Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 1

INTRODUCTION

IF the capital of the French nation, situated on the river Seine, were simply the most beautiful, the wittiest, wickedest, and most artistic of towns, if—as has been so often asserted (and not exclusively by the citizens thereof)—the most commonplace and the most brilliant of human manifestations alike take on new qualities, texture, and interest the moment they become Parisien, then, indeed, would this city be entitled to be considered only with that mild offence which is the proper intellectual attitude before all so-claimed earthly superlatives. But Paris is by no means to be so disposed of. The very peccability of her wit is demonstrated by the extravagant claims which it permits itself. No God-given institution proclaims itself as such,—at least, noisily. It is the shadings to this brilliant picture, the exceeding width and depth and blackness of the sun-spots on this luminary of civilization, which relieve us from any easy toleration and compel us to the liveliest attention. One of her many qualities is that of representing and, too often, of acting for the whole country,—indeed, la centralisation is one of the four great evils (the others being the abuse of alcool, la pornographic, and the stationary birth-rate) which are recognized by its own citizens as menacing the nation. So that, in a general way, for both good and bad, Paris reads France.

Well, the heights and depths which we are called upon to contemplate are not unendurable, but they are certainly in many respects unexcelled. "France," says one of her most eloquent and dignified historians, "has justly been termed the soldier of God;" "Other continents have monkeys," says a learned German philosopher; "Europe has the French." Any community or locality which offers, or is considered by intelligent observers to offer, such a range as this, is certainly worthy of high renown and deep research, and it is not too much to say that Paris justifies her fame. Within her walls the human mind has displayed its loftiest development, and the human passions their most insane excesses; her art and her literature have erected beacon-lights for all the ages to come, and have but too frequently fallen into the depths of more than swinish filth; her science of government has ranged from the Code Napoléon to the statutes of Belial himself; her civilization has attained an elegance of refinement unknown to the Greeks, and her cigars and lucifer-matches are a disgrace to Christendom!

Happily, as in several other human institutions, there is more of good than of bad. The so-called "seamy side" of cities is not like that of flour-bags,—equal in extent and importance to the fair outer surface that meets the eye. Much as has been published of the depravity of Paris, it is not that, but the splendid activity of her material and intellectual civilization, the serious confronting of the heavy problems of humanity, the intelligent accumulation of the treasures of the mind and the hand, legislation, literature, art, science, that impress the intelligent visitor. Moreover, it is the annals of unhappy nations only that are said to be interesting, and it is impossible that a quick human interest should not attach to the contemplation of this capital which has attacked so many problems, maintained so many struggles, and endured such crushing reverses. In the light of her most troubled history the import becomes clear of the galley on her shield, and her motto: "Floats, but sinks not." But few capitals have been more frequently, apparently, on the point of being submerged. Even as these lines are being written, it is agitated by the protracted and cumulating effects of a military and social agitation which, in the language of the President of the Cabinet of Ministers, "is deplorable, which paralyzes all commerce and creates a situation intolerable to all."

LNDEED, it may be said that the present moment is the most critical, the most dramatic, in the long history of the city and the nation, and that an entirely new interest will henceforth attach itself to this crowned capital which sees herself in the inevitable future forever uncrowned. Never before has the pitiless march of events, the pitiless accumulation of irrefutable evidence, the testimony of so many observers, at home and abroad, so seemed to demonstrate that all the methods of government had been exhausted, and that the nation had attained her summit of power and was doomed to steady decline. Down to Louis XIV, her hope was thought to lie in the consolidation of the royal authority and the suppression of the feudal power of the nobles; down to 1789, in the tiers état and the States-General; after the Commune of 1871, in the maintenance of a Republic supported by universal suffrage. The ideals of 1830 and of 1848 have been practically attained; there are, finally, no new and more liberal political expedients to hope for,—and never has France seen herself so distanced by her neighbors. Her contemporary literature groans with the accumulation of these facts—from the ineptitude of her rulers, national and colonial, down to the dependence upon the foreigner for wood for her street pavements and the canned provisions for her army. Behind that "gap in the Vosges" upon which, as one of her statesmen remarks, she cannot forever fix her gaze, she sees her great and hated rival doubling in power. In 1860, Germany had the same population as France; to-day, she has that of France and Spain combined. "Never has such a displacement of power been so quickly produced between two rival peoples. And no one among us seems to regard it, though not one of the problems which torment us is as grave as this one. Our agriculture, our industry, our commerce decline; we seem to be in decadence! How could it be otherwise? There are, in the neighboring hive, beyond the Rhine, sixteen millions of workers who were not there forty years ago,—that is the explanation of the progress of our neighbors as well as of the stagnation of our own activity. All the more that the quality of the French tends to diminish with their quantity; … we can foresee the day when there will be two Germans against one Frenchman, and this prospect fills us with fear for the future of our country, for we cannot comfort ourselves with illusions, we cannot believe in the perpetual peace, we know that history is a Vie Victis continual."

