among the little industries the “Broker of theatrical pleasures;” he sells the pass A, who retires early, to B, who goes in late; and the _Clacqueur_, who for two or three francs a night applauds or hisses the new plays. But we must get on with our journey.

Here on the _Boulevard Poissonnière_, or near it, resides Mr. ----, of New Jersey; he has been sent over (hapless errand!) to convert these French people to Christianity. He is a very clever man; and we will ask if he is yet alive. The journals of this morning say three or four missionaries have been eat up by the Sumatras.

This is the famous Arch of Triumph of the Porte St. Denis. It compliments Louis XIV. on his passage of the Rhine in 1672, and is the counterpart of the Napoleon Arch at the Barrière de l’Etoile. It is seventy-two feet high, and has at each side an obelisk, supported by a lion, and decorated with trophies. That fat Dutch woman at the left base stands for Holland; and that vigorous, muscular-looking man on the right, is deputy to the Rhine; and that overhead on horseback, is great “baby Louis.”

We have now left the fashionable world at our heels--this is the _Boulevard du Temple_. This Boulevard, a few years ago, was a delightful and romantic walk of an evening; but noise and business have now violated all the secret retreats of Paris, one after another, and there is no spot left of the great capital in which you can hear your own voice. There were here, before the Revolution, five theatres; and the lists of fame are crowded with the theatrical celebrities which drew the homage of the whole city to this street. This is the only spot in the world that has furnished clowns for posterity; Baron and Le Kain are hardly more fresh in the memory of man than Galimafré and Bobèche. This was the theatre of their triumphs. It was here, too, that the world came to see a living skeleton of eight pounds, and his wife of eight hundred,--that men, to the great astonishment of our ancestors, swallowed carving knives and boiling oil,--that turkeys danced quadrilles, and fleas drove their coaches and six; and it was here that Mademoiselle Rose stood on her head on a candlestick. There are yet six theatres here; but the street once so adorned with gardens, and equipages, and fashionable ladies, and an infinity of other attractions, is now, alas! built up with gaunt houses, and differs scarcely from the other Boulevards.

The simplicity of original manners is, however, wonderfully preserved in this district. The more fashionable parts are so filled with strangers--with parasite plants, that you can scarcely distinguish the indigenous population. This is the true classical and traditional district--the only place in which you can find unadulterated Frenchmen. The inhabitant of this quarter has rather more than a French share of _embonpoint_, and aims at dignity, and his whiskers leave a part of his chin uncovered; his clothes are large and fine in texture; he carries an umbrella, and, on _fête_ days, a cane, to give him an important air and keep off the dogs. If it rains, he takes a fiacre; he keeps by him his certificate of marriage and “_extrait de batême_,” and has not got over the prejudice of being born in lawful wedlock. His wife is pretty, but not handsome; her features are regular, and face plump--indeed, she is plump all over. He loves his wife by instinct. She keeps his books, and he asks her advice in all his business; she suckles his children, and gives him _tisane_ when he is sick.

I saw this individual and his wife together a few evenings ago at the _Ambigù Comique_. I sometimes go to this theatre, and the _Gaité_ and the _Cirque Olympique_. A vicious student was tempted every now and then to pinch Madame behind. She bore it impatiently, indeed, but silently, for some time. “_Qu’est-ce que tu as?_--_Qu’as tu donc, ma femme?_” At last she communicated to her husband the fact. He immediately grew a foot taller upon his seat; and then he looked at the young man from head to foot with one of those looks which mean so much more than words. Not wishing, however, to disturb the play, he contained himself, only riggling on his seat, and eyeing him occasionally, to the end of the act; and then he got up. “_Quoi, monsieur_,” said he, “_vous avez l’impertinence de pincer les fesses de madame?_” and then thrusting his tongue into the lower lip, he put on an expression, such as you will never meet outside the Boulevard du Temple. You would go a mile any time barefooted to see it. “I would have you to know, sir, that I am a _rentier_, (a freeholder) _que je paye rente à la ville de Paris_; that I am called Grigou, monsieur; and that I live in the Rue d’Angouleme, No. 22;” and he sat down. The little wife now tried to appease him, which made him the more pugnacious; she reminded him he was the father of a family, had children, and, finally, that he had a wife; and then she sat up close by him, and then she came over to the other side, just in front of me, for security.--The bourgeois of this district lives in a larger house than he could get for the same rent in any other part of Paris; he is usually independent in his circumstances, and has a certain _à plomb_, or confidence in himself, and a liberty in all his movements, which give a full relief to his natural feelings and traits of character.

Some distance towards the right, you will find the great market of frippery--one of the curiosities of this district. Every old thing upon the earth is sold there for new. There are 1800 shops. Nothing was ever so restored from raggedness to apparent green youth and integrity as an old coat in the hands of these Israelites, unless it be the conscience of those who sell. A garment that has served at least two generations, and been worn last by a beggar, you will buy in this market for new in spite of your teeth. It is a good study of human nature to see here how far the human face may be modified by its pursuits and meditations.

This building in the _Rue du Temple_, with the superb portico and Ionic columns, and two colossal statues in front, is one of great historical importance; and ladies who love knights would not pardon me for passing it unnoticed. The ancient edifice was built seven hundred years ago, and was occupied by one of the most powerful orders of Christianity--the Knights Templars. Here it was that Philip le Bel tortured and burnt alive these soldier monks, seizing their treasures, and bestowing their other possessions upon his new favourites, the Knights of Malta. Who has not heard of the war-cry of _Beauseant_, which chilled the blood of the Saracens on the plains of Syria, and has since made many a woman tremble in her slippers at midnight? This was his lodging. Heavens! how wide you open your eyes!--yes, here lodged the Knights of the Red Cross, and Richard Cœur de Lion used to put up in this temple in going to the Holy Land. It became national property in the Revolution, and was given at the Restoration (1814) to the _Princesse de Condé_, who established the present “Convent of the Temple.” The ladies who now occupy it are called the _Dames Benedictines_, and, like the other nuns, of whom there are at present more than twenty orders in France, they devote themselves to education, and other benevolent employments.

