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The Paris Sketch Book

W >> William Makepeace Thackeray >> The Paris Sketch Book




I do not (although, perhaps, partial to the subject,) want to talk
more nonsense than the occasion warrants, and will pray you to cast
your eyes over the following anecdote, that is now going the round
of the papers, and respects the commutation of the punishment of
that wretched, fool-hardy Barbés, who, on his trial, seemed to
invite the penalty which has just been remitted to him. You
recollect the braggart's speech: "When the Indian falls into the
power of the enemy, he knows the fate that awaits him, and submits
his head to the knife:--I am the Indian!"

"Well--"

"M. Hugo was at the Opera on the night the sentence of the Court of
Peers, condemning Barbés to death, was published. The great poet
composed the following verses:--


'Par votre ange envolée, ainsi qu'une colombe,
Par le royal enfant, doux et frêle roseau,
Grace encore une fois! Grace au nom de la tombe!
Grace au nom du berçeau!'*


"M. Victor Hugo wrote the lines out instantly on a sheet of paper,
which he folded, and simply despatched them to the King of the
French by the penny-post.

"That truly is a noble voice, which can at all hours thus speak to
the throne. Poetry, in old days, was called the language of the
Gods--it is better named now--it is the language of the Kings.

"But the clemency of the King had anticipated the letter of the
Poet. His Majesty had signed the commutation of Barbés, while the
poet was still writing.

"Louis Philippe replied to the author of 'Ruy Blas' most
graciously, that he had already subscribed to a wish so noble, and
that the verses had only confirmed his previous disposition to
mercy."


* Translated for the benefit of country gentlemen:--

"By your angel flown away just like a dove,
By the royal infant, that frail and tender reed,
Pardon yet once more! Pardon in the name of the tomb!
Pardon in the name of the cradle!"


Now in countries where fools most abound, did one ever read of more
monstrous, palpable folly? In any country, save this, would a poet
who chose to write four crack-brained verses, comparing an angel to
a dove, and a little boy to a reed, and calling upon the chief
magistrate, in the name of the angel, or dove (the Princess Mary),
in her tomb, and the little infant in his cradle, to spare a
criminal, have received a "gracious answer" to his nonsense? Would
he have ever despatched the nonsense? and would any journalist have
been silly enough to talk of "the noble voice that could thus speak
to the throne," and the noble throne that could return such a noble
answer to the noble voice? You get nothing done here gravely and
decently. Tawdry stage tricks are played, and braggadocio
claptraps uttered, on every occasion, however sacred or solemn: in
the face of death, as by Barbés with his hideous Indian metaphor;
in the teeth of reason, as by M. Victor Hugo with his twopenny-post
poetry; and of justice, as by the King's absurd reply to this
absurd demand! Suppose the Count of Paris to be twenty times a
reed, and the Princess Mary a host of angels, is that any reason
why the law should not have its course? Justice is the God of our
lower world, our great omnipresent guardian: as such it moves, or
should move on majestic, awful, irresistible, having no passions--
like a God: but, in the very midst of the path across which it is
to pass, lo! M. Victor Hugo trips forward, smirking, and says,
O divine Justice! I will trouble you to listen to the following
trifling effusion of mine:--


Par votre ange envolée, ainsi qu'une," &c.


Awful Justice stops, and, bowing gravely, listens to M. Hugo's
verses, and, with true French politeness, says, "Mon cher Monsieur,
these verses are charming, ravissans, délicieux, and, coming from
such a célébrité littéraire as yourself, shall meet with every
possible attention--in fact, had I required anything to confirm my
own previous opinions, this charming poem would have done so. Bon
jour, mon cher Monsieur Hugo, au revoir!"--and they part:--Justice
taking off his hat and bowing, and the author of "Ruy Blas" quite
convinced that he has been treating with him d'égal en égal. I can
hardly bring my mind to fancy that anything is serious in France--
it seems to be all rant, tinsel, and stage-play. Sham liberty,
sham monarchy, sham glory, sham justice,--où diable donc la vérité
va-t-elle se nicher?

. . . . . .