Therefore, let us hasten to contemplate this great and most admirable Babylon before Cyrus comes.

Paris, Rue Boissonade.

INTRODUCTION

GALLO-ROMAN AND PRE-MEDIÆVAL

PERIODS

COTOCIA, says that somewhat inexact geographer, Strabo, "is the city of the Parisii, who dwell along the river Seine, and inhabit an island formed by the river." Ptolemy, who has been thought to have been somewhat better informed concerning the Parisii than with regard to any of the other small tribes of Gaul, calls their capital Lucotecia; but both they and their town appear for the first time in history fifty-three years before the birth of Christ, when Cæsar, in his Commentaries, relates, himself, that he summoned a general assembly of the Gauls at Lutetia, the capital of the Parisii. At this date, he was already master of the greater part of the country now called France. More than four hundred years later, Julian, surnamed the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, after having passed more than two years in this city, which he called "his dear Leucetia," was proclaimed emperor here by his soldiers, who refused to obey the orders of Constantius and return to the East. It is surmised by the scholars that the imperial author of the Misopogon adopted this form of the name of the town on the Seine through an affectation of deriving it from the Greek, in which language he wrote, and, as is still evident in those of his works which have survived, in a style remarkably pure.

Lutetia, of which the modern French make Lutèce, is supposed to have been derived from the Celtic louk-teih, which signified the place of morasses; and the name of the Parisii from the Celtic par, a species of boat, and gwys, in composition ys, man, whence parys, boatmen,—these islanders being supposed to have been skilful navigators. But they are said to have called themselves Loutouchezi,—that is to say, a residence in the midst of the waters. Other etymologists cast doubts upon all these deductions, and the matter is not very important. The early Parisians were one of the smallest of the Gaulish tribes, and preferred the islands to the mainland as a safer place of residence; they were surrounded by the Carnutes, Senones, and other, stronger people whose names have not been perpetuated. Of their ten islands and sand-banks, which were preserved until late in the Middle Ages, there are now only two remaining, the Ile Saint-Louis and Ile de la Cité. The ancient town, like the modern one, lay in the centre of a "tertiary" basin, about sixty-five mètres, or two hundred and ten feet, above the level of the sea, broken here and there by low hills. The modern historian, Duruy, quotes Strabo as finding a proof of divine providence in the fortunate configuration of the soil of Gaul; and that writer testifies that the whole country was inhabited, even in the marshes and woods. "The cause of this is, however, rather a dense population than the industry of the inhabitants. For the women there are both very prolific and excellent nurses, while the men devote themselves rather to war than to husbandry."

The antiquity of the inhabitants of Gaul is now pushed back by the learned far beyond the days of Cæsar. M. A. Thieullen, in two communications addressed to the Société d'anthropologie at Paris (January and February, 1898), maintained that the chipped flint arrow-heads found at Chelles and Saint-Acheul, which have been considered as the earliest works of prehistoric man, are, in reality, in common with the polished stone hatchets of the Neolithic age, the products of an industry in a high state of development, the result of successive essays by numberless generations. In this theory he is supported by other scientists, among them the English geologist, Prestwich; and in this insistence upon the artistic quality of the chipped and polished flints and the prodigious number of rudimentary utensils which have preceded and accompanied them is found another argument in favor of the great antiquity of man and his existence in the tertiary period. The soil of Paris has furnished many of these superior flints, and the comparative state of civilization to which the locality early attained is further testified to by the discovery, in the early months of this year, 1898, by an enterprising proprietor on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, of the site of a prehistoric pottery on his grounds. This locality, opposite the village of Ecuelle, was already noted for the menhir, or prehistoric upright stone, standing on the right bank of the canal. The ancient potteries seem to have occupied a space about five hundred mètres in length and two hundred in width; at the depth of sixty-five or seventy centimètres below the surface there is found "a black sand, burned, beaten down, trodden, which gives forth a resonant sound when attacked by the pick-axe; this arises from the fact that it has been, through a long series of centuries, tormented by the incessant passage of men and the innumerable fires of the furnaces." From the specimens of pottery extracted from this sand, it is concluded that this manufactory had been maintained from the Neolithic age down to the Gallo-Roman period. In the little village of La Mouthe, in the department of the Dordogne, farther south, have been discovered within the last few years, in a cavern, very curious and not unskilful outline drawings on the rock, sometimes touched up with color, of now extinct animals,—the extreme age of these works of art being demonstrated by the fact that they are in many cases partially covered with stalactites. The learned scientists who have uncovered and photographed these incised drawings conclude, from their appearance and from the fragments of animals' bones found in the cavern, that they are the work of men of the Neolithic age and the Palæolithic, which preceded it. In short, there is every reason to believe, on the strength of all the testimony which modern science has wrested from the unwilling records of the past, that the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with cleft nostrils.