It was in this old building that Louis XVI. and his queen were imprisoned in 1792. The king was taken out from here the 20th of January, 1793, to the scaffold; the queen about eleven months after; and Madame Elizabeth, his sister, in the following year; leaving his daughter here alone at thirteen years of age. Sir Sydney Smith was confined in the same room in 1798. Bonaparte, in 1811, demolished the old edifice to the last stone--from what motive?--and in 1812 it was fenced round, and the grass grew upon the guilty place. The religious ladies who now reside here, are purifying it by prayers and other acts of devotion. _A propos_ of Sydney Smith; I met him at an evening party lately. He looks like the history of the last half century. He is a venerable old man, and very sociable with the young girls, who were climbing his knees, and hanging about his neck, and getting his name _albummed_ in their little books to carry to America.

I will now shew you a house in this street, (_Rue des Marais du Temple_, No. 31,) a house that, once seen, will never depart from your memory. Its closed doors and windows, as if no one lived there; its iron railing, without entrance, and the interstices condemned with wood, in front; and the slit in the centre of the door to receive the correspondence of its horrible master, who sits within as a spider in its web, you will see all the rest of your life. It is the house of MONSIEUR de Paris. Oh, dear! and who is Monsieur de Paris? He is a civil magistrate, and belongs to the executive department. No one living, is perhaps, so great a terror to evil doers as this Monsieur de Paris. “_Monsieur_,” you must recollect, has its particular and its general meanings. _Monsieur_ means any body; _un_ monsieur is a gentleman of some breeding and education; _La maison de_ monsieur is the family of the king’s eldest son; Monsieur _de Meaux_ means the Archbishop; and Monsieur _de Paris_ means the Hangman! He is also called the “_Executeur de la haute justice_,” or “_Executeur des hautes œuvres_,” and vulgarly, the _Bourreau_. This is his Hotel. The name of the present incumbent is Mr. Henry Sanson. His family consists of a son, a person of mild and gentle manners, who is now serving his apprenticeship to the business under his eminent parent; and two daughters. The elder, about fifteen, is remarkable for beauty and accomplishments. The father is rich, his salary being above that of the President of the Royal Court, and he has spared no expense in the education of the girls. They will be sumptuously endowed.

The two ends of society are affected sometimes in nearly the same way. A princess, being obliged to select her husband from her own rank and religion, runs the hazard of a perpetual virginity; and _Mademoiselle de Paris_ experiences exactly the same inconvenience; she can marry but a hangman. There is no one of all Europe who has performed the same eminent functions as Mr. Henry Sanson, or to whom, without loss of dignity, he can offer the hand of his fair daughter. Ye lords and gentlemen, if you think you have all the pride to yourselves, you are mistaken, the hangman has his share, like another man.

Mr. Sanson has appropriated one or two rooms of this building to a museum of ancient instruments used in judicial torture--Luke’s iron bed, Ravaillac’s boots, and such like relics; and is quite a _dilettanti_ in this department of science. We expect a course of gratuitous lectures, as at the “_Musée des Arts et Metiers_,” when the season begins. Amongst other objects, you will see the sword with which was beheaded the _Marquis de Laly_. I am going to tell you an anecdote I have read of this too famous execution, which is curious.

About the year 1750, in the middle of the night, three young men of the high class of nobility, after breaking windows, and the heads of street passengers, and beating the guard, (which was the privilege of the higher classes in those times,) strolling down the _Faubourg St. Martin_, laughing and talking, and well fuddled with champagne, arrived at the door of this house. They heard the sound of instruments, and music so lively, seemed to indicate a hearty bourgeois dance. How fortunate! they could now pass the night pleasantly. One of them knocked, and a polite well-dressed person opened. A young lord explained the motive of their visit, and was refused. “You are wrong,” said the nobleman; “we are of the court, and do you honour in sharing your amusements.” “I am obliged, nevertheless, to refuse,” replied the stranger; “neither of you know the person you are addressing, or you would be as anxious to withdraw, as now to be admitted.” “Excellent, upon honour! and who the devil are you?” “The executioner of Paris.” “Ha, ha! what you? you the gentleman who breaks limbs, cuts off heads, and tortures poor devils so agreeably?” “Such indeed are the duties of my office; I leave, however, the details you speak of to my deputies, and it is only when a lord like either of you is subject to the penalties of the law, that I do execution on him with my own hands.” The individual who held this dialogue with the executioner was the Marquis de Laly. Twenty years after, he died by the hands of this man, upon whose office he was now exercising his raillery.

One of the ornaments of this Boulevard is the _Café Turc_, fitted up with a furniture of two hundred thousand francs. It would do honour to the Italien. What a display of belles and beaux, about seven of an evening, through its spacious rooms, and gardens, and galleries!--one lends his ear to the concert; another, retired in a grotto at the side of his _bonne amie_, drinks large draughts of love; and another drinks _eau sucrée_. And here is the largest elephant upon the earth, which bears the same relation to all other elephants that the Trojan horse did to all other horses. This monster was to be cast in bronze, and surmounted by a tower, forming a figure of about eighty feet in height. That which you see here is only the model, in plaster of Paris. The stair-way leads up through one of the legs, six and a quarter feet in the ancle. There were to be twenty-four _bas reliefs_ in marble, representing the arts and sciences; and the bronze was to be obtained from the fusion of the cannon captured by the imperial army in Spain. Louis Philippe, who is charged with the public works begun by Bonaparte, will be puzzled to finish this elephant.

