186 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
Star of the brave! thy ray is pale,
And darkness must again prevail.
But oh, thou rainbow of the free!
Our tears and blood must flow for thee:
When thy bright promise fades away,
Our life is but a load of clay.
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When I entered Paris, I found no civilian before me but
Dr. Wollaston, who had been admitted by the
special permission of the French Government before its overthrow; and it would take a
volume, even briefly, to describe the unparalleled condition of the place, and the
multitude who thronged it in every part. But in a work like this I must, as it were, gallop
over the interesting ground with a few miscellaneous reminiscences. Nor will the galloping
be confined to me, for there was little else than galloping all over Paris. With imposition
on every hand, and in every charge, things would not have been so dear but for the cruel
exchange of nearly thirty per cent, against the English stranger; and yet, with so much to
see and enjoy, there was no time for complaint. From my tolerably snug domicile (after a
few absolutely necessary reforms had been effected), the Hôtel de Rome, near our
ambassador’s and his Russian sentinels,
PARIS IN 1814. | 187 |
But it was not the viands at this celebrated restaurant which daily
attracted me to my dinner there. The company were of a description to surpass the utmost
curiosity of an English tourist, and especially of one who, for many months, had been
anxiously following events, and publishing, to the best of his knowledge and belief, for
the information of his country, the most authentic accounts of the feats of
188 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
PARIS IN 1814. | 189 |
Whilst this toasting-bout was going on, a seedy-looking old gentleman came
in, and I noticed that some younger officers rose and offered him a place, which he
rejected, till a vacancy occurred, and then he quietly sat down, swallowed his two dozen of
green oysters as a whet, and proceeded to dine with an appetite. By this time my
vis-à-vis had resumed his seat, and,
after what had passed, I felt myself at liberty to ask him the favour of informing me who
he himself was! I was soon answered. He was a Mr. Parris, of Hamburgh,
whose prodigious commissariat engagements with the grand army had been fulfilled in a
manner to prosper the war; and I was now at no loss to account for his intimacy with its
heroes. It so happened that I knew, and was on friendly terms with some of his near
relations; and so the two hours I have described took the value of two years. But the
climax had to come. Who was the rather seedy-looking personage whom the aides-de-camp
appeared so ready to accommodate? Oh that was Blucher! If I was outrageous before, I was mad now. I explained to
Mr. Parris the feeling of England with regard to this hero; and
that amid the whole host of great and illustrious names, his had become the most glorious
of all, and was really the one which filled most unanimously and loudly the trump of
190 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
This was an interregnum time. Napoleon had been sent off on the 21st of April, and was getting away from the south of France when Louis le Désiré was about getting into it on the north. A strange disorderly order pervaded France, and especially Paris. Everybody seemed to do what they liked, and though there was a certain “Occupation” restraint, liberty and license were carried to as enormous an extent as vice ever triumphed in or virtue mourned. It was impossible to distinguish the true from the false: the world appeared to be made of expedients, and if they were not exceedingly criminal, there was no harm done, nor censure incurred.
The entry of Louis XVIII. into Paris,
on the 4th of May, was a splendid spectacle, and the parade on the banks of the Seine of
the élite of the Allied Forces, the
PARIS IN 1814. | 191 |
And I say unto thee that verily, ah Verily, ah verily, ah; And I say unto thee that verily, ah, Thou and I shall be first in the throng! |
Buonaparte’s exit from Fontainebleau not a fortnight before was already a forgotten event in history; and the fêtes given by the city of Toulouse to Lord Wellington had only preceded these illuminations, fireworks, loyal shoutings, and revelries which filled the capital with a mad joy. The Paris workmen had a troublesome and difficult job to prepare the way for the restoration by effacing and removing the thousands of imperial crowns, N’s, and Bees with which every possible place and thing were covered, and the puns and jokes upon them, as they cut and chiselled away at their labours, were almost as numerous as the objects they were removing. Il a des N. mit (ennemis) partout was a truism in every mouth, and the busy bees had their hum, and their honey, and their stings hived in a hundred
* These looked very different from a body of three or four thousand I met on the road. They had been taken prisoners in one of the battles fought near Paris, and had just been released, and were on their way to rejoin their companions in arms. But no arms had they, and I could compare them to nothing else than a flock of sheep; for they appeared as harmless and passive. J. |
192 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
I have still to describe another of the most remarkable features on this
