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Some years ago a nun left the Couvent des Augustines in open day, passing out from the central door in her nun's garb, and meeting there a foreign-looking man accompanied by a posse of gendarmes. The couple, followed by a half-hooting, half-cheering mob, drove directly to the hôtel-de-ville, where they were united in marriage.
A squad of lumbermen were our new fellow-citizens. These soldiers of the outermost outpost were in the regulation-uniform, red-flannel shirts, impurpled by wetting, big boots, and old felt-hats. Blood-red is the true soldierly color. All the residents of Damville dwelt in a great log-barrack, the Hotel-de-Ville.
With the names of Marx and Lassalle is associated the second great principle which, in 1848, definitely takes its place on the front of the European stage. This is the principle whose votaries confronted Lamartine at the Hôtel-de-Ville on the afternoon of the 25th February.
As Louis-Philippe justly observed when he recently inspected the exterior of the whole building, that it should no longer be called the Hôtel-de-Ville, but for the future the City Palace, as the splendour within it is not exceeded in any of the other palaces in Paris. The library belonging to this establishment consists of 55,000 volumes, and is very rich in manuscripts.
The public walk, which edges the grassy plain allotted to the fair, is bordered by large elm-trees, and the vicinity to the river insures that freshness always so desirable in summer, and more especially in a climate so warm as this. The town of Beaucaire has little worthy of notice, except its Hòtel-de-Ville and church, both of which are handsome buildings.
Viollet-le-Duc has constructed the Hôtel-de-Ville after the perfectly appropriate style of the XIII century, but its stone is so new and its atmosphere so modern and republican that the traveller left it without regret and made his way up the dark, steep, badly-paved alley-way which leads to the door of the Cloister.
To the left there was another trench excavated athwart the gloom; an unbroken chain of stars shone forth down the Champs-Elysees from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, where a new cluster of Pleiades was flashing; next came the gloomy stretches of the Tuileries and the Louvre, the blocks of houses on the brink of the water, and the Hotel-de-Ville away at the extreme end all these masses of darkness being parted here and there by bursts of light from some large square or other; and farther and farther away, amidst the endless confusion of roofs, appeared scattered gleams, affording faint glimpses of the hollow of a street below, the corner of some boulevard, or the brilliantly illuminated meeting-place of several thoroughfares.
And for about four months all France, and to a great degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of delirium, except happily the murderous for most part, was a weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, at the Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman, whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine discerned to be properly "the first stump-orator in the world, standing too on the highest stump, for the time."
In spite of the malignant libels of the aristocrats, I shall go every day at breakfast-time to taste the charms of the purest friendship in her society. She comes to hear me preach! Yes, no doubt of it; no one knows better than herself the sincerity with which I believe in the truths I profess. She comes to the assemblies of the Hôtel-de-Ville!
"At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! and they had illuminated with magic glasses the word hope, which is written on the grand portal." "At the Hotel-de-Ville! At the Hotel-de-Ville! And Husson-le-Voir played the flute!" "I tell you, no!" "I tell you, yes!" "I say, no!"
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