A Nation Stunned
He lonof finorer of the oceanic telegraph may write on the multiform sheet of the ‘’ Associated Press” the news of victory or defeat; but no one not stopping in Paris to-day can realize the condition of things. The city is dazed and confounded. Paris never before came so near keeping Sunday as on the first day of this week. Not many concerts, but little conviviality, and no carousal — it did not seem like Sabbath at all. August 15th, the Emperor’s /Se day, the Fourth of July of France, fell dead in front of the Tuileries. Instead of Paris on fire with illumination, the streets were dull, and the palace, as we passed
along at night, had but one lighted window, save the light of the employes in the basement.
Whatever may be one’s opinion in regard to the French Government, he must sympathize with this afflicted people. Before this paragraph reaches the United States, the pendulum of feeling may have swung from the extreme of sorrow to the extreme of joy; but not once in a hundred years does Paris sit in ashes. She knows how to shout in a carousal, and to howl in a massacre; but it is the strangest thing of the century to see Paris in a “fit of the blues.”
Yesterday we drove out on the Bols de Boulogne, which might be called “the Central Park” of Europe; and in all the ride we passed not a single vehicle. At a concert on Saturday night we heard the Marseillaise Hymn so gloriously sung by soldiers, in full uniform, with flags and guns, that we involuntarily threw up our hats, not knowing exactly what we were excited about; but the general applause that responded to the national air was not as lively as you might hear in any place of amusement in the United States on any night of the year. I know not but that this quiet may be the lull before the tempest of fire that shall sweep back the Prussians from the French frontier; but Paris sits dumbstruck to-day.
The prizes that were to have been given last week in the schools have been withheld. There is no sound of laughter or mirth. Even intoxication has a subdued voice, and men stagger around having a quiet drunk. Many of the fountains accustomed to dance in the light are still, or only weep a few doleful drops into the stone basin. With thirty-seven newspapers in Paris, there is no news. A placard of a few lines on the walls of the city, about every other day, announces something very unimportant. We get occasionally a London Times, but are left chiefly to our imagination; and when our friends ask us what the news is, we tell them that the Dutch have fallen back on Amsterdam, and the Germans advanced to Darmstadt.
Tourists are in a panic. Americans rush to
the steamship offices, wanting to go on the
Cunard, In man, or National Line, or even a
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first-class schooner; and almost ready, were It not for the anxiety of their friends, to go afoot. Some of our friends who have never seen Paris dart down from Switzerland to this city, and take the first train for Calais, expecting to be massacred before they get across the city. We have concluded to risk it a little longer. As we have come on a tour of sight -seeing, we shall stay till we see all; trusting first in the good Providence which has always seen us through, and secondly upon our American passport.
This, of all summers, has been the best for travelling in Europe to those who happened to take Germany first. The climate has been so delicious that we have not suffered from one hot blast. The hotels, heretofore surfeited with patronage and unobliging, now give the best rooms and most obsequious attendance. You have your pick of a dozen carriages, each one underbidding the other. You have a whole rail - carriage for your own party. Though there be but one American newspaper in the reading-room, no one else wants it. You look at the pictures without the impertinence of any one passing before you. There is plenty of room in the diligence for Chamouni. You buy things at cheap rates, because there is no rivalry among purchasers. You hear bands of martial music enlivening the air by day and night.
And, besides that, one feels it grand to be here at a point of time which must be as important in history as 1572, when the belfry of St. Germain L’Auxerrois tolled for the horrors, of St. Bartholomew’s day. And who would blame me if my pen should this moment tremble a little along the line as I write, within hearing distance of the place where the mob hurled the four hundred massacred Swiss guards from the king’s balcony, and only a few steps from the place where the chop of the guillotine tumbled the head of Marie Antoinette into the dead-box.
May the torch of Parisian splendor never through the pool of human blood go hissing out into darkness! The torn and shotted battle -flags of France hang in the chapel of Hotel des Invalides, where the old soldiers worship. Oh! that the banners of the Prince of Peace might be set up in the Tuileries! The Arc de Triomphe has In letters of stone all the battle-fields of the first Napoleon. Oh! that soon, under the arch of heavenly triumph, Immanuel might come up from the conquest of all the nations. In the illumination of that victory there will be no light of burning homesteads; in the wine of that feast there will be no tears.
In a week we start for home. The most welcome sight to us in three months will be the faces of our friends. / am tired of resting. Speed on the days between this and the best rest that a man ever gets on earth — the joy of preaching the gospel which offers to make all men happy and free! In body, mind, and soul I thrill with the anticipation.
|HERE have been men with power to absorb a city. It matters not which way you walk in Edinburgh, you find Walter Scott, and see the unparted hair combed down straight on the great dome of his forehead. You are shown Walter Scott’s cane, and Walter Scott’s jack-knife, and Walter Scott’s white hat, and Walter Scott’s residence. After two hundred years, Peter Paul Rubens carries Antwerp in his vest-pocket. The citizens adore him. You are taken to see Rubens’ house, and to look at Rubens’ statue, and to study Rubens’ pictures, and at the mention of his name the face of the dullest Belgian is illuminated. The sceptre that sways Antwerp to-day is a painter’s pencil.
