1802 – John Carr (4)
Géricault Life
In 1802, Englishman John Carr visited France and published an account of his experiences in 1803. Here, Carr adds more detail to his decription of Rouen, the ancient Norman capital and Théodore Géricault’s place of birth in 1791. Carr concludes this excerpt with a vivid description of the guillotine at work in Rouen in 1802
“…Rouen, upon the whole is a fine city, very large and populous. It was formerly the capital of the kingdom of Normandy. It stands upon a plain, screened on three sides, by high, and picturesque mountains. It is near two leagues in compass, exclusive of the fauxbourgs of St. Severs, Cauchoise, Bouveul (sic), St. Hiliare, Martainville and Beauvisme (sic). Its commerce was very celebrated, and is returning with great rapidity. Most of the fine buildings in this city, and its environs are Anglo-Norman antiquities, and were founded by the English before they left Normandy.
The cathedral is a grand, and awful pile of gothic architecture, built by our William the Conqueror. It has two towers, one of which, is surmounted by a wooden spire covered with lead, and is of the prodigious height of 395 french feet, the other is 236 feet high.
The additional wooden spire, and the inequality of the towers produce rather an unfavourable effect. During the revolution, this august edifice was converted into a sulphur and gunpowder manufactory, by which impious prostitution, the pillars are defaced, and broken, and the whole is blackened, and dingy. The costly cenotaphs of white marble, enriched with valuable ornaments containing the hearts of our Henry III, and Richard I, kings of England, and dukes of Normandy, which were formerly placed on each side of the grand altarpiece, were removed during the revolution. The altarpiece is very fine. Grand preparations were making for the inauguration of the arch-bishop, which was to take place the following Sunday. There were not many people at mass; those who were present, appeared to be chiefly composed of old women, and young children…
I next visited the church of St. Ouens, which is not so large as the cathedral, but surpasses that, and every other sacred edifice I ever beheld, in point of elegance. This graceful pile, has also had its share of sufferings, during the reign of revolutionary barbarism. Its chaste, and elegant pillars, have been violated by the smoke of sulphur and wood; and in many place, present to the distressed eye, chasms, produced by massy forges, which were erected against them, for casting ball. The costly railing of brass, gilt, which half surrounded the altar, had been torn up, and melted into cannon. The large circular stained window over the entrance called La Rose du Portail is very beautiful, and wholly unimpaired. The organs in all the churches are broken and useless. They experienced this fate, in consequence of their having been considered as fanatical instruments during the time of terrour. The fine organ of St. Ouens is in this predicament, and will require much cost to repair it. (The ornaments of the churches of England experienced a similar fate from the commissioners of the Long Parliament, in 1643.)
I cannot help admiring the good sense which in all the churches of France is displayed, by placing the organ upon a gallery over the grand entrance, by which the spectator has an uninterrupted view, and commands the whole length of the interior building. In the English cathedrals, it is always placed midway between the choir and church, by which, this desired effect is lost. — St. Ouens is now open for worship. In spite of all the devastations of atheistic Vandalism, this exquisite building, like the holy cause to which it is consecrated, having withstood the assailing storm, and elevating its meek, but magnificent head above its enemies, is mildly ready to receive them into her bosom, still disfigured with the traces of blind and barbarous ferocity.
Behind the altar I met the celebrated prince of Waldec. He, who possessed of royal honors, and ample domains, revolted in the day of battle, from his imperial master, and joined the victorious and pursuing foe. I beheld him in a shaded corner of one of the cloisters of St. Ouens, in poor atire, with an old umbrella under his arm, scantily provided for, and scarcely noticed by his new friends. A melancholoy, but just example of the rewards due to treachery and desertion.
I have described these churches only generally, it cannot be expected of me to enter into an elaborate history of them, or of any other public edifices. The detail, if attempted, might prove dull, and it is altogether incompatible with the limited time, and nature of my excursion.