Paris contains one hundred and eighty-nine great fountains, of which, about twenty are of beautiful architecture, adorned with sculpture and statuary, and enlivened by _jets d’eaux_, and form a principal ornament of the city. This elephant was intended to add one to the number. That, so imposing and picturesque, which we just now passed, on the Boulevard du Temple, is called the _Chateau_. The building with the jet on the top forms a cone. The water falls from its summit into vases, which overflow in cascades that tumble down from story to story into a large basin at the base, where eight lions of bronze spout torrents in _jets d’eaux_ from their mouths. Its cost was one hundred thousand francs.

It would be too long to particularise the others. On one, you will see Leda caressing her swan, Cupid lurking on the watch; on another, Tantalus gaping in vain for the liquid, which passes by his lips into the pail of the waterman; on another, Hygeia giving drink to a fatigued soldier; and, on another, Charity suckling one of her children, wrapping another from the cold in the folds of her frock, and quenching the parched lips of a third with the pure stream. I have just bought you a clock representing the “Fountain of the Innocents,” with all its waters in motion. It was the Duchess de Berri’s, and is of delicate workmanship. Please to have the proper respect for its dignity, and indulgence for its frailty. I will send it by the next Packet.

The turning of wickets, the gingling of keys, and grating of bolts, were the sounds heard here forty-six years ago. What recollections rise out of the ground to meet you at every step as you tread upon this unhallowed spot. One hears almost the chains clank, and the prisoner groan in his cell! It was here, where the charcoal now floats so peacefully on the lake, and where the boatman sings his absent mistress so joyously, that stood, in horrid majesty--

“With many a foul and midnight murder fed,”

the “high altar and castle of Despotism,” the _Bastille_! Where are now the damp and secret cells, the sombre corridors, and the grim countenances of the gaolers, and where the mob of 1789, and the mad passions that levelled its towers and battlements? Quiet as the Seine that sleeps upon its dungeons! The present substitutes for the Bastille are, the Depôt at the Prefecture of Police; _St. Pelagie_ for state crimes, and _La Force_ for civil; the _Conciergerie_ for those awaiting trial, and the _Salpetrière_ for those awaiting the execution of their sentence.

Bonaparte has built here an immense granary, containing always corn enough for the consumption of the capital for two months. This, with the _Halle aux blés_ in the centre of the city, supplies the whole population. Paris has six hundred bakers, who are obliged to keep always in this granary one hundred thousand sacks of flour, worth thirty shillings sterling per sack; and therefore it is called the _Grenier de Reserve_. Here lived the witty and profligate Beaumarchais; his castle is rased; all but Figaro are dead. You have in sight the Hospital of the Quinze-vingts, which contains three hundred blind, who have twenty-four sous a day each for a living, with the produce of their industry, which is wonderfully ingenious. Now we have passed the Garden of Plants, and the Bridge of Austerlitz. For this latter favour we owe something to the Russians, who saved this bridge from its bad name and Blucher’s gunpowder.

That upon the hill is the _Salpetrière_, the Insane Hospital for women. What a huge pile! One to put the sane ones in would not be half the size. This front on the boulevard is six hundred feet. The building in the rear is of similar dimensions, and the _Rotonde_ between, with the octagon dome, is the chapel. It contains now four thousand five hundred poor, aged above seventy; one thousand five hundred crazy; all women. I went in on Sunday. What immense conversation! There is a similar institution for the other sex, called the _Bicêtre_. Paris has twenty hospitals, affording thirty thousand beds, and classed by the several diseases and infirmities. It has no poor-houses, but each of its twelve _arrondissements_, or municipal divisions, has a “_Bureau de Bienfaisance_,” which distributes provisions to the indigent, and provides labour for the idle; and there is a plenty of benevolent societies, with specific objects. Nor do they want customers, for the number of paupers are near fifty thousand. I forgot to tell you there is a hospital here (_the Hospice des Ménages_) for widowers. What an object of charity is a man without a wife! They have made, however, the terms hard; one has to stay married twenty years to be admitted. The institution is under the care of the sisters of Charity.

This of _Val de Grace_ is for the military, and that of the _Rue d’Enfer_ for the foundlings; not an unnatural association, but emblematic of the two chief concerns of the capital--killing off the people by war, and making up the loss by adultery. And this is the Rue St. Jaques, one of the classical streets of the city. The great rogues pay their last visit to this end of it, and the great men to the other: if you kill ten thousand of your fellow creatures you go to the Pantheon at the west end, if one only, you come here to the Place St. Jaques, now the seat of the guillotine and the public executions. At length we are on the _Boulevard du Mont Parnasse_, at the end of our journey. Yet could you not get a drop of helicon here, though perishing with thirst. All one can offer you is a little sour Burgundy, which is cheaper than inside the wall. This is the reason why you see all this rabble, five hundred at a view, carousing and dancing in their sabots, drinking and caressing, tour-à-tour, the necks of their bottles and their belles; it is the reason why thousands are crowding here to drink who are not dry, and Paris is losing daily her sober reputation, and learning to get drunk like her neighbours.

The bad system of the ports, is in France transferred to all the petty towns. A couple of sergeants, musketted and whiskered, walk with grim dignity at each side of the gates. They stop and examine all vehicles, public and private, and all such persons as carry in provisions to the market, forcing them to pay an _octroi_, or duty, to the city of Paris, which prevents those rogues, the poor people, from getting a dinner untaxed. They even stop sometimes the foot passengers; especially those notorious smugglers, the women. If any one chance to be half gone, she is not allowed to go any farther, unless she produce a certificate from the parish priest, or some equally good authority. Quantities of lace and silks have passed in under such pretexts. The best commentary I know upon the wisdom of this policy is the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse.

