The American in Paris; vol. 2 of 2

The American

In

Paris.

In Two Volumes.

Vol. II.

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

London: Printed By Stewart And Murray, Old Bailey.

Contents.

Letter XII.

Mass at St. Roch for Admiral de Rigny.--The Abbé Lacordaire at Notre Dame.--State of the French Church.--St. Genevieve.--St. Etienne du Mont.--The American child at Prayers.--St. Medard.--Its Miracles.--Chapelle de St. Nicholas.--The Madelaine.--Notre Dame.--St. Denis.--St. Sulpice.--The Church Service.--Celibacy of the Clergy.--American Churches.--Manner of keeping Sunday p. 1-30

Letter XIII.

Père la Chaise.--Funeral of Bellini.--Grave-Merchants.--Description of the Cemetery.--Graves of the Rich and the Poor.--The Fête des Morts.--Tomb of Abelard and Heloise.--Remarkable personages buried there.--The Aristocracy of the Grave.--Monument of Foy.--Inscription.--Grave yards in Cities and Towns.--French regulations for the inhumation of the dead p. 31-71

Letter XIV.

The Louvre.--Patronage of the Fine Arts.--The Luxembourg.--The Palais des Beaux Arts.--The Sêvres Porcelain.--The Gobelins.--Manners of the common People in Paris.--A fair Cicerone.--Her remarks on Painting.--The French, Flemish, and Italian Schools.--English Patronage of Art.--The New National Gallery.--Sir Christopher Wren.--A tender Adieu p. 72-98

Letter XV.

The Schools.--State of Literature.--Minister of Public Instruction.--Education in France.--Prussian System.--Parochial Schools.--Normal Schools.--Institutions of Paris.--Public Libraries.--Machinery of French Justice.--The Judges.--Eloquence of the Bar.--Medicine.--Corporations of Learning.--Their Evils.--The French Institute.--Pretended New System of Instruction.--Professors of Paris p. 99-138

Letter XVI.

Ladies’ Boarding Schools.--Names of Professors in the Prospectus.--System of Education.--American Schools.--Preference for Science.--High Intellectual Acquirements not approved.--Learned Women.--American Girls.--Comparison of French and American Society.--The care to preserve Female Beauty.--Expression of the Mouth.--Dress of American Women.--Notions of the Maternal Character.--Studies in Ladies’ Schools.--Literary Associations.--Société Geographique.--French Lady Authors.--Living Writers.--Chateaubriand--Beranger--Lamartine--Victor Hugo--Casimir de la Vigne--Alfred de Vigny--Guizot--Thiers--Thièrry Ségur--Lacretelle--Sismondi p. 139-163

Letter XVII.

The Theatres.--Mademoiselle Mars.--Théatre Royal.--Italien.--Grisi.--Académie Royal de Musique.--Taglioni.--Miss Fanny Elsler.--The Variètés.--The Odéon.--Mademoiselle George.--Hamlet.--Republican Spirit of the Age.--Character of the French Stage.--Machinery of the Drama.--The Claqueurs.--Supply of New Pieces.--The Vaudevillists.--M. Scribe.--The Diorama.--Concerts.--Music p. 164-187

Letter XVIII.

Parisian habits.--The Chaussée d’Antin.--Season of Bonbons.--Jour de l’An.--Commencement of the Season.--The Carnival.--Reception at the Tuileries.--Lady Granville.--The Royal Family.--Court Ceremonies.--Ball at the Hotel de Ville.--French Beauty.--A Bal de Charité.--Lord Canterbury.--Bulwer.--Sir Sydney Smith.--The Court Balls.--Splendid Scene.--The Princess Amelia.--Comparison between Country and City Life p. 188-210

Letter XIX.

Execution of Fieschi.--The French House of Commons.--French Eloquence.--Thiers.--Guizot.--Berryer.--Abuse of America.--The Chamber of Peers.--Interior of the Madelaine.--Bribery.--False Oaths.--The Middle Classes.--America and England.--Opinions of America.--English Travellers in America.--Mrs. Trollope.--Captain Basil Hall.--Miss Fanny Kemble.--Test of good breeding in America.--American feelings towards England.--Their mutual Interests p. 211-234

Letter XX.

The Dancing Fever.--The Grand Masquerade.--Fooleries of the Carnival.--Mardi Gras.--Splendid Equipages.--Masquerades.--An Adventure.--Educated Women.--The Menus-Plaisirs.--A Fancy Ball.--Porte St. Martin.--The Masked Balls.--Descente de la Courtille.--End of the Carnival.--Birth-Day of Washington p. 235-252

Letter XXI.

Evening Parties at the Duchess d’Abrantes.--Mode of Admission.--The Weather.--Suicides.--Madame le Norman the Sibyl.--Parisian Réunions.--Manners of Frenchwomen.--American Soirées.--Furniture.--Hints on Etiquette.--Manners in Parisian High Life.--Conversation.--Dress.--Qualifications for an Exquisite.--Smoking.--Rules for Dinner p. 253-283

Letter XXII.

The Lap-Dog.--The Dame Blanche.--The Beauty in a Gallery.--The Lingère.--Madame Frederic.--Fête de Longchamps.--Parisian Fashions.--Holy Concerts.--Pretty Women.--Empire of Fashion.--Reign of Beauty.--The Fashionable Lady p. 284-303

Letter XXIII.

Return of Spring.--A New Venus.--The Artesian Well.--Montmartre.--Donjon of Vincennes.--St. Ouen.--St. Germain.--The Pretender.--Machine de Marli.--Versailles.--The Water-works.--The Swiss Garden.--Trianon.--Races at Chantilly.--Stables of the Great Condé--Lodgings in a French Village.--A Domestic Occurrence.--The Boots.--The Alarm.--The Bugs.--Extract from Pepys.--Delights of Chantilly.--Unlucky Days.--Solitude in a Crowd.--The Cure.--The King’s Birth-day.--The Concert.--The Fire-works.--The Illuminations.--The Buffoons.--Punch.--The Eating Department.--The Mat de Cocagne p. 304-340

The American In Paris.

Letter XII.

Mass at St. Roch for Admiral de Rigny.--The Abbé Lacordaire at Notre Dame.--State of the French Church.--St. Genevieve.--St. Etienne du Mont.--The American child at Prayers.--St. Medard.--Its Miracles.--Chapelle de St. Nicholas.--The Madelaine.--Notre Dame.--St. Denis.--St. Sulpice.--The Church Service.--Celibacy of the Clergy.--American Churches.--Manner of keeping Sunday.

Paris, November 14th, 1835.

I attended yesterday a mass said at St. Roch’s for the soul of the Admiral de Rigny, who was famous, you know, for much fighting at sea and land, especially at Navarino, and for much talking in the Chamber of Peers about the American Indemnity. He was never chary about dying, he said, but he thought it unlucky to be snatched away just when he was wanted to chastise “Old Hickory” for his impudent Message. By-the-bye, all the world is talking of war here by the hour, with great fluency and ignorance. Newspapers and conversation are full of abuse. They send out privateers by five hundreds, and take our ships as kites catch chickens. Worst of all, they don’t leave an American alive, and they kill us all off without losing a man.--The Admiral’s hearse was rich with the spoils of vanquished enemies, and was escorted by ten thousand French heroes to _Pére la Chaise_, with thrilling music from all the military bands, and with a pomp and circumstance suitable to the dignity of so great a personage.

I went this morning with every body to Notre Dame, to hear the celebrated Abbé Lacordaire preach. He was too eloquent! Oratory in this country, at least in the pulpit, has her trumpet always at full blast, and announces the smallest little news with the emphasis of a miracle. Her method is to run up to the top of the voice and then pour out her whole spirit, as your Methodists on Guinea Hill, until human nature is exhausted, and then to take a drink and begin again. I will set you a French sermon, if you please, to the gamut, and you may play it on the piano.

You must know, that the Parisian young men having gained great credit at the last Revolution, (and they were not oppressed with modesty before that event,) now give the tone to society. The device of the nation is “Young France.” It is young France that measures merit and deals out reputation; so it is not strange that they should set up this Abbé for a Bossuet or a Bourdaloue; any more than that an eye unpractised in painting should set up a tawdry piece of daubing above the chaste and excellent compositions of genius. It is true, there is not a class of young men in any country more earnest in the pursuit of letters, than these French; but youth is not the age of good taste, and is not the age that ought to govern public sentiment in any department of life.

In old France, the church being rich and honourable, was filled by persons well educated and refined by good society. For a long time, there has been no permanent public esteem to encourage talent among the clergy, or restrain them from vices degrading to their order. Religion, which had nearly perished in the Revolution, had but a feeble health under the Empire; and Louis XVIII. and Charles so favoured the priesthood, especially the Jesuits, and at the same time so mis-governed the nation, that they had again brought it to its last gasp at the accession of Louis Philippe. There was a time when even admission to the Duchess de Berri’s balls required one to go to the communion and take the sacrament. The present king has fallen in with the popular sentiment, and is gradually changing this sentiment to the side of the clergy, showing in this, as in most things else, the ability of a good statesman. He sends his own family to church, and it begins to be fashionable to be seen there. Not indeed from any reverence for religion.

Things venerable in this country have had their day, and, as far as religion is concerned, the bump of veneration is worn out of the human skull. But the world rushes to Notre Dame in the morning, and to the Opera in the evening, and to both, for the same purpose; for the crowd, for the music and dramatic effect, for the emotion, for the fashion. I had a student with me this morning; a young gentleman, who has just made his debut in the world of beards, and judging from his conversation, it would take a fifty-parson power at least to get him to heaven; but he was enthusiastic in admiration of the sermon. Let the Abbé Lacordaire preach when he will, Notre Dame is mobbed with worshippers.

I believe I shall take advantage of my unusual seriousness, as it is Sunday, to tell you all I know about such divine things as French churches. Almost every saint in the Almanack has acquired the honours of at least one. There are forty-five of Roman, one of Greek, and two of Independent French Catholics; and the churches for Protestant service, are three French, and two English, besides a synagogue; and there are several places of worship in private houses and palaces.

All the Catholic churches are decorated with the most costly furniture; with saints, virgins, and angels in statuary and painting by the best masters. Why, the gold and silver expended in this old church of Notre Dame upon Virgin Marys alone, would make a railroad to the Havre.

One of the most beautiful of these churches and my next neighbour too, is _St. Genevieve_, now called the _Pantheon_, once the “abode of Gods whose shrines no longer burn.” It is now the national sepulchre for great men. It is two hundred and fifty feet high, and overtops majestically all Paris. It was designed to rival the Great St. Paul’s of London.

On one of the cupolas of the dome, which is surrounded by a colonnade of Corinthian pillars, is painted the apotheosis of St. Geneviéve. Her saintship is in the costume of a shepherdess, breathing all peace, all happiness, all immortality. Nothing of earth is in her composition. Beside her, is Louis XVIII. and little winged angels. They are very busy--the angels--in scattering flowers about the saint. Above her, is Louis XVI. and his queen, as elegant as she was upon the threshold of Versailles, and Louis XVII. all surrounded by celestial glory. Before her, are the persons the most illustrious of each race; Clovis, who looks very savage; St. Clotilde, very pretty; Charlemagne, very heroic; and St. Louis and Queen Margarite who look very pious. They are now effacing these figures for something more suitable to the occasion.

The floor of this temple, incrusted with various-coloured marble, is very remarkable, and very beautiful. It is exclusively occupied by Voltaire and Rousseau, at opposite extremities.[1] Why did they not lay them at the side of each other, that we might all learn how vain are the jealousies, the petty competitions and animosities of men so soon to come to this appointed and unavoidable term of all human contentions. These are the only two who are buried above ground.

It was once the custom of these old countries to multiply a man by burying him piecemeal, his heart at Rouen and his legs in Kent, because the world was then on short allowance of heroes; but modern times have reversed this practice; and Bonaparte has laid up together a whole batch of them in the basement of this church, for eternity, as you lay up potatoes in your cellar for winter. Here are the names graven overhead in a catalogue, on the marble, of men famous for giving counsel to the Emperor (who never took any) in the senate, and of men who gained a great deal of celebrity by having their brains knocked out on the fields of Austerlitz and Marengo.

When Marat was deified by the Convention, he was interred here in 1793, and in 1794 he was disinterred and undeified, and then thrown into his native element, the common sewer, in the Rue Montmartre--to purify him.

I have often sat an hour in a beautiful little temple adjoining this, called _St. Etienne du Mont_. Its architecture is original and pretty, and it is rich in statuary and paintings. The pulpit is a splendid piece of workmanship, supported by a figure of Samson kneeling upon a dead lion; allegorical figures are hovering over, and an archangel, with two trumpets, is assembling the faithful. The painted glass, too, is brilliant with colours glowing as the rainbow. In a morning walk, I have often found an excuse for returning this way. A few persons, mostly women, are seen kneeling through the church, upon the marble, before the altar, silently--you hear but the little whispering prayers fluttering towards Heaven--the tranquillity of early morning is so favourable to devotion. It feels like giving to Heaven the first offerings of one’s heart. I have often sat here on the fine summer evenings, too, when the twilight shed its gray and glimmering rays through the windows upon the statues of the venerable saints and martyrs, and listened to the voices as they swelled in the sacred anthem, and then fell, with the departing day, into silence. It seemed to me the very romance of religion. One feels more the influence of such feelings when wandering alone in a foreign country.

In visiting a boarding-school of this quarter, a few days ago, I entered a room where the children were praying before retiring to bed; I observed one with his hands clasped, and pouring out his little soul with the fervency of a saint--an American child, of eight years, from New York--I took him in my arms at the end of his prayer, saying: “_Vous aimez donc bien, le bon Dieu?_”--“_Ah! oui_,” he replied, with a most eloquent expression, “_on aime bien le bon Dieu quand on est loin de ses parens._”--It is so natural to lay hold of heaven, when cut off from one’s home and earthly affections. If I had the amiable society of your “Two Hills,” and the other comforts and consolations of the village, I should not be hovering so piously about this little church of St. Etienne du Mont.

The great Pascal, in spite of the Jesuits’ noses, is buried here; and an old tower, in the neighbourhood, recals the memory of the renowned Abbey of St. Genevieve. I have visited, several times, the library of this institution, and paid my respects to its one hundred and fifty thousand volumes, and thirty thousand manuscripts. This, like all the other places of Paris, where they keep books, is filled constantly with readers, and, like every other institution of the kind, is open gratuitously to the public.

I spoke of _Val de Grace_ in my last letter. A little to the east of it, and of not less historical importance, is the church of _St. Medard_; to which I stretched, also, one of my solitary walks, and took a seat among the worshippers. Faint hymns, chanted at a distance, as the still evening comes on, have lured many a wandering sinner from the wickedness of the world. This is the church so famous for its miracles, called the “convulsions,” which once filled the whole city with alarm; and were not discontinued, until the archbishop had placed a strong military guard around the tomb of father Paris. You know the placard put up by some wag on this occasion:

“De par le roi, defense à Dieu, De faire miracle en ce lieu.”