After we left St. Ouens, we visited the Square aux Vaux, where the celebrated heroine of Lorrain – Joan d’Arc, commonly called the Maid of Orleans, was cruelly burnt at the stake, for a pretended sorceress, but in fact to gratify the barbarous revenge of the duke of Bedford, the then regent of France; because after signal successes, she conducted her sovereign, Charles, in safety, to Rheims, where he was crowned, and obtained decisive victories over the English arms. We here saw the statue erected by the French to the memory of this remarkable woman, which as an object of sculpture seems to possess very little worthy of notice.
Chapter VI..
Upon looking up against the corner wall of a street, surrounded by particoloured advertisements of quack medicines, wonderful cures, new invented essences, judgments of cassation, rewards for robbers, and bills of the opera, I beheld Bonaparte’s address to the people of France, to elect him consul for life. I took it for granted that the spanish proverb of ‘tell me with whom you are, and I will tell you what you are,’ was not to be applied in this instance, on account of the company in which the Consular application, by a mere fortuitous coincidence, happened to be placed.
A circumstance occurred at this time, respecting this election, which was rather ridiculous, and excited considerable mirth at Paris. Upon the first appearance of the election book of the first consul, in one of the departments, some wag, instead of subscribing his name, immediately under the title of the page, ‘shall Napoleone Bonaparte be first consul for life?’ wrote the following words, ‘I can’t tell.’
This trifling affair affords rather a favourable impression of the mildness of that government, which could inspire sufficient confidence to hazard such a stroke of pleasantry. It reached Mal Maison with great speed, but is said to have occasioned no other sensation there, than a little merriment. Carnot’s bold negative was a little talked of, but as it was solitary, it was considered harmless. To the love of finery which the french still retain to a certain degree, I could alone attribute the gay appearance of the eggs in the market, upon which had been bestowed a very smart stain of lilac colour. The effect was so singular that I could not help noting it down.
On the third day after our arrival in this city, we attended the trial of a man who belonged to one of the banditti which infest the country round this city. The court was held in the hall of the ancient parliament house, and was composed of three civil judges (one of whom presided) three military judges, and two citizens. The arrangements of the court, which was crowded, were excellent, and afforded uninterrupted accomodations to all its members by separate doors and passages alloted to each, and also to the people, who were permitted to occupy the large area in front, which gradually rose from the last seats of the persons belonging to the court, and enable every spectator to have a perfect view of the whole. Appropriate moral mottoes were inscribed in characters of gold, upon the walls. The judges wore long laced bands, and robes of black, lined with light blue silk, with scarfs of blue and silver fringe, and sat upon an elevated semicircular bench, raised upon a flight of steps, placed in a large alcove, lined with tapestry. The secretaries, and subordinate officers were seated below them. On the left the prisoner was placed, without irons, in the custody of two gendarmes, formerly called maréchaussées, who had their long swords drawn. These soldiers have a very military appearance, and are a fine, and valuable body of men. I fear the respectable impression which I would wish to convey of them will suffer, when I inform my reader, that they are servants of the police, and answer to our Bow-street runners. The swiftness with which they pursue, and apprehend offenders, is surprising.
We were received with politeness, and conducted to a convenient place for hearing, and seeing all that passed. The accusateur general who sat on the left, wore a costume similar to that of the judges, without the scarf. He opened the trial by relating the circumstances, and declaiming upon the enormity of the offence, by which it appeared that the prisoner stood charged with robbery, accompanied with breach of hospitality; which, in that country, be the amount of the plunder ever so trifling, is at present capital. The address of the public accuser was very florid, and vehement, and attended by violent gestures, occasionally graceful. The pleaders of Normandy are considered as the most eloquent men in France, I have heard several of them, but they appear to me, to be too impassioned. Their motions in speacking frequently look like madness. He ransacked his language to furnish himself with reproachful epithets against the miserable wretch by the side of him, who with his hands in his bosom appeared to listen to him, with great sang froid. The witnesses who were kept separate, previous to their giving their evidence, were numerous, and proved many robberies against him attended with aggravated breaches of hospitality. The court entered into proofs of offenses committed by the prisoner at different times, and upon different persons. The women who gave their testimony, exhibited a striking distinction between the timidity of english females, confronting the many eyes of a crowded court of justice, and the calm self possession with which the french ladies here delivered their unperturbed testimony.