The last rocket of the fête of July has just mounted, exploded,
made a portentous bang, and emitted a gorgeous show of blue lights,
and then (like many reputations) disappeared totally: the hundredth
gun on the Invalid terrace has uttered its last roar--and a great
comfort it is for eyes and ears that the festival is over. We
shall be able to go about our everyday business again, and not be
hustled by the gendarmes or the crowd.

The sight which I have just come away from is as brilliant, happy,
and beautiful as can be conceived; and if you want to see French
people to the greatest advantage, you should go to a festival like
this, where their manners, and innocent gayety, show a very
pleasing contrast to the coarse and vulgar hilarity which the same
class would exhibit in our own country--at Epsom racecourse, for
instance, or Greenwich Fair. The greatest noise that I heard
was that of a company of jolly villagers from a place in the
neighborhood of Paris, who, as soon as the fireworks were over,
formed themselves into a line, three or four abreast, and so
marched singing home. As for the fireworks, squibs and crackers
are very hard to describe, and very little was to be seen of them:
to me, the prettiest sight was the vast, orderly, happy crowd, the
number of children, and the extraordinary care and kindness of the
parents towards these little creatures. It does one good to see
honest, heavy épiciers, fathers of families, playing with them in
the Tuileries, or, as to-night, bearing them stoutly on their
shoulders, through many long hours, in order that the little ones
too may have their share of the fun. John Bull, I fear, is more
selfish: he does not take Mrs. Bull to the public-house; but leaves
her, for the most part, to take care of the children at home.

The fête, then, is over; the pompous black pyramid at the Louvre is
only a skeleton now; all the flags have been miraculously whisked
away during the night, and the fine chandeliers which glittered
down the Champs Elysées for full half a mile, have been consigned
to their dens and darkness. Will they ever be reproduced for other
celebrations of the glorious 29th of July?--I think not; the
Government which vowed that there should be no more persecutions of
the press, was, on that very 29th, seizing a Legitimist paper, for
some real or fancied offence against it: it had seized, and was
seizing daily, numbers of persons merely suspected of being
disaffected (and you may fancy how liberty is understood, when some
of these prisoners, the other day, on coming to trial, were found
guilty and sentenced to ONE day's imprisonment, after THIRTY-SIX
DAYS' DETENTION ON SUSPICION). I think the Government which
follows such a system, cannot be very anxious about any farther
revolutionary fêtes, and that the Chamber may reasonably refuse to
vote more money for them. Why should men be so mighty proud of
having, on a certain day, cut a certain number of their fellow-
countrymen's throats? The Guards and the Line employed this time
nine years did no more than those who cannonaded the starving
Lyonnese, or bayoneted the luckless inhabitants of the Rue
Transnounain:--they did but fulfil the soldier's honorable duty:--
his superiors bid him kill and he killeth:--perhaps, had he gone to
his work with a little more heart, the result would have been
different, and then--would the conquering party have been justified
in annually rejoicing over the conquered? Would we have thought
Charles X. justified in causing fireworks to be blazed, and
concerts to be sung, and speeches to be spouted, in commemoration
of his victory over his slaughtered countrymen?--I wish for my part
they would allow the people to go about their business as on the
other 362 days of the year, and leave the Champs Elysées free for
the omnibuses to run, and the Tuileries' in quiet, so that the
nurse-maids might come as usual, and the newspapers be read for a
halfpenny apiece.

Shall I trouble you with an account of the speculations of these
latter, and the state of the parties which they represent? The
complication is not a little curious, and may form, perhaps, a
subject of graver disquisition. The July fêtes occupy, as you may
imagine, a considerable part of their columns just now, and it is
amusing to follow them one by one; to read Tweedledum's praise, and
Tweedledee's indignation--to read, in the Débats how the King was
received with shouts and loyal vivats--in the Nation, how not a
tongue was wagged in his praise, but, on the instant of his
departure, how the people called for the "Marseillaise" and
applauded THAT.--But best say no more about the fête. The
Legitimists were always indignant at it. The high Philippist party
sneers at and despises it; the Republicans hate it: it seems a joke
against THEM. Why continue it?--If there be anything sacred in the
name and idea of loyalty, why renew this fête? It only shows how a
rightful monarch was hurled from his throne, and a dexterous
usurper stole his precious diadem. If there be anything noble in
the memory of a day, when citizens, unused to war, rose against
practised veterans, and, armed with the strength of their cause,
overthrew them, why speak of it now? or renew the bitter
recollections of the bootless struggle and victory? O Lafayette!
O hero of two worlds! O accomplished Cromwell Grandison! you have
to answer for more than any mortal man who has played a part in
history: two republics and one monarchy does the world owe to you;
and especially grateful should your country be to you. Did you
not, in '90, make clear the path for honest Robespierre, and in
'30, prepare the way for--

. . . . . .