The young girls used to have fits at this tomb, which gave them comical twitchings of the nerves. Some would bark all night long at the door of their chambers, and others leap about like frogs all day. Sister Rose supped the air with a spoon, as your babies do pap, and lived on it forty days; another swallowed a New Testament, bound in calf. Some had themselves hung, others crucified, and one, called Sister Rachel, when nailed to a cross, said she was quite happy--“_qu’elle faisait dodo_.” In their holy meetings, they beat, trampled, punctured, crucified, and burnt one another, without the least sentiment of pain. All this was done at St. Medard, under Louis XV., and attested by ten thousand witnesses.

Large packages of the earth were exported to work miracles, in the provinces and foreign countries. One of these miracles is told in a song of the Duchesse de Maine.

“Un decrotteur à la royale, Du talon gauche estropié, Obtint par grace speciale, D’etre boiteux de l’autre pied.”

Some of these fanatics were found, forty years afterwards, in the dungeons of the Bastile, at its destruction in 1789.

There is one point in religion, in which there are no heretics out of Scotland--the music. The choir of voices, which assisted the organs in this church, seemed to be almost divine. One feminine voice, singing occasionally alone, had all the powers of enchantment; swelling sometimes into a strain of almost religious frenzy, and then melting softly away till there was nothing between it and silence; and just in front of me, and in full view, sat a handsome woman, wrapped entirely in her devotional enjoyments, who seemed placed there expressly to give effect to the music; her shoulders, arms, and features, all moved in exact unison with its harmony. I wish you could have seen her beautiful countenance as she presented it to the firmament; her sainted smile which beamed out and waned away upon her lips; the devout expression of her eyes, how illuminated as the music rose, how languishing in its dying notes; how she expired, and then came to life again! I do not hope to see again on the earth a more vivid picture of religious rapture.

Devotion, I believe, exalts a woman’s beauty to its highest perfection; there is no picture so beautiful as the Madonna, and, if I were a woman, I would be religious, if for no other motive, just from vanity. No one doubts that the human countenance is modified by the feelings cherished in the heart, and she who cherishes the mild and benevolent Christian affections, cannot be otherwise than very pretty. If there are any ugly women in the world, it is because they have not been brought up religiously. I sat thinking all this over, till night came on, and I felt one or two of sister Rose’s twitchings.

I am going to tell you next of the _Chapelle de St. Nicholas_; which you will find intrenched under the _Palais de Justice_. This is the “_Sainte Chapelle_,” made famous by the Lutrin of Boileau. It is the most classical, as well as the most holy of the churches of Paris. It was built by St. Louis. It was here he stowed away the relics he brought from the Holy Land. The “real crown” was one of them, which he bought for eighty thousand dollars, and which, walking barefooted, and bareheaded, and preceded by all the prelates and dignitaries of the kingdom, in solemn procession, he deposited in this shrine. There were, besides, Moses’ rod and a great many other such miracles, which the Emperor of Constantinople manufactured, they say, expressly for his use. And, also, a great variety of presents from popes, cardinals, and other holy men, of less equivocal value. A light was burnt here, as in the Temple of Vesta, and a priest waked and watched over them at all hours of the night. They are now--what remains from the sacrilegious and pilfering fingers of the Revolution--in the sacristy of Notre Dame; and their place is supplied by old musty records of the Palais de Justice; lawyers’ declarations, and nasty crim. con. cases--even to the receipt of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers for making the poison she tried so effectually upon her father, husband, and brother. Boileau is buried in this chapel, made immortal by his verses.

For architectural effect, the Madelaine has an unquestionable superiority over all the churches of Paris. It has the advantage of a very favourable site; terminating with one flank, the view from the Boulevards, and fronting the Rue Royale, and Place Louis XV. It is mounted on a basement of eight feet, ascended on its entire perimeter by thirty steps. It is a parallelogram of three hundred and twenty-six, by one hundred and thirty feet, surrounded in double peristyle, by fifty-two Corinthian columns sixty feet high. On the south pediment, is represented in bas-relief, the Day of Judgment; the figures of sixteen feet. In the middle is Christ, and at his feet Madelaine, a suppliant. The rest of the group, is of angels, and allegorical vices and virtues; covering a triangular surface of one hundred and eighteen feet in length, and twenty-two in height.

The interior is a rich and variegated picture. The eye is dazzled at the glittering aspect of its gilding and fanciful decorations; its Ionic and Corinthian pillars. On each flank are three chapels to be adorned with painting, and at the extremity is the choir in the shape of a demi-cylinder, with Ionic pilasters which extend along the two aisles. It was begun in the year of our Independence; it was the “Temple of Glory” in the Revolution, and has got back to its religious destination. It has neither dome nor spire, nor any of the usual emblems of a Christian church, except the sculpture; so that in the event of another Revolution, it may be converted into an Exchange or Bank, or the temple of some Pagan divinity, or a Mosque, without much expense of alteration.

The good lady, Notre Dame, is the largest of the Parisian churches. The adjoining houses squat down in her presence and seem to worship her; and she is not only admirable for her beauty and richness, but for her sense. She has the history of eight centuries in her nave. She has the whole of the Old and New Testament in pictures on her walls, or in groups of statuary, in her chapels. When you sit down under the arched vaults, one hundred and twenty feet over your head, and amidst these massive columns, you see flitting about your imagination, such personages as Queen Fredegonda; or if you please, you can see the pretty Marchioness de Gourville confessing, instead of her sins, her tender loves for the Archbishop of Paris. You can live back into those times when Henry IV. was d----d, and Ravaillac, being anointed and prayed over, in bad Latin, went to heaven.

The light is let in upon her dread abodes by one hundred and thirteen windows, each bordered with a band of painted glass. There are three circular ones painted in the thirteenth century which are not matched, for the delicacy of the stone-work, and brilliancy of the colours, by any thing of modern art.

The choir is paved with precious marble, and enclosed by a railing of polished iron; in the centre of it, is an eagle in gilt brass seven feet high, and three and a half from wing to wing, which serves as a reading desk. Its wainscoting is sculptured with scriptural pieces, and a great many sins in the shape of toads and lizards are carved upon it. It terminates near the sanctuary with two archiepiscopal chairs of great beauty.

The other day, in climbing up through one of the towers, from which there is a splendid panoramic view of the city, two hundred and four feet in the air, I fell in with that famous old bell, Emanuel, whose clapper alone weighs nine hundred and seventy-six pounds. Clappers of this kind do not speak on ordinary occasions. This one announces in a very hoarse and solemn voice, only the approach of some great festival, or an extraordinary event. On July 27th, five years ago, it pealed at midnight, and all night long, the awful tocsin of revolt; and upon these two towers, the tricoloured flag floated triumphant on the 29th.

It was to this church that the world used to come in their gala dresses to thank Providence for all those victories which are carved on the great triumphal column; every time a bulletin came in from Italy and Germany announcing the event, and when a new prince ascended the throne. They came here to thank God for Louis XVIII. then for Charles, and then for Louis Philippe. Providence is always sure of its thanks in this church, whichever side is uppermost.

In Paris, the meanest hovels are striving which shall be nearest the church. Notre Dame is a venerable and noble lady, with a brood of filthy and ragged children about her. We have the same ungracious image often in America. In Philadelphia, there is but a step from St. Stephens’ to the Stews. This is chiefly caused by the vicinity of grave yards; a senseless arrangement, which has happily grown out of fashion in this country. It is deplorable that we should patronize every silly practice that Europe is shaking off.

The fashionable church, of all the churches, is St. Roch’s, of which I have spoken in a former letter. To this, the old lady queen, and the little queenies, and all the prettiest women of Paris, come to be blessed every Sunday. A fine woman is a hymn to the Deity, said some old philosopher. If you wish to see a great number of these hymns, praising most eloquently the workmanship of their divine Author, come to St. Roch’s about twelve. A priest told me there was more merit in saving a pretty woman than an ugly one, on account of the enormity of her temptations; an ugly one goes to heaven of herself. The skill of the musician makes the only distinction between the hallelujahs of St. Roch’s, and the addios of the Italien.

While on the chapter of churches, I must not forget the Cathedral of St. Denis, a few miles out of town, the burial place of the French kings. The village, which was built on account of the church, and its monastery, and the number of pilgrims that resorted there, is now as filthy and stupid as suburban villages always are. About ten thousand persons are doing penance by living there; enough to take them to heaven without any other effort. In 1436 it was taken and rifled by the English, who frightened the nuns desperately, and carried off their most precious things. A bit of the iron grate or gridiron on which St. Francis was burnt, and the prophet Isaiah’s bones, with not a few of the little nuns themselves, were amongst the articles stolen. The cathedral is gothic and magnificent. On the first floor, you will see the tomb of _Dagobert_, the founder; a splendid mausoleum of Francis I., in white marble, and opposite, the tomb of Louis XII., surmounted by the naked figures of the king and his consort in a recumbent posture, and the tomb of Henry de Valois, with the images of Henry II., and Queen Catharine de Medicis. In the centre of the basement, is a vault of octagonal shape, which contains the ashes of the monarchs all in a lump.

----“Dead but sceptered sovereigns, Who rule our spirits in their urns.”

These verses have lost their meaning: but the little urn saith “more than a thousand homilies.”

Around the circumference are cenotaphs, upon which the several kings repose in marble at the side of their marble wives. Two unanointed men were admitted amongst them; Duguesclin and Turenne. Bonaparte removed the latter to the Invalids, and Duguesclin was lost entirely in the Revolution. The convention issued a decree for the total destruction of this royal cemetery in 1793. The first graves examined were those of Henry IV., and Marshal Turenne. Both these heroes were as fresh, as the day they were killed, while all those who had died in the natural way, were in a state of dissolution. The kings were transferred to a vulgar grave, with the grass only of the field for a monument; the ghosts of the mighty Bourbons were turned loose to range upon the commons: the lead too was stripped from the cathedral to shoot the enemies of the Republic. The church was repaired by Napoleon, who destined it to be the burial place of “the Emperors.” _Diis aliter visum._ Fortune provided him a much more remarkable grave. Future ages will no doubt go on a pilgrimage to St. Helena; here he would have mingled with the rabble dust of the French kings.

The farther reparation of the church was reserved for the piety of Louis XVIII. I walked out to St. Denis as the saint did once himself, except that he carried his head under his arm. Returning home, as I was no saint, I got into a _coucou_ at the side of some queer old peasant women and heard their conversation. I am sorry the dignity of my subject does not allow me to report it to you in this letter.

Many others of these churches seem to me very entertaining, but I must postpone them to another time; with only a respectful look upon the great _St. Sulpice_ in front of my window, whose huge towers are staring me reproachfully in the face; and I must say a word in parting with the subject of the _Chapelle Expiatoire_ of the Madelaine. This chapel is placed over the ground in which reposed for twenty-two years the bodies of Louis XVI., and Marie Antoinette. The interior is in form of a cross. In the centre, is the altar, exactly over the spot in which the royal bodies were found, and in the lateral branches are their statues. The entrance through an alley of yew trees, sycamores and cypresses, gives it the air and solemnity of an antique tomb. It is the most mournful spot of all Paris. On the Sunday mornings, mass is said here with great solemnity; and early every day you will see a few persons kneeling in silent worship by the altar, or in solitary corners through the church.

The duties of the Catholic churches are administered by an Archbishop with an annual salary of 5,000 dollars; three vicars general, 800 dollars, and between two and three hundred priests at 300 dollars each. The grand Rabbin has 1200; the little Rabbins from one to four hundred, and a protestant clergyman has from two to six hundred dollars. So you see, the French patronize all sorts of religions, and Moses and St. Peter come in alike for their share of the church funds. But what a change of circumstances! The church revenue of France was, before the Revolution, twenty-seven millions of dollars; at present it is six millions. The clergy of old France exceeded four hundred thousand; of “young France,” they are rated at thirty thousand!

In the service of a French Catholic church, there are officers in a military costume; there are processions and pageantry, and loud and impassioned music. Every thing is prepared for vehement impressions, for theatric effect. I should like a religion intermediate between this Catholic vivacity and our Presbyterian dulness. Whoever believes that any association of men can be held together without forms and ceremonies has much yet to learn of the nature of his species, and whoever would dispense with even the forms which are ridiculous in society, would be himself the most ridiculous man in it. Still, some regard is to be had in this to the popular sentiment and spirit of the age.

There is certainly much absurd and trumpery ceremony kept up in this church, designed formerly for a mass of ignorant people, when the general sense of the world and the infidel propensities of the French have got far a-head of it. That Louis XVIII. should go all the way to Rheims and be greased with some drops saved from the Jacobins, of that same oil or “holy cream” brought by a dove from heaven to anoint king Pepin, was presuming too far upon the stupidity of the times. Surely the age of such nonsense and bigotry has gone by. The elevating the host and processions through the church, are neither solemn nor dignified, and what position has so little dignity as that of the priest kneeling at the altar, with a little boy holding up the tail of his surplice in the face of the congregation?

In these times of popular education, every body reads and reasons, and general learning, by cheap publications, is brought within every one’s reach. The common man, who is fed by twopenny knowledge, is almost as learned upon common affairs, as the gentleman who feasts upon his guinea a volume; so that a ceremony that was very solemn in the last age, may be very notable for its absurdity in this. Not half a century ago, a doctor of medicine did not visit a patient in this city unless his head was first wrapped in a huge wig--_perruque à trois marteaux_; and if he forgot his cane with the golden head he turned back for it, though his patient in the mean time should die. A ring too, with a diamond on his finger, and laced ruffles, were indispensable to his practice. In condemning this Catholic flummery, I do not go into the opposite Presbyterian extreme, and proscribe what is rational and sensible, the music, the paintings, and statuary. There is no more occasion in these times to take measures against idolatry than against witchcraft; and why deprive our churches of what gratifies the senses innocently, excites devotional feelings, and improves the taste and understanding?

But to keep a religion now in favour with the world, requires unexceptionable virtue on the part of those who administer its duties; and the celibacy of the priesthood seems to me directly adverse to such a requirement. It is not likely, that human nature will be controlled in one of her strongest impulses with impunity. When I see these rosy and smart looking priests, who haunt the churches, and reflect upon the penchant of the women for holy men, I cannot help wishing, for the sake of the catholic religion, that they were married. I would not go bail for any one of them under the merit of St. Anthony.

The intrigues and libertinism of the French and Italian clergy are matters of authentic history. There was a time when a cardinal’s hat depended on the patronage of the candidate’s mistresses. The Cardinals de Retz, Richelieu, Mazarin and Dubois were the notorious roués of the day. I see here every where a set of jovial-looking monks, with their caps over the right eye, who would drink your health in the sacristy. Besides, when the cares of men are limited to themselves, they lose some of the best qualities of the human heart; they become selfish. I never knew an old maid, a bachelor, or even a married woman without children, who was not an insupportable _egoist_, unless the affections nourished by matrimony were supplied from other sources; and the concern men have for their children brings out their religious as well as their social qualities into continual exercise. Not only the strongest defence against immorality, but the foundation of every public virtue is laid in the domestic affections. The Athenians would not allow any one to vote who had not a child; if I were pope, I would not permit any one to preach who had not a wife, and I would take one myself to set them the good example.

