University of Virginia Library

5. LETTER V.

The salient object in my idea of Paris has always
been the Louvre. I have spent some hours in its
vast gallery to-day, and I am sure it will retain the
same prominence in my recollections. The whole
palace is one of the oldest, and said to be one of the
finest, in Europe; and, if I may judge by its impressiveness,
the vast inner court (the facades of which
were restored to their original simplicity by Napoleon),
is a specimen of high architectural perfection.
One could hardly pass through it without being better
fitted to see the masterpieces of art within; and it
requires this, and all the expansiveness of which the
mind is capable besides, to walk through the Muséc
Royale without the painful sense of a magnificence
beyond the grasp of the faculties.

I delivered my passport at the door of the palace,
and, as is customary, recorded my name, country, and
profession in the book, and proceeded to the gallery.
The grand double staircase, one part leading to the
private apartments of the royal household, is described
voluminously in the authorities; and, truly, for one
who has been accustomed to convenient dimensions
only, its breadth, its lofty ceilings, its pillars and statuary,
its mosaic pavements and splendid windows, are
enough to unsettle for ever the standards of size and
grandeur. The strongest feeling one has as he stops
half way up to look about him, is the ludicrous disproportion
between it and the size of the inhabiting
animals. I should smile to see any man ascend such
a staircase, except, perhaps, Napoleon.

Passing through a kind of entrance-hall, I came to
a spacious salle ronde, lighted from the ceiling, and
hung principally with pictures of a large size, one of
the most conspicuous of which, “The Wreck,” has
been copied by an American artist, Mr. Cooke, and
is now exhibiting in New York. It is one of the best
of the French school, and very powerfully conceived.
I regret, however, that he did not prefer the wonderfully
fine piece opposite, which is worth all the pictures
ever painted in France, “The Marriage Supper
at Cana.” The left wing of the table, projected toward
the spectator, with the seven or eight guests
who occupy it, absolutely stands out into the hall.
It seems impossible that color and drawing upon a flat
surface can so cheat the eye.

From the salle ronde on the right opens the grand
gallery, which, after the lesson I had just received in
perspective, I took, at the first glance, to be a painting.
You will realize the facility of the deception
when you consider that, with a breadth of but forty-two
feet, this gallery is one thousand three hundred
and thirty-two feet (more than a quarter of a mile) in
length. The floor is of tesselated woods, polished
with wax like a table; and along its glassy surface
were scattered perhaps a hundred visiters, gazing at
the pictures in varied attitudes, and with sizes reduced
in proportion to their distance, the farthest off looking
in the long perspective like pigmies of the most diminutive
description. It is like a matchless painting to
the eye after all. The ceiling is divided by nine or
ten arches, standing each on four corinthian columns,
projecting into the area, and the natural perspective
of these, and the artists scattered from one end to the
other, copying silently at their easels; and a soldier
at every division, standing upon his guard, quite as
silent and motionless, would make it difficult to convince
a spectator, who was led blindfold and unprepared
to the entrance, that it was not some superb
diorama, figures and all.

I found our distinguished countryman, Morse, copying
a beautiful Murillo at the end of the gallery. He

is also engaged upon a Raffaelle for Cooper, the novelist.
Among the French artists, I noticed several
soldiers, and some twenty or thirty females, the latter
with every mark in their countenances of absorbed
and extreme application. There was a striking difference
in this respect between them and the artists of
the other sex. With the single exception of a lovely
girl, drawing from a Madonna, by Guido, and protected
by the presence of an elderly companion, these
lady-painters were anything but interesting in their
appearance.

Greenough, the sculptor, is in Paris, and engaged
just now in taking the bust of an Italian lady. His
reputation is very enviable; and his passion for his
art, together with his untiring industry and his fine
natural powers, will work him up to something that
will, before long, be an honor to our country. If the
wealthy men of taste in America would give Greenough
liberal orders for his time and talents, and send
out Augur, of New Haven, to Italy, they would do
more to advance this glorious art in our country, than
by expending ten times the sum in any other way.
They are both men of rare genius, and both ardent
and diligent, and they are both cramped by the universal
curse of genius—necessity. The Americans in
Paris are deliberating at present on some means for
expressing unitedly to our government their interest
in Greenough, and their appreciation of his merit of
public and private patronage. For the love of true
taste, do everything in your power to second such an
appeal when it comes.

It is a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner.
One can not realize long at a time how his face or his
manners should have become peculiar; and after looking
at a print for five minutes in a shop-window, or
dipping into an English book, or in any manner throwing
off the mental habit of the instant, the curious gaze
of the passer-by, or the accent of a strange language,
strikes one very singularly. Paris is full of foreigners
of all nations, and of course physiognomies of all characters
may be met everywhere; but, differing as the
European nations do decidedly from each other, they
differ still more from the American. Our countrymen,
as a class, are distinguishable wherever they are
met; not as Americans however, for of the habits and
manners of our country, people know nothing this
side the water. But there is something in an American
face, of which I never was aware till I met them
in Europe, that is altogether peculiar. The French
take the Americans to be English; but an Englishman,
while he presumes him his countryman, shows
a curiosity to know who he is, which is very foreign
to his usual indifference. As far as I can analyze it,
it is the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man
unused to look up to any one as his superior in rank,
united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression
which is the index to our national character.
The first is seldom possessed in England but by a man
of decided rank, and the latter is never possessed by an
Englishman at all. The two are united in no other
nation. Nothing is easier than to tell the rank of
an Englishman, and nothing puzzles a European
more than to know how to rate the pretensions of an
American.