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414 “A^.”
Coming to Paris, you find a more powerful memory presiding over everything. It Is not a name that you see, but simply an Initial Inscribed on pillar, and wall, and arch, and chapel. You go Into the Hotel de Vllle, a place where architecture, and painting, and sculpture have done their best: statues, and fluted columns, and ceilings supported by elaborate caryatides, and stairs so graceful they do not climb but alight, and galleries not so much set fast as seemingly on the wing; gold twisted, and carved, and chased into all the witcheries of beauty; and after you have walked from rich apartments to the richest, you look upon a platform, on which there is one empty chair, In the upholstery of which is embroidered the initial, “N.”
You go into the Pantheon, that holds Its crowned head higher than all other structures in Paris, a building bewildering with attractions, whether you look down to its exquisite mosaic floor, or aside to its carved oaken chapels, or through white clouds of sculptured saints and apostles Into the frescoed dome bright with the wings of angels flying in the midst of heaven; and as your eye slips from the dizzy height and comes falling down from balustrade to capital, you see encircled by a wreath the initial, N.
Louis XV., who laid the corner-stone of this building, would not have liked that letter put there. Charles, who went into raptures with the church, would have objected to such an inscription. Marat, with all his hardness, would have opposed the marking of a religious structure with any human name save his own. Yet so it is, no L for Louis, no C for Charles, no M for Marat; but on right and left, and where least you might expect it, the inevitable N! N!
You go into one of the rooms of the Louvre, and you are shown Napoleon’s saddle, and Napoleon’s watch, the hands at seven minutes past three, the moment he died, and his last gray coat, the summer worms having eaten in it two or three holes, for there is nothing that moth may not corrupt; and knife, and cup, and chess-board, on which he played out his games of war in miniature. You look up to see the name of the room. Right over the
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door, any man who knows his letters may discover it, N!
There is no mistaking this initial for anything else. B might be taken for an R, or C for an O, or I for a J; but in the letter spoken of there are two perpendiculars, and between them a line dropped aslant from the top of one to the bottom of the other; and there you have it so that you can see it anywhere, the unmistakable N!
If you want your stay in Paris to be climacteric, leave till the last your visit to the tomb of Napoleon. As you go into the gate, an old man, who was with the great Frenchman at St. Helena, will sell you a poor picture of something that no photographist can catch. It Is a cathedral three hundred and twenty-three feet high, having cost two million dollars, dedicated to one dead man. Under its burnished dome is a concentration of wonders. Not his ashes resting there, but the embalmed and undecayed body of Napoleon, in military suit, in a red sarcophagus of Finlander quartzite, polished to the last perfection by skilful machinery, and resting on a block of green
N.”
granite, surrounded by twelve funeral lamps of bronze, and twelve marble statues of great size, one with a wreath, as if to crown; another with a pen, as if to make record for the ages; another with a key, as if to open the celestial gate for a departed spirit; another with trumpet, to clear the way for the coming of a king! The pavement enamelled into a crown of laurels, from which radiates on all sides a living star. There are gilded gates, and speaking cenotaphs and radiant canopy, and elaborate basso-relievos, and embossed pillars, and two Persian statues, holding on cushions a sceptre and a world, and ceilings a -blossom with finest frescos by French and Italian masters, their light dripping down the marble in blue, and saffron, and emerald, and gold.
Oh! it is a dream of beauty! If the dead Giant could wake up and look around, he might think he lay in the Moscow palace that he coveted, and the glistening whiteness around were the morning shining on Russian snows, or that universal empire had come to him; and to make his palace Egypt had sent its por-
2B phyry, and Switzerland its marble, and Greece its sculpture, and Rome its pictures, and France its bronze; and that the reverential spectators in all kinds of national costume, leaning over the balustrade to look, were the adoring subjects of a universal reign.
At last we thought we had found a building that had escaped the all -conquering initial. From dome to base all is so significant of this one great man that no inscription will be necessary; but turning to the window the old spectacle trembled upon my sight, in gilt, all by itself, N!
And Paris is thus signed through and through; and when the 15th of August comes, it is written out in fire on Boulevard and arch, on Champs Elysees and Bois de Boulogne, in front of restaurant and palace, under the silk veil of lighted fountain, and on the night in sky-rockets, N, N, N.
All this may be well, but the thought comes to us that great men are expensive luxuries. We are told that Napoleon was the benefactor of the world. If you admit it, then, I ask, were his achievements worth the two great
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highways of bone-dust reaching across Europe, showing which way he went out, and which way he came in? Were they worth a continent of destroyed families, and the myriads of souls flung away into smoke of battle? Were his bones worth the hundreds of men who, coming out to do him honor, froze to death on the day his remains were brought back to Paris? Were his achievements worth the two million and a half dollars that he spent on his triumphal arches, and the two millions that built his tomb? Answer the question as you may, great men are expensive luxuries. Paris, August 25 th.