University of Virginia Library

7. LETTER VII.

I met at a breakfast party, to-day, Joachim Lelewel,
the celebrated scholar and patriot of Poland. Having
fallen in with a great deal of revolutionary and emigrant
society since I have been in Paris, I have often
heard his name, and looked forward to meeting him
with high pleasure and curiosity. His writings are
passionately admired by his countrymen. He was
the principal of the university, idolized by that effective
part of the population, the students of Poland;
and the fearless and lofty tone of his patriotic principles
is said to have given the first and strongest momentum
to the ill-fated struggle just over. Lelewel
impressed me very strongly. Unlike most of the
Poles, who are erect, athletic, and florid, he is thin,
bent, and pale; and were it not for the fire and decision
of his eye, his uncertain gait and sensitive address
would convey an expression almost of timidity. His
form, features, and manners, are very like those of
Percival, the American poet, though their counte
nances are marked with the respective difference of
their habits of mind. Lelewel looks like a naturally
modest, shrinking man, worked up to the calm resolution
of a martyr. The strong stamp of his face is
devoted enthusiasm. His eye is excessively bright,
but quiet and habitually downcast; his lips are set
firmly, but without effort, together; and his voice is
almost sepulchral, it is so low and calm. He never
breaks through his melancholy, though his refugee
countrymen, except when Poland is alluded to, have
all the vivacity of French manners, and seem easily
to forget their misfortunes. He was silent, except
when particularly addressed, and had the air of a man
who thought himself unobserved, and had shrunk into
his own mind. I felt that he was winning upon my
heart every moment. I never saw a man in my life
whose whole air and character were so free from self-consciousness
or pretension—never one who looked
to me so capable of the calm, lofty, unconquerable
heroism of a martyr.

“Paris is the centre of the world,” if centripetal
tendency is any proof of it. Everything struck off
from the other parts of the universe flies straight to
the Palais Royal. You may meet in its thronged
galleries, in the course of an hour, representatives of
every creed, rank, nation, and system, under heaven.
Hussein Pacha and Don Pedro pace daily the same
pavé—the one brooding on a kingdom lost, the other
on the throne he hopes to win; the Polish general and
the proscribed Spaniard, the exiled Italian conspirator,
the contemptuous Turk, the well-dressed negro from
Hayti, and the silk-robed Persian, revolve by the hour
together round the same jet d'cau, and costumes of
every cut and order, mustaches and beards of every
degree of ferocity and oddity, press so fast and thick
upon the eye that one forgets to be astonished. There
are no such things as “lions” in Paris. The extraordinary
persons outnumber the ordinary. Every other
man you meet would keep a small town in a ferment
for a month.

I spent yesterday at Pere la Chaise, and to-day at
Versailles. The two places are in opposite environs,
and of very opposite characters—one certainly making
you in love with life, the other almost as certainly with
death. One could wander for ever in the wilderness
of art at Versailles, and it must be a restless ghost that
could not content itself with Pere la Chaise for its
elysium.

This beautiful cemetery is built upon the broad
ascent of a hill, commanding the whole of Paris at a
glance. It is a wood of small trees, laid out in alleys,
and crowded with tombs and monuments of every possible
description. You will scarce get through it
without being surprised into a tear; but if affectation
and fantasticalness in such a place do not more grieve
than amuse you, you will much oftener smile. The
whole thing is a melancholy mock of life. Its distinctions
are all kept up. There are the fashionable avenues,
lined with costly chapels and monuments, with
the names of the exclusive tenants in golden letters
upon the doors, iron railings set forbiddingly about
the shrubs, and the blessing-scrap writ ambitiously in
Latin. The tablets record the long family titles, and
the offices and honors, perhaps the numberless virtues
of the dead. They read like chapters of heraldry
more than like epitaphs. It is a relief to get into the
outer alleys, and see how poverty and simple feeling
express what should be the same thing. It is usually
some brief sentence, common enough, but often exquisitely
beautiful in this prettiest of languages, and
expressing always the kind of sorrow felt by the
mourner. You can tell, for instance, by the sentiment

simply, without looking at the record below,
whether the deceased was young, or much loved, or
mourned by husband, or parent, or brother, or a circle
of all. I noticed one, however, the humblest and
simplest monument perhaps in the whole cemetery,
which left the story beautifully untold: it was a slab
of common marl, inscribed “Pauvre Marie!” nothing
more. I have thought of it, and speculated upon it, a
great deal since. What was she? and who wrote her
epitaph? why was she pauvre Marie?