I am sorry the interior arrangements of our American churches, both catholic and protestant, are so opposed to architectural beauty. The pew has an air of habitation; it has the comfort, it has the sacredness of home. Families, accustomed to see each other, the year round, grow into acquaintance; and, even without the intercourse of words, experience the joy of a friendly meeting. The humble man, also, has the satisfaction, one day in seven, of seeing himself in company with those of better fortunes, on something like terms of equality. When one gets the apostles and all the saints on one’s side, one rises almost to the dignity of any body. A great man, too, can, in a church, associate a little with his inferiors without compromising his importance: all which is lost in this random and desultory way of sitting about upon chairs, as in the French churches.

A great evil of our American churches is, their great respectability, or exclusiveness. Here, being of a large size, and paid by government, the church is open to all the citizens, with an equal right and equal chance of accommodation. In ours, the dearness of pew-rent, especially in the Episcopal and Presbyterian, turns poverty out of doors. Poor people have a sense of shame; and I know many a one who, because he cannot go to church decently, will not go at all. This is an evil we must bear, to avoid the greater one of a church establishment. We suffer disadvantages, also, from want of religious uniformity. A thin settled community, which is just able to support one clergyman, starves three or four, or dispenses altogether with their services. A first-rate Methodist would rather not go to church at all, than take part in the litany; and what good Presbyterian, would not rather be d--d, ten times over, than be seen at a mass?

In a diversity of sects, also, we are given to dogmatise too much, and define articles of faith; to follow the letter rather than the spirit of religion. The French catholic believes (if he believes any thing) in the power of absolution, in the real presence, and in the infallibility of the pope; without inquiry into the absurdity of such belief, we dogmatise and doubt and reason ourselves into infidelity; and, though we can see no essential difference in the prayers and sermons of our different clergymen, we cling to our own, as indispensable to our salvation.

Our clergy, too, of the same denomination, are often falling into schisms, in which they too often show jealousy, malice, and other bad passions, which brings religion itself into disrepute. Are these things worse than the abuses and corruptions of undivided church establishments?

The manner of keeping Sunday is a subject of general censure amongst our American visitors at Paris. There is no visible difference between this day and the others, except that the gardens and public walks, the churches in the morning, and the ball-rooms and theatres in the evening, are more than usually crowded. In London, the bells toll on the Sunday most solemnly; the theatres and dancing rooms are silent, and all the shops (but the gin-shop) shut; yet the poor get drunk, and the equipages of the gentry parade their magnificence in Hyde Park, of a Sunday afternoon.

“How do you spend your Sundays,” said a Frenchman, condoling with another, “in America?” He replied: “_Monsieur, je prends médecine._” A Frenchman has a tormenting load of animal spirits that cannot live without employment: he has no idea of happiness in a calm; and it is not likely that he will remain _endimanché chez-lui_ during the twelve hours of the day, or that his Sunday evenings would be better employed than in the theatre and ball-room.

This is my opinion; but I have great doubts whether a man ought to have an opinion of his own, when it does not correspond with that of others, who are notoriously wiser than himself. I cannot easily persuade myself, that nature has intended the whole of this life to be given up to a preparation for the next, else had she not given us all these means of enjoyment, all these “delicacies of taste, sight, smell, herbs, fruits and flowers, walks and the melody of birds.”--Now this is enough about French churches.

Letter XIII.

Père la Chaise.--Funeral of Bellini.--Grave-Merchants. Description of the Cemetery.--Graves of the Rich and the Poor.--The Fête des Morts.--Tomb of Abelard and Heloise.--Remarkable personages buried there.--The Aristocracy of the Grave.--Monument of Foy.--Inscription.--Grave yards in Cities and Towns.--French regulations for the inhumation of the dead.

Paris, October 29th, 1835.

I took advantage of a beautiful day, which peeped out yesterday, to pay my respects to _Père la Chaise_, and I am going to give you some account of this celebrated city of the dead. But what can I say? I feel scarce wit enough to talk about the weather, and I am going to tell you of that which all the world has described so beautifully. I know not the reason, but I have even less sense and imagination than usual, since I am in Paris. If it were not for Madame de Sevigné, and a few other such characters, I would lay the blame upon the heavy, unthinking and hazy influences of these northern climates. I followed the funeral of _Bellini_, the composer, author of Pirati, Puritani, and other first-rate operas. Is it not a pity to die with so much talent at twenty-nine, when so many fools live out their four-score? I do not recollect any thing that old Methusaleh said or did, with his nine hundred years; and he could not have made such an opera as Puritani, if he had lived as many more. He was accompanied (Bellini, I mean) by the music of all Paris; and the music of the spheres must have played, this day, a sweeter harmony.

The mass of Cherubini, so appropriate to the occasion, and so much better than the archbishop’s prayers, was forbidden by the archbishop, because it had feminine voices in it; and his worship would not have the chapel of the Invalids, all hung over so beautifully with bloody flags, profaned by musical women; not even by the exquisite Grisi. So we had the 39th Psalm. Don’t you think the spirit of the composer must have winced? But the march, with full band, along the Boulevards for several miles, and the end of the ceremony at Père la Chaise, were imposing. Speeches were pronounced in Italian and French by good orators; and, among the listeners, some of us were queens and princesses. The breezes whispered though the pines, and a thunder storm, as if expressly, came over the sun, and played bass in the clouds, and the clouds themselves wept as the grave closed upon Bellini.--I went to the Invalids, with a pretty English woman, one of his scholars, who wailed his loss inconsolably, and who, for certain, was in love with him. Women, you know, always fall in love with their music masters; Mary Queen of Scots, and the pretty Mrs. Thrale into the bargain.

This cemetery of Père la Chaise, thirty years ago, had fourteen tombs; it counts, in the present year, fifty thousand. Hundreds of architects, and sculptors, and statuaries, besides multitudes of labourers, find here a new source of occupation, and improvement in the arts; so that a goodly part of the present generation gets its living by the death of its predecessors. Here is a whole street of marble yards, which manufactures tombs for domestic and foreign commerce, near a mile long; and mighty heaps of bronze, granite and marble, exquisitely chiselled, recommending themselves to the notice of the public. Tombstones, urns, bronze gates, iron railings, crosses, pillars, pyramids, statues and all the furniture of the grave, are laid out, and exhibited here, as the merchandise of the shops and bazaars of the latest and newest fashions--“_Grand Magazin à la General Foy--à l’Abelard et Heloise_,” &c.; as in the city, “_Grand Magazin du Doge de Venise_,” and by trying to under-bury one another, they have reduced funeral expenses in every branch to their minimum;--there is, perhaps, no place in the world where one can die, and be buried so moderately, as in Paris. Here is one selling out at first cost, to close a concern; and another’s whole stock of tombs is brought to the hammer, by the death of the proprietor.

These grave-merchants used to follow the funeral processions, in swarms, to the verge of the tomb, offering to the mourners bills and advertisements, and specimens of their industry, but this emulation has been lately forbidden, by an order of police. These people have got, by professional habit, to think, like the philosophers, that the principal business of man, upon this earth, is to die. The staple of conversation is, the grave; and there is as much pedantry here about the dead people, as in the Latin Quarter there is about the dead languages.--“When do you think you can pay me that bill of marble, M. Grigou?”--“Ah, sir! business is very slack just now; and the season, you see, is almost over. M. Barbeau, I have been twenty years in the trade, and never saw such times. It really seems as if people had left off dying. But, if business becomes brisk, as we expect, towards Christmas, I will pay you off then; if not, you will have to wait till next August.---- When the cholera was here---- Helas! I fear we shall never see such times again.”--“_Eh bien, patience_, M. Grigou, we must hope for the best.”

They have here, too, a kind of Exchange, where they meet to see the state of the market--to see the newest fashions or inventions of urns and crosses, and other sepulchral images, and to read over the bills of mortality, as elsewhere one reads the price current. The joy of a death is, of course, proportionate to the worth, fashion and distinction of the individual who has died. When General Mortier was killed, on the 28th, stock rose one and a quarter.--“Well! what is there to-day?”--“Nothing!--and getting worse and worse!--but what can one expect else under such a detestable government? You remember how it was under the Restoration. Then we had such persons as Marshal Suchet, and Madame Demidoff to bury; now we bury nothing but the canaille. Even under Charles, we had some few nobles left, who could pay for a snug mausoleum; but what is a French nobleman now?--a poor, half-cut gentleman, with a ribbon in his button-hole, which he calls a decoration, and without money to pay the grave digger or the sexton.---- Ah! M. Grigou, things must have a change!”

The gate of the cemetery, which terminates the view at the end of this street, is surmounted by statuary, and is magnificent, like that of some great prince. It is always besieged by equipages, and vehicles of every kind, of the visiters, who are coming and going at all hours--all except one--his equipage goes home empty! Around this entrance is a great crowd of women, all over smiles, who offer you wreaths, chaplets, and crosses of orange blossom, amaranth, and other ever-green, very prettily interwoven, and they get a living by this little trade. As you ascend the hill, you see groups of visiters, noisy and talkative, who on entering are suddenly silent, struck with the awfulness of the place. A kind of death-chill runs through the blood. But after a closer view the mind becomes serene, and even roams with a delightful curiosity amongst the tombs.

Nearly all the ground is covered with small pines, and with fern, woodbines, and jessamines twisted into tufted thickets. There is quite a deficiency of cypress and willow, and hemlock; the vegetation is generally stinted in its growth, and looks forlorn enough indeed. Monuments of brightest marble and exquisite sculpture dazzle the eye on all sides; and there are smooth and gravelled walks, terraces, and flowery banks, paths winding along the hillside, and little scenery of every variety; and nature has borrowed so many ornaments from art, and wears them with so lively a grace, that one is disposed rather to admiration than to melancholy musings; one would think that Hymen and Cupid and not Death walked through her hills and valleys.

This city, like living cities, has its fashionable and rabble districts; its Broadways and Chestnut streets, its Southwark, and Northern Liberties. On the summits and flanks of all the hills, or apart, and half hidden in groves of pines, are mausoleums rich with Egyptian, Grecian, and modern luxury. It seems as if the dead, the business of life being done, had retired here to their magnificent villas. Only think of your scraggy grave-yards of Philadelphia--enough to disgust one with dying. Distinguished and learned dust is collected here from all nations, and virtues are puffed and advertised in all human languages. Whatever one may think of the French people alive, one cannot hope to meet any where a better set of dead people. Here are none but faithful husbands and incorruptible wives, and you would think it had rained patriots. As for great generals, they seem to come up in the parsley-bed as they did in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Surely Père la Chaise still exercises his office of absolution on these grounds.

At the foot of the hill are immense multitudes of dead in a level and open field, assorted in rows, as the vegetables in the Garden of Plants. These are the working people of the other world. They have no shelter of marble, or of shrubbery, or of cypress; no weeping willow hangs its branches upon the little hill of earth, but a small black board, shaped into a cross, and standing up prim at the head of each one, reveals his humble name and merits. You see the hearse arrive here with a few attendants on foot. A priest in an old rusty gown, a boy in a frock no longer white, and an officer under a cocked hat, attend. These form a little procession from the hearse: the priest mutters an epitome of the service, and sprinkles the holy water upon the grave; he, the grave-digger, and the driver betraying not the slightest emotion in the performance of these duties; and the whole escort disappears suddenly and silently. Beyond this, is a field of a still humbler lot, where anything is buried; this they call the _Fosses communs_. They who have no money, consequently no friends, are buried here. It is a yawning excavation, into which one cannot look without horror. The corpse is carried down a long stairway, and placed without distinction of age or sex in a row alongside the corpse which preceded it; and the name of the individual is no more heard--upon the earth. He was perhaps a suicide, or a victim of some accident or murder, a stranger without a friend, or a labourer without a home. No priest attends here.--One other piece of earth, retired from the rest, has a special designation. It is the only religious distinction of the cemetery; the burial place of the Jews.

“Beneath her palm, here sad Judea weeps.”

The graves of the rich are mostly held in perpetuity; those of the poor are disposable anew at the end of every six years; the first lessee having always the right of pre-emption. There is a chapel on the highest spot of the cemetery, and from its threshold the priest has a naked view of all Paris. He has spread out before him his whole stock in trade, and sees his customers winding up the hill; of which every day furnishes him its contingent. If for the district of the poor, he performs the service, as I have described, by his deputies.

But when you see the portals of the marble palace open between the Corinthian columns, and winged angels, chiselled from the marble of Genoa, and the priest kneeling in deep devotion before the altar, all of gold; you will see at the same time the whole street leading up to the Barrière d’Aulney filled with an immense cortége of gorgeous equipages, all of crape; and you will see in the first carriages persons in deep distress, mopping their eyes, all swollen with grief. Keep in your tears, they are not the least vexed. On the contrary, they cry with a great deal of pleasure. They are crying by the month, and getting their living by it. This custom of crying by deputy was practised by the Romans, and is common to all the refined nations of modern Europe; and it is known that hired weepers can wail and cry a great deal better than they who are really grieved; they have a greater quantity of salt water, and have given it the habit of running out by the eyes. The coffin descends from the hearse, glittering with the precious metals, and whilst music wakes around, or speeches are pronounced in eloquent grief, or masses chanted in classic Latin, it is conveyed with pomp into its vault, and laid up for eternity upon its shelf. There is a person here, who keeps a register of the names of the deceased, and is a kind of chief clerk to the Fates.

There is one day of the year when all Paris comes hither dressed in white robes, ten thousand at a time, to do honour to the dead. It looks as if the sheeted dead themselves had risen from the earth. This is called the _Fête des Morts_. Each one brings a garland or crown, and hangs it over a friend or relative; and the whole city bends before the graves of General Foy, Manuel, and Benjamin Constant. Indeed every day of the year that the weather will permit, the cemetery is crowded, either with strangers led by curiosity, or with friends busied in trimming the foliage or flowers, or hanging funeral wreaths upon the monuments. This may be partly vanity, but vanity is a very good quality, if rightly directed, and a great many excellent virtues may be grafted on it. As for myself, I have always found it exceedingly difficult to practise several of the virtues when no one was looking on.

I observed, on entering, a gothic monument, and under its dome, two figures of persons recumbent at the side of each other, who were not always of marble. I will not tell you their names. If they had gone quietly with their marriage articles to St. Sulpice, and to bed, and distributed the wedding cake the next day to their cousins of St. Germain, I should not now have the pleasure of musing upon this little gothic chapel; we should have been deprived of one of the best love-tales that ever was, and some of the best verses in our English language, and _Nouvelle Heloise_ into the bargain. Unsuccessful wooing, you see, has its uses. What would you gentle shepherdesses have done without Petrarch’s sonnets, without Virgil’s fourth book, and Sappho’s little ditty, Englished by Philips.

The Republic brought this pair of lovers from Chalons to Paris, where they have been knocked about, till they have become as common as any pair of students and grisettes of the Luxembourg, (the barbarians!) instead of embowering them in the shady wood at a distance from the road, by the side of a murmuring and romantic stream, where the traveller might alight from his horse, just at setting sun, and give his undisturbed and undivided feelings to their hapless fates. Here they are, the unfortunates, alongside of any body, who has died in lawful wedlock, and their history, as if no one knew it, written upon their tomb, in fine round text, with their names. The children are learning to spell on it: a, b, _ab_; _e_ by itself _e_; l, a, r, d, _lard_.--I am now writing from the spot, perhaps the very spot in which their hearts beat so high in love, and sank so deep in despair--in the very spot, for all I know, in the very chamber--where she “hung upon his lips, and drank delicious poison from his eye!”--where now, alas, no loves are disappointed, and where there is no drinking of any thing stronger or sweeter than a little _vin ordinaire_ after one’s potage.

