The Dead of Paris

Skulls and bones in the Paris Catacombs, a popular tourist spot

     After their visit to Notre Dame, Twain and the Quaker City crew head off for a visit to the Paris Morgue.  In a way, that seems like a natural progression, going from a place for those claimed by God in life to one for those claimed by nobody after death.  It was also a natural logistical progression, since the Paris Morgue was on the Ile de la Cite, a bone's throw from the cathedral.  Still, it might seem an odd tourist destination.  In the nineteenth century, however, it was all the rage, with crowds from Paris and beyond--such as Twain's--coming every day to see the corpses of those who'd died, as he put it, "mysteriously." Many apparently were suicides but no doubt there were other causes of death as well.  For a good description of the history and appeal of the Paris Morgue, take a look at Evangeline Holland's post, "The Morbidity of the Paris Morgue," on her blog, Edwardian Promendade: La Belle Epoch in Our Modern World.
     Twain's comments on the Paris Morgue are brief but gruesome, which is only to be expected given the locale.  He talks about looking into a room full of the clothes of the dead: of men, women, and children rich and poor, clothes "hacked and stabbed and stained with red, a hat that was crushed and bloody."  Then he goes on to describe the "naked, swollen, purple body" of a drowned man on a slab, still clutching a broken twig from a bush.  "Mute witness," he calls it, "of the last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help."  Death was all around on a regular basis for people in the nineteenth century--Twain himself by then had lost four siblings and his father--so people didn't shy away from it the way so many of us do now.  In fact, as the popularity of the Paris Morgue shows, they often stared death staight in the face.
     Which is also what Twain does, in a short but moving meditation on the drowned man:
     A stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the hideous face.  We knew that the body and the clothing was there for identification by friends, but still we wondered if anybody could love that repulsive object or grieve for its loss.  We grew meditative and wondered if, some forty years ago, when the mother of that ghastly thing was dandling it upon her knee, and kissing and petting it and displaying it with satisified pride to the passerby, a prophetic vision of this dread ending ever flitted though her brain.  I half feared that the mother or the wife or a brother of the dead man might come while we stood there, but nothing of the kind occurred.
      It's hard to read those words, written before Twain had even met his wife, and not think of the tragedy that awaited them with the death of their daughter Susy of meningitis at 24.  If I believed in the "gift" of foresight--which I don't and neither did Twain--this would have the ring of prophesy and be as sad as any I could imagine.
     But Twain, knowing nothing of what lay ahead, simply goes on to comment about those who "attend the exhibitions of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see theatrical spectacles every night."  When one of them seems disappointed, he remarks, "Now this don't afford you any satifaction--a party with his head shot off is what you need."
     This passage is a curious one, I think, not because the Paris Morgue was on the Quaker City's itinerary of tourist sights--as I've said, it was popular--but because Twain misses an opportunity to diss the French.  Or at least to comment tongue-in-cheek about something like their "lively" culture.  I find his absence of franco-crit here especially hard to understand because I for one can't think of an equivalently ghoulish American tourist spot.  We like a good depiction of violent death but we generally prefer not to stand too close to the real thing.
     Why we're different from the French in this way seems hard to say.  You could argue it's because France has a much older culture that's faced so many more plagues, epidemics, conflicts, and wars. But the U.S. has had its share of those too: the Civil War and once high infant mortality for example--two things that touched not only Twain but virtually every American of his day.  Still, the French did have to learn to live side-by-side with death before the U.S. was even a country.
     But I have to say I find something qualitatively different in the French attitude toward death, something that is distinctly, well, un-American.  Tourists--French and otherwise--may no longer flock to see the Morgue.  It closed in 1907, partly because not a single person identified a dead body, which was the putative reason for opening it in the first place.   But tourists from France and beyond do still troop down into the Paris Catacombs for a close-up look at two kilometers of human bones stacked up like cord wood.  I've been there myself and it's quite a place.  
     For starters, there's the history: at the end of the eighteenth century, the city began to close its cemeteries for what the Catacombs brochure politely calls "public health reasons."  
That is, there were so many bodies buried on top of each other at Paris's largest cemetery, Cimitiere des Saints-Innocents in what is now the Les Halles district near the Centre Pompidou or Beaubourg, that they were falling through flimsy walls into the cellars of nearby residents.  (For a fine fictional account, read English writer Andrew Miller's book, Pure.) The stench was constant and the risk of disease was rampant.  So the government ordered that human remains in Paris cemeteries be systematically dug up and moved to a network of disused limestone quarries under the city.  All this happened between 1780 and 1860, with our friend Baron Haussmann playing a big role again as urban redeveloper par excellence.  His boss, the very same Napoleon III praised by Twain, even went down for a look-see with his son in 1860.  The Catacombs opened to the public in the early nineteenth century, so Twain could have gone there on the Quaker City trip but didn't.  He went to the Morgue instead, maybe because it was so close to that other must-see site, Notre Dame.  

