Not a bell was ringing, though this was blaze of golden light, and began the Mass. Easter Sunday, but the churches were He was reading the Gopel, and had just open. I passed several, and first, the uttered the words, "Be not affrighted, ye Madeleine, into which I went. It had not seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified," been pillaged, it had not been in any way when there was a sullen roar of cannon. injured. The precious articles removed I hope I may be pardoned if I confess that from the altars had been removed by the I looked up and started. I had never priests themselves. Children were sitting heard anything more warlike than a reon the steps, and women were praying in- view in the Phoenix; but no one else side the church as usual. Only the le-moved; not the smallest sign of surprise gend," Liberté, fraternité, égalité," deep- or uneasiness showed itself on any face. ly cut into the stone over the great door, Then I knew what the siege had taught denoted change. Every church I saw bore all those women and girls. The mass the same superscription, and the Revolu- went on, and the guns went on; the revertion has effaced every trace of the effigies beration set the heavy leather doors of of the Empire, as promptly as the Empire the church flapping, and echoed in the suppressed those of the Republic. On the great painted windows; but I got used to walls, on the hoardings, on the pillars of it in a few minutes, and heard it at interthe Rue de Rivoli, are countless affiches, vals all day afterwards without heeding decrees of the Commune, avis of the Com- it in the least. I went out before the mittee, ordres of General Cluseret, appeals crowd, and found my intelligent cocher to the nation, to the citizen patriots, an- had profited by the interval to purchase nouncements of La Solidarité, innumerable for me Le Cri du Peuple, Le Mot d'Ordre, advertisements of pamphlets, newspapers, and Le Rappel. I should profit by my and educational cours, for the Commune time better, he observed, if I knew exactis going to have everybody taught every- ly how things stood. I did not learn thing immediately. The Palais Royal much from these journals, beyond M. bears a tremendous inscription: "Répub- Rochefort's ardent desire that the "old lique Française, Democratique, Une et Indivisible: Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité, Propriété Nationale;" and its precinct is entirely empty. A ragged individual, feebly manipulating a staggering hose, with dribbly results, by way of watering the street, represents the great nation, in the very core of the heart of its civilization. I want to go to mass at Notre Dame des Victoires, but have heard that is a bad part, and consult the cocher. He laughs at the idea; there is no "bad part," except out Neuilly way, Paris is "as quiet as a bird's nest," so we go out to the Place des Victoires, and the cocher is triumphant. A woman selling flowers sits at one corner, a group of children are coming round another, two are empty and the central space. The church doors stand open, the popular legend is graven upon the left wall; and the steps are occupied, just as usual, by beggars and cripples. No soldiers, no police, no visible authority of any kind, and certainly no call for it. I went into the church, and found it densely crowded, chiefly with women, but a great many men also were present. A solemn, devout crowd, every woman in plain black dress, every face grave, anxious, grieved; but not one frightened, no, not one. I studied them all, in the interval before mass began, at the altar of Our Lady of Victories. Presently an old priest appeared on the altar steps, in the centre of the perpetual assassin" Thiers should be disposed of, and that "as all men of heart (hommes de caur) are demanding more blood, more blood must be had, but it is for the gen tlemen Assassins of Versailles to begin." A second indignant editor denounces the infamous conduct of Lord Lyons in offering the shelter of the British Embassy to the Carmelite nuns,- persons under the displeasure of the nation (one of them being Lord Lyons' own niece),—and a third publishes a voluminous decree of the Commune, of which Article 9 is left blank. I wonder what that significant hiatus means? I am on my way to see a barricade now, and take the Rue St. Honoré du route, where I have to make a call, within a short distance of the former residence of the "sea-green incorruptible," to whom the Commune are going to erect a statue in bronze, when they have time and a few of the kings have been melted down; and I find the lady I want to see (who is very young and pretty) walking up the street, leisurely and unconcernedly, with a beautiful bouquet in her hand, and a flower-pot containing a gorgeous crimson blossom, with a long green stalk, under her arm. "No one need be afraid, then, in Paris?" "No woman," she replies; "men are afraid, I believe, and in danger; they are suspected of wanting to get away, and they will be made to stay and fight, but women are quite safe from everything but disorderly fashion before a group of men in uniform, and something which I cannot make out plainly happens. When the men return, each has a gun with a bayonet, and a belt, to which a coarse white bag is suspended: and for the first time I hear a sound like a feeble shout. I thank my friend for his politeness, and return to the carriage; the young woman is still there, and she smiles at me, as much as to say, shells." There is just a little more live-pointed against all avenues of approach, liness in the Rue St. Honoré, but no open shows me where the ground has been shops, and no noise. The groups of Na- tunnelled, and guns placed, as it seems to tional Guards are more numerous, and