The New Portfolio: A Prospective Visit

AFTER an interval of more than fifty years I propose taking a second look at some parts of Europe. This will give my readers of The Atlantic, as well as the writer, a vacation to which we both seem entitled. It is a Rip Van Winkle experiment which I am promising myself. The changes wrought by half a century in the countries I visited amount almost to a transformation. I left the England of William the Fourth, of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Soult, of Thiers, of Guizot. I went from Manchester to Liverpool by the new railroad, the only one I saw in Europe. I looked upon England from the box of a stage-coach, upon France from the coupé of a diligence, upon Italy from the chariot of a vetturino. The broken windows of Apsley House were still boarded up when I was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid in Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in the Seine, as I remember it. I did not see it erected ; it must have been a sensation to have looked on, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by it if it disgraced him by falling in the process. As for the dynasties which have overlaid each other like Dr. Schliemann’s Trojan cities, there is no need of moralizing over a history which instead of Finis is constantly ending with What next?

With regard to the changes in the general conditions of society and the advance in human knowledge, think for one moment what fifty years have done. I have often imagined myself escorting some wise man of the past to our Saturday Club, where we often have distinguished strangers as our guests. Suppose there sat by me — I will not say Sir Isaac Newton, for he has been too long away from us, but that other great man, whom Professor Tyndall names as next to him in intellectual stature, as he passes along the line of master minds of his country from the days of Newton to our own — Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829. Would he or I be the listener, if we were side by side ? However humble I might feel in such a presence, I should be so clad in the grandeur of the new discoveries, inventions, ideas, I had to impart to him that I should seem to myself like the ambassador of an Emperor. I should tell him of the ocean steamers, the railroads that spread themselves like cobwebs over the civilized and half-civilized portions of the earth, the telegraph and the telephone, the photograph and the spectroscope. I should hand him a paper with the morning news from London to read by the electric light, I should startle him with a friction match, I should amaze him with the incredible truths about anæsthesia, I should astonish him with the later conclusions of geology, I should electrify him by the fully developed doctrine of the correlation of forces, I should delight him with the cell-doctrine, I should confound him with the revolutionary apocalypse of Darwinism. All this change in the aspects, position, beliefs, of humanity since the time of Dr. Young’s death, the date of my own graduation from college !

I ought to consider myself highly favored to have lived through such a half century. But it seems to me that in walking the streets of London and Paris I shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a relic of a former generation. Those who have been born into the inheritance of the new civilization feel very differently about it from those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those approaching middle age all these innovations in life and thought are as natural, as much a matter of course, as the air they breathe: they form a part of the frame-work of their intelligence, of the skeleton about which their mental life is organized. To men and women of more than threescore they are external accretions, like the shell of a mollusk, the jointed plates of an articulate.

This must be remembered in reading anything written by those who knew the century in its teens ; it is not like to be forgotten, for the fact betrays itself in all the writer’s thoughts and expressions. The reader of this paper of mine must recollect that I did not visit Europe to bring home stories for his amusement or instruction. My time was chiefly given up to the study of my profession. I lived largely in hospitals, I listened to medical and surgical lectures, I walked in the train of learned professors, I talked with medical students, I belonged to a medical society, and I took sides in medical contests which agitated the little world around the École de Médecine. In a word, I lived the life of the Quartier Latin, — the students’ quarter. Not rarely, however, I crossed the river by the Pont Neuf or the Pont des Arts, bought a little bouquet of violets or other modest blossoms of a humble flower-dealer at the further end of the bridge, and with that in my button-hole aired myself in the sunny splendors of the Palais Royal and the Boulevard des Italiens. My time was not wholly idle on these excursions, for, to say nothing of the theatres and the opera, I studied with infinite delight the pictures and statues in the Gallery of the Louvre, and gave due attention to that branch of physiology of which Brillat-Savarin was the illustrious teacher, by the aid of practical lessons in the famous restaurants of the day.

The reader may naturally suppose that I can have very little to tell him which can be of special interest. I saw a great deal of which he does not wish to hear. He does not care to follow me into the wards of La Pitié, or St. Louis, or Hôtel Dieu, unless he is so far depraved in his taste by the grossness which calls itself realism as to delight in what is repulsive to healthy natures.

I did not see the men and women whom to have met would have been a priceless memory. I thought of myself only as a medical student, preparing for a laborious calling by which I expected to live. I had not opened my sealed orders. What is there in such a young person to excite a moment’s interest other than that which human brotherhood entitles us all to look for in our fellow - creatures ? Very little, I am afraid. But I was not yet twenty-four years old, and so youthful in aspect that they did not like to let me in at Frascati’s, where I went once only, to look on, not to gamble. My senses were acute, my intellect was hungry, my love of art and taste for it strong enough to be a continual source of excitement, and though I had written a few poems, some of which have lived their half century, I had not wasted my youthful sensibilities in those floods of verse which wash away the emotions that are the life of life in profuse and debilitating expression.

Who does not remember the change of feeling, when, in his boyhood, as he was following a company of “ trainers ” marching to the lean duet of the drum and fife, all at once the full band broke into its rich tumult of harmonies ? Such was my feeling, transplanted from my city of sixty thousand inhabitants into the great world-centres where millions were congregated.

I must have told in print somewhere much of what I have to say in these pages. But if I do not remember when or where I have told it, it is not very probable that my reader does, or that he remembers anything about it. At any rate, I put my recollections in more exact order than ever before. They are many of them, perhaps most of them, trivial, — personal reminiscences, peculiar to the narrator in many cases, not such as his reader would be likely to meet with elsewhere. They are, in point of fact, the flotsam of memory, — the lighter things that have come to the surface in virtue of their buoyancy.

