Chapter XX The Comédie Française — The Opéra — Some Famous Cafés — Conclusion
As early as 1341 the Rue des Jongleurs was inhabited by minstrels, mimes and players. They were men of tender heart, for in 1331 two jongleurs, Giacomo of Pistoia and Hugues of Lorraine, were touched by beholding a paralysed woman forsaken by the way, and determined to found a refuge for the sick poor: they hired a room and furnished it with some beds, but being unable to provide funds for maintenance, their warden collected alms from the charitable. In 1332, at a meeting of the Jongleurs of Paris, Giacomo and Hugues were present, and urged the claims of the poor upon their fellows. The players decided to found a guild with a hospital and church dedicated to St. Julian of the Minstrels,177 but the Bishop of Paris, doubting their financial powers, required a certain sum to be paid within four years, in order to endow a chaplaincy and to compensate the curé of St. Merri. The players more than fulfilled their promise; their capitulary was confirmed by pope and king, and in 1343 they elected William the Flute Player and Henry of Mondidier as administrators; the servants of the Muses were therefore of no small importance in the fourteenth century. As early as 1398 the Confraternity of the Passion is known to have existed, and so charmed the people of Paris by its Passion Plays that the hour of vespers was advanced to allow the faithful time to attend the representations, which lasted from 1.30 to 5 o’clock without any interval. In 1548 the Confraternity was performing at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the old mansion of Jean Sans Peur, for it was then forbidden to play the mystery of the Passion any more, and limited to profane, decent and lawful pieces, which were not to begin before 3 o’clock. From 1566 to 1676 the Comedians of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, as they were then called, continued their performances, and many ordinances were needed to purify the stage, to prevent licentious pieces and the use of words of double entente. Competitive companies performed at the Hôtel de Cluny, and in the Rue Michel le Comte, in those days a narrow street which became so blocked by carriages and horses during the performances that the inhabitants complained of being unable to reach their houses, and of suffering much from thieves and footpads. It was at the Hôtel de Bourgogne that the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine—Le Cid, Andromaque and Phèdre—were first performed.
At No. 12 Rue Mazarine an inscription marks the site of the Tennis Court of the Métayers near the fosses of the old Porte de Nesle, where in 1643 a cultured young fellow, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, son of a prosperous tradesman of Paris, having associated himself with the Béjart family of comedians, opened the Illustre Théâtre. The venture met with small success, for soon Molière crossed the Seine and migrated to the Port St. Paul. Thence he returned to the Faubourg St. Germain and rented the Tennis Court of the Croix Blanche. Ill fortune still followed him, for in 1645, unable to pay his candlemaker, the illustrious player saw the inside of the debtors’ prison at the Petit Châtelet, and the company must needs borrow money to release their director. In 1646 the players left for the Provinces and were not seen again in Paris for twelve years.
The theatre of those days was innocent of stage upholstery, the exiguous decorations being confined to some hangings of faded tapestry on the stage and a few tallow candles with tin reflectors. A chandelier holding four candles hung from the roof and was periodically lowered and drawn up again during the performance; any spectator near by snuffed the candles with his fingers. The orchestra consisted of a flute and a drum, or two violins. The play began at two o’clock; the charges for entrance were twopence half-penny for a standing place in the pit, fivepence for a seat. On 24th October 1658 Molière, having won distinguished patronage, was honoured by a royal command to play Corneille’s Nicodème before the court at the Louvre. After the play was ended Molière prayed to be allowed to perform a little piece of his own—Le Docteur Amoureux—and so much amused Louis XIV. that the players were commanded to settle at Paris and permitted to use the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourbon three days a week in alternation with the comedians of the opera. Here it was that the first essentially French comedy, Les Précieuses Ridicules, was performed with such success that after the second performance the prices were doubled. During the first performance an old playgoer is said to have risen and exclaimed, “Courage! Molière, voilà de la bonne comédie!”
After the demolition of the Hôtel de Bourbon, the players were settled in Richelieu’s theatre at the Palais Royal, where they performed for the first time on 20th January 1661. During this period of transition Molière was again invited to play before the king in the Salle des Gardes (Caryatides) at the Louvre, and so keen was the interest in the new bonne comédie that the almost dying Mazarin had his chair dragged into the hall that he might be present.
In 1665 the king appointed Molière valet du roi at a salary of a thousand livres, subsidised the company to the amount of seven thousand livres a year, and they were thenceforth known as the “Troupe du Roi.” Free from pecuniary anxiety, the great dramatist wrote his masterpieces, Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe, L’Avare, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and Les Femmes Savantes.
In 1673, after Molière’s death, the Troupe du Roi joined the players of the Marais and rented the famous Théâtre Guénégaud in the old Tennis Court of La Bouteille which had been fitted up for the first performances of French opera in 1671-1672. The united companies played there until 1680, when the long-standing jealousy which had existed between the Troupe du Roi and the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne was finally dissipated by the fusion of the two companies to form the Comédie Française. For nine years the famous Comédie used the Théâtre Guénégaud, whose site may be seen marked with an inscription at 42 Rue Mazarine. In 1689 the players were evicted from the Théâtre Guénégaud, owing to the machinations of the Jansenists at the Collége Mazarin, and rented the Tennis Court de l’Etoile near the Boulevard St. Germain, now No. 14 Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, which they opened on 18th April 1689 by a performance of Phèdre and Le Médecin malgré lui. Here the Comédie Française remained until 1770. In 1781 they were playing at the Théâtre de la Nation (now Odéon.)178 In 1787 a theatre was built in the Rue Richelieu for the Variétés Amusantes, or the Palais Variétés, where the new Théâtre Français179 now stands, a little to the west of Richelieu’s theatre of the Palais Cardinal, whose site is indicated by an inscription at the corner of the Rues de Valois and St. Honoré.
