Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

“It is the physiognomy of the borrowers that I have just been sketching, of those wretches of all ranks, who are forced by some dire necessity, whether accidental or normal, to come and pledge their clothes or their jewels; to exhaust – in order not to die of hunger or to meet an overdue debt – the resources which are still at their disposal. Yet, by the side of these careworn, despairing faces, inscribed with poignant melancholy, or, in some cases, resignation, are the radiant faces of those who have come to redeem their jewels and their clothes. These are not silent like the rest. They do not glide in, like furtive shadows amongst other shadows. You hear them coming before you see them: they ascend the steps with tremendous haste. It is a question of arriving before the shop is closed, for it is Saturday, the morrow is Sunday, and they have come up panting like a pair of forge-bellows.

“There is a run of business on Saturday night, and the assistants behind the counter, although they, too, love Sunday with the repose it brings, almost dread it as being preceded by such a rush of work. And these people who come to redeem are not so easy to manage as the poor wretches who pledge, the latter being mild and patient, full of anguish though they are; the former noisy, exacting, and sometimes insolent. The relationship is changed, in fact. One set come to demand something, almost an act of charity – for that is the nature of the request, although the pledge is worth more than the loan granted. The other set come to make what is almost a gift; for the pledge they withdraw is not always worth the price that has been estimated, and if they did not withdraw it the commissionaire would perhaps lose something on it, instead of gaining. You see the difference. And then, again, it is usually men who pledge and women who redeem. In pledging, a signature is required; a certificate alone suffices for the redemption. I leave you to imagine the behaviour of those gossips, proud of “unhooking” from the accursed “nail” the dress or the jacket which has hung there six months, and which is now as indispensable for going to the dance or the promenade as it was useless six months since, when it was a question of procuring a dinner or paying for a bed.”

The Parisian pawnbroker, being simply a Government official, differs necessarily from the pawnbroker of London. The latter is the most independent and insolent of all shopkeepers. He makes very little distinction between those who come to pledge and those who come to redeem. If his Saturday-night customers who come to take their things out of pawn were to give themselves such airs as the Parisian pledge-redeemers already described, he would insult them to their face, and keep them waiting till they had learnt better manners. He feels indebted to no one. He does not seek regular customers, for he knows that the stream of the impecunious will never cease to flow into his shop, that if one does not come another will, and that the people who come to redeem are seriously in want of their property, and must pay him the amount of the loan and interest no matter whether he is bearish or polite.

The branch establishments, with their commissionaires, having been spoken of, let us now glance at the great Mont-de-Piété of Paris, situated in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux. This central establishment dates from the reign of Louis XVI., who founded it by letters patent in 1777. The work of money-lending was at once commenced, but not in the buildings specially constructed in the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, beside the convent of the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, since these buildings were not completed until 1786. It is interesting to follow the different phases through which this vast establishment of public utility, designed to “put an end to the abuses of usury,” has passed, until now it receives upwards of twenty-five million pledges annually. That these pledges present an inconceivably great variety of objects may well be supposed. On this subject M. Blaize, author of the “Traité des Monts-de-Piété,” has written descriptively enough as follows: – “Let us stop at the first floor. This is the quarter of the aristocracy; the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Chaussée d’Antin of our borrowers. Here are the first and second divisions – those of the “jewels” – where the most precious objects are deposited. I open the ‘four-figure cupboards’ – such is the name we give to those cupboards of iron which contain pledges on which a thousand francs or more have been advanced. Great Heaven! what riches! Sparkling sprays, strings of diamonds, trinkets calculated to turn the heads of duchesses! Silver services fit to adorn the table of a king! In these regions of want – opulent want and necessitous want – one’s eyes must not see everything nor one’s ears listen to everything: let us pass on. We take our way through the passages which are bordered on each side with wealth-laden shelves. Look at those thousands of watches, chains, bracelets, jewels of every kind; that countless mass of objects of art, of luxury, of utility, of vanity, or of coquetry.

