FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   184   185  
186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   203   204   205   206   207   208   209   210   >>   >|  
me they told me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood against the wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the Cathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as many decades. IV Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters. It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary history. His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly houses of the Place Vendome that the poet of the keyboard died a few days later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de Musset. A brass plate marks the house. May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and part of which I may at length take to myself: _"Ah me, how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that's gone, When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting In this same place--but not alone-- A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me, There's no one now to share my cup."_ The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn to discriminate? V It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in the memorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian's Coney Island. I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian sojourn just before the outbr
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   184   185  
186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   203   204   205   206   207   208   209   210   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

Countess

 

famous

 

Parisian

 

sitting

 

corner

 

volley

 

Bouillabaisse

 

length

 
Ballad
 
recite

Vendome

 

keyboard

 
houses
 

Chopin

 

lubberly

 

transcribe

 

Musset

 
Thabor
 

Alfred

 
Sunday

writer

 
smiled
 

Boulogne

 

Nonsense

 

impossible

 

memorial

 

giving

 

retrospect

 

discriminate

 

sweetly


foremost
 

flitting

 
sojourn
 

Island

 

looked

 

fondly

 

recall

 

passed

 

nestled

 

archbishops


murdered

 

vestments

 

stained

 

Morgue

 

exhibit

 

decades

 
writing
 

retained

 

artistic

 

yearnings