Edwards Henry Sutherland
Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1
The fifth, sixth, and seventh chambers of the Court of Appeal are all entered from the Galerie Marchande; while the fourth chamber stands in the north-east corner of the said gallery. On the left of the Galerie Mercière is the famous Salle des Pas Perdus, seventy-four metres long and twenty-eight broad. This is the great entrance hall to the courts generally. Why it should be called “Salle des Pas Perdus” is not evident, though the name may be due either to the “lost steps” of litigants bringing or defending actions without result, or, more probably, to the “lost steps” of those who walk wearily to and fro for an indefinite time, vainly expecting their case to be called on. Whatever the derivation of its name, the Salle des Pas Perdus is considered one of the finest halls in Europe. Twice has it been destroyed by fire and twice rebuilt. The first large hall of the palace, as it was at that time called, was built under Philip the Fair and finished towards 1313. It was adorned successively with the statues of the kings of France from Pharamond to Francis I.; the successful ones being represented with their hands raised to heaven in token of thanksgiving, the unfortunate ones with head and hands lowered towards the ground. The most celebrated ornament of the large hall was the immense marble table of which ample mention has already been made.
After the fire of 1618 (in which the table split into several pieces, still preserved in the vaults of the palace) a new hall on the same site, and of the same dimensions as the old one, was built by Jacques Desbrosses, which was burnt in 1871 by the Commune, to be promptly rebuilt by MM. Duc Dommey and Daumet.
The seven civil chambers of the tribunal are entered through the Salle des Pas Perdus, either from the ground floor or from the upper storey, which is reached by two staircases. This portion of the palace was partly reconstructed in 1853 under the reign of Napoleon III., Baron Haussmann being Prefect of the Seine. The fact is recorded on a marble slab let into one of the walls. In the middle of the south part of the Salle des Pas Perdus, a marble monument was raised in 1821 to Malesherbes, the courageous advocate who defended Louis XVI. at the bar of the Convention. The monument comprises the statue of Malesherbes with figures of France and Fidelity by his side. On the pedestal are low reliefs, representing the different phases of the memorable trial. The statues are by Cortot, the illustrative details by Bosio. The Latin inscription engraved on the pedestal was composed by Louis XVIII., in whose reign the monument was executed and placed in its present position. This king, who translated Horace and otherwise distinguished himself as a Latinist, is the author of more than one historical inscription in the Latin language, and he commemorated by this means, not only the heroism of Malesherbes, who defended Louis XVI. at the trial, but also the piety of the Abbé Edgeworth, who accompanied him to the scaffold.
Towards the end of the hall, on the other side, is the statue of Berryer, which, according to M. Vitu, is “the homage paid to eloquence considered as the auxiliary of justice.” In the north-east corner of the Hall of Lost Steps, to the left of Berryer’s monument, is the entrance to the first chamber, once the bed-chamber of Saint Louis, and which, reconstructed with great magnificence by Louis XII. for his marriage with Mary of England, daughter of King Henry VII., took the name of the Golden Room. It afterwards played an important part in the annals of the Parliament of Paris. Here Marshal de Biron was condemned to death on the 28th of July, 1602. Here a like sentence was pronounced against Marshal d’Ancre on the 8th of July, 1617. Here the kings of France held their Bed of Justice, solidly built up at the bottom of the hall in the right corner, and composed of a lofty pile of cushions, covered with blue velvet, in which golden fleurs de lis were worked. Here, finally, on the 3rd of May, 1788, the Marquis d’Agoult, commanding three detachments of French Guards, Swiss Guards, Sappers, and Cavalry, entered to arrest Counsellors d’Épréménil and Goislard, when the president, surrounded by 150 magistrates and seventeen peers of France, every one wearing the insignia of his dignity, called upon him to point out the two inculpated members, and exclaimed: “We are all d’Épréménil and Goislard! What crime have they committed?”
