So we went to take another view of Notre Dame; the very same Notre Dame whose bells in the good old days could be rung by the waving of Michael Scott's wand:—
“Him listed but his wand to wave
The bells should ring in Notre Dame.”
I had been over it once before with Mrs. C., and sitting in a dark corner, with my head against a cold, stone pillar, had heard vespers, all in the most approved style of the poetic. I went back to it now to see how it looked after the cathedrals of Germany. The churches of France have suffered dreadfully by the whirlwind spirit of its revolutions. At different times the painted glass of this church has been shattered, and replaced by common, till now there is too much light in it, though there are exquisite windows yet remaining. These cathedrals must have painted glass; it is essential; the want of it is terrible; the dim, religious light is necessary to keep you from seeing the dirty floors, hanging cobwebs, stacks of little, old rush-bottomed chairs, and the prints where dirty heads and hands have approached too near the stone pillars. As I sat hearing vespers in Notre Dame the first time, seeing these all too plainly, may I be forgiven, but I could not help thinking of Lucifer's soliloquy in a cathedral in the Golden Legend:—
“What a darksome and dismal place!
I wonder that any man has the face
To call such a hole the house of the Lord
And the gate of heaven—yet such is the word.
Ceiling, and walls, and windows old,
Covered with cobwebs, blackened with mould;
Dust on the pulpit, dust on the stairs,
Dust on the benches, and stalls, and chairs.”
* * * * *
However, Notre Dame is a beautiful church; but I wish it was under as good care as Cologne Cathedral, and that instead of building Madeleines and Pantheons, France would restore and preserve her cathedrals—those grand memorials of the past. I consider the King of Prussia as not only a national benefactor, but the benefactor of the world. Cologne, when finished, will be the great epic of architecture, and belong, like all great epics, to all mankind.
Well, Madame M. and I wandered up and down the vast aisles, she with her lively, fanciful remarks, to which there was never wanting a vein both of shrewdness and good sense.
When we came out of Notre Dame, she chattered about the place. “There used to be an archbishop's palace back of the church in that garden, but one day the people took it into their heads to pull it down. I saw the silk-bottomed chairs floating down the Seine. They say that somebody came and told Thiers, 'Do you know the people are rummaging the archbishop's palace?' and he shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Let 'em work.' That's the say, you know; mind, I don't say it is true! Well, he got enough of it at last. The fact is, that with, the French, destructiveness is as much developed as constructiveness, and they are as good at one as the other.”
As we were passing over one of the bridges, we saw a flower market, a gay show of flowers of all hues, and a very brisk trade going on about them. Madame told me that there was a flower market every day in the week, in different parts of the city. The flower trade was more than usually animated to-day, because it is a saint's fete, the fete of St. Louis, the patron of Paris.
The streets every where showed men, women, and children, carrying their pots of blooming flowers. Every person in Paris named Louis or Louise, after this saint, has received this day little tokens of affection from their friends, generally bouquets or flowers. Madame Belloc is named Louise, and her different friends and children called and brought flowers, and a beautiful India China vase.
The life of Paris, indeed of the continent, is floral, to an extent of which the people in the United States can form no conception. Flowers are a part of all their lives. The churches are dressed with flowers, and on fete days are fragrant with them. A jardiniere forms a part of the furniture of every parlor; a jardiniere is a receptacle made in various fanciful forms for holding pots of flowers. These pots are bought at the daily flower market for a trifle, in full bloom and high condition; they are placed in the jardiniere, the spaces around them filled with sand and covered with moss.
Again, there are little hanging baskets suspended from the ceilings, and filled with flowers. These things give a graceful and festive air to apartments. When the plants are out of bloom, the porter of the house takes them, waters, prunes, and tends them, then sells them again: meanwhile the parlor is ornamented with fresh ones. Along the streets on saints' days are little booths, where small vases of artificial flowers are sold to dress the altars. I stopped to look at one of these stalls, all brilliant with cheaply-made, showy vases of flowers, that sell for one or two sous.
We went also to the National Academy of Fine Arts, a government school for the gratuitous instruction of artists, a Grecian building, with a row of all the distinguished painters in front.
In the doorway, as we came in, was an antique, headless statue of Minerva; literally it was Minerva's gown standing up—a pillar of drapery, nothing more, and drapery soiled, tattered, and battered; but then it was an antique, and that is enough. Now, when antique things are ugly, I do not like them any better for being antique, and I should rather have a modern statue than Minerva's old gown. We went through all the galleries in this school, in one of which the prize pieces of scholars are placed. Whoever gets one of these prizes is sent to study in Rome at the expense of the government. We passed through the hall where the judges sit to decide upon pictures, and through various others that I cannot remember. I was particularly interested in the apartment devoted to the casts from the statuary in the Louvre and in other palaces. These casts are taken with mathematical exactness, and subjected to the inspection of a committee, who order any that are defective to be broken. Proof casts of all the best works, ancient and modern, are thus furnished at a small price, and so brought within the reach of the most moderate means.