Soon the passions evoked by the Revolutionary movement were felt on the boards, and the staid old Comédie Française was rent by rival factions. The performance of Chenier’s patriotic tragedy, Charles IX., on 4th November 1789, was made a political demonstration, and the pit acclaimed Talma with frantic applause as he created the rôle of Charles IX., and the days of St. Bartholomew were acted on the stage. The bishops tried to stop the performances, and priests refused absolution to those of their penitents who went to see them. The Royalists among the Comedians replied by playing a loyalist repertory, Cinna and Athalie, amid shouts from the pit for William Tell and the Death of Cæsar, and Molière’s famous house became an arena where political factions strove for mastery. Men went to the theatre armed as to a battle. Every couplet fired the passions of the audience, the boxes crying, “Vive le roi!” to be answered by the hoarse voices of the pit, “Vive la nation!” Shouts were raised for the busts of Voltaire and of Brutus: they were brought from the foyer and placed on the stage. The very kings of shreds and patches on the boards came to blows and the Roman toga concealed a poignard. For a time “idolatry” triumphed at the Nation, but Talma and the patriots at length won. A reconciliation was effected, and at a performance of the Taking of the Bastille, on 8th January 1791, Talma addressed the audience saying that they had composed their differences. Naudet, the Royalist champion, was recalcitrant, and amid furious shouts from the pit, “On your knees, citizen!” at length gave way, embraced Talma with ill-grace, and on the ensuing nights the Revolutionary repertory, The Conquest of Liberty, Rome Saved, and Brutus held the boards. The court took their revenge at the opera where the boxes called for the airs, “O Richard, O mon roi,” and “Règne sur un peuple fidèle,” while the king, queen and dauphin appeared in the box amid shouts of “Vive le roi!” On 13th January of the same year the restrictions on the opening of playhouses were revoked, and by November no less than seventy-eight theatres were registered on the books of the Hôtel de Ville. The Théâtre Français became the Théâtre de la Republique, and during the early months of ’93, when the fate of the monarchy hung in the balance, the most popular piece was Catherine, or The Farmer’s Fair Wife (La belle Fermière). Fénelon, a new tragedy, was often played, and on 6th February citizen Talma acted Othello for his benefit performance.
In the stormy year of 1830, when the July Revolution made an end for ever of the Bourbon cause in France, the Comédie Française was again a scene of fierce and bitter strife. Hernani, a drama in verse, had been accepted from the pen of Victor Hugo, the brilliant and exuberant master of a new Romantic school of poets, who had determined to emancipate themselves from the traditions, which had long since hardened into literary dogmas, of the Classical school of the siècle de Louis Quatorze. On the night of the first performance each side, Romanticists and Classicists, had packed the theatre with their partisans, and the air was charged with feeling. The curtain rose, but less than two lines were uttered before the pent-up passions of the audience burst forth:—
“Dona Josefa—‘Serait-ce déjà lui? C’est bien à l’escalier
Dérobé——’”
The last word had not passed the actress’s lips when a howl of execration rose from the devotees of Racine, outraged by the author’s heresy in permitting an adjective to stray into the second line of the verse. The Romanticists, led by Théophile Gautier, answered in withering blasphemies, and soon the pit became a pandemonium of warring factions. Night after night the literary sects renewed their contests, and the representations, as Victor Hugo said, became battles rather than performances. The year 1830 was the ’93 of the Romantic school, but the passions it evoked have long since been calmed, and Hernani and Le Roi s’Amuse, which latter was suppressed by the Government of Louis Philippe after the first performance, have taken their place in the classic repertory of the Théâtre Français beside the tragedies of Racine and Corneille.
A curious development of dramatic art runs parallel to the movement we have traced. One of the earliest Corporations of Paris was that of the famous Basoche,180 or law-clerks and practitioners, at the Palais de Justice, who were organised in a little realm of their own, subject to the superior power of the Parlement. The Basoche had its own king (roi de la Basoche), chancellor, masters, almoners, secretaries, treasurers and a number of minor officials, made its own laws and punished offenders. It had its own money, seal, and arms composed of an escritoire on a field fleur-de-lisé, surmounted by a casque and morion. It had, moreover, jurisdiction over the farces, sottises and moralités played by its members before the public. The clerks of the Basoche organised processions and plays for public festivals, and were compensated for out-of-pocket expenses if for any reason the celebrations were cancelled by the Parlement. If the date, 6th January 1482, of one of these performances in the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, so vividly described by Victor Hugo in Notre Dame, be correct, the prohibition by the Parlement in 1477, renewed in 1478, of any performances of farce, sottise, or moralité by the king of the Basoche in the Palais or the Châtelet, or elsewhere in public, under pain of a whipping with withies and banishment, must have been soon withdrawn. In 1538 the Basoche was ordered to deliver to the Parlement any plays they proposed to perform, that they might be examined and emended (visités et reformés) and to act in public, only such plays as had been approved by the court.
The clerks of the Basoche were clothed in yellow and blue taffety, and, on extraordinary occasions, in gorgeous costumes varying according to the company to which they belonged. Each captain had the form and style of his company’s dress painted on vellum, and whoso desired to join signed his name beneath, and agreed to be subject to a fine of ten crowns if he made default. In 1528 a famous trial took place before the Parlement on the occasion of an appeal by one of the clerks against the chancellor of the Basoche, who had seized his cloak in payment of a fine and costs. After many pleadings by celebrated lawyers, the case was referred back to the king of the Basoche, with instructions that he was to treat his subjects amiably.
The treasurers of the Basoche were charged with the cost of the annual planting of the May tree in the Cour du Mai of the Palais. Towards the end of May the procession of the Basoche wended its way to the Forest of Bondy, where halt was made under the Orme aux harangues (elm of the speeches). Here their procureur made an oration, and demanded from the officer of woods and forests two trees of his own choice in the king’s name, which were carried to Paris amid much playing of drums and fifes and trumpets. On the last Saturday in May the ceremony of the planting took place in the court of the palace, the preceding year’s tree, standing to the right of the entrance, was felled and removed, and the more flourishing of the two brought from the forest was planted in its stead.
Anne of Austria, to whom Molière dedicated one of his plays, was so devoted an admirer of the theatre that even during the period of court mourning for her royal husband she was unable to renounce her favourite pleasure and witnessed the plays at the Palais Royal concealed behind her ladies. Mazarin, courtier that he was, flattered her passion for the drama by introducing a company of Italian opera-singers, who in 1647 performed La Finta Pazza at the Hôtel de Bourbon.
