Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1. Edwards Henry Sutherland

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СКАЧАТЬ adhere strictly and simply to the facts?” “Rest assured,” replied his adversary. The seconds had measured a distance of forty paces; the combatants were to advance within twenty of each other. Armand Carrel immediately took his place and advanced, presenting, despite the urgent entreaties of M. Ambert that he would show less front, the whole breadth of his person to his adversary’s aim. M. de Girardin having also advanced some paces, both parties fired nearly at the same instant, and both fell wounded, the one in the leg, the other in the groin.

      “I saw him,” wrote Louis Blanc some time afterwards, “as he lay; his pale features expressing passion in repose. His attitude was firm, inflexible, martial, like that of a soldier who slumbers on the eve of battle.”

      M. de Girardin was profoundly grieved at the result of the duel, and he made a vow never to fight again. Many years afterwards, under the Republic of 1848, he visited the grave of the man he had killed, to express his regret and ask for pardon in the name of the form of Government to which he had now become a convert, and which Carrel had always placed above every other.

      The duelling chronicles of the Bois de Vincennes would lead us far away from the Paris of to-day. It may be mentioned, however, that in this wood Alexandre Dumas the elder fought his famous duel with a collaborateur, who claimed to have written the whole of the Tour de Nesle and who, undoubtedly, supplied to the skilful dramatist the framework of the piece.

      Dumas was in all truth a skilful dramatist, though one may hesitate to give him the title of dramatic poet, which he loved to claim. “What are you?” said the judge of the Rouen Tribunal to the author of so many clever pieces, who had to give evidence in a certain case. “If I were not in the city of Corneille,” answered Alexander the Great, “I should call myself a dramatic poet.” “There are degrees in everything,” replied the judge. Alexandre Dumas was, all the same, a great inventor, and he possessed an extraordinary talent for putting dramatic things into shape. When, therefore, the future editor of the Courier des États-Unis claimed to have written all that was important in the Tour de Nesle, he doubtless declared what from a literary point of view was false. Dumas not only rejected his contention, but declined to allow his own name to appear in the bill side by side with that of his collaborateur. Hence angry words and a duel: once more a serious one, and with pistols, not swords.

      With a calm desire to kill his man, of which, were he not his own accuser, one would refuse to suspect him, Dumas tells us, in his Memoirs, how, when he appeared on the ground, he examined his adversary’s costume, and, while thinking it excellent as a “make-up,” was sorry to find that it offered no salient mark for a pistol-shot. M. Gaillardet was dressed entirely in black; his trousers, his buttoned-up coat, his cravat were all as inky as Hamlet’s cloak, and according to the Parisian fashion of the time, he wore no shirt-collar. “Impossible to see the man,” said Dumas to himself; “there is no point about him to aim at.” He at the same time made a mental note of the costume, which he afterwards reproduced in the duel scene of the “Corsican Brothers.” At last he noticed a little speck of white in his adversary’s ear: simply a small piece of cotton-wool. “I will hit him in the ear,” said Dumas to himself; and on his confiding the amiable intention to one of his seconds, the latter promised to watch carefully the effect of the shot, inasmuch as he was anxious to see whether a man hit with a bullet through the head turned round a little before falling or fell straight to the ground. Dumas’s pistol, however, missed fire. The delightful experiment contemplated could not, therefore, be tried; and the encounter was bloodless.

      At Vincennes was confined for a few days, just before his expulsion from France, the Young Pretender, or “Charles Edward,” as the French called him. The Duke de Biron had been ordered to see to his arrest; and one evening when it was known that he intended to visit the Opera, Biron surrounded the building with twelve hundred guards as soon as the prince had entered it. He was arrested, taken to Vincennes, and kept there four days; then to be liberated and expelled from France, in accordance with the treaty of 1748, so humiliating to the French arms. The servants of the Young Pretender, and with them one of the retinue of the Princess de Talmont, whose antiquated charms had detained him at Paris, were conveyed to the Bastille; upon which the princess wrote the following letter to M. de Maurepas, the minister: “The king, sir, has just covered himself with immortal glory by arresting Prince Edward. I have no doubt but that his Majesty will order a Te Deum to be sung to thank God for so brilliant a victory. But as Placide, my lacquey, taken captive in this memorable expedition, can add nothing to his Majesty’s laurels, I beg you to send him back to me.” “The only Englishman the regiment of French guards has taken throughout the war!” exclaimed the Princess de Conti, when she heard of the arrest.

      “Besides the Bastille and the Castle of Vincennes, which are the privileged places of confinement for State prisoners, there are others,” says an old chronicler, “which may be called the last strongholds of tyranny. The minister by his private lettre de cachet sends an objectionable individual to Bicêtre or Charenton. The latter place, indeed, is for lunatics; but a minister who deprives a citizen of his liberty because he so wills it may make him pass for what he pleases; and if the person taken up is not at that time, he will in a few months be, entirely out of his senses, so that at worst it is only a kind of ministerial anticipation. Upon any complaint laid by the parents or other relations, a young man is sent to St. – Lazare, where sometimes he will remain till the death of the complainants; and Heaven knows how fervently this is prayed for by the captive!”

      Under the reign of Charles VII. there stood in the Wood of Vincennes a castle which the King named Château de Beauté, and presented to Agnes Sorel. Of this abode the royal favourite duly took possession. Charles was by no means popular with his subjects, whom he taxed severely; and they were scandalised by the way in which Agnes Sorel squandered money, by her undisguised relations with the king, and by the kindness with which she was apparently treated even by the queen. Far, then, from rendering honours to “the beautiful Agnes,” the Parisians murmured at her prodigality and arrogance; and the favourite, indignant to find herself so ill received in Paris, departed, saying that the Parisians were churls, and that if she had suspected they would render her such insufficient honour she would never have set foot in their city: “which,” says a contemporary writer, “would have been a pity, but not a great one.”

      After saying so much against Agnes Sorel, it is only fair to add that, according to many historians, it was she who roused Charles VII. from his habitual lethargy, and inspired him with the idea of driving the English out of France.

      Vincennes is a military station, where a considerable body of troops is maintained. Hence, as already mentioned, the once famous Chasseurs derived their name. Each division has now its own battalion of Chasseurs. It may be added that special corps of infantry, such as Chasseurs de Vincennes, Zouaves, Turcos, together with the Chasseurs d’Afrique and other kinds of ornamental cavalry, have been abolished: to the detriment of the picturesqueness, if not the practical efficiency, of the French army.

      The infantry regiments are all armed and dressed absolutely alike, with the exception of the battalions of “chasseurs” (corresponding to the “schützen” battalions of the German Army), whose tunics are of a lighter blue than those of the line regiments. The Germans, by the way, have only one battalion of sharpshooters to each army corps, whereas the French have two, one to each division. As the French are adopting as much as possible the principle of uniformity in their army, it seems strange that they should have made any distinction between chasseurs and infantry of the line; that, in short, they should have retained chasseurs in their army at all. Formerly sharp-shooters carried rifles and were supposed to be particularly good shots; whereas infantry of the line were armed with smooth-bore muskets, and if they could pull the trigger, could certainly not aim straight. Now every infantry soldier is supposed, more or less correctly, to be a good marksman; and linesmen and chasseurs are armed alike.

      Lancers exist no more; and the French cavalry, but for differences of uniform, would all be of the same medium pattern, neither “light” nor “heavy,” but presumably fit for duties of all kinds. Some СКАЧАТЬ