A resolution had been obtained from the Parliament declaring that the nation alone had the right to impose taxes through the States-General. This resolution and the scene which followed were the prelude to the French Revolution. Four years later there was no longer either monarch or parliament, French Guards or Swiss Guards. The great chamber of the palace had become the “Hall of Equality,” where, on the 17th of April, 1792, was established the first Revolutionary Tribunal, to be replaced on the 10th of May, 1793, by the criminal tribunal extraordinary; which was reorganised on the 26th of September by a decree which contained this phrase, still more extraordinary than the tribunal itself: “A defender is granted by law to calumniated patriots, but refused to conspirators.” Here were arraigned – one cannot say tried – that same d’Épréménil who had proclaimed the rights of the nation, and Barnave, the Girondists, the Queen of France, Mme. Élizabeth, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Chaumette, Hébert, and Fabre d’Églantine; then, one after the other, the Robespierres, with Couthon, Collot d’Herbois, Saint-Just, Henriot, and Fouquier-Tinville – altogether 2,742 victims, whose 2,742 heads fell into the red basket either on the former Place Louis XV., which had become the Place de la Révolution and was afterwards to be known as the Place de la Concorde, or on the Place du Trône. The numbered list, which used to be sent out, like a newspaper, to subscribers, has been preserved. It began with the slaughter of the 26th of August, 1792, in which La Porte, intendant of the civil list, the journalist Durozoi, and the venerable Jacques Cazotte, author of “Le Diable Amoureux,” lost their heads.
Cazotte had kept up a long correspondence with Ponteaux, secretary of the civil list, and had sent him several plans for the escape of the Royal Family, together with suggestions, from his point of view invaluable, for crushing the revolution. The letters were seized at the house of the intendant of the civil list, the before-mentioned La Porte; and thereupon Cazotte was arrested. His daughter Elizabeth followed him to prison; and they were both at the Abbaye during the atrocious massacres of September. The unhappy young girl had been separated from her father since the beginning of the executions, and she now thought only of rejoining him either to save his life or to die with him. Suddenly she heard him call out, and then hurried down a staircase in the midst of a jingle of arms. Before there was time to arrest him she rushed towards him, reached him, threw her arms around him, and so moved the terrible judges by her daughterly affection that they were completely disarmed. Not only was the old man spared, but he and his heroic daughter were sent back with a guard of honour to their home. Soon afterwards, however, the father was again arrested, and brought before the revolutionary tribunal. On the advice of the counsel defending him, he denied the competence of the court on the plea of autrefois acquit. It was ruled, however, that the court was dealing with new facts, and the judges had indeed simply to apply the decree pronounced against those who had taken part in preparing the repression of the 10th of August. The evidence against Cazotte was only too clear, and he was condemned to death; which suggested the epigram that “Judges struck where executioners had spared.”
But these very judges, bound by inflexible laws, could not refuse the expression of their pity and esteem to the unhappy old man. While condemning him to death they rendered homage to his honesty and his courage. “Why,” exclaimed the public accuser, “after a virtuous life of seventy-two years, must you now be declared guilty? Because it is not sufficient to be a good husband and a good father; because one must also be a good citizen.” The President of the Court, in pronouncing sentence, said with gravity and emotion: “Old man, regard the approach of death without fear. It has no power to alarm you. It can have no terrors for such a man as you.”
Cazotte ascended with fortitude the steps of the scaffold, and exclaimed, before lowering his head: “I die as I have lived, faithful to my God and to my king.” The last victim of the 2,472 was Coffinhal, vice-president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and member of the Council-General of the Paris Commune.
No show of equity, no imitation even of judicial forms, gave colour to these bloody sacrifices. Most of the victims, condemned beforehand, were brought to the prison of the Conciergerie at eight in the morning, led before the tribunal at two, and executed at four. A printing office established in a room adjoining the court was connected with the latter by an opening in the wall, through which notes and documents relating to the case before the tribunal were passed; and often the sentence was composed, printed, and hawked for sale in the streets before being read to the victims.
“You disgrace the guillotine!” said Robespierre one day to Fouquier-Tinville, the public accuser.
Of this historic hall nothing now remains but the four walls. Still, however, may be seen the little door of the staircase which Marie Antoinette ascended to appear before the revolutionary jury, and which she afterwards descended on the way to her dungeon.