On leaving this fairy spot, I wandered along a hundred little footpaths, and read over a thousand crabbed names, which carried no signification to the mind, of a thousand polite nothings, who had put on their breeches in the morning and taken them off at night, and who have monuments in Père la Chaise for such merits--to Monsieur _Doda_, who made excellent _patés de foies gras_; besides, he made the Papage _Vero-Doda_, and he has the mausoleum of a prince, splendid with festoons, I believe of sausages, on the pediment; and a Monsieur _Sebastian_, who made shoes for the Duchesse de Berri’s dear little feet, has one still more magnificent,--this is the man who made the slipper “_dans un moment d’enthousiasme_;” and lastly a coiffeur--inexorable fate!

“Sensible et genereux, dont le cœur gouta l’ivresse Du bonheur, du genie.” ... and so forth.

An obelisk of Carrara marble, forty feet high, was about to rise upon the tomb of M. Boulard, “Upholsterer.” He had journeyed himself to Genoa and chosen the marble, and a foundation trench forty feet deep had been dug, and 400,000 francs devoted to the monument; but his heirs have thought proper to depart from the intentions of the testator, and have buried him in a chapel at St. Mandé which he had built himself at the cost of a million of francs. The site of his grave here is occupied by the pyramidal monument, with two lateral staircases of fifteen or twenty steps descending to its base, of a rich Portuguese family, Dios Santos.

A Frenchman, who enjoys life so well, is, of all creatures, the least concerned at leaving it. He selects his marble of the finest tints; and has often his coffin made and grave dug in advance. I noticed several open graves, which seemed to me yawning for their victims. They dig a good many a-head, so as to have them on hand, like ready-made coats (without the sleeves) at the mercer’s. If a Frenchman buries his wife, he erects her a tomb and one (blanc) for himself, at the side of her. Then frolics out life in wine and good dinners, and has his tomb at Père la Chaise as his box at the opera. He buries his wife too the more splendidly, having a half interest in the concern.

I found myself at length upon a street crowded with most remarkable personages; but so many, that I must put you off as Homer did with his ships. Here was _François Neufchatel_, a minister of the Interior, and author in prose and rhyme, who sung, _tour à tour_, Marie Antoinette and the Republic, who loved Napoleon and the Empire, and rejoiced at the Restoration. In his vicinity was _Regnaud St. Jean d’Angely_, who used to put off his brass for gold, his words for wisdom, and sometimes, in America, his travelling mistress for his wife.

“Le meme jour a vu finir Ses maux, son exil, et sa vie!”

And here too was the stern and philanthropic _Lanjuinais_, who conjured up a devil he could not lay, in the revolution; and the great jurist _Cambacérés_--under Louis XVI. a squire of Montpelier, under the Convention, Citizen Cambacérés; Colleague of Bonaparte in the consulate, and President, Duke, Prince, and Marshal of the Empire under Napoleon. The sword sometimes yields to the gown, and the laurel to the toga. He died with all the decorations of Europe about his neck. I would have graven the Code Napoleon upon his tomb. Remember to give him the credit for dissuading the execution of the Duke d’Enghein, the Russian and Spanish campaigns, and the continuation of the war after Dresden. But he never put his honours to the hazard of dissuading any thing very strenuously; like Piso, the Roman, he never differed long in opinion with a “man who had ten legions.”

Do let me introduce you to Monsieur _Denon_; he loved the ladies so, and what is more, the ladies loved him; he first taught us to read hieroglyphics, and brought us news out of Egypt about Pharoah and the Ptolemies, and he brought over that great “Zodiac of Dendera” in the king’s library;--and to M. _Messier_, who did not know there was a Revolution in France, being very busy about the revolution of the stars. While his wife was dying, he asked a few minutes’ absence to look after a comet. He died himself in looking through a telescope, and his friends had but one eye to close on that occasion. Not a word to _Chenier_, the Jacobin poet; the world has not yet made up its mind about his merits; nor to _Parny_, whose poetry is good enough to deserve your contempt, pure and unqualified. A lyre hangs upon the tomb of _Grêtry_, and a globe in flames upon Madame Blanchard.

If I had time, I would inveigh here against the audacity of woman. She kills tyrants, commits suicide, and goes up in balloons. She leaves us nothing, unless going to war, and scarcely that, to characterize our manhood. A Roman Emperor was obliged to forbid her, by an edict, the profession of the gladiators.--I must not pass unnoticed M. _Pinée_, who passed his life, and with some success, in teaching crazy folks to be reasonable--those in the mad-house. And those two brothers, not less worthy than the best, they who gave eyes to the blind and ears to the dumb, _Haüy_ and _Sicard_;--they must not be forgotten; and here is a poor poet (excuse the tautology) who is buried as decently as if he had made sausages.

I will conclude this part of my catalogue, already as long as Lloyd’s or Homer’s, with a Scotch cousin of mine, Mr. _Justice_. He left his wife, young, amiable, and beautiful as she was, in Edinburgh, for the pleasures of Paris; which pleasures brought him in time to the prison of St. Pelagie. His wife (I will inquire after her health when I go to Scotland) flew to his rescue. She could not procure his enlargement on account of the greatness of his debts, but she stayed with him in the prison, attended him in his illness, and consoled him, and reformed him in his dying moments. She has placed here a modest tomb upon his grave.

If you hear any one speak ill of a woman, have him taken out and fifty lashes given him on my account. I will settle all the costs and damages at the Common Pleas.

We are now upon the summit. This site is unrivalled in beauty. Montroye, Sêvres, Meudon, Mount Calvary, and St. Cloud, are spread before us in the distant prospect. The eye, too, rests upon the green fields and flowery pastures of Montreuil, and forests of Vincennes; and at our feet is that great miracle of the world, Paris; its gilded towers, domes, and palaces, glittering in the sun; and the frequent hearse is bringing up its daily contribution of the inhabitants. It is near the close of a fine day of autumn. The yellow leaf detached from its branch, comes lingering and flutters towards the earth, and is trodden upon by the passers by; others on the same branch are yet green, or tinged with the blight of the first frosts.

That Xerxes, in contemplating his multitudinous legions, should weep over the prospect of their mortality, he being on the very errand of killing men, seems to me a notable absurdity; but that I, who leave them to die just as they please, should weep a little, in a place so favourable to such emotions, would be reasonable enough. While I stood here yesterday and looked down upon this hive of human beings; listened to the hum of its many voices, and saw the silent earth open to receive all this life and animation: when I looked upon the many graves of my own countrymen here, and reflected that to-morrow--to-morrow, far from my friends and native country, I might become one of the number! Why, I would have wept outright, if my manhood had not interfered. After all, such feelings were perhaps more remarkable in Xerxes; and Herodotus was right to give him, and not me, credit with posterity. Common passions in common men are not subjects of history; but that the “king of kings,” who challenged mountains, and fettered oceans, and led myriads to slaughter, should yet have his lucid intervals of humanity--this is a matter worthy of record.

This is the choice spot of the cemetery. It is the spot distinguished for the best society. It is covered with the richest array of tombs, and all the arts of statuary, sculpture and architecture have employed their best skill upon its embellishment. It is the aristocracy of the grave. Here are the Peeresses, the Princesses, and High Mightinesses. The rich house of Ormesson, Montausin and Montmorency, and “all the blood of all the Howards,” are upon this Hill. “_Ici repose très haute, et très puissante dame, Emma Coglan, Duchesse de Castries_;” and here is the proud mausoleum of Russian Kate’s superb noblewoman, _Madame Demidoff_; which, although in bad taste, deserves, for its richness, whole days of admiration to itself. Not one of the cleverest of the Parisians is a match for this fur-clad damsel of the Neva. Here, too, is Joseph, the money changer, and other men of arithmetic; the Barings and the Rothschilds of Père la Chaise, with winged goddesses perched upon their tombs where ought to be Multiplication Tables. And finally ministers and great marshals of France, all who have not been ashamed to come to the term of life according to the due course of mortality, are buried here. Here with images of their living features, upon pyramids that pierce the skies,--

“Heroes in animated marble frown, And legislators seem to think in stone.”

I thought of Washington by the way-side. I thought of Franklin at the corner of Arch and Fifth--in the midst of a city so improved and adorned by his genius, so honoured by his virtues, with no sculpture but the letters of his name, no mausoleum but the grave-digger’s cell.

The monument of Foy is reared by the gratitude of the city of Paris, with almost barbaric magnificence; “kings for such a tomb would wish to die.” They have sculptured upon its façade the principal military events of his life. His statue has a majestic and noble air such as becomes the great Deputy, whose eloquence was lightning, and whose tongue was armed with thunder. The countenance is solemn, and the arm outstretched as if to announce some awful admonition.

Other great men, also, have monuments here, pre-eminent in splendour. _Kellerman_, whose name recals the republican victories of Valmy and Jemappes; _Suchet_, the oldest of the marshals; his ornaments are Rivoli, Zurich, Genoa, Esling. Two winged _Victories_ hold a crown over the head of _Lefebvre_, and a serpent, the symbol of immortality twines around his sword; his trophies are Montmirail, Dantzig, the Passage of the Rhine; and next _Jourdan_, _Serrurier_, _Davoust_, and choicer than all, the great Duke of Tarento, the Prince of Eckmuhl, the rapacious _Massena_. How silent! not a footstep is heard of all those who rushed to the battle.

These military men outdo by far, in the splendour of their monuments, all the other classes.--Ceres and Bacchus, on account of the pure, universal and durable benefits they had conferred upon mankind, were raised to the rank of supreme divinities, says Plutarch, but Hercules, and Theseus, and the other heroes were placed only in the rank of demi-gods, because their services were transitory, and intermixed with the evils of war. The French have reversed this wisdom of the Greeks in Père la Chaise.

But, indeed, if they would snatch a little of their fame from the oblivious grave, there is scarce any other way left; they have so spoilt the trade of glory, by competition. Why, Bonaparte used to send, of these heroes, whole bulletins to Paris weekly; and in Great Britain there are no longer ale-houses, and sign-posts to hang them upon; Smiths, Auchmuties, Abercrombies, and Wellingtons;--memory has a surfeit of their names. Human veneration is not infinite, and it is expanded till, like the circle upon the stream, it terminates in naught. They who lived before Agamemnon will soon have as good a chance as their successors; Werter will be as good a hero as Cato, and the Red Rover as Lord Nelson.

In the early ages, when events were rare, and men had scarce any thing to do but live their nine hundred years, heroes had some chance to be preserved. They could transmit even their mummied bodies to posterity; but with us, loaded as we are with all this biography, all this history, besides what science and letters are daily imposing upon us--with us, who come here to Père la Chaise at threescore, to expect such advantage is unreasonable. The truth is, we cannot get along under the accumulated load, and we must sacrifice a part for the safety of the rest of the crew. We must heave a few Massenas and Lord Wellingtons overboard. Ought I not to say a word in this paragraph of the unfortunate Ney? He is buried here, like his fellow martyr, Labedoyere, at the feet of the Suchets. A single cypress is all that grows over the “bravest of the brave!” Read; “_çi git le Marechal Ney, Duc d’Elchingen, Prince de la Moscowa_: Decédé! * * * _le 7 December, 1815_. I humbly take my leave of the Rivolis, and the Wagrams.”

Here is a most beautiful tomb of a lady surmounted by an image of Silence, her finger on her lip. Does it intimate the lady could keep a secret? Oh, no, it admonishes other ladies to hold their tongues. This one is _all_ French. “_Ici repose Georgina, fille de_ MADEMOISELLE _Mars_.” She adds, _Gardez vos larmes pour sa mère_. Whoever loves Thalia, and the Graces will not disobey the admonition. And now let me introduce you to _Bouffleur_, the _fleur des chevaliers_; to _Delille_, who went down to posterity behind Virgil and Milton; and to _Bernardin de St. Pierre_, of whom one forgets to remember only Paul and the delicious Virginia. Here, too, is _Laplace_, allotted his six feet like the rest. _Eheu! Quid prodest?_ and _Fourcroy_, undergoing one of his own experiments. In the centre of all these is _Molière_ himself. They should have left room beside him for Miss Mars, his best commentary--if, in spite of time, she should chance ever to die. Here, too, is _Talma_, and _Mademoiselle Raucourt_ immortal for feigning others’ passions, and _Lafontaine_, for telling other people’s tales. He has no occasion to think any thing new, who can dress others’ thoughts to such advantage. I observed also a few learned ladies, Madame Guizot, Dufresnoy, and above all, Madame _Cottin_. Are you not sorry she died at twenty-eight, when so many fools never die at all. It is plain, Providence does not trouble itself about what we call human greatness; or genius would not perish thus in its infancy, and so many glorious and manly enterprises would not die in the hatching. Virgil would have lived till the completion of his Æneid; Apelles would have put the finishing hand upon his Venus. I regret that I must pass with only a nod of recognition, Palissot, Mercier, Millevoye, Guinguené, David the painter, and even the elegant, the witty, and profligate Beaumarchais. Who can pass without a sigh the grave of Lavallette? His head was stripped of its hair, and prepared for the guillotine, when he was saved by his wife. Her agitation, and excessive terror lest he should be retaken, affected her brain, and she went mad. Her madness is of a calm and melancholy kind; she sits whole hours in meditation, and has not spoken a word these several years. She is lodged in a _maison de santé_ near Paris.

I strolled awhile amongst the “temporary cessions,” the graves of the poor. There are no trees here, nor artificial tombs. A border of boxwood, and sometimes a wire wicker work, with a wooden cross, is all their decoration. I read the inscriptions upon the crosses.

---- Pierre Robin Age de 67 ans Unes des victimes du 28 Juillet, 1830.

By the side in the same wicker enclosure:

Ici repose une victime _inconnu_, du 28 Julliet, 1830.

A little tri-coloured flag was waving between them.

The following is of a mother, upon a child of four years:--

Prés de mourir, elle nous disait: Ne pleure pas, Papa; ne pleure pas mamma; je me sens mieux, Et elle mourut!

Of a son:

Passant, donne une larme à ma mere, en passant à la tienne.

Of a wife:

Elle vecut bien, elle aima bien, elle mourut bien.

Of an old woman of 81:

Une jour on dira de moi, ce qu’on a dit des autres; Marie Anne Palet est morte, et l’on n’en parlera plus.

This one is pretty:

Pauvre Marie, A 29 Ans!

There is a still prettier one of the same kind at New York. “My Mother.”

The simple language of the heart succeeds better in epitaphs than the “lettered Muse;” for grief at the dissolution of natural ties is usually more intense amongst the poor than the rich; this is notoriously manifest in the funeral ceremonies of Père la Chaise. How indeed should any lady not rejoice when her lord is dead, if she looks well in black? and my young lord who has popped into an estate and title, how should he be sorry? One ought not, however, to blame the rich for exhibiting the signs of woe even where the reality is deficient. The affectation of a virtue is better than the neglect of it; but I would not have it carried to a ridiculous excess. I have heard of a French nobleman here, a M. Brumoi, who, at his mother’s death, put his park into mourning; he craped his deer; put black fish in his ponds; and brought from Paris several barrels of ink to supply his _jets d’eaux_. And every one has read of the Danish count, who had his statue placed by the grave of his wife upon a spring, causing the water to spurt through one of the eyes. This statue exists yet near Copenhagen, and is called the “Weeping Eye.”--You will often see, amongst the poor of Père la Chaise, a half-grown girl kneeling by the fresh earth after the convoy has departed, or a mother lingering over the grave of her child.

