The Brotherhood of Consolation

Excerpt

On a fine evening in the month of September, 1836, a man about thirty years of age was leaning on the parapet of that quay from which a spectator can look up the Seine from the Jardin des Plantes to Notre-Dame, and down, along the vast perspective of the river, to the Louvre.  There is not another point of view to compare with it in the capital of ideas.  We feel ourselves on the quarter-deck, as it were, of a gigantic vessel.  We dream of Paris from the days of the Romans to those of the Franks, from the Normans to the Burgundians, the Middle-Ages, the Valois, Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon, and Louis-Philippe.  Vestiges are before us of all those sovereignties, in monuments that recall their memory.  The cupola of Sainte-Genevieve towers above the Latin quarter.  Behind us rises the noble apsis of the cathedral.  The Hotel de Ville tells of revolutions; the Hotel-Dieu, of the miseries of Paris.  After gazing at the splendors of the Louvre we can, by taking two steps, look down upon the rags and tatters of that ignoble nest of houses huddling between the quai de la Tournelle and the Hotel-Dieu,—­a foul spot, which a modern municipality is endeavoring at the present moment to remove.