I LAUGHED once on the route from Dover to Calais. The fact deserves to be jotted down as an “Incident of Travel.” For the boat was crowded, the wind brisk, and we had a “chopping sea” in the Channel. Words of woe upon which we need not expatiate to those who have lost sight of Shakspeare’s Cliff in like circumstances. The voyage was filled with disgust as Longfellow’s Night with music, and with untold misery to all of our party excepting Caput, to whom smooth and turbulent seas are as one. If he has a preference, it is for the latter. He led off in the laugh that extended even to the wretched creature I had known in calmer hours, as Myself.

An elderly lord was on board. A very loud lord as to voice. A mighty lord in rank and honors, if one might judge from the attentions of deck-stewards and some of the initiated passengers. A very big lord as to size. A very rich lord, if the evidence of furred mantles, and a staff of obsequious servants be admitted. A very pompous lord, whose stiffened cravat, beef-steak complexion and goggle-eyes reminded us of “Joey Bagstock, Tough Jo, J. B., sir!”

If, having sunk to the depths of suffering and degradation, we could have slid into a lower deep, it would have been by reason of that man’s struttings and vaporings and bullyings in our sight. He tramped the deck over and upon the feet of those who were too sick, or too much crowded to get out of his path,—courier and valet at his heels, one bearing a furled umbrella and a mackintosh in case it should rain, the other a second furred surtout should “my lord” grow chilly.

“Ill, sir! what do you mean, sir! I am never ill at sea!” he vociferated to the captain, who ventured a query and the offer of his own cabin should his lordship require the refuge.

“Pinafore” had not then been written, and the assertion went unchallenged.

“I have travelled thousands of miles by water, sir, and never known so much as a qualm of sea-sickness—not a qualm, sir! Do you take me for a woman, sir, or a fool?”

In his choler he was more like Bagstock than ever, as he continued his promenade, gurgling and puffing, goggling and wagging his head like an apoplectic china mandarin.

We were in mid-channel where there was a rush of master, servants, and officious deck-hands to the guards, that made the saddest sufferers raise their eyes. In a few minutes, the parting of the group of attendants showed the elderly lord, upon his feet, indeed, but staggering so wildly that the courier and a footman held him up between them while the valet settled his wig and replaced his hat. His complexion was ashes-of-violets, if there be such a tint,—his eyes were as devoid of speculation as those of a boiled fish. The steward picked up his gold-headed cane, but the flabby hands could not grasp it. The captain hastened forward.

“Very sorry, me lud, I’m sure, for the little accident. But it’s a nosty sea, this trip, me lud, as your ludship sees. An uncommon beastly sea! I hope your ludship is not suffering much?”

The British lion awoke in the great man’s bosom. The crimson of rage burned away the ashes. The eyes glared at the luckless official.

“Suffering, sir! Do you suppose I care for suffering? It is the dommed mortification of the thing!”

Then, as I have said, Caput laughed, and the sickest objects on board joined in feeble chorus.

Prima lifted her head from her father’s shoulder. “I am glad I came!” she said, faintly.

So was I—almost—for the scene lacked no element of grotesqueness nor of poetical retribution.

The long room in the Paris station (gare), where newly-arrived travellers await the examination of their luggage, is comfortless, winter and summer. It was never drearier than on one March morning, when, after a night-journey of fifteen hours, we stood, for the want of seats, upon the stone floor, swept by drifts of mist from the open doors, until our chattering teeth made very broken French of our petition to the officers to clear our trunks at their earliest convenience, and let us go somewhere to fire and breakfast. The inspection was the merest form, as we found it everywhere. Perhaps we looked honest (or poor), or our cheerful alacrity in surrendering our keys and entreating prompt attendance, may have had some share in purchasing immunity from the annoyances of search and confiscation complained of by many. One trunk was unlocked; the tray lifted and put back, without the disturbance of a single article; all the luggage received the mystic chalking that pronounced it innocuous to the French Republic; we entered a carriage and gave the order: “61 Avenue Friedland!”