I left New York in April, 1833, in the ship Philadelphia, Captain Champlin, and returned in the autumn of 1835 in the ship Utica, Captain Depeyster. I began a journal on the first day of the voyage, and closed it on the third. One of my fellow-passengers, Mr. Thomas Gold Appleton, was more persevering, and I learn from his diary, printed in Miss Susan Hale’s “ Life and Recollections,” that it was on Monday, the 1st of April, we sailed. I refer to his record for a few facts.

The list of passengers included, also, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, Dr. R. W. Hooper, and Mr. Thomas B. Curtis. There was, of course, much pleasant talk. “ Tom Appleton ” made fun of everything ; the icebergs which scared us became the icebugs in his vocabulary, and between him and the three I have mentioned it was an ill word that did not furnish a pun, good or bad, for one or the other of them. Of the sights Appleton describes I cannot say so much as he does. I remember the little tug Hercules, which towed us out of the harbor, and watched for her name many a year in the marine records. I recollect the man overboard, and the “ helm cover” — if that was the name of it — which was thrown over to him. How many drowning flies I have rescued in the memory of that struggling mariner ! I can recall, or think I can, the whales, but I am sorry to say I missed the following interesting object : —

“While gazing over the railing at the seething caldron about the ship, I had a fair sight at that most poetical of ocean rovers, the nautilus. It was spinning round in the foam, in shape like a sculpin, with a many-colored and semitransparent body, and two beautiful azure, gauze-like wings or sails. I saw no oars. It was whirled instantly out of sight.”

I did hear some of the passengers speak of seeing what the captain called a “ Portuguese man-of-war,” but I did not see the creature myself, nor did I ever see this description until more than fifty years after it was written. The creature is not a nautilus, and the account seems to me a little fanciful, but not more so than a poem of my own, The Chambered Nautilus, which speaks about “ its wings of living gauze,” and again of its “ purpled wings,” expressions which look as if they had been borrowed from Mr. Appleton’s Diary. “ Tom ” was in the poetical mood, and wrote a sonnet, making a little fun of himself for doing it. He says that he and I “ talked sentiment.” I do not doubt it; he was full enough of it to make verses, and I was too full of it to be jingling syllables, for poems spring up after the floods have subsided.

I happen to remember the name of the vessel he mentions our falling in with ; it was the brig Economist, from Sierra Leone for Leith. This meeting made me feel as if I were reading a story out of a picture-book.

It blew pretty freshly as we neared the land, and a topsail exploded like a torpedo, and hung in rags about the spars. By and by the land grew from a suspicion to a reality, from a mass to a varied surface, and very soon the spire of a church showed itself. The American of English descent is a poor creature if such a sight does not awaken some feeling deeper than mere curiosity or pleasure in its picturesqueness. When the church-bells of England vibrate, the dust of his ancestors of scores of generations,

thrills with the trembling earth that covers it. There is a magnetism in the soil from which our lives were remotely drawn which not even the infinite humor of our countryman’s reflections at the grave of the father of the human race can laugh us out of. If Mr. Appleton and I did not “talk sentiment” when we first caught sight of that steeple, I am ashamed for both of us, —but perhaps our feelings were too deep for any words.

Our first reception in England was cordial, if not hospitable, — cordial, for the best of reasons. The vessel did not put us ashore, but a boat took us on board aud had to be paid for. The boat did not put us on shore, but a plank was laid for us to walk over, and this too had to be paid for. We landed at Portsmouth on the 25th day of April. The Quebec Hotel, to which we went, was a small affair, but we found it comfortable and homelike. What struck me most was the neatness of all outdoors and its conveniences. The roads were so hard and smooth it seemed like maltreatment to drive over them. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a stagecoach ; it looked like a toy, the body so small, and such contrivances for the " outsides.” We drove in the environs of Portsmouth, and the variety and beauty of the cottages astonished us. We stood on the deck of the Victory, and saw where Nelson fell. While at the navy yard we saw some soldiers, marines, perhaps, under arms. What little fellows they are! we said. They looked like boys. The same remark was often made afterwards in looking at French troops of the line.

We crossed over to the Isle of Wight. How lovely and garden-like ! Is the island kept under glass in winter ? At Carisbrook Castle we were shown round by a most respectable-looking old gentleman, who appeared more like one of my brother members of the Massachusetts Historical Society than a cicerone whose business was to show a place to strangers. We could not insult such a gentleman by offering him a shilling or half a crown, and we did not, unless some one who knew the ways of British local historians did it quietly. A similar experience we had with the distinguished-looking personage who showed us the royal yacht in which George the Fourth used to take his sea airings.

The feelings of an educated American on first reaching the home of his ancestors have been so fully expressed by Irving in the Sketch-Book that it would be superfluous to enlarge upon them here. Only eighteen years had passed since he sailed for Europe. We cannot help smiling as we read of the effect produced upon him by the first sight of a man of distinction in the world of letters ; — “ There was something in his whole appearance that indicated a being of a different order from the bustling race around him. I inquired his name, and was informed that it was Roscoe. I drew back with an involuntary feeling of veneration. This, then, was an author of celebrity ; this was one of those men whose voices have gone forth to the ends of the earth, with whose minds I have communed even in the solitude of America.”

An American is in little danger of going into hysterics at the sight of a European celebrity in these days. Washington Irving’s emotions enlarged the object of his contemplation, as the young Plymouth pilgrim’s imagination saw “ a great sea ” in what proved to be a pond or small lake, which has immortalized his blunder by taking the name of “ Billington Sea.” The American of today is far more likely to express himself, after meeting “ an author of celebrity,” in the spirit of the question of the princess in Landor’s “ Gebir : ” —

“Is this the mighty ocean, —is this all ? ” Since Mark Twain introduced the Mississippi to the Jordan, the American has been in danger of losing that “veneration” which the amiable author of the Sketch-Book yielded so freely to the first well-known writer he met with.