Before almost all the poorer monuments is a miniature
garden with a low wooden fence, and either the
initials of the dead sown in flowers, or rose-trees, carefully
cultivated, trained to hang over the stone. I was
surprised to find in a public cemetery, in December,
roses in full bloom and valuable exotics at almost every
grave. It speaks both for the sentiment and delicate
principle of the people. Few of the more costly
monuments were either interesting or pretty. One
struck my fancy—a small open chapel, large enough
to contain four chairs, with the slab facing the door,
and a crucifix encircled with fresh flowers on a simple
shrine above. It is a place where the survivors in a
family might come and sit any time, nowhere more
pleasantly. From the chapel I speak of, you may
look out and see all Paris; and I can imagine how it
would lessen the feeling of desertion and forgetfulness
that makes the anticipation of death so dreadful, to be
certain that your friends would come, as they may
here, and talk cheerfully and enjoy themselves near
you, so to speak. The cemetery in summer must be
one of the sweetest places in the world. It would be
a sufficient inducement of itself to bring me to Pairs
from almost any distance in another season.

Versailles is a royal summer chateau, about twelve
miles from Paris, with a demesne of twenty miles in
circumference. Take that for the scale, and imagine
a palace completed in proportion in all its details of
grounds, ornament, and architecture. It cost, says
the guide book, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars;
and leaving your fancy to expend that trifle over
a residence, which, remember, is but one out of some
half dozen, occupied during the year by a single
family, I commend the republican moral to your consideration,
and proceed with the more particular
description of my visit.

My friend, Dr. Howe, was my companion. We
drove up the grand avenue on one of the loveliest
mornings that ever surprised December with a bright
sun and a warm south wind. Before us, at the distance
of a mile, lay a vast mass of architecture, with
the centre falling back between the two projecting
wings, the whole crowning a long and gradual ascent,
of which the tricolored flag waving against the sky
from the central turrets was the highest point. As
we approached, we noticed an occasional flash in
the sun, and a stir of bright colors through the broad
deep court between the wings, which, as we advanced
nearer, proved to be a body of about two or three
thousand lancers and troops of the line under review.
The effect was indescribably fine. The gay uniforms,
the hundreds of tall lances, each with its red flag flying
in the wind, the imposing crescent of architecture in
which the array was embraced, the ringing echo of
the grand military music from the towers, and all this
intoxication for the positive senses, fused with the historical
atmosphere of the place, the recollection of the
king and queen, whose favorite residence it had been
(the unfortunate Louis and Marie Antoinette), of the
celebrated women who had lived in their separate
palaces within its grounds, of the genius and chivalry
of court after court that had made it, in turn, the
scene of their brilliant follies, and, over all, Napolean,
who must have rode through its gilded gates with the
thought of pride that he was its imperial master by
the royalty of his great nature alone, it was in truth,
enough, the real and the ideal, to dazzle the eyes of a
simple republican.

After gazing at the fascinating show an hour, we
took a guide and entered the palace. We were walked
through suite after suite of cold apartments, desolately
splendid with gold and marble, and crowded
with costly pictures, till I was sick and weary of magnificence.
The guide went before, saying over his
rapid rigmarole of names and dates, giving us about
three minutes to a room in which there were some
twenty pictures, perhaps, of which he presumed he
had told us all that was necessary to know. I fell behind,
after a while; and as a considerable English
party had overtaken and joined us, I succeeded in
keeping one room in the rear, and enjoying the remainder
in my own way.

The little marble palace, called “Petit Trianon”
built for Madame Pompadour in the garden grounds,
is a beautiful affair, full of what somebody calls “affectionate-looking
rooms;” and “Grand Trianon,”
built also on the grounds at the distance of half a mile,
for Madame Maintenon, is a very lovely spot, made
more interesting by the preference given to it over all
other places by Marie Antoinette. Here she amused
herself with her Swiss village. The cottages and artificial
“mountains” (ten feet high, perhaps) are exceedingly
pretty models in miniature, and probably illustrate
very fairly the ideas of a palace-bred fancy upon natural
scenery. There are glens and grottoes, and rocky beds
for brooks that run at will (“les rivieres à volanté,” the
guide called them), and trees set out upon the crags at
most uncomfortable angles, and every contrivance to
make a lovely lawn as inconveniently like nature as possible.
The Swiss families, however, must have been
very amusing. Brought fresh from their wild country,
and set down in these pretty mock cottages, with orders
to live just as they did in their own mountains, they
must have been charmingly puzzled. In the midst of
the village stands an exquisite little Corinthian temple;
and our guide informed us that the cottage which the
queen occupied at her Swiss tea-parties was furnished
at an expense of sixty thousand francs—two not very
Switzer-like circumstances.