Caput, to whom every quarter of the city and every incident of the Commune Reign of Terror were familiar, pointed out streets and squares, as we rode along, that gained a terrible notoriety through the events of that bloody and fiery era. I recollect leaning forward to look at one street—not a wide one—in which ten thousand dead had lain at one time behind the barricades. For the rest, I was ungratefully inattentive. Paris, in the gray of early morning, looked sleepy, respectable, and dismal. The mist soaked us to the bone; the drive was long; we had void stomachs and aching heads. Some day we might listen to and believe in the tale of her revolutions, her horrors and her glories. Now this was a physical, and therefore, a mental impossibility.

“At last!”

Almost in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, looming gigantic through the fog, the carriage stopped at a handsome house. A porter came out for our luggage, the concierge gave us into the care of a waiter.

“But yes, monsieur, the rooms were ready. Perfectly. And the fires. Perfectly—perfectly! Monsieur would find all as had been ordered.”

Up we went, two flights of polished stairs,—where never an atom of dust was allowed to settle—along one hall, across an ante-chamber, and the waiter threw back a door. A large chamber stood revealed, made lightsome by two windows; heartsome by a glowing fire of sea-coal. And set in front of the grate was a round table draped whitely, and bearing that ever-blessed sight to a fagged-out woman—a tea equipage. By the time I, as the family invalid, was divested of bonnet and mufflers, and laid in state upon the sofa at one side of the hearth, a tap at the door heralded the entrance of a smiling English housekeeper in a black dress and muslin cap with flowing lappets. She carried a tray; upon it were hissing tea-urn, bread and butter, and light biscuits.

“Miss Campbell hopes the ladies are not very much fatigued after their long journey, and that they will find themselves quite comfortable here.”

How comfortable we were then, and during all the weeks of our stay in HÔtel Campbell; how we learned to know and esteem, as she deserved, the true gentlewoman who presides with gracious dignity at her table, and makes of her house a genuine home for guests from foreign lands, I can only state here in brief. Neither heart nor conscience will let me pass over in silence the debt of gratitude and personal regard we owe her. I shall be only too happy should these lines be the means of directing other travelers to a house that combines, in a remarkable degree, elegance and comfort in a city whose hotels, boarding-houses, and “appartements” seldom possess both.

The March weather of Paris is execrable. Some portion of our disappointment at this may have been due to popular fictions respecting sunny France, and a city so fair that the nations come bending with awe and delight before her magnificence; where good Americans—of the upper tendom—wish to go when they die; the home of summer, butterflies, and Worth! To one who has heard, and, in a measure, credited all this, the fog that hides from him the grand houses across the particular Rue or Avenue in which he lodges, are more penetrating, the winds more bitter, the flint-dust they hurl into his eyes is sharper, the rain, sleet, and snow-flurries that pelt him to shelter more disagreeable—than London fog or Berlin gloom and dampness. There were whole days during which I sat, perforce, by my fire, or, if I ventured to the window to enjoy the prospect of sheets of rain, dropping a wavering curtain between me and the Rothschild mansion opposite, I must wrap my shawl about my shoulders, so “nipping and eager” was the air forcing its way between the joints of the casements.

But there were other days in which out-door existence was tolerable in a fiacre, jealously closed against the whirling dust. Where it all came from we could not tell. The streets of Paris are a miracle of cleanliness. Twice a day they are swept and washed, and the gutters run continually with clear, living water.

The wind was keen, the dust pervasive, the sky a bright, hard blue when we went, for the first time, to the tomb of Napoleon in the HÔtel des Invalides. The blasts held revel in the courtyard we traversed in order to gain the entrance. The sentinels at the gate halted in the lee of the lodges before turning in their rounds to face the dust-laden gusts. Once within the church a great peace fell upon us—sunshine and silence. It was high noon, and the light flowed through the cupola crowning the dome directly into the great circular crypt in the centre of the floor, filling—overflowing it with glory. We leaned upon the railing and looked down. Twenty feet below was the sarcophagus. It is a monolith of porphyry, twelve feet in length, six in breadth, with a projecting base of green granite. Around it, wrought into the tesselated marble pavement, is a mosaic wreath of laurel—glossy green. Between this and the sarcophagus one reads—“Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena, Rivoli,” and a long list of other battle-fields, also in brilliant mosaic. Without this circle, upon the balustrade fencing in the tomb, are twelve statues, representatives of as many victories. A cluster of fresh flowers lay upon the sarcophagus. And upon all, the sunshine, that seemed to strike into the polished red marble and bring out the reflection of hidden flame. It was a strange optical illusion, so powerful one had to struggle to banish the idea that the porphyry was translucent and the glow reddening the sides of the crypt such gleams as one sees in the heart of an opal—“the pearl with a soul in it.” It was easier to give the rein to fancy and think of a Rosicrucian lamp burning above the stilled heart of the entombed Emperor. The quiet of the magnificent burial-place is benignant, not oppressive. In noting the absence of the sentimental fripperies with which the French delight to adorn the tombs of the loved and illustrious dead we could not but hope that the grandeur of the subject wrought within the architect this pure and sublime conception of more than imperial state.