The new entertainment met with instant success, and the French were spurred to emulation by the music and voices of the foreign performers. Anne’s music masters, Lambert and Cambert, set to music a piece written by the Abbé Perrin, who was attached to the court of the Duke of Orleans, and this musical comedy was performed with brilliant success before the young king at Vincennes. Encouraged by Mazarin, Perrin and Cambert joined the Marquis of Sourdeac, a clever mechanician, and obtained permission in 1669 to open an Academy of Music, for so the new venture was called, and works were performed which vied in attraction with those of the Italians. Perrin now obtained the sole privilege of producing operas in Paris and other French towns, and in 1671-1672 we find the entrepreneurs giving performances of Pomone among other “Comédies Françaises en Musique” in the theatre of the Hôtel de Guénégaud. Perrin having disagreed with his partners, the privilege of performing opera was next transferred to a young Italian musician named Lulli, who had entered the service of Mademoiselle (daughter of the Duke of Orleans) as a kitchen boy, but having developed an extraordinary aptitude for the violin was put under a master, and became one of the greatest performers of the day. He entered the king’s service, won the protection of Madame de Montespan, and so charmed Louis by his talents that his fortune was assured. Lulli’s works were first given at the Tennis Court of Bel-air, in the Rue Vaugirard, and a clause having been inserted in the charter permitting the nobles of the court to take part in the representations without derogation, a performance of Love and Bacchus was given before the king in which the Duke of Monmouth was associated with seven French nobles.
When Molière’s company of comedians left the theatre of the Palais Royal in 1673, Lulli’s “Academy” was established in their place, and the Palais Royal Theatre became the Royal Opera House until 1787, with an interval caused by the rebuilding after the fire of 1763. In 1697 the Italians were forbidden to perform any more in Paris, and French opera enjoyed a monopoly of royal favour, until the Regent recalled the Italians in 1716.
The Académie de Musique, or French Opera, subsequently migrated to the Salle d’Opéra, at the Hôtel Louvois, on the site of the present Square Louvois. It was in this house that the Duke of Berri was assassinated in 1820. The Government decreed the demolition of the building, and an opera house was hurriedly erected in the Rue Lepelletier. This inconvenient, stuffy Hall of the Muses, so familiar to the older generation of opera-goers, was at length superseded by the present luxurious temple in 1874.
The early French operas were of the nature of elaborate ballets, based invariably on mythological subjects, and, indeed, the ballet up to recent times, when the reforming influence of Wagner’s music-dramas made itself felt, has always formed the more important part of every operatic performance. Only when the curtain rose on the scènes de ballet did chatter cease, for as Taine remarked, “Le public ne se trouve émoustillé que par le ballet” (“The public only brightens up at the ballet”), and the traditional habit of Society was expressed in the formula, “On n’écoute que le ballet” (“One only listens to the ballet”). Molière wrote a tragédie-ballet, a pastorale heroique, a pastorale comique, and eight comédies-ballets, in one of which, Le Sicilian, the king himself, the Marquis of Villeroi and other courtiers performed with Molière and his daughter. In 1681 the permission already given to the princes and other nobles to take part in the ballets without derogation was extended to the ladies of the court, who in that year performed the Triomphe de l’Amour. The innovation proved most successful, and soon affected the public stage, where, as at the court, up to that period male performers alone were tolerated. Mdlle. de la Fontaine was the first of the famous danseuses of the Paris opera, and her portrait, with those of some score of her successors, still adorn the foyer de la danse. The opera was a social rather than a musical function, and the old foyer, until the fall of the Second Empire, was the favourite meeting-place during the season of royal and distinguished personages, courtiers, ministers, ambassadors, and, indeed, of all French society of the male persuasion. Such was the passion for the opera during the reign of Louis XVI. that fashionable devotees would journey from Brussels to Paris in time to see the curtain rise and return to Brussels when the performance was over, travelling all night.
“In fair weather or foul,” says Diderot in the opening lines of the Neveu de Rameau “it is my custom, towards five in the evening, to stroll about the Palais Royal, where I muse silently on politics, love, taste or philosophy. If the weather be too cold or wet, I take refuge in the Café de la Régence, and there I amuse myself by watching the chess players; for Paris is the one place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the one place in Paris, where chess is played perfectly.” The Café Procope and the Régence have been termed the Adam and Eve of the cafés of Paris. The former was the first coffee-house seen there, and was opened by one Gregory of Aleppo and a Sicilian, Procopio by name, shortly before the Comédie Française was transferred in 1689 to its new house in the present Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. The famous café, where, too, ices were first sold, was situated opposite the theatre, and at once became a kind of ante-chamber to the Comédie, crowded with actors and dramatic authors, among whom were seen Voltaire, Crébillon and Piron.
The Café de la Place du Palais Royal, the original apellation of the Régence, was founded shortly after the Procope, and became the favourite haunt of literary men, and especially of chess-players. Here the author of Gil Blas beheld, in a vast salon brilliant with lustres and mirrors, a score of silent and grave personages, pousseurs de bois (wood-shovers), playing at chess on marble tables, surrounded by others watching the games, amid a silence so profound that the movement of the pieces could alone be heard. If, however, we may credit a description of the famous hall of the chequer-board published in Fraser’s Magazine, December 1840, the tempers of the players must have suffered a distressing deterioration since the times of Le Sage, for when the author of the article entered the café, in the winter of 1839, his ears were assailed by a “roar like that of the Regent’s Park beast show at feeding-time.” So great was the renown of the Parisian players that strangers from the four corners of the earth—Poles, Turks, Moors and Hindoos—made journeys to the Café de la Régence as to an arena where victory was esteemed final and complete. Not even on the Rialto of Venice, says the writer in Fraser’s, in its most famous time, could so great a mixture of garbs and tongues be met. Here, among other literary monarchs who visited the café, came Voltaire and D’Alembert. Jean Jacques Rousseau, dressed as an Armenian, drew such crowds that the proprietor was forced to appeal for police protection, and the eccentric philosopher, while absorbed in play, was furtively sketched by St. Aubin. Here came, incogniti, the Emperor Joseph of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette, and Emperor Paul of Russia, the latter betraying his imperial quality by tossing to the waiter a golden louis he had won by betting on a game. The café was the favourite resort of Robespierre, a devoted chess-player, who lived close by in the Rue St. Honoré (No. 398), and of the young Napoleon Bonaparte when waiting on fortune in Paris. The latter is said to have been a rough, impatient player, and a bad loser. Hats were kept on to economise space, and on a winter Sunday afternoon a chair was worth a monarch’s ransom: when a champion player entered, hats were raised, and fifty challengers leapt from their seats to offer a game. So proud was the proprietor of the distinction conferred on his café, that long after Rousseau’s and Voltaire’s deaths he would call to the waiter, “Serve Jean Jacques!” “Look to Voltaire!” if any customers sat down at the tables where the famous philosophers had been wont to sit. While the big game of political chess was being enacted in the streets of Paris during the three days of July 1830, the players of the café are said to have calmly pushed their wooden pieces undisturbed by the fighting outside, during which the front of the building was injured. The original café no longer exists, for in 1852 the Régence was removed from the Place du Palais Royal to the Rue St. Honoré. Last year the writer was startled by an amazing exuviation of the somewhat faded café, which had assumed a new decoration of most brilliant and approved modernity; it now vies in splendour with the cafes of the Boulevards. A few chess-players still linger on and are relegated to a recessed room.