It is not to be supposed, however, that these very ancient texts are read without the necessary stumbling over obscure passages and much upsetting of cherished historical truth. The finest presentations of ancient records that we find in grave historians are now set aside by learned archæologists in communications to the Académie des Sciences à Paris or the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Even the original number of islands in the Seine and Cæsar's statements concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed. When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch quaternaire or pléistocène four successive divisions,—in their order of antiquity, the Chelléen, the Moustérien, the Solutréen, and the Magdalénien; M. Perrier du Carne thinks that the traces of the Solutré and of the Madeleine show them to have been derived from two races long contemporary on the same soil, of which the former were autochthonous and the latter, immigrants, who came in with the reindeer and followed him when he retreated northward. M. Piette objects to the word Magdalénien, and proposes to replace it by glyptique, for, during this period, man learned to carve bones with flint instruments; after the Solutré he places the epoch Eburnéenne, and after that, the Tarandienne, characterized by instruments in reindeer's horns. After the quaternary period, Professor Alexandre Bertrand, of the École du Louvre, places the Mégalithiques, whom he thinks belonged to the great ethnological family of the Touranians which preceded the Aryans in Europe, and who erected the great stone monuments, dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs, etc., formerly called druidical, found in various parts of Europe. Several of these monuments mégalithiques have been discovered in Paris and its environs,—a street of the Faubourg du Temple owes its name of Pierre-Levée (raised stone) to the fact that at its opening, in 1782, an enormous ancient rock was found artificially supported on two others, the funerary tumulus, or mound, which formerly covered it having disappeared.

As it is impossible to attribute any longer these prehistoric monuments to the "Celts," or to "their priests, the Druids," so do others of our historical illusions vanish. M. Duruy, in his learned Histoire de France, states that at the dawn of history the country known as Gaul was "divided between three or four hundred tribes (peuplades) belonging to the three great families,—the Celts, the Iberians, and the Belgians." M. Guizot says that "in the south were Iberians or Aquitanians, Phœnicians and Greeks; in the north and northwest, Kymrians or Belgians; everywhere else, Gauls or Celts, the most numerous settlers, who had the honor of giving their name to the country." M. Salomon Reinach, in his detailed description of the monuments in the Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under the general title of Antiquités nationales, declines to recognize the race celtique; in accord with the science of anthropology he distinguishes various Gaulish types and is aware that they nowhere present themselves in a pure state. Professor Bertrand "superposes" upon his Mégalithiques, whose distinguishing trait in Europe is their use of polished stone, another race, numerically inferior and much less ancient; these are the "tribus celtiques or celtisées of the Aryan race." When they arrived in Gaul, they were already familiar with the use of metals, especially bronze, beginning to be acquainted with iron; they were pastoral and agricultural, and burned their dead. About the sixth century B.C. appeared a third group, the tribus galatiques, Helvetians, Kymrians, Belgians; they were wandering bands of warriors, who used iron implements only and buried their dead. "From the superposition, rather than from the fusion, of these divers elements has resulted that which is called la nation gauloise or celtique."

Naturally, the religions of these varied nations were as diversified as their origins. The Druids, according to Professor Bertrand, so far from forming the priesthood of a practically homogeneous race, can be said to have had no influence upon the religion of the people, who were alien to them and who remained faithful to their own worship of the spirits or powers in nature and to their superstitious practices. "Druidism was, then, neither a dogma, nor a religion, nor a particular theogony, but a social institution with an organization analogous to that of the great abbeys of Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, or to the Lamaism of Thibet. The Druids lived in communism, like the Lamas." Moreover, M. Bertrand refuses the Druids all their fine old qualities,—human sacrifices; worship of stones; solstitial ceremonies, such as the Yule-log and fires on the eve of Saint John; the herbs of Saint John; the worship of fountains; the worship of trees, and medical prescriptions. Even more, what Guizot calls their "noblest characteristic, a general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief in the immortality of the soul," was less a particular doctrine of their own than a sentiment innate in the race; "they had only to develop ideas the germ of which had not been imported by them." Nevertheless, so well organized was their communal order that they were, before the Roman epoch, the only central, definite power capable of consecutiveness in its conceptions and of unity in its views, and their influence over a gross and ignorant people was proportionally great.

