Part 10 (1/2)
After supper the dancing was resumed, and the queen remained till three o'clock. At her departure the band played _cotillons_ or waltzes with figures, in which the Duke of Orleans displayed the grace for which he is celebrated, and at four, quite exhausted with fatigue and heat, I went with a friend or two into the long gla.s.s verandah, built by Napoleon as a promenade for the Empress Maria Louisa during her illness, where tea, coffee, and ices were served to those who wished them after supper. It was an interesting place enough, and had my eyes and limbs ached less, I should have liked to walk up and down, and muse a little upon its recollections, but swallowing my tea as hastily as possible, I was but too happy to make my escape and get home to bed.
LETTER XVIII.
CHOLERA--UNIVERSAL TERROR--FLIGHT OF THE INHABITANTS--CASES WITHIN THE WALLS OF THE PALACE--DIFFICULTY OF ESCAPE--DESERTED STREETS--CASES NOT REPORTED--DRYNESS OF THE ATMOSPHERE-- PREVENTIVES RECOMMENDED--PUBLIC BATHS, ETC.
_Cholera! Cholera!_ It is now the only topic. There is no other interest--no other dread--no other occupation, for Paris. The invitations for parties are _at last_ recalled--the theatres are _at last_ shut or languis.h.i.+ng--the fearless are beginning to be afraid--people walk the streets with camphor bags and vinaigrettes at their nostrils--there is a universal terror in all cla.s.ses, and a general flight of all who can afford to get away. I never saw a people so engrossed with one single and constant thought. The waiter brought my breakfast this morning with a pale face, and an apprehensive question, whether I was quite well. I sent to my boot-maker yesterday, and he was dead. I called on a friend, a Hanoverian, one of those broad-chested, florid, immortal-looking men, of whose health for fifty years, violence apart, one is absolutely certain, and he was at death's door with the cholera. Poor fellow! He had fought all through the revolution in Greece; he had slept in rain and cold, under the open sky, many a night, through a ten years' pursuit of the profession of a soldier of fortune, living one of the most remarkable lives, hitherto, of which I ever heard, and to be taken down here in the midst of ease and pleasure, reduced to a shadow with so vulgar and unwarlike a disease as this, was quite too much for his philosophy. He had been ill three days when I found him. He was emaciated to a skeleton in that short time, weak and helpless, and, though he is not a man to exaggerate suffering, he said he never had conceived such intense agony as he had endured. He a.s.sured me, that if he recovered, and should ever be attacked with it again, he would blow out his brains at the first symptom. Nothing but his iron const.i.tution protracted the disorder. Most people who are attacked die in from three to twenty-four hours.
For myself, I have felt and still feel quite safe. My rooms are in the airiest quarter of Paris, facing the gardens of the Tuileries, with windows overlooking the king's; and, as far as _air_ is concerned, if his majesty considers himself well situated, it would be quite ridiculous in so insignificant a person as myself to be alarmed. With absolute health, confident spirits, and tolerably regular habits, I have usually thought one may defy almost anything but love or a bullet. To-day, however, there have been, they say, two cases _within the palace-walls_, members of the royal household, and Casimir Perier, who probably lives well and has enough to occupy his mind, is very low with it, and one cannot help feeling that he has no certain exemption, when a disease has touched both above and below him. I went to-day to the Messagerie to engage my place for Ma.r.s.eilles, on the way to Italy, but the seats are all taken, in both mail-post and diligence, for a fortnight to come, and, as there are no _extras_ in France, one must wait his turn. Having done my duty to myself by the inquiry, I shall be content to remain quiet.
I have just returned from a social tea-party at a house of one of the few English families left in Paris. It is but a little after ten, and the streets, as I came along, were as deserted and still as if it were a city of the dead. Usually, until four or five in the morning, the same streets are thronged with carriages hurrying to and fro, and always till midnight the _trottoirs_ are crowded with promenaders.
To-night I scarce met a foot-pa.s.senger, and but one solitary cabriolet in a walk of a mile. The contrast was really impressive. The moon was nearly full, and high in the heavens, and the sky absolutely without a trace of a cloud; nothing interrupted the full broad light of the moon, and the empty streets were almost as bright as at noon-day; and, as I crossed the _Place Vendome_, I could hear, for the first time since I have been in Paris, though I have pa.s.sed it at every hour of the night, the echo of my footsteps reverberated from the walls around. You should have been in these crowded cities of Europe to realize the impressive solemnity of such solitude.