One sensation I had, overpowering, memorable ever after, — the sight of my first cathedral, that of Salisbury. Others that I have since seen are richer in ornament, their spires rise higher and their windows blaze in brighter colors, but the page of memory on which Salisbury Cathedral stamped itself was a fresh one, almost virgin of impressions. Our village meeting-house was visible upon it, and the Old South, and our dear little Saint Peter’s which calls itself the State House, its dome not yet gilded; but that mighty pile, with its shaft climbing up as high above its lofty roof as Park Street steeple from the ground on which it rests, with its peaceful cloisters, its venerable monuments, its memories of six hundred years, has never faded from my mental picture-gallery. My second pilgrimage in England would naturally carry me first to that precious shrine, that I might look upon it once more through the eyes that saw it when their light was yet undimmed. How that spire seemed to follow me wherever I wandered within the circle of miles around it! Looking down as it does from a height of four hundred feet and more, it was hard to escape its presence. One turned his eyes upward, and over walls and housetops and tall trees ; there it was, its vane among the clouds by day and a companion of the stars by night.

Salisbury Plain would have been of little note to me if I had not so well remembered Miss Hannah More’s Shepherd. What lessons of content have I not got from that story! The little daughter who pities the poor people that have no salt to their potatoes, — “and see, father, our dish is quite full.” Dear Miss Hannah! —I got my most palatable Sunday reading out of her stories in the Cheap Repository Tracts, and I would make one of my first calls upon her; but she has not seen company, — such as I am, — for a long time.

Stonehenge, Big Dominos, — there must have been giants in those days. I knew little more about them then, geologically, historically, ethnologically, than the sheep that nibbled the grass around them. During my first visit to England, of a week only, I visited the places mentioned and others of interest: Southampton and Netley Abbey, Wilton House, home of the Sidneys and the Herberts, and Longford Castle, seat of the Earl of Radnor. To look upon real Claudes, like the famous ones at Longford Castle ; to make the acquaintance of Vandyke and other great painters in the originals, not in pallid copies ; to walk among genuine ancient marbles and bronzes, the accumulations of generations, as at Wilton House, was a new and most agreeable feeling, but it made the “ Athenæum Gallery ” a little less imposing than it had seemed when we were admiring its treasures in the early days of the exhibitions, and writing pert little verses about some of them.

After this taste of Hampshire and Wiltshire, remembering that we had other objects, we crossed the Channel, and found ourselves at Havre. On our way to Paris we were joined by a very social and companionable young man, who was bound to the same place. He knew Boston well, so he said ; had been there, and boarded with " Betsy *****,” a favorite with the best class of boarders. He had been disappointed, it came out before long, in regard to his remittances. This is a not uncommon affliction, and is apt to bring a train of mourners with it and leave them after it. I did not become a fellow-sufferer with him by playing the part of a substitute for his banker, but others, I believe, did.

At Rouen the sensation was in the narrow streets, with the tall houses and the merest ribbon of blue sky between them, a wholly new effect to me. I could only think of being at the bottom of a deep crack in a mountain of rock or hardened lava.

And so we found ourselves in Paris. What current drifted us to the Hôtel des Quinze Vingts I do not remember. There is a well-known asylum for the blind which is called Hospice des Quinze Vingts, Infirmary of the Three Hundred ; but we could hardly have mistaken that for an inn, and the people of the establishment could not have taken three staring medical students for blind persons.

In the morning we sallied forth for breakfast, and soon found ourselves in a café in the Place de la Bourse. It was a bright, sunny day, and Paris revealed herself to us in all that irresistible charm which bewitches every one about whom she casts her spangled net. It was a delight to be alive, to see new faces, to hear a new language, to find everything gay, everything unlike what we had left. But we had come for work, not play. We were soon in the quarters we had selected, on the other side of the river. If the reader would like to know where I passed my two years, I will give him my address as my English friend Thompson (whose peut-être was undistinguishable from the English of pomme de terre) would have rendered it. He would have said that Mônshur H. lived at noomero sankont sank Roo Monshur ler Pranse. I should have written it 55 Rue M. le Prince. M. Bertrand was my landlord ; his wife and her mother were the ladies of the establishment. Both of them died suddenly, not very long after I took my room in the house, and I was prié to assister at the interment. A lady, not youthful, took the place at the head of the household, and after a decorous interval I was prié to assister at the ceremony which made the widower and Mademoiselle Susanne a happy couple. I was au troisième — on the third floor — the first year, au second in the second year.

The mode of life was, for myself and other American students, to take a cup of coffee early in the morning, to walk to the hospital, follow the visit of the physician or surgeon, attend any autopsy there might be, and then go to breakfast.

The favorite resort of myself and my friends was the Café Procope. This café had a remarkable history. It got its name from its founder, who established it in the Rue des Fossés St. Germain, now the Rue de l’Aucienne Comédie, in the year 1689. It is still in existence, and will soon reach its two hundredth anniversary. Here many famous men have been accustomed to repair for their refection, — Voltaire, Piron (qui ne fût rien ; pas même Académicien), J. B. Rousseau, Marmoutel, Saurin, and, in a later generation, Gambetta. There was no show about the place, but Madame at the Comptoir was pleasant to look upon, and Honoré, our favorite garçon, would project a stream of coffee into the middle of a little group about a table with a dash that was audacious and an accuracy that inspired triumphant confidence. The rest of the day was partly taken up in lectures, visits to different hospitals, private instruction, visits to galleries, excursions, and by the time five o’clock arrived we were ready for dinner. For a month I was en pension, at a boarding-house, or at least took my dinner there. All was neat and proper, there was the due succession of courses, but Madame’s “ Un peu de celà ? ” meant si peu that I was fain to seek quarters where frugality was a less distinguishing feature. I therefore joined some young Genevese students, who formed a sort of club and dined together. The house in which we dined was noted from having been the one where Marat was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. We used every day to pass the room that witnessed this event. There were some pleasant things connected with this Bohemian arrangement. The Genevese students seemed to me like a kind of transplanted Bostonians ; indeed, the students from Geneva and from Boston were drawn together naturally. Whether it was because both were citizens of a republic, or whether the fact that both came from snug little buttoned-up cities where Calvinism long found its headquarters accounted for it, Theodore Maunoir and James Jackson, Jean Bizot and myself, were as much at home with each other as if all had been fellowtownsmen. Some of the ways of one or two of my fellow-boarders at table were not exactly such as a fastidious young person, with our New England habits, would be pleased with, and I left the house where the spirit of Charlotte Corday seemed ever present, and the table where my appetite was sometimes discouraged.

