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The rumor of the advent of the party spread through the country around Saranac, and at the frontier town where they would begin the journey into the woods the whole community was on the qui vive to see, not Emerson or Lowell, of whom they knew nothing, but Agassiz, who had become famous in the commonplace world through having refused, not long before, an offer from the Emperor of the French of the keepership of the Jardin des Plantes and a senatorship, if he would come to Paris and live.
He made it his business to give her pleasure; and understanding the inquisitive active little spirit he had to do with he went where his own tastes would hardly have led him. The Quai aux Fleurs was often visited, but also the Halle aux Bles, the great Halle aux Vins, the Jardin des Plantes, and the Marche des Innocens.
Up to this time bread in Paris had been sufficient for its needs, and not too dear. Wine was plenty, but meat was growing scarce. Horses were requisitioned for food. It was the upper classes who ate horse-flesh and queer animals out of the Jardin des Plantes; the working-classes would not touch such things till driven to eat them by absolute famine.
To reach this stone is, for a stranger, a matter of some difficulty. From the Place by the Jardin des Plantes, it is necessary to plunge down a steep descent towards the railway station, and then one climbs a series of zigzag paths on a high grassy bank that brings one out upon the Place Huet. In one corner, surrounded by chains and supported by low iron posts, is the historic stone.
To have achieved the celebrity of being the oldest inmate of that institution was no despicable distinction, but the venerable centenarian had other claims to honor. A native of the Marquesas Islands, he was brought by Bougainville in 1776 to the Royal Museum, afterward known as the Jardin des Plantes.
I did not accompany him on these occasions; but almost always either on his return, after dinner, or in the evening, he related to me what he had done and said. He congratulated himself on having paid a visit to Daubenton, at the Jardin des Plantes, and talked with great self-complacency of the distinguished way in which he had treated the contemporary of Buffon.
While they talked they left behind them the noisy streets of the centre of Paris. They walked along the quays, skirted the Jardin des Plantes, plunged into Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Risler followed where the other led. Sigismond's words did him so much good!
He replied to Börne's revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet's fastidious scorn of the smudgy revolutionist. He tells us of his visit to Börne's rooms, where he found such a menagerie as could hardly be seen in the Jardin des Plantes German polar bears, a Polish wolf, a French ape.
He was very wretched in London lodgings, where I was obliged to fasten him to the bars of a stove, and where he had no fresh air; and he was no sooner let loose than he tried to break everything within his reach; so I persuaded his young mistress to present him to the Jardin des Plantes. I took him there; and during my stay in that place paid him daily visits.
We have seen the Tuileries, the Napoleon Column, the Madeleine, that wonder of wonders the tomb of Napoleon, all the great churches and museums, libraries, imperial palaces, and sculpture and picture galleries, the Pantheon, Jardin des Plantes, the opera, the circus, the legislative body, the billiard rooms, the barbers, the grisettes Ah, the grisettes! I had almost forgotten.
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