PARIS IN JUNE, 1878.—No. I.
THE approach to Paris, after the train has passed Creil, gliding over the restored bridge whose demolition was one of the blunders of the war, is more than usually beautiful this year, because the plentiful rains have kept all the greenery green, laid the dust, and given additional brilliancy to the hues of the poppies, the bloats, and the great sunflowers. The alit-es of the forest of Chantilly look cool and tempting, the multitudinous acacia, not yet at the period when she " waves her yellow hair," but adorned with showers of drooping white blossoms, clothes the roadsides, the banks, and the plains, and the air is sweet with the mingled perfume of her flowers, and those of the limes and the bushes of eh• cre f (utile, which are everywhere. The brilliant patches of colour from the lucerne, cinquefoil, and clover-fields have brightened up the flat lengths of the way ; but here, in the Seine country, it is all greenery and flowers, as you run on, recognising the old land-marks—grim Valerien, for instance— and making out the site, on Montmartre, of the Church of the National Vow, into the dirty and dismal Gare du Nord. The coolness of the air and the cloudiness of the sky are unusual for the time of year ; it is not until the roses and the strawberries reveal themselves, that it is like June in Paris. The long per- spective of the Hue de la Fayette is closed by white and grey clouds, instead of the midsummerpure, and the coachman informs you that it is a " chien de temps," without any reference to the dog-days.
Of course you want to get a good view of the Exhibition building, and the best means of doing so is to refrain from glancing in its direction until you have reached the inner end of the Pont de la Concorde, renewed your recollection of the scene which there surrounds you, and got all the features of it well into your mind. Then, with the river behind you, with the long lines of the quays, and the towers of Notre Dame in the dis- tance around you, the group of palaces, and the vast space, with its leisurely throng of people, before you, the ascending length of the Champs Elysees, and the great distant arch that harmonises the whole, turn your eyes on the huge building which occupies the eminence on the left, closing in the picture at that end by the semicircular projection and the tall flanking towers forming that portion of the Exhibition intended to be permanent, and which crowns the height of the Trocadero. Seen thus for the first time, it has something surprising in its aspect. It is so vast, and it has sprung up so suddenly; there, where the city had seemed to cease, and the cOteaux were seen from the quays and the bridges, is Aladdin's Palace, standing on the old historic site where the sublime and the ridiculous of th e great crises of French history have met more than once, and which is, with the excep- tion of the Place de In Concorde itself, the most phantom-haunted ground in Paris. If you see it in the very early morning— so wonderfully beautiful in the fairest of cities—the impression is stronger still, for the square-topped towers, with their arabesque carvings, have an Eastern look, and they stand out against a sky all suffused with a rosy flush. Something Eastern also in the difference between the romance and the reality of the Paris Exhi- bition reveals itself to you when, having taken a place on one of the crowded river-boats poetically called Hirondelles Parisiennes, endured the bad tobacco and worse manners of your fellow- passengers, and been landed at a shingly wharf overlooked by a row of wooden baraques, and bounded by a dirty dead-wall, you find yourself following a stream of people through a sort of toll- gate (no more picturesque than that on Waterloo Bridge, and planted unaccountably on an open space,—the perks are imagi- nary), on one side of which your ticket is nipped, on the other it is taken from you,—into a sandy expanse, seemingly devoted to empty constructions of glass and wire, and little garden kiosks of shiny wood. Though your first impression, that the out-door exhibits are all conservatories, summer-houses, and wire-work advertisements, chiefly of chimney-pots and sewing- machines, is modified after a while, you never entirely get over