The Galerie Saint-Louis is the name given to the ancient gallery connected with the Galerie Marchande, its name being justified by the various forms in which incidents from the life of Saint Louis are represented on its walls. Here, in sculptured and coloured wood, is the effigy of Saint Louis, close to the open space where, when centuries ago it was a garden, the pious king was wont to imitate, and sometimes to render, justice beneath the spreading trees. One of the bureaux in the Palais de Justice contains an alphabetical list of all the sentences passed, by no matter what court, against any person born in one of the districts of Paris or of the department of the Seine. This record, contemplated by Napoleon I., was established in 1851 by M. Rouher, at that time Minister of Justice. The list is kept strictly secret; nor is any extract permitted except on the requisition of a magistrate, or on the application of one of the persons sentenced, requiring it in his own interest.
The Bureau of “Judicial Assistance,” dating from 1851, enables any indigent person to plead in formâ pauperis, whether as plaintiff or defendant. Nor is he obliged to plead in person. Not only stamped paper, but solicitors, barristers, and every legal luxury are supplied to him gratuitously. It is at the expense of the lawyers that the pauper litigant is relieved.
Two curious bureaux connected with the Palais de Justice are those in which are kept, sealed up and divided into series indicated by different colours, objects of special value taken from persons brought before the court, or voluntarily deposited by them; together with sums of money which, in like manner, have passed into the hands of legal authorities. Still more curious is the collection of articles of all kinds stored in a sort of museum, which presents the aspect at once of a bazaar and of a pawnbroker’s shop. Here, in striking confusion, are seen boots and shoes, clothes, wigs, rags, and a variety of things seized and condemned as fraudulent imitations; likewise instruments of fraud, such as false scales. Here, too, in abundance are murderous arms – knives, daggers, and revolvers. Singularly interesting is the collection of burglarious instruments of the most different patterns, from the enormous lump of iron, which might be used as a battering ram, to the most delicately-made skeleton key, feeble enough in appearance, but sufficiently strong to force the lock of an iron safe. There is now scarcely room for the constantly increasing collection of objects at the service of fraud and crime.
Beneath this strange exhibition, rendered still more sinister by the method and order with which it is arranged, are disposed in two storeys the four chambers which together constitute the civil tribunal. Connected with the criminal tribunal, their duty is to try offences punishable by a scale of sentences, with five years’ imprisonment as the maximum. According to one of the last legislative enactments of the Second Empire, persons brought before a police-court remained provisionally at liberty except under grave circumstances. Cases, moreover, in which the offender has been taken in flagrante delicto are decided in three days. “This is a sign of progress,” says M. Vitu; “but Paris still needs an institution of which London is justly proud, that of district magistrates, something like our juges de paix, deciding police cases forthwith. The principal merit of this institution is that it prevents arbitrary detention and serious mistakes such as unfortunately are only too frequent with us. Instances have occurred, and will occur again, in which an inoffensive man, arrested by mistake, in virtue of a regular warrant intended for another of the same name, is sent straight to the criminal prison of Mazas. It will then take him a week to get set at liberty. In London he would have been taken at once to the magistrate of the district, who would have proceeded without delay to the verification of his identity. It would have been the affair of two hours at most, thanks to the service of constables at the disposal, day and night, of the English magistrate.”
The police-courts have sometimes to deal with remarkable cases, but as a rule their duties are of a somewhat trivial character. Adventurers of a low order, swindlers on a petty scale, and street thieves who have been caught with their hands in the pocket of a gentleman or the muff of a lady, are the sort of persons they usually deal with. To these may be added vendors of pretended theatrical admissions, hawkers of forbidden books, and a few drunkards. From morning till night the police are constantly bringing in poor wretches of both sexes; the men for the most part in blouses, the women in rags. They arrive in “cellular” carriages, vulgarly called “salad baskets”; and leaving the vehicle they are kept together by a long cord attached to the wrist of each prisoner. The place of confinement where they remain pending the trial is called the “mouse-trap”: two rows, placed one above the other, each of twenty-five cells, containing one prisoner apiece. Every cell is closed in front by an iron grating, in the centre of which is a small aperture – a little square window looking into the corridor. Through this window, which can be opened and shut, but which is almost invariably kept open, the prisoner sees all that takes place in the passage, and the occasional arrival of privileged visitors helps to break the monotony of his day. The wire cages in which the prisoners are detained suggest those of the Zoological Gardens; and the character of the wild beast is too often imprinted on the vicious criminal features of the incarcerated ones.