To the chamanisme, or belief in the spirits that pervade nature, and in the power of man over them by magic arts, of the original Touranians, the Celtic tribes brought the worship of natural forces,—the sun, fire, torrents, tempests, mountains, etc.; but neither they nor the Druids had any human figures or symbols in their pantheon. The invasions galatiques or kimrobelge, on the contrary, brought in from the Orient a cult already strongly anthropomorphous, and with these symbols, traditions, and divinities those of the Greeks and Romans became mingled to a greater or lesser degree that it is impossible to determine, because, as it appears, all that we really know of the Gaulish religion before the Roman conquest is reduced to a few lines in Polybius, in which can be found the name of Perkunas, the Perkun of the Slavs. Cæsar identifies the gods of the Gauls with the Roman ones, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva; and M. André Lefèvre, in the Revue mensuelle de l'École d'anthropologie, asks, without being able to answer: "How is it possible that such men as Cæsar and Tacitus were able to confound with Mercury the supreme gods of the Gauls and the Germans; but, still more, how is it that the Gaul should have adopted with enthusiasm the Latin name and forgotten the Gaulish name of his supreme god?" M. Reinach is considered to have proved beyond a doubt that the god with the mallet, the Dispater of the Gallo-Roman period, was a sort of copy, in Gaulish attire, of the Egyptian Serapis; and the inscriptions of the imperial epoch testify to the diffusion of the worship of the divinities of Alexandria from Arles and Nîmes, in the extreme south, to Besançon, almost on the borders of Switzerland, and Soissons, northeast of Paris. Nevertheless, those archæologists who have thought they found traces of the art of Egypt and Babylon in that of the original cave-dwellers are now considered to have been deceiving themselves; and M. Reinach has modified the opinions he held a few years ago on the early religious art of Gaul. "In short, what we know of Gaulish mythology amounts to nothing, or practically nothing."

Various rude images and fragments of altars found under the modern pavements of Paris at different dates and localities—among others, under the choir of Notre-Dame in 1710—have revealed the names, if not the characters, of some of the ancient divinities of the soil, Esus, Jovis, Volcanus, Tarvos trigaramos, Cernunnos.

But if the scientists grope doubtingly in these twilights of history, the romancers relate boldly. One of them, M. Henri Lavedan, has been calling up the Parisienne of the Lacustrine age, "gran' maman archi-centennaire" of her of the present day. This is how she was. "Large, thick, and short, with a vigorous figure, shaking out coarse and matted hair, the feet bare, the arms bare, the breast half bare and unrestrained under her species of primitive corset. The body is that of a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that are simple and elementary, is lit up by eyes grey or blue, eyes limpid and tranquil, which regard without vivacity, without appearing and disappearing lights, without surprise, the eyes of an animal under the yoke and resigned to it, eyes only too well acquainted with the eternal landscape which they have been reflecting ever since they were first opened. The step is slow, sure, heavy, and majestic. Under her petticoat of sombre color may be divined two great legs, the legs, almost, of a man, two legs of labor and of endurance. She sings naturally, this woman, when she is alone, vague songs, sort of fugues of savages, very simple, which seem to have neither beginning nor end, but in the company of others she is almost taciturn, replying by gestures, by signs, accomplishing her task with a passive regularity. She scarcely knows the lighter shades of sentiments and expressions. She laughs or she weeps. No smiling. When she laughs, it is with a large display of the solid white teeth of a carnivorous animal; when she weeps, it is with the deep sobs of a beaten child. She is strong and patient like the ox, she runs like the horse, she resists cold, heat, and fatigue; her sleep is profound and without dreams. She is more mother than wife, in the animal sense of the word; she is capable of courage, of rude goodness and of devotion, but all of these naturally and by instinct. Her life may be hard and long, she may retain until a very advanced age the plenitude of her vigor, and die splitting wood or turning the mill.

"Should the wife cease to please her husband, he sells her again; should she commit a fault, he strips her (the garments will serve for the new spouse); then he takes her by the hair and smothers her in the marsh. Nevertheless, however miserable may be her condition of a domestic animal, this creature has passions. Tacitus informs us that adultery was not unknown to the purchased wife. The male children belonged to the father, and always remained with him; as to the aged, the old relatives, useless and cumbering, they were put 'in a place apart,' a sort of hollow in the neighborhood of the hole for the hogs or the enclosure for the cattle, and there was thrown to them the remnants of the meals. The family sentiment, the voice of kindred blood, did not, as yet, make itself heard very distinctly."

This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue of courage. Cæsar says that when a man of importance died, his wives were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845, indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.