On my way home from the Boulevards this evening,
I was fortunate enough to pass through the grand
court of the Louvre, at the moment when the moon
broke through the clouds that have concealed her own
light and the sun's ever since I have been in France.
I had often stopped, in passing the sentinels at the
entrance, to admire the grandeur of the interior to this
oldest of the royal palaces; but to-night, my dead halt
within the shadow of the arch, as the view broke upon
my eye, and my sudden exclamation in English, star
tled the grenadier, and he had half presented his musket,
when I apologized, and passed on. It was magically
beautiful indeed! and with the moonlight pouring
obliquely into the sombre area, lying full upon the
taller of the three façades, and drawing its soft line
across the rich windows and massive pilasters and
arches of the eastern and western, while the remaining
front lay in the heavy black shadow of relief, it
seemed to me more like an accidental regularity in
some rocky glen of America, than a pile of human
design and proportion. It is strange how such high
walls shut out the world. The court of the Louvre is
in the very centre of the busiest quarter of Paris, thousands
of people passing and repassing constantly at the
extremity of the long arched entrances, and yet, standing
on the pavement of that lonely court, no living
creature in sight but the motionless grenadiers at
either gate, the noises without coming to your ear in
a subdued murmur, like the wind on the sea, and
nothing visible above but the sky, resting like a ceiling
on the lofty walls, the impression of utter solitude
is irresistible. I passed out by the archway for which
Napoleon constructed his bronze gates, said to be the
most magnificent of modern times, and which are now
lying in some obscure corner unused, no succeeding
power having had the spirit or the will to complete, even
by the slight labor that remained, his imperial design.
All over Paris you may see similar instances; they
meet you at every step: glorious plans defeated;
works, that with a mere moiety of what has been
already expended in their progress, might be finished
with an effect that none but a mind like Napoleon's
could have originally projected.

Paris, of course, is rife with politics. There is but
one opinion on the subject of another pending revolution.
The “people's king” is about as unpopular
as he need be for the purposes of his enemies; and
he has aggravated the feeling against him very unnecessarily
by his late project in the Tuileries. The
whole thing is very characteristic of the French people.
He might have deprived them of half their civil
rights without immediate resistance; but to cut off a
strip of the public garden to make a play-ground for
his children—to encroach a hundred feet on the pride
of Paris, the daily promenade of the idlers, who do all
the discussion of his measures, it was a little too venturesome.
Unfortunately, too, the offence is in the
very eye of curiosity, and the workmen are surrounded,
from morning till night, by thousands of people,
of all classes, gesticulating, and looking at the palace-windows,
and winding themselves gradually up to the
revolutionary pitch.

In the event of an explosion, the liberal party will
not want partisans, for France is crowded with refugees
from tyranny of every nation. The Poles are
flocking hither every day, and the streets are full of
their melancholy faces! Poor fellows! they suffer
dreadfully from want. The public charity for refugees
has been wrung dry long ago, and the most heroic
hearts of Poland, after having lost everything but
life, in their unavailing struggle, are starving absolutely
in the streets. Accident has thrown me into
the confidence of a well-known liberal—one of those
men of whom the proud may ask assistance without
humiliation, and circumstances have thus come to my
knowledge, which would move a heart of stone. The
fictious sufferings of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” are
transcended in real-life misery every day, and by natures
quite as noble. Lafayette, I am credibly assured,
has anticipated several years of his income in
relieving them; and no possible charity could be so
well bestowed as contributions for the Poles, starving
in these heartless cities.

I have just heard that Chodsko, a Pole, of distinguished
talent and learning, who threw his whole fortune

and energy into the late attempted revolution,
was arrested here last night, with eight others of his
countrymen, under suspicions by the government.
The late serious insurrection at Lyons has alarmed
the king, and the police is exceedingly strict. The
Spanish and Italian refugees, who receive pensions
from France, have been ordered off to the provincial
towns, by the minister of the interior, and there is
every indication of extreme and apprehensive caution.
The papers, meantime, are raving against the ministry
in the most violent terms, and the king is abused, without
qualification, everywhere. We apprehend oppressive
measures in our country with sufficient indignation
and outcry; but to see the result upon those who
bear their burdens till they are galled into the bone, is
enough to fire the most unwilling blood to resentment.
The irresistible enthusiasm to which one is kindled by
contact with an oppressed people, loses here all the
pleasure of a fine excitement, by the painfulness of the
sympathies it causes with it. Thank God! our own
country is yet free from the scourges of Europe!

I went, a night or two since, to one of the minor
theatres to see the representation of a play, which has
been performed for the hundredth and second time!—
“Napoleon at Schoenbrun and St. Helena.” My object
was to study the feelings of the people toward
Napoleon II., as the exile's love for his son is one of
the leading features of the piece. It was beautifully
played—most beautifully! and I never saw more enthusiasm
manifested by an audience. Every allusion
of Napoleon to his child, was received with that undertoned,
guttural acclamation, that expresses such deep
feeling in a crowd; and the piece is so written, that its
natural pathos alone is irresistible. No one could
doubt, for an instant, it seems to me, that the entrance
of young Napoleon into France, at any critical
moment, would be universally and completely triumphant.
The great cry at Lyons was, “Vive Napoleon
II.!”

I have altered my arrangements a little, in consequence
of the state of feeling here. My design was
to go to Italy immediately, but affairs promise such an
interesting and early change, that I shall pass the winter
in Paris.