THE PULL OF THE PAST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 535, 23 September 1949, Page 12

THE PULL OF THE PAST

The second of a group of articles

written for "The Listener" by

GORDON

MIRAMS

VERYTHING in Paris reminds you of history. It is , almost as if everything conspires to do so. You could, I suppose, walk through a few parts of the city and not feel the past tugging continually at your coat-sleeve to draw your attention to some building, some piece of statuary, or some small square rich in historical .associations. But thus to escape the pull of the past in Paris, even in the more recent quarters, you would need to be both ignorant and insensitive. Indeed, Paris is so prodigal in all its intellectual and aesthetic offerings that, unless you wish to remain a mere dilettante, you feel almost compelled to limit the range of your interests and specialise in something-whether you are a student of art, literature, or history; a connoisseur of prints, coins, furniture, books, or old weapons; or nothing more than a modest collector, as I was, of model soldiers ("toy soldiers" if you like, but they are rather more than that). It is one of the attractions of Paris that anyone, whatever his hobby and taste, will find his private interest or eccentricity ‘catered for somewhere

by some museum, art gallery, or library, or by some craftsman or specialised shopkeeper. To cite my own perhaps rather peculiar case, I came in e course of time upon several small shops concerned with nothing except the making, gathering together, and selling of model soldiers and figurines of different historical periods and of almost limitless variety, intricacy-and cost. So you may, if you like, in your browsing through the city concentrate on the Gallo-Roman period when what was to become Paris was known as Lutgce (Lutetia), growing outward from its cradle on the Ile de la Cité, along the left bank of the Seine, and forming what later came to be known as the Latin Quarter, and leaving its traces in the enigmatic ruins of the Thermes of Cluny past which the traffic of the Boul’ Miche now bustles, in thé Arénes de Lutéce of the Rue Moxge, and in the Church of St. Germain-des Prés. Or you may prefer to specialise in the 13th and 14th Centuries when Paris was becoming the artistic and intellectual capital of the West and when Notre Dame was taking shape. Perhaps it is the 16th or the 17th Century which specially atttacts you-the era of Henri

Quatre, of Cyrane de Bergerac, of Cardinal Richelieu, and the Three Musketeers. If so you will find a Paris still rich in reminders and relics of those days-on the Ile St. Louis, behind Notre Dame, where building after. building dates from about 1650; in the Gardens of the Luxembourg where the Musketeers met the Cardinal’s Guards "at one o’clock" in the affray that Dumas has immortalised; in the Place des Vosges (once the Place Royale) where Henri II was killed in a tournament and where the Mignons of Henri III fought their famous duel in 1575; or perhaps in the Rue St. Honoré where a modern tea-and-cake-shop with the ‘same name stands on the very site of the Rétisserie Ragueneau frequented by Cyrano. NAPOLEONIC GLORIES ET though Paris offers the student and even the casual visitor a deep sense of continuity with every century and almost every year of its history,

there is one epoch above all others which the city commemorates — the Napoleonic. I do not like to generalise, but I am afraid it is true that for the average. Parisian, if not the average Frenchman, history begins about the year 1796 with the emergence of Napoleon and ends on June 17, 1815, the day before Waterloo. Everywhere you turn you are reminded of the Napoleonic legend and the glories of the First Empire. The Little Corporal now sleeps secure in his massive tomb beneath the Dome of Les Invalides, where ancient battle flags, rotting away to the semblance of spiders’ webs, hang thick on the walls; but the magic power of his name still lies over! the nation. .Curiously enough, one seldom hears that name invoked in public utterance by to-day’s leaders; but you have only.to look at the crowds who queue up in their hundreds at week-ends and on anniversaries to pay homage before it to realise that the Tomb of Napoleon is the most sacred shrine of all to the Parisians, more sacred even than that of Ste Genevieve. And there are many other places where the Napoleonic myth is almost as strong. You cannot avoid it at Versailles, at Fontainebleau, and of course at Malmaison, though that most charming of show places on the: outskirts of Paris