It is said that fifty thousand people have left Paris within the past week. Adding this to the thousand a day who are struck with the cholera, and the attendance necessary to the sick, and a thinned population is sufficiently accounted for. There are, however, hundreds ill of this frightful disease, whose cases are not reported.
It is only those who are taken to the hospitals, the poor and dest.i.tute, who are numbered in the official statements. The physicians are wearied out with their _private_ practice. The medical lectures are suspended, and a regular physician is hardly to be had at all.
There is scarce a house in which some one has not been taken. You see biers and litters issuing from almost every gate, and the better ranks are no longer spared. A sister of the premier, M. Perier, died yesterday; and it was reported at the _Bourse_, that several distinguished persons, who have been ill of it, are also dead. No one feels safe; and the consternation and dread on every countenance you meet, is enough to chill one's very blood. I went out to-day for a little exercise, not feeling very well, and I was glad to get home again. Every creature looks stricken with a mortal fear. And this among a French population, the gayest and merriest of people under all depressions ordinarily, is too strong a contrast not to be felt painfully. There is something singular in the air, too; a disagreeable, depressing dryness, which the physicians say must change, or all Paris will be struck with the plague. It is clear and cold, but almost suffocating with dryness.
It is very consoling in the midst of so much that is depressing, that the preventives recommended against the cholera are so agreeable.
”Live well,” say the doctors, ”and bathe often. Abstain from excesses, keep a clear head and good spirits, and amuse yourself as much and as rationally as possible.” It is a very excellent recipe for happiness, let alone the cholera. There is great room for a nice observance of this system in Paris, particularly the eating and bathing. The baths are delightful. You are received in handsome saloons, opening upon a garden in the centre of the building, ornamented with statues and fountains, the journals lying upon the sofas, and everything arranged with quite the luxury of a palace. The bathing-rooms are furnished with taste; the baths are of marble, and covered inside with spotlessly white linen cloths; the water is perfumed, and you may lie and take your coffee, or have your breakfast served upon the mahogany cover which shuts you in--a union of luxuries which is enough to enervate a cynic. When you are ready to come out, a pull of the bell brings a servant, who gives you a _peignoir_--a long linen wrapper, heated in an oven, in the warm folds of which you are enveloped, and in three minutes are quite dry. In this you may sit, at your ease, reading, or musing, or lie upon the sofa without the restraint of a tight dress, till you are ready to depart; and then four or five francs, something less than a dollar, pays for all.
LETTER XIX.
MORNING VIEW FROM THE RUE RIVOLI--THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE--GUICCIOLI--SISMONDI THE HISTORIAN, ETC.
It is now the middle of April, and, sitting at my window on the _Rue Rivoli_, I look through one of the long, clipped avenues of the Tuileries, and see an arch of green leaves, the sun of eight o'clock in the morning just breaking through the thin foliage and dappling the straight, even gravel-walk below, with a look of summer that makes my heart leap. The cholera has put an end to dissipation, and one gets up early, from necessity. It is delicious to step out before breakfast, and cross the street into those lovely gardens, for an hour or two of fresh air and reflection. It is warm enough now to sit on the stone benches about the fountains, by the time the dew is dry; and I know nothing so contemplative as the occupation of watching these royal swans, in the dreamy, almost imperceptible motion with which they glide around the edges of the basins. The gold fish swim up and circle about the breast of the imperial birds with a motion almost as idle; and the old wooden-legged soldier, who has been made warden of the gardens for his service, sits nodding on one of the chairs, or drawing fortifications with his stick in the gravel; and so it happens, that, in the midst of a gay and busy city one may feel always a luxurious solitude; and, be he ever so poor, loiter all day if he will, among scenes which only regal munificence could provide for him. With the _Seine_ bounding them on one side, the splendid uniform _facade_ of the _Rue Rivoli_ on the other, the palace stretching across the southern terrace, and the thick woods of the _Champs Elysees_ at the opposite gate, where could one go in the world to give his taste or his eye a more costly or delightful satisfaction?
The _Bois de Boulogne_, about which the Parisians talk so much, is less to my taste. It is a level wood of small trees, covering a mile or two square, and cut from corner to corner with straight roads for driving. The soil is sandy, and the gra.s.s grows only in tufts, the walks are rough, and either muddy or dusty always; and, barring the equipages and the pleasure of a word in pa.s.sing an acquaintance, I find a drive to this famous wood rather a dull business. I want either one thing or the other--cultivated grounds like the Tuileries, or the wild wood.
