The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 14

We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before.

It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how

intelligent we are. We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment;

it was like the pictures. We stood at a little distance and changed from

one point of observation to another and gazed long at its lofty square

towers and its rich front, clustered thick with stony, mutilated saints

who had been looking calmly down from their perches for ages. The

Patriarch of Jerusalem stood under them in the old days of chivalry and

romance, and preached the third Crusade, more than six hundred years ago;

and since that day they have stood there and looked quietly down upon the

most thrilling scenes, the grandest pageants, the most extraordinary

spectacles that have grieved or delighted Paris. These battered and

broken-nosed old fellows saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad

knights come marching home from Holy Land; they heard the bells above

them toll the signal for the St. Bartholomew's m******e, and they saw the

slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage

of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two

Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a

regiment of servants in the Tuileries to-day--and they may possibly

continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away

and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins. I wish

these old parties could speak. They could tell a tale worth the

listening to.

They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the

old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago--remains of it are still

preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about A.D.

300; another took the place of that in A.D. 500; and that the foundations

of the present cathedral were laid about A.D. 1100. The ground ought to

be measurably sacred by this time, one would think. One portion of this

noble old edifice is suggestive of the quaint fashions of ancient times.

It was built by Jean Sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy, to set his conscience

at rest--he had assassinated the Duke of Orleans. Alas! Those good old

times are gone when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and

soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar

and building an addition to a church.

The portals of the great western front are bisected by square pillars.

They took the central one away in 1852, on the occasion of thanksgivings

for the reinstitution of the presidential power--but precious soon they

had occasion to reconsider that motion and put it back again! And they

did.

We loitered through the grand aisles for an hour or two, staring up at

the rich stained-glass windows embellished with blue and yellow and

crimson saints and martyrs, and trying to admire the numberless great

pictures in the chapels, and then we were admitted to the sacristy and

shown the magnificent robes which the Pope wore when he crowned Napoleon

I; a wagon-load of solid gold and silver utensils used in the great

public processions and ceremonies of the church; some nails of the true

cross, a fragment of the cross itself, a part of the crown of thorns.

We had already seen a large piece of the true cross in a church in the

Azores, but no nails. They showed us likewise the bloody robe which that

archbishop of Paris wore who exposed his sacred person and braved the

wrath of the insurgents of 1848, to mount the barricades and hold aloft

the olive branch of peace in the hope of stopping the slaughter. His

noble effort cost him his life. He was shot dead. They showed us a cast

of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed him, and the two

vertebrae in which it lodged. These people have a somewhat singular

taste in the matter of relics. Ferguson told us that the silver cross

which the good archbishop wore at his girdle was seized and thrown into

the Seine, where it lay embedded in the mud for fifteen years, and then

an angel appeared to a priest and told him where to dive for it; he did

dive for it and got it, and now it is there on exhibition at Notre Dame,

to be inspected by anybody who feels an interest in inanimate objects of

miraculous intervention.

Next we went to visit the Morgue, that horrible receptacle for the dead

who die mysteriously and leave the manner of their taking off a dismal

secret. We stood before a grating and looked through into a room which

was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses,

water-soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician

vestments, hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was

crushed and bloody. On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked,

swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip

which death had so petrified that human strength could not unloose it

--mute witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was

doomed beyond all help. A stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the

hideous face. We knew that the body and the clothing were there for

identification by friends, but still we wondered if anybody could love

that repulsive object or grieve for its loss. We grew meditative and

wondered if, some forty years ago, when the mother of that ghastly thing

was dandling it upon her knee, and kissing it and petting it and

displaying it with satisfied pride to the passers-by, a prophetic vision

of this dread ending ever flitted through her brain. I half feared that

the mother, or the wife or a brother of the dead man might come while we

stood there, but nothing of the kind occurred. Men and women came, and

some looked eagerly in and pressed their faces against the bars; others

glanced carelessly at the body and turned away with a disappointed look

--people, I thought, who live upon strong excitements and who attend the

exhibitions of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see

theatrical spectacles every night. When one of these looked in and

passed on, I could not help thinking--

"Now this don't afford you any satisfaction--a party with his head shot

off is what you need."

One night we went to the celebrated Jardin Mabille, but only staid a

little while. We wanted to see some of this kind of Paris life, however,

and therefore the next night we went to a similar place of entertainment

in a great garden in the suburb of Asnieres. We went to the railroad

depot, toward evening, and Ferguson got tickets for a second-class

carriage. Such a perfect jam of people I have not often seen--but there

was no noise, no disorder, no rowdyism. Some of the women and young

girls that entered the train we knew to be of the demi-monde, but others

we were not at all sure about.

The girls and women in our carriage behaved themselves modestly and

becomingly all the way out, except that they smoked. When we arrived at

the garden in Asnieres, we paid a franc or two admission and entered a

place which had flower beds in it, and grass plots, and long, curving

rows of ornamental shrubbery, with here and there a secluded bower

convenient for eating ice cream in. We moved along the sinuous gravel

walks, with the great concourse of girls and young men, and suddenly a

domed and filigreed white temple, starred over and over and over again

with brilliant gas jets, burst upon us like a fallen sun. Nearby was a

large, handsome house with its ample front illuminated in the same way,

and above its roof floated the Star-Spangled Banner of America.

"Well!" I said. "How is this?" It nearly took my breath away.

Ferguson said an American--a New Yorker--kept the place, and was carrying

on quite a stirring opposition to the Jardin Mabille.

