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PARIS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

1838.

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THE age of Louis the Fourteenth is one of the most brilliant in history; illustrious by its reign of seventy-two years and its hundred authors known to fame. The government of this monarch has been called "" a satire upon despotism." His vanity was boundless his magnificence equally so. The palaces of Marly and Versailles are monuments of his royal pride equestrian statues, and his figure on one of the gates of Paris, represented as a naked Hercules, with a club in his hand and a flowing wig on his head, are monuments of his vanity and self-esteem.

His court was the home of etiquette and the model of all courts. "It seemed," says Voltaire, "that Nature at that time took delight in producing in France the greatest men in all the arts; and of assembling at court the most beautiful men and women that had ever existed. But the king bore the palm away from all his courtiers by the grace of his figure and the majestic beauty of his countenance; the noble and winning sound of his voice gained over the hearts that his presence intimidated. His carriage was such as became him and his rank only, and would have been ridiculous in any other: The embarrassment he inspired in those who spoke with him flattered in secret the self-complacency with which he recognized his own superiority. The old officer, who became agitated and stammered in asking a favor from him, and not being able to finish his discourse, exclaimed, Sire, I do not tremble so before your enemies!' had no difficulty in obtaining the favor he asked."

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All about him was pomp and theatrical show. He invented a kind of livery, which it was held the greatest honor to wear; a blue waistcoat embroidered with gold and silver;

a mark of royal favor. To all around him

he was courteous; towards women chivalrous. He never passed even a chambermaid without touching his hat; and always stood uncovered in the presence of a lady. When the disappointed Duke of Lauzun insulted him by breaking his sword in his presence, he raised the window, and threw his cane into the courtyard, saying, "I never should have forgiven myself if I had struck a gentleman.”

He seems, indeed, to have been a strange mixture of magnanimity and littleness; his gallantries veiled always in a show of decency; severe; capricious; fond of pleasure; hardly less fond of labor. One day we find him dashing from Vincennes to Paris in his huntingdress, and standing in his great boots, with a whip in his hand, dismissing his Parliament as he would a pack of hounds. The next he is dancing in the ballet of his private theatre, in the character of a gypsy, and whistling or singing scraps of opera-songs; and then parading at a military review, or galloping at full speed through the park of Fontainebleau, huntingthe deer, in a calash drawn by four ponies. Towards the close of his life he became a devotee. "It is a very remarkable thing," says Voltaire, "that the public, who forgave him all his mistresses, could not forgive him his father confessor." He outlived the respect of his subjects. When he lay on his death-bed, — those godlike eyes that had overawed the world now grown dim and lustreless, - all his courtiers left him to die alone, and thronged about his successor, the Duke of Orleans. An empiric gave him an elixir, which suddenly revived him. He ate once more, and it was said he could recover. The crowd about the Duke of Orleans diminished very fast. "If the king eats a second time, I shall be left all alone," said he. But the king ate no more. He die

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like a philosopher. To Madame de Maintenon more difficult to Why do you

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he said, "I thought it was die!" and to his domestics, weep? Did you think I was immortal?" Of course the character of the monarch stamped itself upon the society about him. The licentious court made a licentious city. Yet everywhere external decency and decorum prevailed. The courtesy of the old school held sway. Society, moreover, was pompous and artificial. There were pedantic scholars about town; and learned women; and Précieuses Ridicules, and Euphuism. With all its greatness, it was an effeminate age.

The old city of Paris, which lies in the Marais, was once the court end of the town. It is now entirely deserted by wealth and fashion. Travellers even seldom find their way into its broad and silent streets. But sightly mansions and garden walls, over which tall, shadowy trees wave to and fro, speak of a more splendid age, when proud and courtly ladies dwelt there, and the frequent wheels of gay equipages chafed the now grass-grown pavements.

In the centre of this part of Paris, within pistol-shot of the Boulevard St. Antoine, stands the Place Royale. Old palaces of a quaint and uniform style, with a low arcade in front, run quite round the square. In its centre is a public walk, with trees, an iron railing, and an equestrian statue of Louis the Thirteenth. It was here that monarch held his court. But there is no sign of a court now. Under the arcade are shops and fruit-stalls; and in one cor ner sits a cobbler, seemingly as old and deaf as the walls around him. Occasionally you get a glimpse through a grated gate into spacious gardens; and a large flight of steps leads up into what was once a royal palace, and is now a tavern. In the public walk, old gentlemen sit under the trees on benches, and enjoy the evening air. Others walk up and down, buttoned in long frock-coats. They have all a provincial look. Indeed, for a time you imagine yourself in a small French town, not in Paris; so different is everything there from the Paris you live in. You are in a quarter where people retire to live genteelly on small incomes. The gentlemen in long frock-coats are no courtiers, but retired tradesmen.