[The Editor of the Bungay Beacon would insert no more of this
letter, which is, therefore, for ever lost to the public.]




ON THE FRENCH SCHOOL OF PAINTING:

WITH APPROPRIATE ANECDOTES, ILLUSTRATIONS, AND PHILOSOPHICAL
DISQUISITIONS.


IN A LETTER TO MR. MACGILP, OF LONDON.


The three collections of pictures at the Louvre, the Luxembourg,
and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, contain a number of specimens of
French art, since its commencement almost, and give the stranger a
pretty fair opportunity to study and appreciate the school. The
French list of painters contains some very good names--no very
great ones, except Poussin (unless the admirers of Claude choose to
rank him among great painters),--and I think the school was never
in so flourishing a condition as it is at the present day. They
say there are three thousand artists in this town alone: of these a
handsome minority paint not merely tolerably, but well understand
their business: draw the figure accurately; sketch with cleverness;
and paint portraits, churches, or restaurateurs' shops, in a decent
manner.

To account for a superiority over England which, I think, as
regards art, is incontestable--it must be remembered that the
painter's trade, in France, is a very good one; better appreciated,
better understood, and, generally, far better paid than with us.
There are a dozen excellent schools which a lad may enter here,
and, under the eye of a practised master, learn the apprenticeship
of his art at an expense of about ten pounds a year. In England
there is no school except the Academy, unless the student can
afford to pay a very large sum, and place himself under the tuition
of some particular artist. Here, a young man, for his ten pounds,
has all sorts of accessory instruction, models, &c.; and has
further, and for nothing, numberless incitements to study his
profession which are not to be found in England:--the streets are
filled with picture-shops, the people themselves are pictures
walking about; the churches, theatres, eating-houses, concert-rooms
are covered with pictures: Nature itself is inclined more kindly to
him, for the sky is a thousand times more bright and beautiful, and
the sun shines for the greater part of the year. Add to this,
incitements more selfish, but quite as powerful: a French artist is
paid very handsomely; for five hundred a year is much where all are
poor; and has a rank in society rather above his merits than below
them, being caressed by hosts and hostesses in places where titles
are laughed at and a baron is thought of no more account than a
banker's clerk.

The life of the young artist here is the easiest, merriest,
dirtiest existence possible. He comes to Paris, probably at
sixteen, from his province; his parents settle forty pounds a year
on him, and pay his master; he establishes himself in the Pays
Latin, or in the new quarter of Notre Dame de Lorette (which is
quite peopled with painters); he arrives at his atelier at a
tolerably early hour, and labors among a score of companions as
merry and poor as himself. Each gentleman has his favorite
tobacco-pipe; and the pictures are painted in the midst of a cloud
of smoke, and a din of puns and choice French slang, and a roar of
choruses, of which no one can form an idea who has not been present
at such an assembly.

You see here every variety of coiffure that has ever been known.
Some young men of genius have ringlets hanging over their
shoulders--you may smell the tobacco with which they are scented
across the street; some have straight locks, black, oily, and
redundant; some have toupets in the famous Louis-Philippe fashion;
some are cropped close; some have adopted the present mode--which
he who would follow must, in order to do so, part his hair in the
middle, grease it with grease, and gum it with gum, and iron it
flat down over his ears; when arrived at the ears, you take the
tongs and make a couple of ranges of curls close round the whole
head,--such curls as you may see under a gilt three-cornered hat,
and in her Britannic Majesty's coachman's state wig.