The charges were clearly proved, and the prisoner was called upon for his defence. Undismayed, and with all the practiced hardihood of an Old Bailey felon, he calmly declared, that he purchased the pile of booty produced in the court, for sums of money, the amount of which, he did not then know, of persons he could not name, and in places which he did not remember. He had no advocate. The subject was next resumed, and closed by the official orator who opened it. The court retired, and the criminal was reconducted to the prison behind the hall. After an absence of about twenty minutes, a bell rang to announce the return of the judges, the prisoner entered now, escorted by a file of national guards, to hear his fate. The court then resumed its sitting. The president addressed the unhappy man, very briefly, recapitulated his offenses, and read the decree of the republic upon them, by which he doomed him to lose his head at four o’clock that afternoon.
It was then ten minutes past one!! The face of this wretched being presented a fine subject for the pencil. His countenance was dark, masked, and melancholy; over it was spread the sallow tint of long imprisonment. His beard was unshorn, and he displayed an indifference to his fate, which not a little surprised me. He immediately retired, and upon his return to his cell, a priest was sent for to prepare him for his doom. At present, in the provinces, all criminal offences are tried before military tribunals, qualified, as I have described this to be, by a mixture of civil judges and bourgeois.
It is one of the peculier characteristics of such tribunals, to order immediate punishment after conviction. In the present instance, the fate of the offender was well know, for his crimes were many and manifest, and as the interval allowed by military courts between the sentence, and its fulfilment, is so very short, the administrators of the law had postponed his trial for five months from the period of his commitment, for the purpose of affording him an indulgent procrastination. This mode, although arising from merciful motives, is, I am aware, open to objection; but it would be unfair to comment upon laws, which prevailed in times of revolution, and are permitted only to operate, until the fine fabric of french criminal jurisprudence, which is now constructing, shall be presented to the people. To the honor of our country, and one of the greatest ornaments of the british bar, the honorable T. Erskine, in the year 1789, furnished the french, with some of these principles of criminal law, which it was impossible to perfect during the long æra of convulsion, and instability which followed, and which will constitute a considerable part of that great, and humane code, which is about to be bestowed upon the nation, and which will, no doubt, prove to be one of the greatest blessings, which human wisdom can confer upon human weakness. Its foundation is nearly similar to that of our own. The great and enlightened genius whose name I have mentioned, has provided that the contumacy of one juryman shall not be able to force the opinion of the rest.
After the court had broken up, I visited the town house, which, before the revolution, was the monastery of the benedictines, who, from what appeared of the remains of their establishment, must have been magnificently lodged, and well deserved during their existence, to bear the name of the blessed. The two grand staircases are very fine, and there is a noble garden behind. Upon entering the vestibule of the council chamber, formerly the refectory, I thought I was going behind the scenes of a theatre. It was nearly filled with allegorical banners, pasteboard and canvas arches of triumph, altars, emblems of liberty, and despotism, and all the scenic decorations suitable to the frenzied orgies of a republican fête. Thank God! they appeared to be tolerably well covered with dust and cobwebs. At the end of this noble room, seated upon a high pedestal, was the goddess of liberty, beautifully executed in marble. ‘Look at that sanguinary prostitute,’ cried Mons. G—-, to me, pointing to the statue, ‘for years we have had liberty and bloodshed, thank Heaven! we are no longer free.’ Upon which, he wrote his name in the first consul’s book, which was here lying open, upon a table, for the purpose of receiving the suffrages of the department.
The laconic irony, and the manner of the speaker, afforded me a tolerably good display of the nature of the blessings conferred upon the french, by their late political philosophy.