Se NE TS ee es oe a eS ee ae is specially dedicated to the memory of Josephine. You meet it in every : souvenir booth and antique shop in Paris and throughout the length and breadth of France; it catches up and travels with you if you drive inland from a holiday near Cannes on the Mediterranean coast, because then you will almost’ certainly find yourself following the Route Napoleon which the Emperor took on his escape from Elba for the Hundred Days. If you are a collector of almost anything, even of model soldiers, it is much easier for you if you concentrate on the First Empire, because the glamour of that ‘age has attracted so many collectors before you. In a thousand street and place-names you hear the echoes of the legendnames that to a Frenchman particularly but even to an imaginative foreigner seem to carry the sound of a roll of drums or the call of a bugle: Avenue de la Grande Armée, Place d’Iéna, Avenue Wagram, Quai d’Austerlitz, Oudinot, Friedland, Kléber, Murat. THE OTHER SIDE HROUGH their unhealthy preoccupation with Napoleonic glory, the French tend inevitably to ignore the other side of the picture-indeed, to omit that. picture altogether. This struck me forcibly in the gallery at Versailles where the walls are plastered with huge paintings celebrating French

feats of arms in all historical periods and especially the Napoleonic. In such a place it was perhaps unreasonable to expect certain battles.to be remembered, but it still:came as something of a shock to realise that, so far as this collection was concerned, Crecy, Agincourt, and Waterloo had apparently never been fought. There are, of course, many intelligent Frenchmen to-day not under the influence of the Napoleonic myth who are prepared to concede the tragedy and the folly of Bonaparte’s policy of. conquest; but even here they show a tendency to quote in. extenuation his positive achievements, such as the Code Napoleon, Equally disturbing are the signs that the French, partly through their. nostalgia for the Empire, are at present in process of forgetting their Revolution. They have not yet gone to the absurd extremes of some sections in the U.S.A. who, in their abhorrence of all radicalism, no longer remember that their own nation was born out of insurrection against legal authority. All the same, one gains the impression that in France the French Revolution’ is no longer quite respectable. The relics of the years 1789-94 are there, of course, but you have to look (continued on next page)

France To-day (continued from previous page) for them: they do not thrust themselves on your notice as do those of the following two decades, When I visited the prison of La Conciergerie I certainly had to look hard before I found, tucked away in a dark corner, the blade and other parts of the guillotine which cut off the head of Louis XVI. It was morbid curiosity that prompted the search, I admit, and it is probably right and natural that the French should be ashamed of the Terror, and do not like to be reminded of it themselves or to remind others. But the effect of this coupled with the emphasis on subsequent Imperial triumphs must be to obscure, at least in the popular mind, the causes of the Revolution -, the | economic condition of France and the tyranny which made the upheaval almost inevitable-as well as to relegate to the background the conceptions of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity which sprang from it. This tendency was most strikingly illustrated in my experience by the attitude of the guides who show visitors round all such places as La Conciergerie, Versailles, Fontainbleau, and most notably the lovely Church of Sainte Chapelle. That prison of La Conciergerie is a grimly horrible place; you don’t need a guide to stress the fact. But the one I encountered seemed to take a relish in doing just that, so that everybody in our party, French or foreigner, could hardly help being moved by the thought of what was suffered by the aristocrats and the Queen who were imprisoned there before massacre or execution. That, as T say, is right and natural; but as I have also said, it does rather put the picture out of perspective. ; At Saint Chapelle and other churches and palaces, the emphasis was on the architectural beauties defaced and destroyed, the stained-glass windows smashed by the mob during the Revolution. "It is lovely, yes. But, ah, if we could only have see it before those dreadful days," our guide would say. And the good solid bourgeois citizens crowding round him ‘would exclaim, "Quel dommage! Quelle horreur!" and would bend down to explain to little | Jean or Marie how that lovely statue of the Virgin had come to lose its nose. I suppose it often happens thus, or ‘much the same, in England when you are being shown round some ancient edifice defaced by the Cromwellians. But in Paris I think it happens rather too often.