Shortly after the foundation of the Régence another café was opened by Widow Marion on the old Carrefour de l’Opéra, where the Academicians gathered and discussed of matters affecting the French language. At Guadot’s, on the Place de l’Ecole, was heard the clank of spur and sabre. Soon every phase of Parisian social life found its appropriate coffee-house, and by the end of the eighteenth century some nine hundred cafés were established in the city.
But this new development was regarded with small favour by the Government, always suspicious of any form of social and intellectual activity. Politics were forbidden, and spies haunted the precincts of the chief cafés. Ill fared the man, however distinguished, whose political feelings overmastered his prudence, for an invidious phrase was not infrequently the password to the Bastille. It was difficult even to discuss philosophy, and the lovers of wisdom who met at Procope’s were reduced to inventing a jargon for its principal terms—Monsieur l’Etre for God, Javotte for Religion and Margot for the Soul—to put spies off the scent, not always with success. No newspapers were provided until the Revolutionary time, when the Gazette or the Journal became more important than the coffee: the cafés of the Palais Royal were then transformed into so many political clubs, where every table served as a rostrum of fiery declamation, for the agitated and eventful summer of 1789 was a rainy one, to the good fortune of the Palais Royal houses. No. 46 Rue Richelieu stands on the site of the Café de Foy, the senior and most famous of them, founded in 1700. It extended through to the gardens of the Palais Royal, and in early times its proprietor was the only one permitted to place chairs and tables on the terrace. There, in the afternoon, would sit the finely-apparelled sons of Mars, and other gay dogs of the period, with their scented perukes, amber vinaigrettes, silver-hilted swords and gold-headed canes, quizzing the passers-by. In summer evenings, after the conclusion of the opera at 8.30., the bonne compagnie in full dress would stroll under the great overarching trees of the grand allée, or sit at the cafés listening to open-air performers, sometimes remaining on moonlight nights as late as 2 a.m. Between 1770 and 1780 the favourite promenade was the scene of violent conflicts between the partisans of Gluck and Piccini, and many a duel was recorded between the champions of the rival musical factions.
It was from one of the tables of the Café Foy that Camille Desmoulins sounded the war-cry of the Revolution. Every day a special courier from Versailles brought the bulletins of the National Assembly, which were read publicly amid clamorous interjections. Spies found their office a perilous one, for, if discovered, they were ducked in the basins of the fountains, and, when feeling grew more bitter, risked meeting a violent death. Later the Café Foy made a complete volte-face, raised its ices to twenty sous and grew Royalist in tone. Its frequenters came armed with sword-sticks and loaded canes, raised their hats when the king’s name was uttered, and one evil day planted a gallows outside the café, painted with the national colours. The excited patriots stormed the house, expelled the Royalists and disinfected the salon with gin. During the occupation of Paris by the allies many a fatal duel between the foreign officers and the Imperialists was initiated there. Later, Horace Vernet painted a swallow on the ceiling, which attracted many visitors; the dramatists and artists of the Théâtre Français freely patronised the house, and among them might be often seen the huge figure of the most prodigious master of modern romantic fiction, Alexandre Dumas.
The extremer section of the Revolutionists frequented the Café Corazza, still extant, which soon became a minor Jacobins, where, after the club was closed, the excited orators continued their discussions: Chabot, Collot d’Herbois and other terrorists met there. The Café Valois was patronised by the Feuillants, and so excited the ire of the Fédérés, who met at the Caveau, that one day they issued forth, assailed their opponents’ stronghold and burned the copies of the Journal de Paris found there. The old Café Procope in the south of Paris became the Café Zoppi, where the “zealous children of triumphant Liberty” assembled, and where the “Friends of the Revolution and of Humanity,” on the news of Franklin’s death, covered the lustres with crape and affixed his bust, crowned with oak leaves, outside the door. A legend told of the great American’s death, and the words “vir Deus” were inscribed beneath the bust. Every day at five o’clock the habitués formed themselves into a club in the salon decorated with statues of Mucius Scevola and Mirabeau, passed resolutions, sent protesting deputations to Royalist editors, and every evening made autos da fé of their publications outside the café. When war was declared they subscribed to purchase a case of muskets as an offering to the Fatherland. Self-regarding citizens, the Société des Amis de la Loi, who desired to eat and drink in peace far from political storms, met in the Café de Flore, near the Porte St. Denis, until the Jacobins applied the scriptural maxim—He who is not for us is against us—and they were forced to take sides. Every partizan had his café; Hebertists, Fayettists, Maratists, Dantonists and Robespierrists, all gathered where their friends were known to meet.
In the early nineteenth century on the displacement of the favourite promenade of Parisian flaneurs from the Palais Royal to the Boulevard des Italiens, the proprietors of cafés and restaurants followed. A group of young fellows entered one evening a small cabaret near the Comédie Italienne (now Opéra Comique), found the wine to their taste and the cuisine excellent. They praised host and fare to their friends, and the modest cabaret developed into the Café Anglais, most famous of epicurean temples, frequented during the Second Empire by kings and princes, to whom alone the haughty proprietor would devote personal care.
