Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1. Hawthorne Nathaniel
though I suspect they must be somewhat dry and artificial at whatever season, – the trees being slender and scraggy, and requiring to be renewed every few years. The soil is not genial to them. The strangest peculiarity of this place, however, to eyes fresh from moist and verdant England, is, that there is not one blade of grass in all the Elysian Fields, nothing but hard clay, now covered with white dust. It gives the whole scene the air of being a contrivance of man, in which Nature has either not been invited to take any part, or has declined to do so. There were merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, and other provision for children's amusements among the trees; and booths, and tables of cakes, and candy-women; and restaurants on the borders of the wood; but very few people there; and doubtless we can form no idea of what the scene might become when alive with French gayety and vivacity.
As we walked onward the Triumphal Arch began to loom up in the distance, looking huge and massive, though still a long way off. It was not, however, till we stood almost beneath it that we really felt the grandeur of this great arch, including so large a space of the blue sky in its airy sweep. At a distance it impresses the spectator with its solidity; nearer, with the lofty vacancy beneath it. There is a spiral staircase within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted by a lantern which the doorkeeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's-eye view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist. Several interminable avenues shoot with painful directness right towards it.
On our way homeward we visited the Place Vendome, in the centre of which is a tall column, sculptured from top to bottom, all over the pedestal, and all over the shaft, and with Napoleon himself on the summit. The shaft is wreathed round and roundabout with representations of what, as far as I could distinguish, seemed to be the Emperor's victories. It has a very rich effect. At the foot of the column we saw wreaths of artificial flowers, suspended there, no doubt, by some admirer of Napoleon, still ardent enough to expend a franc or two in this way.
Hotel de Louvre, January 10th. – We had purposed going to the Cathedral of Notre Dame to-day, but the weather and walking were too unfavorable for a distant expedition; so we merely went across the street to the Louvre…
Our principal object this morning was to see the pencil drawings by eminent artists. Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection, occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci, Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye, – that idea which inevitably became overlaid with their own handling of it in the finished painting. No doubt the painters themselves had often a happiness in these rude, off-hand sketches, which they never felt again in the same work, and which resulted in disappointment, after they had done their best. To an artist, the collection must be most deeply interesting: to myself, it was merely curious, and soon grew wearisome.
In the same suite of apartments, there is a collection of miniatures, some of them very exquisite, and absolutely lifelike, on their small scale. I observed two of Franklin, both good and picturesque, one of them especially so, with its cloud-like white hair. I do not think we have produced a man so interesting to contemplate, in many points of view, as he. Most of our great men are of a character that I find it impossible to warm into life by thought, or by lavishing any amount of sympathy upon them. Not so Franklin, who had a great deal of common and uncommon human nature in him.
Much of the time, while my wife was looking at the drawings, I sat observing the crowd of Sunday visitors. They were generally of a lower class than those of week-days; private soldiers in a variety of uniforms, and, for the most part, ugly little men, but decorous and well behaved. I saw medals on many of their breasts, denoting Crimean service; some wore the English medal, with Queen Victoria's head upon it. A blue coat, with red baggy trousers, was the most usual uniform. Some had short-breasted coats, made in the same style as those of the first Napoleon, which we had seen in the preceding rooms. The policemen, distributed pretty abundantly about the rooms, themselves looked military, wearing cocked hats and swords. There were many women of the middling classes; some, evidently, of the lowest, but clean and decent, in colored gowns and caps; and laboring men, citizens, Sunday gentlemen, young artists, too, no doubt looking with educated eyes at these art-treasures, and I think, as a general thing, each man was mated with a woman. The soldiers, however, came in pairs or little squads, accompanied by women. I did not much like any of the French faces, and yet I am not sure that there is not more resemblance between them and the American physiognomy, than between the latter and the English. The women are not pretty, but in all ranks above the lowest they have a trained expression that supplies the place of beauty.
I was wearied to death with the drawings, and began to have that dreary and desperate feeling which has often come upon me when the sights last longer than my capacity for receiving them. As our time in Paris, however, is brief and precious, we next inquired our way to the galleries of sculpture, and these alone are of astounding extent, reaching, I should think, all round one quadrangle of the Louvre, on the basement floor. Hall after hall opened interminably before us, and on either side of us, paved and incrusted with variegated and beautifully polished marble, relieved against which stand the antique statues and groups, interspersed with great urns and vases, sarcophagi, altars, tablets, busts of historic personages, and all manner of shapes of marble which consummate art has transmuted into precious stones. Not that I really did feel much impressed by any of this sculpture then, nor saw more than two or three things which I thought very beautiful; but whether it be good or no, I suppose the world has nothing better, unless it be a few world-renowned statues in Italy. I was even more struck by the skill and ingenuity of the French in arranging these sculptural remains, than by the value of the sculptures themselves. The galleries, I should judge, have been recently prepared, and on a magnificent system, – the adornments being yet by no means completed, – for besides the floor and wall-casings of rich, polished marble, the vaulted ceilings of some of the apartments are painted in fresco, causing them to glow as if the sky were opened. It must be owned, however, that the statuary, often time-worn and darkened from its original brilliancy by weather-stains, does not suit well as furniture for such splendid rooms. When we see a perfection of modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their tarnished, even if immortal grace. I rather think the English have given really the more hospitable reception to the maimed Theseus, and his broken-nosed, broken-legged, headless companions, because flouting them with no gorgeous fittings up.
By this time poor J – (who, with his taste for art yet undeveloped, is the companion of all our visits to sculpture and picture galleries) was wofully hungry, and for bread we had given him a stone, – not one stone, but a thousand. We returned to the hotel, and it being too damp and raw to go to our Restaurant des Echelles, we dined at the hotel. In my opinion it would require less time to cultivate our gastronomic taste than taste of any other kind; and, on the whole, I am not sure that a man would not be wise to afford himself a little discipline in this line. It is certainly throwing away the bounties of Providence, to treat them as the English do, producing from better materials than the French have to work upon nothing but sirloins, joints, joints, steaks, steaks, steaks, chops, chops, chops, chops! We had a soup to-day, in which twenty kinds of vegetables were represented, and manifested each its own aroma; a fillet of stewed beef, and a fowl, in some sort of delicate fricassee. We had a bottle of Chablis, and renewed ourselves, at the close of the banquet, with a plate of Chateaubriand ice. It was all very good, and we respected ourselves far more than if we had eaten a quantity of red roast beef; but I am not quite sure that we were right..
Among the relics of kings and princes, I do not know that there was anything more interesting than a little brass cannon, two or three inches long, which had been a toy of the unfortunate Dauphin, son of Louis XVI. There was a map, – a hemisphere of the world, – which his father had drawn for this poor boy; very neatly done, too. The sword of Louis XVI., a magnificent rapier, with a beautifully damasked blade, and a jewelled scabbard, but without a hilt, is likewise preserved, as is the hilt of Henry IV.'s sword. But it is useless to begin a catalogue of these things. What a collection it