Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 1. Walton William

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СКАЧАТЬ forces,—the sun, fire, torrents, tempests, mountains, etc.; but neither they nor the Druids had any human figures or symbols in their pantheon. The invasions galatiques or kimrobelge, on the contrary, brought in from the Orient a cult already strongly anthropomorphous, and with these symbols, traditions, and divinities those of the Greeks and Romans became mingled to a greater or lesser degree that it is impossible to determine, because, as it appears, all that we really know of the Gaulish religion before the Roman conquest is reduced to a few lines in Polybius, in which can be found the name of Perkunas, the Perkun of the Slavs. Cæsar identifies the gods of the Gauls with the Roman ones, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva; and M. André Lefèvre, in the Revue mensuelle de l'École d'anthropologie, asks, without being able to answer: "How is it possible that such men as Cæsar and Tacitus were able to confound with Mercury the supreme gods of the Gauls and the Germans; but, still more, how is it that the Gaul should have adopted with enthusiasm the Latin name and forgotten the Gaulish name of his supreme god?" M. Reinach is considered to have proved beyond a doubt that the god with the mallet, the Dispater of the Gallo-Roman period, was a sort of copy, in Gaulish attire, of the Egyptian Serapis; and the inscriptions of the imperial epoch testify to the diffusion of the worship of the divinities of Alexandria from Arles and Nîmes, in the extreme south, to Besançon, almost on the borders of Switzerland, and Soissons, northeast of Paris. Nevertheless, those archæologists who have thought they found traces of the art of Egypt and Babylon in that of the original cave-dwellers are now considered to have been deceiving themselves; and M. Reinach has modified the opinions he held a few years ago on the early religious art of Gaul. "In short, what we know of Gaulish mythology amounts to nothing, or practically nothing."

      Various rude images and fragments of altars found under the modern pavements of Paris at different dates and localities—among others, under the choir of Notre-Dame in 1710—have revealed the names, if not the characters, of some of the ancient divinities of the soil, Esus, Jovis, Volcanus, Tarvos trigaramos, Cernunnos.

      But if the scientists grope doubtingly in these twilights of history, the romancers relate boldly. One of them, M. Henri Lavedan, has been calling up the Parisienne of the Lacustrine age, "gran' maman archi-centennaire" of her of the present day. This is how she was. "Large, thick, and short, with a vigorous figure, shaking out coarse and matted hair, the feet bare, the arms bare, the breast half bare and unrestrained under her species of primitive corset. The body is that of a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that are simple and elementary, is lit up by eyes grey or blue, eyes limpid and tranquil, which regard without vivacity, without appearing and disappearing lights, without surprise, the eyes of an animal under the yoke and resigned to it, eyes only too well acquainted with the eternal landscape which they have been reflecting ever since they were first opened. The step is slow, sure, heavy, and majestic. Under her petticoat of sombre color may be divined two great legs, the legs, almost, of a man, two legs of labor and of endurance. She sings naturally, this woman, when she is alone, vague songs, sort of fugues of savages, very simple, which seem to have neither beginning nor end, but in the company of others she is almost taciturn, replying by gestures, by signs, accomplishing her task with a passive regularity. She scarcely knows the lighter shades of sentiments and expressions. She laughs or she weeps. No smiling. When she laughs, it is with a large display of the solid white teeth of a carnivorous animal; when she weeps, it is with the deep sobs of a beaten child. She is strong and patient like the ox, she runs like the horse, she resists cold, heat, and fatigue; her sleep is profound and without dreams. She is more mother than wife, in the animal sense of the word; she is capable of courage, of rude goodness and of devotion, but all of these naturally and by instinct. Her life may be hard and long, she may retain until a very advanced age the plenitude of her vigor, and die splitting wood or turning the mill.

      "Should the wife cease to please her husband, he sells her again; should she commit a fault, he strips her (the garments will serve for the new spouse); then he takes her by the hair and smothers her in the marsh. Nevertheless, however miserable may be her condition of a domestic animal, this creature has passions. Tacitus informs us that adultery was not unknown to the purchased wife. The male children belonged to the father, and always remained with him; as to the aged, the old relatives, useless and cumbering, they were put 'in a place apart,' a sort of hollow in the neighborhood of the hole for the hogs or the enclosure for the cattle, and there was thrown to them the remnants of the meals. The family sentiment, the voice of kindred blood, did not, as yet, make itself heard very distinctly."

      This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue of courage. Cæsar says that when a man of importance died, his wives were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845, indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.

      Of the many attempts that have been made to restore the primitive man in his environments, one of the most learned and interesting is that shown by M. Cormon, the painter, in his series of large decorations for the plafond and walls of some ethnological museum, exhibited in the Salon of 1898. But an artist is an impossible archæologist; the more of an artist he is, the more will he be unwilling to represent the merely bestial, as the scientist finds it; and though the original inhabitant of the valley of the Seine and other favored spots may have circulated in some such early landscape, and have garbed himself and tattooed himself somewhat as the painter here paints him, it is probable that there was far less of the picturesque and presentable about him, of grace of attitude and whiteness of skin in his women-folk, than in any artist's presentation on a self-respecting canvas.

      The habitations of the early Parisian were equally unlike those familiar to the Cook's tourist. On the pedestal of an antique statue of Melpomene of heroic size in the Louvre is a relief representing the head of a supposed Gaul defending his house against a Roman soldier, and this sculpture, confirmed by others on the column of Antoninus at Rome of those of the German barbarians, gives this dwelling as a species of circular, upright hut, covered with a conical-shaped roof constructed of branches and reeds, or thatch, or perhaps of a half-spherical piece of wood.

      In the soil of the tertiary, or quaternary, basin in which Paris lies are found traces of marine plants, oyster-shells, skeletons of fish, etc., which indicate that it has risen from the bottom of the sea. As every one knows, the Seine, flowing in a general direction from east to west, curves toward the north to traverse the heart of the city, the former Palais de l'Industrie, but just demolished, having occupied nearly the centre of the upward curve of this bow. On the south, the river receives the waters of the Bièvre, a feeble stream which flows through a narrow valley, and, farther eastward, those of the river Marne. Under the Roman domination and that of the first Merovingian kings, that part of the city lying immediately south of the river seems to have become the most populous and important almost as soon as the narrow limits of the original islands became too confining. The pride of the Faubourg Saint-Germain may date itself back for some fifteen centuries. A central, principal street traversed the city from south to north, entering it in the general direction of the Rue Saint-Jacques, passing on the east side of the imperial palace whose ruins may still be seen in the Musée des Thermes, at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel. Under the Rue Saint-Jacques remains of the ancient pavement have been found at a great depth, and a fragment of it is preserved in the Musée de Cluny. The Roman street crossed the small arm of the Seine on a wooden bridge, near where is now the Petit-Pont, traversed the Ile de la Cité, at the western end of what is to-day the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, and crossed the larger branch of the river near the site of the present Pont Notre-Dame. On the northern shore, it СКАЧАТЬ