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
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