From this place I proceeded to the ci-devant convent of the jesuits, built by one of the munificent dukes de Bourbon. It is a magnificent oblong stone building. In the centre of the court was a tree of liberty, which, like almost all the other trees, dedicated to that goddess, which I saw, looked blighted, and sickly. I mention it as a fact, without alluding to any political sentiment whatever. It is a remark in frequent use in France, that the caps of liberty are without heads, and the trees of liberty without root. The poplar has been selected from all the other trees of the forest, for this distinguished honor, from a whimsical synonymy of its name with that of the people. In french, the poplar is called peuplier, and the word signifies people. This fine building is now converted into a university of learning, and the fine arts. From the number of students, I should suppose the fashionable fervour of study had not as yet reached Rouen.
The professor of philosophy, with great politeness sent a young man to show me the museum of pictures, for which purpose the church of the jesuits, is at present used. There are several paintings in it, the only fine one, was a dying Jesus by Vandyke, which was exquisite. Upon my expressing my admiration, a young student near me said ‘oui monsieur c’est très jolie.’ This misapplied remark, from an easy and natural combination of sound, could not fail of seeming a little singular as applied to such a subject, but every thing that pleases in France is très jolie. From this pointing, I was, by importunity, led to view the other parts of the collection, which were composed of large pictures, by french masters; and so natural is local prejudice, every where, that I was almost held down, before the best artists of Rouen, upon which, as I am at liberty here, I shall beg to make no comment.
In the students’ room, below, were some paintings curious, and valuable only, from their great antiquity, and a few good copies by the pupils. A picture was pointed out to me as a very fine thing, the subject was a fat little cherub, with a full flowing wig, fiddling to St. Francis, who from his gloomy appearance seemed not to possess half the musical genius of a dancing bear.
Upon my return through the market place, I beheld the miserable wretch, at whose trial I was present in the morning, led out to execution. He was seated upon the bottom of a cart, stripped above to his shirt, which was folded back, his arms were pinioned close behind, and his hair was closely cropped, to prevent the stroke of the fatal knife from being impeded. A priest was seated in a chair beside him. As the object of my excursion was to contemplate the manners of the people, I summoned resolution to view this gloomy and painful spectacle, which seemed to excite but little sensation in the market place, where its petty traffic and concerns proceeded with their accustomed activity, and the women at their stalls, which extended to the foot of the scaffold, appeared only with the solicitude of selling their vegetables to the highest bidder. A small body of the national guards, and a few boys and idlers surrounded the fatal spot. The guillotine, painted red, was placed upon a scaffold of about five feet high. As soon as the criminal ascended the upper step which led to it, he mounted by the direction of the executioner, a little board, like a shutter, raised upright to receive him, to which he was strapped, turned down flat, and run into a small ring of iron half opened and made to admit the neck, the top part of which was then closed upon it, a black leather curtain was placed before the head, from which a valve depended, which communicated to a tub placed under the scaffold to receive the blood, the executioner then touched a long thin iron rod, connected with the top of the instrument, and in a moment the axe descended, which was in the form of a square, cut diagonally, heavily charged with lead. The executioner and his assistants placed the body in a shell, half filled with saw dust, which was almost completely stained over with the brown blood of former executions; they then picked up the head, from a bag into which it had fallen, within the curtain, and having placed it in the same gloomy depository, lowered the whole down to the sexton, who covering it with a pall bore it off to the place of burial.
The velocity of this mode of execution can alone recommend it. The pangs of death are passed almost in the same moment, which presents to the terrified eye of the sufferer the frightful apparatus of his disgraceful dissolution. It is a dreary subject to discuss; but surely it is a matter of deep regret, that in England, criminals doomed to die from the uncertain and lingering nature of their annihilation, are seen writhing in the convulsions of death during a period dreadful to think of. It is said, that at the late memorable execution of an African governor for murder, the miserable delinquent was beheld for fifteen minutes struggling with the torments of his untimely fate! The guillotine is far preferable to the savage mode, formerly used in France, of breaking a criminal upon the wheel, and leaving him afterwards to perish in the most poignant agonies…”
Carr, John. The Stranger in France, or A Tour from Devonshire to Paris. London: J. Johnson, 1803.