The Age of Elegance (27 page)

of recognition by Na
poleon's military engineers, th
e means of private travel was antediluvian. Clumsy, ill-sprung
voitures
jolted over the
pave
behind wretched cattle bestridden by dirty postilions cracking enormous whips, and the
diligences,
lumbering along like Noah's Arks at four miles an hour, took two days to reach the capital from Calais.

The countryside seemed to have been depopulated by the wars: one traveller calculated that there were twelve women working by the roadside to every man. In their high, white, conical, flapping bonnets, wooden shoes and scarlet petticoats these made a picturesque appearance, apt to be dispelled on a closer view by their wizened faces and moustaches. Their homes were mud hovels, and their methods of cultivating the interminable, hedgeless fields, with their horizons of straggling apple-trees, were by English notions primitive.
¹

As travellers approached Paris everything wore a deserted, forlorn look. Compared with the elegant environs of London there was no bustle of trade, little to indicate the neighbourhood of a great city. Even the luxurious chateaux of the Napoleonic contractors were in ruins with shuttered windows and broken gates. The northern entrance was as sudden as it was dismal: a rough, wooden palisade to keep out straggling Cossacks, a tall, ominous gateway guarded by soldiers, an idle knot of red-capped blackguards with enormous earrings glaring from a doorway, and then a labyrinth of high, crazy, crumbling, medieval houses with pointed roofs and fantastic gables shutting out the sky. Down the centre of the narrow, villainously-paved roadways trickled streams of stinking water. Overhead ancient lanterns, slung from ropes, swayed in the wind.

In these dark streets, ankle-deep in mud, swarmed the fiery, excitable, braggart race which had conquered Europe. The babel of the crowds and the shaking of the carts was deafening. The men, with their tails dragging behind them, looked like monkeys: the women, ogling through their veils beneath gigantic casques of straw and flowers, were lappeted like Friesland hens. Nobody dressed for the filthy theatres: even the rich spat on the floor and used the points of their knives as toothpicks. A city of grimacing, posturing blackguards, it seemed to the English upper classes, in which no one had

¹
Haydon, I, 243-7, 250; Campbell, II, 246; Wansey, 1, 5, 9. 21-4, 41-2, 108, 111, 114, 116; Bury, I, 242, 245-8, 263-4; Gronow, I, 90^1; II, 299; Broughton, I, 116-17; Harriet Granville, L 60-1; Brownlow, 69; Dudley, 253; Jerningham, II, 54; Stanley, 100-4, 180; Larpent, II, no; JDe Selincourt, II, 878; Lord Coleridge, 223-4; Mercer, II, 17-18, 22-3, 40, 204. 291-2, 302, 309, 328, 330, 334, 336; Simpson, 96-8, 138-9; Lady Shelley, I, 94, 118.

any sense of style except the li
ttle cocottes who, with neat ankles, twirling ruffles and darting black eyes, minced among the filth and traffic as if they trod on needles.
¹

And from the foetid alleys and courtyards of the darker faubourgs —the terrible Quartier de St.-Antoine, the Place Royale and the long blackguard suburbs of La Chapelle and St.-Denis—fearful faces peered, recalling crimes which made respectable folk shudder. Here, recruited at a shilling a head, the guide would explain, the revolutionary mobs had poured forth from their abodes of darkness to fill the gutters with blood. It was clear from the glances cast at visitors that they were only awaiting a chance to repeat their exploits. The presence of foreign troops alone restrained them.
²

Yet thi
s "bloody and ferocious capital
' as Haydon called it, in which refinement and filth, murder and revolution, blasphemy and heroism had alternately reigned triumphant, was also one of idleness and pleasure. There seemed scarcely a counting-house in the place. Its chief industry, now that war and plunder had ceased, was amusement: a hectic, shameless gaiety, Britons thought it. The broad, tree-lined boulevards which encircled the old city were thronged with indolent people, sauntering about or sitting at open-air cafes watching fiddlers, mountebanks and puppet-shows; the theatres, their boastful Napoleonic inscriptions painted over with
fleurs de lys,
played to packed houses; the piazzas of the Palais-Royal rang with the odious propositions of brazen boys and meretricious ladies. It was not the Parisian home—a place where husbands and wives huddled together in nooks and corners to fly their separate ways at the first opportunity—wrote a horrified Scot, which was the heart of Parisian society,
³
but the restaurant. With his
piquante
sauces and
petit-plats,
his gilded mirrors, brilliant lights and marble tables—so different from the smoky, wainscotted chop-houses of London—the
restaurateur
was the residuary legatee of the Revolution. There were gastronomic paradises like
Verys, Hardis
and the
Quadron Bleu;
the
Cafe
de Milles Colonnes,
where a magnificent, diamonded
Madame
in

¹
Haydon, I, 248, 251, 256-7, 270, 277; Wansey, 22, 24, 62, 93; Berry, III, 18; Stanley, 106,

