Part 3 (1/2)

IT was the last week in May, and by no means the ”merry, merry month of May” had we found it. Not only was the sky weighed down with clouds, but they dripped upon the earth continually, the sun showing his ghastly, white, half-drowned face for a moment only to be swept from sight again by the cloud waves. A friend was going to Paris. Would we shake the drops from our garments, close our umbrellas, and go with him? We not only would, we did. We gathered a lunch, packed our trunk, said our adieus, and drove down to the station in the usual pouring rain, the tearful accompaniment to all our movements. But one party besides our own awaited the train upon the platform--a young man with the insignia of bliss in the gloves of startling whiteness upon his hands, and a middle-aged woman of seraphic expression of countenance, clad in robes of spotless white, her feet encased in capacious white slippers. In this airy costume, one hand grasping a huge bouquet devoid of color, the other the arm of her companion, she paced back and forth, to the great amus.e.m.e.nt of the laughing porters, casting upon us less fortunate ones, who s.h.i.+vered meekly in our wraps, glances of triumphant pity indescribable.

”Weddin' party, zur,” explained the guard, touching his cap to our friend. ”Jus' come down in fly.” They looked to us a good deal more as if they were just going up in a ”fly.” The train shrieked into the station, and we were soon rus.h.i.+ng over the road to New Haven, from which, in an evil moment, we had planned to cross the Channel. There was little new or strange in the picture seen from our window. The cottages were now of a dull, clay color, instead of the dingy red we had observed before, as though they had been erected in sudden need, without waiting for the burning of the bricks. There were brick-yards all along the way, answering a vexed question in my mind as to where all the bricks came from which were used so entirely in town and village here, in the absence of the wood so plentiful with us. The ca.n.a.ls added much to the beauty of the landscape, winding through the meadows as if they were going to no particular place, and were in no haste to reach their destination. They turned aside for a clump of willows or a mound of daisy-crowned earth; they went quite out of their way to peep into the back doors of a village, and, in fact, strolled along in a lazy, serpentine manner that would have crazed the proprietor of a Yankee ca.n.a.l boat.

It was five o'clock when we reached New Haven, having dropped our fellow-pa.s.sengers along the way, the blissful couple among them.

Through some error in calculation we had taken an earlier train than we need have, and found hours of doleful leisure awaiting us in this sleepy little town, lying upon an arm of the sea. Its outer appearance was not inviting. Here were the first and last houses of wood we saw in England,--high, ugly things, that might have been built of old boats or drift wood, with an economy that precluded all thought of grace in architecture. The train, in a gracious spirit of accommodation, instead of plunging into the sea, as it might have done, paused before the door of a hotel upon the wharf. There, in a little parlor, we improvised a home for a time. Our friend went off to explore the town. We took possession of the faded red arm-chairs by the wide windows. Down below, beyond the wet platform, rose the well-colored meerschaum of the little French steamer, whose long-boats hung just above the edge of the wharf.

Through the closed window stole the breath of the salt sea, that, only a hand-breadth here, widened out below into boundlessness, bringing visions of the ocean and a thrill of remembered delight. The rain had ceased. The breeze rolled the clouds into snow-b.a.l.l.s, pure white against the blue of the sky. Over the narrow stream came the twitter of birds, hidden in the hawthorn hedge all abloom. Everything smiled, and beamed, and glistened without, though far out to sea the white caps crowned the dancing waves. When night fell, and the lights glimmered all through the town, we drew the heavy curtains, lighted the candles in the s.h.i.+ning candlesticks, whose light cast a delusive glow over the dingy dustiness of the room, bringing out cheerfully the little round tea-table in the centre, with its bright silver and steaming urn, over which we lingered a long hour, measuring and weighing our comfort, telling tales, seeing visions, and dreaming dreams of home.

The clock struck nine as we crossed the plank to the Alexandra, trying in vain to find in its toy appointments some likeness to our ocean steamer of delightful memory. The train whizzed in from London, bringing our fellow-voyagers. The sheep were separated from the goats by the officer at the foot of the plank, who asked each one descending, ”First or second cabin?”--sending one to the right, the other to the left. The wind swept in from the sea raw and cold. The foot-square deck was cheerless and wet. Even a diagonal promenade proved short and unsatisfactory, and in despair we descended the slippery, perpendicular stairs between boxes and bales, and down still another flight, to the cabin. A narrow, cus.h.i.+oned seat clung to its four sides, divided into lengths for berths. ”Will it be a rough night?” we carelessly asked the young stewardess. ”O, no!” was the stereotyped reply, though all the while the wicked waves were dancing beneath the white caps just outside.

We divested ourselves of hats, and wraps, and useless ornaments, reserving only that of a meek and quiet spirit, which, under a nameless fear, grew every moment meeker and more quiet. We undid the interminable b.u.t.tons of our American boots, and prepared for a comfortable rest, with an ignorance that at the time approximated bliss. There was leisure for the working out of elaborate schemes. Something possessed the tide.

