There is a movement on foot to-day to resurrect the Palais Royal to some approach to its former distinction, which is decidedly what it has not been for the past quarter of a century. Satirical persons have demanded as to what should be made of it, a _velodrome_ or a skating-rink, but this is apart from a real consideration of the question for certain it is that much of its former charm can be restored to it without turning it into a Luna Park. It is one of the too few Paris breathing-spots, and as such should be made more attractive than it is at the present time.
It was sixty years ago, when Louis Philippe was the legitimate owner of the Palais Royal, its galleries, its shops, its theatre and its gardens, that it came to its first debasement. "One went there on tip-toe, and spoke in a whisper," said a writer of the time, and one does not need to be particularly astute to see the significance of the remark.
It was Alphonse Karr, the _ecrivain-jardinier_, who set the new vogue for the Palais Royal, but his interest and enthusiasm was not enough to resurrect it, and so in later years it has sunk lower and lower. The solitude of the Palais Royal has become a mockery and a solecism. It is virtually a _campo santo_, or could readily be made one, and this in spite of the fact that it occupies one of the busiest and noisiest quarters of the capital, a quadrangle bounded by the Rues Valois, Beaujolais, Montpensier and the Place du Palais Royal.
The moment one enters its portal the simile accentuates and the hybrid shops which sell such equivocal bric-a-brac to clients of no taste and worse affectations carry out the idea of a cloister still further, for actually the clients are few, and those mostly strangers. One holds his breath and ambles through the corridors glad enough to escape the bustle of the narrow streets which surround it, but, on the other hand, glad enough to get out into the open again.
CHAPTER IX
THE LUXEMBOURG, THE ELYSeE AND THE PALAIS BOURBON
The kings and queens of France were not only rulers of the nation, but they dominated the life of the capital as well. Upon their crowning or entry into Paris it was the custom to command a gift by right from the inhabitants. In 1389 Isabeau de Baviere, of dire memory, got sixty thousand _couronnes d'or_, and in 1501, and again in 1504, was presented with six thousand and ten thousand _livres parisis_ respectively.
The king levied personal taxes on the inhabitants, who were thus forced to pay for the privilege of having him live among them, those of the professions and craftsmen, who might from time to time serve the royal household, paying the highest fees.
It was during the period of Richelieu's ministry that Paris flowered the most profusely. The constructions of this epoch were so numerous and imposing that Corneille in his comedy "Le Menteur," first produced in 1642, made his characters speak thus:
Dorante: Paris semble a mes yeux un pays de roman * * *
En superbes palais a change ses buissons * * *
Aux superbes dehors du palais Cardinal Tout la ville entiere, avec pomp batie * * *
In 1701, Louis XIV divided the capital into twenty _quartiers_, or wards, and in 1726-1728 Louis XV built a new city wall; but it was only with Louis XVI that the faubourgs were at last brought within the city limits. Under the Empire and the Restoration but few changes were made, and with the piercing of the new boulevards under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann the city came to be of much the same general plan that it is to-day.
In the olden time, between the Palais de la Cite and the Louvre and the Palais des Tournelles, extending even to the walls of Charenton, was a gigantic garden, a carpet embroidered with as varied a colouring as the _tapis d'orient_ of the poets, and cut here and there by alleys which separated it into little checker-board squares.
Within this maze was the celebrated Jardin Dedalus that Louis XI gave to Coictier, and above it rose the observatory of the savant like a signal tower of the Romans. This centered upon what is now the Place des Vosges, formerly the Place Royale.
To-day, how changed is all this "intermediate, indeterminate" region!
How changed, indeed! There is nothing vague and indeterminate about it to-day.
The earliest of the little known Paris palaces was the Palais des Thermes. It may be dismissed almost in a word from any consideration of the royal dwellings of Paris, though it was the residence of several Roman emperors and two queens of France. A single apartment of the old palace of the Romans exists to-day--the old Roman Baths--but nothing of the days of the Emperor Constantius Chlorus, who founded the palace in honour of Julian who was proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in 360 A.D.
The Frankish monarchs, if they ever resided here at all, soon transferred their headquarters to the Palais de la Cite, the ruins falling into the possession of the monks of Cluny, who built the present Hotel de Cluny on the site.
Of all the minor French palaces the Luxembourg and the Elysee are the most often heard of in connection with the life of modern times. The first is something a good deal more than an art museum, and the latter more than the residence for the Republican president, though the guide-book makers hardly think it worth while to write down the facts.
The Palais du Luxembourg has been called an imitation of the Pitti Palace at Florence, but, beyond the fact that it was an Italian conception of Marie de Medici's, it is difficult to follow the suggestion, as the architect, Jacques Debrosse, one of the ablest of Frenchmen in his line, simply carried out the work on the general plan of the time of its building, the early seventeenth century.
Its three not very extensive pavilions are joined together by a colonnade which encloses a rather foreboding flagged courtyard, a conception, or elaboration, of the original edifice by Chalgrin, in 1804, under the orders of Napoleon. The garden front, though a restoration of Louis Philippe, is more in keeping with the original Medici plan; that, at any rate, is to its credit.
To-day the Luxembourg, the Republican Palais du Senat, is but an echo of the four centuries of aristocratic existence which upheld the name and fame of its first proprietor, the Duc de Piney-Luxembourg, Prince de Tigry, who built it in the sixteenth century. From 1733 to 1736 the palace underwent important restorations and the last persons to inhabit it before the Revolution were the Duchesse de Brunswick, the Queen Dowager of Spain and the Comte de Provence, brother of Louis XVI, to whom it had been given by Letters Patent in 1779.
[Illustration: _Palais du Luxembourg_]
In 1791 the Convention thought so little of it that they made it a prison, and a few years later it was called again the Palais du Directoire, and, before the end of the century, the Palais du Consulat.