^a
Brownlow, 170* Gronow, II, 147-8; Mercer, II, 237; Campbell, II, 257.
³
"A French family has no notion of what we call a fireside," Simpson, 112. See
idem,
106-7,
in,
114,135-6,143-4,156, 182; Stanley, no, 141-2; Mercer, II, 136,154, 216, 218-21, 222, 239, 256; Wansey, 21, 41-2, 46; Lamb, VI, 444; De Selincourt,
Middle Years*
906; Farington, VIII,

197", Gro
now, II, 283-4, 287-8;
Marlay
Letters,
265.

crimson velvet—reputed to have been a favourite of Bonaparte's— sat at a raised table among golden inkstands, flower-vases and bells for summoning waiters;
Tortoni's
with its famous ices, where the great and fashionable supped and made love after the opera and where intending duellists could be seen breakfasting off cold
pates,
game, fish, broiled kidneys, iced champagne and liqueurs;
Frascatis
and the
Jardin Turque;
the little
traiteurs
of the Palais-Royal where at small spotlessly clothed tables one could dine for a few shillings on three or four dishes and a bottle of good Chablis or Chambertin; and that famous hostelry in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs where the young Thackeray treated his love to
bouillabaisse.

At the west end of Paris, close to the Seine, lay the great public buildings which Napoleon, extending the work of the Bourbon Kings, had made the administrative centre of empire. These far surpassed anything to be seen in London. From this side the French capital presented an utterly different face: the noble bridge at Neuilly, the avenue to the Barriere de L'Etoile, the prospect from the summit across the Elysian fields with the road descending through masses of foliage to the Tuileries in the hazy, dreamy distance. Emerging from the dark, cramped, turbulent streets of the city into this spacious over-world of vistas and buildings unstained by smoke, even the most stubborn John Bull could not help being impressed. Here was the venerable royal palace with its formal trees and gravel walks, the unstained banner of ancient France waving above it in the evening breeze, the Place de la Concorde and the Place de Carousel, the pillar of victory in the Place Vendome, the bronze Venetian horses riding above Napoleon's arch, "the gilt chariot," as Haydon with his poet's eye saw it, "the Russian guard and the setting sun casting its glory over all."

Here, everywhere, was the impress of Napoleon s personality: the huge marble bas-reliefs depicting his triumphs, the interminable bees, eagles and laurelled cyphers, the orange trees drawn up in rows as on parade: the marks of all he had done to create an island of order and splendour in the midst of that dark, airless medieval jungle, and of all that he had meant to do when at last he wearied of war and had the time and labour to devote to the arts of peace. "Ah, sir," an old soldier exclaimed to an English tourist, "the Emperor has done more fine things in ten years for the advantage of Paris than all our Sovereigns of a century past; had he reigned ten years longer he would, have made Paris the finest city in the world." The man whom a generation of Britons had come to regard as anti-Christ might have been a scourge and a tyrant, but at least he had been a tyrant of taste. It was a fine thing for a lover of elegance—and what English traveller in the year 1814 was not—to stand in St.-Cloud, the
Trianon, Fontainebleau or the E
lysee, those temples dedicated to genius and conquest, and see the imperial furniture of green and gold, the ostrich-feathered bed in which the great man had slept, the desk at which he wrote, all daubed with ink, the arm-chair in which he sat, though lacking the gashes which he was said to inflict on it in his fits of neurotic rage, the baths of white marble with cocks for hot and cold water and all their luxurious apparatus of washing.

But of all the evidences of Napoleon's glory, that which most impressed visitors was the palace of the Louvre where he had assembled paintings and sculptures such as had not been collected in one city since the days of Rome. It was something new, this gallery of stolen masterpieces that belonged to a nation. Here, free as sunlight, the property of the public, were humanity's finest achievements. The idea made an irresistible appeal to the English, even though its lawless origin embarrassed them. Instead of being hurried along, after soliciting for cards and bribing the butler, as in the private collections of England, one was allowed to dwell on any painting as long and as often as one pleased. It was there in the statuary hall that Mrs. Siddons, on the arm of the poet Campbell, saw the Apollo Belvedere, his glowing marble unstained by time and the indignation in his countenance giving place to the assurance of victory. As she stood there gazing at it the whole gallery turned and stared at her: this noble Englishwoman in her sixtieth year, as perfect of feature, as poised and as little touched by the years as the Grecian sculpture before her.
¹

But if the English admired the evidences of Napoleon's taste for art, they disliked intensely those of his love for war. The whole nation seemed to be vitiated by it; even the children wore cocked-hats and strutted, drilled and scowled. The Emperor's ambition to make the terms of man and soldier synonymous seemed to have succeeded. There was scarcely a driver of a
fiacre
or a waiter who had not

¹
Campbell, II, 261, 270-1; Haydon, I, 239, 243-4, 255, 262-6:
Marlay Letters,
265; Wansey, 30, 33, 34» 50, 62; Stanley, no, 113-14. 140, 148-9; Lord Coleridge, 221-2; Simpson, 118-24, 141,
146-52, 177-82; Mercer, II, 147

served a campaign. There was scarcely a Frenchman, even among those who most reviled Napoleon, who did not regret his vanished military glory.