Whether it was high or low, narrow or wide, I do not know; but there at the wharf we were to await the working of its own will, regardless of time. Accordingly we selected our places with a deliberation that bore no proportion to the time we were to fill them, advising with the stewardess, who had settled herself comfortably to sleep. We tried our heads to England and our feet to the foe, and then reversed the order, finally compromising by taking a position across the Channel. But the loading of the steamer overhead, with the chattering of our fellow-pa.s.sengers below,--two English girls, a pretty brunette and her sister,--banished sleep. At three o'clock our voyage began--the succession of quivering leaps, plunges, and somersaults which miraculously landed us upon the French coast. I can think of no words to describe it. The first night upon the ocean was paradise and the perfection of peace in comparison. To this day the thought of the swas.h.i.+ng water, beaten white against the port-hole before my eyes, is sickening. A calm--to me, of utter prostration--fell upon us long after the day dawned, only to be broken by the stewardess, when sleep had brought partial forgetfulness, with, ”It's nine o'clock; we're at Dieppe, and the officers want to come in here.” We tried to raise our heads. Officers! What officers? Had we crossed the Styx? Were they of light or darkness? We sank back. O, what were officers to us!

”But you must get up!”--and she began an awkward attempt at the b.u.t.tons of those horrible boots. That recalled to life. American boots are of this world, and we made a feeble attempt to don some of its vanities.

O, how senseless did the cuffs appear that went on upside down!--the collar which was fastened under one ear!--the ribbons that were consigned to our pockets! Making blind stabs at our ears, ”Good heavens!” we e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, ”who ever invented earrings? Relics of barbarism!” We made hasty thrusts at the hair-pins, standing out from our heads in every direction like enraged porcupine quills; being pulled, and twisted, and scolded by the stewardess all the while; hearing the thump, thump, upon our door as one pair of knuckles after another awoke the echoes, as one strange voice after another shouted, ”Why don't those ladies come out?” O the trembling fingers that refused to hold the pins!--the trembling feet that staggered up the ladder-like stairs as we were thrust out of the cabin--out of the cruel little steamer to take refuge in one of the waiting cabs! O the blessedness of our thick veils and charitable wraps!

I recall, as though it were a dream, the narrow, roughly-paved street of Dieppe; a latticed window filled with flowers, and a dark-eyed maiden peeping through the leaves; the fish-wives in short petticoats and with high white caps, clattering over the stones in their wooden _sabots_, wheeling barrows of fish to the market near the station, where they bartered, and bargained, and gossiped. Evidently it is a woman's right in Normandy to work--to grow as withered, and hard, and old before the time as she chooses, or as she has need; for to put away year after year, as do these poor women, every grace and charm of womanhood, cannot be of choice.

At the long table in the refreshment-room of the station we drank the tasteless tea, and ate a slice from the roll four feet in length. The English-speaking girl who attended us found a place--rough enough, to be sure--where in the few moments of waiting we could complete our hasty toilets. Beside us at the table, our fellow-voyagers, were two professors from a Connecticut college of familiar name, whom we had met in London. They joined us in the comfortable railway carriage, and added not a little to the pleasant chat that shortened the long day and the weary journey to Paris. Our number--for the compartment held eight--was completed by a young American gentleman, and a Frenchman of evil countenance, who drank wine and made love to his pretty Lizette in an unblus.h.i.+ng manner, strange, and by no means pleasing, to us, demonstrating the annoyance, if nothing worse, to which one is often subjected in these compartment cars. It needed but one glance from the window to convince us that we were no longer in England. To be sure, the sky is blue, the gra.s.s green, in all lands; but in place of the level sweep of meadow through which we had pa.s.sed across the Channel, the land swelled here into hills on every side. Long rows of stiff poplars divided the fields, or stretched away in straight avenues as far as the eye could reach. The English remember the beauty of a curved line; the French, with a painful rect.i.tude, describe only right angles. Scarlet poppies blushed among the purple, yellow, and white wild flowers along the way. The plastered cottages with their high, thatched roofs, the tortuous River Seine with its green islands, as we neared Paris, the neat little stations along the way--like gingerbread houses--made for us a new and charming panorama. Hanging over a gate at one of these stations was an old man, white-haired, blind; his guide, an old woman, who waited, with a kind of wondering awe stealing over her withered face, while he played some simple air upon a little pipe--thus asking alms. So simple was the air, the very shadow of a melody, that the scene might have been amusing, had it not been so pitiful.