When Paris was surrounded by this wall, fifty years ago, the people murmured and made a riot, and hung up several of the ring-leaders, on the same principles of law recently laid down by our chief justice Lynch. They entered suits, too, against the city, to put her in the Bastille; but a compromise ended the strife, and the wall was built. Here is a line from an old book relating to these times--

“Les murs murant Paris rendent Paris murmurant.”

I could not think of descending from Parnassus without a line of poetry.

Letter IV.

The Palais Royal--French courtesy--Rue Vivienne--Pleasures of walking in the streets--Cafés in the Palais Royal--Mille Colonnes--Véry’s--French dinners--Past History of the Palais Royal--Galerie d’Orleans--Gambling--The unhappy Colton--Hells of the Palais Royal--Prince Puckler Muskau--Lord Brougham--The King and Queen.

_Paris, July, 1835._

You wish to see the _Palais Royal_? Then you must step from the Boulevard Italien a quarter of a mile to the south-west. If you hate Philadelphia sameness and symmetry, you will be gratified here to your heart’s content. In Paris there are ten hundred and eighty streets, besides lanes and alleys, all recommending themselves by the most charming irregularities. That which you will now pass through, the “_Rue Vivienne_,” is among the most bustling; it is a leading avenue, is alive with business, and has pretensions far above its capacity. I must tell you a word about the etiquette of these streets before you set out.

If a lady meets a gentleman upon the little side walk, which French courtesy calls a “_trottoir_,” it is the lady always who _trots_ into the mud. The French women seem used to this submission, and yield to it instinctively; and, indeed, all who feel their weakness, as children and old men, being subject to the same necessity, shew the same resignation. Also, if a number of gentlemen are coteried, even across the broad walk of the Boulevards, the lady walks round, not to incommode them; and it is not expected of a French gentleman in a public place or vehicle that he should give his seat to any one, of whatever age, sex, or condition, or that he should deviate from his straight line on the street for anything less than an omnibus. The French have been a polite people, and they continue to trade on the credit of their ancestors. What is curious to observe, is the complaisance with which human nature follows a general example. A Russian wife, when the husband neglects to beat her for a month or two, is alarmed at his indifference, and I have remarked that the French women are the warmest defenders of this French incivility.

Recollect, that as soon as you put your little foot upon this _Rue Vivienne_, fifty waggons, a wedding coach, and three funerals, with I don’t know how many _malle-postes_, cabs, _coucous_, and bell-eared diligences--all but the _fiacres_, with their gaunt and fleshless horses, which plead inability--will set themselves to run over you, without the smallest respect for your Greek nose, your inky brows, and black eyes. The danger is imminent, and it won’t do to have your two feet in one sock. I have written home to your mother, to have prayers performed in the churches for women’s husbands sojourning in Paris. And by escaping from one danger, you are sure to run full butt against another. Scylla and Charybdis, too, are so close together, that the “prudent middle” is precisely the course that no prudent lady will think of pursuing. To make it worse, the natives will have not the least sympathy in your dangers; they have been used to get run over themselves from time immemorial, and when we staring Yankees come over to see the “Tooleries and the Penny Royal,” they are not aware that any allowance is to be made for our ignorance. Besides, the driver knows a stranger as far as he can see him, and takes aim accordingly; he gets twenty-five francs for his body at the Morgue. It is known, that secret companies for “running over people” exist all over Paris, and that the drivers are the principal stockholders. The truth is, that it is reckoned amongst the natural deaths of the place, and two hundred and fifty are marked upon the bills of the last year. Under the old _régime_, when the nobility put out a greater train of vehicles, and had a kind of monopoly of running over the common people, I have heard it was still worse. Then, if any one walked about the streets unmashed for twenty years, he was entitled to the cross of St. Louis. I have escaped till now, but I set it down entirely to the efficacy of your innocent prayers, which have reversed the fates in my favour.

Your best way is to watch and imitate the address of the native women. Here they are now, in front of my window, sprinkled over the whole street, in their white stockings and prunellas, and in the very filthiest of the French weather, without a spot to their garters. The little things just pull up all the petticoats in the world more than half leg, and then tip-toe they step from the convex surface of one paving stone to another, with a dexterity and grace that go to one’s heart.

A lady must expect, also, other embarrassments here, to which the delicate pusillanimity of the sex is _yet_ but slightly exposed in our country, besides the cat and nine kittens that she must jump over, and the defunct lap-dogs that lie putrid in the gutters. The truth is, that these streets are very often (I ask pardon of Madame de Rambouillet and other good authorities) so in _deshabille_, they are not fit to be seen. A Parisian lady, therefore (and she is to be imitated also in this), when she ventures out on foot, is sharp-sighted as a lynx, and blind as an owl; she has eyes to see and not to see, and she runs the gauntlet through the midst of all these slippery and perilous obstructions in as careless a good humour as you upon the smooth trottoirs of your Chestnut and Broadways. It is true, the ladies of the _haut ton_ do not much exercise their ambulatory functions--their “_vertu caminante_”--upon these unsavoury promenades.