I me, with a design to cut off the enemy's remark that the proportion of uniform to feet satisfactorily at once; points out the mufti is small and the uniforms are shab-"General's" head-quarters, and puts me by. Profound gravity is expressed upon into a convenient position (apparently every countenance, and every man seems envied by several women collected outside to be looking to every other man for the barricade) for witnessing a distribuorders, or news, or consolation. As a tion of arms. A number of men pass in body, I consider the patriots looked hungry, cold, tired, and bored, to say nothing of dirty, which they looked to a man. We turn down a small street, apparently closed in by a neatly-built wall with holes in it, through which I discover the mouths of cannon. About this wall men are swarming, in and out of uniform; they are all armed, and two or three wear red or white sashes with pistols stuck in them, after an Adelphi fashion, which instantly Is he not a fine fellow?" I think he is, causes me to think of Mr. Webster and and there are many fine fellows there very "The dead Heart." My cocher pulls up much out of place in the ruffianly mass. at the corner of the little street, and ex- We turn into the Rue de Rivoli, and are changes friendly grins with the citizen- stopped by a regiment marching out, "to patriots who are swarming inside and out- meet the enemy," says my cocher, and I side the wall, while I peer out of the car- cannot in the least tell whether he is riage window longing to see more. Pres- laughing at them or believes in them. ently the cocher suggests that I should get The grey horse stands still, and the citizen out and look about me; he cannot drive patriots, among whom are some very vilany farther, but from quite the corner I lainous-looking subjects, march past his could see the whole of the Place Vendôme, blunt nose, with a good deal of shuffle to the General's head-quarters, and the very little tramp. I am the solitary specparade of yesterday's levée, then taking tator, and I begin to feel as if I were replace. A cheerful young woman, with a viewing Sir John Falstaff's troop. These pretty wan infant in her arms, encourages poor creatures are shabby, wretched, sime to descend, and a young man to whom lent. I did not hear a laugh, or an oath, she is talking, a clean, trim, fair young I did not see one violent gesture, I hardly fellow, with a military look and step, sa- saw a smile, all that day. The roystering, lutes me with much politeness, and asks roaring, terrible "Reds," as I saw them, me if I ever saw a barricade. "No, citizen are tired, dull men, doing ill-directed work patriot," I reply; "they do not make them with plodding indifference. The regiment in England, and I had no idea they were passes on, and here comes something up so symmetrical. I thought a barricade with a rattle at last. It is a victoria, with was a heap of rubbish piled up anyhow, a flaunting flag, bearing the red cross on a but these are strong stone walls built at white ground, and it contains two young leisure." He seemed much pleased with men smoking and laughing, who have my admiration, and having handed a tin white scarfs with red crosses on their can to the young woman, invited me to arms. Young doctors going to the amcome inside the wall, which I did. There bulance," says the cocher, and we go on, was the Place Vendôme, and filled with past the Tuileries gardens, a bare, desowhat realities and what phantoms! I saw late space, all the beautiful chestnut trees it last on the 15th of August, 1869, decorat- cut down, filled with wooden sheds; past ed for the Emperor's fête, and filled with the side of the great empty palace, the glittering Imperial troops. I see it through the Carrousel, where the only now, a wide, empty waste, bounded by the living creatures are the grey horse, and symmetrical barricades, dotted with the cocher, and I, but which swarms so slouching ungainly figures, whose clothes and arms encumber them, and with busy, silent groups, strengthening the walls with steady industry. My friend points out the cannon, shows me how they are VOL. XXI. 966 LIVING AGE. thick with phantoms, three of them women flying from a mob, that I can hardly breathe, and gasp with relief when I am on the other side, and looking back at the Pavilion of the Prince Imperial, which is I not yet quite finished, I believe. We cross chapter of the prophet Isaiah in carved the noble bridge, and I look, like one in a stone and decorative metals. I had a dream, up and down the beautiful river, long visit to pay in this quarter, and the still as an Arctic river might be in the grey horse and the coachee dined towinter. Very far up there is a little puff gether while I paid it. of steam, and a few people lean over the Back again to the Quai, across the wall eager to behold the marvel of a bridge, and through the Place de la Conmoving boat. On into the Faubourg, corde. The sun shines now, and people where there is even more silence, and are walking about past the statues with where fewer people are moving about. their absurd black masks, and the silly There I visit a famous lady, who gives me heap of tawdy crowns and flimsy flags the history of the past of Paris and her rotting round Strasburg, which, in the anticipation of its future in such brilliant midst of the heap with its black bandage, style, her epigrams bristling like bayonets looks like a colossal figure of the child's along the line of her narrative, that, game of forfeits; and with this détour, to though horrified, I am excessively amused, the Palais d'Industrie, now an ambulance, and carry away the drollest impressions quiet, decorous, spacious, well managed. of "L'Empire Cluseret." But her man- I have no