At noon we lunched in the comfortless waiting-room at Rouen, while the professors made a hasty visit to the cathedral during our stay of half an hour. We still suffered from the tossing of the sea, and cathedrals possessed no charms in our eyes. It was almost night when we reached Paris, and joined the hurrying crowd descending from the train. It was a descent into Pandemonium. There was a confusion of unintelligible sounds in our ears like the roll of a watchman's rattle, bringing no suggestion of meaning. The calmness of despair fell upon our crushed spirits, with a sense of powerlessness such as we never experienced before or since. A dim recollection of school-days--of Ollendorff--rose above the chaos in our minds. ”Has the physician of the shoemaker the canary of the carpenter?” we repeated mechanically; and with that our minds became a blank.

Deliverance awaited us; and when, just outside the closed gates, first in the expectant crowd, we espied the face of a friend, peace enveloped us like a garment. Our troubles were over.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PARIS OF 1869.

The devil.--Cathedrals and churches.--The Louvre.--Modern French art.--The Beauvais clock, with its droll little puppets.--Virtue in a red gown.--The Luxembourg Palace.--The yawning statue of Marshal Ney.--Gay life by gas-light.--The Imperial Circus.--The Opera.--How the emperor and empress rode through the streets after the riots.--The beautiful Spanish woman whose face was her fortune.--Napoleon's tomb.

IT may be the City of Destruction, the very gateway to depths unknown; but with its fair, white dwellings, its fair, white streets, that gleamed almost like gold beneath a summer sun, it seemed much more a City Celestial. It may be, as some affirm, that the devil here walks abroad at midday; but we saw neither the print of his hoofs upon the asphaltum, nor the shadow of his horns upon the cream-like Caen stone.

We walked, and rode, and dwelt a time within its limits; and but for a certain reckless gayety that gave to the Sabbath an air of Vanity Fair, but for the mallet of the workman that disturbed our Sunday wors.h.i.+p, we should never have known that we were not in the most Christian of all Christian cities. It is by no means imperative to do in Rome as the Romans do, and one need not in Paris drink absinthe or visit the Jardin Mabille.

Our first expedition was to the banker's and to the shops, and having replenished our purse and wardrobe, we were prepared to besiege the city. There was a day or two of rest in the gilded chairs, cus.h.i.+oned with blue satin, of our pretty _salon_, whence we peeped down upon the street below between the yellow satin curtains that draped its wide French window; or rolled our eyes meditatively to the delicately tinted ceiling, with its rose-colored clouds skimmed by tiny, impossible birds; or made abortive attempts to penetrate the secrets of the buhl cabinets, and to guess at the time from the pretty clocks of disordered organism; or admired ourselves in the mirrors which gazed at each other from morning till night, for our apartments in the little Hotel Friedland we found most charming.

You will hardly care for a description of the dozen, more or less, churches, old, new, and restored, with which we began and ended our sight-seeing in Paris, where we looked upon sculptured saints without number, and studied ecclesiastical architecture to more than our hearts'

content. There was St. Germain L'Auxerrois, the wicked old bell of which tolled the signal for the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew. We stood with the _bonnes_ and babies under the trees of the square before it, gazing up at the belfry with most severe countenances,--and learned, afterwards, that the bell had been long since removed! There was the Madeleine of more recent date, built in the form of a Greek temple, and interesting just now for having been the church of Father Hyacinthe, to which we could for a time find no entrance. We shook the iron gate; we inquired in excellent English of a French shopkeeper, and found at last an open gateway, a little unlocked door, beyond which we spent a time of search and inquiry in darkness, and among wood, and shavings, and broken chairs, and holy dust-pans, before pa.s.sing around and entering the great bronze doors. There were the Pantheon and St. Sulpice, grand and beautiful, erected piously from the proceeds of lotteries. There was St.

Etienne du Mont, and within one of its chapels the gilded tomb of the patron saint of Paris--St. Genevieve. Who she was, or what she did to gain this rather unenviable position, I failed to learn. Her name seems to have outlived her deeds. Whether she was beautiful and beloved, and put away earthly vanities for a holy life, or old and ugly, and bore her lot with a patience that won saints.h.i.+p, I do not know. I can only tell that tapers burn always upon her tomb, and if you buy one it will burn a prayer for you. So we were told. There is one old church, St. Germain des Pres, most beautifully colored within. Its pictures seem to have melted upon the walls. But admired above all is the Sainte Chapelle, in the Palais de Justice, a chapel fitted up by the fanatical St. Louis, when this palace of justice, which holds now the courts of law, was a royal residence. Of course all its brightness was dimmed long ago. Its glories became dust, like its founder. But it has recently been restored, and is a marvel of gilt, well-blended colors, and stained gla.s.s. A graceful spire surmounts it, but the old, cone-capped towers, rising from another part of the same building, possessed far greater interest in our eyes; for here was the Conciergerie, where were confined Marie Antoinette and so many more victims of the reign of terror.

