"That's the diligence just arrived from Calais; it has been two days EN ROUTE, the passengers sleeping as best they could, side by side, and escaping from their confinement only when horses were changed or while stopping for meals. That high two-wheeled trap with the little `tiger' standing up behind is a tilbury. We used to see the Count d'Orsay driving one like that almost every day. He wore butter-colored gloves, and the skirts of his coat were pleated full all around, and stood out like a ballet girl's. It is a pity they have not included Louis Philippe and his family jogging off to Neuilly in the court `carryall,' - the `Citizen King,' with his blue umbrella between his knees, trying to look like an honest bourgeois, and failing even in that attempt to please the Parisians.
"We were in Paris in '48; from my window at Meurice's I saw poor old JUSTE MILIEU read his abdication from the historic middle balcony of the Tuileries, and half an hour later we perceived the Duchesse d'Orleans leave the Tuileries on foot, leading her two sons by the hand, and walk through the gardens and across the Place de la Concorde to the Corps Legislatif, in a last attempt to save the crown for her son. Futile effort! That evening the `Citizen King' was hurried through those same gardens and into a passing cab, EN ROUTE for a life exile.
"Our balcony at Meurice's was a fine point of observation from which to watch a revolution. With an opera-glass we could see the mob surging to the sack of the palace, the priceless furniture and bric-a-brac flung into the street, court dresses waved on pikes from the tall windows, and finally the throne brought out, and carried off to be burned. There was no keeping the men of our party in after that. They rushed off to have a nearer glimpse of the fighting, and we saw no more of them until daybreak the following morning when, just as we were preparing to send for the police, two dilapidated, ragged, black-faced mortals appeared, in whom we barely recognized our husbands. They had been impressed into service and passed their night building barricades. My better half, however, had succeeded in snatching a handful of the gold fringe from the throne as it was carried by, an act of prowess that repaid him for all his troubles and fatigue.
"I passed the greater part of forty-eight hours on our balcony, watching the mob marching by, singing LA MARSEILLAISE, and camping at night in the streets. It was all I could do to tear myself away from the window long enough to eat and write in my journal.
"There was no Avenue de l'Opera then. The trip from the boulevards to the Palais-Royal had to be made by a long detour across the Place Vendome (where, by the bye, a cattle market was held) or through a labyrinth of narrow, bad-smelling little streets, where strangers easily lost their way. Next to the boulevards, the Palais-Royal was the centre of the elegant and dissipated life in the capital. It was there we met of an afternoon to drink chocolate at the `Rotonde,' or to dine at `Les Trois Freres Provencaux,' and let our husbands have a try at the gambling tables in the Passage d'Orleans.
"No one thought of buying jewelry anywhere else. It was from the windows of its shops that the fashions started on their way around the world. When Victoria as a bride was visiting Louis Philippe, she was so fascinated by the aspect of the place that the gallant French king ordered a miniature copy of the scene, made IN PAPIER-MACHE, as a present for his guest, a sort of gigantic dolls' house in which not only the palace and its long colonnades were reproduced, but every tiny shop and the myriad articles for sale were copied with Chinese fidelity. Unfortunately the pear-headed old king became England's uninvited guest before this clumsy toy was finished, so it never crossed the Channel, but can be seen to-day by any one curious enough to examine it, in the Musee Carnavalet.
"Few of us realize that the Paris of Charles X. and Louis Philippe would seem to us now a small, ill-paved, and worse- lighted provincial town, with few theatres or hotels, communicating with the outer world only by means of a horse- drawn `post,' and practically farther from London than Constantinople is to-day. One feels this isolation in the literature of the time; brilliant as the epoch was, the horizon of its writers was bounded by the boulevards and the Faubourg Saint-Germain."
Dumas says laughingly, in a letter to a friend: "I have never ventured into the unexplored country beyond the Bastille, but am convinced that it shelters wild animals and savages." The wit and brains of the period were concentrated into a small space. Money-making had no more part in the programme of a writer then than an introduction into "society." Catering to a foreign market and snobbishness were undreamed-of degradations. Paris had not yet been turned into the FOIRE DU MONDE that she has since become, with whole quarters given over to the use of foreigners, - theatres, restaurants, and hotels created only for the use of a polyglot population that could give lessons to the people around Babel's famous "tower."