    When I went to the Catacombs with my husband and teenage sons I was ready to see some bones.   But just how many and how perfectly arranged, I had no idea.  The bones are stacked like groceries on shelves and with a method: bodies on the bottom, skulls on top. There's a separate area for each cemetery, telling where those particular bones came from and when, each with its own plaque of course.  The effect is curatorial--an installation/ exhibition of human bones--and my favorite piece of art is the Port-Mahon corridor, where a quarryman named Decure sculpted a replica of an eponymous fort on the island of Minorca. 

The Port-Mahon sculpture in the Paris Catacombs.

    There's also a crystal-clear pool that workers used to mix cement, a fountain with walls made of bones from Cimitiere des Innocents, and a chapel marking where the first bones were put in 1786.  You can't help but think about what will one day become of all of us--death--and in an intense, artistic way that seems to me peculiarly French.
     I don't know why Twain didn't compare the French attitude toward death to the American, with the French coming out on the losing end.  But I find the opposite myself.  Maybe at the Morgue Twain was just going along on the tour, in France doing as the French do, looking the dead in the face.  As the sign over the entrance to the Catacombs says: Arrete!  C'est ici l'empire de la mort.  
     Stop!  You're entering the land of the dead.

 

Pictures from a Catacomb.

A Little Military Marching Music, Please

 