“We are now on the second floor. Here commences the ordinary goods department. The floor bends beneath the weight of the million pledges which are taken in every year. Here are ranged, in admirable order, dresses, coats, shirts, table-cloths, blankets, and indeed every object of household use or of the toilet; vestments of silks or of rags; books; tools. Let us explore the next two storeys. The same arrangements, the same symmetry: cases filled with boxes, bandboxes, and parcels. The walls of the staircases are covered with pictures, mirrors, metronomes, which have not found a place in the interior of the divisions. Let us go higher still. We are now in the doleful city, in the region of sorrow and want. Look at those piles of mattresses so highly packed. They are the very last tribute of misery, which, after being despoiled of its vestments, has given us its last pledge, and which sleeps on a heap of straw, where shiver, in a fetid attic, around an emaciated mother, children blue with cold, with wasted cheeks, hollow eyes, and a smile sad and sweet. Poor dear little creatures! In order to live, they ask for nothing but a little air and bread! Let us descend to the ground floor.

“The warehouses are used for new merchandise, such as linen, cloth, muslins, mirrors of large dimensions, bronze and copper articles, etc. Things which are too heavy to be carried above, such as vices, anvils, and cauldrons, occupy a considerable space below. Do not let us forget the fountain warehouse. At the end of the autumn the cocoa-hawkers bring us their fountains and exchange them for a sum which, small as it is, enables them to follow the little industries by which they are able to live on through the winter… At the first sunshine of the spring they come to redeem the pledge they have left with us, and, with their little bell in their hand, gaily betake themselves once more to the Champs Élysées and the boulevards.

“Each article bears a ticket, each ticket an even number if it is a pledge, an uneven number if it is a renewal. As often as an article is renewed, a fresh ticket is sewn over that of the preceding year (you can count ten on this particular pledge – nine renewals, that is to say). The loan is only six francs – six francs! But it is a fortune to those whose work does not even suffice for the wants of the day. Listen to a simple and touching story. Some years ago one of our predecessors noticed a little packet which had upon it a whole series of renewal-tickets, and on which but three francs had been lent. He wrote to the borrower: a woman presented herself in reply. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘do you not redeem this pledge?’ ‘I am too poor,’ was the answer. ‘You attach a great value, then, to this article?’ ‘Ah, sir, it is all that remains to me of my mother.’ The director gave her back the packet, which contained an old-fashioned petticoat. The poor woman bore away this treasure of filial piety with tears of joy. Instances of this kind are by no means rare, and they prove that if indiscretion and misconduct bring some borrowers to the Mont-de-Piété, the greater number are impelled thither by causes which are highly honourable. The history of many a pledge is a lamentable page in the drama of human life, so full of nameless miseries and unknown misfortunes. The whole of the property does not return to its owners; at least six per cent. does not. What efforts are made to prevent this or that article from falling into the hands of the brokers, who will sell it for a mere trifle at the sale-rooms! On the 26th of June, 1849, a gold watch was sold which had been pledged on the 8th of January, 1817, for eighty francs. It had been renewed for the last time on the 8th of December, 1847. The borrower, who had not been able to redeem it, had successively paid 20 francs 50 centimes for the right of renewal. We made inquiries for him. He was dead. What a mystery of tenderness was implied in so long a constancy!”

CHAPTER XXIV.

PARIS MARKETS

The Halles-Centrales – The Cattle Markets – Agriculture in France – The French Peasant

THE Panthéon, standing on the summit of the mountain of Sainte-Geneviève, and the Luxemburg Palace, surrounded by the galleries and the garden of the same name, dominate the rest of the left bank, which has still, however, one salient point in the Hôtel des Invalides. To the left of the Luxemburg Garden, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, stands the National School of Mines, established in the house which formerly belonged to a religious order. Here, as in so many other of the public establishments of France, the instruction is gratuitous, under the direction of an inspector-general and thirteen professors. The museum contains all kinds of interesting geological and mineralogical specimens, together with a library of 30,000 volumes, which, like the museum, is open to the public.