This was but a brief glory, as Napoleon transferred his residence in accordance with his augmenting ambitions, to the Tuileries in the following year.
By 1870 the edifice had become known as the Palais du Senat, then as the headquarters of the Prefecture of the Seine, and finally, as to-day, the Palais du Luxembourg, the seat of the French Senate and the residence of the president of that body.
The principal public apartments are the Library, the "Salle des Seances," the "Buvette"--formerly Napoleon's "Cabinet de Travail," the "Salle des Pas Perdus"--formerly the "Salle du Trone," the Grand Gallery and the apartments of Marie de Medici. The chapel is modern and dates only from 1844.
The Palais du Petit Luxembourg is the official residence of the president of the Senate and dates also from the time of Marie de Medici.
The picture gallery is housed in a modern structure to the west of the Petit Luxembourg.
[Illustration]
The facade of the Palais du Senat is not altogether lovely and has little suggestion of the daintiness of the Petit Luxembourg, but, for all that, it presents a certain dignified pose and the edifice serves its purpose well as the legislative hall of the upper house.
[Illustration: _The Petit Luxembourg_]
The gardens of the Luxembourg form another of those favourite Paris playgrounds for nursemaids and their charges. It is claimed that the children are all little Legitimists in the Luxembourg gardens, whereas they are all Red Republicans at the Tuileries. One has no means of knowing this with certainty, but it is assumed; at any rate the Legitimists are a very numerous class in the neighbourhood. Another class of childhood to be seen here is that composed of the offsprings of artists and professors of the Latin quarter, and of the active tradesmen of the neighbourhood. They come here, like the others, for the fresh air, to see a bit of greenery, to hear the band play, to sail their boats in the basins of the great fountain and enjoy themselves generally.
One notes a distinct difference in the dress and manners of the children of the gardens of the Luxembourg from those of the Tuileries and wonders if the breach will be widened further as they grow up.
The Jardin du Luxembourg is all that a great city garden should be, ample, commodious, decorative and as thoroughly typical of Paris as the Pont Neuf. Innumerable, but rather mediocre, statues are posed here and there between the palace and the observatory at the end of the long, tree-lined avenue which stretches off to the south, the only really historical monument of this nature being the celebrated Fontaine de Medicis by Debrosse, the architect of the palace. It was a memorial to Marie de Medici.
While one is in this quarter of Paris he has an opportunity to recall a royal memory now somewhat dimmed by time, but still in evidence if one would delve deep.
As a matter of fact, royalty never had much to do with this hybrid quarter of Paris, though, indeed, its past was romantic enough, bordering as it does upon the real Latin Quarter of the students.
Bounded on one side by the immense domain of the Luxembourg, it stretched away indefinitely beyond Vaugiraud, almost to Clamart and Sceaux.
[Illustration: _The Luxembourg Gardens_]
At No. 27 Boulevard Montparnasse is an elaborate seventeenth house-front half hidden by the "modern style" flats of twentieth century Paris. This relic of the _grand siecle_, with its profusion of sculptured details, was the house bought by Louis XIV about 1672 and given to the "widow Scarron," the "young and beautiful widow of the court," as a recompense for the devotion with which she had educated the three children of the Marquise de Montespan, who, in 1673, were legitimatized as princes of the royal house--the Duc de Maine, the Comte de Vexin and Mademoiselle de Mantes.
Madame Scarron, who became in time Madame de Maintenon, the "_vraie reine du roi_," died in 1719, and the house passed to La Tour d'Auvergne.
On this same side of the river are the Palais de l'Institut and the Palais Bourbon. The Palais de l'Institut, or Palais Mazarin, is hardly to be considered one of the domestic establishments, the dwellings of kings, with which contemporary Paris was graced. It was but a creation of Mazarin, the minister, on the site of the Hotel de Nesle, and was first known as the Palais des Quatre Nations, where were educated, at the expense of the Cardinal, sixty young men of various nationalities.
The old chapel has since been transformed into the "Salle des Seances"
of the Institut de France, the Five French Academies. The black, gloomy facade of the edifice, to-day, in spite of the cupola which gives a certain inspiring dignity, is not lovely, and tradition and sentiment alone give it its present interest, though it is undeniably picturesque.
An inscription used to be on the pedestal of one of the fountains opposite the entrance which read:
"Superbe habitant du desert En ce lieu, dis moi, que fais tu --Tu le vois a mon habit vert Je suis membre de l'institut."
If the inscription were still there it would save the asking of a lot of silly questions by strangers who pass this way for the first time. The Palais de l'Institut is one of the sights of Paris, and its functions are notable, though hardly belonging to the romantic school of past days, for at present poets often make their entree via Montmartre's "Chat Noir," or are elected simply because some other candidate has been "_blackbouled_."
Still following along the left bank of the Seine one comes to the Palais Bourbon, the Chambre des Deputes, as it is better known. This edifice, where now sit the French deputies, was built by Girardini for the Dowager Duchesse de Bourbon in 1722, and, though much changed during various successive eras, is still a unique variety of architectural embellishment which is not uncouth, nor yet wholly appealing. Napoleon remade the heavily imposing facade, so familiar to all who cross the river by the Pont de la Concorde, but its grimness is its charm rather than its grace.
The structure cost its first proprietor twenty million or more francs, and since it has become national property the outlay has been constant.
Everything considered it makes a poor showing; but its pseudo-Greek facade, were it removed, would certainly be missed in this section of Paris.
The principal apartments are the "Salle des Pas Perdus," the "Salle des Seances," and the "Salle des Conferences"--where, in 1830, the Duc d'Orleans took the oath as king of France.