I ascended the hill again by the east side. Only think of walking upon the very earth consecrated so often by the pious footsteps of Madame de Maintenon. It was here she poured out her little peccadillos into the bosom of Père la Chaise. She brought him out from his obscurity of schoolmaster of Lyons, and raised him to the dignity of confessor (some say rival) to the king. This father was of extraordinary personal beauty, and polished manners. When he had stepped into the graces of the king, he used the royal favour to enrich himself and his order. His style of living was magnificent, his equipages gorgeous, and in his costly banquets he rivalled the most sumptuous monarchs. To gain admission to his soirées was a favour solicited by princes. He was crafty, wily, subtle, and eloquent, says Duclos, and he alarmed or soothed the conscience of the king as best suited his interests. “He surprises his Majesty,” says Madame de Maintenon, “into the most boundless liberality, by the mere force of his eloquence.” The king pronounced himself, the _éloge_ of his confessor at his death in 1709. “He was always,” says his Majesty, “of a forgiving temper.”

On the site of these tombs, were once his pleasure grounds, and here the proud Jesuit often stood and looked down upon the court and city at his feet. The ruins of his elegant summer palace have perished, but a part of his orchard still remains. I walked up through a low valley, once the channel of a stream that had supplied the water pots, the cascades, and fountains of this reverend father. It is a romantic spot, but barren of trees and shrubbery. I would plant here the drooping willow, the cypress of hoary gray; and I would teach the jay bird, in its plumage of crape, to build here its nest; and, while ambition climbs the summit of the hill, the tender poets and the unfortunate lovers should come to be buried in this melancholy valley.

It is an advantage of eternity, that one may squander as much as one pleases of it without diminishing the capital. I found that the sun of our world was descending fast upon the roofs of St. Cloud, and I was obliged to run over an acre or two of graves with only a general stare. I hurried about in search of several I had heard distinguished for their splendour, but in vain. There should be a “directory” to tell us where the dead people live. I stumbled at last upon a whole plot of English, coteried apart near the wall side; General Murray; Cochran, brother of the admiral; Caroline Sydney Smith, my lady Campbell, Captain O’Conner, and other august personages. Their tombs are very genteel. An Englishman always seems to me (foolishly perhaps) a greater man than a Frenchman, and a Roman than a Greek, with the same degree of merit. The one, I believe, makes his wisdom pass for more, the other for less than it is worth. The great polish of the human character diminishes its solidity. Lord Chesterfield would have been a greater man if he had been more an Englishman.

Lord Bacon and Shakspeare both say, that a certain reserve of speech and manner adds to the general opinion of one’s merits. The Frenchman wastes, and the Englishman husbands his greatness; the latter hides his little passions, and does small things by deputy. Like Moses, he retires into the mountain, and bids Aaron “speak unto the children of Israel.” But the truth is, there is an illusion in my mind at present about all that is English; I have been so long over head and ears in French people. I read over these English graves as a studious school-boy his lesson.

Whilst perusing this page of the great volume, I came with astonishment, not expecting such a rencontre, upon the names of several of our own countrymen, and even of our own townsmen. Of Philadelphia were William Temple Franklin, Adam Seybert, our old congressman and chemist, Samuel Rawlston and Jacob Girard Koch; he who used to “breakfast with the Houris and quaff nectar with Jove at noon.” His great regret, they say, in dying, was an apprehension that there might not be good dinners in the other world. There is here an eloquent and simple tomb upon the grave of Miss Butler, who was cut off in the expectation of unusual accomplishments and in the roseate freshness of her youth.

“Rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses, L’espace d’un matin.”----

I remarked, also, the names of K. M. Smith, New York, Harriet Lewis, New London, Frances Morrison, Kentucky, Francina Wilder, and Mrs. Otis of Boston. A cypress is planted by the grave of Dr. Campbell of Tennessee, and some fresh garlands are hung upon its branches. Who is he who has won these pious attentions from the hands of strangers? I am now writing from the inkstand which once belonged to him, and which I will put with my relics. I am lodging in his room, and with the person who attended his fatal illness. She gave me his biography as follows: “He was always good, always polite, and every one loved him;” and then she burst into tears.

The last grave I looked upon, I will now read to you: “Died, March 1st, 1832, Frances Anne, Countess Colonna de Walewski, daughter of the late John Bulkeley, Esq., of Lisbon, widow of the late General Humphreys, of the United States, minister in Spain and Portugal.”--I could write a romance at the foot of this monument. I lingered here until the last glimmerings of day faded, and night covered all but the bleak and snowy marble. I then descended the hill, and with many a solemn reflection, reached my solitary lodge in the Faubourg St. Germain.

Let us reason awhile about the grave. The custom of locating grave yards in cities and towns, so universal in America, has been discontinued in nearly all these old countries of Europe. France has set the excellent example, which has been followed through the continent, and the large towns of England--London, Liverpool, Manchester, Cheltenham, and several others--and all the world acknowledges its necessity. Such a measure was not adopted here until the agency of burying grounds in corrupting the air and producing disease, was proved by numerous examples and experiments.

An account of these, contained in several hundred pages, was published by Maset, secretary to the Academy of Dijon, the one-twentieth part of which would fill with terror all those who live in dangerous contiguity with a city grave-yard. It is high time your towns in America should give this subject a serious attention. Your grave-yards are multiplying in number and extent prodigiously in the midst of communities which are likely, in a few years, to be numerously increased. Your Pottsville, which is about eight years old, has already six grave-yards, whose population nearly equals that of the village.

All those who die upon the railroads, mines, and canals, for twenty miles around, have themselves carried in and buried in town--as if to be convenient to market. A citizen of Pottsville does consent sometimes to reside in the country during his lifetime, but he does not think it genteel to pass his eternity out of town; and your miner soothes himself with the consolation that though he has many toils and perils in life, he will one day come out of the ground to be buried in Pottsville. It is in their infancy that such evils ought to be averted. They are more easily prevented than cured. And there are enough of other considerations besides health to urge the importance of the subject.

Every body knows the indecent irreverence and general inattention with which grave-yards are regarded in towns and cities. In many of them monuments are defaced and scribbled on, and the place even desecrated sometimes by the obscenity and brutal violation of visitors. To prevent this, they are often enclosed by high walls and rendered invisible. If the object were to forget one’s ancestors there could not be a better contrivance. It is worth while to squander away the best parts of a city to bring one’s deceased parents into oblivion or contempt! That this is the case cannot be denied. The citizen, the clergyman, the grave-digger, and the sexton, are all affected by the bones of their ancestors alike.

Who first brought this system of vampyrism into use? It was at least modern. At Babylon they buried the dead in the valley of ... look into your Bible; and the valley of Jehoshaphat, I believe, was out of town. The interment of the dead within the precincts of the city was prohibited at Rome by law. The Greeks had the same regulation, and forbade expressly that the temples of the gods should be profaned by the sepulture of the dead. The Achæans buried only one man in town, Aratus--look into your Plutarch. If they had governed our city councils they would have buried us all out of town, except “Benjamin Franklin, and Deborah his wife.” The first Christians followed the Pagans and Jews in this, and for a long time graves were not allowed to encroach upon the sanctuary of the church. But some pious and popular bishop having died in the course of time, I presume they buried him with his church, as they bury an Indian with his canoe; and then another and another, or perhaps some fat and lazy priest wished to have his dead family about him for the convenience of praying upon them. Who is going all the way to Père la Chaise? So he could just step out in his gown and slippers and dismiss the poor soul to purgatory, and then step back again to his _soupe à la Julien_. And then came avarice to sanction this convenience. We can heap generation upon generation and sell a church-yard over and over again to eternity.

Make me chief burgess of Pottsville, and I will provide a choice piece of ground overlooking the village, and apart from the living habitations--on a single plot, and with separate apartments for the several denominations; and this I will cultivate tastefully with trees and shrubbery, and lay it out with agreeable walks.

I will make the dead an ornament, instead of a nuisance and deformity to the living; and I will bind your erratic population to the soil, by the decency with which I will bury their fathers and mothers; and by improving the kindred affections, I will improve, at the same time, the moral and religious feelings of the community. I will carve out, from one of your rugged hills, a decent and solitary retreat, where we may sometimes escape from the business, the anxieties and frivolities of life, and where we may peruse the last sad page of our own history, upon the silent and solemn annals of the grave.

In a place of decent appearance, and of public resort and ample space, we have the means (which we have not in our shabby and contracted grave-yards of the towns) of paying honour to the memory of an eminent citizen, or public benefactor; a duty in which we are negligent beyond the example of all other nations; and emulating the princely splendour of Europe in other things, we cannot excuse ourselves upon the republicanism and simplicity of our tastes, in this. Are the virtues of a great man so graven upon our memories, that he needs no other memorial? And are we all so virtuous, ourselves and our children, as to need no excitements to emulation?--To do honour to those who have performed eminent service to the community, is as well a commendable policy, as it is an act of justice and gratitude. It produces, in generous minds, a rivalship of honourable actions. It makes one good deed the parent of a numerous offspring. It is the seed of virtue--the grain of corn that rewards the cultivator with a full and ripened ear.

On the other hand, neglect, the cold neglect that is practised in our country, freezes the current of public spirit; and the people, who are guilty of it, need not complain that they are barren of generous actions, or that they, who have been fortunate in acquiring wealth, should choose to spend it rather upon selfish and transitory interests, than upon schemes of permanent public utility. Even our savages pay respectful honours to the dead, and a luxury of grave-yards is of all antiquity; it has even the most ancient scriptural authority in favour of it.--“Thou art a mighty prince, in the _choicest_ of our sepulchres bury thy dead.”--(Genesis).

I will now put an end to this long letter, with a few of the French regulations for the inhumation of the dead of cities and towns.

All cemeteries are required to be located without the towns, avoiding low, wet, or confined situations. On an elevated site, the fœtid emanations are dispersed by the winds. The dead bodies are to be covered with, at least, four feet of earth, and placed in such a manner that there may be four feet of interval between each, and two feet at the head and foot--about fifty-two square feet for each corpse. It is known, from experiment, that animal decomposition requires about four years, and the grave-yard is to be made four times greater than appears necessary for the number of persons to be interred in it.

The graves are disposed of in perpetuity, or in temporary cessions of six years; the former at twenty-five dollars per metre, of three feet; two metres are required for a grave; and the latter at ten dollars. _These_ are disposable anew at the end of the term--the first occupant having the “refusal.” From the extent of the grounds, this has not yet been required. But Death has nearly filled up the whole space, and is looking out for additions to his estate. A miser, who lives next door to him, taking advantage of his necessity, asks, for three-quarters of an acre, twelve thousand dollars!

All the funerals are in the hands of a company, who have their office, keep a registry of the dead, and attend to all their wants. Companies having no souls, the French fulfil the scriptures, and “let the dead bury the dead.” Having its stock of carriages, grave-diggers, weepers, and all such things on hand, the company is enabled, they say, to bury cheaper than the individuals themselves. It has, besides, a fixed price for the rich, which enables it to eat an annual dinner, and to bury the poor for nothing. The dinner is, no doubt good, but the burying of the poor, as all things else which are done for nothing in Paris, is performed in a niggardly and heartless manner. If you make any such provision for your new grave-yard of Pottsville, let it honour the hand that confers it. Give the poor man his priest, and apply to a life, perhaps, of unmerited sorrows--a little extreme unction.

The leaves, nipt by the first frosts, are already strewed thick upon the Luxembourg; and your hills are, no doubt, putting on their variegated hues of the autumn. My advice is, that you dissolve the cold, by putting largely of the anthracite upon your grate; that you bring out your old wine, and be joyful, while your knees are green--see where Père la Chaise stands beckoning from the heights of Mont-Louis.--I give my compliments to the girls, and say you sweet, good night.

Letter XIV.

The Louvre.--Patronage of the Fine Arts.--The Luxembourg.--The Palais des Beaux Arts.--The Sêvres Porcelain.--The Gobelins.--Manners of the common People in Paris.--A fair Cicerone.--Her remarks on Painting.--The French, Flemish, and Italian Schools.--English Patronage of Art.--The New National Gallery.--Sir Christopher Wren.--A tender Adieu.

PARIS, Nov. 14th, 1835.

I have passed the morning in the _Louvre_, and have nothing in my head but galleries and pictures; and you must expect nothing else through the whole of this letter. You may dread a long letter too, for you know, the less one is conversant with a subject the more one is likely to reason upon it. In the Louvre, the pictures occupy both walls of a room, thirty feet wide by a quarter of a mile long, and consist of about twelve hundred pieces of native and foreign artists. In the same building also is the _Musée des Antiques_ containing 736 statues, with bronzes and precious vases; also the _Musée des Desseins_, with 25,000 engravings; the _Musée de la Marine_, with models of vessels; and the _Musée Egyptien_, with collections of Egyptian, Roman and Grecian antiquities. An exhibition too is held here, from the first of March till May every year, of the works of living artists, painters, sculptors, engravers, architects, and lithographers.

Paris, in patronising the fine arts, has taken the lead of all the cities of Europe. The government spends annually large sums, and extensive purchases are made by the royal family, and wealthy individuals. They do not hoard their pictures in private houses, as in England, but place them, as in ancient Greece, in the public collections. They improve, therefore, the public taste and embellish their city. It is one of the means by which they entice amongst them rich foreigners, who always pay back with usurious interest the money spent for their entertainment.

There is, besides, a public gallery in the palace of the Luxembourg, which contains collections of paintings and sculpture of living French artists since 1825. The other museums are those of Natural History at the Garden of Plants, and the _Musée d’Artillerie_, containing all kinds of military weapons, used by the French from the remotest periods of their history; also the “Conservatory of Arts and Trades,” where models of every French invention, from a doll-baby to an orrery and steam-engine, have been preserved--the greatest museum of gimcracks, they say, in the world. This gives two courses of gratuitous lectures under distinguished professors, and has a free school in which young men are taught the arts.

To these you may add the “_Palais des Beaux Arts_,” begun in 1820, and now near its completion, which is destined to be one of the splendid miracles of Paris. The “Gallery of Architecture,” which is already rich, is to be increased with copies of the choice sculpture, statuary, and architecture of all the world, so that students will have no longer to run after the originals into foreign countries.

There are two manufacturing establishments here with galleries of their produce, which have dignity enough to be mentioned even with the Louvre; the Sêvres Porcelain, and the weaving of the Gobelins. In the gallery of the porcelain, some of the specimens are inconceivable. There was scarcely less difference between mother Eve and the clay that made her than there is between the original materials, and one of these exquisite vases. Gold blushes to see itself outdone by the rude earth at the tables of the Rothschilds and other lords. Plate of the precious metals is mean in comparison. Porcelain has fragility in its favour. The best mine, which sleeps between the Broad and Sharp Mountains would scarce buy you a dinner-set. I priced you breakfast plates at 2,000 francs each, and a table to set them on at 30,000; and a vase with American scenery, as if Iris herself had painted it, 35,000. But why, after all, put this exquisite art upon matter so destructible, and upon objects destined to mean services? Why bake Vandykes upon your cream jugs, and Raffaelles and Angelos on your wash-basin, and the Lord knows what else? There are things which admit of ornament only to a certain extent.

