previous next
[191]

The voyage to Liverpool was quick and uneventful.1 Mr. Garrison proceeded directly to Paris, parting with Mr. Thompson at London, and crossing the Channel, for2 the first time, between Folkestone and Boulogne. The wretched accommodation for passengers on the Channel steamers amazed him, and in trying to compute the yearly aggregate of misery caused thereby to tens of thousands of travellers, he became, as he declared, ‘too indignant to be seasick.’ The next four weeks he devoted to sightseeing in Paris, in company with his children, and was charmed by the gay and brilliant city. He made many visits to the great Exposition, and never wearied of strolling or driving through the parks and along the boulevards, or of excursions to St. Cloud and Versailles. The shop windows had an especial fascination for him. He had never before shown any interest in diamonds or precious stones, but the great jewelry shops in the Palais Royal arcades fairly dazzled him. Every day brought its novel experience, and was so fully occupied that he found scant time for recording his impressions; hence, his letters present little that is quotable. He saw the great military display of the 6th of June, when Napoleon entertained his guests the Czar Alexander and King William of Prussia (accompanied by Bismarck) with a review of sixty thousand troops in the Bois de Boulogne.

‘As a spectacle,’ he wrote,

it was the most gorgeous and3 the most imposing of any I have ever witnessed, or ever expect to witness. The sun shone clearly out, adding to the brilliancy and effectiveness of the scene. . . . Of course, in a moral point of view, this mighty warlike display gave me no pleasure, but rather much pain at seeing such a perversion of human nature in support of usurpation and oppression. As the royal party rode out of the park, they were fired upon by a Pole, who doubtless intended to kill the Emperor of Russia, but he only succeeded in killing the horse of an officer riding by the side of the royal carriage, the pistol bursting in his hand. He was immediately arrested.

I have dined with Madame Coignet and Miss Dowling, who have been at the head of the Freedmen's movement in Paris.

1 May 9-18, 1867.

2 May 20.

3 Ms. June 7, to H. E. G.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)
hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
George Thompson (1)
Napoleon (1)
William Lloyd Garrison (1)
Dowling (1)
Coignet (1)
Boulogne (1)
Bismarck (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1867 AD (1)
June 7th (1)
June 6th (1)
May 20th (1)
May 9th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: