OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE

No. 138.

THE PLACE DE GRÈVE. MR WILD, in his Vacation in Brittany, tells us of an hôtel in St Malo which, besides its other advantages -as the proprietor advertises in English of his innenjoys the propinquity of 'beautiful graves.' Had he been writing in his own language, he would have said grèves, a word which means 'sands.' The Quai de la Grève of Paris, which thus corresponds, as regards its name, with the Strand of London, extends eastwards up the right bank of the Seine from the Hôtel de Ville; and the Place of the same name is the open space beside that edifice.

The Place de Grève was from a very early period a market-place: it is spoken of as being such in letterspatent of Louis VII., dated in 1141. Wine, charcoal, old clothes and rags, seem to have been successively its staple; after the revolution of 1830, a brisk trade in arms of all kinds was carried on there for several months; and the same thing occurred on a smaller scale after February 1848. At present, it is a place of rendezvous for masons and carpenters in search of employment. It was in old times also the chief scene of public rejoicings and the celebration of festivals: there, for instance, it was usual to have the bonfires kindled on the eve of St John-an affair once of such high solemnity, that, under the reign of Francis I., the whole court was wont to be present on such occasions, and the king himself used to light the pile. In the troubles of the League and of the Fronde, and in almost every revolution or insurrection since, the Grève was a sadly busy scene-a thing indeed to be expected, had other causes been wanting, simply from its proximity to the Hôtel de Ville. It is thus full of general historical interest; but the peculiar association connected with the locality arises from its having been, up to a comparatively recent date, the usual scene of judicial executions. These, as may be supposed, have been countless; and thus Sainte-Foix, in his Essays on Paris, quaintly remarks that if all those who, from first to last, have suffered death on this spot were to be assembled on it together, they would form a crowd more numerous than any of those which were present at their executions. To trace the history of the Place de Grève is consequently to trace the history of a field of blood.

Now, we are far from delighting in horrors ourselves, and would not willingly minister to the depraved taste of any who do: the present is, therefore, not a subject on which we enter with any great liking. But in the many tragedies of which the Place de Grève has been the scene, may be read lessons of some value, and these of more kinds than one: to some notice of them,

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therefore-from which we shall of course exclude anything relating to mere crime as such-a page or two may be usefully devoted.

The earliest case that presents itself as worthy of observation is that of a certain Marguerite Porette, a poor woman, who had written that the soul when lost in God is above the virtues, and has no longer any need of them; and that when any one has reached a certain degree of virtue, he cannot go beyond it.' What exactly she meant, we do not pretend to know, and probably she did not herself know; but for her speculative views, whatever they were, she was burnt alive on the Grève in 1310, at the age of thirty; dissenters of any kind or degree being at that time, and for long afterwards, quite intolerable, and not fit to live. If, however, the ecclesiastics of those days brought men and women to the scaffold for crimes of this sort, their own sacerdotal character did not always protect them from being themselves overtaken by a similar fate on grounds not less absurd: we find that in 1398, two Augustine friars were executed at the Grève because they had undertaken to cure Charles VI. of his lunacy, and had failed. The king did not recover his reason under their treatment, and so they had their heads cut off-a way of treating unsuccessful practitioners which decidedly was more worthy of Bagdad than of Paris. In 1475, we again find two monks on the scaffold, this time, however, in another character: they are each claiming for his own house the possession of some seventy pieces of gold, which the Constable St Pol, whom they have attended to his execution, has desired by their hands to bestow on the poor. The unseemly quarrel is terminated by his dividing the sum equally between them, and in another minute his severed head is shewn to the people by the 'master of high works,' as the executioner is oddly but frequently, and we believe officially, styled in French.

At the Grève, on the 20th of December 1559, 'was judicially assassinated,' says an author before us, 'the illustrious Anne Dubourg, condemned to death by the Chambre Ardente, which granted him the favour of being strangled before he was thrown into the flames.' The Chambre Ardente was a special court appointed arbitrarily at various times, by royal letters-patent, to try particular persons and crimes: as to the 'favour' it extended on this occasion, the reader will recollect that 'favoured' victims of the Inquisition sometimes met with the like indulgence. And at the Grève, on the 27th of October 1572, two months and more after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, and consequently in cool blood, Briquemaut, a brave soldier of threescore and ten, and Cavagnes, a counsellor of the parliament of Toulouse, and a man of the like venerable age, were