The sumptuous cafés Tortoni founded in 1798 and de Paris opened 1822 have long since passed away. So has the Café Hardy, whose proprietor invented dejeûners à la fourchette, although its rival and neighbour, the Café Riche, still exists. “One must be very Hardy to dine at Riche’s, and very Riche to dine at Hardy’s,” was the celebrated mot of an old gourmand of the First Empire. During the early times of the Third Republic the Café Fronton was crowded almost daily by prominent politicians, Gambetta, Spuller, Naquet and others, while the Imperialists, under Cassagnac, met at the Café de la Paix in the Place de l’Opéra, which was dubbed the Boulevard de l’Isle d’Elbe. Many others of the celebrated cafés of the boulevards have disappeared or suffered a transformation into the more popular Brasseries or Tavernes of which so many, alternating with the theatres, restaurants and dazzling shops that line the most-frequented evening promenade of Paris, invite the thirsty or leisurely pleasure-seeker of to-day.
Nowhere may the traveller gain a better impression of the essential gaiety and sociability of the Parisian temperament than by sitting outside a café on the boulevards on a public festival and observing his neighbours and the passers-by—their imperturbable good humour; their easy manners; their simple enjoyments; their quick intelligence, alert gait and expressive gestures; the wonderful skill of the women in dress. The glittering halls of pleasure that appeal to so many travellers, the Bohemian cafés of the outer boulevards, the Folies Bergères, the Moulins Rouges, the Bals Bullier, with their meretricious and vulgar attractions, frequented by the more facile daughters of Lutetia, “whose havoc of virtue is measured by the length of their laundresses’ bills,” as a genial satirist of their sex has phrased it—all these manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained by the patronage of foreign visitors, but rather in the smaller voices that speak from the inmost Paris which we have essayed to describe. Nor can we bid more fitting adieu to our readers than by translating Goethe’s words to Eckermann: “Think of the city of Paris where all the best of the realms of nature and art in the whole earth are open to daily contemplation, a world-city where the crossing of every bridge or every square recalls a great past, and where at every street corner a piece of history has been unfolded.”
Footnotes
1 “Faudra recommencer” (“We must begin again”), said, to the present writer in 1871, a Communist refugee bearing a great scar on his face from a wound received fighting at the barricades.
2 Inf. XXIX. 121-123. A French commentator consoles himself by reflecting that the author of the Divina Commedia is far more vituperative when dealing with certain Italian peoples, whom he designates as hogs, curs, wolves and foxes.
3 Cobbett, comparing the relative intellectual culture of the British Isles and of France between the years 1600 and 1787, found that of the writers on the arts and sciences who were distinguished by a place in the Universal, Historical, Critical and Bibliographical Dictionary one hundred and thirty belonged to England, Scotland and Ireland, and six hundred and seventy-six to France.
4 “Nous cuisinons même l’amour.”—Taine.
5 The Seine takes five hours to flow through the seven miles of modern Paris.
6 “Cesare armato con gli occhi grifani.”—Inferno, iv. 123.
7 Of some 10,000 ancient inscriptions found in Gaul, only twenty are in Celtic, and less than thirty words of Celtic origin now remain in the French language.
8 The water supply of Paris is even now partly derived from these sources, and flows along the old repaired Roman aqueduct.
9 Traces of the Gallo-Roman wall have been discovered, and are marked across the roadway opposite No. 6 Rue de la Colombe.
10 The Isle de Galilée was joined to the Cité during the thirteenth century.
11 In 1848 some remains were found of the old halls of this building, and of its columns, worn by the ropes of the boatmen who used to moor their craft to them.
12 The exact position of this bridge is much disputed by authorities, some of whom would locate it on the site of the present Pont au Change. The balance of probabilities seems to us in favour of the position given in the text.
13 “Jovem brutum atque hebetem.”
14 Not to be confounded with the Royal Provost, a king’s officer, who replaced the Carlovingian counts and Capetian viscounts.
15 The present writer recalls a similar glacial epoch in Paris during the early eighties, when the Seine was frozen over at Christmas time.
16 By the law of 350 A.D. it was a capital offence to sacrifice to or honour the old gods. The persecuted had become persecutors. Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme.
17 “He soon hugs himself in unconditioned ease.”
18 To protect home producers against the competition of the Gallic wine and olive growers, Roman statesmen could conceive nothing better than the stupid expedient of prohibiting the culture of the vine and olive in Gaul.
19 The favourite arm of the Franks, a short battle-axe, used as a missile or at close quarters.
20 Her figure was a favourite subject for the sculptors of Christian churches. She usually bears a taper in her hand and a devil is seen peering over her shoulder. This symbolises the miraculous relighting of the taper after the devil had extinguished it. The taper was long preserved at Notre Dame.
21 If we may believe Gregory of Tours, her arguments were vituperative rather than convincing. “Your Jupiter,” said she, “is omnium stuprorum spurcissimus perpetrator.”
22 Merovée, second of the kings of the Salic Franks, was fabled to be the issue of Clodio’s wife and a sea monster.
23 The palace in the Cité, where now stands the Palais de Justice.
24 Roads in the Arrondissement of Amiens and Mondidier in Picardy are still known as Chaussées Brunehautes.
25 The works of art traditionally ascribed to St. Eloy are many. He is reported to have made a golden throne set with stones (or rather two thrones, for he used his material so honestly and economically). He was made master of the mint and thirteen pieces of money are known which bear his name. He decorated the tombs of St. Martin and St. Denis, and constructed reliquaries for St. Germain, Notre Dame, and other churches.
26 Five of them died between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six.
27 It was during this struggle that St. Leger, bishop of Autun, whose name is dear to English sportsmen, one of the most popular of saints in his time, was imprisoned, blinded and subsequently beheaded by Ebrion’s orders in 678.
28 The term Cité (civitas) was given to the old Roman part of many French towns.
29 The Carlovingians had been careful to abolish the office of mayor of the palace.
30 St. Pierre was subsequently enriched by the possession of the body of St. Maur, brought thither in the Norman troubles by fugitive monks from Anjou, and the monastery is better known to history under the name of St. Maur des Fossés. The entrails of our own Henry V. were buried there. Rabelais, before its secularisation, was one of its canons, and Catherine de Medicis once possessed a château on its site. Monastery and château no longer exist.
31 The villa of those days was a vast domain, part dwelling, part farm, part game preserve.
32 The remains of the great Viking’s castle are still shown at Aalesund, in Norway.
33 When Allan Barbetorte, after the recovery of Nantes, went to give thanks to God in the cathedral, he was compelled to cut his way, sword in hand, through thorns and briers.