The Arc de Triomphe today

     Mark Twain may not have liked the French but he did like Napoleon III.  How could that be?  
     Could it have the Emperor's uniform?  The military music? The artillery display?  The horses?  His hat?
     At first, frankly, Twain's high opinion of Napolean III seems inexplicable.  But it's also incontrovertable.  Sure, he puts in a disclaimer that he "cannot feel friendly toward" the emperor  because of how he treated Maximillian of Mexico.  But then he goes on to praise the French ruler not just once but three times in The Innocents Abroad.  The first time occurs when Twain ditches the International Exposition to go watch Napoleon III review 25,000 troops with his guest, the Sultan of Turkey, at the Arc de Triomphe, the second when he sees the emperor riding in a grand carriage through the Bois de Boulogne, the third when Twain  returns from Versailles through the slums of Faubourg St. Antoine.  
     Twain makes no bones about his delight at seeing the military review.  "I had a greater anxiety to see these men than I could have had to see twenty expositions," he admits.  So he and his companions stand on a board somebody has laid across a couple of barrels and join the cheering crowd for the fanfare and parade.  "There was a sound of distant music," Twain writes,
      in another minute a pillar of dust came moving slowly toward us; a moment more and then, with colors flying and a grand crash of military music, a gallant array of cavalrymen emerged from the dust and came down the street on a gentle trot.  After them came a long line of artillery; then more cavalry, in splendid uniforms; and then their imperial majesties Napoleon III and Abdul Azziz.  The vast concourse of people swung their hats and shouted --the windows and housetops in the wide vicinity burst into a snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs, and the wavers of the same mingled their cheers with those of the masses below.  It was a stirring spectacle.
      It's hard to give Twain too hard a time about the military parade since it's the equivalent of taking in an action movie today.  In fact, I watched the current French President, Francois Hollande, do pretty much the same thing on TV the other day: He reviewed the troops--this year including those from Mali because of France's recent engagement there--in a grand military cermony to celebrate 14 Juillet, the  equivalent of the Fourth of July.  We call it Bastille Day and associate it with the start of the French Revolution, though there's an alternate interpretation of the holiday. Whichever is true, I can see how the sounds and sights of the spectacle simply got Twain's his adrenaline going.
     But then he calls Napoleon III "the representative of the highest modern civilization, progress, and refinement."  Meanwhile, he compares the Sultan to a butcher, "a man whose whole appearance somehow suggested that if he only had a cleaver in his hand and a white apron on," he'd be asking, "A mutton roast today, or will you have a nice porterhouse steak?" The Emperor is "the brilliant adventurer" but the Sultan is "the genius of Ignorance."  
     Maybe Twain's preference for a ruler in a brimmed hat over one in a fez reflects a bias for West over East, Occident over Orient?  Surely there's some--in fact a lot--of that.  "Here in brilliant Paris [what?], under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the first century greets the nineteenth," Twain writes.  He also prefers how Napoleon III "rebuilt Paris" and "augmented the commerial prosperity of France in ten years" to how the Sultan "sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his eight hundred conbumbines," though the former lived in pretty lavish circumstances by then himself.  Twain doesn't seem to mind, either, that in order to achieve this remaking of  Paris with Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III tore down the poor quarters of Paris, displacing the people there to make way for the grand boulevards--and conveniently getting rid of revolutionary hotbeds at the same time. You'd think that might have bothered Twain, who'd been pretty poor himself. 
     So why does Twain speak so well of the French emperor?  I think it's because he likes Napoleon's III failure-to-success story, which has, well, a kind of American course to it.  For those Americans a bit rusty on their Napoleonic history--and who isn't?-- Napoleon III wasn't the grandson of Napoleon I but his nephew,  his brother's son.  He grew up with his mother in Switzerland and Germany, and was exiled several times, back to Switzerland as well as to England, Italy, and once even to the U.S.  He was sentenced to life in prison after one failed coup attempt and lived an impoverished life before escaping and assuming power at last.  He extended French colonial power in places as far-flung as China and Mexico and launched wars including the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussion War.  After a humilitating defeat and surrender in Prussia (in 1870, three years after the Quaker City trip), he died in exile in England. 
    Given all that, Twain admires Napoleon III's  "Energy, Persistence, Enterprise."  He likes the guy's struggle, poverty, failure, and eventual success:
      This is the man who was sneered at and reviled and called Bastard--yet who was dreaming of a crown and an empire all the while; who was driven into exile--but carried his dreams with him; who associated with the common herd in America and ran foot races for a wager--but still sat upon a throne of fancy; who braved every danger to go to his dying mother--and grieved that she could not be spared to see him cast aside his plebeian vestments for the purple of royalty; who kept his faithful watch and walked his weary beat a common policeman of London--but dreamed the while of a coming night when he should tread the long-drawn corridors of the Tulleries...found himself a prisoner, the butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless ridicule of all the world--yet went on dreaming of coronations and splendid pageants as before; who lay a forgotten captive in the dungeons of Ham--and still schemed and planned and pondered over future glory and future power--President of France at last!...Who talks of the marvels of fiction?  Who speaks of the wonders of romance?

Franz Xaver Winterhalter's portrait of Napoleon III

     What Twain likes, to put it simply, is Napoleon's III story.  It's a good, big tale, so big and unlikely, in fact, that it's almost a tall tale.  Who could believe the whole thing, Twain wonders, and he's right.  Without a doubt, Napoleon III's biography has the dimensions of fiction; it's a great swashbuckling adventure, featuring the Emperor as its hero.
       It's also, with its ups and downs--its success on the heels of so many setbacks--a very American kind of story.
     Napoleon III, it turns out, lived a French version of the American dream.  That exact phrase may not yet have been coined, but Twain knew the plot--and, with his references to "dreams" and "dreaming," he comes pretty close to coining it himself.
     The Emperor's tale as an American success story--who but Twain could imagine that?
      
