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

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СКАЧАТЬ replaces the second section of the original Louis Philippe bridge, at one time known from its colour as the Red Bridge.

      We now reach the celebrated Pont Neuf, which with its two arms connects the island of the city, otherwise island of Notre Dame, with both banks of the Seine. The island in question is the ancient Lutetia, the germ of modern Paris. The number of habitations on this kernel, this core of the French metropolis, becomes smaller every year. Before long it will be occupied only by its ancient historical edifices, with a café-chantant at one end of the island and the Morgue at the other. Some who begin life at the former will finish it perhaps at the latter establishment. As to the other bridges, it may be sufficient to mention some of their names; which possess for the most part historical significance, and for that reason have, in many cases, to suit historical circumstances, been changed. The bridge of the Arts owes its name to the institute on the left bank, which it connects with the Louvre on the right; and this bridge has retained its original name since the date of its construction. But the National Bridge, as it was called when it was first built under the Republic of 1789, became, after the proclamation of the First Empire, the bridge of the Tuileries; and at the time of the Restoration, Pont Royal. The Solferino bridge, dating only from 1860, the year after the great battle of the French against the Austrians, has retained its name without intermission.

      The Pont de la Cour has, like the Place of the same name, been called successively Pont Louis XV., Pont de la Révolution, Pont Louis XVI., and finally (since the Revolution which in 1830 placed Louis Philippe on the throne) Pont de la Cour. The bridge of the Alma dates from 1855, the second year of the Crimean war.

      Having now disposed, somewhat summarily, of the Paris bridges, let us say a few words about that mournful establishment, the Morgue, to which a desperate leap from one of the bridges has so often led. The Paris Morgue is situated at the back of Notre Dame, close to the bridge of Saint-Louis. Reconstructed in 1864, it replaces the original one in the form of a Greek tomb, which was built in virtue of a police edict under the First Republic. Something of the kind, however, was known long before, and in ancient chronicles a morgue, where dead bodies were exposed, is spoken of as far back as the early days of the seventeenth century. In its existing form the Morgue is a one-storied building, with two wings, and with slabs of black marble in two lines, for the reception of twelve bodies. The keeper of the Morgue is supposed, by the writer of a novel choke-full of horrors, to have dwelling rooms in this dismal abode; and the perverted imagination of the author represents him as giving an evening party to his friends in close proximity to the sepulchral chamber where the remains of so many unhappy victims are waiting to be recognised by their relatives or friends. The number of men who find their way to this place of ill omen is, according to the statistical tables on the subject, far greater than that of the women. Thus, up to the age of twenty-five, the number of male occupants of the Morgue was found, during a period of years, to be 515 as against 115 female occupants. Between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, among 1,242 occupants, 1,050 were men, and 192 women. From forty-five to fifty-five, there were 599 men, and fifty-eight women.

      What are the kinds of death which feed the Morgue? From 1826 to 1846, out of 1745 cases of apparent suicide represented at the Morgue, there were 1,414 deaths by drowning, 114 by hanging, ninety-eight by fire-arms, forty-six through the fumes of charcoal, fifty-six through falls from heights, sixteen through sharp weapons, eleven by poison, seven by crushing beneath vehicles, and 4 by alcohol. About two-thirds of the bodies exposed at the Morgue are never recognised.

      There is so much that is beautiful and elevating, so much that is curious and interesting, to be seen in Paris, that a visit to the Morgue – by many persons thought indispensable – should surely, by persons of ordinary taste and feeling, be regarded as time ill-spent. It ought to be sufficient to read of it in Jules Janin’s strange novel already referred to.

      CHAPTER VIII.

      THE REFORMATION IN PARIS

D’Étaples, the Pioneer of the Reformation – Nicolas Cop and Calvin – Progress of the Reformation – Persecutions – Catharine de Médicis – St. Bartholomew’s – The Edict of Nantes

      PERMANENT head-quarters of science and study, the left bank of the Seine was also in the fifteenth century the home of a great religious movement, by which, for some time, the right bank was scarcely touched.

      “Few persons,” says M. Athanase Coquerel Fils, “know that the Reformation of the sixteenth century, before it flamed forth in Germany and elsewhere, had already been kindled in the capital of France. It had for its cradle that left bank of the Seine which was then separated from the town and its suburbs, and divided into two quarters subjected to special jurisdictions: the University and the vast territory of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Was it not natural, despite the jealous vigilance of the Sorbonne, that the Paris schools where Abailard had boldly attacked school-divinity should be the first to awake to the new spiritual life?”

      A professor of the college of Cardinal Lemoine Lefèvre, d’Étaples by name, produced in 1512, within the precincts of the Abbey, his “Commentary on St. Paul,” in whose epistles he indicated, five years before Luther, the essential doctrines of the Reformation. This book was dedicated to the powerful abbot of Saint-Germain, Briçonnet, and, under his auspices, assembled in Paris a first group of ardent propagators of the new ideas. During forty-three years the Reformation spread gradually to the University, to the town and to the court, though it maintained its head-quarters in the suburb of Saint-Germain, which people became accustomed to call “the little Geneva,” and which is to-day the most Catholic quarter of Paris. The first Protestant put to death for his religion was one of the pupils of Lefèvre, by name Pauvent, burned on the Place de Grève in 1524. His martyrdom was followed ere long by that of many a Huguenot.

      Calvin at this period was studying at Paris, but he could not stay there. The rector of the University, Nicolas Cop, a secret propagator of the Reformation, had commissioned young Calvin to write a discourse which, on a formal occasion, he had to deliver in the church of the Mathurins. Several monks denounced in Parliament the heresies contained in this discourse. The rector fled to Bâle, where he became a pastor. Calvin, it is said, had to escape by a window of one of the colleges.

      It was in the Louvre that the Reformation was first publicly preached at Paris. Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I. and the friend of Briçonnet, caused her chaplain and other disciples of Lefèvre to preach before her in that palace. Thereupon the Franciscan friar, Lemaud, declared from his pulpit that she ought to be thrown into the Seine in a sack. The priestly rage which had now been excited soon spread to the people, and the streets began to resound with cries of “Death to the Heretics.” “To be thrown into the river,” says Bèze, writing of this period, “it was only necessary to be called a Huguenot in public, no matter what one’s religion might be.” A series of religious murders were now perpetrated; and Francis I., a bigot like his people, headed one day in 1535 a procession in which he was followed by his three sons, the court, the parliaments, the trade corporations, and the brotherhoods, and of which the object was to burn at the stake six Protestants at six different halting-places. Henri II. took after his father. On one occasion he assisted, from a window of the Hôtel de la Rochepot, Rue Saint-Antoine, at the execution of a Protestant tailor who was burned alive. It is said, however, that the martyr’s eyes, fixed as they were upon him, inspired him with terror, and that this was the last heretic whose dying pangs he ever witnessed.

      As yet the Protestants of Paris had neither temple nor pastor. But already they had schools, “hedge schools,” as they were termed, because, prohibited within the city walls, the teachers took refuge in the country.

      The secret meetings of the Protestants of Paris were often surprised. In 1557 services were held and the Communion was administered in one of the houses of the Rue Saint-Jacques, beside the building where is now established the Lyceum of Louis the Great. Excited by the seminarists of the Collège Duplessis, the populace besieged the assembly for six hours, stoning many persons as they came out. Several were killed, and 135 prisoners were taken to the СКАЧАТЬ