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FOOTNOTE:

We recognize the life of Paris by the analytical pictures of the French novelists and the graphic details of the memoirs. No mode of national existence had ever been so candidly revealed; the stranger, if familiar with the authors of the country, is better acquainted with what is peculiar in the habits and tableaux around him, than an unlettered native. Parisian character and the salient qualities which distinguish metropolitan and provincial existence have been daguerreotyped and anatomized by Balzac; each class, economy, and phase he makes the basis of a story, has been not only carefully observed but artistically and psychologically studied; what memories of an old pension haunt the reader of Père Goriot—a kind of prose Lear, as he gazes upon some venerable house of that description; how intensely he realizes the consciousness of the well-endowed yet sated young Parisian, as he recals the opening chapters of La Peau de Chagrin; every aspect and secret of Grisette life has been depicted; the poetry of the career of a gifted French noble, whose first youth witnessed the prologue of the fatal revolutionary drama, is embalmed in tragic or tender lines in the autobiography of Chateaubriand; Saint Beuve's critiques have revived the associations of each epoch of French literature; Lammenais recorded what of faith lingered in the heart of the people; Scribe reflects the most shifting traits of manners and character; and thus each indigenous figure, building, and custom appeals to the imaginative memory as well as to the curious eye.

The salon of a literary clique suggests the extraordinary social history of Paris; and the names of De Staël, Sévigné, Recamier, and others, memorable as female arbiters and queens in conversation, occur to us in connection with each political era and great name in science, art and letters. Delaroche's portrait of Napoleon amid the Alps and at Fontainebleau has stamped that remarkable countenance in all its intensity of expression upon the mind; and thus it ever reäppears on the scene of his power. The new style of pavement attests the triumphs of barricades; and every old lamp-post the horrors of the Reign of Terror. We cannot pass a foundling hospital without thinking of Rousseau; the Jardin des Plants brings back the benign researches of Buffon, Michaux, Cuvier, and the host of French naturalists; old Montaigne's Essays are recalled by many a philosophic hint and maxim of worldly wisdom; and each glimpse of the comedy of French life is eloquent of Moliere. As we pass either palace or prison, the fair vision of Maria Antoinette, as it lives in Burke's description, the heroic devotion of Madame Roland, and the heart-melting voice of Charlotte Corday, appeal to remembrance; and thus the localities of Paris lead the fancy, at every step, from the guillotine to the fête, from massacre to beauty, from blood to flowers; and in early morning rambles we almost expect to see the First Consul roaming incog., wrapt in his gray coat. Notre Dame to the admirers of Victor Hugo, seems less a Cathedral than an architectural Romance. Yet, there is no city where the past is so lost sight of in the present, and where local tradition has so slight a hold upon the sympathies. It is fortunate, therefore, that when inclined to detach ourselves from the immediate—here so absorbing—and rehearse the story of the past, with every needful aid to memory and imagination, there is an available and complete resource: we have but to quit Paris for Versailles. The Place de Carousel and the Tuileries are unimpressive in comparison with the stately decadence of that palatial chateau; before which the mob, with ferocious glances, heaved like a raging sea up to the balcony where stood the Queen and Lafayette; the first solemn confronting of regal and popular will, ere the deadly struggle began—whose renewal is ever at hand. Within those walls is gathered the pictorial history of France in one successive and elaborate series; the battles, counsels, domestic life of every reign; the lineaments of heroes, poets and kings; the deeds, and the men and women that are identified with the country from the beginning. To live at Versailles, with a good library at hand, and pass hours of every day in these halls, would make us intimate, not only in a technical but in a picturesque way, with the annals and the celebrities of the kingdom. It would be as if French history was enacted before us and we saw the features of the leading spirits of each generation as we listened to their achievements. 'C'est à la Seine,' says a popular historiographer, 'que Paris doit ses premiers aggrandizement;' but so completely have modern activity and embellishment overlaid the rude defences whereby barbaric hordes indicated the site of a magnificent capital, that few of the artists who linger on the bridges to note the effect of moon-light on arch and islet, or of the scholars that haunt the book-stalls on the quai, have the associations of the past awakened by these picturesque and suggestive localities; yet they signalize the enterprise of Philip the Handsome, of Charles the Fifth, of Francis the First, Henry the Second, Henry the Fourth, Philipe Augustus, and Louis the Fourteenth. There Clovis and his Germanic tribes and his converted Clotilde, formed the nucleus of Pepin's inheritance, and Charlemagne established his name; thither came the Scandinavian pirates, and musing on the banks of the dingy stream now associated with science and fêtes, with baths and suicides, with boot-blacks and laundresses, with the romance of student life, artistic, medical and literary, and charming to the eye for elegant bridges and massive quays—the historical dreamer recals a century and a half of wars between French and English kings: the Black Prince and Joan of Arc, Calvin and the Huguenots, Guise and St. Bartholomew, Condé, Montmorency, Maria de Medicis, Anne of Austria, Richelieu, Louis the Sixteenth—the Revolution, Bonaparte, and the Bourbon! Such a panorama, its fore-ground crowded with memorable figures, its perspective dim with the smoke of battle, its groups distinguishable by varied symbols—the oriflamme, the lilies, the cross, the tri-color—blood-stained yet radiant with female beauty and animated by martial prowess, seems to bear no relation to the living scene typical of prosperous order and the age of commerce, of luxury and of science. Yet the analyst detects in the most common-place fact of to-day the influence of a dynasty and the bequest of an era. Madame de Genlis tells us how she taught the boy Louis Philipe after Rousseau's maxims; and made him cosmopolitan in taste by her German system of gardening, dining after the English fashion, and taking supper en Italien; and Veron says her pupil, when he became King, introduced the rage for fine horses and clever jockeys; it was, according to the same authority, the fermiers generaux who initiated French cookery as a unique art in their table rivalry with the old noblesse. 'Scarcity of fuel,' says the Quarterly Review, 'has not been without its effect in forming the manners of the polished Parisians, and has transferred to the theatre and the café those attractions, which in the British islands belong essentially to the domestic hearth.' The use of tobacco, in the form of cigars, is another modification of the national habits; but a few years ago it was deemed a nuisance, now it prevails among both sexes; and keen observers declare that the French have grown more