Disputes with cab-drivers and hackney coachmen generally are, as a rule, settled by the commissary of the district or the quartier. But serious complaints have now and then to be brought before the Tribunal of Police. In former times the hackney coaches of Paris were at once the disgrace and the terror of the town. “Nothing,” writes Mercier, “can more offend the eye of a stranger than the shabby appearance of these vehicles, especially if he has ever seen the hackney coaches of London and Brussels. Yet the aspect of the drivers is still more shocking than that of the carriages, or of the skinny hacks that drag those frightful machines. Some have but half a coat on, others none at all; they are uniform in one point only, that is extreme wretchedness and insolence. You may observe the following gradation in the conduct of these brutes in human shape. Before breakfast they are pretty tractable, they grow restive towards noon, but in the evening they are not to be borne. The commissaries or justices of the peace are the only umpires between the driver and the drivee; and, right or wrong, their award is in favour of the former, who are generally taken from the honourable body of police greyhounds, and are of course allied to the formidable phalanx of justices of the peace. However, if you would roll on at a reasonable pace, be sure you take a hackney coachman half-seas-over. Nothing is more common than to see the traces giving way, or the wheels flying off at a tangent. You find yourself with a broken shin or a bloody nose; but then, for your comfort, you have nothing to pay for the fare. Some years ago a report prevailed that some alterations were to take place in the regulation of hackney coaches; the Parisian phaetons took the alarm and drove to Choisy, where the King was at that time. The least appearance of a commotion strikes terror to the heart of a despot. The sight of 1,800 empty coaches frightened the monarch; but his apprehensions were soon removed by the vigilance of his guard and courtiers. Four representatives of the phaetonic body were clapped into prison and the speaker sent to Bicêtre, to deliver his harangue before the motley inhabitants of that dreary mansion. The safety of the inhabitants doubtless requires the attention of the Government, in providing carriages hung on better springs and generally more cleanly; but the scarcity of hay and straw, not to mention the heavy impost of twenty sols per day for the privilege of rattling over the pavement of Paris, when for the value of an English shilling you may go from one end of the town to the other, prevents the introduction of so desirable a reformation.”
In another part of his always interesting “Picture of Paris,” Mercier becomes quite tragic on the subject of Paris coaches and Paris coachmen. “Look to the right,” he says, “and see the end of all public rejoicings in Paris; see that score of unfortunate men, some of them with broken legs and arms, some already dead or expiring. Most of them are parents of families, who by this catastrophe must be reduced to the most horrible misery. I had foretold this accident as the consequence of that file of coaches which passed us before. The police take so little notice of these chance medleys that it is simply a wonder such accidents, already too frequent, are not still more numerous. The threatening wheel which runs along with such rapidity carries an obdurate man in power, who has not leisure, or indeed cares not, to observe that the blood of his fellow-subjects is yet fresh on the stones over which his magnificent chariot rattles so swiftly. They talk of a reformation, but when is it to take place? All those who have any share in the administration keep carriages, and what care they for the pedestrian traveller? Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the year 1776, on the road to Mesnil-Montant, was knocked down by a large Lapland dog and remained on the spot, whilst the master, secure in his berline, passed him by with that stoic indifference which amounts to savage barbarity. Rousseau, lame and bruised, was taken up and conducted to his house by some charitable peasants. The gentleman, or rather savage, learning the identity of the person whom the dog had knocked down, sent a servant to know what he could do for him. ‘Tell him,’ said Rousseau, ‘to keep his dog chained,’ and dismissed the messenger. When a coachman has crushed or crippled a passenger, he may be carried before a commissaire, who gravely inquires whether the accident was occasioned by the fore wheels or the hind wheels. If one should die under the latter, no pecuniary damage can be recovered by the heirs-at-law, because the coachman is answerable only for the former; and even in this case there is a police standard by which he is merely judged at so much an arm and so much a leg! After this we boast of being a civilised nation!”