In those days one of the most noted, though by no means the most showy or fashionable, restaurants was the Trois Frères Provençaux. That was a favorite resort of my companions and myself. Five or six francs apiece gave us a modest but respectable dinner, with a half bottle of Macon or Beaune. On great occasions the wine would be Chambertin or Clos-Vougeot. We rarely called for Champagne, — not because we were too economical, but it was very much less the favorite than in these days. In Boston we drank Madeira, in Paris Burgundy. Of course we tried various famous restaurants: Very and Vefour, one or both ; the Café Anglais, famous in those days for its turbot; the Café de Paris; Grignon; and the noted resort of epicures, long since extinct, I have heard, the Rocher de Cancale, a kind of intramural " Taft’s,” where the products of the sea, shell-fish, and the like were to be had in their best condition.

The Latin Quarter, — the left side of the Seine, looking down the river, — compared with the right side, was what a woolen lining is to a silken mantle. There were cafés and restaurants, enough of them, but there was a great difference in the service and in the guests. I wonder whether the “ Petit Rocher ” has withstood the floods of half a century. I wonder whether “ Risbec ” still offers his bill of fare as he did in 1833, and whether some grandson of the waiter of that time would ask me, as did his grandsire, “ Voulez-vous des pommes de terre avec ? ” That terminal abrupt avec—used as the English use “ with ” and “ without ” (warm with, cold without, — sugar, being understood) — happened to fix itself in my memory, which has forgotten so many dynasties and revolutions. I feel half ashamed as I tell such a triviality.

The whole generation of professors and teachers of my student days has passed away, with but two exceptions, so far as I know. Philippe Ricord, “illustre chirurgien,” born in Baltimore in the year 1800, is, I think, still living. Few men have had a larger experience of the infirmities of human nature than this celebrated practitioner. If Voltaire had practiced medicine, his clinical lectures would have been not unlike those of Ricord. It is remarkable that America should furnish two such distinguished men, remarkable also for longevity, as George Bancroft and Philippe Ricord, born in the same year and within two months of each other.

A more extraordinary instance of old age with retention of intellectual and bodily strength is that of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, the great chemist and wellknown professor. Born on the 31st of August, 1786, his hundredth birthday is close at hand. His portrait and a notice of his life and labors may be found in a recent number of the Popular Science Monthly (August, 1885). Last January the students of Paris made a manifestation of respect to " the great savant by whom France is honored, and who, reaching his hundredth year, still remains robust and valiant, and preserves all the force of his genius and his old energy in work.” I regret to say that I never saw him.

But cases like these of Ricord and Chevreul are eminently exceptional. The generation I knew in Paris is extinct. Even of their immediate successors in the professorial chairs, in the prominent positions as practitioners, comparatively few are still living and active. Many Americans still remember Louis, often spoken of erroneously as Baron Louis, the title belonging to a statesman of that name who died in 1837. He was the special object of admiration, the guide and friend, of American, and more peculiarly of Boston, students. We all followed him at his visits and his lectures, believed in his teachings, swore by his words. It seems like profanation to sit in judgment on the teachers one has looked up to in his earlier years. Louis can bear such a retrospect well. His rectilinear intelligence supplied the best possible corrective to minds disposed to whirl in vortices, to roll in cycles and epicycles, to shoot up in parabolas and off in tangents. I, for one, owe him much. A healthy suspicion of the à peu près in matters of science, a willingness to look facts in the face and give them fair play against preconceived notions and prejudices, — these are what he taught, and what I partly learned ; others, I doubt not, learned them better.

How strange is the process of disillusion about our early instructors ! We judge them from the lofty height of twenty, or thirty, or forty years of human progress, and it dwarfs their labors as we look down upon them. Louis was an admirable man and in certain respects an excellent teacher, a great pathologist for that day ; but what was pathology before the reign of the microscope ? We all loved him and honored him. His character had a bonhomie and simplicity almost Arcadian, — indeed, I suspect his early training was distinctly provincial. He had some expressions which struck me as curious, — I will write them phonetically. When he came to the empty bed of a patient who had died, he said something that sounded like fweet, the Latin fuit, perhaps, or fuite, flight. He always called number eleven numero honze, and he used to say asswoiez-vous for asseyezvous, as many of the less educated are in the habit of doing. I am struck with the fact that many of my instructors lived to be very old. I think professorships tend to produce longevity. Quarterly payments of a fixed stipend are tranquillizing prescriptions ; and if one loves teaching and has a fair salary, with moderate views of life, he is almost as sure of tiring out the young man who is waiting for his place as an annuitant of outliving his “ expectation of life ” and the anticipations of the office which is reckoning on his demise within a reasonable period.