The Rue de Tournon – to pass from the garden to the front of the palace – has already been mentioned in connection with that Hôtel de l’Empereur Joseph at which Joseph II., visiting his sister Marie Antoinette, elected to stay in preference to putting up at one of the royal palaces. The street owes its name to François de Tournon, cardinal-ambassador under Francis I. At that time the land through which the street was afterwards to run was the site of a large horse market, a sort of annex to the Marché Saint-Germain, and familiarly known as the Muddy Meadow – “le Pré crotté.” Very different were the Paris markets of those days from the system of markets now so perfectly organised. At present, when Paris has expanded so far beyond its ancient “barriers” that it has become one of the greatest cities in the world, the provisioning of its population is a question of the first importance. For breakfast, as for subsequent meals, the French metropolis requires a stupendous quantity of food, which must arrive regularly at a fixed hour, and be delivered promptly at the doors of the numberless beings whose mouths are to be filled.

At some hours before dawn a large number of market-gardeners and other cultivators from the vicinity of Paris enter the city and converge towards the same point. Enormous and noisy drays at the same time bring in to this common centre the consignments of edible produce which arrive by rail daily from the provinces or abroad.

The great market which receives all these goods, known as the Halles-Centrales, is situated opposite the beautiful church of Saint-Eustache, at the end of the Rues Coquillière, Montmartre, Montorgeuil, and Rambuteau. This immense and elegant building, constructed entirely of bricks and iron, consists of twelve pavilions, which shelter the sale of the various descriptions of goods. Each pavilion has its speciality. One is a wholesale, another a retail meat-market, a third is devoted to fish, a fourth to eggs and butter, and so on.

Markets are held in various parts of the city; but most of them are fed by the Central Market. Many of them recall the Central Market by the light character of the architecture in brick and iron. Two great cattle-markets are established at Sceaux and at Poissy, and a smaller one at La Chapelle Saint-Denis, connected with the Marché de la Villette, built with the view of absorbing all the smaller meat-markets.

Unlike England, France, in the matter of agricultural products, is self-sufficing. Two-thirds of the population are occupied, as proprietors, farmers, or labourers, with the cultivation of the soil. In England the agricultural classes represent only one-third of the population. In France there are nine millions of small landowners with a slight proportion of large ones; in England the land is in the possession of comparatively few persons. Up to the time of the Revolution the number of proprietors in France did not go beyond 30,000, and the peasantry at that period were in a state of utter poverty, the actual cultivators receiving, according to Alison, only a twelfth part of the produce for their share. “The people’s habitations,” wrote Arthur Young, “are miserable heaps of dirt – no glass, no air; the women and children are in rags – no shoes, no stockings. The proprietors of these badly cultivated lands, all absentees, were worshipping the king at Versailles in the most abject and servile manner, spending their scanty income and getting into scandalous debt.” “The agricultural population,” he says elsewhere, “are 76 per cent. worse fed and worse clad than in England. Impossible to have an idea of the animals who served us at table, called women by courtesy. In reality they are walking dunghills, without stockings, shoes, or sabots.”

All this was changed by the Revolution, when immense numbers of tenants became proprietors of the land they had previously cultivated, as serfs, for their masters. The progress from destitution to comfort was effected in less than twenty years, and since then the condition of the peasantry has been constantly improving. Under the system of small ownerships agriculture, as an art, may not be brought to the highest possible pitch of perfection, but the agriculturists thrive and are happy. France is not a corn-exporting country; and it is quite possible that under a system of large estates the sum of her agricultural produce might be greater than it really is. The peasants, however, under the system of “la petite culture” produce more butter and their fowls more eggs than they need for their own consumption or for sale in France. Accordingly great quantities of eggs and butter are sent to England, France’s best customer for produce of this kind.