At the Gobelins the most intricate groups of paintings are interwoven in the carpets and tapestry, of churches and palaces. The great Peter superintending the battle at Pultawa, the Duke d’Epernon carrying off the queen, and St. Stephen pouring out his soul towards Heaven are all under the shuttle or starting into life, from the woof and chain of a weaver’s web. And here is Marie de Medicis, and two other ladies, just out of the loom. The most effeminate tints, the nicest features, have a glow and delicacy equalled but by the best paintings upon canvass. Only think! the charms of the divinest female; her arched eye-brows, her lips, like the opening flower, gently parted, as if going to speak; her graceful smile, which steals away the senses, and all the heaven of her features, may be expressed in wool.

Here are carpets to be trodden on only by queens, and to be purchased only with queens’ revenues. One of the cheapest is 8,000 dollars. Two hundred years have been employed upon a single piece. All that you have read about the “weaving of the Dardan Dames,” of the webs of Penelope and other ladies, is nothing but mythology. Here is a Bonaparte in the plague of Egypt, so natural and so animate, of such questionable shapes and features, one is almost ready to exclaim with Hamlet, “Be thou a spirit”--(the temptation to a pun is not quite so bad as the offence.) You are tempted almost to speak to him, so full is he of expression and vitality. The workmen of the Gobelins require six years’ apprenticeship, and twenty years to become proficients. Under the ancient government they were locked up for life, like old Dædalus, within the walls, and no one is now permitted to buy or sell without an order of the king. A dyeing establishment is kept up under an able chemist, expressly to supply this factory with colours.

The doors of all the French galleries are opened on certain days of the week to every body, and a special favour of every day is extended to strangers. Minerva, like the others of her sex in Paris, cares not to be rumpled a little by the crowd, or stared at by the vulgar. The rich are refined always sufficiently for their own will and resources; but in the condition of the poor man--his poverty, the contempt which follows poverty, every thing tends to debasement. It is surely then wise in a government to devise such institutions, and encourage such modes and fashions as may ennoble the motives, refine the tastes, and employ innocently the idle hours of the poor; and since one member of a community cannot be badly affected without injury to the rest, it is the proper business of the rich to second such measures of policy. It is certain that no city in the world contains so many violent principles of corruption as Paris, and it is equally certain that the common people have an air of neatness and decency, not equalled by the same class in any other country. As for grace, it is here (and it is no where else) a mere bourgeois and plebeian quality. The distinction too is as remarkable in conversation as in manners. There is not a milliner or shop-girl at fifteen sous a-day, whose head is not a little museum of pictures; she will converse with you too of the Malibrans, and Taglionis, and Scribes, with nearly the same sense and the same phraseology as the _Journal des Spectacles_. But the Frenchman seeks his recreation in the dance, the theatre, in the pure air of his gardens, and in these galleries of statues and paintings, whilst the Englishman skulks into his gin-shop. No one can walk into these galleries on the public days, and not see, that there is in man a natural attraction for the arts which exalt and refine his nature. We follow our mother country in many things, and we follow her especially in her whims and her vices. She shuts out the public from her pictures, and then complains that there is no public taste. And she imports her Lelys and Godfrey Knellers from abroad. We have a gallery in Philadelphia, and though there is but one picture in it, the admission to this one picture is a shilling sterling. It is the “Last Supper;” and we have puffed in all the newspapers the religious impressions which it inspires (for a shilling.) I ask pardon of the “Academy of Fine Arts;” it also has pictures, which are visited by fashionable people once a-year, admission twenty-five cents.

The ancients set more value upon this silent kind of instruction than we moderns. A Spartan mother rocked her baby in a shield, and she dressed the household gods in armour, that her little Leonidas might have the image of war before his eyes, even in his prayers. She even commenced this course of education before the child’s birth. For she took care to have bucklers and helmets, and portraits of Castor and Pollux, and other heroes, hung around her chamber, and to have some martial air played over her couch of a morning, that she might not, by pusillanimous dreams, spoil her child. The “city councils” too of that country, employed certain grave old men, good for nothing else, to inspect the public morals, and especially to take care that the recreations of the youth should be public. In a word, they thought it better, by such impressions and such vigilance, to anticipate the dispositions of men to be bad, than to build “Houses of Refuge,” and “Penitentiaries” to correct them.

We prefer to connive at the opportunity of sin, till men have become rogues, and then hang them. But, to take the example of a people nearer our own manners, there can be no doubt that the excellent specimens of the Fine Arts, exhibited daily to the Athenians in the embellishment of their city, with the pomp of their games and festivals, gave them that exquisite taste, that grace of movement, language, dress and manner, in which they had an acknowledged superiority over all other people in the world.

To enter the Louvre this morning, I used the stranger’s privilege; and unfolding my passport, a lady, with so much the air of a lady, as to be sure of meeting no repulse, taking my arm, said, “Sir, I will ask the favour of going in with you. I will be your wife two minutes,” and we went in together. A Frenchwoman says and does things sometimes at which our American honour grows very indignant, yet does she say and do no harm. In conversing with this woman, I did not doubt “two minutes” of her being of the best breeding and education. She had resided at Florence, and a long time at Rome, and had exactly that kind of information which the necessities of my condition required. I entreated her of course not to be divorced at the end of the “minutes.” She has wit and learning, and is eloquent to the very ends of her fingers. Her personal beauty, too, is of no common order, but just threatening to fade; the period at which woman, to my taste, is much more interesting than with the full blown charms of seventeen summers in her face. She has then the interest of a possession which soon may escape; she has maturity of intelligence, of feeling and expression, to which the brilliancy of youthful beauty is as the tinsel to the pure gold.

The Louvre has nine divisions, bounded each by an arch resting on four Corinthian columns, and pilasters of beautiful marble, having bases and capitals of bronze-gilt; and between them are mirrors, and splendid ancient and modern vases and busts. Three of these parts are assigned to the French, three to the German, Flemish, and Dutch, and as many to the Italian and Spanish masters. I walked with my amiable _virtuosa_ up and down this enchanting gallery for an hour; gathering wisdom, not being allowed to gather any thing else, from her lips.

And we conversed, not of politics, or the town scandal, but of what it imported me more to know, of Florence, and of the treasures of that city of the arts--of Florence, the birth-place of Dante, of Galileo, of Machiavelli, of Michael Angelo; and we conversed of those two great patrons of Florentine learning, Cosmo and Lorenzo de Medici,--how the arts revived under their care, and flourished under their munificent protection, and how much more one man often does towards the glory and honour of a country, than ten thousand of his neighbours. And so we walked, and then stood still, and looked up, to the great fatigue of our legs, a contingency which the French foreseeing, had provided against by placing sofas along each side the room, and in front of the finest paintings; so down we sat opposite the “French School.”

Here I put the lady back to her rudiments, and I am going to give you a tincture of her remarks. Before coming to this country I had seen neither statues nor pictures. I had seen only Miss “Liberty,” on the bow of an East Indiaman, and a General Washington or two, hospitably inviting one to put up for the night. In a word I had studied only in that great National Gallery of ours, the sign-posts. So the less I say of my own wit upon this subject, the better.

“To improve your taste, sir, in painting, it is not the best way to dissipate your attention upon all this variety. Select a few pieces of the best and study these alone, for an hour a day, until by comparison you can distinguish their beauties, with the style and character of each master. You will then be able to read with satisfaction through the rest of the great volume; you will know what to receive, what to reject, and how to economise your time and attention. Here are the French masters. It was under Louis XIV., and with Poussin, this school began. The great number of pictures at this time brought to Paris and exhibited publicly gave a general taste for the art; and we have attained since a very eminent distinction, without, however, reaching the great masters of the Flemish and Italian schools. We have all the dry particulars of excellence, such as the labour of copying the fine classical models may produce. All schools, under the authority of a master, lead off from nature, to imitation--to a mean practice of mere copying, which fetters and debases genius.

“How much better to have open galleries, as the ancient Greeks, untrammelled; where the mind may follow its own impulses, and recommend itself at once to the great tribunal, before which all human excellence must come at last for its recompense and fame. Hogarth, Reynolds, Wilson, and West, were all eminent before the birth of the Royal Academy, and who does not know that Reynolds would have been more eminent still, if he had not been thrust into its Presidency? Raphael never read a treatise or heard a lecture on his art. All the great painters under Leo X. were of no school; they were fostered by individuals and the public, and all the efforts of the academy of St. Luke have not been able to continue the race. When painting shows her face in your country, be wise, and do not cramp her natural movements by the trammels of an academy.

“In this French school you must admire the life, the movement, the variety of _Lebrun_; the serene and noble expression, the correct, yet grand and heroic style of the classical _Poussin_; and him, whose landscapes, and tableaux contend for superiority, _Claude Lorraine_; especially the trees, suns, moons, and lightning of his beautiful landscapes; the fine sea pieces too, and landscapes of _Vernet_; and _Lemoine_, immortal for his Hercules. This last died of melancholy from the neglect of his patron and the envy of his rivals. The next time we meet, I shall hear you all day praise the grace and sentiment of _Le Sueur_, and the more animated grace of _Mignard_; you will have adored his cupola of Val-de-Grace, and his virgins, too, and above all his St. Cecilia, celebrated so magnificently by Molière.

“See what a different world!--The phlegmatic and laborious Hollander. This is nature, as it is in Amsterdam, fat, Dutch nature; wrought out to a neat and prudish perfection, to be accomplished only by Dutch patience, admirable in animals, fruits, flowers, insects, night-scenes, vessels, machines, and all the objects of commerce and arts; admirable, too, in perspective; its clara obscura is magic, it paints the very light of heaven; the shades in nature’s self are not better blended. Don’t you love this shop; this peasant’s kitchen; and the grotesque dresses, and comic expression of these figures? All, as you see, in this school have the same face; the artist has no idea of a connection between faces and minds. Scipio is a Dutch burgomaster.

“Here are Alexander and Diogenes; either in the tub will do for the philosopher; both are Dutchmen. But what harmony of colours; what living carnations; what relief; what truth and character!--these are _Rembrandt’s_, and even these want spirit and dignity. Let us sit down here and take a long look at _Rubens_, the Titian, the Raphael of the Low Countries--of the singular beauty of his heads, his light and easy pencil; the life, harmony and truth of all his compositions. The whole world goes to Anvers, alone, to see the works of this extraordinary genius; to see his “Crucifixion,” you would go any where; you can hear his thief scream upon the cross. And here is _Jordaens_, almost his equal, and the portraits, never to be surpassed, of _Vandyke_. Here, too, the inimitable village fêtes, and grotesque peasantry, and soldiers of _Teniers_; the landscapes and farms, and cattle of Potter; and _Van-der-meer’s_ sheep, as natural as those which feed upon the down.--These last, of nearly the same character, are the Germans, _Durer_, _Holbein_, and _Kneller_.

“And now the divine Italy. The noble Florentines; _Michael Angelo_ and _Vinci_ at their head;--the fruitful, the lively, the imaginative, the graceful, the majestic, and every other excellence combined. If you love the arts you will live always in Florence. There is nothing here of Angelo, but this is the _Joconde_ of Vinci, the most finished portrait in the world.

“Next is Lombardy, and her fine forms and expression; her masterly composition, and colours, so sweetly blended; all the best qualities of “excelling nature” are in this school formed by _Correggio_, who received, they say, his pencil from the Graces. His drapery seems agitated by the winds. And who are these others, who divide equally with him the admiration of the world? you cannot remove your eyes from their charming figures--it is _Permessan_ and the _Caraccis_, severe and correct; and he who excels them all three in some of the principal features of the art, he who paints nature in her defects, and with irresistible force and truth, _Caravaggio_; and next _Guido_, who paints her majesty and graces; and _Albano_, in her winning, and poetic enchantments; and _Domenichino_, whose obstinate genius dragged him to the very heights of Parnassus, in spite of the predictions of his masters.

“In the Roman School, founded upon the antique models, you will have an inexhaustible source of enjoyment. Who does not love _Raphael_; his works are as well known as Virgil’s. Who can admire enough the natural expression and attitude of his figures, and his composition, simple and sublime. Here are _Titian’s_ lively portraits, and landscapes, never to be surpassed in force and boldness of colouring. And here is the fruitful, and lively, and dignified _Paul Veronese_, with his brilliant, various and magnificent draperies. His “Marriage of Cana,” is one of the chef-d’œuvres of Italy. And here are tableaux and landscapes by the wild fancy of _Salvator Rosa_, excelling in savage nature; who paints the arid plain and carnage of the battle as no one else. In America, he would have painted your Mississippi, where its mighty flood rolls through the silent wilderness, or your War Dance; or the Hut of the Woodman, where the panther looks through his window, and the rattlesnake coils upon his pillow, or the savage upon his lonely cliff; while surveying the firmament, he reads God’s Holy Scriptures in the skies.

“---- Of this the composition is perfect; the passions are violent, but natural, and without disagreeable distortion, and the drapery even beyond ideal perfection.--The figures have less majesty than Michael Angelo’s, and are more within our common nature.--His women, as you see, are too plump, and his children too grave, whose is it?

“---- And this exquisite woman? with no sins of her ancestors in her face, and none of their diseases and deformities in her limbs; with all the sweet sensibilities, as the colours of the rainbow, in her expression--Who is she?--Who gathered these fugitive charms into her features, and who this divine grace about her limbs, to play upon her tapering arms, and neck and bosom, as the soft moonlight upon the stream?---- Who made her? * *

“---- All these eminent beauties, and this dove-like innocence to be thrown away, as the fragrance of the wild rose upon a desert; no taste to value; no * *

“* * To be sure, her unforbidden husband! * * * This other figure of the same canvass you will no doubt easily recognise. * *

“---- It is no wonder; it is a bad likeness. It should have less of the terrific attributes. Cloven feet and horns are the stupid imaginations of the monks. Without the temptations to sin what exercise or opportunity is there in virtue? What becomes of human greatness--of honesty, piety, charity, continence and all that props up the dignity of our race?--To be well painted he should have nothing of a supernatural being; he should have human passions to enlist human sympathies. He should be a gentleman; a gentleman too in his most seducing and fascinating form. With such a nature only he can sustain the functions assigned to him by Providence, especially amongst women; and to corrupt the world you must begin by them.

“There is here, as you see, no _Ecole Britannique_. The English have given us nothing in return for our Claudes and Poussins. Yet England does not yield to any nation of Europe, in the munificence of her patronage. One of her dukes pays for a picture of West’s 3,000 guineas; another buys “Murillo’s” at half a million in a year. Walpole’s collection at Houghton was valued at 200,000 pounds sterling. And she has not only invited the arts from foreign countries, by sumptuous presents, but has pensioned them, given them degrees in the universities, knighted them, and married them with her proudest nobility. Some pretend that she wants the lively and quick sensibilities necessary to success in this art; that she raises paintings, as the fruit of the Indies, not natural to her climate. But the climate of Rubens, Vandyke and Rembrandt is quite as Bœotian as that of Great Britain. Who ever heard of the sensibilities of the Hollander? The atmosphere, which nourished a Milton, would not have smothered a Raphael, or a Michael Angelo; nor would Salvator Rosa have withered, where Shakspeare ‘warbled his native wood-notes wild.’