be breathing her.' Madame de Sévigné was, moreover, present at the execution of another poisoner, the woman Voisin, in 1680, who, being of the lower class, was burned alive for her crimes: indeed, the amiable lady was quite an amateur of executions, as she herself confesses. To our mind, it is truly painful to find, not only that she was so, but that she can detail the circumstances with a sort of horrible relish. At five o'clock,' says she, they bound her, and with a torch in her hand she appeared in the cart, dressed in white; it is a sort of dress put on to be burned in: she was very red, and she was seen repelling with violence the confessor and the crucifix. At Notre Dame she would on no account pronounce the amende honorable, and at the Grève she resisted with all her might being taken out of the cart: they drew her out by main force; they placed her on the fagots, seated, and bound with iron chains; they covered her with straw: she swore much; she threw off the straw five or six times; but at last the fire increased-we lost sight of her.' So in her own lively way writes the pleasant lady of the wretched woman, her fellow-creature, whose dying agonies she had gone to feast her eyes

upon.

Again, in 1720, a noble criminal and a great one perished on the scaffold of the Grève; this was Count Horn, for the assassination and robbery of a rich speculator in the shares of the famous Mississippi scheme and of the bank set on foot by the enterprising Law. The next year witnessed the execution on the Grève of the daring robber Cartouche; he was broken alive on the wheel, after denouncing as accomplices in his crimes not a few noble lords and ladies, some of them holding posts in the suite of the regent's daughter. The matter was in vain attempted to be hushed up. In 1737, Damiens, for his attempted assassination of Louis XV., suffered, before he was finally put to death, the same horrors as Ravaillac a century and a quarter before such a crowd, we are told, had never been seen in Paris, as was present at the abominable spectacle; thousands came from the remotest provinces to behold it; and what was the most striking, was the eagerness of women to view the sight; they glutted themselves with it, and supported it in all its horrors with a dry eye, and shewing no emotion, when almost every man was shuddering and turning his head away.'

On the 19th of May 1766, a notable personage was executed on the Grève-Lally Tollendal. Whatever this unfortunate man's faults may have been, he was certainly a brave and skilful soldier, and in his defence of Pondicherry, for eight months, he did for an ungrateful king all he could do, and more than most men could have done. His trial, which was a secret one, had lasted two years, when suddenly he was called on for his defence: he asked for three days to prepare it; the delay was refused. Condemned to death, he called down on his shameless judges the execration of men and the vengeance of Heaven, and then stabbed himself with a pair of compasses which he had concealed in his dress. The wound was not immediately mortal; but, apprehensive that it might yet enable him to escape a public execution, the vindictive court ordered that the short time they had already fixed for his execution should be anticipated by six hours. He was drawn on a cart to the Grève, with a gag in his mouth, and a bandage over his eyes; and after a vain struggle on his part to address the people, his head was struck off at a second blow, the executioner having only mangled him at the first. Twelve years afterwards, by the unanimous voices of seventy-two magistrates, the judgment of the parliament which had condemned him was annulled, and his memory 'rehabilitated,' as the French say; which, doubtless, would have been a complete satisfaction to his surviving family and friends, if to his 'rehabilitation' could have been added-his resuscitation.

....