difficulty in getting a look into ner changes when I ask what I shall tell the huge central compartment. It is only her friends in London? And she says, a look, and there is nothing to be seen "Tell them to fear everything, and to with which I am not familiar. But that hope very little. We are a degraded peo- look suffices to convince me that the acple, and we deserve what we have got, counts of the wounded in the late engageand are going to get." I leave her, and ments are enormously exaggerated. go on to the house of another friend. He saw, of course in the most superficial way, is absent, resident (with order) at War- the ambulances in the Champs Elysées saw, but his concierge invites me to in- afterwards, and I don't believe there are spect the premises, which have been neat- half seven thousand men in them all put ly cut in two by a shell, and one-half is a together. Considering that we had been heap of ruins. While we are talking informed on Saturday, in England, that about it, and she is showing me where a shells were falling in the Champs Elysées second shell cut up the tasteful little gar- and that "harmless spectators" had been den, the cannon keeps up an incessant killed, it struck me as I drove up the roar. She does not mind it, of course, and grand avenue, in which I have witnessed even to me it has become a mere detail. many magnificent pageants, that there When I go out, I find a woman sitting were a good many harmless spectators on the carriage-step, her lap full of daffo- about, who were taking things very easily. dils, which she is tying up into nosegays, The whole place was a vast bivouac for at a sou each; and she is talking to the the National Guards; indeed so are all the cocher. As I take my place, I ask her to great thoroughfares; but nurses and chilsell me some of the flowers, and as she dren are strolling about, very much as puts them into my hand I see horror in usual, and the bourgeoisie was taking its her face. I suppose she sees a question in walks abroad. The booming of cannon mine, for she whispers, "On dit qu'ils ont | went on, and some carts bringing in fusillé Monseigneur!" and is gone in an wounded to the ambulance met us halfinstant. I don't believe it. A living hos-way up to the arch. I wanted to go to tage is worth much more to l'Empire Cluseret than a dead archbishop; but I see in the faces of all the women I pass that they have heard the rumour, and that they fear it may be true. We go on, and on, up to the Glacière, past long lines of desolate boulevards, and grand, ghastly, sad houses, which have never been inhabited, the dust of whose construction was hardly laid when their roofs were battered in by the Prussian shells, and which present an extraordinary combination of bran newness and devastation. In this quarter there is hardly a living soul to be seen, and every sign of industry has disappeared. The place is like a the Rue Billaut, and had arrived within a hundred yards of it when the carriage was stopped by a citizen patriot, who came up to the window, and told me politely that it would be dangerous for me to go in that direction, as a shell might be expected to fall there at any moment. While he was speaking, there came a sort of bursting whirr, a sound I never heard before, and I saw something for an instant in the air, above and behind the Arch. It was a shell, he said, and I heard afterwards it had fallen in the ex-avenue of the ex-Empress. This was the only shell I saw, though from the top of a house in the Rue de Lisbonne, immediately afterwards, I had a fine view of Mont Valérien and the came out under the play of the innumercannon. Up to the Arch, on either side, able flickering, dazzling lights, as I looked and in the adjacent streets, the National down upon them from the purple and Guards were swarming, some eating, some gold-draped balcony. The Republic was idly lying about in the sunshine, some proclaimed from that same balcony in talking, many asleep. The people came September. The few and brief speeches and went, children and dogs ran about. of l'Empire Cluseret are spoken from it Occasionally a queer-looking fellow, repre- now. Early in the afternoon an order senting the official who in enslaved, unfra- had been issued for the closing of the ternal, and unequal armies is called an or-churches; no evening services were perderly, mounted upon a horse unacquainted mitted on Easter Day. Notre Dame was with the curry-comb, goes lumbering by, black, silent, and deserted. From the bumping and lurching in a ludicrous fash-bridge I gazed at the Conciergerie, a ion, but no one laughed. An air of wait- grand building now, a fine and strong ing prevailed, weary waiting, not impa- place, no longer the dingy hole in which tient, contagious; so that I found myself the Queen of France and others who had lingering and looking into the blue dis- incurred the displeasure of the nation tance under the Arch, as if a quarter-past waited for the emancipation of death. seven were an indefinite period and the departure of the mail train a movable feast. In the Rue de Monceau and the Rue de Lisbonne the people were out on the pavement. There were not many, and they were chiefly concierges, the proprietors and locataires being unanimous in their absence. From the windows of a house in the latter street I exchanged observations with a placid person seated on an opposite doorstep, respecting the pungency of the smell of powder pervading the atmosphere. She had looked up with an agreeable smile at me as I sneezed violently, "C'est la poudre," she said, "ça fait éternuer." . What of the prisoners of the Republic, I packed all the things I wanted to take away, and then set off to have a look, at safe distance, at the Hôtel de