“One of the great stimulants to excellence has been wanting in England altogether, and is now weakened throughout Europe--the wealth, the influence, the enthusiasm of the Catholic Religion. This spirit which, like the mythology of the Greeks, put a God in every niche of the Temple; which produced the Angelos and Rubens, and breathed inspiration into the artist and spectator, is quenched. Your Presbyterian prejudices of the impressions produced by paintings, as well as by architecture and music, are now obsolete. Idolatry is to be feared only among a savage or very ignorant people. We have got beyond these limits; and a picture of the Saviour or the Virgin can have no worse effect now in a church, than the picture of a father or mother in the habitation of their children.

“England will have a school of paintings, when she will have public galleries and a public taste, when the artist shall hold the reins of his imagination in his own hands, and shall paint, not for private recompense, but public fame, and not for the Duke of Sutherland, but the nation. In portraits, where vanity supplies a public taste, England excels; and the engraver, who ministers to the common pride, and supplies the furniture of the parlour, and the lady’s Annual, succeeds as no where else. Vandyke, who painted the “Descent from the Cross,” in his own country, painted in England only portraits; as affording him a better remuneration than his exertions on historical subjects.

“These seven pieces every one admires for their mellow colouring, and for their bold and vigorous expression--they are of the Spaniard _Murillo_. With these, I beg leave to close my lecture, and to thank you for your amiable and patient attention.”

Now this is the end of the Louvre--Are you not glad?--To designate by single epithets persons, who have a hundred qualities, is too absurd; but to seem to know something about paintings, is so very genteel!

As you cross the _Pont des Arts_, you will see, placed in its centre, a bench to accommodate wearied travellers. You may now fancy me seated--long enough, at least, to fill the rest of this page--upon this bench. The breezes here fan you with their little wings, and the landscape is covered with delightful images. The Seine flows under your feet so smooth, you can count the stars on its surface. It is arched by seventeen sumptuous bridges, many of them in sight; and the dwellings of luxurious men, and the temples of the Divinity, vie with each other in magnificence, upon its banks, and the steeples stand tip-toe upon the neighbouring hills.

“The correspondence of the architecture is not accidental. You must look at Paris as a picture, and examine the composition, as well as the execution of the parts. Its monuments are not only beautiful in themselves, but are made, as you see, to harmonise with each other. The Louvre, the Institute, the Arch of Neuilly, the Tuileries and its gardens, the Madelaine, the Palais Bourbon, the Seine and all its turretted castles--all are but parts of the same tableau. In this respect Paris, so inferior to London in wealth, and to Rome in situation, is yet more beautiful than either. St. Paul’s harmonises with nothing--Westminster Abbey, also, is lost in its individuality. The “New Gallery” occupies one of the best situations in Europe, only cumbering the ground, which the taste of a better age might have employed to the ornament of the city. London monuments are built as at Thebes, _au son du Tambour_; they are built for the job, and ours for the honour of Paris and posterity. The Madelaine, yet under the architect, was begun sixty years ago; St. Paul’s was built by the same architect, and the same mason. Sir Christopher Wren was employed upon it, at two hundred a-year, and had a suit at law for a few half-pence, which stood unpaid upon his bill.

“This ‘_Palais des Beaux Arts_’ is now the Palace of the Institute. As it stands at the head of our fine arts, as well as letters, I may as well tell you the little I know of its organization. It is the old _Academie Française_, expanded from forty to several hundred members. They are separated into four divisions; having only the hall and library in common; and their common funds are managed by a joint committee from each; and they have a united meeting yearly, on the 1st of May. The vacancies are filled by ballot of the members, with the approbation of the king. Each member receives an annual salary of 1500 francs, except honorary members, who are contented with the honours.

“The ‘_Academie des Beaux Arts_’ distributes prizes in painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving, and musical composition; and the successful candidates pursue their studies at Rome at the expense of the state. The ‘_Academie des Belles Lettres_’ gives also a prize of 1500 francs, and medals for the best memoir on French antiquities. The ‘_Academie des Sciences_’ awards a prize of 3000 francs, on a subject given, and smaller prizes upon specific branches of science; and finally, the ‘_Academie Française_’, upon a proposed subject, pays a prize of 1500 francs, and some of smaller amount. One is called the ‘Montyon Prize,’ for some act of virtue in the common class of society.”

Here my fair cicerone slipped through my fingers--not indeed without an effort on my part to hold her fast. I threatened her not to survive.

“Yes, do; and you can put in for the Montyon prize of this year. We are just under the tower of Philip Augustus, so the end like the beginning of our acquaintance will have something of romance.---- Oh, no, my name would spoil all the interest of the plot; what is a plot without a mystery?”

“A romance beginning with a marriage, has usually a tragical end.”

“And so end the best romances--where could you find for the catastrophe a more desirable place?--Here stood the _Tour de Nesle_ of tragical memory, and you have in view the Pont Neuf, and there is the Morgue.”

“It is a pity,” said I in a pique, “that nature had not taken some of the pains she has lavished upon your brains and your beauty, to give to your heart. You see a stranger, never before a traveller, wandering in your country----”

“A stranger never before a traveller is not to my taste. Such a traveller’s views of human nature are very narrow. He judges of merit always by some mode or fashion of his own, and sets up his whims as the standard of propriety for others. One who has travelled does not think a fellow-creature bad because she may deviate from the little etiquette of his native village. He does not think any thing wrong that is not so essentially. If he should meet for example, a lady, an entire stranger, who would ask his arm, to see these fine pictures of the Louvre; in the alternative of remaining out of doors, and should choose, in return for his politeness, to be entertained an hour with his company, he would not infer that she wanted either sense or good breeding; he would not presume, on such appearances, to treat her with less respect--much less----”

I dropped the hand I had taken without her leave. She then returned it, and bade me adieu, crossing the bridge and traversing the _Quai de La Monnaie_, where she disappeared among the narrow lanes of St. Germain--and there was an end of her.

I intended in setting out to give you the cream of her conversation, but it turns out to be the skim-milk only, and I have no time for revision. There is nothing so insipid and creamless as the fine things people say to one’s self, and especially the fine things one says in reply.

This, with a little package of music, will be handed you by Mr. D----, who is going to accompany it all the way himself. The obliging man! Please to give him your thanks; and to his prettiest little wife in the world, a thousand compliments from your very devoted humble servant.

Letter XV.

The Schools.--State of Literature.--Minister of Public Instruction.--Education in France.--Prussian System.--Parochial Schools.--Normal Schools.--Institutions of Paris.--Public Libraries.--Machinery of French Justice.--The Judges.--Eloquence of the Bar.--Medicine.--Corporations of Learning.--Their Evils.--The French Institute.--Pretended New System of Instruction.--Professors of Paris.

Paris, November 20th, 1835.

One of the eminent merits of the French character is the distinction they bestow upon letters. A literary reputation is, at once, a passport to the first respect in private life, and to the first honours in the state. In Paris it gives the tone, which it does nowhere else, to fashionable society. It is not that Paris loves money less than other cities, but she loves learning more; and that titled rank being curtailed of its natural influence, learning has taken the advance, and now travels on in the highway to distinction and preferment, without a patron, and without a rival. At the side of him, whose blood has circulated through fifty generations, or has stood in the van of as many battles, is the author of a French History, born without a father or mother.

Who is Guizot, and who Villemain, Cousin, Collard, Arago, Lamartine, that they should be set up at the head of one of the first nations in Europe? Newspaper editors, schoolmasters, astronomers, and poets, who have thrust the purpled nobles, and time-honoured patricians from the market of public honours, and have sat down quietly in their seats. The same marks of literary supremacy are seen through every feature of the community. Who was at Madame Recamier’s last night? Chateaubriand; and at the Duchesse d’Abrantes? Chateaubriand.--At the Pantheon, the whole nave of the Temple is assigned to two literary men; and the Prince of Eckmuhl, and such like, are crammed into the cellar. At Père la Chaise, David wears the cross of St. Louis, by the side of Massena. Molière is the only author in the world since the Greeks, whose birth-day is a national festival. His statue is crowned on that day at the Theatre Français, and his plays are represented, by order of government, upon all the national theatres. We ought then to presume that the literary and scientific institutions of the French should correspond with this sentiment in favour of learning; and so they do.

Here are two sheets of large post, which I must try to fill with this subject. I say _try_, because I write in obedience to your orders, and in total defiance of inclination. This will be the only letter I have written since I came here, to any of your bearded sex, and I feel already very grave and dull. Not that I think ladies more frivolous than men, or men more stupid than ladies, but it is my humour. I can write to my lady acquaintance without thinking, which I esteem a special favour, during my residence in Paris.--They do not expect me to be wise, and what extravagant notions you may have on this subject I don’t know.--If I write you nothing but what you know already, it will not be my fault, for I am unacquainted with the extent of your information, and you have not been specific in your inquiries.

The authority which presides over the Public Instruction in France, is personified under the term “University,” at the head of which is a minister, who has a salary of twenty thousand dollars, and a rank with the other ministers. A “Central Board” of nine members, has a general superintendence of the studies, and expense of the establishments. The divisions of the kingdom for the “Royal Courts,” are the school districts, which are called Academies; these have each a “Governor,” representing the minister, and an “Academical Board,” the Central Board at Paris; and each has its establishments, which are the Faculties, the Royal and Communal Colleges, Primary Schools, and Private Institutions. The Instruction is Superior, Secondary, and Primary.

The “Faculties” teach theology, law, medicine, science, and letters. They confer degrees of Bachelor, Licentiate, and Doctor; and are thirty-five in number. Three are Medical Faculties, at Paris, Montpelier and Strasburg; eight are Theological; of the Catholic Religion, six; of the Protestant, two; and nine are Faculties of Law. There are thirty Royal, three hundred and twenty Communal; and two Private Colleges; one hundred and twenty Private Institutions, or Boarding Schools, and one thousand and twenty-five Select Private Schools. The studies of these are Philosophy, Natural History, Elementary Mathematics, Latin, Greek, and modern languages.

The Primary Schools embrace only reading, arithmetic, and writing: and the “Primary Superior” add history, geography, elements of chemistry, and surveying. Their number is about fifty thousand.

At Paris there is a “Normal School,” for the education of Professors; and throughout the kingdom about sixty for masters of the Primary Schools.

The minister is appointed by the king, and the other officers directly, or indirectly by him. There are thirty General Inspectors, two for each academy or district. The “Proviseurs” have a care of the household and conduct of the students, and “Censors” superintend studies. Teachers are selected at a distance from their own departments, so that no local interests may grow up against the great central authority. Private institutions are forbidden to teach any thing else than grammar, elements of arithmetic, and geometry. Reports from the Academical Boards are examined twice a-week by the Central Board of the University, and the University presents a report every two years, to the Chamber of Deputies.

Education in France is a universal and uninfringible monopoly, and has the benefits and evils of such systems. The Central Board establishes uniformity in books, and instruction; it decides whether you are to teach your son pot-hooks, or straight strokes; but it impedes also improvement in the school-books, and processes of teaching; it selects competent instructors, but it represses the exercise of ingenuity by prescribing their duties; it cuts up the Lancasters, the Fellenbergs, and Pestalozzis by the roots. I say nothing of the independence of mind, without which there is neither genius, nor virtue, which is repressed by so absolute an authority. It suppresses also imposture in the teachers, but it destroys, too, the spirit of competition which imparts life and vigour to all human employments. It does not suppress the jobbing which arises out of all government projects, or intrigue, or favouritism in the appointment of its officers.

This is the system lately engrafted upon the great Prussian plan, which it is the fashion to praise so much about in the world. Time will perhaps reveal its merits; but this is by no means certain. There are other causes at work for the diffusion of knowledge amongst the people, and it is so easy to ascribe the merit to the Prussians; besides, it is not likely that, once used to receive instruction from their magistrates, as it were, for nothing, the people should consent to educate themselves at their own cost; or that, seeing for a long time effects produced by a certain machinery, especially so remote from their causes, they should conceive them producible by any other.

I have looked at the working of this plan in Paris and several of the neighbouring towns, and am sorry that I cannot share in the flattering hopes entertained of its results. Burke lays it down as “one of the finest problems of legislation” to know “what the state ought to undertake to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual discretion.” “All governments,” he observes, “fall into the error of legislating too much.” I have no good hopes of any system of education under the management of a government.

Nothing is so badly managed as a government itself all over the world; and to have as little as possible of it seems to me the perfection of social economy. The rich and middling classes will take care of their own children always, and no one, I presume, will say that they will not do it better under the impulse of parental feeling than they who act only from delegated authority. Why do we not put the cultivation of the earth under the management of a company? A parent, being able, feels as strong a necessity to educate his son as to cultivate his field. To the parent only, who is destitute, and to whom there is but the alternative of a bad system or none; to him only whose instincts are frozen by necessity, should the sceptre of legislation be extended--extended as medicine to the health, with prudence, and only when the native vigour is irrecoverable by the natural stimulus. You cannot by any human device prevent the division of the poor and rich into different schools; they do not attempt it even in arbitrary Prussia. And it is better the government, with its broad shoulders, than individuals, should make the distinction.

Under a general system the two parties mutually prejudice each other. On the one hand, the current of private charity, so fruitful in its natural channel, is dried up by it. A community of which the individuals give cheerfully; one the timber, another the stone, another his personal services, towards a building, will, under a public system, require to be paid for their smallest contributions; and how many rich legacies have we inherited in Philadelphia, not a dollar of which would have been given under a public system. On the other hand, how many communities through the country, able to support good private schools, without the intermeddling of the government, have no longer the ability, and are obliged either to send their children abroad, or place them, with a total disregard of their morals and education, in a public school, where sixty scholars are taught by an old gentleman of sixty. It is easy to imagine what sort of schools are those in which the teacher receives, as in New England, twenty, or as in Pennsylvania, thirty dollars a month, for this wide diffusion of his services.

The Scotch have been putting this forty-pound-a-year system to the test these two hundred years in their Parochial Schools, and with the most tender nursing, their schools are in the same puny and ricketty condition as at their seven months’ birth. The Scotch are a persevering people, and if they begin by building a house at the roof, they keep building on even after the inutility of their labours has been demonstrated. So the turkeys in your Schuylkill county, their eggs being removed, and stones substituted, continue hatching on as usual. The Yankees, a shrewder people, are beginning to find out that their school system, copied from the Scotch, notwithstanding the care with which they starve their teachers, is actually getting worse every year. I have no objection to the government giving money, the more, the better, but I have no hesitation in saying that it will serve no useful purpose unless the relation between parent and teacher is preserved, and the executive department left to their management. In this delicate concern, the arm of the government should be concealed; her virtues should be busy without noise.

