there is not in travel an interest more fascinating than that of noting with the eyes and proving by the memory and by books the exact place of great or decisive actions. so have i just done in many places. here (i have said to myself) abdul-ul-rahman went up aragon till he came to the head of the pass. here he first saw the plains of gaul from a height and promised himself the conquest of all europe for islam. here, where the two rivers meet somewhat north of poitiers, the two hosts watched each other for a week, and that which was not ours was defeated.
then again, in toulouse it was amazing to collect, as one wandered through, the memories of so many centuries. here were the shrine where the body of saturninus was found dead, dragged to death by a bull through the streets of the city; the quarter from which the populace saw advancing the northern army that was to defeat the visigoths; the site of the wall whence the retreat of the saracen was noted, a flood of men pouring back towards the wall of the[pg 84] pyrenees; the flat heights beyond the city to the east, where the english army came up from spain in the defeats of napoleon and drove back the resistance of the defence.
all these, and many more, a man notes in a travel of but few days, for all europe—and no province more than this—is crammed with the story of its own past; but perhaps that which, in such reminiscences or resurrections, most moves one is to observe the obliteration of the last and most immediate of our efforts. the sites of the revolution have disappeared.
one may walk about paris—as i have walked to-day—and see stones and windows that are still alive with the long business of the city. there is the room where madame de sévigné wrote, there is the long gallery where sully paced, recognising the new power of artillery and planning the greatness of his master. you may stand on the very floor where the priests stood when st. louis held the crown of thorns above them, more than six hundred years ago; you may stand on the stone that covers geoffrey plantagenet before the altar of the cathedral; you may touch the altar that the boatmen raised under tiberius to their gods when our lord was preaching in galilee, and as you marvel at that stone you may note around you the little roman bricks that stood in the same arches when julian saw them, sitting at the council that saved the faith for the west.
all these old things remain in this moving, and yet[pg 85] unchanging, town—except the things of its principal and most memorable feat of will.
the revolution is even now not old. its effects are still in movement; they are not yet accomplished. of the fundamental quarrels which it raised (some five or six) one at least, that of religion, is by no means resolved.
it is not even old in time. i who write this have known some who saw it; many who remembered its soldiers or its victims. i have but to-day visited a room where a daughter of the montgolfiers would tell me in her extreme old age how the mob poured on the bastille, and her companion, nearer to me in blood, had seen, and in my boyhood talked to me of, napoleon. how many all round me, to-day or yesterday, were filled with the light or fire of that time, saying, "my father died in such and such a battle," in spain, or in italy, or beyond the vistula—at the ends of the world. it is not so very long ago. it was much the chief business, for good or evil, that europe has known since the empire accepted the faith. and what visible relics of it remain?
where the national assembly sat at versailles, the salle des menus plaisirs, there are a few houses or barracks, a place in building. where they sat in paris, they and the first days of the convention, wrestling with and throwing necessity, the riding school, that vast oval cavern in which they forged the modern world, has utterly gone.
[pg 86]
i never pass the place, even hurriedly and on business to some work or other, but i pause a moment to consider so great a change! it is where the rue castiglione comes now into the rue de rivoli—two streets whose very names are those of battles fought long after the atlantean work was done. not a trace remains. a drinking shop for foreign jockeys, a cosmopolitan hotel, a milliner's where the rich of all nations (the women of the rich, that is) go in and buy; these hold the place. here mirabeau spoke his last words with effort and went home to die; here verginaud thundered; here louis and mary antoinette took refuge in the oven of the august days; here the long vote, a day and a night and yet another day, dragged on and ended with the end of the capétians—after a thousand years.
the tuileries saw more. they saw the outlawing of thermidor, the quarrels that ended in the dictatorship, the hard scuffle that killed the monarchy. they have wholly disappeared. at the one end of them still stands the room where the committee made war on the whole world, and imposed upon the nation that leaden law of armies which we still call the terror. but for that room all has gone.
the town-hall has gone. it was the focus of the revolt, it led the fever of the war against the kings. from it came the massacres of september—by order, i believe,—into it retreated and was defeated the last effort of extreme equality. this building at[pg 87] least (one might have hoped) might have been spared for history. it had sprung from the renaissance, whole and beautiful. it had seen all the growths of the bourbons and of their power, all the growing consciousness of paris. it held half the documents of the city and more than half its destiny. it was the head, and its italian front was the face, of paris. it has gone altogether. it was burned when the tuileries was burned.
the room where danton pleaded so that his voice was heard beyond the river; the room where the queen, in a voice low and firm, replied to the questions of her judges; the room where marat was acquitted, and where the girondins sang—all that has gone in fire. the house where desmoulins first conspired is pulled down. the house where danton sat in his last hours watching the fire and caring little for life or death has also gone. the jacobins are a market-place. the temple was pulled down by the order of napoleon. that furious business seems to have burnt out the very stones of its origin or to have burst the confines wherein it was conceived.
perhaps a fate rested upon them all.
i went to-day through woods that were quite lonely twenty years ago. they stood near my home. here, in the midst of the trees, and in a deserted place reached by a dismantled and neglected road, rose a country-house, regular in outline, monotonous, and faded. the windows were[pg 88] open to the night, the floors rotten; green moss grew on the plaster of the walls; the roof was ruinous. it was the house to which the daughter of marie antoinette had come, reserved, and perhaps with terrors in her mind, to find silence while the restoration still endured. it was her refuge. years after it stood as i have recalled it. i saw it (i say) again to-day—or rather, i saw it no longer.
the woods are felled in regular great roads. there are villas built and new inns, and pleasure-places. a new paris has spread out towards it and killed it. here also the memory of the revolution, the physical memory, has disappeared.
i know of no wave like it in europe or in the history of europe: of no such attempt, so great, so full of men and of creation, whose outward garment in building has been so thrust away by the irony of time.