Crowds composed of both sexes and nearly all ages were frisking about the

garden or sitting in the open air in front of the flagstaff and the

temple, drinking wine and coffee or smoking. The dancing had not begun

yet. Ferguson said there was to be an exhibition. The famous Blondin

was going to perform on a tightrope in another part of the garden. We

went thither. Here the light was dim, and the masses of people were

pretty closely packed together. And now I made a mistake which any

donkey might make, but a sensible man never. I committed an error which

I find myself repeating every day of my life. Standing right before a

young lady, I said:

"Dan, just look at this girl, how beautiful she is!"

"I thank you more for the evident sincerity of the compliment, sir, than

for the extraordinary publicity you have given to it!" This in good,

pure English.

We took a walk, but my spirits were very, very sadly dampened. I did not

feel right comfortable for some time afterward. Why will people be so

stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten

thousand persons?

But Blondin came out shortly. He appeared on a stretched cable, far away

above the sea of tossing hats and handkerchiefs, and in the glare of the

hundreds of rockets that whizzed heavenward by him he looked like a wee

insect. He balanced his pole and walked the length of his rope--two or

three hundred feet; he came back and got a man and carried him across; he

returned to the center and danced a jig; next he performed some gymnastic

and balancing feats too perilous to afford a pleasant spectacle; and he

finished by fastening to his person a thousand Roman candles, Catherine

wheels, serpents and rockets of all manner of brilliant colors, setting

them on fire all at once and walking and waltzing across his rope again

in a blinding blaze of glory that lit up the garden and the people's

faces like a great conflagration at midnight.

The dance had begun, and we adjourned to the temple. Within it was a

drinking saloon, and all around it was a broad circular platform for the

dancers. I backed up against the wall of the temple, and waited. Twenty

sets formed, the music struck up, and then--I placed my hands before my

face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers. They were dancing

the renowned "Can-can." A handsome girl in the set before me tripped

forward lightly to meet the opposite gentleman, tripped back again,

grasped her dresses vigorously on both sides with her hands, raised them

pretty high, danced an extraordinary jig that had more activity and

exposure about it than any jig I ever saw before, and then, drawing her

clothes still higher, she advanced gaily to the center and launched a

vicious kick full at her vis-a-vis that must infallibly have removed his

nose if he had been seven feet high. It was a mercy he was only six.

That is the can-can. The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily,

as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a

woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which s*x you belong to.

There is no word of exaggeration in this. Any of the staid, respectable,

aged people who were there that night can testify to the truth of that

statement. There were a good many such people present. I suppose French

morality is not of that straight-laced description which is shocked at

trifles.

I moved aside and took a general view of the can-can. Shouts, laughter,

furious music, a bewildering chaos of darting and intermingling forms,

stormy jerking and snatching of gay dresses, bobbing beads, flying arms,

lightning flashes of white-stockinged calves and dainty slippers in the

air, and then a grand final rush, riot, a terrific hubbub, and a wild

stampede! Heavens! Nothing like it has been seen on earth since

trembling Tam O'Shanter saw the devil and the witches at their orgies

that stormy night in "Alloway's auld haunted kirk."

We visited the Louvre, at a time when we had no silk purchases in view,

and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters. Some of them

were beautiful, but at the same time they carried such evidences about

them of the cringing spirit of those great men that we found small

pleasure in examining them. Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons

was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the

charms of color and expression which are claimed to be in the pictures.

Gratitude for kindnesses is well, but it seems to me that some of those

artists carried it so far that it ceased to be gratitude and became

worship. If there is a plausible excuse for the worship of men, then by

all means let us forgive Rubens and his brethren.

But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the old masters

that might as well be left unsaid.

Of course we drove in the Bois de Boulogne, that limitless park, with its

forests, its lakes, its cascades, and its broad avenues. There were

thousands upon thousands of vehicles abroad, and the scene was full of

life and gaiety. There were very common hacks, with father and mother

and all the children in them; conspicuous little open carriages with

celebrated ladies of questionable reputation in them; there were Dukes

and Duchesses abroad, with gorgeous footmen perched behind, and equally

gorgeous outriders perched on each of the six horses; there were blue and

silver, and green and gold, and pink and black, and all sorts and

descriptions of stunning and startling liveries out, and I almost yearned

to be a flunkey myself, for the sake of the fine clothes.

But presently the Emperor came along and he outshone them all. He was

preceded by a bodyguard of gentlemen on horseback in showy uniforms, his

carriage-horses (there appeared to be somewhere in the remote

neighborhood of a thousand of them,) were bestridden by gallant-looking

fellows, also in stylish uniforms, and after the carriage followed

another detachment of bodyguards. Everybody got out of the way;

everybody bowed to the Emperor and his friend the Sultan; and they went

by on a swinging trot and disappeared.

I will not describe the Bois de Boulogne. I can not do it. It is simply

a beautiful, cultivated, endless, wonderful wilderness. It is an

enchanting place. It is in Paris now, one may say, but a crumbling old

cross in one portion of it reminds one that it was not always so. The

cross marks the spot where a celebrated troubadour was waylaid and

murdered in the fourteenth century. It was in this park that that fellow

with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian Czar's

life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree. Ferguson

showed us the place. Now in America that interesting tree would be

chopped down or forgotten within the next five years, but it will be

treasured here. The guides will point it out to visitors for the next

eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put up

another there and go on with the same old story just the same.