At last the terrible days of the great French Revolution arrive, and the Grève becomes a theatre on which tragedy is played on the largest scale and in many varieties. On the 14th of July 1789, the Bastille is taken, or rather Delaunay, the governor, surrenders it, capitulating that the lives of the garrison shall be spared; but before the prisoners reach the Hôtel de Ville, his head is being carried through the streets on a pike, and the bodies of two of his officers are dangling from the lantern-ropes by which 'La Grève,' as the fantastic Michelet calls that mob of Paris, had hanged them. More murders quickly follow. Famine and War, I mean Foulon and Berthier,' says the same historian, or rather apologist of the Revolution, 'found themselves disconcerted by the capture of the Bastille.' They fled, but were arrested by rural mobs, and sent back to the tender mercies of the city mob. The one and the other had been guilty of much misconduct, both in a public and in a private capacity; this, however, certainly did not justify their being assassinated. The Grève,' continues M. Michelet, whom we quote because it is worth while to see how this partisan relates the conduct of his dear 'people'-'the Grève did not the less continue its outcry. At two o'clock, Bailly comes down; all demand justice from him. "He exposed the principles," and made some impression on those who could hear him. The rest cried: "Hang! hang!".... The crowd was in terrible uneasiness lest Foulon should escape. He was shewn to them from a window; this did not hinder them from forcing the doors. In the Salle St Jean they were again preached to-"had the principles exposed to them"that he ought to be tried. "Tried immediately and hanged," said the crowd.' A great tumult follows. Foulon is carried off, borne to the lanterne opposite; he is made to ask pardon of the nation. Then hoisted twice the rope breaks. They persevere; another rope is sought for. Hanged at last, decapitated; the head carried through Paris.' In the same style is told the murder of Berthier, perpetrated shortly after, and at the same place. He was killed by bayonetstabs; when he fell, 'a dragoon who imputed to him the death of his father, tore out the heart, and went to shew it at the Hôtel de Ville.' And then M. Michelet goes on to insinuate that it was the royalist accomplices of Berthier who instigated 'the Grève' to murder him, they fearing he might make disclosures. What follows is characteristic. A great number of the dragoon's comrades declared to him that, having dishonoured the body, he ought to die, and that they would fight him one after the other until he should be killed. Killed he was that very evening.' Such was the tiger-ape, as Voltaire well called M. Michelet's peuple-that is to say, not the French nation, but the French, or still more exactly, the Parisian rabble. A more regular yet not less disgraceful execution took place on the Grève on the 19th of February 1790. Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras, had been condemned by a judgment of the Châtelet to be hanged. The accusations against him were of an incredible, and indeed absurd description; one vague charge being to the effect that he had conspired to overturn the constitution,' and the evidence thereon being as inadequate as it was irrelevant. But the mob wanted a victim; the tribunal was intimidated and coerced by their cry of 'à la lanterne;' and the marquis was basely abandoned to his fate by the royalists and the court. At that time the idea of having a marquis hanged was one that had all the charm of novelty to 'the Grève;' but many a head amongst those very men of his own party who so shamefully deserted him in his extremity, was destined to fall before the popular thirst for blood was sated. The Marquis de Favras left a widow, said to have been by birth a princess of Anhalt-Dessau; she afterwards married a butcher in the Rue d'Orléans St Honoré,

and for many years presided in person at the retail of the meat to his customers.

In 1793, the place of execution was transferred to the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde. There chiefly did the guillotine do the work of the Terrorists, though the ominous machine cast its shadow of death on other localities also. In 1795, it returned to its original site, and the Grève resumed its former character, and retained it under the Empire and the Restoration. It was there, consequently, that, on the 26th of June 1805, the famous Georges Cadoudal and eleven of his associates were executed, for conspiring against the life of the first consul;' and on the 28th of July 1816, Pleignier, Corbonneau, and Tolleron, 'for complicity with the patriots of that year,' as an anti-Bourbon writer expresses itthat is to say, for conspiring against the government of Louis XVIII. On this latter occasion, the cruelty, almost incredible in modern times and in a civilised country, was perpetrated of inflicting on these men the old punishment for treason-preliminary to their execution, their right hands were chopped off. Six years later, four non-commissioned officers, well known in France as the four sergeants of La Rochelle,' were executed on similar political grounds; eight years more passed, and a solemn procession of 10,000 'citizens' marched to the Grève to do honour to their

memory.

Here our list ends; for since the Revolution of 1830 the guillotine has been erected no longer on the Place de Grève, but outside the Barrière St Jacques.

The Grève, it will have been seen, has witnessed the deaths on the scaffold of men and women in every rank, by great variety of torture, for all kinds of offences, during some 600 years. Persons guilty of the most atrocious crimes, persons guilty of the most venial, and many many persons guilty of no crime at all, have there met with a common doom. The victims of a mistake, the scapegoats of a party, the martyrs to their principles, have been among them. There, examples are afforded us of how the judges of one day have been the condemned of the next-how what was supposed to be justice at the time has since been recognised as iniquity-how men in sacrificing their enemies on the scaffold may gibbet themselves in all future history-how the executed criminal may become the murdered hero. But it is needless to call

attention to a moral that speaks for itself.

One word, however, about the guillotine, and another about M. Michelet. The machine was used in France for the first time on the 25th of April 1792, at the execution on the Grève of a man named Pelletier, condemned to death as a robber and assassin. As is generally known, it takes its name from a medical man called Guillotin; but that gentleman was not, as is generally supposed, in France at least, the inventor; he merely recommended to the Convention the adoption, as an instrument for capital punishment, of a machine which, under the name of the mannaia, had long before been used in Italy for the execution of noble personages; and a specimen of which, under the name of the maiden, and three centuries old (it is said to have been introduced into Scotland by Regent Morton), may be seen in the Antiquarian Museum of Edinburgh. M. Michelet, however, who worships the Revolution, so greatly admires its characteristic instrument, that he claims for his sanguinary idol the invention of it. History will say,' so he writes, 'that at its ferocious, its implacable moment, the Revolution feared to aggravate death, that it made punishment milder, removed the hand of man, invented a machine to shorten suffering.' Dr Guillotin, however, who narrowly escaped being guillotined-he was not actually guillotined, as some have said, but died in his bed at the age of seventy-six, in 1814-was not, we believe, at all proud of the application made of his

name; nor do we wonder that he was not so, when we consider the deplorable facility the machine afforded of despatching in quick succession its scores of victims.