Ville, Notre Dame (where the red flag was drooping in an appropriately mean fashion), and the Palais de Justice, which is en congé. Pray observe that the strong grey horse had long intervals of rest. This was his last journey on my account. In these regions, the centre of the authority of the Revolution, there were a great many more people, and they were worse-looking, but there was very little more noise, and a total absence of excitement. I could get only a glimpse of the Hôtel de Ville; it seemed to me to be a perfect ant-hill of guns and soldiers, and they all wavered and danced before my eyes as I remembered a day on which Horace Vernet showed me his portrait of Napoleon III., just placed there, and a night on which the City of Paris gave a ball to the beautiful and proud mother of the "Child of France." The Place de Grève swarmed with soldiers that night too. I remember how the corslets and the I completed my business, and was drivhelmets of the Cent Garde glittered, and en to the railway station, through streets shiny bits of their horses' accoutrements as quiet and orderly in the twilight as they were in the morning. The station intellectual culture combined to discour was guarded by three patriots, and admin-age rather than to promote general educaistered by remarkably civil officials. Ition; not long indeed after the time indinever experienced so little difficulty, or cated by Sydney Smith when no man who more politeness on any occasion of ticket- had not an independent five hundred a taking and luggage-weighing. I paid the year dared proclaim liberal opinions: exact fare of my carriage, the exact price when a Chinese awe of the "wisdom of of my ticket and luggage registration; no our ancestors" checked wholesome efforts one even looked a demand for a fee, on to increase our own; when, consequently, any pretence whatever. I proffered my books were quite out of the reach of the passport for examination, it was declined humble and needy. The value of the work with a bow, and I passed into the usual then inaugurated by these two brothers of waiting-room and out of it into the usual providing elevating and accessible mental carriage for Dames Seules with perfect ease aliment for "The Million" was incalcuand comfort. In the carriage there was lable. The loss, therefore, of one of them an old French lady bound for Brighton, is surely a public loss; and Mr. Robert and two young ladies, whose destination Chambers, who passed away on Friday, was Chantilly. We four were the only the 17th of the present month, will be women in the train, and I was informed mourned by all who value education and that no other railroad from Paris was who love literature. open. After a very comfortable journey, The brothers were born at Peebles, on we reached Victoria Station in perfectly the banks of the Tweed. Their father good time. I despatched my slightly-be- was a muslin-weaver, employing some wildered companion to Brighton, under twenty looms. Mr. James Chambersthe charge of a gallant Volunteer bound at first a prosperous manufacturer, always for the Review, and then proceeded to a lover of books, a keen politician, an buy a newspaper, in order to see what the open-hearted friend had already suffered correspondents had to say about "Red" in his purse from his kindness to the Paris on Easter Sunday. The newspaper French prisoners paroled in Peebles durwas the Daily Telegraph, and among its ing the wars of Napoleon, and was eventusensational telegrams was the following, ally ruined by the competition of machine dated Monday morning, April 10:- with hand-loom weaving. He was obliged "Ladies endeavouring to escape from Paris to withdraw his family, with the wreck of last night were forced to pay 100 francs before his means, to Edinburgh. Here, by the being allowed to take tickets." If my ner- help of his sensible and energetic wife, he vous friend had been in the habit of read-managed to bring up creditably a family ing the Daily Telegraph, what would her of six children. feelings have been on seeing this statement, to which I am compelled to give, in common justice to the Commure, a positive contradiction? From The Athenæum. DR. ROBERT CHAMBERS. Robert, the second son, was born in 1802. He grew up a quiet, self-contained boy, unable, from a painful defect in his. feet, to join in the robust play of his schoolfellows. He may be said to have devoured books from his infancy. In the preface to his collected works he writes: Books, not playthings, filled my hands in childhood. At twelve I was deep, not only in poetry, and fiction, but in encyclopædias." A great prize fell into his hands in an old lumber-room to which he had retired for quiet. He found there a mass of odd volumes of the "Encyclopædia Britannica." These he read through with insatiable eagerness. IN every part of the world where English is spoken, especially where it is spoken with a Scotch accent, the names of William and Robert Chambers pass over the tongue with something of esteem and gratitude. To the productions of their discreet and busy pens, brought to our hearths and The rudiments of classical knowledge homes by their cheap and indefatigable which Robert Chambers obtained at the press, most of us, when young, owed Peebles public school were much improved much useful information that we might in Edinburgh by the teaching of Mr. otherwise have lacked, and many kindly Benjamin Mackay, afterwards head master sentiments which we might not otherwise of the High School. At sixteen he broke have felt. The brothers began to popularize and diffuse knowledge when political distraction, and a low appreciation of away from home. His passion was books. Even at that unripe age, he tried to write them; but determined, at all haz |