A French gentleman, who has resided a week and a half at New York (just long enough to know the manners and customs of a country), told me this very morning, that you American ladies stare in the streets at the gentlemen, he ventured to say, “even to immodesty;” and I have heard other foreigners make similar remarks, I presume without a proper attention to the peculiar circumstances of the different countries. In a Philadelphia street, a lady can give herself up to her thoughts, and her soul has the free use of its wings. She can get into a romance, or a reverie; she can study her lesson, or read a love-letter, and she can stare at a French gentleman, without the least apprehension of danger. Our streets are clean and decent, and are excellent places of parade; and gentlemen and ladies go out expressly on fine evenings to stare at one another. Indeed, Chestnut-street is so trim and neat that sometimes one is almost obliged, like Diogenes, to spit in somebody’s face not to soil its prettiness. Not so in Paris; you are here quite at your ease in all such matters. A French lady, therefore,--and very properly,--sees no one in the street, not even her husband. To get her to look at you, you are obliged to take hold of her, shake her, and turn her about three or four times. But when once upon the Boulevard Italien of an evening, or upon the broad walk of the elegant Tuileries, when she has no longer need of the faculties of her eyes, and ears, and nose too, to anticipate and obviate danger--_ah, ma foi!_ her diamond eyes are no more chary of their amorous glances than the hazle and bugle eyes of Chestnut or Broadway of theirs. I tried to persuade this French gentleman,--who is a baron, has a _bel air_, and large mustachios,--that this happened only to him. I told him (and it is true, too,) of others, who could not get the dear little girls of New York to look at them sufficiently. But I must shew you the Palais Royal.

It is a third less than your Washington Square. Its trees are in two regular rows along each margin. In the centre is an inclosure, containing a shrubbery and flowers; and also an Apollo and a Diana in bronze, and a _jet d’eau_ that separates in the air, and falls in a “_fleur de lis_”--the only emblem of royalty that deceived the Revolution and the Jacobins; and a lake, where the little fishes “wave their wings of gold.” There is no access to vehicles, or street noise, to disturb the quiet of this fairy retreat. It is in the centre, too, of the city, in the vicinity of all the other chief places of diversion; and here all the world meets after dinner to take coffee, to smoke, and concert measures for the rest of the evening. You will see them creeping in from the neighbouring streets, as you have seen the ants into a sugarhouse.

If you wish to know where is the centre of the earth, it is the Palais Royal. Ask a stranger, when he arrives, “whither will you go first?” he will answer, “to the Palais Royal;” or ask a Frenchman, on the top of Caucasus, “where shall I meet you again?” he will give you _rendez-vous_ at the Palais Royal; and no spot, they say, on the earth, has witnessed so many tender recognitions. Just do you ask Mademoiselle Celeste, at New York, “where did you get that superb _robe de chambre_?” and, I will lay you six to one, she will say, “at the Palais Royal.”

Let us sit down beneath these pretty elms. Those upper rooms, which you see so adorned with Ionic columns, with galleries, and vases, and little Virtues, and other ornaments in sculpture--those are not his majesty’s apartments; not the _salles des marechaux_, nor the _salle du trône_, nor the _chambre à coucher de la reine_; they are the _cafés and restaurants_ of the Palais Royal. And those multitudes you see circulating about the galleries, and looking down from the windows--those are not the royal family, nor the _garde du corps_, nor the “hundred Swiss,” nor the _chambellans_, the _écuyers_, the _aumoniers_, the _maitres de cérémonies_, the _introducteurs des ambassadeurs_, nor the historiographers, nor even the _chauf-cire_, nor the _capitaines des levrettes_--they are the cooks, and the garçons, in their white aprons, of the cafés and restaurants; the only order that has suffered no loss of dignity or corruption of blood by the Revolution; the veritable noblesse of these times, the “_cordons bleus_” of the order of the gridiron.

Louis Philippe, our citizen king, and proprietor of this garden, gets thirty-two thousand francs annually from letting out these chairs. Sit you down. It being after dinner, I will treat you to a _regale_; which is, a cup of pure coffee, with a small glass of liqueur, _eau de vie_, or rum, or quirsh. You can take them separate or together; in the latter case, it is called “_gloria_;” or you may put your cognac into a cup, with a large lump of sugar in the middle, and set it on fire, to destroy the effects of the alcohol upon your nerves. See how the area of the garden is already covered with its smoking, drinking, and promenading community; and how the smoke, as if loth to quit us, still lingers, until the whole atmosphere is narcotic with its incense. At a later hour, we shall find in the Rotunda, at the north end, and upon tables under these trees, ices in pyramids, and orgeat, and _eau sucrée_, and all the other luxurious refreshments. Those two oriental pavilions, with the gilded roofs, in front of the Rotonde, will distribute newspapers to the studious, and the whole garden will buzz with conversation and merriment, until the long twilight has faded into night.

Of the inside of the cafés and restaurants I must give you a few particulars. In each, there is a woman of choice beauty, mounted on a kind of throne. She is present always, and may be considered as one of the fixtures of the shop. When you enter any of these cafés, you will see, standing here and there through the room, an individual in a white apron; he has mustachios; he holds a coffee-pot in his left hand, and leaning gracefully over the right, reads his favourite journal--this is the waiter! When you have cried three times “Garçon!” the lady at the bureau will vibrate a little bell, and bring you instantly this waiter from his studies. If you are a very decent-looking man, she will let you cry only twice; and if you have an embroidered waistcoat, and look like a lord, and have whiskers, she will not let you cry at all. The chair occupied by this she-secretary, at the _Mille Colonnes_, cost ten thousand francs; and she who sat, some years ago, upon that of the “_café des Aveugles_,” the “_belle Limonadière_,” charmed all who had eyes, and amongst the rest, a brother of the greatest emperor in the world.

There are above a thousand of these cafés in Paris, and several of the most sumptuous overlook the gardens of the Palais Royal. Ceres has unlocked her richest treasures here, and has poured them out with a prodigality that is unknown elsewhere. Fish, of fresh and salt water; rare wines, of home and foreign production; and as for the confectionaries, sucreries, fruiteries, and charcuiteries--the senses are bewildered by the infinite variety. And the artists here have a higher niche in the temple of Fame than even those of the Boulevard Italien. Monsieur Véry supplied the allied monarchs at three thousand francs per day. The “Purveyor of Fish” to his Majesty, who is of this school, is salaried a thousand dollars above our chief justice of the Union; and Monsieur Dodat, who is immortal for making sausages and the “_Passage Vero-Dodat_,” has at _Père la Chaise_ a monument towering like that of Cheops.