My recollections of the French Theatre are but meagre. I was never much given to theatre-going, but I could not help seeing some of the celebrities of the day. Of these, Mademoiselle Mars was the most distinguished. She was about fifty-five years of age when I saw her in the part of Valerie, the young blind girl. She was not youthful, certainly, but there is a secret compact between time and a French actress which falsifies the baptismal record and the almanac. Her voice retained its wonderful charm, and there was an inundation of tears at the moving point of the drama. The most noted tragedian I saw was Ligier, a favorite pupil of Talma. He acted the part of Gloucester, in Casimir de la Vigne’s play, “ Les Enfans d’Edouard.”

I well remember his cavernous voice, as the Frenchmen called it, and his pronunciation of Buckingham, — Bew-kanggam, in three pieces, as if he were fitting the fragments of a broken word together. The play was not a great success, but Ligier’s formidable personality and voice were very effective. I must have seen him in another part, for among the words which still vibrate in my memory are, O le conseil des dix ! in tones so awful that they can have been none other than his. I find few persons remember Ligier. But Frédéric Lemaître as Robert Macaire, and Mademoiselle Dejazet at the theatre of the Palais Royal, everybody who ever saw them must remember. Dejazet was still playing forty years after I saw her, she being then nearly forty years old. Taglioni was dancing at the Royal Opera ; Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache were singing at the Italian. Auriol, the famous clown, was contorting himself at Franconi’s.

One of the last exhibitions I saw in Paris was a Diorama, as I think it was

called, of Switzerland, got up and exhibited by a certain Monsieur Daguerre; a name afterwards to become familiar to all civilization, and enduring as history. I was, during my stay in Paris, a peaceable subject of le Roi Citoyen, his Majesty Louis Philippe. Once only I looked upon his august and expansive countenance. A barouche full of royalty and its kindred rolled by me, and I saw the Orleans family, or a good part of it. Louis Philippe had a pair of bulging cheeks, with great whiskers, and a comparatively narrow forehead, with a twisted stem of hair surmounting it. The caricaturists found a resemblance in all this to the shape of a pear, and the blank walls were abundantly ornamented with the outlines of a pear, marks being added for eyes, nose, and mouth. This quasi-portrait was to be seen everywhere in its rudimentary form, and more elaborately presented in the illustrated satirical papers. These papers were often very amusing with their political squibs. General Lobau had broken up a mob by turning the stream of a fire-engine upon it. He figured with a squirt in his hand. M. Thiers had laid himself open to ridicule, and the circumstances of the time furnished an excellent handle for the satirist. The column of the Place Vendome had just been surmounted by a statue of Napoleon in the little cocked hat and redingote. So M. Thiers was represented at the top of the column with this inscription : “ M. Thiers. ainsi nommé parcequ’il n’est pas le tiers d’un grand homme.” The citizen king himself figured in various aspects, not generally imposing. He offers his old rifflard — baggy umbrella—to France, crowned with her towers. She turns scornfully towards him with “ Vous me crottez, monsieur.” In those days Monsieur Mayeux, the little swearing, bullying hunchback, descendant of the Roman Maccus, own cousin to the modern Punch, was the favorite vehicle, so to speak, of satire. His reign lasted a year or two, after which he disappeared from the throne of caricature.

There were several émeutes during my residence in Paris, one, especially, in which the “ massacre de la Rue Transnonain ” took place. The soldiers were fired upon from one or more of the houses in this street. The next morning’s record said, in words deeply imprinted on my memory, “Tout ce qui se trouvait dans la maison fût passé au fil de l’épée” — All that were found in the house were put to the edge of the sword. — It was a fearful thought that such Old Testament proceedings were going on in the streets of a Christian city where one was living, but noomero sankont sank Roo Mónshur ler Pranse and the Café Procope were not disturbed by the rising, which was made short work of. I visited the Morgue the next day, and saw the bodies of numerous victims of the outbreak.

I was in Switzerland at the time of Fieschi’s murderous exploit. News travelled slowly in those days. There were telegraphs in France, it is true, but they consisted of a simple mechanism like a letter T, with movable limbs, placed on some high building. I was living near the great Church of St. Sulpice, and used often to see one of these machines in operation, posturing like a slowly moving jumping-jack. The citizen king was thought to use it for his private ends, as was insinuated in paragraphs like this : “ A heavy fog prevented telegraphic communications yesterday. — Certain great personages are said to have made large profits by a sudden rise in the funds.” Before I returned to Paris the Fieschi murders were an old story, and his trial and execution did not take place until February, 1836, after I had returned to America. So I missed that great Parisian event, except in the newspapers I fell in with while travelling.

I cannot help remembering the occurrences which took place at home while I was in Europe. A few months after the massacre of the Rue Transnonain, in which, in one house at least, Number 12, no human being, old person or infant, well or languishing in bed, was spared,—only a few months after this horror occurred the barbarous burning of the Charlestown convent. A few months after the terrible Fieschi murders, Boston was disgraced by the Garrison mob. I did not feel the excitement of those who witnessed these outrages ; they reached me deadened in some measure by distance, coming in broken and sometimes contradictory reports, at intervals and at a time when my thoughts were engrossed by laborious duties. I have always regretted that I was not at home to share the holy indignation which these atrocities called forth, as I hope I should have done.

Among the scraps which my memory has preserved by its own selective action are phrases and verses that have nothing, perhaps, in themselves, but which saw fit to fasten themselves to my recollection as the stray tufts of wool hold to the bramble. The name of François Berton, the musical composer, is, I fear, well-nigh forgotten. He died of cholera the year before I reached Paris, and there was a benefit, or something of that nature, for the relief of those he left after him. Why I should be able to recall the opening lines of a poem recited on the occasion, — I, who cannot remember my own verses, — I am unable to explain, but this is the way it began (errors excepted, of course) : —

This was the beginning of a poem written to be heard once and read the next morning. Very probably no one living, but myself, has the least recollection of it.