In addition to the place of detention already described, the Palais de Justice contains a permanent prison known historically as the Conciergerie, and, by its official name, as the House of Justice. Here are received, on the one hand, prisoners about to be tried before the Assize Court or the Appeal Court of Police; on the other, certain prisoners who are the object of special favour and who consider themselves fortunate to be confined in this rather than any other prison. The list of celebrated persons who have been detained in the Conciergerie would be a long one, from the Constable of Armagnac (1440) to Prince Napoleon (1883). Here may still be seen the dungeons of Damiens, of Ravaillac, of Lacenaire the murderer, of André Chenier the poet, of Mme. Roland, and of Robespierre. The name whose memory, in connection with this fatal place, extinguishes all others is that of the unhappy Marie Antoinette. After a captivity of nearly a year in the Temple the queen was conducted on the 5th of August, 1792, to the Conciergerie, and there shut up in a dark narrow cell called the Council Hall, lighted from the courtyard by a little window crossed with iron bars. This Council Hall was previously divided into two by a partition, which had now been removed; and in place of it a screen was fixed which, during her sleep, shut the queen off from the two gendarmes ordered to watch her day and night. The daughter of the Cæsars left her dungeon on the 15th of October, 1793, dressed in black, to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the next day, dressed in white, to step into the cart which conveyed her to the guillotine erected on the Place Louis XV.
This historical dungeon, which, says M. Vitu, could not contain the tears which it has caused to be shed, and ought to have been walled up in order to bury the memory of a crime unworthy of the French nation, was transformed into a chapel by order of Louis XVIII. in 1816. The altar bears a Latin inscription which, like others previously referred to, was composed by the king himself.
Close to the queen’s dungeon is the so-called Hall of the Girondists (formerly a chapel), in which the most enlightened and the most heroic of the Revolutionists are said, by a not too trustworthy legend, to have passed their last night.
Locally and even architecturally connected with the Palace of Justice is the Holy Chapel, one of the most perfect sacred buildings that Paris possesses. The courtyard of the Holy Chapel, mentioned more than once in connection with the Palace of Justice, stands at the south-east corner of the principal building, and is shut in by the Tribunal of Police and a portion of the Court of Appeal. It can be entered from five different points: from the Boulevard of the Palace of Justice; by two different openings from the Police Tribunal; from the so-called depôt of the Prefecture of Police; and from the Cour du Mai on the north-east. No more admirable specimen of the religious architecture of the middle ages is to be found; nor is any church or chapel more venerable by its origin and its antiquity. Founded by Robert I. in 921, the year of his accession to the throne, it replaced, in the royal palace of which it had formed part, a chapel dedicated to Saint Bartholomew, which dated from the kings of the first dynasty.
The royal palace contained, moreover, several private oratories, including in particular one dedicated to the Holy Virgin. In 1237 Baudouin II., Emperor of Constantinople, exhausted by the wars he had been sustaining against the Greeks, came to France to beg assistance from King Saint Louis. Baudouin was of the House of Flanders, and in consideration of a large sum of money, he pledged to the French king his county of Namur, and allowed him to redeem certain holy relics – the crown of thorns, the sponge which had wiped away the blood and sweat of the Saviour, and the lance with which his side had been pierced – on which the Venetians, the Genoese, the Abbess of Perceul, Pietro Cornaro, and Peter Zauni had lent 13,000 gold pieces. The relics arrived in France the year afterwards, and crossed the country in the midst of pious demonstrations from the whole population. The king himself, and the Count of Artois, went to receive them at Sens and bore on their shoulders the case containing the crown of thorns. Thus, in formal procession, they passed through the streets of Sens and of Paris; and the holy king deposited the relics in the oratory of the Virgin until a building should be erected specially for their reception. This was the Holy Chapel, of which the first stone was laid in 1245. The work had been entrusted to the architect Pierre de Montreuil or de Montereau. In three years it was finished, the chapel being inaugurated on the 25th of April, 1248. “Only three years for the construction of such an edifice,” exclaims a French writer, “when the nineteenth century cannot manage to restore it in thirty years!”