It was in the little palace of Trianon that Napoleon
signed his divorce from Josephine. The guide showed
us the room, and the table on which he wrote. I
have seen nothing that brought me so near Napoleon.
There is no place in France that could have for me a
greater interest. It is a little boudoir, adjoining the
state sleeping-room, simply furnished, and made for
familiar retirement, not for show. The single sofa—
the small round table—the enclosing, tent-like curtains—the
modest, unobtrusive elegance of ornaments
and furniture, give it rather the look of a retreat,
fashioned by the tenderness and taste of private life,
than any apartment in a royal palace. I felt unwilling
to leave it. My thoughts were too busy. What was
the motive of that great man in this most affecting and
disputed action of his life? That he loved Josephine
with his whole power of loving, no one can doubt.
That he was above making such a sacrifice to his ambition
merely, I equally believe. There is but one
other principle into which it can be resolved—one
that has not been sufficiently weighed by those who
have written upon his character, but which, as a spring
of action, is second only to the ruling passion in the
bosoms of men—the desire for offspring. I can conceive
Napoleon's sacrifice of that glorious woman on
no other ground; and, ascribing it to this, it more
proves than discredits the tenderness of his great
nature.

After having been thridded through the palaces, we
had a few moments left for the grounds. They are

magnificent beyond description. We know very little
of this thing in America, as an art; but it is one, I
have come to think, that, in its requisition of genius,
is scarce inferior to architecture. Certainly the three
palaces of Versailles together did not impress me so
much as the single view from the upper terrace of the
gardens. It stretches clear over the horizon. You
stand on a natural eminence that commands the
whole country, and the plan seems to you like some
work of the Titans. The long sweep of the avenue,
with a breadth of descent that at the first glance takes
away your breath, stretching its two lines of gigantic
statues and vases to the water level; the wide, slumbering
canal at its foot, carrying on the eye to the
horizon, like a river of an even flood lying straight
through the bosom of the landscape; the side avenues
almost as extensive; the palaces in the distant grounds,
and the strange union altogether to an American, of as
much extent as the eye can reach, cultivated equally
with the trim elegance of a garden—all these, combining,
together, form a spectacle which nothing but
nature's royalty of genius could design, and (to descend
ungracefully from the climax) which only the exactions
of an unnatural royalty could pay for.

I think the most forcible lesson one learns at Paris
is the value of time and money. I have always been
told, erroneously, that it was a place to waste both.
You could do so much with another hour, if you had
it, and buy so much with another dollar, if you could
afford it, that the reflected economy upon what you
can command, is inevitable. As to the worth of time,
for instance, there are some twelve or fourteen gratuitous
lectures every day at the Sorbonne, the school of
medicine and the college of France, by men like Cuvier,
Say, Spurzheim, and others, each in his professed
pursuit, the most eminent perhaps in the world; and
there are the Louvre, and the Royal Library, and the
Mazarin Library, and similar public institutions, all
open to gratuitous use, with obsequious attendants,
warm rooms, materials for writing, and perfect seclusion;
to say nothing of the thousand interesting but
less useful resorts with which Paris abounds, such as
exhibitions of flowers, porcelains, mosaics, and curious
handiwork of every description, and (more amusing
and time-killing still) the never-ending changes of
sights in the public places, from distinguished foreigners
down to miracles of educated monkeys. Life
seems most provokingly short as you look at it. Then,
for money, you are more puzzled how to spend a poor
pitiful franc in Paris (it will buy so many things you
want) than you would be in America with the outlay
of a month's income. Be as idle and extravagant as
you will, your idle hours look you in the face as they
pass, to know whether, in spite of the increase of their
value, you really mean to waste them; and the money
that slipped through your pocket you know not how
at home, sticks embarrassed to your fingers, from the
mere multiplicity of demands made for it. There are
shops all over Paris called the “Vingt-cinq-sous,”
where every article is fixed at that price—twenty-five
cents! They contain everything you want, except a
wife and fire-wood—the only two things difficult to be
got in France. (The latter, with or without a pun, is
much the dearer of the two.) I wonder that they are not
bought out, and sent over to America on speculation.
There is scarce an article in them that would not be
held cheap with us at five times its purchase. There
are bronze standishes for ink, sand, and wafers, pearl
paper-cutters, spice-lamps, decanters, essence-bottles,
sets of china, table-bells of all devices, mantel ornaments,
vases of artificial flowers, kitchen utensils, dog-collars,
canes, guard-chains, chessmen, whips, hammers,
brushes, and everything that is either convenient
or pretty. You might freight a ship with them, and
all good and well finished, at twenty-five cents the set
or article! You would think the man was joking, to
walk through his shop.