On the ”isle of the city,” in the Seine, where, under the Roman rule, a few mud huts const.i.tuted Paris, stands the church of Notre Dame, which was three hundred years in building. With its spire and two square towers, it may be seen from almost any part of the city. I wish you might look upon the relics and the vestments which the priests wear upon occasions of ceremony, hidden within this church, and displayed upon the payment of an extra fee. I did not wonder that the Sisters of Charity, who went into the little room with us, gazed aghast upon the gold and silver, and precious stones.

Every one visits the galleries of the Louvre, of course. A little, worn shoe, belonging once to Marie Antoinette, and the old gray coat of the first emperor, were to us the most interesting objects among the relics.

From out the sea of pictures rise Murillo's Madonna, the lovely face with a soul behind it, s.h.i.+ning through, and the burial of the heroine of Chateaubriand. Do you know it? The fair form, the sweeping hair of Attila, and the dark lover with despair in his face? As for the Rubens gallery,--his fat, red, undraped women here among the clouds, surrounded by puffy little cherubs, had for us no charms. Rubens in Antwerp was a revelation. We wandered through room after room, lighted from above, crowded with paintings. To live for a time among them would be a delight; to glance at them for a moment was tantalization. All around were the easels of the artists who come here to sketch--sharp-featured, heavy-browed men, with unkempt hair and flowing beards, and in shabby coats, stood before them, pallet and brushes in hand; and women by the score,--some of them young and pleasing, with duennas patiently waiting near by; but more often they were neither young nor beautiful, and with an evident renunciation of pomps and vanities. We glanced at their copies curiously. Sometimes they seemed the original in miniature, and sometimes,--ah well, we all fail.

We looked in upon the annual exhibition of pictures at the Palais de l'Industrie one day, and were particularly impressed with the _nudite_ of the modern school of French art. Pink-tinted flesh may be very beautiful, but there must be something higher! We saw there, too, another day, the clock on exhibition for a time before being consigned to its destined place at Beauvais. It was even more wonderful than the one so famous at Strasbourg. This was of the size of an ordinary church organ, and of similar shape; a ma.s.s of gilt and chocolate-colored wood; a ma.s.s of dials, great and small--of time tables, and, indeed, of tables for computing everything earthly and heavenly, with dials to show the time in fifty different places, and everything else that could, by any possible connection with time, be supposed to belong to a clock. Upon the top, Christ, seated in an arm-chair, was represented as judging the world, his feet upon the clouds; on either side kneeling female figures adored him. Just below, a pair of scales bided their time. On every peak stood little images, while fifty puppets peeped out of fifty windows.

Just below the image of the Saviour, a figure emerged through an open door at the striking of every quarter of an hour,--coming out with a slide and occasional jerk by no means graceful. We had an opportunity of observing all this in the three quarters of an hour of waiting. We viewed the clock upon every side, being especially interested in a picture at one point representing a rocky coast, a light-house, and a long stretch of waves upon which labored two s.h.i.+ps attached in some way to the works within. They pitched back and forth without making any progress whatever, in a way very suggestive to us, who had lately suffered from a similar motion. A dozen priests seated themselves with us upon the bench before the clock as the hand approached the hour. They wore the long black robes and odd little skull-caps, that fit so like a plaster, and which are, I am sure, kept in place by some law of attraction unknown to us. One, of a different order, or higher grade, in a shorter robe and with very thin legs, encased in black stockings that added to their shadowy appearance, shuffled up to his place just in time to throw back his head and open his mouth as the clock struck, and the last judgment began. The c.o.c.k upon the front gave a preliminary and weak flap of his wings, and emitted three feeble, squeaky crows, that must, I am sure, have convulsed the very puppets. Certainly they all disappeared from the windows, and something jumped into their places intended to represent flames, but which looked so much like reversed tin petticoats, that we supposed for a moment they were all standing on their heads. All the figures upon the peaks turned their backs upon us. The image of Christ began to wave its hands. The kneeling women swayed back and forth, clasping their own. Two angels raised to their lips long, gilt trumpets, as if to blow a blast; then dropped them; then raised them a second time, and even made a third abortive attempt. From one of the open doors Virtue was jerked out to be judged, Virtue in a red gown. The scales began to dance up and down. An angel appeared playing a guitar, and Virtue went triumphantly off to the right, to slow and appropriate music, an invisible organ playing meanwhile. Then Vice appeared. I confess he excited my instant and profound pity. Such a poor, naked, wretched-looking object as he was! with his hands to his face, as though he were heartily ashamed to come out in such a plight. I venture to say, if he had been decked out like Virtue, he might have stolen off to the right, and n.o.body been the wiser. Good clothes do a great deal in Paris.

As it was, the scales danced up and down a moment, and then the devil appeared with a sharp stick, and drove him around the corner to the left, with very distant and feeble thunder for an accompaniment. That ended the show. All the little puppets jumped back into all the little windows, and we came away.