34 It must be admitted, however, that the poet’s uncouth diction is anything but Virgilian.
35 Abbo’s favourite epithet. They were without a head, for they knew not Christ, the Head of Mankind.
36 In the Middle Ages and down to 1761 Montfaucon had a sinister reputation. There stood the gallows of Paris, a great stone gibbet with its three rows of chains, near the old Barrière du Combat, where the present Rue de la Grange aux Belles abuts on the Boulevard de la Villette.
37 William the Conqueror was also known as William the Builder.
38 The surname Capet is said to have originated in the capet or hood of the abbot’s mantle which Hugh wore as lay abbot of St. Martin’s, having laid aside the crown after his coronation.
39 Carducci. In una Chiesa gotica.
40 A dramatic representation of the delivery of the papal bull, painted by Jean Paul Laurens, hangs in the museum of the Luxembourg.
41 It must be remembered that heresy was the solvent anti-social force of the age, and was regarded with the same feelings of abhorrence as anarchist doctrines are regarded by modern statesmen.
42 The Rue des Francs Bourgeois in Paris reminds us that there dwelt those who were free to move without the consent of their feudal superiors.
43 It was the conduct of this campaign that won for Robert the title of Robert the Devil.
44 The possession of an oven was a lucrative monopoly in mediæval times. The writer knows of a village in South Italy where this curious privilege is still possessed by the parish priest, who levies a small indemnity of a few loaves, made specially of larger size, for each use of the oven.
45 He was said to be “kind even to Jews.”
46 The indignant scribe is most precise: they walked abroad artatis clunibus et protensis natibus.
47 The reformers always discover the nunneries to be so much more corrupt than the monasteries, but it is a little suspicious that in every case the former are expropriated to the latter. The abbot of St. Maur evidently had some qualms concerning the expropriation of St. Eloy, and wished to restore it to the bishop.
48 The abbey was suppressed at the time of the Revolution, and the site is now occupied by the Halle aux Vins.
49 In the ardour of the fight the king found himself surrounded by the enemy’s footmen, was unhorsed, and while they were vainly seeking for a vulnerable spot in his armour some French knights had time to rescue him.
50 Jeanne de Bourgogne, queen of Philip le Long, lived at the Hôtel de Nesle, and is said to have seduced scholars by night into the tower, had them tied in sacks and flung into the Seine. If we may believe Villon, this was the queen—
“Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust jetté en ung sac en Seine.”
Legend adds that the schoolman, made famous by his thesis, that if an ass were placed equidistant between two bundles of hay of equal attraction he would die of hunger before he could resolve to eat either, was saved by his disciples, who placed a barge, loaded with straw, below the tower to break his fall.
51 She was wont to say to her son—“I would rather see thee die than commit a mortal sin.”
52 By a subtle irony, part of the money was derived from the tribute of the Jews of Paris.
53 In the catalogue of the Acts of Francis I., quoted by Lavisse, is an order to pay the Dames des Filles de Joie, which follow the court, forty-five livres tournois for their payments, due for the month of May 1540, as it has been the custom to do from most ancient times (de toute ancienneté.)
54 On account of the cord they wore round their habit.
55 St. Louis loved the Franciscans, and in the Fioretti a beautiful story is told how the king, in the guise of a pilgrim, visiting Brother Giles at Perugia, knelt with the good friar in the embrace of fervent affection for a great space of time in silence. They parted without speaking a word.
56 The sale or the provostship of Paris was abolished and a man of integrity, Etienne Boileau, appointed with adequate emoluments. So completely was this once venal office rehabilitated, that no seigneur regarded the post as beneath him.
57 It was buried in the church of Monreale at Palermo.
58 Joinville was a brave and tender knight; he tells us that before starting to join the crusaders at Marseilles he called all his friends and household before him, and prayed that if he had wronged any one of them he would declare it and reparation should be made. After a severe penance he was assoiled, and as he set forth, durst not turn back his eyes lest his heart should be melted at leaving his fair château of Joinville and his two children whom he loved so dearly.
59 The relics were transferred to a new church of St. Stephen (St. Etienne du Mont), built by the abbot of St. Genevieve as a parish church for his servants and tenants.
60 The early glass-workers were particularly fond of their beautiful red. “Wine of the colour of the glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle,” was a popular locution of the time.
61 Brunetto Latini, in the thirteenth century contrasted the high towers and grim stone walls of the fortress-palaces of the Italian nobles with the large, spacious and painted houses of the French, their rooms adorned pour avoir joie et delit (to have joy and delight) and surrounded with orchards and gardens.
62 Another delusion of moderns is that there was an absence of personal cleanliness in those ages. In the census of the inhabitants of Paris, who in 1292 were subject to the Taille, there are inscribed the names of no less than twenty-six proprietors of public baths: a larger proportion to population than exists to-day.
63 Hence the name of clerc applied to any student, even if a layman.
64 “Love is quickly caught in gentle heart.”
65 Afterwards bishop of London.
66 The two churches still existed in the eighteenth century and stood on the site of the southern Cours Visconti and Lefuel of the present Louvre.
67 The actual originator was, however, the queen’s physician, Robert de Douai, who left a sum of money which formed the nucleus of the foundation.
68 The Montaigue scholars were called capetes from their peculiar cape fermée, or cloak, such as Masters of Arts used to wear. The Bibliothèque St. Genevieve occupies the site of the college.
69 The Rue des Anglais still exists in the Latin Quarter.
70 This interesting twelfth-century building will be found in the Rue St. Julien le Pauvre, and is now used as a Uniat Greek church.
71 Par. X. 136. “Who lecturing in Straw St. deduced truths that brought him hatred.”
72 Benvenuto was certainly in France and possibly in Paris during the fourteenth century. At any rate he would be familiar with Parisian students, many of whom were Italians.
73 In the seventeenth century the councillors had increased to one hundred and twenty and the courts to seven.
74 The term “Parlement” was originally applied to the transaction of the common business of a monastic establishment after the conclusion of the daily chapter.
[75] The contemporary chronicler, Villani, says of one of these scoundrels that he “was named Nosso Dei, one of our Florentines, a man filled with every vice.”
76 The indictment covers seven quarto pages. The charges may be briefly classified as blasphemy, heresy, spitting and trampling on the crucifix, obscene and secret rites, and unnatural crimes.
77 There is a significant entry on page 273 of the published trial: in ista pagina nihil est scriptum. The empty page tells of the moment when the papal commissioners, having heard that the fifty-four had been burned, suspended the sitting.
