Among the remarkable incidents which the Pont-Neuf has witnessed during its three centuries of existence must be mentioned certain amateur robberies, committed by gentlemen of the highest position. The Duke of Orleans is said to have set the fashion, which, one stormy night, after prolonged libations, was imitated by the Chevalier de Rieux, the Count de Rochefort, and a number of friends more unscrupulous than themselves. The count and the chevalier, though the only ones of the party who got arrested, played the mild part of lookers-on, taking their seats on Henri IV.’s bronze horse, while the actual work of highway robbery was being done by their companions. In due time, however, after several of the passers-by had been plundered of their cloaks, the watch was called, when the active robbers took to flight, whereas their passive accomplices, unable to get down all at once from the back of the bronze horse, were made prisoners, and kept for some time in confinement. Mazarin, indeed, was so glad to have his enemy, the Count de Rochefort, in his power, that he could scarcely be prevailed upon to let him out at all.
On the left bank of the Seine, at the very foot of the Pont-Neuf, stands the Institute of France, with its various academies, of which the most famous is that devoted to literature, the Académie Française, where, said Piron, “there are forty members who have as much learning as four.” “This establishment,” writes Mercier somewhat bitterly, but with much truth, “was set on foot by Richelieu, whose every undertaking constantly tended to despotism. Nor has he in this institution deviated from the rule, for the Academy is manifestly a monarchical establishment. Men of letters have been enticed to the capital like the grandees, and with the same object: namely, to keep a better watch over them. The consequence is fatal to the progress of knowledge, because every writer aspiring to a seat in that modern Areopagus knows that his success depends on Court favour, and therefore does everything to merit this by sacrificing to the Goddess of Flattery, and preferring mean adulation that brings him academical honours to the useful, manly, and legitimate employment of his talents in the instruction of mankind. Hence the Academy enjoys no manner of consideration either at home or abroad. Paris is the only place where it can support any kind of dignity, though it is even there sorely badgered by the wits of the capital, who, expecting from it neither favour nor friendship, point all their epigrammatical batteries against its members. There is, in fact, but too much room for pleasantry and keen sarcasm. Is it not extremely ridiculous that forty men, two-thirds of whom owe their admission to intrigue or fawning, should be by patent created arbiters of taste in literature, and enjoy the exclusive privilege of judging for the rest of their countrymen? But their principal function has been to circulate and suppress new-coined words; regulating the pronunciation, orthography, and idioms of the French language. Is this a service or injury to the language? I should think the latter.
“Instead of becoming, as they ought to do, the oracle of the age and their nation, our men of letters content themselves with being the echo of that dread tribunal; hence the abject state of literature in the capital. We have some, however, who boldly think for themselves, trust to the judgment of the public, and laugh at the award of the Academy. Nothing can better mark the contempt in which a few spirited writers hold the decrees of the forty forestallers of French wit and refinement than the following epitaph which the author above cited, the terror of Voltaire, the scourge of witlings, Piron, ordered to be engraved on his tombstone: —
“‘Cy gît Piron, qui ne fut rien,
Pas même Académicien.’”
Many very distinguished writers have, in every generation since the birth of the Academy, been included among its members. Very few, however, of the forty members have at any one time been men of genuine literary distinction; a duke who has written a pamphlet, an ambassador who has published a volume, having always had a better chance of election than a popular novelist or dramatist. M. Arsène Houssaye has written a book entitled “The Forty-first Chair,” which is intended to show, and does show, that the greatest writer of each successive period, from Molière to Balzac, has always been left out of the Academy: has occupied, that is to say, “the forty-first chair.” M. Alphonse Daudet, to judge by his brilliant novel “L’Immortel,” has no better opinion of the French Academy than had Arsène Houssaye some forty years ago, when his ingenious indirect attack upon the Academy was first published.
The Pont-Neuf was, for a considerable time after its first construction, the most important highway in Paris. It connected Paris of the left bank with Paris of the right, and old Paris, the so-called Cité, with both. It was the only bridge of importance; and what is now the greatest thoroughfare of Paris – the line of boulevards – was not yet in existence. The Pont-Neuf dates from the reign of Henri IV.; the boulevards from that of Louis XIV. Long, moreover, after it had ceased to be fashionable, the Pont-Neuf remained popular by reason of the vast stream of passengers perpetually crossing it in either direction. It was much in favour with itinerant dealers of all kinds, and equally so with beggars. Even in our own time it was on the Pont-Neuf that Les deux Aveugles of Offenbach deceived the public and exchanged confidences with one another. The plague of beggars is nothing, however, in these days, compared with what it was before the Revolution. “Who,” asks a writer of the latter part of the eighteenth century, “seeing the populace of Paris ever merry, and the rich glittering in all the gaudy pomp of luxury, would believe that the streets of the metropolis are infested with swarms of beggars, were not the eye at every turn of the street shocked with some distressing spectacle, truly disgusting to the sight of every stranger who is not lost to all sense of humanity? Nothing has yet been done to remove this evil, and the methods hitherto practised have proved to be remedies worse than the disease. Amongst the ancients there was a class of people that might be called poor, but none reduced to absolute indigence. The very slaves were clothed, fed, had their friends; nor does any historian say that the towns and streets were full of those wretched, disgusting objects which either excite pity or freeze charity itself: wretches covered with vermin did not then go about the streets uttering groans that reach the very heart, and exhibiting wounds that frighten the eye of every passenger.
“This abuse springs from the nature of the legislation itself – more ready to preserve large fortunes than small. Let our new schemers say what they will, great proprietors are a nuisance in the State. They cover the lands with forests and stock them with fawns and deer; they lay out pleasure-gardens; and thus the oppression and luxury of the great is daily crushing the most unfortunate part of the community. In the year 1769 not only beggars, but even the poorer class of citizens were treated with much savage barbarity by secret orders from the Government. In the very dead of night old men, women, and children were suddenly seized upon, deprived of their liberty, and thrown into loathsome gaols, without the assignment of any cause for so cruel a treatment. The pretence was that