The Artillery Museum contains specimens of every kind of cannon used, from the original breech-loader to the breech-loader of the present day. No. 1 of the catalogue is a small cannon of the earliest period, made of forged iron and furnished with a breech-loading apparatus; 14 and the numbers following are siege-pieces of various kinds abandoned by the English at Meaux, after the bombardment of 1422. The projectiles for these pieces were of stone. No. 7 comes from the ancient residence, near Verdun, of the Knights of Malta; and next to it is a fine cannon in bronze given to the Knights of Rhodes by the Emperor Sigismund in 1434. No. 19, also in bronze, belongs to the reign of Louis XI.; and, like No. 18, comes from Rhodes. It bears this inscription: – “At the command of Loys [Louis], by the grace of God King of France, eleventh of this name, I was cast at Chartres by Jean Chollet, knight, artillery master to this sovereign.” Next but one in the series is a large mortar of bronze, cast at the command of the Grand Master of the Order of the Hospitallers of Jerusalem, Pierre d’Aubusson, 1480.
The construction of the various pieces, as we follow them in chronological order, becomes simplified, then complicated, then simplified again. Gun-carriages and ammunition-chests vary in form, until we find at last the field artillery, under Napoleon III., of one pattern; though two kinds of guns, light and heavy, are still used in the reserve artillery. The rifled cannon introduced by the Emperor Napoleon, which did such effective service during the Italian war of 1859, was looked upon by the French as the best possible field-gun; and, possibly from exaggerated loyalty taking the form of servility, the commission of officers to whom the breech loading rifled guns of Krupp were submitted a few years before the war of 1870 rejected them as in no way superior to the gun of Napoleonic invention actually in use. Since the last war the French have adopted breech-loading rifled pieces more or less on the model of the Krupp guns, treated with such disdain by the military advisers of Napoleon III.
Next to the pieces arranged in chronological order have been placed a number of foreign guns taken at various epochs from the enemy, including, among the latest acquisitions of this kind, a number of curious highly ornamented Chinese guns. Apart from the interesting exhibition of musketry and artillery in the military museum, a few words may here be said on the history of fire-arms generally. The use of fire-arms preceded by some centuries the famous invention of the German monk, Berthold Schwartz; which, in Europe, is known to have been anticipated a century earlier by the English monk, Roger Bacon. The art of making gunpowder was known in the second half of the thirteenth century to the Arabs of the north of Africa and the Moors of Spain.
The Italians, too, are said to have employed artillery in the thirteenth century, but there is no positive proof of its having been used until the middle of the fourteenth, when, so far as Europe is concerned, Roger Bacon’s invention, and all previous inventions of the same kind, had borne no fruit, whereas the discovery made by Berthold Schwartz received instant application.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE VAL DE GRÂCE – RELICS OF THE GREAT
RETURNING from the Museum of Artillery to the Museum of the Hôtel Cluny, we see, from the Cluny garden, the portico of the ancient church of Saint-Benoit, first transformed into the Théâtre du Panthéon, and then demolished. Enclosed by the church and cloister of Saint-Benoit was an open space, in which, on the 5th of June, the day of the Fête-Dieu, 1455, François Villon, the wild vagabond poet, assassinated the priest Philippe Chermoye, his rival in love. Closed at the time of the Revolution, and then sold as national property, it was afterwards, in 1813, converted into a flour depôt. In 1832, on the site of the ruined church, was built the Théâtre du Panthéon, where Alexandre Dumas brought out his drama of Paul Jones. The Théâtre du Panthéon, after remaining closed for some years, was pulled down in 1854. Near it, however, on the other side of the Hôtel Cluny, looking towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain, was built the Théâtre des Folies Saint-Germain, where were produced Les Inutiles of Edouard Cadol, Les Sceptiques of Felicien Mallefille, and a number of other amusing pieces.
In the neighbourhood of the Hôtel Cluny and of the Théâtre Cluny is a very interesting establishment: the Deaf and Dumb Institution of the benevolent Abbé de l’Epée, to whom the deaf and dumb are indebted not only for the language of signs, which for them replaces speech, but also for the establishment in which the deaf and dumb children receive the education and instruction necessary for them to make their way in the world. But those inmates intended by their parents for a liberal profession are charged one thousand francs (£40) a year. The departments, communes, and charitable institutions of the country maintain purses of about 6,000 francs. The State has the disposal of 140 purses, from which it makes to the institution an annual allowance of 70,000 francs. There are higher classes for children who desire to follow them, with workshops for children who will have to subsist by manual labour. In 1785 the Deaf and Dumb School, carried on until that time in the Rue des Moulins at the Butte Saint-Roch, received an annual subvention of 34,000 francs. The Abbé de l’Epée died on the 23rd of December, 1789, at the age of seventy-seven. His funeral oration was pronounced on the 23rd of January, 1790, by the Abbé Fauchet, preacher-in-ordinary to the king. On the 21st of July in the following year the National Assembly voted an annual sum of 12,700 livres (i. e., francs) for the Deaf and Dumb School, which now, from the Convent of the Celestins, where Queen Marie Antoinette had established it, was transferred to the ancient seminary of Saint-Magloire, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques.
The Deaf and Dumb School was reconstructed in 1823 by the architect, M. Peyre, who left it as it now stands. It is looked upon as the perfect model of institutions of the kind. It contains, besides the class-rooms, refectories, dormitories, and workshops, not to mention the rooms in which the sittings of the “Central Society of Education and Assistance for the Deaf and Dumb” are held.
Almost opposite the entrance to the Deaf and Dumb Institute is the Rue des Ursulines, and just beyond, the Rue des Feuillantines, where Victor Hugo passed the happiest years of his childhood, to which reference is made in some of the finest verses of the Orientales. The Rue Saint-Jacques now joins the Rue d’Enfer, which separates it from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The Rue d’Enfer owes its ominous name to a belief entertained in the eighteenth century that it was haunted by the fiend. Various plans for driving away the common enemy of man were suggested, until at last the bright idea occurred to someone of making over the entire street to an order of monks, who, it was thought, would be able, if anyone could, to deal with the invader from below. Either by some exorcising process, or by the natural dread which Satan or his emissary could not fail to experience at being brought beneath the observation of so many pious brethren, the Rue d’Enfer, from the time of its passing into the hands of the religious order, became one of the quietest thoroughfares in Paris. It still, however, in memory of the old legend, preserves its ancient name. No. 269 in the Rue d’Enfer, which runs out of Paris by the side of the Luxembourg Gardens, and takes us almost to suburban parts, is the house, formerly a Benedictine monastery, where, until the Revolution, was preserved the body of James II. of England, who had died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the 16th September, 1701, and of Louise Marie Stewart, his daughter, who died at the same place in 1727.
We now approach the Val de Grâce, that superb monument which Anne of Austria founded in 1641 as a thank-offering for the birth of the dauphin, afterwards Louis XIV., who came into the world when his mother had been twenty-two years without giving birth to a child. The young king, now in his eighth year, laid the first stone of the Val de Grâce on the 1st of April, 1645. Mansard, the royal architect, had drawn up the plan and begun the work, when serious difficulties presented themselves; for the site of the church was just above the catacombs. To reach a foundation, it was necessary to make a number of deep piercings, besides supporting the new edifice with blocks of solid masonry. One of Molière’s few serious poems is in honour of the Val de Grâce