it, and that of the disorderliness and want of com- pleteness about the whole thing grows as you visit each de- partment. If all was true that we read and heard of the " feverish activity which prevailed" for so many months—for though the transformation of the Champ de Mars is a surprise to strangers, the work has been long in progress—it is strange that more than a month after the opening of the Exhibition, it should not have even a superficial air of finish, but that masons, carpenters, gardeners, their roughest implements, and the least pleasing debris of their several employments, should be among the conspicuous objects of the scene. Heaps of bricks, slabs of stone, ladders, wheelbarrows, buckets, unsightly remnants of workmen's dinners, treacherous coils of rope, de- sultory cranks and bars, are mixed up with the spectacle, much to its detriment. In a central situation men are screen- ing lime for mortar, and when you approach the Exhibition building proper, you find the terrace disfigured with ladders and wheelbarrows, you cut your shoes and hurt your feet among the grit and lime-dust, and when you enter the Vestibule, you find the floor of it about as clean as that of the Gare de Saint Lazare on Sundays. At one end is a lamentable space, with bare wooden benches and tables under the great vaulted roof, like a workhouse eating-room ; huge wooden frames on wheels are being pushed along en route to the un- finished departments, and immense piles of unopened packing- cases justify the pathetic appeals to public commiseration constantly made by unlucky exposants, who cannot get their e'talages done because, as they declare, the Commissioners cannot manage their employes, and so, the exposants not being allowed to employ workmen of their own, 4,1es choses ne marchent pas." Side by side with some of the most splendid displays in the long lines of bazaars which form the interior of the Palace of the Champ de Mars, there are bare spaces of still uncovered boarding, where men are working with plane, saw, and hammer, much to the detriment of the general effect, and the inconvenience of the public. The Grande Galerie, with its vaulted roof, and its lofty, draped doorways, is an imposing structure ; but the immense estrade on which the products of the manufactory of Sevres are displayed, that occupies the centre of it, and by its height inter- feres with the effect of the great expanse of the roof, is the first example of the spoiling of the coup d'eeil, which one finds fre- quently repeated in the arrangement of the building. If, instead of their being displayed on this massive construction, which is like a whole " court " of the Crystal Palace, the exquisite objects of Sevres ware had been placed in a long, low line, down the centre of the gallery, or in isolated groups, their effect would have been greatly increased—as it is, they are only visible in divisions—and the span of the roof and great extent of the gallery would not have been broken up. The façade, in glass and iron, and painted chiefly a rather dim blue, would be handsomer, if it were more elevated ; it has a distinct squatness about it, and the long line of allegorical figures which represent the various countries of the world—several of them are really fine—suffers also from its position. The colossal figures are almost on a level with the eye, so that their illusion is destroyed, and every defect is plainly visible ; for instance, the hand of the otherwise fine figure of "Japan," which is preposterous. This impression is not removed by any point of view from which one studies the building, though it is strongest when one stands in front of it. From the height of the Trocadero, where the circular galleries are still empty of all that anybody not to be tempted by such objects as fill the dreariest departments of ordinary museums wants to see, the Champ de Mars end looks very squat and depressed indeed, suggestive of an enormous box, with divisions inside, and the lid off.
The Champ de Mars building is the business end," as the Yankee said of the tin-tack when he stepped upon it, and it is better to begin at the Trocadero, because the approach to it is so much pleasanter, and because from thence one gets the plan of the whole into one's mind at once.
