At noon we lunched in the comfortless waiting-room at Rouen, while the professors made a hasty visit to the cathedral during our stay of half an hour. We still suffered from the tossing of the sea, and cathedrals possessed no charms in our eyes. It was almost night when we reached Paris, and joined the hurrying crowd descending from the train. It was a descent into Pandemonium. There was a confusion of unintelligible sounds in our ears like the roll of a watchman's rattle, bringing no suggestion of meaning. The calmness of despair fell upon our crushed spirits, with a sense of powerlessness such as we never experienced before or since. A dim recollection of school-days--of Ollendorff--rose above the chaos in our minds. "Has the physician of the shoemaker the canary of the carpenter?" we repeated mechanically; and with that our minds became a blank.
Deliverance awaited us; and when, just outside the closed gates, first in the expectant crowd, we espied the face of a friend, peace enveloped us like a garment. Our troubles were over.
The devil.--Cathedrals and churches.--The Louvre.--Modern French art.--The Beauvais clock, with its droll little puppets.--Virtue in a red gown.--The Luxembourg Palace.--The yawning statue of Marshal Ney.--Gay life by gas-light.--The Imperial Circus.--The Opera.--How the emperor and empress rode through the streets after the riots.--The beautiful Spanish woman whose face was her fortune.--Napoleon's tomb.
IT may be the City of Destruction, the very gateway to depths unknown; but with its fair, white dwellings, its fair, white streets, that gleamed almost like gold beneath a summer sun, it seemed much more a City Celestial. It may be, as some affirm, that the devil here walks abroad at midday; but we saw neither the print of his hoofs upon the asphaltum, nor the shadow of his horns upon the cream-like Caen stone. We walked, and rode, and dwelt a time within its limits; and but for a certain reckless gayety that gave to the Sabbath an air of Vanity Fair, but for the mallet of the workman that disturbed our Sunday worship, we should never have known that we were not in the most Christian of all Christian cities. It is by no means imperative to do in Rome as the Romans do, and one need not in Paris drink absinthe or visit the Jardin Mabille.