If I were the state; if I owned, for example, your community of Pottsville, I would contribute all I could towards buildings, apparatus, and libraries, and circulating useful books, and above all towards elevating the character and acquirements of the teachers. I would devise some way, by a succession of honours and profits, to make men teach, as in the army they make them fight. For instance, I would pay a per centage, up to a certain number of pupils, to each school; and the teacher with ten years’ approved services should receive a state diploma and the title of professor; thirty years’ services should entitle him to half pay, and I would take care of his wife and children at his decease. I would not encourage universities but for the advanced age of the pupils, and the transcendent branches; so as to give them a higher character, and leave the field of general instruction open to the common teachers, and to a fair and equal competition of abilities. Thus I should find abundant means of employing all my school funds; and this without the Inspectors, Censors, Proviseurs, and the other expensive apparatus of the “_Bureau Central de Paris_.”

If any one of the honourable and useful departments of a state is filled with an inferior class of men, it shows a defect in the policy of such a state. If I wished to devise some means the most direct, to degrade the character of a teacher, I could not hit upon one more efficacious than this French and Prussian system. All that the Prussian receives to console his condition of absolute dependence, is two hundred dollars per annum; the highest professor at the gymnasium, receives five hundred. With this “appointment” he must be all schoolmaster, without any alloy of gentleman about him. It is certain that not any of the respectable literary circles of Europe will receive this working man of the Muses into their society.

The Prussians are not addicted to commerce; nor do they read newspapers, nor meddle with the state; their habits are quiet and agricultural; and they care much less about the heads of their children, than that their cabbages may have good heads for _sour crout_. If not educated by the government, they would, no doubt, remain ignorant of letters. The Prussian system may, then, be a very good system for Prussia; but it is not, therefore, necessary or applicable to the United States;--except it be to our German nests of Pennsylvania; but these are melting away, and will soon be lost in the general improvements of the state.

A part of this system are the Normal Schools, which we are trying, also, to introduce into New England. They seem to me of little value, for they can teach but little that is not taught in any other place of education; besides, under present circumstances, they defeat their own purpose. A good school for educating teachers in America, would, perhaps, be the very best place one could imagine to disqualify men for teaching. I know the trustees of the “Girard College” think otherwise, and entertain sanguine hopes of supplying the whole country with eminent teachers from that institution. I do not see the reasonableness of their hopes; unless we may suppose that the young gentlemen of talent, out of gratitude, will forego the opportunities they may have of wealth and distinction in other professions, to starve themselves for the benefit of the state of Pennsylvania.

Several writers here express fears that this monopoly of education may be turned to the prejudice of liberty; which I believe to be a vain apprehension. The teachers being laymen, it is certain it will not be turned to the profit of the hierarchy. The French literature, which finds its way into every country of Europe, is a complete code of ridicule of the priesthood and nobility; and the more people are taught to read, the more difficult will be the re-establishment of these two orders. Public opinion is but little modified by the books and lectures of the schools; and the minister’s authority, however absolute in the University of Paris, will be but little felt, if in contradiction with that greater university--the world. The studies of the schools are forced upon unripe and unwilling minds; those of society are voluntary, and introduced as reason is developed. Besides, it is human nature to relish most that which is most prohibited. Nothing ever brought the works dangerous to religion more into reputation, than the denunciations of the clergy. In crimes and errors, one cannot cure the patient, by starving and checking perspiration. It happens, too, that the French books, which are most replenished with wit and genius, are precisely those which are most obnoxious. It is true, however unfortunate, that education, liberty, and irreligion are sown here in the same soil, and grow together under the same cultivation. To preserve the French student from the contagion of principles dangerous to the aristocratic and clerical institutions, he must be forbidden the whole of the national classics down to Lafontaine’s Fables, including the history of his country--I was going to say, the company of his father and mother, and his schoolmasters.

I must now give you an account of the particular institutions of Paris. You have your choice of five royal colleges; “_Louis le Grand_,” “_Henri IV._,” and “_St. Louis_,” which receive boarders and externs; and “_Charlemagne_,” and “_Bourbon_,” externs only. The average number of pupils for each is about a thousand. The studies are ancient and modern languages, mathematics, chemistry, natural philosophy, natural history, geography, penmanship, and drawing. They are superintended by a “Proviseur” and a “Directeur General des Etudes.” In August, there is a general competition for prizes, between a few pupils selected from each college, conducted with pomp before the heads of the universities, and other dignitaries of the city. A subject is given, the competitors are locked up, and a council of the university decides, and the names of the successful students, and the schools to which they belong, are published in the journals; which excites a wonderful emulation amongst fifty, and a wonderful jealousy and discontent amongst five hundred; and many get prizes on these days who get nothing else all the rest of their lives.

The price of boarding and instruction is about 220 dollars per annum. There are besides these, and of the same character, “_St. Barbe_ or _Rollin_,” and “_Stanislaus_,” two private colleges. There are in the city, and under the inspection of the university, 116 academies for gentlemen, and 143 for ladies; and a great number of primary schools, in which about 10,000 children are taught gratuitously or for a small price; the boys by the “_Frères de la Doctrine Chretienne_,” and the girls by the “_Sisters of Charity_,” or nearly the half by the “_Frères Ignorantins_,” who profess reading and writing only, with the catechism; any one having higher attainments being disqualified. There are schools also for the blind and dumb.

This machinery of schools, or something equivalent, exists in other countries, but the Parisians have two institutions, which they regard as choice and pre-eminent. Science, which is elsewhere immured in the cloisters of the universities, here breathes the wholesome and ventilated air of social life. “Wisdom uttereth her voice in the market-place; she crieth aloud in the streets.” These are the “_Academie de Paris_,” and the “_College Royal de France_.” Every branch of human knowledge has here its professors, and the doors of the temple are open to the needy of all nations. In the former, which you will find on the “_Place Sorbonne_,” are Faculties of Theology with six professors; of Letters with twelve; and Science, twelve.

It is the theatre upon which Guizot, Cousin, Villemain, and others acquired their professorial celebrity--a noble theatre for the encouragement, exercise, and reward of eminent abilities. The Faculties of Law and Medicine are held each in separate buildings. The “_College de France_” has twenty-one professors, who give lectures on all the higher branches of science and letters; also upon the Hebrew, Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Italian languages. There is besides a Special Royal school for Oriental Languages, to which the government allows annually 3600 dollars. The salaries of professors in these schools seldom exceed 1200 dollars; a pension is given after twenty years’ services.--Besides these, they have the “_Ecole Polytechnique_,” with three hundred scholars, from sixteen to twenty years: twenty-four at the expense of government; the charges of the others 200 dollars a-year. In connection with this is the “_Ecole des Ponts et Chaussés_,” in which eighty of the pupils are instructed specially in the arts of projecting, and constructing roads, canals, &c.

There is a school for Astronomy at the Observatory; also, a “School of Mines,” with an extensive cabinet and lectures, and a “School of Pharmacy,” with a botanic garden. This gives a diploma and licence to practice to Apothecaries.--There is a gratuitous school of Mathematics and Drawing, and one of Drawing for ladies, and two courses of lectures at the Garden of Plants. The Conservatory of Music has four hundred pupils; twelve at the expense of government; it gives prizes, and through the year several concerts. There is a Gymnasium too, and a school of Equitation. Mercy! what a litter of schools.

The institutions also for encouragement and literary intercourse, are numerous in all the branches of learning. At the head of these is the “_Institut de France_.” Of the others, the most distinguished are the “_Academie de Medicine_,” and the Geographical, Historical, and Agricultural societies.

The Public Libraries are the “King’s,” containing four hundred and fifty thousand volumes, sixty thousand manuscripts, one hundred thousand medals, and more than a million of engravings; the Library of the Arsenal, one hundred and eighty thousand volumes; of the Pantheon, one hundred and fifty thousand, and thirty thousand manuscripts; the Mazarine, one hundred thousand; and the City Library forty-eight thousand; and others, as of the Institute and Sorbonne, to be consulted occasionally. There are near two hundred Reading-Rooms, also Circulating Libraries in all directions; and newspapers and reviews are a part of the furniture of every café, and other public house--without saying any thing of the Museums and Institutions of the Fine Arts.

In the Law School, a degree of Bachelor requires two years’ attendance on lectures; a Licentiate three, and “Doctor of Laws,” four. Pleading in court is preceded by a degree of Licentiate, three years’ study, examination and thesis, and after oath of office a noviciate, or constant attendance on the courts, of three years. The Lawyers are _Avocats_ and _Avoués_. The latter enjoins twenty-five years of age, certain years of study, a certificate of capacity from the Faculty of Law, and a Clerkship of five years in a _Cour Royal_. The duties of the _Avocat_ are subordinate. This arrangement brings the inconvenience to the client of acting by two persons; the want of the best advice in the beginning, of unity of action and undivided responsibility. The advantage is that the _Avoué_, not being subjected to the details and humbler duties of a suit, takes a higher professional rank and character, and is less subject to undue influences, having no immediate relation with the parties. In admission to the bar, there is no inquiry about moral character, and the judges are selected immediately from the schools. I will try to give you in two words the machinery of French justice. I go out of my course in reverence for your profession.

There is a “Minister of Justice.” His office is to pursue and bring to punishment all wrongs done to the state. It is a bad relation, being that of vengeance and not mercy. Our principle is reversed, and the accused is considered guilty until proved innocent. For the whole kingdom there are 27 Royal Courts; and, corresponding with our Common Pleas, 365 courts, called “Tribunals of the First Instance.” To each of the former is attached a “_Procureur General_,” and under him a “_Procureur du Roi_,” with a “_Judge d’Instruction_,” and justices of the peace.--The plaintiff, or a police-officer, applies to a commissary, or mayor, or justice, or _Procureur du Roi_, and if a criminal action, the accused, who cannot be confined beyond twenty-four hours, is summoned before a “_Juge d’Instruction_,” who questions, and releases, or commits him.

In the latter case he produces him, of course with all possible proofs of guilt (and to collect these proofs he may detain him, innocent or not, nine months in prison)--before a Chamber of Council, having three judges, himself one, to examine whether there is cause of trial; and next before a Chamber of Accusation, which examines finally, and this concurring, he is tried at the Assizes. A jury of thirty (taxables to 200 francs) are chosen by ballot, of whom the accuser and accused strike off nine. The “_Procureur General_” then opens the trial, states the crime and names the witnesses; and the “_Avocat General_” appeals to the jury in behalf of the injured community, for justice.

The President questions first the prisoner, who if incautious or foolish, may be led, as is the intention, to convict himself, or if expert, as he has the right to question also, he may induce discussions not always to the credit of the magistrate or the majesty of justice. Secondly, he examines witnesses, the prisoner and counsel cross-examining, and the _Avocat General_ then sums up the facts and evidence. Last of all the accused speaks, either by counsel or personally in defence; the court appointing counsel in case of his inability. The President then sums up, gives his opinions, the jury declares him guilty or not guilty, and the court determines the punishment. Small offences are decided before a justice of the peace or a minor court, with liberty of appeal. Civil actions, below 1,000 francs, are tried before a justice of peace and decided finally by a _Juge d’Instruction_: above that sum there is an appeal to a Royal Court. In the “Court of Cassation” at Paris, the decision of any criminal or civil case may be re-examined, and if reversed it is referred to another tribunal. If the original decision is confirmed, it is reconsidered by this court, and if unanimous in the former opinion, it is submitted to a third tribunal, whose decision concurring with the first, is final. There are courts also expressly for the decision of commercial affairs. One at Paris with a president and two judges elected from the most respectable merchants. The number of judges of the kingdom is 4,000; of justices of the peace 3,000; the Avoués of Paris are above 200. The salary of a justice is 2,400 francs, of a Judge of Cassation 15,000; of a President judge 20,000; and a Premier President 40,000; and the entire expense of justice is above three millions and a half.

The judges are habited in black robes of silk, with a crimson sash about the neck and across the breast, with golden tassels. The lawyers wear a black gown, and a “_toque_” or cap. They usually hire this costume for the occasion from a stall within the “_Palais de Justice_.” This cap supplies the place of the old wig; it does more, for the pleader occasionally takes it off and shakes it at the judge, or throws it upon the table in the fury of debate, and then puts it on again. It is certain that gesture was designed by nature to make up the deficiencies of language. It is often the more expressive of the two, and whoever omits it or misuses it, must leave imperfect his meanings or the passions he attempts to represent. Cicero even sets down mimicry amongst the accomplishments of an orator. Whoever converses in English and French will feel, for some reason, a disposition to much action in the one, and less in the other, in expressing the same feelings, which gives rise to a diversity of taste.

But in all such matters there are standard rules in truth and nature which cannot without bad effect be violated. In gesture the English sin by neglect or awkwardness; the French chiefly by extravagance. Rapidity and frequency impair dignity, and even gracefulness is acquired somewhat at the expense of strength. A French orator will tear his ruffles when the occasion does not warrant it; reserving nothing for a fiercer passion. To tell you he has seen a ghost, and not heard of it, he will apply a forefinger to the under lids of his two eyes; and to tell you emphatically that he came on horseback, he will set two fingers to ride upon a third. While the Englishman “on high and noble deeds intent,” puts his right hand in his bosom and his left in his breeches pocket. Propriety lies somewhere between these two extremes. There are two choice lawyers at the French bar, at present, Berryer and Charles Dupin; both eminent models of chaste and graceful oratory. This is enough of the limping old Lady Justice.

A degree of Doctor of Medicine must be preceded by a degree of Bachelor of Letters and Science, and four courses of lectures, a thesis sustained in public, and five public examinations. A vacancy in a professorship is supplied by a “_concour_” that is, the several candidates appear before the Faculty, a subject is given, they retire, and in the prescribed time return with their thesis, which they read and sustain in public, and the choice is settled by a majority of the judges. The diligence of a French doctor should take him to heaven. He rises in the night, and, long before other men have left their pillows, has done a good day’s work. He has visited from four to five hundred sick in the hospitals, prescribed for each, made his autopses and other operations, and explained the cases separately and conjointly to his pupils. He has then consultations till ten, breakfasts, and is in his Professor’s chair at the hour, visiting his patients and giving audience in the intervals of these duties--and has the rest of the day to himself.

In his professorial capacity he wears a cap, a gown and crimson sash. He has given up the wig and gold-headed cane to Molière. Medicine here is divided into strict specialities. One man feels your pulse, and another gives you physic. This exclusive attention to one object, at the same time it impairs the general excellence of the profession, has made the French the most expert operators in the world. Civiale in his _Lithotritie_ has no equal amongst living men; Laënnec does wonders in Auscultation with his Stethoscope, and Larrey, who has cut off the legs of half Europe, and was knighted by Bonaparte for such merits, has been far obscured by the fame of Dupuytren.

It is said here commonly by foreigners that in the French practice there is a reckless sacrifice of life and disregard of humanity, by adventurous and needless experiments; having, at least, no other object than surgical instruction, and that, from neglect or ignorance of treatment after operations, the loss of patients is greater than in any other country. I should suppose, from what I have myself seen, that a millstone, compared to a French surgeon’s heart, would be good pap to feed one’s children upon. I may remark, also, that the science of medicine seems to me less indebted for its improvement to the good feelings, than to the pride, jealousy and avarice, and other bad passions of its practitioners. They have, to be sure, the courtesies they cannot well avoid for each other in social intercourse, but their private and professional purpose appears to be to starve each other, to persecute each other to the grave, and dissect each other after death. Broussais whips all the world, and all the world Brous