For the French were quite impenitent at the suffering they had caused. The only thing they regretted was that they had been defeated. Though they complained bitterly of the Allies' crimes, they dismissed their own with a shrug of the shoulders.
¹
"Apres tout,"
they would remark of some blood-curdling horror,
"c
’
est le sort de la guerre
" Their indifference
to death was such that at Mont
martre, where the Russians stormed their way into Paris over the bodies of the boys of the Military College, corpses were carefully preserved for sightseers, and houses, pitted
with bullets, bore notices, "
on voit la bataille pour deux sous!

Though they found much to admire, the English were disgusted at the cynicism of the French capital. All the Parisians seemed to care about was glory and pleasure. Now they had been deprived of the one, they thought of nothing but the other. On the night after the Allies' entry the theatres and public gardens were packed as though nothing had happened. The people regarded the
denouement
of the bloody drama as a mere spectacle; instead of being chastened by it, they flocked into the streets to gape at their conquerors' uniforms. "They appear," wrote an onlooker, "the same light, trifling, dancing people as ever; pleasure is still their idol,
vive la bagatelle
their motto." Gambling was a universal relaxation; fagged out, slovenly in air and dress, both sexes crowded night after night into airless rooms where no sound was heard but the crack of the croupier's stick and the rattling of money. It shocked English visitors even more than the pornographic prints on the hotel walls.
²

In some ways the country was wonderfully improved. The peasants, thrifty and industrious, were cultivating the holdings acquired from the sale of national lands; roads and bridges had been built; the law codified, and the foundations of an efficient, if over-centralised, administration laid. The
re was reason to hope, now that
France had been freed from the drain of war-taxes and conscription,

¹
"No Tory ever believed more firmly in divine right," wrote John William Ward, "than the French believe in their right to plunder and insult all mankind without the smallest chance of retaliation."
Dudley,
289. See Brownlow. 80; Haydon, I, 258-9, 260, 296; Mercer, II, 175; Stanley, 106, 116-17, 140-1, 143, 157-8, 243; Simpson, 86,
I34
5; Wansey, 93; Campbell, II, 252-3; Granville, II. 512.

⁸
Harriet Granville, I, 67; Wansey, 101. See
idem,
46,100; Haydon, I, 251, 272; Simpson, 108, 125, 162-3; Mercer, II, 128, 144, 154, 216, 222.

that material conditions would rapidly improve. But public morality had ceased, it seemed, to exist. It had been thrown into the basket with the heads of the priests and nobles. The Parisians were ready to betray or follow anyone or anything that suited their private interest. They would in one breath curse Napoleon for having led them to disaster, and in the next praise the crimes he had practised against their neighbours. Their only good seemed to be success.

For after two decades of centralised despotism and the suppression of independent opinion the people of the French capital, politically speaking, were without integrity. The faces of the men struck visitors as coarse and ferocious; those of their womenfolk in the restless boulevards as brazen. There seemed to be no gentlemen and, by English standards, no ladies; as Napoleon himself ungratefully observed, they were all rascals. "Everyone appears intent," wrote a visitor, "on living what is called a life of pleasure
...
splendour without taste and pride without dignity." Self had become a religion; no one was prepared to play an uphill game or put himself in opposition to power except when it was falling. "What have we to make us patriots?" a Frenchman asked; "in England you have a Constitution to maintain under which you live securely and respectably, while we have nothing on which we can depend." For a generation property in France had existed only by permission of the State, and conscience and conviction had been dangerous luxuries. The confiscation of noble and ecclesiastical lands, the abolition of primogeniture, the inflation under the Directory, the crushing taxation, had left only a tiny minority with any independence.
¹

So at least it seemed to Englishmen. The sense of despotism, Haydon wrote, preyed on the mind: in everything there was "a look of gilded and bloody splendour, a tripping grace in the women and a ragged blackguardism in the men." Life was regimented in a way undreamt of in England: the very cultivators' carts bore State-allocated numbers, while armed excisemen searched every wagon entering or leaving the capital. Napoleon's system of preventative tyranny had achieved its object: the restless, inquiring people who had made the Revolution were cowed. They did not even realise their own servility.

¹
Farington, VIII, 38. Sec Simpson, 85-7, 108, 115-16; Haydon, I, 256, 259-60; De Selincourt, II, 002; Stanley, 117, 243; Wansey, 93; Bury, II, 22; Harriet Granville, I, 64-5; Colchester, II, 554; Lady Shelley, I, 132; Neumann, 43.