This is the last fashion. As for the beards, there is no end of
them; all my friends the artists have beards who can raise them;
and Nature, though she has rather stinted the bodies and limbs of
the French nation, has been very liberal to them of hair, as you
may see by the following specimen. Fancy these heads and beards
under all sorts of caps--Chinese caps, Mandarin caps, Greek skull-
caps, English jockey-caps, Russian or Kuzzilbash caps, Middle-age
caps (such as are called, in heraldry, caps of maintenance),
Spanish nets, and striped worsted nightcaps. Fancy all the jackets
you have ever seen, and you have before you, as well as pen can
describe, the costumes of these indescribable Frenchmen.

In this company and costume the French student of art passes his
days and acquires knowledge; how he passes his evenings, at what
theatres, at what guinguettes, in company with what seducing little
milliner, there is no need to say; but I knew one who pawned his
coat to go to a carnival ball, and walked abroad very cheerfully in
his blouse for six weeks, until he could redeem the absent garment.

These young men (together with the students of sciences) comport
themselves towards the sober citizen pretty much as the German
bursch towards the philister, or as the military man, during the
empire, did to the pékin:--from the height of their poverty they
look down upon him with the greatest imaginable scorn--a scorn, I
think, by which the citizen seems dazzled, for his respect for the
arts is intense. The case is very different in England, where a
grocer's daughter would think she made a misalliance by marrying a
painter, and where a literary man (in spite of all we can say
against it) ranks below that class of gentry composed of the
apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in
country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my
friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a
paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire,
in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened
county. Asterisk, as usual, made himself extraordinarily agreeable
at dinner, and delighted all present with his learning and wit.
"Who is that monstrous pleasant fellow?" said one of the squires.
"Don't you know?" replied another. "It's Asterisk, the author of
so-and-so, and a famous contributor to such and such a magazine."
"Good heavens!" said the squire, quite horrified! "a literary man!
I thought he had been a gentleman!"

Another instance: M. Guizot, when he was Minister here, had the
grand hotel of the Ministry, and gave entertainments to all the
great de par le monde, as Brantôme says, and entertained them in a
proper ministerial magnificence. The splendid and beautiful
Duchess of Dash was at one of his ministerial parties; and went, a
fortnight afterwards, as in duty bound, to pay her respects to M.
Guizot. But it happened, in this fortnight, that M. Guizot was
Minister no longer; having given up his portfolio, and his grand
hotel, to retire into private life, and to occupy his humble
apartments in the house which he possesses, and of which he lets
the greater portion. A friend of mine was present at one of the
ex-Minister's soirées, where the Duchess of Dash made her
appearance. He says the Duchess, at her entrance, seemed quite
astounded, and examined the premises with a most curious wonder.
Two or three shabby little rooms, with ordinary furniture, and a
Minister en retraite, who lives by letting lodgings! In our
country was ever such a thing heard of? No, thank heaven! and a
Briton ought to be proud of the difference.

But to our muttons. This country is surely the paradise of
painters and penny-a-liners; and when one reads of M. Horace Vernet
at Rome, exceeding ambassadors at Rome by his magnificence, and
leading such a life as Rubens or Titian did of old; when one sees
M. Thiers's grand villa in the Rue St. George (a dozen years ago he
was not even a penny-a-liner: no such luck); when one contemplates,
in imagination, M. Gudin, the marine painter, too lame to walk
through the picture-gallery of the Louvre, accommodated, therefore,
with a wheel-chair, a privilege of princes only, and accompanied--
nay, for what I know, actually trundled--down the gallery by
majesty itself--who does not long to make one of the great nation,
exchange his native tongue for the melodious jabber of France; or,
at least, adopt it for his native country, like Marshal Saxe,
Napoleon, and Anacharsis Clootz? Noble people! they made Tom Paine
a deputy; and as for Tom Macaulay, they would make a DYNASTY of
him.

