Laudator Temporis Acti

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (1837; rev. 1857), Part I (The Bastille), Book II (The Paper Age), Chapter VI (Windbags) (London: Chapman & Hall, Limited, 1888), vol. I, p. 41 (on the Duc de Chartres):

On the other hand, what a day, not of laughter, was that, when he threatened, for lucre's sake, to lay sacrilegious hand on the Palais-Royal Garden! The flowerparterres shall be riven up; the Chestnut Avenues shall fall: time-honoured boscages, under which the Opera Hamadryads were wont to wander, not inexorable to men. Paris moans aloud. Philidor, from his Cafe de la Regence, shall no longer look on greenness; the loungers and losels of the world, where now shall they haunt? In vain is moaning. The axe glitters; the sacred groves fall crashing,—for indeed Monseigneur was short of money: the Opera Hamadryads fly with shrieks.

[Francis William Blagdon], Paris As It Was and As It Is, Vol. I (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1803), pp. 189-190:

The old garden of the Palais Royal, long famous for its shady walks, and for being the most fashionable public promenade in Paris, had, from its centrical situation, gradually attracted to its vicinity a considerable number of speculators, who there opened ready-furnished hotels, coffeehouses, and shops of various descriptions. The success of these different establishments awakened the cupidity of its wealthy proprietor, then Duke of Chartres, who, conceiving that the ground might be made to yield a capital augmentation to his income, fixed on a plan for enclosing it by a magnificent range of buildings.

Notwithstanding the clamours of the Parisian public, who, from long habit, considered that they had a sort of prescriptive right to this favourite promenade, the axe was laid to the celebrated arbre de Cracovie and other venerable trees, and their stately heads were soon levelled to the ground. Every one murmured as if these trees had been his own private property, and cut down against his will and pleasure. This will not appear extraordinary, when it is considered that, under their wide-spreading branches, which afforded a shelter impervious to the sun and rain, politicians by day, adjusted the balance of power, and arbiters of taste-discussed the fashions of the moment; while, by night, they presented a canopy, beneath which were often arranged the clandestine bargains of opera-girls and other votaries of Venus.

Charles Thévenin (1764-1838),
Figures Felling a Tree Outside a Building in Paris

Labels: arboricide