     
    
      
    
     
     

Big Sites in Short Order

Notre Dame from the flying buttress side

Its familiar face

The celebrated south rose window

     I've already written that Twain spends more time in The Innocents Abroad telling tales about Paris than reporting on sites (Doing the Double-Take: Twain's Split Itinerary, April 23).  And, really, that's generally to the good. Because even if he digresses into odd bits about barbers, billiards, and Billfinger that are unflattering to the French, at least he avoids droning on with descriptions of famous art and architecture spots.  That, I have to think, was deliberate, and I commend him for it.  Honestly, who wants to read other people's accounts of looking at paintings and buildings, no matter how ecstatic their experiences were?  Unless you're an art history major (and, okay, I almost was, but I saw the impracticality in becoming a starving art appreciater), it can make you want to brain yourself with a bronze bust.
   So, cheers to Twain for making short order of Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Paris Exposition.  A sa votre!  On the grande dame of cathedrals, for example, he has this to say--and, again, notice how he messes around with who's the superior one:
      We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before.  It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are.  We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment; it was like the pictures.  We stood at a little distance and changed from one point of observation to another and gazed long at its lofty square towers and its rich front, clustered thick with stony, mutilated saints who had been looking calmly down from their mutilated perches.
     That "brown old Gothic pile" line makes me laugh every time.  People from around the world troop to see a church that's been a symbol of Paris--and of architecture--since 1172.  These days, they can even gaze at it from a huge stand of bleachers set up across from the facade.  I've lingered there myself and heard virtually every language known to humankind.  Some 14 million people come to see Notre Dame every year, and lately it may be attracting even more visitors because of its new bells.  There's no doubt it's always been a huge draw, though.  But Twain reduces it to word rubble. When he calls it a brown old Gothic pile, he gets to the heart of human hubris through architecture--especially of the religious kind--in just four words.  So much for our lofty notions of ourselves.  And thank you, Twain.
     In a similar vein, he uses Notre Dame to remind readers of France's bloody history, from the Crusades to the Napoleons.  Of the facade's "mutilated saints," he writes:
     These battered and broken-nosed old fellows saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad knights come marching home from the Holy Land; they heard the bells above them toll the signal for the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, and they saw the slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a regiment of servants in the Tuileries today...
     True, La France hasn't always been a peaceable kingdom.  But what country has?  Yet, while Twain makes the French a case in point, this time his words aren't directed at them in particular but at all of mankind.   Why do I say so? Because he doesn't even use the word "French" or "France" in this bit.  Nor does he veer off into parody or vitriol.  For me, this is Twain at his irreverent and poignant best.  Not to mention his most educated.  The sly devil--as he himself might have said--clearly did a lot of reading to come up with that deft history.
     Twain briefly covers the site itself: it sported a pagan temple and two smaller churches before the cathedral went up. Then he goes right back to bloody history, noting that one duke (Burgundy)  built part of Notre Dame because he felt guilty about murdering another (Orleans). "Alas!" he writes.  "Those good times are gone when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar and building an addition to a church."
     I'm not so sure about that, but at least Twain doesn't play national favorites here.  After a quip about the central pillar (carted off for political reasons but returned) and the famous stained-glass windows ("embellished with blue and yellow and crimson saints and martyrs"), he circles right back to his theme: the absurdity of human violence.  In the sacristy--the backroom where priests keep "holy" garments and objects--the Quaker City crew sees the robe the pope wore to crown Napoleon, some gold and silver treasures, and supposed relics from Christ's "true" cross and crown of thorns.  They also see the bloody robe of an archibishop of Paris who was killed when he mounted a baricade for peace during the Revolution of 1848, a workers' rebellion that only led to the rise of Napoleon III and the second French empire.  Twain gets his history right again, this time maybe because it wasn't history for him but adolescence: he was born in 1835.  But my point about his views on man's inhumanity comes from these lines:  "His noble effort cost him his life.  He was shot dead. They showed us a cast of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed him, and the two vertebrae in which it lodged." Although he takes the opportunity to make another comment about the French--"These people have a somewhat singular taste in the matter of relics"--it's the image of the dead peacenik bishop that stays in the mind, and I'm pretty sure that's what stayed with Twain, too.
     He polishes off the International Exposition with equal dispatch.
There, typically, he was more drawn to people-watching than art gazing.