We followed the winding staircase from the right of the high altar,—above which flashes a wonderful golden crucifix—to the door of the crypt. Bertrand on one side, Duroc on the other, guard their sleeping master. “The bivouac of the dead!” The trite words are pregnant with dignity and with power when quoted upon that threshold. Over the doorway is a sentence in French, from Napoleon’s will:

“I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have so much loved.”[A]

The Communists tore down the bronze column in the Place VendÔme. The bas-reliefs, winding from bottom to top, were cast from cannon captured by Napoleon, and his statue surmounted the shaft. They battered the Tuileries, where he had lived, to a yawning ruin, and outraged the artistic sensibilities of the world by setting fire to the Louvre. But, neither paving-stone, nor bomb, nor torch, was flung into the awful circle where rests the hero, with his faithful generals at his feet.

Jerome Bonaparte, his brother’s inferior and puppet, is buried in a chapel at the left of the entrance of the DÔme. A bronze statue of him rests upon his sarcophagus. His eldest son—by his second marriage—is near him. A smaller tomb holds the heart of Jerome’s Queen. Joseph Bonaparte is interred in a chapel opposite, the great door being between the brothers.

We took the Place de la Concorde in our ride uptown. We did this whenever we could without making too long a dÉtour. The Luxor obelisk, three thousand years old, is in the middle of the Square. A beautiful fountain plays upon each side of this, and the winds, having free course in the unsheltered Place, flung the waters madly about. Twelve hundred people were trampled to death here once. A discharge of fireworks in celebration of the marriage of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette caused a panic and a stampede among the horses attached to the vehicles blocking up the great square. They dashed into the dense mass of the populace, and in half-an-hour the disaster was complete. Sixteen years later there was another panic,—another rush of maddened brutes, that lasted eighteen months. Twenty-eight hundred souls were driven to bliss or woe in the hurly-burly—the devil’s dance of the eighteenth century. The bride and groom, whose nuptial festivities had caused the minor catastrophe, duly answered to their names at the calling of the death-roll. The most precious blood of the kingdom was flung to right and left as ruthlessly as the March winds now tore the spray of the fountains.

Nobody knows, they say, exactly where the guillotine stood;—only that it was near the obelisk and the bronze basins, where Tritons and nymphs bathe all day long. We were in the Place one evening when an angry sunset tinged the waters to a fearful red. Passers-by stopped to look at the phenomenon, until quite a crowd collected. A very quiet crowd for Parisians, but eyes sought other eyes meaningly, some in superstitious dread. While we reviewed, mentally, the list of the condemned brought hither in those two years, it would not have seemed strange had the dolphins vomited human blood into the vast pools.

“Monsieur will see the Colonne de Juillet?” said our coachman, who, as we gazed at the fountains on this day, had exchanged some words with a compatriot. “There has been an accident to” (or at) “the Colonne. Monsieur and mesdames will find it interesting, without doubt.” The wind was too sharp for bandying words. We jumped at the conclusion that the colossal Statue of Liberty, poised gingerly upon the gilt globe on the summit of the monument, had been blown down; bade him drive to the spot, and closed the window.