This I happened to retain, but how much else I have forgotten ! What had I to do with literature? — trudging to and from hospitals; tramping with a crowd of students, of various nationalities, through long halls, from bedside to bedside; standing on the cold stone floors of the apartment where the secrets of fatal disease were laid open to the eyes of science ; living in an atmosphere scented by the infragrant flora of the pharmacopœia. I might have seen and talked with Châteaubriand and Lamartine, with Béranger, with Balzac, with Victor Hugo, with George Sand, with Alfred de Musset; I might have heard Berryer speak from the tribune, and seen Delacroix paint in his studio. If I could live those two years of Paris over again, I should have a very different record from this; but I did my work, such as it was.

If I was not a great theatre-goer, there were two attractions I always yielded to. The first was the quays, where I could mouse for old books, and where I now and then picked up an Aldus or an Elzevir, or some curious work on medicine or alchemy. Hunting for these was a very pleasant and even exciting occupation. It is a bloodless kind of sport; the element of uncertainty makes it fascinating. I am almost afraid to say it, but sometimes when, looking from my window, I have seen a chiffonnier, with his lamp, his basket, and his hook, attacking a virgin heap of refuse, the sagacious implement transfixing its destined object as the falcon’s beak strikes its quarry, I have thought that he might have as much happiness with his crochet as many a sportsman finds in his rod or his gun.

My other favorite haunt was the gallery of the Louvre. One might spend a lifetime there, and wish it could be longer. I do not know that there would be any great advantage in mentioning the pictures and statues which have lasted longest in the memory of an untrained lover of art. The process of natural selection has made up my little ideal gallery. It was not always the merit of the picture which fixed it. I doubt, for instance, if among the more modern pictures that melodramatic one of the Deluge — of course I am not thinking of Poussin’s picture — would take a very high rank, but my recollection of it is singularly vivid. It would be more interesting to me than to my reader to see what changes my taste has undergone in half a century, and I hope I may have a chance to test it in the long gallery of the Louvre. One thing I am sure of: my allegiance to the Venus of Milo, which had been but a few years in the Museum when I saw it, has not changed, and can be no more ardent now than it was in those early times when I had heard very little about it.

Among the churches of Paris, my peculiar favorite was Saint Etienne du Mont. It was in the way of my morning walk to and from the Hospital of La Pitié, and I was fond of stepping inside, especially on my return from the morning’s visit, and looking around the beautiful interior; admiring the pulpit and the figures about the organ, and reading the inscriptions on the walls. But with what different eyes I should look upon the tablet which bears the name of Blaise Pascal! I am afraid I never read the Lettres Provinçiates or the Pensées until Agassiz, not long after the publication of a book of mine, told me that he thought I should enjoy Pascal, and I soon became well acquainted with his writings. I have such perfect photographs of the interior of Saint Etienne that I know it almost as well as my own library. Can it be that the slender tapers have been burning round that dark sarcophagus all these long years since I stood by its railing ?

Once more to stray into the vast solitudes of Saint Eustache at the twilight hour, and hear its mighty organ roll out its sounding billows beneath the lofty arches! Once more to read the ancient legends on the monuments of Saint Germain des Près; to face the square towers and pass under the sculptured portal of Notre Dame ; to look up at the soaring roof of the Sainte Chapelle ; to stand beneath the mighty dome of the Pantheon, made doubly famous since the time when I last looked upon it by the sublime experiment of Foucault!

Among the striking events which occurred during my residence in Paris was the fatal duel between General Bugeaud, a deputy, and his colleague, Dulong. Words spoken in the Chamber were taken up by the press, and made so much of that the general thought himself obliged to call out the civilian. They were to stand at forty paces and advance towards each other, firing when they chose. The general fired almost immediately, and his ball struck his adversary in the forehead. Single combats affect the imagination more powerfully than the conflict of masses ; Achilles and Hector. David and Goliath, the Constitution and the Guerrière, the Chesapeake and the Shannon, the Monitor and the Merrimack, — the story of these combats is never out of our memories.

The Gazette des Tribunaux was on our table at the café, and was full of stories which one could hardly help reading, and sometimes remembering. Among these was the trial of a lieutenant in the army, M. de La Roncière. I read this, as everybody did, but without dreaming that I should ever write a romance and use one of its incidents, as I did in Elsie Venner.

I was one day walking with a French fellow-student in the Palais Royal, when my attention was drawn to a singular figure. I had noticed this personage before, and it was hardly possible to pass him without taking a second look, and wondering who and what he could be. " Who is that man ? ” I asked my companion,

“ Celui là ? Vous ne savez pas ? C’est CHODRUC DUCLOS ! ” Chodruc Duclos, — that did not teach me a great deal, but the name remained with me. A tall man he was ; ancien militaire, to judge by his appearance ; in the last stage of proud and shabby decadence, buttoned tight up to the throat in a frock coat, long worn and shiny, — a calyx of old broadcloth without a petal of linen visible ; solitary, silent, haughty, recognizing neither man nor woman, recognized by none. Every day saw him pacing the gallery of the Palais Royal, and all strangers asked, as I did, Who is that tall, beggarly, king-like vagabond in the shocking hat and pauper clothing, walking back and forth as if he owned the royal demesnes ?