This morning M. and Madame Belloc took me with them to call on Beranger, the poet. He is a charming old man, very animated, with a face full of feeling and benevolence, and with that agreeable simplicity and vivacity of manner which is peculiarly French. It was eleven o'clock, but he had not yet breakfasted; we entreated him to waive ceremony, and so his maid brought in his chop and coffee, and we all plunged into an animated conversation. Beranger went on conversing with shrewdness mingled with childlike simplicity, a blending of the comic, the earnest, and the complimentary. Conversation in a French circle seems to me like the gambols of a thistle down, or the rainbow changes in soap bubbles. One laughs with tears in one's eyes. One moment confounded with the absolute childhood of the simplicity, in the next one is a little afraid of the keen edge of the shrewdness. This call gave me an insight into a French circle which both amused and delighted me. Coming home, M. Belloc enlarged upon Beranger's benevolence and kindness of heart. “No man,” he said, “is more universally popular with the common people. He has exerted himself much for the families of the unfortunate deportes to Cayenne.” Then he added, laughing, “A mechanic, one of my model sitters, was dilating upon his goodness—'What a man! what sublime virtue! how is he beloved! Could I live to see his funeral! Quelle spectacle! Quelle grande emotion!'”
At tea, Madame M. commented on the manners of a certain English lady of our acquaintance.
“She's an actress; she's too affected!”
Madame Belloc and I defended her.
“Ah,” said M. Belloc, “you cannot judge; the French are never natural in England, nor the English in France. Frenchmen in England are stupid and cross, trying to be dignified; and when the English come to France, it's all guitar playing and capering, in trying to have esprit.“
But it is hard to give a conversation in which the salient points are made by a rapid pantomime, which effervesces like champagne.
Madame Belloc and Madame M. agree that the old French salon is no more; that none in the present iron age can give the faintest idea of the brilliancy of the institution in its palmiest days. The horrors and reverses of succe
ssive revolutions, have thrown a pall over the French heart.
I have been now, in all, about a month in this gay and flowery city, seeing the French people, not in hotels and cafes, but in the seclusion of domestic life; received, when introduced, not with ceremonious distance, as a stranger, but with confidence and affection, as a friend.
Though, according to the showing of my friends, Paris is empty of many of her most brilliant ornaments, yet I have been so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of many noble and justly celebrated people, and to feel as if I had gained a real insight into the French heart.
I liked the English and the Scotch as well as I could like any thing. And now, I equally like the French. Exact opposites, you will say. For that reason all the more charming. The goodness and beauty of the divine mind is no less shown in the traits of different races than of different tribes of fruits and flowers. And because things are exact opposites, is no reason why we should not like both. The eye is not like the hand, nor the ear like the foot; yet who condemns any of them for the difference? So I regard nations as parts of a great common body, and national differences as necessary to a common humanity.
I thought, when in English society, that it was as perfect and delightful as it could be. There was worth of character, strength of principle, true sincerity, and friendship, charmingly expressed. I have found all these, too, among the French, and besides them, something which charms me the more, because it is peculiar to the French, and of a kind wholly different from any I have ever had an experience of before. There is an iris-like variety and versatility of nature, a quickness in catching and reflecting the various shades of emotion or fancy, a readiness in seizing upon one's own half-expressed thoughts, and running them out in a thousand graceful little tendrils, which is very captivating.
I know a general prejudice has gone forth, that the French are all mere outside, without any deep reflection or emotion. This may be true of many. No doubt that the strength of that outward life, that acuteness of the mere perceptive organization, and that tendency to social exhilaration, which prevail, will incline to such a fault in many cases. An English reserve inclines to moroseness, and Scotch perseverance to obstinacy; so this aerial French nature may become levity and insincerity; but then it is neither the sullen Englishman, the dogged Scotchman, nor the shallow Frenchman that we are to take as the national ideal. In each country we are to take the very best as the specimen.
Now, it is true that, here in France, one can find people as judicious, quiet, discreet, and religious, as any where in the world; with views of life as serious, and as earnest, not living for pretence or show, but for the most rational and religious ends. Now, when all this goodness is silvered over, as it were, reflecting like mother-of-pearl or opal, a thousand fanciful shades and changes, is not the result beautiful? Some families into which I have entered, some persons with whom I have talked, have left a most delightful impression upon my mind; and I have talked, by means of imperfect English, French, and interpretations, with a good many. They have made my heart bleed over the history of this most beautiful country. It is truly mournful that a people with so many fine impulses, so much genius, appreciation, and effective power, should, by the influence of historical events quite beyond the control of the masses, so often have been thrown into a false position before the world, and been subjected to such a series of agonizing revulsions and revolutions.