THE PERAMBULATORY MOVEMENT. I HAVE a great respect for children, and never call them little monkeys. I am proud to aid them in their search after knowledge under difficulties, listening to their questions as to so many Open Sesames that will one day win treasures for the world. In children I see the coming men: the future poets, artists, scholars, legislators, soldiers of the nation; and till recently, therefore, I have been highly dissatisfied with the churlish accommodation afforded them in the world. In great towns, they have been usually prisoners at home, or at most they have taken the air cramped up in the nurses' arms; and even if allowed to toddle out, they have enjoyed peeps of life only between the legs of A movement was made long ago in the grown men. right direction, by the invention of a carriage, constructed of rough fir, with four very small wheels; but being heavy and lumbering, it was no go. It took a strong man to draw it; and when the pater familias went out to Hampstead on a hot Sunday, with three or four of the children in this machine, and his wife walking beside it with baby and the basket in her arms, he found it did not go far in the way of rest and recreation. A handsome coach was next constructed on the same principle, with larger and heavier wheels, and painted and varnished beautifully, only difficult to move: which was looked upon as a drawback. This was for aristocratical children, and it was viewed with great awe by the sweep-boys; but still no remarkable change had been operated on the juvenile community, who came forth only in small numbers, and did not seem to appreciate very highly the privilege.

But at length the fulness of time came, and with it the PERAMBULATOR-destined to walk on its three legs into the most distant provinces, and to do more towards extending the views of the rising generation than all the nursery governesses in the world. The moment it appeared, it was seen to be the coming thing; its construction grew into an exclusive branch of the coachmaking trade; and it may now be regarded as one of our national institutions. This remarkable invention -or adaptation, since it is ruled that everything is an adaptation now-a-days-has given a new element to the population of our streets: it has given us children, looking on with their grave smooth faces at the business of life, and seeming to behold with neither interest nor disdain, as they lean back philosophically in their carriages, that shock of men they will one day exasperate or control.

It is a curious instance of the fitness of things, that simultaneously with the Perambulator there sprung up in the metropolitan environs an almost interminable series of handsome and spacious streets, fitted for the elegant little carriage both by the width of the trottoir and the comparative solitude. There you may see, any day you please, Miss Arabella Amelia, not so much pushing the vehicle as leaning lightly in a pensive attitude, one delicate hand on the bar behind, while with the other she holds before her eyes the last new novel, as she walks slowly and gracefully along. Sometimes it is the young brother who performs this sacred duty. He can hardly reach to the bar, but nevertheless the light carriage perambulates obediently under his guidance. Sometimes it is the negro page, with his black-bead eyes, set in white porcelain, and his nether lip even exaggerated with a sense of dignity.

Occasionally he tips forward the little vehicle, and watches it gliding as if by its own volition, and eschewing instinctively the near edge of the kerb-stone. The master, in the meantime, as he is thus borne along -he has not yet assumed the trews-eyes the experiment with philosophic indifference, being only a passenger. He looks as if he knew that his fate was in the distance; and if any quivering of the sensitive Perambulator betrayed a feeling of danger, he would have the air of saying within himself-Quid times? Cæsarem vehis, et fortunam Cæsaris! One part of town where this scene very frequently presents itself is Paddington, a region which not many years ago would have been associated inseparably in our mind with ideas of meanness and vulgarity but for its mysterious connection with the Bank of England, which was forced upon one's attention by the continual cry from the 'buses-' Padd'n'ton-B-ai-nk!' This cry would be useless now, for there could be no need of inviting our notice to a circumstance recurring every minute or two; and the mysterious suburb referred to has grown into a city about the size of Bristol, composed almost exclusively of elegant and aristocratic houses, arranged in some of the finest streets, crescents, terraces, and places in the metropolis. Here, indeed, as in the other suburbs, a scene of still more perambulatory significance may be frequently observed. The children have not only come abroad to view the world, but such of them as are able to walk, make their appearance surrounded with family cares, and sedulously employed in family duties. The Perambulator is occupied by their children, while one of themselves gives it the slight impulse necessary behind, and one or two more walk by the sides, keeping an anxious eye upon the conduct of the dolls to whom they are thus giving an airing. This is the best kind of perambulation, for it exercises the limbs of the children, without depriving them of the protection of the Perambulator: a protection, which, in our opinion, in all cases excepting those of babies, is the great merit of the new carriage.