The Holy Chapel is composed of two chapels one above the other, having a single nave without transept, each chapel possessing a separate entrance. The upper chapel, approached through the Galerie Mercière, was reserved for the king and his family, who, from the royal palace, entered it on foot. The lower chapel, intended for the inferior officers attached to the court, became later on, in virtue of a papal bull, the parish church of all who lives in the immediate neighbourhood of the palace. If the Holy Chapel is admirable by its design and proportions, it is a marvel of construction from a technical point of view. It rests on slender columns, which seem incapable of supporting it. The roof, in pointed vaulting, is very lofty; and for the last six centuries it has resisted every cause of destruction, including the fire which, in 1630, threatened the entire building.
No more beautiful specimens of stained glass are to be seen than in the Holy Chapel, with its immense windows resplendent in rich and varied colours. A remarkable statue of the Virgin bowing her head as if in token of assent, now at the Hôtel Cluny, belonged originally to the Holy Chapel. According to a pious legend, the figure bent forward to show approval of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as formulated by Duns Scotus, who was teaching theology at Paris in 1304, and from the time of the miracle until now maintains the same gesture of inclination.
More than one mediæval tradition makes statues, and especially statues of the Virgin, perform similar actions. There is, for example, in the Contes Dévots a story of a statue of the Virgin to which a certain bourgeois qui aimait une dame prayed that she would either make the lady return his love or cause that love to cease. Some time previously a Hebrew magician had offered to secure the lady’s affections for the infatuated bourgeois provided he would renounce God, the saints, and especially the Blessed Virgin; to which the despondent lover replied that though, in his grief and despair, he might abandon everything else, yet nothing could make him relinquish his allegiance and devotion to the Blessed Virgin. This fidelity, under all temptations, gave him some right, he hoped, to implore the influence of the merciful Virgin towards softening the heart of the woman he so passionately loved; and the statue of the Virgin, before which he prostrated himself, showed by a gentle inclination of the head that his prayer was heard. Fortunately, the lady whose cold demeanour had so vexed the heart of her lover was in the church at the very moment of the miracle, and, seeing the Virgin bow her head to the unhappy bourgeois, felt convinced that he must be an excellent man. Thereupon she went up to him, asked him why he looked so sad, reproached him gently with not having visited her of late, and ended by assuring him that if he still loved her she fully returned his affection. Somewhat analogous to this legend, though in a different order of ideas, is that of the Commander whose statue Don Juan invited to supper, with consequences too familiar to be worth repeating.
The ancient statue of the Virgin, once in the Holy Chapel, venerated now in the Hôtel Cluny, regarded simply as a curiosity, has been replaced by a modern statue. The sacred relics which the Holy Chapel at one time possessed are still preserved at Notre Dame. The gold case which enclosed them was, at the beginning of the Revolution, sent to the Mint to be converted into coin.
The spire which now surmounts the Holy Chapel is the fourth since the erection of the building. The first one, by Pierre de Montreuil, was crumbling away from age under the reign of Charles V., who thereupon had it restored by a master-carpenter, Robert Foucher. Burnt in the great fire of 1630, this second spire was re-constructed by order of Louis XIII., and destroyed during the Revolution. The fourth edition of it, which still exists, was built by M. Lassus in the florid style of the first years of the fifteenth century.
The one thing which strikes the visitor to the Holy Chapel above everything else, and which cannot but make a lasting impression on him, is the wonderful beauty of the stained glass windows already referred to. They date, for the most part, from the reign of Saint Louis, and were put in on the day the building was consecrated in 1248. In their present condition and form, however, they take us back only to the year 1837. During forty-six years (1791 to 1837) the Holy Chapel was given up to all kinds of uses. First it was a club-house, then a flour magazine, and finally a bureau for official documents. This last was the least injurious of the purposes to which it was turned. Nevertheless the incomparable stained glass windows were interfered with by the construction of various boxes and cupboards along the sides of the building, no less than three metres of the lower part of each window being thus sacrificed. Certain glaziers, moreover, employed to take down the windows, clean them, and put them back, had made serious mistakes, restoring portions of windows to the wrong frames. The subjects of the stained art-work are all from the Holy Scriptures, and on a thousand glass panels figure a thousand different personages.