“O, the French are half tiger, half monkey!” said a cultivated American to me the other day. Such remarks cut me to the heart, as if they had been spoken of a brother. And when they come from the mouth of an American, the very shade of Lafayette, it would seem, might rise and say, “Et tu, Brute!“
It is true, it is a sarcasm of Voltaire's; but Voltaire, though born a Frenchman, neither imbodied nor was capable of understanding the true French ideal. The French head he had, but not the French heart. And from his bitter judgment we might appeal to a thousand noble names. The generous Henri IV., the noble Sully, and Bayard the knight sans peur et sans reproche, were these half tiger and half monkey? Were John Calvin and Fenelon half tiger and half monkey? Laplace, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Cuvier, Des Cartes, Malebranche, Arago—what were they? The tree of history is enriched with no nobler and fairer boughs and blossoms than have grown from the French stock.
It seems a most mysterious providence that some nations, without being wickeder than others, should have a more unfortunate and disastrous history.
The woes of France have sprung from the fact that a Jezebel de Medici succeeded in exterminating from the nation that portion of the people corresponding to the Puritans of Scotland, England, and Germany. The series of persecutions which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and ended with the dragonades under Louis XIV., drained France of her lifeblood. Other nations have profited by the treasures then cast out of her, and she has remained poor for want of them. Some of the best blood in America is of the old Huguenot stock. Huguenots carried arts and manufactures into England. An expelled French refugee became the theological leader of Puritanism in England, Scotland, and America; and wherever John Calvin's system of theology has gone, civil liberty has gone with it; so that we might almost say of France, as the apostle said of Israel, “If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness!”
When the English and Americans sneer at the instability, turbulence, and convulsions of the French nation for the last century, let us ask ourselves what our history would have been had the “Gunpowder Plot" succeeded, and the whole element of the reformation been exterminated. It is true, vitality and reactive energy might have survived such a process; but that vitality would have shown itself just as it has in France—in struggles and convulsions. The frequent revolutions of France are not a thing to be sneered at; they are not evidences of fickleness, but of constancy; they are, in fact, a prolonged struggle for liberty, in which there occur periods of defeat, but in which, after every interval of repose, the strife is renewed. Their great difficulty has been, that the destruction of the reformed church in France took out of the country entirely that element of religious rationalism which is at once conservative and progressive.
There are three forces which operate in society: that of blind faith, of reverent religious freedom, and of irreverent scepticism. Now, since the human mind is so made that it must have religion, when this middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superstition; the extreme of superstition reacting to scepticism, and then the barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superstition. When the persecutions in France had succeeded in extinguishing this middle element, then commenced a series of oscillations between religious despotism and atheistic license, which have continued ever since. The suppression of all reasonable religious inquiry, and the consequent corruption of the church, produced the school of Voltaire and his followers. The excesses of that school have made devout Catholics afraid of the very beginning of religious rationalism; and these causes act against each other to this day.
The revolution in England, under Cromwell, succeeded, because it had an open Bible and liberty of conscience for its foundation, and united both the elements of faith and of reason. The French revolution had, as Lamartine says, Plutarch's Lives for its Bible, and the great unchaining of human passion had no element of religious control. Plad France, in the time of her revolution, had leaders like Admiral Coligny, her revolution might have prospered as did England's under Cromwell. But these revolutions, needlessly terrible as they have been, still have accomplished something; without them France might have died away into what Spain is. As it is, progress has been made, though at a fearful sacrifice. No country has been swept cleaner of aristocratic institutions, and the old bastiles and prisons of a past tyranny. The aspiration for democratic freedom has been so thoroughly sown in France, that it never will be rooted up again. How to get it, and how to keep it when it is got, they
do not yet clearly see; but they will never rest till they learn. There is a liberty of thought and of speech in France which the tongue-tied state of the press cannot indicate. Could France receive the Bible—could it be put into the hands of all the common people—that might help her. And France is receiving the Bible. Spite of all efforts to the contrary, the curiosity of the popular mind has been awakened; the yearnings of the popular heart are turning towards it; and therein lie my best hopes for France.
One thing more I would say. Since I have been here, I have made the French and continental mode of keeping Sunday a matter of calm, dispassionate inquiry and observation. I have tried to divest myself of the prejudices—if you so please to call them—of my New England education—to look at the matter sympathetically, in the French or continental point of view, and see whether I have any occasion to revise the opinions in which I had been educated. I fully appreciate all the agreeableness, the joyousness, and vivacity of a day of recreation and social freedom, spent in visiting picture galleries and public grounds, in social reunions and rural excursions. I am far from judging harshly of the piety of those who have been educated in these views and practices. But, viewing the subject merely in relation to things of this life, I am met by one very striking fact: there is not a single nation, possessed of a popular form of government, which has not our Puritan theory of the Sabbath. Protestant Switzerland, England, Scotland, and America cover the whole ground of popular freedom; and in all these this idea of the Sabbath prevails with a distinctness about equal to the degree of liberty. Nor do I think this result an accidental one. If we notice that the Lutheran branch of the reformation did not have this element, and the Calvinistic branch, which spread over England and America, did have it, and compare the influence of these two in sustaining popular rights, we shall be struck with the obvious inference.
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands - Vol. 2 Page 34