78 Nihil sibi appropriare intendebat.
79 Or the isle of the Jews, which, with its sister islet of Bussy, were subsequently joined to the island of the Cité, and now form the Place Dauphine and the land that divides the Pont Neuf. Philip watched the fires from his palace garden.
80 It is to be hoped that some English scholar will do for these most important records, the earliest report of any great criminal trial which we possess, what Mr T. Douglas Murray has done for the Trial and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc.
81 During John the Good’s reign, the province of Dauphiny had been added to the French crown, and the king’s eldest son took the title of Dauphin.
82 So called from the familiar appellation “Jacques Bonhomme,” applied half in contempt, half in jest, by the seigneurs to the peasants who served them in the wars.
83 The bastilles were fortified castles before the chief gates of Paris.
84 Howell mentions the locution in a letter dated 1654.
85 Charles taxed and borrowed heavily. Even the members of his household were importuned for loans, however small. His cook lent him frs. 67.50.
86 The scene is quaintly illustrated in an illuminated copy of Froissart in the British Museum.
87 The scene of the assassination is marked by an escutcheon and an inscription.
88 They melted down the reliquaries in the Paris churches.
89 In 1417 Charles, returning from a visit to the queen at the castle of Vincennes, met the Chevalier Bois-Burdon going thither. He ordered his arrest, and under torture a confession reflecting on the queen’s honour was extorted. Bois-Burdon was sewn in a sack and dropped into the Seine. The queen was banished to Tours, and her jewels and treasures confiscated. Furious with the king and the Armagnac faction, she made common cause with the Duke of Burgundy.
90 A portrait of Jean sans Peur exists in the Louvre, No. 1002.
91 An equestrian statue in bronze stands at the south end of the Rue des Pyramides, a few hundred yards from the spot where the Maid fell before the Porte St. Honoré.
92 The faculty of Theology declared her sold to the devil, impious to her parents, stained with Christian blood. The faculty of Law decreed her deserving of punishment, but only if she were obstinate and of sound mind.
93 In 1421 and 1422 the people of Paris had seen Henry V. and his French consort sitting in state at the Louvre, surrounded by a brilliant throng of princes, prelates and barons. Hungry crowds watched the sumptuous banquet and then went away fasting, for nothing was offered them. “It was not so in the former times under our kings,” they murmured, “then there was open table kept, and servants distributed the meats and wine even of the king himself.”
94 Part of the Rue de l’Homme Armé still exists.
95 The fifteenth-century goldsmiths of Paris: Loris, the Hersants, and Jehan Gallant, were famed throughout Europe.
96 The reader will hardly need to be reminded that this amazing folly forms one of the principal episodes in Scott’s Quentin Durward.
97 Flamboyant windows were a natural, technical development of Gothic. The aim of the later builders was to facilitate the draining away of the water which the old mullioned windows used to retain.
98 One of the façades of this remarkable building may be seen in the courtyard of the Beaux Arts at Paris.
99 Brittany was incorporated with the Monarchy 1491.
100 The good king’s portrait by an Italian sculptor may be seen in the Louvre, Room VII., and on his monument in St. Denis he kneels beside his beloved and chère Bretonne, Anne of Brittany, whose loss he wept for eight days and nights.
101 “He was well named after St. Francis, because of the holes in his hands,” said a Sorbonne doctor.
102 “Ah! me, how thou art changed! See, thou art neither two nor one.”
103 Travellers to Paris in the days of King Francis had cause to remember gratefully that monarch’s solicitude, for a maximum of charges was fixed, and an order made that every hotel-keeper should affix his prices outside the door, that extortion might be avoided. Among other maxima, the price of a pair of sheets, to “sleep not more than five persons,” was to be five deniers (a penny).
104 The salamander was figured on the royal arms of Francis.
105 About £600,000 in present-day value.
106 For the first offence a fine; for the second, the lips to be cloven; for the third, the tongue pierced; for the fourth, death.
107 The image was stolen in 1545 and replaced by one of wood. This was struck down in 1551, and the bishop of Paris substituted for it one of marble.
108 One thousand two hundred are said to have suffered death during the month of vengeance.
109 Henry of Guise had succeeded to the dukedom after his father’s assassination.
110 Suspicions of poison were entertained by the Huguenots. Jeanne, in a letter to the Marquis de Beauvais, complained that holes were made in her rooms that she might be spied upon.
111 Félibien and Lobïneau, 1725.
112 “That to show pity was to be cruel to them: to be cruel to them was to show pity.”
113 The municipality gave presents of money to the archers who had taken part in the massacre, to the watermen who prevented the Huguenots from crossing the Seine, and to grave-diggers for having buried in eight days about 1,100 bodies.
114 Now known as the Galerie d’Apollon.
115 Ugonottorum strages. Inscription on the obverse of the medal.
116 Examples of magnificent costumes of the order may be seen in the Cluny Museum.
117 The Duke of Guise was so called from his face being scarred by a wound received at the battle of Dolmans.
118 The king had premonitions of a violent end. One day, after keeping Easter at Negeon with great devotion, he suddenly returned to the Louvre and ordered all the lions, bears, bulls, and other wild animals he kept there for baiting by dogs, to be shot. He had dreamt that he was set upon and eaten by wild beasts.
119 So called derisively, because he was born and brought up in the poor province of Bearn, in the Pyrenees.
120 Her majesty, we learn from the Mémoires of L’Estoile, was of a rich figure, stout, fine eyes and complexion. She used no paint, powder or other vilanie.
121 The new palace was situated in the parish of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, the parish church of the Louvre.
122 The north tower was left only partially constructed, and was finished by Louis XIII.
123 By a curious coincidence the widening of the Rue de la Ferronnerie had been ordered just before the king was assassinated.
124 They marked the seven resting-places of the saint as he journeyed to St. Denis after his martyrdom.
125 The Grande Galerie.
126 In the Hôtel de Bourbon, east of the old Louvre, sometimes known as the Petit Bourbon.
127 The church of Notre Dame des Victoires commemorates the victory.
128 The Marché St. Honoré now occupies its site.
129 In 1793 the tomb was desecrated, and the head removed from the body, but in 1863, as an inscription tells, the head was recovered by the historian Duruy, and after seventy years reunited to the trunk.