I have just left the Countess Guiccioli, with whom I have been acquainted for some two or three weeks. She is very much frightened at the cholera, and thinks of going to America. The conversation turned princ.i.p.ally upon Sh.e.l.ley, whom of course she knew intimately; and she gave me one of his letters to herself as an autograph. She says at times he was a little crazy--”_fou_,” as she expressed it--but that there never was a n.o.bler or a better man. Lord Byron, she says, loved him like a brother. She is still in correspondence with Sh.e.l.ley's wife, of whom also she speaks with the greatest affection. There were several miniatures of Byron hanging up in the room, and I asked her if any of them were perfect in the resemblance. ”No,” she said, ”this was the most like him,” taking down an exquisitely-finished miniature by an Italian artist, ”_mais il etait beaucoup plus beau--beaucoup!
beaucoup!_” She reiterated the word with a very touching tenderness, and continued to look at the picture for some time, either forgetting our presence, or affecting it. She speaks English sweetly, with a soft, slow, honeyed accent, breaking into French when ever she gets too much interested to choose her words. She went on talking in French of the painters who had drawn Byron, and said the American, West's was the best likeness. I did not like to tell her that West's picture of herself was excessively flattered. I am sure no one would know her from the engraving of it, at least. Her cheek bones are high, her forehead is badly shaped, and, altogether, the _frame_ of her features is decidedly ugly. She dresses in the worst taste, too, and yet, with all this, and poetry and celebrity aside, the Countess Guiccioli is both a lovely and a fascinating woman, and one whom a man of sentiment would admire, even at this age, very sincerely, but not for beauty.
She has white and regular teeth, however, and her hair is incomparably the most beautiful I ever saw. It is of the richest and glossiest gold, silken and luxuriant, and changes, as the light falls upon it, with a mellow softness, than which nothing could be lovelier. It is this and her indescribably winning manner which are lost in a picture, and therefore, it is perhaps fair that she should be otherwise flattered. Her drawing-room is one of the most agreeable in Paris at present, and is one of the chief _agremens_ which console me for a detention in an atmosphere so triste as well as dangerous.
My bed-room window opens upon the court in the interior of the hotel Rivoli, in which I lodge. In looking out occasionally upon my very near neighbors opposite, I have frequently observed a gray-headed, scholar-like, fine-looking old man, writing at a window in the story below. One does not trouble himself much about his fellow-lodgers, and I had seen this gentleman at his work at all hours, for a month or more, without curiosity enough to inquire even his name. This morning the servant came in, with a _Mon Dieu!_ and said _M. Sismondi_ was frightened by the cholera, and was leaving his lodgings at that moment. The name startled me, and making some inquiries, I found that my gray-headed neighbor was no other than the celebrated historian of Italian literature, and that I had been living under the same roof with him for weeks, and watching him at his cla.s.sical labors, without being at all aware of the honor of his neighborhood. He is a kind, benevolent-looking man, of about sixty, I should think; and always had a peculiarly affectionate manner to his wife, who, I am told by the valet, is an Englishwoman. I regretted exceedingly the opportunity I had lost of knowing him, for there are few writers of whom one retains a more friendly and agreeable remembrance.
In a conversation with Mr. Cooper, the other day he was remarking of how little consequence any one individual found himself in Paris, even the most distinguished. We were walking in the Tuileries, and the remark was elicited by my pointing out to him one or two celebrated persons, whose names are sufficiently known, but who walk the public promenades, quite unnoticed and unrecognised. He said he did not think there were five people in Paris who knew him at sight, though his works were advertised in all the bookstores, and he had lived in Paris one or two years, and walked there constantly. This was putting a strong case, for the French idolize Cooper; and the peculiarly translateable character of his works makes them read even better in a good translation than in the original. It is so all over the continent, I am told. The Germans, Italians, and Spaniards, prefer Cooper to Scott; and it is easily accounted for when one remembers how much of the beauty of the Waverly novels depends on their exquisite style, and how peculiarly Cooper's excellence lies in his accurate, definite, tangible descriptions. There is not a more admired author in Europe than Cooper, it is very certain; and I am daily asked whether he is in America at present--so little do the people of these crowded cities interest themselves about that which is immediately at their elbows.
LETTER XX.
GENERAL BERTRAND--FRIEND OF LADY MORGAN--PHRENOLOGY--DR.
SPURZHEIM--HIS LODGINGS--PROCESS OF TAKING A CAST OF THE HEAD--INCARCERATION OF DR. BOWRING AND DE POTTER--DAVID THE SCULPTOR--VISIT OF DR. SPURZHEIM TO THE UNITED STATES.