The scene is one of wonderful animation, contemplated from the space in front of the central building, where there is a piece of ornamental water with a fountain, resembling those on the second level of the Crystal Palace gardens, and a round pond at the lower extremity, with huge gilded wild animals rampant at its edges. The pond is rather too small for the big beasts, and the hippopotamus seems to feel it,—he is protesting so very much. The view of the glittering spires, the shining roofs of the vast city in the plain, the river, with its burden of boats, and formally-planted quays, the bridges, the coteaux, seen so distinctly through the smokeless air, is in itself so enchanting, that one dwells long on it before one turns to the extraordi- nary scene right before one, which is bounded by the Ecole Militaire, and accentuated by the golden dome of the Invalides, which, like the Arc de Triomphe, always has a place in the physio- gnomy of every spectacle that Paris arranges for itself. What is it like, or is it like anything that has ever been seen in the world before ? A Japanese tea-garden on an immense scale, perhaps ? Or one of the great fairs which were got up for the delectation of Catherine II., magnified a hundredfold ; or a Chinese file in an imperial city, for an imperial marriage, only with outer barbarians admitted to contemplate the dragon glories, the fluttering pennons, the many-coloured pagodas, the little joss- houses, the absurd "grottoes," the prim little trees which a child might pull up by the roots, the steep little bridges, apparently built for the accommodation of Tom Thumb, and like nothing except the old, old pattern on the willow plate, of which, indeed, one is reminded at every turn. The multitude of people in con- stant movement, the sense of all this above the life of the city, the boats, the trains, the tramways, the carriages all passing below the bridge of Jena, which unites the sloping grounds of the Trocadero with the flat surface of the Champ de Mars, and whose famous sculptured horses have a strangely savage, yet picturesque effect, uprearing themselves amidst the swarming crowd, from which their naked holders seem to restrain them by desperate force ; the countless kiosks, cottages, cafés, buildings of all sorts, illustrative of all countries, the clang of horses' feet, the noise of horns, the tootling of very mild music somewhere in the vicinity, the chiming of bells far and near, the indescribable excitement of the ceaseless va-et- vient, all these, and a thousand other impressions which it is impossible to define or record, produce a powerful effect upon the beholder. One wants to feel it for a long time before ex- amining any details,—in them there cannot, after all, be any extraordinary novelty, but in this ensemble there is. After some time, one finds that there is no shade to be had, the improvised gardens do not includeumbrage, the trees are pour rire, and that the sticky soil is unpleasant—it must be awful on a rainy day,— but these inconveniences are trifling in comparison with the great interest of the scene. Who can look from the height of the Trocadero across to the Ecole Militaire without a vision of the past history of the Champ de Mars, stretching backwards from the recent disastrous days of the Commune, through the military pageants of the Second Empire, the peaceful shows of the Orleans and the Restoration period, to the grand demonstrations of the warlike glory of France under Napoleon the Great, and then farther back, to that wonderful day which combined in the highest degree the convulsion and the romance of the Great Revolution, when Louis XVI. took the oath on the altar of the country, the Bishop of Autun presiding, and the feudal nobles of the kingdom of France voluntarily abandoned their privileges. Thinking of this, and of the scene which preceded that strange and ominous day,—of the real knie en masse of men, women, and children, who all turned out to level the ground and prepare the site for the great fête of Fraternity, how many ghosts one sees in the sunshine, jostling the unconscious crowd,—ghosts of the men whose feet took that very day the first step on the road to the all-devouring guillotine. And an odd resemblance to the dress of that bygone time may be traced here and there among the shifting crowd. Here comes a young man with a sloping hat, with leather band and rosette, like that into which Camille Desmoulins stuck the green twig which gave rise to the first notion of the Tree of Liberty ; there is a girl in a slouching bonnet, with a clinging white gown and a black silk scarf, crossed over and tied behind her waist, who walks with a sentimental self-consciousness, such as Lucille might have betrayed when she met Camille plying his spade. In this great space re- sounded the famous Chant du Depart—the story of its origin was disinterred from an old chronicle, and retold by Figaro only a few months ago—and who could recall the spectacles which it has wit- nessed? There is a wonderful gathering of all nations upon its transformed surface to-day, and such a med ley of tongues among the kiosks, cafes, booths, and picturesque little shops for the sale of multifarious wares—chiefly, it must be confessed, rubbish—upon the slopes, as could hardly be outgabbled by Cairo or Nijni Novgorod. Tunisians and Algerians, and Turks, Negroes, Japanese, and Chinamen, in the costumes of their respective countries, selling beads, burnouses, brass inlaid trays, strings of amber, sweetmeats of more or less suspicious complexion, pipes, cigars, amulets, chowries, bits of carving, head-tires of mock sequins, bunches of bangles, and other trumpery trinkets, and all seemingly infected with the prevalent British notion that in order to make a foreigner understand your language, you have only to roar at him,—keep up an incessant noise among the gay colony of buildings on the Trocadero aide. A fair, with the brilliancy of a theatrical claw about it, and only the circus miss- ing,—one makes up one's mind, among all the resemblances that suggest themselves, this is the strongest, as one quits the impro- vised garden, which overlies, but only skin deep, the great plain, and entering by the immense draped vestibule, prepares to inspect Aladdin's palace in detail.
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