was more vivid or emphatic. You see this was once a green country town, and made a good living out of the summer visitors. It has a mineral spring, too, and would like to be a fashionable watering-place, only it can’t get people to believe any longer that, to be in Passy, is to be in the country.
It is only a suburb, says the scornful metropolitan; I might as well sit on a two-sous chair in the gardens of the Tuileries or Palais Royal as go there—it is only half-an-hour’s walk or a quarter of an hour’s ride—the country lies further a-field. In fact, it is the misfortune of Passy to be overlaid by its fat old mother, Paris. Yet, with a heart for every fate, Passy bears up against its doom. It clings to the past by the cords of the old swinging lanterns which still adorn its by-streets, though the horrid innovation of gas has been inflicted on its main street. It is garrulous about the Abbé Raynal, Dr. Franklin, Piccini, Bellini, and the other worthies who once lived there. It boasts of its rural situation and salubrious air. It hangs out its thousand placards announcing the summer lodgings which it makes ready for the people who never come. Its shopkeepers proclaim by conspicuous bills in their windows, that Paris fashions, Paris confectionery, and charcuterie are periodically imported from that remote capital. Yet it is easy to see that this is a hopeless struggle.
“Ah!” said the dealer (en gros et en detail), of whom, just to give trade a fillip, I bought a glass of white wine, “Passy est passé.” He had lost heart, but he uttered these words in a whisper. I don’t know what would have happened to him if any of the sparrows had carried the matter to the ears of his heroic townsmen.
Taking coach again, I find myself, some ten minutes after, set down in Auteuil—a dull, dozy, little place, with a promenade ground, flanked with trees and benches, running up the middle of the High Street. Here are “several spots of interest,” as the guide-books say. There is an old church, in the graveyard of which the Chancellor d’Aguesseau is buried, and a bran new hospital—the asylum of Sainte Périne—for persons of decayed fortunes. I don’t care about either, but, turning up the Rue de Boileau, I take a good look at No. 18. It is a modest two-storey house, turning its whitewashed gable end towards the street. Through the open gate in the high, jealous wall I get a sight of a tidy little garden and of the front of the house, which is very plain, with small old-fashioned windows and wooden trellis-work, on which a creeper hangs gracefully. This No. 18 is commonly set down in guide-books as the house of Boileau. That is a mistake. It was, I believe, the dwelling, not of the poet, but only of the poet’s gardener, Antoine Regnier—that same Antoine to whom his master addressed so much poetic counsel, and whom he has celebrated in one of his verses as
Qui dir—gouverneur de mon jardin d’Auteuil
Qui dirige chez moi l’if et le chèvre-feuille.
Boileau’s own house has disappeared, and in its absence we must be content with this relic as a link in the chain of association. Perhaps the honeysuckle on the verandah is the very one which Antoine used to tend while the Historiographer Royal looked on and gossiped with him. The skittle-ground in which Boileau pursued his favourite diversion was, no doubt, somewhere in the garden. What a sight it must have been to see the didactic author of the “Art of Poetry,” in his long, flowing wig, and ample ruffles, bringing down the regiment of pins at one heave of the ball, while Molière, Racine, Lafontaine, and other wits and notabilities of the day formed an applauding circle of onlookers. Molière was as fond of Auteuil as his friend: but the house has fallen in which he wrote several of his greatest plays, and in which he gave those famous suppers where his bursts of humour, like those of our own rare Ben at another series of lyric feasts,
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.
We can, however, trace the site of the mansion, for on the front of the pavilion, built by the order of the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin, appears the inscription, “Ici fut la maison du Molière.” The house in the Rue Molière in which Racine wrote “Les Plaideurs,” has since been the residence of Madame Récamier and Franklin. Near the villa which was once a seat of the Dukes of Montmorency, you may still see the habitation where Madame Helvetius, widow of the author of “L’Esprit,” passed her latter years, receiving the visits of a circle of distinguished men, including Turgot, Franklin, and Napoleon, but never forgetting amidst the distractions of such society to be kind and charitable to the poor, who called her in gratitude Notre Dame d’Auteuil.
Till lately Auteuil has retained, with the exception of a building pulled down here, and a few others erected there, very much the aspect which; it wore when it was the haunt of the poets and other celebrities I have named. But a change is at hand, as, continuing my stroll, I soon discover. Passing up the high street, I find myself in front of the high earthworks of the fortifications, immediately on the other side of which is the Bois de Boulogne. This being the terminus of the omnibus service, and there being also a railway station close at hand, one is not surprised to find a little knot of cafés, estaminets, and dining-rooms. Wedding-parties of the middle rank, and Sunday visitors to the Bois have long patronised these establishments, but they are now looking forward to a more extended business. Already, indeed, the fickle traiteurs have changed their colours, and now do homage, through their sign-boards, to the rival with which the famous park is about to be confronted in the new permanent Exhibition. New refreshment houses are springing up, and the old ones are adding each a wing or a storey. Before long we may expect to see a little commissariat city here. Turning down a dull, ill-kept road to the left, with two or three mouldy-looking villas on the one hand, and a dingy dead wall on the other, I come upon the site of the new undertaking—a site occupied down to the days of the Grand Monarque by a royal hunting-lodge, and subsequently by the Château du Coq, and the magnificent conservatories built by Richelieu. More recently, the property belonged