Pierre August's Renoir's The Champs-Elysees During the Paris Fair of 1867

      "We went there on our third day and we stayed there nearly two hours," he writes. "That was our first and last visit."  Though he makes the excuse that it would have taken weeks---"yea, even months"--to see all the exhibits, he's clearly more interested in "the moving masses of people of all nations" that made "a still more wonderful show." He concludes, "If I were to stay there a month, I should still find myself looking at the people rather the inanimate objects." And writing about them, no doubt. 
     So, even with digressions, Twain has only one long  paragraph about the exposition and a mere four about Notre Dame.  But it's the Louvre that he truly dismisses:
     We visited the Louvre at a time when we had no silk purchases in view, and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters.  Some of them were beautiful, but at the same time they carried such evidences about them of the cringing spirit of those great men that we found small pleasure in examining them.  Their nauseous adulation of princely matrons was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the charms of color and expression which are claimed to be in the pictures.  Gratitude for kindness is well, but it seems to me that some of those artists carried it so far that it ceased to be gratitude and became woship.  If there is plausible evidence for the worship of men, then by all means let us forgive Rubens and his brethen.
     But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the old masters that might as well be left unsaid.
       I found it hard to know what to make of this passage at first.  Twain goes to the Louvre and all he can think about is how painters kissed up to their patrons?  Then I realized he's still going after the over-refined and hyper-civilized, as symbolized by France's famous museum.  He's making iconoclastic comments as one of a new breed of museum-goer, the American tourist.  He knows what he doesn't like when he sees it.  Effeteness in any form.  
     These days, I'm afraid, the tourists have taken over too much at the Louvre, though they're not limited to Americans.  They're an  international crowd bent on proving that they've been there in as many electronic ways as possible.  Instead of looking at a work of art, they stand in front of it and take their picture with it, blocking the view of anyone who might actually want to see it.  I've gone to the Louvre many times since I was a teenager, well before I.M. Pei added his famous pyramid as its main entrance.  It's huge and daunting, and you have to devise a smart strategy if you want to have a good experience these days.  Otherwise you end up getting battered by other people's cameras, smart phones, and now their tablets.  My advice: go as late at night as possible and in bad weather if you can.  That tends to keep out the faint of heart.  Never go on a weekend afternoon in the summer or the first Sunday of the month when admission is free.  And bon courage if you get in the way of a picture-poser.  He'll shove you aside like a mean shopper at the marchee. 
     It was with just such a man at the Louvre, in fact, that I had my only run-in on this stay in France.  The guy started yelling at me after I'd asked the woman with him not to cut in front of me and bang me in the face with her ipad.  I thought I was pretty nice;  "Madam, s'il vous plait" was all I said.  Whereupon he whipped around and screamed at me in English of undetermined provenance, "Oh, fine.  You don't have time to wait for somebody else!  Fuck you!"  Every time I think about it, I start to sputter.  There I was--minding my own business, as my mother used to say--when some woman comes up, shoves her way in front, and hits me with her tablet.  Then, when I ask her to move, the guy with her calls me rude and impatient, and in such rude language himself? 
     But, like Twain, I'm going to drop the subject before I say something that should be left unsaid.  I will say one more thing, though.  Art museums don't always bring out the best in us, whether the Louvre or the Smithsonian.  Some of us react to temples of civilization by becoming, well, uncivilized.  

The crowd heads for the Louvre