memorable day. It was the advent of the Duke of
Wellington from Toulouse, and his appearance in plain clothes, so as to
court no notice as he rode along with Lord Castlereagh,
Lord Aberdeen (I think), and other distinguished
Englishmen, in the cavalcade of the British
PARIS IN 1814. | 193 |
A grand ball given in the evening by Sir Charles
Stewart, was a superb climax to this dies
mirabilis. The rooms were crammed, and for the first time under a
pacific roof, met the long pitted deadly foes to each other, the allied statesmen, and
generals, and the statesmen and marshals of France. It was a strange vision—Schwartzenberg and Berthier, Blucher and Ney, Platoff and
Marmont, Wittgenstein and Mortier, the
Archduke Constantine and Talleyrand, Hardenberg and Augereau,
Czernicheff and Moncey,
Davidoff and Brune,
D’Yorke and Serurier,
Woronzoff and Jourdan, St. Priest and Macdonald, all strolling about and conversing in the most
amiable manner—a perfect mob of princes, commanders, and famous politicians and warriors;
and still among the foremost, Wellington and the representatives of
England, to whom it was a proud triumph. The Emperor
Alexander opened the ball by dancing with Madame
Ney, the Princess of Moskwa. Coming events did not cast their shadows
before—and war’s grim-visaged front entirely relaxed to dress in compliments and
smiles for this merry
194 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
But to return for a short while to Paris and its daily shows. Among the
most novel and amusing the Cossacks certainly played the prominent parts. It was common to
see officers of high rank, and bedizened with crosses, stars, and ribands, galloping
(everybody galloped) through the streets on magnificent horses, magnificently trapped, and
attended by their Orderly Cossacks, probably mounted on ragged-looking, but swift and
hardy, mares, with colts or fillies, of French birth, trotting at their heels. Their
spears, instead of straight shafts, were occasionally crooked, in consequence of the
original being splintered in fight, and the succedaneum cut as handily as might be out of
the nearest wood. There was one bivouac on the shore of the river, just below the handsome
Pont des Arts, where, as it were for the sake of contrast, these wild and old-fashioned
looking beings, with their hair cut round, like the old Holbein portraits, their imposing
beards, their cumbrous waggons, their gipsy tents,
PARIS IN 1814. | 195 |
Another trait may be cited to illustrate my subject. I went with a friend
or two to see Versailles, though the noble chateau was uninhabited, and its vast saloons
painfully vacant. There was only a third-rate cabaret close by, where we ordered dinner,
and having gone over the palace and seen thirty or forty Spaniards released from the
adjacent prison, we went back for our refection. Before sitting down we were invited into
the kitchen, where we found a good deal of dilapidation going on by the side of the
fire-place. Our host and hostess were mysterious, till at length the apparent wall gave way
and discovered a spacious oven of by-gone times, out of which, to our surprise, were
brought
196 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
As a small national drawback, I may just mention that next morning I purchased a pretty pencil-case, within the top of which was concealed, in miniature, one of the best whole-length likenesses of Buonaparte which I ever saw.
Why should I speak of the Opera, where the noble aristocratic presence of Lord and Lady Castlereagh eclipsed every other box, and were admired specimens of the Island race; showing, perhaps, in public places to greater advantage, in consequence of the tawdry uniforms, and petit and mean appearance of the majority of the French marshals, though some of them were very fine-looking men? Or why should I refer to the delight I experienced in Talma and Georges? I must bid Paris, with all its marvels, farewell, and with two brief reminiscences conclude this chapter.
I was informed, in conversation with the courteous and obliging Lord Burghersh, who, it will be remembered, was accredited,
on the part of Great Britain, to the head quarters of the invading forces, that the dash
upon Paris was the result of an opportunity afforded the allied generals to ascertain
almost exactly the amount of the army of Napoleon,
which he, by his amazing activity of movements and crafty stratagems of war, had succeeded
in making appear much greater than it really was. When he resolved on the desperate measure
to throw himself between the allies and the Rhine and south of France, combine with his
numerous garrisons on the former, and still unsubdued divisions in the
PARIS IN 1814. | 197 |
My other anecdote is of peace and the fine arts, though connected with war and pillage. At a soirée, where Talleyrand was of the party, the conversation of a few individuals, knotted in a corner of the room, turned on the pictures brought from Spain by Soult and Wellington; and it was discussed which of the two had the most valuable collection, on which the witty Prince de Perigord, with the usual twinkle of his eye and dry manner, remarked that important as these treasures were, the most extraordinary circumstance of the whole affair was, that the Duke of Wellington had paid money for his acquisitions!!!
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