The Colonne de Juillet stands in the Place de la Bastille. No need to tell the story of the prison-fastness. The useless key hangs in the peaceful halls of Mount Vernon. The leveled stones are built into the Bridge de la Concorde. These “French” titles of squares, bridges, and streets, are sometimes apt, oftener fantastic, not infrequently horribly incongruous. The good Archbishop of Paris was shot upon the site of the old Bastille, in the revolution of 1848, pleading with both parties for the cessation of the fratricidal strife, and dying, like his Lord, with a prayer for his murderers upon his lips. Under the Column of July lie buried the victims of still another revolution—that of 1830,—with some who fell at the neighboring barricade, in 1848. One must carry a pocket record of wars and tumults, if he would keep the run of Parisian Émeutes.

Our cocher’s information was correct. A throng gathered about the railed-in base of the column. But Liberty still tip-toed upon the gilded world, and the bronze shaft was intact.

“If Monsieur would like to get out”—said the driver at the door—“he can learn all about the accident. Le pauvre diable leaped—it is now less than an hour since.”

“Leaped!” Then the interesting accident was described. A man had jumped down from the top of the monument. They often did it.

We ought to have been shocked. But the absurdity of the misunderstanding, the man’s dramatic enjoyment of the situation, and his manner of communicating the news, rather tempted us to amusement.

“Was he killed?”

“Ah! without doubt, Madame! The colonne has one hundred and fifty-two feet of height. Perfectly killed, Monsieur!”

Impelled by a wicked spirit of perversity, or a more complex caprice, I offered another query:

“What do you suppose he thought of while falling?”

The fellow scanned my impassive face.

“Ah, Madame! of nothing! One never thinks at such a moment. Ma foi! why should he? He will be out of being—rien—in ten seconds. He has no more use for thought. Why think?”

We declined to inspect the stone on which the suicide’s head had struck. Indeed, assented our cocher, where was the use? The body had been removed immediately, and the pavement washed. The police would look to that. Monsieur would see only a wet spot. The wind would soon dry it. Ah! they were skilful (habile) in such accident at the monument. If a man were weary of life, there was no better place for him—and no noise made about it afterward.

“Somehow,” said Prima, presently, “I cannot feel that a Frenchman’s soul is as valuable as ours. They make so light of life and death, and as for Eternity, they resolve it into, as that man said—‘nothing.’”

“‘He giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made of one blood all nations of men,’” I quoted, gravely.

I would not admit, unless to myself, that the coachman’s talk of the wet spot upon the pavement and the significant gesture of blowing away a gas, or scent, that had accompanied his “Nothing,” brought to my imagination the figure of a broken phial of spirits of hartshorn—pungent, volatile—rien!

On another windy morning we made one of our favorite “Variety Excursions.” We had spent the previous day at the Louvre, and eyes and minds needed rest. I have seen people who could visit this mine of richest art for seven and eight consecutive days, without suffering from exhaustion or plethora. Three hours at a time insured for me a sleepless night, or dreams thronged with travesties of the beauty in which I had reveled in my waking hours. Instead then, of entering the Louvre on the second day, we checked the carriage on the opposite side of the street before the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois.

Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill, went on a mission to Paris, suffered death for his faith upon Montmartre—probably a corruption of Mons Martyrum,—and was interred upon the site of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. His tomb and chapel are there, in support of the legend. Another chapel is dedicated to “Notre Dame de la Compassion.” The name reads like a sorrowful satire. For we had not come thither out of respect for St Dionysius—alias St. Denis—nor to gaze upon frescoes and paintings—all fine of their kind,—nor to talk of the battle between Bourbons and populace in 1831, when upon the eleventh anniversary of the Duc de Berry’s assassination, as a memorial mass was in progress, the church was stormed by a mob—that canaille-deep that was ever boiling like a pot—the priests violently ejected, the friends of the deceased Duc forced to fly for their lives, and the old church itself closed against priests and worshippers for seven years. It was the royal parish church, for a long time. Catherine de Medicis must have attended it, being a good daughter of the Church. Hence there was especial propriety in her order that from the belfry of this sanctuary should be given the signal for the massacre of her dear son’s heretic subjects on St. Bartholomew’s Night, 1572. From a window in his palace of the Louvre, Charles fired as fast as his guards could load carbines, upon the flying crowds in the streets. In obedience to tradition, a certain window was, up to the beginning of this century, designated as that in which he was stationed on that occasion, and an inscription to this effect was engraved beneath it:

“C’est de cette fenÊtre que l’infÂme Charles 9 d’exÉcrable mÉmoire a tirÉ sur le peuple avec une carabine.”