The small proprietors, too, keep rabbits and pigeons, many of which find their way not only to the Paris markets but to England. A century ago, until the time of the Revolution, the landholding aristocracy had alone the right of shooting rabbits and keeping pigeons. “The birds,” says M. Nottelle, writing on this subject, “ate the seed of the poor peasants in the neighbourhood and the rabbits ate the corn when it was green. These exclusive privileges were abolished on the celebrated night of the 4th of August, 1789.” Yet it should always be remembered that the noble proprietors gave up their exclusive privileges – doubtless under the influence of the Revolution, but, nevertheless, as a matter of fact – of their own accord. Now everyone can keep pigeons; but the owners are ordered by the mayor to keep them in the pigeon-house during seed-time. If they are allowed to fly at this period they are considered as game, and may be shot. The owner, moreover, is fined. Occasionally in the French market frogs are to be seen, and it is quite possible that in the days before the Revolution the epithet “frog-eating” could be more fitly applied to the generality of Frenchmen than it can now, when the thighs of frogs are only to be met with at certain restaurants, where they are served, equally with snails, as a rare delicacy.

It has been seen that before 1789 the French peasants were poor and miserable. Arthur Young’s descriptions of them have been quoted often enough. A century earlier than Arthur Young, La Bruyère, author of “Les Caractères,” spoke of them as looking like ferocious animals. “The men and women,” he continued, “are meagre, dark-looking objects, their dirty rags scarcely covering them, and retiring at night into filthy dens or hovels.” It is possible, then, as M. Nottelle, in his unpretentious but interesting and instructive little book on the French peasantry since the Revolution, declares, that several millions of peasants were obliged to live on roots. “No doubt,” he adds, “they ate frogs, though it took much time to get a decent dish of them. But time was not a great object to these poor famished slaves. From this, most likely, Shakespeare called the French ‘frog-eaters,’ and foreigners have come to the conclusion that many of the French feed mostly on frogs. It is not easy, however, to exist on frogs, which are too dear to be eaten by the generality of people.”

It is said, too, that frogs are in favour with the devout, for they may be eaten as fish on fast days. Not only frogs but also snails are to be seen exhibited for sale in some of the Paris markets. It may be that in the days when the unhappy French peasantry were on the verge of starvation they found themselves reduced to a disgusting diet of snails and even slugs. However that may have been, the only snail eaten by the French at the present day, and the only kind of snail to be seen in the Paris markets, is the “escargot,” in its streaked whity-brown shell. The escargot is found chiefly in the wine countries, especially Burgundy, where it feeds on the leaves of the vine. One of the few places in Paris where snails and frogs used to be sold, cooked, no doubt in perfection, is or was the famous restaurant in the “New Street of the Little Fields” – otherwise Rue Neuve des Petits Champs – which Thackeray celebrated in his ballad on the subject of Bouillabaisse.

Many interesting anecdotes of the French peasants are told by a writer from whom I have recently quoted. Living in the midst of their property, with their domestic animals around them, they become very much attached to their cattle, not sentimentally but by reason of the beasts’ market value. A story is told of a farmer who sent to the cattle-show a fat pig, that obtained a medal which he afterwards wore with great pride as though he himself had carried it off. The peasant’s love of his cow surpasses even his affection for his pig. A peasant proprietor lamented the loss of one of his cows to such an extent that a friend at last said to him: “If you had lost your wife your grief could scarcely be greater.” “Maybe,” he replied; “for many of the farmers about here would gladly give me their daughter in marriage, while none of them would give me a cow.” In one of Pierre Dupont’s songs this preference on the part of the peasant of the cow to the wife finds full expression. The cow, it is true, becomes in the poet’s lines an ox; but cows, like oxen, are used in France for the plough. “I love Jeanne, my wife,” exclaims the peasant of Pierre Dupont’s song; “well, I would rather see her die than see the death of my oxen”; or, in the French —

Eh bien, j’aimerais mieux

La voir mourir que voir mourir mes bœufs.

So great is the cow-passion by which the French peasantry are animated, that when one of them had stolen the cow of his neighbour, the exhortations of the priest were powerless to enforce restitution.

“You must return it to the owner,” said the priest.

“But, father, I have confessed my fault.”

“Yes, yes; but you must do as I tell you. Send back the cow to its owner.”

The man hesitated; he did not wish to restore the cow.

“Then no absolution; no sacrament.”

The peasant still demurred.

“Think,” the priest then said, “of the day of judgment, when all the village will be assembled on the green, and you will be there holding the cow by the tail, and everybody will know you stole it. How ashamed you will be!”