This is the true “Kitchen Cabinet” to which ours is no more to be compared than the dish water to the dinner. Véry is in the kitchen what the Emperor was in the camp; he is the Napoleon of gastronomy. All flesh is nothing in his sight. Why, he will transform you a rabbit to a hare, or an eel to a lamprey, as easily as you a Jackson-man to a Whig; and he turns cocks into capons, and _vice versa_, by the simple artifice of a sauce. You indeed condense the sense of a whole community into the single head of a senator, or a President; and he just as easily a whole flock of geese into a single goose. You, it is true, possess the wonderful art, all know in what excellence, of puffing a man up beyond the natural measure of his merits, and just so Monsieur Véry will puff you a goose’s liver, however unmathematical it may seem, beyond the size of the whole animal.

Now, in the midst of all this skill and profusion, “the devil’s in it if you cannot dine;” yet have I perished myself several times of hunger in the very midst of this Palais Royal. It is not enough that a table be loaded with its dishes, there must be science, to call them by their names, and taste, to discriminate their uses. What can you do with an Iroquois from the “Sharp Mountain,” who does not know that sauce for a gander is not sauce for a goose. Unless you have studied the nomenclature, which is about equal to a first course of anatomy, you are no more fit to enjoy a dinner at Véry’s than Tantalus in his lake. For example, the garçon will present you a bill of fare as big as your prayer-book; you open it; the first page presents you thirty soups, (classically, _potages_,) and there you are to choose between a “_puré_,” a “_consommé_,” “_à la Julien_, _à la Beauvais_, _à la Bonne Femme_,” &c. &c. I prefer the “_consommé_,” and I will tell you how it is made. It is a piece of choice beef and capon boiled many hours over a slow fire to a jelly, and the juices concentrated, and served without any extraneous mixture. The “_Julien_,” is a _pot pourri_ of all that is edible or potable in the list of human aliments. It is a soup, for which, if rightly made, an epicure would give away his birth-right; it was invented, not by Julian the Apostate, but by Monsieur Julien, of the Palais Royal.

The fluids being settled, you will turn then to the following page for the solids: “_Papillottes de Levreaud_,” “_filet à la Napolitaine_,” “_vol-au-vent_,” “_scolope de saumon_,” “_œuf au miroir_,” “_riz sauté à la gláce_,” “_piqué aux truffles_,” &c. &c. Alas, my poor roasting and frying countrymen! There is not a day but I see some poor Yankee scratching his head in despair over this crabbed vocabulary of French dishes. Your best way in this emergency is to call the garçon, and leave all to him, and sit still like a good child, and take what is given to you. I have known many a one to run all over Paris for a beef-steak, and when he has got it, it was a horse’s rump. My advice is, that no one come to Paris to dine in mean houses on cheap dinners, where you will eat cats for hares, and have snails and chalk for your cream, and the jelly of the “_consommé_,” from the barber’s. You are no more sure of the ingredients of a dish under the disguises of a French cookery, than of men’s sentiments from their faces or professions. You can get, to begin with, olives, and eggs, boiled and poached, all that remains of old simplicity, if you know how to ask for them; if not, carry the shells about with you in your pocket.

We will dine to-morrow at the “_Mille Colonnes_.” Ladies often step into this _café_ to be reflected; you can see here all your faces, and behind and before you, as conveniently as Janus. One always enters this threshold with reverence: it has dined the Holy Alliance. Besides the usual officers and attendants, you will sometimes see here a little man, grave, _distrait_, and meditative; do not disturb him; he is, perhaps, busy about the _projét_ of some new sauce. He will start off abruptly sometimes, and leave you in the middle of a phrase; it is not incivility, he has just conceived a dish, and is going out to execute it, or write it upon his tablets. Never ask for him in the mornings before _one_--“_il compose_.” The French are not copyists in cookery, any more than in fashions. They are inventors, and this keeps the imagination on the rack. You will remark, that people always excel in those things in which they invent, and are always mediocre in those things in which they imitate.

After your potage, which you must eat sparingly, and without bread, (for bread will satiate, and spoil the rest of your dinner,) you will take a little “vin ordinaire,” or pure Burgundy, waiting for your first course; and you will just cast a look over the official part of the Moniteur, for there is no knowing when one may be made a Peer of France; and on receiving one dish, always command the next. After the dessert you will read the news all round; the _Messager_, _Gazette_, _Constitutionnel_, _Debats_, _Quotidienne_, _National_, and the _Charivari_; and after coffee, you may amuse yourself at checkers, domino, or improve your morals by a game of chess. In looking about the room, you will see a great number of guests, perhaps a hundred, not in stalls, as in our eating-houses and the stables, but seated at white marble tables, in an open and elegant saloon; the walls tapestried with mirrors.

If it be a serious gentleman, reading deliberately the newspaper over his dessert, careless or contemptuous of what is going on around him, and drinking his bottle of champagne alone--that is an Englishman. If a _partie carré_, that is, a couple of ladies and their cavaliers, dining with much noise and claret, observing a succession and analogy of dishes, swallowing their wine drop by drop, as I read your letters, fearing lest it should come too soon to an end, and prolonging expressly the enjoyments of the repast--these are French people; or if you see a couple of lads, hurried and impatient, and rating the waiters in no gentle terms, “D--n your eyes, why don’t you bring in the dinner? and take away that broth, and your black bottle; who the devil wants your vinegar, and your dishwater, and your bibs too? And bring us, if you can, a whole chicken’s leg at once, and not at seven different times,”--these are from the “Far West,” and a week old in Paris.