And this is all I knew about him until within the last year or two. I looked in all the biographies, and could not find his name. Once I saw it mentioned in one of Victor Hugo’s novels, but only incidentally. I never lost my curiosity about him, but I had almost given him up when I unearthed him in the great Dictionary of Larousse. There must have been romances written about him, one would think. The reader may know some tale founded upon his life, — nothing was ever more inviting. Here is an outline of the career of the gaunt, poverty-stricken spectre of the Palais Royal :

The “ modern Diogenes,” as the writer of the sketch of his life calls him, was born at Bordeaux, nobody knows when, and nobody would have liked to ask him. A royalist, anti-republican, anti-Bonapartist, he became a soldier, was taken prisoner, escaped, and returned to Bordeaux, where his bravery and his personal beauty gained him the name of Duclos THE SUPERB. Plots, imprisonment, escapes, adventures of all kinds, followed in rapid succession. He killed a prison officer who had been rude to him by breaking a pitcher on his head. Armed with cool audacity and a couple of pistols, he walked up to the captain of gendarmes, who had been sent to arrest him. The officer all at once remembered something which he had forgotten, and turned back to go after it. He had the misfortune to kill the young Marquis de Larochejaquelein in a duel, and incurred the hostility of the powerful family to which the young nobleman belonged. Louis Eighteenth said, when applied to by them, “Duclos has been too useful to me that I should harm him, but I will never bestow any favor upon him.”

Returning to Paris, he met with disappointment and humiliation. He wanted to be a Marshal of France, and was offered a captaincy, which he rejected with scorn. After this he became the Timon which he was at the time I saw him. For sixteen years he paced the gallery of the Palais Royal, regularly every day, from four in the afternoon to ten in winter, from two o’clock until midnight in summer. He dressed like a pauper, as a reproach to the ingratitude of his superiors. He carried his personal negligence so far at one time as to outrage propriety, and was put in jail for a fortnight to teach him decency. Poor as he was, he had enough to keep body and soul together, and after his daily promenade he used to retire to a little kennel in the Rue Pierre Lescot, throw down a franc on the table, take his candle, and stretch himself on his pallet for the night.

Such was the career of Chodruc Duclos, the Superb, who in his earlier days had been “ the bugbear and the terror of husbands in virtue of his extraordinary strength and skill with his weapon, and the darling of women for his brilliant address and the proportions and beauty of his Antinous-like figure.” On the 11th of October, 1842, he was missed at the Palais Royal. He lay dead on his pallet, in his obscure hiding-place. These are some of the fragments tossed to the surface in the whirlpool of memory. They have been drawn ashore to these pages almost without selection. Most of them came from the shallower portions of the current, as the reader notices. That is apt to be the way with memory : it lets the ponderous events of life sink far into its depths, and brings to light the lesser incidents, the picturesque trivialities, which seem hardly worth the labor of the vortex.

After all, it was the new life of Paris, following that of Cambridge, Andover, Boston, which was the enchantment, the intoxication. Her streets were not of gold, her gates were not of pearl, and her boulevards were not trodden by white-winged angels. But she blended old relics, reeking with historical memories and modern splendors such as no other city could show the sun in his daily visit of inspection. I was met everywhere by the unexpected: Dimanche was so different from a New England “ Sahbuth ; ” the Seine was so much fuller of strange sights than the Charles ; the Pont Neuf was so much more lively than West Boston bridge; the extremes of life were so much more vivid to look upon than a comparatively level mass of mediocrity; the grandiose was so refreshing after the snug and comfortable; and perhaps I ought to say the change from the dreary abodes of disease and death, where I passed many hours of my day, to the palaces and gardens and galleries of the other side of the river, — all this, and so much more, and three and twenty, — can you not understand and pardon the levity of my witty friend and companion, who said that " good Bostonians, when they die, go to Paris ” ?

My work in Paris was relieved by two vacations. In each of these I took journeys with pleasant friends as my companions.

If I were writing my autobiography, each of these visits might claim a somewhat extended notice. But at this time I will only refer to a few experiences and impressions. The awful remembrance of climbing the spire of the Cathedral of Strasburg is one of the most memorable. I felt sure it was swaying in the wind like a reed, and said so at the time. Long afterwards I found that the fact had been recognized, and made the subject of a memoir in a French periodical. As I looked down on the roof, with its flying buttresses like the ribs of some pre-mastodon, to whom the mammoth was as a mouse, my heart sank within me, like the Queen of Sheba’s. All this was first built in the brain of a frail being, human like myself. All this immensity and grandeur reaches my consciousness through these two little rings no bigger than the capital O ! which expresses my wonder.

Down the Rhine to Rotterdam. Many marvellous paintings I saw in Holland, but one held me so that I could not get away from it,— Van der Helst’s great portrait-picture of the municipal guard. I have some Batavian blood in my veins, and it may be that I have a relative or two among these hearty and ruddy burghers. The portraits of the old professors at Leyden interested me. I, too, was an old professor, in embryo, but I did not know it. I never knew much about them until, in after years, I picked up a copy of the Athenæ Batavæ, of Meursius, where I found many of their portraits reproduced, with memoirs. Countless windmills, endless meadows, party-colored cows grazing on them, make up three quarters of the hasty traveller’s Holland. One strange thing I saw there, which I learn has disappeared from the streets of the cities, namely, sleds, as we should call them, each with a cask of water dribbling upon the stones of the pavement before the runners, so that they might slip easily over them. And so good-by to the land of William the Silent, of Barneveldt, of Grotius, of Erasmus, of Van

Tromp and De Ruyter, and of Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, whose name makes me think he may have been of the same race as myself, unless philology or criticism shall prove me an offshoot of the Vandals.

A visit to Holland before going over to England is like a lunch before a dinner. A small steamer took us from Rotterdam across the Channel, and we found ourselves in the capital of England and of the world.

The great sight in London is — London. No man understands himself as an infinitesimal until he has been a drop in that ocean, a grain of sand on that sea-margin, a mote in its sunbeam, or the fog or smoke which stands for it; in plainer phrase, a unit among its millions.

I had two letters to persons in England: one to kind and worthy Mr. Petty Vaughan, who asked me to dinner ; one to pleasant Mr. William Clift, conservator of the Hunterian Museum, who asked me to tea. These were my chief social relations with England during this visit.