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Not far off is the Rue des Tournelles; and the house is still standing in which lived and loved that Aspasia of the seventeenth century, the celebrated Ninon de l'Enclos. From the Boulevard you look down into the garden, where her illegal and ill-fated son, on discovering that the object of his passion was his own mother, put an end to his miserable life. Not very remote from this is the house once occupied by Madame de Sévigné. You are shown the very cabinet where she composed those letters which beautified her native tongue, and "make us love the very ink that wrote them." In a word, you are here in the centre of the Paris of the seventeenth century; the gay, the witty, the licentious city, which in Louis the Fourteenth's time was like Athens in the age of Pericles. And now all is changed to solitude and silence. The witty age, with its brightness and licentious heat, all burnt out, puffed into darkness by the breath of time. Thus passes an age of libertinism and sedition, and bloody, frivolous wars, and fighting bishops, and devout prostitutes, and "factious beaux esprits improvising epigrams in the midst of seditions, and madrigals on the field of battle."

Westward from this quarter, near the Seine and the Louvre, stood the ever famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, the court of Euphuism and false taste. Here Catherine de Vivonne, Marchioness of Rambouillet, gave her æsthetical soirées in her bedchamber, and she herself in bed, among the curtains and mirrors of a gay alcove. The master of ceremonies bore the title of the Alcoviste. He did the honors of the house and directed the conversation, and such was the fashion of the day, that, impossible as it may seem to us, no evil tongue soiled with malignant whisper the fair fame of the Précieuses, as the ladies of the society were called. Into this bedchamber came all the most noted literary personages of the day; — Corneille, Malherbe, Bossuet, Fléchier, La Rochefoucault, Balzac, Bussy-Rabutin, Madame de Sévigné, Mademoiselle de Scudéri, and others of less note, though hardly less pretension. They paid their homage to the Marchioness, under the title of Arthénice, Éracinthe, and Corinthée, anagrams of the name of Catherine. There, as in the Courts of Love of a still ear

lier age, were held grave dissertations on frivolous themes and all the metaphysics of love, and the subtilties of exaggerated passion, were discussed with most puerile conceits and a vapid sentimentality. "We saw, not long since," says La Bruyère, "a circle of persons of the two sexes, united by conversation and mental sympathy. They left to the vulgar the art of speaking intelligibly. One obscure expression brought on another still more obscure, which in turn was capped by something truly enigmatical, attended with vast applause. With all this so-called delicacy, feeling, and refinement of expression, they at length went so far that they were neither understood by others nor could understand themselves. these conversations one needed neither good sense, nor memory, nor the least capacity; only

For

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esprit, and that not of the best, but a counterfeit kind, made up chiefly of imagination."

Looking back from the present age, how very absurd all these things seem to us! Nevertheless, the minds of some excellent men were seriously impressed with their worth; and the pulpit-orator, Fléchier, in his funeral oration upon the death of Madame de Montausier, exclaimed, in pious enthusiasm: "Remember, my brethren, those cabinets which are still regarded with so much veneration, where the mind was purified, where virtue was revered under the name of the incomparable Arthénice, where were gathered together so many personages of quality and merit, forming a select court, numerous without confusion, modest without constraint, learned without pride, polished without affectation."

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TABLE-TALK.

IF you borrow my books, do not mark them; for I shall not be able to distinguish your marks from my own, and the pages will become, like the doors in Bagdad, marked by Morgiana's chalk.

Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

Authors, in their Prefaces, generally speak in a conciliatory, deprecating tone of the critics, whom they hate and fear; as of old the Greeks spake of the Furies as the Eumenides, the benign Goddesses.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work, rather than its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Popularity is only, in legal phrase, the "instantaneous seisin " of fame.

The Mormons make the marriage ring, like the ring of Saturn, fluid, not solid, and keep it in its place by numerous satellites.

In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays.

We often excuse our own want of philan

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Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be, a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, "Providence."

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