How should these little snacks of a French table not seem egregiously mean to an American, who is used to dine in fifteen minutes, even on a holiday, and to see a whole hog barbacued? The French dine to gratify, we to appease, appetite; we demolish a dinner, and they eat it. The guests who frequent these cafés are regular or flying visiters; some are accidental, others occasional, dining by agreement to enjoy each other’s company; others again are families, who dine out for a change, or to give a respite to their servants; and others live here, a kind of stereotype customers altogether: and these houses serve, in addition to their province of eating and drinking, as places of conference, or clubs; it is here that men communicate on political subjects, that news is circulated, and public opinion formed; and that kings are expelled, and others are set up on their thrones.

On a range with the restaurants, and over them, you will see lodged many of the fine arts; painters, engravers, dentists, barbers, and beautiful sultanas, look out from the highest windows upon these fair dominions, to which the severity of French morals has forbidden them access. In the lower rooms, on a level with the area of the garden, and peeping through the colonnade, west and east, are riches almost immeasurable, in exquisite and fashionable apparel for both sexes, and in jewellery, trinkets, and perfumery. This trade, which in other cities is pedling and huckstering, assumes here the dignity of a great commercial interest, and its productions are reckoned at upwards of a hundred millions of francs. The stores themselves are so little, and yet so pretty, that I have thoughts of sending you one of them over by the packet. Their arrangements are changed every hour, so as to keep up a continuous emotion and a series of agreeable excitements, and so as to present you a new set of temptations twelve times a day.

Everything that human industry, sharpened by necessity or competition, can effect--everything which can excite an appetite, can heighten a beauty, or hide a deformity, is here. I begin to love art almost as well as nature: I begin to love mother Eve in her fig-leaves, as well as in her unaproned innocence. After all, what is nature to us without art? Education is art. Indeed, rightly considered, art itself is nature; she has but left a part of her work unfinished to urge the industry and whet the ingenuity of man. In these stores, everything is sacrificed to the shop; there is no accommodation for the household gods. Persons with their families are not allowed to inhabit here. A man hoards space as a miser hoards money. It is a qualification indispensable in a clerk to be of a slender capacity. You would think you were in Lilliput, served by the fairies. The shop-girls, especially, are of such exquisite exility of figure, you can almost take one of them between your thumb and finger, and set her on the counter.

In our country, we have nothing yet to shew in the way of great works of art. We have nature, indeed, wild and beautiful, but without historic associations; tradition is dumb, and the “memory of man” runs back to the Eden of our race. It is a mighty advantage these old countries have over us; their reminiscences, their traditions, and their antiquities. What would be the Tower but for humpback Richard and the babes; or, what Hounslow Heath but for the ghosts of those who have been murdered there? And in these countries, which have no beginning, they can supply the vacant space into which authentic history does not venture, by legends and romances; and no matter how obscure may be one of their mountains and lakes, they can lie it into a reputation. Some things are beautiful from their accessories alone; as lords are sometimes lords only from their equipages. What is there beautiful in a ruin? We have plains as desolate as Babylon, and no one looks at them.

The Palais Royal, however magnificent as a bazaar, has still higher and better merits. It is the history of some of the most remarkable personages and events of the last two ages. Some day, when we have a ticket from the “_Intendant de sa Majesté_,” I will shew you them all; and first, that very celebrated old fop the Cardinal de Richelieu, who used to strut, with his train of a monarch, through this very garden and these very halls. You shall see the very theatre upon which he represented his woeful tragedies; his flatterers crowding around with wonderful grimace, and Corneille’s muse cowering her timid wings in silence. As you are a lady, and love trinkets, I will shew you, if it yet exists, that great miracle of massive gold and diamonds, the Cardinal’s Chapel; the two candlesticks, valued at a hundred thousand livres; the cross, twenty-two inches high, and of pure gold; the Christ of the same metal, and the crown and drapery all glittering in diamonds. And you shall see the prayer-book, too, encased in lamina of gold; in the centre the cardinal holding up the globe, and from the four corners four angels placing a crown upon his head. If you like, I will shew you also that other smooth-faced rogue, scarcely his inferior in political ability, the Cardinal Mazarin, who put the king’s money in his pocket, and stinted his little majesty in shirts. And if you love more cardinals, I will shew you yet another, more witty, and not less profligate and debauched, than the other two, the Cardinal de Retz. When we read his memoirs together, little did we foresee that one day we should look into the very chambers in which he held his nightly councils, with his fellow conspirators, plotting his rabble Revolution of the Fronde.

You shall see also Turenne and the great Condé. That gentleman gathering maxims--maxims of life at the court of Mazarin!--that is M. le due de Rochefoucauld; and I will introduce you to Madame de Motteville, and other famous wits and beauties of those times. In the room just opposite, where one dines upon soup, three courses, and a dessert, at forty sous, I will shew you the little “Grand Monarque” in his cradle. The dear little thing! It was here the great man first began; it was here he crept, I presume very unwillingly, to school; here he began to seek the bubble reputation, and to sigh at the feet--worthy a better devotion--of the “humble violet,” Madame la Vallière.

Just over head, Doctor Franklin used to sup with the Duke of Orleans and his family; and here Madame de Genlis gave lessons to the little Louis Philippe, causing his most Christian Majesty to walk fifteen miles a day in shoes with leaden soles. The Spartans did better, who, to make their kings hardy and robust, had them flogged daily at the shrine of some pagan goddess. In one of these rooms, the mob Republic held for awhile its meetings; and in this very garden, the tri-coloured cockade was adopted, at a great meeting in 1789, as the revolutionary emblem. On the south end is a gallery of paintings, they say very splendid. It was plundered in the Revolution, and since restored by the present proprietor, the King. If any one steals a picture or a book in Paris, and can prove quiet possession for a certain time, it is a vested right, and the owner is obliged to buy back his goods from the thief.