A coarse-minded man, if in a violent hurry, may knock down a child, but he does not knock down a Perambulator: on the contrary, he keeps out of its way. It is one of the estates of the trottoir, and is even superior in dignity to the pieton. All are safe who belong to it, whether dolls or children; and Miss Arabella Amelia herself, in virtue of her contact with it, reads her novel in tranquillity. Let her only try to do this without the protection of the Perambulator! No, don't let her try; for she would have all the moustached and bearded idiots in the neighbourhood sneaking or buzzing about her, till she lost the thread of the narrative in her mingled anger and contempt.

The power of the Perambulator, in fact, is too great, and, like all illegitimate power, is liable to abuse. It has a tendency towards people's toes, especially when these are afflicted with corns or gout; and in some cases the 'great public question' put by the advertising manufacturer-Do you double up your Perambulators?' might be answered feelingly-No; but very recently one of your Perambulators doubled me up.' This kind of eccentricity, it is said, attracted some time ago the attention of the magistracy, and the police were remorselessly ordered to remove the children's vehicles from the trottoir; but one of these officers executing his duty in a reckless manner, just when a Perambulator of larger growth, drawn by horses, was passing, the consequence was-No, we will not relate it: the newspapers trade in horrors, and we have no doubt adulterate and poison their commodities like other dealers. However, the magisterial mandate was recalled, or else became inoperative from natural weakness, just like an act of parliament; and now the Perambulators hunt our toes all over the trottoir, and double us up as before.

This is wrong: we say it advisedly. We are a warm admirer of the institution; but it must be made to harmonise with the British constitution. With all our respect for the rising generation, we cannot give our sanction to their putting their iron toes upon ours, that are mere flesh and blood. The magistracy must compound with the Perambulators. To sweep them off the trottoir is tyranny and folly, but they must assign them their own place on it. And in promulgating the order, let them annex to contravention a pretty sharp penalty in coined money-a penalty to fall neither on Miss Arabella Amelia, nor the younger brother, nor the black boy, but on the parents. It may be said that these last will, in their turn, take it out of the rest in kind, and that the public will be horrified every morning by distressing yells from genteel interiors. But we are of opinion, in the first place, that private penalties are public benefits; and in the second place, that there will be no private penalties at all. Street-society is on an admirable footing in the metropolis. Everybody knows his proper place, and keeps it; and if the proper place of the Perambulator is fixed, it will keep it like the rest, and intromit with nobody's toes, and double up nobody.

Although this methodism of street-society in London every man, woman, boy, or girl keeping to his or her right hand-is better than the lawlessness of the provincial towns-for instance, Edinburgh-where people perambulate the streets like meeting droves of cattle, it is certainly calculated to give an idea sometimes of hardness and stiffness of character. If the crowd passes face to face, this is not so observable, for then they usually relax the law, when necessary, in favour of kindness and politeness, or mutual convenience; but if you want to pass anybody who is before you, the smallest boy turns at once to a mile-stone, and the most fragile-looking maid to a Tuscan column. They know they are in their proper place, and nobody shall put them out of it. What is the man pressing for? Ain't I on my own side of the way? Just so in the matter of umbrellas. When you meet one face to face, it does not object to bend aside a little to permit yours to pass comfortably; but those that are before you, proceeding more slowly than is agreeable to you, seem part and parcel of the persons who carry them, and stand up like a tree of iron-wood. When you do meet this hostile stiffness face to facewhich sometimes happens-the umbrella is always carried by a hen-cockney. She is usually middle-aged, well, or at least richly dressed, stout, thick-waisted, and with a florid complexion. These marks point her out as a peculiar species of the cockney tribe.

In such a state of methodism, the Perambulator would be in no danger even in the most crowded thoroughfares. But the more quiet aristocratic streets are its peculiar field, and the Parks should as frequently as possible be the goal of the ride; where the children should set an example to their parents by dismounting from their carriages, and exercising their own legs, or when these are not old enough, sitting down on the grass. This, we have a notion, is one part of the mission of the Perambulator. The mothers and grown sisters will not be able to resist the temptation to join such a movement; the gentlemen will not be able to resist the temptation to join the ladies; and so we shall have family parties, not rushing in carriages or on horseback through the dusty ring, or moving on foot in a dense line by its side, but wandering through the whole region, greeting and intermingling, and sitting down in groups among the trees. The charm this would give to such a place as Hyde Park would not be its least advantage: it would operate a most desirable change on the manners and feelings of English society. What we most need in this island of ours is, in truth, to dismount from our high horse, to acquire a little continental sociability,