“Really! but will the owner of the cow be there too?”

“Of course he will.”

“Well, if I see him, I will then give him back his cow.”

One more anecdote may be permitted in reference not indeed to the Paris markets, but to those by whom the Paris markets are supplied. Not only is the French peasant prudent and economical: he is also, as is shown by the story just told, very cunning. Equally so is the peasant woman. One day at a market in Normandy people were much surprised at seeing a woman offer an excellent horse for sale at the price of five francs, and still more astonished at her asking 500 francs for a dog she wished to dispose of. The two animals were to be sold together. They were ultimately got rid of on the terms demanded. The explanation of the mystery was this. The peasant woman was the widow of a man who in his will had directed that the horse was to be sold for the benefit of his own family and the dog for the benefit of his wife. She had so arranged matters that out of the joint sale 500 francs, the price of the dog, came to her, while five francs went to her husband’s relations.

It seems strange and somewhat absurd to English Conservatives that so many peasants in France should have a vote; but inasmuch as of these peasants nine millions are proprietors, the establishment of universal suffrage in France was not a revolutionary but a Conservative measure. The peasantry, moreover, are in some degree trained to public affairs by the part they play in the communal councils. There are about 40,000 communes in France, and each commune has its mayor and its municipal councillors elected by universal suffrage for the management of local affairs. Every peasant may become a municipal councillor and, if duly elected by the municipal council, a mayor. The municipal council meets periodically for the discussion of local affairs; so that its members accustom themselves to public speaking and the interchange of ideas. France has now about 10,000,000 electors, of whom two-thirds are peasants, but, as before explained, peasants in the possession of landed property.

CHAPTER XXV.

SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS

Its Origin and History – Its Library – Its Organ – Saint-Sulpice

IF the Pantheon and the Luxemburg are by their size, their appurtenances, and their dominant position, the most important buildings on the left bank of the Seine, the most interesting, by its antiquity, is the church, with the monastery attached to it, of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; which, like the cathedral-church of Notre Dame in the city, and the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois on the right bank, belong to the most ancient period of the Merovingian monarchy, to that, in other words, of Childebert I. and Ultrogothe his wife, who reigned at Paris from 511 to 538. Childebert, returning from an expedition against the Visgoths, brought back from Spain as trophies of his victory the tunic of Saint Vincent, a gold cross and precious stones, together with some vases which were said to have belonged to King Solomon. By the advice of Saint Germain, Bishop of Paris, he constructed for the reception of the holy relics a church and a monastery at the western end of the gardens belonging to the Palace of the Hot Baths, or Palais des Thermes. On the very day of Childebert’s death, in 558, Saint Germain consecrated the new church as “Church of the Holy Cross and of St. Vincent”; and he was himself buried in it when he died in 596. After the death of the good bishop the church which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross and to St. Vincent got to be known under no other name than that of Saint-Germain; and it now became the burial-place of the kings, queens, and princes of the Merovingian dynasty.

The abbey remained for a long time an isolated building, which the high walls, erected around the church and convent in 1239 by Simon, abbé of Saint-Germain, made into a veritable fortress, which was strengthened in 1368 by Charles V., who, at war with the English, feared a sudden attack on their part against the suburbs of Paris. A narrow canal was at the same time dug, which placed the ditches of the fortified abbey in communication with the Seine. This canal, called at the time “the little Seine,” was filled up towards the middle of the sixteenth century, when the line of land thus formed became the Rue des Petits Augustins, now Rue Bonaparte.

Of this ancient church, three times burned by the Normans and three times rebuilt, but little now remains. Thirty years ago fragments of the walls and two of the gates were still to be seen. But the last traces of the old abbey disappeared when through the Place Saint Germain-des-Prés the Rue de Rennes was made to run. The church, however, was destined to survive, in a sadly mutilated condition, the convent and the walls. It suffered greatly, like so many other sacred buildings, at the time of the Revolution, when the tombs of the Merovingian kings were broken into and their contents dispersed. These or portions of them are now to be found in the abbey of Saint-Denis.