I sometimes walk in this garden with the scholars and the _bonnes_, of a morning, but it is disagreeable; it is not yet aired, and has a stale stupefactive smell from the preceding night’s banquet. It is by degrees ventilated, and life begins to flow into it about ten. Then the readers of news begin to gravitate around Monsieur Perussault’s pavilion. There is a dial here which announces, with a loud detonation, twelve; and as the important hour approaches, every one having a watch takes it out, and looks up with compressed lips, and waits in _uno obtutu_ until Apollo has fired off his cannon; then quick he twirls about the hands, and replaces it complacently in his fob, and walks away very happy to have the official hour in his pocket. You will see also a few _badauds_, who always arrive just afterwards, and stand the same way, looking up for half an hour or so, till informed that the time has already gone off.

It is of a hot summer evening, that this garden is unrivalled in beauty. You swim in a glare of light; the gas flashes from under the arcades; lamps innumerable shine through the interior and look down from five hundred windows above. It is not night, it is “but the daylight sick.” It is haunted by its company, and is full of life to the latest hours, and revelry holds her gambols here, when Paris everywhere over the immense city is lulled into its midnight slumbers. When summer has turned round upon its axis, and the first chills of autumn frighten joy from her court, she retires then to her last hold, the “_Galerie d’Orleans_.” This delightful promenade extends across the south end of the garden; it is three hundred feet long by thirty wide; its roof is of glass and its pavement of tesselated marble; it is bounded on both sides by stores, and cafés, and reading rooms, eighteen feet square, renting annually at four thousand francs each. It is kept warm enough for its company in winter, and is a fashionable resort during that season. It is a pleasant walk also in the twilight of a summer evening.

I know an ex-professor, by dining with him at the same ordinary, and we walk often under the crystal vaults of this gallery, and reason whole evenings away--now we stop, and then walk on, and then take snuff, and then make a whole round arm in arm, in great gravity and silence; at other times, being seated at a marble table, we calmly unfold the intricate mazes of the human mind and systems of human policy; and then we take coffee, with a little glass of quirsh. Last night we reasoned warmly upon the nature of slavery till I got mad, and whilst I sipped and read the newspaper, he amused himself with a drawing (for he is skilled in this art), which he presented me. It was a Liberty, of a healthy and robust complexion, her foot upon a negro slave. The negro sympathies have waxed very warm in this country.

Four of the houses just over us are consecrated to gambling. They are frequented, however, by rather the lower class and rabble of the profession. They who have some regard to reputation go to Frascati’s, to the Rue Richelieu; the more select to the “_Cercle_,” or to the “_Club Anglais_” upon the Boulevard, and the _Rue de Grammont_; and the “Jockey Club” receives the dandies and flash gentlemen of the turf. The three last are of English origin, and the “_Club Anglais_” is in the best English style. It receives only the high functionaries of the state, princes of the blood, ambassadors, and other eminent persons, and even these are not admitted to pick one another’s pockets here, unless known to be of good moral character. Games of hazard are prohibited, and the bets correspondent to the dignity of the company. The “_Cercle_,” also, is frequented by the upper sort of folk; it is _très distingué_; and the eating and service are of no common rate.

The public gambling houses here are authorized by government, and pay for their charter annually six and a half millions of francs. The government has not thought it fit that the black-legs and courtezans should worship in the same temple. The ladies have therefore been turned out, poor things! to get a living as they can on the Boulevards and elsewhere, and the gamblers have the Palais Royal all to themselves. But why do not “the Chambers,” extend this system of financial economy to other moral offences, as stealing, drunkenness, and adultery? I would charter them every one, and enrich the state. If we can succeed in making a vice respectable, it is no vice at all; and why should not a proper protection of government and general custom render gambling or any vice as respectable as thieving or infanticide was at Sparta; or as duelling and privateering are amongst the modern civilized nations? The matter is now under discussion, but there are members of both houses who oppose these doctrines; they say that the government by such licences becomes accessory to the crimes of its subjects, and that bad passions, already rank enough in human nature, should not be made a direct object of education; moreover, they find it awkward that legislators, after having given the whole community a public licence to pick one another’s pockets, should stand up in the national tribune and talk about honesty. There are persons who have absurd prejudices.

But to be serious; indeed, I am very well disposed to such a feeling; I have just fallen accidentally upon the story, which every one knows, of the unhappy Colton. He wrote books in recommendation of virtue, and _critiques_ in reprobation of vice, with admirable talent. He was a clergyman by profession, and yet became a victim to this detestable passion. He subsisted by play several years amongst these dens of the Palais Royal, and at length falling into irretrievable misery, ended his life here by suicide. One feels a sadness of heart in looking upon the scene of so horrible an occurrence; one owes a tear to the errors of genius, to the weakness of our common humanity.

Gambling seems to be the universal passion; the two extremes of human society are equally subject to it. The savage of the Columbia River gambles his rifle and his squaw, and like any gentleman of the “_Cercle_,” commits suicide in his despair. Billiards, cards, Faro, and other games of hazard, are to be found at every hundred steps, in every street and alley of Paris; haunted by black-legs in waiting for your purse; and there is scarce a private ball or _soirée_, even to those of the court, in which immense sums are not lost and won by gambling. The shuffling of cards or rattling of dice is a part of the music of every Parisian saloon, and many fathers of families of the first rank get a living by it. To know how much better it is in London, one has only to read the London books. And how much better is it in America? To know this, you have only to visit our Virginia Springs and other places of fashionable resort. You will hear there the instruments of gambling at every hour of the night; and you will see tables, covered with the infamous gold, set out in the shade during the day; and you will see seat