130 A letter from Paris to Lyons was taxed at two sous: it now costs three.
131 The Rue Poulletier marks the line of the old channel between the islands.
132 So named from the wooden seat, or couche de bois, covered with rich stuff embroidered with fleur-de-lys, on which the king sat when he attended a meeting of the Parlement.
133 One of the schemes of Francis I. to raise money had been to offer the benches to the highest bidders, and under the law of 1604 the office of councillor became a hereditary property on payment to the court of one-sixtieth of its value. Moreover, the Parlement was but a local body, one among several others in the provinces.
134 The added indignity of the whip is an invention of Voltaire.
135 Louis used, however, to stilt his low stature by means of thick pads in his boots.
136 Taine, basing his calculation on a MS. bound with the monogram of Mansard, estimated the cost of Versailles in modern equivalent at about 750,000,000 francs (£30,000,000 sterling.)
137 The writer, whose youth was passed among the descendants of the Huguenot silk-weavers of Spitalfields, has indelible memories of their sterling character and admirable industry.
138 Marshal Luxembourg was dubbed the Tapissier de Notre Dame (the upholsterer of Notre Dame), from the number of captured flags he sent to the cathedral.
139 In a previous campaign the king had taken his queen and two mistresses with him in one coach. The peasants used to amuse themselves by coming to see the “three queens.”
140 When the Duke of Orleans was about to start for Spain, the king asked whom he had chosen to accompany him. Orleans mentioned, among others, Fontpertius. “What, nephew!” exclaimed Louis, “a Jansenist!” “So far from being a Jansenist,” replied Orleans, “he doesn’t even believe in God.” “Oh, if that is so,” said the king, “I see no reason why he should not go.”
141 Among the privileges granted to England was the monopoly of supplying the Spanish Colonies with negro slaves.
142 Levau’s south façade was not completely hidden by Perrault’s screen, for the roofs of the end and central pavilions emerged from behind it until they were destroyed by Gabriel in 1755.
143 Jules Hardouin, the younger Mansard, was a nephew and pupil of François Mansard, who assumed his uncle’s name. The latter was the inventor of the Mansard roof.
144 The sixth part of a sou.
145 Twelve alone were added to the St. Honoré quarter by levelling the Hill of St. Roch and clearing away accumulated rubbish.
146 It extended as far as the entrance to the quadrangle opposite the Pont des Arts. A double line of trees, north and south, enclosed a Renaissance garden of elaborate design, and a charming bosquet, or wood, filled the eastern extremity.
147 “By order of the king, God is forbidden to work miracles in this place.”
148 In 1753 between 20th January and 20th February two hundred persons died of want (misère) in the Faubourg St. Antoine.
149 Some conception of the insanitary condition of the court may be formed by the fact that fifty persons were struck down there by this loathsome disease during the king’s illness.
150 “I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich buildings, and are paid when they are thought of.”
151 The aspect of the west front with Soufflot’s “improvements” is well seen in Les Principaux Monuments Gothiques de l’Europe, published in Brussels, 1843.
152 Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (£5600 to £19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.
153 The score of Rousseau’s opera is still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
154 The Excise duty.
155 Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes alone.
156 It is difficult, however, to read the sober and irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous Books II. and V. of Taine’s Ancien Régime, without deep emotion.
157 After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.
158 When de Brézé reported this to the king, he seemed vexed, and answered petulantly, “Well, if they won’t go they must be left there.”
159 A whole library has been written concerning the identity of this famous prisoner. There is little doubt that the mask was of velvet and not of iron, and that the mysterious captive who died on 19th November 1703 in the Bastille was Count Mattioli of Bologna, who was secretly arrested for having betrayed the confidence of Louis XIV.
160 Only five francs were allowed for a bourgeois, a man of letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France obtained the maximum.
161 It was composed by one of the émigrés, M. de Limon, approved by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, and signed, against his better judgment, by the Duke of Brunswick.
162 The numbers have been variously estimated from 100 to 5000 killed on the popular side.
163 “Sew we, spin we, sew we well, behold the coats we have made for the winter that is coming. Soldiers of the Fatherland, ye shall want for nothing.”
164 Inferno. XV. 76-78.—“In whom lives again the seed of those Romans who remained there when the nest (Florence) of so much wickedness was made.”
165 Mdlle. Curchod, for whom Gibbon “sighed as a lover.”
166 “We could rouse no enthusiasm,” said the head of a State Department to the writer at the time of the Fashoda incident, “even for a war for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, much less against England.”
167 See p. 41.
168 According to Sir Thomas Browne, bodies soon consumed there. “’Tis all one to lie in St. Innocents’ churchyard as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the moles of Adrianus.”—Urn Burial, p. 351.
169 The picture subsequently found its way to the apartments of Louis XVI., and followed him from Versailles to Paris. The attitude of this ill-fated monarch towards his advisers, says Michelet, was much influenced by a fixed idea that Charles I. lost his head for having made war on his people, and that James II. lost his crown for having abandoned them.
170 French Painting in the Sixteenth Century, by L. Dimier. London, 1904.
171 The picture, Une Dame présentée par la Madeleine, attributed to the Maître de Moulins at the Exhibition of Primitifs in the Pavilion de Marsan has now been acquired by the Louvre.
172 M. Lafenestre, the Director of the Louvre, informs the writer that he sees no sufficient reason at present for modifying the traditional attributions of the pictures loaned by the Louvre to the Exhibition of the Primitifs in the Pavilion de Marsan.
173 One of the few non-dramatic compositions of Molière is an eulogistic poem on Mignard’s decoration of this dome.
174 “O the fair statue! O the fair pedestal!
The Virtues are on foot: Vice is on horseback.”
175 “He is here as at Versailles
Without heart and without bowels.”
176 A description of this and of other public balls of the Second Empire will be found in Taine’s Notes sur Paris, which has been translated into English.
177 In 1664 we find Guilliaume roy des Ménéstriers, the viol players and masters of dancing, acting in the name of the foundation against the usurpations of the Fathers of the Christian Doctrine. In 1720 the title of the church was confirmed by royal decree as St. Julian of the Minstrels. The church and the street of the minstrels were swept away to make the Rue Rambuteau.
178 It became the second Théâtre Français in 1819.
179 It became the Théâtre Français in 1799, and was burnt down in 1900.
180 The word is derived from basilica, a law court.