Well, this being the case, no wonder there are so many painters in
France; and here, at least, we are back to them. At the Ecole
Royale des Beaux Arts, you see two or three hundred specimens of
their performances; all the prize-men, since 1750, I think, being
bound to leave their prize sketch or picture. Can anything good
come out of the Royal Academy? is a question which has been
considerably mooted in England (in the neighborhood of Suffolk
Street especially). The hundreds of French samples are, I think,
not very satisfactory. The subjects are almost all what are called
classical: Orestes pursued by every variety of Furies; numbers of
little wolf-sucking Romuluses; Hectors and Andromaches in a
complication of parting embraces, and so forth; for it was the
absurd maxim of our forefathers, that because these subjects had
been the fashion twenty centuries ago, they must remain so in
saecula saeculorum; because to these lofty heights giants had scaled,
behold the race of pigmies must get upon stilts and jump at them
likewise! and on the canvas, and in the theatre, the French frogs
(excuse the pleasantry) were instructed to swell out and roar as
much as possible like bulls.

What was the consequence, my dear friend? In trying to make
themselves into bulls, the frogs make themselves into jackasses, as
might be expected. For a hundred and ten years the classical
humbug oppressed the nation; and you may see, in this gallery of
the Beaux Arts, seventy years' specimens of the dulness which it
engendered.

Now, as Nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she
gave him a character of his own too; and yet we, O foolish race!
must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors,
whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches! It is the study of
nature, surely, that profits us, and not of these imitations of
her. A man, as a man, from a dustman up to Æschylus, is God's
work, and good to read, as all works of Nature are: but the silly
animal is never content; is ever trying to fit itself into another
shape; wants to deny its own identity, and has not the courage to
utter its own thoughts. Because Lord Byron was wicked, and
quarrelled with the world; and found himself growing fat, and
quarrelled with his victuals, and thus, naturally, grew ill-
humored, did not half Europe grow ill-humored too? Did not every
poet feel his young affections withered, and despair and darkness
cast upon his soul? Because certain mighty men of old could make
heroical statues and plays, must we not be told that there is no
other beauty but classical beauty?--must not every little whipster
of a French poet chalk you out plays, "Henriades," and such-like,
and vow that here was the real thing, the undeniable Kalon?

The undeniable fiddlestick! For a hundred years, my dear sir, the
world was humbugged by the so-called classical artists, as they now
are by what is called the Christian art (of which anon); and it is
curious to look at the pictorial traditions as here handed down.
The consequence of them is, that scarce one of the classical
pictures exhibited is worth much more than two-and-sixpence.
Borrowed from statuary, in the first place, the color of the
paintings seems, as much as possible, to participate in it; they
are mostly of a misty, stony green, dismal hue, as if they had been
painted in a world where no color was. In every picture, there
are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white columns, white
statues--those obligé accomplishments of the sublime. There are
the endless straight noses, long eyes, round chins, short upper
lips, just as they are ruled down for you in the drawing-books, as
if the latter were the revelations of beauty, issued by supreme
authority, from which there was no appeal? Why is the classical
reign to endure? Why is yonder simpering Venus de' Medicis to be
our standard of beauty, or the Greek tragedies to bound our notions
of the sublime? There was no reason why Agamemnon should set the
fashions, and remain [Greek text omitted] to eternity: and there
is a classical quotation, which you may have occasionally heard,
beginning Vixere fortes, &c., which, as it avers that there were a
great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably
induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him.
Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty
figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the
blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not
Milton's angel surpass Æschylus's--surpass him by "many a rood?"

In the same school of the Beaux Arts, where are to be found such a
number of pale imitations of the antique, Monsieur Thiers (and he
ought to be thanked for it) has caused to be placed a full-sized
copy of "The Last Judgment" of Michel Angelo, and a number of casts
from statues by the same splendid hand. There IS the sublime, if
you please--a new sublime--an original sublime--quite as sublime as
the Greek sublime. See yonder, in the midst of his angels, the
Judge of the world descending in glory; and near him, beautiful and
gentle, and yet indescribably august and pure, the Virgin by his
side. There is the "Moses," the grandest figure that ever was
carved in stone. It has about it something frightfully majestic,
if one may so speak. In examining this, and the astonishing
picture of "The Judgment," or even a single figure of it, the
spectator's sense amounts almost to pain. I would not like to be
left in a room alone with the "Moses." How did the artist live
amongst them, and create them? How did he suffer the painful labor
of invention? One fancies that he would have been scorched up,
like Semele, by sights too tremendous for his vision to bear.
One cannot imagine him, with our small physical endowments and
weaknesses, a man like ourselves.

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