“Upon the people!” It was not safe even in 1796 to write that the murdered were Huguenots and that they perished for that cause and none other. The cautious inscription was removed upon the belated discovery that the part of the palace containing this window was not built until the execrable Charles was in his grave. The balcony from which he “drew” upon all who did not wear the white badge of Romanism, was in the front of the palace where the deep boom of the bell must have jarred him to his feet, pealing from midnight to dawn. The government suffered no other knell to sound for the untimely taking-off of nearly one hundred thousand of the best citizens of France.

A modern steeple lifts a stately spire between the church-porch and the adjoining Mayor’s Court. The little old belfry is thrown into background and shadow, as if it sought to slink out of sight and history. We paused beneath it, within the church upon the very spot pressed by the ringer’s feet that awful night. The sacristan stared when we asked what had become of the bell, and why it had not been preserved as a historical relic.

“There is a carillon (chime) in the new steeple. Fine bells, large and musical. Unfortunately, they do not at present play.”

The ceiling of the church is disproportionately low; the windows, splendid with painted glass, light the interior inadequately, even in fine weather. As we paced the aisles the settling of the clouds without was marked by denser shades in the chapels and chancel, blotting out figures and colors in frescoes and paintings, and making ghostly the trio of sculptured angels about the cross rising above the holy-water basin—or bÉnitier. Fountains of holy-water at each corner of the Place would not be amiss.

The Parisian PanthÉon has had a hard struggle for a name. First, it was the Church of Ste. GÉneviÈve, the patron saint of Paris, erected soon after her martyrdom, A.D. 500. The present building, finished in 1790, bore the same title until in 1791, the Convention, in abolishing Religion at large, called it “the PanthÉon” and dedicated it to “the great men of a grateful country.” This dedication, erased thirty years afterward, was in 1830, again set upon the faÇade, and remains there, malgrÉ the decree of Church and State, giving back to it the original name.

Under the impression that Ste. GÉneviÈve was buried in the chapel named for her and the church decorated with scenes from her life, I accosted a gentlemanly priest and asked permission on behalf of a namesake of the girl-saint to lay a rosary entrusted to me, upon her tomb. He heard me kindly, took the chaplet and proceeded to inform me that Ste. GÉneviÈve was burned (brÛlÉe), but that “we have here in her shrine, her hand, miraculously preserved, and her ashes.”

“That must do, I suppose,” said I, as deputy for American GÉneviÈve. The chaplet was laid within the shrine, blessed, crossed and returned to me. I had no misgivings until our third visit to Paris, when, going into St. Étienne du Mont, situated also in the Place du PanthÉon, I discovered that Ste. GÉneviÈve had not been burned; had been buried, primarily, in the PanthÉon, then removed to St. Étienne du Mont, and had now rested for a thousand years or so, in a tomb grated over to preserve it from being destroyed by the kisses and touches of the faithful. I bought another rosary; the priest undid a little door on the top of the grating, passed the beads through and rubbed them upon the sacred sarcophagus. Novices are liable to such errors and consequent discomfiture.

The PanthÉon, imposing in architecture and gorgeous in adornment, assumed to us, through a series of disappointments, the character of a vast receiving-vault. The crypt is massive and spacious, supported by enormous pillars of masonry, and remarkable for a tremendous echo, whereby the clapping of the guide’s hands is magnified and multiplied into a prolonged and deafening cannonade, rolling and bursting through the dark vaults, as if all the sons of thunder once interred (but not staying) here were comparing experiences above their vacated tombs, and suiting actions to words in fighting their battles over again.

Mirabeau’s remains were taken from this crypt for re-interment in PÈre Lachaise. Marat—the Abimelech of the Jacobin fraternity—was torn from his tomb, tied up in a sack like offal, and thrown into a sewer. There is here a wooden sarcophagus, cheap and pretentious, inscribed with the name of Rousseau and the epitaph—“Here rests the man of Nature and of Truth.” The door is ajar—a hand and wrist thrust forth, upbear a flaming torch—an audacious conception, that startled us when we came unexpectedly upon it.