To Westminster Abbey. What a pity it could not borrow from Paris the towers of Notre Dame ! But the glory of its interior made up for this shortcoming. Among the monuments, one to my namesake, Rear Admiral C. H., a handsome young man. standing by a cannon. He accompanied Wolfe in his expedition which resulted in the capture of Quebec. Dryden has immortalized him, in the Annus Mirabilis, as

My relative, I will take it for granted, as I find him in Westminster Abbey. Camden tells us how we got our name : “ Holme, plaine grassie ground upon water sides or in the water. S is ioyned to most now, as Manors, Knoles — Gates — Thornes, Holmes,” etc. Blood is thicker than water, — and warmer than marble, I said to myself, as I laid my hand on the cold stone image of my once famous namesake. To the Tower, to see the lions, — of all sorts. There I found a “ poor relation,” who made my acquaintance without introduction. A large baboon, or ape, — some creature of that family, — was sitting at the open door of his cage, when I gave him offence by approaching too near and inspecting him too narrowly. He made a spring at me, and if the keeper had not pulled me back would have treated me unhandsomely, like a quadrumanous rough, as he was. He succeeded in stripping my waistcoat of its buttons, as one would strip a peapod of its peas.

To Vauxhall Gardens. All Americans went there in those days as they go to Madame Tussaud’s in these times. There were fireworks and an exhibition of polar scenery. “Mr. Collins, the English PAGANINI,” treated us to music on his violin. A comic singer gave us a song, of which I remember the line, —

This referred to a bill proposed by Sir Andrew Agnew, a noted Scotch Sabbatarian agitator.

To the Opera to hear Grisi. The king, William the Fourth, was in his box ; also the Princess Victoria, with the Duchess of Kent. The king tapped with his white-gloved hand on the ledge of the box when he was pleased with the singing.—To a morning concert and heard the real Paganini. To one of the lesser theatres and heard a monologue by the elder Mathews, who died a year or two after this time. To another theatre, where I saw Liston in Paul Pry. Is it not a relief that I am abstaining from description of what everybody has heard described ?

To Windsor. Woman forgot to give me change for a shilling, in buying some of her strawberries. England owes me sixpence. How one remembers what people owe him ! Machinery to the left of the road, Recognized it instantly, by recollection of the plate in Rees’s Cyclopædia, as Herschel’s great telescope. — Oxford. Saw only its outside. I knew no one there, and no one knew me. — Blenheim, — the Titians.

The great Derby day of the Epsom races. Went to the race with a coachload of friends and acquaintances. Plenipotentiary, the winner, “rode by P. Connelly.” So says Herring’s picture of him, now before me. Sorrel, a great “ bullock ” of a horse, who easily beat the twenty-two that started. Every New England deacon ought to see one Derby day to learn what sort of a world this is he lives in. Man is a sporting as well as a praying animal.

Stratford on Avon. Emotions, but no scribbling of name on wall. — Warwick. The castle. A village festival, " The Opening of the Meadows,” a true exhibition of the semi-barbarism which had come down from Saxon times. — Yorkshire. “ The Hangman’s Stone.” Story told in my book called The Autocrat, etc. York Cathedral. — Northumberland. Alnwick Castle. The figures on the walls which so frightened my man John when he ran away from Scotland in his boyhood.

Berwick on Tweed. A regatta going on ; a very pretty show. — Scotland. Most to be remembered the incomparable loveliness of Edinburgh. — Stirling. The view of the Links of Forth from the castle. The whole country full of the romance of history and poetry. Made one acquaintance in Scotland, Dr. Robert Knox, who asked my companion and myself to breakfast. That makes four entertainments to which I was treated in Great Britain : breakfast with Dr. Knox; lunch with Mrs. Macadam, — the dear old lady gave me bread, and not a stone ; dinner with Mr. Vaughan ; tea with Mr. Clift, — for all which attentions I was then and am still grateful, for they were more than I had any claim to expect. Fascinated with Edinburgh. Strolls by Salisbury Crag ; to the top of Arthur’s Seat; delight of looking up at the grand old castle, of looking down on Holyrood Palace, of watching the groups on Calton Hill, wandering in the quaint old streets and sauntering on the sidewalks of the noble avenues, even at that time adding beauty to the new city. The weeks I spent in Edinburgh are among the most memorable of my European experiences.

To the Highlands, to the Lakes, in short excursions; to Glasgow, seen to disadvantage under gray skies and with slippery pavements. Through England rapidly to Dover and to Calais, where I found the name of M. Dessein still belonging to the hotel I sought, and where I read Sterne’s “ Preface written in a désobligeante,” sitting in the vehicle most like one that I could find in the stable. Through Calais back to Paris, where I began working again.

In my next summer’s excursion, in 1835, three days and nights in the diligence carried us to Geneva. The sight of the mountains and the lakes was a new education to the senses and a new world to the soul. It always seemed to me to have stretched the horizon of thought so that it never came back to its original dimensions. Wordsworth and, after him, Byron have illustrated the incompetence of words to describe Alpine scenery : —

They intrude themselves into the mind, and become, as it were, a part of it for all coming time.

If Switzerland touched the deepest chord in my consciousness, a solemn bass note which Nature had never before set in vibration, Italy reached a string which returned a keener and higher note than any to which my inward sense had before responded. Italy, more especially Rome, leaves after it an infinite longing which haunts the soul forever.

If I should visit Switzerland and Italy again, I may revive my early impressions as a foil for more recent ones. But this somewhat gossiping, if not garrulous, paper has been spun out long enough, and I will leave my patient, or perhaps impatient, reader to follow out my reference to these two enchanted regions by the aid of his guide-books.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.