“A sputtering flambeau in this day and generation,” said Caput.

The guide, not understanding one English word, hastened to inform us that the tomb was empty.

“Where, then, is the body?”

A shrug. “Ah! monsieur, who knows?”

Another wooden structure, with a statue on top, is dedicated, “Aux manes de Voltaire.”

“Poet, historian, philosopher, he exalted the man of intellect and taught him that he should be free. He defended Calas, Sirven, De la Barre, and Montbailly; combated atheists and fanatics; he inspired toleration; he reclaimed the rights of man from servitude and feudalism.” Thus runs the epitaph.

“Empty, also!” said the guide, tapping the sarcophagus. “The body was removed by stealth and buried—who can say where?”

“Was anybody left here?”

“But yes, certainly, monsieur!” and we were showed the tombs—as yet unrifled—of Marshal Lannes, Lagrange, the mathematician, and Soufflot, the architect of the PanthÉon; likewise, the vaults in which the Communists stored gunpowder for the purpose of blowing up the edifice. It was a military stronghold in 1848, and again in 1871, and but for the opportune dislodgment of the insurgents at the latter date the splendid pile would have followed the example of the noted dead who slumbered, for a time, beneath her dome—then departed—“who can tell where?”

The HÔtel and Museum de Cluny engaged our time for the rest of the forenoon. A visit to it is a “Variety Excursion” in itself. The hall, fifty feet high, and more than sixty in length, and paved with stone—headless trunks, unlidded sarcophagi, like dry and mouldy bath-tubs; broken marbles carved with pagan devices, and heaps of nameless dÉbris lying about in what is, to the unlearned, meaningless disorder—was the frigidarium, or cold-water baths, belonging to the palace of the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus, built between A.D. 290 and 306. It was bleak with the piercing chilliness the rambler in Roman ruins and churches never forgets—which has its acme in the more than deathly cold of that ancient and stupendous refrigerator, St. John of Lateran, and never departs in the hottest noon-tide of burning summer from the frigidaria of Diocletian and Caracalla. But we lingered, shivering, to hear that the Apostate Julian was here proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in 360, and to see his statue, gray and grim, near an altar of Jupiter, found under the church of NÔtre Dame. Wherever Rome set her foot in her day of power, she stamped hard. Centuries, nor French revolutions can sweep away the traces.

In less than three minutes the guide was pointing out part of MoliÈre’s jaw-bone affixed to a corridor-wall in the MusÉe. This, directly adjoining the Roman palace, was a “branch establishment” of the celebrated Abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy; next, a royal palace, first occupied by the English widow of Louis XII., sister of Bluff King Hal. “La chambre de la Reine Blanche,” so called because the queens of France wore white for mourning—is now the receptacle of a great collection of musical instruments, numbered and dated. James V. of Scotland married Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., in this place. After the first Revolution, when kings’ houses were as if they had not been, Cluny became state property, and was bought by an archÆologist, who converted it into a museum. There are now upward of nine thousand articles on the catalogue. The reader will thankfully excuse me from attempting a summary, but heed the remark that the collection is valuable and varied, and better worth visit and study than any other assortment of relics and ancient works of art we saw in France. The fascination it exerted upon us and others is doubtless, in part, referable to the character of the building in which the collection is stored. Palissy faÏence, ivory carvings, rich with the slow, mellow dyes of centuries; enamels in copper, executed for Francis I.; Venetian glasses; old weapons; quaint and ornate tilings; tapestries, more costly than if woof and broidery were pure gold—are tenfold more ravishing when seen in the light from mullioned windows of the fifteenth century, and set in recesses whose carvings vie in beauty and antiquity with the objects enclosed by their walls. Gardens, deep with shade, mossy statues and broken fountains dimly visible in the alleys, great trees tangled and woven into a thick roof over walks and green sward—all curiously quiet in the heart of the restless city, seclude ThermÆ and HÔtel in hushed and dusky grandeur.

The Rue St. Jacques, skirting the garden-wall on one side, was an old Roman road. By it we were transported, without too violent transition from the Past, into the Paris of To-Day.